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Feb. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:13
93 Emails of the Week - Feb 9 2005

Incisive comments from insightful listeners

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
It is the 9th of February, 2006.
This is Free Domain Radio, which you can get a hold of at freedomain.blogspot.com.
For the blog, my email address is s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com.
So, we're going to go straight into emails of the week.
I'm working from home this morning, so I can actually do emails of the week, which I don't really like to do from my car, because I don't like driving by guiding myself from all the horns and screams.
So, I'm going to start with a fine lady who sent me an email with some very nice things about my podcast, and then she says, however, I do have to say, Mr. Molyneux, I can't believe I'm a Mr. Molyneux.
Do I really sound that old on the radio?
You took the wind out of my sails regarding scientists and the field of string theory.
I can understand very little of the theory, but enjoy reading as much as I can on the subject.
I instantly dismissed your criticism of string theory, your position that it is a waste of time and money.
In fact, I was thoroughly irritated and frustrated.
Then I started thinking, how do I know he's wrong?
I have no proof that string theory is real.
No one does.
It's unlikely it will ever be provable.
I realized it was an emotional attachment because it made me feel good to think and learn about it.
Even though some of the principles deny what we know to be the laws of physics and require illogical faith in multiple dimensions, I bought it.
I suddenly came to the conclusion that there was no difference in how I reacted to that of a religious person being told God isn't real.
I have no basis in logic or science for my belief in string theory, just the feelings and the hope it gave me which is exactly equal to why people hang on to religion in the face of science and logic.
It was a bit refreshing to analyze my reaction in such a manner.
I'm sure something I would have been unable to do before listening to your works.
That doesn't mean that I instantly believe string theory is futile, it just means I need to do more research into the politics and processes of the theory.
I would love to hear more of your thoughts on the matter.
And she also closes with a great quote from Einstein, where he says, It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated.
I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this, but have expressed it clearly.
If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Einstein!
So, look, I mean, this is a fantastic email because when you have the capacity, and this is, I mean, for me, a very admirable level of emotional maturity, and not just because it helps her to agree with me, but because this is exactly what, you know, rationality does, is when you have an emotional attachment to something, Then you have to analyze it rationally and to have a look at the premises and the thoughts behind it.
This is not to say that the reason is any enemy of emotion at all.
Our emotional development, as I've rambled on about for the last week, is pretty scarred by our exposure to arbitrary and brutal authority throughout our childhoods, either through our parents or our schools or other social institutions that we encounter as children.
And so our emotional development needs to be assisted.
by our rationality so that the two can work as one.
I mean, as you know, I'm a fairly big fan of the passions.
They are what it is that make life worth living.
But when we have emotional reactions to things, especially irritation is a very key one.
Irritation is the weaker and counterproductive version of anger.
And so irritation is a key one.
And look, I experience it myself and I've occasionally been a little defensive in my emails.
For instance, one person wrote to me and said that I was way over my head in discussing what toddlers need or want.
I'm just one person in 6.5 billion.
How could my perceptions and goals and desires be considered translatable to other people and so on?
And so I reacted a tad defensively and sent an email, you know, saying, well, I worked in a daycare, I've been an uncle for 10 years, I know lots of kids, I was a kid, and also my wife has done significant graduate work in child psychology, blah blah blah, and he identified quite correctly my defensive reaction, because if authority is... if there's no... there's only authority in rationality, not in anything that I say, right?
So, I mean, Except in the sort of areas where I talk about things being more theoretical, then there's value in how, especially emotional topics, in how well it corresponds to your emotional history.
But, of course, I was attempting to establish credibility through a sort of resume, which is not relevant because it doesn't matter what my resume is.
It matters what the ideas are and how resonant or accurate they are to other people's emotional experiences.
Or, if I'm talking about a logical argument, how relevant they are and how much they To what degree they obey the laws of logic.
So he sort of sent me an email back saying, oh, and was your wife's education from a state university?
And I thought that was just very funny.
So I completely admitted.
I surrendered to his master jujitsu.
Yeah, so this woman's email is fantastic.
I mean, the capacity to examine emotional reactions to an idea and, you know, the way that she sort of irritated and frustrated, that is usually a very strong indicator that an illusion is defending itself, that a fantasy is defending itself.
Or you could say, That the false self is attempting to assert its dominance over reality.
I mean, we're all stuffed so full of fantasies, we've sort of got to burp up the truth for the rest of our lives.
But this is a wonderful emotional, sort of mini-emotional journey, that she feels irritated and frustrated.
And then she correctly identifies that that's not a rational reason to reject a criticism, and then, you know, how do I know he's wrong and so on, which is wonderful, right?
Just because you feel it doesn't mean that you know it, which is, you know, I always submit to that.
And then she is able to put herself in the position of other people, say those who believe in God, who then are told that there is no God, and she says, I'm experiencing now what they have experienced in the past.
And, of course, there's no small amount of synergy between string theory and religion, between this really whacked-out, multidimensional, unprovable science that generates billions of dollars in funding and thousands of paid state positions in the world of physics.
There's no small degree of correlation between that and between religious faith.
It's endlessly complicated.
You can theorize around it forever.
There's no objectively testable proofs.
It requires pretty brain-bending things to accept.
There's a lot of things that are in common with it, and I'm not saying that the science is exactly the same as religion, but she correctly is able to jump into the psyche of somebody else and say, well, how much would I respect it if I were trying to explain it to someone and they got irritated and frustrated with me?
I mean, this is a wonderful, wonderful capacity and, you know, she's to be enormously credited.
I think there's a lot to learn from this email.
So, good for you.
So here I got another email from somebody where he says, one point I would have that came up in some recent recordings has been the statement that states do not exist.
By states, this is government, not sort of states of other kinds of states.
I do agree on the conclusion, but within the context in which it has been discussed, for a layman or an uninitiated, it might sound a little strange.
Quote, what do you mean they don't exist?
They manifest themselves every single day.
And that, I think, must be the accent in the conversation.
Manifestation, as in actions or consciences.
States don't have conscience, nor do they act in the same manner that people do, but they do exist in the generally understood context that they affect everyday life.
people have a tendency to morph aspects of reality in human terms, often beyond the reality that pertains to the human, and it might be of value to work on that aspect as well.
And I think that it is an important question, sort of the epistemology of how it is that we can say that something exists versus something that does not exist.
And, And I mean, I can sort of do a whole podcast on this, but the very sort of brief thing, I could probably do a couple and really test everybody's patience, but the only thing that I would say is that if I believe in leprechauns, then the fact that I believe in leprechauns is a true fact.
My belief in leprechauns does not exist in objective reality anymore than my belief in gravity does exist in objective reality.
You could say that it exists as a particular configuration of energy within the mind, but that's not testable at the moment, and until such time as it is, it's non-provable.
i.e.
I could say that I believe in leprechauns when I don't actually believe in leprechauns, and then there's not even truth value in my statement that I believe in leprechauns, and therefore that belief doesn't even exist in reality.
The desire to fool someone into believing that I believe in leprechauns does exist, to add an additional layer of complication, but there's no way of proving or disproving these theses, and therefore it is the same as saying... well, there's no proof or disproof, it's the same as saying something doesn't exist.
And... I mean a proposition, right?
If a proposition can't be proven true or false, then it essentially... it has no existence, it has no truth value, it has no conscious or cognitive existence.
So if I say for you, I really believe that something called flibbertigibbet really exists, there is no value.
I might as well be speaking in a made-up language of my own.
There's no way of evaluating or not evaluating and so on.
And so when I say that the state does not exist, that doesn't mean that people don't believe in the state, that doesn't mean that individuals who call themselves the state don't take guns out and point them at us and tell us what to do on pain of death or imprisonment.
But it does mean that the entity that they claim to represent does not exist in reality.
It may exist as a concept in people's minds that they believe in, the same way that I could believe in leprechauns, but we can only talk about the truth or false value of the statement, the state exists, or I believe in the state.
We can in no way establish the objective existence of something called the state.
The state is a theoretical social relationship that is around sort of cowing other people through the argument for morality, a false argument for morality backed up by some very real intangible weapons.
But we can't say that the state exists in any way shape or form.
So to go back to the leprechaun thing, we can say that some people believe in leprechauns, we can say that we can see a leprechaun on a cereal box, and we can say that there's been some actors who have portrayed leprechauns and so on, and that there are songs which mention leprechauns, But we cannot say that leprechauns exist.
It's just something that people claim to believe in, and their claims is sort of true or false.
What we do know exists, as far as the state goes, is guns and propaganda and state education and so on.
So all of those things exist in the real world, right?
A gun is a tangible object in the real world.
Now, if you are constantly droned at, about how wonderful the state is in state education, then that droning and your response to it, and the fact that if you don't parrot back how wonderful the state is in a state school, you're going to get failed and kicked out of school, and your life is going to have pretty objectively measurable negative consequences.
All of those things exist in the real world.
Like, you can actually track a child who says, I think that the state is morally evil and a blight upon the world.
You can trace their progress through a state school.
Pretty quickly, because they won't last very long at all.
You just couldn't do it in Soviet Russia either, right?
You couldn't say that I think Stalin is a drunken sociopath.
So you can objectively trace the responses of all of this sort of stuff.
So things like propaganda and the violence of the state and so on, all perfectly measurable and objective.
But that in no way says that the state exists.
All it means is that people believe that the state exists.
Because, of course, if belief was proof, then God would exist.
So, that's an interesting email, but I think that we can't really do much to say that the state exists.
So, this is also another interesting email that I got from an article on The Rockwell, which was a sort of refinement of my views on abortion, and it was called, Preventing Tragedy, A Free Market Analysis of Abortion.
So, this gentleman writes, this came through my blog, in your analysis of abortion you mentioned stability of families as a factor in the dynamics, true enough.
But a destabilizing factor in recent decades has been the de facto ownership of children by mothers.
A free market demands fatherless, too.
In divorce, most men cannot get custody of children, and they have visitations denied without effective recourse.
So while the objective facts of financial desperation among pregnant women are well expressed, abortion is also enhanced by the desperation of fathers.
If men have a risk of being alienated from their children after a divorce, why have them knowing the fatherless condition we create?
Further, why lose a paycheck, too, even in stable relationships?
The incentive for a man's spouse to undergo abortion is artificially made high by the state for men, as well as by the threat of involuntary servitude.
In the USA, if that child is male, he is also at extreme risk, over 80% in the US Midwest, for state-funded genital mutilation by a birth hospital.
So abortion is a preventative of this abuse, and it also ensures there is only one victim instead of three.
The government's incitement of abortion is perhaps a bigger tragedy than even you've described.
But the pro-life side would rather have the three victims I described, so I cannot see why on earth a rational person would fight the libertarian perspective on this one.
Well, this is a big topic, of course.
I mean, divorce and the absence of fatherhood is something that I know quite well in my own life, so this is a very large topic and a very large issue.
So I'm only going to touch on it briefly by saying that I agree that the way that marriages dissolve at the moment is, of course, run by the state.
and is subject to all of the evils and corruptions that we would expect from a state-run process.
And therefore, it is one of the reasons why men are very hesitant to marry.
I mean, I can tell you, before I met my wife, I really had no intention of marrying whatsoever, because statistically it's not a good idea.
Statistically, it's a very bad option for a man.
Assuming that you're not absolutely dying to take the risks of becoming a father and, again, running into this involuntary servitude problem, Then, statistically, 50% of marriages don't work out.
If there are children, it means that for the next 15 to 20 years, you are going to be paying the majority of your income to your wife and to your children, who it's very likely that you will not get to see very often, certainly not more than 50%.
And it sort of continues to keep you tied into this orbit of a destructive relationship.
And so it is just a very negative and horrible risk to take.
And it means that, you know, unless you're sort of as rich as a Shah, it means that you can't have another family.
So you lose the family you've got.
You end up paying all this money to a woman you despise.
What is that old joke?
Next time I think about getting married I'm just gonna Go out and buy a house for somebody I hate instead.
So only 50% of these marriages work out.
You know that the remaining 50% aren't all happy, right?
There's no sort of black and white divide between we're miserable and we'll get divorced versus we're miserable but we're staying together for the kids or whatever or we're miserable but we're staying together for the sake of our social community or the church or whatever it is that is keeping these people tied together.
So statistically it's a terrible proposition, right?
You are only probably likely going to be happy 10% of the time, 15% of the time.
I mean these are real.
I've only seen a couple of happy marriages in my life.
Mine and the parents of somebody I knew when I was growing up.
But the extraordinary likelihood is that you're either going to be unhappy or broke and completely miserable.
And of course, you know, there's significant risks of depression, suicidality.
And so on.
And of course, once you have a divorce and you're paying off all your money to your ex-wife and to your kids, the chances of you finding a high-quality partner thereafter is lowered considerably.
So it really does mess up your entire life.
So I completely agree that this is not a very good situation.
Now here's another sort of male-female one.
Okay, so I'll read from my Lew Rockwell article and then his response.
So in mine I say, talking about abortion and women, so far we've only been talking about women, but what about men?
How has male behavior been affected by these fundamental reversals in social values?
The fundamental reversals are that So, how has male behavior been affected by these fundamental reversals in social values?
consequences from a financial standpoint are eliminated, then women choose more risky sexual partners in terms of their desire to stick around, be a dad, and commit, and so on.
So how has male behavior been affected by these fundamental reversals in social values?
Well, as the negative effects of sexual indiscretion become less and less, men also become conditioned to expect, let us say, short-term interactions with the fairer sex.
As more and more women decide to engage in risky sex without requiring a commitment, the value of education, integrity, and hard work for men goes down proportionally.
And, And as male virtue becomes debased, Other values, more sinister and shallow, take their place.
Women go for, quote, hot guys, or guys with lots of cash to spend, or with the kind of predatory status that comes from gang membership.
The entire ecosystem of sexual attraction and stable provision is turned upside down, and the men, formerly viewed as losers, become winners, and vice versa.
Thus, a woman looking for a good man faces a distinct scarcity of such paragons and may also face the mockery of her peers if she chooses a geeky provider over a shifty stud muffin.
A phrase I'm particularly proud of.
Good men become scarcer, and objects of ridicule to boot.
Female attractiveness, formerly the coin that purchased male loyalty, now becomes a magnet for shallow and unstable man-boys looking for another notch in their belts.
So that was sort of from my article, and his response is to say, this is not entirely accurate, which I'm sure I would agree with.
Women choose these losers today because they've always been attracted to what they are and represent.
In further elaboration, I believe, from personal experience and various psychological studies conducted, that women feel a strong sexual attraction to certain personality traits in males, over looks, status, family, wealth, culture, etc.
Basically, a strong personality that a man has will attract a woman over just about anything else.
These personality traits include dominance, as with all sexual animals, body language, humor, unpredictability, confidence bordering on cocky, adventurous, independent, socially adjusted, and a few more, what many bad boys have.
However, there are also very many unattractive personality traits that other men have also, which include submissiveness, shyness, insecurity, neediness, reserved, predictable, dependent, unoriginal, approval-seeking, and more.
It's no secret that many, quote, bad boys and other men from the dregs of society possess many of these very attractive personality traits, while successful nerds and decent mama's boys, many are the men who grew up without fathers, possess the majority of the unattractive personality traits.
I believe that public school played a major, if not deciding role, in creating such a mess.
Now I think that's, you know, very important and something that is an entirely valid addition to the article that I wrote.
And the degree to which public schools harm the development of the male personality is pretty well documented.
I mean, boys just do terribly in state-run schools.
And beforehand, of course, there was a strong correlation between virtue and sort of courage and a dominant personality.
And that doesn't mean sort of dominant over other people.
It means a sort of confidence that you can get what you want in life, that you can have an effect in where it is that you want to get to and so on.
So it's sort of dominant over reality or over insecurity or over neuroses rather than dominant over other people.
So, he has some websites that he sort of says is well worth looking at.
John Taylor Gatto, G-A-T-T-O.
You can have a look at his websites.
I haven't had a chance to read through all of his stuff yet, but he's very critical of the role that state schools have in the distortion of the male personality.
So, I think that's a very important aspect.
And we know this from sort of the popular media that, you know, nerds are sort of socially retarded and discarded and so on.
Even though they're, you know, sort of the best specimens of manhood.
Now, from another gentleman, he wrote to me when I wrote, government solutions are also always disastrous, right?
So that's how I sort of started out my article on LewRockwell.com.
That's L-E-W, Rockwell.
I started off by saying, abortion is always a tragedy and government solutions are always disastrous, so thinking that the government can handle abortion is sort of trying to point out that two disasters can somehow produce a good.
In other words, mixing two poisons together creates a healthy elixir.
So, when I said government solutions are also always disastrous, this gentleman wrote to me, To say this is to be as stupid as those who always promote government solutions.
Speaking of stupid, I'm always amazed at how stupid you so-called libertarians are that you don't understand that government is an institution that arose amongst people to satisfy a need for systematic and accountable justice in human society.
Government is a quintessential free market entity in principle.
That the institution has been abused just means that people are people, and invariably screw up everything they touch.
Free people commit no contradiction when they forbid, under penalty of law, the murder of innocent babies within their jurisdiction.
Why do decent, normal people have to tolerate such heinous crimes just for the sake of some bonehead libertarianism that cannot endure anyhow?
What you don't like is the Hegelian construct of the, quote, state, the amorphous blob so beloved of fascists and communists and liberals.
So stop making yourself look stupid by mixing up the two.
So, well, I mean, it's a very interesting email.
I certainly don't mind being called stupid, as long as somebody could tell me where I've made a mistake.
I find that this kind of email is interesting, and if you're in the sort of freedom movement, you're going to receive these on a fairly regular basis, because people just get, as we pointed out with the first lady's email, irritated and frustrated with the point that you're trying to make.
But what is particularly interesting in the concept, in the content of this email, is his point that government is an institution that arose amongst people, as he says, to satisfy a need.
It's a free market entity in principle.
Now I've had this argument with many people over the years, and I wrote back to this gentleman and said, well, okay, you know, please instruct me if I've made a mistake.
I apologize, and I don't want to put falsehoods out into the public domain, so please, as a service to me, if you wouldn't mind, be so kind as to help me to understand what historical or documentary evidence exists to support the notion that human beings chose governments voluntarily.
And if they did, at some point in the past, choose governments voluntarily, then also please explain to me how the moral logic works that would cause me to have to respect the choices that people made sort of many hundreds or many thousands of years ago, and why I have to submit myself to a violent and destructive state just because people in the past may have.
And, of course, he's never responded to me or never replied to me because such evidence doesn't exist.
There's no evidence whatsoever that human beings at some point in the past decided to voluntarily submit themselves to a state.
It's completely false.
There's no historical evidence for it whatsoever.
What you can see over and over again is peaceful people being waylaid and preyed upon by violent outsiders who then set themselves up as a state.
States impose themselves on individuals violently and without consultation.
It's exactly the same as the Mafia.
To say that the Mafia is in a community offering protection to storekeepers in return for not burning down their stores, to say that this is some sort of solution or that people have voluntarily chosen to have the mafia come in and start doing this is nonsense.
Just because we choose to submit to violence does not mean that we sanction its use, does not mean that we approve of the institution.
And there's no historical evidence that anybody in the past ever said, huh, you know what, I think it's really beneficial to have a group of people around Who are completely exempt from moral laws, who are completely above any kind of rational law or just law within the land, who get to wage wars, who get to sort of clamp down on us and keep us down, and who get to prey on everything that we make, and, you know, who live fat off the land as we starve in the gutter.
I mean, no human being would ever make such a trade.
And the idea that we have chosen for there to be governments is completely ridiculous.
I mean, could you not also take this argument and apply it to slavery?
And to say, well, slavery is an institution that was chosen by the slaves, and how do we know that?
Well, because it exists!
Well, that's nonsense!
If slavery were chosen by the slaves, you would not need any legal sanction to keep it in place.
If governments were chosen, if the idea that a centrally coercive monopoly of force was beneficial to individuals, if that was the case, Then we wouldn't need it to be a monopoly of force.
We wouldn't need laws.
We wouldn't need taxation.
If human beings in general like to have a government, then we don't need to have coercion.
You can't force someone to do something and then claim that it's their moral choice.
If it's their moral choice, you don't have to force them.
And if you are forcing them to claim that it's their moral choice, it's a bastardization of morality that borders on pure corruption.
The only thing that I can say about this gentleman is that he works for a tax preparation agency.
I guess the only thing that I can say is that he's sort of getting his just desserts and of course he's going to have a lot of trouble looking upon his job as an agent.
to state power, which is not to say that everyone who works in the tax agency is an adjunct to state power, but this guy, of course, is, because he's defending it.
Now, this is a very interesting and short email that I got from a gentleman when he listened to the State and the Family Part 2 Toddlers, which was a challenging podcast both to record, to review, and, I'm sure, to listen to.
So he writes to me just two short paragraphs which I think are very interesting.
One is he says, boy, you must have had a difficult childhood.
Why can't I hate the state because it takes my money and has vice crimes and starts wars and on and on?
Not because I was abused as a child.
No one or thing has treated me as badly as the state.
Please don't tell me why I feel the way I do.
Now this is a fascinating email and I could talk about this for quite some time, but I won't.
I'll just talk about it sort of briefly.
The idea that the state exists independently of people's initial perceptions of authority is a complete fantasy.
The state is a product of the family.
This is sort of my thesis over the last four podcasts.
And again, I'm not saying it's true, I'm just saying that there's strong evidence for it.
The reason that people submit to the state and create justifications for it is because they have to the arbitrary power of the state is that they have submitted to the arbitrary power of their parents and then created ex post facto justifications like they did the best they could, they were only trying to act for my best interest, And so on.
But what is so fascinating about this gentleman's email is that he is saying that he wants to just be free to believe in the evil of the state without having to have the prerequisite of an abusive childhood.
Which is fine.
I mean, you know, you can hate whoever you want.
I'm just a voice over the web.
I mean, it doesn't mean anything.
But what is interesting is that he just believes in the evil of the state, but of course lives in a society where everybody else fails to see the evil of the state, except for we few, we band of brothers and sisters.
And so what is interesting to me is that he feels that I am bullying him by telling him that he must hate the state because he hates his parents, which is not what I'm saying at all.
What I'm saying is that if people are exposed to arbitrary authority when they are younger and do not identify it as arbitrary and corrupt authority, which generally you can't do when you're a child, Then you are going to be very susceptible to arbitrary authority when you are an adult, and the arbitrary authority that we generally face the most of when we're adults is the state.
That's my thesis.
So a logical response to this, if you had a very happy childhood, would be to say that, well, I had a happy childhood, and I hate the state because the state is evil.
But I recognize that I'm able to see the evil of the state, but most other people around me are not, even when I explain it to them logically, and therefore some other factor must be at work.
Perhaps Steph's theory about the relationship between childhood and arbitrary authority has some value.
And would explain why, even when we talk to people about the evils of the state and explain it to them logically and they nod and they agree, they still don't get it.
They still don't change their minds and they certainly don't change their behaviors.
So some other factor must be at work, other than the fact that people just haven't been exposed to the ideas.
So, this gentleman is not able to see that even if he himself had no problems with his parents or with any arbitrary authority as a child, which I find hard to believe given how society works these days, then it would be logical for him to say, well, that doesn't apply to me, but it certainly would apply to those people that I'm trying to convert, or at least it might apply to those, so let me try and examine that through conversations with people, as I sort of suggested, and see what the case is.
However, the last sentence I think is most instructive, where he says, please don't tell me why I feel the way I do.
And that is very interesting when you think about it, that this gentleman feels that I am bullying him and ordering him or telling him that he has to feel a certain way.
In other words, he has to... he hates the state because he hates his parents or whatever.
And that to me is very fascinating, that he obviously is very sensitive to being bullied.
And generally, you know, it's called a transference when you have a legitimate grievance against, say, your parents, but you transpose that or transfer that to some other entity.
So as I mentioned the other day, that people who are genuinely angry at the state would much rather pick on capitalists because it's safer and so on, that's called a transference.
And there's also complexities involved called countertransferences.
We don't need to get into those there.
But I'm talking about arbitrary authority and its harm upon the personality, and he is then accusing me or saying that I, Steph, am an arbitrary authority who is imposing my view upon him.
Well, that's of course not true.
I mean, it's just a podcast, right?
They're just ideas.
You know, he can turn it off, he can say that that Steph is a complete lunatic and he doesn't make any sense, but no, he feels compelled to write to me and to tell me that I'm bullying him, when of course I'm not.
In any way shape or form and therefore it would seem to me to be entirely accurate to say that this gentleman did in fact have a bad childhood and was exposed to abusive authority and then when I point out that he needs to deal with abusive authority or we all need to deal with our experiences of abusive authorities in order to become powerful communicators for freedom He then accuses me of being a bully, which completely reveals to me that he was bullied and has not dealt with it, and is instead projecting that bullying onto me.
So, you know, if you're going to accuse me of certain things, either have some proof, or, you know, you're going to be subject to, at least mentally within myself, not that it matters to you, the kind of analysis of this kind.
In other words, I guess I could say that aggression towards me is not going to make your case particularly well.
In fact, it's probably going to reveal a lot more about yourself than you think.
So the only way that I can really be opposed is through rationality or through sort of a compelling story that reveals something that I haven't thought of.
And that's not because I'm perfectly right in any way, shape, or form, but simply because I'm trying to base my theories on either pure logic or the extraction of logic and principles from my own experiences and those experiences of people that I know.
And so you're going to have to either sort of convince me that my own experiences are incorrect, which is going to be tough, but can be done, of course, if I've missed something obvious or if I have a psychological block or defense that I'm not aware of, or you're going to have to disprove the logic.
So I just sort of put that out there as something that It's a bit more challenging than saying that I'm just sort of a mean guy or a bully or something.
Now, another gentleman, I've been getting some emails from young, I guess, libertarians in training, who have had some great things to say about the value of the podcast, which, of course, if my podcasts are your first exposure to logical ideas or ideas around freedom or ideas around empirical consistency or metaphysics or epistemology or ethics, fantastic!
I mean, I can't tell you how wonderful it is to hear that the ideas of rationality are having a strong effect on people And all the praise goes to rationality and empiricism and very little to me, but it's certainly great to hear that it's helpful to people, especially the people who are young, you know, who maybe have not made this kind of mistakes that causes aggression towards me entirely inappropriately in older people.
So I'll just read a paragraph that he wrote and then I'll sort of use that as the basis for a podcast hopefully this week.
If you're interested, I had a discussion with a teacher in class recently that relates to some things you've said on education.
I'm currently in a class that studies race and gender in the media, and one day my teacher had a presentation entitled, The Social Construction of Reality.
At first I was confused at the thought of society being able to construct reality, but I let my teacher make his case.
He said that since most of what we know is taught to us by friends, parents, the media, etc., Then there is no reality but that which is a social reality.
It blew my mind, but not in a good way.
Some of my classmates raised their hands to say people could think differently than what they're taught, but my teacher said that everyone thinks of something that they've been taught, because there's no other way to pick up on this stuff.
So therefore, reality is socially constructed.
I raised my hand and said that the title of the whole thing was misleading and maybe should be called The Social Construction of Perception.
Because you're not getting reality just because someone says it, but their perception of it.
He looked kind of mad at first, but then said, okay, so take this for example.
You're watching a football game, but you're not actually seeing the real game.
You're looking at the scoreboard, at the jumbotron, at the cheerleaders, etc.
So your vision of reality is mediated by other factors.
Therefore, your reality can change.
I replied that you could look at whatever you wanted for three hours, but it wouldn't change the fact that a football game was taking place.
We went back and forth for a little bit, rather civilly, to the teacher's credit, but then he ended it by saying, well, you all obviously don't understand what I'm saying, so let's move on.
And that is, I mean, I've had exactly the same experiences I don't know how many times in undergraduate and graduate school.
I fully sympathize.
And it is a peculiar kind of evil cowardice that these teachers are expressing when they talk in this sort of manner.
As I may have mentioned before, I took a course on the rise of capitalism and the socialist response, which was taught by a sort of toad-like looking teacher.
I'm a communist and we had some pretty spirited debates and I made a big sort of speech at the end of the semester for about 15 minutes on why I thought that a lot of the socialist critiques of what was called capitalism, and of course it's important to define your terms, when people talk about capitalism these days they're not talking about the free market and it's important to move over to their side of the definition so you don't end up having to define every word that you're talking about, which is usually pretty exhausting for most people.
And that the solution, though, was not more government, but less government, and so on.
I made a sort of pretty strong case.
And at the end of it, he just sort of blinked at me and he shrugged sort of angrily and said, well, if that's what you believe, then obviously this class isn't going to do much for you.
And I just thought, what a silly and immature and sad response when somebody comes up with a strong critique and accepts some of your premises, comes up with a strong and logical critique.
If you are a teacher of any substance or integrity or honor, You owe it upon yourself to have a debate with somebody and not to have a fixed position.
Even if you're absolutely sure of it and you argued it a million times before, like there is no God and so on, it's very important to not come across as if you have a fixed position.
Because it's not inviting to the other person.
It doesn't stimulate their mind to... I mean, when you are arguing with someone, you're kind of like a coach.
You want to motivate.
You want to get somebody engaged and involved and become enthusiastic in the process.
You don't want to lecture them, and you don't want to bore them, and you don't want to drone on and on about everything that you know.
I mean, that's not a very effective way to communicate with people or get people excited about ideas.
It's certainly not what I try to do.
I mean, I certainly do drone on and on, but I try to make it energetic and enjoyable and tentative and interesting and hopefully motivating.
So, I mean, I'm not saying I'm a perfect communicator by any means, but that at least I do try and do, and it seems to have some level of success.
So, this teacher is particularly corrupt and it's hard to say the degree of his corruption up front.
The thing that I would suggest to this gentleman, to other young libertarians facing the same problem within their curriculum or within their courses is to, you know, go and have a private meeting with the teacher and come across as curious and uncertain and just say, look, I've never understood these kinds of issues.
I always had a block with it.
Maybe you could go over it.
And then be honest about your reservations, but as if your reservations are simply ignorances that you need to have overcome.
Be persistent.
And it's really scary to do that.
Emotionally, it's really difficult to do that.
And that is something that I would recommend.
It's the only way to solve this.
And that way, You're not going to change the teacher's mind, but you are going to find out if the teacher is corrupt or the teacher is simply certain about something because they've never been exposed to any alternate viewpoints and they're not too bright and they don't like looking things up and they're kind of like a corrupt parrot for state power.
So, that to me is the way to approach that.
The reason why this topic is so dangerous is if the social construction of reality is reality, then of course the state exists, and the state has validity and so on, and so does God and religion and so on.
So what you do is you end up studying people's beliefs, which is a sort of pathetic second-hand interpretation of reality, rather than studying the facts.
So in other words, it would be like studying what people believe about science in the Middle Ages, if you're in the Middle Ages and a scientist, rather than What are the facts of the matter?
So it's a complete getting rid of or destruction of empirical validity or validation of theories, as well as any reference to external logic, which is exactly what the state wants you to believe, right?
I mean, this is one of the sort of fundamental corruptions of intelligence or integrity that occurs in the tender bosom of the state, which is to say that people's beliefs are the only reality, all that you need to study.
People believe in the state, therefore the state is real, and so on.
So it is A pretty corrupt thing to do.
Now, if you do find out, and I think it's likely that you will, if you do find out that this person is genuinely corrupt and a tool and servant and master of state power, then either get out of the course, or if you can't get out of the course, resign yourself to parroting back.
I mean, that would sort of be my suggestion.
There's no moral virtue for me in getting into a situation which is win-lose, and then trying to win using morality without Having a chance of doing it, right?
You can't conceivably win against a teacher who holds the power of giving you your marks and your grades and your sort of future academic success.
So once you're in a situation where you're subjected to the whim of a corrupt bully, why then obey?
I mean, to me it's very similar to, like, if you end up with somebody sticking a knife in your ribs saying, give me your watch.
It's like, well, here's my watch, here's my wallet, you want my pants?
You know, take my thong, whatever it is that you've got on, hand it over!
You're in a situation where you are subject to the whims of arbitrary authority, and you try and learn from it, and you try to avoid having those situations again.
So what I would suggest is to simply have interviews with professors before you take their courses in the future, and try and get a sense of whether they are open to any kind of rational analysis or curiosity and so on.
And if they aren't, you know, steer away from the courses.
And if there isn't anybody in the faculty who is open to any kind of rational curiosity or empirical verification, if they're all just sort of mouth-breathing dogmatists or propaganda machines, then get out of university.
Would be my suggestion.
Or if you're going to stay in university, because you want the degree and all of that, Then recognize that you're going to have to parrot all this nonsense back to them to get your degree and spend the rest of your time in the library or talking to those people you can cultivate who have a rational approach to life.
But recognize that what you're doing and recognize the limitations of freedom in the face of coercion, right?
Freedom in the face of force.
If you burrow down through these professors' minds, And into the reality of their lives, there's a lot of state coercion and state funding and unionization and blood money and so on that's floating around in this sort of morally squalid cesspool of modern education.
And you can't fight that once you're in that situation, right?
You fight for freedom before you go to jail, right?
Once you're in jail, you obey the prison guards.
So my suggestion is, you know, sit down, talk, come from a position of pure ignorance, let that person, in the Socratic method, right, let that person Swell up with instructive power and let them tell you everything about everything, but just keep asking those questions.
Emotionally, very difficult.
My hands used to shake when I did this and probably sometimes they would in particular situations.
It's very hard to do.
Emotionally, simple repetitive curiosity in the face of mounting aggression is a very hard state of mind to achieve and it's always difficult.
I find this a case even now in certain situations, so recognize that it's going to be difficult, but Persistent curiosity will tell you everything that you need to know about your professors.
If you can find rational ones, do it.
If you can't, recognize that you're going to just have to submit.
In the same way that you pay a ticket, even if you don't believe that there's such a thing as speeding, that doesn't really matter how fast you go, it matters how safely you drive, you pay the ticket because you don't want to go to jail, but you don't morally accept it as something that is valid.
So even if you end up having to parrot back all of your professor's nonsense in papers and so on, Then do that, but recognize that it's completely invalid and you're only doing it for the sake of getting the degree because you want to have enough money later on in your life to be able to do podcasts or something.
You know, maybe like me.
I don't know.
So I hope that's been interesting.
I've had some wonderful emails this week as always.
You know, I think you can tell from the quality of the writing and of the ideas that there's some pretty smart people out there who are joining this conversation, and I certainly appreciate it.
And of course, please keep them coming.
I always enjoy reading them.
Thanks so much for listening, and I guess it's time for me to start working.
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