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Feb. 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:33
82 Public Schools (Part 1)

The factories of irrationalities

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 8.47, quarter to nine on Thursday, the 2nd of February, 2006.
And I hope you're doing well.
I am heading into work at a nice, leisurely, aristocratic hour this morning for a variety of reasons.
But I wanted to chat about... I mean, this is a big topic, so it's going to take a couple of podcasts, and I'm not sure I'm going to do them all in sequence.
Because some of them I just can't do while I'm driving.
So don't wait for the end.
My wife was... I burn CDs for Christina to listen to when she's driving around doing her bidness.
And she was saying the other day, she came home and she's like, I said, oh, did you listen to this podcast?
She's like, yeah, was it like 42 minutes?
And I'm sort of, I know the end is close.
I'm waiting for the end to come.
And I'm just like, yeah, it's kind of like a mirage in the desert when you're going over dune over dune sometimes, right?
You feel the end is coming, but still I managed to stretch it out a little more.
But the clue when I'm driving is the beeps, right?
When I come off the private toll highway, there are four beeps, which usually means that you are within a spitting distance of the end of the droning.
So if you're running out of patience with a podcast, it's closer to the end than you think, perhaps.
So the topic that I wanted to talk about this morning, I'm going to sort of preface with a To me, a wonderful metaphor, or not metaphor, but a wonderful description that came out of Orwell's.
He wrote a book.
I mean, the man was quite mad.
Of course, a complete genius, but quite mad.
And he wrote a book when he was younger called Down and Out in Paris and London, where he basically decided to live the life of a tramp for a couple of years and, you know, worked as a dishwasher and, you know, basically tramped around As a homeless person for a couple, I think it was two years, which, you know, ruined his health and sort of one of the theories as to how he got the tuberculosis that finished him off.
Again, quite a mad thing to do, but I mean he was such an achingly beautiful writer that just about anything he turned his pen to, you know, worked beautifully.
And one of the things that he wrote about in this book was a very brief paragraph or two on why tramps keep moving.
And he said, you know, there's all these sociological theories as to why tramps keep moving, that they're nomadic, that they're struck by this wanderlust, that they're, you know, sort of ragtag Vikings of the modern world and so on.
And he said he found all of this stuff to be sort of tragicomic in terms of how intellectuals approach the world.
And it's sort of what I was, a little bit to do with what I was talking about yesterday about, you know, what does a free society look like?
And people don't even think of looking at their own lives for a nonviolent society.
They want some shining city on a hill that everyone can point to and say, see that was perfect.
But in Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell says, basically, why do tramps keep moving?
Everyone has these sociological theories, but it's all nonsense.
The reason that tramps keep moving is that they are compelled to keep moving.
The reason that tramps keep moving is that if they stay in the same place for more than one night or two nights, according to the local laws, they're thrown in jail.
And that struck me as just such a fundamentally interesting, fascinating, and, of course, brilliant solution to a problem which looks very complex.
But it's actually quite simple.
Why do tramps keep moving?
Because if they don't get moving, they're going to be thrown in jail.
And if they resist being thrown in jail, they're going to get shot in the neck.
So I think that is a very important Little story or little insight from Orwell to ponder on.
I mean, I've probably spent days in total pondering upon this in a variety of circumstances where people say, well, they ascribe free will or they ascribe volunteerism to that which is coerced and end up baffled.
So I've been reading this book.
By a French-Quebecois journalist called America the Rogue State or the Rogue State the America the rest of the world sees and so on.
Because it's, you know, like most people who write about the States, it's good on foreign policy and just wretched and terrible on culture.
I mean, everybody in this state, everybody who looks at the United States is baffled by why a country that professes to be so free, and is, you know, free to a large degree, is so religiously fundamentalist, and is so aggressive, and is so patriotic, and so on.
And they try and ascribe all of this to, you know, cultural influences, and, oh, there was the Wild West, and, you know, they found it was a religiously founded country, and it was...
Founded in opposition to European ideals and so on.
And all of this stuff is just kind of funny.
I mean, in the same way that people ascribing all of these motives to Orwellian tramps for their wanderlust is funny.
I mean, it's just people who are making up long, windy explanations for something which is so elementally simple that, to me, it beggars the imagination as to why you would make something more complex than it really is.
So, when you look at a monkey in a zoo, you don't pretend to be a biologist studying chimpanzees and...
And the only thing that you do is you go to chimpanzees in a zoo and you study them for years and you say, well, that's really weird.
Like, chimpanzees, they really like to stay in one place.
I mean, this chimpanzee
It doesn't go beyond this, like, 30 by 40 foot space, and you write your PhD thesis on it, and you try and come up with how this might have occurred or risen up genetically, and you say, you know, boy, those monkeys, they really like throwing their feces at people, and those monkeys, boy, they really like copulating with their feeding trays, and, you know, they're really into masturbation, and they really are, you know, like, you would be trying to, you're pretending to study an entity in its natural state.
When you're actually studying a monkey in a zoo, and every theory you come up with, and every cause and effect that you come up with, you know, you say, oh, the monkeys, well, maybe they have a psychological indisposition to move more than 20 or 30 feet from where they were born, and so on.
I mean, you could just make up all of this nonsense and come up with all of this rich, wonderful explanations for Something which is so patently obvious, it's ridiculous that you wouldn't see it.
And you would say, of course, well, it's a monkey in a zoo.
So I have no idea.
I mean, I can study one or two things about it, maybe from a pure biology standpoint, although even that biology is going to be warped by captivity, psychologically for sure.
So, I don't really know what a monkey does.
If I don't have any clue that I'm looking at a monkey in captivity, then when I study it, I really am not getting anything useful.
Now, of course, to take this rather unsubtle metaphor... I'm still waiting for myself to come up with a subtle metaphor, but I think we're going to have to wait at least one more day for that.
So, to take this rather subtle metaphor a little bit into human society, Well, because everybody wants to tell you, hey, you're free!
You're free!
You're free!
And, you know, they don't want you to notice that you're in a cage, right?
That's sort of the major issue, right?
Like, the families have this.
Dysfunctional families have this.
Somebody calls it, I think, the elephant in the living room, right?
Dads are falling down drunk, and mom cries every night.
But whenever you get together as a family, you can't mention it.
Everybody has to tiptoe around it.
There's this basic fact which is never talked about.
And, you know, the vast majority of social communication is around the obscuring of basic facts.
And, you know, I'll stand by that till the day I die, just because, in my experience, that's sort of simply the basics of it.
And if you're a libertarian communicator who's used the argument from morality or even the argument from violence, which is just to say, you know, that while taxation is violence, Well, you know, the number of people I've told this to, and pleasantly and kindly and nicely, just sort of helping them understand the world that they live in, who have sort of their eyes have widened and have been like, Oh my God!
Well, it's not really violence.
We choose it.
It's like, well, yeah, you can say that we choose it, but nonetheless, it's still violence, right?
I mean, you can put somebody in a jail and say they prefer to be there, which is fine.
I mean, who knows?
But the fact of the matter is, if you've got a gun pointing at him, Which you're going to shoot him with if he leaves, it's kind of hard to say that it's a choice, right?
I mean, just saying, just metaphorically.
Oh, so you're saying Canada's a prison?
You know, and you get all this sort of nonsense where people just, they just can't think.
All they can do is react with sort of mock horror emotionally because that's what they've been programmed to do.
But, you know, these sort of basic facts.
Well, government rests on coercion, right?
I mean, as soon as you say it to someone, it's completely self-evident, but they've never ever thought it.
Which is really amazing.
I mean, I don't know smack about quantum physics from a mathematical standpoint, so somebody can't just sit down there and say, oh, you see, it's like this, and within a second or two I grasp the whole concept.
It would take years of study, and for me, with my math brain, probably decades, if not lifetimes.
But, you know, the fact that there's such a simple fact as, you know, government is based on coercion and it can't be called a value if you force someone to do it.
That's something which people get within a second or two of you telling them, so they're all perfectly aware of it.
You know, it's not like you're trying to teach them ancient, you know, how to rap in ancient Latin or anything like that.
So, you know, the vast... everything that is in society that is affected by the government is obscured with... is sort of involved and complicit in obscuring the true nature of the state, which is that it is a monopolistic agency of coercion that has no reality other than the people in it who claim this moral right that's very different or the opposite from everyone that they rule.
Which is why, of course, it's exactly the same as religion, right?
Religion is that there is this monopolistic, all-powerful being who has moral rules that are the complete opposite of those that teach and doesn't have any existence in reality.
And it's in fact, in reality, religion is populated by false priests, right?
Lying priests.
It is not populated by a god who gives them anything special.
So, in the same way that politicians and bureaucrats and so on inhabit this fictional entity called the government and claim the right of rule out of that, The priests inhabit this fictional entity called God and claim the right of rule out of that.
And, you know, the fact that the morality of God is completely opposite from the morality of human beings, which I've discussed in a previous podcast or two, is completely analogous to the fact that the rules for the state are completely opposite than the rules for the ruled.
And there's so many parallels, it's ridiculous, right?
Which is why you can't be a libertarian and religious.
I mean, I'm sorry, I really hate to break it to you, but You simply can't.
You are then just... I mean, I wouldn't say hypocritical, right?
Because you're not hypocritical until you've been exposed to the ideas and understood them and rejected them, and then you're purely hypocritical.
But you really cannot be interested in truth or freedom or liberty or human progress if you are religious, because you just...
are going to end up mucking up everything that you touch philosophically and you will end up being worse.
It's worse to have someone who's closer to freedom but still wrong than somebody who's directly opposed to freedom because they discredit the whole proximity thing.
This is well known by the CIA.
When they worked with the death squads in South America, in Nicaragua, to discredit the people who were running the government at the time, they would You know, dress up their crazy death squad lunatics in government uniforms and then, you know, perform atrocities which would make people think that the government was bad.
So dressing up as your enemy and getting it wrong is... or doing bad things is very much... it's a well-known trick for discrediting a movement.
And so if you're in the libertarian movement and you're still religious, then you're doing us far more harm than good and you should get out of the movement or fix your ideas.
I hope the latter, because, you know, religion is a cancer on the soul that destroys the mind and the empathy and the capacity for rationality.
And so don't stick around if you're going to continue with this religious nonsense, because you really can't oppose the state in any fundamental way.
You can't oppose an abstract intellectual entity like the state that has absolute power if you believe in an abstract intellectual entity that has absolute power, but just call it God.
There's a reason why those who were Jewish, who, you know, Marxism, Leninism, certainly Communism was pretty much founded exclusively by the Jewish community, right?
I mean, Jews were like, I think, 3 or 4% of the Russian population, but they were 50% of the sort of foundations, founders of the Bolsheviks and so on.
And there's a reason why Jews have found it so easy to move between Communism and Judaism, despite the fact that Communism is supposedly atheistic, right?
Communism is simply atheistic because it doesn't want a competitor to absolute state power called religion.
It's got nothing to do with any opposition to authority or any opposition to irrationality.
And, you know, in the book that I mentioned last night, this V.S.
Nightball's Among the Believers, you see that Muslims move fluidly between You know, it's a crazy Islamic nationalism and communism because the two are just, you know, one has God in the center and the other has the state in the center, but they're both basically the same systems of belief.
So that's why you really can't save freedom in any way, shape, or form by, you know, not violently opposing or energetically opposing at least.
The existence of any of these sort of ghosts and goblins and so on that foul and befog the human mind.
So the reason that I wanted to talk about this topic of the monkey in the cage with a few segues is that when I was reading this book on the America that the rest of the world sees, this guy's talking about how You know American culture is this and Americans believe that and Americans believe the other and you know Oh Americans are nice people, but they've lost control of their government because they have this patriotism and
You know, they have this dichotomistic, black-and-white, good-and-evil kind of thing, like everything they do is good, and everyone they oppose is evil, and blah-blah-blah, and, you know, maybe it comes from their religious fundamentalism.
Fundamerica was the phrase, I think, the title of the chapter.
And, I mean, it was all entertainingly written, and, you know, a pleasant fiction to while away an evening waiting for Christina to come home from work.
But, I mean, it is just the most ridiculous nonsense when you look into that it is, in fact, an anthropological study Claiming to understand apes, but, you know, neglecting to point out that the apes are in prison.
And I don't mean literal prison, although that would be a fine subject for another podcast, the brutalities that go on in American prisons.
But what I mean is that they're in a cage.
So the last metaphor before I actually start dealing with the issue, I promise, well, I can't promise, but I hope so, would be to say that, look, if your child is stolen from you at the age of four or five years old, and raised in some lunatic cult, For the next 14 years this person gets 8-10 hours a day of indoctrination and brainwashing.
this person gets 8 to 10 hours a day of indoctrination and brainwashing.
When your son came back from this cult, you wouldn't necessarily, I mean, I don't think you would justly be able to say, oh, this son of mine who has been stolen from me, lo, these 14 years, has come back with this son of mine who has been stolen from me, lo, these 14 years, has come back with very weird ideas, and Maybe his grandfather was really a fundamentalist, so maybe there's a genetic streak.
You know, maybe he watched too much Pat Robertson on TV, or maybe he saw Tom Cruise's movies and then got sucked into Scientology beliefs, or whatever.
I mean, you wouldn't try and come up with some sort of ridiculous, foggy, anthropological, psychological, causal explanation for what your kid believed.
You'd say, oh, okay, well, this kid's been brainwashed.
So, you know, what we need to do is start the very delicate and difficult process of deprogramming him.
I mean, that would be the logical result of seeing this belief for what it was.
Whatever crazy beliefs your kid had, it would be because they'd been subjected to this mindless brainwashing for 14 years, right?
So from the age of 14 to 18.
And to take anything otherwise would just be completely irresponsible and insane yourself.
Now, imagine... This is not a new metaphor, but an extension of the previous one, so we'll count it as the same.
Yeah, that's it.
Imagine, of course, that it's not your kid alone who is taken into this cult for fourteen years.
It is everybody's kid.
Oh, and by the way, you were also taken into this cult, and so was your grandfather, and so was your great-grandfather, and so was your great-great-grandfather.
And so is everybody else in the society that you deal with.
And anybody who's really educated had exposure to another four to eight years of an even worse cult.
The only way that they could get a degree was to go into an even more deranged and insane cult, but it was the only way they could get ahead in the world was to be further indoctrinated for another four to eight years.
So sort of in total you have 18 to 22 years of brainwashing.
Straight.
And then people look at Americans, and this is true for just about every what I call culture, which is sort of the brain damage or scar tissue of heavily indoctrinated and punished and encouraged falsehoods.
That the people look at Americans who've spent, you know, 14 to 18 to 22 years being brainwashed and say, well, isn't it weird that Americans believe this?
Or isn't it weird that Americans believe that?
I just find that's ridiculous and completely non-empathetic.
And, you know, worse, you might as well be a fist-pumping, flag-waving, mindless patriot To be that would be far better for the freedom movement than for people to write books saying, well, America's kind of bad, and one of the roots of America's badness is the fact that the American people believe this, that, or the other.
Because you completely discredit any honest criticism of the way things are.
Because you're blaming people for brainwashing.
I mean, good God, how blind can you be?
I mean, oh man, I tell you, it pisses me off when people write all these earnest, pedantic, pompous books claiming to unravel somebody else's culture and not even point out the fact that if you don't put your kids in a state school, you get shot.
I mean, it's just insane.
And if your kid can't school at all, you know, even if they go to the library and read books, you know, you get shot.
I mean, I think this happened, what was it, in Ruby Ridge or something like that, where the federal agents ended up shooting someone.
But, you know, the fact that it happened is tragic, of course, for that family, but nobody gets that this is the sort of basic fact that American children are plucked from their parents' bosom, and the money to pay for all of this is extorted from their parents at the point of a gun, that the children are stuck into brutal, brain-deadening
horrible, repetitive, mentally exhausting, boring, mindless environments for a decade and a half and then are sent home to do the worst kind of brain-dead busy work in the form of homework where you're never told any reason for what you're learning.
I'm never going to use calculus.
Why would I learn it?
It's like, well, you learn calculus because it helps you how to think and No topics that would actually be useful to people are ever taught.
No topics that would ever be useful to a citizen, even in a democracy, let alone in a free society, nothing is ever taught that would ever be of any use to anybody.
So you learn all this crap history, like in Canada it's always like, ooh, the BNA Act and Confederation in 1867.
And boy, didn't we treat the Chinese badly in the construction of the National Railroad.
I mean, all this sort of nonsense.
Who cares?
My niece, when I was in the car with her some time back, she had to do this speech on Mary, Queen of Scots.
And so she wrote me what she'd written.
She read to me what she'd written.
And she was like, oh, Mary, Queen of Scots, was born on such and such a date, and did such and such, and then this and that, and then she went to the tower, and then she was killed, and blah, blah, in the end.
It's like, what a completely bizarre waste of brain cells.
What a completely bizarre destruction of cause and effect.
And how on earth is that ever going to help you understand anything you read in the newspaper or any kind of better life that you might build in the world that you live in?
I mean, it's just a complete... And this was a good school!
This was a private school.
Oh, I shouldn't say good school.
This was a private school.
But of course, almost all the teachers who are in private schools are certified by the state and thus, you know, completely killed.
Their brains are completely killed in the coup de grâce.
The Coup De Grace they call Teachers College.
I had energetic debates in a Starbucks when I was working on my last novel a couple years ago.
with a very intelligent Jewish fellow who had just come off where he was teaching in these reserves.
And he was very smart, and he knew exactly how to undermine any kind of logical or rational approach to life, because that's everything that he'd been taught, right?
There's no certainty, there's no such thing as morality, you can't get an ought from an is.
And the funny thing is that he felt that there was no morality.
I mean, this is the part, the sort of tragic comic, if you don't mind the term being used twice in one podcast.
...was that he believed that there was no such thing as morality, but he went up to these horrible gulags in Canada, which are called the Reservations, which I know a little bit about, having worked up north and seen them sort of up close.
You know, he went up to this reserve because he felt it was the right thing to do, to try and help the native kids.
And so I sort of pointed... and he hated it, right?
It was terrifying.
He was physically aggressed against.
The kids would come to school with cigarette burns all over their hands.
Or, you know, the older kids would be drunk by the age of... at 9, by sort of... 9 years old at 9 o'clock in the morning.
All the things that you would expect from the gulag that we put these people into.
And that Canada is considered a nice country.
Oh, those Canadians, they're so nice!
But of course he went up and did this horror of an existence and of course did nothing to help these children because you can't bungee in and fix people who have been exposed to this kind of horror their whole lives.
And so he ended up leaving and feeling really guilty and so on.
And I said, well, that's sort of interesting, right?
You don't believe there's any such thing as morality.
There's no such thing as an ought.
You can't get from the ought from the is.
And it's all so postmodern.
It's like a kaleidoscope of contradictions that are all perfectly consistent.
But nonetheless, you still feel like you should have gone up there and it's bad for you to leave.
So how do you resolve that?
And of course he couldn't.
And then he didn't like talking to me anymore.
And I wasn't as good at it back then, I think, as I am now.
And I'm still not nearly as good as I'd like to be.
And he was a teacher, right?
So he was going to go and teach people that there's no such thing as truth and so on.
And he'd be really insistent and he would punish people.
He would mark them down for saying that there's no such thing as truth.
And as university professors, it's even easier.
I mean, all you do is you ask people for a paper on something.
And whenever they agree with you, you mark them as correct.
And whenever they disagree with you, given that almost every argument can be extended into infinity, you simply mark them down for not proving their points.
And, you know, people get the message pretty quickly, right?
That it's shut up and obey, or you're not going to get your degree and you're going to have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential learnings and years of your life fighting people who've got tenure and who'll never change, right?
I mean, sort of, what's the point of that, right?
You might as well spit into the wind and call yourself a storm fighter.
But this issue of public education and the central nature of state education in what we call culture is...
I mean, if you don't deal with that, first and foremost, for years, and then deal with the rest of it, maybe, who cares, in a sort of later stage.
If you don't do that, you're criminally irresponsible as a thinker.
I mean, just criminally.
And it's a complete insult to any sort of free society or any sort of notion of freedom.
If you talk about what people believe without pointing out that they spend decades of their life being indoctrinated in the most horrible kind of way, And that their parents are not only indoctrinated, but their parents are forced to pay for this indoctrination.
If you don't deal with that basic fact that what we call public education is a brain-destroying gulag for the young, and it is It is exactly what... I mean, there's a sort of vivid scene in Pink Floyd's The Wall where the children, who are faceless, are in school and they are sort of marching along this conveyor belt and dropping into this meat grinder and out they come as this undifferentiated sort of paste or sausage meat.
Mentally, he's bang on.
Mentally, this is exactly what occurs within school.
You come in as a wonderful, curious, free-thinking, imaginative, logical child, because children are wonderfully logical and curious, and enjoy learning to use their minds just as they enjoy learning to use their bodies.
They go into school, public education in particular, but private education as well, They go into school and their brains are simply pulverized.
Their brains are simply turned into pate, and it is gruesome.
I mean, it is completely gruesome.
If they did to their bodies what they did to their minds, you know, they would all come out looking like people in advanced stages of multiple sclerosis.
In fact, In fact, it would be even worse, because the bodies would still be surviving in some crippled manner, whereas people's brains coming out of public school...
are just completely destroyed.
I mean, unless they've got an innate sort of toughness, or they find the right kinds of writing beforehand.
And when I think about my sort of intellectual developments, or the intellectual catastrophe that was my brain prior to discovering philosophers, and logical philosophers, started of course with Rand, and then moved on to some of the other more well-known names.
But before I learned how to think, and before I learned how to communicate, I really didn't exist, as far as having a personality goes.
I mean, I was, you know, this sort of broken-down, pompous windbag who just manipulated language like symbols, right?
but with no concept of meaning or truth or depth or honor or integrity or any of those things.
And I think the same thing is true of most people, right?
And that's why I was saying yesterday, be gentle with people, because they are terribly crippled, wounded, and broken, and they don't know it.
And so you really do, and they're going to resent you for pointing it out, because they have all these fantasies about how well they were treated and how great their government or country is.
But the fact of the matter is that, I mean, this is what public education does.
Now, it's a long topic.
I've started with, obviously, some pretty inflammatory statements, which I either have to back up or retract.
But, you know, just a couple that I can mention to get you, if you want to have a look up on any of this stuff, is that everybody was educated who wanted education prior to, I think it was the 1860s or the 1870s, that public school education came into being.
Everybody was educated beforehand who wanted to be educated, and they were educated far better than the government was ever going to educate them.
Alex de Tocqueville in Democracy in America points out just how amazingly well-read Americans are, you know, this is prior to state education.
The number of pamphlets that were out there, if you think of the number of people who read Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, I mean, it's staggering.
I mean, there was over a 90% literacy rate, which is, you know, really when you think about functional literacy, is higher than the government has managed to achieve after 140 years of state-run education.
People were very intelligent, schools were very efficient, and all the parents wanted to do was to send their kids to school.
And it is pretty easy and cheap to send your kid to school.
I mean, if all the kid's doing is sitting in a classroom with 20 other people learning great thoughts and great ideas and how to critique and how to reason and how to do math and, you know, how to train their mind, it's really not very expensive, right?
School could be, you know, two grand a year for each student, right?
Right now it's six grand a year with all this ridiculous state overhead.
It could be $1,500 to $2,000 a year, which all but the very poorest people could afford.
And there would be, I mean, at that price, I mean, look how much money people gave to the tsunami victims.
People would absolutely give all the money in the world to help the poor kids who couldn't get education because their parents were just so ridiculously dirt poor that they couldn't even afford that much.
So you have absolutely no fear that everybody will get educated who wants to be in school.
And if you don't want to be in school, good Lord, well, don't be there.
I mean, can you imagine if somebody enrolled you in medical school when you had sort of a horror of blood and no interest in being there?
I mean, what a tortuous nightmare of wasted resources and failure it would be.
So, if you don't want to be in school, then by all means, become a tradesman.
It's an honorable occupation.
You're doing something that people need and you can have a perfectly fine and wonderful life.
But, you know, let's say 5% of people or 10% of people under a free system would not get educated.
I mean, that's not true, but let's just say it was true.
Let's say 50%.
I don't care.
Let's say that 50% of people would be not educated or self-educated.
Well, right now, 100% of people are mentally destroyed.
So even if we save only 50% of people in a free system, we're still 50% better off than we are now.
So, you know, the important thing when you're talking about education with people is that they not have any illusions about the nature of state education as it stands at the moment.
That it is just a complete shredder of the mind and destroyer of the personality, and it is a producer of slaves.
And again, it's not because all the teachers are evil.
It's just the natural logic of the system, which we'll get into perhaps this afternoon.
And so when you're thinking about The French or Americans or British and saying, oh they're like this or they're like that.
It's not true at all.
We have no idea what people are like.
We have no idea what the human soul looks like in the absence of brutal coercion because there's simply no human being in the world who grows up who is not subject to brutal coercion all of their lives.
And we know that because there's such a thing as organized religion and there's such a thing as the state and there's such a thing as public education.
So, you know, without a doubt, there is simply no human being alive at the moment who is not subject to brutal coercion throughout their whole life.
So we really don't know what people look like in a free society.
We know that they're going to look a heck of a lot different than they do now, and the important thing is never to sort of forward project from the The present and say, well, everyone I know is sort of mean and bitter and therefore, you know, a free society wouldn't work.
It's like, well, that's ridiculous, right?
That's like saying, well, chimpanzees simply cannot exist in the wild because they don't stray more than 30 feet from where they were born or where they stand and, you know, they copulate with feeding dishes and they, you know, they sort of scratch their fur until they bleed and they don't know how to hunt.
So, of course, they can't be free.
It's like, well, yes, but that's because they've never been free!
So, you know, you have to understand that human beings are sort of naturally drawn to freedom.
You know, the more free somebody gets, the happier they get.
The fact that society exists in a warp and brutalized and prison-like state at the moment is no reason to have any hesitation about wildly advocating in a positive and happy way.
The values of freedom and what a free society is going to look like.
It's going to be unrecognizable now.
It's going to be unrecognizable in the future compared to now because we simply don't know what human beings are like in the absence of brutality.
But I for one am more than eager to find out.
So I hope you're doing well.
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