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Aug. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:50
376 Call In Show Aug 20 2006 4pm EST
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Well, thanks and welcome everybody to the Sunday, August the 20th, 2006, 4pm, 4.03pm to be precise.
Free Domain Radio chit-chat with listeners.
And I'm going to just toss it open wide to begin with.
I have a couple of topics to talk about, but if anybody has any yearning, burning issues that they would like to bring up, either from the podcast over the last 90 minutes or so, Or anything else that they sort of got from the board or anything other sort of related to what we're talking about,
I'll leave everybody unmuted and you can throw something in to the mix to begin with so that we don't have to necessarily start with my rambling chit-chats of which I am not exactly short of material.
So if you'd like to bring something up, feel free to mention it.
Now's the time. All right.
If you can hear me, if you could say something back, that would be excellent.
You sound fantastic.
Okay, good. Alright, well I guess I'll start with one or two things that I noticed sort of on the board.
I was not on the board very much this week because I was far afield, but I did sort of drop in from time to time.
And a very interesting, I wouldn't say exactly eruption, but eruption came up on the board relative to a woman who is a public school teacher who has joined recently...
And she was talking about this, that or the other and then sort of an issue came up around the sort of viability of working for the state or near the state or in the state or around the state or amongst the statists.
And quite a lot of emotions came up in the board relative to this question or this topic.
Now we do know of course that public schools are coercively based institutions Largely designed, if, you know, to use the word designed in a very loose kind of context, I don't believe there's any kind of central conspiracy, people in black helicopters,
putting all these flowcharts up about how to take over the minds and souls of children, but it is sort of an inevitable result that when you have the state paying for education, you're going to end up with a lot of pro-statist propaganda, wherein all of the virtues of the state are triumphed, and all of the problems of the soul...
All of the imaginary virtues of the state are triumphed and all of the problems are glossed over.
And a fair amount of emotional volatility came up on the board.
Anyway, so this question sort of erupted on the board around, well, the schools are bad and coercive state institutions, public schools, and therefore teachers or those who work within the state and therefore teachers or those who work within the state are somehow to blame for this kind of stuff.
And I sort of wanted to give my two cents in it and then sort of talk about – let other people sort of chime in because just my perspective, certainly not – it's nothing to do with any kind of absolute truth.
But my sort of thought is that I can't imagine that this very nice woman who is a public school teacher who is struggling to do her best within the public school system to reach the children and so on.
And to my mind, that's kind of like being the libertarian double agent.
To go into the public school system and to fight to try and get a rational viewpoint across to the children.
And I think that in very many ways she would be doing a whole lot more for the cause of freedom than I will ever in my life.
She probably does more for it in one year than I ever will in my entire life.
And yet there was quite a lot of, well, you know, you have to recognize you're in a coercive situation, you're profiting from the violence of the state and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I just couldn't Quite get my way across to seeing it that way, and certainly could be because I'm missing something important, but I just couldn't quite see my way clear to viewing it the same way, because this woman is not using violence.
I mean, this is sort of an important consideration.
When you look at the layers of protection and propaganda and violence that enclose the state, this woman is not anywhere near the chewy caramel center of violence that the state basically rests on, She herself is not going door-to-door to the taxpayers to get them to pay for the public educational system.
You know, she's not going out there with a Kalashnikov or an AK-47 going to get the money.
That's all handled by the police and the military, and I guess the prison guards as well.
Those are the people who are willing to put guns in people's faces to protect the interests of the politicians and the ruling classes, I guess you could say.
And so I just sort of wanted to float the idea out there that when we're talking about the problems of the state and the problems of violence, that I think we need to be pretty clear, in my view, about what we're talking about relative to people's capacity or willingness to use violence.
Public school teachers are not out there with paramilitary training, uniforms and so on, threatening the general population with violence.
Prison, right?
Imprisonment in the ever-popular state rape rooms or shooting people and so on.
That's the police, that's the military.
Now, I have no problem with examining the question of, you know, where should we work relative to the state and so on.
I don't find it too important a question because it's not like our decisions are really going to change anything.
But, I mean, our decisions in this area.
But overall, I think that it's important to really look at the front lines of violence around the state.
And I don't even mind people who want to pick on nice public school teachers who are sort of trying to do the right thing.
But if you are going to do that, I think you're going to set yourself up a precedent that's going to make your life rather exciting.
Because if you feel that it's important to confront public school teachers on the corruption within the system, then obviously you feel that participation within the state in any sort of direct form, or even indirect form, is a great evil thing.
To be opposed. And what that's going to mean is that logically you're then going to have to spend a vast amount more energy confronting cops and soldiers than you are public school teachers.
Because the cops and the soldiers are the ones who are actually pointing the guns at the civilian population in order to get the taxes, in order to feed the state.
So obviously they're much worse than the public school teachers.
And I guess the only thing that I've been sort of concerned about is that I haven't seen the same kind of Emotional energy and desire to confront people from...
Like when we get military people around.
And I don't know necessarily...
You don't want to be more brave on the board than you are in real life because then it's going to kind of look a little bit like bullying, right?
And so if you want to take public school teachers to task for their participation in the state process, I think that's fine.
But I think that you better be willing to talk to cops directly and...
And talk to soldiers directly about the far greater evil that they're doing.
It's not like if the cops start doing what they're doing, the teachers are going to rush in and grab the guns and start doing it themselves.
So I just sort of wanted to throw that out there that I don't think it's a very good idea for us to be picking on like-minded people who are working for the state.
Because what it means is that we're then going to have to apply much, much more emotional energy to attacking people Who are directly contributing to state power through their willingness to use violence against the citizens.
And I think it ends up with a kind of infighting amongst ourselves, amongst like-minded people, that I don't think is very productive, but even more fundamentally, I'm not sure, is even the right approach.
So that's the thoughts that I had on that.
I'll just unmute everyone if you'd like to put your thoughts in.
I'd be happy to hear them. Yeah, the thread on the board, I haven't been following it very closely, but I was just wondering if maybe the person that they're talking to might have been in, perhaps might have been a situation of not a very high awareness of the Gun in the room,
if you will. And so, I don't know that it's necessarily a bad idea to at least point that out.
But surely, if the school teacher is like-minded, you don't want to grind them into the ground because you're just going to scare them away.
And... And, of course, there is the problem, too, of, you know, we treated the soldier who came here with kid gloves, and the theists we always treat with care.
So if we're going to do that, then to be consistent, we should do it with everybody.
Right. I mean, until, you know, my personal approach is treat people the best that you possibly can, Until they start changing the equation, right?
And then you can treat them after that as they treat you.
But I think it's a real shame, too, because the woman who joined is somebody who's really struggling, right?
I mean, it's really, really not the easiest thing in the world.
Far more difficult than anything I do professionally to be a libertarian within the public school system.
Not easy, and I think it's a real shame that there was a I think it comes a lot from people who've had their own difficult experiences within school, maybe just sort of charging in and venting their frustration.
But I just think that there's lots of bad things in the world that we need to keep an eye on and we need to sort of oppose and we need to fight and use our moral energies to do so.
I'm not sure on the sort of list of priorities, libertarian school teachers are right up there with...
State power of the worst kind of warlike kind.
It's just hard for me to sort of put that, you know, when I sought it by, you know, stink of evil, I don't really find those people coming to the top.
I don't think they'd even be on the list at all.
And I would even say that the average public school teacher, you know, raised within the public school system, went to university, went to teachers' college, which is at least up here in Canada, and I'm sure it's the case in the U.S. as well, is quite the hotbed of socialism.
And never been exposed to any alternative beliefs.
You layer all that on top of the stuff that we've been talking about for quite some time with the family.
I think it's quite a lot to ask people to sort of make that leap all at once or even remotely quickly.
And there just seemed to be quite an eruption of frustration with regards to this teacher.
And I thought it was a bit...
I just think lots of fights in the world.
I don't know that fighting with each other is really going to...
I mean, except over really important things.
But it just seems like...
And it's the same problem that the Libertarian Party is having.
Not that I'm a big expert on the Libertarian Party, but my understanding is they have this very selfsame kind of problem that there's a lot of infighting.
And it sort of reminds me, if you've ever seen the movie The Life of Brian by Monty Python, and if you haven't, you really have to see it.
It's a brilliant film. And in it, there's a bunch of revolutionaries who want to attack the Roman guards and And they get so strung up on minutiae of philosophical differences that they end up attacking each other and the gods just sort of let them go at each other until they're exhausted and then arrest the ones left standing.
I think that's sort of a little bit what happens in the libertarian movement.
There's a lot of some prickly people and some hostile people and of course I'm sure this is true of every movement but I think that libertarianism does seem to Have that kind of problem where people can't seem to organize their battles.
Sometimes. I don't think it's a huge issue, at least not on our board, but people don't seem to be able to organize their priorities of where to apply their emotional energies, I think, in a very objective way.
I think another aspect of that problem is forgetting ourselves and treating individuals as though they are I hate those school teachers because the school teachers that I had were bad, so every time I see a school teacher, I'm going to treat them badly.
You have to treat people as individuals.
No matter what their vocation is, if you don't take the time to figure out who they are, then you really have no justification for your Right, and I mean, unless you're somebody living in the woods and communicating with the internet through, like, carrier pigeons or smoke signals, we're all participating in the state to one degree or another.
We're all standing in various degrees of gasoline, so for me, flicking lit matches at each other isn't going to do anything other than make a barbecue smell in the whole room, so I think that that's something else, and I think it's partly that people also haven't processed their own level of...
What could be called hypocrisy is we all sort of get that kind of stuff too, right?
Where people say to me, well, you got a university education that was heavily subsidized by the state.
You went, your roads, your water, your this, your electricity, all heavily subsidized by the state.
And if people have not processed with or dealt with that ambiguity in a way that they're comfortable with, then I think when we haven't worked through our own potential for hypocrisy...
We tend to both create and attack imagined hypocrisies in others in order to distance ourselves from our own problems.
It's sort of the reaction formation.
We are bribed by the state on a continual basis with our own money and with the money of our children and their children and their children's children.
I think people who haven't worked through that then can tend to latch onto somebody Right, and I mean, if you're...
If you're looking to teach or if you're looking to get an advanced degree in something, where else are you going to go?
Even the private institutions are beholden to the state to some extent.
There's just no escaping it.
Right. Until the International Institute of Freedom and Radio advanced libertarian studies of cross-dimensional disciplines, then, yeah, for sure, you're going to have to buy the You're going to have to buy the acronyms from the state, right?
Your MA, your PhD, or whatever.
You've got to buy those letters from the state.
And I don't really see...
I mean, Christine and I are going to a wedding this evening.
And this is a little bit of a jump, but it's sort of a question that we had in the car.
And I'll sort of put it out there, because I think it's an interesting question.
We sort of spent some time debating it.
And we're going to a wedding tonight, and the gentleman who...
I'm not particularly close to him.
He worked for me as an employee, and...
You know, we would chat and go for lunch from time to time with some other people, but I haven't really socialized with him since he left my employ.
And he has an on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend, who is now his fiancée, who, as of tonight, will be his wife.
And he actually asked us, believe it or not, well, actually, it's not shocking that he asked us our advice.
It is certainly not shocking that he didn't take it, right?
I guess that's absolutely inevitable, right?
Most people don't want your advice.
They want you to confirm their existing prejudices and feel that you've somehow betrayed them when you give them an honest opinion.
But he said, well, what do you guys think, right?
When he was thinking of proposing to this woman.
And Christina, I think quite rightly said, it's not a good indication of the stability of your relationship if you've had this on-again, off-again relationship.
And then when he was off again, he ended up dating somebody at the office and Where I was the manager, which was a huge problem.
And then that didn't work out.
He went back to the girlfriend.
So it just didn't seem to be like a very good basis for it.
And then he invited us to our wedding, his wedding.
And we sort of mulled it over and we decided to go.
I mean, we recognize there are arguments on either side, right?
Like, I mean, we don't really respect the union, should we go to the wedding and so on.
But we like going to weddings.
Weddings are a lot of fun.
I like the eating, I like the dancing, and so on.
And are we going to say, okay, well, unless we get invitations for weddings from couples whose union we respect as greatly as we respect our own union, blah, blah, blah.
Are we going to go? Are we going to not go?
But, of course, the wedding's going to go on whether we're there or not.
And, you know, we can have fun even though the world is not perfect.
I think that...
To say, well, we now must deny ourselves the pleasures of going to wedding to take some sort of stand that nobody will ever understand or know about just seemed kind of ridiculous in a way, so we're going to go to the wedding.
And I think it's those kinds of questions where, in the sort of quest for purity, in a sort of very abstract sense, you can actually choke all of the oxygen out of your life and end up kind of paralyzed, I think.
And I think the same thing is true when you start thinking about state participation.
You try and make the world healthier bit by bit.
You use the medical metaphor.
You don't say, well, I'm not going to release my cure for cancer until I have a cure for every other conceivable ailment that may or may not exist in the world now and forevermore.
I think you just sort of try and take a step forward at a time and recognize that your ideal is where you want to get to and that the existing world That you were born into that you did not choose to vote for.
That none of that is your responsibility and you can't stop living because other people have set up a bad system to begin with.
And if you want to teach children and the only place or way that you can do it in any kind of reasonable time frame or maybe in your environment whatsoever is to be a public school teacher, then are you going to say, well, my only real desire is to teach children and I'm going to do the best that I can within the environment that I find myself, but I'm not going to do it.
Because 150 years ago somebody set up a public school system.
That would seem to me to be surrendering something very good and very positive for the sake of other people's bad decisions who have been 100 years lost to the grave.
So I think that we sort of need to ease up a little bit on our desire for purity in this sense and just recognize that we are not responsible for the world as it was created.
We are responsible for improving I think, if we want to, and if we take pleasure in it, then we are, to some degree, responsible for improving the world as it is.
But I really don't think that we have to paralyze ourselves and fence ourselves into living in trees because the world has been created by...
We've inherited a world that is less than ideal.
That's sort of my thoughts on it.
I was just going to say, I kind of take a more...
I take a more centrist approach to that because you're not much of a pioneer if you're hiding in the town hall your entire life talking about what the wilderness looks like.
So you have to spend some time in the woods and you have to spend some time in the town hall.
I think that's quite right.
I think that's quite right. Now, somebody has written and said, I think it may be important to know if she became a public school teacher before becoming a libertarian, because then it's a matter of trying to pay the bills for the occupation you've chosen.
I think that's somewhat important, but there's no way to invent the history of human knowledge on an individual basis.
When you've been told one thing your whole life, That's the only thing that you've been told.
That's all that you understand, right?
The free market is bad, the government is good, and so on.
Yet, strangely, we'll allow the free market for essential things.
But I just...
I have a lot of sympathy for people who have never been exposed to better ideas.
I mean, also, when I think of my own education, it wasn't like I sort of woke up one morning and thought, ah, you know, I'm going to be Aristotle and Locke and Rand and von Mises and...
And Rothbard and Hayek and Friedman and so I'm going to be all of these great people and I'm just going to speed my way through all of the metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics.
I mean, I didn't invent more than 0.01% of the ideas that are running around in my head and I sort of inherited them from all these other people and if I hadn't been exposed to them, there's no conceivable way that I would have been able to invent even...
That many ideas that I have.
So the vast majority of ideas I have in my mind because I've inherited them or read about them from other people, and it was to some degree a mere accident that I ended up learning about this sort of stuff to begin with.
I mean, we all have our stories of stuff like this, but a friend of mine was into the band Rush, the drummer for Rush.
Neil Peart is a big fan of Ayn Rand and has put the lyrics, I think there's some lyrics around, Ayn Rand's novels, so this guy is a big Rush fan, ended up reading Ayn Rand, passed it along to me, and that's sort of how it all started.
Now, if I hadn't met that guy, or he'd transferred and moved away, or something like that, then would I be sitting here with the kind of life that I have now, the interests, goals, and directives, and marriage, indeed, and career that I have now?
Well, I don't think so. I don't think so at all.
I think I could very well have easily ended up aiming for a professorship or some sort of educational capacity within the public system, Because you simply can't invent all of this stuff yourself.
So for me, to get mad at people who are new to it or who are having trouble with it or who are struggling with it or who oppose it without understanding.
Once you understand, if you continue to oppose it, then you're responsible for it.
But it just seems kind of harsh to me to be jumping down the throats of people who are struggling to understand this stuff, as if we sort of invented it all ourselves and have all of that virtue and can claim all of that moral responsibility for inventing philosophy from the ground up.
It just seems a little bit on the intolerant side and I think that we should be a lot more sympathetic towards people who are, you know, hacking their way through the undergrowth towards us and, you know, maybe help lift a couple of branches and recognize that, yes, as they hack, to extend the metaphor just a little bit, as they hack at us, yeah, they're going to sideswipe us with the machete from time to time and they're going to nick us as they slash and they're going to get angry at us and they're going to get frustrated with us as well.
I'm sure everybody has experienced that With Free Domain Radio, if not necessarily frustration with the ideas, at least with the volume, length, and bandwidth requirements to download, something like that has been frustrating, and I'm sure that I've irritated everybody at least once, if not many more times than that, during the podcasts and the videos, and it's natural.
I mean, there is no smooth transition from slavery to freedom.
There is no clear, predefined path that everybody should follow.
And I think those of us who are a little bit further along in the journey should be, I think, kind and gentle and, you know, until such time as people reveal themselves to be corrupt and against truth and reason because they understand it but have turned against it in this black, evil, satanic kind of way.
That's very, very rare. I've met only a few people like that in my life.
And most people are honestly struggling towards a better kind of life and a truer kind of understanding.
And I just think that it's so important to try and help people along, you know.
We kind of want to be lifeguards, you know, sort of yelling at people for getting themselves into an undertow or a bad current or swimming further out the shore than they can get back from.
You know, people make mistakes.
They do silly things.
We all do. And I think that we want to be more lifeguards going in to help people than castigating themselves for getting involved in situations that they can't handle.
And then, of course, you know, if we go in to help them and they start biting and kicking us, Then, you know, we can make our choices based then, but I think we need to, I think, extend a lot more hands and olive branches first.
And I think that goes from more than just this one post from the school teacher, too.
There's been a lot of that floating around.
I've even caught myself getting impatient at times, too.
Well, you know, it's the after effects of free will versus determinism, right?
It's great to be It takes a little while for the dust from that detonation to settle back down.
I think a little, although we have had some spectacular sunsets as a result.
But I think that that issue was the first time that people had violent disagreements of opinion on the Free Debate Radio Board.
And so I think that has changed.
Not permanently. I just think we have to struggle to get back from the brink as far as that goes.
But I think that that did change some of the tenor of the debates.
And I don't know if Alan has joined us here, but there is a gentleman who's joined us who's got some very unusual ideas which have also, I think, gotten people a bit hot and bothered as well.
So, yeah, I mean, as the community grows, there's going to be people bungeeing in and issues bungeeing in that are going to make people irritable.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, irritation is a perfectly healthy emotion.
It's just not necessarily when people act it out and so on.
Now, I'm going to...
I'm just going to wonder if...
There was a gentleman who was supposed to be joining us.
I actually met...
I met a listener.
And I thought he was going to join us, so I'm going to just try and find the right screen.
It's somewhere in here.
Yes, I do believe it is. I'm going to try unmuting people, and we'll see how the echoes work.
And if you would like to...
If you are the gentleman who...
Greg, I'll just unmute you there in case you wanted to have anything else to add.
And also, if you wanted to just sort of share with people who maybe haven't gotten around to this level or to this stratospheric number of podcasts that we're at right now, I think 375.
If you wanted to share your thoughts, I guess, with me and with others about what it's like with the new video podcasts, which are not exactly time-consuming, tell me whether you think that they're worth it or what they're adding for you.
Well, in general for me, I think they're pretty good, but I don't know.
I've always been an audio guy.
I'm not trying to throw a wet blanket on what you're doing, but for me, the podcasts were fine.
Right, right. Now, the one that you liked, which was, I think, 371, the one about loss, did you listen to that or watch it?
I actually listened to that one.
That was a tough one to listen to, not just for its content, but for technical reasons as well.
It was pretty intense.
I noticed that myself, and it was quite a challenge to do.
The annoying thing about the technical side of things is that When I restarted the computer, I didn't realize that there's two microphones in the car when I have a webcam running.
The one is the one around my, sort of wrap around my face, the one that's by my lips, and the second is the one on the webcam.
So when I restarted the computer, the computer defaulted to the webcam microphone, which is why the audio in the second half wasn't nearly as good.
But it's the natural birth pains of this kind of stuff to try and figure out all of the Ways to optimize it, but we'll get there one way or another.
So for you, I mean, and I certainly know that I would have a tough time sitting down and watching a 50-minute video of somebody talking in a car.
I think Christina actually watched that one today.
I sort of talked about it with her, but she hadn't seen it.
And I think some people have said that it helps them sort of focus because what happens is that they're doing something and listening to a podcast and then they get distracted or they have to sort of rewind and so on, which makes the incredibly lengthy podcast even lengthier, which is a challenge.
So, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what the feedback is.
I don't mind doing the videos at all, but it certainly is quite an additional time requirement relative to just doing – boy, just doing the podcast now seems like almost having a vacation.
Doing the videos is quite a bit longer.
Right, because you've got to do all the processing after the fact and you've got to try and get that gigantic file uploaded and all of that.
Plus the setup time at the beginning now, too, the right lighting and positioning the camera and all that jazz work.
With the podcast, it's just, you know, point the microphone and go, right?
Right, right, absolutely. So here, somebody is saying, the videos are pretty interesting, but I can't listen to them while I do other stuff.
Well, actually, you can, but you just can't watch them.
Oh, there's an annoying amount of little detail correction, isn't there?
So the video and audio release at the same time work well for me.
I find the videos from home a bit more useful than the car ones.
Not on my audio iPod.
Oh, that's right. You know, actually, though, you don't get the WMV files because you can actually download programs to extract the audio from the video and blah, blah, blah, but I guess it doesn't really matter if you can't get the actual source files, but...
Yeah, I know what you mean. I think that the car ones are kind of interesting to me.
It almost looks like a pilot or something.
And it's quite fascinating for me to see the number of times that I gesture with both hands while supposedly driving a car.
And it also, as I mentioned recently, it's quite fascinating to me to see how I seem to be going pretty much three or four kilometers an hour on the highway, because every car in the known universe, and I think a couple of guys in walkers and one turtle, I'll keep plugging away.
I think for the younger people, there seems to be some interest in it, but I'll certainly see.
It actually does allow me to track a little bit more easily how many times they get watched, which is a little tougher to do now that I have the old virtual server.
I'll keep going for a little while and see if there's a big thing.
I think for a lot of people, I think they'll watch one just because they're curious to see how the podcasts are done.
But I don't think it's going to be a particularly regular thing for a lot of people.
I did have one comment on the content.
You were saying in the podcast about how life is a constant process of saying goodbye, and there are these...
Little mini-deaths that we go through constantly throughout our lives.
Life is learning how to cope with those mini-deaths as sort of preparation for the big one at the end.
It just occurred to me that I don't necessarily see the process as a continuous death So much as it is a sort of recycling.
To use your own little metaphors, with every mini death, there's a mini life that rises in its place.
With every minute that falls away, we have another minute that's given to us in its place.
To me, life is more like a circular process of continuous change, of continuous rebirth.
I do understand what you mean, and I certainly agree with you from a biological or global perspective, but I think for the losses that we experience as individuals, Often there's not as much, at least I don't think there's as much to replace it.
Like when we get older, we sort of get into our 60s and 70s and our old friends begin to die off.
It's not like we then get new old friends to replace them.
So I agree with you that there certainly is obviously a cyclical element.
Perhaps you'd like to join me in the Circle of Life song from Lion King in just a moment.
I'll take the falsetto. Actually, no, I'll take the soprano.
Why not? But I think that on an individual level...
That there's not that same level of cycling.
I think that there is quite a bit of loss.
When you're younger, there's more cycling.
A friend moves away when you're in grade four or five.
You sort of get a new friend, and that's the friend can sort of...
But I think as we get older, I think that the losses begin to outweigh...
Like, the stuff falling away begins to outweigh the stuff that's coming up that's new.
Okay, I can kind of see that.
I didn't mean to go cliché with it either, but...
It just seems to me like every time I decide to stop doing something, that there's always something else that I start doing in its place.
Every time I decide to push something out of my life, I'm pulling something else into it.
Right, so for you, the ecstasy sort of replaced the cocaine, right?
Right. It's a bit sort of like whenever something moves away, something else comes along that's new.
So you're sort of transferring addictions from one thing to another, is that?
Oh, exactly. Is that too much around the personal emails that you sent me?
Maybe we should not talk about this publicly.
Right, right. I go from Advil to Motrin.
Right, absolutely.
Oh, okay. By the by.
By the by. I don't know if I've mentioned this.
I'm a little bit of a speed freak, and I know that this sounds not so good in the conversation related to hard drugs.
But I did try see-doing for the first time this last week.
And boy, those things could really kick.
If you get a chance to try it, Christina and I got up to 60 miles an hour on the lake before running out of lake.
It was really cool. And if you get a chance to do it, just by the by, I was up in Muskoka, which is about two hours north of Toronto.
And we stayed in a cabin by a lake, and we sort of did canoeing and all that kind of stuff.
But boy, the sidooing is quite a kick.
I haven't really felt that kind of speed before, except maybe parachuting, right?
Which is, you don't get to feel it for too long because you're too busy screaming and, you know, calling out for your ancestors to save you.
But if you do get a chance to try that sidooing, it's like the sort of skidoo on the water.
It's pretty cool. And then Christina took over and actually managed to hit...
I think about 75% of light speed, which was really kind of cool.
My cheeks were flapping like an astronaut in a centrifuge.
It was really neat. Yeah, the first time I ever got onto one of those, I was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico the day before a major storm blew in.
So I pretty much spent the entire time on the thing praying for my life.
Yeah, we hit some fairly good chop, which was quite exciting.
We actually, well, we did horseback riding, and then we did mountain biking, and then we did this thing.
So we were walking like, kind of bow-legged by the end of the time.
But yeah, we hit some real sort of whap, whap, whap, kind of hitting the wake of certain things, which was quite exciting.
But yeah, it was pretty neat.
I've done ATVing and motorbiking before.
And skidooing, but nothing really hit the kind of speed that these things can get, because you're just flat on the lake going.
I just didn't realize they went that fast.
It was kind of neat. Yeah, they're pretty amazing.
But I wouldn't have described the waves that were hitting me quite as much as flap, flap, flap.
It was more like explosions.
We had old 12-foot swells.
And not being such a great swimmer, you know, every time one of those hits you and you think you're going to go over, you know, that's pretty much it because you don't swim free of that.
No, that's right. They actually had this interesting thing.
They had sort of three cables on this for when that kind of situation occurred.
So you have one cable called the kill cable or whatever it's called, where it's attached to your wrist, and then if you fly off the machine, it stops running, right?
So you don't sort of plow into someone's dock and take out their dog or something.
But they also had two, and they call them, I guess, kidney clasps or something.
They actually do reach back and attach to your kidneys so that when you hit one of those kinds of waves, you can actually just reel your kidneys back in.
And that was very, very helpful, especially when Christina was driving.
Yeah, I probably should have tried...
I probably should have practiced on one of the local lakes before going, because since then I've not been able to get back on one.
Right, no, I think that would be fairly traumatic, right?
It's like outrunning the tsunami or something.
No? Okay. Well, everybody's unmuted, except for Marty Hot, who is giving us a little bit of feedback.
So if you would like to add, or comments, or questions, or issues, or suggestions, or anything you like...
I take suggestions on new hairstyles and stuff like that.
Feel free to speak up now.
Can you hear me properly?
Yes, who is this? Can you hear me properly?
This is Farnu. I have a question.
Sorry, I'm going to just unmute everyone else and unmute you because we're getting a little bit of feedback.
It's just all too technical for words.
Sorry, go ahead. How about the videos?
Check your list thing in YouTube.
And anyway, all the topics you have uploaded after the first introductions and other things are like death and sorrow and deathbed and all that.
Perhaps you should put some topics that are not quite as very for the poor YouTubers.
Oh, like sort of disease or illness or sleeplessness?
The loss of a pet.
Eczema. Yeah, no, I think I know what you're...
Depression or something like that.
Something that I think relative to the deaths of your abusers and your own loss, progressive loss of all that is light and joyful and lovely.
I think just about any other topic I come up with could be viewed as a mood lifter from those.
But I think I certainly do understand what you're saying.
And actually...
Okay, when I was up at...
Maybe this is the next one that I'll post.
This sort of just struck me now.
When I was up at my vacation thing this last week, there was a karaoke.
And we just crossed with this new video camera, which I bought for Freedom and Radio, and we took it up there to sort of get the hang of it.
And I did Britney Spears' baby one more time in a pink wig and pink glasses.
A big sort of Elton John kind of Zoom pink glasses.
And Christina got the last...
Half of it, I think. Before, of course, I was mobbed by all of the fans.
And so maybe what I'll do is I'll post that one so that we can go straight from dealing with the deaths of your childhood abusers to, well, Brittany.
And I think that could help people just understand the kind of consistency and continuity that we aim for at Free Domain Radio.
Hard drugs or military or abuse or a whole other funny topics.
Absolutely. Do you have a thought?
I mean, one of the things that I'd like to do, and I've tried working with this in a number of different ways.
I'll throw this sort of out there in case anybody has an answer to this.
I'd like to be able to do physical object philosophy lessons, right?
I mean, I did the CDs, if you saw the one on understanding concepts.
I'd sort of like to do collectivism with chess pieces or Or even if I could just draw...
Does anyone know if there's a program that allows you to whiteboard and do a video at the same time, record it as a video, sort of integrated, or am I just looking for something way too sophisticated for a PC or whatever?
But I'm sort of looking at doing...
I'd like to do more sort of philosophy stuff, a little bit less sort of emotionally intense and me sort of weeping into the microphone and worrying about mortality.
I would like to do something a little bit more...
Sort of fun, intellectually stimulating kind of philosophy stuff.
And you can do a whole bunch of stuff in just using sort of physical objects.
I use chess pieces or salt and pepper shakers and so on to talk about collectivism and politics and so on.
And that kind of stuff can be a lot of fun.
But I don't...
Because the camera's fixed, I don't really get a chance to sort of move it around that much.
But if there's a sort of whitebody kind of thing, that could be...
A whitebody kind of software, that could be kind of cool.
You could use a drawing and video capture programs through your desktop.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Okay, I will try that. Now, I'm just going to unmute Greg for a moment, because Greg, you were a singer, I believe.
Weren't you the back row of the Vienna Boys Choir for a while?
Actually, I was a tenor with the Waukegan Symphony.
Right, and I do believe that there has been a besmirching of the karaoke landscape in the chat window here.
Okay, yeah. Talk to me, baby.
I don't know. I just kind of find it...
I don't know. I kind of find it dorky.
It seems kind of dorky to me.
And you're a mainframe administrator, right?
Yeah. So when Greg says dorky, that's like me saying really bald.
Just so for one sort of can put this in perspective...
He's not like Justin Timberlake saying that, you know, although I think Justin Timberlake does karaoke.
But just so for people who don't know Greg, it's just important to understand that when he says dorky, it's like Christina saying, that woman's hair is too big, or something like that.
So you can understand where he's coming from.
Yeah, and I guess recently I traded in my pocket protector for a propeller hat too, so.
Excellent, excellent.
So I'm dorky all the way around now.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And we've had a request from Darch for a song, and might I suggest, Greg, that you start off with something by Wagner?
I think he stumped him.
No, he's just going to get a sheet music.
Very cool, very cool.
And when did you start singing?
Who, me? Oh, well, I did it from the time I was about 16 until I was about 21, and that's when I pretty much stopped all that stuff.
Right, right. Well, I mean, all the injuries from the marsh pit, the fans rushing the stage, it can be very intense, and of course all of the flash cameras going off, you know, the limos can get delayed, there's lots of big issues around teenage singers, so...
It was a boy band, is that right, if I remember rightly?
This is getting way too homoerotic for me.
So what you're saying is there's some level of homoerotic that's okay for you, but when it goes beyond a particular level, then it becomes too much.
Sure. Excellent.
Alright, I'm going to, just before Greg and I, well, not so much Greg, before I drag down Greg like I've tied an anchor to a swimmer, I'm going to just unmute everyone else.
If you'd like to add something else, now's the chance to do it.
I can wait all day.
I can wait all day.
I think those tracks are sticking in.
Okay, that's just plain trippy.
I can't do that too long.
I played a song for Christina.
I finally got her lashed down on the beach.
Wait, sorry, let me rephrase that.
I played a song for Christina.
If you ever get a chance to, I don't know, look for it or download it, there's a fairly not-too-bad recording of Queen doing the Prophet song in Japan in 1977, where Freddie Mercury, the lead singer, harmonizes with himself using an echo machine And it really is quite astounding.
And there's a couple of different recordings of it that I have, and it's not like he has the same sequence every time.
He's always doing different kind of stuff.
But that's a singer I just hugely, hugely admired.
And so if you get a chance to do that, that would be great.
And I will unmute you fire new just about now.
Go ahead. I was once at a concert where there was a guitarist who used a sort of recording machine that played it all in a loop.
At the end, he was playing with himself about five times.
It was kind of cool. Oh, it really is the amazing stuff that you can build up doing that.
It really is. Brian May, the guitarist for Gween, used to do that kind of loopback stuff too, but I don't think to that level.
But it really is. It takes an enormous amount of concentration to be able to do it.
and that's true for a guitarist but I think it's a little bit even more true for a singer because you get to you have to sort of listen to yourself stay on key and so on so so yeah do you remember who it was the name of the guitarist?
It's some local guy, you wouldn't know it.
Okay, I will try muting people again just to see if there are any other topics that people have to bring up at the moment.
Alright, well I guess I will just finish up a little.
If people aren't feeling too chatted today, no problemo.
I will finish up a little with, I talked about this a little bit in a podcast today, but I just sort of wanted to point out an approach that I found to be kind of useful when talking about politics with people.
And it is basically, it's the pseudo-debate, I think, that's very important to To understand, in the nature of democracy, this generally tends to be more the case in democracy, though it occurs to an even more so degree in other types of state-evil societies, but it is basically the idea that there always seems to be a debate going on in society, in democracies in particular, right?
So you pick up the newspaper, there are editorials, and you look at this, that, and the other, and there are all these things that Should we be in Iraq?
Should we not be in Iraq? Should we be doing this?
Should we be doing that? There always seems to be this debate going on.
And it really does confuse people quite a bit.
And I think it's well worth looking at when you're talking with people who have opinions, right?
They say, well, I think the government should do this, and I think the government should do that, and so on.
Or they may justify their own position if their position is in confluence with something that the government is doing.
They might justify their position by saying, well, you know, George Bush is who the people voted for or whatever, right?
So there's this idea of debate and voluntary participation within a democracy that is really quite fascinating when you think about it.
Because when people have all of these ideas or beliefs about what sorts of arguments should be brought to bear on government power...
It really is an amazing, amazing thing.
You can sort of ask them that sort of question and say, well, if there's force involved, is it really a debate?
If the mugger is going to steal your money, is it really a debate if he's sort of got a gun to your ribs?
Because I think this is one of the reasons why I don't talk too much about specific government policies in the podcast, because I sort of don't want to even honor the kind of violence that the state deploys against its citizens.
I don't want to pretend to debate when I got a gun to my head, right?
I mean, don't get me wrong.
If they ask me to debate or I'm going to go in jail, then I'll pretend to debate for sure, but given that that is the situation right now, I do think it's quite fascinating.
So up here in Canada, we've just lost our 27th soldier to the anti- Taliban, anti-insurgency, whatever you want to call it, the killing of the Afghanis, right?
They've been... Of course, we don't...
I mean, this stuff's so typical in war, it's barely even worth mentioning.
But, you know, you scan half a dozen articles, you'll find 27 soldiers have fallen, right?
They all say fallen, you know, you tripped and fell down a well or something, and, you know, you'll be bouncing up soon.
But they've fallen, the 27 soldiers have fallen, noble, heroic soldiers have fallen.
You can't, for the life of you, find any kind of statistics relative to how many Afghanis have fallen.
And, of course, our soldiers fall.
Their soldiers are taken out or killed or whatever, put out of commission.
Our soldiers fall in noble, heroic ways.
And they come back and they flag-drape coffins the same way as they do in the United States.
And, of course, we went into this war in the same way that America went into the war in Iraq, based almost entirely on lies, right?
Here, we were supposed to be in this war in Afghanistan in Canada.
We were supposed to be in the war in Afghanistan exactly the same way that we were in the war in Serbia.
In other words, we were there for a considerable number of years, I think six or seven years.
Never lost a soldier, right?
And that's not because we're so good.
It's just because they never went anywhere dangerous, right?
So, you don't want to be...
If you're the cop, you don't want to be where the criminals are, right?
You want to be filling out paperwork.
You want to be cruising around.
You want to be picking up some donuts, right?
You don't really want to be where the bad guys are.
It's the same thing is true of the military.
They don't want to be where the bad guys are.
And I don't know what particular bribery or hellacious stuff is going on behind the scenes that have resulted in Canadian troops being deployed over to Afghanistan.
But what's happened is, basically, we went in, we were told, oh, there's not going to be any violence and so on.
No, we're not doing it just to appease the United States.
We have noble reasons for being there and so on.
And now that people are regularly Canadians, of course, right?
Canadians don't worry about the Afghanis because somehow they're not quite human.
And it's sort of like using bug spray.
But now that the Canadian soldiers are getting killed, everyone's sort of up in arms.
Well, sorry. It's Canada.
They're not up in arms. But they're not smiling as much in a sort of pathetically ingratiating way that Canadians do.
They're not doing that quite as much.
And the support for the war has gone down.
So now... There are all these articles floating around saying, but we are there for a reason, and it is part of our security, and it is going to be good, and we are protecting ourselves.
Well, you don't want the Afghani women to go back to where the Taliban had them before, do you?
And all this kind of stuff. As if there's a debate.
As if there's a debate.
As if the Canadians were ever asked, do you want to go?
And if you don't want to go, you don't have to go.
And if you don't agree with it, you don't have to pay a penny.
As if there was ever any kind of debate about going to war.
As if there's any debate now.
And there is this incredible, and the same thing is true in the United States with the Republican and Democrat, and I would say to a smaller degree the Libertarian.
The idea that there's some sort of debate, that there's some sort of rational back and forth going on, is really just quite astounding.
And I generally would suggest that it could be construed as a rather dishonorable thing to engage in these kinds of debates with people.
I generally don't debate the war with people.
I just say, if I disagree with it, can I not get shot if I don't fund it?
Would that be okay?
Because, of course, the big question in war is always, what are we fighting for?
Well, we're fighting for freedom. We're fighting for independence.
We're fighting for liberty. We're fighting to reduce the violence in the world.
It's like, okay, well, is it then at all possible that I not get shot for disagreeing with this war?
Because if I have to fund the war that's supposed to end violence, and if I don't fund the war that's supposed to end violence, I get shot, it seems to me just a little bit hard to understand how that's net reducing the amount of violence in the world.
So, I just sort of wanted to point out that Getting involved in these debates, is Iraq a good idea?
Is it a bad idea? Is it a war on terror?
Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea?
Should we have gone? Should we not have gone?
Who's responsible? What should we do now?
Should we cut and run? This and that and the other.
I'd just sort of like to invite you into the mental space called, don't get involved.
Don't pretend to debate.
People up here, they'll...
Oh, the healthcare system, the socialized healthcare system, it's good, it's bad, we need some level of three-tier, we need private, we need some level of private, no level of private healthcare provisions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What should we do? What should we do? And generally all I say is, well, can I not get shot for going to talk to a doctor on my own?
Is that possible?
Can we at least support that I not get blown away if I want to go and pay a doctor to remove a corn?
Or whatever, right? Because I don't care about the debate.
The debate is nonsense. The debate obscures the gun in the room to get involved in these kinds of debates.
And you can do it in a very nice way.
You don't have to sort of yell at people.
That's my job. But you can just sort of point out, you know, like, well, I don't agree with the war in Iraq.
Would you at least support my right not to get shot if I don't pay for the war in Iraq?
I think that paying for the war in Iraq is going to make...
My life more dangerous and less secure and make the world a worse, more evil, more dangerous place.
And then people will try and debate you and say, well, you shouldn't believe that or you should believe this or you should believe the other.
It's like, well, but it doesn't really matter what I believe.
Right? It doesn't matter if you believe in property rights when the mugger has a gun stuck to your ribs.
So it doesn't matter whether you approve or disapprove of the war in Iraq.
It doesn't matter at all.
The only thing that matters is, do you have the right to not participate?
And of course, in a state society, you don't have that right.
You'll notice that people don't get into huge amounts of debates about whether Kmart is better than Walmart.
I mean, there's some people who don't like Walmart.
They're always using the power of the state.
They don't really try and debate that much with consumers.
They just try and rouse consumers to write letters so that the state can apply sanctions against Walmart if they don't like it.
But There's not a whole lot of violent arguments around the dinner table about whether you should shop at the Gap or at Old Navy.
Why? Because if I shop at the Gap, I'm not preventing you from shopping at Old Navy.
If you prefer shopping at Walmart and I prefer shopping at Kmart, it doesn't matter.
My choices don't interfere with other people's choices and their choices don't interfere with mine.
And it's just sort of, I think, important to understand...
That the solution to these kinds of conflicts is not to debate other people into believing what we believe, or for other people to debate us into believing what they believe, I mean, other than this point in general, which is that it would be kind of nice not to get shot for having a different opinion, not to pretend that you can have all of these opinions floating around that mean a damn thing relative to the gun against your head.
So... I just sort of was reading this article this morning, and I mentioned it sort of briefly in the podcast that I did today.
I just sort of wanted to mention it just a little bit more.
Because I just do find it quite astounding that there's all of this pseudo-debate going on as if there's no gun in the room.
And participating in that debate, I think, helps to obscure or allows people to pretend that there is not a gun in the room.
So I will unmute if people want to respond to that.
I suppose the same thing goes if we replace your words going to war with going to school then too.
Oh yeah, or the welfare state or anything like that, right?
So people say, and there's this debate going on on the board that I sort of haven't had the chance to look at today around where do we go next?
How do we get there? How do we convince people who believe that market anarchy is a good idea?
How do we sort of give them the road map on how to get there?
And to me that's It's an interesting intellectual exercise, but it's nothing that I would ever bring to bear in an argument, right?
Because, you know, is welfare good for the poor or bad for the poor?
I mean, this is all the kind of amoral economics that's been kicking around for the last 150 years, where people are trying to figure out what the government should do based on the possible responses.
But of course, once you give the government the power to tax and spend, it's just going to buy off the academics to get them to say whatever it wants them to say.
I mean... That's just so inevitable, it's barely even worth mentioning, right?
So the idea that we should base our responses on, you know, well, certain numbers of poor people get helped and certain numbers of poor people...
Even assuming that any of those statistics are true, it doesn't really matter, right?
Because there's still a gun in the room, no matter how many people get helped, right?
I mean, the mugger could give half of the proceeds of his crime to his ailing old mother.
It still doesn't make the crime correct.
And so debating with people about whether welfare is good or bad Is, I think, kind of a false way of approaching the problem and kind of concedes way too much to the perspectives that are completely against any kind of freedom or rationality.
I don't debate about welfare as good or bad.
I just say, you know, could I have the capacity, say, to not get 50% of my money taxed in order to support all these government schemes, but to actually be able to go out and create jobs?
You know, like, wouldn't it be... Couldn't it be called somewhat of a viable strategy to help the poor to go out and create some jobs rather than shovel money at them until they breed like rabbits and get stuck in ghettos, right?
I mean, is there another possibility, and can I be allowed to do that without getting shot, rather than is the current welfare scheme good or bad?
It's just, can I not participate in it without getting shot?
That's sort of the way that I approach it, and it does tend to clarify the debate a little bit.
Right, we sit around and we...
We argue with each other over what the state should or shouldn't do because the people who are actually in the state have convinced us that we can actually have an influence over it.
Oh yeah, that's fantastic.
It really is. Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves.
Basically, you know, it doesn't go anywhere.
It never gets unlocked. It's designed to make you think that you're participating so that you feel that kicking against the powers that be is kicking against yourself in some manner, right?
And that's part of the stuff, to tie it back to what we talked about in the beginning, that's part of the stuff that we're seeing on the board with people getting mad at each other for their level of state involvement.
You know, it's the idea that anybody's opening our suggestion box or gives the rats behind about What it is that we're putting in there is pretty funny.
The only reason that it's there is to get us to fight amongst ourselves about which way things should go, you know?
It's just kind of funny. It's like we're a bunch of rowers down at the bottom of this Roman galley, and there's a guy with a whip, and we're all debating with each other about which way we should go, and we can't even see the sky.
We can't see the stars.
We don't know where the hell we're going.
We're just pulling away, pulling away, paying our taxes, and debating amongst ourselves where we should go, and there's a guy with a whip, and there's another guy Who's the captain upstairs with the tiller, you know, steering the ship.
And we're down here arguing about which way we should go.
You know, it's like the farm animals arguing about what the farmer should have for dinner.
Well, it'll probably be one of us, right?
I just think it's kind of funny.
I think it's something we should try and avoid.
Because we kind of need to bring something new to the debate, right?
I mean, otherwise we're just sort of doing what the libertarians have done or the Austrian economists have done.
The Rothbardians have done.
And that's all been done before, right?
So we don't need to do that again.
I'm certainly not going to write anything better about socialism than von Mises or anything better about the history of liberty than Rothbard.
And I'm certainly not going to come up with better arguments or fictional situations than Rand.
But we do need to bring something new to the debate because nothing that we've been doing has really achieved anything.
We're still accelerating in the wrong direction.
So... One of the posts that was on the board, which I'll just mention briefly here, is this idea that we have to tell people how we're going to get to market anarchy and how everyone's going to be taken care of and what's going to happen to the people on Social Security and this and that.
And I completely reject that as anything other than an interesting mental exercise and would try my best not to have that be part of any debate.
Because, you know, it's like if you're going to end slavery or you want to end slavery...
One of the criteria that people should not bring to bear on your argument is, well, I'll support the ending of slavery if you tell me exactly what's going to happen to every slave and how they're going to be taken care of and how their lives are going to be better and what kind of jobs they're going to get and how they're going to get educated and this and that.
And it's all pure nonsense.
Isn't that also kind of a fundamental rejection of...
The notion of individual autonomy in the first place anyway, to suggest that you should take over the job as central planner, a market anarchist central planner, is sort of a contradiction in terms, you know?
You're saying that those people out there who've been dependent upon the state all these years are dependent because they're fundamentally not human.
They can't take care of themselves, and so we have to find a grand scheme alternative to replace the state.
To me, what market anarchy is, it's a rejection of system.
It's a complete...
It's shucking off the whole idea of I think you're right.
I think you may have gone a little bit too far in your metaphorical description because if you say that it's a rejection of systems or plans and so on, then it sounds a little bit more like the traditional view of anarchy as sort of chaos.
It's just a rejection of centralized monopoly of force.
There's still going to be plans.
There's still going to be ways that people organize their lives.
There's going to be Lots of voluntary organizations.
There's going to be lots of groups who get together to achieve their ends.
It's just that the central violence is dismissed as immoral.
Yeah, I guess that's a fair criticism.
Sorry, it's a slightly naggy point.
Right. But kind of what I meant by that is that we're coming from the presumption that every single individual knows what's best for himself.
And so How could I possibly propose a plan that could be any better than that?
Right? Right, right, right.
No, no, I think that's quite right.
It's like, you know, the king is dead.
Long live the king. Well, the government's gone.
Now who's going to take care of everyone?
Maybe we don't need...
And this idea that there's going to be all this chaos is, to me, quite mad.
Because... There really is going to be no chaos.
And Harry Brown used to talk about this, I think, very effectively.
When people would say, well, if we get rid of the public school systems, everything's going to be thrown into mad chaos and children aren't going to get educated and people will end up eating their own toes and it'll be mad Lord of the Flies chaos everywhere.
And he'd say, oh, there'd be chaos for about a week.
People would start educating the kids in their garages until they managed to buy at the public schools and Whoever got there first, it would be like a gold rush to educate the children.
People would be stampeding in to figure out how to best educate the children.
It's something similar that occurred at the end of the Second World War in the United States, although this also occurred to a smaller degree in Europe and even the Axis countries.
But at the end of the Second World War in the United States, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men were being decommissioned from the military, and they were all coming home, and Congress sat down and said, well, we need a big plan.
We need a big plan to absorb all of these people into the economy because there's not going to be, you know, a quarter million jobs sitting there for these people.
We're going to have to find some way of funding them and integrating them and giving them loans and helping industry and providing monopoly powers.
And they debated and they debated and they debated and by the time they looked up and were relatively sure of what they wanted to do, they noticed that everyone had already come home and been absorbed into the marketplace and everything had been perfectly fine, right?
Because, of course, when people come back from war, they have a lot of – they want to work.
They also have a lot of requirements, right?
Buy houses, buy cars, and so – you don't need any of this sort of – you don't need a central plan agency because human beings are perfectly capable of running their own lives.
And, of course, if people aren't capable of running their own lives – this is the downside that people never want to talk about.
If you say, well, people on welfare are completely incapable of running their own lives – Then we say, okay, well surely they can't vote then, right?
I mean, if you can't run your own lives, how on earth could you conceivably end up running somebody else's life through the state?
If you can't even figure out which foot to put in front of the other, surely you shouldn't be allowed to vote.
But of course, that's never something that's allowed to be talked about.
Right, right. The whole thing is kind of self-defeating.
And to me, the chaos complaint is really just the flip side of the control argument.
It's a fundamental denial of human nature.
It's the argument that we need some sort of controlling external influence because otherwise I'm going to wet my pants and jump off a cliff if I don't have state-run roads and schools.
Yeah, because human beings will starve to death.
If there's no government trying to give us farm subsidies, human beings will literally just sit there in a lump and starve to death.
That's how bright we are.
And of course, if that's true, then there can't be a democracy.
If it's true that human beings can't run their own lives, then sure as hell we can't vote.
So let's just have a dictatorship.
But of course, if it's true that human beings can't run their own lives...
Then nobody... If you're not competent to run your own life, you're certainly not competent to run somebody else's.
In which case, you can't have a dictatorship either, right?
Because then you've got somebody running everybody else's life, but nobody can run their own lives.
You have to do this platonic thing, right?
This republic thing where you divvy up humanity into the sheep and the shepherds, right?
Into the followers and the leaders.
And the leaders, through some miracle, right?
What Plato would call the philosopher kings and other...
Other philosophers had evil names for this evil concept as well, but there's this group of people who can run everybody else's life so much better than they can themselves, and it's not reciprocal, right?
And there's no particular marker.
They have a unicorn thing jutting out of their forehead, right?
They just magically have this power to run everybody else's life.
And democracy makes that even more ridiculous by saying that we can't run our own lives, but we can choose people who can run our lives for us, right?
Right, it's the powerful and the mediocre, right?
Right, right, right. Yeah, what Plato called the silver and the gold.
It seems to also be a sort of a problem of argumentation.
People new to capitalism and free market stuff generally, it seems to me at least, but they seem to tend to think of free market as a sort of a government program and think of it in the same terms, as something that you apply as rules to society, which is kind of the wrong approach and it doesn't really make sense in that way.
Right, right, and of course in the mixed economy that we have in the West, There is all of these questions that you can have, or chats that you can have with people who talk all about how great the government is, right?
And so what I like to say to people is like, well, if the government is so good at things like national defense and running the roads and running the post office and educating the children, then let's have it do everything, right?
Let's have, you know...
If people say, well, we've got to have all these necessities, right?
So people have necessities and those necessities have to be provided and that's why we need a welfare state and so on.
It's like, well, the greatest necessity that human beings have is food, right?
So if we're going to socialize anything, we should socialize the food production, right?
If the government's going to run anything, it shouldn't be education or defense.
All those things are like down the road, right?
The first thing that you want the government to run is the food system, right?
And we noticed how well that worked in Russia in the 1930s and in China in the 1960s and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and so on.
And so that's to me, if people say the government's really good at doing stuff, it's fantastic.
Great. Then the first thing that it needs to do is the food system, right?
So I would say, you know, the government needs to take over all the farms.
The government needs to take over all of the supermarkets, all the food distribution and this and that.
Forget about all this other stuff.
Let's do that later because we've missed the most important thing that the government should be providing.
Which is the food source. But people, for some reason, don't seem to be very keen on letting the government take over all of the food supply, which is sort of understandable when you think, but it's a way that they sort of recognize what it is that they're actually dealing with.
And it's just a funny way of turning it around, because they all say, well, we don't want to do that, right?
We don't want the government to take over the food supply.
Why? Well, because I like to eat, right?
And the government will let you starve to death rather than provide you your daily bread.
And I just think that's another way that I find kind of effective.
And just, yeah, if the government's really good at stuff, the government should take over everything.
If essential stuff should be provided by the government, fire, protection and police and so on, let's start with the food.
But nobody seems to want to do that very much.
And if the government was really good at doing anything, we'd ask it to do it voluntarily.
It wouldn't. We need to have to point a gun at us to tell us that it's going to do X. Right.
And then this, of course, I mentioned this briefly in the podcast today as well.
This idea that we're forced to do something, but that something has innate value and is a benefit to us goes right back to parenting.
It's for your own good, say the parent.
I must do X, Y, and Z and force you to do this and that and the other for your own good.
Um... And I have to use violence or intimidation or threats or manipulation or something to get you to do the right thing, which is complete nonsense.
If it's the right thing, then the child should want to do it.
And if the child doesn't want to do it, then it's because the parent hasn't explained it very well.
Or the parent is totally wrong, in which case the child definitely shouldn't do it.
But what happens is parents bring up their children badly and then say, well, I have to now force you to be good because you don't want to be good.
It's like, well, you're the parent, right?
I mean, isn't that sort of your fault?
But that, of course, never gets addressed.
And lots of religions deal with this, of course, by saying that human beings are fundamentally bad, fundamentally evil, fundamentally selfish.
And, of course, in the realm of the state, exactly the same thing occurs.
Man, in his natural state, is selfish and evil and destructive and mean and stingy and non-charitable and doesn't care about his fellow man.
And that's why we need the government, you see.
So that we can blunt the sharp and evil edges of human nature and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, if human beings are all of these things, if we are fundamentally evil and selfish, then the last thing that we should ever have is monopolistic power over each other, right?
It's absolutely going to guarantee the worst of all possible situations.
Yeah, it's interesting. Just in case anybody knows about this, there's a number of people trying to join the show because it's important to join in the last few minutes.
I did book this show from 4 till 6, but it says on Skype that it's ended.
So the people who are in is good, and the people who aren't in is not so good.
I don't know if anyone's ever used that kind of stuff on Skype before, but I don't think people can't get in at the moment.
But hey, it's always next week.
It seems to be done after 15 minutes.
It seems the conference call ended after 15 minutes.
So that's why it's very kind of low on people.
Perhaps due to the rapidity of my speech, we used up all the available bandwidth for two hours in about 10 or 15 minutes.
I can certainly see that. Ah, yes, we're getting internal error.
Well, I guess, you know, if you're off the island, you can't get back on the island.
That seems to be the way. Alright, I'm going to unmute everyone except our good friend Echo Martlett or whatever his name was.
So I will let people chat to anything else that they wanted to add.
And then if nobody has anything to add, then I will leave it.
Oops, let me just get rid of this gentleman.
Anybody who wants to add anything else, feel free to.
Otherwise, I will wrap things up and start to get ready for my wedding.
No? Okay. Well, thanks everyone for listening.
I really, really appreciate it.
Thanks for everybody's interest in the board.
We're up to, I think, almost 190 members, which is great.
I'm very thrilled. Thanks again for donations that I received late last week.
Have fun at the wedding. I will do my best.
I'm not sure that it's going to be a karaoke wedding, but there's always hope.
If there's a microphone and not too many security guards, it certainly should be possible to, as I like to call it, pull off a Brittany.
But thanks so much for chatting, everyone, and I will talk to you next week.
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