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Oct. 19, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:50
Why Men Get No Compliments...
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Good morning.
Good morning.
Welcome to Sunday Morning Live.
This is a donors only.
We'll start donors only in a sec.
I'll do a little rant for the gen pop.
For the gen pop.
And of course.
Oh, yeah.
Chapters 13 and 14 of your novel Dissolution are super intense.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, it is an intense novel.
I am trying to.
I'm trying to catch the moments in life when people don't understand the import of the decisions they're making, right?
So this every novel for me, you know, needs kind of like a purpose and a theme, right?
Otherwise, what's the point?
You're just showing off language.
So to me, the purpose and the theme of my new novel, Dissolution, which I've never tried before.
I want to try something new.
I don't know how Stephen King just writes the same pure trash over and over again.
Although I always remember, I never read the book, but I read the opening.
I think it's Firestarter or something like that, where he had a great sentence, um women riding shotgun, or writing herd on a writing shotgun on a herd of scratchy up to late children.
I remember that phrase.
And I even remember in the stand, which I read when I was working up north, there's some criticisms of feminism.
Anyway, listen, not a bad writer at all, but just a little bit copy paste.
Uh too, too much ambition to try new things.
So I'm trying a new thing with this new book, which is uh it's sort of related to the conversation I had I think it was Friday, no, Wednesday night.
The conversation I had Wednesday night with the guy who didn't really understand the violence of socialism, and I was saying to him, you know, can um can I disagree with you in your system?
And he's like, Well, no, you can't, right?
And I tried pointing it out to him a couple of times, and he doubled down on the violence, and I told him to F off and kind of moved on.
And he will, you know, for him, that's just a oh, that was just an annoying debate, or that guy was just mouthy and but that's uh that's a fork in the road.
That is a very powerful fork in the road.
And it is something that later on in life, if he gains any kind of self-awareness.
That's a fork in the road.
That's a turning point.
And so each chapter, I mean, there are obvious decisions that you make in your life.
You know, should I take this job?
Should I go meet this girl?
Should I take this kind of education?
Should I start my own business?
Should I get get a home gym or whatever it is?
Like some decisions are kind of obvious in terms of how they play out over the course of your life, but some decisions are not so obvious.
You know, petty decisions, smaller decisions.
You know, so this guy on Wednesday, and you know, I say this with sympathy, I'm not trying to sort of pick on him or bag on him, but I said this with sympathy.
But uh that was a fork in the road.
And I've really been thinking about this since that conversation.
Because I have a pretty desperate, intense desire to reason with the world.
And unfortunately, what that does is it gives the world power over me.
Now, you can only trust people with power if they have principles, and the entire purpose of modern education is to strip not just moral principles, but any kind of principles of reality or rationality.
And in the number of people I've called in, I say, do two and two make four.
And this is long.
Hellacious pause.
Well, that's uh that's complicated.
You know, I don't remember my math teacher when I was five or six years old saying, well, I can't really mark you.
If you wrote down two and two makes five, I can't really mark you as wrong because things are complicated.
Right.
No, it was just two and two is five.
Wrong.
Two and two is four.
And so yeah, so you can't you can't trust people with power if they don't have any principles, which is why I say we can only love virtue.
We can only love virtue because virtue is the self-restraint of our monkey brain dopamin dependence on gaining power over people, and principles prevent us from exercising negative power over others, and therefore you can only trust people who have principles, right?
And it's not super complicated, right?
We can only trust people who have principles.
Because without principles, someone who loves you, someone who is attached to you, someone who's pair bonded With you.
You gain power over them, and without principles, people misuse power.
And power bribes you with release from principles in order to get you to misuse power.
So this is, I mean, this is a solution to the mystery of why people treat strangers better than those they live with, are married to and claim to love.
Why would you treat strangers?
Because strangers aren't committed to you, and strangers, you have no power over strangers.
They're an unknown quantity.
You have no power over them.
But the problem is if you are in love with someone and you get married and they move in, then they are committed to you.
They love you, they want to be with you, they've sworn vows to you.
And so now you have power over them.
And without principles, you will misuse that power.
You will start to take them for granted.
You will be more aggressive with them than you would with strangers.
You will be more short-tempered, more irritable.
You will have expectations that they provide you goods and value without necessarily feeling that you have to do the same in return.
And so this is why I really focus on moral principles are fundamentally about the restraint of power.
I could steal, but I won't.
So with this fellow I talk to, and I've really been thinking about this a lot.
I had this, you know, I'm I'm yearning, I'm desperate.
I'm desperate.
I get it.
Raw, naked, vulnerable ring kind of need.
I need him.
Like I know the crossroads.
I know that.
So again, what I'm working in in the book, the crossroads in your life that are not obvious.
The obvious crossroads, you can uh you can pretty much deal with them, but it's the non-obvious crossroads, right?
So in that pause where I say, am I allowed to disagree with you?
Or will you use violence against me if I do?
There's that pause.
Does a rock exist?
There's that pause.
Do two and two make four.
There's that pause.
Oh man.
That's rough.
I desperately, desperately, desperately want almost like oxygen for people to shake off this bewildering, baffling sophist cobwebs of propaganda and just reach through connect and contact with genuine reality.
Because if they reach through connect and contact with genuine reality, facts, reason, and evidence, then we can live in a peaceful world.
And if they go the other way, we face oceans of blood.
Subjectivism is violence.
Object objectivism or rationality or universalism.
Reason and evidence is peace.
And so I feel when talking to people, and I don't know if this is good or bad.
I've been really mulling it over whether it is good or bad.
I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on it.
But I feel like I have five sons of military age.
And I am the diplomat responsible for bringing peace to the negotiating table with my country and another country on the brink of war.
If I can negotiate peace, my sons will live.
If I fail to negotiate peace, my sons will die.
The stakes are that high and vivid to me.
In the pause between the rational question and the propaganda answer, the possibility of the manifestation of thought.
People turning away from propaganda, people turning away from lies, people turning away from NPC talk, the vanity, vanity.
It's vanity.
Propaganda is vanity.
I know the truth.
The truth is what was told to me.
I don't need to explore, I don't need to be humble.
The vanity that the pinprick of the Socratic method all the way back into time of Socrates, burst the bubble of all the sophist vanity and they retaliated with violence.
To claim to know what you do not know means that the questioner and the truth teller becomes your mortal enemy.
And it's kill their bodies, or they kill your vanity.
They kill your ego.
Which to the highly vain ego death is worse than death.
It's what they call hell.
So they'll do almost anything to avoid ego death.
So in that pause, you know.
In that pause where a man's morality, conscience, and soul hang in the balance between a life of propaganda that leads to violence and a life of reason that leads to peace.
You have to let them choose.
I let that pause hang.
You have to let them choose.
You can't bully or harangue them into accepting reason.
You have to let them choose.
It's free will, right?
But I can't tell you how desperately, desperately I want people to choose reason.
Thank you.
And I wonder if I do not shoot my own goals and plans in the foot by having that level of naked need of desperately, you know, people are watching, like staring into the camera, like, please God alive, make the right choice.
Please, please, please.
My sons will die if diplomacy fails.
The world will be a wash in blood if people reject reason.
It's philosophy or mass slaughter.
I'm aware of that.
I've been saying that for decades.
Choose peace, not war.
And I wonder if people don't have principles in the face of that naked need, that they choose to assert their power by rejecting what I need.
You know, women say this about guys.
I mean, guys say it too, but I've heard it more from women.
Women say, oh, he's he's he's a nice guy, but he's just so desperate.
You know, he's he's he's sending me flowers, he's writing me poetry, he's just so desperate.
Well, maybe I'm that guy who's just so desperate that it empowers the worst aspects of human nature, and then they assert their power by rejecting what I need.
Well, they've rejected what they need, which is their conscience and reality processing sense.
You know, I mean, I'm engaged in this little conversations on X over the last day or two, just you know, people trying to hang, oh, would you just have faith in your senses, man?
It's like, yeah, yeah.
Using my senses to transmit that information.
That's all boring stuff, right?
But I wonder if I'm just more indifferent.
You know, they say that the I don't know that it's true.
I don't think it's true.
It's true for some women.
But they say, you know, the guy who's desperate, you know, you this is a horrifying meme of the woman taking it doggy style, and there's all these guys lined up, and then there's this one guy with flowers.
It's like, don't be that guy who's not naked.
And, you know, there is this sort of belief or thought that the less you want a woman, the more interested she's going to be in you.
Now, I don't think that's true.
I think if you start playing games, you'll never win.
If you if you play games in relationships, you'll never win.
Because the only people who will be attracted to you are people who are playing a game themselves, and love, life, sex, babies, marriage, and family is not a game.
It's not a game.
But there is almost this feeling that if you're dealing with immature people, the more you express need to them, the more they will spurn your need in order to get their flashes of power.
This is not the rant, by the way.
This is just something I was thinking of.
The rant is a little bit different.
I thought life is a game.
Life is a game like war is a game.
You have to play it very seriously.
So I will let the donors choose.
I have a rant about women.
And it's funny, I just wrote this morning on X. Why is it women find it so hard to understand that you can love a woman and still criticize women?
I don't know why it's hard to understand.
Because criticism says you can do better.
Criticism is an act of love, right?
I mean, if you're not a good, if if you're not a good baseball player, you won't even be on the team.
If you are a good place boy baseball player but kind of lazy, you'll be nagged to work harder because people get frustrated by, you know, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A plus kind of thing, right?
So criticism is a form of respect.
Criticism is a form of encouragement.
But people have become so fragile.
I did a call-in show with a woman last night.
Who would call her children stupid and ask, what the hell's wrong with you, and so on.
And then when I pointed out that this was really bad, she said, You're trying to shame me.
And I said, Well, if shaming is so bad, why do you shame your children?
Just trying to, you know, she has the potential to be better.
I don't I don't criticize my mother, because I don't view her as capable of improvement at this point.
So I will let hit me with a why.
If you're a donor, like if you're on locals, hit me with a why if you would like.
The next rant to go to Jen Pop, or if you want to just keep it for the donors.
I will let you.
I will let you decide.
I will let you decide.
Hit me with a Y if you want public or an N for just donors.
It's a pretty pretty significant one.
You'll remember me when the West Wind moves among the fields of barley.
And that was always a song, uh I never made promises lightly.
And I thought it was an Arabian summer lies broken.
An Arabian summer lies broken.
But it's uh I never made promises lightly.
But there have been some that are broken.
All right.
You want the spice.
It looks like.
Yes, it looks like donors only.
Okay, so I uh appreciate that.
And uh thank you everybody if you want to join free uh FDR URL.com slash locals.
We're gonna go.
Woo!
Wrong.
Wrong button.
Wrong button.
We're gonna go to donors only, and of course on X it's donors only.
Supporters only update stream, we got 30 seconds.
And this will be.
Wait, you voted no four times?
Yeah, spice wins.
Uh it's it's gonna be some spice.
It's gonna be the spice.
Yeah, so if you're listening to this later, FT, you can get it later, right?
You can get this uh FreedomAin.com slash donate, just sign up for a subscription.
You can listen to the rant, and we are going to donor only.
There we go.
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