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I was listening to your book this morning life at the bottom at 2.5 times normal speed and it was quite the I mean i’d read it before but I I had forgotten What the it’s an unending litany of complete calamity across every dimension you can possibly imagine And then you said you saw like 20 000 of people who were in dire suicidal straits in addition I I presume that you had patients other than those who were suicidal as well Yes, well mainly because I was working in a general it was a general hospital Then I would see organic patients with organic problems and a few others people who’d been beaten by their partners Oh, I saw that that was standard. Of course. I mean I I discovered that about 80 percent of the women Uh whom I saw Had suffered violence at the hands of their one or more of their sexual partners No, we can dig in there. You tell this story. That’s really quite interesting. So you’re and and very What would you say? Uh Libel any discussion of it is liable to create controversy so you you talked about women that you saw the patients who chronically chose males who you could identify at a glance as extraordinarily likely to burst into violent jealous rages and Become physically violent and you also point out that the markers for that were not precisely subtle Comparing the men that you were looking at I believe to your neighbor’s tomcat who had been in enough fights So his head was a mass of shredded ears and scars and missing an eye And so these were men who had shaved heads multiple scars from battles often tattooed often tattooed on their fists with blatant messages of nihilism or social rejection or anger or Or threats or curse words or Um, so it wasn’t exactly subtle All these and you said that they invariably wore a An expression of malign contempt something like that and they were people you would obviously give wide birth to in the street in broad daylight yet they were in invariably tangled up with a woman or two or three or ten who they were abusing serially but and the women seemed um in some sense blind to this but not only the Underclass women that you were serving but you also mentioned that that was extraordinarily Prevalent among the nursing staff And so walk us through that and tell us how you make sense of that Well, it wasn’t I wouldn’t say it was prevalent amongst the nursing staff. It was present present in the nursing staff uh well My interpretation which would be of course Regarded as highly reactionary in the end. This is the conclusion I came to Was that because sexual relations had been freed from all? Contractual cultural Economic Restraint and constraint Then what was left was a kind of free for all and the men Wanted exclusive sexual possession of somebody but at the same time they wanted the excuse they wanted complete sexual freedom Now these things don’t go together very well I mean, uh, if there’s complete sexual freedom, okay, there’s complete sexual freedom but if at the same time you want possibly for reasons of boosting yourself image the exclusive sexual possession of somebody then And everyone around you is the same then the men would see other men as threats So they would be and they would become extremely jealous Because they would fear any Any uh contact between uh, uh Their girlfriend they were never wise girlfriend With another man would lead to or might lead to a liaison And after all since they were sexually predatory in this in that way Uh, they assumed that everyone around them was Was of similar ilk and which was often true and this this used to lead to fights for example in um In so-called nightclubs Which uh, I mean when I was young a nightclub was a place where there was a floor show and little tables around but these were great caverns of Thousands of people where if one Where if a man looked at a girlfriend? It was assumed to be a challenge by the girlfriend’s boyfriend and And so there could be fights and even murder Financial experts thought we were in the clear while these experts anticipated rate cuts inflation in the united states is still a significant economic concern Think about it The us is in the hole by 34 trillion dollars and yet we keep printing money Which pushes the prices you pay every day even higher so you can bury your head in the sand Or you can do something about it diversify a portion of your savings into gold with birch gold group Gold is your hedge against inflation and birch gold makes it easy to own They’ll help you convert your existing ira or 401k into a tax sheltered ira in gold and you won’t pay a penny out of pocket Make gold part of your saving strategy and buy it from birch gold They’ve been the exclusive gold partner of the daily wire for over seven years now Literally helping thousands of our listeners and they can help you too Make gold part of your saving strategy and buy it from birch gold They’ve been the exclusive gold partner of the daily wire for over seven years now Literally helping thousands of our listeners and they can help you too text jordan to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold then talk to a precious metal specialist about protecting your savings from persistent inflation with gold Text jordan to 989898 now So I got in trouble with the new york times because I pointed out at one One point during the discussion with this journalist that societies all around the world And I thought of this as a universal anthropological truth and something that was well established to the point of being self-evident, but apparently not that A major problem that every society faces is the control of aggression By young men in particular and generally as a consequence of sexual Jealousy and striving and the universal answer to that insofar as there is one was the development of monogamous norms and social enforcement of those norms and you know you You just described it in some sense as inhibition and control, but I I think it’s also useful And to think about it as integration and into a more sophisticated game Um You know being in a marriage obviously does involve not chasing after other people sexually but It isn’t all inhibitory within the marriage something sophisticated and hopefully wonderful in the long term is supposed to occur as a Preferable substitute And I mean preferable if it’s done properly to the short-term gratification that might be obtained by Serial relationships say or sporadic relationships because they’re they’re actually very difficult and they also produce these violent outcomes that you described And I was pilloried for that in quite a remarkable way claims were made that you know, I was Making the claim that governments should you know Hand over unwilling women to undesirable monogamous men or undesirable men just to enforce monogamy, but really what I meant was well One of the reasons for marriage apart from the fact that two fam two parent families are clearly much better for children When the with the father there is that societies that allow unregulated polygamy or that degenerate into that are invariably rife with extraordinarily high levels of violence Yes, well That’s what I I saw now uh, of course what the the the destruction of the idea of uh of The family as we once knew it has been a long process Started I think by intellectuals literary intellectuals And it’s perfectly true that a bad marriage from which you can’t escape is hell I mean, it’s a kind of concentrated hell um and Marriage is not easy um um So people thought well I think this is this is my explanation. They thought that there were if if We could get rid of all the inhibitions and restraints and frustrations because there are frustrations um then the full beauty of the human personality would emerge and we would associate with one another just by love and nothing else and when love was over then you just You just uh go on to something else somebody somebody else But this is actually a very shallow view of things apart from anything else In a marriage if a marriage if there are difficulties in the way of ending a marriage This gives you actual incentives to make it work It also tells you that society values what you’re doing Which helps you continue to value it which makes you likely to stick more likely to stick with it during periods of doubt. I mean Obviously life is extraordinarily difficult and just on its own and and it’s certainly no easier if you’re alone That’s for sure. And so life is difficult when you have a partner and because of that difficulty But not because of anything necessarily intrinsic to the state of marriage itself you need social institutions to buttress the structure so that All of the weight doesn’t fall on those individuals alone You know, I mean i’ve had clients in my practice who are living together And you know when I ask them why they don’t get married the man often will say well We don’t need a piece of paper to signify our commitment and I think First i’ve heard that 20 times and you might think that’s a philosophy, but it’s actually a pretty stunningly shallow cliche and second We’re not talking about a piece of paper here We’re actually talking about something serious you stand up in front of your family your peers your friends The people that love you the people that you want to spend time with Hypothetically for the rest of your life that you’re going to depend on that are going to depend on you and you say look This is important. I want you to recognize it. We’re now one thing We’re going to give it our best shot and it would be nice if you support us and that’s not trivial. It’s vital and and that’s Still why I think Marriage may be less frequent, especially among the lower classes than it once was although cohabiting isn’t or perhaps it is as well, but Romance movies that feature a wedding are certainly not any less popular and marriage is still just as popular among the upper classes which is something you also discuss in books like The mandarins and the masses for example, you’re not very happy with These philosophical discussions of freedom conducted by people say like jean paul sartre and the absolutely catastrophic Consequences of that unbridled thinking on people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy Yes Well with regard to the piece of paper business, I remember I had a patient who had And she was not a foolish woman Had Taker tried to kill herself eventually unfortunately did kill herself She wanted very much a man to marry her And the man didn’t want to marry her but he wanted to cohabit with her And I remember him saying to me I don’t see what What she’s uh what she’s worried about it’s only a piece of paper and I said well if it’s only a piece of paper Why don’t you sign it? Because it’s only a piece of paper either way So obviously This revealed that it wasn’t only a piece of paper. It was a commitment which he was unwilling or for some reason To make he had he had personal. Well, there’s also the the question of well, what what is the basis of your relationship if it isn’t actually a A Formally recognized permanent commitment say you’re cohabiting with someone think in canada it’s six months and it’s basically common law marriage so What is it is we’re going to hang around with each other until one of us finds someone better But you’ll do for now. Is that like I don’t know what well, I think yes, I think it’s uh, it’s uh, particularly with the men I think they uh They don’t want to close off all possibilities They think you see they think that having An infinite choice is actually not committing to anything Which of course is a mistake and what do you think it is committing to Which uh the the the continual the hypothetical continual choice uh that is just uh, they hope to be able to Um to continue a life of uh pleasure and um And sensation I think that that’s about it And they don’t want to They have a kind of anti romantic idea um of um Of love So do you think that the intellectuals that were actively engaged in the destruction of traditional structures or in the criticism of traditional structures were just so Well protected by the fact of those structures that they were only able to see the residual problems I think that that was it. Yes. And of course they were also protected economically because economics does make a big difference here You