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Dec. 20, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:54
Why People Obsess Over Politics!
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Time Text
Yes, good evening, good evening, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid.
Now listen, listen.
Emergency broadcast this year of our Lord, 2024. And we are talking, oh, I guess it's the 24th divided by the month gives us three.
24th of August, 2024. Emergency broadcast.
The emergency being that last night, a man in good faith, I think it was a man, in absolute...
Joyous anticipation of a rigorous answer.
Asked me something, and then I finished off the live stream after yapping fairly incessantly for quite a bit of time.
He asked me, Steph, Steph.
Short question, why do people take politics so seriously?
It's almost like a religion to some individuals.
I mean, not even able to joke about both candidates without complete nasty and crazy replies.
It is hard for people on the voluntarist, libertarian, sort of you-name-it kind of spectrum, and I mean we're on the spectrum, but it is kind of hard for people to understand why people get so nuts about politics.
I'll put forward a bit of a theory.
And you can listen passively, you can jump in and engage, you can question, query, comment, oppose, whatever your ventricles thirst for.
I am happy to accommodate, but here we go.
So, most of us who are skeptical of the endless illusory benefits of infinite government power tend to be people who get shit done.
In the voluntary free market arena.
We tend to be people who other people are willing to pay in a voluntary fashion for the joy and presence of our goods and services.
I have never worked for the government.
I have worked with the government as an entrepreneur back in my 20s.
And I spent one godforsaken summer tucked away in the corner of the Department of Education working on a giant contract for a union, a giant union contract, and just got to see all the ins and outs of the political process through that.
I was just a temp and a student.
I think I was about 20 or so.
And it's really pretty eye-opening.
So, most of the people who are listening to this don't get their money from the government.
And the number of people who get their money from the government is really quite staggering.
And there's a large number of people who have become, in a sense, human beings that have adapted to the nutrient called government money.
They have adopted and adapted.
This is particularly true in the welfare state, although it's also true In the civil service as a whole and all of the tertiary people who get paid by the government, you know, the doctors and the lawyers and the specialists and so on.
So there are people who work directly for the government, there are people who get money directly from the government, and then there are all the people who support and service those people who get money directly from the government.
Now, for those of us who provide value in the remnants of the free market, politics seems Annoying, odd, bizarre, strange.
It's almost fetishistic.
But that's because we don't survive on that food source.
I mean, I'm sure a lion looking at a gazelle would be somewhat bemused at, what, just eats grass?
Well, that's weird.
There's no flesh in grass.
There's no blood pumping through the veins of that grass.
So they would look and say, well, that's weird.
Why would you eat grass?
It doesn't taste like anything.
It's gross.
It doesn't give you any nutritional value.
It's bizarre.
And that looking across this chasm, and it is a true chasm between those who pay for government largesse and those who benefit from it, but when you look across that chasm, at all the people sharpening their political knives on the other side of the Great Divide, It's bizarre.
Why are they so focused?
Why do they care so much?
I mean, one of the reasons I got out of political analysis, other than, you know, obviously ever-escalating dangers, but one of the reasons I got out of political analysis was it is no longer an analysis of policy or preference or economics or morality or rationality or anything like that.
It is the analysis of an ecosystem with such wildly divergent interests, such wildly opposing interests, right, those who want to pay less taxes are generally significantly opposed by those who want to get paid more by their taxes, that It was no longer looking at ideas or arguments or facts, charts, data, anything like that.
Because when people have adapted to a particular form of income, and this can happen at an individual level, and it happens fairly quickly.
So, if you've ever known someone who works for the government, and I remember when I was, after I left theatre school...
In Montreal, I went to the National Theatre School for almost two years.
One year as an actor and one year almost as a playwright.
And I went to Toronto and I lived downtown in a room with a roommate.
I've actually twice in my life lived in one room with another guy.
And we've always gotten along really well.
I'm actually still friends with one of them from Montreal.
But I worked to produce a play that I'd written, which was an adaptation of Ivan Tolgeniev's Fathers and Sons.
I called it Seduction, and it had a pretty good run.
I produced and directed it, and I was also working as a waiter in a high-end restaurant downtown.
And it actually kind of worked out well.
I had split shifts, 11 to 2, and then 5 to midnight.
And so in the afternoons, I would rehearse the play with the actors that I had hired.
Now, my roommate worked for the government.
And it became a running gag.
He'd say, what did you do?
I said, well, you know, I got up pretty early.
I went for a run.
I went to work.
I worked on the play.
I went to work, and I'd come home at like, you know, come back to the room at like 11, 11.30 at night after closing at the restaurant.
And so my days were jam-packed.
And his days, like, what did you do?
I can't, he couldn't remember.
He went to work.
He just, you know, we had some meetings.
I can't remember if anything was really decided.
Nothing really landed on my desk, and this was his life.
By the by, just to dredge this memory up and throw it out into the internet forever, because apparently every part of my history must be scraped and splurged across the planet.
I remember him singing a rousing version of Calendar Girl when he came to meet me at the restaurant I worked at when it was having karaoke night.
I didn't even know there was a song called Calendar Girl.
Calendar Girl, now I do.
And every time I've heard it since, his rendition was much better.
So he had a lot of energy for karaoke, but could not ever remember what he did during the day.
Now, I want you to understand why people are so focused on politics.
We'll take a couple of scenarios and I'm certainly happy to hear your stories and thoughts about all of this.
Let's take a couple of scenarios.
So, a woman works as a teacher for a government school, and she gets to leave, you know, mid-afternoon.
She gets summers off, and these days, certainly, she can download lesson plans from the internet and really doesn't have to do a super amount of work.
And she becomes highly desirable as a wife.
Why?
Well, because we have this insane system where parents work till 5 and kids get off school at 3 o'clock or 3.30.
And so there's that latchkey void in the afternoon that, of course, I'm sure many of us fell through over the course of our young lives.
And if you have a wife who's a teacher, she can take your kids home from school.
Then we also have this void in the summer where you get two months plus...
Off school in the summer, of course, this was originally so the kids could help with the harvest or the planting or farm work of some kind.
I don't know.
I'm not much of a farmer.
I'm an engagement farmer.
Gentleman farmer.
Doesn't get the kind of calluses on my hands that would give me manly credentials in a biker bar, but if you have a wife who is a teacher, she can take your kids home after school, and coincidentally, she gets summers off when your kids get summers off, and so the giant scramble that working parents have Over the course of the summer, which is what on earth do we do with our children?
Right?
That giant scramble...
Doesn't occur.
Because why?
Why?
Because you have a wife who also has summers off, so she becomes much more desirable.
So this woman can probably get, I mean, if she's going for a smart guy who understands these sorts of things, even if only instinctually, she can get a much more attractive and wealthy guy because her work schedule coincides with the great inconvenience of modern education.
And so she's much more valuable.
That's sort of one instance.
Now, government workers don't work very hard.
And I don't know if you've ever been in a particular place in your life where you've gotten lazy.
Have you ever had that?
For whatever reason, maybe you have a slow job, maybe you are recovering from some ailment, or maybe you're having sleep disturbances or, I don't know, rickets, some sort of iron deficiency or vitamin D, and you're just low on energy and you just get kind of lazy.
This...
Make it about me again.
No, just as an example, right?
So this happened to me with regards to working out when I was in the entrepreneurial world as the co-founder of a software company back in the 90s.
Back in the 90s again.
And I didn't work out.
I mean, when I was on a business trip, I'd head down to the gym.
I remember waking up.
It was a wild day.
And this was all new for me, so it was all very exciting.
And I remember waking up.
And it was a terrible snowstorm in Toronto.
I was living downtown Toronto on College Street.
And I woke up.
It was a terrible snowstorm.
I didn't even want to go to work because the weather was so bad.
And I got a phone call from the CEO who said that a client in Phoenix, Arizona was freaking out.
And so I had to get on a plane and fly down and mollify.
Molyneux, mollify, mollify.
The client.
I'm pretty good at calming ruffled feathers, which is why, of course, no one in the world is ever bothered by me.
It's just I'm that chill, I'm that zen, I'm that stoic.
So I woke up in a snowstorm, headed straight to the airport, got on a plane, and then was drowning in my own sweat within a couple of hours heading off to a meeting in Phoenix.
And I remember swimming at the bottom of the pool after my meeting, And looking up, letting the bubbles go up, all the ripples and the chlorine going up your nose that seems to sit in your sinuses for approximately four lifetimes, and just thinking how strange it was that I woke up in a snowstorm, and before the sun was set, I was blowing bubbles up a hotel pool.
It's a wild thing to live in the modern world.
It's a beautiful place to be for the most part.
But I didn't work out much.
And then when I got back into the habit of working out, I just felt kind of kludgy and sludgy and so on.
I remember when I first started running again, I just felt my haunches.
I felt my mildly chunky butt from having a desk job and working 60, 70, 80 hours a week for a couple of years.
So you ever have this thing where you get lazy?
Well, when you get lazy, an object that is in motion tends to stay in motion.
That's inertia, right?
And an object that is at rest, or momentum, sorry, that's momentum, and an object that is at rest tends to stay at rest.
So, people who are government workers adapt to that.
We are energy-conserving machines.
So, when we do not require the expenditure of energy, we tend to hoard it.
Now, this tends to be the case in warmer climates.
Right, if you look at the lion, right?
I mean, why are they called lions?
Because they spend most of their day, yes, that's right, lion around.
That's why they get their name.
I don't think that's true, but it seems true, it feels true, should be true, ought to be true.
It must be true, I decree it to be true.
So, in warm climates, given that you don't really have to worry too much about getting food, when it's hot, I guess you can go kangaroo style and lick your forearms, but you just tend to rest.
In colder climates, well, it's a whole different matter.
I mean, intermediate cold, like Europe.
I'm not talking about the Arctic.
Intermediate cold.
Well, there's always something to do.
Particularly, of course, if you're a farmer.
There's always something to do.
There's a scarecrow to be propped up, there's cows to check on, there's fences to repair, there's hay to bale, there's seeds to spread, there's jam to make, there's always something because you've got this big-ass winter that you've got to flog your way through with limited food resources.
So, basically, what I'm saying is, epidemiologically, epistemologically, In this epistolary fashion, the government turns people into Jamaica.
That's what the government does.
It turns people into lions, occasionally predatory, a lot of time, lying around.
And so people have adapted to that.
They conserve energy.
And it certainly is true, or was true back in the day when I was working, that people seem to have a lot of time to chat and gossip.
Well, we're not that busy.
How about a little hyperfeminine infighting?
Wouldn't that be a wonderful way to pass our lives along?
To get along.
Little doggy.
So people have adapted to it.
They have adapted to a lack of consequences.
This is really, really important to understand that people in the government, people who work for the government, have adapted to a lack of consequences.
It doesn't matter if you screw up.
It doesn't matter if you waste money.
In business, you try to save money.
In governments, you try to spend money.
Because if you save money, well, your budget is going to be cut next year.
And you don't want that to happen because you don't want to fire your friends.
All that tasty nepotism.
So, people have adapted to a lack of consequences.
People have adapted to no deadlines.
People have adapted to no consequences, no efficiency.
Efficiency is confrontation.
You can't become more efficient without confronting and challenging People's work habits.
People have a way of doing things, and if you want things to become more efficient, you have to disrupt that way of doing things with different and better ways of doing things.
And if you are not someone who is a big fan of what can be pretty assertive and sometimes even pretty aggressive confrontation, Well, you want to go and work for the government, because in the government things don't have to be efficient, which means you don't have to tell people to change and improve what they're doing and fire them if they don't or can't.
So you've got this treacly, weird, amniotic sisterhood of everybody just kind of lazily kicking their legs and thinking that they're champion swimmers.
People have adapted to that.
They have adapted their entire personality structure to niceness over efficiency.
And these two things can be polar opposites at times.
Virtue and niceness are often polar opposites because immorality so often hides.
And a smile is the great quote from Hamlet about Polonius.
Let it be written here that one may smile and smile and smile and be a villain.
Smiling damned villain.
But politics.
So, if you want things to be efficient, if you care about efficiency, then you have to be willing to confront people, shake them out of their complacency, demand better, demand different, demand change, and fire them if they don't, go along with it.
And only people Who face no consequences for bad decisions can be unfailingly, mindlessly, NPC-style, blank-smiling, nice, nice, nice, all the time.
Entire personality structures.
And I think even more foundationally, people's sense of self.
People's sense of self has adapted to...
This environment, fenced off by coercion, free of consequences, they have got a sense of self.
Well, I work for this department, or I do that, and I'm nice, and we can have a convivial workplace, and there's no confrontations.
There's maybe a little backstabbing behind the scenes, but we're all nice to each other.
We all care about each other, because it's very easy to be nice when you face no consequences for bad decisions.
In the fairly ruthless world of software entrepreneurship that I was in for, I guess, close to a decade.
No, a little over a decade, actually.
If you make a mistake, you're toast.
If you don't land the sale, you can't make payroll.
You know, I was talking to some friends.
I was at a wedding last week, and I was talking to some friends and some new friends that I've met.
And we were talking about the fact that men don't approach women and talk to women and say, well, there's a lot of rejections.
Now, I, back in the day, I did the math once when I was in the software world because I was selling multi-million dollar entrepreneurial, sorry, enterprise-level software, right?
I mean, the software I sold to one corporation was on most of the continents.
And it's synchronized overnight on undersea cables.
All the data, because we couldn't get a central database.
The internet was too primitive back then to support a central database from Australia to New York.
So everyone worked locally, and then the database is all synchronized at night.
At approximately 8k per second, it seemed like.
Don't make too many changes!
They won't be finished.
And then we had to make sure that things were fenced off, despite all the different time zones.
Anyway, it was quite exciting and complicated.
But the rough math was something like this, that you have to make a thousand calls to get a hundred interested parties to get ten meetings to make one sale.
0.1% success rate per call.
You should make a thousand calls to get a hundred interested parties to get ten meetings to make one sale.
Now, that one sale was millions of dollars.
Which handled payroll for quite a while.
Now, if I'd have said, well, you know, I can't take that rejection and so on, but...
And people would sometimes be snappy and sometimes be rude, right?
Why are you calling me?
I'm a busy man and all that, right?
And people wouldn't return your phone calls and all of that, right?
So, that's business, though.
That's sales.
That's sales.
I mean, think of how many people come through a house.
And you do this all the time, too.
It's funny how people are so sensitive to rejections.
When they're on the receiving end of rejection, oh, she rejected me, she said no, she didn't want my number, she's got a boyfriend, it's so terrible.
But think about all the things and people that you reject.
This is just a basic empathy thing.
You reject all these people all the time.
Right?
I mean, think about when you go to a garage sale, right?
You see all these things on the table.
And most of them you don't buy.
You may not buy anything.
And of course, the person's desperate to have things to buy because otherwise he's going to be left over with a bunch of stuff he's going to have to find a home for.
I guess probably junk, right?
If you've ever gone to a fair or a renaissance fair or something like that where they have all of these...
I don't understand the economics.
I'd love to do a documentary on these ones.
Like, what time do you get here in the morning?
You know, the places where they have the jousts and the sword fighting and all of that, and people are dressed up.
And, of course, you go to all of these little booths, and all of these little booths are full of people desperate to sell their wares, and you probably buy two or three things out of the hundred people who are there, a hundred booths that are there, so 200 people, two-person booth, right?
So 200 people, you might buy two things.
In other words, you have a rejection rate of 99%.
Do you think about that?
Oh, those poor people.
I actually do.
I'm such a softie.
I go to one of these booths and I feel the urge to buy something because I don't want the person to be sad.
Isn't that funny?
Isn't that funny?
I'm such a ridiculous softie.
And of course, having been on the other side of that table, you know, I used to go to Vegas.
And other places, there would be these conferences for environmental software, environmental expertise, and I would be running the booth with someone and be chatting with people, and we'd take their card, and I think we, oh yeah, we were buying them an iPod or something like that back in the day.
We'd give a, here, put your card in, and then we'd use the card for cold calling, and here, put the card in, and, you know, we'll win.
You might win an iPod back in the day, Oh, then, was it twenty?
No, it had to be twenty gigs.
Twenty megs would be eight songs.
I had a sixty-four meg.
Player, Rio 500. Magnificent.
So...
There is all of that.
You have to make a lot of calls.
But if you're in the government, you don't.
You really only have to make one call, which is give me funding.
And then everyone's calling you and you become really important.
So you feel like you've got a very nice work environment because people don't confront each other about inefficiencies and everyone can pretend to get along and everyone can pretend to be nice and you're a nice person and you have a nice work environment and everyone likes you and you can be convivial to everyone and so on.
So you get a sense of yourself As being a good person, because you're a nice person.
And because you're not funded voluntarily, and you don't have competition, you never have to do much to improve efficiency.
And because you never have to do much to improve efficiency, you never have to disrupt people.
And, you know, there's a lot of people who are like, hey, I'm used to doing it this way.
Don't tell me how to do my job.
And it's like, well, you have to shake people loose, right?
I remember working with a corporation, oh gosh, 30 years ago, who was transitioning from Macintosh computers to Windows computers, and people went nuts.
I know how to do it.
I know what's going on.
I don't want to learn new.
But you had to kind of push through it.
So people have adapted their entire personalities.
I'm a nice person.
I'm supportive.
I'm helpful.
And it's non-confrontational.
Because confrontation has to do with efficiency, which has to do with survivability.
But when you're fenced off from the market, have no competition, and your funding is guaranteed, then you don't have to be confrontational.
You don't have to be difficult.
You don't have to teach an old dog new tricks, so to speak.
So you can think of yourself as really, really nice.
So you get kind of lazy.
You conserve energy.
You live consequence-free.
You can't be fired.
You get as much time off, really, as you want.
Because you can afford, then, to be really, really nice.
So you can say, well, you know, Sally is sick quite a bit.
But, you know, we can be compassionate for that because we're sad that Sally is sick and the fact that she misses, you know, a couple of days a month or a week, you know, let's just try and find a way.
She'll get better soon and all of that, right?
Whereas if you're in the free market and somebody is ill a lot, and, you know, of course we would have natural human compassion for them being ill and we care about that and all, but, well, you can't keep paying them for work that they're not doing.
See, that's sort of foundational reality.
I mean, I remember sweating buckets early on in my entrepreneurial career because we had to make payroll.
Cash flow is king, right, in the entrepreneurial world because sometimes people take 60 to 90 days to settle their bills, which means you've got two to three months of payroll you've got to meet before you get the big check.
And I remember, you know, coming from being broke to being a student and living on like, I don't know, $600 a month to then signing jaw-dropping amounts of personal guarantees for payroll.
That it wasn't even in the corporation.
Like, it was a personal guarantee that I had to sign that would have put me in debt for many years to make payroll.
It's quite exciting.
It's quite exciting.
Of course, you know, it's funny because this is true of life as a whole, right?
Isn't it?
That all the things that horrify you, you look back with some fondness later on.
At that time, it was just like, God, is there some third-world country I can sell a kidney in rather than have to do it this way?
But of course, now I look back and it seems kind of quaint and cool and exciting.
Comedy is just tragedy plus time, right?
Often.
So, people have adapted.
And it happens at a very physiological level.
So, sorry to keep bringing up all my entrepreneurial stuff, but I think it does kind of apply, because this is one of the times, I mean, I'm still doing the entrepreneurial thing, but I'll give you an example.
For instance, when the company that I co-founded was being sold, I had to go through a very intense physical blood work and lots of questions and test if I was on drugs or smoking or whatever.
Don't test for caffeine!
It's like, no, no, that's a given.
It's a given that we could probably take your blood and put it in a blender and make a nice latte.
But I had to go through a lot of health checks.
They weighed me.
They measured my body fat composition.
They took my blood.
Because they wanted to know, given that I was the chief technical officer at a software company, which is pretty much the heart and soul of the operation, they wanted to know that I wasn't ill.
So it was kind of important to stay healthy.
We couldn't have sold the company if I'd been ill or if I had really bad health markers.
In fact, when the company grew, the other executives and I were not allowed to fly on the same plane.
Which is fine.
I find making small talk with people I don't know that well in a business context on an airplane to be a special definition of slow-burning, heavily spiced hell.
So we couldn't fly on the same plane, because if the plane went down, the price it was paid for the company and the investor's money would be toast, right?
So even when it comes to health, so one of the reasons that smart people take care of their health is so that you don't miss too much work, and you have energy, and you have focus, and so on, right?
I was just sort of, I don't, I'm not saying I started this trend, I'm not saying I started this trend, but it coincided with me starting to say people would want a meeting, and I'd say, well, let's walk.
Let's walk and talk.
Even if it's just around the corridors in the office, let's just walk and talk.
Why do we need to sit our whole lives?
Let's walk and talk.
If it was nice outside, let's walk and talk outside.
It's just much nicer, much better.
In business, walk with me is usually not a good sign.
It's going to lead to some Joe Pesci Goodfellas basement wall painting.
But I was like, let's walk, let's walk.
So, you don't want to get too sick.
You want to stay focused because you're in competition.
You're in competition.
I still remember there was...
I still occasionally, like once a year, remember this guy when I used to work downtown in Toronto.
There was a guy that you'd see.
He just had this...
Like, he was one of these guys whose legs wasn't too thick, his arms weren't too thick, but he just had this massive, slow-wake tidal...
Wave of gut that looked like it was about to deep throat his belt buckle.
It really was just Jabba the Hutt sliding off his man boobs.
And I remember thinking, like, God, how can you do this?
Like, I mean, how can you have any energy?
How can you have focus?
And all of that.
So you stay healthy.
But the people, of course, in the government, and I haven't seen the studies, maybe they exist, I don't know, but The people in the government, like, holy crap.
They're big.
They're big.
And they can afford to be because they don't need the same level of focus.
They don't need the same level of energy.
They don't need the same level of intensity.
They can get estrogen-y, particularly to the males.
They can get soy-based and estrogen-y because they don't have to be assertive.
They don't have to Rock the boat or confront people or get people to change or anything like that.
They can just, well, roll along.
Just roll along.
And of course they've got Massive unions not constrained by any free market or competition restrictions.
And they can get big.
It's kind of like some of the HR departments where I also worked.
People get kind of big.
Because it's usually mandated work.
There's not a lot of competition.
And it's usually mandated by various regulations that you have to have this, that, and the other in the HR department.
So they get big.
They get heavy.
Because they can't be fired.
They don't have to go and get new jobs.
They get healthcare, usually free, heavily subsidized.
And they get pensions.
So they have actually physically adapted to, like, biologically, physiologically, in terms of overall health, they have adapted to a very different environment.
In the business world, in general, I mean, there was a phase, I think it was probably in the mid-90s, where being a big guy, well, you can be a big guy if you've got dominant features and thick hair, right?
Then you can be a big guy.
And sometimes salespeople, like the sort of big, fuzzy wig, jolly, Roger kind of salesperson and so on.
But it did become the case that in order to sell, I mean, the product that I built was around environmental compliance and health and safety, right?
So you don't see a lot of fat guys welcoming people to the gym that they own, right?
You kind of have to get high on your own supply, so to speak.
And so, in the business world, obesity is associated with negative personality traits.
And so, if you want to be really successful, for the most part, I can think of some exceptions at various places, but you had to be somewhat lean.
And in fact...
The guys who were like, yeah, I just ran a half marathon on the weekend, like the whippet-thin nervous energy guys, were considered to be very productive.
And of course, as a manager, you want people whose health is not going to interfere with their duties, with their commitments, right?
And you want people who are going to have energy and longevity and focus and all of that.
So people have, like, their bodies have distorted relative to their proximity to power.
So that's very serious.
Now, we could just touch briefly on the women in particular, but the men as well, right?
The welfare state and socialized healthcare has a lot to do with fueling and funding sex addiction, right?
What are the products of sex addiction while broken families?
Well, that's taken care of by family courts and the welfare state, and, well, STDs, but that's taken care of by socialized medicine or subsidized medicine, and abortions also same, and all of that.
So, a lot of state power is there to...
Subsidize and thus promote sexual addiction, which is simply sexual intensity, the sexual intensity of all of us that is unconstrained by consequences.
So, I mean, one of the reasons why our sexuality has become so intense, particularly for men, is it's constrained by consequences.
You take away those consequences, and then that which was formerly a great adaptation to pair-bond the species and have us grow the biggest brain in the universe then becomes an addiction that wipes out pair-bonding in great fiery flamethrower swaths across the entire society, like Ripley and the giant Easter eggs.
So we have, of course, women.
Who have adapted themselves to being, you know, hot, pretty sexy, offering sexual access in return for male resources, or even the promise of sexual access in return for male resources.
Could happen the other way too, but it's more common, female to male.
And they've adapted that way.
You've got people, of course, who have not saved much money on the anticipation of Of government pensions in their old age.
They don't think about the money being inflated away.
They don't think about the unfunded liabilities cracking the back of the economy.
They just think it's going to be there.
So they haven't saved.
People who had to pay, say, for all of their own medications would be far more interested in preventing illness rather than managing its symptoms.
But, of course, there's not much profit in the prevention of illness.
There is profit through government money in the treatment of illness, and the more constant the treatment and the more chronic the condition, the more money goes into the pockets of the unscrupulous.
From the taxpayer, by the way.
Would somebody take better care of their own weight and dietary habits if they had to pay the rather scary amounts of money that are needed to be paid to manage diabetes?
Well, yes, of course they would.
Of course they would.
So, people have adapted their entire lifestyles.
They have adapted their entire personalities on consequence-free political redistribution of taxpayer cash, and this has become such a distorted element that people have lost their compassion for the young completely.
I mean, completely.
Society is foundationally nothing more or less than the sacrifices that older people are willing to make for the young.
Society is nothing more or less than the aggregation of the sacrifices the old are willing to make for the young, or the older.
So why is the birth rate declining so much?
Well, there's a lot of reasons, but one of them is that we have a society Well, the old sacrifice nothing for the young.
In fact, the old sacrifice the young.
The old sacrifice the young.
This is why vampire stories, right, have become so popular, vampire movies.
The old sacrifice the young.
Vampire movies became popular, particularly, I'm thinking of Nosferatu in Germany, After the First World War, which was the most conspicuous sacrifice of the old to the young, but of course not many people remember that, the first welfare state in the West was created under Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s.
And it took, as you know, really in a half a century for that to flourish into the hellscape known as full-scale National Socialism.
And war.
I mean, socialism is a war against the citizens.
It's a civil war, which then becomes an external war in order to maintain any pretense of unity in the society.
So people have adapted to all of this.
And I'm just going to not flounder around, but try to remember why I was on The topic of Germany, I did a whole...
It was an NFT called The Rise of Nazism, which was a whole examination all the way back to the origins of Nazism.
It was a great presentation.
So spicy, it was an NFT. FreedomateNFT.com.
Actually, you can check them out.
There's still some cooking around.
Still some cooking around.
My book...
Rationalist Manifesto, some other cool stuff.
And of course, if you are finding what I'm saying helpful and interesting and valuable in comprehending the world, freedomman.com.
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So, women have foregone husbands for the sake of marrying the state.
And freedom, voluntarism, less taxes.
Well, that threatens their existence.
Now, I don't believe it threatens their physical existence.
In fact, I'm enormously sure.
I'm deeply sure.
Enormously sure.
What does that mean?
I'm deeply sure.
I'm...
Yeah, sure is kind of binary.
Sure, unsure is a degree thing.
No.
I'm very sure maximum sureness has been achieved.
I'm sure that, say, single moms, for instance, would be far better off in a free society, even in the existing structure.
If we moved to a free society, a voluntary society, single moms would be far better off because they wouldn't be isolated by welfare.
They would, you know, get together and live communally and they'd all watch each other's kids while they worked and they'd end up in a far better situation.
The isolation of the single mother issue is really chilling and very bad for the kids, of course.
Our single mothers tend to speak only about 600 words a day to their kids, whereas other mothers are, you know, 1,500, 2,000, and so on.
It's a big difference over time.
But yes, so we are in a society where the old sacrifice the young, the old eat the young as a whole.
And one of the reasons why, of course, the birth rate is down, is we have a society where people don't make sacrifices for the next generation.
The old don't make sacrifices for the next generation because the old vote with greater regularity than just about any other group.
And if some politician were to come along and say, listen, oldsters, I say this with great delicacy as I sail confidently into my 58th year next month, or 59th year, in fact, I'll be 58, but...
If a politician were to come along and say, hey, oldsters, there's no money in Social Security, there's too many unfunded liabilities, we're going to have to means test your Social Security, because otherwise there'll be no economy left for the young.
Oh, and, you know, maybe we could reduce immigration just a smidge so that there are a few more job opportunities and slightly cheaper housing for younger people, but that might mean that the value for your home, which you bought for 12 strawberries in 1952, might go down a little bit.
No!
It can't be, right?
So this steady, absolutely steadfast dogginess to sacrifice nothing for the next generation, well, that's flowed down from the boomers to the Gen Xers.
And then to the millennials.
Screw the next generation.
It's what I want and need that goes.
There's no such thing as sacrifice for those who come after me.
Well, that goes from boomers down to Gen Xs, from Gen Xs to millennials.
Gen Xs are aging out – well, actually have aged out – of the reproductive pool, so it's really around the millennials.
And because the boomers and a lot of the Gen Xers dumped them in daycare and went off to work and everyone's aware that they will absolutely hear nothing whatsoever about sacrificing for the next generation, well, having children is sacrifice.
So if the old won't sacrifice for the young, the young won't sacrifice for anyone and you get no kids.
I mean, there's another thing too.
I don't know how accurate this is, I put it forward conditionally, it may not be 5x, it may not be 5 times, but I was reading not too long ago about how if you look at it in terms of real purchasing power and availability of labor-saving devices and all this kind of stuff, even the younger generation right now is many times wealthier than the baby boom generation of the 1950s, late 1940s and 1950s, sort of after the war.
Ah yes, the baby boom that so horrified the socialists and communists that they had to invent feminism to make sure it never happened again.
So, the problem is when kids grow up in I don't know, nice houses with two cars and so on.
They get that template as the idea of how they should live.
But they're comparing the wealth of people in their 20s with the wealth of people in their 40s and 50s, and generally people hit their peak earning power in their 40s and in particular in their 50s, so it's apples to oranges, right?
So, they grow up in these wealthy households, and then they have to go out, and maybe, maybe, gosh forbid, maybe, gosh forbid, they have to have a baby in a one-bedroom apartment.
No, that's appalling.
I need a house.
No, well...
No, no you don't.
So, people are refusing to have kids claiming poverty when they are, in fact, many times wealthier than the parents of the 1940s and the 1950s who had, you know, three, four, five, six kids.
I mean, I know multiple families with five, six, seven kids.
And they make it work.
And they're not wealthy, and they make it work.
So it's not a money thing.
It's the, I don't sacrifice.
It's a selfishness thing.
I don't sacrifice for the next generation.
I mean, and I don't consider it really a sacrifice.
My daughter is one of the greatest and most joyful additions to my life, but I didn't write books for 10 years because I was parenting.
I don't consider that a sacrifice.
But it is a deferral of gratification sometimes.
I really enjoyed writing books rather than going to another playground sometimes.
It was great fun, but I missed it sometimes.
And so this idea that you would sacrifice for the next generation, that's all gone.
So people have not saved in anticipation of government money when they're old.
And in particular, and this, again, I defer to the great Kevin Samuels about this and his argument that women need men because they cannot get together the, you know, million to two million dollars that they need to retire on.
They won't get that without a man.
And, of course, One of the ways that women are provided for in their old age is through the life insurance policy of their husband.
This sounds sinister, but it's not.
So, women I'm provided for in their old age, both by their husband's savings and possible continual work, but also since women outlive their husbands, sometimes by a considerable amount, the husband should of course have, and if you are married, and particularly if you're parents and you don't have life insurance, shame on you, stop listening to this and go deal with that, for heaven's sakes.
But, you know, if a man has...
A million dollar life insurance, then when he dies, as he often does earlier than the wife, then she uses that to pay off his remaining medical bills and to live in comfort for the rest of her life.
Plus, if she has kids and she's a good grandmother, then they will welcome her into their home.
But people have structured their entire lives around government largesse.
People have structured their entire lives.
They've adapted to it.
They've adapted to it.
And it's almost like, if you've ever seen these images, Where a freshwater stream goes into the ocean.
There's like a little lake around the tributary egress, right?
There's a little lake.
It looks like a little lake.
And there's oceans where you can see these ocean currents.
Like, you know, you see these when you look out in Ontario, of course, it's a land of lakes.
And a thousand islands comes from somewhere.
And you look out across these lakes and you see these rivers within these lakes as sort of different currents and temperatures are jostling around.
So when you see fresh water coming from the mountains, come cascading down and goes into the ocean, then you get fresh water and salt water impacted, right?
And they look very different.
They look very different.
They behave very differently.
And so you've got some fish who are adapted to freshwater and some fish who are adapted to saltwater.
And I remember when the movie Finding Nemo came out, everybody was like, oh, let's get Dory and I don't know, whatever the clown fish's name was.
And it was really complicated because keeping saltwater fish is complicated.
Freshwater fish is much easier.
And they were saltwater fish, ocean fish.
So, the fish that have adapted to the freshwater don't do so well in the saltwater and vice versa.
And people have adapted to government logistics, government power, government protection, government security, government coddling.
They've adapted to it.
And so, when you talk about a free society, if freshwater fish were told that they were now going to go On an unstoppable path down the river and end up in the salt water, they'd freak out and they would view it as a death sentence.
We can't live there.
And they get it deep down and instinctively, instinctually.
Exploiters don't like free markets.
It's like the rich kid, right?
The rich kid, if the family loses all their money and he has to go get a job, but he's no longer anything special and he can't Instagram from his private jet and whatever, right?
Well, he's enraged, right?
He's enraged.
It happens to some women, like if they tend to be kind of shallow and looks obsessed, it happens to some degree with women when they...
Get older, and men start paying attention to them, and if they haven't used their youth and beauty and fertility to secure a family, they get mad, right?
2030, half of women, half of women, from 24 to 35, are going to be single, childless.
It's a catastrophe.
But that's what happens when a lack of sacrifice is modeled.
If you won't sacrifice me, if you won't even talk about limiting government spending, if you won't sacrifice to me, Why would I sacrifice?
For kids, it is also, the falling birth rates a lot of times are also vengeance against the selfishness of the parents.
And this is an unconscious thing.
If you were so selfish that you put me in daycare, And you wreck the economy and you change the entire country, not really for the better in many ways.
Well, I'm going to end the bloodline.
I'm going to end the bloodline.
If you're, if you're hedonistic, if you preferred work to spending time with your children, if you're hedonistic, well, I'm hedonistic.
Your hedonism was to put you in daycare.
My hedonism is to become a dog mom.
So, yeah, why do people take politics very seriously?
Because they've adapted to survive upon it, and they can't imagine life without it.
And for them, it feels like you're trying to turn A gazelle into a meat-eater, or a lion into a vegan.
They don't know how they would survive without their source of nutrition.
It's very powerful stuff.
You're dealing with people's identities, with their sense of virtue.
All of that.
All of it.
This is why these conversations get so tense.
And this is why it's so easy to get people to say hate someone like Donald Trump, who's like Gordy and gold-plated toilets and half a rap star, ostentatious consumption.
But Trump is a free market guy.
Trump is a free market guy.
He's associated with the free market.
So it's very easy to get people to hate and fear him because he represents the loss of privilege.
He represents the loss of state power protecting you from competition.
He pays taxes, and so it's easy to get those who consume the taxes he pays and others pay into hating and fearing him.
This is why it's been so easy to do that.
I mean, other than propaganda as a whole.
That's what he represents.
So, if you are having, I don't know, if you still have, I don't really do political arguments anymore, but if you're having political arguments with people, you can just ask yourself, okay, do they work for the government?
Do they...
Rely on the government?
Do they need the government?
Have they formulated their lives to adapt to the nutrition and protection of the government?
Are they coddled, shielded, bubble-wrapped from reality?
Have they become virtuous, unhealthy, or pseudo-virtuous, unhealthy, Could they survive?
Voluntary choice.
Could they survive voluntary choice?
It's kind of like if there was a system of arranged marriages, and it was all just forcibly arranged and so on, and, you know, women wouldn't particularly care how attractive they were because they'd just be assigned and the guy forced to marry them or whatever.
And then you went to romantic love, people would be like, oh, God, maybe I should have taken better care of my teeth and not gained weight and, you know, taking better care of my hair and appearance and all of that.
Well, because now you're in the free market.
So, I mean, this is one of the problems of government power, is people adapt to it.
And then, if it seems that it might change, people really freak out.
So when Trump says, well, maybe let's get rid of the Department of Education, because it just seems like government education is basically just a massive welfare scheme for useless mid-level bureaucrats to shuffle paper back and forth while the children's brains die under the shadow of their bloated...
Loathsome spotty behinds, as the old Monty Python quote goes.
Well, there's a lot of people who depend on that money, a lot of people who depend on that privilege, a lot of people whose emotions and sense of virtue and healthcare all depends.
There's going to be a lot of people who are going to get really freaked out if they have to make it in a voluntary situation.
So I think that's why people take politics so seriously.
For us, you know, we're sort of productive members of the relatively free market.
It's just like, eh, it's just kind of this annoyance from time to time.
But for the people who've adapted to it, it feels like, though I don't think it is, but a lot of times it feels like life and death.
That's what I wanted to get across.
I really do appreciate you guys dropping by tonight, fredemand.com slash donate.
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