March 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:43
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Well, rumor has it, and it does seem to be true, that Harry Brown has died, and I just wanted to put down a few of my thoughts about Harry. | |
| I never met him, and I never even spoke with him directly. | |
| We did email. | |
| once or twice back and forth and I listened to I think almost all of his radio shows and was enormously impressed by him in very many ways. | |
| He was an excellent speaker and he was a very witty and erudite and knowledgeable man and a very compassionate and kind man and I learned a lot about communication just from listening to his shows. | |
| He was a man who really thoroughly appreciated his life and always tried to remind everyone around him that it's very important not to get sucked into politics or libertarianism to the point where you don't live or don't enjoy your life and his life and the richness that he had in his life was really impressive and did remind me that there's always cause for optimism in the world. | |
| I never particularly believed that the Libertarian Party had a chance in the political arena and I also didn't necessarily agree with all of his opinions about the best way to put bounties out on foreign leaders but all of that was irrelevant and there's always areas of disagreement among all thinkers and communicators and I just wanted to say that he was Somebody that I'll miss. | |
| I mean, even though I didn't know him, he had an enormous effect on me in terms of bringing my pro-war position to a much, well, to a humane and rational standpoint. | |
| His constant railing against War was very passionate, very powerful for me and it did slowly turn around my own inhumanity in this area to a warmer and more gentle and more humane approach and I will be grateful for that for the rest of my life because it is a very corrupt thing if you have any voice in the public sphere to be pro-war and I'm very glad that before I came into the public sphere in this little way that | |
| I had the chance to listen to Harry Brown and for him to change my mind. | |
| Otherwise, I would have put stuff out there that I would have forever regretted and would have not done anything to add to the good of this world, but rather something quite different. | |
| So, I will forever be grateful to him for that. | |
| And he also really put me on the path towards anarchism in a way that was very powerful for me, and it occurred for the most ridiculous little thing. | |
| I was listening to one of his radio shows, and he was discussing Martha Stewart, and he was talking about the issue around, she was supposed to be an inside trader, she might have made some money off a stock, and it wasn't much money, but this and that and the other. | |
| And Harry began to talk about this issue, and it was, I mean, I knew a little bit about it, and I had some opinions about it, but it wasn't a particularly important issue for me. | |
| And he said that the government cannot protect you from people who are stockman-like manipulators. | |
| The government cannot protect you from insider traders. | |
| The government cannot... And he went on about a couple more of these things, and it really just... It really was like a sunburst in my head. | |
| I really got that, what he'd been talking about. | |
| I'd been listening to his podcast for months. | |
| His radio show for months. | |
| I first started listening to him, I think shortly, within six months after I got married. | |
| And I found his introductory speeches were almost always wonderful. | |
| As I mentioned before, I didn't particularly care for the call-in aspect of the show, but I just thought that his introductory speeches were wonderful. | |
| He had a great sense of humor. | |
| He was very passionate and very articulate, of course. | |
| And when he finally talked about this, Martha Stewart, the most inconsequential corner of state power that I'd ever really thought about, and he really just said it in such a way, I don't know if I was ready for the message or if he said it in such a way that it just connected with me, but I really got a sunrise in my head, just that the government can't solve anything. | |
| And it was there, it was from that particular radio show of Harry Brown's that I began on this journey of trying to figure out how society can live without a state, how society can function without institutionalized violence. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Without that, I think I would have remained very much in the shadow of other thinkers, right? | |
| I mean, so it was that conversation or that topic that he was talking about that launched me into a kind of originality for me, at least. | |
| I'm sure other people have been down this road before, but it's a new road for me, and it was something that launched me into a new kind of thinking or a new way of thinking that was and has been just the most amazing thing I mean just based on the conversations that I have with people that are so meaningful to me and so important to me and I just wanted to jot down a couple of thoughts about Harry Brown while it was sort of still fresh in my mind because | |
| He really was a grand old gentleman, and I really think that it's a loss to the movement for sure. | |
| He also was a wonderful writer. | |
| If you get a chance to read his Why Government Doesn't Work, it's a wonderful, wonderfully written work, and if you get a chance to hear him in debates, he is a wonderfully eloquent speaker, and it's well worth going back over at the radio show. | |
| Some of them can be a little dated based on the topics, but the ones leading up to the war in Iraq are just wonderful. | |
| And he had a way of absorbing the blows that people who are interested in freedom are continually receiving as we see more and more state control expansion within society. | |
| He had a way of absorbing these and communicating these kinds of blows to freedom that I really respected and admired, and it taught me a lot about how to be optimistic in the face of the grave difficulties that the freedom movement and freedom itself is undergoing and is likely to undergo for quite a number of years into the future. | |
| And he did really teach me something about optimism and joy in the face of great challenges, and that has, I think, enabled me, in my own small way, to do what I can to contribute to this process of trying to get education out there about freedom. | |
| And so I just wanted to to just put this out there that it is a very sad thing. | |
| And I'll certainly miss that voice, and I'll miss his writing, and I'll miss his clarity. | |
| And I hope that if you get a chance to, that you'll go to his website at www.fema.org. | |
| I mean, I'm sure it'll be up for a while. | |
| If you get a chance and go to his website, I think it would be a great thing to gather as many of his radio shows as you can, and give them a listen, because they are They're very good, and he gives a lot of good examples through his conversations with his listeners about how to deal with difficult people, or objectionable people, or people who don't understand what you're talking about, or willfully don't understand what you're talking about. | |
| And you can learn a lot, at least I did, from his level of patience, and his level of graciousness, and his level of persistence, which was just wonderful. |
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