Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 11, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:29:37

643 Sunday Call In Show Feb 11 2007

Celebrity worship, a post-modern fairy tale, and, um, past lives?

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	All right, well thank you everyone so much for joining us this Sunday afternoon, February the 11th, 2007.
	See, it's so much easier when the date's right here before me.
	That much I can actually pull off.
	Thanks for joining. We had an interesting topic put forward by a listener, which I've had some thoughts about over the years, and I'm going to start with an article Welcome to my show!
	And this was a poll that was put before 1,500 children under 10.
	And this was the result of where their values sit.
	And this is, of course, after a couple of, you know, almost a decade's worth of parenting.
	And I guess five years or so in public schools, these are the values that they have inculcated or has been inculcated in them.
	So children under 10 think being a celebrity is the, quote, very best thing in the world, but do not think quite as much of God, a survey has revealed.
	So for us philosophers, it's sort of a mixed bag, that they believe that celebrities are greater than God is good, but it would be great if they didn't think celebrities were greater either.
	This poll of just under 1,500 youngsters ranked God as their 10th favorite thing in the world with celebrity, good looks, and being rich at one, two, and three, respectively.
	Celebrity, good looks, and being rich.
	It is the second year running that God has come in at number 10 in the annual survey for National Kids Day.
	But being rich came top last time around.
	God did come top again this year as the most famous, quote, person in the world, beating US President George Bush into second place.
	Meanwhile, killing in wars had the list of the very worst things in the world, followed by drunks, bullies, illness, smoking, stealing, divorce, and being fat.
	Dying Is in tenth place.
	So, clearly, the razor-sharp reasoning of these children is being put into good use.
	Ask what rules they would make if they were king or queen of the world.
	The number one response from the under-tens was to ban knives and guns.
	They would also put a stop to fighting and killing, telling lies, drugs, bullying, drunks, and smoking.
	Smoking! Evil!
	Absolutely evil, as they say.
	The children who answered the survey would also put a stop to stealing but wanted more holidays and more hospitals.
	Just over three-quarters of the youngsters said they would probably marry later in life, though 21% gave a definite no.
	Most of them want to have children, with most opting for one or two.
	When asked how much money was needed to be rich, the children quoted figures ranging from £1,000 to £10 million, a little bit down on 2005 where the range was £460 million to £200 million.
	So clearly the children are becoming more sophisticated when it comes to their finances.
	Although God comes in as the tenth most famous person in the world, Jesus is at number four, with Father Christmas, a.k.a.
	Santa Claus, at number five.
	Also in the top ten were Madonna the Queen, Tony Blair, and X Factor star Simon Cowell.
	X Factor star Simon Cowell?
	And Sharon Osbourne.
	Wayne Rooney, whoever that is, and David Beckham, I know that at least, who were in the top four, did not make the top ten list this year.
	So this idea that children, admittedly those under 10, right, not the most sophisticated reasoners in the world, though I absolutely believe that they could be with the right promptings, believe that being a celebrity, having good looks and lots of money is the best thing in the whole wide world.
	And the fascinating thing is that this of course is not a phase that people outgrow.
	There has been some questions on the board recently about my perceptions of England, and just not because my perceptions of England are anything special, but it was just curiosity because I had the rather unique position of being able to live in a number of different countries throughout the colonies and to...
	To be able...
	Oh, here we have Wayne Rooney is an English soccer player.
	Yeah, I know. It's Simon Cowell is the American Idol judge.
	Simon Cowell, not Cowell.
	Simon Callow. Simon Cowell is the American Idol judge.
	Cowell? Simon Cowell? Apparently he's a superhero, too.
	That's cool. That is definitely the best thing in the world, judging a singing competition and being a superhero.
	So, Wayne Rooney is an English soccer player.
	So... Oh dear, I self-tangented myself right away from the very beginning.
	Yeah, so I lived, thank you, I lived in pretty tony areas of England as well as not so tony areas of England.
	I went to private school with a number of upper-class, fairly gropey English bastards, and I went to public school with another fairly fruity group of English bastards.
	So I have some perception of the value of England.
	It's of course biased, but at least it's a bias that comes from both sides of the tracks.
	And then of course I came over to Canada where I met a whole bunch of new colonial bastards.
	So it was all quite...
	I have had the sort of bastard salad, I guess you could say, throughout my life.
	I met some bastards in South Africa, too.
	So as far as bastardization goes, I'm a multiculturalist.
	But the one thing that I sort of find, and I've mentioned this in a podcast, and this was questioned in a recent post, was that I said that the fact that the monarchy is still at the center of British society It's something that warps the British character quite significantly, and I've been told that that's not the case as much anymore, and of course it's been 20 years, more than 20 years since I lived in England.
	Gee, almost 30 years since I lived in England.
	Oh God, age flash. I'm just going to lie down for a moment, I'll be right back.
	Oh, that's better. So, now I'm told that Tony Blair wants to get, he's very interested in a meritocracy and wants to get 50% of young people into university.
	Of course, the poster who posted that did not notice the glaring inconsistency of saying, I'm interested in a meritocracy and half of all young people should get into university.
	That, of course, is a mutually exclusive goal.
	So... Let's not panic about it too much, but that's the kind of stuff that goes on.
	But as far as the good old Emerald Isles go, there is still a very strong drive with celebrity in the form of either media celebrity, entertainment celebrity, or aristocracy, or political celebrity.
	I remember reading, I think it was the second Bridget Jones diary book that I was reading because I Wanted to understand women?
	Sorry? What was that?
	I like chiclet. It's a good research tool.
	I have to write female characters.
	Stop staring at me, everybody!
	So I read Chiclet. Fair enough.
	Let's just go with that and move on, shall we?
	I'm sure it's no shock to anyone.
	That's the funny thing, is that I defend something that pretty much people have surmised already, I'm sure.
	So she talks about, with breathless anticipation, the idea that Sherry Blair, Tony Blair's wife, might show up at a party and how everybody was just yearning and agog with anticipation that Sherry Blair might show up at a party.
	And I just thought, how craven.
	How craven and how pathetic.
	To worship some human being who has particularly political power.
	It is a fetish that people have.
	It's like falling in love with Tony Soprano, I guess.
	Looks and wealth and celebrity are considered to be the very best things in the world.
	And that really is a horrifying thing in many ways.
	And I don't mean to sound like a complete fuddy-duddy, though I'm sure I will.
	And I don't mean to sound like these things never cross my mind in any way, show or form.
	Of course, they're great in certain fantasies that everybody has.
	But so what?
	So is war.
	War is a fantasy that people have as being great, but that's not something that we necessarily continue to believe.
	And of course, it is rather fascinating how these children are picking up, and children are in incredible weather veins of the essence of society, what children are picking up in their society that...
	The people who are celebrities get the attention.
	The people who are talented at singing or dancing or acting or then the people who are pretty, they get all the attention.
	It's like high school just never ends.
	And I think that's a very sad thing.
	Plato said that the things that were required to be happy or the things that every man desired was health and beauty and youth.
	And, of course, that's not too far from celebrity either.
	But what the very sad thing is, of course, is that these children are not being taught, and, of course, there's no way, given the state of modern philosophy, that they could be taught.
	These children are not being taught to have any value relative to two things that I would say are pretty important.
	These children are not being taught to have any value or rather to value anything relative to either reality or their conscience.
	In a sense, they're not taught that they have souls.
	And I'm not a religious man for those who are new to listening to this, but I still think that that's a very important thing to understand.
	Being a celebrity, being rich, being talented, being beautiful, is not enough to make you happy.
	It is not even close to being enough to make you happy.
	In fact, I would say that it's quite the opposite.
	That if you desire, or God help you, if you possess, beauty and talent and money, It seems to me, more likely than not, that your life is going to dissolve into a peculiar and terrifying kind of living hell.
	If looks And talent and money and fame were enough, then Marilyn Monroe would be the world's greatest philosopher and still alive today.
	Anna Nicole Smith, this drunken, boozed-up, addled, waste of a human being, was killed by what?
	Was she killed by drugs?
	No, not particularly.
	They are more of the effect.
	Was she killed by overeating?
	Well, at times it seemed that that would be the case, but she managed to pull up from that.
	Was she killed by her body, her boobs, her blonde looks?
	No. What is she killed by?
	What is Marilyn Monroe killed by?
	Well, they're killed by what kills so many people in this life, either spiritually or physically.
	Anna Nicole Smith is killed by other people's fantasies.
	and the fantasies that other people have is that looks are powerful looks are important or money or fame or talent or that any of these sorts of things have And that is such an all-pervasive fantasy that human beings have.
	And in terms of the looks thing and power and so on, there are some biological reasons.
	I'm not saying it's inhuman or it's evil.
	Fundamentally, there are some very important biological reasons why we would be drawn to people who are good-looking and who have lots of resource.
	There are biological imperatives.
	But so what? Biological imperatives excuse nothing when it comes to rigorously figuring out what real values are, and biological imperatives would lead you, when you were hungry and did not happen to have your wallet with you, to knock over a restaurant and get some money, or to rape somebody if you felt sexually attracted to them but they did not want to have sex with you.
	So the merely biological is something that we spend a good deal of time overcoming, and that's the purpose of philosophy, to reorient ourselves to more logically consistent and happiness-producing behavior.
	But I'll give you another example that I think is interesting.
	One of the things that occurred in 98, I think it was, was that Diana and her fame and her looks and her hairdo hit the wall fairly rapidly.
	And I actually, by the by, I remember being awake and seeing this.
	It was very early in the morning, I think on a Saturday.
	And being quite curious about the speed to which the internet would report on this because the internet was all very new back then and it took a long time, hours, for this to show up on the internet.
	Of course now it usually breaks on the internet.
	And one of the fascinating things that occurred after Diana's death was that the reported incidents of female depression in the United Kingdom lifted quite considerably, not even just a little bit, and I can't remember the exact statistics, but women reported being far less depressed after Diana's death.
	Well, why would that be?
	Well, I just have a theory which, you know, maybe you know something better and you can let me know.
	But to let go of a fantasy causes great pain but provides great liberation.
	To let go of the fantasy that your happiness is dependent upon success at work or whether your football team wins or whether you are able to pick a girl up or a guy up at a bar.
	Or whether people think that you're handsome or pretty.
	All of these sorts of things.
	These are the fantasies.
	These are the distractions, the shiny baubles that we hold in front of ourselves as goals that we feel that we ought to pursue in order to achieve value.
	Nobody would say, if asked, do you think that being good-looking gives you moral value?
	And everybody would say no. We all understand that.
	This isn't like learning Chinese or something, which takes years.
	This is the answer. The answer to this is on the tip of everyone's tongue.
	But we pursue it anyway.
	We pursue looking good, and we pursue career success, and we pursue money, and a lot of us pursue celebrity.
	And that is because we don't feel that we have value except in the eyes of others.
	All of the things that the children value, and as I'll get to with Lady Diana in a moment, all of the things that we're talking about here are things that have value not independent of themselves, If you are in a desert and very thirsty, a glass of water has value even if nobody tells you it does or even if everybody says, ew, water, why would you drink that?
	It has value because you're thirsty.
	It has value relative to reality.
	Doing the right thing, the right moral thing, even though it can be hard and result in great disapproval for you, has value and almost always has value as moralists and philosophers have both demonstrated and talked about repeatedly throughout history.
	Doing the right thing from a moral standpoint, talking about the truth from a moral standpoint, they end up providing...
	This is what ends up drawing the wrath of the majority, right?
	Of the majority who just gang up on every new thought that comes along.
	So human beings, sadly, are taught only to have value in the eyes of others, not relative to reality and certainly not relative to their own conscience.
	We are turned into slaves of the smiles of others, and we fear disapproval greater almost than death.
	Now, with Lady Diana, there's a really fascinating thing, I think, that occurs.
	Girls, and Lord knows I have no way of explaining this.
	Women alone are hard enough to understand girls.
	Who knows? But one thing that is true is that girls like the whole princess thing.
	Girls like the Barbie thing.
	Girls like the prince thing. Girls like the Beauty and the Beast thing.
	There is, in fact, a Disney movie, I believe, that brings together all of the Disney princesses and is a massive bestseller.
	The Princess Diaries is not the film, but it's the one that popped into my head when we were down...
	I was just talking to my wife here, but we were down in Las Vegas.
	When we were down at Disney World, there was a...
	Maybe, does somebody know it?
	Nobody's going to admit to that.
	So, the girls, very much like the princess thing, the women loved the whole Diana thing.
	Why? Because Diana was thin.
	And she was pretty, and she had nice hair, and she was poised, and she had a dazzling smile, which of course is very easy to have when you're very pretty.
	It's very easy to have a dazzling smile when you're pretty, and everybody responds positively to a dazzling smile.
	And what's the name of that woman?
	She wrote, wake up, I'm fat.
	She was the big girl who used to be on the practice.
	Do you know the name of that actress? I can't remember her name.
	But if she had a dazzling smile, this woman who was 250 pounds, it seems unlikely that women would respond in the same way, right?
	So the looks condition the response, and they create the value that they're supposed to validate.
	But anyway, we don't have to get into all that complication.
	But Diana was, in the classic fairy tale story, was plucked from relative obscurity.
	She was from the line of Spencers, which is not unknown in the British aristocratic circles, but certainly not up at the level of the Prince of Wales and so on.
	She was plucked from relative obscurity.
	And she was married by the prince, and she had a beautiful gown, and everybody was looking at her, and everybody wanted to be her, and the number of, and I've got to think it was mostly women who tuned into that wedding.
	When was it, 1982?
	81, 82? See, I know chick lit, but I can't remember that.
	But the number of women who tuned into that was staggering, and she was Considered to be a very famous and very envied and very powerful symbol for a lot of women.
	And some writer, some reporter in England, and I can't remember his name or I'd give him credit, said after she died that it was amazing how much public grief was being outpoured for a woman whose most notable achievements were shopping, screwing, and vomiting because she was bulimic.
	So There is this fantasy that if the prince comes along, And whisks you away to his castle and gives you pretty gowns and money, and everybody wants to be you, that you swell your false self in a mad pufferfish manic kind of value through other people envying you, that this is going to make you happy, right?
	This is the fairy tale that they married and lived happily ever after.
	Well, the one thing that was amazing about the Diana story was that it was actually a completely postmodern fairy tale.
	Insofar as we peel back the lid of the fantasy of living happily ever after and had a look at what actually goes on.
	It's like that John F. Kennedy Jr.
	thing. He married this Carolyn Bessette, I think her name was.
	And, my God, what a horrible relationship they had.
	You can see the pictures of his veins literally popping out of his neck as he screams full in her face in Central Park.
	They had a revolting and disgusting relationship.
	And it's no doubt that during...
	I have no doubt that during some heated argument the man simply lost the will to live and plunged his plane into the sea.
	And who could blame him in some ways, right?
	So this is the kind of life that we see when we peel back the living happily ever after or we go beyond the lights and the glamour and the makeup and the gowns and look into people's actual lives.
	Stockard Channing. We're just looking her up because Christina likes her on the West Wing.
	Actually, so do I. Eight marriages, four marriages, something like that, right?
	Just a nightmare existence.
	And Marlon Brando is a complete nightmare, right?
	His wealth and he was very good looking and incredibly talented.
	His children, one of them becomes a murderer, the other one commits suicide.
	What a complete nightmare existence.
	Christian Brando, I think his kid was.
	So with Diana, we got to peel back the layers of the lived happily ever after and look at what happens as this fantasy continues.
	Well, what happens? Well, she becomes completely self-obsessed.
	It's what Sharon Stone says, I think, quite wisely about, and it's not that I associate a lot of wisdom with Sharon Stone, but this particular comment I thought was interesting that Sharon Stone says, celebrity or fame, you think it's feeding you, but it's eating you.
	You think it's feeding you, but it's eating you.
	And I think that's just a wonderful, wonderful phrase.
	And you do. You think that it's going to fill you up, but it, in fact, eats you.
	So, with Diana, we see what happens afterwards.
	Well, she has a loveless relationship with Charles the tampon fetishist.
	She is miserable.
	She throws herself down a flight of stairs.
	She becomes obsessed with her weight.
	She's bulimic. She gets divorced.
	She's completely miserable.
	She takes antidepressants.
	She becomes obsessed with a doctor, stalks him, ends up being passed around, you know, from man to man to some degree, ends up with this Dodi Fayed fellow who I know nothing really about except that he comes from a wealthy family and was one of the producers on Chariots of Fire.
	That's my level of valuable knowledge in that area.
	And this is a loveless existence.
	She has, obviously, immense psychological problems.
	And what happens then?
	Well, she basically gets creamed while trying to flee the press who have been stalking her sort of her whole adult life.
	Now, would she have been better off had she been born ugly?
	Well, sure. Well, sure.
	Look at Anna Nicole Smith.
	The girl was a stripper.
	She got married at 16, had a baby.
	She marries this guy.
	You read this, right?
	Interestingly, I had about half an hour between clients on Friday afternoon.
	I was eating lunch, and I turned the TV on, and we have a station up here that just shows celebrity gossip, and yes, I'm guilty of loving celebrity gossip.
	And there was an Eat True Hollywood story on Anna Nicole Smith, and at that point I didn't know that she had passed away.
	And apparently she was, oh, I can't recall, but she was 19 years old when she got married.
	When she was dancing on...
	No, I can't remember when she got married, but she was 19 years old.
	And she was a stripper when she met her soon-to-be billionaire husband.
	He met her at the strip club.
	And she had a child with her first husband.
	Obviously, that didn't go very far or last very long.
	And the rest is just horrible.
	So she had a horrible existence.
	A complete train wreck of a human being.
	A complete train wreck of a personality.
	And this is somebody who gets what they want as far as celebrity goes.
	This is somebody who based on looks and who based on boobs and based on money, she gets her own reality TV show.
	She shows up and does cameos in movies.
	She is well known. She becomes a spokesperson for a dieting company after she lost like 480 pounds or something.
	I think that was just off one boob though.
	It gave her a sort of listing appearance like a ship that's taking water.
	So, this is somebody who gets what they want.
	Now, I've seen people, I'm not going to get into any details, but I've seen people, particularly a woman that I'm thinking of, who was very attractive, who actually won a beauty pageant, and has wasted her entire adult life trying to break into the celebrity game.
	It's the Seinfeld thing.
	The model, actress, newscaster, whatever, right?
	They just, well, I'm pretty. I better make something.
	I better, as I put it in a novel once, I have beauty.
	I must put it to work for myself like a glistening slave.
	And so you become addicted to having an effect on people.
	You become addicted to finding value through the acceptance and the evaluation of other people.
	And those of us who are not blessed with godlike looks, we of course look at those who are more handsome and we say, gee, that must be great.
	Everybody smiles back and you can go and chat up women and they'll all positively respond to you and so on and so on and so on.
	But of course it doesn't make any difference and it doesn't really help because...
	Let's just say that you are a very handsome man and so you decide to become a model or whatever.
	Well, all that happens is that the standards of your attractiveness then go up, right?
	So, whereas you and I can have a pimple, and who cares?
	A model simply cannot, right?
	So, the more attractive you are, the higher the standards become that you need to overcome, so it's not like you ever get to feel pretty enough or good enough or any of those sorts of things.
	There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.
	The only way to solve the problem of insecurity or unhappiness is through right actions in a rational context of philosophy.
	So I would submit, just before we turn it over to questions as a whole, I would submit that women addicted to this fantasy of salvation and of a prince and of living happily ever after, which makes them frankly impossible to live with as partners, and I can say this with some experience, that the addiction to perfection makes your life hell, right?
	To look for heaven is to live in hell.
	So women have this fantasy that there's this magical prince.
	And men have their own fantasies, which we don't have to get into right now, but usually involve the Barbie twins and a Roto-Rooter man.
	Maybe that's just me. But women have this addiction to this salvation fantasy, which means that when a man scratches himself or farts, it shatters this Disney World image.
	Not that I ever do, but I've read about it.
	Oh, wait, just going for a dig here.
	Oh, that's good stuff.
	Honey, honey, look away! Look outside, there's a bunny.
	So, of course, what happens is everything then becomes a disappointment, right?
	I mean, everything then becomes a disappointment when you have this magical fantasy ideal of perfection.
	And so when Diana dies a gruesome, brutal, bloody, lonely death...
	What happens is the fairy tale that women fell in love with, which turned into a modern horror for Diana, they weep for the loss of Diana.
	Of course, they don't know Diana.
	They don't care about her.
	They've never met her. They don't know what she's like.
	She's just a pretty face in magazines.
	But what they're weeping for is at some deeper and wiser and more sensible part of their souls, they are recognizing that this is an utterly destructive fantasy, seeing this gruesome end to this person, which is why we want celebrities to fail, right?
	It's why when a celebrity goes down in some manner or another, and not in the Hugh Grant kind of way, But when a celebrity goes down, when there's a divorce or there's some sort of meltdown or some sort of breakdown or whatever, we love it because we desperately want to be freed of the power.
	And if we cared anything, of course, for these pretty empty people, we would stop investing them with any sort of value so that they would be free because we trap them through our fantasies.
	So women weep for Diana and then feel better afterwards and depression lifts because they're getting a little bit closer to To reality, which is that there is no prince who will save them.
	And, of course, fundamentally, what is glossed over in the whole idea of a prince is that the foundation of almost every great fortune prior to capitalism, in fact, the foundation of every great fortune prior to the rise of capitalism, was a bloody gang, destructive, evil warfare.
	And so when the woman wants the prince to come and save her, what she's saying is, I want a mafia hitman to come and take me away and make my life a wonderful and beautiful thing.
	And I want the most violent man in the tribe to be the most tender, loving, and best father to my children.
	Well, what a complete and total and utter fantasy.
	And how destructive is that?
	I remember reading once an article where, I think it was Matt Groening, the guy who started The Simpsons, who was saying that an essential question for women is, would you rather make love to the beast in Beauty and the Beast or into the slightly faggy prince that the beast turns into at the end?
	And that's, I think, a pretty essential question.
	But I'd sort of like to say that there's another alternative, which is to find a good and rational man who is going to be virtuous and who is not going to arise from the blood-soaked Macbeth-style killing fields to take you away in a little carriage with flowers.
	and prancing white horses and that the violent addiction or the addiction of violence that is represented by the prince fantasy by the salvation fantasy that somebody's going to take you away who has all this wealth and political power and so on which is basically loving a criminal that's where these fairy tales come from That any kind of release from that sick fantasy is a huge value for women.
	And it's something that we don't really recognize enough.
	And I would suggest that that's what happens with something like Diana and these sorts of things.
	That there is death in this kind of addiction to fantasies.
	And there is death in our addiction to celebrity.
	And there is death in celebrity's addiction to our envy and desire.
	So... I say this having read my share of celebrity magazines in my life and not just when I'm stuck in doctor's offices as well.
	So I say this with full recognition that it can be a seductive thing, but I think that our addiction to celebrity is a way of having or trying to have values without trying to have virtue.
	And this really is the basis of what an enormous, if not the vast majority, if not almost exclusively the total energy of society is devoted to is the attempt to have value without having virtue.
	Ooh, I'll have value if I'm pretty enough.
	Ooh, I'll have value if I lose some weight.
	Ooh, I'll have value if I make more money.
	Ooh, I'll have value if my children obey me.
	Ooh, I'll have value if I complete this degree.
	And this goes on and on and on until mortality kicks us in the face and throws us in the ground.
	That we all strive to find some way To create value without having to have virtue.
	We are absolutely addicted, in its most fundamental sense, to the fantasy of trying to have value without being good.
	And until human beings recognize that there is no happiness without virtue, that there is no value without virtue, and not perfect virtue, but the goal, right?
	There's no perfect health, there's no perfect virtue.
	But until we give up this idea that there's any way to find any sort of value, peace of mind, happiness, contentment, serenity, love, or any of these wonderful goodies that make life really worthwhile without having virtue, until we can give up on that fantasy, we will continue to be tortured upon this empty, gassy, horrible, bloody cloud castle of fantasy.
	And it's just something that...
	That we just have to keep combing over in our minds and keep understanding in our hearts to keep reflecting on this that there is no solution to the problem of happiness without virtue and we can twist and we can turn and we can dodge and we can borrow and we can take drugs and we can go dancing and we can try and pick up a girl or try and get picked up and we can try and get a promotion and we can try and lose weight and we can twist and turn all we want.
	And it won't make a damn bit of difference because there is no such thing as value without virtue.
	So that's my rant on celebrity.
	I hope that that makes some sense to you.
	And this is, of course, why I keep turning away all of these offers for massive radio shows.
	No, I'm kidding. I'll take that in a moment.
	All right. If we have any questions, feel free to jump in, to chime in.
	If you have any questions, you can click on Request Microphone.
	Is that what it says? Oh, it's in the background there?
	Ask to talk.
	Ask to talk. Still haven't been able to find a way to make that beg, or even more pleasantly, pay to talk.
	We're still working on that, but let's have a look at that.
	So if anybody has any questions about this or any other topics, I would be more than happy to entertain them.
	I don't have a huge list of other topics to go on, so feel free to...
	Oh, Dawkins?
	Dawkins. They are talking about Dicky D, Richard Dawkins.
	Very interesting fellow.
	Yeah. If their desire is stronger to escape the fantasy than to worship it, whence all the worship?
	Well, the reason that people want to create value where there is no value is for fear and approval.
	When you decide to live a life of, when you sort of commit yourself to a life of rational virtue, which is again not a reinvention of yourself, but just a simplification of your goals and desires, the reason that people want to create value where there is no value is because they don't want to confront their families.
	Why do our families have value?
	Oh, but she's your mother.
	She's your father. That's your brother.
	My brother has been calling all week and emailing me.
	because he's doing the landmark forum and so he is being challenged on his relationships and when they find out that his brother has barely talked to him for five or seven years or something like that then of course he's being pushed in that direction to reconcile with me and so don't you just imagine how touching that is for me that he's being told to fix things up or he's going to face the disapproval of the landmark leaders and so now he's calling and stalking me and gee isn't that a wonderful thing And the thing,
	of course, that my brother doesn't understand, which I can understand because it's not been told to him by anyone and he's probably not quite ready to go through these podcasts, is that he thinks that he has value to me because he's my brother.
	But being my brother creates or confers no more value to me than being short or tall or bald or hairy or blue-eyed.
	And so this desire to create value where there is no value is what gives us patriotism and racism and religion and obedience to parents and obedience and enslavement to extended family and all these.
	I mean, where you don't have value in your family, you just make it up.
	It's so much easier to make up value and worship that than it is to actually try and live a life of integrity.
	It's just so much easier.
	Because we all have this great hunger for value.
	We all have this great hunger for the truth and for virtue.
	It is what drives every human being.
	This is why this worship exists.
	If we were indifferent to value, there would be no such thing as celebrity worship.
	There'd be no such thing as religion.
	There'd be no such thing as countries.
	There'd be no such thing as sports teams, at least not of the worship David Beckham style sports teams.
	If we were truly indifferent to value and virtue, or what we call virtue, none of these things would have any power over us.
	But human beings fundamentally are driven by and run by the desire to think of themselves as good.
	And what is easier?
	Is it easier to actually be good and face the rejection and criticism of very many people around you, to live a life of integrity, to refuse to be treated badly, to treat others well, to accept nothing less from them?
	Is it easier to do that and face being outcast, or is it easier to just pretend that people have value to you because they had sex before you were born?
	So value has an objective reality.
	No, no, value doesn't have an objective reality at all.
	But there are objective consequences to the pursuit or non-pursuit of value.
	So to give a very simple example, Does my desire for thirst, sorry, does my desire for water if I am thirsty have objective value?
	No. There are biochemical processes occurring within my body that make me yearn for water, or most days on my morning drive scotch.
	But my desire doesn't have objective value in the world.
	You could say that it has objective reality insofar as there are chemicals that are released that make me yearn and so on.
	But my desire for water doesn't have objective value in the world.
	But if I am dying of thirst and I don't drink any water, then I will objectively be dead.
	So there are objective consequences to choices, but the choices themselves don't have existence in the real world.
	If I choose to eat well or I choose to eat badly, there will be specific consequences To my health, but my choices don't exist in the real world.
	You can choose anything you want, but when you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences.
	And we all want peace of mind, and we all want happiness, and we are so constituted as a species that we can only achieve these things by being virtuous and having integrity with regards to reality and to our own consciences.
	Choice and value are synonymous.
	No, I would not say that.
	I would not say that at all.
	I would say that if you want to drive to Sarasota, Florida, then your choice to take the right road is certainly conditioned by that destination goal, right?
	You're not going to get to Toronto and head north.
	So choice and value are not synonymous.
	In fact, you can only have value where you have choice, which is the whole free will versus compatibilism versus determinism argument, that there's no such thing as value if there's no such thing as choice.
	But because I do believe that we have choices, but our immediate biological choices or preferences are not always the right and wisest thing to do, that we need a science of values that will help guide us to make those choices in the same way that it's very hard to drive across the country and get to the right place if you don't have either a map or a marker.
	So you need philosophy as you need a map and markers and speedometers and so on in order to be able to plan your journey.
	And the first round, of course, of values is deciding to get rid of what I call the negative economics in your life.
	So the first thing that you do when you wish to pursue a life of philosophy is you decide to stop doing the things that are bad, right?
	So you stop hanging out with the people who are destructive, whether they're friends or family or co-workers, bosses, whoever.
	People who are destructive and unhealthy, you try to talk to them, you try to open yourself to them and say, look, when you do X, Y, and Z, I feel bad, I'd really prefer you to do it, can we talk about it, and so on.
	So you work for quite a while to eliminate the negative, right?
	Just as if you're very unhealthy and you want to run a marathon, you don't sit there and say, great, tomorrow I'm going to run the marathon, right?
	No, the first thing you do is you start to eliminate the negative things from your lifestyle, right?
	So you start to eliminate the cookies, the chocolate, the chips, the candy, the whatever is causing you to...
	And then you start, you know, baby steps, doing the right things and so on.
	But your goal has got to be to be healthy and you have some measure for that, which may be running a marathon or whatever.
	But the first thing that you do is...
	Just to start to eliminate the bad things, because you don't want to shock your system, and our conscience can work that way as well.
	So biological drives are not good enough to guide our choices.
	Good heavens, no. Oh, my heavens, no.
	Biological drives are certainly not good enough to...
	I mean, just... What do you feel like eating when you're hungry, right?
	I mean, do you feel like eating a nice carrot?
	No, though that may be the best thing for you to eat.
	Our biological drives, as we all well know, for those of us who studied any nutrition, our biological drives were...
	Developed during a time when conditions were very different, right?
	So when sugar and fat were very rare, but we needed them, of course, as every human being does, we need them for energy and for the cushioning of our internal organs and so on.
	When sugar and fat were very rare, then we would have great incentives for pursuing the eating of those things.
	And we would have comparatively less incentive to eat lettuce, say, or something that I think consumes more calories in the chewing than it provides in the swallowing.
	But now that sugar and fat are almost more plentiful in many of the first world countries than lettuce, then people's biological cues give them the wrong thing.
	When violence, for instance, here's an example, when violence was personally costly, I'm talking about when you were a tribal leader.
	If you would declare war as a tribal leader on another tribe, you would usually have to go and fight yourself, so violence would have a personal limiter to it.
	So you'd get angry, you'd want to go and fight someone, and then you'd say, yeah, but I could end up with a spear through my head, and that gives me a headache.
	So you would have a limiter on your eating.
	Sorry, you would have a limiter on your desire for violence.
	What's different now with the invention of the state and of armies and so on is that the leaders face no personal risk and therefore their anger, their pomposity, their posturing, their desire for striking heroic poses for history books and so on or touching down on the USS Lincoln in that crutch grabbing little pantsuit and saying that the war is over and we have prevailed like there was any doubt.
	These leaders no longer face, they have all the same biological equipment for anger, for vengeance, for wishing to appear vainglorious and posture and so on.
	All of these would be biological drives, which would make perfect sense in a primitive society where you yourself would pay the cost of your own violence.
	But right now, It's like I can eat anything I want and anonymous people in far-off lands get fat.
	Well, how is that going to help me limit my eating?
	It's not. It's all too abstract.
	So our desire for vengeance and for violence and so on, which is an innate biological drive, has been completely warped because it was developed during a time where you needed that level of aggression to overcome your fear of being physically hurt.
	And so you would limit your violence based on that fear of retribution.
	Whereas now, you've got armies that go off to foreign countries.
	Your children are never threatened. Your family is never threatened.
	Your friends and their families and their children never threatened.
	And you don't have to pay for it yourself.
	So it's completely outsourced.
	So if I was sort of mildly sociopathic, and if I wanted to, I could smoke all I wanted and someone else In some other country, I would never know, got lung cancer, well, that would become more tempting, right?
	If I could gain all of the benefits and somebody else could accrue all the negatives, that's what the state does, of course, and that's why, although individual aggression is not necessarily a bad thing, and anger can be very healthy, anger is limited by one's own fear, right?
	So I don't get into fights because I don't want to get beaten up, although I have been angry enough to do that.
	My fear of getting beaten up overwhelms that, but If I can just sort of snap my fingers and have other people go and beat people up, then maybe that's going to overcome that.
	So I think biological drives are all healthy and perfectly natural, but we live in very, very different environments than we used to, so they're just no longer as appropriate.
	Does nobody want to talk to me?
	Nobody. Nobody wants to talk to me.
	Well, that's all right. Okay. So in a sense, there really is a mind-body dichotomy then, right?
	Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that there's a mind-body dichotomy, though I'm certainly willing to entertain more on that question.
	I mean, the mind is an effect of matter, right?
	Consciousness is an effect of the brain.
	The mind is an effect of the brain.
	But I don't necessarily mean that that...
	That doesn't mean to me that the brain is one thing and the mind is something else.
	To me, gravity is an effect of matter.
	You need mass to have gravity, so gravity is an effect of matter.
	Light is an effect of photons or visual light.
	So the fact that there are...
	Sort of intangibles that are an effective matter.
	I don't think we say that there's a matter-gravity dichotomy, right?
	The gravity is just an effective matter.
	So for me, there's not a mind-brain dichotomy.
	The mind is just an effective matter.
	And that's really all that I can say, because I don't know anything more about it.
	Hey, can you hear me? We sure can.
	Oh, okay. Sorry about that.
	I had my headset on mute.
	No, what I was getting at was...
	It sounded like what you were describing was a kind of a return to a kind of primitivism, I guess, such that if the body's designed to provide us feedback necessary to write action and we've erected a society where we've divorced ourselves,
	From that feedback, then what the obvious conclusion from that would be is that we need to return to a state where every action has as direct a consequence on the individual as possible.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that, yeah, I mean, I think that that's probably, I don't think that there really was, since the development of sort of society, I don't think that's really been the case, because we've had the aristocracy, the priestly class, and so on.
	But sure, I mean, that's what anarcho-capitalism is all about, right?
	Your choices accrue to you.
	And of course, if you can convince people to give you charity because we've made bad choices, that's great.
	But there's no state that is going to make everything all right for you.
	And of course, that's the argument that I make if your parents are not good people, right?
	That they should not have the right to your time and resources and so on just because they're your parents.
	So yeah, basically anarcho-capitalism is the idea that you can't force value.
	I mean, you can force people, right?
	But you can't make a woman love you by raping her, right?
	You can't force value.
	And of course, that's a very old idea.
	But it's something that once we sort of bring it into the realm of society, It immediately requires that there's no state and that religion be opposed and so on, because religion is to say, you have value because you're alive.
	You have value because God loves you.
	You have value because you obey the priest, right?
	But none, of course, none of that is true, so...
	Right, and so I guess the second question to that would be, if philosophy is only necessary, that map and compass is only necessary...
	In a situation where we're divorced from that direct feedback, then if we were to return to a state like that, then philosophy wouldn't be necessary anymore.
	Well, except that we don't want to return to a state like that, right?
	I mean, I had to go to the dentist on Saturday.
	It turns out I have an odd little crack in my tooth, right?
	So I might have to go in and get a root canal.
	And I found this because my tooth was throbbing a little, right?
	So it's good. It's like I'm 40, so now my tooth problem begins right on time.
	But, you know, you could say that the reason that our body makes our teeth hurt when there's a problem is so that we can rip the teeth out.
	Because, frankly, as far as I know that I'm learning about teeth and just how weird they are, That's your only hope, right?
	And I was saying to Christina, you know, if I have a little infection in my tooth, right?
	So because a crack and so on, right?
	And in the Middle Ages, I could be dead in a month, right?
	I mean, because that infection could spread to other teeth, it could infect my jaw.
	I mean, I could just be dead, right?
	So there's a situation where the pain that's in my tooth would make me want to rip the tooth out, which would be God knows how painful, and would be 99% likely to incur an even worse infection, but it would be the only chance that I had, right?
	It would be to rip the tooth out or something ghastly like that.
	And so the pain that the body is bringing forward makes good sense because it's like, you know, rip this tooth out and maybe you'll have a chance.
	But, of course, that's not what I'm going to do and that's not what I want to do.
	What I want to do is go and get myself a nice drill, a nice root canal and a nice crown so that I don't have to worry about this and I can go on to live my next 40 or 50 years, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, I guess you could say that in a totally primitive society, there's no need of philosophy, which is sort of like saying that if you're in prison, you don't need a dietician, right?
	Because you're just going to get the food you're going to get, right?
	But I don't think that's a state that we really want to return to, because it's much more valuable to have freedom.
	Primitivism is just non-freedom, right?
	The reason that you need philosophy is really because you have choices.
	And the reason that we have physical impulses is because there were fewer choices.
	If we had grown up biologically in a situation where there was all the fat and sugar around in the world, If we grew up in Candyland, which as a kid I really wanted the key to the city of, if we grew up in Candyland, then we would actually have, we would be indifferent to sweets and sugars and fats and so on and we would be craving carrots and all this kind of stuff, right? So it's because of a lack of choice that we developed these biological cues.
	And it is now that we have an excess of choice relative to that.
	It's not really an excess. Now we need nutrition.
	And the same way that in the past we had no real options in a primitive tribal society, what do you do?
	You have sex with whoever will have sex with you and you eat whatever you can get your hands on and you go through these horrible rituals and you circumcise your children and all this kind of stuff.
	But you have no choice, right?
	So you don't need philosophy because there's no choice.
	And your biological cues are sufficient to keep you alive.
	But of course, now that we have the capacity for choice, which we've sort of widened through developing more and more understanding of choice and how to expand it, Now, we need philosophy because we have an excess of choice, which we didn't have before, but I don't think that going back is good.
	You can't put the genie back in the bottle, you can't put knowledge back away, and you also can't put our capacity for choice back away now anymore either, which I think has been developed through civilization.
	Right, but wouldn't you agree that the necessity for that actually...
	It's not a modern necessity.
	I mean, the fact that we're in the situation we're in now is because we haven't had a functional philosophy all this time, right?
	Well, I mean, I think that relative to reality...
	I think that relative to most of history, the philosophy has to some degree been improving.
	The free market and the scientific method are, to me, the two great inventions of the species.
	That's massively beneficial and that's a huge advance forward.
	Unfortunately, The value of those two principles, the voluntarism, you can't force value in science.
	You could take all of Sweden hostage and make them give you a Nobel Prize, but it wouldn't be quite the same as winning one.
	So you can't force value in science.
	It has to be negotiated and it has to be with reference to reality, with the accuracy of your theories and so on.
	You can't force value in the free market.
	I mean, you can, but then it's just called being a thief, right?
	And my argument is you can't force value in religion.
	You can't force value in the family.
	And so I think that we're making great steps forward in many ways in philosophy in that at least we now have a null hypothesis.
	We have a comparator. Like in the Middle Ages, I mean, the people who came up with the free market to begin with, the sort of Smiths and Ricardos, to whatever degree they messed up, they were still incredible advancers.
	They had no comparator.
	At least I can say rational morality is like the scientific method.
	Philosophy is like the free market.
	At least there's some areas which we have as benchmarks to compare a voluntarism with regards to coercion.
	So, yeah, philosophy is definitely taking a while to catch up and to expand, and that's largely because the wild success of the free market and of the scientific method has threatened a lot of crazy and entrenched power interests who then want to do nothing but try and get rid of it as quickly as possible.
	Or, to be more accurate, those who are in power wish to exploit the free market so that they themselves can fund their weapons and fund the money transfers that are the root of their power and fund all of the stuff that they want.
	They want the free market to produce all these goodies But, of course, they're in the process of doing that goose and the golden egg thing, antiquably from Aesop's fables, right?
	Which is that the goose lays the golden egg, and then you get greedy, and you kill the goose and open it up to get all the golden eggs, and you go, hey, no eggs, no goose.
	Ooh, bummer. I guess what I'm trying to figure out here is exactly where the...
	I mean, is this...
	Is our capacity to pursue value something innate to our biology, or is it something artificial we've had to invent after the fact?
	Is it something you're born with?
	And if not, then how is it we could have No, I think I understand what you're saying.
	I think I understand what you mean.
	Of course, there's some people who claim to answer it, this guy who wrote the Rise of consciousness in the bicameral mind.
	I've never read it. It sat in my bookshelf for years, but I've never read it.
	Richard Dawkins says it's completely insane, which means that it might be true, which is good news for me.
	I do know what you mean.
	The question is, is civilization, as Freud said, something that is grafted over the natural healthy animal, almost in the Rousseauian model?
	Is civilization inhibiting us and is it artificial and is it causing neuroses?
	Desmond Morris, the guy who wrote The Naked Ape, had the same thesis in a book called The Human Zoo where he said that animals exhibit extraordinarily deviant and perverse behavior when they're in zoos in the same way that human beings do in cities and this and that and the other.
	For me, the only thing that I can really say is that human beings absolutely run on ethics.
	And the only reason that I know that, it's not something that I sort of made up on my own, I'm trying to be empirical, is that every argument that people make as to why other people should do stuff is because it's ethical, right?
	Every argument that everybody makes is for values.
	Now, the value may be as simple as self-interest, right?
	So if you say to kids, you should be good, otherwise Santa won't bring you any presents, you're still appealing to their values.
	It's just kind of like a base kind of, you want stuff, so obey me, right?
	The Christian model. You want to get into heaven, so give me money.
	So there's that sort of level.
	But then there's another level, which is that people say, well, the free market society and anarcho-capitalist society would result in polarization of rich and poor, the poor starving on the streets and the sick people with no medicine.
	And you don't want that, do you? Or people who say, well, taxes are the price that we pay for a civilized society.
	That's a famous quote. And so they're basically saying, you don't want these bad things to happen because only bad people would want those things.
	And you don't want to be a bad person.
	You don't want to be selfish and keep all your money for yourself and not give it over in legitimate taxation to help others.
	So that is very much the foundation, I think, of the arguments that people make.
	It's based on values.
	The government doesn't say, pay your taxes or we'll shoot you.
	What the government does is it puts these commercials on television with this treacly piano music and smiling children and the before and after pictures of an empty lot with burning vaguely anarchic and capitalistic oil drums and cars and drug dealers and then you pay taxes smilingly and happily and then it's transformed into a beautiful playground.
	This is the kind of nonsense that goes on.
	This is the kind of propaganda that goes on.
	Because human beings want to be good.
	And it's our desire to be good that gets us into so much trouble.
	Because so often we define the good by approval.
	And we define the good as in accordance with standards that other people set.
	In other words, we don't strive to be good, we strive to be approved of, which is the whole back to celebrity.
	But it basically is the desire for virtue and that other people define that virtue and then we just get programmed to do that.
	I was thinking this week, and I'm sorry I'll stop after this, but I was just thinking this week how fascinating it must be to be in power.
	To be in power is just an amazing thing.
	Because you keep turning around and more and more money is pouring in through your tax collection.
	And you pass laws and people just, they grumble a bit but they'll just obey.
	You declare war and there's people willing to go and there's people willing to write that you're a great guy and there's people willing to write that you're a bad guy and so on.
	But it really is amazing.
	Or think about it in terms of a priest, even more insane, right?
	So you take all these kids off to Jesus' camp, and you know that none of them are going to punch you.
	You know that none of them, they're just going to smile, and they're going to nod, and they're going to do their best, and they're going to strive to please you.
	And it really is a very wild thing to imagine.
	That you just say stuff and people do it.
	I mean, what a bizarre, bizarre phenomenon.
	And that has to do with the fact that we're just so desperate to be good and our fatal weakness is that we let other people define what that is.
	Is that a confusion though?
	I mean, are we really desperate to be good or are we just desperate to reproduce the approval that we got from our parents as kids?
	Well, but our parents didn't say obey me because I'll hit you.
	I mean, in some circumstances they did, but for the most part they would say that you are deviating from the good, so I'm going to hit you.
	Or I'm going to terrorize you in some manner because you've become such a bad kid.
	You've deviated so much from what is good that I'm going to beat you or hit you or send you to bed without dinner or I'm not going to play with you for a week or whatever.
	It's because you've been bad, not because you've just disobeyed me and you just obey my whim and so on.
	Or even if that is the case, that they just say obey my whim, then they bring up the Old Testament biblical back up for that.
	So then they say, Obey my whim because God tells you and it's moral.
	Nobody ever says, obey me or I'll punch you.
	They always say, obey me because it's bad not to.
	And they're usually not saying, obey me, but obey the good of which I am but a representative.
	So our desire for approval from our parents really is a need for empirical validation of our pursuit of the good.
	Sorry, could you just say that once more?
	So we think that our parents are telling us what the good is.
	And so by pursuing their approval, we think we're pursuing the good.
	Well, sure. No human being ever really feels good or happy about saying, I obey because I'll get beaten up if I don't.
	We all seethe with resentment, and that's pretty unstable for those in power.
	The most amazing trick, the most amazing and the true genius moralist in history, Was the guy who figured out that if you can get people to believe in the good, then they will do anything you tell them.
	And you don't have to force them.
	Now, you keep the force, you keep the gun under the table, but if you smile and tell them that it's good, and you tell them particularly as their children.
	That is what allowed for the foundation of nation states, right?
	That is what allowed for tribes to go beyond the physical strength of a particular leader into people who will self-subjugate because of their desire to pursue what is virtuous and also that children will accept what is virtuous as is told to them when they are children and that it's very hard to break out of that.
	But you're also arguing that to abandon the good altogether doesn't solve that problem.
	Is that correct? You mean throwing the baby out at the bathwater thing, like if I become a nihilist and say that everyone's an asshole and it's just trying to control me and blah blah blah?
	Right. Exactly.
	So, if I'm trying to escape the conformity of, you know, obeisance to parents, obeisance to the state, obeisance to the church, the answer is not to throw out the idea of the good, but simply to divorce the two.
	Well, sure. I mean, you don't say, people have been feeding me bad food all my life, so I'm going to stop eating.
	You say, I've got to figure out what's good food to eat, right?
	Because otherwise, psychologically, you'd starve to death, right?
	right you become a nihilist so in your mind that what what what what to you is the the highest value the greatest good uh i don't mean to dodge the question i just There's so many ways that that question could be interpreted.
	If you could just give me a little bit more, right?
	The greatest good in terms of nutrition, health, morality.
	What is it that you mean? Okay, so it depends on the subject matter.
	Well, sure. I mean, a good airplane is different from a good submarine sandwich, right?
	Okay, so let's say we narrow it down to just...
	Oh, okay. So if we narrow it down to just morality, then, the highest good for you would be the universal morality that you've defined for yourself, or rather, that you're trying to define for everybody.
	Well, I would say that...
	There's good theory.
	I mean, there's two things, right? There's good theory and there's good practice, right?
	And I would differentiate these two.
	Not to overcomplicate things, but just, again, to rely on our old friend, the scientific method.
	A good scientific theory is one that accurately predicts or describes the behavior of matter or energy, right?
	I mean, if we can sort of agree on that, that good is defined as consistent with reality, right?
	Okay. I'm not sure you sound convinced.
	Actually, I'm quite sure you don't sound convinced.
	You're like, okay, I'll give you that one, but I'm going to circle around behind you and stab you in the knee.
	Well, I mean, consistent with reality...
	Well, if I say a rubber ball bounces, right?
	That's my theory. If I say a rubber ball bounces, then a theory is good if the rubber ball bounces, and it's bad if the rubber ball doesn't bounce.
	But we always seem to return to these physics metaphors.
	We never seem to actually describe or define or quantify that in moral terms.
	We're always trying to describe it relative to what it seems like in physics.
	And I'm just trying to sort out which is which.
	Well, because I view morality as a science, right?
	So I have to use the scientific method.
	I'm not saying morality is like science.
	I'm saying morality is science.
	Morality is subject to the scientific method.
	And so when I sort of say that it's similar to a physics theory, it's not analogous.
	It's not metaphorical, right?
	It's directly analogous. So a good theory And not a theory of goodness, but a good theory is one.
	A theory, of course, means that there's some knowledge which we don't have that we can apply in a more universal way.
	And that's why you have a theory.
	And so if somebody says to me, how long is it going to take for you to shovel the snow off your driveway, I'm going to say 10 minutes, right?
	Now, if it takes me four days, that was not a good estimate, right?
	If I turn out, if I go out the front door and it's summer, then it's also not a good estimate, at least until global warming dumps snow on my The driveway in the summer.
	But after I have completed shoveling my driveway, then if somebody says, how long is it going to take for you to drop, you know, I can say, well, it was 10 minutes and 34 seconds, and, you know, however many nanoseconds, whatever degree of detail we want.
	So a theory has to be that there's some knowledge we don't have that we need to universalize and so on, right?
	How long is it going to take for X? Well, if you've already done it, you know.
	And if it's not appropriate, you don't need to know.
	But given that it is appropriate and you don't know, you have a theory about it.
	So in the realm of the good as far as ethical theories go, for me, universality, consistency, reversibility, all the stuff that we've talked about in universally preferable behavior, that's stuff which is the very basis of a good moral theory.
	A good moral theory has to be that which says space is not a factor, like time and space is not a factor.
	Location, geographical, is not a factor.
	That non-objective Differences which don't exist in any objective manner are not a factor, right?
	So there's no reason to imagine that we have to have different moralities for black guys and white guys and Chinese guys and short guys because these are not things which affect the ethics.
	There are some reasons to believe that we would have different ethics for children and for retarded people because there are objective differences.
	So a good theory simply, first and foremost, just has to be logically consistent and universal and reversible in the same way that any theory that has any validity in math or in science or anything, that any theory would have to have that.
	That is a good theory. Now, a good theory in practice, and we assume that the theory has to be consistent to begin with logically, But a good theory and practice is one that produces predicted and intended behavior, not perfectly because there's human choice and so on, but a good theory and practice is that which then produces the predicted behavior,
	right? So if we say, well, it's pretty much for sure that economic growth is going to be pretty good if there's no government interference in the economy, And then if we create encapistan and then the economy tanks, the theory has problems, let's say.
	But most fundamentally, I think we would say that in the same way that a theory of nutrition gives you specific actions based on rational principles, And takes into account differences like diabetes and so on in the same way we would take into account children and adults and retarded people.
	And then the purpose is to produce a feeling of well-being and energy and decent health.
	The same thing is true of a moral theory, that you have your theory, you have your practice, and the intended result Is mental health, right?
	The intended result is a feeling of peace and well-being and happiness and, you know, to whatever degree it's appropriate, benevolence and the capacity for love and, you know, all of the things that I think we would accept as a value.
	A moral theory is fundamentally, I think, and elementally tested in its outcome in subjective emotional experience.
	Are you happy when you pursue this?
	And not in the short run, right?
	Changing your diet if you're overweight is hell in the short run, but in the long run, you assume that it's going to make you better off.
	That's why you do it. And so for me, the great challenge and the great test of a moral theory is in its execution that you end up happier as a result of following that moral theory, in the same way that you hope you end up healthier when following a nutritionist theory as to how you should eat.
	So then for you, the pursuit of happiness is the highest, the greatest good, the highest value.
	No, I would say that happiness is the ultimate...
	People should pursue. No, not the pursuit of happiness, right?
	It's not the pursuit of health that is the doctor's highest goal, it is health.
	It's not the pursuit of happiness that is a philosopher's highest goal.
	Happiness, and this is pure Aristotle, right, so I don't claim any originality with this.
	If you want to take it up with the Greek guy, go for it.
	But, I mean, Aristotle's the guy who says, and I think he's quite right, he says that We do things to be happy.
	We don't have happiness in order to achieve something else, right?
	Happiness is the one thing that we take in and of itself and we don't have in order for something else, right?
	So back to celebrity, right?
	I want to be famous so I'll be happy.
	I want to be rich so I'll be happy.
	I want to be good-looking so I'll be happy.
	If only I have a boob job, or at least get my right boob done as well, I'll be happy.
	But we don't say, if only I were happy, I could get a boob job, right?
	I mean, we do all of that stuff to achieve happiness.
	So for me, the end goal is happiness, right?
	Just in the same way that in science, the end goal is efficacy or accuracy in nutrition and health sciences.
	It's health. That's the thing which we achieve, right?
	Not for the sake of something else, but for its own sake.
	That's what we want it for. Right.
	But you can't really pursue it.
	According to Aristotle, you can't really pursue it directly either.
	Well, I can't recall that aspect of Aristotelian philosophy, but I think he would say that a life lived in the pursuit of excellence in terms of virtue is that which is most likely to make you happy.
	He wouldn't guarantee it, and no philosopher can guarantee you happiness because you could get struck down by cancer, which is not a philosophical issue except tertiarily in that.
	What is it I read the other day?
	If you regularly...
	If you laugh, or if you regularly are a happy person, you will have 1 20th the number of visits to doctors on any average sort of middle-aged period and so on, right?
	So there are some health effects of happiness, but there is stuff that's beyond your...
	Sorry, yeah, people who are playful.
	Sorry, that was it. People who are playful have 1 20th the number of visits to the doctors.
	Now, I don't know if they're healthy so they're playful, and so I don't know what the cause and effect is, but...
	Aristotle, I think, would say that there are steps that you could take to achieve happiness and his goal was that the pursuit of excellence in terms of virtue would be the way that you would try to achieve happiness.
	That would be your greatest chance of achieving happiness.
	And contracting something like cancer doesn't preclude happiness either.
	Well, assuming that there's some narcotics around, sure.
	I mean, I think it's, you know, as a guy who just went through a bit of a toothache, I can tell you that it's a little tough to be peppy when you're in pain.
	So, you know, but certainly death, which we will all face...
	And I'm sure sooner than we anticipate, death, which we will all face, does not have to be sheer misery, right?
	There is a beauty and even an acceptance in the natural end because it is because of death that we have the privilege of living.
	So to perceive it as the opposite of life and the enemy of life is, I think, incompatible with reality.
	So there can, even in illness, there can be wisdom and through that, joy.
	So happiness is only partially connected to our physical well-being?
	Well, sure, but I mean, it's the only part that we have control over, right?
	I mean, the choices that we make in life, we have some control over, right?
	Whether we have an aneurysm that was based on some weakened blood vessel that we had when we were born that nobody could ever find, We don't have control over that, but we do have control over the choices that we make.
	And the degree to which happiness is dependent upon those choices, which I would say is a very high degree, that much we can affect in terms of happiness.
	But no, we can't, you know, if I suddenly get, you know, necritis of the leg or some horrible flesh-eating disease and I have to get my legs amputated, will I be miserable?
	No, of course I won't be miserable.
	I'll certainly be unhappy for a while.
	And there may be some great things that come out of losing my legs in terms of I would get some great upper body strength.
	I don't know. I'd learn how to balance a wheelchair and do cool things.
	So there could be good things that come out of it, but I'm not going to cut my legs off, right?
	So we are pretty adaptable and we can come up with some good stuff out of bad situations, but there's certainly no need to pursue those bad situations.
	So then something like, say...
	A manicure or a boob job then would be relatively neutral to your overall accumulation of happiness or a negative or a positive?
	Well, I would put those two in different categories, and I'm sorry to be answering such a good question with such a ridiculous set of criteria, but I would say that a manicure can be of great value, right?
	If your passionate desire and goal is to be a hand model, then a manicure is probably a pretty good idea, right?
	Because you don't want to go in with those sort of raw, bitten-down nails or something and then try and sell a set of gloves or whatever, right?
	If you're going for a job interview, a manicure might be for a grooming.
	You're going to go and work for Gillette or something, and that's your deal.
	It's a grooming company, then a manicure is probably a good thing to do to try and make your way, right?
	Because people get first impressions and so on.
	A boob job, I would put in a totally different category.
	Unless it's reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy or something, I would say that a boob job is an entirely inappropriate thing to do to try and achieve happiness, because it's saying that there's value in But there is value in the shininess of my nails.
	I would say that, to me, that's along the continuum of, if it's really warm out, you might want to wear shorts to your job interview.
	But if you really want the job, you're displaying a lack of social appropriateness in wearing gym shorts to your job interview.
	So that, to me, is much more along the realm of aesthetics and so on.
	It's not evil to wear shorts to a job interview, but it sure as heck isn't going to get you the job, right?
	Right. Supposing you're a billboard model for Hooters.
	Have you been reading my resume?
	This is eerie. Come on, nice sweaty mantids hanging right over the highway?
	I'll send you the JPEG. Actually, you probably already have it.
	Well, this is going into a whole other area, which I don't mind particularly, and I'm going to sound very Victorian and old-fashioned here, but I would say that pursuing the career of a billboard model for Hooters is probably not going to bring you a whole lot of happiness either, because then you're saying, I have value because I'm purdy, right?
	Now, Greg, you do.
	But that's the kind of prettiness that you don't see every day, so that's kind of different.
	But for a lot of people, I would say that saying, I have value because I'm pretty, there is no value in flesh, right?
	I mean, there is no value in breast tissue.
	There is no value in ass cleavage, right?
	There is no value in that.
	There is value in virtue, and there's value in truth, and all these kinds of things, but there is no value in tissue.
	And so I would say that wanting to flash your boobs and make money off of it, yeah, people will pay you for it, but you're then sort of creating value where there isn't any, and that's going to catch up with you, I think.
	Well, I'm just trying to understand what the distinction, then, is between perfect cuticles and perfect boobs.
	Well, because if you are going into a company, say, sorry, grooming is not necessarily a bad thing, right?
	Wearing pants is not a bad thing, right?
	You could, I think, legally here in Toronto, you could walk around in a thong, one of those Borat sort of swimsuits, right?
	But if you show up to a job interview in that, you're not very likely to get the job, right?
	Because you're saying quite a bit about your perception of what is appropriate in terms of social behavior.
	So for me, grooming is different, right?
	Showing up for a job interview, having showered and shaved is not a bad thing, right?
	Because you're just sort of saying, yeah, I understand what's appropriate and so on.
	Similarly, I guess, showing up for the Hooters shot in a snowsuit might not be what they're looking for either.
	I don't know. I mean, I've only been to a couple of those.
	And, you know, just as a guy who gets thrown out.
	But to me, there's just a little bit of a difference in terms of communicating a level of appropriateness.
	I, for one, would not want to work for somebody who would say, I'm not hiring you because you haven't had a manicure.
	I don't really want to work for a Quentin Crisp, right?
	So for me, that would be a good indicator that I shouldn't work for that person.
	On the same level, though, if I were a woman, I would not want to work for a guy who would hire me only because my boobs were big.
	Because that's, you know, it's just asking for trouble, right?
	That's just like lawsuits waiting to happen.
	So for me, there's some standards of protocol or decorum or what we called aesthetics before that are worth conforming to.
	If you want to get the job and it's going to make you happy, but you have to wear pants, you know, that seems like a reasonable compromise.
	But if you have to have big boobs to work in an office, that probably is not going to be a place that's going to be very good for you.
	So then alteration of the physical body is that line for you?
	Sorry, is that line? Well, I would say that there's a difference between removing a defect and adding a positive, right?
	That's the old argument about genetic manipulation of children, that I think it's fairly okay.
	In fact, I would say that it's a good thing if you could take a pill that would make sure that your children would not have Down syndrome.
	I think that would be a good thing.
	But if you're going to take a pill to, you know, make your child's IQ go up by 20%, I would say that may not be such a good thing.
	I mean, who knows, right? Because these things always come with some risk.
	So if you have a nose job because you have a nose literally the size of Lincoln's on Mount Rushmore, then that may be...
	And it's causing you problems with sleeping, and, you know, every time you blow your nose, you need a tarpaulin.
	Maybe that's a reasonable thing to do.
	But if you just have a little bump that doesn't affect you, right?
	I mean... For me, I mean, hair transplants or something like that, although I do have a lot more armpit hair that I really need, hair transplants would be not correcting a negative, but striving to achieve a positive, right?
	It's not bad to be bald. In fact, it's pretty efficient.
	So there's a difference between correcting a negative and pursuing a positive.
	Correcting a negative, I think, is a reasonable thing to do, as long as it's fairly noticeable.
	But pursuing a positive, you know, my boobs are...
	If you've had your boobs removed, and having silicone put in may be sort of recovering a negative, but going just for bigger boobs for whatever reason is more like creating a positive, and I think that's more slavish.
	The same would be true for smaller boobs?
	Let's say you're interested in becoming a paralegal, but you're naturally endowed with size double Ds, and it makes everybody uncomfortable.
	Should you in for reduction surgery?
	Well, I don't know that there's a should in there.
	I think that certainly some women have.
	Queen Latifah, I think, donated her boobs to the Third World, at least parts of them, because she said, my God, this back pain and this, you know, constant problems and so on.
	And I certainly have noticed that since turning 40.
	So that is an issue.
	I mean, if it's uncomfortable and this and that.
	But no, I would say that getting rid of naturally big boobs...
	I mean, this is a funny conversation to be having.
	For me, at least getting rid of naturally big boobs because other people...
	Are distracted, you know, that's more of a personal decision, but I wouldn't do it necessarily.
	I mean, but who knows, right?
	I mean, that's around the sort of, how short do you have to be before it's okay to wear lifts?
	I don't know. I mean, that's a pretty subjective question.
	Right. I'm just trying to define, you know, the difference between, I guess, the pursuit of superficiality and the pursuit of real value.
	And... I guess it's predictable that it would cascade into boobs, but...
	Right. And what I think is interesting, though, Greg, is that I think that this is sort of my take on this because we've had this conversation a number of times before.
	What I would suggest...
	Is that, you know, there's stuff that you and I both know is right, and there's like living with integrity and, you know, in most conditions telling the truth and so on, and that violence is bad and rape is bad, this and that and the other, right?
	I think, though, that the desire that you have, which I totally understand, To find lines within the fog, right?
	Because, you know, there's water that's fresh, which you can drink, and then there's seawater, which you can't, right?
	And we're all fairly aware of that.
	But you're saying, you know, how many atoms of salt need to be in the water before it's no longer drinkable, right?
	You can't find that line, I would say, right?
	So what's the difference between buffing your nails and having a boob job?
	Eh, it depends, right?
	But I would say that your desire to want to atomize these questions, which I totally understand.
	There's a logical consistency, and it's fun to figure out.
	But I would say that I think that it's possible that this might be a lack of self-trust on your part, that you'll just know what the right thing to do is in this area, that you'll figure that out, right?
	I mean, you'll know. You'll know in your gut when it's too far, and I know that's a totally cheesy answer for anybody who's interested in philosophy to give, but I think that there's some truth in it nonetheless.
	No, I understand what you're saying, and I kind of follow you.
	I have my own intuitive understanding of these questions.
	It's just that we're going to define a rational standard, right?
	I mean, people are going to go directly for these soft spots, right?
	These gray areas.
	They're going to use those as wedges into...
	Go after those cracks in the wall, right?
	Well, sure, but for me, that's why I always come back to, and I do this on the board with sometimes appalling regularity, is I come back to say, is that the biggest moral question that we have before us?
	I mean, we are doctors in the middle of a war zone.
	Are we going to sit there and say, I need to do some mammograms on the nurses?
	However much fun that may be, we do actually kind of have lots of people bleeding.
	So for me, when people come at me with this, and I'm not saying you're one of these people, but when people come at me as like, oh yeah, well what about this, and what about that, and what about the other?
	It's like, hey, that's all very interesting stuff.
	What about if we get rid of war, and we get rid of the state, and we get rid of religion, and we get rid of people's addiction to the virtue of the family?
	That much we can all agree.
	That that's important stuff to do and that that's where the big bloodletting is going on in the world, not whether people get boob jobs or cuticles or whatever, right?
	Manicures. So I totally understand that people will attempt to use this, but the way that I try and solve that, and there may be other ways to do it, I'm sure there are, but the way that I try to solve that is I say, okay, is that the biggest moral issue that we have to deal with right now?
	Just because we don't have a cure for cancer, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't feed our children nutritious food.
	Yes, we could spend our whole lives looking for a cure for cancer and not eat ourselves and won't live very long.
	So for me, it's about prioritization as well.
	Yeah, those are interesting questions, but let's wait at least until we've got the people dying on the battlefield dealt with and treated before we start trying to figure out how big your boobs have to be before a boob job becomes...
	A valid solution. No, do you know what I mean?
	I'm trying to be facetious a little bit, but I'm trying to give you a way of also managing this tendency, which we all have.
	I mean, I share exactly the same tendency.
	I'm fascinated by boobs.
	I'm sorry, fascinated by questions about boobs.
	So I totally understand where you're coming from, but I would say that it's sort of like you sort of shake your head and go and jump into the snow and sort of come back and say, well, that's very interesting.
	We still do have a government and we still do have wars and we still do have taxation and the war on drugs and we have two million people in prison.
	That's what I kind of need to focus on.
	Harry Brown used to say something kind of similar, though I wouldn't necessarily agree with it in some ways, where he would say, People say, should income tax go down to 2%, or 1%, or 5%, and he said, let's get it down to 5%, and then we'll have a big meeting and figure out what to do with it after that.
	Now, I don't agree with that as a goal, but I certainly do appreciate the sentiment that if we get into minutiae, because we're afraid of not having an answer for particular questions, and there are no answers for a lot of questions, which is fine, but there are answers for the big questions, right? Is violence a decent way of solving human problems?
	No, it's totally evil. Does God exist?
	No, it's complete fantasy.
	Is your family virtuous because they gave birth to you?
	No, that's not a standard of virtue.
	That's enough work for me, at least, for the rest of my life.
	I'm fairly sure that I'm not going to knock down this unholy trinity by the time that I'm dead.
	I hope at least to leave enough trails that people in the future can have a good go at it.
	That's enough for me to take on.
	So for me, if I can cure cancer, that's great.
	I don't have to cure AIDS and tuberculosis and all this other sort of stuff as well and prevent all future illnesses.
	I mean, that's the thing that I'm focusing on.
	And I don't think that figuring out the difference between a cuticle and a boob job is going to help me bring down the state or is going to help me bring down God or is going to help me bring down the fantasy of family virtue or collectivist virtue.
	So for me, when people come at me with these kinds of questions, and I don't mean you by any stretch, but when people come at me with these atomic questions, for me it's like, okay, but let's get these questions in perspective.
	If I answer this question, is it going to bring down the state?
	Well, no. I think not, because you can't answer these questions.
	It is, you know, at what point when you add one molecule of salt to a glass of water, at what point does it become...
	Well, we know when it's all salt, you can't drink it.
	And we know when there's no salt, you can drink it.
	And then for a number of different people somewhere along the row, there'll be different answers.
	But that still doesn't make any difference as to the fact that right now we're all trying to drink salt water.
	So let's deal with that.
	So salt to taste then, right?
	Yeah, that's right. Salt to taste.
	Now we've had two other...
	Ooh, now more of the people patient.
	Do you mind if I jump to somebody else?
	Sure, go ahead. Thanks, Greg.
	I appreciate it. No problem.
	Paul Orangutang, he said, cleverly disguising the name.
	Paul, you are on the air.
	Hello. I'm on there as Obnosis Jones, so you went right to my real name?
	Or are you talking to somebody else?
	I'm talking to Paul G. Oh, you can speak now.
	Oh, okay. Well, that's me and my wife, Terry.
	Hello. Welcome to you both.
	Hello. Seth, I'm wondering if you have considered that your stand on religion is going to turn off a lot of people that might otherwise be interested in your political issues, which is getting rid of the state.
	I'm certainly open to that possibility.
	Tell me more. Well, for example, I am a libertarian and I read Ayn Rand a lot.
	And I don't necessarily agree with her spiritual stance, but I agree with most of the other things she stands for.
	And I would be a lot more likely to want to put my full energies and referring other people and all the rest of it to, for example, your podcast, if I didn't think they were going to get on them and be told that, you know, that most of your emphasis or a great deal of your emphasis is on abolishing religion.
	I'm a Jew, and I... When Paul and I got married, we agreed to live a Jewish life and now we're having a real conflict over this thing and I wouldn't want to wish it on anyone else.
	So people I would ordinarily be inviting to like Freedom Force meetings, I'm not inviting and I'm not sending them your podcasts and so forth.
	Right. I kind of imagine that you're a champion for what at least we're doing here if it's going against some values that you deeply believe in, right?
	I mean, that's the issue and I'm sure that it's quite frustrating for you if you have agreement on a number of issues and yet in a very core issue for you or an issue for you that's important both culturally and in terms of religion in the Judaism aspect.
	That you feel, as far as I can understand it, and I certainly do understand it, that you feel very frustrated, not just because there's agreement or disagreement, but also because of the difficulties that it's bringing into your family life.
	Is that correct? That's right.
	Well, look, I mean, I don't do this with the intention of creating conflict, so obviously that's not my major intention here.
	So I certainly don't relish or look forward to the difficulties that that does bring up within families and within marriages.
	But I will tell you, at least from my standpoint, that it's not that I'm against the state and against God in separation.
	These are not things that are distinct islands from me.
	For me, they're not distinct sort of silos of knowledge, and they, for me at least, rightly or wrongly, this is my reasoning, they themselves are two conclusions that flow from philosophical premises at the very beginning, which is that I believe in the primacy of rationality and empirical reality,
	And what that leads me to believe is that there's no such thing as collective existence of anything, and there's no such thing as the existence of immaterial objects like the state and like gods and so on.
	So it's not that I don't like the state and don't like religion but like some other immaterial thing that may or may not exist.
	But it's because I focus very much on empiricism and the scientific method and rationality to work through my conclusions that, rightly or wrongly, they do lead me to disbelieve as a consequence of earlier ideas in the existence of states and in the existence of gods and so on.
	But if I've made a mistake in my reasoning, I'm certainly more than happy to hear correction.
	Well, what I see around me a whole world of mountains and rivers and oceans that somehow work together and our bone bodies which are extremely complicated and somehow manage to work on the subconscious level and I happen to be a hypnotherapist so I'm familiar with the subconscious level but somehow our hearts beat and our Dress continues and our lungs work,
	and this is a tremendously complicated piece of machinery that we've got here as our bodies, and I don't think it kind of just happened.
	I think that there's a universal intelligence that created this.
	I think we're all part of that universal intelligence.
	I don't believe in a god sitting on a throne, but I do believe that there is a creative force that We perhaps perceive as a white light or whatever we want to perceive it as.
	Our perceptions can't possibly encompass it, but I believe there is a higher force that created us and that we're part of that.
	I choose to be part of that force through my own tradition, which is Judaism.
	And I'm part of a Jewish movement that is very much into meditation and spirituality and not into worshipping something sitting on a throne.
	Right, so you're not into sort of the guilt and punishment and heaven and hell and angels and Adam and Eve and the Old Testament stuff.
	So for you there's really sort of a life force that is sort of part of the creative energy of the universe which manifests itself as life and that for you, I mean again I'm trying to sort of understand your perspective here, That there is something called the body, the brain, which is sort of the wet chemistry and energy, electricity, biology, synapses, and so on.
	But then there's something called the mind, which is more than the sum of its parts and which partakes in something that's more spiritual, more sublime, and deeper and richer than the material.
	I'm trying not to over-characterize your perspective, but I just want to make sure that we're talking about the same thing.
	You're actually pretty accurate.
	Yeah. Okay, good, good.
	You're characterizing me pretty accurately.
	Well, I don't, you know, I never like to diminish people's deeply held spiritual beliefs, although I'm sure that does come across at times in the podcast, but then I'm more going for traditional fire and brimstone, teach the children they're going to hell Christians, which I'm sure that you and I would probably have fairly equal difficulties with.
	We do. I agree with you there, but that doesn't mean that, well, for example, I teach better physics.
	I work with past life regression.
	And when I see somebody playing the piano absolutely beautifully who never had a lesson in his life and couldn't play chopsticks before we did the regression, and I've seen this on a number of occasions, to me there's, you know, what kind of explanation am I going to give for that?
	I cut with Occam's razor.
	It seems like when we brought back a life where they were a concert pianist and they became a concert-level pianist, With no lessons and no abilities in this life, how do you want to explain that?
	I worked with telepathy, astral projection.
	I had somebody last week that was able to get 50% of the cards that I was sending them and chance would have allowed only for 20%.
	Obviously, this person was showing an ability that can't be explained by Actually, it is empirically explainable because I'll ask you to explain that I kept score on this and it happened.
	I sat right there and kept score on it and it happened.
	They went from an average of 20% when we started to 50% by the end with cards that were completely shuffled and they were at the other end of a phone line.
	There was no way they could see what I was doing.
	Right. Well, there's two responses, if you can just indulge me for a second.
	There's sort of two responses that pop into my mind about this, and forgive me for being blunt about one of them.
	But the first is that if there is such a capacity that the human mind has, let's just say that there is a potential...
	That our human mind, through some quantum flux weirdness that we can't even conceive of very easily, that we can share each other's thoughts and impressions over long periods of distances.
	Certainly within science they have shown the ability for subatomic particles to affect each other across large distances instantaneously.
	So let's say That there is some capacity to verify the kinds of phenomenon that you're describing.
	That, to me, would simply be something that would need to be investigated through the scientific method to figure out what was going on.
	It's been extensively investigated through the scientific method.
	Rand Institute, there's a whole number of institutes that have investigated this at great lengths.
	If you go to the Theosophical Study Center, you will see stacks of empirical information on the subject.
	Right, so this is something that we can study as a property of matter and a truly fascinating, if it's true, a truly fascinating capacity of the human mind.
	This would be something that we would study through the investigation of matter and energy.
	To me, that opens up a whole wide and very interesting series of questions, which I'm certainly no physicist or biologist and not even remotely competent to answer.
	So for me, that's some amazing stuff.
	I've been doing this since 1969 and teaching metaphysics since 1969.
	Probably I know something about it.
	Well, sure. Absolutely. And you know something about it as something that you have witnessed and that you describe within your life and so on.
	Now, that's something that...
	And there's one of two possibilities.
	And you'll forgive me for being blunt and I'm not suggesting anything.
	The one possibility is that you're not telling me the truth.
	And again, I apologize for all of that.
	This is just looking at it scientifically.
	I have this all recorded. Yeah.
	Yeah, no, absolutely. And I record sessions.
	I understand that. And I'm not accusing you of lying.
	I'm just saying that from my perspective, if I sort of hear stuff that sounds improbable to me, right?
	And I've done some research on this myself, and I know that there's been a million-dollar reward out for the past 30 years by the amazing Randy for anyone who can prove psychic phenomenon.
	You know, hundreds and hundreds of people have attempted to do so, and they've all failed.
	There have been no...
	I think all this proves is that the...
	I think this proves that Randy has some way of forcing people's psychic abilities.
	Every time he even gets into the picture at all, people can't make it happen or else his requirements for proof are unreasonable.
	I don't know which it is, but I know for certain that I've seen so much evidence of psychic development, psychic abilities, and changes in people's psychic levels based on their exercise, based on their I've done research based on they're really working on it, and I've seen the changes occur.
	So if nobody can prove it to Randy, all that means is there's no way to prove it to Randy.
	Well, that's certainly one argument.
	And I don't know enough, and I don't know enough about his methodology.
	As far as I understand it, it's the same sort of card test, and all he's trying to do is find more than random guesses.
	But just from an outsider, again, not knowing you personally and not having had your level of experience within the field, There's a number of different explanations that are possible.
	One is that you believe that something is occurring where it's not.
	And again, I'm not going to try and argue with that with you.
	I'm certainly not going to try and talk you out of 30 or 40 years of experience within the field.
	But there certainly has, to my knowledge, been no scientific proof of psychic phenomenon.
	Again, that may mean something.
	It may mean nothing. But just from the sort of skeptical outside perspective...
	Are you including past life regression in that?
	Yes. Are you including past life regression?
	That's my understanding, yes.
	There's a... There is a gentleman who comes to hypnotherapy conventions regularly, who is a regular speaker.
	His name is David Quigley.
	He literally has never had any piano lessons.
	He couldn't play chopsticks before he had the past life regression that led him to remember a past life where he could play concert lover piano.
	And now he plays at these conventions.
	Everybody comes and listens to him.
	The man is amazing.
	He easily could make a career out of music.
	Except he chooses to make a career in hypnotherapy, and this is something that would be absolutely impossible, except for the fact that he had the past life regression that resulted in this memory coming back.
	Well, okay, that's certainly possible.
	I know how he played before it.
	Well, that's certainly possible, but there are other explanations, right?
	I mean, there are other explanations of this kind of phenomenon, right?
	He may have taken lessons, which he hasn't told anybody.
	No, he didn't take... No, no, you don't get it.
	He didn't take lessons.
	I know the man.
	He couldn't play the piano.
	Within a period of, you know, an hour and a half from not being able to play the piano and not being able to play chopsticks, he went to concert-level piano.
	But how do you know? Again, empirically and scientifically, a scientist would ask this, right?
	And I'm sure that there's ways of explaining it, but you don't know that he never had lessons, right?
	This is not empirically proven.
	This is just what he says, right?
	Self-reporting is notoriously...
	Well, no, no. It is empirically proven because enough people know him.
	This is somebody I've known for many years.
	I know really well that he did not know how to play the piano.
	He could, you know, you sit down and try to get the man to play and he could not play chopsticks because I had some training in piano myself because my mother taught piano.
	I can guarantee you he did not know how to play the piano before this happened.
	He had no reason to prove anything to me.
	But that's not a scientific conclusion.
	The scientific conclusion would be that he appears to not know how to play the piano, right?
	There's no proof that he never took lessons.
	I mean, to take a hypothetical what if, right?
	And again, I'm not saying any of this is true.
	This is just alternate ways of looking at it.
	That perhaps he took lessons when he was very young, and perhaps he has an amazingly musical brain, and then perhaps he got hit on the head.
	And again, I'm just making stuff up.
	I don't know what the answer is, right?
	His parents are alive, and they are in agreement that he never had piano lessons.
	His parents are alive, they can tell you.
	He didn't have the analyst. Yes, but you see, this is all hearsay, right?
	He's a child or a lawyer or anything.
	So what you're saying, and again, this is just my particular perspective, you know, right or wrong.
	What you're asking me to believe is based on hearsay, That souls exist from life to life, that there is consciousness without matter, that there's such a thing as a soul that the metaphysics that you talk about is valid.
	You're asking me to believe that based on the testimony of a few people that I've never met that's not been subject to any rigorous scientific examination.
	You know what I asked you to do? Sure. I asked you to go to the study center where they have done rigorous studies that are empirical and they have studied at great length Take yourself to the library, my friend, and look at the empirical research on this subject.
	There is absolutely stacks of it.
	You couldn't get through it in your lifetime.
	So is this something that is accepted by the scientific community at large, then?
	Has this been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals?
	Actually, yes. Some of it has.
	Okay, well, look, that's very interesting stuff, and I will certainly have a look at that.
	I'm not a scientist, and of course, I don't know the people, and of course, I don't know you, right?
	So, you're very aware that there's, and I'm not putting you in this category, but just from my perspective, there are priests who will tell you that you are born, that Jesus was born of a virgin, and that you are inflicted with original sin, and the devils walk the earth, and so on, and they will tell you that they...
	Got it. I don't believe any of that.
	No, I understand that, right?
	But they're telling you that this is true.
	Now, as far as I'm concerned, again, no disrespect to you because I don't even know you, but somebody telling me that this stuff is true has about as much credibility to me as somebody telling you that Satan exists has for you, right?
	But I just told you there's a whole stack of scientific research on the subject.
	Absolutely, and I will certainly have a look at that.
	I've never heard of it, and I've read a fair amount of science, and I've never read of any scientifically, empirically proven approaches to past lives or regression or the evidence that knowledge is transmitted from death to birth in some manner.
	I've never read of anything like that, but of course, what do I know?
	I'm no scientific expert.
	I just sort of know the basics.
	But if you would like to give me that website again, I would certainly have a look at it.
	Well, I'm thinking of the Theosophical Study Center, but I'm sure you can type in T-H-E-O-S-O-P-H-I-C-A-L Study Center online, and they probably have a website by now.
	I haven't checked that.
	I just go to their library in Hollywood.
	They have libraries in any places.
	Absolutely. Well, look, I mean, I'm not going to argue against peer-reviewed scientific journals, so I'm certainly more than happy to have a look at that.
	But still, even if it's true that somebody has spontaneously figured out how to play the piano, I would say that that's a fascinating thing to figure out.
	That, to me, in no way, shape, or form leads to the existence of souls, and it doesn't lead to the existence of deities or anything like that.
	So the problem is that the leaps of logic that you make to get to the existence of a deity, the evidence that you put forward, while fascinating, I'll certainly have a look at it, even if it's true that this person spontaneously learned how to play the piano, there's still no evidence that that's based on some sort of scientific transfer of energy or some sort of scientifically measurable transfer of energy or knowledge.
	From a prior life.
	So my concern with this kind of stuff is that you're willing to go, and you've worked in the field for longer, you're just willing to go a lot further than I would be willing to go in terms of believing something.
	And again, you've had direct experience of it, I haven't, but there's lots of people in my life who claim to have had, and I'm not saying you're in this category, but it certainly is the case, There's lots of people who claim to have direct experience of lots of things that just aren't true.
	And again, I'm not saying you're in that category, but whenever I hear people talk about stuff, I've had people talk to me and say, oh, alien abductions, or, you know, and again, I'm not saying you're one of these people, but from my standpoint, when somebody tells me that something is true that is not part of any sort of knowledge that I've been aware of, There's a high sort of barrier to...
	In the same way that I had to put out 640 podcasts to sort of make my case for stuff because where I'm coming from is sort of unusual from that standpoint.
	So my sort of approach to this is just to say that...
	Lots and lots of research on this.
	I think if you will just check it out, and as you have admitted, this is really not your area of expertise.
	It's clear it isn't. I think you should look and see what has been discovered by people whose area of expertise it is.
	And who have done rigorous scientific research, because yes, there is quite a bit of this, and it happens that the state that you don't like very much, and I don't like either, the state actually has hired people in the military to do metaphysical things that have resulted in military action that took place on the metaphysical level.
	That goes on in the United States.
	It goes on in Russia. There is volumes of research on the subject, and if you're not aware of any of it, it just indicates you aren't aware of it.
	Okay, well, let's do this.
	You can't really inspect that particular item.
	Well, if it's been declassified, you can inspect it.
	I invite investigation in all areas.
	Just before we move on to the next topic, I generally prefer to do this sort of stuff when there's some skin in the game.
	So I will spend some time looking up past life research, looking for it in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
	But the only reason that I would do this is that if it turns out that there isn't the evidence that you claim, and again, I'm not going to say that I can do an exhaustive research, but this is such an astonishing claim that somebody has spontaneously learned how to play the piano with no possible way of ever knowing it beforehand.
	It's such an astonishing claim that I'm going to assume that there's a lot of evidence and research into this sort of topic.
	If it does turn out that the evidence isn't there, then you have to give up the belief, right?
	I'm certainly willing to change my mind if the evidence is there, but if the evidence that you claim isn't there, then you have to give up the belief, right?
	Because otherwise it's just academic.
	Yeah, no, the null hypothesis, I understand.
	Anyway, I just got one question on this subject.
	Sure, go for it. We've taken up a good bit of time.
	And that is, I understand your effort to be rigorous, and I respect that, and I think it's the only way through this morass.
	And your point that everything must relate to the physical universe, and I understand the reasoning behind that, but let me ask a question.
	What quality, what property of a molecule of something, you know, a protein molecule, whatever, what properties do these physical molecules have that allows them to think?
	Or allows them to have ideas or to feel?
	Well, I can answer some of those and I can answer some, obviously.
	I mean, if I could, I'd be making a whole different kind of living.
	I admit it's a mystery, but this is what tweaks a lot of people's point of, you know, that they're not willing.
	Well, it's not just physical.
	Right, right. No, and I fully understand that.
	I mean, The fact is, of course, that we can't see the mind, in a sense, objectively, because we are the mind, right?
	The mind is what we use to perceive, and therefore we can't perceive the mind in relation to anything else, right?
	I mean, we're in the movie theater.
	We can't see anything but the movie theater, so to speak.
	So I certainly understand that.
	As far as the properties of molecules that would cause us to feel, those are not that hard to figure out.
	Again, I'm not saying I know all of the science behind it, but, you know, endorphins will cause us to feel good, and certain other kind of chemicals will cause us to feel bad through a sort of complex neuro, sort of psychological and physical chain.
	So there's that aspect of things.
	But as to your question of what properties of atoms or molecules allow us to think, Well, there's just no answer to that yet, of course, right?
	I mean, we don't have any clue, at least I've never read of anything that is any particular clue as to how we know, oh, sorry, how we can differentiate atoms from, or the brain from the mind, right?
	There's nothing in the properties of any individual molecule within the brain that you'd look at if you didn't know about the mind and you'd say, oh, that's going to produce a conscious being with dreams and the unconscious and passions and insecurities and all of this kind of stuff.
	So the answer, of course, is that I don't know, but for me, putting the bookend of a deity out there doesn't bring me any closer to knowing.
	So if we say, how do atoms get to think?
	For me, it's like, I don't know.
	But when people say to me, well, it's God, that doesn't answer the question anymore.
	Because then it's like, well, how is it that atoms think?
	Well, they think because there's some intangible spirit that animates them that was created by some incomprehensible being for some unfathomable purpose in some unknowable manner.
	That, to me, is just piling ignorance upon ignorance, if you'll excuse the phrase.
	It doesn't answer any questions to say that there's such a thing as a God.
	What it does is it overleaps things that we don't know and makes up an answer that doesn't make any sense.
	So that's where, for me, I just can't go.
	I'm willing to say, I don't know, not willing to say, well, I know that there's a God and that answers the question, because it doesn't.
	No, Steph, I'm comfortable with the I don't know.
	And some people aren't.
	And I follow your reasoning in that the fact that we don't know something doesn't mean we can make stuff up and say that's the answer.
	So basically the rest of the show should be you and your wife chatting now.
	Because I think that's going to be better than anything I can do.
	Well, you keep up the good work, and I think this dialogue is absolutely vital for the survival of the human species.
	And I think we are looking at either a golden age beyond all golden ages or our ultimate demise, depending on how we confront these issues.
	Wow, talk about putting the pressure on.
	Now I'm all nervous. Okay, survival of the species.
	Let me just make a note of that. Aim for the survival of the species, not the conflagration of all things evil and malicious.
	Okay, got it. Got it. That takes the pressure off me for the rest of the show.
	I did say we, though.
	I'm not putting it all off you. I'm just kidding.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
	Now we have somebody else who wishes to have a chit-chat?
	All right. Chris A., I think that you're on.
	Hello? Hello?
	Yeah, um...
	Okay, earlier on you were talking about Britain and your experiences with perceptions of aristocracy.
	Oh, I thought we were going back to the boobs, but okay, sure.
	Well, okay, um...
	I just want to say, I don't think I agree entirely with what you're saying about that.
	Because I live in Britain and, well...
	I don't really think people here place as much emphasis in aristocracy class as, well, you say they do.
	Well, again, this is 30 years ago, and things may have changed to some degree since then.
	So when I was a kid, I mean, if you came with the Eaton accent, the hoity-toity, Hugh Grant-type accent, you were viewed in one particular way.
	And if you had a real cockney accent to you, you were viewed in another way.
	Are you saying that that's not as much the case anymore?
	Well, I think that is true to an extent, but even still, I think, like as you were saying before, I think British society is a bit more meritocratic than it used to be.
	Say, if we were speaking, say, probably a hundred years ago, then if you were born in a working class position, then you probably would remain in a working class position for most of your life.
	Today, I don't really think that's the case as such.
	Well, I've got to agree with you. If you're going to go back 100 years, then my thesis would completely fall apart, that it's exactly the same as it was 100 years ago.
	But tell me this.
	this do you think that a person who spoke with the thick cockney accent could be elected prime minister um...
	well you know the answer Come on, I can't be that wrong about it.
	Well, okay, not in terms of accent.
	I think it's more in terms of education, if you think about it, because most British Prime Ministers have been Oxbridge educated.
	That's Oxford and Cambridge, the two main unit, well, the two oldest and sort of most prestigious units here.
	And isn't it true that one of the things that they do as part of that education is if they come from a lower class accent, that they do their best and try their hardest to get rid of that accent?
	Even if they come from sort of poorer backgrounds, that they do their best to try and get rid of that kind of accent.
	I mean, certainly Tony Blair sounds like he was pumped out of the same school as Winston Churchill, right?
	Okay, but actually his predecessor, John Major, never went to university, let alone Oxford.
	But he certainly didn't have a Cockney accent.
	And I'm sort of using the Cockney accent just as an extreme way of phrasing it or characterizing it.
	It's just that my belief is that you can't have an institution like the aristocracy At the core of your social society and not have that have a big effect on society.
	And I think that people put up with the aristocracy because they don't realize just how bad it is for what is called a meritocracy and so on.
	But again, I mean, you live there and I lived there like 30 years ago, so your value, sorry, your perspectives are far more valid than mine.
	But I still can't imagine that somebody with a Cockney accent, no matter how bright, would ever be elected prime minister.
	I think people would just roll their eyes and make fun of him.
	Okay, I see your point, but I don't...
	Well...
	Yeah, yeah, I see your point, yeah.
	And it's not that that's only in England.
	I mean, there's a kind of accent out here in Canada that's considered to be kind of laddish or yobbo or whatever, and you can see this in the States, right?
	I mean, Bill Clinton got rid of the majority of his Arkansas ditched caterpillar accent in order to become president.
	He had to sound...
	More sort of upper class and so on, or at least not quite so much as Jeff Foxworthy says, you know, you open up your mouth and have a southern accent, people immediately deduct 25 points from your IQ. So it's not just in the UK, but I think it's particular to the UK just because there is that,
	there are so many personalities, Personality characteristics that are associated with social origins, with class origins, that there's an image that people have of somebody with a Cockney accent, and there's an image that people have of somebody with an Oxford accent that I just think is quite strong, and certainly the royals all sound like they've got linguistic cucumbers shoved up their butts.
	So I think there is that.
	Again, you know it better than I do because you're there more recently, but that's certainly what I remember.
	Certainly when I went to a public school with a private school accent, holy crap, I mean, that was quite a hurdle to get over.
	Well, okay, yeah, as I say, I see what you're saying, but I think, well, I think in contemporary society, people aren't as quick to judge on class or would not dismiss someone on the basis of their class as much as they used to.
	And what's, and you could be right, what's the evidence that you have for that?
	Because I'm just sort of thinking in terms of accent and politics and so on, but what's, what's the, and the worship of Diana, right, again, which would not have been the same if she was not royalty.
	What's the evidence that you have that things are becoming more meritocratist?
	Well, just basically things I see on an everyday basis that, you know, that general attitudes are that, you know, just because someone is of a lower socioeconomic standard doesn't mean that they're going to have a certain personality type or something.
	Right, right. Well, I think that's great, and I think that's wonderful.
	I think that the real test of that will be when people are willing to abolish the monarchy.
	I think that would be a real test of whether they were willing to have a meritocratic society, and certainly if England is moving in that direction, I think that's wonderful.
	Well, I think most people defend the monarchy because of tradition.
	Well, perhaps I don't really care about the monarchy, but...
	Well, you know, most people cite tradition as the main reason why we should have it.
	Well, sure, but the tradition is not that the queen is on top, right?
	The tradition is that people are forced to pay for her, right?
	That's the tradition that people are defending, right?
	And that's as equivalent as saying that it's tradition that there's slavery in the south of the United States and that the elevated status of the slave owners is tradition.
	But the real fact of the matter with the aristocracy is not that the aristocracy isn't on top.
	That's just the effect. The reality of the situation is that people are forced to pay for the aristocracy or get thrown in jail, and that the aristocracy develop their wealth through warfare, bloodshed, and conquest.
	So the tradition is not the horses and it's not the Beefeaters and it's not Buckingham Palace and it's not any of that sort of stuff.
	The tradition is that people have to pay for these parasites or they get thrown in jail.
	That's the tradition that people don't talk about quite as much, but that's really the root of it.
	Yeah, I can agree with that.
	Where did you live when you were in Britain?
	I lived in London, and I went to school at Dean Klaus, which is a school near Wales, in Cheltenham.
	Oh, okay. Yeah, I live north of London, so...
	Right, so you have some of that north London accent, which I'm sure has given you some challenges, right?
	Particularly in the bars with the birds, right?
	Ahem, they want to hear me speak the Queen's English?
	Oh, darling. All right, let's not do too much of that.
	Did you have any other questions?
	Excellent.
	I appreciate it. And do call back and let me know if you can dig up some good evidence.
	I certainly would like to know that England is moving more in this direction.
	Ahem, Chris, you're up!
	Oh, sorry. Hey, Mediok, I do believe we have some room for you.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hello. First of all, I would like to present myself.
	I'm a 16-year-old boy from Denmark.
	Do you know where Denmark is?
	I certainly do. That's where Hamlet is from.
	All right.
	Well, I have a question for you.
	And I would like to know your side of...
	A special religion being supported by the state, as we do in Denmark and have been doing for many years.
	The main religion in Denmark is supported by the state.
	How do you think it could revolutionize, change a society's perspective to a religion and to religions in general?
	If you separate the religion with the state as you are doing in the USA, Well, that's an excellent question.
	I certainly do appreciate your interest in this very essential topic.
	One correction, though, which is that the separation of church and state in the U.S. is much more in paper than it is in reality.
	So this faith-based initiatives and so on, and all this government funding that's going to churches, and the fact that it's in God we trust, it's a Christian nation, and the fact that so many religious people are so politically active has had an enormous effect.
	George Bush lies about a war, goes to war, kills hundreds of thousands of people, and people re-elect him.
	Why? Because they're Christians, right?
	So he's a Christian. He's one of us.
	We believe the state of Israel needs to exist.
	We believe that war in the Middle East is inevitable because we believe in revelations and we're insane.
	And so the separation of church and state in the U.S. is quite a bit different than what was originally intended and certainly quite a bit different over the last 20 or 30 years than it used to be.
	But as to your question as to how you separate the church and the state, it's very simple.
	You get rid of the state.
	There's no other way to do it.
	There is no conceivable way to separate the church and the state for a long period of time or for any sort of substantial period of time while you still have a government.
	And so if you want to deal with the issue of the separation of church and state, I know that I'm giving you a big pill to swallow, but you don't worry...
	Oh, it's very interesting. It's all right.
	It's very interesting. Please...
	Well, it's just that the government, as you well know, is a coercive monopoly.
	It's a group of people who say, or who claim, we have the right to point guns at whoever we choose and take their money and hand it out to whoever we choose.
	So the government is a massive, violent gang of people that takes money from one group and gives it to another group.
	And naturally, one of those groups that's going to want the money is religion.
	And there's other groups that want the money and businesses and other people and other groups and so on.
	But as long as you have an agency in society called the government, which is basically just this group of people who claim this weird moral right to point guns at everyone and move money around or throw people in jail...
	As long as you have this violent agency that can redistribute money at will, you're always going to have the problem that religion is going to be one of those groups, right?
	So I try to go to the source of the problem and say that it certainly is technically, economically, and most importantly morally possible, and I would say essential, To have a stateless society, to have a society that does not require this centrally coercive monopoly in order to function because Lord knows the world isn't doing too well with all these governments around.
	So I think that the essential goal is to work towards the elimination of the moral justifications for the state because as soon as you eliminate those, the state in itself It tends to sort of fall away, just as when you got rid of certain moral justifications for a monopoly of religions within Europe after the religious wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, religion lost a lot of its power.
	So that would sort of be my, just keep working on focusing that the state is an agency of violence, that the effects of the state are always going to be negative.
	One of those effects is the unity of church and state, but you can't solve that problem if you still have a government.
	You can maybe Beat it down for a bit, you can make it go into remission for a while, but all that will happen is the money will flow to some other group that you disagree with.
	Okay, so how do you see the process from having a state and eliminating the state in a modern society where we have always been used to an authority that could guide us and help us if we were in doubt of something?
	How do you see that process in a modern society?
	I couldn't actually see the possibility, and the idea seemed very far from me, and I think it seemed far from most Danish people.
	So how is your solution for society in the future without a state?
	Well, I can tell you, but you're not going to like it!
	Well, I'm here to learn.
	Sure, sure. I mean, I'll tell you what I think.
	Of course, this is all debatable, right?
	But this is sort of my opinion.
	If you want to get rid of the state, then you don't aim at the state.
	I mean, that's sort of my perspective, right?
	You don't aim at the government because you can't aim at the government.
	They've got all the tanks and guns and policemen and prisons.
	I mean, forget it. It's never going to happen, right?
	You might as well try and take down the mafia by writing a block or wishing.
	It's never going to happen. The way that you bring down the state is through personal action within your own life.
	And by that, what I mean is that the reason that we have governments is fundamentally because we have two other things that lead people to become dependent on external authority.
	The first is that we have religion, right?
	Religion is the fantasy that there's some all-powerful, omniscient, benevolent, sky ghost that's up there that's going to make everything okay.
	And that, of course, is very similar to people's belief that there's something called the government that is going to make everything okay, that's full of all of this wisdom and knowledge and so on, and is somehow fundamentally different from the rest of us, right?
	The government can go and impose a tax on everyone.
	You and I can't walk up and down to our neighbors and say, oh, by the way, I'm putting a tax on you, right?
	I'll just laugh at you, right? The government's sort of magically different.
	In the same way that priests are kind of magically different, right?
	The priest can just say, oh yeah, God talks to me and he told me that you have to become my altar boy, here's some baby oil, right?
	That's not a particularly productive way to do things.
	So the best way to break the power of the state, in my view, is to thoroughly oppose religion in the minds of people as a twisted fantasy that human beings really need to outgrow.
	Because as you start to take away God from people, you're starting to take away this idea that there's some perfect authority out there that can make their lives all right.
	That's going to have a very strong effect on their perception of the state.
	The problem is that when you take away God for people, a lot of times, like, you know, socialists or people who are communists who don't believe as much in God, often believe in the state even more, right?
	Because they have to sort of When they take away God, they end up piling even more faith into the state.
	So you have to oppose God.
	You have to oppose the moral justifications for the state.
	But most fundamentally, and this is the part that you're not going to like, I guess, most fundamentally, you have to clean up your own personal relationships, right?
	So in the philosophy that I sort of talk about, and you can hear more if you want, sort of in these podcasts that I have at freedomainradio.com, I talk about that, for instance, A lot of people will say, well, I think we should have a really small government because I don't respect unjust authority, right? And then, you know, you'll say, well, what are you doing this Sunday?
	And they'll say, oh, man, I have to go over to my parents' house for dinner.
	I hate doing that, but I feel so guilty if I don't do that.
	Or my mom gets really mad if I don't go over for dinner.
	Or, oh, I have to go to my brother's kid's christening.
	It's like, but you don't believe in God?
	Well, yeah, but...
	You know, if I don't go, my family's going to be really mad, you know, this kind of stuff, right?
	So what I talk about is that the most fundamental freedom that you have to gain is with regards to your family.
	And if you have a good, a decent, rational family that you love, fantastic, that's great.
	You're rare, but it's good.
	But what I really suggest to people is that if you want to be free, right, it's not about ending the government, it's about being free yourself, Then you have to live your life with integrity, most importantly and most fundamentally, not with regards to God or the non-existence of God, and not with regards to the state, but with regards to your friends, your family, and your siblings.
	If we can break out of the idea that our families are good just because they're our families, then we will start to break out of the idea that our government is good just because it's our government.
	Okay. So what your idea is based on is actually the message of Jesus that you should love the next as you love yourself.
	Don't you think that a human being was sort of created selfish somehow?
	Did you say that I believe that you should love your neighbor as yourself?
	Is that what you sort of understood from what I was saying?
	I just want to make sure. Yeah, I think that's what you would build your society and your suggestion on.
	The religious part of it.
	Oh no, no, I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt you and I can certainly see how you would get that out of what I'm saying.
	For me, the only rule that I would build any society on is very simple.
	That violence is bad.
	Violence is bad.
	I mean, self-defense is fine, but who cares?
	That never happens to us in real life, right?
	I mean, it's not like I have to go down and every time I walk to my car, 12 ninja jump on me and I have to fight them back.
	It's actually only 11.
	But for me, the basic is that violence is bad, right?
	And abuse is bad, right?
	Violence is bad and abuse is bad.
	Teaching children that there's a God who watches them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and if they do one thing wrong, they're going to go to hell.
	That's abusive. That's an abusive, destructive lie that is inflicted upon children.
	And then when we're adults, when the government or politicians say to us, you have to give me half of your income.
	I think in Denmark it's more like 60 or 65 percent.
	And if you don't give me your money, Just so that I can spend as I see fit.
	If you don't give me your money, I'm going to send some people over to your house, they're going to take your house, and if you resist, I'm going to shoot you down on the sidewalk, right?
	Because that's really what the government comes down to.
	All the laws and all this, it comes down to people pointing guns at you, and if you don't obey them, they pull the trigger and you fall down with a big hole in your body.
	And so fundamentally, it's not about loving your neighbor as yourself or anything like that.
	It's just saying, I renounce the use of violence as a solution to social problems.
	I reject the use of guns and coercion.
	As a way of dealing with my fellow man, I don't think you have to love them, but I think you at least have to commit to not shooting them, right?
	And the government is really just all about pointing, herding people around like cattle and throwing them in jail if they disobey.
	So that's my philosophy.
	I don't care if you love me, but I would at least like you to support not shooting me, right?
	So that would be sort of my fundamental thing.
	But sorry, go ahead. Yeah, well, I think it's very interesting though, but I don't think it would be realistic for modern people to think like that, because somehow the human race is very complicated though,
	and making every people reject violence and reject abuse, like you described, I think that would be I still think we would need a state, otherwise an authority, because I can't see how would you control human beings.
	We are made as we are made, and as I said, I think human beings are made selfish and made with bad size and our own free will, and that's also what can I do understand where you're coming from.
	What you're saying is that human beings are corruptible, they can be selfish, they can be greedy, they can be destructive, and so on, right?
	That's perception? Yes, that's what I say, and that's why I don't actually I understand your idea about eliminating the state.
	Okay, I understand that.
	Who do you think runs the government?
	Is it people or something else?
	I think it's the people.
	No, I mean, sorry, the people who are in the government, politicians, they are human beings, right?
	Yes, you are. I'm sorry, that's a rhetorical question.
	Yes, of course.
	So if you say that human beings are innately greedy and bad, and let's say that's true, I'm not going to try and argue with that with you, then do you think that the people who are running the government are also going to be corrupt and selfish and greedy?
	No, not as much as...
	I think that If you are obliged to a commonship, if you are obliged to a society, and if you are obliged to other people, I think you can build a society by that.
	I can't see how that part of society would function without a state.
	Sorry, I just want to go back for a second.
	So you believe that the people who run the government are more virtuous than the people who they rule?
	No, not by definition, but I think they are obliged in another way than common people in the society.
	I'm not sure what you mean by obliged, though I'm certainly curious.
	Sorry, just so I understand, you believe that people are selfish and greedy as a whole, but that the people in the government are less selfish and greedy?
	Yes, I do. And now, do you believe that the people in the government who are less selfish and greedy, are they voted in or should they be just in like a dictatorship?
	I think they should be voted in.
	Now, how is it that selfish and greedy voters would ever vote in people who aren't selfish and greedy?
	Well, of course.
	Let me just explain what I mean by that.
	That's sort of like saying that if you get the mafia to vote the police in, that the police will be really good.
	If the mafia is selfish and greedy and bad, then whoever the mafia vote for are going to be selfish and greedy and bad.
	That's logical, right? Yes.
	So if the voters are selfish and greedy, then the government that they vote in is going to be selfish and greedy, right?
	Right, so this is the logical problem that you have.
	If people are really bad, then they're going to vote in a really bad government.
	And if people are really bad, then the last thing that you ever want to do is give them all the guns and the soldiers and the police and the law courts and the prisons, because that's just going to make them worse, right?
	If you give people a monopoly of power, that makes bad people even worse, doesn't it?
	Yes, you could say that, yes.
	So, either you can't have a democracy.
	If people are bad, then you can't have a democracy.
	And if people are bad, you can't have a government, because that's just going to make bad people worse.
	Because when you give bad people a monopoly of power, they don't use that power for good because they're bad people, right?
	So the only way that you can have a just society if people are bad is to not have a government so that people don't have this big social control mechanism to control everyone else.
	So your side of the human race is actually like you would consider dogs or other animals.
	Don't you think there is some sort of social obligation because we have this intelligence or do you see the human race, do you consider the human race like you would consider another Well, we have moral understanding.
	We have ethics. We have free will, in my view.
	So, yeah, of course, we have the obligation to be good people.
	But either people are basically good, in which case we don't need a government, because people can organize society themselves, right?
	Or people are evil, in which case you can't have a government, because then all the evil people will just try and run the government, right?
	Either way, you're not making a good case.
	I'm not saying that I've proven anything.
	I'm just saying that you're not making a good case for the existence of a government.
	The only way that you can make a good case for the existence of a government is a dictatorship where every citizen just about is a bad person, but everyone who's in the government is like a philosopher king, is a really great person, but then you can't have any voting because the bad people will just vote bad people into the government.
	So the problem is that your division of people into good and bad leads you directly to this sort of platonic dictatorship.
	And I don't think that that ever works for the good anyway, right?
	So I think that you have a challenge in terms of finding a justification for government based on the fact that people are bad because people will end up running the government.
	Okay, okay.
	Well, it's... Very interesting philosophy you got about that, I think.
	Well, I appreciate you listening. I know that it's an unusual set of ideas to hear, and I do have a lot of podcasts at my website.
	If you'd like to listen to more, I go into the objections that you have into quite some detail.
	So I'm not going to say that I'm going to convince you of anything in this chat, but I certainly appreciate your open-mindedness to listening to some exciting ideas, I guess.
	Well, of course. Of course, that's why I called you.
	Well, I have another question for you as well.
	Today, in our modern society, I see a lot of focus on how we look and how the human body, are we fat, are we pretty, are we thin, are we hot, and those things.
	Do you think that putting the religious messages from, for example, the Bible into the raising of Do you think that we could have a positive influence on this modern society that we're getting right now with all this superficial Superficialness.
	Do you understand me?
	I do, I do. So your question is, if we take deeper spiritual truths of religion and teach them what to children, will we make children less shallow?
	Or people, maybe less shallow?
	Just exactly. No, I don't think that that's true at all.
	I don't think that the solution to irrationality is fantasy, right?
	Because religion is not true.
	There's no truth whatsoever in religion.
	God does not exist. It's all a fairy tale.
	So I don't think that teaching children that things that are false is going to make them deeper.
	It's just going to make them confused and it's going to make them aggressive, right?
	Because religious people don't have any way to resolve conflict or dispute because they don't have science.
	They don't have rationality.
	They just have faith, which is like a cancer, right?
	Because faith is just blind-willed assertion.
	This is true because I believe it.
	And so you can't negotiate with people.
	The conversation that you and I are having is based on logic, right?
	So you say, well, we need a government because people are bad, and I say, well, here's the logical problem, and then we discuss it back and forth.
	You and I could not have this debate if we were both religious, because there would be no logic that we could appeal to.
	So I think that religion is very dangerous to teach to people because it makes for a lot of conflict in society.
	And so I think that teaching children religion is very bad, I think that what we do need to do is teach children a whole lot better.
	And what I mean by that is we need to stop having the government teach the children.
	The reason that children are so shallow is because they're taught by the government and the government doesn't have any interest in making them into intelligent, rational, critical thinkers.
	It just wants to make them obedient, and it just wants to make them pay their damn taxes.
	It's not a conspiracy.
	I don't think anybody sits and plots it, but it's just natural that governments don't teach citizens really how to think and how to question authority.
	I think when you learn how to think logically and philosophically and critically, then you become deep.
	That's Socrates, that's Plato, that's Aristotle, that's Wittgenstein, that's Nietzsche, that's all of these people.
	They achieve depth through thought.
	And you cannot achieve depth through faith because faith is a fantasy.
	Okay. Well, what would you consider as being the correct values?
	What do you think could solve this problem of shallowness?
	I didn't really get that.
	Did you come up with a solution?
	Sure. I mean, I think I have, and I'll just go over it sort of very briefly.
	You can let me know what you think.
	I'm not going to say that some anonymous voice over the Internet is going to solve all the world's problems for you, but this is sort of my perspective or approach, which is that the first thing that human beings need to do is we need to renounce the use of violence, as I mentioned.
	We need to reject the use of violence as a way of solving problems.
	We need to reject a mere blind assertion of willpower in terms of faith or in terms of patriotism or in terms of mere family loyalties or communal loyalties.
	We need to be loyal to the truth.
	We need to be loyal to philosophy, to rationality, to the scientific method.
	That's what we need to be loyal to.
	Not to our parents, or our schools, or our countries, or who Whoever are gods and goblins and devils and so on.
	We need to rely upon truth and upon reason in order to be able to figure out things and make decisions.
	And what that means first and foremost is we say, I renounce the use of violence as a way of dealing with my fellow men.
	Whether that's religious violence in terms of inflicting false beliefs and frightening visions of hell on children, or whether that's wanting to have a government force people to do things, I renounce the use of violence in all its forms.
	That, to me, is a very big first step.
	Now, after that, there's a lot of other things that come along that I'm not going to bore you with right now, but the first step that we need to do, you know, it's like if you're really unhealthy and you're really fat, the first thing you need to do is stop eating junk food, and then later you can start eating salads and exercising, but the first thing you need to do is stop eating junk food.
	The first thing that human beings need to do is to renounce the use of violence as a way of solving problems.
	After that, there's a lot of good things that can be done, but I'd say that's the first step.
	And if you want more, you can go into the podcast, but that's a long answer.
	Okay, okay. Well, that was so red.
	Very interesting to talk to you.
	I just found this on Skypecast.
	So, well, I see your considerations, and I will...
	I will bring some of them to my professor in my philosophy class.
	I will. Well, do come back and let us know how it goes.
	I certainly would be interested. And if you can get your philosophy professor on here, even better.
	Okay, yeah. I guess you could have some interesting talks.
	I appreciate that. Well, do come back and let us know how you go.
	And if you can bring us to the fine land of Danish people, I would be really appreciative.
	Okay. The fine land of Danish people.
	Are you familiar with the Danish society?
	I'm a little familiar with the Danish society.
	Are you the guys who are really into the tango?
	Very into the tango.
	I think it was some Scandinavian country.
	I thought it was Denmark. You're the guys with the really long winter, the high suicide rate, the big government, and you're really into the salsa or the tango or some sort of South American dance.
	I could be totally wrong, and I probably am, but that's what I remember.
	Okay, okay. Well, I think a typical American would fall a bit apart if he...
	He went directly into the Danish society with all those taxes and stuff.
	And don't blame the Americans for my foolishness.
	I'm Canadian, so it's not their fault this time, though, for other things.
	But you can blame Canada for this, not the Americans.
	Okay, okay. Thank you very much.
	Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it, and we'll talk to you soon.
	Do let us know how it goes. I will do, for certain.
	Alright, well, do we have anybody else with any last wind-up questions?
	I appreciate that. We've had some very interesting chats.
	I do feel that my past life is prompting me to say that this is the end of the show, but I'm certainly happy to close up now.
	Nobody? Excellent.
	Well, thank you so much for listening, everybody.
	It's been a great show. We had some very high peaks of listenership, which I managed to drive away with my endless ranting, but we'll see if they can come back at some other point.

▲