Feb. 11, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:44
Why is It So Hard to Fix Relationships?
Stéphane Molyneux examines how humans’ tribal conformity clashes with truth-seeking, shaping relationships, parenting, and societal structures. He ties lasting happiness to rejecting aggression and hypocrisy while acknowledging that dissent risks abandonment—even from dysfunctional kin. Wealth historically insulated iconoclasts, but poverty forces reliance on tribal resources over integrity. Morality often masks vice, like propaganda’s manipulation of virtue to control populations. The episode suggests fixing relationships demands overcoming deep-seated survival instincts, where truth-telling signals status but conformity guarantees survival, leaving individuals trapped between personal growth and societal rejection. [Automatically generated summary]
This is Stéphane Molyneux from Freedomain, Freedomain.com slash donate, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Really, really would appreciate it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And we are getting AI to, again, give me the most important questions that you have as listeners and do my best to answer those.
And so we've done sort of virtue and UPB as a whole.
The other one, of course, is making poor decisions in relationships, parenting, economics, or society because they lack a rational moral compass.
AI says, you tie real lasting happiness, eudaimonia, eudaimonia, in the Aristotelian sense you reference to pursuing virtue, rational ethics, truth-seeking responsibility, and rejecting aggression or hypocrisy.
Answering this question honestly forces listeners to confront their childhood programming, family dynamics, excuses, and inconsistencies, leading to separating from toxic relationships, embraceful abuse from parenting, rejecting statism, and building better lives.
So, yeah, how do you know what is true or right or good?
Why should anything exist or is morality objective?
These questions are crucial, but they serve this primary one.
It cuts through everything, epistemology, morality, relationships, politics, and personal growth.
When listeners answer it with clarity and courage, the rest of philosophy becomes actionable rather than abstract.
If your show's aim to wake people up and help them build virtuous, rational lives, this is the question that unlocks everything else for them.
What do you want?
And are you willing to live by the principles that make it possible?
Right.
So poor decisions in relationships is kind of like very complicated and very simple.
The complicated isn't how it manifests.
The simple is the principle that because we are social animals, which gives us access to philosophy, social animals develop language and concepts and writing and so on.
Because we are social animals, this gives us access to philosophy.
However, as social animals, we rely upon the tribe to survive.
And these two tensions are really at the heart of why philosophy and virtue is so difficult in the world as it is.
So we want the truth and we want to survive.
We have access to philosophy because we are social animals, but as social animals, we need the approval of the tribe in order to survive.
That which liberates us from arbitrary power, which is philosophy and virtue, also is a product of language.
Language is a product of that which enslaves us to arbitrary power, which is our need for the approval of the tribe and the protection of the tribe in order to survive.
That which feeds us also starves us.
And this is really at the heart of why philosophy is so challenging as a whole.
We have access to philosophy because we are social animals.
As social animals, we are subjugated to the approval of the tribe.
And it is this tension between wanting the truth, needing the truth, and being barred from the truth by social approval that is really at the heart of these kinds of tensions.
Philosophy is foundationally individualistic in that philosophy accepts that it is in the power of every sovereign mind to pursue and determine the truth.
However, society, as it has evolved, is tribalistic and collectivist.
We can see this sort of happening in the West, where whites who tend to be individualistic are losing out in identity politics or group politics to those who are more collectivist.
Now, of course, whites are barred from self-organizing through a variety of legal and deplatforming and socially punitive measures.
But if you look at sort of two tribes, the Hatfields and the McCoys, if you think that the Hatfields are largely individualistic and the McCoys are largely collectivist, in other words,
the individual is less important than the success or survival of the group and in particular its leaders, then the Hatfields are going to have a tough time organizing to repel the collectivist and warrior-subjugated and therefore focused on the will of the rulers attitudes and actions of the McCoys.
Individualistic societies, when there's a government in particular, and I talk about this in my novel, The Future, which you should definitely check out at freedomain.com slash books.
But individualistic societies have a challenge relative to collectivist societies throughout most of our evolution.
If you have a hundred warriors who have all given up their individuality for the sake of being ordered around by a leader, then those 100 warriors will do a lot of damage to largely individualistic societies.
Now, of course, individualistic societies also generally have creativity and technological advancements and so on.
So it doesn't do very much good to the collectivist society that may be stuck in an earlier form of warfare.
Let's just take an example.
How well does knights on horseback, how well do knights on horseback do against a machine gun?
And a machine gun is generally developed by more individualistic and free market societies.
So there is a span of danger, though, when individualism takes root in a society, then central cohesiveness and subjugation to the will of the leader is diminished.
And of course, it takes a while to develop good warfare technology.
And during that timeframe, it is easy for the individualistic tribe to be conquered by the more collectivist tribe because I remember when I used to play a game called Unreal Tournament, there was a sort of very famous and great map called Facing Worlds, which was two towers on each end of a kind of half bridge of stone.
And the game was captured the flag.
And I remember a friend of mine that I played with, it's a guy I worked with, he would sort of make jokes about how if you were playing against an opposing team, we played in the same office.
We would sometimes play after work or if we were in working on weekends.
So what happened is we would be playing and we would be coordinating because we'd be in the same room.
There may be three or four of us on the team and we'd all be calling out, I'm going here, I'm doing this, I'm doing that.
And we could always tell, we played on a server called GWARS, G-W-A-R-S, and we could always tell when the other team was playing solo in that they would all be doing kind of random things.
They weren't coordinated.
And I remember a friend of mine joking and saying that they're all acting kind of randomly and in an uncoordinated fashion.
And because we are talking to each other and making plans, what they see is kind of like this Roman phalanx coming over the stone bridge towards their tower to get their flag, like everything's well coordinated.
You go up here, I'll do that, we'll go together, that kind of stuff.
And if you have, you know, a bunch of tribes in the same location, one tribe becomes more individualistic.
Bunch of Tribes Transitioning00:02:36
Yeah, if they can survive, then they get better technology.
But there is a time of danger when the other tribe says, oh, these guys don't have a central ruler.
They don't have a collectivist society where you have fanatical warriors willing to lay their life down for the tribe of the cause.
Therefore, we can take them over.
And that's a big challenge.
It's a big challenge.
And of course, it's fine if you don't have a state sort of in the modern context.
But given that we do, that is a challenge.
And of course, the value of individualism, which is thinking for yourself, individualism allows many more problems to be, many more solutions to be brought to bear on a problem.
So if you think of something like the Manhattan Project, you have a bunch of iconoclastic, individualistic people getting together to solve the problem of splitting the atom and creating an atomic bomb, then you are going to solve the problem much more quickly and much more efficiently if you have a bunch of individualists arguing back and forth and pushing forward their own ideas, as long as there's a framework called science,
where there's sort of an objective metric for determining who's more or less accurate in their formulations.
So individualists advance technology because the debate and the argument, assuming a common framework like science or math or the free market, produces massive gains as a whole, massive advancements.
If you have collectivism where the leader really can't be questioned and can't be opposed, and you have a bunch of blank-faced yes, sir, soldiers who would never imagine barking disagreement up the chain of command, then you have those kinds of issues.
I mean, one of the reasons why, I talked about this in my documentary on Hong Kong, one of the reasons why the Chinese lost against the Europeans, well, first of all, the Chinese emperor didn't like the boat idea, didn't like sort of big boats.
And so he had all the big boats destroyed and then had the family and everyone who knew about the big boats all killed and thrown at the ground and the earth assaulted over their graves and so on.
So nobody did any of that sort of stuff.
And the other thing that happened was when the British were making advancements upriver, everyone was too terrified to tell the emperor because he would shoot the messenger or get mad.
And so everyone pretended things were going better.
Why Women Enforce Conformity00:15:02
And so in that case, a more individualistic society where you're allowed to disagree with those in charge had advancements over the more collectivist society.
So, you know, there are definitely advantages both ways.
But in the short term, all technology being equal, the collectivist society will tend to dominate the more individualistic society.
There's sort of a passage of individualism that you have to go through, which is one of the reasons why individualism arose in places like England and America where there was not any immediate invaders because you had the channel and so on, right?
I mean, I know that the Normans invaded in 1066.
One of my ancestors was there, in fact.
But that's sort of the tension that we face, that we want to get along with the crowd.
We want to get along with the group.
We don't want to stick out and be too eccentric or too oppositional or too weird or too different and so on, which is why the sobriquet, they often come through women, like, you know, the sort of famous, it gives me like a generational ick.
You know, there's these sort of mocking or somewhat despairing, somewhat mocking memes where, you know, things that give women the ick, you know, and there's this endless list of hundreds and hundreds of items of things that give women the ick.
And this is why women tend to enforce conformity among men.
And this is another reason why society doesn't advance as fast as it should, because men who are more iconoclastic or eccentric or different or oppositional, women don't like them as much.
And so those genes tend to die out and conformity tends to be rewarded by women as a whole, which is why leftist women won't sleep with conservative men and conservative men are warning other men about leftist women and so on.
Because in general, women tend to reward conformity.
And that's not a criticism of women.
That's a natural fact of the reality that it takes us a quarter century to brain mature.
And so you just need the support of other women.
If you have five, six, seven children running around a dangerous sort of campsite with beasts and dangers and cliffs and like you need other women to watch your kids.
And if you are ostracized, you really can't survive very well.
Your genes have a they get really hobbled when it comes to reproduction.
So women do need the approval of other women, which is why the mean girls phenomenon tends to be so powerful.
And so men are much more accepting of disagreements because men have a specific task that skill ensures or greatly increases your chance of success.
So when men are out hunting and there's an argument, I think that the prey went this way.
No, I think the prey went that way.
Then those disagreements are essential because you've got to figure out where the prey went.
Or I think danger is coming from over that hill.
I think danger is not coming over that hill or it's coming over some other hill.
You have to get that stuff right because you want to lie in wait and you want to ambush whoever's coming to do you harm and so on.
So for men, disagreements and arguments is how their success is achieved as a whole.
That having been said, if there are too many arguments, then you can't achieve anything like that sort of famous scene, obviously satirical in Monty Python's Life of Brian, when all of the revolutionary groups start attacking each other for minor divergences and the Romans soldiers just kind of look upon them with exasperation and amusement, like because they're all attacking each other rather than sort of the common enemy, the Romans kind of thing.
So women tend to reward conformists, but men among themselves have to allow for disagreement because the survivability of women's offspring, and thus male offspring, require women's continual approval, right?
Women have got to agree to continually watch your children and support you and help you and nurse you back to health and nurse your children and so on.
And women also have to enforce infidelity punishments, right?
Because if there are women who are stepping out on their husbands, women need to punish that because husbands who aren't sure of the paternity of their children don't tend to provide as much hunting as effective a sort of resource provision, which is why women enforce virginity and monogamy, right?
So virginity and monogamy is the best way for men to work hard for the tribe because men only work hard for the tribe when they're certain of their offspring.
So women tend to enforce virginity and monogamy and harshly punish, like the sort of scarlet letter thing, right?
The women harshly punish women who cheat on their husbands because that threatens the resource provision of the men towards the tribe because the resource provision provided by men is for the sake of paternity certainty, which is why when men had to go and fight in the crusades, they locked up, sometimes would lock up women with these contraptions, right?
Chastity belts where it was very hard to or impossible to have sex with another man, right?
So we need the approval of the tribe, particularly females.
And men need women to enforce moral rules, which is good when it comes to good moral rules.
It's bad when it comes to the sort of modern, fairly hysterical woke stuff.
But men need women to enforce moral rules so that women will be sure to ostracize and punish other women for doing things that are destructive to the tribe as a whole.
And in particular, anything that is destructive to paternity certainty would be significantly punished by women, because if the men of the tribe start to doubt that their children are theirs, then the men of the tribe, like the men of the tribe, need to provide 10 times the calories to women and children that the men of the tribe need for themselves.
And so why do men produce 10 times the calorie count to women and children, particularly, of course, through hunting and so on, but also farming, because they do that for paternity certainty, for the sake of paternity certainty, and the excess food and protection provided by men gets weakened and diminished if there is paternity doubt or doubt about one's offspring being oneself,
which is why women significantly punish other women who cheat or who are not virginal.
Because one of the things, of course, that happened throughout history was if a woman slept with a man who didn't marry her, then she would immediately try to get a man to marry her.
Like if the guy took off, right?
So she has sex with a guy on the 1st of February, then if the guy takes off or is not suitable or is whatever, can't be made to marry her, then she immediately has to, within a week or two, has to get another guy to marry her.
And of course, if a woman seems overly eager to marry, one of the concerns, of course, that men have is that she's pregnant with another man's child and she's going to try and swamp that off on him, right?
Just sort of swap it off on him.
And this is why, of course, women, if she, you know, sort of a dark, swarthy man impregnates her, she's probably not going to go for some blonde, blue-eyed guy.
She's going to go for some other dark, swarthy guy, so that she can pass off the child as his.
And some men will even accept that trade.
Say, okay, well, I'll have four or five kids that are my own, and the price is that I raise one child who's not my own.
And they'll call them the black sheep of the family, right?
The black sheep of the family is often the one who is the child of an affair and thus has less genetically in common with the siblings and therefore is kind of cast out as sort of an unconscious thing.
I myself probably never know, but I myself have had for many decades the suspicion that I was not my father's son, that my mother might have had an affair and so on.
My father and I could not be more distant psychologically and we look nothing like each other at all.
I look almost exclusively like my mother.
And so, yeah, that's a, I'll probably never know.
It doesn't particularly matter, but it would be interesting nonetheless.
Maybe they'll do genetic testing long after I'm dead and gone.
In which case, people can hold a seance and let me know, which I won't attend because I'll be dead.
Except alive in these precious TCPIP syllables.
So philosophy gives us access to the truth.
Philosophy results from the social construct of language.
The social requirement of conformity for survival means that the tribe both facilitates and is at war with philosophy.
And this is sort of the question of if you think that a child may not be, like in the sort of the past, right, sort of in our evolution, if you think that a child might not be the father's child, do you say anything?
If you know that the mother had an affair, do you say something?
It's a big question, right?
And morally, of course, you should say, well, the truth is important and facts are real and so on.
But let's say that there's five children, one of whom you have reason to believe is the product of an affair.
Do you say anything?
If you say your wife had an affair around, you know, like nine months before this child was born, maybe your first child or maybe your last child, I don't know, somewhere you can sort of see, this is the guy she had an affair with, and boy, here's a picture of him.
Doesn't he look spitting image of this kid or whatever?
Well, that's a tough question, right?
Morally, you would say, sure, yes, you should tell her.
But the problem, of course, is that if you tell the husband or the father that one of the child is likely not his, then he may abandon his family as a whole.
And then you have a problem, right?
And that you now have five children with no provider.
And if you have five children with no provider, then either you completely drive the female and the children out, which is pretty harsh, or other people have to sort of chip in to figure things out, which is why women tend to circle around an immoral woman.
Like if they can't prevent the immorality, if they can't prevent the affair, then they will tend to circle around and defend the woman, right?
That's a famous line from a movie, not a very good movie, called Bull Durham, where it's sloppy kisses that last for three days.
And the Susan Sarandon character says, every woman deserves to wear white on her wedding day.
I talked about this years ago.
It's just one of these lines that kind of stuck in my head like a burr in the brain.
Every woman deserves to wear white on her wedding day.
So women will, in general, work to prevent a moral crime, particularly around reproduction and fertility, from occurring.
But if they can't prevent it, they will tend to defend the woman.
So they want to prevent the crime.
But if the crime is committed, the woman sleeps around, which is an action.
I mean, to me, paternity fraud is a horrendous crime that should be significantly punished in a free society by whatever.
But it's a horrendous crime to have a man pour decades and decades of resources into raising a child that is not his is a horrendous crime.
It's one of the worst frauds that can conceivably occur.
But this is the phenomenon where women police other women strenuously, but then if a crime, a moral crime is committed, an infidelity, and in particular, if there's a strong suspicion that children have come out of the union, then women will tend to circle and defend the moral criminal.
They will downplay it.
We all make mistakes.
It's not the end of the world.
She did the best she could.
She was young.
She was manipulated.
The older guy lied to her.
Like whatever it is, they will simply minimize it.
And that's just a very practical.
It's not a moral thing at all.
It's a very practical thing.
So if a woman is not a virgin, right, she has sex before she's married, women will tend to minimize that because women need women to marry, right?
Because unmarried women tend to be destabilizing to the pair bonding of the society as a whole.
Unmarried women don't have a male provider and therefore need men and women to provide them with resources.
This is the old sort of Amanda Wingfield story from Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie.
She's terrified that her daughter, who suffers from pleurisy and pathological shyness, she's concerned that her daughter won't get married.
And then her daughter is going to be eternally dependent upon the kindness of strangers to take Blash Dubois' famous statement from, which I didn't understand when I was young, episode of famous statement from the end of a streetcar named Desire.
Whoever you are, please know that I've always relied upon the kindness of strangers.
So an unmarried woman is a burden because she doesn't have a male provider.
As an unmarried woman, she's going to have sexual lusts and desires.
And as a woman with sexual lusts and desires, she is going to perhaps cause a man to cheat on his wife, which causes further instability.
And if the man cheats on his wife and then provides, like she gets pregnant, then that's more destabilization.
So both women and men, and the men don't want to provide for wives or for a wife and children and possibly in-laws and some spinster aunt who's got no provider.
You know, just as Amanda says, sort of these miserable women shut up in these attics, you know, barely, like barely dependent upon the goodwill of some relative constantly in danger of being turned out.
That's sort of a nightmare, you know, prior to the welfare state and old age pensions and free health care and all this other sort of vote bribery, social bond dissolving, predatory statist exploitation of the unborn.
So women need other women to get married.
And therefore, if a woman does something that's bad or wrong, other women will circle around and try to get her married off as quickly as possible.
And this includes, you know, that the level of secrets that the coven, that sort of the women have as a whole, is pretty fascinating, right?
They will keep these secrets forever.
There was some singer, Kevin Spacey played him in a movie, I can't remember his name.
Women's Social Contract00:06:11
It turned out his mother was actually his sister and this kind of stuff, right?
The woman he thought was his mother was actually his sister.
Like the number of secrets that women keep in order to make sure that women get male providers is pretty huge.
It's really quite wild, which is why women can't have the same dedication to truth as a whole that men do.
Because the kind of mistakes that women make last a lifetime.
Like if a woman gets pregnant outside of wedlock, that destroys her life and causes massive instability in the society as a whole.
Plus, of course, if a woman gets pregnant and has a child outside of wedlock, that child is going to be raised in an antisocial way.
Because we all know that the children of single mothers, particularly the sons, turn out extremely badly.
This is the Edgar and Edmund distinction in King Lear by Shakespeare, of course, that Edgar is the good guy and Edmund is the bastard and the bad guy that the king's counselor has out of wedlock and he ends up raging against the entire society.
So women have to cover up, if they can't prevent other women's moral crimes, they have to cover up those crimes to make sure that those women get a provider, even to the point of faking and lying and defending and gaslighting.
And they all have to get together and present a woman who is secretly pregnant as a virginal bride.
And if a woman even has sex outside of wedlock but doesn't get pregnant, they still have to present her as virginal so that a man will marry her.
Because again, unmarried women in a tribe are a source of destabilization, predatory children and danger, and they then require excess resources from the men in general in the family.
And the other thing, too, of course, is that if a woman makes herself unmarriable, that's usually one man who is unmarriable as well.
Because if a woman keeps herself relatively pure and gets married to a man, that's great.
If she makes a moral mistake, commits a moral crime, and then it's unmarriable, right?
Let's say there's 20 young men and 20 young women, and one woman makes herself unmarriable.
Well, then that's one man who ain't going to get married.
And what happens to a man who doesn't get married?
Well, he's a source of destabilization.
He's a source of resentment.
He has nothing to lose.
He's not wound into the protection of the society, and he can then oppose the society more because he doesn't need society's resources to help raise his children, which is why pushing for childlessness is one of the most foundational destabilization subversions that people opposed to a society can do.
Just push for childlessness and you are good to go as far as destabilizing the society goes.
So when it comes to sort of making good or bad decisions in relationships, it's complicated because you want to tell the truth.
You want to be grounded in the truth.
But too much truth makes you unmarriable as a man.
Cheating on the social order, in a sense, makes you unmarriable as a man because women don't want to raise children from a guy who is ostracized from their society because then they and their children will also be ostracized much less likely to, unless the guy is independently wealthy or whatever, right?
In which case there's still difficulties, but not as many.
And this is one of the reasons why women like wealthy guys is wealthy guys give them the capacity to be free from the shackles of social disapproval because they can just hire people or have their kids have enough resources to survive, which is why a lot of progress came from the aristocracy.
A lot of scientific progress and philosophical progress came from the aristocracy because they were able to pay people or have enough independent wealth that they did not need the approval of society as a whole, especially if it was hereditary rather than non-hereditary titles.
This is why I, as an esquire, as a former scion of the nobility, I mean, the fact that my family, I mean, it's pretty iconoclastic on the German side.
I think even more so on the Irish side.
And again, this is assuming my paternity, which I don't know, right?
I assume it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't.
But my family had a thousand years, which is a lot, right?
That's 30 plus generations.
That's enough to shift IQ, like 15 points, right?
So my family had like 30 generations of wealth in Ireland.
No, I shouldn't say, yeah, a thousand years, yeah, 30 generations.
30 times 30 years, 900, maybe 40 generations, depends on how young you marry.
But yeah, 30 to 40 generations of iconoclasts, right?
So one of the reasons that I'm able to stand with relative comfort and ease against social disapproval is it's kind of bread in the bone, right?
I mean, the fact that my family had enough historic lands and hereditary titles that I still have an esquire meant that we could disagree with the majority of society and be fine, right?
In fact, we probably had a lot more power over those we disagreed with than anybody had over those who disagreed with us, with the exception being my ancestor, William Molyneux, who was chased around Ireland by the king's men because he disapproved of something the king was doing.
So it's complicated.
When you have a dysfunctional family, a lot of that dysfunction is rooted in genetics.
It's not genetic 100%, right?
Because it's just a propensity, right?
You can have a propensity towards alcohol, but that doesn't mean you'll become an alcoholic.
In fact, that might be a reason you stay away from alcohol.
I have a propensity towards gambling.
I like gambling a lot.
And therefore, I stay away from it because I know that it could take me down.
This is sort of Mike Pence rule, right?
Don't have a meeting with a woman who's not your wife alone.
And it's partly to avoid false accusations, but also, you know, like just don't put yourself in situations of temptation.
High Status Risks00:07:00
Temptation and these kind of moral crimes are just a step-by-step process, right?
It takes 50 steps to end up committing a moral crime.
And if you just don't take the first one, it's pretty easy because they have these things have a momentum all of their own, right?
It's like if you've ever, I mean, most of us as kids, we've had this situation where we are running down a hill and then we run too fast and we trip and fall, right?
So the best way to not end up tripping and falling while running down a hill too fast is A, don't go down the hill at all, but B, if you do have to go down, go down slowly and carefully and all of that sort of stuff.
So this is another thing that having some money does is it buys you freedom from social disapproval, which is why when they want people to conform with social hysteria or bullshit rules, they'll attack the person's income.
If the person survives the reputational attacks, then they will attack the person's income.
Because if you need society, you need money from society to survive, then you really can't say that much against society, which is why, again, freedomain.com slash donate to help me retain my independence of thought.
So bad relationships, what matters, evolutionarily speaking, is some degree of social approval, absent significant independent wealth or power.
This is why there's a scene in the novel and a great movie, Room with a View by E.M. Forster.
Rupert Everett?
No, Rupert Graves or someone like that.
But young Freddy, Freddie's interested in bones and evolution.
Now, why is Freddy interested in bones and evolution?
Because he's independently wealthy and he doesn't need a job.
And if he was lower middle class and needed a job, he couldn't be spouting off about bones and evolution.
You know, back in the sort of 19th century when this stuff was pretty, I guess, early 20th century, late 19th century, I can't remember exactly when it was said, but Edwardian, I think, post-Victorian Edwardian.
And my ancestors could indulge in counter-propaganda reasoning because we had lands and wealth.
And then they cast me into the very poorest of the poor, and I sort of clawed my way up against massive amounts of social disapproval because in a sense, the genetics were at war with the circumstances.
I had the genetics of independent wealth, but the circumstances of absolute bottom-tier grinding poverty and dysfunction.
My father was obsessed with, when I say obsessed, highly, highly invested in restoring the family's fortunes and reputation.
Well, I'm not sure I've done much with either, but I think the reputation of the family of my name is secured for the future, but obviously not much the present.
So bad relationships compared to what?
If you are born to a dysfunctional clan, which has been dysfunctional for quite some time, then you can't become functional and keep their resources, keep their care and attention.
And, you know, the grandparents aren't going to want to take care of your kids if you become a functional person because you'll confront them and be honest and then they'll abandon you or ostracize you.
And you, of course, probably don't want your parents, if they're highly dysfunctional, taking care of your children if you're functional and healthy.
Because that dysfunction is then going to skip you and then embed itself in your children.
And then it'll all, like all your struggles will have been for nothing, right?
Or worse than nothing, because now you experience functionality and what your dysfunctional parents infect your children and fight that.
And this is why government schools, I'm always a bit surprised when iconoclasts send their kids to government schools.
Like you're just setting yourself up for worse than failure.
I don't know why I have Andrew Wilson voice today, but I do.
Andrew Wilson voice.
It's base, but not rich.
So if you want to move from dysfunction to function, that is a very tricky business.
And there's a desert, right?
So if you are functional and wealthy, then like the ability to speak truth is high status.
So if you speak the truth, then you are taking your stake in high status.
And women will be attracted to the iconoclast and the truth teller and so on, unless he's poor, in which case they will not.
Because being able to speak the truth signals high status.
That's probably one of the reasons I was able to date a lot when I was younger is, I mean, I was a good-looking guy and also was speaking the truth, which signals resolution, courage, high status.
And if speaking the truth gets you resources and status, then it's a plus.
Women are willing to give up approval in return for status.
Because approval signals low status.
If you have to have the approval of those around you, you are low status, right?
The private is at the bottom of the heap in the army, and that means that he has to take orders, can never give orders.
And we all start low status as far as being children.
So good, bad relationships?
It depends.
If you want continuity of your messed up family lineage or mine, then we just hang around the messed up people and don't go for the truth.
And then we are more guaranteed survival because we will get more resources.
If we decide to strike out and say, well, I don't want the resources from my family, you know, the old sort of the prodigal son or the son who disagrees with his father, his father banishes him and he goes out and does well in the world, it's a big risk, right?
If you stick around your family, then you will get resources for your children, inheritance and property and time and attention and care and approval and all that kind of good stuff.
So you have resources for your children if you simply conform and comply with your messed up family.
If you decide to strike out on your own through philosophy, then you give up those resources and it's a big dice roll.
And I'm a big one for roll the dice, like roll the dice, strike out and try and do your best and roll the dice.
But yeah, so it's complex.
It's complicated from an amoral standpoint, right?
But morality serves amorality as much as it serves virtue.
And we know that from propaganda because propaganda always says that enslavement of the rulers is a virtue.
And so it hijacks people's desire to be good or desire to tell themselves that they're good in order to serve the rulers.
So, I mean, virtue serves vice way more than it serves virtue as a whole.
And so that's the challenge.
And that's the complicated nature of, you know, strike out for the truth, sure.
But it means you will be then attacked, rejected, and ostracized by your messed up family that came before and society as a whole.
Because if you successfully escape a dysfunctional family and do well, then that is inspiring to others who will want to do the same, which means it's not just your messed up family that will attack you, but everybody's messed up family that will attack you because they're afraid of you lighting the way for their kids to end up getting out and getting free.
Hope Hijacks Virtue00:00:19
So I hope that makes sense.
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