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July 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:24
835 Enlightened Parenting
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Oh hi, it's Steph. Just before we start A35, if you could do me a massive favor, I would hugely appreciate it.
If you could go to the website we call www.podcastawards.com and Free Domain Radio out of 4,097.
Submitted shows, 335,000 people submitting, 6 million-plus nominations, 4,097 submitted shows.
Free Domain Radio made it to the top 10 in education.
So, if you could go to podcastawards.com.
The voting is until the 15th, I think it is, of August.
You can vote once a day, so if you could do it more than once, I hugely would appreciate it.
It would be really great. If you can't donate, just do this for me, and we'll call it even.
And if you can't donate and do it, I'll be your bitch.
Anyway, if you could go and go to podcastawards.com, To the education category, click Free Domain Radio and do the vote.
I'd really appreciate it.
Vote once every day.
This would be really great to help us.
I mean, if we could put that, you know, the best educational show according to the 2007 Podcast Awards, put that on the homepage.
Instant credibility. We're going to at least double or triple the number of people who stay on the site.
Guaranteed. So if you could do that, podcastawards.com.
Do it before you listen to this podcast.
Please, please, please. Thank you so much.
And, sorry, I babble on a little bit later about a URL at Lulu, and that one is actually...
Okay, back to the regular babbling.
Thank you so much. Well, hello everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It is the 30th of July, 07.
And three days without much of a donation.
But a few subscriptions, and I really, really do appreciate the subscription.
Slightly predictable income.
That's good stuff for the philosopher.
But if perhaps you have shuffled your cash towards the new book on Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, if you have any left over...
That would be most excellent.
If you could shovel some my way, that would be great.
Summer is a time where I must poke and prod just a little bit more because I know that there's lots of other expenses floating around.
But if you could see your way clear to a few dollars to Freedom in Radio, I would hugely appreciate it.
I will check tomorrow to see what the sign-up has been like for the Freedom Aid Radio Symposium, August 25th, 2007.
Chicago, Illinois signed copies of my books, et al., and some, I think, pretty high-quality philosophy, and wouldn't it be nice to put some faces to the names, to the boards, and so on.
Sorry about the board performance for the last day and a half.
Some Bell South customer literally tried to download 834, the Sunday show I think it is, over 1,200 times.
And that was still going on today, so I'm afraid I had to block the IP. And I don't know what's going on with that.
I don't know much about that stuff.
But sorry, I don't even know how you can get that many downloads from one IP address, but that's what occurred.
Anyway, so we're back on our feet.
The Lulu store is set up.
Stores.lulu.stores.com?
Stores.lulu.stores.com forward slash free domain radio.
I think that's it. And there is the On Truth, Tyranny and Evolution book, as well as some audio, which you can listen to, which is a preview, a potential preview of the audio book.
I have completed some more of the God of Atheists, and I will try and post that before the end of the week.
And let's get on with the show as it stands.
So, I didn't even realize this, that people have been leaving me messages.
In YouTube, and I didn't even know there was a message wall on my profile.
I knew there was one on the sort of YouTube forward slash free domain radio, but I didn't know there was one in my profile, so I went and saw some very nice things that have been posted there, and one...
It kind of really leaped out at me.
And it made me think, if you've ever seen the movie Liar Liar with Jim Carrey, it's a very good movie.
And, um, it's your dad?
My dad's a liar.
No, no, I think you mean lawyer.
No, liar!
That's pretty funny. But, um, the claw.
There's some outtakes at the end of it in Swoosie Kurtz in a courtroom scene.
There's a phrase in acting, if you're an over-actor and then you're just, it's too big, it's like bad children's theater, it's just too big, too exaggerated, and so on.
And during one of the verbal parries that she was having with Jim Carrey, they went back and forth with their insults, and then she finally yelled at him, OVER ACTOR! And there was a pause, and he seemed a bit startled.
And then she says, sort of like, oh, they made me say it, or whatever, right?
Because obviously that was a bit of a risky thing to do, if he did happen to be volatile.
But... Then he sort of turned around and said, I think they're onto me!
In a very exaggerated manner.
And I thought of that when I looked at this particular post on YouTube from, I don't know, a watcher or a listener or somebody else.
From the YouTube community, and it's amazing how quickly this can all work for somebody, and it has a lot to do with some pretty fundamental things that I'm up to.
In some ways, the most fundamental thing that I'm up to in Free Domain Radio, so I thought it would be...
Worth spending a few minutes on this particular conversation time.
And let's get to it.
So he said, with regards to, I think it's like a nine-minute read of the...
The Untruth book. And he said, Wow!
As you continued the reading...
Oh, sorry. First of all, he said, Oh man, I don't know if it was because you were reading it or if it was the actual content of the book, but I want Untruth!
Just the first few sentences had such a profound impact.
I felt the little hairs on my back rise.
Is there a way that I can purchase the book through the local Hastings, or do I have to get it over the net?
I want it, just send me a message if you can.
And I said, no, it's net only.
I am not, not going to go down the road of publishing, trying to get it done through a regular publisher.
Just no way shape in hell am I ever going to do that, if I can conceivably avoid it.
I have wasted years!
Going down the blind alley of publishers.
And I've had agents.
I've had incredibly glowing reviews.
Literally one guy with a doctorate read The God of Atheists and said, get this thing published.
It is the great Canadian novel.
It's finally been written.
You know, the novel that puts Canada on the map.
And that's what he said. I mean, I think it's a great novel.
And it's just wasted time.
Wasted time. Nobody ever came back.
And they wouldn't say yes, and they wouldn't say no.
And literally, I wasted years going down that road.
Never again will I let the destiny of what it is that I'm doing be in somebody else's hands.
Oh, except for your hands, with regards to donations.
So, you know, if you're going to participate, there is in fact begging for me.
So, he said, wow, as you continued the reading of your book on truth, you began to mention familial relationships and how they're essentially paralleled to two of the second kind of relationship.
And I began to think of my son, my actions, and our future relationship.
He just turned two.
I began to realize how many times I had been impatient or a bit too harsh with him, and if this trend continued, how much damage it could potentially have on his perspective of me.
Let's just say that you've altered my behavior.
Thanks again, Steph.
And let me just tell you, my friends!
My family!
That it's this kind of leap that makes everything worthwhile.
The begging, the worry, the technical issues, the challenges, the criticisms, the...
The irritations. All of the downside of doing this kind of stuff.
This, you know, wipes it off the map.
And I just want to spend a few minutes talking about this because this guy got it right to the core, which doesn't mean that he gets it at a logistical level or anything like that.
But frankly, I'd rather he get it at this level.
And this, of course, is what I'm hoping to achieve.
And I have... Talked about it off and on from time to time.
But when I talk about family, I'm not talking about your food.
When I talk about parenting or parents, I'm not talking about your parents.
I'm talking about you. There's a conveyor belt of life, right?
And we sort of pop up, think of it going left to right, we pop up when we're born, we cycle along, and near the end, we fade into irrelevance, and then we fall into the pit of nothingness.
And the atoms are recycled in various useful things, but our consciousness is gone.
And when I talk to you about your parents, I'm not fundamentally talking about you and your parents.
I'm not fundamentally, and my intention has always been, to use that as a way of getting to the real heart of the matter, which is not you and your parents, but your children and you.
Our parents are beyond hope.
Who are we kidding? For most of us, right?
Our parents are beyond hope. There would always be grudging problems.
I mean... If they messed us up or were bad or indifferent or mean or cold or hostile or bullying or boring, right?
I mean, any of those varied crimes, they're beyond help.
We can't go back and have another childhood.
That stuff is all gone.
That is all in the history. That is all in the past.
And if we change our parents into good parents when we're adults, what does it matter?
They're never going to be parents again.
Right? It's like pestering a doctor to become a better doctor after he's retired.
Well, why would you do that? It makes no sense.
Right? But, of course, it's never been about you and your parents, fundamentally.
Fundamentally, it's never been about you and your parents.
I mean, yes, I do want you to be free in your life and no unchosen positive obligations and integrity and get the hypocrites and get the bullies and abusers and those who drink the ichor of your soul dry to soothe the aridity of their own deserts, which can never be filled, then I think that's great, right?
But when I tell you, my friends, to judge your parents, it is not so they become better parents because they're no longer parents.
I mean, I'm 40.
My mother is nearly 70.
My father is over 70.
They're not parents.
And they haven't been for decades.
I can never make them better parents.
They're just old people. Old people I lived with.
Old people I once lived with.
Right? Like you live in a frat house and there's some guy 10 years older and you live with him for a couple of years.
You know, it's just some older guy you live with.
Parents, right? But when I talk about you and your parents, I am trying not to teach you To judge your parents, but to inhabit your children, to empathize with your children.
When I talk about your parents and your foo, I'm trying to resurrect or recreate within you the true self, the self which judges with compassion and firmness and sometimes ferocity.
Right? The true self...
Is a wise, compassionate, and incredibly stern judge.
And the only sternness that he really inhabits is that of known hypocrisy that is ignored.
Some guy on the board keeps pestering me about why I can be ill-tempered with Christians.
I said the same thing that I always say.
I mean, if a Christian exists in a state of nature, in a state of propagandized idiocy, for the most part, right?
It's the blind but clueless Ned Flanders kind of stuff.
I mean, he just exists in that empty state of nature.
He's barely a child in a state of infancy.
He's propagandized and love-bombed and narcotized and collectivized.
Barely a consciousness, barely a thought.
But they speak as if they know.
They speak as if they think. And I have no problem with patience the same way I have no problem with patience with children who don't know how to walk yet.
Babies who don't know you are very patient and you take your time.
A Christian comes along and you say well you do realize that your book commands you to put me to death and just about everyone on the planet except for you and 12 other people to kill them all.
You should want to kill me.
That's what your God tells you to do.
I'm patient with that.
If they say, oh my heavens, I've never heard of that.
Great. So you're a Nazi who never read Mein Kampf.
Here's Mein Kampf. Kill all the Jews.
Invade Poland.
Kill the West. Inhabit Russia.
Right? I mean... So you're a Nazi?
You never read Mein Kampf? People just told you Hitler was a great guy.
Okay, well, here's Mein Kampf, right?
Here's what you're actually praising.
Genocide, murder, idolaters, unbelievers, homosexuals, right?
Atheists, sorcerers, witches, warlocks.
All of these people. You're supposed to cut their throats, right?
Drown them in the river. Torture and kill them.
Witches. So, you know, you get your Nazi to read Mein Kampf, and what does he say?
Does he say, holy shit, oh my god, I had no idea.
I'm absolutely horrified, right?
Does it provoke him into a crisis of conscience?
Does it, right? Right, so he obviously has values which are, I don't think that genocide is morally good, right?
Not insane, right?
Or stone evil. Of course, stone evil would not...
It wouldn't be stone evil to say, I want to use violence, right?
Because everybody would think you're an idiot or crazy then, right?
It is stone evil to say, I think we should help the poor through taxation.
I mean, once you get that it's violence, right?
So if the Christian says, wow, I didn't realize that this book says to kill everyone...
Except my family and 12 other guys.
Then, you know, patience, right?
Oh, you're just going to work through it, right?
But if they just vanish from the conversation or change the topic or this or that, then it's like, oh, okay, now you know.
Now you know what it is that you're worshipping.
Genocide, murder, death, child rape.
Sexual. Selling your daughters into sexual slavery.
All of this kind of hellish stuff that's in these horrible primitive texts.
You say, oh, the Bible is true. It's the Word of God.
Oh, really? Well, tell me one thing that's in the Bible that wasn't known to the people writing it at the time.
Right? It's like me calling, I'm the best scientist in the world because I just copied out Einstein's theory of relativity.
It's like, well, you know, if it comes from divine intelligence, it's easy, right?
Just to say it's an all-wise, all-knowing God.
Easy peasy. How do we know whether it was written by man or written by God?
Easy peasy! What's in the Bible that wasn't known at the time?
Does it say the world was flat? Or round?
Does it say heliocentric view of the universe?
Or earth-centered view of the universe?
Mention anything about DNA? Viral theory of germ transmission?
Mention that the blood moves in the body?
Mention that the heart is not a brain?
Does it talk anything about genetics?
Anything? Anything?
No, of course not. It's all complete crap.
Patients, they've never heard these questions, right?
So yes, we can be patient, but the moment, right?
And the true self, or at least my true self, and I think it would be reasonable and fair, the true self is patient and says, okay, so you don't know this stuff.
It's okay. Because we can be gentle and kind with ourselves before we knew the truth.
At least I can be. When I was 15 and said Canada needs a good dose of socialism, I didn't know what the hell I was talking about.
Socialism just seemed like a vaguely nice and positive way to help people.
I'd been propagandized.
I hadn't thought it through. I hadn't been taught how to think it through.
I had no concept of evidence.
I just hadn't been trained!
We don't call someone a bad athlete if they've never heard of the game, right?
I wouldn't call a Christian evil.
He just exists in a blind and empty state of nature until he hears the truth, right?
That's why the early podcasts are positive and pleasant and rational.
And here's 10 questions to ask your Christian friends.
And this is your parents, right?
Okay.
They have their values.
Kindness and love.
You should know your children.
You should never mock your children.
You should never scream at your children.
You should never beat your children up.
These are all values that all of our parents hold.
If you talk to them.
The true self-judge that we all have is very gentle.
When it is talking or confronting somebody who's in a state of nature, right?
When you have these beliefs and then you have these actions, which are the complete opposite of those beliefs.
Making the connection is not easy, right?
And making the connection is something that can be done in a gentle and positive and warm and funny and friendly manner.
It's like, oh, so as a Christian, you're not pro-genocide, right?
Right? No!
You don't think that I should be put to death, right?
No! But it's the book you say, the book that you worship, the God that you worship commands this.
So, you know, what is going on between your values and your faith?
What you call virtuous and what you call the highest virtue.
Like when you talk to Muslims, right?
Is child rape good or bad?
Pedophilia good or bad? Bad, right?
Well, Muhammad took a bride at six and consummated his marriage with her when she was nine.
She was six when he married her, nine when he raped her.
And if people just haven't made that connection, and of course they have at an unconscious level, but it's what they do in the moment that they make that connection.
That is the glory or terror of their lives.
That is the beauty or hell of their existence.
If you help somebody, guide somebody to make that connection, and they get it, and you know when you get it, literally this guy writes, the hair does go up on the back of your neck.
You get goosebumps. You feel dizzy.
You have to sit down.
Your life and your history and your possible future runs over you like a freight train on a coin on the tracks.
And there are sparks!
And there is wet metal.
Or, if you just get uncomfortable, get aggressive, change the topic, if you just...
Right? Right?
There are those who see on their own.
There are those who see when they're shown, and there are those who will never see.
Who refuse to see.
And it's those people I have no patience for, and it doesn't mean that I spend my life hounding them down, right, and telling them what bad people they are, but I don't let them get off the conversation thinking that they've won or that there's some sort of standoff or there's, you know, well, I guess we both have valid points and you have your perspective and my...
No. No.
No, I think I'm sick tired of this kind of stuff going on in the world.
You worship a God that says I should be put to death?
It's not just a difference of opinion.
I take that shit seriously.
Maybe you don't. That's your prerogative.
But I do. And if you continue to hang on to these beliefs, I'm just going to call you evil.
Corrupt, for sure. And anyway, so this guy is like, well, you have no patience, you have no patience, right?
And I can't explain this to him, right?
What possible hierarchy of values has you criticized somebody who may be a little impatient versus somebody who calls for the genocide of billions of people?
Still didn't get it. I just posted this on the board today.
This is actually to do with parents, believe it or not.
But I posted this on the board today, and I said, well...
Suppose you're standing in the middle of a park.
On one side, you see a guy raping a woman.
And on the other side, you see a guy who you just see him out of the corner of your eye.
You think, did he just litter?
Did he just drop a piece of chewing gum wrapper?
Right? You got a rapist on one side of the park.
You got a guy who maybe might have littered on the other side.
Which side of the park do you go to?
Do you head north or south? Do you head north to the rapist or south to the possible litterer?
Well, if they head south to me, Steph, you might be a little impatient with these people.
I get what they're doing.
Right? They're pretending that the rapist doesn't exist.
and then they're calling something a moral examination.
God.
Oh, it is so gruesome when you see all of this stuff playing out.
Thank you.
Oh, it is so gruesome.
And we see this with our parents, right?
What are the values that you think make a good parent?
X, Y, and Z. Well, why did you not do any of those things?
things or why did you do the exact opposite?
When we inhabit or we allow our stern and compassionate, true self, rational judgment, to evaluate our parents, we are inhabiting us as children
we are inhabiting us as children with judgment.
When we inhabit us as children with judgment.
what happens when we are around our children?
When we look at our own parents through the eyes of a child that judges with security, with rationality, with serenity, with firmness, with resolution, with compassion, when we fully absorb and judge our parents according to objective moral standards, We are a child who judges.
Right?
I am not trying to create a mold wherein you have better parents.
Right?
I am trying to create a mold which you can inhabit and which is then the rational shape that your child can inhabit.
When you become a child who judges his parents, and you look at your own children, whether you have them or not yet, it'll come, if you're going to have kids, then you will have created a template, a silhouette, a space where they will be able to judge you.
Right, so I talk about families, and I'm thinking in particular of parents, and I mentioned parents several times near the beginning of On Truth. - I don't know.
And this guy makes this incredible leap.
Magical, fantastical, wonderful, beautiful leap.
When he says, when you talk about parents, I don't think about my parents and me judging them.
I think about me as a parent and my child judging me.
It is only by working through the judging of our own parents that we have the maturity and flexibility and wisdom to allow our own children to judge us.
Once we allow our own children to judge us, we become better parents. we become better parents.
We become better parents.
Once we accept that we as parents can be evaluated by our children and can be fired, right?
Once it is no longer an automatic that our children must be our inevitable slaves to the end of our lives, once we, as I'm going to work on in the book after the next one, privatize the family, which means turning the family into the free market.
It's not about economics.
It's about family. Once we can de-state the family, de-state Tyrannize the family.
Once we can accept that there are no unchosen positive obligations even in the family, especially in the family, primarily in the family, then we privatize the family.
It's no longer a closed shop.
It's no longer a perpetual union.
You can get fired.
You're no longer...
A public servant. You no longer have perpetual tenure.
And once you can get fired, you're going to do a better job.
We know all of this.
All those lazy-ass bastards working on the roads department and all those suck-ass teachers working in the public schools.
All of the crazy ex-military, what is it, 40% of the workforce is ex-military in the post office, all those lunatics?
Right? They can't get fired, so they suck.
Once you establish free market principles within the family, once you establish the principles of voluntary association within the family, you raise the quality of families.
My whole goal, really, is to raise the quality of parenting.
That's everything that I do, is to raise the quality of parenting.
And the only way to raise the quality of parenting, the only way that has ever worked in the free market, is to de-socialize the family, to privatize the family.
The free market brings innovation and it brings quality.
And the free market, it brings innovation and quality because it is based on voluntary association.
Socialism and communism crush and kill innovation and quality and bring about inefficiency and brutality.
And as long as the family is run along communist principles, we're never going to be free.
These opposite poles of peace and violence, voluntary association or forced association, charity or pillaging, peace or war, aggression versus non-aggression.
Either the free market is going to free the family, which is communistic, Either the free market is going to liberate the family with the principles that work so well in society, or the dictatorship of the family is going to kill the free market.
There really are only the two possibilities.
We can't have these unbelievably and fundamentally and incredibly opposite poles that Within the two major social institutions that we have.
Economics and the family.
One of them has to go.
Right? We know which way it's going right now.
Which is that the communism of the family is taking over the freedom of the market.
By turning the entire goddamn world into an abusive family.
You don't get choice.
You don't get your own values.
You don't ever get to grow up.
You've got to pay and bow and beg and scrape and do what you're told.
Don't smoke this. Don't eat that.
Don't trade with this person.
Pay me the goddamn money or I'll throw you in jail.
Do as I say, not as I do.
Horrible, saccharine, sentimental values spouted by every ass clown in existence.
With the exact opposite values being actually lived by those in charge?
The whole thing is a sick family.
Right, so what we have to do is privatize the family.
And what that means is when we become customers, then we also become vendors.
So, when we are just locked into, oh, you've got to go spend time with your parents, you've got to go spend time with your extended family, you've got to spend time with your friends, you've got to go drinking, you've got to do this, you've got to go with the crowd, you've got to pay your taxes, all the sentimental crap that goes with it, oh, family is everything.
No, virtue is everything.
Integrity is everything. Family is blood.
And blood is just blood. But when we become customers, when we look at our parents as a store, I know this sounds silly, but just bear with me.
Hopefully it will make some sense.
When we look at our parents as, what are you providing me?
What are you providing me?
Then, and only then, do we get quality. .
The difference between the parents of the past and the parents of the future, if people, if we all stick and do the right thing at this point, at this juncture, at this fork in the species that I think we're working on, if we do the right thing, then the choice and quality and variety and excellence that we can bring to bear on parenting and families and child raising It's fantastic.
It's going to be the difference between one of those piss-anti-Soviet, quote, grocery stores with one bottle of vinegar and a packet of sugar versus the Uber Loblaws slash IGA slash Tesco slash Safeway slash Wegmans.
Aisle upon aisle of incredibly glorious stuff.
That's the difference between communism and a free market.
That's what we need in the family.
Because once you become a customer of your parents, and they have to actually do things that work for you and that please you, and this doesn't mean just make you happy all the time.
Our dentists don't do that when we love them.
At least I do, because the alternative is much worse.
It doesn't mean just please everyone all the time.
I mean, even Lamborghini dealers don't just please everyone all the time because that would involve taking a huge loss and selling Lamborghinis for five bucks.
Everybody would be really happy.
Right? Rational expectations, negotiations, maturity, volunteerism.
But once we become the customers of our parents and say, well, you know, I know what I'm paying.
Time, money, energy.
Thought, mental space, emotional upset.
I know what I'm paying, now what am I getting?
So with the government, we're never allowed to say, I know what I'm paying, but what am I getting and what are my alternatives?
And that's why the stronger and more...
Well, let's not get into that.
We'll come back to that another time.
Let's keep it short. Keep it focused, people.
Stay on target. Voluntarism is quality.
And there is nothing more important for the peace and health of the world than quality parenting.
Nothing more important than quality parenting.
And you can have, and I've thought of this a number of times, and I thought of this even before Free Domain Radio, I could write the most amazing and wonderful book on parenting.
But it wouldn't do a damn bit of good.
You could write the most amazing and wonderful book on free market economics and how to run a great grocery store.
But if people are forced to shop at your store and have no choice, people will read it for only mildly academic purposes.
They don't really care about it.
It'll just be interesting. You have to generate a need for wisdom in this world.
You have to generate a need for quality in this world.
And the only way that you can generate a need for quality in this world is to make relationships voluntary.
The only way you can make better husbands is by getting rid of enforced marriages.
It won't make every husband a great husband, but at least it will mean that those who end up with bad husbands, it's their own damn fault.
Right? If you want better computers, you stop the government from producing computers and everyone being forced to buy the government's computers.
Quality results from volunteerism.
Quality results from choice.
Choice and quality require customers with options.
Where there are no options, there is no quality.
Where there is forced association, there is no quality.
And we're not talking about quality with regards to how good the soup is.
We're talking about quality with regards to how young minds and souls and bodies are shaped.
How nervous systems are programmed with peace or tension.
The most important quality in the world is how we raise our children.
And that is completely communistic.
Because we are never allowed to have a choice.
All I'm doing and all I've been doing since day one is saying, hey, we've got a choice.
Choose. Choose.
Life is short. Choose quality.
Choose quality. Choose quality.
That's how the world gets better.
And once you become a customer to your parents, you create customers in your children.
Amen.
Okay.
Once we become customers to our parents and say, well, am I getting quality here relative to everything else that I could be doing?
doing?
Am I getting quality here?
You must now compete with everything.
Like if I have a dollar in my wallet, every vendor in the world has got to compete with everything, including inaction.
It has to be the highest possible quality, the highest possible cost benefit for me to spend that dollar.
Standing in the middle of a circle of six billion people, each one of them saying, come here, come here, come here.
How are they going to make themselves attractive to you?
Well, that's what your parents need to be.
You create choice in your life.
You become a customer vis-a-vis your family.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but it is the best way to analogize it, and it's not even an analogy fundamentally.
And it's not about your parents.
It's about you and your children.
When you create choice with regards to your own parents, then you are creating choices with regards to you for your children.
When you become a customer, a voluntary customer, of your parents' interactions, you create a free market store called Youville.
Youasparent.com.
A web business.
An e-business. Choice for you is choice for your children.
Rejection of your parents is potential rejection of you.
Potential rejection of you breeds quality.
In your parenting. This is the best I could come up with after 20 years.
This is the best that I could come up with after 20 years of thinking about how to save the world.
And without wanting to rub shoulders with giants, that's just what Einstein did, right?
He said, what if the speed of light were constant?
What if everything were relative?
All I'm saying is what if the principles of the free market and the value of voluntary association, what if those principles are constant?
What if they reach all the way up to the tip of the government and all the way down to the bowels of the family?
What if we know that all the economics in the world will not turn a communist...
Quote, economy, which is just a gulag of goods, capital, and labor.
All the theory in the world, all the exhortations and rational proofs in the world will not turn a communist slave camp into a free market.
The only way that you can turn a communist slave camp into a free market is through voluntary association.
Through privatizing goods, labor and services, capital.
Through property rights, absolute property rights, which is you vis-a-vis your family.
Do they own your body in Sunday dinners or do you?
Who owns your body when your mom gets sick?
Them or you? Well, this is all I've ever been talking about.
It's what if it's true all the way around, up and down, back to front.
Voluntary association, the non-aggression principle, competition equals quality.
And it's simply extending the principle of the non-aggression principle from physical force to emotional bullying.
Manipulation, control, disappointment, anger, right?
Because those are all the equivalent of physical violence when you're children.
So how do I make you a better parent?
Do I write a book on how to be a better parent?
No. If your kids never have the capacity to choose to defoo, there's no incentive for quality.
If I force everyone at gunpoint to shop at my store and just take what I've got, whether they like it or not, what does it matter if somebody comes in and says, here's how to run a great store?
It doesn't matter. It might be interesting reading.
I might even half-heartedly try a few of those things.
but it's never going to make one single shred of fundamental difference in anything.
The only way, if I'm really interested in making you a better store manager, the only way to make you a better store manager is to create the only way to make you a better store manager is Okay.
The only way to create competition is to create choice.
And I can't create choice for you with regards to the government.
I wish I could. I can't.
But it wouldn't matter even if I could.
Because it would just come back until we crack this communism of the family.
It's just going to come back.
This is the root cause of it all.
The government is merely an effect of the family, as I've said all along.
What works in the free market works in the family.
The only way to improve the quality of parenting...
It's to become adult customers of our parents.
Not to make their parenting better, but to make our parenting better.
That's why the defu is such a step.
That's why the defu is such a step.
What are you going to do when your kids say, where's granddad?
Where's grandma? Oh, I don't see them anymore, you say.
How come? They were bad to me.
Well, what did they do? Oh, they hit me, they yelled at me, they never listened to me, they weren't interested in me.
I just didn't really enjoy their company.
Huh, saith the offspring.
Huh, indeed.
Is that going to have an effect on how you treat your children?
Hell yeah! If they view you as a disposable ATM and hotel proprietor, that come 16 or 17 or 18 or 20, they just barrel off into the sunset and leave you in the dust.
Is that going to have an effect on the quality of your parenting?
I dare say it is.
If you want to keep your kids around, and if you don't, that's fine.
But I bet you will want to keep your kids around.
I bet you'll love them to death and I bet you that you'll die inside if they don't choose you.
If they don't choose to have you in their life.
And not everyone has to do it.
It just has to be allowed. It's just a process.
One out of a hundred people only has to defu.
Not arbitrarily, if it's just, if it's warranted.
If I've got a store and I've got a thousand people who come to my store every month, if another store opens up across the town, I'm going to change what I do.
I'm not going to wait until there's no one coming to my store and then change.
Right.
The moment that the choice appears in the landscape, it affects everyone's behavior.
Right.
And that's why the Dfue rock stars on the boards and in the podcast and in the call-in shows are so important.
Not because everybody else should defoo or this or that or the other.
But because now it's out there.
And it doesn't even have to be extreme.
It's not like, oh my god, my parents just set fire to me every day.
It does not have to be extreme.
Right? To be honest, I mean, to be perfectly frank...
You don't have to stop coming from my store just because I only have one loaf of moldy bread in it.
Maybe I've just got two more choices of bagels, and you're not sure what you want, so you go to the other store.
Now, our parents don't have to be perfect, and neither do we, right?
Because there's proximity, and there's opportunity costs, going out and finding other people to befriend, right?
The store down the block from you doesn't have to be as good as the store across town.
But it still has to be better than if it was the only store around.
Right? So, it's not the defooing of your parents that will change your behavior in the most important way.
It is the possibility that your children will defoo you.
It's not a threat. It's not a threat.
It's choice. It's possibility.
It's opportunity. That's all it is.
That works so beautifully in the free market.
Imagine, imagine what it can do for parenting.
I mean, this is, of course, how we bring down the state, and this is how we bring down the church, is we improve parenting.
And the only way to improve parenting, which we know from principles of economics...
The only way to improve parenting is to create choice.
The only way to improve any service is to privatize it.
To create choice. To create the requirement of excellence.
And of course our parents are like incredibly tenured and entitled postal workers.
Or soldiers who perhaps thought that their retirement was secure for three generations or something.
They're incredibly enraged and petulant, right?
Because they acted like they could never get fired.
Right? So, you know, some lazy-ass Newman-style postal worker who shows up late, takes two-hour lunches, runs an eBay business from his cubicle, right?
Someone comes along and says, oh, we're privatizing this.
Well, he's just going to get enraged, right?
You say, look, you know, you better stop running this eBay business, stop having these two-hour lunches.
You better start working a little here.
He's so angry that he doesn't.
Calls your bluff. Oh, he gets fired.
He's going to be enraged. His whole life was developed as if he could never get fired.
He treated all his customers.
I imagine the person in the front of the store sneers at the customers, makes them wait, goes out for a smoke while they're waiting in line.
Suddenly, his privatizer's like, oops.
Now, my boss is totally aware that if he doesn't fire me, if I'm that guy, then no one's going to come to my store.
I'm almost going to come to his store, right?
Because they all hate me! Right?
So, I mean, this, of course, is the unfortunate thing, and this is the break that needs to take place in humanity for the planet to flourish, for the planet to be just, to just rise above, in general, this bare survival, this depression, this drudgery, this habit, this brutality.
And one generation has to pay for it.
And I'm sorry. I really am, right?
No, they couldn't guess that they were going to get fired.
The odds sort of suck, right?
The odds, they played pretty good odds, right?
It's gone on for 10,000 generations.
But one generation has to suffer, right?
One group of public servants, one group of public workers, especially the lazy-ass, brutal, abusive ones, they have to suffer.
They have to get fired. And it sucks to be them, and they had no reason to believe that they were going to get fired.
But nonetheless, this is what we have to do in order to save the world.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, my brothers and sisters, I look forward...
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