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Feb. 5, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:05
Epstein vs the Social Contract!
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Time Text
People Deferring To Evildoers 00:09:23
Hey everybody, Seventh Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well.
So I wanted to just share a couple of thoughts about the Epstein situation because I'm not sure that, sorry, kind of setting.
I'm not sure that people are kind of really processing what's happened or is happening to the social contract because a lot of people are saying, oh, what's the big deal?
You know, there are worse things in the world.
And of course, you can always find worse things in the world.
But this, I think, what is happening, you know, deep down.
I was looking at the plumbing, I was looking at the Dante in depths of what's really going on with people.
And the only way that I can really put it is to say something like, if you, you know, you have a neighborhood, you're friends with your neighbors, and you all hang out together and you have your block parties and your barbecues and your kids hang out together and so on and everybody's, you know, gets along well and so on.
And if Bob, the guy two doors down, gets convicted of sex trafficking a minor, like the reverberations and the shock through the neighborhood, right?
The over-the-fence, God, can you believe it?
I can't believe my kids were over there.
I'm terrified.
This is appalling.
This is horrifying.
You would like the entire neighborhood cohesion would be shattered and no one would have anything to do with Bob, like from that moment forward.
I mean, that's just the way it would work in, I mean, regular old human normie land.
That's how things would work.
And Bob would have to move.
Nobody, like, and everywhere he would go, if people found out about it, nobody would have anything to do with him.
And that's the way things work in the regular world, in the real world, in the world that you and I move in.
And what's incomprehensible to most people is that, so Bob has been convicted of these appalling crimes.
Well, this appalling crime.
And of course, if you dig into it, you find out that there was much more to it.
And how would you feel, right?
How would you feel if in the neighborhood people kept going over to Bob the sex offender's house, bringing their kids over, wanting to go to his, because he's got a pool, right?
Wanting to go and hang out with him by the pool and wanting to have him get them a job or do some kind of favors or invest their money.
What if Bob had been convicted of these terrible crime and everyone just kept hanging out with him?
I mean, maybe they'd go in through the back door, maybe not through the front door, maybe their eyes would be darting.
They'd be a little bit furtive.
But what would it mean to your neighborhood and your sense of community and your sense of cohesion if Bob was convicted of these of this terrible crime?
And nobody cared.
He was still welcome in everyone's houses.
They still would go over and clap him on the back, big hugs, maybe a little furtive, but wouldn't that feel beyond bizarre?
Wouldn't that feel like you lived in hell?
People had absolutely no integrity.
They had no morals, no standards, no virtues at all.
And Bob was still welcome in every house but yours.
And every neighbor would still go over to Bob's house despite all of this and still bring their kids there.
Wouldn't that be kind of shocking?
So this is the sort of the, I think, the real foundational disconnect that's going on with the Epstein stuff, that people are saying in the world that I know, if somebody is convicted of a horrendous sexual crime against a child, and there's evidence of dozens and dozens more, then he would be ostracized.
He would not be welcome in any community that I've ever been a part of.
So what is going on with the people at the top?
What is going on with the elites that they'll make some nods towards, well, you know, this is kind of disapproved of and this seems kind of squidgy.
And like they would make some nods towards that kind of normality or, quote, respectability or what other people would accept, but they don't have a problem with it, really.
They don't have a problem with it.
I'm going to go through all the lists of the names.
I'm too old to be shocked, but I'm still shocked by some of these names of people.
I'm still shocked.
So I think what's happening is people are willing to defer to people in charge.
If those people in charge understand them and want the best for them and they have stuff in common and they inhabit the same moral universe, right?
I think what's happening is people are truly like at a very foundational level recognizing that the people in charge, the people at the top, are foundationally, fundamentally different, opposite alien.
If you had a neighbor, right, Bob gets convicted of terrible crimes, sexual crimes against children, and your neighbor still goes over and brings his kids over.
Ah, he's fine, you know, whatever.
Everybody makes mistakes, right?
You would recognize that you inhabited a completely opposite moral universe, that you had moral standards yourself, i.e. don't go hang out with convicted sex offenders, but your neighbor or neighbors don't.
They don't have that standard.
They're fine with it.
Now, it's one thing if it's your neighbors.
It's a whole other thing if it's people in charge of your entire life.
The statement, and this goes all the way back to Hobbs and like the social contract is, I will surrender my freedoms in order to gain more security, right?
So the social contract is, I will have people in charge so that I gain maximum security, freedom, property rights.
So if nobody's in charge, this is the theory, right?
If nobody's in charge, it's just a war of all against all and nature red in tooth and claw and life is nasty, brutish, violent, and short.
It's warlords.
So I will surrender my rights in order to gain security, in order to have the maximum freedom, the maximum property rights, the maximum security you can get is if you surrender your liberties to people with almost incomprehensible levels of power over you.
That's a social contract.
And that's broken.
I mean, like really at a foundational level, people are getting a very eerie, surreal, break the matrix kind of feeling.
The people up there, like the people in charge, are really, really, really freaking different.
You know, like there's this old sort of trope, like they're tenfoil hack and speak, like, we're ruled by aliens and so on.
But if you're ruled by evildoers, if you're ruled by sociopaths, they can't conceivably have your best interests at heart because they don't have anyone's best interests at heart except their own lust for power.
So when people look and they say, well, I mean, if someone I knew like Epstein, who, you know, may have been a bit quirky, a bit odd, maybe have given a bit of a funky vibe or like something's quite off about him, but, you know, whatever.
Ruled By Evildoers 00:06:28
People are different, eccentric, right?
But if it turned out that he was a predator preying upon innocent children, then you would recoil from that, right?
You would recoil from that.
But they don't.
The people in charge, so many of them, they continue to flock to him and they've no problem with it.
They're fine with it.
Moral leaders, intellectual leaders, political leaders, media leaders, social leaders, like all of the people who claim moral authority.
People who lecture everyone else on how the world should be and what's right and what's moral and all of that, like the Chomskys and the Summoners and so on, right?
The Summers.
So Larry, not Gordon.
So recognizing that these moralists are corrupt beyond words and don't care and don't notice and just blithely sail on associating with absolutely, unquestionably, hideously repulsive and evil people and no issues with it whatsoever.
Well, what that means is that the ruled and the rulers inhabit absolutely opposite moral universes.
They do not speak the same language.
I mean, imagine if you had a ruler, somebody ruled over you.
Sorry, bit redundant.
You have a ruler who you think speaks your language, but it turns out he doesn't speak your language.
He's like some actor who's just learned how to mouth certain words, right?
Like actors who pretend to speak Japanese or Russian or whatever it is or Mandarin.
They just learn how to mouth a certain series of words.
They don't actually speak the language, right?
So if you have a ruler over you and you say, okay, well, but at least he understands me.
He wants the best for me.
He wants to rule me with some sort of benevolent virtue or morality.
But it turns out that he doesn't even speak the same language you do.
Would you think that democracy made sense?
Would you think that voting and political promises and all of that, would you think any of that made sense if he literally doesn't understand what you're saying?
That you're just like, Months are babbling noise to him, then you would understand that he can't rule over you because he doesn't even understand your concerns.
He doesn't speak your language.
But the same thing with morals.
If the morals that you and I, and people that we know, manifest and inhabit as self-evident, but the people in charge, the elites, the self-appointed or government-appointed arbiters of moral discourse and virtue and good inhabit an opposite moral universe in that you have a moral universe, however instinctive it might be.
It may not be philosophical, it may be usually for most people it's instinctive or biblical or religious or whatever.
But the people in charge, they don't recognize, inhabit, or obey those moral physics, that moral universe at all.
At all.
They'll mouth moral language in the same way an actor would mouth a language, but he doesn't speak the language.
Then that's it, man.
That contract is broken.
Like we give people awesome power over us, debt, taxation, foreign policy, infinite laws, regulations.
We give people almost infinite power over us on the assumption that they're going to use it for good.
And when a real crack appears, a real crack appears, this is a foundational crack in the social contract.
When a foundational crack appears, and people say, the power that we have surrendered to people in the hopes of protecting property and freedom, we surrendered our power to amoral power mongers who do not even remotely recognize the virtues that we recognize as good, reasonable, and true, such as, I mean,
this is a basic moral thing, don't hang out with and ask for favors from convicted child sex offenders.
That's not a subtle Aristotelian mean moral distinction of the, well, it's a little too much courage, it's foolhardy.
Well, it's a little too little courage, it's cowardice.
No, there's not a complicated one.
There's not a complicated one.
And I think people are processing this at a sort of very deep level, and it's very disorienting for people.
I mean, they want to shy away from this knowledge because it's incredibly painful to have been bamboozled in this kind of way, to have been lied to in this kind of way.
And now, of course, what we do is we look all the way back through time, through history, to all the people who have been moral authorities in the past and say, really, are they?
Or were they just serving and justifying the use of infinite power by generalized predatory sociopaths?
Well, people are waking up to what voluntarists have known for decades.
The people who want power are not like you and I. They're not even close.
They're as opposite as opposite can be.
The opposite of a good person is not an evil person.
It's an amoral person.
And people are getting that's what we're ruled by.
People who do not even recognize any of the same moral realities that you and I inhabit on a daily basis.
They're absolute opposites, completely different, entirely alien, foreigners, not just to the country of morality, but to the entire universe of moral physics.
They are self-deluded magicians, forever chewing on the jugular of Human productivity.
Alien In Charge 00:00:12
They are different.
They are opposite.
They are alien.
And they are in charge.
And they do not speak our language.
They do not have our best interests at heart.
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