Stefan Molyneux
  • last year
In this episode, I address a listener's inquiry about navigating personal relationships with someone facing legal challenges regarding their immigration status. I delve into the implications of commitment and integrity, specifically in the context of immigration laws. By examining the moral responsibilities tied to legal agreements, I highlight how breaches of such commitments can impact trust in relationships. Using relatable analogies, I argue that a strong foundation in any relationship relies on fulfilling promises. I encourage the listener to engage in open conversations with their romantic interest to discern her motivations behind her visa situation. Ultimately, I provide insights on the importance of integrity and open dialogue in fostering healthy relationships amidst complex circumstances.

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Transcript
00:00All right, quick question from a donor, thank you for the donation, he says, hi Steph, I'm a 30-year-old male, not sure if you do give advice through donations, recently I've met a girl, 26-year-old female through the Facebook dating, we hung out a few times and after the third date she opened up to me that she came to the US through student visa and overstayed for a few years now, she dropped school because of her father passing and broke up with a long-distance boyfriend.
00:26From conversing with her she seems genuine but deep down I have a feeling she is a red flag, I've talked to my relatives about the situation and they mostly suggested me to know more about her as a quote friend, I want to know what is your advice on how to interact with her and find clues that she is actually genuine.
00:48So look, it's a big question and I am going to, as I am occasionally want to do, I will annoy some people and none of this of course is designed to be a comment on what should or should not be legal, right, at the moment mass immigration in general is not freedom of association, right, it's not freedom of association because
01:16in general people of course come to countries and then they get, a lot of times they get free stuff, right, and because they get free stuff and often they'll get preferential loans or hiring policies and so on, so it's not particularly freedom of association.
01:34If you come to a country legally or illegally and people, you know, you get sort of quote free healthcare or free retirement benefits or welfare or subsidies or preferential hiring policies because of quota systems and so on, that's not freedom of association, I have zero problem with whoever wants to live in a particular geographical area, right, and I write about this in my novel called The Future, which you should get for free.
02:04So moving from one place to another is not a violation of the non-aggression principle, it's not a violation of freedom of association, however, if you as a taxpayer are forced to subsidize said movement, then it's not freedom of association anymore, right, so that's sort of my major issue.
02:30And that's just this sort of inevitable fallout of the principles of freedom of association and voluntarism and so on, non-aggression principle, so I mean you are obviously in a free society, in a free world, you are free to move wherever you want, but nobody is obligated to do any kind of business with you, nobody's obligated to give you money or resources at least at the level of coercion, right, and so on, right.
02:59So these are all, I think, fairly obvious and evident situations.
03:05So there is, however, something that is interesting about this woman in particular, right, so as a whole, and I know this is kind of collectivism and all of that, so this is like not me with my voluntarist hat on, this is me with the sort of general as the world is now.
03:25So, you know, rightly or wrongly, people have voted for particular laws about entering countries, and if you then break those laws, you are going against, in general, the codified world of the people.
03:41So the people have voted and they said, listen, you can come to this country in order to study, right, that's the deal, and she signed up to that deal ahead of time, says, okay, you can come to the country if you are a student, and what's happened, though, is that she is breaking the deal, and she's staying in the country despite the fact that she's a student.
04:11That she is no longer a student.
04:14So that's not ideal.
04:16And again, we're just talking from the general norming perspective, not sort of the enlightened, non-aggression principle, voluntarist perspective.
04:24But it means that she will break a deal unilaterally with no consultation.
04:32So she hasn't maybe applied for a work visa, or she hasn't renegotiated the student visa, or she hasn't even taken part-time courses and so on.
04:40So from the sort of general, average, normy perspective, she signed up for a deal, and she has broken the deal and gone against the wishes of the people as a whole.
04:55And there's no particular way around that.
04:58That's just a fact.
05:00Like, it's hard to think of a great analogy, but it would be something along the lines of, you can stay in this place if you have a medical condition.
05:13And then she stays in this place for free, and then even after the medical condition is cured, she pretends to still have that medical condition, right?
05:21So it's like, you can stay here, this is for people who can't walk, right?
05:26And then she just fakes being in a wheelchair in order to stay in that place or to get those resources.
05:33Or, you know, if it's like the insurance company says, if you are really harmed in some way or another, then you get payouts every month until you get better.
05:45And she signs up for that, she pays her premiums and so on, and then she fakes an injury in order to keep getting paid.
05:53So, from the general normie perspective, this indicates a lack of integrity to go against the laws of the country, to go against the will of the people, and to go against what she herself voluntarily signed up for ahead of time.
06:11Now, I understand that you can argue that the laws are unjust, and I get all of that, and I'm not saying, obviously, obey all laws no matter how unjust, like, I get all of that, right?
06:22I mean, that's the Nuremberg Principle as a whole, right?
06:26That not all laws are just, and a positive law is not a moral substitute for natural law, right?
06:32Not all laws are just.
06:33I get all of that.
06:34So I'm not saying this in order to try and argue for that.
06:38I hope that you would know me well enough to know that that is not my argument or my perspective.
06:43But from a general perspective, it is still the case.
06:49Look, if she says, and I wouldn't necessarily agree with this reasoning, but if she says, look, these laws are corrupt and immoral and unjust, and I'm a freedom fighter who's disobeying that which is wrong.
06:58I'm like somebody, like slavery was legal, but I'm running a kind of underground slavery to get slaves to Canada because I hugely disagree with them.
07:08Okay, you could make that case, and there would be some perspectives on that argument that would be less dishonorable.
07:17I'm just sort of trying to be as circumspect as possible, right?
07:21So I'm trying to give as much credence to the case, right?
07:25But if she's just like, well, I got here on a student visa, I just quit the student life, I'm no longer a student, and I'm just staying.
07:35Like there's no particular reasoning, there's no moral argument, there's no, oh, the woe betide the tyrants who inflict these unjust laws on a helpless population, whatever, right?
07:44Like if it's just, if it's not a principled stand in any way, and whether you agree or not with the principle, you can certainly understand why somebody might have civil disobedience to laws they consider enormously unjust.
07:56I'm not recommending it, obviously, but you can certainly understand the argument, right?
08:00So, you know, the people who resisted apartheid and so on, right?
08:04We can understand that.
08:06So if, and it doesn't sound to me like she's got much of a philosophical perspective on any of this stuff.
08:13It doesn't sound like she's fighting the good fight in her own mind and opposing immoral and unjust laws and striking a blow for her perception of freedom.
08:22And like, it doesn't sound like that.
08:24It just sounds like she just broke the deal.
08:27She came here under true pretenses, but then when those true pretenses became false pretenses, she didn't change, right?
08:37So this would be, another analogy would be that you have insurance, right, on your jewelry, and you think you lost a $5,000 ring, and so you file a claim, and you get your $5,000, right?
08:53Because it's gone, right?
08:55And you sign an affidavit that it's gone and so on, right?
08:57And I assume that in those affidavits, it would also say, oh, and by the way, if you ever find it again, you have to tell us, and you can't keep both the ring and the $5,000.
09:08Now, if she were to file an insurance claim that she had lost the $5,000 ring, and they give her $5,000, and then a month later, she finds the ring again, but doesn't tell the insurance company, that would be dishonorable, right?
09:21That would be a form of theft or fraud, right?
09:25So that would be that even if she filed, not intending to defraud the insurance company and steal $5,000, but she genuinely, like, she genuinely believed the ring was lost, then she is in possession of those $5,000 in an honorable contractual fashion, right?
09:45But then if the conditions change, in other words, she finds the ring, but she does not inform the insurance company and give the $5,000 back, then that's wrong, right?
09:54So the conditions have changed, and now she's in the wrong.
09:58So she came over on a visa, and she signed all this paperwork that says, I'm going to maintain good standing in my educational environment, I'm going to stay a student, and if should to change, I'm going to do X, Y, I'm going to leave, or whatever, right?
10:11So she signed all of that, and she swore to all of that, and that's the deal by which she got the student visa, and if she is just not respecting the document that she signed and the fairly solemn promise that she gave, and again, I mean, you could make some kind of case about, oh, it's an unjust law, and so on, right?
10:30But nonetheless, that doesn't seem to be the case.
10:35So I haven't talked about this as much as I probably should, and maybe I'll do it on the show tomorrow, but it is really, really important to understand that the foundation of any good relationship is honor, that you have to keep your word, right?
10:52I mean, if you say your marriage vows, right?
10:54We're together forever, better or worse, sickness and in health, richer for poorer, till death do us part, holding no others before you, and so on.
11:03That vow, that wedding or marriage vow is a statement that is only as good as the honor of the people making it, and if you don't have honor in your relationship, then you don't have much of a relationship, because honor is predictability when it comes to promises, when it comes to commitments.
11:25I mean, there's this whole argument that erupts on Twitter from time to time about duty sex, right?
11:30Does the woman who has a monogamous relationship or a monogamous marriage, where the man, of course, can't sleep with anyone else, does that woman, well, what happens if she stops providing sex to the man, right?
11:46Well, I mean, at some point, if, you know, it's, what's that shocked Pikachu face where a woman who hasn't slept with her husband for three years is shocked that he cheats on her, right?
11:56I mean, if a man has an economically monogamous relationship, in other words, he's the sole provider of income, and his wife is forbidden to work, and then he stops providing income, what's going to happen?
12:08Well, she's going to have to get her income from somewhere, right?
12:11And you say, ah, yes, but you need income, you don't need sex, right?
12:14But if sex is unimportant, then it shouldn't matter if he cheats, right?
12:18Sex doesn't matter.
12:19So if there is a lot of sex before the marriage or a lot of sex early on in the marriage, a lot of sex on the honeymoon and so on, right, if that's occurring, then there's an implicit deal which says we have a sex fest, right?
12:34We have a sex-filled relationship.
12:36That's the implicit deal.
12:38And for a woman to pull the rug out from under a man and to stop sleeping with him, again, outside of medical issues and stuff like that, to stop sleeping with a man would be as much of a bait-and-switch as a man paying for everything during the courtship and paying for everything during the engagement and then paying for the wedding and then paying the bills for the first six to 12 months of marriage and then just not paying any bills anymore ever again, right?
13:02There's an expectation of continued behavior that is implicit, right?
13:07It is implicit in a relationship that the best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior.
13:14So if the woman is hot to trot when you're dating and engaged and married and honeymoon and early marriage, right, then there's an expectation that that continues, right?
13:24So an honor is when you accept the binding nature of both explicit and implicit commitments, explicit and implicit commitments.
13:37So a woman doesn't have to have a formal contract with a man that he's going to continue to pay the bills if she quits and gets pregnant with their children.
13:45But it is something you talk about if the man sort of says, I'm going to do that.
13:48Yes, of course.
13:49That's my goal.
13:50I want you to be a stay-at-home mom.
13:52I'm happy to pay the bills, all that kind of stuff, right?
13:54Well, then if he does that for a while, he can't just change that because that would be dishonorable, right?
13:59That the woman has made big decisions based upon an expectation of continued behavior, right?
14:06The woman has made big decisions based upon an expectation of continued behavior, right?
14:10And the man has forsworn all other sexual contact in order to have a—on the understanding or the acceptance or the belief or the trust that the sexual behavior that characterizes the early part of the relationship is going to continue, again, absent medical issues and so on, right?
14:28I mean, there's always going to be occasional stuff, right?
14:31So I'm sure that's the deal.
14:34So honor is when a person's word is his or her bond.
14:41And the honor in terms of bond and promise does not have to be explicit, right?
14:47There is implicit behavior, right?
14:50There is implicit behavior.
14:52So if you've used the same catering company for all of your social events for, you know, two or three years and they have consistently delivered and it's been a good value and you're happy with their service,
15:03and then you give them a big order, then you expect them to continue, right, to provide the good service they've provided for the last two or three years.
15:11And if they just suddenly take your money and don't deliver anything, then, you know, would they say, well, you and I didn't have an explicit bargain that, like, maybe you've gone beyond contract.
15:25It's just a handshake deal now, right?
15:27And say, well, we didn't have an explicit bargain that we weren't just going to take your money.
15:31It's like, well, but, you know, you take my money, you deliver the goods, right?
15:35And there's an expectation that that's going to continue.
15:38And that's good, right?
15:39I mean, consistency is efficiency, right?
15:42So it's much easier and cheaper to have to do business with people you trust, right?
15:47Rather than to continually have to get legal contracts and vetting and line by line vetoes and back and forth and all that, right?
15:56I mean, if it was as complicated in terms of negotiating and paperwork to order some catering as it was to, say, sell a house, well, that would be pretty inefficient, right?
16:06So even though the catering company has not explicitly told you that you give me this money and I will provide you this goods, but they've, you know, there's an implicit acceptance of that, right?
16:17So it's like, well, you took down my order.
16:18It's like, yes, but we never promised we were also going to deliver it.
16:21But you took down the date.
16:22Yes, but we never explicitly, you show me the paperwork where we explicitly said we would deliver it, right?
16:28So you understand, right?
16:28So if the woman says, well, I'm just not going to have sex with my husband anymore, that's a change from the implicit provision of activity prior, right?
16:40That's a change.
16:42And I mean, you can negotiate that change, but you can't unilaterally justly just change all of that, right?
16:47Any more than the man can just say, well, I know we've got a lot of bills and I've run up a lot of spending, but I've just decided to quit working and quit making money.
16:55Again, outside of sort of medical issues and so on, right?
16:57So with this woman, what I would be concerned about is the fact that she has unilaterally changed a very solemn contract that she voluntarily signed and agreed to, which is to only stay in the country as long as she's a student.
17:12That's important because if she says, well, I can unilaterally change whatever I agree to.
17:19If I don't find it works for me anymore, I can just change it.
17:23I can just do what I want, when I want, regardless of what I commit to ahead of time, that to me would not be the basis of a relationship that I would consider honorably sustainable or sustainable through the keeping of promises and honor.
17:41And again, like I know I'm not going to be defensive about this.
17:43I know it's real easy to misinterpret this and so on, right?
17:47I'm not saying all laws are just.
17:48I'm saying that from the normal perspective, she's unilaterally changing a solemn contract she agreed to ahead of time, and that is not a good sign for somebody who's good to date, right?
18:00I mean, if you had a boss and you had a handshake deal, yeah, yeah, I'll hire you for 20 bucks.
18:05Oh, no, let's say I hire you for 40 bucks an hour, right?
18:07And you have a handshake deal with some guy, you know, he's going to hire you for 40 bucks an hour.
18:11Right, and then he pays you 40 bucks an hour for a year, and then he just cuts you down to 20 bucks an hour, right?
18:18And he says, well, we don't have a specific contract, right?
18:20It's not written down, right?
18:22It's all right.
18:23But you would say, well, hang on.
18:25I mean, you hired me on.
18:28You said it was going to be 40 bucks an hour.
18:29You paid me 40 bucks an hour.
18:32And now you're just unilaterally dropping me down to 20 bucks an hour.
18:35And let's say he's also got you.
18:37You've signed a non-compete, so you can't just go to the competitor.
18:39Well, that's not good, right?
18:41Because he's now unilaterally changing an implicit agreement with no negotiation.
18:46Something that he agreed to and performed and acted upon, which is $40 an hour.
18:50He's now dropping to 20 bucks an hour with no input from you.
18:54So that is not honorable.
18:56So I would be concerned with a woman like this.
19:00I would ask her, what is your thinking around staying in the country illegally?
19:06Right now, it would be interesting.
19:08And of course, you never have to tell me.
19:10But I mean, it's worth having the conversation.
19:12What is her reasoning behind that?
19:14Now, if it's just like, well, I like it here.
19:16I don't want to go back, blah, blah, blah.
19:17Then she, based on hedonism, is willing to change pretty solemn contracts she agreed
19:22to ahead of time without consulting the other person.
19:25That to me would be too risky a person to give my heart to.
19:29Or at least that would be a giant red flag for me.
19:32And again, maybe, I don't know.
19:34She's got some crazy explanation that I can't think of and that might satisfy you with regards
19:38to the honor question.
19:39But it would be somewhat equivalent to somebody who's like, well, obviously, I want to pay for
19:46things in the store.
19:48But if I really want something and I don't have the money, I'll just steal it.
19:51It's like, that means that there's no particular principles that the person is going to limit
19:57her behavior by.
19:59Is she trustworthy if she unilaterally changes solemn agreements she, and this would be legal
20:04agreements, right, that she signed to and agreed to ahead of time?
20:08Is she trustworthy?
20:09And I would argue that it would be a huge red flag.
20:11Now, if she's trustworthy in every other circumstance, and this is, again, this is all sort
20:15of amoral stuff, right?
20:17That's a different matter.
20:18But it sounds to me like she can just do what she wants.
20:21She doesn't have, she doesn't keep her word.
20:23She doesn't keep her promises.
20:24She doesn't renegotiate.
20:25She doesn't find another way.
20:26She just takes what she wants at the expense of what she agreed to ahead of time.
20:30That is not at all a good sign.
20:33All right.
20:34I hope that helps.
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20:38Lots of love from up here.
20:39I will talk to you soon.