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July 24, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:07
344 The Childhood War of John Stuart Mill
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Good afternoon, everybody. It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. Let's have a little trip down Mill Lane.
We're going to have a quick chat about John Stuart Mill.
We're not going to have an enormous amount of time to chat about John Stuart Mill, but I thought it would at least be worth taking a single quote of his, and I think it's worth having a chat about it, because it is something that's indicative of the kind of philosophy that's floating around.
At the moment. So this is from the Contest in America, Fraser's Magazine, February 1862.
It is quarter to five on the 25th of July now, 2006.
So a little bit later. Later published in Dissertations and Discussions, 1868, Volume 1, page 26.
He writes,"'War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.
The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings, which thinks nothing is worth a war, is much worse.
When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannons or thrusting bayonets in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people.' A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice.
A war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice.
is often the means of their regeneration.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when the need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
Now, I think this is a fascinating thing.
We won't get into John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian, John Stuart Mill, the proto-socialist.
We won't get into any of that stuff because I want to do justice to the fine gentleman, which means let's take that for another time when we can follow his arguments in a little bit more detail.
But I do think that this is the kind of...
Philosophy that is very important to look at.
I always start with a book of quotes or a series of quotes when I'm interested in learning something about a philosopher.
And you can learn an enormous amount about this guy and his history and his beliefs.
And right down to the core, you can learn everything that there is to know about John Stuart Mill from that particular quote.
And this is something that's quite important.
It's one of the reasons why, and I'm sure that not everyone is going to agree with me on this, but it's one of the reasons why I strive very, very hard to try and be consistent across the various fields that we dip into here at Freedom Aid Radio.
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But... I think it's important to try and be consistent in all the various areas.
Now, because I have a desire, and to some degree, I hope, the ability to dip into a variety of fields of psychology, philosophy, political science, artistic theory, relationship theory, and so on, That I do try and be as consistent as possible in the wide range of fields that we dip into here in this conversation.
And I hope, I mean, and I'm sure that the determinists are not feeling this way, but I think that we can find a common ground enough to not be on completely opposite sides of the fence.
I think that I try not to have any situations wherein somebody can pull a quote, unless it's hopelessly out of context.
And some people do get my idea behind self-defense kind of wrong, and I don't blame them for that.
I mean, the fault must be mine.
But for the most part, people...
Get the right idea about what it is that I'm talking about, and I try to be consistent with, sort of based on the first premises, so that you can't pull something from my articles or from my podcasts that's wildly contradictory to something else.
Or, if it is, it's acknowledged to be so.
Or if it is, I try to acknowledge when I'm working on a very preliminary theory that it is preliminary, that it's not something that I'm going to stand by until death do us part, but something that rather is a kind of look-see, I guess you could say.
And that's something that I think is important because the commitment to consistency of any philosopher or thinker is very important to me.
It's very, very important to me.
That's why I find it so funny with people like Sam Harris to see that they are very much against irrational collectivist ideas that result in violence like religion, but then say that the solution is a world government.
I mean, that is just...
Funny. And he would be shocked that I would find it ridiculous, I'm sure.
And he would call me a dreamer, right, for saying that we shouldn't have a government.
But, of course, he wouldn't feel like a dreamer for saying that we shouldn't have religion.
Right? I mean, which is going to be more difficult to uproot in the end?
We don't know.
But I wouldn't put odds on either one right now.
But... So this kind of consistency is just very important, and you only get the consistency working from first principles.
You only get the consistency working from first principles.
So when you look at something like John Stuart Mill and the aforementioned praise for war, Now, war is not a fight.
War is not a bar fight.
War is a government-run thing.
War is a government-run institution or process wherein the taxpayers are stolen from in order to fund a war, and the funding is always pushed off to the next generation, almost always.
And so you have to look at this particular quote and try and understand what aspects of his philosophy would lead him down this kind of path.
What aspects of his philosophy would lead him to say something, which, if I can paraphrase this particular quote, lead him to say something like, I believe that freedom can only be secured through coercion.
Freedom being the absence of coercion, of course, that violence is sometimes the only methodology by which nonviolence can be achieved.
And that to me is such an obvious logical problem.
I'm not saying that this is innate, right?
Yes, I know that good health is sometimes achieved by drilling your tooth and cutting out your appendix.
So I understand that, that injury can result in health.
But it's the fact that this is sort of put forward without any sense that it's a bit freaky, right?
That in order to secure our freedoms, we need taxis levied upon us, and we need...
To have a draft.
That's how we secure our freedom.
It's really quite remarkable when you think about it, this newspeak stuff, right?
This freedom is slavery, slavery is freedom kind of stuff, that philosophers put this forward without really batting an eye.
Or, you know, noticing anything in particular that might be problematic with that kind of, you know, with that kind of approach.
And I think that's just something to be aware of when you're reading philosophers, that they don't really deal with this kind of reality very much.
So, he was born in Pentonville, London, in May the 20th, 1806.
So I guess his 200-year anniversary was a couple of months ago.
The oldest kind of a Scottish philosopher and historian, James Mill.
He was educated by his father with the active assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place.
Not a bad group of guys to have around teaching you what's what.
He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings.
His father was a follower of Bentham and he had this explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham were dead.
So, he was a smart guy even as a kid.
At the age of three, he was taught the Greek alphabet, long lists of Greek words with their English equivalents.
At the age of eight, he'd read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus.
That's quite a challenge. Acquainted with Lucius, Diogenes, Laertes, Isocrates, and the six dialogues of Plato.
A good deal of history in English.
He'd also been taught arithmetic. And from 8 to 13, he published in Bain's sketch of his life.
It suggests that his autobiography rather understates the amount of work done.
At the age of 8, he began learning Latin, Euclid, and algebra, was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family.
His main reading was still history.
He went through all of the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in the schools and universities at the time.
He was taught to compose either in Latin or Greek.
He was never an exact scholar.
It was the subject matter that he was required to read.
By the age of 10, he could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease.
His father's history of India was published in 1818.
Immediately thereafter, at about the age of 12, John began a thorough study of scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle's logical treatises in the original language, which is actually Klingon, oddly enough.
In the following year, he was introduced to political economy and studied Adam Smith and David Ricardo with his father, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, obviously, this is a guy, yeah, he's pushed fairly hard, but we can only hope that he enjoyed it.
We can only hope that, but sadly, we hope in vain, because...
This intensive study was not too good for him.
At the age of 21, he has a mental breakdown.
It was caused by a sort of great physical and mental arduousness of the studies and suppressed any feelings he might have developed normally that might have developed sort of normally in childhood.
So he has this catastrophic depression and his depression eventually begins to dissipate.
He finds solace in the poetry.
Of William Wordsworth.
His capacity for emotion resurfaced, blah, blah, blah.
He goes to Cambridge and he follows his father to work for the British East India Company.
After the company was dissolved, he was elected for a brief period as an independent member of parliament, representing the city and Westminster constituency from 1965 to 1968.
This all from Wikipedia, just in case you're curious.
And he wrote treatises on government.
He was the first person to say that women should be given the right to vote.
He called for various reforms of parliament and voting, especially proportional representation and blah, blah, blah.
He's a godfather to Bertrand Russell, quite an intricate web of well-known philosophical people.
And in 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of a time's intense friendship and love affair, and so on.
He died in 1873.
So, just from this brief biographical sketch, we're going to have a look at his thinking as far as war goes.
And I know that I'm perfectly aware this is the briefest of brief sketches, but life is short, and I think it's important to make decisions relatively quickly.
This doesn't mean don't study Mill, of course, but it means study Mill with one eye on the fact that he's a bit of a lunatic.
I am not even remotely impressed.
Myself, I mean, who knows, right?
Everybody's got their own opinions. I am not remotely impressed by people who can read Greek in the original and this and that.
I mean, Nietzsche could do all of this by the age of like six months old and was a complete lunatic throughout his life.
And these amazing feats of the intellect and so on, I think that a lot of us would be capable of it a lot more if...
If we were taught a lot more early, and we were stretched a lot more earlier, but these sort of feats, they don't particularly impress me, but I know for some people, they're like, ooh, that meant he was a genius, because he could read Greek at the age of eight, and that meant that everything he said is true.
Well, I don't think that's the case at all.
Genius is as open to corruption as anything else in the universe, in fact, sometimes more so, because of its specific ability to awe the masses.
And so somebody who comes from this kind of illustrious past and has this kind of pedigree as far as education goes, and family of course, is going to be of great interest to the ruling class.
If they can co-opt him, they're going to be doing very well, very well indeed, in terms of being able to awe people into submission.
And so, in the question of war, we can see quite a bit of implicit premises, I guess you could say, or stuff that is kind of packaged together as a whole.
I sort of mentioned one of the ones earlier, which was that...
The idea that we can fight for peace by espousing war or by pursuing war is such a contradictory idea that to not notice that it's contradictory takes, I guess, a very early education in Greek and logic.
But he says that war can be beneficial in the defense of liberty.
And like just about everything else that's said, From an emotional baggage standpoint, and I think that we have some understanding as to why he might feel that heavy authoritarianism for the pursuit of the good might be considered a beneficial thing for Mr.
Mill for emotional reasons, right?
I mean, his father ground him into the books until he had a nervous breakdown and fell apart and suffered depression sort of on and off for the rest of his life.
So... It would be a little bit hard for him to say that war is wrong because it is the exercise of an unjust authority over its own population, and that kind of brutalization of your own population can never be for the good.
It's all about the emotional aggrandizement of the person in authority.
It's not for the good of the individual having that authority exercised over him or her.
The person in authority will always tell the individual, the receiver, the child, the citizen, that it is for his or her own good, that all this is being done.
Now, what would it have cost John Stuart Mill to look at his own childhood and say, holy crap, was I ever brutalized into becoming this brain-in-a-tank genius, and my emotional development was completely screwed up?
And how selfish can that be, that I was molded into this little philosophical trail after guy for my father's philosophy?
That's not really a very good way to bring these things into being, and it was kind of selfish and manipulative for my father to do that.
If he'd been able to do that and able to sort of figure this stuff out in more detail, then he would have been a long way further forward to the problem of how taxing your own citizenry into oblivion is a great way of securing their freedom.
And you can see a lot of this sort of packed into what he says, right?
Because when he says a war that is pursued by a people...
For an honest purpose by their free choice is often the means of their regeneration.
So a war that is pursued by people for an honest purpose by their free choice is not a war.
It's not a war. War is a pretty technical term.
War is a pretty technical term.
Usually involves a declaration.
Almost always involves the government printing money to pay the troops.
Almost always involves... The enslavement of the draft.
But certainly it is a governmental activity.
We'll talk about turf wars for gangs, but we put the word turf there so that we don't confuse them with what governments do.
So, of course, what you see here in Mill is a conflation between voluntarism and being forced.
So you are forced into a war by your government.
Individual citizens don't declare war, and individual citizens don't pay for the war themselves.
They... The government prints the money or shoves the debt onto the next generation.
And so it's very sort of hard to imagine how since that is the case with all wars in history, that people are coerced into it, they don't pay for it themselves, they shift the cost to the next generation.
Since that is the case in history, and he read a lot of history, so he wouldn't be unaware of this, right?
This isn't somebody who's philosophizing in a vacuum.
And so, it's a little hard to understand how he would make that statement, except, of course, you can look at his own history and see how heavily bullied he was to the point of having a nervous breakdown and not being allowed to see other children, right?
But this is a pretty tyrannical, for your own good, for the good of mankind, this is a tyrannical situation that he underwent in his own childhood.
And he had a lot of problems with his father throughout his life, but...
This idea of being subjected to a tyranny, a brutal tyranny for the sake of your own good, and that it is regenerative and it can be your salvation and so on.
Well, this is obviously his own childhood.
I mean, this stuff is so obvious.
And it's not because I don't have any respect for this man's intelligence.
I have an enormous amount of respect for John Stuart Mill's intelligence.
That's what makes it so easy to spot psychological tomfoolery that's going on.
Because this thesis, you know, war is better than not going to war if you've got something great to defend and it's voluntary and so on.
It's such a piece of bombast and such a piece of propaganda that any intelligent person who was not blocked in some emotional manner, any intelligent person would be able to say, well, that's a thesis, so let's see if it's true or not.
The way you find out it is true, you look at history.
Well, we're countries more free or less free after wars, including the debts passed on to the next generation.
Obviously, for some people, the death problem was fairly significant in terms of their level of freedom.
It's kind of tough to say that somebody who's been killed is free.
And that's not a very productive thing to argue for, I would say.
And so, you just sort of put this forward as a proposition.
But the fact that John Stuart Mill, a blindingly intelligent man, was completely unable to see that he was putting forward a piece of pure propaganda, although he's very much for, you know, we must reject dogma, we must work scientifically, we must do this, but then he'll just spew out some nonsense like this, and not miss a beat, not have a hiccup, not even notice that there may be something awry.
And of course, part of the way that he notices that something is awry, He doesn't notice it.
It's because this is what everyone else believes, right?
Most human beings don't really have any capacity to fight for what is true.
Most human beings only have a capacity to trumpet what is approved of in their immediate circle.
That's sort of the way that it works.
Everybody's immediate circle has different opinions, or I guess not hugely different opinions, but Democrats and Republicans and so on.
But people really aren't interested in fighting for the truth They're interested in getting the approval of those around them.
And in this case, it happened to be a utilitarianist kind of heavy dominance of a child for your own good, so you get up growing with a guy who grows up to be a utilitarian, a sort of a warmonger, and a socialist.
I mean, he's one of the core socialists of the 19th century.
This is not that hard to figure out as far as his psychology goes.
It seems pretty obvious.
And the other thing that I would say about this is that, and this is sort of fundamental and I would say could be argued, but I think I've got some good statistics to back me up, but 82% of what I say is perfectly true.
No. What I'm saying is that he says that what's most degraded is people who aren't willing to fight in terms of stabbing and killing people for their freedoms.
Now, the one thing that I think we can somewhat safely say, and we have an extraordinary amount of empirical proof for, is that most people, most people, when given the choice, would rather die than speak the truth.
This is how ingrained it is within us.
This is how traumatized people are by their childhoods.
Most people would rather die than speak the truth.
And all that we need to do to figure this out is to look at things statistically.
If we look at things statistically and we say, how many people in the 20th century got up and spoke the truth and damned the consequences?
How many people in the 20th century got up and spoke up and said, screw the consequences.
This is the truth.
And this is my methodology.
And these are the facts that I'm using to build this argument.
And this is what is clear from sensual evidence and rationality in the scientific method.
How many people stand up and say that?
Let's just say the 20th century.
Who weren't...
Warped or mutated by a university degree, or publishing success, or a string of fiction books that brought a whole bunch of acolytes to a particular lady, or any of these sorts of things.
How many people got up, stood up, and said the truth, consequences be damned?
Well, I would put Ayn Rand up there for sure.
I would put Bertrand Russell up there to a small degree relative to Christianity.
I would put Sam Harris up there to a small degree relative to religion.
I would put Milton Friedman up there.
I would put Hayek up there, although, you know, was it Hayek who gave us the deduction from source income tax benefit?
Yummy. Thanks, dude.
And a couple of other people, some of the anarchists, right, that I would sort of put forward as people who stood up and did the right thing and, you know, consequences be damned.
Von Mises, of course, would be one of them.
And, you know, a couple of other people that stood up and told the truth, consequences be damned.
So, let's just say, let's be generous and say a dozen.
Now, how many people were willing to go to war in the 20th century?
Gosh, I would say 20 million people.
We're willing to suit up and go to war.
How many people were willing to be prison guards and police officers and all of the sort of petty detritus of keeping the population at home rather than on the battlefield subjugated and down?
Ten million more? Five million more?
Something like that? And so even if we just look at those particular things, just those two particular things, I think it's fairly safe to say that if you're looking for a particular species of human courage, and if we're looking for courage that is rare, then the courage to go into the battlefield, whatever the alternative, it's a killer be killed or you get shot at home or thrown in jail or whatever.
But of course, the First World War and to some degree the Second World War, a good number of people volunteered.
And they all swore the oath in Germany.
Before Hitler put all the concentration camps in, he wasn't exactly shy on support.
So, if John Stuart Mill is interested in a kind of courage that prevents corruption, Then saying that that is defined by somebody who's willing to get up and shoot people and be shot, and that this is the rarest and most wonderful kind of courage, assuming it's for a just cause and blah, blah, blah, well, there's really no shortage of people who are willing to do that.
I mean, no war has ever been called off on account of attendance, right?
It's like that old joke, right?
Gentlemen, what if we gave a war and everybody came?
So I think that is something to understand, and it's a kind of corruption that you can see in John Stuart Mill.
That he thinks that the brave thing is to act violently for the cause of justice, and that is the best thing in the world.
Whereas I would say that to speak the truth and damn the consequences to your own personal life, to your inbox flowing with hostility to this, that, and the other, if you are willing to speak the truth and damn the consequences, that seems to me...
I know this sounds a little self-aggrandizing, but this is just my opinion.
Just statistically. It's not just me sort of pulling this out of a hat, right?
Statistically, there's tons of people who go to a war.
There are not very many people who will stand up and speak the truth and damn the consequences, and most of those who do end up getting it wrong in pretty significant areas.
Pretty, pretty, pretty significant areas.
We talked about that with Mr.
Harris this morning. So people who get up and speak the truth regardless of the consequences and are consistent across the spectrum of the thoughts that they're working with, Those people are pretty rare.
Those people are hard to come by.
And I think those people do a heck of a lot more good to the world than a bunch of soldiers who are willing to kill and die because someone tells them to.
Because there's this fantasy of participation in war.
What do soldiers do when a war comes along?
Well, they say, who are the bad guys?
Oh, those guys over there?
Great, give me a gun, I'll go kill them.
But that's war. War is not a noble pursuit where everyone studies deeply in philosophy and ethics and then decides that they have identified the correct enemy.
Like war is a bunch of puppets marching on the strings of propaganda to a bloody and dismal and pointless and negative death.
On both sides.
War is not philosopher kings suiting up with the armor of truth.
But the power disparity is also completely absent from Mill's statements about war here.
It's very important to understand.
You can't understand this stuff unless you look at his childhood.
Once you get the power disparity, you lose the illusion of participation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Once you get the reality of the power disparity, you lose the illusion of participation.
This is why people cannot see the power disparities in the state.
This is why people cannot see the power disparities in religion.
This is why people cannot see the power disparities in the family.
Because once you get the power disparity, the idea that you are participating voluntarily, it's ridiculous.
It's laughable. It's foolish.
It's madness. And this is why people will write nonsense like this, where they say, well, yes, it has to be a just war for the good of the people, for their freedom, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, how does this guy think that wars actually occur?
Is there truth that's told?
Is there a moral examination that occurs?
Is there long-term goals that are stuck to?
Is there a cessation or a diminishment of the coercion over the people during and after the war?
Are people more free before or after a war?
These things are all testable.
But this assumption that he makes, and communicates, and we'll get to the communication in just a second, but this assumption that he makes, that there can be such a thing as a just war, that war isn't just a bunch of propagandized puppets marching off to a fiery death, chanting and singing about the glory of it all the way,
That he can't see the power disparity, and the war is declared by the government, and the government forces people to go to war, and the government taxes people to go to the war, and the government prints money and destroys people's income and savings to go to war, and that the government ditches the cost of the war to the next generation, and that the government and the country and the corporations profit enormously from war.
And also that the government has an enormous power disparity relative to the citizen.
No, no, no. None of these fit into his head.
Because he's all about, I had a happy childhood.
There was no power disparity.
I voluntarily wanted to do it.
Yes, it was harsh. Yes, it was harsh.
But it was for the better of everything.
Yes, I was forced.
What child wants to go and read Greek at the age of eight?
They want to go play with their friends. Or at least have that opportunity.
So, this is a kid who was forced to do it.
I don't know if he was beaten.
I would be absolutely shocked if he was not beaten for not getting his things right, because you don't end up with a mental collapse at the age of 21 unless you've experienced some significant pressure, a little bit more than somebody whacking their finger at you.
So, I bet you he was beaten.
I bet you he was brutalized in one form or another.
For his own good, right?
And he was told while he was being beaten that it was for his own good, right?
So, of course, then the idea that authorities can inflict violence for the benefit of the people and that the people should participate and are participating, because I bet you that was the lie too, right?
That he was told that he was participating in it as well, rather than this was just an agenda of his father's that was getting beaten into him.
Like, all of this stuff, if you make up this nonsense about your family, then...
You end up advocating this kind of completely insane position with regards to war, which has no precedence in history logic or the numerology or the basic numbers of the people who are willing to stand up for the truth versus those who are willing to go and fight in a war.
If you're looking for real bravery that improves the population, I think it's worthwhile looking at the philosophers who are willing to stand up and speak the truth.
And that's where you get the real courage that benefits the species, because, you know, we're just kind of few in number.
We're not, you know, in the Bird Watcher's Guide to Social Improvement, we're not exactly the pigeons, right?
I guess we're more like the phoenixes.
Phoenix eye? Phoenix eye?
So... I would say that if he had any kind of understanding of his own childhood, he wouldn't sort of be making up this nonsense.
So what happens? We talked about this on Sunday briefly with the Columbine stuff.
Well, what he does is he hands out a justification for war to the state.
And he hands out a mechanism by which people feel obligated to go to war if they're told over and over again that it's a just war, and it's for their own good, and they are this, that, and the other, and they'll be freer based on this, that, and the other.
Well, what is he doing?
He's reproducing his own childhood to other people.
He's inflicting his own childhood on other people, right?
This is, you know, what we don't acknowledge, we cannot control.
What we don't acknowledge, we cannot prevent the recurrence of.
And so what John Stuart Mill is doing in this particular...
And I'm sort of pointing this out because you'll run across people like this.
This argument I chose in particular because this is the kind of argument that is going on in regards to a lot of conflicts in the world today, particularly Iraq within the United States.
And so what is John Stuart Mill doing?
Well, what he's doing is he's providing a moral justification for the state to treat other people exactly the same way that he was treated by his father.
This is for your own good.
You're coercing to do it. You're beaten if you don't show up.
You're beaten if you don't learn. I mean, this is boot camp.
What he went through was intellectual boot camp.
And now he's inflicting it on other people.
And why is he inflicting on them?
Because he hates them. And why does he hate them?
Because everyone goes like, wow, you must have had a really great childhood.
All those great thinkers around.
You know, wow, you really are impressive in the way that you learned Greek at the age of four months old and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, dudes, that's scar tissue.
That's not something to be proud of.
That's scar tissue. It's like seeing somebody who's had their back stretched on a rack.
Wow, you must be really proud to be so tall, right?
Or somebody who's had their arm chopped off by some brigand.
You don't say, wow, you know, that must have been a great experience.
You don't have to carry all that extra weight around.
You know, isn't that great? Well, of course they're going to be pissed off, sort of in a fundamental way, because you won't be helping them free themselves from their own illusions, of course, which is not a very good thing.
You should be trying to free people from their illusions.
But, the reason that he's reinflicting his childhood on other people, this is an unconscious thing, and we talked about it, and you see this in a lot of different places, when you start to understand this pattern, is that people aren't saying to him, holy crap, what a nightmare!
What a nightmare you went through as a child!
What a horror! You weren't allowed to speak to other children!
You had to study 12 hours a day.
You were beaten if you didn't get things right.
What a complete nightmare existence.
Oh my God, I'm so sorry.
What a miserable time you must have had of it.
If somebody had said that to John Stuart Mill and really listened to him, then it seems quite unlikely that he would have written all of this stuff about how a war in a just cause is really beneficial to people.
That violence exerted by authority can be perfectly moral and result in the improvement of people.
Right? I mean... So nobody said, oh, what a nightmare you went through, and therefore he starts advocating that other people go through exactly this nightmare, because the truth will out.
You can't evade the truth.
You can't evade the facts of reality.
If you suppress them, they come out in some other manner.
The unconscious is a trickster, and if you don't listen to it, it'll just get you in some other way.
You can try and deny it, but it doesn't really work.
It doesn't work at all. So I hope that this is helpful.
I just wanted to take a slightly different approach, and we'll get into John Stuart Mill in more detail another time, but I'd want us to point it out just because we had this conversation that was somewhat truncated with regards to Columbine and the massacres that occurred there.
I also wanted to point out, relative to Columbine, that it's not the fault of the children, primarily, to some degree it is, to a small degree it is, it's not primarily the fault of the children that they ended up in this situation where they teased all these other kids, right? That's just stuff they learned from their own parents and siblings.
They have some small degree of responsibility for it, but it's not primary.
So I hope that that at least helps with that position.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I look forward to donations, feedback, and listener surveys being filled out.
And I will talk to you soon.
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