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Oct. 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:14
466 My Personal Journey to Freedom

Looking back over 25 years... (originally FDR464)

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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is ten past five.
This is actually take three, believe it or not.
The first one, the webcam just...
Decided to shut off, you know, for funsies.
And the second one Christina called.
Ooh, mental note. Edit at the beginning where Christina called.
And so now we're on take three.
Fortunately, traffic is moving like Fig Newton's through the lower intestine of a very old man.
And so we've had more than enough time to start and stop and restart all of these video casts.
So I hope you're doing well.
I'm going to chat.
I took some time at lunch today and I wrote a short article.
I've been asked to submit a sort of personal essay on the history of freedom for me, sort of my personal relationship to freedom and how I sort of moved through the freedom movement, so to speak.
And so I wrote that today, which gave me a little bit of chance to sort of sit and think about the longer term view of things.
And so I'm doing a podcast about an article.
I'm not short of topics. Why are you looking at me that way?
But before that, I don't know, I just want to just sort of personally, by the by, ask you a question that is just personal, got nothing to do with freedom or anything like that.
No, I'm not short of topics.
Why do you keep looking at me that way?
And the question is this.
Do you ever get slow motion sickness?
I know I do. I get this slow motion sickness all the time.
Let me go through a grindingly detailed examination of my last half hour, right?
So, obviously, it's rainy.
It's like an unpleasant inside of the ping pong ball, chilly kind of Toronto wet fall day.
And so I wanted to get on the road, right?
Because as soon as there's a little bit of mist or rain on the road, then, you know, bad things occur, so to speak.
So I wanted to get on the road, and I was trying to leave work because I got into work a little bit early this morning.
So I was trying to leave work, you know, so quarter to five, I'm ready to go, right?
And then the chief technical officer ambles into my office.
And ask me to explain a chart that I got from the consultants that I flew out to meet with on Friday in Boston, right?
So I'm going through the chart, and he's got lots of questions and so on, and that's fine.
It's like five or seven minutes or whatever.
And then anyway, so he's like, oh, but you've got to go.
So off I go, right?
And then I have to sort of pack up my computer, pack up.
I used this microphone for recording some stuff that I was doing today.
To pack that up, I had to bring the webcam down because I'd used it to record some intros to a PowerPoint in my office today.
Or I was going to, but unfortunately with the fluorescent lighting, I look like a highly freckled, shiny death skull head, so I decided against that.
All of the ambience of a drugstore slash porn set is what goes on in my office.
I'm going to try and get the fluorescent lights turned off and get myself some candles, incense, lava lamps, all the good stuff, bachelor day stuff.
So, anyway, so I pack all of that crap up, right, and then I go down to, I get to the elevator, I go down the elevator, and I'm, like, patting my pockets for my car keys.
Oh, I don't have my car keys.
Oh, what a shame.
And the reason is because, you know, with those who are getting the gripping visual of my 20-minute examination, I have a jacket.
It was jacket time, right? According to my wife, it's time to wear a jacket, so...
So I do. And so I get to the elevator, go down.
I don't have my jacket. That's where my keys are, right?
So I go back up. I carry my computer and, you know, the power cable for the computer, the microphone, the notebook itself, the...
The webcam, and so on, right?
So then I get into my car, and it's like, dum-de-dum, off we go.
Okay, so I've got to plug in the computer, make sure the power, make sure everything's seated, right?
So I don't sort of accidentally run out of power halfway through the videocast, which causes everything to be lost.
And then, you know, plug in the webcam, boot up, make sure the microphone is working, get all of that, check the focus, whereas now I'm paranoid about the focus after...
The old cataract videocasts that have gone on lately.
And so finally, sort of off I start going, chugging away.
That's what I mean by slow motion sickness.
You know, like, where everything just seems kind of slow and you're swimming against the corridor.
And it just feels like you're trying...
You have to have those dreams where you're trying to run underwater or something like that.
Or you're running in low gravity and you sort of have to run away.
But you bounce up and the predators...
Oh my God!
There's not a lot of things in life that get me a little testy.
But that seems to be one of them.
Slow motion sickness. Where it's just like, I just would like to get on the freaking road by 10 to 5.
It makes a big difference, right? As far as driving goes.
But no. I mean, I start packing up at 20 to 5, and I get on the road at 5 past 5, straight into the, you know, a full sprint into the Jell-O wall of slow-motion sickness.
So, it's something that...
And, of course, I feel, you know, I'm the Protestant work ethic, and so I feel sort of guilty.
I can't start getting ready to leave at 20 past 4, even though I came in early.
But that's sort of what it feels like, you know?
It's like... I just have to get out of the office and this occurs sometimes in the morning as well.
I have now taken to just leaving all this crap in my car overnight so that I don't have to sort of haul it all in and I just leave it out there and dammit if it freezes that's too bad but I'm just, because in the morning, I get the computer out and set it all up.
And it's not just that. For me, it's everything.
You know, socks, keys, pants, you name it.
So I just, you know, this is one thing that is the case.
And certainly because maybe this has something to do with being an intellectual idea fetishist, but...
I also can literally, my wife can say, could you go downstairs and grab me a cup of coffee?
I'll go downstairs. And I'm usually thinking about something that's not completely inconsequential.
And I go downstairs and I'm standing in front of the fridge.
I'm like, hey, I'm thirsty.
And I'll have a swig of milk or something like that.
And then I'll go back upstairs, you know, perfectly content with myself.
And Christina, bless her demonically beautiful little heart, is, you know, drink?
I'm like, oh, right.
And she's nice about it, which has not always been the case with me, but it's not because I don't care.
I just... I care about other things.
That's sort of my story, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to stick to it.
You see now, we're moving into the hyperspace of the private roads.
My cheeks should be flapping like an astronaut in a centrifuge.
No, I'm not running out of topics.
This is not filler because the traffic is slow.
Why do you keep looking at me like that?
Anyway, so I did this article today, A Personal Journey of Political Freedom or something like that.
And it sort of did give me a very big picture, kind of old man whittling on a porch view of the sort of life that I've led.
And for the past 24 years, I'm 40, I just turned 40 recently.
And the past 24 years, I guess I first started getting into philosophy when I was 16 or 17.
So the past 24 years.
It's sort of my journey, and I'm sort of reflecting on it.
This is sort of what I was asked to do for this submission to a book.
I don't know if it's going to make it or not.
It's pretty personal in a way, and controversial in a way.
But I really wanted to go over this sort of question in my own mind.
What's it all been about?
What's been going down for the past 24 years?
As I just say the word 24 years, I know for a fairly certain fact that I have a fairly substantial number of listeners who are younger than 24.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Oh, my heavens, you know?
It's certainly true, and it's a truism, and it's a cliche, but it's absolutely true that you never think you're going to get there, right?
I remember when I was, you know, 12 or 13 or 14 years old, sitting there thinking, you know, wow, Y2K, the year 2000, I'm going to be like 36 or 34.
I'm going to be 34. Wow, I guess born in 1966.
Yeah, that's right. So, and I remember thinking, 34, my God, what on earth will I be doing?
Like, I'm never going to be that old, 34.
You know, I had sort of vague ideas of wearing a suit and being married and, I don't know, having kids or whatever, right?
But you never think, right?
You never think. And, of course, the same thing is true now, right?
There's probably people listening to this who are 80 who are thinking, 40.
Whoa, I remember 40.
I'm purposefully not doing an old guy Simpson voice just because I don't want to be overly cliched.
Unlike the Valley Girl incident of this Sunday's podcast, which was entirely not cliched, of course.
Anyway, you never think that you're going to get there, but you do, right?
And this is an important thing to remember, right?
You never think that you're 40.
My God, I'm 40.
You talked to me when I was 20 about 40.
It'd be incomprehensible. But you get there, right?
And this is true, of course, about your deathbed, right?
Your dying day. Let's say, I hope I die at 90, 95, 300, depending on stem cell research.
Who knows? I may be podcasting as a brain in a tank in 120 years.
Who knows? Wouldn't that be beyond delicious?
But you never think you're going to get there, but of course you do.
I mean, you hope you do.
Aging may suck, but it sure is better than the alternative.
And in fact, aging doesn't suck at all.
Aging is wonderful. But it's just something, you know, like I know that I'm sitting here talking, I'm 40 years old, you know, like I'm sort of from the creaky side of the dinosaurs.
But you'll get here.
I desperately hope that you will get here.
And I hope that it will be an easier journey than what got me here.
So I know that I'm talking about the big picture view from the grand old age of 40, which these days isn't really that old.
But I just wanted to talk about it a little bit.
The big picture view, which isn't going to mean a huge amount to those who are younger, but listen on if you don't mind.
Just listen on because it's going to sit with you.
It's going to stick with you. Stuff that I heard that I was younger from people who were older that had some sort of self-knowledge or relevance to it.
You might forget about it for a year or two or three, but something's going to occur within your life that's going to help you to remember this sort of chat.
If you've got a little bit of wisdom between your ears, speaking it to younger people, there's a fair amount of eye-rolling and yeah, yeah, yeah, but it'll stick.
It'll stick with you. So what I kind of thought most fundamentally was about the circularity of the journey that I've been on since the age of 15 or 16 or whenever it was, mid-teens.
Let's just say 15. I don't have to keep repeating the same qualifiers.
Other qualifiers. You know, new qualifiers.
That's what we'll go for. It's an incredible kind of circularity.
There's a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that I'm going to...
He's the guy who wrote Murder in the Cathedral.
And I'm going to butcher it like I do with all my quotes because I just remember the gist and not the language.
But the lines go something like this.
There shall be no end to our...
Journeys. And the end of our journey, the end of all our journeys, shall be to return to the place that we started from and know it for the first time.
And that sort of line was rolling around in my head while I was working on this essay today, because there really has been a very strong sense of circularity for me.
So when I first started reading about philosophy, the usual suspects are Ayn Rand and Aristotle and Plato, and I started with Ayn Rand and read a lot of that and got into other things, economists and other kinds of philosophers.
And, you know, when I sort of read the proposition, taxation is theft, I remember being sort of a little bit surprised or like, yeah, I guess I could see that.
But it really wasn't very shocking, right?
It's not like when you're a kid and someone says to you, the world is round and the sun is bigger than the earth and the earth goes around the sun and the moon is much, much smaller than the sun and all that kind of stuff.
It does seem like, huh, that's kind of odd.
That's not exactly intuitive.
It's not exactly highly evident.
But it certainly is reasonable when you sort of sit down and think about it and so on.
And I sort of felt the same thing when some of the basic principles of libertarianism or freedom came along and I was thinking about the proposition such as Taxation is theft, government is violence, and so on, right? It's sort of like, huh, well, it's kind of startling.
I haven't really heard that before.
But, you know, when you sit down and think about it for, you know, a moment or five, it all sort of makes sense.
Well, yeah, that's sort of different.
They have the military, the cops, and no other, you know, certainly the Boy Scouts that I go to doesn't have that power, and neither does the school directly, and neither does...
My mom's business, and neither does the toy store.
So, yeah, even as I remember reading that as a very young man, it sort of made sense, right?
And then, of course, you get, at least for me, sort of swept up in the grandeur of the Howard Rocks and the John Galtz and so on, and you sort of want to live this life of shining integrity and this and that and the other.
And basically what happened was...
I think unconsciously I did, but consciously I didn't.
I just didn't know how far I had to go.
I just didn't know how far I had to go to be a moral human being.
I'm certainly getting thrilled about Atlas Shrugged, and I generally prefer the Fountainhead of all of her books.
To get thrilled about this sort of kind of integrity is one thing, right?
And to live in a sort of imaginary, artistic, platonic world where, you know, virtue triumphs and you're a slave to the goddess of philosophy is a very exciting kind of thing, but it doesn't really have anything to do with how you live your life.
It certainly didn't have anything to do with how I lived my life during this sort of phase of my life.
I mean, I hate to say it, but I can't really think of any other more accurate way to put it, where philosophy, for me, was a kind of pose.
It was kind of like a statue, like I wanted to be a statue.
The guy Hart, in my novel Almost, is very envious of a group of handsome rowers at his school, and he says of them, he said he wanted them to be a commercial that he could climb inside.
And... I think, you know, knowing that it's fake, but also wanting to get inside it, I was sort of trying to get it with that line, that he wanted these people to be a commercial that he could climb inside.
And that really was philosophy for me at the beginning.
I really was very excited by it, very thrilled by it, loved the intellectual stimulation.
I loved, I absolutely loved the feeling.
Of not being lost in space, right?
And when I sort of got into philosophy to begin with, I totally adored and ravished that feeling.
To take a slightly aggressive metaphor, I took that feeling that my mind could actually sort of...
My mind could connect with reality and thoughts that I had were relevant to reality that I was grounded, right?
I was grounded. It's like the difference between running in a zero gravity where you're sort of pumping your...
Your hands back and forth and nothing's really moving.
You're turning in slow circles.
That was what mental activity felt like before philosophy.
After philosophy, I felt that I had some gravity, some distance, some weight, some direction.
I like the shock of the gravity going up my mental muscles.
I was contacting something real.
Through thought, right?
That's what, you know, the true self wants to meet reality.
The true self is defined by reality.
And I was so enveloped and enmeshed in this sort of false self problems and sort of gassy fantasy, intellectual fantasies, that I just had no real substance, no real identity.
Which is why when I was doing the podcast on The Heart is an Organ of Fire, I could really understand where this art student lady was coming from.
Hey, that's no lady, that's a listener.
And... So I do totally understand and remember this complete feeling of emptiness and sort of transitory stimulation and vague panic that wasn't felt and so on.
Wanting to connect with people and with things but having no real methodology or way to connect with people or things.
I totally remember and understand that.
So I really grabbed onto, and I think in a very passionate kind of way, grabbed onto these ideas And I created for myself a secret world of truth and integrity and virtue.
And in this secret world, which had about as much reality as one of Ayn Rand's novels, in this secret world of truth and integrity and virtue and philosophy, I could retreat To this world, and I could sit and think, and my thoughts had tangible reality and value and logic most times, and substance and purpose, and I achieved, right?
I sort of built upon premise, upon premise, upon axiom, upon syllogism, and I could achieve.
Something that was not transitory, that was not just a sort of gassy, helium-filled platonic burp of the moment that was sucked away by the wind to vanish.
I could actually achieve something and build on it.
So that was a world that I retreated to, and I lived there in three sort of primary areas.
I lived there in art, I lived there in writing, and I lived there in debate.
So in art, I wrote novels about heroes, I read novels about heroes, and I lived in that Victor Hugo slash Stefan Molyneux slash Ayn Rand kind of world of virtue and struggle and triumph and so on.
And I also, in my own writing, I lived in that kind of world.
And then in my debates, I also brought that world to bear on conversations that I would have with people about the state, about the family.
Actually, it wasn't so much about the family back then, a little bit.
Actually, no, it wasn't, but not sort of united in the way that it is now.
But I would have that in debates, and I would have that in writing, and I would have that in art.
You know, there was just sort of one place that I didn't have it was kind of in my life, right?
And so in this secret world that I lived in, which was a world of thought and art and conversation, I pursued the definitions and the examinations of virtue.
And it was a very exciting and thrilling and wonderful journey, but not real.
In the way that I understand philosophy now, and I don't think, it certainly could be the case, that in 20 years I'll be doing another videocast, although by that time I'll probably be appearing in your holographic virtual reality data helmet.
But I don't think I'll be saying, and then when I was 40, I had these beliefs that still weren't true, because I really have, I'll sort of go on with this chat, tried to move philosophy into my life as I sort of try and encourage other people to do it,
and so on. So, this world that I lived in that was isolated and internal, this introspective world, And it's so funny when you think about it, of course, at least for me, because, you know, I was virulently anti-Platonic, anti-neuomenal realm, anti-Kantian, and so on.
And not just in the sort of good old, let's get the Ayn Rand Pogrom against Kant going, but I did a fair amount of research on Kant for my thesis, so I, you know, read a good deal of him in the original, which I don't think a lot of anti-Kantian Rand droids have so much got around to.
It's definitely worth doing.
He's a good writer and well worth reading.
But... It didn't have connection to my social world.
And when I talk about people who don't take ideas seriously doing a lot worse for the cause of philosophy than not having ideas at all, I speak for myself in the majority of my adult life.
That's what I was doing. I had friends.
What did I want when I was a young man?
Well, I wanted friends.
I wanted people to go to clubs with.
I wanted cool clothes.
I wanted to date pretty girls.
I wanted professional success.
I wanted to read great books.
I wanted to get a graduate degree.
And I wanted to be a writer.
And it turned out that I'm just a better typist than I am a writer in terms of getting cash, because I still write marketing, business plans, I do write computer code, and so on.
But those are the things that I wanted when I was young, and none of them have anything to do with ethics.
None of them have anything to do with philosophy.
And that was the outside or external world where I don't, and I couldn't honestly tell you the degree to which I had this split because I also had these values internally to myself.
Or because those were simply the values that were trumpeted as the virtuous things to believe in or to want.
Or not the virtuous things, but the good things to believe in.
The advertising from the general culture and certainly from my own family.
And I would say particularly for my mother and my brother who are very much into these kinds of shallow things like...
Do my cheeks look fatter today?
So... I wanted and pursued an inner life of depth and reason and philosophy and integrity and virtue and all these things.
And at the same time, I pursued this shallow...
Gap, Hugo Boss-based life of looking good and dancing well and being cool and being successful and so on.
And I had a terrible, sort of thinking about it in hindsight, I don't think this is a backward projection.
It could be. But there was, for me at least, a terrible kind of loneliness to that.
A terrible sadness to that.
I inherited friends from my teenage years and so on, particularly when I lived without parents.
I inherited friends who were mystics.
I inherited friends who were statists.
I didn't really inherit any religious friends.
Those didn't last. But irrational people and political people and lots of people in my life there Who didn't conform even in the basics with the values that I held dear.
My brother, of course, is complete opposite of me in his philosophy.
He's very intelligent, very creative, and excellent with language.
But, you know, frankly evil to the core when it comes to his philosophy.
He hasn't put the same kind of rigor into defining his philosophy as I have, but...
And of course, feel free to psychologize away on what that means, but I didn't...
I mean, just so you don't waste any time trying to figure out, ooh, Steph's a reaction to his brother's philosophy.
I would say that it probably is more true the other way, because I want to win.
No, because I didn't really talk about philosophy with my brother until I began to become a philosopher myself, and his philosophy then sort of arose as a reaction to the philosophy that I was developing, and I shouldn't say really developing, and his philosophy then sort of arose as a reaction to the And so I think that it's probably a lot more true to say.
and I think valid to say, that my brother's philosophy arose as a reaction to the philosophy that I was imbibing and then speaking about.
But anyway, that's probably a conversation for another time, if indeed it would be of any interest to anyone except me and maybe Christina.
But I don't know the degree to which the values, the sort of shallow external...
You know, date, make money, be cool, the values came in from the culture, or whether I had to split internally, I don't know.
It's hard for me to sort of unravel that.
But it certainly is the case that I did pursue all of those external values, right?
And I was around people or had people I founded a business with my brother, right?
We have the opposite philosophies in almost every fundamental.
And I founded a business with the guy and worked 24-7, traveled with him.
And yes, a lot of it was around problem solving when he's not that bad a problem solver in certain situations and so on.
We got another guy on board who was a CEO who was even more corrupt and was sort of the dark angel to my brother's tiny devils and caused them to swell two full bags of blood-soaked evil, in a sense.
Corruption is probably a better way to put it, although there's pretty strong fraudulent elements in that pair as well.
But this is who I was surrounded with.
I still went for lunch with my mom.
Every Sunday, when my dad and my half-sister came to visit, we dutifully took them.
We were taking the company, Whitewater Rafting, our company.
We dutifully took them along with us.
So, what did my philosophy mean?
Sort of the fundamental question that I never asked consciously.
And of course, if anyone had pointed it out, I would have been really surprised.
And I would have probably made up some Errant bullshit about I need to stick around with these people to pull them to safety.
I'd make up some sort of nonsense to avoid the discomfort of the astoundingly deep contradictions that I was living.
And I don't mean to laugh because it was really unpleasant when it all came to a head, but this was a ridiculous set of contradictions to be living, really.
And it really shouldn't have been that hard, in a sense, to figure out Though, of course, it always is.
But it shouldn't have been that hard to figure out what was really going on for me.
So there's no need to go.
Traffic's slow, but there's no need to make a long story longer.
Long story short, I stopped sleeping.
And I mentioned this before. When I was, oh gosh, how old?
Probably 33, 32, 33.
I just stopped sleeping. Couldn't sleep.
And there was a lot that had gone on around this, but basically the success of the company had drew a particular kind of slithery, evil capitalist class, and I use that in a very looser sense, the word capitalist, right?
But these people who basically were pump-and-dump stock merchants, they come in and pump up a stock, they sell it to a bunch of unwary investors, and then when the price has gone up, they sell it and make off and move on like jackals to the next feast and so on.
And so my virtue, and I think that there was virtue in the company, I think the software was very good, and I think that the culture was very good, and I certainly know that I was quite dedicated to the welfare and progress and salaries of my employees.
There was good in the company, but that good was pillaged by an errant, rampant, state-supported system, right?
This whole idea of IPOs and this whole idea of getting on the stock market and this whole idea of brokers and so on.
It's all heavily state-supported, as I've talked about in a very early podcast.
And these people were only drawn to pillaging this particular company because it was a good company.
It was a virtuous company. And, of course, I didn't feel all too good about these people.
And I went in and fought with them all the time and, you know, railed against things and wanted things to be better and made promises and then, you know, exacted promises from people and bullied them into keeping them.
I did all those things where you're sort of trying to manage things.
You know, it's like you're trying to wrestle a fog and think that you're winning.
It's like, sure you are. Sure you're not.
It's all in your mind. And I was still there creating value, right?
That's sort of the Hank Reardon problem, right?
I'm still there creating value, and that's sort of the fundamental issue which I can't basically escape.
And so it's all well and good for me to say, well, I disagreed with what was going on, and I wanted something different, or I wanted something better, and I was staying different.
But I was still creating and producing value in the form of leading the technical side of the software company as the chief technical officer.
So... It was all well and good for me to say I was fussing and fighting with this, that, or the other, but I was still creating value when I no longer had control of the company.
This was particularly after we'd sold it.
I was still creating value for people, and then people used that value to extract money from others.
Under false pretenses, I'm sure.
I have no idea what kind of perspectives they put out about the parent company, but...
I was still creating value for all these people, and definitely I got swallowed up.
And why? Well, partly because I cared about the company, sure.
It was the baby I'd created, co-created with others, and I'd spent seven years of my life, or six or seven years, working unbelievable hours to get it up and running and so on.
So yeah, I really cared about it.
I didn't want to let it go. But I was also greedy.
I also wanted to make money, right?
On paper, I was worth over a million bucks at one point.
So there was a lot of greed, right?
So I sort of found that the price, like what did my virtue mean after all of this?
Well, the only thing that I can say that it meant, which I'm eternally grateful for, is that the training that I had, sort of the rigorous training I'd put my conscience through, through a continual examination of philosophical and moral truths, that process had at least strengthened my conscience to the point where it could make me stop sleeping when things were getting morally quite compromised in my life, to put it in as gentle a way as possible.
So, I was able, though not willing, to change my course.
Again, to cut this branch of the long story short, I wasn't able to sleep.
I went into therapy.
I quit my seven-year relationship.
Within a year of therapy, I'd stopped seeing my Actually, within six or eight months of therapy, I'd stopped seeing my mother, broke with my mother, and then I broke with my brother, and then I broke with my father, and left that whole world.
I took a year and a half off, and I wrote and lived without that level of corruption in my life.
And that breathing room was enough to cause my soul to, you know, it was wounded and broken, but not dead, right?
So I had to repair it, and this was a lot of introspection, a lot of pretty rigorous analysis, and a lot of resisting the whole process.
I was genuinely baffled why I couldn't sleep.
Sunk into this pit of iniquity, both in a personal and professional and familial way.
Sunk deep into this pit of iniquity.
I could not imagine why I was not sleeping.
I could not imagine what was wrong.
My therapist wasn't a very strict moralist in this sense.
He wasn't able to help me that much.
But through affair, I kept unbelievably voluminous journals and dream journals.
There's a reason that I have some facility with dream analysis because that was a good chunk of what was going on for me in therapy.
And so now, I mean, again, this is real fast forward, but, you know, of course, out of that, I broke with almost all my friends.
Because, you know, there's a sort of point out in the article, there's a sort of fundamental principle at play here, right?
If somebody talks about taxation, they're talking about shooting people.
And you're one of those people, right?
As I've talked about, right?
I sort of worked this sort of stuff out before I started podcasting.
And so if you're going to have people in your life who want you dead, and you think that's okay, and you're willing to sort of, hey, okay, well, enough about having me shot.
Let's go for a beer. Let's go see that movie now.
If that's the status of your relationship to ideas, then, like for most of my life, totally missing the boat.
You have this split. There's two worlds.
There's two worlds.
The world of truth and the world of pragmatism.
The world of philosophy and the world of ambition.
The world of virtue and the world of approval.
The inner world and the outer world split.
For me, making that leap was a bit of an Evel Knievel stunt that really touched and go for a while there, for me at least.
So, I just wanted to sort of point out just how circular it is, right?
That 24 years ago, I'm like, yeah, this stuff is true.
And then, you know, 20 years later, I actually believe it.
I mean, that really is amazing when you think about it.
It took me 20 years to really take philosophy seriously.
It took 20 years for me to begin to take philosophy seriously.
And it's like, oh!
Oh, you mean you're supposed to live it?
You know, this is sort of...
Cosmically hilarious, and tragic to a degree, but mostly hilarious, that I work studying philosophy for like 20 years.
At which point I go, oh, you're supposed to actually put it into practice.
I claim to be a great surfer, right?
And I study the surf and I study the waves and I study the surfboard and I study the physics and I become a hydrologist or whatever the hell you would do to study that kind of stuff.
And I become a meteorologist to study the wind patterns and I, oh my god, am I a fantastic surfer, right?
And then at some point it's like, oh, I'm...
I'm what?
I'm supposed to...
What?
I'm supposed to get on a board?
And get on the water?
No! Come on!
I'm fine up here in the little ivory tower with my blueprints and my spreadsheets and my Google Maps.
I'm just fine.
I'm a great surfer.
I just don't actually want to do that thing where you get on a board and get on a wave.
That seems very strange to me.
That seems entirely unthinkable.
Who would imagine that that would be the case?
Oh, man.
It's too funny.
And, of course, I know that I'm sometimes hurting people a little bit aggressively here, and I guess I'd like to say that my heart's in the right place, and I do berate people from time to time, and I do laugh at people from time to time.
But I'm telling you, I am not laughing at anything that I didn't believe.
Before. And have not myself fallen prey to.
And I know that I don't say that enough, and I probably should, and I'm saying it now.
You can bookmark this part if you want, so that the next time you feel insulted, just recognize that I am laughing fundamentally at myself, at my own absolutely cataclysmic errors, my own mind-blowingly completely obvious Two plus two is what kind of errors that I made in the realm of philosophy?
And I don't even think in terms of forgiving myself for these things.
All right, it's time for me to spank myself.
But because you can't have knowledge before you have knowledge, right?
It's like asking a five-year-old, where's your pubic hair?
Or some more pleasant metaphor.
You can't have knowledge before you have knowledge.
But it is fundamentally hilarious.
And this is where I think I have some sympathy for statists.
It's fundamentally hilarious to me that a statist is going to have all this problem seeing something as obvious as the government is violent.
That you could spend 20 years talking with a statist and they're still going to have trouble seeing it.
While at the same time, it never crossed my mind that philosophy is something really to be lived.
I mean, even though I subscribed in a philosophy that says philosophy is something to be really lived.
Like if I was a Platonist or a theologian, then that would be sort of a little more comprehensible, that I would end up with this kind of nonsense ideas.
But this isn't the case at all.
I subscribe to an empirical, kind of in your face, to be lived, to be acted out, to be part of your life, to inform your decisions in the real world kind of philosophy.
And it never, ever occurred to me to actually act on it.
Just astounding. 20 years.
20 freaking years.
Never crossed my mind. Never imagined that I should do that.
The philosophy is like, act on it, act on it, act on it, act on it, it's real, it's real, it's real, every time you look at it, right?
It's for your life, it's not for the afterlife.
And yet, somehow, amazingly, for over two decades, never occurred to me.
Never Occurred to me.
Of course, there's lots more minor things like, you know, the fact that I was against violence, but it never occurred to me to be an anarchist until a couple of years ago.
Two years ago, really.
Just about two years ago.
22 years for that!
20 years to think that I should actually live this philosophy as if it meant something.
And then 22 years...
To resolve the contradictions inherent in an anti-violent, minarchist position.
So, I do have a little bit of patience for people who need to hear things over and over again.
There's a reason that I do 464 podcasts.
I think this is 464.
Because it's not because I think anybody's dumb.
I think you all are freaking brilliant.
And I'm honored to be sharing your brain.
And it's not because I think anyone...
It's because I think I'm not dumb.
And it took me forever to come up with these things.
For freaking ever!
That's why it's so good there was no podcasting around 20 years ago.
Or even 5. And so it's been an incredibly circular journey for me.
To have accepted these premises pretty much from the get-go, happily and relatively easily, having no idea of what a challenge and a struggle it was going to be to bring them to my life.
Having no idea, and perhaps it was good that I didn't, right?
But having no idea that if I really did begin to accept these ideas, How much was going to be lost?
And when I say lost, right, I don't mean I lost my friends and my family and my lovers.
What I mean is that I lost the illusion that they were any such things.
I lost the illusion that my friends were my friends.
And lane switch, hang on.
Because I'm all about the safety.
Here at Roven Freedomain Radio.
I lost the illusion that these people were my friends.
I lost the illusion that these people were my lovers, that my lovers were in love with me or I with them.
I lost the illusion of the virtue of family, though of course I didn't lose my family until a little bit later.
So it's been incredibly circular when I look at all of the beliefs that I accepted in my mid-teens 24, 25 years ago.
They're all still true.
They're all still true, with the exception of some minor aspects of statism.
So I thought the government should be funded voluntarily, but there should still be a government.
That was a pretty minor corner.
But I just sort of wanted to point that out.
It's been a really, really circular journey.
Of course I'm trying to speed it up for a lot of people through repetition, if not intelligence.
And I hope that it's helpful to you to have that perspective.
But I'm telling you, if you're going to go down the road of these ideas, and I strongly suggest that you do, you won't...
I and others have hacked the jungle up a little bit.
You won't be going through...
It won't be like going through Mordor.
We've hacked the jungle, or what is it, Mirkwood?
We've sort of hacked a path a little bit to make it a little easier.
And there are a couple of flares deep in the jungle to say, here's wherein lies civilization.
So it's not going to be quite as...
You won't get lost in the jungle for 24 years or 20 years like I did, but it is going to be still a challenge, and the way that I would suggest making that challenge as easy and as short as possible is just to take the idea seriously, to live like you mean it, to live like philosophy really means something.
As always, I thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your comments and your feedback.
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