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Nov. 24, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:34
You Get What You NEGOTIATE! Listener Questions
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All right.
Good afternoon.
Questions from the fine folks on Facebook.
Ooh, there's some fell iteration for you.
With Western society resembling that of an insane asylum, how does one stay motivated to participate?
Do you ever have the desire to leave and live on an island beach?
Well, I mean, everybody has that fantasy for sure.
But I will tell you this, that I quite like civilization.
I have a strong affinity.
I did my living in the wilds when I worked as a gold panner and prospector after high school.
I did that for about a year and a half, summer, winter now.
Some of it was in town, but a lot of it was in the bush.
And I quite like it.
I quite like having a nice coffee.
I quite like being able to talk to people about philosophy using technology.
And there's a lot of nice stuff about all of that.
So I do not have a fantasy that the natural life, the life unfretted by technology and comforts, is better.
So I think it's worth staying to participate.
Now, personally, I do not believe that there is a philosophical solution to the problems that are coming.
And I say this having spent 44 years trying to tell people how to live with reason, how to make better moral decisions, how to not be propagandized, how to think from first principles.
I've done all of that for, I mean, gosh, 44 years.
I have some knowledge, I suppose, whereof I speak.
And there's an old saying, it is impossible to get a man to understand something when his income depends upon him not understanding it.
Really, since the post-Second World War period, since the 1960s in particular, people, there's no politics.
There's no political discussion.
There's no political debate.
There's just bribery.
Trillions of dollars poured into voters who vote for more and more government.
And trying to talk people out of taking government benefits is like trying to convince someone who just found a half a million dollar lottery ticket, winning lottery ticket on the road, to not cash it in.
You can't do that.
People will go and cash in that lottery ticket.
We are wired for free stuff.
Sure.
I mean, it's why we have all this technology, right?
So we can, you know, when I was a kid, you actually had to get up and change the channel.
Now you can do it remotely.
First it was wired, now it's wireless.
So we are so wired to get free stuff that when governments have the power to offer trillions of dollars worth of free stuff to the world population every year, people will take that free stuff and they will fight almost to the death to keep it.
So, I mean, this is called the welfare cliff, right?
So a woman in America who has two children and is taking government benefits would have to earn $100,000 in income just to match the free stuff she gets from the government.
It's a staggering amount of money.
It's incomprehensible how much money goes to the poor.
And of course, the problem of poverty is not solved.
The problem of poverty is worse now than before these government programs began because you have people who now for three or four generations are dependent on the government, have lost all economic and labor skills.
Education has gotten worse.
And because of massive amounts of foreign aid and dumping food into the third world, dumping money into the third world, which destroys local farmers, of course, we now have more people dependent on aid that cannot possibly last.
It's a drug, right?
Free stuff is a drug.
It makes you dependent.
It hollows you out.
It makes you manipulative as hell.
And then it destroys you.
That's what addictions do.
And the addiction to violence and exploitation is just that.
It's just an addiction to free stuff to the fruits and products of violence.
And, of course, deficits, debts, and unfunded liabilities have made the system for which people have become dependent on now for several generations utterly unsustainable.
And so the amount of like debt is just divert cruelty, deferred and escalated cruelty, right?
If you borrow, then you can work less now, but you've simply extended and extrapolated the suffering down the road when you have to cut back more in order to pay off the debt.
So the system has no solution outside of collapse, which is a great shame, honestly.
I mean, there's no words large or powerful enough to encapsulate what a great and terrible shame this is.
But of course, people are not wired for honor, for truth, for integrity, for morality.
People are wired to get the maximum resources with the least amount of effort.
I mean, all animals to get the maximum resources for the least amount of effort.
Now, going into the voting booth once every couple of years to check off a ballot to ensure that $100,000 worth of free stuff comes flowing your way is, in all of human history, there has never been this amount of reward for this tiny amount of effort.
You got to get off your butt, and you don't even have to, but, you know, ideally you get off your butt, you waddle down to the voting booth, and you check off the free stuff party, and you go back and you get another couple of years of $7,500,000, $100,000 worth of free stuff every year.
You can't beat that, right?
And it's funny, you know, because there was somebody on X, this politician, who's like, oh, it was a stunning, I achieved a stunning electoral victory.
Well, it's not really that stunning an electoral victory if you happen to be tall and good looking and offer mostly female voters mostly free stuff taken from mostly male voters.
It's like saying, well, I'm a great sportsman in some subjective sport, right?
I'm a great sportsman because I've bribed the judges.
No, you just bribe people.
That's all.
Like, you can't say you're innocent if you bribe the judge.
I mean, you'll say it, of course, that's why you bribe the judge.
But if you bribe the judge to rule in your favor, then you're guilty of two crimes probably rather than one or zero.
So to understand the welfare cliff another way, you would see that a woman who has two kids, who works, is taxed at 100% until she starts making over $100,000.
And then she is taxed really 100% on all the money up to $100,000.
So if she makes $110,000, then she's taxed at some crazy percentage.
If you make $10,000, you're probably not taxed at all or not much.
But if you make $110,000 and you give up $100,000 worth of free stuff from the government, then you're taxed on the $10,000 that you're getting over and above the money you lost from welfare, but you're taxed at a much higher tax rate because it's $10,000 sitting on top of $100,000.
So let's say that the tax rate is 40%.
Let's say you don't get taxed on $10,000, but at $110,000, you're taxed at 40%.
So you're actually only making $6,000 for working a difficult, challenging job and being required to put $110,000 worth of value into an employer's pocket, you make a grand total of $6,000.
Right?
I mean, that's completely insane, right?
I mean, nobody will do that.
Nobody will work hard, give up time with their children, time to relax, time to watch TV, read, go for walks, maybe even go to the gym.
Nobody's going to give up that, right?
For $6,000 a year.
Right.
That is quite mad.
That is about $3 an hour.
Who is going to work crazy hard for $2.88 an hour, right?
So you have to provide well more than $110,000 of value for your employer.
You have to probably provide a quarter of a million dollars worth of value to her employer in return for $2.88 an hour.
So people aren't going to do that.
So there's no solution.
You can't talk people out of that.
You can't convince them to not do that.
And people have already made their decisions in life based upon there being free stuff.
So women, single moms, have had their children and have been, you know, probably fairly horrible to the fathers of their children.
Because like most men want to be happy, they want to be in stable relationships.
They want to be fathers.
They want to be married.
And so to drive a man away, the single mother has to usually be fairly horrible, right?
But she can afford to be fairly horrible.
She can indulge in her most negative instincts because the government is coming to catch her and make sure that she gets massive amounts of money so she can be married to the state rather than to her husband.
And what that does, of course, is that is sacrificing the children for the sake of material greed because the children need a father.
They don't need a check from the government.
They need a father.
And so the woman is basically selling the future happiness and stability of her children in return for free stuff from the government because she marries the government, which gives her more money rather than a husband who gives her children a much better future.
It's a child sacrifice.
It's an old trope, right?
In human history.
It's kind of the default and the norm of human history.
So there is no political solution to our troubled evolution.
So, yeah, I mean, what we are doing is, I mean, to be frank, what we are doing, all we are doing, is documenting the decline so that it is vivid and available.
And I mean, really, all I'm doing, like one of the reasons I withdrew from politics, is that it was becoming extremely tiresome and often annoying being so far ahead of the curve.
And I mean, look, I have my strengths and weaknesses, but one of my strengths is that I'm a pretty good prognosticator, right?
The Cassandra complex, that she warns everyone of danger, but nobody listens to her.
And that's the torment, right?
I mean, the discussions that are being had now on social media were getting people nuked and banned and death threats and doxed and all of that.
And now not so much, right?
So, like I just saw this one on this show on, well, I did a show on tattoos, I think, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago about how there are signs of mental illness.
And now the studies are out.
Not only are they signs of mental illness, they're dose-dependent.
The more the tattoos, the more the mental illness in general.
So, of course, everybody lost their minds 10 or 15 years ago.
It's just kind of dull, being too far ahead of the curve.
And there's really not much reward to it.
There's really not much reward to it.
What's the benefit of being ahead of the curve?
You get all the arrows in your back, and I suppose you get the glorious vista of relatively uncharted territory, but it's really, it's not worth it, right?
And I've done my time.
I've done my 40 years.
Like, there's all these people on AirX and other social media platforms complaining about the price of health insurance in America, which is lunatic and horrible and terrible.
And I was talking, I don't know, 20 years ago about how bad government-run healthcare is and how it's both immoral and impractical.
But everybody wanted to feel like a good little person for voting in Barack Obama to heal America's history of racism and so on, right?
They didn't want it to feel good.
They weren't evaluating anything other than wanting to virtue signal.
And I mean, the bill is due.
I mean, the bill is coming due, and it's been coming due for a while, but it's particularly more true.
So, yeah, you can virtue signal.
You can do the appearance of the good and right thing.
You can get the pat pat of being a good little conciliatory diversity person, and you can get your approval from the media and from the powers that be, and Pat Pat and all your friends.
Oh, so progressive.
Oh, so wonderful.
Oh, he's the one.
And okay, you can get all of that.
And that feels good, right?
That feels good.
It feels good to do the right thing, quote, as it's called.
And it feels good to get everyone's approval.
And it feels good.
And it feels good to be praised for conformity.
It does.
I mean, otherwise we wouldn't do it, right?
It feels good to be praised for conformity.
And then you, well, you have to pay the price for that.
You have to pay the price.
And the bill is due, and people are mad.
And they don't make the connection.
Very often, they don't see the connection.
But yeah, so I don't want to leave.
Why should I be driven away from civilization by the uncivilized?
But yeah, certainly some prepping, some preparation, and in particular, having good people around you who will have your back, should things get a little hairy, would be excellent.
So, no, I understand.
But yeah, I'm staying to cement my reputation in the future.
That's the goal at the moment.
All right.
Next question.
If most of your life was a psychological operation, how would you logically assess the moral and strategic response once it all unravels?
I do not understand that question.
Please reframe.
Next question.
When is it right to speak about an issue?
Well, what you have to remember, of course, is that people are dangerously programmed, programmed to react like an antibody.
So the purpose of propaganda is to weaponize people's desire to feel good rather than do good by turning them into attack dogs or antibodies on the truth.
So the purpose of propaganda is to program people to reward lies and punish and attack the truth-tellers.
Propaganda is an autoimmune disorder in the social and political body corpus.
Of course, your body is supposed to recognize foreign elements that are dangerous to it and attack those, but leave the healthy cells alone.
Propaganda, of course, reverses this into an autoimmune self-attack disorder where your immune system ignores the dangerous attack, viruses, bacteria, or cancers, and instead attacks the healthy cells, the myelin sheath and all other sorts of stuff.
And so the purpose of propaganda is to turn people's desire to get something for nothing.
And in this case, it's the feeling of being virtuous without actually being virtuous.
To bribe people with approval rather than challenge them to be virtuous.
And because people want stuff for free, then once they get addicted to being praised rather than being good, then the praise and the punishment turns from praising the truth and punishing falsehood to praising falsehood and punishing the truth.
So you are in a dangerous environment where people have been propagandized and seduced by the devilish forces in the human mind and world.
They have been programmed to attack the truth and to reward liars.
So this is the old argument from Socrates, right?
If you have a, in a democracy, if you have someone, a politician, who says, eat your vegetables, he is going to be losing.
He's always going to lose to the politician who says, free, consequence-free candy, free and consequence-free free candy.
And so a politician who says we're going to have to tighten our belts and cut our spending is going to lose to the politician who says we can tackle all of these issues and we can fix everything and everything will be wonderful and perfect and we can tax other people.
It's not going to harm you.
All that kind of stuff, right?
So when is it right to speak about an issue?
Well, when you're around reasonable people and you can do little probes for this, right?
When you think you're in enemy territory or you are in enemy territory, which is generally the case, when you're out in society, you are in conquered territory, right?
You are a spy.
You are a scout at best.
You are in enemy territory.
You are among the zombies.
You are among the volatile mob.
And you are in enemy territory when you're out there in society.
You're in conquered territory.
So in the same way that spies used to have their secret handshakes and their secret signals to identify each other, you need to put out these little probes to see and find out if people have the capacity to think, to reason, to be curious, to go against the narrative.
Or are they conquered territory who have no choice but to be an NPC attack agent for their propaganda masters?
So it's like being in the resistance in Germany under Hitler or being in the resistance in France under the Vichy regime, the Hitler or the Nazi regime.
So you are in enemy territory and you need to be very cautious.
You need to be very careful.
Those people who you trust bind them to you with hoops of steel.
Those people you don't know, you know, you just put out very minor things, very minor things, and see how they respond.
And see how they respond.
And, you know, if you knock on the door and there's a big, deep barking and growling and stuff coming from inside the house, don't open the door.
I mean, if it's someone you know, right?
So you put out these little, you scout, right?
You send out these little scouts.
And if you are in Germany in the Second World War and you hate the Hitler regime, then you have to kind of hide your views until you come across people who you think might.
And then you will both test each other's, you know, you'll say something mildly, mildly, oh, there was things I liked before the war or whatever, right?
Oh, yeah, me too, right?
So then you just put out these little scouts to see if this person has been primed into an attack NPC, an anti-antibody, right?
A antibody disorder, an autoimmune disorder.
And you find out if the person is receptive to the truth or just another NPC attack robot.
And then I don't bother talking to people who are programmed to attack the truth.
I don't see the point.
I don't view them as having, they have abandoned their free will for the sake of pat on the head, pretend do goodery.
Virtue signals, right?
So, I mean, there's a couple of things you can do to find out.
Say, oh, it's interesting.
Somebody puts out something, you know, very sort of pro-general brainless narratives.
Say, oh, that's interesting.
Have you ever read anything that disagrees with that?
That might be too far, right?
Or, you know, what are the downsides of that?
Are there any downsides?
Like, this is a really important question.
You can ask that, I think.
Oh, are there any downsides?
Let's say, oh, you know, we should take all the migrants in the world, right?
Say, oh, are there any, how many migrants do you think there are?
Billions, right?
Would there be any downsides to that?
I don't know.
I'm concerned about downsides.
I sometimes wonder about downsides.
And if the person is like, no, there's no downsides, we can do it.
It's like, then anybody who's not willing to recognize that there are cars and benefits, there are trade-offs.
So it's right to speak about issues when you're in the presence of people who are willing to think.
And if people aren't willing to think, like I had a debate, I think it was Friday night with a fellow.
And I was sort of pointing out that this current system is unsustainable.
And he said, no, there'll be new technology that will allow us to pay off the debt.
And I said, well, of course, there's been massive amounts of new technology since the 1970s, which have been incredibly economically productive.
And the debt, the deficit, the debt, and the unfunded liabilities have been climbing exponentially.
So if you're going to say, if we look at the last 50 years and say massive amounts of new technology have only caused the debt to increase, it's not logical to say, but in the future, there'll be new technology that allows us to pay off the debt.
That's not a rational perspective.
And he couldn't, of course, explain what the technology was.
And I said, well, you can't just insert magic to solve a problem.
He's like, it's not magic.
It's technology.
Well, if it's going to somehow reverse the entire cause and effect of political life, then it is magic.
So anyway, it's just not.
And then I just stopped debating on it.
All right, next question.
How does the phenomenon of working yourself out of a job fit into a logical capitalist system?
A logical and moral capitalist system rewards productivity and innovation.
A crony capitalist system punishes productivity and innovation.
Over my many years of work, I've lost track of how many times I was told to don't work yourself out of a job or had bosses steal ideas or even claim work done as their own that was done by another.
Make it work philosophically.
The last frontier was not peaceful parenting.
That was the second last frontier.
The last frontier is private sector ethics, which is the only path towards a real capitalist, capitalistic society.
Yeah, you know, it's funny how people talk about like the logic of the capitalist system or the inevitable products of the capitalist system like it's some machinery.
So the capitalist system is just, well, don't do evil, right?
Don't use force to take other people's property.
Respect property rights.
Right?
I mean, if you were to say, like, as I was in charge of, well, I was in co-charge of, you know, 25 to 30 kids aged 5 to 10 when I worked in a daycare for a couple of years.
And of course, what to be said to the kids?
Don't hit, don't steal.
And that's what we would try and get the kids.
And, you know, I think for the most part, it was pretty successful.
I sort of explained why.
And all of that.
So, if you've got a bunch of kids, right, let's say you've got, I don't know, five kids, and you say to your kids, don't hit, don't steal, don't take stuff from each other and don't hit each other.
Which is, I mean, oh, look, you now have a capitalistic society.
Now, if you were to say to your kids, or if you were to say about your kids, saying to your kids, don't hit, don't steal, means that they are now in a capitalistic system that results inevitably in blah, It's like, well, no, you're just, all you're doing is telling them not to hit and not to steal.
That's all you're doing.
So logical capitalist system, don't hit, don't steal.
I mean, when you end slavery in the world, when you end slavery, you're not locking people into some inexorable system of blah, right?
So I'm not sure when people say the logic of the capitalist system.
So a logical and moral capitalist system rewards productivity and innovation.
No, absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
I disagree with that entirely.
Let's say that you were a movie maker and Brad Pitt appears to star in your movie.
He agrees to star in your movie and he will take only a dollar in pay.
Would you take that deal?
Well, of course you would.
If Brad Pitt agrees to star in your movie, taking only a dollar of pay.
And there have been times, you know, was it Steven Soderbergh, when he was doing Oceans of Level 11, got a bunch of movie stars saying, you know, there used to be all these old movies with lots of movie stars in them and so let's do that again.
And he got a bunch of people to take reduced pay to star with each other, which is how he got so many big stars to do a movie together, which was kind of fun, right?
So let's say that Brad Pitt loves your movie idea so much.
It's something not written by Angelina Jolie, right?
So he loves your movie idea so much that he says, I will only take a dollar to star in your movie.
Well, you would take that deal, right?
Now, you may want to give him some points on the other side or whatever, but you would take that deal.
And then he would get to work on a great project that he really liked.
And you would get a world-famous movie star to open your movie and so on, right?
So the point of this story is that capitalism doesn't reward productivity and innovation.
You get what you negotiate.
You get what you negotiate.
I don't know who's a world-famous singer.
I don't know, Michael Bouble or that puppy dog guy guy, Josh Groban, or Andrea Bocelli or something like that.
Some world-famous singer knocks on your door and says, hey, I hear you're a songwriter.
I'd love to sing your songs for free.
Would you take that deal?
Well, of course you would.
Because you would get automatic plays.
You would get automatic interest in your music.
And, you know, maybe they love your songs.
They'd get to sing your songs, which they would really enjoy.
And you get what you negotiate.
For those of you who don't know, Michael Boublet, if memory serves me right, he was a wedding singer.
And did he sing at Brown Nalroni's kids' wedding or something like that?
But they sort of, he sang at some famous person's wedding and they helped him sort of move up in the world to go from wedding singer to sort of worldwide put-and-face superstar, who still couldn't hit George Michael's notes on kissing a fool.
But that's another matter.
Who could, right?
So I don't know about this.
It seems weird to me when people say there's this machinery that's going to reward me if I'm innovative and productive.
Nope.
No.
The system will not automatically reward you.
There is no system that will automatically reward you.
It's not a conveyor belt.
It's not a machinery.
I mean, crops will grow if you treat them well.
You've got a green thumb, you do the right amount of manure and sunlight and rain or whatever, irrigation.
Then they will generally grow.
Sure.
But in a capitalistic system, you get what you negotiate.
So, and particularly for men, right?
So if you say, well, I'm going to work out, I'm going to get a nice tan or whatever you're going to do to make yourself get teeth white and make yourself more attractive, then women should fall into my lap.
Nope.
No, you've got to go ask women out.
And even if they'll fall in your lap, you've got to get them to keep wanting to date you, which means you've got to have qualities of character.
And you get what you negotiate.
The world doesn't owe you a raise.
It doesn't owe you a living.
It's not something that happens automatically.
And so the real danger of this, well, there's a machinery called capitalism that is supposed to reward my productivity.
Nope.
There is no machinery called capitalism.
Sorry to meet the left.
But there is no machinery called capitalism that is going to reward your productivity.
I believe I have the best show in human history.
I will tell you that straight up.
That's what I aim for.
That's what I'm working to try and achieve at all times.
Does that mean I have the most views?
Does that mean I make the most money?
Hell to the no.
Of course not.
I'm focused on providing the best value relative to philosophy that I possibly can.
But there are many, shows with far more income and viewer interest and so on, right?
So just because I think I'm doing the best show in human history, and again, that's not because I'm the best guy.
It's just because the technology has just come along at the right time.
It's my abilities came along at the right time.
It's a happy coincidence.
So, if and so, if I'm aiming to do the best show, and I genuinely believe, I'm always trying to improve, obviously.
But yeah, I mean, this is what the band says.
Let's go out and do the best show.
Let's go out and do the greatest show.
Yeah, of course.
You aim high and you'll get there, maybe.
If you don't, and aim high, you won't get there for sure.
But there's no machinery by which me doing great philosophical shows dumps viewers and income into my lap.
So if you think that you're going to be automatically rewarded for how did you put it?
Rewards, productivity, and innovation.
Nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
So if you're highly productive and innovative, then you need to let everyone know and you need to be aware of your market value and you need to negotiate your raises.
You get what you negotiate.
There's no conveyor belt or machinery or logic of the system that is going to give you raises and status and anything like that.
And it is nobody's job.
Like when you're a kid, it's your parents' job to negotiate on your behalf when you're a kid.
When you're an adult, it's no one.
I mean, I guess if you're in a union, but it doesn't sound like you're in a union.
But as a sort of white-collar worker, as a salaried worker, it is your job to negotiate on your behalf.
So the boss is not going to automatically give you raises.
I mean, there may be some cost-a-living raise of 3% or 5% or 6% or whatever.
But you get what you negotiate.
And the boss prefers it if you don't negotiate.
The boss prefers it if you don't negotiate for yourself.
And the only reason you wouldn't understand that is if you've never been a boss.
if you have five programmers or five accountants or whatever it is, right?
Say five accountants, you've got five accountants and one of them is twice as productive as the others.
As a boss, you have very little incentive, all other things being equal.
In fact, you have a negative incentive.
You have a negative incentive to pay the twice as productive accountant more.
For why?
Why would you not want to pay the twice as good as the accountant, twice as good accountant more?
Because if the other accountants find out about that, and they probably will, then they're going to get resentful.
Like, I mean, if you've got an accountant that's twice as productive, so you give him a 50% raise, right?
50% raise.
Well, then he's going to maybe upgrade his car.
He's going to buy a cottage, and then he's going to come to work in his new car.
And maybe he's going to say, hey, I bought a cottage, or, you know, and then all of the other accountants, you know, especially being accountants, they're going to be like, huh, I wonder how this guy is affording.
How is he able to afford this new car, this new boat, this cottage?
Because they don't know immediately, of course, that, I mean, they say they get their raises, so they get a 6% raise, right?
So they go to $106,000 or so, but the twice as productive accountant got himself a 50% raise.
So he went from $100,000 to $150,000 a year, which gives him all the extra money to buy the car, the boat, the cottage, or whatever, right?
Not all, but, you know, some.
So there'll be resentment.
And then the other guys are going to be like, hey, how come Bob seems to have got this big raise?
And, you know, maybe there's a woman running payroll who mentioned something.
Who knows, right?
It's supposed to be secret.
Maybe it's not.
Maybe you have an open salary policy.
So then what happens is the accountant who's twice as productive relative to the other four accountants, well, the other four accountants get annoyed, get resentful, they slow down their work, they're complaining, they're bitching with each other, they start looking for other work.
And so maybe you lose 25% productivity from the other four accountants because they're demotivated, because they think it's unfair that someone got a $50,000 raise and they only got a $6,000 raise.
So then you've got an accountant who's twice as productive, but because you gave him a raise, you lose an equal amount of productivity, right?
Four accountants are 25%, right?
So you lose, so you don't gain anything.
And maybe the accountant who's twice as productive, now because he's got a cottage, spends more time away from his desk.
And maybe instead of being twice as productive, he's only 50% more productive.
But the other guys are down 100%.
So now you're minus 50% because you gave a guy a raise.
It's complicated.
And again, if you're a manager, you want to reward people's good performance.
But when you reward people's good performance, other people get annoyed and resentful.
I mean, I remember this.
When I worked up north, I worked with a friend of mine.
And I found that my friend was making $200 more a month than I was.
And the reason for that was that the company who hired us paid $100 a month extra for every year of university you had completed.
And I had not gone to university at this point.
And he had completed two years of a degree.
So he was making $200 a month more.
And honestly, like, this is way back at the day, right?
This isn't the 80s.
That was a good chunk of change.
And it was, I mean, we were doing the exact same work.
But because he had these degrees, which didn't make a damn bit of difference to the work we were doing, he got paid more, and that burned.
That bothered me.
That annoyed me.
So your boss doesn't have much incentive to pay you more based upon your productivity.
Now, if it's tips, that's one thing.
That's not the boss.
That's the customer paying.
If you're on piecework, that's different, right?
Then it's easy.
If you do 50% more work, then you get paid more because you're producing 50% more widgets and the other guys are only producing 6% more widgets.
They say, hey, it's just piecework, man.
This is what he's producing.
If you want to make his money, just produce as much and you'll be fine.
I mean, I remember my father telling me a story many years ago, my late father, about how he was put in charge of a mine in South America, and he was charged with increasing the productivity of that mine.
So he switched to piecework so that people were paid, obviously, by the amount of valuable material that they produced.
Let's say it was gold or something like that.
But he found that they had no incentive, even with that, right?
It's Protestant work ethic, right?
Sort of, that's a different mindset.
Oh, if I work extra, I can make more money.
But they didn't.
They worked the exact same amount of hours, went home at the exact same pay, and almost none of them did any more work.
That's because they all socialized and there was a lot of social pressure to not be more productive.
Now, the other reason why being more productive is punished is because other workers might resent you.
This is very common in factory work.
Slow down, man.
You're making us look bad.
If you're really productive in factory work, then the other factory workers can resent you.
And if they resent you, if they're producing 10 widgets an hour and you start producing 20 widgets an hour, they'll get mad at you because they're concerned that you are going to change the standard, that they're going to say, oh, wow, look, this guy can produce 20 widgets an hour.
And they'll start demanding that other people produce more.
So they will say, oh, slow down, yeah, slow down, slow down.
I remember when I was coding, I was very serious, stayed late, wrote code to change code, all this kind of heavy productivity stuff.
And I remember the guy, the team leader, like, hey, man, you take work way too seriously.
You need to slow down.
Because he didn't want the new guy being more productive than the old guys, the new, the old guards, right?
So it's very tough to get ahead.
If you're in a factory environment and other people choose to shun you because you're being too productive, they can make your life pretty uncomfortable, right?
They can not talk to you during lunch and breaks.
They can accidentally eat your lunch, you know, things that, you know, they cannot let you take a break.
The foreman cannot let you take a break.
If the foreman has to please, you have to please the majority of your workers.
Now, of course, if you are a really productive worker and you document it and you make your case and you say to your boss, you know, I really need a raise that reflects my productivity, then the boss might grudgingly, if he can find a way, then he might grudgingly give you an extra raise or an extra bonus.
But it's complicated for the boss.
Every time you reward one employee, you get everyone else coming into your office to complain.
I'm not always, but often, right?
So, yeah.
I mean, there were guys, I would stay weekends and work.
I remember one day I stayed up for three days to finish a system.
And there were the, often the women, no complaints, but they had kids at home.
So they, you know, 4.59, they're packing up.
And they can't come in on weekends because they've got kids.
So what do you do?
What do you do?
Especially if the men, and it was the young single men, we'd stay and we'd play Unreal Tournament or Quake or something like that.
And then we'd go out for dinner and we'd be talking work and so on.
And so it was half work, half socializing, half play.
And look at me with 150% again.
And the women almost never joined us for that.
But that's where a lot of productivity gains, a lot of great ideas were shared and so on.
But the problem is, if the men are working harder than the women and you end up paying the men more than the women in order to retain them, well, then you look sexist because your male payroll is higher than your female payroll.
And that can cause you significant problems.
So then if you raise the wages of the men because they're so productive, but you also have to raise the wages of the women, then the men get demotivated.
If they say, well, hang on, I just worked all weekend on this project.
I remember one project that a fellow worked quite a bit on was how to get reports from an access database to be recreated in RTF because we couldn't run access on a server, but we could run a DLL to read the properties of the access reports and then recreate them in RTF and then send them to the client.
It's a big project.
He had to learn how to code raw rich text format.
And it was a big job and a hugely important job.
And he did it in a couple of weeks.
Saved our butts.
Because we'd sold a big system with a report generator.
And it turned out that their policies didn't allow Access to run Microsoft Access to Database System to run on their server.
So we had to come up with another solution or we would have been out of compliance with their standards and the contract and so on.
And so he saved our butts.
Did I want to reward him?
Yes.
Yes.
But it's a problem.
It's complicated.
So again, sorry for the long explanation, but the idea that the capitalist system rewards productivity and innovation?
No.
You get what you negotiate.
Your boss doesn't want to pay you more.
And the only way you wouldn't understand that is if you weren't a boss.
You hadn't been a boss.
It's complicated, messy, difficult, and challenging to pay employees more.
So when you say a logical and moral capitalist system rewards productivity and innovation, a crony capitalist system punishes productivity and innovation.
No, it's not crony capitalist system.
It's a fact that you have to deal with a lot of petty entitled people in this world.
Now, I exclude myself from that, you know, going back to when I worked up north and my friend got paid $200 more a month.
That wasn't petty because he wasn't working harder or better than me.
And the fact that he had a couple of years of math and physics didn't help in panning for gold.
So that was unfair.
Unfair relative to the work that we've been doing.
So that's a bit different.
But yeah, a lot of petty and resentful people and so on, right?
So you said, over my many years of work, I've lost track of how many times I was told, don't work yourself out of a job, or had bosses steal ideas or even claim work done as their own that was done by another.
Well, what can I tell you?
You get what you negotiate.
If you are very innovative and very creative and you don't feel like you're getting recognition from your boss, go start your own business.
And I don't mean this like, yeah, well, if you're so good, go, right?
I hated modern novels.
I hate modern novels, so I wrote the kind of novels I've always wanted to read.
I hate the way philosophy has been done for almost its entire history.
So I worked very hard to create philosophy in the way that I believe it should be done.
From first principles relevant to people's personal issues and needs in a way that is actionable and that produces the most virtue with the least effort.
That is the most possible, which is why I talk about child abuse.
So, yeah.
You are expecting capitalism to spit out what you have to negotiate on your behalf.
If you are a tall, wealthy, great-looking guy, and you, like, let's say you're a nine or a ten as a guy, right?
Then you believe that somehow society should deliver to you nine or ten women.
But if you're willing to date a three, then don't complain about society being unjust.
You get what you negotiate, you get what you accept.
All right.
What are your thoughts on meditation?
Have you ever done it?
I have to.
Yeah, I have to admit it.
I've not, I don't sustain it.
I find that the best meditative state for me is doing philosophy.
In a world where evil is rewarded and good behavior punished, is evil behavior justified?
Nope.
No.
I have a philosophical question.
How should you measure philosophical principles against real-world outcomes?
It seems to me that there needs to be an objective yarnstick to gauge philosophical theories.
Sure.
Sure.
So for an example of this, you can go to my oh-so-free book called Peaceful Parenting at peacefulparenting.com.
It's theory, it's practice, and it is to measure, right?
To measure.
So philosophical principles against real-world outcomes.
The further that you expand property rights and the further that you enforce and respect property rights, the better outcomes you should have in society.
The most fundamental violation of property rights was slavery.
When slavery was ended, society got a whole lot better.
On the other hand, communism should economically fail, and so on, right?
So, yeah.
If you don't beat your children and do ungodly things to your children, if you don't beat your children, then your children should turn out healthier and happier and better.
And if you pray for a cure versus using science and medicine, then science and medicine should be superior because it is more empirical, right?
So there's lots of ways that you can test the outcome of philosophical principles.
Treason doth never prosper.
What's the reason?
Why, if it prospered, none day call it treason.
So yes, lots of ways you can test philosophical theories.
Next question.
A man can do bad things all his life and then do one good deed and they say he's not so bad.
A good man can do good deed things all his life and they one day do one bad deed and they say he's shown his true colors.
Well, that's only if you're around hypocrites, right?
So don't be around people who manipulate you that way.
Does evil exist as a force, a demonic or satanic spirit that possesses individuals or even groups as a learned behavior?
Evil exists when people use morality to destroy morality.
So for instance, if you say prejudice is bad, therefore we can't hire white males, sexism is bad, therefore we can't hire males, then you're using morality in a contradictory fashion.
We need to help the poor, and therefore we need to give the government the power to indebt future generations by bribing voters in the here and now.
So that's not helping, right?
So hypocrisy is the foundation of evil.
Are you going to answer these questions?
I just did.
Thank you, everyone.
Freedoman.com slash annate.
Keep the questions coming.
Always love to hear them.
And we'll talk to you soon.
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