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Oct. 31, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:19
The Machinery that Killed my Mother Twitter/X Space
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All right.
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from FreeDomain.
Freedomaine.com slash donate to help out the show.
We'd greatly appreciate it.
And going to have a wee bit of a ramble.
Happy to take questions in a few, but I'm going to have a wee bit of a ramble.
I posted some time ago, somebody said that my mother was in prison on X, and I said, no, she wasn't in prison.
She was institutionalized for a time.
And I would go visit her.
And, you know, one of the things that was sort of a turning point for me in sort of my evolution of thought, you know, when you come to realizations that are very different, or in fact, sometimes really the opposite of what society generally believes, you have to kind of check and make sure you're not just, I have to, I shouldn't say for you, I have to check and make sure it's not just some sort of psychological reaction formation.
So I kind of hated the welfare state.
I grew up in a very poor neighborhood among welfare people.
And this is in England and in Canada.
Sort of the two major places that I lived.
I lived in England.
I was born in Ireland, but grew up in England until I was 11.
And then we moved to Canada, or I was moved to Canada, sort of like a sack of potatoes is moved around.
And so I have sort of two continent experience among the poor for many, many years.
And I mean, that teaches you some things.
And one of the things that was wild to me was my mother was institutionalized.
I'm not sure of the circumstances.
I assumed that she went to her doctor and was speaking either aggressively or incoherently or both.
Not to the point of accusing Peter Thiel and Sam Altman and Elon Musk of being lizard people, but I assume somewhat incoherently.
And then I suppose the doctor tried to talk her down.
It didn't work.
So she ended up being institutionalized.
And I just wasn't, I wasn't really sure where she was.
And I think finally I got a call.
Your mom's here.
And I remembered the location and I would go down to visit her.
I would go down to visit her.
I remember I went down to visit her visiting hours and she was unavailable.
And so there was a woman there.
We ended up playing ping pong while I waited.
I guess I was 12 or 13.
And I remember the woman when I sort of tried to win in a way or tried, you know, I wouldn't say I was aggressive, but, you know, I'm not averse to winning.
So, you know, and eventually, actually, it wasn't even that long, about 10 or 15 minutes into the ping pong game.
She had to stop because she felt that she couldn't handle the competitive aspect of the game.
And she was, you know, fairly nice about it and apologized, but I just remember that very vividly.
I can't do this game.
It's too stressful.
And she had to stop playing.
And I honestly don't remember how long my mom was in for.
It was quite some time.
Not years for sure, but not days.
And I just, looking back on it, at the time, you know, you're just trying to survive, right?
I was working two jobs when I was 13 and 14, and you're just trying to survive.
And sort of later on, thinking about it, though, I'm like, okay, so this was my doctor too.
It's a whole sort of welfare state, whole sort of family system that's supposed to help kids.
And I mean, obviously, they knew that my mother had children.
There was a whole intake and my doctor knew.
And the mental health facility, let's call it, knew.
And they certainly knew because I came to visit alone.
And no one did anything.
No one did anything.
Nobody said, hey, how are you guys paying your bills?
You know, there's no father in the picture.
Like, what's happening with you guys?
They think you're just kids, right?
And that's a wild thing when you sort of think about it.
I mean, I can understand how people, you know, you live in the Appalachian woods and you kind of get, you fall through the cracks because like nobody knows.
But like, I'm right, I'm right deep in the heart of the system, right?
The system which we pay ungodly amounts of taxes for.
And it doesn't do anything.
You know, I was sort of wrapped in this system, right?
I mean, there was the direct healthcare, the doctors, they knew everything.
There was the mental health care, the professionals at this institution, and they knew everything.
There's the whole system, social workers, cases, case studies.
Anyway, so nobody, right?
And you could say the teachers, well, of course, the teachers didn't know anything in particular, but the teachers could see very clearly.
And I could see this, right, among the kids.
I don't know if you saw this when you were a kid, but you know the kids who are having a tough time at home, right?
They're shy, their eyes are downcast.
They have, I mean, I remember I went to school with, we used to buy clothes by the pound, like you go down to Sally Anne and you put the clothes on the waistcoat and just buy clothes by the pound.
So it was all trash.
Some of it was stained.
I remember having to go on, I go to school with clothes that had holes in it.
You know, you lack some of the basic amenities, right?
Deodorant.
Your soap is terrible.
Sometimes you don't even have soap.
And so, of course, what society does in general is they look at the kids who are having a tough time at home and they say, that's the kids' fault.
If the kid is tired because he can't sleep because he's got some crazy person in the house.
Or if the kid doesn't do his homework because he has one or two jobs to help pay the bills.
If the kid is too skinny because they're hungry, or they may be overweight if there's just terrible food in the house.
Because, you know, your body needs nutrients, right?
And if you're eating bad food, like junk food, garbage food, your body says, eat more because I'm not getting the nutrients.
And what society does is it looks at the kids who are, you know, the pig pants, right?
The sort of smelly kids, the loser kids, so to speak, the hyper-shy kids, the kids who can't make eye contact, the kids who are tired, the kids who don't do their homework.
And what they do is they say, well, you're just not doing the right thing.
You're just not making the right decisions.
I mean, it is very much like one athlete gets the best training and nutrition and exercise and runs a race.
And another kid has to carry a fucking anvil.
And everybody's sort of yelling at the kid with the anvil.
Why are you running so slow?
Run faster.
You lazy son of a gun.
Work.
Like this guy worked.
And look how fast he runs.
At which point it's perfectly understandable, though, of course, not morally acceptable for the children to have a strong urge to hurl the anvil into the audience, like bowling for hypocrites.
So, yeah, surrounded by, you know, and I wrote a poem in my teens about how it's one thing to be taken by a lion if you're wandering alone in the woods like in the jungle, like an idiot, right?
Be taken by a lion.
It's quite another thing to be taken by a lion at a bus stop with a whole bunch of people around you.
Back then it was reading their newspapers.
Now it'd be scrolling your phones.
Like you think of the society, right?
And I don't know if you've been through this.
I don't think I was just unlucky because I've certainly talked to a lot of people.
Of course, it's a self-selecting group who call into what it is that I do.
I don't know if I was just unlucky.
I don't think so.
But as I wrote on X, like society is divided between those who imagine the benevolence of status systems and those who've actually experienced what happens.
Because I think of the number of people around, you know, when I was sort of falling through this hole in society, like falling forever.
I mean, doctors, teachers, neighbors, friends, parents, the mental health professionals at the institution where my mother was.
I mean, I had relatives in Canada, not many.
I think only one.
And he was fairly far away.
But, I mean, we were still in contact with my relatives from England.
So it was, over the course of my childhood, conservatively, between 100 and 200 people had reason to believe or direct evidence of a catastrophic failure of a household.
A catastrophic failure of a household.
And I remember one friend of mine's father, who was a doctor, sat me down and told me about deodorant.
Not the most fun conversation I've ever had, but necessary.
And I'm glad he did.
Because, you know, when you're a kid, you don't really, but you know, you hit a teenager years, you get all kinds of funky, right?
But, and he said, you know, you got to get some deodorant, blah, blah, blah.
And, but he didn't say, why don't you have any?
He didn't say, what's going on at home?
I mean, this is a family.
I used to go over to my friend's house after school.
And he had a chalkboard in the basement.
And I drew zombie heads on the chalkboard.
Like you could see the teeth through holes in the cheeks, eyes hanging out, tufts of hair, you know, like eyes hanging on stalks.
And there's nothing like people don't want to get involved.
People don't want to get involved.
Even the professionals who are paid to get involved, where it is their job to take care of children, when a mother, as was the case with my mother, when my mother is incapacitated from mental dysfunction to the point where, again, I don't imagine it was voluntary that she went into the institution.
And nobody cares.
Nobody says anything.
Nobody intervenes.
Nobody asks questions.
Now, I guess I could say in some platonic way or some platonic sense, you could say, well, but people care in the abstract or you don't know their secret thoughts.
It's like, I don't.
Of course, I don't know.
I mean, by definition, I wouldn't know people's secret thoughts.
But I'm an empiricist.
And as an empiricist, what do I do?
Well, as an empiricist, all I can do is judge people by their actions.
Now, that's sort of the basic reality of society that is.
That is the basic, like, let's not kill ourselves.
Let's not fool ourselves.
Let's not lose sight of what the facts are.
Let's not avert our eyes to stare this squarely in the face.
Is it impossible?
No.
I have a number of times over the course of my adult life, even before I got into public life, if I saw a child being mistreated, I'd walk up and say what needed to be said.
I mean, I was obviously kind of gentle.
Said, listen, you don't really want to be parenting this way.
This isn't the right way.
There's lots of alternatives and so on.
I remember being in a parking lot.
Some guy was screaming at his kids in the car.
And I walked up to him and I was like, bro, I'm sure you didn't dream of being a dad like this.
I'm sure that this is not what you wanted.
This is not what you envisioned.
But the kids, but the kids, I understand that.
They are just kids.
And you can't complain about their lack of self-control if you're screaming at them because you're out of control.
And in general, with only one or two exceptions, it has been a positive thing.
I don't know.
Of course, of course, you can't go up and humiliate an abusive parent because then they'll just take it out on their kids later, but you can go up reasonably and peacefully and so on and do that.
And of course, my mother was so unstable that I was mistreated in public.
It wasn't just in private.
I mean, I remember once we were at a pizza hut and I suggested that she get a book on stress to deal with stress, and she threw a picture of pop at me.
And of course, everybody just kind of backs away and you're left completely alone to deal with it.
And that was when I was maybe, I think this is before the institution.
So I believe in about 12.
Because, you know, and I said, hey, you know, you've got real issues, real medical issues.
I didn't really believe that, but that was her sort of story.
But, you know, you can maybe read a book or two on how to handle stress, right?
So trying to give my mother any responsibility resulted in wild levels of aggression.
And these are just the facts of the world.
These are just the facts of the world.
And if you've got between one and 200 people in two different countries who know or have significant indications of what's going on, and nobody says anything, nobody lifts a finger, but instead they just blame you.
I just got blamed, right?
That's what my teachers used to say.
If effort matched ability, you'd be an A-plus.
When I was taking summer school, because I was desperate to get out of school early, at that point, I was working three jobs and taking summer school.
I was tired.
And this was after my mother was no longer living with us.
And the teacher was a bit of a droner.
I sat in the back, and occasionally I'd put my head down on the desk.
I was just tired.
You know, you to get up early and push yourself.
And then when I went up to give a presentation, the teacher screamed at everyone to put their heads down on the desk and to completely ignore my presentation.
And then he turned to me and yelled, How do you feel about it?
Huh?
How do you feel about it?
That's rude.
And he just yelled at me and screamed at me.
And it's like, hey, I mean, I get where he's coming from, but there's no curiosity.
There's certainly no sympathy.
He doesn't sort of sit to me after class and he says, man, you seem really tired.
Is everything okay?
Like, what's going on in your life, right?
I say, well, I've been paying my own bills since I was 15.
And yeah, it's pretty fucking tiring.
It's pretty tiring.
So that, look, that's just the reality.
That's not made up.
That's a fact.
And of course, if you look at your own life, and I'm not perfect this way, so I'm not finger wagging from any guru position of moral superiority here.
But if you look at your own life and you look at your own history, there were the quote weirdo kids, there were the tired kids, there were the kids who did a lot of drugs, there were the kids who couldn't make eye contact, there were the kids who smelled, there were the kids who had bad clothing.
And what did you do in your mind, in your mind, about those kids?
Losers, weirdos, freaks, geeks, nerds.
I guess now it's like Asperger's Autistic or whatever, right?
But nobody wants to ask the questions.
Or the basic question, hey, what's going on at home?
My mother had this very loud, clacky, clacky electric typewriter, and she was constantly involved in various activities, which I won't get into here, which required a lot of typing.
And she'd be chain smoking in my room at night, because that's where the, because I also did some writing, using a typewriter.
I wrote short stories.
And she'd be in my room at night, and she'd be chain smoking and typing away.
And it was literally like trying to sleep at the sounds of a World War Trench with sort of the clatter of small arms fire spraying over your head as you're sucking down yet more carcinogenic nicotine from the atmosphere.
So it's tiring.
I can't get much sleep.
I can't get up and go elsewhere because she'll get angry.
I can't ask her to get to move to a different room and type there because she'll get angry.
And, you know, my mother's anger wasn't just mild irritation, as you can imagine.
So, like, that is the reality of the world.
And absolutely zero people can convince me otherwise.
So, the funny thing is, of course, when people talk about their sympathy, oh, but the poor, we have so much sympathy.
We've got to help the poor.
It's like nobody, nobody does that.
Nobody actually does that.
Now, I understand the argument, and I'll address it here.
It's a good argument, which says, bro, you were a kid in the Jurassic Park period, you old semi-boomer dude.
I get that.
Hey, we're talking about the 70s, man.
That's 50 years ago.
Things have changed now.
No.
No, no, they haven't.
No, because now kids just get drugged.
And also, I have not kept anything secret about my history because I want to give you guys a sense of sort of where I'm coming from.
You can put my thoughts in context.
And the reason I talk about my childhood is: A, it's nothing to be ashamed of.
B, I'm actually quite proud of everything I've overcome.
And C, you need to know my history so you can evaluate me for potential bias.
Right?
That's really, really important.
Conflict of interest, right?
Do I have a, you know, if I was writing about some, if I was writing about something that I had sort of some personal experience with and so on, you need to know my personal experience so you can judge my objectivity.
So I've talked about this from the very beginning, you know, where it's, well, I think at least it's relevant and important.
And so everybody knows how difficult my childhood was.
It wasn't the worst childhood in the world, but it certainly was very difficult.
Now, if you go and read mainstream media reporting on me or whatever, right?
Is there any sympathy?
And nothing has changed, right?
In fact, arguably it's gotten worse.
Because criminals, literal criminals that the media sympathize with, their criminal actions are explained away with regards to environment.
However, my scientific, philosophical, rational, and empirical arguments, I get zero sympathy and, in fact, further attacks and abuse.
I'm treated worse than a leftist murderer.
So, I mean, nothing has really changed.
The harshness is still there, right?
And again, just facts.
So, if you've seen society's rank selfish coldness towards child suffering, and if my words are striking chords of history and pain within you, I wish I'd give you a big hug.
You know, we are bands of brothers and sisters who survived a coldness, a neglect, and a violence that society wallpapers over with judgment and often condemnation.
Like the kid who's abused at home, then gets bullied at school, people pile onto the bully.
So, if you have some resonance with what it is that I'm talking about, I just wanted to extend my very deepest and most heartfelt sympathies about this.
But see, when society then says we care so much about X, right, it's just not true.
It's just not true.
Honestly, I view society as if I were the son of a preacher and I regularly saw him having affairs, and then I saw him preaching about monogamy and fidelity and keeping your marriage vows from the pulpit.
It would be kind of stomach turning, kind of skin-falling.
And that's not even the half of it.
It's not even a 10% of it because that's all consenting adults, or I guess the woman who's being cheated on is not consenting.
But seeing that level of hypocrisy in your father would be stomach turning.
It would be like if you had a father who wrote a whole book on how to be a good parent and then screamed at and abused you in private.
And then you would see him out there giving all of these speeches about how to be a peaceful, reasonable, calm, collected, and effective parent, and then came home and beat you, screamed at you.
It would be alienating, right?
It would be stomach turning.
And the fact that he is preaching all of this virtue while committing the most horrendous vices privately, it would make you feel like either you're insane or society is insane.
Like that's really the only options that you have.
Either you're insane or society is insane.
Either you're crazy or society is corrupt beyond words.
So, I mean, this, I guess, was it 10 years ago or so that the picture of the three-year-old Turkish boy on the beach, I think that they moved his body to get a more effective shot.
And of course, all of the, largely all of the women in Europe were crying and, oh my gosh, the poor boy, the poor kid, the poor this, the poor that.
And I know for an absolute fact that every single one of those women is completely ignoring obvious signs of child abuse within their family, community, environment, society.
Absolutely ignoring it.
You know, like one in three girls get sexually abused as a child.
One in five boys, right?
The staggering numbers.
You got 100 people in a room.
30 of them will molested his children if they're women, and 20 of them if they're boys.
And I think the number is higher, but let's just go with the bare minimum.
That's going on on your block, maybe in your house, in your neighborhood, in your school, in your church, in your community, among extended family.
And everybody's ignoring it for the most part.
And then they pretend to cry over some kid on a distant beat who was endangered by his own father getting onto an overloaded boat in a storm because he wanted to get some dental care for free in another country.
They're all crocodile tears.
It's all political and they're all crocodile tears.
People say, oh, you know, but the people who were in America illegally who are getting deported, their children are sad.
But if you've actually been a sad child in society, a legal, sad child in a legal family in a society, if you've been a harmed, broken, and abused child in society, everybody just steps over your body on their way to a movie.
So then when you see people, oh, the children in zip ties and oh, they're separated and blah, blah, blah, it's like that, like you know, they don't care.
Because if you don't care about that which is close to you and you have some power over, it's all crocodile political tears when it's someone distant you don't even know.
Right?
That's the in-map and out-map, the sort of heat map and so on.
Right.
So, I mean, just so you know where I'm coming from, when people say we have a welfare state because we care about the poor, we care about the underprivileged, we care about those excluded from society.
It's like, nope, no, you don't.
You don't.
You don't.
Don't like, don't even try.
Don't like, don't even try with me.
And I want to raise the Titanic and bring this sort of up to your consciousness as a whole.
Like, don't, don't, don't try.
Don't, please.
Like, whatever you do, right?
Like, the girlfriend you know for a fact is cheating on you with five guys starting to lecture you about loyalty.
It's like, please don't, don't, don't try.
You're embarrassing yourself.
Like, please, let's not go through this charade.
Let's not go through this rigmarole.
Let's not pretend that there's anything real going on here at all.
At all.
And that's my view of society.
And that's not just a subjective opinion.
That's what is.
That's what is.
People don't care.
And but they can pretend to care for political reasons.
I mean, in America, the census counts for your district representation.
And so the more people, and they don't discount illegals in America.
So it's just political, right?
So everyone just pretends to care about the kids when it suits political purposes, but none of it's real.
It's like your preacher father who wants to get his donations, so pretends to care about Christianity while attempting to have sex with everything not nailed down and a couple of things that are nailed down.
It's just money.
It's just resources.
It's just sophistry.
It's just fake.
And when you know this about society, when you've lifted this horrifying veil and seeing people's stone-cold indifference to how children are treated, and they don't care, people don't care.
Like, honestly, over the course of my entire childhood, over the course of my entire childhood, it would have taken just one call to get me rescued.
Now, I understand you say, ah, yes, well, you know, but the government agencies that protect children, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, okay.
I mean, let's say that that's not great.
It's not ideal, whatever.
But I would have been taken out of that environment and placed with family members I really liked.
I won't sort of get into details, but there were family members in England that I really liked.
And I'd spent summers with them and we all got along well and so on.
So they would have put me with family members I liked.
And I'm sure they would have.
And this is interesting too, right?
Because these family members also knew that there were significant issues.
They knew.
They knew.
And did nothing.
And listen, look, I'm not saying they had to do something.
Of course, I'm not saying they had to do something.
But the fact that they chose not to, while being themselves very devout Christians, oof, my mother's not religious.
And so I was being raised by a godless crazy woman, and they knew this and did nothing.
And again, that's fine.
I don't think it's ideal, but it's fine.
But then don't expect me to think that society cares about the quote underprivileged at all.
You don't.
It's political.
It's nonsense.
So when I see people, you know, crying because of this or that or the other, the kids are hungry.
It's like, but you don't care.
Because if you cared, you would feed the kids in your neighborhood.
You'd get a food drive going if you cared, right?
They don't care.
People don't care.
And I'm not trying to blackpill you, right?
There are certain people who do care, and they're a rare minority.
And you want to find those people and hold them close to your heart and do everything you can to keep them in your life and provide value to them as they provide value to you and have good relationships with those people.
Yeah, fantastic.
There are people who care.
There are people who care.
But the people loudly proclaiming they care, well, fundamentally dealing with political matters, they don't care.
They don't care.
They're just like actors come from faking compassion and faking knowledge, right?
Acting is a pretty vile profession in many ways because it comes out of a con, comes out of sophistry.
And it's a grim fact.
It's a grim fact, but in order to not be manipulated, you really have to see the world for what it is.
Because if people can get you to buy into a lie, they could rule your heart, mind, and soul.
Does society care about the suffering of children?
No.
Particularly boys, and of course, particularly white boys.
They don't care.
If they did, they would reform schools.
They would work their best to fix families.
There would be no unfunded liabilities or national debt because they wouldn't do that to their children, right?
You wouldn't want your kid to be born into a million plus dollars worth of debt and unfunded liabilities because that's slavery.
That's slavery.
It's slavery where you get to choose your own job, but it's still slavery.
Most people make about a million dollars over the course of their life and they're born into more and that and debt just by exiting the birth canal.
And if society doesn't care about its children, then why would I believe society cares about anything?
Now, I don't think that's the natural human condition.
I think that people are actually quite caring, but you need freedom to do that.
There's a drug called advocating for politics that people take in order to feel good rather than do the difficult and challenging work of actually getting involved in their communities and so on, right?
I mean, society is so hostile to children that when I say to adult children, you don't actually have to spend time with relentlessly abusive parents or people, including parents.
I'm called a cult leader and a terrible guy, right?
All of that.
So not only does society not care about children, it actually attacks anybody who stands up for children.
Adult children, of course, in my case.
That's just a fact.
It's inelusible.
It is an unerasable core.
I believe in this as I believe in gravity because it has been a constant pattern over the course of my near 60 years.
And this all came out of, and I'll keep it brief here.
And of course, if anybody has questions, comments, stories to share, criticisms, pushback.
It's all welcome.
But there was a lovely young lady who calls into the show from time to time and she asks me, she asked me, did I go and visit my mother voluntarily?
And did therapy help me deal with the guilt of not seeing her?
I think she said of when you decided not to check in with her from time to time.
She put it very nicely and she's a very thoughtful young lady and I appreciate that.
Yeah, I did.
I mean, nobody could compel me to go because there were no adults around.
Like, just understand that.
Society abandoned me at the age of 13 or so with no parent, all these social services, nothing kicked in.
Even though the doctor, the caseworker, the mental health professionals, the psychologists, the psychiatrists, the intake, right, knew everything.
Nobody did anything.
Fact.
Fact.
So, no, I went to visit her on my own.
Now, with regards to the guilt, I have learned more and more about my history going forward in life, as tends to be the case, right?
I knew that my mother was in the war.
I didn't know the mass rape of German females, and I assume some males, by the Red Army in particular, after the war.
I didn't know that.
She did mention having to snuggle up with a Russian tank commander so that he wouldn't destroy the whole village.
I don't know what snuggle up meant, but I can imagine.
Probably wasn't just post-war cuddles.
So it is, I sort of, and the other question was like, why did we leave Canada?
Sorry, my apologies.
Why did we leave England and come to Canada?
Was the sort of question for me?
And I sort of maybe thought it's because I was getting old enough to talk about the abuse or something like that.
But it also may have something to do.
The sort of rape gangs have been operating in England since the 1950s.
And maybe my mom heard some stories and afraid for her children, she got us out, which is good.
But I didn't know any of that, of course, at the age of 11.
So I don't know the answer.
I never will, but I'm certainly more towards, leaning more towards the idea that my mother was so brutally treated in the war and after the war that she really had no chance to develop any kind of stability or mental health.
And I certainly think that's more than possible.
It's one thing.
I grew up in an unstable home environment in a fairly stable society, but she grew up in an unstable home environment and a world being bombed from end to end and then invading armpies, raping everything that moved.
That's a whole different world of pain, of trauma, of suffering.
And she suffered this as a child, not even as a fully formed adult.
So, and I wrote a whole novel about this called Almost.
You should really check it out.
It's a great book.
Freedoman.com slash books.
It's free.
But the way that I sort of look at it now, I'm not saying this is a final destination, but it may be useful for you.
I look at the world as a big, giant machine that grinds up people for profit.
And I'm talking in particular war and in particular, the sort of 30-year civil war that characterizes the First and Second World War in Europe.
The world, the machinery of the world, was far too big and powerful for my poor little family.
It's like some horrible, I've always been particularly horrified by industrial accidents, you know, like people getting caught and pulled into machinery and so on.
And the world is a big, giant machine of disassembling people for profit.
And I'm not talking about the world and its nature, and I'm not talking about human nature.
I'm talking about the statist structures that exist.
You know, slave-based societies are there to turn captive humans into scant profit and use this massive violence to achieve and maintain that end.
The world is a big, giant, blood-soaked machine.
And my family got caught in it, pulled through it, and came out as disassembled chunks of endless trauma.
It destroyed minds, bodies, and souls in equal measure.
And the callous, cold-blooded semi-reptiles who run the planet either enjoy this spectacle or don't mind it or profit from it.
I don't really know or care to imagine their motives.
But my family, on both the British side and the German side, my family got forced into, caught up in, tangled within this machinery, which smashed them up, tore them apart, disassembled them, and spat them out as half alive at best.
I look at the decisions that my parents made less as individual decisions made in a state of free will and more along the lines of a little rabbit sprinting through the grass chased by a wolf or a fox.
The little rabbit is frantically running to the left or to the right, looking for any scrap of cover, a hollowed out log, a bush it can hide under, desperately seeking its warren, its hole in the ground.
Is the rabbit choosing to run?
No.
The rabbit is being hunted.
Is the rabbit choosing to run left or right?
No.
The rabbit is just dodging the snarling, dripping, chomping jaws that is going to make its eyeballs pop when it crunches on its back.
I'm not even particularly sure anymore that my parents made choices other than, can I remotely survive this machinery?
The machinery of war, of debt, of forcible transfer of wealth, of indoctrination, of the capture of children, of the lies, and the self-hatred inculcated in the souls of those formerly free.
Did my parents choose anything?
Or were they just caught in machinery or being chased by a predator?
Being caught in a machinery is more like certainly my mother as a child in Germany in the war.
My male relatives on both sides drafted.
I mean, the machinery came out with spindly, well-armed hands and dragged them into itself by force.
They didn't get caught in, they didn't slip into, they didn't forget to wear their hair net or were careless with their fingers.
They were grabbed and thrown into the machinery.
And then all you can do is survive.
All you can do is try to survive.
Right?
The machinery of the world ate my family.
The machinery of sociopathic violence subjugation.
And when I say debt, I know that sounds like, oh, well, it's just debt.
It's like, but no, but the debt pays for the machinery.
The debt pays for war.
Fiat currency fuels and funds war.
World War I would have been over in a tiny percentage of the time if the governments hadn't been able to borrow and print money.
Turning pretend paper into genuine gravestones is the mission of the languidly violent who run wars.
The people too lazy and cowardly to fight themselves, but they simply lend money and point at maps.
So with regards to guilt, and it was a great question that this woman asked, with regards to guilt I have in not checking up on my mother, I think about her at least once a month, sometimes more, and sometimes she will still show up in dreams, though I have not seen her for well over 25 years.
But I don't feel guilt because I certainly did not make the machinery that disassembled my family.
I have fought ferociously, desperately, haggardly sometimes for well over 40 years.
I have fought the machinery.
The machinery fundamentally exists in the mind before it exists in the world.
Belief in the moral legitimacy of violence is the foundational aspect of it, whether it's spanking or war or welfare.
I have fought against the machinery in the mind that produces the real disassembled humans in reality.
I fought against that with every arrow in my arsenal.
I have fought against it verbally, personally, remotely, through speeches, through novels, through poems, through plays, through podcasts, through books, through articles, through conversations.
I have fought this machinery with everything that I have.
And my mother was, to a large degree, a victim of this machinery.
She was a psychological victim.
Other members of my family, of course, particularly the males, were physical victims of the machinery.
The number of males in my bloodline who were slaughtered in World War I would stagger your imagination.
It was like an endless loop saving private riot in my family tree.
The homage that I have to the brokenness of my mother is to go to the edges of my ability and possibilities, fighting the machinery that tore her apart.
The machinery of legitimized and moral violence.
I cannot fix her.
I cannot reason with her.
And I've tried, honestly.
I mean, so honestly, it's like you don't have to believe me because I use the magic word honestly, but I have.
As you say, as I said, even when I was a kid, I was trying to get her to get some basic elemental self-management going in her mind.
I cannot fix her, but I can avenge her.
I can avenge her.
And my vengeance is taking square intellectual aim at the machinery that tore her apart.
She was anti-rational, mystical, subjectivist, and resisted self-knowledge.
If there was even a self left to acknowledge, I don't know.
I doubt it.
The observing ego, the third eye, the part of you that can look at yourself and assess your actions and behaviors relative to any kind of external standard, that's often the first to go when people lose their minds.
So guilt?
No, I did not destroy my mother.
The machinery of man's minds destroyed my mother.
The belief in the legitimacy of political violence.
Everything from debt to, quote, education, to war, to welfare, to the rampant vote buying that passes as pretend altruism, to the creation, fostering, and festering of a dependent underclass that will consistently vote for more and more government because they have less and less value in the market.
I can fight that machinery of the mind.
I would certainly feel guilt if I could do something to help.
But to me, it's like if you're out on a hike and your friend has a sudden acute appendicitis attack and he either dies or is horribly disabled, and people say to you, Well, aren't you guilty that you didn't help him?
It's like, I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a surgeon.
There was no surgical equipment.
What am I supposed to use?
My phone case and a tree branch to fix this appendicitis.
No.
I didn't break her, and I can't fix her.
And I've tried.
I mean, you try.
You try these things, right?
You try to find, because you want to have an honorable exit strategy.
You earn your way out of negative relationships by trying your very best to fix and help.
But I couldn't.
And the way that I view it in my mind, and I'm obviously genuinely, deeply, humbly, and perfectly happy to be corrected in any and all of this.
These are just my thoughts.
This is not some sort of syllogistical proof.
But the way I view it is this.
I'm scouting with a friend of mine.
Let's call him Bob.
It's a wartime and I'm scouting.
I'm trying to figure out the location of the enemy, right?
And we see avenues of tanks, thousands of soldiers marching towards us.
We're on a hill.
We see down in the valley a big river of weaponry and soldiering flowing through towards our army.
And it's our job to go back and warn people so that they can act decisively to either avoid or confront the danger, but certainly not be taken by surprise by it.
And as we turn to bring news of the oncoming army hostiles to our army, Bob gets shot.
Maybe somebody saw the glint, the glint of sunlight off his gun barrel.
Maybe they were just cleaning their gun that went off and accidentally hit it.
Who knows?
But he got shot.
And he's not going to make it.
And if I try to help him, I cannot warn my compatriots, my fellow soldiers of the oncoming army.
What do you do?
Do you stay with Bob, who you cannot save, thus causing countless more deaths as the unsuspected army crashes into your army?
And let's assume that your army has a just a noble cause, and let's assume that the people in the army are your friends and companions, that it's not a red versus blue soccer nonsense, but there's good and evil.
You're the good guys, they're the bad guys, and Bob has been shot.
And he's gasping and he's coughing up blood, and he begs you to stay.
What do you do?
What can you do?
Let's raise the stakes and say that Bob is your brother.
Do you stay with your brother and comfort him while he dies?
Thus directly causing thousands of deaths because you have not prepared your army.
Do you pry Bob's hands from your uniform, kiss his sweaty, bloody, shaking forehead, wish him the very best, pray for him, and run to warn your good guy army?
And then people might say to you, I mean, you really only have one choice.
I mean, obviously you can choose, but there really is only one choice.
And that choice is, of course, to leave Bob behind because he cannot be saved.
To leave Bob behind and to save your army, your other friends, your civilization, your moral cause by warning them of the approaching orcs.
And then if people say, didn't you feel guilty for leaving Bob behind?
It's like, no, I didn't start the war.
I didn't shoot Bob.
I couldn't save him.
I'm not going to fall prey to manufactured guilt.
And I'm not, obviously, I'm not saying that this is a perfectly legitimate question.
Perfectly legitimate question.
But I don't feel guilt for what others did.
I don't feel I feel guilt for my choices.
If I choose something wrong, choose something bad, choose something that hurts people without any sort of higher purpose.
Sure.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, if I get something wrong on the show, I apologize.
I feel bad and I want to correct it.
And yeah, so absolutely.
That's a very real phenomenon.
And I accept guilt, shame, feeling bad for things that I have chosen to do.
I didn't start the war.
I didn't shoot Bob.
I can't save him.
I regret that it all happened.
But as far as feeling guilt, no.
I'm just trying to survive within the machinery of war that was set in motion by the orcs.
I didn't start the Second World War.
I didn't bomb Dresden that killed my grandmother.
I was not part of the Red Army.
And I'm sure it happened in the East as well, rampaging, torturing, raping, and killing its way across Germany.
I had no power or authority or control over my mother.
And I never have over the course of my life because of the welfare state.
The welfare state pays my money to my mother without requiring anything from her.
If I was paying my mother's, and I certainly have given my mother money over the decades, quite a bit, actually.
But if my mother was dependent upon me for her income, then I could actually have some requirements that she eat better, that she exercise, that she maybe gets some therapy or something like that, right?
I would have some authority, but I don't because she gets my money without my say-so, so she doesn't ever have to listen to anyone.
It's really, it's a cruel, horrible system.
Horrible.
You know, that the people who were the mental health professionals who had direct legal control over my mother for quite a considerable period of time, and this happened more than once.
One of the things that probably saved me in my early years was the fact that my mother was catastrophically depressed after I was born.
Her marriage had fallen apart, and she was hospitalized for depression.
I was sent to a family member, and we bonded so strongly that she ended up naming one of her later children after me.
It had a great relationship as the baby.
And that, you know, people say, How did you survive?
And I didn't, that was an accident, right?
I didn't earn that.
I just happened to have a very early loving bond, which has sustained me and given me strength over the course of my life.
That's a very well-studied and very real phenomenon.
Other family members didn't have that blessing, and it had that effect.
I'm not saying there's no free will.
People can still make choices, but the choices become more challenging.
So the people who had control over my mother intermittently, who were mental health professionals who had full legal rights over her, could not fix her.
Right?
Could not fix her.
With all their rhetorical skills, decades of training, medication, not that I'm a fan of it, but that's the standard.
They could not fix her.
Now, if professionals with full control and authority cannot fix someone, how can I?
If the best surgeon in the world cannot save your wounded mother, do people yell at you, well, you should have saved her.
Why didn't you pick up a butter knife and save her?
It's like, bro, I'm not a surgeon.
If the world's best surgeon cannot fix your mother, would you accept any guilt for failing to repair her torn aorta or the widowmaker or whatever it was?
Bob gets shot, he's going to die, cannot save him, he's bleeding out.
He's got minutes to go, or maybe half an hour, but you need that time to go and warn your army.
You cannot save him.
Now, you can, the analogy breaks down because at least you can comfort him in his dying moments.
But of course, Bob should say to you, I'm done for.
Go save our army.
Go save our moral cause against the orcs.
Wouldn't he?
I'd like to think that's what I would do.
Don't stay here, because if you stay here, I'm going to die anyway, but thousands more will die, and our righteous cause might be destroyed forever.
Come back and give me a full burial with flowers, but for now, go save the battle.
I'm dying either way, but thousands of others and our entire righteous cause will live if you go and warn others.
It is exhausting being around highly dysfunctional people.
It is exhausting.
You have to bite your tongue a lot.
You have to pretend things are not what they are and are what they're not.
You have to nod when they say crazy things or hateful things or hurtful things.
You have to constantly dissociate from your own emotional reactions.
Madness is a virus that spreads verbally.
When I was in the business world, my mother would come down to have lunch with me.
And I would be shaking like I was cold afterwards.
And that's terrible for her, terrible for me.
I can't fix her.
I can't save her.
I didn't break her.
I have to leave her behind so I can save the righteous cause, so I can warn the army of the orcs.
That is my homage.
When I visit my good mother in my dreams, the soul mother, the mother who's contained and caged by the demonic, violent devil that took her over.
In my dreams, when I visit the good mother, I say to her, How am I doing?
And Galedrial-like, she kisses me on the forehead and she says, You're doing well.
You're doing well.
As a blessed ghost of a former self, I thank you for your service.
You are doing the best you can with what was inflicted upon you.
You didn't let the bad mother win.
You honored the potential of the good mother by seeking to evoke it in others.
You loved a world that hated you.
You hugged a world that struck you.
And rather than flee from all dysfunction, you have at times engaged it in your public conversations and worked either to heal those who think poorly or through failing to heal them, instruct others on the consequences of bad thinking.
I suppose every morning I wake up and visit my mother's grave in my mind and pray to her original self and ask, am I doing the best I can with the wreckage I have seen?
And I think like Bob, she cups my face with her hands and says, Go and save others, for I am beyond help or hope.
And you will be shot at more and you will be attacked and you will be lacerated.
But that's just the machinery protecting its fuel, which is endless abattoirs of human blood.
And that is not for you to take personally.
It is a work that has needed to be done for thousands of years.
It has fallen upon you to do it for whatever circumstances of nature and nurture.
The anvil has fallen to you, and you must lift and run as though you had wings.
And you must do homage to the people so broken that almost through no free will of their own, they sought to break you.
But instead of breaking you, they hardened you and strengthened you.
And a lot of what I do in the world is for the sunlit memory of the good mother who was destroyed by the machinery that none of us made.
None of us operate, none of us repair, none of us refuel, and all are entangled in and trying to survive.
So I hope that makes sense.
I appreciate your patience as I talk about these issues.
And let us get to callers.
Richard.
Richard, I'm not going to give you the short name.
Richard, if you're still around, if you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
Oh, hello.
Hello.
Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, not too bad.
What's on your mind?
You know, what's interesting about your case is that your mother, of course, was not a baby boomer.
And I think the things that you've experienced have been rendered much worse and much more common by the cultural milieu that encompasses all, starting with the baby boomer generation, with sex cards walk and wool, you know, fucking in the forest at Woodstock, imagined by John Lennon and all that's garbage.
And it's only gotten worse with which the generation.
I'm sorry.
I appreciate what you're saying.
You're using a speakerphone or a microphone or it's very muffled.
Oh, I'm on my phone.
Okay.
All right.
That's fine.
That's fine.
So, but I mean, the hedonists of the 60s, to some degree, comes out of the nihilism of the First and Second World War.
True.
I mean, how many people are going to go to the dentist if they only have five days to live?
If you only have, I mean, who sits there?
Excuse me.
Who sits there having their last meal?
Excuse me, saying, well, I got to watch my way, so I better not have any dessert.
That's a fair point.
I think, though, that the Western allies and democracies sort of fought for Mull decayed dinner.
I mean, allied bombers had pin-up models on the frames of their airplanes as they went to bomb German civilian populations.
So I think some of this is an inevitable corollary of liberal democracy, at least as it's turned out through the ages.
I'm not sure I follow.
I feel like you're very much sprinting from topic to topic without fleshing them out too much.
If you could flesh it out a bit more, I'd appreciate it.
Oh, well, the hedonism and the prophety that we see in the modern age may be part and parcel of liberal democracy as it has been established.
And, you know, allied bombers, for example, had pin-up models on the frames of the airplanes as they went to bomb German civilian populations.
No, no, I don't need you to repeat your points.
I heard them.
I see.
So I'm asking you to flesh them out.
So when you say that hedonism is the result of liberal democracy, that's a statement, and I appreciate that statement, but it's just a statement.
And what I mean is, can you give me the reasoning behind it?
I'm not really sure, but it was demonstrated, for example, in the war in 20, which in some ways was more sexual than Walk and Wall than even the 60s were.
Sorry, you said it was demonstrated in the war on the warring 20s, right?
In the warring 20s before the Great Depression set in, that was marked by incredible hedonism, more particularly in Germany, but even the United States as well with the flapper girls and all that.
And so it may be something that is characteristic of liberal democracy.
But America in the 1920s was not a liberal democracy.
It's a constitutional republic, right?
At least that's the definition.
Well, a democracy could be a direct democracy or an indirect democracy, and that's no Oxford English Dictionary.
So it is suited its republic, but it's still a democracy, even if it's an indirect one.
So I'm using the term democracy in a broader sense.
Okay, so why do you think that the 1920s in particular were hedonistic?
I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm just wondering why.
Well, you had flapper girls and they were rather promiscuous.
And that's an example of it, right?
Yes.
So, but the why?
Why do you think it hit in the 1920s?
Well, there is unprecedented affluence.
There is a rejection of older social norms and mores, from my understanding.
Before that time, people would go on dates with the chaperone, which I think is a little excessive.
There has to be balanced, but that's something that ended with the 20s.
But it may also just be with the relativism of democracy where everyone's vote is the same, whether someone's a genius or someone's an idiot, whether someone is virtuous or someone's a lecturer, all the votes are same.
Everything is relative.
And so implicit in that philosophy is who are you to say that this behavior is bad or undesirable?
I think that's part of what explains why these things have forced in the 20th century.
So, yeah, World War I was the greatest man-made disaster in history to that time.
I mean, the Black Death was not man-made in that way.
And earlier wars had been less destructive as a whole.
Obviously, the Civil War, 600,000 killed in America, it was terrible, but not quite 10 million plus.
So there was a staggering, self-critical, catastrophe withdrawal from traditional values in the post-World War I period.
I mean, even during, but the post-World War I period for sure.
So there's this great line from a fairly mediocre movie, No Country for Old Men.
If all your rules led you to this, of what use were your rules?
If all your rules led you to this, of what use are your rules?
And if thousands of years of European history led to the First World War, which was a shock to the psyche, and in particular to the female psyche, because women had to a large degree been excluded from direct combat, of course, they were taken as prizes at war and so on, rape of mankind style, but women had generally been excluded from direct combat.
And in the First World War, women were to a large degree excluded from direct combat, but the level of the slaughter was so great that women were left with children and no husbands, which was in many ways the foundation of the welfare state, or the foundation of the need for the welfare state.
And I won't go into all of the historical details of how it ended up that way, but the reality is that European history led to the First World War.
So if European history and values and morals led to the First World War, of what use were European history, culture, values, and morals?
As Winston Churchill himself bitterly said that the only, I think there were two, the only two things that the Western powers did not succumb to were something, I can't remember what, and cannibalism, and only because they were of doubtful utility.
So the descent of the West into absolute barbaric savagery in the First World War produced, and as it should have, produced an absolute crisis of confidence in the West.
Did Christianity fail to prevent the First World War?
Nope.
Almost all the countries involved were heavily Christian, run by Christian rulers.
Did capitalism fail to prevent the First World War?
Nope.
The industrial mechanisms that were developed in the capitalist environment were used to produce even more efficient weapons and machineries of war.
Did democracy fail to prevent it?
Did education fail to prevent it?
Nope.
And do not underestimate the Christmas truce, the effects of the Christmas truce, which, of course, the Christmas truce was when the fighting stopped in the First World War.
The fighting stopped on Christmas Day, and the soldiers got together and played soccer and shared cigarettes, sang Christmas carols together, traded jokes as best as they could, laughed, hugged, clapped each other on the back, and then the very next day went back to gunning each other down by the tens of thousands, sometimes more per day.
Did parenting prevent it?
Nope.
Did women prevent it?
Nope.
Women fueled it by refusing to date men who didn't fight and by handing out their shitty little white feathers to men not in uniform, but of fighting age, white feathers of cowardice.
You can be killed by a feather handed to you by a woman.
So every edifice and every aspect of Western civilization and society did not prevent World War I, the greatest catastrophe to that date man-made in human history.
And there isn't even a close second.
So people are then cut adrift.
And a period of nihilism often follows the collapse of a moral paradigm.
A period of hedonism often follows the collapse of a moral paradigm.
And everyone knew that the peace wouldn't last.
Marshall Fox, upon reading the treaty at Versailles, said this is not peace, this is armistice for 20 years, which he got down almost to the day.
Russia had been lost to communism.
Western democracies had been lost to debt.
And Germany had been shackled and asked to pay the kinds of reparations that could never have worked.
I mean, everybody loves to think that there's some vengeance, some reparations that you can create or make after you conquer a nation.
But as Churchill himself pointed out, not the worst guy when it comes to economics.
He said, well, if we just take a bunch of German shoes as reparations and dump them in England, that simply destroys our domestic shoe market.
If we take their gold, that just drives inflation.
If we seize their factories and reassemble them in England, that just simply means that the people who create factories in England go out of business, and we've lost our industrial base.
The fantasy of reparations, oh, we'll get them to pay us back.
The fantasy of reparations continues to drive the horrors of war.
And so Germany could not pay its debts.
So it printed money.
And of course, we all know that the German currency became virtually worthless.
All the horrifying stories.
I remember reading this, reading about these as a kid.
This is in England, so it was certainly before I was 11.
And reading about how they would burn money rather than use money to buy firewood.
Now, the British pound sterling has been the longest-running currency in human history, 400 years, with the caveat that it's lost 98% of its value, but it's still cooking, not for long.
But Germany had to print its money to pretend to pay off its debts, which destroyed the middle class, radicalized the population, and out of fear of communism, out of fear of international socialism, they ran into the terrible arms of the National Socialists.
So it was a catastrophic time.
The relative peace and stability of Western Europe for 100 years had collapsed and had been replaced with a slaughter which the mind cannot comprehend.
Like the human mind cannot comprehend the slaughter of the First World War.
And we've been really been grappling with the trauma and aftermath of this ever since.
So the hedonism of the 20s, I wouldn't say, is necessarily a feature of liberal democracy.
But if everything in the history of the West led up to, well, imperialism was to a large degree the substitution of domestic wars for overseas conquests, that Europe turned its martial prowess to the conquering of other countries rather than to the attempted conquering of each other.
So war was not solved in the West.
War has not been solved in the West.
Christianity didn't solve it.
Philosophy to the time did not solve it, political institutions did not solve it.
Economics did not solve it.
And when a massive catastrophe occurs, you have to look at your whiteboard and wipe it clean.
Wipe it clean.
Wipe it clean.
And that's a tough thing to do.
It's a tough thing to do to take everything you know and say, if all our decisions led us to World War I, of what use were our decisions?
I mean, World War I was to a large degree a family war.
And I've got the truth about World War I as a presentation, FDRpodcast.com.
You can do a search for it.
Maybe I'll re-release it.
But it was such an incomprehensible, unprecedented, and mind-bending catastrophe.
Europe drowned in the blood of its own sons.
And what that meant was every institution that was not rewritten from scratch lost all credibility.
And we've been living in the shadow of that loss of credibility ever since.
The church lost credibility, and therefore people no longer believed in voluntary charity and turned to the welfare state.
The free market lost credibility because the capitalists were lining up to suck for the bloody teeth of government war spending and provide as much murder machinery as they possibly could, some of which didn't even work very well.
So the industrialists, the capitalists, lost credibility.
Government education, I mean, to anybody with half a brain, the fact that you had a bunch of people eager to serve the state in war one generation after turning the education of the young over to the state.
Well, that's the old saying.
If you send your kids to be educated by Caesar, don't be surprised when they come back as Romans.
So every institution, and I have no faith in any historical institution, because every historical institution has led to the imminent catastrophe that we face as a civilization now.
And if everything you think has led you to disaster, you have to have the courage to think the unthinkable.
And really, that's what I've been about, is trying to get people to think the unthinkable, which means the reason from first principles and all that kind of good stuff.
But I have no...
And I grew up in the shadow, not just of the First World War, but of the Second World War, which was four to five times as murderous as the First World War.
So, all right.
If there's anything else that people wanted to ask or chat or comment about, I'm happy to hear.
But I have another chapter.
The newest club is opening up.
I have another chapter to read of my great novel, Dissolution.
So I may go and do that.
But again, if there's anything else that people want to do, just raise your hand and we can have a chat.
And I appreciate you guys coming by today.
Great pleasure to chat and get your feedback and to give the speeches.
Going once, going twice.
All right.
Hey, look at that.
I've answered everything.
All right.
Thanks, everyone, so much.
We will see you tomorrow night for Friday Night Live.
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Really appreciate your support.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
Lots of love from up here, my friends.
I'll talk to you soon.
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