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June 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:54
280 How Do You Know?
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Good afternoon everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Oh, my voice is beginning to come back, but I shall not burst.
into the first three stanzas of Les Mis just yet.
But that's nice.
It's nice to feel like I'm not speaking through a prickly sea urchin in my throat, so that's good.
I didn't speak too much today, so I just noticed today that it's starting to come back, so hopefully there'll be a little less cracking and yowling.
We can only hope.
It is...
gosh, what is it? 20 to 6 on Thursday, the 16th of...
June 2006. I hope you're doing very well.
I hope you're having a great time, a great summer.
It's actually the 15th. I'm just checking.
15th of June. No need to panic.
I've corrected the date. All is well with the world.
So, I wanted to talk this afternoon, just to sort of continue on the conversation that we were having this morning, about how do you know?
Because it's a pretty important thing to understand, that it's really not...
Easy to come to honest and truthful conclusions about things.
Because so much of what we have in our minds is simply given to us by others.
We're told about things.
And because of that, it's very hard, I think, for people to know or to understand how little they know.
Now, I feel this very keenly.
I'm always knowing.
I always feel very keenly how little I know and how many caveats there have to be in the face of knowledge.
And there's just so much out there that I have to take on the sort of, I say, take it on faith is where my language is going, but I want to resist that impulse, that I have to accept as something that is true just because somebody says so.
I mean, so I'm going to the dentist or whatever, and maybe they say, ooh, looks like you might have a little bit of a cavity here, we should top it up.
Or you might be getting a cavity, well, what am I going to do, go to dental school, give myself a self-examination?
By the time I do all of that, I won't have any teeth left and probably not, well, given my sort of affinity for that kind of stuff, it would never happen, let's say.
So, there's just stuff that you have to take.
You have to trust. You have to trust people.
And I think that's valid, of course, when you're dealing with certain technical forms of expertise.
But it's sort of important to understand that when it comes to things like philosophy and government and war, all of the stuff which involves the massive and violent transfer of wealth, There's an enormous amount of skepticism that we should be bringing to the statements that are made by people in power, or people who serve those in power, or people who are paid by those in power.
We should have an enormous amount of skepticism, and we should never take it as an axiom that it is so, because somebody in power tells us that it's so.
You could call it the Fox News or the PBS syndrome.
So, this is something that's very important to understand when you're talking about politics or philosophy or ethics or economics with someone.
It's that they really don't know except what they've been told.
When they are speaking about something, they don't know what the facts are, they certainly don't know what the theory is, and they rarely know what the facts are.
And I put myself naturally in this kind of category for a lot of things as well.
That's why I try and hold off on podcasting about something like Enron until at least I can get some facts together that I can have some vague capacity to verify in some limited fashion.
Now, where you have a theory and the facts seem to fit to that theory, then there can be some value and you can go a little bit further with that, right?
So every time you are going to sail a ship across the Atlantic, you don't have to figure out whether the Earth is round or flat again, right?
It's going to happen enough times.
So we're comfortable with a crude knowledge, I think, and can be comfortable with that as we move forward and as we communicate.
But I think it's important to understand just how little people know about anything, and how much they're taking on faith.
I can say that, taking it on faith, because they're just told stuff, really.
And that's something that's, I think, fairly important to understand.
They don't know what the facts are about World War II. And look, I'm not saying that I do.
I'm not saying that I do know all the facts about World War II. I'm not even saying I know 1% of the facts about World War II. And I don't think anybody does.
Because a lot of the stuff that went on prior to and including World War II has all gone to the grave with people.
It's not like they put anything incriminating down on paper or anything like that.
So lots of stuff that occurs is not noted.
And we end up receiving...
So, of course, we're having these conversations on the board, and this is not to get into the content of the discussion, but it's, I think, important to sort of see what I'm talking about in a tangible way.
So, of course, people are saying, well, if the U.S. didn't enter World War II, then we'd all be speaking German, and don't you think it was worthwhile to have France and Belgium and so on free, and to free Western Europe, and maybe to some degree even Japan, and free Germany?
Wasn't it even worth that?
So isn't that a justification for the state, and for war, and all this kind of stuff?
Well, I've got to tell you, I have some skepticism towards that viewpoint.
I did take a year-long course when I was doing my undergraduate on World War II, and it started before World War I.
We did a month on the causes and then another month on the 20s, a month on the 30s, and then a couple of months on World War II itself.
And I have some skepticism because, of course, as Harry Brown's article, there's an article I posted on the board by Harry Brown, the world didn't pop into existence in 1938 with this Nazi threat hanging over everyone's throat.
But I have some skepticism about whether or not if the U.S. had entered World War II and therefore that justifies something in the future...
I mean, you're taking a lot of leaps.
I'm not a professional historian.
I did take it all the way through to a master's level, so I have some knowledge about the flimsy nature of history.
It's hard enough to come up with facts in history, I mean, going back any particular distance.
But it's even more difficult to feel that you've come up with enough facts to be able to create a narrative about history.
And it's even more difficult to come up with enough facts that are objective and clear to come up with a narrative about history that can be extracted to a general principle that can be applied to the future in a different situation.
That is something that is extraordinarily difficult.
Not impossible, but very difficult.
You can definitely say that the Dark Ages were pretty wretched, the Middle Ages were fairly wretched, the Renaissance was mildly wretched, the 18th century was pretty bad.
It's called the sad century because there's so much famine.
But then, at the end of the 18th century, when you began to get the agricultural revolution, which the stuff is written about, and you of course can see the population growth, you can't track it down to the last 10%, but you can get some sense of it.
The growth in cities and you can get some laws get struck down around the medieval guilds and so on.
You get a lot of growth of human opportunity which then results in the Industrial Revolution and so on.
So you can look at this and you can extract from that a general principle because you have a before and after lab and you can say that when human beings are subjected to a lot of arbitrary violence, the economy doesn't tend to be very...
Productive. What's the point?
Why do you want to invest in something and defer your gratification when everything you make is just going to get stolen from you anyway?
Who cares? There's no point.
And so you can, in very broad strokes, come up with stuff.
But of course you don't need to go into history to do that.
There's no real point to that.
I mean, if you want to figure out whether economic freedom breeds productivity, breeds increases in human lifespan or additional goods, higher incomes, you just need to look at Hong Kong versus Darfur or something like that.
If you want to sort of figure that...
You don't have to go all the way back in history to figure that out.
Fortunately, there's enough variety in the modern world that you've got all these human labs side by side, right?
So... As Ayn Ryan pointed out in one of our essays, I can't remember which, you have this lab called Eastern Europe.
And, sorry, East Berlin, right?
You have this lab called East Berlin, which is a little island...
Oh, West Berlin, which is a little island of capitalism, so to speak, in a big, ugly, black, blood-soaked sea of communism.
And it was clear that everybody was trying to get into West Berlin because it was...
Free. I mean, this is, I guess, going out to people over the age of 20 or something, so you can remember this kind of stuff.
So you don't have to go back in history to figure that kind of stuff out, because you can figure out what it means to have dictatorship versus freedom just by looking at the modern world.
You might find some value in going back and trying to figure out, say, how the abolitionists, those who wanted to get rid of slavery, how the abolitionists managed to achieve their goals.
I think that could be valuable, and I've done a little bit of that to sort of figure out.
It's sort of one of the reasons that I was able to come up or worked with the argument for morality.
So you can go back and figure out some of that kind of stuff.
Maybe there's some value in that that could be reproducible to what it is you're trying to do in the future, but it's not verifiable.
You can look back and you can say, well, the abolitionists, they used this constant argument from morality about the evil of slavery, and that seemed to work, and the freedom movement has largely been using the argument from efficiency or the argument from effect, which doesn't seem to work, so maybe we'll try what did seem to work and stop trying what didn't seem to work.
I mean, that to me is a valid thing to do with history, because you have to look at something that's completed its cycle.
And to see if it worked or not.
You couldn't look at all the movements around the world right now and figure out which one is going to win or not, but the abolitionistic movement did have some valid approaches that I sort of found it was worthwhile to research and learn from.
So there's a little bit of valuable stuff you can do with history, but sort of what I'm trying to point out, well actually, sorry, what I have not really started pointing out yet, but which I'm leading up to, is that the vast majority of what people think about history is simply a dogmatic interpretation to suit particular ideological requirements.
It's absolutely the case.
And a lot of it is post-justification scar tissue.
I mean, this is pretty important.
A lot of this is post-justification scar tissue.
So if you had, I don't know, a father, a husband, and an uncle killed in World War II, it's pretty hard to say that it was a colossal waste of time, energy, and money in human life.
I've sort of made the case in other podcasts that statistically it's hard to really make the case that the Western world won We're good to go.
Just looking at the growth in governments before and after the Second World War, it's very hard to understand what people mean when they say, boy, did we ever win the Second World War.
Is life in the modern West better than it would be under the Nazis?
Well, of course it is. Absolutely. Absolutely.
But prevention is always better than cure, right?
I mean, the one thing that's important, if you're going to extract lessons from history, to sort of use a medical analogy, what you don't want to do is say, well, once the gangrene gets to your knee, you have to cut off the whole leg, and then you'll be better, right? I mean, that's, I guess, better than dying, but a whole lot better than that is, here's how not to get gangrene to begin with.
That, to me, would be a slightly better thing to do than to figure out how best to hack off people's legs.
So when it comes to history, prevention is always, always, always better than cure.
So if you want to start dipping back into wars and trying to extract principles that you can then apply to other things, then the first thing that you need to figure out is not...
How many people did we have to kill in order to stave off the inevitable spread of tyranny, but why the hell was tyranny spreading to begin with, right?
I mean, how can we prevent the spread of tyranny, not what should we do when tyranny almost has us killed, and how many people do we have to murder and bomb, and how many civilians and children and women do we have to bomb, and how many women have to spontaneously give birth prematurely because the cities are being firebombed, as happened in Dresden and London.
How do we avoid getting into these kinds of situations to begin with?
Not, oh, do you just want to speak German?
And should Western Europe still be enslaved?
And Hitler would have equipped freaking sharks with laser beams and sent them over to attack America?
And that's why we have to have war and a big military?
Because, I mean, this is just not getting the point of history at all.
At all. The point of history is to figure out how the hell did this stuff all come about?
You know, it's like the purpose of martial arts is to prevent a fight.
Not to spearhand or use monkey gets fruit on the guy's heart if he attacks you.
It's to figure out how to avoid the fight, not how to win the fight.
Once you're in a situation where you have to go and drop atom bombs on countries halfway around the world, yeah, hey, it's a free-for-all.
I got it. Do whatever the hell you want, because this is way past the situation where anything productive or useful can be done.
I mean, if you've fallen out of the plane without your parachute, it doesn't matter what you do on the way down.
You can sing, you can do a jig, you can pretend to fly, you can flap open your cheeks hoping to slow yourself down a little.
It's fine. Do what you want.
You're in a free fall. It doesn't really matter.
What we're doing now to try and get people to understand about the coercive nature of the state and about the false and corrupt nature of religion and about the false and corrupt nature of believing that the family is automatically virtuous or the state or the class or the race or whatever or the gender for certain feminists.
The whole purpose of that is to prevent Totalitarianism.
Once totalitarianism comes, if we don't have any luck preventing it, once totalitarian comes, I mean, you can download these podcasts, but that's going to be it.
Because then it's over.
It's done. There's no point podcasting.
Then you just have to wait for the system to work itself out, right?
You have to wait a couple of generations until it collapses.
I mean, so, once you get into a situation where Germany is taking over Europe and, you know, do we go to war?
Forget it. It's way too late.
You're not looking at the right lessons of history.
Philosophy is nutrition, not ER surgery.
Philosophy is eat well and exercise.
Not... I can't feel my leg because I got diabetes two years ago and never treated it.
What should I do? Oh, nutritionist.
Well, you should go see a freaking doctor.
So, the whole point of philosophy is to prevent.
Through integrity, through honesty, through understanding, through logic, through ethics, to prevent these kinds of situations.
Once you're over there, hey, somebody puts me in uniform and sends me over to Iraq.
Maybe I'll fight back. Maybe I won't.
I doubt it. I'd probably just put down my gun and hide somewhere.
But there's no point lecturing about the military when you're in the military.
So, if somebody says that if somebody else puts out another libertarian podcast, they're going to shoot them, well, get used to the sound of this, my friends, because there's not going to be any more.
There's no point in me dying for liberty, because I don't get to experience it, right?
I mean, what's the point of that?
And it's too late then, anyway.
So, the reason that I'm sort of bringing all this stuff up is that this is sort of one example of the war, the Second World War, which is used to justify this kind of stuff.
And you'll always notice, this is another point that I'll make just before getting to my main point.
Don't worry, traffic's a little slow.
We've got time, baby.
You just lay back and relax.
Um... You'll always notice that when wars get closer in time, they get more questionable, always.
It's the wars that are further back in time that always seem heroic and just.
I mean, it's something you should recognize, understand, right?
So, you know, the Revolutionary War of 1776.
Oh, you would rather have paid off King George and you don't want the country to be free.
You'd still rather be a commonwealth, a satellite, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, uh... Canada seemed to make it without getting a whole bunch of people killed.
Anyway, we can come back to that another time.
It's always easy, right? Somebody else is getting killed to say it was just and worthwhile.
But you'll notice that when we get closer to wars in the present, we actually have more information and we know that it's all bullshit, right?
So, people think the Revolutionary War was great.
They have some doubts about the First World War to some degree because it was such an obvious stalemate and And then they have no doubts about the Second World War, although it was in fact an obvious stalemate, right?
You free Western Europe and enslave Eastern Europe, and what the hell was the point of that?
And you fight socialism and impose socialism on yourself.
What's the point of that? But we get a lot more stories told about it.
You have this Nazi Hitler guy.
You don't have the same kind of...
How many people know the leader of Germany in the First World War?
He's not screaming and no concentration camps from that standpoint.
So it's just not as vivid a war as the Second World War.
But we get a lot of stories about the virtue of the Second World War.
With the Korean War, if it wasn't for MASH, maybe, you know, we wouldn't get...
Again, if you're under 20, I apologize for these cultural references.
Go ask your dad.
Anyway. Korean War, eh, it's a little bit of stuff.
Vietnam War is considered to be pretty bad.
Certainly the Korean War is considered to be less just than the Second World War.
The Vietnam War is considered to be less just than the Korean War.
The Gulf War is considered to be perhaps a little bit more just because there was an actual invasion, but there's still a lot of people, especially those who have Gulf War Syndrome, not so much with the whole justice thing.
And then, of course, the Iraq War, everybody knows, is complete nonsense, right?
It's a complete lie and falsehood.
It's got nothing to do with anything other than transferring money and maybe some couple of crazy loonies with mad idealistic visions about reshaping the world because they're insane and narcissistic and megalomaniacal and so on.
But you'll sort of notice that when wars are closer to us in time, it's harder to view them as great, successful, wonderful achievements that have saved the world from evil, right?
I mean, it doesn't really occur that way.
So, when you sort of people say, well, you know, if the US hadn't done this and this and that, well, the question to me is, well, how do you know?
How do you know?
Well, it's obvious.
It's like, well, it's not obvious to historians.
I don't think there are historians who are competent who would make the claim that we'd all be speaking German if the US hadn't entered World War II. With the whole caveat, of course, being that if the U.S. had not entered World War II... I mean, you can play this game any way you want to, right?
But there's just no cause and effect that's simple.
It's like economics. If the U.S. had not entered World War II, then it would not have emerged with this incredible crushing debt and massive, massive social spending that came out of it.
The GI Bill plus the foundations of the welfare state and so on.
If the US had not entered into World War II, taxes would probably be less than half what they are now.
And what that would have meant is that the US economy would have been five times bigger than it is now.
Everybody would be so much richer.
And so everybody would have left all of those countries, come to America, because America wouldn't have had to worry about immigration without a welfare state as big as it is now.
And all of the Western European countries under Nazism would have just collapsed, because they wouldn't have had any competent people left, right?
I mean, you can play this any way that you want.
There's no guarantee of any of these things.
So if the US hadn't entered into World War II, then a lot fewer people would have had to get killed, especially, you know, a couple of million people over in Japan.
Oh, sorry, I don't know if it's a couple of million.
I know it's a couple of hundred thousand died in the firebombing of Tokyo.
Yeah, you know, it's got to be over a million, probably closer to two.
But then everybody would have fled to America, and Nazism would have collapsed, and then they'd have been able to go back and rebuild Europe without all of these huge social programs, right?
So who knows? Who knows?
There's just no way to tell what would have happened in the what-if world of maybe-maybe.
But what is pretty important to understand is that if people just start with, well, it's 1938, what would you do?
It's like, well... Does it matter?
I mean, we're doomed anyway, right?
Because the whole point is prevention, right?
What would you do? I don't know. Roll some dice, flip a coin, doesn't matter.
But every choice has consequences, and we know that the choice of the U.S. to enter World War II has had a lot to do, of course, with creating the American Empire, with creating the perpetual standing army, with creating the military-industrial complex, with transferring enormous amounts of power to the state, And that the world is far less free now than it was before World War II. So, a little hard for me to sort of...
But this sort of question of how do you know is important.
It's very important.
So you say, well, let's privatize education.
Poor people won't get educated, you hear.
That's all you ever hear. Poor people won't get educated.
What about some brilliant poor kid?
Never going to get educated.
Well, how do you know?
How do you know? Do you know?
I don't think you know. Because it's never been privatized.
Maybe you've looked at America in 1850 or 1830.
In which case you'd find out, of course, that poor kids were educated just fine when the per capita income was like 1 15th.
This is what it is now. So, of course, if the poor kids can get educated in 1830, then the poor kids can get educated now.
But it's a question, how do you know?
It's a perfectly valid question to ask.
Ask me, ask anyone. How do you know?
Saddam Hussein was a monster, as I got an email today.
Saddam Hussein was a monster and can only be removed by force, and so it was the right thing to do.
Well, how do you know?
How do you know that the only way to get rid of Saddam Hussein was through force?
How do you know that people in Iraq are better off now than when Saddam Hussein was in power?
And if Saddam Hussein was so bad, and of course he's an evil man, Then shouldn't whoever got him into power be somewhat culpable?
Well, then, of course, the U.S. aided the Ba'ath Party and got them into power and sold them weapons and subsidized them during the whole Iraq War in the 80s and sold them helicopters, which he used to dust the Kurds with weapons of mass destruction, which he also got with American aid.
And then you say, well, America made the mess and America should go and clean it up.
Well, I think that's wonderful.
You let me know if you believe that.
And then what I'll do is I'll take your credit card and go and spend it, right?
Because it's just a mess that you have to clean up then, right?
But the problem is, of course, Americans didn't do this, and it was mostly done without their knowledge, so the idea that...
You know, 18-year-old kids from Canada should go get their arms blown off because Donald Rumsfeld had a thing for Saddam Hussein in the 80s.
It doesn't exactly seem like a very just way of, right, so I do the crime and you go to jail.
I wonder if that's going to help crime diminish or not, right?
But the question is, of course, how do you know?
How do you know these things? So you come to these big, broad, sweeping conclusions about history and so on.
And the question is, well, how do you know?
They hate us because we're good.
Really? Have you asked the Muslims why they hate us?
Have you read Bin Laden's speeches?
Have you researched the Koran?
Do you know why they hate us?
Well, it's a perfectly valid question.
Have you asked your Muslim friends?
Do you have any Muslim friends?
Have you talked to anybody other than people who write for American media?
Do you have any clue why?
Or has somebody just told you?
And there's nothing wrong.
I mean, people tell me stuff all the time which I have to sort of believe, or don't have to, but choose to believe.
But it's a choice.
I believe it because, you know, it fits my theories now.
I believe it because it makes sense, it's logical, but it's always contingent.
I never say it's an absolute fact.
And that's something sort of important to understand.
And I was talking about this on my vacation, about the soldiers in the war, this battle on Roberts Bridge, or Rescue at Roberts Ridge thing.
Well, the first thing you want to do is start sort of coming out with things from a personal empirical standpoint.
Well, if people hate America enough to attack the USS Cole, if people hate the American military so much they're going to attack the USS Cole, I don't think I'm going to get flamed.
I'm not going to use a 9-11 reference.
Just in case anybody thinks it's a massive conspiracy, I'm not even going to use the Oklahoma City bombing.
We're just going to use the bomb that went into the USS Cole.
Well, why do people hate the U.S. military enough To do that.
Or, why do these people, these insurgents in Iraq, attack US checkpoints when they're not likely to live or anything like that?
Suicide bombers. Why? Why do they do this?
Well, the first question to ask yourself, of course, is, well, what would make me do this?
What would make me do this?
And don't give me this afterlife nonsense because Christianity had the same thing, right?
I mean, that's why a lot of people went to the Crusades or work off their sins.
So it's not because they believe in the 72 virgins or anything like that.
There's a cover story. That's what we tell ourselves so that we don't actually have to deal with the socio-political economic motivators for people who want Westerners killed, right?
Well, why do they want to do this?
Well, if my family had been wiped out by a misaligned scud landing in Iraq, and I had no economic future, and I could not...
And if the US continues in Iraq, then I'm going to have to stay underground because I'm on someone's list and I'm wanted by them, even though I didn't do anything wrong, let's say.
It's certainly possible, right? Well, if all of these things occur, if what I love has been blown up and I've got no future, I can never get a job, I can't have any kind of life, well, then going out in a blaze of glory starts to look a whole lot more appealing.
Because, you know, we're all people, right?
The Muslims are not a different species.
They're not a different race of human beings.
They're not from some other planet.
They're not pod people. They're not plant people.
They're not made of silicon. So, they're like us.
And... If you want to try to figure out the soul of a suicide bomber, then you say, well, what is it that would make me do something like this?
And if you can't come up with anything, then you just need to think of worse things, right?
And so... If you can, then you've sort of taken a step towards understanding someone that's told is your foe, right?
The terrorists are our foes, right?
I mean, this is what we hear from the Western governments, that the terror alert is that whatever, Bert and Ernie, who knows?
But that's funny, right?
I mean, that's really funny.
What did Bin Laden ever do to me?
Nothing. Well, of course, I mean, nothing.
But... What happens if I don't pay my property taxes?
Well, guys come to my house with guns and throw me into the rape rooms, right?
I mean, this is what's kind of funny.
This is why it's funny to me. People say Saddam Hussein is a monster, right?
I mean, how many people did Saddam Hussein have in rape rooms?
I don't know, but I bet you it was a whole lot less than the population that the U.S. has in rape rooms, right?
So, it's just a matter of reciprocity, right?
I mean, if terrorizing your own population...
And stealing their money and throwing them into jail for things which are not immoral than, you know, the million-plus nonviolent criminals in the US prison system who are regularly getting shagged by their roommates and not shagged voluntarily either.
Well, that would seem to me to be an indication of a monstrous tyranny that is abusing its people.
So, I could be missing something, of course, but it's just a matter of using the principles consistently.
It's all we're sort of asking, right?
And if 9-11 was a bad thing, which of course it was, then surely the body count matters outside the U.S. that the U.S. is perpetrating, and Britain and Canada to some degree now, too.
We're joining this club of far-off murderers and going off to kill people in foreign lands, thinking that this is somehow going to make the world safer.
So, that's just a question.
It's just a question. How do you know?
How do you know? How do you know the motivations for someone to become a suicide bomber?
Well, they're kind of like...
Like your motivations would be for becoming a suicide bomber.
No future. No life.
Your kid's been shot.
Your brother's been shot. Your father was shot and dragged off, beaten, tortured.
Came back with his eyes gouged out or his hands cut off or came back raving insane because he'd been raped to within an inch of his life and had electrodes attached to his scrotum.
Somebody that you love, it was torture, it would make you mad with rage.
If somebody did that to Christina, I would be absolutely deranged with rage.
Absolutely deranged. And if I never knew what happened, I would go completely mental.
If they just slowed their car down and dumped her body in front of my house, I would go completely mental.
And I would plot bloody vengeance.
It's human nature. I think.
So... The how-do-you-know stuff is just important, right?
If you say, well, let's get rid of the welfare state.
Well, the poor people will all starve to death.
Well, how do you know?
How do you know? Well, they don't.
They haven't done any studies. They haven't read any research.
They just told this stuff.
It's just propaganda. It's like you get the...
It's like you get the all-General Motors channel for, like, all of your...
All of your programming is General Motors commercials, right?
And then you come to me and you say, well, of course General Motors makes the best car.
Why is it even a question?
I say, well, how do you know?
Well, it just does. And you'll come up with all these reasons, but these reasons are all culled from the ads, right?
It's got a great safety rating.
It's this, it's that, right? And I'll say, well, but that's all...
It's all just GM propaganda.
It's just advertising, right?
And propaganda is a harsh word for advertising, but I think you know what I mean, right?
It's just stuff that you're told so that you'll shut up and pay your taxes.
It's just stuff that you're told so that you'll help the hand steady as it shears you and does even more unpleasant things to you with the knives.
I mean, it's just what you're told so that you'll obey, right?
It's the reasons that you're given so that you'll shut up and pay your taxes and obey.
I mean, it's... Not something that you've reasoned out for yourself.
This is not something you've... You haven't looked at source documents and done independent research and figured all this stuff out.
You haven't spent 20 years racking your brains trying to come up with a consistent worldview, I guess like I did, or have, or am trying to.
You haven't, you know, read deeply in philosophy and studied it for years, and, you know, it's just...
It's a knee-jerk. Well, they'd starve to death.
And they don't know that that's justification, right?
Why am I brutalized?
Well, I'm brutalized because the government will kill me if I don't pay the taxes.
So I'm brutalized. But how am I going to live with being brutalized?
Well, I'll pretend that it's virtuous.
And that's fine. That solves a certain kind of immediate pain with the minor problem that it never ends if you do that.
It never ends if you do that.
If you don't accept that you're being brutalized, it'll never end.
Never, never, never, never, never.
And you'll end up fighting anybody who wants to end it.
Tooth and nail. So, this question, how do you know?
I mean, we all, I guess, have talked about this before, sort of at an epistemological level.
How do you know that your car is your car?
And how do you know up is down?
And how do you know gravity exists?
All that scientific method stuff.
But what I'm talking about is, is to how do you know around these sort of sociological facts or theories of history or, you know, what happens without the government?
How do you know? Oh, if there's no government, there'll be endless civil war.
Oh, okay. How do you know?
Well, Somalia this, Somalia that.
Oh, okay. Well, how do you know?
Have you been there? Have you done lots of research?
Have you figured this stuff out? Do you know the history?
I would expect that it would take quite a lot of years and years of work to figure out the history of Somalia.
You'd have to learn the language, go interview people.
It would be years and years of work, and yet people are just like, they read one Time magazine article, and it's like, Somalia!
Civil War! Anarchy!
Ah! Right? And it's like, okay, well, Time Magazine, of course, gets...
A lot of it's stories from the state, and it requires constant state presence and knowledge and information.
And so they may not be the most objective people.
Of course, all these people are raised in state schools, and then they are hoping to get jobs in intellectual endeavors, which are all dwarfed by state power and beholden to state power.
And it's not to say that nobody is telling the truth about anything.
It's just, I... I think it's beholden to be skeptical.
When you're in a virtual sea of propaganda, it may be wise to tread water from time to time, rather than just keep drowning.
I mean, that's sort of what I'm saying, right?
That's sort of what I think it's important to ask people who have really definite opinions about, well, if there's no socialized medicine, then the sick will...
What's that Bono song?
The rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor.
Well... How do you know?
I mean, is this just Marxist propaganda?
Is this socialistic nonsense?
Is this just what you were taught in public school by state-paid teachers that the state is good and without the state?
I mean, how do you know?
Have you just been told this by people however many times?
And I'm not sort of talking about radical skepticism.
Because there are methodologies for figuring this stuff out to one degree or another.
I think that there are ways of approaching this so that you can come up with some answers.
It's just that the criteria is, you know, pretty high, I think.
And there's, of course, things that you can do with the argument for morality when people say something is good, right?
So there's still this confusion that I get emails and sort of response.
There's still this confusion that people have where they say, oh, well, why are you so anti-religious?
Why can't people believe whatever the hell they want to believe?
It's like, well, of course they can believe whatever the hell they want to believe.
I mean, I can't reach into their skulls and change their mind.
I mean, good heavens. People can believe whatever they want to believe.
But once they bring things into a public arena and they say this is true, well, then they...
They're kind of debating, right?
They're kind of coming out and saying this is true.
You don't know. I might have this private shrine to leprechauns in my bedroom.
And I might worship to the light.
Please, little leprechaun gods, give me a good podcast topic for the morning so that I can rant without even taking one breath in.
Oh, leprechaun gods, please help me resist chocolate tonight or whatever.
I could have all of that.
But so what? What do you care?
What effect does it have on you? None.
It doesn't matter at all. You'll never even know about it.
I guess maybe if anybody cared to write my biography, you know, for a rational guy, he really seemed to have a whole lot of shrunken leprechaun head shrine things in his room.
We weren't really expecting that.
But so what? You don't know anything about it.
But the moment I start saying that leprechauns exist and they're real and you should believe in them and they're moral, Well, I'm out in the public, I'm making statements of facts now, right?
So, you know, I think it's entirely beholden to say, well, how do you know?
Right? So, you say, oh, well, you know, we have a government because we vote for the government, and so the government's doing what we want.
Oh, that's interesting. How do you know?
I mean, how do you know? Just work empirically.
Work from your own experience. Does the government do what you want?
No. Of course not.
That's true for everyone. So, okay, so you at least know that the government doesn't do what you want.
Right? Do you feel that a practical solution to the government not doing what you want is to go and run for office and try and spend millions of dollars and dozens of years trying to get to some position of power?
And then try and change it.
Do you feel that that's a valid solution for changing the government?
Well, if you're not talking to George Bush, then the answer is probably no, right?
So, no, it's not a valid approach, right?
So you know that the government doesn't do what you want.
And you know that you also don't believe that it's a valid solution to say, well, if the government doesn't do what you want, then just, you know, vote to change it or go run for office or whatever.
So all I'm saying is that all you need to do is start working empirically.
Just start working from your own experience, start working from what you do.
So all of that sort of makes sense, right?
So, you know, if somebody says, well, the poor will starve, right?
Well, would you help somebody who was poor?
Would you throw a couple of bucks their way if they were starving?
Would you give a little bit to charity?
Like, if you had triple your income, would you give a couple of percentage points to charity?
I sure as heck would. I mean, gratefully.
I just want to make sure that it was being used well.
That's all I would ask for, right?
And if people say no, then obviously...
There's no right to force other people to do what they themselves are not willing to do, right?
This is really hypocritical. And if they say yes, then, you know, that's good.
Then you don't need to stay.
Like, just ask people empirically, how do you know?
Is it based on what you would do?
Or is it just something people...
Is it a knee-jerk reaction based on propaganda you've imbibed?
So I hope this is useful.
I know it was a bit of a ramble fest, but I was really trying to wrestle this idea down into sort of both talking about it theoretically, historically, practically, and personally.
And so I hope this is helpful.
Thanks so much for listening.
As always, I hugely appreciate it.
It's a fantastic conversation. I look forward to your donations, and I look forward to you coming to visit at freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D. And I will soon get the second round up in iTunes.
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Thank you for the people who've donated.
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Are you guys crazy or crazy?
Just plain nuts. So thanks so much for listening, and feel free to donate at freedomainradio.com.
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