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Aug. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:46
381 Loving the 'Sheeple'
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is the 20...
3rd of August 2006, 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
Yes, I know, we all miss the background sounds of traffic and honking and rainstorms from hell, but I am off this week.
I am awaiting the start of my new job, so we are going to have to survive with just the sounds of me rather than all of the ambient and environmental sounds the world over.
So I'd like to chat today about an email conversation that I've been having with some other libertarians, wherein I must say that I find the level of hostility towards the general public to be rather startling, rather astounding, rather surprising.
And I would say misanthropic, I guess you could say, would be the right way of approaching it.
And they could be totally right, and perhaps the human species is a hateful set of organisms, but I'd just like to throw out some possible alternatives to ways of looking at people for us libertarians, or rationalists, or anarcho-capitalists, or whatever you want to call us,
those of us who are philosophers, Ways in which we can possibly, you know, just maybe, find a little bit more peace and love in our hearts for our fine fellow citizens in this world, in this pseudo-democracy that we have.
Now, I'm not going to aim through this conversation to end up with you in some sort of situation where you have to love everything about everyone.
I'm not really talking about that.
What I'm more talking about is this question, what is our relationship to those who know less than we do?
And I would caution you In this, just sort of based on my experience of being a guy who knew very little to a guy who thinks maybe he knows just a little bit, that there is always going to be a phase in life where you know less than you're going to know tomorrow.
And tomorrow you'll know less than you're going to know the day after.
So if you end up with a sort of universal hostility towards people who know less than you, then you must hate yourself or you must apply those same rules to yourself.
That you will relative to your future knowledge.
That's sort of an important thing to understand.
And this occurs at a psychological level, so I'm not arguing that you should love humanity.
Actually, I'm not going to argue you should love humanity at all, but I'm not even going to argue that you shouldn't hate humanity because...
of some pie-in-the-sky goal or ideal but really because you want to try and create consistent principles by which you don't end up judging yourself according to a different standard than you judge others.
Now I think the first thing that I would say in this realm that may be helpful to you is that none of us have invented anything solely or almost nothing on our own.
Almost none of us have created anything that is solely our own.
Even if you think that, say, you or I or somebody else has had some original ideas, then you still have to accept, of course, that We are standing on an edifice of existing knowledge, and even if you don't want to grant that, at least existing language.
That means that we're using words that we didn't invent.
In order to convey ideas, even if they may be new, for instance, the argument for morality that I put forward may be sort of new-ish, but, of course, the idea of consistency and logic and integrity and honesty and virtue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, these are not ideas that I invented myself, of course, but ideas that I inherited like just all of us.
You add each little sedimentary layer to human knowledge as best you can without imagining, I would say, that something that you create is entirely your own and entirely uninfused with the ideas of others.
Now, why is that important? One of the major questions and one of the most popular threads on the Free Domain Radio board is the question, it's called Fatal Attraction, what was your conversion experience?
And like that talking head song goes, well, how did I get here?
And I mentioned this on Sunday and I think in a podcast last week, that my journey towards this kind of truth that I talk about now was...
Coincidental, right? I mean, I didn't just sort of look through all of the possible ideas in the world and end up then saying, oh, you know, I'm going to really go with these ones because these ones are the most logical and so on.
Well, that wasn't what happened at all.
Of course, what did happen was that I ended up being exposed to the Fountainhead through a friend of mine who listened to Rush, and then I started reading from there.
Now, the interesting thing for me was that the process of falling in love with liberty, I guess you could say, was at first an emotional one for me.
And this is not to denigrate the questions of free will or anything like that.
I'm simply talking about my own experience and that which gives me some sort of, I guess...
Sympathy towards others, even those who've been exposed to libertarian ideas and have then rejected them.
I still think that it's important to sort of understand some sort of facts about ourselves before we judge others.
One of the things that I think is important to understand for me, or at least if my story is of any use to, I hope it is, is that when I first read The Fountainhead, I sort of picked the book up and I started reading, and immediately these electrical pulses sort of went through my hands.
And I really did sort of recognize that I was very much...
I had something in my hands that was pretty much unprecedented.
I'd never seen anything or heard anything or knew of anything like it before.
And I really got that at an emotional level.
And I think I got sort of the implications of everything that Ayn Rand was talking about.
And of course, as a gentleman who, as a youth, did not exactly have the most positive and beneficent interactions, With authority figures, it sort of made sense to me to be skeptical about it, and of course I have a natural, I guess you could say, bent towards philosophy, which remained largely undiscovered in myself until...
I started to get involved with a philosophy that actually seemed to make a shred or two of sense.
I mean, I'd been exposed to philosophy beforehand, I just had never really found that it made much sense to me.
Whereas, of course, when you start reading Rand, there is this glorious kind of clarity and rigor and passion and occasional...
Lapsus, I would say, in logic, but I'm sure that's far more true of me than it is of her, so I'm not going to start throwing stones from this glass house to mix my metaphors.
So, from that standpoint, I sort of recognize in myself that my encounter with libertarianism, or objectivism, I guess, in this case, was coincidental.
I just happened to have a friend who happened to like Rush, who happened to hand me this book, and even after that coincidence, it wasn't as if I understood at some fundamental deep level everything that was going to come in store for me with regards to this philosophy, but rather what happened was I kind of fell in love with it.
Now, did I fall in love with it because...
I have some sort of innate rational streak or because I have a talent for reason or ideas or anything like that.
Well, that's certainly possible.
That certainly could be the case, of course.
And I can't really tell you exactly why.
I can sort of tell you in hindsight, because, you know, it opened up a life of meaning and purpose for me.
Out of the sort of primordial soup of my state education, I actually began to understand a few things that were really of value to me.
And I had no inkling of them before.
It's not like you study a lot of Aristotle and Locke in high school.
And of course the history that I'd taken in high school was all complete nonsense, right?
So the fact that I fell in love...
With libertarian ideals or ideas, or I guess you could say objectivists at this time, was not, I would not say it was a moral choice on my part.
It sort of, to me at least, it smacks of something like, you know, there are certain kind of people who end up Being musicians, right?
And they love being musicians because they picked up an instrument and started playing it and loved it right away and so on and so on and so on.
And I liked also, I was a violinist for 10 years, played some piano, played a little bit of guitar, so I love music too.
I love to sing and I love songs and so on.
But there are other people who pick up an instrument and just find it sort of irritating or annoying to work on and so don't get very far in it.
So the love that you have for something when you first encounter it has a lot to do with the amount of energy that you put into it going forward.
Of course, the fact is that I really enjoy these podcasts and it's one of the main reasons why I do them.
I think they do some good in their own small way, but more importantly, I really enjoy doing them, and I'm not sure that I would force myself to do them, even if they did good in the world, if I didn't take pleasure in them to begin with, if that sort of makes any sense.
So, from that standpoint, not only was it fairly coincidental that I ran into objectivist or rationalist philosophy, but it was also...
That my emotional reaction to it, which was not the result of me sort of rationally going into the virtue of X, Y, and Z, but it was really the case that I just happened to love it for a variety of reasons that make sense in hindsight, but which I didn't understand really at the time.
If you'd have said to me, why do you love this, I probably would have given you 15 wrong answers, whereas now I'll probably only give you 14, and that's the kind of progress that I think you can make in the world.
So... So, whether you got exposed to libertarian ideas probably was somewhat coincidental.
Whether or not you, I mean, I guess if you're listening to this, it's probably safe to say that you did find a kind of electric awakening within your brain when all of this stuff started to come into being.
Probably, as it was for me, it's probably the same thing for you, that you started getting into this stuff and it just made your brain giggle, you know, with a kind of rational joy that's really hard to explain to other people.
And I'm not saying that it's value-neutral to have this kind of reaction.
It's a little bit more ethical, I would say, to have a reaction to libertarian thought than it is to like to play the piano, of which, of course, every...
A crazy, evil person in the universe can have the option to play the piano.
Maybe not crazy, but evil.
Whereas to love libertarianism, to love liberty, to love logic and philosophy takes a little bit more virtue, I would think.
But in its initial instance, it's not a question of virtue.
I did not fall in love with libertarianism because...
It was a moral choice and I had to really work it back and forth within myself.
I fell in love with libertarianism because that was sort of my nature to begin with.
And this doesn't mean that there's no value in it and it doesn't mean that it's ethically neutral and it doesn't mean that there's no free will and no virtue.
I'm just telling you sort of what happened for me and maybe there was something similar for you.
Now, We've also had the discussion on the board, and I'm not going to say that it's conclusive.
It probably won't be concluded within my lifetime, and maybe never.
And the discussion on the board related to this question was something along the lines of, well, when it comes to...
Experiences that may have prompted you, and we've sort of tried to figure some of this out, like what sort of life experiences, and this is in one of the very early talk shows, what sort of life experiences prepare one for being attracted to libertarianism?
That's sort of, I think, a very important question.
Because there are some commonalities.
It can't just be completely random.
In psychology, human psychology is not a completely random thing.
So there must be some similarities that occur which allow people to have some sort of receptivity or capacity for receiving moral or philosophical ideas that are logical and coherent and so on.
And, of course, there must be other situations in life which would lead one to have a less emotionally receptive kind of reaction to libertarianism.
And I'm not sure I could say exactly what they are.
I would imagine that some of them might involve complicity in parental power or some sort of elder sibling dominance of younger siblings and so on.
But there must be some kind of...
Because I can't say that my emotional reaction to libertarianism was entirely based on a rational analysis of the information.
The reason... That I pursued and became more knowledgeable about libertarianism was because I loved the ideas.
Because I loved the ideas, I was more drawn towards exploring and understanding them further.
But in that love of it, it took me quite a while to understand that my reaction was not exactly A universal phenomenon, right?
So when I would pick up The Fountainhead and would read through it, read through Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, The Romantic Manifesto, blah, blah, blah.
When I read through these things, I just felt a kind of luminous clarity and loved the ideas behind them and really felt that my mind was given some real scope to work with, some real organization in terms of my thinking.
Thinking. I became thinking through my understanding of rational philosophy.
It didn't exist in my mind beforehand.
Beforehand, I was, as Ayn Rand described certain people, you know, a jumble of preconceptions and half-conceptions and whatever detritus had managed to float to the top of my brain based on a wide variety of experiences and so on.
But I could not think in any fundamental way, of course.
I grew up in an irrational family and then went through many, many different kinds of public and private school, none of which, of course, prepared me to think at all or taught me how to think at all.
And so thinking really was something that I discovered through the process of reading philosophy.
But again, I would not say that I had a strong, rational, logical understanding of where I was going or what was in store for me or why I would choose to have this emotional reaction when I get sort of one chapter into the Fountainhead the first time I'm reading it and go, yeah, this is for me.
Right? This is for me.
So my virtue, I think, in the realm of this has grown into In time, but I really can't claim that it was virtuous to begin with.
It was just that I loved it and wanted more of it and continued to pursue it.
Now, I think the virtue came in for me, the virtue began to come in much later on in the process of understanding philosophy.
And the virtue for me came along a number of different areas.
The main area was, once I really began to think for myself, then I had the challenge of, I guess you could say, disagreements.
Not that disagreements are a sort of fundamental challenge in my life, but when you depart from the texts And this is as true for objectivists as it is for religious people.
No insult, of course, to objectivists.
I'm just sort of talking about when you begin to depart from the texts, then you really do start to set yourself up for some challenging interpersonal conflicts.
And this is one of the reasons why people stick to the texts, right?
And what they do is say, well, Ayn Rand said X, right?
So a guy I knew about 10 years ago has sort of surfaced, not surfaced in his own life, of course, he's always been there, but surfaced for me, because 10 years ago, I guess, or more, maybe 11 or 12, I was a minarchist.
Actually, it was more recent than that, but let's just stick with the ten years ago.
And he seems to be of the opinion, he's a very staunch objectivist, seems to be of the opinion that because I have changed my mind, or I guess I would say grown in my thinking, away from anarchism towards anarcho-capitalism, simply because of the consistency of the moral principles involved, He seems to feel that I have somehow betrayed my values because I'm trying to live them more consistently and a little bit less out of somebody else's thoughts and a little bit more out of my own thoughts vis-a-vis reality,
and I can understand why he would feel that, and I can understand that he's not having a good deal of luck with interpersonal conflict because he can't question These values that I'm holding on a rational basis is just like, well, you know, he's betrayed his former belief in objectivism and now has become an anarchist and blah, blah, blah, and it's a bad thing, right?
Of course, the fact that I believed something different 10 or 12 years ago doesn't mean too, too much to me.
You know, if you go back further, I believed in Santa Claus, but I don't believe that I'm betraying Santa Clausism by no longer holding to the belief that the old bearded chap actually exists and flies around.
And this is, of course, not to call anything like objectivism, any kind of mysticism.
It's not. I mean, it's a philosophical approach that has had enormous value for me, which I find limited in certain areas.
Limited in its understanding of the family, limited in its understanding and exposition on human psychology, and a little bit kind of aggressive towards the uninitiated, which I've always felt to be kind of like A problem.
It's kind of like a problem. I can't really, to be perfectly honest, as I always try to be, I can't claim that I'm some sort of innately virtuous person.
I just happen to have a nature that responded very positively towards libertarian ideals.
And I think that the virtue that I can claim came in sort of, A, thinking for myself, right?
You learn the principles in order to be able to think for yourself, right?
Like you do scales and you learn musical theory in order to be able to compose your own works, not just to keep, I guess, unless you're sort of a holiday and kind of piano player, not to keep playing other people's stuff and do cover songs and so on, but to actually sort of start working out your own compositions.
I think that's sort of the height of musical understanding.
And that to me has been very much the case.
I'll certainly claim some virtue in sticking with it long enough and then starting to put my own ideas out there.
That, I think, is a tough thing to do and I think took some courage and has taken some maturity because, of course, there's nothing.
That the world loves to attack more than somebody with new ideas that he's quite certain about and has, you know, I think sometimes the attack is even stronger when you have logical reasons, right?
So when you have logical reasons for your ideas and evidence, then people feel the need to attack them if they contradict their own even more than if you just said, this is my opinion, because then they could just dismiss you as, well, this is just this guy's opinion.
What does it have to do with me or the truth or anything like that?
So I think that there's been a fair amount.
I could sort of claim some courage and some virtue in sort of coming up with my own ideas and also in learning how to negotiate in a more positive and pleasant way with those who disagree with me.
That has also required some maturing and some sensitivity and some understanding and some empathy, even in difficult situations.
That has required that.
And of course, I'm not saying that I'm solely privy to these.
Lots of people have these virtues.
I think not quite as many as should, especially in the libertarian movement.
So I can sort of claim some virtue there, conflict resolution, coming up with my own ideas, finding good ways to put them forward.
You know, sometimes virtue is doing things that you don't want to do, and so, you know, I don't feel like doing another podcast, or I don't feel like uploading because it's a drag, or doing the XML updates and so on.
I'll still sort of do them because I sort of want to try and do the right thing with the time and energy and abilities that I have.
So I think there's some virtue in that, but I sure as heck can't say that I am virtuous Or virtue was operating in my conversion to libertarianism.
My conversion to libertarianism occurred like in the span of three and a half heartbeats based on an exquisite kind of joy flooding my system.
And that... That joy is not universal is one of the tougher lessons of becoming a philosopher, that your love of wisdom and love of knowledge is not something that's shared by too many other people.
In fact, it would seem, and I'm sure we've all had this experience to some degree, it would seem that your love of knowledge or your love of wisdom actually causes a lot of people to be really upset with you in the way that, like if you just sort of parroted I don't know, like Rush Limbaugh, whoever.
If you just sort of parented these kinds of guys, then I don't think that people would have as much of a problem with you.
Like, they'd get mad at you maybe from time to time, but they wouldn't fundamentally really have the kind of problems that an original thinker gets, right?
So they may say, oh, Rush Limbaugh's an idiot, you're just a ditto head or whatever, right?
But when you start really coming up with original ideas and asking people to think for themselves, what you do, of course, is you begin to expose an enormous deficit in their capacities that they don't believe that they have.
Everybody thinks that they've got the truth and they're acting on the right answers and with the right information and they know what they're doing.
And, of course, the whole point of the Socratic method is to get people to understand that there are significant deficits in their knowledge that are pretty important.
And that they don't know, necessarily, what they say or what they claim to know.
And that creates a lot of hostility for reasons that I've gone into before.
I'll just sort of touch on briefly here.
But basically, it's because they were lied to by their parents and their teachers and their professors and their friends and so on.
And by lied to, I don't mean stuff like somebody said, I don't know, like their high school...
History teachers said something like, socialism is about helping the poor, or Marxism is great in theory, it just doesn't work in practice, or human nature isn't good enough, and the free market is not a bad thing for producing goods, but it's fundamentally amoral, it needs the government. These sorts of things aren't the lies that I'm talking about.
Because errors are always possible.
The problem, the sort of real lies that I see going on in the world are the lies that is the form of knowledge, not the content, right?
So the problem is not somebody saying socialism is about helping the poor.
The problem is that they're absolutely certain about it and they don't give reasons.
You should believe this because it's true, people say, and of course if you ask people, should people believe stuff that's just told to them or should they actually try and figure it out for themselves, then everyone will say, yes, people should try and figure it out for themselves, there should be logic, there should be evidence.
But the lie, sort of the fundamental lie that goes on for people that is the most emotionally troubling, is that, not that people said things that weren't true, but that people did not hold to their own standards of truth and falsehood, and when confronted on it, get very hostile.
And so, really, it's the form of knowledge that people say, well, socialism is about helping the poor, rather than saying, the theory is that socialism is about helping the poor.
What do you think? What do you think the evidence might be?
And getting people to really think on their own, well, that's not really what people are so much into, who are in the teaching profession, and I include in this parents, of course, the sort of first and primary teachers.
And so it's the form that this knowledge takes and the lack of connection with the people's own values around what it means to ask questions and how they can be logically answered.
That's sort of the fundamental problem that people have.
And if they've swallowed all of that stuff and then you start to confront them, they say that they know something and you start to ask them and then find out that they don't know something, they'll get incredibly hostile because you're kind of awakening a part of them I would call it the true self part for those who are up on this funky lingo that we use at Free Domain Radio.
I would say that the true self knows that they were lied to, that everyone said to them not only stuff that was false, but said it with a certainty that was entirely unjustified, even based on their own desire or criteria for what it means to say something that's true.
Sorry, that's a... Let me see if I can put that in a more roundabout and convoluted manner.
No, no, I don't think I can. But if I say to you socialism is about helping the poor, and also you should think for yourself, you should reason things out, you shouldn't just parrot other people's opinions, which is what most teachers will tell you, then of course the hypocrisy is that I'm just parroting other people's opinions and not trying to come up with the truth myself.
But I'm communicating it as if it's true.
I'm directly contradicting my own values.
And this is why people get, in my view, why people sort of get so hostile when you begin to ask them questions.
Now, I myself, I think one of the things that led me to be a little bit more receptive towards the kind of philosophy that I've spent my life pursuing was that I really had no values.
I really had no values.
I had no real commitment to socialism.
I had no real commitment to...
I wasn't left-wing.
I wasn't right-wing. I had a vaguely positive idea about socialism, but nothing particularly informed.
And so I didn't really have anything to contradict.
I'd never really colluded with people who were in power.
I had no power within my own family.
I had no particular theories or no particular allegiances towards any kind of existing philosophy or ideology.
And so I guess I was sort of that tabula rasa, that sort of blank slate wherein new ideas can be formed without a huge amount of resistance.
So, all this having been said, I would like to sort of mention some ideas that might be useful in terms of you helping sort of understand where other people are coming from and so on.
People do have a desperate desire to be consistent.
Nobody wants to think that their ideas are falsely consistent or that they're saying something as if it's true when it's not true.
That much we can say is the saving grace of the species because that's the only possibility that philosophy has.
Philosophy doesn't offer you short-term pleasure right up front.
It's not a heroin hit of intellectual joy.
It can be a very difficult and unpleasant ride to begin with, of course.
And so it's only because of people's desire for consistency that philosophy has any kind of chance to reform the way that people think into something more logical and coherent and productive and positive.
So people do desperately want to be consistent, and they believe that they are, although of course deep down they know that they're not, which is where the hostility comes from.
But those of us who became philosophers, rationalists, libertarians, objectivists, whatever you want to call it, Those of us who made this transition did so because we took real pleasure in it to begin with.
The fact that we took real pleasure in it to begin with is not something that we can be proud of.
I think that's sort of important to understand.
I think that you want to make sure in life that you don't take accidental features as core virtues.
I think that's a very quick way of ending up with very false and unstable and often quite hostile.
I think that libertarianism has a little bit of that.
I'm not saying that it's nearly as strong as other kinds of philosophies, but I think that libertarianism does have some of that where the fact that we were kind of innately or accidentally or emotionally prior to understanding Drawn to these ideas, that we became libertarians because we loved freedom.
We don't love freedom because we became libertarians, right?
And we're not responsible for our initial emotional reactions.
We didn't choose those to the libertarian material that came across our desks.
Now, there may have been times, as we go forward in libertarianism, where...
We come across ideas that are very contrary to our own particular opinions, and I've received a large number of emails from those who've listened to my podcasts or read my articles or participated in the board discussions who say, you know, you're really pushing me way past my comfort zone when it comes to understanding consistent applications of logic and ethics and philosophical premises and so on.
To which I can only say, well, therein lies the virtue, right?
The virtue is when you go solo and have to understand Things that are uncomfortable to you, right?
So this is one of the reasons why I talk about the family, because people are a lot more comfortable talking about the state and all of the abuses that go on with the state than they are about their own families and so on.
So, from that standpoint, I think that it's very important that we don't take our accidental preferences, the emotional preferences which we just sort of had within us for reasons that I'm not even going to try to understand or explain just now, That we were drawn towards these ideas emotionally, and that's why we became very into freedom, very pro-freedom.
So we can't claim virtue for being libertarians.
There are times where virtue is required, you have to push on despite discomfort, but fundamentally, and there may be people out there who hated libertarianism for the moment they started, and that the virtue is blah blah blah, but I think that claiming virtue for being a natural-born libertarian,
I guess you could say, is sort of like those people who have these unbelievable metabolisms that can burn off 90,000 calories a week saying to you, oh, well, yeah, you know, I just try to stay fit and I try to stay thin, whereas somebody who has a slower metabolism is going to have to work a lot harder to remain thin.
So this sort of accidental metabolic thing is all like taking pride in I don't know, your hair, or taking pride in your height, or your good looks, or maybe your athletic ability.
These are all accidental things that occurred.
If you had lots of athletic ability, but hated athletics in your gut, then you would not be a very good athlete.
If you loved athletics, but had no particular coordination, then you would not be...
A good athlete, even despite your desire.
So you have to have both the ability and the desire.
And most libertarians, of course, have the ability, and that's great.
And they have the desire to pursue libertarianism, and that's kind of innate, and that's great too.
But I would be really, really cautious about thinking that you're some sort of superior life form because you're into libertarianism.
I think that that is a real problem, and I think it's quite a false approach to understanding why you are the way that you are.
Now, what does this mean when it comes to looking at the rest of society?
Well, the rest of society either lack the ability or the desire.
And yes, there are some people who have been corrupted and who fight against the truth and who've become bad people and who understand libertarianism and freedom and logic and philosophy and ethics and integrity and honor and decency and Truth-telling and all this kind of stuff.
There are people who've turned against that.
They've become sort of rancid, and I'm not going to dismiss those people as existing, but to my mind, we really can't theorize about how many of those people there are in the world, because we just don't know.
We just don't know. Of course, as we know, the vast majority of people get herded into their, you know, they get their parents who themselves were educated in the state indoctrination camps we call public school, and then they themselves were herded into public schools and were sort of forced to sit there and listen to all of the drivel about how capitalism calls to all the evils in the world and the government saves us and all this kind of stuff.
And then if they didn't, I mean, they got negative feedback.
If they questioned the teacher, incredibly hostile and vicious negative feedback.
And, I mean, we get hostile feedback from people as libertarians in just general conversations.
What's it like when you, of course, try to question those who have authority over you and so on?
It's much, much, much worse. So they got negative feedback for asking questions.
They got positive feedback for parenting back the same kind of bullshit that they were being told by their teachers.
So, I mean, this is years upon years.
And, you know, they grow up and they get older.
They look upon the intellectual landscape and they see that...
Yes, there's some debate between the Keynesians and the Chicago School between whether more Fremont...
Should there be a negative income tax?
Or, you know, what rate should taxation be?
But nobody's out there.
And people get Nobel Prizes for pushing statist policies.
And everybody who's a public figure, you turn on CNN and all these people with degrees are all talking about how the government needs to do this and the government needs to do that.
So, you know, it's...
It's a pretty high wall to get over.
If you are a non-libertarian and you are trying to understand...
I mean, you have to be kind of driven to get this stuff.
You have to be kind of emotionally copacetic and with it, I guess you could say.
You aren't going to get it from just staring around in society.
In fact, staring around in society is going to give you the impression that libertarians are a deranged kind of cult, right?
I mean, that sort of would make sense, right?
None of the politicians are libertarians.
I mean, I guess there's Ron Paul...
But he's very much the exception, and few people have really heard of him and really understand his policies and so on.
And, of course, he's still in the government, so, of course, that's just libertarianism.
When you start to talk about anarcho-capitalism, you really are on a whole different planet.
And, you know, there are lots of crazy ideas out there in the world.
And I certainly don't spend my time investigating them all because, you know, time is limited.
So, for the average person to look at libertarian ideas, they're going to look really weird, really cookie.
And, of course, our level of passion for them is not actually adding in general.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have it because we do and we shouldn't fight it.
But the level of passion that we have helps them to understand that it's our passion that drives us to further understand these ideas now if they don't share that passion Why would they dive in?
You can meet people who are really interested in collecting matchbooks.
I've met a guy who's really interested in collecting shot bottles.
He showed me his basement.
He's got lined up shot bottles and people who collect beer cans.
And they're really enthusiastic.
They're all over eBay looking this stuff up and trying to get this stuff and so on.
And they're very passionate, but it doesn't exactly translate to you wanting to become a collector of this kind of esoteric stuff.
And this is sort of how libertarianism looks to other people.
And of course the only way to get around that is to make the ideas relevant to these people, in my humble opinion.
You talk to them about their ethical decisions and their level of certainty and get them to understand that there are objective standards for truth and falsehood and that the moral propositions that they believe in aren't universally consistent and blah blah blah blah blah.
Now, of course, most people will say, like, yeah, okay, well, so what?
You know, you're one guy who's ever talked to me about this.
Every other single educated human being in the universe...
Both in the media and just in my life that I've ever talked to says exactly the opposite.
And yeah, you could be right, but you're one guy, and there's a social consensus of truth that's the complete opposite that everyone is adhering to.
And of course, last but not least, you have the concern that people have that you're like, you know, some people call him the guy in the diner, right?
So you sit down in a diner, and some guy sits down next to you, and he's got the answers to all the world's problems.
And he's very passionate, and he's arguing with you, and he's doing this, and he's doing that.
And, you know, at some point you're like, well, you know, I guess some of this stuff makes sense.
It's a little bit radical. But you are a guy in a diner, right?
I mean, that's fairly important, I think, to understand where we're coming from with people, how we look to people.
If you were so smart, why aren't you on CNN? If you're so smart, why aren't you a professor?
If you're so smart, why aren't you running for office?
If you're so smart, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And it's not exactly a totally unjust question, right?
Because lots of crazy ideas in the world, as I said.
You spend your whole time investigating them all.
So I just sort of like to put out there that those who don't have our sort of innate emotional drive and desire and love of liberty...
They're going to face some pretty significant problems trying to understand all of this stuff and trying to make sense of it.
And it seems it's very unlikely that they're going to invest the time.
Now, one of the reasons that I'm talking about this is that I'm not going to talk about who, but I'm having a debate with a libertarian who's not unknown within the movement.
And he was sort of coming up with stuff like, people who vote for the theft of my property ought to be shot.
And we'll sort of talk about this another time in general, but...
I think that is not going to help us very much try to get ideas out that people are sort of unfamiliar with, right?
Because whenever people come across an idea that they're unfamiliar with, one of the ways that they figure out whether it's worth investing time to sort it out or to learn more about it is...
Is there anything sort of weird and scary in it, right?
Of course, you know, if you're one of these people who's, you know, they love the comet, they cut their own nuts off to go and join it, that would be kind of a marker for me, you know, particularly if they say, yes, we believe X, Y, and Z, we believe the comet's coming, and it's got space aliens on it.
I'm like, okay, well, that's sort of odd, right?
But, you know, hey, tell me more, because if it's true, it'd be really cool.
And they say, yes, and the way we're going to get there is we're going to cut our own nuts off, right?
Now, for me, that's sort of like...
I would say that I would sort of back off at that point.
And when people start to say that the way that they want to deal with the problem of voting is that they support gunning down anybody who's ever cast a ballot in their life, right? I mean, of course, this is a bit of a hyperbole and so on, but...
You know, that's something where people might say, you know, I've got to tell you, I'm not really sure that exploring this is for me, because if this is where you end up, like if you're saying, if you follow all this stuff, X, Y, and Z will happen.
If where you end up is wanting to shoot people who voted, then I'm not really sure that I'm going to follow that route.
Now, of course... It's a complicated topic.
I'm not going to try and solve it right now.
But this kind of stuff, I think, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Because you say people don't want to learn about liberty.
Join me on the land of wanting to have everyone shot.
And then being upset because people don't do that, I think, might be just a tad irrational.
Because the last thing I'll say here is that it's important to understand the knowledge that we hold...
has been lost to society as a whole.
The knowledge that we hold is totally Gone from the general consciousness.
And I don't just mean, like, some people are like, yeah, the free market is good, and some people are like, yeah, the government should be smaller.
I'm talking about the rigor, the philosophy, the logic, the ethics, and all the stuff that we're holding onto for dear life through these sorts of dark ages.
I mean, this is knowledge that's gone from society.
For me, getting mad at people for not being libertarian right now is kind of like getting mad at people in the dark ages for not knowing anything about Aristotle.
Well... After the fall, the burning of Constantinople, the fall of Rome, and the growth of the Dark Ages and so on, well, Aristotle was lost.
He went and stayed with the Muslims for, I don't know, five, seven hundred years.
It's like getting mad at people in the Dark Ages for not having any knowledge of Roman law.
Well, Roman law was lost.
The knowledge was lost.
And right now, at least for the last 120-140 years, the knowledge has been lost.
Throughout most of human history, throughout 99.9999% of human history, this knowledge is lost to people.
And the fact that it's available on the Internet doesn't mean anything, because people don't go and search out every single conceivable theory on the Internet to validate it, even if you had eternal life.
That's not how you choose to spend a good chunk of it.
So, the knowledge is not there, the knowledge is absent.
If we say some dark age is about to occur, That is going to eradicate, I don't know, some nuclear war or something.
It's going to eradicate computers from the world, let's just say.
Well, five generations from now, there's going to be nobody who understands anything about computers.
And saying to these people that they're ignorant morons who are totally corrupt and maybe should be shot because they don't know anything about computers, well, the knowledge has been lost.
They don't even... The people in the Dark Ages didn't speak Latin anymore.
There were a couple of monks who hung on to the books and who understood them and had these scholastic debates.
But to the general population, the knowledge was lost.
They even saw the mass in Latin.
So expecting them to understand the finer points of Christian theology would be crazy.
Now, we are sort of the monks of freedom in the modern world.
This knowledge is like a little flame, a little flame that we're trying to keep alive in an increasing wind of state power.
And yeah, we've got to hold tight to it because if we lose it, it's gone for who knows how long.
And so for me, at least when I look upon the general population, I just view them as people who've not been exposed to this kind of knowledge.
And it's not like the moment you get exposed to this kind of knowledge, you suddenly fall in love with it.
That was the case for us.
But it's very important not to mistake the world for yourself.
Other people are very, very different.
Some people wake up singing, have a beautiful singing voice, have perfect tone, and can sit down and write a hit song in 20 minutes.
I mean, I think that was the average production of the Beatles in their heyday.
A hit song every 20 minutes, right?
But that doesn't make them better people.
That's not virtue.
It's not like they're, because Paul McCartney can write a thousand times better song, then it doesn't make Paul McCartney a thousand times better than I am.
Guy's got a great singing voice, he's a good musician, and he's a fantastic songwriter and a great performer.
That's just innate to his nature.
It's innate to his physiology. It's part of who he is.
It doesn't make him a better person.
And for him to say anybody who can't write a pop song that's a hit is a corrupt and evil moron, I just think is...
Kind of vain and kind of narcissistic.
It's kind of like looking at the world and saying, well, this happened for me.
I came across these ideas and I fell in love with them and that should be the case for everyone.
Well, clearly it's not the case for everyone.
And we know that it's not the case for everyone just by looking at the world.
And we're supposed to be empirical, right?
We're supposed to work with what is.
We're supposed to understand the existence and nature of reality first, and then build our theories from there.
Well, the theory, the facts that we need to work from, is that very few people encounter these ideas and fall in love with them.
I'm glad that we have, because it keeps the ideas alive until they can begin to sort of plant and grow and so on.
But the vast majority of people hear these ideas and get freaked out or hostile or feel indifferent or feel bored or feel frustrated or feel irritated or feel negative, whatever.
That's just a fact that we have to work with.
That wasn't the case for us.
But it's not our virtue that we fell in love with these ideas.
That's just part of our nature.
And it's not an evil for other people not to fall in love with the ideas the same way that we do.
It's just not their nature.
That doesn't mean we can't talk to them, but I think we need to talk to them like we're monks introducing Aristotle to a dark age population.
You don't call them stupid for never having read a book when they've never been taught how to read.
And you can't call people stupid for being illogical when they've never been taught how to reason.
What you want to do is try and teach them how to reason, not get angry and hostile towards them for not knowing how to reason.
That's like being Mozart, as I mentioned before.
Mozart would be like the worst piano teacher in the world, because everything's so easy for Mozart.
He just sat down and played scales at the age of two and composed symphonies at the age of five and played in front of the king at the age of eight or whatever.
Everything was so easy for Mozart, so he sits there and he'd just get so frustrated if you had any trouble with anything, because he'd be like, it's so easy, just do it!
But you can't, because you're not Mozart.
That's a specific talent he has, and it would be very unwise of him to mistake his specific talent for a universal value that other people could have if they just willed it.
It's not the case at all.
So, I just sort of wanted to talk about that sort of briefly.
I think that it's a scary thing to do emotionally for reasons that we can talk about another time, but I do think that it's absolutely essential.
It's absolutely essential.
That we try and find a way to be more friendly to the people who don't happen to share our talents and interests.
We do want to help them, but we can't do that if we think that our particular habits of character or our particular personalities are the only virtues and that everyone else has to do exactly, has to feel how we felt when we encountered rational philosophy for the first time or they're stupid because they're not.
They just don't have the ability or they don't have the desire.
That's a very different thing from being evil.
And so I hope that that's helpful.
I hope that this gives you some way of approaching people And, of course, the thing is that they don't know that they don't know, and that's a challenge, of course, and that can be frustrating.
But the solution is not to call people stupid, in my view, or necessarily to say that they should get shot.
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