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July 4, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:53
How Much Compassion Should I Have for the Unthinking?
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Government's going to, I mean, mathematically, that which cannot continue will not continue.
The government's going to run out of money.
Bad times are coming for the unthinking, and they're just going to cry and scream and threaten and manipulate and beg and plead and bully and appeal to emotion and reason and appeal to virtue and morality.
And they're just going to try absolutely everything.
And I debate with myself, how much compassion should I have for the unthinking?
Well, if it's not their fault, they don't think we should have endless compassion, but I don't know the degree to which it is people's thoughts.
So there's an example just for me of a debate that I have.
And I guess like a lot of young people these days, I go both ways.
So, all right.
All right, so let's see here.
Is high neuroticism downstream from an inner monologue gone awry?
So inner monologues are there to protect you from non-immediate dangers.
If you're walking in the woods and you start getting chased by a bear, you don't have much of an inner monologue.
You just have straight up fight or flight.
But in terms of storing up enough food for the winter, well, that's a non-obvious danger.
In other words, by the time you're out of food, it's too late to get more.
So if you run out of food in January or February and you're not going to be able to get any food till the spring, it's too late.
So enemonologues or what you call neuroticism is there to keep you from non-obvious dangers.
There's this old story, probably true, might not be true, but there's this old story, which is a guy says to his girlfriend, she wants to go to a party in a really sketchy part of town, right?
And the guy says to her, don't go, man.
This is a bad idea.
Do not go.
Do not.
It's not a safe place to be.
And she's like, no, no, no, my friend's going with me.
I'm going to be fine.
It's really cool.
They have a great DJ.
I'm going to this bad party in someone's house in a sketchy part of town, and you can't tell me otherwise.
You're just so controlling it, insecure, right?
And the guy's like, hey, you know, you can go.
You can go.
But if you go, if you go, I'm breaking up with you.
Because if you won't listen to things that I know as a man, you need to do in order to stay safe.
If you take these kinds of risks without listening to me, that's fine.
You can do these kinds of risks, but I'm not going to be your boyfriend.
And she went and she was assaulted.
And she calls him at three in the morning.
And he's like, yeah, but we're broken up.
And of course, everyone's like, you can't break up with her now.
She just got assaulted.
And he's like, but I have.
How much empathy do we have for people who don't listen?
So he was able to project his mind forward into a party and say, this is a bad idea.
This is dangerous, right?
In the same way, you've got to project your mind forward to non-obvious dangers.
Non-obvious dangers, right?
And this is the difference between people who care about the national debt and unfunded liabilities and people who don't.
The national debt and unfunded liabilities are a non-obvious, like debt as a whole is a non-obvious danger.
It's a drug.
Gives you fun stuff in the here and now at the cost of a lot of stuff later.
So inner dialogues are there to alert you to non-obvious dangers.
So now, if you don't let or encourage, really, if you don't let or encourage the inner voices to keep you safe, then they will not shut up in general, right?
Okay.
Let's see here.
Boom, boom.
Boom, boom.
I have.
I knew a godmother who was a psych nurse, absolutely dreadful personal life.
Oh, don't get me started on nurses.
I think this is the highest cheating profession.
All right.
My dad was exactly like that.
Oh, nicer to strangers than his own family.
Didn't speak with him the last 15 years of his life.
He pretended that we still did.
Oh, yeah.
That's very sad.
That's very sad.
I'm glad this is recorded.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
God bless your daughter.
Thank you.
I really, really appreciate that.
Can you fight RFH live on pay-per-view?
Oh, is that the...
I don't do headblows.
I have to protect the brain.
Not the face.
It's my living.
All right.
Let's see here.
Somebody says, I found giving it to God helps temper overactive inner monologue.
Once I'm at the end of control of a situation, gratitude is a form of O-face, perhaps.
Maybe.
My O-face is generally grateful.
All right.
My internal monologue gets stuck in a loop sometimes.
I will repeatedly tell myself, this isn't right until I decide what I need to do about it.
You know, in general, I find repetitive internal voices.
I mean, I call it the Miko system, which is that I'm not like an individual.
I'm a collection of my thoughts, other people's thoughts, especially when you're sort of a public person debating ideas with the world.
But I am composed of a lot of the people that I've met, a lot of people that I've read.
I've got my inner Socrates, I've got my inner mother, I've got my inner father, which is more about absence and the judgment of absence because I grew up without a father.
But I have, it's called the Mikosystem.
I'm not just I, like one monolithic I. There's a lot of people at the table, and there should be, because we have a lot of different perspectives, right?
It's better to be a gardener in wartime.
No, it's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in wartime.
So we have a lot of different aspects, right?
We speak in different ways to different people.
We have a professional face, we have a personal face, we have a friend face, and so on, right?
We have jokiness and seriousness and goofiness and sorrow and all of that.
So we have a lot of different aspects.
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