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Sept. 15, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:40:22
1453 Freedomain Radio - Stefan Talks to a College Class

A college teacher invites me to answer questions from his class.

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Well, first of all, I'd like to thank you ever so much for taking the time out of your day to address some of these questions.
It's great to have the opportunity to pick your brain on some of these issues, especially since your article caused, I would call it a stir, among my friends.
And they're interested in clarification on your philosophical perspective on things.
Just so you know, in addition to your Lou Rockwell The students also read a bit of Ayn Rand on the topics of collectivism versus individualism.
But even though they may be familiar with these concepts from the text, for many, if not most of them, these are still relatively new concepts and ideas.
But I guess I'd like to maybe give you the opportunity to take a moment to tell a little bit about yourself.
Sure. Hi, everybody.
I certainly would like to commend you on your interest in philosophy.
It is, of course, to me at least, the greatest, deepest, richest, and most powerful discipline that you can embark upon.
It is a very exciting and thrilling extreme sport.
I'm not one of those philosophers who sits in an ivory tower discussing whether nouns exist or things like that.
that.
I am a philosopher in the Socratic tradition who likes to really engage with discussions about how people actually live in the real world and the value and the challenge and the beauty of applying those kinds of principles, rational, consistent, empirical, moral principles to our rational, consistent, empirical, moral principles to our daily life, our relationships, the way that we actually live.
And I have some reasonable education in the field.
I have a master's degree in history and I had as my master's thesis a pretty solid examination of four major philosophers.
So I have some training but really the greatest value that I think I bring is just that willingness to… Start from a blank slate.
I know nothing, and what can I build with certainty from a blank slate?
To assume that nothing that I was taught is true, which doesn't mean it's necessarily false, but to just assume that I have to start from scratch.
When it comes to building things like, you know, what is truth, what is reality, what is virtue, what is love, and so on, I think those things are very important to examine, because if you don't have a map, you'll never have a consistent destination, and philosophy is sort of like the map It's not my philosophy or your philosophy.
It's not Western philosophy or Eastern philosophy anymore than there's my science or your science or Western math and Eastern math.
Philosophy is reasoning from first principles with logical consistency and with reference to empirical evidence.
It's worth thinking, I think, of it like science.
Science is reasoning from first principles and testing in a laboratory or somewhere the accuracy of a particular idea or thesis or theory.
Philosophy is the same thing.
You start from first principles with logical consistency and It works out really well.
Now, I used to have a real job.
I worked as an executive in the software field.
I was an entrepreneur and so on.
And a couple of years ago after I started writing these articles, I got some real interest in The approach that I have taken to ethics, which is the most powerful of the philosophical disciplines.
And a couple of years ago, I took the plunge and quit my career and started talking about philosophy with interested parties and have just had an exciting, wonderful and scary ride ever since.
I'm really thrilled to be talking to you this morning and I hope that the essays have been stimulating.
I'm a huge fan of Ayn Rand for those who like her work.
I was very much schooled in the objectivist tradition and I still agree with most of what the Randians or the objectivists talk about.
I have some differences in the realm of ethics and particularly in the realm of politics.
But the sort of what is truth questions, what is reality questions I think are just wonderfully answered by most objectivist thinking.
So that's my brief introduction.
If there's anything that I can do to clarify, please understand I don't have the answers, right?
And I certainly would not be interested in providing conclusions to you.
You know, my hope is to provide a kind of way of thinking that allows you to reason through these problems yourself, right?
There's no point teaching the answers to a math problem.
You have to, I think, if you want to be a good teacher, you have to try and teach how to solve math problems on your own.
So, I hope that it's not, hey, you know, Steph...
What's the answer? Because I can't really provide that, and even if I could, it would be sort of pointless.
I think that philosophy is a process or a methodology of thinking, and I just want to provide some examples in how I can try and answer questions that you might have today.
But just remember, the important thing is how to think, not what to think.
Very well put. I think that parallels nicely with the project that my students are working on, which, you know, obviously during...
Research and evaluating and forming arguments, it's imperative to make sure you're logically consistent and backing your statements with empirical evidence.
Is there anything else you would like to add for those who are here and going to be doing this sort of research?
Any advice for navigating that type of terrain?
Sorry, which kind of terrain?
Research, you know, sort of helping deciphering facts from fiction in a world where often two truths are considered valid at the same time, matrix sort of a world.
Oh, right. Well, you know, my experience has been that figuring out the truth is not actually that hard, but accepting the truth is really hard.
And if you figure out a basic truth, then sometimes it can be a challenge in your relationships, right?
In the people around you who might be startled or upset or maybe even angry about a particular basic truth.
When I was a little kid, and I'm sure most little kids go through this phase, right?
You read about...
War and medals and people being cheered on for combat and you say to yourself, well, okay, so if you kill a guy in peacetime, it's immoral and you go to jail.
And if you kill a guy in wartime, it's immoral and you get medals and a pension and all that kind of stuff.
And figuring out that murder is wrong, and I'm not talking – self-defense to me is perfectly valid, but I'm just talking about initiation of force.
Figuring out that murder is wrong is not that hard.
Proving why it's wrong, it took me about 20 years.
I think I've done it, but you can judge for yourself.
There's lots of free books on my website.
One is about ethics in particular.
But it's when we take these basic moral rules, like, you know, we should respect people's property.
You know, a kindergarten stuff, don't push and don't snatch, right?
I mean, that's all the ethics that, you know, we don't have much trouble at least understanding when we're three or four.
The real challenge is when we take those basic principles and we expand them to a universal perspective.
So if stealing is wrong, then we have a challenge in the realm of something like taxation because taxation is the initiation of force against citizens to take their property.
And we know it's against their will because there's force involved.
If it's not against their will, then you wouldn't need force.
If everybody wanted to pay the taxes, you wouldn't need a collection agency and the threat of jail and violence and so on.
And that's a challenge, right?
And if murder is wrong in peacetime, then what about the challenges of wars which are not defensive, which all countries – not to pick on any in particular – all countries have engaged in at one time or another.
So it's not so much the moral rules that are the problem at least I've found and most of the people I've talked to have found.
The basics, don't hurt, don't steal kind of thing.
It's when we take those and we make them universally.
In other words, we make the moral rules rather than just local preferences, you know, like I like tapioca or something like that.
When we make them moral rules, what happens is society looks a whole lot different when we take these basic moral rules like non-aggression and respect for property.
When we make them universal, society looks very different after the universalization than before and it's that challenge.
It's not so much the discovery of the moral rules.
I think we would all accept the basics.
It's when we universalize them that society kind of jumps at us in a very different shape when we apply those universal principles and that I think is the real challenge.
And the challenge is, to me at least, is more emotional than intellectual.
Like, we get the rules. But when we apply them universally, it kind of freaks us out.
And it freaks out other people because it really questions the basics of how society is structured and organized at the moment.
And raises some very fundamental questions about the role of, you know, say, force in society.
Can we solve complex social problems with taxation, which is the initiation of force?
I say no.
The more complex and the more challenging the problem, like poverty or helping the poor and so on and educating young people, those are very challenging and complex problems.
And I think you need the most creative and entrepreneurial solutions there, not just governments waving guns and saying, give us money to solve this problem or we'll throw you in jail.
I just don't think the problems get solved in those situations.
So it's not so much the moral rules that are the challenge.
It is the universalization and the sort of freak out aspect that occurs when you say, well, if this is wrong and if it's wrong for everyone, then how can this be explained in society or how can that be justified in society?
So that, you know, if I were to give you one tip, it's look for the...
You know, ZOMG response that comes out of...
Look at me trying to be hip.
The sort of ZOMG response that comes out when you think about universalizing these principles, which really is the essence of philosophy, it really freaks things out.
And you see this in science, right?
If you universalize the speed of light as constant, which is Einstein's theory of relativity, you end up with some really freaky stuff, right?
Like you can... You can stop time.
Mass accumulates when you get closer to the speed of light.
Two spaceships going apart from each other at the speed of light should be distancing each other at twice the speed of light, but they only do it at once the speed of light.
When you make one constant, i.e.
the non-aggression principle or respect for property, some really freaky stuff relative to what is can come tumbling out of that equation, and it can be really startling, and that, I think, is the greatest challenge of philosophy.
Okay, great. Thank you very much for some of the clarification there.
I can't see anyone. Are they still awake?
Okay, good.
Well, that's it for me. I mean, if anyone has any questions, I mean, that's the only intro that I'd like to provide.
I also wanted to mention that I'm recording this as I sort of record everything, and if people are okay with it, I'd like to release the Q&A in the podcast stream, but I'll send a copy to Teach, and you guys can have a listen and let me know what you think.
All right. I will confer with them after the conversation and let you know.
But, yeah, I would like to throw it to the students right now and let them ask you their questions and have you engage in dialogue with them.
And I will take a back seat now.
And so here's the first question.
Okay. In, like, the third section of your article and you write about what is bad for one must be bad for all, I just kind of had a question.
When you say universally applied, you kind of apply it to, like, well, breaking into a peaceful citizen's house is wrong for me, so it's wrong for DEA. But how do you suppose that we reinforce what is bad without the people of the law enforcement crossing that morality boundary or without condoning that behavior for everyone?
That's a fantastic question.
I can tell we're already in the hyper-advanced class.
So let me just make sure – I'm going to repeat your question back to you just to make sure I'm not going to answer some question I've invented in my own head.
So I say if I can't break into some peaceful person's house, then the DEA should not have that right or the individuals should not have that right.
And if they do have that right, we have to sort of figure out what the difference is.
It's hard to come up with that. And so your question is, but then how do we encourage, like in the absence of laws or in the absence of violent consequences to socially undesirable behavior, let's say, how do we get people to be good without using force?
How do we encourage good behavior, discourage bad behavior in the absence of that?
Is that fair to say?
Yes. Okay.
Let me ask you a question back.
Would you say that – I mean you're doing the right thing and being in school and planning your life and doing all these kinds of good things.
Do you do these things because – You want to have a good life and live well and learn and so on.
Or do you do these things because – or do you refrain?
Let's say do you refrain from going out and strangling kittens and boiling dogs or whatever simply because there are laws against it?
Like do you have this big desire to do all these terrible things and then you say, well, I could go to jail so regretfully I will refrain from doing all these terrible things?
Or do you just not have a very strong desire to do these bad things?
Oh, no. Personally, I don't have a very strong desire to do those bad things.
A very strong. It's a medium.
No, I'm just kidding. Right.
So you are not – you do the right things and you avoid doing things which would be the wrong things, not because there are laws, right, but because you have an inner sense of right and wrong and good and bad and you want to live a good life and you don't want to do things that are going to haunt your conscience and be impossible to explain to good people and so on.
Is that fair to say? Yeah, I guess it's a question, if so many people break the law when they're already in place and there are negative reinforcements to them, then how do they expect those to work if we take away the repercussions on them?
I'm sorry, could you repeat that?
I just want to make sure I understood the question.
So many people in society still break rules, even when they know, going into it, that they can have repercussions for their behavior.
So if you take away those repercussions, such as the law enforcement, Isn't that only going to get warned?
Right, right, right.
No, and that's an excellent question, so I will move on to – because I don't think – here's the basic challenge of ethics, at least one of the basic challenges of ethics, and I'll get to the really core of your question in a sec.
Ethics is kind of like a weird thing.
It's like – ethics is like diet books that are only read by slender people, right?
Because people read about ethics – you are obviously interested in ethics, which is fantastic – And you're a good person, right?
So it's like you're interested in ethics, but you're not doing bad things.
Whereas people who do bad things, I don't know, like hitmen and thieves or whatever, they don't really read books on ethics, right?
So it's like you're only preaching to the choir when you do ethics.
And I think that's one challenge.
And your question is, well, in the absence of these coercive repercussions, how do we prevent things like crime?
Well, I think the first thing that I would suggest is that it's called like a false dichotomy.
It's like an either-or that doesn't really exist.
And what happens when people talk about the efficacy of governmental solutions to things like crime is they say, well, this works, and so if we take this away, what will work?
And my argument generally is that it really doesn't work to use these kinds of laws to prevent bad things from happening.
So, for instance... We have laws against killing people.
And whatever your political views on the invasion of Iraq, I think it's fairly clear that this was not – I mean Iraq was not about to invade the United States and was not about to do all these terrible things.
And so here we have up to a million people who've died.
As the result of having these laws and the laws that are fundamental to war are the laws that compel the citizens to pay for the war, either now in the form of taxes or in this case in the future in the form of deficits and debts.
So when it comes to the protection of life, I think it's hard to say that the current system is really good, right?
And there's been pretty credible estimates that – not to pick on America because I think America is a great country in many ways.
But in terms of its foreign policy, about 30 million people have died as a result of US wars overseas.
And you sort of look at that stack of bodies.
That's a big stack of bodies.
And so I would say that having these rules and giving people this power to use the military and to use the police and the prison system and so on to enforce their will and to try to do good, as I'm sure a lot of people in government want to try to do good, results in some very bad things.
So I would sort of question the assumption.
I'm not saying I'm proving it. I just would question the assumption that it works now.
And the second thing that I would say is that education and interest in philosophy is obviously very key.
I take a particular focus on the quality of parenting when it comes to producing good people in the world.
If people have had really bad parenting, destructive or abusive parenting, their odds of being good and successful human beings, they don't go to zero, but they certainly go down.
Not everybody who goes through a bad childhood ends up as a bad person, so to speak, but almost everybody who ends up as a bad person went through a bad childhood.
So I think improving parenting and improving the education of children is very, very important, and I don't think that the government is doing a very good job of that at all.
So that would be my second point.
And my third point is that to live in a society requires the voluntary participation of other people, right?
I mean, nobody here builds their own house and grows all their own food and is their own doctor, can take out their own appendix, can clean their own teeth and so on.
So to live in a society requires the participation of other people, the voluntary participation of other people.
My way of thinking about it, and I'm not going to say I'm proving anything here, but my way of thinking about it is that if society as a whole doesn't like people who punch other people or steal their purses or whatever… Well, And those people will not be able to exist in society, right?
If you can't rent a house, if you can't buy food, if you can't use a road or a sidewalk, then you can't really live in society.
And I'm much more around exclusion or ostracism as a way of controlling undesirable social behavior rather than giving a small group of people the right to use all of this weaponry to enforce their will because they go way beyond their original mandate, right?
Governments always grow and grow and grow until they collapse, which is what takes down every empire in history.
So I'm very much more in favor of something like social ostracism.
If you do stuff that society in general disapproves of, then you go on the list.
You're on the list. It's on your permanent record.
And this is all available now through the technology.
And you go to buy something and people say, I'm not going to do business with you.
And it's very hard for people then to – I would say practically impossible for people to live in society if other people don't want to cooperate with them.
And I think it's in that kind of exploration that we'll end up with a sustainable and positive way.
Of reinforcing good behavior and making bad behavior something which is not sustainable in society.
And I sort of prefer that very much so.
It's in conformity with moral laws that are more universal.
And fundamentally, it does not create the danger of giving a minority of people in the government the right, so to speak, which morally they don't possess, to initiate force against enemies, foreign and domestic, which always seems to end pretty badly.
Thank you. I'm not saying I answered everything.
I'm just saying, you know, this is ways to look at it.
And, you know, you can certainly explore more of that on your own.
But it's a great question.
I don't want to pretend that I've answered it perfectly.
But I think that would be a way to approach it.
All right. We're going to try to stay along those lines.
We have another follow-up question to that.
Now, to say, like, to ostracize, socially ostracize somebody who has undesirable social behavior, what's to stop them from forcing their way back in?
Like, say, they go into a store and they say, we're not going to do business with you.
What's to stop them then from, you know, pulling out a gun and saying, well, give me what I want or I'm going to shoot you, you know?
Well, I mean, what's to stop them from doing that now?
Well, I mean, like, if they were...
I'm ostracized. That's hardly a punishment if they're going to be able to just force their way back into society, whereas today if they're, you know, police, you know, bring them into jail or something like that and they're re-released into society,
they don't have that on their record and people aren't going to say, oh, we're not going to do, we're not going to sell you food at a convenience store because you have a criminal record or something like that, whereas If they were ostracized from society in general, people would say, we're not going to do business with you because you stole from somebody, then what's to stop them from forcing their way back in?
Right. Well, I mean, as I mentioned at the beginning, self-defense is a perfectly legitimate moral concept, I believe, logically and ethically.
And so what will stop someone from pulling out a gun on a shopkeeper is that the shopkeeper can shoot them, right?
I mean, to put it bluntly, right?
And again, I'm not a big fan of violence, but I believe that self-defense is… It's perfectly legitimate morally.
So the defense is important.
And I don't want to get into the whole complexities of how moral rules are enforced in what I call a stateless society or whatever.
But clearly, it's not in society's best interest to turn people who stole a candy bar into permanent...
Permanently ostracized from society, right?
I mean, what should occur, I think, rationally in a free society or you could say a society really committed to nonviolence?
Would be that there would be a punishment if you stole something.
Let's say I steal a car. And there are a number of people – I call them DROs or dispute resolution organizations.
These are sort of kind of like insurance companies that people contract with for security of property and persons and they compete to provide the best services and so on.
And I would not want someone who just stole a car when he was 17 to be permanently excluded from society forever because...
That makes it – you're right.
I mean if that's the situation, he might as well just go completely rogue and just steal and go down in a hail of bullets or something and I wouldn't want that.
What I would want is for that person to submit to counseling, to therapy, to a medical review to make sure that they didn't have any problems with hormones or whatever that might be overstimulating their aggression and to – To heal them,
right? In the same way that if somebody is a drug addict, what they need is significant medical and therapeutic, in my opinion, medical and therapeutic intervention so that they can cure themselves of this addiction rather than just throw them in jail and hope that they make it cold turkey or whatever, which doesn't really seem to happen.
So I think that there should be positive and proactive intervention and I would certainly support that for my own protection as well as just for good things to do in society.
So I think that we'd want to make sure that people who did the wrong things would have every opportunity.
To turn it around, right?
To become better. And of course, the repeat rate for offenders within the existing system for criminal offenders is extraordinarily high.
I mean, throwing people in jail tends to actually make them worse than before they went in, right?
I mean, if criminals come from, as they generally do, come from abusive childhood histories...
Then throwing into jail with a whole bunch of other abusers simply is going to make them worse.
And I think there are many, many better options to fixing that.
And so that would sort of be an answer.
Again, feel free to ask a follow-up.
And again, I'm not saying I've explained everything, but that's the approach that I think would be most productive in society.
Thank you. Hello.
Just another follow-up question.
All of us It sounds wonderful, but what about the bigger picture?
What about protecting ourselves from, let's say, other countries when we're in danger?
How are we going to deal with that with ostracizing?
I don't think that would do it.
Right. I completely agree with you that ostracizing – saying to Hitler, you can't buy candy in my convenience store would not have solved the problem in 1938 or 1939.
I quite agree with you. And what I would say about that is that, again, I would question the premise that the existing way of doing things actually does protect citizens.
And again, not to touch on too many political nerves given the recent anniversary, but there are strong arguments to be made.
And I'm not going to say that they're all conclusive, but there are strong arguments to be made that aggression against America – against American embassies overseas, against New York in 2001 – I think?
But I mean Switzerland is in many ways as free as America and Switzerland doesn't have jihadists flying planes into buildings or attacking its embassies overseas because America – sorry, Switzerland keeps its army at home.
So I don't think that it could be – you could make very strong arguments that the existing system of, quote, defense actually exposes citizens to a lot of danger.
I certainly know a lot of Americans who, when they travel overseas, will put a Canadian lapel, a Canadian flag on their lapel, right?
So they don't end up with arguments with people who are angered by American foreign policy overseas when they're just out for a stroll in Venice or something like that.
So again, I would question the premise that the existing system works really well.
In the 20th century alone, almost a quarter of a billion people were killed by their own governments.
And that doesn't even include war.
That's just… Concentration camps, genocides, starvations.
I mean, a quarter of a billion, 250 million people.
It's called democide. It's when you're killed by your own government.
That does not seem to me to be a great protection scheme.
I mean, that's not very good odds, I think.
And if you throw wars in, the number goes, of course, much, much higher.
So, again, it's just looking at the facts and saying, is this the best way?
Now, as far as... Let's say there's no government.
Again, this is just a mental exercise.
It's not going to happen tomorrow.
But let's say there's There's no government.
Well, the question is then, who would want to invade a place where there's no government?
And that sort of comes down to the basic question is why will one country invade another country?
And if you look at it economically, the first thing that a country does when it invades another country, right?
So the first thing that Germany does when it invades France in the summer of 1940 is it takes over the existing tax structure so that it taxes – it gets all the money that is existing in the form of taxation from the citizens in France.
But if there's no government, there's no tax structure.
So if you're going to invade a country, there's nothing to take over.
It's like the difference between invading a farm to take over the existing livestock and fields and productivity and going to invade a forest where there's no livestock, where nobody goes to invade a forest because there's nothing to take.
I guess you could take some trees or leaves or whatever.
There's nothing really to profit from it.
And so if there is no existing tax structure, then there is really nothing to take over from a foreign government.
And the last point I'll make is that it's never been the case that a nuclear armed power has been invaded because the deterrence of a nuclear weapon is so very strong.
And so if you're in a country without a government – I mean everybody's concerned about invasion, say, from some other countries.
If you're a government, then all you need is a few nuclear weapons that are in the hands of – again, everybody then thinks, well, you give nuclear weapons to some defense agency, they'll just take you over.
There are good answers to all of that, which you can sort of find if you want some on my website or other places.
But a couple of nuclear weapons is all you need.
You don't need a massive standing army in a $400 billion annual budget.
You need like, I don't know, $20 million a year to keep the nukes in tip-top shape, which in a large population would be a couple of bucks a year per person.
And people obviously care enough about that.
But that's all you really need is some deterrence in the form of...
Or nuclear weapons or something else.
And no nuclear country has ever been invaded.
I think that's all you would need.
And I think there's good arguments as to why that would be more than enough, very cheap, and could not really be used offensively.
So I guess we're going to switch gears a little bit here to a more controversial topic.
I got a question from – we actually have a Buddhist monk in our class here.
Namaste. And he asks, how do you see the religious aspect of things?
Have you thought about what religious people think about reality, etc.?
What is religion in your view?
Well, I won't mince any words, but to me, religion is merely socially or economically successful superstition.
I mean, I'm very empirical.
I'm very – I have huge respect for the scientific method and a huge respect for reasoning from first principles with reference to evidence.
When you reason from first principles with reference to objective evidence, what exists in the real world and ways of determining what is true and what is false, there is no possible way to justify the existence of – Lots of things, right?
Unicorns, goblins, leprechauns, ghosts, and gods.
The human beings have worshipped throughout history about 10,000 gods.
And so I do not view religion as a means to truth.
In fact, I view religion, and very strongly too, I view religion as a path to error and confusion.
And I view religion also as something which is problematic because it is something that is taught to children as if it is true, but I find that when religious people meet somebody who's an informed atheist like myself… Then they will argue that religion is a perspective or there's a god somewhere outside of the universe and so on, but that's not really how it's taught to children.
And I certainly don't have any problems with people who choose to be religious as adults.
I mean, anybody can believe whatever they want.
I do not think that it is ideal, to say the least, to teach particular brands of religion.
I mean, to children as if it's true.
I mean, for instance, if you are raised in a Christian country, then the likelihood is that you will become a Christian.
And if you are raised in a Muslim country, then the odds are very high that you will become a Muslim.
So there is a kind of regional...
Bias towards the teaching of religion that I think is problematic.
I think religion is a very interesting subject to study and I certainly have some respect for religion to the degree with which it has tried to solve the problem of ethics.
But I think it has also hampered some of the exploration of the field of ethics because much like we say, well, people should be good because otherwise we'll throw them in jail.
I don't find that a very satisfying or sustainable approach.
And in the same way, I don't think that saying people should be good, otherwise God will throw them in hell, is a particularly good way to deal with the complex and challenging philosophical problems of ethics.
I think that the punishment and reward aspect is kind of primitive, and I don't think it's going to work in the long run.
Right. Follow-up question, Matt?
You mentioned earlier that your views on taxation were Unethical and that you went on to categorize it as stealing, but as Americans, didn't we in a way enter a contract to abide by in order to have the benefits of living here?
And I know that Americans isn't a real term, that's just a conceptual label, but isn't it true that we're not forced to live here, that it was our choice and that we did agree to abide by those rules?
And like on a universal level, isn't it It's more ethical for an individual to keep their promise and fill their end of a voluntary contract.
Well, I think that is an excellent, excellent argument, and it's a social contract argument, right?
And you may never have read any Socrates or Plato, but this goes right back to Socrates, and if you read The Trial and Death of Socrates, you'll see exactly the same argument, where Socrates is condemned to death for raising uncomfortable questions, which is, I guess, the job of somebody who's interested in philosophy.
Yeah. And people offer to – he's condemned to death, but they don't really want to do it.
The Athenian democracy doesn't really want to do it.
And so lots of people say, hey, just run, man.
Get out of town. Get out of Dodge.
And he's like, no. I lived under the protection of the laws my entire life.
I have chosen voluntarily to live in Athens, and I have respected the laws and used them for my own protection.
And so if those laws have turned against me, it's not my place now to suddenly say, well, that's it.
I don't agree with this particular ruling and therefore I'm going to run away that the laws are the laws.
And so the social contract argument is very old, which doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong.
I don't agree with it on a couple of levels and I'll just briefly touch on them and you can see if they make any sense at all.
The first is that there is no social contract.
You don't choose where you're born and therefore you can't really say that you have chosen this social contract.
Now, I mean your argument, if I understand it rightly, is but we choose to stay.
And that does not seem to me to be a very good argument because It's hard to leave a country.
It's really hard to leave a country.
I mean, you have to go and apply for some new citizenship.
You have to get a visa. You have to transfer money.
It can take years, and it can also take a lot of money.
To go to another country, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 plus years and years of work and paperwork.
It's really hard to leave.
I think your argument would be stronger if you could just move from country to country without any paperwork and without renouncing original citizenship and so on.
But the barriers to moving between countries are very, very...
It's very, very hard. And there is no country that you can move to.
If you believe that voluntary and peaceful interactions are the way that society should solve problems, there's no country that you can move to that currently embodies those principles.
They're a long way off.
So that really isn't an option that you have.
And so I don't think that it really is a contract.
You certainly never signed anything.
You certainly never chose to agree to a contract.
And even if you agreed to a contract – and you might want to read as a great, great writer named Lysandra Spooner who wrote, I think, The Constitution of No Authority where he basically says, but people in America didn't sign the constitution.
They didn't even get a chance to review the constitution.
They didn't put their signature to it.
And even if they did, you know, if my dad signs a contract or my great-grandfather signed a contract, it's not like I'm bound by it.
The contract dies with him.
So even if people had approved the Constitution originally, which they didn't, and certainly the women of society didn't because they didn't have the right to enter contracts, if I remember rightly at that time.
Obviously, the African Americans didn't because they were slaves and the – so the people even at the time did not agree to a particular contract that had it imposed upon them by the old rich white dudes.
But even if they had, it's hard to see how that would be the case for us now.
And the argument would be even stronger if the original constitution had been signed by everyone and even if we could make an argument as to it in perpetuity – The existing system is very, very, very far from the original constitution, even if we count all the amendments and so on, which were not ratified by the population as a whole.
So I think it's really hard to make that case that we're bound by a contract that was imposed on people pretty aggressively if you look at things like the Whiskey Rebellion.
If it was imposed on people largely by force a couple of hundred years ago, there's no other situation where that would legally stand up at all.
So that's sort of the one thing that I would say.
The second thing is if we universalize this, then what we're saying is a certain group of individuals have the right to impose one-sided involuntary and enforced contracts on other people in perpetuity.
But if one group of people has the right to do that, why is it only that one group of people who has the right to do that?
Why doesn't everyone I can't start a car dealership and then say, well, everyone in a 10-block radius has to buy my car.
I'm going to deliver them a car and they have to pay me.
If I tried to enforce that kind of contract in a court, the court would charge me with contempt and wasting the court's time because I don't have the right to do that.
To impose an involuntary universal geographical contract on other people.
And if I don't have that right and you don't have that right, why would other people have that right?
That's part of this universality that I would sort of argue – and I'm not saying, okay, please understand.
I'm just giving you perspectives.
I'm not saying all of this is proven or true.
I mean, I think it is, but I'm not saying that this particular conversation is proving it all.
But this is part of the universalization of it, is that why would only one particular group have the right to do that and nobody else?
That's no longer universal, and therefore it can't really be called ethical.
All right. I think we've got a follow-up question to that.
Okay, you said that...
Nobody has the right to choose where they were born and therefore the contract that was signed into being in 1776 shouldn't apply to the rest of us because we didn't have a say in the decision.
So does that mean that every generation thereafter should draw up their own contract and should we have the same process?
Because if I remember anything from my history classes, it took years to decide on something as As strong as the Constitution, and so by the time any one generation has anything set into place, then that generation would be gone and their ideas would be lost.
So, what's the cutoff date for any kind of generation and should each generation have their own Constitution?
Well, I would say not, for a number of reasons.
First of all, I mean, the term generations is certainly useful, but it's never really applicable because it's not like everyone gets born on the same day and then dies on the same day, right?
It's a sort of rolling flow of people being born and dying, so there's no such thing, I think, as a discrete generation.
I mean, there are bulges like the baby boomers and so on, but...
There's no discrete generations, I think, where you could sort of turn over a new leaf and so on.
That would be the first thing. The second thing is that even if you do get a majority of people who want a particular form of social organization, I still would not – I don't think I could ever understand how that majority would have the right – I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
So I don't think the majority would have the right to impose its will upon the minority through force.
And I don't think that the generational thing really works.
I do believe that people will need, in a free society or a stateless society, people will need things like protection from violence and contract negotiations and resolution and protection of property and so on.
And there will be a demand for these things.
They will need a currency, of course, something that's not this kind of paper money that's handed out by governments around the world that continually loses value and results in these terrible economic cycles of boom and bust.
So people need currency.
They need contract enforcement and resolution of disputes and so on, divorces and custodies and all these kinds of things.
People absolutely do need these things as services in the society and As a former entrepreneur, I'm pretty aware of the degree to which people will always try to provide great solutions to the challenges that people face in negotiating and interacting with each other in business, in romance, in family, and so on.
So I think people should have the right to choose from a variety of offerings as to what is going to best suit their needs.
And I also believe that those offerings will tend to be uniform, you know, with some small variations.
And they will also tend to interoperate, right?
So if I try to sell a cell phone that only works in a 10-block radius, nobody's going to buy it.
And if I try and sort of sell an agency for resolving contract disputes that only works with one other company, then that won't work, right?
I mean, cell phone… Users, sorry, cell phone companies share bandwidth with each other.
They work together.
And, you know, the internet, right?
I mean, if I tried to create a gateway to the internet that doesn't accept anybody else's data but mine, then nobody will buy it.
Because it can't interoperate with other people, other internet providers.
And so there will be a strong, I think, irresistible movement towards interoperability between contract resolution organizations and keeping rules simple and clear and as cheap as possible and working to prevent disputes rather than Rather than to resolve them,
if that makes any sense. So, you know, if you and I enter into a contract, we would probably pay a percentage point or two to some third party that we would both agree to defer to.
If we entered into a disagreement, that third party would provide a ruling which we would agree to and we would buy insurance.
If I reneged on it and didn't accept their ruling, then that company would pay you as part of insurance and I would get a strike against me so that it would be more expensive for me to get I mean there's lots – again, nobody can design the future down to the last detail.
But these are things which certainly have lots of precedents in economics and history that I think would be very effective in giving people the legitimate services that they need to help the poor, to educate children, to resolve contracts.
These things can all be provided, I believe, through voluntarism and without the need for this coercive monopoly of the state.
Okay, thank you. I have one other question based off of your answer.
You were talking about how the majority shouldn't have the right to impose their will on a minority, but I think the idea of America is the fact that The minority kind of concedes that the majority has the choice, and if it's the wrong idea,
then the original majority will see that it was the wrong choice and will gradually join the minority and therefore commit social change.
And another idea about the fact that people do have a choice over multiple Because we have the choice over who we elect and why we elect them.
And like I said before, if it's the wrong person, then that person will eventually leave office and we will have a whole new slew of choices to choose from.
Sure. So does that fit?
So therefore, the majority does have the ruling party because it's able to The majority changes with every wrong decision and right decision.
Well, I mean, it's a fantastic question or objection that you're raising, and it's a big, meaty – and if I'm ever in the neighborhood, we'll have some drinks and chew it down in more detail because it's a very big and effective objection that you're raising.
And I'll just – in the interest of time and everybody's sanity, I'll just touch on a few brief points, which again, I'm not going to say is any kind of airtight case, but this is how I would approach answering that question.
It still is – I mean we have a majority.
We vote and so on.
It still is force that's being used to impose the will of the majority on the minority.
It's not the mechanics of how it occurs that is troubling me or that troubles me as a guy who's interested in philosophy and ethics.
It's not how the force is deployed.
It's that the force is deployed, right?
And so whether it's a majority or a minority, whether it's 51, 49, 60, 40, whatever, is not particularly important.
Whether you can try to convince other people to vote for different people and other people will show up in the polls and so on, to me, is not...
I think that's particularly important.
What is important is that the initiation of force is occurring from individuals to other individuals.
And how many individuals are in either camp, to me, doesn't really matter, right?
I mean, to take a silly example, right?
And he and I both agree to take your wallet and run off into the woods screaming something.
The fact that we're in the majority obviously doesn't make it right.
I mean I think we can basically understand that.
There's no defense in court.
Like if you then take us to court and say, well, they stole my wallet.
These nasty people stole my wallet.
There's no way we would get up in court and say, but Gerardo, we were in the majority, and therefore it was okay.
They would say, no, it's not.
It's a principle. It doesn't matter how many of you.
It doesn't matter what two of you agreed to steal the third guy's wallet.
It doesn't make it right.
So it really is the initiation of force that is the issue or theft that is the issue and not the mechanics of how it is arrived at.
The second thing is that – and again, I got a free – and I'm not going to try and pimp any of my books because they're all free anyway.
But I have a little book called Everyday Anarchy where I make the sort of following very, very brief argument that we don't take the political approach to solving problems in any other sphere that I know of, right?
So – When it comes to who we marry, you know, it's not our family's choice over who we marry, right?
So we have one vote. Our parents have two votes.
Our cousins have half a vote.
Our grandparents have a vote.
And, you know, they choose who we marry and we have to go along with that.
And then every four years we can sit down with our family if we're not happy with our spouse and say, well, I'd really like to get a divorce and so let's vote on that and everybody votes again.
So we don't use that approach to marriage, which is obviously a very, very important decision.
We don't use that approach when it comes to choosing a career or choosing a school.
We obviously will get information, but the decision is finally ours.
And our family doesn't get to vote on where we go to school or what profession we pursue.
And then we say, well, that's okay, because every four years, we can petition them to allow us to choose a career that is more to our liking.
And if we can convince them to, then we can switch careers.
But if we can't, then we just go along being forensic accountants or paleontologists or whatever they chose for us.
And when it comes to jobs and our friends and where we live and when we go on vacation, those are individual decisions for us.
They're not decided by a collective majority.
They're individual decisions that we make.
And if somebody were to propose that we run something like marriage or careers or jobs or where we live to submit to a kind of democratic majority vote political process reviewable every four years, we would be completely outraged.
We'd say, you can't run marriage like that.
You can't run careers.
You can't run occupations.
You can't run where you live according to that kind of process.
We would view it as the most insane intrusion into our natural rights for liberty and autonomy and self-determination.
And so again, the universalization comes in.
If it's really wrong to do it in these other areas, why would it be right to do it in areas of contract resolution or national defense or whatever?
And those, again, I'm not saying that I've answered all these questions, but the universalization does push back pretty heavily into those areas and say, well, we would view it as utterly wrong in all of these other areas, which are really much more important to us than these abstract areas of politics.
So why is it suddenly right in the political realm?
It still does violate the initiation of force, whether it's a majority or a minority.
Okay, thank you. You're welcome.
Great questions. You people had your lattes this morning, didn't you?
That's good to know.
Okay, I have a question that kind of goes with the majority and minority.
Topic that we are on.
You said, if the moral theory of majority rule is valid, that it must be valid for all situations.
So I'm going to kind of tie in Rand's article that we read.
That's kind of a characteristic of a collectivist country.
But Rand says that America is 100% an individualist country.
So do you think, like, elections in America, like, are a characteristic of a collectivist country?
And if so, like, Do you think America partially crosses over and contradicts itself sometimes when we do elections and things that involve majority and minority?
Yes. That's a shockingly brief answer.
Yeah, I mean, I think that – I mean, Ayn Rand was, I mean, to me, a complete genius and to kiss the hem of her garment would be a privilege beyond imagination.
But I think that she was referring to the – The free market and entrepreneurial and individualistic aspects of the American philosophy.
I certainly don't think that she was referring to the current political climate that was occurring when she was writing her great works, the post-Second World War period into the 50s and 60s.
I'm convinced that she was not saying that The majority rule that was going on in the political sphere of her time and even more so in our time, that that was 100% individualistic.
I think what she meant was that the general philosophy of America, which is something I really agree with or certainly would have agreed with more in her time than perhaps now… That the philosophy of America was you are responsible for your own life, that we should have voluntary cooperation,
that we should have free exchange of value, conversation, ideas and goods and services between individuals in a free market of – I think she was really talking about the spirit of America as a country, the shining city on a hill,
the new world, the world that was created out of particular ideals that came out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which were rights of men and not yet women nor minorities in terms of racial minorities, but that America had these ideals and was founded on these ideals of freedom and individualism.
But I'm positive that she would not say that that would apply to the existing government of her time because she was very, very critical of the existing government, even of her day, and I'm sure she would be even more critical of it now.
Hi. I don't really have an exact question.
I just kind of have something to say.
I'm going to see your response. It has to do with how you talk about gun control and war.
I kind of feel it. Peace is kind of impossible to find in human nature.
I'm sorry, I just missed that sentence, and I don't want to miss your question.
Could you just repeat that, please? I feel that peace is kind of impossible to find in human nature, and so why should someone take a side whether guns or war is necessary or not?
Because since we don't have peace, we do need them to defend and protect ourselves.
And that's why we have, like, policemen and soldiers, and they're not really being paid to kill like a hitman is, like how you compared them to, but in a sense, like, they're just protecting and doing their job.
They aren't set out to kill.
Well, I mean, I certainly agree with you that there will need to be, in any society, whether it's a society with a government or without, there will, very likely, although it may diminish over time, but there will need to be people who are trained in the use of force, in the use of violence, in the protection of others, right?
There may need to be security guards.
There may need to be bodyguards.
Again, I don't think it's going to be very big as society progresses, but there will need to be those people and I think there's nothing innately dishonorable about the profession of soldier or policeman or whatever.
I think that in the present, the issue that I have with those two occupations, and it's not with any particular individual in those two occupations, but the problem that I have with the occupations as a whole is not what they do, but the structure in which they do it, right? So it's not that there are people who will be paid to use force to protect others in cases of emergency, because everybody would have that right, right?
I could maybe shoot the mugger and people would be okay with that.
So it's not that defending people in the third party is wrong.
I think that defending people in the third party is actually a good thing to do.
It's that at the moment...
The funding for the police and the military comes out of the initiation of force, which is statist taxation.
So it's not so much the effects.
It's the cause that I would focus my moral question on.
So again, just to apply the universal aspect again, if – If one individual has the right to initiate force against a community to fund his or her preferred or even what the majority of the community prefers to be done with that money that was taken by force, why is it that only one person has that right?
Why cannot everybody have that right?
And of course we understand that if everybody has that right, then nobody has that right.
I mean if you have the right to impose a $10,000 bill on me without my consent in the form of some sort of taxes and that right is universal, then what happens logically?
What happens logically is you send me a bill for $10,000.
I send you a bill for $10,000 and I guess we could spend some time shipping that bill back and forth but no money would actually change hands.
If it's a universal right, so to speak.
If it's not universal, then how is it morally justified that only one person or one group can impose unilateral – impose forcefully unilateral contracts on other people?
And so, again, it's not so much the effect of what happens, right?
It's not any particular program or group.
It's the cause of how it is all funded, either through – like if I print money – Without having any basis for it in reality and economics, that's called counterfeiting, right?
But if the government prints money, it's called, I don't know, sound fiscal management or something like that.
But it is morally. It's indistinguishable from counterfeiting.
And so why is it a crime in the private sector and a laudable public policy in the government sector or the public sector?
And again, I'm not saying I'm going to answer all these questions because that's not – my goal here is certainly not to answer questions but to provide ways of asking questions that I think are very interesting and productive.
And maybe – I mean the possibility forever and always exists that, of course, I'm completely talking out of my armpit and I'm wrong about what it is that I'm proposing.
I'm missing something very important or something very essential that I haven't understood – And, you know, the state is both moral and necessary and I'm certainly wrong about – I could be completely wrong about my perspectives on religion and superstition and so on.
But it is really the methodology of asking these questions and how we pursue reasoning through these things.
And if we're going to break principle, right?
So if we're going to say, well, the initiation of force to take property is wrong except for these people.
Then we don't have a principle anymore.
We simply don't have a principle anymore.
Because if we break the universality of it, it's no longer a principle.
It's just a preference. It's like saying most people like chocolate and a few people don't.
Well, liking chocolate is not a moral principle.
But if we're going to say we should not initiate the use of force against each other...
That no one has the right to initiate force and nobody has the right to take property, then that's either a principle or it's not.
That's sort of the approach that I take, right?
And that's the philosophical approach.
Either it's a principle or it's not.
If it's not a principle, then let's stop talking about good and bad and right and wrong and just say, well, these guys can do it because they have guns and therefore they do it, right?
It's just an observation of fact, you know, like a lion can eat a gazelle and so it does.
We don't say it's moral or not, right?
But if we're going to have moral principles in the organization of society, which I argue is essential to pursue, then we do have – we run smack dab into this problem of universality and why we have exceptions to principles that we claim are moral.
And if they are moral and are principles, it must be universal by definition.
That is where the mental gymnastics, I think, are really, really worth pursuing to figure that out.
Because fundamentally, it's not about – The government and it's not about the church and it's not about soldiers and it's not about policemen.
Fundamentally, philosophy is really about our own lives.
It's about how we're going to live.
Are we going to have principles within our own life that are consistent, that we're going to pursue even when they're uncomfortable for us?
Or are we just going to kind of do what we feel like and go with the flow and join the historical errors of the majority and just say, well, it's right because that's the way it is, and just sort of make up reasons after the fact as to why things are good without worrying about consistency, but claiming consistency anyway.
And I think it's tough.
It's tough to do the former.
I'm not going to accept any authority but reason and evidence.
And although it may be uncomfortable and a challenge at times, I'm going to think for myself.
I'm going to not accept the sort of momentum of culture and history and that which kind of seems right because it's just been around for so long.
I mean slavery was around forever and people then began questioning.
The morality of it, right?
The subjugation of women and the lack of protection for children was the fundamental basis of most aspects of society for almost all of human history until people said, well, why would women not be included under the protection of society?
Why would certain races or certain groups be subjugated under the law or not given the protection of the law?
When we expand universality, society gets better.
I mean, that's my My basic contention, when we extend the rights of humanity to minorities and to women and to gays and to, you know, whatever, right?
When we universalize things, society just gets better.
And I think that that is the challenge.
And every particular generation looks at some new universalization and says, well, that's incomprehensible.
That could never work.
It's impossible, right? We can't free the slaves because… They have no jobs.
They have no jobs.
They have no work ethic.
They have no skills.
But when we do consistently apply universal principles, society really does get better.
And again, you can do your own research on that, of course.
Don't take my word for anything.
But that has been my strong understanding and research and experience of looking into these things.
And even though it seems like every new universalization is incomprehensible, in the future, it's simply looked on as natural.
And it seems hard to understand why it took so long.
So freeing – like ending slavery, which had been from the dormant of human history until the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries had been the cornerstone of human society.
People at the time went, you can't have a society without slavery.
It's impossible. It's all of human history.
People are natural slave owners.
They're natural slaves, as some people would argue.
And then, now that it's gone, we look back and say, well, how could anyone ever have believed that?
And I just sort of invite you to look at some of the things that we use to organize society at the moment.
You know, like taxation, like the state, like the military in its current incarnation.
And say, well, maybe, just maybe, maybe, there is a way of extending universalization of principles.
That is as powerful and effective as that which was done for women and children and minorities and gays and slaves and all that kind of stuff.
And even though it seems mind-blowingly incomprehensible to me, it's the same struggle that has been going on throughout human history to extend principles and to make...
The way that we organize society more consistent with that which we fundamentally accept to be right and good and true, right?
Peace and voluntarism and respect for property and so on.
The kindergarten ethics, if we extend them, it's my strong belief that society will continue to get better even though it may seem mind-blowingly incomprehensible to extend them in the way that we're talking about here.
I just wanted to say one more thing about how you talk about the universal...
What we view as being morally correct and how when you say that what's good for one must be good for all, that makes an excellent point because I feel like nowadays, especially with being in college,
the mentality is that what's right for you is not necessarily right for someone else and that you can both be right, but in a sense that does contradict what you say because for one person to be correct And then somebody else who's used something differently to also be correct would be the same as comparing, like, Hitler and Mother Teresa and saying that they're both doing the right thing.
Yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time in college as well and at graduate school, and this postmodern philosophy of everything is an opinion and everything is subjective and so on, I mean, it fundamentally doesn't hold up philosophically.
I mean, I really will take a strong stance on that.
I mean, there's lots of stuff that I'm still curious and uncertain about, but not this one.
I mean, just to give you a very, very simple example, and, you know, it's simple to explain, though it took me a long time to come up with it, so hopefully it's not that simple to think about.
But if someone says everything is relative, well, that's an absolute statement.
It's like someone who says nothing is true.
Well, if nothing is true, the statement nothing is true is false and therefore something must be true.
So at the very, very bottom, at the very beginning of philosophy, when you're talking about metaphysics as the nature of what is reality, or epistemology as what is knowledge, what is true and false, you can't say everything is relative because you've just made a statement that is not relative.
Everything is relative, and therefore it contradicts itself immediately.
It's like saying nothing is true, or it's like me walking up to you and saying, you don't exist.
Well, but I'm talking to you, so I'm immediately contradicting myself in my statement.
It's like me mailing you a letter saying the mail never gets delivered.
Well, if I believe that the mail never gets delivered, then writing you a letter to say that makes no sense.
It's like me going up to you and saying language has no meaning.
But I've just made a comprehensible statement called language has no meaning, therefore language must have meaning.
Right? So at the very beginning of things is where you need to look out for these contradictions.
Right? Nothing is true.
Well, is that a true statement? Yes.
Then something is true and the statement nothing is true can't be true.
Everything is relative. Well, is that an absolute standard that everything is relative?
No. Well, then, some things are relative and some things are not relative.
And if somebody says, yes, it is an absolute standard, then the absolute standard that everything is relative is automatically invalid because it's an absolute standard.
And this is the real challenge of philosophy.
Nothing fundamentally to do with some of the very engaging political topics we've been talking about here.
But when people say stuff, it's really, really important to sort of stop and look at the proposition that they're putting forward and saying, can this logically sustain itself in and of itself?
Like the statement, nothing is true, automatically is falsified.
It can't be valid. So, that is the real challenge of philosophy.
And it's really, I think, in that area that the beginning of real wisdom is to be found, which is that people will come up and say a lot of very silly stuff with a great deal of certainty.
Hopefully, I'm not one of those people.
But they will say a great deal of stuff that is logically completely contradictory.
It makes no sense. And they will just then go from there.
And I think it's really important to stop people at the very beginning of what they're saying.
You know, like if I have a 100-page mathematical proof, and on the first page it says 2 plus 2 equals a unicorn, you don't have to keep going, right?
You know, that thing at the beginning?
That makes no sense. So everything that you're using after that makes even less sense.
So it's really, really important to stop right at the beginning of a philosophical conversation and say, well, what is it that we're talking about?
Can this logically be sustained?
Does it make sense? Is it I've got to… A whole free 18-part Introduction to Philosophy course on YouTube and in my podcast series,
which you can check out if you want, or read any great philosopher, I think is also a fantastic way of doing it.
But I think it's in those areas that the greatest leaps forward in wisdom and understanding can occur.
Okay, so I have a question kind of not related to...
Anything but yet kind of still relating?
Oh no, it's a contradiction.
No, I'm just kidding. Go on. Well, yeah.
Okay, so you said in the readings that we had to read that nothing exists except for people.
Like we're not really...
We can't be put into groups or anything.
Like the government doesn't really exist because it's all individuals.
If that's the case, then how can you keep referring to us as a minority or a majority?
Because aren't those groups?
Yeah, and that's a great question, and I think I understand what you mean.
We can be put into groups.
I mean, there are blonde people, there are bald people, there are tall people, there are short people, blah, blah, blah.
People with freckles and people without freckles.
You can put people into groups.
Young people, old people, whatever, right?
People who wear thongs, people who wear boxers.
You can put people into groups, absolutely.
And if you think of something like biology, right?
In biology, we've got...
I'm no biologist, right?
But they say cold-blooded like reptiles and warm-blooded like mammals, right?
So you can categorize people and you can categorize animals, but the categories do not exist in the real world, right?
They don't exist like a tree, right?
So I can say, well, this group of trees I'm going to call a forest, right?
But the concept forest only exists within my own mind.
It does not exist In reality.
So whether I call it a forest or a flippity-jibbit or a jabberwocky or whatever, it has no effect on the forest itself.
The fact that I group a bunch of trees into a forest has no effect on whether they're trees.
Like if I call a group of trees a forest, they don't suddenly turn into dolphins flopping on the grass, right?
It doesn't have any effect on their actual material existence whatsoever.
And so when we conceptualize people, We don't change their properties whatsoever.
Like if I say, you know, this is a group of blonde, freckled people.
They don't suddenly gain the ability to fly.
They don't suddenly become cold-blooded or give birth through eggs.
They still are exactly the same as they were before I put them into a category.
The categories simply exist within my own mind and they're useful for sure.
Like if I have three bananas on a table and I say, hey, those are three bananas, there are in fact three bananas.
But the number three doesn't fall out of my mouth like a spittle and land on the table.
The number three is just a concept within my mind.
And the reason why that's so important is that when you understand that, then the majority has no more rights than the minority individuals.
It is simply a conceptual tag.
So when I say, well, if I call a bunch of trees a forest, it doesn't change the properties of any individual tree.
When I call a group of people a majority, it doesn't change the properties of any individual.
They have exactly the same properties as each individual human being as the minority.
Therefore, they cannot have more rights or some moral right that the minority does not possess because I'm just calling them something.
But not changing any of their individual properties through labeling them as something.
So it can't be that the majority can have more rights than a minority because I haven't changed the properties of any individual within the majority simply by grouping them as a majority.
I know that's a weird way to put it, but does that make any sense?
Thank you very much.
She didn't say yes or no.
Something about trees and dolphins.
Now I'm hungry. Your paragraph on drugs, I thought was interesting, and what you say, what one does in the privacy of their own home, and how people should decide what we do in our own home.
With that idea and the idea of individual rights, Does that mean we can do anything in our own home as long as it doesn't interfere with anybody else?
Or can we do anything that we want to as long as it doesn't interfere with anybody else's rights?
Yeah, I mean, I would say that – I mean, there are two things that are sort of basic to me in terms of ethics as principles, right?
I mean, it's non-initiation of force and respect for property.
And now, of course, you can do whatever you want to your own property, right?
I mean, I can – I don't know.
I can take a hammer to my car if I want to, but I can't take a hammer to your car, right?
And there will be consequences to me taking a hammer to my car, right, in that it might leak oil all over my lawn or whatever, right?
But, yeah, I would say that as long as I am not initiating the use of force against somebody else and I'm not violating property rights, then I think that's – yeah, you can do what you want in the privacy of your own home with the caveat that you are, of course, responsible for the consequences of what it is that you do and you can't – You can't force other people to pay for the consequences of your own actions.
To take a silly example, if I take out a pair of pinking shears and cut off my toe, well, it's my body.
I can do that, but I can't force anybody else to pay to have the toe reattached, if that makes any sense.
Obviously, I may need some psychiatric help if toe removal is my big hobby, but that would be my argument.
Now, there are some differences when it comes to Having children, right?
I mean, if you have children, you can sit home stoned all day if you're some trustafarian who's got money from mommy and daddy who won the lottery or whatever.
But you can't do that if you have kids, right?
Because they need your care and your protection and your support and your nurturance and so on, right?
Like in the same way, I don't have to feed every dog in the world or I'm a bad person.
But if I buy a dog, and sorry to analogize children to pets, but I mean just to make the point, if I buy a dog and bring it home, I'm responsible for feeding that dog.
Because I have removed from that dog any other possibility of getting food.
He's not getting fed in the pet store.
He's not getting fed by someone else.
He's not even free to find his own food.
So in the same way, I don't have to feed every homeless person in the world in order to be a good person.
But if I lure a homeless person into my home and lock him in the basement and don't feed him, then I'm morally responsible for that.
So the way that I formulate it is there are no unchosen positive obligations.
You can't be forced to do something that you have not Agree to beforehand and buying pets or having children is a chosen obligation and you're responsible for the care and protection of those because you've chosen to put them in your environment.
In that same way, for animals, do they have rights as a person?
Once you stop that person from having a dog but not feeding them, it's not interfering with anybody else's rights.
Well, I think that's an excellent question, and I'm certainly glad that everybody's lobbing their toughest hand grenades into my little bunker, but I'm going to give you my brief.
I'm not an expert on animal rights.
I'm not really much of an expert on anything, right?
These are just thoughts that I've had that I think are good arguments.
So this would be my stance on animal rights.
First and foremost, I think that there's way too much cruelty to animals in the world.
I absolutely, genuinely believe that.
And I think that there's way too much meat-eating in the world.
And generally, that occurs because of government subsidies, right?
I mean, it takes, what, seven pounds of grain to grow one pound of meat in a cow?
So why isn't meat seven times more expensive than your average vegetables?
Well, because... It's heavily subsidized by the state.
I think that if consumers had to pay the real cost of meat, then there would be much, much less consumption of animal meats.
I think that would actually be good for people as a whole, just in terms of both general morality and specific personal health.
I think our closest relatives are certain kinds of chimpanzees, and they have a 95% to 98% vegetarian diet, and that's not the case.
Most people have sort of meat with every meal.
So I do believe that there's far too much domestication of animals.
There's far too much slaughtering of animals, and that is specifically, I think, directly because of government policies in subsidizing meats and paying lots of money to farmers to...
To have cows and chickens and so on.
So that's sort of a practical or pragmatic thing that I think would occur.
I don't believe that animals are covered by the same moral rules as human beings for the simple reason that animals simply don't have the intellectual or mental capacities to enter into any kind of contract, to understand the consequences of their actions, to enter into any kind of voluntary contract in society or anything like that.
So I do think that animals are not covered under the same – I do think the cruelty to animals is a very bad thing.
And I think that the best way to reduce cruelty to animals is to increase kindness to children because it is one of – again, I'm no psychologist, but it is one of the hallmarks of a disturbed and dangerous personality.
One of the first things that you would look for is cruelty to animals.
And so if children are parented with gentleness and kindness and compassion – Then cruelty to animals will be much less if governments don't subsidize the production and consumption of meat, then the domestication of animals will be much less.
And I think that would be the way that I would approach it, but I simply can't get to the place logically where a dog is morally responsible for his actions.
He's acting too much on instinct, does not have a reasoning capacity, can't understand the consequences of his own actions in the same way that a human being can.
So I just don't feel that it's in the same category.
That having been said, I think that the cruelty to animals is something that should really be a focus in society, reduction of that cruelty.
You ask in your article, is the government not the greatest and most egregious example of an excessive self-destructive behavior?
And I was just wondering, how does this statement reflect or parallel your opinion of the United States government?
Okay. Well, in terms – sorry, let me just make sure I understand what you're asking.
Are you asking me to sort of define how I see the United States acting – the government acting in a self-destructive manner?
Yeah, pretty much. Oh, sure.
Well, I mean, you all are in college not trying to find jobs, right?
I mean, it's brutal out there to try and find work.
If you look at – what is the national debt at now?
$12 trillion? $13 trillion?
I think the deficit right now is over a trillion dollars, right, with Obama in power.
So clearly, it's not sustainable.
The existing system is simply not sustainable.
I mean, the unfunded liabilities of the United States government in terms of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and welfare and other aspects of which it has a commitment to pay for on the books but has no money to pay for, the unfunded liabilities of the United States government run in excess of $75 trillion.
I mean, that is completely unsustainable.
And when you are in such an unsustainable debt hole, to increase your debt – I mean, just think of this as an individual, right?
Some individual is $50,000 in debt, and the first thing they do is go out and buy a $40,000 car.
I mean, we understand that that would be self-destructive behavior economically at least on the part of that individual.
We would agree on that at least, right?
Yeah. And so, in the same way, just to look at things economically, it is a completely unsustainable system.
I mean, it's one of the reasons why I am very focused and urgent in my development.
In talking about philosophy and principles, because I think it's the violation of these principles, that violation of basic principles around theft and initiation of force that results in these kinds of destructive situations.
The U.S. has a higher per capita imprisonment rate than China does.
Two million Americans, I think, are currently in jail, half of which are for nonviolent drug offenses.
That, to me, is a destructive set of behaviors.
People who have issues with drug addiction should not be thrown into prison cells, I believe.
I mean, it's been proven time and again, statistically, even, that rehabilitation and some counseling is the way to do it, not just put them into situations where they can very easily get drugs and better drug contacts, where it's harder for them to reintegrate into society after they've been put in jail because it's a permanent record.
Which encourages them to go back into a life of crime.
I mean, it's just a bad way to solve problems.
So, I mean, just the 30 million deaths from American wars overseas, that to me is pretty self-destructive.
It sows a lot of seeds of hatred around the world.
And the world is getting smaller, right?
And when the world is getting smaller and weapons are getting more violent, I think you want to anger fewer people, not more.
And... So I think that there's a lot that is self-destructive in the nature of statism as a whole, in the nature of saying, well, we're going to have this group of individuals, and we're going to give them the right to use whatever force they want to achieve their goals.
I think that that is not a good situation in general, and I think it does tend towards an increase in that power and an increase in destructiveness.
But without a doubt, I mean something is going to have to change radically for the system to be sustainable, right?
I mean there's going to have to be huge spending cuts which are going to be very brutal to a lot of people.
There's going to have to be – I mean hopefully a bringing down of the size of the military industrial complex and all this sort of stuff.
I'm hoping that we can make the adjustments that are needed in societal – I'm not an American, but Canada has its problems too.
I'm hoping that we can make the changes that we need to in our society with reference to moral principles rather than, well, the system has collapsed financially and we have to do X, Y, and Z now out of emergency, which tends to be when good decisions are not made in those kinds of situations, which is why I think it's really important for us to examine principles in order to solve these problems rather than just panic when things go really bad and make bad decisions as has happened many times in history.
I have a couple of questions from students in my other class sort of related along the welfare topic.
One of them asks, how is welfare immoral when it helps people in need and, as you mentioned, how the system is unsustainable.
How, I mean, a lot of people would be concerned on, you know, how we are going to support, you know, poor people and help each other out in that way.
I guess that would be one of the biggest concerns about, you know, the stateless society.
So I'd like you to address that.
That covers a few questions.
Those are fantastic questions.
I mean, there are two aspects, and I really do appreciate everybody's attention here.
I hope that this is enlightening in terms of ways to think about these problems or alternative ways to think about these problems.
So I just wanted to say I really do appreciate everyone's attention here.
And we'll just start off with a couple of facts about welfare.
We just look at the post-war period in the United States, 1946, to the Great Society in the mid-1960s, Andrew Johnson.
If we look at those basic facts...
Poverty was being solved simply through the growth in the economy.
So the number of people under the poverty line, which was adjusted for inflation every year, the number of people under the poverty line fell by 1% approximately every single year.
Why? Because the economy was growing like gangbusters.
And so, the way to solve the problem of involuntary poverty, right?
There's voluntary poverty and there's involuntary poverty, right?
So, voluntary poverty, for want of a better way of putting it, is something like, I got my savings and I went and blew them on the horses at the track or something.
something.
I went on a wild bender weekend in Vegas and stuffed them into the panties of naughty women or something, whatever it is that someone has.
That to me is sort of like a voluntary poverty.
Another kind of voluntary poverty is you all in this class and listening to this, right?
Because you are deferring income in order to spend money going to school.
So, you are poorer than you would be if you weren't in school and getting a job.
So, that's kind of like – or somebody who wants to become a monk, right?
Or me who took a 75% pay cut to talk about philosophy rather than sell software.
So, there's voluntary poverty and there's involuntary poverty.
The involuntary poverty is, I really want to get a job, but there's nothing available.
I really want to buy a house, but they're so expensive because the government is doing weird things to the housing market.
So, I think it's important to differentiate between those two things.
The way to solve involuntary poverty is to have economic growth, and the way that you have economic growth is through freedom, right?
I mean, and again, I'm not going to say that's, you know, don't believe me because I said so, but you can do the research yourself that in the absence of, you know, very strict and coercive controls of the economy, the economy tends to grow because people like to build new things and they like to work and, you know, it can be a very enjoyable thing to do.
So, historically, the problem of poverty was being solved through the expansion of the free market.
And just think of your lives relative to the lives of somebody in the Middle Ages, right?
I mean, they lived in their own filth.
I mean, it was vile.
Most people, I mean, the average life expectancy in the Roman Empire was 21 years old, right?
I mean, that was dragged down by a lot of infant mortality.
But what has changed?
Well, it's not because government has ordered people to become rich.
It's simply because a growing freedom in trade and exchange has produced a growing economy, which deals with Over time, the problem of involuntary poverty.
Now, the problem of voluntary poverty is much tougher.
It's much tougher not to crack.
And there are organizations like the United Way or other charitable organizations that do fantastic work in this kind of stuff.
Homelessness, which so often is related to mental illness, is something that takes a lot of work to solve.
And a lot of homeless people, because they're mentally ill, can't make very good decisions about shelter and so on.
And Do we take away those people's freedoms?
do we not?
I mean, these are all complex questions, which I don't think can be solved by government mandates.
So the first thing I think to understand is that in a free society, people who don't want to be poor will have much, much, much greater opportunities to not be poor, right?
And people who choose to be poor, well, what's wrong with that?
I mean, there's nothing wrong with saying, I only want to work part-time because I really enjoy building xylophones in my basement or whatever, or I don't want to work in the software field anymore.
I want to talk about philosophy with people, and so I make less money.
So I'm poorer than I used to be, but I'm rich in spirit or something, right?
But it's just a choice that people make, which is, to me, a perfectly valid choice.
Now, the sad thing, of course, is that the reduction in the poverty rate that occurred in the post-war period in the United States stopped when the welfare state really came in and has hovered around the same ever since, and that is a real shame.
Whatever you tax diminishes or reduces.
whatever you subsidize increases.
And when you tax productivity and you subsidize welfare or people who are poor, you will reduce the economic growth because you're taxing the creation of jobs and the creation of economic opportunities.
And you are creating or at least maintaining the people on welfare because they simply have less incentive to go and find work and they have more incentive to not.
So there are very tragic effects to the welfare state.
There's been some significant studies that show that the IQ of children raised in the welfare state or in welfare families is substantially lower than even controlled for all variables other children.
So it has a negative effect on brain development and so on among children.
So I mean, I think it's just a really bad solution.
And of course, since the current system is unsustainable, what is going to happen when the welfare checks can no longer be sent out because the government simply has no money left?
I mean, that's going to be really, really bad, right?
So, even if you think it's okay now, because it's not sustainable, it's not going to stay where it is.
So... So I think that freedom – economic freedom is very important to build opportunities for people to make it easier to start their own businesses, to make it more possible for them to get jobs at good wages.
I think that's really important.
And I think that private charities – it's very important for private charities to get involved as they always have historically.
Welfare did not grow out of a no-charity situation.
There was already charity.
There was very effective charities to deal with involuntary – sorry, to deal with voluntary poverty and some involuntary poverty as well.
But with the rise of the welfare state, those charitable agencies simply get displaced.
And so we know that they will come back if welfare from the state side diminishes.
And the last thing that I'll sort of say about this – and again, it's a big topic, so I'm not going to claim that I've answered everything by any stretch.
But if you – If you had $100,000 and you wanted to put it to really good use to help the poor – and everybody wants to help the poor.
Everybody you talk to about a free society wants to help the poor and so they will.
If nobody wanted to help the poor and nobody cared to help them, then we'd have some more concern about it.
But because everybody does, we know that they will.
But if you had $100,000 and you really wanted to help the poor – Would you give it to the United Way or some other charity that was lean and mean and really worked to be effective as possible?
Or would you write a check to the government saying, go help the poor with this money?
Everybody I've ever asked that question says, well, I'd give it to private charity.
Give it to the government. 90% overhead or 80% overhead is going to go to the bureaucracy and a bit of it's going to trickle down, but I'm basically just subsidizing civil servants, not helping the poor.
And so we kind of all understand the ineffectiveness of it in our gut.
It's just hard to imagine how it could work in the absence of this kind of system, but it certainly has in the past much more effectively than it does now.
All right.
We've got one more question and then class is going to close here, but we'll ask one more question and let you finish with your closing comments.
When I read, it's me again.
Sorry.
When I read your essay or article or whatever you want to call it, one of my main questions or responses was the idea of money and, And just a question real quick.
You use money, right? I do.
Okay. Well, my question is people...
Money is only as good as what people believe it is.
And so my question is, what is the difference between the conceptual meaning for money and the label and the conceptual label for something like government and family?
Because government and family only have as much meaning as people give to it just like money.
That's an excellent question.
And there was a lot in your question, so I'm going to pick that which is most convenient to me.
No, I'm going to see if I can extract the essence and you can tell me if it makes any sense or not.
And if I've missed your point, just interrupt me and say, dude, start again, right?
So you're saying that money has no particular meaning because it is just pieces of paper.
And why is it that money would have more meaning or why would I place meaning in money as a concept whereas I don't place meaning in something like the government as a concept?
Is that what you're asking? Yes.
Okay. Well, not to be completely boring about the history of the dismal science, but I'm sure you're somewhat aware that money as pieces of paper is a government invention, right?
This is not something that money – in a free market, money is – it's just another good and service.
Money is like a road or an iPod.
It's just a medium of exchange that is – the more valuable it is, the more stable it is.
It's the more valuable it is, the more universal it is, and the more accepted it is and so on, which is why nobody produces credit cards that only work in one store.
So, in the free market, money has a number of characteristics.
The first thing is that it is not...
A piece of paper. The piece of paper is only government.
So the way that it evolved – and again, I'll keep this real, real brief and just focus on the US here.
The way that it evolved was originally it was gold and silver and maybe copper a little bit here and there.
But it was gold and silver.
A bimetallic currency standard was the foundation of the US currency and currencies throughout the world.
But what happened was people didn't like carrying around big heavy bricks of gold to do their business.
So, what they did was they put the gold in banks and they got pieces of paper that said this represents one ounce of gold.
And then what they would do is they would take the paper around and use it.
And then when people wanted the gold, they would simply take it to the bank and the bank would give them the piece of gold.
So, originally, the pieces of paper were not just pieces of paper printed arbitrarily but were issued by private banks, not the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank but is a monopoly government counterfeiting monstrosity in my opinion – But private banks would issue these pieces of paper to represent actual gold or actual silver or actual value within their vaults.
Now, this is called the gold standard, right?
And it's not perfect, but, you know, it certainly is better than fiat currency.
And then what happened was, through a variety of nasty political maneuvers, the government ended up gaining control over the currency for the entire nation.
And it eventually disconnected gold from the currency, so that you could no longer take your $20 bill and go and get an equivalent amount of gold.
Now, what that meant was the government could print whatever money they wanted.
It's like being able to type whatever number you want into your bank account.
You just type whatever you wanted and that's what the government does.
That's why since the foundation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 to almost a century later, the US dollar has lost over 95% of its value because they just keep printing money.
If you keep printing money, what happens is each dollar is worth less.
In other words, a dollar that used to be able to buy a candy bar can now only buy 50% of a candy bar because there are twice as many of them.
And so the candy bar price has to go up to $2, right?
That's called inflation, right?
And inflation fundamentally results from printing too much money relative to the supply of goods and services in a society.
So I use money at the moment because I'm forced to, right?
Because there's no – government doesn't allow competition in the money supply.
If they did, I would use something else.
So it has meaning because it is the only medium of exchange that is allowed in any particular country, and therefore you have to use it.
But it doesn't have meaning insofar as it actually represents viable goods and services in the way that private currency is used to.
Okay. I guess that ends the Q&A session.
We're a little over time here, but we still have a minute or two for you to finish up with any closing comments.
You can plug your website and anything else that you feel might be beneficial?
Yeah, look, I mean, you can go to the website.
I have lots of free podcasts and books and stuff.
It's all free. I mean, I survive on charity.
I'm a donation guy, so that's why I know that it can work if you give good enough services.
But you guys are students, so don't even think about donating.
Just consume money. I think we're good to go.
But fundamentally it's not about gods, no gods, governments, no governments.
I mean I believe that we need ethics that don't rely on gods and governments because I believe that is the next stage of the progress of expanding universal principles in society.
But fundamentally, philosophy is not about conclusions.
It's not about should there be this or should there be that or how should currency work.
And those things are very useful and important to examine.
But fundamentally, philosophy is about skepticism.
It's about not accepting things as being true just because they've been around for a long time.
It's about starting from first principles.
It's about being original and facing the anxiety that occurs from thinking that you might be living in the matrix.
That with philosophy comes that sort of kind of unplugging of things that seem to make sense, but when you look at them from a sort of principled moral standpoint, make less and less sense the more you dig into them, and that's a really disorienting thing.
And I think that's one of the reasons why that movie, The Matrix, which, you know… Guys are pretty young for it, I guess.
But why the movie The Matrix and not the second two that sucked.
But the first one that was really good, why I think it struck a chord in people, because there is a kind of waking up to a principled reality and comparing that to a lot of the unconscious historical errors that accumulate in culture and society and comparing the two, that is a real challenge.
But it is, I really genuinely believe, where human progress, human happiness, peace, voluntarism, free trade, free markets, free minds, free speech, all of that comes out of the consistent application of principles.
And if you take on this challenge, and you don't have to, of course, right?
If you take on the challenge, it has certainly produced a very exciting and vibrant life for myself.
I think that we can only meet each other in our relationships.
We can only meet in reality.
We can't meet in fantasy.
We can't meet in error.
We can only meet in the truth.
We can only meet in reality and that's why one of the great things that comes out of a dedication to philosophy is real intimacy with other people because you're not defending things which aren't true and avoiding things that are true.
You're simply speaking the truth openly to each other.
And that's an embrace of the minds that is an intimacy that I just didn't get at all before I got into the philosophical life.
So that's a sort of pitch that I would make.
It does bring happiness.
It does bring intimacy. But it is a great challenge.
And, you know, proceed with caution.
All right. Thank you so much for your time, Steph.
We'll let you go now. But I appreciate all of your...
Time and your thoughts, and I look forward to engaging in discussion with my students about some of the stuff you said, and you do have permission until, unless anybody else doesn't feel that they want their voices, yes, you do have permission to post this podcast online so that everybody can enjoy it.
That's very kind, and I also just wanted to say, and I'll let you guys talk, and I'll shut up in like 20 seconds, I promise, but I just wanted to, you know, it's always been my belief that everybody's a genius and everybody's a philosopher, and I just wanted to incredibly commend the class on the brilliance of the question and the succinctness.
I mean, I wish I could be as quick in answering those questions as you guys are in asking them, but...
The questions were fantastic.
The thoughts that have been generated through this process are just brilliant.
And I think you all should just be incredibly proud of the degree to which you have very productively and intelligently engaged in asking these essential questions.
And I just wanted to say that, I mean, I was expecting to be impressed, but I was even more impressed than I expected.
And I think that's something that you should be very proud of.
And that's the last thing that I'll say.
So thank you very much for your time and have yourselves a fantastic term.
Thank you. Right back at you, brothers and sisters.
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