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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?
That 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 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 as the 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 um 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?
You have to 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 eleven year old is going to get a lot more than the two year old.
So she has to forcefully sometimes intervene and say to the eleven 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 eleven year old and redistribute it to the two year old.
Because if she doesn't do that, if it's a raw meritocracy, the eleven 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 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 of 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, there's 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 it.
So the left is from each according to their ability to each according to their needs, which is parents to children, older siblings to younger siblings.
It is a forced redistribution of income, which again is fine when it comes to children, but is 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., 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 uh 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's too bald to go to work.
And then she'll work for him if he gets fired.
And that's enab 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 unfair, 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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