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April 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:27:18

205 FDR Call In Show #3 - April 23, 2006

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	So, hello everybody.
	I'm glad that we finally made it.
	I can't believe this hasn't replaced the phone system already.
	It's just bizarre. It's got to be some sort of government conspiracy.
	So, thanks everybody for joining.
	Now, I sort of wanted to start off with an announcement, which is around Christina has valiantly decided to host a show next week.
	And the show is going to be psychological topics.
	Mostly it's going to be an analysis of why I feel the need to produce such a vast amount of material and how it's a perfect example of what happens when you don't listen to a hyper-intellectual fellow when he's a child.
	So I think it's going to be quite illuminating for everyone.
	He cracked me up.
	We thought it would be an interesting topic to talk about based on some of the stuff that's going on with Christina's clinic at the moment and some of the stuff which we're dealing with with some friends.
	We thought it might be interesting to talk about the idea of depression both in terms of how to deal with it with people around you and also if you've got the blues yourself some useful tips for dealing with it so we thought that might be an interesting topic but as always We open it to the vast, hyper-intelligent Borg nature of the bored brain and would be more than happy to take any other suggestions about show topics.
	I always find it's an interesting topic because it can be tricky to be a libertarian and also there can be people around us who have that sort of problem.
	So I thought it would be interesting to talk about.
	Stefan? Yes.
	We had a nice Skype conversation, Frank and Andrew and me, the day before yesterday.
	Yes. Which was quite a revelation.
	We were trying to convince an atheist, a statist atheist, about market anarchism.
	We went really to the simple things, and we couldn't get anywhere with him.
	Interesting. And then we asked him about his childhood, And then he said, well, I really didn't like my mother, and she left.
	But my father was really great, and he beat me until I was 11 years old with a belt.
	Well, we were quite...
	It was an eye-opener, to say the least.
	And we all went like, okay, this problem is a bit thicker than we thought it was.
	So it all made perfect sense, but only after we started talking about the childhood.
	Well, it's amazing to me.
	Well, it's not amazing to me, actually, to just to recognize the effects of abuse in the family on how people react to their, well, how they develop political beliefs.
	And how did the conversation go after that?
	Was that sort of the end? Well, after that we talked a bit about our own experiences as children.
	We understood what the problem was, is that at a really basic level, we deal with problems in a different way.
	And we all understood that.
	So we thought that we should talk with someone like you.
	Because we're still dealing with our own problems, and we're not really ready, I think, to give someone like that really good advice, because it's outside of our scope, you know?
	Right, right. And then it kind of meandered back to the politics, and he basically didn't listen, I think he didn't understand anything we said, basically.
	So we went back to the same exact topics that we started with, and then he said that I had beliefs, and I asked him what beliefs I had, and he couldn't give him beliefs, so I started shouting at him that much happened.
	Francois, what were you trying, and when you said that before the conversation returned, what was it that you were all trying to talk to him about and get him to understand?
	We were trying to explain to him the market anarchist model and we were getting more and more to the fundamentals.
	Niels was doing a great job going more and more into the fundamentals and basically we realized that in fact he didn't understand any of what we're saying at all.
	And he was basically stuck in all his collectivist concepts, etc.
	So we started to talk about his parenting.
	That was kind of a natural, because of the whole principle of, you know, if someone is that far gone, maybe it's something to do with his parenting.
	So we went into that area.
	How interesting. I think that was a good idea.
	The analogous thing to me may be something like, if you're going to have a conversation with a religious person, and you're going to say that it's going to be a debate about the existence of God, Then you kind of need to, I think, up front establish what the criteria are going to be for the debate, right? I mean, if the person is then going to say, if you disprove the existence of God, they're going to say, well, it's all about faith, then you kind of need to establish that up front.
	And so it sounds to me in a way like it may have been possible that you guys were debating with someone wherein you didn't kind of have an agreed-upon methodology for changing opinions.
	Like if this guy is... Psychologically scarred from a horrible childhood, and it sounds like he is, because to praise a dominant parental figure who beats you could be considered to be not exactly an argument for morality, then it usually can be helpful to try and set up some sort of criteria for true or falsehood, otherwise you really do end up talking in these kinds of circles.
	Does that make any sense?
	I don't, from my experience with this guy, atheist Jew, that was his nickname, I don't know what his name is.
	But, oh yeah, he likes his culture, he likes the religion, he likes all collectivist concepts he can think of.
	So what I think happens is simply, you can't talk about epistemology if there's a complete lack of understanding, which I think there was in this case, there was a complete breakdown of communication.
	Because he cannot understand the language.
	If you're stuck in these collectivist concepts, you just can't understand what we're saying.
	Even Niels was really going at a very basic level, talking about three people living together and trying to set up that kind of scenario, like we do.
	But he simply did not get it at all.
	Right, right. And I think that makes sense.
	If he is somebody who is trying to excuse or justify or minimize the problems of authority that he faced as a child, then, sort of in my view, he's not going to be able...
	to see the state with any kind of clarity because if you can't deal with what is close to you, if what is immediate to you, then you can't deal with what is abstract to you.
	I mean, the general path of learning when we're children is we get things like object constancy from a ball that rolls under a blanket and one day we sort of figure out hey the ball is still there rather than it's just vanished and we generally learn about things that are closest to us and then we apply those abstractions further and further out and if this person is unable to process any kind of moral truth or justice within his immediate life especially when he was a child and there's never any situation where the child is to blame for that kind of violence Then I think it's going to be pretty much guaranteed that he's not going to be able to deal with a more abstract form of authoritarianism in the form of the state.
	So I think you guys were entirely wise to switch the conversation to his childhood, and I think it probably did help uncover why he wasn't able to process the concepts.
	It's quite a challenge.
	Well, the problem is, you know, where do we go from here, I guess?
	I think with these kinds of individuals, you can't go any further.
	You just can't. I mean, you have to recognize when the road has ended.
	I mean, someone like this is never going to change unless he or she pursues some kind of psychological counseling to understand his or her own motivations.
	And to try and have an effect on ideological beliefs without that occurring prior, it's not going to have any effect.
	Yeah, like a lot of people will take personal traumas and build pretty complicated abstract defenses around them and that's their way of avoiding the personal traumas.
	So what you could do, I mean the only thing that I would suggest is obviously get this person to mississaugatherapy.com but I mean given that they're probably not likely to be living in Canada, you could talk to them sort of brother to brother about their own childhood and see if that sort of makes sense.
	We actually tried to explain this to him very delicately, explained to him why there was a difference, but I don't think he really understood that.
	I don't know if you guys might have an insight on that.
	What we tried to explain to him, very simple, is that concepts can't act.
	And basically where the argument came back to is that he wanted to bomb the hell out of Iraq, every single child, mother, brother, grandfather, Because one of them might, if you don't do that, then they'll come back to you with a bigger bomb.
	That was his whole argument.
	He didn't care about killing anyone of those people.
	Right, and that would be an indication to me that somebody had experienced an extraordinary amount of abusive and unjust authoritarianism as a child that that person is defending and is saying is morally justified because this is how their own father treated them.
	And so one of the things that you could do is that you could say, you know, if this person says that it's a principle, Then you could start with the argument from universality, right?
	Or the argument from morality and say, is it then true that anybody who feels that somebody else might be a threat to them at some point has the right to go and kill that person?
	Because, of course, in that case, given that the US was gearing up for the war in Iraq for about 18 months to two years beforehand, and it was pretty clear and pretty inevitable that that was going to occur, That Iraq should then be allowed to attack the United States because the United States is an impending threat, right? Like, if the principle is that you can have a preemptive strike, and, you know, then they're going to say, well, no, it's different, and so on.
	And then you can just start to sort of, say, ask them why.
	And that's one way of approaching it.
	But another one might be to say, can you tell us a little bit about your own experiences with authority, just so we understand where you're coming from?
	Because, I mean, a lot of people's ideas come out of their own experiences rather than out of some abstract revelation.
	So you can ask the person how they develop their own theories about authority and so on, and then they may talk about their father and so on, and you at least will get a mapping of how they came to it.
	And then, of course, if they do say, well, my father beat me and this and that, then you can say, well, do you think that that was a good thing, or would that be something that you think was not a good thing?
	And if they say, no, by God, it gave me discipline and an iron will, and it's the best thing ever, and if I could go back and beat my younger self, I would too.
	I can't wait till they invent a time machine, or whatever, right?
	Then I think you have somebody who is too traumatized to be able to think clearly, and you may want to save your energies for somebody who's less, I don't know, what would you say is the phrase?
	Less stuck. Less stuck, yeah, that would be one way of putting it.
	Does that make sense? No, sorry, I was just saying, I guess there are some people that are just outside of our reach, we just have to admit that, I guess.
	Oh, for sure, yeah. I mean, we all can learn from the political parties in this manner, right?
	Like, if you're a Democrat, you focus on the swing states, right?
	You don't go, like, if you're a Republican, you don't go to the core of New York and try and get votes there.
	You look for the people on the borders, right?
	I mean, as best you can. Because I think it's sort of very important to, in sort of keeping your optimism about communicating the ideas, I think, or I found in my experience, it's so important to keep your own enthusiasm for doing it.
	And if you end up spending a lot of time beating your head against the wall of somebody else's irrational and traumatized emotional defenses, masquerading as intellectual ideas, Doesn't it feel like incredibly frustrating and maddening to be in this situation?
	And I think it makes it tougher to do it the next time.
	I think it's very important to keep one's optimism.
	And that means not spending too much time debating with the crazy people.
	It was only later, after we talked about the politics stuff, for about an hour, that we realized how his mind was structured.
	And at that point, we did understood that we weren't going to get anywhere.
	When he is saying that it was good for his father to hit him, if his father didn't like what he did, our basic message is that we get it now, you see?
	Right. And we just realized that we weren't going to get anywhere.
	And for us, I think, that was a real eye-opener.
	Because you normally don't talk about this, and we could really make the connection between family and state.
	So that was a lesson learned.
	Fantastic. That's fantastic.
	I see that in therapy all the time where you have to know where your boundaries are and I think that applies in all relationships or in all interactions just to recognize when you can have an effect and when you can't.
	And it may be valuable, and I say this with some trepidation because of one of my podcasts about six weeks ago, but it may be instructive to watch a Dr.
	Phil or two because you can see him asking what's maybe called qualifying questions.
	So, for instance, we were watching a show today about a guy who had two restraining orders against him, and he seemed to be a guy who was sort of yelling and dragging and hitting his girlfriends, and Dr.
	Phil sort of asks these qualifying questions, like, did these things occur?
	And if the person says no, everybody's lying, they're all making it up to get me, and so on, then he asks a whole bunch of questions, And then he evaluates whether the person is at all ready to recognize that there's a problem in their behavior or their thinking.
	And then, if not, he basically says, well, you're not motivated to change.
	You don't even admit there's a problem.
	So until that occurs, right, he says, you can't change what you don't acknowledge, right?
	If you don't acknowledge, if somebody says, I think we should go and bomb all the women and children in Iraq.
	And if they don't notice that that seems to be a bit genocidal and that it's not something they would appreciate some other country doing to them, then if they don't acknowledge that, then it's probably not worth continuing other than to say, well, what you're saying is entirely corrupt and wrong.
	And bordering on evil, in my view, or however it is that you want to phrase it, so that you don't participate in a conversation that is just designed to frustrate you, but also you don't back away and have the person still feel that it was a debatable issue, but you've just sort of backed down.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, it does, Steph. I was just away, sorry.
	Away? But that was all for you!
	Now, if nobody minds, I'd like to toss something out there that's been sort of interesting to me.
	I don't know if everyone's heard the podcast about stateless prisons or has read the article.
	I know some people were helpful in participating, doing some edits on it, which is great.
	But I've got to tell you, I don't think I've ever put anything out there that has caused as much or as voluminous a set of hostile emails I just wanted to get people's sense that maybe I'm missing something, but it wasn't something that I felt was particularly controversial.
	But holy crap, people are just railing against me in a way that I just find really startling.
	Has anyone else out there had conversations about private prisons or ways of dealing with criminals that don't involve having a war on drugs and a DEA and all this kind of stuff?
	Has anyone had those conversations out there and experienced a lot of hostility, or do you think it's just a random cluster for me?
	I think, in my opinion, it's because you're already talking to market anarchists, so maybe you're just hitting a lower level of, how should I say, thinking, or collectivist thinking, maybe?
	Instead of talking about God and having the Christians argue with you, perhaps you've hit an issue with market anarchists in general.
	Yeah, it could be, but then it would seem to me that then that would be something where people would say, I think you're wrong and here are the reasons why, but, you know, people are calling me up saying that I'm evil and brain damaged and emails and so on, and they're all coming from the Lou Rockwell site.
	I think only a few of them came from Francois.
	Just kidding. But I just found the level of emotional reaction to be quite startling, and so when I was talking about it with Christina, she was thinking that maybe it has something to do with the fact that if we can even deal with violent criminals in a pacifistic manner that's effective, that it might be making people feel about their own childhood's problems with authority itself.
	I mean, it's a pretty vague conception, but I'm just wondering if anyone else had any thoughts or has had any experience with that kind of hostility in the issue of private prisons.
	I think the main objection people give me when I bring up the idea of a private prison is, you know, again, this whole idea of, you know, oh, the law can't just be something that you decide, it has to be something that we all decide.
	It has to be, you know, a monopolistic law system for it to be, you know, have any validity, you know, like, how can you lock up somebody, you know?
	Can I lock up somebody? And they just don't have the understanding.
	Well, yeah, I'm sort of surprised.
	I think that the point someone made about that law can't be just made up by each individual is very important, but I'm not sure why giving sort of one monopoly group like the state the right to make up laws solves that problem.
	I mean, I certainly haven't been consulted recently.
	by the Canadian government on which laws I think would be important to do so I just find that the level of emotional reaction it's stronger than anything else and I guess I've had about I don't know 12 or 15 articles published on newrockwell.com and I was also wondering if the presentation of it might not be something that would be causing people upset because I did present it in a slightly More tangible manner like a speech from a guy from a DRO coming up at your doorstep when you've been charged with a crime and I was wondering if that because it seemed a bit more tangible and a little bit less abstract like it was almost like a little script of what might happen whether that might make people more hostile.
	It's really easy for people to agree with principles and concepts but when push comes to shove it's always very problematic.
	Can you tell me a bit more about what you mean when push comes to shove?
	I mean when you actually present them with concrete instantiations of the principle or concept, people's instinctual reactions really come back.
	They kind of imagine themselves in that very real situation and perhaps realizing that they don't fully Integrate or support that principle and instead have really personal repulsion to the use of that principle in real life.
	I mean, in actual scenarios, situations.
	Right. I think I understand what you mean.
	Like, somebody may say that private schools would be better than public schools, but then when they talk about it with other people, then they may agree sort of in principle, but then they say, oh, I'm not going to have two months off in the summer anymore and this and that, so there may be more of a reaction around it that way.
	Is that what you mean, or is it even more personal than that?
	No, that's what I mean.
	Well, that's interesting. I'll post a couple of the letters.
	I'll clean them up a little bit, but I'll post a couple of letters on the board.
	I think they'll all be under the not-so-pro category, but I haven't replied to anyone yet.
	I'm not sure that it's worth doing so, because as I talk about in the article, the issue is if there's a lot of violent people in society, you can't have a state, because the balance of power situation would be the only way to solve it.
	And if you don't have a lot of violent people, then you don't need a state at all.
	Most people sort of went into two categories.
	One was that there are so many violent people and they're so violent that there's no way DROs could ever control them, in which case I'm not sure how having a state and a military really solves the problem other than, you know, everyone else gets disarmed and then maybe there's peace through the fact that everybody's under a dictatorship.
	Or the other one was the idea that the DROs, you know, the natural thing, right?
	The DROs are going to turn into fascistic organizations and there'll be no way to control them, which again, giving a monopoly doesn't seem to solve that problem, so there's not a lot of logical replies that I can give to people who are just emotionally blurping back at me, but I'll post them just so I'm sort of very curious about.
	I think this is important, and I'm not sure exactly why, I'm just sort of following my gut.
	Because this is a pretty strong barrier, right?
	This problem of violent crime.
	And ever since I first published on Lew Rockwell over a year ago, it has been something that has repeatedly come up.
	And I'd be interested in getting a sort of collective discussion going, and I'll post the letters and get people's responses.
	I think it's a pretty key issue as to why we're not able to get our ideas out into a wider debate, why we're sort of viewed as pie-eyed, paisley-wearing dreamers who just don't seem to understand the nature of evil and think that everyone's just going to have a big group hug and all evil's going to go away and so on.
	And I'd sort of be curious to get what people's thoughts are.
	So I'll post some of those, and if you'd like to give me your thoughts back, that would be helpful.
	But I think this is a pretty big clue as to why we're facing problems getting ideas out.
	Yeah, please, go ahead. Do you know that Jesusneverexisted.com?
	I've never been there. I didn't even know that site existed.
	See, that's a subtle bit of joke there.
	Well, it's a great site, but one of the features is that he has a site where he shows all the mail he gets.
	And it's nicely categorized in hate mail and love mail.
	And the hate mail is really hilarious.
	It's really great.
	The type of reactions are so telling of their thinking about the stuff that it's really a great way to show people that they are completely wrong because of the way they react.
	Right, like if you get a lot of real hostility then it's not any kind of statement about your ideas, it's just about how people are reacting to them based on their own histories.
	I would just love to find some question, and maybe if we could revisit it with your anarchistic friend or your atheistic friend, some question wherein you could redirect people's thoughts away from abstracts and towards their own personal experiences so they could understand that their abstractions were just a kind of defensiveness around some sort of history that they've had that they haven't dealt with.
	I think Christina's going to reveal that question next week in a magical session of New Possibilities.
	Oh yeah, like I have all the answers.
	But she does. She's just withholding them from us, and I'm not sure why, but I'm sure she'll reveal them next week.
	But I just think that would be a great thing.
	Because then you can actually deal with the real issues that people are facing rather than all the political stuff that it takes a while to grow into and to be responsible around.
	People hide behind their political ideologies.
	I mean, they hide their real selves.
	People hide around, people hide themselves through all their actions.
	They don't want to admit that they are living their defenses.
	Yeah, like culture and politics and patriotism and all that.
	It all comes back to the family.
	Absolutely. That's definitely true.
	I'm trying to figure out why people are having such a problem with this private prisons.
	And maybe it's the fact that there's an ideology that how are you supposed to Fight against violence with non-violence in a community.
	If you're not willing to take up arms and actually push this person to do something for restitution, how are they going to feel motivated to repay the rape victim, for instance, if they don't have to, if they can go into hiding into the middle of the wilderness or something.
	Sure, I mean, I agree with that, and that's a perfectly valid question, and I would certainly say that I have not answered it to, well, to many people's satisfaction, and that's fine too.
	There's going to be some balance of the punishment of having to go and live in the woods, or wherever it is that you're going to go and live with.
	It's going to be hard to find that place, because everything's going to be privately owned.
	But there's going to be some balance wherein it's just worth it to submit yourself to the DRO confinement, In order to pay off your debt.
	They're not going to make it $50 million and your children get enslaved because then people are just going to leave the country or they're going to go to the wilderness or something.
	And they're not going to make it one bucks and ten minutes of watching educational videos about, I don't know, Canadian history or whatever punishment they would come up with.
	There's going to be some balance which the market is going to find wherein it's just worth it to do the DRO confinement.
	That even may be down at the individual level, I don't know.
	But it's going to have to be a big enough punishment that it's a deterrent and gets people confined and off the streets, but not so big a punishment that they're just going to come out guns blazing, shoot everyone, die in a blaze of glory, or go live in the woods.
	It's going to be some kind of calibration in the same way.
	That there is in terms of price, right?
	I mean, people will always charge as much for an iPod as they can possibly get away with, but not so much that people won't buy it.
	So it just seems to me the market is going to find that balance between punishment and, like, punishment that's enough to be a deterrent but not so great That you're gonna, I don't know, firebomb the DRO guy and take off to the woods.
	Some balance, I think, could be achieved, but unfortunately the dozens of letters that I'm getting are so extreme and so opposed to the idea at a very emotional level that There's no, again, it's no curiosity, right?
	So there's no curiosity about, like, why would you even talk about this?
	What an odd thing to talk about.
	Tell me about why you think it's important.
	But I think it kind of is, because once you start to dig into the very base reasons for a state, you seem to, I find, I kick up a lot of emotional aggression in people, and I just find it really fascinating, because there are solutions to find it.
	If people say, oh, well, people are just dying in a blaze of glory, it's like, well, the DROs won't Do it in such a way that that would occur, right?
	Because that's not what they want either, so there's just no dialogue around it.
	Does anyone else have any other issues around which they just find that dialogue seems almost impossible, or is it just this one in this article?
	If I could mention quickly, one issue I always have a problem with is that even if I explain the stateless society to somebody, oftentimes people will still come back at me and say, well, you know, it's never going to happen in your lifetime, so shouldn't you still try and, you know, vote for the good politician, you know, the lesser of two evils?
	What's your response to that?
	Well, I try and explain why I don't vote personally.
	The fact that you're not going to have an election is part of it, but just not wanting to be part of the corrupt system.
	And I just try and explain that, you know, if you support any politician, you're supporting the system as a whole, you know?
	Right, and then they say that you're a dreamer, it's impractical, it's never going to happen, blah blah blah, and therefore you're sort of nonsensical and Don Quixote kind of thing where you're just sort of tilting at windmills and wasting your time and this sort of stuff.
	Is that sort of the approach that you get?
	Yeah, I suppose. I mean, I don't know.
	I'm really not sure the best way to respond to it, I guess.
	Now, is the issue that you're being questioned about, is it going to occur in your lifetime, or you should vote because you will never be able to achieve a stateless society, and so you should do the best you can with what you can?
	I think it's both.
	I've really gotten both objections.
	You know, some people tell me that, well, you know, you're never going to get the stateless society, so, you know, you should still try and, you know, try and get the better of the two politicians, you know, get Kerry instead of Bush or whatever.
	Right, so I think I understand it.
	It's like last Christmas, Christina and I went with a friend of mine to go Christmas shopping, and he's a lifelong bachelor, and we were down at a mall in Toronto, which has a huge and rather seductive picture, I think, of Penelope Cruz, where she was selling some perfume.
	Was it Salma Hayek? No, no, it was a lingerie model.
	Some lingerie model, okay, whose name we don't know.
	Generic hottie, we'll call her.
	And we were going up the escalators and we said to my friend, what do you want for Christmas?
	And he turned and pointed at this big lingerie ad and said, I want her for Christmas.
	And he is a lifelong bachelor, not in the best of shape, and so on.
	And so, to some degree, the impulse when someone says that is to say, yeah, okay, I can understand that, but that you're not going to achieve, so maybe you can date somebody who's available to you, who's in your league, that's going to work for you, and not be a dreamer looking for things that you can't possibly achieve.
	Like, you take things step by step, and gradation, and so on.
	And I certainly understand that as a...
	As an approach, but to me it is, the answer to that is that if it's wrong, like, let's just say, I mean, this is what I sort of say to people who say that.
	Let's just say for funsies that violence is wrong and that the state is the wrong way to do things and that we shouldn't use force in human relations.
	Let's just say. I'm not asking you to take the interstellar journey to anarcho-capitalism, but just go with me two feet down this road.
	Because the way that it looks for me, if it is true that violence is the wrong way to solve problems and that the government uses violence to solve problems, then asking me to participate in something that I think is just wrong, even if it might get me a little bit of goodies at the compromise of the very principle that I'm fighting for, Wouldn't seem to make sense.
	And I think people would sort of understand that, right?
	Even if you can't date a person who isn't going to beat you, it doesn't mean that you should then date a person who is going to beat you, right?
	I mean, you would probably sort of be better off not participating in relationships then.
	And so if it is wrong to use force and voting is a sanction of that use of force, I think people can at least understand if you say, just go with me two feet down this road, that this is the principle I believe in, that at least you can understand why I don't vote.
	And you're not saying to them, therefore you shouldn't vote and therefore voting is evil and blah, blah, blah.
	You're just saying, first thing you can do is understand why I think that voting is bad.
	And then we can debate about more things, but at least you can get them to understand that first thing.
	Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes some sense to me.
	I mean, I've always sort of found it helpful to get, at least understand why I think the way that I think.
	And I'm not saying you have to think that way or that it's perfectly right or that I'm some sort of oracle or whatever, but at least understand why I think the way that I think.
	And then it's not a pressure on them, like they have to agree with you or disagree with you or only one person can leave the room alive from an intellectual standpoint.
	But at least, you know, understand why it is that I believe what I believe, and then at least you can understand why I'm coming to the conclusions that I'm coming to.
	And then it can be sort of a more open conversation.
	I've sort of found that to be helpful.
	Is there anything else that people have in that kind of area?
	Any points where they get really stuck?
	Well, what I think is that there are two main, from our experience so far, and I think from Andrew's experience too, I think there are basically two kinds of scenarios, which is one scenario where, yes, people may object, well, you can't really do anything about it, but when you present them with the market anarchism model, they'll say, oh, hey, that's great, you know, I've never heard this before, etc.
	On the other hand, you have the other people who really can't relate to individualist concepts.
	And they will get into all sorts of objections and areas like we've been talking about.
	So... I think either you can relate to someone or you can't.
	Either they have these pre-existing collectivist beliefs or they don't.
	Right, and if...
	No, go ahead.
	I just wanted to quickly mention that I and Frank and...
	Ned and I guess a couple other people had great successes using the argument for morality in converting, you know, or deconverting people to market anarchy within a matter of, you know, an hour or two, literally.
	I mean, there was one guy who spent just like an hour and a half and he had pretty much totally got it.
	Dude, congratulations! You get the Anaco Capitalist Medal of Honor for the week.
	Can you just give a summation of that conversation for other people, so that they understand the sort of twists and turns that you took to bag a specimen?
	I'm trying to think of a better way to put it next time.
	I don't know, maybe Ned can help me field this one a little bit, but...
	I don't know, just...
	pointing out, sort of, you know, to...
	Just using the argument for morality, you know, and just sort of explaining the scientific method behind it.
	It may be an interesting topic, Andrew, if we talked about the application of the argument for morality, perhaps, in talking to new people.
	I think Ned's back, and I think he missed the question.
	He selfishly had to pee.
	Like he doesn't have a mop or something.
	Yeah, that's true. Well, Ned, can we talk a little bit about last night maybe?
	Sure. I mean, we had a great conversation with an already atheist who had already made the deconversion from Christianity and was sort of in kind of an apolitical, you know, had some party lines that it went with, didn't Fully understand the positions.
	And, you know, we just started talking casually and got into the formality used for topics like war, things like that.
	And it was great.
	I mean, it was a conversation that just was very, very successful.
	I don't know what we're going for exactly.
	Was there one moment or one argument that you felt really was an aha moment?
	I mean, one of the ones that I found around gun control is people say, well, guns are bad, and you say, okay, well, let's get rid of the police and the military, and then they go, you know, like they just recognize that as a real contradiction, and that can help.
	Was there any one particular approach that you found really helped turn people around?
	Public schools in the state and programming and propaganda machines.
	Yeah, that was it right there.
	I remember... Did you sarcastically ask him if that's maybe why he thought the word state was at the beginning?
	No, I don't think so. Because, you know, there's nothing better than sarcasm to win people over.
	That's a good approach. That's a good approach.
	We didn't think of that.
	You used the phrase, duh, as often as possible.
	I think that really helps as well.
	Now, so once he got that sort of pub...
	Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to mention that, you know, I've talked to several people about this, and I, you know, there is two general sort of reactions.
	You either get, you know, people start getting really, you know, emotionally vested and, you know, upset or defensive or whatever, or they just sort of go along with it because they are a thinking person and they're open to new ideas, and it's fine.
	I don't know. I just... I think it's a little hard to tell in the beginning.
	After you present the argument to someone, I think it takes maybe a little time for them to start to let it sink in a little bit and think about their own life, because that's the aspect of the process that we can't really affect.
	It's like we can talk to people about the state and the family or whatever, But if they have, you know, family issues that they have to analyze or whatever, then that's something they're going to have to either do on their own or, you know, come to us about.
	Those aren't things that we can just sort of guess and, you know, try and say, okay, you know, we can help you with this because we don't know what exists and what doesn't exist with regard to, you know, their personal life.
	So I think there's a certain, like, not lag time, but just a natural, you know, like decompression time, you know, to sort of come out of it.
	Maybe somebody who's deconverted from Christianity to atheism can...
	The arguments are very simple, but the implications are not, and they take a lot of time to fully digest and fully understand applications.
	Well, I think if we look at Joe's story, Joe Holloman, the person we're talking about, He already made a significant step in becoming an atheist.
	He was a zealous Christian and a very active minister.
	A minister? Yeah.
	He spoke in a parish and he went door to door and he was that kind of guy.
	And he still had the strength inside him to To let all that aside to abandon his life, essentially, and become an atheist.
	And I think it's a much smaller step to take to market anarchy.
	I mean, I think that's interesting.
	I think that the question of religious people and their relationship to market anarchy is a very complicated one, and I've obviously tried to take a few wild swings at it in a couple of podcasts, but I generally would rather talk to a Christian than I would to one of the people that we've sort of talked about a little bit on the boards, The nihilistic and relativistic sort of the atheists who believe in nothing.
	They don't believe in anything and God is just one of the things that they don't believe in.
	I found that I've had more success chatting with people who are religious than people who are atheistic or agnostic and relativistic.
	Has anyone else had experience either way?
	I've got a question.
	Is it a necessity to be an atheist and to believe in market anarchism?
	Well, it depends how you define market anarchism, in my view.
	I think that you can certainly be religious and believe in anarchy.
	I don't think that's particularly problematic, as long as you separate your metaphysics from your politics and your economics.
	But if you say that reason or rationality is going to be, like, reason and empiricism and the scientific method are my final criteria of truth, and you apply that, in my view, consistently across your whole life, In other words, you don't have one area which has one standard like faith and another area that has another standard like rationality and empiricism.
	If you apply the philosophy consistently, then I think that the two conclusions out of many that you're going to come to is around market anarchy and atheism is really a wrong word because it means anti-God or against God and it's not a positivistic approach to dismissing the idea of supernatural beings.
	But I think if you do apply consistently, you will end up with a non-belief in God and a non-belief in the state, sort of simultaneously, if that makes sense.
	Not necessarily, because something like the state is something tangible that you can see.
	You can see the evil, but something like religion or Christianity or something, you're seeing the evil of people, and they're claiming it is in the name of God.
	So, I mean, it's right there again, coming back to people's evil and immorality.
	And so, I mean, I think you have an argument, I would say that it's possible to be a Christian and a market anarchist if you see it as a purely superficial level, if you don't think about epistemology, if you don't think about morality, if you don't think about the ontology of it.
	Should the state have components that are supposed to be material, but if God exists at all, then it should also have material components.
	Insofar as they are both collectivist concepts, they are both part of the same mentality.
	And I think that's an excellent point.
	And Lance, if you could just tell me a little bit...
	Yeah, I think that's if you could just tell us a little bit more because I was quite interested in what you were saying about that you can't see the religion but there's only people but you can see the state and I think as far as I would approach the topic it would be that the state is a collectivist concept that doesn't exist in reality that is used as a justification for human evil.
	And not only human evil, I mean it's not like everybody in the state is evil and so on, and no more so than every single priest is evil and so on, but the idea that the state is a collectivist concept that is used to justify quite a bit of immorality, it may be said that the argument could be approached similar to things like organized religion, where there is no such thing as religion in the same way that there is no such thing as a forest, there's only trees, right?
	There's no such thing as religion or culture, there's only people.
	And that the appeal to the abstract existence of things like God or the state or class or religion can be used and is used quite a bit to justify individual actions that we would not necessarily call good.
	How's that for a roundabout way of putting it?
	Then couldn't the argument be made that you're more upset at religion and not at God?
	Well, I'm not sure that I would be able to differentiate the two concepts.
	I wouldn't say it's a roundabout way of saying it.
	I would say it's a great way of saying it.
	Sorry. Yes, I do understand what you mean, that it is really only individual people and their own individual actions that we can ever have a moral problem with.
	I have absolutely no problem with God, insofar as I don't believe that there is such a thing as God.
	I don't mean to trivialize your beliefs, and I apologize for using a sort of down-market analogy, but if there was a group of terrorists who blew up Things, and I know this is not the same as religion, right?
	So I'm just sort of using an extreme analogy.
	If there was a group of terrorists who blew up things in the name of leprechauns, and then somebody said to me, well, you don't really have anything against leprechauns, do you?
	I'd be like, no, of course not, because leprechauns don't exist.
	I do have a problem with the people who blow up things in the name of leprechauns, and if...
	If I can strip away the defense of leprechaunism, if that makes sense, that we can actually deal with what is really motivating them, which is not leprechauns, because they don't believe in them any more than I do, but there's a justification that they're using, which is masking their real motives.
	If we can get rid of the justification logically, then we can have a look at the real motives and Of course, just as in communism, through an atheistic approach, a great deal of harm has been done in the name of religion and in the name of atheism.
	So, I mean, I fully respect your arguments in that area.
	It would be crazy to deny them.
	And as somebody pointed out on the boards, I've had some pretty vitriolic attacks on communism relative to my wants on Christianity, and that's of course because the communists are the ones who've killed far more in the 20th century through an atheistic philosophy than Christians have done throughout the entire human history.
	That sort of leprechaunism thing would be my approach to do I have a problem with God?
	Well, no, of course not, but it is a justification that people use for quite a bit of false teaching to children, right?
	Like to say that leprechauns exist to children and to have that go through to adulthood and that they owe allegiance to leprechauns, which never speak to them directly, but which must come through me and I can tell them what to do and so on.
	I wouldn't have any problem with leprechauns because they don't exist, but I would have a problem with people's belief in leprechauns, if that makes sense.
	No, actually it doesn't.
	I mean, I don't have a problem with anybody believing in certain things.
	Like, for instance, you believe that there is not a God, but yet I believe that there is a God.
	And using that same thing, I think that your argument would be better suited that you have a problem with people's morality justified by their belief.
	And that I also have a problem with.
	I mean, I fully agree with you.
	And to that degree, I think that we need to then, or I think that people need to be re-educated, I guess, on the terms of what morality is and go from there to touch on their personal metaphysical beliefs or something along those lines.
	But to come from the opposite direction that, like, okay, well, God just doesn't exist.
	And, you know, that way I'm breaking down your reasoning for using Him as a justification for your immorality.
	I think that's going about it in a backwards method.
	Right, so if I understand it correctly, you say, and I appreciate the argument, you say that we should instead teach people about morality and not worry so much about their belief in a deity.
	Yes. By the way Lance, I have to note that we do not believe that there is not a God.
	I don't know where you got that idea.
	In the term atheist?
	No Lance, the term atheist means non-theism, absence of belief.
	No one here believes that there is not a God.
	Even I'm a strong atheist and I don't believe that there is not a God.
	But you just said it's absence of belief.
	Maybe it would be better if you explained it a little bit more in detail because the way you just said it is, it's absence of belief and from there you were not even saying that you do not not believe.
	Yeah, I'm not sure what...
	I'm definitely a strong atheist in so far as I do believe that there is not a God, right?
	I don't sort of... There is a weak atheism which is that it can't be proven either way so we have to sort of act as if it's not the case.
	There is a strong atheism which is a little bit more, I guess you could say, assertive in this idea.
	And my particular approach would be that, not that, you know, again, to use a more non-controversial term, right, not that leprechauns may exist or may not exist, there's no proof either way, but that they don't, right, because they're sort of self-contradictory entities and so on.
	And so, maybe Francois can clarify that a little bit more.
	I'm probably a little bit further over than Francois is in terms of positively believing in the non-existence of a deity, if that makes sense?
	Well, Stefan, it's not really a mainstream position of strong atheism that I've ever heard.
	If that's your position, that's fine, but it's not mine.
	Actually, that's a very solidly understanding of what atheism is.
	I do not believe there is no God anymore than I believe there is no leprechauns.
	So, I don't know what Stefan's position is, but it's not really one that I've ever Read in any scholarly book, paper, etc.
	And it may be a difference that...
	It may certainly be a difference that may not be...
	I think that the position is very simple. Go ahead.
	Well, I just think that from Lance's perspective, it may be looking like we're splitting hairs a long way away from God.
	So I think that the differences that we may have in our particular approach to God will be significant to us, but probably not too significant to Lance.
	So I think that the thing that I would say about the original question, and not that I don't want to debate the other one, but I just want to make sure that we, or at least that I respond to what Lance was saying, Whether or not we train people on ethics and leave them to have their own beliefs about deities and so on, or my approach is saying, well, if we get rid of the idea of deities or sort of oppose the idea of the existence of deities, then it will help people ethically.
	My approach, the only thing that I've not been able to ever come to an understanding of, and maybe you can help me about this Lance, is If somebody does have faith that there is a God, then they do believe in things that don't have any evidence or rationality behind them, right?
	It's like my feeling that there is a God or my belief that there is a God is more important than any rationality or any empirical evidence that you can find.
	And I've just not found that those people are...
	You can't sort of really condition their beliefs in other areas.
	And I'm not saying that all religious people or Christians are like this, and obviously you're not, which is great.
	But if somebody does believe, like George Bush does, that God tells him to go and invade Iraq, and I don't even believe that's the case, I think it's just his justification, then I just don't know how you oppose that person's belief without opposing the fact that they believe a voice told them to do it that is omniscient and all perfect and so on.
	And if you can help me with that, I mean, I would generally be interested in it.
	Sure. Sure, I totally agree with you.
	I completely understand where you're coming from now.
	It's making more sense. I think it comes back to the argument that you must argue their morals and they have to come to the table and you both have to come to the table at that point in time saying, like, look, let's put away this belief that we have in something else telling me to do something and let's focus on rationale and let's focus on using morality to try to justify this.
	And, you know, in that particular case, if it helps them to believe that there's not a God or there is a God, you know, that's fine.
	But I really think you've got to come from a different angle, from a different perspective.
	And you've got to bring, you know, that understanding to the table.
	You know, first up front, say, look, I understand you believe that God is telling you to do this particular situation, but...
	Let's talk about it morally.
	Let's talk about it as in, how is this going to benefit humanity as a whole?
	And then build from there, not immediately attack the deity which they are placing their entire belief in, and try to attack it from the top down.
	You can't attack a deity you don't believe in, but I think if you're going to take the moral attack on this issue, then you're still in trouble because Like I tried to discuss on the last conference, there's no point of connection between market anarchist values and Christian morality.
	So there's still no point of connection here.
	Well, I think if I understand it correctly, you said, Lance, that you would try and talk somebody out of a genocidal impulse that they claim came from a God that was telling them what to do by saying, how does this benefit humanity as a whole?
	And I don't believe that that's something that a rational morality would approach as a criteria for determining good or bad.
	The way that a rational approach to morality works, in my understanding, is something like If you say that there's such a thing as preferred behavior, then that preferred behavior must be common to all mankind.
	And therefore, if you believe that you can go and kill other people because a voice in your head tells you to, then everybody else should have that same right as well, in which case you're probably not going to want to do it because it's going to sort of be mutually, you know, disastrous and so on.
	And so I don't think that we would approach it, and if I understand Francois' point, it's something to do with this Christian ethics.
	We wouldn't approach the problem of ethics as a market anarchist from the perspective of what benefits mankind as a whole.
	Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense, and I apologize for using that particular terminology.
	Your definition of morality does make absolutely more sense, and maybe that's where you can come from.
	But I still believe firmly that you should not necessarily attack a deity, and to answer Francois, just because you do not believe that there is a deity doesn't mean that you cannot argue against their deity.
	Okay, let me clarify the atheist position a bit more.
	Yeah, go ahead. Okay.
	The idea of an invisible, unknowable being, the question about this simply doesn't connect to us in any meaningful way.
	We're not going to take the question seriously about an unknowable, invisible being.
	That's it. And if it's unknowable and invisible, nothing can derive from that.
	So if you're rational, you have to come up with some kind of way to discover reality and morality outside of this.
	That's the whole issue.
	You're always left with the problem, how do I deal with reality, in the face of an unknowable, invisible being.
	So, it's not that we don't believe in this or this God.
	We just completely ignore the question.
	Because there's nothing to talk about if it's invisible and unknowable.
	It's just a ridiculous, childish question.
	So, anytime somebody starts to take it seriously, then they're tying us up in knots because they're talking From a principle that we simply don't connect to in any meaningful way.
	Well, I mean, I certainly agree with that, but I think that there is a...
	I mean, it is the problem of pre-existing belief, right?
	That we certainly don't connect with it in a meaningful way any more so than the average Christian would connect with the idea of Zeus or Dionysus or anything like that.
	And probably even less, because that's another deity versus a non-deity.
	But I do think that Lance had an interesting point where he said that you would try to argue morality independent of faith.
	And that would seem to me, Lance, if you don't mind responding to that, it would seem to me that then you would say that there is a criteria for morality that would be independent of the existence of a deity, or independent of the commandments of a deity.
	Yes, that is precisely correct because we must argue this from a historical point.
	Morals have existed before Christianity, in the time of Socrates, in the time of Plato.
	They were the founders of what we have a now intellectual understanding of what morals is.
	And so you use that foundation to argue your moral standpoint And leave your deity out of it, whatever that deity might be, whether it be atheism, or whether it be Christianity, whether it be Muslims, whether it be whatever that happens to be, leave that out of it and argue it from a purely rational and purely moral stance.
	But I'm sure that you would agree, and I don't mean to put words in your mouth.
	I mean, I'm fairly sure that you would agree.
	Let me know if you would or wouldn't.
	That you would agree that there is a moral nature to God for those who worship God because it would not make any sense to worship a God that was not good, right?
	I mean, we generally tend to love that which is the most virtuous.
	And therefore, I think a lot of people who are religious would have trouble saying that morality is independent of the existence of a deity, but rather that God is the ultimate expression of the highest morality.
	Can I say something?
	We can perhaps argue that religion is not moral at all.
	We can ask them a question.
	Why do you obey your God?
	Do you obey Him because He is good as you have told, as you have said yourself?
	Or do you obey Him because you are afraid that you will suffer in hell forever?
	So if people act morally for the sole reason that they are afraid I would not say that their actions are particularly moral.
	It's simply a primary instinct.
	It's not morality at all.
	Avoidance of consequences.
	I have a question for Lance.
	I have a question for Lance.
	I would like to know, Lance, how you can be a Christian and argue for moral autonomy Autonomy from faith, individual autonomy, because moral autonomy is not a Christian concept.
	In fact, it makes you a sinner.
	Sin is refusing to obey God.
	If you argue for morality independent from faith, you are a sinner.
	You are going against the Bible.
	You are going against the will of God.
	So I'd like to know how you go ahead and just ignore Those tiny little inconvenient facts in your little independent moral autonomy, which is a completely individualist, market anarchist rational concept, and has nothing to do with Christianity.
	Well, I think you're coming to the table with a preconceived notion of what Christianity is, and I don't know if you've really read any books on Christian morals.
	Lance, are you going to tell me that you don't know what sin means?
	Now, let's not get argumentative.
	Let's stay curious. Do you understand the word sin?
	Yes, sir. I do understand the word sin, but my understanding could be different from your understanding.
	So that's your answer.
	Your answer to the most fundamental contradiction of your whole approach is just my understanding.
	Okay, thanks.
	Well, I think it's a very interesting question, the relationship between ethics and a deity and individual conscience, for sure.
	I mean, this stuff is very challenging, both for most atheists, right?
	Most atheists have a problem with universal morality, and most Christians don't have as much of a problem with universal morality.
	It's just that the relationship of universal morality to a deity can be...
	Challenging. And I think that I just want to make sure that as we talk about this particular religious aspect, whether there are people in the chat as a whole who are interested in this topic or whether we are wandering off into stuff which is more individual to those of us who have an interest in theology.
	Is there anybody out there who has absolutely completely fallen asleep or is this something that is of interest to people to continue talking about?
	I think we have a few snorts.
	Wake up everybody!
	Well, Lance, I mean, I certainly appreciate this.
	I think we should keep this conversation going, but I think let's open it back up to some other questions or comments that people might have had or might have at the moment.
	Certainly, this is a very challenging topic.
	I appreciate your input into the conversation, of course, and I certainly respect that it's not easy with the atheist jackals circling you and drooling to stay in the conversation, but I certainly appreciate that.
	I find it a very fascinating topic, so let's just make sure That we stay in the conversation, but not to the exclusion of other people's other interests.
	So, now, is there other topics that...
	Lance is going to heaven after this one.
	Lance is going to heaven, I think.
	So, I'm going to open it back up if somebody else has another topic.
	Somebody spoke and I didn't quite hear what they said.
	I think it was Ned or R-S-P. Thank you for that, Sipana.
	I am going to heaven. Excellent.
	Now, are there other topics?
	because we had some people, and I don't necessarily want to start grilling everyone about their childhoods again, although that's always fun for me, so don't feel like it would be an imposition for me to do it, but there were some people who either sent me messages or were on the boards claiming some regret about not being able to have talked about but there were some people who either sent me messages or were on the boards claiming some regret about not being able to have talked about their own histories in last week's conversation where we were chatting about what experiences we may have had in common as children that may
	have led us to be more susceptible to or interested in things like market anarchy, and one of the general consensus things that came up, which is still open to a good deal of validation, of course, is that we did not look at our own parents as those who we could really respectfully receive moral instruction is that we did not look at our own parents as those who we could really respectfully receive moral instruction from, and I think that left us kind of with a blank slate that could be written on by new
	I'll have to start picking on people if they don't say anything.
	I'll start with Christina, of course.
	That's not fair.
	She's in the same room.
	I guess maybe getting the ball rolling a little bit and maybe discussing a little bit in your early childhood.
	How did you view your, I guess, mother as a moral agent or as a...
	No, I really just...
	No, I really just prefer asking the questions.
	No, I'm just kidding. My own experience, of course, was that my own mother was absolutely, as I've mentioned in the podcast or 12, a completely horrible human being who used, as my brother did, the argument for morality consistently and completely hypocritically, of course.
	I was exposed to a good deal of nationalism when I was in boarding school and my brother was very much around, you know, we have to keep the family name up as was my father.
	My mother was very much around obey me and give me respect while doing nothing to earn that respect.
	So, from my standpoint, neither in my immediate family nor my extended family nor in my education nor in those people that I was reading nor in the media nor anywhere Did I feel that anybody was making any kind of...
	They were all using moral arguments, but they weren't making consistent moral arguments.
	So I was just very wide open to exploring this field.
	I very much felt that morality was important, but that I just never got any kind of satisfying explanation or any kind of explanation or appeal to ethics.
	That didn't have this sickening leprosy kind of smell of self-interest and subjugation and you should obey me because I'm in charge but I'm going to pretend that it's moral just to club you even further down.
	I just never found that Any of those arguments were convincing and I really rebelled quite strongly against the self-interest that I felt was just so all over the place and that people couldn't just honestly say to me obey me because I'm bigger or obey me because I'm a teacher or obey me because I'm your parent but they always had to attach this sort of sickening saccharine ethical approach to things that just they never lived so I certainly had no template at any time growing up that I can recall Where I ever said,
	yeah, now this person is explaining ethics to me in a way that makes sense.
	Everybody just used ethics to, you know, as Nietzsche talks about it in the Antichrist, they just used ethics to keep you down, right?
	The ethics is something that the strong...
	Inflicts upon the weak so that the weak stay at the bottom and the strong stay at the top.
	And the strong have all of these ethics, which they then inflict upon the weak, which the strong never ever use themselves, right?
	So I just never had any kind of templates that made any sense to me at all.
	But ethics were constantly being appealed to.
	So they were important, but they were always wrong.
	And I think that left me open to wanting to explore them, I guess, on my own horsepower.
	Does that make sense to people?
	Is that anyone else's experience?
	No. Oh, we have a...
	Sorry, just before we go into that, we just have a message from a gentleman who says, my mic isn't working, but I just wanted to say that I was deconverted last night, and I was wondering how important the atheistic movement is to the market anarchist movement, because I'm an atheist, and I hear that that is common in deconverters.
	Should you support their movement?
	Okay, we will get back to that topic, but let's continue with the current topic.
	Sorry, go ahead. I'm sorry, Steph.
	I wasn't really listening.
	I'll be the first one to say.
	What was the topic again?
	Maybe I can actually say something to anything.
	Okay, sure, no problem. The topic is, do we have stuff in common that we grew up with that lent us to be a little bit more open to new ideas about ethics in society and politics?
	And why is it that we're sort of able to move fairly fluidly in these areas and other people aren't?
	And one of the things that we were talking about last week was that a lot of us seem to have not grown up with moral guides That we could really respect and trust and so I think that lent us to be a little bit more open to new ideas about ethics than most people.
	And I think you Lance last week had mentioned that your dad was a bit of a yo-yo dad if I remember sort of rightly and that he left somewhat early and so you didn't necessarily have a strong template for a just or righteous way of living and so it may have left you a little bit more open to explore ethics in a way that was not specifically conventional.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That's a small piece of the gigantic pot.
	My parents were both scientists by training, but I was Catholic, so I had a lot of these.
	I think from very on, I was encouraged to think critically.
	I remember that I would always ask my mom Certain words meant when I was learning vocabulary things, and she would always have me go look them up rather than just telling me what they were.
	Little things like that. I think that really stuck with me in my trying to find truth, I guess.
	Yeah, my parents did that too, except for it kind of made me upset, and I never did go look.
	Upset in what way? It was frustrating, but, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned that Not having some sort of moral system or ethical system that you trust as a kid and then you end up being more open to new ideas and being more likely to have your own ethical system that you based on your own perceptions and your own reasoning because that's exactly what happened to me as a child.
	And I didn't trust the state or the authority figures at all because they always came off as overbearing and hypocritical and not really looking after my best interests.
	And I always got better tangible results when I trusted myself rather than authorities anyway.
	So I ended up being very open-minded towards finding a new system as well when I got into intellectual maturity, became an adult and was able to really look at things big picture on my own.
	When you were growing up, did people use false arguments or morality to, I don't know, get you to do stuff, or was it mostly just obey me because I'm taller?
	It was, a lot of it was, I just have authority, I'm the parent or I am the teacher.
	And a lot of it was also coercive implied threats too.
	Yeah, a lot of it was like, obey me because I'm taller, I have the authority.
	Well, why do you have the authority?
	Because I'm taller.
	You know, things like that.
	Yeah, if that doesn't make you want to pick up a nice set of heels when you were a kid.
	It definitely doesn't.
	I think, for me, it's just like simple stuff always sort of nag a little bit, you know, like if I I had my room a little messy, and my mom would say, clean it up, and I'd say, no, I don't feel like it, and she'd say, well, that's not how we do things in this house.
	And I always, you know, I think in the back of my mind, it wasn't very conscious at the time, but in the back of my mind at the time, it was always, you know, well, that's how I do things.
	Right, I'm in this house too, right?
	Do I get a vote? No, I never got a vote when I was in the house, that's for sure.
	For me, when I was growing up, it was more about this is how to be a good girl.
	You have to be compliant and you have to be submissive, I guess, and just obey the rules, whatever they are.
	Sit pretty, don't speak, be polite, just follow these stupid rules that made no sense.
	Now, I sort of entered this when I met Steph a few years ago.
	I didn't turn to philosophy properly.
	Or ethics per se, I turn to psychology.
	So I think different people respond in different ways to the kinds of sort of authoritarian rules that they're subjected to when they're children.
	That's interesting. I can imagine that culturally, it's not as much in the West, but definitely in the West.
	For women, there's a lot more of that false morality being pushed onto you.
	I imagine. Even more so for guys.
	I imagine as a guy growing up I was frustrated to such seemingly endless degrees but culturally women I think are more oppressed and meant to just follow these arbitrary rules because they're told to rather than think for themselves even more so than for men.
	My wife agrees with you and she says try being next to me.
	Try being Greek! And the real shame of it is, of course, that seeing the kind of culture that Christina grew up in where she deferred to often men, I was really hoping to cash in on that in our marriage, but sadly it didn't seem to quite take in the way that I was hoping.
	I'm right there with you.
	Could that be the reason that there are more men involved in this than...
	I don't know if there are a lot of female listeners out there, but I think women would be more open to talking about psychology rather than philosophy and ethics and morality.
	I don't know why. It's just a gut feeling that I have.
	I may be completely wrong and I don't want to offend any women out there at all.
	It's just, like I said, it's sort of an instinct that I have.
	How does that make you feel?
	Great question.
	Don't worry. You've got it down.
	He is smooth with the ladies, ladies and gentlemen.
	A player. I think I may have noticed that too, actually.
	I mean, not to make some sort of gender stereotype, but even here in relatively progressive Los Angeles, Of the friends I have that are college educated, the men tend to be educated more along the lines of objects and tools or concepts, while women tend to choose educations more along the lines of people's social interaction and people's minds.
	I know a lot more women that are pursuing masters in psychology right now than I know men that are pursuing masters in psychology.
	No, I think that's an excellent point.
	I think that there is also the kinds of relationships that you can have which are win-win, tend to be what women are more attracted to.
	And I think that some of the relationships where there is a winner and a loser tend to be things that men, simply because they're raised to be more competitive, tend to be a little bit more drawn to.
	And so women are often in the helping professions where it's nice and win-win, and men go a little bit more into the sort of win-lose professions, and to some degree, philosophy and economics and sciences are a little bit more around the win-lose situation.
	I don't think that's anything innate to female nature, but I think it's partly cultural.
	It's a way of approaching that.
	And so in the libertarian movement, it definitely is to some degree a win-lose.
	I mean, we try to base our beliefs on empiricism and the scientific methodology and rationality.
	And so for some people, like with the gentleman you were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, it is going to be a win-lose.
	Like one person is going to emerge.
	In a sense, you could say the winner.
	I mean, both people win if the ideas get corrected.
	But one person is going to have to sort of give way.
	And that's, I think, something not...
	Women aren't generally brought up to be as comfortable with.
	That's interesting how you looked at it as a win-win versus a win-lose.
	You know, I never thought of it that way, but looking at it that way, it makes actually a lot of sense.
	I think that based on a lot of cultural things, men tend to be more risk-takers, in part because technically men are more expendable.
	You can accept the risk of losing a lot of men in a group of people more so than you can risking losing a lot of women in a group of people.
	So men tend to take more risks because of those cultural trainings, you know?
	And that's where the win-lose comes into play.
	Well, I think that's an excellent point.
	And just going back to my early memories of teenage dances, I think I also, men have to deal with the risk of generally, at least when I grew up, which I guess would be in the late 70s, early 80s when I was this age, it was very much that the girls would sort of stand at one side of the gym And the boys would sort of go over and you'd have to sort of find the girl who'd want to dance with you or talk to you or whatever.
	And so that level of risk taking, wherein the men are generally still the initiators in, I guess, romantic advancements, which is, you know, a terribly scary thing to do, I think helps us to sort of manage that level of risk, whereas women don't often have that opportunity as much without the pressure of feeling like they'll be viewed negatively.
	Very true. Very true.
	Now, are there any other major topics?
	People, it's the last chance you get this week to talk about your childhoods.
	Last chance, last offer I can make for you.
	But if there are any other topics, I think we can close off with a few minutes on this gentleman whose mic is not working.
	I guess we could pretty much abuse him as much as we want him now.
	He can't say anything back. Oh, it might be fixed next week.
	But we could finish off with his topic unless there's something else that somebody wanted to talk about on this topic.
	My wife was saying something about the reason why women are more inclined to take psychology.
	She was saying that women want to understand people because they want to know why they were oppressed.
	They have that curiosity.
	Do you mean why the women themselves were oppressed?
	Yeah, as children, I believe, anyway.
	Why don't I put the mic over next?
	You could put her on the mic.
	Well, hello. This is Irma, Lance's wife.
	And, well, Lance made a comment that women go into psychology because we want to know how men work.
	And so, well, I added to that that a lot of time as, you know, children, we are so present to, you know, we can't go on dates until we have a certain age and you can't put your makeup on and All these other things that you're not supposed to do as a respectable young lady.
	And so that's like one of the things also that make you want to understand the person's psyche, makes you want to find out how a person thinks.
	You know, I would agree with that, but I'd like to add to that as well.
	I think that women also tend to go into, again, I mean, we're talking about philosophy and economics versus psychology, but a lot of people who go into psychology typically want to be healers and helpers as well.
	Not just they want to understand, but they want to help.
	And I don't know, not to say, I mean, there are a lot of men in my profession as well.
	I mean, I can't tell you the number of male psychologists and psychiatrists.
	That I know. But that's also something that women do.
	They want to be helpers.
	So they will go into psychology, they will go into nursing, maybe they'll become educators.
	But that's something to think about as well, about what women will do.
	Yes, I definitely agree with you.
	That's why I was saying that that is one of the aspects, not the whole reason why women go into psychology.
	That's just one of the aspects.
	It certainly is nice, of course, to think that women go into psychology to understand men.
	And the moment you figure us out, please let us know.
	I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
	Kind of like a stateless society.
	Well put. I'm sorry, I just...
	I just wanted to get one last thing because we've just had a lady join the conversation.
	Some of the stuff that we've been talking about in terms of our own, I guess you could say lack of effective moral imprinting when we were kids, is that something that you experienced or is that not something that you experienced?
	Can you elaborate on that please?
	Sure, we were just talking a little bit to both last week and this week about how A lot of people who sort of came into libertarianism or who are very interested in working out the problems of ethics in society around pacifism and mutual cooperation, a lot of us seem to have in common the fact that our own parents or teachers,
	although they talked about morality, we did not find them to be very effective or believable in terms of ethics and that, at least from my perspective, a lot of it was kind of like Well,
	definitely. My parents always told me to do things because it was a decent thing to do, because it was a Christian thing to do.
	There was never a clear There was an explanation that was rational to me.
	So I always questioned, I always tried to obey them because they are my parents, but there was always something missing.
	And growing up and being able to think and as you become an adult you're able to question the things that your parents command you to do.
	And also in conversations with my husband and his newfound interest in libertarianism, I have been exposed to that even more.
	And have you had any conversations with your parents or with those who you grew up with who were, at least to some degree, moral instructors about sort of some of the ideas that you've been exposed to or have had lately?
	And if so, how have they gone? Since you and I am barely grasping this understanding, it would be difficult for me to bring this up with somebody that does not believe in this and I would not have a way of explaining things and backing my understandings that are, like I said, very limited at this time.
	Well, that's a very good response, of course, very honest.
	And just remember, of course, if you guys have kids, or when you do have kids, to just say, as they grow up, hey, this is mock and anarchy, that's what we do in this house, so you better get in line.
	President, because I said so.
	Exactly, because I'm taller.
	Now, we also have one of the gentlemen who sent a private message who said, if we can go back to what in our childhood led us to this, I always asked my parents why things were the way they were, when they never answered me, it made me want to find out on my own, giving myself that authority and initiative.
	I believe it made me a free thinker and I think that's what led me down the road to being open to, well, guess what he called deconversion, which I guess is a way of trying to at least give up some of the illusions of ethics that we've been given by people whose self-interest was not necessarily aligned with their own.
	Like, if this is the Mexican experience and it's similar to the Greek as far as I understand it, A lot of the moral rules that you were given were more around your parents being afraid of some sort of social sanction or social disapproval rather than something that was necessarily beneficial just for you.
	Definitely society played a big part when we're talking about other people judging your own family and your reflection as a parent.
	Yes, it was a big part of the upbringing in my home and why my dad would Prohibit me of doing certain things like coming home late or having a boy bring me in his car back to my home.
	That was definitely not allowed because of what other people or neighbors might say about him.
	That is such a common experience for young girls and I don't know, how did the guys experience that or did they?
	We were always on the lookout for girls who weren't raised that way.
	Exactly. Well, I always wanted a good girl and that seemed like a good girl if she respected her family and respected her family wishes even if she did not agree with it.
	But, you know, as far as I was growing up or raised, I think it was, you know, go out and do what you want to do and here's a condom, you know.
	Look, not only is, there is a double standard.
	A father would oftentimes even be proud or at least approving or complacent with his son in his late teens, you know, having sex with some girl, but the parents would almost never feel the same way.
	They would feel quite the opposite if their daughter was to do something like that.
	There's a totally arbitrary, very instinctive feeling double standard with all these people.
	Yeah, for sure. And there's some biological reasons around that, of course, but it definitely is hypocritical to say to your daughter, you shouldn't do this, but then to say to your son, good on you.
	People do definitely have to take into account biology and simple facts of who is and who isn't carrying the baby, of course, but at the same time, Those things are taken to these levels that are wholly inappropriate and counterproductive and very damaging to people's self-esteem and very damaging.
	It damages the independent thought of these people and limits their ability to become great people because they end up just falling in line and doing what everyone tells them rather than thinking for themselves.
	Right. I mean, the argument, and we don't have to dig too much into this topic until we get some good photos, but the argument against promiscuity has a lot more to do with personal happiness and joy than it does around, you will shame the family name or something like that, which is a really heavy-handed way of clubbing someone into submission rather than appealing to their self-interest and explaining to them.
	I was just saying to Christina the other day that When I was a kid, it's a toothbrushing thing, right?
	Everyone told me, oh, you've got to brush your teeth, so I'd go through all the usual crap that children did around pretending that I did.
	And I've mentioned this on a podcast, too, but as opposed to somebody just saying, you know, it's really, here's why, it's in your self-interest, and so on.
	And then once I figured that out, or someone told me, then it was never an issue.
	And I think that's just so much of a better way of getting people to do things, to appeal to their own self-interest and their own long-term happiness, rather than to come down with these sort of heavy scenes of, like, if you go out with this boy, I have no daughter, and you'll shame the family name.
	It's just such a heavy club to use on children, and I think it certainly doesn't make them happy, and it just makes them...
	Feel that the only way to get around in life is to subjugate yourself to authority, and I think that's terribly bad, of course, particularly for women, because it gets applied to women so much more.
	All right. Well, I think that we are coming to the end of our discussion.
	Does anybody else have anything that they wanted to add at this point?
	I'd just like to say that that was very well said.
	Well, you know, I guess after about 200 podcasts, sooner or later it's going to happen at least once.
	It's nice to know it's possible. Thank you.
	Well, thanks so much, of course, to everyone who's taken the time to join in.
	I'm very glad that we finally got this technology working.
	I will continue to dig around and see if I can't figure out my own, but thank you so much for the host, of course.
	And if nobody has anything else to add, then we'll try and pick it up again next weekend when the topic will be Christina telling you guys what to do rather than giving me a big list of things.
	So I think it's going to be very exciting for me, and you will get your own lists about better ways to do things.
	Sounds awesome. Alright, thanks very much everybody and we'll do, I guess, a little bit of post-processing on this and post it again.
	Thanks so much and have yourselves a great week.

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