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June 18, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:31
My Ex-Wife Destroyed Me!
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Good morning everybody, Stefan Molyneux, out for a lovely walk in nature with our death crows above and our philosophy down below.
So, question, yesterday was Father's Day, freedomain.com slash oned, if you'd like to help out.
Hopefully they don't think I'm gonna stumble and die.
That's why they're gathering above.
All right.
It's Father's Day.
Does a sperm and money don't account?
Asks a listener.
I once had a wife and two daughters.
My younger daughter died of cancer at 14 during her illness.
The three girls, mother and daughters, ran away.
I had no clue they would do such a thing other than that I know they were hostile to me or more accurately their mother was determined to get rid of me and have total control over her Ill daughter who she was convinced she could save.
She alienated her daughters from their father, me, by crying to them and pretending all was okay to me other than the real problem of a dying child, her favorite.
My reality and existence were about abuse to them.
The tryst was between my ex-wife and younger daughter since her birth.
I was an outsider.
I was served Divorce papers, a week after our daughter died, with false accusations of sexual abuse, never, and never violent.
The house was sold, the assets split, and most of my remaining assets were transferred by force of law for my fifteen-year-old daughter's education and life.
I never saw her again because the feminized family courts allowed her to choose not to see her father, the cause of her poor crying mother's unhappiness.
The court denied my rights.
I paid for her life in university education but never saw her mother or money again.
My mother's sister and friends were shut off from contact or communication.
I could not do anything to protect my daughter.
Any attempt to contact would have instigated police action.
After ten years, when my mother was dying, I left a phone message to my daughter about the situation.
I lived about 50 miles away.
Soon the police turned up to serve a restraining order and removed my guns and ammo.
I had none.
I fought the restraining order in court, so one was never issued.
Amazing.
But that was the end of my longing for fatherhood.
I wonder if my ex-wife ever feels any remorse for her lies, deceit, betrayal and emotional violence against me and her
daughters. I suspect she feels sanctimoniously virtuous and justified that she is a good mother protecting
her daughter on antidepressants. Are there ever any consequences for mothers who alienate their
children from their fathers?
I don't know of any adult that would dare to confront her.
At least I was liberated from a miserable marriage and family. I now have a wonderful life
with an intelligent, kind woman who pampers and smiles me every day, not just on Father's
Day. Yes, it's a very, very sad story.
And I'm sorry, of course, that this happened to you.
And And you focus only on the wrongs.
Oof!
You're not going to like me, but nonetheless, right?
We aim for truth, not for popularity.
And the truth as I see it is that you chose to have Children, multiple children, with, by what you describe as a dangerously evil and destructive woman.
You chose that.
Nobody forced you to date her, nobody forced you to get engaged to her, nobody forced you to marry her, nobody forced you to give her children.
You chose to do that.
So the question is, And it's a tough question, because, man, I sympathize, and it's not like I'm any fan of the statist family courts.
I mean, I understand all of that.
So, along with the sympathy, though, is sort of the grim Don Corleone witch-slapping of, what the hell were you thinking?
Getting married and having children?
You're such a monster!
Who delivered her the children?
You delivered her the children.
You delivered her the children.
And crying, and again I don't mean to sound harsh and I do sympathize, but crying on the internet that you're hurt and you're suffering when you gave multiple children to this horrible woman.
I don't quite understand it.
Like, I'm sorry, I just want to make sure I get the right number.
Two daughters.
Yeah, and again, I'm incredibly sorry for your daughter and the cancer.
I mean, this is all just awful.
Awful, awful stuff.
Absolutely.
But why did your wife have control over these children?
Because you decided to impregnate her multiple times.
You gave your wife power over children by giving her Children, by impregnating her.
Now, the question always is this.
What signs were there beforehand?
What signs were there ahead of time?
That this was an evil woman.
That's always a tough thing, right?
Pretending you are only a victim.
Are you a victim?
Yes, absolutely.
Are you only a victim?
No!
Absolutely not.
You're an adult.
You had a choice.
You had a choice.
You gave this monstrous female...
Children, are you only a victim?
The problem is we get relief by saying we're a victim and we feel self-pity and we feel heart done by.
And are you heart done by?
Absolutely!
Were you victimized?
Absolutely!
Are you only a victim?
Absolutely not!
Look, a five-year-old kid being beaten up is a victim.
No choice, no options, never voluntarily decided to enter that situation, has no practical capacity to leave.
That, my friend, is a genuine victim.
You are not in the same category.
So the problem is, of course, that when you You cry about how badly you were treated and you were treated badly and you don't take ownership for getting yourself in that situation.
What happens is you poison your culture.
You poison your culture because you are saying to people This random, awful, terrible, godforsaken thing can happen to you just like it happened to me.
There are no warning signs.
There are no telltale indications.
You can't possibly know ahead of time.
Bad things will happen to you in the realm of marriage.
And it's completely random.
I had this terrible wife.
Now I have this wonderful wife.
It's all so random.
Well, that is paralyzing the young men and the young women, but mostly the young men, in your society.
Right?
You are poisoning the well of marriage.
marriage.
for the young men of your society in order to avoid your own responsibility.
Right?
I mean, you follow that, right?
This is desperately bad.
Why, publicly, and I'm sure you have talked about this story countless times in private, online, in public, you name it, and what has happened?
Well, you have terrified men into avoiding women and avoiding marriage, right?
That's what you have done.
Now, you haven't said, here are the terrible things that happened to me and here are the warning signs I ignored.
Right?
Here are the terrible things that happened to me and here are the warning signs that I ignored.
Now then, you are helping young men.
You're helping young men avoid the desperate situation that you ended up in.
Now that is being a responsible elder of the tribe.
Saying terrible things happened to me and I had absolutely nothing to do with them.
There was no way ahead of figuring these things out.
I was mistreated.
all up and down the planet, and I'm a complete victim, is doing great harm to young men.
It's doing great harm to young men.
You are shoring up.
you Your own sense of self-righteousness and the avoidance of responsibility by sacrificing the wisdom and knowledge you could pass to young men in order to avoid the situation.
Look, young men are going to have sex with dangerous women.
Young men are going to have sex with women.
Now that's a fact.
This tale Won't really scare off anyone because, as we all know, the hormones, the lust, the desire is just too strong.
So, young men are gonna have sex with women.
Some of that sex is going to be procreative.
That's a fact.
So what does your story communicate to young men?
It communicates That, hey man, you can go for a walk in the woods, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, brothers, there are random landmines scattered throughout the trails, and you can lose both legs and bleed out in an instant.
All right?
There are random dangers a woman can just change and turn on you and reveal herself To be a monstrous witch.
And this can happen to you!
It's a convention of crows here.
A murder of crows, I dare say.
Now, what else could you do with your story?
You can say, here are the signs I failed to heed and here is the punishment I received.
Here are the signs I failed to heed and here is the punishment I received.
Repeat it after me!
Here are the signs I failed to heed and here is the punishment I received.
Now what that would do is it would make it more painful for you to look at your own complicity
in delivering these children, now this child, to your wife.
Bye.
Right?
Why did you choose her?
Right?
Why did you choose her?
Why did you choose that woman to have children with?
A lot of crows.
Why did you choose this woman to have children with?
It certainly wasn't because of the quality of her character, right?
That we can accept.
It had nothing to do with the quality of her character because If, you know, she's as horrible as you say, and all I have is your science, I'm just going to go with that.
She's as horrible as you say, so she's a total monster, and you went through a very dangerous situation that could have resulted in years of jail time, and, like, just monstrous.
Absolutely monstrous.
So why did you choose her?
Right?
We all know, right?
We know.
She was pretty.
You chose her because she was pretty and she was hot, and you didn't care about her character, and you didn't care about her history, and you didn't care about her childhood.
You only cared about her tits and ass.
I mean, there can't be any other reason to choose to have children with such a woman.
What other possible reason could there be?
So you chose her out of lust.
And you committed a sin.
Which is, you chose a woman for her body, not her character.
You chose a woman for her flesh, not her mind, her virtues, her soul, her empathy, her sensitivity, her strength, her virtue.
And when you sin, you pay a price.
And all you want to do is you want to talk about the price, which I sympathize with.
Listen, if you were a smoker and you'd smoked two packs a day for 40 years, and you were writing to me saying, I'm facing lung cancer.
It's a long, horrible, slow, painful, expensive death.
I would have sympathy for you.
Although you brought it on yourself by smoking two packs a day for 40 years.
I would still have sympathy for you.
But let's not pretend That what happened to you was inflicted upon you by physics, the gods, fates, laws, or the government.
You chose this.
You say, well, but I didn't choose these consequences.
But if you marry a woman who is petty, selfish, narcissistic, vengeful, immoral, false, destructive, And abusive, if you choose to date her, get engaged to her, marry her, give her multiple children, and then say, but I didn't choose any of the negative consequences of that, then I'm not sure what to say to you.
Almost this is like saying, well, I chose to jump off a cliff, but you can't blame me for falling.
And I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying that the great temptation of lust, greed, right?
Greed for the hot girl, greed for status, greed for whatever it was that had you marry this woman.
Greed leads to another great sin.
And I don't think it's a formal sin, but it certainly is a sin in the realm of philosophy.
And that sin is self-abandonment.
You learned a horrible, hard lesson, for which I have great and deep sympathy.
And what's the best thing that you can get out of that lesson?
What is the best thing you can get out of that lesson?
Can you get your relationship with your daughter back?
No, almost certainly not.
But you can stop falsifying what happened to justify yourself and thus poison the culture and minds of young men.
You can do that.
You can start telling the truth About what went down.
What went down?
You met this girl.
She was really pretty.
You didn't judge her character.
You didn't judge her virtues.
You just wanted to have sex with her.
So you sent.
And that's, you know, it happens.
It happens.
But the sin that you did in the past, decades ago, should not be compounded by the sin now,
of bearing false witness. Now, if you're going to tell me, and some people do give this a
shot, but I don't believe it, and never will believe it, and I certainly have hundreds if
not thousands of conversations, where people were saying, well, a terrible thing happened
to me because of someone, and I say, well, what were the signs?
They say, well, there weren't any, and then I ask them for the signs, and they say, oh, well, there were these ten signs, right?
She had a bad relationship with her dad.
She blamed other people.
Her friends were trash.
She had tattoos.
She had promiscuity.
She had a prior drug addiction.
She had a conviction.
She forgot about everything.
She fought with me all the time.
She ignored any responsibility.
She never apologized.
She always blamed me for every problem in the relationship.
Right?
From day one!
From day one.
From day one.
And I sympathize with that.
Lust is a very powerful thing.
That's the reason we have to have pretty strict ideas regarding sin.
Because lust is a very powerful thing.
The animal often wants to overtake the angel.
The ape versus the angel.
A story as old as time.
And I sympathize.
And because I sympathize with you, I want you to take responsibility.
Now, if you say to me there were no signs, she was a perfect angel, and then she just turned kind of crazy, and so on.
Well, it's because my daughter got sick.
Well, again, terrible tragedy, massive sympathies, but that does not make people turn evil.
Hardship does not make people turn evil.
Right?
I had cancer.
I still have effects from treatment.
I had cancer.
Did I turn evil?
Nope.
Did the people around me turn evil?
Nope.
So that's not a thing at all.
So.
There were signs.
Now, you were in the lust, right?
You had a situational position of lust.
And one of the reasons why our passions can become so overwhelming is because
we're supposed to have people in our lives who punch us in the nads if we're making a
bad dick-based decision. Right?
Thank you.
If we're making a bad dick-based decision... Oh, look at this.
Should we immortalize this?
A dead bird.
Now forever immortalized, right?
So... Who is supposed to save you from lust for a corrupt woman?
Who is supposed to save you?
Because we all fall prey to that, right?
Who is supposed to save you from lust for a corrupt woman?
Well, it's probably not the men in your life because they also would suffer from lust if she happens to be particularly sexy or pretty or whatever.
So who is supposed to save you from lust for the corrupt women?
It is, in fact, the women in your life.
Yes!
Bing, bing, bing!
That's right, Vanna!
It is the women in your life who are supposed to save you From the danger of corrupt pretty women.
Because women know female nature.
Women know the dangers of lust.
Women know the danger that a pretty woman can represent.
Right?
So who was supposed to save you from this monstrous woman?
Your mother, your grandmother, your aunts, your sisters, your cousins, your nieces, whoever.
Right, whoever.
Now, did they warn you?
Or maybe you were completely consumed by lust.
Lost your mind.
And...
Maybe you had to rely on the women around you to set you straight and say, listen, bro, son, grandson, she's dangerous and here's why.
Right?
Now, let's say that you don't listen.
No problem.
No problem.
So if people care about you, this might blow your mind, but this is the level of love that I'm starting to, well, not starting to, but I demand of the world and hold it accountable for not providing.
So let's say that your aunt knows exactly how dangerous this woman is.
Because you understand, little girls grow up being bullied by women like this.
Like severely bullied.
They know what this kind of female looks like because they have this kind of female in their life bullying them to near insanity when they're children.
Right?
So they know.
Women know dangerous women, because they were bullied by dangerous girls, and other reasons too.
So, let's say your aunt, Aunt Edna, says to you, this woman is bad news, you cannot date her, and here's why, and she lays out her case, right?
Let's say, oh, she has a bad temper, right?
And you say, well, no, I mean, occasionally you should just get a bit irritable, but it's really my fault.
Right?
Penis, penis, penis.
Dick, dick, dick.
And you don't listen.
All right.
Challenge accepted.
So what does Aunt Edna do if you don't believe that the girl you're dating has a bad temper?
Does she just lecture you?
She does not.
She doesn't just lecture you.
Right?
What does she do?
Well, what she does is she gets together with you and your girlfriend, hopefully at a family gathering or some social gathering or some social situation.
She gets together with you and your girlfriend and she Contradicts your girlfriend.
Right?
And she provokes your girlfriend.
Maybe she records it.
I don't know.
If it's legal.
Right?
She provokes your girlfriend.
And then what happens?
Your girlfriend blows up.
Right?
And then Aunt Edna's job is done.
Her conscience is clear.
Right?
She told you, she warned you, she made the case.
She made it theoretically and now she's proven it empirically.
Now if Aunt Edna has warned you about this woman and has made her case and given you evidence from what she's seen, from what she's heard and you don't believe her and then Aunt Edna triggers your girlfriend and your girlfriend blows up and yells at her or storms out
or something like that, right?
And if you still want to continue to date her, then on Edna, I mean, may ask other women to
intervene or whatever, but at that point you've chosen your fate, right?
Right?
You've chosen your fate.
And there's nothing really more that can be done, but then don't come crying to me.
A quarter century later, saying, all these terrible things happened to me, oh my gosh, I'm such a victim.
And this is just one of many different approaches that can be taken.
And I've personally done this, by the way.
I'm not talking theoretically here.
I've literally personally done this in my life.
And sometimes the men are like, they shake off the penis haze and they're like, oh, thank you, man.
You're right.
Right.
Oh my God.
Because sometimes you need to see it from someone else's eyes and so on.
Right.
And I've done this and I've had friends in the past who were dating the wrong women.
And I pointed it out.
I have spent hours pointing out what's going on and why and how dangerous it is
and how bad it's going to be and so on, right?
But sometimes the estrogen hooks go so deeply into the balls that you end up a eunuch of
malevolence, right?
And I have spent hours pointing out the bad behavior.
I provoked women in front of...
God, pretty, right?
Look how lovely.
I've provoked women in front of their boyfriends, and if they continue, oh no, she's just having a bad day, or, you know, you provoked her, man, then okay.
Then go.
I mean, if you won't learn theoretically, and you won't learn from evidence, Then you have to learn from experience.
And what have you learned from experience, my friend?
Have you learned to warn others?
Or are you terrifying young men with your random victim narrative of bad shit happened
to me and there was nothing I could do?
you This is the chilling thing, and I say this out of genuine
affection for you, my friend, and a desire to mail you back your soul from the dungeon
this narrative is keeping it in.
Your wife plays the victim and attacks you, and you play the victim and attack your wife.
Thanks for watching!
Did she do monstrous things?
Yes, she did monstrous things.
Did she show any signs of dysfunction before you gave her two children?
Of course she did.
Did people warn you about her?
Well... If people did warn you about her and you didn't listen, how dare you play the victim?
Right?
If your doctor keeps telling you to quit smoking, you're gonna get sick.
How dare you play the only the victim when you get sick?
Right?
If your doctor tells you, man, you gotta eat better and exercise, you're too fat, and you keep gaining weight, how dare you play the, oh my god, I've got diabetes and bad knees, purely victim card, right?
That's crazy.
So either people warned you about this woman, or they didn't.
And listen, brother, I've been in a situation where I was not in a great relationship, and nobody warned me, and nobody said anything, and I had to figure it all out myself.
Not an easy task.
Not an easy task.
But the fact is, nonetheless, It is an empirical fact that I chose to have the people who didn't warn me in my life.
I chose those people who didn't warn me about a bad relationship or a negative relationship.
I chose to have those people in my life.
Now, did I grow up in a corrupt environment?
Was it hard for me to see?
Did culture not warn me?
Right?
But this is what bothers me.
Is that you're part of the culture that's not warning young men?
Saying, here are the 12 red flags to look out for.
Here's what happens if you don't look out for them.
You see?
Here are the 15 or 20 things that I neglected.
Here's the good advice I just didn't take.
Who would have thought?
It figures.
The good advice I just didn't take.
And here are the consequences of failing to listen.
Now, in the throes of it, I understand feeling victimized, of course,
but this is long after the fact, right?
This is long after the fact.
And you've had time to reflect.
And life begins when you take responsibility for all adult decisions.
Life only truly begins when you take responsibility for all adult decisions.
And also, recognizing the basic fact you
That if you want to become more moral, it will likely cost you every relationship you have.
If you decide to become, if you decide to truly take responsibility, maybe it'll cost me my relationship with you, such as it is.
Maybe you'll be outraged and upset and, you know, cancel your subscription or donations and, hey man, I understand that, I sympathize with that feeling, I really do.
But my concern is not the mistakes of the past but the salvation of the future.
And you, my friend, are toxic to young men when you tell this story because you are giving them what happened to you but not why it happened to you.
Right?
You're saying what happened, but not why.
Why did this happen?
Because you chose an evil woman to procreate with.
Why did you choose an evil woman to procreate with?
That's a fascinating question.
And the generic response is, well, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.
So are you saying That ELO never wrote that song.
Evil woman!
Right?
Are you saying that humanity has never figured out that women can be corrupt and dangerous?
Right?
There's no such thing as the story of Adam and Eve.
There's no such thing as the story of Medea or Medusa or, heck, Fatal Attraction if you want.
Are you saying, or disclosure, Michael Douglas had a whole career in the 90s playing hard done by men with predatory women.
Are you saying that no human beings have ever tried to figure out any signs of female corruption?
There's no warnings in the Bible.
There's no warnings in morality.
There's no warnings in literature.
There's no warning in books, art, movies, anything.
Well, you're wrong.
The analysis of female evil has been fairly constant throughout human history.
I mean, you understand the story of Helen of Troy, right?
The face that launched a thousand ships.
She was so pretty, tens or hundreds of thousands of men were slaughtered in a war.
Never heard that there's a sin called lust.
Never heard of that.
No way of knowing.
Blind, led as lamb to a slaughter.
No option, no choice, no will.
Victim, victim, victim.
I don't know if you had more kids.
It seems unlikely you don't mention them.
And again, this is with all sympathy for what happened to you.
And the sympathy and the responsibility is tough.
A lot of people don't get that.
That you can hold someone accountable and still have sympathy.
I'm sorry for the guy who's dying of lung cancer and I hold him responsible for smoking two packs a day for 40 years.
But I still sympathize with him.
It's a horrible way to go.
But, and I sympathize for you for what happened with your ex.
I really do.
It's very sad.
Very sad stuff.
Tragic.
Awful.
But, I sympathize most for your daughter.
Because she didn't choose, right?
You chose to give an evil woman children, right?
You chose to give an evil woman children, but she did not choose Your ex-wife as her mother.
You chose her ex-wife as your daughter's mother.
You chose that.
You did that.
You did that.
Say it again, man.
My concern is always as a moralist for those who didn't choose.
And you chose your ex-wife.
Now, either, again, just to reiterate, either you got good advice and you didn't listen to it, or you got bad advice and did listen to it.
But if you got bad advice and listened to it, it means that you refused to expose yourself to better advice.
And did you ask people, what do you think of my girlfriend, and take honest responses?
Right?
If you had a bad childhood, did you go to therapy?
Did you resolve things?
Did you learn some wisdom?
right?
So I am not concerned as much with what happened to you as I am concerned
switch arms here with what happened to your daughter right?
Because let's go with your report, right?
Your report is valid.
And your daughter was raised by a vile, toxic, pathological, narcissistic, whatever, whatever, right?
An evil woman.
So you handed over a child of your own free will to be raised by an evil woman.
And in your email, and I'm not saying that this is obviously the sum total, the alpha and the omega of everything that's going on with you, but what I did not notice was an excess of, I gave children to an evil woman.
And those children have suffered much more than me.
Right?
There's sympathy with your own suffering, which is real, and I sympathize too, but what's absent, right?
It's all the dog... Morals is all about the dog that doesn't bark, right?
And what's absent, what's missing, what's tragically not there, of course, is your sympathy for your remaining daughter.
Well, I'm just a sperm donor and a paycheck and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Look at all these bad things that happened to me.
Look at all this victimization I went through.
Look at all these terrible things.
I just tried to tell my daughter about her grandmother dying and I got threatened with a cease and desist and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, okay, so you delivered unto an evil woman a helpless child.
Well, two, but one is still alive.
Now, you could choose To leave your wife.
And you did, right?
And you said, I got out of a toxic marriage.
You know who couldn't choose to leave your wife?
Your daughters.
Your daughters.
They could not choose to leave your wife.
You could get out.
Your children had to stay behind.
Listen, brother, as a child who got left behind by a father who escaped a violent, dangerous, and evil woman, I'm telling you that if my father was crying in self-pity and talking about how hard done by he was, And never once mentioned how hard done by I was when he had a choice and I never did.
I would have some contempt.
I'm not saying this is what your daughter feels.
I'm just telling you what I would feel.
I would feel some contempt and I would question whether he'd learned anything.
Oh, Steph, my son, what your mother did was so terrible, and she was such an awful person, and she was so terrible, and she was so negative, and she was so destructive, and she threatened me with this, and she was just crazy, and psychotic, and it's like... So you left me there.
Oh, but I couldn't, I couldn't get you out, and blah, blah, blah, but it's so hard for me, and so on.
It's like, yeah, but you chose her, and you chose to have children with her.
So you delivered into the control And that, my friend, is a whole lot of not fun for the kid.
And that kid, particularly, she grew up with a single mother, her sister dying of cancer, her mother obviously poisoning her to the point where, what's happening now?
Well, you are Some years ago you tried to contact her and she went totally haywire and got a cease and desist or something like that, right?
So that's how toxic her relationship is.
Ah, well, but her mother poisoned her against me and the only person that you seem to be overly concerned with about your ex-wife poisoning your daughter is you, not the fact that your daughter was poisoned and is poisoned.
That is not particularly good to Put it mildly.
So anyway, I hope that you get my sympathy.
I hope you get some sternness and I hope that you begin your life with a renewed commitment to true responsibility.
Thanks, brother.
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