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May 21, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:57
1666 Hatred
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Hi, everybody. It's time to speak of hatred.
We've done despair, and despair sounded a little bit at the beginning, like it was going to be about hatred.
But no, we've done hate for the topic of hatred in that, and we went with despair instead.
So now let's talk about hatred.
I've used this metaphor before.
I may overuse it, but it's been a while since I have used it.
So we're going to use this metaphor so that we can understand hatred.
And the metaphor is that of counterfeiting.
Now, counterfeiting is a very powerful metaphor for philosophy because a counterfeiter recognizes the value of money because he's not out counterfeiting leaves or blades of grass or paint stains, right?
But he is out there counterfeiting that which has value.
And if it's currency, then he's obviously a counterfeiter of bills or whatever.
If it is art, then he is counterfeiting the masters of Angrae, Rembrandt, whatever.
And there's lots of different ways that this can occur.
An obvious one is the counterfeiting of beauty through makeup, through exercise for the sake of appearance alone.
Hair dye, Botox, right?
It's the counterfeiting of beauty, which of course is really only relevant in the spirit, in the soul, in the mind, in the virtue, not the flesh.
So there's lots of counterfeiting that goes on in society and all counterfeiting recognizes the value of that which it is copying and destroys that value or destroys some portion of that value by the copying, right? So Every counterfeiter who copies money makes money less valuable in two ways.
Either A, he succeeds, in which case he breeds inflation through the injection of fiat currency or a counterfeit currency into a real currency system.
Or B, he fails, in which case he makes everything more expensive on any number of levels.
The thieves are unbelievably expensive economically, right?
Because they have to be punished, they have to be caught, there has to be anti-thievery...
Methodologies in place, right?
You have to have counterfeit detection machines, and you have to call the cops, and you have to fill out the paperwork, and the cops have to try the guy and put the guy in jail.
People who are dishonest or violent, obviously, but counterfeiters are unbelievably expensive.
Now, think of the amount of money that the government has to spend on trying to make bills counterfeit-proof.
That's very, very expensive.
And the prosecution and the money laundering and all, it's just crazy, particularly counterfeiting, how expensive they are.
So, they reduce the value of money, whether they succeed or they fail.
They have still reduced the value.
Of money. So, they recognize that money has value, right?
It's a complete UPB clusterfrag, right?
Because they recognize that money has value, but money only has value because the majority of people don't counterfeit.
And so, it is the opposite of what he is doing that is creating the value that he is pillaging and reducing.
And if there are too many people like him, right, then they all, the whole system collapses.
So, counterfeiting is a really, really important thing to understand, right?
So, a counterfeiter who copies paintings is reducing the value of paintings, either because he succeeds, in which case there's more supply of, quote, great paintings, which drives the price down, or B, he fails, in which case you have to add the price of authentication of a painting and the risk of that authentication failing and additional insurance for fakeries and so on all has to be added.
I mean, these people are just Fucking vampires around the economic throats of society, these counterfeiters, these thieves, these manipulators, these pillagers.
They are vile, blood-engorged, leachy vampires hanging off the neck of the productive.
Now, counterfeiting is an act of hatred.
It is using the virtue of productivity and the necessary or chosen trust of economic interactions and using it to harm and pillage and destroy.
So, it's always sort of struck me as similar.
What is, to me, one of the most vile things that a human being can do is to harm benevolence, to raise the costs and to raise the fears of benevolence, right?
So, a typical scenario is...
It's a dark and stormy night, and some guy is underdressed, shivering along the road.
He's walking along the road, and he's shivering, and he's got his thumb out, and he's hitchhiking.
And, you know, the only people who are going to stop and help him are people who are, you know, nice and want to have this guy not be stuck on the road when it's freezing.
And if he then, you They're gonna tell the story, if they're still alive, or the story's gonna be told if they're dead.
And what happens is then, of course, people fear benevolence.
They fear helping other people out because it is the best and the nicest among us who then are singled out for predation.
So, an act of virtue and compassion and generosity is used against you in the same way that your productivity is used against you and the necessity of trust, certain levels of trust in any economic interaction, that is used to screw you by a counterfeiter, right?
So it's your integrity and your virtue and your benevolence and your kindness, all of which are used to undermine and destroy you.
And it is taking people's values and virtues and turning them against those people.
It is the most fundamental and vile act of betrayal.
And the consequences, both economic and personal, psychological, are just staggering and enormous.
And it is about the vilest thing that a human being can do.
So through hard-won wisdom, and I'm not even saying that this was accrued to me at the beginning of FDR, but I have learned it over the years, painfully and reluctantly and so on.
I have learned this very, very painful truth.
And what I do now...
When I encounter somebody who claims to be about freedom, freedom!
Well, the first thing I ask myself is, are they a counterfeiter?
Are they talking about freedom for parasitical reasons, or are they really dedicated to freedom, to virtue, to truth, to honesty?
Are they really dedicated to these things?
And that's my first question.
And my first suspicion is that it's all just a bunch of mouth-breathing noise designed to hook people in, designed for vanity, designed for exploitation, and so on, right?
Are they really, really into freedom, or is it just a bunch of noise that they're making in order to pat themselves on the back and to Get money from people, whether it's add money or promise things to people that simply can't be achieved, like freedom through politics.
Do they have any real currency or is it all mere counterfeiting?
That is my very first question.
And I must be honest with you that I think the majority of people in the freedom movement are not so much with the actual currency.
Devotion to and dedication to freedom.
Now, this is not true of everyone, and there are some amazing and immensely godlike, in my opinion, heroes out there and heroines who are doing just amazing things when it comes to really struggling and achieving freedom in their own lives.
And, you know, all massive honor, kudos, praise, flowers, and I believe it's 72 virgins to those people in the afterlife, because Lord knows they're getting precious little praise here.
But they will from me. So, I remember, and I don't want to, this is not naming any names, these are all just sort of mixed up, and these, you know, hopefully you can't identify anyone, it doesn't really matter if you can, because I'm not going to confirm or deny anything.
But, for example, right, so I met some prominent libertarians, and one of them had this, I mean, halitosis or some, I don't know, some crow had left rotten eggs under his tongue three years ago or something, but had the most unbelievably bad breath.
And he was sort of moving around the room, and I could see people kind of turning away a little bit and so on, right?
And it struck me, you know, these are people dedicated to freedom, freedom, freedom, and they're not even free to say, dude, I'm sorry, listen, your breath is really unpleasant.
You really need to get this checked out.
I mean, that's actually got significant health issues.
I mean, that kind of level of bacteria can travel down to your heart and cause significant problems, so oral hygiene is...
It's a significant part of just health in general, more than your teeth.
But so these people dedicated to liberty from the government and freedom from oppression weren't even free, were too fearful or too anxious or too avoidant to simply stand up.
And not stand up, not confrontational, but just say to this guy, honestly, listen, your breath is pretty foul.
You really need to get this looked at.
That to me is not, that's counterfeit, right?
No. That's people focusing on freedom to pretend that they're free and to pat themselves on the back about their dedication to freedom, but who aren't even remotely free.
If people are interested in freedom only in spheres that they cannot ever possibly change or control, then that to me is an embarrassing and noisy opposite of what is useful and good.
I mean, libertarians criticize Old Hickory, Lincoln, President Lincoln, because he freed the slaves in areas he couldn't control and didn't free the slaves in the areas he could control.
Haha, what a madman.
But if you're only really interested in freedom in the areas that you cannot possibly control, like changing state policies and so on, but you don't actually exercise freedom in your own life, even basic freedoms like your breath is really unpleasant, like please get it looked at, That, to me, is not liberty.
That is the opposite of liberty.
I mean, that's no interest in liberty.
That's just liberty as distracting noise to make yourself feel something.
And also, because this was a political party, to get money from people.
I mean, to promise them liberty and newsletters and activism and gatherings and symposiums and so on, right?
To get money from people.
So, I think that's one aspect of libertarianism that I've really noticed.
And there are other examples, I mean, I've obviously been very critical, of libertarian academics who continue to take the state-granted privileges of tenure, despite the fact that I've shown that you can make a reasonable living by producing works of meaning and quality and depth and resonance Over the internet, and you can sell them.
I suppose. I prefer to go on donations, but you can give it a shot to sell them.
And that would be in accordance with the principles of the free market and of volunteerism, rather than hiding behind the state-erected fences of tenured professorhood.
Where you work a couple of hours a week and get paid above the six figures.
Oh, we can only dream of that.
But that is, to me, that's counterfeiting, right?
I mean, that is just counterfeiting because that is saying I advocate policies that would cause other people to have to be kicked out of the subsidized sector and into the free market, right?
So privatizing the post office or Privatizing schools or privatizing charities and so on.
So public servants and those dependent upon state transfers of wealth would be forced out of their protected and privileged positions into the free market.
And most economists, particularly of the free market variety, are very much against protectionism.
And subsidies of corporations and individuals.
So they want cotton manufacturers and sugar manufacturers and banana importers and so on to be free of subsidies and protectionism, and yet they cling to tenure.
I mean, you could not design a better way to discredit an ideology than have people trumpet the free market while hiding behind protectionism while demanding it for others.
I mean, it's... I mean, it really is a wonderfully, wonderfully evolved slash designed system.
But this is just a form of counterfeiting, right?
I mean, everybody wants the free market for everyone except themselves because everybody wants the convenience of progress of everyone else being in the free market while they want the protection.
And enforced privileges of themselves hiding behind state-created enforced tariffs, tariff or protectionist walls.
Of course! If you could be the only thief in the world, you'd have easy pickings because nobody would have any anti-theft devices, right?
It wouldn't be worth it. So if you can be the only person in the free market, sorry, if you can be the only person not in the free market, man, you're doing beautifully.
So I just think that's just kind of funny and sad.
And what's even sadder, like, to me, the counterfeit, It's not that free market academics or others, it's not that they choose to stay in academia.
That's, you know, I can understand that, mouths to feed, maybe you just, you've been talking about the need for risk and entrepreneurship and the free market your whole life, but when it comes time to take your own leap into that arena, You, you know, like you so much, right?
But then I think you need to work empirically from your own life, right?
And you need to say, well, you know, if I, who understand these principles so well, don't want to risk the free market, then clearly arguing for the free market is pointless because everyone else in the world who has far more incentive and far less knowledge Or at least far less knowledge of the value of the free market than I do.
If I'm not going to make the leap with all my knowledge of the free market, then arguing for more knowledge of the free market clearly is not going to make anybody make the leap.
If I'm not going to lead by example, when I have the most knowledge, then...
Nobody else is going to, right?
I mean, if you're a doctor and you say that eating apricot seeds will cure cancer, and then you're struck down with cancer, and the first thing that someone says is, oh my god, just eat the apricot seeds you've been offering out for the past 30 years, and you're like, are you kidding me?
I never let that shit in my mouth.
It's fucking poison.
Like, oh, right, okay, I get it.
But it's okay if you don't want to.
I mean, as I've always sort of believed, if you don't want to, that's fine.
Then just back down from your principles.
If you don't want to live them, then if you know so much about the free market and you don't want to live your principles, then just say, I'm not able to live my...
Just be honest. I mean, that's all I'm saying.
If you don't have the integrity to live your values, at least have the integrity to say, I'm not living my values.
I'm not going to live my values.
And I'm arguing for things that I... I'm arguing that other people should accept standards that I run screaming from.
I mean, that's all I'm saying.
If you don't have the two testicles to swing yourself over the fence into the free market, at least have the one testicle to say, that fence is pretty high, and I'm not going to tell other people to go over if I'm not going over, right?
I just think that's sad.
So, there's a lot of, to me, counterfeiting.
I mean, even in the libertarian movement.
I mean, the whole politics thing.
I've gone through this so many times, I'm not even going to bother with going into any details here.
But, you know, saying to people that you can bring about freedom with particular political maneuvers or movements and, you know, give us money to do that, I mean, it's just counterfeiting.
This is just selling a good that...
I mean, if you were selling somebody a cure, you would need to show that there is some proof that that cure has worked.
And if you're selling people a cure called politics, you need to show some proof that it's worked.
And, of course, there is no proof that it's worked.
In fact, it's done quite the opposite.
So, to me, anybody who's...
Who's reasonably knowledgeable about history, and I don't just mean your average dock worker lumber listener, I mean people who, you know, spend some time reading some books and history and so on.
Anybody who's reasonably knowledgeable about history, who is still trying to sell people a political solution and taking money thereof, well...
To me, that's fraudulent.
I mean, it's just plain fraud.
It may not be illegal, but it certainly is immoral.
You are selling something that does not work and has no history of working, and you're continuing to take money for something.
I mean, to me, that's just... You might as well be selling lavender water as a cure for paralysis.
I mean, it's just fraud.
It's just snake oil salesmen.
And that, to me, is not people who are dedicated to freedom.
I mean, that's not dedicated to freedom.
They're dedicated to making sounds that make people give them money.
It's exactly the same as a priest.
A priest will sell you salvation to heaven through giving him money, and the political crowd, in all arenas, but in the libertarian crowd, it's egregious, right?
Because it's against the ideology.
But a priest will sell you heaven to In return for money, and heaven doesn't exist, and you, in fact, are enslaved to the priest.
And libertarian politicians and the libertarian political movement will sell you freedom from the state for political contributions of time, money, resources.
And it doesn't exist.
And this is, of course, to the naive, the religious say, God exists, and God is the Ten Commandments, and so on.
To the naive and the somewhat dumb, And to the more sophisticated, they say, well, it's metaphorical, and it's not to be taken literally, and blah, blah, blah.
And the libertarian political movement is the same.
It's the same way, exactly.
Same as religion. Which is why religion and libertarianism have always gotten along so well.
It's the same beast, different color.
Which is that the libertarians to the naive will say, elect...
This good doctor and we'll be free, you know, or whoever.
It doesn't matter, right? Let's get this guy into Congress and things will start to turn around and we'll restore the republic and blah, blah, blah.
Well, this is exactly the same as selling heaven and evidence for it.
And so to the naive that will say all this stuff, give us money and we'll give you your republic back, which is nonsense.
There's no evidence it's ever going to happen.
Quite the opposite. And yet, to the more sophisticated, they say, well, it's more around educating people, and it's not, you know, not to be taken literally when we say we're going to restore the republic.
It's just about people getting people excited about the ideas, right?
So, if you don't ask for proof, they tell you it's certain.
The moment you ask for proof, they tell you it's metaphorical or educational.
I mean, it's the same bullshit, right?
I understand. So, I know this is going to be a bit of a lengthy discussion, but I think you, and I'm sorry to be focusing, I mean, of course there are hypocrisies all over the world, right?
But let's focus on the ones that we know the best.
I mean, you could pull apart the Democrats for their supposed dedication to the poor while they've created institutions like welfare and public schools that have eviscerated the poor.
You can talk about the Republicans' desire for National security, while the Republicans drive the military-industrial complex to go attacking the world and setting up bases and all sorts of egregious stuff which provokes people around the world to attack America.
So, I mean, I understand that there's all this hypocrisy, but, you know, let's just go to the ones which, I mean, those ones don't touch libertarianism.
They don't touch freedom principles because, I mean, nobody really thinks that that's about liberty.
That's about security and redistribution, you know, Republican and Democrats, respectively.
But, um... You could go all over the map in terms of hypocrisy, and I've done a fairly good job, I think, of eviscerating, at least verbally, those who fall into that category.
But until you understand the counterfeiting, it's about recognizing a value and then selling the opposite which diminishes it, which is false currency, right?
A counterfeit currency is recognizing the value of money and then selling the opposite of money which diminishes the value of money.
Libertarianism, political libertarianism, religious libertarianism, is around recognizing the value of integrity and consistency and freedom and the non-aggression principle, and then selling you the opposite, like God and politics, or tenure, which eviscerates the whole principle and devalues the principle as a whole.
And religion is the same thing.
So, if you don't understand counterfeiting, The recognition of a value, the substitution of a false value, to undermine and destroy and profit from the real value, to mimic the real value in order to profit from its evisceration.
If you don't understand counterfeiting, I don't think you will ever understand the true basis and essence of human hatred, which we will turn to now.
I think that we all understand that...
Paper, obviously, is not money.
And in many ways, gold is not money either, because gold you can steal.
So it's not money.
Money is, in its real state, in its sort of true state, money is the end product of an enormous sequential chain of cause and effect.
So, even if you're working at a bare minimum capacity, right?
So, I mean, when I was in the recession in the early 90s, I was just out of school and there was no jobs, and I took a job weeding someone's garden.
And yeah, I'm down there in the dirt just digging and all that kind of crap.
And even to do that, though, required a significant set of cause and effect.
I had to look for work, I had to find work, had to make the phone call, had to convince them to hire me, had to go and show up and dig and pick up my check and deposit it and so on.
So there was a lot of causal chain that resulted in me being able to do even that Now, of course, at the very highest level of abstraction and intellectual prowess which I'm working with in these conversations in this podcast, it's much more significant and much more deep.
It's tens of thousands of hours of practice and research and reading and technical skill development and so on.
The result of all of that is I got a few bucks for weeding someone's garden and a few more bucks for bringing philosophy to many, many more people than would have had exposure to it in the past.
But the money that comes in to me through PayPal or the money that came from these people who paid me to weed their garden many years ago is merely the effect of a long, long sequence of even down to language acquisition and so on.
And so... We can understand that money is the mere effect of an extremely long and complicated series of things.
I mean, even just the resources of my mom and, to some smaller degree, my dad, to raise me, to feed me, to clothe me, to house me.
And so all of that, the actual money is a complete snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of the cause and effect.
And, of course, when you steal money, you're stealing the effect of that, not all of the enormous productivity that goes into even the most menial of jobs.
When you steal money, you're stealing the effect of the whole sequence that produces that money, and that is the real injustice of it.
Now, the reason I'm going into all of this is that, to me, advocating fundamental social change is, to me, not something that you just grab onto at the end of the process.
It's the end of an enormous series of Personal understandings and education, but also actions such as pursuing freedom within your own life and finding out how well it works and what does work and what doesn't work and so on.
But when you are providing a universal prescription for how society should be organized, I mean, that is the greatest prescription in the world.
And Anyone can say, free market good, government bad.
NAP bad, property rights...
Sorry, NAP good, property rights good, initiation of force bad.
I mean, to say that takes just a few moments.
You can teach anyone to say it.
You can teach probably a parrot to say it.
You can teach someone to say it who doesn't even speak English, and they come out the syllables.
And that's a kind of fraud or a kind of theft.
Because you're taking the effects of a long sequence and repeating them as if you have gone through that sequence.
In the same way that when you steal $100, you're stealing all of the cause and effect and long series of chain domino reality.
You're taking that long series and you're stealing the effect of it.
And so...
When someone comes to me with speakers, and maybe you have had this, I've certainly had it happen to me, in a parking lot sitting there waiting for something or other, and a guy comes up to you and says, hey, you know, we just got some speakers, they're slightly dented, the store doesn't want them anymore, and we're selling them, you know, quarter price.
Or whatever, right? Well, the first thing...
That you want to ask, I suppose, is...
Is this stolen?
I mean, is this stolen?
To all appearances, it seems to be stolen, right?
This is not how often you will buy things, right?
In the back of a truck, quarter price, cash only, man!
Cash only! And he's wearing a balaclava or something.
This is not how you buy things, right?
And so the first thing that when you're buying something for someone, the first question you can ask, if there's reason to ask it, is, well, do you own it in order to sell it?
Is it hot? Is it stolen?
And that, of course, is the same thing with counterfeit currency, right?
Is this real currency? Is this the effect of free exchange, of labor, that you have put in and exchanged with somebody else?
Is this a value that you have created or is this a value you have stolen?
If it's counterfeit, of course, it's a value that's been stolen.
If it's created, it's a value that's real and so on.
And for me, when someone comes up and talks to me about freedom, freedom, well, The first thing that I'm going to ask myself, and after a hard and sometimes bitter experience, a sawtooth learning curve, a chainsaw learning curve, shall we say.
The first thing I'm going to say is, well, do you own this?
Have you earned this right, so to speak, to tell society how it should run?
Have you the right?
Have you earned this? Or are you just repeating something that is emotionally appealing to you that you read somewhere, and that That strikes you as an interesting pose to have in your life.
And that's a very, very important question.
Now, the reason why this, all this, is in a podcast on hatred.
We can all understand that if counterfeiters have been getting away with counterfeiting for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and then they find out that there's this counterfeit detection machine, just one has been invented somewhere on another continent, they'll be sort of amused and so on.
We won't really care.
But when they find out that this counterfeit detection machine is spreading and becoming more and more popular and picking up momentum and so on, and they find out that the guy who invented the counterfeit detection machine is coming to speak and talk to the merchants in his area, Well, he's going to be pretty fucking angry and frightened and hostile and aggressive.
We can all understand that.
He's going to ignore. He's going to poo-poo.
He's going to say, oh, this is nonsense.
There's no such thing as counterfeiting.
This guy's just, he's a bullshit artist.
He's just selling you something you don't need.
It's ridiculous. It's a scam.
He's just going to try and throw as much grit and smoke and bullshit into people's eyes and ears so that they'll just wander on.
He's just going to try all of that sort of nonsense.
And that's inevitable.
Right, because, I mean, I, to break the third wall of the metaphor, I am the guy who's coming along with a significantly empowered posse and cadre of like-minded souls and thinkers coming along and saying, well, fuck freedom in politics.
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
And that's kind of a scam, because you're promising people freedom and taking their money, and you can't Give them freedom, and you never could, right?
So it's a scam, right?
It's a counterfeit. It's a fraud.
You know, you send me a hundred bucks, and I will send you freedom.
And that's a fraud.
I see, of course, I'm confident enough in what I'm talking about that you could just send me money if you find that it's worthwhile and charge you ahead of time, right?
Whereas politics always have to charge you a hell of a lot ahead of time, right?
Tens of millions of dollars.
In the same way that the Pope doesn't say, once you get to heaven, send me a check, right?
Because heaven doesn't exist.
And the Pope has nothing to sell you, so you have to give him the money ahead of time because he's got nothing to ship you.
The same way with politics, right?
They don't say, well, we'll get political freedom and then you can donate, right?
Because they know they can't provide political freedom.
I mean, I understand that's not exactly how the system works, but even if it did, that wouldn't be the case because they can't provide it.
And so we've got a lot of people who are going out into the world in the true Socratic way and saying, oh, that's interesting.
You talk of freedom. You speak of freedom.
You're interested in freedom.
So clearly the non-aggression principle is good.
Violence is bad.
Violence against children is really bad.
It's a source of so many of our troubles, and here's the evidence.
And so how have you put this...
How have you put your dedication to freedom into practice in your own life?
And you understand, that is really enraging to people.
It's really angering to people.
And they hate it!
In the same way that if somebody pays you in counterfeit money, and you know it's counterfeit money, And then you ask them to do something, and they do it, and then you pay them back using their own money, they'll hate you. Because they know it's counterfeit, and they know they can't say it's counterfeit because they paid that money to you.
And now you are paying them back with their own counterfeit money.
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