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Dec. 31, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:01:25

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	Good afternoon, everybody.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, www.freedomainradio.com.
	Thank you so much for taking a little bit of time out of your frantic rave party preparations for New Year's Eve 2006.
	And I really appreciate you taking the time to come in and join.
	We will have a nice, juicy end-of-the-year chat about every valuable topic in the world.
	This is...
	The new Athens in some ways, our community we've just had, actually you've noticed today, 404 members on the board.
	I haven't checked the download statistics, but I'm sure that we're on track to be equivalent to or greater than 140,000 show downloads from last month, which is good.
	And thank you so much to everyone who's taking the time to listen and taking the time to communicate to others.
	Also wanted to mention that I will be...
	On a radio show tomorrow night.
	This will actually be my second radio show.
	I was actually on this last week on a gentleman's show.
	And let me just get the statistics for you.
	Last week I had the chance to talk about market anarchism and so on with a gentleman who's a libertarian or minarchist.
	His name is Peter McCandless, M-C-C-A-N-D-L-E-S-S.
	And I will be back on his show tomorrow night at 6 p.m.
	No, I'm sorry, Tuesday night at 6 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time.
	And you can get a hold of his show.
	Let me just grab his statistics here.
	And you can get a hold of his show at PeterMacShow.com.
	P-E-T-E-R-M-A-C-Show.com.
	He's also on the radio. You can go to his website and find out where.
	And, of course, we will be taking calls, mostly from appalled listeners who have listened to the first round and are shocked and appalled about what I'm saying.
	And I'm sure we'll start piling in to call me a mad anarchist who wants everyone to die in the streets, although there may be some people who are more positive towards it.
	So we'll see what happens from there.
	If you'd like to call in there, that would be more than welcome, I'm sure.
	So let's get moving with the first.
	I'm sorry.
	Corey, do you have to do this on the Skype show?
	Huh?
	I'm running into the show.
	Oh, oh, oh, so sorry.
	My wife, who monitors the board, is everywhere but actually in the show.
	So let me just take a second and move her in to the show and then we'll get started.
	And what we're going to do is start with the argument for morality, also known as universally preferable behavior.
	I've been sort of racking my brain to try and find a better way to communicate it because, Lord knows, the way that I'm communicating it So far, has been rather spectacularly successful at confusing people, so I'm going to try and take another approach to it, and we'll see if we can't make some sense out of it.
	There are a couple of self-contradictory arguments that I think it's important to become familiar with if you're going to start discussing ethics with people, and of course, ethics are very, very important in the realm of philosophy.
	Ethics are perhaps the most important I'll just go over a few of them and I'll do a very short Parable,
	since we are in the season where there are lots of parables floating around.
	So we'll do a short parable, and then I'll certainly take as many questions as people have about this particular phenomenon.
	So some self-contradictory arguments.
	If I come up to you, of course, and I say that you don't exist, that's a self-contradictory argument.
	Because if I say that you don't exist, but I'm talking to you, then that contradicts itself.
	These are arguments that immediately, without any need for action on your part, it's like having a fabulous duel for your honor, and you show up for a duel, and the other person takes out a pistol and shoots himself in the foot.
	Well, the duel's over, and you have no particular problems From there on in, moving on with that particular duel.
	So I hope that these are going to make some sense.
	So if I come up to you and say, you don't exist, then that is a self-contradictory statement.
	If I come up to you and I say, no argument should be put forward using a coherent sentence.
	This one's a little more tricky, a little more subtle.
	I'll just say it again. I come up to you and say, I jab my finger into your chest, which I only do if you're shorter than me, and I say, no argument should ever be put forward using coherent sentences.
	Well, that's a self-contradictory argument because...
	I have just put forward an argument to coherent sentences.
	Or if I say, all arguments are invalid, if they are put forward using coherent sentences, then I've just created a paradox, a mess and not a contradiction and so on.
	Similarly, if I walk up to you and I say, your ears never transmit accurate information.
	I walk up to you and I say, your ears never transmit accurate information.
	Well, there's one of two possibilities.
	The first, of course, is that I'm right and your ears do not transmit accurate information, in which case, if you've understood my argument, the argument sort of falls apart.
	Either I don't understand your argument because all I've got is a blast of static, or some sort of matinee, moo-moo sound, or I've heard you correctly, in which case your argument is false.
	So there are certain kinds of self-contradictory arguments that it's important to be relatively familiar with if you're going to start debating ethics, or if you're going to debate anything with anyone.
	But there are certain arguments that literally just shoot themselves in the foot.
	And I've mentioned these in a recent article, I'm still thinking about where to find a home for, because it offends just about everybody.
	But if I say to you that, for instance, the universe exists, therefore it had a cause, because everything that exists must have a cause, and that first cause is called God.
	Then that is a self-contradiction, because I can only say...
	I can't say that something is true just for an instance.
	I have to always appeal to a principle.
	I can't say, the universe exists, therefore it must have a cause, because that's trying to create a concept from an instance.
	It doesn't work. What I can do is I can say, everything which exists must have a cause.
	Everything which exists must have a cause.
	And that's a very different statement, because then, everything which exists must have a cause, and then you sort of fall down into the black hole of infinite regression.
	Because if you say, everything which exists must have a cause, then we say, well, the universe exists, therefore it must have a cause, and that cause is God.
	Well, does God exist?
	Yes. But God who exists falls under the same principle of that which exists must have a cause, so God must be created by a super-God, the super-God must be created by a super-super-God, and we end up with this problem of infinite regression.
	Similarly, If I say to my son, son, you must obey me because I am your father.
	Sorry, I don't do a very good Darth Vader.
	Actually, I don't do any good impressions at all.
	But if I say to my son, you must obey me because I am your father, then he's going to say to me, should I obey you because you are my father, i.e., all fathers must be obeyed, or...
	Should I obey you because you have greater knowledge or wisdom than I do?
	And if I say to him, well, you should obey me because I have greater knowledge or wisdom than you do, then he should say, well, you give me that knowledge and wisdom because it's the knowledge and wisdom that I'm actually obeying, not you.
	So once you transfer the knowledge and wisdom to me, then I can just know it and obey myself.
	Say, if I sort of give you a fish and keep giving you a fish, what you're going to say is, teach me how to fish.
	I get my own damn fish. Thank you very much.
	Or I'm going to say, hey, you should obey me because I am your father, Luke.
	I don't think that Darth Vader actually had a vaguely fruity British accent, but if he did, it'd be quite a different way to skipping down the hallway in his black robe.
	If I say you must obey me because I'm your father, then clearly we fall into the problem of infinite regression.
	So, if you must obey me because I am your father, then I must obey my father because he is his father and so on.
	And so my son can ask me, well, who was the first person to say, you must obey your father?
	Because whoever that person was, he was disobeying his father because it was a new rule that was being brought into place.
	And so if the new rule that is brought into place...
	is a self-contradiction, then all of the subsequent rules that are based on it are false as well.
	So this is another sort of example of infinite regression.
	Now once we start moving into the realm of what we, well, what I at Free Domain Radio call universally preferable behavior, then we're moving into another interesting area.
	And the reason that I started talking about the arguments that shoot themselves in the foot and their relationship to the universally preferable behavior universally preferable behavior for those who are just joining the conversation is one approach to the problem of ethics in the absence of religion.
	You can't have ethics in the presence of religion because religion just makes up stuff and everyone makes up their own subjective opinions and then calls them the will of God, which is radical subjectivism.
	It's pretty subjective and relative to say everyone's truth is equally true and everyone's opinions are equally valid.
	That sort of gray, soupy, post-modernist stuff, that's pretty radical relativism to begin with.
	But it's truly radical relativism to say everyone's opinions are equally valid and they are all derived from a universal, all-powerful, perfect God.
	Because then you're really in for religious warfare, right, as we've seen throughout history.
	So it's radically relativistic and it is radically subjectivist.
	In other words, everything that is made up is true in the realm of religion.
	You don't get universal ethics out of religion.
	All you get is universal hysterical warfare and rhetoric, bloodshed, and so on.
	As we can see from our dear theistic friends in the Middle East, and not just in the Middle East, but also going over regularly in uniform from the United States, from the Christian South of the U.S. So, you don't get any kind of ethics or objectivity out of religion.
	That's a fool's quest, which has consumed many a great thinker and the lives of many inhabitants of Powerful nations.
	So the question then remains, how are you going to get ethics?
	And the approach that I've sort of taken, which I think is of some interest, is this idea of universally preferable behavior.
	It doesn't mean that it's universally preferable by everyone, right?
	So if I just say something simple like...
	Don't steal. Don't steal is a moral rule.
	It doesn't mean that everyone in the world is then going to say, oh, Steph's right, I won't steal.
	And therefore, everyone is going to be perfectly in alignment with that moral rule.
	That's not what universally preferable behavior means.
	Universally preferable behavior means, I think, that human beings should not steal.
	I think that human beings should not steal.
	I think that it is universally preferable, not just preferable like I like jazz and you like country, but universally preferable in the abstract sense.
	All human beings should not steal.
	Then that's a statement of universally preferable behavior.
	It is universally preferable that all human beings do not steal.
	Any theory which puts forward a standard of either prescription or forbidding of human behavior is a statement of universally preferable behavior.
	It doesn't mean everyone has to follow it.
	In fact, it's quite certain that very few people are going to follow it in an absolute sense, in the way that we say stealing is wrong, but then many people will support taxation.
	In the way that we say murder is wrong, but many people will support the troops, who are simply murderers in costume.
	So universally preferable behavior simply refers to any theory which claims to identify a standard of behavior That people should follow.
	That's all it means. And any time you get sort of confused about this, you can just substitute the scientific method for that.
	The scientific method is the way that we discover things in the real world.
	It doesn't mean that everyone in the world follows the scientific method to determine truth from falsity.
	But in the scientific method, it's universally preferable that theories be logical, supported by evidence, reversible, independent of time and place, and so on.
	So there's a lot of confusion around this idea of universally preferable behavior.
	So the sort of trick that I'll give you...
	I think it's more than a trick, but it's a way of approaching it.
	The trick that I'll give you in terms of understanding how rationalistic ethics can be applied and used in the real world is that if somebody comes up to you and says...
	Universally preferable behavior is false.
	Universally preferable behavior does not exist.
	Universally preferable behavior is not valid.
	Then they have shown up for the duel, flourished their pistol, spat over their shoulder into the dawn, misty air, and then promptly shot themselves in the foot and are now dancing around, or I guess rather hopping around, and claiming victory.
	This is not the case.
	This is not the case.
	If somebody comes up to you and says universally preferable behavior is not valid, then they have already used universally preferable behavior in a very large number of ways.
	But I'll just start with the simplest, well, not the simplest, but the one that's most logically, I think, rigorous.
	Somebody comes up to you and says, there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior.
	Then what they're saying is that there is no such thing as universally preferable behavior, and it is universally preferable that people not believe in things which do not exist.
	I'll just take a moment to let that float down the sedimentary layers of all of our minds, because that's a very, very important thing to understand.
	Once you get it, it sits in your soul like gravity.
	But until you get it, it darts around like a hummingbird on steroids that's greased when you're falling.
	If somebody says to you, universally preferable behavior does not exist, And therefore you should not believe in it.
	You should not argue for it.
	They have just shot themselves in the foot because they are saying human beings should not advocate positions that are false universally because they're trying to make the behavior binding on you.
	You should not advocate universally preferable behavior because it is universally preferable that human beings not advocate false positions.
	Do you see the contradiction in that?
	If they say to you, human beings, you should not argue for, or universally preferable behavior is not valid, then they are saying that no behavior should ever be preferable to any other behavior in a universal manner.
	And this is different from something like a hobby.
	I might like to play ping pong, you might like to put those weird little model boats in a Bottle or something like that.
	Well, no one is going to say that that's good or evil.
	So, if we're talking universally preferable behavior, if somebody says there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, not only have they shot themselves in the foot because they're trying to create a universally preferred standard called don't believe in false things, and then saying that there's no such thing as a universal standard,
	but also When you put forward the argument that universally preferable behavior exists, and they say, no, it doesn't, then they have chosen to put forward a grammatically correct, coherent sentence in reply to your proposition.
	So you say, universally preferable behavior exists, and they say, no, it doesn't.
	Apparently everybody who disagrees with me is nasal.
	But if They put forward a logically coherent sentence that responds to what you've said.
	Then they have also displayed universally preferable behavior.
	It is universally preferable that I respond in a coherent sentence manner to your proposition.
	And my universally preferred response is to say that there's no universally preferable behavior.
	Again, it is a complete self-contradiction.
	It does not work a little bit, a tiny bit.
	They're just dancing around holding A foot missing two toes and some powder burns.
	They've just shot themselves in the foot.
	I hope, I mean, it's my sincere hope, and this is the kind of, I mean, this is the kind of argument that can be resolved in a schoolyard.
	This is the kind of debate that can be resolved in a schoolyard.
	This is not the debate about cloning.
	This is not the debate about the more complicated or obtruse aspects of philosophy.
	This is a kind of gotcha, na-na-na-na-boo-boo approach to philosophy that is not the most complicated thing in the world.
	And it's my hope at some point in the future that generations of children, once we get them out of the mental prisons of state schools, are going to get this in the schoolyard and are going to make fun of people who are going to argue against UPB, or universally preferable behavior, or whatever it's called, right?
	Or you can substitute the term preference.
	If somebody says, there's no such thing as preference, then clearly they are expressing a preference.
	It is a self-contradictory statement.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	Once we understand that universally preferable behavior exists, or if somebody disagrees with you, you'll never know about it because they won't reply to you.
	They certainly won't try and talk you out of it, and if they do, they won't use any coherent sentences.
	And the moment that it makes any kind of sense to you in opposing universally preferable behavior, they've instantly shot themselves in the foot and have accepted universally preferable behavior.
	Once we can get over that hump and recognize that it exists, then we can actually start to examine what it is.
	Right now, I guess I published this article proving libertarian morality about a year ago, And for a lot of people, there's still a lot of question and problem and challenges with this notion.
	And I'm okay with that, of course.
	It's a tough concept. It only took me 20 years, so let's just say that I have some patience for people who are struggling with it or challenged by it.
	But we really do have to try and get past this hump, because it is an airtight logical proposition.
	It cannot be opposed.
	It cannot be opposed.
	Without the person shooting themselves in the foot.
	So it's my hope that we can accept that there is universally preferable behavior and then we can start to work and define what it is.
	what are valid universally preferable behaviors?
	So that approach, I think, is something that can be very useful for people and And to move it into practice, a minor example would be something like this.
	Let's just say that I do really badly on a math test.
	I mean, let's not stretch our imaginations too far.
	Let's work with something that would be fairly probable.
	Let's just say that I do fairly badly on a math test.
	And I go up to my professor and I say, dude, I'd really like it if you could just pass me anyway, man.
	And I, for some reason, they're all from California via London.
	And my professor is going to say, why should I? Now, if I say, no reason, just, you know, hey, do me a solid, man.
	Just do me a solid. Just pass me.
	Pass me, man. I need it.
	Then my professor's going to say, well, no, because that's just your personal preference.
	There's no standard here, right?
	He's going to have to respond to my desire to be passed despite failing.
	It's going to have to be some sort of universal principle that I'm going to have to appeal to.
	If I just ask him for a personal favor, assuming I don't have his daughter locked in the trunk of my car or something, then he's just going to say no.
	And why shouldn't he say no?
	But if I say, you should pass me because my mom was sick, and I couldn't concentrate on my exam, and it wasn't fair, and I did study, but I couldn't think straight, and I was so baffled, and I hadn't had any sleep for two days, and so on.
	And then when I was at the hospital, these three nurses drank me into a room, did unspeakable things to me with candlesticks, and then shot me full of Novocaine directly to the forehead, so it really wasn't a fair test of my abilities.
	Then there's some universal principle that is going to be adhered to, right?
	I mean, I wasn't in control of my faculties, and therefore it wasn't an accurate reflection of my knowledge base, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But if you just go up to a professor and say, you know, just pass me for the hell of it.
	Pass me for funsies, for kicks, for wowsies.
	That's an example of non-universally preferable behavior.
	The moment you come up with some sort of argument around virtue and around fairness and around justice, then you are using universally preferable behavior, and then you get subject to all of the caveats, problems, logical requirements for consistency.
	Of course, if you just say to a professor, pass me because I'm asking you, then of course his response would be, if I pass you because I'm asking you, Then I have to pass everyone who asks me, right?
	We all know this from our kindergarten teachers and moms, right?
	Which is, well, if everybody was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?
	And so he's going to say, well, if I pass everyone who asks me, then I have to pass everyone because everyone's going to just ask me instead of actually studying for the test.
	So you're asking for a personal exception and let me tell you why it's unjust.
	The whole reason that you want to get passed in this math test is you want the degree because you want The prestige or the economic advantage or the job opportunities that come with completing this degree.
	But those advantages only have value because people don't get passed just because they ask for being passed.
	If I set up, you know, Steph's infinite house of universally preferred education, And then anyone who showed up said, hey man, can you give me a degree?
	And I'd be like, hey, sure, if you ask me, no problem, then the degree would be worthless.
	Right? So it's only because there's an objective standard for passing and failing and rigorous standards of education that a degree has any value.
	So... If, as Kant said, or as a categorical imperative, he said, act as if through your actions you were creating universal laws that everyone had to obey.
	That was his approach to this problem of universally preferable behavior.
	And there's some real value in that, and it's definitely something worth considering.
	I don't think it's a logical proof in the way that universally preferable behavior is that we've worked at in Free Domain Radio, but it's an excellent way to understand the challenges of moral understanding.
	So... Anyway, I just wanted to sort of point that out, that there is an extraordinary self-contradiction.
	There's problems with infinite regression.
	There's problems with immediate self-contradiction with anyone who opposes universally preferable behavior and uses coherent sentences and expects that you should drop a position based on an argument.
	They're not pointing a gun to your head and say, you stop saying that or I'm going to shoot you because that would...
	Not be an argument from universally preferable behavior, but keep your brain in your head or something like that, which would be more personal and subjective.
	But when someone comes up and says, you should not believe this argument because it's illogical, then they're saying it is universally preferable that people not believe arguments that are illogical.
	And then you should drop your argument...
	Unless your argument is for universally preferable behavior, then you'll say, well, yes, this particular statement, you know, everybody should kill or everybody should steal or, you know, rape is the highest moral ideal.
	Those all fall apart logically, as we've talked about before.
	But you simply cannot conceivably dislodge any argument for universally preferable behavior without using Universally preferable behavior.
	So, thank you so much for that little intro.
	How long did we do there? Ooh, 30 minutes.
	Oh no, actually there was a few minutes of intro before that, so thank you for your patience there.
	Do we have any questions?
	Oh, wise goddess of the...
	Everybody should listen to FDR. I would say that somebody has posted that.
	That certainly is an example of universally preferable behavior, but it is still suborned to the universally preferable behavior everybody should donate to FDR, which is quite different.
	All right, so we do have a question.
	Is it a should or is it simply the recognition that comprehensible speech is a de facto necessity for social interaction?
	Well, if somebody says that universally preferable behavior, I'm just going to say UPB. I know that some people don't like the acronisms, but I'm tired of saying it, so I'm going to be lazy.
	It's the year-end, man.
	I'm allowed to be lazy. But if UPB, somebody says UPB does not exist...
	And they're using coherent speech, then they're immediately saying that UPB does exist.
	So it is really a self-defeating principle.
	Nobody has to use coherent speech at all.
	I mean, I can come up to you when you're putting forward an argument, and I can say, men's sheep testicles, bing, bing.
	And then you'll be like, well, I don't know what you're saying, but I'm sure in some dimension it's a great argument.
	But they're certainly not arguing against you.
	And it's like going to a group of physicists and attempting to get a paper published that you've written using the Wingdings font in a language of your own invention.
	They're going to say, well, I have no idea what this even says, so how can I judge it?
	But the moment that somebody decides to make themselves comprehensible...
	Comprehensible, to use grammatically correct sentences, to respond to somebody after they've finished speaking and not at the same time, to use the same language as somebody who is debating.
	They have automatically used universally preferable behavior.
	Stephen, I have a critical comment to the Turtle article.
	Sorry, just a second here.
	I'm sorry, I can't quite understand that.
	Intelligent design or creationism faces the same problem.
	If the principle is put forward that life must be created by a god, then that god who is clearly alive must also be created by another god.
	Here you are making logical conclusions on something that is claimed.
	Act alive. I'm sorry, I don't quite...
	Yeah, I don't. Maybe you can post a little bit more.
	Stephan is deducing the aspect of a lie from the fact that God acts.
	However, religion does not, nor does it strive to describe reality.
	You have to be alive to act.
	Yes, this is another infinite regression problem that is faced by those who are religious.
	They say that life exists, life cannot have self-created itself, and life cannot have existed eternally, and of course even biologists would admit that.
	Life is, what, 5 billion years old, and the Earth is 10, and the solar system is 10, and the universe is 20 billion or something.
	So biologists don't say that life creates itself.
	But... Life has to have come from somewhere.
	Now, of course, for most physicists, it's, you know, the primordial soup, some sort of amino acid creation through electricity and chemicals and this and that and the other.
	So a biologist would not say that life has existed eternally, but a biologist would say that it's a co-mixture of energy and chemicals and, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a couple of snails and puppy dog tails, and presto, we have life, but it's not magical.
	Whereas a creationist would say that because life exists, it must have been created by a god.
	But I don't think that we could say that God is not alive.
	Alive is to have animation, to have consciousness, at least for a rational being.
	And I don't think they could say that God...
	They certainly would say God exists.
	And since God has every attribute of consciousness, of a man's consciousness or a woman's consciousness, which is to say...
	purpose, free will, choice, capacity, understanding, reflection, and so on, then God must be alive.
	If every life that is created cannot have self-created itself and cannot have existed eternally, then God, as a being who is alive, cannot have created himself and also cannot have existed eternally.
	And the last point, which I've made sort of last week, of course, is that the only processes that we know of that can produce very complicated things, like a human eye or my podcast, Tangents, is evolution.
	And therefore, God, who is supremely complicated, cannot have been the first cause of evolution, because complicated things only arise as a result of natural selection, not before natural selection.
	So I'm not sure if that answers your question or...
	Or comment or issue.
	But of course, yeah, absolutely.
	Religious people will constantly do this whenever you're debating with religious people.
	And it's important to be gentle, because remember, religious belief is inversely proportional to education and intelligence.
	Not always, but in general.
	So you're dealing with people who often aren't that bright.
	And they'd rather go for the easy, make-up answers than the rather difficult, work them out from first principles.
	So if you say, well, if a religious person says everything that is alive must have been created, and you say, well, God is alive, so who created God?
	They'd say, well, the concept of alive doesn't count for God, right?
	Okay, got it.
	So every time you come up with an objection to a religious person around their premise of God, then the religious person simply says that that does not apply to God.
	So I remember having a debate when I was in my master's with a Christian woman, and I brought up the omniscience versus omnipotence argument that God cannot be both omniscient and omnipotent.
	And she said, well, that would be true for a human being, but God is outside of time.
	So for God, all instances are one instance, right?
	And it's like, really?
	Did God just tell you that?
	Like, is God whispering in your ear saying, hey, by the way...
	Listen, I know he's getting you with this whole thing here, but let me tell you, I'm actually outside of time.
	I mean, I know I'm speaking in sequence to you now, but me, time, we don't even meet.
	I don't even know where time lives.
	I don't have the address. I can't Google it.
	I don't even know what time is.
	I mean, sure, I invented it.
	I don't know what time is. Nothing to do with time.
	Me and time, I don't even get the magazine as a subscription.
	So there's no time for me and no time for you, so just go with that.
	And then, of course, you ask them that, and they say, well, no.
	So you're just making stuff up. All that happens is people keep removing criteria from any kind of proof.
	So I hope that that...
	Right.
	Religion is not knowledge. Religion is not knowledge.
	Religion is not even knowledge like you have knowledge of fairy tales, because somebody who's not religious, such as myself, can have knowledge of the Bible and other religious texts.
	Religion is anti-knowledge.
	Religion is anti-curiosity.
	Religion is anti...
	I mean, fundamentally, it's anti-life, but religion is anti-knowledge.
	And there are some very fascinating debates going on that I'm reading about in a variety of ways, where people are saying, well, how on earth did religion come around, and why is it so prevalent, and so on.
	And there are a couple of theories floating around, none of which I found particularly satisfying.
	The one that I'm sort of working on in the old backburner of my brain is something like this, that the greatest threat to human survival is other human beings.
	I mean, once the saber-toothed tigers die out and you learn how to protect yourself against lions and tigers, the greatest threat to human beings are other human beings.
	And In a world of simple numerical superiority, then it is the larger group of human beings that wins out over the smaller group of human beings.
	And so it seems to me that the religious gene, and there are genes associated with religious faith, the religious gene has won out.
	Because religion turns people into killers.
	And so, basically, a religious community is going to have more warriors, more adherents, more slavish, cutthroat murderers than a non-religious community.
	A bunch of anarcho-capitalists are going to be sort of isolated and individualistic, and they're going to cooperate based on mutual regard and so on.
	They're going to be isolated relative to some crazy...
	You know, goat-shearing, human-infant-sacrificing group of Aztec nutjobs who are going to be thousands strong because they brutalize their children and they terrify their children into blind compliance with authority.
	And so religion turns the human predator relative to other human beings into far more of a deadly collective.
	So it doesn't strike me that religion as a gene and as a mindset within the human psyche It's simply the scar tissue left over from a near infinite series of murders.
	And we know that religious warfare, even in recorded history, has claimed nearly a billion lives.
	I mean, you think of the population of the Earth.
	Relative to, say, prior to the 20th century, that's a whole lot of dead people with crosses through their hearts, right?
	So religion simply exists as the scar tissue of a near-infinite chain of sociopathic murderers created by religion and enslaved to the state.
	And we can see this going on in the Muslim world in the present.
	We can see it going on in the Christian world insofar as the most Christian country is the one going and killing all the non-Christians, i.e.
	the United States. And so it's not that hard to see how dangerous religion makes a group.
	It turns them into blind, selfless, in the worst kind of sense of the word, automatons of murder.
	And the other thing that's true is that Religion also makes people less afraid of dying for a cause, right?
	So this Muslim idea of 72 virgins, which of course is a mistranslation, not as egregious a mistranslation as the silly nonsense about the virgin birth in Christianity, but if people who genuinely believe that if they die while killing non-Muslims, while killing infidels, that they're going to go to this eternal paradise, it's hard for rational, sane people to really believe that people believe that, but they sure do.
	Then those people are going to be much more willing to kill and die for their rulers than we are.
	And the Muslim world, they're fairly aware of all of this, right?
	So they say, well, we'll win because we're not afraid of dying and you are.
	So we're willing to be more violent.
	This is another reason why religious genes tend to win out, because religion just makes people more brutal.
	And before the free market, that's really how resources were shunted around in society, was people just threatening to kill or killing other people, and religion makes people far more prone to do that.
	So it's not surprising to me that the majority of people are religious.
	Because that is the gene that turned them into murderers, which made sure that that gene was going to spread, just in a purely amoral biological sense.
	So the prevalence of religion is really just evidence of the prevalence of genocidal murders throughout history.
	Okay, so there's no knowledge content in religion at all.
	Religion is simply an excuse for obedience.
	Religion is simply an excuse to get people to obey you.
	I've mentioned this before, but it probably bears repeating in this context, that when somebody is religious, they obey God, but God doesn't speak to them unless they're insane.
	They think that God's speaking to them because they're schizophrenic or something.
	But a man does not believe he is obeying the priest or the king.
	He believes that he is obeying God.
	And that bypasses his natural pride at being ordered around.
	And so religion is a wonderful way to get people to obey you without stimulating their natural pride at disliking being ordered around by idiots and funny hats.
	So, there's a great deal of meme survival rate, or meme flourishing in the idea that you can track the growth of ideas the way a virus spreads, and people have done this in terms of looking at things like false memory syndrome and so on.
	But religion is simply just a way to get people to obey, and to die for their rulers, and to kill for their rulers, and it has nothing to do with any examination of truth at all.
	Religion is anti-truth, anti-reason, anti-philosophy, and fundamentally in that it turns people into killers, anti-life.
	So, if you wish to ask a question, then you can click on the Ask to Talk page.
	Ask to Talk, you can type in the window.
	I'm certainly happy to, this is supposed to be not just Steph ranting, but other people ranting as well.
	So, we have a request.
	Alright, what do we got here?
	Okay, you have the mic.
	N-J-L? N-J-A-L? Can you hear anything?
	Oh, is he gone? No, he's gone!
	Oh, he doesn't have to request a mic to talk anymore.
	All right. Well, if you have a question, I'm certainly happy to take questions.
	This is a participative forum.
	Lord knows you get enough of me just chatting on my own in the car and in other places.
	So if you would like to click on Ask to Talk, that is your option to speak.
	If you would like to. So I'll just give a moment or two for that to kick in and for people to click and for Skype to transmit it before moving on to another topic.
	All righty. Roddy.
	Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?
	I certainly can. How are you doing?
	Oh, I'm good. How are you? Good, good.
	Happy New Year to you. Thank you for joining us.
	I actually post on your boards.
	They're under the name Red Deer Rick.
	Okay. And I was just wondering about this universally preferred...
	Isn't it possible that the name is a little off?
	It sounds like you're talking about the behavior that everybody prefers.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	I know what you mean. I do have some questions around that myself, and I've been sort of thinking I'm happy to take other suggestions.
	I certainly do understand that people think that.
	The problem, of course, with that is that if the behavior were universally preferred, we would need no such thing as morality, because everybody would already be good, right?
	But go ahead. Sorry.
	Okay. Just...
	I don't know how to make it into something that you could make a short acronym for or something, but it sounds like you're talking about behavior that should be universally obeyed, or rules of behavior that should be universally obeyed.
	No, I wouldn't say rules that should be universally, and this is, I think, the subtlety that, and I certainly appreciate where you're coming from, and you could be right.
	This is just sort of my first reaction to what you're saying.
	It's not rules that should be universally preferred.
	Ideally, yes, that would be a consequence and so on, right?
	Like, I mean, scientists would prefer that everyone use the scientific method, but the value of the scientific method is not dependent on everyone using it.
	Nutritionists would also rather that we all ate well and so on, ate our veggies, which is not to say that nutrition has no value if only one person believes in it, or indeed, if no people believe in it and it just collects dust in books.
	So I certainly do understand, but it really is just around the moral theory.
	It's the moral theories which get people killed.
	It's not individual crazy people.
	The opposition that we as libertarians or anarchists face in the world is not crazy people who want to come and shoot her dog.
	Those people are just so immensely rare in any sane society that they're really not an issue.
	The thing that we have to fear, like the people who threaten me, I mean, I just sort of take this, maybe you have some sort of different situation and you're locked in a status box or something, but the people who threaten me are the police.
	Most fundamentally, the police and the soldiers and the people who, if I didn't pay my taxes, would throw me into, you know, the old government rape rooms and make me lots of new friends named Bubba.
	Those are the people who are currently threatening me.
	I'm not threatened by sociopaths with machine guns.
	I'm not threatened by crazy people who want to eat my feet.
	I'm threatened by policemen and soldiers and Prison guards and so on.
	And those people think that they're doing the right thing.
	Those people think that they're the thin blue line, that they are moral, that they are good, that society needs them, and everyone else believes the same thing.
	So my particular opposition at the moment, we're so far away from, and this is not anything that you would be expected to know, but we're so far away from getting to universally preferable behavior like don't steal.
	The thing that's important right now is that people who put forward moral theories like Democracy is good.
	You should pay your taxes.
	It was right to invade Iraq.
	Country has the right to self-defense.
	Our troops are noble. Policemen are brave.
	All these kinds of things.
	Public school teachers want nothing but the best for our kids.
	Public education is required.
	Welfare is good. Government regulation is essential.
	Only the government can save the environment.
	People who have moral theories like that, those are the really dangerous people in the world, and those are the people who end up getting other people convinced that guns should be pointed at me unless I shovel over half my income and life to the government.
	So, as far as universally preferable behavior goes, I don't really care what people believe.
	What I do care is that people who put forward moral theories should have them be consistent and logical.
	I think that in the realm of morality which is the most important science in the world it's not too much to say that we should have the same standard as truth as say something like mathematics and physics did I completely blow away what your next question was going to be?
	Do you even remember it now? I think so, yeah.
	Sorry, but I hope that helped.
	But I agree with you.
	Yeah, it'd be great if everybody said don't steal.
	But what I want right now is just for people to understand that if you're going to put forward a moral theory, then it has to have at least the same level of consistency as 2 plus 2 is 4.
	Because 2 plus 2 is 4 is relatively unimportant compared to moral theories.
	But moral theories, anyone can say just any old shite and get away with it, whereas in the realm of physics and in the realm of biology and in the realm of science in general and economics and so on, people have to have logical coherence, evidence, proof, and so on, whereas in social theories and in philosophy in particular, things have degenerated to the point where any idiot, I mean, nobody here, right?
	Any old idiot can say any old thing with enough conviction and people believe it to the point where people are starting to turn back to religion, you know, the oldest curse on the intellectual growth of mankind for answers.
	So I'm just asking that in the most important science, we take even a smidgen of the criteria for proof and logical consistency that are in the least important sciences.
	Okay. Did you have another question?
	Did I even answer your question?
	Sorry if I didn't. Yeah, no, I agree with everything you say.
	I just wonder if there's a better way of expressing that than universally preferable behavior.
	And that seems to me when everybody argues with you is when they think you're saying that that's what everybody wants.
	Right, and you could be right.
	I was actually thinking of replacing UPB with SIR or SIR, which is just Steph is right, but I'm not sure that's going to get us any further, so we might have to wait for that one to be adopted.
	But look, I think you could be right.
	I'm not, of course, wed to the term, and sometimes I call Christina my turnip bunny and she still is beautiful, so just kidding.
	I'm certainly happy and maybe we can have a contest on the board or a mail-in contest for a better phrase because it does seem to make people short-circuit particularly.
	And of course, I think there are strong psychological reasons for that as well.
	I'm going to do a podcast about this this week.
	Why people are so opposed to even the idea.
	Of universally preferred behavior or ethics.
	So definitely another name could be a lot better.
	And if you can come up with any, please let us know.
	Maybe we'll put this out as a contest on the board.
	And otherwise, we'll just have to go with Sir, which will get us all back on the discussion of how culty all this is.
	Great. Well, I can't think of anything.
	I haven't been able to yet, but...
	Okay, well, we'll keep it out.
	Yeah. I'll read it.
	Now, Mr. Rude Word, I know that you're waiting to speak, but I've got to tell you, I do feel a certain amount of trepidation, so if you'd like to put your question into the chat first.
	Oh, okay. Well, maybe you could send it some other way or IM me, because this is a rather rude word gentleman who is waiting to chat, and I've decided...
	Oh, yeah, well, not here.
	So, all right.
	If we have other questions, comments, or issues, I would certainly be happy.
	Click on Request the Mic, and you are more than welcome to chat.
	I certainly get my fair share of chatting during the week.
	I'm all ears.
	I'm all ears.
	Or I'll sing to you. Ooh, don't make me do it.
	Don't make me do it.
	I couldn't get Christina to go to karaoke New Year's.
	So, it is beyond tragic.
	All right, so. Did we have any questions in the universally predictable conditions, universally applicable prescriptions, UAP, universally required consistency in prescriptions?
	Oh, dude, you were so into marketing.
	All right, so we're still just waiting for people to come into the waiting queue.
	I can wait all day, class.
	Don't make me wait. Did we have anything in the hempians' reason...
	Yeah, no, this is Cephas who was talking, he's got a Nathaniel Brandon quote, where Nathaniel Brandon claims to be dismissive of the Cognitive School of Psychology.
	I don't know enough to be able to answer that, unless you do.
	Okay, so I'm sorry that I couldn't really come up with a...
	Commonly acceptable behavior.
	Well, the problem with commonly acceptable behavior is that if universally preferable behavior is wrong, commonly acceptable behavior, people will just say, okay, so that's just what people currently commonly accept, that you are describing the conditions of human belief rather than saying, here's how things should be.
	So I think that then they'll say, well, how common does it have to be before it falls into your category and why is it this percentage and not that percentage and so on.
	Let's go over that podcast you did on various layers of preferability.
	Three-layer cake of ethics.
	Mmm! Okay.
	Greg, do you have your Mr.
	Microphone? Let me just put yourself on here.
	All right. Greg, you have been moved to the chatty queue.
	You can hear me?
	I can. Boy, you know, I've got to tell you, this new Skype is actually working out fairly well as far as that goes because it's a lot snappier and it's a little easier to manage these microphone things.
	But hey, what do people care about that?
	Go on. Well, I just wanted to go over that multi-layered...
	approach you had to preferable behavior.
	The ethics flan, yes, I remember it well.
	Yeah. And the one thing that bugs me about it was the fact that in the two outer layers, in the center you've got the necessity for logical consistency,
	which makes for a great So anything that doesn't meet the standard of logical consistency can't Can't be called universally preferred behavior, right? Can I, sir, just for those who haven't heard that podcast, I know that there's a vague possibility that somewhere out there hasn't heard that podcast.
	Just literally spend 30 seconds on the definitions.
	The first layer called morals is the stuff that's like don't kill, don't rape, don't steal.
	The stuff that you are allowed to use self-defense, that you're allowed to use violence in the defense of or the opposition to, And that's really what we call morals, the most fundamental, the most universal of these kinds of things, and the most objective.
	Now, the second layer is something called ethics, and again, these terms are somewhat arbitrary.
	It's just so we don't have to keep going over the whole triple-layer cake every time we talk about it.
	The second layer is called ethics, and that's stuff like Don't lie.
	Don't mislead.
	Show up for your appointments on time.
	Stuff that's sort of universally preferable, but if you don't do it, people don't get to shoot you, right?
	Because you're not directly harming somebody.
	And if you are, like if the lie is sort of fraudulent or you lie about delivering something on eBay or whatever, then people can attempt to recover that property and so on in the sort of DRO or dispute resolution anarchistic model.
	And then the third layer is more like aesthetics, and that is what kind of behavior is appropriate at a formal dinner party, right?
	Do you show up with just a pajama top on, as I did often before I got married?
	Or, you know, which side of the...
	Do you slurp your tea?
	Or which side of the soup does your spoon go on when you're setting the table?
	Those are all mere local customs and aesthetics.
	And it's sort of much more locally preferable behavior and, of course, doesn't require universal logical consistency.
	The first two layers do.
	So if you have a statement called don't lie, then that has to have universal consistency in a way that if you say that everybody should lie, it doesn't.
	And if you say don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, that has to have universal consistency and so on.
	But the third one, which is more around local customs, politeness, aesthetics, and so on, Which I think we called aesthetics.
	You're not allowed to use violence and it does not require universal consistency.
	There's no way to prove that the soup spoon should go on the left-hand side of the soup bowl or anything like that, whereas there's logical consistency in don't lie and also on be on time and so on, but you don't get to shoot people for disobeying that.
	I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, it just seems to me that this approach has a couple of problems, it seems to me, that First of all, without some sort of objective definition or formula,
	the various different prescriptions that you might stick in one layer or the other are essentially arbitrary.
	Wait, wait, I'm just picking myself back up on the floor.
	Okay, go ahead. I'm okay, I'm just going to breathe.
	Christina, give me the paper bag.
	Ooh, I think that's a better Darth Vader impersonation than I had before.
	Have I thrown him off his train of thought yet?
	Should I go slower?
	Okay. Um...
	So without some kind of objective definition or formula, the kinds of behaviors we're going to be putting into these other two layers are, you know, we're just sort of taking them based on the feel.
	And then the other problem is that, you know, why have these other two layers unless there's some sort of implied, unless we're saying that it's Arguably okay for there to be sanctions for these behaviors or against these behaviors.
	There's no point in having a category unless you're prescribing.
	If you're prescribing, then you're implying that doing other than what is prescribed will In that we're defining these different layers,
	we're also implying that we're the ones that are going to be arguing what those consequences should be.
	Right, and I would say, just very briefly, and I don't want to throw you off completely, but I think that we can argue for consequences in these.
	In the first one, the consequence, like if I come up and try and steal your wallet or something, then in an extremity, I mean, you're allowed to run away.
	In an extremity, you're allowed to shoot me.
	It's the only way that you, hopefully to wound or something like that or aim for the forehead.
	It's an easy target. But if you're allowed to use physical violence in the response to that, it's direct, it's immediate, there's nothing you can do.
	Now, if I'm somebody who...
	You know, employs really insecure people in my factory and I scream at them and I bully them and I make them work all these hours.
	That's not the same. You can't come and shoot me for that because I'm an asshole but I'm not evil.
	I'm corrupt but I'm not evil because I'm not taking a gun and pointing it at anyone.
	So, in the first instance, I think that you're allowed to use physical violence.
	In the second instance, the consequences are that society as a whole, and this is sort of the idea behind a lot of the DRO model, as it is behind eBay, that society as a whole is justified in shunning this person.
	In refusing to do business with this person.
	And this is a very effective economic technique, right?
	The boycott. Nike is employing sweatshops in Indonesia or something.
	I'm not saying I agree with it, but if you look at it, then people will boycott that company.
	Not because the product is bad, but because they view the management practices as distasteful or something like that.
	So if a company is genuinely doing bad things, but not evil things, Sort of bullying and exploiting workers and this and that, right?
	Not breaking contracts and so on, but doing unpleasant things, then I think that it's a fairly just response to then say, I don't want to do business with this person, and you should not want to do business with this person either.
	And this goes back to the prostitution debate that we had, if I can call it a debate, which is that people kept trying to drag the prostitution debate from level two, right, from the level of ethics to the level of morals.
	And, of course, I had never said that it was in the level of good and evil and in the level of using violence, but that it was a distasteful thing and an unpleasant and exploitive thing to do to visit a prostitute.
	Whereas in the third level, you can personally yourself choose not to associate with somebody who, I don't know, talks too much at your dinner party, or is me.
	But I don't think it's just to say in that situation that everyone should not, you know, like if I go to somebody's house and I talk about religion in an honest way, and somebody says, I'm religious, you should leave my house.
	Then I think everyone would say that that person has the right to do that.
	But I don't think that person has a just right to then start organizing a website saying that Steph is evil and nobody should associate with Steph and nobody should have him over for dinner.
	That would obviously be a bit of an overreaction.
	So I think that there's violence at the first level, social ostracism at the second level, and at the third level is personal ostracism.
	And again, I know that I've not defined these any more than 1% further forward, but if that helps at all.
	Well, a couple of questions that arise from that.
	First of all, what, in your mind, is the distinction between violence and exploitation?
	Well, violence obviously is the threat of direct force.
	Whereas, if I was married to somebody and was like a bad guy, I might constantly scorn, dismiss, undermine, gaslight this person, but never lay a finger on them.
	And of course, this is what many parents do.
	We see parents rolling their eyes at their children, belittling them, making fun of them.
	Teasing is a prime example.
	Teasing is not violence, and I don't think, however much it may have crossed my mind when I was a kid, I don't think that we would say that it's fair for, let's just say, a younger sibling who's teased a little too much.
	To shoot an older sibling, right?
	It may cross your mind, but, you know, we wouldn't say that that's really the right thing to do.
	But it is specifically destructive in nature.
	It is specifically aimed at humiliating, undermining, and destroying the self-confidence and capacity to think of another, which is, of course, why I categorize religious education as child abuse.
	But it's not evil. The priest is not, I mean, assuming that it's a priest with some self-restraint, the priest is not forcing himself on the child.
	The priest is making rather terrifying and nasty arguments towards the child.
	But I don't think that many people would say that it's okay that I break into the Sunday school and shoot the priest and say, well, I'm defending the child, right?
	That's stuff that has to be worked out at an intellectual level.
	So for me, the difference is there is behavior which is Destructive and irresistible, right?
	So if I've got a gun pointed to your ribs, there's not much you can do.
	Then there's behavior that's destructive but resistible.
	In other words, if I'm an abusive boss, you can quit.
	And then there's behavior that's just locally preferred but not destructive, right?
	So if you put your soup spoon on the wrong side, then it's not destructive to anyone.
	It's just a local cultural preference.
	But then wouldn't Wouldn't then the abuse of children fall into, even verbal abuse, fall into, and including the priest you talked about, fall into that first category since it's destructive and irresistible?
	The child essentially has no escape.
	Well, that's an excellent point.
	I can't come up with a good answer to that just now.
	Wait. Nope, still not even now.
	But Christina's not feeding me anything.
	Honey, give me an answer! She's actually got her hand in my back most of the time pulling the string.
	But... No, I don't have a good answer for that.
	I agree with you at some level, but I'm still, for whatever reason, and I'm not saying this is an argument, I'm just not comfortable with shooting priests myself.
	So, this is back to the whole question about the doctor who's misprescribing stuff and the intellectuals and their role in the violence of the world.
	For sure, it is very destructive to a child to be taught about religion, but...
	I'm still not comfortable, which doesn't mean that it just could be because I'm a chicken, right?
	I don't know. But there are more priests than atheists, so maybe I just don't want the open gunfire as yet.
	Right, but still that definition then has some problems with it.
	It does, and particularly in the realm of children who can't escape their parents, verbal abuse is real close to evil, if not in the camp of evil.
	What do you think, Sweetie? Any questions about that?
	It's horrible. Okay, well, we've heard from the authority, so any other questions?
	But no, you're right, it is very close, because it is irresistible, right?
	Almost anybody can quit a job where they're being abused, but children, sadly, can't quit the old nasty, down-putting kind of families.
	And the effects are long-lasting, everlasting.
	And the effects are long-lasting.
	I agree with you. I just don't have a very good answer for that as yet.
	And I would say it's something to do with provability.
	Child abuse in terms of the physical damaging of a child, the breaking of an arm or the black eye, is something that's pretty provable.
	Whereas to what degree is religious instruction provable or not in an objective sense?
	I think there's some practicalities around that.
	I mean, let's just say that we passed a law that said religious instruction is evil.
	Well, they're trying to do this, of course, in Afghanistan, where you've got these madrasses cranking out these crazy sociopathic Muslims who are out there trying to do suicide bombing and so on.
	And all that happens is that they close one down, another one pops up, two more pop up, they can't keep track of them.
	So if we said religious instruction is now evil in a DRO society and will not be allowed, all that will happen is that people will set up...
	Anti-religious schools, as they're called, where you're supposed to be taught the truth about religion, but they'll smuggle in these Samestad Bibles and they'll train their children to lie if they're confronted by the authorities and say, no, no, no, I hate God and blah, blah, blah.
	I just don't think you'd get anywhere.
	I think those kinds of things need to be uprooted philosophically rather than through the power of coercion.
	And, well, I mean, it would be antithetical to a DRO society anyway.
	You couldn't pass a law saying, Well, that's true, and of course there's no way that religious people would subscribe to a DRO system where they would be punished.
	What would happen is that as more and more people became atheistic or rational, what would happen is that it would begin to become in the second category.
	There are certain beliefs, of course, that we're all pretty aware a kind of evil, right?
	So there's this cult, which is not the Christian cult, but it's a sub-Christian cult called the Children of God, where there's sexual abuse of children, children get rented out as prostitutes.
	I mean, there's a really black kind of cult.
	And I don't think people would have much problem in a DRO situation shunning that particular group and cutting them out of the economic life of the world or of society.
	And thus doing fairly significant harm to them.
	But what I think would happen is that in a free society, I would certainly want to know in a DRO-based society if the people I were doing business with were Christians or not.
	And I would shun doing business with Christians or Muslims or whoever, right?
	Jews to the best of my ability and within the realm of what is possible.
	I would want to not do business with that kind of situation or with that kind of person.
	But As society became more and more free, the economic cost of being religious would go up.
	And I would do it not for the sake of the adult, but for the sake of the children.
	The economic cost of being religious would go up, the economic cost of being an atheist would go down, and that would further accelerate the process.
	Kind of the reverse of the situation we're in now.
	Right, right. Because now, with the government, the economic cost of being an atheist and a libertarian, of course, is going upwards.
	With faith-based initiatives, there is...
	And, of course, the access of power that being Christian gives you.
	I mean, it's amazing. The prejudice against atheists is absolutely staggering, particularly in the U.S., right?
	People say... They did a survey recently...
	95% of people said, yeah, sure, I'd have no problem voting for a female.
	And like 92% said, oh yeah, I'd have no problem voting for a black man to be president.
	Like 90% were like, oh, I'd have no problem voting for a homosexual, right?
	What were the statistics for an atheist?
	Like 50%, right?
	I bet you 49% of the 50% were lying.
	I'm sorry? I think it was like 44%.
	Right, and 10% of people are atheists, and there's lots of non-Christians and so on who themselves are feeling the lash of this increasing theological power base in the U.S. So, yeah, I mean, we face far greater prejudice than most blacks, most gays, and women in positions of power and so on.
	So right now, for sure, it is very hard to be an atheist, particularly in your neck of the woods.
	In Canada, you just don't speak about it, and it's considered vaguely offensive to speak about it, but in the U.S., There's an extraordinary degree of hostility.
	So getting back to the central question, if we decide that exploitation or exploitative behavior is Socially unacceptable as opposed to completely evil.
	Would you say that an exploitative person or an exploiter is someone who would be either willing to take advantage of Is it someone's inability to defend themselves,
	or someone who actually actively works to undermine the capacity for self-defense, or both?
	Well, if it's the first, if someone's unable to defend themselves, then they're in the first category.
	I mean, if I've got a knife against your ribs, unable to avoid, maybe avoid is better than defend.
	If I've got a knife in your ribs, you're unable to avoid the situation.
	You're already in the situation.
	But if I get hired by you and you turn out to be a jerky boss, then you can avoid the situation simply by quitting.
	And there will be hardships, of course, associated with quitting, and that's your choice to make.
	But you do have a chance to avoid it.
	So I would say that it's in the avoidability of the situation that...
	And, of course, there's lots of gray areas here, too.
	Not a huge amount, right?
	But this whole question of, you know, I don't know, some woman saying, I went to a frat party, I got totally drunk, guys were all over me, and then I seem to have gotten raped.
	Well... I mean, this is not my argument, but Camille Pagli's argument, that she would say, well, that's sort of like saying, I left my wallet for two days on a park bench in Central Park, and when I went back, it was gone.
	It was like, well, yeah, it's wrong what the person did who stole your wallet, but you weren't that smart yourself.
	Ah, but the person who took the wallet, or the person who raped the drunk girl...
	Is exploiting the situation.
	Oh yeah, no question.
	No question that the person who rapes and the person who steals is definitely in category one.
	No question. But as we're all fairly aware, preventability is better than...
	And of course, you do face the problem...
	Preventability is better than response.
	And you do face the problem, I don't know, like some guy who wants to shoot someone.
	I mean, this is a bit of a silly example, so I'm sorry if it's totally off the whack, but...
	You know, some guy wants to shoot someone, so he goes down to some really bad neighborhood dressed in a really expensive suit with a clear plastic bag of $100 bills in his hand and walks around pretending to be drunk.
	Well, you know, how long is it going to be before somebody tries to take his money and then he shoots them?
	Right? So there are certain situations where you can put yourself into a situation where you can then claim that self-defense was the only option.
	I mean, there are these kinds of things that could occur.
	I don't think they'd be very common, but there's a bit of a gray area around can you escape it versus can you not, if that makes any sense?
	We would call that foolish behavior, but the question is why?
	Why would we call that foolish behavior?
	Because In that area, there are people willing to exploit his vulnerability.
	In that case, he's making himself vulnerable to exploiters.
	Right. He's voluntarily putting himself into a situation where he is then acted upon in an involuntary manner.
	Right. So ultimately it's his choice at that point.
	Well, I would say that to get into...
	It's the same problem with, just to take a standardized example, with women who are abused by their husbands.
	If they go back home, then they're voluntarily putting themselves in a situation where they're going to be acted upon in an involuntary manner.
	And I think that most of us would sort of feel great sympathy for a woman who gets beaten by her husband, but feel less sympathy if she goes back voluntarily.
	But our judgment of the husband doesn't change in either circumstance, whether she leaves or not.
	That's correct. Okay.
	So clearly then, even verbally abusive, Even the verbally abusive fall into category one, regardless of whether the victim has a choice to defend himself or not.
	I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that last step.
	We're talking about if it's involuntary, if I've got a knife in your ribs, there's no way for you to escape the situation, but if you are being yelled at, you can leave the room and nobody's going to stop you.
	You can quit your job.
	Sorry, go ahead. But if I go downtown in a clear plastic bag full of cash, or I go back to my wife abusing husband, it doesn't change the fact that the act that occurs as a result of those foolish choices is still in Category 1.
	Yes. But I still don't see how verbal abuse goes from Category 2 to Category 1.
	I thought that's what you said. Right, because...
	In verbal abuse, nobody's preventing you from leaving the room.
	The moment they do prevent you, then they go from Category 2 to Category 1.
	Right, but no one's preventing you from...
	Either you just stepped your toe or came to a conclusion.
	The distinction between the two, then, maybe, is positive action versus negative action.
	So, in the first case of, you know, I have no choice, I can't leave.
	Let me restate that.
	Well, maybe we can look at it this way, that it's sort of the difference between family and prison.
	So in prison, you can't leave.
	If you try to leave, they'll shoot you.
	There's no question prison is a category one.
	You're forcibly kidnapped, incarcerated, and again, we're talking about a non-DRO society where prison may be a just response to a crime or whatever, right?
	And there are behaviors you can avoid doing in order to avoid going to prison, right?
	Right. But in the case of, say, a child in a family, You know, he's born there.
	He couldn't avoid that.
	No, I'm talking about as an adult, right?
	As an adult with your family, what is holding you to your family is the fear of verbal abuse.
	Like, I've never heard anyone who said, well, I'd like to defoo, but I'm going to get shot.
	I mean, that's defamiling in the Sicilian sense, right?
	Which would probably be a little bit more, you know, you're leaving the family, right?
	We don't want that. I mean, I just say, hey, stay, but try and do as little harm as possible.
	But... Your family is not going to shoot you for defooing as an adult.
	So what's keeping you there is the fear of verbal punishment, of guilt, of all of these things which you can treat, you can deal with.
	Nobody's stopping you from walking out of a family dinner.
	But in prison, if you're an adult who's in prison, if you try to leave the prison, they're actively going to shoot you.
	That's a category One.
	Category two is, well, they're going to talk about you in a bad way, right?
	They're going to post on a website that you're a mean guy or something.
	And I don't mean to diminish it, because it's actually a lot more scary for people, for the most part, to leave their family than it would be to go to prison.
	But it still is not direct physical force that's being used against you.
	Okay, so then the distinction for you is physical force.
	Anything that... Is not physical force would then fall into Category 2.
	And that's why the physical forces of retaliation to Category 1 is valid, because you're responding to the initiation of physical force.
	Whereas in Category 2, there's simply emotional bullying or put-downs or something.
	And again, taking aside the child issue, which I don't have a good answer for right now, what are you allowed to do?
	Well, of course, you're allowed to yell back if you want, but you can leave and no one's going to force you to stay.
	And this is where a lot of people are really trapped who don't live in totalitarian societies, right?
	In free societies, if you go against the wishes of your family in Syria and you're a woman, it's not unlikely you're going to get killed.
	There's honor killings and so on, stoned to death and so on.
	So that's category one.
	But in the West, we don't get killed for not going over for a family dinner.
	And that's more in the category two.
	And that, of course, as you and I both know, has an enormous amount of power.
	Right, right, that's true.
	But getting back to this special exception for kids, I remember you once said, I can't remember what podcast it was, but essentially anything, you basically argued that one way to look at universally preferred behavior is that anything you wouldn't do To an adult, you shouldn't do to a child.
	We wouldn't yell at adults in public.
	We wouldn't beat on our grocery checkout clerk for putting the soap in with the bread.
	Why should we do that to kids?
	So to reverse that, I would argue that anything we would consider an evil done to a child, why wouldn't we consider that an evil done to an adult? why wouldn't we consider that an evil done to an So, if it's wrong, because the moral nature of a human being doesn't change just because his age changes, right?
	Well, I think that it does, though.
	I mean, so far, we would not throw a child in jail for stealing if they were five years old.
	We would be more liable to blame the parents for not teaching them any sort of correct ethics.
	But the fundamental difference is that children can't leave their environment, whereas an adult can, right?
	A child can't leave the family An adult can leave a bad marriage or a bad employment situation.
	You're allowed to have different moral rules as long as there are objective moral differences, which is why somebody with an IQ of 60 or 70 is not considered to be as morally responsible as somebody with an IQ of 90 or 100.
	Where there are objective differences, I think that we're allowed to have different rules, just not in soldiers versus civilians, which is a completely arbitrary distinction.
	But the fact that children automatically are in category three just by their very environment, that they're in involuntary situations, I think certainly does raise it.
	But I don't think that you then get to say that a child who can't leave the family is in the same moral category as an employee or a woman who's being abused by her husband who can absolutely leave that environment.
	Okay.
	I've lost my train of thought.
	I forgot where I was going with this.
	Well, you'd gone back to some of my podcasts earlier.
	I think that those were all to do with upgrading the child's category 3 to the adult's category 2.
	But I'm not sure where you were going before that.
	Oh, I was trying to...
	Okay, all right.
	What I'm trying to get to is the fact that I... It's going to sound rather either or of me, but I really don't think there are these three categories.
	I think an action can either be judged by a moral standard or it cannot.
	So if something's either right or wrong, Or it's just convention, right?
	So, you know, where you just said that, you know, we wouldn't throw a five-year-old in prison for whatever.
	Well, in the past, we have.
	In the past, they were putting eight-year-old girls in prison for, you know, debt, you know, for incurring its debt or having to We're having to saddle the debt of their family.
	That was considered okay.
	What got us from that point to the point now where there's moral outrage at putting a 17-year-old in prison for fellatio, for example?
	Right. Well, I mean, I agree with you, but I still think we have to challenge...
	I mean, I agree with you in principle that it would certainly be nicer if there weren't many categories, but in my life, though, I still do have standards of right and wrong that I would never use violence to inflict, and those are to do with the associations, right?
	And we've seen this incidence with people on the board, right, where people on the board become abusive.
	Are they evil? No, of course not.
	I don't get to go over to the house and shoot them, but I definitely can exclude them from my property, right, from the server.
	And I was just talking about this.
	I got an email from a friend of mine who did not, let's say, go down the road with me towards anarcho-capitalism and did not have any good reasons as to why not.
	He just thought it was stupid in a way, right?
	He just didn't like it and was never down with the reasons why I stopped seeing My brother and would criticize me for that, again, without good reasons, without sort of any particular response.
	He couldn't, he's like, I can't argue against you, but I still think that you're wrong, that kind of stuff.
	And this went on for a while, and then I basically just stopped seeing him, because, you know, you can't have people who, when you're going out to a new location, to an unexplored territory, you need people who are going to help carry your load, not pile a load of rocks on your back, right?
	Because it's tough enough to do it anyway, right?
	So to make the journey easier is not, I think, a hard thing to ask or an unjust thing to ask from a friend.
	So he just sent me an email saying, oh, I don't know why we haven't spoken in a year.
	I guess we've both been busy, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, this kind of stuff, right?
	No recognition of the legitimate complaints which I had about his behavior and opinions.
	To me, that's undesirable behavior.
	I won't respond to or associate with that individual.
	It's not evil. I certainly would be completely unjustified in using violence.
	Breaks with integrity, lying, not showing up on time, things like a single guy drinking himself to death, right?
	I mean, this is not evil, but it's nobody that you'd want to really associate with, right?
	So to me, there's still standards of good, and it's not subjective, right?
	It's the same thing with going to prostitutes, as we've talked about before.
	If that argument is valid that we've talked about, about the continued exploitation of earlier sexual abuse victims, that's pretty unpleasant, right?
	I would definitely scorn and reject people who put that forward, as I did, as a moral principle.
	Again, still can't use violence against them.
	There are still levels of human corruption that occur that are really unpleasant, where there's still no direct use of force.
	So, I think just if you think of something like lying, it's wrong, but it's not evil, and that's, I think, the layer that needs to be added.
	So, you're making a distinction between right and wrong, and good and evil.
	Well, sure, because evil really is an extension of wrong thinking.
	I think this is all the way back to Plato, which is actually something I agree with him.
	Or it's Socrates who basically put forward the idea that evil is a kind of deficiency of knowledge.
	Nobody just sort of wakes up one day and says, ooh, I'm going to be evil, right?
	I mean, if you read in the paper tomorrow that I was arrested for axe-murdering a bunch of kittens, you'd probably be a little surprised.
	Some people on the board, maybe not so much.
	You'd probably be a little bit surprised, right?
	Because... Good habits tend to breed good habits, and bad habits tend to breed bad habits.
	So generally, evil is the end result of a vast series of number twos, category twos, which then result in evil.
	And again, if this is inflicted on children, which it generally is, then they're not really responsible for all the bad ideas that they're given.
	So if a parent beats a child for disagreeing with the parent, Then the child is basically going to end up with the bad idea that you should never disagree with somebody in authority.
	In other words, authority is all-powerful.
	And then they get authority themselves, and they start using it to bully and dominate other people.
	Well, it's a bad idea that is resulting in bad behavior.
	And this, of course, is why philosophy is so important, right?
	Because if you get good ideas into people's heads, then their behavior is going to...
	Yeah, for sure, there is right and wrong, and that's what we focus on in philosophy.
	And then by the time someone gets to good and evil, like by the time somebody becomes evil, they're beyond the power of philosophy.
	So the distinction between something that's evil and something that's wrong would be like the distinction between, say, I don't know.
	Well, maybe you can try this one, that if I drink myself into a stupor, that's wrong.
	But if I then go out in a car and mow down somebody who's crossing with the light on a sunny day, you know, who's like not, you know, dressed in black on a bicycle or something, for me, it's wrong for me to abuse my own system and to be destructive towards my own health.
	But it's evil for me to then go out in a car and mow somebody down, even if it's by accident, right?
	I'm still sort of responsible for it.
	So then, if the wrong things you're doing have an effect on others, That they cannot escape.
	That they cannot escape.
	So if I'm a drunken boss going and yelling obscenities at my workers, they can quit.
	But if I come up the blind side of somebody and I'm drunk and I mow them down on a bike, they can't escape that.
	I mean, I guess by not going out of the house they could escape it, but that's not really very reasonable, right?
	So taxation is evil because we can't escape it.
	And the military draft is evil because we can't escape it.
	And the invasion of Iraq is evil because the Iraqis can't escape it and the taxpayers can't escape having to fund it.
	We can't escape it without sacrificing at least some portion of our own lives in the process.
	Well, yeah, I mean, for sure, insofar as you don't have to give the guy your wallet if he sticks a knife in your ribs, but you might lose a ventricle or two, right?
	So that certainly is a challenge.
	The degree of options to escape it, I think, has something to do with it, which, of course, is right back to your point about childhood, which I can't solve just now.
	Maybe we'll sort of mull it over another time.
	Okay. Okay, well, I... I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding it, but I've got some places I can work from at least now.
	Excellent. Excellent. Good.
	Thanks for confusing the rest of us, says Christina.
	She was perfectly clear of it.
	You know, she was perfectly clear on the idea until I started to explain it, which is probably not the first time, nor the last!
	Now, we've managed to whittle down the number of listeners, which is good, because that means that there won't be any more questions.
	I'm just going to put out there that if anybody else has any other questions, I'm certainly happy to hear them, or we might have a relatively short show.
	Did we have anything else come through the chat?
	Yeah, I mean, layer three is not really a layer of ethics.
	It's not really a layer of ethics.
	To slurp your tea, it's not corrupted, it's not evil.
	This is the word, and it's a word that I have a real distaste for, this word inappropriate.
	That behavior is so inappropriate.
	I really dislike that, mostly because Christina used it on her first 12 dates quite considerably, and with a fair amount of mace, which I liked, so that was okay.
	Will you put God on the phone?
	Is he busy? Yeah, absolutely.
	If people want to have a year-end chat with God, I certainly can put him on.
	If people have questions, I'm happy to answer.
	But this is the question of inappropriate, right?
	I can certainly understand inappropriate to particular local customs and so on, but it's a word that in the Pomo universe has ascended to level three, right?
	Murder is inappropriate behavior and so on, and it really has, through some feminists and some Pomo stuff, has really become quite a powerful word.
	Yes, certainly we can throw God on the line if you had any particular questions.
	Does that mean that God is shacking up with you?
	You know what? Deadbeat layabout deity pays no rent whatsoever.
	He's all floating around saying, ah, but I can give you the answers to everything.
	It's like, yeah, would you chip in for groceries maybe?
	Ah, I am above groceries.
	It's like, but you keep eating them.
	Yes, but I created the groceries that you buy, so I don't have to.
	Anyway, I think you get the general idea.
	Total deadbeat. I'm telling you.
	Killer. All right.
	Sorry? Yeah, infinite regression, which Christina at first thought meant my emotional maturity.
	All right, Mr.
	J, did you want to go on?
	Let's roll on. Mr.
	J, you're live. If you had any questions for your local friendly deity.
	Oh, I bet you he asked me to go on.
	He doesn't even have a mic. Let's find out.
	Ah, he says...
	On the plus side, they don't spend much on bread and fish.
	You may wish to get down on the noise.
	No, I don't hear any noise, but let's move Greg back to listening.
	Jonathan, are you on?
	Do you have a mic? I give up.
	I'll try next week. Sorry.
	A little trouble here.
	Oh, goodness.
	Well, you know what's happened is that I thought God was shacking up.
	I think that the Christian deities at my place are stomping around in his underwear, which is not as pleasant as you'd think.
	God-like physique, let me tell you, that's not the case.
	A little bit of flabby from under use.
	But maybe Poseidon is intervening with Jonathan's particular statistics.
	So, all right. Let's ask if anybody else has any other questions.
	I'm certainly happy to continue for another little while.
	But if not, we shall prepare ourselves for our big evening out.
	All right. Mr.
	G, if nobody else has anything, I believe that you are up.
	Go ahead. Yeah.
	Last night, ask a therapist.
	Guilt. Guilt.
	Here you go, sweetie. Guilt.
	Any particular questions, Greg?
	Well, I was just kind of curious about this whole question of social expectations, roles, responsibilities, that sort of thing, and the psychological impact of that.
	Can you be a bit more specific?
	Sure. Particularly, I think it was about halfway through, Steph mentioned something about the idea of the caretaker and how guys are expected not to be that and women are expected to be that socially.
	I'm just wondering, well, first of all, who are these people that are doing this expecting and how do kids know about them?
	Wow. I don't know who are these people who are expecting and how do kids know about it.
	Sorry, sweetie. Just from my experience of chatting with Greg, if you're having trouble answering, we just go on a tangent for quite a long time.
	Throw a few jokes in, a couple of invitations, and you'll be just fine.
	I think on that note, I'm going to hand the mic over to you.
	Why was it you that was supposed to be nice and good?
	Why was it me that was supposed to be nice and good?
	In my family or in my family, in my community?
	I'm not sure that it was...
	I think within families, everybody has a particular role.
	I mean, people have been studying the family for a long, long time, and it's quite well documented and proven that everybody takes on a different role within a family.
	But I think Greg is talking more about in the larger social context than within the family.
	Is that right, Greg? Well, to an extent.
	I guess what I'm arguing is that when you're a kid, there is no larger social context than your own family.
	So this demand to contribute to the family is genderless in that sense, right?
	I mean, your parents will drape it in various...
	I mean, if there were...
	Sons and daughters in the same family, they would probably drape their demands in a gender-specific context, but kids don't really, at least my experience has been, that you're not really aware of any social context, at least until you get to high school.
	I think I would agree to some degree about what you're saying.
	Having grown up with a European background and having spoken to a lot of people who come from European families, not just Greek but Italian and Spanish and Portuguese and And British even.
	There's definitely a gender role, specific gender roles.
	I mean, girls are supposed to help with the cleaning of the household.
	Boys are supposed to help with maintaining the car and the yard work and shoveling the snow and that sort of thing.
	But I didn't have any brothers.
	I only had a sister, so we did all the girly things at home.
	I know that with my cousins, my male cousin would do the stuff outside, and my female cousin would do the stuff inside.
	Of course, my dad would do Everything.
	Cars and the lawn and the mowing and my parents would do the gardening together because they both enjoyed it.
	But I'm not sure, you know, in terms of social expectations, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
	Sorry, I got one other sort of comment to add.
	There is generally the perception, and this is really focused around the resources that are applied to the aging and ailing parents, that the girls are going to be the ones to do it.
	Now, in the absence of daughters, right, and in your particular familiar situation, as is mine, there are no sisters.
	What generally happens then is that The married son with the most susceptible wife, the wife then gets enlisted to take care of the parents.
	It's usually the case that when the parents get old and frail that it is a daughter-in-law who takes the initiative in taking care of the aging and elderly parents.
	And this is one of the reasons why, at least I've seen in some families, why the sons don't get married.
	I mean, to be honest, I think women look at an all-male family, an all-male generation, and say, okay, so none of these guys are going to take care of the aging parents, so which family is going to take the bullet?
	Which daughter-in-law is going to take the bullet for this?
	And I think that happens quite a bit as well.
	There's just not an expectation for men to do it.
	And again, that I think just comes through a wide variety of things, partly biological and partly cultural or social.
	But I don't, and again, I don't think that there's anything, any reason why men shouldn't, fundamentally.
	I mean, if Christina ever gets sick, I'd be a total slave to her, take care of her from here to kingdom come.
	So it's not that I think it's an unmanly or negative thing to do for men at all.
	It's just that in the general social context of things, It is pretty much the case that women take care of the elderly aging parents.
	And yeah, the men are around and the men pitch in and so on, but I'm just, and again, this is, what is my reference?
	Well, I've not experienced this directly, but in just about every movie I've seen, you see the woman taking care of the elderly parents and the guys around.
	But he's no more expected to take care of the elderly parents than he is to breastfeed the infants.
	It just seems to be kind of a social norm that's out there, and what it means is that as the parents get older, defooing is harder for women than it is for men, because there's a real appalled response.
	And this is partly because, I mean, if Christina doesn't take care of her aging parents, other people in the community are going to have to do it, and they don't want to.
	So they're going to come down like a ton of bricks on Christina, For not taking care of aging parents, because the work then falls on other people.
	Right, but I guess I just don't see how that's a gender-specific demand.
	It seems to me that whoever the kids are, they're going to get nailed with it one way or another.
	I agree with you. I agree with you.
	Now, you have, within your family, been a bit of a caregiver at times, right?
	Yes, that's true.
	Because you have been a caregiver to your youngest brother.
	To a significant extent, yes.
	Now, why did you do that? Because he needed the help.
	Well, but that's not a reason, right?
	I mean, sure.
	I mean, yeah, absolutely. But that's not...
	I mean, you must have given yourself a moral reason for it, right?
	I mean, you know, people in Africa need help too, right?
	More so than your brother does.
	So, you know, there are starving children in Africa.
	Finish your meal. But, I mean, there must be some reason why you gave yourself a reason for it, right?
	Well, sure. Brothers help each other out, right?
	Right. So, would you expect this to be reciprocated in the future?
	Like, if you then needed help, that your brother would do it and that's become...
	Like, is it a sort of mutual thing or is it a self-sacrificial thing or what is it?
	In other words, is it giving, like, if I pay an employee, I expect work, and if the employee doesn't do work, I don't pay them anymore, or something like that?
	Or, like, I'll take care of my brother, but it's an obligation that he has to do X, Y, or Z. Is it a mutual thing, or is it just, you know, this is what we do, and there's no mutuality, or how does it work?
	Well, I don't know that there's no mutuality there, but, I mean, I don't know that I can expect the same sort of in-kind reciprocation.
	I mean, God's sake, he's a musician.
	Well, you can expect for him to write a song for your wedding then, right?
	Someday. But is there mutuality?
	Is it something that you just do because, right?
	No reason in a sense, but it's just the right thing to do.
	Or is it something that you do with the expectation of some sort of mutuality?
	In whatever form it may be, housework or mowing the lawn or whatever, right?
	Or is it not that way?
	Well, I mean...
	This is much more fun than discussing abstracts, isn't it?
	Philosophy. Real life.
	Let's put the two together. Yeah, it never seems to work out that well.
	Well, no, I'm just curious, and I really don't have any particular judgment of it as yet, just because I've never really seen this in action.
	People do talk about it a lot, but I've never really seen it in action.
	And certainly, the reason why this is coming up is that taking care of elderly parents is not mutual, I guess, unless they're very rich or something's going to be in the will.
	But taking care of elderly parents is not something where it's like, okay, mom, I'll come over and drive you to your doctor's appointment, but then you have to come over and mow my lawn or something, right?
	I mean, that's not really what happens, especially as they get older.
	Yeah, I mean, they tried that for a while, but it just didn't work.
	Who tried what? My mom offered to actually come and clean my apartment.
	Oh, they always find the porn.
	It's no good. Yeah.
	No, that's not...
	I don't know.
	I mean, a 65-year-old woman with bad knees and I'm asking her to come over here and Vacuum my apartment?
	No, and then you can say, Mom, you missed a spot, and what?
	You call this tub clean? My God, woman, were you raised in a barn?
	Come on, play back the childhood a little bit on the other side of the fence.
	Oh, I don't think you're done yet, young lady.
	Yeah, that's definitely not going to work.
	Right. Or, in fact, didn't work, so...
	So no, I mean, there can't be mutuality there, obviously.
	But the mutuality with parents is usually something along the lines of, they took care of me for 20 years, so the least I can do is, right?
	There still is mutuality, it's just that theirs is in the past, and your obligation then accrues to the present.
	Right. But that's not the case with siblings, right?
	No, it's different with brothers, especially.
	So do you think that you're doing your brother good by...
	I'm sorry, go ahead. I mean, we're all sort of independent in the sense that, like we were saying earlier, we can avoid each other if we don't like each other, right?
	Right. So there, I mean, it's different.
	There has to be mutuality for...
	Any sort of expectation of exchange, right?
	So there's no mutuality with your brother, so what's the motive?
	And again, I'm not saying that there's no reason then to do what you're doing.
	I'm just sort of curious.
	What is the motive?
	Well, I guess my youngest brother, the motive is...
	I don't know. I guess I give him a better chance than I had.
	That's not exactly a moral argument.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	I mean, he'll never listen to this, so I'm sure this will be fine.
	One of the motives could be that you think he's like the next Sting or something and he's going to make a fortune in music and you wanted your fair share of groupies when the time comes.
	Well, I mean, he is very good at what he does, but he's just, you know, hasn't gotten the right opportunities yet, I guess.
	Right, and of course, the opportunities in the realm of music and the realm of art in general are too scary to contemplate for anybody who's good at statistics.
	I mean, the people who become artists are always bad at math, right?
	Because if you knew the odds, it would not be a sensible decision.
	At least that's my story, because that was certainly my call.
	So you feel that you can make up for the lack of opportunity that you got, because I know that you had musical abilities and desires when you were younger, that you are providing for him an opportunity that you did not receive.
	Yeah. Look, that may not be a bad thing, right?
	I mean, I certainly didn't receive any rational education and I tried to throw my little scraps out there to see what works for people, so that's not necessarily a bad thing.
	So the mutuality comes from your satisfaction or your pleasure in providing opportunities for people that you yourself were not provided with.
	Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment.
	Now, it's risky, of course, what you're doing as well.
	And I'll just sort of point out the risk, just because it's worth keeping an eye on, which is that the risk is that by keeping him shielded from economic reality, you may end up crippling him as an economic being.
	And we've actually covered that subject a couple of times.
	But... I mean, what's the time frame, right?
	I mean, I think that's the dangerous thing, right?
	This is where supporting somebody becomes enabling, except when I decide to quit and do this full-time relative to Christina.
	Don't listen to this part, honey.
	But where supporting somebody becomes enabling is where there's no criteria for success or failure, but it becomes a sort of drift along and see what happens.
	And I think that's the challenge, right?
	It's a way of keeping him in a sort of state of limbo economically and having the danger that he becomes then sort of crippled, right?
	Because there's a window of opportunity for getting your economic self going.
	How old is he? Let's see.
	Holy crap. 26?
	26, right? So this not being good at math sort of runs in the family.
	Is that what you're trying? I'm just kidding. So he's 26, right?
	So at what point do you stop supporting him?
	Actually, it's funny you mention that.
	We had already kind of worked out a timetable that way.
	He's supposed to be on his own by...
	This fall. By next fall?
	Like this fall of next year?
	Yeah, this coming fall, sure.
	August or September of 07.
	Alright, let me be an annoying guy and just put out a couple of tips there and Christina can correct me if I'm wrong.
	I think that you need a couple of milestones before the fall.
	Okay. Just because what's going to happen is he's going to get to the fall and there's going to be...
	I'm just guessing. Maybe this will all work out, but...
	I think you need some milestones beforehand because otherwise he's going to get to the fall and he's going to be like, I just need a little bit more time.
	Something's about to happen. I'm waiting for this callback and this and that.
	But I think that the fall has to be the end of the sequence of things that need to be achieved.
	It can't be this cutoff where it says, if you're not self-supporting by this, all of mine gets withdrawn.
	I don't know what that is. He has to have...
	Some significant conversation with someone in the music business who shows significant interest by March, and then he has to at least have had one meeting by June.
	I don't know how the hell you go about doing things in the, you know, he's got to be a backup dancer in the new Britney Spears video by August or something like that.
	Now Christina wants the mic.
	Are you sure? I don't want to stop talking if you're ambivalent about it, sweetie.
	In common to what you're saying, I disagree.
	No, I disagree.
	I mean, if they've agreed on the fall, sometime August or September, they need to pick a date.
	And, you know, it's not like his younger brother is a child.
	At least I don't think so.
	I mean, his younger brother is an adult.
	He needs to take the responsibility and he needs to work towards that.
	It's not like this is the first time he has a goal or an end point.
	He needs to be able to do that and Greg needs to stay firm.
	You know, this is the date that we've chosen.
	I don't know what you're going to do, but you're going to do it, and it's going to be done.
	I don't think milestones along the way is the way to go.
	You're not dealing with a 10-year-old.
	You're dealing with someone who's 26.
	Yes, but he's a 26-year-old musician, so I might have these stereotypes about musicians, and it also may be because I spent most of my early 20s around actors, but I would say that a 26-year-old artist and a 10-year-old non-artist may not be as far apart as you think.
	I could be wrong about that, but...
	And it may not be something you need to discuss with him, but he may not see the fall as clearly as you do.
	Question? No, no.
	It doesn't matter whether he does or he doesn't.
	Greg is not his parent.
	It's not Greg's job.
	This young man is a young man.
	He is responsible. I assume he's had some education.
	I assume he's had, you know, exposure to consequences.
	steps, hook of horror.
	Yeah, I don't think, Greg, that it's your job to do this.
	I think you guys need to agree upon a date, and you need to leave it in his hands.
	He's in his mid-twenties.
	At this point, he's got to be able to do it on his own.
	If that's the case, what's going to happen between now and the fall?
	Is the fall an arbitrary thing, or is it just some distant thing where something is supposed to happen between now and then?
	Well, that's kind of a deadline I've set for myself.
	I don't plan to be in the Midwest anymore after August.
	One way or another, he's out of here.
	So it's not because you've had a discussion with him where you both agreed that, say, August 31st or September 30th, he needs to be in his own place and he needs to be self-supporting and he's got to be managing his own life.
	It sounds to me like this is something that you maybe have talked about sort of arbitrarily.
	It needs to be a clear goal.
	What do you mean by that?
	Well, I mean, if you want him, you know, if there's, I don't know, I don't know the history between your brother as well as Steph does for sure, but if you feel that he's imposing or if you feel that it's, you know, he's become a burden or if you feel that he's, just for his own sake, he needs to move out and have his own life, you need to sit down and actually have a conversation.
	And negotiate the details.
	He might say, oh my god, the fall's too soon.
	I need more time. I don't know what I'm going to do.
	I mean, if he needs your help, he's certainly able to ask for it.
	But I wouldn't say that you necessarily have to provide him with any kind of support.
	He is not your child. He is your brother.
	He's an adult, I assume.
	I mean, if he's anything like you, he has a great deal of intelligence and can manage things on his own.
	He just doesn't need to be enabled.
	So it's a discussion that needs to take place where there are clear...
	Clear goals defined, and everybody agrees on the outcome, and there have to be consequences.
	But sweetie, I mean, when somebody says, I'm a musician, that's clear code, subtitled, easily translated to, please support me, I'm economically helpless.
	Many artists take jobs as waiting staff.
	Well, I guess I'm a philosopher who works in the software industry, but that's a decision that I made fairly early on in life to make sure that I was going to be economically stable so that whatever else I wanted to do, I wouldn't have to do while living at a shelter or something.
	What does he do outside?
	How does he support himself just now?
	Obviously, he's got a good gig going with you, but does he work outside of that?
	Yeah, he's actually got a regular full-time job right now.
	But it doesn't pay enough to pay any kind of legitimate rent.
	What does he do? He's a delivery driver for a medical supply company.
	It's enough to make his car payments and that sort of thing, but that's about it.
	Oh, so he has a car? Yeah.
	Right, right. I mean, there's a real risk here.
	And this is just sort of a personal experience that I went through as an actor, right?
	I mean, that there is a real risk here.
	The vast majority of people who pursue a life in the arts end up destitute, right?
	I mean, it is a brutal, brutal way to make a living.
	And that's because it's just so appealing, right?
	I mean, who wouldn't want that life?
	I mean, it's wonderful.
	I mean, it's like if I can turn Freedom Aid Radio and do a full-time gig, I mean, I'm the happiest guy in the history of the world.
	But it's a hard thing to do.
	And I think that if he's going to sort of look forward into his life, and God, I mean, don't you feel like the worst guy in the world ever for talking to people about their dreams?
	And, you know, like maybe poising the big ball-peen haver above their future goals and dreams and desires.
	But life is not eternal, and...
	Tough decisions do have to be made about a hobby versus an occupation.
	Many a human being has been consumed by a love or a desire for art and the mistaken belief, and I'm not saying this is yours, but the mistaken belief of those around them that this is a noble dream worth pursuing, it should be helped along by other people.
	Most times, art is a dream that needs to be crushed.
	In a really significant way.
	Again, I hate to say that because it's so anti what most people say.
	And I could be totally wrong. I don't think it's sour grapes because I actually had a very happy life as an artist.
	I would have preferred to do it full-time, but I just wasn't willing to take the risk.
	Other people may be willing to take the risk.
	Certainly, some people do achieve success later on in life, but if he's a musician who can't make a living at being a musician eight years out of high school, that's not a good sign.
	Right? So I would say that most times people's dreams need to be crushed because they're more fan...
	And again, I'm not saying this is true of your brother or anything like that, but just for those out there who may be in similar situations, most times it should be a hobby, right?
	Most times it should be a hobby and there's nothing wrong with it being a hobby, right?
	You can go and play at bars in the evenings and so on.
	The reason that it's awful is that many people, when you're young, and I've seen this with many actor friends, right?
	When you're young, It's a fun, footloose, fancy-free kind of lifestyle.
	Then this massive thing hits you when you're in your late 20s and early 30s where you go, oh my god, I don't have any skills.
	I can't have a family.
	I can't own my own property or even rent an apartment.
	What is that old thing?
	What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend?
	Homeless. It's a really, really awful thing to say, but for most people, art should be a hobby.
	There are a small number of people who have either the talent or, it's not even so much talent at times as well, it's also, do you appeal to popular sensibilities, right?
	There are very few novelists, and I think, I mean, I put myself into this category rightly or wrongly.
	I mean, I think I'm a good novelist, but what I write just does not appeal to popular sensibilities, which is why I switched to philosophy, because I'd really want my books to succeed.
	But in order for my books to succeed, people have to become wiser, I think.
	So I'm sort of doing philosophy so that I can be a novelist after I'm dead.
	That's sort of the approach that I'm taking.
	But for me, it absolutely should be a hobby.
	If I had tried to make this a full-time occupation, I would have lived a very different kind of life.
	It's important to think of your brother at 45.
	Is he still going to be delivering goods in a truck or a spaceship or whatever's going on in 20 years?
	Or is he going to say that I gave it a great shot, I'm still going to keep an iron in the fire by continuing to write music on the side and playing in bands on weekends and so on, but it's time for me to get a real job.
	I think that people have a very tough time having that conversation with people because there's this belief that you have to follow your dreams and other people have to support you.
	But it's really not just based on my own experience.
	And again, I don't think it's sour grapes.
	I genuinely am happy for people who succeed in the arts, although they generally do so at a high cost of their own personal integrity.
	But I would say that it is important to crush people's dreams in the real world.
	I mean, I know that that sounds completely horrible, and I don't mean it quite that brutally, but I think it's important.
	I mean, it's not you who has to do it, and you maybe probably more have to have this conversation with yourself relative to him, but will I have done him some service if he's 35 and still in the same situation with his career?
	Sure, sure.
	And actually we've had a couple conversations like that.
	Although, you know, I don't come at it from quite the same angle as you do, but the end result is the same, I think.
	You put the ball-peen hammer in a velvet sack.
	That's nicer. It's more a soft bludgeoning than an open-braining.
	That's good. That's nicer.
	And that's a diplomacy that I could, I'm sure, learn quite a bit from.
	Right. And the bottom line is that...
	His plans are starting to get in the way of my plans now, so one way or another, he's got to figure something out for himself.
	Right, and you don't want him to miss that window of getting a career.
	Obviously, he's an intelligent guy.
	Musicians are very, very smart people, intellectually and musically, if not necessarily, in terms of EQ and forward-looking planning, but...
	So he's obviously a very intelligent guy, and for him to end up in a manual labor situation for the rest of his life because he missed the window is a pretty brutal sentence to impose upon him.
	And, of course, it's not your fault ultimately, but you certainly do have a say in the matter.
	Right. All right.
	Have we driven everyone else away? Yes.
	Excellent. Excellent.
	All right. Well, if anybody else had any other questions, I would certainly be happy to answer them.
	Otherwise, we're actually, as I said, going out this New Year's Eve.
	We're going to go to a dinner and a dance.
	I don't think there's an actual dance, but I'm sure the tabletop will be clear, and after one glass of champagne, that's usually my reaction.
	So... Thank you so much, everyone, for dropping by during this New Year's Eve show where we've had wild spikes in attendance.
	That's fine. I'm sure people have to get their hair done for New Year's Eve.
	I don't, but that's okay.
	So have yourself a wonderful year.
	Thank you everyone so much for participating in this wonderful conversation.
	I've learned an enormous amount this year.
	Thank you very much.
	video posts but thank you so much everyone for making this such a wonderful year I think for ideas as a whole I think we've done some amazing work in the realm of ideas together it's been a wonderful year a very very intellectually stimulating year Certainly my knowledge and wisdom has increased in proportion to the quality of the questions and comments and criticisms that I've received, which have all been almost uniformly excellent.
	And so thank you so much, everyone, for joining.
	Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful new year.
	And I will see y'all next year.

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