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Aug. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:00:15

386 Call In Show Aug 27 2006 4pm EST

Moral responsibility in a statist world, and death by overwork

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	Thanks so much everyone for joining us on Sunday, August 27, 2006, 4 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time. I appreciate everybody's time and attention to drop by and have a listen and a chat.
	This is Stephen Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	And I thought I would start off today with just a little bit of...
	A chat about responsibility.
	And no, not the kind of Sunday school finger-wagging responsibility like you want to go to the dentist and stuff like that.
	Although I must say the dentist isn't a bad idea.
	But the question of why is the world in such a mess?
	Who is responsible? Who is responsible for the world being in such a mess?
	And I'm going to start off with Silence is Loud being perfectly responsible, but I'll make that case in a little bit.
	But overall, I would say that...
	This comes out of a debate that's going on on the boards, mostly around voters and around teachers.
	And as far as voters go...
	There's a strong feeling among, to me at least, a surprisingly large number of people that voters are somehow to blame for the predations of the state.
	In other words, I'll see if I can make the case for what's being said on the boards, and if you've been in this debate and I'm getting something wrong, please feel free to let me know.
	But the basic argument is this.
	Voters know that they are arguing...
	Sorry, voters know that they're voting for stolen money from other people.
	And so when they cast a vote in to have Social Security increase or they cast a vote in for free daycare or an increase in the welfare payments or whatever, that they know that this money is coming from productive or other people and that...
	It's immoral what they're doing, that they are voting to have money taken from people and given to them, and therefore voters, not only do they vote for the transfer of income at the point of a gun, which is bad, but also that voters through the very act of voting To legitimize the power of the state,
	because what happens is when you vote, you are pretending that you're participating in a political or a civilized process when that's not the case at all.
	And as Ayn Rand said a couple of hundred dozen times in each of her novels, this problem with the sanction of the victim is quite a significant one.
	And so when you vote, you are encouraging them, as Harry Brown used to say.
	You're just encouraging them.
	And so when you vote, you are providing a sort of veneer of legitimacy to the whole process of state power.
	And you're also, of course, asking for all of this immoral stuff about getting other people's money and so on.
	So there's a lot of people who feel that the power of the state is highly problematic and is brought about or only enhanced by Because of the problem of people voting.
	So that's sort of the position that's on one side of the fence.
	And I would say that I don't necessarily agree with that proposition.
	And for me, the real question is around cause and effect.
	And then I'll sort of say who I think is responsible and then I'll unmute everyone.
	And if you could just check your speakers and your microphone to make sure they're both on at the same time.
	I'll sort of say why I don't think this is the case.
	And then I will talk about who I think is responsible for the mess that the world is in.
	I don't think that it's voters, and I don't think that it's teachers, and I wouldn't even strongly say that I think that the reason that the world is in such a mess is because of the police and because of the military.
	So, I'll sort of say who I think the responsibility is, and then I'll unmute everyone and you can all have a go at the argument, which would be great, because it's relatively new, and I'm not saying that I've worked out all the kinks.
	So, the reason that I don't think that voters are responsible, primarily for the evils of the government, is sort of three major reasons.
	The first is that We, of course, have seen large numbers of government situations or governments exist which have no voting whatsoever.
	So you can think, or political hierarchies exist without voting.
	Political hierarchies, of course, exist in the ape world.
	They exist among the ancient Aztecs.
	They exist among all primitive tribes that we've had some sort of understanding of from an anthropological standpoint.
	None of these things involve voting, yet they all have the power of the state.
	If you look at pseudo-democracies such as Soviet Russia or Communist China, they all have voting.
	It's just that Stalin, because he was such a great guy, just happened to get 99.9% of the vote.
	And everybody, at that point, 0.01% ended up in an insane asylum because who would be crazy enough not to vote for Stalin?
	So it seems to me that...
	The question of voting is not co-joined necessarily or intimately with the question of state power.
	And from that standpoint, I would say that you can't look at voting as the cause of state power, right?
	I mean, if something is the cause of it, it has to be there prior to and generate the particular effect, right?
	Like a match is a cause of a forest fire because if you don't light the match and throw it into the tinder, then you're not going to get the forest fire, right?
	So I don't see that voting is the cause of state power.
	Now, the second reason that I would put towards the argument against voting being the cause of state power is because the question is around the use of violence, as anybody who's listened to not just my podcast but just about any classical liberal author knows that the government is a social agency which claims a monopoly on the right to initiate force against innocent people.
	And... From that standpoint, the real question is, who's going to use force in this situation?
	Well, the voters aren't going to use force.
	So let's just say that I'm some old guy, which to some of you I may be.
	Even to me, let's just say that I'm an old guy.
	And I vote for an increase in Social Security.
	I want 10% more money because of X, Y, and Z. And so I vote for that.
	Well, the question is, what happens then?
	And we all know what happens is, if enough people vote for it, then it gets passed into law.
	Well, I mean, this is in the general story.
	I'm not saying this is exactly or accurately how it happens, but this is the general story and understanding of democracy.
	Enough people vote for it.
	It gets passed into law, and then you get paid out more money in your Social Security, and people either pay for it, or you deficit finance it, or whatever, right?
	You print the money.
	But let's just say that people have to pay an increase in taxes to pay for the Social Security.
	So then you get a tax increase, and if you don't pay it, then the police come to your door, and you get letters and all that sort of civilized nonsense, and then you get down to the real core of state power, which is that people come along to your house and will take you away and throw you in jail, which is that people come along to your house and will take you away and throw you in jail, aka the rape rooms, in order to get you to pay, if Now, the real violence that's occurring here, of course, is the policemen.
	It's not the politicians.
	It's not the voters. It's not the clerks of the court.
	It's not the judge. The only thing that's happening fundamentally that is violent is that a guy is coming to your house dressed in a costume, usually blue, And saying, if you don't come with me, if you resist arrest, if you try and shoot me the way that you would shoot any other intruder coming into your house, then I'm going to gun you down.
	And I've got 12 guys I can call as backup.
	We can, even in an extremity, call in an airstrike.
	The fundamental violence of the state is the cop or the soldier's gun against your ribs.
	Come with me, sir. And I don't see that the voter...
	It's directly responsible for that.
	Because the question is, what happens if the government doesn't exist, or if the government doesn't have that power?
	If the government doesn't have the power to use the police and the military to transfer income from one segment of the population to another, then I don't believe that voting would occur.
	Voting is what? You take a piece of paper, you write on it, and you put it in a ballot.
	Well, you know, Christina does that with her suggestion box at home quite continually.
	I'm not saying that I open it, and I'm hoping that it's not going to be enforced through violence.
	So, from that standpoint...
	I think it's important to understand that the voting does not cause the violence.
	The violence causes the voting.
	Because the government has the power to redistribute income, people vote to get income, and they're not always voting to get income from other people.
	Sometimes they're just voting to get their money back, the money that's been taken from them prior to.
	So, from that standpoint, I don't think that it's a very good argument to say voting causes violence.
	I would say, quite to the contrary, that the violence of the state causes people to go out and vote.
	Because you get all your money taken from you, and you either vote to get some of it back, or the next guy gets it.
	It's a total state of nature.
	And the last argument, the third one that I would make against this statement, is to say that...
	What happens if the state goes away?
	I'm the old guy who wants 10% increase in Social Security.
	If the state goes away, am I going to pick up a gun and go and rob a bunch of people in my neighborhood or in some other neighborhood?
	In order to get the extra money that I believe is my due.
	Well, I've got to tell you, I don't think it would happen that way.
	I think if you get rid of the state, people aren't going to use violence to get their way.
	See, when you vote, it's a pretty civilized thing in your own mind, right?
	You put your little ballot in and then you never see the violence, right?
	Same thing with politicians.
	They stand up in their, you know, the House of Commons or wherever it is, the Parliament.
	They make their speeches. They sign their documents.
	They don't see the point of the gun that's pointed at the chest of the innocent citizen or civilian, right?
	They're not on the midnight IRS raids which drag people off to jail.
	They don't see it.
	I mean, they get it sort of, if you talk to them about it, they don't see it directly.
	So, if you get rid of the government, you get rid of voting.
	If you get rid of voting, you don't get rid of the government.
	So, I think that to say that voting causes government problems is the tail wagging the dog.
	It's saying that the forest fire causes the match to go off and go into the tinderboard, which I just don't think is a defensible argument.
	So, I don't think that we can logically say that the average citizen who votes is responsible for the evils of the state.
	Now, The second case that I'll make for all of this prior to turning the mics to the faithful listeners is to say that...
	I don't think that teachers are responsible for the state of the world.
	I don't think that the politicians are responsible for the state of the world.
	I don't think that even, although it's a lot closer, the cops and the soldiers are responsible for the state of the world.
	I don't blame the average person for having no clue about freedom any more than I would blame Stalin's daughter for being a communist.
	If you don't obey the teachers in the state schools, then you get no future.
	You don't even graduate high school, and these days in most countries they'll dose you with Ritalin, which is going to do some brain damage to you.
	So I don't blame students for conforming.
	I don't blame people who want to be teachers for conforming, because if you want to be a teacher, 99 times out of 100, it's going to be a state school that you're going to have to teach at.
	So, are we just going to have, like, nobody be teachers?
	Because there is this situation.
	Even the cops are raised to believe that they are essential and the foundations of a civilized society and the price that we pay for a culture and a peaceful world.
	And everybody tells them that they're the heroic men and women in blue.
	And everybody talks about, even the soldiers, how, you know, we respect them for the sacrifices they're making for the causes of our freedom and so on and so on.
	And this is everything that they get from propaganda, from their own teachers, from their own parents, from their own community.
	And every time they turn on the media, they see the same stuff repeated.
	And people get Nobel Prizes, even the free market economists who get Nobel Prizes, get Nobel Prizes for proposing things like a negative income tax and a reduction in tariffs, not anarchy, right?
	If you start to talk about a society with no government, you're going to get marginalized very quickly.
	So I think that most people are caught up in this problem of violence and can't see it for what it is.
	Everybody goes to the experts, everybody turns on television, and you never see people who talk about real freedom on these kinds of mediums, because if you do talk about any kind of real freedom, any kind of principled opposition to the initiation of violence...
	You're not going to get heard, because people simply can't categorize you.
	They're not aware, fundamentally, of the perspective and the viewpoint.
	And all they've ever heard is that only crazy people talk about life without a government or life where you really are principled about the non-initiation of the use of force.
	So, I don't think that it's any individual's fault that we've named so far.
	I do have some ideas about whose fault I think it is.
	But let me just cast it open wide so that people can give me some feedback on anything that they've heard so far.
	I'm just about to unmute everyone now.
	All right, I will continue.
	What that means, of course, is that everybody completely and totally agrees with me.
	Yes, that's it, I'm sure.
	All right, let me sort of give you my ideas about who is responsible.
	Well, the basic idea...
	Oh, sorry, Adi, we have somebody who wants to say one sentence, and if you could make a sentence as long as mine, I'm sure that everybody will appreciate it.
	I doubt I have this talent.
	Just one remark that I want to make is that there is still some sort of responsibility for action, even if we don't intend to do harm.
	So the lack of intent does not excuse the action, if you understand what I'm saying.
	Now, by action, do you mean voting, or do you mean something else like conformity or being a teacher, or do you mean a cop pulling out a gun and pointing it at a taxpayer?
	I mean, a teacher that preaches socialism, for instance, or collectivism, or even a policeman who enforces the law by violence, or a judge who orders the incarceration of drug addicts, for instance, Okay, so let me just unmute everyone else and just unmute you.
	I just want to make sure that I fully understand what it is that you mean by this kind of responsibility.
	Do you think that if somebody has never been exposed to the idea that the government is violence, do you think that they are responsible for having that idea within their minds or not?
	I think we should maintain the idea of responsibility.
	We can't know exactly if they have or if they have not been exposed to such a thing.
	There is no real way of knowing and not knowing I don't see how could be in use.
	They could learn later on that they had been acting immorally but There is no doubt, I think, to the immoral nature of these acts.
	But I think that for a lot of people, and I'm not sort of defending the position, I'm just defending the people who don't know any better, or at least who I would say don't know any better.
	There are a lot of people who've never been exposed to the idea that the government is based on force, and when you tell them, they're usually kind of shocked.
	Now, what happens after you tell them is something I'd like to talk about some more, but I think from that standpoint, I'd at least like to sort of make the case that...
	People who don't understand the kind of ethics that we're talking about.
	It's like saying that people are stupid, in a sense, because in the 12th century they thought that the world was flat.
	No, I'm not saying that necessarily.
	Let's take the example of a soldier who thinks that it is morally right to murder at the order of politicians.
	I wouldn't call a person immoral just because he has been inundated with propaganda all his life.
	So that person, you believe it may be forgivable for them prior to having the argument laid out to them that they may have this opinion that it's morally good to obey politicians and defend your country and so on?
	I don't think there is a specific moral value of opinions.
	I think only actions carry that.
	Well, okay, let me ask you this then.
	And you may well be right.
	I'm just sort of exploring the idea.
	If somebody believes that the world is flat and they try to sail from Europe to America, they're going to get lost, right, because they're not going to take the curvature of the Earth into account.
	And so would you say that somebody's a bad navigator if they try and sail from Europe to America and miss because they believe they've never been told that the world is round, but they believe that the world is flat based on the evidence of their senses?
	I don't know exactly what to say in such a case, but I'm sure there have been navigators lost this way, very short of risk to any sort of endeavor.
	I believe that there is an incentive to look beyond the senses in some way, not beyond the immediate senses, I mean, to think about it.
	Your example, for instance, sea travel is already a dangerous A better example?
	Adi, it's inconceivable that I could come up with a better example.
	That's all I've got! Alright, let me just say something like this then.
	Let's say that you're a doctor, and I've used this before, so apologies to those who've heard it before.
	So you're a doctor in the Middle Ages, and you don't even understand the circulation of the blood.
	You believe in the four humors, and you believe in leeching and all this kind of nonsense that doesn't...
	It doesn't make any sense scientifically, but this is all that you know as far as being a doctor goes.
	If you did that now with the knowledge of antibiotics and you did that now with the knowledge of the circulation and the lymph system and antibodies and so on, if you prescribe bleaching and so on now, you would obviously be a doctor who was criminally insane or evil.
	But in the Middle Ages, given that they didn't know these things, you can't apply the same standards based on exactly the same actions.
	So now, if a doctor prescribed leaching, it's kind of evil.
	But in the Middle Ages, you can't say that a doctor is evil if he has no idea that leaching is bad and no idea of any alternatives.
	Yeah, there is also a caveat in that leeches are, in fact, used in modern medicine, in amputation surgery.
	You can search it up, I think.
	Yes. No, you're quite right.
	You're absolutely right, and that is a caveat.
	But generally, the way that they used them in the Middle Ages was counterproductive.
	Let's just say maybe we'll take the example of bleeding.
	Which was very, you know, they considered the excess of...
	It was an excess of blood that caused problems, so they would actually bleed people, taking crucial white cells out of their system when they were fighting an infection.
	And bleeding would just be considered bad all around.
	Only, yeah, they didn't know the scientific method, and they had no...
	Strong way of determining what they know and what they don't know.
	But I think even by observation, and I think there were such observations at that time, and they were ignored, you could see that people who are consistently bled tend to die more often.
	I think that would have been observable.
	I think the problem in such case would be something that religion or something that consistent ignorance of the information.
	Right. Yes, I agree.
	When you lack certain kinds of information, your responsibility goes down.
	Now, I would argue that once you get certain kinds of information, your responsibility goes up.
	But I would say that given the amount of false information that's put out there by people in power and just by the general nature of the system that we have, I would say that the vast majority of people are in a state of pre-medieval, almost Stone Age ignorance when it comes to understanding the nature of the world that they live in, the social world and the political world that they live in.
	Although there is one important aspect in that if we are trying to develop a system that is distant, we should give them a little less leeway on the ignorance ground.
	We should be able to determine if an action is moral or not.
	And outside these contingencies, if we can call them like that.
	Mm-hmm. Yeah?
	Okay. So I think it's important to determine the moral nature of acts.
	I've got it. I've got it.
	Now, do you mind if I ask you a question or two, just to see if I can understand how you view this vis-a-vis your own life?
	Sure. How old were you when you first got a hold of the idea that government was violence and so on?
	About one year ago, so I was 20.
	20, okay, great.
	Now, did you figure that out on your own, or did you receive it from some external source?
	By external source, you mean written?
	Yeah, someone wrote it.
	Yeah, so over Mises.org.
	Okay, great. Now, would you say that when you were 19, i.e.
	before, you understood this stuff, that you were an immoral human being?
	I wouldn't say necessarily, because if the moral nature of acts is determined by the acts themselves and not the opinions, I don't think I have committed a particular moral act, immoral act particularly.
	So if I had, then I would have to recognize that.
	I would have had to recognize it.
	Okay, I understand.
	I understand. Now, when you think back to the time that you did not have these ideas, do you think that if you had not had these ideas, or not had exposure to these ideas, that you may have ended up doing immoral actions while thinking that they were moral actions?
	I think probably I would have.
	Okay. Now, do you think that if you had not had exposure to these ideas and you had performed immoral actions over the course of your life without believing that they were immoral, or without knowing that they were immoral, that you would be responsible in the same way that you would be now?
	I believe I would have.
	So you would be mistaken?
	Yeah.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Although, yeah, I will have to ponder this idea, but I think I would have.
	I would have regretted it later on, but it could not have been changed.
	So that's one fact.
	Okay. No, I think that's very honestly put, and I think that I certainly respect that answer.
	I think it is an interesting question.
	I do have some opinions about it, but you all have no shortage of my opinions.
	I'm just going to unmute everybody.
	And if you would like to talk about this in more detail, you can speak up now if you'd like.
	Would anyone else like to add something to this?
	Maybe the person who's trapped in the dishwasher?
	Am I unmuted?
	Yep, let me just mute everyone and unmute you.
	Yeah, sorry, just for those who have not met Greg yet, he's a regular contributor to these Sunday afternoons, but he had to, I think he just put in his application to become a cop, so he was a little bit late today.
	But Greg, if you'd like to take that away, you might be able to bring something pretty salient to the debate.
	Well, you were talking about assigning responsibility and basically ignorance.
	And while we couldn't call Eddie immoral while he didn't understand, I don't see how we couldn't call him immoral If once he'd taken the time to understand what he was reading over at Mises and what he's listening to here,
	your podcast, and then willfully refusing to accept it, I don't understand how we couldn't assign the responsibility for that to him and not to Mises or to you or to the people who are explaining this to him.
	Right. So if it was me, for instance, and I came across this stuff and I read it and I understood it and I said, ah, this is crap.
	I'm going to keep right on believing what I believe, even though I know it's irrational.
	You know, how is that the teacher's fault?
	Well, no, I fully understand, but I think that we're talking about the third possibility, right?
	Now, the first possibility is somebody who's never come in contact with any rational ideas about freedom, but swim in a sea of state propaganda and have no idea.
	Like, they're in the matrix, right?
	We could use the...
	Pop your popular culture shorthand here, right?
	They're in the matrix. They have no idea that they're in the matrix, right?
	So that somebody, I would argue, does not have a strong set of moral responsibilities in the matter of defending rationality, freedom, ethics, and being logical, and so on.
	It's like asking Stone Age Neanderthals, why is it that you people are so stupid that you haven't figured out that the world is round, right?
	And then, of course, they just give you those blank, furry-eyed stares because...
	They don't have really good language skills.
	But anyway, we can have the Neanderthal discussion another time.
	But that's sort of the first situation.
	Now, the second situation is somebody who's had exposure to the ideas and accepted them.
	And the third is somebody who's had exposure to the ideas and not accepted them.
	And so there's sort of three conditions here.
	And my argument is to say that the vast majority of people are in category numero uno, for a Spanish listener, That they have not had exposure to the ideas, and then I would say, saying that they are then at fault for the situation of the world, I think is not accurate.
	Right, well, that I'd agree with, but if we once try to explain this to them, and they refuse to acknowledge it, I mean, of course it takes time to do that, but If they still refuse to acknowledge it,
	then I don't see why it wouldn't be reasonable to harbor some hostility toward that person for refusing to acknowledge reason.
	Oh, absolutely. Completely.
	It's like the people who disagree with me in any way, shape, or form.
	It's stone evil. Stone evil.
	This includes Christina sometimes.
	But, no, I totally understand and agree with you.
	And the only reason that I sort of argue for the first case is that, you know, as I mentioned, I just happened to have a friend who liked the band Rush, and he actually moved away for a while and then moved back.
	And of course, this is how I ended up picking up the Fountainhead.
	It's not likely that I would have ended up coming in.
	So for me, there's this totally random fork in the road.
	And in one, if this guy didn't happen to move back or like the band Rush or pick up the Fountainhead, then I'm spiraling into a pit of pure evil because this guy just didn't happen to like a particular rock band.
	And on the other hand, because he did like this rock band, I'm now a paragon of glowing virtue.
	And that just seems a little bit random to me, and not something that I would...
	Because I'm actually as heck didn't invent just about everything that's on the podcast is, you know, cribbed from somebody else.
	So I can't really say that...
	I'm this great guy because I've invented all this philosophy.
	99.9% of what I get, I get from other people.
	And that all came from this initial situation where this guy handed me a book and said, oh yeah, the drummer in the band is really into this writer.
	Maybe you should have a read. I liked it.
	So I guess that's my only concern, that I don't want to look back at my life and say, due to this totally random situation, or like Adi who ended up, because he was in a, I think a UN simulation, ended up getting involved in Mises.
	It's just so random.
	Like the lightning strikes you and you're a moral human being and the lightning lands two feet to the left and you're evil.
	And that's just something that I was kind of surprised when everyone talked about the evils of voters.
	I just thought it seemed like we were not having the right kind of humility about the kind of lucky chance that we had in terms of the material that we've been exposed to.
	Well, I mean, put in those terms, sure, but I don't necessarily see it as, I don't know, it's hard to put this into words, but I don't see it necessarily as entirely random.
	This stuff isn't just arbitrarily falling out of the sky.
	There are people who are doing their best to get it out there, but it's largely being suppressed by everyone else around them.
	And so it takes a certain amount of effort and motivation in the first place to find it.
	Yes, absolutely. It's not like you're just walking along on the street and all of a sudden, you know, speaking of liberty falls out of the sky and hits you in the head.
	Right, it's more like an email.
	No, I absolutely agree that it does take some effort to sort of try and find it or fill it out or have what you will.
	And once – but the other thing too is there's lots of people out there in the libertarian world, some of whom are going to run at you.
	Like, I mean, I try to sort of be vaguely inviting and try and make people enjoy sort of the conversation.
	But there are a lot of people out there and there are some people on our board itself.
	There are some people who are out there who are, oh, you voted?
	You're evil. Right?
	I mean, the way that people jumped all over this poor public school teacher, I thought was a bit sort of mobbish, I guess you could say, or lynchy.
	And that's sort of my major concern, that if you just, like, let's say that you get exposed to libertarian ideas...
	But it's someone who says, oh, you're a public school teacher, you're a tool of the evil fascist masses, and you are indoctrinating the children, and you are stone evil, and blah blah blah.
	I'm not sure that I could really blame somebody for saying, you know, I might not want to pursue these ideas too, too much, given that they define me without asking any questions as Stone Evil.
	I'm just sort of saying that's an example of how somebody may be exposed to the ideas but not have much of a motivation to go further into understanding them.
	Right, but there's still the...
	There's still the need to point out the contradiction, I think.
	I mean, it's only fair to say that without being hot, I guess, how can I say this?
	You're trying to explain to somebody that what they're doing, whether they realize it or not, is At least to some extent, an implicit approval of Of state power,
	right? So you go to become a soldier or a cop or a school teacher or a bureaucrat or a regulatory inspector or something else, you're implicitly, in doing so, agreeing with the institution that you're getting involved with, aren't you?
	Well, that's a very interesting question.
	I can't sort of say that I have a clear answer, but there's sort of two things I would respond to that.
	And if you want to add something to this other than Greg and I, just put it in the chat and maybe Christina will let me know if she's monitoring the chat.
	The first thing that I would say is the initiation of force is the primary evil in any kind of rational moral philosophy, and I don't see how the school teacher is initiating any force.
	The second is I don't believe that there's any core evil called approving an evil institution, right?
	So if I say, well, I think the mafia is great, I don't think that I can be thrown in jail for that, right?
	I mean, it's the people who are out there actually pulling the trigger and so on who are the evil people.
	If I am, I don't know, like a skinhead who likes Nazism, but I don't do anything wrong, surely that's allowed, right?
	What if you go up to your local kapo and say, hey, how can I get in on this?
	Well, I would say that the question is, what does get in on this mean?
	Does it mean that I want to mow your lawn?
	Well, I don't see that the mafia guy hiring someone to mow his lawn is necessary.
	The guy who mows his lawn is evil.
	The guy who delivers his newspaper is not evil.
	The guy who fixes his car is not evil.
	The evil people are the ones pulling the triggers and busting the kneecaps, as far as I can see.
	But if you say, I want to get in on this, like, give me a bat, I want to go bust someone's kneecaps, then yeah, for sure, you've crossed over.
	But, I mean, there were some public school teachers with bats when I grew up, but they were mostly just hitting fly balls.
	Okay, then participation at the voter level is equivalent to the guy mowing the local capo's lawn.
	Well, I wouldn't even say it's that bad, because the guy mowing the lawn is getting directly pressed into his hands money that comes from the proceeds of a crime.
	So you could, I think, make a case, and it's a complicated case to make, but I'll just touch on it briefly here.
	You could say that if the mafia guy steals $10,000 from someone and then gives $100 to some kid to mow his lawn, that the kid might have to return the money because the money was stolen.
	You could make a case for that kind of restitution.
	But, of course, in the world of democracy, there's almost no conceivable way to trace the flow of money.
	So I would say that somebody who votes may be less culpable than somebody who mows the capo's lawn.
	but he's still participating in the same kind of behavior where he's seeking to have pressed into his hand money that was gotten from an immoral act.
	That's certainly true, but he is both a recipient and a victim of that same immoral act, right?
	Because voters have money taken away from them throughout their lives at the point of a gun as well.
	So to me, it's sort of like if you have the local mafia guy comes and steals all of your money, like give me 50% protection money or I'll burn down your store – And then he holds a barbecue.
	Might you not go to get a free meal?
	I mean, the guy's taking half your money.
	I mean, this is an extreme example, and I'm sorry that it's a bit sort of stacked.
	But a voter, if he's sort of outside the system and just generally pillaging and taking everything, then I think you could make a stronger case for that.
	But the voter is a victim as well.
	The voter gets all his money stripped from him at the point of a gun as well.
	And the voter doesn't have a choice about that.
	But even if we say that the voter is evil, he's still less evil than the guy pointing a gun at the citizens.
	Because if the initiation of the use of force is the primeval in a moral philosophy, then the people actually pointing their guns at the citizens to collect the taxes are far, far worse than the voter.
	I mean, would you agree with that?
	I guess in terms of the severity of the outcome and the immediacy of the act, I guess I would agree that it's different in degree, but I don't know if I would agree that it's different in kind.
	Different in kind. Okay, go for it.
	Because anybody along the chain could simply just decide to stop participating.
	From the voter all the way on up to the cops and the soldiers.
	And that would pretty much break the chain.
	It would break the process. Sorry, can I just interrupt you?
	I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying here.
	So, I mean, there's politicians, there's bureaucrats, there's teachers, there's cops, and there's all these people sort of involved in this transfer of the property or recipients of it or managing it or whatever, right?
	And if any one of those people or any group of those people drop out of the equation, the system falls down?
	Is that what you mean? Yeah, at least to an extent.
	So, I would consider participation...
	You know, at all a form of evil.
	And I think we've already established this a while back, too, that everybody's hands are dirty.
	We have no choice in the matter.
	Because we have to participate in order to survive, all of us have blood on our hands.
	But all it would take would be one group of people to say, okay, enough is enough.
	Let's say it's not the voters.
	Let's say it's the elected officials who say, you know what?
	Let's not be elected anymore.
	Do you not think that there would be other people who would take their...
	I mean, I know what you mean.
	Like, if all the politicians go home, but I think that...
	I mean, the problem is, of course, I mean, I understand what you mean from an abstract sense.
	In a procedural way, A, other people would jump into their place, and B, if you were the one politician left standing, you'd have complete power, right?
	So, I mean, as more politicians...
	So, I do sort of understand what you mean.
	Right. In practical terms, that's correct.
	You're right. That there would always be somebody to fill the gap.
	I was just speaking in terms of principle that it's the same evil in kind but maybe not necessarily the same evil in degree.
	I think that, I mean, first of all, there's a couple of things there.
	The first thing is that I don't feel that I have blood on my hands.
	I mean, for me, I didn't sort of invent the system.
	I'm just doing my best to survive and doing what I can to oppose the evils that are there.
	But I violently disagree with the system, did not put it into place, and I'm trying to do the most that I can to sort of oppose it.
	So I don't feel that I have blood on my hands.
	I know that that's a strong feeling with other people.
	But I don't.
	I don't sort of take the moral responsibility for systems that other people have put into place.
	But I think that when it comes to this question of participation, I think it's just important to look at the cause and effect of state power.
	I mean, the cause of state power, in a sort of very fundamental way, is the essence of state power is the one group that if you take it away, they're not the state.
	I mean, there'll be teachers in Libertopia, in the sort of future world to be.
	There'll be teachers, there'll be protection agencies, there may be soldiers, there may be cops, there's going to be bureaucrats.
	I mean, they're a species you can never seem to get rid of.
	But there'll be all of these things.
	But what is going to be the sort of one fundamental difference?
	And there'll be bad and corrupt organizations and organizations that cheat and lie and defraud and all that.
	There'll be thieves, all of the things, right?
	But the one thing that's going to be fundamentally different is not schools and teachers, is not protection and property, is not bureaucrats and corrupt organizations.
	The one thing that's going to be different at a functional or procedural level is that there won't be an army of people willing to pull guns against the innocent.
	I mean, there may be. Who knows, right?
	But there won't be a state...
	And that, to me, is sort of the fundamental difference between where we are and where we want to be.
	And so given that everything else will be, to one degree or another, kind of like the same, except that the idea of there being a central group of people who can point guns at everyone else with impunity and be morally right in doing so, that's the one thing that's going to be different.
	And that's the thing that I focus on.
	And there's no problem with exploring more the idea of participation as evil, But I just wonder if you can define it a little bit, because when we think of good and evil, I think it's nice to have not too blurry a line about these sorts of things, and I'm just wondering if you could define where the line is for participation versus non-participation, or are we sort of all evil, or as you say, have blood on our hands?
	Well, I guess I would say that...
	If, let's say you're a voter and I come up to you and I explain how what you're doing is, you know, basically agreeing to participate in a system where Some people are allowed to take stuff from other people,
	but every three months or every six months, you get to come and put a piece of paper in this box and keep your fingers crossed that maybe you'll get some of it back.
	By casting the ballot, you're saying, I don't have any problem with some men Taking guns out and stealing money from people because I get a piece of the action, maybe. Well, or because they've taken it all from me before.
	Like, they took it all from me my whole life, and I want some of it back because I've got to retire.
	Well, I mean, that's a different way to phrase it, but it's essentially the same thing.
	As long as I get a piece of the action, I don't care if everybody gets robbed.
	Well, but if you've been robbed already, I mean, I think it would be fair to say that if somebody robs you and you get a chance to steal your property back, that that would be a valid thing to do, right?
	Right, but you're not really stealing your property back.
	You're stealing what's already been stolen and it's in a big pile.
	You don't know whose is whose.
	Yes, but you do know, for instance, I do know that I'm paying $50,000 a year or more in taxes, right?
	So I do know that over the course of my life, you know, I don't know, the course of my working career, like, I don't know, $600,000, $700,000 has been taken from me at gunpoint.
	And so if I then say, well, I'm not going to ask for any of that back, then it's a huge net loss for me, obviously.
	And if I'm trying to get the property back, and I'm just playing devil's advocate here, right?
	But if I'm trying to get the property back that has been stolen from me, I think it's tough to talk about voluntary participation or agreement in a system that charges tax on a five-year-old buying a candy bar.
	The fact that your whole life you get taxed and you don't get the bike at Christmas because your parents have to pay property taxes and you can't go to private school because your parents are forced to send you to public school.
	Maybe there's no private school allowed, or maybe they can't afford private school because of the level of taxation, that you're stuck in daycare because both your parents have to work because taxation is so high.
	To me, it's kind of tough to say that there's a voluntary participation in that kind of situation where you're continually enforced.
	Things that you don't agree with are continually enforced against you.
	Property is stripped from you.
	You're ordered to go through X, Y, and Z. I don't think that's the same as somebody participating in a system.
	So voting is not asking for it back.
	Voting is essentially hiring a guy to go take it back at the point of a gun.
	Yes. It's retaliatory violence.
	It's a possible way of looking at it.
	I mean, I'm not saying that this is the case for every voter, right?
	But it's a possible way of looking at it.
	I mean, if they tax me at 99%, and God knows that could come at some point, right?
	It could be in this sort of Beatles situation.
	If they tax me at 99%, and I have no money to save for my retirement, I'm just like, I'm living in a hovel, and I'm drinking rusty water and eating stone bread, and then I need to retire, and the only way that I can retire, after they've stolen millions of dollars from my whole life,
	the only way that I can retire is to ask for a certain amount of money back, So essentially all the violence of the state, at least at the voter level, year after year after year, is just retaliatory self-defense.
	Well, I think that it could be that that's a pretty prime reason.
	I mean, there's some people to whom it's not a reason, right?
	But it could be that that could be an argument that could be made.
	I mean, the problem is, of course, we don't know why people vote.
	But we do know this.
	We do know that people are not given the option to say, I don't want to get taxed and I don't want to vote.
	That's not an option.
	People have stuff stolen from them their whole lives, from the womb onwards, and then they vote.
	They're not given the choice to say, okay, if I don't get taxed, I don't want to vote.
	Now, if they were given that choice and then they decided to vote and to pay taxes and get votes, the only conceivable reason that they would do that is because they were expecting to get more out of the system than they were putting in.
	That would be the only logical reason.
	So then somebody who makes $10,000 a year and pays $1,000 a year in taxes is going to say, yeah, you can tax me and I want to vote because I'm going to get free roads and I'm going to get free emergency health care and I'm going to get my water subsidized and my school subsidized.
	Somebody's going to want to do that.
	All the more reason to quit your job and go on welfare.
	Well, exactly, right? And of course, this is not a very abstract idea, right?
	Because this is the whole problem behind buying the votes of poor people or, you know, paying people to not get upset about not having a job and so on.
	But if somebody has the choice to, say, opt-in or opt-out of voting and taxation, and they choose to opt-in, then I think they're morally responsible.
	But if it's inflicted upon them their whole life and it's a state of nature, to me, I'm not saying it's a good act to vote.
	I'm not saying it's an evil act to vote.
	I'm saying it's a state of nature.
	As an act of retaliation or self-defense then, we can't necessarily call it evil, but we certainly could argue that it's not effective.
	Oh, absolutely. For sure.
	For sure. But, I mean, not effective is also something that's relative to where you are in your lifetime, right?
	I mean, if you're retiring now, it seems very unlikely that the state's going to collapse before you need your retirement money, so Social Security might not be the thing that you want to sort of start smashing, right?
	So I totally agree with you that it's not effective in the long run to vote and say, well, let's just keep this ship going because obviously it's going down.
	But I do view it as you're preyed upon before you have any chance to defend yourself.
	I remember paying taxes on my paycheck when I was 11 years old.
	I mean, you're preyed upon from the very beginning.
	You're stuffed in these state schools.
	You're indoctrinated. You're bullied.
	You're in these horrible, horrible situations.
	And everywhere you turn, you're taxed and so on.
	So for me, it's like, yeah, if you can get some money back, sure.
	I mean, one gentleman emailed me about should I take a scholarship to go and study abroad from the government?
	For me, I'm like, hell yeah.
	You're going to be paying much more in taxes than you'll ever get back.
	From the government, and at least you can take these resources and apply them towards learning more and communicating more about liberty, I'd say that's great.
	In the same way that I would say if somebody wants to go into the public school system, I would say more power to you, but it's only going to be moral.
	If you teach kids about liberty to the best of your ability, and if it ever comes to the point where you can't, that you then have to sort of leave to be a good person.
	But to me, it's just a state of nature, right?
	People don't choose the system.
	It's totally inflicted on them from day one.
	Right, but if I become a public school teacher because...
	There really are no other options.
	You know, I guess there's a private school system, but they're still pretty much beholden to the public institutions.
	Then, you know, if I want to become a teacher, I have to participate.
	So really does it matter what I teach?
	Sorry, could you just repeat that last question?
	I just had three pings from people, and I'm sorry, I lost a few syllables.
	Oh, sorry. No, if I want to become a teacher, I have to involve myself in the system, because there's no other choices, right?
	So that doesn't necessarily make me evil, but...
	But at that point, does it really matter what I teach?
	If I teach what I'm told to teach because that's the job, then I'm just carrying the analogy the next step further.
	If participation isn't necessarily evil because this is the only teaching job available, then how is the content that I'm teaching of any consequence?
	If the state tells me, teach this or else, I wanted to be a teacher, so this is what I've got to teach.
	Yeah, absolutely. And there's usually ways that you can...
	I mean, there were subversive teaching methods even under Soviet rule in a lot of Eastern European countries.
	So there's ways to get the truth across.
	You can send people... You hand one little kid...
	I don't want a little kid. You hand one teenager the website Mises.org, you could have changed that person's life.
	Like, that's how little it can take.
	One guy listened to an album, gave me a book, and my life was changed.
	So you don't have to go on and on about this sort of stuff for years.
	There's lots of things that you can do as a teacher, even if all you're doing is funneling this stuff out.
	This email will self-destruct in five seconds.
	Mises.org, quick, click on it, go!
	Or something like that.
	So there's lots of things you can do from that standpoint.
	But even if we say there's nothing that you can do that you have to...
	Teach what the government tells you to, and there's no other options, and you're not fit for anything else, and there's a recession on, and there are no other jobs, and whatever, whatever, you're in debt.
	Then I'd say, yeah, go parrot what the state tells you to do, and then teach your children something better.
	To me, that's...
	We've got to focus on the primary evil, which is the violence against the innocent, not on participation in a situation that violence is being inflicted upon the teacher.
	The only way to escape that violence would be to quit teaching, in which case maybe you're going to take a huge financial hit.
	You have to put off having kids and whatever.
	There's just so many repercussions.
	I'd just say let's focus on the guys who've got the guns out and not so much focus on...
	It just seems to me kind of, and I don't mean this for you, I just sort of mean this for people on the board, you know, for us to go pick on public school teachers and bureaucrats and so on, it seems a little bit like we're kind of picking on the weaklings, so to speak, because the people who are the real problems as far as the state and the maintenance of its power goes are the people who got the guns out, the marines, the cops, right?
	Those are the people who have actually got the guns pointed at us, not, you know, Nancy, the 55-year-old public school teacher, Not that I know any Nancy who's a 55-year-old public school teacher.
	I'm just sort of pointing out, you know, the kindly old gray-haired kindergarten teacher is not the person who's got a gun to my chest, right?
	That's Joe Friendly cop guy or Joe Friendly marine guy.
	Those are the guys who've got a gun to my chest.
	And I just think that by picking on the school teachers and so on and saying, this is where my moral outrage is going to be, it just seems a little bit...
	Like we're barking up the wrong tree.
	And of course, first and foremost, I would say that we still want to focus on our own families before, you know, the violence that we experience within our own families, the corruption that we experience in our own families before talking about the evils of public school teachers.
	And in that sense, I completely agree with you.
	You know, picking on the weakest target is...
	I mean, it's the lowest form of self-interest, right?
	And I think we've all experienced that at one form or another in the schoolyard, so we should certainly know what that's about, right?
	Right. But still, I think it's fair to point out the logic of it and understand what's really going on there.
	I certainly agree, and it's a fascinating question.
	You're not necessarily picking on school teachers or picking on, you know, DMV bureaucrats Just by pointing out the nature of their jobs.
	Right, right, right. Now, let me just...
	Somebody has asked a question here.
	I am enjoying your comments.
	I'm sure that's for Greg.
	I'm enjoying your comments. I'm noticing that you often put moral questions in binary terms.
	Things are either good or evil.
	Can you comment on this point?
	Are there any shades of grey in moral judgments?
	Now, of course, I view that kind of question as pure evil!
	Sheer evil! No, I'm just kidding.
	Yes, there are shades of gray in moral judgments, absolutely, completely, and totally.
	And one example that sort of springs to mind would be the question of self-defense.
	Self-defense is a complicated moral issue, not because it's not justified, but because the question is always proportionality.
	So if some guy runs a shopping cart over my foot, he's hurt me, I don't think that gives me the right to blow him away.
	The real question is proportionality, which is there's lots of gray areas and so on.
	There's lots of gray areas around things like euthanasia.
	You know, somebody who's brain dead, I don't think too many people are going to feel uncomfortable pulling the plug.
	Somebody with a head cold, again, unless they ask a question like this.
	Probably not so much. So somebody has asked, did I set the Skype cast for 15 minutes again?
	Actually, no, I didn't.
	But let me, I don't think I can change it now.
	I did actually make sure that it went for three hours.
	So I would say give it a shot.
	I have, I will put in the main chat the link.
	If you're in the chat, you can try and come in through there, but it should still be continuing.
	Thanks, Greg. Fantastic conversation, as always.
	I really appreciate that. I'm going to just unmute everyone so that we can get all of the random noises in the universe coming into the chat, just in case other people want to say anything.
	And if not, I'll sort of talk a little bit about who I think is responsible for the mess that the world is in.
	everybody you've got the mic oh let me just mute Andrew and Niels because they often have very good counter arguments to everything that I'm saying so I'm just gonna mute them because we're all about the freedom here okay well let me just we're just talking about why who is responsible for the world being in such a mess and of course I'm very glad that Niels
	Niels has joined because I'm going to try and pin most of it on him, a little bit on Andrew, most of it on Niels.
	But I will give two minutes, maybe 2.2 minutes, on who I think is responsible for the world being in such a mess.
	And I'm going to talk about the philosophers, and I guess you could say the theologians.
	Those who argue for ethics are responsible for the world being in such a mess.
	And I'll give you two minutes on why I think that's the case.
	First of all, they haven't given me any honorary PhDs.
	Obviously, that's number one. No Nobel Prizes.
	I keep staring at the phone.
	It's killing me. It's keeping me awake at night.
	My fingernails are bitten to the quick.
	So obviously, that's number one for everyone.
	But I would say that there are two fundamental...
	errors that spring into the realm of corruption that intellectuals who argue about ethics, we'll just call them intellectuals, make.
	The first is that they do not provide full disclosure.
	They do not provide full disclosure.
	So, for instance, a lot of things that we find out about intellectuals, we find out later.
	So both Jung and Freud were both victims of sexual abuse.
	That may have had some effect on the theories that they put forward.
	So this is one example.
	If you look at somebody like Kant or Nietzsche, these people whose fathers were Lutheran ministers, that they may have some issues left over from their families, And I think that it's very important when you're a philosopher to put out full disclosure so that people can put your ideas in context, in the context of your emotional history and situation.
	I think that's absolutely crucial, and of course I've tried to do that in my podcast, perhaps, at...
	I think it's very important so that people can figure out why you are talking about what you're talking about.
	There's lots of topics you can spend your time on.
	You can be a gardener. You can collect stamps.
	If you're an ethicist, it's probably because of something that happened in your past.
	I certainly know that's the case for me.
	It doesn't mean that the arguments that you make are invalid.
	But I think full disclosure is very important, right?
	So why is it that John Stuart Mill, as I talked about in a podcast recently, was pro-war?
	Well, I think if you look at his family history, and if he was honest about that, then you would have some context with which to put in his...
	His ideas. And I won't go into that into a huge amount of detail because I'm sure you get the idea.
	Full disclosure, number one, right?
	People need to be honest about what has driven them into particular topics, their family history, their personal history, their romantic history, so that you can make sure that the person isn't acting out some really bizarre psychological problem in that realm.
	So that's sort of the first thing is full disclosure.
	Now, the second thing is hypocrisy.
	Hypocrisy is, to me, almost like a definition of an intellectual.
	Intellectual equals hypocrisy in just about every situation you're ever going to want to come across.
	And the reason that I sort of mentioned that, I'll give a very sort of short example and then I'll open it up back to the board.
	Let's say that I'm some guy who's an astronomer in Pius IX's court in the Middle Ages, and I say, well, I'm all about science, and I'm all about learning this, and I'm all about learning that, and I don't say that I put forward what I'm putting forward because the Pope tells me to, or because I'm a Christian and I'm justifying the Bible, or whatever, and you could use this, of course, for creationist arguments now.
	But let's say that the earth says, the Bible says the earth is fixed and does not move.
	So I say, as an astronomer, I say, well, the sun goes around the earth, the earth is fixed and does not move.
	But I don't base that on the Bible, because that would be superstition alone.
	I base this on science.
	I'm very much into science and the rational method and experimentation and so on.
	And then, you know, Copernicus or Kepler or Galileo, someone comes along and says, no, no, no, the sun is the center of the universe, the earth moves and blah, blah, blah.
	Now, I have standards that I put forward saying I'm all about the science, I'm all about the evidence, I'm all about the logic.
	But, secretly and deep down, I'm just being paid by the Pope to say that the Earth is the center of the universe because that corresponds with the Bible.
	Right? So, you want to make God look like he knows what he's talking about, so you want to make sure that you agree with the Bible.
	But I put it forward not as just I agree with the Bible, but it's science, science, science.
	So then... One of these fine, I guess mostly Italian, sometimes Dutch, I can't remember, Kepler, Dutch?
	Well, Niels would know. But somebody puts forward the proposition with strong evidence, very strong evidence, about the heliocentric universe, the Sun-centered universe.
	And I then shit all over that person.
	Metaphorically. Although I don't know exactly what happened at the courts of Pius IX. I doubt that would be acted out directly.
	But what I do is then I've been talking about science and I haven't said pretty honestly, well, you know, I'm kind of paid to say this and You know, that's what I do, right?
	There's a kind of hypocrisy in all of that.
	And so when people have particular standards and then they come across an argument that conforms with those standards but opposes their prejudices, prejudices, conforms to the standards that they claim to hold, but opposes their prejudices.
	That, to me, is the fork in the road between corruption and integrity, between helping the world and killing the world, between happiness and creation of misery around the whole planet.
	So if I'm all about, yeah, I don't believe in violence as a solution to problems, and then somebody says, well, you know, the state is violence.
	And I say, well, that's different.
	That's the moment, right?
	I think, to me, that's the moment that moral responsibility goes one way or the other.
	I mean, moral responsibility is there either way.
	But this is where somebody becomes corrupt or has integrity, is honest or not, right?
	And this is when we talk about parents...
	If your parents are on Dr.
	Phil, and let's say they, I don't know, they hit you, right?
	When you disagree with them, they'll slap you or spank you or whatever, punch you.
	And they're on Dr. Phil, and Dr.
	Phil says, well, how do you discipline these kids?
	Do you think that punching them is a good idea?
	And they say, yeah!
	I mean, what else are you going to do?
	That's the exact perfect, most moral thing to do.
	I mean, how could anyone even think remotely otherwise?
	Then I would say that person is insane, right?
	Because it's like murdering somebody in front of a cop, right?
	I mean, you then have no idea what right and wrong is, and you're innocent in a very kind of weird way.
	You're kind of innocent of moral responsibility.
	But if Dr.
	Phil says, do you think punching your children is a good idea?
	And you say no, and then you say to yourself, I can't believe my kid told Dr.
	Phil about the punching. Man, when I get him home, bam!
	He's going down. That's hypocrisy.
	That's when you have a standard that you claim to adhere to, but when somebody comes along and uses that standard to undermine a prejudice that you hold, and you then obscure or befog or evade or criticize or do an ad hominem attack or anything like that, that to me is why the world is in such a mess.
	Intellectuals, those who talk about ethics, do not pursue self-knowledge in full disclosure and claim to have all of these standards of truth, logic, reality, rationality, scientism, philosophy, empiricism, whatever you want to call it.
	But the moment that somebody comes up with a formulation that uses the standards that they claim are valid and good, which then undermines any of their prejudices, they turn on that person.
	That, to me, is the fundamental corruption.
	And, of course, I would argue that it comes right back to the family, of course.
	And that is...
	The reason that the world is where it is.
	That's my offering to the debate anyway.
	I'll open up the mics to anybody now who wants to rabidly agree with me.
	If you don't want to rabidly agree with me, just let me know and I'll keep you muted.
	I hope people could hear that.
	That would be good. I thought it wasn't a bad speech.
	Did you guys hear that at all?
	Just a blink.
	Yes, this is Manos.
	I did. Oh, hi.
	Good, good. Now, did anybody have any response to that?
	I wasn't speaking Esperanto then, not noticing it, was I? That'd be a bummer.
	Now, there's a gentleman here, I think, who begins with X, who had something, I think, that he wanted to talk about a couple of weeks ago, but didn't have a microphone at that point.
	XAQ fixed. Did you get your microphone?
	Did you want to bring up the topic that you had a couple of weeks ago?
	weeks ago and I'm sorry that we haven't had a chance to catch up since then.
	You can type something if you don't...
	Nanos Kulinski, somebody who's joined, would also, if somebody who's running the chat, could add them to the chat.
	That would be good.
	That would be good. Greg is stuck on a support call right now.
	Wow. Wow. What that means is that he's actually phoning in to put his COP application on hold, I think, just until he resolves this from an ethical standpoint.
	So... Okay, well we can drop that topic if people either agree or need time to think about it or disagree so violently that they don't even want to mention anything about it.
	I've still, everything is open as far as the microphones go.
	If you would like to mention anything, please, now would be a good time.
	You are welcome to type it into the chat.
	As well, if you would like me to read it out, I have a variety of accents that I'm willing to use, and I do sometimes break into fluid hand signals, although not of the kind that anybody else would recognize.
	Hello? Hello.
	Who's this? Hi, Andrew.
	Oh, hi, Andrew. How's it going? Good.
	I was just passing my mic out.
	Oh, you're such a tease. Come on, give me something.
	Hang on, I'm going to mute everyone and then give you the microphone so that you can speak to the masses.
	One sec. And unmute.
	You can do it. Oh, Greg.
	Greg says, damn, I missed the entire monologue.
	Greg, I'm so sorry.
	I proved you entirely wrong, but I forgot to record it.
	So you can just trust me on that.
	Okay, Andrew, go. Go! Alright, well, last summer started out, I flew to Tokyo and spent a month hitchhiking around Japan, which was good fun at times, but after being exposed to some people in Japan, I don't know, not quite for me.
	I don't know, there's a lot of things that are sort of going on there.
	You can imagine just the type of society it is, you know, being pretty impressive towards the kids and A lot of adults are very just, you know, unhappy looking, walking along, you know, looking down at the street and, you know, very just, very regimented.
	Yeah, Japan is the society that has that wonderful statement which says, it is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.
	It's interesting. Japan's unspoken problem is the name of homelessness there.
	It's really interesting because they have this idea that if you're homeless, you're supposed to be the shame of the society and you're supposed to outcast yourself.
	Actually, in Tokyo, you can go to a really rich area like Shinjuku where it's the busiest train station in the world.
	Tons of stores everywhere and take about a 15 or 20 minute walk to the west and there's like a big homeless area where there's literally hundreds and maybe even thousands of People living in these umbrella and cardboard shanty towns and they just live there.
	It's really interesting because you can actually go and walk through these areas because these homeless people won't make eye contact with you.
	It was very interesting.
	I inquired about doing this and I was told, yeah, it's fine.
	You can go walk through these areas and you won't have a problem because these people just have this whole shame thing going on.
	It was quite interesting to sort of get the gravity of how many homeless people there are in Tokyo compared to what they want you to think, just because they sort of segregate themselves out.
	Most cities I've been to you find homeless people begging on the streets and stuff, but in Tokyo it was quite different.
	Did you get any sense of, it's not a casting like it would be in India, did you get any sense of how these people end up in this situation?
	I mean, other than being banned in a former life.
	I don't know. I guess a lot of drug addiction...
	Gambling is a huge problem in Japan.
	It's very interesting how they have this mindset.
	I stayed with this one Australian guy and he was telling me that he and a couple of his friends who are English teachers there, they like to have a friendly game of poker every once in a while for $5 or $10.
	Not a big deal at all.
	One of his coworkers who's Japanese, they invited him to the game and he refused to go.
	He's very morally opposed to gambling.
	He said, look, in Japan, we don't gamble.
	It's very bad on a very moral level.
	At the same time, this guy goes out and plays pachinko all the time.
	Officially, gambling is illegal in Japan, but they have this system where you can buy these chips and play pachinko, like you see on Price is Right.
	Then you can get a prize and walk outside of the building to another physical location and exchange the prize for cash.
	Basically, I saw people lined up at 5.30 in the morning more than once to play Pachinko.
	Yet, at the same time, Japanese will tell you that gambling is bad.
	That's very odd, and it's very odd as well.
	That's pretty unique within...
	Any kind of culture that you have public piety with private vice, that's very unusual.
	You don't see that in Catholicism.
	You don't see that in Communism.
	That's really amazing.
	So it must be very unique to Japan, because I think that's pretty unique.
	It's a very interesting place to have.
	There's a saying in Japan that it takes leaving Japan for a Japanese person to become themselves.
	They sort of understand that unless they leave.
	But actually, at the same time, if you're Japanese and you live outside of Japan for a year or more, or just some extended period of time, when you come back to Japan, you become tainted, is how you're viewed by society.
	Japanese guy in one city who had spent seven years studying and working in Los Angeles from, I guess, about 20 to 27.
	He had just returned back to Japan, I guess, two months before I had met him.
	He said he went to a couple of job interviews at just convenience stores and a gas station, and he couldn't get hired.
	He said to his parents, well, what's the problem?
	Why aren't they hiring me?
	They basically said, well, you're tainted.
	People can sort of tell by the way that you talk and the way that you address your bosses that you haven't been in the workplace in Japan from age 20 to 27.
	You sort of missed these seven years of development and social integration into the system.
	So this guy, he missed all this stuff, and now he doesn't really know how to You know, be correct around these bosses.
	Right, I think slavish deference is where he needs to get to, but after you've been in LA for a while, I think that's a little tough to put on.
	Yeah, so it's very interesting to just sort of get that picture that, wow, this guy came back and now he's viewed as tainted.
	I remember I used to work with a woman who grew up in North America, and then she went to...
	She was Japanese from a Japanese family.
	She grew up in North America, went to Japan, and ended up getting married to a Japanese guy.
	And there was constant problems because he was, you know...
	A woman's place is X, Y, and Z, and she was like, well, not so much.
	I grew up in the West, and so on.
	So there were lots of conflicts around that.
	And he had this, and I do associate this with Japanese culture, rightly or wrongly, he had this sort of terminal addiction to being cool.
	You know, like he had to have the right shades, and he had to have the right haircut, and so on.
	There's a really strong kind of...
	It's a social obsession, especially among young men, about being impassive and totally cool.
	I found that to be rather off-putting in him, for sure.
	Sure. There's huge social pressure on businessmen to go out and drink basically every night with their bosses.
	I was talking to this one guy just in the car.
	It's really interesting when you are hitchhiking because it's a totally voluntary relationship.
	A person pulls over because they want to talk with you or want to have some sort of interaction with you.
	So oftentimes I'm very open with people and people are very open with me.
	So this guy spoke English and he was explaining that he had sort of fallen out of favor at work and he wasn't going out and drinking at night.
	And that was bad because he was on the path to getting fired.
	But at the same time, he was afraid to tell his wife this.
	So instead of going home and sort of telling his wife and admitting that, you know, I'm getting into trouble at work, what he did was he went out and played pachinko.
	Right, because it's a primitive culture as far as it's very focused on face, right?
	Saving face, shame.
	It's a very shame-based culture.
	And what do they call it? This karoshi, right?
	This death over work, right?
	These people who just work all day, go to karaoke all night, get two hours sleep, go back, work all day, that they're actually...
	I saw this, a picture of a, I can't remember where, it was a black and white picture of a Japanese, young Japanese guy, just like three o'clock in the morning on the subway, just exhausted, you know, in the middle, on a weeknight, right?
	And I think, now, can you tell me something about Japan that I don't really understand, though, because I know that there's a certain religious aspect to it, but what is it that keeps...
	What is the philosophy that keeps everybody so much in line?
	That's the part that I can't quite figure out.
	I'm not sure exactly how to answer that.
	But you did go, right? Yeah, yeah.
	You went just off gambling and saying you were in Japan, right?
	No. What keeps them in line, I mean, it's very interesting to see just all the little kids, you know, just sort of like in the States, we don't have school uniforms at the public schools, but in the Japanese schools, the School uniforms are very formal, you know, even for poor kids there.
	But is it nationalism that keeps it so...
	Because, you know, in China, it's communism, and in America, it's patriotism, and in Canada, it's strictly kind of socialism, and in some countries, it's like in Italy, it's socialism plus Catholicism.
	There's some dominant ideology that is generally used to club children into the shapeless mass that I think, honestly, a large part of it is just the family in Japan.
	The cost of living is very high and there's a lot of people who are full grown and start to have their own family and are still living with their parents.
	Well, sure, but it's a particular kind of family philosophy.
	I mean, I don't think it's anything as medieval as, you know, the spirits of your ancestors will be shamed if you speak back to your mother, but what is it that makes them so terrified as a culture of disapproval?
	In England, it's this stifling kind of socialist politeness that goes on.
	But in England, of course, you also have the aristocracy, which is a violent institution that's considered to be the very height of society, the queen and so on.
	So there's lots of stuff in England that keep people just terrified and brutalized.
	And again, this is a tough question to give to you on the spot, but if you could mull it over, I'd be certainly very curious because it's the one area that I don't know much about what keeps them so...
	It keeps them so frightened and so deferential.
	How is it that the parents say, you must obey me?
	Because, of course, in Christianity you have to honor your mother and your father and so on, but I don't know what it is in other areas.
	I'm really not sure how to answer that exactly.
	Well, if you could ask, I mean, you must have still some Japanese contacts, if you could ask, I would really, really appreciate it, because I'm always fascinated about what is the argument for morality that is used to keep people down, right?
	Yeah, the father is very much the dominant figure in the household, that's right, that's right.
	Yeah, I had a very interesting experience.
	I was walking in Harajuku, which is a really big, huge tourist area, lots of shopping, and just big roads, and what you see on the TV when they show Tokyo.
	And all of a sudden, they hear this big loudspeaker and this huge black bus, full-size tour bus, with a Japanese imperial flag on the side.
	And it was followed by a whole bunch of black, like, you know, SUVs and Jeeps and stuff, all with Japanese imperial flags.
	And I was like, wow, what's this, you know?
	And I asked somebody what they were saying on the loudspeaker, and what they were saying was, no Koreans, you know, go home Koreans, go home Chinese, and Americans, we like you, but no bases, no military bases.
	And I thought it was very interesting because my reaction was sort of like, oh, my God, you know, I can't, you know, this should be, like, We protested, you know?
	Like, why isn't anybody sort of standing up to this?
	Because there's thousands of people and they're all just ignoring it.
	And I think that's very much the Japanese mindset towards problems, is just ignore it.
	You know, like, here's a group of people who are very openly racist and in the streets blaring the stuff on a loudspeaker.
	And nobody was sort of standing up to it, you know?
	Like when you have a KKK meeting in the States, you'll get a whole bunch of anti-KKK protesters.
	But here's a Japanese imperialist.
	What's that? Christina was just saying that she believes or has heard that there's quite a bit of violence in the child's rearing within Japan, and that would certainly explain the deference within the society, right?
	I mean, you have to have that kind of independent spirit.
	Which is natural, I think, to every human being, kind of beaten out of you.
	Did you get any sense of, when you talk to people, anything about their histories from a family standpoint or how discipline occurs?
	No, I really... Sorry, go ahead.
	No, I can't say that I have much experience talking with people about that.
	Is there martial punishment in the schools?
	Do you know that? Nope, not sure.
	The schools were very...
	Actually, I stayed with this Australian guy, and he was an English teacher in a public school, and it was...
	Very interesting. Like you said, it's all about faith.
	You know, so like he actually only teaches maybe, I think he said eight hours a week, like eight courses for one hour a piece in an elementary school, but officially he has to be at the school 30 hours or something, so most of the time he's sitting at a desk playing Nintendo DS, and he just sort of has to do it, and like there's no, you know, he said obviously he could just leave, he's not doing any work, everyone knows he's not doing any work, but just to, you know, look good, you have to be at the desk.
	Right, and that indicates a pathological inability to experience and process criticism from an objective standpoint.
	And that, of course, comes from the family, right?
	You never talk back.
	Your opinions are never solicited by your parents.
	There's no negotiation or any of that kind of stuff.
	And that's quite fascinating.
	I mean, Andrew, I hate to have to do this, but I think I'm going to have to assign you an essay.
	I'll email it to you.
	It doesn't have to be too long, like no more than 30,000 words, and you can, of course, submit it in Japanese, but we'll talk about those topics another time.
	I'd like to just touch on the rest of my summer.
	I went up to Alaska, and then I went down to Los Angeles, and I stayed in Los Angeles for seven weeks or so, and I met up with Aaron from the boards, and We had a great time, and I was absolutely, the whole time, speaking with a lot of people about anarchy and all these different things, and I was very well received, I have to say.
	And sort of being in the crowd that I was, very well received.
	Actually, I was at a club one night, and I happened to just notice this guy had a shirt that said selfevolution.org, you know, which is You can check out the site, you know, this guy Chris, he's sort of all about, you know, morality is not outside of you.
	Morality is not from religion.
	Morality is not from government. It's something that, you know, you have within you.
	And it's very interesting to just sort of get that sort of feedback because I had the impression that California was a very, you know, had an individualist vibe to it.
	And that is what I experienced.
	You know, a lot of people, I guess the history of it is, you know, the gold rush and then, you know, the hippies and I think it still very much holds true today.
	Sorry, if I can just add to that, one of the things that I wanted to clarify, for those who don't know or haven't seen Andrew, one of the reasons that he might be sort of, quote, well received, he's actually about eight feet tall, has a huge scar across his forehead, and has lasers for hands.
	So it might be his power of argument, but it also just might be physical intimidation.
	So, of course, in Japan, that would even be greater.
	That might be why he didn't seem to get much information out of the Japanese, because they may have thought that he was some sort of a monster to devour the city, as seems to happen quite a bit in Japan.
	So I just wanted to point that out, you know, just in case you feel like you're not having as positive an effect.
	You just don't have the same fear factor.
	Sorry, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you.
	I think I've just come across as a pretty positive, young, smiling guy.
	I'm well received by a lot of people.
	There's a lot of...
	It's really positive to see.
	I was living in Santa Monica and they have this summer concert series every Thursday night.
	They have a concert down at the pier.
	There was a woman there on a weekly basis who at first was just handing out flyers.
	It's a national day of resistance to the Bush regime.
	It's a drive out the Bush regime.
	I don't know the website, but you can look it up on that, I guess.
	She was handing out flyers, and then the next week she had a table, and the next week there was somebody else with her.
	It was interesting because I really did feel inclined to approach people such as her and a couple of other guys who were on the street selling anti-war bumper stickers and stuff, and just approach these people with some of the ideas.
	I was actually very well received by a lot of people.
	Is that right? So tell us what happened.
	This is quite fascinating.
	So you'd go up.
	Okay, I'll play someone from California.
	Okay, dude. No, I'm kidding.
	So what kind of conversations did you have?
	Like what sort of approaches, what openings did you have and what was the reception?
	Oh, lots of different things.
	I mean, usually just like if, well, the one guy had a bumper sticker, a table full of bumper stickers and And one of them, they all look good to me, you know, like, you know, all that peace and peace signs and stuff.
	And the one said, peace is patriotic, and it had an American flag.
	And I pointed at it, and I sort of chuckled, and I said, well, this one doesn't fit.
	And he says, why not?
	And I said, well, war is patriotic.
	Don't you know? You know, he's like, you know, I never thought about it.
	It's so simple, but it really makes sense.
	War is patriotic, you know?
	And just from there, we sort of got into a discussion about things, and it's very interesting, the level of Reception that I had because some people, like you've been talking about recently, are very naturally curious about these things and want to get into them, and other people aren't so much.
	So it was a bit difficult for me at times to gauge what level of interest someone actually had in what I was saying.
	I'm not sure how to phrase that exactly.
	Oh, because they're stoned, so it's hard to tell.
	Yeah, that too. But this guy just sort of started You know, explaining to us what are your views on the war, you know, and all this stuff.
	And, you know, just sort of get into, you know, what is a market anarchy all about?
	And what is it like to have competing value systems?
	And, you know, once you just sort of explain a couple points, you know, I've found that people are generally really, you know, Just sort of explain the different world view that, hey, look, you know, there's no such thing as these false concepts and explain a bit about epistemology and how we know things and concepts.
	And once you explain these very basic things to people, it all sort of comes together rather quickly.
	And one approach I like to use with people is that you sort of get to a certain point in the conversation where you explain that, you know, this is what society is all about, is, you know, voluntary and, you know, this stuff.
	And I sort of explain, like, look, you know, our conversation right now is an example of what I'm talking about.
	For that, I really value you and I value this conversation that you're open with me and that you're willing to talk about these things and I respect you for that.
	I think just sort of explaining things from that level of like, hey, this is it right here.
	You have all these ideas about freedom and stuff and what we're doing right now is affecting that and that I respect them for that.
	I think that really made things a lot more real for some people.
	I think that's an excellent approach.
	I certainly think finding common ground with people and respecting that just about every human being wants to be free and wants to have a better life and better society.
	So I think especially people who are out there doing this kind of stuff, like more stuff than I'm doing for sure, just in terms of going and sitting at a sidewalk in a hot sun and handing stuff out, that's quite a lot of dedication.
	So I think that does need to be respected.
	I could just touch on like, Aaron is quite into like the club party scene and exposed me to a bit of it and it was really inspiring actually to sort of meet some of these people that he's friends with because they're not so much exposed to the stuff that Aaron and I are,
	but the nature of the things that they like to do, The whole point of it is that people have a common value.
	That's why they're going to a party, to enjoy it and to express their values.
	It's all about freedom and anarchy at a party.
	Now, can I just sound hopelessly square and ask you to give me a minute or two on the rave?
	Because I've never...
	I mean, we have them, I think, Tuesday nights just at home here, just Christina and I. And basically what we do is watch a couple of Christina Aguilera videos and tap her feet.
	But sometimes we'll have like two Diet Cokes instead.
	So we do aim for the sort of narcotic high as well.
	But if you could just tell me a little bit more about California, which is probably even further out than what I'm talking about.
	Well, I mean, a lot of Aaron's friends that I have met, you know, they've been into this sort of rave scene for a few years.
	You know, they've been, you know, doing all the drugs and, you know, sort of just in the scene.
	And my real perception of what it's all about, you know, it's, you know, of course, when you're taking ecstasy, you know, it's described by a lot of people as, you know, it's all about empathy and love and all these things.
	So you get a couple thousand people or more together in one area and it's absolutely the most peaceful environment you can imagine because everyone is there for the same reason to enjoy the music and enjoy each other and have these you know amazing feelings that the drugs sort of bring out and it was really interesting you know amazing to experience that and to talk to people who've had this you know really they've sort of known about freedom for years because they've been doing it you know you go to a rave Because there's no police there,
	there's no violence there, you go to a rave because other people are there for the same reason as you and because you just can look around the crowd and just feel great, you know?
	So once I sort of, Aaron and I would sort of approach some people about the, you know, expanding, you know, the free society beyond just, you know, like, okay, well, the party, you know, a rave sort of, Almost metaphorically, you know, turn into like a classroom lesson on anarchy, you know? Like, hey, this is what you've been doing all night.
	You know, you've been having fun, you agree?
	No, no, go, go. I'll ask you questions at the end.
	Yeah, I mean, you've gone to this party because you have common values, and it's all a self-regulating thing, and then you just want to sort of expand that to the rest of your life, you know?
	Right, right. And absolutely, this comes back to, and I certainly put it forward with open arms, that I'm hopelessly square about drugs, right?
	So, I love to dance.
	Actually, Christina and I went to a wedding the other day where we got to dance to some good Bhangra Indian music, man.
	And that was very interesting.
	But I just, you know, so for me, dancing all night is fantastic.
	I have no problem with any of that kind of stuff.
	But I would say that, you know, the drug side of things would be where, for me, you know, I'm a libertarian, so I don't care that people do drugs.
	More power to them and I like musicians who've gotten a lot of their inspiration through drugs, and some of the writers that I've liked have used drugs.
	So I don't have any particular problem with it, but I'm not sure that I would say that raves, especially in conjunction with drug use, would translate to some kind of freedom, simply because if you're not free to be yourself when you are not under the influence of mind-altering substances,
	then I'm not sure that That the states that come out of that, while enjoyable, I'm sure, I'm not sure that they would be necessarily the same as freedom because you have to kind of get outside your own particular brain chemistry or your own particular identity in order to be free.
	I'm not sure that... I mean, that's just my own, like, not experience with them, so I'm not sort of trying to disprove your experience.
	That's just sort of my thoughts on it.
	Well, I mean, I was actually told...
	By, you know, a few people, because I was sort of just being exposed to some of these things as well, and I was told by some more, you know, some people who've been doing these things for a while that a large part of what they do is, I guess,
	as they've sort of grown, this is, you know, like a mid to late 20s crowd now, and certainly young people are into it, you know, but that they've learned, you know, a lot of this I don't know how to phrase this, but learn to have some of the same experiences but without the drugs, you know? Right, right.
	And I think that's fantastic.
	And I certainly do appreciate that there, you know, when you're in a group dancing and, you know, and I mean, look, I have a beer or two, so it's not like, you know, I'm not going to say that you have to be like coming off a marathon.
	But you can get a great spiritual feeling when you're dancing with a bunch of people and there is a kind of positive collectivism in a way that I've experienced at times to do with that, where you do sort of feel all in a sea of common humanity and there is a kind of dissolution of boundaries within the personality and in a pleasurable way.
	I just think that if it is the case that sort of drugs and I guess certain kinds of ecstatic dehydration are required for that, that they may not be as free as being able to achieve it in other ways.
	Well, I think a large part of it as well is, you know, Pretty much everyone at these events is a product of propaganda.
	They are a false self.
	It's sort of hard to say what exactly their nature would be.
	What is their true self?
	Are they naturally dancers without drugs?
	What role does the drug play in affecting the false self to have the true self come out?
	I don't know. I just had to think about these things.
	Yeah, and I don't have an answer to it either.
	Now, is there... I've heard, and of course this just could be...
	You know, this is the way it filters through to middle-aged guys who live in suburbia, but I've heard that, you know, there is a fairly sexual element to the raves and to the experience of ecstasy as well.
	Did you experience any of that, or is that just sort of a myth that people talk about?
	Yeah, it's totally hypersexualized, yeah.
	Absolutely. In the way that your strip poker parties with the Australian were not?
	Just rewriting history for you, too, to make it even more gripping.
	But yeah, so tell us a little bit more about that.
	Is it hypersexualized in terms, obviously it's a lot of young tan people dancing and I guess not exactly in chain mail, but is it mostly in the sort of mental or emotional experience, the hypersexuality, or is it actually sort of descending into, not descending, becoming sort of gropefests and so on?
	Oh, I mean it can become, I remember I was in Amsterdam last year and I saw a big poster for a rave that We're good to go.
	In my experience, everyone was very respectful towards everyone else and respecting their rights to not just have people come up on them and start touching them.
	But I'm sure if you found an area of the party where that was sort of the norm, then yeah, sure, that goes.
	But you've got to find that part.
	So you really did go from one extreme of culture to the other, going from Japan to raves.
	My God, man. Your head must have been spinning.
	Go ahead. Like I said, it's all about common values.
	So if you want to be in an area of the party where there's no groping going on, then go for it.
	And if you want to be in an area of the party where it's just a wild free-for-all, then go for that too, you know?
	And is there an area where self-groping is the norm?
	I'm just sort of trying to think if I ever end up at one.
	Did they give you like a fur glove and some baby oil?
	And anyway, we can talk about this perhaps sort of one-on-one.
	I just sort of am curious about where this sort of stuff goes.
	Because you don't want to go to the llama section for sure.
	I mean, that's no good. So I just sort of wonder if these things are all divided.
	I mean, certainly there's, you know, a homosexual section and there's a straight section and there's whatever, whatever, whatever, you know?
	It's anarchy. It's freedom.
	It's whatever values people have, they're affecting them.
	So you can find other people who have the same values.
	Are you finished with that anaconda?
	I mean, that could be sort of one of the things that has occurred for sure.
	Now, did you come across any of this sort of acted out orgy sexuality or was it mostly like there's a room back there where you want to make sure you don't go in barefoot and that they're going to have five guys with a hose out next morning?
	Was it just sort of out there or was it sort of in your face?
	A lot of what I experienced was a corporate version of it, you know, because it's...
	I guess the sort of scene has become a lot less underground, especially now that police are breaking up parties out in the desert and stuff.
	Of course, that still goes on.
	I've never really experienced that. Actually, this week right now is Burning Man, which is the largest Leave No Trace festival in the world.
	It's 25,000 or 30,000 people out in the middle of the Nevada desert.
	It's basically like a complete anarchy for a week.
	I can only imagine some of the things that go on there and that's going on now.
	It's a totally privately funded thing.
	It costs $150 for a ticket and you go out there and you bring everything that you need for a week and you have fun.
	It's actually known for being a huge meeting place for drug distribution for the country for the year and just for some of the most individualistic forms of expression out there.
	I've heard there's some real radical stuff going on there, like for instance, in some of the chess games, the king can move two spaces.
	Like they really just go all out as far as that sort of abandonment of rules go.
	And actually, there's an anti-gravity section as well, where you can float up.
	Now, I've just had a long chat with Andrew, which has been fascinating.
	Thank you so much. Very, very interesting stuff.
	I'm going to open it up if other people wanted to add something before we wind this puppy back down to the earth.
	Was somebody just about to say?
	so Well, I mean, this is sort of a...
	There's some...
	I mean, there's controversy, obviously, because there's two kinds of things in the world, right?
	I mean, as far as shoulds and should nots, right?
	So for me, if people want to go to raves and, you know, take drugs and have orgies, that's their life, right?
	I mean, that's their life.
	It's their bodies. It certainly wouldn't be my cup of tea, and you can tell that because I use the phrase my cup of tea, which I don't think would be used by a lot of rafers, right?
	But who I think the phrase is more often, can I borrow your goat?
	But the question around sort of, is this sort of pro-anarchistic or not pro-anarchistic?
	I think that, you know, there are certain things which are always tests of tolerance, right, which is sort of natural.
	And I think that raves must be a good deal of fun and must be quite an intense experience at certain times.
	Ecstasy is a very dangerous drug, just so people are aware of this.
	Christina, for most of her 20s...
	No, just kidding. But ecstasy is a very, very dangerous drug.
	a single use can impair your cognitive capacities permanently.
	So just to be aware of it, I sort of want to put that minor public service announcement out there.
	Ecstasy is a dangerous drug, but of course you can take it for years and I guess still end up as a fairly good functioning lamppost.
	But the question around is it good for anarchy Is it not good for anarchy?
	I personally would say that it's probably too much fun to be good for anarchy.
	The delineation of a philosophical framework for a stateless society is quite a lot of work, or at least I experience it as quite a lot of work.
	But... I don't think that dancing all night gets a stateless society, which is not to say that dancing all night is not a great thing to do.
	It is a lot of fun. But I would be careful about saying stuff like...
	And nobody has, right?
	But I mean, I would be careful about being tempted by this kind of hedonism and saying that I'm advancing the cause of liberty.
	I think you're advancing the cause of having a lot of fun, and there's nothing wrong with that cause at all.
	But I would say that...
	It's not necessarily the case that you are moving...
	You're not moving science anywhere further forward by going to a rave, right?
	Nobody thinks that the science of medicine is moved forward by dancing all night, and I don't think that anyone would say that the science of philosophy is moved forward by dancing all night.
	So I think that it's important to understand what is political and what is personal, or what is philosophical and what is personal, and if you want to go to a rave, more power to you.
	But I wouldn't say that it does anything in particular to advance sort of the cause of freedom.
	I think you just want to go to a rave and have fun and not necessarily say that I'm serving the course.
	That might not be the most accurate.
	Oh, Andrew, sorry that we're actually out of time because I'm just concerned that you might have something that...
	That might be contradicting my immense knowledge about illicit drugs, because I mentioned the Diet Coke, right?
	And that's my courage about talking about that kind of stuff on air.
	So, Andrew, of course you're unmiked, and you can absolutely tell me something about an experience that I've never had, rather than have me theorize about something based on second-hand information.
	Go ahead. I was just going to say, I mean, if you read the Wikipedia entry on free parties there, It's sort of the idea that you have a whole bunch of thousands and millions of people who want to do these drugs, do you put them in jail or do you let them do them?
	And the issue of why they want to do them and does it create an anarchist society, that's all sort of null because the idea is that they want to do it.
	And they should, yeah.
	If they've got the property and it's all voluntary and nobody's coerced, absolutely.
	And if you read this link on the free parties, it talks about how parties would go on for weeks And basically they would be totally self-regulating and there would be pill testing centers and there would be all types of regulation, right?
	Whatever is required. And basically the parties would go on so long that the police sort of realized, hey, it's not going to end.
	This is a safe thing. People aren't getting hurt.
	This party's not going to go away.
	So the police would just sort of send in the police to just break it up at some random time.
	Right. No, and I agree. Look, I have no problem with people using private property.
	Your body is your own. Do whatever you want.
	If you go to a party for a couple of weeks, the likelihood of you doing some pretty serious damage to yourself is pretty high.
	That's the only thing that I'm sort of saying, that there's a risk to this kind of stuff.
	I would say the same people aren't there for a couple of weeks.
	It develops, and then people keep coming, and people keep leaving, and people keep coming and leaving, and it just sort of stays.
	Sorry, can I just interrupt for a sec?
	Greg wanted to come in, and I think he wanted to ask about where the Burning Man stuff is, because I think he was really keen to join up just before he goes into Cop Academy.
	Sorry, Greg, go ahead. Am I unmuted?
	You are unmuted, yes.
	Oh, okay.
	I couldn't tell from the display.
	Oh, Greg, sorry.
	It's burningman.com, and I think they have good instructions on how to get there, because I think that was your question.
	Like, how do I get me some of this teenage, gyraging, ecstasy-laden flesh?
	I think that was, if I read the type correctly.
	Sure. No, I guess I just don't see how...
	I don't know. All night party is fine.
	If you want to do that kind of thing, fine.
	If you want to get high, fine.
	Do whatever you want. I'm not suggesting there needs to be a law against it.
	All I'm saying is that I don't see how that...
	I don't see how that's...
	To me, that's an escape.
	That's not an achievement of happiness.
	That's an escape from pain.
	Well, the idea, like I said, is that you have, you know, sort of competing parties, and whichever one is the safest and has the best self-regulation, that's going to win out, you know?
	And then, like I said, the question of why do people want to do these things, that's another issue altogether, you know?
	The issue that we want to deal with is how do we make people who have this value system safe?
	Right, but you equated the party itself with anarchy and...
	Well, it is. I know...
	Well, by definition, it's a voluntary society.
	Everyone goes there because they want to go there.
	But then you can say a shopping mall is anarchy as well, right?
	Well, sure. Yeah, okay.
	Just so you know, I mean, he's not sort of saying that the ideal of an anarchist society is a 500-person orgy, but that's not true at all.
	Because the ideal of an anarchist society is a 600-person orgy.
	So, sorry, go ahead. No, it's just people voluntarily...
	Coming together and associating, and that's the definition of a voluntary society, so that's all it is.
	Now, I would be interested, and of course there's no way to do this unless you're willing to dive back in and do noble research for the cause, and this would be a little bit more fun than finding out about how Japanese children are treated, but to me it would be very interesting having known a couple of people when I was younger, or I I guess I could almost say young, that were into this kind of scene that I would say that most of them came from very disordered family histories.
	So I think that's the other cautionary tale that I would put forward about people who are into these kinds of all-night raves, week-long parties, that a lot of them do come from pretty disordered family histories.
	And in which case, it's like, yes, they're free to do it, but I think it might, if it is a case that they're acting out prior abuse by a certain kind of escapism from pain or whatever, which isn't going to help them, right?
	I mean, escapism is fine if you are sort of, you know, we go to see movies and it's not like we're jumping out of our skins and becoming other kinds of people.
	But the only thing I would be careful of, and I don't know the answer to this, but just based on some anecdotal stuff from my own past, that a lot of the people who I've known who are into this kind of club scene do come from some pretty disorganized and disordered and abusive pasts, which is not to say anything about the people who were at the race you were at, Andrew, of course. I don't know, right?
	But that's something that's worth asking if you get into that kind of situation.
	Because nothing enhances a party more than asking people if they've been abused.
	I mean, that really is... Before you finish this, Greg, I just wanted to mention that, you know, I think absolutely when you have sort of people who are experienced with these things and have seen, you know, they sort of ran the gambit and now they're a little bit older, I think they really have,
	you know, and these are some of the people I've been talking to, Have, you know, really realized the importance of, hey, this is why the government is not helping the situation, and this is how we, you know, through my experience, this is how I know that a party can be regulated in such a way so that it's safe, you know? And it's just, and of course, you know, once you sort of realize that, hey, this party can be self-regulating, then your ideas about, you know, getting rid of force in other areas of society, of course, they're going to grow, you know?
	Right. I mean, certainly if a drug-induced orgy can be self-regulating, we probably can be fairly safe with Walmart.
	I think that would sort of be the approach that I would take.
	And this is, I mean, I mean that sort of facetiously, but also not facetiously.
	I mean, this might be one of the reasons why people who've gone through these kinds of experiences aren't particularly worried about a stateless society, because they've seen situations where you would never expect self-regulation to occur or be effective.
	And we're talking about There's things like education and charity, and they've seen drug-induced orgies be self-regulating, so I think from that standpoint, the stuff we're proposing doesn't seem particularly radical.
	Interesting, interesting.
	Alright, I'm going to just unmute everyone just in case anybody had any sort of final comments as we wind up the show.
	Thank you, of course, everyone for joining and I hope that I'm using my USB microphone.
	I've turned the sound up on my notebook because I did get some complaints that I wasn't loud enough and that's not something I often get in life so it really did stick out in my mind.
	So everybody's unmuted.
	If you would like to add any sort of final questions or comments or issues, problems, now's the time.
	The mic is the collectives.
	So, Andrew, I'll concede that a rave party is anarchy if you'll concede that a bridge party is anarchy.
	What's a bridge party? You know, four old people sitting around a table playing cards.
	Well, as long as they're naked and on ecstasy, for sure.
	And there's an anaconda. They've got to be playing for something.
	As long as it's voluntary.
	For sure, for sure.
	Karaoke time, somebody says.
	Absolutely. Take it away, Greg.
	No, I'm kidding. I did actually...
	I went to some friends of Christine and I's, came over last night, and we did end up going for an hour and a half of karaoke, and there is video evidence, which I'm not sure what I'm going to do with, but...
	Do I have another...
	Sorry, go ahead. Do I have another second?
	Niels has asked me to talk about my airport experience.
	I flew back last... I was at Los Angeles Airport, I guess a couple of you have read my post on this already, but the National Guard is there screening for bags and on the plasma screen TV is CNN. I just had one really interesting moment because I was just sort of standing there surveying the scene and all of a sudden I noticed that Bush is on the TV and it was just very interesting to sort of take in the gravity of that situation and Realize that,
	hey, here's the army crawling all around this airport and thousands of people just sort of scuffling around.
	And the leader's face is anywhere I look on plasma screen TVs.
	It's just a very, very interesting scene.
	I thought that was a very, very gripping metaphor, and I just wanted to mention, just to those of you who are air-traveling these days, the thing that you don't want to say when you're in the security lineup is, damn it, I knew I shouldn't be storing my Visine up my ass.
	That's just something that's very important to not say, right?
	Because if you do, you might have an even more gripping story than Andrew's, and possibly a voice that ends up in a different pitch.
	But that's just a little sort of words of wisdom to go into.
	I like to do what I can to put some good words out.
	Right. All right.
	Is there anything else that people wanted to add?
	We've made it to 6.03 and it's been a fantastic chat.
	Thanks so much to everyone, of course, for participating.
	I wanted to mention, because I like to put the important announcements right at the end of a two-hour podcast that I'm not sure how many people get to the end of, but next Saturday I'm going to be a guest on Mark Stevens' show, the Adventures in Legal Land show, which is going to be a radio show.
	You can actually call in And heckle, and no matter how you describe your voice, I will track you down.
	But it'll actually probably be Christina.
	But I just sort of wanted to mention that.
	I've also, thanks to the board member who suggested this, I've bought an ad using everybody's kind donations at Free Talk Live, which is one of the largest or most visited libertarian sites on the web.
	So I think that will help.
	But I'm going to continue or reinstate my ad on the International Society for Individual Liberty.
	And I guess we're hoving in on two fairly significant numbers.
	The one is that we are coming up to podcast 400.
	And that's just mind-blowing to me, but we are in fact doing it.
	And so I think that what Podcast 400 is going to be is playing back all of the podcasts at about 15 times speed just so that everyone can get a more efficient way to process free-domain radio.
	And so that'll sort of be one.
	And the other thing is we're coming up for 200 board members, which I think is fantastic.
	And I certainly appreciate everybody who's helping get the word out there.
	And when's Podcast 1000 coming along?
	I think for Podcast 1000, we'll be broadcasting from the rapture.
	That's sort of my goal. Or it'll be naked either way.
	So Thursday...
	Darch, can you just lean into the microphone a little bit?
	I'm just going to poke you in the eye.
	So yes, somebody said, when's Podcast 1000 coming along?
	And Darch says, Thursday.
	And then very kindly he said, ow.
	So thank you so much, of course, everybody for listening.
	I will process this when I can.
	If you get a chance, go to YouTube, y-o-u-t-u-b-e.com.
	You can have a look at the philosophy videos, which are coming along nicely, I think.
	And we're starting to get, I guess, we've had about 150 people start on the videos.
	And the ranks have been thinned out a little bit once I start using polysyllabic words, but hardy souls are plowing forward.
	Thanks so much. They're also available.
	They're on the Freedom Aid Radio website.
	Just click on the videos link.
	You can see the sort of introduction to philosophy ones there, which I think are a pretty good way to start.
	So, the YouTube stuff is great.
	Well, thank you very much. I think that it's a nice change, and I think, as Christina pointed out, like 90% of communication is non-verbal, and so I feel that each one of these is worth 10 podcasts.
	So, I appreciate that.
	So I think it's nice.
	I also kind of wanted people to get the sense that I wasn't insane.
	I mean, that's a fairly important thing for me overall, because when you put out a lot of very unusual ideas, the first concern that people have is that you're mental.
	I may not have disabused people of that notion with the podcast, but I hope that seeing me as a relatively balanced and able to make eye contact individual with some vaguely positive social skills, that it might actually be helpful in building some kind of credibility so that people don't see some sort of Howard Hughes guy with a beard down to his ass, 15-inch long fingernails shuffling around with Kleenex boxes on his feet.
	I think that can be quite helpful.
	Maybe check if you can get the colors better, Steph.
	It kind of looks like an infrared camera.
	That's because I also do want to see people, the heat that my brain is generating, which I'm fairly sure is visible from space because those things are very hard to do.
	I think you're right.
	And what I have to do with that, because I'm using natural lighting, is I have to record mid-afternoon when it's sunny rather than waiting for evening where it does get kind of washed out for sure.
	So I appreciate that. And what I will be doing, of course, is getting...
	Sort of a kind of plaid contact lenses so that when I go into the camera, it's really going to freak people out.
	And I think that's going to be quite helpful as well.
	All right. Well, thanks so much, everybody, for listening.
	I will talk to you next week.
	Do remember that Saturday night, I'll post this, of course.
	I'm on Mark Stevens' radio show.
	And thanks, everybody, for posting.
	And thanks for the donations which came in this week.
	I really appreciate it. I will talk to you guys soon.

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