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July 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:18:02
332 Call In Show 16 Jul 2006

Religion, biology and hope for freedom

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So thanks so much for joining us, of course, for the Sunday afternoon Free Domain Radio chat.
And thanks a lot for, of course, listening to Free Domain Radio as a whole.
So sorry about what's happened to the board over the last couple of days.
It has been a real challenge getting stuff back from GoDaddy.
What's happened is that there's sort of an undocumented kind of limit on what you can do in terms of getting a community server board going.
It's a sort of undocumented limit of 10 megs, and so they're trying to figure out ways to work around that or something like that, but they have not been wildly responsive, but I'm sure it will come back and we'll sort of go to an alternative if we can't.
So, thanks for your patience there.
And I thought I would start off with something that I was going to do as a podcast earlier today, but didn't quite get round to it in terms of recording it, so I'll just do a very short one now.
And I know it's shocking, because we're generally talking about very abstract topics, but it is a contemporary issue, right?
So all of this stuff that's going on in the Middle East at the moment, which is that...
You get Israel and Lebanon going at it based on these two Israeli soldiers got captured and then I guess there was some demise from Lebanon and then some rockets from Israel to Lebanon and bombs and then rockets going back from Lebanon to Israel and so on.
And I have dipped a little bit into, I mean, overcome my somewhat heinous media distaste and dipped a little bit into this sort of stuff to see what's being talked about.
And of course, there's lots of shock and horror about all of this stuff in the media, as you would naturally expect.
And nobody, of course, is talking about the real solution to these sorts of problems, which is don't be Muslim and don't be Jewish.
That's sort of the basis of where I think it is that we should go as a culture.
Don't believe in these collectivist concepts.
Don't believe in silly, superstitious concepts.
Things like Judaism and Muslim and Israeli and Arab and collectivist, nationalist and religious concepts.
Nobody ever talks about that.
What should the UN do?
Should we do this? Should we invade?
Should we bomb? Should we go to the negotiating table?
When, of course, the real answer to these sorts of things is stop believing in silly, culty things like a nation and like a religion.
And a religion in particular.
I would say that this is much more a religious dispute than it is even a nationalistic dispute.
And, of course, that solution, nobody can ever talk about the real solutions in these kinds of things anymore.
It just sort of becomes completely impossible.
And so now, of course, everyone's shocked and appalled.
And the one thing that I can't quite understand, and I think something that we should talk about either today or just sort of in general with people that we're talking about this topic with, is I fundamentally don't see what the problem is.
You know, it's like the World Cup was on, and you got to see pictures of all these crazy Italians standing around, cheering and tears streaming down their faces with this holy vision ecstasy of winning the World Cup and so on.
And, you know, that's a lot of joy to pack into a crazy human brain, and they get all of that joy, and those of us who aren't nationalistic don't get that kind of joy, right?
And so... If they then feel depressed because their team lost, well, that's just sort of the addiction of collectivism, right?
So you take triumph and other people winning a game as if you had something to do with it because your parents happened to have sex in Italy and that's where you were born and that's your big achievement.
Well, you get that high. Of pretending that somebody else's achievement is yours by virtue of having the mafia boundary around both of you for a particular government.
And that's your high.
And that seems like, you know, well, if you take that, then you're going to take the lows as well, right?
So when your team, everybody else gets hosed, right?
So I don't know how many, maybe 100 entrants into the World Cup Series.
Italy, the Italian fans got to be happy and everyone else got to be sad.
And that's kind of the negative sum game that comes out of collectivism.
But if you want that high, then you're going to get the low.
That seems to me quite natural.
And if you want the high of being really jazzed up on how amazingly unique your religious beliefs are and how you're engaged in this huge cosmic drama and you're The soul is yearning for paradise and you're better than everyone else and you're the chosen people and you're pan-Arab nationalists and you get to participate in all of that very exciting drama of being part of a god-like world historical story and the only slightly downside to all of that is you get bombed from time to time and you're in a state of perpetual war,
right? Because, I mean, religion is a war against reality and so the fact that it bursts into conflict in a human sense is completely inevitable.
So I'm just not sure why people are saying that this should sort of be different within the context of what it is.
People want to be part of these crazy cult-like religious stories about the final battle of everything on the planet and who's better and whose gods are better and whose culture is better and whose country is better and my race is better, the Arabs and the Jews.
It's like if you want all of that stuff, then the natural inevitable result is that you're going to get scuds thudding down in your city every couple of years.
And so I don't, sort of, my sort of advice to the people in the Middle East is, you know, I guess have fun with it because this is what you're choosing.
I mean, it's a shame that the children aren't choosing it, right?
But you're also choosing that the children can't choose it, right?
So my sort of, I could care less, frankly, about the Middle East.
It's just a natural result of somebody who's enjoying it.
He's echoing us.
I can't tell you how exciting this is to go through every week.
But that's not a particular thing.
It's like, well, if that's what you want, then, you know, as the Greeks used to say, take...
Take what you want and then pay for it.
And if you want to believe that your race and your God and your country and your culture and your Jewishness or your Arabness or your Muslimness or whatever, or being an Israeli, it makes you a better human being just sort of living in a particular geography or being born of certain parents, that's great, right? Then you get all of those highs and feeling like the chosen person and that you're special and so on.
And the downside of it is just that lots of people tend to get killed.
So that's sort of my brief take on a current affairs thing.
I just can't imagine why people are so upset about it.
It's the natural result of believing in crazy, culty things.
Anyway, so that's sort of my take on it.
I'll sort of throw it open to either responses to that or any other sort of questions or issues that you have going on today.
I'll throw it out and feel free to jump in.
No, can people hear?
I guess people can hear me.
I guess the question is, no, everyone's not muted.
Can somebody say something just to see if the technology is working?
I think it's working.
Oh, okay, good, good.
Well, either that's a topic which people don't have anything to add to for fear of being targeted by religious extremists, or we will go in some other direction.
You can either, if you want, jump straight into here, or you can type it into the chat window as well.
And I think Greg has just come back in, up and down like the Assyrian Empire.
Sorry about that.
I had a little problem with PCM. We have a lot of sort of peeping Toms on the call today, so it could just be a chat between you and I, because we have people in, but they're not too chatty yet.
That's okay. We can take some time.
What we're going to do is start making fun of their nicknames until they blow up and get back at us.
So did you have anything that you wanted to add?
You must have some pent-up stuff, because we've been boardless for the last couple of days.
Yeah, I've got a couple of things I can...
Well, besides the Lebanon-Israel question, I mean, really, would Israel have had the...
I mean, setting aside the philosophical question of the motivation, would they even have had the means had it not been for...
The fact that their economy is so heavily dependent upon foreign aid from us.
Yeah, I think it's 3 billion a year or something like that that goes over just the military aid, irregardless of the general foreign aid?
Oh, yeah, it's in the tens of billions that I'm aware of, the general number.
But even just the general foreign aid, I mean, all the money that they don't have to devote to, I mean, their own economy, They're free to spend it however they want.
Training troops and building weapons and all of that.
The Israeli economy itself, independent of foreign aid, is a bit of a basket case because it's pretty lefty, right?
I mean, not compared to the virtual fascistic communist dictatorships of the Arab world, but the Israeli economy is pretty left-wing and has all of the associated problems that you have with heavy welfare states and the military industrial states and so on.
Yeah, I doubt it would be able to survive long without...
Without our intervention.
And, of course, the right wing, you know, they use that as an excuse to continue the foreign aid.
But, I mean, to me it's evidence that we really shouldn't be involved at all.
Well, and it's interesting. I've read this, although I don't have any real confirmation of it.
I haven't talked to any Christians who truly believe this, but it is an interesting question that some people have argued that the sort of growing emergence of the right wing...
Is somebody playing music on the station?
Would you, like, not do that, please, if you wouldn't mind?
Where's that music coming from?
I'm glad other people hear it too, because sometimes I feel like there's just a good jingle I should write down to make money if no one else can hear it, but I think this did actually come from the technology.
But I've heard this sort of argument that certain Christians within the West or within the United States are eager to fund Israel because they believe that it is a precondition to sort of the end times to have Israel exist as a nation.
Now, I don't know. That seems a little bit far out for me, but I've never really had much luck understanding this religious mindset.
But I certainly have heard that there is this argument that Israel has to exist in order for revelations to end up being provable or coming into being.
And that's one of the reasons why there's such funding.
I think I would generally put it down to, you know, it's just a lot of Jewish lobbyists in the West, as there are for every other kind of racial and ethnic group that want to get their hands on the taxpayers' money.
I would sort of put it down more to that.
But has anyone else heard this sort of idea that the Christians are keen on funding Israel as a precondition to the end times or anything like that?
I've heard it a couple of different times.
I'm a very skeptical observer myself.
I never really bought into that.
I couldn't believe that there would actually be people who were so devoted to the Revelations narrative that they would actually try, in reality, to bring it about.
And so I never really believed those stories until I actually ran into a couple of people who behind closed doors were willing to admit it.
And I was just, I was speechless.
You know, it's funny how, you know, the conspiracy theorists will point to these sorts of things in public and we'll all kind of turn askance at it, saying, oh, that's That's just silly, but But then, you know, you actually meet somebody who's like this, and you're like, oh, my God, how many other people are there like this?
Well, and can you imagine, of course, if I put out a podcast saying that the purpose of Free Domain Radio is to bring about Ragnarok, and that's why we should fund Iceland in terms of foreign aid or something like that?
Because just about every religion has this sort of end times narrative that sort of raises the drama.
And, boy, just the amount of stuff that I would get back about, like, how insane is that, right?
But, of course... It is something that is very easy for us to underestimate the effect that religious faith has on people's view.
I've picked up Sam Harris' book, finally, The End of Faith, and I'll read just a little bit from one or two places about it, because it's hard for us as skeptics or free thinkers or atheists or rationalists to understand just how common it is.
According to a recent Gallup poll, 35% of Americans believe that the Bible is a literal and inerrant word of the creator of the universe.
Another 48% believe that it is the, quote, inspired word of the same, still inerrant, though certain of its passages must be interpreted symbolically before their truth can be brought to light.
Only 17% of us remain to doubt that a personal God in his infinite wisdom is likely to have authored this text, or, for that matter, to have created the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles.
Some 46% of Americans take a literalist view of creation.
40% believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years.
This means that 120 million of us placed the Big Bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
If our Pauls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency It was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity.
And, of course, that is probably going to be true for the majority of people who have sort of religious leanings of one form or another, that they're going to believe this kind of stuff about their own sort of religious texts.
He also has some very interesting...
The Burden of Paradise is a section near the beginning.
This is from page 26, where he has a list which I think is well worth talking about.
So we have the recent conflicts in Palestine...
Jews vs. Muslim, the Balkans, Orthodox Serbians vs.
Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbians vs.
Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, Northern Ireland, Protestants vs.
Catholics, Kashmir, Muslims vs.
Hindus, Sudan, Muslims vs.
Christians and Animists, Nigeria, Muslims vs.
Christians, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Muslims vs.
Christians, Sri Lanka, Sinhalese Buddhists vs.
Tamil Hindus, Indonesia, Muslims versus Timorese Christians, and the Caucasus, Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims, Muslim, oh lord, here we go, Azerbaijans versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians.
These are just a few of the cases in point, and in these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the past ten years.
And so, you don't, I mean, of course, atheism has had its own death toll, which is what you generally hear back from those who are Christians or who are religious, saying that, well, the communists were atheists, and look how many people they killed.
And that's all perfectly valid, but it is still not a defense of either communism or, like, saying, well, the mafia killed a whole bunch of people, and the Bloods and the Crips killed a whole bunch of people, and that should be sort of like, these two cancel each other out.
See, what I would argue is that it wasn't really atheism that caused all those deaths.
It was basically a replacement of religion with...
Statism itself as a religious ideology.
Sure, it's just a different form of collectivism where religion has a collective concept called God which has no voice and therefore must be interpreted by an elite group called priests.
Communism or statism or collectivism has An abstract entity called society or the class or the race which has no voice of its own and therefore must be interpreted and enforced by a special group of people called the inner party or the sort of politburo or the sort of fascist dictatorship.
It really is the same form of thing.
The most amazing thing that you can do to hold power over other human beings when they're adults is to invent something that is the ultimate good that has no existence and no voice and then appoint yourself that We're good to go.
Is that the fundamental problem is not the leaders, of course, it's all of us.
It's all of us who are out there who are either not fighting for the truth, not exposing all the nonsense that people believe, or the people who actually believe it, right?
So they believe this stuff and then people say, well, I'm shocked and appalled that all of these violence and these murders occur.
It's absolutely inevitable based on the beliefs when people believe in silly things and when people believe that there's some abstract entity out there that they should obey, that someone has been appointed...
Well, the natural result is that you're going to end up getting thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people killed.
And yet people then just go back to the same thing over and over again, right?
I would say because of excessive childhood trauma, but that's just sort of one theory.
But people keep going back to this and drinking deep of this well of blood.
And it really is just going to have to keep escalating until people realize that it's just a bad idea.
And I guess that's part of what we're trying to do in this conversation, is to get that idea across, hopefully without the blood, with a little bit more prevention and a little less cure.
Going back to this idea of an earthly expert, I have a brother who himself sort of tacitly subscribes to this notion that Israel is a historical necessity according to the biblical account of Revelations and all of that, but he's never actually read Revelations.
He depends on his pastor to supply him with what it means.
And so his attitude is, well, you know, he's the expert.
I don't have time for that.
My job is X, Y, and Z, so whatever he says is good enough for me.
Right. Of course, even if you read Revelations, his pastor could say, well, you haven't read it in the original.
There's always something that you can appeal to.
Sorry, go ahead. Right, exactly.
And his attitude toward me is, well, you know, who the hell are you?
He's the expert. You're just some guy with a copy of the Bible.
Right. But does he believe, and this is something I've always been curious about with religious people, does he really believe that he himself can just ask God and bypass the priest, or does he always have to go through the priest to get this kind of certainty?
He himself actually doesn't...
It's really kind of strange.
He sort of believes it and sort of doesn't.
He thinks that he can make requests, but he shouldn't expect a response, if you know what I mean.
God answers every prayer, but sometimes the answer is no.
Right, and he doesn't expect a voice in his head either.
He expects that voice to come through the priest.
Right, right. See, because I'd just love to meet a religious person who went the whole hog and said, hell yeah, I can ask God a question.
He speaks in a vaguely Scottish accent.
Sounds a little bit like the old James Bond, a little bit like Sean Connery.
And you want me to ask him something?
Absolutely. I will ask him something right now, and he comes like clear as a bell, voice in my head.
I just think that would be...
I mean, that would be too exciting for words, right?
It would be like arguing with someone who said, I don't believe in property rights and I haven't eaten since the day I was born because I wouldn't want to accidentally make something in the material world of my property.
Hello?
Hello.
I think we're interrupting an argument in a foreign language.
I think it's ancient Aramaic.
Shit, that's funny.
Okay, well I'm going to have to just step to the room.
I think it's somebody who just joined.
Okay, let's just see if that gives us...
Joe Netone, you have been muted, because this is the kind of audio dictatorship we live in, in Free Domain Radio.
Sorry, Greg, go ahead.
Actually, I lost my train of thought there.
I win! Yay!
You were actually talking about somebody who would, you would love to meet someone who would say, yeah, I can ask God a question, he'll hear, that's for you exactly, what's you?
Oh, me? Sorry, I thought you meant Greg.
Yeah, but what was Greg saying before that?
Greg was talking about his brother.
Yeah, his reliance on experts to tell him, you know, what God means and doesn't mean and all of that.
And I have met someone who actually can speak to God and hears God speaking to him, and that person was locked up in a psychiatric unit, so...
Which seems entirely unjust.
I mean, if they actually have a direct pipeline to the divine, we should really put them at front and center as far as the media goes.
Yeah, they ought to be a priest.
They ought to be a priest. They probably would be, right?
And here we go. Somebody has put in the chat, if you want to see something really funny, go to a Pentecostal church and watch the preacher translate the tongues in real time.
Crazy stuff. Translate the tongues.
Good name for a band. Tongue translation.
I think I've seen that movie.
No, I think that's quite right.
Now, is this the same brother that you have who writes the memos regarding the drug trade in foreign countries?
No, actually that's a different brother.
Right. So they have the same kind of continuum, right?
Because people also have the same thing like, you know, George Bush said and this kind of stuff, right?
And that would be quite...
I mean, people have that very strong feeling as well, that there's this thing called America which has this kind of national interest, and you just have to trust people who know all about the national interest.
And I remember when Christine and I, early in our dating relationship, she...
She would say, when we were having arguments about democracy, she would say, well, I'm sure that George Bush has all these advisors around him who have all of his information and tell him what to do, and that's where he gets all of his information, right?
And sort of my response to that was like, well, if that's the case, let's just vote the advisors here.
Why are we not just voting directly for the people who are telling the talking head what to say?
And that would sort of make it a little bit more sense politically, you know?
It's like, at some point, can I just speak to the man behind the mirror rather than, you know, speak into the mirror?
Yeah, and that's pretty much where Chris is coming from, you know.
We're the experts here.
We know what we're talking about.
You know, you're just some guy with a laptop.
And the amazing thing too, if I just add one last thing to this before everyone else starts charging in with their own thoughts.
I think that's about imminent.
I can hear the stampede from over the hill.
But the other thing that's amazing about that as well is that I really don't mind if people believe that they are the experts and should speak for the collective, right?
So if people feel all of that, I think that's fantastic.
If George Bush is the guy who everybody thinks should tell everybody what to do, fantastic!
Let's have George Bush can set up a website and you can phone in or you can just send you an email every morning telling you what to do and it can all be voluntary.
The thing I find so horrifying...
Is that people say, well, George Bush is the wisest guy, and his decisions should be enforced at the point of a gun.
Because, of course, if he's the wisest guy, then everyone should just follow him voluntarily, right?
They don't need to be forced to do stuff.
But it's always that kind of dichotomy that is the case, right?
So the priest says, well, I'm the one who can tell you exactly how to live your life, and I need to threaten you with hell and get your children at the age of four into Sunday school and give them all this propaganda.
Whereas, of course, if you actually did have something useful to say, then people would just kind of voluntarily come along and say, hey, I think I should listen to you, and, you know, maybe you have something of value to say.
There's always this combination of I have value and it needs to be enforced to the point of a gun.
And it would seem to me that the two are a little bit exclusive.
Well, the objection I usually get to that is, well, not everybody can be rational all the time.
So, of course, you need the gun there to ensure that not only the rational people, but the irrational people are paying attention to leaders as well.
No, and I think that's quite right.
And so, of course, the logical thing to do in that situation, since not everyone can be rational all the time, is to create a monopoly of violence and staff it with people who never are subject to that rule, right?
Who are perfectly rational all the time.
Because there's nothing dangerous about that.
Because if people are not perfectly rational all the time, the last thing that you'd want to do is have any kind of government, right?
Because then you've got people who are irrational with a monopolistic capacity for violence and so on.
Right. It's the who watches the watchers problem.
And the objection I usually get to that is, well, that's our own fault for not voting for the most rational people there are, and so we get what we deserve.
Right, right. But still, the option of it being non-coercive never really comes up, right?
The axiom is that people need to be forced to do stuff, and there are people who are wise enough to do that forcing.
That's always the axiom that's at the basis of it.
You simply can't talk about real solutions, right?
It's like a whole bunch of doctors getting together towards an infectious plague, and no one can mention antibiotics.
Like, you can talk about massage and Pilates.
And you can talk about nutrition, and you can talk about all of this nonsense.
The one thing you can't talk about that was anything that might actually help the plague, right?
Right, and they spend more of their time arguing over which doctor should apply the treatment and not which treatment is best.
Now, did you notice, and I just sort of want to point this out to the people who are listening, that we're talking about mysticism and politics.
And Greg worked the term witch doctor right in there.
And I just sort of wanted to applaud you for that because I thought that was, you know, kinky and subversive.
That's secret messages from my subconscious.
Just play it backwards, baby, and you'll join the cult.
All right, we actually have our biggest crowd to date so far.
We have 16 people in.
If you can't, Christina and myself and at least two and a half of the other personalities...
That's 18.5, I think.
So, 18.6 since lunch.
Niels, you can certainly say something.
Go ahead. Hey, Stefan.
Hi, guys. The latest podcast, you were talking about Hitler and that the question is never really asked, well, why would someone be like that?
And I thought that was a very interesting question.
And another example could be, that I've heard in the news this week about somewhere here in the neighborhood in the Netherlands or Belgium somewhere there were these kids disappearing so a few weeks ago a child disappeared and ended up being killed and you know these typical psychopathic people And,
well, what does everybody do with this information?
Well, the parents tell their children that, well, there are bad people out there and you should be very wary of them and never trust anybody.
And what everybody does is, well, we need to lock these people up, etc., etc.
So, well, we need more police and this and that.
It's a real scare. Politics.
But nobody ever asked the question, well, why would somebody possibly be like that?
It's not that people are born like this.
And we know quite a lot about why people turn out to be so corrupt and destroyed.
I think that's an excellent point.
Sorry, go ahead. I thought you were done.
Go ahead. Yeah.
And if we...
And this is where it comes down to, if you know what's going on with these people.
Just like you said, the people in Germany, not Hitler himself, but the other people who were following him, that says something about the current state of society.
Well, we have to ask ourselves the same question.
Well, we really have to look at parenting and what's going on there because if people like that turn up everywhere, then there's something structurally wrong and we need to look at that.
But people never ever look at that or at their own family structures.
It's just a taboo question.
Right, because that would actually be talked about before.
If you actually talk about something that can solve the problem, then nobody wants to hear about it, right?
Everybody wants to talk around the problem.
And so parents will do things like say, well, there are these crazy people on the streets who might kidnap you and kill you, and that's terrible, and that's all valid.
You know, of course you want to watch out for that kind of stuff.
But, you know, who's more dangerous in general, right?
I mean, some crazy guy on a street that you can childproof your kid or carry a gun to protect yourself or not leave your house.
Or the police, right, who take half your income and shoot you if you resist.
Or the government that has nuclear weapons or can draft you or change whatever laws or smile on you.
I mean, people, what they do is...
There is a kind of agony within the world that comes from conformity, right?
That comes from crushing the natural, curious, honest and natural soul of a child within this brutal family structure.
There is a huge agony in the world.
Based on conformity.
And we have it to some degree in the West, but we have it a whole lot more in more dictatorial countries.
The agony that children go through when they're squeezed into these horrible, claustrophobic little iron maidens called Muslim or Jewish or Christian or American or rich or poor...
The brutality that occurs for children creates a huge agony in the world and until that agony is acknowledged and the pain of conformity and the violence that erupts from conformity always Until that is acknowledged, everything just gets worse, right?
It's like if you have a cancer, until you acknowledge it and treat it, it just gets worse until you're dead.
And so our whole point here is to try and point out this agony before it acts out and demands to be known through a fairly universal kind of violence.
And people are desperately afraid of their governments, and I think we're all pretty aware that we're in a very unsustainable and probably quite short-run situation as a society.
And what they do is, of course, they try and imagine that what's dangerous to them is things like global warming and things like predators, right?
Serial killers and, you know, what's in their food and the ties.
Everybody imagines that there's all these dangers to their survival so that they don't actually have to deal with what is really dangerous to their survival, which is the growth of state power in sort of the 21st century and the unsustainability of our existing political models.
The capacity for presidents to go to war with bypassing the Constitution.
That's what's really dangerous to us.
But all you ever get from the media is, you know, there could be toxins in your food, you know, stuff like that.
And that's what people would much rather focus on than anything that's really of danger to them.
Yeah, it actually...
uh...
That's kind of an echo there.
It actually brings up a question that I keep posing to various people who subscribe to government as a form of social organization.
If you look back over the last 3,000 years, we keep trying it and trying it and trying it over and over and over again, and it keeps failing and failing and failing over and over and over again.
What's the point in doing it again?
In whatever form we decide to constitute it, it seems pretty obvious to me that it's, one way or another, it's bound to fail.
No, I think that's right, and I think it's very much like our addiction to this fantasy that there's a virtue possible to human beings through a brutal coercive monopoly like the state is like any addiction.
You go through various phases of quitting, right?
So if you're an alcoholic, you don't quit the first time you go on a bender, right?
You have to go through a whole series of things, and then you have to hit rock bottom.
And then if you do hit rock bottom, you're able to turn it around if you understand that there's an alternative, right?
So that's sort of what it is that we're trying to do in the Free Domain Radio conversations and on the boards, is to help get the word out that there's an alternative, hopefully so that we don't have to end up hitting bottom.
But if we do end up having to hit bottom, then at least we'll have an alternative, right?
So there was no such thing as a cure for alcoholism before certain things came along that allowed people to find an alternative to being alcoholics.
And so with state power, we have exactly the same thing.
So everybody is really focused on how can we fix the state or make the state moral or make it virtuous.
And we've gone through this whole series of different kinds of governments and different associations and different ways of trying to make brutal monopolistic power a humane and benevolent situation.
And like any kind of addiction, we just have to twist and turn and then eventually we'll figure it out and we'll try something different.
And I think we're a lot closer there now because we really have, thanks to the American experiment and to some smaller degree the British experiment, We have had some really, really smart people, as in the founding fathers, try and figure out how to design the very smallest and most restrained possible government.
I don't think people could really come up with a smaller government than one that came out through the Republic in 1776.
And so now, there's no one who's going to say, well, if we just make it smaller than tiny...
It won't grow to be, you know, swollen and fascistic and horrible.
And so I think we're a lot closer now.
And the American experiment definitely moved the debate forward by providing a very small government that then grew to be the same kind of brutal and domineering and imperial kind of government as everything else.
And that's really, really a big step forward because now people don't, you know, anybody who really thinks clearly about it doesn't even have that, it doesn't really have that illusion so much anymore.
So that's really helped the debate quite a bit.
Well, I mean, for me anyways, we wind up in debates over minutiae, like, you know, how exactly to properly interpret the 14th Amendment, how to interpret the tension between the articles and the amendments, and all these little, you know, these little tweaking debates.
So, you know, it... They still won't stipulate to the idea that it's not this state, it's the state that's the problem.
Right, and that's very similar to just about every debate that has occurred throughout history when it comes to relaxing a monopolistic form of power.
The way that monopolistic forms of power maintain themselves is by saying, yes, where we are is bad, but the alternative is worse.
Or, yes, it's harsh what we do, but the alternative is bad.
So, yes, I'm breaking your arm, but the alternative is for you to get shot through the chest.
And this is the same thing that occurred with abolitionism, right?
So when they were talking about ending slavery, people said, well, if we end slavery, you know, the blacks are going to riot and society will fall apart and they'll all take up arms against us.
So there's this general idea that if you relax coercion, that society collapses.
And this was very much the argument in the Middle Ages with regards to the economy.
And what it generally comes down to is that the people who are at the top of a violent society know that if people actually get to choose voluntary association, they're not going to choose the people who are at the top.
So what they do is they scare people into thinking that any relaxation and violence is going to result in the destruction of everything they hold dear.
And it's just a basic scare scenario.
And it's absolutely common, it's absolutely inevitable that people at the top always, always, always are going to say, well, if you have anarchism, you're going to have continual civil war and there'll be rioting and bloodshed in the streets, blah, blah, blah.
You know, without any sort of particular understanding that as governments get smaller, peace generally tends to increase.
It's historically pretty proven, right?
And so there's no reason to believe that when governments are smaller, peace increases, that when you get rid of governments, peace wouldn't be at its maximum, right?
But there's always this fear that's instilled in people, and you really get this when you read the word anarchism.
Most people think of some sort of...
Post-apocalyptic Mel Gibson kind of road warrior, Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, Tina Turner's legs kind of situation where his shaven-headed guys with nails through their ears are going to bite each other's noses off and stuff.
I mean, that's just the general kind of fairy tale horror story that is always put forward by those in power to those who are saying maybe your power is not legitimate or moral or required.
It's completely inevitable.
You get the same thing when you hear about, well, maybe we should privatize education.
Well, the poor people wouldn't get educated and it would be chaos and there'd be this underclass and blah, blah, blah, right?
And it's the natural fear-mongering that goes on.
And the sad thing is that it's actually put out by the people in power, but it's slavishly repeated by the people who they have power over.
It's like they don't even have to lift themselves off their divans to whip us.
We grab the whips and go to town ourselves.
It's really quite shameful, I think.
In a lot of ways, and people are going to look back and just say, well, what the hell were you people thinking?
I mean, you had all this freedom, and you let it slip away, and you drove it out yourself almost, you know?
It's really quite remarkable.
Yeah, it's the same thing with religion.
As soon as you start talking about morality, they say, you know, where does morality come from if it doesn't come from the Bible, you know?
Right, or in the absence of religion, people will shoot each other in the streets, sort of one thing, or nobody will get out of bed because they won't find a shred of meaning without the infinite kermit in the sky telling them what to do.
Yeah, it's the same thing.
And let's just update with people with a few things from beyond.
We do say that some people say that they like Beyond the Thunderdome.
I've never seen it. But the poor people would line the rich up against the wall and shoot them.
Isn't that what has happened cyclically throughout history?
Well, actually, I don't think that's the case.
And I'm no expert on historical revolutions.
But what I do understand about it is that what happens is that the people who are the revolutionaries generally are not the poor.
The poor are this sort of constant mass of underdogs kept down through state power, or through religious power, translated into state power.
But the people who are the revolutionaries are not the poor.
As if you look at someone like bin Laden, he's not poor.
He comes from a very rich family.
Lenin was a very well-educated Jewish gentleman.
And Marx had a good deal of money in the second half of his life.
The revolutionaries generally don't come from the poor.
They generally come from a competing group of rich people, a competing group of people who have relatively more privilege.
It's very uncommon for somebody to actually come out of the slums and become a revolutionary.
That's really not usually the case.
The same was even true with the American revolutionaries.
That's very true. They were very privileged.
The only person I can think of who falls into that category is Hitler, right?
Who was a kind of evil revolutionary, right?
But, I mean, Hitler did come from a pretty impoverished background and did manage to sort of make his way to the top of society through, you know, the generally bad parenting of Germany.
He became, you know, the uber-father for everyone, but generally it's not the case that...
That it's the poor who rise up against the rich.
That's sort of a Marxist fantasy.
The poor are just too busy to kind of survive, right?
So what happens is that you get a bunch of rich intellectuals who are really good at mining the current myths of the time and turning it into a justification for violence.
And what happens is you generally just get a new argument for morality, right?
That's generally the revolution that occurs.
If somebody comes up with a new argument for morality, right?
So whereas beforehand in Russia, before 1917, it was like Mother Russia and the church and so on.
And the new argument for morality was, you know, the class and the inevitable march of history towards its, you know, communist solution and so on.
But what is defined as the good gets redefined, and that's the new higher classes, and none of it has anything to do with universalizing the argument for morality, right?
Like this sort of fiery fence or like a firewall that encloses the people in power and lets them do things that no one else is allowed to and then obeying them becomes the highest moral goal.
And human beings like that.
I mean, I think that we like that because we're broken as children on sort of the rack of religion and collectivism and irrationality as a whole for our parents.
But as a whole, human beings prefer that, right?
And it's nothing wrong with preferring that.
You just have to recognize that with that comes...
You know, genocide and war.
Obeying people in power has its pleasures, right?
I mean, I certainly understand that.
You get lots of money, you get honorary degrees, you get to talk shows, you get all of these great things, and there's lots of good things about obeying people in power, and they pay you well to prop up their ethics.
The only consequence, of course, is that you get this...
Endless murder. There's a price to be paid, right?
And so far, human beings seem relatively willing to pay that price, and I think that's only because they are not convinced of an alternative, which is, I think, our goal to the degree we want to bring that along.
Another freedom seems to be freedom from responsibility, too.
Can you say a little bit more about that?
Meaning that the bulk of people are able to Free themselves from being responsible when they can say the state is in charge.
I think that's true.
I think that's true. But can you tell me whether you think that's sort of innate to human nature or do you think that's something that sort of results from their upbringing?
Oh, definitely taught. It's taught when you're a team member on a sports team.
You have to get responsibility to the captain who accepts it and then sort of relieves you from the responsibility if the team loses.
It's sort of taught from From kindergarten all the way through school.
No, I think that's quite right.
And I was actually thinking of doing a sort of conversation topic on this.
I don't know if it's too personal for people, so just let me know.
But I did sort of mention on a podcast this last week about the number of ways that I was taught that sort of my innate nature was bad or wrong as a child.
And some of it was religious and some of it was more social.
But just that children or young boys or whoever are...
Selfish by nature, are greedy, are short-sighted, are cruel, are, you know, that you're basically born wrong and have to be fixed by an enormous amount of heavy pressure and sometimes violent social engineering.
And this is obviously very true in a lot of the Christian and Muslim and Jewish faiths, right?
That you're sort of born wrong through original sin or something like that and have to be fixed through a huge amount of emotional coercion or physical coercion.
But what did other people get?
That's sort of what I got in a boarding school in England, that I was just sort of broken and evil by nature and had to be fixed through social engineering.
Was that the case in other countries as well, or was that more of a uniquely British experience?
Well, I think at least in my own case, the mindset was there, but the pressure, but the...
The pressure was much more subtle.
The application of that principle was much more subtle than maybe some other folks have experienced.
Can you give me some examples of that, or is it too subtle that you can communicate?
Can you paint us like a sort of Mohs picture in the air or something like that, or is it more of a scent?
Well, for example, in my own case, My dad was big into the whole eldest son thing, so I got a lot of this pressure to be the man of the house, and every time I made a mistake, I would get this lecture about how I wasn't being mature enough, and how I wasn't thinking straight, and how I needed to do better, and so on and so forth.
It was sort of your broken...
But it came at it from the point of view of you need to keep working on yourself kind of an approach.
Did you also have this heavy weight of, you know, your brothers take their cue from you and everybody's looking up to you and you set the tone and did you get that kind of stuff as well?
Oh yeah. Yeah, that was definitely there for sure.
Niels has kindly informed me that I'm a little bit incorrect, because he's written that, no, you are broken, Stephen.
So I just sort of wanted to point that that's certainly one option.
But I think that the difficulty could be that there's a difference between being broken and being a broken record.
And the repetition that I have in the podcast sometimes will probably fall a little bit more into the ladder than the formal.
Now, did anyone else experience this as a situation when they were growing up, that they were sort of taught that they themselves, in their sort of natural states, were somehow flawed or broken or antithetical to the values that worked in society?
We also have somebody play music, and if you could not do that, I would really appreciate it.
I'd love to mute the list, but I just asked the people to respond.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think I found it.
Campinzon, I do believe that you are sharing your musical tastes with us.
Not that they're bad. It did sound a little bit like being in a sort of underwater jello submarine, but not necessarily bad.
It's just not too appropriate for what it is that we're doing here.
Did you...
I'm just trying to think.
There was definitely quite a lot of belief that there was a selfishness involved in sort of breathing as a child.
And if you didn't want to share, that was considered to be a bad thing, for sure.
So if you got something and you didn't want to share with everyone else, you'd get the kind of thing where people would say, Oh, did you bring enough gum for everyone?
All that kind of nonsense.
So it was definitely that standpoint that whatever you had that you didn't want to share, you were just considered to be selfish, right?
So there was pretty much a very strong violation of property rights and a very strong socialism in my education when I was growing up.
And so not wanting to sacrifice yourself for the group was a really big problem.
There was that aspect of it.
Definitely there was the religious side, that you were just kind of sinful and so on.
And also there was a lot of this kind of stuff that went on, particularly in boarding school, where you had all these crazy irrational rules that were put in place, and then what would happen is when you then decided to try and have a life by breaking some of those rules, you were considered to be sneaky, right?
So we were given like one soccer ball a month, and if it went over a low fence to get to what was called the sanatorium or where the sort of kids who had some illnesses were, you would just, you would eventually just sort of climb over it, because otherwise if it sort of went over the wall in the first couple of days of the month, we then wouldn't have a soccer ball for the rest of the month, which was a real shame.
And what happened was, they had these rules that you can't climb over the fence, right?
And so what happened then was we'd climb over the fence, and then we'd hide it, and of course we then would be considered really sneaky and bad for just...
It was no danger in climbing over the fence.
It wasn't like a big fence. So it was just a silly rule that you then would try and get around.
Two silly rules, I guess. One is that you only get one soccer ball a month, and the second is that you can't climb over the fence.
And then when you would break that rule, you would consider to be selfish and bad.
So there was that kind of stuff as well, which was not at all uncommon.
And there were also these...
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, it's the no-win situation that you're stuck in, like in my own case, where, you know, as the oldest brother, you're the example.
But you're also in charge of all the stuff, right?
So right away you're like, ooh, cool.
But then the minute you don't share, you know, well, you know, you're not being sure and blah, blah, blah.
So acting in your own interest, you're essentially a bad person.
Yeah. Right, and it was never the case that that would be universal either, like that that would be universalized, because of course that's the whole problem with this kind of altruistic philosophy, right?
Like if you're just supposed to worry about the feelings and what's to the benefit of others, then of course you have absolutely the same right to ask for that back from others and what happens when you don't get it and all that, right?
It's all just so patently irrational, but it's very hard to ask those kinds of questions when you're a kid.
At least I found it very hard to ask those kinds of questions of people, right?
Because I always felt like I'd get these rules and they'd sort of be pounded down on me.
And I remember these sort of long lectures.
We'd all sort of get gathered, like when something bad happened, right?
Someone stole something from a teacher or something went missing, right?
I never thought it was actually stolen or what?
We'd all get gathered into this big auditorium, and there'd be these long, grueling moral lectures about responsibility, and so on, and all this, that, and the other.
And, you know, it was really kind of...
It was like a gulag, you know?
You get these ridiculous situations.
And what would then happen is that...
You wouldn't be able to leave until someone confessed.
And basically what we would do is we'd go up and down the ranks and say, okay, whose turn is it now to confess to something?
We don't even know what the problem is, right?
But basically it's like, well, we're all going to sit here until somebody confesses to this crime that's gone on, right?
And nobody really believed that anyone was guilty of any crime or stealing or swearing or whatever, right?
But we all just sort of went down and say, okay, who's going to pick the short straw this time and submit themselves to satisfy authority, right?
That was very much the way that it went.
It's like authority, like some evil god, demands a sacrifice of some child.
So someone's going to put their hands up and say, I did it, even if they didn't, and then sort of take their punishment.
And it was, you know, just because we all wanted to get out at some point, right?
Well, in my own case, it was more than just satisfying authority.
It was also, in some sense, protecting my younger brothers as well.
And I can remember a case where, you know, my brother Tom and I had been, we'd had the crayons taken away from us, right?
And my dad tucked them away in his desk somewhere, and I knew where they were, and Tom knew where they were.
Tom goes and gets them.
Dad finds out.
At the dinner table, he asks both of us, and so I feel compelled to stand in his stead, and I say, I do it, I get the spanking, and then I'm thinking, okay, after the fact, Tom will be my friend, right? Right.
He actually resents me for doing it, which was kind of weird.
Did he ever say why?
You never talked about it?
We never talked about it.
He probably doesn't remember.
This was when I was nine, I think.
Right, and this trait of Greg's actually is to the advantage of a lot of people.
I certainly know that when I get letters from the IRS, I know which name I report, and it's not my own.
It does start with Greg and then finishes with his last name.
So the things that he developed as a child can actually be very beneficial to other people down the road, so you just might want to mention that to those around you, because, I mean, you did enjoy it, right?
I mean, that role. This is very entertaining.
Third level sarcasm.
What was that? Now, when I have kids, or at least when I worked in a daycare, for those who tell me that I can't have any opinions because I don't have kids yet, but when I worked in a daycare, I tried to make the rules sort of sensible for children, and if they didn't obey the rules, I would generally sort of assume that they didn't obey them because they just found the rules to be kind of silly, right?
But they also, I mean, this is what happens when you are a child, right?
So if you're given some rule, and the person who's the parent comes down really hard on you about this rule, And then you question the rule, then you're just in even more trouble.
Someone's mentioning this here.
It says, in my experience, questioning a parent or teacher got me in trouble.
Corporal punishment, usually.
So obviously this was a child soldier.
I don't know what the corporal's rank was, but corporal punishment was obviously going on.
But the more heavy you come down on the child about the morality of what's going on, the harder it is to back down if the child has any questions.
So what I found was that if children didn't obey me when I was a daycare teacher, I would sort of sit them down one-on-one and say, well, you know, do you think it's a dumb rule?
And if you do think it's a dumb rule, why?
And there were times when the kids made really excellent cases as to why the rule was dumb, right?
And so then I would let them out of the cage and restore their bread and water rations, and we'd sort of move forward from there, and obviously the restraints would come off.
So, you know, I would try to listen to the kids about the rules and what they found sensible and what they found not sensible, because to some degree it should be a negotiation with children, I think.
It shouldn't just be the imposition.
Because children have their own opinions about things.
And children, of course, are not naturally disobedient or naturally irrational or naturally cruel or naturally mean or selfish or vicious or all that kind of things.
I find most children are extraordinarily eager to please their parents, to sort of enjoy the family life, to contribute and so on.
And this...
It's a real shame how heavy parents come down on children about moral rules and how much they are ensuring a continual passive-aggressive disobedience all the way through to the end of their parenting days, which I think is a real shame.
What I found is that parents and teachers don't want to ask questions like you asked precisely because they know that there's going to be some kid out there who's going to have an answer.
Right. And it hurts their ego, because they don't feel like, you know, as the adult, that they should be bested by a child.
Yeah, I think that's very true, and I think at an even deeper level, they have usually echoed all of the moral commandments that they themselves received as children and believed were perfectly moral.
Because parents never say, obey me because, I mean, rarely they will say, obey me because I'm bigger and stronger and I can beat you up.
I mean, there will be some of the dads who say, I brought you into this world, I can take you out too.
But most parents will say, obey what is good rather than obey me.
This is where, of course, people get the sense that you don't subject yourself to an individual, you subject yourself to ethics.
So morality becomes a kind of domination, as we talked about in the podcast last week.
But if a child comes along and says, and this is sort of what I try and write about in The God of Atheists, right?
So a child comes along and says, well, why?
Why is this the case?
Why is this the good? And I'm not going to be satisfied with just a sort of answer that says, you're bad if you don't believe it.
That's a really bad argument to give to a child.
So if a child comes and says, well, why is this good?
And then the person who's giving them those rules would have to do a heck of a lot of work on their own history.
To be able to legitimately say, you know, that's a good question.
I never did ask that, and I guess I've been sort of bullying children with a whole bunch of things that I don't know the answer to for the last X number of years, and that's a lot to take on, right?
You have to call all those kids who you were the teacher of and say, listen, by the way, all those times I punished you for something that I thought was moral, I really didn't have a clue.
And I think that's a lot for people to take.
And I'm just going to, someone, Dr.
Fix has said, sounds like the military, been there, done that.
They tear you down to build you up in the image they want.
I have to admit, I'd literally eat hand grenades after that conditioning.
But the rules were so silly.
Looking back at it all now, it's just another extension of public education.
Cue Pink Floyd. So that's, I'm sure, something we can all understand.
Someone else has mentioned, I read somewhere that you can forgive someone for being wrong, but you can't forgive someone for being right.
And I read that on the chat line.
I'm not sure what it means.
So if you'd like to expand on that a little more, that would be great.
Hey, Steph, can I say a thing?
You sure can. Okay, well, what children almost never realize is that Whenever there's any kind of dispute or any kind of quarrel, when you realize that it could be handled differently,
then you know that these people are actually treating you in a way that's causing you more pain than needed.
Quote, unquote, needed.
And only if you realize that, then you know that these people actually don't care about you at all.
But children never make this realization that things could be done completely different because they know how they were treated so well in their entire life.
That's just how things are.
And you never, ever see any rational treatment around you.
Until you brought it up in the show and on the forum where people were telling how children could be raised in a completely different manner and I myself have never seen this and you only have to see a little bit of it until it all breaks down because at that point if someone treats you in a manipulative way then you say to them Well, you don't have to act like this.
You can act differently.
It's not needed. And that gives yourself a lot of freedom and a lot of headroom.
That's an excellent way of putting it and I think we've all experienced this to some degree in political conversations as well.
You know, we're all after the same thing.
We're all after truth and virtue and nobody sort of consciously is out there arguing, at least I can't think of anyone, who's consciously out there arguing saying, If my arguments are believed, then genocide will occur, and I couldn't think of anything better than that, right?
I mean, nobody is really believing that.
So what we're doing is we're all doctors, and we're all trying to heal the ills of society.
It's just that we have different ideas about how to do it.
But what happens is that people just get so angry and they can't imagine that we can have a civilized and pleasant discussion even about things that we're quite opposed to.
And I've certainly found that the times where people have had harsh discussions with me I do find that it really is not necessary.
And people sort of get mad at me quite a bit, and they tell me just how bad I am and how wrong I am and so on.
And my response is always the same.
If you are wiser than me, fantastic.
This is what I want.
I want to be corrected if I'm making mistakes, especially because I have, to a small degree, A bit of a public voice, right?
So if I'm putting stuff out there that's incorrect, I certainly...
I mean, people can come and debate with me.
I've read out emails of people who've corrected me.
I mean, it's fantastic. You don't have to be harsh and yelly, because all you're doing is revealing your own childhood.
You're just revealing your own family.
You're not doing anything to me that's not perfectly obvious.
Like, you know, you may have had this with lovers or whatever, where...
They just start getting freaked out about something.
Like, I remember I once had a girlfriend where I mentioned that a hockey player in Canada was the best sportsman in the world because he was so far ahead of the second best sportsman that, you know, you could compare apples to oranges that way or whatever.
And she got really bugged by it.
And it just looked so weird, right?
And she was an egalitarian, so obviously she didn't like someone being better than someone else.
And there was lots of issues around that.
But it was totally obvious from the outside that this was just her family issues, right?
That she was never allowed to sort of pursue excellence or try and be great at anything.
They just cut her down to size.
So whenever I talked about someone being better than someone else, she just got kind of freaked out.
That stuff's totally obvious from the outside.
And once you understand that when you're debating with people, that when you see them freaking out, right?
You don't take it personally because, I mean, people don't know me, right?
There's just some voice around, right?
But what happens is that people act in these very obvious ways that reveal how their families brutalize them.
And then the great mistake that a lot of freedom fighters make is that we then imagine that it's got something to do with us or something to do with the debate rather than trying to come back in a more civil manner and help them to understand that that's not how people need to talk to each other.
And then if they continue to do it, just not have those conversations with those people until they learn to be a little bit more mature and wise.
But it is hard, you know, when people attack you because of their own family history, it's very hard to disassociate that from yourself and recognize it for what it is, because the natural reaction is to fight back, right?
As if it's personal, but of course, logically, it's not.
We have 18, including Christine and I. We've been up to 20, but I think what happened was some people were in a year waiting for me to take a breath, and obviously probably ran out of bandwidth or expired.
So... Certainly, I think we've done this topic.
If there's anything else that people want to bring up as another topic, that would be great.
I certainly do have another question to throw out, but if anyone has a topic that they want to talk about based on the podcast they've been hearing, I'm certainly happy to do what I can to answer any questions, or we can throw it wide.
Hi, everybody. So, Stefan, somebody has asked, do you have extra air pumped in your house?
Actually, it's not quite the case.
It's that you can actually get it pumped into your body to help you speak more quickly and to not actually take a breath.
But you probably don't want to know a whole lot about the mechanics.
Let's just say there's a good reason I don't have a webcam.
Now, we have a question here.
I think he has the ability of birds.
Double ventilation. Ah, you've seen me after Mexican food.
Actually, it's more like a jazz trumpeteer who can blow the note while still breathing in.
Now, Charlie has asked, sorry if I missed it, but did you answer my question about leader-soldier earlier and what causes the different turnouts?
Now, Charlie here is obviously quite optimistic because he's expecting me to answer any question directly, let alone his question specifically.
So I certainly appreciate that optimism.
It might not be something you'd want to hold your breath for.
But if you do repeat the question, and I'm not distracted by anything, however unlikely that may sound, I'll certainly be happy to take a stab at him.
So type like a madman.
So I don't have any important questions to edit.
Now, the amazing thing, we have people bunching in and out of this conversation quite quickly, which is very interesting, 1918, 1920, 18, 19.
So it's the same people coming in and out.
Maybe they think it's something quite different.
I have a question.
Sure, go ahead. This is something I was talking to my youngest brother about yesterday at lunch.
Knowing that everybody is kind of trapped in this fantasy and that the collapse of the state isn't necessarily going to wash away that fantasy, how do you break the cycle?
How do you get people out of the mindset of, well, we need another government and into the mindset of, well, maybe we don't need any at all?
Right, right, right.
Um...
I'm working... Sorry, go ahead.
Can I answer that? Can you guys hear, Christina?
We're just working to share one mic here.
I hope so. Anyway, I think that's a great question.
I think that... To think about a stateless society is a wonderful proposition, but I don't think that that's going to happen until people start to deal with the issues within their own family.
You have to start small before you can work large.
That's the bottom line, and people need to do a lot of work, a lot of work before I think a stateless society is possible.
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would suggest is to try and understand if they If they can differentiate between their family and the state.
And sorry, Charlie, we will get back to your question, but it took you just too long to retype it.
Sorry, we're on a tight schedule here at Free Domain Radio with Go, Go, Go!
I'll get back to it. But given that that's the question at hand, I for sure as heck won't get back to it if I leave this one.
But the first question is, and we've talked about this in the podcast, this question of mistaking the world for yourself, right?
Are people aware that their perceptions of authority are shaped by their family history?
If they are not aware of that, then you have absolutely no chance of converting them about anything political because you're trying to cook a meal without any ingredients, right?
I mean, there's just no possibility of being able to communicate if people don't understand that they're dealing with family issues when they're talking about the state.
So if you can get someone to say, like if they start talking about the government and they say, well, you know, if the moment that the government relaxes its control, there'll be chaos and anarchy, right?
Then you sort of ask them about their own family history.
You know, what happened with you when you were a teenager, right?
When you sort of needed more...
I would guess that those people for the most part had their parents clamped down on them pretty heavily when they were teenagers, right?
Because their parents had the feeling that if the teenager was granted freedom relative to their emotional, relative to their physical maturity, that chaos and destruction would result, right?
If you give your kids the keys to the car that they're going to get drunk and drive it off a cliff or something, then obviously they're dealing with a whole lot of propaganda about themselves from their parents.
And, of course, if parents then say, well, teenagers are bad and need to be controlled, but the parents don't say, and that's my fault for being a bad parent, right?
Because I've raised a child who has no self-discipline or self-control or no sense of self-interest and no ability to predict the consequences of actions and all that.
But, of course, then you don't punish the child who becomes a teenager.
You go into therapy yourself as a parent and try and deal with it more honestly that way.
So if you can get people to understand that when they're talking about authority, they're talking about their parents or their extended family, their community, their teachers, their priests, right?
Because, you know, what direct experience do we have of the state other than some letters and some deductions on our tax, right?
I've never touched a damn thing, and I almost never spend any time...
In its space, I mean every now and then I'll get stopped for a traffic ticket or something, but that's about it, right?
People don't really have any direct experience with the state, right?
But what we do have direct experience with is all the authority figures.
That we experience.
And if people can understand that, then that's great.
You can start to deal with how they understand authority relative to their actual experience, right?
All we're trying to do is apply the scientific method over and over and over again, right?
So if you have beliefs about authority, you can say to people, well, where did you get these beliefs about authority, right?
So somebody says, well, if we get anarchism...
Then we'll just get civil war, right?
They say to people, well, where did you get that?
Like, how do you know that's true? What's your thing?
Oh, well, it's just inevitable.
It's like, well, why is it inevitable?
If you keep asking questions, at some point it will come back.
You know, they'll say, well, the war, the armies will split off and the DROs will develop military and so on.
It's like, well, how do you know that?
And at some point, right, somebody says, it's inevitable because Hobbes said so.
And I don't think I read the Calvin and Hobbes where that was referred to, but I could be wrong.
But at some point it's going to come back to their family.
Like at some point, once they realize that they don't have any direct experience of the state, then it's going to come back to their family.
In the same way that when you question a religious person, at some point they're going to say, well, it's not something that I've got directly from God.
It is something that my priest told me.
There's a very big difference, right?
If somebody's like, do you obey God or do you obey the priest?
So at some point, people are going to have to start working empirically when you're debating with them about the nature of authority.
And that's when you can really start to get some very important conversations going.
But as long as you're talking about the family, but you think you're talking about the state, then you're just going to go round and round in circles.
So, let me just finish off by saying, answer Charlie's questions about this, and I just want to make sure I understand this.
I had a question about the podcast the other day, too.
What would cause someone to be a leader who doesn't kill Bush, Hitler, etc., versus a brutal soldier guard?
Opportunity? Money? Abuse?
So, I think that the question is...
What would make somebody who lusts for power decide to go for politics rather than become like a prison guard or something like that?
And what would basically be the case for that is that those who are interested in power and in maximizing their own power use their own abilities to the best.
Right? So if you are six foot eight and, I don't know, 250 pounds of pure muscle, then you're probably going to try and, and not too bright, right?
Then you're going to probably try and exercise power by becoming a dancer at a nightclub or a prison guard or a boxer or something like that, something sort of brutal that requires more physical strength than brains.
If you're like Bush, like you're not too tall, but you're good with words, and you've got that kind of all-American face, and you can cash in on your family name and so on, then you're going to maximize power by going for politics, right?
So it has a lot to do with your history and your physiology and your innate abilities, and your patience to some degree as well, right?
You'd have to be a little bit more intelligent to be the president than you would to be a bouncer, though not necessarily economically more productive, because at least people actually voluntarily pay for bouncers.
But, yeah, I mean, people like Bush, they avoid the military.
The leaders don't want to have anything to do with the military.
What they do want to do is make stirring speeches about taking out any threat to America until North Korea comes along, in which case they become all conciliatory because they're just so brave.
Zavoboy has asked, is there a set topic?
That's good. No.
Whatever you want to jump in with, just go for it.
Did you have a topic that you wanted to talk about?
No. Okay.
So there is no set topic.
And so that would be sort of my suggestion about how it is that people just use whatever they can to gain the most power that they can while saying that they're only doing it for other people.
I reluctantly became the president because other people felt that I could do the best for the country that way and all that kind of stuff.
If they're more linguistically skilled, Then physically skilled or physically strong, then they will be those kinds of manipulative leaders rather than sort of a brute criminal, right?
And plus, you get a lot more money and power in the political system than you would by being a bouncer or a boxer or someone like that, prison guard, right?
So the cost-benefit for people with strong language skills and the ability to manipulate is very strong to go into politics, right?
So... Does that answer your question?
He says, thanks.
Sounds about what I was thinking.
Didn't know if it was something deeper.
You always seem to have something more.
Except this time, it would seem.
I do have...
Sorry, go ahead. I have kind of a follow-up on the other thing I was talking about.
That would be all right. Follow-up?
Have you not read the Rules of Engagement for Free Domain Radio?
Never any follow-up. Always keep moving.
Forward, forward. Don't circle back to pick up the wounded.
Sorry, go ahead. Okay.
All right. So, aren't we sort of dooming ourselves to a niche in arguing that...
I agree that it takes, you know...
A lot of personal introspection and a lot of work on yourself to get over the whole fantasy that the state is where it's at.
But given that and the fact that we can only work with the people around us and the fact that the success rate isn't necessarily guaranteed and the fact that People in a status mindset, when the present state does fall, are pretty much just going to...
The whole notion of chaos and destruction and all is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, really.
Aren't you really saying that all we can do is stand back and watch it happen and hope that maybe somehow a mass psychological movement Move through the population before the 10 to 15 years that you were estimating occurs?
Well, yeah, no, that's an excellent question, of course, because we're trying not too much to sow the seeds of despair.
And if I did have my webcam hooked up, what I would do is I would pan around.
This enormous army of hand puppets that I'm gathering together for the final assault upon the status agenda.
So once I do get the, you'll see them all lined up and we have little felt cannons and all that.
So there's lots of great stuff that I can bring to bear in a martial or loosely martial sense from that standpoint.
So I'd sort of like to offer that forward as an optimistic approach about how we can take things back in that sense.
The other thing to do is, you know, just in case you feel that the military hand puppet agenda isn't going to be the final solution, the other thing that you can do is you can, or at least, and I sort of find this to be helpful, and I did jump a step when I was talking before.
The first thing that you need to do is to create discomfort in people, and this is very important, in the same way that I'm creating discomfort by talking about the hand puppet military, but hopefully in a more productive way.
But I was so close to doing that straight and having people really believe that the hand puppets were the way to go.
But anyway, we'll do that another time.
But you need to create discomfort in people and the way that you do that is just the old Socratic method, right?
So whenever somebody has some status solution, right, then you say, okay, well, is that your opinion?
Or the old argument from around you, right?
Is that your opinion? Oh, the welfare state is the best thing ever.
It's like, oh, is that your opinion?
Like, I like candy?
Or is that a true fact that's empirical and testable and universal and so on, right?
And so the first thing you need to do is to break the illusory certainty of the false self, as we sort of talked about on a number of different podcasts.
So when people say silly things that are illogical, but believe them to be true, the first thing you need to do is to create a schism in their personality, right?
To create discomfort within themselves.
By saying that, as Socrates did thousands of years ago, and as we still continue to this day, to say, oh, so you believe that you understand something called justice, or honesty, or honor, or integrity, or virtue, or whatever, right?
Whatever they're using for the argument for morality.
Well, that's great. Okay, well, because I'm not certain about these things, and I find them very difficult to work with, so educate me, a wise person, about all of these things, and you just keep asking questions.
Now... Once you can establish with someone that they don't know what they think they know, then you have done one of two things.
Either you've got them really pissed off and they just slam down the phone or walk away from you or whatever, in which case at least they're not in your face saying all these stupid things all the time, so I think that's a step forward, right?
But the second thing that you may have done is you may have helped somebody to become a little bit more intellectually humble, right?
Because from humility comes wisdom, right?
We all have to understand that we don't know the kind of important things that we need to know.
At least I certainly didn't when I started this journey.
And it's only through humility that you gain knowledge, right?
You gain wisdom because you have to first admit that you don't know something in order to be open to learning it.
And so you sort of roll through life just creating discomfort in people, and I know that that sounds like a difficult thing to do, and nobody has to do it, of course, but if you do want to sort of help the world become better, the first thing you need to do is to basically get people to understand that, you know, as they used to believe that if you had some sort of mental illness, that drilling a hole in your skull would let the demon out, and they were completely convinced that that was the way to go, well, the first thing you need to do is...
You know, maybe get people to doubt that, right?
Once they doubt that, then they can start looking for more logical explanations.
So it's this continual process that when somebody says, I know for sure that democracy is the best system, the welfare state helps the poor, we should raise the minimum wage, we should, you know, they talk all of this tripe about economics and politics and ethics and virtue and the war in Iraq is justified and the president is the leader of the country and America is the best and all this.
You know, just to keep asking them questions because they are, you know, my general approach is to take people at face value.
It's like, wow, if you know all of these wise things that I'm not certain about even now, you must be really, really a genius, in which case you need to instruct me on how brilliant you are so that I can finally gain certainty about these things that I've struggled with for my life, and that's a wonderful thing, and maybe you can share all that with me, and then it turns out that they don't have any clue what they're talking about.
And then they may have some humility, they may be open to some sort of progress, right?
And then, this is sort of where I was before, when somebody finally understands that they don't know what they're talking about, then you can jump in with the family stuff, right?
So then you can start to say, well, why is it do you think that you had these opinions and were so certain of them when they turned out to be false?
Is there anything in your history that might have led you to believe this about authority or the state or the use of violence or whatever, right?
And then if they are very honest, and this is not too, too many people, but it's growing, I think, then they will say, yeah, you know, I guess my father was pretty authoritarian or, you know, I was spanked and I was told like I was a bad kid and I had to be spanked, so maybe that's why I think that the police and the military are such a good idea.
Or something like that. You can at least start down that road with people.
But the first thing you have to do is not jump in and say to somebody sitting innocently at a barbecue, say, You're entirely run by your family history and you think it's all politics and philosophy, at least not before a couple of drinks when they're a little more open.
But, you know, sort of wait for people to tell you a whole bunch of nonsense that they believe to be true, which is what everyone will tell you if given half a chance, and then you just ask questions.
And I've seen Christina do this a number of times, and it really is quite delightful to watch.
She does it on a more psychological level, but man, she'll make you cry.
The problem becomes then, let's say I'm able to master this process and I can idealistically get someone to question their statism on average across a year,
on an average of once a day, then in ten years I've only just I've only just reached 3,000 people, 3,650 people.
If 10 of us on this board do that over 10 years, then it's still only 36,000 people, right?
Which is... 36,500 people.
Right. You can tell I'm not a math major.
But the point is that still less than 1% of the population in the United States, for example...
Sorry, can I just interrupt you once more?
Sure. Ron Paul Fan has reminded us that there's leap years.
So, 36, 525 people.
Okay. So, let it never be said that we're nitpickers.
Sorry, go ahead. But the point is that we've only really still retched less than 1% of the population of the United States, let alone, you know, the 6.5 or 7 billion people in the world.
You know, isn't this sort of quixotic?
I certainly understand what you're saying.
Now, I don't mean to quote your own texts back at you, Gungadin, but weren't you the person who was talking about the story about the child and the starfish?
Yeah, that was...
Sorry, just so I don't have to look it up on the board, for those who haven't read that, would you just like to basically mention that story?
Sure, I'd be glad to.
And to give myself away, I was sort of taking the opposition opinion.
You? For the sake of an interesting argument.
Who are we really talking to? This isn't Greg, is it?
Yeah. Anyway, the story is basically there's a guy on the beach, and it's low tide, and the beach is covered with thousands and thousands of starfish.
And most of them are still alive, but they won't be in a very short time.
So this guy's walking along the beach, and he's picking one up and throwing it in the water, and picking another one up and throwing it in the water, and so on and so forth.
Another guy comes along, sees this guy pitching these starfish into the water, and comes up to him and says, what are you doing?
And the guy throwing starfish says, well, I'm saving starfish.
And the guy who just came up to him says, well, that's kind of goofy.
There's thousands of them here.
There's no way you're going to be able to touch every single one of these.
By the time, you know, night falls.
And he says, well, no, of course not, but I can reach this one, and that one, and that one, and that one.
Now, actually, Greg does this until he says that one 36,525 times.
Is that right? I just wanted to cut you off before we got too far down that road.
Right. I would have kept going.
Right. Absolutely.
Which makes my podcast almost look non-repetitive.
Right. So, I mean, given that you were playing the...
I agree with you, and Niels wants to jump in, so I'll just mention something briefly that I think that's perfectly valid, right, that you save the sole one human being at a time, but I also agree that that's not going to make a damn bit of a dent in our lifetime in the world's consciousness.
So, there is a little bit of, like, I alienate myself from a good dinner of ribs with my family for the sake of reaching, you know,.00001% of the world's population that may or may not change.
So, Niels, you wanted to respond on this, right?
Yeah, there's a couple of things that you're overlooking.
And first of all, our approach is to get rid of the corrupt people in our lives.
So this means that we ourselves are going to look at every single relationship we have in our lives.
And if there are some of those that are manipulative, One way or the other.
We're going to try to change that.
And we've gone a long way since the start of the development of our thinking about understanding the world.
And most of us see very clearly now.
So that helps speed this process.
But what we want to do is the people that we keep in our lives, you could call this a circle or whatever, We want to straighten out every thoughts that we differ with them on these big issues like politics and relationships and everything because they are part of our lives and we have a commitment two ways.
So just like on Skype, every day a new person comes in and he or she has some kind of point to make And we are in a chat and we talk about the issue and at some point it's resolved and it's pretty easy, mostly if people are on the right track and such.
So what happens is the people who stay in our lives, they themselves become into the same mindset as we are because they understand what integrity means, etc., etc.
Naturally, they will show this same behavior.
That's the logical consequence and the interesting outcome of the things that Stefan and we all have discovered is that it's not just, well, we have to talk about politics.
No, it's all encompassing.
Hello? So anyway, you're talking about numbers.
Well, you're forgetting the fact that it's exponential.
If you change your life to the better, then other people will do the same thing.
So the numbers that you're talking about, you should multiply them every time that there is a connection.
And finally...
There's only one way to change the world, and it's not through guns.
May they be hand puppet guns or big ones.
It's through changing people's minds.
That's the only thing that can change the world.
So we get at it, and thinking about how far we can go, that's completely irrelevant.
It's the only logical thing we can do, change our lives.
And that will change the world.
I really don't see the problem here.
And what's going to be interesting is the results.
Because you'll be surprised.
And everyone will be surprised when these things...
At some point, they will show themselves in ways you'll never expect.
Like the free market.
It's just full of surprises.
And that's what's going to happen.
And asking and saying, being nihilistic...
Well, what can we do?
We are just one person.
That's completely against all common knowledge, and it's against all the principles that we share.
So, that was it.
Well, I think that's a very good way of putting it.
I'll sort of add two minor points to that.
I'll turn my microphone on like a true audio professional.
And then I'll turn it back to another question to Greg.
The first thing that I would say is that the primary benefit, as Neil's pointed out, to freedom, to integrity, to philosophy is one's own personal life.
Let's just say that, to sort of take yet another medical metaphor from my page of Infinite Medical Metaphors, everybody thinks that eating nothing but fat and sitting on the couch is the best thing for your health, and then they all die at 30 and think that that's sort of living to a ripe old age.
And then we figure out that if we exercise a little and don't eat quite as much fat, then we can double our lifespan, right?
Well, I think we do that because that makes us happier.
We're healthier. We can get upstairs.
We can do whatever.
We're going to be healthier. We're going to be happier ourselves.
And yes, we can put up some websites and have some podcasts or whatever saying to people, you know, you're going to be a lot happier if you don't end up eating all this fat and you get off the couch and walk around a little bit.
You can double your lifespan. But it's not like if people don't double their lifespan that our lifespan drops.
This is not the perfect analogy to politics because, of course, politics is about the gun in the room pointed at us.
But the first and foremost thing is that if we figure out that nutrition and exercise makes us happier and healthier and we can at least convince a few people around us, right?
I mean, so that we're not, you know, the only thin person in a group of expiring chunkies.
But we sort of do it for ourselves, and we get the benefits of that within our own life.
And then by being happy ourselves, we then end up drawing more people, right?
In marketing, you want to create what's called a pull market, where instead of having to push your product out there, which is what a lot of us have to do, you want to pull people in to your solution because you're happy and productive and all that kind of stuff, right?
When people see that you're living past 30 and you can run marathons and you can, you know, climb stairs, then they might be curious and find out what's going on.
Then you can start to get a pull market wherein people are starting to come to you rather than you having to go out like John the Baptist and convert people one by one, which is obviously a somewhat daunting task.
And, of course, the first thing, of course, and the second thing that I'd say is that our success or failure is not, of course, what we can measure our happiness on because it's outside of our control.
What is inside of our control is the degree to which we live with integrity and the clarity with which we pursue communication with people about freedom.
We can control that. You know, it's like if you're going to ask a girl out, you can't base your happiness on whether she says yes or not, right?
You can only base your happiness on, or at least to some degree, based on whether you go and ask her out or not, right?
Because you have control over that, right?
Unless you're sort of into the chloroform and back-of-the-trunk kind of stuff, you don't have as much control of whether she's going to go out with you.
And, of course, until anarchy comes along, that's sadly going to remain illegal.
But unlike Christina and Second Date, I think, was it?
Second Date, sweetie, with the chloroform and the back-of-the-trunk?
First date, right, first date, sorry.
But, you know, as you can see, it works out, although she does take it all out on Podcast 300.
So you can't really sort of base your self-esteem on whether we succeed or not.
You can only base your self-esteem on how well you live yourself, which you have some sort of control over.
But anyway, so back to you, Greg.
What do you think about these various arguments?
So the point is, it doesn't really matter, then.
Well, it's not that it doesn't really matter.
It's just not within our control.
I mean, of course, we'd all prefer that we sort of have this magic wand where we can change people into pacifists and anti-war people or people who recognize the truth and so on.
But given that we don't have that magic wand, it certainly matters.
It matters a great deal to me.
It's just that I don't have any control over the outcome.
So the only thing that I can base my happiness on is how well a job and how much work do I think I'm putting into something that I treasure, like the spread of sort of ideas of freedom or whatever.
And not whether or not people like them or don't like them.
Because I don't have any control.
I can't sort of inject myself into people's history and replace their parents and their teachers and all this and that, right?
I've tried, but usually the ear canals are too small.
But I can't do any of that.
So all I can do is sort of try and be as enthusiastic and positive about freedom and see if they respond.
And if they do respond, great.
And if they respond in a hostile manner, that's a drag.
But I can't do anything about that.
All I can do is try and be as positive myself.
Because, you know, we try to avoid the argument from a fact.
Like, this is worth doing if we win, right?
This is worth doing because it makes us free, it makes us happier.
And the last thing I'd mention is that for yourself, Greg, I mean, not only have you been an incredibly prolific and logical and respectful board contributor, but when you look at, you know, we're up to 60,000 downloads a month for free domain radio shows, we're getting 500 new listeners pretty much every month.
We have 163 board members.
We have, you know, close to 17,000 posts and so on.
That your own contributions to this sort of growing thing that we've got going on here has, I think, given you a great deal of exposure as a thinker and as a communicator relative to what you were doing before.
So, in a sense, I could imagine you asking that before, but a little bit less now, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
This is a hell of a lot more fulfilling than the life I was leading a year ago, even.
Absolutely. I think you've certainly outstripped me in terms of your contributions to the board, and they've been uniformly excellent.
In terms of what you're contributing, you've got 163 members.
I've seen up to 47 guests up there, and that's your quota for a year, isn't it?
Which you can get pretty much every day or two.
So it is sort of accelerating from that standpoint if we offer something that's fun and consistent and friendly.
And yet, without breaking the integrity that we need as communicators and as philosophers, if we can offer a forum that is friendly and inviting and rigorous and which has a strong criteria for proof and disproof, I think that's a fantastic thing, right? Because it's not who wins, it's that reason wins, and I think we've got a good forum for that.
It's getting a lot of people involved, which is certainly growing a lot faster than It's a sincere appreciation.
I mean, you've done a great job. I actually hadn't even thought about it that way, but I guess that is true.
No, I guess the imp of self-doubt sneaks back in there every once in a while, and I just thought I'd throw the question out.
And I think it's a perfectly valid question now.
You know what question I'm going to throw back at you now, don't you?
I mean, that's not going to be a big shock here, is it?
What, why am I asking the question?
No, no, no, no, no. That's far too open-ended a question for me.
I like to zero in things a little bit more.
Right, because we're talking in general about, most times when people are talking about ideas, they're talking about their family, right?
I mean, we sort of, you may have listened to the odd podcast or two, or even the odd radio show.
But was there any particular history within your family or any sort of interactions within your family wherein you might sort of get the idea that changing people is an uphill laborious and sometimes very depressing task?
Well, pretty much every encounter with my family is that way.
But other than that, it was okay?
Yeah.
I apologize.
I'm sorry.
I'm almost looking for the silver lining.
yeah Right. So, I mean, if this is sort of one of the things that we've talked about before, and this is not to pick on your family, but, you know, they're here, and they're Americans, and I'm Canadian.
It's just the law. But not to pick on your family, but this is the challenge that you face when you keep people who are directly oppositional to your ideas, and we would say, I think, with some degree of severity, not just our ideas, but good ideas, right?
We try and put these through a pretty rigorous process of proof.
But when you keep people around yourself that have ideas that are antithetical to your own, then the compromise that that entails, the split that that entails within your own value system, right?
That you value X and you also value the opposite of X simultaneously yet separately, right?
Because, I mean, what that does to your energy and your motivation and your confidence is pretty severe.
Right? So, this is sort of the consequence that you feel, the consequence that you're going to feel by keeping your family around, at least for the short run, right?
I mean, taking a break or would find some way to either get them to respect your ideas or take a break from them.
This is the consequence that you're going to have emotionally, is that you're going to feel...
That it is a huge uphill battle and that the site is, that the top of the peak is many generations in the future and do you want to be one of the innocent foot soldiers mown down by the blind, uncaring prejudices of the majority and live a life of misery and solitude for the sake of some future Jerusalem that other people are going to reach maybe at some point in the future, right? That is going to be how you experience freedom.
Or the ideas of freedom.
You're going to experience them as a friction-based, somewhat depressing and unchosen burden.
To a small degree, right?
To whatever degree that this is sort of hitting you.
But that's not the result of freedom or politics or anything like that.
That's the natural result of having both these values within your life and also people who hold the opposite values that you still see a lot of or still see a fair amount of.
I think that, again, we're probably a little bit more into the family arena and the compromises that you have within your own philosophy with your family, which is not to say that this is resolvable, you know, storm out today or whatever, but this is the natural result.
It's not anything to do with the freedom movement or anything like that.
I think I would start, you know, with the idea that it's something more to do with your family and your own compromises and your level of comfort with those.
I would just add, too, that to a certain extent it's not really...
I mean, once you understand this stuff, it's not something you can choose.
I mean, if I were to just go back to, say, oh, I don't know, voting for George Bush tomorrow, I would be kind of like faking it, you know?
Yeah, the technical term is you.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, once you understand all this stuff, it's...
It's like it's natural.
It would be like trying to breathe water now if I were to try and go back.
No, I mean, that's absolutely true, right?
You can't unlearn a fact, right?
You can no longer sit in your room, close your eyes, and think about philosophy without using the English language, right?
It's absolutely impossible to go back and to unlearn something, especially when, for whatever reason, and we talked about this, I think, in one of the very first radio shows, if for whatever reason we've been touched by the ghostly finger of rational fate or something like that, I mean, it's nothing like that, but it's the closest metaphor I can think of, right, that we are the sort of somewhat random gene in the social body that's supposed to move the race forward to some degree or another because we just have a natural predilection to think rationally and to examine things philosophically,
and we have a certain autoimmune system within our minds that keeps us free of certain pestilent kinds of social and we have a certain autoimmune system within our minds that And so, yes, not only are we naturally the state, and before I got into philosophy, I would say that I was not even a personality as far as I would understand it now.
I was simply just a collection of prejudices and defenses and emotional baggage and whatever, somebody who was trying to make impressions on people.
I didn't have a sort of self in a way that I would understand it now.
And so this sort of gave me a structure and an identity, really, because to me, if you're just a mystic or a collectivist or whatever, you don't really have an identity, right?
Anymore than a cell in a body does.
And so we not only are naturally drawn towards these ideas, but almost in a way these ideas are naturally drawn to us.
And that union, which is something that is fairly unique to people involved in this conversation, and seems to be almost completely incomprehensible, yet vaguely hateful to everybody else, It's really quite a challenge to manage, right?
I mean, it's really hard to feel like part of the species when you're sort of a mutant gene designed to advance everything to some degree.
It is a little hard to sort of figure out where you fit in.
And I know that's a little bit off topic from what you were saying, but it's a real challenge, right?
I mean, we are not part of society, but we are definitely part of the human race.
And given where society is right now, I think we're an absolutely essential antibody to the illusions that are currently sucking us all under it.
Yeah, and to bring that back to the family, it was pretty much the case that I wasn't beaten down, but I was sort of put in a box to tolerate it to the extent that you weren't dangerous.
Yeah, I mean, most people who are into philosophy or into sort of any examination of truth within the family context, the best that you can hope for is to be tolerated like somebody who's got Tourette's and swears in front of children and has to be explained away, right?
That's generally the best that you can hope for, which is not the most satisfying of relationships.
Right, and that's kind of where my, you know, my own self-doubts come from because it's like, well, maybe they're, you know, maybe this is goofy, you know?
And that's one of the reasons why I tend to be attracted to people who are so vociferously anti what I'm saying is that it forces me to re-question everything from the beginning over and over and over again to make sure I've got it right.
Oh, absolutely. Look, the last thing that we'd ever want is to both be social outcasts and be wrong.
I mean, that would really suck, right?
I don't mind being a social outcast if I'm right, because then it's progress of a kind.
So it's absolutely continually essential, and that's why I really appreciate the new flood of people who've come onto the boards questioning things like property rights and the ultimate supremacy of Steph's brain, like all of the things that would seem unquestionable otherwise.
Oh, wait, Christina's looking at me questioningly.
Oh, hang on just a sec.
Time for my medication. Mmm, a handful of pills.
That's tasty. But, yeah, I mean, the people who've come on board who've really sort of forced us to re-examine our own questions, the determinists and the property rights, the people who are anti-property rights and so on.
Fantastic, because we constantly want to make sure that we're not pissing our lives away, not only not gaining the benefits of being within society in a way that is comfortable and conformist and gets us lots of goodies and approval, So we don't get those benefits because we are very much against the prevailing social norms.
And I hate to not get those benefits and not even be right either.
I mean, that would be like one razor away from being a shaven-headed guy at the airport, right?
I mean, that would really suck. In a very fundamental way, so I think it is absolutely always the case to re-question, right?
But I think the important thing to understand about you, and maybe other people can find this useful as well, relative to your family, is that it's not the conclusions that you come to that differentiates you from your family or you from society or us from the world as a whole.
It's not the conclusions that we come to.
It's the methodology that we use that differentiates us.
Right? So it's not, oh Greg, you've come to a silly conclusion, right?
Or a right conclusion.
That doesn't matter. That's why I keep telling people, people think that I have a position, right?
Like, I think this is right.
And of course I do. But so what, right?
If someone comes up with a better argument or proof against it, then I'll just slavishly follow that like any decent sort of social scientist.
So, it's the methodology that is different, right?
So, the conclusions don't matter.
It's the scientific method that differs from religion.
It's not relativity versus the enunciation, right?
So, I think that is where your real differentiator is with your family and those around you, is your methodology, your curiosity, and your willingness to submit yourself to rationality and evidence.
So, you use the scientific method in every realm.
That's what differentiates us, not a specific conclusion about capitalism or the welfare state or whatever.
And it's very easy to get sort of sucked into the specific disagreements that we have with people and say, well, the difference of opinion that I have with my brother is regarding the welfare state, but it's not the case at all.
It's regarding the epistemological methodology of how you gain and keep knowledge that is the great differentiator, not the conclusions that we come to on either side of the fence.
Had to happen sooner or later, we'll be an hour and a half now.
Shoot enough random ball bearings around, eventually you get the one in the hole.
I didn't want to hog up the hole.
Thank you.
No, look, what you're facing, I think that's what a lot of people are facing as well, so I can certainly understand that.
Some of the hardest things that anybody has to do is question their family.
Question the values and the morals that were forced upon them and come to their own decisions about what is meaningful and what is valuable and what is right.
And I think that's what members of this board are trying to do, and they're trying to do it with respect to looking at government and politics and the state.
But I think it's essential that they need to put it Into place with their families and their relationships with their significant others first because that will clear the way, I think, to greater freedom in the world.
No, that's right. And as far as questioning family goes, it's very hard.
Like one day, and that day is probably not close in coming, Christina may question something that I say.
And, well, let's not even really talk about that because we don't even want to conceive of that, but it is a very hard thing to do.
I just wish it was a little harder for Christina to say.
I think it would be the case. Okay.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what I have to live with.
What I choose to live with.
Remember, you can turn me off.
Christina, it's just a constant tidal wave of medicated management.
It's quite different. I do my best, ladies and gentlemen, to tame them.
Now, does anybody else have anything that they want to add on this topic or any other topic before we close up?
Christina is invisible.
Oh, look. I mean, if you're going to get into the whole hand puppet discussion again, then I might lose a little bit of credibility.
And a man with an unpronounceable name has left the chat.
Yeah. Hey, can I change the subject?
You certainly can. You had a question or two about religious proofs.
Ron Paul Fan is currently incarcerated in a Christian summer camp, and so he had a couple of questions.
Unfortunately, no access to a microphone, and we were going to use God as the Internet, but unfortunately he seems to be down at the moment.
He doesn't have a microphone.
He's going to type this out, so I'll just put some filler in while he types it out.
Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.
Filler, sweetie. Are you at a loss for words?
Ooh, do you hear that tweak, ladies and gentlemen?
Do you hear that? Oh, wait.
Ooh, more medication.
Ah. Ooh, wow, that's great.
So mellow. Everything's turning yellow.
I don't know. I thought do was a word.
Absolutely. Their top argument is that the universe appears to have a designer, and Einstein supposedly proved that the Earth had a beginning, that the universe appears to have a designer.
This is, of course, the argument for the Christians, and we can approach this from any number of ways.
The very brief way that I would approach it is that you don't want to project organic concepts onto inorganic entities, right?
So, human beings are born, live, and die, and we have creators, namely our parents.
And... Of course, the universe exists, and therefore the natural tendency is for us to believe that organic concepts can be applied to inorganic entities like the universe, right?
Born and dies and has creators and so on.
So the fact that the universe exists in no way predicates that it was created, right?
And the basic argument against that, just in case you have a question about that, the basic question that you can respond to in this sort of area...
Let me just unmute you there.
It's to say something like this.
Well, if everything that exists had a creator, right?
This is sort of the basic argument.
It's not mine. This goes all the way back to Democritus.
But if everything that exists had a creator, then God must also have had a creator, right?
Because if the fundamental principle is that if something exists and it must have been created, then God himself or herself must have been created.
Now, if God can exist eternally and does not need to have been created, right?
Because otherwise you end up with this infinite chain of causality as far as gods go.
Although I do believe that Zeus and a leprechaun were the originators of the Christian deity.
But I'd have to check my genealogy there.
But if God can be perceived or conceived of to exist without being created or caused himself, then we have allowed for the existence of entities that Can exist in perpetuity.
Now, of course, if God can exist in perpetuity and did not need to be created, then the same thing can be true of the universe itself.
And then they argue about how the universe wouldn't work if small things were different, like if the amount of oxygen were more than 1% different either way, we would die.
If there were several more miles closer to the sun, we would fry.
And all sorts of things that are unlikely to happen by accident.
Well, statistically, that's not true at all.
Right? Statistically, that's not true at all.
The vast majority of the universe, of course, is a complete waste of space, right?
Even if you look at the solar system, if you think that the whole, even if just the solar system were invented for the existence of human beings, then why would you need all these other planets, right?
I mean, it's not like Uranus gives a good deal of richness to human life or the moons of Jupiter or anything like that.
And so it doesn't really, yeah, eye candy for sure.
I think it left astronomy like anybody else, and it sure looks pretty in those color-enhanced NASA photos, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that hundreds of millions of suns and galaxies and so on were created for the sole purpose of one little planet in the corner of the Milky Way, a relatively small galaxy on the edge of nowhere.
So if you did want to think of something that the universe was created for, you'd be a lot more closer to think that we are accidental byproducts of God's need to create black holes.
Because the number of black holes is absolutely enormous, right?
And so especially at the center of galaxies, this is conceived to be the center of the gravitational well that keeps galaxies together.
And so there are far more black holes in the universe than human beings, both in terms of just numbers and mass.
Of course, it's like bajillions of times More black holes than human beings.
And so we can't really logically think that we are the center of creation if it was created to bring something into being.
We can't think that we're the center of it and that black holes are a byproduct.
The goal, if the universe was designed to create something, would be to create black holes and human beings are an accidental byproduct.
So it doesn't really make any sense to say that...
That the world is designed to produce human beings.
Like I have a sidewalk out front of my house and it's got these cracks in it, right?
And I bet you there's some religion down in there with the weeds, right?
Because the weeds say, my God, when you think about it, I had to fly over 15 different neighborhoods and then I had to spiral in right down, right?
The seed for my weed, right?
I had to spiral right down in.
To the crack in my sidewalk right before a thunderstorm which cemented me allowed me to grow, right?
So that particular weed thinks it's the most miraculous thing in the world that it has come into being and the odds against it are so enormous and so on, right?
Like some raindrop falls from the sky and happens to land on my big shiny head, then it's going to feel like, wow, I got really close to an immense and rather random furnace and So it's going to feel like, wow, look at everything.
I had to get sucked up from the lake.
I had to fly above the clouds and then land.
But it's all accidental, right?
It seems non-accidental to whatever is benefiting from a whole series of coincidences, but it doesn't really make that much sense at all.
This is a good counter-argument.
I will bring it up with them. Moving on to another one of their arguments.
All right. And now the people who are non-American seem to have left the chat, which I can fully understand because this is a quite American topic, right?
There's a lot more religious, centralized religious thinking in America, so definitely worth giving a chat.
Moving on to another one of their arguments.
Friggin' theists.
Friggin' theists, absolutely.
Just seeing if I missed anyone here.
I mean, yeah, without a doubt, we're accidental byproducts of whole things, right?
Oh, yeah, so they say that a single cell contains over 10,000 books of information in a single cell, or about 200 of my novels, and that this wouldn't evolve.
They say that a single cell contains over 10,000 books of information, right?
Yeah, I got this. This is all the DNA stuff, right, down at the base level, right?
There's lots of information about it, for sure.
And that this wouldn't evolve.
1,000 books? 1,000 books, okay.
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm no biologist, but this is sort of my answer to this kind of objection.
And this you can...
This you can argue with anyone about anything that they do to bring up religion or to bring up the existence of a deity.
I'm no biologist, so I can't argue.
I can certainly argue that this isn't information in the way that we understand information.
Like a library contains information that was created by someone, a cell does not.
So, as Greg puts it, they're conflating DNA with information theory.
Let's have a look at this, and let's just say that we don't have any way of answering this, and I don't have all of the details about how this all evolved or anything like this, but this is what I'm comfortable saying.
So somebody says, well, there are 10,000 books worth of information in a single cell.
How could that have evolved? So the correct answer, if you don't know, is to say, well, I don't know.
Like the correct answer about where did the universe come from before modern physics was to say, well, I don't know where the universe came from.
I mean, that's the correct answer, because you don't know.
But if you say to the question, where did the universe come from?
You say, well, a giant turtle named Bob created it from his own turds in a cosmic infinite way 6,500 years ago.
Then you're lying.
You're saying you know something that you don't know.
And in fact, you are preventing knowledge from coming into being by claiming that you know something that you don't know.
I mean, that's the fundamental thing.
Yeah, let's say that human beings have no idea how cells came into being.
Right? Well, that's fine.
Then we say, I don't know how DNA came into being.
I don't know how you end up with 10,000 books in a cell.
But saying that God created it is not answering the question.
It's not answering the question at all.
You're just saying, oh, so the answer to the question of how did 10,000 books worth of information get into a cell is to say some incomprehensible, self-contradictory, unknowable being did it through some methodology we could never understand for reasons we could never possibly understand or fathom and there's no particular proof of the existence of or any after-effect or after-image of this process and that's her answer.
But that's not an answer at all.
That's a pure obfuscation.
You're not answering a damn thing when you say, God did it, right?
Any more than you can say, well, where do babies come from?
Leprechauns make them in a little invisible factory at the bottom of my garden.
Which is completely untrue.
It's in my attic. So, you're just not actually answering anything.
When you say, a God came up with it, you're not answering anything at all.
Right? So, this is a...
And storage is not the same as intelligence, right?
A CD does not write music.
So the fact that there's a bunch of information in cells does not imply any kind of creation, right?
So that would sort of be the second.
The Big Bang argues that there was no DNA and then it formed randomly.
Well, no, not exactly formed randomly.
First of all, they've been able to create self-replicating DNA strands by applying electricity to particular chemical sets that are supposed to sort of symbolize or recreate the primordial soup, right?
Biologists and scientists have been able to create the origins of life in a test tube, right?
That's not the end of the world, and it certainly reproduces the kind of environment that was around at the dawn of time.
So that's not a big deal to do.
From there on, what happens is that the cells reproduce...
And those which reproduce the most effectively, all we are is ways for our DNA to reproduce, right?
Like all my toe wants is to use me to create another toe, right?
And it's not even the toe that it wants to create its individual DNA strand within the toe.
It's just using me as leverage to create another one, right?
I just happened to throw some meaning in there for my own particular pleasure.
But there is no challenge in creating life in a test tube, and then it's just a matter of the constant competition for scarce resources causes the...
The most efficient DNA strands to reproduce themselves the fastest.
So that is...
Stefan, what did you do?
Somebody has asked to understand life and evolution.
Well, the key thing is that I actually started as a small tree frog.
And through an enormous amount of willpower and, frankly, quite a lot of working out, I actually managed to evolve to where I am now, which is something sort of between Cousin It from the Addams Family and a pine cone.
So I'm sort of on my way.
It's another reason why, of course, I don't have a webcam.
It might freak people out.
Silicon-based life form and so on.
Do tree frogs have extra-large lungs?
What are you trying to get at, man?
Cousin It has hair.
Ooh! Ooh!
The stabbing!
Oh, the stabbing of the user.
It's quick, honey. It's right between my shoulder blades.
Just pull it out. Oh!
Oh! Hey, now she's stuffing more medication in there.
Oh, so relaxed.
All right, well, thank you very much for giving me your name, William.
You will have an entire podcast dedicated to you.
What did you do to understand it, not to become it?
Should I cancel the head wax gift?
You know, between us, Christina and I actually have a normal head of hair.
Where I have a deficiency, she has a vast excess.
Plus, evolution does not explain how life arises.
I think it does. I think that if you basically shoot a whole bunch of electricity into this primordial soup with possible proteins and so on, that you can actually start to get these things reproducing.
Gosh, well, I had a friend who was a biologist throughout my undergraduate degree at McGill, and he was a very brilliant biologist who actually ended up getting his PhD, I think, from Stanford.
And so we would have long discussions about biology, and he was very interested in memes.
I've talked about this before. Stefan, what's your position on hair transplants?
What I've found is that pubic to back of the neck is definitely bad.
So, other than that, that's the only one that I've really worked at.
Other than that, because it just makes you look kind of Italian, and also like a little choir boy.
So, the Italian priests are...
Anyway, we don't need to go into all of that.
That's obviously too traumatic for me.
But, um...
I think that one actually finally...
Christine is now completely embarrassed to ask me how long...
But, yeah, so, I mean, I got a lot of information with a good friend of mine, Richard, who was my roommate, and we actually shared not just a flat, but a single room for a good chunk of our undergraduate, and we had sort of these all-night conversations about stuff, so I found that to be a very good explanation of a lot of stuff to do with...
And, of course, Richard Dawkins is a great guy to read as well.
The Selfish Genes is a fantastic book, and he's a great guy to get into, but there's lots of stuff around this that is not actually required at all, so...
Niels, can you add T-A-W-L-S-R to the chat again?
Now, I haven't read Stephen Gould at all, and Ron Paul Fan, is it biased towards a view?
Truth, yes, I would say.
I'm no biologist, right, so all I can do is read and go, ooh, that's kind of cool.
There's some big words, but it seems kind of reasonable, I guess you could say.
But yeah, TalkOrigins, I don't know.
I've never looked at that. Somebody who's suggesting that he might find it worthwhile to have a look at a website called TalkOrigins.org.
T-A-L-K, Origins.org.
Evolution creation information, so...
Yeah, but I mean, the basic thing is that you don't have to become a biologist to deal with the problems that are brought up by creationists, right, any more than you have to become a politician to deal with the problems of statism, right?
So that is not important.
You just have to recognize that...
God is no answer to anything.
God is not an answer to anything.
What God is is a huge iron bar in front of any progressive knowledge, right?
Because then it becomes sort of blasphemy and so on, right?
There was a cartoon in The New Yorker at the moment, which is a road, it's a highway, and traffic is completely stopped because there's a huge sign in the road which says, sorry for the inconvenience.
And that to me is to some degree what happens with the progress of thought when it comes to religion.
That it doesn't matter who's right, who's wrong, all you have to know is that religion is not an answer to anything.
That's it. Niels says we've lured him back by stopping to talk as much about religion and a little bit more about science, so you definitely talk a bit.
Okay. Well, the reason I ask this is because in my own experience, we people don't have a good feeling for these Vast periods of time, these millions and millions and millions of years of time and billions of years if you're talking about the universe and planets and all this kind of stuff and stars and matter.
So what really helped me to get a good feeling for these kind of things is to watch a couple of really good documentaries because understanding how a mechanism works is one thing But that doesn't give you a good sense of time, of the power of time and the power of ever-rising complexity through life and matter.
Also, we don't usually get to appreciate all the things that are around us because we think our own life is pretty complex and we've got all these different things like All these things we do throughout our day and our lives.
But in public school, we get these basic things, you know, like how does DNA work, and you learn some plants and some pretty things that don't really give you a good sense of what's going on around you.
So if you watch a couple of documentaries, From David Attenborough, he's really got awesome ones, like six or ten potters, where he goes through all the different stages of life and all the complexities that different animals go through, and you get to really appreciate them.
For instance, the life of a spider is very interesting and complex.
A lot of things that nobody knows because they're never introduced to these kind of things.
And if you get into that, then all these kind of questions, well, here, a Ron Paul fan has questions.
Well, what about this? What about that?
They just evaporate because if you get a sense of what's really going on, not just a theory, but if you look at what's around us, Well, I think those are excellent points.
I'm just going to also read a couple of other things that people have mentioned here.
Big Bang by Simon Singh is supposed to be excellent.
That's S-I-N-G-H. And The Fabric of the Cosmos, which actually turns out to be muslin, is by Brian Green.
It's also supposed to be good.
And we'd also like to send out prompts and consolations to Ron Paul Fan, who is stuck at a Christian camp at the moment.
And what I would do, though, is if I were you, Ron Paul Fan, To the Christians, when they say, you sort of bring up topics around anarchism, and they say, well, that's not...
That's not biblical. Anarchism is not biblical.
You could certainly make the argument, of course, that Jesus Christ came to the earth.
I mean, this is going to reinforce some religious beliefs, but it's certainly going to allow you to have some interesting discussions around anarchism, if that's your preference, right?
And certainly you're going to have more fun debating anarchism with Christians than atheism with Christians, especially at a Christian camp, right?
But what I would do if I were you and stuck in this particular kind of position is to say that the Old Testament would probably be anti-anarchistic, but that the New Testament could be very much argued to be pro-anarchistic insofar as...
That salvation without the intervention of Jesus Christ was impossible in the Old Testament, but that Jesus Christ came and through the worship of Jesus Christ you gain access to your individual conscience and you have a direct relationship with God without the requirement of an intermediary priest.
And therefore, because you have an individual conscience and an individual relationship with God, that any secular authority which forces you to do X, Y, and Z is interfering in your direct and conscience-based relationship with God, and therefore anarchy could be said to be that which opens up direct communication between man and God by not putting an intermediary and violently-based coercive monopoly like the state, To force people to do stuff against their conscience.
So thou shalt not kill is the direct opposite of the draft.
So thou shalt not steal is the direct opposite of taxation.
So you can actually have quite interesting arguments with Christians about anarchism.
And I would much, much rather that you convert a Christian to an anarchist than a Christian to a communist.
Because then they give up religion, but they're still into collectivism, which is a lot more intrusive.
I have no problem with Christians.
I do have a problem that they want me killed, but...
I have much less problem with Christians than I do with statists, because Christians aren't out there arming up to get me killed, and of course I face a lot more danger from the state than my local church these days.
You can actually have some great arguments with Christians about the role of secular authority, And the fact that after the New Testament, especially with most of the modern Christian religions, every human being who accepts Jesus Christ as his personal savior can be saved, and therefore there's no need for a divinely appointed secular authority to force people to do X, Y, or Z. So you can have some great chats with Christians about anarchism, and that would be my approach.
You'll have more fun at the camp, and also you'll be doing a lot more good for the freedom movement to get people into.
And of course you'll be basically undermining their Christianity through the back door, right?
Because as soon as you get rid of...
Their concept of the state, you're automatically undermining their concept of an abstract authority, and that's going to do harm in the long run to their idea of God.
So that would be my suggestion.
All right. Is there anything else we have?
We've been going for two hours and 21 minutes, which is even slightly longer than most of my podcasts before editing with the errs and ums.
So if there's nothing else that people have to add, I'll close it off now.
But if there's any last-minute topics that people, or comments, I'd say not so much topics that people want to get in, now's the time.
Yeah, I just kind of wanted to comment on when kids ask questions.
The thing that I kind of experienced was when myself and some of my classmates asked questions to these teachers is they would get mad and tell you, you know, You need to stop asking these what-if questions and stuff like that and be really verbally abusive.
Right, like you're bad for asking those questions.
You have malevolent motives or something, right?
Right, and like the parental thing is, you know, if you ask these questions, you know, if they're into the whole physical abuse, then they'll do that, you know.
Oh, yeah, and it works, right?
I mean, certainly, I didn't ask my mom any questions after a certain amount of time just because I was afraid of physical injury, right?
So, you kind of want to hang on to the integrity of your body so that you can have a good basis from which to think later, right?
Especially when they aim for the head, right?
I mean, it's like, no, no, no, protect the brain, I'll think later.
Yeah. This is Manos.
Just one thing I wanted to add for the person at camp.
Having a training in science, actually training in logic helped me more in forming an argument than actually my training in science.
So you might want to try that, just a little study of logic.
Logic, let me just, how do you spell it again?
L-O-J? Is it J or J? Just, you know, I should probably look into that a little bit too.
Why not? Could be a start.
You're always open to new things.
Now, I'll keep people posted.
I've tried to find an alternative to the GoDaddy board.
I mean, I just don't want to get into all of the ins and outs, but I'm still struggling with them to get the board back up and running.
And so we'll figure that one out.
And just be patient.
I'm sorry about the interruptions in service.
I'm certainly doing my best to bully them in a nice, positive, enthusiastic way to get them to do the things that need them.
There is a board.
Gosh, excellent question.
Which board should we post at now?
Greg, do you remember the name of it?
I think I might have it downstairs.
Let me see if I can't.
It's freedomain.com.
Is it WOW BBS? Hang on one sec.
Boy, for people who've come to the end, they're really going to want to hear this, right?
So I'm just going to look it up, and then I will tell you in just a second.
So for now, just until we figure out what's going to happen with the board, the place that you can go to post, and I'm sorry, I can't figure out how to transfer all the users and all that, so we'll get that out. But free-domain.mywowbb.com.
M-Y-W-O-W-B-B.com.
Free-domain.mywowbb.com.
And just be aware that it may not last if I get the regular board back.
But it's a demo right now.
I've got it for 30 days.
And we'll just sort of keep that going as a do for now.
And, you know, it's not the end of the world.
Let's say that we can't get the board back that we currently have.
Then what we'll do is just, you know, shift everyone over as best we can to the new one where we'll have a chance to organize things in a little bit more of a consistent manner because we just kind of grew up slowly with the other board without any real sense of how quickly it was going to grow so we can organize it a little bit more.
So, yeah, get rid of that green.
I agree. We'll figure out how to get it to a nicer color once I've figured it all out, whether we're going to keep it or not.
Any other questions before we sign off?
Future plans for the podcast.
Is there a set end to them?
Absolutely. At some point I'm going to be dead.
And that will probably be the end.
Or, if things go really badly, I'll get arrested, but I don't think so either.
So, and I'm sorry, somebody had asked whether or not I don't like to do more than one or two before I get people's level of interest.
So, listen, thanks so much, everyone, obviously, for listening to the podcast.
I can't tell you how much it means to me.
I'm very, very glad that it's helpful to you.
It really has made it very exciting for me to continue to put it out, the level of response that we're getting.
I think it's fantastic. Thank you so much to everyone who's contributing to the board and sending emails.
You're raising the quality of the podcast enormously, and, of course, I can't do a better show than the material that I debate with people on the boards and in emails.
Thank you so much to everyone, and I look forward to talking with you more next week.
And this is all going to be pretty stable until I hit my 40th birthday, September the 24th, 2006, at which point we'll probably be off.
So thanks so much to everyone, and have yourselves a fantastic week, and I'll keep everyone posted about what's happening with the boards, and I will talk to you next Sunday.
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