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Feb. 21, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:36
Leftism and Wealth: A Theory!
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Okay, it's getting ready to blow your mind again.
So let's talk about a question that came up Recently online was, why is it that so many communists or hard leftists are trust fund kids, you know, come from sort of very wealthy backgrounds?
So I'm going to put forward a theory here.
You can tell me what you think. Feels true.
Doesn't mean it is true. Feels true.
And you can supply to me your thoughts and evidence and rebuttals.
So here we go. When you grow up...
Wealthy. In a wealthy family.
And a friend of mine actually was sort of instrumental in introducing me to my wife.
A friend of mine, when I was first as a programmer, was saying that he grew up very wealthy.
He got everything he wanted.
He lost his bike. He got a new bike.
But he was desperately lonely.
And I referred to him as...
His name wasn't Mike, but I referred to him as Mike on the Moon because he was kind of emotionally inaccessible.
Very smart, very funny, but kind of emotionally inaccessible in a lot of ways.
loneliness and isolation is kind of characteristic of people who've got a
lot of money. People who have a lot of money, families have a lot of money
generally, the parents are working very hard. They're out there busting their nuts.
And the other thing too is that when you have a lot of money you have a lot of
people who want to spend time with you who tend to be more interesting than
babies and toddlers, right? So let's take a typical example of the entrepreneur dad
and the stay-at-home wife.
Well, he's off working and traveling and all this kind of stuff, and he's not really available for his children.
And his wife, what's she doing?
Well, she's on boards, she's on committees, she's doing charities, everybody wants a piece of her, a fundraising and all that.
So there's precious little time with the children.
And from a purely economic standpoint, of course, it makes sense.
I forget about the human side of things, but it makes absolute perfect and total sense for wealthy parents to hire nannies in the same way that, you know, Bill Gates doesn't change the oil in his car.
He hires people to do that or pays people to do that.
So If you are very wealthy, spending time with your child is very expensive.
It's costly. And if you just look at it from a cost-efficient standpoint, from a purely short-term economic value standpoint, it pays much more money or you make much more money if you pay someone to take care of your child.
You hire a nanny or something like that if she's a nanny.
So if you hire a nanny to take care of your child, you pay the nanny, what, 20 bucks an hour, whatever it's going to be, but as an entrepreneur or as somebody who's running charities and so on, doing this important fundraising work in the community, from a purely, again, surely short-term economic standpoint...
It is much more efficient.
You'll make much more money by hiring a nanny to take care of your children rather than taking care of your children directly.
And if you think of this like if you're a movie star, right?
So Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, they're both movie stars.
So does it make sense for them to take time off from making $10 million or more a movie in order to raise their own children?
From a, again, purely economic standpoint, it doesn't make much sense at all.
I remember when I was chatting once with Warren Farrell, he was telling me about how he was at a meeting where there was a rock star, a very sort of famous rock star, and the famous rock star was talking about his issue with masculinity and so on.
Anyway, long story short, the famous rock star ended up taking off years from his career to race.
His son.
He hadn't done a good job with one kid and he wanted to do a better job with another kid.
And from an economic standpoint, that probably cost him $50 million to take off those number of years.
So again, the sort of market system, the dollars, the profits, the short-term economic incentives have rich parents pay other people to raise their own children.
And it's hard to argue against it from a dollar maximization standpoint, right?
So... The kids grow up and they're isolated, right?
They have a series of nannies or even if they just have one nanny, they recognize that they're low priority for their parents.
Obviously low priority for your parents, right?
I made this comment, sort of tragic analogy many years ago where I said if you have an anniversary, You have a 10th wedding anniversary and you've got a big evening planned with your wife and then you don't show up.
But you pay someone 20 bucks an hour.
Maybe somebody who doesn't even speak English that well.
You pay someone 20 bucks an hour to show up to have dinner with your wife.
She would be like outraged, upset, offended, incensed, right?
And rightly so. It's like how dare you send someone in your place who doesn't even know me to go out for dinner with me to celebrate her anniversary or anything for that matter.
I hired someone, right?
And I remember when I was a broke student once being paid by a family to take an elderly grandmother to various locations, right?
I took her to Sandra Island.
I took her to the Science Museum and so on because they were really busy and blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, she was... It's somewhat embittered to have a stranger taking her around rather than her own family.
It's low status, right?
And this would be like a very strange comedy, black comedy sketch, right?
You could imagine a story like a kid who was raised by nannies and then his mother She has her 60th birthday celebration, and the kid sends along some stranger in his place.
And of course, the mother would be incensed, like, how dare you send some stranger along in my place?
And it's like, well, you raised, I mean, you had a nanny for me, right?
You sent some stranger to do your job.
Sending a stranger to do my job.
You paid a stranger to spend time with me, and now I'm paying a stranger to spend time with you.
How dare you be upset, right?
So, with, of course, the added thing that it would be a kind of karmic blowback situation.
Now, people who become wealthy tend to be very good at making financial calculations.
They're not always quite so good at making emotional, long-term, spiritual, or soulful calculations, but they're very good at making financial calculations.
They're very good at maximizing their resources.
That's one of the jobs, how you become rich, right?
So, when A man and a woman who are very wealthy have a child, then they do that calculation.
And they say, look, it's pretty hard to justify.
I mean, for the dad to stay home full-time means giving up millions of dollars a year.
Perhaps for the woman to stay home full-time and raise the kids, it feels like very low-rent labor, right?
It feels like, well, you know, I'll be wiping butts and spooning, breastfeeding and spooning food into children's mouths.
It feels like if you look at it mechanically, It's very low-rent labor, right?
Very low-value labor.
Or, you know, it's easily duplicated labor.
Like, if you just look at the labor of that.
However, if you look at the sort of spiritual soul connection and the maternal love and the, you know, the delight and the eye contact and the love and all of that, then the mother is irreplaceable.
I mean, irreplaceable. But if you look at it as just wiping butts and feeding and making sure they don't fall down the stairs and so on, then you just look at the mere mechanics of it.
And again, if you look at the mere mechanics of going to dinner with your wife, well, she just needs a warm body to sit across from and eat food with her and have a conversation, right?
That's all, right? Well, I mean, you can pay someone to sit across from someone else, eat food, and talk to them.
So if you just look at the mechanics of it, then it makes sense if you are making $5,000 an hour to pay somebody $20 an hour to go have dinner with your wife, right?
Because you're saving $49,000, sorry, $4,980, right?
It's a maximum resource situation.
You're doing well. So wealthy couple, and it could be, you know, these days it's increasingly like two high-powered executives, two high-powered lawyers, or mergers and acquisition specialists, or whatever it is, right?
Forensic accountants, or whoever makes Bitcoin these days, or two actors, or whatever, if they're successful.
So, if two very wealthy people making a lot of money have a kid, their resource maximization algorithms, which allow them to become wealthy or maintain their wealth, kick in and say, well, I'm going to pay somebody else to raise my kid in that way.
And, of course, everyone else who's not the kid is saying, oh, come back to work, come back to work, right?
The woman who's a big-shot lawyer billing out at $1,500 an hour, she has a whole company who's saying to her, Oh no, you've got to come back to work.
I mean, we're desperate to have you come back to work and we'll give you all these bonuses, right?
Because they don't want to retrain and hire and that's a real nightmare for an organization.
Plus, of course, she has existing relationships with clients.
They don't want to see someone new. Of course, if you're an actor, a famous actor, then you've got agents and publicists and all of these hangers-on that you pay, all desperate for you to get back to work.
Otherwise, they have to go and find real jobs or whatever, right?
So you have the kid can't say anything.
The baby can't say anything other than cry and complain.
And of course, if you're not there, then you don't really notice that so much because you're not there.
So the baby can't advocate for himself or herself.
So what happens? Well, you're pulled towards maximum resources.
You're pulled by the other people who profit from your labor and parasite to some degree off your labor, although maybe a valuable exchange.
They all want you to get back to work.
I mean, if you're an actor, an agent takes 10%.
Ten million dollar movie, then the agent's out a million dollars if, you know, every six months if you don't go back to work, well, agent wants you to go back to work, right?
And put a hell, well, no, scare stories, you know, you'll be forgotten and your Q factor will go down and you won't be able to get any roles and you're going to age out, you know, these are your productive, youthful, beautiful years, you've got to have that, right?
They'll put all these scare stories in.
And of course, you don't get to the top tier of any profession without a lot of ambition.
And so people can always push those ambition buttons.
You know, if you take a year off, man, you know, or God forbid, five years off, nobody will remember you.
And if you're a lawyer, you'll be the law will have changed and you're going to spend forever coming back in and people won't want to hire you because they're afraid you're going to Leave for another half decade.
You know, all this stuff. They just scare the crap out of you and push all the buttons so that they can keep getting the resources.
Right. That's the situation.
But that's, of course, if you look at children as kind of like accessories.
Or, in a sense, even worse than pets, right?
Like goldfish.
Pay someone else to take care of them.
So, the kids grow up.
And they lack bonding. And their parents are revealed as people who have had children and then prioritize the children very low.
Very low on the totem pole, on the hierarchy, right?
Now these are also, so when you grow up with this kind of neglect and paying other people to raise your children is a form of neglect.
It's a form of humiliation for the children.
You know, mommy and daddy, we have so much more important things to do than to spend time with you.
So you have a very tenuous bond, very tenuous bond.
And if you're a kid, of course, and you're raised by parents who don't like you that much and don't have much of a bond with you and don't, you know, you can't rock the boat.
You can't rock the boat.
I mean, you want to raise children who can disagree with authority, so they're not susceptible to peer pressure, unlike everybody else over the last couple of years.
You want to raise kids who can think for themselves, but in order to do that, they have to be able to disagree with you, and in order to be able to disagree with you, they have to know that you love them, not just despite disagreements, but also because of disagreements.
You love them because they can disagree with you, because they can fight back.
I was talking to a friend of mine whose kid needed some braces in the dentist's office and they were going through the braces thing and they got some exam and there was these models.
There was this wild stuff that goes on with braces these days.
They can show you how your teeth are going to look on computer screens and so on.
And his kid just suddenly turned back and just put up the most impassioned and ferocious defense of not having braces, you know.
I want people to like me for who I am, not for how my teeth look, all this kind of stuff, right?
And so he was like, fantastic, you know, and put it on hold, and then they went and discussed it and all of that.
And that's what you want.
You want your kid to be able to disagree with you, and also that's good for you, not just from an ego standpoint, but it's good for you because, of course, parents can make significant mistakes, particularly if you've been raised badly, but you're raising your children well.
They have a wisdom that outstrips you because...
You're built on a different foundation than they are, right?
So you absolutely need kids to disagree with you.
So if you're raised by parents where the bond is very tenuous and fragile and, you know, their parents are easily distracted and, you know, they...
Every time they sit down to read you a story, the phone goes off or they jump up or they come to play with you and there's a call or something or an email and they jump up, right?
Then you're low on the totem pole.
You have a very fragile relationship with your parents.
You can't disagree with them.
You can't state your preferences very strongly and so on, right?
So this situation, we think of the child growing up, material needs are taken care of, but there's no bond.
Or very little bond. Certainly not enough to sustain any significant disagreement.
And of course, the kid knows when the kid gets old enough to speak, right, sort of, and sort of process preferences and so on, maybe four, five, six years old.
If the kid were to say, I want you to stay home.
I don't want to be in daycare. I want you to stay home and be with me.
He knows exactly what his mom is going to say and his dad is going to say.
Oh, well, we can't, you know, we've got so many obligations and responsibilities, but we've got you a wonderful preschool and they really care about you and And your nanny is...
Right? So the kid knows that the parents aren't going to sit there and say, Oh, well, you know, obviously it's that important to you.
I mean, you're in this situation by circumstance.
We chose everything. So if it's not working for you, then we will adjust.
You know, we will come home and we'll take you out of daycare and so on.
Now, of course, the kid, as the kid gets older, the kid realizes and sees very explicitly that...
Clients, customers, investors, outsiders.
It's a shadowy fog bank of outsiders that children see beyond the family barriers, the moat, so to speak, of local concerns, that there are all these people, these sort of ghostly arms that come in through the windows and yank the parents away.
So, oh, we're supposed to go to the zoo.
Oh, an emergency has come up at work.
And, oh, you know, we wanted to go to the playground.
Oh, you know, I got a client who needs something and so on.
And everyone else gets higher priority.
The kid... Because the kid can't complain and the parents respond to need and satisfying need from an economic standpoint because that's where they get their wealth from.
They don't get any wealth from sacrificing other people's needs to their children's needs.
In fact, they lose a lot of money that way.
And so the kids grow up.
Lonely. And they can't criticize their parents.
Even in their own heads. Well, you know, mom is doing very important stuff, and daddy's a heart surgeon.
All this stuff's going on, right?
And they can't criticize their parents.
That's number one. Now, of course, as they get older, into their teen years, they've got to figure out some way to live.
So they go to the internet, they go to their peers, they go to whatever, right?
The media, and then sort of figure out how they live.
And they're really mad at their parents, right?
So they're really mad at their parents in their teenage years, but they can't criticize their parents.
That's tough. You're really mad at your parents, but you can't criticize your parents.
Very tough situation. And also, as they get older, they realize...
Because, you know, a lot of people who are wealthy, they have their kids kind of late, right?
So, let's say they have the kids at, you know, 35.
By the time the kid gets to be...
15, then the parents are 40, 45 or whatever.
I'm sorry, 50, 55.
And so Age kind of kicks in, you know.
For a guy, you know, the ages of sort of 25 to 45, I mean, other than some hair loss and maybe a little bit of weight around the middle, it's pretty, you know, you get into your 50s, I mean, I'm telling you this, right, to be 57 this year, like, you get a little creaky.
I mean, I exercise and all of that, but all you can do is delay the inevitable, right?
You can't eliminate it. So, what happens then is the kid...
He is trained by nature, evolution and everything to not criticize parents when he has a tenuous relationship to begin with because if the parents don't seem to care that much about the kid and the kid puts up a lot of fuss, well, from an evolutionary standpoint, those kids didn't do very well, did they?
They didn't do very well at all.
And They might get less food.
They might get less left behind.
They might not be protected from predators as much.
They might not get as much care when they're ill.
You know, just there would be evolutionary pressures against demanding more and more resources or really any resources at all from indifferent parents, right?
So you're programmed to manage your parents, but you're programmed to not criticize them.
Then, of course, you get into your mid-teens and you really begin to understand the concept of inheritance.
Ah, inheritance.
Okay, so... Okay, I'm really mad at my parents, but...
If I get mad at them and complain, you know...
I mean, they might not pay for my university.
They might cut me out of their will.
They might kick me out when I'm 18.
I'll lose all of this stuff and I'll lose my whole peer group.
And of course, they've based their personalities and sort of the value that they bring is often based on money and the envy that people outside the void of...
Unattached money, right?
The vacuum that's at the center of people who pursue money and money alone.
The people outside that, they look at all that shiny exteriors, the nice houses, the pools, the vacations, and they're like, oh, so envy, right?
So they're not loved, but they're envied.
And envied is this cheap cocaine substitute for the natural endorphins of a virtuous life.
And so what can they do?
If they lose their money, then people don't envy them.
In fact, they pity them. And because they don't have a strong love connection bond with their parents, they are tremulous with themselves.
And instead of love, They seek the inevitable cheap cocaine substitute for love, which is a status, right?
And without money, right?
If they anger their parents too much, their parents will cut them off.
Their parents might kick them out. And then they're out there in the world and they're emotionally crippled.
And the only thing that they have going for them, they believe, is the envy of others and status, which is reliant upon their parents' money.
So if their parents' money is threatened, they lose everything.
And honestly, that is for a lot of people, right?
That's a suicidal situation.
That's a self-destructive situation.
So, a lot of hatred, a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of feelings of being low priority, of being unloved, of being unimportant, unimportant.
And they're not wrong.
They're not wrong. They're really angry, but they can't get angry at their parents.
Ah, right. So when your parents have done you real wrong, Your parents have done you real wrong, and my hierarchy, my hierarchy of abuse, the worst is sexual abuse, the second worst is neglect, the third worst is verbal abuse, and the fourth worst or the least worst is physical abuse.
I know that these often overlap and so on, but just in terms of category, right?
So, you're the tragic receiver of really terrible abuse, which is the neglect.
And you're really angry at your parents, but you can't get angry at your parents.
You can't express any anger at your parents directly.
You can't even express it in your own head.
Because people also become quite wealthy by learning how to read others very well.
We learn how to read others very well, so they're very good at reading you, the kid.
You can't, even in your own head, be angry at your parents.
So, what happens?
What happens? Where does that anger go?
Can't just vanish. Can't just vanish.
Where does that anger go? Well, I think we all know you get angry, not at your parents, because that's going to cost you dearly.
It could cost you everything, even in your life.
What do you get angry at?
You can't get angry at your parents. You get angry at the system.
The system! What do the Marxists say?
Capitalism puts profits above people.
See, that's a perfect distillation of everything I've been talking about.
The hotshot lawyer makes fifteen hundred bucks, makes nothing to stay home.
So, Dump the kid in daycare, dump the kid with a nanny, go off and make your money.
Look at that. They just put profits above people.
Why do the Marxists hate profits so much?
So much because it's the system that took mommy and daddy away.
It's mommy's and daddy's addiction to profit.
Now, they can't say my parents were shallow and materialistic and susceptible to manipulations of others to make money for others and some for themselves, of course.
They can't say my parents put profits above people because that would be to make their parents responsible.
To make their parents... No, no, no.
You can't do that. You can't make your parents responsible.
You can't get mad at your parents.
Just then they'll reject you.
They'll kick you out. You'll lose all the money.
You'll lose whatever tenuous bond you have created in your own mind.
No, no, no. You can't get angry at your parents for choosing profit over people because that's an individual thing, right?
And of course, you know, it feels true that the system makes people choose profits over people because...
All your friends are the same way.
All your friends come from these wealthy families where the parents went out to work and dumped the kids in daycare or nannies or whatever, right?
And moved around, right?
Moved around. Often to pursue better economic opportunities.
And those people are because the carnage on the children's hearts, minds, and souls is unremarked upon in society.
Children are the ultimate expendables, right?
Disposable. And so...
Everyone around them is just the same way.
All the parents of their friends did the same thing.
And of course, if there are wealthy people who's, you know, there would be occasionally wealthy people who the mother stayed home and breastfed and was a great mom and so on, but those kids aren't hanging around with these kids.
The daycare kids hang around with the daycare kids and the natural-raised kids hang around with the natural-raised kids.
Because the natural-raised kids really don't have anything in common with the daycare kids.
And the daycare kids will avoid the natural kids because it reminds them that what their parents did wasn't the result of some indifferent machinery of a system, but their parents' specific and personal moral choices.
See, there's the system that puts profit above people.
And profit is terrible.
Profit is evil. Profit is wretched, reprehensible, satanic.
Why? Why is profit so bad?
Because profit took mommy and daddy away.
Because mommy and daddy did a calculation and said, well, we're going to make more money working than taking care of our children, so off we go to work.
It's putting profits above people.
It's an individual choice.
But they can't view it as an individual choice.
That threatens the bond, the money, the inheritance, the future.
So, they have to invent a system.
They take out all of their rage against the system.
And they invent the system to excuse their parents.
In other words, they themselves are putting profit above people.
In other words, the profit of continuing to get their parents' money and the profit of the future inheritance, they're putting it above the actual humanity of their existence, of their experience, and each other's deprivations as children.
This is why they're so angry at profit.
Because by getting angry at profit as a system rather than their parents' choices as individuals, They, like their parents, are putting profit above people, profit above principle.
And there's almost no better way to create a foment-at-the-mouth ideologue than to have someone attack the immorals of a system when it is actually their own immorality that's at play.
So, what else?
What do the hard leftists say?
Ah, they say, you see, there are these capitalists, you see, there are these capitalists and these proletariat.
The capitalists and the workers.
Now the workers are entirely at the whim of the capitalists and the workers have no capacity to negotiate.
So the one thing you'll always hear on the left is like the company town.
Let's talk about the company town. So there's some mine in the middle of nowhere and they send up, you know, Acme town, Acme mining companies, Acme town, and you can only shop at the Acme store and they've got a monopoly.
They're always obsessed with monopoly and concerned about monopoly, frightened of monopoly.
There's a town in the middle of nowhere and there's only one...
Company that supplies water to that town, and if you don't want to pay what that company demands, you have no option.
So they put the workers in a situation where the workers have no choices, can't negotiate, can't move away, can't find a better opportunity.
Right? Well, what's that?
Why does that feel so true?
I've never understood this, right?
I mean, let's say you are in the middle of some Mining town and you have to buy at the company store and the company keeps raising the prices and it becomes unprofitable, then you just leave.
Or you find some way to import goods and undercut the company and, oh, but then, right?
So they create a situation where the workers are exploited and helpless.
They can't negotiate.
They can't quit. They can't leave.
Why does that feel so true for people?
Why? It's not true.
People always have choices.
Why did they create a situation where the people being exploited have no choices?
Can't negotiate, can't fight back, can't create outside competition, can't move, can't quit.
Because that was their childhood.
That was their childhood.
When you are a child, You can't quit.
You can't move.
And if your parents don't listen, you can't negotiate.
And why are they so terrified and obsessed and focused on this question of monopoly?
Monopolies don't really exist in the free market, absent government power.
There's never been any kind of lasting monopoly in the free market.
So why are they so...
Why does monopoly feel so vivid to them?
Why? Because...
We know, right?
Because parents do have a monopoly.
Why are the workers so helpless?
Well, the workers are a proxy for their own childhood experiences.
The workers have to be put into the situation of helplessness and dependence which foments the rage of the workers.
Because these people, as children, with profit over people parents, were helpless, couldn't leave, were paralyzed, were entirely dependent upon the, quote, company store, which is the parents' resources.
And that's a very real thing, of course, right?
Parents control, parents have a monopoly, you can't leave as a kid.
So, yeah, that's entirely valid, entirely true, entirely real.
It's just not real for adults in the free market, but it feels so real that rather than say, well, I have to deal with my own feelings of helplessness and inability to negotiate, I have to deal with all of that.
I have to deal with that emotional stuff.
I have to deal with my parents as individual moral actors, not mere machinery or cogs in a machine that forces them to put profits about people.
And I have to create the situation for this system to work, for this system to be the receptacle of the rage I feel towards my parents, this system I'm inventing, this class-based system.
For it to work, the workers have to be helpless.
Because when you remind the Marxists, as I have over the last 40 years, you remind them that if a worker is unhappy, The worker can negotiate, the worker can leave, the worker can up their skills, the worker can do any number of things.
Well, they don't feel that because the purpose is not to analyze the world, but to excuse the parents and to find a system where they can unleash their anger at their parents at an abstract system that they've invented.
Mad at your dad? No!
Punch an orc! Right?
It literally is that. Unreal.
And look, I say this with great sympathy.
I say this with great and deep sympathy.
This form of neglect is really, really tragic and appalling and horrible for children.
I say this with very deep sympathy and compassion.
I mean, how much horror do you have to go through?
How much neglect and feelings of rejection and unimportance do you have to go through as a child to invent an entire alternate universe to contain the hurt and outrage of your brutalized and ignored childhood?
Like, that's a lot of pain right there.
It's a lot of pain.
And there's not a lot of people who can handle, in a productive way, that kind of pain.
Not a lot of people who can handle, in a productive way, that kind of pain.
How else does it fit potentially?
Well, look at it this way.
The capitalist is somehow magically in control of the means of production without having earned them, right?
I mean, in the sort of Marxist or the hard leftist approach, the capitalist just has a factory, right?
He didn't sacrifice to get that factory.
He didn't work hard.
He didn't defer gratification.
He didn't save all of his money.
He just has a factory.
And the workers are just there.
And the workers can't just go and set up another factory.
The workers can't all pool their money to create a competing factory.
None of that can happen, right?
In this situation.
Why? Why is it that the means of production are just magically somehow in the hands of the capitalist?
Well, because parents don't earn the capacity to have children.
That's a built-in biological function.
I don't need to pay my stomach to digest food.
The means of production are the sperm and the egg, the testicles and the womb, the penis and the vagina.
Which is why so much sexual dysfunction is often caught up in socialist thinking, where the capitalist is raping the workers and all this, that and the other, right?
The capitalist, the mother and the father, is just magically in possession of the means of production, Which they did not earn.
They did not sacrifice in order to gain.
Well, that's true. We don't sacrifice in order to gain reproductive ability.
We just have sex which is pleasurable and there you go, right?
It just happens, right?
Now, the workers don't have access to the means of production, but if you understand that the capitalists are parents and the workers are the neglected children, then of course the workers are helpless, enmeshed in the monopoly, can't leave, can't negotiate, can't change the situation, and also don't have any access to the means of production.
Why? Because they're children!
They can't reproduce.
They're sexually and biologically immature.
So if you understand, the capitalists are the neglecting parents who choose profits over people.
The proletariat are the children.
This is why the proletariat are stripped of free will and agency.
And if you understand that the means of production are becoming parents and children can't become parents, this is why the children or the children proxies called the proletariat never seem to have any access to the means of production.
And it feels true because it mirrors a familiar situation.
That was true and deeply true.
And deeply, deeply true.
So this is why economics, valid, you know, reasonable, sole Austrian economics, doesn't touch this.
Because this is a world-spanning delusion set up to protect the parents from the anger of the neglected child.
And because it's a worldview spontaneously generated or often inflicted on a deep, deep web of psychological trauma and some of the worst kinds of psychological trauma which is neglect.
So when somebody who's been neglected because their parents put profit over people And they were helpless to negotiate, helpless to leave.
And then someone comes along and says, there are these capitalists who magically own the means of production, and the workers, they can't leave, they can't negotiate, and the capitalist is exploiting them by putting profits over people.
Boy, it feels so true.
It just, like a key into a lock, it just fits and it gives them a great sense of relief.
Because they've been so shattered by profits over people that they have resorted to being
envied as having value.
Having money is having value.
They are now putting profits over people, in other words they would rather strip mine
human envy, which is debilitating, in order to prop up their cracked and shattered self-esteem.
So they themselves are now participating in the profits over people and they also will reject their own hurt and violated needs and requirements as a child in order to hang on to the parental cash flow and stay in the will.
They also say, here's the other thing too.
So they're part of the system that they're now decrying.
So when someone says this, it just feels so true.
It fits and it gives them a great relief and release.
Now, oh gosh, thank goodness.
It's not my parents. It's the system.
My parents aren't bad.
My parents aren't greedy. My parents aren't selfish.
My parents are bad. There's a system.
And they want to smash that system in order to excuse their parents and, of course, continue to get parental resources and stay in the will and all that kind of stuff, right?
So, I remember there was some lawmaker in the States.
I think their kid was, a teenage kid was involved in one of these leftist riots and so on.
You can see this kind of stuff.
I'm mad at corporations.
I'm mad at business.
I'm mad at capitalism. I'm mad at profits.
Why? Because they kidnapped your mommy and daddy.
And I say this not in mommy and daddy issues.
I hate that phrase as a whole, mommy and daddy issues, because it doesn't go to the depth of suffering that a lack of bond exists.
That the enormous amount of suffering, the fragility, instability, the chaos of emotions, the inability to defer gratification, because the parents can't defer gratification.
The parents can't say, well, I'll spend time with my baby now and make more money later if I want.
Right? There's this fear, you see, that the capitalist greed is destroying the planet.
Well, no, it's greed for money that destroyed everything.
The maternal bond. Mother nature.
Mother nature. And so, when they say human beings are a cancer, because a cancer doesn't know when to stop growing, when you live in a big-ass mansion with a pool and two cars, well, your parents can easily afford to stay home.
But your parents just want more and more and more at the expense of their children, at the expense of their children's happiness, their own future security, and really the entire system, right?
They're destroying the next generation by raising people who hate the free market.
The free market did not dictate that the parents should go to work rather than spend time with their children.
That's not a free market. The free market doesn't dictate that.
The free market will pay them For going to work rather than staying home with their children.
But so what? I mean, people will pay you to go beat up a homeless guy.
Or, you know, you can get hit, man.
Just because somebody pays you doesn't mean that you have to do it.
It doesn't mean that you're right. But it has to be the system that is to blame.
Smash the system. Because it's the system that stole my parents from me.
It's capitalism and business that stole my parents from me.
That's why I'm so lonely. It's why I'm so unstable.
My parents could not defer gratification.
Is that their fault? Look, I gave up writing books for almost 10 years when I was raising my daughter.
I used to write two books a year.
I gave up 20 books short, right?
Except I am a happy child plus, right?
So what... Frankly, what do I care about the 20 books, right?
Compared to a happy child.
It's a good relationship, right? Great relationship.
So your parents, if you went through this, your parents couldn't defer gratification.
They were shallow and materialistic.
That's your parents. That's not the system.
It's not a system. It's not the system because, you see, the system, like if it's a system like fascism or the draft or communism where you're forced to do stuff at gunpoint all the time, okay, you can blame the system for sure.
But there's no gun to your head.
There's no gun to your parents' head saying that they had to go and Make money rather than spend time with their children.
That's not the system.
That's your parents' choice. It's your parents' choice.
They say, ah, well, but the capitalist puts profits over people and ignores the legitimate needs of the proletariat.
Well, your parents ignore your legitimate needs for time with them, constant time with them.
Human beings are raised in constant contact with parents, evolutionarily speaking, historically speaking.
Right? It's really such a tragedy.
Ignoring the legitimate needs of children creates rage.
The rage can't be placed upon the parents, so the rage gets transformed into a system.
If someone had kidnapped your parents, obviously against their will, kidnapping by definition, if someone had kidnapped your parents, wouldn't you be really, really angry at the person who kidnapped your parents and not your parents?
You'd be sympathetic towards your parents, right?
You'd be sympathetic towards your parents, and you'd be really angry at the mean old criminal who kidnapped your parents, right?
So if you look at the system and corporations of blah, blah, blah, right?
And then you do have this terror that people's greed is bottomless and it destroys humanity because your parents' greed for money they did not need, right?
It's the law of diminishing returns, right?
Marginal utility. If you're starving, the first 10 bucks means everything, like life and death, right?
If you have 10 million dollars, an extra 10 bucks doesn't really mean that much, right?
So how much did your parents need?
If you grow up in luxury and your parents buy you everything you want, Well, if you've ever been unhappy in a wealthy environment or been around people who've been unhappy in a wealthy environment, you know that money sure as hell doesn't buy you happiness.
The pursuit of money and profits over people produces communism, produces hard leftism, produces socialism.
Right? Because what is a socialist fantasy?
Don't have to work. And what does that translate to?
Parents stay home. Parents stay home.
You can live on a commune.
People are going to be around to raise the kids.
You can pursue the arts.
And what is the great fear that communists have?
Greed destroys relationships.
Greed and the environmentalists, right?
Which is often, right? Watermelon, green on the outside, red on the inside.
That the environmentalists is that the greed of man destroys the planet.
Almost not. The greed of parents destroys the children, right?
If you have money...
Spend that money so that you can stay home and raise your children.
If you want kids, if you don't want kids, it's another matter entirely, but if you're going to have kids, then you're creating people dependent upon you and your love and your time and your attention in order to be raised in a healthy and productive and happy manner.
Children are not accessories.
Children are not disposable. Putting profits above babies.
Really, it's profits above babies.
So, if you grow up with parents who pursue money at the expense of their children's happiness, then of course you're concerned that unbridled greed will destroy the world because it destroyed your world as a child.
Now, the last thing I'll say is that an argument that I have made countless times before, not in a long time in this show because it got kind of boring realizing just how little people listen to it, but What I have said before is that if you have one capitalist and a hundred workers, then the hundred workers, if they really want to get better wages or whatever, they can all threaten to quit.
They can all threaten to quit.
And this is just kind of brushed off.
Now, if you've ever been a manager, you know, I managed like 35 people at one point in my career, and if they all stopped coming to work tomorrow, I mean, that would be pretty much the end of the business, because, I mean, especially with computer code and so on, sort of complicated things, then, you know, if you've got a couple of million lines of computer code, it takes you six months to become productive in that environment, so it would just...
If everyone just didn't come into work the next day, then you have to listen to them, right?
So, this idea, though, that the workers just can't band together, that it's just impossible, right?
That you need violent unions who are going to beat up scabs and you need the government to allow the unions to have a total legal monopoly on...
Nobody else can come in and all that.
Well... This is the fear that the parents can't be reformed.
Let's say there are three kids, right?
So the kids could all band together and say, you know what, we're going to talk to our parents, we're going to say what we need, and we're going to say, look, we're just not going to take care of you when you get older or blah, blah, blah.
But the problem is that the kids can't band together because the parents will simply, like, every kid who falls out means the other kid gets that much more wealthy, right?
So you've got three kids. Let's say the first two kids rebel against the parents and, you know, say if you don't become better decent people or at least apologize for the past or something, then, you know, we're not going to have anything to do with you.
Okay, so let's say that the parents have $9 million.
First two kids drop out.
The last kid gets nine million dollars, right?
It was the first, otherwise they each would get three million dollars, right?
So if one kid drops out, everyone else's take goes from $3 million to $4.5 million.
If two of the kids drop out, then the last guy goes from $3 million to $9 million in the inheritance scenario, right?
Or even just in the spending money on the kids scenario.
So why is it that they feel, well, the workers can't possibly unionize and get together?
They can't, you know, in a voluntary free market way, refuse to come to work, blah, blah, blah, because they have this issue with their siblings where A sibling who's sex with the parents is vastly rewarded.
And if you peel off because you, you know, like say you decide to take a break from your parents because they're just, you know, unrelentingly awful, And then they say, or cut you out of the will, then if you want that money in the future, you've got to come back, you've got to grovel, and you're back at their mercy, and it's just, it's too painful, right?
So this feeling that the workers can't, that you need a government force to make sure that the workers can unionize and that the workers won't be able to unionize on their own, well, that comes out of a family situation directly to do with Siblings and inheritance and so on, right? So if you look at this, we could keep playing around with this idea for literally for hours.
And I sort of wanted to get your thoughts on it.
But I think this is really, really important to understand where people are coming from.
Someone sent me a video recently.
It's a theory I've talked about before that.
Sometimes it's raised by single mothers.
If you're raised by single mothers, then one of this guy was saying, well, he was really mad at people on the right because people on the right criticize single mothers and that his mother and he was just defending her and so on.
So we could talk about it with regards to kids who come in who are poor, and we could also talk about what the government...
means to the leftists.
But the governments are a means to compel parents to be good, to compel parents to stay home, to compel parents to be good parents, to compel parents to love their children by removing the profit motive, which returns the children, which returns the parents home, right?
So if you have a government that forces redistribution, eliminates the profit motive, then you are eliminating the kidnapper called profit that stole your parents from you.
So, let me know what you think.
It's a pretty powerful thesis, I think, and I think it explains a lot, but of course, tell me your thoughts, your experiences, and we'll get on with this great job of doing good things in the world.
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