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Oct. 29, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:00
The Truth About Small Talk
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Hey everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom and Hope you're doing well.
Alright, an interestingly deep question for y'all, which sounds shallow.
So here we go. Somebody says, I'm filled with thoughts, but often find my mind blank when engaging with people who are fluent in small talk.
What is the truth about people who love small talk?
Your reveal about shy people was legendary.
Then extremely helpful, right?
Small talk. Now, small talk is a kind of social lubricant.
You know, the small pleasantries that people exchange back and forth to just acknowledge each other's presence and to show some sort of basic social skills and empathy.
It's a good thing to be...
Decent at small talk.
I don't think it's something you want to become a real expert at, but it's a good thing to be decent at small talk.
Okay, you can get by, you can do it on a sort of as-needed basis.
That's a fine thing, not a bad thing at all.
Remember, and this is particularly true for men, but also to some degree for women, are you relatively decent at, you know, what's called reading the room?
Can you read the room?
That's important. Because if you don't get social cues very well, then you're less likely to be successful.
Right? There's this joke, it's been around forever, in comedy circles, where some bad thing happens, and some bad sort of social war of it, and somebody makes a joke about it, and then they say, too soon?
Too soon? Yeah, it's too soon.
Right? Is it too soon?
Right? Because comedy is tragedy plus time.
So can you read the room...
Are you good at reading social cues?
Do you know if somebody's bored with what you're saying?
Do you know if somebody's actually finding you funny?
Do you know if somebody's interested in what you're saying?
So are you good at reading the room?
Do you know how to act appropriately in social situations?
Now, this doesn't mean being a slave to social situations.
It doesn't mean having no identity.
It doesn't mean having no integrity.
It's just, can you read particular social cues?
So for instance, somebody who's bad at reading social cues would be the petty criminal who decides to fight the cop, right?
I think that's not good at reading about legal cues, but also to some degree social cues.
Are you decent at reading social cues?
If somebody is acutely uncomfortable, then are you able to adjust your behavior To act in recognition of that.
It doesn't mean necessarily to make them feel better or anything like that, but just are you able to adjust your behavior in reaction to someone who's acutely uncomfortable?
So there's another real cliché In comedies, which is somebody gets kind of obsessed with doing something themselves.
They're obsessed with cleaning something under their nails and they really get into it.
And other people look at them like, whoa, what are you doing?
That kind of thing. This is used a number of times in the 80s movie, The Breakfast Club, where the goth girl, the emo girl, is biting at her nails or her cuticles or something and everyone's looking at her like with that, what are you doing?
And that's an example of not reading social cues.
You get so into what you're doing that other people look at you like you've sprouted a second how to get an advertising head or something like that.
And that's an example of not reading social cues very well.
And that's the problem. You really should be...
A lot of people feel like, oh, I'm not going to be a slave to convention.
I'm not going to read social cues.
And it's like, okay, well, that's fine.
You can do that.
But... It's going to harm your dating prospects.
In particular, women tend to be a little bit more concerned about social status and reading the room and reading social cues and so on.
Reading social cues doesn't mean that you're a slave.
If somebody's uncomfortable, reading the social cues simply means noticing that they're uncomfortable.
And whether you deal with that or not, but at least noticing it.
Maybe you'll take some steps to make them more comfortable, maybe you'll drop the topic, or maybe You know, if you are engaged in some sort of hostile debate, maybe you'll press your advantage and really push verbally hard down on where they're the least comfortable.
Like, it could be any number of things, but you've got to at least know what's going on.
What you do with it is a different matter, but you have to at least be able to read the room.
So, being able to do small talk is fine.
Now, you want to be able to do small talk You don't want to be only able to do small talk.
Does that make sense?
You want to have fine motor skills, but you don't want to only have fine motor skills.
Like, you want to be able to thread a needle, I suppose, but you also want to be able to lift heavy weights and run away from a bear, right?
You need your big, big ass...
Muscle skills as well as your sort of fine motor skills.
So you don't want to be a slave to social convention in this way.
There is a certain kind of small-minded, narrow-minded, rigid personality structure that is quite hostile towards anything of depth.
I mean, I think we...
It's almost the default position these days to be hostile and frightened and aggressive towards anything of any depth.
This is an old Seinfeld joke.
I don't really think we're supposed to be talking about this.
You know, that kind of stuff, right?
Keep it shallow, keep it goofy, keep it nonsensical, and so on.
And as sort of woke culture has expanded, or woke anti-culture has expanded, this has become more and more common.
So there are people who are desperate to keep topics relentlessly shallow, inconsequential, and unimportant.
And they do that with quite an aggressive rigidity.
And this is where the word inappropriate comes from.
This is inappropriate to talk about.
Well, of course, the question is always, well, appropriate to what?
Who defines it? What does it mean relative to whatever else is going on?
So it's never defined.
It's just a generic negative term that is supposed to make you feel bad and thus
Train you into not talking about particular topics rather than give you a reason for not talking about particular
topics. So yeah inappropriate Getting cold angry glances shot at you people withdrawing
people rolling their eyes. These are all designed to program you into avoiding
Particular topics now I was thinking about this just over the last couple of days
so what is it that characterizes some of the worst aspects of the
Lower classes that I can I crawled my way out of and one of them is this intense rigidity?
with regards to thoughts and ideas There's no flexibility. There's no curiosity.
And I've referred to them as the period people.
You know, it's just this way.
Period. You know, hate has no home here.
It's like, what does that even mean?
Does that mean you hate people? Who hate?
What if they hate evil?
It doesn't mean anything.
It's just, well, when people say hate has no home here, what they mean is that they are giving themselves license to hate people.
Which is, I mean, it's kind of ironic, right?
Intolerance has no home here!
It's like, well then aren't you intolerant?
And what if somebody's intolerant of intolerance?
I mean, does that mean that...
Anyway, so it's all just a bunch of nonsense.
Has no home here means...
Has no home here is one of these threats of ostracism.
It's designed to kick into your unconscious and provoke...
The torture circuits that are stimulated by threats or enactments of ostracism.
So that's what that sort of, hate has no home here, means that you're going to threaten you with ostracism if you do something that I define as hate.
We're allowed to hate the hateful even if the hateful are hating the hateful and the evil.
Anyway, it's all a bunch of Pavlovian programmable brain vacuum nonsense, but There are this rigidity and these slogans, right?
And these slogans pass for wisdom, these slogans pass for knowledge, these slogans pass for virtue, but the slogans are stupid.
The slogans are stupid.
And, you know, no human being is illegal, right?
It's just a stupid statement.
It's a stupid statement because, of course, there are tons of people who are illegal.
Try not paying your taxes and see if you end up becoming illegal, right?
Try not paying for government schools.
Anyway, so it's all... But these are just slogans, right?
Now, when people pretend that they have wisdom because they have slogans...
Then they have to skate on the shallowest of shallow surfaces of things because any depth reveals their pretense of wisdom.
Any depth, any curiosity.
This is back to the ancient battle between Socrates and the sophists.
The sophists are those who pretend to have knowledge that they don't in fact have.
And this is sort of the MPC thing, right?
You get programmed with a bunch of slogans and you can see them.
Like people proudly display them on their lawns and so on.
And we've sort of mentioned them here.
Well, just a bunch of slogans.
There's no depth. There's no knowledge.
Like, you know, all of the people who say, well, you can't know anything for certain, man.
Oh, really? Are you certain of that?
You know, it's just stupid.
Stupid stuff. People are given slogans and they grab onto those slogans as a form of vanity advertising to pretend that they're deep and knowledgeable when they are when they're not.
Deep and knowledgeable and quite the opposite, right?
To give people slogans and have them pretend to be virtuous is one of the surest methods of advancing power and control over people.
The reason being that the way that you avoid the simplicity and stupidity of violence is with the depth and curiosity of philosophy.
That there aren't simple answers, that it's very complex, because when there are simple answers, violence is very tempting.
When there are complex answers, violence becomes less tempting, right?
So idiots will say, well, we've got a bunch of rich people, there's a couple of poor people, we'll just take money from the rich people, give it to the poor people, and everyone will be fine.
That's a stupid solution to a challenging problem.
And if you can get people to believe that, then the use of violence and the use of slogans, the use of violence and the boiling down of things to one-variable simplicity idiot formulas are very intertwined.
Complexity is freedom.
Simplicity often is brutality.
Now, it's sort of like, how should goods be allocated in society?
Well, of course, the stupid answer is to say, you know, that the wisest people should sit and distribute resources according to what's best for the economy.
That's some sort of central planning nonsense, right?
You say, well, how are they going to know?
And how can they be so wise?
And how do they get chosen?
And what happens if they're bad?
You know, there's just so many questions.
How do we protect our property?
Well, the government. But the government can only protect your property by taking it ahead of time, so that's not really much of an answer now, is it, right?
It's like saying, well, we protect women from being raped by forcing them to marry men and then making...
No. There's no possibility of raping within a marriage.
So we're protecting women from rape.
This would be the dumb argument, right?
Women are getting raped. Well, we'll force women to marry men and then define marriage as that in which you cannot rape your wife.
And look at that. No rape, right?
It's all this sort of stuff, right?
Rather than dealing with root causes, you jiggle with effects and think that you're a genius.
So... You want to keep things complex.
Shallow people want to keep things simple.
Shallow people want to keep things simple.
And those in power want to hand people slogans because by pretending that things are simple, they make people vain and impatient and aggressive.
And they both emotionally and from a sort of consequential standpoint raise the likelihood of advocating violence.
You know, if the government is just great at educating kids, and kids need to be educated, then of course we have the government educate children, right?
That's the argument. As opposed to, well, the greatest power any human beings have is over the mindset of children.
And how are people never, like, how are you going to guarantee without competition and voluntarism that people will never use that power to ill?
You can't guarantee that.
And therefore, you are setting yourself up for society destroying propaganda machines, right?
Mills. So, shallow people, small talk addicted people, people who will try and punish you for veering out of the shallow end of the conversation pool, well, the reason they want to keep you in the shallow end is the dead bodies of their former conscience is buried in the deep end.
When you trade out your conscience for slogans, when you trade out challenging virtue for simplistic shouting, you kill your conscience.
I mean, you can't really kill a dead, but you entomb it for sure.
And in the same way that a guy who's killed a bunch of people and buried them In his backyard doesn't want you rooting around his backyard.
People who have traded in their conscience for empty, stupid sloganeering don't want you asking any foundational questions because that will reveal their own corruption and their own pretense of knowledge and virtue, right?
So the people who say, I care about the poor and we should just give the poor money and then they won't be poor and everything will be great.
Well, that's...
It's dumb. And because it's dumb, it tempts people to violence.
The reason for that, well, if it's so simple, you might as well just use coercion to achieve it.
That's number one. And number two, they need it enacted through violence because otherwise people will start asking uncomfortable questions, reveal their own appalling lack of ignorance or thought or care about the actual subject, their lack of caring about the poor.
They only care about people perceiving that they care about the poor.
They don't actually care about the poor.
They're perfectly willing to sacrifice the poor to And the future of the poor in order to pretend to care and for people to believe that they care.
And so I care about the arts, so the government should fund the arts.
It's like, well, the arts is very powerful ways of programming people, and will the government fund art financially?
That is critical of the government.
Well, probably not, and therefore you're losing a pretty powerful way of pushing back against expansions of government power, which is terrible and so on, right?
So again, simple answers provoke violence.
Or justify violence.
Because if it's that simple, just get it done with a gun.
And also because complex questions that are allowed in the vicinity unravel the vanity and narcissistic ignorance of people masquerading as deep, rich, wise, and tenderhearted virtues.
So, yeah, shallow people in that sense.
The people who are constantly...
Promoting small talk.
And it doesn't just necessarily mean about sports and the weather, although that's certainly part of it.
But it also has to do with stupid solutions to complex social problems, like take money from the rich and give them to the poor.
Well, isn't that the use of coercion?
Well, a lot of rich people get their Money from coercion as well.
Well, do two wrongs justify it, right?
And all this kind of stuff, right?
So, yeah, it's really bad.
For the most part, and I've only penetrated this a couple of times, so this is not exactly scientific, but for the most part, when people are relentlessly addicted to small talk...
It's because they have a really bad conscience.
They have a really bad conscience because they're pretending to promote virtue while being in the service of evil, for the most part.
By promoting simple, coercive solutions to complex social problems, they're pretending to be virtuous while actually serving evil.
Well, that's going to give you a very, very, very bad conscience.
In fact, it's going to give you in some ways a worse conscience than actively doing evil.
A thief has a better conscience than a sophist, because the thief is not lying to himself or to others.
I mean, a sophist is more of a con man, but a con man can only target people who voluntarily walk into his trap, but the sophist can, in conjunction with the state, produce absolutely completely disastrous effects that affect hundreds of millions or billions of people in a pretty permanent and escalating kind of way.
So the sophist is more dangerous than the thief in many ways.
And those who advocate stupid, coercive slogans in the place of sophisticated and curious wisdom are, I mean, doing really, really terrible things in the world.
And because they never want that revealed to themselves, least of all, they never want you to find the bodies in the deep end.
They've got to keep you shallow.
They've got to keep small talk.
Small talk births very, very big evils.
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