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July 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:15:01

342 Call In Show 23 Jul 2006

Religion, war, the rise of evil and, yes, Virginia, Free Will!

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	Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us on this fine and up here in Canada, at least thunderously overcast Sunday afternoon.
	It's nice because when we have these chats, it's a lot better for me if I don't have to drag myself in from my addiction to vitamin D, which everybody in Canada has because we have so few months a year to be able to enjoy it.
	So thank you so much for taking the time to join us this afternoon.
	Now, unless my memory for odd acronym names escapes me, I think we have some new people who've joined us on the chat today.
	So if you would like to take a minute or two to introduce yourself, if you haven't chatted with us before and how you found the podcast and how you're finding the podcast, that would be great.
	Just feel free to jump in.
	Don't worry if you talk over each other.
	For those of you who had headphones, I've upgraded my Skype.
	I actually have a mild electrical shock capacity now.
	So if you do go a little bit high, then it's a little shock, but it also helps with the podcast as well to make them seem more coherent.
	So if you're new to this chat, if you would like to just sort of say a word or two and introduce yourself and how you ended up here, I would appreciate that.
	Hey guys, what's up?
	My name is Matt. I'm the guy with a name you can't pronounce, the LJ. I've been listening to the show since...
	I started listening around show 60, and since then I've listened to every one of them.
	Is that right? I haven't caught up on donations yet though, so don't get me on that one.
	Sorry, I'm actually going to have to give you a larger shock than I was talking about before then.
	So if you hear a bit of screaming, this is just a review of Milgram's experiment.
	It's just another way of doing that.
	Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, I've been wanting to join the Skype cast, but unfortunately I usually work Sundays.
	So you're a regional? No, not exactly.
	Maybe I'm a spy.
	Maybe I'm infiltrating them.
	Well, you know, we're a powerful group to infiltrate, so here's where you'd want to be.
	Now, how did you first find the podcast?
	Actually, I'm a gold member over at the Infidel Guy show, and I heard you were a guest on the program discussing market anarchy, and that's when I first heard about you.
	Ever since, I've been helplessly addicted.
	Oh, that's good to hear.
	Well, I appreciate that. And I remember that show quite well.
	It was one of the first ones that I did.
	And I don't think he knew exactly what he was getting into because he said, you know, hey, tell us your story, right?
	And I started on the argument for morality.
	And, you know, there was a howling wasteland of dead air afterwards.
	Oh, we have somebody who joined us.
	If you could, I think we got it.
	Okay, good. Yeah, so there was a sort of howling wasteland of dead air afterwards because he's like, oh, argument for morality.
	Well, this should make for some great radio.
	Are you actually a philosopher?
	Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I just wanted a talking head who'd get people to call in.
	I think I did, but certainly when the callers came in, it was a lot more fun, but he certainly has a great show.
	And somebody else who's new, would you like to sort of mention or say hi?
	Somebody needs to be muted.
	Okay, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
	I'm going to mute everyone because we sort of have this problem every week.
	So what I'm going to do is mute everyone.
	And if you could say in the chat, if you want to say something, that would be great.
	Then I'll unmute you. But because we're not sort of following the format of one person calling in at a time, which I think is sort of better...
	Then we'll sort of do it that way.
	So if you do want to say something, just mention something in the chat, and I would appreciate it.
	And then we will get you to sort of unlock the audio from there.
	Stephan, can you hear me?
	I certainly can. This is Aaron.
	How are you doing? And I'm doing fine.
	I'm a little confused. I'm looking at my window, my browser window for the Free Domain Skycast, And it shows you as not being joined, and apparently you muted all the mics, but on my screen, I'm not seeing that any of them are muted at all, and I'm not muted.
	I've inserted myself into the internet as sort of a virus, so it's going to be hard to see that.
	No, it says the same thing on my screen.
	It says not joined, but I'm...
	But you still have the ability to mute, but you didn't mute me, and none of the things I see are muted.
	If you're not logged in as the host, I don't think you have the ability to mute mics, do you?
	I certainly do. I haven't muted everyone yet.
	I just sort of wanted to, just because I asked people to introduce themselves, they may not be in on the chat yet.
	I thought I'd give it a few minutes before muting everyone.
	Okay, good.
	Never mind. I was just curious what was going on.
	No problem. No problem.
	Actually, we have a confessional.
	Charlie has said, I'm trying out my MacBook with the internal mic, and it's screwing up.
	I thought that was only Wintel.
	You can mute me. I probably won't have anything to say anyway.
	Shocking. Unthinkable.
	Can't imagine. Imagine people who have nothing to say not saying it.
	Yeah. Shocking. The whole media would shut down, I think, except for us then, at that point.
	We would be the lone voice of reason in the Internet.
	Well, the lone voice.
	Right. Now, I guess I'll start with sort of saying something that's interesting and it's provoked some thought in myself, and we sort of opened that up for discussion and then for general topics that other people have, podcasts, pet issues, relationship issues, medical issues, all the stuff, you know, which we're fully qualified to talk about.
	But the thing that was interesting for me was that I wrote an article that was rather fiery, I guess you could say, or you could say almost incendiary, about the Middle East.
	And basically the gist of the article, I won't read it, but the gist of the article was something like this, that if people want to believe in these collective fantasies like Judaism or Muslim or Arab or Israel or Jordan or Syria, all of these collective fantasies that don't exist in reality, as we all know, from space you don't get to see anything about borders except for the defunct Chinese wall or the Great Wall of China.
	But I did sort of find that in the immediate conversations about the Middle East in general, there's lots of foo-fuff about how to solve it.
	It usually has to do with appealing to the Security Council and things like that.
	One of the things that I pointed out in this article is that you're allowed to talk about anything in the world except the real solutions.
	It's kind of a very interesting fact of life or of being a commentator that as long as you're willing to talk about something which can't solve the problem, then you get all of the listeners in the world.
	But very unusual relative to my normal outlets for writing on publishing articles, every single one of the people who've published me in the past and a number of people who have not published me in the past Have all refused to publish this article.
	So it's kind of interesting because I say in the article that you can talk about anything except the real solution.
	And the interesting thing is that I'm kind of getting confirmation of that theory at the moment.
	And so it sort of has struck me as very interesting that I can certainly understand why people would not want to publish something along those lines.
	Because everybody who is, I guess except for me, and maybe a couple of other people as well, It's interesting to me that...
	Sort of the independence, even within the libertarian movement, doesn't seem to be quite as strong.
	That everyone has a line within themselves or within their own consciousness that says, okay, well, I'm not interested in irrational collectivism except for, you know, X, Y, Z. And it's that except for that I found sort of very interesting.
	So I'm still sort of struggling to find a media outlet for an article which says, if you want to solve the problem of the Middle East, then you need to get rid of collective concepts that people have allegiance to over and above their own conscience.
	And sort of rational objective reality...
	And until you can get rid of those things, and we know the exact solution, because although the Middle East looks very foreign to us, it's not.
	I mean, the Middle East is actually a much more civilized mirror of what was going on in Western culture 400 years ago.
	I mean, the fact that we had no separation of church and state throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance up until the later Enlightenment, the fact that we had no separation of church and state, that skepticism was not part of the public debate about collective concepts, either in terms of Of religion or statehood or the aristocracy and so on.
	It's very easy for us to see what the Middle East looked like, just go back into history books within our own culture.
	And the way to solve this was very hard for the West, right?
	Because the West found it hard to solve the problem of collective violence because we were sort of the first to go down that road, something that we inherited from the Greeks and the Romans, right?
	A sort of pantheistic skepticism towards I think we're good to go.
	And has proven to work quite beautifully, if not permanently, because it's continually backsliding because everyone's educated by the state.
	But to me it's quite fascinating that we know exactly how to solve this problem.
	Separation of church and state, skepticism towards religion, skepticism towards collectivist concepts.
	And nobody that I have seen has talked about it at all.
	And it's been quite instructive to me that nobody who normally publishes my stuff, which is not exactly mainstream, has seen fit to publish this.
	So I just wondered to some degree what people think about that in terms of the freedom movement or whether there is a line that people don't want to cross in terms of offending others.
	I'm just not sure exactly why you would want to not offend people who are logically incorrect, like people who believe in these concepts like Judaism and Islam and Israel and so on.
	I'm just not sure why not offending people has become so important in a movement that seems, to a large degree, not afraid to pursue new lines of thinking or more rigorous ways of approaching problems.
	Can I comment, please?
	Sure, go ahead. Yes, this is Heron again.
	I think it's all the more reason for you to continue to send any article like that to them over and over again, because at least the people who are rejecting you are reading it.
	And I think in the long run, history is on our side.
	And even if you don't get published by them, the people who are rejecting you are reading it.
	And the tenth time they read it, the fiftieth time they read it, in a different perspective from different people, some of those people are going to get it.
	And those are important people that need to be converted, if you will.
	I mean, the chances of them really being converted are probably slim, but still, that's the job.
	So, you know, you just keep doing it and expect the rejections, but occasionally, you know, one of these times, somebody's going to accept it, And then we will have another cohort on our side.
	Well, that's interesting, and I wonder, and I don't know if this will be the case or not, but now that I've sort of shown my hand about somebody who has skepticism towards all collectivist concepts, whether there will be any challenges around getting other stuff that isn't directly in this vein published in the future, it will be interesting to see.
	Well, but you still have your own outlets anyway, you know.
	The thing is to continue to put these ideas out.
	That's all we can do.
	It's to continually put them out as prolifically as possible and trust that there are some people out there who are ready to wake up.
	Yeah, and see, to me, I don't like the idea that you sort of try and force people not to believe in their collectivist concepts.
	That sort of wasn't the thrust of my article.
	Not that we should... I mean, if you want to beat your head against a wall, you can beat your head against a wall, but then complaining about a concussion seems to be rather silly.
	What I'm trying to do is just point out that there are very inevitable consequences to believing...
	In collectivist irrational absolutes, especially in the ethical realm.
	Well, really, one of the things I've been talking about a lot lately is really the end of the era of nation-states and the end of religion.
	Those are two ideas that maybe made sense a couple thousand years ago, or five hundred years ago even, but they're nonsense now, and it's time we start saying it.
	Being a Christian, or a Moslem, or a Jew, or an atheist for that matter, Yeah, and I think that there is quite a lot of denial that people want to have their cake and eat it too.
	And I just sort of want to point out, just as any doctor will say...
	You know, you can smoke, but there's risks associated with smoking.
	And if you do get sick, you can't complain about it.
	It's not what I'm saying to people, don't smoke.
	It's just that if you're going to have these collectivist concepts, then you're going to end up with wars in the Middle East.
	You're going to end up with wars in Bosnia and Serbia.
	You're going to end up with wars all over the world.
	And you're going to end up with murders in bars, too.
	I mean, it's all related. I mean, you know, yeah.
	And so people don't really like the idea of those being the inevitable consequences of their ideas, right?
	Because people associate these ideas with a kind of virtue.
	And pointing out that for humanity to continue to believe, I mean, it's one thing to believe in these kinds of things when you're a sort of primitive culture, but with weapons of mass destruction and biological chemical warfare and so on, the stakes have become a little bit higher for error.
	I mean, now it's not just murders in bars or localized wars, but the capacity exists to do some pretty serious damage in the world, not just to people, but to the environment as well.
	And I think that's one of the reasons why it's become a little bit more important to talk about these ideas.
	And I'm sort of plowing my way through Sam Harris's End of Faith, I think it's called.
	And it is something that you just can't talk about, right?
	You can't sort of say that, you know, if George Bush says, you know, behind every decision in the world is a just and all-loving God, you then can't say that behind every decision and idea in the world is a just and all-loving Zeus.
	Well, people would recognize that that's pretty much ridiculous.
	And it's just something that you still can't talk about.
	And I just find that quite fascinating because...
	In the two, three hundred years ago during the later enlightenment phase, it did become the case that you could talk about these things.
	And now we sort of seem to be backsliding into a medieval kind of thinking.
	Unfortunately though with 21st century weapons and communications, but of course the 21st century communications is also how we are talking, so it will be interesting to see who wins the race so to speak.
	Now could somebody tell me who is typing just so I can mute that?
	Charlie, can you just tell me what your name is?
	I don't see it. Is it C.W. Kirschner?
	Okay. There we go.
	A little bit better. Okay.
	Well, that was the main thing that was going on in sort of my mind this week.
	Of course, we've been having some very exciting discussions on the Freedom Aid Radio Board on both the issues of property rights and free will versus determinism, which have been quite fascinating.
	And I have had some interesting discussions It goes back and forth with the people on that.
	But I'm going to leave it open now so people can talk about whatever's on their mind.
	It's not as if I don't get enough time to talk during the week.
	So, over to you all.
	Well, Hal, I'll speak up on free will and determinism.
	Go for it. Okay.
	To me, those are very much like the arguments that were going on in physics just before the turn of the 20th century about whether light was a particle or a wave.
	And there were some friendships broken and heated arguments and accusations of all sorts of things going on back and forth because people felt the need to have one explanation that encompassed everything and that therefore light had to be either a wave or a particle.
	And I think it's not that different with this concept of freedom and determinism.
	They're both true. They're just looking at it from different perspectives.
	When I'm faced with the decision Free will dominates.
	But after I've made the decision, it's easy to explain how that came about.
	And neither one of those theories or ways of thinking are the way it is.
	They're just different ways of thinking about a phenomenon that shed light on different aspects of it.
	That's all. Interesting.
	Interesting. So it's sort of like I get to throw myself...
	I can choose whether to throw myself off a cliff, but after I throw myself off a cliff, I can't choose whether I fall or not.
	Well, I won't even go there.
	I don't know. But I just think that freedom and determinism are...
	They're reifications of the same kind you were talking about.
	Democracy, freedom, boundaries, borders.
	None of those things exist.
	There's no such thing as freedom.
	There's no such thing as determinism.
	Those are abstract concepts that at best refer to relationships between things, not things in their own right.
	Very interesting. Now, does somebody else want to add to that or bring up another topic?
	Well, just to go back to the discussion about your article, I think one of the things that scares people away from articles like that is that they confuse their own,
	in their minds they confuse their attachment to fantasies like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, with themselves.
	They see no distinction between the belief in those things and their own conscious self.
	When you suggest in an article, stop believing in these things, when you suggest the destruction of the fantasy, you're suggesting the destruction of the self in their minds.
	And so it becomes a sort of self-defense reaction to reject the article out of hand, I think.
	Excuse me, who said that?
	Who was that? That was Greg.
	Tech Radio 2?
	No, Jim Gothi.
	Okay, thank you. Well, I think that's very interesting, and I think that there's, as we've talked about in the podcast, a sort of false self and true self dichotomy.
	The false self believes that fantasy is the only survivable mode of existence in a corrupt social environment, but then the false self forgets that it's corruption and just thinks it's adhering to the good rather than just conforming to irrational authority.
	And so when you say that these things don't exist, you are directly challenging the supremacy of the false self over the personality of And from the false self's perspective, that is the same as self-destruction.
	It's just that when you peel off that scar tissue, there's usually quite a vibrant and intelligent and curious human being underneath.
	And people don't really want to go through that process because they're so dominated by the false self that it does feel like personal destruction.
	But I think the interesting thing is also that nobody supplied any counter-arguments.
	They just said, well, people will be upset, basically, or we'll lose listenership or we'll lose readership or whatever.
	And some didn't even provide any explanation at all.
	It was very curt. And I think another thing that people feel is that if, like, let's just say I'm, you know, publish on some libertarian website and I'm sort of say that I'm really into freedom and this, that and the other.
	And then I say, okay, well, if I publish this article or some other article like it, I'm going to offend and alienate a lot of my readers.
	Now, am I going to do that because the argument is offensive and irrational?
	Well, no, the argument is not.
	Well, offensive, yes.
	Irrational, no. But I think what happens then is they're coming a little bit closer to the problem that's right at the core of this kind of communication, which is that if I can't publish something that is true because I will drive away my readers, then my readers are not coming to me for the truth.
	The readers are not coming to me for the truth.
	The readers are coming to me to confirm their pre-existing beliefs.
	And that's a very, very great difference from coming to someone for the truth.
	But I think within their own minds, the people who run these websites and so on, they're feeling or they believe that they're in it for the truth.
	The same way that people say, oh yeah, my family's great, we love each other, but you can never be yourself around them, right?
	Because when you actually start to deal with these issues...
	Then you realize that you're not as free as you claim to be, and that, I think, is a great deal of threat towards somebody's life work.
	Like if I say, well, I'm all about the freedom, and then I say, well, I can't publish this article even though it's true and useful because I don't want to alienate my readers, then obviously the relationship that I have with my readers or my listeners is not one in which the pursuit of truth is paramount.
	It is one wherein I am feeding up something which serves their own prejudices and doesn't challenge them in ways that are startling to them, which means that it's kind of like Not exactly a pointless exercise, but it's not exactly a truth-centric exercise.
	And the interesting thing, that I say sort of finally too, is that for most of the people that I'm writing to, to say, hey, you might want to publish this article, if they bring libertarian ideas up outside their own circle, they often face a great deal of hostility or indifference, and they probably dislike that, but now, of course, they're pursuing the same thing against other ideas, which I think is a real shame.
	And, of course, if you said to them, Do you think that what Socrates was doing was very important?
	They'd say, yes, it's very important to question premises and bring forward new ideas.
	But when it actually puts them in the hot seat and they have to do it themselves, vastly more people fold than don't fold.
	And my issue isn't even with the fact that they're folding.
	I mean, I don't mind that they don't want to publish this article.
	What bothers me is that they're still probably going to convince themselves that they're in a truth relationship with their listeners or readers and that they're very interested in freedom and honesty.
	And so... It's not saying, well, you know, I guess I'm not as free as I, because I'm too scared to publish this article, or I don't want to alienate my listeners, so I'm not as free or have as honest a relationship as I thought I did.
	But of course, there's nothing. Nobody's written to me and said, you know, this is true, but I'm going to have to back down from publishing it because I'm just going to alienate stuff, and I guess I need to look at my own premises about what it is that I'm doing in the realm of communication.
	Nobody's been that honest.
	They've just basically said it's offensive or I just don't want to publish it.
	Right.
	It's like the experience with a corrupt family.
	Everybody sits around and pretends they like each other, and what they really like is the fantasy that they have in their heads of what each other is like.
	Right. I think that's very true.
	It's interesting, too. We've had somebody who's joined the board recently.
	I can't remember their login name, but I will hand out their social insurance number.
	And this person was something like, and we see this quite a bit on the Freedom Aid radio board when new people join, and there are discussions about the family that's going on, and people come on and sort of guns are blazing, and they say, you guys are just anti-family, and you think all families are evil.
	Well, it's not the case, because my family was really good and really nice, and we have a great time and blah, blah, blah.
	And that to me is very interesting, because it would strike me...
	That if somebody did have a really good family that taught them the truth and taught them integrity and taught them honesty and taught them compassion and all the good things in life, then it would be likely, at least in my opinion, that they would have sympathy towards people who didn't have such a great experience.
	Like if you had the most wonderful family in the world, I think that's great.
	I certainly believe that that's possible, otherwise I wouldn't be fighting for it.
	Like if I was absolutely anti-family, I thought that all families were evil.
	And there was no capacity of that disparity in power producing a good relationship between parent and child, then I wouldn't fight it.
	I don't spend a whole lot of time fighting gravity either.
	But, of course, it's because I do have a vision of a better family structure, a better family situation.
	But when people come in guns blazing and say, you guys are just anti-family, you hate all families, and my family was great, my sort of response is, and I haven't heard anything back from this gentleman, would be something like, well, then shouldn't you have compassion for people who didn't have such a great family life?
	Wouldn't that sort of make sense?
	And if your family was so great, then they would have taught you that lots of families aren't great and you should have compassion for them.
	And if we were making that kind of mistake of blanketing statement that says all families are evil, then surely you should have compassion and kindness and help us out of our error rather than just charge in guns blazing and say that we're completely irrational and think that all families are evil.
	So it's that kind of sensitivity.
	When you become wise in this sort of area, people think that they're coming on really strong and making a really strong point, but boy, does it ever just reveal so much about themselves that they don't probably want other people to see.
	It's almost embarrassing to watch.
	I mean, I do understand sort of where it comes from, but people don't have that.
	It's the same thing that I posted today on the Determinist Board, which is that people are getting all mad at me for my position on Thank you.
	well, we should have, you know, one of the aspects of determinism is that we have compassion for people because we know that, you know, where they are in life is not their fault, but it's simply causal.
	And yes, every single determinist I've ever debated with gets really angry with me.
	So it's sort of hard to understand where all that stuff comes from.
	And to me, it just reveals the entire family history rather than any kind of intellectual debate.
	So did you manage to get anyone to consider it?
	To consider what? The article?
	No, nobody has agreed to publish it yet.
	I've had, I don't know, probably six to eight submissions of outlets that I would regularly...
	Even antiwar.com, which is a great site and have published The State is the Health of War, which was an article that I wrote a couple of months ago.
	And they very much came back with, well, yes, but we would offend people.
	And that, to me, it's just very interesting.
	I mean, if you're going to want to become a philosopher and to talk about ideas, I think one of the things you kind of have to give up is offending people, right?
	It's like saying, well, I want to be a doctor, but I'm not going to tell anyone to change their lifestyle if they're overweight or heavy smokers or, you know, I don't know, IV drug users or people who like to parachute without a parachute.
	Like, I'm not going to say anything to anyone that they should ever change their lifestyle because they don't want to offend anyone.
	Well, then you're not really a doctor, right?
	That's sort of a basic thing.
	And so, yeah, there has been no acceptance of the article in any sort of my regular outlets.
	Sorry, go ahead. It's like the difference between a sophist and a philosopher.
	Everything's equal, but here's your menu of choices.
	Whichever one you like is the one you cling to.
	You're not really interested in truth, and you're just interested in a psychologically comfortable position.
	And I have no problem with that.
	Again, I'm not one to say to people, you have to publish this article.
	It's just that people should be honest about their reasons for not publishing it.
	That they're into freedom, but they don't want to alienate their listeners.
	Well, they're irrational listeners.
	It's like, but then you're not into freedom. You're not into rationality.
	If you're afraid of offending irrational people, then you're not into rationality.
	Right, right. And their unwillingness to be honest in that sense is an implicit admission that they're really not interested in freedom or truth.
	They're just interested in, you know, kind of what makes them feel good.
	Now, I have had a question here, which is going to be something on the fly.
	It says here, Stephan, I have too much background noise, kids, to open the mic.
	But could you expand on your concept of determinism?
	As a psychological defense mechanism.
	Sweetie, would you like to take that one?
	Now, I don't have a particularly strong theory on this, and given that I've just talked about the need to sort of drive on to a rational conclusion, at least as far as I see fit, to pursue it, regardless of its offense to people, I would say that determinism is, you know, and I'm talking about hardcore determinism, like Everything that we say and do is foreordained from the Big Bang onwards that there's nothing that is voluntarily chosen.
	Everything is causal based on what came before and the brains that we have are simply arrangements of atoms that have been influenced by every prior atom and every piece of energy in the universe so that we don't have a choice.
	So I'm talking about that sort of hardcore stuff.
	I mean, obviously it's a complete rejection of ethics and of personal responsibility because, of course, if you have no more free will than a rock does, then to get angry at anybody's opinion is sort of like getting angry at somebody who's got epilepsy for having an epileptic attack, right? You don't get angry at that because it's not under their control.
	If Christina and I have a disagreement, I can get angry at her if she pops me on in the jaw while we're awake.
	But if she then pretends to be asleep, as happened last night, if she's asleep, rolls over and hits me in the face, I can't get mad at her for it.
	I mean, I can sort of say, ow, but I can't sort of say, I'm calling the cops because you're hitting me, and so on.
	So, in the hardcore determinist world, There is the basic idea that ethics and personal responsibility are mere illusions, sort of mere fantasies.
	And I'm really, really, this is very early in this development of this idea, so I apologize for its sketchiness.
	But basically, my question is, with people who have ideas that seem to be counterintuitive or counter experiential, and to some degree, I would say counter logical, which is the basic idea of a hardcore determinist trying to change somebody else's mind, it just seems kind of contradictory.
	And certainly the emotional content of the debates on the board, where people get really angry at me, who then say that my opinions...
	I'm not at all responsible for my opinions, but other people get really angry at me.
	That's something not quite working in the theory, right, from that standpoint.
	Because in order to change someone's mind, you have to feel that they're in error and can be corrected, right?
	But of course, in determinism, in the hardcore determinism, that doesn't make any sense, right?
	But I would sort of say, when these things occur, my general approach is to say something like this.
	Okay, well...
	What motive could somebody have for wanting to get rid of all personal responsibility and the idea of good and evil and so on?
	And I think that generally, if I try and sort of touch back on the family history that might produce something like this, a lot of philosophy is sort of what I would call pseudo-philosophy is around excusing the parents, right?
	People who are statists are saying that, yes, a vast degree differential in power and a monopoly of authority in the form of the state is a morally good thing and makes you free.
	And these, I would say, are people who had some sort of abusive kind of authority over themselves as children, probably parents, but it could be teachers and so on.
	And they're then saying, in order to avoid the problem of coming right up against...
	The corruption that they experienced from authority when they were children and having to deal with that emotional stuff, they then end up having to justify authority in a wider sense and they become statists.
	And so I would say that people who become determinists have probably experienced a lot of verbal, emotional manipulation, right?
	Not physical abuse. Because people who are into physical abuse or who've been strongly physically abused will often end up as cops or in the army or criminals or they will end up being sort of More physically abusive, either within a sort of marital relationship or towards their own children.
	And that's not absolute, right?
	The majority of people who are physically abused do not themselves become abusers.
	But if there is a trend, it would be in that direction.
	But the people who've been emotionally or abused in a way that, you know, their ideas were put down, that they were never given sort of rational consideration for their own personalities, never controlled or teased or, you know, in a very sort of subtle manner, I would say that they're going to have a problem with personal responsibility because they then are going to have a very difficult fight on their hands with their parents saying, well, you kind of did wrong by me.
	And the parents are like, hey, we never laid a finger on you.
	We gave you everything you wanted.
	We took you on vacations.
	We took you to the beach. We bought you bicycles.
	We did whatever, right? And they're going to have a very tough time narrowing down or trying to figure out what went wrong in their childhoods.
	And so one of the ways that they're going to try and cover up This kind of parental abuse is to say there's no such thing as choice.
	There's no such thing as responsibility because, of course, that gets them right off the hook as far as dealing with their own situation goes because they don't ever have to confront anyone because everything that everyone does is without a choice, without sort of voluntary responsibility.
	And so they then, it's just another way for me of avoiding that kind of confrontation with the family that a lot of sort of thinking seems to be involved in.
	That's the end of the rant, so feel free to let me know what you think.
	Okay, I'll take a chance on this mic.
	Can you hear me? You bet.
	Where do you keep getting anger from?
	I'm sorry? You've referenced several times that the determinist side is getting angry with you.
	I'm just wondering where you get that.
	I've gone back over my post and tried to find what could be interpreted as angry.
	Oh, sure. Well, I mean, people will say, you know, Steph, you know, you've admitted to your emotional problems.
	You're obsessed with this topic.
	You don't understand the logic.
	You're being irrational. You know, there's lots of sort of...
	I hope that was a voice outside of my head, because that's exactly the same accent that the podcast originally came through in, which I'm just transcribing, so good for you.
	But yeah, I would sort of expect, because there was a post recently about determinism, where people said, you know, we will...
	We will forgive or we will be kind towards people who beat their children or who abuse their children.
	And I don't get any of that sense of compassion as far as it goes in the determinist debates that I've either had sort of on these shows or on the boards or through emails.
	People seem to get sort of irritated with my position.
	Well, I mean, people disagree with you and continue to challenge things that we disagree with.
	I don't know. I mean, I guess, to me, anger is a tone and anger is an emotion.
	I mean, I guess it would be great if you could go back and point to some specific items.
	If you could just keep talking for a minute or two, I will see if I can dig something up that fits that because I don't want to also sound unjust that And also, you know, the problem is that then I don't want to sound like, well, somebody disagreed with me, therefore they had a bad childhood.
	That wouldn't be a very radical approach to the problem, right?
	And again, as I described today, I mean, there's nothing about some anger that would, you know, anger is a natural response to anger.
	Frustration, anyway, I'd say is probably a better word and that's a natural response to having a goal and not being able to accomplish that goal.
	I mean, there's nothing that violates determinism about somebody getting frustrated if they're not being successful with something.
	That's just a matter of, you know, I think you're sort of personifying it a bit too much.
	I'm frustrated because determinism tells me, if nothing else, that I'm not doing a very good job of convincing you and that is frustrating.
	Just like I said in the post, I get frustrated when a mosquito bites me.
	I know that mosquito is just acting deterministically.
	That frustration, if you analyze it for a minute, comes down to, boy, it was stupid for me to be out here where the mosquitoes can bite me without some mosquito spray on or whatever.
	But the point is, I certainly have not been getting heated.
	I've been trying to figure out the right way to approach these things.
	And the only thing that I can say that actually frustrated me is in the podcast when you've made a couple of claims that I think we've sort of shot down well enough that they shouldn't be coming back up about, you know, it doesn't really matter one way or the other being the one and the other one being that we are somehow inconsistent in engaging in a debate if we're determinists.
	Like, determinism should mean that you should crawl in a corner and not do anything.
	I mean, it just makes...
	It's a contradiction that's only a contradiction if you want to view it from a free will perspective.
	Oh, sure. No, I understand that.
	I certainly do understand that.
	And that's sort of one of the reasons why I've sort of tried to deal with this.
	I want to sort of understand in general what the difference is between determinism and free will in terms of how you act rather than just sort of a mental spot.
	And so one of the things that was not asked by me but was asked by other people is that if you are somebody who believes in determinism then you're going to have much less frustration because you're going to recognize that everything is kind of inevitable.
	And I would sort of see that a little bit more if I felt that it was sort of emotionally part of the debates And that's sort of my instinct, right?
	I don't sort of have any proof. I'm just sort of running through a couple of things here, wherein I'm just sort of trying to dig up some stuff here.
	But let me just have a look here.
	Okay, so let's see here.
	I said something where I said, whether I participate or not in a debate and the outcome of a discussion and my opinion at the end of a talk, all of that is also predetermined, right?
	And then somebody wrote back and said, barring any true randomness that might come into play, you know that old discussion, yes.
	But as I've noted before, you seem preoccupied with what determinism means about the future.
	Since we don't know the future, I don't see much point in worrying about that.
	I'm far more interested in what determinism has to say about the events of the past and our actions in the present.
	That's where it really matters.
	And the emotional tone of that, at least to me, this is sort of my perception of it, and I think that it's fairly objective.
	So if somebody says...
	That you have a problem because you're preoccupied with something that's irrelevant, but I'm interested in what is relevant.
	Well, that very much is not...
	I mean, that's kind of condescending, right?
	I mean, it's someone saying to me, well, you're preoccupied or obsessed.
	People would say that that's a negative phrase and that being interested in what really matters is a good thing and being preoccupied with something that's irrelevant is a bad thing.
	So, I mean, it's those kinds of approaches, and I'm sort of trying to figure out, see if I can dig any other ones up, but it's those kinds of approaches that seem to be a little bit more sort of like manipulative than, it's like the appearance of something rather than the actual argument, if that makes any sense? Kind of, yeah.
	It's funny because that's my post and I tend to go over these posts several times to try to ferret out anything that might even be interpreted that way.
	In this case, I think what you're saying there is a little weak.
	I do consider it a preoccupation with what determinism says about the future, because that seems to be where everybody goes with determinism immediately, is, well, wait a second, when the future's all, you know, settled, then that means we don't have power, you know, whatever.
	And to me, that's...
	I've said several times, that's a gee whiz thing, but there's nothing practical we can do with that.
	I guess I don't see any point in talking about what it has to do with the future.
	It doesn't get us anything.
	I believe what I said.
	I do think you're preoccupied with that.
	I don't mean that in any negative way.
	I would have to say that's a far cry from From saying that somebody's position is a psychological defect in a defense mechanism, which is what you said about my point of view.
	But again, I don't take that too personally.
	I guess you read that post in a tone that made it come across a little negative, and I certainly didn't mean it that way.
	I don't have any problem with people who take that approach to a debate, but...
	It seems to me, and again, this could be my preoccupation, but it would certainly seem to me that since determinism is saying that what occurs in the future is caused directly and inevitably by what occurred in the past, that the future is where determinism stakes its claim.
	To validity? Because if I say, well, I know exactly what's happening in the present, but no capacity to determine what happens in the future, I would certainly not be a determinist, right?
	I mean, because determinism is to say that the future is where the null hypothesis would lie.
	Like, I can't sort of say, I'm sort of sitting in my porch looking at someone across the street, and I'm saying, I have this theory about how they're going to behave, and I'm sort of relating it to you and saying, oh, they're going to cut their lawn now, and now they're going to water their lawn, and now they're going to tie their shoe, And yet I can't predict what happens next.
	That would not really be much of a theory.
	It would just be an observation, right?
	I'm sorry. I'm just saying what you're saying is a completely understandable train of thinking.
	It's just... Everyone's acknowledged up, down, backwards, and forwards that nobody has the capability to unravel the complexity of the human mind and all the complex inputs and processes therein and thereby derive the future.
	I don't know if it would be great if we could, but it doesn't even matter.
	We can't. Sure, a null hypothesis would lie there, but it's just inaccessible to us.
	So what's the point of talking about it?
	Whereas there are some extremely applicable and important aspects of determinism to events of the present and events of the past.
	And so, you know, I don't see why our inability to predict the future should cause us to throw the whole thing out.
	That just seems strange.
	What's that? I just want to know who's talking with Stephan right now.
	This is Paul. Your username on the screen?
	Prism Paul? Yes.
	Okay, thank you. And I certainly do understand where you're coming from.
	I mean, my position on determinism versus free will is agnostic, that I don't have an answer, that it feels like I experience free will on a continual basis.
	I don't have any proof for it, just as the determinists don't have any proof.
	There's indications on both sides.
	And so my position is sort of more agnostic.
	That's progress from, say, podcast number 37 or wherever, where you basically just made fun of it.
	Okay. No, I certainly...
	Correct? I mean, I'm just wondering.
	No, it is... Your position's changed a bit on that.
	Well, yeah. The very first podcast, I simply just said, free will exists, and I got fairly heavily blasted for that.
	And I think that that was perfectly correct, right?
	Because... Making a statement about that sort of base physiology and understanding of the mind and physics and all that was simply an unthought out position based on my own sort of experiential perception of my own existence and the choices that I make.
	That was incorrect, for sure.
	Wouldn't you agree with me that an awful lot of what you have to say about morality is based on the idea that If determinism was true, wouldn't that cause a lot of problems for a lot of things that you feel about the family, about morality, about a lot of these issues you'd spend a lot of time talking about?
	Oh, absolutely. It would completely change.
	So if you're agnostic, how can you take all those other things with such certainty?
	Well, because when you don't know the answer to something, but you have to act, I mean, I experience free will.
	I can't prove free will.
	At least I believe that I experience free will based on sort of the choices that I make and the knowledge and the understanding.
	I can't prove it, but I believe that I experience it.
	And so if I have to act, and everybody has to act, and you have to have a methodology by which you act, then the sort of experience that I have of experiencing what I believe to be free will That is sort of the basis for what it is that I'm doing and the sort of moral philosophy that we're talking about in general in this conversation.
	And if it does turn out that somebody comes up with a proof for determinism and can prove to me what it is that I'm going to do tomorrow and so on, then I would be completely incorrect.
	I would absolutely be totally, totally incorrect and nobody would listen to these podcasts other than as an interesting example of a fundamental error.
	But given that I feel that I experience free will and given that I see lots of evidence that human beings perceive in free will and act on the case of free will, as I've mentioned before, advertising is sort of one of those where you try and convince people to change their minds.
	Debating is another one where I'm trying to convince people to change their minds.
	I'll certainly stipulate that the vast majority of people believe that we have free will.
	There's no problem with that. Right.
	And if there was no such thing as free will, then people would stop funding advertisements, for instance.
	And if there was no such thing as free will...
	The vast majority of people believed in all kinds of superstitions in the past.
	I mean, you know that's not a...
	No, of course not. Absolutely, yeah.
	I mean, the majority of people disagree with us.
	That doesn't mean they're wrong. Let me just real quick...
	I apologize, but...
	So you do not agree that the significant amount of evidence...
	You really think it's a 50-50 kind of thing?
	I mean, because basically your position is that there's something in the human brain That's different than anything else that we know of physically or in nature.
	In other words, everything else we know in nature, we can trace the cause and effect.
	We can see how it behaves.
	You know, the outcomes are traced to the inputs.
	And you really think it's just as likely that there's something in the brain that makes it different, as opposed to the alternative, which is just that we sort of like to think that.
	Right, yeah. Yeah, based on sort of two things, and I'm not going to say it's only these two things, but these are the two main things.
	The one is that we don't know, obviously, everything about physics and the mind and consciousness and so on.
	No, of course not. And so to draw final conclusions in these areas seems to me premature, right?
	And so that's sort of the one thing.
	The second thing is that when you deal with a very unusual substance that appears to violate the laws of pure causality, right?
	Consciousness does things, as I mentioned before, that nothing else in the universe can do.
	And so it would seem to me that it's possible that you can have self-referential and choice-based.
	Whatever consciousness produces, it's possible for it to be choice-based because that's certainly how I experience my life, right?
	So the first thing that I have to work with is sort of myself as a lab.
	And that's sort of in my experience is to make choices and to weigh consequences and figure out where my long-term and short-term objectives are and what I'm going to focus on doing.
	Right. You understand that determinism doesn't disagree that that weighing of consequences and that decision-making occurs.
	It just says that it's a deterministic process that your brain is following.
	It's illusory, right? No, no, no.
	It's real. It's just a process your brain is following deterministically.
	It's a deterministic process.
	In other words, the brain does absorb information, weigh alternatives, and make decisions.
	Absolutely. The question is whether that's a 100% deterministic process.
	Just like I could write a computer program that would look at a whole bunch of variables and make a quote-unquote decision.
	You know, there is weighing going on.
	There is decision-making going on.
	The question is, is it purely deterministic, or do we somehow get to override Yeah, I do understand that.
	I fully understand that, but if I am weighing decisions and determinism is true, then it is an illusory process that I'm undergoing, right?
	Because the decision that I'm going to make is Is foreordained by the factors and the processes that came before, right?
	Yes. Right, so weighing decisions is...
	No, that's not true.
	Hold on there, Niels.
	It's a combination of the current state of your brain and whatever inputs are coming in, absolutely.
	Right, but whatever inputs are coming in are themselves predetermined by other people's actions or natural sort of reality, right?
	Yeah, natural effects in the world.
	Sure, whatever. Yeah, but so the process of making a choice or encouraging other people to make a choice or this or that is sort of like it would be much more efficient to not do that Because the outcome is sort of, is foreordained.
	You may want to go through that process like just for the heck of it, but thinking that you're weighing and making choices is illusory.
	Yes, thinking that you're weighing, your brain is weighing and making choices.
	I mean, and I think you're dancing around that same problem again of that our participation is irrelevant or because the results are already, because it's not under our control.
	A bunch of robots can go in a room and interact with each other, and every robot is going to have an outcome on what happens in the end.
	And that's basically what we all are.
	And you feel this is a proven proposition, like there's no doubt in your mind about this?
	No, absolutely not, but it's very similar to atheism.
	It's just the overwhelming reasonable explanation for what we are and what goes on.
	From a couple of lines of evidence, one being neuroscience, the other one being just the fact that you can see us, if you understand evolution and understand how we're sort of this pinnacle in terms of at least a brain, of a whole range of lower capacity brains all the way down to the simplest.
	You know, you can see the path.
	It's, to me, odd to just suggest that somewhere along that path of complexity, something completely contrary to everything else jumps into place, you know?
	I mean, you know what I'm saying.
	Sure, no, I understand that.
	And, of course, if we were a direct line continuation, From everything that came before, then I would certainly understand that, right?
	Like saying that a tree is somehow fundamentally different from a plant would be sort of not logical because it's just a bigger plant.
	Yeah, just to say our brain is special from a chimp's brain or a chimp's brain is special from a pig's brain or a pig's brain to a dog's brain and just keep working your way back.
	They're high levels of complexity, obviously, but they're the same in kind.
	They're organic electrical structures that work by neurons firing.
	We don't know the details, but we certainly can go down to the simpler forms and understand very well how they work.
	Scientists understand the nature of how ours work.
	They don't know every detail of every neuron firing.
	There's nothing anywhere in the science to indicate that there's something non-causal and something that just doesn't follow cause and effect.
	Well, yeah, I mean...
	It's a much more logical explanation that we are just sort of looking at ourselves, that somewhere in this consciousness we kind of give ourselves credit for coming up with these decisions that our brain comes up with.
	Right, I understand that.
	So what you're saying is that it's an extension of a prior path, and the human mind is just orders of degree more complicated, but the same fact, and it's that very complication that would seem to us to indicate that we have free will, but it doesn't.
	Exactly.
	I got it.
	Now, I understand that.
	Yeah, that's right, and I think the reason people really freak out about that is because, you know, yes, it does throw ethics into question, It does throw morality into question.
	And I think what compatibilists do is redefine those terms so that they're not a problem anymore.
	Yes, there's still a problem.
	Yes, it's easy for you to say you have compassion for a child molester.
	Yes, in a way. I absolutely have more compassion for the victims, no question, but show me a child molester that hasn't lived an extremely painful and horrible life.
	They have. I think they're dangerous.
	I think they need to be contained.
	They need to be stopped.
	They need to be studied. They need to be understood so that we can Do what we can to prevent that kind of behavior in the world.
	But I don't see any reason to get caught up in a concept of vengeance or saying that that person is evil and needs justice, you know, rain down on them or anything like that.
	So, yeah, there's a huge...
	People are very uncomfortable with the implications of this.
	And I think it's those implications that throw people off.
	Otherwise, it makes perfect sense.
	But, see, this is the kind of language that always gets me confused about determinants, whereas you say...
	Based on the fact that we now understand that determinism is true, we should change our behavior and no longer say, I don't know, like call these people evil, but instead work to contain the danger and so on.
	So you're suggesting an alternative course of action based on the understanding of a particular idea.
	And again, this could just be my ignorance of the position, so I'm fully aware of this, but just sort of to be perfectly honest, this is where I get very confused because what we're going to do in terms of The future is predetermined, right?
	So saying, well, we should pursue this course of action instead of that course of action is saying that we should change our path based on new information.
	We should, right? We should or shouldn't, but it seems to me that that's sort of like if you throw a piano off a cliff saying, well, it should fall to the left or to the right, but there is no should, right?
	Wouldn't that sort of make sense? It does, but you just have to...
	I understand absolutely that that's something...
	To struggle with.
	There's a lot of kids in the background.
	Can you hold on just one sec?
	Let me mute everyone except you because I think it's just you and I in this particular chat.
	So hold on just one second.
	Okay, go ahead. Very quickly, you just back that up to when I say you should, I'm talking to you because I want you to change your mind and I think you should approach things differently as a result.
	That's all just shorthand for my brain has derived this conclusion and is putting inputs into your brain with the hopes that your brain...
	I understand it's weird.
	It's a different mindset than people are used to.
	There's no question about it. That's just like when somebody gives up God and accepts atheism.
	It's a process of rearranging their thoughts.
	They're used to going to bed and praying at night and every time you go to bed, A month after you've given up theism, you still kind of go, wait, that's right, there's no reason to pray.
	You have to adjust.
	You have to get used to thinking a different way because it is different, but there's nothing inconsistent about it at all.
	Well, and you could well be right, and look, as I've admitted in podcasts, I mean, an enormous amount of what gives me pleasure would be stripped away from me if determinism were true, and that doesn't mean that that has anything to do with whether I should accept it or not.
	It's just sort of my emotional reaction to it.
	Right, and honestly, that's where I'm confused myself, because I don't...
	It's been nothing but good for me, so...
	Right, but would you say that your desire to change my mind, your desire to alter my way of thinking, would you say that that The aspect of having a desire to want me to think something different than what I'm thinking is a rational desire or an irrational desire?
	I believe it's rational.
	I mean, I hope it is.
	It seems rational to me.
	But wanting something different than what is, wouldn't that sort of be irrational?
	Again, I'm just talking purely from ignorance in the determinist position.
	Not at all. That's recognizing your role as an agent in the world that can change things.
	We obviously are. But can change things.
	But if there is determinism, then you can't change things, right?
	Whatever is going to come is going to come.
	Not at all. I mean, are you having a different conversation than you would have if I hadn't picked up the line here?
	Well, sure, but I mean...
	Then I'm changing something.
	We change things. We change things by interacting in the world.
	There's nothing inconsistent about that.
	I'm sorry. And again, I'm having trouble sort of translating this into my understanding of the determinants' viewpoint.
	So you can have conversations that will alter people's thinking and get them to do different things.
	Definitely. We do all the time.
	And what that conversation is and the outcome of it, is that predetermined or not?
	It is the unfolding of deterministic processes, there's no doubt about it, yes.
	So we can't change it. So you can't change somebody else's mind because...
	No, no, no, that's different.
	Sorry, go ahead. That's different.
	How so? We can change somebody else's mind.
	We can't change whether or not we're going to change somebody else's mind, if that makes any sense.
	It does.
	But if I can't change my mind, then can you change your mind?
	What do you mean, can I change my mind?
	Yes, my conclusions can change, if that's what you mean by can I change my mind.
	Of course, my conclusions have changed many times.
	Right, but whether they're going to change or not is preordained.
	I hate the word preordained, but it's the result of deterministic processes, yeah.
	Preordained sounds like somebody else.
	No, I know, and I don't mean to say that there's a cosmic script, because certainly the script in my life is mostly written by Christina, so it's a little bit different from what most people experience.
	And this is where, for me, the problem becomes fairly acute, In that you're using language that I would associate with free will, like you communicate in order to change people's minds to achieve a better outcome and blah, blah, blah.
	But as far as I understand from the deterministic position, it is very much like two television sets talking to each other insofar as what the conclusion of the conversation is going to be is purely determined ahead of time.
	Yeah, and again, this is where I, when I say with all due respect, I think you're preoccupied with the future aspects of it.
	Yes, that is true, but who cares?
	That's what I say. Who cares?
	And that's a fantastic position, and look, I really do respect your consistency in this area, right, because the compatibilists just give me a headache.
	Because it just seems like they want to have their cake and eat it, too.
	So I really do respect, A, your intelligence in keeping in the conversation and the consistency of your position.
	The compatibilists are being consistent, too.
	They've just redefined the term free will to make it work, and I just don't see the point in doing that.
	It just allows people to talk about free will and actually be talking about two different things and think they're agreeing with each other.
	So, I mean, I don't see the point of that at all.
	Right, so when you say that the determinism says that the future is determined ahead of time, but it doesn't matter because we don't know what it is, right?
	I mean, I don't mean to oversimplify your position, but that's something sort of like it, right?
	Like the idea that we're actors and somebody's whispering the lines into our minds as we go ahead, but we don't know what's next in the script or whatever, right?
	Sort of, okay. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that was your metaphor, but somebody posted that, and I thought it was quite a striking way of explaining it.
	But if it's like, well, we don't know what's coming in the future, so we kind of have to act as if there's a choice.
	And again, I'm not trying not to oversimplify your position.
	I'm just sort of trying to break it down into bite-sized chunks through my own brain.
	So because we can't focus on the future, because we don't know what's coming, there are far too many variables, we have to act like in a manner that would be compatible with somebody who would believe in free will.
	Like we engage in debate, we try and change people, we try and improve things, we appeal to people's rationality and so on.
	Yeah, you've gone through this.
	I understand exactly what you're saying.
	And this is...
	What I would say is this.
	Pretend it's true for a little while.
	Just pretend it's true.
	Just accept it as if it was true as a thought experiment for a day or two.
	Determinism, yeah.
	The thing that you can't believe is true.
	Just pretend it is. And then you'll see what I mean.
	I mean, you still...
	It's like I said. You still get hungry, so you still eat.
	You know, you still form goals and pursue those goals.
	It's not... Yes, and that's sort of because you don't know what's coming.
	You have a role to play.
	You play your role. There's just not a big problem there.
	But there is a big difference.
	When you say we should act as if there's free will, we act however we're going to act.
	We act according to our nature.
	Watch yourself. Watch yourself.
	You'll act according to your nature. I promise you will.
	I guarantee it. But where we don't, we shouldn't act as if free will is true is when we look at behavior and morality and those things.
	We shouldn't pretend it's true because it's not.
	Well, ethics would be a prejudice, right?
	Ethics would be a fantasy in that realm.
	Basically. I mean, you can rewrite ethics based on reduction of harm and things of those natures, but certainly some concepts like good and evil and things like that, you can redefine them as compatible as to do to make something work.
	But, you know, to me, they are fairytale concepts.
	We're used to thinking some people are good and some people are evil.
	No, some actions are good and some actions are evil in the aspect of how they harm people.
	But there's no reason to, you know, the rational approach to people causing other people harm is preventing it, And trying to understand it better.
	Well, because it's kind of like the rabid dog thing, right?
	Like, you put a rabid dog in a cage, not because it's evil, but because it's sick, right?
	Exactly like that. Look at 9-11.
	I mean, those guys were following their process.
	I mean, they were, you know, their inputs in their life told them that they were on the side of good, right?
	That they were fighting for, you know, that they were, what's the word?
	When they were going to have 100 virgins, you know?
	Oh, they were aiming for paradise.
	Yeah, exactly. They were doing exactly what they were programmed to do.
	And so anyone that wants to just get excited about how evil they are and go bomb some other people, you and I will agree on this.
	But that's determinism.
	That's basically saying, were those people evil?
	No, they were misinformed.
	They were badly programmed. Well, and certainly it would be the case then that those who are responding to bomb Afghanistan are not evil either, right?
	Because they're just responding to that program.
	No, they're also, absolutely, absolutely.
	And so we can sit, you know, we can sit and call an evil and rant and enjoy ourselves, or we can try to think what's the best way to change these behaviors to actually minimize harm in the world.
	So you would sort of view, and I think I understand this now, you would sort of view those who are focused on the free will side of things, it's like those people in movie theaters who, when someone's creeping up on the heroin, they're kind of yelling like, turn around, turn around, and it's like, Dude, the film's already finished.
	It's already been made. It doesn't make any sense to yell at that.
	Oh, yeah, basically. I mean, but no, I mean, if you're, you know, if I'm not watching the movie, then I would tell the woman to turn around because I'd like her not to get hurt.
	Right? Right.
	I understand that. I try to stop the guy from hurting her.
	Right. But yeah, I think I do understand it.
	It really is a fascinating position.
	It is a very difficult thing to use language to describe it because our language is so centered around the assumption of free will.
	So it is almost like you need a new set of language to describe it.
	Yeah. A good defense of where you're coming from.
	Try the thought experiment. You understand the concept.
	You understand that it could be true.
	So just pretend it is for a couple of days.
	I certainly will, and I will let you know what happens.
	You should unmute Neil.
	He's going to disagree with a lot of what I said.
	But listen, now you know we're not angry, and I hope you don't think we're as inconsistent as you seem to think, and I hope you think we're not psychologically bent on some kind of defense mechanism or something like that.
	To me, this is rationality.
	That's what led me here.
	I didn't have a big problem with my parents or anything like that.
	All righty. Okay, so we've...
	Now, somebody who's just joined, I think, is having the exciting...
	You've got your speakers turned on and your microphone turned on, so you're getting a loop back.
	So I've just had to unmute people.
	But we can certainly talk a little bit more about free will.
	I don't want to... We've now done three or four shows on a number of podcasts, so let me do this.
	Let me try this thought experiment, pretending that free will is a fantasy, and sort of see what happens, and we'll see what...
	I mean, unless nobody else has anything that we want to talk about, or everybody really wants to continue on the free will topic, I'm certainly happy to talk about it.
	I just want to make sure that we're not driving everybody to distraction with the free will topic.
	So I'll just unmute everyone now, and if you'd like to bring up another topic, fantastic.
	Or if you all say free will or death, then we'll continue on with that.
	So I'll just unmute everyone now if you'd like to sort of say what's on your mind.
	Sure, go ahead, Nils.
	Let me just unmute everyone and then unmute you, so just one sec.
	Okay.
	Go ahead. Okay.
	I think you're making a couple of logical mistakes.
	Only a couple? That's good.
	Which are pretty important.
	You say that if people assume that The universe works in a logical causal way, and the logical consequence of causality is determinism, if you add time to it.
	That's basically all that determinism is.
	You say that it's not rational to talk to other people to try to change their minds.
	Right? Yes.
	But that's...
	I don't agree with that logic.
	I don't agree with that logic at all.
	The human mind is not a thing that only outputs things.
	It's also a thing that uses inputs.
	That's what a mind is all about.
	It's a sensory...
	It's largely a sensory mechanism.
	So when we talk to people, You try to input them ideas that they will use so that it will change their behavior somehow.
	It's like an investment.
	You hope to change things for the better.
	That's why you talk to people.
	The entire process of speaking and directing is based on causality, not only through the communication, Not only through the senses and the nerves, but also in the mind itself, which is a big muscle of neurons.
	Does it make any sense?
	We are not hearing you right now, Stefan.
	Something might be wrong.
	I hope I didn't set off an inconsistency in your head that made it explode like a robot.
	Can you hear me now? Yeah.
	Oh, okay. Sorry. So sorry about that.
	Well, I would say that some people on the board have said that human beings are as predetermined as rocks are.
	And I don't debate with rocks saying that you should turn into a tree or a unicorn or anything like that.
	And I don't mean to trivialize your position.
	This is just sort of where it comes to from my standpoint, that if I genuinely believed that debating was not under my volitional control, like so that me debating with you was just something foreordained since the Big Bang, and everything that I'm going to say is just foreordained, and then your opinion, the opinion that you're going to come out with at the end of this debate is foreordained, I wouldn't bother.
	To me, it just wouldn't make any sense to do it.
	Explain the logic. Explain the logic.
	Because we don't know what the future is going to bring.
	The deterministic nature of the universe lies in all matter and the way it interacts, in all matter.
	So it's completely unknowable, even theoretically.
	Well, sure, but I mean...
	And choices we make are in the now.
	So that's a distinction you've got to make.
	A choice happens in the now, Which is a process in time, its mechanism, and through time all these choices result in different things and through all these interactions the future or the past actually is formed.
	But there is no deviation from anything because the future is a big In this black space of unknowability, the deterministic nature lies in the characteristic of all matter.
	So saying that the outcome is determined, well yes, it's determined through the entire universe, but we act in the now to change the future How we want it to be.
	And it's not a deviation from anything, because there's no standard.
	Right, so I understand.
	So you're saying that the future is predetermined, but we have no idea what it is, so we have to act as if it's not.
	No. There's no acting involved.
	We know we have information about the now.
	And we have certain wishes and emotions, and that's how we act.
	It's a straw man to say that we know how the future is going to be, and it's set, and that we have to act as though we can change that.
	But the future is not knowable, so there's no acting involved.
	And if you say that determinists should act with humans as they act with rocks, that's a straw man.
	Rocks have no capacity of any kind to do anything.
	You can throw another rock at it, that's about it.
	But it has no input, no choice involved in the now, no outputs.
	I understand the input argument, right?
	If I click a rock, it moves, right?
	And if I say something to someone else that strikes them as true, they might change their thoughts and therefore their behavior and so on.
	I understand all that. I'm in full agreement with the idea of inputs.
	I mean, heavens, I've got 341 podcasts up there.
	I'm fully plugged into the idea of trying to provide alternate inputs to people to get them to alter their behavior.
	I'm totally down with that, and that I have no problem with, and that's based on my supposition that human beings have choice.
	But the thing that I find sort of problematic is that I don't think that the deterministic position is altered by saying that there are inputs that can be different from what came before because those inputs are also predetermined, right?
	So you debating with me about determinism, we can't tell how the debate is going to end up because we can't see the future, but it is going to end up the way it's going to end up based on all the inputs that came before and there's nothing new that we can add to it.
	And what exactly is your point?
	Well, what I'm saying is that saying that there are inputs doesn't help because those inputs are also predetermined.
	So it doesn't introduce any variability into the interaction to say that you're trying to put new inputs into people's minds because the inputs are also predetermined.
	So it doesn't add anything new or variable to the equation as far as I understand it.
	Yeah, but we don't know them as well.
	I know you to a certain extent.
	So that's why I will talk to you differently like I would talk to someone else.
	Another thing I wanted to mention was the thing I posted on the board today about the phantom limbs.
	Did you see it? No, I know the idea behind phantom limbs, but I didn't read the article yet.
	Okay, because it's a pretty interesting example.
	To talk about, because you say, well, pre-will is an illusion, and that means that it's not real, as opposed to something that would be real.
	But things like vision and the consciousness, they are produced by the brain.
	And the brain can also produce for us the feeling that we have a limb even though we don't have it.
	And I think that's a pretty amazing example of what the brain is capable of.
	And vision is almost the same example because there's no small cinema in our head that our mini-me is looking at.
	No, it's a complete construction of our 3D vision.
	And you can call it an illusion.
	But it is what it is.
	It's a construction. That's the word I'd like to use for that.
	And so consciousness is a construction as well.
	It's a product of the brain which is based on causality.
	And if you look at evolution, the human brain is not evolved to It has no motive to look into the future and change itself even though it can be predicted, those kind of things. It has no motive in any kind of shape or form.
	What it does have a motive is to survive.
	And how does it do that?
	It looks at the facts of life and how it can use it for its own benefit.
	And manipulate it.
	And that's why we have consciousness to make much more complex decisions than, for instance, a snail can make.
	Well, but not decisions, right?
	It's not a decision that we're making.
	Yes. It is a decision. A choice is a thing that happens in the now.
	A choice is a process that happens That you need a couple of things.
	You need matter and you need time.
	It's a process. That's choice.
	So in your view, choice does exist?
	Choice is a mechanism.
	Well, but you see, choice is a free will term, right?
	I don't know what...
	Free will has not been defined in any way that I have.
	I found useful, but the choice is very real to me.
	It's a process that you can find in nature, like a plant can have a choice, but it's a very mechanical choice.
	So, suppose a fly falls into the fly trap, some mechanism sets itself off, and it falls down, and it can't escape anymore.
	That's a choice, but it's very, very causal and logical and determined through time.
	And that's a very simple choice, but you can also have choices in your mind and even through your electrons.
	A computer can make a choice.
	A computer can make a choice?
	Of course. It's a big choice-making machine.
	That's why we built it.
	Well, I mean, I tell you, just as a guy who's spent a little bit of time with computers, computers don't make choices, at least in the way that human beings are perceived to make choices, right?
	I agree.
	What goes into a computer is what comes out of it.
	You can randomize stuff, but in the arguments around causality, even the randomness of a computer is pseudo-random, right?
	But as far as I understand it, in the way that we use the word choice in this debate, I don't think that computers or plants would fall into that category.
	But I certainly do understand that if you feel that human beings are like very complex robots or very complex plants, that you could see an analogy between them by...
	But that's why I sort of say that we need a new set of words almost, because choice means very different things to somebody who believes in voluntary responsibility and the freedom to make decisions.
	And somebody who believes that everything is a causal, the word choice means too many different things to both sides, so I think it would be a useful term.
	Okay. Well, what I can tell about what I think is a choice for, for instance, a computer, is a simple loop or whatever.
	It says, if this, then that.
	That's what I call a choice.
	Right. Sorry, go ahead.
	And if you look at a human being who makes a choice...
	Then suppose we have a very simple example.
	There's an apple and there's an orange.
	And what I do, how I perceive how the human mind works is it looks at its values and it looks at the options and the alternatives and it weighs them and it makes a choice.
	And it can be thrown away, eat it, make a choice between either of the two.
	But at the end, I make a choice for my action, and I act it out.
	And you, as a free-will person, says, well, the choice that I made seems to diminish my freedom in some way.
	But what I would say is, well, the choice that I make is actually A pronunciation of my person, of my values, of my history, of my emotions, everything that I want and feel and am, is pronounced in that action that I make.
	So, I see causality as a way of being free, because you can actually act out your person.
	And I don't see how that's scary at all.
	Because if you say, well, suppose your theory is I could have done multiple different things that were not determined through time, so this also means that I could have done a number of things that were even based on my persona at that moment,
	and my feelings and emotions and observations, I could have done different things, but that also means that there are certain choices that were less based on me, or maybe not based on me at all, and I don't understand what me actually means, if I can make choices that are independent of me, of the status of my human brain.
	No, I fully understand that.
	I mean, I fully understand that.
	It's why the term is thrown around on the boards around That free will is assuming something magical or assuming something sort of outside of physical reality.
	I fully understand that issue, right?
	I mean, that you could just have a sort of randomness inserted into your particular opinions and, you know, somebody who's studied to be an opera singer for 20 years could suddenly wake up one morning and just say, well, that's it, I'm going to become a mime and never sing again or something like that.
	I mean, that there would be no, it would be completely random, right, as far as I understand it.
	And for sure, there are, as I've talked about in sort of prior podcasts, there are, free will is to some degree, in my sort of formulation of it, is something that you sort of earn by studying and knowledge and focusing and so on.
	It's not something, it's like health, right?
	You don't just sort of, you're not born with health and then just maintain health no matter what you do.
	You have to make specific choices within your life to maintain good health, right?
	To eat well and exercise and so on.
	And so it becomes sort of a continuum of, And then you have access to health.
	And if you focus on learning and knowledge and understanding and reasoning and curiosity and you focus on long-term and short-term objectives and you don't abrogate the responsibility of thinking for yourself and so on, then in my view you can develop a capacity to make better, wiser, more humane choices.
	And those who don't, who just act in sort of a brute reaction to their past and just go on drinking binges and don't ever stop to think about how they might improve themselves, then those people again end up in a very sort of mechanistic or deterministic kind of way.
	Somebody who doesn't deal with their defenses in a particular kind of emotional relationship and doesn't make the choice to deal with their history rather than act it out in the present is going to end up just continually reacting to and continually getting angry at them.
	They're going to be sort of, their buttons get pushed and they react.
	And that to me is a kind of mechanistic way of living.
	And that is, I think, the majority of human beings, right?
	I mean, most people who are born in Muslim countries grow up to be Muslims, right?
	And, you know, they say born a Catholic, always a Catholic, and so on.
	I think those things can change.
	And certainly I've experienced in my life that as my knowledge increases and grows, That I have the capacity to make wiser and better decisions.
	Certainly my relationships are a lot better now than they were when I was in my 20s, and that's the result of, for me, fairly intensive studies, self-analysis, therapy, and so on.
	And so for me, it's not that you end up with some sort of thing that pops in out of nowhere, like health just sort of appears in somebody who's never eaten well or exercised.
	It's just that in the development of understanding, You can make different decisions that are better decisions in terms of longer-term happiness, but that's the result of fairly intensive studies, the same way that health in the long run is the result of fairly intensive decisions around eating habits and exercising habits and so on.
	So I don't think that it sort of popped up randomly out of nowhere.
	I think it's something that's developed with great care over time.
	Well, I certainly agree with you.
	Making better choices is extremely hard, and your mind is a thing that can be changed in a lot of different ways.
	And what's interesting about the mind is that we are conscious of ourselves, And that we can do things that change our ability to think about ourselves and our decisions.
	I think that's really the thing where the discussion gets derailed in certain ways, because I still view that as causality, a mechanism that can look at itself and change itself in a logical way.
	Does that make any sense to you?
	Yes, I certainly do.
	I certainly do understand it to some degree.
	I'm not saying that I get right to the bottom of it.
	And I'm not saying that we're going to get right to the bottom of it today.
	And let me just pause for a sec.
	Unmute other people, just so that it is something that other people can jump into as they want.
	So I've just unmuted everyone.
	If you'd like to add something to this, just let me know.
	Just super fast.
	I posted a link to a restless hand, or it's called actually Dr.
	Strangelove Syndrome, which is something I meant to post as evidence earlier on the free will thing.
	It's very interesting.
	It's an extremely rare thing, but there is brain injuries that lead to a situation where a person's hand, if you're familiar with the movie Dr.
	Strangelove, a person's hand actually It acts as if it has a mind of its own and acts contrary to the will of the person.
	So they have one hand that they actually have to fight with their other hand that will actually try to harm other people, even harm themselves.
	I think Peter Sellers had that, if I remember rightly.
	Yeah, he was the guy. He played it, right.
	He played the character. But it's a real thing, and the link I showed is an example.
	And I think it's just, you know, it's an example of the mechanism of the brain going wrong.
	And there's so many evidences for determinism in cases where the brain screws up.
	You know, that's where you see...
	You can even see people that have real mental problems just seem more like machines.
	You know what I mean? You can just see when it's not right.
	I just wanted to set that context for that thing because it's something definitely to take a look at.
	It's amazing. Thanks.
	Will you put that on the board as well?
	I'll try to, yeah. Thanks so much.
	Now, was there something else that people wanted to add?
	to add?
	I don't want to monopolize the debate with Nils.
	I had some comments on your - Thank you.
	Was that you, Greg?
	I think you've just gone off the air.
	Yeah, that was me. Okay, let me just mute everyone and unmute you, and then you can go ahead.
	Okay, I've unmuted yourself and Neil, so go ahead.
	Should I go or Neil's?
	No, you go ahead. You go ahead, Greg.
	Okay, yeah, I didn't really have anything to say about determinism.
	I thought you were asking for other stuff.
	Well, go ahead, but other stuff, and because Nils and I are still going to have this chat, we're going to do a one-on-one and record it, so go ahead with something else.
	We'll certainly get the issues with Nils squared away at some point, or at least we'll certainly get clarification on both sides of the fence.
	Okay. Uh...
	Two questions really which are just follow-ups from what we were talking about on the board.
	One is the issue around lying, and the other one is a problem I kind of had with the whole idea and the other one is a problem I kind of had with the whole idea Oh, the growth of evil one, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you had some excellent questions about that, and I was hoping that we would get to those today because I didn't want to sort of jump it on you if you weren't ready.
	But yeah, excellent questions about that.
	So that probably would be worth having a chat.
	Just for those who haven't listened to the podcast, shocking, shocking.
	Give yourself a quick spanking, then continue.
	And if you have a webcam, I'll send you the address.
	But this is a thesis that I'm sort of batting around that people who have really bad childhoods tend to act out bad things.
	And the idea is that the growth of evil always escalates until people recognize that people had bad childhoods and have sympathy for it and say that it's unequivocally wrong what they went through.
	So people like Hitler, who grew up in a society where child abuse was pretty much the norm, and actually approved of, beating children and so on, which was in Germany throughout the early to mid-20th century, That because society doesn't recognize the abused child and the moral horror that they went through, that they continue to act out their childhoods in other people until such time as the horror gets inflicted on enough people that people sort of put the brakes on and decide to deal with those sorts of issues.
	So the Western culture was awash in a kind of relativism until the end of the Second World War when relativism took a blow through the Nuremberg Trials and people said that there's a morality over and above what people believe in subjective ways.
	And that was sort of the end result of it, and that's sort of the point.
	And that the way that you can try and prevent this kind of escalation of evil is to talk openly about child abuse and the suffering that it causes so that people don't end up acting it out in this escalating way.
	Sorry, that's a very brief thing.
	Boy, it's good to know I can do it. I probably didn't need three podcasts.
	But anyway, that's a sort of very brief description of it, and that's just set the context for Greg, if you'd like to go ahead with your question.
	Sure, and...
	I guess my problem, I think, really just comes down to the examples you're using, because I think the examples were confusing me a lot.
	Of course, you went straight for the big ones, you know, Saddam and Hitler, and I mean, I don't know much about Saddam's childhood or Well, for that matter, Hitler's either.
	But if you look at what they actually did, Saddam particularly, it just seemed to me that it didn't square with the notion that there's it just seemed to me that it didn't square with the notion that there's this
	And you supplied some self-refutation, I guess, in the podcast, too, on this, with pointing out how Stalin didn't actually rush into Western Europe, with pointing out how Stalin didn't actually rush into Western He pulled his troops back.
	How Hitler really wasn't interested in going after England.
	He just wanted to beat up on the little guys so that he could prance around and show how tough he was.
	And then the same thing with Saddam, how he, even if he had nukes, would never have thought of lighting up Baltimore because he'd wind up dead.
	So... If there is this compulsion toward escalation to the point of self-destruction, those three examples alone seem to argue against that.
	So I guess I was kind of looking for better examples.
	Right, so what you're saying is that in the podcast I sort of acted a little bit like Paul's other hand, debating with myself and winning on the downside.
	No, the key thing, Greg, is what you need to do is go back and keep listening to the podcast until you can't think in any other kind of way.
	And that will probably be the easiest way to approach that, and certainly a lot easier than me trying to defend my position.
	Does that make sense? I perfectly understand.
	Excellent. Well, no, I mean, those are perfectly good objections, and they may well be valid.
	The thing that I would say about Hitler, of course, is that he did end up attacking England.
	And he did end up sort of growing to the point or growing in escalation.
	And of course he attacked Russia, which was the big, you know, like he'd never heard of Napoleon, right?
	So he attacked Russia and destroyed, you know, the one thing that he had the whole pact with Russia for was to avoid the two-front war, which always nails Germany and certainly did in the First World War.
	But he did attack England and then he did attack Russia.
	So although they say, and they don't want to sort of do these things internally, that sort of is the way that it ends up.
	And the way that you can sort of see this pattern in Stalin is that Stalin has complete control over his country and then in the 1930s begins his whole system of purging which destroys his army, signs a pact with Hitler who he knows he cannot trust and then Stalin also refused to believe that the Germans were invading.
	One of the main reasons that the German troops got so far into Russia was that Stalin simply refused to believe that they were invading.
	He thought it was just lies spread by people who wanted to get him into a war with Hitler and So there are those kinds of mistakes as well.
	But when I'm thinking, and you're right to point out that individuals do survive, as Lenin did, to the end of their course of power without self-destroying, but the system as a whole tends to increase to self-destruction, right?
	I mean, if we even look at the American or Canadian examples currently, right, where the system is simply expanding in power and control to the point where it is going to end up self-destructing.
	Logically, it would just sort of make sense.
	Like if I were Joe Evil or something like that, or Joe predetermined to negative behavior for the determinists, then what I would do is I'd grab power of the government and then I would sort of keep it at around 10 or 15 percent of the GDP so that I could live like a king, but it never ends up that way.
	It always continues to escalate, continues to escalate until there is a real self-destruction.
	You can see this in Germany in the 20s, in the Weimar Republic in the 30s, with Hitler in the 40s, with With communism, with Pol Pot, with Stalin, with Mao, there's always this continual escalation to self-destruction.
	And if they were simply just interested in grabbing hold of resources and holding on to them, that just didn't make much sense to me.
	And my explanation might not be, there may be another one, but I think it's something that does need to be explained.
	With Saddam Hussein, he's got complete control of the country.
	There are no credible rival threats.
	And he goes and destroys his army by fighting with Iran for 10 years in the 1980s.
	And then he starts tweaking the United States, although he does believe that Kuwait is allowed to invade, at least according to certain sources.
	The U.S. gave permission for that invasion.
	When that doesn't work, he retreats, and then he starts tweaking the United States again, and then he starts underselling OPEC. Like, he's already got billions and billions of dollars and is in control of the entire country, but there's always this escalation to self-destruction, if not for the individual, for the system as a whole, like for those who come in right after them.
	I don't know that that clinches the case, but does that at least clarify some of the examples that were admittedly not as clear as they should be in the podcast?
	Yeah, those elaborations do kind of help out.
	I just wish there were better examples.
	But that does make sense that Hitler did go into England.
	Well, can I just interrupt for one second?
	I mean, if you really do want to pursue this topic...
	The way that you could help the most is if you go on a rampage yourself, then that would do quite a bit to help contribute towards the discussion here, because then we could interview you afterwards and so on, and you could say, well, Steph told me to do it, or something like that.
	So, you know, I think it's time to take a bullet for freedom, and if you could just sort of get up on that, maybe you could give us a call back next Sunday, if you're allowed to, from wherever you're going to be incarcerated, that would probably help a bit as well.
	And actually, that kind of gets to the second half of this particular objection, which was the The other side of that equation, how predictable is it?
	Because if you take, for example, like Harris and Klebold out in Columbine, I think it was, right?
	It's not like they were tortured day in and day out the way, say, Stalin was or Hitler was, and yet it seems that they achieved the level of Psychological self-destruction much faster and in a much more personal way than either of the two icons of dictatorial power.
	What is it that caused Stalin to work his way through the system and climb the ladder until he could achieve You know, the highest seat possible in the country and then start wreaking havoc instead of just doing, you know, the Harrison Klebold thing and going bananas and blowing themselves up in a school.
	No, excellent points.
	And I would say that the reason that Stalin was able to achieve what he achieved was that child abuse was much more common in Russia than it is in modern America, right?
	So these guys, who are obviously, you know, homicidal sociopaths, I'm sure we can pretty much be sure of that.
	I don't know much about the details of their histories.
	I don't even know if those histories are well known.
	But those people had to go out in a blaze of glory because they knew that they could not achieve political power in the same way that a homicidal madman like Hitler or Stalin could, because there is at least some consciousness in America or in most of the West, which is one of the reasons why our freedoms are slow to erode, There's some consciousness that, say, beating the crap out of children is not a good thing.
	Whereas in Russia, it was almost de rigueur, right?
	I mean, in Germany as well.
	The children were seen as sort of evil creatures, naturally selfish and destructive and harmful, and they had to be beaten and tortured and propagandized into submission.
	Which is why when somebody comes up and starts screaming at you in Germany in the 1930s, you sort of go, well, yeah, I can sort of believe that that's how authority should act because this is how my parents acted, this is how I act, and it's the right thing to do.
	Whereas if somebody starts pulling a Hitler in America, they're not going to associate that with a legitimate kind of authority because that's not how they were parented.
	But in these other cultures, and this is particularly true in the Muslim culture as well, Children are seen as naturally disobedient and evil, and they need to be beaten and tortured and humiliated and propagandized into a kind of subservience, which is why they end up with this sort of death worship, right? Because life is sort of, in a fundamental sense, not worth living when you're in that kind of society.
	So, of course, they're going to end up with these crazy, violent people at the top of their culture, because that's a direct translation of the parenting that they experienced as children.
	So I think the difference is that there's a general consciousness of the sensitivity and rights of children in North America that I think, you know, with the exclusion of the sort of Christian or collectivist camps, right, because when I sort of first started podcasting and was talking about Christianity as child abuse, I got an enormous amount of sort of people who had problems with the idea, let's say.
	But as this particular...
	If the streak within American culture continues to grow, then subservience to authority is going to seem very natural.
	And it's going to be subservience to a kind of benevolent, kind, all-American type of authority where the sort of fascism and the troops are held in the background, right?
	In the same way that these people experience their parents being sort of fairly genial and nice and occasionally violent but for their own good.
	And the violence is kept very much in the background of people's consciousness and that's how it translates into into subservience to the kind of state that is growing, right?
	Whether it's sort of crazy screaming German Nazism or it's crazy screaming communist dictatorships or the sort of more genial, pleasant but in a subtle way crazy and violent kind of presidencies that are growing in the US and of course in England as well.
	So I would say that it is directly related to the kind of parenting that people experienced And I think if in the Columbine world of these children, if there was a general consciousness around that world that what these children had experienced was absolutely horrible and wrong and that they should not have experienced and so on, I don't think they would have had to act out that violence because they would have felt heard and validated.
	And the last thing I'll say before turning it back to you is that you can also look at your own experience here Because prior to the conversations that we're involved in here, I think that you did not feel that same kind of validation of your own experiences.
	And I think that you've mentioned on the board that you feel more relaxed and at peace with yourself and a little less sort of like an oddball and a guy out in left field because you're in a sort of environment where what you experience and what you're experiencing...
	It's thoroughly validated, not just by people giving you the sort of Mormon love bomb group hug, but through a sort of intelligent analysis of the ethics and the interactions that you're going through.
	So in that sense, the peace that you feel relative to when you were not in a conversation with like-minded people, I think is an example, in a small way, and not that you were heading to some sort of a breakout scenario, let's say, beforehand.
	But I think some of the peace and ease that you feel relative to what you felt before is precisely because that kind of visibility and validation, which I don't think was present in these other countries.
	I think I would agree with that last statement.
	So what you're saying, though, then, is that someone like Harris or Klebold, given enough cunning, could easily have been the next George Bush.
	No, I don't think so.
	I think because they were so emotionally scarred, In very obvious ways that they could not have sublimated that degree of...
	I mean, my guess is childhood rape.
	I mean, whenever I see this kind of...
	And this will make the determinants happy, of course.
	But this is when I see that level of dysfunction, then I automatically assume extreme physical abuse or childhood rape and no...
	No recognition of it within their emotional environment, right?
	So, you know, I sort of picture that these kids are sitting around a table and they've been raped by an uncle or a father or something like that.
	And they want to talk about it, but if they know that if they bring it up, they're going to get attacked and the uncle's going to get off scot-free and they're going to get even more punished, right?
	So they're in a situation where the abuse that they're experiencing, they can't talk about at all.
	And so they end up having to act it out.
	And they're actually angry at the society even more so than they're angry at their uncle or their father who raped them.
	This is sort of my psychologizing, and it's definitely from the sidelines, but just bear with me for a second, right?
	Because the hatred is not against the people who do us wrong.
	The hatred is against the people who won't acknowledge that people did us wrong, right?
	So for me, you know, I have this crazy, violent, evil mom, but my general dissatisfaction was not so much with her, who was sort of crazy and irrational and violent, but with everybody.
	And this occurs even up to the present, right?
	Even up to the present. People will say, how's your mom?
	And I'll say, what? I don't see her.
	And they'll say, but why?
	Right? Even these people who knew my mom when I was a teenager and who knew how sort of crazy and bad she was.
	So my sort of frustration is much more so even with the people who refuse to acknowledge a wrong than those who perpetrate it.
	And that I think is why they acted out against society as a whole.
	So my guess is something like this, and I'll stop after this little comment.
	The Columbine kids, they went to school in combat fatigues.
	They were obsessed with violence.
	They were dangerous.
	They swore. People were afraid of them.
	And nobody ever said, what is going on with you guys at home?
	Nobody ever said, what is happening?
	They were just labeled as freaks and misfits and weirdos.
	Like they had this great childhood like everybody else did.
	But unfortunately, they just took some different path for reasons unknown.
	Maybe they listened to one too many rap albums or thrash metal or something like that.
	And they're just freaks and weirdos.
	But nobody looked at them and said, what is going on for you guys?
	And this is so common in junior high school and high school or any kind of school that it's barely worth even mentioning because we all know what this is all about, right?
	That there are the kids who are the freaks who everyone scorns and looks at and then there are kids from the rich households with the nice cars who, you know, dyed hair.
	I'm really overgeneralizing here.
	But what happened was these kids went to school with definite markers about how crazy they were and how much suffering they were experiencing And everybody blamed them and refused to read the signs that they were obviously putting out there, right?
	Like somebody comes to school with like a mohawk and pierced ears and nipple rings and stuff.
	Somebody really should probably say, hey, what the hell's going on for you that you're self-mutilating in this manner?
	And... If you don't do that, they're going to be angry at you more so than they're going to be angry at their parents, which is why these kids got guns and went to the school rather than went and shot their parents, right?
	I mean, that's sort of my approach to it.
	So, given that in general, these kids were viewed as freaks and weirdos, they weren't going to make it to the top of the political hierarchy, but they had to act out their rage, and to me it's very instructive, who they acted out their rage against, and it was their peers who could have actually helped them rather than their parents, who they probably viewed as unable to change.
	That's a good point.
	But so what you're saying then is that had they had a release valve, if you will, that allowed them to sublimate the rage to some degree, then they would have been able to say maybe climb the political ladder.
	Yes. I would say, well, if you look at George Bush, right?
	Like, I mean, George Bush is somebody who's got a lot of rage.
	I mean, deep down, the man's got a lot of rage, right?
	He's killing hundreds of thousands of people around the world, right?
	This is not somebody who's full of love and peace and benevolence, right?
	And he's a bully and a coward, which you can totally see in the different way that he treats a far more genuine threat like North Korea, right, where he's all about diplomacy, right, because they actually have some weapons that could do them some harm.
	And this compared to Saddam Hussein, whose military budget was one-tenth of one percent the United States was and who he'd had confirmation that they had no military capacity.
	So this is a man who's very much into bullying and being harsh and destroying and all this kind of stuff, right?
	And then claims the ultimate virtue of being motivated by an all-loving Christian God and so on.
	But in this kind of situation, this is somebody whose rage has been very well polished and sublimated into a socially acceptable format where he talks about His love of God and his love of the country and his desire to protect Americans and so on.
	Yet he's, you know, fully supporting 800 bases, poking sticks into the hornet's nest of Muslim extremism and so on.
	And so in these kinds of situations, this is somebody who's much more polished and who has a childhood that other people identify with, right?
	So there's lots of people who vote for George Bush who were also raised as Christians and also raised as patriots and also raised with this love of crazy collective ideals So they identify with him.
	What he's saying doesn't appear insane to them.
	And in Germany, people were raised with the same kind of childhood that Hitler had, so when people are screaming at them and telling them that they owe all of their blood to the collective, they're familiar with that.
	They understand that. And because they're familiar with it and understand it, they don't challenge it.
	And because they don't challenge it, the power ends up growing until they do go, hey, something's wrong here.
	So then the same must have been true also for Hitler and Stalin.
	They must have had some release valve that allowed them to sublimate their own rage to the point that they could climb the political ladder.
	I don't think that would be true of Hitler because Hitler's speeches were full of foaming rage, as were Stalin's, all the way from the beginning.
	And Stalin was a known murderer in his teens, as was Saddam Hussein, as was Fidel Castro.
	It's just that nobody saw anything particularly wrong with that because their own child had been so abusive.
	Okay, so in that case, it's not that the society is closed off to their problem.
	It's just that the whole society is suffering from the same exact problem, and so it doesn't look any different.
	Well, and they want to cover it up, right?
	So if they say to Stalin, you had a bad childhood, but he had the same childhood they did, then they have to say, I had a bad childhood.
	And they don't want to do that, right?
	So things get worse and worse and worse because this has to be acted out.
	This has to become real. This trauma has to become real.
	Things get worse and worse and worse until 40 million people are dead, and then suddenly people say, hey, maybe there is such a thing as ethics after all.
	Okay. I'm not saying I'm going to convince you of this.
	I'm not saying it's logistical, right?
	Actually, 39 million dead.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Sorry, Nils just corrected that.
	Right, right. But tell me what it is that you have.
	I'm sure the difficulties you have with the theory are not yours alone, so feel free to.
	I mean, this is just a theory, right?
	So feel free to poke it because I want to make sure it makes sense.
	Well, I'm just trying to bring the two sides together in the middle now.
	Let's say that Stalin was abused as a child and nobody would acknowledge his suffering, right?
	Right. But the abuse had to be...
	Significant enough that he would want to turn that abuse against everyone around him, but not significant enough to just go out in an immediate blaze of glory.
	Yeah, I mean the sadism, it's a more calculated sadism than what goes on in Columbine.
	But that's only because America is far healthier than Russia was at the turn of the last century.
	I mean, for all the problems that we poke at the West, it's still the healthiest society in the world, and in some ways is a lot more healthy than it was 400 years ago, right?
	Separation of church and state, even 200 years ago.
	If the abuse has occurred and nobody's saying that it's wrong, then it's going to continue to escalate until people say something is wrong.
	Something is wrong here. And these two cultures that we're looking at, Germany and Russia, in the early to mid-20th century, the history of child raising was, you know, beat them until they obeyed.
	Scream at them until they obey.
	Parents have absolute authority over children and children are evil by nature and must be forced to conform through brutalized physical violence or emotional violence.
	And nobody says that that's wrong and that's a deviation and that shouldn't occur because they all went through the same thing and nobody can look at themselves honestly and objectively because it's a very difficult thing to do as we all know who are working in this kind of environment.
	But these terrible things did occur, and they're going to get acted out against a population that refuses to label them as extreme.
	I would say that Stalin's childhood was probably worse, as Hitler's was, than the average Russian or German.
	But it was close enough in the general methodology of parenting that people could not resist their kind of authority.
	And so in America, people don't usually get the crap beaten out of them or screamed at in the way that the Germans and the Russians did in the early to mid-20th century, but there's a lot of addiction to universal abstracts that are considered to be moral, like the God and country, and there's this crazy patriotism and crazy religious strongholds in America.
	And so what do they end up with?
	Well, they end up with a president who conforms and appeals to all of these collectivist ideals and And with whom there is a lot of veiled or hidden punishment in the background.
	That's not obvious, right? Mussolini dragged people out of their homes and shot them in the streets, right?
	Saddam Hussein, supposedly, put people in vats of acid, right?
	That's pretty up front, right?
	That has a lot to do with the kind of parenting that these people experienced.
	But in the West, and particularly in America, the conformity that is demanded of children is done through an up front kind of niceness or respectability of But there's an enormous amount of both emotional and physical potential violence in the background that's not obvious, it's not up front, which is why it's sort of hard to see it.
	And the same thing, of course, is true in America, right?
	The violence occurs overseas.
	The violence is in the laws, but people obey, and therefore people think that there's a voluntary cooperation.
	But these things will continue to escalate until such time as we say, yeah, Christianity is child abuse.
	Yes, patriotism is child abuse.
	Yes, adherence to authority in any form that is not based on virtue is child abuse.
	And once we start to get that idea out there, then people will start to denormalize the kind of childhoods they had.
	And then they'll look at George Bush and see him relatively clearly.
	That's the crazy kind of fascistic guy who appeals to people emotionally and keeps the violence in a kind of semi-hidden way, which is wrong and should not exist, in sort of my opinion.
	So does that.
	So the only difference then between, say, Bush and Stalin is one, it's just a stylistic difference because of the difference in our overall social culture.
	Sure.
	Yeah, and I would say that Stalin's childhood was openly like drunken father, abusive mother, beaten black and blue, and probably, you know, raped.
	And so the childhoods that went on in most of these countries were, and in the world, the majority of the world today, absolutely horrific.
	I mean, we can't even comprehend how bad these childhoods are.
	I mean, you see these kids rocking back and forth over these Muslim texts.
	You just know that they're living a completely horrifying and deadly existence where any shred...
	of rationality or selfhood, it's just going to be crushed and beaten out of them.
	You see the women running around in these burkas, right?
	These are not people who've been allowed to choose for themselves in any way, shape or form.
	And so they are dealing with these absolutely horrendous and wretched childhoods.
	The childhood abuse that goes on, say, in America is much more, I would say, subtle in a way.
	It's not as upfront in terms of beating, right?
	Like in the Muslim world, you beat your kids and it makes good sense, right?
	I mean, according to their ideas of parenting.
	And in America, though, you drag your kids to church, and if they don't want to come, you don't beat them.
	I mean, rarely, anyway.
	You don't beat your kids to come to church, but there's an enormous amount of emotional manipulation in it, an enormous amount of control from the parents, the withdrawal of affection, the scorn, the hostility, the exclusionary tactics that the parents use.
	It's all more subtle and more hidden.
	What that does is it translates into an authoritarian government that very rarely shows its hand.
	It very rarely shoots students in Kent State.
	And in England, it very rarely seems to be involved in the deaths of people who are exposing that they knew that there were no WMDs before the invasion.
	It's more subtle and it's more sort of behind the scenes because that's what's occurring in the childhoods, right?
	The childhoods and the governments are going to keep getting worse until people sort of go, okay, well there's now enough horror that I'm going to see it and I'm going to stop it and at least my goal is to try and get some word out there so we can kind of head that off at the pass.
	Right, so I guess what my problem really is then is a distinction between, is not to draw a distinction between American culture now and German culture then,
	but more to try and figure out what the trigger is between, say, a guy like George Bush who makes it all the way to the presidency and a guy like Harris who goes apeshit and kills everyone around him.
	What's the difference between a guy in Germany in the 1920s who drinks himself into a stupor and shoots himself in the head versus a guy like Hitler Right, right.
	Well, I would say it has something to do with skill and ability for sure.
	It has something to do with the depth of rage as well.
	It also has something to do with the level of self-awareness, right?
	Hitler had no awareness of himself.
	That's why he acted out against the whole world, right?
	He was never the problem.
	It was always, you know, the Jews or whatever, who were the problem.
	So he had no ability, seemingly, to reflect upon his own life, whereas somebody who ended up shooting themselves might have a little bit more self-reflection from that standpoint.
	So I would say that it's tough to know exactly what it is, but I would also say that it is the degree of horror within the childhood relative to the degree of horror in everyone's childhood or more or less everybody's in the society.
	So if you have a horrifying childhood and everyone else in your society has a horrifying childhood, And you have particular skills and abilities and drives and ambitions that can get you to the top, then you're going to go that route.
	But the guys in Columbine had a far worse childhood than everybody else's, but everyone else had a bad enough childhood that they could not recognize what was going on for the Columbine kids, so they ended up coming to school with guns, right?
	Because this horror was going to come out one way or another, and we either ask about it and have sympathy towards it, Or we're going to end up with guns pointed at us from those who we refuse to sympathize with.
	So that to me is a little bit, hopefully it helps to delineate it a little bit.
	Yeah, I think that's at least a good start for me.
	I'm still kind of working it through, but I won't belabor it.
	Now, Niels has asked, Steph, can you say something about the fact that they do not want to admit things to themselves like that they are projecting?
	Because how could you deal with someone once you recognize it?
	Do you want to say a little bit more about that, Niels?
	I'm not sure I understand the question.
	Well, suppose the children in the high school who are clearly expressing emotions from their views or things like that, Suppose you would observe that.
	How could you handle that?
	Because I would seem that if you would go to someone and you explained your observation, that they would deny it.
	Right? Well, I think you're right.
	And the way that I would approach it is not to ask them to have sympathy for the Columbine kids.
	Or let's just say, if I were going to the average high school kid, I would sort of ask them not...
	To have sympathy for the freaks because that's not going to help, right?
	I mean, the quote freaks. What I would ask them is about their own history and their own childhood because we can't have any more sympathy for others than we have for ourselves, right?
	We can't have any more empathy for others than we have for ourselves.
	It's sort of logically impossible.
	And so the first thing that I would do is ask them about their own childhoods and their own histories and how much independence and respect that they had as children and how much people valued them and thought that they were great and all this kind of stuff.
	And then once you got them to understand that their own childhoods may have been problematic, then they are going to start, I think, in time to be able to understand that other people's childhoods are problematic.
	And it's a very, very difficult thing to experience.
	Once you look at six billion people in the world all having these wretched, wretched childhoods, with some minor exceptions and so on, but certainly nothing statistically relevant and it's a big problem to face.
	You do really get sort of the scream of the world, right?
	You do really get the horror that is most people's existence when growing up throughout the world.
	Less so in the West, of course, but still to some significant degree.
	But as soon as people can look at their own childhoods, not relative to, well, other people had worse childhoods, but relative to the ideal that they needed as individuals with natures that wanted to be logical and happy and free, then they can start to empathize with their own histories.
	And through that, they can begin to empathize with other people's histories.
	So I wouldn't get them to sort of say, well, you've got to be nice to the freaks.
	I'd get them to say, well, what was your history like?
	And once they start to understand the issues within their own history, they can then start to understand the issues of other people's histories as well.
	Well, I actually I actually meant to ask if you see somebody expressing these things like piercings, or if someone is like a friend of mine who I've now have received an email from since a long time,
	where it's very clear that they have problems in their youth, and they're expressing it in an indirect way, you know?
	Another example could be, suppose they're constantly trying to make people feel better and never dealing with their own emotions.
	What would be a good way to help such a person to look into themselves?
	Well, the first thing that you need to get them to do is donate an enormous amount of money to Freedom Aid Radio.
	But that's true of just about anything.
	But no, in all seriousness, what I would do with people like that and the question, Christina just had to leave for a moment, the question is how do you get somebody to recognize that they have issues and need to whatever, right?
	Do you deal with them in some way and what should you do?
	And I'll sort of mention, if Christina wants to add something, she will.
	But the first thing you need to do, in my opinion, is to tell them about how you feel.
	Not about what's wrong with them or anything like that, but, you know, I feel that discomfort or sadness or upset or whatever, like I feel that something's up with you that's not making you happy, that there's a problem, that...
	You could be happier, that you could be better off.
	I feel sympathy towards you.
	I understand, you know, and I want to sort of understand what's going on for you.
	And then just sort of, you have to be a little bit persistent because people are very suspicious when you start talking like that, trying to get them or something like that, or be superior.
	And so you need to have empathy for them, and then I would say that my particular goal would be to try and get them to a competent therapist, right?
	Because... You know, you can say to someone, you look pale, you look unwell, you should go and see a doctor, right?
	But I would not be the person who would take on everybody's problems myself, because it takes quite a lot of specific training to be able to deal with people's psychological issues, none of which I've had, but don't worry about my...
	Well, of course, I don't debate people one-on-one about their psychological issues unless invited, but that, you know, to say, recognize that something's wrong with the person, that you feel concerned about them in a sympathetic way...
	Ask them to talk, but it very much is like sort of noticing that somebody has a huge growth on their back, right?
	It's like you have a growth on your back, it's bad, I'm concerned, and you need to get to a specialist.
	But the thing you're talking about right now, is that something you could also try yourself?
	Yes.
	Because, basically, what they need to do is they need to face their own past.
	And a good way of that is just talking about it.
	And what you could do is to mirror that, to say, yeah, I understand this and this emotions.
	I have similar...
	I think, sorry, Niels, since Kristina is speaking, I think that we can all offer some...
	Sorry, I lost my earphones.
	I think we could all offer some support and some empathy toward other people, but therapy is very, very complicated, so I would just urge people not to try and be a therapist, be a friend, be supportive, be open to other people's thoughts and feelings, but really when we're looking at profound, deep emotional issues, direct them to a therapist or a couple of professionals.
	I think an amount of emotional dysfunction is going to be very, very difficult to deal with, and it does really take a professional.
	I mean, Christina studied this for, I think, two weeks, and I think you say longer than that, don't you, pretty much?
	Six years of education and then an additional five years of supervised training.
	Right, so more than a decade of education and supervised training in order to be able to figure out people's defenses, to work around them, knowing when to be confrontational and when to be sympathetic, because you really only get one shot, right?
	I mean, you don't get a lot of chances to try and help people.
	And I myself don't feel particularly...
	I mean, I don't try and be anyone's therapist, right?
	But just try and get people into somebody who's got real experience.
	And this doesn't mean that every therapist is great, right?
	They need to get to a therapist and find someone who they're comfortable with, which is a complicated business.
	That's something they need to pursue.
	But I think I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable trying to be somebody's therapist.
	It is a very complicated situation, needing to know exactly the right approach with the person, whether it's medically based, whether they need medication, whether their ego strength at particular times, about what they can handle in terms of confrontation versus sympathy and so on.
	Knowing when sympathy is going to do more harm than good, right?
	Because there are times when people really need to be confronted rather than have sympathy applied to them.
	And there are other times when sympathy is much more appropriate, and that's why it's such a complicated business to save a soul in this way.
	So I definitely would take the approach of not trying to be a therapist any more than I would, say, amble up to someone and say, I've got a spoon, I can help you out with that appendix.
	Yeah, that sounds very good, of course.
	But there's always this worry, you know.
	Because the state of the world is so awful, what can we expect of most of these professionals?
	Everybody is a statist, everybody is warm towards family.
	The things you're talking about, from Dr.
	Phil, that certain things that he does completely wrong, like the children who got beaten by their mother.
	And if you say to someone, well, you might look into therapy, well, of course, if they're Christian, they're going to look for a Christian therapist and so on.
	Because what they need is somebody who has a healthy look on life, which is very opposite of what they have.
	Yes, yes. We don't often know what it is that they need.
	A Christian may go to a Christian therapist or a Christian counselor.
	That doesn't mean that they're going to...
	They could get some real benefits from going to a Christian counselor or a Christian therapist.
	It's a revolution in the individual or in the self that needs to happen.
	I mean, it's very rare that it does happen, and even I see people, it's time consuming, it's lengthy, it's costly, and most people don't have the tolerance to do it anyway.
	A lot of people are just looking for symptom relief, and that's the unfortunate state, and you're absolutely right.
	The world does need A therapist and more openness to the kind of changes in individual, I guess, humanity.
	Yeah, I mean, there is a revolution that is needed in the world, and I guess we're doing our part to try and move ideas forward that can help with that.
	But you're right. I mean, the only thing that I would say, though, that if somebody is a Christian and chooses to go to a Christian therapist, they will get some symptom relief.
	There will be some improvement.
	But mostly, it's what Freud used to say, that all I can do is, he would say to a lot of his patients, all I can do is return you to an ordinary state of unhappiness and conformity.
	I mean, I can get you from wanting to throw yourself off a building to merely being semi-miserable around the dinner table with your family.
	That's the best that I can do for you.
	I mean, he was Jewish, so he compromised himself, so that's the best that he could hope for, for his patients, and obviously so for himself.
	But that is what most people can expect to get out of therapy.
	There are a few hardy souls like us who are willing to sail further on into the ice floes to look for the undreamt of paradise, the island in the middle of the iceberg with the palm trees on it, but these are very few people.
	And if somebody really does have significant dysfunction in their history, They don't need to have a purely rational therapist, because once they get in touch with their feelings, they will experience some relief, and they will probably evolve at least to an ordinary level of conformity, which is what most people can hope for.
	My particular therapist was a mystic, but I just didn't talk about mysticism with her.
	What she was great at, though, was understanding instincts, and she was also great at dream analysis.
	So I got an enormous amount of benefit out of a counselor or a therapist who did not share my epistemological or metaphysical beliefs.
	But had particular value in what it is that I had a problem with, right?
	So to some degree you can get your appendix taken out by a mystic, sorry, by a statist doctor, but you can't get it taken out by a witch doctor.
	So getting people into therapy is going to help them for sure, as long as they find a therapist that they're willing to talk to and be open to.
	But you're right, it still isn't going to get them to be purely rational, but they're going to have more of a shot at it if they go to a therapist and Part of what we do as therapists is we encourage people to look at reality, what are the facts of reality and deal with their lives within reality and to bring some of the illusions that they have about other people and themselves No,
	but maybe they'll start to see things a little differently and begin to make some small changes, and that's the best that we can hope for, some small changes that will sort of snowball over time.
	Yeah, because, of course, they're going to raise children a little bit more rationally.
	I don't think it's going to be purely an intergenerational process.
	I think it's going to be faster than that, but at the very worst, what we're going to do is help incremental improvements across generations, and sometimes we do have to be that patient.
	All right. Well, thanks so much, everyone, for listening.
	If there's nothing else that anybody wants to add, we'll wrap it up now.
	Is there anything that people wanted to add at this point?
	No? No?
	No? Going once. Bueller, Ferris, Bueller, Bueller.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I had a whole other argument on the rise of evil, but...
	It would probably go on way too long, so we can postpone that.
	Alright, we'll save them for next week, for sure.
	I think it's a very fascinating topic, and I appreciate the questions.
	They certainly do help me push the ideas a little bit further forward, and so do save them for next week, if you don't mind.
	But, yeah, thanks so much, everyone, for listening.
	Of course, we look forward to chatting with you next week.
	And I hope you're all enjoying the new server.
	It's nice and fast and very responsive.
	And of course, I haven't got emails every day with people saying downloads are interrupted and all that, so that's good.
	So thanks so much for listening, and have yourselves a fantastic week.

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