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Jan. 21, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:44
OnlyFans and the Paradox of Tolerance!
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People Coming to Adulthood Exhausted 00:12:05
Hey everybody, it's Defen Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well.
A couple of great questions.
We're going to talk about the paradox of tolerance in a moment.
So somebody wrote to me and said, the free market determines economic value, not moral value.
OnlyFans content has immense economic value to certain audiences, while morally it has negative value as it encourages and incentivizes degeneracy.
Meanwhile, for peaceful parenting UPB, it's the reverse.
It has great moral value, but relatively few people are willing to donate to Free Domain currently.
So if you're correct in an economic context that OnlyFans is more valuable, so you're correct in an economic context that OnlyFans is more valuable, that you fail to see a distinction with moral value is a bit troubling to people who are troubled.
I understand.
I understand.
So there are always going to be people in the world who offer easy shortcuts or the avoidance of strife.
Life is battle.
And we have this sort of Elysium Fields dream of peace, but I mean, at the moment, life is battle.
I like to eat sweet things, so I have to say no to sugar all the time.
I never feel full when I eat, so I have to say no to eating.
There's times I don't want to work out, so I have to say yes to working out.
There are times when my daughter wants to go to bargaining at 10 o'clock at night when it's minus 15 out.
It wouldn't be my first choice.
I wouldn't do it if I wasn't a parent, but I go and do it.
It's not like there's some big battle.
I mean, I ended up having fun and I'm glad that I did it, but it wouldn't be my choice.
So life is battle.
There are bad people constantly wanting to do bad things in the world.
And we constantly, we battle aging.
Life is just a combat.
And so there are always people out there, though, who want to give you the soft and easy way out.
The less controversial, the less frightening, the less requiring of courage and integrity.
The people who try to give you, I mean, I remember there was a Berkeley breed, it's an odd name.
He had a cartoon, comic strip sort of many years ago, called Bloom County.
And in it, there was a penguin who was trying to lose weight.
I sort of remembered this.
And he said something like, you know, I'm going on the all-avocado and seed oil diet and blah, And somebody was like, well, why don't you just eat less and exercise more?
No, no, no, no.
I've got a magic diet that's going to solve all of my problems.
Now, the reason why people want the easy out usually is that childhood is supposed to charge you up, right?
It is supposed to give you love, a base, consistency, clarity, energy, self-respect, good decisions.
That's what childhood is supposed to be like.
I mean, I remember when I was in theater school, there was a fellow there who wanted to be a director.
I mean, he was pretty talented myself.
I think he was pretty talented.
And I remember we were all sitting around at lunch and I can't remember how the topic came up, but I remember him saying to the group, he said, you know, my parents have always said to me, go out and throw yourself at the world and pursue that which you're most passionate at.
If it works out great.
If it doesn't work, we'll always be a soft place to land.
Of course, there'll always be a room for you to sleep in.
You'll always have food.
We'll always care about what you do.
So he had a very, very sort of secure base from which to go out into life.
And so childhood is supposed to be a time where you get energized and filled with, my father used to call them resources.
Resource.
I'm out of resources.
I'm depressed.
I'm low on resources.
But childhood is supposed to fill you up with a strong sense of self, with a sense of virtue and the reward for a just energy spent, just energy spent in a good cause.
So childhood is a time of charging up.
And then, you know, the battles over the course of your life require energy.
They will expend energy.
And so if you come to adulthood brimming over with energy and positivity, you know, the most popular people in the world tend to be those who like others the most, who have the longest list of people they like.
And so if you're so so, so if you start life with a good childhood, then your life is you are you're charged up and then you have a lot of energy and it will get depleted over life as difficult people come along, as governments do bad things, as you face obstacles, both accidental, just and unjust, you will have challenges to overcome, but you're charged up.
Your battery never goes below 50% because you're severely charged up or seriously charged up from your childhood.
Now, one of the problems that's happening these days is people, children, they enter into adulthood exhausted because they've had too much adversity, too little love, too much propaganda, particularly for white boys.
Too much propaganda has caused them to feel hunted and negative about themselves, their history, their culture, their countries, and so on.
And so, and this is all sort of by design.
So, by the time you get to adulthood, you are already kind of drained by the excessive hostility, propaganda, adversities, neglect, and abuse that you have experienced.
Over the course of your life, one of the things that charges people up most in their whole life is, you know, the first 18 months to two years, you know, nestled in the arms of their loving parents, the mother breastfeeding, eye contact, you know, people who take delight in your existence and enjoy your company and look forward to seeing you and so on.
That charges you up with a sort of positive view of yourself.
So, one of the challenges that's really happening in society at the moment is, and again, this is not accidental, people are coming to adulthood already exhausted.
They're not physically strong.
They're not mentally resilient.
And I don't mean this in any negative way.
I'm not saying that people are weak or anything like that at all.
I mean, if you, you know, if you get the flu and you lie in bed, you're not a weak person.
You're just, you know, under attack and your body is conserving energy in order to fight the illness and also to make sure you don't infect others or to try and help you not infect others.
I mean, one of the things that's kind of funny is that we're really not designed for this many illnesses, right?
So if you're a kid and you go to daycare, like I, because I worked in a daycare, as you probably know, for years, and if you go to a daycare, I mean, you're sick at least half the time.
And then it comes to your family and then everyone else gets sick and then they get it.
And so we're really not designed to be out there among strangers for eight hours a day when we're a year or two or three.
So one of the reasons that people grow up tired is that they've just had too much adversity.
I mean, there's tons of things, but these are sort of a couple of the major things.
You're tired as well because you get ridiculous amounts of labor.
You know, it's funny because people are, oh, child labor is so bad.
Child labor is so bad.
Well, you work in school and then you come home and you have an hour or two or more of homework at night.
That is hard intellectual labor and it's often boring and unpleasant and pointless and so on because people forget like 97% of everything they learn in school.
So it's all just a complete waste of time and the consumption of childhood.
So you have those battles.
If you grow up with a single mother, particularly if you're a boy, then you have generally a battle to do risky things because your single mother is nervous and as women tend to be about injuries, but without a man, a father to say, yeah, let him try it.
It'll be fine, blah, blah, blah, right?
I mean, so long story short, we grow up and enter into adulthood.
We're kind of worn out these days.
We're tired.
Because it's one, what is it?
One battle after another.
That's a movie title of a movie that came out recently.
You're just tired.
You don't have a stable base.
You don't have a stable sense of self.
You're not usually physically energetic and fit.
You may not have the kind of social circle that you want because teenagers are socializing less and less.
And it's harder and harder to organize things with people because it's, you know, with video games and Netflix and chill or whatever, it's just so comfortable to be at home.
One of the reasons that my friends and I would just go out roaming the neighborhood and the woods and we'd pick up dented cans of beans, hammer them open with a rock and cook them in the woods, because it was just boring at home.
There was like nothing on TV.
Video games were very primitive.
And before that, of course, until I was like 12, really didn't have much access to video games at all.
And then the ones that we had were kind of boring and primitive.
There was no internet and we didn't even have a VCR.
Couldn't watch movies on demand and so on.
So there's nothing to do at home after you read books and done your thing, right?
So we would go roam.
Whereas being home now is super comfortable.
The houses are nicer.
The entertainment is better.
And you can simulate social activities by headset and Call of Duty.
So kids are growing up.
And then, of course, you're exhausted.
And then you go to university and you are lectured about your privilege and how your ancestors stole everything and how your culture is sexist and racist and misogynistic.
And you just get attacked and abused and undermined and it just wears people down.
I mean, if you've ever been in a relationship with a lot of verbal abuse, it just wears you down.
It just wears you down and eventually it wears you out.
So my point is that people are tired and worn out.
And so this is one of the things I assume, something like OnlyFans is, well, I want to be in the company, court company of an attractive woman and I want to get some sexual satisfaction.
So, oh, I'm tired.
Like, I'll just do this.
It's easier, it's whatever it is, 10 bucks a month, 5 bucks a month, 20 bucks, whatever, I don't know, whatever people pay, right?
And it's just easier.
And it's easier to take a pill, psychotropics, SSRIs, it's easier to take a pill than to realize how distorted and degenerate your society is and how bad your family might have been and so on, right?
Tired of Rationality Denial 00:04:43
It's easier to take as empic than it is to lose weight, even though a lot of the weight that you lose is actually muscle mass, which I'm not a doctor, but I don't think that's ideal.
So people are just worn out.
They're worn out from trying to find jobs.
They're worn out from an educational system that constantly opposes every scintilla of rational thought and objectivity.
This guy said every he said in my philosophy, in my university philosophy class, I try and experiment.
Every semester I write a pro-free market essay and every semester I write a pro-communist essay using the same skill set.
The pro-free market essay gets marked really badly.
The pro-communist essay gets marked really well.
And boys like meritocracy.
Socialism is something like this estrogen wave that drowns testosterone and removes testicles because socialism is everybody's got to be safe and nice and taken care of and you can't do much better than anybody else.
There's no such thing as a meritocracy or if there is, it's bad.
And so this goop of everyone's the same is really, really horrible.
Girls like to play games with no clear winner and losers, right?
Like, I mean, the Barbie stuff and, you know, I'm running a grocery store.
It's all, it's fun.
It's nothing wrong with it, but it's not, whereas boys are like, who win?
Who won?
And boys will instinctively raise the stakes.
Okay, you know, this next game is for the championship of the entire universe.
And, you know, we just, I mean, I live with two delightful females and one of the sort of jokes is we'll sit down to play a game and I'll say, okay, what are we playing for?
Hey, let's play for what we do next.
You know, I just need some stakes.
I need, you know, and they're fine, whatever.
And both perspectives are fine, but no winners and losers.
No, we are the champions.
No, being carried on other boys' shoulders because you made a great play.
You just won out.
Just one out.
So people want easier answers because they're tired.
Because they're tired.
And the exhaustion of having an entire system that insistently, eternally, and aggressively resists every single one of your natural feelings of pride and win-lose and meritocracy and excellence and so on.
And lies to you continually, right?
Everything that happens in modern society is an assault on reason and evidence.
And I mean, I remember when I was in, I went to three different universities.
Well, I guess four post-secondary theater school, York University, McGill University, and the University of Toronto where I did my graduate degree.
And fighting for, I mean, not just for the free market, just fighting for objective rationality was a wild, bitter battle.
I mean, I threw myself into it and I definitely had some impact, but it's tiring.
It's tiring to keep having to explain the basics to people.
It's tiring to people who give you objective marks but tell you that there's no such thing as objective facts.
Like it's just tiring to keep pointing out these inconsistencies.
It's tiring to challenge those with no reason who have power over you.
Because if they have power over you, but they surrender to reason, then you can make your case, right?
I mean, a math teacher Who has power over you because they can give you their grade, your grades, but you have a proven mathematical you have a way of solving a problem mathematically and it's proven and they can't deny the logic, they have to mark you well.
And if they don't mark you well, even that you can go to their superiors and someone's going to say, Yes, that is a valid proof, and you should be marked well.
Maybe it could be better or different or whatever, but you can't be marked as a failure if you've actually proved it.
The same thing should be true, of course, in philosophy, but it's not.
It's not so it's exhausting when people have power over you, claim to be rational, apply objective metrics, but then deny rationality and objectivity.
It's tiring.
It's like, you know, I was trained for this battle because one of the reasons I ended up hyperrational was my mother was, I mean, like literally insane.
Men Transmit Culture 00:07:04
She went insane.
She was institutionalized.
But if you've been around crazy people, they can't just be content to sit in a corner and be crazy.
They will grab your face and they will wretch their craziness down your throat.
They will try to infect you.
They will try that.
It's like an anti-empirical demon that tries to inhabit and possess and take you over.
The crazy people will try to make you crazy.
It's a virus that spreads.
So that battle for like my entire childhood finally kicked my mom out when I was 15, started paying my own bills with roommates.
I had like two or three jobs at times.
So, you know, I became hyper-rational because that was, you know, if people keep throwing daggers at you, you get pretty good at dodging daggers, right?
So I had that sort of experience, but it's tiring.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to lie.
So people taking the easy way out, you know, that's because they're tired.
You know, if you're really exhausted and you've got a big heavy backpack on and you're walking down the sidewalk in the snow, it's uphill, and a friend pulls over, hey, can I, I'm heading your way, let me give you a lift.
You're like, oh, thank God, put your backpack.
Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, right?
Because you're tired.
So when you're tired, you want something easy and you want easy food.
I guess you want easy sexual satisfaction through OnlyFans or something like that.
You want easy weight loss.
You want easy entertainment.
So you'll put up, you'll put on some whatever of a programmed brain slop.
You'll doom scroll.
You'll scroll through.
You just need a distraction from yourself.
You're just tired.
And you don't want to have kids because you're tired.
And you're tired also from looking for work, particularly as a white male when people aren't hiring white males.
You just, you're tired.
If we have a society that's free, then we have the resources for parents to stay home with their children.
If peaceful parenting becomes more of a thing, we have that.
And we end up with people who enter into life with energy and confidence and a feeling that they're, you know, what tires people out the most is when you work hard and rationally at things, but you can't succeed.
That's when people get the most tired.
And that is where people are.
When your will has traction, you know, if you've ever been in the snow and your wheels are just spinning, or it can happen in the mud too.
So people are trying to affect will.
They're trying to affect things.
They're trying to make things happen.
Things don't happen.
And after a while, you just feel like your will has no connection to reality.
And then your will begins to atrophy because will is a muscle.
I mean, if I just did this all day with no weights, it would be pretty hard to gain any muscles.
And so your will needs to have contact interaction with reality and make things actually happen and change.
And thwarting the will causes people's motors to burn out.
They spin their wheels until their motors burn out and then they're tired.
So sorry, that's kind of a long explanation, but I don't think that would be as big an issue in a free society.
Is there something that modern women have taught us that's important?
Well, I'm going to think about that.
It's a great question.
I'm going to think about that.
Women in general, men create culture, women transmit culture.
That's sort of been the history of the world.
And so women receive information and transmit it on.
And when, in a free society, a relatively free society, when the men within that society are in general creating the culture and transmitting the culture to women, then women transmit the culture to children.
Women are the essential link in the chain.
Women are why men create culture because women transmit that culture to offspring.
Again, a big generality, but that's generally the case.
Let me just use the word generally again.
I'm sure that will help clear things up.
So what's happened is instead of receiving culture from men, women are now receiving propaganda from the state.
And they are then spreading and inflicting that propaganda on others, which is why women have gone hugely leftist while men have stayed about the same.
So talk about this radicalization of men towards the right.
No.
Men have stayed pretty much the same in terms of their beliefs, but women have gone super hard left.
Like, I mean, especially in South Korea.
But women have gone super hard left because women are no longer getting propaganda.
Sorry, women are no longer getting culture from men, and there are propagandistic elements to it, but they're getting pure propaganda for the state.
They are absorbing it.
And women are now interested in pleasing other women rather than pleasing men because they get their resources from the state.
They get their jobs from the state.
They get their healthcare from the state.
Their kids get educated by the state.
They often get subsidies, welfare, old age pensions, you name it, from the state.
And so women will tend to orient themselves like sort of salmon in a swift current.
Women will tend to orient themselves towards the source of their resources.
That's how women listen to men and transmit culture to their children.
Now women are getting their resources from the state, so they are listening to the state and transmitting woke stuff to their children.
So that the power of the state to provide resources realigns the loyalties of women and has women absorb, amplify, and transmit the propaganda that they receive.
So it's quite tragic.
Hey, Steph, my question is on necessary evil.
Is there such a thing?
My thoughts are: evil is the unwanted use of force against you.
But say you push someone out of the way from getting hit by a car, that is preferable to getting hit by the car, even though unwanted force was used.
Well, this is the beautiful thing about universally preferable behavior, which means independent of time and place.
So force is unwanted if it remains unwanted.
But if you grab someone and pull them back, is that using force?
No, it's not.
Because it doesn't matter if they agree ahead of time or after the fact.
That doesn't matter.
Is grabbing someone and wrestling with them and yanking and pulling at their stomach aggression?
Paradox of Tolerance 00:10:19
Yeah, I guess.
Except no.
Because if they're got a food lodge in their throat into doing the Heimlich maneuver, I actually interviewed the daughter of the guy who made the Heimlich maneuver, Janet Heimlich.
It was a great interview.
You can find it at fdrpodcast.com.
But if you're doing the Heimlich maneuver and you save their life, they will say thank you.
Is stabbing someone in the throat violence?
No, not if they need an emergency tracheotomy because they're dying and you need to give them air.
They'll thank you afterwards.
So it's not violence if it's approved after the fact.
Right?
So when I was six, I went to visit my father in Africa.
We went to the Victoria Falls and I was leaning over to look down how far the falls went.
And I suppose I was doing something a bit dangerously because a woman came up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders and pretended to push me and she said, stand back from the ledge.
Now, that was a little aggressive, obviously.
Maybe there's other ways that could have been communicated.
But nonetheless, I didn't go near ledges after that, right?
So I guess I have something to thank her for.
And of course, if I'd fallen, I would have died.
So good job.
Thank you.
So it's not violence.
So you say it is unwanted force.
It's not unwanted force if you approve of it after the fact.
It doesn't really matter.
Now, another thing I wanted to mention, which we'll touch on in more detail another time, the paradox of tolerance.
Somebody was asking me about sort of the paradox of tolerance.
So the paradox of tolerance is, let's say, you have a society where people are tolerant of disagreements, people are tolerant of different opinions and perspectives and so on.
And then you come along, along come people who are intolerant of other people's perspectives.
And if you're tolerant, can you be tolerant of intolerance?
And if you are tolerant of intolerance, then the intolerant people are going to gain more power and then they're going to remove tolerance from your society.
And therefore, you cannot tolerate the intolerant if you wish to retain tolerance in a society.
You know, this is one of these things where you repeat the word so often it starts to sound like Klingon or some sort of foreign utterance.
It's all, this came out of Karl Popper, I think in the post-war period.
This is all complete nonsense.
Sorry to be annoying.
Sorry to be, oh, it's just nonsense.
But absolute nonsense.
What does it mean to be tolerant?
What does it mean to be tolerant?
Tolerance is a virtue to the slave because the slave cannot will what he wants.
It's really nothing more complicated than that.
So tolerance is used for things like hate speech laws and so on.
They say, oh, this person is being intolerant and therefore we can act again.
We can ban them.
Like I suffered from this very mechanic myself when I was saying things that people didn't like.
I wasn't being intolerant.
I was simply quoting facts, reason, evidence, and arguments.
But people said they applied the label of intolerant to me, of racist or sexist or whatever, right?
So they applied this label to me and that allowed them to be intolerant of facts, reason, evidence, and arguments.
So it's complete bullshit, this idea of, well, we can't tolerate the intolerant.
Because all that happens is that people who want to push their agenda get into positions of power and then they label people as intolerant and then ban them.
All of your rules, everything you come up with that people are supposed to do, that is the better path.
That is the right thing to do.
Every aggressive system you set up will be inhabited by power-hungry sociopaths with no particular conscience and an infinite ability to lie without troubling themselves at all.
I mean, if you've ever been around real liars, like the people who lie for a living, the people who lie without a single shred of conscience, who can pass lie detector tests even though they're lying through their ass, people who lie with a straight face and a big smile and no disturbance in their vision and no tremulous in their voice, you know, looking you hand on the shoulder earnestly, eye contact, deep and serious, like absolute pathological, soulless liars.
They'll be the people in charge of whatever system you come up with.
And so this idea, well, we can't tolerate the intolerant, well, all that'll happen is people who want to push their agenda will label other people as intolerant and use that power to silence them.
It's all complete fantastical bullshit.
Every philosopher or thinker of any kind who doesn't take into account the infinite power of human evil when designing a system is corrupt and evil to the fucking core.
Absolute, sorry for the language, but absolute stone-deluded, bleeding heart, eye-gouging, syllable-throat-slashing fucking assholes who set up all of these systems to deal with human evil and never ever once answer the simple fucking question, which is, hey, so there's lots of evil people out there.
Oh, how does your system handle it when evil people take it over?
Huh?
How?
Because they will.
You fucking idiots.
They will.
Every single fucking time.
Whatever system you put into place, evil people will gravitate to running it.
And then what?
And then this is why I'm a voluntarist.
Human beings cannot handle power.
Power either makes people evil, or if power exists, evil people will be drawn to control it.
Human beings cannot handle political power.
Human beings cannot handle the power of the state.
Well, we have a paradox of tolerance and intolerance, so we can't tolerate the intolerant.
Blah, we're going to lose the value of tolerance.
Okay, what happens?
You set up a system to ostracize, jail, or silence those called intolerant.
What happens when evil, intolerant people get a hold of that power?
It's so genuinely, fundamentally, I don't fucking get it.
Maybe I'm just missing something obvious.
I'm happy to have it explained to me.
I've been studying this stuff for 45 years.
Doesn't mean I'm right about everything, of course.
But, well, we have to have these systems in place, you see, so that we can ostracize, silent, and punish and jail the intolerant.
It's like, okay.
So let's say there are intolerant people and society says, well, there's this big giant lever to eject intolerant people into space.
Okay, so what are intolerant people going to do?
Well, they're going to get a hold of that lever and use it to punish their enemies.
They will call them intolerant.
So they'll just silence them that way.
Having gone through it myself, I take it pretty fucking personally when people talk about these abstract systems as if they're going to run on their own.
You know, these laws, they're going to run.
It's like physics.
You know, it's like you get a machine, an engine, but you start it up.
It just runs on its own.
There are no people involved.
There's no human corruption.
There's no evil.
There's no conflict of interest.
Bad people are never going to take a hold of this system in order to punish their enemies and reward their friends.
And like there's this system.
Oh, we have to have a system whereby the intolerant are punished so that we can obtain the value of tolerance.
Okay, who the fuck is going to be running that system, bro?
Who is going to be, sorry, it's just so bizarre that people think about this at all.
Who's going to be running that system?
People.
Can people be intolerant?
Well, yes, that's why we need the system in the first place.
Okay, so if people are being punished for being intolerant, the intolerant people are going to get a hold of that system and use it to punish everyone else.
How do you stop that?
Democracy?
And I don't know much.
I've not read.
all of Karl Popper's works, of course, right?
But I wonder if Karl Popper ever said, well, we can't have government schools because that is intolerant of people who don't want to send their kids to government schools, forcing people to pay for government schools.
See, we can't have government schools because that's intolerant of people who don't want to send their kids to government schools or want alternate forms of education.
I bet he never said that shit.
How about, well, we can't have the welfare stage, you see, because that's intolerant of people who want private charity.
We're forcing people to fund a particular kind of education, an old age pension and charity.
And we can't have a taxation because that's intolerant of people who want to spend their money in different ways.
Nope.
I bet you he never said a single syllable of that stuff, which would be perfectly in alignment with his philosophy.
But nope, his philosophy was proposed and then governments use it to murder free speech in the public square.
String people up, isolate them, degrade their reputations, harm their families, destroy their incomes.
And I don't know.
Did Karl Popper ever say?
Ooh, you know what?
That's true.
I'm saying there are really bad people in society, so we should have this coercive mechanisms to harm the bad people.
Ooh, what happens if the bad people get a hold of those coercive mechanisms?
Ha!
I wonder if that's a fucking problem we should think about.
Nope.
No, no.
Anyway.
Yeah, paradox of tolerance.
It's just an excuse used by assholes to silence those they dislike or disagree with or interfere with their evil plans.
So predictable.
And yet these people are held on high as these wonderful, magical, genius philosophers.
Bullshit.
You're just useful toadies for the blood-soaked ring fingers of the infinite kings.
Fuck them all.
Freedomaine.com slash today to help out the show.
Thank you so much for your time today.
Look forward to more questions.
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