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Sept. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:21
433 Battling Addictions

More complaints from Christians...

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. 8.44am on the 27th of September 2006.
Welcome back to the audio-only version of the show.
I have just paid off a car.
And so in order to get the car transferred from the company who was loaning me the car, I have to, well rather Christina has to go and get it safety checked and emissions tested and so on.
So of course the emissions test is what concerns me most.
It's mostly the buildup of CO2 from the show that I'm concerned about that it's going to leak out through the emissions system and cause much woe in the testing.
So of course we had to leave a big fan in it to blow it all out.
Last night, these are the kinds of sacrifices, my friends, my brothers and sisters, that I am willing to make to blather on the way that I do.
So, I hope you're doing well.
I got another series of emails.
I sort of wasn't going to do this topic, but then I'm going to, because you need to know these decision points.
But I've received a number of emails that That are shocked and appalled about my attitude towards Christianity.
And I certainly understand why people feel that I am rabidly anti-Christian.
And what this comes from, I think, is that Christianity has an enormous amount of Emotional...
Hey, remember when I could use language?
That was really cool. Well, I guess I've run out.
Bye-bye. Christianity has an enormous amount of emotional propaganda associated with it.
And I was trying to think of a nicer word, but apparently being that polite is not in my unconscious vocabulary monkey brain engine of generating language.
So, we have this idea of Christianity that is sort of associated with little old ladies and bake sales.
These are the emotional associations that I have with Christianity, at least.
That Jesus was peaceful and doe-eyed and hippie-looking, but we hate the hippies.
And... Peaceful and gentle, and that every time a sinner occurs, an angel cries, and that there's an enormous amount of what you might call hyper-feminization in the sort of emotional lexicon of Christianity, that basically Christianity is sort of like a sad, guilt-imposing, manipulative mother.
And in this, at least for me, in this emotional context, Jesus always seems just a little sort of pathetic and almost gay.
He's sorrowful that everybody is so evil or disrespectful to the Word of God.
And he is...
He plays the woman to God's abusive dad.
He plays the mom, right?
And this is something that, when you just look at it on the surface, you see, well, you know, there's charities that Christianity gets going.
They help children.
They are very keen on helping the old and delivering meals.
And there's this whole sort of really, really nice air associated with Christianity.
And so when people hear me talking about religion as a whole, then Christianity is not.
I'm no particular animus towards Christianity in particular.
It's irrational, brutal absolutes that...
irrational moral absolutes in particular, I think, of the fundamental cancer of the species.
So it's those that I will go to my grave attacking with all of the emotional power at my command and all of the linguistic might that I can summon.
Because it is the rational moral absolutes that get millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of people murdered, and those that it doesn't murder, it forces to live like dogs on the scraps left over from the brutal strangling power of the rulers.
So I consider it the fundamental cancer of the species.
To me, if I could sort of snap my fingers and invent a cure for cancer, or snap my fingers and invent a cure for irrational moral absolutes, I would absolutely snap my fingers and invent a cure for irrational moral absolutes.
Because if you get rid of irrational moral absolutes, I've really got to find a tidier name for this sort of thing, if you get rid of those things, then things like the cure for cancer and so on are all entirely possible.
But if you don't get rid of those irrational moral absolutes, then there will never be any cure for cancer, and everybody will live these dog-like, wretched, hoveled existences.
So it is really, to me, the irrational moral absolutes that we have to fight in all their forms, you know, all the way from From fascism, to Nazism, to communism, to socialism, to a mixed economy, to the state, to the family, to religion.
They're everywhere, right? They're everywhere.
They are the water in which we swim.
They are the air that we breathe.
And we are as conscious of them, and it is as hard to become...
As conscious of them as it is to recognize that you're breathing every day, every moment of every day.
It's very, very hard to do because it's just, it is the species, so to speak.
It is not something we do, it just is.
So, it's sort of like if you were given the choice to give everybody enough to eat, For a year.
No, let's just say if you were given the choice to give everybody enough to eat forever, to eliminate hunger in the world, snap your fingers and eliminate hunger, or snap your fingers and Create the free market or basically eliminate all interferences in people's ability to use their property as they saw fit and their own bodies as they saw fit.
In other words, if you could eliminate hunger or you could eliminate oppression, which would you choose?
I would absolutely, every single day, choose to eliminate oppression.
Because if I eliminate hunger, all that ends up is you end up with some well-fed slaves rather than some starving slaves.
But if you eliminate oppression, then everybody becomes wealthy.
Everybody becomes free, and everybody has opportunities and possibilities.
And so you solve the problem of hunger when you solve the problem of oppression, but you also end up with all of the wild, asymptotic flourishing of culture that occurs when you lift oppression, when you take the gun out of the room.
I mean, you take the gun away from the heads of the people, then they live these glorious, well-fed, beautiful, artistic, glowing, growing lives.
Not all of them, but, you know, most of them for sure.
So this hostility that I have, people, there's a sort of collision, because most people can't think rationally, right?
So they can't trace, I mean, they're obviously the people who write to me about Christianity and how shocked and appalled and offended they are by my treatment of Christianity and how I am fundamentally a bigoted and emotionally volatile ignoramus who is willfully taking everything out of context and that obviously I have some irrational Now,
it is a bit of easy pickings to work on the logical capacities of these people, because you will notice that I haven't actually advanced a single counter-argument to any of the things, or they have not.
In my recounting of their responses, they don't advance any counter-arguments.
To what it is that I'm saying about religion and what it is that I'm saying about the existence of God.
There are an enormous number of ways that people try to rescue this pathetic, abusive sky ghost from the ash heap of history where he, she, or it belongs.
And none of them are rational, and none of them have to do with grappling with the logical problems with the existence of God.
They're all things like, well, can you be absolutely sure that we have discovered all possible forms of energy in the universe?
Well, no, of course not.
But so what? I mean, that doesn't mean that your Christian God exists and you should pray to him.
I'm sorry. I can't do a videocast.
I'm borrowing Christina's car because she had to take mine in, so this is the audio-only version.
So for those somebody on the board mentioned that they wanted to do a remix to a beat of My Maniacal Laughter, which would give me about the closest thing to Disco Steph that you could get, which I think would be hilarious, and if you get it done, let me know.
I'll put it on the air. But...
You know, this appeal to insecurity, right, sort of one of the basic things.
And this happens in politics as well, right?
Can you guarantee that everyone will do better under an anarcho-capitalist system?
Well, no, of course not.
Bad people will do worse, right?
The current evil, filthy quagmire of political manipulators will end up doing worse.
And there'll be lots of people who currently make a fortune out of mercantilism that won't do as well in a free market competitive environment.
So for sure, I can absolutely guarantee you that a lot of people currently doing very well will do a whole lot worse.
I can also guarantee you that mentally ill people who don't want to get any help or people who just prefer living on the streets and before you write in to tell me that nobody prefers living on the streets Remember that my wife worked in a hospital that dealt with the mentally ill for 10 years,
so you're going to have a fair amount of experience that I've received in this realm to contradict if you're going to just try and knock me down, which is something you can find to try, but I've got some fairly lengthy and in-depth counter-examples.
So those people aren't going to be helped at all by an anarcho-capitalist society, with the possible exception that people will have more money to give to them If they feel like being generous, right?
Because actually the income will go up very, very quickly under a free society.
So you get those appeals from, you know, are you so arrogant as to assume that you know everything there is to know about the universe and you can definitively rule out the existence of God?
Oh man, it's too funny.
It's too funny, right? I mean, in other words, you have to believe everything because you don't know everything.
Right? I mean, this is just hilarious.
You have to believe everything because you don't know everything.
Right? So, as I don't mean to pick on our good friends, the Keebler elves, but they do pop into my mind at times like these.
It's like, yeah, I don't know all possible forms of energy that exist, so maybe Zeus is real.
Maybe the Keebler elves are real.
You know, maybe everybody who's in a movie is actually mirroring that in real life somewhere in a parallel universe and da-da-da-da-da.
And that proves determinism in that universe because it is scripted!
Maybe I'm covered with wood nymphs as we drive.
You know, maybe I'm growing at an exponential rate and so is the universe, but it's all proportional so we don't notice it.
Maybe the solar system is an atom within the brain of a larger person in a larger solar system.
Maybe everything is true.
Maybe everything is true.
Because we don't know everything.
But so what? What would that have to do?
Then there's absolutely no reason to dispute with anyone, right?
I mean, basically what's happening is I'm taking away their heroin.
Or, I'm not taking away their heroin.
I'm threatening the virtue of their heroin.
This is the only thing that's occurring when statists argue with you.
It's the only thing that's occurring when religious people argue with you.
And it's certainly the only thing that's occurring when people who are addicted to their family virtue, where it doesn't exist, it's the only thing that's occurring when family addicts are talking with you.
And, to quote, debating with you.
I mean, there is no addiction greater than the addiction to a false argument for morality.
Fundamentally humiliating, fundamentally wretched, fundamentally it is a history of catastrophic and soul-destroying abuse that is being represented.
And people don't want to go back there.
They don't want to go back there.
Because it's really, really painful.
And the people who are going through a moral examination of their families at the moment, who are bravely, and I salute them, communicating on the board about this, if you want to see some real courage in action, you don't turn on the news and look at firefighters.
You turn on the board and look at the people who are working through the moral issues with their family.
Now those people have some balls and some other things.
I can't quite put the ovaries...
But they're going through all of this and that's a really, really difficult and painful thing to do.
And people, they don't want to do that.
They don't want to do that.
And I understand that. I mean...
I understand that. I mean, who does want to go through painful things, right?
But, you know, they just have to be honest about it and say, yeah, I'm addicted and I can't quit, right?
It's like somebody who's addicted to heroin, right, gets all the hits of heroin, and if they also believe that it's the only virtuous thing in the world is to take heroin, and anybody who suggests that you don't take heroin is fundamentally evil, right?
Then you're never going to get them to quit heroin, right?
Because they've got both the physical hit of pleasure, or I guess as heroin use advances, relief from pain.
You have that, and then you also have later on, or I guess all the way through the process, the belief that heroin use is the only virtuous behavior, and anyone who tries to talk you out of it is evil and corrupt and mean.
And you can make up all the fantasies in the world that you want in order to convince yourself that their motives are impure and they're projecting and they're this and they're that and they're the other, right?
Once you have the argument for morality, all of the defenses on the planet just perfectly kick into being, and you never have to worry anymore about having to ever listen to anyone's arguments, right?
The same thing occurs when you do...
But at least a drug addict won't say that it's the most moral thing in the world to take drugs, right?
And quitting God, quitting the family, quitting the state, quitting irrational absolutes, quitting illusion is harder than quitting heroin.
I mean, it's way harder than quitting heroin, right?
So how many people want to do it?
Well, not many.
I mean, sure, they'll be healthier, they'll be happier, but unfortunately the whole planet is addicted to heroin, so they're going to be a little lonely because they're going to suddenly...
Well, not suddenly, but after they go through the process of getting out of the whole heroin kick...
They are going to end up not really having as much to talk to with people and realizing that everywhere they go, everyone's kind of stoned and spaced out and glazed-eyed and speaking in total gibberish, right?
I mean, if you ever listen to somebody who's stoned talk, I mean, it may be funny for them and it may be meaningful for them, but for you, it's mostly just a bunch of nonsense, right?
So, it is a very difficult thing to quit these irrational absolutes.
And so when people sort of come back to me with this, I'm shocked and appalled that you want to take away my heroin, that's exactly how I see it, right?
I mean, I'm not even talking to them, right?
I'm just putting stuff out there saying heroin use is bad.
Heroin use is destructive.
Heroin use will get you killed.
Heroin use will turn you into a thief.
I know that this isn't all true of all heroin users, and it certainly would not be the case if heroin were illegal as it should be, but...
I'm just sort of working on the generally understood metaphors of this kind of drug use.
So all I'm doing is putting out something that says heroin use is bad, will get you killed, will turn you into a thief, might turn you into a murderer, will turn you into just a wild-eyed, disconnected, spaced-out, burnt-out hulk of a human being will destroy your soul.
And what happens is I get, you know, countless emails from people who are addicted to heroin saying, well, boy, you must have had a really bad experience of heroin at one point to turn against heroin in this kind of way.
I mean, you just don't understand what a beautiful thing heroin is.
And sure, there are all these statistics about how much heroin will get you killed and turn you into a junkie, but you're taking all those statistics out of context.
You have to look at the larger picture.
Heroin is wonderful.
Heroin gives you love.
Heroin gives you pleasure.
Heroin gives you joy.
Heroin gives you intimacy.
And I just think it's absolutely appalling and absolutely abusive to That you would talk about heroin in this kind of way.
It's this beautiful, wonderful substance that elevates you and gives you additional consciousness.
And you say that it's false consciousness, but how can you know?
Do you know everything that there is to know about the human mind?
Maybe the places that I go when I take heroin is the real world, and you're living in a fantasy.
Can you prove that to me? I mean, this is exactly what I get, sort of at an emotional level.
When people write to me about their addiction to religion, right?
And their bonding with religion that has come out of abuse when they're children, right?
Because the teaching of religion, as I've talked about from the very beginning, is the moral equivalent and the real equivalent of child abuse, and teach children things that aren't True, as if they're true, and to layer in and to use their desire to be good to get them to conform to a corrupt and greedy institution and to trap them in a false argument for morality for the rest of their lives is totally abusive.
I mean, you might as well just take a stick to their ribs.
Or, I guess in biblical terms, a rot.
So, I just sort of wanted to point that out, that there are these emotional, propagandistic images associated with the church, right?
The little kind old ladies who do bake sales and the gentle priests in a country village and...
I can't remember if it was Tony Blair who used this image of preserving England.
Old maids going to Sunday church on bicycles, you know, that this was considered to be the sort of image of England that was powerful, that we should want to preserve and keep.
And that is, to me, a very sad, sad image.
Somebody who's an old maid going to church on Sunday on a bicycle is one of the saddest images of a broken-down slave that you could conceivably imagine.
I won't even get into it because I'm sure you know exactly where I would go with that image.
But you do have all of these kindly images of all this stuff, and it really just goes to show you the power of emotional imagery and the power of Emotional certainty.
There have been a number of debates that I've participated in recently, outside of Free Domain Radio, wherein the question is, you know, a role of emotions in philosophy, right?
I mean, it's not really put that boldly, but that's really what the topic is.
You know, are you allowed to hate people in a libertarian context?
And, you know, of course everybody knows, if you've come this far, you certainly know my opinion at least about all this sort of stuff, that if we surrender the emotional ground to those who are irrational and simply bleat on and on and on about reason in a forgotten and disused corner of the social world, then we are doing a complete and total disservice.
To freedom. That freedom is something that we should love passionately enough to get excited about, right?
I mean, imagine somebody who's talking to you about their girlfriend and is sort of saying, yes, my girlfriend is efficient.
My girlfriend is clean.
My girlfriend is...
Her income is increasing at a proportional basis.
My girlfriend, when she receives...
Additional income.
She uses it wisely. She is a good saver.
My girlfriend is of a height that is proportional to me so that she can wear heels when we go out.
The height proportion is pleasing.
My girlfriend, she doesn't use makeup and looks good.
I mean, if somebody was telling you all this about their girlfriend, would you feel that there was a great love and a great passion involved?
Or would you just think that someone was droning on about fairly inconsequential attributes, and that was the sum total of their passionate devotion to their girlfriend, right?
Well, I would say that you would probably think that this was not a great passionate affair and that the person who was talking about his girlfriend was not in love with her and was not emotionally invested or attached to his relationship to his girlfriend.
Now, this, of course, is to some degree, and I'm mischaracterizing it a little bit, so exaggerating a little bit, but not a huge amount.
This is how most libertarians will talk about freedom.
They'll drone. There'll be a couple of jokes that, you know, are not too bad.
There will be some pointed remarks about opponents.
There will be all this, that, and the other.
And, of course, none of it will have anything to do with anything that motivates somebody to get involved.
I mean, it's all too sad for words.
None of it will motivate anyone to get involved in any way, shape, or form in this kind of life or world.
So, what occurs is that people basically just get involved.
I'm bored with libertarians, and it's kind of irritating, because deep down they sense that libertarianism or a commitment to freedom is like the greatest, most wonderful and beautiful thing in the world, and at the same time people droning on and on about it in an emotionally disconnected way.
Is not going to motivate anybody to get involved.
Because it's like, oh, so basically if I spend years and years studying this stuff, alienate myself from friends, family, and my society, end up in this lonely subculture, I'll be as happy as you are.
I'll be as emotionally connected and invested as you are.
Thanks, but I think I'll pass.
And who can blame them?
I certainly walk up to a woman and they're like, would you like to go out sometime with me?
Okay, well, I tell you what.
Y'all take some Ativan and maybe give me a call once it kicks in because right now I just think of spending an entire evening listening to someone like that not to be number one on my list of gosh, gotta get done in my life.
So all of that, to me, is quite funny and quite silly.
And, of course, some of the people who I've pointed this out to tend to sort of say, well, I'm not going to take any responsibility.
I'm not going to feel guilty for the non-success of libertarianism.
I'm not going to feel guilty for the non-success of libertarianism.
Which also tells you quite a bit about their emotional state, right?
I mean, if you don't want to take any guilt for the failure of libertarianism, that's fine.
I'm not saying that anyone should feel guilty, right?
I mean, if you are trying to climb a mountain and you try a particular way that you think is going to work, and it turns out that that way won't work because there's some horrible cliff face that you can't surmount or get around, Then, sure. I'm not saying you would feel guilty about that, right?
If you take a wrong turn while legitimately trying to drive somewhere, then yeah, don't feel guilty.
I got no problem with that.
Don't feel guilty at all. But you're still responsible for changing your behavior if you really want to get up the mountain.
I mean, if you say getting up the mountain is your life's goal and you're trying this particular cliff face and you keep climbing up and you get stuck and you try two feet over, you try two feet to the left and you still get stuck because it's a huge cliff face that you can't climb and icy, I don't know, like birds pecking at you and hail and pellets and sky frogs raiding down on you, right? So nobody's saying that you need to feel guilty.
Oh my god, I'm such a bad person for trying this cliff face.
No, you don't try it. You try another route.
You go back to your map and have a look and say, gee, I wonder if there's any other ways to get up.
I don't think I'm going to be able to get up this way.
I've been trying for like 10 years or whatever.
Try another route. Nobody's talking about guilt in these kinds of situations, but a change in strategy is probably pretty important.
But what it does say, of course, is that this person has experienced a very large amount of blame and hostility in his or her life, and so then when you have to sort of say, X isn't working, I'm going to try Y, whenever that would occur in this person's childhood, they would be heavily criticized and attacked for that in one form or another, or there'd be some sort of...
That they would have guilt inflicted upon them in this kind of circumstance.
So, in that world, there is no possibility of change, right?
You're just like a broken record.
You keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, and you're expecting different results, right?
Which, as we all know, is the definition of not the most rational approach to things in the world, right?
You're trying to mix up a milkshake, and you put in, like, bricks and mortar and blueberry juice and a cat, and you don't get a pleasant-tasting milkshake out of it.
Or, I guess more to libertarianism, you don't get a milkshake that anybody else wants to taste.
One of the things that you can try is maybe not mixing up the milkshake over and over again with the same damn ingredients for the rest of your life, and then getting mad at people for not buying it, right?
I think that would be kind of irrational.
But libertarians have no problem, not all, but a lot, have no problem droning on and on and on about the same damn stuff over and over again in emotionally disconnected and unappealing way, and then calling people sheeple because they're not interested in liberty.
I mean, that's kind of funny, right?
Okay, one more metaphor.
The metaphor brain seems to be working fairly well today, so we'll just do one more.
Just let me have my hit.
So, if you are, you know, 300 pounds, you don't brush your teeth, and you don't comb your hair, and you don't bathe, and you go to a bar, and you have some mysterious trouble picking up women...
And you keep going back to the same bar.
You don't shave. You don't shower.
You don't lose weight. You don't get your teeth fixed.
And mysteriously, the women are all bigoted and prejudiced and stupid because they don't realize what a great guy you are.
But libertarians often forget that the whole presentation thing is sort of important.
And the reason that I think it's so important is I'm not sort of making this stuff up.
Well, not this podcast, anyway.
I'm not sort of making this stuff up.
What I'm doing is just looking at the world, right?
Just trying to be scientific and looking at the world, right?
And when you look at the world, you kind of look at, hey, what works, right?
I mean, hey, what works?
That's kind of important. What are the trends?
What works? What works historically in terms of changing people's minds, right?
Right? There are, I don't know, maybe 10 million libertarians.
There are like a billion.
I mean, and those are like minarchists.
As far as anarcho-capitalists go, we probably number in the tens of thousands.
And there are like a billion Muslims.
And there are God knows how many hundreds of millions of Christians and, you know, like 12 Jews and so on.
So, I think the real question is, well, gee, as far as numbers go, as far as convincing people goes, I would say that religious people and statists have pretty good things to tell us, right?
I mean, they're kicking our ass, right?
They're winning hands down. There's not even a contest, right?
And, you know, they're Microsoft and we're like a small startup that's just staying in our garage and posting ugly pictures on the internet and wondering why no one's buying them.
And so it's probably worthwhile looking at, even if you, as I do, consider religion to be corrupt, I think it's generally worthwhile having a look at this kind of successful institution that wins the hearts and minds and souls of humanity in dispiriting numbers, so to speak, and say, hey, what are they doing?
You know, because we might want to be doing some of that.
And there are a number of things that I won't sort of get into the whole list here, because traffic's picking up, but this is the kind of heavily planned out shows that we have when we take a new route to work.
But this is the kind of...
It's stuff that works for religion, right?
I mean, obviously there is sentimentality in religion.
There is a lot of emotional imagery.
There is anthropomorphism, which is very comforting for a lot of people who aren't trained in the beauty of science, right?
They prefer to think that the world is alive and cares about them rather than that the world is an amazing place that will support them if they obey its laws, right?
But... And the emotional connection is very key.
The emotional connection is very key.
People, as I've mentioned before, people can't possibly evaluate every radical belief that they come across.
Because to the mainstream, something like libertarianism, and certainly anarcho-capitalism, is totally, it's a fringe nut-job, whack-job, weird world that no respectable academic really supports that they've ever heard of, that no media outlet ever supports, the blah-de-blah-de-blah. You sort of get the idea.
And so we're sort of, you know, maybe three rungs above the guys who cut their balls off to go and join that comet, right?
So, you know, from that standpoint, it's like, I'm not one who particularly looks into the philosophy of the guys who cut their balls off to go and join that comet, because I'm pretty sure that it's insane, right?
I'm not going to sort of go into the theology in any sort of great detail, because I'm pretty sure that it's nuts, just based on what they did and how they acted.
Now, the libertarian ball cutters are a fairly small minority, even within the libertarian movement, so we don't need to worry about those particular kinds of, I guess, signs or markers going out to really freak people out.
But, you know, there certainly are a lot of fairly deranged libertarians.
It does draw some people who are non-conformist to the point of being eccentric.
And... But even still, it's the complete lack of visibility of the creed within the general social milieu that you really have a high hump to climb over in order to win the hearts and minds of anyone.
Hell, in order to get them even vaguely interested in a topic like philosophy or freedom or logic, you've got a huge hill to climb over.
And they don't know smack about us.
We do seem like we're totally out of the mainstream.
And the only way that you...
And you won't... I mean, of course the logic will win because we're logical, but...
To even get people interested in the debate, plus what libertarians generally don't recognize, and anarcho-capitalists may a little bit more, is to recognize that if somebody were to accept your beliefs, it's like buh-bye to their entire social milieu.
That's fairly important that that is going to occur, and there is going to be much woe in the land for them.
Because when they bid farewell to their total social milieu, it's pretty agonizing and pretty wrenching.
So, from that standpoint, I think it's important to understand that we're asking a lot.
You know, we're asking a lot.
And what do we have to offer? I mean, nobody's going to buy a product that you say, okay, well, this product, it's an anti-antiperspirant.
It's going to make you sweat like a pig. It's going to make you stink like crazy.
But, you know, after a couple of years of living alone in a shack, you're going to be happy, right?
I mean, it's like, okay, maybe I will be happy.
But, boy, that's a bit of a hump to get over, right, as far as accepting these beliefs.
And I fully understand that this is where Christians come from.
Our Christians are completely embedded in the Christian community.
Their friends, their family, their social circle, perhaps their colleagues at work, everything that they're involved in.
And, of course, this is a community that will be poised to attack them if they ever grow a brain in this area and start to think for themselves and realize what a load of nonsense it all is.
So I totally get that they're going to get upset with me because I'm saying you need to dump your entire social circle, you have to undo everything you've taught your children, you have to possibly end up getting divorced, all for the sake of...
At some point in the future, after this horrifying, agonizing, wrenching change will occur, that you will be, you know, you'll be happy in the future.
I was like one of those old-time preachers, throw away the crutches!
Throw away the crutches!
You can walk alone, my brother!
And they throw away the crutches and they faceplot down on the ground in agony.
And I'm like, well now you need to do some rehab, you see.
But after five years of rehab, you will stumble around in a fairly coherent manner.
And you will be happier, my brother.
And, of course, they might say, you know, I just got to get those crutches back because I don't know that I went through five years of agonizing rehab in order for a possibility of being happy at some point in the future, right?
That's the same reason why people don't want to quit heroin, right?
You got to give up your whole social stuff.
People who are embedded addicts, like they have their social world is sort of bound up with their addiction.
They quit drinking, they have to give up all their friends and all that.
I mean, there's a huge wrenching change that occurs for people when they give up their addictions, when those addictions have a heavily social component, right?
It's not like I hang around with people that heroin addicts hang around with.
I mean, we all have different social circles.
The twain don't exactly mesh.
And if I sort of decided to become Joe Heroin, I would probably have to give up my friends and my marriage because I don't think I'd get a whole lot of support in that life decision.
And similarly, of course, when the heroin addicts give up their heroin, they have to give up the social circle that enables...
That heroin addiction, which is hostile for them giving up.
No one more hostile than an addict who watches another addict give it up and get better, because then it puts an implicit demand upon them, an implicit possibility on them that they don't want to have.
So the attack that occurs when you leave these kinds of irrational cults like Christianity and statism, The attacks that occur are very strong, very powerful, very deep, very personal, and everybody knows that that's what's going to occur, and they don't want to, A,
they don't want to have that happen, and B, they don't want to recognize that this has been their social world forever, that the only thing that People don't want to look back on their lives and say, yeah, I spent 20 years doing that.
Boy, wasn't that great?
I couldn't be more proud of that particular approach.
Man, oh man, oh man, was that ever the best conceivable way to spend my time?
Well, no. People don't really want that at all.
So we're asking for, you know, an enormous amount from people.
And, you know, given that we can't really get them while they're young, because we don't run the public schools, then we have an even higher hurdle to get, right?
I mean, there's not a lot of...
There's not a lot of Christian converters or those who are interested in apostasy, the conversion from one faith to another or from no faith to a faith.
They don't try and convert me to Christianity.
All they do is get angry at me for being, as they call it, anti-Christian, anti-God, arrogant.
They don't try and convert me to Christianity.
Because, for obvious reasons, right?
They'd have to sort of come up to me and say, Steph, we want to save you.
I was like, from what?
You know, I'm happy. I've got a great life.
I've got a wonderful marriage.
I've got an interesting job.
I have a great community of people that I can chat with and exchange ideas with, which is more meaningful than I can probably even express.
So, you know, save me from what?
Like the doctor coming up and saying, I can get rid of that pain.
It's like, I'm playing tennis.
I'm perfectly healthy. I feel nothing but good.
So please take your snake oil away from me, right?
Of course, they don't approach people who are sort of healthy and happy.
They, you know, they prey on the broken.
I mean, they're jackals, right?
They prey on the broken and the wounded and the sad and the lonely and the depressed and all this and that.
They're just jackals, right? So...
This approach that Christianity takes of emotional passion and embracing and positivity and we offer you a community and so on.
Well, anarcho-capitalists certainly can't really offer much of a community except a little bit on the internet.
But at least we can use some of the tools that are currently being used for bad and use them for good.
That would seem to me to be a fairly good way of turning this thing around.
Emotional passion is important.
Conviction, good humor, positive interactions.
There's a reason why people who disagree with me even keep calling back on the 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time call-in shows on Sundays through Skype.
S-K-Y-P-E dot com.
Just search for Free Domain Radio under...
Oh gosh, what are they called?
Skype casts. There's a reason that they call back, even if they violently disagree with me, right?
Because I try and keep the interaction positive and enjoyable.
And, of course, I'm trying to put forward, and not in a false way, because it's kind of true, that I sort of love life and have a great time doing this stuff.
So I think that kind of positivity is important.
The latent hostility that most rational people feel for the irrational majority is entirely itself irrational, right?
It's the great Achilles heel of the freedom movement is to view those who are irrational as...
To be hostile towards those who are irrational.
I mean, our philosophy says that if you're taught irrational things during development, it's very hard to get rid of them.
And human beings, I mean, it's funny because, you know, economists, people who are interested in economics, and a lot of people who are into this kind of stuff are interested in economics, they say that, you know, well, of course there's more people on welfare because there's a positive feedback mechanism for welfare.
In so far as...
Boy, the guy passing me on the right there.
Ooh, you've got to hate that. He's got a low tan car, which is the same color as the road, and he's zooming up at 104, 130 on the right there.
It just caught him out of the corner of my eye.
Boy, isn't that... Don't you just love the underbrain and the way it saves your life from time to time?
But, you know, we recognize that the cause and effect of economics is that when, you know, you have an incentive, people will do more of it.
And when you have a disincentive, people will do less of it.
And what this means is that when you have socially embedded positive reinforcement for irrational beliefs and then social hostility for rational beliefs, that more people are going to end up being irrational and embedded within that.
I mean, that's perfectly understandable and absolutely predictable from the standpoint of our own very own philosophy.
Rationality and economics explains all of this for us.
So it's as it's sort of like getting getting really angry at politicians.
I mean, I guess I've fallen prey to that a couple of times, but it's sort of like that.
Politicians are well paid for what they do.
They get a lot of respect. They get a lot of deference.
People come along begging and bowing and scraping for their favor.
You know, for vain false self idiots, it's a pretty good gig, right?
For us to get angry at these kinds of people is fundamentally irrational.
It's the very reason why this hostility combined with the lack of emotional connectivity is one of the central reasons why we're not really working as a movement very well at all.
And last but not least, I would say that it's a fundamental problem with criticism, with being critical of others.
Right? I mean, and I have as much problem with this as anyone else, if not more, so I'm certainly not going in.
None of this. This is all stuff that I've been susceptible to, so I don't feel that I'm casting stones from on high.
But... This problem of, you know, one of the things that will happen with people who are Christians or Muslims, right, is they'll be all positive in love and brotherhood, but they'll also have that it's evil for you not to believe in God.
Fundamentally, there'll be disapproval, guilt, and hellfire if you don't convert and if you don't believe.
And this is something that libertarians, we're in a difficult position with this, because hostility is considered to be a pretty high mark of irrationality.
And we can certainly all understand this when we see some ranting crazy nutjob preacher talking about hellfire and brimstone, then he looks kind of crazy, as opposed to the nice blue-rince ladies' brigade who are much more interested in baking cookies and being nice and covering up the evils of the church.
But this problem is pretty significant when it comes to hostility and contempt towards those who advocate the use of violence as a methodology for solving just about every social problem.
That is something that we have an enormous amount of difficulty getting around or getting over just because as a fringe group, if we show hostility, then people think that we're insane and it confirms all of their worst beliefs about us.
But of course, if we don't show any contempt for those who advocate the use of violence against us to solve problems, whether their problem is their own need to believe in God or social problems or whatever, if we don't show any anger or contempt towards those people, then it becomes very clear that we don't really believe in what then it becomes very clear that we don't really believe in what we say we believe
Because if we say that we're against, I don't know, being held up and then we show no anger at a mugger who holds us up either before or afterwards to the mugger or to anyone else who, you know, whatever, then it doesn't really look like we believe what we believe, right?
So this is one of the catch-22s of libertarianism.
If we show anger, we're considered to be crazy.
And if we don't show anger, then we're considered to be too intellectual and it's kind of like a mind game and we don't really care.
So I'm not saying that I found any magical way to solve that, right?
I mean, I try to sort of let my passions roam free when I'm doing my podcasts, and of course, whenever I get angry, I get a fair amount of criticism.
And I have no choice about that, of course, other than to do podcasts in a monotone, and so people could understand that it's just a little bit more fun.
When I'm engaged emotionally in what it is that I'm doing, that tends to be a little more positive for just about everyone.
So I hope that this has been enjoyable.
Thank you so much for listening.
I got a few donations yesterday.
Thank you, my brothers. I really appreciate it, and I will look forward to more donations.
I appreciate all of the interaction on the board.
Congratulations to a regular caller who's going through some significant defooing issues, and I will try and get to those today at lunch.
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