Stefan Molyneux dismantles the "noble savage" myth as a Marxist and religious tool to induce hatred for modern freedom, contrasting it with the psychological trauma of childhood conformity. He argues that men and women evolved distinct mental machinery—externalizing order versus internalizing change—to survive war and nurture infants respectively, noting a 90% behavioral overlap despite statistical trait differences. The episode concludes with Molyneux terminating a debate after his interlocutor engaged in gaslighting and refused to listen, illustrating how punishing independent thought destroys human potential and honor. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Ancient History vs Prehistory00:02:38
Hey, good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Sunday, May the 3rd, 10 a.m.
Give or take a minute or two.
And.
Boy, oh boy, oh boy.
So something has come out about ancient history, sort of prehistory.
Anthropologists, for some reason I don't particularly understand, anthropologists.
Are some of the most propagandized people in the world.
He who controls the past controls the future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But man, the anthropologists are cray cray when it comes to talking about history and the world.
And of course, one of the things about anthropology as opposed to history, I mean, in my obviously amateur assessment, anthropology is about pre written history and.
History is about written history.
When the written word comes in, you start to get history before that.
It's anthropology.
I don't know if that's a formal way of distinguishing it, but that's certainly the way that I work with it in my head.
Now, of course, the problem with history that is pre literate, pre written, is I mean, you can make up any old crapola shiny shite that you want.
I mean, if you want to know about Ancient Greece, which also was the nickname of my frying pan when I was a bachelor.
But if you want to know about ancient Greece, I mean, the first place you'd do, you'd hopefully go and learn ancient Greek, and you would go and study the ideas and arguments of the Greeks, and you would begin to understand how all of that worked.
And that would be helpful and positive and useful, and that's sort of a requirement as a whole.
Now, if it's prehistory, though, I mean, you've got some.
Artifacts.
You got yourself some bones.
You got yourself some burial mounds.
You got yourself some cave paintings.
I mean, you've got pretty sketchy stuff.
I remember Bill Bryson was writing about it, he's a very funny writer.
He had a whole book on travel that I read, even though it wasn't particularly interesting.
He's like Hunter S. Thompson.
He just has a way of writing that is interesting, even if the subjects themselves aren't interesting.
It's a Weird kind of ability.
The Myth of the Noble Savage00:03:23
And he was saying that one of the reasons why the fossil record is so sketchy is because it's incredibly rare for anything to be fossilized.
He said, relative to the fossil record, if you take the entire human population of North America, you'd have one thigh bone.
That's how rare it is for anything to get fossilized.
So, of course, it's pretty tough to, you know, find intermediate species evolution and so on because it's so scattered.
And with anthropology, it is a fertile ground for truly predatory imaginary bullshit.
And this noble savage stuff, like, why is it so prevalent?
Why is it so common all over the place?
Almost every religion and almost every culture, almost every myth has a golden age, a beautiful, wonderful, Golden Age.
And why?
I mean, I've always found this stuff to be kind of foolish as a whole.
And I've talked about this for, oh, decades, right?
A noble savage, boy, you know, back in the day, and, you know, a particularly egregious violator of basic reason and history is the movie Dances with Wolves with the, I guess, recently deceased actor Graham Greene and Kevin Costner's ass.
I don't remember much about it other than there were some beautiful views and then Kevin Costner's skinny ass.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
But it was all about how the natives live in peace with the peace pipe and they sit around and they.
They lovingly hunt and kill only what they need to survive.
And they have lovely loyalties and virtues and blend with nature and live in peace and harmony with all that is.
And this is why Dances with Wolves got made.
I guess this is why Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, which I've never seen, but I've seen clips and it looks, of course, pretty brutal and violent.
And the famous sort of scene at the end when the Spanish show up, it's like, well, we're going to put an end to some of this brutality and violence.
But there's this incredibly prevalent and common myth.
And this myth of the noble savage, that back in the day, you know, there's this famous tweet on X, you know, like, why do we have to get up and go to work, man?
I would have preferred it in the ancient days when you just, you know, hunt some salmon, sit around, tell stories, look at the stars, and just vibe or something like that, right?
That there's this idea that in the past you see things.
were simple and better.
And you were in comfort with nature, at one with those around you, and so on.
And I had a conversation with a fellow just yesterday about how to dismantle the antinatalist arguments.
And, you know, when people say that we live in troubled times, we live in troubled times.
Yeah, sure, sure, absolutely, absolutely.
But if you could push a button and trade places with someone 500 years ago, would you?
And if they saw a day in your life, Would they push a button and trade places with you?
Of course they would.
Destined for Conformity and Conflict00:04:41
I mean, anyone who says otherwise is just lying to themselves or others or whatever, right?
And yeah, there are overcomplications and there are complexities and challenges in modern life.
And a lot of that has to do with our relative ability to have free speech and free thoughts, which is very unusual in human history as a whole.
In human history as a whole, and I wrote a whole novel about this when I was in my 20s called Just Poor.
You can get it at freedomain.comslash books.
It's a fantastic book, in particular the audiobook where I take on every accent known to man, God, and devil.
But the amount of conformity that was inflicted upon people in the past is almost impossible to understand.
People say, oh, well, you know, there's this wokeness and there's this conformity.
Absolutely.
Yeah, for sure.
But it pales.
I mean, people aren't being burnt at the stake.
They're not being walked off planks.
They're not being.
Drawn and quartered in the public square for questioning prevailing orthodoxies, at least not yet.
And so the amount of conformity that was inflicted in the past is something that we can't even really comprehend.
I would have had a truly Sean Bean cycle of infinite deaths for just about every podcast in the past, as opposed to now, people write mean things about me and I have to survive various deplatformings and blah, And, you know, I'm not going to say that's overly fun, although there have been some massive benefits to it as well.
But in the past, you know, I mean, someone like Alex Jones, who I think has just reconstituted himself at alexjoneslive.com, I think it is, so might want to check that out.
But Alex Jones in the past wouldn't have lasted more than three to five syllables.
And so if they can get you to love an imaginary past, then as surely as day follows night, you will end up hating your present.
Oh, but in the past, In the 1950s, there were all these positives.
People had lots of kids, great neighborhoods.
A man could support his wife on one income and his family, and blah, blah, blah.
And of course, there's some truth to that.
And the money has been corrupted since, and the debt has increased since.
And there are financial problems.
But there's also Bitcoin and other things that are unimaginably fantastic compared to things in the past.
And would I snap my fingers and go back to the 1950s?
I would not.
I would not.
I mean, I was destined to go from birth to grave.
With all of my thoughts dying with me.
Just from my perspective, that is the reality of the life that I was destined for.
And again, I wrote about this in my novel Just Poor, about how you can be brilliant and destroyed by society.
I was destined to go from birth to grave with my thoughts all dying with me.
Now, of course, I would have told my thoughts to people and so on.
And I used to have fantasies about when I was younger because I wrote these great books, great novels, and so on.
And I remember thinking that, you know, if I get married, I'm just going to have to promise my wife to try and get my books published after I'm dead because they can't be published while I'm alive because my books are very critical of anti rationalism and collectivism and socialism and so on.
So I personally was destined to leave zero footprint in the collective consciousness of the planet because I was studiously excluded from having a voice, a publication, a prominence in.
The world and the internet came along, and I get to leave a wild trail of butterfly laced footprints through the mental landscapes of the world forever and ever.
Amen.
There is no burning of the Library of Alexandria of the work that people like myself have done that remains online.
So for me, it's been fantastic.
And if I think about going back into the past, you know, one of the things that helps you understand the present in particular, you should watch my presentation on.
Joseph McCarthy, because realizing just how much of a grip communists have had on the media and on academia and on government policies, even, I mean, gosh, 70 years ago and so on, is pretty instructive.
Marxism and the Magical Past00:02:43
And it's one of the things that helped me bail out of politics, was, you know, I'm not a powerful politician and I don't have Richard Nixon on my side and so on, right?
And You know, what they can do to presidents, what they can do to powerful politicians is, I mean, it's pretty instructive.
So they can get you to look back upon some beautiful, wonderful, magical past, and that makes you discontented and frustrated and negative about the present.
And so anthropologists, which are rife with Marxists and Marxism, even those who aren't outright or direct Marxists, basically say Marxism informs all of our worldview.
Now, Marxism, of course, has to promote the noble savage, the people live in harmony in the past.
And the reason that they have to do that is that they have to say that conflict is not innate to human nature.
Because they say the argument from Marxists is that conflict is an artificial state of hostility brought about by capitalism.
And if we get rid of capitalism, then by golly, we will just return to that land of peace and plenty and.
Milk and butterflies and honey and lovemaking under the starry skies.
And the movie Avatar and Avatar 2 does the same thing, which is that the Nali, the Nali, not the ones from Unreal, but the Nali are living in harmony and peace with nature, and then the evil technocratic, mostly white colonialists come along and destroy there.
Lovely, beautiful forest, and torch their beautiful tree.
And, you know, this idea that there's this peace and love and harmony and, you know, some playful play fighting and so on.
I mean, the savagery is in the beasts, but the people are at one with nature and only lovingly kill that which they absolutely need to eat and dance and sing and live in harmony.
And so I think that James Cameron is a vicious propagandist in this way and has created more unhappiness than probably any other single filmmaker.
Because, of course, if they can get you to daydream about some perfect, wonderful past, then you're going to get up and you're going to kind of hate your life in the present.
So the Marxists need to say, well, you know, before capitalism, people lived in relative peace and plenty before there was a market, or at least peace, and capitalism has brought about all of this, you know, horrible violence.
And if we get rid of capitalism, then we get rid of the violence.
God's Design for Short-Term Pleasure00:02:35
And, of course, religions need their Garden of Eden because people look around the world and they say, if people are the best that God can do, Then God has some splaining to do, right?
Doesn't really make much sense.
I mean, I'm not an engineer.
I could design a better form of human consciousness than what we have.
But, you know, it's evolved, so it's spotty.
It's maybe a beta.
Maybe.
We're trying to get it to production through this show.
So, religion has to look at the pretty terrible state of the world and it has to say, well, gee, if God made the world and God made people, then why is everything so crappy?
And of course, religion has to blame people.
Can't blame God by definition, right?
Because God is perfect.
And therefore, God gave us free will, and we have just randomly chosen to misuse that free will, even though it should be said, it must be said, that God also designed our lusts and pleasures, right?
God also designed our lusts and pleasures.
God designed us to have short term preferences over long term preferences.
God could have as easily given us.
Better incentives for better behavior by reducing, say, lust, by reducing greed, by increasing intelligence to the point where people could make better decisions in the long term, because it takes some IQ points to see past the veil of immediate pleasure to the disastrous and hedonic treadmill dissipation of the future.
God could easily have given humanity better emotions or emotions that tended more towards virtue.
God could have given Humanity more intelligence because more intelligent people tend to make better decisions as a whole.
They tend to get and stay married longer.
They tend to be more into peaceful parenting.
They tend to be able to defer gratification better and so on.
So it's kind of unfair when entire groups have different levels of IQ, which of course is designed by God, and they're all held to the same moral standard.
That is not a fair situation, but of course, religion has to portray life as beautiful in the past, and then it has to make you feel like an atomic pile of supernatural crap because of the world that is, since there's original sin and.
You're bad because a man can't say no to any piece of food offered to him by a naked woman.
Humanity Started Peaceful00:04:03
And so the Marxists have to say, well, we started off peaceful and we started off in a state of community and conviviality and plenty relative to our needs.
And then it's advertising, you see, and the capitalists and they exploit our labor and steal our blah, And so we have to get back to what was because if.
Anthropologists, and if Marxists, and if general historians, and political scientists, and philosophers say that we came from a monstrous, wriggling, blood soaked,
tentacle waving, sword swinging, skull crushing, eternally essaying hellhole of bestial, violent nature, nature reddened tooth and claw, then capitalism, free trade, free markets, is a massive improvement.
And if we get rid of those, we're just going back to this world of savagery.
And the fact that ethnicities largely exist because of conquering and assault and violence and murder and genocide, the fact that ethnicities exist and countries exist because of violence, if people accepted that, then they would say, okay, well, if we bring a lot of cultures in together, historically, you know, evolutionarily speaking, one subspecies.
Does not coexist with another subspecies like the red and gray squirrel and so on.
They tend to displace each other.
I know humans are all one species and all of that, but it's just a biological analogy, but there's going to be conflict.
Whereas if there's this joyful, blissful, drug soaked, hedonistic peace and harmony that is fantasized about distant history, prehistory, where you can make up pretty much anything you want, then you can say, well, we started off great.
Clearly, we've taken a wrong turn somewhere.
I started off thin.
Now I'm fat, therefore I should go back to being thin.
Humanity started off peaceful and wonderful.
We see a lot of conflict in the present, and therefore we should go back to the peace and plenty, which means getting rid of modernity.
And so if people can get you to hate your life because they can make you fantasize about some blissful time in the past where milk and honey ran like streams and fruit fell from the Trees and you never got sick and never died.
And, you know, it's a fantasy, it's a child's view of happiness, which is infancy, basically.
We'll get to that in a sec.
If they can get you to worship the past, they can get you to hate the present, your life, your society, your culture, and then you're easy to take over.
You're just easy to conquer.
If you're fundamentally frustrated, angry, and dissatisfied with your life because you've been, you compare it to some perfect, wonderful, imaginary, non existent past, paradise, bliss, nirvana drug dream, then you can very easily end up hating your life.
And you will, really.
Oh, I don't have to get up and go to work.
It's like, you think human beings didn't work in the past?
You think that human beings didn't slog and slave day and night?
I mean, antibiotics, that's all you need to say.
Or dental surgery, or dentistry, or anesthesia, or central heating, or cooling in the summer, right?
I mean, you could go on and on.
The fact that we can have this conversation is important.
And sorry, somebody was wanting to talk and then has come and gone, but I will be finished shortly and happy to have anybody who wants to chat.
I can just assume that what I'm saying is so riveting, I might as well be building the hull of the Titanic.
So, I can get you to hate.
Your present by having you fall in love with a beautiful imaginary past.
And this is also Lord of the Rings does this a little bit as well.
The past is better than the present.
And why are we so susceptible to all of this?
Why We Worship Coercive Power00:02:47
Well, who makes life bad?
Well, mostly people with coercive power over us that we worship, right?
That's who makes life bad.
People who have coercive power, bureaucrats, politicians, and so on.
Or people who want to control that coercive power by programming you through media.
The media is utterly designed to have you oppose every pattern recognition, natural instinct that you have.
And so, who makes our life bad?
Well, those who can threaten violence against us, who we worship.
Like you think of your king, and he's put there by God.
You worship him as you would worship God.
But of course, he has the violent power to put you to death whenever he wants.
So, it's the People with power over us who we worship who do us the most harm.
And of course, what they want you to do is to believe that there was great beauty and peace in the past and the present is caused by what?
The present harms or problems are caused by what?
Well, for the Marxists, of course, free trade, property rights, you know, voluntary trade for mutual advantage, right?
This is a sort of foundational principle of economics that in any voluntary trade, both parties.
Anticipate being better off.
If I have a dollar and you have a pencil and I need to write something down and you want to buy whatever you can buy for a dollar, then I will give you the dollar and you can go and buy whatever you want because you want my dollar more than you want your pencil.
I want your pencil more than I want my dollar because I want to write down something important.
And so we both trade and we are both better off.
Now, that doesn't mean there's no such thing as buyer's remorse, but you anticipate being better off.
You anticipate being better off as a result of free trade.
Free trade by definition.
Results in a mutual increase of human happiness.
And of course, if you're unhappy and there's a return policy, you can just change your mind and send it back and so on, right?
But so voluntary trade to mutual advantage is monstrous and evil and corrupt.
But in the past, everything was beautiful and wonderful.
You just vibed and picked up some salmon and lay in the grass and watched the clouds go by and daydreamed and had sex and, you know, snacked and sang some songs and went to bed.
Which, of course, is a fantasy.
And the last thing I'll say, and again, happy to take questions and comments, criticisms, of course, debates, fight me, bro.
But where does this come from?
Well, I think in general, it comes from I mean, you probably heard this sort of idea, you know, the terrible twos.
The Terrible Twos of Belief00:14:49
What do they call it?
The terrible twos.
And the terrible twos emerge when ego, opposition, and saying no occur.
In children.
And so we have, in general, baked into the deepest parts of our brain, primitive, not quite memories, but primitive experiences of relative bliss, where we didn't have to lift a finger, we only had to cry out, and comfort was provided, and food was given, and cuddling was achieved, and diapers were changed, and so on.
And we didn't have to do anything other than burble, chortle, giggle, and complain.
Gurgle, chortle, giggle, and complain was actually the name of my barbershop quartet in elementary school and lie.
And people took care of us and everything was pretty great.
Or, of course, if you weren't taken care of, if you were neglected or yelled at, or people, heaven forbid, shook you or things like that, then you still have to create a fantasy of a better life or a better time or whatever it is, right?
And then you start with this either a real kind of bliss where you don't have to work or An imaginary kind of bliss, which is a recoil from trauma or neglect where you didn't have to work and things were better.
So, when we're born, or if you want to go all the way back, then in the womb, right?
In the womb, all of your needs are taken care of.
You don't have to lift a finger.
You don't have to do anything.
There's a warm heartbeat.
It's nice and goopy and enclosed.
You're fed through your belly and you don't have to do anything.
So, you know, do we have memories of things in the womb?
Well, I don't think we have direct memories of things in the womb.
My memory started about the age of 10 months.
But We do know that positive or negative experiences in the womb can have significant effects on our later lives.
So, we know that our experiences in the womb translate and transmit to our nervous system, to our brain development, to our hormones, to our stress hormones, and so on.
So, we know all of that.
We know all of that.
So, we have a distant, deep experience.
Body inscribed set of experiences around early childhood or fetal development and bliss, happiness, not having to lift a finger.
And so when people say that in the distant past things were blissful, I think that strikes a chord within us, not conscious memories, of course, right?
But I think it strikes a chord within us.
I mean, most people can't remember learning how to speak because that happens really early, right?
And we just remember being able to talk, but we don't remember not being able to talk.
And then what happens is we start to disagree.
And then the question is, how do our parents handle our disagreements?
Starting around the age of two, it's a variety of different times or places, but starting around the age of two, we start to disagree with our parents.
No, right?
We learned the word no.
And how our parents respond to that is pretty key, pretty powerful, pretty deep, and pretty important.
If our parents respond to that with anger, rage, escalation, hostility, rejection, neglect, And so on, or hit us, as is very common at that age, or lock us in our room, or send us to bed without supper and keep us hungry and so on, or call us names and so on.
Well, then what happens is, well, you see, we started from a place of bliss, peace, and plenty, and then we disagreed and were punished.
Right, so this is Garden of Eden 101, right?
You start from a place of bliss, which is.
Which is being a fetus, being a baby, early toddlerhood, we start from a place of bliss.
And then what happens?
Well, you see, we disagree with our parents, which is Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and so on, right?
And then what happens?
Well, you see, then all the problems that start are the result of our disagreement with those in authority.
And of course, adults are as gods to babies and toddlers.
Babies and toddlers view adults as infinite, babies and toddlers view adults as all powerful.
And babies and toddlers.
Recognize a vague commonality, but no identification.
In other words, babies and toddlers respond to human faces and not faces of dogs or pigs or whatever.
So they do recognize humanity and, you know, they recognize that the hand they grasp, or the finger, you know, you get your cute little baby's fist around your finger, that the fingers that they grasp are the same.
You can put your baby's or toddler's hand in yours and say, look, five fingers or four fingers and a thumb or whatever.
But babies and toddlers cannot comprehend what it is to be an adult.
And so adults appear as gods to babies and toddlers.
And the story is always it starts off blissful, and then you disagree, and then you're punished forevermore.
And the reason for that is not that parents are just sort of mean, random sadists who just enjoy thwarting the will of toddlers, but what happens is culture and religion and social myths.
So, a sort of silly, silly example which most parents have experienced is what is it?
Somebody was talking about this on Instagram not too long ago.
Something my five year old son has said to me, and one of the things his five year old son said to him was, Daddy, why is that woman so lazy?
Why is that woman so lazy?
And the actual fact of the matter was that it was a woman in a wheelchair being pushed around a mall.
Not lazy at all.
But you can't say that, right?
Why is that woman so fat?
Why does that man have spots on his face?
And you can't have your kid saying that kind of stuff, or if your kid hears a swear word somewhere and reproduces it, you have to sort of go in and stop them.
And if you've seen this wild video of children being interviewed in North Korea, their parents are terrified of what the kids might say.
Because if the kids say anything against the dear leader, they're off to a gulag, probably even the kids too.
And that may be the nicest thing that could happen to them.
So, you have your natural empiricism as a baby and a toddler, and then your parents have to interfere with that basic empiricism and get you to stop being natural and empirical.
So, you see somebody with a significantly different skin color, and you say, Well, why is that person so whatever it is, light or dark or whatever?
That's a perfectly reasonable question, but parents get tense.
Because even perceptions of racism or inventions of racism is the new absolutely evil thought crime and it is the new blasphemy laws and so on, right?
So, if you are told then as a little kid, right, you go to church as a little kid and you're bored and you're restless and you don't really understand things and you're kicking the seat ahead of you and it's like, sit still, get up, sit down, Jesus loves you or whatever, right?
And, you know, maybe a little bit more for boys and girls.
It's just all kind of incomprehensible.
Like, what the hell's going on?
And, What sense does it make?
And I'm supposed to believe in things that don't exist.
You know, can you imagine your mom tells you to put away the dishes, right?
And you don't put away the dishes.
And she says, Hey, I told you to put away the dishes.
And you pull an Obi Wan Kenobi and you say, But mom, but mom, really, I did put away the dishes.
She says, No, you didn't.
They're right there.
No, no, mom, you need to believe that I put away the dishes.
These are not the dishes you're looking for, right?
You need to have faith that the dishes have been put away.
No, no.
So you can't just have belief in things that are the opposite.
Of what you see.
You can't just believe, right?
You just can't believe.
You have to be empirical.
And if you try and tell your mother to go against her empirical evidence, she will get very upset with you.
But when your mother takes you to church and tells you to go against your empirical evidence, that's good, right?
That's a virtue.
That's a big plus, and so on, right?
I told you to take out the garbage.
Why is the garbage still there?
No, mom, dad.
You must have faith that the garbage is out by the curb.
You must believe.
And if the garbage is still here in the hallway rather than out at the curb, it's because you didn't believe hard enough.
And then you're going to hell.
I mean, can you imagine saying that to parents?
Told you to put away your toys.
They're away.
I'm trying to think of one where you create something, where you would create something.
You know, maybe you're a little older, right?
And your parents tell you to dig a ditch in the backyard.
Maybe they need to do some irrigation.
Maybe they're going to build a wall.
They tell you to dig a ditch and you don't dig the ditch.
And they say, Hey, I told you to dig that ditch.
I thought you agreed to dig that ditch.
Where's the ditch?
No, Mater and Pater, you must understand, making David Copperfield gestures.
You must understand.
The ditch is there.
You must just believe.
I told you to build that wall.
All the bricks and mortar is out there.
The pestle, what are you doing?
No, no.
The wall is there.
You must just believe.
And your parents would get mad at you and say, What sort of nonsense are you talking about?
I remember a friend of mine.
I've always remembered this story for, oh my gosh, now almost 50 years.
A friend of mine, when I was younger, sorry, that's kind of almost 50 years ago, and I was younger.
Talk about redundancy.
Anyway, so a friend of mine didn't go to school one afternoon when he was a little kid, and he came home instead and played with his Lego or whatever it was.
This is back when you could do these kinds of things in the single digits, and my friend didn't really quite process or understand.
You know, the sort of natural basic fact that the school would call his mother and did call his mother and said, Your child did not come to school today.
And his mother came home.
His mother was actually a teacher.
And his mother came home and said to my friend, let's call him Bob, say, Hey, little Bob, why didn't you go to school today?
He said, Oh, I threw up.
And she said, Where?
And he said, In the playground.
And it had been a tragically nice sunny day, no rain.
And so she, you know, half grabs him by the ear and says to him, Show me.
And marches him out to the playground, where, of course, there's no vomit.
And the story kind of collapses.
And maybe they cleaned it up, but then it would be wet, you know, this kind of stuff, right?
And so he was not allowed to say something that went contrary to empirical evidence.
I mean, I wouldn't suggest this, but I imagine him making these magic user sauron gestures of like, No, but mother.
You must believe there is vomit there.
You must have faith in the vomit.
There's the show title Faith in Vomit.
You must believe, although the evidence points to the contrary.
And it's like, no, right?
You come home with an F, right?
You've seen these things where they change the F to an A by curling over the top right and all of that.
You bring home an F, you failed.
No, mother, your father, you must believe that I've passed.
You must have faith that I've passed.
Right?
So people would just get mad at you for that kind of stuff where people are told, right, that to have a belief in the opposite of reason and evidence is a virtue and also a It's lying.
Don't lie to me.
You didn't vomit.
There's no vomit here in the playground.
You didn't vomit.
You lied to me.
Lying is bad, right?
Asking people to believe in the opposite or absence of reason and evidence is both a glorious virtue that gets you to heaven and a terrible lie that gets you punished.
A little confusing, right?
A little confusing, obviously.
So, children get contradictory information, which is that.
You should never lie, and lying is saying things that go against reason and evidence, right?
Like the classic example of the kid with chocolate all over his face who said, I didn't eat any chocolate.
I didn't eat any cotulate, or whatever they're saying at that age, right?
And your parents smile, right?
Because it's, no, mother, father, you must believe.
You must go against the evidence of your senses and the evidence of sheer reason.
You must believe, right?
Because parents will cross examine you, and if you say things that are false that go against reason and evidence, you're punished.
But then you're also rewarded for going against reason and evidence in the church and in culture and so on, right?
And the classic story of this, of course, is and a story that influenced me enormously when I flew to Africa with my brother at the age of six.
This is back when you could put a six and an eight year old on a plane together with no parent.
I flew to Africa and I listened over and over again on the headphones to the story The Emperor's New Clothes.
Which is an entire society where people go against reason and evidence.
The tailors come and say, We've made you the most wonderful fabric, but only people competent to do their jobs can see it.
And everyone goes against reason and evidence.
And then a kid says, The king is naked.
The king is naked.
Which, if your king is Janie Dornan, is probably quite a swoon fest for the ladies, but not so much with half ghoul King Charles, who should be a Spaniard, obviously, for dark based reasons.
So you are raised and.
You are told to tell the truth, and you are told the evidence of your senses is important, and you should not lie.
You should not go against reason and evidence.
Following Reason Against Evidence00:05:42
And how do people know that you're lying?
Well, there was no vomit in the playground, and there's chocolate on your face, and what you're saying doesn't make any sense.
But if a kid who was in the room knocks over a lamp, right, in the living room, and the parent comes in and says, Hey, you knocked over the lamp.
And the kid says, No, I was in the basement, or I was up the street playing.
Says something that is obviously contradictory.
You can't be in the living room and elsewhere at the same time.
This is why alibis work, of course.
And if the kid says, No, no, no, mom, you've got to understand, I was playing up the street and not here.
And it's like, No, the front door's locked.
I heard you in this room, right?
You were in this room.
And the lamp didn't knock itself over.
No, no, a ghost did it, mama.
A ghost.
My invisible friend pushed it over.
I remember a poem when I was a kid about, you know, you've got to give.
Me, two candy bars.
You've got to give me two chocolate bars, one for me, one for my invisible friend.
But I have to eat them both because his teeth are kind of new, which is like bureaucrats of the welfare state.
But you are told, and you were given this contradictory information.
You must tell the truth.
Reason and evidence is how you determine the truth.
And if you lie, you'll be punished.
And then you go to church and you have to believe in things that go against reason and evidence.
And if you don't believe them, you're punished.
And if you do believe them, you are rewarded.
Little contradictory.
And so kids get confused and they say no and they get frustrated.
And then what?
Well, they go against what their parents are saying.
Their parents lose credibility, but the parents have to get the kids to obey because if the kid is out there puncturing social myths on a regular basis, the kid is in significant danger.
I mean, throughout history, for certain, a little bit now, also.
So, parents have to say, reason and evidence wins.
You have to follow reason and evidence.
You also have to follow the opposite of reason and evidence, and we can't tell you why.
This creates contradiction, frustration, opposition, and the dual life of mankind, the dual life of our species.
It is a kind of hell.
It is a special kind of hell.
It's a little bit less hell now than it was in the past, but it's still a kind of hell.
And the dual life of our species is think for yourself, conform to everyone.
Follow reason and evidence, follow the opposite of reason and evidence.
You will be punished for violating reason and evidence.
You will be punished by accepting reason and evidence.
Sorry, you will be punished, yeah, and you will be rewarded for telling the truth, and you will be rewarded for lying.
You can ask me anything except why is that woman so lazy?
Why is that man so fat?
Why is this person a different color?
I will punish you if you tell me things that go against reason and evidence.
I will reward you if you believe things I say that go against reason and evidence.
And not just in the religious realm, but in the social or cultural realm and in the political realm and so on.
And it's kind of hell.
I'm not even blaming parents in particular for all of this sort of stuff.
I'm really not.
I mean, we are programmed to have our kids survive, right?
That's the thing.
That's what we have to do.
We are programmed to have our kids survive.
And if this.
Contradictory reality.
If this contradictory reality and focusing on this contradictory reality is what is needed for our children to survive, then by golly, by God, by gosh, that is what we will do.
And we can't even tell them.
We can't say, well, you know, we're in this place and, you know, I can't really prove to you that God exists and I'm telling you that you have to accept that God exists even though it goes against reason and evidence.
But then there's this whole other category.
Where, if you go against reason and evidence, you'll be punished.
And then, you know, the ways in which I'm telling you to believe in these things that aren't true or real, if you ever try that on me, you'll also be punished.
If you try that on other people who have authority and power over you, you will also be punished.
Right?
I mean, if you get marked as a fail on a math test and you go to your teacher and you say, no, no, no, teacher, you must have faith and belief that I got the answers right.
I just need you to believe.
It's like, but you didn't get the answers right.
No, no.
Faith is a virtue, and faith is belief in the opposite of reason and evidence.
And so, I need you to have faith that I got an A. Right?
If somebody sends you 500 bucks, you're supposed to send them a tablet, a computer tablet, and they don't receive it.
And they call you up and say, Hey, I sent you the 500 bucks.
Where's my tablet?
No, no, you need to have faith that I sent you the tablet.
You need to have faith, oh government person, that I paid my taxes.
You need to believe.
It's like, but you didn't, but you need to believe, like you'll.
Doesn't matter.
And this is the mad, wild contradictions of the world.
And so, of course, to some degree, we're going to look back on a time where we didn't have to wrestle with both truth and falsehood being the highest goals, with both conformity to reason and evidence and opposition to reason and evidence both being the highest goals, with lying being punished, but faith, which is the fancy word for lying, being rewarded.
Don't you long to go back to that time where you didn't have to walk this tightrope and try and survive?
In a propagandized society, by letting vague little puffs of truth out, but not enough to get you handed out of society and attacked and punished, and your genes end and your bloodline ends.
Breathing Truth in a Propagandized Society00:02:46
Wow, isn't it?
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished to go back to that time without contradictions.
Other interesting, well, maybe vaguely interesting bits of trivia when I was in my early teens, maybe 11 or so.
I would occasionally lie in the bath.
Wait, sorry, I've just talked about lying.
I mean, horizontally.
I would lie in the bath and I would grab a face cloth and I would dip the face cloth in the water and I would try a little experiment.
Wet face cloth stuck to my face like an alien laying eggs.
This face cloth stuck to my face and I would try an experiment.
And that experiment was can I breathe?
Can I breathe?
Now, what I found, of course, was that if I breathed too quickly, the face cloth would get more stuck to my face, it would go into my mouth a little, and I couldn't get any air.
I couldn't.
However, if I breathed very slowly, then I could, because it didn't tighten it on my face.
I could just dribble a little bit of air through the soggy washcloth and breathe.
And that's kind of what it's like in society, isn't it?
A little bit, but especially when you know the truth about things that are controversial or whatever it is.
That you can only breathe a little, you can only exhale a little, you can only tell a little bit of truth, maybe.
And you never know where the tripwires are, and you never know where the landmines are, and you never know who's going to approve of one thing you say that is controversial but true, but then massively oppose another thing you say that is controversial and true.
In other words, they just have a particular fetish for a particular subject, but they have no broad or general principles regarding the pursuit of truth.
I mean, these are things as silly as I care about my sports team, the Bills, right?
It's an old Jerry Seinfeld joke you're cheering on laundry because it's just different colors of the shirts.
And go and cheer and go and pay and go and get excited.
But your team is not moral and your team is not better or worse morally than any other team.
And you're not the good guys and they're not the bad guys.
And people waste their entire lives with this kind of nonsense.
There was an old Michael Palin series called Ripping Yarns.
Tompkins in Schooldays is particularly funny, but there was one that wasn't particularly good about a guy who was over invested in his football team, footer, soccer team, and just lived or died based upon how well or badly his team did.
Rationality and Reproduction Challenges00:14:36
It's all nonsense.
We know it's all nonsense.
People say, I, strangely enough, fully believe in the.
Cultural nonsense, I was fed as a child.
I fully believe in the religious beliefs I happen to be born into.
And people on the other side of the street fully believe in the religious impulses they were born into, that they were taught.
Saying my cultural or religious beliefs are true is like saying I chose to speak English and English is the best.
No, that's just how you were raised.
If you were raised speaking English, that's just how you were raised.
It's not a personal value statement of objective truth and virtue and value.
And I think we do all, to some degree, daydream about a time in the past when we didn't have to navigate.
Between suicidal honesty, that is both valued, treasured, rewarded, and punished, and you are castigated for telling the truth, and you are rewarded for telling the truth, tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, the famous commandment in court cases.
And if you lie about matters of great moral import in a courtroom, you are guilty of perjury, and you can go to jail.
Al Ja'ist style.
So, wasn't it nice?
Oh, back in the Garden of Eden, before you had language, before you were stuffed full.
Of lies when you have felt beautiful, warm, nutritious, squishy breast milk rather than an endless series of contradictory falsehoods where you put a step wrong in telling the truth and you get punished, and you put a step wrong the next moment in lying and you get punished, and fully two thirds of your brain is consumed by having a dual commandment A, to tell the truth, B, to lie, A,
to think for yourself.
Be to conform.
And then a society tells you, as I was told many times as a kid, it changed locations depending on whether it was England or Canada or Africa.
In England, it was, well, he was doing it.
He was doing it.
Well, if everybody's doing it, well, if he or everyone was jumping off the London Bridge, would you do that too?
Or in Canada, of course, it was a CN Tower.
If they were jumping off the CN Tower, would you do that too?
You've got to think for yourself.
You can't just go with the flower, you can't just go with the crowd.
Got to think for yourself.
Okay.
Hey, you know what?
I'm going to try thinking for myself.
Oh, no, no.
You're going to get punished for that too.
I shouldn't laugh because it is like a foundational agony that is brutalizing to the mind.
To force people to live in contradictions, to force them to both affirm and deny reason and evidence, to praise them for honesty and praise them for falsehood, to praise them for integrity.
To praise them for corruption, to punish them for not thinking for themselves, and then punish them for thinking for themselves.
That's how you scatter, destroy, set human beings against themselves, conquer and rule forever and ever until people start truly accepting philosophy and put aside all this bullshite and focus on the truth to some degree, whatever the cost.
But I think that's one of the reasons why we have this belief in this past paradise.
Ah, remember how great it was?
Before you had to lie?
Remember how great it was before you got punished and ostracized for telling the truth?
Remember when your brain was consistently praised.
Hey, you learned how to walk.
Everybody was happy when you learned how to walk.
Everybody was happy when you learned to roll over.
Everybody was happy when you learned how to throw and catch a ball.
And you weren't both praised and punished for learning how to walk.
Hey, you learned how to walk.
That's fantastic.
Hey, you learned how to walk.
I'm going to hit you.
That's wrong.
It's bad.
It's evil.
Hey, you learned that two and two make four.
That's fantastic.
Oh, did you learn that two and two make four?
Off to bed without supper.
It's confusing as hell.
It's confusing as hell.
And there was a paradise before that.
And then that happened.
And I think that's one of the reasons why we're very susceptible to these myths.
All right.
Kirk.
Kirk.
Stop having sex with aliens.
And if you want to unmute, I'm on you.
Did you say if I unmute, I can talk or what?
Yeah.
Hey, so I've done a lot of world traveling and I'm also a mixed European myself.
And I've come to the conclusion that it's actually impossible to feel comfortable unless you're around people that.
Are genetically similar to you because you simply cannot understand how anyone else thinks unless you share the same machinery under the hood.
And you're talking about like punishing people for thinking for themselves and thinking different ways.
I mean, there's an even worse aspect of it, which is that when you're around people that have different machinery under the hood and how that they think, you're never going to be able to predict how they're going to respond.
And that basically fills your entire life with anxiety, which if you don't, If you don't properly direct that anxiety to its source, which almost nobody does, because you're fed narratives which deliberately redirect that anxiety to other things, I can be more specific in saying that the anxiety comes from being around people that you cannot predict their behavior and therefore you don't trust.
And that's what makes humans anxious, not being able to predict their environment.
And it's redirected towards, oh, you have a problem with yourself, psychotherapy, or you have a problem.
With somebody else as the enemy, like women are the enemy or blacks are the enemy or whatever.
So it's, but really it actually comes down to being around people that are genetically related to you enough, you know, unless your genetic pedigree is liars, you know, genetic liars, then I guess you can't trust them.
But actually, at a minimum, you can trust them to not be trustable.
So at least you know what to expect.
So I wanted to just kind of add on to what you were saying about adding a level on top of it, which is, Uh, even in the extreme case, if you don't actually share the machinery under the hood, you always are in a state of not being able to trust your surroundings.
Interesting.
Now, how would you say this relates to males and females who have evolved with certain different characteristics mentally?
Yeah, so I mean, for me, it's well, the first question is why did males and females evolve with different mental machinery under the hood?
They share almost all of their genetics, right?
So the male.
The male chromosome, the Y chromosome, has one gene which tends to adjust the rest of them called SRY, I think.
And the Y chromosome is extremely small, and we both share the X chromosome, right?
So we have superficially the same things under the hood, but those things are not equally expressed during development.
So you've got like a, you have the same information, but a different phenotype, right?
A different instantiation of that.
But the fundamental question is why men and women had to have different mental characteristics.
If it was advantageous for them to have the same mental characteristics, Characteristics, you would assume that it would evolve in that way.
And I think the classic evolutionary explanation, and I probably agree with it, is that there were two distinct sets of ways of behaving with the world that were necessary for men and women that were mutually exclusive.
And those things taken at their extreme were the need to not kill an annoying infant and the need to kill another man without hesitating.
And those two instincts couldn't exist in the same person.
So a man in war needs to not hesitate before killing, or he might be killed.
He has to be roused to anger quickly enough to act.
And a woman has to be able to be annoyed constantly without, you know, if it's a cute thing and it's annoying, she can't kill it, right?
So this is she also, I mean, you can take it a step further and potentially say that women are to a certain extent enslaved by their need to give birth.
And this makes them have to be sort of nature essentially hides rationality from them.
To a certain extent, because if it didn't, they wouldn't participate in the system.
Those are my two descriptions for men and women.
Sorry, are you saying that it's irrational for women to give birth?
Well, I'd really have to think that one out.
I mean, it's a tough.
Sorry, and I'm not trying to catch you out here.
I just want to make sure I understand.
If you say nature hides rationality from women so that they'll have children, to me, again, I just want to make sure I understand what you're thinking.
This is not a critical question.
I'm just trying to follow what you're thinking.
So that I understand it.
Is it that for a woman, it would be more rational to not give birth, and therefore, in your formulation, nature hides rationality from women in order to encourage them to have children?
So it's a very good question.
I'm not sure I can answer it, but I'll try to some extent.
If I had more time to think about it, I may be able to get you a better answer.
I'm sorry, and I'm not trying to put you on the spot here.
I thought that was your argument.
Well, if it's not, then I don't want to straw man you.
It is.
It is part of my argument.
It's part of it.
I'll try to answer it to some degree.
So, you know, there are things which are evolutionarily rational, and it's perfectly obvious that evolution basically puts coding in us, which is different from the coding that we sort of live on a day to day basis.
So, if you just said, you know, in the olden days, women often died from childbirth, correct?
So, very, very often.
With each child, you had another risk of dying and not being able to take care of your current children.
You also had a lot of things that you could do in life that might be pleasurable besides child rearing, which had a lower chance of death.
So, if you were trying to pursue pleasure and not pursue, basically, not follow your biological instincts, you could have a pretty good life and probably a longer life if you didn't have children.
But nature gives people a super high libido when they're young and drives.
I mean, look at how animals reproduce.
Cats basically have this.
Infernal hunger to mate temporarily.
It's like a pain that they have to get rid of.
So, nature consistently tricks organisms into reproducing, and it's not clear that they would do so otherwise.
When it comes to humans, we've continuously evolved to become more rational.
And it does seem to me.
So, I understand your critique.
Your critique is how do you get from rationality and reason to not reproducing?
And that's a very, very.
Well, let's put it this way.
It's a good critique, but it's also subject to how an individual person decides to take the path of reason for themselves.
You can certainly say that as societies have become more advanced, people tend to reproduce less.
So maybe the question is what is it about societies which have embraced reason, which are also the same as those which are advanced, that has led them to not reproduce?
So maybe I can direct the question back at you.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that.
It's an interesting answer.
I would argue that it is not in the nature of economically successful people to not reproduce.
If that was the case, we never would have been able to raise IQ, right?
Raise IQ, right?
So there's an argument that I made many years ago about Ashkenazi Jews, which is that, you know, for 700 years, it was the most intelligent Jews who tended to reproduce the most.
That gives you a third of an IQ point per generation.
That could some explain sort of 10 to 15 point IQ gap in verbal reasoning and so on, verbal skills.
And so in the past, it was the most wealthy who tended to reproduce.
And that, of course, is natural.
I mean, children are.
Resource costs, and therefore, if you have more resources, you can have more children.
You think of sort of the sultan with his wives, or even just wealthy early capitalists had lots of kids, and so on.
So, it is not in the nature of wealth to not reproduce, it is something that is propagandized and it is a form of warfare.
We live in a very distorted society.
Okay, hang on, hang on.
Did I let you finish your thoughts?
Now, if I've got something wrong or misstated something, obviously, you're welcome to interrupt.
Well, I think possibly yes.
I want to divorce.
You're sort of putting rationality and IQ together.
And I wouldn't necessarily put them together in this particular instance.
You know, my experience is that women who are interested in using their reason, so there are intelligent women who are interested in using their reason, and there are intelligent women who are not so much interested in using their reason.
In my experience, unfortunately, the ones that are interested in using their reason, like scientists and so on, of whom I've met many, They do have a difficulty reproducing.
At the extreme end, I mean, you look at what happens with men who are really, really interested in thinking all the time.
They're not good at taking care of children because you have to think about another person and it's just not, it's kind of boring.
So the issue is when you get women who are interested in reasoning all day, they don't tend to make great mates for taking care of young children.
So perhaps that's where the mutual exclusivity comes from.
Well, but we couldn't have raised our IQs as species from whatever pre humans we evolved from.
We couldn't have raised our IQ unless smarter people reproduced more.
Yeah, no, no, I agree with that.
Evolutionary Protection and Paternity00:07:17
Okay, good.
So, yeah, no problem with that.
There is an evolutionary advantage to intelligence.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, no, I absolutely agree with that.
I mean, the bell curve, but things have changed, right?
So, we have birth control now.
We have delayed education where people are getting more and more educated and they go past their reproductive window.
I would put a pretty big barrier between the 1950s and the rest of human history.
When you don't have birth control, when you have religion controlling how people marry and so on, it's basically two different time periods in history.
Well, I think we agree on that.
I think I said at the very beginning that the modern world is a different situation because of the amount of propaganda and Wealth redistribution through force and so on.
So, I was talking more about, and I was talking about 700 years of Jewish reproductive history.
So, I'm not sure why you're telling me that the present is different from the past when I started off my argument by saying that the present is different from the past.
So, we agree with that.
Let's go back a little further, though, and let's look at women because I'm interested in, you could be right.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm just interested in exploring the idea that having children is against a woman's rational self interest.
So, throughout human history, Women, of course, are physically weaker and more vulnerable, and they have the great treasure of eggs, right?
That if you can get your sperm into an egg, your genes reproduce.
If you can't, they don't.
Don't, and men, of course, have a great hunger to reproduce.
And men, one of the great sources of conflict in human history was that the top tier of men would keep most of the women for themselves, or at least the highest quality females, the harem, so to speak, that the top tier of men, and this is kind of happening again now for a variety of reasons, but the top tier of men would keep most of the women for themselves.
And then what would happen is the men who were without access to eggs would either Foment a revolution internally, or would go and attack other tribes in order to get access to their women because the drive is to reproduce.
And this is a great source of the hypergamy, it is one of the sources of violence.
And this is not a moral judgment.
This is just a sort of description of history.
And so, women being smaller and weaker, and you know, having periods and you know, whether they couldn't, you know, some women's periods are really brutal.
And you know, if you've ever tried a period cramp simulator, it's not a lot of fun.
And so, women needed provision and protection throughout history.
Human history.
They needed more calories than they could usually produce themselves, and they certainly needed meat when it was pretty tough for them to go hunting.
So, women needed provision and they needed protection because the unprotected woman would often be grabbed by some other guy or something like that, or there'd be some sort of conflict or war, or she could be essayed or whatever it is.
And so, if women need protection and provision, which they did, I think, as a whole, then How do they get provision and protection?
Well, a man gives provision and protection to the mother of his children and not to random women around, at least certainly not quite as much.
And so, for her to gain provision and protection in exchange for giving up, well, having children, you say, well, there's a risk in her having children.
It's like, well, sure, but compared to what?
What is the risk of an unattached female who's young and, let's say, very attractive, a female without any male protection?
In primitive societies, I would argue that the safest thing she can do is have children because that gets her provider and protector.
And of course, it does allow her to continue her genes.
And so, from an evolutionary standpoint, it is perfectly rational to have children.
And again, I'm certainly happy to hear arguments to the contrary, but that would be my counterpoints or those counterpoints, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that's a very good counterpoint.
I would restate it.
Sort of more simply, as we're saying exactly the same thing.
It's actually sort of not really a choice in the ancient days.
The choice wasn't whether to risk childbirth.
The question was whether to risk it under the protection of other males or under the protection of no males.
That's exactly what you're saying, and it's true.
Does that make sense?
Well, I'm not sure about no males because if there are no males around, the mother can't survive, right?
If there are no males around or no other tribespeople around, Then the woman can't survive, right?
Because if she goes out into the wilderness and she's pregnant and she has a baby, she's just going to get killed or starve or whatever it is, right?
So, yeah, being fertile and being in possession of the eggs means that men are going to lust after her.
And so she can either give a pair bonded male children and thus gain his lifelong protection in sort of monogamous societies, or she can choose not to have children, which leads her unprotected and will most likely then end up with her being assaulted.
And having children without any lifelong protector.
So she's going to have children either way, and the safest option is monogamy for the most part.
And so I think it is rational for her to have children, at least.
And the most rational thing to do is to have children in a pair bonded relationship.
And what I would provide as some evidence or support for this is that married women with children are by far the most happy in human society.
They've done studies now for 75 years, and married women with children are the happiest.
And single women, in particular, as they get into their 30s and so on, are filled with existential dread and anxiety because they don't have protectors.
And then what they do, of course, is they just run to the government.
For protection, and you end up with a grinning villain like Maldani being in charge of New York and so on.
And this is why governments want to keep women single because then they run for political power.
So women face significant anxiety.
Of course, as you know, liberal women or left leaning women are the most likely to be single, unmarried, and childless.
And 40% of them have been diagnosed with a mental health condition.
You know, I'm not saying that the cause and effect is complicated.
I get the correlation.
It's not causation just for everyone who's not you, but everyone who's going to.
Mention that in the future comments.
But if it is irrational for women to get married and have children, it doesn't make much sense to me then why the women who are the happiest and feel the most content and secure and have the most provision and love and security into their old age are the happiest if it's not a rational thing to do.
Yeah, great point.
The only thing I would add to that is that in addition to gaining the male protection of a partner in the scenario that you discussed earlier, the Female would also gain the protection of that partner's family and extended relatives to the extent that the paternity of the child could be guaranteed.
So it's an even greater level of security in that sense.
Masculine, Feminine, and External Worlds00:14:56
Going into the modern, yeah, so I mean, I still think there's a pretty firm boundary between the pre modern and the modern.
And a lot of that has to do with the physical security, right?
It's no longer dependent on immediate relatives in that sense.
And So, taking the point, I hope I'm not ignoring any of your points.
If so, I'm not doing it deliberately.
But one of the things that I've seen, if you look at modern women, is that they have.
So, Western, particularly Western Germanic society, is highly masculine.
I'm not saying male, I'm saying masculine, which is quite different.
And women and not feminine, I'm talking about women, have internalized.
Particularly, Germanic women in Germanic countries have internalized that the masculine way of approaching the world is superior to the feminine way of approaching the world, in part because the system that we live under is essentially a very hyper masculine system.
Although I would argue that it's the negative masculine rather than the positive masculine.
So when they see that system, it's not because I want to interrupt you because I disagree with you.
It's just that when you say hyper masculine and feminine and female, and I don't know what you're talking about.
I mean, masculine is not.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Let me get my words out.
It's what's called polite, right?
So I just need you to define your terms because if I don't know what you're talking about, then you continuing doesn't shed any illumination.
And it also makes me a little bit suspicious if you use terms like masculine and feminine and saying something which is quite surprising that the modern world is hyper masculine, but you say masculine in a negative way.
Well, I don't know what you mean by masculine.
I don't know how you define the negative from the positive.
So, if I'm not sure what you're talking about or really don't have any idea what you're talking about, I need to ask for definitions because otherwise I can't follow your argument.
Okay, I'll give you the definitions.
So, in my view, masculine and feminine are two ways of a living being interacting with the world.
They're sort of two approaches to life, and they have to be in balance.
What is the masculine?
The masculine is something which externalizes, it has a firm boundary, and it participates in what I call the masculine process, which is deductive and inductive reasoning about objects which are contained in an impermeable boundary.
Which is to say that they are not currently under the influence of external forces.
So, what the masculine does is it has stuff in the boundary that's its known world.
And it has subjected those things to deductive and inductive reasoning.
It's dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's.
It says there are no internal contradictions here, as far as I understand it.
And then it attempts to externalize that view of the world onto the world itself.
And that is in a form of a test.
It's essentially an experiment.
It's saying, I believe the world is this way, and I'm going to act on the world according to my prediction.
And if what happens, what I expect to happen, happens, then my internal model is correct.
So that exists in every living organism, all the way down to a bacteria.
And the feminine is internalizing, internalizing.
It has a permeable boundary, and it has a process which I call the feminine process, which is.
If I could explain that, I would be a sage, but I'll do my best.
So, internalizing in the sense that it lowers a boundary with the world, it allows the external world to change it, and it does so in an unconscious way.
So, the masculine is conscious and the feminine is unconscious, which is to say that it's not monitoring the processes which are happening inside it.
The external world comes in, it changes the internal world, and what the feminine does is it hopes that the change which is produced by the external world creates a new form of order.
Which is useful.
So it allows itself to be moved.
Sorry, can you just go over that last part again?
So the feminine lowers a boundary, which can be a physical skin or it can be an intellectual boundary.
It allows itself to be changed, to be moved by the external world.
It exists in flow with the external world.
And then that changes it in an unknown way.
And it detects somehow whether this change moves closer or further away from a desired state.
So, in other words, it's trying to detect whether the new order produced is useful order or not.
And once it does that, it rebounds it, it puts a boundary around it, it subjects it to the masculine process, which then externalizes it to test it.
So, the dance of life is essentially these two oppositional strategies, which exist in every single organism, all the way down to bacteria, of basically trying to predict how the world works, acting along those predictions.
If you're right, the model is correct, you say, Yay, I'm a good masculine.
I chopped it up with my sword and I know how the world works.
If it fails as a masculine, you can have different choices.
You can keep chopping at it with your sword and you can say, I have the correct model and the external world just doesn't know it yet.
That works sometimes.
Or you can completely devolve into the feminine and you can say, I'm getting rid of my boundary.
I'm going to stop externalizing.
I'm going to allow the external internal because I'm missing something fundamental.
I don't have a piece that I need.
And then you go into the feminine domain, you get that piece that you need, and then you rebuild the masculine model, and the cycle continues endlessly.
And that's how you basically end up with order and life.
So, when I say the masculine model essentially takes its idea of how the world works and how the world should be, and it attempts to impose order and impose its way of being on everything else around it.
And that's why I say that the Western world is hyper masculine.
It's like we have our intellectual construct of how the world should be, and we're going to force it into what it should be, right?
That's why I'm saying that the Western world is hyper masculine.
We're using Testing, reason, science, deduction, induction, and we have a sort of moral idea of where we want things to go.
And we're trying to shape the world by hammer into what we want it to be.
And that has been the trajectory of human history.
And I think everyone subconsciously knows that whoever's on top of that process, the masculine process, that is the direction that things have been going.
It started feminine and it's going masculine, right?
Gaia was first.
Well, I guess chaos was first, but Gaia is before the masculine and it's the unshaped, and same with Aphrodite and the ancient gods that were sort of the unshaped feminine.
And from that comes the order, and the trajectory is towards order.
So if you're a woman and you see yourself as feminine and you subconsciously or consciously realize that the world is moving towards the masculine or order, rationally you can say, The more important of these two is the masculine because that's the directionality where everything is moving.
Well, I think they're sort of wrong about that.
I think that the feminine is still important.
But women tend to be sort of easily indoctrinated, and that is because the feminine, as I defined it, is easily shaped because it doesn't have a boundary.
So the feminine on its own is always shaped by the external.
So if the external is masculine, the feminine ends up being shaped to be more masculine, but ends up denying its.
Its own particular skill, its own particular highest purpose, as it were.
So you have reason itself is masculine, right?
So you have women sort of looking and saying that by virtue of evolution, we're moving towards a more rational masculine system, and that is therefore superior.
So the achievements that they're trying to make are masculine in origin, which are the highest masculine achievements, which include changing the nature of.
Knowledge and thought are higher than a single woman's reproduction.
So I'm finally landing the plane here.
Isaac Newton, even though he didn't have children, had a larger impact on history than someone who had children to some degree.
You can argue that if you want, and I could accept it to some degree.
Well, except his own mother, but yeah, go on.
Yeah, rationally speaking, if the highest form of accomplishment is intellectual dominance or intellectual impact, you have reasonable women.
Trying to pursue intellectual dominance and intellectual impact.
The issue is well, one of the issues is there's probably many issues, but one of the issues is that women seem to think that founding their company counts as intellectual impact.
So, the same with men, right?
People achieve on the level that they can achieve, and the issue is that they think that this achievement on basically a pretty trivial level of whatever their small business is or whatever the hell it is is more important than reproducing.
And that this is horseshit.
Horseshit.
It's not more important than reproducing unless you're like fucking Isaac Newton.
If you're not somebody really, really high level, it's actually if you think on a maximally long time scale, so a maximally long time scale meaning the entire future of human evolution, it may be more important for you to pass on your genes and then four generations later your genes recombine with somebody else's and they produce an Isaac Newton.
If you don't reproduce at all, your chance of having an Isaac Newton is zero.
If you do reproduce, it's small but not so.
I just need to put a pause on this.
I mean, I don't know when the end of this speech is going to be because now we're talking about something completely different.
So I'm just not sure if you're used to or alert to how to best communicate complex ideas because it just kind of goes on and on without examples and without proof.
I mean, these are thoughts, and I think they're interesting thoughts.
But, and again, I'm not trying to be critical.
I'm just sort of trying to point out I don't know.
You don't check in to see if things are making sense or if there's any confusion or anything like that.
You just keep talking.
Well, I apologize for that.
I assumed that you would interrupt me if something was unclear.
I mean, my first goal was just to define masculine and feminine.
Did I do that or not?
Well, you gave me a number of ideas about them that masculine is externalizing, it has firm boundaries, reasoning, and evidence, and so on.
Change in an unknown way and try to detect whether a new order is needed and so on.
And I mean, these are certainly interesting ideas.
I'm not sure how they're falsifiable.
And I'm also, if you could give me, in general, when you're trying to give very abstract arguments, like I give, you know, Bob and Doug and sort of practical examples, if you could give me some practical or just like one of the sort of more compelling practical examples from each category, I would agree.
I mean, obviously, I think that men.
Flourish in competition, women flourish in cooperation.
So men are more conflict prone, women are more conflict avoidant, or at least direct conflict avoidant for a variety of sort of evolutionary reasons.
But if you could give me examples, is it hunting versus child raising or war versus community?
If you could give me some sort of examples as to the masculine, like when you say it has firm boundaries, it externalizes, and so on, that's very abstract, and I'm not sure what it means in sort of concrete.
I'm going to give you some concrete examples.
So I want to make a very Clear distinction.
I'm not talking about men and women.
I'm talking about masculine and feminine.
And unfortunately, we have this terminology of masculine and feminine because we don't have any better terminology.
But, you know, this has almost nothing to do with men and women whatsoever.
It's just unfortunately the term is not to do with that.
That's very confusing, right?
If you say masculine and feminine, masculine and feminine has almost nothing to do with male and female, then I find that very confusing.
I mean, you can understand that's very confusing.
Oh, it's very, it's utterly confusing.
It's ridiculous.
Okay, so hang on, hang on.
So, when you're trying to explain something that's utterly confusing and ridiculous, I mean, my personal advice I mean, I've been a professional communicator for like 30 plus years is that if you're going to talk about things that are completely counterintuitive, that masculine and feminine has nothing to do with male and female or almost nothing to do, that it's absurdly complex and contradictory, that just going on and on without providing specific examples is not, I think, giving due.
Respect to the self contradictory nature of what you're trying to get across, if that makes sense?
Well, yeah.
Let me try to give a couple of examples and see if it makes it any clearer, like just practical examples.
I mean, is that all right?
Yeah.
But I still, I still, I'm still troubled by masculine and feminine has almost nothing to do with male and female.
Well, the reason, so I'll try to explain why that is and then I'll give a couple of practical examples.
But why are we doing this now rather than at the beginning?
Because now I don't know what we were talking about.
Yeah.
Well, sorry for that.
But the reason is that nobody has any other, you know, if I just came up with some totally new word like splork or something like that, you know, no, It wouldn't help anybody understand what I'm talking about any more than the traditional language.
Okay, sorry, sir.
You don't need to explain to me the basic concepts of language.
Both me and the audience are very smart with language, so you don't need to tell me that if you have to invent an entirely new word, people.
I mean, I understand Esperanto didn't take off and so on.
So help me understand why masculine and feminine has almost nothing to do with males and females.
Okay, let me first give the practical examples and then I'll come back to that because I think it's just easier.
So And you're going to laugh at the example immediately, and I know why, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Totally Different Definitions00:05:31
Okay.
So imagine you got a dude, a young guy.
And so I define masculine as having three components to it.
And these are three separable components externalizing, firm boundary, and masculine process, which is the analytic process, the splitting apart.
So you've got a young guy, and he externalizes a lot.
You know, he says, I want this, do that.
The world is this way.
You don't know what you're talking about.
And he's got a phone number.
No, that's not clear to me.
I want this, do that.
I'm not sure how that is.
I thought externalizing was saying something like, I am not responsible for my life, environment, circumstances, or whatever are responsible for my life.
So I'm now not at all clear what you mean by externalizing.
No, no, no.
Externalizing.
Okay, you really, have to.
Hang on.
We really got, you got to let me finish my sentences, especially when I'm in the middle of asking a question.
You can, I know you're excited and I'm happy to chat.
But you got, I mean, and again, unless I get something egregiously wrong, then you're certainly welcome to interrupt me.
But if I'm asking a question, you need to fucking wait till I finish.
Okay.
That's just basic politeness.
But yeah.
So go ahead.
Tell me what externalizing means, if you don't mind, because I don't know what it means.
Yeah.
So I thought you had something egregiously wrong.
That's why I was interrupting you, because it sounded like we were on completely different pages on what externalizing was.
For me, externalizing is an actual behavior, which is an imposition of your internal model of the world.
Onto the world itself, which may or may not include other people.
So it's like you're trying to shape, you're trying to make the outside look like the inside, whether through words or through violence or physical actions.
It has nothing to do with blaming someone else for how your life turned out or anything like that.
It's literally just trying to make the physical world like your internal world.
Okay, so let me just pause you for a sec there because, you know, I'm trying to keep things sort of civil.
To me, that was kind of rude, and I'll just sort of tell you why.
So Externalization, there's a phrase in psychology, externalized locus of control, and so on, where you perceive that the motive power of your life or the decision, what happens in your life, comes from external sources or circumstances.
So externalization is somewhat related to that.
Now, if you have a different way of using the word, then it's important to address the more common usage of the word.
Externalization is usually saying that you are more acted upon than able to act yourself.
And again, I'm not saying that's sort of some final definition of it, but.
If I'm telling you what my understanding is of the word externalization and you interrupt me because I'm wrong, that's saying that your definition of the word, which is somewhat non standard, is right and that I'm wrong.
And that's why it's important to let me finish saying what I think so that we can talk about if you're going to use a different definition than I have, even if mine is wrong, you still need to understand what my definition is because if you're going to adjust the word for your argument and if we're using different definitions of the word, you need to know what my definition is, if that makes sense.
And mine is not just mine, it's a bit more standard.
Yeah, no, I wasn't interrupting you because I thought it was wrong.
I just was trying to clarify that we were on totally different pages before you went way down a line that.
That I thought was just totally different than what I was trying to say.
So I wasn't disagreeing with you.
I was just saying, like, oh, okay, we have totally different versions of what this word is.
And perhaps it's due to my ignorance of the psychological literature.
I am admittedly not massively versed on it.
So that's all.
Okay.
So you said it was a guy's imposition of will on the world.
That's what you mean by externalization?
Yeah.
You're trying to, you have an internal model in your brain of how the world works and you're trying to, or should work, and you're trying to act in such a way as if that were true.
And then people that disagree with you.
So you've got externalization and a boundary.
So these are all difficult words, right?
I had to come up with words for highly abstract concepts or sets of concepts.
So in every philosophical discussion, as you well know, a lot of the argument ends up like, what do you mean by this word, right?
So this is difficult territory, especially when I'm not going to be able to.
But this is why it's confusing to me that if you know that you've used non standard definitions, shouldn't we start with those definitions rather than sort of a 15 minute monologue where the definitions aren't explained?
Yeah, well, usually on this app, people don't have the patience for that kind of long winded face.
So, I mean, kudos to you for having the patience for it.
No, no, that's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that shouldn't you?
I mean, this is just, you know, one communicator to another.
And I don't know how long have you listened to what I do, or are you relatively new?
Actually, I will say that I think I encountered you a long time ago.
And then you sort of fell off the face of the earth.
I don't know if you got canceled way back then or what.
I think I may have.
How long have you been around?
20 years at least or something?
21 years canceling was five and a half years.
I think I knew you.
I don't know what you were on.
I forgot what medium you were on.
It had to be YouTube or I don't know what it was or forums or something.
I think I encountered you ages ago when I was a younger kid and I liked you quite a bit.
And then I just went, I hadn't seen you for 15 years or whatever, 10 years.
And actually, I should start by saying it's a pleasure to meet you.
Contradictions in Gender Roles00:15:07
I really enjoyed your work.
A long time ago, and I like you.
And I'm a bit of a nerd, so I tend to just jump right into it.
But it's a pleasure.
No, and I appreciate that.
And thank you.
I appreciate that.
It's just that, as a communication tip, if you're going to use complex, non standard words to describe highly contradictory things, you need to start with the definitions.
Because then, if the definitions are different, then prior speeches don't make any sense.
Like, you know, if you and I were on a ship and I said north when I meant south and I said, Go north and we sailed for a day in the wrong direction, that would be bad.
And so when it comes to masculinity, is the imposition of will on the world, isn't nagging, let's just take that sort of example, isn't nagging imposing your will on the world, like saying a man, you need to do this, that, or the other, and making his life difficult and he does it?
Is that not, again, I'm trying to understand the difference between the masculine and the feminine?
So that's a woman rather than the feminine.
But again, there is overlap.
And to me, it would depend on whether her nagging.
Nagging actually intends to make you behave in a certain way, or whether it's a shit test.
If it intends to make you act in a certain way, it's masculine.
And actually, when women are behaving in the masculine domain, it's usually when people don't like them.
I'm not the only one who thinks that.
What is her name?
Marian Woodman.
This is actually Marian Woodman's work.
She's a psychologist.
And she talks all about how when women are in their masculine, it's bad for them, and when men are in their feminine, it's bad for them.
But if the woman is doing it as a shit test, to some degree that is actually being in the feminine domain, and I'll explain why.
So, when a woman is doing a shit test, she has to allow all of what the man is behaving into herself, and then she sort of notices the different things which are in contradiction, and she generates an output by instinct, usually not consciously, and she says something which is not true and which she doesn't mean in order to provoke a response in the man that tells her some useful information.
Usually, about whether he's internally coherent, which is actually a test of his masculine process, that the internal coherence is a test of the masculine process.
So, that's actually the sort of nagging is actually a rather interesting example of how the full masculine feminine cycle comes into play.
The man is not aware of what's going on.
And actually, the woman is usually not aware of what's going on either, because remember, the feminine is not conscious.
So, a lot of times she's nagging.
She'll say, I'm doing it because of this reason.
Oh, that's not at all the reason, right?
Because actually, Her statement as to what reason she's doing it is part of the internal self deception which allows her to do it in the first place.
And one advantage of the feminine is that it permits contradictions.
The masculine does not permit contradictions because of the masculine process.
And because when you put something in a boundary, in other words, it's separated from everything else, and you subject it to a logic, you get rid of the contradictions.
But the feminine stuff is not in the boundary.
So it allows contradictions to exist in the same space, which is a problem for reason.
I'll end it there before I talk too much.
So, a woman is unattractive if she's acting in a masculine fashion.
Is that right?
No, I wouldn't say unattractive.
Miriam Woodman would say.
I thought it was unappealing or something like that, or as a negative judgment.
I'm struggling for a better word because none of these words are exactly what I mean.
It's sort of bad for her soul, something like that.
It's bad for her soul.
That's not even close to philosophy, bro.
Okay, how do I?
Well, I wouldn't have to try to define that.
You could say that about anything.
Disobeying me is bad for the soul.
Not giving me 20 bucks is bad for the soul.
I mean, that's not a philosophical.
So perhaps it doesn't bring her.
It's not her best instantiation.
It's not her highest instantiation.
highest instantiation?
Is it any better for you?
No.
So, and the reason I'm asking this is that if a woman is acting masculine, is it fair to say that if a woman is acting masculine, it's negative?
Or not as positive as it could be?
I don't think it's a good question.
Yeah.
Maybe not as positive as it could be.
Perhaps it's the one I agree with more.
I think it's okay for women to embody the masculine if they're doing it consciously.
And what happens.
So it's also.
This theory that I have is sort of complex.
Maybe I'll send it to you if you're interested in it.
One of the issues is if you try to mix things, the biggest no no in this theory of masculine and feminine that I have is mixing.
Things.
Mixing things.
So if you're missing, so each one has three components.
And if you try to do just one of the components without the other ones, you create a bad result, which is to say, you create a result that isn't good for you or anyone else and is also not what you intended, even if you thought you did.
So if you try to externalize, but you don't think and you're an idiot, you end up screwing things up for yourself and everyone else.
If you put your boundary down and internalize, but you don't engage in the feminine process, you end up Cast about like a ship at sea, which you see all the time, women in Bali and stuff like that.
They let everybody influence them and they completely lose their ability to do anything useful for themselves or anybody else.
So, a balanced person has both masculine and feminine, and they have to have all three components activating at the same time.
And they can't behave in a masculine and feminine way at exactly the same time.
You can do one, then the other, and switch, which is actually what you should do.
And the conversation is masculine and feminine.
So, like when I'm listening to you, I need to go into the feminine domain and not, I shouldn't be just thinking about my response to you, right?
I should be lowering my boundary, lowering my own thoughts.
I should be letting what you say come into me and try to honestly let that change my way of thinking and then come back into the masculine domain, reintegrate it and try to make some statement and externalization.
And if I switch well between those two modes, I'm a good interlocutor, right?
And I'm a good person.
But if you try to do the two at the same time, it doesn't work.
Man, this is like some Jordan Peterson FIFA dream.
Okay.
So, if it's not as positive as it could be for a woman to act in a masculine fashion, and it's not as positive as it could be for a man to act in a feminine fashion, then wouldn't it be the case that masculinity and femininity and male and female are related?
Yeah, I think there's a contradiction there.
I think you're sort of correct.
So, I disagree with Marian Woodman slightly in this.
So, Marian Woodman's a, hang on, Sorry, Sergeant Trump.
But I feel like that just got blown past there, right?
So, my understanding was, and I'm sorry if I got it wrong, my understanding was that you were saying that masculine and feminine have almost nothing to do with male and female.
But then, if you say if a woman acts masculine, it's not as good as it could be.
And if a man acts feminine, it's not as good as it could be, which would seem to indicate that male and female and masculine and feminine are related.
Yeah, agreed.
So, they, but to a small degree.
So, the idea is that females.
Have slightly more innate skill at being feminine and males have slightly more innate skill at being masculine.
Oh, so they are related.
I didn't say they weren't related.
I said they're almost not related.
It is an important distinction.
I didn't say there was zero overlap.
I said there's very little overlap.
And the reason that we have the, in my view, the reason we have the term masculine and feminine is because what we did is that we paid attention to the way that men and women behaved over the centuries.
We were paying a lot of attention to the opposite sex because we wanted to mate with them.
So, because of the amount of attention we were paying to them, we noticed that there was a mild non overlap in the distributions of behavior, right?
Let's say a third of a standard deviation or half a standard deviation across traits of interest.
And then you begin to apply.
So, these things, oh, the way you're saying it's a tiny difference, and then you say it's up to a half of a standard deviation.
I'm not a statistician, of course, but I find that a little confusing.
If it's both a tiny, which I would say almost inconsequential, difference, but then you say there's a almost like a third to a half of a standard deviation difference, that seems like more than a tiny bit.
And I'm not trying to be contentious.
I'm just telling you where my confusion lies.
Well, so if you look at two, let's say you have two normal distributions and you shift one over by half a standard deviation in either direction, the amount of absolute overlap in the distributions is probably at least 90% or more.
Yes?
Well, is it the case that when it comes to traditionally male or female occupations or education and so on, is it the case that if you look at something very masculine coded like physics, that there is only a third or a half of a standard deviation?
In other words, there's a 90% overlap in the males or females and their interest in, say, Engineering, like hard engineering, physics, computer science, and the sort of masculine things over people interests.
My understanding, and we can sort of look this up, is that it's a little bit more than a 90% overlap.
So, okay, I think we're at two slightly different cross purposes here.
So, if you have a normal distribution, which is a symmetrical distribution, and you overlay one and then another that's half a standard deviation shifted to the right or the left, it doesn't matter which way, they're the same because it's symmetrical.
And you just look at the overlapped area, okay, the shared area.
So the question is, what do we mean by that shared area?
In my example of masculine and feminine, that shared area is just all the behaviors a normal human being would have, including like, I don't know, chatting and cooking and jealousy and aggression and whatever.
It's all that shit, it's all in distribution.
So in that case, the vast majority of it is still shared.
What you're talking about is the non overlap in the tail region.
Right.
So in the tail region at the extremes, you can, if you have a threshold value in the tail region where you have to be three standard deviations of intelligence, which is one trade-off.
No, sorry to interrupt.
No, I'm not just talking about that because I was talking about general occupations as well.
So if you look at the difference in people who go into becoming daycare teachers, I was a daycare worker for many years.
I was the only male in a very large institution.
Women who go into, say, education or women who go into nursing or women who go into these days, of course, psychology is like 70% or 75% female in some places.
So if there's massive disproportionality, or if you look at things like being a logger or underwater welding or working on an oil rig and so on, then you are not looking at tail ends.
I mean, obviously.
Being into physics as a tail end, that was just one of the examples.
But even being interested in physics at an amateur level.
So, for instance, if you talk to men about, say, the history of the Roman Empire or hard politics or physics or things like that, you will find many, many more times men who are interested in these topics as opposed to women.
And I'm sure you've seen the breakdown of the kinds of books that are bought that women are really into historical romances and men are really into.
Philosophy and politics, and so on.
So, I think that it's not just a 10% difference in these areas on average.
And again, I'm not just looking at the tail ends, but in the general proportionality of women.
And when women gain more freedom, they tend to be more interested in traditionally female occupations, which have to do with people.
And men gravitate towards working with things.
And at least in many professions, it's not just 10% more women, it's overwhelmingly female, if that makes sense.
So I guess I see that as a male female difference rather than a masculine feminine difference.
And this is where it gets annoying.
But the male female differences are quite large.
But that, again, male and female is not masculine and feminine.
There is kind of connections to them.
Like for the fact that, let's say, men have a lot of muscle and women don't.
Well, that means that men might be predisposed to externalize.
Why?
Because they have the ability to externalize.
If you have physical power, externalization can become a predominant mode of being for you.
This is also why small, weaker men sometimes turn gay and become feminine, I think, because they consciously shift strategies.
Well, I don't know that you want to just jump into men who are not physically strong turn gay.
I think that's a pretty extraordinary statement.
I don't know that there's much backup for that.
You could say that.
I think there's some science studies on that, I think.
I saw one.
Let's not go down that path because we're going to start quoting studies, which is going to derail.
Okay.
So then my question is.
Why would you use the term masculine and feminine rather than externalized and internalized if externalized and internalized is actually what you're talking about and it has almost no relationship to males and females?
Well, there's so for me, masculine is not just externalized and internalized.
There's two other components.
No, but whatever it is, like why wouldn't you just say there are people who are more empirical, the people who externalize and impose their will on the world through reason and evidence or test the models of the world through reason and evidence, and others are more experiential?
I'm trying to understand, like, honestly, good faith's trying to understand why you talk about masculine and feminine to describe traits that are human based and have almost nothing to do with males and females.
Okay, I'll try to explain that.
It's a practical reason.
It's literally just a practical reason.
Debating Empirical vs Experiential Traits00:15:57
Hang on.
Do you understand the confusion?
That's what I'm trying to understand.
Yeah, I think so.
I believe so.
Because you've given me 45 minutes on masculine and feminine, which is to do with males and females, right?
That's what masculine means pertaining to men, feminine means pertaining to female.
So, you're giving me 45 minutes on masculine and feminine, and then you say it has almost nothing to do with males and females.
It instead is a description of these traits.
Yeah.
Right.
So, then you're saying there are people who speak German and there are people who speak French, and I'm going to call them masculine and feminine, but it actually has almost nothing to do with which language they speak.
It's just kind of do you understand the confusion?
Yep.
Oh, yeah.
It's confusing as hell.
And I'll tell you why I maybe it'll make more sense if I explain why I did this in the first place.
The culture is obsessed with masculinity and feminity.
And the culture uses those words.
Do we agree on that?
Sorry, are you asking me if the words masculine and feminine are used in the world?
No.
I'm asking you whether the world is obsessed with the concepts or what they believe to be the concepts of masculine and feminine.
That's question number one.
I don't know what you mean by the word obsessed in this case.
Is it a common topic of conflict and conversation in the modern world?
There's toxic masculinity.
People talk about toxic masculinity, they talk about toxic femininity.
So I'm saying this is a topic of interest, and people use these words and they have conflicts about the concepts involved.
Would you agree with that?
That's true of philosophy.
That's true of politics.
That's true of history.
I don't know where the word obsessed comes into that.
I mean, I like to debate philosophy.
Does that mean I'm obsessed with philosophy?
Obsessed has a negative, it's a pejorative term, right?
It is not just interested in or invested in or, you know, pursues knowledge in.
Obsessed is a pejorative term.
And that's why I'm trying to understand why you would apply a.
I'm sorry?
I mean it as a pejorative term.
Okay, good.
So I'm not sure.
But when you describe it, You are describing, you know, the people are interested in the topic and there is some conflict.
Of course, a lot of that conflict is driven by politics, in that men pay significantly more into the tax system and women take significantly more out of the tax system.
So there's a lot of conflict because males and females are in a, to some degree, a master slave relationship, in that the women vote to take away property from the men and the men resent it.
So there is a great deal of tension based upon the political redistribution or really outright coerced transfer.
Of the trillions of dollars a year throughout the West in particular.
So it's sort of like saying if a serf wants to break free, he's just obsessed with being a serf and he's obsessed with the master slave relationship.
And it's like, I don't know that obsession is really the right word.
He just wants to be free, and men want to be free of women taking their money through the state by force and running them up into debt and so on.
And so I don't know where the pejorative comes from, but I'm certainly happy to hear.
That wasn't my line of.
I tend to think about it more the obsession of women in gender studies and all of this sort of ideologies that are composed in the university systems, which involve the same concepts that I'm talking about, but set men versus women all over the place.
First, it was sort of women against men, and then now it's kind of, I think, shifting towards men against women.
And people use the terms masculine and feminine when they're talking about this kind of stuff.
And the whole purpose of why I tried to understand this kind of thing.
Was I just asked myself the questions like, what the fuck do these things mean?
When people say, so yeah, it's confusing.
Okay, so sorry, hang on.
So when you say, hang on, hang on.
So when you say that society is obsessed with masculine and feminine, and then you talk about gender studies departments, that's not society, right?
Again, it's a little confusing.
I don't think that's confusing.
I mean, I meet people all over the world, and a lot of the young women and young men are interested in these topics, and they're sort of ruminating on it.
Because it's like kind of an unresolvable dilemma for people.
It's like they can't get past it.
So, the purpose of what I was doing was to simply ask myself, what the hell do these things mean?
And what I did is I just went, scoured the internet and everything I could find for words that people associated with masculine and words that people associated with feminine.
And I created a massive spreadsheet about a hundred thousand words.
Okay, I want you to.
I just want to.
Sorry, man, you can talk.
I really don't feel like I'm being listened to.
I want you to restate my last objection, if you don't mind.
I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but my experience is that you just take what I say as a launching pad to an unrelated speech.
So if you could do me a favor, it's just a listening check.
Can you tell me what my last objection was?
Yeah, so your objection was that men are protesting against the taking of resources by the state against.
By women who can vote.
And that's about.
So for me, like your objection to me.
No, that wasn't my objection.
That was my argument.
Yeah, I didn't understand.
Do you remember my last objection?
Well, look, I didn't really understand your objection too much.
And to me, it was not a continuation of the conversation.
Okay, then restate it as you understand it.
Honestly, I thought it was not addressing the point that I was making.
Restate it as you understand it.
Even if I got it completely wrong, right?
You still have to understand, even if you don't agree, right?
We have to be able to communicate to each other and listen.
Because if there's no listening, it gets frustrating, right?
And it's a pretend conversation.
So if you can, just restate.
My last objection.
I thought I did, but I'll try again.
I mean, it's not very good.
No, no, it's not about the politics.
It wasn't about the politics of income transfers between males and females.
If you could just restate my last objection.
Sorry.
Would you be so kind as to state it again?
No.
Yeah, I'm dumping that.
So, just for those of you who were listening, and I appreciate that you were listening.
For those of you who were listening, my last objection was that he said society is obsessed.
With masculine and feminine, and he viewed that as a pejorative.
And then I said, Well, you know, there's men who are concerned about coercive income transfers through the state.
And then he said, I'm talking about what's going on in academics and women's studies and departments and so on.
And then I said, But then that's not society.
If you're going to say that the obsession is in a tiny sliver of students relative to the general population of the West, it's only a very tiny sliver of students who are in gender studies departments.
Then he can't say society is obsessed and also that it's happening in gender studies departments.
Now, whether this was a correct or incorrect understanding of what he was saying is an interesting question, but he could not restate it.
And that is not good.
That is not good.
And so, as a whole, I would say that when you're in, I mean, I was writing notes and sort of trying to really keep track.
Of what I don't even know if we're on anymore because it looks like I don't know if it's running, I don't see it on X here, so maybe I've maybe it just crashed out on X, so that's fine.
But when you're in a conversation and you're having debates about complicated topics, which is great, I mean, I love debates about complicated topics, I think it's great.
But if you are having debates about complicated topics, first of all, you need to define your terms and you need to get agreement on those terms, right?
And so If he's going to talk to me about masculine and feminine for 20 minutes, and then he's going to say that it has nothing to do with male and female, which is, or almost nothing to do with male and female, which is a very non standard way of doing it, then you need to define your terms ahead of time and get agreement on those terms.
And then, especially in the more complicated topics, right?
So if I'm debating ethics, I will say, you know, my definition of ethics is universally preferable behavior, and we can have a discussion about all of that.
And I think that's helpful and useful and interesting and so on.
But it's sort of like if I go to some sort of dealership, like a car dealership, and I say, I want a car.
And by car, I mean a van.
And by car, the salesman thinks I mean a sports car, like a little zippy sports car.
And if we don't have the same definition, Of what the word car means, we can't have a productive negotiation because he's trying to sell me a car he's defined as a sports car, and I'm trying to buy a car I've defined as a van or maybe a sports utility vehicle or something like that.
So, if I go and say I want to buy a boat and what I'm thinking of is a rowboat, and somebody tries to sell me a yacht, which is technically a boat, we're not going to have a very productive discussion.
So, the reason that I ended the conversation was that I had for quite some time suspected that he wasn't listening and that he was basically just waiting.
And there were always these kind of insults a little bit.
I mean, the passive aggressive stuff, I don't know why it's kind of been floating up in my life recently with people, but the passive aggressive stuff is.
Now, this happened with Vosh many years ago.
This stuff's incredibly complicated.
It's like, and so he's like, yes, it is really complicated.
It's really contradictory and blah, And it's like, well, I mean, I'm a pretty smart guy.
I can understand some pretty complicated things.
I did solve the holy grail of philosophy known as a rational proof of secular ethics.
So when people keep telling me, or you've got to watch out for this as well with people, that if people are telling you that what they're trying to explain is just so gosh darn complicated, Then, what they're saying is, I'm smarter than you.
I get this stuff that's really complicated.
I'm going to try my best to squeeze it into your tiny brain.
And it's not great.
And there are people, of course, who say stuff to sound smart rather than.
I think the smartest people try to break things down into things that can be communicated easily.
Because if you can't talk about things and communicate them relatively easily, then, of course, what happens is.
You end up with a philosophy of the elites.
So I've always aimed at UPB, IQ 85, IQ 90, you can get it, right?
Little kids can get it.
I've done a whole bunch of work on that.
Now, if this guy was, you know, there's the masculine and the feminine, and you've got to switch from this mode to the other, and you've got to have knowledge of your externalization, and like that's all so complicated that it actually doesn't help the average person.
And I think, I think, That the job of thinkers and people who want to do good in society, he mentioned about doing good.
So, if you want to do good in society, which I think is a great goal, idea, and task, then what you have to do is find ways to communicate things in ways that people can, in general, actually understand.
I didn't get one practical thing out of this conversation.
I got a bunch of vague generalities and stuff that, you know, sounds vaguely plausible, but, you know, I asked him for.
A particular instance, I think twice, and all I got was a guy who wants to do stuff.
And I didn't actually get to any particular instances.
So I asked for something.
Now, I did ask him to clarify that, but I didn't actually get.
So, so here's, I mean, this is just a communications tip for people, right?
If you're in a conversation like this, I've got like three pages of notes here.
You need to write down what people are saying.
So if I'm asking for, let's say he has a bit of a habit of tangenting, which I do too.
So that's fine.
That's why I take notes.
But if you're in a communication with someone, And they've asked you for something, and you have a tendency, as we all do, to maybe win back a little, go on side quests, obfuscate perhaps, then you have to write down.
You know, if I was on his side and my debating partner, it should be a partnership, right?
If my debating partner had asked for my, let's say my debating opponent, right?
Debating partner sounds like we're both on the same team.
But if my debating opponent had said, I need some tangible, material, practical, empirical examples of your theories, I would write down, give examples in all caps.
And I've done this, of course, give examples, right?
And I would refer to that, right?
Because he agreed to give me examples.
Now, of course, I could say, or he could say, I'm not going to give you examples.
There's no way.
But that is not a particularly good debating.
If you have a theory that's kind of complicated, then oftentimes practical examples can help cut through the theory stuff, right?
That could be very helpful.
So if you are communicating particularly complex ideas, then You need to write down what people are asking you for, and you need to write down their arguments.
Again, I have pages and pages of notes just from this conversation because I want to be able to address what it is that he's saying.
And that's why I let him talk for so long because I really was hoping that he was going to start providing examples or give me some more clear definitions.
And another objection I had that he didn't reference was if he's talking about personality traits that have almost nothing to do with males and females, right?
His words, right?
He didn't address that.
If you're going to use Masculine and feminine to describe personality traits, and then say it has almost nothing to do with males and females, that's very confusing.
And I gave sort of the example of, you know, I divide people into people who speak French and people who speak German, and maybe there's a slightly higher population of females in France or something like that.
Well, probably not now, but let's say native born.
So my point was if you're going to say, I'm going to divide people into English speaking, sorry, in French speaking and Italian speaking, and I'm going to call the Italian speaking masculine and the French speaking feminine, and then say, well, it has almost nothing to do with male and female.
Then, if it has almost nothing to do with male and female, then why use words specifically designed to describe male and female, right?
I mean, that's a reasonable question because it's confusing, right?
If I think he's talking about males and females, which is the default position when you're talking about masculine and feminine, and of course, there can be masculine women and there can be feminine men, and we can sort of say all of that, but you still, in general, in the bulk, in the large, It is a term that is used for males and females.
In other words, if we say, here's a masculine woman, we say, here's a woman who is acting like a typical man.
Or if the feminized man, here's a man who's acting like a typical female.
And so the male and female is how we make those differentiations.
However, fair or unfair they may be, that's the general convention.
Commitment to Truth Over Lies00:07:44
And what we didn't get to, which I doubt we ever will, I wouldn't want to redo that.
I'm also looking for, like, if somebody tunes out, like, it can happen, right?
It can happen.
It's a long conversation, so we can tune out, right?
So, I mean, you've heard me do this on a call in show.
Like, if I get something wrong that someone has said, you know, they said, I was 30 when this happened, and I say 25, and they say 30.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry I got that wrong, right?
So, if you have not listened, first of all, you know, don't try and pretend that you've listened, right?
Don't do that math thing.
Can you repeat back to me what I just said?
As opposed to saying, you know what?
I kind of spaced out there.
I'm really sorry.
I just missed what you said and I should have said something.
And, right?
So, look, we can all tune out a little bit here and there in conversations.
That's not the end of the world.
But if you have spaced out and not listened to someone in a challenging conversation where you admit things are very complicated, then what should you do?
Right?
This is just a politeness thing.
So, if I have not listened to the last five minutes of a conversation and somebody says, Can you repeat back to me?
What I just said?
What is the honorable, moral, honest thing to do?
Well, we know the honorable, honest, moral thing to do is to say, Oh my gosh, this is so rude.
I gapped out.
I spaced out.
I was thinking about my own thoughts.
I was not really listening.
I'm so sorry.
That was really rude.
I do apologize.
And if you accept my apology, I will stab myself with a spork if I have to to make sure I pay attention.
I promise to not do that again.
I've got my notepad ready.
I really do apologize because it's kind of rude to come on your show and then not listen to you.
Even if it's only for five minutes or whatever.
Okay.
Well, that's an honest, reasonable, and moral thing to do.
And he didn't do that.
He didn't satisfy me about the rudeness of A, not listening, and B, pretending you were.
Right.
So he's like, Well, I can restate your argument.
It's like, that wasn't my argument.
I can restate your objection.
I said objection, not argument.
And he then went further back to something, and I said, That's not my argument.
That wasn't my objection.
And he wouldn't apologize.
This is really important.
You've got to notice these things in life.
That's why I hung up on him.
Not because he didn't listen.
I mean, that can happen, whatever, right?
But because he lied about not listening.
And then he said, when I asked him to repeat my objection, he said, Well, you stated it badly.
So then it's my fault, right?
And that's also a lie because he thought he was restating.
He went back to the last thing he could remember and stated that.
And so when I said that wasn't my last objection, he then started.
Insulting me by saying I stated it badly.
And then I said to him, I said, okay, then restate my bad statement back to me.
You don't have to agree to straw man to play the devil's advocate.
And then there was some other falsehood he came up with.
And then it's just an honor thing.
I don't debate with people who lie to me.
And listen, it's not fun to be caught out in public not listening.
I think we've all been there at one time or another.
I certainly have.
And so it really is just an honor thing.
And it's really, really important.
If you want to engage in complicated debates with people, you need to show the utmost honor, honesty, integrity, and virtue.
Because if he's not willing to say, Oh, you know, Steph, you got me.
I gapped out.
I'm so sorry.
That was really rude.
I do apologize.
Okay, that's fine.
You know, we all have speed bumps and hiccups and no big deal, right?
And I would respect that.
But when people just get kind of weaselly and then blame me and say I didn't state it well and all of that, and they won't admit that they weren't listening, That's when everything before that is stated with no commitment to truth.
That's really, really important.
Everything before that is stated with no commitment to truth because he does not have a commitment to truth.
And that's why I ended the debate.
Because a commitment to truth would be I don't remember what you said.
I'm sorry.
Okay, no harm, no fell.
We all gap out.
But if somebody is going to lie and make excuses and not take responsibility, then they do not have a commitment to truth.
And if they do not have a commitment to truth, that's why I asked him, Do you understand my confusion?
Not do you agree with it, but do you understand it?
Like if I use the word argon and CO2 to refer to gravity, people would be, I would say, Yeah, that is kind of confusing.
And let me tell you why I'm doing it.
And let me, I should have defined these things at the beginning.
Like when I said to him, If you're using masculine and feminine or you're using this, that, or the other, why didn't you define these terms at the beginning?
He's like, Well, because it's really complicated.
It's like, No, no, it's not.
That's why I asked him.
How long have you listened to what I do, and you know that definitions, particularly when you're using non standard definitions, are important?
So, I mean, I'm very happy to have had the conversation.
I did find it interesting.
But I will just tell you I mean, and I would recommend you adopt this as a strategy in life as a whole is that if people lie to you, particularly when you're first talking to them, if people lie to you, don't continue the conversation.
Now, I'm not calling him some big old stinky liar.
I mean, it was in public.
Obviously, he has a certain amount of vanity, I guess, as we do as a whole or whatever, right?
He didn't want to admit fault and all of that.
But the funny thing, of course, is that I think that he would say that being unwilling to admit fault when you've done something wrong is probably feminine coded, but has nothing to do with women.
So if somebody can't admit fault and then lies to me, right?
Because when I went back and said what was my last objection, and he talked about something that was an argument about the transfer of money from men to women through the state, that was an argument.
My last objection was about him saying society's obsessed and then saying it's really just the gender studies department.
And even if I'd gotten that wrong, even if I'd misunderstood something, he still needs to be able to repeat back to me what I said.
And so then saying, well, this was your argument.
No, it wasn't.
Well, you stated it badly.
That's moving the goalposts, right?
That's moving the goalposts.
And I don't interact with people who don't have integrity that way.
I really don't.
And honestly, I would suggest this the moment that somebody starts not taking responsibility and starts kind of lying and moving the goalposts and so on, because he pretended that he did know, and he didn't say, you know, I'm really sorry.
Just please tell me, and I apologize.
I will take more notes.
Okay, that's fine.
We can move on.
But when people don't take responsibility and then lie and move the goalposts, because he pretended that he did know, which means he wasn't listening.
And he didn't say to me, Why do you have an experience of not being listened to?
Tell me more about that, which is, you know, curiosity, because I'm expressing a frustration in the relationship.
I'm expressing a frustration in the relationship, which is I'm not feeling listened to.
And.
There's no curiosity.
There's just gaslighting and faucets.
And I just, if somebody doesn't have a commitment to telling me the truth in something I know about, I'm not going to accept that they have a commitment to telling the truth in things I don't know about.
So I think it was a very helpful conversation.
I hope you listened through to the end.
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Really do appreciate that.
Have yourself an absolutely wonderful, glorious day.