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Oct. 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:23:26

471 Sunday Call In Show Oct 21 2006

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	Thank you so much everyone for joining 22nd of October 2006 for the Free Domain Radio Sunday Afternoon Chat Fest aka Slugfest aka Intellectual Mud Wrestling Challenge of all time.
	I'd like to return to a topic that we haven't talked about for a while, which is religion, because there has been a revival, a religious revival, I guess you could say, of a debate on the board, which is to do with people's perception of my hostility towards Christianity.
	Because there are so many podcasts now, I've given up trying to chastise people for not listening in sequence.
	Certainly Christina was the last person to be listening in sequence and she's given up.
	So I think if my wife can't listen in sequence, I really can't expect anyone else to.
	So this is a sort of refresher course with some additional data towards how it is that I approach religion from a philosophical standpoint and also from a sort of practical standpoint.
	The general issue that seems to confuse people, and I'm sure that the fault is mine, seems to confuse people is that, and we'll just talk about Christianity, though what I'll say is equally applicable to the other majors and almost all of the minors of religion, of religious beliefs.
	I talk about the fact that religion is violent in its imagery, in its moral commandments, in its ideas, in its storytelling, in its approach.
	And so when I say that religion is violent, and that's one of the reasons why I oppose it, I do get a fair number of emails and responses to that statement that religion is violent.
	And what people say, and I can certainly understand why they would say this, what they say is, my aunt, the lovely blue rinse lady who lives down the block who bakes a pie every week for her neighbor's children, goes to church every Sunday, and she is certainly not a violent woman, and therefore your premise that religion is violent is incorrect.
	So I was given a long lecture on the boards this week by a fine gentleman who has said, When I say that religion is offensive to non-religious people because Christianity calls for the murder of non-believers in various parts of both the Old and the New Testament, so you can't do that wood-splitting, Old Testament equals bad, New Testament equals good thing.
	Atheists, for want of a better phrase, do find Christianity offensive because it calls for our murder, right?
	I mean, our death. I mean, there's no...
	I'm not making up any words here.
	I'm not trying to paint anything with a dramatic brush, as I'm sometimes accused of.
	It is simply that you just look at the text, right?
	And so, because religion is violent in its language, and unfortunately for most of human history in its practice, People get a little bit confused when I talk about the violence that's inherent within religion and they believe that it is a counter example to say that they know a very nice religious person who is not trying to kill me, right? So somebody asked me at great length today, do I currently have Christian bullets whizzing by my head?
	Are Christians gathering on the front door?
	Yard of my house with torches and brands and are they going to crucify me and so on and because that isn't the case then it's not violent, right?
	So this is considered to be that I'm looking merely at the words and not at the behavior of the people and that's an interesting I generally though, from a philosophical standpoint, I'm more into prevention than cure.
	That would seem to me a good, you know, when it comes to sort of using the medical analogy, philosophers as a whole are more, I think, better suited in the role of nutritionists rather than surgeons, right? A philosopher is somebody who is going to say, eat well and exercise and you won't get sick.
	A philosopher isn't that much use when you do get sort of spiritually sick, so to speak, or when a culture gets spiritually sick.
	So what I do is I look at the language that is inherent within religion.
	And so we'll just spend a few minutes looking at some of the theory and practice of Christianity, sort of stuff within the Bible.
	And then we'll have a look at a little bit of the statistics of that practice, sort of throughout history.
	This is partly to do with stuff when I was after I left high school I worked as a gold panner many many years ago I guess now I worked as a gold panner for about a year and a half I had a copy of the Bible and I read it so I don't know how many Christians have read the Bible end to end but it seems to me that when you join a group that has let's just say a checkered history at best it's probably worth having a look at the fine print and the stories as a whole and not just relying on sentimental Sunday school stories but actually look at the text So we'll just go through a couple of these.
	I'm not going to go through too many of them because they're kind of freaky, but let's just go through a couple of these.
	So we'll talk about the theory, we'll talk about the practice, then I'll open the board for comments.
	So here is some commandments that come out of the Christian Bible.
	And a lot of these are Old Testament, of course, so they would apply to the other two, Judaism and Islam as well, the Muslim religion.
	You must kill those who worship another god.
	That's from Exodus.
	Kill any friends or family that worship a god that is different from your own.
	Our good old friend, Deuteronomy.
	Kill all the inhabitants of any city where you find people that worship differently than you.
	Kill everyone who has religious views that are different than your own.
	Kill anyone who refuses to listen to a priest.
	Kill any false prophets.
	Any city that doesn't receive the followers of Jesus will be destroyed in a manner even more savage than that of Sodom and Gomorrah.
	Jude reminds us that God destroys those Who don't believe in him, right?
	So there's lots of kill the unbeliever stuff.
	Of course, we as people who have grown up in a sort of inherited Christian culture really look across the pond or across the cultural chasm to the Muslim world and find it absolutely horrifying and we really don't see it as clearly in our own sort of religion.
	That's pretty natural. Christians should not practice free inquiry nor socialize with non-Christians.
	Don't associate with non-Christians.
	Don't receive them into your house or even exchange greeting with them.
	That's John, New Testament.
	Shun those who disagree with your religious views.
	Paul, knowing that their faith would crumble if subjected to free and critical inquiry, tells his followers to avoid philosophy.
	And actually, if that was the only commandment that religious people would just avoid me, I would probably feel a little bit more friendly.
	Judge other religions for not following Christ.
	Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ is a liar and an antichrist.
	Christians are of God.
	Everyone else is wicked. The non-Christian is a deceiver and an antichrist.
	Anyone who doesn't share Paul's beliefs has a, quote, an evil heart.
	False Jews are members of the synagogue of Satan.
	That's from Revelations.
	This is from Zechariah.
	And I don't think that means the doorway to Chuck E. Cheese.
	I think that means with a sword somewhere down in his innards.
	For truly, I say to you, this is from Matthew...
	Because people say, well, the Old Testament is, you know, kind of cruel, and the New Testament is the new covenant, and Christ came down to say the Old Testament was a bit of a mistake, and there was a bit of revision going on, but this is Matthew saying, For truly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass the law until all is accomplished.
	Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.
	But he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
	So the Bible is true all the way through.
	All of the Old Testament laws are binding forever.
	This is from Luke, New Testament again.
	It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for the smallest part of the letter of the law to become invalid.
	Jesus approves of the law of prophets.
	He has the slightest objections to the cruelties of the Old Testament, which include Selling your daughters into sexual slavery, slavery itself, murder, rape, pedophilia, and so on.
	He says, do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
	I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
	Amen, I say to you until heaven and earth pass away.
	Not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter shall pass from the law until all things have taken place.
	All scripture is inspired by God.
	There is no prophecy of scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation.
	That is from Peter.
	Know this first of all, that there is no prophecy of the scripture that is a matter of personal interpretation.
	For no prophecy ever came through human will, but rather human beings moved by the Holy Spirit spoke under the influence of God.
	Oh, is it peaking too much? I'm so sorry.
	Sometimes when the voice of the Lord moves through me, it's a little more than mere electronics can handle.
	So thanks, I will turn it down.
	I apologize for that. Let's see.
	Jesus says that looking at lust, of course, is the same thing as acting on lust.
	You should gouge your eye out, all of that kind of stuff.
	The punishment under Jesus for transgression of any Christian law is eternity in hell.
	Obviously, that's fairly psychotic.
	Slavery commands. Paul says that all slaves should be subject to their masters with all fear, to the bad and cruel, as well as the good and gentle.
	So you always have to subject yourself to secular authority.
	This is a very common thread throughout almost all religions that rise to political prominence.
	They do so by supporting the predations of the rulers.
	The scripture cannot be broken, says Jesus Christ.
	All this kind of stuff. I just need to go on and on, but I think you sort of get the idea that...
	I just sort of wanted to point out that, you know, this stuff's all in the Bible.
	This is all in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
	This is not something which is...
	I didn't write this.
	I mean, people get mad at me like I wrote this when they're the ones who follow these sociopathic and psychotic beliefs about murdering everyone who disagrees with you.
	And this is why I find it funny when people feel that I offend Christians, right?
	I mean, or that I offend religious people.
	They subscribe to a belief system whether they know it or not.
	They're still responsible. They subscribe to a belief system that demands that myself and my wife and most of my, actually all of my friends, would be murdered and they find that I am the one who is offending Christians.
	I just think that's quite funny.
	So that's sort of the theory in a nutshell, although there's of course a lot more than that in the theory.
	So let's have a look at it a little bit in practice, right?
	So the people who say that Christianity is anti-war and so on And that religion, organized religion, is sort of anti-war.
	That's the theory, it's going to murder everyone.
	Who doesn't agree with you?
	And of course, because the Bible is an irrational collection of fairy tales, there's simply no possible way...
	That you can not kill anyone you want, right?
	Because it's all subject to interpretation.
	Now, there is a lot of controversy about the statistics that I'm going to tell you about now, so I'm certainly not going to pretend that this is the final answer.
	Because, of course, what you hear when you talk about the wars of religion throughout history is you hear, well, what about the atheist communists, right?
	I think that's a false dichotomy to say that those who worship the state in the communist model are somehow the opposite of those who worship the state and secular power usually in the religious model.
	So I don't really see that killing people over doctrinal interpretation of the Gospel of Marx and Lenin is somehow different from killing people over the doctrines of religious texts.
	So these are sort of two sides of the same coin.
	It's just two ways of holding power over other human beings is the state and organized religion.
	And, of course, I know many, I guess when I was in school, I knew socialists and communists who weren't trying to kill me, who weren't setting up gulags, but that doesn't mean that the philosophy doesn't have a horrible effect when practiced.
	Consistently in the world, especially when it unites with the awesome and horrible power of the state.
	So even though I knew some Marxists and Leninists who weren't trying to kill me, it doesn't mean that communism is not an evil thing which killed 190 million people in the 20th century, right?
	So the individual practitioner of a belief is no judge of the belief itself.
	The way you judge a belief is not by saying, well, I know a nice guy who holds this belief, right?
	Because then all you have to do is find one relatively decent Nazi and, you know, suddenly Hitler is reformed as a saint.
	And I don't think many of us would feel that that would be a proper way to go.
	So the way that you judge a belief is sort of twofold, right?
	You judge it according to its own internal logic and its relationship to reality and practice in history.
	So the statistic, which I've sort of dug up and I'll provide a reference for this on the board, is that pretty much throughout history that's recorded history and this is not even counting the lack of progress that is generally the case in religious societies or societies where there's no separation of church and state which is an achievement not of religion but of philosophy throughout history we've had close to a billion people murdered Through religious conflicts.
	For a democide, we can get to about 260 million people.
	That's governments killing people in non-war situations.
	War, of course, adds a lot more to it.
	But religious wars throughout history, the ones that are recorded, and of course the numbers are highly subjective, so they could be way off.
	But even if you say that they're twice as high as they should be, you're quibbling over whether it's a billion people Or half a billion people.
	I don't really think, you know, if you look at the moral horror of the Holocaust with six million people, I think that you would say that a hundred times that throughout history as a sort of bare minimum would be something that would be subject to some scrutiny or some reservation or some concern for moralists who are actually interested in preserving and enhancing human life rather than people who are interested in defending their own religious beliefs.
	So very sort of briefly, we've got the Albigensian Crusades in the 13th century, Algeria in 1992 and forwards.
	The Aztecs, the Baha'is, the Bosnians, the Boxer Rebellion at the late 19th, early 20th century.
	The Christian Romans, Croatia, early Christian doctrinal disputes, the English Civil War, the Holocaust, the Huguenot Wars, India, 1992 to 2002, India, Suttis and Thugs, India, Indo-Pakistani partition, 1947, a couple hundred thousand people died there.
	Iran-Iraq War, the Jewish Holocaust against others in the 14th century, Jonestown, a more local American version, Korea in the 18th century, Lebanon in the 19th and 20th centuries, martyrs in general, Mongolia, Moloca, Northern Ireland, Russian pogroms of the early 20th century, St.
	Bartholomew Massacre, Shang-China in the BCE, I don't even know what that is, a long time ago.
	Shimabara Revolt in the 17th century in Japan, Sikh Uprising in India in the late 20th century, Spanish Inquisition, Taipan Rebellion, Thirty Years' War, Tudor England, Vietnam, Witch Hunts, Zosa, and this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as violence has been perpetrated in the name Of God, of Allah, of a wide variety of other deities.
	And this is not even to talk about, which I won't get into.
	I had sort of grabbed the reference here, but I won't go into all the stuff to do with Islam.
	I'm sure that people are fairly aware of the sort of bloodthirsty and murderous nature of the Islamic texts.
	So I just sort of wanted to point this out that as a non-believer in these sorts of fairy tales, that when people sort of say that I am somehow offensive to Christians, I would just sort of like them to invite themselves, if they so wanted, to just try on the following thought experiment so that they could get a sense of how it is that I view this kind of stuff.
	And it doesn't mean that I'm going to change your mind.
	But it may be worth just trying this on as a thought experiment.
	So if I did a podcast, and not just a podcast, but a whole series of podcasts, where I sort of ranted and screamed about the need to resurrect slavery, about the fertility of tween women, and how raping them and selling them into slavery was a great thing to do, about how you should beat your children if they disagree with you, Spare the rod, spoil the child.
	And if I also said that anybody who disagreed with my particular philosophical fairy tale should be put to death, should have their eyes gouged out, should be burnt at the stake, should be crucified, should be drowned in water.
	And if I talked about the, you know, that if people didn't start agreeing with me that I was going to start a program to wipe out the entire world, of course, except for A couple of people I chose and some animals I'd put on a boat.
	I think, you know, like, if you didn't put that in any kind of context, if you just look at the ideas themselves that I would be putting forward, I don't think that you would say, like, if I had a huge lengthy podcast on why exactly Jews should be killed,
	you know, in masses for being unbelievers in my particular position, I don't think that if a Jew got offended by my outspoken desire to see himself and his wife and his family and his entire tribe killed or converted, if a Jew got offended at that, I would be very surprised if you would write a letter to that Jew saying, gee, you know, it's pretty offensive that you're offended by this, you know?
	It's really bad that you are offended by somebody who's spewing a fair amount of bile into the intellectual atmosphere, demanding that you get killed.
	You need to be more tolerant.
	I know one guy who listens to this podcast.
	There are a couple of guys who listen to this podcast who isn't actually trying to kill you.
	So really, it's totally offensive that you would think that this guy has a bad bone in his body.
	And I would be absolutely astounded if you would do that.
	If I was sort of spewing out death to Jews and a Jewish person got offended, whether you would write to that person and say, I'm now offended that you're offended.
	You know, this guy's podcast is the most beautiful, sublime and spiritual thing in the world.
	I think that that would be rather a startling thing to do.
	So just so you get a view, and I know I'm not speaking to a whole lot of religious people here, but just so you get a view of what it's like from the other side, that's sort of where I'm coming from when it comes to religion.
	So yes, I'm perfectly aware that there are not religious people who are currently trying to kill me.
	With the possible exception of some people who've made threats against Canada from a terrorist standpoint who will remain unnamed because I can't pronounce their names.
	But with that sort of exception, I would say that yes, there's not a whole lot of people who get up every morning chanting death to free domain radio and down with the big chatty forehead.
	But that's only because people have spent a huge amount of time, effort and unfortunately blood in opposing religion as a universal absolute phenomenon, especially it's being united with the state.
	So religion doesn't get off the hook, right?
	A tiger doesn't become kind because you take its teeth out, right?
	Especially when it's doing all it can to grow them back.
	So I just sort of wanted to point that out.
	I know it's been a while since we've talked about religion, but I just wanted to talk about that so that you could get a sense of, you know, if you are religion, that...
	Oh, and the last...
	Okay, one last thing.
	It came to me in a vision. I have to follow it.
	The one last thing I'll say is that We're just looking at the direct, you know, godicides or however you want to call them, the religious slaughters, the genocidal murders of enormous groups of people throughout history for religious principles.
	We're just kind of looking at that.
	The one other thing I think that's quite true is that religion was very opposed to the foundation of sort of modern capitalism, the separation of church and state, and very much opposed to science.
	So all of the benefits that we have in the world today, in the absence of religion, could have been around thousands of years ago, thus eliminating thousands of years of hundreds of millions of people living miserable, short, nasty, despotic, brutish, bloody, hideous lives.
	So we're just looking at the...
	We're not looking at the opportunity cost of there being religion in the world.
	We're simply looking at the direct sort of graves which reach almost to the sky.
	But we're not looking at the opportunity cost of what did it cost, you know, the world to have countless scientists burned and killed for challenging religious doctrine.
	So from that standpoint, there's, you know, I mean, there's a whole world of crimes that we can only really imagine, or a whole world of what could have been in the absence of this kind of murderous unity of church and state.
	So I just sort of wanted to point that out so that people understand where I'm coming from as far as all of this sort of stuff goes.
	So if you have, let me just, we've had a gentleman who's posted, who has posted something bright, surprisingly, no, it's published something bright.
	So, Mr.
	Gigamouthy, let me just unmute you if you wanted to add something else to that.
	Oh, Skype, you can do it.
	Unmute, unmute, unmute.
	Skype's just shocked that I've finished my intro this quickly.
	Greg, do you have a mic?
	Hello, hello.
	Do you have a mic?
	You can't hear.
	All right. Can you try now?
	I'm sorry. You know, one day I'll get this right.
	Yes, I've got you. Go ahead. Okay.
	And my first name's fine, but Skype ID is just for utility's sake, but...
	Oh, so we can go with St. Greg?
	Hey, whatever floats your boat.
	Right, St.
	Greg the Spikey, that's what we're calling him these days.
	Sorry, inside Jim, go ahead. Captain Porcupine, I guess.
	That's right. No, I was just going to say that, you know...
	Reaching back into history for all these examples of violence to me seems like you're sort of seeding the argument to the religious in the here and now that,
	well, it's not violent anymore, but I think there's plenty of examples you can find in modern day history And in even the current news that demonstrate clearly that religion as an irrational mode of thought, as an irrational mode of understanding reality, is equally as violent now as it was then.
	I'm sorry, I hate to interrupt you, but I just want to clarify one point.
	Are you disagreeing with me?
	Because I don't want to have to put out this fatwa.
	I really don't. I just...
	What was the last name again? Gee.
	Okay, go ahead. Right, right.
	No, not so much disagreement, but just sort of clarification, I guess.
	No, please go ahead. I certainly could add something to that, but you should definitely take it for a spin.
	Right, but... So, like, I mean, you just go out and do a Google search and you can find all kinds of examples of priests who've killed people and people who've killed other people in the name of religion and even basing it on specific passages they've found in their holy books.
	I mean, it's not just Muslims that do this.
	It's Christians and Jews and I mean, there's all sorts of examples.
	I mean, everything from is, well, I guess I can't really say innocuous, but as It's a spectrum from the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, who won't...
	Is it that religion?
	It's the transfusion thing, right?
	Yeah, that's the Jehovah's Witnesses.
	The ones that won't take their kids to the doctor because God told them not to.
	All the way to the Jim Jones of the world who convinced their followers to kill themselves...
	All the way on up to the George Bushes of the world who launched massive wars in the name of defending freedom lovers from the religious zealots over the Atlantic.
	No, that's quite right. The gentleman who posted this sort of question about this on the board, he said, you know, how many Christians want to come and bomb your town at a submission because you disagree with them?
	And, you know, my sort of response was that...
	Well, there's, you know, a couple of hundred thousand dead Iraqis who might question the veracity of that statement, right?
	I mean, as I said, you know, George Bush said that he prayed to God about whether to go to war, and God told him to go to war.
	And, you know, then he, of course, said, well, we don't know that that's true.
	That's just what he said. You know, this willing way of evidence is very common in the religious mindset.
	You know, it's like, Christians don't kill people.
	Okay, well, what about this religious war that's going on in Iraq?
	I also pointed out Though it's, I think, a little bit less empirically supportable, but it's something that kind of feels true, which I know is not the best criteria, but I'll sort of throw it out there anyway, A lot of the sort of socially engineered kind of laws in the world, particularly the anti-drug laws, are simply just extensions of the anti-pleasure, anti-sensual pleasure aspect of Christianity, right?
	So when pleasure is not associated with serving the church or procreating more Christians, you know, like homosexuality and drug use and gambling and so on, most of this stuff comes from Christians, right?
	So lots of people, millions of people in jail around the world, For, you know, having a bag of vegetation in their car, simply because this stuff is heavily influenced by Christians, so I just...
	I've never taken any drugs, but if I did, my relationship to Christianity would probably be even more harsh, I guess.
	Right, and in a sense, they're kind of using the state to sort of whitewash the fact that it's really religious sensibility that's...
	Demanding all of this.
	I mean, the blue laws in the United States are infamous.
	What? I live... Blue laws?
	Don't be sad. What's that?
	No, you know, bars can't be open on Sunday, and you can't, you know...
	There's a town that I live about 20 miles from, 15, 20 miles from here, that you can't...
	You cannot sell alcohol at all any day of the week.
	And the folks who live in that town, they just go out of town, buy all their liquor and bring it in, right?
	Now, sorry, can I just interrupt you for one more sec?
	Did they actually have that law before you moved there?
	Or was it the fact that you were ordering your moonshine by the trough?
	Did that sort of change things? Well, I mean, rather predictably, the name of the town is Zion.
	That's good. But, I mean, they've got laws on the books in a lot of little towns like this where you can't dress certain ways on certain days, and they're all passed off as secular legislation, right? But at their core, they're essentially religious edicts.
	Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you look at, and this is true of, I certainly know this is true of Jewish culture, but it's certainly to some degree true of Christian culture.
	If you look at a lot of stuff that's going on, the welfare state as well, is a lot to do with the sort of Christian notions of charity and taking care of people, which, you know, is really just all about sort of resource reallocation, right?
	The church wants you to give charity to the church so we can distribute it as it see fit.
	Perhaps it's bait for altar boys that we don't know.
	But there's a lot of that sort of stuff that goes on in legislation that has nothing to do with...
	And it also doesn't have to do with the overtly religious aspect that was in the country, right?
	So we have lots of listeners from Europe who are completely bewildered by the focus that we have sometimes.
	In this show on religion, because they're like, you know, here nobody believes in God.
	But if you look at the transposed socialism that arose in Europe after the fall of religion, which Nietzsche correctly and accurately identified as early as in the mid-19th century, That the fall of God, the ethics don't die when God dies, right?
	All that happens is they get transposed to the state, as you can see with the Christian communist transitions.
	So I think that for people to think that you've somehow evaded Christianity by becoming secular, the sort of altruistic, collectivist, hierarchical, hegemonic, top-down income transfer to people who know how to spend your time, money, life, and energy better than you And this is not even to mention the,
	by now, fairly tired but horrible story of, what is it, up to 5,000 priests now being investigated for pedophilia in the United States alone who were constantly shifted from parish to parish.
	In other words, the Catholic Church, although it's other churches, but I think it was a bit more true in the Catholic Church because if you're going to not get married, if you're going to have a priesthood that can't get married, It's going to attract more gay people not because there's any particular relationship between Homosexuality and pedophilia, but if you've got those two cooking, a church life is a pretty good life for you.
	Access to children and nobody's going to question why you aren't married and like to wear a smock.
	So that whole aspect of choosing the small amount of revenue and to retain the investment in the priests that the Catholic Church had entered into, choosing to keep that small investment safe rather than protect You know, the sanctity of children's bodies.
	Absolutely heinous. I mean, if you could imagine a massive pedophile ring being run out of a corporation, imagine what would happen to that corporation.
	I mean, it would be just astounding.
	but of course the church operates on a different moral plane and I'm not sure exactly why but it just does yeah I had a completely Missed the whole pedophilia angle, but there's that too.
	But the state, really, that is sort of...
	I kind of like how Rand puts it, replacing the ethics of the mystical sky god with the ethics of the tribe, right?
	Yeah, that's the...
	What did she call it?
	The witch doctor and the...
	Was it Genghis Khan or something like that?
	The witch doctor? It'll come back to me.
	But... Yeah, it is quite an astounding thing, and it's something that, you know, I don't mean to sort of pump this book, although the first half is quite good, this idea that...
	We just can't talk about religion as a non-deific ethical system.
	It's simply not allowed, right?
	You simply can't talk about religion.
	You can even talk about communism as an ethical system.
	You can talk about capitalism, socialism, republican, democrat, liberal, whatever, left, right?
	You can talk about all of these things as Non-cultural, political or ideological philosophies, but you simply cannot look at and talk about religion in this context.
	It's something that is still a great taboo.
	And that, to me, is exactly why it needs to be talked about with some degree of energy and emphasis.
	Because it is a taboo, it's exactly where we need to go, those of us who are interested in sort of speaking the truth and doing our part to heal the world.
	Any competent psychologist will tell you this as well, that whatever it is that you feel is the most taboo is probably the first thing that you need to explore, because they kind of get their voyeuristic kicks that way.
	Isn't that right, Steve? I think that goes hand-in-hand with the state, too.
	I think in this country, at least, criticism of the government is sort of taboo now.
	Which is kind of ironic, given the First Amendment and all of the reverence around freedom of speech and whatnot.
	There's this sense that you can't criticize the fundamentals of this government.
	We've sort of enshrined the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Founding Fathers into a kind of religion of its own.
	The Constitution is kind of like our Bible here, and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or at least the mythical depictions of those characters are kind of like, you know, they've reached demigod status is what they've done with them.
	And to pick them apart or to criticize them in any way is akin to...
	Shaking your fist at God.
	You know, hating freedom, hating virtue, hating all that is great and noble and pure in society, and being a sort of subhuman evil troll aimed at, you know, blah blah blah, that kind of stuff.
	Right, just like how, you know, criticizing the idea of God is equated with hating morality.
	Right, right. Like, I mean, if you are This is a dichotomy that, of course, about 30 or 35 seconds of not even that intense philosophical thought can ditch pretty quickly to say that if I am against the war in drugs, I must be for supplying free drugs to school children.
	I mean, this kind of dichotomy.
	This is what happens when a culture loses its rationality, is it swings between these extremes of hyper-aggression and hyper-compliance.
	The hyper-compliance usually directed inwards towards the society that's close at hand, and the hyper-violence or hyper-aggression being extended towards societies overseas.
	But yeah, when you lose your...
	The reason, as a society, you just start swinging between these wild poles, and this is sort of how totalitarianism works its way in, because people get sick and tired of the seesaw and just say, damn it, we just need someone to clamp down.
	And Churchill said about the Germans, and I don't know how true it is now, though I was raised by a German woman, I could probably talk quite at length about it, but he said about the Germans, he said, you know, it's a culture, it's like they're either at your feet or they're at your throat.
	There's nothing in between and that certainly is an increasing polarization that's occurring in the West and it is something that you either have to learn to mediate as a thinker, sort of put stuff out there that's going to mediate this stuff or you're going to end up with some sort of totalitarianism for sure.
	Right, you lose your reason and you're left with only one method for negotiation and that is violence.
	Right? Yeah, for sure.
	Absolutely. Human beings always need to make decisions about resource allocation and who gets what and who does what.
	And in the absence of reason, when you lose reason, you lose the appeal to self-interest.
	And when you lose reason, you lose the appeal to self-interest.
	It becomes hierarchical, which always results in compulsion.
	So would you consider then someone like Sam Harris a mediator?
	No. No, sadly, unfortunately not.
	He falls into the classic trap of Western intellectuals, which is, and this is not just Western intellectuals, but they show it more than other cultures who are more monomaniacal about the hierarchies they worship.
	But yeah, he is skeptical in the true socialist or communist sense.
	I don't think he's a communist, but he certainly is a world government kind of guy.
	But no, he says, well, religion is really bad, and what we need is a socialist-style world government to mediate the issues that are occurring between religions, right?
	So... So he's like, you know, he's like that irritable mom or dad who comes in and sees two kids fighting and says, I don't care, just both go to your rooms, right?
	He's that kind of guy, right?
	So he doesn't sort of care to really think things through as far as solutions go.
	And this is not rocket science.
	I mean, religion has been tamed, right?
	Religion was on its way out in the 19th century.
	It's just that when its good buddy the state grew back in the mid-19th century, and especially and particularly in the realm of public schools.
	I mean public schools in America for sure were entirely completely and totally set up in order to rescue religious institutions from a falling away of the flock and also to indoctrinate children from other cultures who were coming in who were getting to be more and more part of the cultural mosaic.
	Public schools absolutely nothing to do with wanting to educate children.
	Children were getting very well educated by the private sector beforehand and much more efficiently so.
	But public schools were what saved religion from, you know, its exit.
	And in a sense, I mean, although not everyone who comes out of public school is religious, they all worship a sort of secular, sorry, they all worship a kind of secular authority, and the church is a secular authority like the state, right?
	I mean, whatever trappings it uses, it's still a secular in this world kind of authority, and you don't even need to look at the Vatican's $30 billion bank account to figure that out.
	Yeah, I mean, once religion came back through the apparatus of state schooling, yeah, absolutely.
	The whole mess of the 20th century was sort of brought into being through that particular process.
	And Sam Harris is very much like that.
	He talks very critically about the irrationality of faith and then says that we need to subject ourselves to the irrationality of politicians in order to free ourselves from the irrationality of priests.
	So it's like, you know, is there ever a door number three that you people can talk about?
	Like, ever. It's like, well, we don't want door number one because that's God.
	So we'll take door number two because that's the state.
	It's like, my God, you people are well-paid and highly intelligent.
	They're verbally skilled.
	You have access to great books.
	Is it really that hard to try and figure out some society where there aren't guns pointing at everyone telling them what to do?
	Is it really that hard to think of?
	And apparently it is.
	Or if you do think of it, you don't get book deals the way he does.
	And that's one of the reasons why I've I've started to come to the opinion that, I mean, you really can't consider the one without considering the other.
	When you're talking about religion, you're really talking about the state.
	When you're talking about the state, you're really talking about religion as well.
	Right, and when you put the two together...
	Sorry, go ahead. I mean, they're more than just synonymous.
	They're two sides of the same exact coin.
	That's true. And they're both, as I've sort of mentioned before, the reflection sort of the fundamental sort of family experience.
	So, yeah, no, you can't.
	I mean, as I've mentioned before, what you need to do if you want to hold power over the human beings is you need to invent a fictitious hyper-moral entity that can't speak for itself because it doesn't actually exist.
	And then you need to claim that it only speaks to you, and only you can interpret its will, and everyone has to obey, not you, but this fictitious invisible giant friend that you have that tells you everything to do that's right.
	And that bypasses people's resentment of being, you know, if George Bush came to your house and said, you know, I'd like you to do X, right?
	You'd be like, hey, I'll put that on my list, you freak.
	I mean, you wouldn't really take him very seriously, right?
	But... What they need to do is say, you know, your country needs you to do X, and suddenly it's like, oh, okay, well, I'm not submitting to George Bush then, I'm submitting to this ideal big buddy friend God thing they call the country, right?
	So if you can invent something, get people to believe this hyper-moral, abstract, non-existent entity, and then say, well, only I speak for it.
	Because, you know, the old thing is like, your country wants you to do X. It's like, oh really?
	Can I get that number?
	Because I'd like to talk to my country.
	I'm not sure I've got this clear.
	And of course there's no number that you can call.
	The same way when the priest says, your God wants you to do X, it'd be like, no, it's okay, I'm going to pray and see what I get, right?
	There generally has to be this thing that you have to surrender your willpower to somebody else who claims to speak for some giant moral entity that has no voice.
	Right, and some people you have to work a little harder to...
	To confuse.
	And so you assemble a panel of 12 men in black robes and they start preaching to you about things like original intent.
	Huh? What's that?
	The Supreme Court and the various interpretations of the Constitution.
	Some people aren't satisfied with, well, your country tells you you have to do this.
	So then you make it look more officious, right?
	And you release all these proclamations about the original intent of the founders and the proper interpretation of the Constitution, kind of the scholasticism of the state, right? Right, right, and of course I can't wait for them to have a seance trying to call up the spirit of Jefferson and Washington.
	What did you guys actually mean?
	And what they would do is they'd come along and they'd say, the state takes how much of your income?
	Are you people insane?
	We fought a war over a 0.5% tax and you guys are submitting to 50%?
	What the hell went wrong with our republic?
	And then we'd say in return, well, you guys should really have not done this whole state thing.
	I know it was kind of fun. I know it seemed like a lot smaller than the ones that came before.
	But, you know, just winging someone instead of not shooting them at all is still wounding them, right?
	So they would probably have missed that out.
	Right. So you get people distracted, you know, debating, you know, how many Jeffersons can dance on the head of a pin.
	And they forget about the whole idea.
	Wait, I know this one. Tell me the first few bars.
	I think I know how it goes from there.
	But in doing so, then, you know, people are distracted away from the whole question of, well, do we even need this state or not?
	No, absolutely, for sure.
	I mean, it's like, do you want to be a Republican or a Democrat?
	It's like, please, please, can we just get a door number three at any point, right?
	But it's like that old Thomas Pinchot quote, right?
	He says, if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they really don't care about the answers, right?
	So, you know, which party do I support is a whole lot of a safer question for people in power than do I need anybody to point guns at me and tell me what to do.
	Is that really... And people who want to do that, should they really be trusted with that kind of power, you know?
	I was thinking about this this weekend.
	There's this funny kind of thing where people believe that there's this group of people out there that can be trusted to do good with power.
	They really do believe that there's this group out there that can have nuclear weapons at their fingertips and access to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in terms of available spending or whatever.
	That this is not going to corrupt people, right?
	That this concentration of power in the hands of the state is not corrupting to some people.
	Oh, exactly the opposite, right?
	They think it makes them better.
	Like, the exercise of this power makes them better.
	Right. I remember reading in the Federalist Papers, Madison actually trying to make this argument that the process of rising to the level of president Would naturally shake out all of the men of lower character and only the most purest of heart could attain such heights,
	right? And so they wouldn't be distracted by the base and simple desire for power over people domestically.
	They would be more concerned with the caretaking of liberty.
	So those who desperately seek power their whole life don't want power.
	Oh, that's great. Can we dig him up and kick him?
	Where is he buried? Oh, that's hilarious.
	I mean, talk about leaving a woman at the altar, right?
	I pursued this woman for 20 years.
	I have finangled everyone and sold my soul to get a hold of this woman just so I can marry her, beg her to marry me.
	Finally, she's mine. We walk up to the altar and then I take off.
	Right, I got it.
	Yeah, that makes sense. Right, right.
	I got up to that statement in the Federalist Papers which I think is like number 73 or number 74 and it suddenly occurred to me that Maybe these guys aren't quite as smart as everyone says they were.
	Well, yeah, for sure. You know, another thing that you want to do is you want to, if you want political power, right?
	You have to convince people that there's this group of gods somewhere up there in the universe that know everything, right?
	That just know everything.
	I remember a very early conversation that I had with Christina where she was saying, well...
	How could this guy who's the Prime Minister or whatever, how could he know everything there is to know about healthcare and how could he know the military stuff and how could he know roads and how could he know buses and everything that sort of governments deal with?
	How could he have any kind of expertise in all of these things?
	It's pretty hard to become good at something.
	I even still get the dates wrong on my podcast.
	So it's really, really hard to become good at stuff.
	And of course, these politicians say, you have to believe that George Bush knows what is best for the country, is the ultimate philosopher king, knows everything there is to know about running a war, and knows everything there is to know about how to effect change in a foreign culture through violence, who knows everything that there is to know about social security and investment and health and and welfare and the prison system and laws and you have to just imagine that basically he's a human God right I mean this is sort of where the tie in between religion and statism becomes it's almost identical right because in the religious context power does not corrupt right and fundamentally God who is the most powerful based on all sort of human standards of virtue God who is the most powerful should be the most corrupt because we know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely So,
	the more powerful God becomes in any rational philosophy, the more corrupt he's going to become.
	But of course, that short-circuits in the religious mindset such that you can have omniscience and omnipotence with benevolence and a complete absence or the opposite of corruption, a perfect virtue.
	So this idea that in human society, in our sort of empirical day-to-day experience, what happens is we notice that people who gain illicit power, I don't mean sort of like a doctor has power, but it's not necessarily corrupting, because it's a voluntary relationship, or at least it used to be, and people who gain sort of illicit or brutal power, either political or criminal, or two sides of the same coin sense, that they become more and more corrupt.
	But then we imagine that at the very sort of stellar heights of human potential, there is this, you know, godlike philosopher king who can know everything about everything.
	And no matter how many times they're proven wrong, no matter how badly George Bush screws up everything he touches, the man has the withering hand of death.
	Everything he touches, people get killed in Katrina, people get killed in Iraq, people get thrown in prison because of these stupid laws.
	There's torture in Abu Ghraib, there's torture in Guantanamo Bay.
	They're now legalizing torture and making people who use torture immune for prosecution for those actions.
	I mean this man literally has like the withering hand of satanic death because he's just an incompetent boob, right?
	But we have this fantasy that there's someone out there who can wield all of this mind-bending power and who has a brain of such stupendous magnitude that they can be an ultimate lawyer slash surgeon slash public servant slash military strategist of the first order slash you know that they can make decisions about everything and that have access to all this power and it won't corrupt them.
	And that fantasy would be absolutely unsustainable without religious faith.
	Exactly. That's exactly right.
	He becomes, in your mind, the Godhead.
	At least as I've had some people try to explain to me, well, no, he doesn't know all the details of all these subjects.
	He has brilliant men around him that single-mindedly focus on all of these subjects and then present him with all of the obvious choices and then He, with his grand managerial wisdom, picks the right one.
	Right, so he's smart enough to know when an expert is giving him a good idea.
	That's why quite often when I watch the show House, I'm shouting at him about what to do as far as medicine goes.
	Because I would choose him as my doctor, but I would definitely be able to override his decision.
	And of course, then the thing is, you know, if we're not voting for George Bush, but we're voting for his accomplices, sorry, his advisors, why don't we just vote for the advisors, right?
	It doesn't make any sense, right?
	Right, and the minute you start to disassemble all of that, I mean, the whole thing just falls apart in your lap.
	You just can't believe in it anymore when you actually start understanding what's really going on.
	Right, and I just sort of wanted, somebody has corrected me.
	Oh, hang on, let me just add another name to that list.
	Boy, these people donate too.
	Oh well, it's for the cause. So, somebody says, they're not legalizing torture.
	They just gave themselves the authority to define it.
	Right, right, absolutely.
	Just as it's not legal to counterfeit money, but the Fed reserves the right to print it at will.
	So, you're absolutely right.
	right.
	It's a very powerful distinction.
	And testicle information gathering, I think is the phrase.
	And certainly that's how I thought through most of my teens.
	So I'm going to just unmute other people if there's anything else that you would like to add to what it is that we're chatting about.
	I'm certainly more than happy to continue on with another topic.
	But if anybody has any comments about what we've talked about so far, now is the time.
	Hello.
	Hello? Hello? Yes, we can keep doing this if you like.
	I'm more than happy to. Who is this?
	Uh-huh. Okay, excellent.
	Let me just do my little mutey-unmutey thing.
	Wait, let me just ask one of the senior engineers at Freedomain Radio to click the mouse button.
	Let me just get that straight.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, hi.
	Well, it's just a question, something I've been thinking about for the past few months or so.
	Let's say that God revealed himself somehow to everyone in the world, that he really didn't exist.
	He gave some kind of rational or logical means to prove his existence.
	Would you, as an atheist, Do Russians readily accept him or would you still choose to disbelieve in him?
	A very interesting question.
	I just have to get a few more parameters before I commit myself to any kind of answer.
	So if you're a If you're a physicist, let's just say you're a mathematician, and of course as a mathematician you can't logically believe in a square circle, but if somebody discovers a square circle, would you then adapt your laws of mathematics to include that square circle?
	Would that be sort of equivalent?
	I'm just sort of trying to understand an equivalence here.
	Well, I know your points about how you think the existence of God is not logically possible, but let's just say for the sake of argument that it could be proven.
	So that somehow God did reveal himself, so to speak.
	Okay, so some invisible being sort of like a big blimp sort of orbited over the world and broadcast his existence and so on, would I believe in the existence of such a supernatural being?
	For sure, absolutely, because then he wouldn't be supernatural anymore, right?
	And if he was able to impress himself upon my senses, and if we were able to measure him and sort of understand that it wasn't some sort of mass hallucination, independent Verifiable scientific instruments picked up his godlike passing.
	Absolutely! I would completely and totally believe in consciousness without matter then and just say, well, we're going to have to expand the definition of consciousness just a little bit To bring this old being into our sights from a scientific standpoint.
	To me that would have absolutely nothing to do with ethics and it would have absolutely nothing to do with the Bible, right?
	So you just say, okay, well now we understand sort of if there was some sort of, instead of x-rays there were like y-rays or z-rays or something.
	You'd say, okay, well so there's something there that we had no evidence for before.
	Now we have evidence for it so we assume and we can accept that it exists.
	There's still no moral dimension to any of that, right?
	It still wouldn't be like if this floating sky god then say to me, you know, you have to cut your own toe off in order to be a good human being.
	I'd say, well, okay, so we'll say invisible consciousness exists and it's insane, right?
	That would sort of be the next step, right?
	But there would be nothing moral in it, right?
	I mean, there would be no moral content if some sort of consciousness came along.
	You wouldn't judge that consciousness as being infinitely right or infinitely correct or infinitely moral.
	You would judge whatever that consciousness said by any other rational or objective standards.
	Does that sort of make sense? Yeah, I suppose it would.
	Also, just another question.
	You said in your beginning piece that you felt the Bible, certainly in the Old and New Testaments, contained what you felt was some immoral or unethical statements.
	Well, I'm not a Christian as such, but...
	Even still, I think most Christians would say that I would not necessarily condone the murder of atheists or, you know, I think even in the Bible it says that you can't even eat shellfish.
	Yeah, I'm sure most Christians eat prawns or mussels or oysters or things like that.
	But that's only because prawns don't believe in God.
	Just kidding. Look, I absolutely understand, and I'm certainly not trying to say that every Christian is a homicidal maniac.
	I mean, that's obviously a completely unsustainable thesis and would be highly offensive to homicidal maniacs.
	But what I would say is that this is the very problem that we have, right?
	So there is no such thing as a Christian.
	That's just something that's very important to understand.
	There is no such thing as a Christian.
	Because there is nobody who practices everything that's in the Bible because it's impossible to practice everything that's in the Bible because so much of it is contradictory.
	So there's no such thing as a Christian.
	A Christian is a fantasy.
	It's like a unicorn that is a million miles high, exists, flies, and is both fire and ice at the same time.
	It simply doesn't exist.
	And because there's no such thing as a Christian, Everybody interprets the Bible based on what they've been told, their own particular family history, what kind of priests they happen to get, their own personality, their own ways of doing things, their own natural inclinations and so on.
	But there is no such thing as a Christian and this is why when religion becomes something that is politically armed, that you get this constant fighting.
	There is no such thing as a Christian because there's no scientific method for Christianity.
	I fully am aware of you that lots of Christians don't want to sort of have me killed, but what I would expect then if Christians wanted to retain the label of even remotely moral human beings would be if they weren't aware that their sort of God says that they should kill people, right? When they become aware of that, the first thing they should do is not defend their god, right?
	That would sort of be the moral thing to do in that kind of situation.
	Like if I'm part of a club, let's just say I happen to look good in white, so I joined the Ku Klux Klan, right?
	And I sort of go around and we have nice barbecues and cookouts and we all call each other Bubba and play horseshoes and all the other stereotypical things from the South.
	And then someone comes along and says, you know they kill black people, right?
	You know, it's right there in the text.
	In the handbook, it's right there.
	You know, it's like chapter 5.
	By the way, we're going to string up all the black people we can find and kill them as quickly as we can, and we want to wipe the black race off the face of the earth, and we're white supremacists, and so on, right?
	Now, if I just sort of joined this group because I kind of like the cookouts and I look good in white and, you know, I've got a good Halloween costume handy, then surely I'm going to be horrified by that.
	I'm going to say, are you kidding?
	They actually, this nice group of ghosty Casper white guys actually are going to kill people?
	Well, that's just horrible.
	I must have totally missed something.
	I'm absolutely not going to be part of this group anymore.
	I mean, that would be a decent, like somebody who didn't know, right?
	That would be a logical and decent moral thing to do.
	But that's not what Christians do, right?
	What Christians do is they say, well...
	That's taken out of context.
	When we say black people, they don't have to be perfectly black.
	We'll kill dark-skinned brown people.
	We also go for Chinese.
	Basically, anyone who's not a wasp will kill them.
	They will try and defend this god that wants me killed, these holy texts that are perfectly moral, that are the highest conceivable statements of morality that say that I should be killed.
	When I point this out to them, if they don't know it, they should be shocked, appalled, and should stop being Christians at least until they figure it out.
	At least stop paying your dues to the Ku Klux Klan while you're trying to figure out whether they actually are genocidal killers or not, in terms of the ethics behind the ideology.
	But the Christians don't do that, right?
	So they absolutely know that the Bible is full of horrible violence and they've reconciled themselves to it for the sake of social conformity, career advancement.
	Who knows? I can't even imagine what keeps Christians going to church.
	Terror of their parents. I have no idea.
	But that would be a pretty strong criteria for me.
	And I would have an enormous amount of respect for a Christian who said, Oh my God, I've never heard about this thing where they want to kill you.
	I can totally understand why you're offended.
	And I certainly have some research to do.
	And then they would come back to me and they would say, You know what?
	I've looked up the quotes you talk about.
	It absolutely does say that there.
	I cannot be a Christian any longer because I don't think that murder is right.
	But that has never happened to me.
	That level of moral integrity, which is not even a hugely high bar.
	All I'm saying is don't subscribe to a belief that demands that people who disagree with you should be put to death.
	I'm not saying that you have to be a perfect example of shining moral perfection.
	Just don't hang with the genocidal freaks.
	That's all I'm saying. But in the entire 25 years that I've been discussing Christianity with people, I've never had one person Who has ditched Christianity because of its genocidal beliefs.
	And I've never even had one Christian who said, I can understand why you're offended by the fact that I worship a book from the highest moral being in the universe that says you should be put to death.
	Never even once have I had a Christian apologize for believing in something that horrible, that murderous, that destructive, that vicious.
	So, yeah, that's sort of my take on that.
	Feel free to ask any other questions if this is helpful.
	Okay, I understand that, yeah.
	So, go forth and convert.
	I'm just kidding. Okay, I'm going to open the board up if there's anything else that people wanted to ask.
	Feel free. Now's the time.
	Hello, I'm Richie. Hi, let me just unmute you.
	You have the floor, my friend.
	Go ahead. Okay.
	So, if you don't believe in any kind of Bible, doesn't matter which one, then can you still believe in God?
	You'll have to tell me what you mean by God.
	Well, You know, some kind of vision, like a meeting point where we all come from, or something.
	You mean like a supreme being, a higher power, that kind of stuff?
	Yeah, something like that.
	Well, you can certainly believe in whatever you want, but it's not logical to believe in the idea of consciousness without material form.
	Right? Of life without death or birth or these kinds of things.
	So from that standpoint, it's not logical and you would be incorrect to believe those things even if you didn't believe in some sort of defined deity like Zeus or Osiris or Buddha or something.
	Even if you had a sort of personal deity that was an abstract higher being, It would be no more logical to do that.
	It would probably be a little bit less illogical, because you probably wouldn't give that being, you know, born of a virgin, all these saints, these human characteristics, but in the fundamental sense, it would still be equally illogical, but I'm certainly willing to hear the counter-argument.
	Yeah, okay. So, I was...
	I believe, like, that if you...
	you can leave your body and still be some kind of being, you know?
	Like a soul. Yeah, a soul or a ghost or something, you know.
	Alright. I don't know.
	I got it. Now, let me ask you this, though.
	How do you know that that's true?
	How do you know the difference between something that is true and something that is not true?
	Well, I felt that I have left my body before, you know.
	And when I'm dreaming, sometimes I dream of a future, you know, of the future.
	Right, right. Do you have any stock tips?
	Sorry? Go ahead, sorry.
	What was your question?
	Oh, I was just wondering if you've gone to the future, if you have any stock tips.
	Because I'm currently investing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That would be nice, man. That would be good, you know.
	I'd just love to have that power, for sure, right?
	Yeah, yeah. I would like that too.
	If I figured that out, then I would let you know.
	That's very kind. If you talk with a human being, sometimes you feel like a kind of spiritual connection.
	It's not material, but it feels like it's air or something.
	It's air, but it's different.
	But I can't really explain, but I find it not material, you know?
	Right, and I certainly understand that.
	I'm no sort of a base materialist in so far as I believe very much that we have a very powerful and deep and rich consciousness and that we absorb an enormous amount of information about people when we meet them.
	And certainly when I first met my wife when we were dating, I experienced it as a kind of spiritual connection.
	She just experienced it as a really grabby guy.
	But I think that sort of fundamentally it was similar in that I sort of floated in bliss and she used up at least a can of mace I think on our second date.
	So I do believe this is what you would call spiritual connections.
	I have no doubt about all of that.
	I think that we do absorb an enormous amount about other people.
	But I believe that we do that through the way that they present themselves.
	We do that through the way they speak, their eye contacts, their body language and so on.
	I'm sure that you are very, very sensitively attuned to other people and you feel great connections with people and so on.
	I'm not sure, in fact, well, I am quite sure that that's not evidence of the existence of a soul because these things can be explained through other means, right?
	The soul is a huge leap in terms of, you know, now we have life without material form which can be observed nowhere in nature.
	Certainly, if you could find some sort of proof for it, you know, this idea that when you die, your body weight goes down by 21 grams and that's your soul leaving or whatever, if there was some way to determine that, that would be pretty cool.
	And trust me, I would be fascinated and excited by the idea of a soul because I wouldn't have to shower.
	Man, that would be great. No shaving would be fantastic, but I would hesitate to say that because you feel a strong connection with people and because you have visions when you're dreaming, which we all do, that that's evidence for the existence of a soul.
	I think that you'll have more fun exploring that from a physiological standpoint.
	Yeah. Well, I know what you mean, you know, because I always try to search for some kind of evidence, but, you know, I don't know because Nobody really has any idea that it exists or not.
	You just can guess.
	Well, I would say that, but you know as somebody who's obviously very intelligent and interested in empirical truth, verification, The burden of proof lies on the sum of whoever proposes an idea, right?
	So if I say that the world is full of invisible spiders, I sort of have to prove, right?
	I can't say, well, you can't disprove my invisible spiders that can't be detected by any human form, therefore they might exist.
	Right? So if somebody's proposing that there is a soul, the rest of us who don't believe that are perfectly within our rights, I think, sort of logically to say that it's not the case until somebody can prove it.
	And look, I mean, if you're that guy, hey, you could be the guest forever, right, on this show, because that would be fantastic.
	But I think right now, the burden of proof lies on those who propose it.
	Yeah. Well, yes, yeah, I understand what you were saying, you know.
	I just... I think it's in some kind of other dimension where we can't see.
	We're not really living in it, but just for a part of it.
	And we have no knowledge of it.
	That's why we can't see it.
	I think there may be so many guides or different kinds of guides.
	I truly believe that some people might have discovered a way of looking in a different dimension and let other people feel that something is there.
	Sure, but what you're telling me is that you believe something, which is fine, but that's not the same as saying that something is true.
	To take a silly example, I could believe that I'm an elephant, right?
	And I could say that I really believe that I'm an elephant, but that doesn't mean that I am an elephant, right?
	So you're saying that you really believe other dimensions and so on.
	I understand that. And there are certainly interesting ideas, but that's not the same as saying something is proven and true, like in a logical or specific way.
	Yes, it's true.
	I like to see something too, you know, where you can really see that, okay, That explains everything that you can see.
	You mean my blog? What?
	My blog? Your blog?
	This show! This is a nice show.
	We can talk about anything.
	People have good questions and answers.
	I'll tell you what, I mean, we won't be able to solve this in this conversation, but if you would like to come back next week, if you get any time this week in between astral travels, if you could come back with some evidence that maybe I haven't seen about other dimensions and so on, I really would be very interested in looking at it.
	But until then, it certainly can't be the case that I could say that any of this is true or anything other than opinions that...
	You know, that you're sort of coming up with, which, you know, I'm not saying that you're wrong, but you certainly have a pretty challenging burden of proof on your hands.
	Yeah, I understand. But I don't think I can come with some kind of proof, you know.
	Do you need two weeks?
	Is that what you need? Because you don't have to do it in one week.
	I'm happy to give you two. It could take a whole year, you know.
	A year? Yeah, people try to figure out a lot of different dimensions through a whole of history.
	Well, I think Greg could do it in a week, so you've got to race on.
	Okay, okay. Okay, thank you very much for your contribution.
	I really appreciate it. I'm going to unmute if anybody else wants to jump in.
	Feel free, now's the time. Greg wants to pick my notes.
	Pick me a pot. Pick me a pot?
	Oh, has he noticed the slightly illogical inconsistency in Podcast 468?
	Gee, let me... Where's that a check button?
	Could you grab me the McLean's?
	It's recent. I wanted to read something from that.
	Great that you... Did you have a question?
	No, Christina doesn't want to hear me being corrected by anyone, because she hates that.
	Hang on, I'm just going to go and pull the evidence from the server about Podcast 468.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. The thread name actually is 468, in case you're looking for it.
	But I was just sort of looking for some clarification, I guess.
	He's going to get two fatwas today, I can feel it.
	Well, I didn't deserve it for the other one, but this one I probably will deserve it.
	No, I hope that we're not talking about the same hole, but go ahead.
	The focus around 468 was, of course, embracing your dark side.
	Yeah, and actually everybody was supposed to embrace your dark side.
	Because I think you've got enough to go around, and I think that'll just be easier.
	I think for me, I need to learn how to embrace my bright side.
	Light side, right.
	Well, that podcast will be a little bit later, right?
	So, there's a couple of things in here that really kind of bugged me.
	The first being, exactly how is it you're defining...
	You kind of wavered back and forth a couple of times throughout that podcast over whether it was some innate biological component or whether it was behavior selected for Or whether it was,
	you know, whether it could be or couldn't be a bad or good thing, or whether it was completely amoral, right?
	And so if manipulation is defined as, you know, behaviors that were kind of built into us biologically, then of course it's amoral and we don't have a choice.
	We can only manipulate, right?
	If it's something that we have conscious control over, then it's something that can be characterized as good or bad, right?
	So you say...
	In one place in the podcast you say that...
	Well, here.
	Now theft and rape are how people who are corrupt...
	Get a hold of resources when they have physical strength and superior.
	When they're not in strong position, then they generally work on manipulation.
	So the implication is there that only corrupt people are manipulators and that manipulation is wrong.
	But earlier on in the podcast you say physical attractiveness is a form of manipulation.
	Right.
	Right.
	Which is it?
	Well, first of all, I'd like to give Greg the FDR Award of the Week, which is that I think he sort of noticed one of the subtle things about show 468, which is that I was not only talking about manipulation, but I was actually showing it in action, which was part of the subtle complexity but I was actually showing it in action, which was part of the subtle complexity So, well done, Greg.
	That was very well picked up on.
	Right, right. I get it.
	I've been making the response.
	Right. You see? You see how brilliant the show is, really?
	That way, are you going to go for that?
	Any luck? Gee, if only that was a webcam, I'd get to see you making a face right now.
	Anyway, well, yeah, I mean, this is quite right, and it's an excellent point.
	Fortunately, it's not the big hole I was thinking of, but we'll talk about that in a second.
	Well, there is a second one that I want to pick on, too, but...
	Oh, do you want to talk about that one now?
	Well, I mean, it's kind of up to you, but...
	Because it's easier for me if we try and forget the first one.
	Ha ha ha ha! So, okay, no, I'll talk about this one.
	I'm sure you'll remember the other one.
	See, that's the reason I do podcasts, because it's harder to quote me back.
	You know, in among all the verbal drivel and bad jokes, and occasional screaming pedestrians, it's hard to quote me back.
	Well, as far as the biological side of things go, yes, I do believe that there's the kind of manipulation that is purely natural, and this is in terms of its just nature.
	And this is basically stuff that is common to all species and anything that's common to all species is not something that can be called moral in nature, right?
	So I guess, you know, there's an attractive standard to a humpback whale that is different from what it would be for a human being but obviously works for them.
	So, physical attractiveness is a kind of manipulation that comes from nature because, I mean, you know, to be somewhat anthropological about it and fairly frank, you know, sticking an appendage into a hole is not a very logical thing to do, right? It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, so to speak.
	And so, from that standpoint, the fact that we're kind of tweaked by biological receptors and hormones and so on and you know the sort of sexual focus that we have in our lives from you know age of 14 to about for men 12 minutes after death that is that sometimes feels a little bit for me at least like there's a kind of manipulation going on because it's not it's not like a logical pursuit right in the absence of these hormones you wouldn't say I'm gonna spend a good deal of my life's effort attempting to stick my finger into somebody's ear You know,
	that really wouldn't be...
	So the reason we do that is because there's all of these incentives from a biological standpoint to do that.
	Sort of pleasure-seeking and so on.
	And so, from that standpoint, to me, that's just a kind of manipulation.
	It's not bad or wrong, but it can be dangerous.
	I mean, I think, you know, like certain, like anger can turn to rage.
	Anger's healthy, rage is sort of not healthy.
	And sexual attraction can be healthy, but some people will put far too much time and energy into that kind of stuff and think that they have value because they are sexually attractive, right?
	So that's...
	And I think that's a little bit more of a danger for women because women are just fundamentally so much more attractive than us hairy-backed guys.
	But I think that women have a greater danger thinking that they have value because they're attractive.
	So a kind of...
	And that becomes manipulative because they're trying to gain value out of something that's purely biological in nature, right?
	So a woman doesn't have much control over the quality of her figure, so to speak.
	I mean, a lot of women who are, you know, who eat well and exercise, you know, still look like an elephant's leg or whatever, right?
	There's a tree trunk. And I've known some women who don't eat well and exercise who have great figures, right?
	So that's all I'm saying.
	Sorry, go ahead. Isn't there really two things going on there, though?
	I mean, the innate biological is...
	It's kind of the first level, and then the second level is where we choose to use that in a way that's...
	It's vanity-based, right?
	Like you attempt to feed your ego as a valuable person because you can be sexually attractive, and that I think is dangerous.
	So in the first sense, I simply mean manipulation in the way that if I want to build a doghouse, I have to manipulate a saw and a hammer and a piece of wood.
	Right? So, in that sense, manipulation that's occurring at the biological-hormonal level is just nature making us want to have sex, right?
	And that's what I mean. There's nothing particularly evil or wrong about that.
	That's just nature doing its thing to us, right?
	And, of course, it is, because of our biological nature, it's a source of great pleasure and, you know, for most of my 20s, a source of great expense and begging.
	The hormones manipulate us, right?
	We adhere because of reproduction and so we want to reproduce.
	That's kind of like the deal, right?
	I mean, a lot of us anyway. So there's that level of manipulation, but then there's people who take that level of manipulation that they didn't invent.
	I would just talk about women. I mean, it could be true for men too, I'm sure it is, but I'll just talk about it from looking at it as a man looking at a woman.
	But there's women who then will take those natural biological urges and the accidental, you know, bodies and hair and faces and so on that they've inherited combined with the youth and the fertility that nature grants them and then will say, I am a more valuable or a special or a better person because I am sexually attractive.
	Which is, that becomes manipulative in a negative way, right?
	Because that's a choice. Does that sort of help?
	Right, but I think it goes a little farther than that.
	I mean... When you take your natural gifts and you choose to use them in such a way that you're focused entirely on bringing goods to yourself as opposed to,
	say, offering your gifts See, I'm having trouble describing what I'm trying to say here.
	Where you recognize the value of your own gifts and you offer those out to people saying, maybe you'll find value in this too.
	And in the process, you gain good from that.
	Versus saying, well, I have this I have this thing that I can use to bludgeon people over the head with to get what I want, then ultimately I do gain a good from that, but I gain less good than I would if I was trying to trade, and the other party gains nothing.
	In fact, loses as a result.
	In the first case, it's win-win.
	In the second case, it's almost a negative sum gain.
	Yeah, it's a negative sum game for sure.
	Absolutely. Because you're also destroying the incentive for future production.
	Right.
	So as we've talked, I think I mentioned there, like if you're a herd of Vikings who go around raising the countryside and stealing all of the food from the farmers, then, yeah, you'll get a certain amount of food that you don't have to work to produce, but you're destroying the incentives for those farmers to grow any excess.
	They'll just grow enough to feed themselves, and then they'll arm themselves and fight you to the death because they're going to know they're going to starve if you come back.
	Yeah, you're destroying productivity for the sake of short-term gain.
	It's sort of the heroin of history, right, that you get a short-term gain at the expense of a long-term negative.
	So, yeah, for sure.
	And that's immoral and impractical in the long run as well.
	But, sorry, go ahead.
	Right, and it's immoral, right?
	So that kind of manipulation is bad.
	Yes. Yes, for sure.
	For sure. And I would say just to...
	There's one other sort of distinction I'd like to put into the mix, hopefully to confuse you into thinking that I was consistent in the first place, which I may well have been.
	We'll find out. But to me, it's sort of because I'm in the marketing world now, right?
	There's sort of two kinds of advertisements, right?
	There's one advertisement which says, this is something that will make you happier, and you should buy it because you're going to be happy, right?
	That's sort of the one thing, right?
	And then, there's like just about every ad aimed at women, and I don't know why this susceptibility occurs, although if you pick up Men's Health magazine and look for that six pack, it's the same thing for men too.
	Where it says, you are a lesser person if you don't have this good, right?
	So one is saying, I can make you happier if you buy this good, and the other is, you are deficient if you don't buy this good.
	Now the former is a sort of, to me, a sort of more ethical kind of advertising.
	It's like a win-win. And the second is kind of like negative economics, right?
	And it's sort of a little bit more akin to what goes on in families, and it does seem to be aimed a little bit more at women.
	That's more manipulative, I think.
	You're broken and we can fix you.
	Exactly, right. So it's all the way from the church to the state to the family to every woman's magazine in the world, right?
	Because, you know, it's nothing but men who oppress women because men produce all those magazines and men buy them.
	No, wait, that's not right.
	So then there actually is moral content to conscious manipulation.
	But not to the biological aspects of it.
	No, no, for sure.
	I mean, it would take a religion to say that the sexual desire is evil, right?
	I mean, because sexual desire is just what it is.
	It can be a very productive and positive force, right?
	I mean, it builds families, it makes men protect women, and so on, and it keeps the stocking industry alive, like all of the essentials of civilization.
	So there's nothing wrong with sexual attraction, a perfectly healthy thing.
	But when it becomes, you know, manipulative and somebody thinks that they have value because they're sexually attractive, then it becomes manipulative and I think then becomes sort of a problem.
	So then that kind of leads into my second question actually on the whole question of biological viability.
	Oh, and I'm sorry, I just wanted to express as well, because as far as I understood it from one of your posts, you were going to get a webcam and actually give us a demonstration of sexual manipulation.
	I was going to give you like five bucks through PayPal.
	Anyway, maybe next week.
	Maybe next week. I'll send you the disco soundtrack.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so biological viability, right?
	So... The argument is that we need manipulation to be successful biologically, but then at the same time you say that this manipulation, in fact, you said it exactly this way.
	The major problem is that where there's All this theft, rape, and manipulation going on, there's almost no incentive to produce anything.
	And you just said that here as well.
	So my question is, if manipulative behavior, which we've determined here can be argued as a bad thing, and can be demonstrated to be a destructive force,
	How can we then say that it's a viable means of biological success?
	If manipulation leads to general starvation or lack of incentive, as you put it, then it seems to me that it's exactly destructive to biological success.
	Well, yes, I certainly understand where you're coming from.
	This is sort of the 90 second answer will be something like this.
	If you are a Viking and you're just talking about a completely amoral spread of your DNA kind of situation, which of course life is founded on and grew from, then universal rape is your best strategy for spreading those seeds in a time of predation.
	Right? So I mean, as I've mentioned in a really early podcast, human beings can kind of go one of two ways, right?
	So in a time of plenty, they tend to be more secure, less prone to violence, and so on.
	And in a time of want, they tend to be more trigger-happy and so on, right?
	So people who grew up in abusive families usually are a little bit more sort of trigger-happy and impulse control becomes a problem because, of course, Human beings have this incredible ability to, in a sense, mutate into a variety of different personality structures based upon the economic cues or social cues or resource availability cues that are coming in from the environment,
	right? So, if you grow up and you have no parents, it's likely because you're in a time of war or a time of great destruction and so you're going to grow up to be more aggressive Then you would be if you grew up in a time of sort of peace and plenty and all your mother's milk was available and you had security and so on because that would likely be a time of peace,
	right? So when people grow up in great sort of socially or economically disadvantageous environments, then they tend to be more aggressive because of course there's going to be a high degree of competition for the scarce resources that exist.
	So they're going to be more aggressive.
	And that's, you know, pretty much universally true that people who grow up in want end up more aggressive.
	In general, I mean, there's exceptions and so on, but that's a general pattern.
	So in a sense, the personality takes its shape to some degree from the social and economic cues that are coming in from a very, very early age.
	And so from that standpoint, if you are in a situation Where there is general war and famine and predation, which is, you know, just about all of human society and throughout almost all of human history, then being the nice guy does cause you to finish last,
	right? I mean, the guy who then sort of goes around and rapes, of course it's evil and so on, but he's not going to be able to found capitalism and bring it to the point where he can change the sort of social wants of society in his lifetime So there's a pure biologically advantageous strategy called go and rape people in a situation of extreme plunder and predation.
	Yes, it does add to it and makes things worse and so on, but that can't really be changed within his lifetime.
	That's one of the reasons why those situations tend to last so long and are so prevalent across the planet even now, sort of in the modern age, sort of quote modern age.
	And of course, other species do do this, you know, there's the cuckoo, right, the bird species that lays its egg in, I think it's a finch's or some other bird's nest, and then kicks out that other bird's babies, and then the other birds just raise that, because the egg, I think, is a similar size or something, and they just raise it.
	So that, you know, this sort of murder and kidnapping, and then, you know, I guess, planting a stealth egg in another bird's nest.
	There's tons of examples of that kind of stuff.
	Which would be completely immoral for a human being to do, right?
	Like, you know, I had to kill your baby and give you my baby to raise so that I get more babies raised and do this all over the place.
	That would be totally immoral.
	But it's something that occurs.
	These kinds of strategies, parasitical strategies, they occur quite constantly in nature.
	So from a pure sort of human-animal biological DNA standpoint, there are advantageous strategies that involve immoral actions, if that sort of helps.
	Well... I guess I'm not quite under...
	It all goes back to the question of morality, doesn't it?
	Because I guess I'm not quite understanding that then, because on the one hand, it sounds to me like what you're saying is that in a statist society, your best course of action is to be a statist.
	Why should you be anything else?
	But then on the other hand, you're saying to be a statist is immoral.
	So if, you know, if morality isn't akin, if it isn't, if it doesn't include self-preservation, then what's the point?
	Right? If morality doesn't include self-preservation?
	Yeah. So, yeah, go ahead.
	So in a society where rape and pillage is a necessity for survival, but will ultimately lead to your demise in the long run anyways, I mean you have to engage in it to survive for as long as you can until it happens to you, right? Right, but I mean here we're to some degree talking about a society where I would say that ethics would be a pretty tough thing to even consider.
	You know, it's the old, you know, if you're starving, do you have the right to steal a loaf of bread and all that kind of stuff?
	And if you're in a situation of perpetual war, is it, you know, does it pay to be a good guy and, you know, whatever not?
	Like if you're in a situation where you have 12 siblings, And there's not enough food to go around and you're like a polite sibling who says, no, no, you go first.
	Well, you're going to starve to death, right?
	I mean, so this is a very sort of tricky situation.
	I would say, in general, that societies that end up in those situations do so because they have been immoral.
	For quite a long period of time, right?
	So if you look at sort of Uganda, right, under Idi Amin and all of the other bloodthirsty monsters who ruled it in the 60s and 70s, you end up in this situation of perpetual civil war and cannibalism.
	Because there's been an extraordinarily immoral ethic that has gone on in society for quite a long period of time, And so just as if you live in an unhealthy way, at some point you can't turn back, right?
	Like once you, you know, if you smoke like a chimney for 40 years, then you're going to get, you know, 99%, you're going to get lung cancer or emphysema and you're going to die, right?
	And then quitting smoking in your 39th year isn't going to change that.
	So I think we're talking about a situation where an immoral kind of ethic has dominated society for so long that it's devolved into a war of all against all, and I would say that ethics would be a pretty tough subject to talk about in that environment, and that is sort of what I mean when I say, as I did at the beginning, though in another context, that philosophy is about prevention rather than cure.
	Once you're in that kind of situation, to me it is to some degree a state of nature.
	And yeah, it's sort of immoral, but Then you have to choose between life and morality and of course the purpose of philosophy is to prevent that choice from having to come about.
	And in fact to make the choice of morality to be the choice of enhancing your life.
	That's the central problem with the state is that it pays people enormous amounts of money for incredibly immoral behavior.
	And so once you take that factor out of the equation, people aren't going to make as much money doing immoral things, and they're going to make a lot more money doing moral things, so then self-interest and survival and flourishing and ethics all go hand in hand together.
	But where you have the dominance of theology or statism, then you end up with everything kind of being asked backwards, and people get Positive economic incentives for being corrupt and dishonest and evil and so on.
	And they get negative incentives sometimes for being moral.
	And so philosophy can't really solve that, I think, other than by saying we need a different kind of society.
	So we're really kind of walking a pretty dangerous tightrope here.
	In what way?
	Well, I mean, on the one hand, we're saying that...
	You know, that philosophy and morality and ethics and all of these things, you know, properly understood are supposed to bring the good life, are supposed to bring happiness, all of these things.
	But on the other hand, we're saying, well, you know, if you go out and you, you know, proselytize this sort of viewpoint, then Chances are you're going to significantly shorten your life and make it significantly worse because of the state that society is in.
	So the implication is that it's far better to just go along to get along than to actually push through all of that to some higher ideal.
	Sure. I mean, we can look at that just empirically in history, right?
	I mean, if you were in Nazi Germany and you sort of railed against the state, you'd just get shot, right?
	You don't get to pass your jeans on.
	So that doesn't really, you know, that's definitely a situation where to be ethical in the way that we would talk about it now is completely self-destructive, right?
	And philosophy can't solve that problem.
	It's sort of like if you're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you have a box of crackers, right?
	You've got a box of crackers and there's two of you on this raft and one of you is a nutritionist, right?
	And you turn to this nutritionist and say, you know, what should we eat to preserve our optimum health?
	You don't have any fishing wire or anything like that, right?
	Then the nutritionist is going to say, well, all we've got is crackers, right?
	So, you know, let's eat those, right?
	There's no choice, right?
	And it's the same thing with moral philosophy, right?
	I mean, there has to be choice in order for philosophy to have value.
	And if you're in a situation where it's a dictatorship and like, hey, the moment that they make free domain radio illegal, I'm off the air.
	Like, don't... I mean, once I'm submitted to the point of a gun, I'm obeying, right?
	And for me to say otherwise would be hypocritical, right?
	Because I don't believe in a cop's right to arrest me.
	But if a cop ever comes to arrest me...
	I'm gonna go. I mean, I'm not gonna, you know, I mean, because I'm not in a situation where philosophy can help me anymore.
	It's like being a nutritionist when you only have one thing to eat.
	Well, just eat that thing. So in a sense, we're actually literally living lifeboat scenario right now.
	I don't think yet, but I think that's sort of one of the reasons why I'm trying to put, and I guess we're all trying to put out a fairly high degree of intellectual energy and communication into the sort of social mix to get these questions a little bit more clear, because for sure, I mean, you know, there is no question whatsoever where all of this stuff ends without some pretty significant intellectual intervention, that it ends in dictatorship and the silencing of virtuous men and women.
	You know, either through going underground or through more explicit forms.
	But, yeah, absolutely.
	We know where this is all heading because it's not like this is the first time in history that the government has grown precipitously over the course of, say, a single generation.
	So, yeah, absolutely.
	We are heading towards the lifeboat scenario.
	And so, you know, as I said, there's a fulcrum, right?
	So we're like the lung doctor saying don't smoke, right?
	But at some point it doesn't matter.
	Right? And if you're the nutritionist saying, don't eat this combination of foods, don't eat all this sugar and fat because you're going to become diabetic, right?
	And if you don't listen to your nutritionist and you become diabetic, then you go talk to your doctor, right?
	In a sense, the prevention nutritionist has failed.
	And you don't go back and talk to that prevention nutritionist.
	Then you go talk to some other nutritionist who says here's how you deal with diabetes and so on.
	But the prevention person loses their relevance once you contract the ailment in a permanent kind of way.
	And so yes, for sure, our relevance or actually my relevance as a philosopher will absolutely fade Once you get a kind of strong abridgment of the First Amendment kind of totalitarianism, I'll have nothing to say, for sure, because the cure will then pass on to other people and won't have much to do with me at all.
	And maybe that's one of the reasons why, in a broader sense, philosophy is already treated as relatively irrelevant.
	Well, and that's also because philosophy hasn't been dealing with the root causes, right?
	Philosophy has become irrelevant because people are arguing about particular semantics and particular kinds of linguistic constructs and so on, rather than talking about the basics of good and evil.
	And that's because, of course, the philosophers who are public are all in the pay of the state or under the influence of the state.
	And, you know, they're already in that sort of Viking-Cossack state of nature thing where in order to speak the truth, they would have to give up their careers and their incomes and all of their training.
	And then they'd say, well, I wouldn't even have a voice anyway because then I would speak the truth, immediately be cut off and never be allowed to speak again.
	So, you know, I'm sure they tell themselves a whole bunch of bedtime stories to sleep at night, but none of it has anything to do with integrity or truth, right?
	The best thing to do with...
	You know, the bad money drives out good money.
	The best thing to do to discredit philosophy is not to get rid of philosophers, but to promote bad philosophers, right?
	Corrupt philosophers, subjective, state-worshipping, snide, bitchy philosophers, right?
	Which you can see in academics all over the place.
	That discredits philosophy, not getting rid of them, which actually raises their value.
	Right. The attitude being one of two strains.
	Either the fundamental questions...
	are already answered and we're wasting our time dealing with them still or secondly the fundamental questions can't be answered.
	Right, which of course then would make people say well if the fundamental questions can't be answered there's no such discipline as philosophy it's all opinion let's shut it down but of course people like their philosophy professorships and so they don't really talk about that kind of stuff.
	So the third question I have, the last question I guess right to the specific point of having a dark side at all.
	And you kind of defined the dark side specifically as our own biology.
	And this is where I got kind of confused over whether you thought biology could be moral or not, or whether it was just an axiomatic fact.
	And forgive me for quoting you extensively here, but I have to in order to kind of frame the question.
	Are you going to throw all the verbal tics in too?
	No, no, no, no.
	Do you mind if I throw them in then while you're talking?
	Oh, sure. Go ahead.
	You say that manipulation is a pretty inevitable reaction to any sort of intimation or confrontation with one's own dark side.
	And here's the key part.
	With the weaker side, the more petty, manipulative, cold, and cruel side, all implying that it's something bad.
	Which is just about maximizing resources.
	That's sort of cold, calculating, mere biological, enormously powerful, but merely biological kind of approach.
	It's certainly my strong feeling that it's very important to accept our base biological calculating capacity to do some pretty great harm.
	Right? The implication being that our biology is, you know, in some sense at war with our rationality.
	That biologically we're programmed to do harm.
	And that our rationality is a sort of governor to that or opposing force or split personality within us.
	Right? I think I understand your question.
	Is there some sort of innate contradictory nature within us between our biology and our rationality?
	If we're two halves, good and bad, how do you explain that in a material sense?
	And if you don't explain it in a material sense, Are you suggesting then some kind of transcendent imprint on the mind that is rationality?
	That rationality somehow exceeds biology and is like a blanket over our biological desire to do harm?
	Right. So, in a sense, that would be a pretty religious approach, right?
	To say that we have this original sin called biology, which we can hopefully temper with rationality that is against our natures.
	Is that sort of your question or objection?
	That's the impression I really got from that passage in the podcast.
	It kind of bugged me because all along I've been working on the presumption that Rationality and our biology are essentially one and the same.
	That the reason there's this problem with unhappiness is that we've kind of constructed an artificial...
	We've artificially created this contradiction between It sounded to me like you were kind of buying into that whole thing.
	Right, right. Well, this is sort of my perspective.
	For me, it's always important to remember that the culture that we're in is pretty irrational and pretty corrupt.
	It's pretty medieval in its presumptions and its suppositions.
	So the way that we're taught now is not the way that we should be taught.
	The way that we're raised now is not the way that we should be raised.
	That is going to result in contradictions within our natures that are not innate.
	But simply provoked by irrational upbringings and public schools and histories and so on.
	So, you know, when I'm talking about contradictions that exist now, I don't necessarily mean that they're innate to us as human beings in the way that, you know, bones and veins are, but it's simply the way that we're taught, right?
	Any more than it's innate within our biology to believe in Jesus Christ, it's just that that's what most people are taught.
	You know, it's the Son of God and all that kind of stuff, the three-in-one oil of Christian theology.
	It's just something that we're taught.
	So from that standpoint, I would say that I wouldn't view this as innate, this contradiction.
	But when we look at Things empirically, and I'm not suggesting that you aren't, I'm just sort of pointing out where I would do it, is human beings almost inevitably, and this is the basis of totalitarianism, will almost inevitably choose survival over virtue.
	I mean, this is just absolutely universal.
	Human beings will choose the survival of their children over an abstract stand for a principle of truth or virtue.
	And they're not one and the same?
	In what way? I'm saying that the pursuit of survival, the pursuit of self-interest, that isn't virtue?
	Well, we can just look at it in our own lives, right?
	I mean, you and I both pay our taxes, right?
	Although we know that it's immoral.
	Okay, correct. Right.
	So, I mean, we're choosing freedom in a sort of localized material sense over a virtuous principle, right, because it would be more virtuous.
	You could make the argument, I wouldn't necessarily, but you could make the argument that the money that we pay in our taxes goes to support a war and the murder of other people and so there's a causal chain from us paying our taxes to other people getting killed and so on, right?
	But we don't go and live in the woods in Montana.
	We pay our taxes and have pleasant chats about philosophy, but we don't run up against...
	The armed might of the state and go down in a blaze of glory to make an abstract point.
	I mean, I'm just working empirically.
	This doesn't mean that what we're doing is right, but it just is sort of how we're living, and that's sort of a good place to start in terms of ethical ideas.
	We also know that we have the right to self-defense, but if a cop stops us on a highway, I submit as meekly as a little lamb, so to speak, because my jiu-jitsu is getting a little rusty.
	So, you know, from that standpoint, I just sort of look at my own life and say, well, I choose, you know, physical liberty over the abstract principle.
	And yeah, I have reasons for that.
	And I think I can do more good here than in prison and so on.
	And I don't want to go to prison.
	So I don't want to be a pirate with that old Seinfeld.
	But so I'm just sort of pointing out.
	Sorry, go ahead. Are you suggesting then that to be consistently virtuous, to be consistently moral, that we have an obligation then to not pay taxes?
	No, what I'm saying is that if it was a free society, right?
	And somebody was being regularly held up and sort of didn't move and didn't fight back and so on.
	At some point, we'd say, well, look, you're not really standing up for yourself here, right?
	You're not really standing up for what's right.
	You're just surrendering your property to bad people who then use it to, you know, pay hitmen to go and terrorize your neighbors.
	You're sort of enabling them and so on, right?
	You could make that case.
	And of course, the moral crime would still be more so on the part of the people who were doing the violence, but the person who submits to the violence and sort of buys his own freedom by paying off the mafia who then used that money to expand their power and so on, right?
	It could be said that that's a kind of enabling behavior that might not be the most moral thing in the world and so on.
	We certainly would feel more admiration for somebody who fought back or at least moved away and stopped enabling the criminals and so on.
	From that standpoint, you certainly could make that case.
	I mean, it would be a complicated argument to get into right now, but it's at least a theoretically viable case, and that you could call it cowardice for somebody who would not stand up for themselves and retain their property and ended up feeding organized crime and so on.
	Now, What we want, of course, is a society where you don't have to make those choices.
	You don't want to have a society where it's like the Sophie's Choice, if you've ever seen that movie, those kinds of, you know, which child do I choose to live in the concentration camp and so on, this sort of lifeboat scenarios, right?
	You want to have a society, and that's what philosophers, I think, should work to promote, where to be ethical is to follow your self-interest.
	Whereas, you know, these ridiculously terrible choices that we're faced in right now, the money that I pay in my taxes is going to fund a war where people are getting killed.
	Do I then not pay my taxes and go to jail?
	Philosophy cannot answer those questions.
	Philosophy cannot answer those questions.
	It can simply point out that those are bad things to have in your life, those kinds of choices.
	Philosophy is all about designing a system, or rather eliminating the sort of violence of the state and the brutality of religion, which says that any situation where those are your choices is a bad system.
	Just like any scientific theory which comes up with a contradiction that says, okay, for the scientific theory to be true, a rock has to fall both up and down simultaneously, there's something wrong with that scientific theory.
	Or any moral theory that comes up with, you know, the most moral actions are rape and murder, something's kind of wrong.
	You may not know exactly what, but something's kind of wrong with that moral theory.
	And any society where your choice is to be forced into supporting murder or to go to jail, there's something fundamentally wrong with that society.
	And so the vast majority of people in the world throughout history and in the modern world, they simply go along in order to maximize their resources, right?
	So they go along because the alternative is to get killed or to be thrown in jail or concentration camps or to be stoned to death or throughout most of the world.
	In more subtle forms of social ostracism even in the West where those things are less, of course, far less of a risk.
	But most people will simply slide along as I talked about.
	They're sort of products of their culture.
	They'll simply slide along In a sort of manipulative, cold-blooded, frankly, kind of way, they'll just try and maximize their resources, which is not an unreasonable thing to do in a state-of-nature kind of society, right?
	I'm not saying that I would take a job as a guard in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, but if I couldn't get out, I'm not sure that I'd go out.
	I'm pretty sure I wouldn't go out in a blaze of glory fighting the state, because it wouldn't work.
	It wouldn't help. Right?
	So, that's sort of what I'm saying.
	It's just looking at the way that I live, and that doesn't mean that it's right, it's just sort of the choices that I'm making, and looking at history, that human beings do make those kinds of decisions all the time, where they simply choose in a state of nature where intense violence is being applied against them, They just obey.
	I mean, this is what Noam Chomsky says.
	He says, the amazing thing about violence is that it works beautifully.
	Violence works wonderfully, both in terms of controlling children, as you know from your own experience, and in terms of controlling citizens in a society, you know, this is why the state is so dangerous, because the violence that it uses works absolutely beautifully in controlling people, right? There's almost no examples of civil insurrections short of people actually dying of starvation, Throughout history, everybody just gets in line and tries to survive, keeps their head low, keeps moving along.
	There are no revolutions in history that are really substantial.
	There are a few minor exceptions, but for the most part, people just get along, they go along, they take jobs with the state, they'll do whatever it takes to take care of themselves and their family, and they'll keep their heads low and they'll turn themselves into little obedient statist mice in order to buy another day or week or month or year of life.
	I mean, that's... That's inevitable.
	That's what happens. And that's sort of where I'm sort of starting from in terms of trying to reason some of this stuff out around biological calculations.
	So to summarize then, virtue and self-interest are not synonymous, but ideally they should be as closely associated as possible, and where they're not, we should choose self-interest.
	Well, I would say that the should become sort of irrelevant at the point of a gun, right?
	I would not say that somebody who chose to go out in a blaze of glory when faced with, you know, a statist intervention and dragging them off to concentration camp, part of me would be like, you go, brother, you know, but part of me would also be like, hey, if they come for me, I'm going quietly with the hopes that I get out in 10 years or something, right?
	So for me, the morality ends where the point of a gun is.
	There is no should, there is no should not, you know, if you want to comply, if you want to not comply.
	It's irrelevant, right?
	It's sort of like the question of what should I eat when all you have is a box of crackers.
	You eat the crackers, right?
	I mean, nutrition doesn't make any sense when you don't have any choices.
	And ethics don't make any sense when you don't have any choices.
	But I simply am pointing out that the vast majority of people do choose to comply and obey.
	And a lot of them will do it passively, but some of them will do it more actively.
	Like in Nazi Germany, people just sort of went around their business and kept their eyes shut and kept their heads down.
	But some people were like, great, I finally get to release my sadistic side in a concentration camp and they sort out those jobs and so on.
	And other people were simply assigned those jobs to be guards in concentration camps, and if they didn't obey, they would get shot and they went along and then they got further corrupted and suicidal because of the evil they perpetrated and so on.
	But good and evil, for me at least, doesn't really mean anything in a state of coercion.
	So what you want to do as a philosopher is to try and design societies which do not reward coercion, right?
	Where coercion is not subsidized, is not abstracted to the layer of the state and thus a source of enormous profit to people.
	And you do that simply by pointing out that violence is occurring when people don't want to look at it either in the church or the state or the family.
	Right. If the ideal is pork ribs and sweet potatoes and all you have are crackers, Then it would be kind of silly to refuse to eat if you're looking for pork ribs and all you can get is crackers.
	Right. I mean, we call someone an anorexic if they don't eat where there's food available, but we don't call someone an anorexic if they're thrown in a basement and they're starving because no one's giving them any food, right?
	Where there's no choice, there really can't be a whole lot of judgment about the ethics of the situation.
	And you've passed beyond the horizon where philosophy can help you, just as once you've got diabetes, you can't be helped by somebody who specializes in nutritional design of a menu to prevent diabetes, or you move on to someone else.
	Okay, I think that makes sense.
	So it's really more, it's not so much intrinsic nature, it's more social circumstances, social conditioning, that sort of thing.
	Right, and of course people who did, you know, as I mentioned in the article, people who did choose to go out in a blaze of glory to fight all the evil in their surroundings would never live to reproduce, right?
	So that, from a biological standpoint, those genes, if they ever did exist, probably didn't exist for very long.
	Which doesn't make it, again, right or wrong.
	That's just looking at it from a biological standpoint.
	Okay. The challenge, and where I haven't sort of sorted it out, and I want to make sure other people get their say, but the challenge for me in this situation is if people are a product of their cultural circumstance, which seems to be very common throughout history, what is the nature of their moral responsibility?
	But that's something I'll deal with in another podcast.
	That's the one hole that I skirted a little bit in that one, which I'll sort of have to come back.
	Just working empirically, people obey whoever's in power.
	that's just an empirical fact so in asking for you know pure moral responsibility asking too much I think it is when you're in a state of nature like an anarchy that is a dictatorship but I will unmute everybody if you'd like to have other questions comments issues suggestions problems suggestions for new hairdos for me please feel free to mention them Hello? All right.
	Are you going to disagree with me again?
	Hang on. I just have to wait.
	Skype has this wonderful ability to completely erase everybody in the chat window and then bring them back.
	It's really quite exciting. I keep thinking everyone's going to find better podcasts and then coming back to this.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was just thinking about last week's...
	In which you mentioned that the state is, well, the collapse of the state you feel is inevitable.
	I'm just wondering what method do you think the state will, how exactly would the state collapse?
	Because I was thinking, well, Okay, let's say the U.S. government say federal debt becomes unmanageable.
	Would that just mean that the U.S. federal government would collapse or would all governments collapse as a result, sort of like a domino effect?
	What's your thinking on that?
	Well I think that again it's very hard to prognosticate so as somebody who's trained in history I tend to go back rather than forward because you can't tell the future but you can certainly have some idea of what happened in the past and the reason that the entire system would collapse was that what would cause the US government to collapse would be an inability to pay its bills because it could no longer borrow money and therefore it would be a run on the US dollar people would start to sell their US dollars which would drive the value of the US dollar down And so inflation would become extraordinarily high.
	The US would be tempted to print more money in order to pay off its debts.
	But that situation, which is what caused the hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s, and of course towards the end of the Roman Empire as well, That situation is unlikely to occur because the market information is so quick these days and there's such a strong understanding of the relationship between the overprinting of currency and inflation that the moment the US government began to increase the printing of its money supply,
	The international money markets would simply discount the dollar based on the volume increase of the additional money supply.
	So if the U.S. printed 10% more money, everybody would just demand 10% more payment in U.S. dollars.
	So it really wouldn't do them any good.
	They would lose purchasing power of the dollar to the degree that they increase the printing of the dollar.
	So everyone's pretty much into that and they would understand that.
	I'm just looking at the...
	I think a whole bunch of people left when we start talking about economics.
	Wait, wait, we'll get back to talking about sexual manipulation and Greg will get his webcam set up.
	So from that standpoint, once the US dollar begins to go down, which it will, because anything which is mathematically going to end will end, it's just a matter of when.
	And that will cause the US dollar to become worthless, which means that the US government will simply be unable to pay its employees, will be unable to pay the army, and that's maybe why they ship them all over to Iraq.
	I don't know, right? To get them overseas so that it's hard for them to get back and have an insurrection to go get their pay.
	I don't know. And of course, once the US currency begins to go down, it won't be the end of the world for the domestic consumer because things like PayPal or credit cards or whatever will simply become the de facto currency.
	There may be a resurrection of the gold standard.
	Banks could issue their own currency.
	There's lots of ways to bypass the use of official fiat currency in a relatively free market situation.
	So that's not necessarily the end of the world for the private consumer, but it certainly is the end of the world for government spending, right?
	So there will be an enormous amount of hardship.
	The people who are on welfare, the people who are on old age security, I mean, they're all going to get thrown overboard long before anything else, right?
	I mean, the people who have less power, less control, in other words, you know, the people who are not as politically organized, certainly the poor people will start to get hosed.
	The people who are old age security will start to get hosed, because we're sort of in a post-democratic situation by that time.
	But yeah, the government's sort of unable to pay its employees, and that's how the government collapses, right?
	The effects are quite complicated, but the cause is quite simple.
	Now, the reason that I think that this is going to happen sooner rather than later is because I believe that the war in Iraq is the methodology by which people are cleaning out the treasury.
	The war in Iraq, there's $400 billion being spent in the war in Iraq.
	This is not going to the soldiers, as we all know.
	It's certainly not going to the people who supply armor to the soldiers.
	It's going to the private sector.
	And the war is occurring because the government is running out of money and they need to transfer as much money as possible and there's no faster way to transfer money from the public sector to the private individuals than to have a war on, right?
	Because people then are perfectly happy to support massive increases in government debt and so on.
	So that's the war on terror, really.
	It was the replacement for the war, as you know, for the war, the Cold War, in terms of allowing people to transfer money from the public sector to the private sector.
	And the reason that I think it's even, I've sort of upped my estimate to something even closer now is that relatively recently, I think within the last month or two, the US federal government, or the Fed, sorry, the Federal Reserve System, they have stopped printing the money supply statistics, right? They have stopped releasing the volume of money supply that they're printing to the public.
	That's a pretty significant thing.
	Of course, it's not reported in most of the major media because they're really interested in emails that Mark Foley sent to a bunch of pages, but the far more relevant information is that the Fed has stopped printing money supply information, and that means that they're printing money like mad, which is again the final spasm of stealing from the public purse.
	They're printing money like mad, gathering money like mad, and they're trying to obscure the degree of money printing that's going on from the general market.
	Of course, there will be people who are in the know who are going to short the U.S. dollar and so on, but this is another example of what happens when the government begins to run out of cash and things get all...
	I mean, there's a massive grab, right?
	As I mentioned previously, there's a whole bunch of people and there's like a...
	A big vault of money and there's a door coming down.
	People are going to just go in and grab whatever they can.
	It's not going to be organized. It's going to be a real feeding frenzy free-for-all.
	And so the government is simply going to be unable to pay its debts and its workers and so on, which is a fantastically positive thing.
	I mean, it's risky, don't get me wrong, but it's amazingly positive because It means that people get released to actually have productive jobs in the private sector and the government shrinks simply through being unable to pay its debts, right?
	So it's the only way the government can shrink.
	It's never going to happen voluntarily.
	So that's sort of the way that I see it going down.
	So just let me know if that sort of makes any sense for you.
	Yes, it does make sense.
	Well, there's just one thing I've been thinking about, though.
	Why is it that...
	Uncontrollable debt only seems to occur largely in the United States.
	Because I was reading some government statistics from my own country, and it seems that, certainly since when Tony Blair has been the Prime Minister, national debt in Britain has actually fallen, yet it keeps on going up and up and up in the United States.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but do you mean, is it the national debt that has been reduced, or the deficit that has been reduced?
	No, the national debt, not the budget deficit.
	So, yeah, the amount of money that the government owes to other people, not the difference.
	And this has occurred during a time of war, is that correct?
	I mean, I'm sure you're right, and if you could send me a link to some reference on that, that certainly would be quite remarkable that the government would be paying down its debt during a time of war, but certainly I would be happy to read more about that.
	Certainly, the national indebtedness of America is not actually that significant relative to other debt loads throughout the world.
	So, for instance, Canada, with no military sector to speak of, has a higher per capita national debt than America, and Italy has a higher...
	I think Italy, at least a couple of years ago, was Italy, then Canada, then a bunch of other places, but the national debt within the United States relative to the size of the economy, which, of course, the U.S. is one of the largest economies of the world, I think the largest.
	So it's not so much that the national debt is so horrendous within the United States.
	It's just that the future liabilities in terms of war and in terms of the medical expenses that have been built into the war, $100 billion worth of medical expenses coming for the veterans and so on.
	That is particularly catastrophic.
	The other thing that occurs, of course, is that because America is the richest country in the world, it tends to draw the most corrupt people to the top, right?
	And so America has a particularly dangerous situation because of the sort of military-industrial complex.
	It's demise is a little bit more risky than someone like Sweden and France.
	But all of the Western countries are facing exactly the same kind of problems with indebtedness and with, I mean, the major issue, I don't want to get into a whole discussion about demographics here, but the major issue is demographics.
	The fact is that the West simply is not reproducing.
	I mean, the birth rate is ridiculously low in the West.
	So, for instance, my big fat Greek wedding scenario where you have endless cousins and brothers, the Greek reproduction rate is like 1.2 children per couple, which is, you know, no culture ever survives that.
	I mean, that's simply impossible, especially with a welfare state, right?
	I don't know what it is in England.
	In Canada, it's very low.
	And I was going to get into it this week.
	We can talk about it more next week.
	But, you know, the Muslim world has three and a half kids per couple.
	And the Western world is like between one and 1.5.
	The U.S. is a little bit higher.
	But, sorry, 2.1.
	Yeah, the U.S. is a little bit higher.
	But that's all going to change as well, right?
	I mean, as state power increases, birth rate decreases for a variety of reasons.
	We can get into another time.
	But, you know, it really comes down to demographics, right?
	As people get older, they're simply...
	It becomes an inverted pyramid of income transfers in that this, you know, incredibly wealthy older people are looking to get all of their social security from younger people who are simply going to find that working doesn't really pay.
	Oh, sorry... Yeah, let me just wait until everyone comes back.
	So, yeah, so I mean the US is in a better standpoint than a lot of Europe is in terms of demographics, but for sure it's ridiculously bad in Europe, and of course that's partly because of the whole, it's largely because of the whole state of society.
	I'm just waiting, it says zero people in here, I'm just waiting for Skype to give me back the control.
	I'm just going to switch Adi off, and I'm just going to have to, hang on, let me just, We've got a bit of a heavy breather on, which is probably turning me on a little bit too much.
	Addy, go ahead. So, you're talking about the inevitability of the collapse of the US government.
	I know what you base your assumptions on, but I think we need to get a little more into this.
	Are we exactly sure that this will happen?
	The US likely will default on the foreign debts, but it's not a sure thing.
	I think statism is here to stay.
	I see exactly a way in which the US government is going to disappear or fade away as it is seen in the libertarian world.
	I mean... No, I don't see it.
	Sorry, just to be clear. I don't see that the US government is going to vanish and we're going to get Ancapistan or Libertopia.
	You know, when that happens, but certainly the size of the government is going to decrease much in the same way that in the Russian system, right?
	I mean, the size of the government and the degree of the free market has changed considerably since the fall of the Soviet Empire in 89, but it's not like there's no government, right?
	I mean, it just means that it's smaller and most people are better off.
	Yeah, but we can only say that it will relapse up to a point, but it won't fade away.
	For instance, economic recovery measures have been adopted in countries which underwent some sort of severe crisis where we're on the brink of something like that.
	Chile, right?
	Even the Soviet Union which later turned into Russia.
	They had a few years of hyperinflation or bad management but the state, the government eventually recovered and we can even look at hunger which went through the same collapse that Eastern Europe went through and now it's at the state that encompasses half the economy, right? And it's growing bigger.
	Absolutely. I don't think it's a sure thing.
	Well, a correction is a sure thing.
	Like, for sure, there's going to be a correction of some kind, and it's impossible to accurately predict, unless you're really in the inside, which, of course, I'm not, right?
	It's impossible to predict what kind of corrections that agree.
	It's going to be pretty severe, but it's impossible to tell.
	You're right. There's no way to tell exactly what form it's going to take.
	I can guarantee you it's not going to, as you, I'm sure, would agree, that it's not going to result in a stateless society.
	But there will be a correction of some kind that will require a significant change and the thing that's a little bit different from the cultures that you're mentioning is that a lot of that had to do with outside intervention either in terms of foreign aid or the stability of the US dollar and so on.
	The US dollar really is a lot of the hinge point of the Of the international economy.
	It is the gold standard, so to speak, in a horrible kind of way of the international economy.
	And if that undergoes a significant change, the euro won't be far behind in its collapse because there's a lot of tie-in there.
	And whether the yen or whoever, the Chinese currency will replace it.
	If that stability goes, it's going to be a little bit more significant to the world economy if the U.S. goes through a significant correction than, say, when Hungary and so on did.
	So I think it will be a larger effect.
	It certainly won't make a stateless society, but I think it will be a correction for the better.
	And the way that I'm trying, my best at least, to try and make it as much of a correction for the better is to put as many ideas out there as possible so that people understand that it's not freedom that failed, but coercion that failed.
	Yeah, this kind of makes sense and the second point that I had was about self-sacrifice and doctrine of sacrifice and this is observed in quite a lot of ideologies and even on our libertarians that there will be some time where Enlightened people,
	leaders will have to give up their lives in order to establish this stateless society, this freedom society.
	And I think the desire to sacrifice oneself is exactly the opposite of this objective that we have.
	I think we have to establish in some way that the self is I agree with you that the self should be at the center of morality and truth as long as it's myself.
	Like, as long as it's me and Steph that's at the center of everybody's truth and reality, that's perfectly fine with me.
	No, I agree with you. The self...
	There is no identity.
	There is no existence without the self.
	And there is no...
	Any objective or external measure to say this self is more important than that self.
	You should sacrifice yourself to me.
	I should sacrifice myself to you.
	It sort of reminds me of when I was a kid.
	I read this P.D.A.T. cartoon, the old Charles Schultz thing.
	And... I think Charlie Brown went to Linus or something and said, you know, what is the purpose of life?
	And he said, you know, the purpose of life is to make others happy, right?
	I mean, that's sort of the standard religious response, right?
	The standard collectivist response.
	And Charlie Brown said, well, I'm not happy.
	And then he turned around and said, somebody's not doing their job, right?
	And that's actually kind of funny, right?
	Harry Brown used to have this metaphor where he'd say, you know, if the purpose of life is to make others happy, I actually can't be happy.
	I can only give you happiness, but then you have to turn and give the other person happiness.
	They have to turn and give the other person happiness, and nobody ever ends up being happy.
	They're just trying to busy running around trying to make other people happy.
	I actually find it very annoying when people try to make me happy.
	You know, like when you get those waiters who are like, hi, is there anything else I can get for you or anything else I can do for you?
	It's like, you know, just leave me alone, let me eat, right?
	And so I don't actually like it when people try to make me happy.
	I just sort of prefer it when we're engaged in a chat.
	I mean, if you've ever been around obsequious people, you know just how kind of stomach-turning it is, right?
	So I absolutely agree with you.
	We cannot have a philosophy that is going to be at all rational unless it recognizes the primacy of the individual.
	Which, as I talked about in the Introduction to Philosophy series, is really the only instance in which human life exists.
	And if you're interested in human life, it has to be the individual that is the center of your moral philosophy, because there is no other evidence or examples of human life.
	There is no collective life, no nation life, no spiritual life that is collective in a religious sense.
	There is only individuals who are alive.
	And the idea of sacrifice, as Ayn Rand quite rightly pointed out, is like the question, of course, is sacrifice to whom, right?
	So people say you need to sacrifice your life for your country.
	That's a whole lot different than saying you need to go and get killed so that Cheney can get some money, right?
	I mean, that's, you know, when you look at the reality of what occurs in the realm of sacrifice...
	It's never to anything abstract.
	It's always to some other individual and there's never been any reason explained why that individual should be so much more important than you that you should sacrifice your life or your values to that person.
	I mean, that's real exploitation.
	Yeah, we could also apply the universality principle and self-sacrifice or sacrifice for an idea certainly not personal or cannot be because if you are willing to do that to yourself then you must be willing to do that to others, right?
	Right, right. Somebody has written here, Steph, UK national debt is lower today than it was in 1997 when Blair first became PM. Public expenditure has risen largely because of extra financing.
	For the NHS and other public services, you also have to note that the UK is only occupying Basra now, which is in the south of Iraq, I guess.
	The US had a far more extensive role in the war and occupation, of course, so I don't think our government has spent that much in comparison.
	So somebody's going to have a look for these statistics, and we'll certainly get back to them, because it's a very interesting question.
	Remember also that these are government statistics.
	There's no independent auditing of these kinds of government statistics.
	There's a very interesting website you can search for called Shadow Government Statistics, which actually is other ways of calculating things like unemployment and the national debt and so on, because basically, I mean, the government simply manipulates statistics in order to make itself look better.
	I would certainly be very skeptical about government statistics about things like a lower national debt.
	They're certainly not independently audited and verified.
	Like, for instance, when the...
	One of the things that the government does when unemployment gets too high is it just redefines unemployment.
	So then it says, well, if you stop looking for work, you're no longer unemployed.
	It takes you off the rolls and puts you, I don't know, in some other category, like an illegal alien or something.
	So, again, I want to sound skeptical, but we'll certainly look into this more, but I certainly would be careful in talking about government statistics from this standpoint.
	Alright, we are at 2 hours and 20 minutes, and that means my stomach begins to growl, which is not to say that I can't take another question or comment or two, but to try and keep them relatively brief if you have something.
	I've certainly opened the mics.
	If you would like to ask a question or make a comment, please go ahead.
	We have but crackling and the vague intake of breath as people try to.
	Get the oxygen back in their lungs after I've sucked it right out for the last two hours and twenty minutes.
	Okay, well, if nobody has any other comments, last chance.
	We can then wrap it up for today.
	I certainly thank everybody for joining us.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	Wonderful questions, as always.
	And I really do appreciate everybody's time, efforts, amazing work that's going into the board.
	We are getting some extraordinary activity on the board, which is great.
	We have had...
	I'm just going to actually just go and check this right now.
	But we have had quite a number of people who have joined the boards recently.
	And let me just check our numbers.
	We're definitely over 250 members, which I'm very pleased with.
	That's ahead of schedule.
	And of course, I'm all about the schedule, the projected growth, which is good.
	I just wanted to mention, as of a couple of days ago, we've had our largest amount of downloads so far.
	50,000 downloads in...
	In the first 20 days of October, that certainly is the best month we've had so far.
	And also we've had about 10,000 or 11,000 video views on Google and YouTube, which I very much appreciate and I think it's great.
	We have 256 users on the Free Domain Radio Board.
	I regularly see 30 to 80 guests online and we, of course, have an enormously vibrant and positive community.
	I certainly would also like to thank and compliment everyone for the very high degree, not just of intellectual content on the board, but of emotional maturity and wisdom, which is not to say that everybody just applauds everybody else for all their wonderful posts, but where there is conflict, I just like to point out that it is handled in a respectful and positive and inviting manner.
	And yet at the same time it's not insipid and all positive so I really want to applaud everybody for the magnificent work that is going into that board.
	I certainly appreciate it and it is doing an enormous amount.
	We can't tell how much good we're doing just yet but I can tell you that we're doing quite a lot.
	I think that this is a very great conversation that we're having here and I think it's going to have an effect.
	We don't know where. We don't know how.
	But I think when it comes, it will be quite surprising.
	Oh, and I also want to mention I've been asked to speak at the Libertarian Convention here in Canada.
	I don't know if I'm going to do it or not because I'm pretty sure they won't want to hear what I have to say.
	I'm still mulling it over. And I'd also like to thank you for the people who gave me the feedback on the article that's going into the book on sort of personal experiences in the freedom movement.
	So thank you so much and I will talk to you guys next week.

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