- 3 months ago
In this Flash X Space from 30 October 2025, philosopher Stefan Molyneux recounts his challenging childhood marked by neglect and systemic failures in welfare systems. He highlights the lack of support from social services and educators, arguing these institutions often exacerbate dependency. Engaging with callers, Molyneux calls for societal reflection on indifference and urges listeners to advocate for meaningful change to combat cycles of neglect.
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LearningTranscript
00:00:00All right. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
00:00:04Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
00:00:08We'd greatly appreciate it. And going to have a wee bit of a ramble.
00:00:12Happy to take questions in a few, but I'm going to have a wee bit of a ramble.
00:00:20I posted some time ago, somebody said that my mother was in prison on X, and I said,
00:00:24no, she wasn't in prison. She was institutionalized for a time.
00:00:26And I would go visit her. And, you know, one of the things that was sort of a turning point for me
00:00:35in sort of my evolution of thought, you know, when you come to realizations that are very
00:00:42different, or in fact, sometimes really the opposite of what society generally believes,
00:00:48you have to kind of check and make sure you're not just, I have to, I shouldn't say for you,
00:00:52I have to check and make sure. It's not just some sort of psychological reaction formation.
00:00:58So I kind of hated the welfare state. I grew up in a very poor neighborhood among welfare people.
00:01:06And this is in England and in Canada. That's sort of the two major places that I lived.
00:01:13I lived in England. I was born in Ireland, but grew up in England until I was 11. And then we moved to
00:01:18Canada, or I was moved to Canada, sort of like a sack of potatoes has moved around. And so I have
00:01:24sort of two continent experience among the poor for many, many years. And I mean, that teaches you
00:01:31some things. And one of the things that was wild to me was my mother was institutionalized. I'm not
00:01:39sure of the circumstances. I assumed that she went to her doctor and was speaking either aggressively
00:01:45or incoherently or both. Not to the point of accusing Peter Thiel and Sam Altman and Elon Musk
00:01:53of being lizard people, but I assume somewhat incoherently. And then I suppose the doctor
00:01:58tried to talk her down. It didn't work. So she ended up being institutionalized. And I just was,
00:02:04I wasn't really sure where she was. And I think finally, I got a call. Your mom's here. And I
00:02:11remembered the location and I would go down to visit her. I would go down to visit her.
00:02:15I remember I went down to visit her, visiting hours, and she was unavailable. And so there
00:02:23was a woman there. We ended up playing ping pong while I waited. I guess I was 12 or 13. And
00:02:31I remember the woman when I sort of tried to win in a way or tried, you know, I wouldn't say I was
00:02:38aggressive, but you know, I'm not averse to winning. So, you know, and eventually, it actually wasn't even
00:02:44that long, about 10 or 15 minutes into the ping pong game. She had to stop because she felt that
00:02:50she couldn't handle the competitive aspect of the game. And she was, you know, fairly nice about it
00:02:55and apologized. But I just remember that very vividly. I can't, I can't do this game. It's too
00:02:59stressful. And she had to stop playing. And I honestly don't remember how long my mom was,
00:03:06was in for, it was quite, quite some time, not years for sure, but not days. And I just,
00:03:14looking back on it, at the time, you know, you're just, you're just trying to survive,
00:03:18right? I was working two jobs when I was 13 and 14, and you're just trying to, trying to survive.
00:03:25And sort of later on thinking about it, though, I'm like, okay, so this was my doctor too.
00:03:30It's a whole sort of welfare state, whole sort of family system that's supposed to help kids. And
00:03:36I mean, obviously, they knew that my mother had children. There was a whole intake and my doctor
00:03:42knew. And the mental health facility, let's call it, knew. And they certainly knew because I came to
00:03:49visit alone. And no one did anything. No one did anything. Nobody said, hey, how are you guys paying
00:03:58your bills? We know there's no father in the picture. Like, what's happening with you guys?
00:04:02You think you're just kids, right? And that's a wild thing when you sort of think about it. I mean,
00:04:08I can understand how people, you know, you live in the Appalachian woods, and you kind of get,
00:04:14you fall through the cracks, because like, nobody knows. But like, I'm right, I'm right deep in the
00:04:18heart of the system, right? The system which we pay ungodly amounts of taxes for. And it doesn't,
00:04:26it doesn't do anything. You know, I was sort of wrapped in this system, right? I mean,
00:04:31there was the direct health care, the doctors, they knew everything. There was the mental health
00:04:36care, the professionals at this institution, and they knew everything, the whole system,
00:04:41social workers, cases, case studies. Anyway, so nobody, right? And you could say the teachers,
00:04:48well, of course, the teachers didn't know anything in particular. But the teachers could see very
00:04:54clearly, and I could see this right among the kids. I don't know if you saw this when you were
00:04:58a kid, but you know the kids who are having a tough time at home, right? They're shy, their eyes
00:05:03are downcast. They have, I mean, I remember I had, I went to school with, we used to buy clothes by the
00:05:12pound, like you go down to Sally Ann, and you put the, you put the clothes on the waistcoats,
00:05:17buy clothes by the pound. So it was all trash. Some of it was stained. I remember having to go
00:05:22on, I go to school with clothes that had holes in it. You know, you, you lack some of the basic
00:05:29amenities, right? Deodorant, your soap is terrible. Sometimes you don't even have soap.
00:05:37And so, of course, what society does, in general, is they look at the kids who are having a tough time
00:05:44at home, and they say, that's the kid's fault. If the kid is tired, because he can't sleep,
00:05:51because he's got some crazy person in the house, or if the kid doesn't do his homework, because he
00:05:56has one or two jobs to help pay the bills, if the kid is too skinny, because they're hungry,
00:06:03or they may be overweight if there's just terrible food in the house. Because, you know, your body needs
00:06:09nutrients, right? And if you're eating bad food, like junk food, garbage food, your body says,
00:06:15eat more, because I'm not getting the nutrients. And what society does is it looks at the kids
00:06:22who are, you know, the pig pants, right? The sort of smelly kids, the loser kids, so to speak, the
00:06:28hyper shy kids, the kids who can't make eye contact, the kids who are tired, the kids who don't do the
00:06:33homework. And what they do is they say, well, you're just not doing the right thing. You're just not
00:06:39making the right decisions. I mean, it is very much like one athlete gets the best training and
00:06:46nutrition and exercise and runs a race, and another kid has to carry a fucking anvil. And
00:06:53everybody's sort of yelling at the kid, but the anvil, why are you running so slow? Run faster,
00:07:00you lazy son of a gun. Work like this guy worked, and look how fast he runs. At which point,
00:07:06it's perfectly understandable, though, of course, not morally acceptable for the children to have a
00:07:10strong urge to hurl the anvil into the audience, like bowling for hypocrites.
00:07:16So, yeah, surrounded by, you know, and I wrote a poem in my teens about how it's one thing to be
00:07:23taken by a lion if you're wandering alone in the woods, like in the jungle, like an idiot,
00:07:27right? Be taken by a lion. It's quite another thing to be taken by a lion at a bus stop with a
00:07:33whole bunch of people around you. Back then, it was reading their newspapers. Now, it'd be
00:07:36scrolling your phones. Like, you think of the society, right? And I don't know if you've been
00:07:41through this. I don't think I was just unlucky, because I've certainly talked to a lot of people.
00:07:44Of course, it's a self-selecting group who call into what it is that I do. I don't know if I was
00:07:48just unlucky. I don't think so. But as I wrote on X, like society is divided between those who
00:07:54imagine the benevolence of status systems and those who've actually experienced what happens.
00:07:58Because I think of the number of people around, you know, when I was sort of falling through this
00:08:03hole in society, like falling forever. I mean, doctors, teachers, neighbors, friends, parents,
00:08:12the mental health professionals at the institution where my mother was. I mean, I had relatives in
00:08:20Canada, not many, I think only one. And he was fairly far away. But I mean, we were still in
00:08:28contact with my relatives from England. So it was, I just saw over the course of my childhood,
00:08:34conservatively, between 100 and 200 people had reason to believe or direct evidence of
00:08:43a catastrophic failure of a household. A catastrophic failure of a household. And
00:08:53I remember one friend of mine's father, who was a doctor, sat me down and told me about deodorant.
00:09:01Not the most fun conversation I've ever had, but necessary. And I'm glad he did. Because,
00:09:06you know, when you're a kid, you don't really, but you know, you hit a teenager years,
00:09:09you get all kinds of funky, right? But, and he said, you know, you got to get some deodorant,
00:09:13blah, blah, blah, blah. And, but he didn't say, why don't you have any? He didn't say,
00:09:18what's going on at home? I mean, this is a, this is a family. I used to go over to my friend's
00:09:24house after school. And he had a chalkboard in the basement. And I drew zombie heads on the chalkboard.
00:09:32Like, you could see the teeth through holes in the cheeks, eyes hanging out, tufts of hair,
00:09:39you know, like eyes hanging on storks. And there's nothing like people don't want to get involved.
00:09:49People don't want to get involved. Even the professionals who are paid to get involved,
00:09:53where it is their job to take care of children when a mother, as was the case with my mother,
00:09:59when my mother is incapacitated from mental dysfunction to the point where, again, I don't
00:10:06imagine it was voluntary that she went into the institution. And nobody cares. Nobody says
00:10:16anything. Nobody intervenes. Nobody asks questions. Now, I guess I could say in some platonic way or
00:10:24some platonic sense, you could say, well, but people care in the abstract, or you don't know their
00:10:28secret thoughts. It's like, I don't. Of course, I don't know. I mean, by definition, I wouldn't know
00:10:32people's secret thoughts. But I'm an empiricist. And as an empiricist, what do I do? Well, as an
00:10:39empiricist, all I can do is judge people by their actions. Now, that's sort of the basic reality of
00:10:49society that is. That is the basic, like, let's not kill ourselves. Let's not fool ourselves. Let's not
00:10:57lose sight of what the facts are. Let's not avert our eyes to stare this squarely in the face.
00:11:05Is it impossible? No. I have a number of times over the course of my adult life, even before
00:11:11I got into public life, if I saw a child being mistreated, I'd walk up and say what needed to be
00:11:18said. I mean, I was obviously kind of gentle. I said, listen, you don't really want to be parenting
00:11:22this way. This isn't the right way. There's lots of alternatives, and so on. I remember being in a
00:11:27parking lot. Some guy was dreaming at his kids in the car. And I walked up to him. And I was like,
00:11:32bro, I'm sure you didn't dream of being a dad like this. I'm sure that this is not what you
00:11:37wanted. This is not what you envisioned. But the kids, but the kids, I understand that. They are just
00:11:41kids. And you can't complain about their lack of self-control if you're screaming at them,
00:11:45because you're out of control. And in general, with only one or two exceptions, it has been
00:11:51a positive thing. I don't know. Of course, of course, you can't go up and humiliate an abusive
00:11:55parent because then they'll just take it out on their kids later. But you can go up reasonably and
00:11:59peacefully and so on and do that. And of course, my mother was so unstable that I was mistreated
00:12:05in public. It wasn't just in private. I mean, I remember once we were at a pizza hut and I suggested
00:12:13that she get a book on stress to deal with stress. And she threw a picture of pop at me.
00:12:22And of course, everybody just kind of backs away and you're left completely alone to deal with it.
00:12:26And that was when I was maybe, I think this is before the institution. So I believe in about 12.
00:12:34Because, you know, and I said, hey, you know, you've got real issues, real medical issues. I didn't
00:12:38really believe that, but that was her sort of story. But, you know, you can maybe read a book or two on
00:12:42have a handle stress, right? So trying to give my mother any responsibility resulted in wild levels
00:12:48of aggression. And these are just the facts of the world. These are just the facts of the world.
00:12:57And if you've got between one and 200 people in two different countries who know or have significant
00:13:05indications of what's going on and nobody says anything, nobody lifts a finger, but instead they
00:13:10just blame you. I mean, I just got blamed, right? That's what my teachers used to say. If effort
00:13:14matched ability, you'd be an A+. When I was taking summer school, because I was desperate to get out
00:13:19of school early, at that point, I was working three jobs and taking summer school. I was tired.
00:13:26And this was after my mother was no longer living with us. And the teacher was a bit of a droner. I sat
00:13:33in the back and occasionally I put my head down on the desk. I was just tired, you know,
00:13:36to get up early and push yourself. And then when I went up to give a presentation, the teacher
00:13:42screamed at everyone to put their heads down on the desk and to completely ignore my presentation.
00:13:46And then he turned to me and yelled, how do you feel about it? Huh? How do you feel about it?
00:13:51That's rude. And just yelled at me and screamed at me. And it's like, hey, I mean, I get where he's
00:13:55coming from, but there's no curiosity. There's certainly no sympathy. He doesn't sort of sit to me
00:14:01after class and he says, man, you seem really tired. Is everything okay? Like what's going on in your life,
00:14:06right? Say, well, I've been paying my own bills since I was 15. And yeah, it's pretty fucking
00:14:11tiring. It's pretty tiring. So that look, that's just the reality. That's not made up. That's a
00:14:20fact. And of course, if you look at your own life, and I'm not perfect this way, so I'm not
00:14:25finger wagging from any guru position of moral superiority here. But if you look at your own
00:14:30life and you look at your own history, there were the quote, weirdo kids, there were the
00:14:35tired kids. There were the kids who did a lot of drugs. There were the kids who couldn't make eye
00:14:40contact. There were the kids who smelled. There were the kids who had bad clothing. And what did you do
00:14:45in your mind, in your mind about those kids? Losers, weirdos, freaks, geeks, nerds. I guess now it's
00:14:55like Asperger's autistic or whatever, right? But nobody wants to ask the questions or the basic
00:15:02question, hey, what's going on at home? My mother had this very loud, clacky, clacky electric
00:15:08typewriter. And she was constantly involved in various activities, which I won't get into here,
00:15:14which required a lot of typing. And she'd be chain smoking in my room at night, because that's where
00:15:20the... Because I also did some writing using the typewriter. I wrote short stories. And she'd be in
00:15:27my room at night, and she'd be chain smoking and typing away. And it was literally like trying to
00:15:33sleep with the sounds of a World War trench with sort of the clatter of small arms fire
00:15:37spraying over your head as you're sucking down yet more carcinogenic nicotine from the atmosphere.
00:15:43So it's tiring. I can't get much sleep. I can't get up and go elsewhere because she'll get angry.
00:15:48I can't ask her to get to move to a different room and type there because she'll get angry.
00:15:53And, you know, my mother's anger wasn't just mild irritation, as you can imagine.
00:15:56So, like, that is the reality of the world. And absolutely zero people can convince me otherwise.
00:16:04So the funny thing is, of course, when people talk about their sympathy,
00:16:09oh, but the poor, we have so much sympathy, we've got to help the poor. It's like,
00:16:12nobody does that. Nobody actually does that. Now, I understand the argument, and I'll address it
00:16:19here. It's a good argument, which says, bro, you were a kid in the Jurassic Park period, you old
00:16:24semi-boomer dude. I get that. Hey, we're talking about the 70s, man. That's 50 years ago. Things
00:16:34have changed. Now? Uh, no. No, no, they haven't. No, because now kids just get drugged. And also,
00:16:44I have not kept anything secret about my history because I want to give you guys a sense of sort
00:16:50of where I'm coming from. You can put my thoughts in context. And the reason I talk about my
00:16:55childhood is, A, it's nothing to be ashamed of. B, I'm actually quite proud of everything I've
00:16:59overcome. And C, you need to know my history so you can evaluate me for potential bias.
00:17:06Right? That's really, really important. Conflict of interest, right? Do I have a, you know,
00:17:11if I was writing about some, uh, if I was, uh, writing about something that I had sort of
00:17:16some personal experience with and so on, you need to know my personal experience so you can judge
00:17:20my objectivity. So, I've talked about this from the very beginning, you know, where it's,
00:17:28but I think at least it's relevant and important. And so, everybody knows how difficult my childhood
00:17:34was. It wasn't the worst childhood in the world, but it certainly was very difficult.
00:17:38Now, if you go and read, uh, mainstream media reporting on me or whatever, right? Uh, is there
00:17:46any sympathy? Right? And nothing has changed, right? In fact, arguably, it's gotten worse because
00:17:53criminals, literal criminals that the media sympathize with, their criminal actions are
00:17:59explained away with regards to environment. However, my scientific, philosophical, rational,
00:18:05and empirical arguments, I get zero sympathy and in fact, further attacks and abuse. I'm treated worse
00:18:13than a leftist murderer. So, I mean, nothing has really changed. The, the harshness is still,
00:18:20is still there, right? And again, just facts. So, if you've seen society's rank selfish coldness
00:18:32towards child suffering, and you know, if you're, if my words are striking chords of history and pain
00:18:39within you, I, I wish I'd give you a big hug. Uh, you know, we are bands of brothers and sisters
00:18:45who survived a coldness, a neglect, and a violence that society wallpapers over with judgment and
00:18:54often condemnation. Like the kid who's abused at home, then gets bullied at school, people pile
00:19:00down to the bully. So, if you have some resonance with what it is that I'm talking about, I just
00:19:06wanted to extend my very deepest and most heartfelt sympathies about this. But see, when society then
00:19:13says, we care so much about X, right? It's just not true. It's just not true. Honestly, I view society
00:19:22as if I were the, the son of a preacher, and I regularly saw him having affairs. And then I saw
00:19:32him preaching about monogamy and fidelity and keeping your marriage vows from the pulpit. It would
00:19:40be kind of stomach turning, kind of skin crawling. And that, that's not even the half of it. It's not
00:19:45even a 10% of it because that's all consenting adults, or I guess the woman who's being cheated on
00:19:50is not consenting. But seeing that level of hypocrisy in your father would be stomach turning. It would
00:19:57be like if you had a father who wrote a whole book on how to be a good parent, and then screamed at
00:20:04and abused you in private. And then you would see him out there giving all of these speeches about how
00:20:11to be a peaceful, reasonable, calm, collected, and effective parent, and then came home and beat you,
00:20:18screamed at you. It would be alienating, right? It would be stomach turning. And the fact that he
00:20:26is preaching all of this virtue while committing the most horrendous vices privately, it would make
00:20:34you feel like either you're insane or society is insane. Like that's, that's really the only
00:20:38options that you have. Either you're insane or society is insane. Either you're crazy or society
00:20:44is corrupt beyond words. So, I mean, this, I guess, was it 10 years ago or so that the picture of the
00:20:53three-year-old Turkish boy on the beach, I think that they moved his body to get a more effective
00:20:57shot. And of course, all of the, largely all of the women in Europe were crying and, oh my gosh,
00:21:05the poor boy, the poor kid, the poor this, the poor that. And I know for an absolute fact that every
00:21:10single one of those women is completely ignoring obvious signs of child abuse within their family,
00:21:15community, environment, society, absolutely ignoring it. You know, like one in three girls
00:21:22get sexually abused as a child, one in five boys, right? The staggering numbers. You got a hundred
00:21:31people in a room, 30 of them were molested as children if they're women, and 20 of them if they're
00:21:36boys. And I, I think the number is higher, but let's just go with the bare minimum. That's going
00:21:42on, on your block, maybe in your house, in your neighborhood, in your school, in your church,
00:21:47in your community, among extended family, and everybody's ignoring it for the most part.
00:21:53And then they pretend to cry over some kid on a distant beat who was endangered by his own father
00:22:00getting onto an overloaded boat in a storm because he wanted to get some dental care for free
00:22:05in another country. They're all crocodile tears. They're all, it's all political, and they're all
00:22:11crocodile tears. They say, oh, you know, but the, the, the, the people who were in America illegally,
00:22:17who were getting deported, their children are sad. But if you've actually been a sad child in society,
00:22:23a legal sad child in a legal family in a society, if you've been a harmed, broken, and abused child
00:22:31in society, everybody just steps over your body on their way to a movie. So then when you see people,
00:22:38oh, the children in zip ties, and oh, they're separated, and blah, blah, blah, it's like,
00:22:43that, that, like, you know, they don't care. Because if you don't care about that, which is
00:22:47close to you, and you have some power over, it's all crocodile political tears. When it's someone
00:22:52distant, you don't even know, right? That's the in-map and out-map, the sort of heat map,
00:22:56and so on, right? So, I mean, just so you know where I'm coming from, when people say we have
00:23:02a welfare state because we care about the poor, we care about the underprivileged, we care about
00:23:06those excluded from society, it's like, no, no, you don't. You don't. You don't. Don't, like,
00:23:11don't even try. Don't, like, don't even try with me. And I want to, like, raise the Titanic and bring
00:23:18this sort of up to your consciousness as a whole. Like, don't, don't, don't try. Don't, please.
00:23:23Like, whatever you do, right? Like, the girlfriend you know for a fact is cheating on you with five
00:23:28guys, starting to lecture you about loyalty. It's like, please don't, don't, don't try. You're
00:23:33embarrassing yourself. Like, please. Let's not go through this charade. Let's not go through this
00:23:38rigmarole. Let's not pretend that there's anything real going on here at all. At all. And that's my
00:23:47view of society. And that's not just a subjective opinion. That's what is.
00:23:53That's what is. People don't care. And, but they can pretend to care for political reasons.
00:24:01I mean, in, in America, the census counts for your district representation. And so the more people,
00:24:08and they don't discount, um, illegals in America. So it's just political, right? So everyone just
00:24:16pretends to care about the kids when it suits political purposes, but none of it's real.
00:24:20Right? It's like your preacher father who wants to get his donations. So pretends to care about
00:24:26Christianity while attempting to have sex with everything not nailed down and a couple of things
00:24:32that are nailed down. It's just money. It's just resources. It's just sophistry. It's just fake.
00:24:38And when you know this about society, when you've lifted this horrifying veil and seeing people's
00:24:45stone cold indifference to how children are treated and they don't care, people don't care.
00:24:52Like honestly, over the course of my entire childhood, over the course of my entire childhood,
00:24:56it would have taken just one call to get me rescued. Now I understand you say, ah, yes,
00:25:04well, you know, but the government agencies that protect children, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Okay.
00:25:08I mean, let's say that that's not great. It's not ideal, whatever. But I would have been taken
00:25:13out of that environment and placed with family members. I really liked, I won't sort of get into
00:25:19details, but there were family members in England that I've really liked and I'd spent summers with
00:25:25them and we all got along well and, and so on. So they would have put me with family members.
00:25:30I liked. And I'm sure they would have, right? And this is interesting too, right? Because
00:25:35these family members also knew that there were significant issues. They knew, they knew and did
00:25:43nothing. And listen, I look, I'm not saying they had to do something. Of course, right? I'm not saying
00:25:49they had to do something, but the fact that they chose not to while being themselves very devout
00:25:58Christians. Oof, my mother's not religious. And so I was being raised by a godless crazy woman
00:26:07and they knew this and did nothing. And again, that's fine. I don't think it's ideal, but it's
00:26:16fine. But then don't expect me to think that society cares about the quote underprivileged
00:26:23at all. You don't. It's political. It's nonsense. So when I see people, you know, crying because of
00:26:32this or that or the other, the kids are, the kids are hungry. It's like, but you don't care.
00:26:39Because if you cared, you would feed the kids in your neighborhood. You'd get a food drive if you
00:26:43cared, right? They don't care. People don't care. And I'm not trying to black pill you, right? There are
00:26:50certain people who do care and they're a rare minority and you want to find those people and
00:26:54hold them close to your heart and do everything you can to keep them in your life and provide value
00:26:59to them as they provide value to you and have good relationships with those people. Yeah, fantastic.
00:27:05There are people who care. There are people who care. But the people loudly proclaiming they care,
00:27:11well, fundamentally dealing with political matters, they don't care. They don't care.
00:27:16They're just like, actors come from faking compassion and faking knowledge, right? Acting
00:27:21is a pretty vile profession in many ways because it comes out of a con, comes out of sophistry.
00:27:28And it's a grim fact. It's a grim fact, but in order to not be manipulated,
00:27:35you really have to see the world for what it is. Because if people can get you to buy into a lie,
00:27:41they could rule your heart, mind, and soul. Does society care about the suffering of children?
00:27:48No. Particularly boys, and of course, particularly white boys, they don't care.
00:27:53If they did, they would reform schools. They would work their best to fix families.
00:28:00There would be no unfunded liabilities or national debt because they wouldn't do that to their children,
00:28:05right? You wouldn't want your kid to be born into a million plus dollars worth of debt and unfunded
00:28:10liabilities because that's slavery. That's slavery. It's slavery where you get to choose your own job,
00:28:15but it's still slavery. Most people make about a million dollars over the course of their life,
00:28:18and they're born into more than that and debt just by exiting the birth canal. And if society doesn't
00:28:24care about its children, then why would I believe society cares about anything? Now, I don't think
00:28:29that's the natural human condition. I think that people are actually quite caring, but you need freedom
00:28:34to do that. There's a drug called advocating for politics that people take in order to feel good
00:28:40rather than do the difficult and challenging work of actually getting involved in their communities and
00:28:45so on, right? I mean, society is so hostile to children that when I say to adult children,
00:28:53you don't actually have to spend time with relentlessly abusive parents or people, including
00:28:57parents. I'm called a cult leader and a terrible guy, right? All of that.
00:29:04So not only does society not care about children, it actually attacks anybody who stands up for
00:29:11children. Adult children, of course, in my case. That's just a fact. It's inelusible. It is a
00:29:20unerasable core. I believe in this as I believe in gravity because it has been a constant pattern
00:29:28over the course of my near 60 years. And this all came out of, and I'll keep it brief here, and of course,
00:29:34if anybody has questions, comments, stories to share, criticisms, pushback, it's all welcome.
00:29:41But there was a lovely young lady who calls into the show from time to time, and she asks me,
00:29:48did I go and visit my mother voluntarily? And did therapy help me deal with the guilt
00:29:56of not seeing her? I think she said of when you decided not to check in with her from time to time.
00:30:01She put it very nicely, and she's a very thoughtful young lady, and I appreciate that. Yeah, I did.
00:30:07I mean, nobody could compel me to go because there were no adults around. Like, just understand that.
00:30:12Society abandoned me at the age of 13 or so with no parent. All these social services, nothing kicked
00:30:22in, even though the doctor, the caseworker, the mental health professionals, the psychologist,
00:30:27the psychiatrist, the intake, right, knew everything. Nobody did anything. Fact. Fact. So, no, I went to
00:30:35visit her on my own. Now, with regards to the guilt, I have learned more and more about my history going
00:30:45forward in life, as tends to be the case, right? I knew that my mother was in the war. I didn't know
00:30:51the mass rape of German females, and I assume some males, by the Red Army in particular, after the war.
00:31:01I didn't know that. She did mention having to snuggle up with a Russian tank commander so that he
00:31:05wouldn't destroy the whole village. I don't know what snuggle up meant, but I can imagine.
00:31:10Probably wasn't just post-war cuddles. So, it is, I sort of, and the other question was, like,
00:31:18why did we leave Canada? Sorry, my apologies. Why did we leave England and come to Canada?
00:31:23Was a sort of question for me. And I sort of maybe thought it's because I was getting old enough to
00:31:28talk about the abuse or something like that. But it also may have something to do, the sort of
00:31:33rape gangs have been operating in England since the 1950s. And maybe my mom heard some stories and
00:31:39afraid of, afraid for her children, she got us out. Which is good. But I didn't know any of that,
00:31:48of course, at the age of 11. So, I don't know the answer. I never will. But I'm certainly more towards,
00:31:55leaning more towards the idea that my mother was so brutally treated in the war and after the war,
00:32:01that she really had no chance to develop any kind of stability or mental health. And I certainly
00:32:07think that's more than possible. It's one thing. I grew up in an unstable home environment in a fairly
00:32:14stable society, but she grew up in an unstable home environment and a world being bombed from end
00:32:20to end and then invading Arby's, raping everything that moved. That's a whole different world of pain,
00:32:27of trauma, of suffering. And she suffered this as a child, not even as a fully formed adult.
00:32:34So, and I wrote a whole novel about this called Almost. You should really check it out. It's a great book.
00:32:41freedomain.com slash books. It's free. But the way that I sort of look at it now, I'm not saying this is a
00:32:48final destination, but it may be useful for you. I look at the world as a big, giant machine that
00:32:57grinds up people for profit. And I'm talking in particular war and in particular, the sort of 30
00:33:04year civil war that characterizes the first and second world war in Europe. The world, the machinery
00:33:10of the world was far too big and powerful for my poor little family. It's like some horrible,
00:33:17I've always been particularly horrified by industrial accidents, you know, like people
00:33:21getting caught and pulled into machinery and so on. And the world is a big, giant machine
00:33:28of disassembling people for profit. And I'm not talking about the world and its nature. And I'm
00:33:32not talking about human nature. I'm talking about the statist structures that exist. You know,
00:33:37slave based societies are there to turn captive humans into scant profit and uses massive violence to
00:33:45achieve and maintain that end. The world is a big, giant, blood-soaked machine. And my family
00:33:53got caught in it, pulled through it, and came out as disassembled chunks of endless trauma.
00:34:03It destroyed minds, bodies, and souls in equal measure. And the callous, cold-blooded semi-reptiles
00:34:10who run the planet either enjoy the spectacle or don't mind it or profit from it. I don't really
00:34:15know or care to imagine their motives. But my family, on both the British side and the German
00:34:21side, my family got forced into, caught up in, tangled within this machinery, which smashed them
00:34:31up, tore them apart, disassembled them, and spat them out as half alive at best. I look at the
00:34:39decisions that my parents made, less as individual decisions made in a state of free will, and more
00:34:47along the lines of a little rabbit sprinting through the grass chased by a wolf or a fox.
00:34:56The little rabbit is frantically running to the left or to the right, looking for any scrap of cover,
00:35:04a hollowed-out log, a bush it can hide under, desperately seeking its warren, its hole in the
00:35:10ground. Is the rabbit choosing to run? No. The rabbit is being hunted. Is the rabbit choosing
00:35:17to run left or right? No. The rabbit is just dodging the snarling, dripping, chomping jaws
00:35:24that is going to make its eyeballs pop when it crunches on its back. I'm not even particularly
00:35:30sure anymore that my parents made choices, other than, can I remotely survive this machinery?
00:35:38The machinery of war, of debt, of forcible transfer, of wealth, of indoctrination, of the
00:35:46capture of children, of the lies, and the self-hatred inculcated in the souls of those formerly free?
00:35:53Did my parents choose anything? Or were they just caught in machinery, or being chased by
00:36:00a predator? Being caught in machinery is more like, certainly my mother as a child, in Germany,
00:36:08in the war. My male relatives, on both sides, drafted. I mean, the machinery came out with
00:36:16spindly, well-armed hands and dragged them into itself by force. They didn't get caught in,
00:36:22they didn't slip into, they didn't forget to wear their hairnet, or were careless with their
00:36:26fingers. They were grabbed and thrown into the machinery. And then, all you can do is survive.
00:36:33All you can do is try to survive. Right? The machinery of the world ate my family. The machinery
00:36:44of sociopathic violence, subjugation. And when I say debt, I know that sounds like, oh, well,
00:36:49it's just debt. It's like, but no, but the debt pays for the machinery. The debt pays for war,
00:36:53fiat currency fuels and funds for war. World War I would have been over in a tiny percentage of the
00:37:00time, if the governments hadn't been able to borrow and print money. Turning pretend paper
00:37:07into genuine gravestones is the mission of the languidly violent who run wars. The people too lazy
00:37:15and cowardly to fight themselves, but they simply lend money and point at maps.
00:37:20So, with regards to guilt, and it was a great question that this woman asked, with regards
00:37:27to guilt I have in not checking up on my mother, I think about her at least once a month, sometimes
00:37:33more, and sometimes she will still show up in dreams, though I have not seen her for well
00:37:38over 25 years. But I don't feel guilt, because I certainly did not make the machinery that disassembled
00:37:49my family. I have fought ferociously, desperately, haggardly sometimes. For well over 40 years,
00:37:59I have fought the machinery. The machinery fundamentally exists in the mind before it exists
00:38:04in the world. Belief in the moral legitimacy of violence is the foundational aspect of it,
00:38:11whether it's spanking or war or welfare. I have fought against the machinery in the mind that
00:38:20produces the real disassembled humans in reality. I fought against that with every arrow in my arson.
00:38:28I have fought against it verbally, personally, remotely, through speeches, through novels, through poems,
00:38:34through plays, through podcasts, through books, through articles, through conversations. I have
00:38:41fought this machinery with everything that I have. And my mother was, to a large degree,
00:38:50a victim of this machinery. She was a psychological victim. Other members of my family, of course,
00:38:57particularly the males, were physical victims of the machinery. The number of males in my bloodline
00:39:03who were slaughtered in World War I would stagger your imagination. It was like an endless looped
00:39:11Saving Private Ryan in my family tree. The homage that I have to the brokenness of my mother
00:39:19is to go to the edges of my ability and possibilities, fighting the machinery that tore her apart.
00:39:28The machinery of legitimized and moral violence. I cannot fix her. I cannot reason with her.
00:39:38And I've tried, honestly. I mean, so honestly, it's like you don't have to believe me because I used
00:39:43the magic word honestly, but I have. As you say, even as I said, even when I was a kid, I was trying to
00:39:48get her to get some basic elemental self-management going in her mind. I cannot fix her, but I can
00:39:57avenge her. I can avenge her. And my vengeance is taking square intellectual aim at the machinery
00:40:05that tore her apart. She was anti-rational, mystical, subjectivist, and resisted self-knowledge.
00:40:14If there was even a self left to acknowledge, I don't know. I doubt it. The observing ego, the third
00:40:21eye, the part of you that can look at yourself and assess your actions and behaviors relative to any
00:40:26kind of external standard, that's often the first to go when people lose their minds. So guilt? No,
00:40:32I did not destroy my mother. The machinery of man's minds destroyed my mother. The belief in the
00:40:40legitimacy of political violence, everything from debt to, quote, education, to war, to welfare,
00:40:48to the rampant vote buying that passes as pretend altruism, to the creation, fostering and festering
00:40:54of a dependent underclass that will consistently vote for more and more government because they have
00:41:00less and less value in the market. I can fight that machinery of the mind. I would certainly feel guilt
00:41:08if I could do something to help. But to me, it's like if you're out on a hike and your friend has a
00:41:18sudden acute appendicitis attack and he either dies or is horribly disabled and people say to you,
00:41:27well, aren't you guilty that you didn't help him? It's like, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a surgeon.
00:41:31There was no surgical equipment. What am I supposed to use? My phone case and a tree branch to fix his
00:41:37appendicitis? No. I didn't break her and I can't fix her. And I've tried. I mean, you try. You try
00:41:45these things, right? You try to find, because you want to have an honorable exit strategy. You earn your
00:41:50way out of negative relationships by trying your very best to fix and help. But I couldn't.
00:41:58And the way that I view it in my mind, and I'm obviously genuinely, deeply, humbly, and perfectly
00:42:04happy to be corrected in any and all of this. These are just my thoughts. This is not some sort
00:42:08of logistical proof. But the way I view it is this. I'm scouting with a friend of mine. Let's call him
00:42:17Bob. It's a wartime and I'm scouting. I'm trying to figure out the location of the enemy, right?
00:42:22And we see avenues of tanks, thousands of soldiers marching towards us. We're on a hill. We see down
00:42:32in the valley a big river of weaponry and soldiering flowing through towards our army.
00:42:40And it's our job to go back and warn people so that they can act decisively to either avoid
00:42:47or confront the danger, but certainly not be taken by surprise by it. And as we turn to
00:42:55bring news of the oncoming army, hostiles to our army, Bob gets shot. Maybe somebody saw
00:43:03the glint, the glint of sunlight off his gun barrel. Maybe they were just cleaning their gun.
00:43:08It went off and accidentally hit it. Who knows? But he got shot. And he's not going to make it.
00:43:15And if I try to help him, I cannot warn my compatriots, my fellow soldiers of the oncoming
00:43:23army. What do you do? Do you stay with Bob who you cannot save, thus causing countless more deaths
00:43:31as the unsuspected army crashes into your army? And let's assume that your army has a just and noble
00:43:38cause. And let's assume that the people in the army are your friends and companions, that it's
00:43:43not a red versus blue soccer nonsense, but there's good and evil. You're the good guys, they're the bad
00:43:49guys. And Bob has been shot. And he's gasping and he's coughing up blood. And he begs you to stay.
00:43:56What do you do? What can you do? Let's raise the stakes and say that Bob is your brother.
00:44:02Do you stay with your brother and comfort him while he dies? Thus directly causing thousands of death
00:44:11death? Because you have not prepared your army? Do you pry Bob's hands from your uniform, kiss his
00:44:18sweaty, bloody, shaking forehead, wish him the very best, pray for him, and run to warn your good guy
00:44:26army? And then people might say to you, I mean, you really only have one choice. I mean, obviously you
00:44:33can choose. But there really is only one choice. And that choice is, of course, of course, to
00:44:40leave Bob behind, because he cannot be saved, to leave Bob behind and to save your army, your other
00:44:50friends, your civilization, your moral cause, by warning them of the approaching orcs. And then
00:44:57if people say, didn't you feel guilty for leaving Bob behind? It's like, no, I didn't start the war. I
00:45:04didn't shoot Bob. I couldn't save him. I'm not going to fall prey to manufactured guilt. And I'm
00:45:10not, obviously, I'm not saying that this is a perfectly legitimate question. Perfectly legitimate
00:45:15question. But I don't feel guilt for what others did. I don't feel, I feel guilt for my choices. If I
00:45:23choose something wrong, choose something bad, choose something that hurts people without any sort of
00:45:29higher purpose. Sure. I mean, yes, absolutely. I mean, if I get something wrong on the show, I apologize,
00:45:34I feel bad, and I want to correct it. And yeah, so absolutely, that's a very real phenomenon. And
00:45:40I accept guilt, shame, feeling bad for things that I have chosen to do. I didn't start the war.
00:45:48I didn't shoot Bob. I can't save him. I regret that it all happened. But as far as feeling guilt,
00:45:56no. I'm just trying to survive within the machinery of war that was set in motion by the orcs.
00:46:01I didn't start the Second World War. I didn't bomb Dresden to kill my grandmother. I was not part of
00:46:09the Red Army. And I'm sure it happened in the East as well. Rampaging, torturing, raping, and killing
00:46:16its way across Germany. I had no power or authority or control over my mother. And I never have over the
00:46:23course of my life because of the welfare state. The welfare state pays my money to my mother without
00:46:29requiring anything from her. If I was paying my mother's, and I certainly have given my mother
00:46:34money over the decades, quite a bit actually. But if my mother was dependent upon me for her income,
00:46:41then I could actually have some requirements. That she eat better, that she exercise, that she
00:46:47maybe get some therapy or something like that, right? I would have some authority. But I don't because
00:46:52she gets my money without my say-so. So she doesn't ever have to listen to anyone. It's really,
00:46:56it's a cruel, horrible system. Horrible. You know, the people who were the mental health
00:47:02professionals who had direct legal control over my mother for quite a considerable period of time,
00:47:09and this happened more than once. One of the things that probably saved me in my early years
00:47:15was the fact that my mother was catastrophically depressed after I was born. Her marriage had
00:47:21fallen apart and she was hospitalized for depression and I was sent to a family member and we bonded so
00:47:27strongly that she ended up naming one of her later children after me. It had a great relationship.
00:47:33It was a baby. And that's, you know, people say, how did you survive? And that was an accident,
00:47:39right? I didn't earn that. I just happened to have a very early loving bond, which has sustained me and
00:47:44given me strength over the course of my life. That's a very well-studied and very real phenomenon.
00:47:49Other family members didn't have that blessing and it had that effect. I'm not saying there's no
00:47:55free will. People can still make choices, but the choices become more challenging. So the people who
00:48:01had control over my mother intermittently, who were mental health professionals who had full legal
00:48:08rights over her, could not fix her, right? Could not fix her with all their rhetorical skills,
00:48:16decades of training, medication, not that I'm a fan of it, but that's the standard.
00:48:21They could not fix her. Now, if professionals with full control and authority cannot fix someone,
00:48:31how can I? Right? If the best surgeon in the world cannot save your wounded mother,
00:48:39do people yell at you, well, you should have saved her. Why didn't you pick up a butter knife and save her?
00:48:44It's like, bro, I'm not a surgeon. If the world's best surgeon cannot fix your mother,
00:48:50would you accept any guilt for failing to repair her torn aorta or the widow maker or whatever it was?
00:49:00Bob gets shot. He's going to die. Cannot save him. He's bleeding out. He's got minutes to go,
00:49:06or maybe half an hour, but you need that time to go and warn your army. You cannot save him.
00:49:12Now, you can, the analogy breaks down, because at least you can comfort him in his dying moments.
00:49:17But of course, Bob should say to you, I'm done for. Go save our army. Go save our moral cause
00:49:25against the orcs. Wouldn't he? I'd like to think that's what I would do. Don't stay here,
00:49:31because if you stay here, I'm going to die anyway, but thousands more will die,
00:49:35and our righteous cause might be destroyed forever. Come back and give me a full burial
00:49:40with flowers, but for now, go save the battle. I'm dying either way, but thousands of others and
00:49:47our entire righteous cause will live if you go and warn others. It is exhausting being around highly
00:49:54dysfunctional people. It is exhausting. You have to bite your tongue a lot. You have to pretend things
00:50:01are not what they are and are what they're not. You have to nod when they say crazy things
00:50:06or hateful things or hurtful things. You have to constantly dissociate from your own emotional
00:50:12reactions. Madness is a virus that spreads verbally. When I was in the business world, my mother would
00:50:20come down to have lunch with me, and I would be shaking like I was cold afterwards. And that's terrible
00:50:29for her. For her, terrible for me. I can't fix her. I can't save her. I didn't break her. I have to
00:50:36leave her behind so I can save the righteous cause, so I can warn the army of the orcs. That is my homage
00:50:45when I visit my good mother in my dreams. The soul mother, the mother who's contained
00:50:54and caged by the demonic, violent devil that took her over. In my dreams when I visit
00:51:03the good mother, I say to her, how am I doing? And Galadriel-like she kisses me on the forehead
00:51:11and she says, you're doing well. You're doing well. As a blessed ghost of a former self,
00:51:18I thank you for your service. You are doing the best you can with what was inflicted upon
00:51:26you. You didn't let the bad mother win. You honor the potential of the good mother by seeking
00:51:32to evoke it in others. You left a world that hated you. You hugged a world that struck you.
00:51:38And rather than flee from all dysfunction, you have, at times, engaged it in your public conversations
00:51:46and worked either to heal those who think poorly or through failing to heal them, instruct others
00:51:54on the consequences of bad thinking. I suppose every morning I wake up and visit my mother's grave
00:52:00in my mind and pray to her original self and ask, am I doing the best I can with the wreckage I have
00:52:09seen? And I think like Bob, she cups my face with her hands and says, go and save others for I
00:52:18am beyond help or hope. And you will be shot at more and you will be attacked and you will be
00:52:25lacerated. But that's just the machinery protecting its fuel, which is endless abattoirs of human blood.
00:52:33And that is not for you to take personally. It is a work that has needed to be done for thousands
00:52:39of years. It has fallen upon you to do it for whatever circumstances of nature and nurture.
00:52:47The anvil has fallen to you and you must lift and run as though you had wings. And you must do
00:52:56homage to the people so broken that almost through no free will of their own, they sought to break you.
00:53:03But instead of breaking you, they hardened you and strengthened you. And a lot of what I do in
00:53:11the world is for the sunlit memory of the good mother who was destroyed by the machinery that none
00:53:20of us made, none of us operate, none of us repair, none of us refuel, and all are entangled in and trying
00:53:29to survive. So I hope that makes sense. I appreciate your patience as I talk about these issues.
00:53:37And let us get to callers. Richard. Richard, I'm not going to give you the short name.
00:53:43Richard, if you're still around, if you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.
00:53:47Oh, hello. Hello. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, not too bad. What's on your mind?
00:53:53Um, you know, what's interesting about your case is that your mother, of course, was not
00:53:59a baby boomer. And I think the things that you've experienced have been rendered much worse
00:54:05and much more common by the cultural milieu that encompasses all, starting with the baby
00:54:11boomer generation, with sex cards, rock and roll, you know, fucking in the forest at Woodstock,
00:54:18imagined by John Lennon and all this garbage. It's only gotten worse because that's the generation.
00:54:24I'm sorry. I appreciate what you're saying. You're using a speakerphone or a microphone or it's
00:54:29very muffled. Oh, I'm, I'm on my, um, I'm on my, um, my, on my phone. Okay. All right. That's,
00:54:35that's fine. That's fine. Uh, so, uh, but I mean, the hedonist of the sixties to some degree comes
00:54:40out of the nihilism of the first and second world war. True. I mean, how many people are going to go
00:54:47to the dentist if they only have five days to live? If you only have, I mean, who, who sits,
00:54:51who sits there, excuse me, who sits there having their last meal, excuse me, saying, well,
00:54:58I've got to watch my way. So I better not have any dessert.
00:55:02That's a fair point. I think though, that, um, the Western allies and democracies sort of
00:55:07fought for moral decay and degeneracy. I mean, ally bombers had pinup models on the frames
00:55:14of the airplanes and they went to bomb German civilian populations. So I think some of this
00:55:20is a inevitable corollary of liberal democracy, at least because it's turned out to the agent.
00:55:26I'm not sure I follow you. I feel like you're very much, um, sprinting from topic to topic
00:55:33without fleshing them out too much. If you could flesh it out a bit more, I'd appreciate it.
00:55:37Oh, well, the hedonism and the profligacy that we see in the modern age may be, um, part and
00:55:44parcel of liberal democracy as it has been established. And, um, you know, allied bombers, for example,
00:55:50had pinup models on the frames of the airplanes as they went to bomb Germans.
00:55:56No, no, I don't, I don't need you to repeat your points. I heard them.
00:56:00I see.
00:56:00So I'm asking you to flesh them out. So when you say that hedonism is the result of liberal
00:56:05democracy, that's a statement and I appreciate that statement, but it's just a statement. And
00:56:10what I mean is, can you give me the reasoning behind it?
00:56:13I'm not really sure, but it's, it was demonstrated, for example, on the one, which in some ways
00:56:18was more sexual than rock and roll, um, than even the sixties were.
00:56:22Sorry, you said it was demonstrated in the war on what?
00:56:25In the warring twenties, right. In the warring twenties, um, before the Great Depression
00:56:29set in, um, that was marked by incredible hedonism. More particularly in Germany, but even in the
00:56:35United States as well with the flapper girls and all that. And so, so it may be, um, something
00:56:40that is characteristic of liberal democracy.
00:56:43But, uh, but America in the 1920s was not a liberal democracy.
00:56:47It's a constitutional republic, right? At least that's the definition.
00:56:51Um, well, a democracy could be a direct democracy or an indirect democracy. And that's from Oxford
00:56:57English Dictionary. But it's true that it's a republic, but it's still a democracy, even
00:57:01if it's an indirect one. So I'm using the term democracy in a broader sense.
00:57:07Okay. So why do you think that the 1920s in particular were hedonistic? I'm not disagreeing
00:57:13with you. I'm just wondering why. Um, well, you had flapper girls and they were rather
00:57:18promiscuous and that's an example of it. Right. So, but the, why, why do you think it hit
00:57:26in the 1920s? Um, well, there's, there's, um, unprecedented affluence. There is a rejection
00:57:34of older social norms and mores. From my understanding, um, before that time, people would go on dates
00:57:41with the chaperone, which I think is a little excessive. There has to be balance, but that's
00:57:45something that ended with the 20s. But it may also just be with the, um, the relativism
00:57:52of democracy where everyone's vote is the same. Whether someone's a genius or someone's
00:57:58an idiot, whether someone is virtuous or someone's a lecturer, all the votes are same. Everything
00:58:03is relative. And so implicit in that philosophy is who are you to say that this behavior is bad
00:58:10and desirable. I think that's a part of what explains why these things have forced in the
00:58:1720th century. So yeah, World War I was the greatest man-made disaster in history to that
00:58:25time. I mean, the Black Death was not man-made in that way. And, uh, earlier wars had been
00:58:34less destructive as a whole. Obviously the Civil War, 600,000 killed in America. It was terrible,
00:58:42but not quite 10 million plus. So there was a staggering, self-critical catastrophe withdrawal
00:58:53from traditional values in the post-World War I period. I mean, even during, but the post-World
00:59:00War I period for sure. So there's this great line from a fairly mediocre movie, No Country
00:59:06for Old Men. If all your rules led you to this, of what use were your rules? If all your rules
00:59:13led you to this, of what use are your rules? And if thousands of years of European history
00:59:20led to the First World War, which was a shock to the psyche, and in particular to the female
00:59:27psyche, because women had, to a large degree, been excluded from direct combat. Of course,
00:59:31they were taken as prizes at war and so on. Rape of man-king style, but women had generally
00:59:36been excluded from direct combat. And in the First World War, women were, to a large degree,
00:59:41excluded from direct combat, but the level of the slaughter was so great that women were left
00:59:47with children and no husbands, which was, in many ways, the foundation of the welfare state,
00:59:53or the foundation of the need for the welfare state. And I won't go into all of the historical
00:59:59details of how it ended up that way. But the reality is that European history led to the First
01:00:05World War. So if European history and values and morals led to the First World War, of what use were
01:00:12European history, culture, values, and morals. As Winston Churchill himself bitterly said,
01:00:21that the only, I think there were two, the only two things that the Western powers did not
01:00:29succumb to were something, I can't remember what, and cannibalism, and only because they were of
01:00:34doubtful utility. So the descent of the West into absolute barbaric savagery in the First World War
01:00:42produced, and as it should have, produced an absolute crisis of confidence in the West.
01:00:48Did Christianity fail to prevent the First World War? Nope. Almost all the countries involved
01:00:57were heavily Christian run by Christian rulers. Did capitalism fail to prevent the First World War?
01:01:04Nope. The industrial mechanisms that were developed in the capitalist environment were
01:01:13used to produce even more efficient weapons and machineries of war. Did democracy fail to prevent
01:01:20it? Did education fail to prevent it? Nope. And do not underestimate the Christmas truce,
01:01:28the effects of the Christmas truce, which of course the Christmas truce was when the fighting stopped
01:01:34in the First World War. The fighting stopped on Christmas Day, and the soldiers got together and played
01:01:41soccer and shared cigarettes, sang Christmas carols together, traded jokes as best as they could,
01:01:51laughed, hugged, clapped each other on the back, and then the very next day went back to gunning each
01:01:58other down by the tens of thousands, sometimes more per day. Did parenting prevent it? Nope. Did women
01:02:07prevent it? Nope. Women fueled it by refusing to date men who didn't fight, and by handing out their
01:02:15shitty little white feathers to men not in uniform, but of fighting age. White feathers of cowardice.
01:02:22You can be killed by a feather handed to you by a woman. So, every edifice in every aspect of
01:02:32Western civilization and society did not prevent World War I, the greatest catastrophe to that date,
01:02:41man-made in human history, and there isn't even a close second. So, people are then cut adrift,
01:02:47and a period of nihilism often follows the collapse of a moral paradigm. A period of hedonism often
01:02:56follows the collapse of a moral paradigm. And everyone knew that the peace wouldn't last.
01:03:02Marshall Fox, upon reading the treaty at Versailles, said this is not peace, this is armistice for 20
01:03:09years, which he got down almost to the day. Russia had been lost to communism. Western democracies had
01:03:16been lost to debt. And Germany had been shackled and asked to pay the kinds of reparations that
01:03:24could never have worked. I mean, everybody loves to think that there's some vengeance, some
01:03:28reparations that you can create or make after you conquer a nation. But as Churchill himself pointed
01:03:36out, not the worst guy when it comes to economics, he said, well, if we just take a bunch of German
01:03:41shoes as reparations and dump them in England, that simply destroys our domestic shoe market.
01:03:46If we take their gold, that just drives inflation. If we seize their factories and reassemble them
01:03:53in England, that just simply means that the people who create factories in England go out of business,
01:03:59and we've lost our industrial base. The fantasy of reparations, oh, we'll get them to pay us back.
01:04:06The fantasy of reparations continues to drive the horrors of war. And so, Germany could not
01:04:11pay its debts. So, it printed money. And of course, we all know that the German currency became virtually
01:04:20worthless. All the horrifying stories. I remember reading this, reading about these as a kid. This
01:04:26is in England, so it was certainly before I was 11. And reading about how they would burn money rather
01:04:33than use money to buy firewood. Now, the British pound sterling has been the longest running currency in
01:04:38human history. 400 years, with the caveat that it's lost 98% of its value, but it's still cooking.
01:04:44Not for long. But Germany had to print its money to pretend to pay off its debts, which destroyed the
01:04:51middle class, radicalized the population, and out of fear of communism, out of fear of international
01:04:57socialism, they ran into the terrible arms of the national socialists. So, it was a catastrophic time.
01:05:03The relative peace and stability of Western Europe for 100 years had collapsed and had been replaced
01:05:12with a slaughter which the mind cannot comprehend. Like, the human mind cannot comprehend the slaughter
01:05:18of the First World War. And we've really been grappling with the trauma and aftermath of this ever since.
01:05:24So, the hedonism of the 20s, I wouldn't say, is necessarily a feature of liberal democracy.
01:05:30But if everything in the history of the West led up to, well, imperialism was to a large degree
01:05:40the substitution of domestic wars for overseas conquests. That Europe turned its martial prowess to the
01:05:47conquering of other countries rather than to the attempted conquering of each other. So,
01:05:53war was not solved in the West. War has not been solved in the West. Christianity didn't solve it.
01:06:03Philosophy to the time did not solve it. Political institutions did not solve it. Economics did not
01:06:09solve it. And when a massive catastrophe occurs, you have to look at your whiteboard and wipe it clean.
01:06:16Wipe it clean. Wipe it clean. And that's a tough thing to do. It's a tough thing to do to take
01:06:23everything you know and say, if all our decisions led us to World War I, of what use were our
01:06:30decisions? I mean, World War I was, to a large degree, a family war. And I've got the truth about
01:06:35World War I as a presentation. FDRpodcast.com. You can do a search for it. Maybe I'll re-release it.
01:06:42But it was such an incomprehensible, unprecedented, and mind-bending catastrophe.
01:06:48Europe drowned in the blood of its own sons. And what that meant was, every institution
01:06:57that was not rewritten from scratch lost all credibility. And we've been living in the shadow
01:07:02of that loss of credibility ever since. The church lost credibility, and therefore people no longer
01:07:09believed in voluntary charity and turned to the welfare state. The free market lost credibility
01:07:14because the capitalists were lining up to suck from the bloody teat of government war spending
01:07:19and provide as much murder machinery as they possibly could, some of which didn't even work
01:07:23very well. So, the industrialists, the capitalists lost credibility. Government education, I mean,
01:07:32to anybody with half a brain, the fact that you had a bunch of people eager to serve the state
01:07:36in war, one generation after turning the education of the young over to the state, well, that's the old
01:07:42saying. If you send your kids to be educated by Caesar, don't be surprised when they come back
01:07:47as Romans. So, every institution, and I have no faith in any historical institution,
01:07:55because every historical institution has led to the imminent catastrophe that we face as a civilization
01:08:03now. And if everything you think has led you to disaster, you have to have the courage to think
01:08:10the unthinkable. And really, that's what I've been about, is trying to get people to think the
01:08:15unthinkable, which means the reason from first principles, and all that kind of good stuff.
01:08:20But I have no... And I grew up in the shadow, not just of the First World War,
01:08:26but of the Second World War, which was four to five times as murderous as the First World War.
01:08:33So, all right. If there's anything else that people wanted to ask or chat or comment about,
01:08:38I'm happy to hear. But I have another chapter. The newest club is opening up. I have another
01:08:46chapter to read of my great novel, Dissolution. So, I may go and do that. But again, if there's
01:08:52anything else that people want to do, just raise your hand, and we can have a chat. And I appreciate
01:08:56you guys coming by today. Great pleasure to chat and get your feedback and to give the speeches.
01:09:02Go on once, go on twice. All right. Hey, look at that. I've answered everything. All right.
01:09:07Thanks, everyone, so much. We will see you tomorrow night for Friday Night Live,
01:09:11fredemand.com. Really appreciate your support, fredemand.com. Lots of love for my PMI friends.
01:09:18I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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