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Jan. 21, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:52:07

611 Call In Show Jan 21 2007

Are anarchists naive, and leading a gene pool to freedom!

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	Alright, so I guess we'll get started.
	Well, thank you everyone so much for joining us on this chilly Sunday up here in Canada.
	I really appreciate it. I wanted to start with a topic that got me just a little riled up.
	This weekend, we had a gentleman, I won't sort of get into his name, but he was, I guess, a fairly prominent libertarian.
	He dropped past the boards and began to chat with us about minarchism.
	And for those who are not into these technical definitions, minarchism is the philosophy that, sort of the foundation of the U.S. philosophy, it's the idea that a small government is the way to go.
	That it's not good to have a very big government, but that it's very good to have a small government.
	And in the anarchistic model, this is a particular kind of fantasy, or a particularly dangerous kind of fantasy.
	And so, as he put forward the idea, the people on the boards, and I think quite rightly so, Ended up asking him questions of principle, like if violence is bad, if the initiation of the use of force is bad, how can it be good if it's smaller?
	If slavery is bad, it's not like less slavery is better.
	A smaller focus doesn't mean that suddenly you change things from bad to good.
	It's not like if...
	I mean, we all pretty much agree that if 100% of the economy of a country is owned and run by the state, that that's a bad thing.
	90% is pretty bad, and it's not like if it gets down to 10%, suddenly it becomes really good, or 1% even.
	The ability to use force against other people, to initiate taxation against them, to draft them into an army, to regulate the use of their own private property, and so on.
	It's a poison pill and it really doesn't matter whether you swallow a hundred of them or one of them, it is going to result in the same kind of thing.
	And of course there's no example of a society in history where a government has stayed small.
	Governments always grow and grow and grow.
	People questioned and criticized this gentleman, and he got a little volatile.
	I'll just read you a quote that he had sort of out there where he said...
	He said, somebody said, we just handed you your ass, which, you know, is not necessarily the best way of approaching a debate, but things flared a little bit.
	And he said... Somebody wrote to him and said, confronting a person active in Libertarian Party politics, lots of laughs, seems like such a contradiction when I hear that term.
	Like this is good stuff.
	It should happen more often and more publicly.
	When they continually get their asses handed to them, maybe people will start to see the inconsistencies of minarchism, and there can be a real growth in the awareness of market anarchy as an alternative paradigm to the state as a whole.
	We're like people who were abolitionists in the 19th century.
	The abolitionists didn't say we need less slavery.
	They said slavery is immoral.
	To its root, to its core, there's no way to be a moral slave owner, and it's not about making slave owners treat their slaves better.
	And it's not about giving the slaves every third week off to go to town and have fun.
	And it's not about this, that or the other.
	It's about one core issue that there is no way to morally own another human being.
	And the same thing is true in the way that anarchists approach the question or the problem of the state.
	There is no moral way that one human being has the right to initiate the use of force against another.
	And the state is really predicated on that whole principle of being able to have a small group of people who can use force at will against everybody else.
	And of course that's going to corrupt and it's going to grow and it's going to expand and this and that.
	People began to question this guy, and he replied back to this post I just read, which wasn't mine, but he said, you might have a point if I'd actually gotten my ass handed to me, but the opposite is true.
	I've had a few feeble and childish arguments tossed at me, and I've destroyed them.
	This is actually WWF script as well.
	Also, there is nothing in consistency with minarchy and libertarian philosophy.
	Obviously I won't be posting here again.
	I've got better things to do than to crush the weak and laughable arguments of children who believe in utopia.
	And if you can...
	I apologize for even reading this kind of intellectual nonsense or anti-intellectual nonsense.
	But I think it's a pretty graphic way of explaining or describing the kinds of oppositions that anarchists get handed fairly often.
	That we're considered to be...
	Naive, utopian fantasists that it's never going to happen.
	There's just no possibility.
	It's mad. We've got to work within the system.
	We should vote for Ron Paul.
	We should run as libertarians.
	We should go move to New Hampshire.
	We should buy Sealand. We should do all of these things.
	And it's all the most errant nonsense.
	And I'll sort of tell you why, and then I'll sort of open it up to either responses to this topic or anything else that people want to talk about.
	Why do I not think that anarchism is pie-in-the-sky utopianism?
	Well, the probability of an event's occurrence does not mark whether or not one is a fool for believing in it.
	Sure, snapping my fingers tomorrow, or today, maybe the day after, is not going to...
	You can sit there. It's not going to get rid of the state.
	No question. The state's probably going to be around for as long as I am.
	And I'm no spring chicken, so that prediction is getting better day by day.
	But the fact that it's improbable, so what?
	Wasn't democracy improbable?
	Wasn't America improbable?
	Wasn't eliminating slavery improbable?
	Wasn't equal rights for women improbable?
	These things, so what?
	It doesn't matter. If it's progress, it's progress.
	Whether it's probable or not doesn't really matter.
	If you look at Thomas Edison and he took like 2,000 different ways of trying to make the lightbulb work, each one of those ways was improbable.
	And after 1,500 of them, I'm sure each of the next ones looked even more infinitely improbable.
	But so what? Why does probability have anything to do with it?
	When you're looking for a radical improvement in the human condition, you have the entire weight of history, tradition, and the inertia of society against you, but so what?
	Why would it be any fun if it were easy, right?
	That doesn't seem to me to make any sense.
	So the probability of something occurring doesn't matter.
	If you have to sort of climb your way over a mountain, and it looks to be very daunting to do so, Then you can choose not to climb the mountain, but don't wander into the valley and think that you're getting over the mountain.
	And this is sort of the problem that I have with traditional party politics or those who say that if you vote for Ron Paul, things will be better.
	And Ron Paul is a pseudo-libertarian slash Republican who is one of the smaller government advocates within American politics.
	And I think he's considering running for president or something like that.
	So the fact that...
	Getting rid of the state is a very difficult and improbable task.
	It has nothing to do with whether it's the right thing to do or not.
	You could spend 40 years looking for a vaccine for a particular medicine.
	Maybe you'll fail. Maybe you'll get that vaccine up and running.
	Of course, it's highly improbable that you're going to succeed.
	How many people worked at Fermat's last theorem before it was solved?
	Hundreds, thousands. So, how many people have been currently struggling with trying to do the grand unified theory?
	Einstein sort of dreamed about one set of equations or paradigms that's going to explain all of the forces strong and weak in the universe.
	It's all enormously improbable, but so what?
	It's still what you do if you want to make something really great with your life.
	Of course you have to aim for the improbable.
	Me going and picking up the mail this afternoon is not that improbable.
	Actually, no, for me it kind of is because my wife handles that stuff.
	But improbability doesn't mean anything to do with it.
	If you're aiming at eliminating violence as a moral norm within society, it's never a moral norm for people in their own individual lives, but it is a moral norm in terms of how we think of as the state.
	Taxes are good, illegal immigration is bad, regulation is good, for a lot of people invading foreign countries is good.
	So if you're looking at eliminating violence as a moral paradigm, which is really the central focus of what's going on in the anarchistic movement, at least the part that I'm interested in, it's not that people are like, oh, let's get rid of the state, that's why I wake up in the morning.
	What happens is people say, I think violence is bad.
	And that's really the sum total of it.
	I think violence...
	Violence is bad. Forget self-defense.
	We're just talking about initiation of the use of force.
	I think violence is bad.
	That's really all anarchism comes down to.
	Violence, abuse, both verbal, physical, emotional, sexual.
	Violence is bad.
	That's all it's coming down to.
	And if that's a really tough thing for people to To work with if they want to find all of these areas and nooks and crannies and hidden corners and craters and clouds through which to hide violence and justify violence and say that, yeah, violence is bad, but then we have this war on terror, so now violence is good.
	Well, that's fine. Then you're just saying violence isn't bad, but I'm saying violence is bad.
	And that's the central, massively complicated thing, right?
	I mean, all Einstein did was say maybe the speed of light is constant, but that changed everything.
	And all an anarchist is doing is saying violence is bad.
	It's really not that complicated.
	So if getting to a society where violence is generally conceived of as bad, which is a long way off, if that's getting over the mountain, then since the state is really defined as little other than an agency within a particular geographical region,
	a group of people who claim the right to initiate force, to initiate and use violence against other human beings, Then participating in that in a voting way, in a support way, and so on, you're just saying, well, yeah, violence is bad, but let's use it here.
	Violence is bad, but we need to deploy it here.
	Violence is bad, so we should have less of it.
	Well, none of that really makes any sense.
	If violence is bad, I mean, if getting punched in the face is bad, there are not a lot of people who say, okay, I'd like to get punched in the face with a non-ring finger, but from a different angle.
	Or, I don't like getting punched in the face every day.
	If I could get it down to every five days, I would be so happy.
	You'd say, no, I don't want to get punched in the face.
	Like, if I could just not get punched in the face, that would be good for me.
	So, if participating within the state in a very proactive kind of party politics, vote for people, go support campaign, this, that, the other, if that is supporting the use of violence, which in my book it kind of is, Then you're not getting over the mountain.
	You're going into the valley. And you don't have to go over the mountain.
	You don't have to say that violence is bad.
	That high cliff on the other side is Libertopia, you don't have to do that.
	But if you go the other route and you say that violence is good or acceptable or should be less or should be used in a different kind of way, or Ron Paul is the new Christ of pacifism who can use violence in a way that's better than George Bush, as if it doesn't matter, right?
	Like saying, well, if we put this other guy in charge of the mafia, it'll turn into the United Way.
	Well, it's not going to happen.
	The fact that we're called naive, I think, is really quite interesting.
	The last thing that I'll say about this, and I could go on, as I'm sure everyone's aware, the last thing that I'll say about this before opening it up to questions is, I think that anarchism is, as a political side, not in terms of the personal, anarchism for me is mostly a personal philosophy, but as a political philosophy, anarchism is really composed of two things.
	One, violence is bad.
	And two, nobody can use violence.
	Nobody can use violence and do well.
	Violence corrupts everyone.
	The power to initiate force against hundreds of thousands or millions or billions of people corrupts every human being who comes into contact with it.
	There's nobody who can run the state and do a good job.
	There's nobody who can use violence against unarmed opponents or mostly disarmed opponents and save their soul.
	So violence is not only bad, but it's infinitely corruptible.
	It infinitely corrupts the human soul.
	A minarchist, on the other hand, or a libertarian who's involved in party politics or somebody who wants to vote for Ron Paul or whatever, what they say is, well, sure, violence is bad when it's too much.
	So we should reduce it.
	We should just shrink it down.
	You know, like if we get chemo to reduce the size of the cancer, then we're good.
	We don't want to eliminate the cancer because that's bad in some way.
	But if we can just get the cancer to shrink, If we can just get it down to the point where it's like a manageable sickness, to the point where maybe it only sticks out of our armpit half an inch rather than two feet, that's a real advantage.
	And if you shrink it down any further than that, then that becomes very, very bad.
	Well, I don't think that that is a rational position.
	I think that if you accept that there is no human being who can be put in charge Of running a state of using violence against their fellow citizens and do it in a way that is not going to be corrupt and corrupting and growing and increasingly predatory.
	I think that's naive.
	I think it's naive to have this magic spatula, right?
	Just think of a whole bunch of peas on a counter, on a kitchen counter.
	This is the Freedom Aid Radio cooking show for those who are...
	Think of...
	You know, you got a whole bunch of P's on a kitchen counter, you got this magic spatula, and you go wham, right down the middle, and you flick 10 P's to the left and then like 9,000 million P's to the right.
	Now, those P's on the left, see, they can handle running a state, but those P's on the right, oh my God, they need to be ruled over, they need to have guns pointed at them, they need to have prisons, they can't be allowed to run their own lives, their own businesses, their own incomes, they have to hand over their children to state education.
	All this kind of nonsense.
	I think it's naive to say that there's this massive differentiation between the peas on the left and the peas on the right and say those guys on the right, they can't handle their own freedom.
	Those guys on the left, they can handle and they can flourish from and society as a whole can flourish from the use of violence that is We're good to go.
	All of those people, those 10 Ps on the left, they can do all of that and they'll be great.
	Those people can handle all the capacity to use violence that the modern state offers and they'll do a great job.
	But all those other Ps, they can't even be allowed to run their own lives and to come to voluntary negotiations with each other because those people can't handle freedom.
	So they need a state.
	Okay, it's a small state, they say, but they need a state.
	All those Ps on the right need a state.
	Those couple of peas on the left, they can handle that kind of violence.
	Well, what insanity is it, in my view, to say that there are people who can't even handle their own freedom because they're so susceptible to corruption or they're so confused or they're so idiotic or whatever.
	There are all these peas on the right that can't even handle their own freedom, but there are these few peas on the left.
	Who can handle the power of violence and force and all of the power of the state and all the power of cattle prodding all the other peas on the plantation around and not be corrupted.
	That is naive.
	To split humanity into the sheep and the shepherds, into the livestock and the herders, into the maize and the farmers.
	That is naive.
	That is irrational. There is no magic spatula wherein you can divide human beings into those who must be ruled and those who can rule without being corrupted.
	That's naive and anarchism is the only philosophy that recognizes that power corrupts in a very fundamental way.
	What kind of human being wants to take control of a military and a judicial system and a congress What kind of human being wants that kind of power over other human beings?
	The virtuous ones? Well, no, of course not.
	The bullies? The actors?
	The shallow? The hateful?
	The false? Yeah, of course.
	But the virtuous?
	Do you want that kind of power over your fellow human being?
	I don't think so. Would you like to run around your neighborhood waving guns at people and getting them to obey you?
	I don't think so.
	Anybody who wants that kind of power is by definition corrupt and that's why the state only attracts those kinds of people.
	If you want to separate the worst from the best with your magic spatula, you create a state and you will get those ten people on the left hand side of your spatula and they will be the worst people around because they want that power over other human beings.
	So it's not even randomized.
	You are actively creating and separating and giving the maximum power, the maximum power to use force against other human beings to the worst in society.
	Not to the best. The best don't want that power.
	And because we recognize this as anarchists and we recognize that there's no magic way of dividing human beings into the good who should rule and the bad who need to be ruled.
	That it's arbitrary at best and in reality simply gives bad people control over good people.
	Because we recognize that and we don't compromise and we don't say well let's see if we can find these magic peas who can run the state or let's just make violence smaller or less.
	Let's only beat our wives once a month rather than five times a month.
	Because we say no violence is bad and no human being can handle it and the only solution to corruption and the only solution to hegemonic domination, the only solution It's freedom of association and competition, as we've talked about before.
	For that we're called naive.
	It's not even for having idealistic principles that are so far out in the Milky Way that they can't be seen by the Hubble scope that we're called naive.
	We're called naive because we recognize a basic fact about humanity, which is that violence is bad, and those who want to use violence are worse.
	And that's really all it comes down to.
	And that's all that anarchism is really saying, that human beings cannot handle power over other human beings.
	It's really that simple. Violence is bad.
	No one can handle violence.
	And everyone here has logged Acton's statement.
	Power tends to corrupt.
	Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
	And they go, yeah, that's true, man.
	That's heavy. That's deep.
	But then when you put a philosophy in place that recognizes that, people are like, ah!
	No! It ain't melting!
	It's all so naive!
	Well, what if that statement is true?
	Power does corrupt. Political power does corrupt.
	And the greater the political power, and it always grows, the greater the corruption.
	If that is true, if it's not true, then find me an example in history where the government doesn't grow and where Those in power in the government don't go through precipitous declines even in the semblance of morality generation after generation.
	I certainly would be happy to listen to it and to look at those kinds of historical examples.
	I've never seen one and Lord knows I've studied enough history in graduate school that I think one would have shown up.
	So for all of this, we're called naive for looking at the facts, for saying that violence is bad, For saying that human beings do not do well when they are given the power of life and death and violence over millions of their fellow men, for that we're called naive and childish.
	And it's not just this guy's post.
	It's many, many conversations that I've had over the years.
	And, of course, childishness is not, you know, saying that something is childish is not exactly an argument.
	But it's just important to recognize that If people do say and they do believe that either violence is good or can be good or that you can find these magic people, not just now, but for all time, political systems that we can put in place, they must be for all time.
	That these 10 people or 50 people or 100 people or however many philosopher kings you have in your mad system That you're going to consistently have a system that's going to put the best and most virtuous philosopher kings in control of the military, the law courts, the police, the prison guards,
	the children's education, that you're going to find only the right and most moral and virtuous people from now until the end of time and that only those moral and righteous people are going to be running this awesome power to control and corrupt and destroy and maim and kill and murder and rape other human beings That seems to me just a little bit naive.
	That seems to me just a little bit naive.
	That there's some fantasy world out there that's going to keep ejecting perfect and virtuous politicians like some fleshy thing being spewed out of the pod-like matrix or something like that.
	That there's these great politicians who are just going to pop out of nowhere and settle down and float down into these thrones over humanity and organize everything wisely and benevolently and perfectly.
	And even if people do believe that democracy is the way to do it, unlimited, brute, majority rule democracy like we have now, the same kind of democracy that gave unpleasant drinks to Socrates, even if we do say that democracy is the way to do it, then the question, as I posed before, the question still arises.
	So you have, again, think of your spatula, you've got ten peas on the left, you've got millions of peas on the right, These 10 peas on the left are so virtuous and noble and good that they can justly and morally use violence to order around everybody else,
	all the other peas of the kitchen, that these 10 or 20 or 50 peas on the left can pick up the power of the state, use the power of the military, use the power of the law courts, use the power of prisons and of childhood education and all the other apparatus that is involved in the modern state's control of its citizenry And these 10 or 20 or 50 people can morally use all this force against everyone else.
	But then if you're a Democrat, not a US-style Democrat, but somebody who's into democracy, then you face the additional logical challenge of saying, well, it's not my spatula.
	Hey, I don't come up with these people.
	I don't pick out these 10 or 20 or 50 people.
	You know who does?
	The millions of peas that are so stupid that they have to be ruled over, that are so corrupt that they can't let, can't be let to be free.
	Those people pick the 10 or 20 people.
	But, and I always feel like Columbo at this point, you know.
	Sorry, I just, I don't understand something.
	Help me to understand.
	If these millions and millions of peas can choose the peas of the left to rule over them because they're so wise that their votes, they know exactly what's good for them and what's just and what's right and they can pick out the people who lie to them from the people who tell the truth And they can tell exactly what these politicians are going to do after they get in office.
	And they know all of these wonderful things about what these politicians are going to do.
	They're that wise. All of these millions of peas are so wise.
	They all have this beautiful magical spatula and they can vote for the right politicians.
	But if they're that wise and that virtuous, these millions of peas, why, oh why, oh why, do they even need politicians to rule over them?
	If you know enough about nutrition to be able to evaluate a nutritional plan that some nutritionist puts forward and to evaluate that and to know it so well that you can tell from hundreds or thousands of nutritional plans which one is the right one for you and for everyone else.
	If you know enough about Nutrition that you can pick out, the best nutritional plan that could conceivably be offered repeatedly over and over again.
	You can pick out the best one.
	Why do we need a nutritional dictatorship then?
	I mean, if I can pick the best nutritional plan, then why do I need to have nutritional plans forced on me?
	If a citizen can pick the best possible political candidate to run his life at the point of a gun, because we're so wise, we know exactly what we need to have forced onto us, then why do we need to pick someone to force us?
	Because we're so wise, we know it for ourselves already.
	So, I don't think it's naive to have these perspectives.
	I think it's the result of a kind of logic that most people don't feel very comfortable with, and I understand that, and most people don't like to talk about this stuff, and I understand that.
	It was sort of cutting through a lot of illusions here, but I don't think it's naive to say power corrupts, and I don't think it's naive to say that violence is bad.
	And I've certainly never had people respond to anarchistic philosophies at that level, and to say, well, violence is bad, but But other kinds of violence are good, or a small amount of violence is good, and then somehow magically the small government is supposed to stay small,
	though. Society never had a smaller government than was put in place in America at the end of the 18th century, which had no rights for women, no rights for children, Slavery, restricted suffrage, taxes right off the bat, the Whiskey Rebellion, the War of 1812.
	It wasn't very long before they started taking over, well, heavily interfering in foreign policy adventures like who gets to rule Hawaii and lying to Indians and breaking policies.
	And then you have the Civil War, 600,000 people killed, and we've gone through this litany before.
	But that's the smallest and best state that you ever had.
	How long did it take for the government to take total control of the currency?
	How long did it take for the income tax to come in?
	How long did it take for America to turn into just another dictatorial, in terms of its foreign policy, just another dictatorial centralized superpower like France, like Germany, like Russia, like England, like Rome, like Greece, like Macedonia, like the Peloponnesians, like Alexander the Great, like Genghis Khan.
	It's all the same story.
	So even if we could magically turn everything back to 1776, we know exactly what happens when you stop rewinding this tape and let it play forward again, but for some reason people think that if I throw myself off a cliff for the 10,000th time, maybe, just maybe, this time, I'm going to fly.
	Well, I'm saying after 10,000 failed states, maybe we can start looking for alternatives.
	Well, that's it for my intro.
	Thank you so much for listening in.
	I hope that that wasn't too impassioned to be comprehensible.
	But it's not that I particularly mind being called childish.
	It's just that the moral superiority from those that is put forward by those who support the use of violence and are blind to the reality of the corruption that occurs from violence, those people calling me and my listeners childish, Gets my goat just a little bit.
	Okay, sorry. You're not?
	Interesting. Alright, so one second technical issue.
	Let me just get the old wife in here.
	And let's see what happens there.
	Alright, so if somebody could also add, when this goes in, if somebody could add Christina to the chat, that would be excellent.
	Now, if you would like to ask a question or to join in the chat, that would be excellent.
	This is the participatory timeframe here, so if you would like to...
	to-- oh, I think we have somebody who wants to chat.
	Lapafrax, can you-- yeah, he's in, right?
	He wanted to talk?
	Go ahead, can you speak?
	Hello? Hello, how's it going?
	Fine, thanks, yeah.
	Just in reference to what you were saying before about Minichists, well, what do you think is the best method of making Minichists realize that It's just wrong to say that violence is bad, but they only have minimal violence.
	Well, yeah. I mean, the argument that most Minarchists, in fact, every Minarchist I've ever talked to, and they are a very special prey to the Anarchist crew because they're so close.
	It's really titillating, right?
	It's like, oh, they're so close.
	They're just so close that you just want them to take one little more step.
	So I would approach minarchists with, I mean, I try to approach them with respect, because obviously they're smart people.
	They're already going against the grain in that most people have state solutions, and they're very interested in non-state solutions.
	The big stumbling block, in my experience, you can let me know what you think, the big stumbling block with minarchists is that they feel that if you have too much state, things are bad, right?
	Violence and foreign policies and terrorism, wars, and so on.
	And then you take away the state and things get better, right?
	So things get better and better and better and better and that's great.
	And then if you take away too much state, then things get worse again, right?
	So it's like for minarchists, anarchists are like saying you should go on a diet by not eating any food at all for the rest of your life.
	Well, of course, the rest of your life would be fairly short, right?
	So when you say to a minarchist, we should have no state, They'd say, well, hey, you know, I got it.
	I got it that America, let's just take the example, America is a bit fat.
	It's a lot fat. And so what we need to do is we need to cut back America's government caloric intake to the point where America slims down and everything's better.
	But what they hear the anarchists saying is, America should stop eating.
	They're going to say, well, then we're going to die.
	So for a minarchist, the challenge is that they believe that if the state is eliminated, that the very violence that has, the opposition to violence that they have, which has brought them into the minarchist camp, will then rear its ugly head again, and they picture this, you know, the stereotype of anarchy, right? I mean, what people always complain about in Somalia, and I think somewhat unjustly.
	You know, Molotov throwing, you know, punks and tattoos of swastikas and shaven heads and Mel Gibson coming in through windows and stuff.
	So I think that the challenge is To try and differentiate for a minarchist and say, are you a minarchist because you believe that society will run better and more efficiently with less government?
	Or are you a minarchist because you believe that violence is wrong?
	And if they say it's because it's more efficient and so on, then you can try the argument for morality, which I've talked about before.
	But I think it's important to figure out where they're coming from.
	Are they coming from... The idea that society is just inefficient and it's kind of unjust and we need less government or is it that they really do oppose violence as a way of resolving conflict?
	And if you can get them to the point where they'll say, well, it's because I reject violence as a way of resolving human disputes, Then you can say something like, and you don't have to say, I'm an anarchist.
	I mean, this always, I still get emails where people come, see my picture on my website and say, gee, you don't look anything like I thought you would.
	I'm sort of expecting this guy with nine heads and, you know, a mohawk and so on.
	And clearly the mohawk's not much of an option, but they are quite surprised.
	But I would say, you know, if you, you know, to a monarchist, you could say, Since you are a minochist because you believe that violence is the wrong way for human beings to interact, could it be, like, would it be a better thing for you if it were possible that the state, which we both know is an agency of violence, could be eliminated without there being a massive spike in violence?
	Would that be better? Like, you want small state.
	If you could get no state and things would be closer even to the ideal that you want of a non-violent way of human beings interacting, at least at a social and sanctified level, Would that be of interest to you?
	And if they say, no, I'm back enough, I'm not about getting rid of violence, then I would just leave it there and say, well, I just think that you're incorrect.
	But if they say, you know, I'd never really thought that You might be able to get rid of the government, but certainly if I think the government is bad, then getting rid of it, as long as things didn't turn to hell in a handbasket would be good, then I think you're getting a little bit further.
	But I think you need to figure out if they're just around efficiency or if they're working out mommy-daddy issues through their political stances.
	But if they're into efficiency or they're into morality, I would take two different approaches.
	Does that make any sense? Yes, it does.
	Hey, first time. And also...
	Well, I really used to be a Munichist about a few years ago, but I realized myself that I was being contradictory, sort of, in essentially saying that, yes, I think the initiation of force is wrong, but then how can you support the initiation of force of the government?
	And also, yeah, also, I think minichism is wrong because, well, if people own themselves, then who is any government, no matter how big or intrusive it is, to say how they can live their lives?
	You know, if people own themselves, they should be the final authority as to how they live their lives.
	So that's really why I disapprove of minichism.
	Right, right. And I was accused this week, and perhaps not unjustly, I'm sure not unjustly, of creating schisms by saying, well, I dislike minarchists almost more than statists, right?
	The out and out kind of Republicans or Democrats.
	And the reason that I do that is that...
	It's like a false turn-off, right?
	It's like a false turn-off.
	It's like there's this road which leads to personal and political and social and romantic and sexual and all these kinds of things, these freedoms, called, you know, what I like to sort of, whatever, the free domain radio philosophy that we talk about, you know, sort of personal relationships, find freedom in those and then, you know, expand outward from there.
	There's this road that leads to market anarchy, which is real freedom, but then there's this You know, there's this woman swinging a purse with fishnet stockings all the way up and she's, you know, boobs are hanging out of her top and she's like, so honey, you want to go to Minarchist route?
	You know, you don't have to go.
	That's a tough drive.
	You come down here, sugar.
	We'll do the Minarchist route and it'll be just sugary.
	And that to me is the big problem because the Minarchists draw people away from the truth, right?
	Which is, I think, the sort of rational anarchism that we're working with.
	And that kind of bothers me, because without that false turnoff, without that kind of off-road thing, which just leads you right back to mainstream statism in one form or another, I think that people would continue to take the high road and the hard road and actually get over the mountain to real freedom.
	But I think the minarchist is like, ooh, okay, well, small government is good.
	I don't like the government. Government is bad.
	And then somebody's saying like, hey, come this way, honey.
	We're just going to do small. You don't have to go the whole hog.
	That's tough. You just come over here and give you a nice little back rub.
	We'll get you nice and relaxed. We'll get you chillaxing in the hot tub.
	And then we'll do the status thing all over again.
	So to me, it's kind of like a temptation for a lot of people that is so much easier in terms of just slithering along with conformity than going the whole hog towards a truly rational philosophy.
	And I think that's why the Minarchists bugged me a little bit, because people are heading towards the truth, and then they just get kind of siphoned off to Minarchism.
	And I think that that just leads them right back to where they started.
	And I think that's a real shame. Okay.
	I can't think of anything else to say, though.
	I think I just shocked you with the whole prostitute thing, right?
	I mean, you need a moment to react and to hang in there.
	I understand. I really do.
	All right. Okay, well, thanks very much.
	I appreciate that. I'm just trying to figure out how to use all this stuff in...
	Let's put you back on here.
	Alright, so I think that...
	Oh, we had somebody who was waiting and is now no longer waiting.
	Did we have somebody else?
	Did any questions come up in the window?
	Violence, it works.
	Care to address?
	Oh, sure. Okay. Let me...
	Do you have a mic? Let me put you on here just to make sure I get the right question.
	Yeah, it's Greg, right? Do, do, do, do, do, do, do.
	Greg, you want? All right, you're on.
	Breaker 1-9.
	Well, I was just thinking about some of the objections that often come up.
	One of them is particularly from those I know in the military, and that is that, you know, wrong or not, it works, right?
	If I stick a gun in your face, I can get you to do whatever I want you to do.
	So why shouldn't I do it?
	Right? So I guess what I'm driving at is that They call us naive because they think we're trying to talk them out of using a gun.
	And people who are already predisposed to use a gun, you can't talk those people out of using it.
	No, absolutely, you're quite right.
	I mean, I don't stroll down to Little Italy and find the seedy guys and say, you know, I've got to say, gentlemen, I don't think that this whole racketeering is quite the right way to save your souls, right?
	That's going to end up with me curled up in a fetal position in the back of some old Buick fairly quickly.
	So, yeah, I absolutely have no doubt.
	And I would say that anarchism also recognizes that violence really does work.
	Otherwise, why would we need to oppose it, right?
	I mean, cancer works really well for the cancer cells, right?
	I mean, if it didn't work really well for the cancer cells, it wouldn't be cancer, right?
	It would just be some benign thing that's stabilized or something.
	So, violence does work without a doubt.
	That's why it corrupts, right?
	As far as the state goes, I mean, for the people who are on the holster side of the gun rather than the barrel side of the gun, for the people who are on the holster side, Violence works fantastically.
	Violence works beautifully.
	They get all the money in the world to play with.
	They get to move men around on maps.
	They get to create their grand social schemes.
	They get to be carved into the sides of mountains.
	They get their pictures on postage stamps.
	They go down in the history books.
	It works beautifully for people in power, and that's why it's so dangerous, right?
	I mean, heroin feels good, I guess, right?
	So you want to make sure that people understand that heroin is not really the best thing in the world for them, because it feels so good, and violence feels really good.
	But my general approach, I mean, if I felt that we had to change the minds of the people with the guns, I would give up.
	I wouldn't even try. But violence works when it's not portrayed as violence, right?
	Violence works when it's portrayed as patriotism, when it's portrayed as nobility, when it's portrayed as sensible, when it's portrayed as efficient, when it's portrayed as virtuous, right?
	As I sort of believe the world runs on virtue.
	And so violence itself is something that works beautifully, but only when people believe that it's virtuous.
	And that's why I try to aim at, you know, the general population.
	I don't sort of publish ads for Free Domain Radio in the Stars and Stripes, because I just don't imagine that I would get some conference, but probably not to my benefit.
	So I would say that it's to the average person who believes that violence is virtuous that we need to talk to because the people who are benefiting from the violence, I just don't think that we would have a hope in heck of getting them to, well, Mr. Bollinger.
	Bush, don't you understand that it's wrong to use violence?
	So he's not going to say, well, yeah, you're right.
	Let's stop that.
	That's no good. I'll get myself off that stamp right now.
	What's so wrong about it?
	It's working fine for me.
	You want to look at my ranch?
	It's beautiful. Well, and that's exactly my point, you know.
	Even if you just go from the standpoint of, you know, just talking people out of their love of the state, it's still a fairly daunting task, you know.
	No, I've never noticed that.
	That's always the reason for me.
	I know that some people find it tough, but Greg, I mean, come on, it's always been easy for me.
	That's why I only have three podcasts, because it's that easy.
	No, it's horrible. It's absolutely horrible.
	It's a horrible, horrible task.
	And it's really like trying to do surgery on a hyena that's hopped up on cocaine and is trying to bite you, and this rabbit, right?
	You know that you're doing the best thing for the hyena, but the hyena doesn't seem to agree.
	So there's quite a lot of difficulty in that.
	And the people that you've hired to hold the hyena down are tickling you.
	So it's a challenge all around, no question.
	And that's where the naivety objection comes from, I think, for the most part, is that a lot of people just aren't willing to, you know, stare that bear in the face and believe it's possible.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's, I would agree with you that that's probably what would occur for some people.
	But I think that that more likely is what occurs with people who have spent quite some time struggling to understand the ideas, struggling to work out stuff, and then the task overwhelms them.
	I can totally understand that.
	It's not for everyone. But I think that when people first hear the ideas, and this is where the personal aspect that Christine has taught me so much about philosophy and psychology is so important, that when people first hear about A life opposed to violence.
	A life dedicated to real virtue.
	Everybody agrees that if you could find a way to have a society run without a government, that would be better.
	Everyone who understands anything about the state, they may say it's naive, it's ridiculous, it's stupid or whatever.
	But without a doubt, I mean, it's the peaches and creams, blessed universe, you know, paradise on wheels that...
	I mean, yeah, of course, you know, it would be great if, you know, the lamb and the lion could lie down together and so on, right?
	So if you could have a society without a state, then I think everybody recognizes that that would be better.
	But what happens, I think, with people at a very personal level is that when you start to talk about no state...
	And that it's wrong to support a state, that the state is composed of violence, that human beings do not have to bully each other to get what they want, What happens is their dark side rears its ugly head.
	Their own capacity to bully and manipulate rears its ugly head.
	Minarchists and people hang on to the idea of the state so that they can give themselves the excuse to bully and manipulate.
	They don't do it because they believe in politics or they've studied it or they've been in Congress for 30 years and found out how well it works.
	They don't do it for any reason like that.
	The reason that people support the state is to make excuses either for themselves or for other corrupt people in their lives.
	Because when you say that you no longer wish to support violence in any form, whether it's a state or the church bullying children or friends or siblings or families or armies or whatever, then, as you and I both know,
	right, you have to look at yourself and right, you have to look at yourself and say, well, I have to look in the mirror and say, well, if I'm against violence and I'm against corruption and I'm against control and I'm against hierarchy, how have I participated in this?
	What have I done in my own little statist universe of me to bully, manipulate, control and undermine others?
	So the reason that people rebel against it is that they themselves can't look at their own corruption.
	regards to your own relationship with your siblings and other areas in your life.
	I looked at it in regards to my own dating relationships and also my relationships with my family and my relationships in business.
	It's a very, very personal thing to give up violence.
	It's a very, very personal thing to give up bullying, manipulation, control, propaganda.
	Propaganda, right? The state is a lot about propaganda.
	They don't shoot children who don't agree with the teacher in a state school, right?
	They just disapprove of them.
	They bully them in sort of passive-aggressive kinds of ways.
	Anarchism is a very personal thing and it requires you to look in the mirror and really see your own dark side and your own capacity for that which we oppose, which we all have, right?
	So I think that's the emotional challenge and that's why you'll sort of notice that, at least on the boards and certainly in my inbox, I almost never get a logical argument against what I'm saying.
	Like, I almost never get a logical argument.
	I have gotten probably about a half a dozen over the last year, year and a half.
	I got a half a dozen really good logical arguments to get what it is that I'm saying.
	And that's, you know, thousands of emails and posts that have come my way based on what we're doing here.
	And the only way that I can explain that or understand that is to recognize that it's not logical arguments.
	It's an emotional reaction that then coalesces into a pseudo-logical argument, right?
	Because people can't say, you know, this idea of anarchy, it really fucking freaks me out.
	You know, it really, it makes me feel dizzy.
	I feel disoriented.
	I feel guilty.
	I feel bad.
	I feel angry.
	I feel... People can't say that because that's too much self-knowledge.
	That's too much like looking in the mirror.
	What they do is they come back with sort of condescending stuff or supercilious stuff or scornful stuff or passive-aggressive stuff, not arguments, not real arguments that are based on the understanding.
	I naively thought that after I put out the intro to philosophy that would sort of slow the tide of arguments about the basics.
	It has done nothing of the kind and so I can only assume that it's not intellectual but psychological in nature.
	Does that make any sense with your experience of it?
	Yeah, I think...
	Fundamentally, at some point in everyone's life, you may not be consciously aware of it, but you have to make a choice.
	Do you love violence or don't you?
	Or do you hate it?
	What you're really doing is asking people to consciously Change their minds about that.
	And that's why it's...
	It's not naive at all, but it's certainly not an easy task.
	No, I think it's naive to think that a couple of debates are going to change people's minds about their own souls.
	I think it's a very, very hard thing to ask people to do that with their own souls.
	It's really... The magnitude of the task is enormous.
	You know, there's a great quote by Nietzsche, and Nietzsche says, when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
	And I think that's just a wonderful quote in a very fundamental way, right?
	When you started investigating this kind of, or this approach to philosophy, I don't think you heard the incoming scuds that were going to detonate your familial and friendly relations, right?
	I mean, it's like, hey, that's a nice bird whistle.
	Why has the sun gone dark, right?
	Kaboom! And it's, you know, and I keep wanting people, but it's hard because when you really do let go of illusion and you really do let go of our natural capacity for violence, and when I say violence, I don't mean that you were, you know, like shaking down people or anything like that.
	I just mean that... You were blind to corruption and domination within your own life.
	Although you had rejected it in yourself, you still accepted it in others.
	But when you reject violence, and when you reject control, manipulation, bullying, and all these kinds of interactions, it's quite a detonation at the center of things.
	It really changes your view of the world.
	It certainly does. That I agree with you on.
	Alright. Did you have another question?
	No, that was basically it.
	Okay, thanks. Appreciate it.
	No problem. I have actually just...
	Yeah, I've just...
	I finally got the Freedomain Radio dance mix from my listener.
	It's pretty fine, I must say.
	It's got even more rhythm than I do, which, well, isn't hard.
	Nate, you up? Yep.
	I had actually three questions, I think.
	I don't... Written some of them down so I don't forget.
	I actually had four, but I forgot the one I thought of yesterday.
	It was very important. I have that all the time.
	I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm like, ooh, that's a great podcast idea!
	And then the next morning it's like, something to do with a hamster and a rotary blade.
	I can't remember what, but man, it was great.
	First of all, chapters 14 and 15 of Virtue of Selfishness, where she kind of Flew off the tracks for a while of logic and just sort of went backwards.
	The whole men-artist route.
	Oh, she... Virtue of selfishness, Ayn Rand.
	Ayn Rand. Yes.
	Yeah, she kind of...
	She acknowledged the blatant contradiction and then called anarchism an abstraction.
	She even used...
	I think she used the word naive.
	Mm-hmm. Right, and it's not like Ayn Rand to refrain from syllogistically or axiomatically identifying the flaws in an opponent's argument.
	So the fact that she veers off into an Al-Hawmanem attack is, I think, quite instructive.
	And I don't want to interrupt your question, but I will just sort of mention here that if the theory that we're working with, that we were just talking about with Greg, about people's difficulty in accepting non-hierarchical, non- Master-slave, dominant style of human relationships, whether in a state or a church or a family, if people have difficulty accepting that as a possibility because they themselves prefer to dominate and bully other people, I think Ayn Rand is a perfect example of that.
	She had no rational arguments against anarchism, but as we know from those of us who've studied her life, and I certainly am one of them, she was an enormous influence on me, She herself had very, dare I say, Russian approaches to her own personal relationships, that she really had to have the last say, that she would put up mock trials and banish people from her circle if they displeased her or were, quote, irrational.
	That she even dictated people's musical tastes and would kick someone out of her circle if they claimed to have a preference for an artist like Beethoven, who she felt was anti-life.
	That's very dictatorial, right?
	So she, of course, if our theory is correct, that unless you're able to look at your own capacity for dominance and bullying and to let go of that, you're never going to have any luck accepting anarchism.
	But it won't be because there's anything wrong with anarchism.
	It'd be because there's something wrong with you.
	I think Ayn Rand would be a very good example of that.
	However, wonderful she was in many areas in her own personal relationships and this, I think, made her philosophy fundamentally fail, right, in that she was a minarchist and a wonderfully rational and very, very critical and blazingly intelligent human being and a very good writer, I think, too. But her own capacity for dictatorial interactions, she never looked at.
	She did not have the ability or the willingness or the desire, who knows, right, to look at that herself.
	And so she detonated her own movement and put too many contradictions and compromises into her novels to have any real traction.
	And, of course, in my utterly humble way, I'm trying to undo some of those problems.
	Yeah, I figured maybe you'll be the next...
	Hopefully not the next Ayn Rand, because then that would be weird.
	That's it! You're banished! Off with his head!
	Wait, sorry. I'm back.
	Just a little bit of possession and channeling, but I'm okay now.
	Okay now. Right. She had a real Russian smoker's voice.
	She sounded like Don Ho with Quaaludes.
	I remember hearing that from the Phil Donahue video.
	I haven't got myself a rationalist.
	Ayn Rand's like the kind of person, if you've ever seen Ace Ventura Pet Detective, he's got this landlord who comes up behind him and says, Ventura!
	And he's like, yes, Satan?
	Oh... I'm sorry, I mistook you for somebody else.
	That would be like Ayn Rand. Yes, Ayn Rand!
	Sorry, I mistook you for somebody else.
	Okay, let's not mock the brilliant anyway.
	Well, that happens to be one of my top ten movies.
	That's a great, great film.
	He detonated a little bit his own comedic talent.
	I think that, and the one where he paid the lawyer who couldn't lie.
	I can't remember the name of it, but that was also a really good film.
	I loved it. Next one was, oh yeah, you did a podcast a long time ago and I don't remember which one it was and I could never find it again, so I gave up on finding it.
	It was about, you had gone to an interview and they had Googled your name and then asked if that would be interfering and you started it out in such a way as, and my main question about that was, When you started out, you had a way of asking a question or something.
	And I wanted to know what were some ways, you know, when somebody comes up and says, oh, Hillary's running in 2008, I mean, who are you going to vote for?
	What am I going to say to these people?
	I'm on the left. What party are you with?
	It's like, what am I going to say when it's like, well, I'm not with either party.
	Oh, you're a centrist or whatever.
	They always have that reaction.
	You couldn't possibly be an anarchist.
	I don't want to come out and say I'm an anarchist because then I'll just kind of walk off.
	I want to start it off better, but I don't know how.
	I kind of came across that situation yesterday when I was helping somebody.
	I had a customer with my VisaGeek side business, and they were talking about Hillary.
	I just didn't comment instead of trying to launch into something.
	If I was going to launch into something, I wanted to have the right approach, but I just couldn't think of an approach to that.
	Right, right, right.
	No, look, I mean, it's a horrible challenge.
	I mean, I don't do it as gracefully as I'd like to, like 10% of the time, so there's no silver bullet here.
	They know at work that where I am now, that I'm I think they think libertarian, right?
	And I'm not about to correct them on that because libertarian in Canada is like anarchist in the U.S. If I said anarchist, their heads would just explode.
	So I can't even go that far.
	But if people do ask me my opinion on stuff, I will say that my answer is probably going to be far longer than you would ever be really interested in.
	Right? And if they say, oh good, I'm glad you warned me of that, right?
	I mean, how often have you liked it when somebody calls you up, oh no, let's just say you go to the dentist or whatever, and the dentist makes you wait for two hours, right?
	You're kind of mad, right?
	So what I do, if somebody asks me a political question, you can say something like, well, I could give you an answer to that, but it doesn't really fit into a category, and I don't want to bore you, right?
	And then if they say, no, I love being bored, I listen to Steph's podcast, then you can say, oh, okay, well, at least we have some crazy place to start from.
	But I think it's important to identify that you don't have, like I say, I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
	I'm certainly not a communist, not a fascist.
	I'm sort of libertarian-ish, but I'm probably a little bit even more radical than most libertarians.
	So I don't want to bore you with my political ideas because I can't sort of be pigeonholed.
	I can't say, well, I'm pro-Hillary or against Hillary.
	I'm not against Hillary, right, any more than a doctor is against an individual cold germ, right?
	I'm sort of against illness as a whole.
	So I sort of find out if people are just sort of being vaguely polite or just kind of curious, then there's no point in me launching into a manifesto.
	But if I sort of warn them and say, well, my answers to political or philosophical questions are very long and involved and complicated, and I don't want to bore you.
	And if they say, no, I love long and complicated philosophical discussions, then it's like, oh, yeah, let's get down.
	Let's get on it. But I sort of warn them out of front, right?
	Because otherwise what happens is you feel like you're trying to You're trying to push a watermelon through a letter slot, right?
	Because you don't know what the fuse is like.
	You don't know when the person is going to start to get bored.
	And so you feel like you've got to get so much information into a short amount of time.
	I sort of panic sometimes on the radio interviews trying to get as much information in as I can and have to sort of consciously...
	Christina has a little hypodermic.
	It's like a little dart thing that she actually got from a guy who used it to bring down a rhinoceros, I think it was.
	And she finds that after four or five of those, I actually can communicate fairly coherently.
	Well... Well...
	Yeah, I like the doctor one, the doctor, the germ thing.
	I'm not against Hillary any more than a doctor.
	I'm going to use that one.
	I'm stealing it. Well, yeah, feel free to.
	Just remember that anybody who laughs at it has to donate.
	But, yeah, I think it's important to say, like, I can't be pigeonholed.
	I'm really interested in politics.
	But my political philosophy is kind of long-winded, right?
	So if you like chatting about that stuff in great detail, I'm more than happy to chat with you.
	But if you're just sort of being polite, like if they're all discussing politics and I haven't said anything and someone turns to me and says, oh, where do you stand, right?
	And they could just be being polite, right?
	Like if I have a sore tooth and some vague acquaintance says, hey, how's it going?
	I said, you know, the odd thing two nights ago, I woke up with a bit of sore tooth, then I got better for a little bit, then I got worse, I went to the dentist, and this person is like, all I wanted to hear was fine and then go get a coffee.
	I don't know if people are just being polite, and I certainly don't want to launch into a big long-winded explanation of something if they're just being polite or You know, this is just sort of something you ask about.
	But if they're really interested in politics and really enjoying discussing theory and they make that sort of clear, then I'm happy to talk about things with them further.
	But there is no silver bullet.
	You know, you're just going to have to take a lot of rejection, I think.
	But I would be very careful at work.
	I mean, very careful at work.
	It's explosive stuff.
	I certainly don't talk about politics at work.
	If the theory that we're talking about is right, that politics is really a mask of the family for just about everyone, then it's going to freak people out for sure, and man's got to eat.
	Exactly. I don't do that at work, but this was a customer that I knew from somewhere else that was a friend of a friend, and I already I've been eating dinner with them and all that stuff.
	So it's kind of a, you know, I was debating on whether to really say anything.
	I could just kind of shut myself up.
	Well, you can also ask them questions, right?
	You can also just say, well, if they say, well, I'm pro Hillary, Then just you don't have to say anything about your beliefs, right?
	This is a Socratic method.
	That's why Socrates is so annoying but so instructive, right?
	In a way that, well, I guess I'm annoying and not always as instructive, but you can always ask the other person, right?
	You don't have to reveal a thing about yourself.
	So someone says, I'm pro-Hillary.
	You know, I would bear Hillary's children if it were biologically possible.
	Then you could say, oh, that's interesting.
	Tell me what you like about Hillary.
	Oh, well, she's for the poor.
	And it's like, oh, okay, well, what does that mean, for the poor?
	Oh, she's for expanding social programs for the poor.
	Oh, so you think that social programs are really effective.
	Why, yes. Well, tell me why you think that, because I don't know.
	I've never really been very sure about whether social programs are effective.
	And they say, oh, well, social programs are effective because they get people out of poverty.
	It's like, well, how do you know that they get people out of poverty?
	Because it seems to me that you could make an argument for the other side.
	It's like, well, they get people out of poverty because they get people educated.
	But how do you know that they get people educated?
	Where are the statistics that say that social programs get people out of poverty?
	And even if those statistics do exist, what about the national debt that's been incurred?
	What do you think is going to happen to the poor people when we pay it off and so on?
	Like, you're just asking questions.
	You're not telling anything about your beliefs.
	You're just asking them questions like, how do you know what you know?
	Hillary, she's great.
	She'll turn this country around.
	It's like, is it going to crash into China?
	And I'm not aware of it. She's going to grab the helm and swing this thing around so it doesn't hit an iceberg?
	What does it mean, turn the country around?
	She says, oh, she's going to get us out of the war in Iraq and she's going to put more troops into Afghanistan.
	I think she was saying that yesterday, that she feels that the thing is that the troops are in the wrong place, right?
	Because that's the kind of variety we get from our leaders.
	And they say, oh, okay, so you think that it would be better if our troops were in Afghanistan.
	Well, why? And I say, oh, well, because it'll bring stability to the region.
	It's like, oh, well, why do you think it would bring stability to the region?
	Just keep asking questions about that other person's belief.
	You don't have to, you know, and either they'll get confused and irritated, which is fine.
	At least you still haven't confronted them on anything.
	Or, you know, you'll really get into a good debate.
	But you don't actually have to reveal anything about your own beliefs.
	You can just ask questions.
	Exactly. I didn't think of that.
	It's a great approach.
	It's the same approach I've been taking on all the dates I've been on until, of course, I met this most recent woman, which I've been on six dates with, and she seems to be responding very well to all the questions.
	And I've thought of the questions as like being, you know, You know, if you're going to do some cliff diving, you might want to scuba dive down below and make sure there's no rocks or anything below there.
	And, you know, snap around and do some scans, maybe some sonic scans.
	Well, you know, I appreciate the metaphor, but as you and I both know, a bad relationship, if only it ended as quickly as impacting on rocks from a high cliff, right?
	That would be okay.
	It's more like slow, acidic quicksand that takes your skin off one by one over months.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I usually hit rock pretty fast on several of them.
	The ones that I hit rock on would always get irritated, like you were saying, about the people that would just get irritated and it wouldn't result in a good debate.
	The ones that don't get irritated don't react defensively.
	Those are the ones I kind of explore more on.
	So, look, if this thing's working out with this woman, you will have to name your first child Steffina.
	Or Steftina, I think, is okay as well, or Crispin, but it'll happen.
	Right. If the initial spell is satisfied.
	Yes, I think I will.
	Great. Stephanopoulos.
	Well, I would...
	So things are going well with this new young lady?
	After six days, things are just kind of cruising along.
	We talked about all the important relationship stuff, and trust me, I've versed myself in all y'all's relationship.
	You and Christina's relationship podcast, and the ones about the whole...
	I've got a bag on the floor with a carpet, the zinging, and I've gone over the zinging with her, and she's actually zinged me once, and we talked about it, and it turned out so well.
	So I'm starting there.
	I'm not going into the religion thing yet.
	She's an agnostic. I already know that.
	So I'm bursting myself on the agnostic arguments and stuff like that, just in case, when it does come up, and it will.
	You know, how will she treat her children and stuff like that.
	And I'm already getting an idea that she's just really...
	And she's in therapy, so...
	She's been in therapy for a long time, just, you know, for no other reason other than to just figure her life out.
	And so it's very promising.
	And I'm being very, very cautious, but it's very promising.
	I'm thrilled. I think that's fantastic.
	Well, good for you and good for her, of course.
	Christina was an agnostic when we first met, and I think she'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't have to say that.
	But what I think the argument that clinched it for her was when, sort of late at night, we were sort of walking home after going for dinner, and I bought a little pocket flashlight.
	And we were just sort of standing in front of her apartment building at the time.
	And what I did was, just as I was leaning in to kiss her, I flicked on the pocket flashlight so that it was shining up, you know, in this Alfred Hitchcock kind of way into my face.
	And I said, Christina, the problem that I have with your agnosticism is that by thinking that another god may exist, it is going to interfere with your worship of me!
	And I think that really did help turn her around quite rapidly with a slap and some mace, which actually is kind of what I was looking for.
	So I just sort of wanted to point out that there's lots of different ways to approach this that might get some interesting reactions.
	Hilarious. Alright, I think that's it for me.
	Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Jeff.
	We've got somebody else waiting to come on.
	Thanks, man.
	You know, I can't keep doing those voices.
	It's really tough on the throat after all that skiing.
	The flashlight move works every time.
	Works best out in the middle of the woods.
	Absolutely. Just make sure you're not alone, otherwise you start to feel a little weird.
	Alright, so, Mr.
	R had, what's his handle?
	Ah, yes, okay.
	Radzilla, I think that you had a question, if I remember rightly.
	Is he on? Is he on?
	Is he on? Yes, can you hear us, Rad?
	Hello? Hello?
	Yes? You're live, baby.
	Oh, I had myself on mute.
	Sorry. Could you just either turn your mic up or speak a little bit more loudly?
	I'm getting old. Okay.
	I have to yell at my MacBook because the microphone is stuck on the monitor.
	Got it. I had a couple of things.
	One of them had to do with defooing.
	I'll hold that one for later because it's kind of a fun and kind of in-depth thing.
	But the other thing I was thinking about was when people were talking about...
	Having these debates with people at work and such, you know, how do you go about, you know, saying that you're an anarchist and things like that without just completely freaking out your coworkers?
	And I've actually found that, you know, when I talk about anarchism and, you know, atheism sometimes, not with too many people at work, but, you know, especially anarchism, I usually say it with such excitement in my voice and, you know, such a positive attitude that I think it throws people off.
	Because I think a lot of times when people...
	You know, talk to, you know, the anarchistic type of person.
	They're seeing the cynical, you know, I hate my parents anarchist type thing.
	Right, so I think I understand.
	You're saying there's a big difference between saying, yeah, I'm an anarchist, and, hey, I'm an anarchist!
	Exactly, yeah. You know, with a big smile that doesn't change.
	Yes. Big Cheshire cat grin.
	That's right, and a flashlight underneath your face.
	Is there backing away really slowly?
	Absolutely, but at least you don't get into those awkward conversations.
	But anyway, a couple days ago I was talking to one guy at work about my distaste for intellectual property and stuff enforced through the state.
	I mean, I have no problem with people protecting ideas and stuff with contracts, voluntary contracts, but of course the The IP enforcement through the state is nothing but a gang and stuff.
	So I was explaining this all to him and after a few minutes of me going through all this stuff and answering his questions, well, how can we do this?
	How can we do that? And I would give him examples of insurance or DROs, things like that.
	And he just stopped all of a sudden and said, boy, you really have all this thought out, don't you?
	And it just shocked him that someone would think so deeply about it.
	And I think that's what really throws people off is they're not expecting Someone to have thought through a philosophy very deeply before holding a belief on it.
	And it seems a bit, it seems funny to me now, but, you know, that's the way I was just a couple of years ago.
	I just, you know, kind of shoot from the hip about whatever I had heard someone else say before and had absolutely no backing behind it.
	And it really does throw someone off, I think, when you're saying this stuff, but you actually have really sound logic and reason behind it.
	They just They don't know what to do.
	They don't know how to respond to that.
	I can't even do it anymore.
	It's like listening to those talk shows on AM where they bring up something like, should Islamic students be allowed to carry swords to school because it's their religion?
	People just calling in like, yes!
	No! Maybe! It's just like with no reasoning behind them.
	This sort of catterwalling is really what passes for debate and conversation in most people's lives.
	I think it's quite sad.
	I think if you're sort of calm and rational in a way that I seldom am, I think it can be very effective.
	Like I said, I've had a bit of success, I think, bringing these ideas to people just in my own demeanor because I'm a pretty Happy, high-energy person.
	I'm kind of extroverted. I like to talk to people.
	But when I say all these incredibly radical things to people, but I say it with such positive excitement and enthusiasm in my voice, I think it really is disarming, and it gets them thinking about it.
	Right, right. It's this incongruence between the unusualness and the, I mean, you have a very, I wouldn't say exactly deadpan, but you have a very calm and methodical way of communicating that, you know, it's like, well, yes, as lemmings, I think that the cliff is our friend.
	And people are like, yeah, suddenly I want to jump.
	That's very good. I've never been able to pull off, but it's good that you can do it.
	That's great. Cool.
	That's about all I had to say on that subject.
	Alright, so let's get to the juicy stuff.
	We've already gone over dating, now let's go over your family.
	Alright. So, um, some interesting developments over the holiday break.
	I took a road, instead of going home for the holidays, I took a road trip up to Oregon, Portland, to visit my, uh, to visit my cousin.
	She's a year younger than me, and we grew up a couple miles away from each other.
	We were pretty close when we were growing up.
	And, uh, I talked to her about, you know, these things I'm going through right now, trying to, you know, figure out the whole, I'm considering deep booing, you know, all this other stuff, trying to figure out, you know, my atheism, my anarchism, all this other.
	And she was really, you know, surprised by it all.
	But again, my happiness and my enthusiasm let her know that, you know, hey, it's not a crazy thing that he's going through.
	This is actually something interesting.
	And I found out something shockingly Horrible, but very revealing, you know, about her at the same time, is that she was abused quite a bit by her family, her whole family,
	actually. I won't go into too much detail because, as you know, it's kind of a private thing for her, but I found, you know, she lived with, you know, mother, father, and older brother, and all three of them played a part in really messing this poor girl up when she was young.
	And one of the things that especially hurt me to hear was that I guess when my cousin went to her mother to, you know, kind of report on a certain incident that had happened to her brother, that her mom didn't do anything about it.
	You know, didn't help her out.
	She just kind of tried to sweep it under the rug.
	And even later on in elementary school, when she got a bit older and she was having a lot of emotional problems in school and stuff, one of her teachers was just completely dismissive of her and saying, oh, you're just acting out for attention.
	And during this time, her mom was actually kind of just feeding her these, I don't know, anti-depression pills or something every now and then, without ever having brought her to a doctor to get a prescription, just kind of medicating her herself.
	And my cousin said, well, she was doing that to try to help me.
	I said, wait a minute. She was not doing that to try to help you.
	She was doing that to try to dope you so that you wouldn't be sending signals out to the world that your life was horrible at home.
	And some of this stuff started kind of waking her up a little bit, I think.
	And it was really...
	It was great for both of us because you know she was telling me how she's like oh wow right I can't believe it when you know when we were young I always thought that you had a perfect you know family life and stuff I just I wished I could have lived in your family and everything and obviously mine was far sight better than hers you know I didn't have the overt abuse that she had but you know it just still it's you know she was surprised to hear the struggles I'm going through but at the same time it really It made her feel good that I was actually making all this progress.
	I was feeling so happy now these days.
	But the other thing that really helped me about this interaction that I was completely surprised about is that after learning about how just destructively horrible her family was, and then remembering how, you know, my mom actually is a, you know, one of her best friends is my aunt, you know, the mother of my cousin.
	It started to kind of chip away, I think, at some of the false self story that I had around my mom.
	And it started to allow me to see her through a different light, I think.
	And just recently, now here's where the really juicy part comes in.
	I think one of the biggest breakthroughs I've made ever in this realm.
	I finally was able to access a memory that I had from From, you know, long ago.
	It was never hidden to me.
	It's just that I finally accessed it in a truly awake and seeing it for the first time type of way.
	When I was quite young, my brother's two years older than me.
	I can't remember how old I was.
	I'm guessing maybe seven, something like that.
	Maybe a little bit younger. My brother and I were, you know, we shared a bedroom and we were asleep in the morning.
	My mom comes busting in just frantic, like it It was kind of the type of, you know, frantic, what are we going to do type thing as if a tornado is bearing down the house and we've got to go run to a storm shelter or something like that.
	But it was, she was just almost out of her mind with, you know, fear and terror, you know, and stuff.
	And she wakes us up and she says, you know, your dad is scaring me.
	I want you to go out and talk to him.
	And so here's, you know, my brother and I just kind of A couple little kids in our pajamas rubbing the sleep out of our eyes.
	And we wander out to the kitchen.
	I don't know. I don't think my mom followed us.
	I think she kind of hid away back in the bedroom or something.
	It was just... Anyway, the...
	So my dad is out at the kitchen table doing taxes.
	Of course, you know, my family having been horrible with finances and stuff when I was young, money always being an issue, you know, he's going just completely star-craving nuts.
	It was an annual ritual that, you know, tax time every year my dad would lose his mind.
	But this time it was especially bad.
	He was, you know, just ranting and just going nuts.
	I don't think I've ever seen him that bonkers before.
	He was saying things like, I'm going to kill myself so that you people don't have to worry about me anymore.
	Just all kinds of horrible, just terrifying things.
	This memory of mine has always been there.
	It's always been an indication to me of how sick my dad was.
	Obviously, he has Chemical imbalances and all that stuff.
	He's actually gotten treatment for it.
	He's on medication for it and things like that.
	But it finally, finally, finally dawned on me after talking to my cousin and I think that just chipping away of my mom's edifice of, you know, virtue and victimhood, it finally dawned on me that the real crime in this incident was not my dad going crazy because my dad's a crazy person, you know, and I think it's more of a medical condition than anything.
	Of course, you know, there's plenty of fault to be had there, but the real crime to me now is that, you know, my mom tossed a couple of little kids into, you know, the Coliseum with a lion, you know, and there's absolutely no way for her to have known what would have happened when she sent us out there, and it was like, It finally has dawned on me that that was just an unconscionably evil thing to do to a couple of little kids.
	And like I was saying, it's finally sinking into me that mom isn't so much a victim as she is a perpetrator herself.
	So anyway, that's like I say, a lot of progress there.
	But the problem that I'm having right now is I really do want to be Fu, but I would much rather, I mean, it feels like I'm being weak because all I want to do is just disappear.
	I don't want to talk it out.
	I don't want to, you know, I don't want to have to go through the, you know, I really want to make something out of this relationship because I really don't think there's much there.
	You know, I've tried talking to my mom before about this stuff and she just pretty much blanks me out.
	You know, it's, I don't understand or let's change the subject or it's your dad's fault, you know, things like that.
	I'm just kind of tired of it.
	Is it wrong for me to not want to even address it anymore and just want to slip away into the night?
	Is that going to be unhealthy for me in the long run, or is that okay?
	That's my question. Rod, it's Christina speaking.
	I'm so sorry to hear what happened.
	It was a horrible, horrible experience, and I'm sure there were probably others maybe more subtle that are sort of helping you come to this decision to leave your family.
	Is it horrible for you to just want to slip out?
	And not have a confrontation and not have a discussion and not sort of try to explain your position?
	No, absolutely not.
	If you've tried to be rational with these people, if you've tried to have conversations and explain your position in the past and it seems to be fruitless and endless and you kind of get the quizzical looks like what's wrong with you and goodness knows what else, No, you don't have to do any more.
	I mean, if you know what's going to happen, based on experience, based on previous opportunities that you've taken to have conversations with your family, then there is nothing weak about just walking away.
	In fact, it's actually quite courageous.
	I've been going back and forth with this in my mind for the last couple of weeks, and You know, part of me says, of course, that's, you know, absolutely acceptable.
	It's something that you should do.
	And the other part of me says, well, maybe it's just taking the easy way out.
	You know, I should make another try at it.
	But then, you know, it's kind of this back and forth, what do I do, what do I do thing.
	So I do appreciate very much your response here.
	And you're right, there are many other things, not just this one story, but there's been many other things that I've been thinking about over the last, you know, Right.
	I mean, that's really one of the central things around what they call closure.
	Closure is when there's nothing more to say.
	Right? And it doesn't sound like you're torn because you have things you want to say, but you're afraid to say them.
	And that, I think, would be a situation where it might be better to go back and have another conversation, right?
	If you have like, oh, I really want to say this to my mom, or I really want to understand this, or I don't know how she'd react to that, and so on, then I think it would make sense to go back and have those conversations.
	But it sounds like in your heart, you're done.
	But you feel that you should not be done or there should be something.
	It's more of a should than a genuine impulse that comes from the heart.
	Does that make sense? Yeah.
	I guess the indecision that I'm feeling or have felt is that it's not so much that I feel a responsibility to explain myself or anything like that.
	I don't have that responsibility to explain myself.
	The only fear I have is, am I doing the right thing for myself in order to heal myself?
	Because in the end, the whole purpose of this is to be happy, to be free.
	And I'm wondering, if I slip away like this without leaving an explanation, Is that actually going to hurt me in the long run or is it going to be okay?
	I mean, the doubt is around my own future health, not about, you know, whether or not they have a good story to tell themselves and I'm gone.
	Right. So it's the question that floats around for a lot of people when they defoo, which is, am I going to wake up sobbing 10 years from now because I didn't do X now?
	I mean, that's a bit of a dramatic way of putting it, not too surprisingly for me.
	But it sounds like you're really concerned about, are you sort of laying the foundations for your future happiness, or are you going to look back and say, I should have done more, but I just ran away?
	Yeah, is it like just setting the fuse on a time bomb or something like that?
	Right, right. That's the question.
	Well, I mean, the main criteria is, do you have things that you want to talk about with your family?
	Or do you still have intense burning hatreds and all this, that, and that?
	I mean, those things are still things that you don't necessarily need to work those out with your family, but, you know, the real question about whether you should talk, I mean, this sounds ridiculously simple, and maybe it's too simple, but the real question for me about whether you should talk to someone is, do you have something that you really want to say to that person?
	And if you don't at the moment feel that you have anything that you want to say to your family, and certainly based on where you are in reconnecting emotionally with your own history, so that it's not just a story like a story that happened, but a story that happened that is pregnant with meaning.
	And that's really the great challenge is to reawaken all of the feelings in the present that we were not allowed to have in the past.
	So when you're seven, And your mother puts you in a highly dangerous situation with a suicidally deranged man who has great capacity, I would imagine, for violence and those kinds of moods, especially if it's a chemical disorder.
	You simply can't process the fear and the loathing of that behavior when you're seven because you still got another ten years to go with this witch, right?
	So it's when we go back and we look at her past, not like it's an old faded movie where things seem kind of histrionic or things seem kind of distant, but when we go back and we're in that room and we remember, that's when we really come to life in the present because that's when we're safe enough or secure enough to feel what happened in the past in a living kind of way and that's what I was talking about previously when I was not to you but to another listener when I was talking about self-protection that if we don't experience the feelings of danger that occurred for us when we're younger we have a great deal of difficulty recognizing the signs of danger that are going on in the present right from other people and also from our family so this re-experiencing of danger which is very hard it's impossible for children to experience it directly because it's just too overwhelming That I think is,
	you know, because you're there at that point where your past is coming back to life for you in a way that's real.
	And for me, the incident was kind of, it's odd because they are somewhat innocuous sometimes relative to other things.
	But for me, my brother was sent back to England when I was 11 or 12 and I stayed with my mother for two years when she went slowly berserk.
	And somebody asked me and said, why did your brother go back to England and you didn't?
	And it was like that one simple question that I'd known this story for years, but I had no answer for that.
	It's like, well, why would they split the kids up?
	And why would, you know, and of course, the reason, as I found out later, was basically because she thought that if she sent both her kids away, we'd never, you know, we'd be strong enough to talk about what was going on with those we were staying with and we would not go back.
	Right.
	So she kept she kept me back as a hostage.
	Right.
	These these are how nefarious some of these family things can be.
	But it's when you when you really start to ask questions from a blank slate and re-experience the feelings that you really are progressing fantastically.
	And when you're in that kind of place and you recognize in your gut that your mother was capable of handing you over to a dangerous lunatic to protect herself.
	Well, what is there left to say to someone like that?
	Like, if she didn't recognize her needs when you were seven and much more dependent and much more helpless, why on earth would she recognize her needs now?
	And I think that may be what's going on in your heart, that you're kind of giving up, that if she did that in the past and her motivation for doing it now is much less, why would she suddenly recognize her needs now?
	Right. No, you make a very good point.
	I've actually... I think what I've finally realized about my childhood, you know, my brother and me, both of us together, I mean, we seem to have been created specifically for the purpose of, you know, just being unhealing bandages over my mom's wounds.
	And she was married, you know, to my father for, gosh, I don't know how long it was, about I think they were married for about 15 years before my brother was born.
	And from what I've heard, you know, the marriage wasn't great.
	It never was. It never has or had been.
	And then I think, well, my dad was a long-haul trucker, so he'd be, you know, away from home for quite a while at a time, at any time.
	And I guess she was going to, of course, I passed her for counseling, which, you know, there's a mistake.
	But for some reason, this pastor, I guess, told her...
	I guess he had been in contact with my dad or something like that.
	I don't know what it was. But he told her where my dad was staying.
	And he said, I want you to go to him.
	And, you know, I think the implication was get knocked up, you know.
	And as if that was going to somehow be a glue in this relationship.
	You know, of course, because, you know, for some reason, pastors just can't seem to see that people need to be divorced sometimes.
	I don't know if that was it or what.
	But anyway, I guess... That's when my brother was conceived, was this, you know, at a time when my, I guess when my dad was trying to escape or whatever, and she went and reeled him back in with a child.
	And so, you know, my brother was created to be like a glue in this failing marriage.
	And then I was, I don't know what my purpose was, if it was just kind of like, hey, the first one worked, let's get a second one in here to cement it even further.
	But, you know, it seems like The torment that I felt from coming from my brother, obviously, I can't imagine, since he was the wedge breaker on this thing, I can't imagine what kind of horrible pain he went through in the two years before I was born.
	Anyway, what I'm getting to now is just thinking, my gosh, I really...
	I'm seeing the patterns now in my own life, in my own relationships of how I've either been an attacker or a victim in just about every relationship I've been in.
	And it seems to me like I have this very vivid – I mean, it's an extremely vivid image.
	I don't know why it just stands out so starkly and clearly.
	I feel like there's a V formation, almost like a flock of geese flying in a V. And I'm at the head of the V and everyone behind me is my ancestors stretching back into hundreds of years of both of these families and the abuse and the emotional manipulations of all these hundreds of years of people coming down through the ages and ending with me.
	And I'm thinking to myself, this has to stop here.
	This really has to stop.
	If I ever have children, I can't let this continue through me.
	I have to be a barrier to this.
	Like I said, it's just amazing to feel such a strong image.
	It's not that I can see the faces of the people behind me, it's just that I can feel them.
	It's really incredible.
	Anyway, again, I'm glad to have heard Yeah, listen, I mean, this image that you have of the geese, I mean, it's more than an image.
	In my view, this is absolutely correct.
	You know, this is how, it is through the courage of people like yourself, in my view, this is how the planet moves forward.
	This is how the race improves.
	This is how humanity gets up another bloody step towards some kind of better world for children and for others.
	This kind of thing where one generation just pries open their own eyes and says, this stops here.
	This historical abuse that has gone on for I don't know how long in this gene pool, and it's just about everybody's gene pool, this stops now.
	This is exactly how the race, you know, everybody wants to bring down the state.
	And everybody wants to bring down the church, and everybody wants to convert people to anarcho-capitalism, and I know I do, and I think that's great.
	But this is the practical reality of how the world changes, step by step, bit by bit, person by person, and breaking this kind of chain.
	Just think of all the people that you have freed in the future.
	From this same god-awful fate that has been going on for centuries, if you have kids, fantastic.
	It doesn't matter if you don't because you'll be around kids and you'll be around parents and you already have had a very strong and powerful and positive effect on your cousin, as you talked about over Christmas.
	So, you know, hats off, a huge bow.
	This is some amazing work that you're doing.
	I actually had a really great conversation with her the other night.
	I was listening to one of your podcasts on the way home.
	I can't remember which one it was.
	Well, that's not surprising.
	It's actually my daily ritual to and from work and then while I'm at work I listen to you.
	What was really great was I was listening to your podcast and the image again of this conversation with my cousin came into mind and I hit pause on the iPod and I called her up and I said, I just started talking to her about all this stuff, just like floodgates opening.
	And we had probably an hour and a half long conversation.
	And, you know, we both just thanked each other, you know, because, you know, she said it's just incredible that I'm sharing the stuff with her, I'm helping her out and all that stuff.
	And I said, you know what, I really do think that my conversation with her unlocked so much in me because it was someone that I'm close enough to and, you know, I just, I can't believe how open and honest my cousin is after all the abuse that's happened to her.
	I mean, I think part of it is, you know, she kind of is really open to everybody all the time, but, you know, just the honesty that she showed me and the, you know, the genuine curiosity when I talked about this stuff, she wasn't like, oh, I don't believe you.
	She said, wow, I can't believe it.
	It's amazing, you know, like it's incredible to me.
	Right, and she can probably use a little bit of help in the long run.
	I mean, this is just a guess, right?
	But in terms of self-protection, just because she's not able or not been able to see the corruption and evil that was in her family, and she still has, as we all do, a tendency to whitewash the crimes of our parents, of her parents, that is going to be a challenge for her in terms of self-protection.
	But, you know, as long as you guys keep up the conversation, she's got every chance in the world.
	Yeah, and she actually is, she's still, you know, having much difficulty.
	I mean, I can tell that just from her responses to things, you know, when she talks about her family and stuff, that she's still pretty numb to it.
	She still hasn't, she hasn't reached the same, obviously, the same level of acceptance of what really happened.
	She's still talking about how she wants to go, she and her husband are moving back to the homeland area to, you know, They just got married this last fall, and they're moving back home to start their life back there and be closer to family and stuff, and I guess her dad's dying from lifelong smoking and all that stuff like that.
	But she's saying that, you know, I feel like I should be around in his last days, so all this stuff.
	And I'm thinking, this guy abused you for years.
	It still hasn't hit her yet, but she's still living in a lot of denial.
	But just being able to talk to her about this stuff as openly as I did, like I said, it just completely unlocked a lot of stuff for me.
	Right. And, you know, in contrast with Nate's earlier call and with calls that other people have been talking about, how do I bring up anarchism at work or how do I talk about libertarianism, you know, at social events and so on.
	Those are great conversations to have and I'd never say that those are not important, you know, but the real grist of the matter, the real meat of the matter is what you're doing by talking with your cousin and what you're doing with yourself.
	We all want to leap over the mountain, right?
	We all want to get to the other side, but there's just a lot of really in-depth conversations that we have with ourselves and with those that we're close to about the really meaningful stuff, right?
	If you went in and started lecturing to her about the economics of DROs, I mean, you'd probably put her to sleep, right?
	You know, this is not where she's at.
	It's not what she needs. But in helping people with the really core emotional issues that goes on, it's why I do the dreams and stuff like that, because that is the stuff where change really occurs.
	Changing people's minds about DROs and the minimum wage is a funsy topic, don't get me wrong.
	I certainly enjoy them.
	But the real meat of human change occurs right down at the core, right in the sort of spinal fluid of the soul where it is our primary personal relationships that we need to see clearly and ethically and to free ourselves from where corruption cannot be assuaged.
	So I think it's fantastic what you're doing.
	And also I think that you're seeing that the degree to which you can open somebody else's eyes is mutual, right?
	Doesn't it open your eyes more so as well?
	Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
	I agree. There's no such thing as just helping others, right?
	It's always mutual. You're always helping yourself.
	Yeah, I honestly feel like that helped me more than I felt that I helped her.
	I mean, it really did. It shocked me awake in several ways.
	There was one other thing that I wanted to ask about.
	Maybe Christina could help with this, too.
	But my brother is having a child soon.
	This spring, they're expecting a son.
	They live back, you know, home close to my family.
	And I'm wondering, you know, I'd really like to go back and, you know, see the boy when he's born and stuff, but I also know that if I do this whole de-fooing thing between now and then, I mean, is this going to be an unfair imposition on my brother to, you know, say, hey, I'm coming home, but I don't want to see Mom.
	You know, is this going to be like putting him in the middle of things?
	I don't know. What's the way that I can approach that, do you think?
	That's never an easy thing to answer.
	I think the question is, what relationship does your brother have with your family?
	And how do you feel about his relationship with them?
	And in that light, can you have a relationship with him?
	If you can't have a relationship with him, you certainly can't have a relationship with your son.
	And these are some of the losses that are really, really, really difficult to stomach.
	Steph has gone through this with his nieces.
	Not being able to have a relationship with his brother means not being able to have a relationship with his nieces.
	And it's really, really difficult.
	Again, you can't go...
	To see your brother, if he has a relationship with your mom, it would put him in a very difficult position.
	And you'd also have to sort of factor in, how do you feel?
	How do you feel about the fact that he's still involved with your family?
	Well, I've actually had a couple of short conversations with him about this, and it surprised me how open he is to hearing me talk about this stuff.
	I don't know if that just means that he's too timid to tell me to shut up or what, but I was...
	I was kind of going over some stuff with him the other day about, I guess it was a couple weeks ago, about just some memories of my mom and stuff and just kind of commiserating with him about it.
	He's definitely in a position where he knows that there's something terribly wrong with the whole thing.
	It's just that I don't think that he has the intestinal fortitude to go through with confronting it.
	He's a very Non-confrontational type of person.
	He kind of wants the world to go on around him and as long as he doesn't upset it too much, then that's Right, so he's in a sense, he's appeasing you by listening and not necessarily being open, but I think it's important to remember that your brother is enmeshed in his own relationships, right? So this is the domino theory of self-improvement.
	This is why it's so hard to be rational, at least initially, but I'm guessing here, and you can certainly let me know, or you don't have to, it's your brother, you can discuss it, it's not as you see fit, but What's going to happen if your brother decides to defoot?
	Right? So think of it from his position, right?
	So he says, you know, you're right.
	You know, you're younger than me, but I'm going to be the rarest older brother in the universe and take advice from my younger brother.
	Oh wait, that's projection, sorry.
	But you're right, younger brother of mine.
	Our family is immoral and corrupt and I'm going to defoo, right?
	But the defooing is not about the family.
	The defooing is about having standards of ethics and standards of behavior and standards of being, of how you treat it.
	So it's not about, let's just ditch my family.
	You say, okay, well, I'm going to ditch my family because they're bad people.
	They did bad things to me in the past and they're not willing to make any kind of amends or even admit to these things or work through any of these issues in the present.
	So that's a standard of behavior.
	Now, what happens to your brother when he applies that standard of behavior?
	To everyone in his life, because it's not just about your family.
	The family is a mere effect of wanting better, right?
	You sort of wake up in the morning and say, my sole goal today is to get rid of my family.
	No. Your goal is to be happy, to end the cycle of abuse, to be positive, to have standards, to be moral, and all these kinds of things.
	The effect of that is that you have to ditch your family.
	Because of their behavior and so on.
	So for your brother, it's like, okay, so my wife's pregnant, and I'm going to introduce a few new variables into her family.
	One is no grandparents on my side, but I can almost guarantee you for positively sure, if your brother has not dealt with his own past, then his wife's parents are going to be the same way.
	Right? So he's going to have to defoo for your side, and then he's going to have to talk to his wife, and he's going to have to say, honey, now I have these standards of behavior, which is if people did bad things to you in the past and don't apologize or make amends or do things differently in the present, then they've got to go, right? Then she's going to say, what are you talking about?
	I mean, are you crazy?
	I'm not going to confront my parents.
	I need them to help us raise the kid.
	They're going to ask me questions about why we're not seeing your side of the family anymore.
	And, oh, what, you're bringing up my cousins now and my sister?
	It's a real snowball, right?
	It's a real domino thing.
	It's not an accident that you're doing this before you have kids, right?
	It's hard, hard, hard to do it after you have kids.
	So from your brother's standpoint, it's a lot, right?
	It's going to snowball.
	And, you know, last but not least, what about his wife, right?
	If he's going to have these standards of behavior...
	What about his own wife, the woman who is bearing his child?
	Is he going to go there?
	And I'm not even going to ask that.
	I'm just because this is his business and your business.
	But if he has these standards of behavior about how he's treated, how does his own wife stack up?
	Because if she's still enmeshed in a corrupt family, then she's going to have all these problems as well.
	Basically asking him to take a landmine to his own family structure as a whole and to possibly take the risk of ending up with absolutely nothing.
	There's principles and then there's really reaching for doing the right thing.
	Your brother may be in a situation where he's just too enmeshed, if that makes sense.
	I've always been the iconoplast of the family.
	As difficult as it is It has been for me to tear myself loose from this whole thing.
	I can only imagine that it's going to be almost impossible for him because he's not the type of person that can handle that kind of really rigorous emotional Destruction, I guess.
	I don't know. And then what that means is that you're going to have to see his child.
	You'll see the effects of your parents on his child.
	And you'll see the effects of his wife.
	It's really, it's very painful.
	It's very, very painful. Absolutely.
	And unless he fully supports you in not having your parents around, you're going to be sweating every time you're over there.
	You're not going to be enjoying it because every time the doorbell rings, you're like, oh, God, is it them?
	It's terrifying. Right.
	Absolutely. Absolutely. No, this is, he actually, when he was married, when he got married, his wife has two kids from a previous marriage, and they're two just awesome little dudes.
	I mean, they're so lively and, you know, smart and fun, but I do see, you know, patterns and stuff that I've seen before, you know, obviously in my own life, and I've actually seen my, you know, like the older kid in Of these two, he's really bright, I mean, in school and stuff.
	He's a very smart kid.
	And I always was in school, too.
	And I've noticed my brother teasing him about his intelligence before.
	And, you know, that's something that he always did to me, too.
	And I've told my brother, I just said, look, this is unacceptable.
	You can't do this to the kid, you know.
	I just, I don't know if he's, you know, he kind of just sort of laughed it off or whatever.
	And he's like, yeah, but the kid's so You know, nerdy and stuff.
	And I'm like, well, yeah, but does that mean he's bad and deserves to be taunted and stuff?
	You know who wasn't nerdy?
	It was Dad. Dad wasn't nerdy.
	Was that good? Yeah, exactly.
	So anyway, yeah, I think you've made several really, really good points here that are going to help me kind of clarify this in my own mind again, too.
	And it's reminded me of several things.
	So again... Mad props to you and the wife.
	I mean, it's just amazing what you guys are doing for me and for everybody else, so thanks again.
	Appreciate it. Keep us posted.
	You're doing some fantastic stuff there.
	Yeah, I'll try to be more active on the forums again.
	I've been away from it for a while, but I'll try to keep you guys up to date on what's going on here.
	I appreciate that. I mean, it's been marvelously instructive and helpful for me to read over Greg's and Nathan's progress and things like that, so if I can give back some of that, I really want to, so...
	Fantastic. Well, thanks so much, and I appreciate it.
	Cool. Peace out. All right, so if anybody had any, what are we at, six o'clock, any sort of last remaining questions, you could either type them into the chat window, or I'm certainly happy to take another call or two.
	If you would like to ask or have any other sorts of questions about stuff, I certainly would be happy to entertain more.
	Type them in. Christina herself, her fine self, is watching the chat window, and I'm pacing back and forth.
	So feel free to ask any other questions.
	You can just click on the request mic or ask for mic.
	If you had any sort of questions, we do philosophy, economics, psychology, relationships, art, literature, and foreheads here.
	So feel free to come up with anything else that you have.
	Any other questions? Questions, questions.
	Do we have any other questions? Because I don't have any more topics.
	I'm entirely out of time.
	I mean, I do, but I'm saving them for the podcast this week.
	That could be it? All right.
	Well, listen, thanks so much, everyone, for joining us on this Sunday afternoon.
	Really appreciate it. And we will chat next week.
	Same bat time, same bat channel.
	And again, thanks very much to our callers today for sharing some amazing and powerful stuff that they're up to.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	And Nathan says, I thought of a question I was going to ask, but I just forgot again.
	And the answer is Alzheimer's.
	So, that's sort of my guess.
	So, thanks very much.
	I really appreciate it, and we'll talk to you guys soon.

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