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Oct. 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:22:40

440 Call In Show Sunday Oct 1 2006

A tale of joy and freedom, and shining a light in dark places...

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	Good afternoon, everybody. It's October 1st, 2006, 4.03pm.
	We are just starting so ridiculously on time that I feel like it's almost Friday.
	So I hope that everyone's doing well.
	We're going to start off today.
	I have done a podcast today.
	Recently, around sort of marital stuff, and there were some questions slash criticisms that, of course, I need to crush like ants so that I retain my self-image of omniscience.
	So we're going to chat about that.
	Christina's going to pop in if I say anything that's not appropriate.
	I'll just do a brief recap of the podcast.
	The original podcast was about 45 minutes, so I'm going to recap it very quickly and just do it in about...
	Maybe 44 and a half minutes, so I'll skip the intro.
	Oh, wait. I just introduced it, didn't I? Okay.
	Well, very briefly, there was a discussion around masculinity, and of course, Christina did it on my behalf.
	No. There was a discussion around masculinity, and one of the comments that, well, one of the sort of brief stories that I talked about in this question around masculinity and the relationship of men to women was that I was talking about An incident that happened between Christina and I sort of early in our marriage where we were checking out of a grocery store and Christina went back to get something in the grocery store and then she left me to sort of bag all the groceries and so on.
	And then we were about to leave and the clerk, in a rather, was pretty snotty, wasn't it?
	Like in a rather snide way.
	You need to pay.
	And Christina, a little bit, not quite rolled her eyes, but just a little, little bit.
	So, oh yeah, well, my husband, you know, he would forget his head if it wasn't attached, that kind of stuff, ha ha ha.
	And so what happened was we had quite a long series of conversations after that about what that sort of meant in terms of loyalty and respect and so on.
	And it certainly has been fairly well established by most psychologists that one of the most dangerous and corrosive states of mind to occur in any relationship is the emotion of contempt or eye-rolling or a lack of respect, like you don't roll your eyes at your partner, you don't talk negatively about your partner to other people.
	And so I sort of posted about how when I was responding to that with Christina, what we did was I didn't focus on the fact that what she had done had hurt me.
	What I did was I focused on what it meant to our marriage.
	If this was the kind of marriage that we wanted, where if the other person incurred the displeasure of anyone else, then we would side with that other person against our marital partner and where our vows were, where our values were, where our respect was, and what kind of marriage we wanted to build.
	And I said that in the podcast, I said that your feelings don't matter too much.
	Like if someone does something that upsets you, it doesn't really matter and it's not really worth saying, only saying, well, I got really upset by what you did or that hurt me that you did this, that or the other.
	And the question that came out of that was, in general, I try to talk about being open with your feelings and talking about your feelings with people that you're close to.
	And in this instance, somebody pointed out, and quite rightly so, it appeared that...
	I was talking about not communicating your feelings because your feelings are perceived as manipulative.
	So if I'd said to Christina, oh, that incident at the grocery store, that really hurt me, then it seems likely that Christina, being a very nice person, would have said, oh, okay, well, I won't do that anymore.
	And that would have sort of been the end of it.
	But what we did was have a discussion around values, the kind of values that we wanted in our marriage.
	And that became a very positive and productive sort of form of conversation.
	And if I'd have just said...
	That I was hurt by what she did, she would have said, oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you, and I won't do that again, right?
	And that sort of cuts off the conversation.
	So there's nothing wrong with saying that what happened hurt me, but it's really just a very sort of fairly inconsequential thing to digging into the ethical situation, right?
	The ethics of what's Of what's actually going on.
	Because the one thing that I've noticed in prior relationships, not so much Christina didn't because she never dated before we met.
	Other than, I think, the Dallas Cowboys.
	Just kidding. Oh, I'm going to pay for that later.
	But you know, sometimes the joke is worth it.
	But the one thing I'd noticed in relationships before my relationship with Christina, which is, of course, one of the major reasons why I begged and pleaded and bribed her to marry me, was that...
	What would happen is something like an incident like I was just talking about in the grocery store would happen, and I'd say, oh, that really hurts me.
	And then the woman would say, oh, I'm so sorry.
	I didn't mean to hurt you.
	I won't do that again. And then I would do something that upset her.
	And then she'd say, oh, you know, that really bothered me.
	I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to bother you.
	I won't do that again. And then what happens is sort of this accumulates bit by bit over time.
	What happens is your world begins to shrink.
	You know, like you're slowly painting yourself in a corner.
	And you can't, in the end, sort of really figure out what is going on.
	So, from that standpoint, that's not a very productive approach, wherein you say, oh, gee, I'm offended, I'm upset, I'm hurt, and then the other person simply modifies their behavior.
	It becomes a sort of, you know, in Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver is on the island of Lilliput, I think, or the Lilliputians, among the Lilliputians, and he falls asleep on the beach, and he wakes up, and they've tied all of these Tiny little threads across him, but there are so many of him that he can't move.
	And that's sort of what happens, that thread by thread, you restrict your expression and you restrict your emotion and your choices of actions within a relationship.
	And then what eventually happens is you just can't do anything and your relationship becomes very paralyzed.
	And then you're kind of in a really bad shape.
	So I certainly don't mean to imply that Although I'm sure I did, right?
	I mean, it's always my issue if somebody doesn't understand what I'm saying.
	But I certainly don't mean to imply that there are any situations where not talking about your feelings is important.
	But without reference to principles in a relationship, without reference to principles, what happens is you end up just getting, it gets a little more claustrophobic every time you have a conflict because you get these landmines.
	right? It's like, oh crap, when we go over here, we step on a landmine and we have a problem.
	Okay, so we're not going to go over there.
	And then, oh, when we go over there, Man, that's bad stuff for sure.
	When I criticize her mom, or when it's a birthday and I don't get her what she wants, or all of these sorts of things, I actually had one woman I knew who got upset at me because I talked too much.
	And I know.
	I mean, in my mind's eye, I can see everybody's faces and the jaws, you know, just clacking away on the computer tables and on your chins because it's just too shocking for words.
	But this is what I'm talking about.
	This is how irrational relationships can get.
	And, no, actually, I did go out with a woman once who got upset with me because sometimes when I got excited, I sounded gay, which is totally unfair because I sound gay pretty much for the most part.
	I don't actually have to get excited.
	It's the accent. You know, you all colonists just think that it's all that and more.
	So that's sort of the thing that I wanted to talk about, that there's nothing wrong with saying I'm hurt, but don't let that be the end of the conversation.
	It's not that relevant to actually solving what's going on.
	And don't let it happen that you hurt someone or they hurt you and what happens is you just don't go there, right?
	If you're in a relationship with someone, you claim to love them, they claim to love you back, and something happens that hurts one of you or the other, that's exactly where you need to go.
	And you need to go there and you need to stay there and you need to stay in the conversation about what's going on until you wear down your wife's resistance.
	No, sorry. Let me just check my notes here.
	Sorry, until she wears down your resistance.
	Until you sort of figure out the ethical and moral aspects that are going on.
	So I hope that clears it up a little bit.
	I'll certainly open the board. I didn't want to start off with a huge monologue today, just a medium one.
	So I'll unmute everyone if anyone has any questions or comments.
	I can hear you breathing.
	The question of landmines is an interesting one.
	Hang on a sec. Let me just mute everyone except you because we're still getting a little bit of...
	Background noise. Oh, it's all too technological for words.
	Sorry, go ahead. You were talking about avoiding the landmines.
	And thinking about it, I can remember at least last few years, whenever I was around my parents, I would actually try to find the landmines and jump right on them.
	It's sort of a way to kind of, I don't know, how can you put it?
	Lose a foot? More like hoping that in the process of detonating it, I could blow us both up.
	Right. And that certainly is once you get into a situation in a relationship where a sort of interconnected web of offenses and upsets and problems have kind of hemmed you in, then what happens is you do end up sort of backed into a corner.
	And you get rebellious, or at least that's certainly been my experience, and you get punchy.
	But what I'm suggesting is that when you're sort of ambling along in a relationship, and you put your foot down and you hear that sort of click, and it's like, oh, dang, landmine.
	What you want to do is neither sort of say, okay, well, I'm never going to step there again, and neither do you want to sort of jump around in a pogo stick hoping for some sort of spectacular horizon lighting up flash, but you actually want to not detonate and not ignore, but disarm, which I find to be the most powerful way.
	But it's, of course, with parents, this doesn't generally tend to be the way that it works, because there's a lot of historical stuff that is accumulated between yourself and your parents, And I used a metaphor in The God of Atheists.
	It's a novel that I wrote, which I kind of like, wherein I write about a woman with regards to her marriage, and I say that she had accumulated insults and wrongs in her marriage the same way that an elk collects burrs, which are those little sort of sticky thorns that attach burrs.
	To animals that have fur.
	So she had accumulated wrongs and insults and problems in her marriage the way that an elk collects burrs, and at this point in her marriage she was far more burr than elk.
	And that can actually sort of happen where...
	You have, because of an inability or a lack of capacity or a lack of possibility, and I think that's much more the case with parents, with lovers, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, and so on, and friends even, we can have, we start relatively with a clean slate, and so when you have a new relationship and you run into those kinds of problems, You can stop and really take the time to work through them and be honest and open and curious about what's going on for the other person.
	But the problem with parental stuff, of course, is that there's a lot of history there.
	There's a lot of stuff that happened when you were kids.
	By the time you are old or mature enough to be able to articulate Rational sort of self-interest and curiosity with regards to your parents.
	You know, I think it's kind of tough to do that before the age of 30.
	I mean, that's just somewhat arbitrary in my mind.
	That's certainly been my experience and the people that I know who've gone through it.
	So you're kind of 30 and there's a lot of water under the bridge at this point.
	So I certainly understand that impulse.
	It does become rather difficult.
	To have non-heavily-laden discussions with your parents, because if they admit that there's been a problem, then there's a whole lot of problems that go back historically, and of course parents, as the gentleman who was talking before we started recording, generally have claimed the knowledge that they don't have about virtue, not because they're necessarily mean or bad, but just because rational knowledge about virtue doesn't seem to be very common.
	But every parent has a need to adjust the behavior of the child, and the best way to do that is with the argument for morality.
	So everybody uses it, but not many people really understand it.
	Sorry if you wanted to ask about something else, but A, it's great to hear you laugh that way.
	I appreciate that. And B, I wonder if you wouldn't mind spending a few minutes talking about what happened for you this week.
	Sure. Just one quick question on the last set of comments, though.
	You don't think that it's the same sort of accumulations that's going on?
	In what sense?
	In parent-child relationships compared to No, I think it's entirely one-sided, because parents have all the authority and the control when you're a child.
	Parenting, of course, as you know, it's a non-reciprocal relationship when you're a child.
	I mean, your parents know, and they're sort of running the show, and that doesn't mean necessarily that that's a bad thing, but generally, or often, or too often, let's say, it is.
	But with parents, it's such a one-sided relationship when you're a child.
	They set the rules, they earn the bread, and you have no capacity in the way that you do when you're an adult to just leave, right?
	Because you're a child and you're totally dependent and there's nowhere to go.
	So there is a certain, I think, one-sidedness to it.
	In other words, if we have the kind of parents who manipulate us and get upset and get angry and correct us incessantly in tiny little ways, then we end up hemmed in, but our parents don't so much.
	I mean, I don't know if that's been your experience.
	Oh, I see what you're saying.
	So... The difference is that both sides are accumulating these burgers rather than just one side.
	Yeah, certainly with lovers and friends and so on, and this can also happen in professional situations, wherever you come in with a roughly equal capacity for independent action and your own finances and so on, then I think you can look at it as more mutual, but that's not at all the case.
	With the state, right?
	And it's certainly not the case with the family, and often it's not the case with people's relationships to religious authorities when they're children, right?
	It's a completely unequal relationship.
	Children don't really hem their parents in very much.
	They do in some sort of passive-aggressive ways, like, okay, well, if you're going to control me irrationally, then I'm going to make your life as a parent unpleasant.
	But that's very reactive, and I don't think it could be looked at as reciprocal in the way that adult relationships are.
	Okay, that makes sense.
	Hey, finally! Woo-hoo!
	You know, you shoot enough arrows over a house, eventually you hit a bullseye.
	My arm was getting just, oh, so tired.
	But anyway, go ahead, if you don't mind, with your week, which was quite an exciting one.
	Yeah, my week.
	Well, it's been a hell of a rollercoaster, I can tell you that.
	After I listened to...
	Oh, I forget what podcast number it was.
	The one on vulnerability.
	I'm actually just referring to them as Pi now.
	After I listened to that one, I went and had a long talk with my brother John.
	And he agreed to explain...
	What went on between him and Steve and Mom and Dad the night before.
	And during that conversation, he was...
	He was recounting all kinds of things that they were saying to him about me that they were unwilling to say in front of me.
	It occurred to me that most of those things you've already been telling me for the last four or five months.
	I didn't want to believe they were true.
	I really didn't want to believe they were true.
	And as he was saying those things, that occurred to me that I didn't want it to be true.
	But that's what is true.
	And so, you know, I was sort of living a kind of cognitive dissonance of, you know, I was just resisting it.
	And as soon as it...
	As soon as I came to that realization, I was just resisting.
	It was sort of like I had a brick lifted off my chest.
	Yeah, no, unreality is a huge strain on the system for sure.
	Yeah, you could put it that way.
	They were telling him that I was going crazy and that I was...
	I was angry and negative.
	They used the term breakdown, if I remember rightly.
	Yeah, exactly. They were telling them I was having a nervous breakdown, a mental breakdown.
	I don't know what that's like, but I certainly don't feel like that's what's happening.
	I mean, obviously something's going on, but I don't know if I would characterize it as that.
	Right, and for those of you who...
	Sorry, just to interrupt for a second.
	For those of you who are just a little bit curious, Greg is having trouble typing into the chat window because of the straitjacket, so I'll try and translate.
	He uses a kind of Morse code where he bumps his forehead against the microphone, so if you hear that, you'll sort of know what's going on.
	I'm sorry, Greg, I just want to clarify it for others.
	Let me out! That's right.
	No, so...
	If they really felt that that was what was going on with me, then why would they be afraid to say it to my face?
	Right? Right. So they're just saying things to defend themselves in front of him.
	Right. I mean, if you have the temerity to question the absolute moral authority of your parents, if you have questions where you compare their words with their actions...
	Are consistent, you don't generally get that level of anger from them, right?
	So if your parents say, ah, we never loved you, we just kind of want to keep you around so that you'll take care of us when we get old, or something like that, right?
	I mean, whoever, right? Yes, I did hit you, and boy, I wish I'd hit you more, because, you know, that was a good workout for me, or something like that.
	Or if your parents acted in a consistent manner such that if they were Physically or emotionally abusive that they would do so at the mall, they would do so at the church, they would do so in front of the cop.
	If they were consistent, if their words were consistent with their actions, generally you don't get that level of hostility.
	But what happens is your parents, of course, talk an enormously good game, as every single parental unit on the planet that I've ever heard of does, about how much they love you, about how much they care for you, and what great parents you were.
	And if you have the temerity to bring your own experiences of their parenting to them and ask to be heard, not necessarily ask to be totally right, but at least ask to be heard, then this is usually the level of rage.
	When you begin to expose the gap between the stated ideals of them And their actual behavior, that's usually when a pretty aggressive defensive coalition is formed between the parents and you are sort of isolated from the family unit.
	This is sort of what you want when you get a cold virus.
	You want your immune system to coat the cold virus and isolate it from the general bloodstream.
	This is generally what happens when somebody like yourself asks It asks for a hearing of your experience within a family instead of just being told what your experience was and accepting it.
	What happens is you are very quickly isolated from the remainder of the family, so the fact that they're trash-talking your mental health with your siblings seems to me entirely predictable and natural and normal.
	The same thing, of course, occurred with my family when I had the temerity to bring my own experience of my family to my family And to talk honestly and openly about my experiences of being in that family with them, after 1.001 conversations in that area,
	the emails flew, and the phone calls flew, and everybody huddled together, and the wagons circled, and I was ejected with not even a moment's A hesitation or a moment's thought.
	It's extraordinarily threatening to the false selves of people who are hypocritical to have somebody not listen to their own propaganda about their moral story of their life.
	Yeah, it was kind of telling to me that, you know, if they were so concerned about the influence I might be having on John, why wouldn't they say that to me?
	Why would they go to Steve instead?
	And then have Steve arrange a meeting between them and John.
	You know? It's just like...
	As he was describing all this stuff to me, I was like, oh my god!
	What... Why wasn't this stuff obvious before?
	I mean, it's just so obvious to me now, you know?
	I would get, like, all uptight and frustrated and Just twisted up inside thinking about it.
	Now when I think about it, I swear to God, now when I think about it, I just want to laugh because it's so stupid obvious.
	Now, I've got a couple of questions about that if you don't mind.
	Does it seem sort of like junior high school or something like that?
	Like, you know, so-and-so says that so-and-so says that you have a problem with him and this and that.
	Does it seem sort of immature from that standpoint?
	Or is there something else?
	Because certainly the moral horror...
	Of what has occurred is draining away from you, which is generally what happens when you really begin to get the principle of philosophy and of ethics.
	But what is sort of the emotional experience that has changed for you?
	That's sort of the first question. The second is, what was the moment?
	What was the moment that changed that?
	I really think it was the moment that, you know...
	John started describing what they were saying and a lot of what they were saying was exactly what you were telling me they would say and were going to say or did say to themselves.
	They would never say this stuff to me, to my face.
	They would never dare.
	Oh, you're just going crazy.
	You're just... You're just angry.
	You're just negative. You're just this, that, and the other thing.
	No, they would placate me in front of my face, but tell, you know, my brothers, ooh, there's something wrong with him.
	Right, right. You know? Yeah, yeah.
	And so in that sense, it's kind of juvenile.
	Right, and it certainly would not, like, if...
	Christina and I were talking about this the other day.
	And just so people understand a little bit of the history of this, if you don't mind, Greg.
	Because I'm so invested in being right all the time, I actually, Christina and I flew down to near where Greg lives, and we imitated his parents to his brothers.
	So when Greg's saying that they said things that I predicted that they would say...
	That was me. So I just sort of wanted to mention that so that, and yeah, he is going crazy.
	I mean, good Lord. But we were talking about this, that if you were to go to your parents, right, this is always the great challenge, not just with parents, but with people as a whole and with where society is, I think, ethically as a whole.
	If you were to sit down with your parents in some outlandish disguise or something, right, and you were to say to your parents, if you have a problem with someone, do you think that you should, A, sit down and talk about it with them directly, or B, go around spreading vicious rumors about them behind their back?
	I'm sure that your parents would say, A, right?
	Yes, you should sit down and talk about it with the person.
	And they would never say, yes, I think that the best thing to do is to go around spreading vicious rumors about them behind their back.
	And that is the fundamental reason why this circling of the wagons is occurring.
	Because in basically bringing your own historical experience of the family to the family, you're exposing this kind of hypocrisy And your parents know exactly what the right thing to do is in this situation.
	If somebody queried them, if they were writing out a questionnaire or something, they would sure say, yes, spreading vicious rumors about someone behind their back while placating them to their face is kind of two-faced and kind of hypocritical and kind of childish and mean and vicious and blah blah blah.
	So they know exactly what the right thing to do is in this situation.
	They just won't do it, right? And this is always the great mystery of ethics, right?
	And this is why people are, in my view, always morally responsible.
	I mean, unless they're completely deranged.
	Because they know exactly what the right thing to do is.
	Your parents, if they were asked this question by a stranger, would say exactly the moral thing to do.
	They just won't do it in their own life.
	And it's that dichotomy that is causing them to become so aggressive and frankly fearful.
	Yeah. And all the while they're saying, oh, we don't do that.
	Oh, sure. Absolutely.
	At the moment that they're doing it, they're saying, we don't do that.
	That's not how we operate, right?
	But then you kind of point it out, and they're like, oh, well, that's different.
	Right, right. And that fundamental dichotomy is where an enormous amount of anger comes from in the world.
	I mean, the behavior of your parents that you're seeing is common to all cultures, particularly common in certain kinds of organized religious societies, right, where the leaders, and of course this is very true in politics, right, that the leaders arrogate to themselves all of these rights that they specifically deny to the other people in society, you know, the right to tax and start wars and so on.
	And then claim that it's moral and universal to obey them.
	Yet they, of course, don't obey anyone.
	So this dichotomy between what people say in terms of ethics and what they actually do is the fundamental furnace.
	It is the hell that people who are interested in ethics and interested in making the world a better place, this is the furnace we have to voluntarily throw ourselves into.
	And it's a kind of weird thing because the moment that we do, it sort of becomes less frightening and it becomes more funny.
	Once you actually jump into this furnace, it's like, you know, it looked like I was throwing myself off a cliff, and I thought I was going to smash onto the rocks into atoms, but I'm actually flying, and this is the coolest thing ever.
	And it's that leap of faith, so to speak, to use a term that I wouldn't normally use, but just for illustration.
	It is that particular process that I've been sort of trying to encourage people by saying, look, just do it, and it'll be fine.
	And of course, I can't ask people to take that on faith, but it certainly is the case.
	Well, it was...
	I have to say it was fine for me.
	I mean, you run away from it because you think it's so freaking scary.
	And then when it finally happens, it's like, what the hell was I so afraid of?
	Right. And that is stepping from the false self to the true self.
	Right. And at first I was like, really...
	I used to get really angry at myself too, but now it's like, like you say, I just want to laugh about the whole thing because it's just ridiculous.
	Right. And the way, as I mentioned on the podcast, there's a fairly recent one, so I doubt people would have heard it.
	But what really occurs, the reason that I've been trying to say to people, go talk to your families, go talk to the people you have problems with, go talk to the people who you feel have done you wrong in your life.
	And don't go and talk like you're going to bully them and tell them how it is and so on.
	But be open and be vulnerable to them.
	Because what happens is most of us, right, I would say, have been wronged in our lives by people.
	And if we don't open ourselves up to them and give them the chance to either show us that they've changed or if they haven't changed, we get to re-experience at a very tangible level the hostility or the abuse or the indifference or the coldness or the contempt or the whatever,
	the rejection. Then what it does is it takes a huge weight off of us because we get the chance to see that if we don't identify the fact that we were harmed when we were children, then the dysfunction that we have as adults must be our fault.
	And there's a huge difference between that.
	You get told...
	Well, you know, because I would ask them the same questions that I was asking my brother.
	John, you know, why there are certain things that I do?
	Why do I do that? There are certain things that I won't do.
	Why won't I do those? You know, their answer is always, always, well, that's just who you are.
	Right. Like, you can't change that.
	And it's got nothing to do with circumstance or your history or their behavior.
	Right, exactly. I just...
	That's what was injected into me when I was born, and so that's how I am.
	And for the longest time, I bought into that.
	That's not intrinsic.
	That's learned. Yeah, I would say a little bit less learned and a little bit more inflicted.
	I mean, that's a minor change in language, but I certainly know what you mean.
	Right. And so they weren't even willing to entertain the idea that You know, it could have been, you know, I am who I am because of, or I, because, because of, because of an accumulation of, you know, 35, 36, how old am I? 39 years of garbage, you know?
	And, they won't, they won't, They won't even acknowledge that.
	What's happening is, as far as they're concerned, is that I'm inflicting some kind of punishment on them because of some perceived wrong, and they'll call it perceived wrong, because they don't think they've done anything wrong.
	Absolutely do not.
	They absolutely do not think that they've done anything wrong at all.
	And when I try to talk about it in those terms, it's immediately my problem.
	Right, which indicates that they know exactly that they've done something wrong.
	When people are unable to talk about something in an open and constructive manner, it's because they're guilty.
	They know exactly that they have been problematic parents, to put it as charitably as possible.
	So the fact that they're unable to talk about it and immediately reflect any possibility of responsibility back on you is because they know exactly what the problem is and exactly how they behave.
	The other amazing thing about parents, just by the by, and I think this is somewhat relevant to what has occurred for you, What is another thing that occurs with parents is when your children, they will take total responsibility for how you act.
	So if you please them, then they'll throw you some kibble and they'll pet you and so on and tickle your belly.
	And if you displease them, then they'll whack you with a newspaper or something even harsher, and they'll be really upset.
	So when you're a child, they really work hard to control how you behave, to mold your personality, to turn you into something that causes them little problems, a few problems, and is good for their ego, and gives them a sense of control, and so on. So parents are not indifferent to the behavior of their children when the children are young.
	They take total responsibility for how those children behave And yet, when you get older and you say, I had problems with the ways in which you exercised power and control over me when I was a child, they say, oh, you were just that way.
	And that's a complete dichotomy.
	Like when your kids, they're all over you about do this, do that, don't do that, do this, do that, don't do that.
	And then when you get older and you say, who I am has something to do with how you raised me, they say, oh, no.
	I mean, it's completely erased.
	There's some weird magic line that they draw on the sand around 13 or 14 and everything after that is your fault.
	Right. And that's because you're getting old enough to, well, frankly, to hit back, right?
	If physical abuse is going on and you're getting old enough that you represent a threat to your parents at a base physical level at that point.
	And you're right. There is usually, and it certainly was for me at around 13 or 14 as well, there is that time where your parents suddenly go, oh, hey, whoa.
	Yeah. You know, hey, now things have changed.
	Things are totally different now.
	Now that we're looking at each other on eye level, I suddenly find that I have to be a lot nicer or at least to hide what it is that I'm doing into a bit more sort of subtle psychological stuff rather than openly physical or emotional abusive stuff.
	And, you know, I'm not saying that to sort of absolve myself of any Responsibility for who I am now, I mean, in terms of shaping it, right?
	Because only I can determine what I should be at this point, right?
	And so in that sense, it's my responsibility, right, to become who I want to become.
	Absolutely. But the first thing that you have to recognize, not you, and I certainly don't mean must, but I mean, it's sort of for me, my experience with it was like, okay, I want to get from here to where it is I want to go in life.
	And I'm sitting in this car that I've inherited from my family, and I keep turning, I keep hitting the gas, I keep checking the map and so on.
	The only thing I haven't noticed is that the car is totally broken.
	So I'm actually not able to get where it is that I want to get to in life because I keep doing all these things.
	I keep checking the lamps.
	I keep turning the key in the ignition.
	I keep pumping the gas. But there's actually no engine, right?
	It's been completely broken.
	So once you get that you need to fix the car, then that's totally your responsibility.
	The fact that you inherited a broken car is your parents' responsibility.
	But now that it's your life and you want to get somewhere, you've got to fix the car.
	And if you keep thinking the car's okay, you're never going to get anywhere, if that makes sense.
	Right. To move forward, you have to acknowledge where the source of the problem is.
	Right. The engine is broken, and now I've got to fix the engine.
	I can't expect my parents to fix it.
	I can't expect anyone else to fix it.
	There's a guy, a pretty good psychologist named Nathaniel Brandon, who was associated with Ian Rand in a professional-slash-sleasily-personal way.
	But he did say at one point, I saw a lecture of his once, he said that his entire purpose in being a psychologist was to get his patients to understand that no one is coming back.
	To save them, right? Now that they're adults, they have to apportion blame correctly, they have to recognize their own historical etymology, but no one is coming to save them and to turn their life into what it should be, right?
	That there's no possibility of re-parenting when you're an adult.
	And someone said, yes, but you came, right?
	He said, yes, and I came to tell you that no one is coming.
	And I thought that was actually a pretty good way of putting it.
	Right. And so you go to your parents, you say...
	What the hell did you do to this car?
	Oh, nothing. It worked fine.
	You can't get it started? That's your problem.
	Hey, it worked fine when we gave it to you.
	Right, exactly. So it must be you that broke it.
	You're just flooding the engine.
	Right, right.
	There is no engine. Oh, you know, well, hey, it was, you know, we gave to you this perfectly working car.
	If you have problems with it now, don't come running to us.
	Be responsible, right?
	Oh, yeah, exactly.
	That's exactly what's going on.
	And then behind my back, they're saying to everyone else in the family, this guy doesn't know what's wrong with his own car.
	Yeah, or, you know, Greg broke his own car and now he's blaming us.
	Yeah. You know, there isn't in fact a car, but we're just playing along with it.
	He's standing out there in the desert riding a cat or something.
	Right, yeah, it's not really a car, it's a...
	It's a rickshaw. And you see, you know, you can see this, and this is why I sort of talk about, and this is one of the things that Christina really helped me to understand, that the family is a microcosm for the political sphere, right, for the state.
	Because this is, of course, what we as anarchists or anarcho-capitalists face, right, when we go and talk to people about possibilities.
	There's this total terror of freedom, right?
	There's this total terror of, oh, if we don't have a state, then...
	You know, like the earth will fall into the ocean and the skies will be a fire and so on.
	And there's this terror that's out there about what life would be like if we didn't have political masters herding us around with guns all the time.
	And in the same way as once you get through that fear, it's funny, right?
	Because some of the people that I get emails fairly regularly that, you know, it's like, dude, you're laughing about some really serious topics.
	And it's like, that's true. But once you get past the fear of freedom, Once you get past the fear of philosophy, once you get past the fear of integrity, then you can look back and, yes, you still remember what it was like to be terrified, but fundamentally it's funny because you realize that the only thing that people are fearing is sort of fear itself to some degree.
	And you can also see the same thing insofar as when you talk to people about universal ethics, about rational approaches to philosophy and so on, people might humor you to your face, but you are quite often here when they go to talk to other people that they think you're completely insane.
	You also will get that, as I get from time, well, more than from time to time, I get quite regularly, people say, well, you know, Steph, you had a bad childhood and you're taking it out on the state, right?
	And so this sort of argument from psychology is brought to bear and all of these same sort of things that are occurring within your own family structure at the moment occur in a much larger sense when you bring a kind of rational philosophy to bear on social problems and the existence of the state and God and organized religion You get all of the same tactics occurring at the political level that you do at the personal level.
	It's really odd because I used to understand all this stuff at the paperwork level.
	I've been reading books like this since I was 21 or 22 years old.
	I figured I kind of got it.
	It's not really intellectually all that difficult to understand, but I never really got it.
	It's hard to explain, but there was a moment where I just, I felt it.
	Yes, you talked about the goosebumps, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	It went from being just something that I could piece together intellectually to something that just vibrated through me.
	Yeah. Look, it's a long way from saying, yes, we should go back to the gold standard, which I don't mean to trivialize where you were coming from, but it's a long way when you're interested in freedom to read about the founding of the Fed and how bad that was and how the depression was really caused by the government and not by the free market.
	And, you know, how we should go back to the gold stand.
	That's one sort of aspect of freedom, and there's nothing wrong with it.
	It's very interesting. But that's a long way from sitting down with your parents and saying, I need to become self-expressed in this familial situation.
	And I need to talk to you and have you listen to me about what my experience of is this family, the positive and the negative, and so on.
	I need to be free to speak as I believe in my personal relationships.
	That is a long way from reading Murray Rothbard, and I think a lot of libertarians get stuck at that place, and that's why we're not compelling to society as a whole, because it looks kind of like bookworm-y, if that makes any sense.
	And that's the distinction, I think.
	It's not just the intellectual consistency.
	It's the consistency across the entire self, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, emotionally.
	The whole package, you know, intellectual consistency is fine and that worked for me for a while.
	Well, kind of worked.
	But you're not, you don't really, freedom isn't really in you until all, until it absorbs all of you.
	Yeah, do you believe the principles that you claim, right?
	I mean, that's really what it comes down to.
	And I certainly spent most of my adult life not living the principles that I believed, but reading more and more about economics and philosophy and political science and so on.
	And then, of course, for a variety of reasons, which I talked about a little bit in Podcast 183, about, you know, the one that's me ranting about, that it's not about the state, it's not about the church, it's not about God, it's not about politics, it's about you, and it's about your relationships.
	That's what freedom really is.
	And it is a very powerful thing to say, okay, what if I really believe in freedom all the way through in all areas of my life?
	Then, of course, the thing that you need to look at is your own personal relationships long before you ever need to worry about the state.
	Right, and taking it out of that abstract level and down to the personal as well in terms of the questions you're asking yourself.
	What if I said this?
	You know, I feel this.
	I think this. What if I said this in front of them?
	What would happen? You know, the most amazing thing to me, I'm sorry to interrupt, the most amazing thing to me is that people talk about, you know, I've had lots of libertarians talk about the right to free speech, right?
	Free speech should be, it's a Second Amendment or something, right?
	Free speech is embedded in the Constitution and they think it's got something to do with the media.
	And frankly, it has almost nothing to do with the media, and it has everything to do with what you say around your family dinner on Sunday.
	Are you free to speak your mind about what you care about and to speak and to listen in an intimate and open and honest way with the people in your life?
	That is free speech, and everyone's worrying about Fox News, right?
	Exactly. That's exactly right.
	And I would add to that that At least as it is today, that even when you do speak up as a kid, it's more out of a kind of strange desire to extract approval from those around you than it is to actually express your own opinions.
	Oh sure. And that's not free either.
	So I'm free to manipulate my parents into liking me.
	That's not free.
	Yeah, that's like saying I'm free to bribe my God and I'm in prison and he'll bring me a little piece of cake.
	So that's real freedom. Right.
	It's just playing the same game back to them.
	Right. But again, I would say that it's something that's much more at a sort of fundamental survival level for children that you simply can't survive without your parents' approval.
	So it's not like playing again.
	I mean, it really is survival at that sense.
	Right. But if you can't escape that mindset, then you live it your entire life.
	Oh, sure. Oh, my God.
	Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm sitting there trying to get people's approval all the time.
	And this is, of course, what a lot of people face as problems in their personal relationships is that they can't get the approval that they want, right?
	Because this is what tortures so many people in their personal relationships is that I really need approval, but I don't have a lot of self-esteem because I'm not living my values consistently and...
	And so what happens is when people get closer and closer and closer to you and begin to see what you're really all about, then they begin to see the gap in you between what you profess as your ideals and how you actually live your life.
	And what that means is that the closer you get to someone, the more desperately you need their approval.
	I am completely dependent on Christina's approval.
	This is something that happens when you get married.
	You can't escape it and I don't think you should even try.
	But as you get closer and closer to someone and you need their approval, you put more of your self-esteem into their hands And you then don't get their approval because you're not living according to your values.
	And this is why I say that the quality of your relationships is always dependent on the quality of your integrity.
	If you are living your values, however, nobody ever does it perfectly, but, you know, if you have that commitment, then as you get closer and closer to people in your life, their respect for you will go up rather than go down, and you won't be stuck in this tortuous world if every time you get close to people, you lose their respect, and they lose your respect.
	And that, to me, is a really tortured situation that's quite common in most people's relationships.
	Right, because then you're physically close, but you're not really close-close.
	Well, you're the opposite, right?
	Because the closer you get, the less you like each other.
	It's like trying to push those two opposite pole magnets together.
	You could spend the rest of your life wasting time with that stuff.
	And I think that's where some of that eye-rolling comes from.
	Oh, totally. Yeah, totally.
	If I talked all this big talk about freedom, and then when my brother called me, I'm like, oh, hi, how's it going?
	Absolutely. You need me to help you on your business plan with your new corrupt business venture?
	Oh, absolutely. Oh, honey, I've got to go over to my brother's place.
	She'd be like, oh, man, who are you?
	Where are you relative to your values?
	We've had a chat here, and I just wanted to make sure that we weren't totally bypassing everybody else's desire to participate.
	So I've just unmuted everybody's mic.
	If anybody wanted to jump in, please feel free.
	We can talk about anything you like.
	No, no, that was good.
	I think that's very, very important stuff, and I think it will be very helpful for other people.
	That's why I think that your story in particular is very powerful for people at the moment.
	So, mics are open. If anybody wants to add anything else, please help yourself.
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello? Hi, how's it going?
	One moment, let me just...
	Okay, go ahead, you're unmuted.
	Yeah, I was listening to podcast 400 today.
	Sorry, just let me interrupt you for a second.
	Can you just check your mic? You've got a bit of rumbling there.
	But Podcast 400 is...
	Christina is interviewing me as if I am a priest, somewhat non-denominational, but nominally sort of a Christian priest.
	And we recorded that for a number of reasons, but largely because I get accused quite a bit of not being able to think outside my own particular way of thinking, so I wanted to make sure that people understood that I was absolutely able to argue the devil's advocate position in this case quite literally, and so that's the podcast that you're referring to.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I was going to ask what your rationale behind The podcast was or why you decided to do that.
	But also, well, did you say that in your podcast that the existence of God in itself is illogical because the existence of, well, the Abrahamic God, so to speak, is not consistent with the known laws of physics or logic?
	Did I say that in the podcast or in some other podcast?
	Yeah, in another podcast, sorry.
	Yes, that certainly is my belief.
	So, well...
	I know you were saying you were speaking from a devil's advocate position in Podcast 400, but...
	But, um...
	I just want to jump ahead.
	Is your question sort of what rationale or what arguments would I put forward to prove that God is inherently illogical?
	Yeah, yeah. Okay, I mean, I'd be happy to spend a few minutes on that.
	There's a number of podcasts on this topic, so I won't try and recreate them all.
	But, yeah, for sure, the existence of a universal, omniscient, all-powerful, is-everywhere-yet-nowhere Is consciousness without material form?
	Is a mind without either energy nor atomic form?
	It's all a complete contradiction because there is no possibility in the material world of having a mind without a brain.
	Whatever the relationship is between mind and brain is obviously quite complicated, but we certainly do know that there's no such thing as human thought without electrical activity that occurs in a measurable context within the physical brain.
	And so if you posit forward the existence of an entity that has consciousness without material form, Then that's a complete contradiction, right?
	It's like saying that you have a giraffe that has no material form whatsoever.
	Well, a giraffe is a definition of something that does have material form, so that's quite self-contradictory.
	If you're saying that an entity exists that lives forever and cannot die and was never born, then what you're doing is you're trying to apply the second law of thermodynamics, that something can neither be created nor destroyed, not to physical matter, because God, of course, has not composed of physical matter, but rather To consciousness, which is an organic concept.
	There is no such thing as consciousness that exists in a non-organic situation.
	A rock doesn't think, a mountain doesn't cogitate or anything like that.
	And so again, what you're doing is you're saying that, I'm not saying you, but I mean this sort of idea, that people are saying that consciousness can exist, which is a biological concept, without being born or dying and with no physical form.
	And all of those, of course, are completely contradictory to all observed and known forms of consciousness and biology.
	Also, people who believe in God are saying that an entity exists and does not exist.
	An entity exists insofar as God exists and is real and so on, and yet there's absolutely zero possibility of being able to measure its existence.
	So normally, if you can't measure anything's existence or a particular thing's existence, then it doesn't exist, right?
	If I say to you, there's a chair in the middle of the room and you go walk and try and sit down and you fall on your ass, then you're going to say, there's no chair here.
	And I'm going to say, well, yes, there is a chair.
	And you're going to say, okay, well, I can't sit in it.
	I just fall through it. And I say, yes, it's a chair that has no material form.
	And then you're going to say, okay, well, can I at least measure its heat?
	Can I scatter dust on it or heroin or something and see the outline?
	No, no, no. I say it absolutely can't be detected in any particular way.
	Then, of course, that would normally be defined as the complete absence of a chair.
	So if I say there is a chair there, but there's no possible way in any way, shape, or form to measure its presence, then I'm saying that something exists And does not exist at the same time, which is a complete contradiction.
	And there's more, which I've sort of gone into in other contexts, like if God is all-knowing, then God knows what's going to happen in the future, and if God knows what's going to happen in the future, then God can't change what's going to happen in the future, which means God can't be all-powerful, right?
	Like if I know what I'm going to do tomorrow, then I can't change what I'm going to do tomorrow.
	So I can't be both all-powerful and all-knowing at the same time.
	And this is just a few examples of the kinds of logical contradictions involved in the ideas of You know, gods and unicorns and devils and elves and dryads and all these kinds of things.
	So I hope that makes some sense.
	Yeah, it does, yeah. Thanks.
	Wow, that was astoundingly easy.
	Oh, we have made another convert.
	No, I'm just kidding. I'm not even going to suggest that you had, but I'm glad that that was helpful.
	Is there anything else you wanted to add?
	Not for now, no. Okay, good.
	Listen, I must say that your soul is a particularly tasty one, and I appreciate being able to eat it.
	it.
	Thank you so much.
	Now, is there anything else that people wanted to add at this point in the show?
	Somebody has mentioned here, I'm not going to read out their name, I'm just going to refer to them as Candy, but somebody has mentioned here that, I think, is this right?
	This is in reference to Podcast 400 that he's writing?
	Yeah, I mean, Podcast 400, I'm just going to mention a, certainly I'll put a pitch on to say that you should listen to it because I think it's good.
	I mean, I think it's very interesting and Christina is a fantastic debating opponent, but of course I knew that when I got married because, It was her deal when we got married, as far as how things went.
	But it's a good debate, I think, where I do play the part of a priest, I think, with some fair degree of accuracy, but without all the fondling.
	Well, at least not of others.
	And... But do have a listen to it, because I think it's worthwhile.
	The one thing that does occur in the podcast that you'll notice is that every time Christina tries to put a criteria of truth forward, I'll keep switching subjects, I'll keep switching topics, I'll keep switching perspectives, I'll keep conflating human agencies with divine agencies.
	Whenever she asks for proof of God, I'll say, well, you'll have to ask God, which begs the question, and all this kind of stuff.
	So I think definitely have a listen to it.
	It probably would be an interesting exercise to just sort of sit there.
	I'm not saying you should or could, but...
	You could sit there with a notebook and just mark down every time I switch contexts, every time I switch topics, every time she asks one question and I answer it with something unrelated, every time I talk about personal experience as a proof of the existence of something divine and so on, because pretty much that would be the whole podcast from my side.
	But at the same time, it does seem sort of plausible in a surface and untrained kind of way.
	Somebody said, yes, it was maddening.
	And somebody said, lucky you're a psychologist.
	If Steph went to the dark side, he would be dangerous.
	That's right. You know what's funny?
	I can sort of see that if people snipped out bits of this podcast and listened to it completely out of context, it would actually be quite popular in Christian circles, I think so.
	Yeah, and the thing that you have to do when you're, I mean, my suggestion is for whatever it's worth, the thing that's important to do when you are debating with someone in whatever context about anything is you need to not, I mean, everybody wants to start philosophizing in midstream, I think is what Ayn Rand used to call it, that you sort of jump into the argument and then you're right in there talking about omniscience and all-powerful and this and that and, you know, material form and non-material form with regards to God and so on.
	But the thing that you need to do up front when you're debating with someone, in my opinion, is you need to say, okay, before we start, let's clear the decks beforehand.
	If neither of you know how to play tennis, you don't just go in there and start swinging away at anything you see, right?
	Basketballs and mascots and spectators.
	You say, okay, neither you or I know how to play chess, so let's get a book out, let's see what the moves are, let's practice a little.
	And so you don't want to just start going in pretending you're playing tennis when you're really just swinging the racket sort of edgeways at the net and saying, hey, that made a really cool sound.
	So when you're debating with someone what is a useful thing to do is to say, okay, by what criteria will you change your mind?
	Because you sort of need to establish that up front.
	What will I have to do to change your mind?
	So if I start debating with somebody who's religious, and of course, Christine is not a trained philosopher, so any more than I'm a trained psychologist, although she at least doesn't do philosophy, whereas I do dream analysis, but that's more vanity...
	So if she was a trained philosopher, what she would do is she'd say, okay, Mr.
	Evil Priest Guy, let's say, if we're going to debate the existence of God, you tell me what criteria you would accept as proof that God does not exist.
	That's what you need to establish.
	Otherwise, you're all just swinging wildly.
	There's nothing going on. It's just a bunch of back and forth, which is why it was maddening and why it is sort of designed to be maddening to listen to that.
	Because Christine is obviously a very intelligent and linguistically capable amateur philosopher.
	I mean, she's very good at that. And of course, I can't touch her when it comes to psychology.
	This is where I think a lot of people are.
	This is certainly where I, even now, sometimes are and certainly was for most of my life.
	I just sort of want to dive in and start debating the issues, but first and foremost, just sit down and say, okay, let's get some ground rules going here, right?
	Does empirical evidence trump subjective opinion, right?
	I mean, that's sort of a thing to sort of say, because what I was saying in the podcast is, well, God exists basically because I feel his presence every morning.
	With cocoa butter and some jojoba.
	But that's really not a very good argument, right?
	Because you could say that about anything.
	So the first thing you need to say is, okay, well what are we going to establish as criteria of proof?
	Is logic going to be how we determine truth from falsehood?
	Is, God forbid, faith going to be how we determine truth from falsehood?
	Because if somebody's going to pull the faith thing out, if they're going to pull the faith stick out and say, well, God exists because I believe God exists, then I would say don't dignify that with pretending that it's an argument.
	That's just like two television sets pointed at each other thinking they're having a debate.
	So those kinds of things, I think, are very important.
	We should edit some podcasts so Steph argues against himself.
	LAUGHTER That's excellent.
	Excellent. Excellent.
	So yeah, I think that's the thing you need to do.
	If you're going to debate ideas, which is, I think, the most worthwhile and powerful pursuit in the world, then when you are debating ideas with people, it's absolutely essential that you sit there and define your terms, define your proof.
	How is it that we're going to make progress in this debate?
	That, I think, is very, very important.
	Yeah, Podcast 500.
	Maybe what I'll do is I'll have a violent argument with myself in a mud pit on a webcam.
	I think that would be the way to go.
	So I'll start limbering up for that right now.
	So yeah, that's my suggestion.
	If you want to have productive and enjoyable, enjoyable being very important, right?
	Philosophy shouldn't be something that ends up just being sort of frustrating and annoying thing to do where you feel like you're never making any progress and everything goes round in circles.
	You know, if you want to start nailing this jello to the wall, then get out your intellectual stud finder.
	Oh man, I hate it when those metaphors dry up right there in my mouth.
	It's just terrible. But yeah, define your terms up front.
	Scientists do this all the time, right?
	They do this with the scientific method.
	They say, okay, if you and I have a disagreement about a principle, a theory, a methodology, a conclusion, or whatever, or numbers, how is it we're going to determine truth from falsehood?
	And of course, Scientists go with the whole, I think quite reasonably, go with the whole scientific method, but philosophers just swing wildly and never get anywhere so many times.
	So I just say, just sit there and say, okay, well, I'm happy to debate this with you, but let's get some ground rules going, right?
	How is it that you are going to change your mind, and how is it that I'm going to change my mind, right?
	And that is how you make progress, but you have to define that thing up front, I think, first.
	Somebody else has said here, you should do one of those podcasts where you laugh at ridiculous ideas.
	I remember one of the earlier ones in which you talked about the police being interested in going after the mafia.
	I was walking around town with the biggest smile on my face.
	I probably looked like an idiot.
	That made my day. That's good.
	You know, if you like those ones, oh boy, there's one that I did about Christian criticisms of...
	The theory of evolution being...
	The Christians felt that the theory of evolution was just irrational.
	I can't remember the number of it now.
	It's up in the 400 somewhere.
	But it's called... Evolution's in the title.
	I'm sure it'll pop up in the Skype chat if somebody remembers the name.
	There's also one about environmentalism and DDT where I got pretty hysterical.
	I mean, funny, or at least enjoyed it quite a bit there as well.
	Okay, I'm going to open up the mics to anybody else who wants to add something.
	Just about now.
	So if you have any questions or comments, please go ahead.
	You know, I'll just start talking again if nobody says anything.
	I I can always do that.
	Honey? Do you have anything to add?
	I think everybody's unmuted.
	Can you just let me know if you are or are not?
	Hello. Okay, good. Everyone is unmuted.
	They're just... I've either put them to sleep or they've just fallen asleep on their own.
	I bet you it's one or the other. Okay, well, that's interesting and exciting.
	Let's just see what other topics we had listed as things that we might talk about today.
	Just a quick comment on 400?
	Yes, please. I was struck...
	By how you were able to actually sound as though you were passionate about the opposition argument.
	Well, yeah, and the truth behind that, of course, is that I do have an evil twin who's a priest.
	I was hoping not to be outed yet, but this is the one who's actually doing the podcast now.
	I'm going to slowly move you guys towards God, you know, to our good buddy Jesus.
	No, I think that's important.
	And the reason that I wanted to do that was obviously it's more entertaining if it sounds like I really believe what it is that I'm arguing.
	But the second thing, too, is that I really wanted to have this available to all of the hordes of religious people who come at me guns blazing because I don't have any sympathy or understanding of religious arguments.
	And I would certainly suggest that if the people are interested in playing devil's advocate position, which I think is a very powerful tool, it's not manipulative, but most times people get upset because they don't think that you're listening to them, not because you disagree with them, just at an emotional level.
	And so if you can echo their own arguments back to them with the same kind of emotional force that they feel, And with the same conviction that they feel, then it does two things.
	One is that it makes them feel understood and heard, which is, of course, very important to me.
	I mean, I'm very interested in talking to religious people because at least they care about ideas and about ethics.
	They're way further forward than nihilists.
	So I don't want to completely alienate the possibility of conversations with religious people, so I do want them to understand that I do understand where they're coming from.
	I just don't agree. I just haven't rejected the whole thing out of hand and have no emotional sympathy for the positions or anything like that.
	And the second thing that I find very helpful in that area is that if you do put forward a very powerful...
	I don't want to sound like I'm saying I did that because I was kind of jumping in and out of character there, but if you do put forward a passionately argued false argument, then it does kind of give people a little bit of pause.
	Oh, it did me. Yeah, and because...
	Well, actually, why don't you tell me what it did for you rather than me rambling on about my theories?
	It gave me pause.
	I found it almost disturbing because it's like, you know, how does anyone know that you're not acting all the time, right?
	You mean like the one out of 450 podcasts?
	Yeah. Absolutely.
	And that's the danger, of course, of what Socrates called sophism, sophistry, which, if you remember back to the holy wars of the determinist versus free will debates, that was the term that got the determinists so embroiled.
	But... I think that it's very interesting to listen to somebody passionately argue for a false position.
	Now, of course, remember, I was a semi-professional debater, so I do have the ability to argue that the pen is mightier than the sword, or that the sword is mightier than the pen, or however you want to put it.
	Plus, I was an actor, right?
	So I don't have a huge amount of problems summoning emotional conviction for other people's scripts.
	But... The reason that I think it's important is that if I compassionately argue for something that I know to be false, what does that mean about people who are religious?
	Because a lot of people will take arguments at face value based on the conviction and the passion of the person who's making the argument, which is one of the reasons why I try to put a little bit more emotional energy into what it is that I do rather than just sort of a recitation of facts and logic.
	But if a Christian can feel that I am passionately arguing for something that I know to be false, that is going to give them a different perspective on the passion of their own preachers.
	That it is possible to both be incredibly passionate and incredibly wrong I think is a very interesting way to get people to question what it is that they're being taught.
	That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's a good point.
	But yes, I certainly do understand that it can be a little creepy.
	A little creepy. Okay, I'm just going to see who's got the...
	I think it was just...
	Okay, so does anyone else have any comments or questions?
	I don't have a massive stack of other topics, so if we don't have any more, we could actually have a show that doesn't run almost three hours, which would be quite fascinating.
	So if you don't have any other questions or comments or issues, we do, just for those who are joining, maybe for the first time, we talk about...
	Family, psychology, philosophy, economics, art, literature, movies, and occasionally other topics.
	So if you have any questions or comments about that, and we try and take a sort of rigorous philosophical or psychological approach to these issues.
	So I'll just put it out there and then I'll ask sort of one more question if people don't have anything to add or questions to ask at the moment.
	Okay, then the last question that I'll sort of ask is that somebody else has posted a dream on the board.
	And I was just wondering, I think two or three people replied, one of whom did not enjoy the Dream Analysis podcast.
	and another of whom did, two people did, and I was just wondering if people have heard those, whether What their feelings are about the Dream Analysis podcast.
	I find them very challenging, and I wanted to just sort of make sure that they were of interest and of value to other people if I was going to take a stab at another one.
	If you would like me to do another one, just make a vague hissing sound and possibly echo my voice a little.
	Thank you.
	It's...
	Okay, good. Well, it seems that we have a few people in the chat window who are saying that they do enjoy them.
	So that's great. They can be very, very difficult.
	And the reason that they're very difficult is not because the dream analysis is sort of made up or anything like that, but because, man, oh man, do I ever have to do a lot of peyote to get into somebody else's head.
	So that's a real challenge.
	But of course, I don't know much about the family history, about the background and all the stuff that therapeutically would be very useful, so they can be quite a challenge.
	So... I thought that might get you there, Andrew, out of seclusion writing.
	Oh, what was it? Did you?
	I was just reading this. I was listening to a listener of this podcast runs a show called Jimmy Doane.
	Jimmy Doane. It's J-I-M-M-Y-D-O-A-N-E, which is JimmyDoane.com.
	It's very fast-paced.
	It's three guys talking about the news.
	It's very energetic. It's not particularly my cup of tea, because for me, it just gets a bit schizophrenic with three people all trying to make jokes at the same time.
	Because, I mean, I have more than that in my head, but at least I have only one set of vocal cords for them all to come out with.
	So there's some filtering that goes on there, but I'm pretty much it.
	You talk like three.
	Have I got it down to three?
	That would be cool. Just remember, don't get me started.
	I'm not going to have my evil twin come in here and do the whole Holy Trinity three-in-one argument because that will just blow everybody's mind.
	But anyway, so this Jimmy DeWayne, I was listening to his show.
	He sort of asked me to listen to it, so I was listening to it.
	And I would certainly recommend going to check it out.
	It's actually, if you've only listened to this podcast, it will be quite surprising for you to go to Jimmy DeWayne's podcast because it's got some production values.
	You know, they actually have intro music.
	They have editing.
	They have... Seven acres of forehead.
	You know, if I had a webcam, and I will do this at some point once I get the webcam hooked up, I will actually give you, I'll turn on a red light in my study, and I will give you an enormously accurate simulation of a Mars landing using only my forehead and a webcam, but we won't have to do that right now.
	But he was talking about, this sort of blew my mind.
	I think that this is correct.
	That the heroin production coming out of Afghanistan these days is over 5,000 tons per year.
	Not raw poppies, but 5,000 tons of heroin that's coming out of Afghanistan every year.
	Isn't that just astounding?
	I mean, that's far more than ever came out under the Taliban.
	Which, of course, is no defense of the Taliban, but just to me quite funny that the war on terror seems to have been having some deleterious effects on the war on drugs.
	But, of course, the nice thing is, since a lot of terrorist organizations use drug running to raise funds, that the war on terror can never be won while there is a war on drugs going on, and vice versa.
	So I just sort of wanted to point that out, but it is quite...
	It is quite funny.
	And of course, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a fair amount of black ops within the CIA or the FBI or other countries' security services were in fact funded by getting involved with the war on drugs.
	It certainly would be a good way to be able to conduct black ops or off-book operations by being able to trade this kind of material.
	And so you could look at it as just another form of taxation, but with the added bonus of offending trigger-happy people in foreign lands.
	So I thought that it's worth checking out the show.
	If you like that kind of stuff, then I think you'll certainly enjoy listening to some libertarian opinions that actually go through some post-production processing.
	And so it sounds certainly a lot more professional, which is good.
	If they kill the war on drugs, they will also cut the funding of the Afghan terrorists.
	Oh, absolutely. That's very true.
	If you want to look at, I would say, just about the greatest source of funding for terrorism or for crime, the war on drugs, absolutely all it does is it pours more and more profits into the hands of the criminals.
	I mean, this is what's so funny about state power, right?
	That they aim to make you safe from drugs, but what they do is they raise the incentive for people to make money shipping and producing drugs, and I'm sure as Good libertarian historians, most if not all of us, are aware of the fact that there really was no organized crime in America prior to the introduction of prohibition in the 1920s.
	And after that, of course, organized crime came to America.
	This is why it's so difficult to uproot this stuff once it's already in there.
	Organized crime came to America, and then the prohibition was repealed in the 30s.
	And then it wasn't too long thereafter that you began to get things like marijuana and cocaine and heroin and LSD after it became produced, becoming illegal.
	And it would be no shock to me at all whatsoever to find out that one of the major lobbyists behind keeping drugs, gambling, and prostitution illegal would be the Cosa Nostra, or the mafia, or the organized crime of some form.
	Whereas it would be perfectly economically sensible for organized crime to lobby very hard to keep these things illegal, because if they ever become legal and Walmart ever starts applying just-in-time manufacturing principles to the gathering and dissemination of these kinds of articles, because if they ever become legal and Walmart ever starts applying just-in-time manufacturing principles to the gathering and dissemination of these kinds of articles, right, if you've got the hooker aisle at Walmart, then it seems to me quite likely that
	And then the mafia would have to go overseas and start funding terrorists over there to get more money that way.
	But, yeah, absolutely, you can't.
	You can't have a war on terror and a war on drugs simultaneously.
	I mean, not if you want to win either one.
	And of course, the goal is not to win either one, but just to frighten the population into giving up more and more of their rights.
	Let's see here. I'm just having a look here.
	Environmental policies here, increase oil revenues in the Middle East, which could also be used to sponsor governments there.
	For sure, there's no question that the introduction of the EPA under Nixon in 1971, I think it was, the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, Did an enormous amount to shut down the possibility of creating oil refineries in North America.
	And in America, I don't believe that for the last 30 years there has not been a new refinery built because of environmental regulations and also because of OSHA, the Health and Safety Association, and so on, that it's become politically impossible, and zoning laws, and nobody wants the garbage and this and that.
	It's become almost impossible to open up any kind of refining plant in the United States, which means, of course, that there's an enormous amount of dependence on foreign oil, right?
	So everyone says we need to cut our dependence on foreign oil, and they think that's going to happen because the government's going to invest in the electric car, which is lunatic.
	There's simply a very easy way to do that, and let's just make it easier to create oil refineries in America, and that would certainly happen.
	But again, to me, it would seem quite likely, given that the Saudis have, you know, what, over a trillion dollars invested in the American economy, that a good portion of that trillion dollars that is invested in the US economy is lobbying to make sure that oil refineries don't get built in the United States, right? The idea of, again, with all this lobbying that's going on for these various groups, the idea that it has anything to do with what Americans vote for is, to me, quite a funny idea.
	All right. Well, listen, I'm going to just have a quick look at the chat window again.
	But I'm not going to continue chatting.
	I don't have any sort of big topics today, other than the ones that we've already talked about.
	So I'll just open it up sort of one last time for questions.
	Certainly thank everyone who joined.
	We had a good turnout today.
	I really appreciate that.
	And if anybody has anything that they would like to add or any questions they would like to ask at the moment, speak now.
	Hello? Hello?
	Yeah, it's me again.
	Hang on just one sec. Go ahead with your fine British self.
	Well, I recently purchased a book by Harry Brough, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.
	You know, in that book it was basically a self-help book based on Well, as he said when he was alive, libertarian principles, and basically set up traps which, while in his thinking, inhibited people's freedom to live their life as they wanted to live it.
	One of those traps was the rights trap, saying that you can't base your freedom On, well, concepts of legal rights because they're only theoretical and not practical.
	So he gave an example of, say, I don't know, your car being stolen or something that you can't, you know, Your rights don't stop someone physically from stealing your car.
	Have you ever read that book?
	What's your opinion of that?
	Well, I have not read that book.
	I was quite a fan of Harry Brown.
	I thought he was a very, he was an excellent communicator.
	I believe that he was religious and he was also not, he believed that the state could be valid to one degree or another.
	And so I don't think that he and I would see eye to eye as far as that goes, but that's like a 5% difference or something, not so much on the religious side.
	So Harry's, I think, major challenge was that he could not find a way to prove the existence of or the value of or people's need or reason to conform to an objective form of morality, right?
	And of course, this has been sort of one of the major goals of my life, if not the major goal, everything else just sort of falling by the wayside of that.
	Because he was not able to come up with a binding reason for people to be obligated by a universal theory of morality, he had a great deal of difficulty talking about the concept of rights.
	I don't mean difficulty like he wasn't smart enough because the man was very, very intelligent.
	But rather because his fundamental belief in virtue was based on religion, not on logical analyses, it was to some degree he viewed the idea of positive rights as to some degree a matter of faith.
	And therefore, it was not something that he could use as a foundation for his political philosophy.
	So I'm not sure that I followed too well the, I'm sure I don't, the argument about the car.
	He certainly would argue, and I'm confident in saying this, he would argue that you don't have a right for other people to treat you well.
	You don't have a right for other people to want to spend time with you.
	It was his lack of belief in rights that made him a libertarian, which is a little bit different from my approach.
	Because you don't have a right to other people to treat you well or to give you property or to respect you or anything like that, then the idea of using government to achieve these things at the point of a gun was anathema to his approach.
	And there is a lot of anti-state thinking that goes around, there is no such thing as morality, That is objective and universal.
	Therefore, we can't have a government because a government is all about the imposition of values.
	That's a very different approach from what I believe.
	I believe that there are universal and absolute moral principles that are binding on everyone and that they can be sort of logically evaluated and proven And the reason we don't have a state, or shouldn't have a state or government, is because the government violates every single one of those universal moral principles.
	Whereas Harry Brown would say that morality is subjective to a large degree, and therefore you can't have a government because that's all about imposing universal morality.
	So I would say that would be sort of my take on Harry Brown's approach.
	But that having been said, I have not read the book.
	I'm just going by some comments that I heard on his radio show when he was still alive.
	Let me just...
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, yeah. He sounds unconvinced.
	Yes, maybe?
	Yes, yes? Yeah, it does help, yeah.
	Okay, good. Good.
	Let's go with that.
	It helps. Now, I think the word rights is a very challenging word to use in political discussions.
	It is... I mean, it is something that people get into an enormous amount of trouble with because the word right has been defined by so many people in so many different ways, right?
	So when you think about the suffragettes in the 20s, they say, well, a woman has the right to vote.
	But of course, a woman's right to vote, just as a man's right to vote, is basically saying a woman should have the right to join men in the general pillaging of the public purse that occurs through the democratic political process or the non-democratic process.
	Political process.
	So women should be able to participate in the slaughter fest that is democratic government.
	So a woman's right to vote directly violates other people's rights to retain their property.
	So you have real problems with those concepts of rights.
	There are people who say, well, people have a right to a minimum income, which again is a perfect violation of other people's property rights and so on.
	There's lots of ways in which rights, the very concept rights, has been so debased by political debate That it just becomes sort of very sort of silly from my standpoint, right?
	So I think that the word rights is one of these holes almost in space-time that many a good philosopher goes in and doesn't come back out of.
	So I generally prefer not to talk about rights because they generally are considered to be things which are enforced by government or dependent upon government mandates and so on.
	I generally prefer to talk about ethics or philosophy rather than something like rights.
	Now, I certainly do talk about property rights, but that's simply because you can't talk about property philosophy or property ethics without confusing people, so I certainly do use that word.
	But I don't find that the term rights adds an enormous amount to political debates, because so often the word is defined as, I have a right which supersedes or destroys a right that you have, But nobody ever talks about the right that goes missing.
	Everybody just talks about the right that is present.
	And I find that stuff too embedded in people's minds to begin talking about it.
	I'm just having a look at the questions here.
	Are you interested in...
	Oh, okay. I'm not going to try.
	Oh, people are typing a mile a minute in the chat window, so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to follow that one.
	But if you like, you can see it.
	All right. I'm going to give one last...
	Oh, we've got internet.
	All right. I'm going to...
	Just after I finish talking here, I'm going to unmute everyone, perhaps for the last time.
	If you have any other questions or comments, feel free to ask them now.
	Otherwise, I will close today's show off.
	So, I'm going to zoom in here at a...
	Oh, hang on a sec.
	Let me just... We had a fair amount of bubbly background there.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. I'm going to loop you in on a question that's come up in the chat on the nature of actions, human actions.
	Particularly interaction, actions between humans.
	There's someone who's arguing that all action is aggression.
	All action is aggression?
	Yeah. And that what distinguishes proper aggression from improper aggression is the...
	I think he's saying the non-aggression principle?
	But to me that sounds...
	Contradictory? Right.
	Okay, I mean... Sorry, go ahead.
	I'm sorry. I guess the question I'm asking you is what is the difference between, say, what's the difference between my approaching you to negotiate and exchange and my aggressing against you?
	According to him, there's no distinction.
	They're both aggression. Well, I mean, the first thing that I would say, if somebody came to me with an argument that said, all action is aggression, the first thing I would then ask is, well, why do we have two words for it?
	If there are complete synonyms, Then, what you're basically, it's a tautology, right?
	If you're saying, well, all action is aggression.
	Well, how do you define aggression?
	Aggression is all action.
	Well, you're just saying, well, coke is it, and then you end up defining it as coke.
	So you're basically saying that...
	A rock is a rock, right?
	I mean, so it's not really an argument.
	If there is a distinction between action and aggression, then obviously there are two overlapping concepts that aren't perfectly synonymous, which means that you have to then define aggression as somehow different from mere action, because otherwise you just have a tautological argument that doesn't sort of lead you anywhere.
	It's sort of like if we remember our British friend Michael Who was talking, and this sort of struck me.
	I spent an inordinate amount of time working on my lawn today.
	And while I was doing it, I was sort of thinking about the problem of tautology and these kinds of arguments that he was saying last week and the week before and the week before that, that when I would criticize public schools, government-run indoctrination camps slash public schools, That he would say to me, well, they can't have been that bad because you're obviously a fairly smart fellow and you came out of the public school system.
	Well, of course, that again becomes tautological because then anybody who is not intelligent as a result of the public school educational system will never end up criticizing the public school because they're not smart enough to.
	And anybody who is smart enough to criticize the public school system, their argument is automatically defeated because they're smart and came out of the public school system and have the capacity to debate against the public school system.
	So, in other words, there is no possibility of criticizing the public school system.
	Either you can't do it, in which case the question never comes up, or you can criticize the public school system, in which case it's not valid for you to do so because you're a product of the public school system.
	So I think that with debates of this kind, the first thing to do is to get people to differentiate the terms so that you make sure you're not just working with the tautology, which doesn't really add anything to the intellectual landscape and is kind of a...
	You don't even run in circles with that.
	You don't even move anywhere with a tautological debate.
	I don't know if he's put anything else in the chat window to differentiate the two concepts of action and aggression, but if they are synonymous, then he's just saying action is action.
	Okay. I guess that makes sense.
	It can either be a subset or it can be a synonym, but it can't be both.
	Yeah, well, it can be both, but then he's not adding anything to any kind of intellectual debate.
	He's just saying that action is action, and I use the word aggression interchangeably with action.
	It's a total synonym.
	They're completely identical, in which case he's just saying action is action, right?
	It's like, okay, I'm not going to argue you with that, but it certainly doesn't add anything to the sum total of human knowledge to say that a rock is a rock, right?
	No, that's fair.
	Has he, sweetie, has he put anything else on the chat window?
	No. But this is the kind of stuff that's worthwhile doing, right?
	If somebody comes up to you and says, I mean, this isn't useful to have these kinds of debates because, I mean, to analyze these kinds of propositions, right?
	So if somebody comes up to you and says that, well, all action is aggression, it's like, okay, so are they exactly the same?
	And if not, how are they different, right?
	And if they're not different at all, then you're not adding anything.
	It's not a debate, right? Somebody's just coming up and saying, my red jacket is a red jacket.
	And I'm certainly not going to argue with him, because that's a rather deranged thing to say, in my view.
	But maybe he's got a way of defining aggression that's different from action.
	I haven't seen anything come up yet.
	But, I mean, it's useful to have these kinds of propositions put forward so that you can have a look at them with a bit of a practiced eye and get used to just sort of...
	Because what will happen is people will then get, okay, well, not all action is aggression, right?
	But the problem is, if someone comes up to you and says, all action is aggression, and you say, no, it's not, well, you don't know because you don't know how this person is defining the terms, right?
	That makes sense. You know, it's certainly true, and I wonder why this is the case, that we always get the most people coming in towards the end.
	Isn't that interesting? Did we get anything else on this question of aggression?
	So they don't want to talk about it with me on the mic.
	So what I'll do is I'll pretend to turn the mic off.
	When the show's over and I'm, quote, done recording...
	Yes, okay.
	Right, like the other night in the bedroom when I said I was going to turn the webcam off.
	Right, okay.
	For those who put out a lot of subscription money to Freedom Aid Radio, I'll stop sending this feed to your email.
	Well, as long as nobody else wants to talk, then...
	Mind if I talk about...
	No, not at all.
	Sorry, I just opened it up for other people, but let me just unmute you again.
	Go for it, man! Well, I just had a question that popped into my head while I was thinking about this earlier.
	Is it possible that...
	Is it possible that...
	The fact that I have few other personal connections besides my family, that that was why I was actually able to do this?
	Or is it exactly the opposite?
	That this is why it took me so long to do this?
	That's a very interesting question.
	I'll certainly only talk about my own experience with this, that I have very, very few friends, and I would think that if I were heavily embedded Into a social network that included extended family and lots of friends and so on.
	I think what would have been the case is that if I had, and I certainly had more friends before I got rid of my family, and there were a number of friends, a not insignificant number of friends who did not make it over the great divide, right?
	And when I began to really think for myself and really sort of start to work from first principles and All of this then, a large number of my then friends basically just thought I was insane, or as your parents had talked about with you, that I had lost it, that the difficulties of my childhood have finally claimed my rational mind and I had become a mad, eccentric, crazy guy.
	And so that was their particular approach.
	And of course, I couldn't continue those friendships, right?
	And it wasn't so much because they thought I was crazy, but because they couldn't prove it, right?
	I mean, if they could prove that I was crazy, I would have kept them as dear bosom friends because they would be very helpful people to have around.
	But they called me crazy without being able to prove it, and that's not something that I could stomach.
	I would say that the friends that we choose when we are embedded in false and exploitive social relationships, particularly familial ones, the friends that we choose when we are embedded into a corrupt family structure will be corrupt friends, for the most part, themselves.
	And so I think that the reason that you have few friends is because you were embedded into a false social structure.
	And if you'd had more friends, it would be because your false self had been stronger and you would have been able to sustain more false relationships.
	But we can't have any more authentic relationships than the closest ones that we claim to have, right?
	I mean, I can't be closer to anyone than I am to my wife.
	And so if you have a false relationship at the core of what you claim to value, I think all the relationships that you will be facing or that you would be growing out of that would be false as well.
	So I think that it's the duality of your knowledge, right?
	That the true self prevents you from making friends because your true self has sort of been, you know, maybe plotting this escape for a long time, right?
	So I'm not sure if that...
	I think Christina went through a similar kind of thing that when she really began to think for herself and began to bring her own experience to the table with her family and with her own friends, that...
	Very few of those relationships made it across the great divide of actually becoming authentic.
	And that's, of course, the price that you pay.
	And that's why very few people do it, because it's a very high price to pay.
	It's just that once you pay it, you're like...
	That was nothing compared to what I have now.
	Man, I thought I was going to lose all my limbs and have to roll around in a little go-kart for the rest of my life.
	Basically, I am stronger and healthier and happier now that I've done it.
	But yeah, as you know, that step's a bit of a doozy.
	Yeah, it's huge.
	So then...
	You would say that before the change, that the wider the net is cast, the more difficult it's going to be.
	For sure. And I think you can notice this if you wanted to look at it empirically.
	And again, this is just my experience.
	I'm not saying that it's proven.
	But I will say that the people who are most full of illusion, as far as their relationships go, their core relationships go, those are the people that have the widest circle of friends.
	I mean, I was watching Bill Clinton on Fox the other day, and I mean, Bill Clinton obviously is a completely deranged lunatic as far as ethics go and so on.
	Obviously a very presentable and well-spoken man, but morally will be sort of looked at down the road as pretty corrupt.
	And he's completely embedded in his fantasies of virtue and his fantasies of the benevolence of the power that he held and so on.
	And the man knows everyone, right?
	So I think that you can almost measure someone's corruption by the number of relationships that they have.
	I mean, that's a very blanket statement.
	But the more popular someone is, the more you know that they're working with the lowest common denominator.
	That makes sense.
	That makes complete sense.
	But... On the other hand, that being the case, as difficult as it is for me to establish relationships, then why would it have taken this long to kind of crawl out of that hole in comparison to, say, yourself or others in similar situations?
	Well, I can't answer that.
	I mean, I certainly don't know your entire history.
	I can't answer that with any strong degree of precision, but I will certainly say that I didn't want to do it.
	I will certainly say that when it came to really thinking for myself and really bringing my own personal experience to my relationships, I really, really, really did not want to do it.
	And the only reason that I ended up doing it was that I was not able to sleep.
	And so in the way that you hated and feared it, I also hated and feared it.
	It's just that I had a precipitating drive that had nothing to do with intellectual integrity and had nothing to do with philosophical discovery and had everything to do with...
	When I was able to speak my mind, I was able to sleep.
	And when I was not able to speak my mind, I was not able to sleep.
	And so I was as kicking and screaming brought to the altar of truth as anybody else.
	I just had a precipitating feeling that went along with...
	That drove me absolutely unwillingly through these gates.
	And it was a very, very difficult transition.
	So where you may have had conversations with myself or with other people involved on the board or with other people in your life that have brought you kicking and screaming in a sense to this particular transition, I just had my unconscious just wouldn't let me sleep until I had dealt with this.
	Going even further back from that, there was a variety of precipitating things that occurred that brought me to that point where I was involved in a company.
	We sold the company. I found out that there was some untoward stuff going on at the board level, which I wasn't a part of.
	I found out about that stuff, and then later I sold stock.
	It wasn't with insider information, but it certainly was, I don't think, the most honest transaction that ever occurred in my life.
	And I was sort of unable to sleep because I think it was, for me, the first major moral transgression that I'd ever done in my life.
	And it wasn't something that was even illegal.
	It wasn't even something nobody even really believed when I was talking about it that it was immoral for me to sell my shares when I knew that the company was in trouble but the general marketplace didn't know.
	And of course, my brother turned out to betray me during this whole business transaction.
	The guy that we co-founded the company with turned out to betray me during this transaction.
	Then my brother betrayed me with regards to this guy.
	And basically, I ended up in a real moral quagmire that I couldn't sleep.
	And I didn't even know what the problem was.
	I just simply stopped being able to sleep.
	And I was in a relationship that was not good for me.
	I was involved in business partners who were, you know, increasingly I could not ignore that they were dishonest people.
	And I just was being exploited and then I was beginning to become, to a minor degree but to a very troubling degree, an exploiter myself.
	And this is sort of in The God of Atheists, which I know that you've read.
	This is the story that Terry goes through, right, where he sort of is, you know, good technically, but ends up starting to exploit his employees in order to maintain his position.
	And I was becoming dangerously close to that kind of person, and I simply was unable to sleep.
	It was a matter of, because I guess I had all these values that I said I believed in and I aspired to, and yet my life was not reflecting those values at all.
	And that contradiction between what I claimed and really did believe in and how I was actually living my life, the gap just became too wide and I was getting sucked into a world that began to violate all the principles that I claimed to believe in and that I'd written about in novels and articles and so on.
	And I just...
	Was not able to continue in that kind of life, and I didn't want to change it either, because I kind of knew that it was going to be a really, really wrenching kind of change.
	So, where you had a precipitating kind of conversation with somebody else, I kind of had a precipitating kind of, not even conversation, but I just wasn't able to sleep.
	Right? There's nothing more humbling than insomnia, right?
	Because it's the one thing you can't control sleep, right?
	You can control your food intake.
	You can control whether you go to the gym.
	You can control what you wear.
	But you can't control whether you can sleep.
	So there was an enormous amount of humbling process that I had to go through.
	And then, of course, I went into therapy and I worked on this for an enormous amount of time.
	But I was absolutely as unwilling as anybody else is to take this particular step of actually living my values.
	But the one thing that I wasn't willing to do, which I think is the same thing between you and I, the one thing that I wasn't willing to do was to give up my values.
	Like, you know, somebody hanging on to a piece of wood in a storm at sea, you hang on to your values and they carry you through.
	Because you simply, once you understand the beauty of truth and of philosophy and of virtue, which I've understood from quite a young age, when you face those kinds of crises, you just, I couldn't, like it was never a thing for me where I said, okay, well I'll just go join the dark side.
	That was never really an option for me.
	And so I just had to cling on to these values and I didn't know where the hell I was going and I didn't know what the hell was going on.
	There's not a lot of discussion and literature out there about moral evaluations of family or culture or society.
	And there's not a lot out there about personal freedom.
	And it's all, you know, politics and so on.
	And so for me, I wouldn't say that I had some sort of intellectual insight.
	I just got, like, so insane from not being able to sleep that I was willing to do anything.
	And that's where my conscience led me, which was to change my entire life, change it over and sort of hit the reboot and reform my relationships with regard to the values that I'd always claimed to believe in, but believe them for real.
	So, that's the only thing that I can say, that just as you had a precipitating kind of event that occurred for you that propelled you in this direction, so did I. It just happened to come a little bit more from inside, and I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to fully explain that.
	So, I guess in a sense, one is more physiological, the other is more existential.
	I don't know. Well, but you went through...
	You were going through a period of having sleep problems as well, right?
	When you were sort of dealing with this stuff at...
	When it was beginning to... When your values were sort of beginning to drill down into your emotional core, you were having some physiological challenges as well, right?
	Around sleep and so on. Oh, sure.
	And that's been on and off for the last five or six months.
	You know, sometimes I sleep 12, 14 hours a day.
	Other days I, you know, sleep one or two...
	You know, it's just constant latent exhaustion that you live with for so long that after a while you just get sick of it.
	Right, and that's what, you know, there is a thing that's I think somewhat true in psychology that you change when you get sick of your life.
	And the one thing that's important, and this is why I keep telling people, don't hide your soul as if it's a guilty secret, but go and talk to people.
	Because then, if you don't talk to people about what really matters to you, then you end up drugging yourself with regard to what's actually happening with your relationships.
	You need to expose either that your relationships are good or bad.
	And that way you can actually make decisions.
	But if you pretend that everything's going fine, I don't mean you, but if someone pretends that everything's going fine and never talks about anything important and constantly complies with their family's demands or their culture's demands or their country's demands or whatever, just goes along like a cork on the ocean, then they never get sick of their life because they're constantly just goes along like a cork on the ocean, then they never get sick of their life because But you need to stand up for what you believe in so that you can get sick of the people who won't let you do that and so you can actually change.
	But change, I mean, it almost needs to be provoked.
	You know, it's not something of everybody, for me at least, you know, I always had this idea of change as like because I'm, you know, relentlessly intellectualized.
	So this idea that, you know, change is like, ah, I've had an intellectual insight, so I'm just going to alter, you know, my life, and I'm going to go in a different direction, I'm going to make different choices, and, you know, it all seemed to be a pretty tidy and manageable situation.
	But to me, that's not what change turned out to be like at all.
	Change turned out to be like being shot from a cannon involuntarily and trying to find a safe place to land.
	It was much more like that.
	It was much more like change needs to be provoked rather than managed, at least certainly that was the case in my life, and I think that was the case for Christina as well.
	It's something that you resist enormously.
	It's something that is enormously terrifying, and you kind of need to goad your true self into finally taking action against your false self, and you do that By continually allowing your true self to speak and see what happens in your social circles.
	That sort of worked for me, but yeah, it's horrible.
	It really is absolutely horrible, until you're through the major part of it, in which case it's like, what was all that about?
	It's really not so bad at all.
	Yeah, you know, it's sort of like, I wonder, you know, when I first stumbled across the podcast and across the...
	In the past, I never would have bothered.
	I wonder now exactly what it was that drew me into talking about this stuff.
	To me, it seems like it's exactly the opposite of what you described.
	My true self was actually cajoling Right, for sure.
	But your true self is like, I want to speak what's on my mind.
	I want to speak what's real for me.
	I want to speak what really matters to me.
	I want to have real relationships.
	And your false self is like, basically, no, you don't.
	No, let's just conform.
	Let's not make waves. And the false self floods you with terror.
	Because that's the only argument that the government and the false self and the priests and all this nonsense, the only argument that they finally have is to frighten the living shit out of you.
	And that's what happens in these kind of situations.
	When you think of sitting down with your parents and telling them what actually means something to you, what actually you're passionate about, what is true for your soul and what really works for you, I mean, the false self can't say, no, honesty is really bad in relationships, right?
	The false self can't do that. So what it does is it floods you with terror and hopes that that...
	Like the same way that the government doesn't say that you need to give us all of your rights because we're greedy and power-hungry and empty souls that want to dominate the planet.
	No, they just scare the shit out of you with terrorism and global warming and nuclear war and killer bees and global cooling and running out of food and all this kind of stuff.
	And So you'll capitulate to whatever they tell you.
	Right, and all they're doing is just making you frightened, and that's the fear that you and I were both feeling when facing this particular situation, which is not breaking with family, but being honest, right?
	I mean, what is it that you and I were doing except being honest?
	Right, exactly.
	And so, you know...
	I guess I just wonder why I waited so long.
	It seems like a huge waste.
	Right. Well, fortunately, capitalism has extended our lifespan to the point where you and I are barely halfway through.
	It would really suck if we were in the Middle Ages and figured this out because the lifespan was like 40.
	So it's like, great, I get 19 days of freedom.
	But so, look, I mean, you're a young man when it comes to the longevity of your life.
	And, you know, there is an enormous amount of good that we can do with this kind of stuff, which is to talk to other people about it, right?
	That's how you turn these kinds of negative things into positive things, right?
	Because once you've made this kind of leap to freedom, to authenticity, to honesty, to integrity, then you can talk to other people, right?
	I mean, however that works for you, or, you know, whether you want to do it or not, it's up to you.
	But you don't know where your life's going to go from here, right?
	Maybe this is a revolution that might bring about even marriage and fatherhood for you.
	Who knows, right? But there's lots of different things that can occur now, and it certainly is the case that the reason that you, I would say, I mean, at a very reductive level, the reason that you didn't do it before, because the cost benefits were different for you, right? It was more comfortable for you to To stay in that particular situation.
	You get to avoid all the fear that you went through.
	And you know that the fear that you went through, as it was for Me Too, was almost overwhelming and probably would have been in the absence of any kind of community that you could talk to these things honestly about.
	Does that sort of make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
	I mean, and I had... I was going to three hours of therapy a week with a great therapist.
	So you need...
	You know, I don't think that we could just sort of leap off the ship of our histories into the water and hope that some friendly current is going to take us to some island somewhere, right?
	I think that we need to get into a dinghy and that dinghy is composed of like-minded people who understand what we're going through.
	I don't think that...
	To me, that just seems like too much of a leap, right?
	So I had a therapist, Christina had me, you had this conversation and other people in your life, but it's inconceivable in a sense that it can happen without somebody else talking about it.
	That certainly was the case with me.
	That was definitely the case with me.
	I would not be where I'm at right now if it weren't for the conversation I've been having with my brother John and with you and the folks on the board.
	Absolutely, for sure. I mean, so in a sense, it's sort of like saying, well, why didn't people fly in the 17th century?
	Because... They didn't have the capacity.
	It didn't exist in their world.
	There was no technology for it.
	And knowledge is a form of technology.
	It was not a viable option for you to even consider because it simply didn't exist within your mind.
	And that's part of the sort of conversation that we all have as human beings and especially those of us who are philosophers.
	The conversation that we have is around opening up what is possible for other people, right?
	What is inconceivable to people is usually what is going to set them the most free, right?
	Because we're all trained to not believe in things that are going to set us free so that we'll be there to help and serve others or whatever.
	Not exactly help, but to be exploited by others.
	And so, for me, the conversation that's so powerful and important is just about this is possible and what you thought of as impossible is absolutely a valuable choice that works.
	And that means that you kind of have no free will in the absence of even being able to conceive of alternatives.
	And so, in a sense, I mean, it's almost like in this conversation we're trying to create free will for the planet, if that makes any sense, right?
	That what is inconceivable becomes possible.
	And actually valuable.
	And moving things from impossible to possible to valuable to enacted is I think one of the major goals of philosophy.
	Yeah, you know, you say that about free will.
	It's kind of interesting.
	I was just thinking about that yesterday.
	All these possibilities that I never even considered for myself that I used to tell people that I just wanted to die at my keyboard.
	I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life, but it doesn't scare me anymore.
	Right, you don't need to avoid your life because you don't know where to take it.
	Right now you don't know where to take it, but at least there's possibilities that are going to be pleasurable for you.
	Right. Right.
	All kinds of possibilities I didn't even think were viable, like you were saying.
	It was inconceivable.
	If I could just interrupt for one second, Christina has told me that we have a nice, juicy, younger participant in the conversation who may be 13 and who may be, in fact, an FBI agent trolling for pedophiles.
	We'll find out. So let's...
	I'm just going to unmute...
	What was his name again?
	Okay. I'm going to just, I don't know if you have a mic or not, but for me, let's hear from those who are in the dawn of life.
	Cyberjet, if you have a microphone, I would like to say hello.
	Feel free to. Hi there.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hello. Hello, can you hear me?
	Yes, we can hear you. Well, I'm not...
	I'm sorry, we've got a lot of echo here.
	If you would just like to give me your handle, then I'll unmute you, if you'd just like to say it now.
	Hello? Hello?
	If you could just tell me your name.
	Oh, not your name, but your handle on Skype.
	New to me. All right.
	Fantastic. Let me just unmute you.
	I'm sorry, you had a question. Go ahead.
	Yeah, I'm not a teenager, and I'm not juicy.
	Well, you may not be a teenager, sir, but we're not sure whether you're juicy or not, but you could be.
	I just got on.
	It's 6 a.m. here. And where's here?
	I'm from Malaysia. Oh, were you the gentleman who came on last time who does the Skycast reviews?
	Yes, yes. Oh, how's it going?
	Great, great. And what's the topic of the day?
	You could have absolutely impersonated a 13-year-old there.
	We just would have assumed that maybe you were a wrestler or someone taking a lot of steroids and that's why you had the deep voice.
	And what is the topic today?
	Well, the topic today actually has been just about everything that's been on people's minds, but we are talking quite a bit about...
	You know, the degree to which we're sort of honest and open in our personal relationships and the degree to which we talk about what really matters to us in our personal relationships or, you know, to put a slightly downer side on it, the degree to which we kind of just go along, you know, when you're like at a family dinner and you just kind of conform with what everyone's saying and you don't really talk about what really matters to you and what's really important to you and what can happen out of changing that.
	Now, you sound stunningly uninterested in that topic, which is no problem, because this may not be something that's of interest to you.
	But if you did have another question or comment, certainly it's a pretty wide open format.
	Yes, what do you think of Lebanon?
	Uh-huh, what? Of which?
	Lebanon, the war that went on between Israel and Lebanon.
	Oh, Israel and Lebanon?
	Okay, I can certainly give you my two cents worth on the war between Israel and Lebanon.
	Sure, go ahead. Well, we actually just had on the board fairly recently a gentleman who came on vociferously defending Israel, and...
	The problem with that for me is that I don't believe that any government or any nation is a morally legitimate entity.
	Governments are all about people using force to tell other people what to do while being immune from that force themselves.
	So I think it's entirely unjust.
	However, if I did have to pick, heaven help me, a country to live in in the Middle East, it would have to be Israel.
	But I do believe that Israel is an entity that has been created largely out of a desire for Jewish leaders to be able to frighten the crap out of the Jewish people and so get lots of money from them.
	And so basically, as I've talked about recently in a podcast, if I'm sort of a mild racist guy, and I use my political connections to go and buy the biggest and most beautiful house in Harlem, and everybody knows that I got the house by using my political connections,
	and I go and live in that house, And I hire some servants to clean my house and then treat them badly and underpay them and so on, then I don't think that I should be entirely shocked if violence begins to occur between myself and the black community that is around me, right? Because it's a pretty provocative thing to do if I'm a known racist to go and buy a house in Harlem and then end up not even letting other people bid on it and so on.
	The Jewish occupation of what is now called Israel occurred of course at the end of the Second World War and was the result of a fair amount of bullying and manipulation and frankly blackmail from David Ben-Gurion and so you have this collectivist tribal intrusion into an Arab world.
	I do believe that the Arab world is worse and even more corrupt But this is an entirely artificially created situation that results from religion, results from culture, results from a kind of racism, results from statism, and this is the price that human beings pay for believing in things that simply aren't true.
	There is no such thing as Arab.
	Arab is a fantasy.
	The whole idea of Arab, they're only human beings.
	There's no grand history, there's no Mohammed, there's no Islam, there's no countries, there's no states, there's no princes.
	So if people choose to believe in these irrational concepts like countries and histories and religions and prophets and ghosts and goblins and people are elves, if they choose to believe in all of these sorts of things, then they're going to end up fighting with guns and with bombs because it's all unreal.
	It's all a complete fantasy, but nobody can admit it.
	So I do believe that Israel is not the worst country in the world.
	I do believe that it's the best of a bad lot, which doesn't make it good.
	I do believe that the Arabic countries as theocracies are even worse than Israel, but until human beings as a whole give up these incredibly destructive fantasies that governments and gods exist and culture exists and history exists, Then, yeah, they'll just keep fighting from here to eternity.
	So this is inevitable.
	It's never going to change until people start thinking more rationally.
	Well answered. Well, thank you.
	You know, people are not fighting with me too much today.
	That's good. That's good.
	Well, I just woke up.
	Oh, good. Well, maybe you'll get offended later.
	We'll see. All right, the microphones are open.
	I wonder if anybody had anything else they wanted to add.
	Oh, I think we could be ending on time.
	Bye.
	Yeah? We were talking earlier about the non-aggression principle, and I think Andrew wants to talk offline, but I think this is as good a time as ever.
	So, I had a few conversations with him and other people about these limitations of the non-aggression principle and for those who don't know it, the non-aggression principle states that aggression against non-aggressors It's wrong, and aggression is understood as a violation of someone's property.
	So you own your own body, so if I hit you, I am against you because I'm destroying, I'm affecting your property.
	And the example posed was that if someone lights a flashlight, On your property or in your face, then they are breaking the non-aggression principle.
	So that's the idea posed.
	And the conclusion that Andrew and others took is that the non-aggression principle is false because it doesn't apply in every possible situation.
	Or this can be replaced with something that's called the chosen aggression principle.
	This means that if you choose to be offended by the flashlight in your face, then you have been aggressed against.
	Of course, my take on this would be that the aggression principle should not be taken as such in a kind of vacuum and outside everything else.
	We should think of it as a way to solve a particular problem, which is that of a human conflict.
	And I don't see that someone flashing a flashlight in your face would cause a significant conflict.
	And I also don't think it's a particularly interesting example.
	The exact example posed was that someone lighting a match and the light somehow affecting your retina and the I'm more than happy to talk about this.
	Somebody asked me earlier if I wouldn't mind spending a little bit more time laughing at silly ideas.
	And I'm not saying that this is your silly idea or anything like that.
	And I'm obviously going off second-hand information.
	But I've got to tell you, I mean, I'm getting taxed at a rate of about 60%.
	So 60% of my working life is being spent as a slave standing before the guns of other people.
	And the same thing is occurring for my wife.
	And... Around the world, and of course this isn't even counting the national debt that's being built up, the money that is being taken from me is being used to pay killers to go and murder people in Afghanistan, and also we have some not-so-secret bases in Iraq as a Canadian government.
	The money is also being used to fund the police and the military who aggress against me if I choose to break any one of a million ridiculous laws and to throw my fellow citizens who do nothing at all wrong except either try and keep their property through not paying their taxes or who smoke a little joint rather than take a couple of martinis that these people get thrown in jail.
	And they get thrown in jail and get raped and get incarcerated for years and come out broken shells of human beings.
	And this is Canada.
	We're not talking Syria here where our citizens get deported to countries where they get tortured for two years as this Araf fellow, a Canadian citizen, got sent to the U.S. where he gets sent on to Syria.
	I'm not even going to talk about what's occurring in the United States as far as the incarceration of two million citizens and a war in Iraq and a war in Afghanistan and the war on terror, the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act II. I'm not even going to get into any of that kind of stuff, right?
	And God forbid we even talk about what's going on in the Muslim world or the theocratic worlds overseas.
	God forbid what's going on in Africa where you've got Western governments selling arms to dictators who are destroying the lives of their people.
	You've got genocides occurring.
	You've got millions of people dying of AIDS. You've got a life expectancy in the low 40s.
	So, around the world, we have billions of people crushed through the direct pointing of guns at their heads.
	Lives destroyed, souls ground underfoot.
	And we libertarians are fussing about somebody shining a light in somebody's eyes.
	I mean, people!
	This is not important!
	You know, if we want to be doctors, if we want to be people who help society, if we want to be people who actually make a difference in the world, if we get fussed and bothered...
	About shining a light or lighting a match.
	We are going to look as insane as a doctor in the middle of a plague saying, oh gee, you know, I think I might be getting a hangnail.
	I think I'm going to work on that rather than go out and save the people actually dying of illness when I have the remedy right here on my belt.
	So I could give a flying fuck, frankly, and with apologies to the 13-year-old listener, I could give a flying fuck about somebody shining a flashlight in my eyes.
	When we as libertarians get to the state where that is an issue that we need to deal with, we will be so far in the paradise of libertopia that we won't even bother thinking about that kind of stuff.
	So for me, finding the edge of the possibilities of where the non-aggression principle becomes problematic based on this or that, so like I'm hanging off a balcony and I have to kick in somebody's window and go into their apartment and they're not home, is that breaking and entering?
	Is that a violation? You know, if we are in a situation where the greatest difficulty that we have to deal with is somebody shining a flashlight in our eyes, Because the rest of the world has become a paradise?
	Fantastic. I can't wait to get to that place.
	But we are never going to get there if we focus our intellectual energies on worrying about these tiny little problems relative to the enormous amount of hell that the world currently experiences as a result of people sticking guns, not flashlights, into each other's eyes.
	That wasn't directed at you, by the way.
	I mean, I understand it's an interesting question, but I think that it is not something that we need to worry about.
	So somebody wrote here, Steph, I think it's the difference between talking about a tiny issue between intellectuals and addressing the basics with the masses.
	I don't think that we have the luxury.
	Frankly, I think if we are interested in virtue and we are interested in being philosophers and we are interested in being doctors relative to the ills of society, I think that's a pretty big and powerful responsibility.
	Intellectuals get more people saved and more people killed than any other group in society.
	Intellectuals created the capitalist revolution.
	Intellectuals created the limited state and saved the world from a misery of medieval torture.
	And intellectuals also created totalitarian dictatorships and fascism and communism and got millions upon millions of people, hundreds of millions of people killed over the last 100, 150 years.
	So intellectuals have the greatest power in the universe that we know of, far greater than any power of any state because states are simply reflections of the ideals put forward by intellectuals.
	And so, if intellectual, if we want to sort of take up this idea of philosophy and ethics and politics and we want to talk about what is right and what is wrong, if we focus on flashlights in people's eyes, we completely discredit the whole idea of talking about ethics.
	Especially when we're in a situation where ethics are so desperately needed at the moment and very powerful and passionate arguments for what is right and what is good is so desperately needed at the moment.
	I personally think it's a kind of intellectual crime, to be honest with you, to be talking about nonsensical things like flashlights and matches when the world is groaning under the heel of brutal states, of brutal theocracies, of brutal religions, of brutal families.
	I think that's the stuff that we need to be focusing on.
	And I think that to focus on Tiny little gray areas at the edges of principles when there's a bloodbath occurring right at the center of those principles is taking entirely the wrong approach.
	So that's my particular perspective on it.
	on it.
	I'm certainly willing to hear if that's incorrect.
	But I just see a lot of libertarians worrying about this kind of stuff.
	And I think it discredits the whole idea of philosophy and what is needed in the world so much these days.
	And the other thing, too, is that, of course, we were also talking recently, actually, this very, very show, and Greg and I were talking and other people were sort of chiming in on that.
	And...
	What I would say to people who are very much concerned about a flashlight being shone in your face is, have you completely talked openly and honestly with your families?
	Is your level of integrity focusing on whether or not somebody should shine a flashlight in your face?
	Have you dealt with all other possible sources of corruption or inconsistency within your own personal relationships?
	Have you become free as a human being individually or are you allowing your relationships to remain problematic and corrupted while focusing on whether flashlights should be shone in your face or not?
	That would be sort of my suggestion and I don't mean to sound overly aggressive but I think it's very important that if you're going to get involved in philosophy that you work on the real issues.
	that you work on the big issues, that you don't work on these tiny little inconsistencies about possible theories of something in the future, which, of course, is never really going to be a particular issue anyway.
	All right.
	Well, does anybody have anything else they'd like to add to that?
	All right.
	Well, thank you very much, everybody, for listening.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	I also wanted to mention that if you want to listen to an entirely whimsical podcast, I did one recently called St.
	Argoth and the Dragon. I think it's 439 or something like that, wherein I attempt to create a spontaneous and live libertarian fairy tale, which...
	It was quite a lot of fun, quite a challenge.
	Christina was just watching it earlier today.
	And I hope that you'll have a chance to look at that.
	It was quite a challenge to do and quite a lot of fun to work on.
	Oh, Greg, he wanted an ending.
	Oh, yes. Sorry, Greg, you're on.
	You wanted an ending to the podcast?
	To the story. You go, okay, well, that's it.
	No ending. And I was like, what?
	Right, right. Well, and I think the reason for that is that because it's a fairy tale about the contemporary life, right, then it's not something that I can say what the ending is going to be, right?
	Because if I come up with an ending, then that's saying I can certainly read into the future about what's going to happen based on this metaphor.
	And right now, I certainly don't feel Capable of doing that.
	I certainly hope that the ending isn't that people start to...
	As the volcanoes erupt around them, they start arguing about whether we can shine flashlights into each other's eyes.
	But it certainly could be the case.
	But I certainly couldn't come up with an ending just yet.
	Or just exactly how big the dragon's wings are going to be.
	Right, right. Or what the shape of the...
	What sex the dragon's great-great-great-grandchildren are going to be or whatever.
	Does Christina talk in Skypecast?
	She actually, I'm still working with her on this.
	She's very keen on sign language, though I keep telling her that until we get the webcam hooked up, it's not going to be as effective.
	No, sometimes. Christina very much likes to participate in these things, but she likes to participate when she has a clear sort of mandate about what to talk about.
	She's not like Joe Ramblefest, like I am.
	She's not as comfortable. She has a very organized mind, and so she doesn't have quite a comfort level with the kind of rambling that I do.
	So... I think that when we have a structured topic like I'm going to be the priest and you're going to be the girl guide, then that works.
	but when we don't have a structured topic she doesn't find that quite as enjoyable now somebody says I feel that the straw man is that we care very much about the flashlight which we don't Yeah, no, I mean, I know that it was harsh what I was saying, and I certainly don't mean it to come across that way.
	It's just sort of my way of sort of expressing frustration with 20 years of hearing people talk about this kind of stuff.
	But, you know, the thing is, with libertarianism or with any kind of philosophical argument for freedom, at some point, you're going to have to put your heart and soul out there.
	You are not going to convert people to freedom by dotting everyone's I's and crossing everyone's T's because you have to motivate people to want to be free in this life.
	And there is no amount of intellectual argument that is going to pile up enough facts, enough logic, enough perspectives, enough approaches on the libertarian side that people are going to wake up one day and say, huh, well, I guess they've answered the question about the flashlight, so I'm going to become a libertarian.
	That is not how freedom is going to occur.
	I can't tell you exactly how it will occur, but I sure as heck can tell you how it won't occur.
	I can't tell you how people are going to cure cancer, but they're not going to cure cancer by shining flashlights at it.
	So, at some point, people who are really interested in philosophy, who are really interested in ideas of freedom, are going to have to actually get out there and talk to people passionately about the value of freedom at a personal level.
	Not about an intellectual argument on an abstract planet called the future.
	Not about the Fed and the effects of currency exchanges in Austrian economic theory or the business cycle in the 1930s.
	At some point, if you really care about this stuff and you really want the world to be free, you're going to have to get out there.
	You're going to have to put some skin in the game.
	You're going to have to talk to people passionately about what freedom means to you and motivate people that way.
	That's what's going to make the world free.
	There is no amount...
	of dotting your I's and crossing your T's and coming up with perfect answers for every conceivable question that is ever going to convince other people.
	It may be a fine intellectual game for you to work on and there's nothing wrong with it as a form of practice, but it's never going to change the world because there are always going to be gray areas in moral philosophy, right?
	I mean, just to take an example, right?
	A six-year-old is not a moral agent.
	Very few people would argue that.
	A 25-year-old is a moral agent, assuming that they're mentally healthy or not physically disabled or mentally disabled.
	Now, when does a 6-year-old become a moral agent?
	Well, generally we'd say, I don't know, 17 or 18 or 19 years old.
	So you have to attach some date to it where they become a moral agent.
	Is it one split second, they're not a moral agent, and then they are a moral agent?
	Well, you can't answer these questions.
	There's always going to be gray areas in philosophy.
	But that doesn't matter. The world is not free.
	Sorry, the world is not enslaved because we haven't answered any questions about philosophy or we haven't answered every question about philosophy.
	Because if you want to look at what people believe that makes them enslaved, look at something like Christianity or Islam.
	Now, they don't answer any questions.
	They don't even have proof that God exists or that the Bible has any kind of authenticity.
	They have a blood-soaked history, they have a ridiculous set of arguments, and they're totally beating us.
	They win hands down.
	And they have no truth on their side.
	They have no intellectual consistency.
	They say that a sky ghost tells us what to do and you better listen.
	Or you'll go to hell.
	Or whatever. It's pure nonsense.
	Statism. Complete nonsense.
	I'm supposed to let George Bush run my life because he's so much smarter at it than I am?
	It's ridiculous. And so it's not because other people have better arguments that we're getting our asses kicked.
	And it's not because we haven't answered every conceivable question about the non-aggression principle.
	That's not why we're getting our asses kicked.
	We're getting our asses kicked because we worry about flashlights rather than convincing people.
	Because we worry about minutiae of possible moral questions in some future world that doesn't exist rather than becoming free and happy about our own lives.
	So it's not because we haven't answered all the questions that we're not winning.
	we're not winning because we're asking the wrong questions all right well on that note thank you so much for listening I really, really appreciate it.
	And I hope that you will take my criticisms of certain aspects of libertarian approaches to problems, not as any kind of smackdown.
	Of course, I don't have any power to do that anyway.
	This is just my opinions. But as a way of maybe pushing you a little closer to confront Your capacity to communicate passionately about freedom with the people around you and to talk about what really matters to you.
	That is going to make you feel a lot more free than chasing grey distinctions around the realm of moral philosophy, which you will never get rid of to end up with anyway.
	So thank you so much for listening.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	Fantastic chat. Thank you so much to everyone who has participated and is participating in both the boards at freedomainradio.com and also on these chats.

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