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July 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:12
321 Scientific Anarchism - Working From The Evidence

How to use real-world examples to solve and communicate the challenges and solutions of anarchism

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You can hear the rain against my windshield pain.
How are you doing, everybody?
It's stiff. Yes, it's raining cats and dogs.
Thud, thud, thud up here in Toronto this fine morning, 8.30 in the morning on Monday, July the 10th, 2006.
Thank you to everyone who was listening to and contributing to Welcome to my show.
That may be the case.
It may not be the case.
I sense self-education, which is not a bad thing, as long as you end up validating it.
You know, there is quite a chunk of human knowledge already out there which can help you, and so I just wasn't sure a little bit about the content of that.
Because it would be like the guy was saying, it comes below the consciousness, and then was saying, no, but it's not unconscious.
So, I just, I find it interesting, but I don't know about you, and I'm not sure I would say it's true about this guy.
I don't know if it's the same with you.
When I start hearing somebody that I find interesting...
For me, I do end up with this kind of problem where I get a little skittish, you know?
It's like, like this guy yesterday, it was like, now he's talking about Adam 6,000 years ago and so on, and Adam was the first language monkey and stuff, and I just...
I mean, I find like, hey, that's an interesting idea.
When does it get weird?
I used to have that in relationships as well.
Hey, you seem like a great woman.
When do you get weird?
When do we have that first conflict where just really strange things start to occur, and we end up on totally different sides of the couches within about 30 seconds, and you end up...
I remember, I didn't date this woman, but I knew her, and I was sort of interested in her, and then one day she read in...
She seemed like a nice, competent, intelligent woman, and certainly was intelligent.
One day we were reading in the paper and she was saying what happened was there was a cougar that had attacked a woman and children in BC, British Columbia, the socialist paradise, the socialist paradise, what they call the left coast of Canada.
So it's like our California, but with mountains.
And the cougar had attacked a woman and her two children, and they had killed the cougar.
And she was absolutely appalled, just almost beyond appalled, outraged, that they had shot the cougar.
And I understand that the cougar's not responsible for doing what the cougar does, and maybe it would be better to put it in a zoo or something, but not really a whole lot of compassion for the women and children, and the husband who then had to sort of I don't know, pick his children's remains off the landscape and out of the inside of the cougar, you know, might be, I mean, might be a problem.
I don't remember a whole lot of people booing at the end of Jaws when Roy Scheider pops the canister in the shark's mouth with the gun.
I don't remember a whole lot of people thinking, gosh, how sad, they should have put it in a zoo.
But rather, wow, that's a dangerous predator that's put to rest.
So... I just...
And so with that guy a little bit yesterday, I felt that.
Perhaps he'd like to come back and explain us some more.
But I always have a little bit of trouble with people, and this is sort of a general communications thing.
My preference, right? It's just my particular preference.
If you do have confusing and obtuse ideas...
Then I do sort of think that you need to sort of state them as tentative conclusions rather than as absolute facts, and give lots of arguments and support, and real-world examples, right?
That's sort of saying there are language monkeys associated with Adam, not so much with the real-world examples, and saying it's complicated doesn't really help if you don't sort of help people along step by step.
I try not to introduce anarchism by saying, It's complicated.
There is no real state.
There's lots of mini-states that have no military or little military.
And they all get along.
And if you have any questions, go read a bunch of books.
So, that's generally not the way that...
I'm going to try to sort of work from people's empirical life and how you live your life and so on.
And also, I don't really agree with the conclusion that you have to reach children who are 8 or 9 years old in order for freedom to work.
I mean... I was older than 8 or 9 when I came to the most important conclusion, which was anarchy.
I was in my mid-30s, right?
So I wouldn't say that.
That's just a little bit past that guy's...
And there's lots of kids who don't think.
They're too scared. I mean, they want to, right?
It's our natural condition is to think and enjoy it.
But they want to.
They're just sort of too frightened by their parents and peers and siblings and so on.
So... So I wanted to talk, I know that we had some requests yesterday, about more to do with relationship stuff, and I certainly appreciate that, and I'm glad that that's bringing value.
And I will do that.
I will do that tomorrow morning, and tomorrow evening I've booked Christina's time, and we'll have a mutual chat, because...
It's better to have both people talking about conflict resolution if you're in a situation where conflict resolution is working.
And in our marriage, we've got it down to a pretty fine art.
And that mostly is to do with credibility and trust, which we'll talk about a little bit more either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.
But this morning, I would like to tie up some loose ends from the second half of the Colin show yesterday.
And talk about some DRO stuff, because this question still keeps coming up, and I understand it.
It is a tough question to answer.
Some DRO stuff around how you deal with DROs that don't agree.
And the other thing that I'd like to talk about is social power, the power of social arrangements, social sanctions.
Which is enormously, enormously undervalued in most political philosophy.
Every political philosopher in the world is like, well, we need a military, just about.
We need a military, so we need a state, so we need taxes, and if you don't like it, you can move.
It's really all it comes down to.
Because, you know, they're toady slaves to state power, and they're angling for government-sponsored jobs, and I've never been more free than not trying to work within the media.
And... So that's sort of the general gist of all political philosophy.
And... I don't know if it's because philosophers live lives of isolation.
I don't know if it's because they were exposed to too many high levels of toxic shaming when they were children.
I couldn't really tell you the psychology behind it without looking more into the lives of philosophers.
Certainly Nietzsche would fall into that.
Father was a pastor in Germany, of all things.
Lutheran pastors in Germany are not known for their...
And there's quite a bit of a description of this in my novel Almost, where the guy who's a Nazi...
He speaks quite a bit about his childhood as a Lutheran minister, and you can sort of try and subtly draw the direct parallels between these kinds of philosophies.
But I don't know why social philosophers are so blind to the power of...
Social approval is a very, very powerful thing in life.
I mean, why do people think that families that aren't the best things in the world continue?
Well, they continue because people are afraid of having to answer that question, how's your mom, how's your dad, and sort of saying, oh, I ditched them like old fruit.
I did some, like, sagging oranges, so I really couldn't tell you.
Oh, shock! People still stay around this conformity stuff because, well, A, because they're afraid of the isolation that they imagined and will come from not spending time with their family.
But it's because they haven't fully processed the bottomless isolation that is occurring for them.
By spending time with their family, I would much rather spend time with the Free Domain Radio Board than spend any time with my family, because at least in the Free Domain Radio Board, while certainly there's tons of people there who don't agree with me, there are lots of people who, in fact, I would say just about all of them, who are really smart, intelligent people who really, really, really care about ideas, which, of course, are the most important thing in the world.
So, we'll talk a little bit about that.
Now, the first thing with DROs, this is my suggestion.
Almost every form of anarchism is alive and well in the world today.
I can sort of do another podcast on this if you're interested.
Almost every aspect of anarchism is alive and well in the world today.
And in fact, it is the majority of social interaction.
Anarchism does not describe some kind of magical future realm where everybody has grown angels' wings and nobody disagrees and everybody floats by on this karmic level of harmony and conformity.
Not at all. Anarchism simply says, how do you live your life?
Anarchism is an empirical philosophy.
So, anarchism does not have any ideals, at least for me, prior to those which are observed within the world.
Anarchism and the scientific method are one and the same.
What that means is, forget about what you prefer in terms of society.
Forget about what you're used to.
Forget about the fact that you were raised with the idea of the state.
Forget about the idea that you were raised with the virtue of the collective and the family and the country and the virtue of the military and the virtue of the cops.
Forget about all the propaganda, right?
Because when you look at the scientists who were working in the, and even some scientists now, those in the stem cell area, When you look at scientists who were working in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, they were facing exactly the same prejudices that we anarchists are facing now, which is that people would prefer that the divine right of kings be valid, and people would prefer that the Pope be the infallible oracle of all things scientific, moral, personal, philosophical, political, or anything.
In the world, they would prefer that God exists.
They would prefer that the Bible be accurate in its statements around physics, right?
So when the Bible talks about the earth which does not move, people would prefer for that to be true, but unfortunately it wasn't true, and the astronomers sort of proved that, mathematicians proved that.
And so all they're saying is, well, forget about what we would prefer, and forget about what's been handed down, and forget about what's been written, and forget about what everyone says.
Forget about all that shit.
Let's just go have a look at how the world actually works.
That's all that anarchism does.
Anarchism is just the scientific method applied to the realm of politics.
That's all it is. It's nothing more complicated than that.
And the conclusions that it reaches are nothing more startling than, yeah, okay, it might look like the Sun goes around the Earth and the Sun and the Moon are the same size and blah blah blah, but that's not the case.
It might look like the entire star system and the galaxies and the constellations all wheel around the Earth, but that's not the case.
It might look like Venus is a star, but it is in fact a planet.
And it may look to people who were raised with a lot of state propaganda, it may look to them like without the government everything would be chaos and without the government there'd be nothing but civil war.
It may look to them like the family is virtuous just for the supreme act of virtue is having sex and ejaculating in someone after the age of 14 that years of study and wisdom and virtue don't add up to a hill of beans relative to, say, having sex with someone You know, or even raping them, I guess.
You're still a father, right?
And it's in the category of father, even if you're in jail.
And so that is the supreme act of virtue.
And it may look like the Sopranos are bad guys, but the military are good guys.
These are all just things we're raised with, right?
They're all just things that we're told. And...
All that anarchism is doing is saying, well, how do people really live their lives?
Politics does have to have something to do with how people live their lives.
It does have to have something to do with empirical observations.
So everything that occurs within anarchistic theory occurs within the real world as well, like in the current world.
So when you're thinking about, well, good heavens to Betsy, good lord, good lord, good lord, how on earth would DROs possibly conceivably remotely be able to deal with each other when they had disagreements about ethics or about what constituted an immoral or, I guess you could say, illegal in quotes, act?
So the first thing that I would do is not dive for my Rothbard and not dive for my free domain radio and not dive for a piece of paper to work out the logical theory.
That's scholastic in nature.
That fundamentally is not using the scientific method.
What I would do in asking this question is to say, well, are there any real world examples of organizations that have no binding ties on each other Who still cooperate in order to get things done.
And there are sort of some examples of cell phone companies and railway, sort of railway line manufacturers that don't change the gauge, and airports which deal with a bunch of different airlines, and lots of sort of examples that you could come up with about how disparate dogs, the cell phone sort of transmission, cell phone roaming calls, and so on.
And of course, internet service providers, they all cooperate with each other.
They don't change the TCP IP protocol because it happens to work better for them.
They all stick with it.
So there's lots of cooperation, or what's called coopetition sometimes, right?
It's stuff that companies that are sort of normally in competition will cooperate with each other.
Tons and tons of examples.
And now, if those aren't sort of state-ish enough for you, and you could study those and figure out sort of...
You start with the world. Start with the world.
Don't start with ideas. Ideas are derived from empirical observation and then projected to a sort of more predictive and perfect set of principles.
But the first thing you do is start by observing the world, not by reading books, and not by theorizing in a vacuum.
The first thing you do is you start by observing the world.
So if you wanted to figure out how the worst conceivable situation, which would be DROs that do not profit at all from dealing with each other directly...
Where there are very disparate belief systems, in fact, you could say opposing belief systems, and where the DRO has gained some sort of evil monopoly of force over a particular geographical region.
I mean, this is never going to happen, but let's just say that's the worst case scenario for DROs.
And let's just say that each DRO has an army, right?
I mean, let's go all out.
Opposite beliefs, monopolistic control, each DRO has an army, and they do not profit from dealing with each other directly.
Well, what does that sort of look like?
Well, that sort of looks like existing governments.
Now, the question is then, if this would be the worst case situation for DROs, and this would never be the case with DROs, and I'll get into sort of why in a minute or two, but actually, no, let me do it now, because I'll forget.
The reason that this would never occur for DROs is that governments get to fund the military by taxing people, and DROs don't, because DROs don't have the power to offload the costs of violence to other people.
Governments are sort of fundamental agents for For offloading the costs of violence to other people while retaining the profits, which is why governments cause violence to spread so enormously and why the governments cause violence to grow.
Governments are nothing but enormous fictions for subsidizing violence and the profits of violence, whereas in a DRO system you have to pay for your own troops and it doesn't really work as well.
So, in this situation, the worst case DRO situation, we can look at existing governments and pretend that they're DROs.
And say, okay, well, do existing governments cooperate at all?
Do existing governments have extradition treaties?
Do they have trade treaties?
Do they allow for travel?
Do they allow for trade between themselves?
Are they interested in tourism?
Do they provide visas? Do they cooperate with each other in any way, shape, or form?
And the answer, of course, is yes.
And what happens when they have a dispute?
Well, they negotiate.
They have ambassadors, and sometimes successfully, and sometimes not.
Of course, the main reason that governments in the modern world don't negotiate successfully is because they profit from not coming to resolutions with other countries, so in Canada and The United States, there has been, since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, this issue around softwood lumber, right?
Canada has a slightly different ownership structure for lumber, wherein the U.S. feels that the lumber is subsidized, and therefore it slaps all these tariffs on the Canadian softwood lumber.
The story is, well, it's subsidized.
We're just leveling the playing field.
Of course, that's not what's happening.
It's just that they're paying back the soft and lumber guys for donating political money.
I mean, you buy the politicians who then force the taxpayers to pay for policies which raise the price and inhibit the freedom of the taxpayers.
It's a wonderful scam.
It benefits everyone except the citizens.
Except the vast majority, because it's democracy.
So there's an example where, because the U.S. government can offload the cost of enforcing a tariff to the general population, then it can productively do these kinds of things, because DROs wouldn't have that option.
If the DRO came to you and said, I'm going to charge you an extra thousand dollars a year in order to drive up the price of your goods by about 20%, You probably would say, I'm not so keen on that.
I think that I would far, far rather go with another DRO that wasn't going to charge me $1,000 a year to raise the price of my goods 20%.
But of course, when you have governments, they can do exactly that, right?
They can raise the price of goods by putting up all these tariff walls that benefit particular individuals at your expense and then charge you for the tariff walls, right?
For the enforcement of those, right?
Charge you for the customs officers and inspections and all the lawmakers and so on.
And so that is something that DROs simply can't do.
They're in competition with each other.
And so... If you look at the real world, you can see examples of cooperation and significant amounts of cooperation between governments, especially if you look at the extradition system, which is pretty common across all.
The Western countries all have it, and there are some regional differences in crimes, but those are relatively unimportant, but sort of for the...
Murder, rape, and major, grand theft, larceny, and stuff like that.
There are extradition treaties which governments work with, and the reason that they do that is because they don't want criminals in their countries, right?
Sort of the fundamental issue, right?
This is why...
And DROs, of course, would have a much greater desire for this.
And they also want to get their own criminals back so it looks like they're doing something, right?
Governments need the story.
And this is probably more important than the one I just mentioned.
But governments need the story of, hey, we're doing something.
And we're a great law enforcement agency for you.
And, of course, if somebody just steps over a border and then nobody can get them, then the government looks ineffective and pathetic and they don't like that.
So they all have these extradition treaties.
And so this is sort of my general way of saying there's lots of other reasons that DROs...
And DROs would profit from cooperation because you're going to want the DRO with the widest amount of reciprocity, and you're also going to want the DRO with the smallest amount of laws that are productive, or smallest amount of regulations or rules that are conductive and productive to human life and flourishing as a citizen and so on.
So, it's tough to think of DROs having all of these, I guess you could say, reciprocity agreements, If there are 150,000 laws, but of course there wouldn't be because the cost-benefit of enforcing those would be ridiculously bad, right? So nobody would do that.
There would be a constant desire to minimize laws To prevent rather than cure, the same way that in a fully privatized medical insurance scheme, prevention versus cure and getting rid of, well, basically prevention, would be the way that they would make money, so there would be lots of preventative checkups and there would be lots of...
Looking into drugs that prevented heart disease rather than cured it and so on.
And so prevention of crime and the minimization of regulations and all that kind of stuff and reciprocity agreements would be directly beneficial.
And what I would do, of course, is that I would sign up with a DRO if I wanted to do business with people overseas or in other DROs, represented by other DROs.
I would join a guild of DROs that all agreed to Have a basic minimum standards for X, Y, and Z. That would sort of be mine.
Like, they'd all say, yes, I agree with that, and they might have their own DROs for resolving their own disputes if they couldn't, but they'd be pretty good at that.
And fundamentally, I would join a DRO that was part of this guild that had sort of the bare minimum standards of theft and rape and murder and so on.
And the enforcement of contracts, but I would also make sure that I only signed up with a DRO wherein if that DRO failed to get me restitution.
So if my car is stolen by someone who's not covered by my DRO, then I would want my DRO to buy me a new car, even if they couldn't get the money back.
I don't care about the machinations of the DROs and the complications of their negotiations with some DRO in Des Moines or something.
What I care about is getting my car back, right?
So what I want is for the DRO to just give me the damn money for the car and then, you know, go get...
Whatever restitution they can from this other company.
And if they can't, right, then they just downgrade the contract rating of that other DRO, and therefore that DRO is going to have to lower its prices because people are going to be worried that it doesn't sort of fulfill its contract.
So lots of things around that, just ways that you can solve that kind of issue.
But the first thing you do is you look at existing capitalist and governmental structures wherein there is no legal power, To enforce something in another country, but people still negotiate and deal with each other, and this is sort of the level of governments.
And so if it can work with governments, sure as hell it can work with DROs, right?
Because governments don't even have the same incentives as DROs do.
So that was sort of, that's my suggestion.
I know lots of people want to look straight for the argument, and I understand that, I really do.
But the first thing that you should do when you're faced with an anarchist question is say, is there any way that this problem has been solved in the world as it stands, right?
Switzerland, of course, is a great example for self-defense, cell phone companies for cooperation, and governments for cooperation in that realm.
So just start, you use the scientific method, like really respect the scientific method, start with the facts.
Anarchism is nothing but a universal description of how just about everyone lives their life.
Very few people shoot people, very few people kill people, and very few people would support shooting or killing people who disagree with them or would do it themselves when it would be stated to them that openly, but through the lies and propaganda of the government, that's how.
So, it's what people believe, but it's not how they live.
In the same way that in the Middle Ages, physics was what the Church believed, but not how the world actually works.
What people believe is completely unimportant.
What I believe, what you believe, just completely unimportant.
What matters is how the world actually works.
And how the world actually works is people don't like to use violence.
There's a small subset of sociopaths who like to use violence, but people don't like to use violence.
So then the question is, well, if people don't like to use violence, Why is violence so common throughout the whole world?
Well, the answer is because the state subsidizes violence.
The state subsidizes it all, and anything that you subsidize will increase.
The state subsidizes it all, and it also shields people from the violence that they would otherwise see by having overwhelming force-producing conformity, right?
So, that is an example of How the world actually works, right?
So people in their private lives don't use violence.
You don't go to a lot of poker games where the guy says, if you win, I'm going to strangle you.
That doesn't sort of really occur.
But you do have violence all over the world, encouraged and nurtured by states.
Wherein all of the violence is both hidden and subsidized and the state has control of the children's minds and propaganda and the media and blah blah blah, right?
So, the way that the world actually works is that people don't like to use violence.
I've met maybe two people in my life who like to use violence or who prefer to use violence on a regular basis, sort of my mother and my brother.
And so I just would say that in families and in personal relationships, it's a little bit more common, but those kinds of things are nowhere near.
I mean, they're not even the same category of limitations of freedom as the state does, right?
I mean, you can leave your husband or wife.
The only thing that's analogous to it is a child with a parent, which is why I wanted DROs to cover my ass when I was a kid.
It wasn't there. Maybe I could help some other kids that way, which is...
What I've written about in a Lou Rockwell article, and I can't remember if I podcasted it here or not, about the issue of dealing with Now, I just...
I don't think that I have quite enough time to start on the next topic, which is social conformity, but I just sort of wanted to point out, and I'll reiterate it again, because it's such an important principle.
When it comes to philosophy, you start with the world, right?
Start with the world. Start with all these abstractions.
You start with the world, just the same way that a good scientist does.
First you observe, and then you theorize, right?
And then you continue to theorize, and then you see if your theory begins to predict things, right?
And if your theory can be universal, and if your theory is logical.
I mean, that's really all we're talking about when it comes to anarchism.
Anarchism is just science.
It's a scientific method. Now, I know people are going to get all mad at me and say, well, you're saying that anarchism is the only true philosophy and blah, blah, blah.
Well, we can debate that another time.
But I'll certainly tell you that my approach to anarchism is simply founded on my respect for the scientific method.
It's simply founded on my respect for the scientific method.
That's all it comes down to.
That's all it's about.
That's all I'm working with.
So it comes down to principles as simple as this.
I felt terrible when violence occurred to me.
I hated it.
I felt frightened. I felt angry.
I felt helpless. I felt degraded.
So I didn't like violence.
I mean, it really came down to something.
It started sort of as simple as that.
And the other thing...
That I started with was the welfare state, the sort of social state, did nothing to protect me.
The government did nothing to protect me when I was going through a pretty desperate situation of being aggressed against by my own family.
So the government did absolutely nothing to help me in that area.
And it wasn't like the government didn't have any clues because a government doctor institutionalized my mother in a state system and I went to visit.
Pretty much every day.
So they knew that my mom had a child and my teachers knew that I didn't have any parents at home because whenever they'd say, can your mom come to...
Sign some forms.
I'd say no, because she's been institutionalized, and nobody ever said, well, who's taking care of you?
And they knew that I was a single mom, like my mom was a single mom, because that's sort of something they keep track of at the school.
And then my mom called the cops on me once when we were having a big argument, and so the cops knew, the teachers knew, the doctors knew, the mental health care institution knew, the welfare agencies knew, and nobody did anything To take care of me when I was sort of 13 or 14 and all of the stuff began to go down.
And that doesn't mean, I mean, that could, you know, everyone says, oh my God, you just fell through the cracks.
It's like, well, that's certainly possible.
That's certainly possible.
But... It's not something I would take for granted, right?
It's the first thing I'll start with with my own experiences.
I was incredibly bored at school.
I found university to be an incredible conformity camp with more syllables, but pretty much like high school.
You know, you look up books with longer titles.
So school was incredibly boring.
The government was incredibly inefficient.
I worked for the government directly, I think, for the only time in my life when I was a summer student once, or a summer worker, working on contracts for union reps.
And so the government was horribly inefficient and ridiculous, and everyone just sat around doing nothing.
And I also had, when I was a gold canner, this was a job that was made possible because there was...
Very little taxation on money that was spent on researching, on sort of exploring the North for diamonds and gold and that sort of stuff, right?
So people weren't taxed on it, so that occurred.
So I got my skill set up and all of that.
I became Joe Woodsman.
And then what happened was the laws changed over one winter.
And I would have enjoyed doing this for another couple of summers because, man, it was good money.
But the laws changed, and suddenly this tax was imposed on money that was spent on exploring, probably because some rich company had found a mine and no longer wanted other people to compete.
So subsidized the government.
It's not something that every government official wakes up and says, ooh, why should I work on this?
Why do I care about this?
And so I was suddenly out of a summer job, right?
Because the laws had changed.
And then I became a waiter, and then there was a downturn in the early 90s, and I couldn't get a job in waitering.
And so basically I kept having all of these careers, sort of quote careers.
I knew that they weren't going to be my long-time occupation, but ways of making money, which is kind of important when you don't have parents, that you have the ability to make money.
Because... You're not getting anything else.
And so I just sort of noticed, how did the government work in my life?
And I knew that the government ran the economy, pretty much, and printed all the money.
And so my own experience was that the government was sort of ridiculously not helpful and incompetent and brutal, and that the claims of the welfare state to care for people really didn't...
It didn't make any sense, right?
And then when my mom went on disability, they kept cutting off her benefits and not telling her, and so I had to keep bailing her out.
And so, you know, just work with your, you start with your own life.
That's sort of all I'm saying. I've got countless examples of this kind of stuff that kind of got me thinking about this, right?
And so then, of course, when I ran into Harry Brown's magnificent anti-war stance over, and it took six to ten months, I think, of continual listening to his back podcast about the war to sort of understand the position.
And Harry Brown was predictive, right?
And he'd also been in the military, which I've never been, right?
So instead of me, so I had to sort of get this principle, take this principle and apply it to war, rather than every piece of war propaganda that I've ever been exposed to, which is just what people believe, what actually happens.
And that's when I began looking into World War II in a little bit more detail and trying to figure out, well, did we achieve the freedom that we were fighting for?
And that's not a hard thing to answer, right?
Are we more free at the end or more free before?
And if public education was supposed to make us better citizens, then do they actually teach us anything rational about politics and philosophy in public schools?
And the answer is, well, of course not.
So it's just about dealing with the world in an empirical manner, in a scientific manner, and just saying, okay, well, how do people live, right?
Which is one of the reasons why I have these questions that I keep asking the determinants, and also questions that you can quite validly ask people who say there are no such thing as property rights.
It's like, great, give me your wallet.
Give me your car. Give me your pants.
Give me your underpants.
Because there's no such thing as property rights.
So if you believe that, that must be because you've examined your own life and it doesn't work for you and you figured it out so well that you want to tell everyone else how to behave or how to live because you've worked it out so well that you now are the experts.
Obviously, you believe that this cure works and it must be because you've experimented on it and morals is one of the few things that you can actually experiment in your own life on.
So that's sort of where I'm coming from as a whole or as a philosopher.
And this is what I would suggest to you, as the scientific method is by far the best data-gathering and rational method for human life.
And so people are constantly asking me for evidence, and yeah, absolutely.
People want to say, well, what are the measurable results of ethical theories?
It's like, well, yeah, go and have a look at something like how well countries do when they achieve economic freedom relative to countries that don't.
No country has perfect freedom, but look at Singapore versus Syria, say.
And see the effects on human life and infant mortality.
It's all measurable, right? I mean, we're all saying that when property rights are enforced, the world gets better, right?
That's the theory. And it should be measurable, and by George it is measurable.
And so we're just looking for the facts, right?
Do I use property rights in my own life?
That's sort of where the theory of property rights comes from is not, well, we own our own arms, we own the products of our labor, and blah, blah, blah.
You don't go research John Locke and Adam Smith and all these people.
In my sort of humble opinion, you look at your own life and say, how do I live?
How do I live?
That's all I'm really asking people to do.
How do I live? Do I act as if I have free will?
Well, then looking up scientific explanations of determinism, Maybe for your own personal interest, but it's not how you live.
So you don't want to be putting ideas out there that are in direct opposition to how you actually live, because that's kind of bullshitting everyone, right?
And it's hypocritical, fundamentally, right?
It's saying to people you shouldn't do heroin and then shooting up three times a day, right?
That's just kind of hypocritical.
So that's sort of what I suggest to people who want to be moral philosophers.
Just look at how people actually live.
And if there are lots of people who are using violence, look and see whether or not they've been free to choose whether they can use violence or not.
And you will find almost always that the people who have a strong desire to use violence either were personally abused by their families or abused by the state or dragged into it.
Or the state has been running civil wars or wars for dozens of years or years.
And so that's not really a person who's in a free condition to choose.
So once you make their lives free, then they'll choose something different, which is what just about everyone chooses.
And people who are serial killers were abused as children with extraordinary levels of violence and kinds of violence that you and I can't even really understand or really imagine.
But those kinds of issues are where you want to start working when you are a philosopher.
A philosopher is not somebody with their head in the clouds.
A philosopher is a keen observer.
Of physical and social reality.
And a philosopher does not come up with theories first and then look at the world, right?
A philosopher, if a philosopher wants to be respected, and if a philosopher wants to gain access to the awesome power of the scientific method, then just start with observations.
So when you have questions about how anarchism works, look in your own life.
Do you resolve disputes with people without calling the cops?
Well, then you are an anarchist.
Do you resolve disputes with people without pulling out a gun?
Well, yes, then you're an anarchist.
This is how you live your life.
And because concepts and collectives are no different from individuals, all concepts are subservient to instances, So if how you live your life is as an anarchist, as somebody who does not take out guns or call cops every time you have a dispute, then the way that society works is simply how you work writ large.
Individuals count, abstractions don't.
So if you want to look at how society should run, at least if you want to be non-hypocritical or you want to have integrity with how you live your life, if you want to look at how society should run, look at how you run your life and figure it out from there and come up with theories and predictions and so on.
But first and foremost, always, always, always start from your own life and start from what you can observe in the world and do research into that and only then So that's sort of my suggestion.
I found it very helpful for me, sort of how this whole philosophy was developed.
So I hope that that's helpful for you.
And thanks to everyone who participated in the call yesterday.
Please send me some donations.
I'm looking forward to them. And sign up for FeedBurner and fill out your listener survey.
I'd be very much appreciative of that.
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