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Sept. 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:38
The True Power of WOMEN!
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Good morning everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molineu, freedomand.com slash donate to help out the show and just having a little stroll before the morning show at 11 a.m.
And I wanted to talk about, you know, sort of the problem of pregnancy.
And it's a huge, it's a huge problem.
It's a huge, huge problem and a lot of politics.
is kind of centered or focused on attempting to deal with this problem of unwed mothers.
unwed mothers.
It's a very, very big So we can say, well, women who make mistakes should bear the brunt of those mistakes and so on, but they kind of can't.
I mean, they practically, actually, really can't bear the brunt of those mistakes.
And what I mean by that is, if a woman gets pregnant and the man doesn't stick around, it's everybody's problem.
It's everybody's problem.
So, that sort of foundational issue, it's not like if a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, you know, she's sent to go and live in the woods, right?
I was said to go and live in the woods and raise her child on her own and they just kind of live their lives out in the wilderness and so on, right?
I mean, as you know, humans are a grow and release species, right?
If somebody, you know, beats their dog, that's terrible, horrible, of course, if they beat their dog.
But usually a beaten dog stays in property and doesn't get out to, you know, bite and harm others, right?
But given that these dogs grow up, get big, and go out into the world, so to speak, that the children who are raised in bad circumstances, they get up.
Get up, out of their initial environment, they go out into the world, and the world has to deal with them for like eighty five years.
Well, I mean, you could say sixty five years after they become adults sixty, seven years, eighteen to eighty five.
So society, and this is the amazing power that women have.
And this is why society is so helpless in the face of women's bad decisions.
Because it's not fundamentally the women who suffer in the long term over bad child raising.
It is, of course, society as a whole that suffers.
It's other people who suffer when kids are lazy or violent or unmotivated or neglectful or abusive or go out and father their own.
Like a teenage girl gets pregnant out of wedlock and what is society supposed to do?
What is society supposed to do?
Now if it's a small number of women who get pregnant out of wedlock, that's one thing.
If it's a small number.
However, when that number swells, society is hosed.
Now, of course, the traditional way that society I mean, I'm generally talking about out-of-wedlock pregnancy as a whole.
But the way that it used to work in the past was, sorry, used to work in the past, but redundant.
Let me lengthen it by pointing out how redundant it is.
Oh, that's redundant too.
Anyway, so what used to happen, of course, was the women, the girls, the teenagers, would be taken in by their parents.
Well, they would try to track down the boy and shotgun marriage, right, make him marry her.
If that fails, right, if he managed to escape, then what would happen?
Well, I suppose certain abortion techniques would be tried.
And if those failed, then the woman would move in with her parents.
Right.
And the parents, they would sort of hide the young woman and in richer families, she'd be sent away to Switzerland or France or something.
And she'd give the, she would have the baby and then...
But they would just have to hide it all and then it would be raised that way.
And that was one.
The other, of course, would you give the child up for adoption or something like that.
Or someone else in the family might pretend that the baby was theirs and raise the baby that way.
And that was sort of how it was dealt with.
Now, this is not great.
I know, occasionally I sort of think about starting over, right?
And not because I have any plans to start over, but just because I'm, you know, curious, like to sort of put myself in other sort of thoughts and mindsets.
So I think about, you know, there's a sort of typical story of a guy who, he's married, he raises a kid, or he also raises a couple of kids with his wife, he gets divorced or his wife dies or something like that, and then he meets a new woman who's younger, and she wants to have kids, and there's sort of a conflict, right?
And the conflict is that the guy is like, nah, I feel like starting over.
I just, I don't want to start over.
I don't want to start over.
I don't want to start it all over again.
And I sort of think about that with myself.
And my daughter is going to be 17 this year.
And so she's, you know, getting ready to launch, right?
And so I just imagine if there was some circumstance under which 58, you know, obviously a bit old, right, but that I would start with a new family or raise new kids, and it's like, oh man, not only am I kind of old, but just the idea of starting all over again is pretty wild.
So I think most people in general, when they get into their 50s, they don't particularly want to start over, but of course most people would be doing it if they had their kids at 18, and then their kid got pregnant at say 16.
Well, that's a whole different situation, right?
You're much younger, you can pass off a pregnancy as your own, and you have more energy, some youth and all of that.
So that's sort of how it used to work.
You would try for an abortion.
I guess I'm justifying, I'm just saying what would work, right?
You try for an abortion or the grandparents would pass the children off, the baby off as their own, and try to get the girl back into the dating market, and or the child would be put up for adoption or something like that, right?
So that's how it used to work, and given how ridiculously inconvenient that was, and also kind of shameful because it was kind of a known strategy.
So if you say, oh, my wife had a surprise pregnancy while we were on vacation for you know five months or four months or you know from show to baby right so this would be such a fairly obvious ruse but it would be kind of like the obvious ruse like people would just kind of go along with it they'd know but nobody would challenge it right nobody would challenge it you know it's kind of like when your kid makes a drawing objectively it's not very good compared to like a
real artist but you just kind of go along with it And so when you tell a lie like that, everybody knows it's kind of a lie.
But, you know, they just kind of go along with it because that's the kind of lubrication that society needs sometimes or at least feels it needs and so society as a whole cannot be indifferent to pregnancy without a provider it's an out-of-wedlock pregnancy it's a pregnancy without a provider because the woman the girl cannot provide for herself while raising a baby and of course it was well understood in society
that particularly boys that's harmful for girls too but particularly for boys to be raised without a father created problems and this is all the way back to Edmund and Edgar in King Lear.
Again, this is not proof, but it's an example of what sort of society thought that bastards were a problem, right?
Edgar is the nice one.
Edmund is the not nice one.
Edmund is the bastard and so on, right?
I think I've got those right.
It's been a while since I was in the play.
And so society cannot much survive a plethora of single mothers.
It's one of these, like, a small amount can be dealt with with sort of social falsehoods and things like that.
A small amount can be dealt with.
A small amount of single mothers can be dealt with.
A significant number of single mothers cannot be dealt with.
And so it's one of these things that as single motherhood begins to grow, society kind of panics and votes at a welfare state.
And then because of the welfare state, single motherhood explodes.
Right.
And once that happens, it becomes systemic, it becomes endemic, it becomes multi-generational, and there's no good answers.
Like there are no good answers left at that point.
There are no good, I mean, obviously freedom is a good answer, and single mothers would be much better off if they also pooled together their resources, rented houses together, watched each other's children while each other worked, they'd have a community, and it would be better as a whole.
But they would, of course, fight and resist that like crazy.
And the problem is, of course, as I sort of talked about before, that I think a lot of leftist agitators are just the sons of single mothers sent out to ensure that the government cheese keeps rolling into the nest.
But this vulnerability of pregnancy without a provider, society has to do something.
Society has to do something.
And what society does, of course what society should do, is it should prevent these situations or circumstances from coming into being in the first place.
But once that rubricon has been crossed and we have ridiculous numbers of single mothers now, fatherless households are 50% in the white community, almost three quarters in the black community, and it's a catastrophe, right?
And this is why, because women have this, it's not the power.
directly, it's the power of consequences.
I mean, if a blind guy starts firing off a machine gun in a mall, he's not aiming to hit anyone because he can't see them.
But there's huge negative consequences to his actions.
So he's not trying to shoot anyone, but people are going to get shot.
So single mothers, they're not trying to harm society, but society's going to get harmed.
So the vulnerability that society has to women's bad decisions.
Now, of course, I understand it takes two to tango, and of course the man is involved as well.
But the man can flee, the woman can't.
A man can flee a pregnancy, a woman can't outrun a fetus, right?
It's going with her wherever she's going.
So this is not to say that men are not responsible.
fifty fifty, I get all of that.
But this is why women traditionally were the gatekeepers of sex because they had many more negative consequences than men, and as a result of that, society as a whole.
So society cannot be indifferent to unwed mothers, to a pregnancy without a provider.
It is not something that whose problems are contained within the family.
Right?
Like there are indirect effects.
I sort of take some guy who drinks, he lives out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, he drinks himself, half blind every night, and he's obviously a rampant alcoholic and so on, but he's out there in the woods on his own.
He's not out drunk driving.
He's not starting bar fights.
He's just kind of wrecking his liver out among the pines on his own.
Now, there's an indirect effect in society in that, and let's assume he makes his own moonshine, so he's not even fueling the alcohol industry.
So, the only effects that he really has is indirect in that he's not participating in society.
But he's not directly harming society.
I mean, it's the removal of a positive, not the infliction of a negative.
And, you know, in some ridiculous imaginary scenario, if all...
for reasons of sort of general morality and so on, but not sort of specific negative consequences.
So the fact that the unwed mothers have children within society and those fatherless children are going to cause disproportionate amounts of chaos and violence and abuse and addiction and you know all kinds of bad stuff, society is, has a vested interest in trying to figure out how to manage this system.
Now, of course, the way to manage this system is through morality, through the non-initiation of force, right?
we look at this, how a free society would handle this kind of issue, then yeah, it would handle this issue by a respect for property rights and personhood.
So since the family would bear the brunt of the
an encouragement of early marriage I mean of course one of the things is that I mean young people are told to finish high school and then go to university and then start their careers before they get married, right?
So we're talking sort of mid to late 20s, which is, you know, more than a decade after sexual maturity.
and to expect them to not have any sex from the age of 18 to 25 or 27 is it's a bit idealistic to put it mildly so yeah encouragement of early marriage so that the pregnancy would come with the provider and a lack of ability to access more responsible people's money if you got pregnant and therefore the costs and shame would accrue to the family and I mean,
It would be kind of hard to hide a pregnancy in the age of social media if you were posting.
So it would be even more obvious than it would be in the past.
So the costs would accrue to the family.
And because the costs accrue to the family, the parents, they have a vested interest in making sure that their kids get hitched before getting pregnant, get pregnant, get married, right?
No bedding before the wedding, at least.
Not procreative sex.
So that's sort of how it would be handled.
That's how it would be handled in the past.
Of course, people would still make mistakes and they would still be irresponsible and so on.
And there would still be consequences, negative consequences that would accrue.
the problem is, of course, and this is just economics, right?
seen versus the unseen.
The problem is that the negative consequences that accrue to women who are pregnant or girls who are pregnant outside of wedlock, if they don't have a family, the family just kicks them out, they wander the streets pregnant, and, you know, no man's going to want to marry them because they're pregnant with another man's child and whatever reason, right?
I mean, these days, of course, a lot easier to find and track down the father and make him responsible, right?
That would be the other issue too, right?
So the parents would take something on, of course, in the past, you could just move to some other town and, you know, it was a whole lot easier to escape the responsibility.
Now, And because you'd have to pay for the baby, you'd be more responsible in your sexuality, right?
The fact that men can a lot of times escape these responsibilities now, or legally maybe they can't, but because of the welfare state there's less incentive to pursue them, but then you would have everybody with a vested interest in controlling procreative sex to the point where don't.
It always has to rhyme for some reason.
So you have the parents with a vested interest.
They're controlling their offspring's sexuality.
You have the young women who face negative consequences for getting pregnant outside of wedlock.
You have the young men who are going to face negative consequences for the same.
And everybody's kind of working in concert to try and minimize these issues.
Will these issues be minimized?
Yeah.
Will they be eliminated?
No.
Free will, right?
People make bad decisions.
So, of course, the problem is it's the seen versus the unseen and the immediate versus the distant.
Right, so, if a woman And this can happen to widows too, particularly if her husband doesn't have health insurance and he dies, sorry, life insurance and he dies, then she's kind of out of luck as far as that goes, right?
But what happens is the suffering of that woman in the moment, oh, who's going to feed my kids?
How am I going to survive, right?
The suffering of that woman in the moment moves everyone's hearts.
And they don't see, of course, that in 15 plus years, her little kids might be terrorizing the neighborhood.
And so the immediate suffering is clear.
The woman needs money, she wants government money, she wants resources and so on.
And then what they don't see is two things.
one is the harm that this is going to do down the road.
Because if she gets government money, she's going to keep her kids and raise them as a single mother.
If she doesn't get government money and there's no other support systems, she's going to most likely give the kids up to adoption and they're going to be, you know, in a free society at least, of course, they would be raised by a mentally healthy two-parent household.
So they would do much better, right?
That is a big problem.
People see the seen versus the unseen, the suffering of the woman at the moment, not two things one is the suffering of course of society down the road if she keeps her kids most likely or at least reasonably likely and the second of course is, is if she gets a bunch of government money because she's a single mom, people don't see all of the other bad decisions that are made because of that money.
As I've mentioned before in this show, turning children from a liability into an asset has fundamentally reshaped all of society in exactly the wrong direction.
Children are not an asset.
You shouldn't be able to make money by having children.
Children are a cost.
Financially, they're a liability.
Wonderful things.
Wonderful creatures, but a financial liability, which means someone's got to pay for it.
But if you force people to pay for it through the state, then children are turned from a liability which requires a provider into an asset which promotes the unhealthy having of extra children for the sake of income so it is very tragic what is going on and because statist systems cannot reform themselves because statist systems cannot reform themselves things just get kind of worse and worse there is no arresting these
issues i mean this i mean i remember after was it losing ground Charles Murray's book came out Bill Clinton and the Democrats tried to reform welfare and you know there were some moves in the right direction but when the principle of coercive redistribution is unmolested, so to speak.
It just shapes itself into various configurations with the basic principle remaining intact, which is violations of the non-aggression principle and property rights.
So I think if we sort of understand that women have such an unbelievable amount of power over society in that if they get pregnant out of wedlock, if they get pregnant without a provider, then...
They kind of hold society hostage.
Because they hold a beautiful baby, of course, not the baby's fault, but they also hold statistically somewhat of a ticking time bomb that goes off for the next 60 years in society.
I mean, the amount of dysfunction that badly raised children can wreak upon society, and of course, they can be badly raised in a two-parent household, they get all of that, but we're just talking the general statistics of what's most likely, but the mayhem that badly raised children can wreak in society is, I mean, it's practically infinite because it really can't be measured in any detailed way, because there's no control group, right?
Some rampaging son of a single mother can't be compared with if he'd been raised in a two-parent household, and you can't measure the difference, and you just, it's practically infinite because we know it's more, but it can't ever be measured directly.
So, that power, the power that women have in their absolute demand for resources, if they're pregnant without a provider, that power, or the effect that that has on society, means that society has to do something.
You just can't let these women live in the gutter, right?
Well, as their kid lets them even worse, right?
So, society has to do something, And And I'm just talking, I'm not talking about morals.
I'm talking about rational and resource-based analysis of the situation.
So given that pregnancy without provision holds society hostage, women need resources, otherwise it's even worse for society as their kids grow and their kids grow up.
And of course, it's not just when they grow up, right?
Because, you know, the badly raised kids, I was just talking to someone on the X-Basis the other day about this it's a bully this badly raised kid became a violent bully so it can happen in kidhood as well So you combine the power of pregnancy without a provider with the power of political voting and you have a power block.
that men cannot reason with, cannot surmount, cannot overcome.
Because deep down, of course, because men can't get pregnant, at least, you know, as of until quite recently, men cannot get pregnant and they just don't have that same leverage over society.
Now, of course, we should shame the rakes and we should shame the fornicators and we should shame the men who have unprotected sex with women, get them pregnant and then leave.
We should absolutely shame and harm those men in terms of not harm them physically, but, you know, should take resources from them to provide for the children that they have made.
But it's still not the same.
It's just not a visceral.
It's not as direct.
So the power of pregnancy without provision plus the power of political voting creates an authority that men cannot surmount.
Now, we can say, oh, well, women are just mean this way.
And it's like, yeah, but women have lusts and women make mistakes.
but it is that that power of pregnancy without provision and the hostage that this holds in a sense because of the negative effects in general in society in the future, that's just a fact.
And it can't be wished away, it can't be waved away, it just has to be looked at, I think, and confronted head on.
So I hope that helps.
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