Nov. 10, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:35
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| I hope you will check out the site. | |
| What are your thoughts on sleepovers? | |
| I used to do sleepovers growing up, and we always snuck out, stayed up super late, ate crappy food, watched horror movies, etc. | |
| There are a lot of stories coming out about kids getting raped and molested while sleeping over at a, quote, friend's house. | |
| Do you let Izzy go to sleepovers? | |
| Well, without getting into any particular specifics, the only way that Izzy would be at a sleepover is if we had known the family for many years, and if they were peaceful parents, and so on. | |
| You know, the number of messed up kids based on father absence, we know that children are over 30 times more likely to be abused if there's a non-related male living in the house, i.e. | |
| a single mother with a boyfriend, so There's just a lot of dangerous kids out there, and so we would have to know him. | |
| Yeah, she's had sleepovers, but it's been with families we've known for many, many years and are intact and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So the cost-benefit, right? | |
| You have to look at the cost-benefit. | |
| If you don't know people very well, you're really rolling the dice. | |
| What's the cost-benefit? | |
| It could be lifelong psychological harm versus, what, bad food and a horror movie. | |
| In general, I would say that it's probably wiser to keep your kids only in the orbit of people you've known for a long time and who are vetted. | |
| And of course you can't vet sleepover parents, right? | |
| So I certainly wouldn't consider it particularly safe to let any kid go to a sleepover with unvetted other kids, right? | |
| So if it's, you know, you've known the family for 10 years and they've got great kids and Everyone, you know everyone who's going to be there and so on, that's great, but some other kid with a whole bunch of other kids you haven't vetted, seems like a bad idea to me, but anyway. | |
| Alright, when I was younger, I was exposed to very violent TV and movies by my dad. | |
| My mom didn't like it, but didn't do anything other than passive-aggressively insult my dad. | |
| Thinking back, I remember times when I would tortuously kill insects and little frogs. | |
| I also had no trouble hitting our dog to quote discipline it. | |
| I am repulsed by this now, and have developed empathy to the point where I would never dream of herding animals like this. | |
| What is your analysis of this? | |
| I mean, I think it's very sad. | |
| I think it's very sad. | |
| I remember when I was very young, maybe five or so, I was dumped with a bunch of kids because my mother was dating some guy and the older kids put on a Dracula movie and I remember watching a steak getting pounded into a guy's chest and blood coming out of his mouth and all of that and it was really pretty horrible. | |
| I also have mentioned that at my boarding school Well, normally we had sort of very cute movies. | |
| We'd have a couple of movie nights every month or two, and in one of them was the movie Omega Man about Charlton Heston being chased and zombies, and I remember a motorbike scene, him throwing grenades. | |
| I mean, just horrible, horrible stuff. | |
| The destruction of innocence is the business of power. | |
| You understand? The destruction of innocence is the business of power. | |
| And the way that you destroy innocence is you hyper-stimulate the fight-or-flight response in children before they're able to contextualize it. | |
| Before they're able to reason it, before they're able to understand, well, it's just a movie, they're just actors, it's just all make-believe, and so on. | |
| Children don't really have the ability to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction, in terms of movies and so on, at a very young age. | |
| Everything's real, and there's no filter. | |
| There are people who take just enormous delight in destroying innocence. | |
| Sort of back to the movie I mentioned, Last Tank in Paris. | |
| There are just people who take an enormous and deep delight in the destruction of innocence. | |
| It's a kind of sadism, and it is, of course, All to the service of those in power. | |
| Because what happens, of course, is that when your innocence is attacked in this kind of way, you end up with particular characteristics that you view yourself as, quote, bad, as you say, herding insects and being aggressive towards dogs and so on. | |
| So, yeah, you end up with these habits that seem incomprehensible to you that you then label as, quote, bad. | |
| And so you grow up with low self-esteem, you grow up with self-concern, you grow up with hostility towards your own impulses, and you're very easy to rule. | |
| All right, in the news recently, someone says, Baltimore City Schools had almost 0% of students pass the 7th grade standardized tests, and in Oregon, they're getting rid of standards for reading, writing, and math because people of color can't pass them. | |
| Is this proving the bell curve by Douglas Murray? | |
| I think you're not talking about Douglas Murray, Charles Murray. | |
| Can you be used to make educators more realistic? | |
| Should students be taught to their level of capabilities, how do you imagine education in a free society? | |
| Well, of course, the beautiful thing about a free society is nobody has to imagine anything. | |
| I mean, nobody knows how children should be educated, both because we have the government in charge of most education and also because we haven't had UPB to teach ethics to children. | |
| I did a show many, many years ago called The ABCs of UPB. You can find it at fdrpodcast.com. | |
| Nobody knows. I don't know the best way for children to be educated. | |
| There is no one-size-fits-all solution. | |
| I don't know how many kids should be... | |
| Like when I was a kid, there was basic, normal, and advanced. | |
| And I was always shunted into the advanced classes. | |
| And, you know, now you can't do that stuff for obvious reasons. | |
| So, I don't know how people should be educated. | |
| I'm pretty good, I think, at trying to get philosophical ideas across to people. | |
| How various cohorts of children should be educated, who should go more into the trades, and have practical experience, who should be more theoretical. | |
| I have no idea. I have no idea. | |
| All I know, like I don't know what the economy looks like post-slavery, but I know slavery is wrong. | |
| All right. Is the United States of America an example of a philosophical derived nation? | |
| How have cultures been influenced or united by philosophy? | |
| What are some modern examples of philosophical unification? | |
| Well, certainly the founding fathers were very philosophical. | |
| They were enlightenment figures. | |
| And they were very influenced by, for instance, Milton's Aria Pagetica, which is the first full-throated defense of free speech in the world. | |
| Really, I mean, the most powerful one, certainly of the early examples. | |
| And they were very influenced by Locke and free markets and so on. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| Cultures are incredibly influenced and united by philosophy. | |
| Not many people sort of see this or realize it. | |
| Philosophy has a great and powerful unifying impact on culture. | |
| Philosophy brings people together like nothing else. | |
| Philosophy unites and focuses and brings everyone in a straight line, and that straight line is fear and hatred of philosophy. | |
| Philosophy unifies by creating a common enemy to culture called philosophy. | |
| Anybody who speaks in abstractions, in universals, particularly universal morals are the biggest thing that unseat unjust powers, so yeah, cultures are incredibly influenced and united by philosophy in their hatred Of an opposition to philosophy as a whole. | |
| Alright. Someone says, how would you navigate a world in which it becomes increasingly more difficult to believe what you see and hear with the use of AI-generated content? | |
| As it is now AI videos and AI voice recreation is about as bad as it will ever be. | |
| It will only continue to get better. | |
| It seems like sources of news, whether that's social media or mainstream media, will be less and less reliable. | |
| Well, I mean, I think this is great. | |
| You know, who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes? | |
| I mean, people have been lying about me for so long and taking things out of context. | |
| It's nice to see technology widen, you know, how many people were defending me and pointing out that I was being lied about and so on, right? | |
| So I guess it's kind of nice to see everyone being subject to the same ugliness that was inflicted and continues to be inflicted on me. | |
| An argument can't be AI generated. | |
| And so, if people are susceptible to negative portrayals, right? | |
| I mean, obviously people have taken me way out of context, and a scribe believes to me that the exact opposite of everything that is decent, noble, and virtuous. | |
| So for me, seeing this net widen so that fake stuff can now be created to bring other people down, I don't like the process, but it's kind of inevitable. | |
| If you let people lie by taking people out of context, then you've created a great weapon, which is to disappear people from the public stage based upon falsehoods. | |
| And so... Once you give people the power to silence others through lying, the lies are just going to get more and more sophisticated until they become such a great problem that we need a whole new epistemology, right? So the old epistemology is something like, well this person used this sequence of words, therefore they're a bad person, right? | |
| I said children needed to be protected from child abuses and suddenly I believe that the human species is divided in some fundamental way. | |
| We need a new methodology. | |
| To become skeptical of slander can only benefit the truth-tellers. | |
| And so it's an inevitable development that has some real positive aspects down the road, which is people are going to have to find a way to figure out the truth about someone without taking tiny snippets and rushing to conclusions. | |
| That's been pretty terrible. | |
| That's been a pretty terrible process. | |
| Like all the things that people say, I support and so on, you'd think there'd be some example of me saying, I support these things, but of course there isn't. | |
| So they just slice and dice out of context and try and get their message across that way. | |
| So people... | |
| Jumping to conclusions based on snippy-snip quotes, well, that's going to expand to the point where it's entirely made up, right? | |
| And so people are then going to say, well, we're going to have to have another way of determining who's good and who's bad rather than things that look real, right? | |
| We're going to actually have to go to the source and we're going to have to weigh things in the balance. | |
| And so I think it's a positive development because it's going to mean that standard is going to be less effective. | |
| All right. Hey, Snaff, I have a friend much older than me, who I've known for over five years now. | |
| He's shown almost no character growth over the course of knowing him, and instead has shown a steady regression towards a deeper immaturity and arrested development. | |
| One example is his continual complaints about his abusive and narcissistic mother, who he now cares for and looks after begrudgingly, as well as his marriage, which quickly fell apart after he says his wife physically abused him. | |
| How does one leave old friendships that were forged in a time of immaturity and a lack of self-knowledge? | |
| He is now looking to get back in touch and rekindle our friendship, but appears to hold no standards for his own self-development. | |
| Is it worth trying to reason with someone who seems to be retreating into an ever-deepening pit of Peter Pan syndrome? | |
| Yeah, it's a funny thing you know how there's this general perception that emotional growth follows physical growth. | |
| You know, you grow from baby to adulthood and you don't really have to work at it, it just kind of happens. | |
| The default, and you just have to look at, forget about the modern world, forget about modern changeability. | |
| Look at the, you know, 150,000 years of almost total stagnation in the human species over the course of our evolution and go back sort of even further. | |
| Was growth a plus when society stagnated? | |
| When the tribe stagnated, when every day was just kind of a photocopy of the same idiot day previous? | |
| Was it advantageous to you to pursue growth and virtue and development and maturity | |
| when you were kind of stuck in this terrible groundhog day without even the intelligence of a groundhog situation | |
| of just photocopying the same dull, dumb day over and over again for most of human evolution? | |
| Well, no. So the default position is stagnation. | |
| The default position is immaturity. | |
| The default position is repetition. | |
| So he's much older and he's not growing. | |
| In fact, he's stagnating. | |
| I mean, is he getting in touch with you because he wants to grow, or is he getting in touch with you because he doesn't have anything to offer anyone new? | |
| I went through this when I went to go and work up north. | |
| I lived in Thunder Bay. | |
| I was sort of based in Thunder Bay for a while. | |
| And I lived in the same apartment with this woman who was my boss. | |
| And it was tough. | |
| You know, I was a young man and I wanted to go out and make friends. | |
| So I went to the gym and chatted with some dudes. | |
| I'd go to bars and chat with women. | |
| You know, you're in a new town. | |
| It's not a tiny town. | |
| It's 100,000 people or so. | |
| It's a northern city, I guess, but not that big. | |
| And it's tough to meet people. | |
| I think everyone recognizes this when you get out of high school or you get out of college. | |
| It's kind of tough to meet and make new friends. | |
| So... If you have kids, it's a little easier because your kids hang out with other kids, you meet the parents, and if you get along, there's that aspect of things, which can be quite positive. | |
| But yeah, it's tough. | |
| So is he getting back in touch with you because he's just such a wonderful guy and misses your friendship? | |
| Or is he just, I need someone to complain to, I need a listening rock who's going to absorb my venom? | |
| Don't, in general, don't be around people who frustrate you. | |
| Don't be around people who frustrate you. | |
| Don't be around people that you want to be different from who they are. | |
| Don't be around people as projects, as fixer-uppers, as reclaimers, as propulsion experiments for your newfangled philosophy. | |
| Don't be around people That you reject in the present in the hopes of liking them in the future. | |
| Because all they'll experience is that rejection in the present. | |
| And it's not a good thing at all. | |
| So, yeah, don't be around people like that, in my opinion. | |
| It's kind of cruel. All right. | |
| Is it immoral to donate sperm? | |
| Duck! I'm just kidding. Is it immoral to donate sperm? | |
| I'm near a place that pays people with sufficient credentials to donate sperm. | |
| I meet the credentials, and the money's pretty nice for the use of the labor. | |
| But I'm not sure if it's ethical. | |
| On the one hand, it's helping people who want families have them, bringing a life into the world who otherwise wouldn't exist. | |
| And it also, of course, benefits me by propagating my genes and making some easy money. | |
| The downside, of course, is I have no idea if the parents are going to be lunatics. | |
| It seems like a crapshoot. | |
| People who get sperm donations aren't having babies by accident. | |
| But our culture still believes in spanking. | |
| How responsible am I if my offspring gets bad luck with the parents? | |
| Well, I mean you have to go back to UPB. These things are all complicated until you go to UPB. Are you engaging in fraud if you donate sperm? | |
| You are not. Are you engaging in verbal abuse, lies, slander, that kind of stuff? | |
| You are not. Are you violating the non-aggression principle by donating sperm? | |
| You are not. So it's not immoral. | |
| As far as Whether the child might be mistreated. | |
| Well, I was mistreated. | |
| Maybe you were mistreated too. | |
| Are you happy to be alive? I know I am. | |
| Overjoyed to be alive. If somebody had said to me, I don't know, like imagine this scenario ahead of time, they'd say, well, you're going to have a bad childhood, but you're going to have a great adulthood. | |
| I'd be like, yeah, okay, I'll take those odds. | |
| I'll do it. And I'd say, well, and in fact, some of your great adulthood will be directly a result of your bad childhood. | |
| I'd be like, yeah, I can do that. | |
| I can handle that. I can go with that. | |
| Would you rather be alive? | |
| Or not alive? Would you rather be here or not here? | |
| I think whatever gets more people here, probably not a bad thing at all. | |
| Hi, Steph. When would you say you're running out of time to find a wife and make a career? | |
| I'm 23. I have a good paying job or career if I want it to be about 50,000 per year but constantly feel like I'm running out of time to do things. | |
| I constantly feel like life is slipping away. | |
| Like I'm going to die soon or something. | |
| I have a lot of responsibilities that I take care of and I imagine that's part of it. | |
| Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. | |
| I'm trying to sort of follow that. | |
| You're 23 and you've got a good paying career. | |
| You're fine. You feel like your life is slipping away and you're going to die soon. | |
| That is probably success, anxiety. | |
| You're probably doing better than your parents. | |
| You're probably doing better than your peers. | |
| And when you do better than losers, like failures, people who failed in life, like let's say you have parents who failed and you do better than your parents, They often have a kind of murderous intent towards you or a murderous thought or feeling or destructive impulses and so on. | |
| A lot of people don't like to be passed by. | |
| A lot of people don't like to be exceeded. | |
| They don't like to lose. | |
| So, if you want to do a call-in, callin.freedom.com. | |
| We can talk about it, but I can't give you much with this little information. | |
| All right. What are your thoughts on over-employment? | |
| As described in the following article, blah blah blah. | |
| What would you expect to result from this? | |
| The author claims to make over a million dollars with a series of full-time remote IT positions that do not actually require full-time work from him to accomplish the required tasks. | |
| Presumably these companies do not know that the author is working at multiple companies simultaneously, though no non-compete conditions of employment is mentioned. | |
| Um... Well, if he's happy and the companies are happy, I don't see what the issue is. | |
| He's not lying to them. He doesn't have a monopoly clause in his contract. | |
| So, I mean, I think for the most part, it feels like this sort of old-timey company loyalty stuff is kind of by the wayside. | |
| We're in a state of nature with regards to most of our dealings in the world. | |
| Again, with the exclusion of virtuous people that you care about, And we're down to the letter of the law. | |
| The spirit of the law is not really such a thing anymore. | |
| I mean, the spirit of the law, generationally, the spirit of morals is to leave the world better for the next generation, or at least not make it worse. | |
| And the boomers kind of broke all of that, right? | |
| And so, older people, do they have much right to demand the highest ethical standards from the young? | |
| In society? I think that's pretty questionable. | |
| That's pretty questionable. So, no, I don't, I mean, again, he's not violating fraud, he's not violating the non-aggression principle, and so I don't see what the issue would be as a whole. | |
| The company's happy, he's happy, still be fine. | |
| All right. How did you prepare for your daughter's birth? | |
| Did you find it unsettling how everyone seems to be winging parenting? | |
| We require four years of intense schooling and licensing to be an engineer, but with zero oversight, one can have sex and assume full responsibility for the care of a baby. | |
| Yeah, there's a famous line from a great movie called Parenthood with Keanu Reeves and Diana Wiest and Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen. | |
| Yeah, it's a really, really good movie. You know, you need a license to own a dog, but any butt-wielding asshole can become a dad, right? | |
| So... How did I prepare for my daughter's birth? | |
| Well, you know, you clean your house, you get all your baby stuff together, you get your baby-proofing stuff, you read a bunch of books on parenting and health and nutrition, and you talk to people who are parents, and you ask for people's help, and you lay up the food in the fridge, and you get ready to settle into this whole new world that never goes back the way it was, right? They say, like, a mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape. | |
| It's the same thing. A life once stretched by a new baby never regains its original shape, which is great. | |
| Winging parenting? Sure. | |
| I mean, the fact that we spend all our time in school learning about the triangle inequality relation and the opposite angle theory and so on, and not any time learning about health and welfare and parenting and all of that, I mean, it's really, really sad. | |
| Of course, yeah. Do I find it unsettling how everyone seems to be winging parenting? | |
| Well, I'm writing a whole book on that. | |
| Which, by the by, I'm not really getting any feedback on. | |
| So I'm going to put that on hold for a little bit, just by the by, in terms of doing the audiobook, because I kind of need to focus on what I'm getting more feedback and resources from. | |
| So I'll put that on hold for a bit, as I sort of tend to the finances and feedback of the show. | |
| I just sort of want to mention that. | |
| So thanks everyone so much, freedomand.com slash donate, to help out the show. | |
| Have a wonderful, wonderful day. |
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