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Aug. 18, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:17
The Difference Between the Left and the Right
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So the left, the reason I say it is feminine or maternal is it views people as incompetent as children and as unable to make their own decisions.
Now, that is great if you're a mother with a toddler or a baby, right?
You have to make their decisions for them because they're toddlers and babies, right?
So you don't let them drive.
You don't let them sign contracts.
They're not really responsible for what they're doing.
And in a family, you take from the most competent and you give to the least competent, from each according to their ability to each according to their need.
The reason that resonates with people is because that's how families work.
And that's totally fine.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's perfectly fine and perfectly moral, as long as it's voluntary, which a family is.
So you don't ask toddlers to go to work or pay taxes or lift heavy machinery or anything like that.
That is all left to the stronger adults.
So the left is the maternal view of babies and toddlers transferred to the political arena.
The right, on the other hand, rather than being egalitarian, right?
So let me give you another example from the left, right?
So the left says, well, if you make more, you should give to those who have less.
Well, this, of course, translates perfectly into a woman who's got five kids, right?
Yeah, say two, five, seven, nine, eleven, or whatever, right?
And she's got five kids.
If she just lays out a whole buffet of food, the 11-year-old's going to get a lot more than the two-year-old.
So she has to forcefully sometimes intervene and say to the 11-year-old, you can't take all that food because the younger kids also need their food.
And she has to sometimes maybe even take the food from the complaining 11-year-old and redistribute it to the two-year-old.
Because if she doesn't do that, if it's a raw meritocracy, the 11-year-old is going to get all the food and the two-year-old is not going to get much.
And the two-year-old is not going to do very well from a basic survival standpoint.
So taking from the more active, the more competent, the more successful, even by force, if need be, and giving to the less competent, the less able, and the less successful is female nature.
And it's perfectly right, fine, appropriate, and healthy in a family.
It's just fucking tyrannical when it comes to giving them the awesome power of the state.
So a woman's urge to take from the most competent and give to the least competent and to forcefully redistribute resources from the bigger, the older, the stronger to the smaller, the younger, the weaker makes perfect sense.
It's why we're all here.
I'm a younger brother myself, so it's why we're all here.
And it's perfectly healthy in a family.
But what is perfectly healthy in a family is not at all healthy when it comes to a government.
So that is on the left.
So the left is a maternal view of incompetent people and mysteriously strong and capable people and then mysteriously weak and incapable people.
It's resentment to an anger, right?
So if you've got an 11-year-old kid who keeps grabbing all the food from the two-year-old, you're going to get angry at that.
Give the food to your brother.
You don't need it all.
He's hungry.
And you get angry and impatient.
And this is the left's anger towards the wealthy and the successful.
This is their anger, like just be nice, share your stuff, right?
Because they call it redistribution.
Redistribution is a lie.
Wealth is not distributed.
It is created, right?
Which is why almost all human history was horribly poor.
So they say it's redistribution, and that's true in a family, right?
So the dad makes the money, the mom goes and gets the groceries, the mom makes a bunch of food, and then the kids swarm it.
And so the parents are already distributing the food, and then they have to redistribute the food because the various siblings are taking more than perhaps they should, but it's delicate.
The teenage boy needs a lot more food than the five-year-old girl, right?
So it's a balance.
And so there's resentment towards the more successful, this bottomless sympathy towards the less successful.
Again, in a family, when you're dealing with kids, perfectly sensible and healthy, when it comes to society as a whole, you then have to keep inventing people who are incompetent to fulfill and manifest and justify your urge to use the power of the state to redistribute income, which is not redistributed, but in fact, created, right?
So you're basically just stealing at that point.
So the left is from each according to their ability to each according to their need, which is parents to children, older siblings to younger siblings.
It is a forcible redistribution of income, which again is fine when it comes to children, but it's bad when it comes to adults.
And so that is the left.
It's a feminine worldview where equality of outcome is absolutely necessary for survival.
It's just, it's right and it's good and it's healthy.
But the only way that that mindset survives is to pretend that there are people who are adults and there are people who are children.
And the way that they do it is they say that the wealthy and successful are the adults and the poor, the sick, the sad, the blah, blah, blah are the children.
And then all of those mechanisms for redistribution and aggression and hostility kick in, but at a societal, political level.
So that's on the left.
On the right, that is treating everyone as an adult who is an adult.
It's a raw meritocracy.
And charity is good, but dangerous.
And, you know, I mean, the only people who think that the government can help poor people or disadvantaged people, the only people who think that are people who've never actually put time, effort, and energy into helping the disadvantaged or the poor in their own lives.
Because if you've really tried to help somebody who's disadvantaged or poor, you know it's a really, really difficult situation.
If you've ever tried to help an addict, it's a really difficult situation.
If you've ever tried to help somebody who's really overweight, it's a really difficult situation and it fails more often, much more often than it succeeds.
If you've ever had somebody in your family member who you want them to quit drugs or quit smoking or quit overeating or quit gambling or quit sleeping around or, you know, whatever it is, quit drinking, it's really, really tough.
And these are people who care about you, who've known you probably your whole life or you've known them their whole lives.
And it's really, really tough.
So charity is good, but charity is really, really tricky.
Charity is like incredibly complex surgery.
You don't just turn it over to anyone and just throw money at people and think you've solved the problem.
And so it's good to help people, but the problem is by trying to help people, there's this thing called enabling, right?
Where the woman who's got a husband who's an alcoholic, she goes and buys his alcohol because otherwise he'll get the DTs and he'll scream and stomp.
And then she'll call in sick for him when he is too hungover to go to work.
And then she'll work for him if he gets fired.
And right.
And that's enabling.
And it's really, really, really destructive to provide additional resources to people who are addicts or who have problems.
So the way that the women work is equality of outcome because the inequalities of opportunity are unjust, right?
The older kid shouldn't get more food just because he's older, because he didn't earn that.
It's just an accident, right?
And this is why when you look at birth order, people say, well, it's unfair.
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