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Stefan Molyneux
  • 2/13/2024
This episode delves into thought-provoking paradoxes that challenge perspectives, exploring creativity, responsibility, and the complexities of the human experience. Join us for intriguing discussions that push the boundaries of conventional thinking.

Chapters

0:00:13 Introduction and Appreciation for Support
0:02:54 Balancing Exciting Storylines and Deep Character Knowledge
0:05:43 Applying the Approach to Software Coding
0:08:20 Compassion as a Paradox in the Modern World
0:11:14 Compassion for the old, pregnant women, and the injured
0:13:31 Changes in compassion: avoidable illnesses and personal choices
0:16:32 Diminished compassion for those with avoidable illnesses
0:20:10 Compassion: Party Sister vs Hardworking Sister
0:23:32 Insurance: Eliminating Helplessness in the Face of Disaster
0:29:58 Importance of wearing a helmet and having insurance
0:32:11 The paradox of claiming helplessness while demanding rights
0:38:00 The Paradox of Vision: Seeing from Afar vs. Up Close
0:42:22 The Paradox of Identifying Good and Bad: Politicians vs. Personal Relationships
0:46:31 The Paradox of Agency and Victimhood

Brief Summary

In this episode, we explore thought-provoking paradoxes that challenge our perspectives. From originality through copying to the role of compassion, we reflect on creativity, responsibility, and the complexities of the human experience. Join us as we delve into intriguing discussions that push the boundaries of conventional thinking.
Transcript
00:00 Yes, good afternoon. What have we got? The 12th of February 2024. I hope you're having a great
00:06 afternoon. Just wanted to dip in and say hi. Thank you, of course, for all of your wonderfully kind
00:10 support for the show. All right. So I saw an interesting post on social media,
00:17 10 paradoxical truths from 10 brilliant men. 10 paradoxical truths from 10 brilliant men.
00:25 Now, in particular, I'm not a huge fan of these sort of paradoxes, but some of these I thought
00:32 were interesting and worth discussing. So the first one is from C.S. Lewis. He says, "Originality
00:38 is best attained via copying." Now, as a guy who's done a smidgen or two of original creative work,
00:49 I both resist and accept this, if that makes any sense. I both resist and accept this. I resist it
00:57 because I'd like to claim more credit, but I also accept it because to copy somebody who's really
01:05 good at something to, in a sense, be their slave is a good way of getting you grounded in the
01:10 basics. You know, the wax on, wax off. So learning how to make other people's rational arguments
01:17 trains you in making rational arguments. Reading books that you love can open up your creativity.
01:23 And I mean, a book that I read some years ago, and I remember posting about this back of the
01:28 day in Twitter, my daughter and I were reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James
01:34 Joyce. And it's quite a mad piece of literature. And I guess this is back when attacks on
01:39 Christianity had to be clouded in complexity and analogy and metaphor, but it was really quite a
01:43 mad book. But what I did love about that book was the very beginning where it's like an infant's
01:50 view of the world. And I pillaged a little bit of that idea for the opening of my novel, The Future,
01:55 that always sort of struck with me, or stuck with me, that you could somehow through language get
02:00 the experience of starting life, which of course is a pre-language situation and trying to use
02:05 language to evoke the start of life. Well, that's Lewis Staten coming back from his cryogenic freeze
02:12 in the beginning of my novel, The Future. So yeah, weaving together. So philosophy
02:20 and economics are kind of wired together in Ayn Rand's work. What I wanted to do was to bring
02:29 philosophy and psychology together. That really has been the focus of what I've done as a novelist,
02:35 and even as a poet to some degree, but it has been to try to get philosophy and self-knowledge
02:43 together, which is why I tend to go pretty deep into my characters and their motivations and
02:48 thoughts. So some of the introspective stuff that comes out of modern novels is great. Some of the
02:55 sort of classical, exciting storylines that come out of older fashioned novels, Victorian and
03:01 pre-Victorian novels, certainly in Just Poor, I tried to wire those two together. And also in
03:05 Almost, where you have a sword fight. So you have, I mean, in Just Poor, there's sword fights and
03:12 gun battles and all kinds of exciting, like all of that. Robert Louis Stevenson,
03:16 or exciting stuff. And, or Alexandre Dumas, son of three musketeers, exciting stuff. While at the
03:25 same time, there's also deep knowledge of the characters. And I don't like it when people go
03:30 internal and lose the world. That's kind of bad for me. When people go external and lose the
03:35 internal, which is kind of the Ayn Rand thing, that to me is also negative. So trying to cross
03:39 these two worlds together. But I mean, in a sense, for me, the person who did that best in a particular
03:47 novel is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, where he's got exciting story, an exciting story,
03:51 and also deep psychology and certainly some philosophy in there as well. So originally,
03:57 originality is best attained via copying. I really do think that there's some truth in that.
04:01 All mathematicians start with copying the 12 times table, and we all have spelling tests and spelling
04:07 Bs, and we practice writing, we practice tracing. I don't know if you were a kid, you practice
04:10 tracing, drawings that did all of that. So originality is best attained via copying.
04:15 Yeah, so for me, if, why do I write and why do I do philosophy? Not that this is a truly thrilling
04:22 question for you, but the reason why I do it is what I wanted the world isn't there. Isn't that
04:29 why everybody creates any, anybody creates anything, is that what you want in the world
04:34 isn't there. And because it's not there, and it should be there, or it needs to be there,
04:39 or you want it to be there, it ends up that you have to create it. It is almost with regret
04:44 that, you know, Shakespeare, of course, in terms of self-knowledge and exciting stories was
04:50 really the past master of this kind of stuff. So for me, you have to, in order to figure out
04:56 what's missing, you have to know what is. I mean, to take a silly example, you don't walk through a
05:02 wall, you walk through a doorway. So you have to walk through where the wall isn't. So where you go
05:08 has to be where things aren't. And so for me, creatively, creatively and artistically,
05:12 I have to map what is there in order to find out for myself what's missing. And that was a pretty
05:19 important part of that. Now, again, I'm not trying to make this all about me, but maybe this approach,
05:24 if you have creative things to do, and it's not just in the realm of creative writing or anything
05:29 like that. I mean, when I was a software coder, when I was chief technical officer and head of
05:35 research and development, I wrote some pretty innovative, creative and powerful code because
05:43 what I wanted, which was, I wanted to be able to create and modify database systems with full
05:50 interfaces on the fly, tables to queries, to forms, to reports, and also dynamically create a web
05:58 interface for all of that, which was really advanced at the time. And I wanted to be able to
06:05 have people edit a interface and then have all of the database changes propagate through the entire
06:11 database, the queries, the forms, the reports, and also the web interface. And that was a really
06:18 exciting challenge that did not exist at the time. I really wanted it, really needed it for the
06:22 business to succeed. And so I made it, right? But you have to know what is there before you know
06:29 what's worth creating. And so I think that originality coming from copying has real value
06:35 to it. And I think a lot of people who just create without learning what's there and how to do what
06:42 exists end up, it's a little bit too much creativity. In other words, it's unanchored,
06:47 ungrounded, and tends to end up being taken over by ideologues, like sort of the modern art
06:52 movement. So this is another, so 10 paradoxical truths from 10 brilliant men. Two, Nietzsche
06:59 wrote, this is a paraphrase, "Compassion is a psyop designed by the weak to redirect resources
07:07 from the most deserving to the least deserving." This is the guy's interpretation of Nietzsche,
07:14 "Compassion is a psyop designed by the weak to redirect resources from the most deserving
07:19 to the least." Well, I wouldn't put it that way myself. I wouldn't put it that way. I think that
07:28 that's not correct. And the reason I think that's not correct is compassion is something that we
07:37 have developed to take care of those weaker than ourselves. So babies obviously can't fend for
07:43 themselves and they need us to take care of them, to feed them, to clothe them, to change them,
07:48 and so on. If you're an older sibling or an older brother and you have a younger sibling,
07:55 I mean, I think ideally it would be nice if you expended some resources to take care of the
07:59 younger sibling if your younger sibling's being pushed around or something. So compassion is not
08:04 a psyop that is only for the weak to manipulate the strong, but it is a paradox within itself
08:16 in the way that it manifests in the modern world, which is to say also within Nietzsche's time.
08:24 There are those who are genuinely deserving, of course, of our compassion. And our compassion,
08:31 in my view, should be extended to those who are in a bad situation through no fault of their own.
08:37 They're in a bad situation through no fault of their own. We should have compassion. I think
08:46 that's what compassion is for. Now, of course, babies are in a situation of dependence through
08:51 no fault of their own. They're just born. In fact, you could say it's the causality of the parents
08:55 that has caused the baby's need to arrive. If you are a man and your wife stays home raising
09:02 your kids and running your household and so on, then you have to work a lot more than if you were
09:06 just a single guy taking care of himself, right? You have to work, I mean, about 10 times harder
09:11 to provide for a family than you would just to provide for yourself. And your wife is in a
09:17 dependent position based upon your either explicit or implicit contract of what you're going to do,
09:22 right? To take an obvious example, if you hire a maid to clean your house,
09:29 then you pay the maid for cleaning your house. And if you say to your wife, "You stay home,
09:36 I'll take care of the bills, you run the household and raise the kids," and she does that,
09:39 then you owe her that money. So she's in a dependent position, but based upon a contract
09:44 which gives her leverage and equality in the same way that if you hire someone to do a job,
09:49 they do the job, they're dependent upon you to pay them, but you justly have to pay them.
09:53 You don't just slip out the back when the maids finish the house and not pay her, right?
09:58 So there are people who, through no fault of their own, end up in bad situations. Now,
10:04 that's changed quite a bit over the course of history. That's changed quite a bit. A couple
10:08 of things when compassion evolved, I mean, a couple of important factors that no longer apply.
10:14 So let's say someone is a hunter and they trip and fall and break their leg. Well, they can't hunt,
10:25 right? Now, of course, they would bind the wounds, and this is sort of one of the origins of
10:31 civilization is where you see wounds being bound rather than people just being left behind.
10:35 So they do what they can to allow the leg to heal or something like that, and you would provide
10:41 resources to that person because tripping and twisting your leg, breaking your leg,
10:47 that's just a risk of hunting. That's just a risk of hunting, right? So it's through no fault of
10:52 their own, they twisted their leg, broke their leg, and therefore they need resources. Those who
10:59 are old, assuming you're not in some Inuit community that destroys old people or pushes
11:05 them off to some glacier, old people have diminished capacity through no fault of their own.
11:13 Right? Through no fault of their own. It's just aging, right? And so they don't have the eyes
11:19 they once had, they don't have a limberness and the strength they once had, they don't have the
11:23 hearing they once had. Women, of course, when they're pregnant, they can't exactly—late-stage
11:29 pregnancy—they can't go and gather a bunch of nuts and berries and so on, and so they can't
11:35 participate in helping to raise the barn or whatever is going on. So yeah, through no fault
11:39 of their own. Now you could say, of course, "Well, they chose to get pregnant," this, that,
11:43 and the other, but that's kind of understood. A woman would not choose to get pregnant if—like
11:48 in our evolution, a woman would not choose to get pregnant if no one would take care of her while
11:52 she was pregnant, right? So that's kind of the deal, right? I'll give you new life, but you've
11:56 got to give me food when I can't get around because I'm the size of the Hindenburg. So
12:02 in the past, the people who justly deserved compassion were the people who either through
12:11 contract—like implicit contract—either through contract or through no fault of their own,
12:18 required resources. And since all acquisition of resources requires risk, then all who roll
12:27 snake eyes on the dice of risk and break their leg or fall and cut themselves badly or something
12:33 like that—so since all resource acquisition requires risk, all those who have bad luck in
12:41 the acquisition of resources need to be taken care of. So there's a couple of factors that
12:46 have changed in the modern world that I think Nietzsche was sort of struggling with as they
12:50 began to emerge. And of course, remember, it was Germany in the mid-19th century.
12:56 Germany was the first country to—certainly in the modern world, in the modern West—to
13:02 create what we would recognize now as a welfare state. Germany was the first country to do that.
13:07 And so Nietzsche was wrestling with this new beast around. I think it was under Bismarck,
13:15 if you want to look it up. Now, I don't know, obviously, how much Nietzsche knew
13:20 about the welfare state, but it certainly was around. So a couple of things that have changed
13:26 with regards to compassion, which is very, very interesting. So compassion for illness. Of course,
13:32 when we were evolving, the chance to avoid illness was pretty low. It was pretty low.
13:41 They didn't understand the germ theory. They understood that being around sick people could
13:47 make you sick, but they really didn't have much choice to be around sick people when you're in a
13:51 small hunter-gatherer tribe or a farming community and so on. I mean, the farming community is a
13:55 little more easy. You can put someone in the back room or something, but getting sick was pretty
14:01 hard to avoid in our evolution. And so people who got sick were deserving of compassion because
14:07 there was no real opportunity to not get sick. Now, in the modern world, you have a lot of
14:13 opportunities to not get sick. You know, 70 plus percent of illnesses are the result of lifestyle
14:20 choices. You know, overeating, lack of exercise, smoking, drinking, staying up late, not getting
14:27 any sleep, drug use, promiscuity, STDs, all that kind of stuff. So I think personally,
14:33 I think it's higher, but I think the official figures is slightly north of 70 percent, at least
14:37 in America, of illnesses are the result of personal choice. Not the result of a bad accident or vapors
14:44 from the bog or something like that or a little cut that got infected and then you get really sick
14:50 because now we have antibiotics and all that kind of stuff, right? So now illness is, I mean,
14:57 overwhelmingly the result of choices. Now, of course, there are people who have bad luck and
15:03 get sick and they don't have bad lifestyles. It's just, you know, bad luck. I get all of that,
15:08 but that's one factor that reduces our sympathy, our compassion for the unwell. One factor,
15:16 of course, is, well, you chose it. You chose to eat too much. You chose not to exercise.
15:22 You chose to do drugs. You chose to smoke. You chose to drink. You chose to stay up all night.
15:27 You chose to engage in risky behavior. You chose to ride your motorcycle in the rain
15:32 as the Billy Joel song goes. So you chose all these things and therefore I don't have compassion
15:38 nearly as much as somebody who is just having bad luck, right? So somebody who gets drunk and
15:46 drives their car into a mall, Blues Brothers style, we have no compassion for. In fact,
15:51 we would have anger towards that person for engaging in such risky behavior. On the other hand,
15:55 somebody who's in a mall just going about their business and some giant car comes crashing through
16:00 the glass and injures them, well, that's, I mean, what can you do? You can't, I mean, unless you
16:06 just don't leave your house, right? In which case you have the problem of a lack of exercise. So,
16:12 I mean, that's just bad luck. It's bad luck. And we should have compassion for that. Not for the
16:16 guy who's drunk and drives into the mall, but for the person who's in the mall gets hit by the car.
16:20 The choice to go to the mall is not, well, you know, remember if you go to the mall,
16:26 there is of course always the risk of being hit by a car, right? That's not really a thing.
16:31 So, the two major factors that would have diminished our compassion for people, the first is
16:37 that illness is significantly avoidable. And also where there's risk for illness,
16:46 there's lots of preventive measures that you can take. So, somebody who avoids, say,
16:51 a colonoscopy and then ends up with the cancer of the bowels or the intestines or the stomach,
16:56 or I don't know, I don't think it goes as high as the stomach, but you know, something that they,
17:00 somebody who never gets checkups, even if they appear healthy, but they just never get a checkup,
17:06 they never get blood work done, they don't, as they age out, get their colonoscopies,
17:10 they don't go to the dentist or so, and then they end up with problems. Well, that's the result of a
17:16 lifestyle choice to avoid. Preventive healthcare is to choose in a way the ailments that return,
17:23 the result. And, you know, that wasn't really a thing over the course of our evolution, right?
17:29 There were no colonoscopies, dentistry was very primitive and mostly reactive, and there really
17:36 wasn't much that you could do. There's no blood work, they didn't even know what to look for,
17:39 right? They're looking for humorous in the Middle Ages, right? So, healthcare as a whole has
17:45 improved to the point where most illnesses are the result of bad choices. And we simply can't
17:53 justly have the same compassion for people who've made bad choices as for people who've made good
17:58 choices. So, Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer, but he wasn't a smoker. Just very bad luck.
18:05 So, medicine and preventive care and a deeper knowledge of illness and transmission,
18:12 like, so all of that means that ill health has changed a lot from our evolution. In our evolution,
18:18 those with ill health were almost always deserving of compassion, unless they just
18:22 stabbed themselves or something, which would be pretty rare. But those with ill health were almost
18:26 always the just recipients of compassion during our evolution. Now, not so much.
18:32 Of course, poverty was endemic to the human condition as we were evolving.
18:39 And when I was a kid, 12 or 13 years old, I lived in Don Mills, of course, and I became friends
18:46 with a couple of Indian kids who lived one floor down. And I would play Monopoly and we would just
18:54 have a blast. Now, I chatted with the mother, because even back in the day, I was always
18:59 interested in chatting with people. And I chatted with the mother, and she kept getting these
19:04 stressful phone calls because her sister was a party girl. Party girl! And her sister drank and
19:13 slept around and just did all kinds of dangerous things and was constantly in trouble, constantly
19:21 broke, constantly needing resources, and constantly getting her heart broken by bad guys and needing
19:28 compassion and money and resources and so on. And I remember the mother saying, you know,
19:34 "I have, I have, I'm working on my second degree. I work very hard." I can't remember if the father
19:40 was absent, like back in India, or the father was just not around or something like that. I
19:45 don't remember, but she was going it alone, but working very hard. And she said, you know,
19:51 "I feel like my sister is dragging me down." So, this woman was being responsible and raising her
19:56 children and getting educated and working hard. And her sister was living this hedonistic,
20:01 self-destructive, wastrel lifestyle. Wastrel is a word that really should be resurrected,
20:06 but it's too much of a shame-based word. I'm sure people would do it.
20:09 So, do we have compassion more for the party sister or the hard-working sister? For the
20:19 irresponsible sister or the responsible sister? I think we would have more compassion for the
20:24 hard-working sister. Now, there's even a limit to that, though, because if the hard-working sister
20:29 keeps on bailing out the party sister and then gets stressed and overwhelmed and gets sick from
20:35 all of that stress, we'd say, "Well, even that is the result of choice in that you've chosen to
20:39 continually bail out your party sister, and she's stressing you and all of that, so you get ill
20:46 maybe from the stress, and nobody forced you to do that." That was still a lifestyle choice. Still a
20:52 lifestyle choice to help out, so to speak, chaotic and random people, that's still negative. So,
21:00 that's one. The medical care, health care, better knowledge of illness and stress and transmission
21:06 and all of that. So, it's pretty hard to get really accidentally sick. Of course, it is in
21:15 your old age, there's arthritis and things like that, but for a lot of people's lives, it's pretty
21:22 hard. If you compare it to all of the random stuff that happened during the course of our evolution,
21:27 it's pretty hard to just get sick. I've always been fascinated by this, and I'll do a whole
21:33 show on this at one point, or I don't know if you share the same fascination, but when somebody is
21:37 sick, my first question is, "Why?" I assume that the body functions well and illness has some kind
21:44 of cause. Now, again, it could be bad genes, bad luck, whatever it is, but why? Why? Why? There
21:51 has to be a cause, and most times when I talk to people, there's a pretty obvious cause, and they
21:57 know it and all of that. So, that's sort of number one thing that's changed. The number two thing
22:03 that has changed is insurance. I know, such an exciting topic, but it really is. Insurance is
22:10 one of the biggest things that ever happened to humanity. I know, this sounds like a completely
22:14 bizarre statement, but insurance is one of the biggest things that ever happened to humanity.
22:22 It's absolutely mind-blowing what insurance has done, because compassion is a combination,
22:29 is a response to a combination of disaster and helplessness. Now, disasters were endemic to our
22:36 evolution, whether it's plague, famine, war, random illness, whatever, right? So, disaster
22:44 plus helplessness is generally our cause of compassion. The modern world has mostly, mostly,
22:53 obviously there's lots of exceptions, it has, let's say largely, the modern world has largely
22:58 eliminated disaster. The modern world has largely eliminated, I mean, just think of how many women
23:05 died in childbirth in the past versus how many children die of childbirth now. Just think of the
23:09 number of people who died of plagues and pestilences and so on in the past versus now. I
23:14 mean, let's talk about the West for the moment, although this is pretty common throughout the
23:17 world. Think of infant mortality close to 50% before the age of five for most of human history
23:22 now is extraordinarily low. So, the modern world has largely eliminated disaster compared to the
23:31 past. So, remember, it's disaster plus helplessness. Now, what does insurance do to the
23:39 concept of helplessness, right? Well, I got really sick, it wasn't my fault, that's a shame.
23:47 And we're talking sort of like in a free market context. I got really sick, it wasn't my fault,
23:51 it's just bad luck. I don't smoke, I don't drink, I exercise, I eat well, I'm not overweight, I just
23:55 got sick, it's not my fault. Okay, I accept that. I think every reasonable person would accept that
24:00 there's times where that's going to happen. It's rare, but it happens. But it's one thing to say,
24:06 I'm sick and it's not my fault. It's another thing to say, I'm sick, it's not my fault,
24:14 and I'm broke. Can you feel the difference? Can you feel the difference? And I'm broke.
24:21 I mean, that's what insurance did, is it eliminated the helplessness in the face of disaster,
24:28 right? It eliminated helplessness in the face of disaster. My husband died, wasn't his fault,
24:36 he got hit by somebody, a drunk car driver, my husband died, I have five kids. Well, that's
24:44 disaster and that can't be eliminated completely. It's been significantly eliminated. I mean,
24:49 just look at climate-related deaths over the last couple of hundred years, or last hundred years,
24:53 really, they've gone down enormously. And of course, there is drunk driving, but in the past,
24:57 there was being thrown by a horse that got spooked, right? Lots of bad things can happen,
25:01 and also drunk riders, although I assume drunk riders, drunk horseback riders weren't as dangerous
25:06 as drunk drivers, because the horse is not drunk, and the horse has mobility, and it's not 6,000
25:14 pounds of metal flying along at high speeds. You say, well, my husband died, got hit by a drunk
25:22 car driver, and we would sort of post insurance. You say, well, I'm sure he has life insurance,
25:29 right? I'm sure he has life insurance. Of course you have life insurance. I mean,
25:33 I remember this as a kid. I remember reading, I'm sorry, I remember listening, I used to listen to
25:37 radio dramas when I was a kid, when I was in bed. I'd be in bed and I would listen to comedy shows,
25:44 and I had a little portable radio, and I could plug it in, and I would listen to these sort of,
25:49 and I remember one, I must have been maybe eight or nine years old, I was listening to a radio
25:55 drama, and in that radio drama, somebody's house had burnt down, right? Husband went,
26:01 oh, the house burnt down, goes to the wife, and the wife says, no, that's okay. It's terrible
26:06 that our house burnt down, but at least we have insurance, and then the husband suddenly remembered
26:12 something, patted the chest, the breast of his pocket, and realized that he'd never mailed the
26:18 insurance policy, and even as a kid, I was like, oh, that's terrible. Oh, no, because you can't
26:26 mail the insurance company after your house has burnt down, and just because he'd forgotten to
26:33 mail the insurance policy, it turned from a significant inconvenience to an absolute life
26:39 disaster, absolute life disaster. Now they couldn't rebuild the house. They lost all the money in the
26:46 house, probably still had to pay parts of it off, and because he had not mailed the insurance, and I
26:51 remember even as a kid, like, oh, no, oh, that's terrible. So insurance has taken away helplessness
26:59 in the face of disaster, and I would love to see, as I write about in my novel, The Future,
27:03 I would love to see insurance placed everywhere in life, placed everywhere in life. There's life
27:10 insurance, dental insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, unemployment insurance,
27:15 though of course that's run by the government as a whole, but people should be surrounded by these
27:20 nets of insurance, because society needs to be really strict in its compassion. I think this is
27:25 what Nietzsche was talking about. Society does need to be really strict in its compassion,
27:30 because if society is loosey-goosey in its compassion, then people will exploit that
27:34 compassion. Compassion needs to be very tightly restrained and tightly reined in, because otherwise
27:40 people will exploit it. And it's tough, you know, I mean, it's tough. If somebody's husband dies,
27:48 the woman's husband dies, she's got a bunch of kids, there's not a lot of savings, and they don't
27:53 have life insurance, oof, oof, what do you do? Well, we would have compassion for the kids,
28:01 obviously, and this is one of the big problems, is we all have compassion for the kids,
28:05 but sometimes, oftentimes, that is used as leverage by under-functioning people to gain
28:09 resources. It's for my kids, how are my kids going to eat? You know, that kind of stuff.
28:12 How are my kids going to get their braces? How are my kids going to do X, Y, and Z?
28:15 So we have compassion for the kids, but if, and you know, I've always been nagging people over
28:22 the course of this show, get insurance! Get insurance, especially when you're young. I mean,
28:28 I got my first life insurance policy when I was in my early 20s. Now, I mean, it's been
28:35 self-funding for decades now, because you want to get it when you're young, unlikely to die. You
28:40 want to start trying to get life insurance when you're 70, right? I guess you can get
28:43 catastrophic insurance, but life insurance is going to be pretty pricey, right? Based on
28:48 actuarial science. So somebody's husband died, they don't have a lot of savings, they've got six
28:54 kids, and they don't have insurance. Well, I guess they saved a hundred bucks a month, or whatever
29:04 they would pay. I guess they saved that money. We have compassion for the children, but would we
29:09 have compassion for people who have exposed themselves to unnecessary risk when it's
29:15 relatively cheap to eliminate that risk? Do we have compassion for people who have access
29:21 to insurance, which eliminates helplessness in the face of risk, and financial helplessness?
29:30 What do we think of people who don't go to the dentist, who don't take out insurance,
29:34 who do risky things, who, against reasonable and good advice, ride without a helmet? I mean,
29:40 I used to do that. I used to do that for many years. I rode a bike without a helmet.
29:44 And then a friend of mine's girlfriend, who worked as a volunteer on a hotline,
29:52 like an emergency hotline, she said, "You have to wear a helmet. Sometimes it feels like half
29:59 the calls are people who've spilled on a bike without a helmet, and things look very bad."
30:05 So I tend to be a fairly coachable fellow, so what did I do? Well, I went out and I got me a helmet.
30:10 I've been wearing one ever since. Compassion, yeah, for accidents. Accidents have largely been
30:17 reduced or eliminated, and helplessness. No, we're not helpless in the face of disaster.
30:21 We're not. We're not helpless in the face of disaster. And that's obviously something to
30:27 do with better knowledge, prevention, and so on, but a lot of it has to do with insurance.
30:32 Insurance is the closest thing to a godsend that can be imagined for agnostic or atheist people.
30:41 It is a godsend. And you can't have as much compassion for the sufferings of people
30:48 if they've inflicted it on themselves. So if people say, if the husband or the wife say,
30:54 "Yeah, we have six kids, and I ride my motorcycle in the rain," says the husband,
30:58 "But we don't need life insurance." Well, if the husband dies in a fiery, I guess fiery,
31:04 quickly put out by the rain motorcycle crash, I mean, do we have much compassion for the husband
31:11 and wife? I'd actually be angry at the husband and wife if this was people that I knew, right?
31:15 Of course, I would have told them, "You have to have insurance because you have kids."
31:18 "No, I don't need insurance," whatever, right? And then the disaster happens, and it's like,
31:22 I'm angry at the parents because it's incredibly irresponsible to have kids without having
31:27 insurance. Health insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, all of this kind of stuff.
31:33 Do we have compassion for people who put their children's future at risk for the sake of saving
31:39 a hundred bucks a month? Could be less if they're younger, 50 bucks a month, whatever, right?
31:43 Well, it's stupid. It's stupid, it's irresponsible, and it's kind of contemptible, in my view,
31:50 to put your children's futures at risk to that degree.
31:52 So, I mentioned earlier a paradox, and I've got 10 of these, but I'll just do this one,
32:00 and if you have any comments, I'm certainly happy to hear them, but I guess maybe I'll make this a
32:03 series because it's good fuel for thought. So, here's what happens. This is how compassion gets
32:09 weaponized. So, the way that compassion gets weaponized is people say, "I'm a victim of
32:18 circumstances. I'm a helpless victim of circumstances, but also, I want all the rights
32:26 of adulthood. I am both helpless and all-empowered at the same time." And the welfare state can't
32:35 exist without this combination in a democracy or in a, you know, obviously, with a republic or
32:41 anywhere, anywhere that people vote, right? So, people say, "I'm a helpless victim of circumstances,
32:47 but I demand all the full rights of adulthood." That's the paradox. Now, people who are helpless
32:52 victims of circumstances absolutely deserve our compassion and should be helped. I mean,
32:57 the average person isn't going to have kidnapping insurance. I mean, I guess if you're operating in
33:02 some dangerous part of the world, you would, but the average person's not going to have any
33:05 of that, right? So, if somebody is vacationing in some safe, nice place and they get kidnapped
33:12 in some... I mean, we'd have real sympathy for that, right? They didn't do anything foolish,
33:18 unwise, and I wouldn't sit there and say, "Well, why didn't you have kidnapping insurance when you
33:23 were vacationing in Ireland or something, right? I mean, or wherever you, you know,
33:27 the crime is low and things are relatively safe, at least for now." I mean, be like, "Oh,
33:32 that's so terrible. My gosh. What can we do to help?" Right? That's appalling. That's awful.
33:37 That's terrible. What can we do to help? I think as a society, I mean, all decent people would have
33:42 that, would have that approach because you are a helpless victim of circumstances. Now, I don't
33:48 mean to pick on the single moms, but it's the most obvious example. So, a woman who has her
33:54 children, a child or children with an irresponsible man, she says, "I'm a victim." But if you say,
34:02 "Well, hang on. Are you a helpless victim of circumstances who can't figure out what's right
34:06 or wrong for herself?" Well, then voting doesn't make any sense. Like if you say, "I'm a helpless
34:12 victim. I'm essentially an infant and played upon by manipulative people, larger forces of society,
34:18 my neighborhood, history, poverty. I'm just a helpless victim. I'm a shadow cast by circumstances."
34:25 Well, then you're saying you have no free will in the determining of right and wrong, good and bad,
34:31 proper, improper, appropriate, inappropriate. Like you have no capacity to determine good from bad.
34:38 Right? Because a single mother says often, "I had no capacity to know that the father of my
34:46 children was irresponsible and was going to take off and all that. Like I had no way of knowing
34:50 these things." Okay. So, in your own personal life where the stakes couldn't be higher,
34:56 in your own personal life where the stakes couldn't be higher, you can't figure out a good
35:01 guy from a bad guy, but somehow you can determine an honest politician from a corrupt politician
35:07 where the stakes are infinitely lower. Everything's much more removed. The consequences virtually
35:12 don't exist for you. So, you're saying that when the stakes are higher and your own life and future
35:18 is at stake, you can't figure out good from bad. But when it comes to voting for strangers in far
35:24 distant states with wild macroeconomic ideas, suddenly then you know right from wrong, good
35:33 from bad, and so on. Right? Like that doesn't make... So, people say, like the single mothers
35:37 say, and we'll talk about men in a sec here, but the single mothers say, "Well, I couldn't figure
35:42 out what was right or wrong, good or bad. I was so easily swayed and manipulated. I'm helpless.
35:46 But I absolutely demand the right to have a full and adult say in the running of society." Well,
35:55 that's not logically sustainable. I mean, not even close. Not even close. If you can't figure out
36:04 right from wrong in your own life, how can you figure out right from wrong in the life of society?
36:10 If you can't figure out a manipulative, irresponsible guy when he's impregnating you,
36:19 how could you figure out a manipulative and irresponsible politician
36:23 on the other side of the country? Right? But that's the paradox. I'm helpless. I'm a victim.
36:32 I'm a shadow cast by circumstances. I have no agency or responsibility or discernment in the
36:39 matters of my own life, but I absolutely demand full empowerment and equality in the determining
36:45 of life in society. I can't figure out an irresponsible guy I have unprotected sex with,
36:53 but I totally can figure out a responsible politician to vote for. So, the reason that
37:00 it's a paradox is that if you can determine that which is distant and far removed,
37:08 then you can determine that which is close, intimate, and high stakes.
37:15 Like, if you imagine a young man with perfect eyesight, he's standing in the bushlands,
37:22 the savannahs of Africa, and he sees an animal right far on the horizon through the haze,
37:30 through the heat shimmers, the blinding light of the day. He sees an animal right on the horizon.
37:38 You look and you can barely see anything. It's so bright. It's so hard. It's so hard.
37:44 It's a little Christopher Walken for you. And he says, the guy looking into the hazy,
37:52 heat-rippled distance of the African veldt, he says, "Oh, that's a zebra." And then you spend,
38:00 I don't know, half a day walking to where the zebras are. And again, his eyesight is fine.
38:07 Nearsighted, farsighted, so he's a young man. He's got good eyesight. He sees the zebra,
38:12 says, "Oh, that's a zebra," far off in the milky haze of the African sunlight,
38:19 miles and miles and miles and miles away. "Oh, that's a zebra." And then you walk, you spend
38:24 half a day walking to the zebra, and there's a whole herd of zebra, not 50 feet in front of you,
38:28 not 25 feet in front of you. And he says, "I have no idea what they are. I have no idea what they
38:36 are." Would that make any sense? Somebody might be unable to hear. Well, we know for a fact,
38:44 based on the principle of hearing aids, some people can hear loud noises, but not soft noises.
38:50 This is a hearing aid. It's designed to amplify the audio, the volume.
38:54 So people like Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey and Sting and Will.i.am and other people,
39:03 other celebrities with hearing problems or tinnitus or whatever, well, they need hearing
39:08 aids or whatever it is, right? I mean, I think it was The Who, the band The Who, had the world's
39:14 record for the loudest concert in the history of the planet, and people kept trying to beat that,
39:19 but then the Guinness Book of World Records ended up dropping that category because too many people
39:23 were getting their hearing blasted. And of course, Pete Townsend is quite regretful at all of the
39:30 loud concerts because his hearing is wrecked. Or if you look at Huey Lewis, Huey Lewis blew
39:34 out one ear in the 80s, and then he just, I think it was a year or two ago, he kind of lost the
39:39 other one and I think became suicidal. It's just because, you know, as a musician, lives by sound,
39:44 right? So somebody might be able to hear a loud sound, but not a soft sound. But is there anyone
39:52 who can hear a soft sound, but not a loud sound? Is there anyone who can hear a soft sound,
39:58 but not a loud sound? Again, assuming the same frequencies and this and that, right? We don't
40:01 make it sort of dog hearing or whatever, right? Well, that wouldn't make any sense. Is there anyone
40:06 with average, like, average decent 20/20 vision who can see something and identify it clearly
40:11 that's tiny, 20 miles away, but can't identify that thing 25 feet from their nose? Or to go even
40:21 further, can somebody say, "Oh, that's a horse," when the horse is 20 miles away in the haze and
40:26 heat, summer light, and then you put them on the horse, they're riding the horse, and they look
40:32 down and say, "What the hell is this? I have no idea what this is." Well, this would make no sense.
40:36 Now, if somebody doesn't know, so the single mothers, the way that it works, and again,
40:42 this is men with crazy women too, so I'm not trying to pick on the ladies here, but this is
40:45 sort of the most, the clearest example for most people. The single mothers are saying,
40:52 "I can accurately identify a zebra 20 miles away in the heat and haze and heat ripples,
40:59 and I can accurately, 100% of the time, accurately identify a zebra 100 miles away,
41:06 50 miles away, 20 miles away," whatever the distance of vision would be even potentially,
41:11 right? Some of Africa's pretty flat, like prairie flat. So she says, "I can accurately identify a
41:18 zebra 20 miles away, but you put a zebra 10 feet from me, I have no idea what it is. I genuinely
41:26 think that that zebra is a tractor. I genuinely think that that zebra is something completely
41:31 opposite." Right? So the victim phenomenon is something like this. The victim phenomenon is,
41:39 "I demand the right to vote because I can accurately identify corruption and virtue,
41:44 integrity and evil and good and bad and right and wrong and productive and unproductive and
41:49 valid and invalid and honest and dishonest and noble and nasty. I can determine all of that
41:55 in a politician I'm never going to meet who lives on the other side of the country and who has
42:01 policies I could not even explain to an expert. So I can accurately identify good and bad, right
42:07 and wrong, a thousand miles away from where I am. But a guy in my bedroom, I have no idea what's
42:14 good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous, evil, responsible, irresponsible, a liar, a truth
42:20 teller. I have no idea. I have no idea. I'm completely fooled while straddling a man in a
42:26 sexual position. I'm completely fooled. But you give me a politician I'll never meet on the other
42:32 side of the country whose message is massaged by a hostile or sympathetic media, and I can totally,
42:39 a hundred percent of the time, identify the right and wrong and good and bad. That's the paradox.
42:43 That's the paradox. People who can't, again, I know you can go with nearsighted and farsighted,
42:48 so again, which is certain. People who can't identify what's right in front of them should
42:52 never be trusted to identify that which is further away. And people who claim to be able to identify
42:58 things 20 miles away but can't identify them right in front of them are not to be believed.
43:04 Again, we are talking about not sight and again nearsighted and farsighted, there's a limit to
43:08 these things, but it's not possible. So the victim claims to be a helpless independent victim,
43:17 but also to have the full rights, moral choices, and agency of an adult. But if you have
43:28 full adulthood you can't be a victim. If you are a victim you can't simultaneously claim
43:35 full adulthood. I'm ridiculously easily fooled, but I absolutely demand full adulthood and full
43:43 rights. Okay, so full adulthood and full rights means that you have to suffer the consequences
43:48 of your own foolishness. Like babies don't have to do that, and babies aren't really foolish,
43:53 of course, right? But you baby-proof your house and you keep your kids safe and you make sure
43:58 they don't roll off the change table with your babies. So babies are not supposed to be suffering
44:04 the negative effects of their own "bad choices" because babies don't make bad choices, they just
44:09 do what babies do. So I want to have all of the freedom of adulthood but none of the consequences
44:16 of bad decisions. That's not possible. I want to have all the responsibilities, none of the
44:25 outcomes. I want to have all the freedom, none of the consequences. But the way that compassion is
44:33 milked is people say "I'm a victim" and we would have this even in the insurance realm. I'll give
44:40 you sort of an example here so we can further delineate the issue, which is a woman with six
44:46 kids, her husband dies, they have life insurance, but the life insurance company has been pillaged
44:53 from the inside, was fraudulent, and there's no money to pay her. Now of course you could say yes,
44:58 but the life insurance policy should itself, like life insurance company should itself have insurance,
45:03 but we can imagine some scenario where through no fault of her own she got life insurance,
45:08 she paid for it, but the company's gone out of business suddenly and she had no time to switch
45:13 her policy because it happened right after her husband died. We can imagine some scenario
45:17 where the woman did everything right, it's really really bad luck. Now of course in a free society
45:23 you would go to all of the executives of that insurance company and you would strip them of
45:28 everything they owned in order to pay off the policies that were coming due. For the people
45:34 whose policies weren't due, whatever, they'd switch to some new place, but for the people
45:39 whose policies, like something triggered the policy, pay out and they don't have the money,
45:44 then the court system, the legal system, would go after all the executives and would take away
45:49 their houses, their cars, their savings, their crypto, whatever, like everything would just be
45:54 stripped from them in order to pay, so that would be most likely solved. But we can think of those
45:58 situations where if that didn't work for some reason somebody would, even though they did the
46:02 right things, they ended up in the wrong situation, but we have compassion for that.
46:04 But all the people who trick us by claiming to be victims, well you can claim to be a victim
46:14 if you claim you have no agency in the matter, right? Like the person who's walking through
46:21 the mall and some car comes and runs into them, they have no agency in their disaster. It's just
46:25 bad luck the agency is on the part of the drunken guy who drove into the mall. They have no agency.
46:29 So if you claim to be a victim and thus deserving of compassion, you also have to claim to have no
46:35 agency in the problems you need resources to fix. No agency, no responsibility, no agency, no choice,
46:42 no responsibility. So then you're claiming the status of an infant or a toddler. I mean,
46:49 we even hold toddlers responsible for their own behavior at times, or some people do even more
46:54 aggressively, right? The toddler draws on the wall and the parent gets mad as the toddler drew on
46:59 the wall, right? Really angry. So compassion in the sort of modern welfare state sense is
47:06 the simultaneous full agency and moral acuity, right? I demand the vote. I demand to have a say
47:14 in social matters because I can determine good guys from bad guys, and just say guys for politicians
47:21 or whatever, right? So people say, I demand the vote. I demand a say in public affairs or how
47:26 society runs because I can determine right from wrong, responsible from irresponsible, good from
47:34 evil, and I can see through lies, right? So that's why they say, well, I have to have the rights to
47:40 determine these things. Ah, but if you say you have this ability, then you have this ability,
47:44 and then you can't claim to be a victim in your dating life. There's a politician, I know if he's
47:49 good or bad, but the guy I had unprotected sex with, I have no idea whether he's good or bad.
47:54 Well, that's too much of a paradox for any sane brain to hang on to, right? And it really wouldn't
48:00 be possible without the power of the state, this kind of stuff, right? So I don't think that
48:07 compassion as a whole is some psyop that's set up as Nietzsche would claim by the undeserving to take
48:12 resources from the more deserving because compassion originated out of the chaos and
48:19 confusion and risk and danger, which was largely unmanageable in our evolution. Now, danger is
48:25 largely civilization is when you can manage danger. You can predict things, you can have buffers, you
48:29 get hit by a bus and you got six kids, then insurance pays off and while your wife is
48:36 certain to grieve and your children are certain to grieve, they will grieve not starve, right?
48:40 They will grieve not starve. And of course, the insurance policy in the past used to be the tribe
48:45 and society and like your community, your church or whatever, right? In the end, the falling away
48:50 of these things, increased mobility leads to the welfare state in many ways because people lose
48:54 their social ties and risks seem too great. Now, of course, and I'll just touch on this briefly,
48:59 but the same thing happens with men, right? So men, you know, they, they, the top tier,
49:07 like the attractive diet guys, you know, they'll sleep around and, and then they'll be
49:11 upset that they get a stalker or something like that, right? Some, some woman really,
49:19 really wants to be their girlfriend, you know, the over-attached staring-eyed girlfriend meme.
49:24 So some girl really wants to be the girlfriend. Some girl stalks them, some girl chases them
49:27 around. Some girl gets really angry because the guy ghosts her and then she posts rumors about
49:33 her, like bad, posts lies about him on social media. And of course, you know, the posting of
49:36 lies about people is bad, definitely wrong, but, but that is part of the risk that you take.
49:43 Knowing that there are crazy people out there, you have to adapt your behavior accordingly.
49:47 This is kind of similar to the conversation we had a week or two ago about the biker bar and
49:52 free speech and men versus women. So if you engage in risky behavior, sooner or later,
49:57 you're going to roll snake eyes and bad things are going to happen. So yeah, I think that that
50:02 quote that compassion is designed by the, you know, we have compassion for infants and infants
50:07 are not plotting to take our resources through the welfare state, right? They just absolutely
50:11 need our compassion. And again, we evolved with a lot of risk that's largely mitigated now.
50:15 And that paradox, I both can and cannot determine good from evil. I, when it comes to my personal
50:27 life, it is impossible for me to figure out who's good and evil, even to the point where I'll have
50:32 babies, right? With a guy who bails, right? I can't determine good from evil in my own life,
50:39 with my own body, when the consequences are dire, but I can totally determine good from evil
50:45 in a remote situation of political abstraction that doesn't make any particular sense at all.
50:52 So anyway, those are two out of the 10. Alrighty, well, thanks everyone for dropping by. Of course,
50:56 you know, boy, I feel incredibly honored to have these conversations. I feel incredibly
51:02 honored to have the liberty and the reach to be able to, I think, hopefully provide some of this
51:06 useful wisdom to the world. And thank you everyone so much for your support and donations
51:10 over the years. It is why I can do what I do. And I hope that you will check out as donors
51:15 the next chapter in the Peaceful Parenting book. Thanks about everyone. Have yourself
51:19 a wonderful afternoon. Take care. Bye.