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May 26, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:37
253 Nuclear Infidelity
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Good afternoon, people.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
Friday afternoon, heading home for a weekend with my baby.
And I had a joyous, joyous four-hour meeting today with an auditor from the tax agency in Canada who is reviewing our company's application for R&D tax credits.
Holy, you want to talk about the invasive and ugly side of petty bureaucracy, and I'm not sure that there is another side.
But, of course, he's all about cooperation, while, I guess, close to half a million dollars lies in the balance.
And, boy, the power that these petty people take based on their ability to snap their fingers and have people shoot people really is quite astounding, and what a long meeting it was.
I'm more than happy to do what I can to get the money back that we've paid in taxes, but it is fascinating to watch the soul of the bureaucrat, if that's not an oxymoron, which it may well be, the soul of the bureaucrat at work.
So... I'd like to deal with two topics this afternoon, both of which are...
I'm actually... I'm just going to be a board slut for the foreseeable future.
I'm going to be a board slave because the topics that are flying around on the board are better than anything I can come up with, and maybe it will help draw people to the board.
Now that the issues have been fixed, I want more to remind people that it was not community server that was the issue, but rather the SQL database that GoDaddy runs its community server systems on.
The logs were full, and so that's why we weren't able to post.
All hail to the masterful system that is community server.
And actually, kudos to GoDaddy.
I'd heard pretty bad things about their support, but to be honest, they fixed it relatively within a day.
And it had to get escalated to senior tech people because it was a bit esoteric.
So, you know, the pimply-faced home computer guy who's answering the phone to begin with had to pass it upstairs.
So, relatively well done.
So, I'm just going to talk about two issues that are floating around on the board.
Two opposite issues related but at completely opposite ends of the spectrum.
The first is the question of proving things in relationships and the relationship to proving things in relationships to integrity versus corruption.
Boy, there's a clear example of how to communicate, isn't it?
Okay, see, it's about relationships, but not really, but kind of, but it's convoluted, but I'll start again.
So, the issue is that one of the board members has had, I guess, a fairly significant hiccup in his relationship.
In that, in an inconclusive way, he believes that he's found evidence that his girlfriend has cheated on him.
Now, she says she didn't, and he says she did, or seems to, and so on.
Now, this is sort of what I've learned.
I've never had someone cheat on me, to my knowledge.
I've certainly had a girlfriend who wanted to be with another guy, and something similar occurred to me when I was about 20, where I found a journal and read bits of it, and she was sighing for this other guy while she was living with me.
But I was once unfaithful to, twice actually, I've been unfaithful to women, both once when I was 17 and once when I was 20.
So many moons ago now.
And one of them, it wasn't even a sexual thing, just a kissing thing.
So that was kind of kid stuff.
The other one was the tail end of a long-distance relationship, and so I'm not sort of excusing it.
It was still very bad and wrong.
But what I did was, in those situations, I don't really remember the first one too well, but in the second one, I absolutely remember it.
And what happened was, I was in a long-distance relationship with this woman, and another woman began sort of cruising me, and we ended up going to bed together, and...
I ended up fessing up to the long-distance relationship, which kind of put the nail in the coffin, but she was very upset with me.
And what happened was I took a bus to go and see her and basically spent the weekend getting my ear chewed off by a very angry woman for what I had done, which I can't blame her for.
I mean, what was I expecting?
What did I think was going to happen?
And what a dishonorable way to end a relationship is to perform this kind of distant and cowardly action to just go with somebody else.
To my minor credit, I confessed, and to my minor credit, I went and took my lumps, and the relationship terminated from there.
But I would have been a whole lot more honorable to simply have ended the relationship prior to this infidelity.
So it's devastating for the other person.
I regret this to this day, the harm, and I wrote her many letters of apology because I really recognized God, the harm that I had done, and God, what happens when you let things drift in a relationship and don't take action is that you will...
Action will be taken for you, in a sense, by the wrongs that you commit, and you don't want to get into that position.
It's a dishonorable position.
So, nearly 20 years ago now, but still, I regret the action, and I regret the effect that it had on the woman.
And so, I know a little bit about it, I guess you could say.
But... And the interesting thing is that yesterday I watched a Dr.
Phil where they talked about this exact issue.
So, you might...
Oh, fellow board member, you might want to go to drphil.com and look at the seven criteria for infidelity and its capacity to maintain a relationship beyond this.
Now, the one thing that is very important, I think, to understand in relationships is that you can never prove anything.
You can never, ever prove anything in a relationship.
Right? I mean, unless you actually catch your partner with their hand in the cookie jar, so to speak, you can't ever prove anything.
That's why trust is so important.
I mean, Christina works at home all day.
She could have an entire succession of Spanish seamen coming through the house, and I would never know it.
But that's really what trust is all about.
And she thinks that I'm going to work during the day.
I'm actually going to an office where they pay me to work on free-domain radio boards and edit my podcasts and send emails out and invite people to free-domain radio.
So, you know, obviously there's a trust issue there that I need to work on.
But you can't ever prove anything in a relationship.
You certainly can't prove a negative, right?
So you have, I don't know, like your boyfriend comes home with lipstick on his collar and he says, oh, this was just a joke or whatever, right?
You can't ever, if somebody wants to lie to you, unless you actually catch them red-handed, which is extraordinarily rare and will drive you insane trying to find that, you will go mental trying to find that.
You can never find the proof, so that's what trust is all about.
I mean, if you had proof, you wouldn't need trust, right?
So if you're in a situation where infidelity can, or you feel that it's occurring, you're never going to be able to prove it.
Thank you.
And so, what most couples do is they get caught in this issue of, you know, did she or didn't she?
So, if you find a journal where she confesses to it, and then she says, no, no, no, it was just like a short story I was working on.
Well, there's simply no way to know whether or not that's occurring.
And the most important thing, as I've mentioned on the board, from my humble perspective, the most important thing is this.
That if you have a feeling of betrayal that has been triggered by something that your partner did, so in this case a journal entry saying, I don't know, I snogged another guy or something, then...
How your partner reacts to that is the most important thing.
So it doesn't matter whether the person was unfaithful or not.
It really, really, really doesn't matter.
Because you'll never be able to prove it or not.
So if she confesses, you know, that's obviously important and that can be helpful.
But if she doesn't confess, if she says, no, no, no, it's just a journal entry.
It wasn't real. It's crazy.
I mean, it's just something I was trying to get out of my system.
It never happened. It was never real.
Defensive and putting the blame off, making excuses, downgrading your perception of reality.
You have reason to feel betrayed in this situation.
You came across evidence that your partner, your girlfriend, is cheating on you.
So you have every reason to feel angry and betrayed.
And if your girlfriend does not understand that you have every reason, To feel angry and betrayed.
If she doesn't help you through that by being contrite, consideratory, yes, I totally understand, you're totally right to feel this, I can't, I mean, it was a terrible thing that I did, whether it was just writing it down in a journal, or whether it was actually sleeping around.
Either way, it doesn't matter.
Either way, she has done something that is not trustworthy, something that has fundamentally violated a trust in the relationship.
Because, let's say, that the only thing she did was to write down that she wanted to sleep with some other guy and then write a story about how it happened and all the details and his name, but she didn't actually do it.
Well, I've got to tell you, that does not exactly get her off the hook as far as integrity within a relationship goes.
So, if I end up I don't know, like, rankly writing fantasy stories about some other woman that I'm wildly attracted to.
Well, I've got to tell Christina that I'm attracted to this woman.
Like, oh my God, this woman has just knocked me out of the ballpark.
I don't know what's going on.
We've got to figure out what's wrong with our relationship.
We've got to figure out what I'm not getting at home.
We've got to figure out, am I having a midlife crisis?
What is going on that I just can't stop thinking about this other woman?
Of course it's going to hurt her.
Of course it's going to hurt her.
But it's going to hurt her a lot more if she finds out that this occurred and I didn't tell her.
Because then you have no idea what your partner is keeping from you.
If I'm wildly attracted to some other woman and I'm flirting and I'm not doing anything that you could get nailed with in a court of romantic law or something, but I'm sort of inappropriate, I'm making sexual jokes, I'm spending long lunch hours talking with the woman and listening to her complain about her relationship or whatever, and I'm wildly attracted to this woman, then if I don't tell Christina, then there's going to be a huge issue.
Huge, huge issue. Yes, it's going to hurt Christina if I tell her, but how much is it going to hurt Christina and how much is her trust going to be violated if she finds out that this was going on for some time and I never told her?
How is she going to trust me in the future?
How is she going to know what I'm thinking?
This is why it's so important to confess.
If you get caught, then the person never knows whether or not you're sorry for doing it or just for getting caught.
This is why when I talk about parents, if you have to confront them, then it's too late.
If when they get old, they're suddenly like, oh, we're so sorry about how we treated you as a child.
Well, now they just need you to take care of them when they're old, so it's too late.
They didn't bring it up. You bring it up and you say, you know, I'm really angry about you, what happened in childhood, blah, blah, blah.
And they're like 60 and they know that they're going to need you for the next 30 years to wipe their asses.
And suddenly they're like, oh, we're so sorry, we're wrong.
My childhood this, and oh, I didn't know, and I... We did the best we could, but we're so sorry.
Well, it's too late, right? I mean, if they didn't sort of bring it up when you were five, saying, you know what?
I yelled at you the other day.
It was pretty unfair. Let's talk about it.
Or when you're in your teens or your 20s.
If you're the one who has to bring it up, and then when they're in a vulnerable position, they say, oh, I'm so sorry.
It is exactly the same thing as if you find out that your partner has betrayed you in word or in deed or in mind.
You catch them, then it's about a hundred times worse in terms of regaining trust than if that person just says to you, something weird is going on with me.
I'm really sorry to bring this up and I'm really sorry that it's happening to me, but I'm more frightened of what is going to happen to our relationship if I don't bring it up with you.
I'm more frightened of how it's going to hurt you if you find out or if I do something stupid.
I've got to talk to you about this because I have this enormous problem.
That is interfering with my enjoyment of the relationship, and the last thing I wanted to do is to hurt you worse than the fact that I have this problem.
That's the honorable way to deal with it.
Now, if you do get caught, like let's say, I don't know, I write some short story about banging this woman like a herd of Vikings, and how attracted I am to her or whatever, and I talk about it, write it like it actually happened, and then I say to Christina, no, no, no, no, it was just a story, it's not real. Well, Christina's going to feel betrayed.
She's going to feel betrayed.
Now, if Christina were to make the mistake of trying to figure out whether it actually happened or not, which I don't think she would, I think she would talk about her own feelings of betrayal, and we focus on whether it happened or not, then we get diverted from the actual occurrence, which is that there's a betrayal regardless of what happened.
There's a betrayal regardless of what happened.
So with relationships, you don't want to focus on non-empirical, non-provable facts which led you to be susceptible to the other person's falsehoods.
You want to deal with your own feelings.
Don't deal with what the other person is saying.
Don't deal with what the other person is telling you, whether it's true or false.
Deal with the fact that you feel betrayed.
And how do you feel the other person is dealing with your feelings of betrayal?
So if Christina walks into it and says, I feel so betrayed, I'd be like, oh my god, what happened?
And if she sort of pointed this, that, or that, it's like, oh my god, the last thing I want you to feel is betrayed, but I did this, this, and this, so there must be something that I haven't figured out about myself, that I'm causing these problems.
Oh my god, it's terrible.
I'm so sorry. What can I do?
Let's talk about it all night, all weekend.
What can I do to make it better for you?
I'll go into counseling.
I'll figure out what's going on with me.
How is the person reacting to the fact that you feel betrayed?
That's one option. It's to step up to be a man or a mature man or a mature woman about it.
To step up, to take ownership, to deal with the issues, to be rigorous with your own self-examination, to figure out why this occurred, why you were attracted to someone outside of a relationship in any sort of significant manner, why you didn't tell your partner, why you wrote it down, why when the other person found out you didn't do this.
You've got to figure out all of this kind of stuff.
It's got to be complete Transparency.
You have got to be completely transparent then from here to the end of time, and it could be a lifelong sentence.
That kind of betrayal and the ramifications that it brings to bear on a relationship can be, as Dr.
Phil once mentioned, it can be a lifelong sentence.
You might have to be prepared, if you've done it, to lose every fight for the next 50 years.
Now, If that's sort of the one choice that you can make, if you've done something to hurt someone you say that you're going to love, right?
Now, this is not something that happens with our parents.
Sadly, parents never do this.
So, this is not something that we learn how to do at all, I mean, even remotely.
What happens is that people say, when you say, I feel betrayed, and people all learn this from our parents and our teachers, We say, oh, I feel so betrayed, I feel angry.
And they say, oh, you're wrong.
Oh, come on, don't be silly.
Oh, look, I didn't, that's not what I meant.
That's not what happened. Don't overreact.
Don't be such a, oh, my God, don't be so paranoid.
You'll get all of this kind of bullshit coming out all over the place.
Because when we have hurt someone, the choice is we either look inward and say, wow, I'm not living up to my values.
I'm not living up to what I'm capable of.
I've done a bad thing.
Doesn't mean I'm a bad person.
I've done a bad thing.
And I really am in the wrong here.
And I need to, to some degree, and I think this is a pretty relevant term, you need to throw yourself on the other person's mercy.
You need to say, I've really hurt you.
I'm so, so, so sorry.
I have no defense.
I'm going to do these 50 things for the next six months to figure out what the heck I did so that you can trust me again.
But that's not what people do.
What people do is say to the other person, you're wrong, you've misunderstood, you're overreacting.
You've got issues. That's not what I did.
You don't trust me. You need to trust me.
I'm not acting in an untrustworthy manner.
You are untrusting.
You have the issue.
The best defense is a good offense, right?
So, it doesn't matter what they did.
It matters how they react to your feelings of upset.
If they're caring, and they're nurturing, and they're sorry, and they throw themselves on your mercy, and they make commitments and follow through on those commitments on what it is to do to feel better.
If they don't blame you, if they don't make excuses, if they don't blame some external factors, I was drunk, I was lonely, you weren't being attentive, or whatever.
If they do any of that stuff, then they're just sociopaths, and for God's sake, open the bomb bays and let them go.
So it doesn't matter what happens in relationships.
What matters is, how do people react to what happens?
So if you're legitimately upset and hurt and angry, how does your partner react to that?
Because you can't prove anything in relationships.
All that can happen is you can note how people treat you.
How do people treat you?
And the best way you get that is out of your gut.
Your gut will tell you.
It'll sum up everything.
All the little details.
This is why it's so important to be consistently kind, generous, and wonderful in a relationship.
Because every time you're snarky, every time you snap, every time what you're doing is you're putting one little weight on the negative side of the teeter-totter.
I don't know, what do you call it in North America?
The seesaw.
I don't know. I think, you know, two kids either side, pivot in the middle, fulcrum in the middle.
So every time you're snarky, every time you snap, every time you're moody, every time you're distant, every time you're not fun to be around, every time that happens, you're putting one little more weight on the negative side of things.
And what happens is, at some point, your partner...
The pivot will just occur.
It's like a deposit.
It's like a bank account. Every time you're kind and nice and generous and sweet and loving and affectionate and strong and brave and courageous and honorable and have integrity and all that, charming, and let her come first, all of that kind of stuff, Is little deposits into the bank, right? All these little details, right?
Deposits into the bank. You came home, you saw that the dishwasher was full.
Did you empty it? There's a little deposit in the bank, right?
You got to do all these little things in relationships.
And then every time you're snarky, you're mean, you're selfish, you're upset, you're cold, you're distant, you're mean, whatever, then you're taking withdrawals from the bank.
What you want to do is make sure that you're always so far in the black that it's not even funny.
Once you go bankrupt, it's all over.
Then the whole bank account shuts down.
You go bankrupt, you don't get a credit card, so to speak, and you have to pay cash for the next seven years.
So, what happens is your gut will tell you what that bank account is with Your relationships.
All of them. All of your relationships.
You've got a gut sense of what your account balance is.
No human being consciously can figure out.
We wouldn't be able to do anything else with our lives.
You can't consciously figure out and say, Oh, this is good stuff.
This is a plus. This is five bucks into the account.
Well, that was bad. That's $4.50 plus a little bit of interest.
That's bad. That's negative. This is why we have an unconscious.
This is why we have a gut feeling.
This is why we have instincts.
This is why we have emotions.
They'll sum it all up for you, good or bad.
Now, what happens is, though, and this is part of the whole grow a pair philosophy.
It's the gap philosophy, which Christina and I have joked about a number of times.
But the whole idea of growing a pair is to trust your instincts.
Trust your gut.
Your gut will tell you whether the relationship is good for you or bad for you, whether it's making you happy or unhappy.
And if you're fussing then back and forth and overthinking and trying to comb over and trying to prove this out of the other, well, don't.
Because it'll never work for you.
You're using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
It's like trying to use a shovel to build a computer.
Wrong tool for the wrong job.
You'll just break everything and get frustrated and wonder why you're not good with your hands.
So, of course, if you want to figure out how good you are with your hands, then break up with the relationship.
But It's the gut sense.
The gut sense is what will tell you the pluses and minuses.
So this is the kind of thing where you really have to let go of your conscious mind.
Honestly, you know, Luke, act on instinct, right?
You have to let go of your conscious mind, and you have to trust your instincts.
You have to just let it happen, because I can tell you, every single relationship that I had before Christina's, there was a moment where that last withdrawal occurred, and it was like, bink!
Done. Now I am done.
But what happened was I kept overthinking everything beforehand and stayed in too long.
And what did that do? Well, it wasted time.
It meant that I was that much further away from meeting the woman of my dreams.
Because she wouldn't have been the woman of my dreams if I hadn't learned how to trust my instincts.
You don't just magically come across someone and then they're perfect for you.
Christine and I have had to work at our relationship like everybody else.
But because we've gotten the corrupt people out of our lives, we are free to work at it without contradiction or guilt or insecurity.
We can just work on our relationship where it needs to be worked on on occasion, openly and honestly.
So you just trust your gut.
Your gut will tell you. You can't think about these things.
You can't say, ah, I've got a catcher in this lie, or I've got a catcher in this, or that, or the other, or, well, we have this fun time, but we have this bad time, and who knows?
Just look in your gut, my friends.
That's all you need to do.
Your instincts trust your unconscious.
Trust that whole huge mechanism of processing that's going on beneath you.
Don't worry about juggling.
Just let gravity take care of itself.
And trust your instincts.
And that will lead you where you need to go.
And if you have any significant questions and you're back and forth about a relationship, your relationship is done, done, done like dinner.
If you have doubts, you're done.
And I say this only as a guy who had like, I don't know, 35 girlfriends.
And then when I met the woman of his dreams, there's never been any doubt.
Never. Not even a shred of doubt.
We met. After about three weeks, we spent every single day together.
We got married in ten months.
After meeting, and we've been living blissfully ever since, there's never a single shred of doubt.
Once you're fundamentally should I or shouldn't I in a relationship, for God's sake, just put it out of its agony.
Don't leave it lingering there, choking and dying on the floor.
It's done. It's done.
It's done. It's done.
So, to move on to the second topic, which is a little bit more abstract, but really comes down to the same basic principle, Should people in an anarchic DRO-based, dispute-resolution-organization-based society, a no-state society, be allowed to own nuclear weapons?
Well, sure, and have I got some great models for you.
Come to freedomainradio.com forward slash nukes for sale and pick from anyone you want.
Well, of course, of course, because the question is entirely false.
So if anybody asks you this question, this is how I would respond to it and say, well, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by allows.
Should people be allowed to, in a stateless society, should be allowed to own nuclear weapons?
Other than DROs, right?
Well, it's like, I'm not sure what you mean by DROs.
I'm not sure what you mean by allows.
Because DROs don't exist.
They're just a conceptual tag, right?
There's only people. Always, always, always, only people.
So, if you're saying that DROs should be allowed to own nuclear weapons, then you're saying people should be allowed to own nuclear weapons.
Because DROs are just made of people.
Nothing else. Just people.
People, people, people. And so, the first thing I wouldn't understand is if you say, should people be allowed to own nuclear weapons?
Well, the question is, should people be allowed to own nuclear weapons?
Yes or no? If the answer is yes, then fine.
That's logically consistent. If the answer is no, only some people should be allowed to own nuclear weapons, while other people should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons.
Well, then you have a logical problem.
This is the basic argument for morality.
Well, then you explain to me, my friend, what is the difference?
Because if you say, some people yes, some people no, well, you tell me how people get opposite rights.
You are not allowed to own nuclear weapons.
Well, what's the difference?
How are you going to divide the species up into these two disparate camps?
Is there going to be a tattoo on the forehead?
Is it those born with six toes?
Is there some genetic difference?
And if not, then you're just making up silly rules that are completely arbitrary.
And also, if you say no, that people should not be allowed to own nuclear weapons in a stateless society, then the question is, well, who's going to stop them?
Who's going to stop them? Well, you have a nuclear weapon, and you're one of the guys on that other side of the arbitrary fence, so you are allowed to own nuclear weapons, but I'm not, for some reason.
You all had a vote. If I'm not allowed to own nuclear weapons, then owning nuclear weapons is bad.
But then who's going to enforce it?
Well, obviously it's going to be guys with nuclear weapons.
So you're saying it's bad for people to own nuclear weapons, and so they should be prevented from owning nuclear weapons by people who own nuclear weapons.
So it's both simultaneously very bad and very good to own nuclear weapons.
Doesn't make any sense, right?
I mean, it's completely illogical.
It's either good or it's bad.
The right to, I don't mean the ownership of, but the right to own, right?
And if it's bad, there's no way to enforce it except by allowing people to own them, right?
So it doesn't make any sense.
What you do want, as always, as always, as always, as always, as always, what you do want is a situation...
Wherein the incentives to own nuclear weapons, well, who cares about owning them, to deploy them, right?
The defense, I mean, if everybody owns them but nobody's ever going to set them off, who cares, right?
I mean, it's good for the nuclear weapons manufacturers, bad for everything that they would have bought with the money they spent on nukes, but fundamentally, who really cares?
So it's the data nation of them what we care about, really, not the ownership, right?
What do we care about the ownership?
So, the question that the anarcho-capitalist society always answers is the question of incentives.
So, what are the incentives for owning nuclear weapons?
Well, right now, if you're a nuclear power, you get two major benefits.
Like, if you're someone in the government, then you get to own a nuclear weapon.
So, you're George Bush or Tony Blair or, I don't know, whoever replaced François Mitterrand.
So you are a, you own a nuclear weapon, you get two benefits, two major benefits, three, three major benefits that I can think of.
Number one, you get to terrorize your own population into paying 50 or 60 or more percent taxation.
And why? Because you have nuclear weapons and they don't.
Disparity of power, there you go.
They can't fight back. Number two, you get to ensure that no other state is ever going to threaten you because, as I've mentioned a couple of dozen times on this podcast series, no nuclear power ever attacks any other nuclear power.
And so we know for a simple, honest-to-goodness fact that if you are a leader and you have nuclear weapons, you don't have to worry about anybody invading your country, which means that you can do, bing, bing, bing, the third thing.
And the third thing you can do, because you know nobody's going to invade your country, is you can take all of your standing armies and send them out overseas.
This is what people do.
They join the UN peacekeeping missions where they get paid for sending troops out.
Well, the troops don't get paid.
The politicians get paid.
The government gets paid. They get a stipend for everybody who's wearing their stupid blue helmet.
And... I think we're good to go.
So, I can certainly understand why owning nuclear weapons is a great thing for a politician.
And, by the way, of course, the people who are paying for the nuclear weapons are those that you've got the nuclear weapons pointed at, right?
So, it's like protection money. I mean, your own citizens, and to some degree, the citizens of other countries.
So, I can totally understand why it's important for a government to have nuclear weapons.
They get all the benefits, they get to make bazillions of dollars in corrupt bribe transactions and money laundering foreign exchange, sorry, foreign...
Foreign policy shenanigans and, of course, military contracts.
And they get to make a fortune.
So it makes total sense.
And they don't have to worry about being invaded so they can divert all of the money that they used to have to spend at least on protecting their own population into all of these foreign adventures.
So, perfectly sensible to me.
Yes, that's why you have the ownership of nuclear weapons being a good thing.
Now, without a state, in the absence of a state, Who is going to buy and build and maintain nuclear weapons?
Who? I mean, these Lex Luthor scenarios of, like, the evil private genius, I mean, it's all fine for comic books and state propaganda, but it doesn't really occur in real life, right?
I mean, there are no bald, evil geniuses out there trying to figure out how to send a nuke into California so it falls into the sea and all the new beachfront property becomes very wealthy, expensive, and so you make a lot of money.
This doesn't happen. People who are like that, they join the state.
And if they can't join the state, we don't have to worry about them.
They're at best, or I guess at worst, petty criminals.
So what I can never understand is, yeah, sure, somebody could buy a nuke, but do you know anybody who wants to have a nuke?
Really? Because I don't.
I said I could probably go up and down my whole neighborhood and say, if nuclear weapons were available for you, would you spend $10 million to buy one and maintain it and risk the danger of it going off and radiation leaks and problems and Your DRO's getting rid of you as a customer and forcing you to leave.
I mean, would you really?
And why? Conceivably, what would be the benefit in it?
It would make no sense whatsoever.
If DROs were particularly concerned about people buying nuclear weapons, then DROs would band together to make sure that there were like 10 nukes in the country and anybody who manufactured them, the DROs would pay top dollar and have them destroyed or whatever.
They would take steps, right?
It's the property damage that would result from a nuke.
It's something that DROs would not be particularly pleased at managing the effects of.
So they would find ways to prevent or avoid people from owning weapons of mass destruction.
But, I mean, you can get this stuff.
I mean, please. I mean, these are governments.
I mean, they can't even find 40% of the nuclear weapons that Russia used to have.
So they're out there floating around.
But my question is, who wants them?
Who wants them? So there's no positive benefit for you to buy a nuclear weapon.
I know everyone's like, well, you see, I buy a nuclear weapon and then I hold this town hostage and they have to pay me this and they have to pay me that.
And it's like, oh, come on, this is not Batman.
This is not Superman. This is like the real world.
This stuff just doesn't happen.
You can't think of any historical example where this stuff happens and it's not funded by the state.
So there's just no incentive to do it.
The mafia is not going to do it because someone else could have it too, right?
This mutually assured destruction thing, it doesn't just work between countries.
It works within countries as well.
So if I have a nuke and I point it at three doors down and say, pay me a ransom, I mean, how much ransom are you going to have to get to make up for the fact that you have a nuke?
How many DROs are going to put that as a license to snipe you?
I mean, they might have that in their contract.
I mean, just making stuff up, right?
But it's just not going to be beneficial.
Anybody can have the nukes, and as soon as everyone has nukes, having a nuke doesn't mean anything.
And of course, you won't know who has a nuke or who doesn't have a nuke, so nobody's going to want one.
Trust me, it's just not going to happen.
It's not an issue. We have a quarter of a billion people murdered by governments last century.
What's going to happen if people, for some bizarre reason, want to drop 10 mil or 20 mil or 50 mil on a nuke or two?
Who cares? As far as the things we have to worry about, it really doesn't matter.
And if owning nukes is so bad, then...
We want to make sure that as many people have the capacity to own nukes as possible because nukes are at their worst when you have a predefined group of people who have them pointing their nukes at a predefined group of people they know do not have them.
That's when the real abuses occur, as you can see from U.S. foreign policy from about 1950 to the end of time.
I don't think that's particularly an issue when it comes to the DRO-based society.
Yeah, everyone can have nukes. Like, if you imagine there's a society that exists where everyone can point their finger at everyone else and have them killed at a single mental command, well, everyone's going to be perfectly polite.
If everyone could think a certain word and blow up the planet...
Well, nobody would think that word.
It's just not going to happen. Mutually assured destruction is the best way to ensure peace.
And the best way to ensure peace is to make sure that nobody has an advantage.
That's the only way to do it.
That's my sort of response to that.
It's just another one of these scare stories that people come up with because, oh, if we don't have the state, then everyone's going to have a nuke and the world's going to explode and, oh, this, that, and the other.
It's just like, oh, man, you know, save these kiddie ghost stories for infants because it doesn't have anything to do.
The greater the danger of human beings owning nukes, the more you want the ownership, the right to own nukes to be proliferated, right?
I mean, that's just so obvious that it's not even worth really discussing.
And this idea, of course, it comes back to this basic statist idea that the government is full of virtuous people who know how to use power responsibly and well, and sadly, the private sector is just full of mean, nasty, evil people who have no idea how to use power well and will use it badly, unlike the noble, heroic state meisters who are just doing it all for our benefit and would never imagine using nuclear power in any sort of negative way.
And so we don't actually have to worry about any foreign policy adventures that are based on any disparities in power.
And so I guess everything that's happened over the past 50 years, from the Western powers to the Third World, just never really happened.
It was all just a big mistake and a big misunderstanding.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
I hope you're doing most excellently.
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