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Jan. 17, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:23
The Dangers of Outsourcing!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Questions from Facebook, couple other places.
How can we verify if humans are inherently self-interested?
Are all actions selfish?
What are the implications of this, if it is true?
I mean, yeah, this is a basic question.
I don't mean, by basic, I don't mean simple.
It's a great question.
It comes to the Kantian question of...
Is an act virtuous if we benefit from it?
In other words, selflessness or acting against our own benefits for the benefits of others is considered by Kant to be a higher virtue.
So if a man helps a woman move, she wants to move, he helps her move, but in the hopes that they kiss over pizza and beer afterwards, then he's not helping her move, he's trying to get a kiss or whatever, right?
So, he's not doing the move for helping the woman, he's doing the move to help himself and therefore his action is ignoble.
Now, it is a logical impossibility for everyone to act to the benefit of others and not themselves or against their own interests because somebody has to be the recipient of that generosity, right?
And so, if the man should help The woman move just to help her move because he's a nice guy and not with the expectation of a kiss or anything like that.
Or even if he helps her move with the expectation of pizza and beer afterwards, right?
That's not doing it for the thing itself.
So if he is helping her move in order to get something and he shouldn't do that, he should simply help her move without expecting anything in return, then that's a universal, right?
And if it's a universal, then She should not want him to help her move because she would want him to get whatever benefit is best for him, and it's not best for him to help her move with no benefit to him.
So he has to want to help her move because that's what's beneficial to her, but she has to not want him to help her move because that's what's beneficial to him, right?
Because he doesn't want to do it for the thing itself.
So it becomes completely entangled and impossible.
And basically the whole do things for the benefit of others at your own expense is just a giant, it's a long con.
It's just a giant con because somebody has to be in the collecting side, right?
Somebody has to be in the collecting side, right?
I mean, the sort of foodie call that I talked about in the show recently about women who Say that they go on a date with a guy just because they're hungry and want to go out and not because they want any romantic interest from him.
So they're taking resources from the man under false pretenses, right?
If they said, listen, I'm never going to date you, but take me out for dinner, the guy would probably be like, well, no, right?
Unless he thought he could change her mind or something like that.
So if the woman accepts a man's date with no intention of dating him, then that's selfish, right?
She should want to go out with him because she enjoys his company.
She is potentially attracted to him or is attracted to him and so on, right?
So, are all actions selfish?
Well, for this answer, I mean, there is, of course, UPB, which I'll, you know, you can go and read about that at freedomain.com slash books.
The book is free and you should definitely read that.
Or if you want a shorter version, you can go to essentialphilosophy.com, which is a short...
A book that I wrote on fundamental philosophical questions such as free will, virtue, are we in a simulation, and so on.
Essentialphilosophy.com is also free.
So we have philosophical answers, which is all that is not compelled is voluntary.
All that is not compelled or fraudulent is voluntary.
And all that is not compelled is fraudulent.
Not evil, right?
So, but we just look at evolution, right?
So, if we look at evolution and we say, okay, so if there is a truly selfish gene, could it evolve to the high level of conceptual ability that human beings possess?
Well, no.
It's completely impossible for genetics to be purely selfish in the human realm, right?
So, the fundamental argument goes like this.
For human beings to develop the extraordinary brains that we have, unmatched, unparalleled, anywhere in the universe that we know of, for human beings to develop the complexity of our brains takes between 20 and 25 years of development, right?
In other words, and certainly for the first 5-10 years, children require massive amounts of resources and devotion and dedication and so on, right?
So if human beings were just innately selfish, in other words, they just went for, say, sexual pleasure and food and rest or whatever, then they would not invest, like we would not invest in our children.
And if we don't invest in our children, they would never evolve to develop the complexity of brains that they do.
So there has to be something in human beings Where devotion to children is part of our makeup.
We would never, ever, ever have developed.
I mean, if you look at the creatures that don't care for their young, they always tend to be more primitive.
And the more primitive the creature, the less it cares for its young, because the young develop quickly and therefore end up less complex, of course, right?
And our brains are the most complex things in nature, outside of the tax code.
The only way we're able to develop these highly complex brains is because our parents are devoted to our interests to a large degree in general, right?
So the concept of selfish only arises out of the complexity of our brains and the complexity of our brains only arises out of the fact that human parents are willing to devote, you know, 15 to 25 years of their life to raise their children.
So, there's absolutely no way that human beings are just purely selfish, only for their own, like, their selfishness is not a penumbra that includes anyone else.
So, no, the fact that our brains exist is because we devote, as parents, huge amounts of time, effort, interest and effort and resources into the raising of our children.
I mean, just look at language, right?
Language takes a long time to teach children.
It takes a long time to learn.
And the only reason we have the language, the only reason we have the word selfish is because people are not purely selfish.
Our language develops over thousands and thousands and thousands of years and it's transmitted from parent to child.
And it's not like it's super fun teaching your kids language.
We exist, we communicate, we have language, we have concepts and therefore we have devoted parents and therefore actions that are Purely selfish do not fundamentally...
I mean, obviously there's exceptions, right?
Rare exceptions.
But no, there's no such thing as all actions being selfish.
If they were, then we wouldn't have brains, the brains that we have.
All right.
How do I deal with a neurotic personality where I always do the opposite of what's good for me?
Well, you have to figure out why you would have something in your mind that makes you want to do things that are the opposite of what you claim is good for you.
Right?
So if you grew up with, say, tyrannical parents where you could not disagree with them without fear of violence or escalation, then suppressing honesty, suppressing your true self, suppressing resistance is a survival mechanism, right?
And so if, as an adult, you say, oh, gee, but me suppressing my true self and my opposition is bad for me, Well, but it wasn't bad for you in the past, right?
It was essential for you in the past to suppress rebelliousness against people.
Like, I wrote this in one of my novels, The God of Atheists, that it's pretty horrifying for children when you realize how little truth can be spoken in a young life, like at school or at home or at church, just how little truth can be spoken in a young life.
So, most of dysfunctional parenting is forcing children to lie.
And so, lying becomes a survival mechanism, and it's good for you, right?
Now, when you're an adult, lying all the time is bad for you because it means that honest people don't want to be around you, and dishonest people will be drawn to you, so your life is just bad, right?
As a child, if you have tyrannical parents, not standing up for yourself is a survival mechanism, is therefore good for you, but when you become an adult, not standing up for yourself becomes dysfunctional, so you're not doing the opposite Of what's good for you, because that's just self-lacerating.
It's just attacking yourself.
You are applying a survival mechanism that is no longer necessary, right?
Because you don't have to have dysfunctional people in your life as an adult.
As an adult, all of your relationships are chosen.
As a child, very few of your relationships are chosen, some friends and so on.
But even your friends are somewhat limited by your parents, because if you have highly dysfunctional parents, then your friends probably don't want to spend too much time at your house, or people don't want to spend too much time at your house, and you may have bad It's not that you're just doing the opposite of what's good for you.
You have to have sympathy for what was necessary as a child and give yourself permission to change the environment as an adult.
This is why I've always said, like, you don't have to have dysfunctional people in your life.
I don't care if they're parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, whoever.
You don't have to have dysfunctional people in your life.
If you choose to have dysfunctional people in your life, It will have a ripple effect on your personality because your childhood will never end.
And now, dysfunctional people, maybe you can talk to them, maybe you can reason with them, maybe you all can go to family therapy, maybe you can fix things or whatever.
But if you can't, if they're just relentlessly dysfunctional and abrasive and abusive and nasty and undermining and gaslighting and all of that, then if you keep dysfunctional people in your life and you grew up with dysfunctional people, you're signaling to your mind that childhood will never end.
It doesn't matter if you have a choice or not.
Dysfunctional people are going to be in your life.
So childhood is never going to end.
So you do not choose to be abused as a child, but if you're an adult and you continue to have dysfunctional or abusive people in your life, then you are choosing to be abused.
Now, if you are choosing to be abused, then your childhood is never going to end.
So you have to look around and say, if I'm doing that which is bad for me, then it must be good for someone else.
And that someone else is probably dysfunctional.
And if they're in your life, you just...
You're conforming with prior survival mechanisms when it's no longer necessary.
And so it's not the opposite of what's good for you.
It's just outdated survival stuff.
All right.
I asked people what questions you have.
Somebody said, yes, what the hell is wrong with you?
Right.
I mean, I included this one kind of as a joke in that people are...
I mean, obviously, you know, people are quite frustrated and angry with me.
Some people are quite frustrated and angry with me, which I sympathize with and I truly understand.
I mean, it is...
Difficult.
Moral advancing is difficult, right?
I've sort of been thinking about this, that I'm just sort of a fleshly transitory tool used by eternal concepts to get out into the world, to escape through the amplification of my mouth and tongue, to escape from Plato's realm of eternal forms through my fleshly body out into the world for all time.
I know it's kind of an analogy, but my life doesn't in particular matter.
What matters is that The universal eternal concepts of virtue and truth and beauty are transmitted through me, at which point I can be discarded on death.
But the ideas, the arguments, the concepts, the eternities will be here forever and will do their beautiful work in the world over time.
And so I do understand that what I argue for, what I have proven, what I have established, the experts I've interviewed, the articles and the data that I've gathered is very, very upsetting and disturbing to a lot of people.
Absolutely.
So when I say you don't have to have dysfunctional people in your life, and there's a price to be paid for having dysfunctional people in your life, all the dysfunctional people in your mind get mad at me.
And if you're a dysfunctional person, you don't want me saying this to your victims, so I understand that.
I get that.
Thoughts about doing a meet-up in Thailand?
I love Asia as a whole, and it would be fun.
I don't have any particularly short-term plans for anything like that.
Your thoughts on long-term permanent space colonies, will it ever be possible?
Sure.
I mean, we would have had them long ago.
Everything that we want is barred by coercion.
I would love to go into space.
I would love to see the curve of the Earth.
I would love to walk on the Moon.
I would love to do all of these things.
All of this would have been possible except for coercion.
I mean, there's a story that Elon Musk tells about when they wanted to do their launches and someone in the government was like, well, you have to study on whether Parts of your rocket might fall and kill a shark.
Or what if it goes underwater and explodes and causes hearing damage to fish and whales or whatever, right?
So it's just this sort of endless political neurotic holding back, right?
So there's an impulse in humanity to push forward and then there's an impulse to anxiously hold back, right?
This is sort of progressivism versus conservatism but not in the political sense, right?
There's a desire for things to be familiar and then there's a desire to push forward.
And this should be left to the free market, right?
And the people who get neurotic and weird when things push forward, it's because they have rooted their identity in that which is familiar rather than that which is rational.
And again, I have nostalgia for the old ways.
I understand all of that.
I'm doing some research for my new novel, and I had to look up a beach in Canada from, you know, 30 years ago.
And I feel a real nostalgia for the old world, the old times.
I wrote an entire book about this called Just Poor, which is people seek the familiar, but the familiar is kind of stagnant.
And then when things progress, some people are eager for change and some people are nostalgic for...
My daughter's a little bit like this every time they change anything in the environment.
She misses the old thing.
And I completely understand that.
It makes sense, right?
So, but all of this progress versus...
A yearning for the familiar.
All of this should be left to the free market, because when people get control of the state, then those who want to drive things forward in their view, and we can think, of course, of the great leap forward of Stalin's industrialization of Russia that has ripped people off the farmlands and threw them in factories, and the same thing happened under Mao, that they moved things forward using the power of the state.
Too fast, too violently.
Of course, the death count is absolutely appalling in these two slaughter fests of Soviet Russia and Communist China.
And so that's propelling people forward through the power of the state.
Terrible.
Holding people back through the power of the state, anything you want to do, requires, you know, 15,000 different levels of approval from various.
Bureaucrats and so on and laws that you can't figure out and so on.
It's a money grab, of course.
I get all these consultants who will help you.
But yeah, we would have all of this stuff.
We would have all of this stuff and we'd have, you know, cures for cancer.
We'd have all of this stuff.
But there is so much anxiety about the new, which is natural, but it shouldn't be combined with the power of the state, of course, right?
All right.
Somebody said, do we really need more, quote, relationship experts?
In the context of people not really changing, we are just hanging on more often than not.
And all these experts created a trend where a lot of people are more interested in the theory of being healed and ready instead of just freaking going out like normal people.
In the end, don't we just make it as we go?
Make it up as we go, I assume.
All this expertise people are developing from two-minute clips is just a new and different kind of apathy and esoteric judgment.
Well, okay, so how many times have you seen relationship experts saying your relationship, I mean, it's true in the Christian world and other religions as well, but in this sort of general psychology world, how many times have you said that dysfunction in relationships results from immorality?
It results from immorality.
It results from people not being honest and virtuous and courageous and direct, and instead they are false, lying, manipulative, gaslighting.
Which is lying, right?
Falsehood.
And so, how many people have you heard who talk about, like, you know, men are from Mars.
No, men are from Mars.
Women are from Venus.
There's different kinds of love language.
Women are looking not just for solutions, but just to be listened to and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
There's all just manipulation, right?
So, what I bring to the table and always have, and you can get my free book, Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, freedomain.com slash books.
You really should check it out.
It could save your life, like, literally.
So, What is missing most from relationships is virtue, right?
So you've heard me say this in call-in shows.
I've been together with this woman for X amount of time and say, oh, what was it that drew you to her?
She was cute, she was funny, she was whatever, right?
Engaging, we shared similar interests.
It's like, okay.
But love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
So if you claim to love someone, the only thing that you can love about them as an adult is their virtue.
There's nothing else that you can love about someone other than their virtue.
That's it.
So if you want to love and be loved, you must be virtuous.
So, I mean, again, some religious people will talk about this to their credit, although some of the ethics might be slightly divergent from UPB, but how many times do you see this, right?
That what's lacking is virtue, that we can only love virtue.
Because if we want a pair bond over the course of a life, well, if you love a woman just because she's sexy, well, Is she still sexy when she's 80?
No, she's not, right?
If you love a man because he's hardworking and wealthy, well, he's going to end up working less as he ages, and money can come and go, as we all know.
So, what is the one thing that is going to hopefully grow over the course of your life?
It's virtue, right?
I mean, I started off as a pretty amoral guy.
I'm a pretty good guy now, for the most part.
Not perfect, obviously, but pretty good.
That is something that I sort of aim to improve and increase over time.
So I hear what you're saying about all these people talking about these relationship stuff and it's like, okay, but when people are saying, well, I'm having trouble in my marriage and I say, well, what is it that you admire?
What are the morals you admire in your wife?
It's long pause, right?
Two words.
Thank you.
You are absolutely welcome.
I appreciate that.
If it's any consolation or if it's any, you know, hands across the water stuff.
I thank my brain for coming up with this stuff, so I will pass the thanks along to my brain that generates this stuff.
I've never heard you analyze the effects of outsourcing.
Globalization is the number one conspiracy in my opinion.
You focus a lot on fiat currency and the welfare state, but I think outsourcing is more causative to the human condition.
Such a simple trick.
We've given the final product but denied the growing and the making of the product.
So simple yet devastating.
That's very true.
That's very true.
If you look at globalization, of course, there is some economic advantages to allow free trade across different economic systems.
I get that.
However, when you ship in goods, you also ship in bacteria and viruses, right?
So how advantageous was it for Europe to open up trade with the Far East, given that it brought the Black Plague to Europe and killed a third of the population?
And came in waves decade after decade, right?
Destroyed most of Europe.
Was that worth it to get some goods from the Far East?
Nope.
If you look at the economic benefits of, say, trade with China, and then you look at the economic costs of, say, SARS and, of course, COVID, the relatively recent COVID thing, If you look at the illnesses and diseases that are brought in, is it worth it?
If you look at the settling of the New World and you say, okay, well, the natives received smallpox and Europeans received syphilis and smoking, right?
If you just look at the death count, right, was it beneficial?
Now, again, I'm not saying that force should be used to ban these things, but we just...
There's no point looking at something without looking at the costs.
It is true that you get some cheaper goods, but you also get viruses and bacteria back and forth with the goods.
In a free society, there would be liability for the introduction of pathogens to a domestic population.
I don't know how that would affect overseas trade, but that would be quite a liability, to put it mildly.
There is, of course, also the problem that outsourcing is a way to cover up an increase in bureaucracy.
So when you start to get, and I know a lot about this because I worked for many years in the software field devoted entirely to environmental and health and safety regulations, which in my view are excessive.
So when you start piling up things like excessive regulations and you start piling up things like unions where you have to bow to the union because You can't bring in alternate workers, right?
So unions, of course, in collective bargaining, you can have the power to quit, but then the owner of the business should have the power to hire new people, right?
To get around that, right?
Otherwise, you're just held hostage and you have to give in everything.
So excessive unionization demands that are enforced at the point of a gun and regulations have driven up the price of producing things as well as a hyper-complicated tax code.
So it's driven up the price of producing things and normally that would drive significant inflation.
And then people would get mad at that and they would reduce the bureaucracy and complications of doing business.
But what happens instead is you open up trade with people without those regulations and people without those protections, right?
So it's sort of famous that the carbon reduction in the West is very expensive, but then you just outsource to China, which is building like a coal-fired power plant every week or something like that, right?
And building these cities to nowhere just to drive up economic numbers.
And I assume transfer a lot of money to people.
So what happens is your economy gets clogged up with hyper-regulation and complicated taxes and excessive worker demands and also the liability shields of corporations.
So all of that really slows down and then you say, well, rather than making our own system more efficient, we're going to go to less efficient systems and trade with them.
And that brings down the price of goods.
But it also brings down the tax base, right?
So if you clog up your own industry, it becomes completely impossible.
This happened in Canada under free trade.
A lot of companies went to Mexico, right, where there were fewer regulations and so on, right?
And, I mean, it's okay to have a lot of regulations from a purely economic standpoint.
If you have a lot of regulations in a place like Mexico, but you can bribe your way around them, that's a lot cheaper than having complicated regulations where that's not really possible.
I'm not obviously advocating for bribery.
I'm just saying that from a simple economic standpoint.
It is more efficient.
So, what happens is when you outsource, because your own system is becoming more complicated and coercive, you outsource to other jurisdictions, you then take the jobs that would have been domestic and you move them overseas, which hollows out your tax base and your birth rate, of course, right?
Because if men can't get jobs, women don't tend to want to settle down with them, right?
So, yeah, I agree with you.
It's all terrible stuff.
All right.
Somebody writes, after a long break from family due to dysfunction, abuse, addiction, and infidelity, how do I self-prepare to visit a parent who is gravely ill or attend the funeral?
I haven't had contact with my parents or siblings in over a year due to their inappropriate lifestyle choices that I refuse to allow my daughters to bear witness to.
I'm really, really sorry about your family.
It's very sad.
It's very sad, you know.
It's actually pretty easy to have a wonderful and lovely and positive family life.
It's really not that complicated.
Just be nice, be curious, help people, and family life is wonderful.
So you say dysfunction, abuse, addiction, and infidelity.
Maybe I'm missing something, and I'm certainly happy to be schooled and corrected on this, as in all things, but why would you go back?
Somebody who's been corrupt and abusive, do they gain virtue on their deathbed?
You know, a lot of what passes for, quote, wisdom in society is exploitation from abusers, right?
So, ah, you've got to make restitution with your parents, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
You've got to connect with your parents.
If you don't go see your parents, you'll regret it for the rest of your life.
Well, my father...
Died years ago.
I have not seen my mother in like a quarter century, and my life is significantly better thereby.
I mean, I wasn't able to visit my father's funeral because of COVID, but I wouldn't have gone anyway.
I mean, somebody doesn't become moral because they're dying.
It should be the dying person, the person who knows they're going to die.
It's their job to reach out to those they've harmed and make peace and amends, right?
But if it is for the comfort of the dying at the expense of virtue and integrity, then I don't see the plus.
I don't see the plus.
If your parent who is gravely ill, if your parent contacts you, apologizes and so on, I mean, it's not ideal because it should have happened before they were dying, but that can have some value and so on.
But if that hasn't happened, you know, There's no big change with people.
I mean, I'm old enough now that I've seen a fair number of people join the choir invisible, pass over to the other side or whatever, and they don't get better.
They don't get wiser.
There's no depth.
You know, this idea that the long-dormant virtuous soul starts peeking out at the end of a corrupt and immoral life?
Nope.
It's like saying that a smoker's lungs magically heal on their deathbed.
It's like, nope, no, the soul doesn't heal.
There's no magic on the deathbed that turns someone into a good person.
And so is it for your benefit or the benefit of the dying person?
If it's for the benefit of the dying person at your expense and there's been no apology and restitution, I can't see the case.
But again, I'm happy to be schooled on this, of course, as in all things.
Do you still support fluoridation despite the NTP fluoride neurotoxicity report showing that fluoride lowers IQ? Yeah, I don't know that I've talked much about fluoridation over the course of my career as a public intellectual.
I don't know that I've talked much about fluoridation.
I mean, I follow the data.
If it seems to be good for you, I can see reasons for it.
If it lowers IQ, then it's obviously a negative.
It's kind of a...
I don't know that I ever was like, I don't ever remember being a big supporter of fluoridation.
But of course, if it says the fluoride lowers IQ, then that's obviously a bad thing.
So it seems kind of aggressive, like I'm responsible for fluoridation or something like that.
It seems kind of odd.
All right.
Yeah, I'll stop here because I've got a show in about nine, eight minutes.
So I will see you on the Sunday show.
Please drop by freedomain.com.
Go to freedomain.com to help out the show.
I'd hugely appreciate it.
Lots of love from up here.
Enjoy the sun, my fellow Canadians, while you can.
I'll talk to you soon.
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