Stefan Molyneux
  • 11 months ago
This conversation explores sadism's origins, tribalism, men's struggles, porn's influence, and the connection between money pursuit and declining parental support. Feedback and more discussion welcome.

Full series: https://rss.com/podcasts/sadism/

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Brief Summary

In this part of our conversation, we explore the origins and dysfunction of sadism, discussing its relevance to tribalism and the challenges men face in balancing aggression and emotional availability. We also touch upon the role of pornography and its influence on our perception of aggression and affection. Reflecting on history and power structures, we consider the connection between pursuit of money and declining support for parents. We invite feedback and support for further discussions on this topic.

Chapters

0:00:00 The Origins and Dysfunction of Sadism
0:03:10 Sadism in Evolution and the Duality of Life
0:06:57 The Natural Balance of Affection and Cruelty in Predators
0:10:26 Human Beings: The Apex Predators with Duality of Kindness and Cruelty
0:12:24 Exploring the Dichotomy of Cruelty and Affection
0:13:03 Siblings' Cruelty and Unity against Outsiders
0:19:32 The Tricky Balance of Aggression and Affection
0:22:49 Affection for Offspring and Cruelty to Others
0:25:47 Sadism as a Central Goal: Motivation and Risks
0:28:16 Enslavement and the Thirst for Cruelty
0:34:29 Sadism as a Tool for Maintaining Control
0:41:24 Cruelty within families and kindness towards outsiders
0:47:58 The reversal of the cruelty-kindness metric in modern families
0:50:48 The Impact of Observation on Behavior
0:52:02 The Relationship Between Power and Cruelty
Transcript
00:00 All right so we've done a fair amount of the detailed work on sadism.
00:04 This is part six where I'm going to talk about why it arose, why the wiring is there,
00:11 and how it goes wrong. Sadism can only be thought of as a dysfunction if the circumstances
00:19 through which it arose no longer apply. Does it make sense? Like something's dysfunctional,
00:25 I mean I'm not talking moral here, I'm just talking dysfunctional. So something is dysfunctional
00:30 only if the circumstances that cause it to arise no longer apply. So if you are subservient to
00:40 those in authority as a child that can have positive adaptive benefits. It's sort of why
00:48 it developed. However, subservience to authority alone when you are an adult is probably adaptive.
00:56 Right? So being reliant upon one person say for your survival is appropriate as a baby,
01:03 but then believing that only one person can ever make you happy over the course of your life
01:07 can make you kind of obsessive as an adult. The one-itis thing, "only she can blah blah blah"
01:14 right? So tribalism is necessary for survival in the primitive eras of our species. Tribalism
01:23 has significant problems now because tribalism is largely abstractly conceptual and therefore
01:32 very open to manipulation. So if you live in a tribe of 60 or 70 or 80 other people,
01:38 those are sort of very real ties. You can evaluate everyone and the sense of tribalism
01:43 is empirical. However, if your tribe is like a whole country or a continent or a giant religion
01:51 or something, then you don't know everyone and your immediate empirical tribalism gets
01:56 moved to an abstraction that's very easy to manipulate and therefore your tribalism
02:01 is very easy to manipulate and therefore you're very easy to manipulate. The common good, right?
02:07 The common good, if you're in a tribe of 70 people, the common good is fairly easy to understand
02:13 and you can evaluate it. However, the common good for an entire country, well, first of all,
02:19 doesn't exist because it's not something you can evaluate. Secondly, it's easy to manipulate,
02:23 but because it ties into your tribal feelings of wanting to sacrifice for the larger good,
02:30 but you can't evaluate it because it's not a tribe that's empirical. It's a conceptual thing
02:35 and concepts are easy to manipulate and people whose direct empiricism has been translated into
02:40 conceptual abstraction are very easy to manipulate and control. Again, in a tribe of 70 people,
02:46 you can directly evaluate the common good because you're part of it and you're involved in it and
02:51 it's evident to you and you have experience of everyone and you can have a say. Whereas
02:58 when a political leader of a 300 million people country tells you about the common good,
03:03 it's just manipulation. It's nothing you can directly experience or have an effect on or
03:07 evaluate or anything like that. So, if somebody suggests sacrifice to you in a smaller tribal
03:15 situation, you may very well do it, but if somebody suggests sacrifice to you for a large
03:22 conceptual thing, conceptual idea like a nation state, then it's just about exploiting you.
03:32 So, tribalism is good in terms of evolution when you can directly anticipate experience
03:38 and it's empirical right in front of you and you have knowledge and you have the authority of being
03:43 part of a small group. So, tribalism has evolutionary advantages for you as an individual
03:51 when we're evolving, but when you get to the nation state or to other sort of large conceptual
03:58 collectivist abstractions, it just gets you indebted, enslaved, or killed like on a fairly
04:04 regular basis as we can sort of see from the 20th century. So, the question is what evolutionary
04:12 advantages did sadism have over the course of our evolution that we even have such a capacity?
04:20 I mean, animals generally aren't particularly sadistic. I mean, obviously they eat under
04:27 animals that's not sadistic and they are, I mean, occasionally mice will play with,
04:33 sorry, cats will play with mice, but that's not really sadistic. That's just practicing or maybe
04:38 being bored or something like that, but as far as sort of this torture goes, that's a different
04:44 matter. So, A, why would we develop it? And B, why would it go so wrong? Right? Why would it go so
04:52 wrong? And the reason that sadism goes wrong in general is that we would expect, like, so look at
04:59 animals like mammals as a whole, right? So, how do they do their thing? Well, they do their thing
05:05 by being violent to prey or violence in defense of their own. So, they are loving to their offspring
05:19 and cruel to other animals. I mean, I'm loving and cruel, I know these sort of vaguely moral terms,
05:26 but let's just say they have, they take pleasure in violence towards other animals and they take
05:33 pleasure in kindness towards their own offspring. So, this is the inevitable duality of life,
05:39 right? That you have to be capable of aggression and aggression doesn't necessarily mean violence,
05:47 right? But you have to be capable of aggression towards your enemies and you have to have great
05:53 affection for your family, for your tribe, for your group, your gathering, your, we'll just say
06:01 family, although that it could be more than that. I mean, it is, of course, a common phenomenon
06:08 to look at lions as they rip the throat out of a zebra or pile on a giraffe or even try and take
06:15 down an elephant, that they are, I mean, obviously as apex predators, incredibly aggressive.
06:21 When I think of, you know, if I want some meat chewing the neck out of a running cow, I mean,
06:29 it's vaguely incomprehensible, right? So, they have to be capable of, you know, what in a human
06:35 being would be psychotic levels of aggression, right? And yet, the lions, the lionesses are
06:42 cute and cuddly with each other and they're cute and cuddly with their offspring and they're sort
06:47 of very tender and gentle with their offspring. So, this duality, which is common to all predators,
06:54 is intense aggression to prey, intense affection for offspring or the family.
07:06 And that's sort of natural. Now, what's also interesting, we know this from the RK stuff
07:11 that I did in the past, the truth of that, like the gene wars, G-E-N-E wars, you should check that
07:16 out if you haven't already, it's sort of a foundational aspect of what we talk about here.
07:20 But the gene wars presentation is pretty important because in general, the higher
07:29 on the food chain the predator is, particularly for mammals, but the higher on the food chain
07:35 the predator is, the more affection the predator has for its own offspring. So, lions are very
07:43 affectionate with their offspring, wolves are very affectionate with their offspring, and the prey
07:50 species, like the mice, the rabbits in particular, right, they just have a bunch of kids and barely
07:56 do anything with them, right? So, the reason for that, of course, is that the higher you are
08:03 on the food chain, the more complex your food gathering is, therefore, the more bond and
08:10 training and play and protection and so on, right? That which is more complex in nature
08:15 takes longer to develop. And predator species are generally quite complex in terms of their
08:23 intelligence, their social organization, their hunting coordination, all this kind of stuff.
08:27 Hunting in packs is quite complex and requires a strong social bond and a lot of practice and a
08:32 lot of training, whereas, of course, for a rabbit to eat grass, well, they just have to be hungry
08:38 and eat stuff and hope they don't get eaten themselves. So, in the reproductive strategy
08:44 called being a predator, you have to have great cruelty for your prey, like psychotic levels of
08:52 aggression ripping the throat out of your prey, and you also need to have intense affection and
08:58 protection for your own offspring. And the more cruelty you have, in other words, the higher you
09:08 are on the food chain, the more apex-y a predator you are, the higher you are on the food chain,
09:16 the more psychotic aggression you need because you need to take down bigger animals, you need to
09:21 take down baby animals like baby giraffe or baby zebras or whatever. So, the higher you are on the
09:30 food chain, the more aggression and affection you need. Both of them get turned up. The more love
09:36 and cruelty you need, and again, I know I'm anthropomorphizing, but I hope you sort of will
09:43 understand that, right? And we even see this in the sea mammals, which hunt in packs, the killer
09:50 whales, orcas, and dolphins and so on, fairly significant affection for their offspring and
09:58 great coordination and "cruelty" again, "cruelty" for their prey. So, we are the apex predators.
10:08 Right? What does that mean? So, the higher you go up on the food chain, the higher you go up on
10:14 the food chain, the more cruelty and kindness, the more violence and love you need, which is why,
10:22 you understand, we're the apex predators. So, this is why human beings have the capacity
10:28 for genocidal wars and stirring love poems, right? We sort of veer between, because we have great
10:37 capacities for kindness and cruelty, we veer between, in a sense, pathological altruism and
10:43 pathological cruelty, a self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of others, right? I mean, this is what,
10:50 I mean, lions have to sacrifice others in order to keep alive, and they also have to sacrifice
10:54 their own immediate interests for the sake of their offspring. So, this is why people, "Oh,
11:01 this duality," and this is often characterized, at least it was when I was younger, it was
11:06 characterized by the angel and the devil on the shoulder, right? An angel on one shoulder,
11:12 the devil is on the other shoulder, and the angel and the devil are both telling you,
11:18 "Go my way, go my way, go my way," right? So, that angel and the devil, and it is projected
11:24 into the universe as a whole as the angel and the devil, and the angel is our affection for our
11:32 family, and our devil is our predation upon absolutely everything else. I mean, there's
11:39 nothing that human beings won't prey on. I mean, when you think about it, it's wild.
11:45 I mean, we prey on trees, right? We cut them down for lumber and firewood and clear them for our
11:54 agriculture. We prey on mice because we drive mice out of their homes in order to plant our
11:59 crops. We prey on the ground and we strip it of nutrients in order to get our vegetables. We prey,
12:05 of course, on livestock. There's nothing that we won't prey on, touch it, and eat it or exploit it
12:15 or drive it off. So, we have, of course, this almost bottomless capacity for cruelty, and
12:23 you can't get to be an apex predator without expanding your capacity for cruelty and affection.
12:30 And, of course, when you think of what happens in divorce, right? What happens in divorce is
12:36 people go from great love to great hatred. They go from, "You're the most perfect person in the
12:42 world," to, "I will destroy your life from start to end, from top to bottom, from the alpha to the
12:48 omega." And people say, "It's like a flip gets—it's like a switch gets flipped. She was so nice."
12:58 She was lovey-dovey. And, housemaid blues. So, people have a tough time understanding this, and
13:08 you see this with siblings, right? So, siblings are incredibly cruel, nasty, and vicious to each
13:14 other and then go play. Males can poke vicious fun at each other and then band together against
13:23 a common foe, and women do this too, right? So, the sibling joke is the siblings are beating each
13:30 other up. At the moment someone says something mean about the sibling, they both unite against
13:33 the outsider. And understand, one of the reasons why I'm an advocate for the stateless society is
13:39 a deep understanding of our capacity for cruelty gets activated by power. So, somebody can seem
13:47 very nice, and they may be very nice, and they may be very thoughtful, but they get power,
13:52 and the switch gets flipped from kindness to cruelty. I mean, I think a lot of people go
13:59 into politics with the intention of doing good, and power makes us cruel, right? I mean, I remember
14:06 thinking about all of this stuff—again, I don't mean to sound overly precocious, but I promise
14:11 you it's true. I remember thinking about all this stuff when I was a kid, and one of the things that
14:19 my father bought my family—because, of course, he was in Africa, right? One of the things my
14:25 father bought my family was a subscription to National Geographic. Now, National Geographic
14:31 was popular enough back in the '70s—I think it stopped publishing recently—but it was popular
14:36 enough in the '70s, and so many people had it or got it, that it was a massive tool of social
14:44 programming. National Geographic was a massive, massive tool for social programming. So, of course,
14:51 just—we don't have to go into detail about it, but I remember when there was a push to save the
14:58 whales, right? To save the whales, which, you know, it's a fine thing. It's a fine thing, but
15:02 they included in the National Geographic a little flat plastic insert that you could put on your
15:12 record player—put the needle on the record—you could put it on your record player, and you would
15:16 hear whale sounds, whale songs, and so on. So, yeah, it was a lot of social programming,
15:24 and it was, of course, an early pornography delivery system, because there were topless
15:30 women—Amazonian women, rainforest women, or whatever—topless women, which was interesting,
15:36 and again, I think sort of a tool of social programming, but nonetheless.
15:40 So, but of course, I remember it in National Geographic, and you would watch these documentaries,
15:44 and so on, and I remember seeing these documentaries, and one of the documentaries was
15:50 a mother lion reaching down, and it looked like she was going to eat her offspring.
15:57 And I'm sure you've seen this—cats do this, too, right? They pick up their kittens by
16:01 the nape of the neck and take them from one place to another. And, of course, because I had a very
16:07 aggressive and violent mother, I saw the female, like the mother lion, reaching down, opening her
16:14 mouth, and I'm like, "Oh my God, it's going to bite the head off!" And, of course, you think,
16:17 "Well, there's some calories," but, of course, it's way more calories to produce than you get
16:20 by consuming it. But, of course, she would gently pick up her offspring and carry it away from
16:27 danger or carry it to where she wanted it to go, and so on, right? And so you see this,
16:33 these lion jaws, which regularly rip the throats out of baby zebras, and instead,
16:40 they're gently picking up and carting off to safety their offspring. And that duality was
16:47 really fascinating to me, seeing—and you see this all over the place on social media. It is
16:54 the woman who raised the lion returns after 10 years, and the lion, of course,
17:02 bounds up, and, of course, it looks like an attack thing, right? It's an attack that's
17:07 going to rip her head off, but, of course, the lion bounds into her arms and hugs her,
17:12 and so on, right? And, of course, you know, lions eat people, right? And so this is something where
17:19 people are quite fascinated by this duality of kindness and cruelty. The lion you didn't raise
17:24 will rip your throat out. The lion you did raise will hug you. And that is, you know—and I remember,
17:33 of course, when my daughter first got into ducks, and we'd get these ducks that would trail us
17:36 everywhere, and so on. And I said, you know, it's nice to think of this as a faction, right? It is.
17:43 It's nice to think of this as, "Oh, they love us, blah, blah, blah." But it's programming, right?
17:47 They're programmed to follow the largest moving thing in the vicinity, right? They're programmed
17:53 to follow that because that's how they stay alive, right? And you see ducks with the orange balloons,
17:57 they'll follow an orange balloon. So as you become a predator species, you have to develop
18:02 both aggression and you have to develop love and affection for your own offspring so that you can
18:14 train them on the complexities of your predation—how to hunt in packs, how to coordinate.
18:20 And so the knowledge transfer of the predator species is almost infinitely greater than the
18:27 knowledge transfer of the prey species, which is why the prey species are simply programmed
18:31 by hunger, thirst, and a sex drive, right? That's all that happens with the prey species—hunger,
18:37 thirst, and sex drive. And so they don't need that much affection for their offspring. So
18:43 aggression and affection evolve simultaneously. And of course, women are constantly having to do
18:51 this dance, right? Women have to do this very complex evaluation when it comes to who they
18:58 choose to marry. Who do they choose to marry? Well, they want to choose a man, of course,
19:03 who is aggressive because aggression means apex predator. It means he's going to dominate over
19:10 other men. He's going to win resources. He's not going to back down. He's not going to be a cog in
19:14 the machine. So they want a guy who is aggressive, if not downright cruel to outsiders, but lovey-dovey,
19:26 soft, and kind of half-feminine at home. And that's a tricky thing. That is a very,
19:35 very tricky balance to try and get a hold of. Aggression to outsiders, affection at home.
19:43 And so women want to dial up the aggression because that's going to get them the most
19:49 resources and provide the most security, right? This is the challenge that women face,
19:54 that they want security for their children, which means an aggressive male. But if the male is too
20:02 aggressive, then their children are endangered because their children get beaten up, or the man
20:08 gets killed by some other man who he aggresses against, or the man gets injured in some pointless
20:14 fight, or the man gets locked up or ostracized or punished, or he gets his hands cut off because he
20:20 stole. So women want more aggression, but not too much aggression. So women are turned on by
20:28 aggression, but they also want great attachment, which is why, again, Fifty Shades of Grey,
20:35 the Christian Grey, is very aggressive, very cold-eyed, very abusive in a way,
20:39 but he's also got a great attachment to this woman and so on, right? Because, you know,
20:44 you heard this in the Barbie movie, you know, it was all about, "Oh, women, we face so many
20:51 contradictions. Women, we face so many contradictions." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on.
20:55 Who cares? Who cares? And the reason I say, "Who cares?" is that who cares about the male?
21:00 The men's contradictions, the contradictions that men live with. I mean, you don't think we have any
21:05 contradictions that we need to live with? You don't think we have any challenges that way?
21:10 You don't think men are supposed to be aggressive in the outside world and yet
21:15 emotionally available at home? We're supposed to be, what, aggressive and dominant in the outside
21:22 world but submissive to the woman at home? We're supposed to be hyper-masculine in the outside
21:26 world but half a girlfriend at home? Come on. Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible, but when
21:33 women are drawn towards aggressive or abusive men, I mean, there's real reasons for that.
21:41 There's real reasons for that. Another reason why, of course, women are drawn to
21:47 aggressive or abusive men is because they don't know how to negotiate because they were raised by
21:54 aggressive and abusive parents and therefore they need an aggressive child so that they can
22:00 aggress against the child so that they don't end up having to negotiate with the child because they
22:04 don't know how to do that. In the same way that a woman is unlikely to adopt a child who speaks a
22:10 completely different language from her, so negotiation is a language, aggression dominance
22:15 is a language. So sadism, the ability to enjoy cruelty, is essential to the survival of every
22:28 and any predator species and to a smaller degree prey species. I mean, in a sense, for a prey
22:34 species to run away is cruel to the predator species because the predator species is hungry.
22:39 So the predator species has to deny his prey life and the prey species has to deny
22:47 the predator species life by running away. So affection for offspring, cruelty to others,
22:54 is foundational to all predator species. We're the apex predators, therefore we have the greatest
22:59 capacity for cruelty and kindness. And power stimulates cruelty, which is why you can't have
23:06 power. People can't have power, they can't handle power, because it turns you into the apex apex
23:12 apex predator, which means that you will be hyper loyal to those on the inside, your own particular
23:17 tribe, and hyper hostile and exploitive to others. You'll just view them as pawns to be served
23:23 up on your infinite platter of consumption. So we're there. I don't want to be overly repetitive
23:28 here because we're not right at the core as yet. We're getting there, we're getting there.
23:33 Look at me being over repetitive, isn't it kind of sadistic? So now we kind of get to the core.
23:40 So why has sadism arisen? So sadism is enjoying hurting others. Now that's different from
23:49 a lion eating a zebra. Now for the lion to eat the zebra, I'm sure the lion enjoys the hunt,
23:59 I'm sure the lion takes satisfaction in chewing the neck out of the zebra, and of course the
24:03 lion enjoys eating the meat and so on, right? But it's not sadism exactly. It's not sadism because
24:13 the chasing of the zebra, the killing of the zebra, the eating of the zebra
24:20 is serving a distinct biological need. It's serving a distinct biological need, and therefore
24:27 it is adaptive to survival, and therefore it is not cruelty to the zebra that is the major
24:37 motivator of the lion. I mean of course it has to enjoy the hunting because that programs it to do
24:43 the hunting, it has to enjoy the, assume the killing, the eating, and so on, but the motivator
24:51 is eating. The motivator is not the pain of the zebra, right? So if you're in a running race in
24:58 the Olympics and you want the gold medal, you have to want to beat the other people, but beating the
25:04 other people isn't your primary motivation. Your primary motivation is to get the gold, right?
25:09 If there's a race and you win ten thousand dollars if you win the race, of course you want to win,
25:14 and when you pull ahead of the other people you feel good and you're happy that you won and they
25:17 lost, but the primary motivator is not just to make the other people feel bad. Your primary motivator
25:23 is the ten thousand dollars. Now if you get the ten thousand dollars, of course the other people
25:28 feel bad, no question of that, but that's not your primary motivator. It's a side effect.
25:33 But with sadism the primary motivator is the negative experiences of others. It's the pain,
25:41 the horror, the humiliation, right? That is your primary motivation. So a sadist will torture
25:48 someone without any direct material benefit and a sadist may in fact torture someone to his risk or
25:54 danger. I mean he may abuse his girlfriend which could land him in jail. He may either mentally or
26:02 physically torture his wife and then she divorces him and it takes his stuff, right? And his kids,
26:10 especially if you can prove the cruelty. So people take significant risks. Now of course you could
26:16 say lions take risks every time they hunt and they do. They could pull a muscle, they could
26:21 fall, they could get kicked by the zebra hoof in the face and break their jaw or get their jaw
26:26 broken, but they have to do that to survive. You don't have to be sadistic to survive, but a lion
26:32 has to kill and eat prey in order to survive. So what's going on here? How does sadism go from
26:41 a side benefit to a central goal? Well, because of this and remember this is how we evolved,
26:50 right? It's really only been the last couple of hundred years that we've escaped this.
26:53 So for human beings the primary prey for the apex predators is human beings.
27:07 Now that's fairly unique in the animal kingdom that you enslave your own species and that marks
27:12 you as the apex predator. We're starting to see it now, right? Starting to see all this click into
27:18 view. Lions don't enslave other lions and force those other lions to hunt for them and take
27:26 half their kills as taxation, right? This is all back to the story of your enslavement.
27:35 Human beings, primary prey is other human beings for the apex predators.
27:41 And so we have a thirst for cruelty towards human beings because if we can dominate other
27:52 human beings through cruelty, we can access to a portion of those human beings productivity.
28:00 If we can enslave others then, I mean for 99.99% of human history and evolution,
28:10 the only labor-saving device is for you who are enslaved human beings.
28:15 So, I mean lions, hyenas will fight each other but they don't enslave each other.
28:21 So if you think of a human being, a man, right? A bunch of males in tribal war, they
28:29 will of course turn off their empathy and activate their cruelty in order to fight and win, right?
28:37 Because they, like you know, these aren't moral combats, they're combats over territory and
28:41 superstition and whatever, right? And women. So, you know deep down and you have to reject this
28:48 reality. You know for a fact that deep down the guy on the other side of the field is just like
28:54 you. He's just like you. You want to win, he wants to win. It's like in sports, which is not sports
29:00 are not moral combats. And so the guys in the red shirts know that the guys in the blue shirts are
29:06 just like them but they have to pretend that they're the opposite the enemy. They have to take
29:10 pleasure in harming their interests because that's part of the matrix of victory. And the purpose is
29:17 victory. So I get it. That's not sadistic. But you have to turn off universality in order to activate
29:26 irrational in-group preferences. From a philosophical standard, the in-group preferences
29:32 are irrational because it's not like one is morally better than the other or morally more honest or
29:36 has a greater grasp of reality or more virtues. So from an evolutionary standpoint, in-group
29:42 preferences make sense. Like it's a war of all tribal genetics against all tribal genetics.
29:47 But from a philosophical standpoint, there's no justification. It's a description of evolution
29:54 and biology and genetic imperatives. It's not a description of universality. And this is why
30:01 universality is so hard. Because universality is we should trade to mutual benefit, not kill and
30:08 enslave each other or not try to kill and enslave each other. So philosophy, property rights,
30:15 the non-aggression principle says we shouldn't fight each other. We should specialize and trade.
30:20 I'm better at something. You're better at something. We should specialize and trade.
30:22 That's universality. And that is in fact better for humanity as a whole. But in this sort of
30:28 brutal slugfest of our evolution, win-win was not something much thought of. And of course,
30:34 prior to the advent of labor-saving devices, the only way in general to do less work was
30:40 to enslave others. So if you're in a battle, normally the battle is an afternoon. You fight
30:48 like crazy. You win or you lose. Now, the difference being, of course, that among human beings,
30:55 the battle is only the beginning of the domination. Because if you win against the other tribe,
31:03 you enslave them. I mean, you can see this all over the place in the world, right? Slavery is a
31:07 universal phenomenon, right? You enslave them because that's the only labor-saving devices
31:12 you have access to is others, is the labor of others. So you have to turn off your empathy
31:21 and invoke your cruelty in order to fight the battle. But then, after you win the battle,
31:29 you then have to turn off your empathy in perpetuity regarding your victims,
31:35 because now you have to enslave them, or now you do enslave them, which means that you can't
31:42 return to a state of empathy, at least in your society as a whole. So let's say there's a
31:51 non-enslavement scenario. Let's say that some people are invading your area and you drive them
31:57 off and they run away. You can't enslave them, they run away, right? So you activate your cruelty
32:02 for the battle and then the threat is gone, and therefore you can reactivate your sensitivity,
32:08 your empathy, your tribal loyalties, your affections, and so on, right? Because it's
32:13 gone, right? The danger is gone, right? Your fight or flight goes away, and therefore you can
32:19 reactivate your empathy, right? But it's a different situation completely when you attack a
32:28 tribe in order to enslave them. So you obviously, they don't want to be enslaved anymore, like you
32:33 don't want to be enslaved, so they don't want to be enslaved, so you have to turn off your empathy
32:36 circuits and activate cruelty in order to attack and enslave the other tribe. Now, if you succeed
32:46 and you enslave them, you can't return to empathy because now you have rebellious, angry,
32:57 capable of aggression human livestock that your entire tribal income and survival now depends
33:04 upon. So you can't reactivate your empathy and kindness in any generalized way. Now you have
33:14 resentful slaves to manage forever and ever. So now, how do you manage your resentful slaves?
33:24 Well, you continually have to break their spirit, you continually have to break their will, but
33:29 you can't do it to the point where they have nothing to lose and might as well attack you.
33:33 So you have to break their will, you have to break their spirit, you have to oppose
33:37 any potential rebellions, but not to the point where you're just outright killing everyone,
33:43 because then you kill off your livestock, so to speak, your slaves, and they have so little to
33:50 lose that they might as well attack and fight back. So now you have to be continually cruel
33:56 to your slaves, you have to continually break their wills, you have to continually
34:01 be mean and undermine any confidence they have, and you have to keep your empathy circuits shut
34:10 off. So now the only way you can maintain your hold over your slaves is sadism. Sadism is the
34:21 livestock management system used for maintaining your control over slaves, and slaves were the
34:31 primary economic engine and survival engine of almost all human history. So why do we have
34:38 sadism? Because we own people. We own and we control people. And of course we've seen these
34:46 various rebellions in the West, which these blowbacks are just wild, right? So when Jesus
34:53 comes along and says "have empathy, love your enemies, we all are equal, universality is the
34:59 key," he challenges, fundamentally challenges, the win-lose sadism that maintains almost all
35:07 the power structures of the ancient world, at least all the ones that I can think of.
35:10 Sadism is taking pleasure in the suffering of others, and the only way to maintain a slave
35:20 population as a slave population is to take pleasure in their suffering, to enjoy hurting
35:25 them. Now again, to be rigorous, right? So earlier I said "well, the purpose of the
35:35 runner in the Olympics is to get the gold. Getting the gold means that he harms the
35:38 interests of others, so he has to enjoy harming their interests, he has to enjoy winning," and
35:44 all of that. But that's a short-term thing. It's a short race, right? Even an ultra-marathon is only
35:50 a day or two, right? Or three. So a regular marathon is 26 and a half miles, or whatever it
35:56 is. It's like five hours, six hours, four hours, depending on how fast you run. So it starts and
36:02 it ends. But when you're a slave-owning population, which is the apex predator of the apex predator,
36:08 right? Human beings are apex predators, but slave owners are apex predators of the apex predators.
36:13 Now you're in a situation of perpetuity. You're in a situation of perpetuity. So
36:18 your goal is to maintain control, and the best way to maintain control over slaves is to enjoy
36:26 hurting them, to enjoy humiliating them, to convince them of your superiority through your
36:31 capacity for violence, to turn them into a prey species by continually undoing and destroying
36:38 any confidence or stability or security or safety or predictability in their environment,
36:44 to assert your dominance. And of course we can see this in sort of traditional depictions of
36:50 hazing in various frats and groups. You can see this, of course, in the traditional depictions of
36:57 a boot camp and a screaming sergeant who's breaking down the will of, "He's got to enjoy
37:06 hurting the recruits because they are now drafted. They are now subject to military discipline."
37:14 So sadism evolved in human beings because those who enjoyed hurting others were the most effective
37:24 slave owners. And remember, slavery was the engine of productivity. The more slaves,
37:29 the more wealth. The more slaves, the more power. The more slaves, the more
37:32 soldiers. Because it's not just about slaves. It's also about the army, conscriptees, right?
37:39 Those who enjoy torturing others end up with the most agricultural productivity,
37:47 the most manufacturing productivity, the most weapons, and the most soldiers.
37:51 Sadism is the foundation of political, social, military, and economic strength
37:59 throughout almost all of human history. Throughout almost all of human history. This
38:03 makes sense, right? Now, but sadism has another component. I don't know, of course, how true this
38:12 was throughout human history, but it has another component in the modern world, which is, according
38:18 to this analysis, sadism, like, "Cruelty to your enemies, kindness to your family." Right? "Cruelty
38:23 to your enemies, kindness to your family." Wow, but the problem is, with modern sadism, I mean,
38:29 there is, of course, the political, the economic, and so on, right? But with modern sadism,
38:33 a lot of times the way it manifests is, "Cruelty to family, kindness to outsiders."
38:42 Right? Should be the other way around, right? According to the evolution, right?
38:45 What they call the other, the othering, right? The slaves are others, they're not quite human,
38:50 and therefore you can dominate and abuse them, and so on, right? But your family, you know,
38:53 is that scene from Brazil? Is it Michael Palin plays a guy who tortures and then comes home and
38:59 hugs his family? The cruelty to others, kindness to family, but for a lot of modern sadists,
39:05 it's reversed, and now it's cruelty to family and kindness to others. And, I mean, of course,
39:11 I saw this, and my mother would be very violent towards me, and then somebody would knock at the
39:17 door and she'd be all sweetness and sugar, right? So kindness to outsiders, cruelty to people in
39:24 your family, right? It's a reversal of how things should be, how things should have evolved, right?
39:31 So how does this come about? Well, the way this comes about is that, in general,
39:39 most people didn't own slaves, but they could turn their children into serfs. So most people
39:46 couldn't save enough resources to take care of themselves in their old age, so they required
39:51 their children to be their caregivers and to bond with them and to take care of them and all this,
39:59 that, and the other, right? So turning children into serfs of the parents was foundational to
40:08 survival strategies. And, again, we can talk about the morals of it. That's kind of dull,
40:12 because we're talking about a sort of pre-moral state of humanity, but there are advantages to
40:19 having grandparents around for children in terms of resources, in terms of knowledge transfer,
40:26 and so on, and status, and there really wasn't much of a chance to escape grandparents. I mean,
40:32 you live in a small tribe, you live in a small village, there really wasn't much chance to escape
40:36 grandparents anyway, so you might as well find some way to do them, to get along with them.
40:41 So in order to keep your children bound to you, you break their spirit, you break their will,
40:47 and then they will continue to obey you even after you get old and weak, you can't hit them anymore,
40:54 you can't dominate them in the same way physically that you used to, so you then are cruel
41:03 to family and kind to outsiders. Now, this is a long way from the lions being cruel to outsiders
41:11 and kind to family, but, again, this is sort of the way the evolution worked, at least I think
41:18 this is how it worked, this sort of makes sense from an evolutionary and, I think, moral and
41:22 logical standpoint. So one of the reasons, of course, that lions are cruel to zebras and kind
41:30 to their family is because that's how they grew up. They grew up seeing their mothers in particular
41:36 be cruel to zebras and kind to them, right, so they get programmed and they understand
41:41 you're cruel to outsiders and kind to your family, that's how things work.
41:45 Ah, but how do most people grow up these days, right? They grow up watching their parents,
41:51 a lot of people, not everyone obviously, but a lot of people who grow up seeing their parents
41:56 be cruel to them and kind to outsiders, right? This is not made up, right? I've had countless
42:01 call-in shows where somebody says, "My father couldn't control his temper," and I'd say, "Well,
42:06 did he ever beat you in public?" "No." "Did he ever beat you when other people were over?" "No."
42:09 "Did he ever beat you at a parent-child, a teacher, a parent-teacher conference?" "Did he ever beat
42:14 you in front of a security guard or a cop or on an airplane or at an airport?" "No, no, no, no,
42:18 of course, right, so he's perfectly able to control his temper." So the fact that strangers
42:24 are given high moral consideration but children are often aggressed against, it teaches children
42:31 that sadism is for the family and kindness is for the outsiders, right? Sadism is for the children
42:39 or the family members and kindness is for the outsiders. And if you're a, I don't want to be
42:44 overly cliched, but in general if you're a younger sibling, you see this with your older sibling
42:50 all the time, particularly if it's a dysfunctional household, you see this with your older sibling
42:54 all the time. So what happens? Well, your older sibling is mean to you and then his friend comes
43:00 over and he's a good-natured and happy and positive and friendly with his friend. And if
43:07 his friends are going somewhere, then he wants to go with his friends and he doesn't want you to come.
43:13 In other words, as strangers, you were kind to strangers and cruel to family. Kind to strangers
43:19 and cruel to family. Parents are kind to strangers and cruel to family. If you grew up with
43:27 squabbling 101 Bickerton parents, it's the same pattern. Your parents are cruel to each other
43:36 but kind to strangers, right? They'll yell at each other, maybe throw things at each other,
43:42 but when people are over for a dinner or you have a dinner party or some other kind of gathering,
43:49 in general, they're nice to everyone. So when you have these really dysfunctional families,
43:56 then the children are raised with kindness to outsiders, cruelty to insiders, and of course
44:03 you can see this all over the place in the modern world. It's really the foundation of a lot of the
44:08 mindsets of the modern world. Outgroup preferences. Well, if you're raised with your family and your
44:14 elder siblings being kind to strangers and cruel to people at home, then you're going to end up
44:19 worshipping other cultures and hating your own. Right? Kindness to outsiders, cruelty to your
44:26 tribe. And this is not, again, it's not just made up, particularly people on the left. They have
44:34 significantly greater outgroup preferences than in-group preferences. This is, again,
44:39 this is not made up. You can look at these studies and you can look at these charts and graphs. It's
44:42 really quite striking. So people who tend to be conservative tend to have strong in-group
44:46 preferences and are more skeptical of outsiders, but people on the left have very strong outgroup
44:51 preferences and are skeptical of insiders, which means that they were raised in situations of
44:55 abuse where they were treated very badly by their own family and yet their own family was nice
45:03 to outsiders. What that translates to, and if you've been in an abusive household, you'll know
45:07 exactly what I'm talking about, and even if you haven't, you'll get it right away, which is you're
45:12 only safe when other people are around. Right? I mean, I remember when I was a kid, a little
45:18 personal anecdote time here. So when I was a kid, I think that they were Mormons, right? So when I
45:25 was a kid, two young Mormon gentlemen knocked on the door of our apartment, our flat as we called
45:31 it, and they came in and I remember showing them my model airplanes and so on, and my mom made
45:37 them tea and we chatted for quite some time, and I felt happy, right? Because as long as they were
45:44 there, I was safe, because my mother would be nice when others were around, which means that
45:53 you are programmed to prefer others to your own family, because your own family is a source of
46:00 danger, but when others are around, that danger is relieved. They are your bodyguards in a very
46:07 dangerous environment, right? So if you're in a very dangerous environment, you really, really
46:11 are thankful for your bodyguards, right? Because they keep you safe, and so you have a positive
46:16 response to outsiders, because outsiders keep you safe, and I felt sad, you know, when I had a
46:24 babysitter who let me stay up late and bought me a curly wooly every time I went over, and she was
46:29 really nice and all of that, and so I really loved spending time with her, and I of course remember
46:35 one time when I was supposed to spend the evening with her, and instead I had to stay home, I just
46:41 like, I wept all night. I was like, I don't know, four years old, I just wept all night, because
46:46 she was a positive and my own family was a negative. Out-group preferences. And again, we can
46:55 see this all over the place in the modern world, these massive out-group preferences which arise
47:01 out of sadism towards the family and positive experiences of outsiders. So I hope this sort
47:10 of unpacks and sort of makes sense of this evolution, and there's sort of one more point
47:15 that I wanted to mention here to sort of close this up, and this may be the end, like I've got
47:21 many more notes about sadism, but I think that this is the best explanation, one that fits the
47:26 most facts and the most experience, so I don't want to go on too long. What's that thing about,
47:31 you know, always leave them wanting a little bit more, but I may do more, and let me know of course
47:35 what you think of this. I'm happy to do more, but I think this kind of encapsulates it well.
47:40 It's what Seinfeld said about comedians, like if you do in an hour 10, people love you, but if you
47:45 do an hour 30, they're like, oh my god, when's this guy gonna end? And we've all had that in
47:49 movies, like, oh there's more? Especially if it's a scattered movie, then you're like, oh this
47:54 ill-fitting jigsaw just goes on and on and on, so I don't want to go on too much about sadism.
48:00 So if you're raised with parents who are cruel to you but kind to outsiders,
48:04 then the natural cruelty-kindness metric is reversed from our evolution, where you are
48:12 kind to family and cruel to outsiders. So why does this happen? Because in the modern family structure,
48:19 parents have way too much power. Way too much power. Way too much power. So families, of course,
48:26 have become atomized, which also means isolated. So what I mean by that is, the idea that there are
48:34 no outsiders to your family life is pretty new, right? So it's not that children were raised in
48:40 some sort of platonic sense in common or whatever, but you think of a sort of farming community,
48:45 you think of a small village, you think of a tribe, everybody knows each other's business,
48:50 which puts a limit on the power that parents have, because there's always an observer. There's always
48:55 an observer. Somebody's always around, somebody can hear you, somebody can intervene, somebody
49:00 else has authority, there are older people who are going to tell you not to be too cruel, who are
49:04 going to, you know, but now we're isolated. So cruelty is blunted by other people being around,
49:11 right? So if you're raised with cruel parents, you know that when other people are around,
49:15 they're almost always much, much infinitely nicer, right? But now we're in a situation where
49:20 there are no other people around on any regular or unexpected way, right?
49:28 And so the cruelty of parents is no longer blunted by the presence of others because we have these
49:34 atomized and isolated family structures. And I know this isn't a perfect answer, obviously,
49:38 this is just part of the answer, because if you have a truly sadistic family as a whole,
49:42 then they're all going to sort of enjoy the cruelty, but that's pretty rare.
49:48 That's pretty rare. You know, when a girl brings her boyfriend over to meet her parents,
49:54 both the boyfriend and the parents are on their best behavior. And so in the past,
50:00 confronting people who are really cruel to their children would be the job of the extended family,
50:08 but the extended family has been scattered, and the families are all isolated. Therefore,
50:13 because there are fewer others around, the cruelty tends to flourish because it's way too much power,
50:20 there's no interference from others. I mean, to take a sort of silly example, if you can imagine
50:26 that your parents knew for sure that there was a live feed being broadcast from their house
50:36 to somebody who had authority over them, maybe parents, police, child protective services,
50:40 whatever. If they knew that there was a feed of a live webcam from their house to an authority
50:45 figure, would they change their behavior? Of course they would. I'm sure you've seen these
50:49 videos of a guy in a lineup steals the wallet of the guy ahead of him and then notices that
50:54 there's a camera, clasps his hands in apologetic prayer, puts the wallet back and leaves,
51:01 because now he's being observed and therefore his behavior improves. So the welfare state
51:08 and the pursuit of money at the expense of children, which is "I'll just move to make
51:12 20% more money" without realizing that that takes you out of an extended family that will probably
51:16 help improve your parent parenting. The pursuit of money, the pursuit of status, the pursuit of,
51:23 I don't know, self-actualization, and also the selfishness of the boomer parents who move away
51:27 and don't provide a lot of grandparenting services to their children, means that there are fewer and
51:34 fewer repercussions to bad behavior on the part of parents. Like no grandparents who are like,
51:41 "What are you doing? Stop! Stop! This is crazy!" Right? So there's less aid, which means more
51:46 overwhelming for new mothers. We talked about this in a show recently, or I talked about this
51:50 in a show recently. So new mothers are more overwhelmed because they're more isolated,
51:54 more overwhelmed. Parents tend to lash out more, and so they get less support, less feedback,
51:59 less help, and so parental power has swelled. And wherever power swells, so also does cruelty
52:07 swell. Because evolutionarily speaking, if you get more power, the only way to maintain it is
52:14 more cruelty. Right? Because if you, let's say you get five slaves through war or you inherit
52:23 them or whatever, right? So let's say you get five slaves, now you have power over people,
52:28 and the only way to maintain that power over people is to be cruel. And therefore,
52:34 the fight-or-flight mechanism, the aggression mechanism, goes from a temporary stimuli to a
52:42 permanent state of being. You permanently have to be cruel, you permanently have to be cold,
52:47 you permanently have to be aggressive or abusive, or you permanently have to humiliate, and then you
52:53 you have to enjoy it. There have to be positive incentives for your cruelty,
52:56 and therefore it is no longer reactive or dominant or conquering. It is no longer...
53:02 It's like the lions, instead of hunting the zebras, they capture the zebras, put them in an
53:10 electrified fence and prey on them. They have to... and they know that if the zebras all push
53:16 together they can take down the fence and stomp all the lions while they sleep, so they have to
53:20 break the wills of the zebras so that the zebras stay in the fence even though the zebras vastly
53:25 outnumber the lions. And although the lions have teeth, the zebras have weight and hooves,
53:30 so you have to break the will, which means that you have... because human beings own other human
53:34 beings for most of human history, you have to go from fight-or-flight to permanent cruelty,
53:38 and permanent cruelty is sadism. And then in the modern world, sadism is combined with an
53:45 out-group preference because what's modeled to you is cruelty to family and kindness to outsiders,
53:50 so you end up hating your own culture and having a fetish for other cultures,
53:53 and you also end up being cruel to your own children because you have the power of isolation.
53:59 So I feel that wraps things up on sadism. I could be wrong, there could be more to talk about,
54:03 but I hope this makes sense to you and of course happy to get your feedback and any counter
54:08 examples I'm happy to take on in a subsequent show, but I think we've got sadism cornered,
54:15 tagged, back to tagged, evaluated, but of course I'm perfectly happy to go further if you find it
54:20 would be helpful, you think that there's stuff that's missing, of course there is, but you know
54:23 really really important stuff that's missing. So of course thank you so much for the opportunity to
54:29 do these kinds of talks and and also freedomain.com/donate, freedomain.com/donate to help
54:36 out the show. Pretty sure this is unique and powerful and this kind of illumination is life
54:41 changing, isn't it? It is life changing, doesn't it help you understand the world in a really
54:46 fundamental way and maybe yourself too since we all do have these angels and devils on our
54:52 shoulders. So freedomain.com/donate to help out what it is that we're doing up here. Thanks of
54:57 course to Jared for some of the research and to you for listening and sharing the ideas and
55:04 and supporting philosophy.
55:05 Love you guys.
55:07 Take care, talk to you soon, bye.