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Jan. 15, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:08
602 My Gift Part 1
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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
Oh, it's ten to seven.
On some day in January.
Fifteenth? Something like that, anyway.
It's a, uh...
Tuesday? Tuesday!
So, I hope you're doing well.
I, um...
I didn't podcast for the last day or a half or so.
I needed a short break, and also, I... Very oddly, my tooth began to hurt.
Very strange. I try to take good care of my teeth.
I still have my wisdom teeth, so I know I have to be pretty diligent about flossing and cleaning and occasionally sending in the elves with the sandblasters.
But I just had a check-up a couple of months ago, and it was fine, and the x-rays and everything was good.
But my tooth became too hurt, sometimes on the top, sometimes on the bottom.
I have always had a fear of teeth, I guess you could say.
I've always sort of been a little suspicious of the old chompers because I have a feeling they're going to turn on me at some point in my life.
And so far, I've been very fortunate with my health as a whole, but...
Something happened, and my tooth began to hurt, so I went into the dentist.
I sort of suffered through a night, and I went into the dentist, and they took X-rays and looked up and down and backwards and frontwards, and they could find nothing that was wrong with my teeth.
I had to have a tooth built up because it was very countersunk, and they're suspecting that perhaps in that one, which it's hard to see through the X-ray, I'm having a problem with a nerve, but they can't really tell.
So they sort of think, well, do you want us to do a root canal anyway?
It's like, what are my options, right?
What else could we do other than a root canal?
And they said, well, you could just, for a couple of days, suffer and see if it goes away on its own.
And I'm like, well, I guess that could work.
They'd tap my teeth and all that.
None of them hurt. So it's most odd.
Anyway, I've decided to not get the random...
Root canal done in the hopes that that solves the problem, because they can't find a problem, so we shall see.
Anyway, so I'm on Motrin.
I don't want to sound like a weenie who can't handle pain, but it's noticeable, as my brother would say.
Well, that kind of gets your attention, doesn't it?
Anyway, so I have a drive home, and I'm high on Motrin, so I thought, what better than to take you on a phantasmagorical journey through my brain?
Actually, it's nothing quite that prosaic.
I wanted to talk about something that I find incomprehensible about human nature.
Incomprehensible about human nature.
I just really, really, really don't understand where people's Confidence comes from in life.
It's just massive, massively confusing to me.
Maybe you feel the same way.
I'll tell you what I mean. You can let me know what you think.
But I was just listening to this Imperial Life in the Emerald City.
I'm listening to it on audiobook.
And this guy, this reporter who was in Iraq for a couple of years, wrote up his experience.
Not quite what I thought.
It's a little bit more like a Bob Woodward than a sort of novel.
I was thinking more Graham Greene.
I'm getting more Bob Woodward.
But it's interesting nonetheless, although I find the twists and turns of politics not too thrillingly exciting, because, of course, you just know that it's all nonsense anyway.
So maybe you're more excited if you believe that somehow political process can produce something good.
Thank you.
But there's one guy, I can't remember his name, and it's well worth having a listen to or read of the book.
There's one guy who is supposed to be arranging some massive complicated thing about how, I can't remember, food or medical stuff's going to be distributed after the invasion.
And he's in Kuwait, and...
He basically falls apart, and he, according to all reports, is sort of hiding in his room and not coming to meetings, and seems completely overwhelmed, and so on.
And so far, I have to tell you, that guy sounds like the most intelligent guy in the whole book.
To stupid people, you know, things are pretty easy.
To smart people, they get really complicated.
Now, I think that maybe on the other side of smart, when you get into genius territory, things become simple again.
That could well be the case.
But we'll just sort of deal with these two gradients at the moment.
So these army guys who are supposed to be dealing with this guy, they say, Ah, he couldn't...
What was their phrase?
He couldn't organize a two-car funeral.
And the number of assumptions that they had to make in order to figure out how to distribute whatever they were distributing after the war, you know, what's going to be left standing, what's going to be available, what's going to be there, what's not going to be there, and so on.
And these, sort of, the size and degree of variables would make any kind of project planning completely and utterly impossible.
It would be madness to even try.
And I've got to tell you that although this guy probably looked...
Pretty weak, next to everyone else, and certainly got, like, he was just striding around confident and so on, and probably felt overwhelmed and felt bad that he couldn't get things done, but he was right.
It was impossible. And of course, the massive cock-up that is Iraq has proven that people sail in with all the confidence in the world.
And to get to be in a position of running Iraq, you have to have at least had a few years under your belt.
So you assume that their confidence has come from something.
But just these massive, massive mistakes.
The guy who was charged with opening up the stock exchange was a 22-year-old kid who'd never studied economics.
It really is just astounding.
And I'm sort of working, in a sense, on the idea that the fundamental sin is hubris, is pride.
I'm just sort of trying to think about how pride leads to just such a wide variety of other problems in life.
But pride really is really quite something.
And I think this started cooking around in my brain a little while back when I had an interview on the Peter Mack show.
And either he asked or I just came up with the question myself, which is something like, you know, why anarchism?
Why anarchism? And I think, for me, the answer is a lot to do with this, that I'm just fundamentally clueless.
I mean, I think that I just sort of want to put that out there.
I know it's a bit of a shock when we're up here in the, I don't know, 600s or whatever.
But I think that I fundamentally am clueless about just about everything.
I don't pretend to know how shoveling money around, taxpayer money around, can...
Solve poverty, get rid of drugs, or help the old, or make medicine free and wonderful and available to everyone.
Like, I have no clue how to do any of this stuff.
I mean, I studied economics for quite a while, and I've studied philosophy for quite a while, but I think a lot of it comes down to, I just, I don't, I don't know.
I don't know. And that's one of the things that's quite interesting in the world, of course, is to say, I don't know.
I don't know.
That's the beginning of wisdom, right?
The beginning of wisdom. Is to say, I don't know.
Can I, as I said on the Peter Mack show, could I, Steph, design a better government than the Founding Fathers?
You know, I don't really think so.
I really don't think so.
Could I find better uses for other people's money than they would have for themselves?
I don't really think that I could.
I mean, even if I thought it was better...
I wouldn't do it.
I mean, I'm so square, I probably would have counseled all the people whose music I love that music is such a risky career that you'd better be off being a business guy.
I mean, that's how bright I am.
So, I don't...
I mean, I know this sounds odd, and I'll sort of get to what I mean by this.
I don't like to give advice to other people.
In fact, really, all of my philosophy, all of my podcasts sort of centered around one thing.
I don't know. I don't know.
And I don't like to give advice.
Because how am I supposed to know how you're supposed to live your life?
And, you know, you watch the show House, and it's like, I don't know anything about that.
I guess it makes sense.
You watch any sort of show, Prison Break, I don't know, Tattoo, and Break Out of Prison over 12, 24 episodes.
I mean, that seems like a heck of a lot of work.
I don't think I could do that, but it really is just an enormous amount of humility, and I was sort of struck when I was listening to this audiobook just how amazingly confident Everybody just plain is.
We have a can-do attitude.
When they went in, a group of people went in, three people went in, with the goal of a plan of privatizing all of the Iraqi public industries in 30 days.
Three people. Three people, 30 days.
The Baghdad airport was not even Open to commercial traffic.
So you'd have to fly to Jordan and then take an 11-hour drive for 11 hours through insurgents to get to look at a factory that was wrecked and looted and had no electricity.
A couple of barriers to capital investment, you could say.
No stable currency, no peace in the streets, no alternatives to governments allowed.
Insurgency, troops shooting up people, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, IEDs.
And no electricity or electricity only intermittently.
No skilled workers who are available.
No records, right?
I mean, these guys couldn't even figure out which government industry owed which government industry what before the war.
I shipped you 10,000 mattresses and you owe me, I don't know, 1.2 quintillion denarii.
And I just did that in my head, by the way.
And so I'm expecting all this to pay the people who've paid me to make the mattresses, and everything gets blown up during the attack, so nobody knows anything about who's owed what and what's valid and what's not valid.
We just make stuff up. So there's no way even of evaluating this.
So they open up the Iraqi banks and they say, okay, well we've got about a billion dollars in assets, more or less, and we have two billion dollars in deposits.
Hmm, I wonder how that's going to work out.
And then, of course, their first instinct is, don't tell anyone!
Hide it! Hide it!
Don't tell anyone!
Because there'll be a capital flight from the banks that will collapse.
So these three guys are sort of looking, and they can't even go and visit these places because it's too dangerous, right?
These three guys, oh, we're going to do this in 30 days and sell off all these state industries in 30 days on eBay, I think.
And there's some East German guy, they hear he had some experience in selling off the state-owned industries in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And they say, okay, dude, come over here and give us a hand.
We've got to sell all these things in 30 days.
And no doubt, this is what we're going to do.
This sounds good. We can get this done.
We can get her done.
And the East German guy comes over, and he says...
Well, I've got to tell you, it took 6,000 of us to sell off the East German industries.
And, of course, most of it was to people who spoke their language saying, you know, East German.
And they said, how many people do you have working for you?
And I said, oh, it's the three of us.
And he's like, no, really.
How many people do you have working for you?
I mean, it took us... 6,000 people to sell off these industries.
And this is when the books were all there.
And there was no war going on.
There was electricity. There was a common language, for the most part.
And about a million other things that made it easier.
And it took us years.
It took them years. And again, I'm not saying that's a very efficient way of doing it.
I'm sure it could be done more quickly.
But, you know, 6,000 people a year or two or three...
All of these positive things.
And then bango, bango, bongo!
Three people, all of the Iraq public industries, 30 days.
Hey, no problem. And they go in with all this confidence.
And one guy writes, I think, quite tellingly.
He says, well, it took us a little while to figure it out.
But we're three guys, and we're up against 150,000 state employees.
And we're saying to them, okay, we run everything now.
And he said it's like some guy wandering into getting off the boat to the United States and saying, I've got this piece of paper which says I own everything.
And everyone started begging with me.
And they'd say, okay, why don't you go sit over in the corner, crazy guy?
There's 150,000 of us state employees.
There's three of you. And so, yeah, absolutely.
This is great. We'll go get you some information.
We'll sit down tomorrow.
We'll have some tea. We'll work it all out.
We'll have a good chat. And everything will be fine.
And, of course, everyone thinks that someone's getting somewhere and so on.
But the enormity of the tasks is just staggering.
The enormity of what people try to pull off with government.
I mentioned this once before in the book All Too Human.
George Stephanopoulos writes down a list of what he's supposed to be doing in sort of a given day.
And it's dealing with at least a dozen highly complex, highly technical, highly subjective in a lot of ways.
How do you help poverty and so on?
And he's just sailing through meetings.
And he's like, yeah, I think we should do this.
Oh yeah, I think we should do that. It's like, you couldn't force an opinion out of gunpoint.
Like out of me, at a gunpoint.
For this stuff. How do you force people to give you money and then force other people to solve poverty?
I don't know.
I don't know.
And anarchism is just honest humility.
It's really just honest...
Humility. I don't know.
I don't know the best way to run a hospital.
And if Mises is right, and I'm sure that he is about price, lack of price, meaning nothing gets allocated efficiently, in the absence of price, neither does anyone else.
I'm sure there's really great hospital administrators out there, and I've been around the business world long enough to know that there are some people of real talent.
No question. But, do you know how to run a hospital in the absence of price effectively?
To the point where you're willing to take a third of a country's money and give it to people who say they can?
Are you sure about all of that?
Are you positive that's the best solution?
You know, the kind of...
Anarchism is just the scientific method applied to social organization.
I mean, that's really all it comes down to.
It's the scientific method applied to social organization.
It's voluntary, there's no central authority, just as there is not in the scientific method.
There's humility, there's a constant need for correction, and the recognition that as soon as you put a central agency in there that is self-interested, you're not going to get the self-correction.
In the same way that the free market is the scientific method applied to economics, anarchism is the scientific method applied to politics.
There's no man alive wise enough to have sole discretionary authority on judging whether other people's scientific methods are valid or not valid.
No human being, I mean, if somebody was there who could scan every single scientific paper in a tenth of a nanosecond and judge it to be flawed or accurate, then you wouldn't need a scientific method.
That guy would do everything, right?
You'd hope he'd have a kid.
But the wisdom and the knowledge and the resource allocation and all these kinds of things that comes out of voluntary solutions, non-centralized, non-coercive solutions, Freedom of association solutions.
The wisdom and the knowledge and the resource allocation that comes out of that simply can't be matched.
It's the difference between religion and science.
Look at the progress of knowledge in science and look at the barriers to progress to knowledge in religion.
And a scientist fundamentally...
I mean, I know there's lots of arrogant scientists and so on, but a scientist fundamentally is humble.
Fundamentally, a scientist is humble.
Because he says, hey, my opinion doesn't really matter.
I've got to test. I've got to validate.
I've got to have rigorous submission to peer-reviewed journals.
It's humble.
And no matter how wed I am to an opinion, if reality shows otherwise, then I have to give up my cherished opinion.
I just have to. No matter how much, the same thing is true as an entrepreneur.
No matter how great I think this product is, if nobody else agrees, then it's not really a very good product.
Or it's certainly not really a very profitable product.
And all of this humility that allows yourself to be guided by the feedback from reality, both in terms of physics and in terms of who wants to voluntarily interact with you.
That humility to say, it's not up to me.
It's not up to me.
And I really wish that we could either make people smarter.
I don't think that's necessary.
I think that what we really need to do is to make education better.
To drill this humility into people.
It's not up to me.
It's a fundamental statement about...
Anarchism and the scientific method and the free market.
What's valuable economically?
It's not up to me. I can make my little contributions by buying a pack of gum and thus raising the price of gum by.0000001%.
Where should people build their houses?
It's not up to me. I can go buy a house someplace I want to live and I guess if enough other people want to do that then the houses will be built there.
But it's not up to me. Is this scientific method accurate?
Or is this scientific theory or conclusion accurate?
It's not up to me. And it's not up to you.
It's really up to...
Does the physical verification support it?
How should people help the poor?
It's not up to me. How do we prevent old people from living in poverty?
It's not up to me. I can do my part.
I can give. I can help.
I can sign galley slave cruises for old people with them on the oars.
I mean, who knows? But it's not up to me.
And it's not up to you.
We can do our part.
But these global questions and answers about how things should be done, it's very hard for us to let go of that mad fantasy.
That it's up to someone else.
You know, people are always saying, well, how should we help the poor?
We don't hear, although logically we should, how are we going to help people marry better?
How are we going to help them have better and happier marriages?
Well, by choosing their spouses for them based on personality tests and this and that and the other.
Of course, people would just lie.
Other people would skew the results and Everybody would find out what the most popular answers are and just answer those.
Unless they didn't want to get married and they'd do the exact opposite, but it would be a pretty gruesome way to simulate a free market in marriage.
But who should people marry?
I don't know. It's not up to me.
I can get married.
I can say who I should marry.
I can't even say who my wife should marry.
I can beg and plead.
But I don't know.
I don't know. It's not up to me.
And it's a hard answer for people to hear.
And this is one of the great challenges of anarchism.
How does a country defend itself?
Well, you know, it's not up to me.
Well, how's it going to happen?
Hey, it's not up to me how farmers grow their crops, but still there's food in the grocery store.
It's not up to me where people build their houses, yet still I can buy a house where I want to live.
Getting that it's not up to you, but it will be provided, is really tough.
It's really tough. And this is the great danger of religion, why it feeds people's vanity so much, not just because the great all-powerful God is watching them.
But what's the answer?
I'll pray on it. It's up to God.
But of course there is no God, so you're just praying to yourself, so then it's up to you again.
George Bush sits down and says, God, shut up!
Invade Iraq! God says, yes.
Turns out to be Dick Cheney.
He's like, well, that's it.
I asked. I axed.
And the answer came. God said, invade Iraq.
And there's your answer.
And he's saying, well, it's not up to me.
I prayed on it. It's up to God.
But there is no God, so you are deciding in a universal manner.
And this is really the most fundamental challenge that I think that we face.
And this is one sort of thing that I could get across.
If there's one emotion that I could wave my hand and increase that emotion, I would increase the emotion of humility, uncertainty, insecurity.
It seems to me that the secure people who are insane...
Are enormously dangerous in the world.
And there's lots of philosophies that make people secure where they damn well shouldn't be secure.
That make them confident where they damn well shouldn't be confident.
And this comes back to a podcast I did about six months ago called How Do You Know?
And this is why Minichus...
God hate their steaming loathsome guts.
And this is why Minichus are so annoying.
Because they say that violence is bad and corrupt and this and that and the other, and they're on our side as far as that goes.
But they say, but just a little.
Poison's bad. Yeah, no, we're not quaffing the poison thinking it's good.
Poison is bad, so we really want to reduce the dosage.
Slavery is evil, so let's have fewer slaves.
And don't even get me started on libertarians and immigration.
There's an acid test that most people seem to fail.
I shouldn't say that. I haven't done any statistically on it, but just based on a fairly wide number of conversations over the years and not so long ago.
But it's the humility.
And the fundamental humility is really this.
The fundamental humility is also confidence.
The fundamental humility is also confidence.
It's one thing to say...
I don't know. Truck stopped in the road.
Sorry about that. It's one thing to say, oh man, it was going to be a good one too.
Oh, it was going to be done.
It was going to clinch everything. That was going to change the whole world.
And then there's that truck in the middle of the road.
But it's one thing to say, I don't know.
I don't know how people should live their lives.
I don't know. I believe...
Sorry, I'll go through this one step.
Step at a time. I don't know.
I don't know how people should live their lives.
It's not up to me. How will DROs handle it if you want to do X, Y, or Z? It's not up to me.
It's up to you to the degree that you want it.
You can ask for it. And if people want to provide it and you're willing to pay for it, then they'll provide it.
It's not up to me and it's not up to you.
How will things get done?
It's not up to me. It's not up to you.
Because nobody can comprehend it.
The vanity of the anointed, as it's sometimes called, and people who anoint themselves, lords of creation, organize everybody else's lives.
But, no, it's not up to them.
It's not up to you. It's not up to me.
Who should you marry? Who should you date?
It's not up to me. I can give you some words of wisdom, maybe.
I can give you some stuff that might be helpful, but it's your decision, fundamentally, and that conforms with the facts of reality.
You can't make other people do things.
Can't inhabit their brains and pull their neurons like levers, and it doesn't work.
So, the first step towards wisdom is to say, I don't know, it's not up to me.
I don't know. I don't know.
Don't know. Don't know. No, no, no, no, no.
That's the first step of wisdom.
Now, the second step of wisdom, which is the far more challenging one in a lot of ways, is the confrontation aspect.
Where the first thing you say is, I don't know.
And then the second thing you say is, and if you just stop there, then you just remain ineffectual and insecure.
But the real challenge is the following.
To go from, I don't know, to, you know what?
You don't know either, my friend.
That's the big leap.
That's the huge challenge.
And that's, I don't think, where libertarianism has gone far enough.
They say we run around trying to provide answers about how the market's going to solve this, that, or the other.
But, I don't know.
And none of us do.
How everyone should live their lives.
How poverty should be solved.
For everyone. How the children should be educated.
Who knows? Who knows how all children should be educated?
Each child's individual capacities and skills and family environments and preferences.
Who knows?
What insane human being is going to stand up and say, I'm going to put forward a curriculum for the entire state.
And it's going to be good.
It's going to be perfect for everybody.
Well, that's madness.
Nobody knows how to teach old children.
I bet you you put 30 kids in with a very great teacher and they're going to have to think about how to teach each child to get the most out of that child, to inspire that child the most.
What human being is going to say, oh, I know what everyone should eat.
I mean, okay, we can rule out ball bearings and castor oil, but, oh, I know what everyone should eat.
Everyone. Everyone. Old men with stomach cancer, young women, big with child.
I know what everyone should eat.
I mean, it's madness.
And then to force people to eat it, which is really what the state is all about.
Somebody's saying, I know how it should be for everyone, and you just fucking do it.
And if you don't, it's after the rape rooms for you, my friend.
So you say, well, I don't know.
And that insecurity is the first thing, and it's a tortuous passage.
It really is. That insecurity is really tough.
You say, I don't know. It's not up to me.
The next thing is to say, and you don't know either, my friend, and it's not up to you.
That's very hard. And that we have to say to men and kids as well as everybody else.
No, it's not up to you.
It's not up to you.
It's not up to you how I spend my money, how I live my life.
Yeah, yeah, you've got self-defense and we'll forget about all of that.
That's fine. It's not up to you.
And it's not up to me. My life is up to me and your life is up to you.
And I can give you advice and I can yammer in your ear and say you should or shouldn't do this, that or the other.
And really that's what I've been talking about for over a year.
It's not up to you.
Your life is up to you. Nobody else's life is up to you.
There's great freedom in that, right?
Once you give up trying to control your parents and just accept them for who they are, you can then see whether you like them or not.
And you can choose whether you want to associate with them or not.
And you can choose to associate with them if they're really bad and abusive people too.
My only thing is don't lie to yourself, right?
Because that's not very healthy.
Don't say that they're good when they're not good.
And once you get that, if you just think you don't know, then you feel insecure.
You're like that guy in Iraq hiding in his room, overwhelmed, thinking that everyone else knows how to do it, but he just doesn't.
But it's really hard to go to that next step and say, I don't know, and you don't know either.
And really, this is Socrates, right, in a lot of ways.
I don't know, and neither do you.
What is the best way we can have a small government that stays small and stays within the bounds of the Constitution and never grows and never becomes corrupt and never does foreign subdefusions and wages war and raises taxes?
I don't know. I have no idea how to do that.
I have no idea how to do that.
I have every reason to believe that anything you put into a place, a government that met once every three years and collected 300 bucks in taxes every decade, I can't figure out any way that that would not grow and corrupt the society.
There is no benign stately tumor.
And libertarianism is, well, I don't know, like, monarchism is like, I don't know how to do that, but I'm sure it can be done.
Or, I know how to do that, right, when you don't, really, because nobody knows.
And statism as a whole is, well, I don't know.
You put me in charge of the government, I couldn't solve all the problems.
I don't know how to solve these problems.
That's statism. But somebody does.
Somebody does and let's vote them in.
Somebody knows how to solve this stuff.
And that's statism.
Now, of course, if you're on the status side of things, it's like, I know how to solve these problems and you don't, so shut up and get in line or I'm going to throw you in the rape rooms.
That's democracy, fascism, communism, totalitarianism, dictatorships of every kind.
I know how to solve these things.
You don't. So shut up and obey.
Give me your goddamn money. Anarchism is, I don't know how to do it.
And, you know what?
Nobody does. Nobody knows how to use violence in a collective and centralized manner for the benefit of society in the long run without that power corrupting and metastasizing.
Nobody knows. Nobody knows.
And either you have the guts and the integrity to admit that, and to accept the humility of anarchism, or you strut around saying that you know all this stuff that you don't know.
And that humility, the humility to say, I don't know, and the integrity to say, and neither does anybody else, that's the one-two cha-cha-cha of rational philosophy.
And the degree to which you can achieve that, I think that you have achieved some real wisdom.
I mean, that's what I'm always striving for.
I think you've achieved some real wisdom in your life.
To be humble enough to say, I don't know, and it's not up to me.
And to have enough integrity and courage to say, you don't know, and it's not up to you.
That is really the great challenge that the pompous trumpeting masses really should come up against.
They should come up against that kind of certainty in philosophy, and they should come up against it.
Like a wave against a cliff.
Because the insubstantiality of I know, when you don't really know, should come bang, smash up against...
A philosophy of great integrity and great courage and great humility to say, no, you don't know.
No, you don't know.
You don't know. It's not up to you, and I don't know, and it's not up to me.
But I'm not going to fool myself that I do know and pretend to have answers where I don't.
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