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June 2, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:04
1674 True News: BP Spill Update, Educating my Daughter, and Conspiracy Theories?

A philosophical review of current news from Freedomain Radio.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is a grab bag collection of some thoughts, observations and responses to your feedback and I hope that you enjoy it.
The first thing that has struck me as entirely predictable is the fact that environmentalists as a whole tend to turn towards the state for solutions.
They're about nationalizing things, despite the fact that the nationalization of the public parks almost destroyed the entire ecosystem.
They are for more regulation, more control, more laws, more threats, more guns held to the head of individuals in order to protect Mother Earth.
The unfortunate aspect of violence, which we all understand at a personal level, but which is very hard for us to conceptually translate into a social level, is that violence is like any drug.
It will give you a short-term solution while creating longer-term problems and greater problems.
So if you're unhappy, you can take a snort of heroin, and lo and behold, other than the babies walking on the ceiling, you are happy for a short amount of time, and then you end up with more problems at the end of it.
And environmentalists have, since Rachel Carson's entirely fictitious and false book, The Silent Spring, was published in the 1960s, have stampeded towards the state for solutions to environmental problems, creating, frankly, biological genocides, such as the banning of relatively innocuous DDT throughout the world, which is the only effective mosquito repulsion or prevention,
which has resulted in about 60 million deaths from mosquitoes around the world, the banning of DDT, which turned which has resulted in about 60 million deaths from mosquitoes around the world, the banning of DDT, which turned out to not be at all harmful, or at least not harmful relative to the mosquitoes But of course, you don't.
All you hear is Joni Mitchell wobbling about farmers and apples and DDT.
You don't actually get to hear the science and you don't get to hear the voices of the 60 million dead as a result of banning DDT around the world, which is truly catastrophic.
I I mean, that's like the first and the second world war put together in terms of human casualties.
And so environmentalists have increasingly and really almost inevitably turned towards the state as the solution to the protection of the environment.
One of the results of that has been they don't want drilling on land.
They don't even want drilling at a slant from on land to offshore, which is why BP is out there down in a mile of water digging up.
a huge, expensive, massive engineering risk is digging up the oil from the bottom of the ocean.
We're not so short of oil on land that you have to go down a mile into the ocean to get the oil out.
That's because no nuclear plants, no coal-fired plants, no drilling.
It's the not-in-my-backyard syndrome.
And I hope that I don't hold my breath, as none of us who are rational do.
I don't hold my breath, but I hope, hope, hope that a few environmentalists will step forward to re-evaluate the role of pushing environmental exploration or oil exploration offshore and deep and say, maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
Maybe, given that we are going to use oil for the foreseeable future, we should bow to the actual facts of reality and try to ensure that oil is extracted from the safest possible place.
Because otherwise you're going to end up with these kinds of disasters.
Now, that having been said, BP was not very good and the government regulation, which everyone relies on, is not very good.
This is the great danger of government regulation, is that it provides the illusion of a solution while actually exacerbating the problem.
You may have heard of this sort of revolving door idea between lobbyists, the industry, and the government.
So when the government sets up some agency to manage offshore drilling, the first place they recruit is people from the industry.
Those people from the industry already have those contacts.
I mean, look at the number of people from the brokerage industry or the Wall Street industries, the financial industries who were involved in bailing out the financial institutions.
Well, it's a revolving door.
You go back and forth between, it's true of the industrial military complex, it's true of the educational system, it's true of just about every government regulation that you can come up with.
It's going to be staffed by people from the actual industry because they're the only people with the expertise, the interest and the credibility to manage these things because they come from the industry and go back regularly to the industry.
You are asking for an industry to self-regulate itself at the taxpayer's expense.
That last part is crucial.
I do believe that entities can be self-regulating, but not if they get to offload the costs and problems to the anonymous third-party biomass of the taxpayers as a whole.
So I think that's really important.
I haven't seen a single article from a prominent or even non-prominent environmentalist saying, oops, bad us, maybe we shouldn't have gone to the state for the solution.
We see this very clearly in our individual lives, right?
So if you know someone who takes to a life of crime, it's clear that they don't have to work very hard for quite some time because they can just go and steal the stuff that they want and sell it to fences and so on.
But we all understand that in the long run, this person is not going to be happy.
We also know that if more and more people become thieves, they may do very well to begin with.
Like if you've got a town of 10,000 people, and only one person is a thief, It's not that big a deal, right?
But if half the population decides to become thieves, the society will break down almost overnight.
And so we all understand that the more people who do it, the greater this compulsion becomes, the greater this theft becomes, the worse things get for society as a whole.
We understand that at a personal level.
We understand that when it comes to Drinking, as Homer Simpson says, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
We understand that drinking your problems away may give you temporary relief.
We understand that drugs may give you temporary relief, but they don't solve your problems in the long run.
And the same thing is true of state action.
It will give you temporary relief.
That's why it works. So the social security system went in place in the 1930s, and the people, like the 12 people over the age of 65, made out relatively like bandits.
And now the system is heading towards a fiscal collapse.
Same thing with the welfare state.
The people who got money to begin with, out of the first few people who became the recipients of this kind of forcible transfer of income, they did pretty well.
But then what happens is more and more people become thieves and become the recipients of income that is taken through force through taxation.
And the whole system then stops working after a while.
And those who really care about the poor, this has been my contention for many, many years, those who really care about the poor should be the most concerned with the welfare state because of its very unsustainability.
The poor, and I'm talking about the poor who have become addicted to welfare, where it has become a depressingly inevitable choice to father children, to not have fathers in the family, to not get educated, to not get a job, to not move forward in your life.
To those cultures and those aspects of society that have become really addicted to welfare...
My question has always been, what's going to happen when the welfare checks stop coming?
And they're going to stop coming. I mean, it's completely inevitable.
Anything which mathematically cannot continue will not continue.
And there's no possibility that the existing state of society and all of its overhead and predation and bribing of various sections of the population through unjustly obtained benefits, there's no way.
That is going to be able to continue.
What is going to happen to the old people when the Social Security checks have to be cut by half or three quarters?
What is going to happen to the poor people when their welfare checks stop coming or are enormously diminished or just delayed?
What is going to happen to these people when all of this stops working?
What is going to happen to the, you know, everyone says, well, the education of the poor is so important.
In Massachusetts, for sure, the literacy rate of the general population, since the inclusion of public schools, since the infliction of public schools, was always lower afterwards.
I believe it was 91% or 94% before the institution of public schools, and it has never even come close to that ever since.
And now, in certain Washington states, you have only a third of the school-age population is even performing at grade level.
So when you institute something through force, you gain an immediate benefit, for sure.
When public schools first went in, you had people whose discipline had come out of the private sector, teachers whose discipline and whose commitment to the children had come out of the private sector.
So everything looks fantastic at the very beginning.
But as time goes along, that unjust benefit, that forced transfer of wealth, that lack of sensitivity to the end customers who are the children takes over and the debt skyrocket and the fiat currency printing skyrockets.
The inflation begins to skyrocket.
What is going to happen to the poor children when the government runs out of money for education, as it is already starting to do by threatening to lay off tens of thousands of teachers?
What is going to happen to these kids?
What is going to happen to the poor when the welfare checks stop coming?
What is going to happen to the old? Anybody who cares, who actually cares, rather than just wants the self Aggrandizing, pious appearance of caring.
Anybody who really cares about the underprivileged would be about a million light years away from a state solution because they know what would happen in the long run to people who have become utterly dependent on this income when this income cannot possibly be sustained.
It's the same thing with the war on drugs.
Everything that you try to do with the government using any kind of force will get you an immediate benefit.
Hey, I got the iPod.
But as it begins to spread, as people begin to steal iPods more and more and more, iPods stop getting manufactured.
And that's one thing when it's iPod.
It's another thing when it's the income of people and what they're using to support themselves and their children.
If you really care about the underprivileged, and if you really care about the environment, please, please, please, I'm begging you, just look into other possibilities.
That's all I'm saying. I'm just saying look into other possibilities.
I've got free books on my website.
There's lots of free resources available.
Look into peaceful, non-state, non-taxation, non-regulation, non-coercive solutions to social problems.
Now, a number of people have written to me to ask about educating my daughter.
And it's a great question.
Of course, I accept anarchism as logically consistent with the non-aggression principle.
I accept atheism as consistent with reason and reality.
And there's a number of other positions I have that are challenging.
There's a lot of prejudice against atheists, a lot of prejudice against anarchists, a lot of prejudice, historically, of course, against philosophers as a whole, which I'm sure you've experienced if you put two syllogisms together in a mating position.
But when it comes to teaching my daughter, I say, "Are you going to teach her to be an atheist?" Well, no, I'm not going to teach her to be an atheist.
I'm not going to teach her to be an anarchist.
I'm not going to teach her any of my conclusions.
Her mind is I want to help her to develop that muscle, which means critical thinking.
It means you're focusing on her capacity to reason with reference to empirical evidence and so on.
That is my goal as a parent, and I think it should be everyone's goal as a parent.
I'm not going to teach My daughter, that there is no such thing as a God, because that would be to teach her a conclusion rather than teaching her how to think.
And also, that would have the arrogance for me of saying that I have all the conclusions, or rather that all my conclusions are true, and I am absolutely positive that not all of my conclusions are true.
I will certainly always bow to reason and evidence, and I've certainly worked as hard as I can.
To make my positions consistent with reason and evidence.
But there's no doubt whatsoever that I have some erroneous conclusions, either because I got the wrong evidence or made an error in reasoning or something like that.
There's just no way I'm going to have the arrogance to tell her that everything I believe is true.
I'm going to teach her how to think, not what to think.
And that, I think, is really, really important.
I really feel that I don't have the right to inflict my conclusions upon my daughter.
In the same way, if you're going to teach your kid math, you're not just going to teach them to memorize the answer to every reasonably possible multiplication or division problem.
That's like saying, I don't want to teach you how to divide 7 into 22.
I'm just going to teach you 3.14159627...
You're not going to teach pi.
You want to teach the methodology of mathematics.
You don't want to teach the conclusions of mathematics so that the child can work out their own math problems and has that.
And so I want to teach my daughter reason and evidence, philosophical, critical, rational thinking, but I certainly don't want to teach her my conclusions because if you're teaching someone your conclusions, you're not teaching them anything.
You're just teaching them to repeat something which they don't understand.
So that's my particular approach.
The last thing that I wanted to mention is I do get a lot of comments on YouTube, and I do want to compliment the YouTube commenters.
Since I did my Post Somalia video, which was a bit of a lashback at the trolls, comments have been much, much better.
And I really want to compliment those of you on YouTube who are leaving comments.
I try to read them all.
Lord knows I get close to 200 emails a day, so...
I do try to read them all.
Oh, yeah. Well, what's your solution, Baldy?
Well, you know, a fairly valid question.
The reality is that I don't have to provide a solution in order to criticize what is, right?
So if I am an engineer and I'm looking at a bridge and I know from my experience and from stress tests that I've done and knowing the history of how the bridge was built and how old it is and how it's been maintained, if I look at that bridge and I say that bridge won't stand, It doesn't make much sense to turn to me and say, well, what would you build in its place?
No, no, no, no. The first thing we all have to understand is that the existing bridge called society cannot stand.
It cannot stand.
It will not stand. It is something which we need to look at and to accept as a basic reality in our lives.
I mean, you can't change what you don't acknowledge, as the great philosopher Dr.
Phillips says from time to time.
So if I'm looking at the bridge called statism and say, this can't stand because it's built on coercion, it's built on immorality.
It doesn't make any sense to say to me, well, what's your solution?
I mean, it's true that I do have solutions, and you can go to my website if you want, freedomainradio.com forward slash free for all of my free books, where I have lots of solutions, both socially and politically, economically and personally.
But it doesn't matter whether I have a solution or not.
You don't have to know how to build a better bridge in order to say the existing bridge is going to fall down.
So that's one thing that I would say.
And the second is... That people accuse me, and I do understand why.
I don't complain about it.
I just want to clarify my position on it, about being a conspiracy theorist and so on.
When I talk about, you know, the powers that be and their ownership of human livestock for the sake of milking them for tax money and so on, I certainly don't believe that there are smoky backfilled rooms with Illuminati robe-wearing people chanting, you know, let's enslave the proletariat.
And I don't think that's necessary any more than I believe that when a bunch of lions are stalking a gazelle in the African savannah, you know, they all have to have these little walkie-talkies like, you take the left.
I would try and bring down the right.
Let's have furry go around the end and block out the knees.
They don't have to strategize.
Lions have an instinct for hunting.
Lions have an instinct for controlling and bringing down.
They have an instinct for going for the weakest members of the herd.
They have an instinct. For when to eat the meat and when to let it sit for a while and bake in the sun.
In the same way that crocodiles have an instinct for when the zebra are going to have to cross the river and they will all congregate.
In the same way that birds have an instinct about when to fly south.
I think you understand. Let me repeat my metaphor 10,000 more times.
So human beings have an instinct for predation, particularly for preying on other human beings.
And they know that the best way to prey on other human beings It's to take control of the children as soon as possible through daycare and public schools to indoctrinate the children.
And that is the fundamental crop.
The fundamental crop in human society is not taxpayers.
It is children because it is the children.
If you mold the child's brain, mold the child's beliefs, then you can own that child for the most part.
Absent the intervention of self-knowledge and philosophy, you can own that child for the rest of his or her life.
So the fundamental crop is children.
I don't believe that there's any big, you know, if you've seen that PowerPoint presentation on how to achieve victory in Afghanistan, I don't think there's anything like that.
But that doesn't need to be any more than crocodiles need a GPS to go and bring down some river crossing zebras.
We all of us have an instinct.
For control and domination, that's just biologically developed, because the greatest resources in the world are other human beings.
And so, biologically, those who were very adept at controlling, managing, and enslaving other human beings rose to the top of the food chain.
The top of the food chain being the hierarchy of society.
Those who have those instincts, who are very good at manipulating, controlling, and subjugating other human beings, that has been reinforced biologically.
That has been reinforced through natural selection.
Those instincts we all have.
Doesn't mean we have to act on them.
You know, I'd like to pee on a bus when I'm stuck on a bus sometimes, but I don't.
At least not, well, actually, generally don't.
But we don't have to have a conspiracy.
We simply have to recognize that the instinct for human ownership is highly developed within our minds and has also been refined through natural selection.
And that is really, really important to understand.
So I'm not talking about any grand conspiracy theory.
I'm simply talking about the instinct for human ownership that characterizes The existence of the most successful hierarchies in society, which generally, at least socially, are the state and the church.
So I hope that clarifies my position on a variety of subjects.
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