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May 26, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:20
252 Changing a Person's Mind

First, find out if he has one...

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Time Text
Good morning, people!
How are you? It's Steph.
It's 8.38 on the 27th of May, I do believe it might be.
And heading off to work.
It's a Friday. Short week for us.
Have yourselves a great long weekend, I guess, in the States.
We had a long weekend here last weekend, which was delish.
Except for the weather, of course, which is still a little spotty.
Christine and I bought mountain bikes this last weekend and have been really enjoying going out and shaking our kidneys loose from their moorings.
So that's been a whole lot of fun.
So I hope you have a great long weekend.
I know of at least two board members who are unlikely to have a great long weekend based on their posts this morning as of their personal relationships.
So my heart goes out to you, my brothers.
It's a very, very difficult thing to be going through.
But... The only thing that I can say about relationships that are problematic towards your true self, problematic towards your integrity, is that life is short and every moment you spend walking in the wrong direction is a moment you don't get back at the end of your life.
It is a disaster, of course, when a long-term relationship fails, but it is the kind of disaster that can save you.
The only most important thing to learn from relationships, in my humble opinion, is to look back at the signs that occurred early on that help you to understand the corruption that you experience later on, and to vow to yourself, look yourself in the mirror and vow to yourself and shake your fist at your false self.
That blinded you to these clues, because in my experience, and I've had some experience with relationships, the corruption that you have experienced was evident at the beginning.
If you think back and you're really honest and rigorous with yourself, it was evident at the beginning.
And the only thing that you can do to turn this...
Disaster into progress is to find those signs, to be honest about your susceptibility to them, and vow that you will never let that happen again.
And then you can turn this disaster into a positive.
So when I had a seven-year relationship in my early 30s, When I was honest with myself, and it took a little while, I did see the problem signs from the very beginning.
And it's just a matter of saying, yes, I have a susceptibility to those signs.
I have a weakness for X, Y, and Z. Maybe the woman is very pretty.
Maybe the woman had other characteristics that appeal to you, and you decided not to have any deal-breakers with her.
But the fact of the matter is, there were deal-breakers that showed up years or over a decade later.
Just make sure that you don't let that happen again.
That's the best way to turn this disaster.
Everything in life, with the exception of spontaneous beheading or combustion, everything in life that is a problem can be turned into a solution.
But it's not emotionally easy to do it, which is why most people don't.
But I'm sure that the people on the board are made of pretty stern stuff because the work we do is pretty challenging.
So I would say the false self that led you down this path of these relationships that were significantly negative, you need to wrestle that down and you need to see it more clearly.
So that it doesn't happen again, because the last thing you want to do is to run from one problematic relationship into another.
That will be your tendency, as it was my tendency for many years.
And the only way out of that is self-knowledge and...
To stop using relationships as a way of normalizing or covering up or bypassing the pain of early childhood experiences.
So keep me posted or keep us posted.
My heart goes out to you.
Big hug. Best wishes, of course.
And take comfort that there are people out there that are rooting for you.
We may not be in your living room, but you are in our thoughts.
Keep us in the conversation.
This podcast, this series, this website that we have is about personal and political freedom.
Personal always first.
So use the resources of those who care about you and who have some words of wisdom to offer.
We do sympathize.
Most of us have been there.
And it does seem like you're going down a rather black hole.
But when you bounce, you bounce a lot higher than where you were before.
And what you can get on the other side is something that is beautiful and glorious in terms of a relationship.
But take your time, learn about yourself, figure out your own susceptibilities to it, and then you won't be drawn into a similar situation again in the future.
And that is freedom, my friends.
That is freedom.
So, there's a post that was made last night.
Unfortunately, sorry, the topics that I'm looking to do over the next little while require some research, so I'm going to have to wait to do them.
So, I'm going to take some stuff that I can do in the car that I think I have down enough to do in the car, so that I'm not checking my notes while driving.
Always important.
So, the topic that I'd like to talk about today is a minor repeat with variations.
It's like the live version of the studio song.
So, the question that came up on the board is, and this is a number of people who have mentioned this, both in emails and on the board, they say, you know, I tried taking the anarcho-capitalist argument to the masses and got shut down completely, got blown away completely, got dismissed completely.
Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again, people.
Please don't go out there.
Please don't go out there.
It is 10th Dan Black Belt stuff to talk about anarcho-capitalism.
You don't have to take a baby from infancy to graduating college in the span of one conversation.
And this is sort of what we're talking about.
When it comes to getting people to understand the argument for morality, the innate evil and corruption of the state and the military, the corruption that is inherent in family, when family is considered to be a moral content entity.
Sorry, that's a pretty technical way of putting it.
When people believe that family is good just because it's family, then that gives family power, which breeds corruption.
When people think that the state or the military is good because they're called the state and the military, that breeds power and corruption.
So, getting people to understand all of that is really, you know, like, this person is going to eat, I don't know, what, a thousand meals over the next...
So basically what you're trying to do, if you're trying to take all these topics on at once in a conversation, is you're trying to get somebody to eat a thousand meals in one sitting.
Well, they're going to feel like you're trying to kill them.
So the first thing that is important to understand, in my humble opinion, when it comes to discussing this kind of stuff, is that either, A, you're going to find a brother and sister or sister in spirit who is...
The scales fall away from their eyes.
They leap up out of their chair.
They're like, God damn it!
That's right! I never saw it like that!
Oh my God! It's like I've just been shot out into the light from the cave by a sky cannon of truth and logic.
Well, of course, those are the people you want to find.
Those are the people who are imminently free.
And just needs, like, they're, all that needs to be said is, look, there's violence in the, and you might not even get a chance to finish your second sentence before they bolt upright and go, oh my god.
Now, those people are the people you want to focus on and find.
And those people are so rare, it's ridiculous.
Like, I would say, statistically, one in 50,000, one in a hundred, you may never meet one in your life.
But you may. And so what I would do and what I try to do is spend my time on people who are, you know, 95% of the way saying, hey, look, there's this last 5% that might be helpful.
Those are the people that you're really going to have an effect on.
Those are the people that you are really going to be able to change, be able to illuminate, be able to educate.
So, you know, you pick your battles, and what you need to do is not do the following.
One, it's not your position.
Somebody used the phrase, and I don't mean to pick on this, but it's an important thing to sort of get your mind around.
Anarcho-capitalism is not a position.
It is not your position.
If you invest your ego into it, like, I have to be right.
I'm right about this.
If you invest your ego into this, then you are going to lose every single time.
Even if you win, you're going to lose.
Because if you invest your ego into it, people smell that very quickly coming off you.
And they experience it as you attempting to dominate them.
That's not what you want.
It's not what you want to do.
You don't want to be like, you're wrong, I'm right, let me tell you how it is.
That's not ever going to change anyone's mind except those who are the most logical, who can look past that personal attempt of, that feeling of domination to see if there's something valuable regardless.
So, you don't want to take the approach that, well, I tried to put forth my position.
No, no, no, no, no. It's not your position.
And there is no position.
There is no position at all in anarcho-capitalist thought or in rational philosophy.
There's no position at all.
That's so important to understand.
There's no position. All there is is a methodology.
There's a methodology and that's it.
There's no position.
And if you want to understand sort of what that means in a context that's probably more familiar to you, just think of science.
Is there a position in science?
No, there's no position in science.
Newton had a position. Einstein had a position.
There seem to be some cracks at the edge of Einstein's theory to this day, so there'll be some new position.
There used to be this thing called ether.
They used to think that the world was flat.
They used to think that the sun went around the earth.
I mean, there's been so many mistakes and gradual improvements in science that it would be crazy to say that there's any kind of position in science at all.
Science is merely a set of theories attempting to describe the various natures and properties and processes of material reality, organic or inorganic, physics versus biology.
There's no position, though.
No position. There's no position in science.
There's only a methodology.
All positions, sort of quote, positions in science and in rational philosophy are conditional.
So, not only is it not your position, but there is no position.
Now, once you really understand that, once you really get that, and you might want to listen to this a couple of times, because certainly for me, it took me a while to get this into my bloodstream, because we want to stake out a piece of turf and either defend it aggressively or expand it to include other people's pieces of turf, like it's a position, like they've got to understand, they've got to agree with the conclusions.
No, they don't have to agree with the conclusions.
You're not trying to teach somebody conclusions.
So like when I was a very little kid in boarding school, we went through the times table, right?
So 9 times 8 is 72.
You chanted all this stuff.
And they didn't teach us any sort of methodological.
Oh my God, my brain has seized and my mouth is following.
They didn't teach us anything methodological.
For some reason, I can only say the word methodological.
Oh my God, I'm having a seizure.
I better pull over. Oh, anyway, I'll come back to that.
For some reason, the shorter form of methodological is escaping me at the moment.
But they didn't teach us any of that.
What they did was teach us rote.
So we just had to learn up to 12 times 12.
We just had to learn it.
And so we could just sort of repeat it in our sleep.
And that was the way that they tested us and got us to get this sort of first round of math.
Now, after that...
They began to teach us this methodological approach.
To understanding math.
So that we learned how to do long division, long multiplication.
So that then we could take sort of any sum and process it.
So the first thing they taught us was, you know, this rote conclusions.
And the second thing they taught us was this methodological approach to figuring out anything we wanted on our own.
Now, if you're at the stage of teaching conclusions, right?
State is evil.
Taxes are evil.
Well, those are all conclusions.
And if people don't understand the methodology, then they're absolutely going to reject your conclusions.
See, remember, everybody views the truth the way that they have achieved the truth.
Everybody views how everybody else achieved the truth as how they achieved the truth.
So, given that everybody believes that the state is good because of propaganda, deep down they know you pick your propaganda and stick with it.
You have loyalty to propaganda, not to truth.
The truth is the opposite of propaganda.
Propaganda is all about teaching conclusions and letting people figure out their own methodology.
Ah! I did it! Methodology!
Ah, the blood is flowing back to that one little brain cell that holds that word.
So, what propaganda does, it teaches you the conclusions, and then whatever methodology you want to figure out to get there is completely up to you.
Here's your destination, you can get there any way you want, doesn't matter, right?
And the destination is united with the ethics, so the state helps the poor.
Without the state, the poor will starve in the streets, and therefore anybody who opposes the state redistribution programs is selfish and evil.
They're like the Gordon Gekko.
I mean, that's what...
All of these conclusions are taught, and then a moral is thrown, and an impossibility of any other solution is thrown.
I mean, this is all the package deal of propaganda.
So, if you say to someone, well, the state doesn't help the poor, and the poor will be helped in other manner, well, they're already inoculated against that.
Because they've had 20, 30, 40 years of propaganda about how you're just wrong.
And, of course, what they think is that you have achieved your conclusions the same way that they have achieved their conclusions.
Now, the way that their propaganda was inflicted upon them because other people wanted to and want to continue to dominate them.
So people are taught about the virtue of the welfare state so that people can continue to rob them and they'll smile and cheer as their pockets are rifled through as a gun's held to their cheek.
I mean, that's the sickening, the sheep licking the knife that cuts them open situation that the false arguments for morality always end up, right?
So they were taught propaganda because other people wanted to dominate and exploit them.
So everything that they believe is a justification for and a tool of exploitation and domination.
Over them from others. So when you come up with a theory, and they will experience that, right?
They will divert all of their feelings of humiliation and feelings of being subjugated and controlled and humiliated and bullied.
They will divert all of that to you.
They will transfer all of those emotions to you.
So they will feel that you are attempting to bully and dominate them and so on.
So you can't conceivably ask them to take on all of this at once.
Now, it's up to you whether you think it's worthwhile doing this at all with these people.
I personally don't think it is.
Now, if I'm really bored on a plane, yes, I will have a go at it.
But I generally don't find it worthwhile talking to these people.
The real question is, you know, think of yourself as a vocal coach.
Well, you can make anybody sing better who's not absolutely tone deaf, but you can make anybody sing better, and you can spend years improving someone's voice, if you want, by helping them to, well, but it all comes down to the physical instrument that you've been born with.
And as an amateur singer myself, I know a little bit about this.
I took singing lessons for a couple of years in theater school, and I sort of was in musicals, and this and that.
If you are a vocal coach, you want to pick somebody who's got an innately great instrument.
Because if a vocal coach were to take me on, yeah, they'd make me sound a little better over time.
But fundamentally, they should be training someone like Celine Dion or Freddie Mercury or Bono or Luciano Pavarotti or whoever it is that's got a great natural instrument to begin with.
And just helping them refine that and further advance that.
So, no matter how much training I'm going to get, I'm never going to get Freddie Mercury's singing capacity.
You're born with that. That's just your innate vocal instrument.
That's your physiology.
And it's the same thing if you're an Olympic coach, then you don't want to take some guy who's a couch potato and say, I'm going to make you into a runner.
No, what you want is you want to take the fastest conceivable runners in all of the high schools you go to visit, and then all of the universities you go to visit, you want to pick the cream of the crop, the people who you know are naturally motivated to be runners, who are lean, who have the physique, who have the physiology, who have the natural heart pump capacity, and you want to train them to go from 99.9% to 99.99%, right?
That's the real value, because that's the difference between winning and losing at the most advanced levels of sport.
Now, if you take some couch potato, and you train them, and you do this, and yeah, you can get them from 10% to 80%, maybe, or 70%, but who cares?
Because nobody competes at that level.
If they try and compete, they're going to get blown away anyway, so you're spending all of your time getting somebody from being a couch potato to a decent runner, rather than getting a great runner to be a gold medal runner.
So, I think that this is very, very important to understand that you've got to look at yourself as an Olympic-level coach.
When you're a football team, you pick the creme de la creme of the college football circuit.
You don't just sort of grab some guy on a bus and say, I'm going to train you into being a great football player.
Sure, when you're done with them after a year or two, they'll be a much better football player than when they started, but why would you want to do that?
It doesn't make any sense. So, I would say that you've really got to look at it like you're an Olympic coach and you're actually auditioning people.
About making them into gold medal athletes.
That's certainly how I look at it.
I look at all you people as incredibly gifted athletes who need some additional coaching.
Any competent sports coach will tell you that all you're doing is refining somebody's innate talent.
You're not manufacturing that talent.
You're not taking somebody who's average and making them great.
You're taking somebody who's great and making them even better.
So the real coaching is not that big a deal, right?
So the woman who was on, Catherine I think her name was, was on American Idol recently, came in second, I think unjustly, because I think she had the best set of pipes and the best presentation.
She is a little bland, and the other guy jumped around a little more, but her mother was a vocal coach.
This is the woman you want to spend time investing in coaching because she's got a naturally great set of pipes.
What you want to do, in my opinion, is when you start to look at somebody who is a potential person who can open up their minds and really learn something and reproduce it and become a better parent and transfer it to their kids, who you're going to have great and exciting conversations with, who you're going to really enjoy, well, that's somebody who's a naturally great athlete.
Now, in the future, next generation, generation, who knows, right?
In the future, everybody will understand these ideas and everybody will have a great capacity for natural athleticism in the same way that everybody kind of understands the scientific method now.
Even if you're not a scientist, you still respect the conclusions.
But we're not there yet.
We're not there yet.
So when it comes to talking to people, you want to look like you're auditioning.
Are people worthy of this conversation?
That's sort of an important question to ask.
So our good friend Spear, who called me arrogant for having doubts about the Exile, saying that there was no proof, no such thing as the existence of God...
I haven't heard from him for about a week since the podcast where we talked about his conclusions, so he may be somebody who has decided to abandon the conversation.
I hope not, but perhaps he is.
Well, that just means that he couldn't make it to the final tryouts, right?
So it just means that he decided to drop out of the training because he sort of pulled the muscle, so to speak, or he just didn't want to do it.
He wanted to, I guess, stay as the best athlete in a small team rather than the best athlete around the world.
So, when you're talking to people, the impulse, I think, or at least the impulse that I felt when I was younger...
Is this. Oh God, please believe me when I tell you.
I am desperate for you to understand this.
Well, don't do that. That's going to come across as culty.
It's going to come across as, I'm not sure, so I want you to believe me to shore up my own doubt.
And also, that I have a position that I want to transfer to you, that I want to replace your useful propaganda.
The people who, as I mentioned yesterday, the people who believe all this statism and believe in the virtue of the family and so on, They get all of the positive reinforcement in the world.
They're happy as pigs, wallowing in their own feces, because they get all the social reinforcement, they never have awkward dinner conversations, they can dominate uncertain questing souls like ourselves, they're all doing well, and they never have any conflicts about enrolling in the profits of state power programs, and so on, and they get to express opinions that fundamentally nobody is going to find objectionable.
They may get into some arguments if they're a conservative or a democrat, but it doesn't really matter that much.
Everybody's accepting the power of the state.
Those people are looking at you saying, okay, so I've got all this useful propaganda that gets me along well in society, that lets me get along with my family and my friends and my work, and makes me predictable and understandable and beneficial to people and so on.
And you want me to replace that with your propaganda that's going to make me a loner and an outcast and bitter and excluded and desperate and lonely and I'm going to start to...
Convert my family and friends?
Basically, they look at you like they would look at a Seventh-day Adventist, because that's how they believe knowledge is gained, is propaganda, right?
So they're looking at you as some desperate, lonely, excluded cult member trying really badly to convert them to a cult that is going to destroy their family life and their economic opportunities and their business contacts and is going to put them in the same desperate, lonely, sad position of trying to convert excluded cult member trying really badly to convert them to a cult that is going to destroy their Well, I've got to tell you, I wouldn't take that deal.
Just imagine if some Seventh-day Adventist or some...
I don't know, the Watchtower, the Jehovah's Witness guys come along and want to convert you to their cause.
Well, of course you're not going to be interested.
It's like, oh great, this is sort of like becoming Amway, an Amway salesman without even the financial profit.
Well, there's no benefit in it to me.
So, you're just not going to have any luck.
And it's going to be humiliating. And the reason that I say don't do that...
It's because it's going to make you feel negative, frustrated, angry, bitter.
You're going to feel despair.
You're going to feel contempt.
You're going to feel like you're being pushed off a cliff and you're lonely.
Don't do it. These ideas are designed or they're supposed to make you happy.
It's sort of the basic idea.
Now, if you're out there pounding back and forth on the brick walls of other people's indifference and contempt for you, it's not going to make you happy.
So don't do it. The purpose of your life is not to change people.
The purpose of your life is not to be a libertarian warrior for truth.
The purpose of your life is to be happy.
So what you want to do is not have a position.
You have no position. You have no position at all.
Once you have a position, Then your communication appears to be dominating others.
And also you've got to work empirically.
You know, you know, you know that the vast majority of people are irrational and do not come by their beliefs honestly.
I mean, you know. You absolutely know that.
I mean, just look at your own life. Look at your family.
Look at your history. Look at your friends.
Look at everyone you know. Everyone you've ever met.
How many really logical and curious and rational and scientific people do you know?
One? Two? Maybe none?
I mean, just look at the statistics.
You're missing something fundamental about the philosophy if you get frustrated by the fact that people are irrational.
To be frustrated by the fact that people are irrational is itself irrational.
So it's the pot calling the kettle black.
Oh, people are so irrational, I hate them so much.
I'm so angry, so frustrated that people are irrational.
Well, you're being irrational.
They are irrational.
And we know that. The philosophy perfectly predicts that public schools are going to turn people into irrational and pompous tools of propaganda, tools of power.
And everyone's going to run around singing the praises of the knife that stabs them.
I mean, the philosophy of any rational philosophy, any empirical philosophy is going to perfectly predict that.
And so, to be frustrated by something that a philosophy absolutely predicts and tells you is going to be the case...
It's so irrational I can't even tell you.
I mean, if people were rational, if people were rational and able to have these conversations, what complaint would we have against public school?
I mean, other than the ethical complaint.
What practical complaint would we have?
And if people who were in public school were taught to be very, very rational, then something would be wrong with our theory.
And we know that people are taught to be rational, belligerent, pompous, self-serving servants of power.
And that the moment you talk to them about freedom, they're going to slam you down.
And we know that. That's exactly what public school is designed to do.
And that's exactly what is predicted by the theory.
And if it wasn't the case, something would be very wrong with our theory.
So there's something you're not understanding about the theory if you don't get that people are irrational.
And we know that people are irrational because of public schools and the media and culture and everything, right?
All of the effects that come out of that.
And families. And families, perhaps, first and foremost.
So, if you're frustrated by the fact that people are irrational, you're missing something fundamental.
You're missing the fact that we know that they're rational, that it's perfectly predictable that they're irrational, that because they are so irrational, we are motivated to change society.
And also you're missing that the first thing you need to do is not philosophize from abstracts, but philosophize from empiricism, right?
The first thing, you develop your theories from empiricism, not from me, not from any other books, not from Murray Rothbard, not from Ayn Rand, not from Nathaniel Brandon, not from Hans Hoppe, not from any of these, not from the Mises article.
You do not, you do not develop your ideas from these sources, right?
Do not do that.
That is missing something very fundamental about empirical philosophy.
With empirical philosophy, what you do is you develop theories from your own experiences first.
Now, that's not to say that these ideas can't be helpful to you In helping you to sort out your own empirical experiences.
But you start from your own experiences, your own empirical understanding of the world.
Because that's what every scientist has to do.
You have the scientific method, right?
By all means, develop the method, understand that, right?
The scientific method for approaching truth.
But when it comes to understanding the world, you start with your own experiences.
And you use other people's ideas as a guide.
But I guarantee you that in your own experiences, you have not met more than a handful of rational people.
Out of the thousands of people that you know, you've not met more than a few of them.
Now, if that's the case, then it's very important that you understand that You are not working empirically if you're frustrated by something that you know to be an empirical fact.
So, if you're a doctor, and I've used this metaphor before, but we'll take a variation on it and call it a semi-new metaphor.
So, if you're a doctor and you know that there's a plague, and the plague is affecting everyone, then becoming incredibly frustrated and upset every time you come across a new plague victim means that you haven't really understood that there's a plague, and it affects everyone, and those exceptions that you find are incredibly rare and valuable, and that's who you should focus your efforts on in this particular example.
There are people who are terminal, and there are people who are savable.
And anybody who immediately attacks you for trying to talk about the truth or your approach to the truth is somebody who's not savable, and I think that it would be important to avoid that kind of person, right?
There's a contamination that occurs as well, which is not something that you want to get involved in.
There is a real problem that occurs Which you really don't want to deal with, I think.
Which is that if you deal with or you end up with people who are problematic or frustrating or people who will make you upset about the truth or understanding the truth, that...
They will make you crazy.
They will make you feel negative.
They will make you feel depressed.
You just don't want to come in contact with that.
It's a kind of virus, that kind of nihilism, that kind of propagandistic absolutism.
Just avoid it. It's never going to make you happy.
You're never going to change those people.
It's never going to make you feel positive about philosophy.
It's just going to make you frustrated.
And why? Why? There's no point.
There's no point whatsoever.
It's like exposing yourself to a cholera virus in the hopes that you'll be able to beat it out of your system somehow.
Well, of course you may well be able to.
But why would you want to?
All it's going to do is it's going to leave you with the knowledge that you can beat a cholera attack, but it's going to leave you weakened.
You might have some antibodies, but frankly it's not really worth it.
So... Don't bother with that at all.
Now, what does it mean when I say there's no position at all?
There's only a methodology?
Well, what it means is that you get to be curious.
I mean, if you want to take one of these people on, I'm not saying you have to, I'm not saying you should, I'm not even saying it's positive, but let's just say you feel like doing it for whatever.
You're on a plane and you're bored and you want to play with someone's head.
Fine. So, you simply say to someone, well, that's very interesting.
How do you know?
You know, it seems to me, it roughly seems to me, that knowledge is a very difficult thing.
So somebody says, I think the war in Iraq is great.
Oh, that's interesting. Well, how do you know?
I'm curious, because, you know, I don't agree with you, but we probably have a very different way of approaching this, right?
So they're going to say, well, because Saddam Hussein was bad, and this and that and the other, right?
And so on. It's like, okay, well, that's great.
So you feel that the war in Iraq is good because Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, and...
Because he should have been gotten rid of and the United States got rid of him.
That's a good thing.
And so you feel that it's a good thing to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
We've saved all these lives and so on.
Okay, I got it. So...
Obviously, the truth is not something that you apply to an individual.
You wouldn't say that Saddam Hussein is evil, but Saddam Hussein's brother, who's doing exactly the same thing, is good.
The standard is not Saddam Hussein is evil.
The standard is certain actions are evil.
Would that be a fair way of expressing it?
And, you know, they'll probably be a little bit surprised, but they'd have to say yes, right?
I mean, unless they're completely deranged, then they would have to say that yes, it is not Saddam Hussein who is evil, it is particular actions that are evil, and Saddam Hussein performs those actions, or is in the category of somebody who has performed those actions, and therefore he is evil, as a derivation.
You wouldn't be this technical, but this is sort of the facts of it, right?
So the evil of Saddam Hussein is a derivation of the fact that certain actions are evil, And therefore, those who perform those actions are evil.
So anyone who performs those actions are evil.
That's the methodology.
It's not the position. The position is Saddam Hussein is evil, but that's an incorrect position.
I mean, it's not specifically incorrect, but it's incorrect if you say Saddam Hussein is evil rather than these actions are evil and Saddam Hussein has performed them, which makes him mean whatever, right?
So that's really fascinating.
So if Saddam Hussein is evil and the United States government put him into place, then obviously the United States government in the past had something to do with whatever, right?
And if Saddam Hussein is evil because he inflicts suffering on the Iraqi people, then the sanctions which killed half a million Iraqi children and destroyed the economy and caused massive malnutrition, death, and so on, Well, that's, you know, that inflicted a lot of harm.
And Saddam Hussein didn't do that, right?
The British and the Americans did that.
So the category, like this, I'm just saying, this is where I get confused.
Because I like to think that it's not individuals who are good or evil, but categories of actions.
And so if there's a category of action called harm to the Iraqi people, then it would seem to me that the Americans are, you know, complicit in that.
And therefore, they're not out of that category of evil, right?
I mean, it would seem to me, unless I'm missing something.
And also, if harm to the Iraqi people is paramount than the sanctions, which did far more harm in many ways than whatever Saddam Hussein did, then...
Those things are bad and harm the Iraqi people and so on.
And then they can say, well, it was Saddam Hussein's fault because he was so evil.
And it's like, well, but one of the categories of morality is I don't think you get to blame other people for direct harm that you caused to someone, right?
Like, if I punch you in the face and then say, well, I was raised by a violent mother who punched me, then I don't think that I'd get off the hook.
I mean, that would sort of not make sense to me, and I don't think it would make sense to many people.
We'd have sympathy for somebody who had suffering inflicted on them as a child, but we would not use that as a justification.
Because, well, for a variety of reasons, we can get into another time.
So you can't sort of say, well, the British and the Americans are killing lots of Iraqi people with the sanctions, but it's Saddam Hussein's fault because he's somehow making them do it.
Well, that doesn't sort of logically make sense.
When you get into principles and get out of instances, like British Americans, Saddam Hussein, or whatever, then you actually get some more useful information, more useful approaches to it.
And so then, of course, what they'll say is, well, yes, okay, maybe the Americans put them in there, but then that's why the Americans have a responsibility to take them out, right?
They made the mess and now they have to clean it up.
And to me, that's sort of interesting.
It's like, okay, so they made the mess.
First of all, the people who made the mess are not the people who are cleaning it up, right?
So it's like, you steal something from me and then I go to my neighbor and say, you have to give me that stuff back.
That sort of seems... You know, not very moral, right?
So... And of course, the 100,000 Iraqis who've been killed didn't cause the problem either, but their pain...
Like, it just doesn't seem to me as simple as what you're saying, and maybe I'm sort of missing something.
And so... And then the other thing that I would say is, well, why Saddam Hussein was evil?
Because he had these rape rooms, and he had imprisonment without trial, and so on.
And then I would say, well... The fact that you could say, so the principle is that if you unjustly imprison your citizens, whether you have a trial or not, it doesn't really matter.
If I have a law that says spitting on the sidewalk is a death penalty and I have a trial and prove it, it doesn't make the law just.
It's written down in law doesn't make it just.
We would disagree with the laws and so on.
There was a law that said running away, if you're a slave, running away was evil and you had to be owned by your slave owner and so on.
And we wouldn't say that that law was just, even though they had trials and did try and ascertain whether a slave had actually run away.
And so you'd say, well, there are rules.
It doesn't matter whether there's a trial.
It doesn't matter what the law is. You can unjustly imprison your citizens regardless of the laws, right?
And so... For instance, let's just say that there are certain arguments about the drug war, there are certain arguments about the levels of taxation, there are certain arguments about whatever, right?
But there are, in fact, two million Americans who are currently in jail.
I would say that there would be very strong arguments for the fact or the approach that some of those people are in jail unjustly.
Right? Because justice is not, you know, not really conditional upon a time frame, right?
So you could have drugs, say, up until the 1960s, and then suddenly you couldn't, and the initial penalties were very minor, and now they're very great.
And there's a disproportionate number of blacks who get thrown in jail because of drug offenses versus rich white kids.
Well, this, that, and the other, right?
So... There's a very strong argument to be made that a fairly significant portion, if not most, of the two million Americans in jail are there unjustly.
And, of course, in jail, as we know, people get raped all the time.
It's a pretty perpetual situation in jail.
It's not just one person on the board.
It wasn't just a dramatic device in the Shawshank Redemption.
It's a very real offense.
In fact, they call the post-rape situation in jail being on your period because you have to stuff all of this tissue up your butt because you're bleeding anally.
And, of course, if you get raped again in that, I mean, the excruciating nature of what's going on for these people is very, very hard to contemplate.
Of course, the contemplation of it is far less significant than the horror of experiencing it.
You know, so it could be said, like, if throwing your own people into jail where they get raped is a bad thing, and that's one of the things that makes Saddam Hussein fit into the category of bad people, then it's hard for me to understand how, you know, most countries, but, you know, Saudi Arabia, America, and so on, we all have the death penalty or whatever.
That there could be an argument made that if it's evil for Saddam Hussein to incarcerate his own people and have them thrown in rape rooms, then it would sort of seem to me to be the case that that evil category would then subsume other people, Tony Blair and George Bush and lots of other people around the world, in fact, all leaders, all political leaders, and warlords in Somalia, whatever.
So what you want to do is continue not to focus on the instances, but get people to focus on the principles.
So it's a lot more about asking questions than it is about putting forth your position.
That's so important to understand.
The Socratic method, the scientific method, the peer review of somebody else's theory.
If somebody submits to you and you're a scientist, so you're in some peer review committee on a magazine...
Well, if somebody submits to you a thesis, what you do is you ask them questions about it.
How good is your data? How reproducible is the experiment?
What is your methodology? How does it fit with this theory?
How does it fit with that? All you're doing is asking questions.
That's what a peer review is.
And of course, if you are submitting a theory, then everyone has the right to ask you the same thing, especially if it's a startling in theory that reverses all known causality, as is the case with anarcho-capitalism.
Perfectly valid. Absolutely what you want to have occur.
Now... If you are somebody who is peer reviewing somebody else's theory, you don't peer review it by saying, oh yeah, well here's my theory.
So if somebody sits down with you and says the Iraq war is good, you don't sit there and say, I mean logically, I think scientifically, you don't sit there and say, oh yeah, no, it's evil.
It's evil and let me tell you why.
That's not peer review.
That's not helping somebody to understand their own errors.
That's just you jamming your own, what they perceive as bigoted errors down their throat.
throat.
It's not going to get you anywhere.
What you do is you simply ask questions.
Because you can use the Socratic method, which says, you know, you obviously have a much greater deal of understanding about this than I do, because I really can't come to that conclusion at all.
And here's what I'm baffled by in terms of your position, right?
Here's what I don't understand.
You obviously have really thought this through, and you can really help me understand it, which would be fantastic.
And then the person's going to get all like, wow, this is great, Somebody actually really wants to hear my theories and my ideas rather than either just blindly agree with me or fight me.
So they're going to get really thrilled and they're going to want to teach you and educate you.
As you continue to ask questions, they're going to get progressively more irritated.
But that's fine, right?
But what's not happening is you're getting angry and they're getting angry.
All you're doing is being sort of blandly persistent and curious.
Well, how does it fit with this?
You know, somebody's proposing a theory and all you're doing is doing a peer review.
You're asking questions. You're not putting forward your own theory.
You're just asking questions.
Because in order for them to take on your theory down the road, the first thing they have to do is abandon their own theory.
Because as long as they're still holding on to their theory, you're never going to have a single opening at all.
All they're going to be viewing is they're going to view themselves as somebody who knows that 2 plus 2 is 4, and they're going to look at you as somebody who's trying to convince them in a very irritated and desperate way that 2 plus 2 is 5.
That's all they're going to experience emotionally.
So the first thing you have to do is detach them from their own bigoted opinions first.
Otherwise, it's like, blacks are bad, blacks are good, right?
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
Well, how do we know?
How do we determine it? What's the methodology?
And that's all we're really trying to get across in these kinds of conversations.
So that would be an approach that I would suggest is very helpful.
It's going to be a lot less frustrating.
And always be open to being corrected.
Right? Because we don't have a position.
We have a methodology. If somebody can prove to me tomorrow that God exists, I'll be the first one to throw myself on my knees and sacrifice a chicken.
I'm all over it. Absolutely and positively, I'm all over it.
And that's what's called being scientific.
It's embracing the unthinkable.
Maybe that person is true. Maybe we're all completely wrong.
Maybe the state is necessary. Let's go over the argument again.
No problem. That's scientific.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
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