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Jan. 24, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:08
617 Futile Words?

Should I hurl myself into the fire of the state?

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It is the 24th of January 2007, and all I can say is, are you ready to rumble?
I have had a post that puts a lot of criticisms together in one place, which I really appreciate.
It saves me some effort. And I'd like to go through it, and then we'll have a chat about it, and you can let me know what you think.
Dear Steph, Thank you so very much for all that you don't do.
For a while there, you really had us worried.
Let me be honest, when you first emerged advocating freedom and rationality and threatening to blow the cover off our nice little racket we have going, we thought we would have a problem on our hands.
We were faced with a very sticky mess of people resisting our power, questioning the reality we have invented, or with the messy but fun prospect of running you over with a tank.
Ah! But now we see we have no problem with you.
You could have lived your bizarre anti-status philosophy and not paid taxes, ignored or broken some of our funnier laws, or even bred to create more of your thinking minions.
You could have advocated your listeners to also follow their brains and refused us.
You could have even changed more minds by practicing freedom.
We appreciate you advocating against any form of violent or non-violent force of resistance.
I mean, we have enough to do without stamping our little cockroaches.
But no worries here. As long as you pay your taxes, follow our laws, and go through the motions we force on you, we are happy with you.
We are, after all, fierce proponents of freedom of thought, but don't tell anyone, so long as our money keeps coming.
We encourage you to keep up the good fight and educate all those religious and socialist monkeys to think exactly as you do.
After all, that has worked so well in the past.
You are right to follow our commands.
We have all the force.
You have none. You will never have a crumb of what we have.
And we thank you, another quote, radical anarcho-capitalist for making it possible.
So enjoy being right.
We honestly don't care. We both know a real person of worth needs rationality, morality, and courage.
But hey, two out of three ain't bad.
You are very sincerely ours, the state.
P.S. We love FDR. It's kind of like an end farm.
And somebody said, don't feed the trolls.
He replied, let me be clear, I'm not trying to be a troll.
I am feeling a bit cheeky.
But I feel that this is a valid critique.
If I am out of bounds, tear me up.
Actually, if Steph finds this offensive and thinks it's not fair or mature, I apologize for the form I choose to express myself in, but not the overall thesis.
Well, good for you, my brother.
I really think that's great.
I think that you should stick by your guns, and if you post something that claims that anarcho-capitalists are responsible for the state, I think that it's going to be a rather challenging thesis to maintain, and I'll give you some sort of reasons why.
Let's just touch on this first, though.
I mean, I try not to be overly sensitive about honor.
And I don't mind people saying, well, Steph, why don't you take up arms against the state and get yourself killed?
Or why don't you get yourself thrown in a state jail?
Or why don't you stop paying taxes?
I have no problem with all those questions coming at me.
Maybe that would be exactly right.
I don't think so, but maybe it would be.
But... Where I think, and this is always the grave danger when you critique someone or when you criticize someone, the grave danger is always to go too far and lose your credibility.
And I know this having, I think, gone rather far in 600 million podcasts, that it's very important not to go, sort of to build credibility over time.
And that means that you don't go too far and start accusing people of wild crimes against humanity when there's not any particular evidence.
And maybe there is evidence, and this guy does have some that I'm not aware of.
But when he says that the sort of radical anarcho-capitalists are making the state possible, Well, that's a, I mean, that's a pretty serious charge, to be honest with you.
I mean, the state is the greatest evil outside of what is inflicted on children, the state is the greatest, including the church, the state is the greatest evil in the world.
And if I'm making the state possible through what it is that I'm doing, first of all, if I stop doing it, then the state should collapse, right?
That would be, that would be the central thesis that would work logically according to that.
You even mentioned the word state, you hear sirens.
Now, if I'm making the state possible, then I just sort of have a pretty basic question.
I mean, certainly if I am making the state possible, I would be absolutely overjoyed.
Like, if somebody said to me, hey Steph, you're the reason the state exists, I would like leap for joy.
I'd feel a bit bad over the past 6,000 years or 10,000 years or 50,000 years of human history and all those murders and deaths and the...
You know, billions of people killed and so on.
But I would still feel overjoyed because I would then get to stop doing what I'm doing and the state would collapse.
If what I'm doing is causing or allowing the state to continue, fantastic.
If I'm the silver thread that keeps these monstrous guns rotating over mankind, fabulous.
I'll just stop willing to do what I'm doing and then the guns will fall and there will be plowshares and parties.
So, that approach...
I just have one sort of basic question, which is that I started really sort of writing and podcasting a little bit over a year ago.
A year and two months, three months.
Before that, I had personal conversations and so on, but fundamentally, before that, I was not writing or podcasting.
So, if I'm making the state possible...
Then I can't help but wonder how it is that the state managed to grow when I was not at all active in the movement.
I mean, obviously I was fairly inactive in the movement before I was born, but since I've been born, for the first 39 years of my life, where I did almost nothing active in any kind of political or philosophical or psychological movement, I wonder how it is that the state managed to grow so nicely without My participation.
So if you could explain that, that would help me understand why it is that you're placing all of these millions upon millions of bodies and jailed people and intimidated and bullied people while you're piling all these corpses at my door.
Because if you make the accusation that somebody is responsible for the state, then you really are bulldozing a whole lot of genocide at their door.
If I am morally responsible for the genocide of hundreds of millions of people, then I think it might be worthwhile coming up with some proof that explains how the state flourished and continues to flourish when I was not participating in this at all.
So I don't mean to get too upset, but when people accuse me of supporting such an evil institution or allowing it to continue or being a prop for it, then I take that very seriously.
I take the accusations of genocide rather seriously, of supporting genocide.
So that's the first thing that I would question about this gentleman's credibility.
And that would sort of lead me to believe that he's not working from facts.
I get emotional terror, and I'll talk about that a little bit later.
And I'm not saying any of this to try and humiliate this gentleman.
I actually believe that these kinds of Accusatory emails, which I get with some regularity, really come from...
They're a false self-maneuver, but they're provoked by the true self.
The true self, deep down in the sky, wants to believe.
He wants to believe that there's a path to freedom that doesn't involve getting yourself thrown in jail.
And he wants to believe that there are virtues and values out there that are not self-destructive in the way that he proposes values should be enacted.
And he really wants that, because he's trapped where he is right now.
I mean, the email irritates me a little, but more than that I feel, or the post, I feel sympathy, because this guy's trapped in a way that I can't even imagine.
And so, yes, he's going to kick and curse at me as I attempt to lift some masonry off his legs, but none of this is with the intent to humiliate.
But when you do get a gap between...
Your accusations and reality, then it's a lot easier for you to see that your accusations have nothing to do with who you're accusing, right?
This guy's accusations against me don't have anything to do with me.
They are very much to do with his own emotional state and his own personal history, which I don't know anything about, and I'll make some guesses, but...
When you get a sense of the gap, right?
So when you get a sense of the gap between your accusations and the person that you're accusing or the people that you're accusing, in reality, then you can see that it's not the people who you're accusing who are provoking the accusation.
Sorry, I'll try not to use the word accuse so much.
I'll switch to French as accuse.
Right? So if I think that somebody is trying to attack me in my bed, there's a headless guy leading over my bed who wants to choke me and kill me.
And I leap out of bed and grab the headless guy's shoulders and so on and find out that it is a jacket that I've thrown over a chair and left by my bed that I woke up in the shadow and this and that, then it's not likely that I'm going to keep attacking my jacket.
I'm not going to sit there.
Well, okay, but just in case, I'm going to set fire to you, right?
I mean, that's not really what happens.
When you attack someone and you realize that you're attacking a fantasy, then you stop the attack, right?
And You say, oh, okay, well, that was just a trick of a light and I shouldn't leave these jackets over my chairs.
This did actually happen to me when I was a kid.
I'm going to crap my pants. So, I mean, I didn't actually set fire to the jacket.
We just had a long chat, and I invited that jacket into the space of not scaring the crap out of me.
So that's important, right?
When you attack someone or something and you find out that it's a fantasy, then you can stop the attack and you can look at your own motives.
That's sort of the desire. That's the best that I can do.
That's the kindest thing that I can do with something like this.
Because this person really is trapped.
And my God, what a terrible place to be.
What a terrible place to be to feel that your values must either lead you to rank-stinking, state-supporting hypocrisy or to wanton self-destruction and exclusion from even the minor pleasantries of society and a life of fear.
A life of terror of being arrested for tax evasion or not paying your taxes or whatever, right?
So, I could be wrong, right?
That's just my perspective.
This guy could be entirely right.
Perhaps I should drive my car off the cliff into a jail to save the state some time and then no longer be able to podcast, no longer be able to explore our philosophy, spend most of my time fending off various gentlemen.
Perhaps that would be a great step forward in terms of freedom.
That could be the case.
But I'm not sure that it would really be the case.
And I'll start with some sort of practical reasons, and then we'll talk about some philosophical reasons.
And, you know, again, I'm perfectly open to being corrected, just not so much on the one that I'm supporting the bloody more of the state.
So, first and foremost, there are lots of people already who don't pay taxes.
Tons and tons of people already.
10%, 15%, 20% of the economy is black market or grey markets.
Already tons of people. Who don't pay their taxes.
So I don't really think that adding one more person to the millions upon millions upon millions of people in each country who don't pay taxes is really going to do anything.
So going, say in Canada, right, say 10% of people don't pay taxes.
Or even if we say, let's say it's 5%, right?
So we've got a population of 30 million odd.
So we've got, what, 1.5 million people who don't pay taxes or who pay few taxes.
And I'm sure it's higher than that. That's just 5%.
There's among the rich with trust funds and offshore blah-blahs and so on.
So we've got 1.5 million people who aren't paying taxes.
And then if we get 1.5 and 1, I'm not sure that that's going to bring the state down.
The state has quite nicely hung on to its power, despite the fact that millions of people don't pay taxes.
So for me, adding my number to the roster won't really make any difference.
In my view, maybe there's a reason why you feel there's one more person that needs to join the tax evaders and then we will be free.
I don't really think that's the case because, of course, all the state does, it does two things.
One is it actually likes there to be tax evaders.
The state loves tax evaders.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
If there were no tax evaders, it would be very hard for the state to continue.
It would be harder for the state to continue to justify its power.
If there were no tax evaders, then the state would not need all of the tax collectors and the IRS, and it would not need all of the additional powers that it requires to go after the tax evaders.
And also, it would not have a wonderful wedge to drive between the population to get all of the taxpayers inflamed about all of the cheating taxpayers who don't pay their taxes and thus raise the taxes on everyone else and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that makes all of the taxpayers angry at who?
Yes? What? No? The tax collectors?
No! At the people who don't pay taxes.
This is a very standard way that you divide the sheeple, right?
You leave the gate open, some of the sheep wander out, and you get the other sheep to be angry at those who wander out.
So that they feel self-righteous and justified.
And then you say, well, I'm sorry.
We're going to have to kill a few of you because the ones who've wandered out, we can't kill.
And they're like, well, that's a bummer.
The real problem is not that I'm getting killed, but that other sheep wandered out of the enclosure and are free.
So the state has no particular problem with people who evade taxes.
It gets to ramp up tax collection brutality.
It gets to divide the population.
And, of course, all it does is it borrows the money that...
That is not coming in through taxes.
So I don't think that tax evasion or tax revolt is particularly the way to go.
I'll give you another reason why.
I don't think that a tax revolt, even if I could snap my fingers today and have a 100% tax revolt tomorrow, I would not do it.
I would not do it.
And the reason that I would not do it It's because intellectually, philosophically, rationally, we're nowhere close to ready for a stateless society.
We're nowhere close to ready for a stateless society.
You don't just detonate the government and get rid of the state.
The state is something in people's minds that is inherited from their interactions with their family and teachers and authority thinkers when they're younger, and their priests and their gods.
So detonating a government and imagining that you're going to get rid of the state, the state of mind, so to speak, is fantasy, mad fantasy.
It would be like some mad radical atheist saying, well, if we blow up all the churches, we'll get rid of religion.
Well, not so much.
In fact, what you'll do is you will increase religion.
Terrorism is...
It doesn't win. Terrorism never wins.
Terrorism does not achieve its stated objectives.
Look at the IRA. Watch Season 3, Episode 1 of The West Wing.
It does not achieve, which I don't agree with an enormous amount, but terrorism certainly does not achieve its goals.
Palestine and Israel and all these sorts of things, well, they just don't care what they want, right?
I mean, I guess the only way that you could say that terrorism gets what it wants is that Bin Laden's crew seems to be rather effective at speeding along the bankruptcy of the U.S. government, and in that, if we get the ideas out consistently and powerfully enough, then they actually will be a good friend to the U.S. taxpayer.
But if the government is...
You know, if we snap our fingers tomorrow and everybody...
Stops paying the taxes and the government collapses in a month.
What happens then?
What happens then? Well, the government is not a cause of anything.
The government is an effect of everything.
The government is an effect of everything.
And as people say, everyone gets the government they deserve.
And I don't think that's quite true. Because none of us deserve to have these statist hierarchies inflicted on us when we were children through parents, teachers and priests.
But... Nonetheless, it's still very true that the state is merely an effect of the mind.
The state is an effect of people's thinking.
Because the moment that people think differently, everything changes.
And it doesn't change back.
Look at getting rid of slavery.
Perfectly justified, now considered to be perfectly heinous.
Coffee break. And it's not going to come back.
So... I don't think, or I'm very sure...
Rightly or wrongly, that collapsing the state tomorrow is a very, very bad idea.
It is better the devil that you know.
And when people are free of their family corruptions and people are free of romantic corruptions and people are free within their own minds, then...
Society will change of its own accord.
It will just happen.
You don't need to will a damn thing for social change.
You just need to stay in a powerful conversation with people.
Until the state becomes as unthinkable as slavery.
As women not having property rights.
But until that is achieved, to some degree, I mean, I'm sure there's still a few crazy nutjobs who want slavery back and think that women should be put back in the burqa.
Well, there's quite a few of those.
But that's because the conversation hasn't occurred in those countries.
So, I have dedicated a good portion of my life, and hopefully more, In the future, to having that essential conversation about freedom with people.
Personal freedom comes first.
Political freedom is merely an effect of personal freedom.
When you defoo, if your family is corrupt and unwilling to change or listen, you are doing more to bring down the state than a thousand Molotov-throwing cocktail Sergei Nechayev-Bekunin types.
More than a million people who move to some e-currency.
Because the challenge is not bringing down the state.
The state has been brought down many times throughout history.
But it happened in Thailand recently.
Three tanks rolled down the street, you got a new government.
Happens all the time, all the time, every year.
In society, at least one government is overturned and probably more.
Just on average, right?
Dozens of them are running through my mind, but no need to go into details.
We all are aware that governments get replaced by other governments all the time.
So bringing down a government doesn't matter.
The challenge is not replacing it with another government.
That's the challenge. If you've got a bunch of slaves that are valuable economic resources in the ancient world, yes.
People will kill the slave owners, and the slaves will go, Yay!
We're free! We killed our slave owners!
Wait, manacles? Really? That's where we're going with this?
At least I had a brief moment of freedom there.
So, killing the slave owners, and again, I'm not suggesting any violence here, but just using it as a metaphor.
Killing the slave owners...
And then taking over their slaves and making them your slaves is not exactly progress.
So bringing down the state doesn't matter to me.
Doesn't matter to me at all.
Because I see where human beings have to be in order for the state to wither away of its own accord.
In order for the state to just become something that's ridiculous.
And it will be a fight.
Don't get me wrong. It will be a fight.
But it will be a fight with momentum.
It will be a fight with intellectual certainty, and it will be a fight with comedy and ridicule.
You know when the state will come down?
It will come down after about three days after Saturday Night Live does a sketch about how ridiculous governments are.
Not this government in the John Stewart tradition, but governments as a whole.
Once you get comedians starting to talk, it's that common a coinage, that comedians and people laugh at it, then the state will fall.
And it will not need to be violent.
There will be fights. And brother shall be divided against brother.
But it does not necessarily have to be violent.
Because if it's violent, that just sets the stage for another state.
So... Excuse me while I wander into yodel land.
So this gentleman is really trapped in a terrifying and terrible place.
And I have all the sympathy in the world for him.
I really do. Because...
He is enraged at these values.
And it's almost like he thinks that these values are enraged at him.
So, I mean, who cares about the snarkiness and the sarcasticity, sarcasticness, the sarcastic quotient of the post?
That's not particularly relevant.
But what is relevant is that you will, when you are a philosopher and deal with ideas, you will...
Very commonly come across the mad, frustrated, impatient attackers.
And I think it's time that we just talked about it in this way.
So the mad impatient attackers are like, oh my god, enough talk!
Talk, talk, talk, talk!
Has talk removed one single soldier from his station?
Has talk removed one single law from the statute books?
Has law set one child free from state education?
No, I say, nay, talk!
Talk, all we do is talk back and forth.
Ooh, we think we're such heroes because we're talk, talk, talking!
And we're not doing a damn thing, and it's all just hypocrisy and nonsense, and if we really had any commitment to our deals, we would take to the barricades, we would stop paying taxes, we'd go out in a blaze of glory, and that would free the world, and then we'd actually be doing something and not just talking.
I understand that. I really do.
I understand the impatience and the frustration.
I do. I do. I do.
I do. I do. But...
I just don't agree with it, right?
I mean, clearly, I just don't agree with it.
And I've talked a little bit about why I don't agree with that.
I'll finish it off and then talk about what I think might be the psychological motivations for such impatience and hostility towards people who are talking and communicating and trying to be right about freedom, right?
First thing is, let's get it right.
Let's get it right. God forbid there's some essential flaw to the anarchist model that we're proposing and some country sets it up or it happens somewhere and there's just a massive disaster.
We're in the process of social engineering here.
We're in the goal or in the...
We are going through the methodology of social engineering, and social engineering is the greatest virus in the world.
It makes the 1917 smallpox virus look like a minor head cold.
Social engineering, the restructuring of society and the use of its resources, particularly those around violence, is the most fundamental virus in the world.
That's what gets 270 million people killed.
It's genocide, right?
The state kills people because of social engineering.
So I, for one, don't mind spending a year or two or five making sure that we're getting it right.
And that we're not going to produce some macabre, totalitarian, twisted slaughterhouse, which I really don't believe we are, but I don't mind taking a little bit of time to get social engineering right, because it is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction when it goes wrong.
And it is really the most glorious thing when it goes right.
So for me, when designing the planet of the future, which is really what we're doing here, when designing the planet of the future, Uh, I'm okay if we take a little time.
I'm fine. I'm fine if we take a little time to get it right, to look at the questions, to go back and forth, and to try these on, to try these ideals on for size.
So, for me, yeah, we're, what, the website has been running, the board has, the website has been running, the board has been running for about 10 months now, I think it was.
No, actually 11 months.
It was end of February, I think, that we went up.
So about 11 months we've been having this conversation.
You can throw that less than a year up against the backdrop of 50,000 years of statism of one kind or another, from tribalism to anything else you can think of, and see that we're...
I'm in no hurry from that standpoint.
If we've taken 10,000 years, then yes, I would say that we should probably get moving.
But after 10 or 11 months, I would say that it's okay if we continue to take a little bit of time to get the word out.
I mean, what is there?
Maybe a couple of thousand listeners to this podcast, maybe a couple of thousand more that I'm not aware of.
But... That's not really much of a momentum as yet.
For each individual, it's hugely valuable, and that I massively respect.
But we are not in any place where we can do anything other than dent the armor of the state and leave nearly a scratch.
It's like firing a peashooter at a tank.
You might want to wait until you have something slightly more punch to it, I guess you could say.
So, there's lots of reasons for that.
I, myself, don't feel that I am compelled, because I believe in personal liberty, first and foremost, I don't believe that I am compelled to risk jail, to drop out of society, to sell my house, To go live in the woods or whatever it is that this person is suggesting, to go and work under the table, I don't believe that I am compelled to do that.
Because, of course, if I was compelled to do that, I can't really see what good a philosophy of personal freedom would be.
Or how logically consistent it would be.
Actually, I can see exactly how logically consistent it would be to say that in order to be free or in order to live a philosophy of personal freedom, you must defy the state, stop paying taxes, and go live in the woods.
Well, really, that's my only option.
That's when I believe in personal freedom and choice, that I can only do one thing.
Well, that doesn't seem to be quite right.
I mean, there's something quite not correct about that.
And... So, I think that that may need...
You may need another swing at that, right?
If you say, you can go anywhere!
Really? Anywhere? I'm personally free?
Yes! Where can I go?
Anywhere! Now, get into this box and stop participating in society and give up your career, give up your house, give up podcasting, give up writing.
Kind of tough to get internet reception in the woods, and so you need to stop doing all of that, and that's called personal freedom.
Well... Really?
I just got to tell you, I don't really think that's the case.
I think personal freedom is you pick your battles as befits your personal preferences and choices and abilities and so on.
Hey, if you want to stop paying taxes, be my guest.
I don't think it's a particularly effective thing to do, but if it's where your conscience takes you, I'm not going to argue with you.
I've got bigger fish to fry than people who are on the same wavelength but singing slightly different songs.
This doesn't count people like...
I'm anarchist and those who are agnostics and so on.
Not singing the same song.
Singing countertenor, countertune, counter...
contrapunctual! Oh, I knew I'd get it sooner or later.
So I don't really feel that that is a valuable approach to take or a consistent approach to take with personal freedom.
Now, why? Why is this mad impatience and this angry accusations of hypocrisy and state-supporting and futility and this and that, which we've been getting a few of lately, and I've had a few land in my inbox as well?
Well, this is sort of what I believe.
Now, I'm going to guess that this gentleman is not living in the woods, because he sent me an email, or he posted on the board, right?
So he has access to a computer or to an ISP to...
You know, whatever. He's got a place to live.
So I'm going to guess that he has some degree of participation in the state society and so on.
And of course, he drives on roads and all these sorts of things which we've talked about before.
So you have some involuntary participation in state society just through the simple act of drawing breath.
And so I'm guessing that this gentleman has not enacted the ideals that he claims I am hypocritical and state-supporting for not enacting, right?
So he hasn't done it, and of course, unless he is, in fact, posting from jail, maybe there's a computer in jail, and he's posting from there, in which case, you know, dude, way to be consistent, right?
I mean, that's great. I'm not sure it's A good use of your time and life and resources, of which you get only one, but, you know, at least you've been following your own philosophy, but I doubt that's the case.
What I think is occurring is the following.
I have been talking about personal freedom with people low these many months and saying, forget the state for now.
Forget the state. Focus on your personal relationships.
It's good to know the theory. Let's chat about the minimum wage, but...
Let's talk about your personal relationships.
And I've kind of eased people into it a little bit more gently, right?
I mean, I started with the state, went to religion as a whole, started talking about anarchism, in other words, the concepts of freedom in a non-threatening way, which involved people understanding that we could live without a state, which is like, huh, well, I guess we don't need this degree of control and violence, manipulation, and bullying over us.
And then, of course, around podcasts, 180 or 183 I think it was, I began to bring the message home in talking about your personal relationships.
So that was sort of my sinuous, snake-like way of easing my way into your ear and erecting these values slowly in your heart as best I could without kicking over the ejectometer of the false self.
So that's sort of been my approach and When I talk about philosophy or the philosophy that I espouse around personal freedom is something that is highly actionable, to use a buzzword.
You can do it.
You can do it. In fact, it really involves not doing anything, right?
So you can absolutely not be involved in your family or you can not continue to see a bad boyfriend or girlfriend or anything.
You can do these things. You can achieve these things.
It's based on your personal willpower, your personal evaluation of what is virtuous and what allows you to have integrity and be happy.
So, the interesting thing is that I actually, maybe there are anarcho-capitalists out there, I don't know, I don't really listen to other anarcho-capitalists, but it seems to me that what I've put forward is a very highly actionable set of principles.
That You can really put into place tomorrow, if you want, and achieve far greater freedom than if we got rid of the state, but you stayed enslaved to your family and to bad relationships.
So, I don't really believe that I'm stuck in some sort of futile, spin-the-wheels, talk-talk-talk situation.
Relative to the state, well, sure.
But so what? That's not the real problem in human freedom.
And that's only an effect of the family.
The state is an effect of the family and of religion and of state schooling.
So, in terms of, oh, this philosophy is just about talk, talk, talk, I highly, highly disagree with that assessment.
I don't think that there's a philosopher out there who's talking more about personal freedom Then I am.
There may be some psychologists out there who do as well.
I don't know. I doubt it.
But I don't think that there's anyone who's saying you have the power to make yourself free and you're not dependent on the state going away and you don't have to live in fear because you're going to disobey state laws and you're going to get arrested and you're going to go through all that hell of ending up in jail and ruining your life.
I'm the one who's saying, act, act, act, act.
But, you know, think first and then act, right?
That's sort of my goal.
So I don't think that this is a case of mere windbagging or anything like that.
I think that what we're talking about here is pretty actionable stuff, right?
You know, just stop seeing corrupt people.
Don't deal with corrupt people.
Steer clear of corrupt people.
Blood ties, history, family, doesn't matter.
Lover, wife, doesn't matter.
So, to me, that's highly actionable.
And it's interesting to me when somebody says the only action that would be of value in philosophical terms is defying a well-armed state and getting thrown in jail.
That's the only thing that can bring you freedom.
Because frankly, I don't care about the freedom of society.
I really don't. Because there's no such thing.
I care about your freedom.
I certainly care about my freedom.
I don't care about the freedom of society as a whole.
What a load of nonsense. So, for me to destroy my personal freedom, even if I did think it would advance the freedom of society as a whole, well, so what?
My world is me, right?
I mean, my world is me.
I don't believe in sacrifices of those kinds.
So, for me to sacrifice all of my personal freedom, to be thrown in jail, into the rape rooms, or to live in terror thereof, To destroy my career, all the value of my education, to have to sell my house, and of course, most importantly, to be separated from my wife should I get arrested.
No, thank you. No, no, no, no, a thousand times no.
I would consider that to be pretty sad.
I mean, I'd consider that to be a form of self-terrorism, which is really what this gentleman, I think, is ensnared in.
So... The psychological reasons behind it, to me, are relatively simple, and I could be wrong, but this person does not want to act in his life to become free.
Right? I mean, what threatens him about this conversation, what upsets him and angers him, is he's very frightened of the people around him.
Or he's very angry at the people around him or something.
There's some fear, some tension, some nervous energy around his own personal life.
And it's either because he's enmeshed in some sort of corrupt situation.
Or because he has isolated himself because of his anger against people.
So his own values have been destructive to his own happiness, right?
This is not a happy person. A happy person would say, hey, Steph, I think that I can certainly see an argument as to how not paying your taxes could be really good.
Tell me what you think. Or could put forward a more structured and logical argument and I could respond and that would be great.
That would be a happy person's interaction.
Where you question someone and you don't accuse them of supporting the state and all this sort of nonsense.
That would be the interaction.
So there's not a happy person. So obviously following his own values, whatever they are, has not made him happy.
I would say has made him very unhappy.
And for that, my brother, I feel great sympathy.
So following his own values has made him unhappy.
And so naturally now, like a virus, this odd attachment to weird absolutes must now be communicated to other people.
So now he's going to accuse me that the values I must follow will naturally make me unhappy.
So his values have made him unhappy, so now he has to convince me that...
I must follow self-destructive values or be labeled a hypocrite.
Either way, I'm unhappy, right? If I follow the self-destructive values, get thrown in jail and crap like that, I'm unhappy.
Whereas if I believe in those values but don't follow them, then I'm a hypocrite and then I'm unhappy as well, right?
So it's a no-win situation, of course.
And this is really a mirror of this gentleman's life, right?
This is how he lives, right?
So I'm saying, yeah, you can act and here's what you need to do.
You can act. And you need to get the corrupt people out of your life.
And if this gentleman is still embedded within his family or is still embedded within corrupt relationships of a business or personal kind, friend kind or whatever...
Then, naturally, he is going to feel a great deal of hostility when I say, you can act.
You can act to free yourself.
You don't need to wait for the state to fall.
You don't need to wait for the minimum wage to be repealed.
You don't need to wait for foreign policy to get better.
You don't need to be enslaved to the idea of getting rid of a state.
You can be free yourself within your own life.
So I'm saying act. So that arouses a great deal of tension and fear and hostility in him.
And also partly because, of course, I'm sure I'm not the first philosopher or psychologist or whoever that he's written to saying, oh, it's all talk, talk, talk.
You've got to act. Well, I'm saying, great.
So go act. Go act.
Go get the bad people out of your life.
And so now he's kind of trapped.
If he has been hostile towards other people who he considers mere talkers in the realm of ideas...
And I'm saying, go act.
And he's terrified of acting or it arouses anger in him for some reason that I can't imagine.
Then naturally he's going to feel a great deal of hostility towards me because I'm kind of calling on him, right?
So he's been spending 10 or 20 or 30 years mocking people who only talk about ideas.
And I'm saying, go act!
Go free yourself.
These ideas have legs and can carry you to freedom, but you have to act.
So basically, I'm calling him on it.
Oh, so you're about philosophy and action.
Great. Here's the prescription.
Here's the action. And he can't disagree with getting corrupt people out of your life.
I mean, he's not doing that, right?
So now he's saying, well, yes, but your ideas are futile relative to the state.
Well, yeah, but so what?
Relative to this state today?
Yeah, of course. So what? So what?
That's like saying that the guy who's researching the vaccine for cancer isn't curing the person dying of cancer.
It's like, well, yeah. Got it.
Got it. There are doctors for that.
I'm about curing cancer, preventing cancer.
I'm not about chemotherapy.
And I would say, if you have the ability to cure or prevent cancer, then you're doing a whole lot better for the planet than if you simply learn how to run a chemo machine.
So, snarling at me that my cancer cure, which is in the works, which I actually think is developed, but it takes some time to propagate, It's snarling at me that my cancer cure is ineffective for people who are currently dying of cancer.
It's like, yeah, I got it. But do you think I don't care about the people dying of cancer?
Do you think that that's why I would spend all this time and energy and money communicating the cure?
So I don't know if this is going to be enough to get through the false self of this gentleman, but I would dearly love to know the degree to which I'm on the mark, and of course off the mark, right?
I mean, self-reporting is always a tricky thing, and especially after the first salvo has been fired, which reveals more than most people know.
I would certainly like to know the degree to which I'm on the mark or off the mark.
To know the family history and to know whether this person has freed himself of all corrupt and negative and hostile and difficult influences in his life.
I'd love to know that. I really would.
I'm not sure that this person is going to be able to tell me that.
This is the problem. When you fire off a heavy gun right away without being curious, you end up in a position that's very hard to admit to.
You end up in a position where you really have to defend your...
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