Jan. 30, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:38:46
5387 STOP BEING SELFISH! Freedomain Livestream
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And of course I just wanted to say, since this is mostly a donor session, thank you of course enormously for your support and very kind help to keep the show going and keep us all in vittles and heating.
Certainly pretty important this time of year.
So I just wanted to say thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your very kind support of the show.
And of course I'm here to serve you as best I can, have philosophy serve you as best I can.
If there's anything I can do better or different,
I'm absolutely thrilled to do it and if there's anything that you find woefully missing or anything you find woefully excessive, I'm happy to have feedback.
If you want to draw a bone about philosophy, personal issues, whatever is on your mind, I'm thrilled for that.
And I'm not sure that you'll need to hear more of me, other than perhaps in response to what it is that you have to say.
So all you have to do is unmute and give me a holler, and I am absolutely thrilled to hear whatever's on your mind.
I just wanted to say that I'm...
Thank you very much.
A couple days ago, I had the experience of... How shall I say this?
Seeing the dynamic that I typically experience with a relationship starting up, and being able to kind of short-circuit it, that I tend to be drawn to... I've realized now, thanks to a couple of recent
Podcasts you put up that I am attracted to hyper-narcissistic women, almost certainly due to my... Wow, not just narcissistic, but hyper-narcissistic.
How do you differentiate?
Well, so I guess you could say that, as you actually said in the podcast, we all have some degree of narcissism inherent to us, otherwise we would die.
You know what I mean?
Though, I guess by saying hyper-narcissistic, I'm trying to say narcissistic to, let's say, an abusive dignity, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not a sort of Kantian person who doesn't have any self-interest in what he does, but of course your self-interest should include the happiness of other people, and if it doesn't, that seems pretty narcissistic.
Sorry, go ahead.
Sure sure yeah so um anyways I um I was able to kind of um I was having a conversation uh with with this woman and she was let's say going on about something that was you know talking about kind of new agey stuff and uh like what like what do you mean oh so she's talking about you know the vibration of the earth and um about how uh
What's she talking about?
Some nutritional something or other.
What I'm trying to communicate, I'm going on about this because she was going on about it, and I was realizing that it was a really one-sided thing.
That it was a kind of pattern in her talking.
That I felt very comfortable with and I felt myself being fawned into and just kind of like flipping into a warm bath, you know, kind of mentally like, ah, I'm comfortable with this.
A woman talking about... Yeah, a warm Roman birth that ends up full of blood from your veins or something like that.
Hopefully a little more relaxing than that.
You know, I hear in the long run that's actually very relaxing.
But anyway, go on.
Yeah, perhaps.
Yeah, so she was going on about, there wasn't any room in there for my thoughts and my opinion on the matter.
It wasn't a, she wasn't talking because she was curious about what my thoughts were and wanted to kind of have that interplay, you know, that a good conversation is.
It was about putting out what she thought and seeing if I was the kind of guy
Who would just kind of sit back and smile and entertain that and kind of stroke her ego, that kind of thing, right?
Which typically I will.
I'm like a tuning fork, you know?
I don't have a deep knowledge about this kind of thing, but I understand that if a tuning fork is tuned to a certain note, that if it experiences that note, it'll start vibrating.
Continuing on, if I'm correct about that, I'm psychologically built, due to my upbringing, that when I encounter this kind of personality, it's almost like the rational part of my brain just starts to just melt.
And I start becoming sexual and start becoming totally in that mode with this
And I noticed that, and I was able to kind of step back and say, holy crap, this is happening, you know, and be able to kind of have boundaries and able to kind of stop and notice myself and notice her and notice kind of what was going on there.
And yeah, and so I just wanted to say it was, you know, thanks to recent podcasts that you've put up that I was able to kind of stop and also thanks to the callers.
Who had been very giving and very kind of open about their experiences.
But I was able to kind of take a look at that and see how it reflected with mine.
And luckily, well luckily, whatever, and have that degree of self-awareness to have my radar out and see it this time, you know?
Yeah, I mean, when you meet new people in this kind of way, it's always something I sort of scan for, is that, are they curious, or are they interested in power?
Are they interested in status, or are they interested in people?
Because one of the things that happens when you're with somebody who's higher status, is they will try to do, either they'll try to do all the talking, or they will appear to be avoidant of you.
Like, you know, the cocktail eyes are looking around the room, seeing if there's someone better to talk to, and kind of half putting you down just by being in that mindset.
Or they just talk about themselves.
And I don't know if you've ever been in a situation with a boss where... I had this boss, he just kept telling the same stories over and over again.
And I literally would say, no, no, no, yeah, you already told me, and he would just keep going.
And he didn't have to...
He didn't have to put quality into the conversation because he was the boss, so he was so used to everyone just nodding and smiling and laughing and going along with that.
And so, if it's not reciprocal, then they're interested in status, power, hierarchy, and a lot of women.
This happens for men as well, but I think it's a bit more true for women.
A lot of women will either be kind of cold and distant by which they're trying to signal that they're of high value.
Friendly girls are generally considered to be lower value.
The only reason they can afford to be friendly is they're not stimulating much male desire.
But if you're really a high value, super hot,
Girl, then of course you have to have resting bitch face because otherwise you're just going to generate so much male lust and male attention, you're going to end up with all these stalkers.
So, unfriendliness then becomes a mark of high status.
Not inquiring about the other person is also a mark of high status.
If the king has a cold, all of the courtiers graciously ask, oh, how is your cold, your majesty?
How are you feeling today?
But if the servant of the king has a cold, the king doesn't say, oh, my servant, how is your cold?
So this mutual interest is then a sign of lower status, or at least not much higher status.
Most people these days are just kind of imitating higher status in the hope of transmitting the perception of value.
And it's really, it's tragic because you just don't get to know anyone.
All you do is try and lord it over people in the hopes that they'll bear down before you.
A couple thoughts about that.
I think that that dynamic, I do think that that is clearly in play with a lot of these situations.
In this particular situation, my, at least how it hit me, was that she was testing the waters with me.
It wasn't necessarily so much about status as it was about seeing if I was the kind of guy she thought I was.
And I was that kind of tuning fork I'm talking about.
That she could kind of be this narcissistic person and I was going to fall into my role.
You know?
Fall into the role of being groomed by this single mom.
Of being groomed into being the person who will service the narcissistic in a partner.
And kind of be there and be their whatever it's called.
Their other half of that equation.
I have seen that status thing you're talking about also.
Um, with people, where it's almost like the subject matter doesn't even matter.
It doesn't even, they could be talking about the weather, they could be talking about whether or not, you know, the wall over there is really colored orange or blue.
The point is that they're talking and they are expecting that everyone is listening with rapt, you know, kind of, um, kind of, uh, demeanor.
And to have someone stop them or halt them or whatever would be kind of unthinkable.
Right.
Even though everyone's kind of hurt, like, like you're saying, everyone's kind of hurt.
And it's sort of.
It short circuits humility and empathy for women to be too long in the status of free market sexual attraction.
As a free market, sexual attraction is only supposed to be six to 12 months of a woman's life when she's very young.
Right.
So she turns 18 or, you know, would have a debutante ball.
She's supposed to be married off within six to 12 months.
And in terms of like men vying for her hand, men, the men she's supposed to choose from and so on, that's a very heady and exciting time for a woman and all consuming.
Like we say, Oh, women, they're kind of neurotic.
And it's like, well, yeah, because they have to figure out on relatively little information, the future of their lives with who they marry, assuming they're not sort of in arranged marriage or some sort of aristocratic thing.
So women are only supposed to spend six months, maybe at the outside a year, before getting married.
Where men are vying for their attention, and singing songs, and writing poems, and whatever they're doing to woo the woman.
That's supposed to be a very, very short time frame in life.
And then it's done, right?
Because then you're married, and you're pregnant, and you're having babies, and you're youthful.
Beauty and all of that sort of stuff, you know, is burned up on the altar of, you know, more generations.
So, this flower of youth and excitement of being pursued and vied after and considered massively valuable and so on, well, that's supposed to be a very, very short time frame in a woman's life, but no!
And so, nature has kind of designed women to be very excited by that and to love that
Because they want to be out there in the marketplace, to be evaluated and be pursued is very exciting for women because nature's programmed them that way so that they get out there in the marketplace, risk rejection or choosing the wrong guy or whatever.
But now, of course, with the modern world, it just goes on and on and on.
If women want it to, if they don't settle down, if they don't get married and have kids.
Which again, happened very shortly after fertility for a lot of women throughout most of history.
So now, women are taking this, I'm so desirable, men are vying for me, and instead of it being 6 months, maximum 12 months, it's, you know, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, you know, 20 to 38, at 38 you're starting to hit the wall and so on.
So, you're getting 20 years, you know, you're getting
You know, 20 to 40 times more of that dopamine than you were designed to get, and I think it just burns women out.
It just burns out their empathy.
You know, I wanted to get your opinion about this kind of thesis I got about the nature of that.
I have the sense that it's more cyclic in nature, rather than kind of a one-shot in a woman's life, or a person's life.
It seems like what you're describing, which I
I think there's a lot of validity to.
It seems like that's most applicable to kind of a more modern, by which I mean the last, let's say, you know, 8,000 years, more the modern existence of humans.
And that from kind of looking at things from a more ancient kind of tribal existence, it seems to me like
Like we're built for, you know, these, you've heard of this, this, this, these groups of, of I guess the ideal number is like 120 something or whatever.
You know, this, this study of how many, how many faces and how many, how many people's kind of emotions we can keep track of and all this kind of stuff.
And then that given that to be the case, if you accept that as, you know, basically right enough to kind of continue
If we're built for a tribal existence, if human beings have been around in this form for, let's say, the last 250,000 odd years or so, and the vast majority of that time has been spent in these tribal groups, that stands to reason that most of our makeup is going to be optimized for that, not necessarily optimized for this kind of more vastly recent existence.
And that if that's the case,
People will have been growing up in these cohorts of 10 or 12 kids that are all growing up in the same group.
They will have been sexually playful with one another and feeling the waters and that kind of thing with this group that's growing up together.
And there's also this so-called seven-year
That's a classic thing that happens with women, with relationships in general.
Bottom line is, it seems like, to me, that things are optimized for women having one kid per until they can settle down in, let's say, the late 30s or
Sorry, they have one kid per man until they can settle down in their late thirties?
I don't follow.
Yeah, right, right.
This is kind of a little off from what one might expect, right?
Let me back up.
No, no, I'm not saying I disagree.
I just genuinely don't understand what you're saying.
They have one kid with one guy and then settle down in their late thirties.
I don't... Yeah, you know, thank you.
Thank you for that.
One of the kind of things this is also based on is the idea that... Wait, wait, what is based on?
I still don't understand what you mean when you say... Give me how this works in a practical way.
Woman's 15, she's getting, uh, you know, she's able to have kids and they don't want to waste time.
So how does it work?
So, so, so first of all, when I say settle down, right, I'm not talking about, you know, settling down in like a house and you have a kind of family kind of thing.
My sense of the way a tribal existence works and what settling down means isn't... I don't know if you can use the right word when I say settle down, right?
I think that... Sorry, forget the settling down.
What do you even mean by having one kid in her 20s?
I mean, you had to have a whack load of kids just to maintain the tribal survivability because you got 50% infant mortality, right?
Do you mean one kid that lives?
Because then you've got a replacement rate of one.
Okay, let's see here.
So, what am I saying here, right?
Let me back up for a second.
If you don't know, that's fine.
We can move on.
If it was just a misstatement, I don't want to pick apart something that might have been a misstatement, but just didn't make much sense to me.
So, let me make sure I get your question.
You're asking about whether or not she's having one kid with a guy and then
Like, attempting to have one kid?
Like, one kid that survives or something like that?
Please help me understand.
Wait, wait, what are you asking me for?
You made a statement about she has one kid and then settles down in her late 30s, and I didn't understand that.
So if you can explain that, that's all I'm asking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, okay.
That it would be one kid per guy that she's together.
Right?
And that it's a cycle of having these relationships that tend to last about six years or so.
And that it would be, you know, if, let's say, she starts having kids, 16 or 17-ish, right?
And then doing the math, oh, she has, let's say, five kids, you've got about 30, 46, well, okay, so probably more like four kids.
And then the cycle ends on the fourth kid, and she stays together with this guy kind of through the, you know, her later years, right?
But why, why would she do that?
I mean, if she has a guy who's a good provider, she gets along with, they're emotionally and sexually compatible or whatever.
Why wouldn't she just keep having kids with that one guy?
Why would she wait seven years?
Which remember, of course, waiting seven years would be to deny him intercourse.
Because there's, you know, there's no birth control really, right?
And so she's with a guy, she has a kid, and then what, she doesn't have intercourse?
Like, I don't follow.
I mean, wouldn't you just want the pair bonding to continue and the intercourse access for both to continue and just keep having kids with the same guy?
Again, I don't have a time machine.
I don't know exactly what's going on back there, right?
But again, this is just kind of a playing around thing.
This assumes that the tribal existence is right.
That the guys are off they're going off and they're they're hunting they're going off and you know having adventures and and scouting out the land or whatever and they're not all coming back right that a lot of these guys are getting killed by lions or cave bears or what have you right and so you can't have all your eggs in one basket right as a woman um that's furthermore um to kind of actually to go into that a little more deeply having
A kid per per man if you've got let's say you're growing up with you know eight other guys And some of them are more capable as hunters some or less, right?
Do you want to if you've got?
You know three different kids by three different really capable hunters who are going out there and and getting the beat coming back.
Yeah Um, I know with my soul When I look back at my very first girlfriend back when I was, you know, like like 17
Even now today, if she, you know, had, you know, a kid by me, and a kid by this other guy, and a kid by that other guy, and I came back with, you know, half of a bison ass, you know, and I'm, you know, kind of divvying it up among, you know, the different women or something, I'd give her a little, you know, because I still have that kind of connection.
And I look at that and I kind of think, why?
Right?
You know, what, how would that serve the tribe?
How would that kind of fit into this picture?
Okay, I gotta interrupt you for a second here, because weren't you complaining earlier that the woman was just talking on and on about her own mystical theories and not allowing any input?
Yes, I sure was, yeah.
Does that strike you as at all familiar to what you're doing to me right now, just out of curiosity?
I had the impression that you were asking questions.
No, no, I'm asking questions, you're still not really answering them, you're saying, oh no, no, it's only theoretical or whatever it is, right?
So you're talking a lot about, like, it's kind of interesting to me, right?
Because everything we're susceptible to, we're susceptible to reproducing, right?
So if you're susceptible to being bullied, you're susceptible to being a bully.
If you're susceptible to someone talking on and on about their own mystical theories without
Any feedback?
You know, moving the goalposts.
Because, you know, I'm asking for details and you're asking me that back.
Like, what are you asking about?
And then it's like, well, no, this is only theoretical and there's no proof and I don't have a time machine.
I don't know what it was like back then.
And it's like, then what the hell are we talking about?
You're doing to me what the girl did to you, which is...
Pretty interesting, right?
Oh, there's definitely a piece of me that's like that.
100%.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so let's go back.
What is the problem that you have?
I assume you're not married, you're not a dad, you're not settled down, is that right?
No, I actually am a dad.
Hang on, so do you want to be?
Do I want to be which of these things?
Settled down?
A dad?
I mean, a family man?
Yeah, I have three children.
Oh, you have three children already?
Mm-hmm, that's correct.
Yeah, I do.
And where's the mom?
Two different moms.
And I'm broken up with both of them.
Okay, so this is a self-serving theory about the past that is attempting to justify your own dating and mating decisions, isn't it?
Yeah, no, yeah, totally.
Okay, so this is not anything empirical or scientific or abstract or, right, this is just like, what anthropological stuff can I pull out of my ass to justify my own dating and mating behavior?
Am I wrong?
No, no, no.
I heard that that is absolutely specific.
Okay, so what happened with these women that you've got three kids by two different women and you've broken up with both of them?
Yeah, that's correct.
Let me stop for a second and say,
I don't think this is black and white.
I don't think that, you know, putting this, I'm just putting this forward as a justification for, for, you know, that what's happened to me in my life and what I've done in my life.
Right.
Um, I think that, that there is a, that is part of the truth and the other part of the truth.
You're not talking to, you're not talking to me though, which is why it's so hard to get any input in what you're saying, because you're mostly just talking to yourself with someone else in the room, so to speak.
So, what happened with these women?
Why are you, I guess, a single dad?
Do you share custody with the women?
Well, yeah.
So, with the two older kids, with my ex from a decade and a half ago, I have a really bad relationship with her.
It used to be good.
And the relationship is body at best with the kids.
Um, with my more recent, um, relation, the relationship is better and my daughter is, well, she's in the other room right now.
Um, I'm sorry, you cut out there.
So you're, she's what?
Oh, um, my, my daughter with my younger daughter, who's, who's now nine.
She's, she's over in the other right now.
So.
Okay.
Got it.
Got it.
We've got, I mean, we've got a bunch of people who are listening and talking and we're, we're trying to find something that's a value to a general population.
Thank you, yeah.
So, what happened, do you think, with these women, or, you know, let's say your kids get old enough, you say the relationship with the first two is kind of spotty.
I mean, at some point they're going to ask what happened, why you weren't with their moms, or what happened and all, and what would you say, let's say they're, I don't know, 15 years old or 14 years old, they're asking these questions, and what would you say?
Well, I've asked myself that question a number of times.
What would I say?
So, again, it's not black and white.
It's not just one thing.
But the biggies are that I... It's like I fell into a place of kind of what I was talking about initially, of servicing this narcissistic personality.
That satisfied a need that I had inside to satisfy my mom's need to have a little man there.
You know, we had this emotionally incestuous relationship with my mom.
And that I had
was sometimes better and sometimes worse at at fighting it off and and being a good partner or you know being this this um like i'm saying someone who would do would kind of serve as this narcissistic personality um and then with with the first woman that um after a while i just kind of had enough and i i i grew out of it and i pushed back and um
When I started pushing back... Dad, when did you first figure out that you had this pattern of choosing and serving selfish women?
So, I'm not sure.
I don't know when the first time is.
Well, Ted, that's not an answer.
I mean, was it yesterday?
Was it ten years ago?
I mean, I'm not asking for the date.
4am on September the 29th, 1987.
Just roughly, when did you first figure out that you had a problem with selfish women, or being attracted to selfish women?
When was the first time?
You know, it dawned on me slowly.
Probably in...
Probably in my late teens.
No, that's not true.
Even as I'm saying that, that's not true.
Yeah, I think probably in my 20s.
In my mid-20s, I realized... And I don't know how old you are, but how long ago was that?
Oh yeah, I'm early 50s myself.
So that was... That's like almost 30 years ago.
Correct.
Yeah, yeah.
So, how long after you figured out this pattern did you continue to repeat it?
I guess my question is, did knowing that pattern change things?
Or how long did it take to change things once you knew that pattern in your early 20s?
I'm still changing it right now, to this day.
I'm still working on it.
It's an ongoing process.
I'm getting better at it, hopefully.
Yeah, does that answer your question?
Please, please, please.
Well, because I have memories, Dad, of you correcting me, of you telling me how to live and what to do as a parent, right?
Yeah.
And I don't remember you saying, you know, you can start working on this now, but you'll still be 30 years later, you'll still be trying to sort it out.
It was like, you know, improve your behavior now and do the right thing now and
You know, don't hit, don't steal, or whatever it is, right?
I mean, so I'm trying to sort of figure out why you were kind of much more strict with me when I was a kid than you are with yourself, where it's kind of loosey-goosey, nothing's black and white, and you can be working on something for 30 plus years and still not be done.
Well, okay, so two pieces to that, right?
Number one is that I do believe, actually, that I'm going to be working on this to some degree until I'm dead.
Until I'm in the grave, you know?
Um, I believe that that's probably to some degree going to be the case with, with you.
It's what I've seen with most people is that a problem, a problem isn't done.
It's not just simply like solved and we walk on onto the next problem or something like that.
This is a problem, which is for better or worse.
It's kind of written into my DNA.
Right.
And, and that if I think it's done, if I think I've quote unquote solved it, then it comes back and kicks me in the butt.
In a time of weakness or.
Well, I mean, you're just kind of confirming the first part of my question.
So my question is,
You corrected me as a child, like you're my dad, right?
You corrected me, told me do this, don't do that.
And you gave me some discipline as a kid.
Yes.
But now I find out that in the central issue or the central dysfunction in your life, nothing's black and white.
You can't really solve things that's written into your DNA.
So you tried to change my behavior in a fairly absolute way when I was a kid.
But for yourself, it's all kind of loosey-goosey and forgiveness and accept that there's going to be very little, if any, change that's written into your DNA.
I'm just trying to sort of square that circle, if that makes sense.
That's true.
That's not my recollection of things.
My recollection is that actually I
At least tried very hard to not put forth things like you... the way you were characterizing it, you know?
That, like, an absolute, you need to do this, like, you're a screw-up if you get this wrong or something like that.
It's a process.
It's a process of working on yourself, you know?
Um, and if I didn't get that across to you at that point, I apologize.
I want to get it across.
Okay.
So sorry to just jump out of the role play.
So you didn't discipline your kids as far as any of that goes.
You didn't say you have to study, you have to do your homework, you have to go to school, you have to not hit other kids.
You have to respect property.
You had like, you didn't do those kinds of standards with your kids.
No, I, I, I did with a caveat there.
I mean, I, I try to make it clear that it's a, it's a decision, you know?
That, I mean, it's not that you have to do this, it's that if you don't do it, this is what's going to happen.
That if you choose to have this bad behavior, then these are the consequences that are going to happen.
Does that make sense to you?
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Yeah, I mean, somewhat.
So you would allow them to not go to school, they just had to accept the consequences of not going to school?
Is that right?
Well, actually, okay, so this is... They didn't have to go to the dentist, they didn't have to eat any good food, they didn't have to get any exercise, they just would then just have to accept the consequences, is that right?
It's not black and white that way.
You keep saying that like that means anything, right?
I mean, I don't know what that... I mean, I don't even know what that means, it's not black and white.
I mean, whether your kids are in school or not, that's black and white.
Whether they go to see the dentist or not, that's black and white.
Whether they eat vegetables or not, that's black and white.
Whether they get enough exercise or not, that's black and white, isn't it?
No, actually, no.
Whether or not they get enough exercise, I don't necessarily think that's black and white.
Oh yeah, it is.
No, it absolutely is.
No, it absolutely is.
I mean, you can say that there's extremes, like they totally sit on the couch, or you're making them run up and down flights of stairs and do burpees for 18 hours a day, but yeah, whether they get enough exercise, yeah, 30 to 60 minutes a day, that's black and white.
Well, okay, it's black and white, you can measure that.
Black and white, did they get 30 minutes, yes or no?
But did they get enough exercise?
I don't think that that's blackmail.
Well, no, that is technically what is enough exercise, as far as I understand it.
But, I mean, they went to the dentist, they obviously ate enough food to do well.
Did they have bedtimes, or did they get to stay up as late as they wanted and just deal with the consequences the next day?
Oh, yeah.
This is an interesting subject.
So, this is with my earlier wife, with the older kids.
We experimented with what's called unschooling.
Which is, you know, putting a label on almost fucking doing nothing for the kids, right?
Just letting things be like bedlam almost for them, right?
This is after going to, you know, a couple of different conferences and...
I'm black and whiting it on a conversational level so we can continue on, you know what I mean?
There were grey areas to it.
Like, there were pieces which I think did work, and pieces which didn't.
So, what ended up happening there was... Everyone's okay?
Again, we experimented with allowing them to eat whatever they wanted, essentially.
Experimented with allowing them to sleep whenever they wanted, get up, watch as much TV as they wanted, etc.
And it turned out that it was like one of these experiments with like how much cocaine do you allow a rhesus monkey to to you know give itself or something like that and you know this kind of thing where they'll just keep on giving themselves cocaine until they whatever the drug is I can't forget this this classic thing until they're just lying dead on the the kids were were
If we'd given them a vat of sugar, they would have eaten away at the sugar until they were dead on the screen, you know?
They were like zombies waking up at odd times in the day, turning on the TV and just drooling in front of it.
And we let that go on for, oh, maybe two and a half weeks, maybe three weeks, to kind of see if it was going to break through into
Oh my god, it was nightmarish.
The thinking there was that the philosophy behind some parts of unschooling is that kids will naturally find their own way of doing things right, you know, whatever, and that did not work out with our kids.
Maybe some other kids, that's true.
Now, I obviously can't speak for your wife, but it's no mystery to me why it didn't work with your kids.
I mean, you have this whole, I mean, this is not critical, I'm just sort of pointing out if you want to know the causality, at least as far as I see it.
Yeah, I mean, you have a philosophy wherein knowledge really doesn't change that much.
Knowing the right thing to do doesn't really change that much.
Because, you know, for 30 years, you've known that you have a susceptibility to selfish women, and, you know, it hasn't really changed that much, you're still working on it, it's wired into your DNA, so you can't model
Knowledge leading to significantly changed outcomes.
You know what?
If you were a diet guy, you were 50 pounds overweight, and decade after decade your kid sees you trying to diet and failing, right?
Then, you know, and you say, well, you know, dieting is mostly just a state of mind, it's nothing that really changes anything, and so on, right?
Then they're not going to really respect the discipline of dieting, right?
And if you have a general philosophy, which is, and I say this because you're still a parent, right?
So, if you have a general philosophy which says, yeah, I've known for over 30 years that I have a susceptibility to selfish women, and you know what I just did the other day?
I got into a real conversation with a selfish woman!
You know, and you know what else I did?
I talked to this philosophy guy online, and I turned into that selfish woman.
And so, you've known for decades about this kind of stuff, but it hasn't taken root.
It hasn't changed things.
And the question then is, why?
Is it generally the case that once you have an insight about your behavior, that 30 years later it's still manifesting itself?
And if so, why?
It's not the case that that's not true for everyone.
Some people have insights, and it just radically changes their behavior.
And it doesn't go back to the way that it was.
And so, the question is, for me, what is it in your mind or thought or life that allows you to just have this knowledge but not fundamentally change for 30 or years or more?
Sure.
So, first of all, I would say that it's not true.
It's not true that I don't fundamentally change.
Do this, you know, information.
I started off this call.
You said it's wired into your DNA!
And you didn't even notice that you say, well, you know, all these selfish people with their vague theories that don't add up to much and don't take any feedback, and then you just did that exactly to me.
I would say that's not a massive amount of change, is it?
Well, okay, so the reason I was piling on all that information earlier, right, about this tribal kind of concept of things, right, was
There was a fair amount of back information that I needed to get across in order to, you know, have you be able to evaluate what I was talking about.
That's what was going on behind that.
In terms of the question of the things being wired into my DNA, I'm not saying that it's impossible for me to fight back against it, right?
What I'm saying is that that's kind of the behavior that I
Have been kind of built for... That doesn't mean I have to necessarily follow through with that.
Doesn't mean I necessarily have to.
Well, hang on.
Was I built for peaceful parenting?
Hmm.
Were you built for peaceful parenting?
I don't think so.
Of course I was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Of course I was built for really quite the opposite, right?
Correct.
Yeah.
But I don't give myself the out of saying, well, you know, I'm making little turns on the steering wheel.
It's going to drift over decades and it's baked into my DNA.
I don't give myself those excuses.
It's just not something I'm ever going to do.
It's not something I attempted to do.
30 years after I come up with peaceful parenting, I'm not still manifesting aggressive parenting and then giving myself an out called, well, you know, things change, it's not black and white, it's in my DNA.
I'm really fundamentally concerned about the excuses that you have, rather than absolutes.
Oh, yeah, please don't get the impression that I'm putting forth these
That I'm saying it's okay.
It's not okay.
It's absolutely not okay for me to be getting into relationships with narcissistic women.
That's not alright.
Right?
No, I don't care.
But are you?
Well, no.
Are you still getting into relationships with narcissistic people?
Nope.
When was the last relationship with somebody you would describe as selfish?
I mean, other than the woman you were just chatting with at the beginning of this conversation.
When was the last time you were in a relationship with somebody who was selfish?
Well, so that wasn't a relationship that I was describing in the beginning.
The woman I was chatting with a couple of days ago, right?
I mean, unless your term of... No, no, that's fine.
I mean, you know, someone you got into a relationship with.
Well, the mother of my daughter, who's in the other room, right?
Which is, uh, that was 10... I guess it was 11 years ago that we got together.
And we've been broken up.
No, but when did you split up?
So, um, I broke up with her probably nine times.
No, actually, that type of relationship... Okay, just save me the grief.
Just when did you end things with her, finally?
Uh, three years ago?
I'm trying to think about this for a second.
I think it was three years ago now.
Okay, so almost 30 years after you realized you had a susceptibility for narcissistic women, almost 30 years after you first realized that, you finally broke up with the narcissistic woman.
Okay, hold on, hold on.
Well, you're in your 50s, right?
You're in your early 50s, right?
Yeah, but if I understand you correctly, you just claimed that this is the first time that I broke up with a woman due to her narcissism, or due to my realization that she was narcissistic.
This is the first time that I've put my foot down in 30 years or something like that.
Did I understand that correctly or not?
Listen, you can go off on your own conversational flight, or we can just talk about what I'm talking about.
I asked you when was the last time you were in a relationship with a narcissistic woman, and you said, well, yes, it was three years ago when I broke up with the narcissistic woman, right?
And you said you got your understanding of narcissistic women and your susceptibility to it in your early 20s, and then in your late 40s, which is close to 30 years,
You finally broke up with a narcissistic woman, then you had another conversation with a narcissistic woman, and then you acted in the way that you had described with me, so I'm not sure the problem is entirely solved.
No, I didn't claim that it was solved.
I know, I know you didn't claim that it was solved!
And I'm telling you that why it's not solved is you keep giving yourself all of these outs and these excuses, and the major issue that I have with that is you're the father of three children.
So I disagree?
I disagree that the reason that I haven't solved it is because I'm giving myself excuses.
Okay, why do you think you haven't solved it?
So... Because I haven't done enough work on it, essentially, right?
And by solved... That doesn't really answer the question, right?
So why haven't you done... I mean, after 30 years, right?
And you listen to this show and so on, right?
We've never done a call-in, have we?
No, we have not.
And how long have you listened to this show for?
So it's, it was 2014, 15, I think I started.
Okay.
So nine years or so, right?
That sounds right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So for nine years, you've known that you can have a completely free call-in, takes two hours of your life with somebody who's really, really good at untangling these kinds of patterns, right?
Sure.
So why haven't you?
Just out of curiosity, it's not a big attack, I'm just genuinely curious.
I mean, if this is the big issue that you're wrestling with, and you have a free resource to help you work on it, which has been pretty successful with just about everyone else, why wouldn't you, in nine years, you've had two hours free, so, I mean, you're here talking to me, right?
So, why wouldn't you take that resource?
I was afraid.
I was afraid of encountering it, you know?
Of really being vulnerable.
Also, a piece of not feeling worthy.
You know?
Not feeling worthy to call in and talk about my needs.
I'm not sure what other pieces are at play.
Yeah, fear of what I would encounter.
So, a fear of what you would encounter and a concern about feeling vulnerable, is that right?
Yeah, and also not feeling worthy, I think is a piece also.
Like, I didn't want to... I gotta tell you, bro, I gotta tell you, that is an unbelievably selfish set of excuses.
Okay, yeah.
And I'll tell you, I mean, I'll tell you why, and maybe I'm being a jerk and I'm perfectly happy to take that case.
So why should you have called in to deal with the snuffishness or the narcissistic susceptibilities or, you know, whatever we want to, to deal with these issues, right?
So you've got, you've got these things where like, I don't feel worthy and I don't want to be vulnerable and whatever it is, right?
I'm afraid of what I might uncover.
That's all about you, right?
So why should you have called in?
To be a better father, to be a better partner for them.
It's about your children.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
What's best for them.
Yep.
So for nine years, you've got a free resource.
I'm happy to take the calls.
Call in a free domain.com.
Happy to take the calls.
Nine years.
You're like, well, I, this and I, that, and I'm nervous and I don't want to be vulnerable and I don't feel worthy and this and that and the other.
Right.
Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's one way of looking at it.
Which is like you not taking your kids to the dentist because you're nervous of dentists.
Sorry, kids, your teeth have to rot because daddy's nervous of dentists.
You know, I'm really susceptible to narcissistic people.
I recognize there's a kernel of truth in what you're saying.
I think this is a bit hyperbolic.
I think this is kind of taking it a bit far, but we can keep on going.
No, you're just giving me another defense called, it's not black and white.
You just fog out every time I bring you an absolute.
If you had been solely focused, and look, I'm not the only solution here, obviously, but it was a free solution that you knew about for nine years.
If you had only focused on what was best for your children,
Would you have done the call-in?
If I had only focused on what was best for my children, would I have done the call-in?
Okay, look, the way you're phrasing it like that, the answer is yes, but there's so much more to it than that, you know what I mean?
No, no, now you're just bringing up relativistic fog, it's not black and white, it's complicated.
It's complicated stuff I don't care about.
I don't care about.
Would it have been better for your children if nine years ago you had confronted your susceptibility to narcissism?
I was working on confronting it.
I absolutely was working on confronting it.
Yes, but it didn't work.
Because you continued on for another six years without solving the problem.
And you admit to yourself, or you say now, the problem still isn't solved.
Would it have been better for your children
Now, whether it was talk therapy, whether it was, I don't know, whatever you would do, whether it's calling me or something like that, I have a fairly good track record with this kind of stuff.
Would it have been better for your children if you had taken every available resource to deal with this issue in the past?
Let's back up for a second.
Let's back up.
This is a dynamic which I've listened to a number of call-in shows, right?
This is a dynamic which occurs a lot, which it doesn't work for me, right?
Characterizing a problem that a caller has, or that I have, right?
And saying that I clearly haven't worked on it, or what I've done so far hasn't worked, because I still have the problem.
Well, no, but also because you continued in a relationship with a narcissistic woman for six years after you started listening to this show, right?
That was, yeah, and this is... And you had nine different breakups, right?
Which is incredibly destabilizing for your children, right?
It was very bad.
It was terrible.
Okay, so, forgive me, I think you can understand that from my shoes, it didn't work.
My breakup with the mother of your children is not a success.
Oh, it's clearly not a success.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Okay, so we agree that whatever you were doing didn't work.
Yes, yes, and I'll tell you, and we can close on this, because you know, I'll tell you why I'm doing this, and again, maybe I'm being a total jerk and you can dismiss everything I'm saying, that's always more than a possibility.
So here's what I see as selfishness.
Selfishness, fundamentally, is a refusal to surrender yourself to an objective metric.
Right?
It's a refusal to surrender your own ego and preferences to an objective standard or metric.
Now, my concern is that the justifications, and the fog, and the DNA, it's wrapped in my DNA, and I'll be working on it.
In the form of self-examination, you subject your own preferences to an external standard.
Now for me, again, I've done good things, I've done bad things, but one of the things I think that's done been fairly good is just saying, I'm not going to raise my voice, I'm not going to yell, I'm not going to hit, I'm going to focus all of my energies on that which is best for my
My daughter and my family and so on and there's just an it's an absolute standard.
There's no excuses.
There's no it's not black and white.
There's no it's my DNA that because to me excuses and Selfishness and look I'm not calling you just a selfish guy or anything like that I'm just saying in this particular area, which we all have to keep an eye on
The selfishness is what I prefer, what I feel more comfortable with, rather than what is objectively right, or true, or good, or needed.
Right?
So, when you said to me, Steph, I've heard this dynamic, it just doesn't work for me.
Like, who cares what works for you?
It's not about you!
You're a dad!
It's not about you.
It's about what works for your family, for your children.
And so, you are still looking at your own feelings and preferences as the standard by which you're trying to navigate.
And it's not going to work.
Because this is a show about philosophy, not about self-indulgence.
And just saying, I'll do what I prefer, I won't do what I don't like quite as much, is hedonistic.
She's helping me understand more.
I'm going by, I'm using my feelings and preferences
Because you said, well, like I said, well, why didn't you call me?
And you said, well, I didn't feel quite good enough.
I didn't want to confront.
And so that's a subjective preference.
I am nervous about this.
I don't know if it's going to go well.
I don't know what I'm going to find.
I don't feel worthy or whatever you're saying.
This is all just emotions.
I agree.
Yeah.
Philosophy is when you say, I have, I have a standard by which I'm going to act.
And your level of personal comfort, while interesting and important to you personally, is absolutely irrelevant to what you do.
Please understand, I'm not saying that this is a... No, no, you're just trying to tell me that I've misunderstood something, that it's not black and white, that I have done the... I get all of that.
I'm just going by the general principle.
I'm not saying you've never done anything selfless.
Of course you have.
I mean, I'm not trying to say that, and I don't want to get into the fog of subjectivity again, right?
I'm just saying that, based upon all the patterns, if you really do want to follow philosophy,
And you have to have standards that you just follow.
And it's like, yeah, it's uncomfortable.
Like, you know, like I had a sore throat this week.
Did I want to do a show?
I did not, but I've made commitments and I end up enjoying them and it's a good thing to do for the community.
So I'll do the show.
You know, when I wake up with a headache, um, I don't necessarily want to go and exercise, but I know that exercise is important and I'm an older father, so I want to stay healthy for my daughter and I want to stay attractive for my wife.
So I'll just,
Go and exercise.
It's just having that absolute.
If all I'm doing is following what feels right or good or preferential in the moment, I'm a hedonist.
And my suggestion to you is that the hedonism is kind of like an excuse.
Whereas if you have the absolute of saying, I can't keep, let's say, I can't keep having these breakups.
Def's pretty good.
I know about him.
I'll call him.
Right?
Maybe it'll work.
Maybe it won't, but it's worth a try.
It's worth a try.
But what you do is you say, well, I don't really feel like it.
And then that's enough for you.
And then you don't.
But whether you feel good or bad or right or wrong about it is irrelevant as to what you do.
What you do is what's best for your children.
Maybe that's calling me, maybe that's six million other things, I don't know, right?
But whatever you have been doing hasn't
been enough, and that strictness.
This is why I said this is why your kids didn't take to unschooling, which is they didn't have a model of discipline.
Like, my daughter is, she's not an exercise fiend now, but she exercises every day or two.
Now, I have not told her to exercise.
I've mentioned it a couple of times, probably would be good and so on, but she has seen me exercise
For as long as she can remember.
So she has seen, and she's seen me do it, when I don't feel like it.
She's seen me, she's seen me drag myself off a couch saying, I don't feel good, but I'm gonna go do a show.
So she has seen that level of discipline, and so I don't need to convince her to do things.
So, you want to model this kind of discipline to your children, because what you've modeled is, well, I know that's a thing that could be kind of good, it only takes a couple of hours of my time, but, you know, I have these fears, these nervousnesses, the anxieties, the insecurities, or whatever it is, so I just won't do it.
And that's what you're modeling for your kids.
You know, I'm attracted to your mother, so I'm going to get together with her.
Oh, we've had a big fight, we're breaking up.
Oh, I'm attracted to her again.
Oh, we've had a big fight, so I'm running away.
It's just emotion.
An unstable emotion.
And not the discipline of objective standards.
Now, the way that you combat selfishness, which we all have, you know, I'm with you down there in the trenches, brother, we all have this, right?
But the way that you combat it is to say, I have a set of standards that are rational and empirical and useful and helpful and right and validated and all of that.
I'm going to pursue those standards.
Now, that's going to kick up some emotional stuff, which is, you know, worth dealing with and all of that, but the self-indulgence of saying, it's the right thing to do.
I don't feel like doing it.
So I'm just not going to do it.
That's not philosophy.
Then, you know, the whole point of nutrition is like, I was at lunch with my daughter today and there was a dessert that was 1400 calories.
Now, I'm telling you, man, I'm telling you, man-to-man, brother-to-brother, I could FaceTime in that dessert, and I could eat another one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Never full, never satisfied.
I can go to a buffet and I have to, like, saw my phalanges off rather than take another meringue, right?
And the waitress comes by and, oh, it's so good, and I was like, nope, I appreciate that, but just the bill and go.
Because it's not the right thing for me to do, or anyone to do, in my opinion, to eat a 1,450 calorie dessert, even to split it, right?
So, nutrition is because we want to eat stuff that's bad for us.
Exercise is because we don't feel like moving.
And you have to have a standard of discipline, I think, especially because you're saying to your kids, no, we can't unschool because you lack discipline.
So now you have to have discipline imposed from outside, right?
And I would say that for yourself, just say, okay, what are the standards
That I have no excuses for.
Like, I don't have any excuse for raising my voice at my daughter, or anybody that I care about.
I don't have any excuse about hitting, or... I'm not saying you're doing any of these things, but I'm just saying, I have no excuse.
Like, I won't do it.
It's not a thing.
It's not a thing.
I won't do it.
There's no excuse.
And, of course, you train yourself out, because your impulses, like your emotions, they seem so incredibly strong when you indulge them, right?
Like, they're like these giant, towering tsunamis of preference.
But then when you train them, and you say, well no, like now it's not hard for me to go exercise, it's not hard for me to go do a show.
At the beginning it was tough when I didn't feel like it, but you know, it just becomes a habit.
It's like the Scott Adams has this thing about exercise, and he says like, even if I don't have time to exercise, I'll put my gym stuff on, I'll go to the gym, I'll stand in the doorway, and then I'll turn around and go and do whatever I have to do.
You just have to...
Get used to it and the more you tame your hedonism.
The less powerful it is and the less it will dominate your actions and I think.
If you say, well, I'm kind of get hooked into these narcissistic people, then you're hooked into people who don't have standards.
Narcissism is the refusal to subject yourself to any external standards, whether it's empathy or morality or
Self-restraint or whatever it is, right?
And the narcissist, I am the standard of value, I am whatever I want is good and whatever I don't want is bad and self-indulgent in the emotions and so on.
So, to fight your susceptibility, in my view, opinion of course, right?
To fight your susceptibility to selfishness you must impose objective standards on your own behavior.
And then you won't feel like you're not worthy because you will have developed some self-respect.
So sorry to sort of, I know you've got a kid to go and chat with, but, and I really do appreciate the conversation, but I just wanted to say thank you.
Thank you, brother.
I really, really appreciate it.
Thank you for the chat.
Yeah.
All right, I'm all ears.
It's funny, because I was kind of thinking about that, and it just kind of came to me in a rush, what was going on in that call.
It's kind of a funny thing, how these instincts work.
But yeah, I've got some more time if anybody wants to chat.
I'm all ears.
May I start?
Yeah, go ahead.
I hate even doing this this way because I'm so pressed for time right now.
I have to get back to work in minutes.
No, you're good.
The opportunity doesn't always arise to get a Q&A with you.
I always have so many things that I'm like, I'm just curious what Steph would say.
I guess I'll condense it to two things.
I just want to share with you something.
I spoke to you, I think, a month or two ago about a buddy who was doing libertarian content specifically on the subject of ethics.
I mentioned him to you.
I don't know if you recall that.
I just wanted to send you one of his essays on objective morality, specifically proving the NAP.
It's a different argument than the one I gave you before, and I just thought as somebody so interested in ethics, you'd be interested in that.
So I'm going to send that to you.
Of course.
And then, oh man, I don't even know what I want to ask about first.
You know what?
I'm just curious about some of the terminology used in that discussion you just had.
I think you had a lot of great points, but coming from the objectivist camp, as you once did, and I think in many ways you would probably still identify as an objectivist, I think it's a little interesting you discern between rational egoism and
You know, subjective whim worship there, which is what it seems like he was giving into.
And I was just curious about the terminology there.
What made you use the words the way you did?
Well, I mean, I assume he's not an objectivist, so I try not to use terms that would be outside people's already understood mindset, if that makes sense?
Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.
No, it's like the word anarchy, right?
I mean, there's a common parlance for it, which is very different.
from, you know, how I would define it.
So I sort of have to bow to convention to some degree.
So I wasn't going to try and define the sort of rational egoism and so on.
And I really wanted to get across this narcissism is the refusal to subject yourself to any objective standards, which is why a lot of mysticism tends to be narcissistic as opposed to science, which is more, at least ideally, more objective.
So I didn't want to have to define a bunch of terms and then have him try and follow along in language that he wasn't used to.
Certainly.
Yeah, that's why I said like terminal, like I had questions about the terms because the points you were making were still that of, you know, the, the stuff that I was just referring to, right?
Like referencing the objective standard that was all within line of the things where I was just mentioning.
So, um, yeah, I was just curious about that.
Okay.
Um, I'll just bug you about one more thing that's been on my mind.
Not bugging me at all.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Uh, I appreciate it.
So, um,
Coming from the...
You know, my new camp of learning libertarianism and metaphysics and epistemology and all these things.
I started reading Rand two years ago and I've gone on down a great journey.
I've met a lot of cool people and I'm helping write a book on philosophy right now.
It's a merging objectivism and libertarianism, which in many ways you've done, obviously.
And I'm going to be writing a chapter on aesthetics and I get into conversations every day about ethics.
And I was just really curious because I started revisiting some stuff on UPB recently.
And, uh, it turns out maybe I just need a better grasp of UPB, but something that regularly comes up... You said you were writing a chapter on aesthetics or ethics?
Aesthetics, but like, I'm sorry, what I was saying is, I'm going to be writing a chapter on aesthetics, but I regularly talk about ethics.
That's like the subject that fascinates me the most.
I think I'm pretty well versed in metaphysics and epistemology.
I think, I mean, I can always get better, obviously, but ethics is like the main thing that concerns me and I probably discuss every single day with my buddies that are writing this book.
And, like I said, I was revisiting some UPB stuff, and it seems like one of these arguments people pose at you all the time is that you can't bridge the is-ought gap.
So I did some searching through your catalog about the is-ought gap, and I'm a little confused about your position on it, to try and wrap this up as quickly.
They can.
I don't understand why the is-ought gap is relevant.
As you would call it, it would be a self-detonating statement to say you can't get an is from an ought.
They're doing it in the moment that they tell you that.
And as far as I can deduce, all
All statements are ought statements.
If it's a statement directed at someone, you're telling them, you ought to hear what I'm saying, you ought to believe me, you ought to engage with this.
I don't see what kind of statement could be a normative statement, an ought statement.
So, anyways, I'm sorry if that… Yeah, I mean, so for instance, a chimpanzee can't get an is.
Sorry, a chimpanzee can't get an ought from an is because a chimpanzee, to our knowledge, doesn't have any capacity for abstract philosophical thought, universal thought.
But yeah, human beings, language is an ought, you ought to use the correct terms, you ought to address people in a language they can understand, you ought to try and correct false statements.
So the moment, if I say you can get an ought from an is,
The moment somebody says, you can't get an ought from an is, they've just given me the whole ought from an is.
That I ought to say things that are true, that I ought not to say things that are false, that my ideas ought to correlate with reality.
So yeah, the moment you correct someone, the is-ought thing is deep in the rear view and should never be discussed again by anybody who's not just a total troll.
So I'm with you there.
Thank you.
Okay, yeah, I just never understood why, like, in your debate with Rationality Rules, this was even a relevant thing to discuss.
I don't, uh, I checked out the debate- It's a midwit thing, and I, yeah, it's a midwit thing, and I sort of hate to say that about, um, well, I am happy to say that about, about
Stephen Woodard or whatever, I can't remember what his name was, but Rationality Rules, I think he's completely made.
But of course, Hume was a great philosopher and so on, so you can't get an or from an is.
It's a great and challenging question.
It's like the Cartesian question of if you wipe everything blank and you have to build your knowledge up from scratch, what can you absolutely be certain of?
These are great questions.
But just because, so what happens is someone says, well you can't get an ought from an is, and it feels kind of true, and it seems kind of true, and of course it is a great secular God that you cannot get an ought from an is.
Because almost all of modern secularism is the desire to escape morality.
And so when, if you're a Christian, the ought and the is are synonymous.
God created the universe, God creates the ought.
The ought and the is are synonymous.
It's like saying a man makes a clock.
Well, the purpose of the clock is to tell the time.
Well, you can't get the purpose of a clock from a clock.
It's like, well, of course you can, because it was designed to create it.
So, if God designs and creates the universe and God gives us moral rules, the ought of the is are intertwined.
So, along comes Hume.
And he says, you can't get an O from an S. And all the people desperate to follow him and escape morality grab onto that and are like, yeah, you can't, there's no prescription against murder written into the DNA or written into the atomic structure of the universe.
Yes, you're right.
And then they can fly free of all moral restraint.
Satanism and secularism are very closely intertwined.
And I know this in particular because after I proved secular ethics, people did not grab onto that, but rather mocked it, laughed at it.
Scorned it and because they don't want to have any moral rules because it interferes with their narcissism so.
Yes, it's one of these things.
Hume says it.
The question is, why is it believed?
Why is it widespread?
Every time I look at an idea these days, they're almost all of them false.
So the question is, okay, who does it serve?
Who does it serve?
Who does this idea serve?
There's no such thing as IQ.
Okay, who does that serve?
Global warming is a catastrophic anthropogenic catastrophe.
Who does that serve?
Because when things are just obviously not true,
Or at least open to significant question, but they're accepted and repeated and trumpeted.
It's because it's serving power, and power is the avoidance of morality.
Power is the use of morality in order to subvert and destroy.
Morality, the common good, turns out to be the good of the ruler, right?
So, the question is, who does it serve?
And you can't get an ought from an is, gives people a great sense of relief, because then, you know what they can do?
If they want to get rid of morality,
They just have to stop believing in Bill.
I'm free baby!
It's like you've got these chains and all you have to do is whisper a magic spell and the chains vanish.
And so the reason why people hang on to, oh you can't get it all from an is, is because they can simply will away the existence of morality.
by not believing in God and hanging on in pathetic desperation to the Hume-ian chant of, you can't get an ought from an is.
And then they start doing bad things, they start doing wrong things, they start doing selfish and immoral or downright evil things.
Because they've got this magic wand that gets rid of morality called, you can't get an ought from an is, and I don't believe in God, so there's no such thing as morality.
And then what happens is
They do some pretty bad shit.
And then what happens is someone like me comes along and says, Oh, by the way, you can get it all from an is and it's actually really obvious.
Oh, that feels, that's like snake through the heart stuff.
That's really, really awful.
It's like, who's like a chain smoker because they're like, smoking doesn't cause cancer.
And then after 30 years of chain smoking, someone comes along and says, Oh yeah, no, it totally doesn't.
Here's the proof.
Oh God, what have I done?
Right?
What have I done is really foundational to this kind of stuff.
So, I hope that makes some sense.
Yeah, what I think about in regards to, I mean, it coincides with what you said in some way.
It's really odd that these people do this.
Obviously, the main reason, like you said, to escape having to be like morally responsible for their action.
But the thing is, I know they're not sitting there questioning in their own head and justifying every single
movements they make, and every breath of oxygen they intake, and every waking moment of their existence isn't justified, you know, in their head questioning, well, ought I breathe?
Ought I eat?
Ought I be alive?
They're not doing that.
That's only as a means of escaping morality.
And that's, I think that's obvious, right?
This is like the sign of a softness.
But if you want the dopamine of virtue, and virtue gives us the greatest dopamine,
And it has to, because virtue is so bloody dangerous, right?
Virtue is so dangerous in the world that you have to have a giant dopamine dump in order to get it, right?
So they want the dopamine dump, but they don't want to be good.
They just want to feel good.
They just want to seem good.
They want to be viewed as good.
They want to be viewed as wise and good and seekers of truth and this, that, and the other.
So they make a whole bunch of polysyllabic baffle gab up.
And then they could just feel like, yeah, I'm good, man.
I'm wise.
I'm into science.
I'm rational.
I care about the poor.
I could just make up a bunch of stuff.
And then some people are wired that other people's opinions are a viable substitute for actual reality.
It's a weird thing.
I've never quite gotten it.
Maybe to my detriment, of course.
Well, sometimes to my detriment, sometimes to my benefit.
But there are other people
I mean, you see this, there's people who are like 300 pounds, and other people say, you look great, and they switch from looking in the mirror with horror, to listening to other people say, you look great, and they're like, wow, I do!
Like, there's something in the human mind that substitutes other people's opinions for actual facts.
For an objective standard of what, you know, looking means, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so, um, did, you know, the old, did these jeans make my ass look too big?
It's like, honey, it ain't the jeans.
Right.
So do these jeans, have I gained weight?
No, you look great.
Right.
And they're like, whew.
It's like, well, get on the scale.
Don't ask me.
What am I supposed to do?
Maybe.
And even if you did gain weight, maybe it's muscle.
So, because I work out, weighing myself is always kind of a challenge, right?
Because if I've done more weights recently, then I'm going to seem heavier, because muscle weighs a lot more than fat, and so on, right?
So, I usually just, like, do my pants fit, or it's kind of all I've got going for me, or whatever, right?
But yeah, there's a whole bunch of people out there who have entirely founded their self-perception
On the views and opinions of others.
So some guy who's just some crappy factory worker who has never, he's got potential, but he's just never bothered to upgrade his skills.
He's just sat there and resented and complained and not really worked that hard.
And then some communist comes along and says, hey man, you're the real hero of the outfit.
Your boss is just a parasite and he's stealing from you and you'd be way better off if you owned this factory.
Like, he doesn't look there and say, well, you know, I really don't work that hard and
I really don't, I don't really contribute that much, and I've never taken any business courses, and I don't really understand the customer base, and you know, the boss has put up all his own money and took all of those risks, and sleeps in the factory sometimes, and so... So the communist comes up and just sort of sows these seeds of discontent, and
frustration and anger and rage in the guy and the guy's like, yeah, I do.
I do deserve more.
And rather than, okay, if I do deserve more, I should go and negotiate for more.
I should, you know, up my skills or whatever.
Right?
So there's this whole class of people.
And sometimes it really does feel like the majority.
Those are people who are perfectly happy to, to unplug reality from their mind and just jam in other people's opinions and live off that.
But the problem is that once you make that switch, anybody who tries to switch you back,
I think so.
And that's kind of what I was doing with the first caller, right?
He had a bunch of opinions.
I'm saying, well, based on the evidence of the facts of the matter of what you've told me, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And then we had this battle event about whether things were, what was true and what was, what was false.
So, so yeah, the people who, um, they say, well, I don't want to be good.
I just want to be perceived as good.
I don't want to be wise.
I just want people to comment and say, Hey man, you, you know, you're, you're totally right.
You're saying some really fascinating stuff.
I couldn't agree more and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And they don't want to be right.
And you know this from Objectivism, right?
This is nothing new to me.
This is an old... I mean, Oscar Wilde was writing about this in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
So, yeah, they're second-handers, right?
They're social metaphysicians.
They don't ask what is true, they ask what is perceived to be true.
And then they're susceptible to bullying, and because they're susceptible to bullying they become bullies, and then anyone who comes along with objective facts and tries to wrestle with their soul, and it really does feel as close to wrestling with the soul as a secularist can process, you're wrestling with their soul and you're trying to unplug
The opinions of idiots and plug in actual facts, truth, reason and reality and they fight you like hell.
They fight you because they've drifted a long way from virtue and they are now addicts.
They are addicts to the positive opinions of others.
They're addicts to the positive opinions of others and it's a whole lot easier, of course, as you know, to
Say to an unhealthy person, you're healthy.
Then it is for an unhealthy person to actually become healthy.
Lose weight, exercise and all of that.
And it could cost them their entire social group.
Because once you've plugged yourself into other people's opinions rather than actual facts, you'll lose everyone around you.
If you start turning towards facts and you're on trash planet and nobody wants to go off planet because it's cold out there among the stars.
Hope that makes some sense.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I appreciate it.
I'm gonna get to work here.
I really appreciate your time again today.
I just forwarded you that essay by my buddy.
And again, I don't know if you've checked out his YouTube content.
I think it's amazing work in the realm of ethics.
So if you have anything to say about it, I'd love to hear it.
I'd like to share him your preferred explanation of UPB.
I've watched many videos and
Yeah, so I used a section from Essential Philosophy.
It's my free book, freedomain.com slash books.
Essential Philosophy has the most boiled down and accurate description of UPB.
Okay.
Got it.
I need to brush up on it myself.
So, hey, thanks again, Steph.
Thanks, man.
Great questions.
I appreciate it.
Have fun at work.
You have a good day.
Alrighty, righty.
Should we do another?
Should we do another?
Yes, sir.
So, this is the first time I'm speaking to you.
I'm honoured.
So, I wanted to ask you something actually you brought up in the last question.
Talking past each other, for lack of a better reference to it.
So, using Anne Rand terms, the normal colloquial sort of terms.
How can you navigate, in a question, hey, we're going to talk past each other because
I'm sorry, you're kind of garbled to me.
I'm having trouble hearing what you're saying.
I apologize.
I've exhausted my questions.
Yeah, just a little slower, and if you can enunciate a bit more, I'd appreciate it.
Sorry about that.
Right, right.
Being an Aussie, that's how I rumble.
So, talking past each other.
When, for example,
Bringing up anarchy in the usual reference of lawlessness versus anarchy with our government in a discussion.
How do you not be a dick in a discussion to bring up that we're probably going to be talking past each other 60% of the time?
Right, no and that's a great question and the phrase talking past each other, it can be annoying.
Oh, you two are just talking past each other, and people say that, and it can be kind of annoying, because usually it's just a kind of statement, but I think the kernel of truth that's in it is, have the terms been defined?
So, if you're an anarchist, like an anarcho-capitalist, then if you say the government should not enforce
These laws, right?
And then somebody says, well, by definition, that means a lawless society.
And of course, if by government laws, that's what you mean by laws, then yes, clearly a society without the government enforcing laws is a lawless society.
If by laws, you mean government laws, that's
I mean, if I say we should take down this fence, you're saying, well that's just fenceless.
It's like, yes, yes it is.
So, if somebody means by laws, government rules, then yeah, they're right.
It's a lawless society.
But if you mean rules that are effectively, cheaply, and justly enforced, then we've got a different, then we have a different matter.
Then we have a different matter.
So, of course, the thing is that most people associate government functions as the sole provision of those functions.
So, the way it kind of works is people say, well, we have roads, the roads are built and run by the government, and I'm sure if the roads could be built and run by non-governmental entities, then that's what would have been done.
In other words, they say, well, we have to have had countless societies that tried having
Non-government roads, and as a result of them trying to have non-government roads, the roads weren't built, the roads weren't enforced, and then the governments that built better roads, like the Romans, they took over everyone, and so it's the only efficient way to have roads made and maintained is by the government.
So, the general perception that a function that is provided by the government
And is provided by the government just about everywhere, must always be provided by the government, and other societies must have tried different things, but it didn't work out, and therefore we've settled on this.
There's a kind of conservative element to it, which is where people say, okay, so we have, you know, an argument is pair bonded marriage, and societies have tried a variety of things, that tends to be the best thing.
Or another conservative argument is, if you find a
We're good to go.
Right, and I remember this, talking to a programmer at Microsoft many years ago, reading an article, and the guy was saying, well, you know, you've got all this code, and you don't know what it's there for, and you figure, well, it's just, this is inefficient, you know, this is ridiculous, right, why is it caching all of this stuff in memory, blah blah blah, and then you find out that the reason the code was there was that, you know, what if somebody, you're saving to a floppy disk, back in the days of floppy disks, you're saving to a floppy disk, and then someone
It takes out the floppy disk in the middle of the save, right?
And so that's what all of that code is for, but you haven't really thought about it in that kind of way.
So you have to figure out why things are there before you change or get rid of them.
Now, I think a good analogy is to say, okay, so prior to, say, the 14th century,
Was slavery and or serfdom the standard way of agriculture?
Either you had direct slaves or workers with some nominal economic freedoms who were still tied to the land like livestock.
And the answer of course is that yes, across the entire world there was no such thing as a free market in agriculture.
It was either serfdom or slavery or some combination thereof.
And you would say, well was it the case
Was it the case that society had tried a whole bunch of free market stuff, but it all was settled on slavery and serfdom as the best ways of organizing agriculture?
And people would say, anybody who knew anything about history would say, well, no.
We just kind of evolved that brutal fashion of dominance and subjugation and so on.
Work needed to be done and it's way better to have a slave do it than to do it yourself.
So, because of the sort of brutality and primitive prehistory of the species, we inherited from a brutal and violent age, we inherited
Slavery.
I mean, let's just subsume serfdom among that, because it's just a different kind of slavery.
So, you wouldn't say that all societies have experimented with a wide variety of agricultural organization, including a pure free market, but boy, you know, the most efficient thing was slavery.
It's like, no, based on the brutal prehistory, the absence of machinery, the absence of private property, the absence of automation,
And the ad of, you know, stocks and bonds and a wage market economy and all of that.
We just inherited this brutality called slavery.
We say, okay, so slaves pick the crops, right?
And what was it, Nadler, the Democrat politician, was just like, well, we have to have illegal immigration because otherwise the crops will rot in the ground, the vegetables will rot in the ground.
Well, that's the argument, right?
And the argument is, because slaves pick the crops,
If there's no such thing as slavery, then the crops will not be picked, right?
And this is a completely false argument, of course.
It's absolutely a false argument.
It's basically the equivalent of saying, a man rapes a woman, but if he doesn't rape the woman, she'll never have sex.
Like, it's a completely insane argument, but we accept it for reasons of psychology and power-mongering and propaganda and so on.
So, if somebody says about Rhodes, well, this is the way it's always been done, you say, well, you know, prior to there not being slavery, slavery was the way that agriculture and other work was done, right?
I mean, before there were steamships, there were galley slaves, right?
And galley slaves was really the only way that you got ships across the ocean, so we would sort of understand that.
And it wasn't like people had tried all these steamships but just found galley slaves were the most efficient way of doing these things, of course, right?
Generally just trying to get people to understand that just because the government does something doesn't mean it's moral, doesn't mean it's the only way to do something, and certainly doesn't mean it's the most efficient way to do things.
The question is not efficiency, the question is not can you imagine an alternative, the question is the morality.
Slavery is immoral.
It is a violation of the non-aggression principle, it's a violation of self-ownership, it's one of the worst things ever in human history, if not the worst thing ever given the opportunity cost of the free market that it cost.
So, if somebody says law means government fiat, do this or else, well then yeah, okay.
But that's like saying agriculture means
Slavery.
Now, of course, somebody will perfectly accept that agriculture does not mean slavery.
Certainly, there's agriculture that relies on slavery, even in the modern world.
There is also agriculture that does not rely on slavery.
There's slavery without agriculture, and there's agriculture without slavery.
And there is, of course, also agriculture with slavery.
And there's, of course, slavery in vast fields that don't involve agriculture.
If you say that social rules means government fiat, government order, government decree, then, of course, most social rules are not enforced by government decree, right?
And if the person doubts that, just say, oh, try bringing up IQ in a social situation, and see how many have a law against it, right?
Just see how well that's
We're good to go.
And clearly social rules are not just the government.
And we questioned slavery and eliminated slavery because it was deeply immoral.
And the absence of government fear does not mean the absence of rules.
And the presence of government fear does not mean the presence of positive and healthy and efficient and moral social rules.
And of course we can all think of endless amounts of laws that were passed and still exist in the world.
that are deeply immoral.
This is the argument that, you know, the Soviet Constitution, the Constitution under the Communists, was incredibly liberal and positive and healthy and productive and gave people lots of rights, but it was never enforced and it was just a piece of paper, right?
So, laws can be corrupted and generally are.
There are tons of rules, very positive and healthy social rules, that are enforced without
Laws and the fact that governments enforce laws doesn't make it right, doesn't make it moral, and it certainly doesn't mean that there aren't better alternatives in the same way that agriculture being based on slavery didn't make slavery right or moral and certainly didn't mean that there weren't better alternatives.
Does that make some sense?
It makes a lot of sense.
That was a good example of what we should do, continue with our syllogisms and whatnot in our discussions, and usually something that follows on with that, rather than suggesting that we're going to talk past each other, continue with the reasoning that you just went with, that's fine.
In a not-so-available time or
Environment, milieu type environment.
Just say a man and wife, partner, girlfriend, and we understand that men are going to want to solve versus the woman wants to be third and a bit of intimate time.
How do we maybe suggest to the woman that, hey, we're geared to solving problems?
You know, we could talk about a little bit.
Um, about what you're thinking and that sort of thing.
But, um, also we have a right to, um, that's the way I'm geared.
I'm just going to solve a problem.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I, I don't quite follow this distinction between men and women.
And I understand the general one, which is that women want to talk about problems just to feel heard, but men actually want to solve problems.
I mean, I've, I've dated both kinds of women.
In fact, once I found out who actually, I'm sorry.
It was a bit too general on my part.
No, no, no, it's not your fault at all.
No, I mean, I think what you're identifying is a general truism that people accept as a whole.
But, in my experience, the competent women do want to solve problems.
Incompetent women want to complain, as do incompetent men.
They just want to complain.
Right?
A stitch and bitch, as they used to call it, right?
You get some knitting and you just complain about your husband or the world or whatever, right?
But so, this idea that when a woman says, for instance, I'm having this problem at work, this guy's being really mean to me, and then the man says, well, you can try this, this, and this, or whatever, right?
Or maybe you should leave your job, or whatever it is, right?
And the woman says, I just want you to listen.
Then, what she's actually saying is, I don't want to solve the problem.
I just want to complain about it.
Now, it's not a particularly male thing.
I mean, if you've ever known women who are competent in solving problems, they don't like hearing other women complain about problems without wanting solutions either.
So, to me... Minority, yeah.
Yeah, like if... Look, there's lots of men who want to complain about things without solving the problem either.
You hear like, you know, my girlfriend is this, that and the other.
It's like, well, you should get her to stop doing that or you should break up with her.
Hey, man!
What are you talking about?
It's extreme.
It's not black and white.
No, I don't particularly, and I don't think anybody does, I don't want to hear someone complain about a problem.
I mean, I'll listen a couple of times for sure, yeah, but if it's a repetitive problem, yeah, I want to solve it.
Of course I want to solve it.
I mean, and if you want women to understand this, right?
If you want women to understand this, then what you do is you say to the woman, if she's complaining without wanting a solution, you say, okay, listen, man, listen, honey, uh, there's this woman at work.
I'm really, really attracted to her.
I mean, she's so hot.
She's so hot and, and she's like completely flirty with me too.
Like it's crazy.
Leaning over me, boobs half full and out, flipping back her hair and laughs at everything I say.
Keeps wanting to come to lunch with me and sit like uncomfortably close to me.
She's got this great perfume and her hair smells fantastic.
And you know, now of course, what's your girlfriend going to say?
She's going to get really upset.
Right?
And then you say, no, no, no, no.
I, I just, I just need you to listen.
And she'll say, I don't want to hear that!
What do you mean you're attracted to someone?
So yeah, now that's how I feel when you complain without wanting a solution.
Yes, awesome.
You got me in the oh my oh jeez!
That's no good.
Alright, hang on just a sec.
Sorry about this.
Oh, sorry about that.
Just had a call about a piece of technology.
So, okay.
But yeah, I mean, so she's like, the pain that you feel if I'm attracted to another woman is the pain that I feel when you don't want a solution to a repetitive problem.
Yeah, that's an awesome little reasoning sort of comeback.
Thank you, Stephan.
Very, very great insights in those two little blurbs from me.
Thank you so much.
You're very welcome, man.
All right, let's do one more quickie quickie, if anybody has a question or comment.
And listen, by the way, again, I just really want to reiterate how grateful I am for you guys to have supported the show and keep us afloat, and just thank you, thank you, thank you.
It really does mean the world.
I know we got a smaller audience now, but there's some real pluses to that, and
The stuff that we're doing now, so let me tell you sort of very briefly the benefits of the smaller audience.
The massive benefits of the smaller audience is that our work resonates.
For all time.
The stuff that I'm talking about, this human condition stuff, this is relationship stuff, this is conversational stuff, ethics, virtue, and all of that.
So, rather than me doing another presentation on what's happening in Ukraine, or another presentation on the Paris Peace Accord, or the climate change, all of that stuff kind of comes and goes.
And, of course, I have this view, which I'm sure you can understand, and you probably experience this too, that how many emails do you think people send me about work I did on some terrorist attack in Paris eight years ago?
They don't, because that was a singular event, and it did get a wider audience, and there was value in that.
I'm not going to pretend there wasn't.
I don't have any regrets for that.
But it comes and goes.
And it has very little interest or relevance to people in the future, because it was a very specific thing.
The example that I always have in my own mind is something like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn or other works that Mark Twain did, Samuel Clemens.
He also had a weekly newspaper column that ran for decades, I think, and nobody cares about that stuff.
Nobody reads that because it's all the news of the day, the moments of the day.
So he's like, well, you know, but I get much more feedback in the moment from my newspaper columns, but what do we care about centuries later?
Or a century and a half later?
We care about
His novels.
We care about the stuff that is more timeless, the stuff that is more human, the stuff that connects us in a more visceral way.
So, taking away the cocaine pig trough of politics, in a way, was hugely beneficial to the future.
We have a smaller audience now, but we have a much greater effect in the future, because the shows that I do about
Human condition and relationships and personal virtues and calling and so on, those speak to eternal human challenges and issues as opposed to Brexit or, you know, the politics of the moment, which has a certain, I guess, historical interest for people in the future.
What people will listen to the most in the future is the stuff with the smaller audience now.
That I'm very, very clear on.
That we are losing eyeballs in the present, but gaining minds in the future.
And the ratio is, you know, one-tenth the audience is at least a hundred or a thousand times the relevance of the shows.
In the future.
And given that philosophy doesn't have much musculature to try and change things in the world that is, except at the personal level, the fact that we can have a much greater impact on the future not only keeps me going, but makes the shows for me even more enjoyable and powerful now than they were in the heyday of the show.
So I hope that helps, at least from my perspective, make clear what I'm working on or thinking about or looking at.
All right, well it looks like a good time to close down.
I really, really appreciate everyone.
Thank you so much for dropping by.
What a great deal of pleasure to have this opportunity to chat with you guys, and I will see you on Wednesday night for Wednesday Night Live.
Thanks again for all of your support.
If you're listening to this later, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show and join these fine people who I think can be happy with their support of philosophy over the course of our lives, and lots of love.
