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Aug. 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:38
390 Statist Intellectuals Part 1

The start of a very, very troubling idea...

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Well, good morning everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's 9.30 on the 29th of August 2006 and I'm actually on my way to test my drive Welcome to my new job.
I'm not actually starting until next week the 5th, but I thought it would be worthwhile to go and have a chat with them first and get myself all sorted out.
And so we're going to chat this morning.
It's an update of a conversation that I had with Christina, Public Roads, last night.
And it's a follow-up to what we were talking about the other day with regards to...
The question of intellectuals.
So I'm going to talk about an analogy, a metaphor, if you like, not a simile, and we'll see if it's doing us any use in helping us to try and delineate or to differentiate the question or the conversation that we're having around What do we do with our dear friends, the intellectuals?
Now, one of the things that I have sort of found to be useful is thinking about things obviously in analogous terms can be very, very helpful.
So, here's a story which I'm going to talk about that hopefully will help us to differentiate some of this stuff.
Now, let's imagine that there's a town which has five doctors, and I know that this is a somewhat artificial situation, so please bear with me as we plow our way through it.
I think that something useful will come out of the other side.
But let's say that we have this town which has five doctors, and you are a cancer patient, Who is looking for treatment, right? So you've recognized that you're ill, you're looking for treatment, and you go to see your handy-dandy doctor.
And your doctor prescribes for you a set of pills.
We'll call them the blue pills.
And he says, if you take these, not only will your cancer go away, but your Health will improve to the point of sheer beatific, ecstasy-laden happiness.
And so you say, well, gee, that sounds good.
I almost wish I'd gotten sick before.
And the reason that you think you've got cancer is that you have a swollen abdomen, that you have all of these symptoms, that you are peeing frequently, you have a sore back, and you look it all up on the books that these five doctors have written,
and it seems to me that the case is, and you're a woman, let's really sort of go with the whole hog, So you start taking these pills and you keep feeling worse.
Well, you start feeling better sort of initially, but then you notice that your symptoms keep getting worse and things aren't going well, and you're starting to feel pretty damn miserable.
And so you go back to your doctor and you say, Doc, I don't know.
I'm not sure that this is really the stuff for me.
It's not making me feel very good.
And my swelling is getting bigger and so on.
And he says, oh yeah, no, that's natural.
There are some growing pains with this.
The transition isn't sort of immediate.
There are some growing pains involved in it.
There's going to be a transition time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, so then at some point you say, oh, listen, do you mind awfully if I go for a second opinion?
He's like, no, you can go for a second opinion.
Of course you can. So then you go touring around the other five doctors in your town, and let's pretend there's no internet and you can't leave town.
I would just give me the bubble if you don't mind for a moment.
And... What happens then is every one of the doctors tells you exactly the same thing.
Yes, the blue pills are what you need.
Yes, it's going to feel worse for a while.
But then, by golly, it's going to start to feel a whole lot better.
And trust Dr.
X, your first doctor.
He knows what he's talking about.
Anyway, so to cut a long story short, as it turns out, You get very sick and you die.
And the answer as to what was wrong with you was that you actually were pregnant.
That was the swelling, that was all of this.
And the pills that the doctor gave you were morphine.
And, as it turned out, The doctor, all the doctors in the town who gave you these pills were in the pay of the Blue Pill Morphine Company.
Well, I've got to tell you, I think that there would be a certain amount of culpability in a pretty significant kind of way to that kind of situation.
It seems to me that this kind of The problem would be something that I would feel pretty comfortable putting the doctors, like, really, totally, completely and utterly at fault for.
I would feel quite comfortable suing them, taking away their license, if I was in the current situation, throwing them in jail, just, again, not to put too many variables in place.
And why? Well, obviously there was a horrendous misdiagnosis.
What was growing pains of a baby was called, you maybe felt was cancerous, and then you went to the doctor who said, oh yeah, it's cancerous, take these blue pills.
And as it turned out, the blue pills, while providing some initial euphoria, ended up providing a toxic level of narcotics to you and your fetus, which caused you to both die.
Now, the reason that I think this metaphor is fairly valid is that the growing pains of capitalism Cause dislocation, cause apparent poverty.
They bring the rural poor into view of the urban elite to the intellectuals and so on.
So it kind of feels bad, right?
Like pregnancy feels like the flu, a minor version of the flu at the beginning.
And so you went to a doctor after misdiagnosing yourself.
And, of course, this is society, right?
The woman is society. Society as a whole goes to the intellectuals just as individual citizens go to doctors, and society says to the intellectuals, you know, this feels bad.
What's going on right now feels really, really bad.
Just as a pregnant woman will go to a doctor, a woman who knows nothing about pregnancy, and say, well, gee, I feel bad.
Now, of course, a good doctor will say, no smoky, no drinky, take your folic acid, you need to do X, Y, and Z to change your diet perhaps a little, and don't worry about feeling that you're It's a wonderful thing.
Yes, there's some unpleasantness involved with it, but it is in fact a wonderful thing.
And you should be very pleased and happy that you're pregnant and you're going to have a bundle of new life.
And yes, there are growing pains and blah, blah, blah.
So a good doctor will reassure the patient that she's not ill but in fact pregnant.
And of course, this is what society, when going through the growing pains of capitalism, which brings a lot of formerly buried misery to the fore, right?
And brings a lot of resentment from all of the people who have profited from the previous social incarnation, I guess you could say.
And it's really up to the intellectuals to say to society, yeah, it feels bad, but it's a good thing.
It feels bad, but it's a good thing.
I think that would be sort of the job of intellectuals, to help people to correctly diagnose what is going on in society, to help them differentiate from that which merely feels bad to that which actually is bad.
Which is quite a bit of different stuff.
And of course, as I've been talking about in the Introduction to Philosophy series, what philosophy reveals is true is not obvious.
If it was obvious, like if a nutritionist job were to say, eat chocolate and sit on the couch, it wouldn't really be much of a job.
Right? Because...
That's what sort of people want to do anyway.
So given that that's what people want to do anyway, it wouldn't really seem to make that much sense for there to be a sort of PhD in nutrition that told people sort of what it is they wanted to do anyway.
The whole point of nutrition, as we've talked about in the other series, is that what you should do in terms of nutrition is...
Sorry, I just happened to adjust here a little.
What you should do in terms of nutrition is...
Quite different from what your natural impulses are to do in terms of nutrition, because, well, you can listen to the other series if you want to know more about that.
So it's all the non-obvious truths that people who are intellectuals should be providing to society.
Now... When this woman goes to the doctor and then goes to the other doctors for second opinion and receives a unanimity of opinion about what her ailment is and what the cure is, you are sick, take the blue pills, well, what's she supposed to do?
She can't go to medical school and become a doctor.
She has to Either refuse medicine of any kind, given that she only has access to the doctors that are in her town, these five doctors.
She either has to issue medical help of any kind or...
She has to take the blue pills.
I mean, she can't go to school and become a doctor, and of course, it wouldn't really do her much good to go to school and become a doctor because these five doctors also went to school to become doctors, so it seems very unlikely that she would get a different diagnosis.
Now, the question is, do the doctors really believe that The blue pill is a good remedy for pregnancy.
Is that what the doctors believe?
Do they believe that the blue pill is a good cure for pregnancy?
And do they actually believe that pregnancy is an illness?
Well, of course, there's no real way to tell.
There's no real way to tell, because all we know is that the doctors are in the pay of the Blue Pill Morphine Company, and therefore we know that their enumeration is based almost completely on the prescription of these pills.
That's a fairly important thing.
We can speculate all we want as to their, sort of, quote, real motives, but the one thing that is important to understand is that they are paid to tell you to take the blue pill,
and this is the most fundamental part and this is where I think the intellectuals become culpable and they are not telling you that they are being paid to prescribe you the blue pill.
So all of this I think is a fairly significant and important aspect to understanding the role of intellectuals in the development of state power.
And we're all talking sort of prior to the rise of the internet where you can get alternative viewpoints but of course very few people go and dig into these alternative viewpoints unless you actually have a kind of desire for or nature for this kind of stuff.
So the blue pill being prescribed to the pregnant woman which results in the death of her and her baby One of the things that I think would be a reasonable thing to ask would be to say to the doctors, The first thing that you need to reveal is that you're in the pay of the blue pill morphine company.
And if you don't prescribe the blue pills for every ailment known to man, you are not only going to be a less profitable doctor, you are not only going to be a less profitable doctor, but by heavens you're not even going to be a doctor at
You don't get to be a doctor at all if you don't work and falsely prescribe morphine for all ailments.
You don't get to be a doctor at all if you don't work for the Blue Pill Morphine Company.
So, basically, in this sort of example, the position of doctor is completely false.
There is no such thing as a doctor.
All there are are blue pill morphine dispensers who claim to be doctors and who know that they're not doctors and who know that there is such a thing as health and that they don't pursue it.
And, of course, the question is, How do we know that they know?
Well, let's pretend for a moment that the doctors in this town, these five doctors in this town, say, well, we don't know.
If a reporter sits down and asks them, and we'll talk about reporters later, if a reporter sits down and asks them, do you think that The blue pills are good for people.
And they'll say, yes, of course, my whole reputation is based on the fact that I'm prescribing these blue pills.
Of course I think the blue pills are good for people.
Well, the real question then is, since full disclosure is relatively important, especially when you're dealing with things like health and philosophy, I think that it could well be argued that That if you're giving somebody advice, it's usually important to talk about what your interests and motives are in it so that the person can judge your objectivity.
And so if the doctors truly believe that the blue pills are the best thing since sliced bread, and it's really unfortunate that the woman who was pregnant died from taking the blue pills and lost her baby to boot, but what happened was she was probably too stupid to take the pills correctly.
Or maybe she sold them on the black market and only pretended to tell them to take the pills.
So, it really was the fault of the woman that she died.
So, it's certainly not the fault of the doctors, and it's certainly not the fault of the blue pills.
So, this is the doctor's story.
The question that you would then ask these doctors if you wanted to find out whether or not they, I guess, had swallowed their own pills, whether or not they believed in these pills, the question that you would ask them would be something like this.
Okay, Mr. Doctor, Dr.
X, if you believe that the blue pills are really great for a pregnancy, Then I have two questions for you.
Number one. Will you prescribe the same blue pills to your wife when she's pregnant?
Will you prescribe the same blue pills, or have you prescribed, or did you prescribe the same blue pills to your wife when she's pregnant?
Number one. Number two would be Why don't you tell your patients that you are in the pay of the Blue Pill Morphine Company?
That's a fairly important conflict of interest, wouldn't you say?
So the two questions.
Do you prescribe it for yourself, A, and B, Will you tell your patients about your financial remuneration package from the blue pill company?
Or, will you tell them in the future?
Have you told them, and if not, why not, and will you tell them in the future?
Now, if the doctor says, hell yeah, I prescribed the blue pills for my wife, okay, credibility goes up just a little bit.
And if the doctor also says, yes, I do tell every single one of my patients about my association with the Blue Pill Company, and it's up front, it's and it's up front, it's right there in the documentation,
They sign it and they hear that, yes, I am a doctor only because of my financial association with the Blue Pill Company.
And therefore, they can judge my prescription of the Blue Pills for whatever ails them accordingly.
So, yes, I have prescribed this pill for myself.
And also, I have full disclosure when it comes to...
Telling my patients about my compensation package and what it all means.
So, if, however, the doctor has done neither of these two things, if the doctor has neither prescribed this same pill for his own wife, nor does he tell his patients about His compensation package or his entire reason or possibility of being a doctor from the Blue Pill Company,
if he doesn't sort of talk about this with his patients, then we know for sure that he knows it's total bullshit.
So this is, I would say, fairly important to understand.
This is how you find out about people's culpability in this area.
This is how you find out whether or not people have, in a sense, sort of, or in effect, swallowed their own nonsense, is have they prescribed it for themselves.
I think that's a fairly reasonable approach to the question or the problem.
And let's now turn, having this metaphor in hand, let's now turn to intellectuals so that we can figure out what is meant by this metaphor, what this metaphor reveals to us.
Now, why is this metaphor relevant?
Well, you're in a town, which is a country, and there are five doctors, which is all the doctors that you have access to.
And in a country, you have access to intellectuals, and these are pretty much the only figures prior to the Internet.
These are the only figures that exist in terms of helping you to diagnose the ills of society.
So these are the sociology professors from Harvard, these are the pundits, these are the reporters, these are all of the professors, all of the intellectuals, the writers and so on, all of the intellectuals that exist and claim to be able to diagnose society's ailments and ills.
These people are available to you, and no others are available to you.
So there are no libertarian professors.
Yes, there may be a couple in a country, but they're not given any respect by the other intellectuals.
It's a sort of self-reinforcing system.
You can find people like Murray Rothbard and von Mises, but they are not given any respect in the general sense of things.
So you can't find these intellectuals.
Sorry, you can't find any non-statist intellectuals.
And so you can't go and become a political philosopher or a philosopher or a sociologist or a professor yourself to sort of validate their opinions and Because you don't have the time.
I mean, that's the whole point of the division of laborer, is I don't have to become a mechanic to get my car fixed.
That's why I pay to get my car fixed.
Tiger Woods probably doesn't do his own typing.
So... This...
Issue that the intellectuals are kind of...
They present a common front, I guess you could say.
That gives people who are not intellectuals a fair amount of trust, right?
So there are scientists, there are not a whole lot of scientists, in fact I can't even think of one, who don...
Aztec headdresses to figure out the problem to an equation.
They all generally sit down and work it out on a whiteboard or a computer or a notepad or whatever, chalkboard, to work it out.
They all use math. They're all logical.
There are not a whole lot of mathematicians who decide whose theory is better Through armed combat.
You get some of that in religion, but it's not...
So there's a consistency among mathematicians, there's a consistency among scientists about the whole deal and what it means.
So when intellectuals all have the same opinion, they're very much like the five doctors.
Yeah, you can go for a second opinion.
But what does it really mean?
It doesn't really mean anything to go for a second opinion.
So, from that standpoint, the analogy holds.
Now, when society goes through something that's painful, Then it is really up to the intellectuals to diagnose it.
And there are things that society goes through that is painful, like a cancer or something, like a cancer in terms of health, that needs to be treated with aggressive intervention from a medical standpoint, or at least that's what I hear.
I'm sure that there are alternative medical practitioners who will think otherwise.
But these kinds of pains that occur are very much along the lines of yes something is really bad we need to fix it and here's what we need to do And there are other things which cause pain which are actually good for you, right? So when I was a kid, I had lumbago in that my bones grew a lot faster than my tendons and my muscles.
So I was in quite a bit of pain throughout my series of growth spurts from about the age of 8 to about the age of 16, off and on.
And I'm not going to say it's any sort of huge deal.
But... If the doctor...
I mean, this was kind of healthy, right?
It meant that I ended up being taller.
It meant that I was never particularly flexible because I still can't touch my toes and never will be able to, even after I've done years of yoga.
But... that's a growing pain, I guess you could say.
And in the same way that when a woman develops breasts, there's tenderness, there's pain, there's all this, that, and the other.
And... That should not be diagnosed as breast cancer, right?
I mean, that's just breast, I guess you could say.
Oh, phrase of the day, I guess you could say.
Let me see if I can wrestle that stray cattle in back to the herd.
I'm off the private roads and back onto the public roads, and so it's going to be a little jouncy-bouncy.
This is for the webcam viewers.
I don't think that the people who are just listening to the audio give too much of a fussy deal about it.
Not, I guess you could say.
So, the question then becomes, the intellectuals and their relationship to what it is that they're sort of, quote, prescribing.
So, there were obviously some growing pains to capitalism, and...
They're much better than the alternative, which is to stay in the filth and squalor of feudalism.
Even Marx said that capitalism was better than feudalism.
So when society was experiencing these pains and then you had sentimental and talented fools like Dickens talking up how important it was for society to intervene and pointing out the misery with the non-economist's sentimental view that all who suffer must have their suffering alleviated.
Which is sort of the equivalent of society should be like a boy in a bubble, right?
A healthy boy in a bubble who should never fall and get scrapes and blah, blah, blah.
But people like politicians are always fussing, as you can see with Kyoto.
They're always fussing for more statist interventionist crap.
And... So you've got the intellectual, you've got the politicians fussing for it.
You've got the artists provoking all of these wounds in the public conscience.
You have the priests, of course, who hate capitalism and always have, talking about how we need to intervene and this and that.
And so you have, and of course, the aristocracy want to regain their own, their old sort of situation of largesse where they got to hand out all of the candy to the kids.
To make themselves feel valuable and noble and good.
So you've got lots and lots of groups, right?
The corrupt poor want welfare.
So there's lots of groups in society that are agitating for a slowdown, a control, a management, an intervention, whatever you want to call it, to capitalism.
And the same thing you can see with the Great Depression followed by the Keynesian Revolution.
Whereas, of course, it's up to the intellectuals to say, no, you've got to not do this.
You've got to not intervene.
This is painful, of course, like puberty is painful, like growing is painful, like childbirth is painful, but it's a good thing.
And here's why, and this is, of course, what economists try to do, to try and show the hidden losses and problems behind every transaction so that people don't just focus on the good stuff and not have any problems with the bad stuff.
So, the question then becomes, the intellectuals then say, yes, let's get the blue pill.
Let's take the morphine as society.
We've got these pains. Let's take the morphine.
And the question is, of course, do they take the morphine themselves?
So for the socialists, and of course these are the main people, the socialists, the communists, the fascists, the statists, right?
I mean, this is the public intellectuals of every hue, and I'll talk about this a little bit more this afternoon.
Public intellectuals of every hue are statists to the core.
You know, are vicious statist bastards.
And... So I think that it's important to understand that they don't take the pill themselves.
They don't take the pill themselves.
I'll sort of give you three minor examples.
One of the prominent Fabian socialists, George Bernard Shaw, who was the gentleman who wrote Arms and the Mans.
He's a good playwright, of course.
He was a socialist, and he lived a fairly wealthy life, and he had his own house with a lovely garden, and he moved among the aristocracy, and he did not.
He exercised property rights himself while talking about the need for a strongly interventionist kind of socialism.
So a man who has a lovely little manor with a lovely little garden and who does not work other than to...
I mean, he worked his whole life.
He lived to be a ripe old age.
But it's not quite the same as working in a factory if you've got a talent to write plays.
And so he did not turn over all of his property to the state and say, go help the poor, which is what he was advocating as a principal.
I don't think he turned even over the majority of his property to the state to say, go help the poor.
What he did was he sat in his garden sipping his tea and writing tracts about how no property rights was the ideal and everybody should do everything to help the poor by turning their property over to the state.
Well, he didn't do any of that. He kept his property for himself.
So he certainly did not prescribe the blue pill for his own life.
Now, of course, he, as a playwright at the turn of the last century, was very beholden to the state.
The state had the power of turning away all of his plays, of forcing them to not be produced.
And... So he was very much beholden to the state, and of course he was educated largely by the state, and I don't know much about his other history, perhaps we can look it up, or I can look it up and let you know, but he could not be a playwright unless he pleased the state.
And if he wrote stuff that was against what the state felt was the right thing to do, then he would actually have to get a real job and stop writing about how good socialism was.
And you don't see that kind of full disclosure.
So he didn't apply his own socialistic principles towards his own life.
So he didn't prescribe the blue pill to his own wife, so to speak, when she was pregnant, but feels happy prescribing it for everyone else.
And that, of course, seems somewhat hypocritical.
And that's how you know that he knows it's nonsense.
But it's popular nonsense, and it's what the government liked because it gave them more power.
So he wrote it as if he were not on their payroll and under their thumb.
Now, if we take a look at Edmund Wilson, who was a prominent British socialist-slash-communist who wrote To the Finland Station, which was a history of Russian communism.
To the Finland Station was Lenin's journey.
He was paid by the Germans to return to Russia in 1916-1917 to foment a revolution to get them out of the war so that Germany wouldn't have to fight a two-front war, which worked very well.
And... He was very much a communist and very much for socialist redistribution of wealth, the government owning all the property and so on.
And he actually ended up having to leave the United States basically one step ahead of the IRS because he did not pay his income tax for about ten years.
I've mentioned this once before.
This is quite fantastical when you think about it.
I mean, boy, you just can't get any more hypocritical than this.
This is a man who believes that the government should run everything, should own all the property, and that everybody should turn over their property to the government, and he doesn't even pay his income tax.
Of course, I don't think that you should pay income tax, but surely, if you're a communist, you could see your way clear to paying 10 or 20 percent of your income back then in income tax.
And when he was found out, he fled the country so that he wouldn't have to pay.
I mean, at least the Beatles wrote a song about the taxman condemning taxes when they had to flee England.
They weren't all communists.
Well, I guess Lenin was definitely a socialist, probably a communist.
But it's pretty revolting to see that.
It's pretty revolting to see that.
So... I think that you can look at that guy and see exactly the same kind of hypocrisy going on when it comes to his.
Now, of course, Marx, we've talked about before.
Marx made a lot of money in his life, played the stock market, tried to get bourgeois jobs, and lived off the proceeds of Engels' inheritance, which was all made from capitalism, right?
So he had no problem with the sort of tainted money that came out of manufacturing.
He was very much against the exploitation of workers, and, of course, he...
He exploited his maid, banged her senseless.
She had a kid. He basically kicked her out of the house.
His two daughters committed suicide.
I mean, this is a guy who definitely did not take his own pill, right?
He hung on to his money. He didn't work pretty much for the last 20 years of his life, just read a whole load of nonsense and learned all these languages for no reason.
But he didn't really work.
He lifted off the exploitation of the workers, right?
And he exploited his own people, and he hung on to all of his property, all of the property that he conceivably could, while talking about the joys of communism, right?
So intellectuals themselves are, you know, a filthy bunch of prevaricators in this sense, that they absolutely do not want to take their own pill.
They absolutely do not want to take their own pill.
It's for other people, you see.
It's for you. It's for me. It's not for them.
This stuff, these rules, they're not for them.
I mean, they're like the Saudi princes.
Yes, you should follow the rule of Allah and you should not consort with prostitutes and blah, blah, blah.
But, you know, when I'm on my yacht in the French Riviera, I break out the cocaine and the hookers.
I mean, these rules, they're not for the rulers.
They're for you and I. I mean...
And it's the same thing with the intellectuals.
Now, the last thing that I'll say on this topic, on this podcast, is that you also don't get the full disclosure.
Just about every single intellectual and reporter and public pundit and so on is beholden to the state in one damn form or another.
And that's a pretty important thing to understand.
They're beholden to the state in one damn form or another.
So we've talked about reporters always need their sources from the government.
And we've talked about university professors constantly having to please the state in order to get tenure and in order to get published.
They can't publish anything radical.
Public school teachers, I mean, we don't even need to talk about public school teachers.
That's just so obvious.
People who run networks are, of course, required to get licenses every year from the state, and, of course, if they do things which displease the state, I think they might find, sadly, that their licenses don't get approved or get revoked, or they get audited, or some damn thing is going to happen that is going to mean that they don't end up getting to...
To do their broadcasting and of course they may have the odd impulse to defy the state and then to when the state pulls their license to continue the good fight but of course it's a little hard to continue the good fight When the state has pulled your license.
So this is something that, in the interest of full disclosure, and I'm going to work on over the next little while, full disclosure for various professions just so that we can understand how closely tied up they are to the state, full disclosure for professors and reporters and public school teachers and so on.
And what this all means, for me at least, is that When you don't provide full disclosure, when you don't say, I am beholden to and in the pay of the state,
and if I don't write things that please the state, then I am going to lose my job, lose my income, lose my reputation, blah, blah, blah, blah, then you really are not telling your patients,
so to speak, What your motivations are for what it is that you're saying and you are, I believe, morally and financially culpable and I would say criminally culpable for what it is that you're putting forward.
And I think that's a very important thing or a very important approach to understand that these people really don't have the basic honesty that we would expect from a doctor in other words I want to hear about full disclosure about your financial motives and interests in these particular areas and I also want to know if you have prescribed if you have taken the very medicine that you prescribe and of course I would like and I'm going to work on this it's going to be a bit of a project but I think it's worthwhile doing I'm going to work on sample full disclosures for people in various professions that are sort of public diagnoses of social ills and solutions so that we can understand How corrupt they are and how morally culpable they are,
we'll just talk morally, for misdiagnosing.
I mean, the average person can't think their way out of a paper bag, right, as far as that goes.
The average person cannot, for the life of them, figure out what the right thing to do is from a moral standpoint.
There's absolutely no chance that they'll be able to do that.
Any more than you can sort of snap your fingers and learn Russian, right?
Learning philosophy, learning politics, learning economics is a lifelong pursuit.
It certainly has been for me, and I think I have a few brain cells to offer to the equation.
And... Ah, look at that.
Only 41 minutes, and I'm almost at work.
The issue that I would sort of like to put on the table is that I do believe that intellectuals are responsible for the evil of the world.
And we'll talk a little bit more next about the absolutely horrifying ramifications of that belief.
And I think it's a good way towards solving this issue.
I'm not saying that I have any strong ideas or opinions about the next steps or how we get the intellectuals to fess up to their corruption.
I'm not going to talk about anything like that.
That's certainly more than I can manage to figure out just now.
I'm trying to hack my way through this bit by bit.
But I do think that this particular beginning is well worth understanding.
This metaphor of the five doctors I think is actually very helpful.
And so I hope that this is of use to you and I do hope that you can begin to use this in your own life to understand these issues perhaps a little bit more clearly.
They've certainly been very helpful and once more, once more, thank you so so much to the board who has just been magnificent In getting me to understand these issues in a way that I didn't before, I can't even begin to tell you how much I appreciate that and how much I value the integrity and intelligence of the people on the board.
So I hugely, hugely appreciate that and I hope that this has been of use to you and I thank you as always for listening and I look forward to your donations.
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