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March 14, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:24
The Ethics of Divorce
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Good morning. So, I've been thinking about divorce in a free society.
And again, thanks and welcome to everybody who's new, who's listening in.
If you're returning, boomerang style, nice to see you again if you're here for the first time.
Nice to see you at all. So, divorce.
So, what is the purpose of marriage?
What is the purpose of marriage?
Well, if you look at the two things that are essential to marriage, it's resource provision and monogamy.
These are two things that are essential to marriage.
You have to have a monogamous sexual relationship, and a partner, almost always the man, has to provide resources.
And that's, like, if you think of sort of two people who, you know, just hang out and shack up, like they both work, they don't want kids or whatever, right?
There wouldn't be any particular need for a contract.
I mean, I had roommates and was a roommate for many years when I was in my teens and my twenties, and we never had a contract.
We never had a contract of any kind.
It was sort of, obviously you've got to pay rent and so on, but yeah, I never signed anything because it doesn't really matter.
I mean, it doesn't really matter.
So why is it that we need this marriage contract and why does it require monogamy and resource provision?
Well, because marriage is for the production and protection of children.
Marriage is for the production and protection of children.
That's the whole thing.
Now, of course, you know, if you happen to be childless, you have fertility issues, you just don't want kids, of course you don't get married and so on, but that's not what it's for fundamentally.
It's not why the institution exists.
Like, when I was younger, I biked on the roads, right?
I biked everywhere on the roads.
But the roads weren't built for me, right?
The roads were built for cars and trucks and lorries, as they would say in England.
Like that old tongue twister, red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry that we used to do as kids.
So the roads were built for something else, but I was welcome to use them.
Well, not always welcome, but you know what I mean, right?
So... Marriage is for the children.
Now, if marriage is for the children, then the most fundamental thing to understand is that the marriage contract is not between, primarily, is not between the husband and the wife.
It is not between the husband and the wife.
And I'm just talking about hetero marriage because that's sort of how the norms were developed, right?
So the contract is not between husband and wife.
Fundamentally, the purpose of the contract is not the relationship between the husband and the wife.
The purpose of the marriage and the marriage contract is between the husband and the wife and the children.
It's between the parents and the children.
It's between the adults and the children.
That's the fundamental marriage contract.
So, why is monogamy essential?
Well, monogamy is essential because the man needs to know that the children are his.
Monogamy is essential because the man needs to know that the children are his.
And the reason that the man needs to know that the children are his is because society benefits from children being raised with more love and affection, right?
The more love, affection, and attachment that children are raised, then the better society does.
And if a man suspects or finds out that his children are not his,
then he will treat them less well.
Again, I don't mean to harp on the same thing, but it's called the Cinderella Effect,
which is that non-biological custodians don't treat children on average as well as biological custodians,
like directly related children of the father.
So, society has a huge vested interest in children being raised nicely with love and affection and all this kind of stuff, which means that the preservation of affection between father and children is essential, which is why monogamy is foundational to the marriage contract.
So, number one, the man is more affectionate, When he knows that children are his, and part of that affection is emotional, and part of that affection is, of course, financial, that he is much more likely to provide resources for his children if he is certain that those children are his.
So, society functions at its best, or at least has the greatest chance of successful functioning when two conditions are met.
Children are treated well, and women stay home with children.
Right? Because society, you know, painfully over tens of thousands of years develops particular ethos and virtues and ways of doing things and it requires that women stay home in order to transmit those values to the children.
In the same way that having children is, to me, kind of pointless if those children themselves don't have children.
Struggling to develop virtues and fight immorality and impose reason and standards of rational behavior in the world.
It's sort of pointless if in one generation all of those gains can be fritted away by kids being dumped in daycare, often being taken care of by daycare attendants who don't have any investment or particular care or concern about existing cultural standards.
What's the point? What's the point of it all, right?
It can all just, poof, vanish, right?
If you're childless and you go to your ancestors and you say, yeah, yeah, you've really got to struggle through the Black Death and you've got to raise children, you've got to bury children, you've got to fight evil and you've got to get your harvest in and you've got to get through the winter with barely any food and so on.
And you've got to do that so that I can travel around in a van and never settle down and never have any children.
Well, of course, you wouldn't exist, right?
If your principle were universalized, you wouldn't exist.
They wouldn't bother. They'd go be a monk, right?
It's more pleasant being a monk in many ways in the medieval world.
So society needs men to love their children, and society needs men to provide financial resources for their children.
And that gets nuked if there is, you know, some sort of hippy-dippy commune with multiple partnerings and nobody knows whose kid is who.
And remember, of course, over the course of history that DNA testing, of course, wasn't available.
Sorry to use the word of course so many times, but DNA testing wasn't available, so a man just had to do his best to try and figure it out, right?
So, a pair-bonded, exclusive, monogamous relationship provides the greatest love for the children from the part of the father, and also provides for the greatest resources.
So, if the father doesn't love his children, those children will grow up to be, on average, more problematic, maybe more criminal, and so on.
I mean, we know fatherless children are highly overrepresented or Very high numbers when it comes to crime and illegitimacy and addiction and promiscuity and all that, right?
So we know that society works at its best when fathers pair bond with their children and provide resources for the children.
Providing resources allows the mothers to stay home and transmit cultural values, and so society as a whole does a lot better.
I sort of point this out in my new novel, The Present, which you can get at freedoman.locals.com.
The daycare kids versus the mom-stay-home kids.
Daycare kids versus non-daycare kids.
I mean, not only do fathers tend not to work hard if the children aren't theirs, or they suspect that, but also...
Men don't work very hard in society to produce resources and drive the economy and so on if they have those doubts.
And, I mean, King Lear obviously is not exactly a sociological document, but a very famous play wherein...
The one kid who's a bastard, born out of wedlock, is kind of a sociopath, right?
Because he's not raised in the nurturance of society's protection and the bosom of its hearthiness and so on.
So, yeah, it tends to not particularly believe in...
I mean, if society provides children protection, then those children will generally grow up respecting society's rules.
I mean, that's just a kind of instinctual thing, right?
We're drawn to that which gives us protection.
I mean, ducklings follow whoever is bigger and around when they're born to give protection to them.
So if society does protect children, then those children tend to respect the rules of society.
And if society doesn't protect children, well, I think we all know how that plays out.
So the marriage contract is between caregivers and children.
The woman, when economically disabled through childbirth and breastfeeding and pregnancy, and the general cycle that goes from 20 to 40 for a lot of women throughout history, when the woman is economically disabled, she desperately needs a man to provide resources to her.
Right? So monogamy and resource provision is a contract not between two adults, but between two adults and their children.
Monogamy, resource provision, is the contract between parents and children.
Because the children can't provide for themselves.
And whatever we can't provide for ourselves, we need to contract that.
I can't provide my own cell phone service, so I I have a contract.
I can't do my own dental work, so I have a payment system with my dentist.
I go and get my checkups. And you understand, right?
Whatever you can't provide for yourself, you know, whatever you can provide yourself, you don't need a contract.
You need to pee, you go pee. You can't pay someone else to do it.
You can't pay somebody else to eat for you or get your tan or whatever you're doing.
So whatever you can provide for yourself, you don't need a contract.
A contract is needed for things you can't provide for yourself.
Two adults, if you just think of the husband and the wife, two adults can absolutely provide for themselves, so they don't need a contract.
The people who can provide for themselves in the marriage contract are the children, and therefore the marriage contract is between two adults and their children.
So marriage is a contract between adults and children.
That's its fundamental purpose and the reason why it exists at all, the marital contract, marital standards.
So, when we understand that, we understand what divorce is.
Divorce is the breaking of the contract Between the parents and the children.
Divorce is the breaking of the contract between the parents and the children.
And this is what I've been talking about recently.
It's just sort of come up a bunch of times.
When I was a kid in boarding school, at the age of six or seven or eight, I had to write a letter to my father every week, and I referred to him as dear first name.
And people would say, well, no.
He's your father. You can refer to him as your father.
I said, but he's my ex-father.
He's my mother's ex-husband, and he's my ex-father.
Because my father had left me.
I mean, there's no way to put too fine a point on it.
My father had left me.
My father had left me.
So, I only existed...
I was only birthed because of the marriage contract.
So when my father divorced my mother, he abandoned the marital contract that gave me life.
The marital contract that gave me life.
The marital contract that only existed in order to give me life.
Right? The real IVF, so to speak, is the marriage contract.
Marriage contract exists to serve the needs of children.
And so when my father left my mother, he left me.
He divorced me.
Because my mother could find another man, she worked, she could survive.
I could not survive without resources.
My mother could. So when my father essentially abandoned us and For various reasons we don't have to get into here, was not able to or did not provide a significant number of resources.
I remember he got me $90 a month for some part of the year when I was in university.
I remember that. But my father divorced me because divorce is about the provision of protection and resources For children.
And when my father left, he could not provide protection.
And, okay, there were some resources, but the resources were not Because of love, right?
So remember, society desperately needs fathers.
Look, of course it needs mothers to love their children, but mothers always know that the children are theirs and fathers don't, right?
It's mama's baby and daddy's maybe.
So this is why monogamy is so precious and why chastity belts existed and so on, because women can always have affairs.
Women can always have sex with just about Any, if they're reasonable looking, just about any dude.
So chastity and loyalty and monogamy is so prized and precious.
So the purpose of the marriage contract is to have the man provide resources and love.
And the love is the protection.
The resources are the feeding and the love is...
The protection, right?
So you can think of a deer in the woods nibbling on some leaves.
It is eating, but it is not protected.
A deer in a zoo eating on some leaves is both feeding and protected.
So I was able to gain resources, but I did not have the protection.
of my father and without getting into any particular details I might do those before I die but I really was not protected in some very fundamental and disturbing ways so my father and my mother did not divorce each other so my mother and father did not divorce each other Because marriage only exists for the sake of children.
Marriage is a contract between parents and children.
Whatever facilitates the close bond, greater affection, and voluntary resource transference is for the betterment of society.
So, my parents separated But they both divorced me.
Because the conditions that created me had been rejected.
My father obviously went to the other side of the world.
And my mother brought strange men into the environment.
And of course I use the word strange as you can imagine in a multiplicity of ways.
So that divorce, my mother would not have had a child if she was not married.
And so I only exist because my mother believed she had a provider and a protector in the form of my father.
When they separated, She broke the contract with me, which was to have a provider and protector, a male who could raise and love me.
That was the deal.
That's the deal that marriage provides to children.
So, she separated from my father, but she, even though she stayed, she divorced me.
Because she separated from my father And my father was essential to the health and security and safety of my upbringing.
So even if you stay, by divorcing, you are breaking the contract with your children.
By divorcing, you are breaking the contract with your children.
The contract is to have a protector and a provider, biologically your father, in the environment so that you get treated the very best you can get treated.
That is the deal.
That is the contract.
And when my mother removed from my environment my protector and provider And went with other men who were not related to me and had no interest in me and basically viewed me, as most men who date single mothers do, as an obstacle to what they wanted.
Well, that was breaking the contract.
So one of the great lies in society, one of the many great lies in society, is that divorce is about the parents.
Divorce is the breaking of a contract designed to provide for and protect children.
Divorce is breaking a contract with the children.
Divorce is a betrayal of the children.
And divorce is not an isolated act.
Divorce is not an isolated act.
No man is an island.
We are all bound in together.
If you chain-smoke in a house with little children, that is not a personal decision.
It's not a personal... I mean, I remember a friend of mine, a friend of mine's father, who was a smoker, died.
We went to clean out his apartment, and the walls were yellow.
Like, we had to repaint because he exhaled so much smoke that the walls had turned yellow.
So even that smoking...
I mean, it went into the environment and so on.
And he was in an apartment building, so it went through the vents.
And yeah, so even that...
Like, my mother smoked when I was growing up.
Still smokes, as far as I know.
And that's not an isolated decision.
It's that line from Schindler's List.
For every cigarette you smoke, I smoke half.
So divorce is...
I left my husband.
I divorced my husband. Okay.
But even that way of putting it is not accurate.
I broke my contract with my children and endangered society.
The very society that I demand gives me protection, I am now loosing, in all likelihood, harm and danger upon that society.
I expect the society to give me protection.
I am now breaking the contract with my children, which is much more likely that they will end up harming society through criminality, through promiscuity, through drug addiction, through cigarette smoking, through ill health, and all of that, right?
So this atomization that has occurred where people think that their decisions are just individual.
I think one of the reasons why...
People may have some issues with other people who pursue unhealthy lifestyles.
They don't exercise, maybe significantly overweight, they smoke and so on.
One of the reasons why people have an issue with that is because, I mean, especially in the sort of socialized medicine in America is like half socialized in medical, because it raises other people's taxes.
The butterfly effect, the ripple effect.
And also, even if you were in an entirely self-funded medical system, Other people who pursue unhealthy lifestyles are harming society as a whole for a couple of reasons.
They are consuming inevitably scarce healthcare supplies.
So for everyone whose lifestyle choices lead them to get diabetes, they have to have a doctor to help manage that diabetes.
That doctor is then not available.
To other people, available to help the health of other people who are in the, you know, 30% of people who get ill, not as a result of lifestyle choices.
So you are raising the price of healthcare for everyone by excessively consuming healthcare due to poor lifestyle choices.
Also, You are raising the price of everything else.
Because when a lot of people make bad health choices, then the demand for healthcare goes up, which means smart and talented people go into healthcare rather than engineering or being an entrepreneur or whatever it is.
So they get drawn out of the productive economy and they get ensconced in the rescue economy.
Productive economy is making new things.
The rescue economy is trying to keep people alive who are killing themselves with food or smoking or sedentary lifestyles
or something like that.
It's not exactly economic plus to have that happen.
I mean, it's important and you need to have a healthcare system and all of that, but...
This is the guy when I once had a forearm crack from a bicycle accident, which was entirely my own fault.
I was carrying a bag full of things and it went into my spokes.
Entirely my fault and a bad decision.
But when I went to get an x-rayed, it was fine.
It healed up in a couple of weeks.
But when I went to get an x-rayed, there was a guy...
Who had his arm in a sling and the doctor said, you know, this is not getting better.
This doesn't seem to be healing like what's happening.
And the guy said, well, not much.
I did go parachuting and, you know, fell on it and all that.
And the doctor got really enraged with him.
Like, what's the point of me patching you up if you just go out and parachute?
I gave you specific instructions not to put your arm under any stress and strain.
You decide to go parachuting.
Why the hell should I treat you at all?
If you don't follow my advice, it's all a complete waste of time.
And, you know, the doctor had a really good point.
I remembered this from like 30 plus years ago.
I remember this. The doctor was really angry.
I fix you up. You go and voluntarily break yourself.
Then there's no point in me fixing you up, right?
This is all worse than a waste of time.
And I understand that the doctor was frustrated and angry and this all made perfect sense to me.
So we have decisions as a whole.
We say, well, I divorced my husband.
That's an atomistic, really selfish view of the entire situation.
I broke faith with my children, put them in harm's way, and am endangering society as a whole.
Because even if, you know, you have kids of divorce and so on, I mean, of course, you know, not all of them end up as criminals and so on, but there is a lot of work to be done.
You know, one of the reasons that I needed to spend tens of thousands of dollars on therapy was because I had been raised in an environment of divorce.
So that was a cost.
I didn't take that money and use it to create another company or invest in something.
I used it to pay for the repair of my psyche that had been damaged in part through divorce.
So again, it's just negative for society as a whole.
And so when people say, well, we stayed together for the sake of the kids, and then we got divorced.
Okay, even that has, I mean, I think that's better, assuming no, you know, direct physical abuse or whatever, right?
Or sexual abuse, of course.
But he said, well, we stayed, I stayed with him, I stayed with my husband for the sake of the kids.
When the kids grew up, I divorced him.
Okay, even if you do that, you should never talk about it.
Because then what the kids do is they look back on their family life, and they say, gosh, how much of that was a lie?
How much of that was a lie? How much of that was real?
How much of that was mom faking it?
And then it becomes really tough for them to trust.
It becomes really tough for them to trust.
Now, you know, and the problem with these redefinitions, right?
The problem with these redefinitions is when people have made a bunch of bad decisions, then redefinitions become good for the future but very tough for the present.
And because people's time preferences have shrunk enormously, we used to think about eternity and the entire span of our civilization, And now we think about the next dopamine hit five minutes from now or three minutes from now.
But when, you know, you got hundreds of millions of people who were smokers, and then society says, oh, by the way, smoking can kill you.
And those people, like that helps people avoid smoking in the future, but the people who are already smoking feel bad and stressed and worried and nervous and check their lungs and so on, right?
And this is why in the past people had some real significant contempt for those who divorced.
Because it was viewed as an act extraordinarily selfish that harmed both children and society.
An extraordinarily selfish act that broke faith with your children and harmed society as a whole.
Because the kids that you raise, they go out into the world and they wreak havoc or Bring virtue depending on to a large degree how you've raised them.
So the idea that you would betray your children and remove from them their protector and loving provider because you were dissatisfied would be the mark of a complete selfish monster.
A complete selfish monster.
That you wouldn't bend, you wouldn't figure it out, and also that you were just really dumb because you had the chance to vet your, like the father of your children, you had a chance to vet them for months or years before you got married.
You know, if somebody spends three months researching which car to buy and test drives 20 different cars, finally settles on a car, And then a couple of months later says, I can't stand this car.
It's the worst car ever. I mean, this would seem false, ridiculous, embarrassing.
And that somebody would say, well, I'm really dissatisfied with this car.
And I'm just going to get rid of it, right?
Well, that would be the mark of somebody who was dangerously crazy.
Right? That would be the mark of somebody really, really disturbed, and so on, right?
Now, of course, society has given back the provision of resources aspect of it through alimony, the welfare state, child support, and so on.
But the unfortunate thing, of course, is that that has now also worked against the interests of the children.
So a woman who gets resources from the father of her children and the father of the children is not present, those additional resources end up as a draw for lazy, entitled, greedy, exploitive, and often abusive men.
Right, so they call them in the projects the girlfriend farms, right?
It's all the women who have all of this money because of the welfare state and maybe some child support, and then they just get these deadbeat boyfriends lounging on the couch watching ESPN and not contributing anything, which is, you know, really bad for the children who have to try and navigate that kind of situation.
So when we give resources...
To women who have divorced their husbands, it did double harm for the children.
One is that the loving protector and provider is no longer in the house.
And number two, it acts as, you know, honey to ants in terms of bringing dysfunctional men around who just like the resources.
And so on, right? So it's just absolutely appalling.
And of course, you know, the children then try this Velcro-on-Velcro-off pair bonding with the men who come drifting through the single mother's squalid environment.
And, you know, it's repulsive, and it's horrible, and it's destructive, and it's...
I mean, it's a wild thing. This is why society used to say to a woman, no, you made your bed, now lie in it.
You had a chance to marry a wide variety of men.
You chose this man. You chose to date him, to get engaged, to get married, to stay married, to have children.
You are now in, because the contract is not between you and your husband.
The contract is not between you and the father of your children.
The contract is between you and the children.
And you don't get to break a contract With the children who only exist because of that contract.
Right? I mean, if a woman is told there's no money in protection available for you, do you want to have unprotected sex?
I mean, the vast majority of women would, of course, refrain from that.
Unprotected, like intercourse, right?
So, women are perfectly capable of not having children out of wedlock.
And, you know, I say this, I've talked to countless women over the course of this show.
Oh, I got pregnant. Oh, it was an oops.
It was an accidental. And every single time, at least almost every single time, it's like, oh, yeah, well, I had unprotected sex.
It's like, well, you did that because the resources were guaranteed.
But if you do that, you have a child with a man in a Marriage or a relationship where you expect monogamy and resource provision, whether that's a formal marriage or not, right?
Marriage was, of course, originally civil.
And the marriage license in the States was only put in to prevent interracial marriage back in the day.
But when you have a kid with a man and you expect that man to love and provide resources to those children, love those children, provide resources to them, then you do that on the foundation of monogamy.
Because if the man finds out those aren't his children, then he won't provide resources for them, mostly.
I mean, maybe a few super-rich men could, but most men wouldn't.
And society is thrown into absolute turmoil when this happens, right?
So you have a child on the expectation of loving protection from a father and loving resource provision.
And when you break that, you're breaking the contract with the child.
That's why the child exists and that's what's best for the child.
And so how society would deal with this in a free society?
I don't think it would have to.
If people are raised well, and the quality of people around is very good, and people are taught these things, and they're taught what to look for, and you go through, you know, pre-marriage counseling, which people should go through if they've had a rough past, if they haven't done therapy, and people understand this, and there's a lot of social ostracism and so on, then, yeah, I mean, if a woman is getting resources from a man because she's his wife, and then she divorces him, she doesn't get resources.
Right? I mean, if I quit a job, I don't still get paid, right?
That's sort of one of the deals.
And if somebody fires me, it doesn't have to pay me.
So, ah, yes, well, what about the children?
It's like, yes, that is very tough, which is why you should choose the right person.
Well, the children could end up starving to death and so on.
Well, then maybe the children are put up for adoption, or maybe there's some focus on Keeping the children in a fair degree of comfort without ever, you know, stunning, brave, noble, and wonderful praising of the woman who divorced or never even settled down with the man who was her children.
So the children grow up knowing that their mother is viewed as a dangerous and destructive force by society.
Now, of course, that's tough when you're a kid, but boy, does that make it easier.
When you get older.
So yeah, tell me what you think.
I'm curious about your thoughts.
This is a fairly new idea I'm working with, so I look forward to getting your feedback.
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