Freedomain
Politics • Culture • Lifestyle
THE TRUTH ABOUT SADISM!
Part 1
January 19, 2024
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This episode explores sadism, masochism, and consensual BDSM without judgment. It discusses the impact of sexual elements on societal dysfunctions.

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Brief Summary
In this episode, we delve into the captivating world of sadism and masochism. I find this topic personally intriguing, as it's a mindset that I struggle to fully comprehend. With an anthropological approach, we aim to explore this subject without constantly passing moral judgment. Sadism, the pleasure derived from causing pain to others, is contrasted with consensual acts of physical pain or humiliation for sexual gratification known as BDSM. I believe that as long as these behaviors are consensual and don't result in irreversible harm, they may not be a moral concern. Furthermore, I argue that many dysfunctions in society may have a sexual element, such as the behavior of a stereotypical Karen or couples engaging in hostile fights. Additionally, the power dynamics and domination present in public rituals or workplace hierarchies can harbor sadistic components. While I personally feel perplexed by sadism, I'm interested in exploring it without constantly condemning it.

Chapters
0:00:00 Introduction to the Fascinating Topic of Sadism
0:03:50 Society's Dysfunctions and the Relationship to Sadistic Tendencies
0:07:05 The Suspension of Disbelief and Sadistic Satisfaction in Fictional Violence
0:07:29 The Complexity of Sadism and Paraphilias
0:12:48 Paraphilias and the Distinction from Healthy Sexuality
0:18:16 Hypermasculinity and the Capacity to Avoid Empathy
0:21:05 Women's Expectations of Selective Empathy in Men
0:28:12 The dynamics of power and masochism in relationships.
0:32:10 The nature of women's thrill in being desired.
0:35:50 The importance of bravery in pursuing attractive partners.
0:38:42 The Pitfalls of Settling for Less
0:47:22 Freud's Observations on Sadism and Masochism
0:49:06 The Purpose of Pleasure: Selfishness or Pair Bonding?
0:54:15 Gifts and Abilities: Serving Self or World?
0:56:51 The Dehumanization of Excellence and Competition
1:00:03 Domination and Submission: The Absence of Reason and Negotiation


Long Summary
In this episode, we dive into the intriguing topic of sadism and masochism. The main-speaker finds it personally fascinating, as it is a mindset that they cannot fully comprehend. They approach the subject from an anthropological standpoint, aiming to explore it without constantly passing moral judgment. Sadism is defined as deriving pleasure from causing pain to others, while consensual acts of physical pain or humiliation for sexual gratification are known as BDSM. The speaker believes that these behaviors, as long as they are consensual and do not cause irreversible harm, may not be a moral concern. They also argue that many dysfunctions in society may have a sexual element to them, such as the behavior of a stereotypical Karen or couples engaging in hostile fights. Additionally, the power dynamics and domination involved in public rituals or workplace hierarchies can have sadistic components. The main-speaker expresses their personal perplexity towards sadism, but expresses an interest in exploring it without constantly condemning it.

Tags
episode, sadism, masochism, mindset, comprehend, anthropological approach, moral judgment, pleasure, pain, BDSM, consensual acts, physical pain, humiliation, sexual gratification, moral concern, irreversible harm, dysfunctions, society, sexual element, Karen, hostile fights, power dynamics, domination, public rituals, workplace hierarchies, perplexed, exploring, condemning

Transcript
Introduction to the Fascinating Topic of Sadism

[0:00] So a fascinating topic, in my view, is sadism.
And maybe you've known a sadist. Maybe you have some tendencies towards cruelty yourself.
But I just find it absolutely fascinating. We've got some research to go into the great depths and detail of this mindset or this behavior.
And, of course, the flip side, which is masochism. So, I mean, start, of course, always with the definitions.
What is sadism? so the general way of understanding it is deriving pleasure from inflicting pain on others now i find this really fascinating because it's such a foreign mindset to me the idea of taking pleasure through cruelty is like the polar opposite of my emotional apparatus and so i find it like an upside down world it's uh it's the nether it's the back rooms it's all kinds of crazy stuff because Because it just is such a complete opposite to my mindset and makeup.
The idea of watching people in pain and so on is just appalling.
I rush to do anything you can to save and solve it. So it is one of the most, if not the most, foreign mindsets to me.
Which is always very interesting to explore from that standpoint.
Now also, I'm going to try and avoid, over the course of this conversation, I'm going to try to avoid judging it morally. I mean, obviously, it's unhealthy, at least in the context of healthy relationships, it's unhealthy.

[1:27] And, of course, it's cruel and vicious and mean and destructive.
And, obviously, if it's not role-playing, then it's going to violate the non-aggression principle. So, all of those moral standards, please assume, are implicit.
I don't want to have to keep repeating it. This is going to be anthropological exploration of an immoral mindset.
Just so you understand that. Like, I'm not going to go in and, ooh, this is bad, ooh, this is bad.
I get all of that. I understand all of that. But we're going to explore like an anthropologist will explore. law.
You know, if an anthropologist is looking at a mutilation ritual in a tribe, they have to describe it and try to understand it, but they don't have to, in every other breath, be condemning it.
That's taken for granted, so hopefully that will make sense.
So Webster's Dictionary defines sadism as the derivation of sexual gratification from the infliction of physical pain or humiliation on another person.

[2:27] If it's consensual and does not cause gross irreparable harm, then it's generally known as BDSM, bondage, domination, sadomasochism.
So, of course, it's not exactly a healthy lifestyle choice, but it's not an immediate moral concern if it's consensual and avoids gross irreparable harm.
So, I don't know, were we talking about wax on the nipples and things like that, or light lashings with a symbolic whip, this kind of stuff.
Of so it's it's role-playing and it has sort of the relationship of you know fake wooden sword medieval duels at a renaissance fair as opposed to actually slashing people up in some misty morning duel in the 19th century with real swords and the aim is death so it's a form of role-playing and therefore it's still consensual it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle and so however we might look at it as dysfunctional it would not be immoral evil in that way sadomasochism is the giving or receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation i mean a lot of society's dysfunctions are driven by fairly warped at least in my view fairly warped sexual preferences so if you look at someone like a karen you know, the sort of stereotypical Karen.
Society's Dysfunctions and the Relationship to Sadistic Tendencies

[3:50] This middle-aged woman who wants to speak with your manager, that's kind of a humiliation ritual.
You're attempting to dominate and humiliate the retail worker, and I believe in many cases that has a sexual excitement component, which is why this behavior just seems so incomprehensible to other people.
Some couples who fight, the fighting is part of a sexual ritual, right? The hostility, the domination, the wrestling for control.
And when one person then finally asserts dominance, then sexual activity can occur. So a lot of it, I think, has to do with.

[4:27] This kind of stuff. If you look at a struggle session, right, this is sort of a leftist trope, I guess it happens in fascism as well, but a struggle session is when you have to be openly and publicly humiliated and subjugated to a particular person's ideology.

[4:44] Well, that to me has a kind of sexual component to it, in that you are humiliating someone, you're grinding them down, you're asserting your will and dominance over them, and power and sexuality for this kind of mindset are always, always intertwined.
You can see this with bosses dominating, you know, so the typical male boss dominating helpless, independent female employees.
There is a sadistic element to that.
So when I look at these kinds of public rituals where you have to mouth the most absurd statements, or you get banished, attacked, humiliated, fired.
That is an assertion of will and dominance, of anti-rationality over common sense.
And there's a sadistic element to that that has, I think, I can't prove it, but I always assume that it has a certain sexual component.
You saw this with regards to people who did their own research, right, during COVID and so on, did their own research.
They were shamed and humiliated and attacked.
So this dominance wherein absurd anti-rational statements have to be mouthed and repeated and you have to bow and scrape before them that has a sadistic element and sadism to me is generally tied into a warped sexual impulse.
So there's a lot of that kind of stuff going on in society at the moment which is obviously somewhat unfortunate.

[6:13] So, of course, if it's non-consensual sadism, that's outright torture, and that's immoral and evil and a violation of the non-aggression principle, not UPB compliant, and so on.
Now, the sadist will often seek a victim who is not a masochist.
And the masochist is like, you know, hurt me, baby, hurt me.
Because for the sadist, though, some of the sexual excitement would derive from the very unwillingness of the victim, right?
So, no don't, no don't, in a role play, will satisfy, I suppose, some sadists, but they kind of have to dissociate, and there has to be a suspension of disbelief, if that makes sense.
There has to be a suspension of disbelief. Like, you know, these horrible Saw movies, where people get trapped and tortured and have to mutilate themselves in order to survive and so on.
The Suspension of Disbelief and Sadistic Satisfaction in Fictional Violence

[7:05] So somebody who's a real sadist would watch a Saw movie I suppose, I mean I assume that they do would watch a Saw movie and would gain some satisfaction, and I assume some erotic satisfaction, from watching people be brutalized tortured and humiliated in this kind of way but of course he knows it's a movie, he knows it's not real he knows it's fake blood.
The Complexity of Sadism and Paraphilias

[7:29] Does that slake off his sadism them or does it tease it and draw it further close to the edge of actually acting out always tough always a tough question i don't know if there are any general answers to this kind of stuff, Now, clinically, this is known as sadistic personality disorder or sexual sadism disorder.
Depending on the professional or academic you come across, they may only consider it sadism if the pleasure experience is sexual in origin.
Sexual sadism disorder, we'll call this SSD, not to be confused with the non-mechanical storage drives.
SSD is generally classified as paraphilia. The term paraphilia refers to sexual interests or fantasies or urges or behaviors that are outside the range of what is considered typical or normative in a given culture or society.

[8:20] So, this would be pedophilia or, I guess, bestiality, exhibitionism, fetishism, sexual focus on non-living objects, voyeurism, and so on.
So, in general, it's kind of considered the norm in society, but I think the way that I would classify it, again, I'm no psychologist, it's just an amateur outside view, but the way that I would look at it, or the case I'm going to make to you, is that there are sexual preferences that are related to fertility, right? right?
So breast size, hip to waist ratio, even features and so on.
Markets of self-discipline, such as having a slender body in a time of cheap and excess food production and consumption.
So there are things that you would consider sexually attractive that would in fact be related to fertility and genetic quality.

[9:19] Good teeth, good hair, clear eyes, clear skin, all of that. kind of stuff.
These would all be related to health and genetic fitness and so on.
So there are things and we wouldn't say that...

[9:33] A woman has a fetish for tall, dark, and handsome, right? That's not a fetish.
That's a preference that would be related to genetic quality in a lot of ways.
We wouldn't say that a man has a fetish for a very pretty woman with a great figure.
That's not a fetish because all of those things would be related to genetic fitness.
However, if a man is sexually excited by a toaster, we would say that was actually a plot point in some show from many years ago or what was it henry winkler was played a guy who was attracted to watching a woman crush insects well toasters insect crushing not specifically related to human reproduction so where the wiring has gone from pointing your sexual desires towards genetic fitness of a partner and you know youth and so so on, right?
I remember when I, in the, I think it was in the 70s, there was a movie called Harold and Maud about a teenage guy who ended up with a woman who was in her 70s or whatever as a girlfriend.

[10:35] A very odd film, very strange film, quite a cult classic, I suppose.
I don't remember much about it other than, well, that's a genetic dead end, right?
So that would be, I think, more of a fetish, right?
Because in the same way, also, you know, like if you have a preference for or for pregnant women, right?
Then, well, not your wife, but some pregnant woman.
That would be not ideal for you because your genetic reproduction is already displaced by another man's baby.

[11:04] So paraphilia, they say it's outside the range of what's considered typical or normative in a given culture. That's relativity.
And I'm obviously not a big fan of that. Philosophy doesn't deal with relativity, right? Philosophy doesn't deal with relativity.
If there's some culture that really worships the color red or something.
There's another culture that really worships the color blue.
That's not a philosophy. That's not even aesthetics.

[11:31] That would just be sort of local customs, like, oh, in this country, they dance this way. In this country, they dance this way.
That's not a subject for philosophy because it's purely subjective and relativistic.
So the subjective and relativistic stuff, philosophy, if it's genuinely that way, philosophy doesn't have anything to say about it.
But if we can say there are sexual preferences that relate to reproductive fitness and the health and quality of your offspring, well, philosophy would have something to say about that because that's objective.
That's an objective metric. So typically, you know, in general, right, they will say, well, whatever the norm is, is healthy, and that, of course, is just pure relativism and so on, right?
It literally is a positive law doctrine which says whatever the law says is legal is both legal and moral, right?
We don't judge the laws, we simply examine them.
Neutral anthropology style so so talking about this paraphilius in the way that i talk about it here we're going to say that if you have a particular fetish that is not related to.

[12:43] Genetic fitness and you know with all sort of humility and respect we're just
Paraphilias and the Distinction from Healthy Sexuality

[12:48] going to talk about genetic reproduction here so some some stuff that we're not going to be dealing with But in general, the sort of evolutionary pressures for genetic reproduction, whereas if you're sexually attracted to, I don't know, anteaters, then that's obviously something that's not exactly priming you for genetic reproductive fitness as a whole.
So, paraphilias are often characterized by intense, persistent sexual interests in objects, situations, or individuals that are not typically associated with normative sexual arousal.
For paraphilia to be classified as a disorder, right, so this is sort of psychologically speaking, it typically must cause significant distress or impairment to the individual or involve personal or legal consequences, especially if it involves non-consenting parties. parties.
So I guess one of the things I heard about when I was a kid was this sort of issue or question of peeping toms.
And peeping toms, I guess that guy, the original tom guy kind of got around.
But peeping toms are people who are voyeurs, right?
They enjoy watching other people, you know, sort of the typical example is the creepy guy in the raincoat crouching in the bushes watching some woman undress or what, so voyeuristic, right? So voyeuristic.

[14:03] And it would seem to me that that's a sort of a twist.
So in a lot of this paraphilia stuff, you can see the essence of something that's not dysfunctional, which then becomes dysfunctional through excess, right?
A lot of the sexuality stuff is sort of the Aristotelian mean, right?
So a rounded buttocks would be an indication of estrogen and youthful fertility and so on.
But then if it gets too much like you've seen these sort of ridiculous brazilian butt lift women who basically are carrying around their own couches on the rear ends well that gets to be be too much right that gets to be too much and so i think healthy sexuality is when you're kind of in in the middle of these things and then it gets unhealthy if it goes to the extremes so So, in the case of women, a certain amount of healthy male assertiveness would be a good thing, right?
A complete deficiency of assertiveness, you know, some drippy, spineless guy who's kind of depressed and absent and so on.
Well, that would be not particularly exciting unless you happen to be, I guess, a sadistic woman who wanted to. But if he has no will, even the masochism wouldn't be, like even sadism against a person without any particular will would not be satisfying because there'd be no resistance.

[15:24] So a man who has no assertiveness is probably not that attractive to a woman.
But if we look at assertiveness, deficiency is bad, but an excess of assertiveness is aggression, right? It could be yelling, violence, and so on, right?
So when nature designs us, so to speak, or when we evolve.

[15:52] Everything that points you at a trait has a danger of also pointing you at an excess of that trait, if that makes sense.
So everything that, like a woman likes an assertive kind of dominant guy because he needs to go out there and win against other guys to gain resources for the kids and so on.
So she's going to like an assertive guy. And if you look at Fifty Shades of Grey, we have a guy, Christian Grey, who has gone beyond assertiveness to mimed or mimicked violence.
Sometimes not even like there is, I think there is real whippings and beatings in the S&M that Christian Grey likes.
And so you've gone beyond assertiveness to violence.
You've gone beyond assertiveness to violence. makeup of course is a way also of taking features that in and of themselves are attractive, and then exaggerating them often to the point of clownish kabuki pantomime stuff right so it goes to an excess and so everything that nature puts within us that aims at a plus.

[17:00] Can end up with the plus being a minus through excess if that if that makes sense right Okay. So, let's see here.
For a philosophical definition, sadism is experiencing satisfaction, which could be pleasure, or relief from pain, by inflicting pain on another involuntarily, with masochism being the inverse.
So, consensual sadomasochism is not the same, of course, as acts of sexual aggression.
Sadomasochists seek out pain in the context of love and sex.
They do not do so in other situations, and they dislike uninvited aggression or abuse as much as the next person.
Sadomasochists are not psychopaths, and that's sort of an important thing.
You know, like people who play Dungeons & Dragons don't actually want to go and explore sewers and fight giant were-rats, right?
It's a fantasy, a fantasy idea.
People who play shooting games generally aren't going to end up, obviously a vast majority, aren't going to end up shooting anyone. So that's important.
Now, sadomasochistic practices are actually quite diverse. So one study identified four separate clusters, hypermasculinity, infliction and reception of pain, physical restriction, and psychological humiliation.
Hypermasculinity and the Capacity to Avoid Empathy

[18:16] So, hypermasculinity, that would be the Christian gray thing, where you take male traits of dominance, and dominance does involve the capacity to avoid empathy, right?
So I'm sure that you're aware of this, particularly if you're a man, but if you're a man and you've not engaged in, say, highly competitive sports, or if you're a woman and you haven't engaged in highly competitive sports, then this empathy shut off is really, really important.
And I mean, I've been doing this, of course, for close to 18 years.

[18:53] And when I do a great show, every show I try to do, I try to do a great show.
But when I do a great show, what happens is I am drawing you or the audience away from other shows.
You're listening to me and not to someone else. Now, the people who lost audiences to me, I have to not have empathy for them.
In fact, not only do I not have to have empathy for them, I have to, I don't take pleasure in it, but I at least have to measure my success relative to other people.
So if I win a thousand audience members then those thousand audience members are taken away from somebody else's show at least you know what for the time that they're listening you understand that if you are running a marathon and you want to win the marathon it means that everyone else is going to be a little bit sad because they also want to win the marathon and so win lose requires requires the shut off of empathy, right?
So when I was in cross country running or swimming, you know, I'd be running and there'd be a guy next to me pounding through the water or pounding across the pavement and we would both ferociously want to win.

[20:08] And I would push myself and he would push himself and we'd end up better runners because we're competing.
But I want to win and that means he has to lose, right?
So if I was running and some guy tripped, I could then slow slow down, assuming nobody else was close, and I could still win.
But I would want to win, and men, you know this, and I'm sure women know this too, but, you know, that sort of ferocious, I'm going to win and you're going to lose.

[20:34] I'm going to beat you, right? So in most sports, there's not beating anyone abstract.
There's beating you.
I want to beat you. I want to win and you're going to lose. I'll be happy and you'll be unhappy, and it's a zero-sum game. Like, One of us is going to be happy.
One of us is going to be unhappy.
And I mean, this is one of the challenges, of course, of being a man is that women do expect you to have selective empathy slash opposite of empathy.
Women's Expectations of Selective Empathy in Men

[21:05] Is it cruel to want to win a race against another guy?

[21:12] It's certainly involved because you know that by winning the race, he's going to be unhappy.
And it goes even further than that in the sort of race towards dating a girl, like in your teenage years or wherever, you want to date Sally and your friends think Sally is the greatest, you're going to shoot your shot.
And of course, if you get to date Sally, who everyone thinks is the greatest, then you'll be very happy and they'll be unhappy, right?
So, women need men who have the capacity to reverse empathy.
So, if you think about watching your friend run a race, you're cheering and you want that friend to win the race.
But if you are racing against your friend, you are not cheering him on.
You want to win, and it's going to be at his expense. Now, his unhappiness and your happiness are kind of the same thing because both arrive from you winning.
Both are the result of you winning.
So, what women like, evolutionarily speaking, is a man with the capacity for coldness.
A man with the capacity for cruelty.

[22:26] The cruelty is the result of winning. It's not directed at the other person, unless I happen to really dislike that other person, in which case them losing might be, I might be happy because of that, right?
And of course, in the ultimate, you know, if war or combat or a duel or something like that, or a fistfight or something, then you kind of have to win because the price of losing could be maiming or death, right? So you kind of have to win.
And so you have to have the capacity to either A, be unbothered by other people being very unhappy, which is what you need to win, or actively taking pleasure in somebody else's unhappiness.

[23:09] So, of course, women want men who have the capacity for this kind of coldness and or cruelty, because that means, of course, that they have a man who's going to get resources. sources.
But at the same time, of course, they want him to be, you know, tender and sensitive and affectionate at home, right?
This is one of the paradoxes, one of the many paradoxes that men have to sort of work with and deal with.
So for a woman to be turned on by a man's aggression, coldness, lack of empathy, and cruelty is understandable.
Because if a man is, you know, kind of soft and gooey and sensitive and empathetic and wants to encourage everyone else and never win himself, he's going to lose out in this sort of battle for scarce resources that characterizes most of our evolution. He's going to lose out.

[24:01] So, a woman is going to have to be attracted to a guy with the coldness and even the cruelty to win at the expense of others.
But, of course, everything that nature primes you to be attracted to, you run the risk of it being too far, of it going too far.
Right so you can think of course that women often will like a taller guy but a guy who's too tall is going to have often knee problems and and back problems and shoulder problems and because his heart has to work harder to pump the blood everywhere he might not live quite as long and so on right so nature aims for height a lot of times but it's easy for nature to overshoot the mark it's easy for nature to overshoot the mark and if nature overshoots the mark then that's a negative if that makes sense so it's the same thing with sexual desire nature programs us to respond to particular stimuli but in that dice roll right a lot of times you'll get you know the six the seven the eight right in the two six-sided dice but occasionally you'll get the two, and occasionally you'll get the 12.
But there's always a dice roll, as far as I understand it, with this sort of evolutionary stuff.
And it's easy, relatively easy, at least in the large population, for things to go too far, rather than assertiveness and aggression, which is necessary for a man to win.

[25:25] The woman's desires, for whatever reason, could come out of childhood, could be wherever, right?
Goes to cruelty and sadism, and so on, right?

[25:35] So, more recent surveys suggests that sadistic fantasies are just as prevalent in women as in men, although it is true that men with sadistic urges tend to develop them at an earlier age.
Now, what we do want to do, of course, is we're going to talk quite a bit about the Marquis de Sade.
And that's where the word sadism, of course, comes from. And he was a really chilling French aristocrat, which we'll get into.
It somewhat ties into the history of the French Revolution. But de Sade wrote, wrote, How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination!
In those delectable moments the whole world is ours.
Not a single creature resists us. We devastate the world. We repopulate it with new objects, which in turn we immolate.
The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all. We multiply the horror a hundredfold.
So, of course, the desire to dominate nature, sure the desire to win at all costs and so on is baked into humanity.
We didn't become the dominant species on the planet by accident.
So our desire to dominate, to win, to wipe out rivals and enemies, that's natural and there's nothing wrong with it at all. In fact, it's probably quite healthy.

[26:51] Can it go too far? And that too farness, is it early trauma?
I think probably a lot of times. Is it genetic? I have some doubts about that.
Is it that you indulge and allow yourself to take every step further and further to break down your inhibitions, right?
Because I think healthy humans have impulses to aggression, and we also have blocks to aggression.
We don't indulge ourselves that much, right? So we will have an impulse towards aggression, but we also have the capacity to resist that impulse.
That extremity is kind of a temptation.
That reason and moderation give you blocks too. But if you continually allow yourself, increment by increment, bit by bit, inch by inch, if you allow yourself to wear down inhibitions, then you kind of uncork the inner demons.
You uncork the inner monstrous, and that is a result of a whole series of choices, right? So you can sort of think of spicy food, right?
If you allow yourself to get progressively more and more used to spicy food, then you can tolerate stuff that would be inconceivable when you first start, and you're going to burn out your tongue receptors, and you have trouble tasting ordinary food, and so on, right?
The dynamics of power and masochism in relationships.

[28:12] So, for just a wide variety of reasons. So a woman who is attracted to a really dominant guy, when he starts to become aggressive, she either puts that in check and says, no, no, no, that's not good, or she allows herself or indulges in the excitement of that danger, and then you sort of slippery slope, and you keep going down.
Right so masochism so there was a fellow leopold von sasha masoch author of venus in first from 1870 and this is where the word masochism comes from from masoch he wrote man is the one who desires women the one who is desired this is women's entire but decisive advantage, through man's passions nature has given man into women's hands and the woman who does not know how How to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile, in the end, is not wise.

[29:10] So, if you're in pursuit of a woman, then she has a great deal of power.
And there's a lot, of course, frustration in the modern world at the wild amount of social and economic power that young, attractive women possess.
And there's a certain amount of resentment.
The aristocracy of youth and beauty is something that I think a lot of people have kind of an impulse to challenge or to resent, right?
Unearned privilege is something which we are kind of half programmed to resent.
So the fact that men pursue women give women the upper hand.

[29:48] And the more that the man pursues the woman, the more desirable she is, the more power she has, right?
So if the man catches the woman, if the woman becomes his bride and the mother of his children, then her value to him increases, her sexual marketplace value to others diminishes, right?
You trade in sexual market value for love.
That's really, that's the purpose. Purpose of sexual market value is to give women the free choice from a variety of men so that she is then responsible for her choice.
Like a woman who's married off and forced into matrimony, we don't blame her for her choice in husbands.
She's some 14-year-old kid in history who's married off. Like, what is that old joke?
My girlfriend demanded that I treat her like a princess, says, so I married her off against her will to cement the alliance with France.
So we wouldn't blame a woman married against her will. So the purpose of youthful sexual attraction is for a woman to have a variety of suitors so that she has the greatest choice, because out of choice and options comes quality, right?
Out of choice and options. Prison food doesn't have much quality because it's a monopoly, right?
So out of choice comes quality and responsibility.

[31:11] So the purpose purpose of youthful female beauty is to attract as many men as possible so that the woman has the highest, she has the most variety from which to choose and therefore that's really the only, it doesn't guarantee quality, but it's the only possibility of quality.
And so she trades in her hotness for love and devotion, right?
So she chooses a man, she gets pregnant with the a man's children she raises his children well she's a great companion to him and you know like that that joke uh okay hear me out only fans but there's only one fan and he takes care of you for life right i mean that's kind of so that's the idea of trading in the lust of strangers for the love of a husband right that's that's the deal and it's tough for women to to trade that in i mean it's very nature has programmed women to be incredibly thrilled and excited, to have men desire her, right?
The nature of women's thrill in being desired.

[32:10] And that process is supposed to be relatively short, right?
Six to 12 months, I've sort of talked about that a young woman would have in the sexual marketplace before she would have to choose her husband and the father of her children.

[32:24] So, for a woman, that's the offer from God, you could say, or the offer from virtue, is trade in your sexual market value for the love and devotion of a man, and the love and devotion of children, and so on.
The devil, of course, so to speak, would say, no, no, no, stay where you're desired.
Stay where you are desired.

[32:47] Because sexual market value for women Women, it's much easier than being a wife, being pregnant, and raising children, right?
Obviously, right? Even if you say, well, she's going to have to exercise for two hours a day. It's like, okay, well, say she exercises for two hours a day, all right?
Say she buys a bunch of creams and, you know, but all of that is easy, relatively, right?
The having and raising of children, and the risk of that too, right? Having and raising of children is really hard work.
I mean, that's really, especially when they're young, right?
It's really, really hard work.
Pregnancy can be difficult. There's a lot of vomiting, sometimes for some women with morning sickness, and there can be complications, and childbirth is a challenge, and breastfeeding can be difficult, and so the devil says, well, stay where things are easy and fun, which is to be lusted after, to be desired, to be told how beautiful you are, and all of that, and you never have to trade in your sexual market value for love and pair bonding and devotion, right?

[33:49] In other words, you hoard your money until your money disappears, right? This, like inflation, right?
Don't spend your money, just hoard it, and then the government steals it, in a sense, through inflation anyway, right?
So, of course, when this is the war, right?
Women get into their 30s and their 40s, and they find, of course, that eyeballs are drying up, attention is drying up, and then they panic and try and trade in their social market value for true love.
And it's, well, it's a pretty tough trade. It's a pretty tough trade at that time.
So for the masochist, the woman who is the most scornful and rejecting is probably the woman with the highest sexual market value.
Right. So, again, going after, and I still remember, I still remember the name of the girl who was the queen of my junior high school.
Right. Which is 45 years ago.
And I asked her out. And she was the queen of the high school, and so she had to be fairly distant to all the boys who worshipped her.
I can go back, you know what, I can go back even further.
I can still pick out the girl who was the queen of my boarding school. school.
And the boys used to run past the fences because we were separated, right, boys and girls. The boys used to run past the fences to try and just catch a glimpse of her, and I would be in their midst.
And she was a little goddess, right?

[35:15] And this was out of, what is it, 500, 600 kids. I guarantee you, I could still pick her up of the picture of my boarding school in my basement.

[35:25] And so, knowing the very highest and most attractive, of course, there was nothing sexual about it.
We were like six years old, but, you know, she was dreamy or whatever. She was cute.
But knowing the highest romantic object and being willing to brave rejection in order to win her was essential for men, right?
The importance of bravery in pursuing attractive partners.

[35:50] To have the courage to continue to pursue a woman and the courage to face rejection, right, was important.
I mentioned this on the show in the past, how, you know, one of the calculations that I would have to do in junior high school when I was, you know, grade six, grade seven or whatever, I guess it was the end of elementary school, beginning of junior high school, was you'd go to dances and you'd go to dances and you would then cross the no man's land of the dance floor and you'd get to the far side and you'd walk up the line of girls.

[36:20] And you'd have to find that girl you knew that there would be some girls you'd be able to ask out and they would say yes, but so you had to find a girl who was attractive enough that your friends wouldn't mock you relentlessly for asking her to dance but not so attractive that she'd never dance with you got to find that middle ground and you want to push the high envelope as a male right so you know the least attractive girls and i'm sorry to put it so coarsely but this is just the mechanics annex of at least my mind and the mind of my friends below those many decades ago but the least attractive girls yeah you could they would dance with you but your friends would mock you and roll because you and roll their eyes because you're aiming too low so for a man in a sense welcoming rejection or at least being okay with rejection is essential to getting a quality partner.

[37:13] And so it's the same thing in the business world, right?
So in the business world, when I was a software entrepreneur, the salespeople would sometimes have to call 100 people to get one sale.
That's not that uncommon in sort of niche markets, niche products markets.
Now, if you hate rejection, you can't do that job because it just wears you down and grinds you down.
I don't know if anyone can be indifferent, completely indifferent to rejection.
That seems kind of robotic and inhuman.
If you get a little bit of a thrill out of rejection, then you're going to be able to pursue the hard-to-attain much better. Much better.
So, taking some pleasure in rejection, even if it's a small pleasure, allows you to continue to pursue a very high goal.
Now, of course, you could say, well, gee, why would you ever take pleasure in being rejected?
Because if nature can program you to take pleasure in being rejected, even a small pleasure, then you can work much harder and take more risks.
So a guy who's terrified of rejection is going to aim low in the attractiveness of the girl he asks out.
The Pitfalls of Settling for Less

[38:42] And that has problems because in order to avoid the immediate rejection, he ends up with a woman that deep down he's saying, I could have done better.
And that doesn't help the pair bond and it doesn't help his, you know, the quality of his kids, maybe the quality of his wife's parenting or something like that.
Right. So in order to avoid rejection, you aim too low and then you end up with regret. regret.
I think everyone's had it over the course of their life where they say, I'm going to save money on X, Y, or Z, and you get something for half price, but it ends up being low quality.
And then you regret that, right? And you say, ah, I aimed too low.
I should have spent more.
That was a bad idea. That was a bad call. I mean, I have this even now.
I'm 57. I have this even now.
I saved money by buying a secondhand tablet to do call-in shows.
And because I'm like, Like, well, what do I care, right? Because I'm, you know, I would buy secondhand computers and it didn't matter, really.

[39:38] But, of course, the battery life sucks. And so that's a problem.
And a couple of times I've had the computer die while in the middle of a call-in show, and then that's a real hassle and a problem.
And I should have just spent more to buy the tablet.
I mean, and I have not got around to, I don't think I can, I think that, yeah, you can't replace the battery or something like that.
So, yeah, that's just the reality of the situation, sort of buyer's remorse.
So, on the other hand, if you take too much pleasure in rejection, then you will ask girls out who will never say yes, and then you get a reputation as delusional, you get even the normal girls don't want to go out with you because they recognize that you have some sort of fetish for rejection. rejection.

[40:20] So if you hate rejection too much, you aim too low or don't aim at all.
If you love rejection too much, then you aim too high and also miss the mark.
So again, this is the Aristotelian mean.
You have to be okay with rejection, right? I mean, when I'm doing a live stream or, you know, of course, here I'm at freedomain.com slash donate if you'd like to help the show out.
I think there's really important work here, but I ask people for donations, and most of you won't donate.
That's kind of like a rejection, right? So I have to be relatively comfortable with that.
You have to get relatively comfortable with it. Now, I think having a slight preference for rejection, and salespeople will say this to themselves, they'll say, yep, I've got to call well, a hundred people to make one sale.

[41:10] So everyone who rejects me, I'm fine with, because that means I'm just closer.
I'm one person closer to that person who's going to say yes.
So they turn it into a positive.

[41:21] So nature may well program us with a slight preference for rejection or, you know, I know this is kind of hard if it's hard for me, but I do this, of course, I do this every day again with donations and other things and so on, right?

[41:35] And of course, when I was starting out in my show, I would try to get conversations with people and they would say no or they wouldn't even respond or reply.
You know, there's a lot of rejections in that.
But you just got to keep going. Now, I never learned to love the rejection.
I think that would be kind of odd.
But you can understand that if nature gives you a slight thrill with regards to rejection, it's an incentive to keep risking rejection.
Now, of course, she also has to program into you a great happiness when you're accepted, right? happiness that's greater.
Because if the thrill of rejection is too great, then you just become a masochist.
This is sort of what I'm talking about.
Nature has to program you to want something, and then the flip side of wanting something is being sad or unhappy or angry if you don't get it.

[42:17] So you really want the girl, you ask her out, she says no, you're sad.
Now, if you're too sad, you don't ask girls out.

[42:25] And so you have to find some way to be okay with the rejection.
Rejection and so if nature gives you a slight positive experience of rejection then you won't be as afraid of rejection of course you think of of actors right actors go to hundreds of auditions never get any roles and they have to keep going which means they can't take those negatives too seriously of course this is the story of my life in a lot of ways is you know constant rejection but you just gotta you just gotta keep going so a man will measure to some degree the quality, of a woman by her coldness and her scorn her coldness and her scorn i mean you can see this kind of stuff where a really attractive woman gives you a cold look and then they'll get some very unattractive woman to give exactly the same look and it looks very strange looks very bizarre are.

[43:19] And so men will be drawn to women who reject a lot because the women who reject a lot have high value and you want to kind of clear that hurdle, so to speak.
And so to be drawn towards a woman who rejects you is kind of baked into, or at least has the capacity to reject you, is kind of baked into human nature.
If it goes too far, then it becomes a fetish for rejection, a fetish for or humiliation, which is masochism.
So in 1782, I've talked about him in the History of Philosophy series, in 1782, in his book Confessions, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

[44:01] Discusses the sexual pleasure he derived from childhood beatings, adding that, quote, after having ventured to say so much, I can shrink from nothing.
He certainly did not censor himself. of, here's a quote, to fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments.

[44:26] So, yeah, and beatings of children, well, it's almost like too dark a forest to venture in alone and unaided.
So, let's just say there's some pretty creepy stuff going on there that often borders on paraphilia or fetishism.
So, the Kama Sutra, of course, second century India, includes an entire chapter devoted to blows and cries. eyes.
So sexual relations, this is a quote from the Hindu text, sexual relations can be conceived as a kind of combat.
For successful intercourse, a show of cruelty is essential.

[45:04] So this battle, right, this is war of the sexes. And what's that old joke, like the war of the sexes can never be won because there's way too much fraternization with the enemy.
But yeah, this idea that the man conquers, the woman submits, she doesn't want to submit, and so on.
And this, of course, is the whole plot of Pride and Prejudice.
If you look at this Jane Austen novel, that you have a man who has an excess of pride, an excess of arrogance, an excess of superiority, and he must be humbled in order to be a fit partner.
So he's attractive because he has all this land, he has all this money, he has these giant houses, and he's incredibly successful.
Well, at least he has a lot of resources. Success and resources aren't always the same thing, right? It could be aristocracy, just bought into it, or win the lottery, or something like that.

[45:57] But he has all of these resources, but he's too arrogant.
He's too arrogant, and he needs to be humbled.
He needs to gain more moderation in his arrogance in order to be a fit partner for Elizabeth Bennet.
And I have a sort of similar story arc with Rachel Hastings in my novel The Present that she's far too vain and needs to be humbled in order to be a good partner for Oliver or at least have the potential for that.
So the battle, right, the battle is, and for a woman to feel conquered can be quite sexy and for the man to do the conquering can be quite sexy.
See, the challenge is how do you transition that into a loving pair bond to the benefit of the children, right? That's the challenge.
All right, do another few minutes here in this first part.
Let me know what you think. Of course, when we're done, the physician Johann Heinrich Melbourne introduced the first theory of masochism in his treatise on the use of flogging in medicine and venery.
This is from 1639.
According to Melbourne, flogging a man's back warms the semen in the kidneys, don't you know?
Which leads to sexual arousal when the warmed-up semen flows down to the testicles.
Other theories of masochism centered around the warming of the blood or the use of sexual arousal to mitigate physical pain.
Freud's Observations on Sadism and Masochism

[47:22] Three papers on sexual theory, a little bit of a time jump here, 1905, Freud observed that sadism and masochism are often found in the same individual, and accordingly combined the terms, right, sadomasochism.
He understood sadism as a distortion of the aggressive component of the male sexual instinct, and masochism as a form of sadism directed against the self, and a graver aberration than simple sadism.
So masochism is a form of sadism directed against the self.
See, That doesn't really, again, I'm not going to say that this summary is all of Freud's thoughts on the matter.
But, of course, you know, as we know, Freud denied the reality of childhood abuse, particularly childhood sexual abuse, that he continually got from his neurasthenic or, quote, hysterical patients, and thus betrayed the children. I betrayed the children.
All of those who talk about child abuse are attacked by child abusers.
And this is one of the reasons why people don't talk about it and why child abuse tends to continue and in many cases it's even escalating in the modern world.

[48:27] But to me masochism would have to do with we are wired to have some positive responses to being rejected and if it goes too far, for whatever reasons, if it goes too far, then that becomes negative. All right.
So sadism can also be a defensive strategy by objectifying their partner.
The Purpose of Pleasure: Selfishness or Pair Bonding?

[49:06] Yeah, I mean, I think there's real truth in that. Yeah.
Question of the orgasm is central to human life right is the orgasm a unifying pair bonding experience that cements the value of monogamy and builds a life partnership that is a stable base from which to raise children or is it entirely for your own pleasure regardless of of its purpose?
Do you consume things for you or in order to do something else?
Right? So if you look at people with, they overeat, right?
So people overeat and they say that the purpose of food is the pleasure it gives me.
The purpose of food, it's selfish. The purpose of food is the pleasure it gives me.

[49:54] Whereas other people say that the purpose of food, yeah, yeah, pleasure is important, but the purpose of food is to break bread with people, to chat, to pair bond, and to provide fuel for me to go out into the world and do good things.
Right? So is food there for your pleasure and your pleasure alone?
Or is food there as a means by which you pair bond, break bread with people, and use it as fuel to go out and do good things in the world?
Right? That's the big question. Right? That's the big question about this kind kind of stuff.
And you can see this in just about every area of life, right?
So if, for instance, you spend four hours a day in the gym, well, what is the purpose of exercise?
Is the purpose of exercise to maintain health and strength and to allow you to age with as much grace as possible and to keep your body fit for the enjoyment of sports and to stay healthy so that you don't burden your children with early ailments as best you can.
So what is the purpose of exercise? Is the purpose of exercise exercise?

[51:04] Allow you to live a better longer life or is the purpose of exercise to pile physical attractiveness on you or muscles on you in order to serve your own vanity right do you do the thing for you, or do you do the thing with an end in mind i know this sounds i'm really phrasing it badly which is kind of unusual for me but i'm kind of at the edge of where at least for me language can accurately really portray things so do you diet because you want to live a better longer healthier life or do you diet because you want other people to envy your abs is it vanity based is it just for you or is it to allow you to do other things do you make money so that you can buy things to make yourself look cool and good and dominate and flex and all this kind of stuff bugatti right or do you make money in order to provide for your family and do some charitable good in the world and and so on right do you lust after a woman or a man because you genuinely admire her character she's great she's wise she's funny she's interesting she's well-read she's good and and sexy and right do you lust or do you lust after her because it will be higher status.

[52:33] For you if she's on your arm right for for women when you look at a guy do you think will he be a good father for my children or do you think will i look higher status for dating him or what will will my friends say, right?
Now, again, I'm a medium, I'm an Aristotelian mean guy even in these things.
You shouldn't completely not care what other people think, but you shouldn't run your life by what other people think.

[53:02] So, with regards to, let's say that you get a thrill out of rejection.
Okay, so do you then just get into some weird sadomasochistic thing where you get beaten and humiliated and you get all of these orgasmic thrills from being rejected and humiliated? Then it's just for you.
Or do you say, wow, you know, I have a pretty good relationship with being rejected.
I can use this to forward challenging thoughts and ideas in the world.
The gifts that I have, let's say, you know, with regards to language skills and imagination skills and so on, I don't even really know where this came from in particular.
It could be, of course, my Christian upbringing, but the idea that all of my gifts would be just for me and my comfort is kind of incomprehensible to me.
That's demonic. It's kind of satanic, right? right? That it's just for, I mean, I think my gifts are for the world as best as I can make them.
Now, that doesn't mean that I would immolate myself, but it does mean that I would focus on taking the gifts that I have and trying to help the world as much as possible.
But it's not, my gifts aren't just for me. My gifts aren't just for me, right?
Gifts and Abilities: Serving Self or World?

[54:15] So let's say that you're a great songwriter and a singer, then is that, are those gifts there to make the world a better place?
Or are those gifts there to make you money and get you laid?
What is the purpose of the abilities that you have?

[54:32] And masochists take their capacity to have a positive experience with rejection and turn it entirely into pursuing their own hedonism.
Rather than saying, okay, well, if I'm less sensitive to rejection or even have a positive experience of rejection, then I can do things in the world that other people would be afraid of because they're afraid of being rejected.
Good, necessary, positive things.
Without a doubt the capacity to dehumanize which is sort of what i was talking about in terms of, your capacity to compete and win as a man you have to dehumanize to some degree the person you're competing with or the entire group that you're competing with right i mean we all see these sports movies and it's like well this this sports team has has the blue outfit and and so we We want them to win.
But that other sports team has the red outfit, and we want them to lose.
And, of course, I've said this before, but I remember even as a kid watching these movies thinking, like, well, okay, but if we just shot the camera, if the camera was just on the other side of the field, then we'd be cheering for the other team. There's nothing moral here.

[55:41] Now, of course, you know, it's the, they always have the same cliches.
Like, it's the broken-down, chaotic, disorganized team with the broken-down, chaotic manager who's fallen on hard times, and, you know, they've got to find something within them that can turn it around and so on, and it's always made by middle-aged men who feel they've missed out on the virtues of life, but you have to dehumanize in order to win.
I mean, when I was in the business world, I had competitors, and we would see the same people over and over again, and we would be competing for the same jobs.
And I would want to win, and I would want them to lose, which means you kind of have to turn off your pathological altruism, your excessive empathy, and so on.
Now, of course, I believe that me winning was better for the client, better for the environment, because I thought, you know, I genuinely believe that what I had created was better than what they had created.
So I had some good reasons for all of that.
But again, dehumanization is essential to the production of excellence that requires, competition, which requires win-losing, which requires that the winners, to some degree, dehumanize those they're competing with.
The Dehumanization of Excellence and Competition

[56:51] You can't get excellence without some levels of dehumanization i mean if just just think of, how how many auditions you have to go through in order to get the lead in a movie i mean assuming you're not already famous right when i was auditioning for the national theater school, there were 1600 applicants and there was they took 16 people so they took one percent of people which meant i really wanted to go and that meant i had to do my absolute best because if i had had not done my best, then somebody else would have gone and they would have been happy instead of me.
So I have to focus on winning and there is to a certain degree of dehumanizing others through that process.

[57:34] And I hope this isn't too much of a shock to anybody who's honest.
I know that's not much of an argument, but of course, anybody who's honest understands this.
Just by listening to this, in a sense, you're dehumanizing the needs and preferences of every other content creator who wants you to listen to their show and not my show.
There's literally tens of millions of other content creators out there who would much rather you be listening to them.
I want you to be listening to me, which means I have to be perfectly comfortable with their unhappiness that you're listening to me, not them.
And it's the same way they want, they're perfectly comfortable with you you listening to them, not me, right?
So, dehumanization is kind of essential.
It's kind of essential. Like, if there is, you think of sort of our ancestors, right?
So, if there's a shortage of food for the winter, you would rather other people's children go hungry than your own children go hungry. That's sort of natural and baked in, right?
You would rather other people's children children go hungry, then your own children go hungry.
Now, that means, to some degree, you have to shut down your empathy with the other parents and the other children.

[58:45] It's just the way it is. So, again, this dehumanization, lack of empathy in someone, it's kind of baked into every choice, quality, market, excellence pursuit.
But, of course, it can go too far, right? The purpose of dehumanizing competitors is to serve of your own family.
It is out of love for your family that you would dehumanize competitors, right?

[59:11] You're an athlete, and if you win this race, your kids get braces and they desperately need braces, then you have to dehumanize your competitors because you love your children, right?
But you take these things to excess, right? And it can be too far.
For the couple, sadomasochism can be seen as a means of intensifying normal sexual relations, pain releases endorphins and other hormones, leaving a mark or memory, testing boundaries, giving form and expression to psychological logical realities, building trust and intimacy, or simply playing.
In her book, Aesthetic Sexuality, Romana Byrne goes so far as to argue that S&M practices can be driven by certain aesthetic goals tied to style, pleasure, and identity, and as such can be compared to the creation of art.

[59:58] Well, that's kind of nuts, in my opinion.
Domination and Submission: The Absence of Reason and Negotiation

[1:00:03] Now, the other thing, too, is that in the absence of of rational negotiation, dominance and submission are the only alternatives, right?
In terms of how things get done, where resources go to.
In the absence of rational negotiation, of course, in the free market, price is a form of rational negotiation.
But in the realm of relationships, you either negotiate according to reason and evidence, or you end up with domination and submission, right?
So for a man, often it's physical violence. For a woman, often it's the the emotional abuse called nagging, well, you can't come to a rational accommodation, and so you have to bully and dominate.

[1:00:44] And so to me, the sadomasochistic relationships would be characterized by an absence of reason.
And in that absence of reason, the sexual dynamic then mirrors the emotional and relationship dynamic of dominance and submission. mission.
Because in S&M, you are not negotiating for mutually shared pleasure.
It's one person wins and the other person loses, but they win by losing and the person wins by winning.
And that's the best you can do. The only win-win you can have is win-lose.
Well, that mirrors the relationship dynamic as a whole, the negotiation of the relationship dynamic as a whole.
So where you you don't have reason, you have bullying, you have domination and submission, like those two pieces of paper on a flat surface, you push them together, one goes over, one goes under, they can't negotiate.
And so, if you are raised in a situation where you are dominated and bullied and so on, then you don't develop the relationship skills of negotiation, you just don't.
Now then, you go out into the sexual or romantic marketplace and you don't have the ability to negotiate.

[1:02:03] What happens? Well, you have to make some decisions. So because you can't negotiate, you can't recognize reason or virtue or values or empathy in a positive sense or any of that, right?
Because empathy can go pathological, right? You need a mean of empathy. Too little is cruelty.
Too much is self-sacrifice. You need a mean of empathy. Empathy can't be a compulsion.
Empathy has to be a negotiation. negotiation you're empathetic with those who share your values of empathy but you have to have the ability to turn off your empathy when around cruel or exploitive people because otherwise your empathy will simply be used against you and you get weaponized against yourself and you're no longer in control of your own destiny as you're just appeasing the most aggressive people in the room so if you grew up without being reasoned with then you lack skills of reasoning you lack skills of negotiation and so how are you going to make decisions well you're going to make decisions based on lust?
Are you going to make decisions based on, well, this person is hostile and aggressive, therefore they must have great value, therefore I will serve them and try to win them?

[1:03:05] If you don't have reason, you only have manipulation. Now, of course, masochism is a form of pretend submission that actually controls the other person, right?
So at the end of the The third movie, I'm not proud, but I took one for philosophy, actually. I took three for philosophy.
At the end of the third movie of Fifty Shades of Grey, they go back to the sex dungeon.

[1:03:33] And the woman turns around and looks at the camera with a smile of domination, right?
Because he is now addicted to dominating her, she's in charge.
She gets the house, she gets the resources, she gets the kid, she gets the guy, she gets all of this stuff. She's in charge by submitting to him.
And he is actually a slave to dominating her because he can't get a healthy woman.
And of course, Christian Grey was raised in a situation of extreme child abuse and I think molestation, if I remember rightly, and all of that. So he wasn't raised.

[1:04:07] In any way learning how to negotiate and therefore the sexual pattern mirrors the relationship dynamic of submission and domination and submission is simply a strategy, to gain resources often right when you see this with dogs right the dogs will bear their like bear their throat to the dominant dog and so the dominant dog stops attacking them and then they They get to survive and reproduce.
It's a form of manipulation. So there is, I think, a sort of Mobius strip, infinity symbol of wraparound when it comes to this kind of stuff.
Of course, I just realized that I used a flash of a movie scene to make a philosophical point, but it certainly struck a chord with people in a very further foundational way.
So, yeah, this is the introduction. We have a long ways to go and a lot of very interesting stuff here about sadism.
I just wanted to put something out to get your thoughts on it and where we're going and whether it has value or interest to you at all.
Of course, I will provide resources, the articles and the footnotes and so on as we go forward.
Next, we do, okay, well, like how common is sadism?

[1:05:24] Because, you know, if it's teeny, teeny, tiny, then it's more of a sort of outlier movement. If not, so we've got all of that.
We've got the history of sadism and its manifestation in particular philosophical and artistic and even political personalities and where it's grown to in the modern world. So, I've got a lot of great stuff coming.
Please let me know what you think. Link, freedomain.com/donate if you find these kinds of examinations helpful.
So this is part one, probably be a six or seven part series, but let me know if you find this helpful. Thank you so much for all of your support.
Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

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00:01:00
The Truth About AI Part 1

Stefan Molyneux looks at the philosophical and moral sides of artificial intelligence, particularly where it crosses with copyright laws and its effects on society. He points out how AI draws from copyrighted materials without getting permission, which brings up issues around intellectual property. Molyneux draws a comparison between standard ways of learning and what AI can do as a customized tutor, noting its ability to deliver information suited to individual needs. He cautions that AI could lower the worth of conventional media and put authors' incomes at risk by turning their creations into commodities. Molyneux calls for an approach where AI firms get approval from the original creators, stressing the importance of acknowledging authors' work as AI becomes more common.

0:00:00 Introduction to AI's Impact
0:00:15 The Ethics of Copyright
0:04:19 Transformative Uses of AI
0:07:55 The Role of AI in Learning
0:16:22 The Nature of AI's Existence
0:20:37 AI and Intellectual Property Issues
0:23:15...

00:24:49
Peaceful Parenting: Immunity to Politics

This clip comes from "Stefan Molyneux on the Scott Adams School!", get the full show at https://fdrpodcasts.com/6302

Raising kids with reason, negotiation, and evidence creates future adults immune to political force. It’s about shaping minds, not just moments. 🌱 Better late than never—plant that seed today!

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00:00:37
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A chapter from my new novel...

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FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE X SPACE WITH STEFAN MOLYNEUX 7pm EST - ONE HOUR TO GO!

Let us talk philosophy, my friends! Bring your questions!

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Heard Tania Khazaal on Ontario talk radio yesterday. Her message speaks in contrast to @freedomain in approach to family, so wanted to bring it to attention.

She writes about family estrangement, emotional resilience, and reconciliation. Drawing from her personal experience of estrangement and repair within her own family, she emphasizes the value of rebuilding trust through calm communication, accountability, and self-reflection. Her work centres on the idea that healing is possible when individuals approach conflict with emotional regulation and a willingness to engage in difficult but constructive conversations.

She also critiques aspects of contemporary “cut-off culture,” suggesting that long-term growth often requires resilience and responsibility rather than avoidance. Across her content, there is a consistent theme that family connection is worth preserving when possible, and that structured tools, inner work, and disciplined communication can help restore fractured ...

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In the vast tapestry of human experience, this collection of premium content stands as a beacon of reflection and introspection! Each episode is a journey into the complexities of our shared existence. From the intricate dance of self-forgiveness to the harrowing tales of personal adversity, these moments of life challenge, provoke, and inspire.


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THE GREATEST ESSAY IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Humanity evolves through accumulated wisdom from endless trial and error. This wisdom has been transmitted through fiction – stories, superstitions, commandments, and ancestor-worship – which has created the considerable problem that these fictions can be easily intercepted and replaced by other lies. 

Children absorb their moral and cultural wisdom from parents, priests and teachers. When governments take over education, foreign thoughts easily transmit themselves to the young, displacing parents and priests. In a fast-changing world, parents represent the past, and are easily displaced by propaganda. 

Government education thus facilitates cultural takeovers – a soft invasion that displaces existing thought-patterns and destroys all prior values. 

The strength of intergenerational cultural transmission of values only exists when authority is exercised by elders. When that authority transfers to the State, children adapt to the new leaders, scorning their parents in the process. 

This is an evolutionary adaptation that resulted from the constant brutal takeovers of human history and prehistory. If your tribe was conquered, you had to adapt to the values of your new masters or risk genetic death through murder or ostracism. 

When a new overlord – who represents the future – inflicts his values on the young, they scorn their parents and cleave to the new ruler in order to survive. 

Government instruction of the young is thus the portal through which alien ideas conquer the young as if a violent overthrow had occurred – which in fact it did, since government education is funded through force. 

This is the weakness of the cultural transmission of values – by using ‘authority’ instead of philosophy – reason and evidence – new authorities can easily displace the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years. 

It is a common observation that a culture’s success breeds its own destruction. Cultures that follow more objective reason tend to prosper – this prosperity breeds resentment and greed in the hearts of less-successful people and cultures, who then swarm into the wealthier lands and use the State to drain them dry of their resources. 

Everything that has been painfully learned and transmitted over a thousand generations can be scattered to the winds in a mere generation or two. 

This happens less in the realms of reason and mathematics, for obvious reasons. Two and two make four throughout all time, in all places, regardless of propaganda. The Pythagorean theorem is as true now as it was thousands of years ago – Aristotle’s three laws of logic remain absolute and incontrovertible to all but the most deranged. 

Science – absent the corrupting influence of government funding – remains true and absolute across time and space. Biological absolutes can only be opposed by those about to commit suicide. 

Authority based on lies hates the clarity and objectivity – and curiosity – of rational philosophy. Bowing to the authority of reason means abandoning the lies that prop up the powerful – but refusing to bow to reason means you end up bowing to foreigners who take over your society via the centralized indoctrination of the young. 

Why is this inevitable? 

Because it is an addiction. 

Political power is the most powerful – and dangerous – addiction. The drug addict only destroys his own life, and harms those close to him. The addiction to political power harms hundreds of millions of people – but the political junkies don’t care, they have dehumanized their fellow citizens – in order to rule over others, you must first view them as mere useful livestock instead of sovereign minds like your own. 

Just as drug addicts would rather destroy lives than stop using – political addicts would rather be slaves in their own sick system than free in a rational, moral world. 

If we cannot find a way to transmit morals without lies or assumptions, we will never break the self-destructive cycle of civilization – success breeds unequal wealth, which breeds resentment and greed, which breeds stealing from the successful through political power, which collapses the society. 

If we cannot anchor morals in reason and evidence, we can never build a successful civilization that does not engineer its own demise. Everything good that mankind builds will forever be dismantled using the same tools that were used to build it. 

Since the fall of religion in the West – inevitable given the wild successes of the free market and modern science and medicinewhich came out of skepticism, reason and the Enlightenment – we have applied critical reasoning to every sphere except morality. We have spun spaceships out of the solar system, plumbed the depths of the atom and cast our minds back to the very nanoseconds after our universe came into being – but we cannot yet clearly state why murder, rape, theft and assault are wrong. 

We can say that they are “wrong” because they feel bad, or are harmful to social cohesion, or because God commands it, or because they are against the law – but that does not help us understand what morality is, or how it is proven. 

Saying that rape is wrong because it feels bad to the victim does not answer why rape is wrong. Clearly it feels ‘good’ to the rapist – otherwise rape would not exist. 

Saying it harms social happiness or cohesion is a category error, since ‘society’ does not exist empirically. Individuals act in their own perceived self-interest. From an evolutionary perspective, ‘rape’ is common. The amoral genes of an ugly man that no woman wants are rewarded for rape, since it gives them at least some chance to survive. 

Saying that rape is wrong because God commands it does not answer the question – it is an appeal to an unreasoning authority that cannot be directly questioned. 

Saying that rape is wrong because it is illegal is begging the question. Many evil things throughout history have been legal, and many good things – such as free speech and absolute private property – are currently criminalized. 

Saying that rape is wrong because it makes the victim unhappy is not a moral argument – it is a strange argument from hedonism, in that the ‘morality’ of an action is measured only by pleasure and painWe often inflict significant misery on people in order to heal or educate them. We punish children – often harshly. The ‘hedonism’ argument is also used to justify sacrificing free speech on the altar of self-proclaimed ‘offense’ and ‘upset.’ 

So… 

Why is rape wrong? 

Why are murder, theft and assault immoral? 

A central tenet of modernity has been the confirmation of personal experience through universal laws that end up utterly blowing our minds. 

The theory of gravity affirms our immediate experience of weight and balance and throwing and catching – and also that we are standing on giant spinning ball rocketing around a star that is itself rocketing around a galaxy. We feel still; we are in fact in blinding motion. The sun and the moon appear to be the same size – they are in fact vastly different. It looks like the stars go round the Earth, but they don’t 

Science confirms our most immediate experiences, while blowing our minds about the universe as a whole. 

If you expand your local observations – “everything I drop falls” – to the universal – “everything in the universe falls” – you radically rewrite your entire world-view. 

If you take the speed of light as constant, your perception of time and space change forever – and you also unlock the power of the atom, for better and for worse. 

If you take the principles of selective breeding and animal husbandry and apply them to life for the last four billion years, you get the theory of evolution, and your world-view is forever changed – for the better, but the transition is dizzying. 

If we take our most common moral instincts – that rape, theft, assault and murder are wrong – and truly universalize them, our world-view also changes forever – better, more accuratemore moral – but also deeply disturbing, disorienting and dizzying. 

But we cannot universalize what we cannot prove – this would just be the attempt to turn personal preferences into universal rules: “I like blue, therefore blue is universally preferable.” 

No, we must first prove morality – only then can we universalize it. 

To prove morality, we must first accept that anything that is impossible cannot also be true. 

It cannot be true that a man can walk north and south at the same time. 

It cannot be true that a ball can fall up and down at the same time. 

It cannot be true that gases both expand and contract when heated. 

It cannot be true that water both boils and freezes at the same temperature. 

It cannot be true that 2 plus 2 equals both 4 and 5. 

If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then it cannot be true that Socrates is immortal. 

If you say that impossible things can be true, then you are saying that you have a standard of truth that includes both truth and the opposite of truth, which is itself impossible. 

The impossible is the opposite of the possible – if you say that both the possible and the impossible can be true, then you are saying that your standard for truth has two opposite standards, which cannot be valid. This would be like saying that the proof of a scientific theory is conformity with reason and evidence, and also the opposite of conformity with reason and evidence, or that profit in a company equals both making money, and losing money. 

All morality is universally preferable behaviourin that it categorizes behaviour that should ideally be chosen or avoided by all people, at all timesWe do not say that rape is evil only on Wednesdays, or 1° north of the equator, or only by tall people. Rape is always and forever wrong – we understand this instinctively, though it is a challenge to prove it rationally. 

Remember, that which is impossible can never be true. 

If we put forward the proposition that “rape is universally preferable behaviour,” can that ever be true? 

If it is impossible, it can never be true. 

If we logically analyse the proposition that “rape is universally preferable behaviour,” we quickly find that it is impossible. 

The statement demands that everyone prefers rape – to rape and be raped at all times, and under all circumstances. 

Aside from the logistical challenges of both raping and being raped at the same time, the entire proposition immediately contradicts itself. Since it is self-contradictory, it is impossible, and if it is impossible, it can neither be true nor valid. 

If “rape is universally preferable behaviour,” then everyone must want to rape and be raped at all times. 

However, rape is by definition violently unwanted sexual behaviour. 

In other words, it is only “rape” because it is decidedly not preferred. 

Since the category “rape” only exists because one person wants it, while the other person – his or her victim – desperately does not want itrape cannot be universally preferable. 

No behaviour that only exists because one person wants it, and the other person does not, can ever be in the category of “universally preferable.” 

Therefore, it is impossible that rape is universally preferable behaviour. 

What about the opposite? Not raping? 

Can “not raping” logically ever be “universally preferable behaviour”? 

In other words, are there innate self-contradictions in the statement “not raping is universally preferable behaviour”? 

No. 

Everyone on the planet can simultaneously “not rape” without logical self-contradiction. Two neighbours can both be gardening at the same time – which is “not raping” – without self-contradiction. All of humanity can operate under the “don’t rape” rule without any logical contradictions whatsoever. 

Therefore, when we say that “rape is wrong,” we mean this in a dual sense – rape is morally wrong, and it is morally wrong because any attempt to make rape “moral” – i.e. universally preferable behaviour – creates immediate self-contradictions, and therefore is impossible, and therefore cannot be correct or valid. 

It is both morally and logically wrong. 

What about assault? 

Well, assault occurs when one person violently attacks another person who does not want the attack to occur. (This does not apply to sports such as boxing or wrestling where aggressive attacks are agreed to beforehand.) 

This follows the same asymmetry as rape. 

Assault can never be universally preferable behaviour, because if it were, everyone must want to assault and be assaulted at all times and under all circumstances. 

However, if you want to be assaulted, then it is not assault. 

Boom. 

What about theft? 

Well, theft is the unwanted transfer of property. 

To say that theft is universally preferable behaviour is to argue that everyone must want to steal and be stolen from at all times, and under all circumstances. 

However, if you want to be stolen from, it is not theft – the category completely disappears when it is universalized. 

If I want you to take my property, you are not stealing from me. 

If I put a couch by the side of the road with a sign saying “TAKE ME,” I cannot call you a thief for taking the couch. 

Theft cannot be universally preferable behaviour because again, it is asymmetrical, in that it is wanted by one party – the thief – but desperately not wanted by the other party – the person stolen from. 

If a category only exists because one person wants it, but the other person doesn’t, it cannot fall under the category of “universally preferable behaviour.” 

The same goes for murder. 

Murder is the unwanted killing of another. 

If someone wants to be killed, this would fall under the category of euthanasia, which is different from murder, which is decidedly unwanted. 

In this way, rape, theft, assault and murder can never be universally preferable behaviours. 

The nonaggression principle and a respect for property rights fully conform to rational morality, in that they can be universalized with perfect consistency. 

There is no contradiction in the proposal that everyone should respect persons and property at all times. To not initiate the use of force, and to not steal, are both perfectly logically consistent. 

Of course, morality exists because people want to do evil – we do not live in heaven, at least not yet. 

Universally preferable behaviour is a method of evaluating moral propositions which entirely accepts that some people want to do evil. 

The reason why it is so essential is because the greatest evils in the world are done not by violent or greedy individuals, but rather by false moral systems such as fascism, communism, socialism and so on. 

In the 20th century alone, governments murdered 250 million of their own citizens – outside of war, just slaughtering them in the streets, in gulags and concentration camps. 

Individual murderers can at worst kill only a few dozen people in their lifetime, and such serial killers are extraordinarily rare. 

Compare this to the toll of war. 

A thief may steal your car, but it takes a government to have you born into millions of dollars of intergenerational debt and unfunded liabilities. 

Now, remember when I told you that when we universalize your individual experience, we end up with great and dizzying truths? 

Get ready. 

What is theft? 

The unwanted transfer of property, usually through the threat of force. 

What is the national debt? 

The unwanted transfer of property, through the threat of force. 

Individuals in governments have run up incomprehensible debts to be paid by the next generations – the ultimate example of “taxation without representation.” 

The concept of “government” is a moral theory, just like “slavery” and “theocracy” and “honour killings.” 

The theory is that some individuals must initiate the use of force, while other individuals are banned from initiating the use of force. 

Those within the “government” are defined by their moral and legal rights to initiate the use of force, while those outside the “government” are defined by moral and legal bans on initiating the use of force. 

This is an entirely contradictory moral theory. 

If initiating the use of force is wrong, then it is wrong for everyone, since morality is universally preferable behaviour. 

If all men are mortal, we cannot say that Socrates is both a man and immortal. 

If initiating force is universally wrong, we cannot say that it is wrong for some people, but right for others. 

“Government” is a moral theory that is entirely self-contradictory – and that which is self-contradictory is impossible – as we accepted earlier – and thus cannot be valid. 

If a biologist creates a category called “mammal” which is defined by being warm-blooded,” is it valid to include cold-blooded creatures in that category? 

Of course not. 

If a physicist proposes a rule that all matter has the property of gravity, can he also say that obsidian has the property of antigravity? 

Of course not. 

If all matter has gravity, and obsidian is composed of matter, then obsidian must have gravity. 

If we say that morality applies to all humanscan we create a separate category of humans for which the opposite of morality applies? 

Of course not. 

I mean, we can do whatever we want, but it’s neither true nor moral. 

If we look at something like counterfeiting, we understand that counterfeiting is the creation of pretend currency based on no underlying value or limitation. 

Counterfeiting is illegal for private citizens, but legal – and indeed encouraged – for those protected by the government. 

Thus, by the moral theory of “government,” that which is evil for one person, is virtuous for another. 

No. 

False. 

That which is self-contradictory cannot stand. 

People who live by ignoring obvious self-contradictions are generally called insane. 

They cannot succeed for long in this life. 

Societies that live by ignoring obvious self-contradictions are also insane, although we generally call them degenerate, decadent, declining and corrupt. 

Such societies cannot succeed for long in this world. 

The only real power – the essence of political power – is to create opposite moral categories for power-mongers. 

What is evil for you is good for them. 

It is disorienting to take our personal morals and truly universalize them. 

So what? 

Do you think we have reached the perfect end of our moral journey as a species? 

Is there nothing left to improve upon when it comes to virtue? 

Every evil person creates opposite standards for themselves – the thief says that he can steal, but others should not, because he doesn’t like to be stolen from! 

Politicians say that they must use violence, but citizens must not. 

Nothing that is self-contradictory can last for long. 

You think we have finished our moral journey? 

Of course not. 

Shake off your stupor, wake up to the corruption all around and within you. 

Like “government,” slavery was a universal morally-justified ethic for almost all of human history. 

Until it wasn’t. 

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