Make Me Abandon ETHICS! Listener Questions

Stefan Molyneux

Philosopher Stefan Molyneux dares people to make him abandon ethics if UPB is shown to be self-contradictory or against reason and evidence. He also covers why prison is mainly about removing dangerous people, how conscience only forms in childhood, and why true moral change cannot just be switched on later.  0:00:00 Crime and Punishment 0:06:53 Souls or Brains 0:12:25 Power and Corruption 0:17:14 Defining UPB 0:20:04 Anger and Family 0:25:30 Can Machines Think? 0:26:05 Abusive Child Behavior 0:26:33 Finding Peaceful Parents 0:28:09 Aimless Young Men 0:28:48 Concepts Shape Behavior 0:30:13 Reason and Consciousness  JOIN ME IN NASHVILLE SEPTEMBER 12! https://wordwardebate.com/  Use code STEFAN for 10% off!  GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/FREEDOMAIN2026

Transcript

00:00All right. Hello, everybody. Thank you for the great questions on X. My apologies for

00:06taking a while to get to them. So here's a question. Is prison really a punishment for

00:13someone if they don't understand their own freedom? It seems the stability of confinement

00:17and three hearts and a cart is a sense of relief for some who are unable to bear the responsibility

00:21of freedom in the first place, and society pays rent. Well, of course, this comes back to a sort

00:29of foundational question about crime and punishment. Do we punish horse thieves because stealing

00:37horses is wrong, or do we punish horse thieves so that horses are not stolen? I mean, I suppose both

00:46of those things come into play, but is it, well, someone has done something wrong and therefore

00:53they need to be punished? Is that what prison is for? Or is prison the last ditch attempt to preserve

01:01the peace and stability of society by taking predatory people out of society? So in the

01:10religious conception of the world, people have souls within them which cannot be fundamentally

01:19corrupted. There's always an access to a good person in there, right? So the analogy would be something

01:26like, well, it's true that someone has been a lifelong 40-year pack-a-day smoker, and if the doctor

01:36can use

01:36the right magic words or phrases, then the emergency backup pink perfect lungs will then replace the

01:43corrupt ones, which would really distort the entire discipline of medicine, right? So if you corrupt

01:49your lungs through smoking, then, I mean, I suppose you can try and mitigate the damage or deal with the

01:56resulting diseases, but there's no emergency, break the glass and get the perfect pink lungs to replace

02:03your existing corrupt lungs. But of course, in the religious conception, particularly the Christian

02:09conception, there's a perfect soul made by God, that, you know, if you repent and seek forgiveness in

02:18someone, then your bad brain can be replaced with a good moral brain. And this is kind of tormenting

02:28for people. It's really tormenting for people, or it torments people, I suppose is a better way of

02:33putting it. It torments people because, for instance, to personalize it a little bit, if I

02:39believed that there was a really great mother inside the brain of my not-so-great mother, well, then I

02:47would be tormented, and I would be trying to fix it, and I would spend my entire life circling around

02:52trying to figure out how to summon or access or reveal or unlock this great mother. You know, you've

03:01heard these stories of people who have locked their Bitcoins in some password-protected place,

03:06they forgot the password, and so they are tormented, and they are, you know, they can spend

03:12years or decades trying to unlock the Bitcoin on this device. And there's a guy, I think he's got

03:2110 password guesses, he's tried eight of them, and he's terrified of the last two, he's got to really

03:25think about it and hope it'll come to him in a dream or something like that. So if there's a

03:30great

03:30treasure that you have to unlock, then you're going to try all in your power to unlock this

03:38treasure. There's a guy who tossed out, or maybe his wife tossed out, a computer with Bitcoin on it,

03:42he knows it's in the landfill, and he's been spending years trying to get the city to let

03:46him go to the landfill and get his computer back because it's got, of course, a huge amount of money

03:49on it. Or Bitcoin. So, which is better money. So, think of it as you come across a little USB

03:59drive,

04:01and it's password-protected, and you clearly remember that it was just a blank USB drive

04:06that you were practicing encryption on or something like that, right? You set up some encryption scheme,

04:13and you know it's blank. Then, you know, if you can't remember the password, well, you're just

04:17reformatted, or so, because there's nothing of value on it, right? Whereas, of course, if you come

04:22across that same USB drive, and that's the, and it has, you know, a hundred Bitcoin, or some crazy

04:28number, right? Some, whatever it is, a hundred Bitcoin written on it, then there's a treasure in

04:33there that you're going to move heaven and earth to try and unlock. And so, is the mind like the

04:41lungs?

04:41Or is there a perfect person always buried inside, even a bad person, that you can access with the

04:49right combination, the right combination of words, the right intervention, the right prayer,

04:54the right connection? Is there always the possibility, in a sense, of someone or something

05:00snapping their fingers and summoning the great lungs? Now, the problem, of course, is that if you

05:08believe that there are, like, let's say you're a lung doctor, as I was mentioning, and if you believe

05:12that there's a way that you can replace the diseased, corrupt lungs from smoking with perfect

05:21pink lungs, as if you've never smoked, then that's going to really inhibit everything that you do when

05:29it comes to dealing with people with diseased lungs. In other words, why would you get into all of

05:33the medical stuff and the treatments and, you know, maybe removing a lung if it's true? I think

05:39that happened to Ayn Rand later on because she was a heavy smoker. And you're going to be, everything

05:45you're going to do regarding lung disease is going to be distorted by this belief, or it's going to be

05:52affected by this belief that you can just find a way to replace the diseased lungs with perfect,

05:57healthy lungs. And you're not going to look for other things. And you're going to spend,

06:02and your career as a whole focusing on trying to unlock these perfect lungs, if you believe that.

06:09And so it's the same thing with the conscience, with the mind, with empathy. So God creates a soul

06:15which has empathy and love and virtue and grace, and that is indestructible within the body.

06:21It's always there in the body, lurking just around the corner, just under the spleen,

06:26just hidden in some Byzantine folds of the brain. There is this perfect, wonderful, great,

06:35empathetic, moral person who's in there. You've just got to find him. And then if you find him,

06:42find that perfect soul, connect with it, then the badness vanishes and is replaced by

06:47goodness and there's reform and all of this kind of stuff. So, sorry, I don't mean to labor the point

06:51too much, but that's kind of my gig. So, you have this belief. Now, if, on the other hand,

06:57you don't believe in the soul, then the person is the brain. And the brain is really not distinguishable

07:04in many ways from the lungs. In other words, if you don't have a conscience, if you don't have

07:11empathy, if you're predatory, if you're win-lose mentality, if you're narcissistic, if you're

07:16psychopathic, if you're sociopathic, if you're greedy, selfish, mean, nasty, violent, impulsive,

07:22and so on, then let's say you commit a bunch of crimes in your teens and you get a bunch

07:28of

07:28warnings and then you just double down and commit a bunch more crimes in your early 20s, then at some

07:33point, you're just going to get thrown in jail and you're going to stay there for quite a while.

07:37Now, is this to punish the person? Punishment being hopefully to reform the person, right?

07:47So, punishing someone who's incapable of reform is just a kind of cruelty, right? Like, I mean,

07:53if a coach yells at a guy with no legs to run faster, well, he can't run faster. He's not

07:59capable of it. And if the coach then punishes him for not running faster, we would understand that

08:04this would just be a kind of sadism, just a kind of bizarre cruelty, right? So, punishing someone who

08:10has no conscience will not create a conscience within them because there's no empathetic,

08:16conscience-based soul within the person that can be accessed. So, if somebody is antisocial,

08:23a criminal, violent, predatory, and evil, then we remove them from society, but not with the purpose

08:31of punishing them to make them a better person. Because they can't be a better person after a

08:37certain amount of evil and criminality. They can't be a better person because there's no better person

08:45in there. And the lungs, after a decade or two of smoking, can't just instantaneously become

08:51pink healthy lungs. I mean, so, if the person changes course or whatever, like, so let's say you

08:58smoke for 10 or 20 years and you quit, you exercise and so on, then you can, your lungs will

09:04heal over

09:04time and, you know, your baseline for dangerous diseases goes down and so on, right? I mean,

09:13you look at George Harrison, the guitarist for the Beatles, so one of them, smoked like a chimney,

09:19died of lung cancer. Paul McCartney quit smoking, I suppose, and is now in his 80s and all of that.

09:26So, that's a possibility. So, you know, if you are on a path towards bad things, corrupt things,

09:34you're a shoplifter in your early mid-teens or whatever, and then you're like, ah, this is bad,

09:38and you change, right? No, you can recover. But if somebody is really committed and has done a lot

09:43of violence, predation, and evil, and remember, by the time somebody is caught, tried, convicted,

09:49sent to prison, they've usually been a criminal for a long time, and they've usually done a lot of wrong.

09:52This is just the first thing they've been caught for. So, recidivism rates are very high. In other

09:59words, if somebody is a criminal, goes to prison, gets out, they usually will commit another, a crime.

10:05So, are you punishing them with the goal of changing them for the better? Now, of course,

10:12everybody hears these anecdotes, and of course, I accept that. Everyone hears these anecdotes of the

10:17reformed criminal, right? The guy who was a criminal, and then became a nicer, better person,

10:24and reformed, and all this, that, and the other. And that certainly is the case, that that can happen,

10:29so it's not impossible. But I don't know that the person suddenly grows a conscience. Growing a

10:34conscience after childhood is like asking someone to grow an arm that got bitten off by a shark when you

10:41regrow the arm. It's not something that really happens. But people can adapt and suppress based

10:46upon costs and benefits to themselves. So, somebody just might get tired of the life of

10:52crime and say, you know, fine, I'll get a job. You know, I don't really like getting a job. It's

10:56kind

10:56of goofy, but it's, you know, I'm tired of the life of crime. It's still hedonism. It's just that

11:02crime has become less pleasant compared to getting a job. Same thing happens with addiction,

11:08you hit rock bottom, and you then don't quit your addiction because you have empathy for others or

11:13your future self, right? You quit your addiction because it's just becoming too costly and so on,

11:19right? So, yeah, people can change, but they can't just grow a conscience. The conscience is a

11:24complicated thing that develops with 13 different parts, 12 or 13 different parts of the brain

11:29working together over babyhood and toddlerhood and early childhood, and you can't just go back in

11:38time and grow it later. It's like if you don't get enough food to eat as a kid and you

11:42grow up

11:43three inches shorter, you can't just fix that later, right? I mean, you just eat more food,

11:48you'll get wider, not taller. So, the purpose of prison is to keep the predators away from the

11:58general population in the same way that if there is an aggressive alligator in Florida, say, then

12:05the alligator will be relocated to some more remote area where it's not going to come in contact with

12:11people. As far as a free market goes, I would imagine that a free market would put prisoners

12:17to work and have money go both to the costs of their incarceration and also to recompense their

12:24victims. So, all right, do you think the idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts

12:29absolutely might be a falsehood that actually discourages good people from seeking power because

12:33they're afraid to risk being corrupted, leaving positions of power to be filled primarily by

12:38people who are amoral or corrupt? I mean, it certainly is possible and, you know, I'm not going to say

12:44it's impossible. We have, of course, seen people struggle to create virtue in corrupt systems and

12:53you can certainly have some good things done for a while. You can certainly have some good things done

12:59for a while. So, for instance, in the excesses of crony capitalism and socialism that characterized

13:05the England that I grew up in the 1970s where there were shortages of everything. I couldn't get any

13:10meat. We were cold in the winter because coal was short and so on. So, Margaret Thatcher comes along

13:15and privatizes a bunch of stuff and things get better and then, you know, things get worse

13:21afterwards, right? And England is doing extraordinarily badly at the moment, arguably worse than at any

13:28other time in its history. So, you can get, like, there's a downward spiral in a sense and you can

13:35get people to bump it up a little bit but then just other bad people will come in and continue

13:41that

13:41downward spiral. So, power corrupts and so, yeah, some people come in and will try to lower or diminish

13:49the amount of power that the government has and they might even do some decent work in either

13:58preventing or slowing down the expansion of government power or even reducing it in certain

14:03circumstances. But the logic of the system is that government power will always and continue to

14:10spread because you would have to have a whole bunch of people who had, you know, almost perfect

14:18moral fiber go in to government and take on these battles and government can't really be reduced while

14:26government controls the education of children, right? This is a foundational thing, right? So, if

14:32children are given to the government to be educated, as almost all of them are, then they just bond with

14:38the government, right? We bond with our educators and, of course, people can't, children can't look at

14:43their parents and say, wait, you put me under the control of a corrupt organization like the government?

14:48That would be crazy, right? So, it's sort of like saying we should have moral slave owners. Now, of course,

14:55if you are a slave, you don't want to be the slave of a sadist, right? This sort of story

15:00of

15:02Dostoevsky's father was such a brutal serf owner that, and such a drunkard, that the serfs rebelled

15:10and tied him down and forced him to drink liquor until he died. I mean, that's how angry they were

15:14and how horrified they were at his brutality. So, if you are a slave or a serf, then obviously you

15:22would prefer a more gentle and kind master to a more cruel and sadistic master, for sure, of course.

15:28But the problem is slavery and serfdom. The problem is that you have to try and depend on the

15:34personality or character of the person who's involved in wielding that power, and that's bad,

15:40because the general tendency is to more cruelty. And the other thing, too, is that it's not just

15:46that power corrupts, it's that it is impossible to wield power in a moral and productive way. So,

15:54a simple example from Austrian economics is you cannot have an efficient allocation of resources

16:01without the price system. The price system signals empirical supply and demand for free,

16:08right? If the price of something is going up, then the supply is going down while the demand remains

16:12constant, or the demand is going up faster than the supply. So, you just, if the price of copper

16:21goes up, then people who have a bunch of copper wiring in their basement may be motivated to sell

16:26it, which no central planner is going to understand. Like, you can't have efficient allocation of

16:32resources. I just remember, I debated this with Peter Joseph years ago. So, you cannot have an

16:37efficient allocation of resources without the price system, and you can't have the price system

16:42without the free market. So, even if you wanted to be efficient as some sort of socialist central

16:48planner, it's impossible to do so. So, my goal is not to say to people, be nicer in your pursuit

16:56of

16:57power. And of course, you know, I think Trump did some good stuff, but, you know, the pandemic

17:02response and all of that was just absolutely catastrophic. So, all right. Oh, next question.

17:09You remove the power. Don't ask people to do it better, especially when sometimes they can.

17:13Another question, what would lead you to abandon UPB as a, quote, proof of secular ethics?

17:18That's a dipshite troll question because it frames my advocacy or rejection of arguments in a personal

17:29manner. In other words, if you don't know what would cause me to reject a proof, then you don't

17:35understand me, my work, or philosophy as a whole at all. At all. It's like asking somebody,

17:43it's like asking a scientist, what would cause you to abandon the scientific method? I mean,

17:50a philosopher is someone who organizes his or her thoughts according to reason and evidence.

17:57So, if you say, I can't imagine what would cause staff to abandon UPB, which is universally preferable

18:04behavior, my rational proof of secular ethics, or the rational proof of secular ethics, what would

18:08lead you to abandon it? Well, if it was proven to be self-contradictory, right? And if somehow,

18:18let's say, let's say communism was far more economically productive and produced far more

18:25freedom than the free market, right? So, that would be the evidence because communism is a

18:32violation of UPB by using the initiation of force and denying property rights. Communism is a violation

18:39of UPB. The free market is an affirmation of UPB. So, one piece of evidence that would be interesting

18:47to explore is if central planning was much more economically productive and produced greater

18:55human freedoms and well-being than the free market. That would be evidence against that would

19:02be interesting to explore. But, yeah, if UPB was self-contradictory, then I would abandon it.

19:08Um, and if it was opposed by evidence, right? So, reason and evidence, as I said. So, if somebody

19:14is saying, well, what could possibly lead you, a philosopher who's devoted to reason and evidence,

19:19to reject a theory? That means you don't understand that I organize my thoughts by reason and evidence.

19:26You don't, like, you don't even understand the basis of what it is that I'm doing. And it's,

19:31it's snarky and bitchy because you're saying, well, I mean, I can't possibly, like, you have such

19:37an emotional attachment step to UPB. Like, what could possibly cause you to abandon it? It's like,

19:42just disprove it. Just disprove it. But you can't. You can't disprove it. Yeah, it has withstood

19:49close to 20 years of relentless assaults. Everybody I've talked to it accepts the basic premises.

19:56And so, even a professor of logic who's called in from time to time, who's very hostile to UPB,

20:01has accepted it. So, yeah, it's just true. All right. Now, why do you think some listeners are able

20:06to feel their anger, says the question, when talking about their families, while others

20:09struggle to access it during calls? So, if you're going to ask me why people with the same

20:17circumstances have different reactions, then you are, in a sense, trying to draw me, I'm not saying

20:23consciously, and I'm not even saying it's a bad thing to ask, of course, right? But logically,

20:27you're trying to draw me into determinism. Determinism. When people feel angry, so I'll give you an

20:35example from my own life. So, when I was a kid, I had to suppress my emotions because I was

20:40raised by

20:40a very violent and selfish woman. So, I had to suppress my emotions because my emotions interfered

20:49with her preferences, and then she would get violent or aggressive or something like that.

20:53And so, after high school, I went to work in northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan

21:01as a gold panner and prospector. And not always in the bush, but at least half and half of the

21:08time

21:08I was in the bush. And so, I remember reading The Psychology of Self-Esteem, which was the first book

21:16that I really read, sorry, the first book that I read that really got me into the process of

21:22self-knowledge. And Nathaniel Brandom was like, oh, you should accept your emotions, right? So,

21:29I remember I was in Thunder Bay, and I was chatting with this attractive young woman

21:34at a disco or a bar. It was a bar where they had live music. It was really great.

21:40And I remember asking her about her mother, her childhood, her family, her history, all kinds of

21:46stuff. I was doing this even at the age of 18. And we chatted for a while, and then she

21:53went

21:54somewhere else. And then she came back, and we chatted some more, and I gave her my number.

22:01And I was, I used to work out at the, I think it was Lakehead University. I had a membership

22:06at the

22:06gym when I was in town. I'd work out there. And I remember sitting in the, a couple of days

22:11after I

22:12met this woman at the bar, gave her my number. And I remember sitting in the sauna. And I felt,

22:21I was like, hey, she never called, right? And I felt this sort of stab at disappointment that

22:24she'd never called. And then I took a deep breath, blow it away, get rid of the, get rid of

22:28the

22:28feeling, right? Because that was my habit as a, as a child and as a teenager. And not just at

22:34home,

22:34but other places as well, school and so on, right? And so, but then I remember Nathaniel Brandon

22:41and his, you know, you should feel your feelings, they're not your enemies and so on. And so I was

22:46like,

22:46you know what, let me not do that. Let me, let me feel the feeling. And so I thought about

22:53this

22:53woman and the fact that she hadn't called me. And I let myself feel sad or disappointed or

23:03whatever it was, right? I just let myself feel that feeling. And I sort of made a vow to myself

23:09to start pushing my feelings away, to accept my feelings and so on, right? And this is a little

23:15over 40 years ago. And so why? Well, I mean, you can look at all this causality. My best friend

23:22was into Rush. The drummer for Rush was into Ayn Rand. He gave me The Fountainhead. I read it.

23:26The Fountainhead led me to Nathaniel Brandon, who led me to accepting my feelings, which is not exactly

23:32something that's done in Ayn Rand's novels and so on. So you can do all that, but it comes down

23:36to a

23:36choice. It comes down to a choice. That objectivism was a philosophy that I quite respected. And Nathaniel

23:44Brandon, in terms of self-knowledge, was a thinker. And I actually did get to interview him

23:48later, but he's a thinker who I respected and so on. A psychologist that I respected. But I made

23:54that choice. I made that choice to pursue self-knowledge. I made that choice to start

23:58accepting my own emotions, which has been great over the course of my life, and so on. So I can't

24:04put it

24:05to causality. You know, there's lots of people. In fact, my friend who gave me my first Ayn Rand book

24:14had, to me, a goofy and foolish relationship with self-knowledge. He said, even as a teenager,

24:19he said he knows himself perfectly, which I thought was kind of a goofy guess, or whatever it is. And

24:25so,

24:26as a whole, even though he read The Psychology of Self-Esteem, he did not get from it what I

24:34got

24:34from it. And in fact, I think I got deeper and better things from the book. So we had exposure

24:39to the same material, but we had different conclusions out of it and so on. So why are

24:47some people able to feel their anger? Others struggle to access it during calls? The first

24:51cause that I would think is simply punishment. So in some families, you're allowed to have

24:59screaming matches with your parents. Like as a teenager, the hormones hit and your independence

25:03hits and your revulsion and compulsion from above hits. And so you can have screaming matches with

25:11your parents. And so you're able to get angry. In other families, if you even start to raise your

25:19voice at your parents a little, they'll beat you up. Like your dad might beat you up and so on,

25:24right? So then you just, you can't get angry because it's going to threaten your survival. So

25:28it would probably be something like that. Do you think, next question, do you think it's possible

25:33for a machine to actually know things or just process code? Yes, it seems like the entire stock

25:39market is riding on a sentient computer coming to life. What do you think? No, computers can't know

25:43things. They can't think. They can't reason. They're not organic. They don't have dreams. They don't sleep.

25:47They don't have intuition or instincts. They don't have the second brain gut, which has a bunch of

25:51neurons in your belly. They don't have any of that stuff. It is just binary. AI is just a word

25:57guesser and it guesses words pretty well and it can be very thoughtful and so on. So no, sentient

26:02computers, they're not coming to life, they don't think. If a child is found torturing animals, do you

26:08think the child should be euthanized? Good heavens no. Heavens no. A child who's torturing animals is

26:13almost certainly suffering either from some brain dysfunction, some organic brain dysfunction or

26:18severe child abuse. So no, of course not. You would try to help the child and to turn that child

26:25away from the disasters that are coming without an intervention and you would try and figure out

26:30what's going on wrong with the parenting. Somebody asks, you've said many times that the virtuous

26:35path is lonesome. We're not finding people that make their children the number one priority and

26:41we've cut ties with those who are abusive, neglectful, who have sent their children to

26:44daycare. What can we do to find peaceful parents? So lonesome is interesting, you know, the idea of

26:50the lonely crowd. Like nothing's more lonely to me than being with a group of people and not being

26:57able to be honest or speak my thoughts or be myself. See, if I'm alone, I can have my own

27:02thoughts,

27:03I can write, I can read, I can podcast, I can daydream, I can go for a walk and enjoy

27:08the

27:09scenery and so on, right? So if I'm on my own, I'm not disconnected from myself. If I'm with people

27:15where I can be myself and be honest, I'm not disconnected from myself. The thing that is most

27:20isolating is to be with people and not be able to be yourself. Then you don't get the authenticity

27:24of being alone nor the connection with the true self that comes from being honest with people.

27:31So lonesome? No, it's not lonesome because you have a great connection with your spouse and you have

27:36a great connection with your children. So what can we do to find peaceful parents? Well, just

27:39take a leadership position, right? Just, you know, there's meetup.com, there's tons of places where

27:45you can go and just try and get a meetup going and say, you know, we're interested in peaceful

27:49parenting. We, you know, we take this approach to parenting, even if people don't know the technical

27:53terms and just try and meet up with people. So just don't wait for people to come. Don't wait for

27:58virtuous people to come your way, go out and find them, right? It's like saying, oh, I want to go

28:04hunting. I'm going to wait for the deer to show up in my living room, right? Sorry, I know that's

28:07not the best analogy, but you know what I mean. Somebody says, recently you've had a few shows,

28:11like I'm 30 and I'm male and my life hasn't started. Why does it seem to be happening so often

28:16these

28:16days? Because men are raised without fathers in general and men are raised without need, right? I had to

28:25go and I woke up north. My family needed the money and so I had to go. My brother did

28:32it before me

28:33and I did it after him and so I had needs. I had to go. I had to go. And

28:38so there's no particular need

28:40and there's no father urging them forward and they don't have a larger life mission. So just become

28:45a porn and video game hedonist, right? All right. Are concepts more powerful than individual physical

28:51instances when it comes down to influencing people's psyche and behavior? I would say in general,

28:57yes, because most people are entire slaves to abstract concepts that don't exist, right?

29:06Religion and statism and the automatic value of parents, that people are of value simply because

29:15they're your parents or your brother or your sister and so on. These are abstract standards or

29:20concepts that do not exist and seem to influence just about everyone the most. All right. Question

29:27is there any behavior that could be universally preferable in which the user is forced to be

29:33at a loss or sacrifice, i.e. something like donating blood, which is generally good but couldn't be up

29:39because an anemic would not want to donate. Or couldn't be UPB because an anemic would not want

29:44to donate blood. Yeah, I'm not allowed to donate blood either because of my prior medical history.

29:49Is there any behavior that's forced to be at a loss or sacrifice? No. No. No. Because UPB is that

29:58you can use violence to enforce, right? So you can use violence to prevent somebody from assaulting you

30:04or graping you or murdering you and so on. So you can use force for that. You can't use force

30:09to make someone sacrifice. You can't use force to make someone give blood. All right. Where does the

30:15human, where does the human's ability to reason come from? If by evolution, how did it actually

30:19evolve to become the reason we have today? Reason comes from the stable properties and behavior of

30:24matter and energy conceptualized in the mind. How we learned how to conceptualize, this is the origin

30:30of consciousness in the bicameral mind, how we learned to create universal abstractions from particular

30:35sense data is an unknown. It is an unknown. Nobody has that answer. But it's an interesting question,

30:41right? Uh, last question. Why do I masturbate so much? Well, the problem is I keep doing shows

30:46and, uh, obviously I'm the biggest turn-on in the known universe. So as long as I keep doing shows,

30:51you will continue to have that urge and impulse. Of course, I fully understand that.

30:55freedomain.com slash donate. Thank you so much for your time, care, affection, and attention. It means

31:01the world to me. And don't forget, see me in Nashville, Tennessee, September 12, 2026. Go to

31:11BG lynch. So you won't forget, see me in Nashville, Tennessee. Go to the pantry. Amen.

31:11You're going to get in a little one from me, where's your mind.

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