Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:29:01

409 Call In Show Sep 10 2006 - 9/11, War, Invasion, Defense and Education

A pleasant chat that went into overtime!

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, thank you so much for joining us this fine Sunday afternoon, September the 10th, 2006.
	One day before the anniversary of...
	something...
	something...
	no... Anyway, more importantly, it's two weeks before the anniversary of my 40th birthday, so that's going to be quite exciting.
	And, of course, we've already booked the dancing girls and so on, so that's going to be a lot of fun.
	I just sort of wanted to mention that I just mentioned that Christina had joined me on a podcast today, which I'm thrilled about.
	And... I just wanted to sort of mention that the question was, because we'd sort of promised, and we will get to it, we had promised to do a video podcast on how to productively solve certain types of relationship issues.
	So there are some ways which we have sort of worked out, which have been very useful for us in terms of being able to solve relationship problems.
	And a lot of it has to do with eroding my capacity for free will and choice, of course, because that doesn't really help us very much.
	And we sort of were going to do a...
	We still are going to do...
	It's why there's still a bit of a gap in Podcast 400.
	We're going to do a sort of suggested ways and ways that don't work.
	So we're going to sort of do it the ways that don't work, and then we're going to do it the ways that do work.
	And that's something which we're going to get around to.
	That's going to be fairly involved, though, of course...
	So, we'll get round to that.
	And I was hoping to do it this weekend.
	I'm actually not starting my job for another week, so this is why I've been able to be fairly productive in the realm of the videocasts and to a smaller degree the podcasts.
	But what I have done is that there were some requests for people who have been listening to the audiobook of The God of Atheists, which is my, I don't know, I guess my modern comedy, or at least I remember it being a comedy.
	At least when I wrote it, it seemed to be quite funny.
	And there are parts in it that I think are funny, When I am going through the reading of it, it's got quite a lot of heartbreak in it.
	And I'm a little bit surprised, sort of noticing that as I go through the reading, how heartbreaking it is.
	But of course, it was a time in my life.
	I mean, I started the novel before I met Christina, when I was still embedded in some pretty...
	In hindsight, not relationships that had the most integrity in the universe.
	And so I find when I go back and read it that there's a lot of heartbreak.
	It's kind of bittersweet, I guess, and I remember more the sweetness than the bitterness, but in rereading it.
	I'm finding it to be... I mean, I'm very pleased with it, but I also find it to be a little bit darker than I recall.
	And so that's been a little bit draining for me, so I've had to take some breaks from that.
	And I try to try and pour heart and soul into reading it, and that means it's mostly just screamed.
	So that's...
	It's also tough on the voice.
	No, I'm kidding. So once that's finished, I will be able to get back a bit more into doing some of these video casts, but it's been quite a...
	Greg, you read, you were one of the first people to read The God of Atheists.
	Is it just me sort of layering back some things in history, or did you find that there was a fair amount of heartbreak in the book as well?
	With all of your books, if it weren't for the podcast, I wouldn't have realized just how much, just how autobiographical they are.
	But yeah, God of Atheists was...
	There were some, well, the opening chapters, for example.
	That whole bit with, oh, what was her name?
	Yeah, where you're describing her in the bookstore and all that.
	I found that pretty depressing.
	And then the relationship between Stephen and his father and the camping trip and all of that.
	It's a pretty dramatic book.
	I don't know if I would describe it as a comedy though.
	Right. Well, I would say that it's, you know, like, it's like when you look up at the night sky, it's mostly black, but your eyes are drawn towards the stars.
	So I guess I don't notice the heartbreak so much, but I go, hey, there's a funny joke.
	So it's probably not the most, but I'm finding as I'm rereading it, that putting the emotional energy into reproducing the characters and their motivations, that there's quite a lot of heartbreak in it.
	And of course, because the novel is really around children waking up To the moral natures of their families.
	And as I sort of worked very hard to try and make it a non-dramatic kind of family corruption story, so I don't think I'm giving anything away for those who haven't read it, but...
	Oh, we have somebody joined who's giving us an echo.
	All right. I'll just mute everyone.
	Now, if you've just joined, if you could turn off the...
	Turn off the speakers or the microphone because you're going to get the feedback loop.
	But I tried sort of to make, in The God of Atheists, I tried to make the family situations not madly dramatic, right?
	So I didn't want there to be like child beating or screaming at children or whatever.
	I wanted the sort of corruption of the children to be kind of subtle.
	And I think that it did remain sort of subtle because I wanted it to be...
	I didn't want it to be a kind of book where people go like...
	Wow, that wasn't my childhood.
	That's a really bad childhood, but it's somehow distanced from my own childhood.
	So if I'd written an autobiographical novel about my own childhood, then I think people would have said, well, that's without a doubt.
	That's a bad childhood, and that's what he means by corruption, sort of violence and so on.
	But that's not what I wanted to get at.
	What I wanted to get at is that the corruption that goes on in a lot of family units is a lot more subtle than that.
	So I wanted to sort of reach it out to a sort of broader kind of audience, but what I found in the rereading of it is that it's almost sadder that way, because it's a little bit more universal.
	I originally called it a comedy-drama.
	I think I might now have to say sort of drama, and then with a little footnote, some comedic bits.
	So I think that'll have to be the approach.
	Yeah, I found that, at least for me, the most dramatic in that sense was the scene where Gordon is trying to pitch the most dramatic in that sense was the scene where Gordon is trying to That was a pretty dramatic moment.
	Yes, yes, no, and I think that...
	I just finished reading that scene, and I'm bracing myself for...
	I'd forgotten what a bad temper Dave has, and how vicious he can get when he's angry, so that kind of stuff is a little bit tough to act and reproduce, so...
	All right.
	Now... Sorry, go ahead. And that whole scene with...
	The whole scene with...
	Oh...
	Where Terry has to go out and get a power cable.
	That was great.
	That was taking two of my worst presentations and rolling in with one horrible experience.
	I just listened to that last night trying to get to sleep and I found that it got me so stressed I couldn't stop listening to it because I was having a tough time falling asleep again.
	There's definitely some truth in those moments.
	Excellent. All right.
	Now, I guess we are coming up to the anniversary of 9-11.
	I guess it's been five years since the shadows of the planes first passed over Lower Manhattan.
	And I'm not going to have a very long chat about it, at least from my side.
	I'll certainly be happy to open it up to other people.
	But I just wanted to sort of point out the number of logical and conceptual errors that are involved in something like the war on terror.
	The war on terror.
	And we touched on this last weekend when we were talking about some of the ways in which public schools could fall under the penumbra of using violence to influence political thinking within a culture or society.
	But when we think about something like, and this isn't going to be hugely shocking to the people here, but to other people who may be listening in, it might be sort of eye-opening.
	But when we think about something like the War on Terror, generally it is, as you know, as you know, the idea that America or the Western countries as bastions of post-Enlightenment civilization and democracy and human rights and virtue and all that is happy and noble in the world are fighting a rearguard action against the forces of medieval theocracy and darkness the idea that America or the Western countries as bastions of post-Enlightenment civilization and democracy and human rights and virtue and all that is although sometimes other third world kinds of Of nations.
	And it is cast in this sort of Lord of the Rings style, Aragorn versus Sauron kind of world where we are moral and they are evil.
	And we can't cut and run.
	We can't surrender the fight for virtue and truth and light and goodness in the world.
	And the moment that we put down our weapons or sometimes even when we stop to reload, that the forces of darkness and evil inch forward even further and capture more of the noble hill of shining virtue and so on.
	And I just sort of wanted to point out...
	That there's an enormous number of logical errors.
	I'll just touch on a few of them and then sort of open it up for further discussion.
	But the idea that there is a we in society is really quite illogical, sort of when you think about it.
	When you hear the government with its terror levels and so on saying, you know, we are fighting a war on terror, it's not the case.
	Not the case at all.
	There is no we when it comes to us and the government.
	It's sort of like the...
	The pig farmer saying to the pig, we're going to sit down for a nice bacon sandwich.
	It's not a we in any way that would make any kind of logical sense.
	Because a we implies, I think, voluntary association.
	If somebody takes a bride by force, either through blackmail or through kidnapping or whatever, if somebody just grabs a woman off the street and forces her at gunpoint to marry him, and then he later says, we got married, I think that you might reasonably say, what on earth would that possibly mean, to say we got married when somebody was forced to become somebody else's bride?
	It's sort of like a rapist saying, we had sex.
	Well, you might have, but I bet you the woman wouldn't characterize it that way.
	And so the idea that when the government sits down and talks about a we, it really is, and it's very important why it does this, it really wants to try as hard as possible to pretend that there's no gun in the room, as we've talked about before.
	So it really wants to pretend that you voted for us to protect you, that you voluntarily want us to protect you, and we together are fighting the forces of darkness, and so on.
	And, of course, what it has to do is it has to create a complete merging of the concepts of citizen and government.
	Of citizen and government.
	So, for instance, when you look over at the theocratic Muslim world, what you see is the result of government corruption.
	I mean, they are theocracies, and there's a damn good reason why they're theocracies, because if you don't have a gun pointed at you, you're not likely to do all the crazy things that the Muslim society requires for you to do.
	So, it kind of talks about them as if the citizens and the governments in the Muslim countries are one, that it's a voluntary relationship, and therefore everybody's responsible.
	And it kind of talks about an us.
	In that it tries to unite a voluntary relationship between citizens and the government.
	And there's a huge reason why it does this, of course, because the people in the government don't want to be reminded that they have a gun trained at us, right?
	That any time that you were to look at something like a war on terror, the first place that you would look at is the tax collection agencies and the regulatory agencies domestically.
	Because the real cycle of violence is always between taxpayers and government.
	Everything else is just an effect of that.
	So we always say, well, American foreign policy is bad.
	Or maybe some people say it's good.
	I would say that it's bad.
	But that's just an effect of the primary violence within society, which is the forcible theft of income from citizens at the point of a gun through taxation.
	You simply can't have...
	Overthrows of foreign governments, all of the corrupting influences and briberies involved in foreign aid and the IMF and the UN redistribution programs, and you can't have black ops in Vietnam and you can't have organized assassination of innocent peasants without the primary, central, initiatory, coercive force of taxation.
	Everything that we see in the world that is an evil effect of violence is merely a symptom of taxation.
	And I just sort of think when it comes to thinking about the innocent people who were murdered September 11th, five years ago, that we remember that these people were murdered as a result of taxation, not as a result of the evil Muslims in foreign countries.
	Because taxation domestically paid for all of the initiations of violence that have been endemic to U.S. foreign policy and CIA overthrows of democratic governments and sometimes not so democratic governments for the past 50 or 60 years.
	The constant meddling in South America, the constant meddling in Asia, the violence, the subterfuge, the poisonings, the assassinations.
	The sanctions, the blockades, the quarantines, the sanctions alone which resulted in the death supposedly of half a million Iraqi children throughout the 1990s.
	That all of that causal instigation of hostility from overseas is a direct result of taxation.
	People don't fund this themselves.
	They don't sort of wake up one morning and say, hey, you know what, I'm going to quit my job.
	I'm going to go and become some grease-painted ass monkey out in Asia, shooting people for the hell of it.
	People don't fund that themselves.
	If you've got to have a job, then you really don't have the time to go become some recreational, suicidal, sociopathic soldier of fortune.
	In some jungle overseas, because you've got to get up and go to work.
	So all of the violence that has been unleashed by the US government and the British government and a lot of the Western governments, which of course is largely hidden from the general population, is a direct result of the violence of taxation.
	When we look at people like Bin Laden as a creation of the CIA, and then, of course, when we look at the money that Bin Laden, if he was involved in 9-11, we have a look at the money that these sorts of groups get.
	Where do they get it from? Well, they get it from the drug trade.
	And where do they get the drug trade profits from?
	From the very illegality of the governments in the Western countries.
	And where do the Saudi princes get their money from in a sort of subterranean manner to fund all of this stuff?
	They get it from taxation. The violence, the genocide, the brutality, the foreign enslavements and murderers, almost every instance of institutionalized violence in the world is a direct symptom of taxation.
	Taxation is the greatest plague and I think that if we had any sensitivity to the realities of that kind of situation, then there would be a tax revolt.
	To commemorate the murdered victims of 9-11, 2001, and there would be a tax revolt to commemorate the murdered victims of Vietnam and Korea and Campuchia and China and Russia and Africa, the entire damn continent for the past couple of hundred years.
	That the best way to commemorate the victims of violence is to go to the root of violence and to try and strike down all of the coercion that makes all of the resulting violence not only possible but profitable.
	So that's my general lead-in to the idea.
	of what we should be thinking about or advocating when we start talking to people.
	That's the topic, of course, will inevitably come up, I guess, tomorrow, about what we need to do to commemorate these victims.
	The best way to honor the dead is to prevent further plagues of violence, and we simply can't do that without striking at the root of evil, which is taxation.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hi, this is Lapa Frax.
	Hi, let me just mute everyone except yourself, so that we don't end up in the turning washing machine of sound echoes.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, just in reference to your point about taxation, isn't it real...
	Well, you say that people should revolt against tax, which is what I'd agree with, but isn't it basically...
	Well, isn't it because of the state itself why people kind of revere taxation?
	Sorry, did you say revere taxation?
	Well, I think to a degree, yeah.
	I think, well, I think most people in Western societies don't view taxation as theft as a libertarian would.
	They certainly would actually welcome taxation.
	And I think it's because of the state infrastructure and state education why this is the case.
	And I think as long as we have state education and, well, big government in essence, then people always would view taxation a favourable right.
	Well, I mean, I think you're entirely correct.
	And certainly, as Harry Brown used to say, if there's one thing that we could do to change the world, it would be to get rid of state taxation.
	Sorry, to get rid of state-funded and state-supported education for the young.
	But I think that one of the things that I try to communicate when I'm talking to people about this who aren't too familiar with these ideas is they say, well, people want to pay their taxes.
	They like the government services.
	They want the government to run roads and hospitals and whatever, right?
	And the mail and so on.
	To which, of course, the perfectly sensible reply is to say, well, then we should remove guns from the equation.
	I think that the government knows perfectly well that people don't want to pay 50 or 60% of their income in taxation, and that they don't feel that they're getting any kind of real value, and in fact they're getting a lot of inconvenience and disvalue in the interaction.
	So I think that if people do say, well...
	People want to pay their taxes.
	To me, that's fine. Then all we need to do is take the gun out of the room, right?
	It's like if you've got your girlfriend locked up in the basement and you say, well, she really loves me.
	She wants to be with me.
	It's like, great. Then why don't you unlock the damn basement and see if you can figure that out?
	Well, yeah, I'd agree with that.
	You know, if these services that government provides truly are good services like education or healthcare, then yeah, why can't they be funded voluntarily if they truly are good?
	Right. And then people say often, well, people won't fund them voluntarily because they're selfish and stupid and evil or whatever, right?
	I'm not saying you're saying that, but that's a common argument.
	To which, of course, we can only say, as we were chatting with Michael last week, that if people are stupid and selfish and evil, then we simply can't have such a thing as democracy.
	And we could only then assume that the people who would then end up running the resulting dictatorship would also be I think we're good to go.
	That's why the government expends so much effort in trying to convince us, through mostly never bringing the topic up, that we do in fact have guns pointed against us by people who are almost always morally and intellectually inferior to ourselves.
	Yeah, I suppose that is true.
	But in relation to the point of that people are too selfish or stupid or unintelligent to voluntarily fund service as well, I think it's basically a case of basic economic supply and demand.
	People naturally demand education or good roads or things like that.
	So because the demand is there, then surely someone will be available to produce a supply to meet that demand.
	Sure. Yeah. No, I mean, I think you're quite right.
	And again, this is to harken back to something Harry Brown said.
	If we got rid of public school education tomorrow, there would be chaos for about a week, and then everything would be perfectly well taken care of, and parents would have choice, and children would actually have education that they enjoyed, rather than being stuck in these state brain-draining gulags that just turn people into conformist-compliant pieces of meat, ready for the end of sacrifice to state power.
	Well, and also, in regard to what you were saying earlier about, well, American interventionist foreign policy, well, as a libertarian, of course, I thoroughly agree with what you were saying, but, you know, I think, to an extent, international interventionism is an inherent byproduct of being a major world power.
	If you look here historically, say, at the British Empire or, I don't know...
	Yeah, any empire, I think, would fall into that category, for sure.
	Okay, now, but what do you mean when you say it's an inevitable by-product?
	Do you mean that because if you have the power, you're going to use it, that kind of stuff?
	To an extent, but I think, well, the definition of a world power is a country that has great influence in the world.
	Not necessarily in a military or economic sense, but in a cultural sense also.
	So because of that niche, I think it's inevitable that Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	A major world poll would be interventionist.
	Can I just, can I just, I hate to interrupt you for just a second, but I just wanted to slice and dice your definition of the word power for just a moment, because I think you might be joining a few things together that might be sort of fish and fowl in one category.
	Because you said that there's sort of cultural influences, and by that I assume you would mean things like movies and books and music and so on, which I would assume are voluntarily of value to the consumers in foreign cultures, and that causes a spread of certain kinds of values or whatever.
	And that's sort of a voluntary interaction, but I think if you conflate within to that the definition of military interaction, you might be overstuffing the concept a bit.
	Does that make sense? Well, yeah, I understand your point, but...
	Well, I think cultural influence can and often probably does stem from military influence.
	If you look at the British Empire, well, how do you think the English language came to places like India or Africa?
	It wasn't via necessarily the British voluntarily making people speak these languages, English, was it?
	I think it spread through the dissemination of video games, if I remember my history correctly, is that Just kidding.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, absolutely.
	It was imposed through the ruling classes, and it was heavily imposed through the British opening up of the Indian economy through the smashing of the local pashas, for sure.
	I mean, they went in, in the 19th century, as you know, and smashed up all of the local.
	There were 6,000 princes in India, and they smashed them all up, got them to open up trade, for purely selfish and mercantilist reasons, but for sure.
	And then, of course, the saddest thing is that in the 19th century, they opened up the trade, and then in the 20th century, they taught all of the Indian leaders, like Nehru and Gandhi, to be socialists, and then they had two generations of lost socialist disastrous experiments in India.
	So it's the exporting of bad ideas has always been far more dangerous than the exporting of guns.
	Well, yeah. As I said, I generally think that any major world power, even if China becomes a superpower one day, I still think it would naturally exert influence on other parts of the world because of the inherent nature of being a powerful nation.
	Now, again, I'm sorry to interrupt you again.
	Can you just tell me a little bit more what you mean by influence?
	Because that's the kind of word that I think might be stepping into worlds at the same time.
	Well... I'll define influence in this context as basically having an effect on another power or party.
	Having an effect, okay.
	So in that sense, I don't mean to be overly dismissive, but in that sense, wind has influence on my walking.
	I mean, it has an effect on what it is that I've got to lean into it and that kind of stuff.
	And that's maybe a little bit more vague than would be helpful.
	Well, yeah, I acknowledge your point, but in terms of, say, military or economic influence, well, the United States military or economic influence, well, the United States has economic influence because of the size of its economy.
	And that's not necessarily influencing the sense of force.
	America doesn't force other countries to trade with it as such.
	Right. I mean, there's economic influence, which I would certainly agree with you.
	Actually, Christina and I were just watching an old Boston Legal, wherein if you want to get state-raped government funding from the American taxpayers, then you have to, if you're a medical institution, you have to not perform abortions, right?
	Because it's against the president's ethical beliefs that abortions should be allowed.
	Now, that definitely is a strong degree of economic influence, But that is all the result of money that is coercively taken from taxpayers.
	That's sort of the one thing.
	But if I write a piece of software and then I need to support it, so I go and hire 200 people in India to support it, then of course I'm having an influence on their lives and so on.
	But it's, I think, a very different kind of thing because it's sort of voluntarily mutual win-win and so on.
	Like my employer who pays me a paycheck influences my decision to get up and go to work, but in quite a different way than if I don't pay my taxes, the police are going to influence me to go to jail.
	Well, yeah, I recognize the distinction between coercive influence and what influence by voluntary means.
	But again, in regards to my point about what general power in the world is, I think libertarians in the United States, and perhaps universally, should realize that because the US is the predominant power in the world,
	that it naturally would exert or have an effect on international affairs.
	As I say, historically, that always has been the case.
	Yes, I think you're right.
	I mean, the general cycle seems to be that a certain number of libertarian-style philosophers tend to open up freedom within a country.
	The freedom then produces a vast explosion of productivity and wealth generation, and what that does is it flows more and more money through taxation into the coffers of the government, which thus eventually ends up completely undoing the libertarian or free market revolution, By creating state control and mercantilism and so on.
	So this is the constant cycle that human society is going through, that societies live in shit and squalor, and then some people come along and say, maybe freedom would be better, and then for some reason, which I'm still working on, they get their point across, and then people throw off the yoke of government, and then all of this lovely money is created, and that then ends up flowing into the coffers of the government, Thus causing the government to swell until it cracks and breaks down society as a whole again.
	It really is quite a depressing sort of cycle and one that I hope that the next time we get round to throwing off the government, which certainly will happen, that we can actually put the nail in the coffin or the stake through the heart of this damn beast once and for all so that we can get out of this cycle.
	Well, yeah, yeah. I suppose that's one reason I don't really trust, well, limited government, libertarian or minichist beliefs as such, because I think limited government's an oxymoron, essentially. I think it's intrinsic to the nature of government that it will always will grow, and that, well, you know, as George Washington said, government is force.
	Yes. Yeah, and I mean, you know, if somebody says, do you want me to shoot you in the arm, the neck, or the leg, I'd sort of like to say, well, isn't there a choice D that you don't shoot me at all?
	And so, you know, if you shoot someone in the neck, that's totalitarianism, and if you shoot them in the arm, that's limited democracy, because it's not going to kill you.
	It's just going to, you know, hamper your life in the way that sort of 50% taxation does.
	But I just sort of like, you know, is there something behind door number four that we could open and have a look at, which doesn't involve anybody pointing a gun at each other in an institutional manner?
	And sadly, that seems to be a fairly unexplored option within human society.
	Now, I'm just going to...
	There's another topic which I have.
	Let me just see if I can sort this out.
	And what that is, is there's been a debate on some libertarian forums around immigration, which I would be certainly interested in getting people's thoughts on.
	But the mics are open now if people had something, another topic that they wanted to chat about.
	Oh, somebody said, minarchism is half a milkshake and half a crap. - Thank you.
	I wouldn't want to drink that.
	Right, right. And so you want to get down to 1% crack.
	It's still not going to be that tasty.
	Sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to...
	The previous topic, the question of...
	What do you do about taxation as a mechanism for generating the kind of violence that we saw on 9-11?
	Going back to your original monologue, one question that I had was if we assume...
	Well, not assume, but let's just hypothetically say that...
	Let's say the United States in 1917, 1918 was still as libertarian as it was when it was first formed.
	There was no foreign intervention.
	There was no motivation for foreign interventionism and that sort of thing.
	Would there still have been a 1917 revolution in Russia?
	Would there still have been a communist party?
	Would there still have been their own desire to dominate the planet?
	And if there was, then why?
	Why shouldn't we consider security as an important service, even in a free society?
	Well, I mean, yeah, I certainly understand.
	I'm going to give you two really short answers, then turn it back to you.
	The first, of course, is that, I mean, there's lots of arguments that are pulled out of the 20th century imaginary history to justify, you know, standing armies and foreign interventions and so on.
	But if you go back 100 years...
	You have all of the wars that were going on from the late 17th century all the way through the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
	Massive wars going on all over Europe.
	America stayed out and it seemed that it managed to survive.
	So you can find lots of instances of wars going on early in the first 100-150 years of US history in Europe and in other places as well, of course, where America did not intervene and things managed to sort of trundle their way through to the end.
	Now, as far as 1917 goes, the fact that the United States entered into the First World War caused an enormous imbalance in the fighting, right?
	I mean, there was no possibility for either side to win that war as it stood and they were fighting themselves to exhaustion and they would doubtless have gone back To some sort of original configuration of how the countries were in 1914.
	Everybody would have just gotten exhausted, so to speak, after 10 million people had been killed, and they would have gone home.
	But because the United States entered the war, both militarily and with its about 100,000 troops, which was quite significant, what happened was England and France managed to achieve such an overwhelming victory over Germany that they were able to impose this crazy Treaty of Versailles.
	Now, the Treaty of Versailles, as you know, had these massive reparations payments that would have continued up to about 1980.
	I think they would have finally paid off.
	And that, of course, would have completely destroyed the economy.
	As Churchill said, at the time, there's no point getting reparations.
	So you go and steal 200 million or 2 million shoes from Germany and ship them to England.
	All you do is put English shoemakers out of work.
	Now, if the United States' intervention in World War I had not resulted in the Treaty of Versailles, then Germany would not have had to print all of the money that it had to print, or felt it had to print, in order to pay off its reparations, which would not have caused the destruction of the middle class through the hyperinflation in the 1920s, which is directly linked to the rise of Hitler.
	You can't ever figure out what the end results are I think?
	Well, no, of course, Germany didn't have to print money, but whenever government finds itself in a significant series of debt, it doesn't cut its spending.
	Germany had a huge welfare state.
	Bismarck put it in in 1871.
	It was the first welfare state in the history of the world.
	It had enormous, powerful unions, and so the German politicians, because they're looking at the next couple of years, not the health of the country as a whole, when they have to pay all of this money out of the country, all they do is print the money, and that's what caused the hyperinflation.
	So, also what happened was, as America came in to the war, Germany realized, and it was fairly clear in 1917 that America was coming into the war, because that's the year that it came in.
	Germany realized that it couldn't conceivably fight a two-front war, and so it knew it had to start shifting all of its troops to the Western Front to deal with the new American threat, because, of course, the Americans weren't exactly parachuting into Russia and attacking from the east.
	So Germany had to shift all of its troops to the Western Front in order to have any chance of even fighting to a stalemate.
	And so it had to immediately take Russia out of the equation because America was coming into the war.
	And the way that they did that was they shipped off through Finland.
	They shipped Lenin over to Moscow, gave him money, gave him weapons, gave him funding.
	And that's one of the reasons why you ended up with communism in Russia and 70 million people killed.
	And these are, I mean, you can play these games all day, but these are pretty directly causal effects of the United States' decision to enter into World War II. And, of course, the effects of World War I was the destruction of liberal democracy and classical liberalism throughout the West and the beginning of statism as we sort of know it now.
	And, of course, I would argue that all of that resulted from the 1870s decision to institute public schools.
	But anyway, so that's – sorry, I said short, but it wasn't quite.
	And none of that, the public school systems entering into World War I, all that – None of that would have been possible without taxation.
	Of course, yeah. You simply can't have public schools without taxation.
	You can't have an army without taxation.
	You can't have oppressive governments without taxation.
	And the whole question around taxation was pretty fundamental to the founding of America, right?
	I mean, they originally were fighting for no taxation.
	Some people refused to sign the Articles of Confederation because it included excise taxes and duties and so on.
	And that's why, of course, they had life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and not life, liberty, and property, which was the original draft.
	Because if you have property, then it's anti-slavery and anti-taxation.
	So they had to leave that out.
	That way we don't get to keep our property, but we do have this vaguely defined right to the pursuit of happiness, which I think governments are much more keen to hand out than actual money.
	So then, what you're really saying then is that...
	Historically, if it weren't for the state, there really wouldn't be, and I guess this kind of makes sense, if it weren't for the state historically, then there wouldn't really be any motivation for any kind of grand-scale security at all.
	Well, without the U.S. going into World War I, you have no Soviet empire, so you have no Cold War.
	You have no Nazism getting into power because you don't have the hyperinflation of the 20s.
	So you have neither Nazism, nor do you have Soviet communism, nor, of course, do you have Chinese communism.
	Now, who knows what would have happened in the intervening time, but I think without World War I, and this is totally hypothetical, of course, as most of this stuff is, but this is much more further out there, I think that without the U.S. intervening in World War I, I think that society would have gone in a very different direction, much closer to minarchism, or possibly even, who knows, where we'd be right now.
	Maybe even we'd be in an anarchistic society because...
	The war would have broken the backs of governments.
	Of course, the war would have – you didn't end up creating these endless enemies, these endless – you wouldn't have had the Great Depression, right?
	Without the US entering in World War I, you wouldn't have ended up with the Great Depression, which was a lot to do with the hyperinflation in Germany and other financial dislocations around the world.
	And so, you know, you wouldn't have this whole mythology of government where the welfare state had to be set up.
	I mean, that one decision to enter into World War I might have...
	And of course, the last thing I'll say is that if America hadn't entered into World War I, then because the British and French victory would not have been so complete, there might have been some reassessment of the role of government, right?
	Because the role of government had been growing for the past 40 or 50 years since the sort of 1860s.
	Then people might have re-evaluated that, but they would have said, well, gee, 10 million dead, we kind of ended up back where we started.
	What the hell was the point of all of that?
	And there might have been a much more critical examination of the war, but because there was a perceived victory and we vanquished our foe and we did very well, there was not as much of a critical re-examination of the war.
	I mean, that's all hypothetical and so on, but it's certainly possible that if the war had been, if World War I had ended up being analyzed as the total disaster that it was, Rather than a hard-won victory and blah blah blah, then the role of government might not have expanded in the way that it did.
	And so then the consequence of that is that, of the fact that we did enter, is that now we're faced with a situation where the whole world is full of People who are ready to use force and to use violence for all sorts of different reasons.
	And so if we're to get anywhere with this idea of an anarchistic state or a free society, then we're pretty much stuck with Having to institute some form of,
	at least on an individual basis, some form of protection as a result of the crap left over from the statist world, aren't we?
	You mean because there's been so much violence back and forth?
	Because we're the Hatfields and the Bucoys and we've been shooting each other for so long, we still have to be armed even if we give up sort of the formal structures?
	Is that what you mean? Well, I mean, like, let's say tomorrow we wake up and somehow, mysteriously, everybody who has a government job in the United States just magically vaporized, vanished. Or just decided to go get a real job, right.
	Right. And so there's nobody there to sort of maintain the illusion that there's actually a state there.
	And so all the tanks start rusting and the buildings fall down and so forth.
	That doesn't change the fact that there's still a tax-funded government in Europe, many of them, and in Russia, and in the Middle East, and in South America.
	And how many of those tax-funded governments are going to want to Okay, I mean, that's certainly a viable question, and let's sort of examine how that might work.
	So let's just say that the military gets privatized tomorrow or whatever, which obviously would cause it to shrink enormously in size, and I would say to focus a little bit more on nuclear capacity than conventional warfare.
	But do you feel that some countries within Europe, like Sweden or whatever, might want to sail over the Atlantic and invade the United States to take gold or to steal people?
	Or what do you feel might occur?
	I know I'm being a little facetious, but I just want to make sure I understand what the threat is that you perceive or that could happen.
	Right. I'm kind of, you know, wandering off into...
	No, these are real questions that we get asked, so I think it's well worth asking them because there'll be people out there who say...
	There's lots of ways to answer this.
	The first, of course, is to say that the United States did not have a highly interventionist foreign policy.
	You had the Monroe Doctrine and you had all this kind of stuff, but compared to now, the United States did not have a highly interventionist foreign policy Throughout the first sort of 60 or 70 years of its existence and nobody invaded, right?
	So even if we withdrew our sort of foreign policy weaponry and technology and manpower and funding back to the level say of 1800, we can be pretty sure that even that 99.9% reduction would not result in any kind of invasion because we've been there before and there was no invasion.
	I guess the War of 1812, but that was more government versus government.
	So we had France to our west, we had Spain to the south, and we had England, of course, to the north in the Atlantic.
	How did we manage to keep all of them at bay?
	And still maintain the colonies.
	Right, right.
	With France, of course, we bought the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, so That kind of took him out of the picture, but that still left...
	England was a real threat to us, weren't they?
	Well, it depends what you mean by us.
	Again, it's important not to conflate the citizens with the leaders.
	The motivations for leaders are to maintain their power over their own population.
	I mean, unless they're complete homicidal maniacs like Hitler.
	The purpose of a leader is to maintain domestic control over his own population.
	The main purpose of a leader is not necessarily to go and invade other countries.
	So, if you look at a lot of the wars throughout history, they tend to be caused by people sort of treading on other people and then those other people fighting back.
	And so, if you don't go around sticking your pole into hornet's nests, you often end up not getting stung, right?
	So, of course, in the American, the Revolutionary War, a lot of it had to do with fighting over the carcasses of the domestic taxpayers, right?
	So, was it the local governments or the British governments who were going to get the lion's share of the taxes?
	So that was government versus government.
	If there had been no government collecting any form of taxes within America in the late 18th century, what would England have done?
	Well, maybe it would have come across and tried to invade to set up a tax collection regime, but the fact that the taxes are already being collected and distributed is usually fairly important.
	You want to take over that apparatus because, of course, the tax collector, in sort of fundamental ways, doesn't care who he hands over the taxes to as long as he gets to keep his portion.
	But in an anarchistic society, it would be very, I think, non-profitable to invade and try and set up taxation because the mechanisms of government wouldn't exist already, and you'd have to sort of set them up against a population that you had no information about.
	One of the things that is very, very common in societies that get invaded is that a lot of the citizens are legally disarmed.
	I mean, certainly legally disarmed relative to any kind of military.
	If you simply have no idea who has what scuds or bazookas or tanks or whatever in their basement, it's very hard to invade.
	You have absolutely no information about what it is that you are going to end up trying to take over.
	This is one of the problems that the Americans are having in Iraq.
	They have no idea what's around the next corner.
	They have no idea who's funded with what weapons and where they are.
	So, I think it's pretty hard to invade and take over an anarchistic society because there's no tax-collecting system to take over, and you have no idea who's armed with what.
	So, it would seem to me, and of course, there's no central agency to knock out, right?
	I mean, if you go and invade another country, if you kill the top ten people in the government, then you've kind of taken over the government, right?
	Yeah. But if you sort of think about it in the free market, if you want to try and establish dominance in a particular field, you're not fighting against one mercantilist enemy, right?
	Like, I mean, if Microsoft has the government license to, I don't know, create operating systems or whatever, and nobody else can do it, then you get those rules changed and suddenly you can do it and nobody else can.
	But in attacking an anarchist society, everything's much more amorphous.
	Who do you knock out to become the government?
	The power is like trying to knock out the internet.
	There's no central hub that it all goes through.
	The whole reason the internet was developed was to avoid that kind of strike that might result in no communication.
	I think in an anarchistic society, the difficulty of collecting taxes because there's no existing agency, the lack of knowledge about who's going to be armed with what kind of weapons...
	And, of course, the final problem that there's no organized institution to attack and replace, I think is going to mean that even if there is some very expansionistic society somewhere around, they're going to go pick on some other state of society because it's that much easier.
	Unless we've got some natural resource they want.
	Well, again, who's they?
	Do you mean the government? Yeah, I mean, supposing this expansionist society is interested in You know, just occupying our coal mines or occupying our, you know, some other natural resource that they just, they want.
	So you mean they would invade the country and then ship the coal off without paying, like, sorry, they would invade the country and then what would they do?
	Right. Let's say that they invade Pennsylvania and they get the coal mines.
	So what do they do next? Right.
	So they set up a system whereby they just, you know, with guns and whatnot, protect their position and then take what they want out of it.
	And we can't do anything about it because, I mean, unless the owner of the coal mine is willing to pay a service to protect himself from the potentiality.
	Okay, I understand that.
	But let's say that Finland invades Pennsylvania and takes over the coal mine.
	How are they going to get the coal out?
	Well, they'd do it with their own people, wouldn't they?
	So they would ship people over from Finland and they would then pay them, what, like prevailing wages to dig the coal out?
	Well, I would presume that they would pay them pretty low wages.
	I mean, if they're soldiers to begin with.
	Oh, so they would turn the soldiers into miners, and then the soldiers would dig out the coal, and they would then transport it back to Finland.
	Is that right? Okay, because I tell you, economically, that would never work.
	It would never make any sense, right?
	Because you'd have the cost of shipping everyone over, you'd have the cost of invasion, you'd have all of the infrastructure around keeping your troops fed, and, of course, all of the hospital expenses and so on, right?
	So economically, it's hugely expensive to go over and invade Pennsylvania.
	And then you have to turn soldiers into miners.
	So you have a recalcitrant and unwilling workforce, right?
	They joined up to be soldiers, not miners.
	You'd have to pay them some kind of additional bonus, or you'd have to end up paying a lot of guards to point guns at their head to go dig out the coal.
	So economically, it's a huge losing proposition.
	And you're not going to have any optimization, right?
	Because what's going to happen is you're going to invade Pennsylvania, you're going to put soldiers down the coal mines.
	Your innovation, of course, is going to completely stop.
	Nobody's going to be interested in alternative fuel sources.
	Nobody's going to be interested in figuring out new ways to get coal out of the ground or whatever.
	And so everybody else in the world is going to be continuing to develop new methodologies for producing coal that's going to drive the price of coal down, whereas you, by invading and forcing your soldiers and having all the extra costs of war and the military overhead and all that, it's going to be far more expensive for you to produce coal that way than just to buy it on the open market.
	Right, sort of like having U.S. soldiers building schools and teaching children in Iraq, right?
	Right.
	I mean, can you imagine...
	I mean, the total cost of that entire war would probably build you like 30 schools for every single school that was being built there right now.
	Not even counting the Iraqi and American dead, just purely economically.
	So if somebody did want our resources, then the best thing that they could conceivably do would be to trade for us.
	Like, wars are not fought because the governments want resources.
	Wars are fought because the government loves the excitement and also because it gets to expand its powers over the domestic population.
	Wars are always primarily against the domestic population in the form of taxation, And also in the form of, you know, what happened in World War I in the United States was just chilling.
	It makes the Patriot Act look like the Declaration of Independence.
	I mean, you had Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate, jailed for 10 years for even questioning the validity of getting into the war.
	Woodrow Wilson was a total fascist when it came to cracking down on any anti-war intellectuals.
	And this happened in England and France as well.
	Incredible repression.
	The war is not to get foreign resources.
	The war is not to expand territory.
	The war is for excitement, the thrill, and of course these asshole historians who just talk about the people who declare war as if they're not total criminals.
	And so, of course, they want to get their name in the history books.
	There's a lot of vanity.
	But fundamentally it's about the transfer of power from the private sector to the public sector in the domestic country.
	It's got nothing to do with any sort of stated objectives about that.
	And I think that even a very cursory analysis of looking at what might happen if somebody wanted to take over the coal mines would reveal that economically it just makes no sense at all.
	You're just far better off trading.
	And so that would also be true for our invasion of Iraq?
	Oh, sure. The invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with the Middle East.
	It has nothing to do with oil.
	Of course not.
	Because it doesn't make any sense.
	What happens if the US government starts pumping out all this oil and shipping it home?
	It just depresses oil prices, which is going to cause huge problems for the oil workers and for the oil producers within America.
	So the government doesn't make any money by shipping all this oil back, because all it does is it depresses the price of oil, which means it ends up with fewer oil workers that it can tax, with less robust oil manufacturers, which it can tax, with the property value of homes going down, so its taxes go down.
	It's got nothing to do with oil.
	It's got nothing to do with anything to do with changing anything in the Middle East or anti-Islam or 9-11 or whatever.
	The only thing that war is always ever about is expanding the powers of the domestic population in the forms of taxation and repression, because that's the one thing that always happens, right?
	I mean, you always have to reduce these things to their essentials, right?
	What is it that always happens in war?
	The government expands its powers, taxes more, and further represses its domestic population.
	That's the one thing that always, always, always happens.
	Everything else which is talked about almost never happens, but that's the one thing that always happens, so that has to be the primary reason, because that's the one thing that always occurs.
	In a sense, you could say that's true then with the invasion of Iraq, because we didn't have soldiers actually taking up positions around the oil wells.
	Instead, we just transferred control of them to American companies.
	which are already under the influence of the American government.
	Right, absolutely, for sure.
	And the one thing that has absolutely occurred is the destruction of further civil liberties and a massive increase in the military budget, right?
	And of course, you know my vague theory, which is certainly unproven, that the interventions in the Middle East are much more around the U.S. government realizing that it can't sustain itself.
	And the best way to transfer wealth from the taxpayers to the private citizens is to create fear, urgency, a desire to be protected, right?
	I mean, people's desire to be protected is very powerful.
	And so the best way to transfer money from the citizens to the leaders is war.
	I mean, there's simply no better way.
	You may have remembered, I guess, a couple of months ago, I read something that was written by a general with regards to World War I about the vast profits that were created both by people who were in the mercantilist sector for supplying goods and services to the military and also to the political leaders.
	It's a massive cash grab.
	It's littered with bodies and evil, and it creates enormous repercussions for future generations.
	But all it is is a massive cash grab from the citizens to the leaders.
	That's really, to me, that's what war is all about.
	There's really nothing else to it.
	Yeah, on that point about keeping people in a state of terror, on my way out to dinner last night...
	I flipped on the radio just out of curiosity.
	I'd almost forgotten that this was 910, but I flipped on the radio and one of the first things that the commentator had to say, he was on the phone with some caller, and he's one of his local right-wing talk show hosts.
	The first thing he said as I turned the radio on was, this is a war, we are at war, and we just have to keep saying that.
	And I was like, wow, we have to keep saying that.
	Yeah, sure. And the best war is the war that never ends, right?
	I mean, just very briefly, if you look at the history just of the 20th century, which we're more familiar with, at least I am more than what went before, right?
	All you see in the history of the 20th century, you can really reduce it to just one thing, stealing from taxpayers.
	I mean, World War I, massive transfer of money from the private sector to the public sector, right?
	And then you have the creation of all the war wounded.
	You have the foundations of the welfare state.
	Now, the war failed, right?
	The welfare state failed.
	Of course, now, I guess ever since the 1970s, it's been fairly clear, and even economic textbooks are beginning to admit this, that the Great Depression was a direct result of the Fed manipulation of the money supply, specifically contracting the money supply by about a third in the early 1930s.
	So, What happens is the government says, we're going to go and solve this problem for you.
	And everyone goes, okay, great.
	And then the government takes all of your money and all of your energy and all of your time and your resources and it goes off to solve this problem.
	And then it turns out that it doesn't solve this problem.
	And so it needs to invent a new problem.
	And then it never gets rid of the resources that it's taking to solve the old problem, but then it goes and creates the new problem, right?
	So it always starts with education.
	We need standards in education, blah, blah, blah.
	And, of course, the American educational system, as most of the world's public education systems, they're specifically put in place to protect the dominant culture.
	I mean, one of the first and most powerful advocates for the public school system in the States was the KKK.
	It was specifically put in to destroy the increasing fragmentation of sort of the dominant culture, the sort of white Protestant culture, as more and more immigrants came in.
	So they sort of say, okay, well, we've got to solve this problem – It starts with education, and then it leads to war, and then it leads to welfare, and then it leads to the war on illiteracy, it leads to the war on drugs, it leads to now we're going to make everybody healthy, and every single time, it fails.
	And so what it has to keep doing is it has to keep inventing new problems so that it can continue.
	It's a voracious, bottomless beast, right, the government, in terms of what it requires.
	Because everyone who comes in has to bribe new people, because all the old people are already bought and paid for.
	So if you look at the history of the 20th century, and you look at sort of the wars and the recessions and the education and the more wars and the war on drugs, all it is is people.
	And now, of course, the war on terror.
	It's just a series of things that governments invent in order to steal money from the people.
	It's got nothing to do with the problems themselves.
	That's just a mere excuse, right?
	So it's essentially just using force to take things from people, right?
	Well, I would say that it's using ideology to take things from people, and this is where this debate about who is to blame is still cooking around in my brain.
	I'm not going to say that I've solved it yet, but...
	The people, like somebody has to say, this is a real problem.
	Very intelligent people who are very eloquent have to say, this is a real problem that only government can solve and it's patriotic to sort of shoulder the burden.
	If the government, like the government has two choices when it comes to controlling people, just like the church, right?
	It can either try and control people who are mentally free directly by force, which means that the costs of ownership, so to speak, go up.
	So it's sort of like being a shepherd or a farmer and having no fences around your animals.
	The cost of being a farmer when you have no fences around your animals is pretty high.
	And so it can either do a sort of direct force situation, which doesn't work with the large population because very quickly you realize that you vastly outnumber, right?
	It's like that moment when you're a teenager and you realize you're bigger than your dad or something.
	At some point it's like, you know, there's really not that many of you and there's quite a lot of us, right?
	So the governments don't generally do that.
	I think that kind of happens in a small tribal situation.
	But when society grows larger and larger, the governments need to get people to be their own slaves, right?
	You need to police yourself.
	You need to brutalize yourself.
	You need to destroy your own capacity for individuation and for integrity.
	And in order to do that, the government enlists the intellectuals to preach to everyone about how noble and virtuous and positive the government is.
	And that takes down the cost of ownership.
	The total cost of ownership for your taxpayer goes down enormously if you can get the taxpayer to ignore the violence and imagine the virtue.
	Well, one...
	The question that I have is then, since this endeavor is so expensive and so dangerous and so fraught with peril...
	Sorry, which endeavor?
	The use of government to accumulate wealth or to make a profit or whatever.
	And who, sorry, who is it dangerous for?
	Well... For the people in government, in fact, like you were just saying, all we need to do is look around and see that there's a hundred times more citizens than there are bureaucrats, right? I would consider it a little dangerous to be a bureaucrat who's...
	The guy in charge of raising the army, because you're putting guns in the hands of people who could very well turn them against you, right?
	Well, except that historically it's very rarely dangerous for people in government, right?
	I mean, just looking at it empirically, it's very, very rare that, especially in the West, I mean, it's been, you know, I don't know what, 10 or 15 generations since there's been any kind of coup where, you know, I guess you could last look at the Russian Revolution where they beheaded or maybe when they beheaded Charles in the Glorious Revolution in England.
	But it's like if you look at it statistically, you know, driving on the highway is really dangerous because So, arming an army and preying on your citizens is incredibly safe.
	I mean, you can look at, in the West in particular, or look at sort of these 5,000 Saudi princes, the odds of you getting killed in an insurrection are virtually insignificant.
	So, I don't know, I sort of can't think of, I can think of like maybe five examples.
	I guess maybe you could look at Tsar Nicholas, I think the second it was, who was killed in the revolution in 1917 in Russia.
	But, you know, that was after a thousand years of Tsarist rule, like where there'd been, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of these guys, and then one guy gets killed in his family.
	So it's, and this is, of course, the ruling class in Russia was, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of people over a thousand years.
	It's millions and millions of people, and then like three people get killed.
	I'll take those odds, pretty much.
	I mean, if I'm just looking at it from a pure calculation standpoint, it's a pretty safe gig, I think.
	All right. I'll concede to the violence question, or the danger question, but you've admitted yourself that...
	That it's an extremely expensive approach to use the force of government to attempt to accumulate resources or wealth or that sort of thing.
	And as expensive as it is, as non-profitable as it is, I guess I'm just wondering what the motivation is.
	Why take that approach when, you know, a more volunteeristic approach I mean, as we can obviously see from the charts you were showing in your YouTube videos and other things, you know, the growth of the American economy, but other approaches, voluntary approaches, seem so much more fruitful.
	Why Why even maintain the illusion that a government is even a viable alternative?
	Well, it's certainly viable for those in power.
	And the example that we had of, I think it was Finland invading Pennsylvania, that example only doesn't work if you have to openly use force.
	I mean, if I was the Finnish government and I wanted to invade Pennsylvania and make a lot of money from the coal mines, what I would do is set up...
	I'd be patient, right?
	I'd set up schools and I would send priests over who would begin to preach that the Finnish leader is the incarnation of God on earth and he's put there to lead human beings into the promised land and that in order to be virtuous, there's nothing more virtuous than you can do in order to save your soul and become a gloriously noble and elevated and honorable human being than to work In the coal mines for below standard wages, right?
	That's how I would do it, because then you don't need the military.
	Then people will enslave themselves, right?
	Because the argument for morality is all powerful.
	So if you can get people, especially when they're children, to believe that paying your taxes is patriotic, That the troops are noble, that the government is there to help, that sure it makes mistakes, but those mistakes are limited to rogue individuals.
	But, you know, it's like you see those movies where there's a bad cop and then the system rights itself, right?
	So yeah, there's bad things, but it's just individuals, but the system itself is noble and pure and good, right?
	I mean, there's a reason why the cop cars have printed on the side to serve and protect, right?
	They don't mention that it's the political masters.
	They think, you know, they need you to believe it's you, right?
	But if you can get people to believe that the government is virtue, that there's no violence, that they participate through democracy, that soldiers and cops are noble heroes, that the firemen who raced up the stairs of the Twin Towers five years ago are sort of noble heroes and not people who live on forced tax dollars for providing very poor service, then people will enslave themselves.
	You don't have to spend that much money.
	That's why the U.S., Government can afford to have 600 bases and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of troops overseas and leave just about a token force at home because the people are enslaving themselves because that's all they're taught to do, both by their parents and in the government schools.
	So it's very cheap to do it if you get the intellectuals on your side.
	In the Pennsylvania analogy, though...
	Why even bother going through all that effort and being all that patient and taking all that time to build a school system and all of that when I could just get on a boat and sail over to America and ask the first guy I know, Hey, uh, you know anybody selling a coal mine?
	Right, right, absolutely.
	For sure, for sure.
	But, I mean, and I don't claim to be much of an expert on this because this kind of personality structure is so foreign to me, I have real difficulty navigating its logic, but...
	If you look at somebody like, I don't know, you could pick just about anybody, Giuliani, right?
	So, Rudolph Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, right?
	These people, how would they do in the pure private sector, right?
	They're obviously verbally very acute.
	They have some sort of impressive charisma or air around them.
	But, you know, they're much more style than substance, right?
	They're more sophists, right?
	They're about the appearance of truth and passion, not about the intellectual exploration of what is real.
	So, if you're that kind of person, you have sort of two choices, right?
	You can either go and learn a marketable skill and sort of climb the rungs of the ladder of professional success slowly and painfully and pay your dues and this and that, Or you can put all of this crazy, weird charisma to work for you and convince people,
	right? I mean, this goes right back to if you are somebody who's a really good storyteller in a medieval village, you can either sort of go and work in the fields and tell people stories and maybe get a couple of extra drinks a week because of that, or you can tell people stories called religion and get a full-time occupation and rise to the top of your society, and most people will choose the latter.
	If I have a silver tongue though, and I'm able to use that to convince you of some wild, ridiculous theory, have I really aggressed against you though?
	Well, if I'm a child, then yes.
	How is it different from being an adult?
	Well, because there's no implicit threat when adults are talking to other adults.
	But when you're a parent, and we'll just talk about parents, when you're a parent talking to a child, there's an explicit dependence of the child upon the parent, and therefore there is...
	An explicit threat in if the parent disapproves of the child, then the parent will abandon the child, and the child biologically fears it will die, right?
	Because you can't really survive when you're four years old and your parents don't like you anymore.
	And so parents generally will threaten with the child the breaking of a bond, right?
	The breaking of the parental responsibility bond.
	And that's how they force children to comply.
	And it works. Like universally, it works.
	It's the most powerful tool for controlling another human being is to threaten a child with some sort of either violence or, which is equivalent to a child, the violence implicit in the breaking or the severing or the rejection of the child by the parent in terms of breaking the bond.
	It works universally, it works almost perfectly, and it is the most powerful way for power structures to maintain themselves is to threaten violence or abandonment towards children.
	Okay, I'll concede the parent-child relationship to you, that's true, but let's say we're talking two full-grown adults here, two people who we've never met before, and I come to you and I say, you know, you need me to protect you, and If you agree with that, then there really isn't any...
	That's a voluntary exchange, isn't it?
	Well, look, this is right on the edge of what I'm working on right now, so I'm not going to claim to have any hard and fast answers, but the problem I have, and this sounds odd coming from me, I know, the problem I have with the free will argument is that statistically it's just not the case.
	Statistically, children who are brought up in highly brutal and compromised societies tend to grow up, by the vast, vast majority, tend to grow up as people who will comply with the demands of those or even the requests of those in authority.
	It's just what we're trained to do.
	It's like trying to unlearn English as you get older.
	You simply can't do it.
	So, I would agree with you that adult to adult, there's more responsibility than there is from adult to child, but statistically, it doesn't explain why, as I talked about in a recent podcast, why children in Germany, in the 1930s, would almost universally accede to Hitler.
	And not other societies.
	It doesn't really explain that.
	So I agree with you, but it is a challenge.
	Now, I'm just sorry. I want to keep going on this because I think it's an essential topic.
	There is a question that's come up that says, do you discipline your children, Stefan and Christina?
	We don't have children yet.
	It's because I don't want it to ruin my figure, but we're getting to it.
	Now, as far as threatening children goes, I can only speak from the experience of having been a daycare teacher throughout a good number of years as a teen.
	And what I did generally was I said to them that if they didn't obey me, I would cry.
	And that actually seemed to work very well.
	I think it was more out of pity than anything else, but it certainly did seem to control their behavior very nicely.
	I would say that there are certain times when, with children, you can legitimately restrain them, right?
	I mean, obviously, when one of my nieces, who was very young, Hello again,
	Stefan. Oh, Michael, sorry, just one sec.
	Let me mute you because that was quite a challenge last week.
	So, you know, this is an interesting topic.
	I heard you speaking to other chap, I don't know what his name is, and you were talking about the relationship between parents and their children.
	And it's an interesting point because I think to be an effective parent, a parent would have to act Which is in itself a way that is a kind of microcosm of the kind of state that you dislike so much, i.e. some legitimate coercion, legitimized coercion.
	Otherwise, what kind of children are you going to bring up?
	And perhaps that kind of microcosmic truth is an indication that perhaps legitimized coercion is relevant not only just in parental relationships, but in society as whole.
	Okay, that's certainly a possibility.
	That's obviously a too broad a theory for me to deal with any detail.
	Can you give me an example where you would consider violence against, or let's just say force against children to be legitimate?
	Okay, you have two children.
	I'm just off the top of my head here.
	You have two children. One male, one female.
	The male child is the eldest.
	I'm sorry, just one sec. Can you just give me your name again?
	Oh, yeah, I remember. Let me just make sure that I can just unmute everybody else.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. Okay, so you have an eldest son and a younger daughter.
	The son is at... A bit of a silly age where he insists on punching his sister.
	Not very nice behaviour. He's not at the age where you can actually sit down and talk about the impact of violence and how it's non-necessity, blah, blah, blah.
	He's at that age where he needs some kind of sanction.
	You do that again and I'm not going to give you cookies and milk tonight or whatever.
	Do you think that would be some kind of terrorist act?
	This is for the listeners.
	Do you see how our good friend Michael is bringing in the same withdrawal of a positive that he used last week?
	Very good. I like how you're trying to bring this in in another direction.
	That's very nice. Well, I mean, you don't have to threaten them to beat them with an inch of their lives to be an effective modifier of behavior.
	But operant conditioning...
	Be it positive or negative reinforcement is surely a necessary part of raising your child.
	I agree. I agree completely.
	And I would certainly, if you remember the conversation that we had last week, we talked about you had a question or at least a proposition that your ability to fire employees and thus cause them to be unemployed have to look for workers.
	An interruption in income, a black mark on their resume, whatever, right?
	That that was a possible instance of coercion.
	But I said that the withdrawal of a positive is not the same as the infliction of a negative, right?
	So not marrying a woman who wants to marry you is not the same as kidnapping and forcing a woman who doesn't want to marry you to marry you.
	And so in this particular instance, saying to a child, I don't like your behavior, and therefore I'm going to not give you milk and cookies, is the withdrawal of a positive.
	And I think that when I'm talking about threat, I'm talking about things like, I will hit you, I will publicly humiliate you, or I will not love you.
	I mean, it's sort of... I know that sounds a bit touchy-feely, but for children, the parental bond is absolutely essential for the security of their basic need to survive.
	You need your parents to have a bond with you if you're going to be a child and feel secure.
	So you have to refine your definition of threat then as the presence of something rather nasty happening as opposed to the withdrawal of something positive.
	Yes, and you're absolutely right to refine that.
	Thanks. That's definitely a better way of putting it.
	Oh, I won! Okay, let me just mute him quickly before he comes back with another rejoinder.
	That's no good. Now, let's just see here.
	Yeah, so just to return to Greg's point while I'm just sort of waiting for Michael to come back, it does seem to be a fairly universal phenomenon.
	That we happy few have somehow escaped, I think.
	But it does seem to be a fairly universal phenomenon that children who are aggressed against in this kind of way, in the way that Michael has suggested the refinement of, which I perfectly well accept, children who are aggressed against do prove to be entirely willing, so to speak, quote, willing...
	Participants in the continued brutality of state power as they become adults.
	And this, of course, is well known by everyone, it seems, except market anarchists to some degree, because when you look at the church and you look at the state, they very much and very clearly recognize that the instigation of pretty...
	Pretty impressive sanctions against children is the way to get them to conform later on in life.
	And, of course, when the military gets people who are older, they do the same kind of thing in boot camps.
	So I think it's something that we should recognize the power of, just as those who put out false theories of behavior.
	And exploitative systems of social organization recognize the power of kind of the first impressions of what you tell children is true and how much that lasts, right?
	You know that old saying that says, once a Catholic, always a Catholic.
	And that really does seem to be that kind of sanction.
	And just to take an example, right?
	If you look at... I'll just finish up for just one sec.
	If you look at something like Judaism...
	Which has lasted for 5,000 years.
	It hasn't lasted because it's logically true.
	It has lasted because it is inflicted upon children as the highest standard of behavior, and there is an enormous amount of sanctions that are applied, and this isn't true to just Judaism, but to other cultures as well.
	It lasts because it's inflicted on children, not because it's logically true.
	Greg, do you want to go ahead?
	I was just going to ask a question on that last comment.
	So then our presumption should be that adults are actually not capable of making free and voluntary decisions unless they've acknowledged this prior coercion in the first place.
	Is that what you're saying? I would say that if we look at, and I'm sorry, I can't just sort of say yes or no, because that would commit me to something which could be criticized.
	No, I'm just kidding. What I would say is that if we just look around the world, we can see statistically that almost nobody breaks out of their dominant cultural paradigm.
	Almost nobody breaks out and actually gets to really think for themselves.
	You have the mainstream, and then you have the counterculture, and you have the alternative viewpoint, and so on.
	But most people that you meet, you can categorize their thinking pretty quickly.
	And so very, very few people actually break out of the dominant ideology and that ideology is either pounded into them as a child or it's pounded into them as a child and then they react against it in their teenage years and sort of fight against it but end up with the same sort of negative response to the positive paradigm which isn't really escaping it at all, right? It's not really thinking for themselves.
	I certainly would say that human beings...
	We cannot invent the entire history of philosophy and rational thought and empiricism and the scientific method in the humanities and in the physical sciences.
	They can't invent all of that for themselves, and it is not intuitive for human beings to be able to think for themselves.
	Thinking is sometimes not synonymous with intuition.
	Sometimes it's quite the opposite.
	What is intuitive for people as biological organisms is to try and survive, and usually that means accepting the dominant ideology and acceding to it.
	The difference would be between heuristic thought and algorithmic thought, surely, in terms of what's intuitive and what's counterintuitive.
	It could be, but if you could explain those terms a little to me, I'm not sure I would look at them the same way you would.
	Well, if I told you that if I dropped an elephant and a hamster off, I don't know, the CN Tower, and I told you that they'll fall at the same rate...
	Intuitively, you'd say, no, that can't be true.
	Right, that's Galileo with the orange and the bowling ball, right?
	Exactly, and you're thinking heuristically.
	You're thinking that the slit through which you're viewing the horizon That filter, if you like, is based on your own experiences.
	It's not reasonable. It's not algorithmic.
	It's heuristic. That's very true.
	I used two other examples briefly.
	One is that, of course, the world looks flat.
	It looks like the sun goes around the Earth, and it looks like the sun and the moon are the same size.
	Just from our vantage point here, we, of course, would not need science If everything was obvious, right?
	I mean, we have to go counter-intuitively to get to the truth.
	We also would not need the science of nutrition if chocolate was good for you and broccoli was bad for you, right?
	We wouldn't need the science of nutrition, right?
	Chocolate's very good for you. Flavonoids are anti-oxidants.
	But anyway, carry on. But remember, if a kid eats too much, though, you must discipline him.
	Question. Yes.
	Are you saying then that you can't be free unless you're reasonable?
	Well, you certainly can't get to the truth unless you're willing to work from first principles and empirical facts, right?
	I mean, this is my enormous and mind-bending respect for the scientific method.
	You know, the scientific method and the free market are the two most incredible inventions of the human mind, sort of in my humble opinion.
	And I would certainly say that they are not intuitive.
	I think that they could be a whole lot more intuitive if people weren't taught all of this claustrophobic, irrational, conformist nonsense.
	When they were growing up about the value of the state and how your parents are wonderful no matter what and how you should respect your teachers and how God exists and the priests are kindly.
	Like all of the nonsense that people are taught and taught in a rather brutal kind of way.
	And I speak as somebody who went through boarding school so may have had a little bit more aggression put against me than most.
	I think that it could be a lot more intuitive if people weren't lied to.
	And I would say that the human beings are naturally rational, which is why we need to have nonsense drilled into our heads for 14 years straight, right, in order for us to not be rational.
	I think human beings are very innately rational and peaceful, and we have to kind of have a lot of intervention.
	Human beings naturally grow to five foot six or whatever, but if you withhold certain key nutrition at certain key points in their life, then they're going to die.
	But it takes quite a bit of intervention to make a human body grow in a warped manner, like if you think of foot binding for the Chinese women in the 19th century or even the modern practice of elongating.
	The necks of the Tsutsu tribe or whatever it is in Africa, it takes an enormous amount of intervention to warp the human body and it takes an enormous amount of intervention to warp the human mind.
	Once that intervention has occurred, you can find your way to reason, but very few people actually do.
	Can I ask you a question, Stefan?
	A pertinent point really at this moment would be when considering the ideas of children and conformity and people not being able to break out of the dominant culture in which they find themselves, Were you raised in an anarchist household?
	I suspect not. I would say if you equate anarchist with like crazy and irrational, yes, it was a pretty anarchist household.
	No, I was raised as a good Protestant child who went to boarding school and who believed in the dominant paradigm, I guess until my sort of mid-teens when I had a sort of major intellectual convulsion and began trying to throw off all the nonsense that I was No, I was definitely not. And some people can, right?
	Because otherwise the human race could never advance, right?
	Maybe we're sort of like the mutant gene that moves the species forward in that sense.
	But I don't think that it's possible for most people to do it, right?
	I mean, there's lots of people who can become scientists.
	There are not that many people who can be Francis Bacon, right?
	Oh, did I? Sorry. Finally, I muted everyone.
	I'm sorry. Let me unmute you again, just in case you had another question.
	Right, you're sorry.
	I just accidentally muted everyone there.
	Go ahead. Sorry, I've lost my train of thought.
	Oh, good. Okay, well, that's...
	It's been derailed, but I seem to get the impression when you talk, Stefan, very much that It's kind of like that old sentence, everything you've been told is not true.
	You seem to be discounting all the kind of cultural received wisdoms.
	I mean, you went through a whole string of there that God exists, that this, that that, that this, that this.
	I mean, as if to say that because of the manner of the transmission of those concepts is, in your mind, a coercive one, that the concepts themselves are therefore...
	I think God can't exist because you learnt that God exists in an intimidating or cultural brainwashing mechanism and therefore the concept of God itself You seem to sort of ride roughshod over all those possibilities.
	And by the way, I'm not here to address the idea about God.
	I'm not here in some kind of evangelical crusade.
	But I can't think of the other ones you said.
	You wrestled off a litany of maybe three or four of those.
	Yeah, and they're basically going to state your family.
	I mean, God, state, and family, I think, are the sort of major value judgments that are imposed upon children.
	No, I agree with you.
	I mean, I can put a gun to your head and say 2 plus 2 is 4.
	It doesn't make the proposition false.
	I mean, I certainly agree. My argument against the existence of God wouldn't have much to do with the...
	with the ways in which it's taught to children.
	My arguments against God, I think, would be much more empirical and logical than that.
	But what bothers me most about the way in which children are taught is not the content so much, but the form of how it is that they're taught.
	So you could teach a child that 2 plus 2 is 4 and that the world is round and the sun goes around the earth and the earth goes around the sun and the sun goes around the Milky Way and so on.
	But if the child believes those things because he or she is simply frightened and conforming, then it doesn't matter that they're true.
	What you've done is still done an enormous amount of harm to the child's capacity to sort of reason and think from first principles, which is usually not what people in power want, right?
	It's sort of an informed citizenry that really thinks for itself, right?
	Would you say that our society as it is at the moment, I know it obviously doesn't conform to your kind of utopian ideals of an anarchist market and anarchist society, would you say that it is in any sense civilized?
	Oh heavens yes, good lord!
	Compared to something like the Middle Ages?
	Compared to the Muslim countries?
	I mean, I can have this conversation.
	And do you not feel that the presence of a state and legitimized coercion is in itself one of the major causative factors for having this kind of order and structure that allows us to be civilized and to live in reasonable peaceful coexistence with our neighbors?
	No, no. Actually, I would say not at all.
	I would say that the degree to which I am free is the degree to which the state is limited in the violence that it can initiate against me and that there's never been a state that has been successfully restrained for the long term in the past.
	So I would say that we are an enormously civilized society and that is largely due to the separation of the church and state, the separation of the state and economics, which is continually being eroded in the modern world.
	Absolutely. I'm not saying that I live in a dictatorship.
	That would be crazy compared to the vast majority of history.
	But I certainly would say that the degree to which I am enslaved...
	And I use that term with all seriousness because 60% of my income is taken from me at gunpoint.
	I was put into state schools for 14 years.
	Well, no. But then we have to go back to last week's...
	I know, I know. We won't show that one again.
	But it's just that...
	You see... This Skypecast, which I do enjoy, so I'll take that as a compliment, is obviously, in a sense, evangelical.
	Except for you're not telling everyone to be a Southern Baptist.
	You're suggesting that you have a revelation of truth and you've had some epiphanic moment and you and a small group of lucid-thinking friends have kind of got this...
	It's a greater concept of how society and life would be, and that's fair enough, and of course, that's nice in the way that people are confident in their ideals and their beliefs.
	But, you know, when you talk about violence and at gunpoint, it kind of goes into that kind of idea of evangelism almost because it's very provocative language.
	Propaganda-ish, may I say.
	Yes, there are sanctions.
	Yes, there are structures in place to breed conformity and passivity in the world, so it's not a violent, disorganized place.
	But, you know, 60% of your salary has never been taken for you at gunpoint.
	Have you ever been at gunpoint, Stefan?
	And I know you'll make the logical connection.
	You'll say, yes, but what if I didn't pay, and what if people came around, and what if I resisted arrest, and what if I pulled a weapon?
	Yes, there may be a causative chain of events, which may be implicit or explicit, but it's an important distinction to mention that you haven't ever had money taken away from you at gunpoint.
	It's just loaded terms, if you pardon the pun.
	It's loaded terms, and it sounds very sensationalist, and it smacks of propaganda.
	Look, I fully understand what you're saying, and I've obviously been immersed in this for like 25 years, so for me the terms don't seem as extreme as they do to outsiders.
	But let me ask you sort of two questions, and I will absolutely let you have your say.
	The first is that if you run a store, and let's be totally cliched and say that it's in an Italian neighborhood and some guy with a cheesy mustache and, you know, a soprano's haircut and, I don't know, some greasy three-piece suit comes up and says, you know, you need to pay me this protection money or...
	Maybe your store will burn down or something.
	And I know this is sort of a silly example.
	But if you then pay your protection money, well, your store has obviously never been bought down, but they're burnt down, but would still understand that there is a crime being committed, right?
	I mean, yeah. Yeah, there's an implicit threat, right?
	And of course, you wouldn't say to the person, well, nothing bad has happened because your store has never been burnt down.
	It's like, but that's why I pay the money, right?
	Because I don't want my store to get burnt down.
	And so that's the first thing.
	And the second thing that I would say is that If, as you sort of survey the logical or linguistic landscape that we're talking about here, if you sort of survey this and, you know, I sort of make the case in a number of articles, I haven't really talked about it here,
	but that, you know, governments are responsible, or have been responsible outside of wars for the direct murders of 270 million people in the last, like just in the 20th century alone, outside of wars, just in terms of government direct, it's called democide, right?
	Government direct murders of civilians.
	That 270 million people outside of wars, which would add another 100 million, a quarter of a billion people have been killed by governments directly, that governments do threaten civilians with jail if the non-conformity occurs.
	If, as you sort of survey that landscape of brutality, if the violence that you feel is the most important to talk about is in my language, That genuinely confuses me.
	Like, if you think that the most violent thing that's going on is me saying that governments use violence, then I would just sort of suggest that you might be missing sort of the forest for the trees, so to speak.
	Yeah, but hang on for a second.
	You're making a huge cognitive leap there.
	I never said, hey, Stefan, your language is by far the most violent thing I've ever conceptually encountered.
	Of course not. I watch CNN. I watch the news.
	I see the violence in the world.
	I never said that.
	No, but it's what you're talking about in terms of, I guess what you said was sort of evangelical or extreme or whatever.
	It's the language that I'm using that you're focusing on in terms of the violence.
	So from my standpoint, it's sort of like to take, again, a ridiculous example.
	It's like I'm some black guy in the South and people are getting lynched, right?
	Two million Americans are thrown in jail for drug possession where they get regularly raped.
	That's pretty horrendous, right?
	So people are getting lynched and thrown in jail and hung and killed and sent off to war and all this kind of stuff.
	And I'm sort of saying, you know, the KKK is doing some really violent things, that they're really brutal.
	And then it's sort of like, from my standpoint, you look like you're saying that the problem is with me describing the KKK as violence, not the violence that the KKK is actually doing.
	Does that make any sense?
	Kind of. Talking about the violent and bigoted actions of the KKK, again, it's a bit of a distraction from the fact that we were talking about your salary at 60%.
	But again, I don't really want to go back over that, because we did that last week.
	It gets down to semantics, and we'll have to agree to disagree on that, which is absolutely fine.
	But it's just that You know, whether you have a group of anarchists together, or a group of reformed Jews together, or a group of Islamists together, or a group of Catholics together, any time you have a group of people who share the same ideology,
	As part of their ideology to spread it to others so that they will internalize the same beliefs, they will often use language which is very provocative, which is, if you look at it from a kind of cognitive psychological point of view, is very absolute and extreme.
	So, you know, and just you saying that you get your salary taken at gunpoint was just one of those and I just wanted to point it out.
	I understand the implicit threat, I understand the possible causative factors and change of events that could lead To, you know, possibly some physicality in the sanctions.
	But that's still not the same to say you've got your salary taken at gunpoint.
	And I think, you know, you talk about the state and the church and the idea of, hey, you're going to go to hell, you know, or blah, blah, blah, these sort of terrorist threats, as you were, on children or even on adults.
	And surely it just happens the same with your religion of anarchy, which is basically, well, look, you know, Wake up, the world is a terrifying, hostile, murderous place.
	It's the same kind of thing.
	Instead of saying, look, if you don't conform to where we think, you will go to hell in eternity, you're saying, look, conform to where you think and you'll realize that you are in hell now and you better do something to avoid it.
	It's a similar sort of thing in my mind.
	In both cases, powerful, evocative images and words are used.
	To make the alternative seem completely unpalatable.
	Would you say that science is a religion or would you say that science is sort of an objective methodology for understanding the sort of nature and properties of matter and energy?
	Well, I mean... Or something else that I haven't sort of mentioned.
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, Stephen Hawkins said...
	Especially when you look at quantum mechanics, the physicists of the next century will be mystics.
	In fact, there are many similarities between science and religion.
	There are lots of articles of faith.
	I think that old idea that mankind looks for truth and chronologically his attempts to do that have been through four main modes, through art.
	And then for religion, then philosophy and science.
	And I think, as similar as they may seem in some ways, they're very similar also in terms of what their aims are.
	Maybe the way you go about it is different.
	Right, so for you, all systems of thought are to some degree sort of personal, interpretive, and have sort of a religiosity to them?
	them, would that sort of be fair to say?
	Well, perhaps not a religiosity, but features that are like, If you take, for example, the big fight between Fred Hoyle and his steady state theory, and the emerging theory of Big Bang, the proponents of these conflicting views were almost like in their own little churches, as it were.
	And people, when they're trying to resist paradigm shifts, stick to their scientific beliefs as if they were articles of faith.
	Right. I think, I can't remember who said it, but somebody said science advances one grave, or one funeral at a time, right?
	Be there in a minute. I'm going to have to go, actually, because my dinner is ready.
	I appreciate you dropping back in, and feel free to drop by next time.
	I just want to sum up, really, one thing that I was thinking, getting back to this idea.
	You said about, I asked you how you were raised, you know, were you raised in an anarchist family, and you made a little sort of off-the-cuff joke, well, if you mean it was a casey and crazy and, you know, disorganized and etc., Then yes, but no, not in a political sense.
	But it's interesting, you know, many a true word be spoken in jest and all that.
	Why is it that anarchy has become synonymous with the idea of chaos and violence?
	And, you know, that's just something that I don't think is coincidental.
	I mean, of course you would just say it's propaganda by the controlling state to convince you that you shouldn't have anything else.
	There you go. It's a shame, actually, because my dinner's just arrived at the wrong time.
	No problem. Well, thanks for dropping by.
	I've got your email.
	I'll send you the link if you sort of want to hear how it ends up.
	But thanks so much for dropping by.
	Okay. Take care.
	Best wishes. Bye-bye. Right.
	I mean, this is obviously a very challenging position to debate with somebody.
	The problem is that if there's not a sort of recognition of the same methodology, I mean, if...
	If all positions are fundamentally personal and sort of semi-religious in nature, then anybody who makes an absolute statement, this is a kind of Humean skepticism, right, which says that anybody who makes any kind of statement of fact is asserting his will in an irrational kind of way.
	And that, of course, is a very difficult thing.
	For people to argue against, right?
	Because you either then say, well, what I believe is not true, in which case you gain the approval, but there's been no resolution to the debate, or you say that what I believe is true, and you provide evidence, which is then rejected, and then people will say that any statement of fact is erroneous,
	right? To me it's interesting, of course, this is always interesting to debate with a scientist, but everything that occurred during the foundation of the scientific revolution was called evil and dangerous and would result in chaos and the destruction of Christendom and the moral destruction of mankind and so on.
	So it's sort of interesting to me that a scientist who has benefited from people like us fighting for a new and more rational paradigm so that he can actually have a job in science That a scientist would then say, yes, but your theory is associated with evil and chaos and therefore may be illegitimate.
	Of course, that sort of puts him on the anti-science side of things as far as the Catholic Church viewed it back in the 18th century.
	But nonetheless, it's still always interesting to get these questions.
	But for sure, it's a bit of an emotional game when somebody says any statement of fact that he considers inflammatory is suspicious and is culty, which of course is not exactly the first time that I've heard this kind of argument.
	But it's really an argument from aesthetics.
	It's somebody saying, I feel uncomfortable when you say that your money gets taken at gunpoint And he didn't respond to the metaphor about the mafia threatening to burn down your store, but that's okay, because, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that he's not going to think about it during the week and see where things come back from.
	Stefan, he called you a propagandistic cult leader and you did nothing.
	I don't think he did.
	I think that what he said was that there was an evangelical aspect to what it is that we were doing.
	But the interesting thing, of course, is that I'm not sure that there's anything to do with somebody whose basic axiom is that any statement of certainty is the result of a desire to, or even if it's an unconscious desire, If somebody says that every statement of fact or every statement of something which is considered to be more than opinion is propagandistic in nature, I don't really believe that there's any particular place for the debate to go forward from there.
	Because, as I said, either you concede your belief as pure propaganda, in which case, certainly for me, the time and energy that I'm spending on this is a massive waste, or you continue to assert the truth, in which case you then dig yourself more into the hole of being viewed as somebody who's propagandistic and so on.
	So that's why I sort of wanted to understand That's why I sort of asked him, I said, is it your view that all statements of certainty are fundamentally sort of religious in nature?
	And he seemed to think that that was the case, right?
	Now, of course, the problem with that is that the view, if it's true that everything is subjective, then of course the statement that everything is subjective is itself subjective and so on.
	But, of course, what we need to do is we need to ask this gentleman, if he comes back, about his own history.
	Because if we are running into a kind of challenge in the debate where terms cannot be decided upon, it's because there's family history interfering, and it could be on my side and it could be on his side, but it's something that we need to ask a little bit further when he comes up, when he comes up next time.
	So I'll, of course, we are wide open as far as the mics go.
	I'll just open it up. We have a few more minutes before the end of the show.
	It's wide open.
	We can chat about immigration next week.
	But if you would like to say anything now, now is the time.
	An audience of dozens awaits.
	I'd like to follow up on this question of family history.
	Alright, that sounds like we can do that in a minute or two.
	Just kidding. Go on. Well, I guess what I'm wondering is, because you said that essentially the coercion and propaganda that we get from our parents that makes us irrational and makes it impossible for us to...
	To see things in a rational light.
	So how is it exactly that you managed to do this yourself without having You know, some other resource out there to kind of pull you out of that.
	Do you see what I'm saying?
	Well, I certainly wouldn't say that I did it myself.
	I mean, I have...
	You may remember the conversation with my friend John, who's very good at helping me through this.
	I had three hours a week of therapy for two years.
	I worked enormously hard on my own sort of journaling and writing.
	So I certainly...
	And of course, I mean, I... I have rational and moral philosophies that I've ingested from a variety of thinkers, so I certainly wouldn't say that I did it myself, but I certainly would say that it was a bit more bootstrapping than a number of people have probably experienced in their life.
	I can't explain.
	That's sort of like saying, where does your personality come from?
	I certainly can't explain it.
	Other than, you know, I did draw on a lot of resources to try and make this leap.
	And it was, I mean, I will never, I don't think dying will be as hard as making that leap for me.
	I don't think there'll ever be anything as hard again in my life.
	But I certainly didn't do it entirely on my own.
	So that it is possible, in spite of the brutality and the propaganda that you receive as a child, it is possible to rebuild your rationality from scratch?
	I don't think you can do it from scratch, because we can't erase our histories.
	But it certainly is possible.
	I mean, that's the whole point behind the podcast, is that if I've managed to sort of trip over some sort of landmine of truth that blew an unnecessary appendage off...
	I think if I can share that, then it can help people not necessarily reinvent the wheel.
	I don't want to say this in any sort of intellectual vanity, but the reason that I sort of asked this guy or mentioned that lots of people can be scientists, but not many people can be Francis Bacon.
	Lots of people can use the scientific method, not many people can invent it.
	I'm not trying to put myself remotely in any kind of class with a genius like Francis Bacon.
	Francis Bacon, I'm just sort of trying to say that if you've managed to come up with something that is not already out there, then sharing it with people I think is sort of required, right?
	I mean, if you care about humanity at all.
	But I think that a lot of people can enormously benefit from it who wouldn't necessarily have been able to invent it themselves, right?
	A doctor can prescribe penicillin without being the guy who invented penicillin, if that makes any sense.
	Right, and I'm not suggesting that what you've come up with here is any kind of mystical revelation.
	You've laid out a fairly rigorous rationale for it all, but what I am saying is that it's possible to attain that level of rational discipline, that level of rigor, Without necessarily having...
	I mean you're the one example, right?
	Well, I mean, so are you, right?
	I mean, you have become, at least according to your own words, right?
	I mean, since you start examining not my podcast or anything, but just philosophy in general, you've certainly made some extraordinary leaps towards a certain kind of maybe clearer thinking about certain aspects of the world, which would certainly put you in that capacity, right, as well.
	So I would say that most of the people who are working their way through sort of rational philosophies, whether as part of our project or as part of other projects, that we're all sort of trying to bring some light to this fairly darkening landscape.
	And it certainly is possible for sure.
	It's just that there's not too many people who can come up with it from scratch, so to speak, but far more people can use it.
	And then, of course, there's lots of people who will never be able to use it, no matter – they could listen to all podcasts, read all of Aristotle or whatever.
	They still wouldn't be able to use it.
	Right.
	But to take this back to my original question, this is why I have a hard time accepting the idea that somebody who hasn't this is why I have a hard time accepting the idea that somebody who hasn't quite come to
	That he's incapable of making free decisions, that somehow he's actually enslaved himself.
	You see what I'm saying?
	So that if a politician like, who were we saying before, Rudolf Giuliani comes to him and says, you need me to be your leader, if he accedes to that, Whether rationally or irrationally, isn't that a free act?
	Can an act only be free if the person making the choice is doing so rationally?
	Well, I don't know. I mean, I can't really answer that other than to say that statistically, given that 99.99% of people believe what their leaders and their priests and their parents tell them, that it doesn't seem to be very free.
	Again, I can't speak to what goes on in other people's consciousnesses, but just statistically, it doesn't look good for sort of the rationality and possibility for free inquiry.
	Now, sorry to interrupt, but Adi had a question and I wanted to just give him the chance to have a leap in.
	Adi, you've got the mic? Okay, I'm going to imitate Adi.
	No, I'm not actually. Greg, did you have anything that you wanted to add just before we go to Mr.
	A.? No, I think that pretty much covers it.
	Adi, did you come back?
	Are you here? Hello?
	Oh, hi. Okay, let me just mute everyone except for you.
	Go ahead. Yeah, so I was wondering, we are talking about these ideas, dispute resolution organizations, private justice, private defense.
	I'm wondering maybe to what extent these things can be materialized in the world today.
	I believe there aren't many hurdles to be overcome in these questions.
	So, for instance, I don't have much information but private justice does exist in the United States and quite successfully from what I hear.
	Also, there are private protection agencies everywhere practically.
	And I was wondering if these entities could now integrate into a greater organization that would act like some sort of DRO but in our status system.
	I mean, I know what you mean and that question has come up a number of times.
	I've never really addressed it and I don't know that there's any way to really do it other than to really give it a shot.
	But what I will say is that If it becomes successful enough to threaten the moral validity of the government, then it will be banned.
	I think that's sort of the major thing to understand.
	It will either be banned or the tax system will remain the same.
	So if, let's say, you came up with some teleportation device, they're not going to shut down the postal office tomorrow and sort of return all of the tax money to the citizens.
	What they're going to do is they're going to try and have the postal office take over that technology or they're going to say that that technology needs to be subjected to, you know, 20 years of testing and that's going to go on forever and investors will flee.
	The government will find some way to eliminate any direct threats to its moral supremacy.
	We're not going to displace the government with free market efficiencies, because free market efficiencies are already evident in so many different areas that any informed observer can easily see that.
	So I think that we do need to really focus on the argument for morality more than finding alternatives to the state, because the state will let these things exist to a small degree, like when FedEx comes in, and of course FedEx is allowed because the government needs to get some packages sent somewhere and can't rely on its own post office, so they'll let FedEx come in.
	But FedEx and UPS and all there, their prices are forced artificially higher by government legislation.
	Like you have to charge, I think, five times the price of a first-class letter to deliver something through FedEx, when, of course, FedEx could do it far cheaper than the post office could.
	So the problem with putting free market solutions alongside statist ones is that the government will throw so many obstacles and so many regulations into In the way of the free market solutions, that the free market solutions will lose credibility, right?
	So people will say, well, we have to have the post office because FedEx is so expensive.
	But of course, FedEx is only so expensive because the government forces it to be expensive.
	So I have a certain amount of hesitation, right?
	That's why I'm working on these podcasts rather than going out and starting a DRO. I have a certain amount of problems with that.
	So a sort of minor example is the road that's up here in Canada that's privately run, the highway that's privately run.
	It's very expensive.
	And why is it very expensive?
	Because they have to use state union labor.
	And they have to comply with all these ridiculous regulations.
	And they spend half their time in court fighting the government over necessary pay hikes that are imposed on them by government regulations and the need to use government labor.
	So what happens is people say, well, my God, that road is so expensive that we can't have private roads because that's going to make, you know, I won't be able to afford it even if I got all my taxes returned.
	So I have a certain amount of caution about putting sort of, quote, free market solutions up next to the status ones.
	I think that they're going to be warped and discredited and not win many people over.
	Yeah, but technically speaking, there are no hurdles today.
	Would you say that there would be an explicit effort to stop this?
	You mean sort of like a private DRO? I think there are enormous hurdles today, and the major hurdle is the problem of not being able to have your own legitimate police force to enforce things.
	I think the other major hurdle is that the government will let you do it in a way that's not going to interfere with its profits.
	But the more successful you become, if you are successful, and of course you would be more successful than the government, as you continue to grow, the government will definitely move in to discredit you.
	And I think that would actually be a sort of fairly large problem and would end up...
	Like, we're only going to get one shot to make private agencies work, right?
	And I'd rather do it in a free society than have the government sort of come in and pass all these regulations and requirements and drive the price up to the point where people say, well, we can't have anarchy because look at all these DROs.
	They're so expensive. Yeah, right.
	So one idea that I have right now is the whole key to this is the insurance companies.
	These are giant multinational corporations, but they are cartelized.
	They are controlled by the government and the banking system is controlled by the government.
	So I think that since the insurance companies are not allowed some sort of freedom, right?
	If they were, maybe we should threaten the authority of the government itself, right?
	Well, and of course, what happens is, because the government exists, I mean, let's not take the Randian approach that all big businessmen are heroes of the free market, right?
	I mean, because government exists, when a company like an insurance company gets big, they start donating to politicians and start to get preferential legislation that starts to raise the barrier to entry to smaller competitors, and you can see this is the case with banks.
	And what happens then is because people are educated by state schools, they always misinterpret a quasi-free market as being problematic because of the free market elements, not because of the state elements, right?
	So here in Canada, whenever you talk about private medicine, you end up having to talk people out of their misperceptions of the U.S. system because they think, well, if that's the free market, we don't want it.
	It's like, no, it's not the free market because of these regulations and 50 cents on the dollar is spent by the government and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	People and doctors spend half their time filling out paperwork and this, that, and of course you've got employee deductions and tax incentive to raise the price.
	You have to then start to educate people that it's not a free market solution and that's what I got tired of doing.
	That's why I sort of shifted to the argument for morality.
	Not only because I was becoming a terminal bore by learning all this nonsense about the minutiae of mixed economy economics, but more fundamentally because it wasn't working.
	Thank you. That makes sense, right?
	Yeah, I mean, there's no substitute for pointing out the gun in the room, right?
	So, for this gentleman who was talking, Michael, earlier, you know, if he's not able or willing, for whatever reason, to understand that the government is force, then there's no point having a conversation, right?
	I mean, sort of, and it's not because I'm prejudicial, it's just because if you can't agree on basic fundamental things, like the government uses violence to achieve its ends, Then you won't be able to have any conversations.
	And the reason that I use language like that is to avoid wasting time trying to debate with people who aren't going to change their minds, right?
	Because if somebody gets, I'm not saying this is true of Michael, but just in general, if somebody thinks that the problem is that I'm identifying violence rather than the fact that violence exists, then we're not going to have much to talk about, right?
	Because the reason that you want to use the argument for morality is because you are going to eliminate People from the debate that you're going to waste your time on who are going to sort of argue about economic efficiency and never really change their minds.
	All right, so one last point that I would like to add, and this does not relate to the argument from morality, but it can be used in some sort.
	A lot of people are afraid of the free market.
	I'm sorry, there's some disturbance in the background.
	Oh, I'm sorry. I muted everyone.
	Let me just mute them again and I will then give you the solo mic.
	You are live somewhere.
	Go ahead. Yeah, so people are afraid of the free market because they are essentially afraid of high prices.
	They imagine that if a free market were allowed to be developed, then only the rich people would get the services and the poor would die in the streets, so to say, right?
	But we have to look at one particular aspect of even today, that the people who are the wealthiest in the acting in a free market Are the ones who provide the mass goods, mass services, right? They don't work for Jewish, right?
	They provide services for the common men, right?
	Yes, and they're only rich because they're doing what people want.
	They're only wealthy because they're supplying what people want voluntarily.
	If only the wealthy would work for each other, then, right?
	Yeah, they would have nothing.
	They wouldn't be very wealthy, yeah. The other thing that I'll sort of mention as well, and this is a bit picky, but I think it's important to understand.
	You said that people are afraid of the free market, and I don't think that that's true, and I'll just give you a sort of very brief analogy as to why I think that's not true.
	And I'm sure, I mean, this isn't going to be a huge shock to you.
	If I sort of brought you up, yes, I was your dad, right?
	And I brought you up to say that dentists are evil.
	And dentists will strap you into chairs and cause you pain.
	Yeah, I would say in that context.
	I would say in that context.
	I'm not saying that they would be afraid of freedom, but...
	They have been taught to be...
	Yeah, they've been taught to...
	They're afraid of fairy tales.
	I mean, and I think it's important that we really work towards...
	I won't repeat the podcast.
	I think it's 407 or 408, but...
	We have to really focus on, you know, when people say, well, the free market would do this or the free market would do that, to have as much regard for that opinion as Michael, the physicist, would have for my opinions about quantum mechanics, right?
	I am barely a kind of amateur in this kind of area.
	Somebody asked, can somebody please define what a market anarchist is?
	Well, we are a group of individuals who are trying to figure out how societies can exist without governments.
	So voluntary organizations of individuals that can sort of get together and replace governments.
	And the reason that we want to do that is because governments are sort of defined as groups of individuals who have the right to use force against others.
	And so we're very interested in trying to define non-violent solutions.
	And we call ourselves market anarchists because we are very keen on property rights and, you know, having jobs and, you know, having a sort of free market and so on.
	But what we don't see as required and what we do see as, you know, something which if we can get rid of it, that would be a great thing, would be the government itself.
	Do-do-do-do-do-do.
	Take not of Bright Cove's calm stuff.
	Brightcove.com is the future of internet television.
	Well, that's great, because I'm actually posting...
	I've got 20... Oh, yeah, it's, I guess, an update here.
	Just before we sign off, I've had, I guess, 2,500 video viewings so far, 40 subscribers.
	I guess I've just had them up for a couple of weeks.
	And so word is spreading around the YouTube stuff, and that's leading a bunch of people to the site, which I'm very pleased of.
	I also finished...
	Yeah, you should have these Sunday Chats videotaped.
	You know, I actually thought of doing that today.
	To videotape the Sunday chat, but the problem is because they go on for over two hours, my concern is that when I then compress them down to the 100 megabyte limit, they'll be just too blurry to be of any use, right?
	A half-hour one can compress fairly well.
	I think a two-hour one would be kind of like running down.
	Michael Quinn says, is it still going, the Skype cast?
	It is! We've been going for two and a quarter hours, so it is beginning to wind down.
	Actually, it's on the verge of winding down.
	But if anybody had any sort of last questions, please, no limits on brightcove.com.
	Well, maybe then what we'll do is we will record next week's Skypecast and I will post it on brightcove.com.
	Yes, and it is free.
	And that's pretty much how we know that Michael is completely wrong in everything he says and that I'm completely right.
	Actually, I just thought that he came back in.
	I'm sorry that you missed that part.
	Man, that was so enlightening.
	And you know, the sad thing is, I think we actually didn't capture that audio.
	But boy, it would have been absolutely perfect in terms of that.
	I hate it when that happens.
	No kidding. I hope you enjoyed your meal.
	I did. It was absolutely wonderful.
	Thank you. And there was no legitimized coercion needed.
	My wife made it off her own free will, which would make it even sweeter.
	That's not true. You're totally bullied by your stomach, which I would equate to the state.
	Alright, listen, I'm sorry to ditch out just as you've come back, but at two hours and ten minutes, I'm getting kind of hungry myself as well.
	So, I'm going to...
	I'm sorry? Oh, did you hear me?
	I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was muted.
	I'm sorry. I began a fast this week.
	I didn't know you could hear me. Well, you're in now.
	You've got to say something. I said it's all about food.
	Everything I listen to is about food.
	Sorry. I didn't know you could hear me.
	I was yelling at the computer. No problem.
	No problem. Is there anything else that anybody wanted to add before we shut down for the week?
	Yeah, just one quick question to Michael.
	Yeah, this is laparactica.
	I'm sorry. Did you say quick question to Michael?
	Just kidding. Thank you, Stefan.
	Well, look, I'm one to talk, right?
	I'm Joe Ramblehead, so go ahead.
	Earlier on you were questioning why the initiation of force is bad.
	Well, I was just saying, do you think that in general human interaction we should use force?
	General human interaction.
	That's very broad.
	Force? Physical force?
	I would be very disappointed if, as a species, we have to resort to physical force in general human interactions.
	Well, not necessarily physical force, but, well, yeah, it could be any kind of force, be it Sorry, if I can just paraphrase.
	I think the question is, if there's a choice between using coercion and using voluntary cooperation, I mean, I think that just about everybody who's got even basic ideas about ethics would sort of say, let's explore the possibility of a peaceful solution.
	Oh, cool. Of course.
	hierarchical, top-down, enforced systems or solutions with voluntary and peaceful and cooperative solutions.
	I mean, that's obviously not that much of a radical process.
	It's just how far are you willing to sort of push that before you start to feel weird, right?
	A lot of people sort of part ways.
	The thing I find in these discussions we've had is although I may have issues with what I perceive to be the kind of sensationalist nature of A language in which the current state of affairs, again pardon the pun, is being described.
	At the same time, I have a great deal of sympathy and empathy with what you're saying in terms of the fact that it's far from ideal.
	I think where we diverge is our perception of how workable the alternative is.
	I mean, you know, the world as it is, is a very sick place in many ways, there's many sort of maladies in our society.
	However, the alternative, you know, what anarchists, to my limited knowledge, seem to be proposing as the cure, to me seems like an even worse disease.
	Right, so it was a successful operation, the patient just died, right?
	Well, you see, I wouldn't particularly want to have sickle cell anemia, but I'd rather have it than have malaria, which is what it protects it from.
	So, I'm not actually saying that the world is wonderful and, you know, it's some sort of giant Walt Disneyville and everything is just peachy and, you know, isn't everything just wonderful?
	I'm actually saying, yes, there are problems in society, but whereas you'll see them as...
	Oppressive and something to be avoided and reformed at all costs.
	I will see them sometimes as necessary evils, as it were, as I see the alternatives as being unworkable.
	Right. And I mean, the fundamental question comes down to it is, are we allowed to disagree?
	And I think, of course, to me, it's perfectly essential that human beings be allowed to disagree with each other.
	I mean, not in terms of like, I want to live and you want to kill me or anything like that.
	But I think that it's fundamentally essential that human beings are allowed to disagree with each other.
	And the problem, of course...
	With all statist solutions is that there is a uniformity of opinion that's required.
	So, sort of very briefly, a friend of Christina's was over and her husband, he started...
	We were having a perfectly pleasant non-political evening and he brought up his enormous pleasure in the fact that we are sending over our troops to kill a bunch of people in Afghanistan and so on.
	And I said, well...
	I don't agree with the war.
	I would never, ever say that you should be thrown in jail for agreeing with the war.
	I mean, I would consider that to be immoral, right?
	And he said, well, sure, I shouldn't be thrown in jail for agreeing with the war.
	And I said, well, I don't think that I should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with the war.
	And he said, no, I don't think you should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with the war.
	And I said, well, but if I don't want to pay the taxes that support the war, I'm going to be thrown in jail.
	So what would it conceivably mean to say that I have the right to disagree with the war if I have to fund it anyway?
	So, I mean, that's, I think, where we're coming from.
	You may be right that there may be certain things that need to be run by a government.
	I don't think that, but you may be right.
	I certainly am far from having a tenth of a percent of the answers, but...
	The real question is, you know, would you support the right of people to look for alternatives in a peaceful way?
	And then if we find out that only the government can run roads, then we'll pay the government to run roads.
	But the moment that you say that a state should run stuff, then it's got taxes and a uniformity of solution approaches and so on, you wouldn't run the scientific community like that, right?
	Say there's one central authority that determines whether theories are true or false.
	You want to have a vociferous and competing and I dare I say anarchistic sort of style of society where people can propose solutions and try and come up with solutions and so on to the best of their knowledge and ability and there's no central authority who says yes, you know, Einstein is right and Newton is wrong.
	You want that to be a consensus that grows through proof and argument and that's sort of what we're proposing in society as well.
	Yes, but what's to say that that consensus hasn't already grown and been approved through the democratic process?
	As non-ideal as it is, some of the legislation we have Sure, absolutely. Absolutely.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely. I agree with that.
	But I would also say that the government is, you know, 86% of murders remain unsolved.
	I would say that... If we do want murder to be eliminated, right, then we want to get rid of things like the war on drugs, right?
	We want to get rid of things like public schools, which don't educate children.
	We want to get rid of things like public housing, which, you know, basically are girlfriend farms for drug dealers and so on.
	So there's lots of things that governments do to initiate murders, right, both in terms of domestic policies and foreign policies, right?
	Wars, for instance, and so on, are a lot around murder, and they seem to come with governments like handing glove.
	Sorry, go ahead. So, I mean...
	I don't know how familiar you are with cognitive psychology, but one of the things that get people into a mess when it comes to things like depression, I'm not suggesting that you have a high prognostic risk of depression or anxiety, but one of the things that gets people into trouble, human beings, is thinking in absolutes.
	You just said again another kind of blanket coverall statement about public schools don't educate children.
	Well, if they go to school, not knowing Pythagoras theorem, and they leave knowing only that, then by definition they have been educated.
	I mean, it's just this broad...
	I mean, semantics, and I'm being very pedantic and very anal, but schools do educate children.
	You may see there's been deficiencies in their education.
	You may feel that there should be a greater emphasis on critical thinking and evaluative skills, and I'd agree with you on that.
	You may also think that education Has implicit and explicit terror communicated to children, which I'd probably disagree with.
	But even then, surely you cannot say that public schools do not educate children, period.
	It's a blanket statement.
	Right, no, absolutely. But these absolutes aren't helpful, surely, in discussion.
	You know, then we're veering...
	I mean, the whole point of this discussion, I assume, is to struggle and try and grasp truth.
	But these absolute statements are, in themselves, deceptions of truth and take us further away.
	It gives us a kind of...
	an aura of irrationality to say things like that, I think.
	Okay, and I perfectly understand where you're coming from, and I will certainly try to be more clear about what it is that I'm saying.
	And you're luring me into a slightly longer one, but that's okay.
	I sort of wanted to talk about this.
	What I do, and this is my sort of fault or failing as an idealist, for sure.
	I mean, this is the tendency that I have to fight, which you're quite right in pointing out, which is that what I do is I view what is possible within the world, or what I see as possible within the world, Which is to me to have, you know, I mean, you had people in the Middle Ages who, you had a guy who was 12 who was the court astronomer of Pope Pius the whatever.
	You have had incredible minds throughout history.
	That have achieved enormous things at a very young age.
	And I view that as a bit more of a norm than I think most people would.
	And so what I do, and I'm not saying everyone is like that, but I think human beings have enormously more potential than is currently being exploited or generated or brought into being in the public school system.
	And what I find is that I sort of look at what's possible in terms of education and what's actually being achieved.
	And so I think that if children are undereducated compared to what the potential is for human beings to be able to do in terms of cognitive abilities, I think that that's such an enormous deficiency compared to how it could be that for me, you're right, it's wrong to say that they don't get educated.
	But I'm sort of comparing it to an ideal situation which you're quite right in pointing out is unclear to other people and there's no reason why it would be clear to them.
	But the second thing that I would say is that to take a totally extreme example, and I only bring this in for point of emphasis, if you say something like, well, some kid is in the Hitler Youth in the 1930s, well, he's getting educated.
	And it's like, well, yes, it's true that he's getting educated, right?
	But I'm not really sure that we would consider that to be a good thing.
	Because what is he being taught?
	Well, he's being taught that the Jews are evil, and he's being taught that he has to obey the Fuhrer, and he's got to take these oaths of allegiance and so on, right?
	So, as far as you can say, yes, he might be taught how to read and write, and he might be taught about Pythagoras' theorem, but I think that you would still say that the education is pretty much disastrous.
	Absolutely, although I don't believe, to my knowledge, that the Hitler Youth was an educational...
	Organism, as it were, and as far as teaching people how to read, write and do algebra, I think it was purely political, wasn't it?
	That's very true. That's very true.
	I understand what you're saying, but even then, even if we can see that point, you're saying that there are good and less than good, or less than ideal aspects in education, which again is a whole block and a half away from saying that Yeah,
	what I should say, I think, is that the net effects of education, for me, in the state school system are vastly more negative than they are positive, which I think would be a more accurate statement, and you're quite right to point out that that is a better way of putting it, at least from my perspective, not saying that that's proven.
	But again, it does presuppose that you have knowledge or insight as to what the ideal education is, which in itself is a subjective thing.
	Well, sure. And the reason that it is, I would certainly never say that I would have any kind of mandate to put forward an ideal education system any more than I would have a mandate to put forward an ideal diet for someone, right?
	Because your diet is, are you trying to gain weight?
	Are you trying to lose weight? Do you have diabetes?
	Are you lactose intolerant?
	Everybody's diet is different depending on their circumstances and requirements, right?
	There's no perfect diet, right?
	No, but there are enough commonalities that we can consensually, as nutritional scientists, say you're going to need proteins, carbohydrates, fats, etc., etc.
	Absolutely. So reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the basics, and logical thinking, and analysis, and so on.
	I would say that would be part of any common valuable educational system.
	But as to how it should be implemented, how many hours a day, Should you get two months off in the summer just because they needed kids to do the harvest 150 years ago?
	I mean, all of these sorts of things, I would never say that I would have any idea how education should work as a whole.
	It should be left to the individual decisions of the parents, right?
	And that's not possible under the current system.
	What I would really like in one of these Skype casts is I would like to actually discuss the actual mechanisms By which the solution, or your perceived solution, or this perceived alternative to a state, a status society?
	How does it work?
	I mean, I don't think, as I mentioned to you earlier, that the fact that anarchy has become a synonym for chaos and violence is accidental.
	And, you know, I think that's happened for a reason.
	I mean, no doubt, you know, people in here would say, well, that's propaganda and it's a state that's trying to convince you that, you know, being free is dangerous.
	But I would like to actually talk about how workable is the alternative?
	Because I don't conform to all of your perceptions of how bad things are now, but I certainly do some of them.
	But the problem where we diverge, for me, is that I see, as I mentioned to you earlier, that your perceived cure for these ills of society are in themselves greater ills than we're currently experiencing.
	Look, Michael, you're absolutely completely and totally correct.
	I would consider it personally the height of intellectual irresponsibility to be, in a sense, a kind of nihilist who would say that the existing social structure is evil and must be swept away and...
	From the ashes will come a new society that will be...
	I mean, that's kind of Marxist in its approach, which is to say that everything that exists is corrupt and evil and destructive and we must sweep it all away in a violent whatever and then a new Jerusalem will arise from the ashes.
	I would consider that to be hugely irresponsible.
	I don't think that a philosopher or somebody who's proposing a change in the social order should do so unless they have worked out an alternative that has at least some logical consistency, some empirical validation, and some proof of sort of working.
	So you're totally correct.
	What I will do, though, is if I can...
	If I can ask you to spend a few minutes, maybe more, listening to a few podcasts, when I started off this show about 10 months ago, the first thing that I did was not lay out how bad everything is, because of course there's lots of stuff about the modern world and the free market and what freedom and human ingenuity has produced, this technology that we're using right now being one of them.
	There's lots about the world that is wonderful.
	I mean, life is great and all this kind of stuff.
	But the first thing that I did when I began to, after working on this stuff for 20-odd years, after I began to want to put my views out there, the first thing that I did was actually talk about how the alternative works.
	I didn't talk initially about what's wrong with the existing system, other than sort of very briefly to say, here's why an alternative needs to be looked at.
	But... The vast majority of my output over the last year, the year before I started this podcast last November, the vast majority of that output was really focused on providing viable alternatives because I think that it's very dangerous for intellectuals to put out ideas without putting out viable alternatives.
	I don't know if you prefer to read or to listen to audio as you sort of go to the gym or ski.
	Boy, it would be a wonderful accompaniment, skiing, which if I remember right, you quite enjoy.
	But there's a couple of podcasts, just the first couple or the first couple of articles, which I think somebody put on the – there's a link in the chat.
	Have a look at those and then you can certainly come back with any questions.
	But I don't want to do a whole show on the alternatives because that's kind of where we started and that might not be too enjoyable for others.
	I see. Okay. Alright.
	Okay, I'm going to do one more, and I'm certainly happy to, if you have a yearning burning, gotta talk kind of thing, I'm certainly happy to listen, but if there's anything else you'd like to add, the mics are open.
	What's the meaning of life?
	42, I think, if I remember rightly.
	That's a joke that most of the only British people get, so...
	Good old Douglas Adams.
	Oh yeah, we miss him. Okay, and you know, of course, Michael, that I'm going to look up the Hitler Youth.
	Well, I don't know much about the Hitler Youth.
	Just so I can be tracked by the Department of Homeland Security, I thought I would do that.
	You probably already are with your anarchist Skype card.
	I imagine I am. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening.
	I really appreciate it hugely, and I will post a couple of more podcasts that I did this weekend, and I will chat to you all next week.

▲