Stefan Molyneux
  • last year
https://freedomain.com/freedomain_books/the-future/

Centuries in the future, an old man awakes from cryogenic sleep to face the judgement of a utopian society that barely survived his past abuses of power. In the vein of 'Atlas Shrugged, philosophy, philosopher Stefan Molyneux has created a compelling and powerful work of imagination. He vividly describes the wonderful future that mankind can achieve - and the barriers to getting there - and all that we need to leave behind to finally live in peace...

Transcript
00:00 The future by Stephen Molyneux. Chapter 13. I open my eyes and see the white room
00:15 I died in and I know that I am in heaven or hell or some kind of afterlife. I hear
00:27 a soft beeping and wonder if this is my soul breathing. There is no need for a heartbeat
00:37 after death. From the corner of my vision I see, sitting beside my bed, a woman with
00:49 long dark hair leaning forward, half asleep perhaps. But what would the purpose of sleep
00:57 be in the afterlife either? I see her and I feel my heart open. My heart would be probably
01:08 a hole in my soul at the moment it breaks. I am cracked open like a dropped egg full
01:17 of tears. I feel the tragic trickle as they stream down the side of my face and I have
01:24 a sudden urge to stick out my tongue and lick them to see if there is salt in heaven. I
01:34 then feel a desperate and deep chill in my soul that there is only one person to greet
01:40 me and that person has fallen asleep. Then I know who it is and an audible sob escapes
01:49 my throat. Power is sadness. Power over sadness is the whole point. Anyone who has achieved
02:04 anything starts from a canyon of tragedy. The muscles you build climbing out of sorrow
02:11 allow you to climb past the clouds and become the sun. These analogies tumble from my brain
02:20 like a poet crapping from a plane. Even that one surprises me, shocks me with its vivid
02:26 awfulness. Jane sits by my bed. She had gone to death over fifty years before me. She sits
02:40 by my bed as I had sat by her bed how many years ago in life above. You don't know how
02:51 to love when you grow up with ambition and success and conditions. My father was a fisherman.
03:04 He fished me out of the lukewarm lake of the average with the bait of his approval and
03:11 the hook of his approval as well. My mother was busy. She had a lot of lunches to attend
03:21 and the greatest joy I ever saw on faces belonged to strangers. My mother did not take much
03:28 pleasure in me, but she enjoyed the pleasure I gave to others. I was there to serve her
03:35 needs. I understood that. I didn't resent it. I was happy and relieved that she was
03:39 so clear in what she wanted. I was desperate to get out of my crib, my carriage, my confinement,
03:48 my baby burrito of swaddling so that I could keep her attention by gathering flowers and
03:53 cooing smiles from strangers. I was nothing when I was a baby, an inconvenience, a status
04:04 symbol, an interruption, I suppose. And babies are boring and manipulative as hell, and I
04:11 know that from my own children, though I suppose my heart had softened by the time I became
04:17 a grandfather.
04:22 One thought suddenly strikes me as I feel the blood start to creep to my extremities.
04:28 What age shall I be in this afterlife? I'm not a baby, but I don't feel old and used
04:35 up like I did before I died.
04:43 And then another thought strikes me, what the child abuser said in Dostoevsky's novel
04:48 Crime and Punishment. What if the afterlife is just a little bathhouse with flaking paint
04:57 full of spiders?
04:59 But no, the air tastes different, but I am still breathing. My eyes, God, above, they
05:12 seem sharper than I remembered. And of course I have no glasses on. Together we scan the
05:19 room I am in, looking for any flaw, any crack, any imperfection, any fragment of mottled
05:24 mortality, anything that would indicate I am in the crumbling world of tragic reality.
05:30 There is nothing, nothing that I can see. Everything is perfect, like a computer program
05:40 or a simulation of some kind.
05:47 I desperately try to remember what I had learned about God. What is the word between heaven
05:53 and hell where you labor for thousands of years to redeem yourself, to make yourself
05:56 perfect for being in between afterlife, not entropy, not, oh God, what is the word? A
06:05 place of confrontation of evil and a hand cramping, grasping for redemption, a place
06:10 where you had to stare in the mirror and learn to stop screaming in order to graduate.
06:14 But it's no use. The word will not come. I'm even close to the shape of the letters. I'll
06:29 have to stop thinking about it in order to receive the grace of possible knowledge. But
06:37 suicides don't go to heaven. I shudder viscerally and I want to rip the clothes from my body,
06:43 rip the covers from my clothes, rip the flesh from my bones, because if it is her beside
06:50 me then I am in hell. And perhaps this is my short reprieve before the suffering truly
06:57 begins. But what did I do to deserve hell? I suddenly feel a strange sensation in my
07:07 chest or just below my chest in my diaphragm where a body seems to awaken and wriggle its
07:13 fat arms within me. A God baby that has sat judging me my entire life. A baby I buried
07:21 under money and sex and power and greed, the greed that came from denying where I came
07:28 from. That is all nonsense, offensive crap. Anyone who achieves anything has to create
07:36 and carve themselves from nothing, from rejection and void and scorn and conditions and superiority
07:44 and inferiority and dominance of the evacuated, the condemned. The words tumble within me
07:51 like paratroopers abandoning a flaming plane. But there is nowhere to fall if you are already
08:00 in hell. I try to move my arms but they feel frozen to my side. I imagine an armless torso
08:09 with giant sausages beside it and almost laugh. But I am afraid to laugh because I am terrified
08:15 that it will come out as a hysterical cackle and bring the curious knife-toothed devil
08:19 through the doorway. And what if hell is nothing but being alone with your thoughts? What if
08:32 the body beside me never wakes up? What if I can never move my arms? What if the BP never
08:36 stops? What if the light never changes and my vision never decays? What if I am bound
08:41 in bed for eternity with my thoughts racing to avoid the baby in my belly? I try to think.
08:48 What hell would I create if I were the head devil? I would create a powerlust with no
08:54 one to subjugate. Do I have a powerlust at the moment? Of course. I yearn for power over
09:01 my body, my thoughts. And power to either wake up the girl beside me or keep her asleep
09:10 dead and purple-necked forever. But I can move my eyes. That much I can do. I try turning
09:19 my head and find that it moves slightly. I feel a rush of relief flooding my bone marrow.
09:26 But I suddenly can't remember if I could move it before when I was trying to look around
09:30 the white room and my relief evaporates instantly like water on a red skillet. What if slight
09:38 movement is all I am allowed? I feel a great sudden rage at the situation, my environment,
09:45 and my own scattered and random thoughts. I am a man of action, a king ape. I am designed
09:51 to stride the world like a colossus, not lie in bed looking for cobwebs in the wild hope
09:56 that I am not in hell. I pour all my energy into moving my limbs. I have a desperate desire
10:02 to leap from my bed and tear down the blank white walls that surround me, that make me
10:06 feel like I am trapped inside a hollow dice. And even though I suddenly feel certain that
10:11 if I were to tear down these walls, nothing but burning lakes and grinning red-eyed spider
10:15 skulls would hang beyond my cell. I would rather have the knowledge, I would rather
10:23 know where I am than have to guess until I go mad. And if I am in hell within one spin
10:30 of this infernal planet, I will rule. I almost laugh at the thought of subjugating Satan
10:38 with charm, bribes, and threats, the standard route to power, so that a legion of assembled
10:43 devils would vault me up to the fiery throne. And I genuinely feel, in the moment, that
10:50 I would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And damn, I would be fantastic at
10:59 tempting mortals, as I was tempted, and as I... The word "succumbed" floats into my head,
11:06 and I feel the god baby in my belly open its mouth to cry, but I force it into a yawn,
11:12 and feel a thrill of power that it works. I think I sense movement from the girl to
11:18 my left, the random patterns of my brain suddenly blow into nothing, like a child's silver bubbles
11:25 before the ghostly slap of a hurricane. Heart pounding, beeping, increasing, I try to crane
11:31 my head to turn my neck to look and see, but it's like trying to move a giant boulder with
11:36 my fingertips. I feel abject terror, a fear I could never remember feeling before in my
11:43 adult life, as I imagine Jane looming over me, accusing me of murder. I didn't kill her,
11:51 I never killed her, she died because... But the words fall over the edge of my mind, like
11:57 leaves over a waterfall. Why did Jane die? You are here to find out. You are here because
12:07 you never asked that question. I sigh, or try to. Oh great, now there's another voice
12:16 in here. You are here because you think this is a new voice. Jane. She was always an unusual
12:27 girl, which is why she had a closed casket. My throat thickens, more tears spill from
12:36 the sides of my eyes. If I could only look at her directly, I could see whether she had
12:43 a face. If she has a face, I am in heaven. If not, I am in hell. The beeping changes
12:53 slightly, at least I think it does, and it suddenly reminds me of my alarm clock when
12:59 I was little. I can't remember the year, my year, because none of my years felt like mine,
13:06 I suppose. The alarm would wake me, and I would be desperate for sleep, for oblivion,
13:12 for non-existence, because I hated getting up, to slip from the open seas of dreaming
13:17 to the narrow train tracks of my daily existence, the tracks laid by my parents, their disapproval,
13:22 my future. I would wake and flow like senseless water through the carved channels of my routine,
13:31 the channels that led me to the summit of my existence, the peak of my power, and I
13:35 appreciated all that later. But at the time, I remember feeling a great ancient weariness
13:41 in my young heart as I arose in the dark to dress and stretch and brush, and then to eat
13:45 a silent power breakfast of two hot boiled eggs and a smear of peanut butter, which always
13:50 reminded me of skid marks in my underwear, and then to be driven in the dark, ah, in
13:56 the slowly glowing light of another day, through the sleeping city, past the houses of children
14:03 still playing in their dreams, a soldier of future fortune destined for greatness, discipline,
14:10 branded into my skull like a hissing tattoo of endless ownership, and then into the white
14:17 cube with red lines, so much like my current room, the inside of an empty dice. No, that
14:24 is wrong. The singular of dice is die, and the pounding, leaping thwack of the black
14:35 ball, first with a yellow dart, then a blue, and the snarling encouragement of the coach,
14:42 the diagramming of strategy, the video review of my opponents, the narrow jumping exercises,
14:47 the lunges, the feeling that my day should be done when everyone else's was just beginning,
14:52 the showering, alone, and the feeling that getting to school should be lunchtime when
14:57 it was just after breakfast. In the winter, my hair frozen, hanging and swinging like
15:04 a thatched ice roof over my forehead. Oh, and then the Mandarin lessons after school,
15:13 first thinking I would be learning about oranges, the tutors, the constant feeling of exhaustion
15:20 and overextension, and the inevitability of disappointing my parents, the slow stoking
15:25 of rage, of subjugation. And then, leaping forward to puberty, my father laughing and
15:36 leaning forward in his overstuffed leather chair, his breath the hot scent of foreign
15:40 cigars. "It's good that you learned to hate being subjugated. That was the point, kid,"
15:47 my hard thumb stabs a soft palm. "Because you hate it so much, you will never let it
15:52 happen to you ever again." I imagine my mother floating through the air, invisible
16:02 except for her earrings, laughing softly, as if it is all part of the plan, as if my
16:08 entire adulthood was drawn by my parents, my circumstances, by what I thought was our
16:14 mutual ambition, like a connect-the-dots picture. I suddenly remember one of those books that
16:22 I had when I was very little, given to me by, not by someone in the family, God, or
16:27 anyone close by, because it had no purpose other than pleasure. I would start, I would
16:32 hunt for the one and then draw to the two, and I would wait for that moment, that thrill
16:37 of excitement, of recognition, when I would see what the picture was going to be, from
16:41 a bare half-drawn outline, a bear, a starfish, a clown, an angular pentagram. Maybe that's
16:51 what happened in my life. Other people drew the lines, and eventually I saw the shape
16:57 that my life was going to take. I wasn't the numbers, I wasn't the lines, I wasn't the
17:02 hand. Perhaps I was the paper, the raw material necessary for everything else to have purpose.
17:09 You are running from Jane. I shuddered because the voice had a strange accent I could not
17:14 place, and it certainly wasn't my voice, it was too deep and broad.
17:18 "Hello, my devil," I murmur within my skull prison. There is no response, but I can hear
17:28 a faint fleshy creak, as if an invisible smile widened within.
17:33 "Blackness, I am inter--"
17:35 Return. Jolt. My father's foggy voice telling me that life is a circle, you are busy from
17:43 the age of thirteen to the age of eighty, in between, you have no time to reflect. His
17:48 own days were like a cannon being shot against a wall, the cannon being breakfast, and the
17:51 wall being his bed at night, everything in the middle was just a blur.
17:56 A leaning dark, whisky face, a night-time confessional under my glow-lit ceiling stars.
18:03 "Wait and see, son. Old age is your second childhood when the dead come back to life."
18:11 A gesture, a turn, the soft glug of a pour.
18:17 "I'm a year old." The scorecard is in. The marks have been tallied, the reviews have
18:25 been printed. The best way to live has been revealed by the decades, and you go back over
18:30 your youth and try to figure out who took the right path.
18:37 One of my first memories. Riding in a train, pressing my face against the cold, dusty glass,
18:46 breath fogging the window and drawing lollipop people, frozen in the foreground against the
18:50 blurred night of distance. Rain blowing past, streaks of concentrated vision drying.
19:01 I was tired. Lean my head on the glass but keep one eye open.
19:07 Occasionally in the flashing dark lights rocket by.
19:12 I see a scene that I could reassemble in my mind a moment afterwards.
19:17 A light shining on a broken playground. The swing set had toppled over completely, and
19:21 I thought of death very suddenly. Why would a family let a playground decay so badly?
19:27 If their children were young, it would still be in use. If their children were older, it
19:31 would have been taken down or kept up for grandkids. Death. It had to be the death of
19:38 a child. Who could bear the pain of tearing down a playground after burying a boy or girl?
19:47 A doze, perhaps. Another scene through the dusty streaks of drying rain. I see a woman
19:51 with her head lowered on a balcony bathed in a soft sieve of yellow light. I see the
19:57 rising orange firefly of her cigarette as she raises it to her lips. Two thoughts overlap.
20:02 Was she crying? Did she want someone to see her?
20:06 A tiny train station flashes by and I see a young boy alone, sitting on sacks of something.
20:12 I didn't know at the time, but now I think it must have been grain. He stares at the
20:17 train and through a trick of perspective he seems to be staring right at me, and I shudder
20:22 with a sudden chill because I thought of death again. That the boy was a ghost, killed on
20:28 the tracks perhaps, sentenced to sit and stare every night. And I had a sudden urge to pull
20:34 the emergency cord of the train to jump off and run back and demand that he explain himself.
20:40 "You are thinking of your father." "Yeah, so what?"
20:42 I remember that long ago midnight train ride. Even the memory is like the scenes outside
20:50 the window, flashing past with no sense of before or after, because interactions with
20:55 my father were long stretches of darkness and manic motion. But occasionally, very rarely,
21:01 a scene would flash by, illuminating...
21:05 "What?" More tears, of course, from my eyes. I am relieved to feel them trickle down the
21:13 back of my neck like tiny silver threads trying to hug me, because it means that,
21:19 or at least there was a chance that, I am not paralyzed.
21:22 Sometimes my father would open his mouth, so rare, so precious, and show an inner world
21:33 of reflection and consideration. And I would feel a sudden hunger rising within me to meet
21:39 his words and bathe in their illumination, like a parched man in a desert finding wet
21:45 sand beneath his scrambling hands. "Your father was a torturer."
21:49 I shudder again, because I have no work to distract me from my voices. "What the hell
21:54 does that mean?" He opened his heart from time to...
21:57 I was afraid of that voice, so I opened myself to the explanation.
22:03 That arises within me. "My father showed me his heart like an eclipse shows darkness at
22:10 noon. Common enough to be possible, rare enough to be insanely, utterly maddening."
22:14 "Where was he when Jane..."
22:17 Oh, I realize I'm holding my breath, waiting for that sentence to end.
22:24 I am afraid of trying to stop that inner voice, afraid of its escalation and its potential to
22:31 undo me completely. But the voice simply stops mid-sentence, or to be more accurate,
22:37 given what happened to Jane near the end of the sentence, two words away, to be precise.
22:43 Jane was the most popular girl in school. Beautiful, athletic, academic,
22:57 and a nice person. God, how long has it been since I've viewed that as a positive attribute rather
23:04 than... Jane was everywhere, doing everything, helping everyone. Although insanely popular,
23:17 she did not develop that resting bitch, frozen face mask, but was friendly to just about everyone.
23:26 She had no sense of self-protection. She had no sense that...
23:28 "That you were in the world," I gasp. "Where am I? Who are you?"
23:34 The voice says nothing, but I sense a great cavernous interstellar disapproval and realize
23:44 that I am trying to put the voice at a distance, outside myself, beyond...
23:51 The thought fails me. The words will not come.
23:54 Ah, I am closer to remembering the state between heaven and hell, not entropy,
24:03 but something like it. The syllables jumble against each other in an
24:07 unformed background, like faceless crowds of pink eggs in the distant bleachers of
24:11 an impressionist painting. Ah, it's getting closer, closer. A thousand years of...
24:20 Ah, purgatory! Purgatory, that was the word. The gateway to riches for priests who could
24:28 reduce your time there for a fee. Purgatory, a place of confrontation with sin and the expulsion
24:36 of the catastrophe of the physical. The chance to burrow up from the flesh and head to the
24:42 encircling stars in a puff of pure, transcended being.
24:46 Is this purgatory? This is the place of judgment for your sins.
24:54 A half-snarling laugh rises in my taut throat. To hell with that! Sins! I guided my country. I got
25:04 things done. I liberated an entire nation. I provided for my family and made sure the children
25:10 of the land had enough to eat. I raised reasonably successful children. I stayed married to my wife.
25:15 My breath stops. What the hell am I doing? Why was I thinking of Jane, gone these many decades,
25:27 forever and a day, before thinking of my wife, who bore my children and supported my elevation
25:32 to the peaks of power, and who stayed with me like a trainer, taunting me on a treadmill to
25:36 run faster but never reach him? My mind goes blank for a time. How much time? I have no idea.
25:49 Was that a movement from the dark-haired woman to my left?
25:54 I suddenly think that Jane has been waiting for me in this maddening chamber, this inner die,
26:04 for over sixty years, waiting for me to come and explain myself,
26:07 as if I could. The next thought was darker, as if I would. Does she deserve an explanation?
26:19 Well, you run from your past. That's the nature of life. You run from it, and then it encircles
26:28 you and swallows you whole. Everything we avoid, we recreate. You avoided death. I did not recreate
26:36 death. The very thought made me feel like I was falling forever, that I had been falling forever.
26:47 And I suddenly realized that if my little room were hurtling through space,
26:53 no, I would know it, because I would be weightless.
26:55 My father always told me that I could achieve whatever I wanted, I just had to have a plan
27:03 and commitment. For most people, plans are just dreams. If you take three steps towards an actual
27:08 objective, you're doing better than 99% of the useless eaters in this world.
27:12 Ah, I remember him saying this more than once, and for the life of me now, I cannot decide if
27:18 that was a flash of illumination outside the train window, or the yawning blackness between
27:23 the lit vignettes. Everyone loved the drama of Jane's ending. Everyone claimed to have been her
27:36 best friend, and wore black, and talked in murmurs, and created mixtapes of her favorite songs, and
27:41 played them in the quad, and wept, and talked in hushed tones about how life is short and fleeting,
27:45 and to make the best of it, make the most of it in honor of her.
27:48 Jane was angry at her parents, I understood that, though I never would have said it aloud.
27:57 If you hang yourself in the closet of your parents' bedroom,
28:10 I can't conceive of that level of anger. Or, yes, I can, I suppose,
28:17 because I'm afraid of the voice, so I will speak for it. I wait. Nothing.
28:26 I was at the party, but I didn't know what happened. I heard the rumors, that she drank,
28:34 or her drink was spiked. The night that effectively ended her was shrouded in lies,
28:42 and misdirection, and drunkenness, and drugs, and legally compliant silence, ordered by the
28:48 Roman phalanx of lawyers that descended on the teenagers at that party, shielding them from a
28:52 cowardly and ineffective police force. All parents shield their children, I was just
29:01 outsourced it, like holding hands. I was in the process of becoming Jane's best friend.
29:10 My father on women. Imagine a woman had nothing romantic to offer you, how interesting would she
29:16 be? He would shrug. I've met very few living women who could pass that test.
29:23 More than a few dead ones, but they pass the test mostly because they can't talk back.
29:30 My father had the powerful man's habit of loudly laughing at his own jokes,
29:33 as a signal for other people to join in, to show their deference and appreciation.
29:36 My father was offensive, because he had power. As he would tell me,
29:44 power is mostly the power to offend, that's how you measure it at least.
29:47 During the time of hysterical attacks on whatever caused offense, my father sailed over the
29:55 panicking melee as if it didn't exist, like a presidential plane flying over the storm cloud,
30:01 serene in the peak of power.
30:04 Power is not having to care about what other people think, he would say to me, which wasn't
30:12 true, but just sounded good, like a fortune cookie you could read while walking off a cliff.
30:16 You only get power by caring about what other people think, understanding what makes them tick,
30:23 and then using it to control them. This was a refreshing honesty for me.
30:29 Power is precarious, because you can never say the truth about what makes it work,
30:35 using fear to disassemble personalities so that you can invade and take them over.
30:40 Is this the purpose of purgatory? To strip away the tinsel and reveal the tree?
30:51 Or more appropriately, the roots?
30:53 Ah, it is amazing to me that I can remember Jane's last name long before I could remember the word
31:02 purgatory.
31:02 Middlebrook.
31:07 I stifled an inner giggle.
31:12 With that name she should have been found floating in a stream like Ophelia.
31:18 Ah, wobbly things are cute when they're young, but if they stay wobbly as they age,
31:28 they just start to look ridiculous and infertile. What an odd word.
31:34 Cutesy speak is fine in toddlers, but grating in teenagers.
31:44 Jane's father was a deep thinker who understood nothing about evil. He thought that evil was a
31:51 kind of error, that it could be fixed by reason and evidence. He thought that evildoers wanted
31:58 to achieve an end but were just mistaken about the right path, and thought that his own deep
32:03 thoughts were like a murmuring GPS that would set people back in the right direction. Recalculating.
32:11 My father taught me well, taught me better, infinitely better,
32:14 which is why I became president and Jane rotted in the closet.
32:17 I shudder. Purgatory will not be kind to such vanity.
32:23 I'm really just playing with the idea. I don't believe in the afterlife,
32:30 and I won't now, even if I am here.
32:32 My father told me bluntly, when he deemed me old enough to understand,
32:39 he was wrong. Evil is just a word that losers invented to console themselves when they blew it.
32:45 The zebra thinks the lion is evil. The lion thinks the hunter is evil, because they lose,
32:51 and when they lose, they need a consolation prize for their vanity,
32:54 and that consolation prize is that they are good, and the winner is evil.
32:59 Being called evil is just a sign, a mark of honor, really, that you are getting what you
33:04 want in this life and not settling for stupid word game consolation prizes.
33:09 Ha ha. Your mother is a beautiful woman, and she was engaged when we met, which I loved,
33:13 because it was just one versus one. If she was single, it would have been one versus twenty,
33:18 or a hundred. And it's easy to get a woman to choose you. All you have to do is drop hints
33:24 that she can do better than her current boyfriend, or fiancé in this case, and then talk about all of
33:30 your grand ambitions. Hypergamy, my boy, that's the hidden switch of the V-Bomb.
33:37 If she's looking up, she's climbing up. Just be the summit of her destination,
33:41 and she will come to you. Cigar pull, whiskey sip, hand wave.
33:49 So she dumped her fiancé and married me. Yeah, he was bitter. He called me unscrupulous and vile
33:56 and predatory, and I'm sure evil, too. Ha ha ha. And he confronted me once in a parking lot and
34:05 raged and shook his fist. Ha ha. I just laughed at him and almost said, "You're just making noise,
34:12 but I'm going home to banger." But then I remembered that everything could be recorded,
34:17 so I just smiled and drove away. When you get what you want, you don't need to retaliate.
34:23 And all these moral terms were just invented to try and shame people who get what they want.
34:27 It's the voodoo language revenge of the losers. But the winners write the history. All we have
34:34 to do is ignore the losers who try to rewrite the fight as good versus evil, rather than just
34:38 winner versus loser. Life is a sport, my boy. Don't get sucked into talk about morality. That's
34:46 just a way of castrating yourself and letting people with better words conquer you without
34:49 even a fight. This was not just a still scene shooting by in the night outside the window.
34:59 It seemed that these kinds of talk were the destination, the goal of the journey they were
35:05 repeated so often. And I was doing this with Jane, who had a fiancé, and she genuinely seemed to
35:14 think that this meant she could be friendly with boys because they would respect that bond.
35:19 Oh, Lord, she probably got that from her Socrates of a father.
35:26 Jane and Matt were one of those couples that had lasted from junior high school onwards,
35:35 the married couple of her high school. Matt was serious and scholarly and reasonably good-natured,
35:43 so obviously a copy of Jane's dad that nobody even bothered to point it out.
35:46 She claimed he had a private sense of good humor but was relatively shy in public, which was just
35:53 a cry for help, really. Pretending that he had all these secret virtues that made him worthwhile,
35:58 which no one in public could ever see, was just her way of screaming, "I don't think he's good
36:04 enough for me." But Matt had a vulnerability, a need for her, which arose from the fact that she
36:13 was a bit of a late bloomer. And he got his hooks into her when she was lower status, not as pretty,
36:19 not as curvy, and her brain had not developed much either. I clearly remember a biology tutor
36:26 telling me once, "That which is more complex takes longer to develop." He was talking about
36:34 human babies versus ducklings, something like that, but the sentence always stuck in my brain
36:38 and helped me a lot in my political career. Jane's brain, nothing spectacular when she was younger,
36:46 rocketed to prominence in her mid-teens. I'm sure that Matt bored her to death with his long
36:51 speeches about loyalty and investment. At least she knew he wasn't just into her for her looks
36:59 because he chose her when she was still a bit of an ugly duckling. Anyone who insists he has
37:08 value to you is just a leech and a drain, trying to make up in words for what he lacks in substance,
37:12 in action. And Matt, Matt, oh man, I can see him now, tall and just on the skinny side of slender,
37:21 his pleading brown eyes insisting that the world conform to his theories for the sake of virtue.
37:26 Matt wanted to change the world for the better, which always kills a woman's libidos, or
37:33 a girl's in Jane's case. I mean, the odds of actually changing the world through words
37:41 are so incredibly tiny that, oh God, who would bother? Maybe, just maybe, a hundred or a thousand
37:50 years after your death you can have some effect. But as the old saying goes, a prophet is respected
37:56 everywhere but in his own country and his own house, which means by his wife.
38:02 Women desire men because men provide resources. A man is a portal to get resources so that a
38:10 mother can feed and shelter her kids. Universal abstractions and calls to virtue and the scolding
38:16 of evildoers puts no meat or drink on the table. Either the prophet is successful, in which case
38:21 he is persecuted, or he fails. In both cases his children go hungry. Either way, the woman loses
38:29 out. Abstract improvements are always material disasters. Men tend to be smarter than women,
38:38 my father would say, so the greatest purpose of women is the production of more male brains.
38:42 It was a mark of his power over me that he could tell me these things,
38:48 knowing that I would never use his words against him and destroy his world.
38:51 So I would sit with Jane and talk about hopes and dreams. She was torn between a career and
39:02 raising a family, because the rules of this world are not stupid. They know that IQ is mostly
39:06 genetic and want to make sure that smart women don't breed, so we dangle careers in front of
39:11 them to keep them barren. Careers make money. Children cost money. Careers pay off now.
39:17 Children pay off later. Careers make you independent. Children make you dependent.
39:21 Careers let you keep your figure and dress exquisitely. Children turn you to kitchen
39:26 pudge and sweatpants. What do I want for my life? I would say to Jane with a shrug.
39:35 "Man, I don't really like these kinds of conversations. No offense,
39:38 because the only thing I want for my life is the living of it. I'm going to make money,
39:42 I'm going to be successful, and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it all.
39:44 What that looks like in detail, I have no idea, and I don't really care. I'm smart, reasonably
39:50 attractive, charismatic, good with words. I have a successful family. I have a built-in mentor in
39:54 my father, not to mention his brothers. The world is going to be unjustly kind to me,
39:59 and I'm going to love every minute of it." And I would see these words disappear into her,
40:07 like burrowing gophers building an invisible underground city.
40:10 And I would see her hypergamy rise within her, growing like a tree towards the light of my
40:18 absolute and unencumbered ambition. The uncomplicated provision of resources is catnip
40:24 to women, and I was laying a trail of simple coins from her heart to my bed.
40:29 I knew that my words would cause friction between her and Matt, who quite regularly tangled himself
40:37 up in sketchy and wildly ambitious projects for improving the world, with no material benefit to
40:41 himself and great risk to his future family. He would, without a hint of sarcasm or irony,
40:49 talk about speaking truth to power, which I think is a fine piece of nonsense to say,
40:54 as long as you don't actually speak any truth to any actual power. Scolding Christians is one thing,
41:00 it doesn't take a lot of moral courage to criticize a group commanded to love their enemies,
41:03 but if he ever took on any real power in this world, his days would be dark,
41:10 short, and extremely unpleasant. Socrates talked about being a gadfly, and gadflies get swatted,
41:19 as he was. Might as well rub yourself up with marinade and go swimming with sharks,
41:24 thinking that you are bringing peace to the ocean.
41:26 I was consciously setting up a polar opposite to Jane's boyfriend. She didn't even seem to be aware
41:37 of it. I held tangible wealth before her female eyes, while Matt held out the faint possibility
41:46 of future fame in the next century. Men can reproduce through ideas. Women need babies.
41:56 Anyone who doesn't understand that equation doesn't understand women at all, and will fail,
42:01 and be left alone muttering mean moral words about the winners.
42:04 It was a war of words, a war of wills, a silent combat over the greatest treasure.
42:16 And, shockingly to me, Matt won.
42:22 I never knew what he said to win, but I'm sure it had something to do with Nietzsche and the
42:31 will to power and amoral resource acquisition, and her future children being abandoned by a
42:36 materialistic father (that's if fathers are there to play paddy-cake and dress up dolls),
42:41 and her future regrets at pursuing money over meaning. I'm sure that he drew with air quotes a
42:46 very vivid moat around the natural greed of her future children, and was able to successfully
42:52 bar me from entry. I was utterly unused to losing,
43:03 but I knew enough about winning to know that such a loss could never go unpunished.
43:11 I also knew enough to know that I should not insult myself by pretending that Jane was too
43:14 inconsequential to mourn. Nietzsche did say, and I agree, "Never leave your actions in the lurch."
43:21 I valued Jane. I wanted Jane. I treasured Jane, which is close enough to love to count,
43:32 and I wasn't going to pretend that she was suddenly worthless because she rejected me.
43:37 I knew that lie would diminish my future desire, since my desire would know that it could be
43:41 flushed away on a whim, on a dumb rejection. Jane was not a confrontational person, so she never
43:49 told me why she drifted away, but she started suggesting that we hang out more with friends,
43:54 and less one-on-one, and then she went away for a summer and barely contacted me. God,
44:00 I hate that word "busy." It's such a lie, at least for women. Of course, my friends and boon
44:10 companions circled her, all vying to outdo me by capturing what I had lost. I'm guessing Matt was
44:19 ambivalent about this new interest in his girlfriend from Powerful Sons. He wanted to
44:25 change the world for the better, and I imagine that he fantasized that access to powerful people
44:29 would help him, like we are just moldable pieces of useless clay to be shaped by the airy words of
44:34 some language-based loser. "Oh, you're going to call us immoral? You're going to have to say that
44:39 we have responsibilities? You're going to try and use us to achieve your goals? Well, sure,
44:44 you can have all our power and money, because we definitely achieved our summits of influence and
44:48 leadership by listening to teenage losers full of insults pretending to be plans."
44:57 Oh, it's all so laughable.
44:58 Such a lesson that has to be learned every single generation, over and over.
45:07 You cannot shape the powerful with the soft, useless words of moralizing.
45:13 We only became powerful by rejecting moralizing and accepting the mammal fats of getting stuff
45:21 done, of winning women and making babies. You can have your words, we'll just take the world.
45:29 And I knew these sharks were circling Jane, and I also knew that they would be my vengeance.
45:44 (swoosh)
45:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]