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May 13, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:11:37

758 Sunday Call In Show May 13 2007

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	Thanks, everyone, for joining this week.
	We have, I guess, a default topic, which is that there's been some excitement in the Free Domain Radio community.
	And for those of you who don't know anything about it, I'll just give you the brief overview, which is that we had a not insignificant altercation on the board, which resulted in a ban.
	Which is troubling some people, which I certainly understand, which I am more than willing to take questions about.
	I don't really have an introductory statement on it.
	So I'm sorry if you wanted to come and hear something else.
	But at least I'd like to deal with this at the beginning.
	If there are any sort of additional questions or comments or issues or concerns, I would be more than happy to hear them and retrench myself with dishonor if I have been proven to be unjust.
	So I'm certainly happy to hear all of that.
	And if there are questions, fantastic.
	We'll start right away with putting me on the grill.
	And then if there aren't questions, though, we shall move on to un topic autre, as they say in imaginary land where I speak French.
	And if anyone has any, if you've bought a computer recently, my computer, the hard drive, just completely died.
	Friday night. I just wouldn't even boot.
	I wouldn't even make a sound. I had somebody from the Geek Squad.
	I put my tech pride aside, my geek pride aside, and I had somebody from the Geek Squad come in.
	And, yo, she is as dead as a doornail, so I'm going to buy a new computer because, Lord knows, repairing old ones isn't even that old.
	It's like 10 months old. But sadly, the hard drive has died, so we're using the excellently donated from a listener notebook, which I really appreciate.
	And if you've bought a good computer recently, or you have, I'm sort of interested in a dual core, because I do all of this encoding.
	It's got nothing to do with the games.
	I don't know why Christina keeps staring at me like that.
	It's all about serving the audio and video needs of Free Domain Radio.
	So if you've bought a good computer lately, feel free to email me with recommendations and let me know.
	But I'm going to make the leap.
	I've always had this problem.
	I don't know if anyone's interested in this, but just as we're waiting for everyone to come on board, I've always had this problem in that, A, I know enough about computers to be dangerous, as the web admin, who's been helpful enough with the free domain radio board, can owe more than it has to.
	But what happens is I buy a computer, and I have components left over from the last computer that I want to keep, you know, sound card or video card or something like that.
	And what happens then is I buy a new computer without those things, and then I put those things in, update the drivers, and it always seems to be a kind of instability in that.
	Like, I spend a fair amount of time not driving the car, but being under the hood, or, you know, covered in grease and cursing and spitting.
	So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just bite the bullet and try and overcome my own natural aversion to spending money, and just buy a complete system, all pre-packaged.
	I think that's going to be helpful and positive, and allow me to spend just a little bit more time Working the computer to advantage rather than trying to futz with making it work to work at all.
	So if you've bought a packaged computer that's been really excellent, then let me know.
	I certainly would appreciate any recommendations, but I sort of need to go and pick that up early this week.
	So I would look forward to that if you can do it.
	It should give you that window in just a second.
	Thanks everyone for joining. We're just getting some technical stuff set up.
	The very large Free Domain Radio roadie crew is just finishing up the massive soundstage set up.
	The flashpots, the dancers, and the bats.
	Excellent. Excellent. All right.
	All right. So let's start with the meat of the matter.
	The last time that we had a board altercation, I breezed right past it, which caused some consternation.
	And I'm not one to repeat mistakes other than with the date more than a half dozen times.
	So if you do have any questions or issues or comments about what's been going on on the board recently, I would be more than happy to entertain them.
	Just click on Ask for Mike.
	And if you don't know what we're talking about, It will be an interesting topic nonetheless because it is around sort of the realm of conflict and confrontation and interpersonal challenges, let's say.
	And of course, I've had more than my fair share of comments about it through the podcast and on the board.
	So if people do have questions or comments or criticisms, now is the time.
	Leap on that Ask for Mike and I will be more than happy to respond to them.
	Questions about the board?
	You will be assimilated into the question queue.
	Alright, we'll just wait for people to find that ask for mic thing, or maybe people don't have mics, or maybe just maybe ask to talk.
	Is it ask to talk?
	Ask to talk, yes. There's a top right-hand side of your screen.
	Miming, not so much, because we don't have the webcam set up, but talking, so much.
	And if you are going to, if you could...
	Erdem Kennett, you are on, my brother.
	Yeah, can you hear me? I sure can.
	How are you doing? Good, and yourself?
	Great, thanks. All right.
	I feel that I think that people are afraid to express their freedom of speech because of the new hate crime.
	I think that, you know, race minorities are using that to their advantage, to sue people.
	I mean, I don't think that words should offend people as much as they do.
	Can you think of an example, or do you have a geographical area that you're talking about?
	I just feel that people, they use it to their advantage because, I don't know, it's just confusing.
	And are you talking about how there are certain minorities who seem to have sort of legally advantageous ways of sort of extracting money either from other people or from the general population through the tax mechanism by being sort of professionally offended and upset about being talked as they perceive negatively about?
	Okay. Well, I guess we'll put that as a topic on the back burner, and we have somebody else coming in.
	Mediok, you are on the show.
	How can I help you? Hello.
	My name is Martin.
	I'm calling from Denmark.
	I'm 16 years old, and I'm attending the Danish public school at the moment.
	Sorry, can I just interrupt you for a sec?
	Yes. You're 16, right?
	Yes. You have a very manly voice.
	You should think about doing radio.
	You sound older and more mature than I do, so I just wanted to compliment you.
	That's a great set of pipes you have there, so I hope that you're going to put it to fine use.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	Well, since nobody's actually talking about anything, I would like you to maybe comment or give me some advices about my English exam.
	I'm going to do five minutes of presentation where I have to Do some philosophy about a certain subject and I chose the subject of terrorism and one of the things that I have to touch in that presentation is why it's triggered off and how we can prevent people from getting influenced by terror and the risk of terror.
	So if you have any suggestions or maybe Sorry.
	Maybe some considerations about this.
	I would like to maybe have a learning conversation with you about that.
	I think that terrorism is triggered off, especially the 9-11.
	Maybe it was triggered off because of a long...
	Sorry, just a minute.
	No problem. Take your time. Because the terrorists think that they've been ignored for a very long period of time, and they think that that was the only way for them to express themselves.
	Which leads me over to another thing that I want to touch in my presentation, which is, is there Is there actually a fair chance for everyone, every nation, every people, every human in the world to express themselves rightly and broadly and get accepted for their opinion?
	Also, such things I want to discuss.
	Do you have any considerations in that connection?
	Well, sure. I mean, I certainly do, but I'm going to have to ask you to give me half the marks.
	I'll send you my email, and then after your presentation, if you get an A, you have to send me at least letters A through C. But we can talk about that afterwards.
	The first thing that I would ask is what is your definition of terrorism?
	My definition of terrorism is when you commit something, maybe do a crime or do something just to harm people, just to kill people.
	With no other purpose than to harm people to promote your case, to advance your case to other people.
	Do you follow me? I do, and I would say that the fairly mainstream, which is not to say perfectly correct, but the fairly mainstream definition of terrorism is the use of violence to achieve a political end.
	So it's not to achieve an end of personal gain like you go and rob a bank, it's not to achieve an end of sexual or biological gratification like if you go and rape someone, but it is the calculated use of violence to achieve a political end.
	Would that be okay with you?
	Yeah. Okay.
	Now, if you do use that definition of violence, then why is it that you'd focus on the Muslims first?
	Because it would seem to me that there's, I mean, if you look at For instance, and again, not to pick on the United States, it's overly fashionable, but I just thought I'd sort of mention it, and we could pick on any other country here as well, but if we pick on, sort of look at the United States, the United States has said that they wish to invade Iraq in order to bring democracy to the Middle East, which is clearly a political end, right?
	I mean, that they wish to have a regime change by ousting or killing Saddam Hussein, and that is the use of violence to achieve a political end.
	Whatever they call it, right?
	I mean, the Muslims would call it a jihad for the greater glory of Muhammad and Allah, blessed be his whatever.
	But the Americans call it bringing democracy to the Middle East.
	And if you look at the death toll in Iraq, for instance, I mean, if you want to take an exciting slant, you know, in your presentation, it's just a possibility.
	That Iraq, which has a population of about 13 million, or about 5% of the United States population, Iraq is suffering and has, for the past couple of years, 100 deaths a day, which would translate to about 1,500 deaths a day in the United States.
	In other words, Iraq, for the past couple of years, has been suffering from a 9-11 every two days.
	So I'm just wondering why it is that you would focus on the Muslims, which is not to say that if the Muslims did 9-11 that it's not a criminal and terrorist act, but I'm just wondering why you would move towards the Muslims as the characterization of terrorism when just to pick one particular action from a government rather than from Al-Qaeda, that you would focus on that.
	And I'm not trying to pick at you, I'm just wondering.
	Well, it's not actually because I want to focus on the Muslims and what you just presented me, what you just said is actually very interesting and that is a comparison that I definitely am going to show and going to It was not to put the Muslims on the side.
	It was not to hang them up or something like that.
	Actually, I'm not characterizing terrorists with Muslims.
	I think that's very wrong, actually.
	Well, it's not incorrect. It's just not the core issue, right?
	I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you could also, if you didn't want to pick on the United States, you could pick on Saudi Arabia, which regularly executes hundreds or thousands of people in public beheadings every year.
	And also has honor killings of women who don't obey the family, which is clearly a calculated use of violence to achieve...
	It's hard to sort of say political ends, but it certainly is to keep the women down.
	So I'm just...
	We have these people who are put forward to us We're always in the realm of terrorism, you know, these towel heads with crazy eyes and want to, you know, have sex with imaginary virgins after death and so on.
	And I'm just not sure that that's really sort of the core issue.
	If we define terrorism in an objective way, then governments are far greater.
	Like governments in the 20th century, and you can have a look at this online, don't sort of believe me, but in the 20th century, governments killed Even outside of wars, it's called democide, killed 270 million people in the 20th century alone.
	And of course, most of those people were killed to maintain a political order, right?
	So the 70 or 90 million who were killed in Russia under the communist regime were killed to maintain a political order.
	Stalin's purges the collectivized famines of the 30s throughout the Ukraine and other areas of the Eastern Bloc countries.
	If you look at Mao's forced collectivization of the farmlands, And the deaths of tens of millions of people in Russia, if you look at three to five million people, and they don't even know, that were killed in Vietnam and Cambodia,
	as a direct result of the US-led war in Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, that was calculated use of violence to achieve political ends, which was, for them, The desire to hold back, they had this domino theory, you know, like if the USSR takes Afghanistan and then takes Vietnam and then Korea and Cambodia, then, you know, it'll be really bad.
	So they had political agendas, which was, as they saw it, or at least as they said, to restrain the spread of communism.
	And in order to do that, the US was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people.
	You could, of course, if you wanted, throw in the nuclear bombings on Japan after Japan at the end of the Second World War, which were only launched after Japan had agreed to surrender.
	You could say, well, the United States wanted to show Russia they had the bomb and blah, blah, blah, but that's a political end.
	I think that if you're going to talk about terrorism, my suggestion would be to say, if you're going to have an objective definition of terrorism, then you need to start with governments and not so much fringe, crazy religious groups.
	Okay, well that's very interesting I think.
	Well then, can you somehow terrorism, we both agree that terrorism is done very widely and done by governments, but could you make, could you put the good terrorism, could you make a difference between the good terrorism and the bad terrorism, do you think that's That's even a discussion.
	Well, it's hard to say.
	I mean, I guess there are some people in the United States, and I wouldn't get into this debate myself, but if you wanted to throw it in there, there are some people who believe in the United States that the War of Independence in the late 18th century, which culminated in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, was the calculated use of violence against the British troops in order to secure a political end, which was independence from Great Britain.
	Now, of course, for a lot of Americans, this was a great and noble and wonderful act, this use of violence.
	To the British, of course, at the time, it was terrorism.
	And to the blacks who would have been freed if the British had stayed, it probably wasn't such a good thing that the blacks in the South, who remained slaves for another couple of generations, It probably wasn't such a good thing, right?
	Because England ended slavery throughout the British Empire long before America did.
	And so, you know, there's people who would say, well, if you're fighting for independence from a foreign aggressor, blah, blah, blah, that that's maybe more benevolent or positive form of terrorism.
	But I think that's a tough case to make, you know.
	We don't like that government.
	We want another government. And I don't know if you know anything about the show, but we try and take a sort of market anarchist slant at things that the society without a government is by far the best society that you could ever imagine.
	There are some people who would say fighting against a tyrannical power is good terrorism.
	You could make that argument and it's a complicated argument to make and refute, but that's one approach you could take.
	For instance, I'm from Denmark and you know about the World War II and the German invasion of Denmark.
	At that time there were a lot of groups that organized terror cells that made terrorism and committed terrorism on the Germans.
	They killed their infrastructure and they killed Germans by poisoning them and intoxicating their drinks and such things.
	The Germans were invading Denmark and I think it's common sense that that invasion wasn't fair.
	Would you be fairly able to commit terrorism on the Germans?
	I don't know how familiar you are with That World War II situation and the invasion of Denmark, but would you say that you could somehow justify terrorism committed to the Germans in Denmark because they invaded us?
	Right. I mean, I certainly, I know a little bit about that.
	I know that the terrorists of what we could call the resistance cells in the occupied countries in Western Europe, and of course, which also occurred in Eastern Europe and in Russia, that they were very active and quite brutal, right?
	I mean, their philosophy was, I don't want to kill a German.
	Yeah. I want to mortally wound a German, right?
	Because if I kill a German, they just bury him.
	But if I wound him, they've got to spend hospital resources.
	They've got to, you know, they really were trying to drain.
	And I think, you know, in a certain, if your country is invaded, self-defense is a reasonable option.
	I think it's a morally important option.
	If you are, I mean, if somebody comes at you with a knife and you have a bigger knife, you should use it.
	I mean, I think it's up to you, but I would certainly not have any problems with people who acted in a situation of self-defense.
	But the thing that I would put forward, and you may or may not like this, it's just my particular opinion, we don't have to debate it into oblivion, but I'm not sure that, you know, freedom won the Second World War, in my opinion, right?
	So, for instance, in Denmark, the enemy was Nazism, which is, of course, a sort of acronym or a short form for national socialism, right?
	So, Hitler was a socialist, right?
	And he was very much for government control of the economy and so on.
	And he was an aggressive socialism, socialism mixed with expansionistic fascism, And throughout the West, the Britain and America and the other allied countries and the resistance fighters in Denmark were all fighting like crazy against socialism.
	But then what happened after the war was pretty much all of the Western countries, including America, began instituting socialism.
	So you live in Denmark, which is a heavily socialist country, right?
	So instead of the Nazis controlling your income, instead of the Nazis telling you what to do, instead of the Nazis educating your children and paying for the education of those children through the use of forced taxation, you've got your own guys doing it in the same way that the taxes in America went up after the revolution, right? So I don't know that it really works unless you've got a very rigorous philosophical Discipline behind you.
	I don't think it really works to just say, I don't like those guys who are invading.
	I'm going to go shoot them. I think that if you are going to go to the point of using violence, you should have a very clear idea of where it is you're heading.
	And I think that where things were sort of heading for Europe after the Second World War, during and after the Second World War, was socialism is terrible.
	We have to go and kill all these socialists.
	Now we've killed them all.
	Let's institute socialism.
	And I just think that sort of made no sense.
	Okay. Well, I totally find your opinions very interesting.
	There's a reason I'm on the internet, my brother.
	Sorry, go ahead. When hearing your opinions, a question occurs to me, who should define what good terrorism or what a good aim should be?
	Because you said that maybe somehow they failed because the invader-occupied role just flipped.
	That was your point, wasn't it?
	I think that you have to have a very clear moral goal.
	And the moral goal of self-defense is to eliminate a virulent or violent evil within society.
	The same way that if I'm a surgeon, I cut you open in order to remove a cancer.
	That doesn't mean that I cut you open to remove a cancer and then I inject you with tuberculosis or something like that.
	So you have to have a very clear definition of what health is before you go around cutting people open.
	And so if you're going to use violence, you have to have a very clear idea Of what violence is used for, where violence is legitimate.
	And for me, the initiation of the use of force against mostly legally disarmed citizens by governments is entirely and completely immoral, right?
	So the fact that, I mean, you're 16, right?
	So you're just finishing up school.
	You're going to go to university. You're a smart fellow, obviously.
	And then you're going to spend the rest of your life having, I guess, at least half of your income taken from you by force.
	Like if you don't pay your taxes, they're going to come for you and they're going to throw you in jail.
	And if you resist, they're going to shoot you.
	Right? So that's what I mean when I say that, yeah, you got rid of the Nazis, so you got rid of the overt violence, but then you put in the sort of violent conformity That is masked through that very conformity of socialism.
	So I think that the use of violence is legitimate in the same way that the use of a knife to cut someone open is legitimate if you know exactly where the cancer is, what the cancer is, how to remove it, and how to make sure it doesn't grow back.
	But what happens is that people just say, oh my god, this guy has cancer, and they shoot his leg off or something.
	You know, it doesn't really solve the very problem.
	They just shift whoever's got the guns.
	Okay, okay.
	Well, how could you then, because you're talking about the Danish system, which is not actually pure socialism, but we do pay high taxes, we really do.
	But how could we somehow, well, if you compare the German invasion and the Nazis and such things with the system that we are having today, the socialist system in Denmark that we are having today, Could you somehow justify to use violence to change this as well?
	Well, I wouldn't, no.
	I wouldn't, no. I don't think it works.
	I mean, violence has been used or attempted to be used for tens of thousands of years and it's always used with the claim that it's going to bring about freedom.
	And it never does, right?
	It never does. What it does is it beats back foreign invaders and then it strengthens the government at home.
	And so everybody says, of course, that we want to use violence to achieve some moral end, to make some good thing happen, to bring peace, freedom, and democracy, to liberate the Poles from the Russians and all of this.
	I mean, Hitler had the same stories, right?
	When he invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he said it was because the Germans were crying out for protection against the evil Czechoslovaks who were attacking them.
	Everybody has their stories.
	Everybody has their stories.
	When Stalin killed off all of his generals and military elite in the 1930s, which of course led him to end up having to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler because he had no military left, right?
	He said because they're enemies of the party and they're going to harm society and so on.
	Everybody always says, my use of violence is to bring about a perfect and better and more wonderful world.
	And it never works. It never, ever, ever works.
	So I don't think that the use of violence is appropriate.
	The only way that we can make the world free is to win in the world of ideas.
	And that means applying very rigorous definitions.
	That's why I asked you at the beginning, right?
	What is your definition of terrorism, right?
	So that I can understand what we're talking about.
	That kind of rigor in defining things tends to expose where the moral corruptions are in the world.
	And if you can take away the moral justifications for the wrongs that are done to us, then those wrongs become clear and open and obvious.
	And when they become clear and open and obvious, people have a much tougher time justifying them, and I think that they'll tend to crumble away.
	But you can't win it with a knife.
	You have to win it with words. Okay.
	Well, I have another question for you.
	It's also somehow related to terrorism.
	I know that this free domain radio is into that stateless society.
	Is that right? We are, in fact, into that stateless society thing.
	You're right. Yeah. Well, how is your look at democracy then?
	How is our look at democracy?
	Tell me what you mean by democracy.
	I mean that the people have the right to choose to vote for the candidate they want to represent them in the people's assembly.
	How would you feel if I said that you are a slave but you get to vote for who is your master?
	Well, I would say that that's terribly wrong because everybody can be the master if they like to.
	They can just say, I want to run for the seat in the assembly.
	I think that's pretty simple, actually.
	Oh, really? What's the population of Denmark?
	Five million. Okay, so there are like 5 million people that can fit inside your government, like your chamber of commerce or your house of representatives?
	So everyone can be a politician, is that right?
	Well, everybody can be a politician if enough people think that they are good as politicians, but I think that democracy is ensuring that Most people are happy if you understand what I mean, if you get my point. I'm sure I don't get your point.
	What we need to do is be pretty rigorous about our definitions, right?
	So when you say democracy, what you mean is that the majority get to impose their will on the minority, right?
	So if I live in Denmark and I disagree with 50% taxation, but other people like 50% taxation, then they get to impose their will upon me, and if I disagree with that, they're going to throw me in jail, right?
	Yes. Right, okay.
	So if you can sort of imagine this scenario, that you have two rapists, and I'm sorry to use such a violent metaphor, but democracy has got a really good rap, and I think kind of unjustly.
	If you look at two rapists and a woman on a desert island and they vote, who gets raped?
	Does the woman have much of a chance?
	And is it moral to do that?
	No, it's not moral in that situation.
	Right, so since democracy is about who gets to point the guns at whom, right?
	See, government is about violence.
	Government is a gun.
	Government is a gun in somebody's face.
	There's nothing more or less to the definition of what a government is than a group of people who claim the moral right to point a gun at you, and if you disagree with them, you can either try to join them You can try to join this gang, or you can go into the ground.
	That's really all it comes down to.
	There's nothing more complex or sophisticated to it than that.
	And I have a tough time trying to understand why it is that some people get to point guns at other people and say that that's a good thing to do.
	I don't think that anybody should be pointing guns at other people.
	Well, how would you rule a society then?
	That's actually what I don't get, because how would you then do it?
	Well, there are plenty of things that I don't like about the Danish society, and my neighbor, there's plenty of things that he doesn't like about the Danish society.
	But there has to be.
	I think there has to be.
	But we do disagree on some major points, so we could agree on that, and we can go with our...
	but still accept that I'll compromise.
	Well, there could be. Let me ask you a question, because I think that you already do agree with the stateless society, but you just may not know it, and there's no reason why you would, right?
	Do you play any sports?
	Yes, I do. Handball.
	I'm sure it's unfamiliar, but it's somehow similar to basketball.
	It's Danish. Okay, so you play handball.
	Who is it who enforces the rules in handball?
	The referee. Right, and what happens, like, does he have a gun?
	Somehow, yeah. No, really?
	Does he have a gun? Because that'd be pretty cool.
	Well, he has...
	Well, he...
	Literally, he doesn't have a gun.
	But... Well, he has the power to tell people, go away, you can't be a part of this game.
	Right, right. Now I've been suffering from that very power this last week.
	But he can't force anyone.
	He can't shoot anyone, right?
	No, he can't. Right, but you respect his authority.
	Yes. Right.
	So, when you say to me, how could society conceivably be ruled in the absence of a gun, you've just given me an example of a sport where you have rules in the absence of a gun.
	Yeah, okay. But, well, what if the one that we're told to leave the sport comes back with a real gun to shoot the referee?
	Oh, well, then you shoot him.
	Shoot him? You shoot self-defense, right?
	Like if a woman's going to get raped, she can stick a guy with a knife.
	I mean, that's self-defense. But how often does that happen, right?
	How often does that really happen?
	Have you ever had a handball game when someone came back and shot a ref because he disagreed with the referee?
	I had a handball game where somebody went back to hit the referee because he disagreed with him.
	Right, okay, and that didn't happen, right?
	And does anyone play with that guy anymore?
	No, I don't think so.
	Ah, you see? We have a violation of a rule, and then we have an ejection from the game.
	Yes. So he's not a problem anymore, at least for the referee.
	Well, yeah.
	Yes, he's not a problem, or yes, he's not a problem?
	Yes, he is not a problem anymore for the referee.
	And look, I'm not trying to convince you that all five million Danes can be run with exactly the same rule set that applies to a game of handball, but I'm just trying to point out that there are circumstances where this does happen successfully.
	And I'm just trying to give you an example.
	So let me ask you, do you have a girlfriend?
	No. A boyfriend?
	Do you have any furry animals that you really like?
	No, I'm kidding. Are your parents married?
	Yes. Okay.
	Now, who is the ruler in your household?
	I guess that's my parents.
	Right. Do they have a gun?
	No, not literally. Now, with your mom and your dad, who's the ruler between your mom and your dad?
	Oh, I'm not quite sure about that.
	So that's good, right?
	They share power. Yeah.
	Right, they share power and they exercise power without the use of a gun.
	Yes. Now what about your friends?
	Do you have any friends locked in the basement that you don't let them go out because you want them to be around whenever you want to go and see a movie or something?
	No. No, okay, so your friends, you don't force them to do anything, right?
	You're nice to them or they're nice to you or whatever.
	You enjoy hanging out together.
	So you have a whole community here of people.
	You don't use a gun when you're at school.
	You don't use a gun when you're playing handball.
	You don't use a gun in your household.
	Your parents don't use guns.
	And this is a very complicated social structure.
	So I would submit to you, my friend, that you have a very complex society around you, which all operates without the threat of violence, with one exception, which is the government.
	So when you say to me, how could society run without the government, I say to you, the society that you live in runs perfectly well, except for the government.
	Well, yeah, but there's someone...
	Someone is harassing that complex social society that you say that I live, my family and my friends.
	If they harass them too much and if they do something that that social complex can't deal with only by ignoring those people or getting them out of their lives or something like that.
	For instance, committing violence or threatening or maybe steals or something like that.
	How should the complex society deal with that without a gun?
	Well, that's an excellent question.
	Clearly, it's not just your voice that is mature.
	It's a good brain, too, so that's excellent.
	I'm not going to answer that for you because it's a really difficult question.
	No, I'm kidding. I'm not going to answer that for you because I would like you to come and listen to the podcasts at freedomainradio.com.
	I'm not going to tell you how many podcasts there are because I don't want to scare you off.
	But if you do listen to the first couple of podcasts, maybe first sort of half dozen or a dozen, it should at least make it clear what my answer is to these kinds of questions, which hopefully will be enough at least to draw you into the vortex of near-infinite podcasts that follow.
	I'm definitely going to listen to some of your podcasts at your website.
	I actually already did it in one of your shows before.
	Oh, I appreciate it. And listen, do let me know how your test goes.
	You are much better at English than I am at Danish, so I'm not going to complain about a thing.
	All right, thanks. All right, so the person who has L337 Onosaurus, if you could just hang on for one second.
	We've had some questions from the chat window, which the lovely and talented wife will read.
	No, they're not reading. They want to talk.
	They want to talk? Quick, check their donations.
	The guy from Denmark actually sent me a Danish, so he got to talk.
	Oh my god, I can't believe I made that joke.
	You know, there's just that fork in the road that you should just take differently.
	Oh, hi. Great, excellent.
	I was going to ask you about the mythology series.
	I just had a question about the second, well, I think it's actually the third podcast you did.
	I posted on the board a sort of question about That series, because as I said on the board, I think it was obviously very important to you.
	It sort of went over my head, I think.
	So after I asked a question, put on another podcast where you went into the JFK conspiracy.
	Great. So this series, you came back and provided the example of somebody bringing up the JFK conspiracy thread.
	We were talking about mythology and it was really in response to the question of what do you do with this idea of mythology that you brought up?
	How do you actually operationalize it?
	What can you do with this idea?
	You mentioned somebody bringing up the JFK conspiracy and you talked about how You could kind of try to understand why somebody would bring that up and what that means, given its sort of importance relative to other things.
	So I thought it was very useful, but I'm still not really clear on what to do with the ideas that you were putting forward in that series.
	And I just wondered if you could kind of explain how to actually I mean, for example, is it a question of thinking about what people are bringing up and trying to assess why they're bringing it up?
	Or, you know, basically, what do you do with those ideas?
	How's that? Ah, hello.
	Hello. Hi.
	Hi. I'm still here. I just decided to take a refreshing dip in the pool.
	So clearly it was just an excess of chlorine.
	Okay. Well, I can hear you now.
	You sound almost human.
	Good. Please go on with your question.
	Should we take another run at that?
	Yes. So, I think I understood your question.
	I'm going to just start with my response, and I'm sorry that if you have heard some of this, I'll try and keep it brief.
	The gentleman who, our fine Danish friend who called in, who is making me hungry, he was talking about A terrorism and he was talking about essentially a fairy tale, right?
	And the fairy tale has characters called evil, crazy, fundamentalist Muslims who are the most significant risk to him, right?
	And this is just a story, right?
	And the story is, the mythology is that there are dangerous people in the woods and you can't go walking in the woods.
	You have to stay in the light, right?
	You have to have a government that's going to protect you because there are all these dangerous people out there who wish to do you harm and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And so that's the story. And the story is that subjugation to your government is sensible because otherwise you're going to be attacked and you're going to get killed.
	And so it's a scary story, right?
	This is a horror story. And he didn't know that.
	And of course, there's no reason why he would know that, right?
	This is everything he's been told.
	And I've never been to Thailand, but everyone tells me it exists, right?
	So I don't have to go comb over the world to find out who's lying to me.
	I've got to accept some things.
	I would like to say on faith, but it's a little bit more rational than that.
	So he didn't know that he was in a story wherein there was this definition of terrorism that was not populated by anything rational or anything objective, but was populated by ghosts or goblins or hobgoblins or scary things of some kind.
	So that's when I said to him, what's your definition of terrorism?
	And then when you get a definition of terrorism, then you can begin to really prioritize what the person should be cautious about or afraid of, right?
	So then you can say, well, So if you're afraid of terrorists or you think terrorists are bad, who is going to do you greater harm, right?
	A possible terrorist attack that occurs once every 10 or 20 years or whatever?
	Or is it the government who wants to, say, end poverty or provide free healthcare for everyone, which are certainly political ends, and uses violence to achieve those ends?
	So is it the subjugation of 50% of your income and the threat of being thrown in jail at a government's whim, your own domestic government, is that not a form of terrorism by the definition that we've put forward?
	So when somebody's embedded in a mythology or a fairy tale, then pulling them out is remarkably easy.
	It's actually quite easy if you sort of ask the right questions.
	At a similar level, when he said, you know, what do you think of democracy, blah, blah, blah, I said, well, what is democracy to you?
	And at one point, and again, no disrespect to him, He said it's making everyone happy.
	Well, I'm not going to argue against that.
	You can't win, right? If you're in somebody else's story, then they're just going to, right?
	And you say, well, some people are unhappy in a democracy.
	It's like, well, that's not democracy's fault or whatever, right?
	Like they just keep changing because it's just a story.
	It's just a story wherein there's a central Mythology of ethics, right?
	That democracy makes everyone happy and therefore you can't be against democracy unless you're against happiness, right?
	So you must be pro-democracy and since like 0.0001% of people in a democracy get to make any decisions, it means obey those in power and that will make you happy.
	Obedience is the virtue, right?
	The central mythology, the central character of all these mythologies is virtue, right?
	That's why the story is told.
	So the same thing, like either you want people to be happy or you don't want to get killed in a terrorist attack, do you?
	That's sort of more of an appeal to fear than to love, but still the central message is the same.
	So that's sort of why I think it's important to understand that people are building their ethics from fairy tales and if you ask them for definitions, you find very quickly that you can reorient their thinking and change their mind, who knows, but at least you can reorient their thinking according to their own premises.
	I'm still struggling with seeing on a day-to-day level how you apply that.
	I understand what you're saying.
	For example, do you mean that when you meet people you have to find out what stories they're trying to tell you and assess them against objective reality?
	Is that what you mean? Well, I think that's certainly true.
	And to recognize that people inhabit a fairy tale, right?
	That they're embedded in the fantasies of the stories that they've been told.
	And again, I know that you're a very pragmatic Englishman and British people, myself included, have a great deal of difficulty with this.
	You know, we are embedded in myth nonsense.
	But I think it's important to recognize that people are bouncing off the opinions of others, but they don't know that they're opinions, right?
	They think that they're facts, right?
	So it's the same thing, right?
	I mean, like, if you go before you invade Iraq, you go and say Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda, and 9-11, the same sentence enough, right?
	It just builds a story. It builds a story in people's heads.
	And people then, they're in Star Wars and they think it's a documentary.
	And I think that also helps us to be delicate, right?
	It helps us to be delicate with the operations that we have to do with people and to sympathize with them, right?
	I mean, we certainly would sympathize with a child who was raised by Muslim extremists or just Muslims, right?
	We would certainly have some sympathy when the child was like, you know, 14 or 15, that their fear of authority, their terror of the afterlife, their, you know, the hatreds and the awful emotions that they would be experiencing.
	Because they had had a fairy tale sort of inflicted upon them as if it were true, which is incredibly disorienting for people when you sort of rip the veil off, so to speak.
	And you see this, I mean, this occurs in therapy too, right?
	So some woman will say, you know, but I love him.
	It's like, yeah, but he cheats and he does drugs and he gambles and he steals your money.
	Yes, but I love him, right?
	So she's in a fairy tale called I Love Him, right?
	Love, right? And it's impervious to evidence, right?
	I mean, so it is a very tricky thing.
	And now, if you wanted to sort of bring it more to the ground, if you wanted to share a conflict or a challenging discussion that you had, we could try and run it through this ringer and see if anything comes out.
	A conflict or challenging discussion involving somebody believing in a myth or something?
	No, just any sort of conflict that you may have had recently that you didn't feel was resolved successfully.
	Well, I was kind of involved in the recent conflicts on the board.
	I knew we'd get someone to talk about it sooner or later.
	I can't believe it made me wait for this.
	Such a tease. Go ahead.
	Well, I mean, I guess for me what was interesting about that whole discussion is that I sort of tried to have a discussion with the Bob in question a number of times about things that he'd raised on boards, but I never felt that I got any...
	I really didn't feel I got any progress out of it.
	I would sort of question what was behind...
	what sort of logic of what he was saying was, and we would sometimes get into a bit of a debate about it, but it never really went anywhere for me.
	So, I don't know.
	Is that... The question is, could you get an objective definition of the complaint?
	If I say to you, Jake, you're just so damn negative, I say, well, that could be true, but all I've basically said to you is, Jake, you really remind me of a flying turtle I dreamt about, right? I mean, it's a nonsense phrase, right?
	Actually, it's more of a nonsense phrase.
	It's like I'm just speaking in wingdings, which I won't try and do because it causes a lot of feedback.
	But if I say, Jake, you're just so X... I don't know.
	Am I negative like I'm a negative man and I bring down evil because I'm negative to the negative, which makes it positive?
	It doesn't mean anything.
	If I say to you, Jake, you're 160 pounds, that can be true or false, can be accurate or not.
	If I say to you, Jake, you are X, it doesn't mean anything.
	Negative has never meant anything to me.
	It's just one of these labels.
	But you can then say to me, I don't know what that means.
	And then if the person says, I don't know, well, you disagree with people a lot.
	Well, that's not negative.
	I mean, you could say maybe that's disagreeable, but that also has connotations of negativity.
	So, oh, you disagree with people a lot.
	And it's like, well, that could mean that I'm disagreeable, or it could mean that the people around me are wrong a lot.
	It doesn't sort of mean anything.
	And of course, if disagreeing is considered to be negative, then saying, Jake, you're so negative is disagreeing with you, because you don't think you're negative.
	So it's just about getting the definitions.
	And if people won't furnish definitions, Then don't debate, because it means that they know that they're in a story, and they don't want to get out.
	Right. Like, don't go anywhere.
	Yeah, I think I'm...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Odia, I think you may have...
	No, sorry, you're there.
	I thought we'd lost you again for a minute there.
	I think I understand what you're saying, and if I just try and sort of, in my own mind, think about how to use this, Basically, would it be then that if you get into conflicts with people or you get into discussions with them that you have to assess whether or not what they're saying is something that's clearly rooted in fact or whether or not it's just some type of generalization or Or vague thing that's more related to a myth that they're believing in?
	Is that what you mean? Yeah, I mean, are they taking a fiction and presenting it as truth, but since they're the authors, they can change it, right?
	So something kept you in this conversation.
	Yeah. I certainly felt...
	Go ahead.
	I mean, I certainly felt, for example, that there was a very interesting thing going on with this issue of It's okay for people to disagree with me, but only if they do it in a positive way.
	What I thought was interesting about that was that the definition of what positive way is was in control of the person who was making this rule up.
	In other words, if I say to you, Oh yeah, sure, I'm quite happy to debate you and you can disagree with me, but you can only do so in a way that I find positive, and I always have the opportunity to turn around and say to you, no, no, that's illegitimate because you didn't bring it up in a positive way, and that is the kind of, that's the sort of thing that was going on in those debates, but how does that relate to, where's the mythology there?
	Is it this mythology of what positiveness is?
	Is that what it is? Well, that may not be the best example of mythology because it's more of a personal thing.
	Mythology tends to be a little bit larger, like democracy or terrorism or something like that.
	But we could just say narrative or fiction.
	Obviously, there's a great logical problem if I say to you, negativity is bad and I can attack people who I consider negative.
	Because clearly attacking someone is a negative action.
	I mean, we can at least get that down as a basic definition.
	So I'm then basically saying if people aren't positive enough, I can be negative because negativity is bad.
	That's a real Mobius strip.
	That's just brain bending.
	That really is like O'Brien and Winston Smith in Room 101.
	That really is. If I define you as negative, I can act negatively towards you because negativity is bad.
	That's really what that breaks down to.
	Now, if you put that forward to someone and they say, well, I swore at this guy because he was negative.
	Well, isn't swearing a negative action?
	No, it's a reaction.
	So maybe it's okay to be negative if you're reacting.
	But then who knows who is acting and reacting and that's why that debate devolved into is it self-defense or is it attack and who was first and who was second and this and that.
	But none of that really matters because the central issue is sort of being avoided which is it's not good to attack people.
	It's not good to swear at people.
	It's not good to verbally abuse people.
	And then if you're confronted on it, it's not good to say, well, he started it.
	That's not a very manly way to own your own mistakes.
	So if I abuse someone or I yell at someone and then someone says, well, please don't abuse this person.
	Well, he started it. It's not my fault.
	It's not my issue. He did it.
	He's been negative. You're just making a new story called, I, who am the attacker, are in fact the victim.
	It's mere self-defense.
	I'm sick and tired of this guy being negative and I wasn't going to stand for it anymore.
	Then you're just inventing a new story called I'm a hero and I'm fighting back against the evil forces of darkness and so on.
	It's just the invention of new stories at all times without a lot of reference to previous stories, without usually any reference to previous stories, always with the effect of excusing or justifying whatever behavior occurs, but always with reference to objective and universal values.
	I'm allowed to attack negativity because negativity is bad, but it's not negative for me to attack negativity.
	Or, I mentioned this sort of in a podcast today, but this, as I sort of found out later, this conversation or this dispute had been going on for some months, right?
	And so if you say, well, it's negative to keep disagreeing with me, but if you've been in a relationship with someone who you've both been disagreeing with each other for months, how do you get to point the gun at someone else without it going off in your own face, right?
	Yeah. But it's setting up a narrative wherein you're always justified, you're always doing the right thing, and if you did the wrong thing, it's because you were provoked, right?
	And it's the other person who was doing much more wrong, and yes, maybe you overreacted, but the real evil was with the other person, right?
	Right. I just had one question about that as well because I didn't really want to necessarily get into a discussion about the sort of specifics of that debate but I was interested in a comment that you made afterwards on the board about the mythology series and you said that you had a theory about why there wasn't more feedback about this and why it hadn't sort of Got as much reaction as I think you'd hoped for on that.
	And you said that you were going to hold off on that theory until you saw what the response to one of your podcasts was.
	And I just wondered if you had anything to say about that.
	I was just curious as to what your theory was.
	I sort of undecided about that and I mean it's excellent to bring it up.
	I knew that this was going to cause a big kerfuffle, to use a highly charged term, that this was going to cause a big kerfuffle on the board.
	It was going to be this stuff and I wanted to sort of use it to sort of point out some of the ethics in action.
	Like we've done a lot of ethics in podcasts and I wanted to talk about some sort of ethics in action.
	The board sort of provided me with some good material.
	But basically, I mean, I'll talk about this more a little bit later, but the challenge, of course, is that it's easy to see other people's fictions, right?
	It's easier to see other people's fictions once you get the hang of it, right?
	The stories that they invent, wherein they're always right and other people are always wrong.
	And if they do bad, it's because they were provoked.
	And like all of the standard stories that we withdraw and make other people wrong when we feel threatened.
	The really fascinating thing, though, is then to start to look in the mirror and say, well, if culture is a fiction, and culture is a fiction, if it's not a fiction, it's not culture.
	It's science, right? It's truth.
	It's philosophy. So culture is a fiction, right?
	So if you look at the example of somebody like George Bush, who's down on his dude ranch, I don't know, Gang banging armadillos or whatever it is they do in Texas.
	And you've got bin Laden over in Pakistan or whatever doing his thing, right, as a sort of fundamentalist Muslim.
	And I'm taking sort of two extreme examples, right?
	Well, what in them is authentic?
	What in them is generated spontaneously and in an alive and rational manner from their interactions with reality?
	And what in them is merely a brutalized scar tissue of cultural conformity?
	And if we look at those two extremes, why are these human beings so different, so, quote, different?
	Why is it that British people Have a certain kind of feel to them.
	And of course, it's very much class-based as well, right?
	You've got the Yobbos down in Brixton.
	You've got the people in Westminster, right?
	So why is it that there are these classes, the Cockney?
	Why is it that there's so much what we could call false personas or attitudes that come with, like why is it that frat boys always seem to be kind of the same?
	And when we start to look at the amount of cliches, in a sense, that are in society and the sort of iron straitjackets that people end up with, which they call their personalities, How much of it is fiction?
	Like, not how much of other people is fiction.
	How much of ourselves is fiction?
	Like, if I peel away all the stuff that I was told that is not true about my culture, my religion, my country, my family, my everything.
	Everything. The history of my country, which of course, as we know, is mostly nonsense, right?
	So, if I peel away all of that stuff, And this is the sort of process of unbecoming that is very powerful and very intense.
	And I mean, you know, it's called sometimes the journey towards authenticity, or Freud called it other terms.
	And for Jung, I think it was, I can't remember the term, individuation, right?
	Jung called it individuation, where it is you say, "Okay, well, if I peel away from myself all of the things that I were told that aren't true, what is left?" That's a very interesting question.
	I presume that what's left is your interaction with the real world.
	I mean, your experiences that are about dealing with tangible, sort of real life things around you.
	Sure. I think it's objective and honest interpretations of reality.
	But so much of what has accumulated within us, right?
	I mean, even for myself, I started to get into philosophy when I was in my mid-teens.
	And, you know, like, I don't know, was it like almost 20 years later, I had this sort of individuation...
	I don't know, like, massive, crazy, whitewater rafting ride.
	And, I mean, I still have nonsense about my self-pettiness and vanity and irritability and all these sorts of things that, and there's nothing wrong with this all kind of being human, but what I had to give up was far more than I got to retain.
	Now what I got to retain was real, but it really felt like I was eliminating myself as a human being because so much, even after so much studying philosophy and so on, so much of what I had as an emotional core, so much of what I perceived and believed and reacted to in the world was based on pure fiction.
	I mean, and I was worst of all because I had the values, right?
	Like, oh, you know, abuse is bad and blah, blah, blah.
	Oh, okay, is it time to go see mom?
	Let's go, right? I mean, it was nonsense in the worst kind of way, right?
	So I think that the mythology thing is hard to grasp because, at least it was for me, because the self, for me, that was grasping it was largely mythological.
	Okay, so are you saying that it's hard to grasp because we're still believing ourselves to be things that are, in fact, just myths?
	Right. I mean, I can tell very, very quickly, not just...
	And this has nothing to do with you, and this is everyone, right?
	But I can tell very quickly...
	Based on your accent and the words that you choose and so on, you know, that you're from England and from a particular class and this and that, right?
	Can you imagine who you would be if you'd grown up in Sri Lanka?
	Yes, I do understand that.
	Although, interestingly enough, you might be wrong about me because I think, I mean, you're making assumptions on the basis of my accent, but I had a somewhat unusual upbringing, so you may not be able to know what I think you're presuming about me just from my accent.
	Well, that's very true, and I don't want to sound overly clever here.
	It often happens that I can sound overly clever, but here's one.
	Which is that I know that you are more authentic than most because you're bringing up the mythology series.
	Right. So how do you know I'm more authentic because I'm bringing that up?
	Well, it is very scary, right?
	As Nietzsche said, right? When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you, right?
	So it is very scary, at least it was for me, to look into, you know, my soul and say, well, what is mine?
	What is mine? What are my conclusions derived from reality?
	What is not a bunch of nonsense that a bunch of people told me?
	Hmm. Right? Now, it's not a pleasant thing to do.
	It really isn't. It is really, really unsettling.
	Because it's the whole question of ego and I and so on, right?
	And I would say that The more that people are embedded in the kind of mythology and, you know, of course, libertarianism is a kind of mythology as well, right?
	I mean, you know, we're tough, rugged individualists, state fighters, and, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
	Which doesn't mean that it's not more accurate than other things in certain areas, but if we recognize, and we talked about this sort of briefly when it's sort of the accident of birth, right?
	If we recognize how much of ourself is either A, accidental, like I happened to be born in the West, and B, How much of ourselves are ego identifications with narratives or stories or mythologies about our countries and our cultures and our governments and our gods and our institutions and so on?
	When we sort of recognized, for me, it was a very, very thin slice of the pie that I could call truly authentic.
	But it was just enough for me to hang on to while I went through this examination of all the stuff that was not true.
	Just enough. And I, of course, I had a pretty unusual upbringing as well.
	But because I'd spent a lot of time alone, because I was largely rejected by my peers, because I was almost completely rejected by my family, I had managed to avoid Ego identification with the myths.
	Like, the myths of society, they never really served me very well, because the myths were always kind of negative towards me, right?
	And so I had experienced enough rejection from society that I had enough authenticity, which was not something I wanted.
	I mean, if you'd given me the choice when I was 15 to buy into social myths and be popular, I mean, I'd have probably jumped at it with, you know, both hands and both feet.
	But... I had to...
	Oh, sorry, no. I was going to just say, I had a similar experience in some ways.
	When I grew up, I had a bit of an unusual upbringing for this country because, as you know, England is very, very class-based and has a lot of social distinctions.
	Not so much in London because London is a big city, but I grew up partly living in a kind of, well, basically a squat in South London.
	Which is a rough area of town and going to a pretty rough school and partly living in a very wealthy part of North London because my parents were divorced.
	So that was kind of unusual because I got to see both sides of it.
	But also I think it left me feeling, well I grew up not particularly identifying with being English or any of those sorts of ideas.
	I just didn't really have any, I mean I just knew it was all rubbish basically.
	But what I found very interesting was that I went to live abroad for about, well, on and off for ten years, and I just realized actually how deeply embedded those cultural things are.
	Even if you think that you're a very international, you know, open-minded guy, then you actually go abroad and you realize that you're just totally indoctrinated to a certain level without you even being conscious of it.
	Of all these cultural norms and ideas about the society that you're born in.
	Right. And I mean, I think that you and I had very similar backgrounds in that way.
	I mean, I went from, you know, a very posh public school, which is reversed in England, if I remember rightly, like what would be called a private school in most places.
	I went from a very posh private school to then You know, basically being threatened with eviction notices and, you know, facing very intense poverty and also then moving from one continent to another and then living in Africa for a while.
	So this kind of disorientation that occurs when there's no particular mythology that you can embed yourself into that feels secure.
	It's hell at the time.
	Maybe you were stronger with this than I was, but I really wanted a place to be at home, and I couldn't find one.
	I'm really glad now, of course, in hindsight, that that didn't occur.
	That's why I say, yes, there are certain things about you that are British and so on, which you couldn't scrub away with eight pounds of steel wool.
	The fact that you're the person the most interested in the mythology podcast I think indicates to me that there's through various things that we wouldn't inflict on our worst enemies I think we have sort of gone through a process wherein it's been very hard to identify with a particular mythology and therefore Through mostly rejection, we have been skeptical towards certain kinds of stories.
	And I think that's why you're...
	I mean, I'm guessing, right? I mean, this could be right, this could be wrong.
	I think that's why you're more interested than some in the mythology.
	And I've received some private emails, so it's not you and me alone or anything like that.
	But in the realm of the mythology podcast, the fact that I would not be able to guess certain things about your upbringing, I think is exactly why this would be a topic of more interest to you than most.
	You've less to lose and more to gain from this information.
	Yeah. Although, just in terms of what you were saying about whether it felt good or bad to belong or not, I remember I had two very different experiences.
	When I was a child and I was living in these two different worlds, one weekend up in a really nice part of London in basically a posh house and then during the week, It was a really hardcore inner city environment.
	It felt horrible.
	It really felt bad and I didn't really belong in either at all.
	It was a total nightmare.
	However, leaving England and going to live abroad, that was just great fun.
	That was obviously when I was an adult.
	That was a completely different experience of not belonging.
	I really enjoyed it.
	I enjoyed it just because I found it quite funny to learn what was more English about me than I thought, and I also found it interesting to see, you know, the bizarre cultural sort of ideas that there are in other places too.
	Right, and then recognizing that And this used to be a pretty staple of certain kinds of fiction, particularly in the Enlightenment, was Voltaire wrote some of these, other writers wrote them, where it's like someone from Mars comes to visit the palace at Versailles and what they observe, right?
	So the idea of approaching your own culture as a stranger is a very, very alien and frightening thing.
	At least it was for me, right?
	I mean, because I had all the mythologies about You know, America was founded on the principles of rationality and virtue and the enlightenment and so on.
	I mean, there's 10,000 of these things that we're told that we believe.
	I believed, you know, that England was a noble island fighting the Nazis and won the war and all these things that, you know, these mythologies that you believe that gives you pride and give you, you know, like love your country and so on.
	I remember literally not, God, seven or eight years ago, Walking around the British Parliament system with tears in my eyes at the beauty of democracy.
	And that's not wrong.
	Democracy is better than feudalism.
	Feudalism is better than being a slave under the Egyptians.
	So there's definitely improvement.
	But that amount of emotional investment in the story, rather than peeling away the facades and the ornaments and so on and looking at the facts of the interaction, To me, it really felt like going mad or dying or something like that.
	It's really unsettling.
	I may have invested more in these things than you did, but it is a very, very scary thing to stand naked before reality and try and throw away everything that has accumulated that is just not true.
	How do you know when you're naked then?
	I look down. No, I'm kidding.
	Yeah, I really set that one up for you, didn't I? And children faint.
	Anyway, so how do I navigate?
	Well, I mean, it's a process, right?
	But for me, it's just constantly comparing things with the facts, right?
	Just the facts. What are the facts?
	And, I mean, this is something that's talked about in the Landmark Forum.
	I don't want to claim to be this massive innovator in this particular area, but...
	Human beings are kind of meaning-making machines.
	There's been times where this has been greater.
	If you look at the Middle Ages, where they genuinely believed that there were devils, that somebody who was mentally ill, who was afflicted by a physical ailment like schizophrenia, It was possessed by a devil.
	They have this meaning.
	We are meaning-making machines.
	We see something and we assign meaning to it.
	And that's really what culture is.
	You see something and you assign a meaning to it.
	And taking away all of that meaning is really hard.
	So I was rejected by my mother and my brother continually and perpetually.
	And the terrifying phrase is, and therefore Right?
	And we say, and therefore, X. Right?
	So, if my mom hates me, or my brother feels contempt for me, or whatever.
	I mean, it could be any number of things.
	Say, and therefore, this.
	Right? Like, if this girl doesn't go out with me, I am not attractive.
	Right? This girl says no to me, therefore...
	There's a meaning to that.
	And trying to peel away that automatic meaning-making machine, so to speak, so that you can just have a more direct and uncluttered relationship with reality, is really about looking at the myths in others, looking at the myths in your culture, and then most importantly turning that laser into yourself and looking and trying to carve away all of the layers of meaning and nonsense and myth and emotional binding and all of this that we all have.
	Like Christina's parents came over from Greece in the early 1960s And I swear to God, they carved a little reality corner of Greece, packed it in their suitcase, and unpacked it in Winnipeg.
	And now they live in this little corner.
	They have Greek parades.
	They go to Greek dances. They listen to Greek music.
	They have Greek friends. They go on holidays to the Greek islands with other Greek friends.
	And why is it that?
	Because they know that they're in a narrative and they can't step out of it, because their identities are so bound up in these stories, right?
	And we all have these with the virtues of our families, the virtues of our governments, and so on.
	I was just going to say, does it mean that you have to examine all of your and therefores?
	Is that what you mean? Is that the way to find out whether or not you're still carrying mythologies?
	Yeah, I think so. Like, I mean, I don't know what your story was with your parents, right?
	But, you know, my story was like, my parents divorced and therefore...
	Whatever it is that people make up, and everyone has their own stories.
	My mom was hateful, therefore women are hateful, or therefore you can't trust authority, or therefore whatever, whatever, right?
	It's the end of the course, right?
	But what are the facts? The facts are, my mom was crazy and hateful.
	And that's it!
	Those are the therefores, which I based so many of my conclusions on, were nothing in the world.
	Yeah, I understand that now.
	And therefore, it's the story.
	It's the moral that we take out of the events that occur and the events that we initiate.
	The and therefore is the identity that we claim based on an interpretation of events that the events themselves do not contain.
	But there are legitimate and therefores, aren't there?
	Yeah, because so many things you can never know, right?
	And so many things we claim to take ownership over that we simply can't rationally take ownership over.
	I mean, my mom's insanity was laid in stone long before I ever came along.
	And the and therefore is like it's got something to do with me.
	Some girl says no to going out with me, whatever, right?
	There's no and therefore.
	I don't know. Maybe she's like the most evil person in the world and she smells the scent of virtue on me or whatever.
	Who knows, right? It is the metaphor that we make up which becomes more us than us.
	We get...
	I use this metaphor in The God of Atheists, right?
	That there's this fly in amber and the amber flows over the mosquito or the fly, if you remember your science from Jurassic Park.
	Then... That you're more buried in imaginary meaning, imaginary and therefores, and narrative and stories about everything that happens to you that has a moral to it.
	This girl said no to me, therefore I'm unattractive.
	That's the story that we take out of it.
	But no, what happened? The girl said no.
	We desperately want and therefore, because we're still a primitive species and we're trying to get through to reality, and we're doing a pretty good job, I think, at least here.
	But there is no and therefore.
	Okay, so all and therefore type change of thought of this kind are basically suspects, right?
	Sure. If I say, I have cancer and therefore I'm sick, well, yeah, that's true because it's empirical.
	You can see it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	There's got to be fact-based ones that you can really be...
	Right. Our evaluations that we really live by, which is our evaluations of the worth and quality of ourselves.
	Which we are told to devalue.
	I don't know that as a species we're naturally and therefore addicts.
	I don't know. I really don't know.
	Maybe if I have kids I'll find out.
	But I don't know if as a species we are totally addicted to this.
	Like it's just the way our brain works.
	We are meaning-making machines and there's nothing we can do about it.
	I don't know. I don't know.
	I don't find that that's the case when I sort of burrowed my way out of this nonsense fantasy gas planet.
	But I certainly do know that the enormous number of heavy lectures that were laid on me when I was a kid, those boarding school lectures where the guy's pacing up and down and someone has done something like, oh my god, they lost a football or a cup of milk or something.
	You know, and you've got these stern, sadistic lecturers going up and down, and the, and therefores, and therefores.
	Your team wins, and therefore it's good.
	Your team loses, and therefore, you know, oh my God, that's so bad.
	None of it exists outside of our imagination, outside of our fantasy.
	Right. Yeah, I couldn't really tell you much about the public school thing, because I didn't experience that, but I know it from the documentaries I've seen.
	Yeah, just for those who don't know much about British geography or class structure, what Jake is talking about is basically going from like one frame of the movie, he's in Trainspotting, and the next frame of the movie, he's in some light, vapid Hugh Grant comedy.
	You sort of get a sense of directions that he had to travel back and forth.
	It's pretty trivial. Well, that's great.
	Thank you very much. That was the question I wanted to write.
	Glad to be even more of a dream crusher than normal.
	Yeah, I'm going to have to go out and work out which dreams to crush now.
	Absolutely. Well, let us know how it goes.
	It should be fun. Okay.
	Thank you very much. Thanks. All right.
	So, Rog, you had questions?
	Is that right? So, let's see.
	Oh, I had a question.
	I wanted to see what your take was on...
	You were just Talking with Jake about the mythologies that you had in your homeland when you move around the world, this gets kind of ripped away from you.
	And I was wondering, what about people who go native when they go to a different culture and they try as hard as they can to assimilate that?
	What do you think is going on with people there?
	I've never done it myself because I've never been in another culture for an extended period of time, but I've heard about it happening.
	Right, so when you say go native, what you mean is sort of with reference to the photo that I posted last week after three and a half days of full-time free domain radio.
	Hello? Can you hear me?
	Yeah, can you hear me? Oh, sorry about that.
	Okay, there we go. So when you say going native, what you mean is sort of with reference to the photo that I posted last week after three and a half days of full-time free domain radio, that's fairly close to the kind of thing you're talking about, right?
	Precisely, yeah. Right, well, that makes sense.
	There's a reason the video cam's not on, but...
	So you're doing that for the forthcoming statues or the busts of Stefan Molyneux that'll hang next to Plato and Aristotle and stuff, right?
	Yeah, that's right. With the bald pate and the crazy hair.
	I don't want the sculptors to have any tough time.
	That's why the beard is in, right?
	Right. But no, The Going Native, and you do see this kind of stuff, and believe it or not, I don't even know the name of this band.
	This has always been something that has sort of struck me, that there was a band that did a song, All I can say is that my life is pretty plain.
	I like watching the puddles gather rain.
	Oh, right. No rain. Blind Melon.
	There you go. And this guy was like, the lead singer was a total jock, right?
	So you see this guy, he's a total jock, he's like a football player and this and that.
	And you see him a couple of years later and he's like a skinny hippie.
	Like it really doesn't look like the same guy at all.
	And so you do see people who go through this kind of persona shift in life where they'll take on different personas and so on.
	The going native thing, if you're facing rejection from a particular culture that you grew up in or a familiar structure or something, and this is well known in cults, right?
	It's the love bomb, right?
	The first time you go to, I don't know, Jehovah's Witness or whatever, the temple, They just love you.
	They just love you and they open their arms.
	It's really kind of creepy and manipulative, but it's the unconditional love that your true self is suspicious of, but which your false self is always yearned for and so on.
	And what happens is I think if you've gone through that unstable rejection and you've got the there and therefore I am no good or therefore nobody loves me or therefore I'm unlovable and all that stuff rather than I was rejected, right?
	And that's all that happened. The facts are I was rejected, not and therefore this means and this...
	But so what happens if you've got that negative story, the negative fairy, the evil fairy tale on you, and you go to some place where you are just embraced and accepted and, you know, without criteria, you know, just because they want someone new in the cult or to get their hands on your kids or something like that.
	Then what happens is it's very hard to resist that, right?
	Because we kind of yearn for that, especially if you're in the trap of a sort of evil fairy tale.
	So I think that what happens is people then just go and assimilate to that, right?
	They have an unformed personality because they've been rejected, but they're kind of waiting to assume an identity.
	And I think that sort of occurs in that kind of situation.
	And it can be permanent, right?
	I mean, you can take on a new persona and it can kind of stick.
	Right. Yeah, actually the...
	The first time that I really heard anything in depth about this going native stuff was when I was back in college.
	I was taking a Japanese society class.
	I used to take Japanese language courses too.
	This one professor was a very interesting guy.
	I told a story about when he was younger.
	I kind of think that if I'm guessing his age correctly, he may have gone overseas to avoid the drafts and things like that during Vietnam.
	But he lived in Japan for a while, and he talked about how Japanese have a very effective method for shutting out foreigners, the gaijin they call them, and treating them like they're I guess, kind of subpar or something like that.
	He spoke of this one thing where he considered it a triumph of his when he was kind of playing peekaboo or something with a little child on a subway one time,
	and the child's mother He called him uncle, which I guess in Japanese society, when someone is called uncle, it doesn't necessarily have to be a biological uncle, but it's an affectionate term of someone that they trust with their child or something like that.
	And he thought that that was just a wonderful thing.
	And I think what he was saying is that he had sufficiently demolished his Americanness to the point where he was now Japanese enough to be accepted.
	and I thought that that was pretty interesting but then at the same time the same professor was warning us in the class about you know if we ever traveled around the world and things like that for an extended period of time he warned us about going native so it's it's almost like he was saying it was a good thing in one case and then warning us not to do it in another case well it's it's a very ambivalent thing right and Assuming the false self-identity is very ambivalent.
	It gives you a lot of relief.
	This is why people who are unstable in their lives become born-again Christians because there's the instability and so on.
	They can pour themselves into a structure.
	They're not like a puddle.
	They're now like wine in a glass.
	They're not a different form.
	They're still formless, but they've been given some kind of structure.
	What I always think about with those kinds of stories is, so you lived in this town for five years, and on the 365th day of the fifth year, somebody called you uncle, and you feel good about that, but what about the 4.999 years that came before where people rejected you for no reason?
	How do you square that?
	Well, because if you say, I now feel good that I'm accepted, you logically have to have felt bad that you were rejected.
	And that just doesn't seem like a very good price to pay for me.
	No, I agree. I just thought it was the...
	I was just kind of wondering about your take on the why people do this, and I think you're right about the they're kind of addicted to the rejection type of thing, and once they finally break through that, they feel like they've achieved some kind of monumental thing, but really all they're doing is just they've Destroyed themselves to the point where they can fit in with all the other broken people around them.
	I finally made it into the KKK. Let's have a party.
	Wahoo! Yeah, that's great.
	There was another thing that I wanted to talk about with the ruckus on the board slightly.
	Is that alright if I bring that up?
	Yeah, of course. Yeah, there's a thread going on right now that I've linked to it a couple times in the chat window, but one of the objections that A board member has been bringing up about what's going on here with your banning and things like that.
	He's saying that he's viewing the boards as a simulator for anarchy and this is proving that the simulation doesn't work because you're acting as a dictator or something like that or as a government or something.
	My interpretation of that was...
	Somebody must have joined who's got some background noise.
	Keep going, I'll deal with it.
	I think someone's in Heathrow.
	There we go.
	So anyway, my interpretation of what was happening there was that I was having a very hard time connecting with this metaphor, this analogy that he was trying to make with this simulation thing, and I think I finally cracked The barrier between us is that I've been trying very hard to stop thinking of anarchy as a simulation of just reading about it and wondering what that would be like.
	I'm literally trying to apply it to my life everywhere and so when I see This stuff happening on the boards, I'm thinking to myself, well, this is a good thing.
	Steph is protecting the pool that I've invested in from pool piers, and I really think that that's a very positive thing.
	But then, if someone's seeing this as just a simulation type thing, I think what's going on is that they're not yet bringing anarchy, the principles behind anarchy, the universal Morality and things like that.
	They want to just keep anarchy in a glass beaker in a laboratory somewhere safe away from their real world.
	It's a sterile environment where they can go and play in anarchy for a little while and then they can come back into their real world where they have all of their fictions and their mythologies that they're living in and they don't have to worry about that really just hard-ass anarchy stuff.
	Well, yeah, I mean, they want very much, people want very much to turn philosophy into a fiction, so that they need to create a story about it and then have it not apply to the real world.
	That's how you keep something fictional in a lot of ways.
	But sorry, go ahead. That was just my main point there, was that I was having a really hard time trying to understand what he was saying with this whole simulation thing, and I think I finally cracked it there, is that, you know, I don't see this thing Even remotely close to a simulation.
	This is real life. This is your property.
	This is something I've donated to saying that I absolutely approve with how you're dealing with your property, how you're treating it, how you're protecting it.
	I've left another message board I used to be on with my fraternity brothers that I used to talk with.
	I don't have any contact with any of them anymore because the The message boards were just nothing but straight poison.
	The ones here, the FDR boards are safe and courteous and I can be completely honest and open about things here and I know that I would never be able to have this level of honesty and openness if I felt like There are going to be people that are, you know, playing out their false self mythologies all the time here, just as they were on that last board that I was on.
	So, I mean, it's a...
	This is not a simulation for me.
	This is the way I want to live my life.
	Hello, hello, hello. Yeah, go ahead.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hello. Sorry, I don't have control yet.
	Sorry, I'll bring you back in a sec.
	No, I mean, this is quite right.
	I mean, this is not a simulation, right?
	And this is not a simulation insofar as we have these principles that we're trying to live by and to work by, which are around integrity and not having abusive people in your life and so on, right? And honest and open communication, right?
	I posted on the board, right? If somebody does something that's offensive...
	All right, how about now?
	Oh, here we go, yep.
	Sorry about that. I forgot that I was in as Christina, so I muted everyone, including me.
	Not Skype, I've got to take full responsibility for that, but I'm fine now.
	Sorry, I was saying that, no, it's not a simulation.
	I mean, this is, you know, philosophy is lived in the real world, right?
	philosophy is about decisions and actions that you make in the real world.
	And the idea that this is a, I mean, we need philosophy because there's error and we're all prone to error.
	And we need ethics because there's bad behavior in the world, which we don't want to commit and which we want to be able to identify in other people.
	So the idea that we wouldn't need doctors if we never got sick And we wouldn't need to be tough or assertive if people never misbehaved, right?
	I mean, so the very idea of philosophy and of the virtues like courage and integrity and honesty and strength or whatever, those things wouldn't mean anything if they were never tested, if there was never any negative or problematic behavior in the world.
	And so the idea that this board should be a place where no standards of behavior get applied, though it is a board primarily devoted to the exploration of moral philosophy, would just be completely bizarre to me.
	It just wouldn't make any sense at all.
	So from that standpoint, that there is surprise in what is called sort of the exercise of power, or that I'm kind of like a state.
	Well, of course, I mean, this is not anything to do with me, and it's not anything to do with the board, and it's not anything to do with the various bobs and bills and bobbies that are around.
	It's entirely to do, as we know, from sort of history and family and this kind of stuff.
	That, you know, he's had an arbitrary authority figure in his life.
	And we may never know the truth, right?
	But for sure, for somebody to get this involved in a dispute on a board, of which the only important thing is the principles, and to say that somehow moral philosophy is being violated by being applied in a consistent manner, Is not a very rational argument, right? I mean, and he's a smart fellow, right?
	And I've read some of this stuff that's on this post.
	He's a very smart fellow.
	And therefore it can't be that this doesn't strike him from an intelligence standpoint.
	Easily can grasp this, right?
	But it's the same sort of principle.
	This is why I know that the gentleman in question who began the flame wars wanted to go.
	As I've said before, do people think that I can get rid of my family for bad behavior but I'm going to have trouble with some anonymous person on a board?
	It just doesn't make any sense to me.
	I don't know if people think that they loom larger in my mind than I did like I got another email from this guy today with all this convoluted and complicated stuff about, well, this person said this and here's a post of someone who agrees with me and this and that.
	And maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure if people think that they loom that much in my mind.
	You know, I mean, friends, yes, of course.
	You know, my wife, absolutely.
	But why would I want to get involved in this kind of debate and discussion?
	I know where I stand, and I've worked it out, and I've talked about it with Christina, and I know what the facts are.
	I find it amazing that people think I'm going to sit there and cross-correlate various posts and spend half a day crafting a response and this and that.
	I mean, this isn't that complicated.
	This is not that subtle.
	Don't swear at people. Right?
	And if you do, apologize.
	Be a man, own your actions, and don't say, oh, I only did it because he provoked me.
	I mean, that's just mealy-mouthed and childish.
	And, you know, we all make mistakes.
	We've all lost our temper. And you just apologize.
	And you say, oh, man, that's really bad.
	You know, I really shouldn't have done that.
	Total apologies. I'm definitely going to work on myself and figure out what's going on.
	And so on, right? You don't sort of say, well, I'd had enough of this negative behavior and I'm going to...
	You don't. You own your bad actions and then you deal with them.
	You own them, you apologize for them, you do what you can, you move on.
	It's just not that complicated and people who make it complicated, I just don't know where they think they are in my mind's eye that this is a major issue for me.
	There's some Ed O'Neill film where he says, He's the guy from Married with Children.
	I can't remember the name of the film.
	Maybe somebody can remember it. But he's driving this kid across country who's a real difficult kid and so on.
	And he says to this kid, and I think it's a great line, he says, you know, you may be like a real terror in the fifth grade, but to me you're about as much trouble as a cloudy day.
	I've always kind of liked that line.
	And for me, like, I don't care about the, you know, if people want to cause trouble, fine.
	They know where it's going to end, right?
	I mean, this guy's been around.
	He knows where it ends, right?
	He knows exactly where this ends, but he won't back down.
	False pride, false self, blah, blah, blah.
	And it's like, okay, the only thing that troubles me is the ruckus that it causes on the board when this happens.
	But as far as the decision goes, maybe it's a big deal for him, but some board doesn't want him around anymore.
	Go find some other board.
	Unless I'm some sort of real authority to him, in which case, then maybe he should listen.
	Or something like that.
	I don't know. It's just not...
	The only problem I have is with the after effects, the actual decision of just saying to one person out of six billion, and I asked him nicely, please don't post on the board for a while, and then he just blew right past that, and it's like, oh, come on, you know where this is going to end.
	Come on. Right.
	Yeah, actually, something you just mentioned earlier brought up something I think that's important, and it was...
	This came into the podcast series quite a while ago when we were first starting to get into the family stuff.
	You were talking about trust and it's about the, okay, I've gotten you this far through this stuff and so far you've agreed with me on this, this, this, this, and this.
	Now I'm throwing something at you that's making you feel pretty wonky.
	It's okay to feel that, but the I mean, we've known you now for almost a year and a half or something like that.
	We have well over 700 podcasts of your stuff.
	And all of a sudden, I mean, we know what your methodology is.
	We know what's going on here.
	And all of a sudden, there's something that is really tripping up some very, very intelligent people.
	I mean, I have enormous respect for a lot of the people who are having trouble with this.
	And I just remembered that one of the things that was the absolute The key to me unlocking my problems with my own mother was that I remember that one podcast that you did where you read out my letter about the good wife and the bad husband when I was complaining about how you would interrupt Christina with some little jokes now and then it would kind of derail her sometimes.
	And for some reason that just really got under my skin and so I kind of wrote this letter saying, hey, this ain't cool, man.
	And then you and Christina Talked it out, and the response that, you know, the podcast that you guys did over dinner, it got me even more perturbed.
	And so what I did is I just kind of timed myself out for a while.
	I took my fingers off the keyboard, and I said, okay, just remember, can you trust this guy?
	Yes, I believe you can.
	Let's see what we can figure out about this stuff.
	And within, you know, probably a week or so, I was battering down some pretty big walls in my mind that stood between me and understanding my relationship with my mom.
	And just that stepping back and getting out of my own bruised ego there for a little while is, I think, what was the essential part of that.
	And your response, the even response that you and Christina had, even though it just irked me so much at the time, I look back at it now and I realize it was absolutely consistent with everything else that you set up to that point.
	So, yeah, this is what I just want to, I think, my recommendation to these, again, these just magnificent and intelligent people on the boards is just step back a little bit, take the fingers off the keyboard, and see what's going on in your mind.
	Right, and that's why I suggested to this guy, you know, go see some anger counseling, right?
	And if he goes to the anger counselor and the anger counselor says, you have no problems with anger, you know, it's all this deaf guy who has amazingly managed to suppress his latent rage and tyrannical, you know, nature, lo these 750 podcasts and God knows how many tens of thousands of posts and emails, right, that this guy has the real rage issue, although there's no evidence, the complete evidence of the opposite, but whatever, right?
	He could come back and say, well, this is whatever, whatever, right?
	I think you touched on an essential point.
	You can't heal the past without trusting somebody in the present.
	We are very social beings.
	I needed to trust the therapist that I was working with.
	In order to break from the past, we need human bridges to get to our futures and to make them different from the past.
	And I had my human bridges, both in terms of the stuff that I'd read and a personal therapist and then, of course, Christina.
	But we need to trust somebody.
	Because if we don't trust anyone, then we just stay stuck in fiction.
	We can't make up anything you want and so on.
	And I think you're quite right. And there is...
	And, you know, of course, this all sounds ridiculous, like, oh, trust me over the internet or something.
	I mean, I understand that there's a lot of skepticism in this idea.
	But the idea of trusting someone who has shown, you know, consistent behavior over time, I think is important.
	Because, you know, in a sense, if people can't trust me after 750 podcasts or, and by trust me, that has nothing to do with, like, blind allegiance or anything nonsense like that, but if people can't say, He's a decent guy who's wise or whatever.
	He's got some good things to say.
	If you can't trust me after listening to 750 podcasts, because these guys, not all of them, but some of them are up to date and have been quite praiseworthy, who are you going to trust?
	Who are you going to trust who's going to deal with things at a deeper level in a more consistent and I hope at least positive kind of manner?
	Who are you going to trust? I mean, maybe there's tons of other people out there that you can trust who've got the same sort of consistency of behavior and positivity and rationality and willingness to self-criticize and so on.
	But I think it's kind of important, and this trust issue is really, really key.
	And I think that's sort of the bridge that you crossed, right?
	To say, I'm going to put my own ego aside.
	I'm going to trust what Steph says.
	And really what that is, is not trusting me.
	It's trusting you.
	Well, it wasn't even so much that, I think.
	It was just that I trusted that when I had come so far with you in the conversation, and, you know, I was...
	In my car every day going, yeah, testify, brother!
	And then all of a sudden I said, oh, you're just an SOB. I can't stand you all of a sudden.
	I said to myself, okay, what has changed here?
	What has changed? And it was the trust that I had was in the newfound recognition of what my emotions are, I think.
	And it was when that sudden Jekyll and Hyde thing switched in my head from I really dig this guy to, I want to tear his guts out.
	There was something there, and there was something really important, and I knew that it was the recognition of my own emotions, not even so much I think the trust for you, it was the trusting my own instinct on emotions that I said, this is not like me to feel this kind of rage like this.
	It shouldn't happen.
	It's completely out of place.
	And that was the big, you know, like the big flashing red light that I had to go for, you know?
	And you could trust that, let's say you decided to trust me and I turned out to be some dual personality bald lunatic or something, that you would survive.
	That's what I mean by self-trust.
	So if you can just sort of say, okay, he may be wrong, but he's been right about a bunch of stuff so far, I'm going to go with it.
	And then if I'm wrong, you'll survive, right?
	That's what I mean about self-trust.
	I mean, it really, but the way we get there is through trusting someone else, recognizing that if that person fails our trust, we will survive, not letting the brutalities of the past rob us of the joys of trusting people in the present.
	Absolutely.
	I think I've, I think I've said my piece and that's just what I wanted to get out, so.
	Thanks again for the forum.
	All right, my pleasure, my pleasure, and thanks again for all your support.
	All right, do we have another final listener for the Freedom Aid Radio show with massive interruptions this Sunday, May 13, 2007?
	Now I'm just showing off with the rolling off the date thing.
	Anybody you can say in the chat window?
	Or let me see if I've got this thing which says, who wants to talk, eh?
	Well, perhaps not.
	Perhaps not. Anybody?
	Going once? Going twice?
	614? Uh, sure.
	Surely. Surely.
	All right, let me just, uh, request to change topics.
	Uh, yes, I do believe you're on, Mr.
	G. Okay.
	Um... This actually came up in a conversation I was having with Freebie yesterday.
	The difference between morality and virtue and how you would define the two.
	And what did you guys come up with?
	Well, that's a good question, actually.
	I think what we ultimately decided was that Both were essentially defining certain kinds of actions,
	human actions, but that they couldn't be defining the same actions since morality is essentially a A description of non-action,
	at least moral behavior is a description of non-action, whereas virtue is a description of action.
	Yeah, I think that's certainly where I would go with it, that morality is a theory and that virtue is the practice.
	I'm not quite sure I follow that.
	Oh, sorry. Then I probably snipped off your definition mid-sentence.
	I thought that you were talking about that morality is more of the inaction and virtue is more of the action.
	So I thought it was sort of like morality is a theory, like there's a moral theory.
	There's not a virtue theory so much.
	But we would say more that somebody is a virtuous man rather than that he is a morality man, right?
	So for me, morality would be more around the theory and virtue would be the rubber hitting the road and acting it out in sort of consistently in your life.
	Right, but you wouldn't say that anyone is under any moral obligation, for example, to act courageously, however you would define courageous, right?
	No, no, certainly not.
	I mean, any more than a nutritionist is going to say that anyone's under a moral obligation to eat salads rather than, I don't know, ball bearings or something.
	Yeah, you can do whatever you want, but I mean, certain choices have consequences.
	So then...
	Taking particular examples of what we would call a virtuous behavior, say courage or honesty or something like that, you couldn't really call those moral behaviors, could you?
	Honesty? No, no.
	Virtue is, to me, honesty in action.
	I would say that to be honest is to be virtuous.
	But if you have a theory that says honesty is good, then that's a moral theory.
	And it's the moral theories that I care about.
	The individual's actions don't matter to me.
	It's the justifications for the PLC universals that matters to me.
	Okay. Morality, then, isn't really a description of behavior.
	It's an assignment of...
	It's a value judgment on specific behaviors.
	Yes, and not a value judgment like I like ice cream, but a value judgment like ice cream is morally good.
	If I tell the truth, You know, 90% of the time and then 10% of the time I don't or 50-50 or whatever, right?
	That's just a description of behavior.
	I mean, that's like a Dian Fossey taking notes about Sigourney Weaver's gorillas in some movie, right?
	And on the other hand, though, sorry to have mixed up.
	Anyway, it's working with narrative and fiction.
	Anyway, it's messed up my head.
	But on the other hand, right, if somebody says that telling the truth is morally good 100% of the time, and then people who don't tell the truth are bad, objective to perfect and true values, you know, whatever, right? Then you have a moral theory, right?
	So if somebody, you say this is an honest person because he tells the truth most of the times, but that's different from a moral theory which says honesty is always virtuous or something like that.
	Or honesty is always good.
	Yeah, yeah. Honesty is always good, which is another way of sort of saying it, right?
	So there's a difference between saying he does and you should, right?
	In other words, my kid lies is one thing.
	My kid tells lies is one thing.
	My kid should not tell lies is a whole different planet, right?
	It's from descriptive to prescriptive, and that's where the moral theory comes in.
	And the moral theory is the only thing that matters, right?
	I mean, the description of behavior, who cares?
	I mean, nobody ever chastises a child based on descriptions of behavior, right?
	It's always, and therefore, it is wrong, right?
	And that's bad, right?
	Or that's good. I mean, that's the moral theory that philosophers need to reclaim from random parents.
	So taking a specific behavior then, let's take courage, for example, somebody behaving courageously.
	The definition itself might not necessarily include...
	What am I trying to say here?
	Do you need to reboot? Like last night, we decided that it would be reasonable to assume a definition that was something like the Aristotelian mean.
	Jumping in front of a bullet is not always a courageous act.
	It's only under certain circumstances that somewhere in the middle of just randomly jumping in front of a bullet on the one end or refusing to jump in front of any bullets on the other end, right? Right.
	I mean, the bullet thing is a tough one, but yeah, I mean, the Aristotelian mean like a deficiency of courage is cowardice and an excessive courage is foolhardiness.
	I think that's reasonable and courage is notoriously difficult to define, but yeah, sure.
	So, by that standard then, the mean is the good and the extremes are the bad, right?
	And that's where the moral theory would be, correct?
	Sort of. I mean, courage is a difficult one because I'm not sure that it falls into the category of morality as it does fall into the category of psychology or some of the aesthetics of living that we've talked about before.
	Like, I would not call a coward an evil person, right?
	Okay. Let's say that there was this big conflagration on the board and I made a threat and I didn't follow through in it and then I weaseled, right?
	People would go, well, that's cowardly.
	I don't think they'd say I was evil.
	They'd probably be kind of disappointed.
	It's like, well, that was a whole lot of talk for somebody who doesn't even walk the talk, right?
	But I don't think that people would say, and that makes me evil, right?
	In the same way that we would say, like, killer or rapist or something like that is evil.
	So what's the difference between being a bad person and being an evil person?
	Well, it's the infliction on other people.
	In a sense, you could say that a coward beats himself up, and that's kind of silly.
	You can self-mutilate.
	That doesn't make you evil. That makes you kind of disturbed, but doesn't make you evil.
	It's definitely not good, but it's not evil because cutting someone else is quite different from cutting yourself.
	A coward is somebody who beats up on himself and won't face it or whatever.
	And for me, then, that's dysfunctional or a negative behavior that should be changed, but it's not evil.
	Now, if a coward, though, says that he is being courageous by not confronting when he really knows that he's being weaselly and he puts forward his behavior as if it were courage, that's corrupt, right?
	That's not evil, but it's corrupt because it messes up other people's minds, particularly if he teaches that to children.
	That's close to abuse.
	But if the coward who's about to be outed as a coward kills someone, then that's evil, right?
	Because he's removing the decision from someone else and so on.
	So there's behavior that's just sort of negative to you.
	And then there's behavior that's negative to you, which you portray as a virtue which screws up everybody else, right?
	Like a doctor who prescribes poison instead of medicine, right?
	That's just corrupting.
	That just messes people's minds up, but it's not quite the same as being evil.
	And then there's, you know, you stick a shiv in someone's back or something like that, and that's evil.
	So courage to me, it's nice to have, but I don't feel that if the world were full of cowards that I would necessarily Be in the same situation as if I was thrown into a gulag, so to speak.
	Would you say that's also true, then, with honesty versus lying?
	Well, sure. I mean, somebody who lies, I just don't associate with them, right?
	But if somebody sticks a shiv in my back, my choice is sort of gone, right?
	I mean, I already got the shiv sticking out of my back.
	So, yeah, somebody lies, I can just, you know, whatever, right?
	Just not deal with them.
	We had a giant sieve that we were passing every behavior through.
	The sieve is a filter that only collects evil.
	The only thing remaining in it would be basically aggression.
	Every other action essentially falls outside the realm of morality and And is simply described in certain ways, which we call virtue or vice.
	Yeah, like good or generally good for or generally bad for, you know, happiness and so on.
	I mean, there's two gray areas that I don't know the answer to, and maybe I'll sit there and figure it out one day, but the area of fraud is one of these areas that people go back and forth on, and I'm generally moving towards the idea that If somebody defrauds you, you know, don't be stupid, right?
	And the reason that people can defraud right now is without DROs, there's no contract rating and it's all relied on by the government and so on, right?
	So people can get away with a lot more fraud now than they would be in a free society.
	But if you enter into a million-dollar contract with somebody who's never...
	I've never fulfilled a contract before.
	I'm not so sure that's fraud as it is, I guess, you just wanted to give away a million dollars to a bad person, right?
	Fraud I'm sort of back and forth on.
	What was the other one? It'll come back to me.
	So yeah, to me there's a couple of gray areas in this.
	Oh yeah, the other one is teaching children things that are false virtues, right?
	Bad virtues. That's really close.
	Really helpless children.
	I mean to me this is very much like a doctor prescribing bad medicine.
	So if you tell children things that are false, I mean that is, especially in the realm of ethics, right?
	That you know is false.
	Well, I don't know. I mean, the question of knowledge, it's all been changed by the Internet, right?
	I mean, who is responsible for not knowing that there are contradictions in the Bible?
	Well, in the Middle Ages, I mean, the average guy couldn't read the damn Bible, right?
	Right, right. But, I mean, the distinction I'm making, though, is that say you know something's false versus you believe something but you don't realize it's false.
	So teaching something you know is false to a kid, I would call that...
	But the issue with what I'm saying is that there's almost no excuse.
	If I teach kids some quantum mechanics and it turns out the theory is disproven, of course, there's nothing wrong.
	You can't wait for human knowledge to become perfect to teach anyone anything.
	But if I actively avoid knowledge...
	If I actively reject and avoid knowledge and yet teach the child as if it's true, then clearly I have doubts or I wouldn't actively avoid and reject knowledge.
	I'm thinking more in the realm of religion and statism and so on, but particularly religion.
	The contradictions in the Bible, the evils within the Bible, it's literally 30 seconds on Google and it's all right there.
	You don't have to become a Bible scholar and learn the original Arabic to know the immorality and contradictions and moral filth that's all throughout the Bible.
	Right. Arguments against the existence of God.
	I mean, you don't have to...
	They're not sealed in the Catholic prohibited books thing.
	Again, it's like the arguments are right there.
	I mean, there's no... The Internet has changed an enormous amount in terms of people's responsibility for knowledge, right?
	And so there's no Christian who's teaching, no Muslim who's...
	Well, let's just say Christian.
	I don't know the Muslim access to the internet or whatever, but there's certainly no Christian in the West who's teaching his child that God is true and Christ died for his sins that is not being a total asshole, frankly.
	To me, that's real close, and I'm really kind of...
	We certainly would get that a parent who did not feed the kid calcium, so the kid grew up with bad bones, osteoporosis by the age of 12 or whatever, that that would be child abuse, right?
	But if you do the same thing to the child's mind, I don't know.
	It's right on the edge for me and I don't know what to think about it just yet.
	Right. Well, I mean, regardless of how you come about a certain piece of knowledge, whether you get it from the internet or whether you divine it yourself or I mean, it's still knowledge that you have, right?
	So, if you then go and actively deceive a child of what you know,
	I make a distinction between children and adults, too, because with an adult, you have a fully formed mind there as well.
	You may be preying off somebody else's evil, right?
	If I don't give you dinner, I'm not aggressing against you, but if I don't give my child dinner, then my four-year-old kid can't go and order a pizza or whatever.
	And the child's brain is still developing.
	You fill it full of contradictions and you're essentially causing a physical deformity.
	Yeah, absolutely. And the worst kind of physical deformity.
	That which is very hard to identify and results in depression rather than a physical injury which can be healed.
	So then, in a sense, you're committing a form of aggression against the child.
	Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
	But it's a really tricky area to get into, right?
	Because it's subjective, right, in a way that physical injury is not, right?
	Like, I thought it was true, or I'd never read that website, or whatever.
	I mean, whereas physical injury is much more objective, right?
	So it's tough to prove, although I think that the moral case is fairly solid.
	Well, is it really all that subjective, though?
	I mean, if the child's brain is still developing, then that means that we could, I mean, eventually at some point, the neurological development of a healthy child who was taught how to use his own rational skills and empirical, sensual, and spiritual skills.
	And so, you know, we have to do that.
	You know, it's five senses and empirical validation and rational evaluation and all of that.
	You should be able to tell the difference between that brain, the development of a brain like that in a child at, say, the age of 5, 10, 15, and 20, and the brain of a child who was Continuously lied to or verbally abused or something like that.
	So you would have an objective-- More like a subtle-- sorry, go ahead.
	So there is an objective empirical standard that you could go by.
	I mean, neuron count maybe, or the speed of-- MRI.
	Yeah.
	Something like that.
	I think that when we get children that are raised properly, their brains are going to light up.
	They'll make the current brains in MRI scans look like black holes, right?
	Forget ecstasy. Religion is the real brain killer and cultism and mythology and culture.
	So, yeah, I mean, I think that that will be the case, but that knowledge, of course, is not available to a large number of people at the moment, right?
	And, of course, the objective scientific knowledge is available to none.
	So, I just, you know, the problem is, right, I mean, as soon as you invoke good and evil, then you invoke self-defense, right?
	So, would I be comfortable with a child shooting a Sunday school teacher?
	To me, you pull universal morality out of its holster, there's no safety.
	That's why things like abortion and things like, is it evil to teach children religion?
	Well, as soon as you use the E-word, you've got guns blazing.
	Certainly, it's evil to rape and I'm not going to condemn a woman who shoots a rapist.
	I'm not going to condemn someone who shoots someone in self-defense.
	Well, isn't there also such a thing as proportional response?
	I mean, if somebody on the street gives me a shove, I'm not going to whip out a baseball bat and beat the hell out of them.
	No, I know. I mean, unless it's like a bad day or something.
	No, I mean, I understand that, but still there's a line to be crossed, right?
	I mean, there is a line that legitimizes the use of force, right?
	If a parent is starving a child of calcium, we go in and just society goes in and takes the kid away from the parents.
	And if the parents resist, force is viable because they're torturing and starving the child.
	Right? So, if we're willing to use that amount of force, right, to get a child away from parents who are starving and corrupting and undermining and harming the physical body, well, what about the physical brain, right?
	Are we going to say, if you send your child to Sunday school, we're going to take that child away, and if you resist, we're going to shoot you?
	That's not a place I'm ready to go to yet, and I don't know if it ever will be the case, but I think we need far more science to be able to make that determination.
	I'm just not sure how...
	I guess it's one of the gray areas, I suppose.
	Yeah, I mean, to me, I don't think it really matters that much because it's not like we're about to pass a law saying, you know, you can open fire and your Sunday school teacher...
	I just don't think that...
	I don't think we're at a big risk for, you know, let's play Hunt the Priest this weekend, right?
	Like, I just don't think that's something that we have to worry about too much.
	It is one of these lifeboat scenarios.
	At some point in the future, when the world is sane, it may be the case that people view people who teach these kinds of horrible falsehoods to children with as much horror as we view people who beat their children right now with a baseball bat, which of course was permissible in the past.
	Spare the rod, spoil the child.
	That rule of thumb comes from you can hit your wife with a stick no bigger than the width of your thumb.
	It may be in the future that people will look back, but that doesn't matter right now.
	Right now we've got more basic things to work on, like 2 plus 2 is 4 for people, rather than what is the size of caliber that you're allowed to use on a Sunday school teacher.
	That's not something we have to worry about.
	That's for a way down. Okay, so just to sum up then, you would agree that essentially those actions that we would define as virtues and even those actions we would define as vices are essentially amoral.
	Sorry, can you just say that again?
	I was distracted by Rod saying elephant shot, and I think he meant with the Sunday school teacher.
	So I'm so sorry. If you could just repeat that.
	I thought he was just using his random words generator again, but I think I understood it.
	Yes, Rod, you have successfully distracted the BCF. Please.
	I'm sorry Greg, go ahead.
	Greg Foss: Thumbs up to Rod.
	Greg Foss: Not easy.
	Greg Foss: But yeah, okay.
	So I was saying just to make sure I understand where you stand on this, Would you agree that those human actions that we would define as virtues and vices fall essentially outside the realm of morality, they're amoral, with the single exception of the vice of aggression? with the single exception of the vice of aggression?
	Yeah, they're preferable behaviors, but not universally preferable behaviors.
	Okay. So whether you're a coward or a courageous man, or whether you're an honest man or a liar, that says nothing about your moral status.
	Well, no. I mean, I think definitely it's less good to lie than it is to tell the truth.
	I mean, weird circumstances aside.
	Right, but good... Good in a moral sense or good in just a descriptive sense?
	Well, good in a preferable, but not...
	I mean, for me, morality is the universally preferable behavior and the aesthetic stuff is just preferable behavior.
	Like, I would prefer that my child tell the truth, but if my child doesn't tell the truth, nobody gets killed, right?
	If my child is an arsonist, that's something kind of different, right?
	I mean, that's a whole different...
	Right, so that's aggression and that would fall into the...
	Yeah, evil and, you know, if you see some, I don't know, 12-year-old kid running towards, you know, your highly flammable house with your sleeping children with a, you know, a Molotov cocktail, you can shoot the kid.
	I mean, I hate to say it, right?
	I mean, but this is, you've got to protect your property, protect the lives of your family more so than your property, right?
	But, you know, that's, but, you know, you don't get to shoot a kid who lies, right?
	I mean, that just wouldn't make much sense, right?
	So, yeah. It's preferable, but other people have choice in the interaction, whereas when force is employed, people don't have choice in the interaction.
	Right, so we're not obligated to act in a courageous manner, for example.
	No, for sure, but we can certainly, if we portray our cowardice as courage and thus screw up other people, we can certainly be looked at with a fair degree of contempt.
	If we spread the falsehood, If somebody's just...
	They don't have courage within their own house, and they never go outside.
	What do I care? I don't even know about it.
	But if there's somebody out there on television saying that, as they all do, forgiving your evil parents is courage and not seeing them as cowardice, well, I got a problem with that.
	I'm not going to shoot the guy, but it's in the public sphere.
	There's the implicit...
	Assignment of good and evil to that statement.
	Or even if it's just right and wrong, right?
	Even if he's just saying it's preferable.
	People who believe that forgiveness is better than defooing don't say that people who defoo should be shot.
	They just say that they're cowards or they're running away or they put all these pejoratives on them.
	I definitely have a problem with that and that's something I'll take issue with in a public sphere because people are putting out moral theories then that affect values that I hold or at least could and certainly will sway people who don't happen to have the weird obsession with philosophy that We do, right?
	So they're going to be helpless before that, right?
	So I'll definitely sort of...
	If somebody takes, you know, bad medicine in their own home and dies, like, what are you going to do, right?
	But if you've got some doctor out there prescribing bad medicine as if it's good medicine, again, forget about the aggression thing, we're just talking about the mental thing, then yeah, I think it's important for a good doctor to go out and tell the truth.
	Okay, so then since we're not morally obligated to act, Let's say, for example, I'm just walking down the street one day and I walk past a pond and I see somebody drowning.
	If I decide not to jump in for fear of my own life, then I'm not doing anything that you would call evil.
	No, no, no, of course not. Okay.
	But you could judge it in terms of a virtue or a vice as Reprehensible in a non-universal sense.
	Let's put a ridiculous example out there and say that 12 innocent children are drowning and you don't jump into the water because you don't want to mess up your hair.
	That's not evil, but I'm not saying this.
	You don't want to be telling that story at a dinner party, right?
	People would be like, oh my god, you monster, right?
	They wouldn't say throw you in jail, at least rationally, but it wouldn't be something to put on the old resume.
	Right, so we can't punish people for not being courageous.
	We can't punish them for not being honest.
	No, we can exclude them.
	This is back to the board thing.
	If somebody aggresses against you on the board and they don't admit any wrong or if they do it's because you provoke them and someone, which of course I understand, but it's still not right.
	I can just choose not to associate with that person anymore.
	There's no positive obligations from that standpoint whatsoever.
	I think that's a good formulation.
	Okay, so yeah, in that case it would be the difference between courteous and rude, for example.
	Right, I mean, if this guy is over at my house who says, I let the 12 children drown because I didn't want to mess up my hair, I'd say, you know, get out of my house.
	You're like, you're not someone I want at my dinner table, right?
	So I'm not aggressing against the guy.
	Now if he refuses to leave, I can certainly throw him out because of my property.
	Right, because at that point he's aggressing against you.
	Yeah, of course, of course.
	But I mean, I can choose to order him off my product.
	This is the exclusion thing that's at the root of both defooing and DROs, right?
	Which is that don't associate with bad people is a very effective mechanism for social control.
	And not control over, right, in the way that some of the people on the border are confusing this kind of stuff, right?
	You know, like, control over who you associate with is like a woman can say no to sex, right?
	I mean, that's, you know, if I can't kick people off the board, then there's no such thing as rape, right?
	Women can't say no to sex, right?
	I mean, because they can just associate with whoever they want, right?
	Whoever wants to associate with them and use their property, their body, can, and they can't say boo about it, right?
	That's the weird kind of egalitarianism that's sometimes out there.
	And in that case, isn't the control really over your life?
	You're not really controlling anyone else.
	You're controlling your property and that has consequences for everybody else, but you're not really controlling them.
	Right, and of course, I mean, if somebody wants to come and post on my server and I'm not allowed to say no to them, then clearly it's not my server.
	Right. At that point, they have control over you.
	They have control, right? And so on, right?
	But, I mean, that's just not factually true.
	I paid for the server. I mean, it's GoDaddy's server, but I got a lease, right?
	So, I mean, this is just the basics, right?
	When you go back to the basics, these things become very easy.
	When you start worrying about the nobility of egalitarian public spaces, it all gets very confusing, right?
	But someone gets to use that server, right?
	Is it me, the person who paid for it?
	Well, actually, and With your help, right?
	But is it me or is it the other guy, right?
	And if it's me, then I'm, you know, simply asserting property rights.
	If he gets to use it despite my say-so, then he should pay for it and run his own server, right?
	I mean, that's how it works.
	It's not that complicated. Okay.
	Well, actually, that helps, so...
	I like the surprise in your voice.
	Actually, you know, that, after 40 minutes, that, Steph, I think that really helps.
	Just kidding. All right, listen, my food's ready.
	I must go. I must go.
	All right, thanks, Emil. It was great chatting with you, and thanks to everyone for joining.
	I look forward to spending a good chunk of tomorrow repairing the damage that Skype has done to our chat.
	Okay. Thanks, Emil, everyone.

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