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Oct. 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:43
461 Rulers and Ruled

The root of condescension from the 'happy' and 'successful'...

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's 7.48 in the morning.
Still not quite used to these early, early mornings.
And I am on my way to work.
It is the 16th of October, 2006.
I just passed. Interesting. I just passed.
Maybe you can see it in the rearview mirror.
I just passed a school bus, and it sort of reminded me of something that occurred when I was very young.
I can't remember how old I was, but I don't think I was more than 10 or 11.
And I saw a show.
Lord, this would be a long, long, long, long time ago, and I don't remember even if it was a repetitive show or sort of a one-time show.
And in it, there was a small town.
There was a big city guy going through a small town.
Ugh, sunlight.
It burns, it burns.
And... In this small town, there was a school bus.
The school bus was parked with those flashing lights that mean, like, don't cross or we'll shoot you.
I think it was a woman who was sitting behind the school bus for many minutes, you know, 10, 20, 30 minutes, sitting behind the school bus.
She then eventually said, don't pass while the school bus is flashing, and eventually she just pulled around and went cautiously around, and then it was like, whoop!
The cops sort of swooped down, and it was basically a sort of sting operation for out-of-towners to get them to pay up a big fine or something like that for passing the school bus.
But basically the school bus was there, and the lights were flashing, and they were just waiting for out-of-towners to go around it in order to...
To collect fines from them and then this woman started going down this horrible deliverance kind of world where things just got worse and worse and so on.
I wasn't allowed to make a phone call.
I can't remember the plot really that happened after that.
But I do very strongly remember as a child thinking that that was a pretty terrifying situation to be in and it's amazing to me when I think back On how I came to sort of believe in the basic ethics of freedom and the basic potential or problems with the corruption of the state, that it's almost like the idea was implanted in me, some sort of alien seed, when I was very young.
And it's amazing how constant it's been.
And this is long, long, long before I read anything about freedom in traditional circles and read any Ayn Rand or anything like that.
But I thought it was kind of interesting.
And so every now and then, right, there's this bus parked in front of my house that's flashing.
The lights are flashing.
Only one set, not both.
And I always sort of get the same feeling.
It's like, am I supposed to go around?
Is it just sitting there?
Is it not?
You know, and so I sort of go by.
Is it okay?
You know, you don't sue me.
Anyway, so I wanted to talk this morning about...
An interesting thing that occurred on the chat yesterday.
We actually had 27 people in at one point, which I was actually quite pleased with.
I think that's good. And I've also noticed, although there really weren't any on the chat yesterday, that we have had some additions of the Fairer Sex.
I think it's got something to do with Christina's increased participation in the show, which I'm very pleased about, of course.
So I wanted to talk about something that occurred that I thought was quite interesting.
I talked about it with Christina last night, and I don't think that I'm overreacting.
It could be, but it's probably well worth having a listen and let me know what you think.
So, there's this gentleman who calls in.
We'll call him Fred.
And he calls in and he is rather impatient with the degree of family chats that are occurring with the Freedomain Radio crew, right?
So, we talk about a lot of things.
And one of the things that we talk about, of course, is...
Things to do with family, right?
I got problems with my family, or my family is corrupt, or what am I going to do with this, or what am I going to do with that, right?
It's all a great and huge challenge to deal with, and of course, it's something that I have an enormous amount of respect for, and an enormous amount of sympathy and time for, because having gone through that process myself, which took a couple of years, and 20 grand worth of therapy, you know, whatever I can do to make it a little easier for someone else, A sympathetic ear, a couple of words of advice, you know, whatever they need, I'm more than willing to do, right?
I mean, once you've gone through this kind of process, you almost don't want to invite people to start because you know what a challenge it's going to be, but you also, having tasted, you know, the sweet life that's on the other side of dealing with family issues in a very proactive and positive and decisive kind of way, you really can't Not help.
At least for me. I can't not help.
If you found some magical way for poor people to become wealthy and happy, wouldn't you want to share it?
Wouldn't that be like, wow, I've discovered this great thing which will give you the resources that you need to live a happier life, provide better for your children, and so on.
If there was magic words to make bad people good, you'd want to speak them as often as possible.
Not that I'm referring to any of our listeners, of course, If you just happen to trip over something you think is useful in this realm, you would share it too, right?
I mean, that's sort of what I'm all about.
So we were talking about some family stuff.
We started off with politics, and there's a bullying of the 14-year-old girl by the Secret Service agents, and then we moved on to some family issues, which was, to me, important.
It came up from a listener.
And there's this frat guy who calls in.
He's very smart, very eloquent, a nice guy in a lot of ways.
But he typed into the chat window, What is this?
Catharsis.com?
And I'm assuming what he meant by that was, My God, there's a lot of whining about family on this show.
Let's get back to politics and philosophy.
And let's stop whining about family.
So I invited him to come on the show and chat and said to him, as a joke, this is the man who most appreciates the discussions that we're having about family.
And he said something to the effect of, well, I had a great family.
They were very supportive, very loving, very wonderful, very positive.
My only problem with them is that they're 3,500 miles away, and that's a really bad thing.
And when he said this, Christina turned to me and shook her head.
As a sort of wise and experienced psychologist, she is aware of the kind of problems associated with this kind of statement.
So I'm going to mention them not because I have any animus towards this particular gentleman.
This is not uncommon among people who are successful and eloquent and so on.
It's not uncommon for them to have a kind of...
You know, captain of the football team, head cheerleader kind of Contempt is probably too strong a word.
Lack of impatience with people who are struggling.
So I'll sort of use the following metaphor as hopefully a way of diffusing the tension between these two groups.
Between groups who are struggling with family, personal, psychological issues to make themselves whole and those who feel that that is a form of self-indulgence and a form of whining and a form of negative behavior in one form or another.
So here is my metaphor, finely forged from the metaphor center of the brain.
And actually, I took it for a test drive last night, so I think it might actually be one of those ones that doesn't leave both of us frowning in a puzzled, sort of bewildered way.
So there's a land, and in this land there is a famine.
And There's no possibility of escaping this land.
It's walled in or a dictatorship or something like that.
And this famine is terrible in that it kills very few people but debilitates an enormous number of them.
And it really only strikes children.
The adult food is okay, you know, the sort of baby food and mashed up food and all of that and mother's milk and all of that kind of good infant feeding stuff is tainted or corrupted in some manner and so the children are very hungry and they go through physiological changes.
They go through physiological changes because of their lack of nutrition, lack of protein and so on, lack of carbs.
And what this means is that the children grow up stunted.
There are direct, measurable physiological changes to their bodies.
They grow up stunted.
Now, there are a small minority, a minority of the opulent, who have enough to eat, have more than enough to eat, who are well-fed.
And they claim great knowledge and great wisdom, and almost completely unconsciously, they feel superior.
And it's almost impossible not to feel superior.
When you are a young, well-fed, well-exercised, well-educated boy, and you're strolling through the streets of a town in this land, and all the other boys are kind of rickety and stick-armed and hollow-eyed and not as well-educated and definitely poor and certainly malnourished, it's hard not to feel proportionally more healthy.
It would require an extraordinary leap of empathy for a child not to feel this, the sort of well-fed child.
Now, this famine doesn't let up, but when you become an adult, there are certain things that you can do.
You can take certain proteins.
You may never become whole, but you certainly can repair a good deal of the damage, and in the repairing of that damage, you may actually become stronger than if you'd never been malnourished.
This is the old argument from if you break a leg and then you go through physiotherapy and you learn a lot about physiotherapy and how your body works and so on, you may very well end up healthier than if you had never broken your leg.
You may become more pro-exercise.
Maybe you didn't really exercise before you broke your leg, but then you get pro-exercise as a result of learning about the sports medicine aspect of your rehabilitation.
And so you end up healthier than if you'd never broken your leg.
That's certainly possible in this fantasy land of starvation, that you will absolutely face severe physiological deficits because you were malnourished as a child.
But in studying how to ameliorate or mediate the effects of that starvation as you get older, You can actually end up even stronger than if you had never been starved, right?
You just learn an enormous amount about your body and how it works and how to feed it and how to take care of it and so on.
Now, further imagine that there are groups of these formerly starved children who get together as adults.
I'm sure you get where this metaphor is going.
There are groups who get together to talk about the best ways to alleviate Or to reverse the damage that was done through malnourishment as children.
And then into this conversation bounces somebody who grew up in, to some degree, I'd have to say the ruling class to join the metaphors together a little bit.
Who grew up in the ruling class who had more than enough food and grew up strong and healthy and secure and this and that and the other.
And who then basically looks at this group of people who are striving to not only repair the damage but to find ways to prevent the starvation in the future.
Right? Who have experienced the problems involved with malnutrition as children, and who are not only attempting to solve it for themselves, but to prevent it for others, which is the basic empathy that can come from having gone through a very difficult situation as a child, that you have empathy for others and will do everything that you can to attempt to prevent that from occurring in the future.
And this well-fed child who grows up into an adult He bounces into one of these conversations that is occurring between these people who were heavily malnourished as a child and are seeking ways to mediate the problem and prevent starvation in the future.
And he says, you people whine a lot.
You people sure do whine a lot.
Now, if you kind of get the depth of that metaphor and its relation to a wide, wide, wide variety of other things, then you can sort of understand why Christina turned to me and shook her head when our good friend Fred said on the Skype chat yesterday that he had a wonderful family.
Because the starvation that, of course, we're talking about is parental affection, positive relationships with families and so on.
Now, if you did have a family that was wise and good and moral and virtuous, Then I would think that one of the first things that they would do as you got a little bit older as a child would be to impress upon you how incredibly fortunate you had been relative to everyone else in the world.
Even if you don't like the first world view of things and feel that everyone in the first world has these wonderful childhoods, then at least look at the other worlds, right?
The third world and so on and recognize, you know, gee, we're really lucky to be born in the West, right?
Who would I be if I'd been born in Saudi Arabia?
And it really wouldn't matter, fundamentally, whether I was born in the gutter or as one of the sons of the 5,000 princes, I would be utterly corrupted.
I would not be able to resist.
It would be... I mean, nobody does.
It just looks statistically. Nobody does.
And I doubt that I would...
I strongly doubt. I think I would be more miserable than most by being corrupted because I have a pretty sensitive moral nature, but I absolutely do not believe that I would survive That process.
So the first thing, I think, that a really good family would do, if they are a really good family, and of course when I have kids, that's going to be my approach when they get older, is to say, yes, we're teaching you sort of rational ethics and we're teaching you how to really enjoy yourself and feel rooted in your senses and have a great time, but you have to recognize how rare this is.
And I think that it's very very important to retain your empathy for those who are not blessed with your unearned advantages.
That it's very important to retain empathy for those who are not blessed with your unearned advantages.
You didn't earn being born into this family.
You didn't earn being born my son or my daughter.
So you can't think that you're a better person because you were better raised.
You can't think that the fortune that you have inherited, and of course there's a metaphor which we can use in a moment about physical fortune, you can't imagine that because you were fortunate enough to be raised well, that that makes you a better person.
I do understand that being raised well will make you a better person like you will probably have an easier time being moral than somebody who was raised really badly.
I mean just statistically we can see that borne out pretty well.
But the fact that you have an easier time being moral should make you humble and grateful, not arrogant, cold and superior.
It's a very, very important thing to understand when you are dealing with those who claim that they have no problems because their family was so wonderful and the people who do have problems are kind of whiners.
Obviously, the vanity and arrogance that is associated with that statement would almost take God's breath away.
If you and I and a group of other people, to switch metaphors for a moment, were born dirt poor and were striving to create jobs, start businesses, add wealth to the world to surmount our initial circumstances,
if you and I were born dirt poor, then We were meeting with a group of other people, also born to varying degrees, poor or not necessarily rich.
And we were figuring out the best ways to get educated, to get careers going, and so on.
And somebody who was born wealthy came in to our conversation and said, My God, I can't believe how money-obsessed you people are.
It's so easy to make money.
You know, you're making it way too hard.
It's not this complicated.
Well, I think that it would be fairly reasonable for us to turn around and say, well, sure.
I get that it's easy to have money if you inherit the goddamn stuff, but if you don't, maybe you'd like to leave us with dealing with our issues that are real rather than imposing your values and thinking that you're such a wonderful businessman because you happened to inherit some money, right? I mean, I think it would be a lack of empathy, a vanity, and a kind of cold superiority and very much a hierarchical, top-down kind of, I'm better than you...
Why are you people so obsessed with making money?
Money is very easy to possess.
Money is very easy to make.
Because the great danger with people who inherit money is they think that there's some virtue in that.
They think that that makes them a better person because it's like people who are born good-looking or people who are born with particular talents or people who are born very intelligent.
These are all accidental gifts from nature that you do nothing to earn.
And yes, it certainly is the case that if you're born intelligent and you work very hard, then you will achieve things.
But let's not forget that there are lots of people who work very hard in the world who don't achieve things, and it's not necessarily through any fault of their own.
Lots of people take singing lessons and want to be singers, and Pavarotti ends up like the best singer in the world, or whoever you think it is.
And it's not because Pavarotti worked harder.
In fact, Pavarotti probably worked less hard than somebody who was second or third rate.
Because Pavarotti just has the physical equipment.
And being in mere possession of the physical equipment is not a virtue that you've earned.
It's just something you inherit.
So yeah, absolutely. If you're born very intelligent and you work very hard, then you can get graduate degrees and you can do well in business if you deal with the emotional side as well.
But... Actually, you don't even have to deal with the emotional side.
There's lots of talented people in business who are deranged emotionally.
But it's no virtue.
I mean, that's for sure.
It's no virtue to possess intelligence and talent and verbal skills and good looks.
And it's certainly no virtue to have been born into a family with money, means, history, status, education.
That's a pure accident.
And the degree to which it is tempting To substitute historical accident for personal virtue is very high.
I don't know. I think I mixed up that sentence, but you know where I'm coming from.
It's almost inevitable in the absence of strong intervention for Somebody who's born good-looking, from an upper-crust family, intelligent, all of these things, and with access to resources, money.
Maybe your father is a PhD professor.
That tends to run in families, although that's certainly not true all the time.
But the degree to which people mistake those opportunities and those capacities for personal virtues...
It's really, really quite astounding.
And that's one of the reasons why Christina turned and shook her head when this guy said, I had a great and wonderful family.
They were very supportive and very wonderful.
Well, that's kind of narcissistic, if you don't mind me saying so.
Because your family certainly didn't help you understand how lucky you were.
In other words, your family hid all of the natural inherited advantages that you had, and in so doing, they inculcated or fed a kind of vanity and a kind of coldness and a kind of non-sympathy, non-empathy.
It basically is the equivalent, and I hate to put it this sort of boldly, but it basically is the equivalent of the kid who grows up in the ruling class family of a land in the grip of a famine who is well fed, of his family saying to him, look, you get food because you're a good boy.
Only the bad boys don't get food.
You know, we have resources because we're good people.
And basically, the people who don't have food, the children who don't have food, they're kind of lazy.
You know, their parents just don't really care about them in the way that we care about you because otherwise they'd go get them some food.
Now, and I realize I'm exaggerating here for a fact, but I think that the principle is worth examining.
Let's go one step a little bit further.
Fred comes from England.
Now, I don't know a lot about a whole lot of cultures, but I do know a little bit of something about the English culture.
I'm also fairly aware that a lot of the people, and this may not be the case with this gentleman, although I strongly suspect that it is, That a lot of the families in England who have wealth, have wealth as a result of significant oppression of other people.
I mean, aristocracy, right?
Certainly that was the case in my family, that my family's historical wealth and opportunities and so on arose from enormous and significant and vile oppression of other people.
So my family were aristocracy who owned significant tracts of land in Ireland and I'm sure worked the peasants into oblivion and stole from other people.
And it's significant, right?
They say that most, and it's true in the, not so much, it's not true in the private sector, but it's certainly true in the mercantilist or state-supported, state-protected, and certainly true in the aristocratic circles, that all great fortunes are founded on great crimes.
And people become very rich through manipulation of state power and brutalization of the poor in history almost exclusively.
With the exception being those who made great wealth in the free market in the post-industrial revolution situation.
So the fascinating thing about people who...
And there is this kind of coldness and superiority that is very, very common.
And this absolute lack of sympathy for people who did not have access to resources when they were growing up.
There really is a coldness and there is a very strong feeling.
And this is not just true in England, but in many other cultures as well.
The more mercantilist the culture, the more brutal the culture, the less sympathy the ruling class has, of course, I mean, almost by definition, for those that they are exploiting or have been exploited in the past that has resulted in their wealth and opportunities and education and so on.
But I do know that in my family history, yeah, there was a lot of landowning, right?
And of course, did we earn that land?
No, of course not. We were granted that land from the crown, from the British royalty.
And we were granted that land in order to squeeze, exploit, and destroy the peasants.
So that we could hand over all of the goodies we were pillaging from these poor wretched people to the crown to pay for the soldiers to go and kill people who didn't pay their taxes.
That's the reason this guy can't see the brutality of the state.
What do you think his family fortune is founded on?
I'm betting, though, not proving, of course.
So, this is a very, very important thing to understand, that the implicit statement that is made by those in power to their children, sometimes it's explicit, but most times it's implicit, is the following. sometimes it's explicit, but most times it's implicit, is the You have resources because we are more moral.
You have resources, and you have food, and you have education, and you have opportunity, and you have security, and we have wealth because we're better.
That's really the meta-statement that's going on.
And, of course, that results in an enormous amount of vanity, right?
I mean, of course, a lot of the people in the upper crust are fairly good-looking, right?
Because they stole money from the peasants, and so they had enough money to be able to take their pick of women.
And, of course, they generally would choose attractive women, the most attractive women, right?
That old song, your mama's rich and your daddy's...
Oh, sorry, your daddy's rich and your mama's good-looking, right?
From summertime, George Gershwin.
And so, of course, these people are going to be more attractive, on average, than the general population, because through their exploitation of the poor, they were able to get more attractive wives, which generally results in more attractive...
Look at Charles, Charles of the British family fame, right?
Old Cro-Mannion jug-ears.
And look at Diana and then look at his kids, right?
I mean, of course they're going to be pretty good looking, right?
I mean, at least it's going to be more likely on average that they will be.
He actually went outside the narrow gene pool and got somebody who was still royalty, or still in the aristocracy, but not quite as embedded and historically overbred or inbred than where Charles came from.
And so, yeah, of course these people are going to be taller on average than the general population because historically their gene pool has had enough to eat, right, relative to the peasants that they were stealing the food from.
And of course they're going to be taller, they're going to be healthier, they're going to be better looking, all these kinds of things.
I mean, no question of that.
I mean, that's absolute Darwinian, right?
It's inevitable. And...
They're going to feel, right, that they are sort of like a master race.
I mean, that's going to be very hard.
And, you know, again, I hope I'm not projecting.
I don't think that I am.
It's certainly possible that I am.
But... Certainly my family has had this kind of vanity, right?
Certainly in my family there is this kind of vanity, and there is to some degree this kind of vanity on both sides of my family.
On my mother's side, which is more famed for artistic pursuits in writing and so on.
And on my father's side, where intellectual contributions are considered to be the badge of honor for the family, I have some fairly, not top tier, but certainly not far from the top tier, ancestors who made some pretty good contributions to science and philosophy.
And my father's general obsession has been around raising the family fortunes because they fell rather precipitously.
And I think for myself and maybe for the world, too, given my small contributions, I think, thankfully, my fortunes fell.
I think my grandfather was a profligate or my great-grandfather, a great-grandfather, I think, who, you know, basically hoared and...
He gambled and drank away the family fortune, and this left my grandfather, who put all of his five children, four daughters and a son, through school.
Excuse me.
God, I'm turning into the Prison Planet guy.
I can't remember his name right now, but you know who I mean.
But this obsession with regaining sort of family honor and family fortune and so on, to me, is really quite remarkable.
And this is sort of the fundamental moral error and moral horror that these kind of aristocrats live with, or have historically, which is that my father believes, like with all of his heart, which is not to say very much, but my father really believes That the family fortunes were good,
that our family was up and noble and honest and good when we were exploiting the peasants, you know, stealing the crusts of bread from starving people, that we were good and up in status during that time period of our family history.
But sadly, now that we actually have to work for a living and contribute and don't get to use the violence of the state to fatten our purses at the expense of paupers, that our family fortunes are down.
Like, he genuinely believes this.
That we held more honor when we stole from the destitute than now that we have to work for a living and produce something of value in voluntary exchange.
It's absolutely astounding that he feels that it's a deviation from honor to not steal from poor people.
Amazing. Just amazing.
But, of course, this is the kind of coldness that is part of the British upper crust.
You can definitely see this.
I mean, just look at the Queen's reaction to Diana's death.
I mean, there's lots of things about it.
I mean, who cares really about the inner life of parasites, especially of that particularly egregious variety, but...
I think it is important to understand that there is this polarity in society.
I mean, I'm certainly no Marxist, so I'm not necessarily entirely devoted to class.
But there is this polarity in society between the given and the not-so-given.
I was going to say the haves and the have-nots, but that is not subtle enough.
Because lots of people become halves by giving to others, right?
The basis of capitalism.
Free exchange of goods and values means that you become rich in a free market situation by providing value and services and efficiencies to others, right?
So you take through giving in capitalism, right?
I mean, that's the basic point of sales.
Give me a million bucks, and I'll give you back three million in a year.
Or save you three million.
So... I don't want to say the haves and the have-nots, because that's a ridiculous snapshot without any sense of process of where these things and these monies came from.
But the fortunate and the unfortunate, you know, maybe...
I mean, but even that's a tough way to put it, because there is...
I mean, you know, was I fortunate or unfortunate to be born into the family that I was born into?
Well... I wouldn't really say that there's any...
I mean, there's no possibility of anything else, right?
There wasn't like a soul floating around that happened to, you know, drop off the dangling godlike umbilical cords just when I happened to be over this particular family's crib, right?
There was no me prior to my creation biologically through this family.
So there was no other...
There is no me except in this family, so it's hard to say even that it's not...
that it's unlucky, right?
There's no real possibility of anything that's an alternative.
And, you know, if somebody jumps out of a plane, it's not unlucky that they hit the ground.
I mean, there's no other possibility.
They may have been unlucky to be accidentally pushed out of a plane, but once they're out of the plane, it's not unlucky that they hit the ground.
So I'm not going to say that I have a really good term for it.
But the vanity of the lucky.
And in a sense, the guilt of the unlucky is a very fundamental divide in society.
And it really does keep the unlucky down and keep the lucky unsympathetic and unempathetic.
Because the lucky obviously genuinely believe that, like they say with pride, I had a good family.
And they don't say, and I'm so sorry that you guys had bad families, because I know how many of there are out there.
I know that I didn't do anything to earn my good family.
So, you know, with all due sympathy for those who were starving, I was fortunate and totally lucky enough and did nothing to earn it to have enough to eat in this land of hunger.
And yes, that made me taller and stronger and healthier and so on.
And I'm not going to be guilty for that because that was the environment I was born into.
But I totally have sympathy for the bad fortune of where you guys happen to get born.
And I would say, to some degree, I think, and this is really where the fundamental moral issue comes down to, I would say that the world, ethically, I'm not talking about any redistribution of resources, of course, but the world, morally, would be a much better place if those who were well-fed as children had sympathy for those who were starved as children.
And thus would do something to hold out a sympathetic hand, and maybe that would do quite a bit to turn this thing around as far as the power structure goes.
It's very fundamental, of course.
It is the fundamental characteristic of the ruling class that you simply cannot have sympathy for those you're exploiting.
I mean, you simply can't have a ruling class.
And, of course, I'm not just talking about the British aristocracy here.
You've got the political aristocracy in America and just about every other, quote, democracy in the world, right?
But it's absolutely essential and fundamental to maintaining your power as a ruling class that you do not have sympathy for those you're exploiting.
And the best way to do that, the best way to ensure that that is going to occur, is to make the children feel...
That they are superior for accidental gifts of nature and accidental biological coincidences.
I was born here, not there.
Because once you can get children to place their self-esteem on accidental and vanity-based characteristics, accidental characteristics, then they get a great deal of vanity and they get a false self that is firmly planted On accidental characteristics.
It's unstable, it's vain, it's accidental, and it's considered to be virtuous, right?
So once you get people to believe a false argument for morality, either way, either that they're good or that they're bad, based on accidental characteristics and not personal and earned virtue, then you destroy empathy.
You destroy sympathy. You can't have empathy for the less fortunate if you believe that you are better, somehow, for being more fortunate.
You simply can't.
It's totally impossible.
Because the moment that you have sympathy for the less fortunate, you realize that you have no virtue for being more fortunate, and that destroys your entire false self self-esteem.
Quote self-esteem. Right?
It punctures vanity.
To recognize how accidental most of our characteristics and circumstances are.
It doesn't mean you can't have self-esteem, but you've really got to earn it by being a good person.
And being a good person fundamentally means having sympathy for those who did not have your gifts.
Accidental gifts. I mean, it's true for me as well, right?
I mean, I happen to be a fairly good speaker and so on.
I didn't earn that. I mean, yeah, I've worked hard to sort of expand my knowledge and this and that, but so have lots of people.
And lots of people who are far smarter than me about libertarianism, they may not have this sort of gift of the gab thing, to whatever degree I have it.
But it certainly doesn't mean that I am somehow better.
Good heavens! I mean, that's just accidental gifts.
It's like saying, oh my god, I'm a bad person.
I'm a lesser person because I'm bald.
How ridiculous would that be?
I mean, although you do see quite a bit of that stuff floating around, insofar as people will say, to some degree or another, that they are better because they are...
Oh, I've got nice hair, and so on.
I'm so sorry. I'm looking for my parking card, so I'm not going to pretend to retain my concentration.
Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk some more this afternoon.
And thank you to those who've tossed some donations in my way.
I massively appreciate it, and I certainly look forward to more donations.
You can sign up either for one-time donations.
You don't need a PayPal account.
You can just put it on your credit card.
I'll pay all the transfer fees.
Or, sort of more beneficially, or most beneficially for me at least, you can sign up for monthly donations, which would be massively appreciated by me.
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