The One in the Many
The purpose of the One in the Many podcast is to explore the process of integration as inspirational, energizing and corrective and apply it to human psychology.
The One in the Many
Reflections on Marriage, Beauty, and Personal Growth
Have you ever witnessed the captivating interplay between strength and beauty, courage and vulnerability? Our latest conversation with Ronald Pisaturo delves into this poignant dance, beginning with a correction on baseball coach Charlie Lau and transitioning into the valor it takes for women to showcase their beauty in a world that can often punish them for it. Ron's childhood memories serve as a heartwarming preamble to our deeper exploration of the vital role men play in not just partnering with women but in safeguarding them from the darker elements of society.
Our exchange with Ron opens up a treasure trove of insights on the sacred institution of marriage and the quest for soulmates. We traverse the changing landscape of beauty standards, the immeasurable worth of emotional bonds, and the artistry of synchronizing our feelings with our values. Ron, with a touch of vulnerability, shares his reflections on the spiritual and emotional tapestry that a lifelong partnership weaves, celebrating the growth of judgment and appreciation that comes with such a profound commitment.
Finally, we address the intricate topic of parenthood and the impact of children on our lives. With candor, Ron expresses his regrets regarding his decision not to have children and how it shaped his personal and philosophical outlook. We contrast this with a guest's mindful choice to forgo parenthood, examining the societal implications and the diverse ways in which family dynamics can sculpt our communities and our sense of self. Join us for an episode that not only probes personal values, love, and legacy but also invites you to ponder your own life's tapestry of confidence and generosity.
Ron, thank you very much for coming back on the One in the Many, and we are continuing the discussion of your book Masculine Power, feminine Beauty, and this is let me get it on the camera, uh-oh, do you see it? Yeah, there you go. Masculine Power, feminine Beauty, the Volitional Objective, bas. Objective basis for heterosexuality and romantic love and marriage. Uh, by ronald pisciotturo. Um ron, is great to have you back and as we um um it was you mentioned off camera you wanted to follow up on the last discussion we had on masculinity and femininity with a few more points and then we'll go into the subject of marriage, as we offered as a promise to the audience for this episode.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, arshak, thank you very much for having me back, and I listened to the recording from last time and, yeah, I noticed just a couple of things. First, a detail I said that Charlie Lau was not a good hitter and I should not say that. I should say he was not a great hitter Right. After all, he was in the major leagues and anybody to get to the major leagues has to be a good hitter, right, and he was about average for a major league hitter. But he was known as a great hitting coach. One of his famous students, george Brett, was one of the best hitters of his time. So that's one detail.
Speaker 2:Then, another thing that occurred to me was I talked about how a woman should be admired for her beauty, because beauty is something that every woman is born with as a potential. But it takes work to exploit that potential right To be fit, to be graceful and, you know, well-groomed, well-dressed and all that kind of thing. But one thing I wanted to add to that is that also, or another way of looking at that, is it takes courage, and one aspect of that is that a beautiful woman is a target. Of that is that a beautiful woman is a target. She's, of course, of appeal to many men, and it's appealing to good men, men that she wants, but it's also appealing to bad men, men who will try to take advantage of her. And sadly, there are some women who have experience of attention from men, from bad men, and have bad experiences, and after that they choose not to be beautiful because they don't want that bad attention to be beautiful, because they don't want that bad attention. You know, and again, it takes courage to be out there with your virtue of beauty because you are going to be a target, and all the more reason that a beautiful woman and a desirable woman needs a good man, a good man to defend her against so many bad men.
Speaker 2:That's a good point. You're nodding. Do you have a…?
Speaker 1:I was going to say this is a good point, because women know very early on how beautiful they are and they know that they are attracting a lot of attention from men. So they have to develop that sense of who is good for them and who is not. Otherwise they expose themselves to potential danger. And the more they take care of themselves, the more open they are to potential threat. So this is a good point that you're bringing up that it takes courage and it takes refinement of their judgment.
Speaker 2:And again, it takes more courage for a man. A man who wants a desirable woman knows that she's going to be a target and he has to be even better prepared to defend her because of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, like you. In the book you say that you were five years old when you sensed and remembered that sensation of an attraction to a girl, right? Well, when I was five years old, I actually stole one of my mom's golden rings and offered it as a proposal to my neighbor who's a five-year-old. So I thought I'm married to her, so we would go to her bedroom and we'll set up the dolls as our kids and we'll imagine what kind of house we're going to build and how we're going to live and all this stuff. And all of a sudden I realized that her mom knocks on my mom's door and says does this belong to you, by the way?
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, well, your son gave it to my daughter and that was the end of my marriage life with that five-year-old as a five-year-old, five-year-old as a five-year-old, um, but, um, uh. You know one one thing I remember how, um, uh, how attracted I was to her and how beautiful I thought she was, and, um, you know, I was five-year-old, kid and um. So these were fun memories that I have and I have some pictures to remind me of those experiences. So that was a fun thing. But since you know, from age five until I became a young adult, I never really reflected on marriage until I met the woman that I fell in love with, and that's when I started thinking about marriage. Um, so, um, there's a good points. Um, that you're making is because, even as a child, um, I remember that sense of feeling protective of the girls that I like to make sure that they're protected, that they are not exposed to outsiders who may wish them ill, and it was natural.
Speaker 1:Nobody taught me that nobody told me you gotta go and protect the girls that you like, so that's, that's interesting well, young boys often learn an analog to that when they have to protect their little sister. Right, right, if you have a little sister, right, right, if you have a little sister, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, in my case it's three boys in the family, so we don't have a sister to protect, but my older brother was acting as a protector of the younger brothers, so I felt that protection from him.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm from him. So a couple of other things that I wanted to say is, you know, I'm talking about women being beautiful, and someone might wonder well, not every woman can be beautiful, because then, what standard is there? Everybody is beautiful and I think it's important to understand that when I say beautiful, I don't mean a woman is beautiful in comparison to other women. I don't mean a woman is beautiful in comparison to other women. If you have a group of women, some are going to be more beautiful physically than others. A woman should be the most beautiful thing in the man's environment. So a woman's beauty is in comparison to, you know, the harsh elements of the world and the furniture and the food and the clothes. You know all the things that are in a man's environment.
Speaker 2:There are some beautiful things, but the pinnacle of beauty, in my judgment, for a man is the woman in his life, and in that respect the woman is beautiful, you know. Or if she strives to exercise her potential for beauty, and that's that's the reward to a man. And you hear so many times that a man will describe his wife as beautiful speaker, you know, uh, beginning his remarks saying, oh, and my beautiful wife is in the audience today. You know, or I'm grateful for my beautiful wife. It's such a common thing for a man to say about his wife. You rarely hear a woman say my handsome husband that way. I mean she might say it in passing and you know, a woman reasonably wants a husband who's handsome, but that virtue is not fundamental or foundational the way it is to a man you know, wanting, deserving and enjoying the beauty of the woman in his life, the beauty of the woman in his life.
Speaker 1:So my wife may not qualify to become Miss Universe to the objective judging eyes of a commission that decides who the Miss Universe will become among, I don't know, 100 or 200 women out there competing for that title, but to me she is the universe. It's a very beautiful universe and that's the way that you are delegating this right. So, yeah, in that respect, yeah, in that respect, my standard of beauty definitely reflects on the person that I fall in love with, and it varies from man to man and it also varies in different time periods. In the 1920s, women looked differently than the women in 2020. And there were different standards that men developed to show what they consider beautiful next to them.
Speaker 1:But that also, that beauty radiates through the grace and charisma that you read in somebody's demeanor, not just the physical aspect of the symmetrical proportion or harmony of the body and so forth that we consider as beautiful, so um, so, so that that's, I guess, an aspect of your chapter of, uh, volition and emotion, the way you interact with a person on an emotional level. But that emotion that you have, you have an automatic reaction to, to the interaction you are experiencing with the person. It's based on some prior evaluation that is conscious and thought after I mean thought out and explicit and then eventually turns into an automatic reaction that you could analyze. But I guess many people don't analyze, they just react to it and go with the flow of their emotions. So it could be positive and negative, right?
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm. Well, going with the flow is not a bad thing if it is in conjunction with thinking, you know Right, and if it's consonant with your explicit values. And one thing related to that idea is about beauty. You know, I consider the beauty of the woman not as a standalone entity but as part of a couple, right? So when I was a young boy, I would not want to or, let's say, a young man, I would not want to be paired with a 50-year-old woman. It's for spiritual, intellectual, mental reasons, but also for aesthetic reasons. It's not a harmonious picture, right, and the same.
Speaker 2:Now that I'm almost 70, it's not a harmonious picture to be with someone in her 20s, you know, yeah. So it's not just again, it's not just the woman alone, it's how it forms a couple and or how she forms a couple. And that also means that the values that you hold as a man are going to be values that you're going to admire in the woman. If the man is graceful in his movements, he's going to admire that kind of grace, with the woman to compliment that or even to exceed his own grace, right. And if a man has certain other features, it's nice to have the woman compliment those as well, you know, pointing to a harmony of values and complementarity and shared virtues right that change over time and evolve over time.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, indeed. And it is that sharing of values of virtues, it is that sharing of values of virtues, of that emotional connection, that generates the deeper connection between the two that eventually permeates in a future contract that we are going to discuss in terms of marriage. Right, yeah, and? But the question is why do people marry, why can't they? Live just as a couple. Why do they marry?
Speaker 2:That's a great question and that relates to one more a fourth thing that I wanted to do, that I remembered that I wanted to say from last time Because I did not have a good answer for that question when I lived in New York and California. Marriage was not so important to me and you know, when I say that I also don't want to imply that I'm innocent. You know, I was just taken in by the bad ideas in those places, like Pinocchio or something like that. You know, and you know mea culpa. So I did not have the wisdom to think past the mistakes of the people. Most of the people around me and it's not that everybody around me made that mistake.
Speaker 2:People did get married and have families around me and women in my age range, once they got into their early 30s, did want to have children. You know they did. Many of them did not want it earlier, but many of them came to want it later. But I could have known. I should have known that New York and California don't constitute the whole world and it was possible for me to discover how important marriage was. So I just wanted to say that I'm not trying to pass off all the blame.
Speaker 2:I was influenced by the influences around me, but I also lacked the wisdom to see past those influences, right? So the why marry thing question also. Well, it's so important and valuable, essential for someone to have what I call, in one of the appendices of the book, a constant spiritual companion, right? This is why we want to have just one partner at a given time, but it's also why we want to have one romantic life partner throughout one's life, because gives that continuity right that you, you can answer this question better than I, right, but it how um irreplaceable is it to have another soul that you admire more than any other soul as a constant companion over a long duration of your life, all the way to the end.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, so you have that judge, that evaluator, who can say I've observed you over many decades and I love you even more and more through those observations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's very rewarding.
Speaker 2:There's so much more to share. Yeah, it's a greater reward, and in both directions, right. I mean, you know, if certain individuals are so, so valuable and deserving of high value, well it's clear, it's obvious, that you want to have that person of such high value with you for as much as your life as possible, for as long as possible, you know know yeah. So that's why you want permanence, right.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, absolutely. I agree that, especially when you find the one, the one that you are in love with, the one that you are in love with, the one that has judged you and you have judged in return, right, you have. Well, you bring up this issue, this point, in your chapter on volition and emotion, you, you quote iran about that sense of life. That sense of life meets another sense of life, and that sense of life is um metaphysical level, emotional response to somebody else, um. So, when you encounter that, when you find your soulmate.
Speaker 1:You don't want to let go. You can't let go right and especially when that response is positive, that, yes, they acknowledge that they are your soulmate and you, in return, are their soulmate, or her soulmate in my case. So when that happens, um, I mean, nothing can separate you.
Speaker 1:I don't feel that we part, or whatever the term was there. But um and so um. I I guess the way we structured modern life, we do these marital contracts not only for ourselves, to show the commitment to ourselves, but we also have to do it in a sense for the government to acknowledge us as a unit, as a family, to treat us tax-wise as a family, as a married couple, to be able to legitimize our offspring, if we have one. There are a lot of legal issues involved with a couple living as a married couple and my thinking was, if those socioeconomic reasons take priority, then maybe you're not with the right person. First has to come the person. I mean, if you rise independent, above the law, beyond the law, beyond financial restraints or anything like that, will you still be with that person? That's pretty much. How would you find out, I guess from a political standpoint, whether that's the right person for you? So in my experience, it doesn't matter what our status is, but I know that my wife and I will be together, no matter what. Whether we're going to be homeless or live in a mansion, we're going to be together, and that permanence gives you the security of your soul.
Speaker 1:You know you, you found yourself. You found your loved one and that loved one becomes the most important person in the world, like I mean, my mom, kind of um, alluded to this when I was getting married. When I told her that I found my wife and this is going to be my wife and I want. My grandma gave me a ring when I was a little kid and I said this is going to be the ring for your wife. Whenever you find her, you give her this ring. So my mom kept it for me and when I told her I found the one and I want the ring to give it to her, she said, ok, well, now you're a man. Now you're a man and you're on.
Speaker 1:I mean, I was already on my own Right, so I was living by myself in America before they arrived. But in her estimate, now you're a man. Now you found your wife. Now you're going to start a family. Now you're independent man. Now you found your wife. Now you're going to start a family. Now you're independent of us and I no longer care for you as, uh, as my son, you know, you're like you're out of the family now. So that was interesting that you know. Be careful who you find, because even your mom is going to say you're no longer, you no longer belong to me.
Speaker 1:You now belong to that woman. So that was interesting for me in my experience. But I also think that, as dearly as I love my mom, my wife is the most important person in my world. I know my mom is much older, older and eventually she'll die before me, if everything goes according to nature, um, and I'm going to remain with my wife um so it's um, uh, it's a very.
Speaker 1:That's what it comes to. But you go in a little more philosophical way of showing that the defense of marriage is also important on an epistemological, cognitive level. Right, and this is what I really appreciate in your book, how you develop the point that you develop the point that you become a defender of marriage, and I wanted to ask you if you could talk a little bit more about that, like, why do you think it's important to defend the concept of marriage?
Speaker 2:for all the reasons we we just said. A man needs to have this in the forefront of his mind. He needs conceptual understanding along with the emotion. Right Marriage is the most romantic word in the language. It denotes this unbreakable, lifelong bond between two constant spiritual companions, two people who think about each other almost all the time. When you have an experience, even when you're by yourself, you look forward to sharing, relating that experience to your wife when you see her right, and marriage is the concept that captures all of that meaning. It captures the meaning of everything that I've said and you have said in our two interviews about the relationship between a man and a woman, and a man and a woman in particular, not some other relationship.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You know, between friends or between two men or whatever. Everything we talked about has to do with a deep romantic relationship between a man and a woman, and that's what the concept marriage is for just to hold all of that in one mental unit right, yeah, yeah, and um, you know, um I.
Speaker 1:I keep reading about ancient g Greece and it's amazing how much we are repeating from the past in our attitude towards that family life and how we think that we can outsmart nature or the natural order of things. And I just wanted to read something from Durand. He says as the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility. End of quote. And I found that quote remarkable, that you know that he observed that about Greece.
Speaker 1:And I think this is a decent portrayal of what's going on right now in the culture. We are forgetting the authority of the parent, we are forgetting what it means to be masculine, to take care of the marriage, we are forgetting what it means to be a woman, to be a mother, and we're forgetting what it means to live in an organized, civilized society with political consequences. So we have to be responsible for that, for that and you, I mean the dark side of the book, if I can call it this. It's just it's dark. For me, I couldn't stomach it, but you, you have to write this, you have to explicate the entire LGBT or whatever it's called movement, and kudos to you that you had the strength and the courage and the wisdom to be able to do it in the way you did. But I love the opening sentence that you present when you start talking about the homosexuality. Is that a homosexual couple cannot have kids? Right yeah, couple cannot have kids, right yeah. So how?
Speaker 2:important is to have offspring for a marriage. Arshak, I'm going to put on my Charlie Lau hat again here. Okay, because I don't have children and it is by far the greatest regret of my life and possibly the reason I'm not married, is because I did not want to have children when I was younger. I did not want to have children when I was younger and there were undoubtedly many eligible women in my age range who did want come to want children and I was not a fit, you know, prospect for a husband because I did not want to have children at the time and it was. It was lacking in wisdom on my part and if I, if I can talk about personally how, how it's it's held me back. You know I see how much joy that my friends now where I live get from their families, some reasonable joy. And you know, when I was a young man I accepted the premise that, well, I first have to make it in the world right, I have to establish myself in terms of having a certain amount of income and so forth, before I could consider having a family, you know, having a wife and children. And you know there's some plausibility to that because, frankly, when I started my business, I slept on the floor in my office for five years, slept on the floor in my office for five years. I slept on a little blow up, not like these air mattresses we have now, but more like one of those things that you put in the swimming pool. You blow up this little thing and I slept on that on the floor for five years and it was a studio apartment and my roommate slept on the sofa bed, my business partner and our office. We had desks in there and we had so little room, so little space that one time a friend missed the last train out of town for the night and he had to stay over our place and it took us about 20 minutes to find floor space for him to sleep on the floor and finally he slept like half his body was in the bathroom and half his body was like that little bump in the middle. And that's what we did, and the place I lived before that, or two places before that even I remember a couple of friends came over in the middle of the night needed a place to stay through that and have children in that situation. You know, but you know in retrospect, arshak, what I learned from my friends in my new place is that having a wife and then even eventually having children yeah, there's an expense involved, but it makes you more productive, it gives you the spiritual fuel you know. Some people might say, well, it makes you more responsible Maybe that too but it gives you the ability to be more productive.
Speaker 2:And I look back at all the professions that I had and Go through After I worked just a few years to learn how to work in business a little bit, I started a private high school and, of course, if I had had my own wife and children especially children I would have been better at running a high school with kids. I did not know how to manage kids, you know high school kids. So that was the first thing. And then I also was in theater, I was an actor, and if I had had a wife and children, that would have been so much more life experience to make me by far a better actor than I could have been on my own.
Speaker 2:I mean, how am I going to play a character who was a father? You know where's my experience for that, my understanding. How could I play atticus finch from uh to kill the mockingbird? You know, I think when gregory peck played that role he already had five children. Wow and uh, you know. So I'm just talking even about from the practical level, you know. And then I became a philosopher and again, how much I could have learned about epistemology, about how people learn, by observing my own children learn, how I could have learned more aspects of ethics from the experience of having to be responsible for my children. I think actually one drawback of the current state of Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism is that there's not much at all written about the rights of children, you know, and the responsibilities of parents, rights of parents and responsibilities of parents and the rights of children, and so few objectivists who are the leaders of that movement over the decades. Few of them have their own families.
Speaker 1:Well, Ayn Rand herself didn't have any kids and in her work, in her fiction, very little mention of children.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I have to think that if she had had her own children, that from time to time she would have written about the rights of children and the responsibilities of the parents toward children and the relation of parents to the state and children to the state and children to the parents. Now, from what I've heard I don't remember whether I read this somewhere is that she made a conscious decision not to have children because it would have in her judgment would have, in her judgment, detracted from her ability to um devote the time needed to pursue her career as a novelist.
Speaker 2:You know, and um, I guess by the time she was a philosopher she was already past the age of having children. You know, but's, it's just a very unfortunate situation that she had to come from another country and was poor right or relatively, and um had to struggle financially to uh have the time to to write her great, her great novels. So I'm not going to say she was wrong to forego having kids, but I will say I think it's unfortunate that she was in a financial predicament that made it very difficult for her to have kids. Kids, you know, probably would have been better for her and for uh civilization today if she had been able to work fewer hours in the wardrobe department of uh, you know, a film studio and could have spent that time raising children. Yeah, you know, um, but so I, I don't know.
Speaker 2:So all that is, that is to say that, ironically, uh, I, I, I thought I was sabotaged my career, you know. Now I think I've accomplished more than I ever expected to. Anyway, and you know I have had a very fulfilling life professionally and personally, you know I've had an unbelievably happy life. I think unbelievably. I say that word describing myself. I never knew this much happiness was possible to a human being when I was a child and a very young man. So I've had a great life. Nevertheless, I judge that I would have had even a greater life by a lot if I had had children, and so it is my greatest regret. And again, I mean I've written, so I have an article that I've drafted that will probably come out in a few weeks about. It's actually about abortion.
Speaker 1:Okay about.
Speaker 2:It's actually about abortion, okay, but I I cover some of the the virtues of to a to a, a parent of having of having a child, yeah, yeah, so that was a long answer.
Speaker 2:You know, and I'll just mention one other thing, um, my friend brad thompson c bradley th Thompson is the one who impressed upon me the most the importance of having children as part of the concept of marriage, you know. So I'm very grateful to him for that, and I'm also grateful to him and to all my friends in Utah now where I live, where they really love their families, to give me a chance to observe and experience secondhand just the absolute joy that people have from their children joy that people have from their children.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I see it in my brothers. Like you, I don't have children and in my case it was a conscious decision. It was not a condition, but basically both my wife and I had made a decision before we got married, before we met each other, that we're not going to have kids. And when we met and the issue came up, that was very satisfactory for both of us, because you cannot marry someone who wants to have kids and you don't want to have kids. It just doesn't work, no matter how good of a match they are. Kids are that important. They're deal-makers or deal-breakers.
Speaker 1:It's just the pure desire to have or not have a child. But I can see it in my nephew and nieces. When my brothers have their kids and I spend time with them, it's remarkable, it's very rewarding, it's amazing to have them in the family and you can see the joy they bring to the parents and the parents become so proud and it's really fascinating. I mean, my nephew is four years old and yesterday one of my brother's friends gave him a magic trick kit to play with and he said this is too difficult for me, I need help. So the guy helped him set up the kit and he showed him one of the magic tricks and then he told him okay, now you do it, and you know this is a four-year-old. So he tried, he he stumbled once or twice and he succeeded at one trick and he said well, this is very difficult and if I need help, will you help me? He said, yeah, sure, anytime he goes, yeah, but uh, he said uh, my brother's friend said, well, call me, I'll come and help you. And he said well, I can't call you. I I don't have a phone. I have to ask my mom to call you. And he said that's fine, yeah, but what if my mom is busy and I cannot call you and she cannot, cannot, you know, help me. Are you going to come from work to help me? And he said, yes, he goes. Oh, now I know that you really love me.
Speaker 1:And so if a four-year-old can show that kind of connection making between people, like what's important, what's not important, and it's contracting this deal with this guy that gave him something to do and now he's conditioning on this activity their relationship, I mean it's amazing. Right, as a parent, they're like oh, my kid is so smart. This is remarkable to see in a kid. So you're constantly challenged by their surprises, but also you're working on maintaining that liveliness in them. Right, you don't want to make them um fall into, uh, some kind of resistance and hiding and all this stuff. You, you want them constantly um being comfortable in their attachments, so to speak. Um, so kids play a huge role, uh, as you say, um, but in modern society, in today's society, um, there are very few people, very few families. I, I mean, I, I pretty much know none um who, who don't outsource the raising of the kids, and that makes it inefficient and deficient and makes it unhealthy for the kids.
Speaker 2:That's the blue state way.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, I live in a blue state, so that's what I see around me, like everybody's sourcing out the…. Yeah it's not the Utah way. That's great that it's not the Utah way, because the natural way is you have kids, you take care of them. You don't give it to somebody else to take care of your kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's a friend of mine who has eight children. Wow, I think he's still in his thirties.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:And when you see him and his wife with their eight children, it's a sight to behold because they just handle it like, you know, like pouring a glass of water, it's just so. And and the way they outsource is the oldest kid takes care of the, you know, the younger the, the older ones take care of the younger ones and and when they have a place to go or something to do and the parents have to run somewhere, you know they'll have a quick meeting and say okay, you have to do. You know you take care of this, these two, this and that, and they just handle it. Yeah, that's a division of labor within the family.
Speaker 1:You know what's that? That's a division of labor within the family.
Speaker 2:That's not outsourcing, yeah, and that's something that they've learned to do, you know. Yeah, I remember I, I I asked a friend of mine. I said, you know, when I was back in new york I would see a mother with one child in the supermarket and she could not handle the one child and the kid was making yelling and you know, behavior problems and with that. And then I came to Utah and I see parents we've been a father handling six all the time and I asked my friend you know, how do you guys do this? And he said, well, we learned it in church, you know, after the first hour of their sacrament meeting. Then the men go off to a class to learn how to be a good husband and father and the women go off to a class to learn how to be a good mother and wife. And sure enough, they do learn it, you know. I mean I'm not not to say that families there, everybody has has to deal with issues, but it's handled so much better and and it's just so much genuine love that I, and you know I could try.
Speaker 2:You know, in my article I try to project what some of the values are that a parent gets from children. But I'm only guessing, you know because I haven't done it. I mean, I can read you part of my guesses, but I also quote some other parents. I quote my friend Charlotte Cushman, and also, you know, see, bradley Thompson in articles that they have published Right. Or, in the case of Brad Thompson, articles that he's published, in the case of Brad Thompson, articles that he's published. But one thing I wrote this is the best I could do is having children is an adult's most thorough means to validate and transmit his wisdom to the next generation and thereby to witness the further enduring fruit of that wisdom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's beautiful, yeah, well said. And it strengthens that permanence, right, oh yes, that permanence right, um, oh yes, in a, in a proper marriage relationship with proper raising of kids. It strengthens the permanence because without kids, if you haven't found the one, you cannot survive in a relationship if there are no kids, strengthening the permanence of your relations. And it's not surprising that in a state I'm going to use the quote from ancient Greece, but as the state, religion here stands for the education system, for the moral standards of our society today, for the culture in general. So, when the culture lost its hold upon the educated classes, we have 40 to 50 percent divorce ratio I mean ratio in America, right, and what happens to all these kids that were born into those divorce couples? And so marriage is very important, it's sacred and it has to be treated as sacred.
Speaker 1:You cannot take it lightly. It's not a casual affair. And then having a kid. In addition to that very serious relationship, it's even more serious because now it's not just you and your loved one.
Speaker 2:Now you're responsible for a whole life that's right and, and that's a huge, tremendous responsibility yeah, and could have started a year yeah it has eight kids and two.
Speaker 1:My sin was that I was gonna say I was saying kudos to that 30-something-year-old that has eight kids. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's tremendous. And you know, again I'm going to sing the praises of my friend Brad Thompson, because he's also. I recommend all of his writing he's written. You know he's a historian and he's written wonderfully about the American Revolution. But he's also written beautifully about family, family life, children and parenthood. And you know, being a parent and a child of great parents, and I remember one thing he wrote and I'm going to not do it justice, but I'll just say this as a commercial for anybody's recommendation to read his book, his work, his writings and one thing he wrote was that he fell in love all over again with his wife when he saw her teaching their children.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, and it's one thing, you don't know, when you get married, how your wife is going to be with the kids, right? And then when you see, oh my gosh, how wonderful she is, that's just a greater reward. And this is another thing I did not have the wisdom to grasp. You know, when I thought about, oh my gosh, having kids, what a responsibility is going to take me away from all the my professional goals and I I didn't have the wisdom to think. Well, you know, there's going to be a wife there with me, right? You know it's a, it's a team effort, not that that means, oh, she's going to do it all. I mean it's a team effort and it's just another exalted, sacred project for the two of us to to work on together, right? Yeah, to to uh, to to raise a another soul. So it's another way to get to know and love your romantic soulmate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, and um, I, I guess, um, the, the in in today's context. Um, when, um, when people, well, not in your states, but in the blue states, as you say, people around me I'm in New York, right, so in New York everybody's so busy, nobody has time for kids, everybody gives the kiss to somebody else. In that respect, that's exactly what you um saying, um, to the people around you. I am not confident that I can do this. All I'm in, all I'm confident of doing, is going to my uh, you know, job and so long as I provide financially for my family, I'm okay in my head.
Speaker 1:And that kind of distorts the whole contract, the whole purpose of two people coming together to start a family, and it results in disintegration and divorce. Um, so, again, it all emanates from that understanding of the masculinity and femininity that you so wisely describe and focus on. That, uh, and this, you know, speaks back to the ancient world, when they focused on you got to know yourself. You know, know thyself. People put it on stone on the temple's entrances you have to know yourself to enter here. This is a sacred place, so you have to know yourself to marry.
Speaker 1:And I ran, puts it in the voice of Howard Turok, saying to say I love you, you have to know the I right. So you have to know who you are and what it is that you love, who it is that you love and saying I love you. It's not as easy, it's a very difficult thing, and so, but just to clarify on this distinction from your perspective, so what's wrong with two men or two women saying I love you to each other, knowing each other and wanting to have the marriage? Wanting to have the marriage? I mean, we touched on it, but I guess we should, now that we're talking more about marriage, we should go back just to clarify the point that this is only heterosexual relationship. Right, it's not a homosexual relationship.
Speaker 1:It cannot be a homosexual relationship in terms of marriage.
Speaker 2:Do you want me to get into that? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, I think just a little bit. It's up to you if you want to be clear that this is one of the messages that you are writing about. Right, that it's a heterosexual marriage belongs to men and women. It doesn't belong to anybody else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I can accomplish that just by saying again everything that we've spoken about in this session and the previous one has to do to express that power to a soul who will thrive on receiving that power and judge it. In my celebration of my life, I don't want someone else to be expressing his power onto me and making me feel weak or subordinate. That's not the celebration of life that I, as a man, want to experience. So I mean I could go into more detail, but frankly, I just don't want to put a downer on all this beauty that we're talking about fair enough, you know um and and, and.
Speaker 2:What I will say instead is to put things in a pot as positive a light as I can, and I don't remember if I said this last time or not, but it bears repeating. Actually, I don't think we did talk about this. An overarching theme of the book is to understand the values you hold that are consistent with your sexual orientation, and so I wrote about my values as a man and how that was consistent with my wanting to marry a woman. And by having that consistency, as Ayn Rand has written, that you have, that's how you get the full joy of love right. It's when you have an integration of your conscious philosophy and your emotional feelings. Remember I said about how, if you understand why you love a woman, then the love becomes deeper, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so that's what I set out to do as a man who loves a woman and wants you know a marriage. And so what I write as well is whatever your sexual orientation, you should want to understand it, understand what values you hold that are consistent with your sexual orientation. If you really think your orientation is good for you, then understanding the integration of your values and your feelings will be even better for you. So I offer that goodwill challenge. I say I know my values that are consistent with my sexual orientation. Do you understand the values that are consistent with yours? And I write it's brought me a great deal of happiness and that's what I encourage any of you to do as well. And if someone who, let's say, is homosexual, takes up that challenge and writes a book or an article or a passage even about how his values are consistent with his orientation, I say good for you for doing that and I would be interested in reading it.
Speaker 2:I don't think that there is a way for homosexuals to have this integrated and fulfilling a relationship as a heterosexual one. But I welcome the chance to be proven wrong, you know. And and that that's not the fundamental motivation, you know, for someone to prove me wrong. The fundamental motivation is, you know again, if you have this integration of philosophical conscious ideas and your, your emotions of love, it's going to be good for you. So you do it so. So that's how I'd like to address that issue in this, in this interview. You know, as I've just done, to turn it into a positive, a positive thing, that that that anyone you know um can benefit from from, from that exercise that's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that. Um I I wanted to also elaborate a little more on that issue of the sense of life. So that's quite abstract, but I'm going to offer some of my experiences, how I read the sense of life in the person that I fell in love with, and then you can say anything you want about it or elaborate more on the understanding of the sense of life.
Speaker 1:But one of the first things that struck me is reading confidence in the other right. I mean, this doesn't apply only to the person that I fell in love with, but in general, when I can interpret what I see in one's demeanor as confidence, that to me speaks to the way they carry themselves and how they manifest their sense of life, whether they can go about the world and do it, as you said, just like pouring a glass of water or without even thinking about it, just doing it and being successful at it. So the ability to execute tasks with confidence. And, in addition, in my experience in terms of my relationship with my wife, I also noticed that sense of generosity which is an addition to that confidence, of self-confidence, because I haven't encountered yet a person who is generous and who is not confident in their abilities to produce, so they can give again more um.
Speaker 1:So those two go hand in hand and then from it there there are again many more personal nuances that everybody has a different take on. It's like somebody likes light blue, somebody likes a little darker blue, or dark blue or navy blue, whatever it is. So it's a variation on the same team, so to speak, and the personal preferences will vary. But there are fundamental issues in, in, in that sense of life understanding, um that speak in a deep, fundamental sense about the person that attracts another person like that person to um, to explore that attraction, so to speak, um. So that's how um, that's like a superfluous more general on this, my understanding of that sense of life, um idea well, there's a.
Speaker 2:There's a lot to think about in in what you said. Um, I don't think I've ever thought of confidence as being a fundamental element of sense of life, but I could see how that's plausible in that part of a sense of life is an overall feeling that comes from a metaphysical value judgment, meaning a judgment about your estimation of the world, whether the world is auspicious to human life and in what way it is auspicious to human life and in what way it is right. And there's a kind of a confidence that comes from that in the sense that human beings are capable of survival and flourishing and happiness in this world and they have a good chance of achieving all those things by being rational. So there's a certain kind of confidence that comes from that, or that view is a certain kind of confidence. But confidence is a tricky concept because we also are well advised to seek difficult challenges, things that push us to the limit, right, that push us so far that we're not fully confident that we're going to succeed, right, right.
Speaker 2:In fact, we all love to read stories and go to movies that tell a story that has an ending that's not obvious, right. Is the hero going to succeed or not obvious right. Is the hero going to succeed or not? And the hero might, has it, has a degree of confidence that he's seeking, even choosing to seek that success. Right, that takes a lot of confidence right away, right To play in the arena, right To fight in the arena. But the courageous man, the hero, is not certain that he's going to succeed. So in that sense sense, he doesn't have confidence in all degrees. Oh, there's a phone. Um, sorry about that of course uh and uh.
Speaker 2:But there's a certain thing he is confident in right, he's confident in his, his morality. He's got a certain, he's got self-esteem. Right, he knows that he's worthy of success and that he's capable, and he's got the courage to seek that, even though he's not sure that he's going to succeed. In this case, because the challenges are so great, right, there may be forces marshaled against him. Right, and he's got to hold his values so deeply that even the chance of succeeding is enough. Even if he were to fail, he still thinks the pursuit was worth it. So there is confidence, but there's also uncertainty. It does mean, oh, I know, I'm so confident that I know it's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna succeed, right, yes, so it's an interesting, uh, an interesting balance and an interesting.
Speaker 2:You know, one of my really excellent acting teachers one time handed out a piece of paper with a bunch of paragraphs, passages about great actors who were lacked confidence and they, they, they cashed in on that. They tell a story I don't know whether it's true that Lawrence Olivier used to throw up before performances. I remember hearing that Bill Russell, one of the greatest basketball players ever, who won, won, I think, eight world championships in a row with the Boston Celtics right. Might have been eight in a row. That's pretty unbelievable.
Speaker 1:I don't know his statistics, no.
Speaker 2:And I've heard it said that he threw up before every single game he ever played. Um, and there was a passage about meryl streep, the actress who, who said that every time she's handed a new script, she she says to herself this is the time my public is going to realize that I cannot act. You know, this script, this role is going to show that, and Robert De Niro, all of the you know, icons of great actors, go into a new challenge, fearing that they're going to fail, and fail terribly. And, sure enough, that's just what the character is probably feeling.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And the essence of drama is conflict, you know. And so the, the character, the hero. He's facing conflict. What should I do? What should I do? And he doesn't know whether he's going to succeed. He doesn't even know what to do until the climax. That's when he figures out oh, this is the solution to the problem, I'm going to do this, but then you have it play out and it may or may not live. He might die in the next 10 minutes, in the next 10 minutes. So the only time the person is comfortable in a dramatic work is in the last minute, and if it lasts more than a minute it's boring. So the actor goes through two hours of stress to the hilt Right, through two hours of stress to the hilt, right, so you know. So we have to be clear on what we mean by confidence, right?
Speaker 1:Well, I like the way you focused on the fact that confidence could be tricky as well, but the point that this relates in terms of marriage, from my perspective, is that marriage is not just union of two people, of man and a wife, just union of two people, of men and a wife, because they bring in their families as an extended circle of their spectrum of activity um, even without the children, right. So life. But now you are embracing all the things that she values, and part of those things is her family, and these are complete strangers to you. You don't know these guys. You didn't sign up for that.
Speaker 2:You did not meet your wife's parents before you got married.
Speaker 1:Of course I did, but this is part of the deal. They sized you up, I bet Exactly right. So the feminine side is very judgmental, Right. But so it's as progressing in the offspring as it is investigating and exploring the past that what exactly shaped this woman to be the woman that I'm falling in love with right, to be the woman that I'm falling in love with right.
Speaker 1:She has a baggage, she has a dowry that I have to explore, I have to understand and I have to appreciate. And so that pedigree resonates in one's character and you cannot ignore it. It has all kinds of repercussions in one's stand on life and understanding of life. So it's as personal as it becomes public. And so making it public, standing firm on your conviction and showing the confidence that you can handle it, helps. Even if you have to throw up before you say that, or stand up with a confident face, right?
Speaker 2:So when you saw your wife's mother, did you say this is what my wife is going to be like in 25 years?
Speaker 1:I didn't explicitly reference it that way, but I'll give you one anecdote. So in my household my family nickname was like Hotel Ben Leon, because we always had strangers staying at our place. My mom always cooked every day for at least an extra person or two, and my father always brought more than one or two people extra, so we always entertained. My mom was always working extra.
Speaker 2:And they enjoyed that. They loved it, they liked it, they loved it and they enjoyed that.
Speaker 1:It was not a burden. They loved it.
Speaker 2:They liked it, they loved it.
Speaker 1:And so one of the things that I was curious to find out about the love of my life is when I first went to visit, were there going to be other people there? Because this was an unannounced visit. This was just like we're going to go in and you're going to meet them, and then I go and I see another, like another hotel, like lobby, our old friends and stuff. They're playing cards and you know the food on the table and you know everybody's interacting with each other. So it was a very social party kind of a scene, very benevolent, very friendly, and oh yeah, this is our daughter's friend and introduced to everybody, so I knew exactly where she's coming from. So it was very much like my environment if, uh, she had seen my scene at my home um so, um, um.
Speaker 1:So I said, in that regard, I know what to expect, right, so she has the may disagree with, and there'll be people that you agree with, but it gives you more confidence of interacting with more people because you have exposure to more people, right, and you have more experience in that sense.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I mean, marriage is very complicated, so there is a biological component to it, right, it's like we're coupling two different sets of DNAs, two different environments, two different locations of DNAs of two different environments, with different locations, histories, and there's a lot going in. And so integration is definitely a process that has to be appreciated in that union and it's very much philosophical, very much psychological and social and political and cultural, and it's very, very important. So, um, I mean, in general, I think we we touched on enough generalities and stuff, um, but I think, uh, it's good enough to convey that this is an important issue, should be taken seriously, should be defended. And again, I'll say to everybody who listens to check out your book, masculine Power, feminine Beauty, the Volitional Objective, basis for Heterosexuality in Romantic Love and Marriage, because in the book it's, you know, in a book format you get much more than you can get from our conversation here, no matter how much we enjoy talking about it.
Speaker 1:So it will be more valuable to the listener to read the book and get more out of it and then hopefully have questions or comments for you.
Speaker 2:That's right. You know, an interview to me is more like a sketch.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the book is more like the painting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and you did a great job, but thank you again for coming on and talking about this. Thank you, arshak, and if you don't want to say anything else, we can draw a line here and look forward to another discussion with you. I'm very curious and looking forward to reading your article that you mentioned you were drafting an article on abortion. I'm sure that's going to be interesting and it will be worth discussing. So whenever you finish, if you're willing, I'll be happy to have you to discuss that.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, all right.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Oh, okay, all right, thank you, no, thank you. Well, thank you again, ron, for your wisdom, for your time and always a pleasure to talk to you.
Speaker 2:Same with you, Arshak.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you so much for having me. Have a great one, bye-bye.
Speaker 2:You too. Bye for now.
