May 17, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:51
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| On page 76, you discuss the importance of empathy. | |
| If I remember correctly, you had said something to the extent of one spouse is extremely angry that the other spouse is just not empathizing with them, which you point out is a contradiction. | |
| The spouse saying, you should empathize with me while in the process of not empathizing with the other person, asking what might be going on with them. | |
| What is empathy? | |
| Why is it important? | |
| So empathy is when you correctly understand the emotions of others. | |
| And it's very important in life. | |
| Empathy is not the same as sympathy, right? | |
| So if a woman is walking down, let's get back to a traditional Baldoni comment, right? | |
| So a woman's walking down a dark alley and some guy is creeping up behind her. | |
| She can barely hear him. | |
| He's obviously sneaking, right? | |
| So, empathy then would be, he wants to do me harm. | |
| And that would be a reasonable belief. | |
| That's why he's kind of sneaking up like some sort of predator. | |
| Now, empathy is when you correctly and accurately interpret the emotional state of other people. | |
| In this case, it would be the desire for the man to attack or assault or rape or something like that. | |
| Sympathy is when... | |
| You agree with the validity of those emotions. | |
| So if our best friend, his beloved mother, dies and he's very, very sad, we correctly empathize with his sadness and we agree with it. | |
| I mean, if our beloved mother died, we would also be very sad. | |
| So empathy is when you correctly identify somebody else's emotional state and sympathy is when you agree with it and think it's a positive or natural or healthy thing. | |
| So, if you judge someone as having... | |
| Let's go back to the example. | |
| Let me just sort of reset and just go back to the example that you gave where, let's say, the woman is like, you never empathize with me. | |
| You never empathize with me. | |
| Okay? | |
| So the big question, and this really comes back to what we talked about in the first part about curiosity in relationships. | |
| The big question is, okay, so for the woman, let's say you're dating a guy who is not very empathetic. | |
| Okay. | |
| Why? | |
| Why are you dating a guy who's not very empathetic? | |
| And we look at these states as if they're just purely negative. | |
| Well... | |
| Male success, and it's true for females as well, we just talked male success. | |
| Male success relies on selective empathy. | |
| Right? | |
| So, when I was in the business world, we would write what are called RFPs, or request for proposal. | |
| We respond to requests for proposals, and we would try and sell the software that I'd written in prices that range from like $100,000 to over a million dollars. | |
| Now, of course, there would be half a dozen other companies that wanted to sell the software as well, right? | |
| Did we want to win? | |
| Yes, we did. | |
| If we won, did the other companies feel bad? | |
| Yes, they did. | |
| How did I know that? | |
| Because sometimes we didn't win, and I felt bad, right? | |
| If you're in a running race, you want to win, and that means that the other people are going to lose. | |
| So you can't have excessive empathy in male... | |
| Because male competition tends to be win-lose. | |
| I mean, it's win-win for society in general in the long run, but with regards to your specific competitors, if you're playing basketball, you want to win, that means the other team's going to be sad. | |
| If you want to get a job and there's 10 other applicants, you want the job, which means the other 10 other applicants are going to be sad. | |
| So a woman who chooses a man who does not have a lot of empathy is choosing a man with a significant Ability or advantage in competition. | |
| He's going to win a lot because he can just focus on winning and he's not going to empathize. | |
| A man with excessive empathy is going to feel bad that other people are losing and that's probably going to interfere with his capacity to win. | |
| So, you know, if you're hunting, to go back in time, if you're hunting on the... | |
| Do you want them to get the deer or do you want yourself to get the deer? | |
| Because if they get the deer, well, they're happy and you're sad. | |
| If you get the deer, you're happy and they're sad or hungry or whatever, right? | |
| Now, of course, evolution would demand that we get the deer for ourselves, and that means having a lack of empathy for others. | |
| So women who complain about men being emotionally unavailable, okay, but... | |
| To some degree, in order to win, we have to be emotionally unavailable. | |
| We have to be kind of bloody-minded and cold-hearted and be willing to have a lot of people be unhappy because we win and others lose. | |
| So a woman who just complains that the man is not empathetic is not looking at all the upside of that lack of empathy, which is that he's going to win and gain more resources for her and for the children. | |
| That's sort of one aspect. | |
| The other is... | |
| The imputation of immoral conclusions to other people's emotional states. | |
| You are cold and unempathetic and uncaring and bad and you're just lacerating the man's heart. | |
| Well, I mean, that's like smacking someone on the face saying, you're flinching. | |
| The attack is causing the response. | |
| If a man feels nagged, belittled, criticized, and that there's something fundamentally wrong with his entire emotional makeup, how's that supposed to fix his emotional distance? | |
| You're just attacking, and it just creates scar tissue after scar tissue after scar tissue. | |
| It doesn't give you access to people's inner lives to morally condemn them for characteristics. | |
| I mean, to choose a romantic partner and then to condemn or criticize that romantic partner is morally crazy. | |
| It's so dysfunctional. | |
| It's like watching a bird attack its reflection. | |
| I mean, the women who complain about the men they choose or the men who complain about the women they choose, you're just condemning your own choice. | |
| I mean, especially in marital partners. | |
| I mean, if I get a chance to test drive a car for... | |
| 18 months. | |
| And then I get to use that car for another year. | |
| And then I finally buy that car. | |
| And then five minutes later, I'm like, this is the worst car ever. | |
| And it's like, but you got to test drive it. | |
| Nobody forced you to buy the car. | |
| You got to evaluate it for years, which is the dating life. | |
| You get to date someone usually for a year or two. | |
| Maybe you spend six to 12 months engaged and you finally get married. | |
| So you've had... | |
| Years and years to figure out if that's the right person for you and then to morally condemn that person is the strangest thing in the world. | |
| It is the strangest thing in the world. | |
| And the fact that people don't just roll their eyes at this stuff is one of the reasons why these complaints continue in a very negative and destructive way. | |
| And so, yeah, if a man is, let's say the man is kind of cold and unempathetic, okay, well, you chose him in part because of that. | |
| There's a real upside to that, which he gets to win without his conscience being overly disturbed. | |
| And if it is a big problem, In the relationship, then you need to get to the cause. | |
| What is the cause of someone lacking empathy? | |
| What is the cause? | |
| And you have to then go back to early childhood. | |
| You know, a lot of times, you know, there's this meme. | |
| It's kind of a bitter meme, but I think there's some truth in it in some circumstances where the woman is saying to the man, no, no, no, you need to tell me your deepest thoughts and fears. | |
| And he's like, no, I'm good. | |
| You keep using those against me. | |
| So I'm not going to. | |
| No, thanks. | |
| Thanks, but no, thanks. |
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