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May 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:49
227 Call In Show #5, May 7 2006: State Participation

What is the morality of participating in the State?

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Okay, well thanks everyone for joining us.
We have, for the 8 millionth time in a row, got our technical difficulties squared away.
And I guess one of the topics that I wanted to talk about today before throwing it open pretty wide is the issue or the question of participation in state things or state programs, state activities, participation in state money.
The reason that that became a topic relatively recently was that I mentioned late last week that I had closed a deal with a, I guess what would be in the U.S., a state agency, but here is a provincial agency.
And I received some emails full of shocking and appalling sentiments that I had actually done a deal with the devil we call the state.
And I sort of made a couple of cases here and there.
On my approach to this sort of participation in society, participation in state programs, which seems to me absolutely unavoidable.
I mean, to drive roads, to get water, to get electricity, to own property, to buy food, all involves participation in state programs.
So I, for one, can't really see that there's a clear line between participation in state programs versus non-participation in state programs.
You can go and live in the woods, I guess, if you want.
That's not my particular approach to solving it, but that would seem to me to be the only perfectly logically consistent approach to non-participation in state programs.
On the other hand, I would view that, say, volunteering for the military would be something that I would have a bit more of a problem with, but It just seems to me that if I want to eat or have shelter, then I'm going to have to participate in state programs.
And we're so completely enmeshed in the public side of the economy that it seems to me a pretty gray area to draw a line in to say, I will participate here, but I won't participate there.
And so, in the comments that I've made to people who've been wrestling with the dilemma of, I think one listener said, I might get funding to go and study abroad, but part of it is state funding, should we do it?
Or should I do it or not?
And my suggestion is, yeah, grab it.
I mean, I started a company and have contributed millions of dollars, or should have contributed, have had taken from me millions of dollars of Taxes, and I will continue to have all that money taken from me from taxes for the rest of my life.
So for me, if I can get some of that money back, yeah, I know that it's not specifically one-on-one justice because there's no such thing as a state.
So the people who take the money from me are not the people who get the money back, who I get the money back from.
But that's all impossible to trace anyway, so there's no possibility of restitution in this situation.
So I do view it to some degree as a state of nature, I guess you could say.
So I just wanted to sort of toss the idea out there.
I don't feel any... I have no problem myself with doing a deal with the government.
I wouldn't do a deal for the military.
That much I wouldn't do.
But I don't have a problem getting some money for school maintenance.
And, I mean, it's just the software that I sell that provides that fiscal argument.
Because otherwise the money is going to go to things like jails and, you know, our military adventures over in Afghanistan and around the world.
And it's going to go to foreign dictatorships.
So, I mean, if I can, I have some, but I would never say they're purely objective, some moral standards where I would say, okay, well, I wouldn't do a deal that got billions of dollars for the military, but if I do a deal in this area, and it's all sort of me, it's a bit gray,
and I think what we want to do is get rid of the state so that we don't have these kinds of problems, but I just sort of wanted to put it out there and just sort of say that's sort of my perspective on it and get other people's feedback about how they reconcile themselves with The problem of our enmeshment with the state.
So you don't see a distinction between those situations where you absolutely have to get involved and those situations where you actively engage in involvement.
Can you give me examples of distinctions between the two?
Well, for example, like they were saying on the board, If I want to get around anywhere, I have to use the roads, because those are the only things that are available.
For example, if I were, like what happened to me in Wisconsin, I got a phone call from a state agency saying that I could get an interest or free loan to work to do repairs on my house.
And I refused it because that interest-free, of course, is tax-funded.
Do you see the distinction?
Yeah, I certainly understand the distinction, but I'm not sure that I follow the moral argument.
So, if it's something where there's no choice, then it's okay, but if it's something where you are voluntarily pursuing that, then it's not.
Is that right? Yeah, and maybe I'm just confused myself, but that's always been kind of a problem for me.
Well, what about the situation where you are owed a tax refund and you apply for it?
Is that legitimate or not?
Because then you're actively pursuing state money, right?
Well, in one sense you could actually claim that you're reclaiming that which was taken from you in the first place because that's actually directly connected to you.
Well, it's only directly connected to you because the state says so, right?
Yeah, I guess that's true.
I mean, I wouldn't say that I would leave it up to the state...
Yeah, because there's really no way to know.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that I would leave it up to the state to determine which of my tax money it is legitimate for me to get a hold of and which of my tax money it's not.
That would seem to me to sort of be an externalization of a moral standard.
Or I guess leaving it up to, I guess, politicians or accountants or bureaucrats or lawmakers to say what it is legitimate for me to pursue in terms of retrieving the money that's taken from me.
I mean, I'm not saying I have an answer for these things.
I'm just saying that I really want to keep the money that I make.
No, I'm just saying that I don't know where the clear line in this is, and I've never had any luck trying to figure it out.
And I would absolutely grant you that, because I've been just as confused by the whole mess myself.
At one level, you know, I'm repulsed by it, but on another level, it's like, well, you know, What can you do?
It's all one big gray slush fund in the first place.
Right, and I mean, whether it's self-justification or not, I don't know, but I certainly do feel that it's not as if my...
I mean, I know I don't use the argument from a fact, except in specific circumstances, and I know that I'm leaning on it now, but, you know, forgive me for the moment, but...
It's not as if I don't get the money from the government back that the government is going to shrink in size.
It's going to go to someone else, and that someone else is probably not going to be fighting for freedom or fighting to get ideas across about a more moral situation and so on.
And I mean, that's a justification, a slippery slope, and I'm fully aware of that.
But I am pretty positive that if I don't get money back in terms of income from the state or in any way that I can, I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
Then I think that's better.
The other thing that I would say is that if I don't get the money back and use it for myself, the government usually uses that to borrow, thus putting the next generation into a greater deficit.
So me refusing to take money back from the state would be, it actually sort of dumps an even greater load on the next generation.
I mean, I know this all sounds like pretty self-interested reasoning, and I fully recognize that, but it still seems to me that it has some validity.
So in a sense what you're saying is that we don't really have a choice that we all have to engage in the mad scramble if we're going to participate at all.
Well, yeah, I mean, we do have a choice in that you can go and live in the woods.
I mean, that's a little more of a choice up here in Canada where we have more woods than we know what to do with.
But you do have a choice in terms of complete non-participation.
You also do have a choice in terms of going off the grid in terms of you can live to some degree like, you know, if you're what they call illegal immigrants.
You can live without legal representation.
You can live without car insurance.
Up here in Canada, it would mean no health care and so on.
And if you choose to live off the grid, then it would seem to me you are not really participating that much in civil society.
I mean, I guess you're still using the roads and so on, but your taxation is minimum to none.
You would just be paying your consumption taxes.
So I think that you always have a choice in terms of non-participation in the state.
Two, of course, the ultimate degree, which is a silly and absurd degree, but the choice of suicide would completely remove you from having to involve yourself in state activities at all.
But I think that if you take that to its logical extreme and say, I'm not going to participate in the state at all, I'm going to go and live in the woods or go completely off the grid or whatever, Then it would seem to me that you're kind of handing over the whole arena to those who don't have the best interests of humanity at heart, and I think it's worth staying in the arena and fighting, even if you have to pick up a publicly funded sword from time to time, if that metaphor hasn't been overworked.
Steph, can I talk?
Okay, well, we all agree that the only thing to change society is through changing the people's minds in society.
And we also know that the human behavior doesn't change in different situations.
That's why Nike isn't acting differently in third-world countries.
Then in the West, they simply look at the market and act accordingly.
So the wages they pay are market prices.
That's how humans work.
You can't blame Nike For paying low wages, you can only blame the violence.
So, if we act according to this, then there's really no problem.
When we as a group are acting against violence, Through word of mouth.
And that's the best we can do.
We shouldn't look at our actions because they're just natural.
And it's almost impossible to distinguish the situation in acting with or without the government because there's really no free market.
So that's my opinion.
Okay, good. Thanks.
I appreciate that. I think if we get one more person, we can definitely gang up on Greg.
And that's really the purpose of this chat.
So, Andrew, are you in?
Did you have something to talk about in that?
Oh, I'm afraid he's napping.
It's a little ZZZ sign next to him.
Normal Tim? Mike is dead, okay?
Would you like to type it and I'll speak it?
I agree with Steph.
He is my personal Jesus.
Well, that's very nice. Thank you very much.
Actually, he's not typing at all.
What was the question?
The question was...
This is to Andrew.
The question was, do you...
I guess we've had this chat privately, but how do you feel about taking your filthy blood state money in your school?
I don't mind it at all. I mean, I have a full tuition scholarship to a state university in New Jersey, which is equivalent of about $7,000 a year for the past three years, and I've taken that, and I went to Australia on it, and yeah, I don't know. It's not been bad.
I mean, at the same time, you have to consider also that, hey, you know, if you're taking the money, you're going to be in a state university for three or four years.
So it's sort of like, I don't know, I look at it sort of like Some good, some bad in it.
If I didn't take the money, I also wouldn't be at state school.
But if you're going to go, yeah, definitely, I'd say take the money.
But I agree, definitely, that there's a line to be drawn.
That's what I was curious, Steph, was if you would write code for a military missile guiding system or something.
I guess you've already answered that. But definitely, I have my lines too.
But taking state funds for universities is not there yet.
Well, I think also I like to think of it as restitution for them having put me in a state school jail for 14 years.
So I think they owe me something for that.
But of course you can never find, I was talking about this with Christina last night, you can never ever find the people who did it, right?
I mean, so because I comply with paying my taxes, nobody comes to my door with a gun drawn, right?
Now, if I didn't pay my taxes and someone did come to my door with a gun drawn, then that person would be the person I should get my taxes back from because that's the person who is using force against me.
But given the amount of taxes I've paid over my life and am going to pay over my life, That person, as a flat-footed cop with his two-finger typing, is probably not going to be the guy who's going to be able to perform that kind of restitution.
So I'm still trying to work on a good metaphor for how much this level of violence and the implicit violence that's in all of the regulations and the taxes that we pay, how much that corrupts everybody's decision-making and so on.
I haven't really come up with a good metaphor yet.
Christina and I were trying to come up with one yesterday, but we couldn't quite get around to it.
And so I just think that it's so impossible to try and extricate yourself from the corruption and violence that is within the state.
I think the most important thing to do is to do it conceptually, to do it morally, to do it intellectually so that you're clear.
I mean, I think honesty is the first step towards anything.
And what I would say is that if I said I am morally justified for this money because it's not blood money, then that would be something completely false.
Now, if I first admit, yes, this money is coerced out of other people, then I would also say that that is something more honest and something more straightforward, which we can then sort of discuss out of that.
So, we have a question, what do we say to the welfare recipient?
Get off my back? Is that reasonable?
Did you want to answer that one, Sweeney? What do we say to the welfare recipient?
Well, that's a very interesting question.
And I wrote an article called The Soldier's Choice, which is on freedomain.blogspot.com.
It's an interesting question. To the welfare recipient, if you say, let's sort of look at a situation where the welfare recipient is somebody who grew up in a welfare home.
I think we've had welfare enough now that we're into the second or maybe even the third generation in certain areas.
And so, you know, you've got some kid named Bobby whose mom was a welfare mom and she had him out of wedlock because she could get welfare and therefore she didn't have to get married.
And he grows up in a town where everybody's on welfare and there's lots of towns like this in Canada because we're a resource economy in a lot of ways and when mines shut down people just lobby the government rather than move.
If this person grows up in an economically depressed area, and their government school is terrible, so he never gets any real skills, and there's lots of, you know, substance abuse around him, when he grows up, I mean, I would still argue for him that he needs to get off the welfare, but I can certainly understand a certain amount of restitution might be in order.
But the problem is you can never give restitution in the state system without Violating other people's rights, but his rights were violated by all the corruption and violence that surrounded him, either explicitly or implicitly.
It's a very tricky situation, and I guess the whole point for me is not to try and solve the moral problems within this situation, but to try and change the situation.
To me it's sort of like arguing, well, how should you morally act when you're in a concentration camp?
Well, I would actually much rather shut down the concentration camp than argue about how best we should morally act within that concentration camp, because I think it's kind of impossible to come up with a moral action.
If it's sort of like, oh, either I get this piece of bread and live, or that person gets this piece of bread and live, what's the moral situation?
Well, you know, the moral answer is let's come up with a situation where you never face that kind of moral choice.
So that would be my sort of approach.
And last but not least, and Adi has joined us, who always has smart things to say, and he says, of course, that using money at all.
is participating in a state system.
So the government prints the money and manages the money supply and so on.
So you're already in a coercive situation when you use any kind of cash transaction.
I guess this would be the case even if you were in the grey market or the black market.
But you could still live in the woods, eat berries and bunnies and not have to deal with that.
Yeah, I like that approach, Steph.
It's like a lot of people like to argue about, well, if you're in a prison camp and you have the choice between being a prisoner or a prison guard, what are you going to choose and then how do you act if you choose to be a prison guard?
Well, I think it's quite obvious, like you said, you just sort of keep it in the back of your mind that the goal, of course, is the elimination of the prison camp You know, altogether, you know, and even if you're pretty much forced to be a prison guard because if you, you know, don't, you know, do the headcounts and stuff, you're going to get shot.
Well, yeah, you do them, you know, but you, of course, you know, try and subvert it to whatever degree you can without really endangering yourself too much.
And just, you know, as long as you know what's right in the back of your mind and when an opportunity presents itself for change, then you take it.
Right. I mean, I guess those kinds of situations where it's like, would you do this or would you do that in this kind of compulsory situation?
I've always sort of had the impulse to ask, is there not a door number three that we can think about where this kind of option is not so catastrophically demoralizing?
The other thing I would say too, which struck me last night when I was thinking about this, was that if I had taken the approach that anybody who had direct participation in a state system was immoral, then I would have looked upon Christina in quite a different light when I met her because she was working directly within the state, which is something I guess I worked very briefly at a As a student at the Ministry of Education working on union contracts, just typing them up.
I was just a temp.
But I would have looked at Christina in quite a different light and would have said, oh, well, this woman is working within the state system and therefore she is corrupt and so on.
And although I did try to corrupt her in her early dating, it wasn't in that kind of way.
So that would have been quite a thing to miss out on, I think.
That's like Buddha, the portly butcher shop owner.
That's funny. Yes, I guess I was a temp just brought in to type up union contracts, which was one of my first exposures to what unions were sort of all about and all the good stuff that they were getting.
There is a just-by-the-by.
Since we're mentioning unions, In Quebec, there is a mayor of Montreal, I think it is, who has tried to take on the public sector unions.
So what he did was he hired private detectives to follow these guys around, and he found that it took them 90 hours to fill in a grand total of, I think, seven or eight potholes.
And that they were operating, even in their peak times, at 18% to 28% efficiency, which I thought was pretty funny.
Because it's one of the big things that goes on in unions is that you can't work too fast, otherwise everybody looks bad and you get people mad at you and so on.
So I think that's kind of funny.
Well, is there anyone else who wanted to chime in on the issue of state participation?
I mean, it is a challenging topic, not least because we have conversations about it within our own community, but also because you may get people jumping out of the shadows at you when you talk about it With other people as well.
Of course, you know, I've had the arguments where people say, well, you know, you went to university and that university is subsidized and you do this.
You took the bus and the bus is subsidized.
I mean, it is something where, because there's no way of escaping it, if people use that as a criteria, then everyone's hypocritical and nobody is sort of morally pure, which strikes me as sort of a based-in-Christianity kind of argument, you know, that the sort of original sin has besmirched us irretrievably None can call themselves pure and all this kind of stuff.
So I think it's an important issue to become sort of somewhat clear about.
And without wanting to sound too superstitious, when I talk about this sort of conscience or demon that I have or daemon that I have, I've never had any particular issue with this.
Although at the very beginning, when I was about 19 or 20, When I got a student grant, back then you could actually get student grants to go to university, and I sort of held the check in my hands and talked about it with a couple of objectivist friends back then.
I did wrestle with that a little bit, but after that I just gave up on that as a moral question that was particularly compelling and figured that whatever resources I could use to get the message out about a better way of doing things, I would just use without worrying too much about it.
Is there anyone else who wanted to toss in that two cents worth?
Greg would like to, but he's just gone to fill out that loan application for the interest-free loan, so he'll be back in a few minutes.
Sorry, Eddie, do you want to go ahead?
Yeah, I was wondering in what way Can we then blame people who benefit from the state if everybody benefits from the state?
So everybody participates in some way, because the property that the government appropriates, it may pass through 5, 10, 20 hands before it reaches us.
We don't know exactly what we receive and we can be basically sure but we do receive some blood money even if we do try to avoid it.
So I'm just asking in what way can we be moral in accepting this money?
And we can, at the same time, blame people who benefit from state power, such as lobbyists or industries who seek all sorts of subsidies and something like that, yeah?
Yeah, no, that's a perfectly valid question.
That was my question. Yeah, that's a perfectly valid question.
My approach would be to constantly stay on the attack and hope that they don't notice the rank hypocrisy.
That would be, you just keep going at them, you know, like a rat terrier dog on steroids and just hope that they never notice the fact that it's completely contradictory.
And if that doesn't work, and that only works so far, then what I... I mean, I've never done a podcast about lobbyists because it's important for me to differentiate between...
Ooh, differential diagnosis.
You can see which medical show I've been watching lately.
But it's important to differentiate between the symptoms and the cause, right?
The underlying ailment and the surface symptoms, as somebody mentioned about...
I think it was Niels, who's currently about three-quarters of the way through a melon, I think.
As Niels mentioned, you don't blame Nike, you blame the corrupt rules which create the situation where Nike can exploit workers and so on.
So I've never really done a show about lobbyists because they're just a symptom.
I mean, as soon as you change the system, then the lobbyists will go away.
It's like you don't fight to reform communism by saying the communist rulers should be nicer, right?
You just change the system so that people end up being nicer through their own self-interest.
I can bring about here an example from the podcast where you are somewhat against a certain person who lived off state money doing theater.
Would you consider that person immoral from that perspective?
I think I'm going to start having problems with my microphone in just a moment, because I think you may have...
Yeah, that's perfectly valid.
And I think this goes back to, you know, where I said, you missed the beginning, but what I was talking about at the beginning of the show was that there are degrees that I think are still sort of important.
Like... Going to live in the woods because you don't want to use the roads, to me, would be an extreme that wouldn't be that helpful.
But on the other side, volunteering for the military, to me, would still be morally corrupt, even though both of them are sort of participating in state activities.
So I think that what I felt about this theater guy was that by never having a single productive job and by living off taxpayers his whole life when he was well-educated, articulate, capable, and intelligent, Was sort of on the really parasitical side of things.
And it wasn't even so much that he went and lived his whole life on theater subsidies and never had a real job and, you know, relied on the taxpayers to keep him.
It was that he felt that it was moral.
I mean, if he'd sort of said to me, oh yeah, I mean, I know it's a total scam, but I'm going for it because, I mean, it's blood money, but it's what I want to do, or whatever.
If he'd come up with some honesty about it, but no, it was like, I'm serving the people, I'm owed this because I'm culturally sensitive and a great artist, and so on.
And I think that's the problem with that kind of approach.
I think purely parasitical, when you have the option to do otherwise, I would view as pretty corrupt.
And also if there's a lot of hypocrisy about your approach to it, I would also view that as corrupt.
So I guess it would bother me with lobbyists if they said it was a perfectly moral thing that they were doing, but in my couple of conversations I've had with lobbyists over the years, they view it as a complete scam and it's just a great way to make some money and they don't view it as a moral action at all.
It's just, you know, they're just paid to do what they do.
Does that make any sense?
I think there is still a level of inconsistency in here.
I don't think that maybe we should really strive for perfect consistency but it's certainly a problem because also the manner that that person was living off the back of the taxpayers, which is not exactly true, Because if we are to approach that perspective, everybody is receiving some benefits, right?
So, he's not living off the backs of the taxpayers, but rather he's living off government money.
Oh, I see. So, because we all receive some benefit in return for our taxes, there is less of a sort of clear line between those who receive their entire income from government money and those who receive only a portion of their income from government money?
Yeah, I think it's a rather artificial distinction.
I certainly agree with that.
Now, but then would you feel that somebody like myself, and I don't mean to personalize it and put you on the spot, but it seems only fair because you did that to me about the theater thing, which is perfectly valid, of course.
But let's just say that there was some guy who was making part of his income from selling software to the government versus somebody else Who was joining the military and participating in the government from that standpoint, would you say that there's a moral distinction between those two people?
I can find a certain distinction.
If a person joins the military and kills people, then that is certainly wrong.
But if he joins the military and takes just a simple death job, or is not involved in military action, then he's, from the moral perspective and from our point of view of the debate here, he's equal, basically.
I know what you're saying, but the question then becomes somebody who has the gun versus somebody who gives that person the gun.
If the person who's in the military has a desk job and their desk job involves getting as many guns out to Afghanistan or Iran, Or Iraq.
I guess not quite Iran. Maybe tomorrow.
As possible, then, I'm not sure that I see a clear distinction between the guy who hands the soldier the gun and the soldier who pulls the trigger.
Well, maybe we can make such an argument, but it's not precise.
No, I agree.
I certainly agree that the guy who's pulling the trigger is absolutely wrong.
And the guy who hands the gun to him is wrong.
But of course the problem is that that comes all the way back to us, right?
The fact that I'm not going to live in the woods is causing some of my money to be diverted to the people who are in Afghanistan pulling triggers and so on.
So I think that if we take that approach that there is this kind of moral corruption, then we definitely do participate in it, which I think was Greg's point initially.
But at the same time, I feel that that's relatively easy to, at least for me, to shrug off and say, yes, I don't like being participating in this system which I'm forced to participate in, and that's why it's so important to come up with, I think, a strong conceptual argument for a different kind of system where you don't end up with these kinds of problems.
So, would you say then that The position basically is work toward elimination of the system, but while you have to work within it, you might as well go all the way.
Can you tell me what you mean by you might as well go all the way?
Well, I mean, in for a penny, in for a pound, right?
If I'm going to cross the line to say, well, it's okay to take student loans because I can use that to further the cause.
It's okay to take money to, I don't know, whatever.
Any number of different things.
As long as I'm going to do that one thing, then it's pretty much okay to do all those things.
As long as, on the side, I'm working toward eliminating the system.
Yeah, I mean, I would say whether you're working towards eliminating the system, as long as you're honest and clear about what it is that's occurring, then I think it's much harder to get corrupted by it.
If you say, well, I'm owed this money and I deserve it and it's the right thing to do and so on, then...
I think that's much more corrupt, but given that we just have no choice but to participate in the system, and by that I mean particularly when we're children and most of us were thrown into state schools and so on, and we have no choice but to participate in it, then I think that we must take as many resources as we can, and my particular approach is to use as many resources as I can.
And of course, I'll never get as much money back as they're taking from me.
I mean, I guess unless they win the lottery, which will never happen because they don't play it, but I'm never going to get as much money back as they're taking from me or as I've generated for the tax system.
So I'm always going to be in the hole.
I'm never going to be ahead of the game.
And I would suspect, Greg, that...
If you took an interest-free loan to fix up your house, that you would also never be back.
I mean, I don't know if you have like a 900-room mansion or something, but I doubt that you would get as much back as you're paying.
But to me, it would be perfectly, you know, right to just grab as much back from this sort of pile of money that can never be cleansed of its moral taint, you know, just grab as much money as you can and use it to fight the system.
So I should have taken the loan then?
Well, I wouldn't say that should, I mean, because it's a personal decision.
I don't think there's any moral rule which says you have to take it or you must take it because that's a positive obligation.
But I think if you didn't take it because you felt that it was corrupt, that I would say that that's not a clear moral argument, or at least a moral argument that doesn't end up with almost a complete paralysis of action if applied consistently.
Okay, to clarify then, I shouldn't have used...
Morality as an item in my thinking when I was considering whether to take the loan or not.
Yeah, I think that's sort of where I got to.
And again, I'm not going to say that I have any objective proof of this other than to say that when you're in a situation of coercion, morality becomes almost...
Morality is about choice, right?
And when you've had half your income pillaged for most of your adult life, and you're going to continue to have it perhaps for the remainder of your adult life, then you're not in a situation where morality can really be applied.
So, I would say that, I'm not going to say whether you should or shouldn't take the loan, but even if you take the loan, you're still going to be way behind in terms of the money that's being taken from you.
So, I would say from that standpoint, I think it's possible.
And Charlie says, if you take the loan, you must offset it by inviting all of us over so we can talk about freedom, which I think is a perfectly valid approach.
So it's really more of an amoral situation than it is an immoral situation.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't think that morality can be applied to...
I mean, I apply for income tax returns.
I try and minimize the amount of tax that I pay.
I take very active steps to retrieve as much money as possible, either preventative or sort of after the fact from the state.
Christina deducts perfectly legitimately for our Canada Revenue friends who may be listening at some point.
We have an office in the house where she runs a lot of therapy sessions and sometimes not just for me.
We deduct everything humanly possible and so on.
And why is that? Well, because, you know, we just get pillaged as much as possible and whatever we can do to defend our income.
And I don't see a strong distinction between preventing them from taking money and getting money back after the fact.
To me, it doesn't really seem I don't really sort of see it as their job to set the rules of where or when or how I can recover the money that's being taken from me.
Okay, so taking this a step farther then, in the situation that you were in, where you were providing the state with a mechanism by which they could optimize their own capacity to Let me give the two seconds on that just because it's hard to figure out what I do just from an email.
But basically the software that I sell helps to predict the amount of capital, like the amount of money, That needs to go into facilities as they age in order to prevent them from failing.
So from the HVAC system, from the roofing, from the boiler heating, cooling systems and so on.
To figure out how much money needs to go into those facilities to keep them running so that they don't fall apart and collapse and so on.
And so we sell this to private sector and to some degree to public sector companies as well.
And when public sector agencies use the software they get lots of additional funding.
And so, when I close a deal with, say, this deal with one of the agencies in Alberta, then they will be using it to repair schools and so on.
They'll be using the software to predict how much money needs to repair the schools.
And then they will go for that money, and because the software has very strong components for making the business case, they're more likely to get that money than if they didn't have the software.
So it's just an enabling piece of software to predict the amount of money that...
it's like if you could have something that said here's how much you're going to need to spend on your car over the next 10 years broken down by a month then here we go sorry I think that sort of makes sense Adias I was wondering if the software is used to save money why did they get more funds well Well, the software isn't used to save money, it's used to pinpoint spending.
One of the things that happens in the public sector, as you can well imagine, It's that they don't repair stuff, right?
All the politicians want to cut the ribbons on new facilities.
Nobody wants to spend money maintaining and upgrading old facilities because there's no real political capital to be gained out of that.
And so stuff just falls into enormous disrepair.
There's hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. Army facilities that are just unbelievably badly repaired and in need of great investment of capital.
And here in Canada, we sold to about 5,000 Ontario schools and...
They ended up with quite a bit of additional money based on the fact that they could prove significant deterioration in the school systems.
And so they were able to make the case for additional funding because they could say, if we don't get this money now, here's how much it's going to cost you next year or the year after or the year after that.
So it's just about backfilling in the holes or the deterioration that has come about because of underfunding for a long period of time.
Sorry Greg, I know that was a little long, but if you can still remember your original thought, feel free to pursue it.
Sorry about that. Yeah, and actually I was kind of going from that angle too.
Is it better then to leave the state blind to what it needs, or is it better to allow them to clearly see what they need and then to use that to go pursue it?
That's an interesting question. Do you see what I'm saying?
Yeah, I certainly do. I'm not sure that there's a clear answer because you could argue it either way.
You could argue that it's more harmful for the government to be hit with all of these failures within their assets and then have to apply capital from a reactive basis, or you could say that If you get the government to spend more now, then it's not able to spend on other things or it's going to have to borrow more now and therefore precipitate its own financial collapse that much the quicker.
So I don't know that there's any way of predicting which wish is the best course for that.
But I do know this, that by selling the software, I'm going to make some money, which I can then apply to either taking some time off To work more strongly on free domain radio, or to pay for more bandwidth, or to pay for more professional recording time, or, you know, or, or, or, or whatever.
And I think that that's a decent way of using the cash that otherwise would go to some flaky socialist professor, I would guess.
I could see that. Stefan, I was wondering, we are discussing about the argument for morality, but I have been for a few days in a few discussions with Francois and Andrew, and we do not agree on a definition of morality, so how would you define morality?
I work from the perspective that morality, in our case, should only deal with human interaction.
So, basically, social aspect.
And as Francois and Andrew define it, morality is, as they say, the study of causality as it applies to human action.
Right? Right. How would you define morality?
Well, I would say that morality is any universal statement of preferred human behavior.
No, you say potato, I say potato.
Okay, potato. No, I mean, sorry, um...
No, I mean, sorry, um...
No, Francois, I think you've got your echo machine going again.
No, Francois, I think you've got your echo machine going again.
No, it's just that I don't have headphones right now.
Okay, but you still have your echo machine going whether or not you have headphones.
Okay Stefan, whatever you say.
So Adi was your...
We can all hear the echo.
Sorry, go ahead Adi. In what way can we define an action as moral or immoral?
Or how can we establish the moral value of an action?
Well, I would say that, for instance, if you had a rule which said don't steal, then you could apply that to all human beings, universally throughout time, past, present, and future.
And so, in the same way as in physics, you want to have any kind of rule of physics that is going to apply, like gravity is going to apply to all things that have matter.
Throughout all time, past, present, and future, and there are no exceptions to that, right?
So you don't create one rule which says this rock falls down and this rock falls up and so on.
And so if you have a rule like don't steal, then you can logically apply that to all human beings at all times.
And so that would be to me an example of a moral rule, don't murder, don't rape, and those kinds of things would be examples of moral rules that you could apply consistently to all human beings at all times.
And so it would be different from saying that we need a welfare state to help the poor, which is to say that some people should be allowed to steal, i.e.
those in the government, and some people should not be allowed to steal, i.e.
everybody else. And that to me would be an example of a completely illogical or contradictory moral rule, and therefore not a moral rule at all, just a statement of sort of silly opinion.
Okay, but I was referring specifically to actions as they affect only the individual that performs them and actions in a social context.
So don't steal, don't kill.
These are social rules, basically.
But, for instance, if I decide to wear a sweater today, that's not a moral action, right?
Well, unless that sweater has a harpoon in it that can be pointed at other people.
It's important to deal with all the possibilities, of course.
Or, unless underneath that sweater you have explosives or something like that.
No, I fully understand that there are, in general, you could say that there are two sort of major categories of philosophy.
The first is Ethics which are universal and which apply to interactions between human beings and the second would be sort of personal integrity or the ethics or morality of personal integrity which would be the pursuit of which would be happiness right so the pursuit of Social ethics is minimization of violence and so on.
And all of that is for logical consistency, but also for violence being a bad thing and so on.
But for personal behavior, what is it that makes me happy is going to be very different from what makes you happy.
And so from that standpoint, you want to have sort of authenticity with your true self.
You want to have Integrity in your personal relationships, I mean, yelling at your husband or your wife is not evil, but it's not going to make you very happy.
I mean, unless they're not doing something that you want them to do.
No, I'm kidding. So, I would say that there are sort of personal ethics that are around the pursuit of your own happiness, and then there are universal ethics which are around social interactions between human beings.
Does that make any sense?
Somewhat, yeah. Somewhat?
Ooh, that's a step up. Can you tell me what doesn't...
No, it makes sense, but I'll have to think about it for a while.
Wow, that's good. At least one of us will be thinking.
That's good stuff. That's good stuff.
Well, Stefan, I don't think that there are two types of ethics.
I think that we should call it...
A better term would be social organization versus value organization, which would be ethics.
And ethics...
It guides our social organization.
Social organization is a subset of ethics because, as you know, morality dictates how we see other people and what we see as the role of living in society.
Yes, and I would certainly say that in order to be a moral agent in society, we have to have our own personal ethics organized first and foremost.
So I think that we become good ourselves and then we are better in society.
It's very rare that we attempt to become better in society and end up better ourselves.
That's fairly esoteric and that's sort of more of an opinion.
And there's certainly consistency in all of the philosophical preferred behavior that I would suggest, at least I think, in that it all has to be rational and empirical.
But empirical in the social context does not involve personal feelings or preferences or ideas or dreams or any of those sorts of things.
What is empirical for me is that writing novels makes me happy.
That's sort of an empirical fact, and I know that.
Because when I write novels, I feel happy, which is right before the crushing rage from not getting them published.
But the happiness part is absolutely real, and I really enjoy.
Now, for somebody else, the idea of writing a novel would be a particular kind of hell.
And so... The empirical information that I'm working with, the logical and empirical information, is my particular preferences, abilities, desires and goals.
And that's not universal, right?
I mean, it's universal that you should listen to your own sort of dreams and desires and goals and pursue them in a rational context.
But it's not a universal that everyone has the same, but it is universal that nobody should steal or kill or rape or whatever.
So I think it's both empirical and rational in both spheres, but in one you have access to your own personal goals and desires, and in the other sphere you simply can't talk about that in any meaningful way, as I talked about in the utilitarian podcast this last week.
It's not that it's universal, it's that it's objective.
It's an objective fact that you have this specific mind state.
The issue of universality, I think, applies to different...
In terms of universality, in terms of ethics, applies to values and virtues.
It does not necessarily apply to every fact that we use to make determinations.
But I think all these facts have to be objective.
I mean, if they are to be facts.
Like you said, the fact that it makes you happy to do that is an objective fact.
Yes, it is an objective fact, but I'm not sure that it's a provable fact.
I mean, if I go and kill someone, there's a smoking gun, there's a body, and so on.
But I can say that I want to be a dancer.
My whole life I've wanted to be a dancer, but instead I go and become a forensic accountant of some other horrifying profession.
I could continue to say my whole life that I want to be a dancer, but there's really no objective way of proving that my desire is real or not.
Maybe you could hook someone up to a CAT scan or something.
Yeah, sure there.
It's more of a precise question than we can answer with EEGs right now.
But if you have a better tool and you can find where the desire is, yeah, definitely.
It's measurable. But the important thing is that it's measurable for you.
You're the only person to whom it matters anyway.
You don't need to analyze it.
You don't need to make moral decisions for other people.
You can't, anyway. So it's not really important if others believe you or not, per se.
Yeah, that's true. That's true.
But can you tell me a little bit more about what you meant when you said that you can't make moral decisions for others?
Well, what I'm saying is I can tell other people what to do, but that's not a justification.
A real moral decision or principle It has to be based on observation of the facts and having a proper justification.
For example, you know, if someone tells me a situation, you know, I can tell him, well, okay, well, it sounds like you should be, you know, I'm going to ask him questions about his mind states, and I'm going to tell him, well, I think you should be doing X or Y. I think you should consider this factor.
But I'm only doing this insofar as the other person is able to communicate to me This information.
He was able to understand this information.
But I can't tell someone, you know, you're going to do this or that.
The person is going to do it for himself or not.
I can't really make anyone do anything, per se.
And I agree with you as far as personal preferences go.
I mean, I could say to Christina that she should be a dancer or whatever and get a brass pole set up in her house.
Wait, let me just make a note here.
That might be a good birthday present for both of us, really.
But you can say to people, of course, that they shouldn't kill and shouldn't steal And that, I think, would be a perfectly valid thing to say, regardless of their preferences.
Yes, I would say in most cases it would.
And that's another problem with the state.
The state can't impose value systems.
You can't impose a value system by definition.
You understand what I mean?
By impose, do you mean get someone to obey it?
No. I mean, for the person to have that value system, the only way to do that would be if you were able to perfectly brainwash someone, which is not really possible.
I suppose if you had the technology, you might be able to.
I don't know. Can you help...
I guess that's... Can you help...
Can you help me understand what this might look like in terms of the scientific community?
Don't you think or feel that the scientific community has the same value system in terms of the scientific method?
More or less. I'm not saying it's perfect, but they would agree with that as a principle.
Sure. In any pre-cooperation like science, science is not based on coercion.
Science is based on harmony of values.
And how that works is, first of all, only people who agree with these values are going to join it.
Because if you're not interested in objectivity or you're not interested in finding out things, you're not going to become a scientist.
You're going to become a palm reader or tarot drawer or whatever the shit weird people do.
And the second thing is you've got the system in place that says, you know, science is kind of the form of market anarchy in so far as you have different journals Who put up their own standards and they have consumers and they have reputations to uphold.
So what you have is kind of a market anarchist system where people have incentives to follow objective methods and be honest in what they're doing.
Right, right. I see what you're saying about the voluntary participation side of things, for sure.
Yeah, people can get together, and that's the whole idea behind dispute resolution organizations, that people can get together with similar methodologies for resolving disputes, and especially if those methodologies are sort of objective and rational, then they'll be a voluntarily good community, I guess, or a community which can resolve the disputes that way.
So, I think we're in agreement about that, and certainly the state can never impose values.
The moment that you impose values through the use of force, except the value of self-defense, of course, then you are in a situation where you violated values, right?
If I force someone to be honest, then I have immediately violated the ethic of honesty and so on, so that would be a real shame.
I agree with that. Exactly.
And you know people say, well, when I tell them you can't impose a value system because everyone has different values, they say, yep, obviously we share some values because we cooperate in general, which is absolutely true.
But that doesn't mean that you should enforce them.
Because if people do really share these values, then you don't need to enforce them in the first place.
And if they don't, then you have no justification to enforce them.
Right. I mean, we were talking, Christina and I were talking yesterday about, no, Friday, Friday night, just about how when you want someone to do something, you have to appeal, first and foremost, to their own self-interest.
I mean, this is something that Harry Brown used to talk about quite a lot as well.
And you have to talk about how it's going to make them happy, how it's going to make their life better, and so on.
And that's why the argument from morality can be most powerful, because if people believe a false argument from morality, then they believe that that is going to be the right thing to do, to have welfare state or whatever.
And so they're never going to change their minds.
So going at their arguments for morality can be very helpful, but it's what Harry Brown, I guess, called the great libertarian offer, which was, would you give up your favorite government program if you never had to pay income tax and your children never had to pay income tax ever again?
Now, I think that's a bit of an argument from a fact, and I'm not sure that it really took off in the way that he wanted to, because he hadn't, I don't think he spent quite as much time dismantling the argument from morality, but that you have to appeal to people's self-interest.
And everybody wants to be good, and so that if you can help them to understand what it really means to be good, which is not to mouth sort of state platitudes about ethics, but to actually define them in a logical way, I think you really can get people to change their minds, at least sort of...
I've had good luck alienating most people in my life.
I mean, good luck changing a few people's minds in my life.
Well, Stefan, so far we're still doing it on Skype, and...
It's really going very well.
It's going very well.
We basically argue for morality and then we explain the model.
That's pretty much all we do.
Can you tell me a couple of victory stories, or at least one of them, that's sort of been...
You mentioned last week about the guy...
Niels mentioned, I think, two weeks about the guy who you guys were talking to, who ended up talking about a father who was a fairly aggressive guy who might have had some effect on his political ideas.
Can you give us a nice victory lap and chant of what's happened lately with the argument for morality?
Okay, well, maybe Andrew could...
Go ahead and do that, because I have to tell you, I have an extremely bad memory.
I can't remember details, but maybe Andrew can go ahead and talk about that.
Okay. Well, I don't know.
I guess we've talked to at least, I don't know, half a dozen people now or so.
It's not too many, but...
I don't know. The argument for morality is very powerful.
And what we basically do, I guess, is just present sort of the simple argument, you know, only people exist, and sort of drill that, you know, into people.
And, you know, I've never really had anyone disagree and say, okay, there is some common good.
You know, people sort of understand that, yeah, only individuals exist.
And you can present the argument, and people...
You know, I think in general are pretty accepting of and accepting of the market anarchist model for about, you know, societal organization and the DRO society.
But something that I've run up against is that when you sort of bring in the stuff about the family, and maybe it's a problem with how I'm introducing it, but I think I'm doing okay, is just that people seem to not want to really integrate these things into their own life.
It's one thing for them to think about it on a sort of conceptual, abstract level, but...
Talk about it, you know, regarding their own family, and it just, I don't know, I've met some resistance there.
But in general, I think that people are very receptive of the model, which is the important thing, because even if people don't want to, I guess, you know, bring these ideas into their own life, then as long as they're not advocating the state, I guess it's something.
Yes, I certainly understand that.
You know, the only thing that I would say, and I think I may have mentioned this in a podcast for 12, but people have a great deal of difficulty putting these things into their own lives because it's much easier to talk about the state than it is to talk about your own family or your own sort of personal experiences.
I certainly understand that people would rather talk about the government programs than my dad or my mom or my brother or sister or whatever because that's actually something that you can have an effect on.
I mean people want to talk about ethics but they don't want to live ethics and that's not because ethics are that hard, it's just because we all got raised so badly, right?
So it's like a real struggle.
But people want to talk about ethics because we're all so interested in ethics but actually bringing them to life in your own life is so hard for people because You can't do anything about the state, but you can do something about your own life.
And so people would rather stick to a topic which is really abstract, that doesn't put any onus on them, rather than say, okay, well, I can't overthrow the welfare state, but maybe I can get irrational, crazy, abusive people out of my own life.
That's something that I do have effect in.
And so there's a real resistance to that because they know it.
Deep down, the moment you start using the argument for morality, They know deep down that you're talking about their family and not the state, because nobody ever meets the state, right?
I get pulled over. I've been pulled over in a cop car like three times in my life, right?
I've never been arrested or anything.
Well, okay, once. Once.
But I was very young. Anyway, but, you know, we really don't experience the state in that sense.
It's just a bunch of numbers taken off our paychecks, but we really do experience in our personal lives some pretty fundamental corruption that we can actually do something about, and people don't want to, I think.
And doesn't that sort of bring us full circle back to the original topic?
Maybe it cunningly does.
Can you tell me how? Well, doing things that I can do to change myself and my life and the people around me.
Versus just talking about ethics as though it were some stratospheric abstraction.
It gets back to the question of how can I genuinely affect any kind of real change outside of these various discussions we're having on the board.
And that always gets me back to, well, Maybe I should start packing up the back of my truck.
Right, right.
But do you mean sort of like to move into the woods kind of thing?
Exactly. Right.
Well, I would say that that may not be, you know, and I'm not going to sort of pick on your family because I have some sort of idea about it, but I'm not going to presume any knowledge.
But certainly for myself, I can say this.
I can say that once I have gotten rid of all of the corrupt and bad people in my life, and by that I don't just mean that I wake up one morning and, you know, throw darts at the...
Board of people I know and just sort of say, ha, that's it, they're all excommunicated.
I have conversations with people and I talk to them about what I value and why.
And if they understand but then remain corrupt or remain sort of resistant to something, I'll have a couple more conversations with them.
But at some point I have to sort of stop wasting my time if there's a lot of hostility or obstructionism in what it is that's going on.
Then once I've gotten all of those people out of my life, And I am trying to bring as much freedom to my employees and my friends and my wife and so on as possible.
Right? Which means giving them as many choices and as much opportunity as possible.
And I am as nice to everyone in a productive way as possible while still sort of sitting within this sort of state layer of this sort of state prison.
If I've done all of that, no corrupt people left in my life, I'm bringing as much freedom as possible to everyone around me, and talking as passionately and positively as I can, where appropriate and when I want to, about freedom, if at that point I'm still not happy, then yes, I will go to the woods.
But I'm still on my way to that, and so far the degree of happiness that it's brought me has been nothing short of remarkable.
So right now the woods just look like a dark place full of bugs, not like a clearing of light full of freedom.
And that's kind of where I'm at, too, in those terms, is that stage where I'm kind of trying to pull people along and not quite ready to say, you know, it's not worth it anymore.
Right, right. And there is no objective way to know when that is, right?
The only thing that you can do is continue having the conversations and then when it is time, I mean, if you can get people to come along, fantastic.
I know that there are some people, and I've received emails from this, right, you know, that say, you know, there's one culty thing to your podcast, which is that you want to separate people from their families and so on.
And that's true insofar as sometimes families don't want people to give me donations.
So for sure, we want to separate people.
That's people as much as possible.
But no, I really want to bring people closer to their families, for sure.
I want people to be as close as possible, and how I want that to occur is for people to be honest about what they're passionate about, what they believe in, what they think, and really share.
And if it is a false relationship, then stop wasting your time.
And if it is a relationship that can be improved and is a great relationship, then wonderful.
You know, enjoy and grow within that relationship.
But for sure, it is the personal relationships where this philosophy takes its root.
And again, as I said in 183, if we can't do it in our personal lives, then it is going to be somewhat problematic for us to advocate that other people do it with the state, right?
So... Oh, great.
Now here's another pause. I have to find and edit it out.
Over to the crowd. Well, I think he's being very...
...to me earlier.
I guess I had to edit this.
Sorry. The idea that many collectivists have this problem where there's this choice between pursuing individual values, I guess you could say, or sort of collective values.
A lot of people look at this as such a tough choice, like, oh, do I have to You know, do what's good for the group or do I do what's good for me?
Or, you know, how do I act within the system or whatever?
But that's not a problem at all.
And it's like once people get over that, you know, and just sort of realize that, well, I just pursue values, you know, and that it's the same for all of us, you know, then it's no problem anymore.
But I think a lot of people are just stuck in this whole False, um, tension between, you know, them and some sort of greater good, you know?
Oh, for sure. That just really obscures the whole, uh, conversation, in my experience.
Like, they don't really understand that values are values, you know?
It's not, uh, I don't know, just the presence of these sort of false values just really make it difficult.
And the whole thing is, you just have to explain that, uh, There's no value there.
I don't know, that's it. Right, and I would say that...
I guess I'll sort of put this out to the group.
I was thinking of doing a video podcast.
I've got this fantastic little red leather number that I'm looking forward to putting into a video podcast.
But no, actually, I wanted to do a video podcast with a chess set.
And I sort of have this whole script worked out, which I won't put anything into great detail here.
But basically, it's sort of, you know, you pull out a pawn and you say, okay, this pawn has particular properties and so on.
And then you sort of pull out another pawn, stand it next to it and say, now I have two pawns next to each other.
Has any of their physical properties changed?
Well, of course not. And you pull out three, four...
Somebody tell me where the concept suddenly becomes bigger or overpowers the physical instances of these particular objects and so on.
And I would just like to...
I just, you know, what do you think?
Do you think that would be sort of funsy?
Because I think it's something that's hard for people to get just sort of on audio.
But if you just sort of have sort of physical objects there, I think people can see just how ridiculous it is to think that there's something like a collective.
Well, sure. I think that's sort of the value of, you know, if you look at The Daily Show or something and they show a video of, you know, Bush picking his nose, it sort of, you know, just humanizes him and, you know, sort of shows that, hey, this guy isn't really anything more than just another guy, you know?
He is not human!
But, you know, the idea is that, you know, we all sit down on the toilet, you know?
So what you're saying is that I should do this in my red outfit from the toilet while picking my nose?
Okay. Very humanizing.
Perhaps a little too humanizing.
He's not human. He's some kind of market anarchist machine.
Well, that's it for my topics.
Does anybody else have...
I'm just sitting here sketching out the backdrop for my new show.
Does anybody else have any other topics I'd like to talk about?
Yeah, I had another question lingering in the back of my head.
You mentioned a lot of times the concept of the false self, right?
And I was wondering In what way do you talk about it?
Is it a descriptive concept?
Is it a kind of battle between good and evil?
Do you have an angel on your right shoulder and a demon on your left shoulder?
So how does the false self manifest itself?
Can you describe it a bit or define it maybe?
Sure! I'll just give you a very brief description at least how I think of it and then let me know what you think.
As you know, we have sort of two adaptive mechanisms within our souls, sort of when we're born.
The first adaptive mechanism is that we have to adapt to and integrate the information that comes through our senses and logically and so on through reality.
We have to deal with physical, tangible, material, objective, external reality and that's one of our adaptive mechanisms and that's sort of what I would function or say is the true self.
Now, there's another mechanism that occurs within human beings to survive, which is conformity to the group, right?
Because both objective reality and the collective group, the tribe, have mechanisms within them that can destroy us, right?
We can fall off a cliff if we don't believe in gravity.
We can get eaten by a tiger if we don't care that the grass is rustling or whatever.
So that can cause us to be destroyed.
But at the same time, we also have pressures from within the group that can cause our physical or emotional destruction if we don't conform to the group.
And it is an absolutely telling fact, of course, that in all societies, conformity is very much the norm and conformity is generated through direct physical threats against children, whether it's religion or culture or whatever.
And so the false self is a perfectly healthy adaptive mechanism that we use when we are lied to and bullied as children to conform to things that our parents irrationally believe and impose upon us, particularly in the realms of the arguments for morality.
And so we, as children, have to adapt to our parents' irrationalities because if we don't, the direct physical threat of either the withdrawal of parental affection, which is a death sentence for the child, direct physical or emotional or verbal abuse, and the physical abuse, of course, can be physically very dangerous because you're a helpless child, so we have an adaptive side of our personalities That causes us to comply in order to survive.
Now, that's not particularly a false self, except insofar as we begin to believe the lies that we're told, right?
So, at some point, I was very frightened of my mother, and because she was physically violent, And then the danger is that you go, okay, well she's good and so she's trying to do the best by me so I'm going to conform not just because she's dangerous but because she's a good person and she's doing the right thing, she's telling me the right thing or whatever.
Now that moment where your adaptive habits for survival transition into a worship Of what is causing you to conform, the danger, the physical threat that is making you conform, that's what the false self is when you no longer are adapting because of danger, but you adapt to a false argument for morality that the person who's inflicting danger on you is right.
Now, even that is understandable within a situation where you're a child, but when you're an adult, it's absolutely inappropriate.
Perfectly appropriate adaptive mechanism when you're a child, but when you're an adult, if you continue to justify aggression that was taken against you as a child, and you continue to internalize the false arguments from morality that were inflicted on you,
and you actually believe all this sort of stuff that is your false self and that's something which is definitely going to lead you and others astray because it fundamentally rests on other people's opinions and on emotional or physical trauma but it masquerades as a universal moral rule when it is in fact just a justification for corruption and to me that's the root of social systems like the state and the family and culture and religion and so on.
Does that help? Would you say that the false selves and the true selves are agents?
Or are they some sort of helmsmen on a ship struggling for the control?
Or is it more descriptive, more a kind of metaphor we can use?
So are the true selves Do they act or do they not?
I think that they do act and I think...
I am only speaking... This is not something provable because I don't have Francois' magic x-ray machine of the mind, but I would say that in my own experience, to speak honestly and simply to people about what is important to me is often very scary.
And when I... When I overcome that fear and speak honestly, that is when I, I guess, beat the false self and speak openly and honestly.
Now there are times when that's been a real mistake, because I've opened myself up to people who are dangerous, and so that fear was actually quite healthy, and I should have listened to that instead, right?
It's all very complicated. But definitely when it comes to people that I trust implicitly in my life, like when it comes to someone like Christina, If I say something that is not true, in order to achieve some kind of effect or intended way of having her perceive me, then that is absolutely a victory of the false self over the true self.
So, for me, there is a real battle, and it has a lot to do with learning who you can trust and who you can't trust, and just following that instinct, if that makes any sense.
So you would construct a kind of hierarchy in which you have two selves battling for control and the actual self, which is the manifestation, in the eyes of the others.
Is that what you're saying, basically?
I wouldn't say that the actual...
You have two people inside of you, also.
Yeah, I mean, I've certainly...
Sorry, go ahead.
The person that acts is only one person.
There's only one self, right?
And you're speaking of a multitude of moral agents that reside within one person.
Well, that's certainly been my experience.
Maybe I'm not understanding. Yeah, that's certainly been my experience that I have a multiplicity of opinions within me and that I have to validate and it's almost like a conference sometimes, you know, where we get to sort of all, so I have this opinion or that opinion or the other opinion and so on.
And so I find that for me there is a multiplicity of opinions which to me is entirely natural given the way that I was raised wherein everybody tried to tell me what to do based on their own self-interest but portrayed it as a universal good, right?
So the priest would tell me this and my mother would tell me that and my brother would tell me something else and then the schoolmaster and then the teacher and then everybody would give me contrary but universal instructions on how to act.
And so to me it would be entirely natural to assume that there's some residual conflicts of opinions within me, and you could characterize those as selves, but they certainly are opinions that I need to resolve, and that's part of sort of learning about self-knowledge and communication.
Okay, so is it used as an analogy or is it used as a proof?
I wouldn't say that I could prove it, and I don't know that it could be proved, so I would have to put it in the realm of analogy at the moment, and based on sort of my personal experience, it's a very real thing, but I couldn't claim to prove it objectively.
Adi, if I might add something, it's Christina speaking, I just, what I, this is a question that, uh, You're talking about the false self and the true self and of course working in psychology I try to help people identify and become one with their true self and essentially what that means in psychotherapy is having people achieve freedom and freedom from External pressures and irrational values that are imposed upon them through their families and culture and society.
Freedom to make choices.
Freedom to understand that if they want to go ahead and do something that That they feel is good for the community, then it's a choice, that they don't have to do it out of fear or obligation, but they know that there are consequences for their choices.
If they're not acting with that knowledge, then they're not free, and therefore they are acting with their false self.
In conformity to other people's expectations rather than what they think is right or proven.
Right. Okay. Right.
So, sorry, there you actually have some facts.
Yeah. Okay.
Shocking. Ah, yeah, so...
It's a kind of drawing you make to explain it better, right?
In that sense? Yeah. Okay.
Do we have anyone else with a raging query?
Do we have anyone else with a raging query?
I have a question for Stefan.
Sure, Christina can pick that up.
Go ahead. Stefan, is it true that you are from the future?
Well, the only thing that I can say, Francois, is that there probably is a slight lag between what I'm saying in my room and what you're hearing over there, so for you, yes, I am absolutely from the future.
Wow. What is it like 3.6 seconds in the future?
You wouldn't believe the money I make on short-term trading.
Wow, that is crazy.
I'm not even going to make any...
No, no, no. I'm not going to make those jokes.
Nothing to do with Christina and I in 3.6 seconds.
Because that would be uncouth, don't you think, sweetie?
I think that this will need to be edited out.
Absolutely.
Oh, if I could only get it to 3.6 seconds.
Yeah.
Well, we're not actually using any words, so it's not going to be actually explicit in iTunes.
I mean...
Alright, does anybody else have any other questions that are going to get me slapped upside the head?
The block universe.
I have another question. Oh, this is Lego.
I have another question, Stefan.
What is your opinion about the block universe model, especially as it relates to the question of...
Compatibilism. So by the Block Universe model, you mean Lego, right?
I think this is going to take a while.
You know, let's talk about it next weekend because I don't want to get into a whole big new topic.
But I will definitely have to have a look at it and see if I can come up with any useful opinions.
Alrighty, now. Does somebody have the IP? Can they put it into Skype?
We had Lance, if you remember.
Lance wanted to know what the IP was.
Oh, actually, never mind.
I think I can do it. And we've got...
Now, Lance's brother is over from Arizona.
So with any luck, his...
His brother might be a pure market anarchist and so on.
Now, we have a question from...
Did I look at...
No, sorry, Nils. I didn't have a chance to look at your worldview model.
I was very, very busy this week, as you can imagine, trying to pillage all of the blood money from the state that I could, so I didn't get a chance to do as much as I'd like to, but I will definitely get a chance to look at it.
I'm going to actually be in New York for a couple of days, and so I'll have a chance to sort of look through some stuff on the plane.
No. Are there any other massive topics that people are interested in chatting about?
Because what we should do is just wait for Lance to come in and then just wind it up.
You know he's going to come in and be like, well, thanks everybody.
We really appreciate it.
I think we finally figured out Lance and why he's still a Christian.
So. Is he coming in?
Is he coming in? We don't know.
One idea for...
Go ahead. One idea for a future Sunday?
Some point in the future, once everybody's had a chance to read God of Atheists, we do a powwow on that.
Yeah, well, that would be great.
Do you want to mention a little bit about whether you're enjoying it, what you like, what you don't like, that kind of stuff?
Because, I mean, there are some people out there who may want to know a little bit more about it before they plunk down a donation to receive a copy.
Well, yeah, I'm up to about, I think, chapter 24 or 25 now.
And the thing I like most about it is how in-depth the inner lives of these characters are.
You don't often see that in books.
The content in the head of the main character typically tends to stay tightly wed with the plot.
That doesn't necessarily seem to be the case in this book, at least as far as I've gotten with it.
I think that would actually require the existence of a plot, so I think I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, I kind of like the rabbit trail as it goes down.
That's a nice way of putting it.
You think that, well, you know, I mean, I know what you mean.
I really did want to try and get people's inner thoughts, and for those who haven't read it or heard it, there is two of the main characters are two little girls.
So you can summarize what you like about my thought processes then that I dive deep into the inner lives of two little girls.
In fact, when I was writing the book, I was interviewing little girls.
I remember being at a friend of mine's cottage and his niece came over.
And so I sat with her on the dock asking her about her life in depth for about three or four hours so that I could get a sense of what it was like to be an eight-year-old girl And so, yeah, honestly, interviewing little girls. But, you know, you have to sort of have some idea of what you're talking about.
Now, well, somebody just wrote in the chat window, hey, can I borrow your niece?
Where are you going? Oh, I'm just going to take her to the docks for a little chat.
Look, I've got to tell you, the parents were sort of hovering pretty closely around that.
Of course, it's a weird thing to do.
I want to interview your daughter.
Absolutely. You always sound like Ed the Sock when you think about these sorts of things.
Did I interview any bad girls?
I actually did. That's the anarchist guy who's interviewing your daughter.
I did interview girls.
Of course, no girl is going to sit there and say I am bad.
I have two nieces, of course, that I was around pretty much constantly when they were growing up, so I have some sense of that.
Sorry to go back to Greg's original comic.
I do try and put some inner lives into the characters, because since I am trying to talk about the growth of freedom in a bunch of different, very, very different kinds of people, then it is important for me to portray how they're not free to begin with.
Does that make sense, Greg? Yeah, actually, perfectly.
And I kind of like the chapter where Gordon discovers his big idea and it's kind of a really interesting transition moment for that character.
Well, I think that you'd mentioned on the boards today that you found that to be fairly descriptive of experiences that you've had, so I can't believe, A, that you haven't shared your great idea with us, and B, it's the frustration that after you've been pounding your head against other people's smug and pompous irrationalities,
which I did all throughout my graduate school career, of course, you feel sort of just choked with the craziness of others, and I think that's One of the ways that I tried to describe how sometimes a breakthrough, or often a breakthrough that is powerful, either intellectually or emotionally, occurs during a time of great extremity, great emotional extremity.
And so the fact that he finally did experience all the bitterness and frustration of a guy who speaks the truth, or at least tries to, in a land of sort of smug and self-satisfied irrational people, I think that did really help propel him to the idea that he was sort of destined to get, I guess.
Yeah, it actually was kind of interesting too how on one level I was sort of repulsed and yet on another level completely attracted to at least three of the characters in the book.
In some ways they're exactly like me, in other ways they're exactly not like me.
And now two of them are the little girls, right?
We have a comment from Skype which says, release the inner girl.
Well, you just wait till you see my video card.
Sorry, go ahead, Rick.
So are you going to be holding up placards, too, with the bullet points on them?
It could be, I don't know.
Sorry, go ahead. So the three characters, which are the characters?
Well, Terry and Gordon and the Babblefish.
Right, yeah, okay, because I remember you posted on the boards as well that when Gordon was sort of slithering into the entrepreneur's world of crazy sales that you were just like, run, run, save yourself!
It's too late for me, but you're young, you have your whole life ahead of you.
Exactly. Exactly. Now, Andrew has said, and I think he's quite right, the only thing that I wasn't sure of is why the great idea was about democracy versus dictatorship.
They are one and the same.
Couldn't it be anarchy versus collectivism?
Now, I don't know why Andrew doesn't want me to get published so badly, because I can't figure out.
He's been pretty nice up to now, but obviously he's turning on me now, because he doesn't want me to just expose the corruption of certain kinds of family structures, but...
He also wants me to expose the state as well, in the same book.
So, Andrew, I'll tell you what, I'll write the one about the family, and you write the one about the state, and we'll see who gets published first.
Actually, it might be you, come to think of it.
But no, I've actually written another book, which is semi-fiction, I guess, called The Island, about an island that erupts in the middle of the ocean, and an anarcho-capitalist society gets founded on it, and how the rest of the world reacts, but that's still in its first draft stage, so...
I'm getting to the one about anarchy versus collectivism.
It's just, you know, I'm taking it in stages.
Sort of a gulch take, too?
Yeah, yeah, where they don't just sort of sit there and rewrite the American Constitution and call it progress.
That would be my take, for sure.
Now, Lance, did you make it in?
I think he said he couldn't speak very much.
Yeah, like I said, my brother is over right now.
Player left. So I'm just kind of listening in and stuff.
That's great. So basically you came into it just as we started talking about a book you haven't read.
Game player. Yep.
Stefan? Yo.
I have a proposition for your next conference.
Yes? You should talk about the very close parallels between belief in God and belief in the state.
And there would be many different categories we could talk about, like legitimacy, the semantic problems, the collectivist aspect, the arguments that they use.
So you're The thing is that I should basically have a show that's basically me talking the whole time.
So it's like a podcast, but live.
Well, no. I mean, I think most of us are atheists.
I think we're all well-habilitated to do that comparison.
Well, be careful because Lance is still to step over the line.
So what we're doing is we're laying a trail of anarchist cookies across the line, and what he's doing is he's eyeing them, sort of like a nervous but very brave rabbit.
And so just, you know, we'll do this one step at a time now that Lance has joined us, little bit by bit, slowly.
Thanks for the analogy that I'm a rabbit.
See, that's why I wanted to put in a brave rabbit, because otherwise it seemed kind of like a diminishment of you.
And, you know, given that I've seen your picture on MSN, I wouldn't want to do anything to piss you off, because you look like you could take me, but then the little girls in my novel could probably take me too, so that's not...
That's just too funny.
No, I'm not saying that for Lance.
It's just a general topic because it's really interesting in my opinion.
Okay, well, I think that's very interesting, and one of the things that I wouldn't mind doing is I think that I appreciate Lance's interest in our conversation, of course, and maybe what the one thing that can be problematic when you get a bunch of atheists together talking is who are like, there's no God. Yeah, really, really there is no God, and I think that it would be helpful maybe to give Lance a bit of a voice and give him a chance to To do it, and I'd certainly invite him to do it.
The only thing that I would request is that, given that the rabbit analogy seems to be holding, if he could do it in the sort of Bugs Bunny voice the whole time, I think that would be entertaining for me, for sure.
Man, what's up, Buck? See, that's just perfect, and I think that's something.
And then at the end, if we win, we could go, we killed a rabbit!
Like that. Do you think we're disintegrating?
Is the show completely disintegrating at this point, or are we still holding together?
Christina seems to feel that we are, in fact, disintegrating, so maybe we should wrap it up for today.
Engines two and four are out, sir.
That's right. That's a quote from the book, just in case you haven't heard it.
Well, listen, thanks so much.
Sorry we just got you in at the end here, Lance, but I think that you really did help close us off with a bang.
Sorry that we got you in just here at the very end, but we have been sort of going on for almost two hours.
If anybody else has anything major to say, please feel free to do so.
Sure, not a problem. It's always fun to talk with you guys and to hear you guys' point of view.
I find it very helpful and And I thank you all, even those I strongly disagree with.
Are you going to be around next weekend at all?
I think so, but I might not be because it is Mother's Day over here in the States.
Oh, is it Mother's Day up here too?
Yes, it is. Huh.
Huh. Alright, well listen, give my best to your mother.
Thanks so much for joining, of course, and thanks everyone.
It's more like my wife's mother, but thank you. I'm sorry?
I said it's more like my wife's mother, but thank you.
Oh, okay. Well, I guess your wife is from south of the border, is that right?
So you're going to get some pretty good food on Sunday.
Well, if she's a mother, she's not cooking.
That's what I'm hoping for. Absolutely.
So actually, if we did get you after a whole bunch of Mexican food, it would be a whole other kind of audio experience.
Wait, I feel it's disintegrating again.
Alright, well listen, thanks everybody so much for taking the time.
I'll edit out a couple pauses and perhaps throw in a few more ribald jokes between myself and Christina just for funsies.
And I guess we'll talk to you during the week in the podcast and I guess I won't get too many done early in the week because I'm traveling, but thanks so much and we'll talk to you next weekend.
Bye everyone. Goodbye.
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