March 13, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:16
X/Twitter Questions March 2026
Stefan Molyneux addresses X/Twitter questions on March 12, 2026, defending Universally Preferable Behavior as a rational ethical framework that avoids the atrocities enabled by religious morality. He rejects "deserving" rights as slavery's flip side, asserts love is an involuntary response to virtue, and dismisses reincarnation while critiquing faith-based delusions like the Shroud of Turin. Molyneux also clarifies that defensive martial arts align with UPB, distinguishes the Enlightenment as a truth-experiment era, and explains gendered cognitive differences in social dynamics, ultimately arguing that reason and free markets provide the only stable foundation for multicultural peace. [Automatically generated summary]
Hope you're doing well, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
And yesterday, 12th of March 2026, I asked my friends and frenemies and enemies on X for questions.
And I got a bunch.
Here are my responses.
Brutal Logic writes, I think of UPB, that's my theory of ethics, universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
I think of UPB as an Aristotelian proof of morality, which also implies God.
I've always loved your content, but don't catch all of it.
Do you have thoughts on this or an episode I missed?
Well, as far as an Aristotelian proof of morality, I wouldn't say in particular, for a variety of reasons, the lesser status of women, the massive existence of slaves, would prevent Aristotle really from getting to a universal theory of ethics.
It's a rational proof of secular ethics for sure.
And if morality is proven through UPB, and it is, I mean, the theory's been out for 20 years.
I've had endless debates and criticisms and articles and so on.
It's absolutely held the test of time.
Had a professor of logic call in who kind of hates my guts trying to take it down.
Even he had to admit that rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
So the theory of ethics is proven.
It doesn't mean that everyone immediately becomes ethical.
It's not like when you prove the value of Baconian science that everybody immediately becomes a scientist or somebody who respects science, but it's proven.
Math proofs are true whether people are good at math or not.
Now, as to whether or not this proves the existence of God, I would say that it does not prove the existence of God.
Having a rational proof of ethics does not prove the existence of God.
One of the problems that I have with religious morality is it requires a belief in God and religion in order to be moral.
And as we've seen from the, and this was predicted by Nietzsche in the 19th century, as we certainly saw in the 20th century, atheists can be spectacularly evil because they have stepped outside the bounds of morality by disbelieving in God.
And the escape clause or the escape hatch of morality that is achieved by atheists is quite disturbing, to put it mildly, quarter of a billion people murdered in the 20th century by their own governments outside of war.
It's democide.
So it is quite disturbing to moralists that if you have a moral belief system based upon the existence of a counter-rational entity such as God, well, I mean, you could get away with that for some time, but the problem is it creates many loopholes.
So then we elevate politicians who operate outside the moral realm and do terrible things.
And the undeniable success of science and reason as a mode of thought.
All the conversations that we have in the world electronically and so on, the real backbone of human communication these days comes out of science, all of the technology, and modern medicine and the free market and so on.
The free market is simply based on absolute property rights and freedom of association.
So the fact that the free market with its incredibly efficient allocation of resources based upon all of the information signals provided by price in trade, for which there is no substitute.
There's never any conceivable substitute by which we can find better information about where our scarce resources should be allocated than the price system.
This is von Mises from the 1920s.
There's no substitute for the price system, as I debated many, many years ago with Peter Joseph from the Venus Project, and has been debated countless times.
So the problem with religious morality is, well, first of all, it requires a belief in God, and it requires a belief in a particular God.
And since we're going to have diversity, you know, whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, whether we approve of it or not, since we're going to have diversity, the only chance that different cultures can live together in any kind of peace and harmony is through philosophy, right?
Because if you have math and science, you can get people from different belief systems and ethnic backgrounds and so on to live together in relative peace and harmony and productivity, but they all have to believe in the scientific method.
They all have to believe in reason and evidence.
And that's how they resolve their disputes.
Diversity without rationality is just war or conflicts of other kinds.
So since diversity in the West is a foregone conclusion, at this point, the only chance we have to avoid endless conflict is to promote rational ethics.
It's not a huge chance, but it is the only chance.
And even though it's not a huge chance, you have to take your only chance.
So science, reason, free markets, empiricism, these have all produced such amazing goods.
And these were in many ways withheld or held back by religion and go against the grain of religion.
Reason, empiricism, and evidence do not reveal God.
And therefore, reason, empiricism, and evidence are generally strongly opposed by religion as a whole as a competing and, as it turns out, in terms of quality of life, a much more productive way to approach the universe.
So because of the success of science, of reason, of technology, of markets, and so on, because of all of that, religion has lost foundational credibility.
And because reason has lost foundational credibility, we have to have another way of doing ethics.
And the only way to have multicultural societies live in any kind of peace is for people to embrace reason.
It's the only way to resolve disputes between people is to have a rational approach to these questions.
It's not likely we'll achieve that this cycle of history, but at least we have to lay the groundwork so the future cycles of history will learn from our mistakes.
So the rational proof of secular ethics does not prove God.
But what it does do is it creates a system of ethics that can only be escaped by abandoning any pretense at rationality.
So if you say two and two make four, anybody who rejects that has to abandon any pretense at rationality and thus will discredit themselves in the eyes of all but the most crazed and ideological.
They're sort of like flat earthers, right?
There are people out there.
Debated one many years ago.
There are people out there who believe in the flat earth that the sun is closer to North America than Australia is, and somehow believe that gravity is produced through constant acceleration.
And those people are generally not very welcome at scientific conferences because the hypothesis is quite crazed.
And so the purpose, of course, is to promote a morality for which there is no escape.
You can't just wish it away.
You can grow up religious, as I did.
You can find the flaws in religion and the weaknesses in religion.
And you can move beyond it, as I did, and still have a coherent worldview that is very much supported by the success of science, reason, empiricism, and free markets.
But you cannot say that two and two make five with any credibility except among the most insane and ideological, of which there's no shortage.
But when you give education over to politics, all education becomes political.
So, or when you give education over to politicians, all education becomes political, and thus indoctrination.
So, saying that a rational proof of something supports the existence of God, or a god or many gods, is not itself rational.
And we need to have a system of morality which cannot be escaped by disbelieving in the unprovable, or human conflict will continue.
All right.
Vera asks, you've had the same trolls on your live streams a few times.
I'm curious to know why you allowed them so much time to talk.
Is there a lesson you're trying to teach us?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, I think it is important.
So, with regards to trolls, I don't know that they're trolls.
I don't know if they could just be ideological, they could just be manipulative.
And, you know, one of the things that is really, really important in life as a whole and success as a whole is humility.
I don't know if you've seen the video where Elon Musk is talking about something, and the person who's holding the camera or interviewing him mentions something about how to improve the rocket.
And Elon pauses and says, Yeah, you know, that's actually a really good idea.
And they ended up doing that.
And it, you know, there's no ego, right?
Like, hey, I'm the rocket scientist.
You do not, right?
It's just ego.
Whoever has the best ideas should win.
And vanity is the great enemy of wisdom.
Vanity is really the modern sin.
And so, one of the things that is a real challenge, and I view all of my listeners in general as having the top 1% of intelligence, because it's, you know, sophisticated stuff.
I try to make it as comprehensible and rational as possible, but it is sometimes quite complicated and sophisticated stuff.
And so I view the people who call in who only think that they know and don't actually know to be people of great potential.
But in order to achieve that potential, you have to be humble.
You have to not pretend to know what you don't know.
Now, one of the big problems of growing up smart is being smarter than everyone else and therefore not being challenged.
So when people come on to my live streams and they perform sophistry, in other words, they overcomplicate things, they use a lot of buzzwords, they use technical terms and are therefore rude.
It is rude to come on a general audience live stream and start launching into technical terms and buzzwords and refusing to define what it is that you're talking about and refusing to explain it in a way that's comprehensible to people as a whole, that's rude.
I mean, if I spoke Latin, and I don't think anybody really knows how it was actually pronounced because it's not like there are any recordings.
But if I go to an English-speaking audience and I do a speech in Latin, that is rude.
That is insensitive to the audience.
So one of the ways that people who are smarter than those around them maintain their status is to be incomprehensible to people as a whole.
But the purpose of being smart is to make challenging things comprehensible to the average person.
There's intelligence which complicates things.
That's more intelligence plus vanity.
And then there's intelligence that clarifies and communicates in a way that people understand.
So I put my audience at the top 1%, but there are lots of people who listen to what I do and are of average intelligence and so on.
But the people who call in generally tend to be more curious and maybe smarter, but the purpose of what I do is to bring philosophy to life in the actual circumstances that people have to make moral choices in, which is not about Iran, but about family members and friends and lovers and parenting and so on.
That's where we make our actual moral decisions.
So the reason why I welcome people and I will challenge them is because I view people who are smart but possessed by vanity.
And the vanity is the desire to look smart.
It's like intelligent signaling.
It's like virtue signaling, which is the desire to appear virtuous rather than be virtuous, to look good rather than feel good and be good and feel good in the long run.
So when people want to appear smart, what they do is they complicate things and then you're put in a very difficult position.
And what they do is they complicate things and they're kind of incomprehensible.
And then when you ask them for clarification, they get irritated and annoyed.
And this, of course, is an ancient battle of philosophers, which is to confront those who pretend to know but don't actually know and reveal their ignorance, which means to challenge their vanity.
And I do this not because I think they're terrible people.
I do this because we all have that vanity.
I mean, I certainly do.
And I have to humble myself on a regular basis.
So we all have that vanity.
And vanity destroys potential.
If you think you're fantastic, then you're not going to continue to improve.
The Vanity That Destroys Potential00:12:58
So I was studying philosophy for 20 years and had to realize that although I got some things right and inherited some things that were good, I did not know what virtue was.
I did not know.
I knew what truth was.
I had the metaphysics and epistemology down pretty well, but I didn't know what virtue was.
I didn't have a good definition of love or free will or anything like that.
And so I had to humble myself and say that although I had studied something from the age of 15 to the age of 35, I didn't have any foundational answers.
And that's sort of when I sat down to write out UPB and say, look, I'm basically not getting out from this chair until I've solved the problem of secular ethics.
And it took quite a while, but it had to be done.
And of course, for philosophy as a whole to be thousands of years as a discipline and to not have an accepted definition of virtue, and virtue is really the purpose of philosophy.
All philosophy is moral philosophy.
If it's physical philosophy, it tends to be science.
And so a discipline that has been pursuing its central reason for being for thousands and thousands of years and has yet to achieve it is a discipline that everybody can be justly skeptical of in terms of its value, right?
So my goal and purpose is to bring simple, clear truths to average people so that they can live lives with greater virtue and consistency.
Now, when people come on my show and are sophists, I view them in the same way that a Christian priest would view somebody who's possessed by a devil or a demon.
And what I mean by that is there is a good mind under there that has been unable to overcome the devilish temptations of vanity.
And that is a real shame.
So I struggle to free people from vanity, but that requires that they honestly state that they don't know what they claim to know.
And you can't learn anything if you think you already know it.
I don't wake up every morning studying the basics of English.
I don't wake up every morning trying to memorize where in the world I live, right?
And so we don't study what we believe we already know.
And one of the ways that you know that somebody is possessed by the devil of vanity is they set you up in an impossible situation.
Because vanity is an impossible situation because it's claiming to have knowledge that you don't have.
And so when someone comes on and starts talking about some complicated topic and I ask them for simple definitions, or at least simplified definitions so that the audience and myself can know what they're talking about, then, I mean, we all face people like this.
It's the Cliff Clavin from the old show, Cheers.
The actor actually was auditioning for a part, didn't do a very good audition, John Ratzenberger, and then he was leaving the audition and he said, well, what about a know-it-all, like a bar know-it-all?
And a sort of very fairly famous character was developed as a result of that.
So when people come in who've got good minds, but they prefer the appearance of knowledge rather than the fact of knowledge, and the appearance of knowledge is revealed in the Socratic tradition by asking for definitions and then seeking out contradictions.
And we all know that what happens is, and we've all had bad teachers to one degree or another in this way.
So what happens is somebody comes in with a blizzard or tsunami of technical language.
And then what it's usually a he, right?
What he tends to do is when you ask for definitions, he gets irritated and wants to continue.
And then you're in a challenging situation, right?
Which is, if he continues and you don't understand his definitions, then he's dominating you and you are in a subjugated position.
Like, you know, if you've ever had a boss, I've certainly had more than one, who tells the same stories over and over again.
I mean, if it was just a friend, it'd be like, bro, we already heard this.
Like, you told this story last week.
Can you come up with some new material?
But of course, he's your boss.
You just nod and pretend like you haven't heard it before.
It's a subjugated position.
So they're using this complication to dominate you.
And if you ask for definitions or if you say, I don't understand what you're talking about, in other words, if you're honest and admit what could be a failure on your part, I mean, I'm a pretty smart guy, but I need things explained to me sometimes like I'm five years old because I want to make sure that the other person truly understands it.
And so when people come on the show and they waffle burger with tsunamis of technical terms, I'm going to ask them for their basic definitions to find out so I can find out if they know what they're talking about.
And maybe they do.
And maybe they would say, oh, you know what?
I'm sorry, I should have defined that and so on.
Because when people ask me for definitions, what is love?
Baby, don't hurt me.
People ask me for definitions.
I'm happy to back off and give definitions and sometimes will apologize for not starting off with definitions in my enthusiasm.
I'm happy to take definitions.
And of course, I know that most people don't know what they're talking about.
They just don't.
They're just saying a bunch of stuff to look smart and that's a vanity thing.
And I don't like it when people use philosophy to serve the false self of vanity.
And I don't like it when people discredit philosophy by being overly technical or obfuscating things or getting annoyed when you're asked for definitions.
I don't like it.
I don't like when people use a noble pursuit like philosophy to serve their own vanity and to dominate people.
So we all face this.
We face this in the media.
We face this among teachers.
We face this among peers.
We face this in family, among friends.
Lots of people are talking a whole lot of shite and they refuse to define their terms.
And if you don't define your terms, if you don't actually have a rigorous methodology for determining truth from falsehood, and if you don't have empathy or sympathy for the audience, right, having empathy or sympathy for the audience is really important.
If you're going to talk to people in a public square, you need to talk to them in a language that they understand.
I remember many years ago, in a philosophical conversation in public, it was demanded of me that I explain philosophy to Homer Simpson, as if the person I was talking to was a Homer Simpson.
And that I thought was very, very funny and a good challenge, a very interesting challenge.
So they're everywhere.
They are the traditional enemies of philosophy and the traditional enemies of their own virtue.
And I struggle to free them from the grip of vanity, which gets progressively harder.
I think the last guy who called in was talking about the law was 67 years old and that there's no chance to free someone from vanity at that age because if vanity has run their whole life until they're in their late 60s, there's no way to overturn it because they don't have an original self left and the level of regret would be too high.
When people have done wrong to others, it is almost impossible to teach them anything about virtue.
It's too painful.
So if this guy has been out there, you know, bullshiting people for decades and sowing baffle gab and discrediting philosophy, there's no chance that he will achieve virtue now.
So I say I'm trying to free people from the demons of vanity.
And then I say, wow, but this guy can't be freed from the demon of vanity.
And that's why if it was a private conversation, I would not stay in the conversation.
But it's a public conversation.
So sometimes I will have a public conversation to free people from the demons of vanity.
And other times I will have a public conversation to show people how terrible it is to be possessed by the demon called vanity.
Sometimes you can talk people into losing weight and exercise.
Other times you simply have to search to show people who won't change how bad it is to be morbidly obese, out of shape and unhealthy and so on.
So I hope that makes some kind of sense.
And I really appreciate the question.
All right.
So what do we have?
Any thoughts on Nigeria?
Not in particular?
All right.
If we are not virtuous, does that mean we should stay single or not deserving of love?
If we are not virtuous, does that mean we should stay single or are not deserving of love?
Deserve is a very strange word, really.
You know, there's an old Kevin Costner movie where Susan Zarandin, there's some woman who's really been passed around, like a joint at a frat party.
And she says, I want to wear white on my wedding.
And she says, oh, honey, we all deserve to wear white.
We all deserve this.
We all deserve that.
I don't know what any of that really means.
It seems to me kind of female-coded.
It's sort of like saying, well, I went out hunting.
I deserve to come home with meat.
It's like, I don't know what deserve means in that context.
It seems like it's an implicit claim upon other people to provide it.
Like, you know, the human right, that housing is a human right.
The houses don't assemble themselves.
If you're saying you have a right to someone else's labor and can compel them to provide it, that just makes you a slave owner.
So deserve is sort of a flip side of slavery.
I don't know what it means to stay single.
If you don't have a virtue, which most people don't, they have a pretense.
If you don't have virtue, then you will go and have babies and you'll go and be married.
And 70% of criminals in jail have girlfriends on the outside waiting for them, messaging them, right?
So I don't know what it means if you're not virtuous, whether you should stay single or not.
Most people won't.
So as far as whether you deserve love or not, again, I don't know what that means.
If I say, I don't want to exercise and I want to overeat like crazy, does that mean I don't deserve to be healthy?
Do you see what I mean?
Like, I don't know what the word deserve means here.
It's kind of a plaintive, immature cry.
If I am a nasty, mean, vicious person, well, don't I deserve to be happy?
It's like, but you're doing things that will make you unhappy.
And so deserve, I don't know what it means.
If you're not virtuous, then you cannot partake of love.
Because love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
There's a couple of possibilities.
If we're virtuous, then evil people will hate us and good people will love us.
And the only way to avoid the hatred of evil people is to also avoid the love of good people.
Because if you're just an NPC, you will neither be loved nor hated.
And I would rather be loved and hated since that really is the only possibility in life.
Sadly, you know, because there are so many evildoers in the world, if you want to be loved, then you have to be morally courageous and do good in the world.
Doing good in the world means interfering with the desires, goals, and plans of evildoers.
And so if you want to be loved, then you have to do good, which means you'll also be hated, right?
The love of my wife and friends and family comes with the Wikipedia page.
And that's just the way, that's just the way that it is.
It comes with sort of media attacks.
That's just the deal.
And it's a good deal overall.
I'd much rather have the love of good people.
Although it comes with the hatred of evildoers, I'd much rather have the love of good people because otherwise you're just a slave to fear, which is not ideal.
So we say not deserving of love.
Faith Versus Reason in War00:06:17
Again, I don't know.
I want to eat 10,000 calories of cheesecake a day.
Does that mean I'm not deserving of a healthy weight?
I don't know.
There's cause and effect, right?
So if you're not virtuous, then you don't get love, right?
If I don't practice playing billiards, I'm not good at billiards.
Well, I don't want to.
If I don't practice playing billiards at all, does that mean I'm not deserving of skill in billiards?
It's like, I don't know what that means.
If you don't practice virtue, then you don't get to be loved because love is our admiration for virtue.
All right.
Any opinions on the shroud of Turin?
Well, it's part of the complicated challenge that religious people have, which is that they have faith but want proof.
They have faith, but they want proof.
This goes back to Thomas Aquinas and other people who claim to have empirical or rational arguments for the existence of God.
People have faith but want proof.
Faith is a very uneasy state of mind to be in because there's no such thing as faith without proof.
In other words, people believe in the divinity of Jesus because Jesus performed miracles and went to heaven and speaks in prayer and so on.
And so faith is belief not in the absence of reason and evidence, but in opposition to reason and evidence.
But if you say, I believe in opposition to reason and evidence, how are you different from a metaphysical or like nature of reality, nature of truth way, from somebody who's having visions, a schizophrenic who's having visions, or an epileptic who has visions of sort of spiraling cherubs and so on.
How are you foundationally different from people who believe against reason and evidence in every field?
People who have other religions, people who are still communists, people who just believe all kinds of crazy stuff against reason and evidence, flat earthers and so on, right?
So belief against reason and evidence is a big, wide field.
And how would you be different from people who believe their dreams come true or who believe they can predict the future or believe that they're time travelers or all other kinds of stuff?
It's all belief against reason and evidence.
So if you are faith-based in your knowledge seeking, you have to narrow it down.
You have to say, well, those people who believe against reason and evidence, those people over there, maybe in that asylum or something, those people who believe against reason, that guy who thinks he's Napoleon, well, that's crazy, right?
It's 2026.
He's not Napoleon, right?
That guy who thinks he's a Genghis Khan.
Like, no, no, he's not Genghis Khan, right?
He died centuries ago.
It's still on the bills of currency in Mongolia.
But anyway, and statues, right?
They're allowed to celebrate their mass murderers, and we're not allowed to celebrate our heroes in the West.
So if you have faith, you believe in opposition to reason and evidence, which means logically you would have to believe and accept every claim made against reason and evidence.
Two and two make five.
The world is a square banana.
You'd have to believe all of these things and just take them on faith, or you wouldn't have any foundational reason to oppose other people's beliefs based on faith.
So, if you believe against reason and evidence, it is a very wide net for everything that is impossible.
So, then you have to find a way to narrow it down so that other people's belief against reason and evidence is wrong, but your belief against reason and evidence is right.
And so, you are constantly going to need empiricism.
But then, the more empiricism you bring into your belief system, the more it challenges the foundations of your belief system, which goes against reason and evidence.
So, this is this great tension between faith and proof.
I just go to proof, I just go to reason and evidence.
All right.
Question from Frank.
Can I be frank with you?
You can be anything you want with me, Frank says.
How do you grapple with martial military philosophy?
Klausowitz, Mushashi, Sun Tzu, etc.
I understand that it may tend to violate UPB, but surely it is useful to know for defensive stratagems and to understand the actions of the enemy.
Well, I would say that military action does not violate UPB if it is defensive, in the same way that killing someone in self-defense is a homicide in that you've caused the death of someone, but it's not a murder because you're reacting to their desire or action of creating imminent bodily harm or death to you.
So, there's nothing wrong with studying military matters.
I talk about this in my novel, The Future, freedom.com/slash books, and talk about the martial philosophy of a free society, which is to target the leaders of your opponents and their families because they're willing to target families, and therefore you can target families in return.
Because, you know, bombing and terrorism is indiscriminate and kills family members.
So, they've already passed that threshold.
So, in terms of the military, we have seen, of course, a number of times when guerrilla fighters are up against a government military.
In other words, private, sort of semi-private military forces or paramilitary forces are up against government-run military forces, and it tends to be the same as private mail delivery versus government mail delivery, private roads versus public roads, private anything versus public anything.
It tends to be a whole lot more efficient, particularly cost-efficient, especially when unhampered by endless regulations and mandates.
So, I think that studying a war is important, and it does not violate UPB to have a military, again, unless it's initiating the use of force.
All right.
Is the Ada Lord Shad says, is the Age of Enlightenment a fake historical time period up in the 20th century, and what's the core of this movement?
Is the Enlightenment a Fake Era00:02:39
Well, the Age of Enlightenment was the shedding of foundational mysticism that characterized the Dark Ages, right?
So, there was a kind of rational, amoral pragmatism that characterized the Roman Empire, and then that fell, of course, away as these things do, because governments will always engineer the demise of their own societies through the inevitable mismatches of cause and effect and incentives and punishments.
And so, the Age of Enlightenment is when people began to say that we should learn about the truth of reality without pretending that we know.
And in the sort of scholastic period, the purpose was to study books.
And so, if you wanted to know something about the world, you just looked up Aristotle or Plato or the Bible or like so.
You would focus called scholastic because they were scholars.
And of course, as you know, Aristotle was considered such a perfect philosopher that he was simply referred to as the philosopher.
And so if you wanted to know something, you looked it up.
And the Age of Enlightenment was to say, let us not assume that we know the truth.
Let us experiment for ourselves.
Sort of famous experiment, I think it was Galileo, where he took a cannonball and an orange to the top of the leaning tower of pisa and dropped them down.
And everyone, of course, imagined that the bowling ball being far heavier would fall faster.
And as it turned out, it did not.
So the accepted wisdom that everybody just assumed was true.
I mean, it's almost like if you drop an orange on your toe, it doesn't really hurt.
You drop a bowling ball in your toe, it does really hurt, and therefore you think it's falling faster.
But it's no, it's just heavier.
And so people began to view the world with humility rather than assuming everything had been understood, accepted, and written down before, and therefore you just needed to look things up rather than reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
And so people said, what if we work from first principles from a state of humble ignorance and build our knowledge up from the evidence of the senses onward?
So it looks like the sun is an object the same size as the moon and that both go around the earth.
It turns out that the moon does go around the earth.
The sun does not.
The earth goes around the sun.
So rather than say, well, I'm just going to assume that what I see and what has been written down prior is true, I'm going to try and reason things from first principles.
And that turned out to be very productive and very positive and was the foundation of the modern world.
Perfection Standards Are Inhuman00:07:56
Huitz says, is there a perfect dad joke in Plato's realm of perfect forms?
That's funny.
Sean says, have you ever been back to Ireland?
I have not.
I have not.
Last time I was in Ireland was when I was probably 10 or so.
And I have not been back to Ireland.
I did go back to England.
I met a literary agent on a plane and ended up giving her Just Poor.
She read it and she said that the second half was weaker than the, she's left the first half.
And I agreed she was right.
So I went and rented a cottage in England and went and wrote because it was set in the countryside in England.
So I wanted to immerse myself in the countryside.
And I wrote a new ending to Just Poor, which is better, but still not quite as good as it should be.
Maybe I'll get back to that at some point.
So I have not been back to Ireland.
I think for me to go back to England or Ireland, except maybe deep in the country, would be too heartbreaking because it's so vastly changed from when I was young.
All right.
Have you ever read any of Steve Ditko's comic books?
He was a huge Ayn Rand fan.
And, you know, like, I'm sorry to be blunt, but I don't read comic books because I'm not 12.
I did read comic books.
I guess I stopped reading comic books when I think I remember reading a fantastic four comic book when I was in Can.
No, no, I was still in England.
No, I was still in England.
I thought they were just, that was terrible.
Maybe I read a couple of Archies when I was 12 or so.
But no, I don't read comic books because I'm not a child.
Sorry, there's so many great books to read.
How do you start taking action and risks in life when your mind constantly lists reasons why it's not worth it, won't work, or it's too difficult to attain anyway?
Hmm.
Right.
Well, a standard of perfection is the most common tool of abuse in families and in schools.
There's some, you know, think of the East Asian, like, wow, you got an A, why didn't you get an A plus, right?
So the standard of perfection is a tool of abuse.
Right.
So whenever we carry things, we have a small risk of dropping them or knocking them over or spilling or something like that.
And there's this weird fetish that, frankly, women, a little bit more than men, have for keeping things neat and tidy.
Like a woman's stress level goes through the roof when she's looking at or facing a messy place.
And for reasons I've sort of talked about before, that it would be unhygienic.
Rats could hide their food, could hide there, and the kids could die from rat bites or infections.
So, you know, for women, facing mess is very stressful and negative.
And some women will go to like crazy extremes in this regard.
And if you spill something, you know, having kids is having mess, right?
That's just the nature of the beast.
Having kids is having mess.
And the only way you can not have mess is to terrorize your children into inaction.
So people will have a standard of behavior and so on and of perfection that is inhuman and it is used for abusive reasons.
So if you're a kid and you're carrying something and you drop something, then, you know, people get mad.
People get mad at you.
And I have a scene in my novel called Dissolution, which is about this with Chloe and her family.
So people will have a standard of behavior and of perfection that is simply used for abuse.
Now, of course, it's pretty easy, like intellectually or morally, to push back against this standard, right?
Because if you have a standard of perfection, then you should have a standard of perfection with regards to parenting, right?
If you think that perfection is really important, then parents should have read up on parenting, learned how to be good parents, learned how to be great parents, and so on.
And that should be their standard of behavior.
And if parents have not read a bunch of books, and if there's no books on parenting that say, you know, scream at your child if they drop something or make a mess or spill something or whatever, right?
I mean, I remember when I was a kid, maybe about eight or nine, I was painting a model airplane and I spilt some silver paint on our shag carpet.
And I remember my stepmother, my stepgrandmother, so my stepgrandmother was staying with us and she was terrified of my mother too.
My mother had a truly vicious temper.
And I remember she helped me hide this, a spill, because of course, if my mother came home and saw the spill, she'd just beat the living tar out of me.
And so I remember my stepgrandmother helped me cut a small section of the shag carpet from underneath the couch and then cut out a small section from where the paint had spilled.
And we replaced them, right?
We moved to the spilled part underneath the couch.
And then we moved the clean part from underneath the couch.
And, you know, and because it was like a kind of a thick shag carpet, like, you know, sheepdogs, it was pretty easy to cover up.
But of course, what it does is it creates a certain feeling of unease from time to time where you generally and genuinely fear what might happen if it is discovered.
And this deception was never discovered.
And we moved out.
And then at some point, people changed the carpet in the old flat that we lived in and were mightily confused as to why there were little holes cut in the carpet and so on.
But so, yeah, having a standard called don't spill paint, who cares about the carpet?
It doesn't matter.
It's unimportant and so on, right?
So having the standard of perfection is simply a is simply a form of control and abuse.
That's all.
That's all it is.
All it is.
And so if you think that your caution has anything to do with reason, then you will be paralyzed, unable to achieve what you want to achieve in life, because you think that you have to get things right.
And you don't.
You don't have to get things right.
You just have to get things done.
It's like writing.
You will never write perfectly.
The important thing to do is to get it down and then get it right.
Just get the idea down, get the ideas down, get the plot down, get the characters, just push forward, just keep writing, and don't judge.
Everything that is achieved comes out of a state of error and absolute imperfection.
That's just a reality.
And so the reason why you're paralyzed, I would assume, and you're certainly welcome to do a calling show, freedomain.com slash call, but the reason that you are paralyzed or feel paralyzed is because you think that things have to be perfect, because if they're not perfect, you will be attacked.
I assume that you grew up with violent or highly aggressive control freak parents or other authority figures that if you made a mistake or got things wrong, that you would be attacked, right?
Like, you know, it's the old story that, I mean, this is in my novel, right?
Your kids want to make you breakfast and they make a mess and they spill something on the stairs and blah, And the parents or the mother usually gets really angry and, you know, you've made more mess rather than, well, this is great.
You know, how thoughtful and nice for the kids to want to make me some breakfast, right?
So that is what you are facing, which is you were punished for imperfection in the past by people who were infinitely more imperfect as parents than you ever were in mistakes you made as a child.
Evaluating Accusations and Relationships00:08:34
And so it's pure hypocrisy for abusive parents to demand perfection on the part of their children.
It is hypocritical and it's wretched.
And you've got to get angry at that.
And when you get angry at how perfectionism was used as a standard to punish you and aggress against you, you get angry at that rank hypocrisy.
Then you will find yourself wonderfully liberated from having to be perfect.
You know, I had one video that went totally viral many years ago, the story of your enslavement.
And I would love for every video to do that, but I can't achieve that.
So I do what I can, and I do as best as I can with what I've got.
All right.
What do you think about Christian Zionists?
I mean, the big challenge, of course, and this goes back to my earlier statement, the big challenge, of course, with any anti-rational system is it's easily hijacked by other people.
And this is true of any particular system.
So it is very tough.
Why do you think people don't want people convicted of violent crime deported?
Yeah, that's a very interesting question.
I mean, mostly because they're programmed to have sympathy.
So when men look at a baby lion, they see a full-grown lion that is easier to drive out or to kill, right?
And when women look at adult lions, they think of the baby lion within and there's a sympathy and all of that.
So when a man looks at a dangerous criminal, he sees someone that needs to be jailed or driven away or something like that.
And what women do as a whole when they look at a violent criminal is they see his bad childhood, which I'm sure he had, and they have a sympathy.
Other people, of course, the government wants violent criminals around to keep you uneasy.
And, you know, we were very close to solving the problem of crime completely when I was a kid.
Sure, it was almost no crime around.
I mean, other than within my household, but let's see here.
Vacation or staycation?
I don't really do vacations very much.
I mean, I sort of hate to say it.
My life is a vacation, but I mean, I'm doing exactly what I want to do with the people I love the most around.
So I don't feel any need to go on vacation because I don't have a life that needs vacations from.
So I can't remember the last time I just went on vacation, but it's been a while.
All right.
What percentage, in your opinion, of still die-hard MAGA people, anonymous or otherwise, are true believers versus being paid?
I don't know.
I would guess that people who just seem to go against their principles are either being paid directly or are captured by their audience, right?
So if you are, you know, pro-MAGA, and then if you criticize MAGA, then some portion of your audience will leave you.
So there's lots of different ways to be paid to be a conformist.
Somebody else asks, what happens when you die?
Besides the people you love being sad, do you put any credence in reincarnation?
If so, what purpose could this serve?
What do you make of Nikola Tesla's if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration?
Well, we know what happens when we die because we've already experienced non-existence for 14 billion years before we were born.
So we know what happens after you die is exactly the same as what happened before you were born, which is you're not there.
You know, when a radio runs out of batteries, the voices don't go anywhere.
They're not reincarnated somewhere else.
The energy that runs the voices runs out and the electricity stops flowing and it's out, right?
And people say, my phone died.
My phone died.
Well, of course, you can resurrect it with a charger, but that's not how I guess we do that every night.
But no, there's no reincarnation because the idea that we have consciousness that is not just an effect of physical matter is to say that there is an effect without a cause, that there is gravity without a gravity source, that there is light without a light source, which is impossible.
There cannot be an effect without a cause.
And to say that our consciousness is immaterial when consciousness is always and forever associated with a brain that is active and there is no consciousness where there is no brain that is active.
Consciousness is an effect of the brain.
The mind is an effect of the physical brain.
And when the physical brain is dead, there is no mind.
And so the idea that the mind exists independent of the physical brain and does not require or is not an effect or a shadow cast by the energy of the physical brain is not right.
All right.
Joe says, my decades-long friend exploded at me during a very heated debate where I defended Trump from the SA accusations.
He's a very kind, decent person, and I've never seen him do that before.
And I feel a real strain in the friendship, like something's broken.
Have you any advice?
Well, you're not, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like a know-it-all, because Lord knows I've had these kinds of conflicts in the past, so maybe I'll have some in the future.
I doubt it, but maybe.
But you're not arguing with him, right?
Most people, you're not arguing with them.
You're arguing about their relationships.
You're arguing about their relationships.
So let's say that his wife has been fully borged, right?
She's been fully absorbed like an adventurer into a gelatinous cube.
Let's say he's been fully absorbed, his wife has been fully absorbed into this.
You know, Trump is a sexual abuser or something like that, right?
So fully absorbed into that.
And all her friendships are based on that.
And they complain about it and they nod and they smile and they have wine and tea or whatever it is, right?
And that's their thing.
Well, then she has said, Trump is this terrible guy.
Trump is this terrible guy.
Now, if he were to say, you know, compared to what, right?
And so on, right?
And what's the actual evidence rather than the mere accusations?
So if he says that to his wife, his wife does not evaluate the truth or falsehood of the proposition.
And this is true for most people.
They don't evaluate the truth or falsehood of a proposition or an argument.
They unconsciously evaluate the effect of accepting that is true on their friendships.
So the fine people hoax.
People say, well, Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people.
And then they get into these embedded relationships and all of that.
And if it turns out that Trump did not call neo-Nazis very fine people, then they face a problem.
Because if they go to their friends and they say, you know, I looked into this, he didn't actually maybe be a terrible guy in other ways, but this is not true.
Like, this is not true.
He said they should be condemned totally.
He was talking about very fine people on both sides of the debate and so on, right?
And so people don't think whether something is true or not.
They unconsciously evaluate the effect of something being true on their friendships.
So to flip the script, if it is false that Trump said neo-Nazis are very fine people and they bring that truth, then they don't evaluate whether it's true or false.
They evaluate how it's going to affect their relationships.
Now, we can say this is good, this is bad.
Evolutionarily speaking, we can understand it because for women to not get the support of other women meant that it was very hard for their children to survive and be protected because women needed to raise children collectively in the past.
And for men, then men generally inhabited a separate cognitive space that they kept separate from women so that women's conformity and in-group preferences and the fact that women score much higher in the big five trait of agreeableness,
men had to have their own set, which is why men had their frats, why men had their smoking clubs, why men had their hunting clubs, why men had their separate spaces so that they could talk about things that mattered without the fear and tension of compliance fascism, so to speak.
And so if you defend Trump from these essay accusations, then your friend is not evaluating whether these things are true or not.
Your friend is evaluating what happens if he accepts that these accusations are false, or at least are certainly not proven in any meaningful way.
What happens to his relationships?
And I've seen this tension like a billion times in the world.
Defending Marriage Over Objective Truth00:00:41
And I sympathize with it.
I mean, obviously we all share it to some degree, but I sympathize with it.
I mean, if a man is married to a die-hard Christian and he begins to doubt the existence of God and other people, or even if he doesn't, but if he can't answer the arguments, then he's defending his relationship with his wife rather than arguing the existence of God on objective metrics, if that makes sense.
All right.
Well, I've got more questions to answer, but I'll stop here and I really do appreciate your support.
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