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Nov. 28, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:00
The Truth About HEDONISM!
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All right, great question from a listener to free domain.
Freedomain.com/slash domain, shop.freedomaine.com to get your swaggy merch.
Now, isn't the end goal of philosophy being happiness the same as hedonism?
What a great question.
You know, one thing I love about philosophy is that I've been doing it for 44 years, and the most blindingly obvious and brilliant questions still emerge from you, the great listeners, a very obvious challenge, a very obvious problem.
I wouldn't say that it ever particularly crossed my mind before, which, you know, could be because I'm pretty.
All right.
So it's a great question.
So what is the difference between philosophical happiness and hedonism?
So clearly, I'm going to pretend like I'm explaining this to my daughter.
Clearly, honey, clearly and obviously, philosophical happiness is the things that I like.
Hedonism is all the things that other people like, unless they happen to be the same things that I like, in which case I will grant them the nomenclature of philosophical happiness.
Well, well, well.
And then she will headbutt me.
And, you know, who can blame her?
Not I. Not I.
It's the most grating thing in the family is that we call them smuggins.
Oh, magnificent.
Oh, my gosh.
So it's a great question.
So, first of all, we have to define what hedonism is.
So hedonism is the pursuit of animal pleasures or pursuit of pleasures that cost far more later on than they provide in the present, which also be kind of addiction, right?
Addiction is something that you have that has a negative impact on your life that you don't stop doing, significant negative impact on your life that you don't stop doing, and so on.
Now, the animal pleasures is having sex is pleasurable.
And if a man or a woman pursues merely the physical act of sex with no other considerations, that would be hedonistic.
Hedonistic is disrespectful to our capacities as human beings.
So animals take pleasure in sex.
That's why they have sex.
And to merely have the naughty bits rubbing together and the orgasm and so on without any other considerations, to pursue that at the expense of things like love and so on, would be hedonistic.
You are pursuing animal pleasures.
And that's fine if you're an animal.
Animals should pursue animal pleasures because I like the fact that there are animals in the world and animals should rut with each other till kingdom come so that we get lots of lovely critters in the world.
So when you are an animal and you're pursuing animal pleasures, I mean, that's beyond fine.
That's healthy, natural, good, nothing wrong with it.
On the other hand, if you're a human being and you're pursuing animal pleasures alone, right, or at the expense of long-term happiness, then that's not great.
There are animals, when I had fish as a kid, I had a bunch of pets as a kid.
We lived in a pretty small apartment, so I couldn't do dogs or anything.
We did take in cats, rescue cats from time to time.
But what I did have is I had hamsters and I had mice and I had a goldfish.
And of course, I was warned, like all kids were, don't overfeed the goldfish because they will just keep eating until they basically explode.
Now, I don't know if that's a myth or not, or just parents who don't want to waste money on fish food, but don't overfeed your fish.
Your fish do not know, like me, they don't know when they're full.
And so they'll just keep eating and they will rupture their innards or whatever it is.
I don't know if some told all that sort of stuff.
So that is an animal, a fish, I guess, if this is true, it's an animal that eats until it gets sick.
Or animals like rabbits will reproduce in the absence of predation, right?
Rabbits will reproduce until they strip all of the vegetation from the environment, at which point they starve, right?
If you take away the natural predators, predators are actually serving the rabbits by making sure that they don't eat all the vegetation and then all starve to death.
Predators, by killing some, are keeping rabbits alive.
I had to sort of explain all of this stuff to my daughter when she first saw she had a beloved toad.
We had chickens, and the chickens tore the beloved toad in two, and she was very upset, which I can completely understand.
But we sort of had to talk about nature and life and all of that.
So to act in pursuit of pleasure at a physical level is to act in the service of that which is lower.
Now, by lower, I don't mean bad or wrong or negative, but the purpose of sex for rabbits is mere reproduction.
That's the purpose of sex.
That's why they don't particularly pair bond.
The male will just jackhammer for 30 seconds or 10 seconds or whatever and then just pass out.
So the purpose of sex for rabbits is reproduction.
What is the purpose of sexuality for human beings?
Well, it is not just reproduction because human infants cannot survive for many, many, many years without parental co-investment, right?
Because human babies take so ridiculously long to develop.
I remember showing a my daughter and I saw a video when she was younger of a horse being born and within a day or whatever it is, maybe even a couple of hours, it's up and tottering around.
I say, yeah, but humans take a year.
We take a year.
And that which is slower to develop ends up more complex.
And the human brain takes 20 to 25 years to reach full maturity.
And that's a long, time.
So the purpose of sexuality in human beings is the maintenance of pair bonding so that children can stay alive and also so that children can be inculcated into the values of the tribe.
Our tribe the best, other tribes bad, that's how it used to be.
It's been kind of reversed in the West lately, but in general, our tribe good, your tribe bad, they're tribe bad.
And here are the particular rituals and the way in which we do things.
Here's our power structure.
Here's the gods we worship.
Here's how we court.
So the purpose of pair bonding, sorry, the purpose of sexuality for human beings is the maintenance of a lifelong pair bond.
Because without that pair bond, women don't want to have children, right?
I mean, I'm sure you guys know this.
I'll just touch on it briefly.
But when a couple gets married and decides to have children, the way that it evolved, of course, was that the women, women, the wives, they give up their economic independence.
So now they're almost entirely dependent upon the man for the provision of resources because they are now going to spend the next 20 years having and raising children.
And then after that, they start having, or they start raising grandchildren.
So the woman hands over the monopoly on provision to the man and surrenders to him and he is the provider.
And without that, women don't want to have kids because it's too risky, right?
So the way you lower the population, the way you lower the birth rate is to make women frightened of men.
That way it kills their desire to reproduce.
So in return for the man being the sole provider, the woman becomes his sole sexual partner.
The man provides a monopoly of resources.
He's the monopoly provider of resources to the woman, and the woman is the monopoly provider of sexuality for the man.
I mean, they're both monopoly with each other.
They're both monogamy with each other.
And so the woman has to trust that the man will provide, and the man has to trust that the woman will have sex.
Because the better that the man is at providing, the easier it is for him to replace a woman who's not having sex with him with a woman who is having sex with him.
Because if you're a good provider, there are lots of women who want to have you provide for them, right?
Makes sense.
The woman gives up her sexual market value when she's young and it's at its maximum in order for monogamy and care and loyalty and provision into her middle age and old age.
And the man agrees to give up his peak sexual market value when he's in his 30s and 40s, when he's got a lot of resources and maturity, but is still young enough to reasonably have children and help in the child raising.
So the woman gives up her sexual market value at the peak of it in return for monopoly provision.
And the man gives up sexual variety in return for a reasonable assurance that, you know, outside of medical issues and so on, that the woman is going to have sex with him.
And the woman's temptation to stray is when she's young.
And the man's temptation to stray is when he's older, which is why a lot of marriages crater when the man hits his late 30s, 40s.
They call it a midlife crisis.
It's not that.
I mean, all it is is a man who is now at his peak sexual market value.
If he's in a sexless marriage or a non-affection marriage, then the man is simply saying, oh, so I'm at my peak hotness.
I'm at my peak sexual market value.
And my wife is not having sex with me.
So I can go and get another wife.
It's not a midlife crisis.
It's just sexless marriage.
So the purpose of sexuality for humans is not just the rushing of the orgasm in the way that it is for lower animals.
It is to create a pair bonding environment for children to survive and flourish and for values to be transmitted.
The R-selected creatures, the ones who just reproduce and reproduce and reproduce and are only limited not by any self-restraint, but by the hunting animals, the K-selected, the rabbits, the owls and the wolves and the foxes and so on.
So the rabbits don't need to teach the baby rabbits anything, right?
They get hungry, they eat.
They get horny, they rut, they have sex.
But, you know, the wolves need to teach their pups how to hunt.
And that's why there's a lot of play hunting when wolves are pups, right?
There's a lot of play hunting, play stalking, cats will do it, kittens will do it.
It's very cute, of course, you know?
But it's essential, right?
So there's a lot of teaching and practice that is needed for hunters.
Like if you're just eating vegetation, you don't need any training.
If you're a hunter, you need training and practice and all that, right?
You don't need to practice creeping up on a couple of blades of grass, right?
Or leaves or berries or whatever.
Just go and eat them.
So the purpose of sexuality for humans is pair bonding and the transmission of values and the maintenance of sexual monogamy in more advanced cultures for the purpose of best raising children and the transmitting of values.
That's what humans do.
Transmission of language, of religion, of morals, good and evil, of in-group preference, and how to interact, how to, I mean, think of how different it is in Somalia versus Japan, right?
Just in terms of how you negotiate, how you behave, how you act, what's expected, and so on, right?
All of that needs to be transmitted.
So if you are acting as a K-selected creature, and human beings are the ultimate K-selected creatures, if you are acting as an R-selected animal, in other words, you just rut, right?
You just, you go have sex and you don't care about the consequences, you don't have any pair bonding, then you are pursuing the mere physical pleasures when the physical pleasures are there to serve your family and your lineage and your offspring and your tribe and your culture and your history and your ancestors, right?
Sexuality for K-selected creatures is particularly powerful and strong.
And all this oxytocin and the love hormones and pair bonding hormones get released because it's there to ensure a pair bond for the positive transmission of values and the pair bonding over the course of people's lives all the way through to their great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren or however long they live.
And so for humans, sexuality is like an inheritance that you shouldn't squander, right?
So we would recognize that if family wealth has been created by people in the family in the past, like ancestors, who really work hard to provide value in the market, to save their money, to invest wisely, to restrain their spending, all that kind of stuff, right?
Then you end up inheriting $5 million or $2 million or something like that.
And then if you blow that all on yourself, that would be hedonistic because it only exists because other people in the past didn't blow it.
And therefore, for you to blow it is bad.
It's wrong.
And so rabbits create what they consume in a sense, whereas K-selected creatures save and transmit in the long term.
And a hedonism is when you take that which is designed for long-term value and you use it for short-term gratification at the expense of long-term value.
So a woman who sleeps around, as women, women can always sleep around, right?
A woman who sleeps around is taking carnal pleasure in the short term at the direct expense of pair bonding in the long term.
Because she is taking sexuality that is designed to unite and have one flesh in a sense, to unite and to pair bond and to all of that.
She's taking all of that and she is using it for immediate pleasure.
So she's spending the saved up money of her ancestors on her own pleasure, that she's not investing it.
She's not treating it wisely.
She's not showing any self-restraint.
She is taking all the stored up values of her ancestors and she is destroying her capacity to pair bond by seeking pure pleasure in the moment.
So she's taking K-selected values and destroying them on the altar of our selected pleasure.
So the analogy would be that a female wolf simply gets pregnant and then chases away the male wolf and does not teach her cubs how to hunt, does not take them with her hunting, does not teach and doesn't have a male take them hunting.
So then her children, her offspring, her pups, the wolf pups, are crippled and will not survive or have a much lower chance of survival.
And that would be selfish, right?
The equivalent would be a bird that births a bunch of baby birds and then doesn't feed them.
So they just, right?
They just starve.
They just starve to death.
So that would be selfish.
And that would be weeded out of the gene pool in the way that things used to be weeded out of the gene pool.
So, you know, if you sort of think about the Victorian world, then you think of particularly the middle and upper classes.
If there was a young woman who was hedonistic and slept around and so on, then her reputation would be destroyed and men might use her for sex, but they wouldn't marry her, right?
This is the myth from a street guy named Desire when dealing with Blanche Dubois.
He's like, I'm not going to marry you.
I mean, you've basically been the town whore for years and years and you slept with your students.
And now you're making me wait.
You're not clean enough to bring into the house with my mother.
And that's an oof, for sure.
But Blanche Dubois is an example of trauma leading to promiscuity, leading to madness and having to lie about everything.
Hypocrisy.
This is the women who give it out like Halloween candy when they're young and then try to make a man wait when they get older.
It's just not credible.
It's not believable.
And it's kind of insulting, right?
So I'm a better guy, so I have to wait for sex.
And you gave it to worse guys for free.
That's, well, that's kind of a negative experience for men, right?
So hedonism is when you act on animal impulses that are designed for higher and better and longer term values.
And through the pursuit of those merely physical animal impulses, you destroy the higher purpose for which those animal impulses have evolved.
So the pair bonding hormones that are released with human sexual activity are designed to have you stay with your partner forever to raise children with and so on.
And if you then take all of those pair bonding hormones and use it for a wide variety of short-term sexual partners, then you are taking that which is the foundation of long-term value and you are mining and milking it for the sake of short-term pleasure while destroying the long-term value.
So that would be hedonism.
Okay, so I think I've flogged that horse to death three times.
Okay, sorry.
Let's keep moving.
Keep moving.
Move on.
Move on.
Was that a bump on the road?
Just keep driving.
So that would be hedonism.
Now, happiness is sustainable.
Happiness is something that is sustainable.
Happiness is not an addiction because happiness is acting in accordance with reason and virtue.
And acting in accordance with reason and virtue will produce happiness in a sustainable fashion because reason is not self-destructive.
Hedonism is self-destructive, right?
If you take the oxytocin love pair bonding hormones and apply them to a wide variety of sexual partners in a relatively short term frame, short time frame, then you destroy your long-term pair bonding capacity.
So your pursuit of pleasure has destroyed your long-term value.
So, for instance, if you can bench press, I don't know, 350 pounds, right?
I guess you feel good.
You feel like you've done something, you've conquered something, something cool has occurred, right?
So, you have bench pressed 350 pounds.
Now, if you haven't built up to that and you just go to the gym and you try to, let's say you do manage to bench press 350 pounds, but you tear your shoulder muscles, right?
You tear your shoulder to hell, right?
Well, then you can't even scratch your nose, right?
So, you did get your 350 pounds, but you've destroyed your capacity to use your body for quite a considerable period of time.
So, that would be an example of that would be hedonism.
Hey, look, I benched 350, but now I can't scratch my nose and I can't go to the gym for months.
I don't know however long it takes to heal that kind of stuff, right?
So, hedonism is mining pleasures designed for the long term for the very, very short term, which is like, you know, saving money for retirement, right?
If you blow all your money and you have nothing to retire on, that would be hedonistic, right?
Because you've taken excessive pleasure in the present at the expense of survivability, in fact, or certainly pleasure in the long run.
So, reason is not self-contradictory.
Hedonism is self-contradictory.
If you value pleasure, you should also value future pleasure.
Valuing pleasure is a long-term proposition, right?
Otherwise, if the only thing we did was value pleasure and pleasure alone, then we'd have, you know, just go take cocaine or heroin, like don't, right?
But that would be the argument, right?
It just, well, you just pursue that kind of pleasure because the only thing that matters is pleasure, right?
And so, it doesn't matter what happens down the road, right?
It just only matters, and that's our selected, right?
I'm hungry now.
It doesn't matter if we run out of food tomorrow, if the rabbits eat all of the vegetation and we all starve to death, that doesn't matter because I'm hungry now, right?
So, reason, though, is not self-contradictory.
Hedonism is, because if pleasure is a value and we live for a long time, then pleasure should be a value for the long term.
Pleasure is a value now, like I'm 59, pleasure is a value now, and pleasure is also a value when I'm 89.
And so, you need long-term planning for your happiness, right?
So, there's this, you know, the old joke about some guy who's on death row, right?
And he's going to be executed.
He's allowed a last meal.
Does he worry about having too much dessert?
No, because he's about to die, right?
So, his timeframe is gone, right?
There's no time frame.
He only has to live for the now because there is no future.
Well, that's that no.
So, it would be rational, right, in that sense.
But, yeah, pleasure is a long-term value.
And so, we should do things that enhance our pleasure in the long run rather than merely in the short run.
So, we should exercise and eat well because it is important to be healthy a year or 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.
Given that we value health in the here and now, we should also value health in the future.
And therefore, we should exercise and eat well.
That's rational.
Rational is saying that pleasure is a value which is lifelong, and therefore to steal pleasure from the future in order to feed excess happiness in the present is irrational.
Because if you're saying pleasure is a value, then pleasure will be a value when you're older as well.
And you should work to try and maintain reasonable degrees of pleasure in the future as well.
If you enjoy being a healthy weight now, you will enjoy being a healthy weight when you're older, and therefore you should not overeat, right?
So reason equals virtue.
So virtue is acting in a manner consistent with universality and reason, which is why greed is a vice and self-restraint is a virtue.
Because greed is anti-rational.
Because greed is saying the only pleasure is the now, which is true.
I mean, you only experience pleasure in the present.
You might think about pleasure in the future, but you can only experience pleasure directly in the moment, right?
And so greed, which is saying only the pleasure of the moment matters, which is not true, if pleasure is a value, then you need to reasonably prepare for it from a lifelong standpoint.
So when you look at something like moderation, right, you don't want to eat too little or you experience the pain of hunger and it's bad for you as a whole.
You don't want to eat too much because then you experience the discomfort of being obese and all of the limitations that come with that and so on, right?
So you want reasonable compromises in these areas.
So to have moderation is a virtue.
And if you say, well, sexual pleasure is a benefit and you're married and then you cheat, well, then you are actually getting less sexual pleasure as a whole because your marriage is going to be screwed up.
Unless you're in a sexless marriage, which is a whole other issue, right?
If you're in a sexless marriage, then you're in a whole other world of pain and problems.
But we're talking about a generally reasonable and successful marriage.
If you go and cheat on your wife, then, you know, maybe you'll have some sex with your mistress.
Well, you will, I guess what cheating would be.
You'll have some sex with your mistress, but your wife will be very upset with you, angry.
She may divorce you, and then you may not have much sex at all.
Or even if you stay together, she's going to be negative about sexuality for, you know, to some degree for the rest of her marriage with you.
And so that's all bad.
So reason is to moderate the pursuit of pleasure over the course of your life so that you get, I wouldn't say maximum pleasure because who knows what that is.
There's too many uncertainties in life.
I mean, you might forego smoking, but get lung cancer anyway.
I mean, so, but you need to do your reasonable best guesses about best practices to maintain, you know, health and happiness and so on, right?
So happiness is when you take an Aristotelian mean approach to the pursuit of pleasure and virtue.
If you pursue too much virtue, then you'll get killed or ostracized or something like that.
So you want to push the envelope without tearing it in two.
You want to move the Overton window, not be guillotined by the thing right next to the Overton window, right?
Which is social destruction or sometimes even physical destruction, as was found out by Charlie Kirk five or so, five or six weeks ago.
So it's not hedonism to pursue happiness.
Happiness is saying that pleasure is a value and we should work to maximize pleasure in the long run because that's the best way to get the most pleasure out of life.
And an addiction is when we sacrifice our long-term happiness for the sake of short-term pleasure, which is unbefitting to us as human beings because we do have the capacity to pursue maximum pleasure in this life, which is a lot to do with self-restraint and discipline and so on, right?
So I'm going to be 60 next year.
Yes, yes, yes.
I'm going to be 60 next year.
And right now, I can do just about everything that I could do when I was 20.
I mean, I haven't done, obviously, I haven't done the full test, but I still have the same workout now that I had when I was 20.
And I can still do an hour of racket sports.
I can still sprint.
I can still do all of these cool things that I did when I was younger.
And I've hoped to be able to keep that going for the rest of my life.
Now, that requires that I spend, oh, gosh, at least six hours a week working out.
I mean, it's like a part-time job.
It is.
I mean, it is, right?
But I also save time because I don't have to, I don't get injured really, and I don't, oh, I hurt my back or something like that.
So, I mean, it's an investment.
Also, because I eat relatively, in relative moderation, because of that, then I don't have to spend a lot of time shopping and eating in the shopping grocery, cooking, you know, all that.
I don't have to do all of that all the time, right?
Because I'm eating relatively sparsely compared to if I was overeating.
So I save some time that way and all of that.
And, you know, in general, you know, what do I get to listen to music?
I get to think and I enjoy sort of pondering when I'm working out and these sorts of things.
So happiness is different from hedonism.
And I hope that I've explained it in a way that makes sense to you.
If it doesn't, of course, please let me know.
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