Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - War is a Battle of INTELLIGENCE! Listener Questions
Aired: 2026-03-25
Duration: 51:45


=== Bias in Government IQ Claims (08:14) ===

[00:00:00]  Good morning, good morning, everybody.
[00:00:02]  Hope you're doing well.
[00:00:02]  Stefan Maloney from you know freedomaine.com.
[00:00:06]  Freedomaine.com slash donate to help keep this amazing conversation ad free.
[00:00:13]  Freedomaine.com slash donate.
[00:00:16]  So asked for some questions and feedback from freedomain.locals.com and had some good harsh stuff, which I appreciate.
[00:00:26]  I always appreciate the pushback.
[00:00:28]  Let's keep me and everyone as honest as humanly possible.
[00:00:31]  So I appreciate this pushback.
[00:00:33]  And it's going to sound like it's an odd criticism to start, but it makes sense as we go forward.
[00:00:38]  Somebody writes, would you say your love for the music of Reddy Mercury, Farouk Bulsara, is the primary factor that has unconsciously influenced you to repeatedly make false claims on X that the average IQ of Iran is 104 to 106.
[00:00:53]  Firstly, Steph, I'm a man who is deeply fascinated by the topic of IQ.
[00:00:59]  And having said that, I know, and having said that, he forgot a comma, I know that the IQ of Iran is roughly 84.
[00:01:06]  I, of course, am not an IQ scientist researcher myself, but I have several sources from the top IQ experts, some of which you probably have heard of or maybe even interviewed on your show.
[00:01:16]  Now, data from the most prominent IQ scientist, Richard Lynn, confirms the average IQ of Iran to be 84.
[00:01:21]  Citation, The Wealth of Nations 2002, page 133.
[00:01:25]  Which conversely is not only 20 points lower than your outrageous 104 IQ claim, but it's also even lower than Iraq, which is 87.
[00:01:34]  Now, of course, in a country of 90 million people, you might have a million people with an IQ of 104, and let's say 90,000 with an IQ of 129 or more.
[00:01:43]  See normal distribution charts attached below.
[00:01:45]  So you will have some very smart people in Iran.
[00:01:48]  Okay, so we know all of that, right?
[00:01:51]  And now, Steph, back to your claim.
[00:01:53]  Your claim is outrageous.
[00:01:54]  Your claim, the IQ of Iran is 104, 106, which is complete nonsense.
[00:01:58]  I mean, Steph, think about it.
[00:02:00]  What you're saying.
[00:02:03]  So that is, he's saying, compare it to Japan, which would be crazy.
[00:02:13]  And now I know the IQ of the government in Iran, he says, is not necessarily the same as the general population, but if the IQ of the general population was really that much higher than the governing leaders, then those Moronic leaders would have been deposed off by the people a long time ago.
[00:02:30]  I mean, I'll get to my pushback, but just so I don't forget this one, genetically, North Koreans and South Koreans are indistinguishable, and the average IQ of East Asians, of Koreans, is higher than that of the white population, particularly in spatial reasoning, which is fantastic.
[00:02:47]  So the idea that if you have a high IQ population, you can just get rid of tyranny, like that is not true.
[00:02:57]  North Korea has been a sort of communist, open-air prison hellhole for many, many, many decades, and you have a very smart population.
[00:03:05]  So I don't know about that.
[00:03:08]  So, Steph, in the West, you might encounter Iranians who are very smart.
[00:03:11]  This goes without saying this is a very biased sample.
[00:03:13]  Very true.
[00:03:15]  What's particularly strange about all this is you, Steph, are a man with a very high knowledge about IQs, a fact on national wealth and civil decorum and functionality, yet despite Iran being a highly dysfunctional nation at practically any level you can look at.
[00:03:31]  You push this claim, blah, blah, blah, how absurd.
[00:03:34]  So when otherwise rational people act out of character and push fake news based on data that is from a biased sample, or is possibly even data that has been manipulated and propagated as a scient by the Iranian government, when they otherwise wouldn't ordinarily do so, one naturally has to ask why question mark, question mark, question mark, in my opinion.
[00:03:55]  I think I know the answer, Steph.
[00:03:56]  only thing that explains this bizarre old caps behavior of yours is have a bias in favor of a ram.
[00:04:04]  Simpson, we love Freddy McQueen music, would you agree?
[00:04:09]  All right.
[00:04:10]  It matters.
[00:04:11]  Yeah, of course it matters.
[00:04:15]  Sorry, it just kind of goes on and on.
[00:04:18]  It's a lot of question marks, a lot of old caps and so on.
[00:04:24]  So why is he so mad, right?
[00:04:28]  And outrageous, terrible, blah, blah, blah.
[00:04:32]  I mean, I probably have maybe a bit of a bias.
[00:04:35]  I've talked about this before that one of the best men I knew growing up happened to be Persian, the best father that I knew and so on.
[00:04:43]  So, you know, maybe there's a bit of a bias there.
[00:04:47]  But, you know, it's always interesting to me when you get really angry at someone.
[00:04:54]  And it's fine.
[00:04:54]  You can be mad at me.
[00:04:55]  And of course, I can make mistakes or have my biases.
[00:04:57]  And so that's totally fine.
[00:04:59]  But it's always interesting to me when people get really, really angry about something that doesn't affect them personally.
[00:05:09]  Like I understand if someone runs over your dog, you would take that personally and you get sort of very angry.
[00:05:15]  But getting very angry about purely abstract topics that don't have any impact on you in particular and not knowing why is probably a failure of self-knowledge, if that makes sense.
[00:05:27]  I mean, so, I mean, for instance, I know that, you know, why would people want to talk about IQ and distributions and ethnicities and so on?
[00:05:39]  Because the reason why leftists in particular and some rightists suppress IQ, well, actually both the left and the right suppress IQ research and variations across populations, the left do it because they live off resentment, right?
[00:05:58]  They sow falsehood and they reap resentment and that's their crop.
[00:06:01]  Resentment, anger, rage, and so on.
[00:06:03]  So I did talked about this in my documentary, Hong Kong Fight for Freedom, that the communists will come into a society, they came into China and they go to the Chinese, you know, the average person in China work in the land and says, oh, that rich guy up there, he stole from your ancestors.
[00:06:18]  He's just like you.
[00:06:19]  He's just evil.
[00:06:20]  And then they whip up all this hatred and then everybody ends up killing the rich people.
[00:06:26]  And because they say, well, everyone's the same.
[00:06:28]  Therefore, the only reason he has more is because he's stolen from you and exploited you and ripped off your ancestors.
[00:06:33]  And it's a very common thing.
[00:06:35]  And the same thing happens with IQ.
[00:06:38]  So a lot of poor people generally are less intelligent than a lot of very successful people.
[00:06:45]  I mean, plenty of people who are poor and very high IQ.
[00:06:48]  Not so much the converse, unless they just have inherited the money.
[00:06:51]  But people who earn their own money in the challenging whirligigs of the free market tend to be pretty smart.
[00:06:59]  And that is one way to explain this.
[00:07:03]  And IQ is significantly genetic, 80% late teens.
[00:07:06]  It only goes up from there.
[00:07:09]  So the left doesn't like it because it lowers social tensions, it lowers racial tensions, it lowers class tensions, and class tensions are what they exploit in order to gain power.
[00:07:20]  So they don't like it.
[00:07:22]  On the right, they don't like it because they tend to be more religious, more fundamentalist, and IQ variations across populations, which come out of evolution, like sort of the cold winter hypothesis that if you have cold winters, you need to delay gratification.
[00:07:37]  You need to plan and you need to have a lot of forethought and so on.
[00:07:44]  And so that tends to promote IQ.
[00:07:45]  Or to put it another way, those who don't plan don't generally do very well in cold climates where there's a lot of coldness, in particular where there are seasons that allow for farming, right?
[00:07:54]  It's different if it's perpetually cold, except for a month or two, such as in the Arctic, and so on.
[00:08:00]  So the left doesn't like it because it lowers social tensions, the social tensions and hostilities and hatreds that they exploit to gain power.
[00:08:08]  And the right doesn't like it because it's pretty certain proof of evolution and not that, you know, we're all created in the image of God and so on.

=== Iran's High IQ Population Gap (14:56) ===

[00:08:15]  So it's just a combo.
[00:08:17]  But the alternative to discussing IQ is war.
[00:08:23]  I mean, honestly, there's nothing more that you can do to promote the cause of peace than to talk about IQ.
[00:08:29]  All right.
[00:08:30]  So my response is, well, first of all, I appreciate the pushback.
[00:08:35]  It's always great to check to see if I have biases or are putting out incorrect information.
[00:08:40]  I promise you it doesn't have anything to do.
[00:08:42]  I like the music of Freddie Mercury.
[00:08:44]  Freddie Mercury himself was an absolutely wretched, horrifying, horrible human being.
[00:08:49]  And that's a topic for another time.
[00:08:52]  But, you know, a great musician and a great singer.
[00:08:55]  So the primary quote evidence cited for an Iranian average IQ above 100 comes almost entirely from recent voluntary online IQ tests 2025 to 2026, not from representative, professionally administered national studies.
[00:09:10]  These platforms report scores of 104.8 to 108.25 for Iran, but they come with major caveats about selection bias, of course, right?
[00:09:19]  Because it's the people with access to the internet who want to take IQ tests and so on, so they generally would be smarter as a whole.
[00:09:27]  Online test data, based on 2025 results updated January 2026, Iran ranks fourth globally, 104.8, behind South Korea, 106.97, China, 106.48, Japan, 106.3.
[00:09:43]  This uses 10,538 Iranian test takers out of about 1.21 million worldwide.
[00:09:50]  The test is Raven-style non-verbal reasoning, normed to mean 100.
[00:09:54]  Standard deviation 15.
[00:09:57]  So, yeah.
[00:10:00]  So these numbers have been widely shared in Iranian media.
[00:10:04]  And that's, of course, update, but we'd be understanding, right?
[00:10:08]  So, of course, it's self-selected and all of that.
[00:10:11]  It's not a random or representative sample of Iran's 90 million population.
[00:10:15]  Completely agree.
[00:10:16]  I completely understand that.
[00:10:19]  More rigorous studies have shown lower IQs, of course, right?
[00:10:28]  Which I would completely expect.
[00:10:32]  But Iranian meta-analysis, this is 51 studies using proper Weschler IQ scales, 5,352 Iranians.
[00:10:47]  Overall mean, 97.12, subgroups, under 20 years, 97.73, over 20 years, 105.62.
[00:10:57]  This is the best Iranian-specific review of clinical grade tests.
[00:11:05]  So over 20 years, the most rigorous review of 51 studies is that the IQ of Iranians over 20 years is 105.61.
[00:11:22]  And in my view, education does have something to do with it as well.
[00:11:25]  Censorship, I believe, in my view, censorship tends to lower intelligence tests to do with verbal reasoning, to do with verbal analysis and verbal understanding.
[00:11:38]  If you're only allowed five books, right, then you can read those over and over again.
[00:11:42]  If there's no particular censorship and you can read just about anything, including stuff that challenges, you get involved in debates and arguments, and if you have free speech, then your verbal reasoning is going to significantly increase.
[00:11:52]  If you're not allowed to disagree, if you're not allowed to argue, if you're not allowed to debate, if you're not allowed to talk about a wide variety of topics, if you don't have access to a wide variety of books, well, then you're going to end up with lower verbal skills, lower verbal reasoning, lower verbal abilities.
[00:12:11]  That's going to show up in an IQ test.
[00:12:15]  Intelligence improves upon resistance.
[00:12:20]  Intelligence is a muscle, right?
[00:12:21]  So the resistance of needing to plan for the winter selects for higher intelligence as a whole.
[00:12:27]  And we know this because the general, the highest IQs tend to be East Asians who come out of Siberia with brutal winters and short summers, but still enough to farm often.
[00:12:37]  And then whites where there is less brutal winters and so on.
[00:12:43]  And so it sort of goes down from there.
[00:12:50]  So I will put sources all of that.
[00:12:56]  And so this, of course, success of the Iranian diaspora in science engineering is sometimes cited anecdotally as indirect support for higher genetic potential.
[00:13:07]  That reflects selection affects educated emigrants rather than average back home.
[00:13:12]  So, I mean, one of the reasons why I would look at the difference between Iran and Iraq, for instance, which is what I tweeted about, is that the Iranians are Middle Eastern as a whole, but the Iranians, or at least the Persian population, are Caucasian, right?
[00:13:32]  They come from the Caucasian route.
[00:13:37]  And wherever you go, there tends to be ethnic or population norms.
[00:13:50]  And so Caucasians tend to norm that way.
[00:13:53]  Is there a reason why it might be slightly higher in Iraq?
[00:13:58]  It's certainly possible.
[00:14:00]  But anyone who doesn't take this into account in particular when looking at populations and even more in particular when looking at military conflict, basically it's high IQ fighting high IQ.
[00:14:13]  And so this is going to be different as a whole.
[00:14:18]  And so if you rely on these general rankings, and again, are they perfect?
[00:14:27]  Of course not.
[00:14:27]  Are they questionable?
[00:14:28]  Of course.
[00:14:29]  But in general, I would say that Iranians have a higher IQ than, say, people in Iraq on average.
[00:14:36]  And what that means, of course, is that you will end up with Iran having more high IQ individuals, 4 to 5 million versus 300,000, which is a 15 times difference driven by a reported 10 to 12 point IQ gap.
[00:14:52]  These figures appear in Iranian media and globalists, but heavily biased.
[00:14:55]  Yeah, I get all that.
[00:14:58]  So high IQ individuals, and these are IQ 130 plus, are rare everywhere, about 2.3% of mean 100.
[00:15:09]  And what that means is that if you have small differences in IQ, and a 10-point difference in IQ on average, is not a huge difference.
[00:15:18]  It's not like you'd meet someone and go, oh my gosh, they're totally different if it's 105 versus 95.
[00:15:27]  But it is at the very highest end that IQ differences show up with a great and wide set of numbers.
[00:15:36]  So if you look at people who are 160 plus, then you end up with 10 to 15,000 of those in Iran versus only a few hundred in Iraq.
[00:15:51]  So small mean shifts cause huge relative differences far out in the outliers.
[00:15:59]  IQ 160 or more is extraordinarily rare globally, one in every 30,000 people at mean 100.
[00:16:07]  So that is important.
[00:16:13]  So what you end up with is at the very, very high end, you end up with a lot of people, you say 10,000 to 15,000 in Iran versus only a few hundred in Iraq.
[00:16:26]  And of course, in Iran, because it's a dictatorship to a large degree, then they can force the IQ 160 people to work in the military.
[00:16:35]  You can't do that in a relatively free society, say, such as in the West.
[00:16:39]  You can't force the smartest people to go into the military.
[00:16:44]  IQ 160 plus, you can do just about anything that you want.
[00:16:48]  So they would go, the people who could teach themselves computer science, they can teach themselves mathematics or learn it online these days in particular.
[00:16:55]  They can study just about anything they want with great success.
[00:16:58]  And so what's going to happen with the IQ 160 plus people in a free society, are they likely to end up in the military?
[00:17:05]  Not in particular.
[00:17:06]  They're going to go into finance.
[00:17:07]  They're going to go into academia.
[00:17:11]  They're going to go be super lawyers, although they may even be too smart for the law because a lot of memorization, not creativity.
[00:17:18]  But they are not likely to go into the military.
[00:17:22]  Whereas, of course, in a dictatorship, you can put them straight into the military and force them to work for your military.
[00:17:29]  And so you're going to have a much smaller sampling of IQ 160 plus people in Western military as opposed to Iranian military.
[00:17:38]  And that is going to make a very big difference in what happens, especially in terms of the engineering abilities for which Iranians or Persians are renowned.
[00:17:47]  And you're going to end up, since war is IQ, engineering, logistics, supply, it is a strategy.
[00:17:55]  It is all war is based upon deception.
[00:17:58]  So you're going to end up with a high IQ population.
[00:18:03]  And there's going to be 10 to 15,000 of them in Iran versus how many in the West, in the military, at the top echelons, in the decision-making powers.
[00:18:14]  It's kind of tough, especially, of course, because in the West, there's been a lot of DEI in the military, which has promoted people not based upon raw meritocracy.
[00:18:23]  See, in a dictatorship, particularly a fairly mono-ethnic dictatorship, you can promote based simply upon raw meritocracy.
[00:18:31]  But in the West, raw meritocracy has been cast aside for the sake of checking boxes and fulfilling quotas and representative groups and minorities and blah, blah, blah.
[00:18:45]  So you are just going to end up with a difference, and that's important.
[00:18:51]  And I think the numbers are defensible.
[00:18:59]  So, all right.
[00:19:00]  And of course, the other thing, too, is that if you look at Iran, it's not monoethnic completely, of course, right?
[00:19:04]  So you would look at the Persians, the Persian population, because that's where the source of the raw meritocracy is going to come from.
[00:19:11]  It's sort of like saying, you know, in America, you've got the NBA, and you average out the population or opportunity to be in the NBA.
[00:19:23]  You average out between, say, blacks and whites and East Asians.
[00:19:30]  Well, that wouldn't be particularly fair because in general, of course, the draw of talent from the NBA, for the NBA, comes from a lot of blacks, some whites, and really that's about it.
[00:19:44]  So saying that you would look at the quality of an NBA team based upon the population of East Asians would be not particularly helpful because there's very few East Asians who end up in the NBA for a variety of reasons, some genetic, some height, some cultural, whatever, right?
[00:20:07]  So you would want to say if you wanted to look at the quality of a basketball team in a country, you would want to look at factors not including the prevalence or population of East Asians, but other factors.
[00:20:19]  And in the same way, if you want to look at who is available to run the military at its highest capacity, you would look at the highest IQ population.
[00:20:29]  You'd look at the size of it, and then you would look at how what are the process of drawing the highest talent people out of that pool of smart people, right?
[00:20:43]  And so in the West, one of the things that's added to income inequality is that in the past, the high IQ individuals would kind of stay in their local communities.
[00:20:53]  They'd be the mayors.
[00:20:54]  They'd be the local business owners.
[00:20:55]  They would be the lawyers, the doctors, accountants, and so on.
[00:20:58]  And so they would keep things running fairly well in their local community.
[00:21:02]  Now, of course, there's this big white net that's cast across the entire country that's trying to get the highest IQ people into universities, again, with the sad restrictions of DEI initiatives and so on.
[00:21:16]  And so, and this is one of the reasons why rural America and rural places are kind of falling down.
[00:21:22]  And there's a great concentration of intelligence in the white-collar industries in academia and so on, because there's this net that goes out and scoops people up and takes the smartest people repeatedly, but this has happened for generations now, takes the smartest people out of the local communities, centralizes them in urban centers.
[00:21:41]  Local communities fall without the IQ support, and it just gets worse from there.
[00:21:45]  So I appreciate that.
[00:21:47]  And of course, everyone should look into these estimates.
[00:21:50]  Everyone should look into the estimates.
[00:21:52]  I look at the winter origins of particular ethnic groups.
[00:22:00]  And with the filter of winter that's gone on for like hundreds of thousands of years or a million years, depends on how you measure it or what your sources are.
[00:22:08]  But that's a brutal selection pressure that has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years.
[00:22:12]  You know, in just a couple of generations, there was a Russian researcher who divided foxes into the most aggressive and the least aggressive.
[00:22:20]  And he just bred them.
[00:22:21]  And within a couple of generations, he had bred incredibly ferocious foxes or incredibly passive and domesticated and peaceful foxes.
[00:22:31]  And that's just in, you know, five, ten generations.
[00:22:34]  If you've got brutal selection pressures for intelligence and social cooperation, well, I mean, those selection pressures over hundreds of thousands of years are going to produce enormous differences in outcomes.
[00:22:49]  And sort of if you look at East Asians, high IQ, great spatial reasoning, a little bit over-conformist relative to Western cultures.
[00:22:59]  Well, that's because they faced more brutal winters where social cooperation was an absolute and a necessity.
[00:23:03]  So anyway, you can look at these sorts of things.
[00:23:05]  And there's, you know, again, the usual caveats, you don't judge individuals, you just look at general trends.
[00:23:10]  But it's important.

=== Evaluating Truth in Relationships (08:59) ===

[00:23:12]  And we'll see.
[00:23:14]  We will see.
[00:23:17]  The war, modern warfare, is entirely based, or I shouldn't say entirely, modern warfare is significantly, if not almost overwhelmingly based upon IQ.
[00:23:32]  It's not the same as when you've got two knights whacking at each other with swords, that's based on skill and strength and reflexes and so on.
[00:23:40]  But modern warfare is based on IQ.
[00:23:46]  Significantly, almost overwhelmingly, again, in my opinion.
[00:23:50]  And there's lots of evidence for this as a whole.
[00:23:56]  And so, if modern warfare is based upon IQ, then, and if Iranian IQ is pretty high, and if as a dictatorship they can scour for the smartest individuals and put them in the military and in the military-industrial complex in Iran, then we would expect Iran to do relatively well in this war.
[00:24:19]  I say this without any shred of moral analysis.
[00:24:22]  I'm just talking about the sort of raw capacities.
[00:24:26]  In the same way that if you look at an American basketball team and you put it up against a South Korean basketball team, who would you expect to win if you had to put a lot of money on it?
[00:24:46]  Well, there's no DEI in American basketball, in the NBA, because you can see that just look upon the demographics of the teams.
[00:24:54]  And so, if you had to bet money on an NBA team versus whatever the equivalent would be in South Korea, you would probably put your money on the NBA team.
[00:25:09]  So, that's sort of what I'm saying.
[00:25:10]  All right.
[00:25:12]  Hi, Steph.
[00:25:13]  When communicating philosophy or philosophical ideas to the average person and they respond with confusion or indifference, how do we know whether we have failed to adequately relate the ideas or if it is just too complex a language for them to grasp?
[00:25:25]  I know everyone's capable of understanding philosophy on some level, even if they're lower IQ.
[00:25:29]  So, could the disconnect come from the disparity of time spent in the subject?
[00:25:33]  It's a great question.
[00:25:36]  It's a big question about philosophy.
[00:25:41]  What is or are people's resistances to reason and evidence?
[00:25:49]  Why are people, why do they get so tense, they get so hostile, they get so angry, get so manipulative, get so defensive, get so gaslighting, so fogging, so opaque?
[00:25:59]  Why do they get so tense around philosophy?
[00:26:04]  So, historically, philosophy got you killed.
[00:26:09]  So, we all want to pursue the truth, and society benefits and only survives if we pursue the truth.
[00:26:14]  But those in charge really prefer that we pursue practical truths rather than moral absolutes and universals.
[00:26:23]  And so, they encourage us to seek the truth in the material realm, and then they attack us for seeking truth in the moral, philosophical, and universal ethical realm.
[00:26:35]  The king wants you to study the mechanics of war.
[00:26:39]  He doesn't want you to study whether he's just a guy in a funny hat, just like you, but claiming to be divine, right?
[00:26:46]  Because philosophically, that would be repudiated.
[00:26:48]  So, most people, and the overwhelming majority of people, they do not evaluate the truth.
[00:26:55]  They evaluate the effect of the truth on their relationships.
[00:27:00]  Like most people don't filter the world through true-false, they filter it through us them.
[00:27:07]  So, when you say something to someone that is a sort of startling moral truth, they don't filter whether it's true or false, right or wrong, moral or immoral, heavens know.
[00:27:20]  What they do is they filter based upon its expected effect upon their relationships.
[00:27:26]  So, if I put forward UPB and I say that we don't need divine morality because we have a secular, rational, philosophical proof of universal ethics, really the holy grail of philosophy has been achieved, yay, me, yay, this community.
[00:27:43]  So when you talk to a religious person about the ethics of secular morality and the non-existence of God and so on, they don't figure out whether it's true or false.
[00:27:56]  They figure out whether it's going to have a positive or negative effect on their relationships.
[00:28:00]  And that's all they're doing.
[00:28:01]  Evolutionarily speaking, we can go into the reasons why.
[00:28:05]  They're obviously pretty obvious, so I don't think we really need to.
[00:28:09]  So it's not a matter of intelligence.
[00:28:10]  Very smart people are very resistant to basic truths.
[00:28:13]  And some less intelligent people are quite receptive to basic truths.
[00:28:17]  So it's kind of like if you're talking about child abuse, then people don't evaluate the morals of child abuse as a whole.
[00:28:32]  They evaluate what talking about the evils of child abuse is going to do to their relationships.
[00:28:38]  If you're talking about circumcision being child-male genital mutilation, which of course it is, a violation of the non-aggression principle, which of course it is, as being stone evil, which of course it is, people aren't evaluating that according to any rational, objective, or moral standard.
[00:28:54]  What they're saying is, ooh, if I was circumcised and I call it evil, what effect does that have on my relationship with my parents who chose to get me circumcised?
[00:29:04]  That's what people are evaluating.
[00:29:08]  If you say you don't have to keep abusive people in your life, then people are like, yeah, that seems reasonable.
[00:29:17]  And then you say, and that includes parents, right?
[00:29:20]  And if you've had bad parents, abusive, neglectful parents, whatever, and they continue to be unrepentant, then that argument is not evaluated according to its moral truth.
[00:29:29]  It's evaluated according to if it's going to put you in conflict with others.
[00:29:33]  And I've always loved that line.
[00:29:36]  You speak treason fluently.
[00:29:39]  But, of course, the king, the ruler, would send out people in the past to probe for resistance among the general population.
[00:29:47]  So some guy would go into a bar and start trying to talk people into disavowing the king.
[00:29:53]  I don't think the king is divine.
[00:29:55]  I think he's just a guy in a funny hat.
[00:29:57]  And if anyone said, yes, I agree, then they would clap them in irons and they would be a traitor and they would be killed and their property would be dispersed and their children would be cursed.
[00:30:06]  So when I come up and talk to people about moral things, there's an old instinct that comes out of people, which is, if I agree with this guy who is speaking things that might be unacceptable for a lot of people, then he could be an agent of the king and it's a trick, right?
[00:30:24]  So they're like, and that's so they hop they go vague, they despawn, they go rubber bones, they go manipulative.
[00:30:32]  So if a man has married a woman based upon the belief in female supremacy, which is a huge modern issue, like happy wife, happy life.
[00:30:48]  You got to please your wife.
[00:30:49]  You got to do what your wife wants.
[00:30:50]  The honeydew list, how you do this, how you do that.
[00:30:54]  And, you know, you can't ever relax or take a nap because your wife will get annoyed and you got to beg for sex, you know, all of this female supremacy stuff.
[00:31:02]  If a man has married a woman and has children based upon that principle or premise, and he was raised by a mother who put forward that principle or premise, if all of that has happened and you start talking about female supremacy and universal morality and self-respect and negotiation among equals and so on, he doesn't evaluate the truth or falsehood of that.
[00:31:27]  He evaluates what is going to happen if he tries to put that into practice in his marriage.
[00:31:33]  So try to get a sense of people's relationships.
[00:31:36]  Your show on Sunday, March the 15th, 2026, was incredible.
[00:31:42]  Ask a Catholic that opening monologue challenging today's Christians to answer with clarity what Jesus commands via the Good Samaritan parable, especially when it comes to the specific child abuse scenario you laid out, it left me with a deep sense of sorrow for what you endured, my own sense of frustration with the leadership of the church.
[00:31:58]  The reality that not one, no church leaders, Anglican or not, lay or religious influences, no one has tried to dialogue with you to address these essential issues when you've been pointing them out for decades, is more than disappointing to hear.

=== The Problem with Moral Intervention (13:16) ===

[00:32:11]  Not as disappointing as some of the immediate life caller responses yesterday.
[00:32:15]  The second woman was out of line, and the gentleman who landed on the idea that if you had not been abused, we wouldn't have received your philosophy gifts was hard to stomach.
[00:32:23]  Nonetheless, if one, myself, was to try and reach out, share your 315 show, and try to coordinate a dialogue just to deal with the Good Samaritan and cold abuse and child abuse topic, is it something you would be comfortable with?
[00:32:34]  Sure, I appreciate that.
[00:32:36]  And yeah, it's a fact.
[00:32:38]  And if it's any consolation, philosophers have not dealt with the topic of child abuse.
[00:32:43]  Philosophers, of course, should have been talking for the few thousand years, 3,000 years, give or take, that philosophy has been a sort of recorded thing.
[00:32:54]  Philosophers prior to myself have not dealt with the topic of child abuse.
[00:33:03]  It's, I mean, just beyond shocking to me.
[00:33:05]  It's beyond shocking, and it still remains beyond shocking to me that it had to fall to me.
[00:33:12]  It had to fall to me.
[00:33:14]  And that's a real shame.
[00:33:17]  I guess I get the glory.
[00:33:21]  It doesn't feel like that sometimes.
[00:33:23]  But yeah, the fact that, now, of course, there are philosophers who've occasionally mentioned childhood.
[00:33:28]  John Locke talks a little bit about child raising, but Ayn Rand didn't touch upon it.
[00:33:32]  Aristotle didn't really touch upon it.
[00:33:35]  Plato did, but in a very creepy and negative way, that you his ideal society was one giant culty flesh pit where nobody had any parents and you could end up marrying your sister.
[00:33:47]  It's just completely bizarre and weird, but he was a bizarre and weird fellow because he was a mystic.
[00:33:53]  So, yeah, philosophers have not put forward any, they've had some practical arguments about child raising, but they have not put forward any deep or even shallow moral analysis of child raising.
[00:34:08]  What is good and evil in child raising?
[00:34:10]  Are children covered by the non-aggression principle?
[00:34:13]  I mean, you've got philosophers like Hegel talking about the manifestations of the world spirit in blast.
[00:34:18]  Like, okay, should you hit children?
[00:34:20]  If I hit adults, should you hit children?
[00:34:23]  Pretty freaking basic.
[00:34:26]  You can't hit adults.
[00:34:28]  Should you be able to hit children?
[00:34:33]  An obvious, basic, clear, experienced, like people experience getting hit as children.
[00:34:41]  So why wouldn't you just, or libertarians don't do that either.
[00:34:45]  Is spanking a violation of the non-aggression principle?
[00:34:47]  I mean, I did this essay and debated Walter Bloch and blah, blah, blah, 20 years ago, 15 years ago.
[00:34:54]  So I don't understand why, for thousands of years, people dedicated to truth, virtue, reason, and objectivity have not touched upon the topic of the most widespread violation of rights in the world, which is hitting, neglecting, and abusing children.
[00:35:21]  It's the most widespread evil that we can do the most about.
[00:35:24]  And for thousands of years, tens of thousands of thinkers have adroitly refused to address the topic.
[00:35:32]  It honestly is like during a massive plague, the Black Death or the Spanish flu, for all of the medical professionals to be talking about everything but the massive plague that is going on.
[00:35:52]  I mean, I've got to tell you, it's beyond insane to me.
[00:35:57]  It is so deranged, so avoidant, that when you really get how absolutely bizarre it is, then in a time of universal plague, every single medical professional is avoiding the topic of the universal plague and talking about things completely unrelated to actionable human health.
[00:36:21]  For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers, libertarians, anarchists, voluntarists, and communists, they've all avoided the most widespread evils in the world that you can do the most about.
[00:36:36]  They've all talked about all the, oh, the class thing and the race thing and the gender thing and the free market thing and the, I mean, they've talked about everything but the most widespread evil you can do the most about, which everyone has experienced.
[00:36:52]  And of course, the answer probably is that everyone's experienced it and they don't want to deal with the trauma, so they resolutely avoid the topic.
[00:37:01]  I don't know.
[00:37:01]  It's bizarre.
[00:37:02]  Honestly, when you get it, that the entire philosophy, the entire history of moral philosophy has been the covering up of child abuse and almost nothing else.
[00:37:11]  And the entire history of libertarianism, which concerns itself with the non-aggression principle, has been the cover-up of child abuse, that it's all about the cover-up of child abuse.
[00:37:19]  And of course, given how I got attacked, it's sort of understandable.
[00:37:24]  All right.
[00:37:28]  He had another question.
[00:37:29]  A few days ago, someone asked how you feel about the Shroud of Turin.
[00:37:32]  Maybe you missed it, but there has been renewed interest in the Shroud the last few years when new photo negatives that appeared in 2024, along with new studies that for many was very compelling from a reason and evidence standpoint to the image being impossible to reproduce.
[00:37:45]  I could be wrong, but I felt like your answer lumped so quickly with other things.
[00:37:49]  I believe you mentioned people of faith like Aquinas have searched for, quote, proof for centuries, and you found that people of faith were seeking proof to be an interesting paradox.
[00:37:58]  Are you able to revisit this topic and assess what authenticating, if we are to believe the new reporting, that specific historical artifact could mean for at least establishing how the image came to be on the cloth?
[00:38:09]  Again, appreciate all you do to improve the world via philosophy and advocating for objective morality.
[00:38:17]  Well, a good number of the Ten Commandments and a good number of moral commandments of God are proven by UPB.
[00:38:32]  So, why would religious people not flock to UPB and say, Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal, are proven absolutely by rational philosophy?
[00:38:47]  That would be a pretty strong proof, but they don't.
[00:38:49]  They don't want to.
[00:38:50]  Because of course, because people believe you can't get an ought from an is, unless you're Chuck Norris, of course, he can get an ought from an is.
[00:38:57]  But if you believe you can't get an ought from an is, then the only place you can get morality is through the divine, through religion, through God.
[00:39:05]  So if there's secular proof of ethics, then leftists don't like it because it universes morality and denies them the political power they hunger for.
[00:39:19]  And the rightists don't like it because it removes the need for God to establish morality.
[00:39:26]  So the Shroud of Turin, Well, let's say, let's say that the Shroud of Turin is a genuine miracle, which means that God intervenes in reality to create miracles to prove his own existence.
[00:39:49]  Let's just go all the way.
[00:39:50]  Let's say that somehow the Shroud of Turin proves the existence of God.
[00:39:57]  And God has created that miracle, he has maintained that miracle, and he has shown, or science shows, that that miracle is impossible, but at least it provides significant evidence for the existence of God.
[00:40:13]  Well, then we have another problem.
[00:40:17]  It's not a pretty problem.
[00:40:20]  So the other problem is, God intervenes in the world for moral purposes.
[00:40:36]  So if we have broken the fourth wall, and God, by maintaining the miracle of the Shroud of Turin, continues to intervene in the material world for moral purposes.
[00:40:53]  then why on earth would I face 15 years of brutal child abuse?
[00:40:58]  And I'm not saying it's about me, just personally, a lot of people have gone through this.
[00:41:03]  But why, if God intervenes in the world for moral purposes, then why wouldn't he warm my mother's heart or stay her hand or at least give me some kind of comfort, some kind of sign that things were going to get better, and there was nothing?
[00:41:18]  You don't solve the problem of a virtuous God by proving, if you could, that God interferes with, creates miracles and creates impossibilities for the sake of what?
[00:41:31]  Well, God would put forward the Shroud of Turin, would create and maintain this miracle so that people would be more likely to believe in God.
[00:41:38]  Okay.
[00:41:39]  So God would do this for him.
[00:41:40]  He wouldn't do it for an evil purpose.
[00:41:42]  So God is perfectly clear and keen and willing and able and does interfere in material reality in order to promote virtue.
[00:41:58]  But then, I mean, outside of just what I suffered, you have the problem of if God interferes with reality to create the Shroud of Turin or any other miracle you want to care for that you want to promote or believe in or accept, then you may substantiate the existence of God, but you then deny his morality.
[00:42:25]  So if there was a child drowning, and I'm a lifeguard, and somebody says, can you go and save that child?
[00:42:39]  And I say, no, I'm working on a piece of cloth that has remarkable properties that will be established over 2,000 years from now.
[00:42:53]  What would people say?
[00:42:55]  They would say, okay, I mean, I don't necessarily hate the cloth thing, but there's a child who's drowning, and you're the only person who can swim out and save that child.
[00:43:05]  Say, no, no, no, no.
[00:43:06]  I'm working on this piece of cloth, man.
[00:43:10]  And the child drowns.
[00:43:13]  A fireman.
[00:43:15]  There's a bunch of nuns in a burning building and he won't do it.
[00:43:19]  He won't because he's working on a piece of cloth that might be authenticated in 2,000 years, so he won't go and save the children.
[00:43:27]  Or, well, he won't go and save the children or the nuns or whoever is your favorite victim group from the burning building.
[00:43:34]  So, and let's say that 2,000 years in the future, the cloth of the fireman, the cloth of the lifeguard, is authenticated and say, ah, yes, well, the fireman or the lifeguard, yes, they made this cloth and it's remarkable.
[00:43:56]  It's amazing.
[00:43:56]  It's a miracle.
[00:43:58]  Well, we then have to look at the people that they let die while they were making the cloth.
[00:44:09]  The moment you manifest a supernatural or immaterial force to impact upon reality for the purposes of moral improvement, then the capacity to change things has now been established.
[00:44:24]  God can now intervene and interfere with material reality for the sake of pursuing a moral purpose or purposes.
[00:44:33]  Maybe you solve the problem of the existence of God, but now you have another problem, which is if God does interfere, why does he not interfere against clear evils?
[00:44:44]  I mean, a policeman, let's take it even more deep.
[00:44:46]  A policeman is watching a man assault a woman in a heinous manner.
[00:44:54]  And he says, I can't, I'm not going to help this woman because I'm working on a piece of cloth that might validate my existence in 2,000 years.
[00:45:02]  Oh, okay, so we validated the existence of the cop, and now we know that he didn't interfere in this grievous assault.
[00:45:08]  And you see, I've got one child, a couple of nuns.
[00:45:11]  In one instance, we're talking about billions of people over thousands of years, not helped.
[00:45:18]  So it doesn't solve the problem.
[00:45:22]  All you can do with the Shroud of Turin is prove the existence of an evil God.

=== Frat Hazing as Humiliation Rituals (03:19) ===

[00:45:28]  Sorry.
[00:45:29]  Okay, America in World War II has burned down some and bombed all the major cities in Japan, even using the atomic bomb to create a glimpse of hell never before seen on earth.
[00:45:38]  Yet today, the alliance between U.S. and Japan couldn't be friendlier.
[00:45:41]  In the Middle East, we've also bombed them to next week and back for 30 or so years, and they still understandably hate us, hate the U.S. What do you think causes this difference?
[00:45:50]  It's religion.
[00:45:52]  And of course, I mean, you know, way back in the day that the Americans in the founding of the country went over and talked to the people in the Middle East about terrible things that were being done to American shipping and Americans.
[00:46:12]  And this is long before America had any involvement in the Middle East, and they ended up having to go and fight, right?
[00:46:17]  Shores of Tripoli.
[00:46:20]  My martial arts, there's another question.
[00:46:21]  My martial arts club have a hazing ritual that I believe is immoral and useless.
[00:46:25]  I'm trying to get it banned.
[00:46:26]  What's your opinion on hazing?
[00:46:27]  Is it, for example, always immoral?
[00:46:31]  Yeah, hazing, I remember a friend of mine many years ago wanted to get into a frat.
[00:46:44]  And to get into the frat, you had to run around a track.
[00:46:49]  And every time you went around, they'd give you a warmer and warmer beer until you threw up and they would collect your vomit in giant plastic bags.
[00:46:59]  And then to get into the frat, you had to try and break your way through a human chain under an archway while the people on top of the archway dumped the vomit on you, your own vomit or the vomit of other pledges.
[00:47:14]  I was once invited to, I lived in a frat house for a while and I was invited to join, which was nice.
[00:47:20]  They were nice guys, but I'm not that.
[00:47:23]  Obviously, I'm not.
[00:47:24]  Obviously, for better or worse, I'm not much of a joiner.
[00:47:27]  Other than joining reason, evidence, and truth.
[00:47:30]  And so I think that's just a basic humiliation ritual.
[00:47:34]  It is the erasure of any sense of personal identity in order to merge with the group.
[00:47:39]  And you have to be willing to go through the most abject humiliations, you know, like the put your penis into the hole of a shotgun and things like that, and you be beaten and all of that.
[00:47:49]  So you have to be willing to go through the most brutal humiliations in order to say that you will erase any sense of personal identity to merge with the authority of the group.
[00:48:05]  And I won't fucking do it.
[00:48:07]  I mean, I wouldn't.
[00:48:08]  I really like myself.
[00:48:09]  I like being me.
[00:48:11]  And the idea that I would go through some pathetic humiliation ritual in order to join with a bunch of other people who'd all given up their own identities.
[00:48:23]  I mean, really, that's a fate worse than death for me.
[00:48:26]  So I'm just, I mean, it's not necessarily a violation of the non-aggression principle since people are agreeing to do it, but there's something that young people cannot consent to rationally.
[00:48:37]  All right.
[00:48:38]  Why do some folks put 50 bumper stickers on their car aside from looking silly?
[00:48:41]  What is the philosophy behind it?
[00:48:43]  I don't get it.
[00:48:43]  Love your content.
[00:48:44]  Always worth it to donate.
[00:48:45]  Well, that certainly is very true.

=== Surviving a Compromised World (02:57) ===

[00:48:48]  So they do it because this particular boomer phenomenon.
[00:48:54]  Boomers are NPC toddlers.
[00:48:56]  They are performative.
[00:48:58]  Boomers want to get pats on the head and approval for pretend virtue rather than actually dig in and achieve real virtue.
[00:49:06]  They tend to be followers and conformists and so on.
[00:49:10]  And I mean, the boomers were raised in a Christian monoculture, so they feel safe to rebel against it without realizing that by rebelling against it, they destroy it.
[00:49:20]  So what they do is they're putting out signals to show how, quote, virtuous they are.
[00:49:30]  And they're putting out signals to be able to find like-minded people and all twist each other into pretzels, patting each other on the back for how moral they are because they conform to usually programmed psyops from alphabet agencies.
[00:49:45]  All right.
[00:49:46]  Next question.
[00:49:46]  Is it immoral or unethical to use companies like Facebook, Google, Meta, Amazon to build one's business?
[00:49:52]  Nope.
[00:49:53]  Nope.
[00:49:54]  No.
[00:49:56]  No.
[00:49:59]  I don't think so.
[00:50:01]  All right.
[00:50:04]  No, because, I mean, we all have to survive in a morally compromised world.
[00:50:10]  And the world that we have to survive in is much less morally compromised than most societies or places throughout human history.
[00:50:18]  We all, I mean, most of society ran on slavery in history.
[00:50:25]  Every race engaged in it.
[00:50:26]  Every race was subject to it.
[00:50:28]  So all societies ran on slavery.
[00:50:31]  Does that mean you can't participate in any aspect of their society because it has immoral elements?
[00:50:36]  I mean, you're worried about Amazon or Facebook or whatever.
[00:50:41]  I mean, the roads are publicly funded.
[00:50:43]  I don't agree with the public funding of roads.
[00:50:44]  Does that mean I can't drive on any roads?
[00:50:47]  Buses are subsidized.
[00:50:48]  Does that mean I could never use a bus when I was a kid or a teenager?
[00:50:50]  I mean, I didn't get my car until I was in my late 20s.
[00:50:54]  I never got a car.
[00:50:57]  The universities I attended to were publicly controlled and funded.
[00:51:01]  And does that mean I can't like you take the world as it is and you try to improve it.
[00:51:06]  But purity is simply an excuse for non-participation.
[00:51:11]  So, all right, I will stop here.
[00:51:13]  I really, really appreciate these questions.
[00:51:14]  You know, keep them coming.
[00:51:16]  Follow me on X at Stefan Molyneux.
[00:51:19]  And I regularly will ask for questions there.
[00:51:21]  Freedomain.locals.com is a great community.
[00:51:23]  Please, please, please help support the show.
[00:51:25]  I know that the economy is tough.
[00:51:26]  I know that.
[00:51:27]  I really appreciate that.
[00:51:28]  Please don't give me anything you can't afford.
[00:51:31]  But if you could do what you can to help support the show, you know, the fact that it's ad-free is really, really important.
[00:51:37]  And that relies upon your voluntary support.
[00:51:41]  So I really do appreciate that.
[00:51:43]  Thanks so much.
[00:51:44]  Have a great day.
[00:51:45]  Bye.