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July 15, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:45
The END of Female Beauty? Listener Questions
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Alrighty, good morning, everybody.
It is Tam Mollany from Freedomain.
Freedomain.com slash deny to help out the show.
Really would appreciate that.
And let's start with some passive-aggressive Facebook comments.
So some guy wrote, because I asked more philosophy questions, please.
And he wrote, you don't respond to comments, so what's the point?
This is a way of goading me into responding to his comment.
I would have responded either way, but just this kind of passive-aggressive stuff is not good in your relationships.
It means that direct and honest people really won't want to spend time with you.
Anyway, so he asks, are republics a natural trajectory of all human civilizations?
Or are we naturally directed towards hierarchical pyramid structures in society?
So there is no natural trajectory to all human civilizations.
If people are willing to think, if people are willing to reason, then there is no natural trajectory.
If people avoid thinking, if they avoid reasoning, if they avoid empirical evidence, if they avoid better arguments, then there is an inevitability.
I'll give you an example.
So if somebody is a heavy smoker and they avoid dealing with whatever childhood trauma they're self-medicating with nicotine, if they avoid looking at the data about smoking and how dangerous it is, if they avoid thinking about their terrible addiction and the harm that it does to their bodies, their minds, their families, and so on, then they will not quit smoking.
And therefore, the course of their decline in health becomes inevitable.
So if somebody refuses to process evidence, if they refuse to think, then there is an inevitability.
Free will is our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, nothing more, nothing less.
If people think there is no such thing as inevitability, if people avoid thinking, then inevitability is chosen, right?
You choose inevitability by avoiding thinking.
So now we can say, is it inevitable that people avoid thinking?
No, it's not.
That's not inevitable.
And it's not inevitable at all.
If somebody has a trauma, right?
So one of the common reasons why, say, a woman will become obese is because she was sexually abused by a male as a child.
And therefore, being, quote, attractive is dangerous.
And therefore, she will make herself as unattractive as possible.
It's well known and horrible data, of course, that single mothers, the children of single mothers, vastly greater at risk for abuse and in particular sexual abuse than if they have a father, their own biologically related father living with them.
If a man is not related to the child, often the girl, right?
But if the man is not related to the child, the incidence of abuse 30 plus times higher.
So if children are sexually abused, then they become terrified of being attractive.
It's no accident or coincidence that the rise in female unattractiveness, consciously willed and chosen female unattractiveness, has coincided with the rise, although it lags by a while, of single motherhood.
Having a non-biologically related male in the house raises the incidence of violence or abuse and sexual abuse against children dozens of times, 30 plus times in some circumstances.
Now, when, let's just say, little girls are sexually abused, then they have a terrible relationship to their own perception of their own attractiveness, because they believe that it is their attractiveness or appeal that has caused the sexual abuse.
Often, not always, but often.
And when they grow up, and certainly when they get their own choices, or this can be, of course, the case from early teens onwards, they are then, they wish to make themselves as unattractive as possible so that they will not be further preyed upon.
And so this is one of the reasons for the rises in the rates of obesity.
This is why you have people with weird haircuts and blue hair and strange facial piercings and so on, badly dressed or unappealingly dressed, because they don't want to make themselves, quote, attractive because they were preyed upon as children.
And so you either learn to deal with these traumas and accept these traumas and work through these traumas or the commitment to being unattractive, to protective unattractiveness is going to continue.
So I don't believe that not thinking or refusing to think or avoiding thinking, I don't think that that is inevitable at all.
I mean, it's common.
It's common without a doubt, but I don't view it as inevitable.
So the natural trajectory of human society is that when you don't think or when you refuse to think, when you avoid thinking, you are immediately captured, almost always, by ideology.
So let's say that you, and it's not just single mothers, but we're just looking at the more common situation or the most common situation, something which is 30 plus times more likely to happen needs to be examined first.
I mean, you are many times more likely to get lung cancer or whatever it is, emphysema, COPD, if you smoke, then if you don't smoke, it's certainly people who don't smoke.
I think Andy Kaufman was one, do get lung cancer, but it's very rare.
So if you want to reduce the incidence of lung cancer, you would look at smoking first, right?
And when you've dealt with that, you'd move on to other things.
So when we're looking at child abuse, we would look at situations where child abuse is the most common.
And one of those would be, unfortunately, single mother households.
And I say this with great sympathy.
So if children are raised in an abusive situation, in part because of the single mother household, let's say a girl is preyed Upon by her single mother's boyfriends or other non-related males in the household, then if you don't think and reason and look at the causes of these kinds of things, what happens is you end up being captured by ideology.
Ideology is what stands between trauma and its true source.
It codifies trauma into a wild series of abstractions, and ideology protects the abuser.
I'll sort of explain this mechanism briefly, or as reasonably briefly as it can be effectively explained.
So let's take the example of a girl, and it doesn't just have to be sexual abuse.
It could be other forms of exploitation and abuse.
Let's say that she's forced to work sort of Cinderella style.
She's sort of forced to work for mother and her mother's live-in boyfriend.
She's forced to do all the chores or take care of the children.
It's exploited in some way.
Now, what ideology does is it takes away the moral choices of individuals and replaces them with systematic, i.e.
non-individual, motivations and causes.
So if a little girl is exploited by a male when she's growing up, an adult male, again, could be her biological father, although that's much more rare.
It could be a mother's live-in boyfriend or some other male who's not related to her.
If she is exploited as a little girl or abused, neglected maybe, then she suffers a great deal of pain based upon people's individual choices, right?
Her mother's choice to be a single mother, her mother's choice to bring, say, an abusive boyfriend into the environment, her mother's choice to continue to keep that abusive boyfriend in the environment and so on.
So, and of course, the live-in boyfriend's choice to abuse the little girl, right?
These are all choices and moral choices, and people need to be held accountable for their moral choices.
I mean, certainly adults.
I mean, we're continually holding children accountable for their moral choices.
So we have to hold adults accountable for their moral choices, otherwise our entire society is an exploitive lie.
Now, she suffers a great deal of pain, the pain of being exploited or abused or both, and also the pain of the moral choices made by the adults in her environment that resulted in the abuse.
Now, ideology comes along and says, I'm going to take the pain that you experience because of people's individual choices and move it into an abstract, generalized, systemic issue.
So instead of saying your mother made bad choices bringing in abusive men into the environment, again, I'm just talking one of many circumstances or situations, but it is the most common.
It is kind of the smoking of this kind of lung cancer stuff.
So your mother made very bad choices, wrong choices, abusive choices, and the live-in boyfriend say made abusive, bad, and wrong choices.
Those are specific and individual.
You hold people to account, and it's very painful.
It involves a confrontation that goes against family bonds, which is unpleasant, difficult, and dangerous emotionally to pursue.
But ideology will step in and take that away, take the individual issue away.
And it will not say, your mother made bad choices, her boyfriend made bad choices, wrong choices, immoral, evil choices.
What it will say is, well, men exploit women in general, and men are cruel in general.
Now, if you move something from individual choices to, say, physics or biology, you can't really blame the individuals anymore.
You have this sort of generalized issue with like sort of, I'm not very clear, sorry.
So an example would be if someone dies of old age, we don't hold anyone individually accountable or any person as a whole, because human beings are mortal, right?
We're born, we age, we get old, we die.
Now, so that is not murder.
It is not like the world is murdering somebody just dies peacefully in their sleep of old age.
They're not killed, right?
They're just, we have an expiry date.
So that's not anybody's individual choice that is bound up in the very nature of biology, right?
We're only alive because people die, and therefore life is a gift cast in the shadow of death.
If people didn't die, people wouldn't need to be born.
There would be no evolution or whatever, right?
And entropy demands that all systems decay over time.
So we don't hold anybody personally accountable.
So if you can imagine that if you believed that there was a malevolent God who was causing people to age or a malevolent person, let's say, not even a God, a person who had some horrible Chernobyl-style radiation ray that caused everyone in the world to age and die, we would view that person as a almost infinite genocidal mass murderer.
But if, of course, it's just nature, then we don't hold anybody individually responsible.
We accept that as part of the natural order of things.
Getting old and dying is just part of the natural order of things.
And so when you have pain from people's individual choices, an ideology, sorry, an ideologue will come along and say, well, it's not that your mother made bad choices.
It's that men in general, there's a patriarchy that exploits and harms women and your mother is in fact a victim.
And this allows you to protect your attachment with your mother because you've transferred her bad decisions to a generalized ideology of male exploitation that portrays her as a victim, that she has no choice, right?
If somebody is 90 and unable to do gymnastics, we don't say, well, that's just because they don't exercise.
It's their fault.
And we don't blame them for that.
That's just, you know, they're going to be kind of creaky because they're 90.
So they're just going to be old and they might have arthritis.
They have joint issues.
They certainly would lack some strength and flexibility and so on because they're 90.
So we don't blame them for that because that's inherent to existence as a whole.
Biological existence, you're going to age, right?
So we don't Hold individuals responsible for systemic issues beyond their control.
We don't hold somebody responsible for having wrinkles when they're 90 or having gray hair or health issues that are related to aging.
So, in the same way, we would not hold our single mother responsible if there's a generalized system called the exploitive and abusive patriarchy that our mother is a victim of.
So, if you refuse to hold people accountable, the accountability shifts to the ideology, which removes individuals from their choices.
In Marxism, a sort of traditional class-based analysis of society, it's not that the individual workers choose to be workers rather than owners of the means of production.
It's not that the worker could save money and study at night and learn how to become an entrepreneur.
I mean, the worker could take his money and save it and then study plumbing or how to be an electrician and then start his own trade business and become the owner of the means of production, right?
It's not that individual workers, and it's not a complaint or criticism, it's just sort of a fact that individual workers are not choosing to remain workers.
And there is no law which says you have to be an entrepreneur, but there will be certain choices, certain results of that choice.
And of course, I've worked with a lot of people who would be considered lower-class workers, right?
I worked in the manual labor environment.
I worked as a waiter and so on.
And there were people who spent their whole life as waiters.
And there were people who went to work and did their job and they came home and they enjoyed time with their family.
They enjoyed time with their friends.
They went bowling.
They did barbecues and they had a lot of fun rather than coming home and studying how to become an entrepreneur and how to open their own business, which is a lot of work and a lot of risk.
And they viewed the bosses or those who were workaholics or those who studied at night as kind of nerds and losers.
And so rather than say it is somebody's individual choice if they wish to receive a paycheck rather than become an entrepreneur or work their way up to becoming an owner of the means of production rather than an employer hired by somebody who owns the means of production, it's a choice.
And the ideology comes along and says, well, it's not the choice of the worker.
It's baked into or inherent in the economic system that the bosses own the means of production and they exploit the workers who then have no choice.
And so let's say that you're a kid and you grow up and your dad is kind of lazy and unreliable and he gets fired.
He can't really keep a job and you kind of have to keep moving and you're hungry and you worry about where food and shelter and heat are going to come from.
And it's kind of stressful and you have to get a job kind of early.
I mean, this was certainly my experience.
I got my first job at 10 and I remember trying to contact my mother once when I was 12 or 13 and I had to go through a whole list of places that she had worked.
There was a whole list of phone numbers.
And I had to go through that list and I remember calling people and say, oh, no, your mom was let go last year, that kind of stuff, right?
I had to try and get in contact with her.
And I mean, my mother obviously was unstable.
It wasn't just a matter of laziness, but she had a lot of mental instability, you know, being a young girl during the war and in the post-war period when German population was preyed on unbelievably.
I think you can look at a documentary called Savage Peace or The Savage Peace for more on that.
But my mother obviously never became an entrepreneur.
She never achieved when I was young any kind of financial stability and she got fired a lot.
And I can either look at that and say, okay, well, my mother decided not to deal with her trauma.
She decided to externalize, right?
She decided to externalize her trauma.
She herself was not, she did not have mental challenges, according to her own mind.
It was the doctors who'd poisoned her, so she went to ideology rather than personal responsibility.
And I mean, her childhood was much worse than mine.
So I'm not even going to judge that at this time.
I'm just saying that that is what happened.
I'm not sure how much choice she practically had, but this is what she did was she went to ideology and externalization and blame rather than internalization and free will and taking responsibility.
So if you grew up in a situation where your dad can't really keep a job and is constantly running from place to place, then you can either say, well, my dad made bad choices or my dad was irresponsible or my dad was kind of lazy or my dad drank and shouldn't have or whatever, right?
Or, right, which would be sort of personal responsibility and taking ownership of the pain that you were experiencing.
Or you can say, well, it wasn't my dad's fault.
It's just that in capitalism, people get exploited.
And there are these, you know, mean, it's funny because the workers are innocent, but the factory owners are guilty, right?
So the workers have no free will, but the owners are, you know, bad and wrong and guilty, which of course doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you think about it.
If there are two people trapped in a system which destroys free will, then the owners would have no more free will than the employees.
But of course, the employees outnumber the owners, and they're not looking for logical consistency.
They're looking for protecting those around them who've made bad decisions by blaming a generalized system and attacking people distant from them rather than close to them, right?
So if you grow up with a dysfunctional provider, let's say a father, and he's kind of lazy and irresponsible and drinks and so on, then you don't want to get mad at him because that threatens the bond.
And you have to bond with people when you're growing up and you have to protect their reputation within their own mind, especially if they're aggressive or violent or dangerous or neglectful because you might be, evolutionarily speaking, you might be killed or abandoned or not protected or left behind or something like that.
So you have to bond.
So you have to protect that bond.
So you're angry at your mother, you're angry at your father for bad behavior, but you have to protect the bond.
So you can't just eliminate the anger, but you don't want to get angry directly at your mother and or father because you have to protect the bond.
So what do you do?
Well, sophists and ideologues come along and they give you an ideology that allows you to express your anger without threatening the bond.
And they do that by saying there are these institutional factors.
It's not free will.
It's physics.
It's not choice.
It's biology.
It's not murder.
It's just old age, why people die.
And this allows you to protect your bond with your particular parent by viewing them as the victim of a, quote, system, right?
There's a system that oppresses, there's a system that exploits.
And your single mother was not morally responsible for her choices.
She was the victim of the patriarchy, right?
And your father was not lazy or inattentive or chose things other than making money.
He was exploited by these sort of evil capitalists and so on.
And this way, you get to express your hatred against abstract classes and sexes and so on, like males and capitalists and so on, right?
So you get to express your anger while maintaining your bond.
So you get to get angry at the capitalist while maintaining your bond with your father by viewing him as a victim, not as a person who chooses.
You get to get angry at the, quote, patriarchy, and you get to protect your bond with your single mother.
And this way you get to express your anger without threatening the bond.
So this is what a refusal to think and to accurately process the choices.
So that people make.
And the reason that we know this is that the reason we know this is false is because, say for instance, my mother would get angry at me for my choices as a child, as a little child.
She would get angry at me.
And I remember when I was very little, maybe five or so, I had a coloring book that I really liked.
And my mother and I were crossing the street.
And it was not at the lights.
It was a dangerous situation.
And I dropped my coloring book, so I turned to pick it up.
And a car drove over half of my coloring book while I was picking up the other half.
And of course, it was incredibly dangerous for a car to be racing past me while I was picking up my coloring book.
And my mother got very angry at me and sort of hit me quite a bit on the other side, right?
Although she, of course, had put me into that dangerous situation.
I was just picking up my book.
I was, again, I don't know, I was about five, maybe, maybe a little younger.
And so my mother held me responsible for picking up my coloring book and beat me for making a bad choice, even though, of course, it was her who'd put me in that situation.
So if I am to be held responsible for a, quote, bad choice when I'm five, then of course I can hold my mother responsible for the choices that she made in her 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and so on, right?
You can't say, well, you had to be beaten for a bad choice you made at the age of five, but you can't hold me accountable for any choices I've ever made as an adult, right?
That would be, I mean, that's perverse beyond words, right?
So, you know, if I were an ideologue, if I were not a thinker, if I took sort of pre-digested food like a mom, a mama bird spitting half-digested worms into the baby beaks, if I were drawn towards sophistry, and of course, sophists make this offer to people all the time, right?
So if I was drawn to sophistry, what I would do is I would say, well, it's not my mother's fault that she was a bad mother because there is this capitalist system that exploited her and underpaid her.
So she was always stressed about money.
And there's this patriarchy that my father was part of that abandoned and exploited her and abused her and neglected her and she had no chance.
So she was just an innocent victim struggling against storms, not of her own creation.
And sort of like the Titanic, right?
If your mother struggles to save you and grabs you and leaves bruises on your arms and throws you into a lifeboat and so on, we wouldn't say, well, that's really abusive.
We'd say, well, your mother is struggling to save you in a situation called the sinking of the Titanic that's not of her own making.
She's just struggling to survive a circumstance that she didn't create, right?
So ideology allows you to express your anger at mistreatment without threatening the bond.
And I mean, it's a terrible answer.
I mean, just factually, honestly, it's a terrible answer.
You can go to significant extremes.
And I talk about this.
I have a premium presentation for subscribers at fdrurl.com slash locals or freedomain.locals.com or subscribe, subscribestar.com slash freedomain.
I have a presentation on the French Revolution.
In the French Revolution, the people who were abused as children blamed the clergy and the aristocracy.
Now, were the clergy and the aristocracy back then great?
No.
But who harmed the children more?
It was their own parents.
And I talk about the child abuse that was endemic throughout French society at that time.
And when you start blaming abstract categories of human beings rather than holding the individuals in your life morally responsible for their choices, you unleash this highly directional hatred at entire groups that can be easily weaponized by ideologues into creating, I mean, honestly, I mean, mass murder can be the result of that, right?
So it's a devilish bargain to attempt to maintain your bond with people who made immoral choices by allowing ideologues to place those who harmed you in the victim category and designating entire classes of people as exploiters and abusers, which it allows them to weaponize your anger at your own immediate, it could be family members or others.
And it then gets weaponized so that you hate entire classes or groups or sexes of people.
And then this is used to dismantle your society.
And of course, if you doubt any of this, we can just look at something like the welfare state.
The welfare state is predicated on the idea that those who have money, that they exploited others to get it, right?
And as a result, the rich owe the poor, because the rich only have their money because they exploited the poor.
The poor don't have any choice.
They didn't make any bad decisions.
It's a whole system.
And so the welfare state is the result of ideology, which is the result of people not processing their own trauma and instead allowing the black alchemy of sophistry to change or transform their anger towards individuals into hatred of abstract classes, which can then be weaponized for true exploitation.
And individual personal responsibility is sustainable.
Sophistry and the hatred of abstract classes is not sustainable any more than the welfare state is sustainable or ever has been throughout history.
You can look at the Roman Empire welfare state, Bread and Circuses.
You can look at Spienemland.
I did a show on that many years ago for Peter Schiff's radio show, and it is terrible, terrible what happens.
So there's nothing inevitable with regards to people who think.
And people who think, it's not an IQ thing.
There are many of high IQ people who don't think, and there are many people who would not score high on the IQ test who think.
So this is just a matter of willpower and making that choice.
So yeah, there's nothing inevitable except the avoidance of thought.
So let's see here.
Would Neil Purd have agreed with your politics?
Well, I am anti-political in the same way that people in the past were anti-slavery.
So I view politics as one of the ultimate corrupters of human relations because it turns everything into win-lose.
Again, not to bang on the sophistry thing, but they are the natural enemies of philosophers.
But I view politics as a win-lose, and it's the pretense of virtue covering the reality of coercion.
So would Neil Purt have agreed with my politics?
I obviously don't know, but if he remained, and I'm not sure what his political course was over the course of his life.
But as far as objectivism goes, objectivists do not, this is sort of people who follow the reasoning of Ayn Rand, they do not follow either my ethics or my politics.
So there's probably not a dime's worth of difference between my views on metaphysics and epistemology with regards to the objectivists.
And I myself was an objectivist for like 20 years.
And I've got a whole series on Ayn Rand.
You can find it at fdrpodcasts.com.
You can just do a search for A-Y-N.
And with regards to ethics and politics, I disagree enormously and deeply.
And so on, right?
So, I mean, so very, very briefly, Ayn Rand said that that which is good for human life is the good.
Reason serves human life.
Therefore, reason is the good.
And that's just factually not true.
It's not even close to true.
There are many human lives that flourish through non-reason.
I mean, we can see them all over the place.
See the people at the top of the military-industrial complex.
How are they doing?
And you say, oh, well, but it's not sustainable.
It's like, well, they're doing pretty well.
And Genghis Khan, you know, there's a pretty high proportion of people in that part of the world that trace their direct lineage back to Genghis Khan because he rules very, very well, very, very powerfully, very aggressively, very violently, very well in terms of like genetic spread and conquering and so on.
It was effective.
And so the idea that it is reason alone that serves human life and human flourishing and human success, it's just not true.
That's just factually not true.
So that is, and of course, people can disagree with it, right?
So that's the whole point of my approach to ethics, universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
You can get it at freedomain.com slash books.
It's free.
You should definitely consume it.
You can also find a shorter version at essentialphilosophy.com, essentialphilosophy.com.
You can listen to that.
There's a very more concise version of UPP, which UPP is quite long, but it's a huge problem to solve.
So one of the problems I have with objectivist ethics is that if you disagree, then it's not true for you.
Right?
So, sorry, I shouldn't say right, like I've proven anything.
Let me, sorry, let me apologize for that.
Let me sort of make the case.
So if you agree that reason is that which serves man's life, whatever serves man's life is the best.
Reason serves man's life the best.
Therefore, reason is the highest value.
If you agree with that, then it's true for you.
If you don't agree with that, then it's not true for you.
Saying to people that they're wrong in their subjective interpretations is pointless.
It's like saying to people, oh, you think you like the colour navy blue, but you don't really.
You really like pink.
It's like, no, I like navy blue.
Oh, you don't really like steak.
What you want to do is eat a cheesecake made out of cricket legs.
It's like, no, kind of don't, right?
And so for sophists, it is not reason, but manipulation that is the greatest good for them.
I mean, look at the people who run central banks or, you know, whatever, right?
I mean, are you going to tell them that what they're doing is not serving their best interests?
I mean, good luck with that, right?
Because self-interest is a subjective term.
Should you save more or should you spend more?
That's subjective.
So if somebody says, well, you should just save your money, okay, there's value in that.
There's good stuff that can come out of saving your money.
And there's good stuff that can come out of spending your money too.
There's no rational economist who would say one is better than the other, objectively, right?
I mean, it's fine to save your money if you're, you know, you're young and you want to save up to buy something.
Sure, save your money.
But if you're old and you have no dependence, Let's say, what's the point of saving your money?
Go spend it and enjoy yourself, right?
It's not like you can't take it with you, right?
As the old saying goes.
So that which best serves your life is kind of subjective, right?
So you could say to someone, oh, you shouldn't do drugs, right?
Okay, that's, I think that's a good, good idea in general.
But of course, there are some people who get great inspiration, right?
Lucy and the Sky with Diamonds, LSD, right?
There are some people who get great inspiration from drugs and would rather have that inspiration than be drug-free.
And can you foundationally argue with that?
To me, it's hard.
It's hard to do that.
I mean, taking drugs is not, I mean, unless you have dependents who are responsible for you and then you're irresponsible and that's bad.
But taking drugs is not a violation of the non-aggression principle because you're doing it to yourself, right?
I mean, hitting somebody else with a hammer is immoral.
You're going to whack someone with a hammer.
That's assault.
It could be grievous assault.
However, if you hit your own hand with a hammer, could be by accident you put you canal in, that's not assault, right?
It's an error, or maybe it's like if you're a self-cutter, like you cut yourself for reasons of trauma, that is not the same as assault.
You don't go to jail because you're cutting yourself, right?
So harming yourself is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
It might be unwise, could be wrong, but it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle because you own yourself and you can destroy your own property.
So if you say, well, you should be rational because reason is what best serves your life.
Well, if you're much better at being a sophist and you like that and being a sophist gets you a lot of money and sexual opportunity, right, then biologically speaking, you're doing pretty well, right?
You gather resources, you spread your seed, so to speak, and all of that, right?
So you run some cult, right?
And your people give you a lot of money and then you have sex with a lot of women or men or whatever, right?
Then if you're a woman.
So, okay, you're going to say, well, biologically, sadly, that's got some efficacy to it, right?
I mean, you're getting resources and you're spreading your seed, right?
You say, oh, no, no, that's bad for you.
It's like, well, again, are you talking morally?
Are you talking biologically?
These are all somewhat subjective, right?
And again, I'm not talking about gross violations of the non-aggression principle and so on.
I'm talking about sophistry and manipulation.
And so you have to have a system of ethics where you don't have to believe in it in order to practice it.
It's the same thing if you say, well, morals come from Zeus, right?
Zeus tells you what is good and bad, right and wrong.
Okay, but the problem is that if you disbelieve in Zeus, all of those morals vanish, right?
So you can just disbelieve in Zeus, and then you're no longer bound by Zeusian ethics, so to speak, right?
You can say, well, no, what's best for me is not reason, but sophistry and manipulation, right?
Which is, honestly, I mean, this most people in the world, most people in the world, with regards to morals, live on sophistry and manipulation, right?
I mean, if you look at the argument that Jordan Peterson had, but the atheists, and the atheists say, well, morality has evolved, reciprocal altruism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, okay, so you're saying that that which best serves resource acquisition and reproduction is the moral, right?
So, well, then you can just focus on, I don't know, reciprocal altruism and so on.
But if you look at, say, dolphins or ducks or whatever, rape, we would call it rape.
I mean, if it was humans, but it's not, it's animals, it doesn't really count.
But forced sexual activity is how they reproduce to a large extent.
So would you say to them that's that's bad?
Well, no, I mean, that's how they reproduce, how the genes reproduce, right?
It's how the genes reproduce.
And most people, certainly with regards to the moral realm, lie, lie and use sophistry, right?
So with regards to, well, you know, evolutionarily what serves reproduction and resource acquisition is the good, it's like, okay, sometimes that is reciprocal altruism, which I guess could be considered kind of nice.
And sometimes it's Genghis Khan.
Resource acquisition and reproduction, Genghis Khan's sort of campaign of almost infinite violence, served those biological needs fairly well, genetically, right?
I'm not talking morally, just genetically, right?
So you can just focus on one aspect versus another.
You can disagree with the framework and UPB, you can't disagree with the framework without objecting yourself from reason and evidence as a whole.
Now, again, people can do that.
They can always disagree.
People can say that the world is banana-shaped.
But if you meet, the point is, of course, if you meet someone who says that the world is banana-shaped, then you don't take them seriously, right?
You don't view them as somebody with anything meaningful or valuable to contribute to the dialogue or the discourse, right?
And that's so if you say, if you meet someone who says two and two equal a blue unicorn, well, you don't view them as a mathematician who's going to have much of value to add.
You view them as kind of crazy because they've rejected basic reason and evidence, right?
And it's not that everyone's going to be rational.
It's that if people reject basic reasoning, they are not taken seriously or accepted in any rational discourse.
If someone says a gravity does not attract, it repels, but it is love.
The atoms love each other, and that's why they are drawn.
They overcome the repelling nature of a gravity and the atoms love each other and that's what draws them together.
You would say that's not a very helpful contribution to physics.
And that person would not get to present the love overcomes the repulsive nature of gravity or the repelling nature of gravity.
It is the atoms' love for each other that draws them closer together.
That person would not get published in a scientific journal unless they tied it into the patriarchy, maybe.
They would not be invited to speak at physics conferences.
They would not be discussed or taken seriously.
It would be like, that's just, I mean, it's a crackpot.
I mean, that's just somebody who's just making things up and is not following the scientific method and not doing anything particularly rational, right?
So we would understand that.
And so the point of UPB is, well, you can reject UPB, but that is to reject reason and evidence because UPB is so tightly reasoned.
Like an example being that stealing can never be universally preferable behavior because universally preferable behavior means that everybody wants to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
But if you want to be stolen from, it's not theft.
If you want someone to take your property, like you leave a couch out on the curb saying, take me, and then you can't complain that they stole.
You want them to take your property, right?
So, you know, if you throw a ball to someone because you're playing catch, if I've got a ball and I'm playing catch with a friend and I throw the ball and he catches it, can I then film that and say, he stole my ball?
Well, no, because I threw it to him.
I want him to catch the ball so you can throw it back, whatever, right?
So that's to reject that is to reject reason itself, right?
You can't want someone to take your property and call it theft.
So stealing can never be universally preferable behavior.
So, I mean, you can't, and even I remember rationality rules.
I had a debate with him some years ago and he accepted that, right?
Okay.
So you can reject all of that, but that is rejecting the two and two make four, and you're not going to be taken at all seriously.
You're going to be like, well, there's something kind of wrong with you emotionally or intellectually, like you have a problem or a deficiency or a vanity or like you simply won't admit the obvious, right?
I mean, I guess you could try and be a physicist and reject the concept of E equals M C squared or gases expand when heated, you know, my usual examples.
But you wouldn't be taken seriously.
You'd be viewed as a non-physicist, as a crackpot, because you're rejecting basic facts.
Or if, you know, if you're jumping up and down and saying there's no such thing as gravity, you would be viewed as somebody who had significant processing issues within the mind, either emotional or intellectual or whatever, right?
So the point of ethics is that it has to be so clearly and obviously reasoned that to reject it is to reject reason and therefore have no credibility.
Now, it's going to take a while, a century or two, for that to become more common knowledge.
People have to be less traumatized in order to be more rational.
And that's why I'm focusing on peaceful parenting, peacefulparenting.com.
With regards to politics, Ayn Rand, of course, was a big fan of the non-aggression principle, but carved out an exception for the state.
That she was a minarchist.
She wanted a small government, police, law courts, military, maybe prisons or whatever, a very small government.
But that means, of course, a violation, allowing some people to violate the non-aggression principle.
And so that is just an inconsistency.
And having an inconsistency in your thinking is particularly bad if you pride yourself and focus your entire intellectual output on demanding and requiring absolute consistency.
And so allowing that to kind of slip through.
And she opposed consequentialism as a standard to judge things by, which it should be.
Consequentialism is just a form of mysticism.
And consequentialism invites sophistry, right?
Hand over massive chunks of your money, trillions of dollars, or the CO2 weather guards will get angry and drown your city, right?
That's this consequentialism, right?
And it just means that people will come up with more and more terrible consequences in order to get you to do what they want.
And so when the concept of DROs was explained to her, I think, by Lou Rockwell.
No, not Lou Rockwell, sorry.
Marie Rothbard.
Marie Rouge Rothbard.
She said, oh, well, what happens if one DRO just doesn't agree or obey with the other DRO's rules?
Then you just end up with civil war and blah, blah, blah.
And so that's just consequentialism, right?
Saying, well, we can abandon the non-aggression principle if I can come up with a negative enough scenario in my mind.
And then that was brusque and abrupt and so on.
And again, the reasons why I think she wanted to have a larger political and cultural effect than she did, she was incredibly embittered by the hostile response, particularly of conservatives to Atlanta Schrugg, which is not shocking.
I mean, Atlas Schruggt is atheistic and conservatism is largely Christian, so it's not too shocking.
But she got very depressed and arguably stayed that way for the rest of her life because she never produced another novel, even though people were encouraging her to do so.
So with regards to ethics, I reject the subjectivity of that which is best for human life, because for a lot of people, that which is best for human life is deception and aggression, at least for their genes.
And again, outside of morality, just in terms of like best for human life.
Yeah, for, I mean, I agree that people are better off being rational, but we have had a lot of human beings who've adapted to falsehood and aggression.
And it's not better for their lives, so to speak, for people to be rational.
So that's subjective, and better for your life is subjective.
So that's a subjective view of ethics, and therefore can't close the circle and demand allegiance.
And with regards to politics, allowing a group of people, not just allowing, but encouraging and approving of the right of some people to violate the non-aggression principle is a break in integrity that is a little incomprehensible.
But I mean, I understand it because it seems efficient.
And trying to shrink the power of the initiation of the use of force down to its minimum is just like trying to shrink a tumor that's going to grow back even bigger.
So I hope that helps.
I will get to other questions in a little bit.
Thank you so much for your time, care, and attention, thoughts, resources.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
Have a glorious, beautiful day.
I'll talk to you soon.
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