All Episodes
Previous Next
April 23, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:24
1648 Preparing to Speak of Freedom - A Convo

I give some advice to a listener who is going to do a speech on voluntarism.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello. Hey, how's it going?
Not bad, you? Great, thanks.
Great. So what's the venue?
What's the speech?
Well, I'm in a town here that I don't live in, and I'm actually here for a few months on business.
And there's a coffee shop around the corner that have lectures on stuff like that all the time.
And I was talking to the owner the other day, and I asked him if I could put on a little talk or lecture on...
And anarchism and morals and, you know, how they, at least how I see it.
And he thought it was interesting and he said, okay.
And he asked me when and I said, okay, well, let me plan something and then I'll have a better idea.
Right, right. And how would you like to, how have you thought of approaching it?
Well, I thought of approaching it in the sense of starting with the non-aggression principle kind of perspective so I can get people kind of on board with me because most people tend to agree with the non-aggression principle and then work my way on to like where like government and maybe talk a little bit of statistics.
Basically, I have 20 minutes and then it's question and answer.
Right, right, right.
Well, I can certainly give you some of my thoughts, and obviously it's your presentation when it comes down to the reality of it, but I can certainly give you some stuff that's worked for me, and you can let me know.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily put anarchism in the title.
Because it's going to draw a certain kind of, quote, anarchist, you know, the sort of Sid Vicious kind.
And, you know, it's like if you're going to talk about nihilism and you put nihilism into the topic, then you draw people who aren't necessarily philosophical but just kind of emo, right?
So, you know, society ethics or, you know, voluntarism and society, you know, whatever it is, right?
That would be sort of my suggestion first and foremost.
I completely agree with that.
I've encountered that several times.
I've had a guy at a bar once ask me, after having a few minutes of just standard political talk, nothing specific, he kind of asked me abruptly, what do you believe in?
Like, what are you, conservative?
And I was like, well, I'm kind of following anarcho-capitalism.
And he's like, what's that? And I'm like, well, anarchy mixed with capitalism.
And he almost lunged across the bar to, like, attack me.
It was the most strangest experience I've had.
Yeah, I mean, we don't own the word anarchism.
The word anarchism has been owned by statists, right, who have defined it in such a way that no reasonable person would be for it.
No quote reasonable, right?
No person who's not familiar with the theories.
And so... It's just a word that we can't really use.
We can't reclaim it like the N-word for black people.
They can reclaim that word in a kind of cool way.
We're not there yet.
So I think that I wouldn't do it myself.
And I think that I would start with...
The system doesn't work.
You don't want to be a solution in search of a problem.
The first thing I would say is the system clearly doesn't work.
You're in the States. You can have all the statistics in the world about the $100,000 or $200,000 owed per household on the national debt.
Unjust wars.
Terrible statistics on the literacy rate of high school graduates.
You know, the system doesn't work.
Actually, I'm in Canada.
Oh, Canada. Well, it's still pretty similar statistics.
We have, you know, a massive sort of welfare state and all this, and there was an article in McLean's just about how...
The boomers are just starting to hit the medical system as they retire.
And it's like 10 to 15 times per year the cost for an older person than for a younger person in the healthcare system.
So it's just not sustainable.
It's not going to work.
Or it doesn't work.
Mathematically, it can't continue.
So the question of the status quo doesn't exist.
There's no such thing as keep doing what we're doing.
That mathematically doesn't.
Well, it's been shown repeatedly that it'll fail in any kind of simulation, what we're currently doing.
Sure, sure. And, you know, you don't even need to have...
You just need to project forward five or ten years and everybody gets, you know, that this is...
And it's not just us, right?
I mean, it's all governments around the world.
I mean, Greece and the...
I mean, Greece is pulling down the euro and they're having this massive bailout and America is going into the tank and all these kinds of things.
So most governments...
And where the economies are doing somewhat better, you have these repressive regimes like in China and India and other parts of Asia.
So... So, the system as a whole doesn't It doesn't work.
And democracy has gone through so many manifestations throughout its history that it doesn't seem very likely that one more manifestation isn't going to work.
Now, I was thinking about a quote by Winston Churchill the other day who said, democracy is the worst system in the world of government, except for all the others.
And I actually kind of agree with that.
You know, it is one of the better systems of government.
It's just that the question is not...
What sort of government we should choose?
That's sort of begging the question.
That's saying, if you were in the 17th century, that's like saying, what kind of slavery do we want?
Well, that's kind of begging the question, right?
The question is, do we want slavery at all?
And the question that we should be asking is, if we have an institution that has repeatedly and catastrophically failed for the past 5 or 10,000 years, Is it possible?
Is it possible? That we can have thoughts about a society without this destructive institution at its core.
I mean, it's possible. And I would just throw it out there.
There's a thought experiment.
Let's just do a thought experiment, not let's go turn over the houses of parliament and fill them with potted plants.
It's just a thought experiment.
What are the possibilities? Well, one nice thing about anarchism, of course, or one nice thing about voluntarism, or whatever you're going to call it, is that It is consistent with moral principles that we all already accept, right?
I mean, nobody here, I assume you're in a coffee shop, right?
Nobody here has used violence to get their cup of coffee, right?
Very true. I assume you all paid.
I assume that you did not use violence to get the clothes on your back, that you did not use violence to get here.
You didn't grab a hobo and whip him until he charged into the place and dumped you off his back, right?
So everybody's living this life of nonviolence.
And we all say and we all accept that violence is a bad way to solve problems.
It doesn't really solve problems except in the very short run for the person with the gun.
But in the long run, things get bad for everyone, including the guy with the gun, right?
So we all accept that in the personal sphere, but it's a real challenge for us to extend that thinking to the public sphere, right?
To the sphere of government.
We've just lived with this institution so long that it seems completely freaky to think of life without it.
But We've had even bigger revolutions in the past, right?
So we've had rights for women, unthinkable, throughout most of history.
We've had the end of slavery, at least formal slavery, and that's, you know, that's fantastic.
We're starting to think about rights and protections for children, and that's fantastic.
So we've had these moral revolutions where stuff which has just been central to human society throughout its history is called into question, is examined with a Socratic moral rigor, And it's found to be invalid.
And people then take the courage to rebuild society according to universal moral principles.
And then, you know, I just sort of go into the NAP. But that would sort of be an introduction that could be helpful, you know, in a way of just helping people to put into context what it is that you're saying.
Exactly. My biggest belief is that we need to educate more people with this kind of thinking because so many people are just, they absolutely worship the government without even realizing they worship it.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I think I know what you mean.
I wouldn't say that they worship it.
I mean, you could be right in terms of the people that you've met.
What I would say is that when you say to people, society without government, what they hear is like marriage without people, children without parents, mass without gravity.
Like, it doesn't make any sense because we just associate the two things.
We think group of people, I mean, we need to be more creative, more imaginative in solving these problems.
And so, you know, that's the invitation, right?
And we have this weird mutation, right?
So in the private sphere, with you and I, all of us here, we don't have a government in this coffee shop.
We don't. We can debate.
You can interrupt if you want.
We can get into it. We don't have a government.
Now, There's no government, in a sense, on the street.
There's no government in the town, just in terms of your everyday interactions with people.
But when we move into society as a whole or countries as a whole, suddenly it's impossible to imagine that human beings can get along without this big violent hierarchy in the center of things.
And that creates a huge logical and moral problem.
Look, is violence a good way to solve problems or is it a bad way to solve problems?
If violence is a good way to solve problems, why is it only the government that gets to do it?
If violence is a bad way to solve the problems of society, then why do we have this compulsive hierarchy at the center of things?
And these are not abstract questions because we have governments that do not stay stable in their use of violence.
The Canadian government is dozens of times larger now per capita and even adjusted for inflation than it was at the beginning of things.
Governments continue to grow and grow.
They're not stable.
So we're not talking about, I don't know, a freckle.
We're talking about skin cancer.
It's not a stable situation.
And that is something that we are going to have to address sooner or later.
We have to, as a society, address the problem of violence in the way that we organize things.
Do we need the violence of taxation?
Do we need the violence of prisons?
Do we need the violence of the state?
Do we need the hidden violence of inflation and national debts?
Do we need to force parents to pay for education?
Would they not do it otherwise?
Do we need to force people to be charitable?
Do we need to force people to take care of the sick?
Do we need to force people to take care of the old?
Well, if we do, then we have a problem because these governments are never stable.
They continue to grow and they eventually collapse, always throughout history.
And so the best thing we can do is it's like a tent that's continually collapsing on you.
The best thing you can do is prop it up a little bit before the whole thing finally caves in.
That's the best that can conceivably be hoped for.
It's some sort of new society or some sort of revolution that keeps the government at bay for a generation or two or three.
And then it swells and eats up everything and everything collapses.
And there's this crushing debt and burden.
The economy breaks apart.
And then you slowly rebuild things and then it starts all over again.
I don't think that that's the best that human beings can do.
I think that human beings who can...
Build computers and nanotechnology and 3D movies can do better than this, you know, constant heart attack followed by fatty foods followed by heart attack of governments.
I think we can do better. I agree completely, and this is why I want to do this.
I want to help educate this kind of system because I find that even out of my friends that completely agree with me, they're like, oh, but I'm not going to talk to anyone else about this.
They're kind of afraid to talk to their friends about it.
To them, it's just like, oh, I agree with you completely, but then they just go on and live normal.
To me, I think that's part of the problem, so I kind of want to do anything I can to go against that.
Oh, no, good for you. Absolutely.
I'm not trying to convince you.
I'm just sort of saying the things that I found.
Oh, no, I know. In trying to get others.
No, I think what you're doing is fantastic.
I hope that you record it and you'll be able to post it on the message board so that people can hear what it is that you're saying.
And if people get all kinds of hoity, you know, like, oh, we've got a great system of this and that, you know, a question that could be helpful to ask people is, so what you're saying is that we're done.
You know, like that's A government that continually grows, that gets into completely unsustainable debts, that cannot educate its children with any kind of efficiency, that ridiculously overspends and creates a system that is completely unsustainable and is going to crash in a terrible way.
We're done. That's the very best that we can do.
You know, and of course, if you took a car in that was on its last legs and, you know, coughing, I don't know, horse shit out of its carburetor, and they said, well, we've put four Band-Aids on it, it should be able to get you home, and then it's going to break down again, would you say, great, you know, that's a fantastic job?
No, you'd say, look, this repetitive crisis...
It's not great.
And you just have to look at the 20th century, right?
I mean, you've got the arms race between England and Germany and France, and to some degree America in the early 1900s.
You have a crash, I think, in 1905.
You have wars in Asia in 1905.
You have the First World War.
You have the Communist Revolution.
You have the hyperinflation in Germany, and you have the massive I mean, just talking about American imperialism, let alone what's going on in the rest of the world, you've got tens of millions of people slaughtered in the Soviet empire.
In the Chinese Empire, you've got 300 million people killed by governments, even outside of war.
This cannot be conceivably called an optimum way of dealing with social problems.
I mean, nobody could look at that and say, that is the very best that human beings could ever possibly do.
No. There's room for improvement.
And by improvement, we don't mean tweaking.
We don't mean fixing slavery by replacing whips with, by replacing cat o'nine tails with cat o'eight tails, right?
I mean, that's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about fundamentally reexamining the institutions that cause such catastrophes throughout human life.
Millions of people in jail throughout the world.
You've got organized crime, corrupting police departments.
You have unions squashing the educational potentials of children.
I mean, this is not the best that we can do.
And tweaking isn't going to do it because an institution which is 5,000 to 10,000 years old, which is the state, has been tweaked a lot over the last 5,000 or 10,000 years.
If incredibly ingenious and brilliant human beings who've been working at tweaking the state for five or ten thousand years Have only gotten this far, then another tweak isn't going to do it.
I'm too humble to think that I'm somehow smarter than 5,000 or 10,000 years of highly interested human beings attempting to solve these problems.
I'm going to say no. If 5,000 or 10,000 years of intense human intellectual, moral, and social effort has produced what we have now, then no.
No. Another tweak is not going to help.
We need to look at things more fundamentally.
And the tweaks that we've been doing haven't really been improving things at all.
The ones that could actually improve things, like not that I support that even if the government was getting smaller or anything like that, it's still not the right type of system.
But at least we'd be heading in the right direction.
Oh, granted, but it would still, it'd be like, I can't come up with an analogy, but it would be like just delaying the inedivable.
You know, it wouldn't be actually helping in the long run.
Well, but if governments were getting smaller in a sort of consistent way, it would be because people were replacing violent solutions with peaceful solutions, but that never happens, right?
And you can mention, of course, which can be helpful to me, and I'm sure to you it's common knowledge, but a lot of people don't know it that well, the imbalance of incentives, right?
So the people who are profiting from government power have a massive incentive to continue a particular government program, right?
So it could be artists getting grants, It could be farmers.
It could be postal workers.
It could be school teachers. It could be retired people.
Like whoever it is, they have a massive incentive to keep these programs going.
Whereas each taxpayer who's being taxed 50 or 100 or 1,000 bucks for each one of these 10,000 programs has no particular incentive to stop any one of them.
And it's this imbalance of incentives that is continually making the state bigger and bigger and bigger.
Because if I can get a million dollars a year from the government, I have a massive incentive to lobby the government to keep that going.
But my million dollars a year costs, what, 30 bucks for each Canadian?
What incentive do they have to stop me?
Well, 30 bucks worth, right?
So it's this massive imbalance of incentives that causes the problem.
And it's one of the major things.
And that can't be solved.
That can't be solved within the context of the institution.
Whenever you have a violent transfer of wealth, you create these imbalance of incentives.
And this is exactly how the mafia works, right?
I mean, the mafia has this imbalance of incentives insofar as if I'm running some store and they come and take $1,000 a month from me from protection money.
Whereas if I go forward to try and take the organization down, I'm likely to get me and my family killed.
Well, this is an imbalance of incentives, right?
So I'll just pay them their money and live with whatever's left over from paying them off.
And so this imbalance of incentives, violence always works that way, right?
So for people who are using violence, there's a huge incentive to continue to expand it.
And for people on the receiving end, there's very little incentive to fight it because the stakes are so high.
So, you know, just talk about these imbalance of incentives and, you know, that it's not that everybody in the government is evil.
It's just that the system itself, it doesn't work in any fundamental way.
Violence doesn't solve problems.
Violence doesn't solve problems. Now, people, of course, will start hurling all these objections at you.
And, you know, in 20 minutes, I would sort of say, like, but the whole point is I don't have any answers.
And the whole point is that nobody has any answers.
And the state is the illusion of an answer.
The state is just pointing a bunch of guns at people and saying, hey, look, we're organized.
But that's like locking a bunch of people into a room, throwing in some textbooks and saying, look, an education.
No, it's not.
It's an illusion. I don't have the answer as to how the roads will be built.
I don't have the answer as to how national defense will be provided.
Because if I had the answer, if somebody had the perfect answer for how society should be organized, then that person should be the political, economic, and moral dictator of the world.
But the reality is nobody knows how all these things are going to be done.
I mean, nobody even knows how a freaking pencil gets made, right?
I mean, there's like probably a thousand people contribute to the making of a single pencil.
Not one person has enough skills to dig up the graphite and grow the wood and treat the wood and come up with the paint and paint, you know, and through the eraser.
Who the hell knows what that stuff is made of, right?
So, if a human being doesn't, no single human being even knows how to make a pencil, how on earth could any individual or group of individuals know how society should be run?
I don't know. Who you should marry.
I don't know what job you should have.
I don't know what you should take in school.
Because if I knew all of these things, then you would just come to me and say, what should I do?
And I'd say, do this, this, this, and this.
And you'd go off and do it, and you'd be perfectly happy.
But no human being has this knowledge.
And I don't know how all the problems in the world are going to be solved in the absence of a government.
But I sure as hell know that they're not being solved, but rather being made worse.
By the presence of violence.
Just like when you get rid of slavery, people say to you, well, how's this slave going to get a job?
And how's this slave going to get a job?
And what about this guy? I don't know.
I don't know. Because if I knew exactly what slaves should be doing, they should still be slaves to me.
But the reality is nobody has this knowledge.
So I wouldn't try and get sucked into explaining how everything could work.
You could say, look, there's tons of examples of how this stuff does get solved peacefully.
But it's like saying, if we get rid of forced marriage, how on earth will people get married?
Well, they'll go to singles bars, they'll hook up online, they'll join clubs, they'll meet in school.
It doesn't matter. I don't have an answer as to how each individual is going to get married if you get rid of an enforced marriage market.
But the point is, it's just a wrong and inefficient way to do things.
It's immoral to use force.
And what happens in the absence of force...
Who knows? But that doesn't matter.
What matters is that we don't use force to solve these problems.
Anyway, that would sort of be just because people would try to sucker you into being the, you know, the genius of the ages who can solve every problem on the fly without a government, and I'd try and avoid that if I were you.
Yeah, I agree completely.
One of my biggest goals is just to get people talking about this stuff.
I find most people kind of, even when you talk to them about it, they kind of shy away from it and they'll never mention it again to anyone.
They'll think about it.
But I just want people to be able to understand that, like you said, there's no solution right now.
And what we currently have isn't working.
And it's going to stay that way if no one is willing to communicate about it.
Right, right. And we have to, I think, look for some really creative and different solutions.
And it's the solutions that work in our own lives.
That's where we should start, right?
Yep. Oh, like I've read your books and you have great solutions to it.
And, you know, if you could implement them and all that, it would be a great world.
But who says that someone else doesn't have a better solution?
Oh, exactly. Yeah. It's more like everyone needs to talk about things and more people need to be exposed to the current solutions that do exist and need to think about new solutions or better solutions if they do exist.
However, I like your solutions.
They're very, very good. I'm just thinking that five billion minds or six billion minds can come up with better things and we need to work at that.
Right. And then if people say, well, I don't think it'll work, I don't think it's like, well, then how does it work in your life?
How does it work in your personal life?
Because if it doesn't work, like society is just people, right?
And if it works in everybody's personal life to not use violence to get what they want, Then how does it not work?
Like, how many people? So we've got 20 people in the coffee shop or 50 people in the coffee shop.
Is it 51? Suddenly we all get to use force, or some of us.
Is it 52? Is it 100?
Is it 10,000? At what point do the moral rules completely reverse?
And now violence is the only and the best and the only decent way to solve social problems.
I couldn't agree more.
Where's the number change? I've never got an answer to that, and of course there isn't one, that's why.
Well, that's actually a very good way of letting people understand that democracy is not that great, especially people that think that democracy is absolutely amazing.
If you go, well, if 51% of the people thought that we should go back to slavery, would you think that that was okay for the 49% that were most likely minorities?
And that usually kind of clues into someone.
Someone will go like, yeah, wait a sec, that's not really, you know, the right kind of system.
Right, right, right.
I mean, there's moral rules that go above and beyond the majority.
And perhaps we should focus on expanding those moral rules rather than expanding the power of the government that violates those moral rules around the non-initiation of force.
Exactly. So I'm thinking about writing up something to like what I'm going to talk about because I only have about 20 minutes and I was wondering if you would like to go over it afterwards after I've written it up and just kind of give me your ideas and opinions on it.
It'll be like short form.
I think not.
Not because I wouldn't enjoy it, but I think that you need to own the speech.
And so, you know, we've had this conversation.
You've obviously heard a lot of voluntarist theory.
So, you know, you've got to focus on the stuff that's going to hit...
I think we're good to go.
The only thing that I would suggest, and of course I've done not a huge amount of public speaking live, I've done some, but I would strongly, strongly suggest that it's all about practice, practice, practice.
And if you can get someone, you can ask people on the message board to listen, you can record something and throw it up there for people to listen, but it's all about the practice.
Even when you know a topic really well, like when I was preparing for the Badanaric debate, I think I did three or four podcasts that I threw out to donators for feedback.
And then I did a live presentation of the speech to anybody.
I think there were a bunch of donators who were interested in hearing my arguments.
And for real, not just like a skim.
Of course, I chatted about it with friends.
I chatted about it with my wife, what it is that I was going to do.
I had a long drive down where I practiced speech two or three times.
It's really, really key.
To be prepared and to not go with, you know, a couple of notes and just sort of wing it.
But to be prepared.
And then it's okay if you go off book, right?
But at least you know you're going off book and then you have some place to get back to.
So I think that the preparation is key.
And I found that it's five to ten times the amount of time to give the speech to prepare and practice for the speech.
And I think that's really important.
Okay. Okay. Well, I've never done this in front of people other than students that were in my class that I knew very well.
So this is going to be an interesting experience, and I really appreciate your advice.
Yeah, and seriously, if you can get – I mean, there's little MP3 players that will record.
Just get a recording.
If you can get video, so much the better.
But just try and get a recording.
And even if you never do anything with the recording other than listen to it yourself, it's really helpful so that you can hear where you're clear, you can hear where you're fuzzy, you can hear where you got thrown.
And those are all really, really useful things.
I mean, to be a good public speaker is a fantastic thing.
It's a great ability, but it's 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration.
And I do the same thing for all of my public appearances, even for debates that I have with people.
Even on YouTube, I will prepare, you know, more arguments than I could ever use.
And I will sort of prioritize them and color-code them and practice and practice.
And I think that's really important.
Preparation is effectiveness in this kind of thing.
Okay. Well, I do have a video camera, so I will be...
I will only post it, though, if I feel comfortable doing so.
But I definitely think I'm going to practice a lot more now.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to, you know, we can put it in the donator section so there's just a small minority of people who would get a chance to see it and give you feedback.
But I think it's useful because there's lots of other people who are interested in this kind of thing.
So I think your experience would be very helpful.
And do you think that this would help other people, maybe encourage them to also kind of give talks?
Oh, I hope so. I mean, I hope so.
I think that it is very important to get out and engage with people in society.
But it's a very, very, very tough thing to do.
So I really applaud what it is you're doing.
It's not easy at all.
So good for you.
And I think that it is the kind of thing that people should see a lot more of.
I agree. And would it be okay with you if I added information on your website and stuff like that?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I would be thrilled.
But yeah, just if you can try and refer to it as a philosophy website or whatever, and one of the conclusions is anarchy, but if it's an anarchy website, then people might be a little confused, but that would be great.
Okay, perfect. I will definitely enjoy this.
I definitely hope so.
Was there any other tips that you had?
No, if you get a chance, I do have a video on public speaking which you can find on my channel.
And you can check that out if you like.
But no, I think you'll do great.
I mean, I think with practice and all that, I mean, you'd do fine.
Don't get me wrong. You'd do fine without any practice.
It's just that more practice is better.
And especially given the challenge of the ideas, I think that the more comfortable you are, the more comfortable people will be in hearing them.
Well, I've gotten pretty comfortable talking one-on-one with people and dealing with their questions and stuff like that over the last few months.
So this is like the next kind of step for me.
Well, great for you, man.
And I really look forward to hearing how it goes.
I will definitely let you know.
And regardless, I'll let you watch the video.
Oh, I hope so. Yeah, please do.
I will. Thanks, man.
Take care. Best of luck. Thank you very much.
▲
Export Selection