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June 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:40
268 Debating Freedom Without Solutions Part 1

What if we waited before offering solutions?

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is the 5th of June, 2006, and I'm heading into work on the first Sunday day of my vacation.
Isn't that just funny? Sometimes it's hard to imagine that one is getting paid enough.
Anyway, I wanted to chat about an interesting idea that came to me this weekend.
And The idea was quite interesting, I think, and I'm not sure whether it's going to work or not, but I think it's well worth talking about in terms of having a different approach to communicating ideas around personal or political freedom.
Now, the idea is sort of this.
What if we no longer offered solutions to those we were talking with?
Doesn't that sound like a motivating thing to say?
Let's stop offering solutions to those that we are talking to.
But I think it might have some real value, and I'll tell you why.
For my whole adult intellectual life, I have been obviously fascinated by Socrates, as anybody who works in this arena is.
But at the same time, I have felt strongly...
Skeptical and sometimes even close to contemptuous about Socrates, as I feel with Nietzsche's, propensity to dismantle rather than to build.
And I've never understood, really, why that would be the case.
Why would you, if you know the falseness, right?
So you know the story of Socrates.
He's told he's the wisest man in the world.
And he says, well, how can that be?
Because I know nothing. And he goes around trying to disprove this idea that he's the wisest.
It's the oracle that Delphi tells him he's the wisest man in the world.
He goes around the world to try and disprove it.
And everyone he examines tells him that they know something.
And then after he continues to examine them, he finds out that they know nothing.
And I have always been annoyed at that You could say negative philosophizing or dismantling philosophizing.
And I've never really understood why he did it.
Why wouldn't he work out a positive scheme?
And I had all these, oh, he was involved in slavery, and I had all of these, a bad relationship with his wife, and I don't know, like, I mean, he was never a capitalist.
I mean, all these things that I have no idea, of course.
We really don't know anything about Socrates, other than he didn't write anything down, so of course we have Plato's version of Socrates, but we don't really know what Socrates himself did or thought or why he took the approaches that he did.
We don't even know the approaches that he took directly, but we certainly don't know why he took the approach that he did.
But I think I might have a gleam of understanding about this based on something that I was thinking about on the weekend.
And so I would like to sort of put forward this as a possibility, as a way of, you know, an experiment in examination.
Which is, I think what happens when we talk with people about philosophy, if we're anarcho-capitalists or market anarchists and we have a solution, is what happens is we are...
In a sense, offering the cure before anybody knows that they're ill.
And if we just accept that Socrates was, you know, because of course we all do follow the Oracle of Delphi, right?
I mean, there's no question about that as a source.
And so if we do follow that, then we can, I think, reasonably say that Socrates was the wisest man in the world.
And one of the ways in which he might have taken this approach to dealing with In arguing with people is that he might have said to himself, yeah, I've got the perfect solution, but there's no way that people are going to be able to accept it.
So the first thing I need to do is to create doubt in their minds.
Because what happens in conversations that I've had countless times with people about this kind of stuff, what happens is something like the following.
The current system is bad.
Oh yeah? Well what's the better system?
The better system is this.
And then all we start doing is focusing on picking apart this.
And what happens is then I'm put on the defensive to justify and to prove and to explain and to reason through and to shore up and to prove this.
And yet we never end up talking about what is.
We only end up arguing about what might be.
And I don't think, at the moment, and I could be wrong, I don't think that that's going to work with a lot of people.
Now, it will work with some, where they just get all hot and bothered about this, and they get very excited, and you launch them into the Mises-Rothbart world, and they get really cooking on these ideas, and that's wonderful.
But I don't think that we have taken an approach that is as effective as...
The following approach.
Something like this. So, I say, the current system is terrible.
And somebody says, oh yeah, well, what's a better system?
Right, so, roads are bad.
Oh yeah, well, who would run the roads without a government?
And then we all jump into with, oh, the roads, the roads, the roads, the roads, the roads.
And this is true of the ethics as well.
Right, so if we say, the military is sociopathic and composed of hitmen, right, let's say.
And they say, oh yeah, well, how would a free market system defend itself in the absence of a military?
And then we're sort of scrambling around.
I know that I've talked about this before with the argument from effect, but I'm going to take it one step further.
So if we say the government is evil, and they say, well, it would be more evil without a government, and it would be civil war without a government, and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and I'll throw all these clichés at you.
But what if... What if we simply took the approach of saying, the government is evil, oh yeah, well what would replace the government that wouldn't be evil?
It's like, forget about that.
Forget about what will replace the evil of government.
Because what we need to do, in fact, is to figure out whether government is evil or not.
Not what will replace it.
Because if we have not established that government is evil, then there's no point coming up with anything to replace it.
And I think that's quite important.
Why discuss the cure before you've established whether there's an illness?
Now, I feel that this is somewhat related to this whole false self, true self thing that we've been talking about for the last month or two.
I feel...
That it takes the true self to look at evil directly without feeling like it's looking in a mirror.
The false self is manipulative and destructive and controlling and false.
The false self is false. See how well I'm working on these non-totological definitions?
The false self cannot look at a problem without instantly running for a solution.
I'm not going to sort of get into exactly why, but it is something that you see so common.
So if you're talking to a Republican, I mean Democrats have a tougher time seeing the government as evil except in terms of foreign policy, but let's just say you're talking about domestic policy with a Republican.
Well, the Republican's going to say, yeah, but the alternative is worse.
Like what Churchill said, right?
Democracy is the worst system in the world except for all the others.
Which is true, but of course anarcho-capitalism is not a system, so it gets out of that logical problem, but I'm not going to summon the ghost of Churchill and debate with him.
But the false self really can't look at a problem and not have a solution.
And you probably know lots of people like this in your life.
So if there's something going wrong with your project and you start to bring in that there's a problem with the project, oh, the client is demanding all these spec changes and we're not billing for them.
Well, very few people in business can actually look at that and say, yeah, that's a real issue.
I don't know what to do about it, but that is a real issue and we should sit down and try and figure it out.
But first of all, we need to scope out the scope of the issue, so to speak.
Almost everyone is like, well, that's just how we do things, or this client pays us a lot of money, or we just have to live with it, or let's just send them a huge bill.
People jump into these solutions, and it's really a stupid, stupid thing to do in life, of course.
Before you have fully mapped out the problem, You jump into solutions.
I'm not talking about us. I'm just talking about in those kinds of situations.
Because that's not particularly important relative to what we're doing.
And we're inventing the whole science of communication, so to speak, because we're inventing a new methodology for sort of disseminating truth.
Or we're trying to, anyway. I'm trying to.
Let's just take the we out of it.
I'm trying to work out...
The missing link in getting these obviously logical, sensible, commonsensical and true ideas out into the world in a way that is inspiring and inviting and motivating so that they don't just sort of sit here true in a vacuum but can actually get out there and start taking on some bullies.
But to actually look at a problem and not have a solution takes a good deal of ego strength.
Everybody wants to rush into the solution because looking at a problem and not knowing the answer is discomforting.
And this is why I think when we come up and we say, and this is becoming more and more true as society gets worse and worse, when we come up and we say, the government is a mess, the government is a moral monstrosity, the government...
Everybody knows this in their heart of hearts in the way that they just didn't really know it like 50 years ago, right?
At the end of World War II, oh, he just saved us from the Nazis and...
And so on.
Civil liberties were things that we could only dream of now.
Taxation was at a level we could, you know, we would wet our pants if we woke up tomorrow and had the 1950s taxation levels back and the size of the 1950s Americana, pre-Great Society, and throughout the world this would be the case.
We would dream of that.
We would be very tempted to lay down our spanking new swords if we could suddenly reverse it back to 1950s, say.
But now people know that it's a complete mess.
I also believe that people are feeling that the state and the corporations are not enemies anymore.
I don't think people really believe that anymore.
I think Enron, to a very strange degree, really helped that.
So the really, really close links between Ley and Skilling and the Bushes, for instance, Those links have really helped people to figure out that the state and the corporations at the top tier are not exactly bitter enemies.
And you look at things like Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and so on.
It's really not hard for people to see that there's something very amiss in terms of the regulation of business that is sort of the government's last claim to fame.
I mean, it...
Trying to figure out what the government can say that it does well these days and that people will accept it.
We must protect New Orleans, right?
We must protect America from terrorism.
We must help the world, help make the world safer democracy.
We must help the poor. We must control drugs.
We must get rid of drug addiction.
We must protect the children.
We must educate everyone. I mean, what the government does...
It's slowly being whittled away in terms of people's basic emotional apparatus and perception of accepting that kind of propaganda.
So the idea that the government is doing anything well is really beginning to fall away.
Now, one of the things that the government has always talked about, that it does well and that, boy, without the government it would just be a mess, is, you know, those darn evil corporations are going to make you work for pennies a day, In a sweatshop and steal your children's kidneys.
And there's all of this stuff around how the government needs to protect the environment.
And Katrina did a good job for helping people understand how well the government protects the environment as well.
But the government's sort of justifications, the propaganda is...
It's falling away. The false self, unless you get hit by a bus when you're 22, the false self never lasts in the long run.
It doesn't take long to figure out that it's all nonsense and the government is the ultimate expression of the brutal false self.
And so the idea that the government is good at X, Y, and Z and that's what we need it for, they're really beginning to fall away.
And the sort of tight enmeshment between corporations and the state in terms of campaign donations and preferential contracts and so on, and this is very true of the war, it's very true of just about every reconstruction effort that comes across, the lies of the government are becoming absolutely more brazen.
I mean, of course, the big lie that was revealed was around Iraq, not just in terms of the weapons of mass destruction, but But also in terms of, oh, the wall will pay for itself through oil revenues, and then, oh, it's only going to cost $50 billion, and all of this, and we know exactly where they are.
This stuff has all been entirely known.
Now, people come up with all these rational defenses, and this is what's so silly about rational defenses, because deep down we know the truth.
So somebody posted on the boards, as I said, about whether an anarchist politician could run for office.
I said, my gut says no.
And he said, your gut?
Have you thrown aside all rationality in terms of determining truth and falsehood?
And... Well, no, but rationality doesn't always lead people to the right conclusions.
It does if they're rational, but we know lots of physicists who are religious, so just being rational alone in one sphere doesn't have the unifying integration that occurs when you start talking about the unconscious.
There are some estimates, and I've heard estimates that are semi-credible, that say that about 80% of our mental activity occurs in the unconscious, and about 20% of our activity occurs in the conscious mind.
So, I think that if you just say, well, I'm only going to work with conscious rationality, you're kind of throwing away a whole lot of helpful stuff that's going on in your brain.
And oftentimes, the unconscious is more accurate than the conscious.
The conscious has a much stronger capacity to reject information.
The unconscious absorbs everything.
And tries to integrate everything.
And of course, when the conscious mind blocks the integration by saying, no, no, no, no, that's unacceptable.
That? That's no good. My mother was a saint.
The state is great. Whatever.
I never hit my brother.
Then the unconscious gets all haywire, and we can sort of go into that another time.
But... People in their conscious mind will still continue to mouth the same platitudes that they always have, but in their unconscious, the information that they're absorbing about the state, all of the information that they're absorbing about what the government is doing in terms of falsehoods and corruption and the national debt and the absolute disregard for the clients.
That's something that's very, very important.
The absolute disregard for the clients.
It's like watching a married couple who says that all they want to do when they're divorcing, as they're getting divorced, all they want to do when they're divorcing is to make sure that the kids come out okay.
But they're screaming at the kids and beating the kids and yelling in front of the kids and so on and fighting over the kids.
But not because they want the kids, but because they want to hurt the other person.
I mean, at some point you're going to say, you know, I really don't think that your stated interest of, you know, that you're only around to help the kids is really true because your actions indicate otherwise, right?
I mean, actions speak louder than words, and the actions of the government have nothing to do with protecting the citizens, as we're all fully aware.
So, deep down in people's gut, in their unconscious, in their central processing neurons, right, which occur whether we want them or not, like you can open your eyes, and you can choose to open your eyes or not, but if you open your eyes, you can't choose not to see.
That all occurs at the autonomous nervous system level.
And the same thing is true of what integrates in the unconscious.
It just pieces together things.
It is where we get inspiration from, and it's where we get the aha moments, and it's where we get the rush of emotional intensity that occurs when we stumble across something that's really true, once we've got the ego strength to accept the truth, rather than just try and manipulate reality to suit our propaganda preferences, our propaganda-influenced or inspired or inflicted preferences.
And so people, having seen the state in action over the past particularly 10 to 15 years, They now no longer believe that the state is a benevolent, daddy-cum-lawyer-cum-priest who is only waking...
It's a robot whose only waking intention is to protect and care for the sheep we are.
People don't believe that anymore.
They may sort of mouth the same platitudes, but deep down, they really don't believe it.
Or, you know, if you live outside the U.S., you might still vaguely believe it about your own government.
You certainly don't believe it about the U.S. government, of course, and so at least that's a place to start.
And so when we say the government is evil, well, everybody believes it.
Plus, taxes have just gone through the roof in the past 20 years, and so everybody's sort of scrambling around broke and don't have any time or money, can't spend time with their kids.
Both people have to work in order to have any kind of lifestyle.
Like, people are feeling pretty beleaguered these days.
And so, when we say the government is evil, I believe that what is occurring to people psychologically is they're agreeing with us in their gut, but their false self is intervening and saying, oh yeah?
Now, they don't want to get into an argument about whether the government is evil or not, right?
The false self always wants to put other people on the defensive, right?
It never wants to be on the defensive.
Because its whole point is to pretend that there's no defensiveness, right?
Because it was created in a situation of assault, usually through parents, but sometimes through elder siblings or teachers.
The false self is created because the true self is being assaulted, and it is created in order so we don't experience the assault, so we can continue to bond with those who are assaulting us, right?
It's the Stockholm Syndrome scar tissue of the mind.
And so the false self can never be on the defensive.
At least we can never experience being on the defensive when the false self is in charge because it's created to hide defensiveness from us so that we can continue to, quote, love those who are attacking us, like our parents or whatever.
And so... Whenever a truth comes along that gets past the false self-defenses, and all truths that are spoken without preparation do get through the false self-defenses because it's reactive, not proactive, right?
So it's not expecting you to be an anarcho-capitalist because we're so rare, right?
So the false self is going to immediately want to put the other person on the defensive so that it gets to do the interrogation, so that it is not on the defensive and it does not feel vulnerable, and also it does not have to justify and be rational, right?
As soon as the false self is asked to be rational, it vanishes, and the true self has an avenue to the world, right?
And we've talked about that before.
So, the mechanism, I think, that is occurring is...
And yes, this is all empirically proven, and you will find the data on my website.
You might just have to look quite a bit.
But the mechanism that is occurring is we say the government is evil.
The false self knows that the government is evil, but is keeping that knowledge from the true self.
I mean, because if the government is evil, then the parents can be evil.
And if we are blind to evil, it has to be because our parents did not protect us and instead filled us with propaganda and conformity.
They did not teach us to understand the world in a way that was going to help us.
They simply told us to obey authority because that was easier for them than becoming good people.
So... What happens is that the false self realizes that the true self has received a truth that is very important.
But the false self is automatic, right?
It's not something that thinks, it's something that reacts and manipulates.
And so the false self immediately says, Oh yeah?
You prove your point.
You prove your case. And not about the government being evil, but about what will take its place.
Because the false self, basically, that's the argument that it uses with the true self.
I know this is all complicated, and forgive me if it's making your head spin.
But the true self is always dominated by the false self, because the false self says, well, look, if I leave, it gets even worse.
So the false self is to the true self, as the state is to the citizen.
So, the false self is always saying to the true self, hey, trust me, it may not be pleasant with me in charge, but if I'm not in charge, you're going crazy, or you're going to have a mental breakdown, or you're going to go crazy and attack people, or you're going to get so depressed you can't even get out of bed, right? It's all the same scare stories we get from the government, right?
I mean, and this is all a complicated mess, which is why, of course, you want to focus on yourself first to make sure that you're free before launching into the government, because You have to be free of your false self in order to take on the government, and in order to take on your family, right?
You have to be free of the false self, because otherwise, all of the arguments that people have against the state is going to be what you've listened to unconsciously a million times from your false self, and you really won't be effective in being able...
Like, when you get stumped or when you get stymied, it's because you already agree with the person at some level, you just don't know at what level, and so you get kind of stumped.
So, when we say there should be no government, the false self correctly parses that out to the statement, the false self is evil.
Now, of course, the false self, much like those in the government, doesn't believe that it's evil.
Evil people don't walk around saying, gee, what a nasty guy I am, what a bad, bad, bad man I am.
Everybody who's evil has a justification, right?
We'll talk about that a little bit more this afternoon.
But... The false self believed that it's good because it swallowed the propaganda that if there is no false self, the consequences will be horrendous.
And of course, when you're a child, that's true.
So if you have brutal parents or parents who want you to conform or who won't let you think for yourself, who aren't curious about your opinions and who don't know how to think, i.e.
if you have been born into this world, if you are born of woman, then...
If you continue to have a true self in the face of that, the consequences will be dire and disastrous.
Absolutely no question.
However, as an adult, it's not the case.
The consequences will be dire for the false self, then, if you become more true when you're an adult, but it will not be dire for you as a whole.
So, when we say to people the government is...
Is evil, then I think a number of things are occurring that means we get stymied, right?
So the first thing is the false self says, oh, that means I'm evil.
And if I'm evil, that means those who provoked my existence are evil, i.e.
the parents. And, of course, the false self was directly created to hide the corruption of the parents from the child, so that the child could continue to have the capacity to survive with some sense of self-esteem and some sense of bonding, right?
Because otherwise the child simply won't survive.
So, the false self can't see evil.
Now, it can project evil.
So, people can get angry at Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda is evil!
Evil! And, of course, the death count of Al-Qaeda relative to the U.S. military is inconsequential, but they're evil.
So, the false self has the capacity to project evil onto others, but it doesn't have the capacity to see evil.
In itself and in those which it approves of, those entities.
And so when we say the government is evil, the false self says, oh, he's saying I'm evil, he's saying our parents are evil, he's saying that I have the exact opposite of ethics and that can't be allowed, because that means, frankly, that at the moment I'm enormously corrupt.
So given that the false self is around not seeing corruption, But rather justifying and loving corruption, then saying to the false self that you are corrupt blows its mind, right? It simply can't accept it.
It's too much of a logical contradiction.
And so it leaps into the defense of the parents, it leaps into the defense of authority and the state and teachers and anyone who has ever harmed the child, which the false self is there to pretend never happened, to defend or usually to praise, right?
Well, the false self then leaps into action by demanding a substitute, which it can then criticize, and then basically will end up saying, well, it's too risky, and of course there's no way that it would work, and even if it would work, it's never going to happen in our lifetime, and by the way, the state's not evil anyway, so you just get all this stuff where the false self claims to evaluate the risk and say, well, the risk of freedom is too great.
But of course, that's exactly what the false self does say.
In order to maintain its energy, right?
In order to maintain its ascendancy over the personality, it says, yes, I am definitely a control freak, I'm definitely manipulative, and I'm definitely making you anxious, and I'm definitely interfering with your ability to love and experience joy, but hey, trust me, where we are right now is a whole lot better than where we'd be If you got rid of me,
the false self, and started trying to live authentically, you would be murdered, nobody would talk to you, you would be depressed, you would be miserable, you would be completely alone, you would be suicidal, you'd be psychotic, like all the scare stories that you always hear around the state.
Well, without the state, there'd be endless civil war, without a central dominating and organizing violent and authoritative...
In principle, within society, we'd have nothing but civil war, and the same thing is true if you get rid of the false self, which dominates and controls the personality through lies and propaganda.
And scare stories, without the false self, you would fall apart completely.
I mean, the two, they're completely parallel.
And so what happens is then we end up having to defend the alternative, but of course the false self is created in order to dismiss the alternative.
The false self is created so that it can come up with, well, I'm bad, but it's worse without me.
I'm tough, but I'm the best there is.
And this, of course, is what leads people to get depressed and to give up on ethics, right?
Because that's the best it is.
Yikes! How bad is that?
So... I'm sort of thinking about this option of trying to confront the false self in people.
And the way to do that is to not present alternatives.
I think this will work.
Because if the response to the state is evil is, yeah, okay, maybe, but the alternative is even more evil.
Which, of course, is completely unprovable.
I mean, it's just completely unprovable that the alternative is worse.
It is the kind of, because it's a propaganda scare story, we're never going to find out because everyone believes it.
So we have to. We have to connect with the true self of those that we're talking to.
I mean, I guess that's sort of what I'm getting down to here.
We have to, have to, have to connect with the true self of those we're talking to.
If we cannot connect with the true self of those that we're talking to, if we get stuck in this sort of kaleidoscopic maze of no gravity, up is down, black is white, or the false self, we're never going to get anywhere.
We're going to get trapped. And feel futile.
And we, of course, end up feeling exactly the same as the false self does within the personality.
The false self yearns to live honestly and authentically and to be truthful and to live with integrity.
But the true self creates all of these mazes where the false self just gets exhausted, depressed, and gives up.
We need to connect with the true self.
And in order to do that, we need to find ways of dismantling the defenses of the false self.
And the first thing to do is to never get defensive yourself.
Is to never get defensive yourself.
And so, I mean, as a minor example...
Somebody posted something with this comment about, Steph, you've given up all reason because you're trusting your gut.
Well, that's a false self attack.
It's clear to me, right?
This is somebody who's not comfortable with the true self and doesn't understand the wisdom of the true self and therefore is stuck at mere syllogistic reasoning, which is impossible to come up with any kind of coherent integrity because you're missing out on the great integrating mechanism of the unconscious.
And of course, I... I absolutely believe it all needs to be validated through logic and experience, but you're giving up a great fountain of knowledge and wisdom if you don't access your instincts and your emotions.
We've talked about this before. So, a defensive situation, right?
If that had triggered my false self, that kind of accusation or attack or comment, let's say, then my false self would have said, no, no, no, I'm totally into reason.
You've got to understand that when I talk about the gut, I'm talking about the rational thing and defense, defense, defense, right?
And, of course, the problem with this man's statement is twofold.
One is that, and I'm not sort of picking on him, I just sort of want to give you an example of how to react in a way that is not false self-based, or a way to bypass the false self.
Of course, if I had totally given up on reason, if I had completely rejected the concept of validating truth through rationality, then this man's jibe would not have hurt, right?
It would not have been... Something which would have been capable of manipulating me.
And this is back to the Hank Reardon thing in Atlas Shrugged, where he's told he's bad, and of course he only cares about being bad because he's virtuous, and so they're saying he has no virtue, but presupposing that he has virtue, otherwise they would never say that.
So, this gentleman knows that I'm being rational, and knows that I want to be rational.
And so he's attacking me in a way by saying that I've given up on rationality and that using my gut is a bad idea, but he's only saying that because he believes that I value rationality, right?
So he's saying, you've given up on rationality, but at the same time it's only got any effect on me emotionally because...
I value rationality.
So, of course, I posted that back and said, of course, if I'd given up on rationality, then that wouldn't mean anything to me.
I would not feel bad about that at all.
And so your intent wouldn't work.
And secondly, if something I've said seems unusual, like if I say, you know, if I'm the rational guy and I say, my gut says, then a true self response would be to say, Huh. Well, that's odd because as far as I understand it, gut means crazy, irrational, subjective mysticism.
And Steph claims to be a rationalist and now he's leaning on his gut.
Steph, can you help me understand what it is you mean by gut so that I can understand?
And then if I turn out to say, well, gut means crazy, irrational mysticism, then you can let go with both barrels, of course.
But if I sort of say to you stuff that I've said about the instincts, then at least we can get into a productive and enjoyable debate about it.
That sort of a true self-response would be curiosity.
Well, this doesn't make sense, but a false self-response is attack, right?
I mean, we've sort of gone into why that's the case.
But I think that if we take the approach with arguing politics, and we'll just talk about politics for now, if you say, if you want to get into conversations about the state, right, like if you're not ready for conversations about the family yet, fine, if you want to get into conversations about the state, and you say that the state is evil, right, And people say, well, without the state there'd be civil war and the state is evil.
It uses force, sure, but it's for our benefit and we choose it and we vote for it and all this sort of stuff.
And, I mean, we can't have a society without a state.
That's a dream. It's never going to work.
And then, of course, we want to say, no, no, no, we could work.
There are DROs and we have private roads.
And then they start hacking that stuff down.
But what if we simply said, well, maybe we could or we could not have a society without the state, but that's not what we're talking about.
I mean, what we're talking about is, is the state evil?
Forget about the solutions, right?
Because that's not the topic at hand.
We can only deal with one thing at a time.
Like, yesterday in the call, Francois wanted to have me defend a position that he thought I had, the values are subjective, and so I start defending it, and he says that all the terms that I'm using are wrong, and he wants me to continue.
I accepted the first round, and then he said my other terms were wrong, so, you know, I just said, well, I can't do that.
Like, I can't do what you're asking.
I can't defend a position.
And have you correct me on every term that I'm using, that's simply not possible and I won't do it.
That's not what we're talking about. If you want me to defend my position using commonly accepted words, I think that's great.
If you want me to defend my position and at the same time integrate, accept, and understand all of your redefinitions of my terms, I'm not going to do that because that's not the topic.
If the topic is what terms should we use, that's one thing.
If the topic is can you, Steph, defend your position that values as subjective or whatever, correct it, Then that's another, but you can't conflate the two together.
So in the same way, if you're talking about, is the state evil?
That's one topic. The question of what would replace the state is another topic.
And I would invite you to try, in your conversations, when people start trying to drag you into some other realm, and they start talking about, well, there's disasters that occur without the state, and the state has forced, but it's not really forced because we support it, and so on.
I would just say keep coming back because this is how you're going to get through to the true self, right?
So you don't get distracted by all of the noise and sound and fury signifying nothing of the false self.
And don't ever get on the defensive about your position because as soon as you're on the defensive you've lost the argument.
But simply keep going over and over and over the fact that we need to establish whether the government is evil or not.
That's the only topic that we're talking about.
That's a big enough topic without dragging all this other stuff into it and just see what happens with that.
And we'll talk a little bit more about this this afternoon, but I hope that this is at least a helpful place to start for you.
I have a really strong and completely rational gut instinct that says it's going to be very helpful for us.
Oh, and come by and donate.
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If you could break the drought, I would really appreciate it.
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