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April 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:39
199 Space Aliens from Luxemburg: A Horror Story

Sure, that was the next topic you were expecting, right?

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Good afternoon everybody.
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is... It's 5.10 on the 20th of April 2006.
I did not podcast this morning.
I was working on something quite late last night, which I will reveal to you in due course, perhaps even in podcast 200, because lo and behold, this is podcast 199.
And given the fact that we are a species with 10 digits, I believe that it's going to be significant, and a bicentennial is probably something worth celebrating, so...
I was working on that last night, woke up a little tired and did not hugely feel like podcasting this morning.
I know that I had talked about doing a fourth podcast in the series on parenting, which was how to alter your relationship with your child.
If it's gone awry.
But I'm going to try and read the pulse of the listenership and note that I've had, I think, no comments at all about the series on parenting, except that one parent has told me that I'm full of hooey.
Because I'm not a parent yet.
And of course, I can fully understand that.
I can understand that this person may not have fully understood the whole thing about curiosity, about another person's experience.
And it certainly could be the case that when I have kids, I will then be podcasting in a year or two, full of tears and apologies about having spoken about parenting without being a parent.
But we shall see.
I have, over the course of my life, received large numbers of scare stories.
About what it was going to be like in university and what it was going to be like when I went to work up north and what it was going to be like in a long-term relationship and then what it was going to be like to be married and what it was going to be like to be a manager.
And everyone was saying, well, until you do it, you just can't...
You know, understand and, you know, hey, it could be right.
Maybe parenting is the one exception to that.
I'd be surprised. I mean, nobody has emailed me and said that I really shouldn't be talking about politics because I'm not a politician or something like that or healthcare because I'm not a doctor.
So I do think that it's valid to talk about parenting if you're not a parent.
But we shall see.
We shall see.
So I'm going to drop that, given that there seems to be an enormous, nearly titanic level of indifference about the topic.
So if you're absolutely dying to hear the rest of it, you can email me and perhaps I'll resurrect the topic at some point.
But right now, we shall defer to the pleasure of the listeners and talk about another issue.
Now, the issue that I'm going to talk about, and I sort of have something a bit more dramatic for Podcast 200, but the issue that I'm going to talk about very briefly before today's topic is the issue around gifts to give to you from me.
And I'm sure it's no shock, but I have four or five gifts that I am going to start giving out, handing out like candy.
To listeners who donate, and there's going to be sort of ranges of what I'm going to offer.
The lowest level range, I actually have a great, well, I think it was great, and it did very well.
I have my master's thesis, which is, I think, pretty good.
It's a little technical, but it has lots of citations, and basically the idea that I was trying to prove in my master's thesis It was that there were two streams of thought in Western philosophy.
The first was empiricism, rationality, sort of the Aristotelian side.
And the second was what I called suprasensualism back then.
It was the idea that truth or reality is not derived from the senses, but from some other realm.
realm.
This is basically the Platonic and Aristotelian thing, which I certainly don't claim to be any great master in originality in that area.
But what I did try to do, and I think somewhat successfully, was I took, I think, three philosophers from each side of this debate, and I talked about how, given their metaphysical premises, given their metaphysical premises, like the beliefs about basic reality.
working through their epistemology, working through their ethics to their politics, how those who were on the higher realm of reality side, the non-empirical conceptual side, And so I took three philosophers from each side.
The two that I remember, I took Aristotle, I think, and Locke from the empirical side, and I think Bacon?
I can't remember. And on the other side, it was, of course, Kant and Plato.
And it's a little technical, but I think it's got lots of good citations.
I think it's quite well argued.
And it did get me an A in a Master's, so after a lot of fighting.
But I'm going to release that.
It's not too long a read, but I think it's a very interesting read.
So that's sort of going to be the bottom level, because, you know, it was only my masters.
That's going to be the bottom level of what I'd like to offer you.
Now, the next higher level is I actually have, oh gosh, I have three novels.
Is that right? Three novels?
I have four novels that have not been published yet.
So I would like people to read them.
Obviously, I worked hard on them.
I think that they're good. I think that I have a good knack with dialogue and character.
I have some weaknesses in plot, which of course I'm working on, but that's not the end of the world, I think, for the basic idea of what it is that I'm trying to get across.
So I'm going to give...
Those who donate more, a choice of one of two of those novels, and then those who donate a lot more will get a choice of the two longer novels, right?
So I have a short novel, which is about 200 pages, which is a day in the life of...
A psychologist in a public hospital and the revelation that she comes to about the nature of working for the government throughout the course of her day, which I think is sort of a gentle novel.
I wrote it with Christina and so it's very sort of fact-based because it's based on her experience and I think it gives you some pretty significant insights and I think somewhat funny ones into what life is like in the public sector if you've not been there and if you have I think you'll find it enjoyable anyway.
And that's a relatively short novel.
That's going to be the second tier.
The second tier is going to be that novel.
And also, I wrote a book.
It's actually the one that, in some ways, I love the most, because it was the first time that I had a real, what I consider to be a real gem of a novel.
I like Revolutions very much, but it didn't come together quite the way that this second novel did, which I wrote after Revolutions.
It's called Just Poor.
And it's set during the late agricultural revolution in the 1790s in England, and it is the story of a young girl who was born Into a rural farm family.
She's actually an orphan, but she grows up in a rural farm family in the middle of nowhere.
And she's a complete genius.
And it's basically the story of her struggle to attempt to find some scope for her intelligence.
And the story of how she finally achieves influence and what she does with it.
And I think it's one of my favorite books of mine.
And certainly it has my favorite character in it.
I mean, this woman I just think is stellar, if you don't mind me saying so.
So that's called Just Poor, and Public Lives is the one that takes place in the hospital.
That's going to be the second tier. Now the third tier is going to be for those who give more.
I'll sort of talk about the ranges another time.
But that is going to be, one of them is called The God of Atheists, which is a modern comedy.
It's a fairly long book, and it sort of has most of my ideas.
It's where I was developing ideas about the family and so on, and you'll hear more about it.
So I won't give you too much on that.
But it's sort of a modern comedy-drama.
And there's a review of it on the Freedomain Radio board.
I posted it. And I think you'll see that it got an excellent review, though it has yet to find a publisher, because it's quite long and I'm an unknown writer.
And it's going to be a risky thing to publish, right?
Because it's pretty libertarian.
And then there is my magnum opus.
There is the beast we call Almost.
Now, Almost is a three-volume novel that is set from 1913 to 1940, and it's the story of two brothers.
One joins the Air Force, becomes a fighter pilot, the other works in the Foreign Office, and contributes to the appeasement policies that lead to the rise of the Second World War.
And so it's one, that's the British family, and there's a German family.
And it really is about everything that's going on in Europe for 20 years, leading up to the Second World War.
It is a huge, huge novel.
I worked on it for quite a long time.
I'm quite pleased with it. It's a lot of family history for me, because I have a German side and a British side, though I was actually born in Ireland.
And I think it's a great novel.
I'm really proud of it.
It's long. It's a big read.
But I think that it's enjoyable.
I think it's rich. I'm quite pleased with the characterization.
And it certainly is my best plot, right?
I mean, because this is the last one that I wrote.
And so it is the one that I had learned the most about in terms of plot.
I think it would be a fantastic miniseries.
Probably too long to be a movie.
But I think that you will really enjoy it if you enjoy it.
I think this is certainly a very good one.
So that's the stuff that I want to hand out like candy in return for measly donations.
So we will talk about the levels.
I'm sort of roughly thinking like 0 to 50 bucks will get you the Masters.
50 to 100 will get you your choice of one of the other books.
And more than 100 will get you a choice of any two of the books.
And then we'll sort of scale up.
But from there, anything significantly more than that I'll actually come over, walk your dog, and wax your car.
So I'm sort of working with a variety of reward incentives here.
I think it's win-win, because I think that if you haven't read a lot of, frankly, humanistic libertarian fiction, Then I think you'll be in for a treat.
I think that I have been a playwright and an actor for a number of years.
I have a good ear for dialogue.
I think I have a good eye for character.
And I try to sprinkle just a little bit of humor in from time to time.
So I think that you'll find them enjoyable reads.
I don't think there are books that you can sort of get elsewhere.
If you go to freedomainradio.com, have a look under products and under revolutions, you can see a sort of mini review of revolutions.
The editor who worked on it with me said that it was the best book that she'd edited during her entire career.
So there is some really positive stuff in the books.
I mean, if I do say so myself, I'm sort of quite proud of them.
And I think there's a number of reasons why they haven't been published yet.
They're radical. They're unusual.
They're, I think, very creative.
And they're sort of neither fish nor fowl insofar as a lot of libertarian stuff tends to be kind of science fiction-y, a little bit stilted.
The dialogue's a little wooden. The character's a little cut out.
And I try to bring a bit more sort of jazzy improvisation and raw energy, as you can imagine, into the novel.
So I'd like people to read them.
I think that it would give you a chance to get your hands on something rather unique.
I am toying with the idea of doing The God of Atheists as an audiobook, which I'll talk about more next podcast.
And that might be something which will also be in the mix for people who donate.
But I'm just going to sort of see how long it takes me to do that and also whether the reading is any good, right?
It's one thing to do a podcast straight for 45 minutes.
It's another thing to be able to imitate all the characters in a room.
You know, you have five people at a dinner party.
All of the characters and accents and so on, that may be more than I want to sort of chew off because it's going to be a fair amount of rehearsal and so on.
So I'll sort of see how the reading goes and you'll get a little bit more of a sense of that next podcast.
So having decided to abandon the parenting topic, I thought that I would leave you this day with a small tale.
A moral tale, I guess you could say.
Not a pithy moral tale that you can snappily send into an email and send around to your friends like those syrupy ones about kids dying of cancer who get to play baseball and stuff.
But I think that one of the themes that I think I'm going to try to get to middle of next week is around universality, also known as reciprocity.
Sort of one of the basic ideas of morality and its application in foreign policy.
Oh, it's going to be gripping.
I can hear the vast suction of intake and bated breath even as I drive.
Oh wait, no, my window's just open.
So, I'm going to talk about that next week, but this is sort of a little warm-up to it.
And I hope that it sort of makes sense to you where it is that I'll be going with this next week.
And so, the tale is something like this.
For those who say that foreign policy is a valid mechanism, and I'm not sure there's a lot of people in this conversation who would say that, but maybe there are some, and maybe you'll be chatting with people who do believe this.
But if you say, well, foreign policy is reasonable in terms of we have liberated We've gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we have liberated Iraq.
This isn't going to be a podcast on Iraq.
That's scheduled for two weeks from now.
Again, I want to do it when the whole thing's just winding down, which, of course, it won't be in two weeks, so I can't put it up any longer.
But the...
Those who say that, say that the cost is worth it.
So, 100,000 to 110,000 Iraqis slaughtered and bodies dying, sort of bloating in the streets.
You have checkpoints which, similar to the Palestinian nightmare, you can't go through.
If you're an ambulance, there's all these problems.
So, people say that it's worth it.
So, for instance, Madeleine Albright said of the 500,000 Iraqi children...
Who were killed or died as a direct result of the sanctions that were imposed by primarily the US and the UK during the 1990s.
500,000 people killed.
Somebody said to Madeleine Albright, do you think that it was worth it?
And she said, yes. I think it's a tough price to pay, but I do think that it's worth it.
Because when you're not paying the price, it never really seems that tough, does it?
I mean, none of her children were dying, so...
So I'd just like to put out a possible metaphor that may be of use, and you can distill it down to whatever reproducible format that you like, and use it if you get into this particular topic, but I think it can be useful.
So let's just say that space aliens...
See, I want to start off with something believable.
So let's just say that libertarian space aliens land somewhere in the world, in Luxembourg.
And they look around, and they say, my goodness.
See, they're not going to say, my God, because they're really rational libertarians.
They're going to say, my goodness.
It seems to me that most of the governments, sorry, most of the, if not all of the societies on this planet, have these terrible slave-owning, destructive, violent governments on their hands.
So really, what we're going to do is we're going to free these people.
We are going to liberate them.
And the way that we're going to do that is we're going to attempt to bomb, with our magic laser ray bombs, we're going to bomb the leaders into submission.
But before we do that, or I guess simultaneous to doing that, we're also going to prevent most of the crops from growing by using our magic anti-growing crop sunlight shield ray guns, or something like that.
So this is going to be our approach.
We are going to free you people from your tyrannical governments.
I mean, look over there in the United States.
They're paying over 40% taxation, all this regulation.
They've got nuclear weapons that their government has.
They have a huge standing army.
They have ID cards coming in.
I mean, it's a complete nightmare.
These people are completely enslaved.
My God, my God. My goodness, sorry.
My goodness. Do they ever need to be free?
And... Then, of course, they're going to go to other countries.
But let's just say they decide to start with the U.S. because the U.S. is the most free country in the world, let's just say.
I mean, I think it probably is, and maybe Hong Kong is a little more free.
But let's just say, I mean, all due respect to what the U.S. has inherited politically, though, of course, it could never create it now with its current class of intellectuals, given 10,000 years and 10 bazillion dollars.
But let's just say that these space aliens from Luxembourg, they turn their cold, beady, saucer-like single eye to America, and they say, well, I know exactly how it is that we're going to stop this terrible government and we're going to make it into a free society.
We are going to prevent ships from coming and going and planes from coming and going.
We are going to prevent planes from taking off and landing.
We're going to shut down the railways.
We are going to irradiate the crops so that basically what we're going to do is we're going to start bombing like crazy.
And this is how we are going to free America from its current government.
Now, just so you know, dear fellow American citizens soon to be freed by the wonderful Luxembourg space aliens, there's going to be a price to be paid.
There really is sadly going to be a price to be paid.
Now, the price that's going to be paid is that a couple of million of your children are going to die.
Sorry. We know that it's a tough price to pay, but we think, we, the space aliens from Luxembourg, we think that it's worth it.
So, a couple of million of your kids are going to die because you can't get them food, you can't get them formula, your trade is going to collapse.
Oh, also, I've got to mention this too, your income is going to plunge by about 90%.
Your houses are going to be taken away from you.
You won't be able to get gas for your cars.
Your children's schools will have almost no functionality.
Your teachers won't be able to come to school.
So you're going to lose about nine-tenths of your income.
A couple of million of your kids are going to die.
And, oh, one other thing.
About a million of you are going to die, because we think we have these perfect Luxembourg space alien laser-guided bombs, but sometimes they just seem to go a little awry and crash down randomly.
We will, by and large, aim for the leadership, but don't be too close, i.e.
within a couple of hundred miles of the leadership, if you'd be so very kind.
And most of your homes are going to get destroyed.
Your economic life is going to come to a standstill.
The odds of you actually having a job is only going to be about 10% during the duration of this.
And so this is more or less the price that we are going to inflict upon you.
But in return, we really think that there's an excellent chance, a decent chance, a good chance, a chance, somewhat of a chance, a vague chance, a bit of a chance.
There's a really vague possibility.
It could conceivably happen maybe once in a million times.
This could work. That you're going to be free afterwards.
So that's the deal that we're putting forward to you.
Now, we'd love to ask you what you think about this deal.
We really would, because we are humane and caring space aliens who want and value a libertarian society and want to help you achieve a stateless society.
So we are very much around the argument for morality.
We're very much around kindness and goodness and helping people and helping to free you.
We're coming to liberate you.
And we'd love to ask you whether you're interested in this or whether you think it's a good or a bad idea, but we really don't care.
We're not going to listen.
We're just going to go ahead and do it anyway.
And so kiss probably one of your children goodbye, because they will die a slow and painful death within the next probably 12 to 20 months.
Kiss your income goodbye.
Kiss your job goodbye.
Kiss a couple of people on your street and hopefully not your wife and another one of your kids goodbye because they're going to get blown up.
And... You can also, another thing that we're going to have to do in order to solve this problem of you paying 40% taxation, which is a grave, grave evil.
Oh, it's terrible.
We can't tell you. We stay awake nights tossing and turning in our little space hammocks, in our little UFOs over here in Luxembourg.
We toss and turn with the untold horrors of thinking of you actually paying 40% taxation.
We care about your freedom so much.
That, well, the only problem is that as we go through this process, we're actually going to have to raise your taxes to about 60%, maybe 65%, just until we're done.
Now, when we're done, you'll be free and this and that.
Absolutely, for sure.
Mostly, likely, very likely, somewhat likely, a little bit likely.
It happened once in a million times.
Possibly, theoretically, could happen.
That the taxation will go down to, you know, zero at some point in the future.
But during the time that we're freeing you, we will have to raise your taxes 20-25%.
And I know that you're also going to have a 90% drop in your income.
So I just...
I've got to tell you, it's going to be tough for you.
It's going to be tough for you. But we are committed to helping free you.
And so we're going to have to jack up your taxes.
We're going to have to slaughter a whole bunch of you.
We're going to have to destroy your economy.
We're going to have to destroy your income.
You're going to have to lose your job.
You're going to have to double up and live on whatever you can grow.
And the odd food rations which we're able to throw over are sanctioned field, force field, Luxembourg, space alien, draping curtains from the sky, energy...
Curtain. So, it's going to be tough for you.
Now, I've got to ask you, if you hear this radio broadcast or you hear this, whatever, communication from the space aliens landed in Luxembourg that this is going to be the plan for your society, what do you think?
Would you get behind that?
Would you say, yes, I do realize that I have a pretty good chance of getting killed.
I will sacrifice one of my children.
Yeah, I can do that.
I will lose my job, lose 90% of my income, be unable to travel.
And then when they come after they...
Arrest George Bush and say that they'll try him at some point for some minor thing he did 20 years ago.
Then I think that that seems good to me.
I don't mind having a curfew at 6pm every night.
I don't mind wild random bombings in the street.
I don't mind all of the stuff that's going to go on, all the taxation that's going to be jacked up on my pitiful and meager income.
I think that's all good.
I'm willing to do all of that.
I very much doubt, my friend, that you would be willing to do that At all.
I think that you would say, you know what?
We've got it. We got it.
We got this one. Would you mind going to free some other place?
Would you mind maybe just going back away from Luxembourg into the skies and letting us handle this the way that we want to handle it?
Would you mind not blasting millions of us into smithereens and killing hundreds of, like, five million of our kids and jacking up our taxes and slapping curfews on us and shooting us at checkpoints just to free us?
Would you mind not doing that?
Would you mind just leaving us the goddamn hell alone so that we can deal with this issue the way we see fit?
Would you mind giving us that respect?
Just do it.
Don't even think about...
Killing millions of us to, quote, free us.
I think that would be most people's response, frankly.
Pretty much. And we know this is the case because people don't risk their own lives to overthrow the government right now, right?
There's obvious reasons. Now...
So I'm sure you're aware of what it is that I'm talking about here, but it's not just Iraq.
I mean, it's any of this nonsense that goes on, right?
I mean, it's soon to be Iran and Haiti and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Argentina and all the stuff that I read off about six weeks ago in terms of U.S. foreign policy.
This could be British foreign policy.
It could be any one. Now, let's figure out something else, right?
To really make this metaphor not perfect, but complete for the moment.
Let's say that this all starts happening, and very quickly a rumor begins to surface.
Now, the rumor that begins to surface Which is a very strange and troubling rumour.
And you may have heard it even before the Luxembourg space aliens come to save you.
The rumour that you hear is that George Bush and the government as a whole was put in by the space aliens to begin with.
That George Bush was put in power as a direct result of the space aliens manufacturing magic US dollars and handing them to his campaign contribution.
And the space aliens say that we really want to save you from that standing army that George Bush has, which has all its guns pointed at you, which is all there to just keep you enslaved and get you to pay taxes and this and that and the other.
And we really want to free you from that because that is just tyrannical.
And then something odd, this rumor, starts to surface that the army It's actually paid.
The U.S. Army that is oppressing you that the space aliens say they want to free you from was actually kind of funded and paid in its initial inception and for many years after its initial inception by the space aliens from Luxembourg.
Well, wouldn't that be the strangest thing in the world, really?
You want to save us from a dictator, from this bad government, from this guy who you put into place to begin with and whose army and whose military might you funded?
And then even more strange rumors begin to circulate.
For instance, the space aliens have been floating around the planet for a long time and occasionally seeming to bugger people in remote areas of Kansas for reasons that can't be fully explained, but they've been floating around for a long time and they've had a long-standing policy of not giving arms and helping to equip with the latest intergalactic weaponry dictatorships.
But then you find out that George Bush was on that list.
He was on that list. He was put in place by the space aliens and then they didn't want to give him any military aid because they were very much against dictators and so on.
But then they actually took him off this list and they started to flood him with intergalactic space electron cannons and laser beams and so on.
And really...
Gave him an enormous amount of money, an enormous amount of military aid, funding, advice, equipment.
And that's really quite remarkable.
So these space aliens that are going to come and free us are the ones who had a heck of a lot to do with enslaving us and getting us under this ridiculous government to begin with.
I mean, I've got to ask you, my friends, at what point do you start to wonder what the frick is going on What kind of nonsense would it be for these space aliens to say, we're going to free you when they enslaved you and freedom looks even worse than the enslavement they created in the first place?
And if you had a pretty good shot of dying during the point of freeing you when you still never saw any freedom in sight and things were more repressive, not less repressive afterwards, at what point do you just say, I gotta tell you guys, gotta tell you, you single-eyed freaks...
I just don't believe you.
I think there's something else completely weird that's going on.
So, if the space alien said, we also have to get rid of your government, you see, because George Bush has this secret laser ray gun that can wipe out our home planet...
I mean, look, this is about the level of accuracy that we were talking about even in the non-metaphorical situation.
And because he has this hyper-dangerous ray gun that can wipe out our home planet, we have to go in there and take him out.
Well, if they then come in and take him out, and there was no ray gun whatsoever to be found, and it turns out that one of the reasons they would have known that to begin with was that he got just about all of his weapons from the space alien guys to begin with, and the space aliens had been swarming all over the military and the states trying to see this ray gun and so on, at what point are you going to say, you know what, can you shut the frick up about liberating us, because these words are just sickening.
We're actually just dying.
We're dying like dogs. Millions of us here in the United States are dying like dogs.
Our children are starving to death.
We don't have any jobs. We've got curfews.
We've got ridiculously high taxation.
We've got no infrastructure.
And let's not even start to get into things like Fallujah, where the war crime of the highest order occurred during the US occupation, but roughly, equivalently, it would be like picking some city in the United States and bombing it would be like picking some city in the United States and bombing it, directly aiming at civilians in order to drive them out, but only allowing women and children out and turning all able-bodied men back into the city to be
I mean, if this is part of the liberation of the space aliens to America, I've got to tell you that it just looks kind of genocidal.
It just looks like absolute murderousness.
And of course, there is no freedom in sight whatsoever.
They say, oh yeah, you'll be able to vote, but you can't vote about this and you can't vote about that and you can't vote about the other.
And by the way, the people that you vote for are going to be like 12th down on the organizational chart and we'll be making all the fundamental decisions and we'll be taking all your oil and we'll be doing this and we'll be doing that and you guys get nothing.
And we're so afraid of you guys having a standing army around bullying you that we're going to station about a million space troops in your country because we definitely want to liberate you from the dangers of an abusive standing army that you currently have under George Bush.
So the way that we're going to do that is to station a million of our space-trained troops that you can't conceivably fight in America who are going to order you around and detain you and tell you exactly what to do.
I mean, do you just see how lunatic this all is?
If you take this particular metaphor that you would never consider that to be anything worthwhile having in your life, can you understand that the people in Iraq know for sure?
It's not even a rumor, right?
The people in Iraq know for sure.
That Saddam Hussein is a creature of the United States, was funded by the United States, was armed by the United States, got enormous credits from the United States.
And of course the United States with the UN set up this oil for food program wherein Saddam Hussein just got richer and richer and richer.
And of course nobody could fight against him because they were all too weak from hunger and malnutrition.
And the idea that this is viewed from Iraq as any kind of liberation is something that if we understand this space alien thing And I'm sorry for being so flippant, but I wanted to make it enjoyable.
If we understand this space alien metaphor in our own hearts, we can, I think, have some empathy for what our brothers and sisters over there in the Middle East are experiencing right now.
And I'm not saying that Saddam Hussein was a good guy.
Of course he wasn't. But he was not somebody who gained power without the aid of the people who ended up smashing him.
That's something to understand if you want to have empathy for what is going on to those poor souls over there who certainly never asked for this level of dictatorship and never wanted this kind of, quote, liberty, and who just wanted to live out their lives, even partially enslaved as we are.
We still prefer the right to live out our lives as we see fit rather than have other people come and smash us down and kill our children.
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