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June 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:26
269 Debating Freedom Without Solutions Part 2
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Everything, everything, everything gonna be alright this morning.
Boy, gotta love John Lee Hooker.
You get a chance to download or listen to Manish Boy.
It's a great song, especially the live version.
It's just fantastic. So, I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. What a great vacation day this was at 6.30.
And the CEO really wanted me to drag me out to dinner with these potential acquirers of the company.
But I managed to slither out of that one by saying goodbye.
It's funny. It's how political things can get.
So I didn't want to go for dinner. Christina's been patiently waiting at home.
Well, not waiting at home, but she's been patient with me all day.
I've had to do this stuff.
And she's very supportive of stuff that I do to try and do what it is that I'm doing at this company, which we'll get into another time.
So my boss really, really wanted me to come, the CEO really wanted me to come to this dinner with these clients or these potential acquirers.
But I'd just been presenting for like three or four hours, all the ramifications, permutations of the software and the business case and so on.
And, oh, it was like far away, the dinner, and I wasn't getting home until 10 or 11, and it was supposed to be a vacation day, so...
So, this is sort of the way that I work if you want to sort of see my business career sense in action.
So, my boss was saying, oh, you've got to come to dinner.
And then this guy was saying, yeah, this IT guy, this...
Director of technologies. I've got all these technology questions.
And so I said, so what sort of technology questions do you have?
And he's like, oh, architecture, this and that.
So I spent a couple of five, ten minutes answering those questions.
And I say, well, is that it?
And he said, yeah.
And I said, well, you know, then if you don't mind, if those are all the questions you have, then I'll skip dinner and...
Because, you know, it's supposed to be a vacation day for me and my wife's waiting at home, so if you don't mind, I'll skip dinner if you have any questions.
Now, of course, because I said this in front of the potential acquirers, who I was supposed to have dinner with, they say, oh, absolutely, if it's a vacation day, for sure, we understand.
And so then my boss tries to get me to go.
After these guys leave, he's like, no, no, you've got to come.
It's like, well, you know, I already said to these guys I wasn't coming, it's my vacation day.
So if I come now, it's going to look like obvious arm-twisting, and I'm not going to look that good.
I'm going to look like a sort of weak-willed guy, and I don't think you want that impression.
See, it's not bad to know how to manipulate.
You just have to know that you're doing it.
That's all I'm trying to say.
That's my big story of the day.
What a gripping and exciting career that I have.
Boy, you must just be green with envy.
So... Now, let's continue our talk from this morning.
I'm really quite thrilled and excited with this idea.
And it dovetails with the idea that if you haven't been listening sequentially, you naughty person you, then this is part two of arguing without providing a solution.
And... I think that this dovetails nicely into a metaphor that I've used before around this problem of the plague.
That we're doctors, we have cures, but unfortunately nobody even knows that they're sick.
And so when we come up to them with a needle saying, you need to get this injection going, then unfortunately they tend to feel that we're assaulting them and we're attacking them.
Chemotherapy is good if you have cancer.
If not, it's just an assault, right?
So that's why I think it's important, if this metaphor works, and I think it does, that we need to not come up with solutions.
Because solutions don't mean anything until people recognize that there's a problem.
So what my ex-boss used to drill into me over and over around the sales process is, you know, clients would say, when we're presenting, well, how much does your software cost?
Right? And I now can comfortably have the discussion where I say, well, it doesn't matter, does it?
I mean, with all due respect, it doesn't matter how much it costs because we have an established value, right?
So, if it costs five bucks but it doesn't provide any value to you, then it's too much, you know, if it's free.
But it doesn't provide any value to you.
Then it doesn't matter. But if it's a million dollars, but it provides five million dollars of value to you, then it's a good deal.
If it's a million dollars and it only provides a million dollars worth of value to you, it probably isn't a good deal.
So the first thing that you have to do when you're trying to get somebody to change their mind or become interested in something is to provide value.
Which is, of course, why I've been focusing so much with y'all out there I've been focusing on getting you guys to do that, because that's going to give you a tangible benefit that is going to make you happier and happier.
More capable of having great relationships and falling in love.
It's going to make you better parents to your own children.
Should that be your persuasion?
If you are in the biological replicating frame of mind in your life, then what I'm trying to do is to provide value for you that's more tangible.
If I say, oh, you should follow these ideas, or you should really work with these ideas of freedom, why?
Well, because it makes your life really difficult, but maybe three generations down the road, people might be free.
Well, that's not really much of a sale, right?
It's sort of like saying to someone, you should buy my software because the guy who gets your job after you will look great.
I mean, that's not really going to be that, especially if you get fired for buying it, but the next guy looks great, right?
That's the argument as to why politicians never want to deal with the deficit, right?
They'll get thrown out of office and the next guy will inherit a surplus, right?
So... So in the cunning application of this principle, I've really been focusing on trying to get you to examine the relationships that you have in your life and to get rid of the corrupt ones and liberate yourself from obligation that is unjust and irrational and subjugatory.
Of a subjugatory nature, it subjugates you.
Let's go with that, because I don't really want to make up more than a half dozen words of podcasts.
So what that's going to do is it's going to give you a benefit.
In your life, that is more immediate than, see, when the state is gone, X, Y, and Z, right?
We may never live to see that, but what this will do is give you joy, happiness, and peace of mind in your life after a certain amount of tumult.
And after a certain amount of difficulties, you will at least have that possibility in your life, which is great.
But in the same way, when we bring ideas to other people, We need to provoke discomfort.
Because if we can't provoke discomfort, then we are not going to be able to provide any solution.
Now, this is not a case of like, I break your leg and then I sell you a crutch.
We're not talking about that.
The creation of discomfort in other human beings is simply the Socratic method of this persistent curiosity without being suckered into providing a solution.
Once you suck it into providing a solution, as I mentioned this morning, then you are stuck in the horrible place of having to explain and defend the solution when, of course, people are just ignoring the emotional discomfort they have from thinking they know something that they don't.
So, DROs, I think, are a pretty good solution.
I think they're a pretty apt way of approaching the problem of no state.
But I can't predict, of course, that that's going to be the case.
I have no idea what the solution is in every sphere, or even in any sphere, for understateless society.
But I do know that the state doesn't work, and it's evil, and it's destructive.
I do know that. I mean, I don't know much, but I do know that.
Now, Then to say to somebody that the state is evil is putting forth the proposition that they then have to disprove.
You can say the state is evil because robbery and murder and rape and all these things are evil.
And that's the root of the proposition that those who do this, those individuals who do this, may be wearing a certain uniform and may have medals on their chests or whatever, but if that doesn't change their moral nature...
Based on the argument for morality, and therefore if murder is wrong for one, then it's wrong for all.
And so, proving that the state is evil is very easy.
Proving that there are valid alternatives to the state that will work and are productive is very hard, and of course to some degree it's impossible because people can always say, as they have on the boards and in countless emails to me, oh yeah?
Now you show me a historical example of a state that's the stateless society that works, and ancient Iceland this, and Mogadishu that, and all of this sort of stuff, and America between...
I don't know, 1776 and the Constitution or something.
No federal government. All of this kind of stuff doesn't mean anything to me.
It doesn't matter at all. That's why I focus on people's personal lives.
But what it does do is whoever is the one who is putting forth the proposition...
It's the one who is having to work really hard and the one who is most vulnerable for people just not buying their proposition.
And, of course, in the argument for what replaces the state, there's lots of places where there's no historical validity, there's no historical validation, there's no guarantee, there's no proof.
Of course, there is no stateless society that has existed for more than a couple of years or a generation or two.
And, of course, it always ends up with some damn government, so there's no example.
There's so many places where you can be tripped up.
But the problem is, of course, that...
A, you're on the defensive trying to madly prove things which anybody can say, well, I just don't believe, and you just can't force them to believe or can't prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So that is not going to work.
What you want to be when you are in a situation with someone when you're disagreeing is you want to try and be...
You want to co-opt them, right?
You want to try and be two partners in the search for truth.
You want to both be searching for the truth, right?
So there's a...
There's no better way to find a cure than to have two doctors who are great scientists afflicted with it both trying to come up with a cure, right?
That's probably going to be fairly substantial.
A cure which they then submit to the FDA which never approves it and so there's no point, but we're talking about a free market situation.
What I've sort of started to do, and I've sort of tried it out on the board, and it seems to work well, is people say something like, well, I don't want to carry an ID card, and your DRO societies would make me carry an ID card, so you proved to me that I don't have to carry an ID card in a DRO-based society, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, what I do, or what I'm starting to do now, and it seems to work pretty well, is to say, well...
Here's one or two ideas, but I don't know.
Let's say that you were in charge of a DRO. How would you convince me that you could find some way to not make me carry an ID card?
See, what happens then is that they're in the business now of providing a solution, rather than in judging or evaluating a solution that I am providing.
And I think that's very interesting, right?
So if somebody says, well, how could roads be done in a free market society?
How could we conceivably have roads?
Well, a way to sort of take that on is to sort of say, I don't know, what do you think?
Let's just say there's no government tomorrow and you've got $10 million in the bank or $10 billion in the bank.
How could you possibly go about dealing with the issue of roads?
Oh, well, that's interesting.
Well, maybe we could try putting odometers on the cars and measuring where they go anonymously so that we could do this or we could do that.
Or maybe we would contract with the people who build malls somewhere out there and we'll build roads to them.
Or maybe we'll invest in personal helicopters.
I mean, who knows, right?
Who knows? But what you've got then is two people looking for a solution, rather than one person skeptically saying, Oh, well, I don't believe in Rose.
You proved to me. And then all they do is they sit there pinging down and shooting down all the ideas you come up with, with all the objections of the world.
But if you put them in the position of...
Trying to come up with solutions, then they have a lot more scope and a lot more intellectual energy, and they're more of a partner.
A lot more intellectual energy will be generated in them if they have to come up with solutions rather than sitting back there with a skeptical smirk on their face and just pea-shooting down everything that you're coming up with, which is a really annoying interaction to be in, right?
It's a really irritating interaction because it's not productive, right?
It's not going to get anywhere. So when I put this out on the boards where I said, I don't know, maybe it's these two ideas, but tell me what you would do.
So there's this idea about, well, how are we going to prove that DROs aren't going to just become another set of governments, right?
Let's say that you're a customer and I'm the DRO. What are you going to demand of me in order to be willing to sign up with me?
Like, let's just say you don't have to sign up with anyone, but there's benefits, whatever we've talked about, sort of representation and so on, insurance.
If I'm interested in getting your business to sign up to my DRO, and you're worried about me turning into a government and getting my own army and warehouses full of black helicopters and so on, Well, what would you demand of me in order to be able to prove to you or at least satisfy you to a large degree that I was not about to become a government?
Well, you'd have to get audited.
All of your books would have to get audited to make sure you weren't buying weapons.
And we'd have to audit your employees to make sure that they weren't secret bondish ninjas.
And we'd have to audit your property to make sure you weren't hiding vertical stacks of black helicopters.
I mean, whatever you'd come up with.
And say, well, that seems to me like a reasonable approach.
So I find that not coming up with a solution is very interesting.
Because the first thing it does is it stays on the question of, is the state evil?
As we sort of talked about before.
So a psychologist who is working with a patient...
And hopefully I won't have to edit this out.
I'll check it with Christina. But I'm sure this is the case.
A psychologist who's working with a client...
You might say, look, your husband beats you, you have to leave.
Your husband is a bad guy.
Now, if the woman, and I'm sorry to take this so stereotypical, but we'll survive.
So if the woman then says, yeah, well, okay, what am I going to do if I leave him?
Well, that's not the issue.
A trained psychologist will not get into, well, you could get vocational training, and you could go to the Elizabeth Fry Society, and you could go to a shelter, and you could do this, and you could get this.
He's not going to start plotting it, because then the person is just going to say, well, I don't have the skills, and my kids are too young, and he's going to hunt me down, and blah, blah, blah.
Because that's just putting up solutions to get shut down.
That's never going to get anyone anywhere.
And, of course, we've all experienced this in the freedom movement, so I don't have to explain this to anyone.
A competent psychologist will not get into, here's the solutions that then get shot down by someone.
What they are going to say is, is your husband a bad guy or not?
Does it hurt you when they beat you up in front of your kids?
Does it hurt you that they beat up your kids?
kids?
Does it make you feel unhappy that you live in mortal terror every day of your life?
Does it make you feel unhappy that this drunken lout comes home and gropes and grabs at you like an octopus looking for a clam on the seabed, right?
I mean, is it unpleasant?
Is it unpleasant?
Is it unpleasant?
Is it working?
Does it make you happy?
Do you see the effects on your kids?
Are they positive?
Blah, blah, blah.
The reason is that the psychologist is attempting to create a To expose discomfort, not to create, but to expose discomfort within the woman.
Because if she's like, no, everything's fine, he's a good provider, yeah, it beats me up, but I'm willing to take it, and yeah, he's mean to my kids, but he sucks to be them, I want to live in the big mansion.
Well, then there's no discomfort, there's no possibility of coming up with solutions, because there is no problem.
There is no problem.
Without any problem, without a problem that's admitted to and exists, I can't come up with a solution.
So a competent psychologist is going to say, your husband is a bad guy, he beats you up.
And the woman's going to say, oh yeah, well what will I do if I leave him?
It's like, well, we're not interested in that.
The first thing we need to establish is that he's a bad guy, and we need to talk about that.
Now, if you realize that you're sleeping with the devil, and that your kids are being beaten up, and you're being beaten up, then you're going to come up with, once you feel enough pain, then you're going to come up with your own solutions.
Somebody who's been thrown into a vat of hot water is not going to sit there and say, well, should I get out?
Should I not get out? And if you say, well, I think you should jump out or I think you should grab the rope above you, they're not going to say, well, I don't know.
It's kind of hot and if I get out, my skin could get really cold really quickly.
It could be bad and so on.
I think I can adjust. What they're going to do is they're going to hit the bottom, kick back up and try and get out however they can.
Because they're experiencing pain, so they're going to come up with their own solutions, and you can facilitate, you can throw them a rope or something, you can facilitate that.
But in the absence of understanding that there's pain, then there's no possibility of solutions.
You're just going to come up with something and shoot it down.
So, of course, as sensitive, kind, nice people, it can feel kind of weird to create discomfort in others.
I understand that. I really do.
The false self doesn't like discomfort, right?
That's what it's all about, is getting rid of corruption, getting rid of pain.
The true self is writhing in agony, but the false self is just smiling and shrugging, right?
So it can feel bad about that.
It can feel bad, but unfortunately, that's just the situation in life that we've inherited where people believe false things and the truth is going to be painful.
So, what I would like to suggest is that we need to sort of talk about the evil, right?
So, you know, you do realize that your children are being really badly educated.
You do realize that they're going to grow up and be unhappy because they don't know how to differentiate truth from falsehood.
You do realize that you're going to be very unlikely to collect Social Security, and when it goes down, there's lots of people.
You do realize that hundreds of thousands of people are murdered around the world by governments, if not millions.
You do realize that taxation is theft and that you're completely subjugated.
You're never allowed to be an adult.
You're never allowed to make your own decisions, that you're just a slave.
You do realize that children are going to have to grow up to pay off the national debt, which is going to cause a complete destruction of their economic opportunities.
You do realize this.
I mean, just talking about this stuff.
that or the other. You do realize that by calling the government good, you are saying that theft is virtuous.
So you kind of have to go back to your kids and say, kids, all that thing, I told you about shoplifting, I'm totally wrong, go and steal money.
But only if you are currently worth less than the person who owns the store.
So I'd go to Macy's or Bloomingdale's where the people are very rich and I'd do it that way and blah, blah, blah.
So, if you can't create discomfort in people or expose the discomfort that the contradictions actually have at their root, then you're going to be in a significant amount of problem when it comes to establishing the value of freedom.
If you create discomfort, then you open them up to the possibility that there are solutions that can alleviate the contradictions or the discomfort that they're experiencing.
Discomfort being one way of putting it.
If you use the argument for morality, it's going to be an existential panic that they experience, which is why it's like smiling into a hurricane sometimes to be using the argument for morality.
It's kind of scary and you feel like you're going to get blown off into the distance at any moment.
So...
The discomfort that they feel is going to make a solution to be that much better.
Like if I walk up to you and say, you need to go into chemotherapy and you feel as fit as a fiddle and you've just finished running a marathon, and I say to you, you need to go into chemo, you're going to say to me, are you crazy?
I feel great! And so, of course, there's no solution, right?
The people don't feel sick.
And they don't feel sick because we talk about, oh, the government is inefficient, and we don't use the argument for morality, and we hold back.
And we also take on the solutions, right, before we've even established there's a problem.
So there's lots of reasons why we get people stuck in this place.
It's more comfortable for us, and it's more comfortable for them.
And because it's kind of tough to be a moralist when it causes people that sort of fundamental existential terror of realizing that what they have pursued as the good may in fact be the evil.
I mean, that's the worst thing in the world that can happen to people at a conscious level and certainly the worst thing that can happen to the false self.
Well, we sort of enable this behavior, right?
This is what I've been arguing about for the last couple of months.
We enable the behavior of people who don't believe in freedom or the value of freedom.
We enable it by focusing on inconsequential stuff, by focusing on...
Taking on the solutions and arguing for how things should be rather than how they are.
And so by coming up with the solutions and letting other people shoot them down, we take on this sort of clownish role of the, you might, and then they say, yeah, but, or it could be, well, yeah, but.
And so they're the skeptics and we're the eager beavers and we just get shot down.
It doesn't work, right?
We know that. We know that very well.
But if we cause some kind of discomfort in them, then they'll be more open to solutions.
And then if we say, I don't know, what do you think could be the solution?
Then that's doing a whole lot better than trying to stuff them to the gills with anarchistic theory.
I mean, I'm sure you don't like being lectured at any more than I do.
That's why I try not to make these things into lectures.
But... Yeah, I sort of say, these are my ideas, so what do you think?
And I try and keep it entertaining, but I'm not sort of sitting there saying, oh yeah, well you need to believe this, and you need to believe that, and here's the solution, and here's the answer, and this and that.
I'm sort of inviting you to apply principles in your own life in ways that maybe you haven't thought of, or maybe you have, but haven't thought of them in this particular context, or whatever.
And so, the thing that we need to trust, right, the thing that we need to trust, sort of fundamentally, is that people know the answers already.
And this is what I mean by connecting with the true self.
And this is really, really important.
People know everything that we're going to tell them already.
So Greg, a member on the boards, who's one of our most prolific posters and also one, I think, who's somebody who's really taking on the courageous act of tackling family issues.
Good for you. Sorry about the praise.
I know it makes your toes curl.
But he sort of had a conversation with his niece.
His niece is all talking about this or that in the military and so on.
And he just points out a couple of things.
You can find the posts on the board.
It's very well done. Just search for niece.
I don't think there's too many posts with that.
And he just points out a couple of things.
And she's like, wow, that's true!
And so she's talking about the military.
She wants to join the Air Force and they're there to protect us and so on.
He says, well, you know, they're kind of there to kill people, right?
I mean, I just sort of pointed out that way.
And she's like, yeah, that's true.
She already knows. She's eight years old.
She already knows it totally and completely and utterly down to its final core.
Because, you see, the world would not be unhappy if there was no such thing as the true self, right?
That's the empirical, you know, if people believe false things, they become unhappy.
Well, why? Well, because there's a true self, there's reality, and truth is not subjective.
So you can lie to yourself the same way you can smoke, but you can't make lying to yourself, you can't make it that it's going to make you happy in the long run, and of course that's not going to work.
So, because there's a true self buried in people, and I'm not going to say to what degree, you know, does my mom have a true self left?
I don't know. I'd be surprised.
But if she has enough of a true self that she's miserable, right?
Whether there's any access to the true self, I'd be really surprised.
But any sort of way of invoking it.
So the true self has just dissolved into her bloodstream and become a source of pain or arthritis or whatever, to stretch the metaphor.
But There is a true self in the people that we're talking with, and that true self knows the exact answer.
We don't need to lecture people because they already know.
They already know.
If you ask anybody, is the military involved in killing people?
Yes. Do soldiers get paid for killing people?
Yes. Are the soldiers killing people who are directly threatening those soldiers' bodies?
Yes. And before they get deployed, right?
I mean, are the Iraqis marching down Cincinnati and attacking the soldiers?
Is it self-defense? No.
I mean, everybody knows this stuff.
I mean, a seven- or eight-year-old will tell you all of this stuff.
They might need a little prompting, but everybody knows this stuff.
Is stealing bad?
Yes. Does the government steal from you when it takes taxes at the point of a gun?
Yes. An eight-year-old can tell you that.
Everybody already knows everything.
Everybody already knows everything that we're going to tell them.
And that's why when you say, well, I don't know.
I have some ideas, but tell me your ideas.
How could roads work in the Avatar?
Why would DROs? How could you work it so that DROs could be audited or assessed so that they're not going to turn into other states?
Don't provide any answers.
It's not inviting, and it doesn't work.
Try it out. Just try it out.
Because everybody already knows everything.
I've already talked about that. Certainly when it comes to violence and so on, everybody already knows everything.
Everybody knows the state is evil.
Everybody knows the military are a bunch of thugs who kill people for money.
Everybody knows all these things.
And so we really don't have to lecture anybody.
The truth is really the simplest thing in the world.
It's the easiest and simplest thing in the world.
Just ask a couple of questions and put those people, put the people you're talking to, on the path to coming up with solutions.
Rather than them firing problems at you and you running around trying to come up with solutions, just say, I don't know.
I don't know. What do you think? How do you think it could?
Let's just play around.
Tell me how you think it might be able to work.
And if they say, well, there's just no way it can work, well, then you've just saved yourself a lot of time.
Because if they've just said there's no way that it can work, then you don't have to waste time then trying to come up with solutions for them because they've already told you there's no way it can work.
I would definitely take this approach.
I think it's quite interesting. I'm definitely excited to try it out on people.
I'll try it out on the boards too, just so you know what I'm doing, and try it.
See how it works. I think it could be really productive for us.
I look forward to your donations.
I look forward to receiving some money from you for my podcasting and the ideas that I'm putting out there.
I haven't received any more today, so please, if you're on the fence, I would really appreciate it.
Do the right thing if you've come this far or listened to this many podcasts.
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