Stefan Molyneux's First Interview in FOUR YEARS!

Stefan Molyneux

Stefan Molyneux interviewed by Connor Tomlinson Writer & Presenter, LotusEaters.com https://www.lotuseaters.com/author/connor-tomlinson

Transcript

00:00:00 Before we start with an interview, I am so glad that I have the opportunity to do,

00:00:04 because I've been wanting to speak to this man for years now, but why does work do you have to

00:00:08 mention that today are good editor, Rory launched our new imprint is in its Islander. You can go

00:00:14 and get that all much store. It'd be quarterly. Fantastic contributions here. Do look out for

00:00:20 that. We've got really push out in print media, but I don't want to waste any time because I've

00:00:23 already wasted enough of his time with irritating tech problems. Mr. Stefan Mollen, you thank you

00:00:29 for being so gracious for joining me for your first interview with like a proper external outlet in

00:00:34 quite a few years. I really appreciate it. Well, thanks. I guess I'm going back from

00:00:38 being the studio band to playing a little live and very nice to meet you. Nice to chat with you.

00:00:42 Yeah, well, I, I have to say that I, I'm definitely not a neutral interviewer. I

00:00:48 have listened to free domain for years. I've been a donator for some time.

00:00:56 I think that your cancellation is probably the single most high profile least just one

00:01:02 that I've ever encountered, particularly because if you contrast the, what read likes a rap sheet

00:01:08 of defamatory claims on your Wikipedia page to your simple to read what I believe page on your

00:01:15 own website, you get a very different impression. And so, so in 2020 struck off the internet,

00:01:21 digitally exiled. I know it, it coincided with a difficult time for you when you're,

00:01:27 when your father passed away and obviously lots of mixed emotions about that. So I know this might

00:01:32 be a soft question, but how have you felt since then? How, how are you? Oh, I'm, I'm great.

00:01:38 Honestly, I view the deep platforming as really part of a very important conversation that I'm

00:01:44 having with the world. So the beginning of the show for me was about ethics and childhood.

00:01:54 And those who are really good at thinking about ethics are not very good at thinking about

00:01:59 childhood. And those who are good at thinking about childhood are generally not very good

00:02:03 at thinking about ethics. And I really, really wanted to bring these sort of rational philosophical

00:02:11 discipline of universal ethics to questions of childhood. I just recently finished, I guess,

00:02:18 my magnum opus called peaceful parenting, which I wouldn't have done if I wasn't de-platformed sort

00:02:22 of part of the general conversation with the world. So I really, really, really wanted to

00:02:28 write the book, which takes moral philosophy and applies it to parent child relations.

00:02:33 And philosophers haven't really done that. They don't talk much about childhood. They're really,

00:02:37 really into trolley problems and they're really into, "Hey man, is it possible that we're living

00:02:42 in a simulation, man?" And things like that. I don't mean to scorn all prior philosophers,

00:02:47 but it is a little bit annoying that these giant brains of analytical reasoning have not turned

00:02:51 their attentions to the furnace of the human heart, the origin story of the species, which

00:02:56 is our childhood. So I started the show with childhood and ethics. And then, you know,

00:03:03 that smoky come hither look that politics has, rightly or wrongly, good or bad, it was what it

00:03:09 was, it kind of drew me in that direction towards politics. And of course, the rise of populism,

00:03:15 the rise of Trump was a really, really fascinating phenomenon for me as a sort of moral philosopher

00:03:20 in particular. So I kind of got into politics. And for me, I'm the kind of guy when I kind of

00:03:26 get into something, it's not like a little thing, it's like cannonball, in I go. So I went into

00:03:31 politics. And that grew the show, of course, enormously. And it drew me away from the childhood

00:03:37 stuff. Now, I wasn't the worst political analyzer in the world, but it's not a job that can't be

00:03:42 done by other people. So I think in part of the unconscious conversation that I was having with

00:03:47 the world, which means things below, of course, the can of the neofrontal cortex part of the brain,

00:03:55 the unconscious, which, you know, has been clocked at like 6000 times faster than the

00:03:59 conscious mind, but produces all of our wild dreams at night and all of that sort of stuff.

00:04:02 So in the unconscious conversation with the world, I think that the world was saying, bro,

00:04:07 love the politics, you've been good with the politics, but you're staying too long.

00:04:13 And of course, it's getting kind of slander or lawfare kind of dangerous.

00:04:18 So you should go and do what you can do, which is to bring reason and ethics and analytical

00:04:26 virtues to childhood, because that's the one thing that's not being done. It's the one thing

00:04:31 that has never been done from a really rigorous philosophical standpoint. And it's the one thing

00:04:36 that you can do. And so when it came to shuffling around the chess pieces of society, I do view the

00:04:44 people who de-platform me as giving me a cold wet fish across the face of reminding me of the

00:04:50 most important thing that I could be doing, which is to focus on the ethics of childhood.

00:04:54 When you focus on the ethics of childhood, though, you do have to deal with some of the

00:04:58 existential angst that comes from giving up on politics. It's like, well, I don't know that

00:05:01 politics is going to solve things right now, but if I focus back on the childhood stuff,

00:05:05 maybe in a generation or two, things can be a lot better. So sorry, long answer, but no,

00:05:11 I feel great. I feel like I got set back to the primary mission. I got put back to my useful

00:05:17 place in society. And it means that I probably won't live to see many of the fruits of my

00:05:24 labors, but that's kind of the gig of the philosopher is to have at least a 500 year

00:05:28 business plan. You've got to be like, I don't know, the old Chinese sort of dynasties with

00:05:33 their endless business plans. So I think that it kicked me out of politics, which was obviously

00:05:38 quite addictive. I think we've all been there to one degree or another, like what's going on in

00:05:42 the world? What can I say about it? And when you do talk about that stuff, you get a lot of

00:05:45 attention. Of course, you know, you get donations and so on, which has its plus in terms of building

00:05:50 the business. So turning away from all of that, and sometimes you look back at the things that

00:05:58 you didn't like at the time, this is true for all addictions, I think, where you say, "Hey, man,

00:06:02 that day I couldn't find my dealer was actually a really great day. I really, really was frustrated.

00:06:08 My dealer quit, man. Where am I going to get my stuff? I need my stuff." So for me, I think the

00:06:14 world was saying in, you know, not obviously a very kind or rational manner, but you know,

00:06:19 if it was kind and rational, I wouldn't need to be working on childhood so much. It said,

00:06:23 "Bro, you got to get back to the childhood stuff." And so removing the audience to some degree and

00:06:28 realizing when I shifted platforms, because, you know, I'm not gone from the internet. I'm just,

00:06:31 "I'm one website over, man. I'm one website over." And people are like, "One website?

00:06:37 Thus is a bridge too far. I cannot make it. It's the bridge at Khazad-Dum. None shall pass."

00:06:42 It's like, "Oh, one website over." So realizing the sort of ephemeral nature of people's interest

00:06:47 in you is also really important because then you can build a much deeper legacy for the future,

00:06:52 rather than chasing the dopamine of the moment. So I view the deplatforming, although obviously

00:06:57 it was a bit of a band-aid coming off my soul, but a very positive thing in the long run. I think not

00:07:02 just for me and what it is that I can do, but for the future as a whole.

00:07:06 Luke: Okay. Firstly, please never apologize for a long answer.

00:07:10 [laughter]

00:07:12 Sorry, I'm British. I apologize. That's just the way it is.

00:07:15 But we're getting the reciprocal manners here, you know.

00:07:18 [laughter]

00:07:18 No, no. After you, please.

00:07:20 [laughter]

00:07:22 Yeah, it feels like we're letting each other through doorways. We just never get anywhere.

00:07:25 I do find it very frustrating that people just didn't hop off YouTube to rumblebitchute,

00:07:30 Odyssey, Locals, your website, even Google Podcasts, which is being shut down this year.

00:07:34 But you've had an RSS feed for ages. All of those are linked in the description, by the way,

00:07:37 so that people got no excuse not to go over and listen and follow you and donate,

00:07:41 which they absolutely should. But I suppose, let's reverse engineer my original thinking of

00:07:46 the flow of the conversation. You brought up peaceful parenting. I've listened to it twice.

00:07:49 I was listening as you were releasing the chapters, and now that you've sent me the full

00:07:53 block thing, it's important and harrowing. The only person, I think, that's done anything even

00:07:58 remotely similar is Katie Faust over at Them Before Us. That was a more data-driven advocacy

00:08:02 thing. It wasn't philosophical, necessarily. So I think it's a real triumph. I think,

00:08:08 if anyone took the time to actually read it, and were operating in good faith,

00:08:12 it would repudiate the defamatory claim that you're somehow a white nationalist,

00:08:17 but also don't want the existence of a state and don't want to use violence against the most

00:08:20 vulnerable in civilization. So how did it feel to write this, particularly digging into

00:08:26 personal memories, I'm sure, and dealing with some of the worst possible implications for what

00:08:31 children are suffering that so-called "protected minorities" now - they don't have to go through

00:08:36 any of this, but everyone seems to be overlooking exactly what the most vulnerable in our civilization

00:08:40 are going through. Oh, I gotta tell you, man, the book was horrible. Horrible to write. And now,

00:08:46 I mean, that's probably not the best piece of marketing. My marketing brain - I used to be

00:08:50 a software guy, and I was a chief director of marketing at a company - so my marketing brain is,

00:08:56 "Don't talk about how horrible the book is!" But for me, it was very, very difficult to write

00:09:03 because it really does highlight what is so wrong with our society and the way that it views ethics

00:09:11 and virtue and consistency. So it was very painful. I mean, I kind of knew all of these

00:09:16 arguments. I've made them over the 17, 18, 19 years that I've been doing work as a sort of public

00:09:21 philosopher, but this one, I've never had anything this hard. For me, a book is like, "Hey, great,

00:09:27 you know, I get on the treadmill. I have my voice dictation machine. I just write away,

00:09:31 and it's great fun, and it gives me adrenaline." And this was, you know, it wasn't exactly like

00:09:37 doing your own appendicitis with chopsticks, but it wasn't exactly the opposite of that either.

00:09:41 And the reason being that - and the book is long - there will be a shorter version coming out,

00:09:47 and I think that's perfectly reasonable, but I needed to make not a civil case, but a criminal

00:09:53 case, right? So, you know, in generally, in the law, a civil case, like a lawsuit about money or

00:09:59 whatever, that is preponderance of evidence, like 51%, more likely than not. I'm not making that

00:10:06 case when it comes to peaceful parenting. I'm not making the case that, you know, it'd be

00:10:10 on the balance, it's nicer if you don't savage your children. Yeah, I mean, I'm making a criminal

00:10:16 case. So a criminal case is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but I wanted to go even

00:10:20 further than that. I wanted it to be, if you finish the book, there's no doubt. This is like

00:10:25 video, smoking gun, satellite imagery, GPS location, your DNA is on the scene. This is 100%.

00:10:32 So the only thing you can do if you're caught in a criminal activity like that is you plea out,

00:10:37 right? You plea out, because there's no point going to trial, you're going to lose, right? So

00:10:41 the pleaing out is being nice to your children. So I really had to make the case. So I make the

00:10:46 case, of course, philosophically, morally. I make the case in terms of here, practical ways in which

00:10:51 you can deal with parenting issues, because I've been a stay at home parent for 15 and a half

00:10:55 years. So I've, you know, some experience. I also worked at a daycare for many years when I was

00:10:59 younger. So I make the case from theory, I make the case from practice. And then, which is what

00:11:05 took the book so long to write, is I make the case from absolute bulletproof scientific proof,

00:11:11 like the biology of child abuse, what it does to the brain, what it does to longevity, what it does

00:11:16 to cancer, ischemic heart disease, what it does to promiscuity, what it does to addiction, and so on,

00:11:21 criminality, of course, as a whole. And so I had to make the case, here's what's right,

00:11:28 here's how to do it, and here's why to do it. And if you get to the end of the book and you think

00:11:33 like, maybe then you've obviously skipped a whole bunch or not been honest with the chain of

00:11:38 reasoning, because I needed to make an irrefutable case. My books are normally two months to write,

00:11:43 three months to write. This was 14, 15 months and a lot of iterations. So, because the tone,

00:11:50 oh man, the tone. I don't mean to overly tone police myself like some blue haired feminist,

00:11:55 but it really was important to get the tone right. Because you don't want it to be angry,

00:11:59 because then that's kind of turning people off. And it also triggers their defenses and trying

00:12:03 to get through people's defenses is one of the big tricks of being a public communicator about

00:12:08 sensitive issues. So, this one's too angry, this one's too placid. And so just rewriting and

00:12:14 rewriting and trying to find the right tone. You want to be outraged, of course, because you need

00:12:18 to shake people out of their train tracks, but you also don't want to be psycho angry. You know

00:12:24 what I mean? But of course, given the scope of the subject, that billions of children are horribly

00:12:29 abused every day around the world, it's finding the right tone for it to be passionate, but

00:12:35 encouraging for it to be firm without being abusive, for it to be assertive without being

00:12:40 aggressive. I mean, that tone stuff was really, really tough. And the number of iterations I went

00:12:44 through trying to pick the lock of people's defenses is tough. If it's not important enough,

00:12:48 they don't care. If it's too important, they get too defensive. So, trying to find that way through

00:12:52 the maze was tricky. - You don't want to trigger the parental defense mechanisms that have been

00:12:58 outsourced to them. That's like a parasite in their own conscience. Immediately, if you criticize an

00:13:03 abstract behavior, which I don't want to be reductivist to your work, because it's really

00:13:06 comprehensive, but the essential argument is don't neglect, assault, abuse verbally, physically, or

00:13:14 sexually your child, and we might have a more healthy civilization. Very robust argumentation,

00:13:19 but the takeaway moral is really all that simple. - Oh, sorry to interrupt. I'm sorry to interrupt.

00:13:23 You went back to the preponderance of them. We might have... No, no, no. It's not that we might.

00:13:29 We absolutely, completely, and totally will. It's not we might have a more civilized... That's the

00:13:34 delicacy, right? It's that you want to say, "Well, it might be some... No, no, no. 150%.

00:13:38 Absolute for certain." I mean, child abuse can take an average of 20... Significant child abuse

00:13:43 can take 20 years off people's lifespan. And it raises the odds of addiction, promiscuity,

00:13:49 criminal behavior, children out of wedlock, destabilizations, and so on by hundreds,

00:13:55 if not thousands of percent. So it is absolutely a better world with the better treatment of

00:13:59 children. Sorry to be that annoying guy who's circling back, but that word might is like,

00:14:03 "No, no. I didn't suffer for 15 months for might. It's for absolute." Anyway, sorry. Go ahead.

00:14:07 - No, no. It's important to be corrected because I have a tendency to slip sarcasm in there,

00:14:12 but I don't want to underplay the issue, particularly when... So I grew up in 2011,

00:14:16 and one of my first moments of political awareness was the London riots. And I saw something very

00:14:20 similar in 2020, of course, with the "Summer of Love", as it's now colloquially called, where

00:14:25 dozens of people lost their lives and billions of dollars in property damage were committed.

00:14:28 And I and many other people just sort of saw that as in your book, "The Present". These sorts of

00:14:32 riots are adults having a temper tantrum because they were growing up in broken homes. And so I

00:14:38 really think addressing that problem at the root, getting rid of daycare and the like, ensuring

00:14:42 parents are present and attentive and not violent, will absolutely fix things. So then I was sort of

00:14:48 racking my brain. Why has no other philosopher dedicated their work to that yet? Because that's

00:14:53 a question you've been asking. Why haven't they bothered? - Ah, boy, big question. The first

00:15:01 answer, of course, is I don't know, because we can't sort of cross-examine the corpses. But

00:15:05 I would imagine that there's a couple of reasons why. So when I was growing up, I mean, I was born

00:15:13 in the 60s, grew up in the 70s in England. And the one thing that was really, really common in the

00:15:20 somewhat dark and decadent decade of the 70s was the issue of marriage, right? And this happened

00:15:27 even in Canada, you needed an act of parliament to get divorced even in the 1960s. So there was

00:15:33 that whole question of the voluntary relationship, which is, "Hey, a lot of men are male chauvinist

00:15:39 pigs. There's a patriarchy, honey." And if you're just not happy, if you're just kind of discontented,

00:15:46 if you feel that maybe you'd be better off instead of cooking greasy bangers and eggs for some guy

00:15:53 who's a laborer, you should jet off to Greece and you should open a restaurant on the Mediterranean,

00:15:59 and you can have this wonderful life and all of that. And so if you're just kind of not happy,

00:16:03 you should get out. You should just, you know, you're liberated. And certainly if he's mean,

00:16:08 man, if he's mean, it's an absolute, you just got to get out, right? Now, I don't know what

00:16:12 your experience was. I think it's fairly common. Most of my childhood was in a retarded and naive

00:16:18 way was saying, "Oh, okay. So society, this is the rule. Okay. So I'll just use the rule." And

00:16:23 then you use the rule and you get hammered like a nail, like a recalcitrant or slightly rebellious

00:16:29 Japanese person. Like you just get banged, right? It's like, I remember when I was a kid,

00:16:36 you know, you get yelled at by adults and then you say, "Okay, so we solve our problems by

00:16:41 yelling." So then as a kid, you yell at people and you're like, "No, you can't do that. That's

00:16:45 terrible." Or the teachers are constantly correcting you. And then I was, you know,

00:16:50 got really into particular topics and would learn a lot. And I'd hold up my hand and say, "Oh,

00:16:54 teach, you got this wrong." Right? Because, you know, correcting people is good, right? I get

00:16:57 corrected all the time. So now you correct the teacher and then you get this frozen faced,

00:17:01 "Well, I can't quite punish you, but I can still make you suffer when you correct your parents."

00:17:05 Or, you know, I was always told, "Oh, you've got this chicken scratch handwriting. You know,

00:17:09 you got to write better." And then your teacher would give you notes back that looked like some

00:17:13 doctor giving you a prescription while having an epileptic attack. And you'd say, "Well, I can't

00:17:17 read this." And they'd say, "Well, you've just got to parse it better." You know, so my handwriting

00:17:21 needed to be improved, but their incomprehensible handwriting. So just silly examples of all of

00:17:25 these rules where you say, "Oh, so this is how we do stuff. Okay, I'll do that." No,

00:17:28 that's absolutely wrong. And it was sort of interesting to me that I grew up with

00:17:35 all of these broken marriages around. I didn't say broken marriages, but of course, at the time,

00:17:38 it was female liberation. You shouldn't be a slave. You shouldn't be a broodmare. You should

00:17:42 fight the patriarchy. You should follow your bliss. You should live, laugh, laugh. Like all

00:17:46 of the stuff that breadcrumbs led people, or led women in particular, away from marriages.

00:17:50 And because I grew up in a single mother household, you end up tumbling down this spiral staircase of

00:17:55 socioeconomic doom. Not quite at the bottom, but very close to the bottom. So what that means is

00:18:01 that everyone around you is dysfunctional, and it's mostly single mother households in

00:18:05 highly subsidized or rent-controlled flats, as we would say back in the old country.

00:18:11 And so I was like, "Okay, so you don't have to stay married if you're unhappy. You don't have

00:18:18 to stay married if you're unfulfilled, if you think that there could be something better out

00:18:21 there. And you certainly, certainly don't need to stay married if you're being abused." So I was

00:18:27 like, "Okay, so the family is not something that is an iron cage that you have to stay in no matter

00:18:32 what." Even though you choose the person, right? You get married, you date the person, usually for

00:18:39 a year or two. You get engaged six months to a year, you get married, then it's usually a year

00:18:45 or two or three later, you start having kids. So you've got a lot of, you've got a half decade plus

00:18:49 of test driving, right? And I don't know if you've ever bought a car. I'm sure you have, but most

00:18:54 people who buy a car, we go and we test drive. Now I can't test drive a car for five years and then

00:18:59 say, "This is the worst car that has ever been invented. I can't believe I ended up with this

00:19:04 car. This is monstrous. I have nothing to do with this car. It's evil." And it's like, "But you did

00:19:09 get to test drive it for five years. So maybe you have a tiny bit of a say in things." So the marriage

00:19:14 is chosen and the marriage is vetted, right? You choose your marriage partner and you get to vet

00:19:19 them. And yet, even after you choose the person's voluntary relationship and you get to vet them

00:19:24 for a half a decade, if you want to go, good for you, empowerment, baby. You've come a long way.

00:19:30 Off you go to your bliss. So then of course you think, "Okay, well, parents you don't choose and

00:19:36 you don't get to test drive them at all. You're just born into the family that you're born into."

00:19:41 And I sort of think about arranged marriages, right? So if someone came off the boat from some

00:19:47 place where, I don't know, child marriage was a thing, right? And she was married off as a child,

00:19:52 she comes to England or some Western country, and she was married off as a child to some brute

00:19:57 of a husband, maybe he's 20 years older and drinks or whatever, right? And then she says,

00:20:01 "Well, I can't leave him." You would say, "You can. I mean, you didn't in fact choose him in

00:20:06 the first place, right? You were just married into this." And I'm not saying you have to leave,

00:20:11 but it's certainly possible. And so involuntary relationships should be the ones that have the

00:20:17 highest moral standard, right? Where there's a power disparity in particular, right? The boss

00:20:22 who seduces his secretary is considered to be abusing his power because he can fire her and

00:20:26 so on, right? So that's a bad thing. So each thread of these makes perfect sense and everybody

00:20:32 would agree with. But you put them all together and you say, "Adult children don't have to spend

00:20:36 time with relentlessly abusive parents." And again, things that everyone agrees with.

00:20:41 Everyone agrees with. You shouldn't be in abusive relationships, or at least you're

00:20:45 certainly free to leave. That unchosen relationships should have a higher moral

00:20:49 standard than chosen relationships. And that we have been encouraging people to leave unsatisfying

00:20:55 families for decades. And all of this, everyone accepts. And then you put it together to the most

00:21:02 foundational and primal relationship and everybody loses their mind. I feel like that Joker in the

00:21:06 movie, like, "Yeah, but everyone loses their minds and half their face," or something like that.

00:21:12 So that's very suspicious to me. And I get annoyed by these things. I get annoyed.

00:21:19 It's like, I'm sure we've had this argument or this interaction. You take someone through the

00:21:23 steps of a logical argument. Boom, you agree with this. Yes. Okay. Then this means this. Yes. Okay.

00:21:28 Then this means this. Yes. Okay. Then this means this. Yes. Okay. And then this means this. No.

00:21:31 And it's like, no, no, you don't. That's not a thing. You can't just back away from the

00:21:37 conclusions of all the premises and arguments you've agreed with. So I think why they didn't

00:21:42 do it, your original question has popped in my head. See, sometimes we go on quite a journey here,

00:21:47 but your original question, why didn't they do it? Well, I would assume it's for a couple of

00:21:51 reasons. One, they hadn't processed their own childhood trauma, so they avoid the topic.

00:21:55 Number two, they had been abusive towards its children. They had been abusive towards younger

00:21:59 siblings. Often it's younger siblings. It could be older siblings, but usually it's younger

00:22:03 siblings, or they'd been a bully or abusive to other children. Or they had grown up to be abusive

00:22:09 parents. I mean, I think we can pretty much see why someone like Jean-Jacques Rousseau would not

00:22:13 have written a philosophical work on the ethics of childhood because he tossed almost half a dozen

00:22:19 of his own children into certain death in the furnace of state orphanages with wet nurses. So

00:22:24 he's not going to be doing that. So I think that a guilty conscience is not the best spirit towards

00:22:31 moral exploration. And I've obviously not been perfect in my life. I've done good and bad things.

00:22:36 But as far as harming children go, I have a clean conscience. I was never a bully as a kid.

00:22:40 I was never mean to other kids. I've been a good father to my child. And so I have a very good

00:22:47 conscience. So I'm not confronting any demon in myself, but only out there in the world.

00:22:51 And confronting demons out there in the world can give you a lot of strength and clarity.

00:22:55 But when you're mucked up by demons sabotaging you within, you've got a bad conscience,

00:22:59 so you can't be direct and honest because it's too painful. I assume that through either some

00:23:04 instinct or just luck, I ended up with a clean conscience regarding these matters. And therefore,

00:23:09 although it annoys the world, enrages the world, for reasons I'm sure we can understand,

00:23:14 it doesn't horsehoof me in the heart to explore these matters because my conscience is clean. And

00:23:22 that's one of the great benefits of a clean conscience. So when people don't approach a

00:23:25 very obvious topic where ethics are the most important, I simply assume it's a bad conscience.

00:23:30 Luke: Yeah, I think you're a mirror to that gagged and bound conscience. I think a lot of things at

00:23:35 the moment in the affirmation culture, particularly things like the pride parades and like,

00:23:39 are public celebrations to make a large amount of noise to hide the rattling of skeletons in

00:23:44 their personal closets. And I think that because you've been quite open and honest on the internet

00:23:49 and even have whole pages dedicated to exactly what you think, which is, I think, quite moral

00:23:53 and upstanding, you have a clear conscience. Therefore, they go, "Don't look at that guy.

00:23:57 That would be terrible. You can't remind us that we've got all these things to hide.

00:24:00 That would just be absolutely intolerable." I mean, for me, when you say that, "Oh, I'm sure

00:24:05 you had this experience in childhood," my parents were thankfully wonderful and wonderful by all of

00:24:10 the metrics of... I like your almost syllogism that says, "Treat your child as if they could

00:24:18 have picked any parents in the world, they would have chosen their parents." And I've had that

00:24:21 exact conversation with both my parents. They're both very, very grateful for that, because they

00:24:24 made lots of sacrifices. But of course, the number one instance where kids encounter anarcho-tyranny

00:24:29 is in school. Very few parents, particularly in England, homeschool. And I had that exact example

00:24:34 where, with other kids or with teachers or the midwitted lunch ladies that would go around

00:24:39 patrolling every interaction, like the den mother of the longhouse, I'd do a thing and they'd say,

00:24:43 "Well, if everyone did that thing, if some guy said he was going to jump off a cliff,

00:24:48 would you follow him like a lemming?" And it's like, "But you coerce everyone else to pay your

00:24:52 salary. What are you talking about?" That drove me mad for years. And actually, it was your podcasts

00:24:58 and the like that helped me apply reciprocal standards and break the cycle that I was

00:25:02 thinking, "Well, why aren't they acting in equally good faith? Maybe if I just keep acting in good

00:25:06 faith, they'll eventually act in good faith and it leads to exploitation." So I'm grateful for

00:25:10 that. Very few people want to enable the principle of reciprocity, I think.

00:25:14 - I think that's true. And I love that den mother of the longhouse, that's a juicy phrase,

00:25:20 is turning in the barbecue of my brain with a heady aroma. That's very nicely put. Now,

00:25:25 I don't want to obviously hijack because you're the Q guy. So there wasn't a question in that.

00:25:31 I'm certainly happy to talk about it. But if you have other questions, if you want to hammer me,

00:25:34 I'm happy to serve them back as best I can. - I'll probably best connect that to one of

00:25:40 your other books, which is "Real-Time Relationships," which we've actually discussed

00:25:42 on BoatSeats.com with my colleague, Stelios, about the definition of love. People should go

00:25:47 and read that. They're all linked in the description. So first of all, how did you

00:25:53 come to formulate your definition of love? Because it's very different to the Catholic definition,

00:25:57 which is one I'm used to, which is the willing of the good and the other without

00:26:00 fair or favor in return. How would you advise the people in my audience to apply standards

00:26:08 to their relationships so they can properly vet those voluntary relationships?

00:26:11 - So love is a virtually infinite obligation. I mean, and by the way, I wanted to mention too,

00:26:17 please pass along my affection and congratulations to your parents. I think it's absolutely wonderful

00:26:23 that they treated you so well and were such great parents. It's lovely to hear,

00:26:26 and I really do appreciate it. So, yeah.

00:26:36 So when it comes to the general principles of parenting and childhood and how we apply

00:26:46 sort of best standards and best practices, and you know what? You're going to have to circle

00:26:51 back at me. Please just remind me. I don't want to vamp till I get it, because when I was just

00:26:56 thinking about how lovely your parents were and then everything just completely evaporated. So

00:27:00 just hit me up again and we'll take another run. - Yeah. How did you come to-

00:27:04 - Oh, love. Yes. Sorry. Sorry. There we go. - Love, that four-letter word. So yeah,

00:27:09 love is an almost infinite obligation. So if someone can convince you that they love you,

00:27:16 then there generally is a sense of reciprocity and that can lead to exploitation, right? So

00:27:23 we think of this with countries, like to take an extreme example, you have North Korea, right?

00:27:26 So North Korea, the Supreme Leader wants the very best and you have to be patriotic. You have to

00:27:32 love your country and so on. And that often leads to exploitation. So the question of love has to

00:27:40 have some kind of objective definition. Otherwise you're going to be exploited by people who claim

00:27:44 to love you. The typical example from 19th century rake-based literature is, "Hey, honey, I love you.

00:27:51 Let's go to bed." And so, because if the girl perceives that the man loves her, she's more

00:27:57 likely to sleep with him and he will then use that to get his sexual kicks and move on and leaving

00:28:02 her a bit of an exploited wreck. So love is a very powerful thing. If you love your country,

00:28:09 well, maybe you'll get drafted and go get your butt blown off in a war, right? If your parents,

00:28:15 if they're abusive or dismissive or nasty, but they can convince you that they love you, then

00:28:21 you're going to feel this kind of obligation and so on. So love is one of these, if it's wonderful

00:28:27 and great, it's a beautiful foundation for a great life, but it can be a sort of repeatedly

00:28:31 hammered wound through which the infection of exploitation gets in. So I really, really wanted

00:28:35 to work on a definition of love that as an emotion, it cannot be a willed state. You can't

00:28:43 will yourself to love someone. And love then has to be involuntary. And that to me was really,

00:28:51 really important because being told that you must love someone, that you must love someone is just,

00:28:58 it's too much power for any human being to handle. If you can command other people to love you,

00:29:04 and if they don't love you, they're just bad, ungrateful, selfish, you know, King Lear's how

00:29:10 sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful child, right? If you can command people

00:29:14 to love you, that's way too much power for any human. We're not good with power. It's too

00:29:20 addictive. We know this from Bonobo studies that as they climb the hierarchy, they get more dopamine

00:29:25 and as they fall, they get depressed and hollowed out. And we're just, power is very addictive. So

00:29:30 the purpose of philosophy is to limit power through principle, just as the purpose of

00:29:33 the Ten Commandments is to limit the Darwinian or Nietzschean will to power man or woman with

00:29:40 moral standards that limit the ferocity of the will. So it had to be something involuntary.

00:29:46 Okay. So if it's involuntary, then what do we love and why do we love?

00:29:49 So the most beautiful, I think we agree on this, whether you're secular or religious,

00:29:54 the most beautiful thing in the world is virtue.

00:29:56 What could be more beautiful than that? And even, of course, you look at sculptures and so on,

00:30:03 but it's the beautiful sculptures, sculptures that healthy people tend to love the most. I mean,

00:30:06 the sort of twisted, what's the, this sort of demonic ascent of Satan, King Charles,

00:30:12 a portrait that just came out is like, okay, so doorway to hell. You're being very upfront

00:30:16 about it. I appreciate the honesty. I guess you've got your comic debt cleared by saying,

00:30:21 well, yeah, it's doorway to hell. And we're real clear about it.

00:30:25 So the most beautiful thing is virtue. So we must love the good. I mean, this is not even

00:30:32 my particular formulation, right? Aristotle goes all the way back to the Thutamania idea that the

00:30:37 excellence in the pursuit of moral virtues is the greatest good and the highest ideal.

00:30:42 So we would love the virtuous the most. Now we can't will people to be virtuous. I mean,

00:30:48 if we could, I wouldn't write books. I'd just go around casting mind spells on everyone. And then

00:30:52 there wouldn't be any virtue because I'd overwrite their free will. So annoying.

00:30:54 So you really have to have an involuntary response to what? To virtue. But I guess back to my

00:31:04 Wikipedia page, I think I'm a pretty decent guy. I'm a nice guy. I want the best for the world.

00:31:09 Certainly, you compare my Wikipedia page to someone like Che Guevara, who seems to have

00:31:14 raped his maid when he was a teenager and murdered many people, including children and homosexuals.

00:31:18 And it's like, he has a complicated legacy. And it's like, OK, so that's his Wikipedia page. And

00:31:23 I do advocate for children. I'm Satan. So it has to be that we have an involuntary response to

00:31:30 virtue, but we also have to be virtuous. We have to value virtue in order to have a positive

00:31:37 response to virtue, because there's lots of people who have, I mean, we've all experienced

00:31:41 this if we do good in the world, they have a highly negative response to virtue. So the formulation

00:31:46 that love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous, takes the generation of love

00:31:54 out of your control. And that's really important, because if the generation of love is perceived to

00:31:59 be in your control, then you have these giant levers that sophists and manipulators can use

00:32:03 to control you and exploit you. So it's actually, it's funny enough, there was a show in the 70s,

00:32:10 80s, I guess 70s, I think, Happy Days. This is like really, really going back through the vaults.

00:32:17 And I remember watching this as a kid, you know, you get these little things, they just stick,

00:32:20 you know, like Legos on the feet, they stick in your brain for a long time. And there was this,

00:32:25 Ron Howard played this guy, Richie Cunningham, his name was, and he was trying to kiss this girl

00:32:32 in a car. And she said, "Oh, I don't kiss a guy unless I can hear some song, I can't remember

00:32:38 what it was, My Sharona or whatever. Unless I hear My Sharona on the radio, like unless I hear My

00:32:42 Sharona in my head, I don't kiss the guy." And he's like, "Oh, should I turn on the radio? Maybe

00:32:46 we could find that song and so on." And so she wouldn't kiss him unless some condition was met.

00:32:52 And I just remember thinking, well, that's interesting. So she didn't have a will about

00:32:55 it. She needed a particular condition to be met. And then he tried to manufacture that condition.

00:32:59 And it's like, okay, well, I'm not going to cleave to you and be loyal to you and devote

00:33:03 my resources to helping you unless a certain condition is met. And that has to be virtue.

00:33:08 And in order to appreciate virtue, I have to become virtuous myself. And that's sort of the

00:33:13 general theoretical. Very briefly, the practical aspect was, since the very beginning of the show,

00:33:19 I've had this, these call-in shows, I mean, you're familiar with them, but for those who don't,

00:33:24 people, your audience is absolutely willing to invite them to email callin@freedomain.com.

00:33:29 It's any philosophical topic. It's not limited to anything. If you want to debate ethics,

00:33:33 you want to do metaphysics, epistemology, let's grind, let's do it. I love that kind of stuff.

00:33:38 And at a conservative estimate, approximately 99.9% of people who want philosophical feedback

00:33:47 are saying, "I'm having a very tough time in my adulthood. I think there's something in my

00:33:52 childhood. Can you help me find it and help me figure out these principles?" So I've had,

00:33:56 at this point, I've been doing the show for almost 20 years, I've had thousands and thousands of

00:33:59 conversations, an incredibly unique view that nobody else in the world has of principles

00:34:05 in childhood. I now have had, and you can't reproduce this. You can't just snap your fingers

00:34:09 and learn this. I've had thousands and thousands of conversations with people exploring the very

00:34:13 roots of their being from a philosophical standpoint and trying to tie the threads

00:34:16 together that have negative effects in the present. And that view of people saying,

00:34:26 "My life is a mess. I think it's got something to do with the principles that were inflicted

00:34:30 upon me as childhood," because in childhood, we all develop principles based upon our empirical

00:34:34 experience. We're conceptual beings. We're conceptual beings. We are universal making

00:34:39 machines. That's what our brains do. That's our absolute special treat. We can't just catch the

00:34:43 dog. It's very kind to catch the ball like a dog does. We know the physics of it. We can do the

00:34:48 analytics and the math behind it. So we universalize all the time, and children do that based on their

00:34:51 experiences. And in these thousands of conversations, I guess it was probably 500 by the time I wrote

00:34:58 the book, it was always the same kind of thing. "Well, my parents say they sacrificed me. They

00:35:02 love me, and I feel this sense of obligation." And then you ask about the parents, and often,

00:35:07 not always, they're pretty terrible. They abandoned, they beat, they sometimes assaulted,

00:35:13 they sometimes sexually abused. And so it's like, okay, so they don't understand love,

00:35:19 but they're using love as a control mechanism. And if you think that your capacity to love and

00:35:27 to love particular people is under your control, the moment people say, at the moment you say

00:35:33 to the world, "Who I love is under my control," a lot of pretty nasty people will come in and try

00:35:38 and convince you that you love them in order to exploit you. And this is not just people,

00:35:42 certainly not parents. It's countries, it's ideologies as a whole, and cults operate this

00:35:49 way, the love bomb, right? Like, "We love you, and you're the best person ever." And that just

00:35:53 opens up endless obligations, and then you end up signing these crazy contracts and so on.

00:35:57 So I really wanted to give people a defense against the exploitation that sophists deploy,

00:36:03 using the word love to just tear people apart inside and exploit everything they have.

00:36:08 - Yeah, if I might make an observation, I don't know, I think there might be a question here

00:36:13 somewhere, but I'll sound it out. Ever since you were kicked off of YouTube and your call-in shows

00:36:18 have not been available to as wide an audience that might've stumbled upon them, were they to

00:36:24 just encounter them in the algorithm? I think dating discourse has taken a real turn for the

00:36:28 worse, but also become the most salient issue alongside immigration and our sphere of

00:36:33 conversation. I mean, our mutual friend/colleague Lauren Southern and my good friend Mary Harrington,

00:36:39 there was a recent article about how her marriage fell through, and she said that she learned how to

00:36:44 have a relationship, wrote learned it through listicles and trad memes, and how it wasn't

00:36:48 particularly applicable because she didn't vet him properly, didn't have a proper philosophical

00:36:52 framework of how virtue and reciprocity should be fostered. And on the other side, you have lots of

00:36:57 these new podcasts springing up in essentially your wake, doing an inferior version of things,

00:37:02 saying to men, "Well, women have behaved this, that, and that way. The statistics are really

00:37:07 dooming on marriage and divorce and promiscuity, and therefore it's a write-off and either turn

00:37:12 to Islam or pornography." And it's like, well, neither of those are very encouraging. They both

00:37:16 seem to be a means of mitigating risk, but I think the fear and insecurity about the risk is because

00:37:23 they don't have those morals instilled in themselves to vet them properly. Would you say

00:37:27 I've got a good read on that? I'm...

00:37:29 Steven: Yeah, I think it's a huge topic. I've really been thinking about it a lot lately,

00:37:34 because every time I'm on social media, there's some woman crying about being lonely, and

00:37:38 then the next woman is crying about inflation. So I do think it's a very, very big topic, and

00:37:45 a few of the things that I will say... This could be the rest of the show, so I really want to sort

00:37:50 of sort my brain to make sure that I hit some short, big points. So first of all, morality is

00:37:55 based upon scarcity. And the reason we need property rights is because property is scarce.

00:38:01 The reason you land, you farmer, there's not an infinity of land, so you need... We don't have

00:38:06 really property rights around air because air is functionally limitless. You're never going to run

00:38:11 out of air. So morality, and in particular sexual morality, is based on scarcity. So of course,

00:38:19 the way it used to work is that we have this... Well, the way it still works biologically,

00:38:23 we have this insanely long development process as babies and children. I mean, it truly is mad

00:38:30 when you think about it, that it takes the male brain a quarter of a century to reach maturity,

00:38:36 female brain slightly shorter. And it's a true thing in nature that that which takes the longest

00:38:41 to develop ends up the most complex. So horses can walk a couple of days after they're born.

00:38:46 We take close to a year to do it, but horses can't do gymnastics and we can. So that which is slowest

00:38:53 to develop ends up the most complex. And the complexity of our brain is precisely because

00:38:58 there was a deep and abiding sense of sexual morality in the past. Women who get pregnant,

00:39:04 of course, out of wedlock in the past would be seriously ostracized. It would be a complete

00:39:10 disaster, right? They'd have to go away. They would try various concoctions to try to induce

00:39:16 abortions or they'd travel to Switzerland for a clinic or a therapy or something and then come

00:39:22 back. You had, of course, countless parents who would pretend that the child of their child was,

00:39:28 in fact, their own child, a late oopsie, and then raise the child of the child as a sibling.

00:39:34 And this was quite common. And so the question of controlling reproduction was based upon the

00:39:40 scarcity of resources, that if a woman got pregnant out of wedlock, she was unmarriable.

00:39:45 And the parents would have to foot the bill, right? Not just in terms of the immediate raising

00:39:50 of the child or the long-term raising of the child, but then having a daughter who could get

00:39:55 married and therefore would have to try and find some work somewhere. And maybe she wants a

00:40:00 boyfriend, so maybe there'd be another child out of wedlock. So controlling the sexual impulsivity

00:40:06 of teenagers was a very foundational aspect of society, which is why people would get married.

00:40:13 Now, I mean, I did a whole show on the lies about the Wild West in America. And in the research,

00:40:17 it was like, yeah, about a third of weddings in America in the 19th, 18th, 19th centuries

00:40:22 were shotgun weddings. So people got pregnant and it's like, okay, well, if you get married,

00:40:27 whatever, it wasn't ideal, but at least the kid has a home. Now, I mean, the two aspects of modern

00:40:34 society that have completely decayed our sense of limits is money printing, debt and the welfare

00:40:40 state. Now, money printing and debt, sort of two sides of the same coin. So, you know, if you can

00:40:44 type whatever you want into your own bank account, you don't need to budget for anything. You can

00:40:48 just spend on whatever you want. If you can borrow infinitely and you don't have to pay

00:40:52 back the bills, you know, how much fun is monopoly when you can just print money? Well, it's not much

00:40:57 fun because there's no limits, right? No, you can in fact, print spaces around the board. You can

00:41:02 print properties. So because we have money printing and it seems almost infinite, though it won't in

00:41:09 fact be infinite government debt. If a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, the parents don't have

00:41:14 to pay because she can just go on welfare. She can hammer the guy for child support or whatever it

00:41:19 is. And so the restraints upon sexuality have been lifted. And this is very much counter to

00:41:29 how we evolved. We only got these giant brains because of pair bonding and monogamy, because for

00:41:35 a woman to dedicate herself to raising a whole bunch of kids to the age of 20, at least, is a

00:41:41 massive commitment. And she can only do that if there's a pair bonded man who's willing to provide,

00:41:45 who's going to shield her from the necessities of life by going out and producing food for the

00:41:50 family and protecting the family from predators, both human and animal. So we developed this giant

00:41:55 brain because of monogamy and sexual restraint, at least until marriage. And now there's no sense

00:42:02 of limitations. And so women can do what they want and get away with what they want. And we have

00:42:08 become kids in a candy store. And we have this fantasy. It is kind of a demonic or devilish

00:42:14 fantasy that if all restraint is loosed, we will become happy. Mark Wahlberg had to gain, he's this

00:42:21 ripped actor, and he had to gain 80 pounds. And he's this famously strict diet and exercise regime,

00:42:28 and he had to gain a bunch of weight for a role. And I remember clearly he was interviewed and he's

00:42:33 like, "Yeah, I started eating cheesecakes and carrot cakes and all of this fried food." And

00:42:39 "Oh, how was that?" You're drooling the envy and the reporter. And he's like, "I can tell you for

00:42:45 the first day, it was great. After that, oh, it was just horrible. I felt bloated, sluggish. I

00:42:51 couldn't digest properly. It was a mess." So we have this fantasy that if all restraints are taken

00:42:56 away, paradise awaits. And that's what's been happening to women since I was a kid. Restraints

00:43:04 are being taken away. Sexual restraints. Restraints about any hesitancy that employers

00:43:09 might have to hire them, because you legally have to hire women and you have to pay them this, even

00:43:14 though women often will get pregnant and drop out of the workforce and so on, which makes them less

00:43:19 valuable than economically, in terms of society, massively valuable, but in terms of sheer

00:43:24 economics, they're less valuable. So women have had all restraints removed against them. And in

00:43:30 fact, anybody now who tries to impose restraints on women outside of our good friends in the Islamic

00:43:36 community, anybody who tries to impose restraints upon women is a psychotic, controlling Nazi

00:43:43 fascist, something like that. And that's not a good situation. And we can see this. So women

00:43:50 have had this, in a sense, this paradise of no consequences, do what you want for 50 years. And

00:43:57 every decade they get more and more and more unhappy. And it's this idea, and it's a wild

00:44:04 idea, comes to some degree out of the left, which is, we are simply produced by circumstances and

00:44:10 we have no innate natures. I mean, this is the new Soviet man. We can have people who work hard,

00:44:15 even if they don't make any extra money and so on. You can create people by changing their

00:44:20 environment. There's no such thing as human nature. Human nature is just like water. You

00:44:25 pour it into a cup, it takes the shape of a cup. If you pour it into a beaker, it takes the shape

00:44:28 of a beaker. If you pour it on the ground, it gets flat. And we're finding out that this is not how

00:44:33 things are, that there is a human nature. And we had all of these solutions to these problems in

00:44:40 the past. This is sort of a conservative argument. We had all these solutions and they were trial and

00:44:43 error and they were developed over tens of thousands of years of brutal struggle. And then

00:44:48 the left comes along and says, well, that's all just historical prejudice and bigotry and

00:44:53 patriarchy and let's just lose all restraints and do whatever we want. And it's not working out

00:45:00 because women got sold this idea that you can have all the benefits of a masculine life and there are

00:45:10 no costs. You get all, like they call the Schrodinger's feminist, right? Like, so if being

00:45:15 empowered gets you more resources, then you're empowered. If being a victim gets you more

00:45:20 resources, then you'll flip back and forth between the two. And so women are very upset that they're

00:45:28 getting very well educated, they have good careers and they make good money, which is, you know,

00:45:32 from a free market standpoint, hey, you know, fly your freak flag, do what you want. That's great.

00:45:37 But then you have to say to women, if you're going to become wealthy and successful,

00:45:44 you can't have hypergamy. You can't want to marry up. Because if the majority of women and the

00:45:51 majority of students are in university and so on, and the majority of people who are successful in

00:45:56 the workplace in many areas is women. And I did this show, I think many, many years ago with a

00:46:02 woman who did the research on this and said, as a woman's status goes up, the pool of available men

00:46:07 goes down. Right. And I remember talking to this with women, I don't know, 20, 25 years ago,

00:46:14 you know, they say, okay, I have a master's degree, so I'm not going to date a guy who

00:46:18 doesn't have a master's degree. And I'm like, all right. So you've now cut 90% of men out of

00:46:24 your dating pool. And so if you want the exception, right, if you're a 30 year old woman,

00:46:32 you've got a master's degree, you make six figures, or I guess in the UK, I don't know,

00:46:35 like 60, 70, 80, 80 K, then you're going to have to marry down or you're probably not going to get

00:46:42 married. Right. You're going to have to marry maybe a blue collar guy. And I don't say this

00:46:45 is down, like this is some bad thing or anything like that. But in terms of like what you consider

00:46:49 high status and so on, you're just going to have to either A, marry down or B, you're going to

00:46:55 have to become so spectacular that you're going to be chased by the kind of guys you want. Right.

00:47:00 You've, I'm sure you've seen this website, the female delusion calculator, where you put in your

00:47:04 standards of what you want and it tells you what percentage of the population will reach that. And

00:47:09 because women haven't had to settle down early, or they don't, they've chosen not to settle down

00:47:15 early, then guys who really, really want to marry them or settle down with them, they can't get

00:47:20 that. So men then change their programming. Like we can flip between this R and K selection, right?

00:47:27 Whether you pair bond or whether you just do a spray and pray, sleep with lots of different people,

00:47:31 you know, whether you're the wolf or the rabbit, right? We've got these, and child abuse tends to

00:47:36 move you more towards promiscuity and healthy childhood tends to move you more towards monogamy.

00:47:42 And this even happens at a biological level. Like women who are abused as children enter

00:47:47 develop menstruation much earlier than women who are not abused. So the men can't lock down the

00:47:54 women. So the men are like, okay, I got to work really hard. I got to make money. I've got to

00:47:58 work out. I got to get abs and whatever it is. And then sailing into their thirties, the women

00:48:03 are finally like, okay, I guess I want to settle down. But they've trained the men out of commitment.

00:48:08 And then the high value men that they want have a sea, you might as well be a rockstar.

00:48:13 It's like Aerosmith staring over a sea of groupies. So there's a sea of women who want to date them.

00:48:18 And now they finally hit their stride and they don't want to settle down. It's just this tragic

00:48:23 mismatch. When the men want to settle down, the women don't want to settle down. When the women

00:48:26 want to settle down, the men don't want to settle down. And then the women say, and you see this all

00:48:30 over social media saying, when is it my turn? Like, when do I get the person that I love? And it's like,

00:48:34 there's no such thing as a man in a career saying, well, when is it my turn to get promoted? When do

00:48:41 I get the promotion that I want? It's like, no, you got to go out there. You got to convince people

00:48:46 of your value and you've got to negotiate for it. And you've made, have to switch jobs. You've got

00:48:49 to really be assertive to get what it is that you want. And so women want the male life in terms of,

00:48:56 you know, careerism, professionalism, education. Wonderful. You know, I think that's great.

00:49:01 But then you've got to look at the downsides of the male life, which is you've really got to fight

00:49:06 hard to get what you want. And you might have to pursue, and you might have to compromise

00:49:11 your ideals in terms of like some, you know, hyper six foot four stud muffin. What's that woman?

00:49:17 Who's like, I'm looking for a man in finance, six, four blue eyes. It's like, no, you're not,

00:49:22 you're not going to get that because those guys, you're never going to meet those guys. They're

00:49:25 never in your orbit. And everyone else is then going to seem like, meh, you know, give you the

00:49:29 ick or whatever it is. So yeah, you can have the life of a man and that's great. But the downside

00:49:34 is you're going to have to compromise. Most men don't marry women who make as much as they do.

00:49:40 And a lot of men, like, you know, this is the old thing that a man is like, you know, you could have

00:49:44 a six figure income and a PhD, and you're checking out your groceries and you're like, you know,

00:49:49 that, that woman behind the grocery counter, man, she's really pretty. And you're like, maybe,

00:49:54 maybe, you know, and whereas if there's some woman who's like CXO of some corporation,

00:49:59 and there's some guy bagging her groceries, well, he ain't going to be bagging her anytime soon

00:50:03 because she's just like, oh, yes, my surf, my P.R. and you, you can carry these groceries to the car,

00:50:09 but plan not to get your proletariat thumbprints on my bumper. And you can take that any number of

00:50:14 ways. So yeah, you're going to have to go out and you're going to have to be a hunter. You're going

00:50:18 to have to compromise. You're going to have to pursue the men you want. You're going to have

00:50:20 to swallow your pride. You can't just sit there looking pretty and wait for some guy to approach

00:50:24 you. And this is the problem we have. We have this educational system where nobody looks at trade

00:50:30 offs. Nobody looks at cost benefits. If you want to sell something to someone, you just say, here

00:50:35 are all the benefits. And everyone's like, yay. Right. And they say, well, but there are these

00:50:39 drawbacks. Right. And so, but again, that's a function of scarcity. If you have an infinity,

00:50:43 you don't need to budget. You don't ever think about drawbacks. And unfortunately, the drawbacks

00:50:47 are really accumulating to women at a time when the government spending simply cannot continue.

00:50:53 And when the welfare state ends, and it will, I mean, it's mathematical that you can't escape math.

00:50:59 I mean, you can pray, you can do any, but math is as absolute as gravity. And when the welfare

00:51:04 state runs out, you, and this is what I of course talk right about in my recent novel, The Present.

00:51:10 When the welfare state runs out, there's going to be a lot of women who are really going to panic

00:51:15 and who are going to try and lock down guys who can provide them resources or protect them and so

00:51:21 on. And I don't know, I mean, are men going to have to swallow this and say, well, you know,

00:51:27 women have been kind of annoying in a lot of ways. They've been inconstant. They've been flitting

00:51:31 around. They've been vain. They've been, you know, chasing clicks and likes and, you know,

00:51:36 drowning in DMs and so on and won't settle down. And then when this changes and women are like,

00:51:43 no, no, no, I want to settle down now. I've had my fun. That's a tough thing. That's a tough thing

00:51:48 because all of the men that the women want have infinite options. And this is the mismatch that's

00:51:53 brutal. And it's really killing the birth rate and whether, you know, if women say, you know,

00:51:58 I really made a terrible mistake. I was heavily propagandized. I didn't think of the men. I didn't

00:52:02 think of the future. I was just chasing the dopamine and it was really shallow. You know,

00:52:06 I'm so sorry. You know, let's find a way. I mean, if that happens, maybe, but otherwise, you know,

00:52:12 either men find a way to forgive women for some of this selfishness or we, we cease to be. I mean,

00:52:20 that's really, that's not a third option because we can't beam in from outer space.

00:52:23 - Telling hate facts like that to Taylor Swift fans probably will get kicked you off

00:52:28 Twitter and YouTube, Stiffen, but it's good to always hear.

00:52:30 - I think the YouTube thing was Wuhan. But anyway.

00:52:34 - That and George Floyd protests. I mean, we can't be trying to overcome racial animosity now,

00:52:40 can we?

00:52:40 - Well, sorry. And I just wanted to mention that as well. So the video that got me kicked off,

00:52:44 right? It was actually processing. And then I was, I have a good friend who's a police officer

00:52:49 in the United States and he has a good friend who is a black police officer in the United States.

00:52:54 And it was a show where myself and two very experienced police officers, one black and one

00:52:59 white, were talking about George Floyd. And they were talking about their experiences in arresting

00:53:03 people and what can happen from them in terms of health and so on. That was uploaded and processing.

00:53:09 But before I could publish it, it went, right? Because yes, trying to calm racial, I mean,

00:53:14 the communists have said for over a hundred years that they hope to inflame racial animosity in

00:53:18 order to destabilize the remnants of the free market and do their usual takeover. So yeah,

00:53:23 you can't be doing any of that. Can't have any of that reconciliation or

00:53:27 calm and peace between the races because that doesn't serve the hegemony.

00:53:30 - Yeah. We were de-platformed from Vimeo for the exact same reason. They sent us a long list of

00:53:35 their transgressions of why they weren't going to keep using us. We couldn't use them as a hosting

00:53:38 service. And one of them was that we had undermined the narrative that George Floyd was a murder

00:53:43 rather than obviously a drug overdose and a heart failure. And again, we can't be citing things like

00:53:48 the coroner's report now, can we? I mean, you do paint a very bleak picture. And I've always worried

00:53:53 about this, particularly I've been covering the birth rates discourse for quite some time now with

00:53:58 Stephen Shore as well, a former Brit, sort of accent to you actually, who went around the world

00:54:02 and interviewed many women who wanted to have children, but didn't. And it had expired because

00:54:07 they had flinged onto their career or their education for far too long. They'd been in dead

00:54:10 end relationships and hadn't called you, for example. He estimates that by 2050, there's

00:54:15 going to be 800 million people that have succumbed to unplanned childlessness, men and women who

00:54:19 wanted children, but didn't have them. And so yes, men are trending more conservative. And it might

00:54:24 mean that young women, if they are aware of the biological clock, may have to bend more towards

00:54:28 a conservative bent rather than trying to progressivize all of the men that they find

00:54:32 attractive out of being attracted. - Oh, sorry to interrupt, but they can't.

00:54:36 So this is something you see among young people that the more conservative are the males and the

00:54:42 more liberal are the females. Now, okay, why? Well, the answer to that is very simple. That

00:54:48 the left has as its most substantial voting bloc, single women, right? So because single women have

00:54:55 a sense of vulnerability, they like running to the government for protection and sort of variety

00:54:59 of other reasons. So I think in the US it's like plus 37% single women vote for the left. So the

00:55:05 left has a foundational drive to keep women single. So if you can keep women single, you have

00:55:14 a lock on voting and power. And of course, even if you say, well, but sometimes conservatives

00:55:20 get into power and it's like, yes, but they still have to appease this plus 37%, right?

00:55:23 And so when I was talking about my sort of, it actually got voted the worst tweet in human

00:55:29 history, which I shouldn't be proud of, you know, cause it's kind of shallow, but I am.

00:55:33 And the tweet was something like, I don't know, it was five or six years ago when Taylor Swift

00:55:37 was turning 30. And it was like, wow, Taylor Swift is turning 30. She looks so young. It's

00:55:42 pretty wild. It's wild to think that 90% of her eggs are dead already. It'd be 98% by the time

00:55:47 she's 40. I hope she becomes a mother. I'm sure she'd be, she looks like she'd be a really fun

00:55:51 mom. Right? Now, of course, on the left, they don't want women freaking out about fertility

00:55:58 because then they'll find a man, get married and turn conservative and won't vote for the left

00:56:02 anymore. So unfortunately, you know, predators will always separate individuals from the herd

00:56:08 in order to pick them off and single women will just vote for the left. And so they're being

00:56:14 guided towards this sterile dead end. It's a hideous exploitation. And look, industrial strength,

00:56:21 propaganda, military grade propaganda fails most people. You know, I'm sure there are a few,

00:56:28 you know, in a giant forest fire, there are a few trees that survive, but most of them don't.

00:56:33 And of course, we're not trained to resist propaganda because government schools are

00:56:36 propaganda. So they're not going to teach you how to resist it. And so I really do have a lot of

00:56:42 sympathy because it is again, demonic. It's appealing to vanity. It's appealing to, oh,

00:56:46 you don't need no man and so on. And it's appealing to the worst and greediest and most

00:56:51 carnal and flesh-based and materialistic and evolutionary and will to power instincts of the

00:56:56 species. And very few people can resist that. I mean, we know this from the sort of vaccine rollout.

00:57:00 It's very, very hard for people to think clearly, even when the evidence is very easy and solid.

00:57:05 And so I do have a lot of sympathy, but this, you know, the power of the state is huge and the

00:57:11 corruption that the state is willing to pursue in its pursuit of power is like any addict, right?

00:57:15 They'll, they become emotional terrorists. And I think that they are convincing a lot of women.

00:57:20 We know that they're convincing a lot of women to not have children and, you know, they are hiding

00:57:26 facts and anybody who brings the facts to bear because, you know, I have a wife, I have a

00:57:31 daughter, I care enormously about women and want them to be as happy as humanly possible. But if

00:57:36 you bring facts that will actually bring them happiness, that interferes with the pursuit of

00:57:40 political power. And, you know, they just have, they have slightly bigger megaphones than me,

00:57:46 certainly. Yeah. I do think back to almost your point on striking the right tone with peaceful

00:57:52 parenting, we have to strike the right tone in diffusing the war between the sexes to the best

00:57:58 extent that we can until the welfare state is dismantled and takes away all the perverse

00:58:02 incentives driving us at each other's throats, because we do have to let them know that, you

00:58:05 know, we care about them despite them being almost incomprehensibly emotional creatures, you know?

00:58:11 And so I think we can show some leadership on that. But I think your criticism of a lot of this,

00:58:15 of the perverse incentives set by the state is rooted in not just as all modern morality seems

00:58:21 to be a concern for minority groups as a kind of clientele class that they're infinitely vulnerable

00:58:27 and they have to be protected, but it's instead in your foundational moral work, which again,

00:58:31 we've discussed on Lotus Seaters before with my colleague Stelios. UPB. I wanted to just spend a

00:58:36 little bit of time before I have to wrap up and let you get on with the rest of your day,

00:58:40 going over that, because I think that along with peaceful parenting has been your

00:58:44 prominent contribution to philosophy. Do you mind just giving a sort of distilled version

00:58:49 for the audience that might not be familiar with the book yet?

00:58:51 Sure. Absolutely. So I grew up as Christian and then I moved into the secular world. And of course,

00:58:59 the one thing I noticed in the secular world was they don't have a system of ethics. I mean,

00:59:03 they have some Dawkins-based reciprocal altruism nonsense, but to me, if bonobos can do it,

00:59:08 it's not virtue. It's just instinct. So I accepted the objectivist definition of ethics,

00:59:14 that which is best for man's nature. But, you know, there's always a little part,

00:59:18 that splinter in the mind's eye, that little part of you that's like, "I don't know,

00:59:20 that's really complete because, you know, the people in power seem to really enjoy it and they

00:59:24 don't want to give it up and they seem quite happy. And right. So it's obviously better for

00:59:27 them to be in at the summit of political power." So I'm hugely influenced by Aristotle, of course.

00:59:33 And Aristotle famously, to me at least, said, you know, "You can come up with a system of ethics,

00:59:37 but if your system of ethics can be used to prove that murder and rape is good,

00:59:42 you know, something's wrong. Like, I don't care. Like something's wrong." And so I said,

00:59:47 "Okay, so rape, theft, assault, and murder, right? Rape, theft, assault, and murder. Those are the

00:59:51 biggies that everybody would accept as bad. So is there a way to prove that system of ethics

01:00:04 without reference to the power of the state and without the need for religion?" Because

01:00:11 looking at the market, the people who are not religious are growing. And if we can't convince

01:00:16 them of a system of ethics, well, we're going back to the pre-Stone Age, right? I mean,

01:00:20 with no system of ethics and then it's just will to power, lies, deception, manipulation,

01:00:23 propaganda, all of the tricks of nature that predators use to get their prey.

01:00:29 So I'm like, "Okay, blank slate time, right? Like wipe the blackboard totally clean. Can I build a

01:00:37 system of ethics?" Again, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, right? And again, I'm always

01:00:44 aiming for a hundred percent, right? You can get to a hundred percent with deductive reasoning.

01:00:48 Inductive reasoning is a little more tricky, but you can get to a hundred... Like, you know,

01:00:51 all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. That's a hundred percent.

01:00:55 You can't evade that, right? It's not probability. So I can't do probability. I can't rely on

01:01:00 evolution because evolution is not ethics. Evolution is absolutely the opposite of ethics.

01:01:05 I mean, deception is used and violence is used in nature all the time. I mean, my daughter loves

01:01:12 ducks, but ducks are pretty rapey. I mean, they're very rapey. So, you know, duck morality isn't

01:01:16 going to cut it. They're dancing, honey. Oh, God. Look away. So don't ever think where your

01:01:25 omelet comes from because it's all UPB violations. So I wanted to build a system of ethics

01:01:31 that could not be denied. So long story short, the book is called Universally Preferable Behavior,

01:01:39 a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics. So the first part of the book is showing that there is such a

01:01:45 thing as universally preferable behavior. And you can't get away from that. Because if I say,

01:01:48 "Ah, there is such a thing as universally preferable behavior," and you say,

01:01:52 "Steph, you're absolutely wrong. There is no such thing as universally preferable behavior."

01:01:57 Well, you've just told me I'm wrong according to a universal standard, and I'm wrong absolutely,

01:02:02 and I should change my argument to something that is better. So you've affirmed universally

01:02:06 preferable behavior. I mean, maybe some crazy guy in a cave doesn't believe in it, but even

01:02:09 he has to deal with reality in order to know he's in the cave. So there's universally preferable

01:02:14 behavior. So once we establish that, and this is a real acceleration, but the book's available for

01:02:18 free at freedomain.com/books. So once we establish the validity of universal preferable behavior,

01:02:24 the only question is, what is or is not universally preferable behavior? Now,

01:02:30 think of something like theft. So if we say, "Stealing is universally preferable behavior,"

01:02:39 because either stealing or not stealing is universally preferable behavior. So if we say,

01:02:45 "Stealing is universally preferable behavior," we immediately run into insurmountable self-contradictions.

01:02:51 So stealing is the taking of someone's property against their will. They don't want you to steal

01:02:57 it. So if stealing is universally preferable behavior, then everybody must want to steal

01:03:04 and be stolen from at the same time. But if you want to be stolen from, it's not theft.

01:03:08 If I have got an old couch and I leave it out front of my house with a sign that says, "Take me,"

01:03:14 and someone takes it, do I get to call the cops and say, "Hey, man, this guy just stole my couch?"

01:03:18 The cop will say, "Well, where was it?" "Oh, it was out front of my house, and it had a big

01:03:21 sign on it that says, 'Take me.'" It's like, "Then he didn't steal it, you lunatic. Stop

01:03:25 bothering us. We've got people to arrest for hate speech." So theft cannot be universally

01:03:32 preferable behavior, because if you want to be stolen from, it's not theft. So if you say,

01:03:39 "Stealing is universally preferable behavior," it cannot be achieved. It self-contradicts,

01:03:42 detonates immediately. Now, if you say, "Respect for property is universally preferable behavior,"

01:03:47 then absolutely. Everybody can respect property at the same time. I also have something called

01:03:52 the coma test, which is we would never... This is just a gut instinct thing. You can prove it as

01:03:57 well, but the gut instinct is, "Can a guy in a coma be evil?" It's like, "Well, no. A guy in a

01:04:06 coma can't be evil, because he's just in a coma, or a guy who's asleep, or unconscious, or whatever."

01:04:10 So if you say, "Stealing is universally preferable behavior," then not stealing must be evil.

01:04:19 Then a guy in a coma is not stealing, therefore a guy in a coma is evil, and that doesn't sit right.

01:04:24 So something has to be wrong, so we continue the exploration. You can go through the same

01:04:27 thing with rape, theft, assault, and murder. So assault, there are times when people consent to

01:04:35 be assaulted. Anybody who ever debates with me, for instance. No. There are people who consent

01:04:39 to being assaulted. You go in a boxing ring or whatever it is, you consent to being assaulted.

01:04:46 So that's not assault. You can't be at a... "Hey man, this guy hit me. I'm judging him with assault."

01:04:50 It's like, "No, no." So assault is when you have physical injury inflicted upon you against your

01:04:55 will, and therefore it falls into the same category. If assault is universally preferable

01:04:59 behavior, then everybody must want to assault and be assaulted at the same time. Now, not only is

01:05:04 that physically impossible, but if you want to be assaulted, the category evaporates. So the only

01:05:09 way that we can have universally preferable behavior, which is an absolute and is a thing

01:05:14 that is in the world, is to ban rape, theft, assault, and murder. And there's some tertiary

01:05:22 stuff around property rights and so on, and self-defense, which I go into in the book.

01:05:26 But it absolutely hangs together. It has been now criticized and attempted to be undermined by,

01:05:32 I don't know, how many people over the past 16 or 17 years. I've done countless debates on it.

01:05:37 I presented it at conferences and you can't overturn it. You absolutely cannot overturn it.

01:05:43 And this was one of my fascinating things about why I bungeed out of the

01:05:47 atheist secular community and more towards Christianity, is that I thought this would be

01:05:56 water in the desert to a guy dying of thirst to the secular community. Because we all want to be

01:06:04 good, don't we? We want to organize our days around ethics. We want to be loved. We want to

01:06:07 love people. And that requires that we be good. So I thought that the atheist community was like,

01:06:15 "Well, we're not going to get our morals from God." And it's like, "Okay, so you're not going

01:06:21 to get your morals from God. So where are you going to get them from?" Because that's kind of

01:06:26 an important question, right? Because otherwise it's just going to be a war of all against all

01:06:30 and based on slander and lies. And well, we've already been through that whole topic. So, okay.

01:06:34 So you don't believe in God and therefore you don't believe in religious-derived virtues. Okay,

01:06:42 so where are you going to get your virtues from? Or at least be honest and say, "Well, it's not so

01:06:48 much that we don't believe in God. We just don't like virtue. And God produces virtue. God convinces

01:06:54 us of virtue. So we're not disbelieving in God so much as we just want to live a hedonism-based

01:07:00 life of dopamine chasing and deception." Okay, but they don't say that. They say, "Well, we really

01:07:05 want to be good and we don't find that the religious ethics quite cut it. So we really want

01:07:10 to..." And so, okay, I'm like, "Pfft, no, totally free. Free book here, man. I prove the case.

01:07:14 Prove the case beyond the shadow of a doubt." No rape, no theft, no assault, no murder. Oh,

01:07:19 and that has a lot of implications to political power, blah, blah, blah, right?

01:07:22 So I thought, I mean, I thought it would take a little time, of course, because

01:07:27 the odds that... I mean, I've been trained in philosophy at the graduate school level,

01:07:30 but I was a software entrepreneur for a long time. And the odds that some guy just wanders in and out

01:07:35 of academia and solves the biggest problem in philosophy, I can understand the skepticism.

01:07:39 And I actually start the book by saying, "You have every reason to not believe that I've done

01:07:43 what I claim to believe," because it's a little... To take an extreme example, it's like Einstein in

01:07:48 the patent office, right? But the indifference and hostility with which the atheist community

01:07:55 greeted the final proof of secular ethics was pretty instructive. And it's like, "Okay, so it's

01:08:02 kind of just demonic. It's a rebellion against morals with God as the proxy. It's not a rational

01:08:08 analysis of the limitations of consistencies in the religious worldview." So that was quite

01:08:17 instructive. And when some guy says, "I'm dying of thirst in the water," and you come there with

01:08:24 water and he stabs you in the side, it's like, "Okay, I'm a little confused here." "Help, help,

01:08:31 I'm drowning." You come out and they're like, "Great, I just tied a boat anchor to your leg."

01:08:35 And I'm like, "That's wild." And I found that there's no Christian group that's ever had

01:08:43 hostility towards me, but the atheist and secular groups do. I mean, this is very consistent. And

01:08:49 when you think you're on a particular team and you're not, that's pretty instructive. I'm an

01:08:56 empiricist, so I judge people's deeds rather than just their words. And so that was quite a wild

01:09:03 experience and has returned me certainly closer to the roots of the faith that I grew up in and

01:09:10 a respect for the actual virtues of Christianity who are willing to say,

01:09:18 if you look back at the later Middle Ages, there's this whole idea that comes out of

01:09:22 the scientific community that the church was just massively hostile to scientists and burnt them at

01:09:28 the stake. And it's not true. It's not true. And of course, a lot of the scientists were like,

01:09:34 "I'm very religious. I want to understand the mind of God, and therefore I'm going to study

01:09:38 the mathematical or physical properties of the universe because through the blueprint,

01:09:42 do you understand the architect?" And the Christians were like, "So you are attempting to

01:09:49 find philosophical rational proofs for the Ten Commandments," which, in general, I am.

01:09:58 "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is foundational to telling the truth, which is a commandment of

01:10:03 philosophy that's very important. And so it's like, "Welcome, fellow traveler, to... We do

01:10:10 not diminish the glory of God by finding that the morals he gives us are actually very rational,

01:10:14 any more than we diminish the glory of God by finding out that there are physical properties

01:10:18 to the universe that are beautiful, consistent, and absolute, because God is not a whim-based

01:10:23 creature. God does not play dice." So that has been pretty wild to see what I thought was a

01:10:30 rational community dedicated to reason, ethics, and virtue, and then finding out that when they

01:10:35 are provided with a rational proof of secular ethics... Right? It's like the sunlight to a

01:10:42 vampire, it's like, "Oh boy, I was not expecting that." And yet, it's a fact, and it's now

01:10:49 consistent enough of a fact that I've really had to bake it into my worldview, which has been

01:10:52 a very exciting journey, to put it mildly. ALICE: Yeah, well, I suppose you led me onto my

01:10:58 observation/question, which I think we probably round it out with.

01:11:04 So you were very instrumental, along with Jordan Peterson Priest of 2020, in convincing me to

01:11:11 revert back to Catholicism, at least in the way of taking my nan to my girlfriend's church, and

01:11:16 it's been really wholesome. And I wonder if the reason the Christians so readily adopted UPB and

01:11:22 the atheists didn't is because within Christianity there's a belief in the universal dignity of the

01:11:28 human being a priori. So the principle of Imago Dei means that you see everyone else with the

01:11:35 equal capacity imparted onto them by God of moral worth, and from there, downstream of that is all

01:11:41 of the tenets of UPB make perfect logical coherence. But lots of the liberal secular

01:11:47 atheist types who do treat it like sunlight to a vampire are very solipsistic, and they're only

01:11:53 interested in consuming and gratifying themselves and pure materialistic pleasures. And so as soon

01:11:58 as you bring this ethic to them, they just go, "Ooh, but Hume is all ooh, ooh," and think that

01:12:03 it just hand-waves it all away. So that was my observation. My question is then, I suppose...

01:12:07 Oh, screen's gone off.

01:12:10 [laughter]

01:12:10 LIAM: Yeah, mine's still running.

01:12:12 [silence]

01:12:13 ALICE: There we go. Oh, there we go, heart attack moment! Sorry, TV's gone off.

01:12:19 As long as it's still streaming, that's fine. The question I suppose I have is...

01:12:24 Since writing Against the Gods, has your relationship with Christianity changed?

01:12:30 RILEY: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I was obviously raised Christian,

01:12:40 I was in the church choir, I was absolutely in there. The problem for me, and this is very

01:12:49 personal, but certainly people talk about personal things in my show, and I'm fine with that. I mean,

01:12:56 a lot of our base ideas come out of our histories. So I felt very much abandoned by the divine,

01:13:03 because I suffered a lot as a child with violence and exploitation, and everyone around me was in a

01:13:09 similar situation, to one degree or another. My mother ended up being institutionalized,

01:13:14 as did my father, although they were divorced when I was a baby and my father lived on the

01:13:19 other side of the world. So that sense of vulnerability and lack of protection, I'll

01:13:26 just tell you, it's sort of basic for me. So I grew up in England in the 60s and 70s,

01:13:34 which was solidly Christian. Now, I know that for you guys it's a bit of a breakaway sect

01:13:38 called Protestantism, but nonetheless, it was solidly Christian, we went to church,

01:13:43 I had lovely aunts and uncles who took me to church, and I was in boarding school where I

01:13:47 went to church. And all the Christians around me, and we lived in apartment buildings with

01:13:58 paper-thin walls, flats with paper-thin walls, so there were lots of Christians around me who

01:14:04 would hear abuse and harm and crying and screaming and violence and so on. And we lived in a wide

01:14:10 variety, when you're poor, you tend to move around quite a bit for a variety of reasons,

01:14:13 usually you're on the run from creditors and so on. And so for me, it's like, okay, so this is a

01:14:20 Christian society where children can be audibly harmed and listened to by hundreds of people

01:14:27 and no one does anything. Now, that's tough, right? So for me, it was like, okay, so this

01:14:34 moral answer is not enough of an answer for me, because a society where Jesus very clearly says,

01:14:43 you know, whoever does harm to the least among us, which is the children, it's better that a

01:14:47 millstone be tied around his neck and be dropped into the deep water. And so Jesus's care and

01:14:52 concern for children was not translating into any actionable protection in society, right? So I was

01:15:00 in school, I was in church, I was in a neighborhood, I had friends, families, neighbors, and over the

01:15:06 entire course of my childhood, I finally ended up going solo at about the age of 15 or so.

01:15:12 So for 15 years, I was being harmed and brutalized in full earshot of everyone who all were Christians

01:15:19 for the most part. Sorry, all were Christians for the most part, it's a bit of a contradiction,

01:15:24 but it was overwhelmingly Christian. And that was not enough. And it was not enough to save

01:15:29 my childhood, and it was not enough to save the childhood of the people that I know. And of course,

01:15:34 in the thousands of conversations I've had with people over the last 19 or so years,

01:15:37 it has not been enough to save their childhoods either. So for me, it was not an answer that was

01:15:44 going to be enough. It was not an answer that was going to be enough, because there's something about

01:15:50 the worldview that I grew up in that was not protective of children. Now we can say

01:15:59 that, well, it had to do with you don't want to confront, you don't want to, you know, people,

01:16:05 but you can, it's an anonymous phone call. Like I'm doing research at the moment on this Turpin

01:16:10 family, which was a family in the US where they had 13 children that were all chained to beds and

01:16:15 starved and so on. And they, for 30 years, they moved through the world because their oldest kids

01:16:21 were 30 and still chained up at home. And for 30 years, they moved through the world and they were

01:16:25 Christians and they went fair. And none of the neighbors said anything, even though it was very

01:16:29 obvious that the children were being extremely maltreated. So as far as the protection of

01:16:35 children goes, it wasn't enough. Now I assume that the Christian, and this is, I'm telling you my

01:16:44 thinking, right? So I said, okay, well, everyone's praying. Everyone's praying to God, help me be

01:16:50 good. Let me do good. And like, they're praying to God, hearing some child getting beaten half to

01:16:54 death next door. And God is not saying to them, make a call. What are you praying? Pick up the

01:17:02 phone, make a call. It's anonymous. They won't know, right? They won't know. And someone will

01:17:07 come by and they'll find out and some protection will be offered, right? So to me, the question

01:17:16 of child abuse was not solved by the Christian communities in the major places I lived, which was

01:17:24 a couple of places in England, in Canada, I spent time in Africa, and all of the places were

01:17:30 Christian and in none of the places, in probably a thousand, 2000 or more people, not one of them

01:17:37 intervened in my situation, not one of them intervened in the situation of anybody that I knew.

01:17:42 So that is confusing. What's confusing to me as a child. So if they're praying to God and God is

01:17:51 saying to them, it's not important to make a phone call, then I'm not sure what they're praying

01:17:56 about or for. And so I went more to the secular world because, okay, well, the problem of child

01:18:04 abuse is not solved in the Christian culture or context, in my experience. And again, it wasn't

01:18:09 just my experience and it wasn't just in one place. It was people that I knew. And again, now

01:18:13 I know that the people who call me, it's a self-selecting group, like the doctor who says,

01:18:17 man, everyone's sick. It's like, no, no, they come to you because they're sick. So I get all

01:18:21 of that. But the problem of child abuse was not solved in the Christian context. And so I went to

01:18:30 the secular context and found that it was in fact even worse. So it's like, okay, I'm not sure what

01:18:37 the solution is other than, you know, I wrote the whole book on peaceful parenting with the goal of

01:18:41 saying, if we can't protect the children, the morality can't survive. The virtue can't survive

01:18:50 because the children grow up with deep cynicism about the supposed ethics of their society if the

01:18:54 children are unprotected. And the cynicism that we see regarding society, you know, people say,

01:18:59 well, I hate capitalism and so on. And that's because they associate the free market with not

01:19:03 being protected as children. We know of course that single mothers, the children are usually,

01:19:08 they're harmed far more. And when there's a non-biologically related male in the house with a

01:19:13 single mother, child abuse is 32 or 33 times, not percent, times higher. But the production of

01:19:23 the single mother household has been the result of our failure to respect thou shall not steal

01:19:30 because the welfare state is coerced redistribution of wealth. So focusing on the protection of

01:19:37 children has sort of brought me full circle in that when I talk to the secular people, I just

01:19:44 get rants about the patriarchy and racism, and that doesn't protect children. But when I talk

01:19:48 about Christian, when I talk with Christians, there's much more sensitivity and openness

01:19:53 to that. And I think if whatever community solves the problem of child abuse will absolutely rule

01:19:59 the future in a sense, because they will have so much credibility. You know, I've got a whole

01:20:03 series on the French revolution for premium members at freedom.locals.com, where I basically

01:20:08 make the case that revolutions happen when some people escape child abuse and don't circle back

01:20:14 for others to save them, to help them, to rescue them. Because that resentment of everyone leaving

01:20:18 and going to a better place, everyone who's left behind is just easily exploited and their rage

01:20:22 is easily exploited. And so one of the things I've really done is, although I have a wonderful life

01:20:28 with great friends, I've been lovingly married for 21 years, I have a wonderful child, but I'm not

01:20:34 getting out. Like I'm not escaping to the Elysium fields and leaving the sufferers behind. I very

01:20:42 much feel that it's important to us if we want to survive as a society, we have to adopt that marine

01:20:46 thing. It's like, we can't leave the victims behind. We cannot leave the victims behind.

01:20:50 They create an undertow that pulls down our entire society. And I can't even blame them that much.

01:20:56 When I was in my early teens, I had absolutely zero respect for the rules of society. None,

01:21:01 none whatsoever. Whatever I could get away with, I was completely amoral. Why?

01:21:05 Big world, what's what credibility would society have? Well, you know, it's really important that

01:21:09 you don't mark up your, your textbook. And it's like, but I'm being abused at home and nobody

01:21:14 cares. Like, so why would I care about society's rules if society doesn't care about protecting me?

01:21:19 And if we can't protect the children, we can't sustain, you know, that's the great cycle of

01:21:22 civilization is it starts with close knit family and tribal structures that do do something to

01:21:27 protect children. And then you get all of this money printing and debt where people are released

01:21:31 from moral restraints. They don't have to protect anyone. They can go live their own selfish lives.

01:21:36 And then the backlash from the abused children takes down the society as a whole. And to me,

01:21:40 a lot of this leftist rage is just, yeah, you know, we, we moved on. A lot of people moved on

01:21:44 and didn't, didn't circle back. I'm not putting you in that category, of course. Right. But

01:21:48 I just think, you know, everybody knows somebody who's suffering, everybody, a child, everybody

01:21:52 knows a parent who's not doing that well. And you know, you with, with love and with grace,

01:21:56 you need to talk to them and really work to try and improve things because man, if we can't rescue

01:22:01 the kids, uh, they'll grow up to be some very, very angry adults with no respect for our customs

01:22:06 and history. And I think that we are hopefully not past the tipping point of that situation,

01:22:12 but we're, we're pretty close. I've done my best. I hope to pay your message, echo it forward on

01:22:20 daycare and nonviolent parenting relationships and the like. I, I really would like to express,

01:22:25 and I know it doesn't change anything in the past, but my deepest possible sympathies for

01:22:28 everyone you grew up with. And I think it only amplifies not only your credibility,

01:22:32 but also the respect you are owed for circling back. And in many cases, practicing the Christian

01:22:38 ethic more than those complacent once on Sunday Christians who didn't listen to you growing up.

01:22:44 I just wanted to, at the end of this, pour out my unending admiration for all you do.

01:22:50 And my deep disgust at how badly you've been treated for the last how many years it isn't

01:22:55 right. And I hope people use this as an opportunity to circle back for you and enrich their lives with

01:23:02 everything you have to say. Well, I appreciate that. That's very, very kind for you to say.

01:23:05 And I really do appreciate that. And I would also say like, if I'm too controversial, whatever,

01:23:09 like forget me, strip me. I don't particularly matter. Like in the big scheme of philosophy,

01:23:14 I don't want people to think about me or, you know, the controversies, just take the ideas

01:23:18 and arguments, strip me from them and have them move forward. Peaceful parenting and UPB and so

01:23:24 on. They don't have to reference me. It doesn't matter. But the ideas is sort of what matters.

01:23:29 So I appreciate the opportunity to speak with your audience and talk about these

01:23:33 arguments and ideas as well. Well, if people can add fuel to the idea engine, I mean,

01:23:38 obviously everything's linked down in the description, but for the audio listeners

01:23:41 who want to type it in right away, is it freedomain.com/donate?

01:23:46 Yes, absolutely. But I would strongly encourage people, listen first, you know, listen first,

01:23:52 find out if I'm providing value and virtue and the donation is obviously gratefully accepted down the

01:23:58 road, but get into the ideas, get into the arguments, you know, stimulate your brain.

01:24:06 And I actually wanted to mention, I know we got to end, so it's one thing I wanted to mention.

01:24:11 One thing that's fascinating to me is that the Christian conception of the soul, of course,

01:24:14 is that we have an essence to ourself that is connected to divine knowledge. That is not all

01:24:20 knowing itself, but is far greater knowledge than our conscious minds. And one of the things that

01:24:25 really validates that in my experience is that everybody, when they talk about their childhoods

01:24:29 with me, they say, I don't know. And I say, yes, you do. Right. And in the Christian context,

01:24:36 that would be, well, everything's recorded, everything is understood, and you do have some

01:24:39 access to the divine. So you can't claim that you don't know about your own life. And you also

01:24:43 can't claim that you don't know about your own parents if you spent 25 years or 30 years or 40

01:24:47 years around them. And that has been completely validated. Right. So every single time, there's

01:24:52 not been one exception in almost 20 years where somebody says, I don't know. And then I say,

01:24:57 yes, you do. And then like, okay, it's this. So it's really interesting whether you, you know,

01:25:02 the secularists would call it the unconscious, but whether it's the soul of the unconscious

01:25:05 is not particularly relevant. But there is a absolute wealth and treasure of knowledge within

01:25:09 us that the sort of shallow surface skimmery doesn't get to. And whether people go down there

01:25:15 and find truth, virtue, the soul, God, faith, just burrow down and get as deep as you can,

01:25:23 because we're only here for a short time. And the deeper we go, the longer we echo in the future,

01:25:28 and the wider our spread of virtue in the present and depth is power and really, really try to work

01:25:36 to get down to where the truth is and the essences of your thinking and your experience and try not

01:25:42 to be distracted into inconsequentiality, which is a great temptation. We all want to be little

01:25:47 mammals at the feet of the giant dinosaurs of power, but it doesn't work out very well in the

01:25:52 long run. And I would really encourage everybody, everybody listen to this. Don't ever have the

01:25:56 arrogance to assume that you know what your potential is. That to me is a sin of pride.

01:26:01 That is just terrible. I don't know what my potential is. I'm continuing to explore it and

01:26:05 really lift the lid on what you think you're capable of and what you are capable of will be

01:26:12 revealed to you in a way that is as close to the divine as I think mortals are possible of achieving.

01:26:17 Mason: That was beautiful. And just as beautiful as a lot of the writing of fiction books as well.

01:26:23 I really enjoyed almost, I must say, just right at the end. For everyone listening,

01:26:28 thank you very much for listening live. If you're listening on catch up, again, all the

01:26:30 Stephans links down in the description. This was a genuine dream for me. So thank you for the time

01:26:36 sacrificed. We will be back next week as I'm talking to a former prime minister, which is

01:26:41 hilarious. Until then, take care and goodbye.

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