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May 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:16
230 And May Nog Have Mercy On Your Gool...

Deciphering the confusion of emotional abstractions

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Good morning everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is 8.36 on, I think, probably roughly something like or around the 10th of May 2006.
And this morning we're going to get back to a little philosophy man.
That's the way we want to go because that's what the poll tells me.
Which is on the Freedom Aid Radio website.
On the left-hand side, we have Pulse.
And you can give me your feedback.
I aim to please.
So, we will talk a little bit more about philosophy.
And I wanted to offer you a philosophical...
You could say trick, but that might be elevating it too much.
A philosophical approach to discussing issues with people that can be very, very helpful.
And I came up with this when I was working on a novel called Just Poor, which is set in England just towards the end of the Agricultural Revolution, which is the revolution which enabled the Industrial Revolution, of course, because you can't have cities.
If you don't have excess food production, and so the privatization that was occurring in the realm of land, more important even than the privatization which later occurred in the realm of capital, so I thought it was a sort of unsung hero of the free market.
So I wanted to write a novel about the life and the circumstances and the situations which brought about the agricultural revolution.
And boy, if that doesn't make for exciting copy, for exciting dust jacket copy, I just can't imagine what would set in the exciting realm of the agricultural revolution.
So you throw Russian revolution in there like revolutions, and you've got something that you could cook with, right?
But with this one, it sounds like I'm going to lecture to you about soybeans with characters.
But I think it's a great book myself, but so far, no takers.
Anyway, in this novel, a woman attempts, who's born with nothing except an incredibly fierce intellect, tries to make something of her life, and realizes that the society officer knows God, where she's an orphan, and so on.
And so she begins to take her vengeance on society in very clever ways, and she ends up being hauled into court, and she uses an argument sort of like this, right?
So they say to her, do you believe in God?
And she says, well, I don't know.
God means different things to different people, so I really couldn't tell you whether I believe in God.
You'll have to define God.
To me what God is before I can tell you whether I believe in it or not.
Now this is something that's actually quite an interesting approach, and you can do this to...
You can do this to people who use platitudes or cliches or who are using concepts that are sort of all bundled together and really can only be talked about in vague emotional terms.
So if somebody says, don't you love your country?
It's like, well, okay, you define to me what the country is and maybe I can tell you if I love my country or not.
If by country you mean my wife, then yes, I do love my country.
But if by country you mean the land and the trees, well, then I think that they're pretty, but I'm not so sure that I would actually call it love.
If you talk about George Bush, well, I've never met the man, and so I couldn't say that I love him any more than I could say that I love Angelina Jolie.
Although I would suspect that the odds would be slightly higher for the latter, if not for a particularly long duration.
Although it does seem to be true, and I say this because I've read it in a number of different sources now, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are considering Putting the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged onto the screen, and that would be very interesting.
That would be very interesting indeed.
So I wish that I were slightly more prominent, because I would love to work on those screenplays, but I suspect that mailing them, spending six months working on a screenplay, and then mailing it to them will get me precisely squat.
So if you know them, be sure to email them the link to Freedomain Radio, and that's where my next stop will be.
We'll be working... With these people on Atlas Shrugged and on The Fountainhead.
I think I would prefer The Fountainhead.
Obviously, from a screenplay standpoint, it would be much easier.
But also, it's more about personal freedom than political freedom.
And the political freedom that's put forward at the end of Atlas Shrugged.
Not exactly what I would call a rousing intellectual success.
Certainly not compared to the rest of the book, which most definitely is.
So... This question of, well, what do you mean by what you're saying, is very important.
And it's back to the Socratic method, of course.
I've sort of put a wrinkle on it, which I've sort of found to be quite helpful.
So, for instance, somebody could say to me, do you believe in God?
And I could say, well, I don't know.
What do you mean? This word means many things to many people.
So, I'm not sure that I want to talk about God.
Let's sort of make it funsies, and let's talk about Nog.
Right, so you're saying to me, do you believe in something called nog?
If you define nog as something made of wood with leaves and branches and roots that go into the ground, and the only part of it that's living is the bark, which grows every year, then you'd say, oh, nog, that's a tree.
Well, of course, I believe in trees.
But it's sort of like 20 Questions, if you ever played that game, or Animal, Mineral, or Vegetable, which is another game that I whiled away many a dull hour sitting in the back of a Land Rover in Africa when I was a kid.
So, you just say, well, do you believe in NOG? And that can be a very valuable approach to trying to figure out whether what someone is saying is sensible or not.
Somebody says, do you believe in God?
I say, well, let's call it Nog.
And then they say, do you believe in Nog?
And you say, well, I don't know. What does Nog mean?
Oh, well, Nog is all-powerful.
Nog is all-knowing.
Nog is infinite in scope and has no body and consciousness and all that kind of stuff and lives forever and so on.
Well, the problem is that all you're doing is describing the characteristics of Nog.
You're not doing anything to prove its existence.
So, for instance, if NOG, if you say, do you believe that NOG can be logical, and then NOG ends up being defined as 2 plus 2 equals 4, then you'd say, well, sure, yeah, you can use whatever word you want.
The concepts remain the same, and therefore, the 2 plus 2 is 4.
I'm perfectly happy with that.
Or if you define NOG as accurately describing reality, then you could say that NOG is truthfulness, or something like that.
So, this is a very interesting approach, but you can't just get there, you can't just prove the definition of something by describing its mere characteristics, unless they can be verified by central evidence, as in the case of the tree.
So, if I say to you, I believe that Blufar exists, and you should believe it too.
And you say, well, tell me a little bit about Blufar.
And I say, well, Blufar is purple.
Do you believe yet?
No. Blufar is invisible and purple.
Do you believe me yet?
This is what happens when people talk about God, which is obviously so illogical and silly that it can only come from people who've had it inflicted on them, for the most part as children, either culturally or personally.
So I find this to be a very helpful approach, because then you sort of can begin to raise up the causal chain of reasoning that the person needs to achieve in order to prove the existence of a god, or an og, or ghosts, or goblins, or spirits, or gremlins, unicorns, dryads, leprechauns, whatever you want.
You sort of raise the bar, right?
So they say, well...
Nog is alive, but has no body.
And Nog cannot be perceived by the senses.
And Nog is this, that, or the other.
Well, it really doesn't do anything to help prove their case.
And it will be irritating to people who are religious if you ask them to use the word Nog.
You could just as easily ask them to use the word Poseidon.
If you substitute the word Poseidon for tree, it's going to be kind of funny, but you can still have a conversation about how you were watering your Poseidon this morning, and Poseidon's cherry blossoms are coming in very nicely, or whatever.
You can still have a conversation about it, because we don't have a lot of emotional associations with Poseidon.
Or, as Sam Harris said on a very short and, I think, a little over-jokey interview with Stephen Colbert, we're all atheists when it comes to Poseidon.
So I thought that was quite an interesting approach.
But what you do is you start to create the causal chain, right?
So they say, well, Nog is all-knowing, right?
And you say, well, I've never seen anything that's all-knowing, so...
You think that you're describing Nog in a way that makes me more likely to believe in Nog by describing characteristics.
But because those characteristics are self-contradicting, you're actually making me less likely to believe in Nog, right?
So if we go back to this Blufar example...
And I think probably by the end of the conversation, I will be speaking completely a made-up language.
But, you know, we'll get there in increments.
But if I was talking about the Blufar thing, if I said that Blufar was both enormously tall and enormously short at the very same time, and...
Blufar inhabited two large positions in space-time simultaneously, and Blufar was both square and round at the same time.
Like, I think that I'm describing characteristics that will make you more likely to believe in Blufar, but I gotta tell you, I mean, unless you're completely deranged or hopped up on something fierce, it would seem to me less than likely than that the characteristics that I'm describing would make you any more likely to believe in Blufar.
So, it's the same thing with Nog.
Oh, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-wise, all-merciful, all-judgmental, and so on.
Well, these things are all contradictory, so it's sort of hard to understand how they lead us to believe in Nog any more than...
It's going to help us believe in Nog less than when the person starts.
And then, if they try and bring some sort of physics into it, and say, well, you have to believe in Nag, because Nag created the universe.
You're like, oh, okay.
Well, you see, now you're talking.
Because now Nag could be the first moment of the Big Bang.
The part that scientists are having a little bit of trouble figuring out, you know, this bit where everything appears out of nothing.
Well, if you say that I should believe in Nag because Nag created the universe, then either you're talking to a nutjob fundamentalist or just Christian or Muslim or Jew, or you're talking to somebody who has just stumbled out of their lab with the final answer to the creation of the universe and they're just interested in calling it Nag.
It's the theory of Nag, right?
And in which case it would be like, I would be absolutely most eager and curious to hear about and subsequently believe in the theory of Nog.
I believe in Nog the same way that I sort of believe in relativity, in Einstein's theory.
It seems to be proven. So I've got no problem believing in it.
Just wish he'd named it something different.
The theory of absolute ethics.
Boy, that would be nice, eh? But...
It's important to understand that when somebody says, oh, you should believe in Nog because Nog created the universe, you say, wow, that is fantastic because, of course, scientists and some brilliant scientists have been trying to figure out what created the universe for quite some time.
Have you figured it out?
Yes, it is Nog.
Okay, well, tell me.
Well, Nog was an invisible being who snapped his fingers and created the universe.
It's like, ah...
You had me going. My hopes were up just a little bit there, but apparently you're not that keen on science and logic and so on, because that's not exactly the answer I was looking for.
It's sort of akin to saying to a kid, where did I come from?
An invisible infinite stalk carried you to our house and dropped you.
You can't even say a regular stalk because at least that would be tangibly verifiable that a stalk does exist.
But, if somebody says to you, well, you should believe in NARC, NARC created the universe, then they need to, wow, you know, okay, tell me how the universe was created.
Well, it was created by NARC. So, that's tautological, right?
I mean, so if you say that I must believe in the universe, sorry, I must believe in NARC because NARC created the universe, and I say, well, that's great.
So, how was the universe created?
Well, NARC created it. It's like, well, okay, so...
You're sort of saying, Coke is it.
Do you believe that? And in the end, you define it as Coke.
It's like, so Coke is Coke, but what's the point of arguing it?
I mean, you just took me in a big circle.
So that can be enormously helpful in talking about things with people.
And it does also help save you time, not just from a sort of philosophical standpoint.
But it also helps save you time from an intellectual standpoint.
So if you're dealing with a person who is genuinely intellectually curious and still religious in some manner, then they will enjoy the exercise.
They'll go like, wow, okay, that's really interesting.
So let's give it a shot.
And then they'll sort of say, yes, I can see that if you take the emotional overtones of the word God out of there, then...
I think that it's tricky to understand.
It's tricky to believe. I certainly see where you're coming from.
They're probably not going to change their minds right away, but it will be somewhere in their thinking.
But if you get someone who's like, don't show disrespect to the Holy Lord God above, then I just say, thanks.
Good luck with your sort of not so much with the sanity, and I'll catch you.
I tell you what, you can lecture me all you want in the afterlife.
I'll fully submit to that.
So, that is a way that you can approach things that I think can be quite helpful.
And, of course, it can also work in terms of the soul, right?
So, if they say, well, you should believe in the soul, and in the novel I call this the ghoul, G-O-O-L. Of course, it's also a play on G-H-O-U-L, because somehow invisible spirits always end up being sort of good or evil, right?
So, we've got the soul, which is a good thing, and then we have a ghoul, which is sort of a ghost, which is a bad thing.
But anyway, if I call this thing Ghoul, do you believe?
The way that they cross-examine her in the religious examination is they say, okay, so if you're stuck on Nag, because Nag is existence or life without form, then we have to ask you if you believe in the soul.
Because if you believe in the soul, then you believe in existence or consciousness without form, therefore you're a step closer to believing in a big soul, a really big soul, an infinite soul, i.e.
Nag. But they say to her, do you believe in a soul?
She's like, well, I don't know. I mean, the soul means many things to many people.
So maybe you can...
Well, let's use another word so that we don't get confused.
And let's talk about ghoul.
And they say, well, the ghoul lives within you, and it's eternal, and it has no material form, and it leaves your body when you die, and so on.
And again, she says, well, not to be disrespectful, but all you're doing is describing characteristics.
Of a ghoul. And those characteristics, unfortunately, not only do they not prove the existence of it, you're just saying, well, do you believe in foobar that is purple and spotty and can levitate and so on?
But the properties that you are describing contradict sort of everything that I've ever known or experienced.
And so... Your attempt to prove me is actually moving me in the opposite direction.
So, unless you can change tack, this probably isn't going to be a very useful debate.
And so, just to finish up that part of the story, they end up at the end.
They're sort of sentencing her, and I won't give anything more away.
And they say to her, you know, with great solemnity, because of course the whole thing's a show, right?
I mean, she's tried as a heretic, and the whole thing's for show.
It doesn't mean, it's a kangaroo court, right?
It's got nothing to do, it's like Stalin's trials of the 30s.
During the purchase, it doesn't mean anything.
It's just for the comfort of the prosecutors so that they can pretend to themselves that some sort of justice has been served.
But they do say to her at the end with great solemnity, and may God have mercy on your soul.
And she turns to them, and I think with great courage, says, and may Nog have mercy on your ghoul.
Which I actually think is, I mean, it sounds kind of silly, but I think it is actually quite an important thing to say in these kinds of situations.
Certainly, if you have the kinds of religious people around you, or you're talking with them, who are sort of pompous and smug, and we're so moral, and we're so this and that and the other, I think it is worth taking away the emotional overtones of the word God and so on.
And that, since you're not supposed to speak God's name anyway, it surely shouldn't matter what you call him.
It doesn't matter whether you call God, God, or Nog, or Flippityjibbit, or any of those sorts of things, Jabberwocky, or anything.
It doesn't really matter.
I mean, if my wife changed her last name when we got married, it did not change her nature one little bit.
It doesn't matter what you call something, the thing itself still remains the same.
So changing the name of God doesn't really matter.
And I've also sort of thought you could fell down religion in pretty much 30 seconds if you just change the name of God to Bob.
I think I mentioned this before in the Bible.
I just think, and Bob smote, and Bob said, and Bob did this, and Bob did that.
I just think that's kind of funny.
I mean, wouldn't that make you kind of giggle a little if you were a kid?
Because it'd be like, just some guy, right?
And Bob, because it shouldn't matter.
So, I mean, if, I don't know, if George Bush changed his name to Olay Fatang Fatang Biscuit Barrel, he's still going to be the president, right?
He's just going to have a slightly longer business card, and we'll all continue as per.
But when you change the name of something, and suddenly it becomes different in your mind or in your heart, then you know you're dealing with propaganda, right?
This is a balloon that, when punctured, actually vanishes, right?
So... So this can work in a whole number of areas, right?
It's like, do you support the war in Iraq?
Well, I have no problem with...
I mean, Iraq is a country. I don't like the fact that there's this arbitrary lines in the desert where you can kill on one side and not on the other, but fine.
I mean, at least you're describing something tangible.
And when somebody says war, though...
That is a term that if you change it, it shouldn't matter.
So you can say, well, I'm not sure what you mean by war.
What do you mean by war?
Well, the U.S. forces are out in there rooting out evil or whatever, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, no. See, that's not really what war is to me, and this is why it's important to not use the word that we think, that both of us think we know what it means, but we're working with different definitions, right?
We want to try and be as clear as possible.
And I want to give you as honest and accurate an answer as possible, right?
I don't want you to get confused, or I don't want to agree with you when I really don't agree with you because that'll be confusing to you.
Like, I want to be as clear as possible.
So, you know, let's call it a goo bar, right?
Or something like that. So, do I support the goo bar?
Well, what is the goo bar? Well, the goo bar is sending Americans over to kill people in Iraq, right?
So, it seems kind of like, I mean, and they're going to say, well, they were ordered to by the state, and they say, okay, well, the state is another one of the things that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
So, what is the state, right?
Well, let's define the state as hibbit-a-jibbit or something, and You can continue to go on and what it does is it helps people who are intellectually courageous and not just sort of fools.
It will help people to understand the number of assumptions that they're taking for granted when they talk about things.
And that's pretty important.
It's very important when somebody says, I support the war in Iraq, that they're automatically bundling things like, war is not murder, war is somehow different from murder, because it's not very likely that they would say, I support mass murder in Philadelphia.
I support genocide in New York.
And so, you know, if they say, and just to take the 9-11 at face value, if they were to say, well, 9-11 was a tragedy and a disaster and those guys, how could they come over and do this and so on?
Well, is it really different from what's going on in Iraq?
In fact, Iraq had never threatened the United States, but the United States had spent years threatening the Middle East directly and through its support of Israel, and had poured lots of money into the Mujahideen over in Afghanistan in the 80s and so on.
And I read off all of the coups that the CIA and the U.S. government have been responsible for engineering or aiding and abetting.
And so it's sort of hard to understand if they say, well, we should go and kill Iraqis because, you know, Saudis came over and killed Americans because we had been funding all of the corrupt and evil governments in Saudi Arabia and in the Middle East, and we'd been funding Israel and so on.
It's just kind of hard.
Like, you just want to say, okay, so the bad thing from 9-11 is that innocent people shouldn't be killed for political purposes.
Or that you shouldn't attack people without self-defense.
In the absence of self-defense.
Well, then if you're against what happened in New York on 9-11, then of course you sort of have to be against the war logically.
The only way that you can not do that is if you don't define your terms clearly, right?
So getting people to define their terms clearly is very, very important.
And if you don't do that, you're forever going to be chasing your own tail because people would just keep redefining stuff however they want it.
They'll change definitions. This happens, it used to happen with me at least in discussions of a romantic nature where we're trying to sort of resolve a problem that the definitions will just change and you really can't get anywhere until you actually define your terms with people.
So I find that...
Not using a term that is emotionally laden, that means a lot of things to a lot of different people, that has a long history, that has a lot of propaganda associated with it, like God, the state, your country, war, welfare, social security, all these sorts of things. I mean, there's a reason that these names get chosen, right?
So we say, do you support Social Security?
It's like, well, I'm not sure that I understand what you mean by Social Security.
Because some people, when they say Social Security, they mean, do you support helping old people out who can't feed themselves?
And, of course, if that's what you mean by Social Security, then we're not talking about a state program at all.
We're talking about charity, in which case, yeah, absolutely.
I would be more than happy to give money to people who have, you know, sort of through no fault of their own, ended up on the door of poverty and need help.
Sure, right? So when you talk to people, it's just so, so important to get them to understand their terms and to get them to understand what it is that they're taking for granted.
Because if people say, well, do you support Social Security?
And you say, yes, because I like helping old people who can't feed themselves, then you're not getting anywhere if what they mean by Social Security is the government holds a gun to people's necks, takes the lion's share, blows it, and puts an IOU into the future for the recipients of Social Security.
Well, that's sort of hard to support, right?
And anybody who understands it in those terms is going to have a tough time supporting it.
So I think it's just so important not to assume that you have any idea what people are talking about.
If somebody says, do you believe in God?
And you say, what do you mean by God?
Well, God is the affection that we feel to people that we hold in high regard.
Right? It's like, oh, so God is love, right?
So basically you're using the word God where I would use the word love.
Well, yeah, you and I are brothers.
Absolutely, I believe in love.
And I'm not going to burst into song, but don't get me wrong.
The temptation is there. But...
It's sort of important to understand that most people don't have a clue what they're saying.
They're just wielding these emotional words that they grew up with that don't mean anything other than they've had a huge amount of emotional energy poured into them, right?
So, you know, do you love your country?
Well, what do you mean by my country?
Do you mean freedom?
Yeah, if you're going to use the word country to mean freedom, Then, yes, I do love my country, but I'm not going to talk about it that way because we already have the word freedom that's actually less confusing to people.
Do I love freedom? Yes, I love freedom.
I've got two and a quarter-odd podcasts talking about how much I love freedom.
So, yes, we're brothers, so I love freedom, but you're using the word incorrectly when you say my country because we already have the word freedom, which is less confusing to people.
And, you know, when it comes to do you support the war in Iraq, it's like, do you support the troops?
It's like, well, I'm not sure what you mean by support, and I'm also not sure what you mean by troops.
There are, as we can imagine, I mean, just to sort of take the thin edge of the wedge with people, there are some real nutjobs over there in Iraq who are killing people, and we've seen footage of it, who are just sort of killing people because they're sociopaths, right?
I mean, that's not inconceivable that the army might hire somebody who actually really likes violence.
I mean, it's not absolutely outside the bounds of what is possible within reality, right?
And then people would say, well, yeah, I guess it could be the case that There are a couple of nutjobs out there in the army who are sort of loose cannons and so on.
It's like, okay, well, let's just say that I'm going to start off by saying I don't support those guys.
I don't really support people who join the army because they want to go and shoot people.
And torture people and so on.
Like, I don't support Lindy England.
I mean, let's start really at the bottom of the heap of moral corruption.
And I don't support that guy who was there who, you know, she had a kid by or whatever.
I don't support those people.
Do I support my troops?
I don't support those guys.
Like, can we at least agree that we don't support the sociopathic murderers and torturers and so on, right?
Well... Because the problem is when people say, the troops, right?
I mean, all that you get are these army videos of guys marching nobly into a sunset and, you know, cradling children and throwing them candies and, you know, being all of the pistol-whipping social workers that they can be.
And that is not something that means anything in reality, right?
That's propaganda, right?
That's just advertising.
In fact, it's not even real advertising, it's just pure propaganda, right?
Advertising opens up possibilities, propaganda narrows down, stifles debate.
So, do you support our troops?
It's like, well, I'm not sure what you mean by troops.
Do you mean the torturers and the murderers?
Of which there are for sure, some percent.
Oh, there aren't any, none whatsoever.
It's like, okay, well, you're obviously completely insane, so there's not much point talking to you.
but if they say, okay, well, yeah, I don't support the sort of murderers either, right?
And it's like, okay, well, that's very interesting.
Okay, so if somebody kills somebody outside the bounds of the chain of command, that sort of murder, and even the army recognizes that, and the torture is bad, and so on.
I mean, the army prosecuted those lunatics as well, most unjustly, of course, but we can at least agree that those guys are bad.
Well, if you're saying then that murder...
is something that occurs when somebody kills somebody else outside of a moral justification.
Then it would seem to me that we have a significant problem in Iraq, right?
So if you say, well, it's only murder if it's outside of the justification.
The justification in one sense is the chain of command in terms of murder and so on.
But, of course, the whole point of the war in Iraq was for self-defense because Iraq was going to hit with these weapons of mass destruction and so on.
Well, doesn't that mean that everyone who's over there getting killed by U.S. troops is being actually murdered, right?
Because you have killing that's occurring outside of a moral justification, right?
So if I shoot some guy and I say, well, he had a gun out and he was holding it at me, and then the cops come along and the guy had no gun and both of his arms were in a sling and so on, Then might it not be fair to say that it doesn't seem to be the case that I was actually justified in terms of self-defense and shooting the guy and it would sort of be out-and-out murder and I'm sort of lying about something or other,
right? That would seem to me to be a sort of logical approach to the problem.
And so, you know, you can just start to sort of chip away at these things just so people don't use emotional terms that don't mean anything like support the troops, right?
And, you know, another approach you can say is, well, you do recognize that I have to pay for the troops, even if I disagree with the war.
If I don't pay for the guys going out there killing people in Iraq, then I actually do end up with somebody trying to come and kill me here, right?
So the question of support is very interesting, right?
Because support indicates a voluntary thing, right?
I support rationality because I might have a choice, right?
I support my local store by shopping there.
I get to shop somewhere else.
So, supporting troops.
You can, of course, quibble with the question of the word troops, but you can also quibble with the question of the word support.
Well, what does it mean to say, I support the troops, when if I don't pay for the troops, which is really fundamentally what support comes down to?
I mean, if I say, I support my local store, but never go in there to shop, I'm obviously just sort of speaking emptily, right?
I support charity, but I never donate.
I mean, that would sort of be a pretty empty statement.
So, to say that, do I support the troops?
Well, I don't really understand what you mean by support, because if I don't pay for the troops, I get shot.
If I don't give the troops money to go and kill people, then I get killed myself.
So, I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean when you say the word support.
And that is something that is well worth examining with people because all they're doing is they're bundling all these concepts.
I can't remember the phrase Ayn Rand had, but it was something to do with this around bundling all these concepts together, package dealing or something.
I can't remember the phrase that she used, but it's basically when you just take all of these assumptions and speak about them in these sort of vague emotional terms and consider it to be some sort of argument.
And of course, most people don't have a freaking clue What it is that they're talking about, right?
So they say, do you support welfare?
And it's like, well, I have no idea what you mean by the word welfare.
Because you could mean, do you support helping people who are down on their luck through no fault of their own?
Well, yes, of course I do. Or it could mean, do you support the general progress and benefits of human beings, right?
The welfare of the nation or the welfare of the species or something like that.
In which case, I really don't know what you're talking about because you'd have to define that a lot more clearly.
Or, you know, it could be that do you support a government agency that is voluntarily funded by taxpayers?
I mean, not that that's true, right?
But I mean, this is what somebody may believe.
Do you support a government agency that is voluntarily funded by taxpayers that helps out those in need?
That might be their definition.
In which case, if you say no, then it's exactly the same as saying, no, I think that people should not be helped, and so on, right?
So it's just so important to get people to define what it is that they're talking about, and not to just say yes or no to things when you don't know what they mean.
So if somebody says to you, do you support welfare?
And you say, well, what does that mean? You say, well, welfare is when the government holds a gun to your neck and demands money from you.
And if you say no, then they'll shoot you.
Well, that's probably not what they mean, but that's, of course, what's actually going on.
But it's just very important to understand.
So with welfare, you can say, okay, well, what do you mean?
It's like, well, state programs that help the poor.
It's like, well, see, but that's complicated, right?
That's a big chunk of information to digest all at once.
I mean, for instance, when you talk about state programs, I'm not sure what you mean.
Do you mean, like, people can voluntarily give to the government, and then the government can redistribute that?
Or do you mean that the government has the right to take your income, and if you resist, they can shoot you?
I mean, is that what you mean by a state program?
You're also talking about helping, right?
And we still don't even know.
In fact, there's strong arguments against, right?
That the government programs do help the poor at all is pretty debatable, let's just say, at the very least.
And when you talk about the state, you're not talking to me, the state doesn't exist.
You're talking about, you know, this guy, that guy, and the other guy, and a whole bunch of cops.
And, of course, cops don't exist either, right?
It's just a bunch of guys in a uniform with guns who can shoot you without legal repercussions if you don't obey them, which only they have the right.
Like, there's so much that people are bundling into all of that.
And so, when you finally get through this process, and, of course, if somebody isn't interested in going through this process, then just stop talking to them because they're a corrupt and vicious fool.
But if they are, you know, all praise to them.
It's exciting and challenging.
And if then, when you define the terms well enough, you don't have to have the debate, right?
There's only a debate when people are misusing terms.
I mean, in the realm of ethics, right?
There's no real debate.
I mean, yeah, okay, we've got some lifeboat scenarios, blah, blah, blah.
But for the vast majority of things that are occurring in the world, the only reason that there's ever a debate is because people don't know what they're talking about.
Right? So, if...
I mean, there's very few people who will say, yes, I think that out-and-out stealing should be absolutely encouraged and moral.
And there should be a class of people who get to steal with impunity, and there should be another class of people who must be robbed and never resist, and, you know, all these kinds of things, right?
So, if you end up with the welfare state, do you support welfare?
It's like, well, if it ends up that the welfare state is defined as...
The sort of, quote, moral right for certain people to hire other people to go and take money from other people, and those other people also pay the bills for the people who are hired to take money from themselves.
Any who resist gets shot or thrown in jail and incarcerated forever, and that there's a third party of people who manage all this money, and only a small portion of it trickles down to the poor and seems to trap them in poverty.
Well, I think it's gonna be kinda harder to get behind that, right?
Because that's sort of the reality of the situation.
So, I think if you find yourself in debates with people, you know, always stop and say, okay, well, what is it that we're not talking about that's the same thing?
Every single human being is a libertarian when it is defined for them in a way that is clear.
And statism is all just fog, right?
It's all just mental nonsense.
And statism is false, right?
I mean, it's just emotional nothings.
It's exactly like religion in that sense, right?
So I think it's just so important to define things so that you can reach agreement with people.
And I find this is much more useful than something like, well, what kind of, you know, are you a blue or red or green personality type and what approach should I take?
I don't think any of that is necessary at all.
I think it's just important to get people to define what it is that they're talking about so that you can all end up agreeing because we all agree that violence is bad.
I mean, it's a pretty common thing, even if people practice it, like they beat up their husband or whatever.
Then they still are going to say that violence is bad.
I wish he didn't drive me to it, right?
So just define the terms and people will absolutely fall into your lap, and I hope that that's been helpful.
If it has, feel free to come by and donate at freedomainradio.com.
I really appreciate it. And to those people that I sent the God of Atheists to, terribly sorry that a few of the pages were missing.
I guess the file got corrupted, but I had a backup, so we'll send that off to you today.
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