Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - The Cycle of Civilization!

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Sept. 26, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

22:51

The Cycle of Civilization!

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	Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain, hope you're doing well.
	So this is just a sort of couple of forty thoughts after the live stream today, my experience with Christians.
	And I kind of wanted to talk about this sort of cycle that civilizations tend to get stuck into.
	It's something that Roman talked about in my novel The Future, about, you know, can civilizations survive their own success.
	And I think it kind of goes something like this.
	So when you get a lot of wealth in society, scarcity is lifted away.
	Now, when scarcity is lifted away, then meritocracy well, you could say that scarcity is only take it away when meritocracy reigns.
	When meritocracy reigns, there is significant inequality of outcome.
	When there is significant inequality of outcome, men cheer and women cry.
	So when there is significant inequality of outcomes, such as, you know, Bob is the best hunter, well, that means we get more food.
	Yay.
	A Bob is the best warrior, that means I'm more likely to survive a battle if I stick by Bob.
	Yay, you know, all of this sort of stuff.
	So when inequality allows for scarce resources to be handed to those with the best ability to multiply them, inequality allows for resources to get to the best place.
	The person who's best at farming gets the most land.
	So the inequality ends up becoming greater and greater.
	Now, it's true that the poorest person alive today is better off than the richest person, I mean, in the West, right?
	The poorest person alive today, or the person with the least income, is better off than the richest person throughout almost all of human history.
	But the inequality is painful.
	And then what happens is men tend to cheer excellence, but women tend to cry at excellence.
	And we can sorry, uh inequality, right?
	So men cheer on excellence, but women cry at inequality.
	And again, it's nothing negative towards women, and nothing really positive to my towards men.
	It's just the evolutionary pressures.
	Men strive to excel, and men like those who are really great at stuff.
	We we admire, we look up to.
	I mean, there may be some jealousy and all of that, but nonetheless, we tend to admire those who are really excellent because it benefits us all.
	But because women are evolved to take care of little kids, inequality or the poor starving a child, that makes women upset because they feel that they have failed to equally distribute the resources that will keep that child alive.
	So a woman, of course, generally has a soft spot for the youngest kid, and that's evolutionarily developed because the youngest kid is the one least able to get resources in any kind of meritocracy, and therefore the mom has to forcefully intervene.
	So to get the kid resources.
	So, like ten years ago, when the Turkish boy was drowned on the beach, men were like, Well, that was stupid to take your kid on a boat like that.
	Men blamed the Turkish father.
	However, women looked at that and felt awful and horrible because they felt they had failed to watch a child, and that child drowned on their what, right?
	They were supposed to take care, they were down with the kids at the beach and their kid drowned.
	That's how they sort of experience it, that kind of horror, like this must never be allowed to happen again, this is the worst nightmare, blah, blah, blah.
	Now, you could say, ah, well, but wouldn't men also be horrified if their child drowned?
	Well, of course they would, for sure, but men don't view all children as their children.
	Men are, you know, self and other, our tribe, their tribe.
	And women are less so that way, because women were generally kept Around the circle of protection, they were kept inwardly looking at their own people.
	And if they was another tribe that took over, well, they'd just have to, I mean, maybe even literally just suck it up and find a way to adapt to the new tribe.
	So men look and say, that's a foreign tribe.
	That's a foreign kid, it's not my kid.
	Whereas all the women that were around kids and all the kids that were around women saw those kids as their own offspring, as genetically proximate, and therefore showing a female, a hungry child programs her to get resources by whatever means necessary,
	a bullying, yelling, pleading, crying, get that child's resources because women evolved in such a context that all the children around them were related, were genetically related to that.
	And so when they see a kid, and and this is so programmed that, you know, even when uh when was it, Sally Strutherus used to have these uh commercials for starving kids in Africa and you know, the the kids with the bloated bellies because of the hunger and so on.
	And even when it's sort of clear that they're not genetically close to you, say in the West, uh the programming is still is still the same.
	There's a hungry child, get that child resources by whatever means necessary.
	You don't worry about the cost.
	The kid has to eat.
	I mean, if you if you've ever been around a woman who's a really great hostess, and my wife is a fantastic hostess, I mean, the tables have to groan with food, right?
	So as you get more resources as a result of meritocracy, there's more inequality.
	As there is more inequality, women's instincts are to close that inequality by taking resources of the powerful and giving them to the weak, because that's what women do.
	They take resources from their husbands and give them to their weakest children.
	They are conveyor belts of forceful egalitarianism, and of course, as I've mentioned before, if the older kids are, you know, grabbing at and and snatching the food from the youngest kids, well, then that's what the mother has to forcefully intervene to redistribute these things.
	So egalitarianism is programmed into women.
	And of course, for women, for mothers, they see the youngest and the most helpless, it's not their fault.
	So my friend when I was younger, who later died, he and I went dirt biking around in the winter, and in part because we had no money.
	And he had these big giant hockey gloves that kept his hands beautifully toasty warm.
	I had no gloves.
	And my hands were like my fingers were like icicles.
	I could barely close them around the handlebars.
	It was so cold.
	And I would ask him, can I warm my hands up in your gloves?
	And he said, Well, why didn't you bring your gloves?
	I mean, gosh, it's oh, it's it's uh almost almost like over well over 40 years and close to 50 years ago, so it it no longer bothers me, as you can imagine, but it's fascinating that this is sort of the male perspective.
	That if you screwed up, it's your fault.
	That's the male perspective.
	If you threw the spear and missed the deer, you should have practiced more, you idiot, and you're not going to throw the spear again until you can prove that you've practiced.
	If you failed to study for the test, you've failed, too bad, so sad, etc., etc.
	Men need a meritocracy so that we can figure out who gets the spear, the land, the swords, the shield, whatever, the armor, whatever.
	So in a meritocracy, we need it so that we can give the most resources to the most skilled.
	But women feel acutely uncomfortable with meritocracy because they are dealing with children, and let's say you have a three-year-old and a nine-year-old, three or six and a nine year old, the nine-year-old is going to be able to get all the food you put out.
	All of it.
	He's going to snatch it away, and the three-year-old is going to cry.
	And the crying is a signal for the mother that the nine-year-old is taking all the food, and she better go and get food from the nine-year-old and give it to the three-year-old, or the three-year-old is going to be sick, starving, hungry, dying, whatever, right?
	Going to be harmful, if that makes sense.
	So that's the problem.
	Men hunger for meritocracy.
	Women dislike meritocracy, because for men, a meritocracy is win-win, other than sort of your ego or whatever it is, right?
	But if you look at a band like Queen, I mean, three out of the four were competent singers.
	Well, one of the four was a fantastic singer, Freddie Mercury, but the drummer, Roger Taylor had this dog whistle voice, Freddie called it, a very high voice, and he had a kind of bluesy rocky voice, and Brian May had a sort of soft, warm tenor.
	Uh, but Freddie Mercury had the sort of wildly powerful and rock and roll voice with an amazing falsetto.
	So uh John Deacon couldn't sing.
	So would they be successful if John Deacon was the front man?
	No, he was a bass player, so he was kind of shy, and he couldn't sing.
	So John Deacon wins by not singing.
	So it's win-win for everyone.
	In the band the police.
	Andy Summers, the guitarist, was a wretched songwriter.
	He wrote the song Mother, which is a giant ass pimple on the glorious album Synchronicity.
	Uh everybody that uh that song was so bad and so discordant and atonal, that song was so bad that everyone I knew immediately got bought synchronicity and bought a tape deck and recorded the album onto the tape deck while skipping that song.
	It was so and it probably had a lot to do with why they broke up is that that song was just wretched.
	Sting actually buried the audio tape for behind my camel, and they ended up rescuing it and putting it out, and it actually is a pretty pretty good.
	Now, Stuart Copeland, the drummer, was also a pretty terrible songwriter.
	I don't want to be rich, I I want to be rich, I don't want to work in a ditch.
	I mean, he's terrible.
	He had a solo project called Clark Kent, but the songs are just just ass, just absolute ass.
	Miss Grudenko is a pretty good song.
	I actually really, really like I was actually just listening it to a day today.
	The song um I don't close ten times before I take you on a date.
	I get the heebie jeebies, my panic makes me late.
	Does everyone stare this way at you?
	Does it does everyone stare?
	Does everyone stare from Rageta DeBlanc?
	Pretty good song.
	But he was not a very good songwriter.
	But Sting was a great songwriter, so the reason that they were all successful was that they let Sting's songs dominate the records.
	Because Sting writes very good songs and the other two don't.
	It's a win-win.
	And Sting also a really good lyricist.
	A really good I mean, just listen to um Under the Doc Sus the Reefs of Moonshine.
	Why should I cry for you?
	Lovely, lovely song.
	I think it's about the death of his father.
	So that's mer a meritocracy, win-win.
	Everybody wins if the best hunter gets the spear.
	Now, for women, though, meritocracy let's look at the meritocracy of prettiness, or charm or good humor, or just general levels of attractiveness.
	So prettiness is to attractiveness as IQ is to G. So for women, a meritocracy means the other woman gets the great guy and you don't.
	The other woman gets the tall, dark and handsome fellow, and you get the short bald and pudgy fellow.
	Twin lose.
	Now you could say, of course, well, uh the tribe uh overall, blah, blah, blah, but that's intergenerational, that's not immediate, right?
	So when you get a free market, you get the meritocracy, the meritocracy allows men to uh allows society to allocate resources in a sort of free market way to the most competent, which guarantees an increase in general wealth, and everybody wins.
	Even those who lose win, right?
	Just as John Deacon loses out to Freddie Mercury as the lead singer, and the band Queen uh wins.
	Not just a great singer, but a great front man and all that kind of stuff as well.
	So men like meritocracy, Men hunger for meritocracy, men admire excellence.
	And women are anxious or negative around meritocracy because they generally lose for their lifetimes the quality man to the more attractive woman, and they have to enforce anti-meritocracy, and they have to say, I have to violently intervene to get resources to those who are the least competent through no fault of their own.
	Right?
	I mean, the three-year-old is not least competent.
	It's not less competent than the nine-year-old.
	He just happens to be born later.
	I mean, the sort of the eternal cry of the younger sibling is like, well, you're you're stronger, faster, taller, you get to stay up later, you get more pocket money, you hit puberty sooner, and you win games and so on.
	And uh the fact that that a lot of elder siblings get uh smug and feel superior from a for a mere accident of birth.
	I mean, it really is pretty pathetic, right?
	It really is pretty pathetic.
	It's like a man preening himself on being taller than strong and stronger than women as a whole.
	It's like that's just an accident of birth, bro.
	Certainly the height, you could say you're work out or whatever, right?
	But even if men and women are working out the same, men will be much stronger.
	So the reason I'm sort of going over this stuff, a little bit new, some of it you may have heard before, but the reason going over all of this is because the purpose of conscience is to avoid the charge of hypocrisy.
	You can di like for somebody who is verbally very aggressive, and then when somebody pushes back against them, they sort of cry or they get upset or huffy or whatever it is, oh, you could dish it out, but you can't take it.
	And one of the reasons why we want to avoid being hypocrites is it means that our high status is very tremulous.
	Our high status, right?
	So if you're verbally aggressive and then somebody makes fun of you and you you sort of lie you you get upset and you get mad and you get huffy and you swarm out and so on, then your status goes from higher to lower very quickly.
	In the same way that if you're very physically aggressive, you kind of go up and you throw chest at someone and and then you know, they they smack you across the face, and then you curl into a ball and cry, you go from higher status to lower status immediately.
	So you don't want to leave your flank open by hypocrisy.
	A man who rails against infidelity in another man's girlfriend who then turns out to be cheating himself, goes from a moralist to a hypocrite incredibly low status very quickly.
	It is an exposure, it is a weakness by which you can be attacked if you are a hypocrite.
	It's just one of the many reasons why we have a conscience to avoid that flank attack of hypocrisy.
	So when people do wrong, it is humiliating to have to apologize.
	I remember in a business meeting, I was just kind of on autopilot doing my sales pitch, and I promoted the services of a competitor, right?
	So we had a relationship with ABC Company, I was with XYZ company, and I talked about ABC company if using our software gave a 40% reduction in a service if you used our software, which was not also matched by the XYZ company, and it did not cross my mind, I was kind of on autopilot, I was tired, whatever, right?
	And then the guy railed me out after the meeting and said, We don't come out to these meetings so that you can pr can promote our competitors' products.
	And he was really mad.
	He called the CEO, and, you know, he was right.
	He was right.
	I was careless, I was thoughtless, and I was on autopilot.
	But it was humiliating, and I was mad.
	And of course, you know, well, because uh because I was being yelled at or I was being chewed out.
	And I love that I mean it's not a great movie, Inglorious Bastards, but when Brad Pitt's character is like, I've been chewed out before, it's just like it just takes it, you know, just it's the way it is, not a big deal.
	But it was uh unpleasant, and I, of course, felt humiliated, and therefore I wished to find a way in which I was actually in the right, and this other person gosh, I still remember his name, this other person was unreasonable, right?
	So so when you're in the wrong when you've done something wrong, I remember when I was getting a million and a half dollars worth of raises from my employees, I made a mistake and uh I made a mistake in my calculations, and they ended up being ten thousand dollars off.
	I needed ten thousand dollars more to make to fulfill the promises I'd make to my employees.
	And I said, and now you say ten thousand dollars out of one point five million dollars, not a huge amount.
	But 1.501.
	Anyway, it was a lot of money.
	Uh so what is that?
	Uh it's not much.
	10%.
	Well, 1%, sorry, 1%.
	So 1% calculation on a million dollars.
	I mean, that's not massive, but it's also $10,000, which is a lot of money.
	So I went to the board and I said, I messed up.
	Here's how I messed up.
	I really need this $10,000.
	I did make my promises to my employees, and if this is an issue, uh please take it out of my salary and I will give it to the employees, because I did make that commitment.
	And fortunately, they said, it's fine, no big deal, uh, and uh because I'd already made the case about how much we were going to lose if we didn't raise people's pays.
	Uh, it didn't raise people's pay.
	But I was embarrassed at having made that kind of mistake.
	And of course, if you've been operating at any level in the business world or of just about any job, everybody makes mistakes, right?
	Everybody has these these errors and these issues.
	So it's humiliating to have to apologize.
	It's humiliating to be in the wrong.
	And when you apologize, if you're a if you are around healthy people, then they appreciate the apology and they respect you more for it.
	If you're around dysfunctional people, they will grind your gears, they will bust they will uh bust your balls, they will break your balls, they will uh uh hold it over you for ever and ever Amen, because you now have power over them, which is why it's so hard for so many people to apologize.
	You know, I've always made a point of if I've done something that's embarrassed or done something that's been annoying or negative towards my daughter that I'll apologize.
	And one of the reasons I do that is A, it's the right thing to do, and B, I wanted to see that you can apologize and be fine.
	And then when she is um in the wrong, she generally apologizes, and it's no big deal.
	And I say, thanks, we have a hug, and uh I don't I don't think of it any further.
	So it's humiliating.
	So those who are around dysfunctional people don't want to apologize.
	So then of course what happens is if you wrong someone, then they are uh annoyed and hurt and upset, or if you do something negative or harmful or bad to someone, they're hurt, they're upset.
	And then you should apologize.
	You should earn their forgiveness.
	However, if you have power over someone, what you do is you don't earn forgiveness, but you demand it anyway.
	So what you do is you gaslight and you postpone and you delay the conversation until a week or two later, and then you say, What are you still bothered by that?
	God, let it go.
	It was like two weeks ago.
	God, it'd be ridiculous.
	Right?
	You you humiliate them for still being stuck on this issue.
	You've got to let it go, you've got to move on, forgive and forget, put it put it in the past, put it behind us, move on.
	Like, you just humiliate people for daring to uh bring it up, right?
	That's one way that you get them to no longer request or require an apology.
	The second thing, of course, is you wait until or again, you delay these conversations until it has become uh so in the past that you have plausible deniability.
	Oh, that didn't happen, it didn't happen in the way that you think it did, I have a different memory of the events, sort of Justin Trudeau's famous statement, I'm sure from his lawyer, I have a different memory of the events, not you were lying or you were wrong.
	And so there's a huge market for getting the benefits of an apology without actually having to go through the humiliating process of apologizing.
	And because churches are the major machinery by which apologies are affected, then churches have become an epicenter for the rewards of forgiveness without the pain of contrition.
	Right?
	And I think that's one of the reasons why it has become this.
	And of course, the more that you can get people to demand forgiveness without contrition, then the less negative impact bad behavior ha has, and therefore the more bad behavior there is, and therefore the greater demand for apologies without contrition, and therefore the worse the behavior, and therefore the m the greater the demand, and I think that's kind of the vortex or the whirlpool that was stuck in now.
	Hope that helps, free demand.com slash an eight.
	Thanks a mil.
	I will talk to you soon.

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