1719 The Salvation of Philosophy Part 2 - Property Rights
Taking aim at property rights deniers using the power of self-detonating statements...
Aug. 12, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:44
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Let's say you and I get lost in the woods, and I whip out my compass, point and say, we have to go north, and then immediately start heading in the opposite direction. | |
| What would you think? Would you be sure that north was the best way to go? | |
| South? There would be no way to know, but one thing would be certain, that I did not believe that north was the best way to go, despite my claim. | |
| If you called out, dude, you just said we should head north, now you're heading south, and I got angry or started running away, what then? | |
| Let's suppose that you run a store, and I tried to buy something with bills that look kind of fake. | |
| When you begin to wave them in front of the counterfeit detection machine, I grab at them and run away. | |
| Does that prove that the bills are in fact counterfeit? | |
| Nope. But it does prove that I think they're counterfeit. | |
| Self-detonating statements are not always absolutely conclusive, but they are always worth identifying because they expose the integrity of your debating partner. | |
| Some people get into debates because they have a yearning burning for the truth and are willing to hurl errors aside to find it. | |
| Others, most it seems at times, debate because they are overflowing with bullshit and need some place to dump it. | |
| An honest debater will acknowledge a self-designating statement and stop the debate in order to examine and resolve it. | |
| A brain-troll will always attempt to evade his own contradictions. | |
| Just a heads-up. So, property rights. | |
| Why are they so important? | |
| Well, without property rights, there's really no such thing as philosophy. | |
| Certainly, ethics are completely impossible, so I think they're worth examining in some detail. | |
| Property rights rest on two central pillars. | |
| The first is self-ownership, and the second is responsibility for the effects of one's actions. | |
| Self-ownership simply means that I am responsible for my own body. | |
| Barring demonic possession, epilepsy, or Vulcan mind melds, my body pretty much does what I tell it to do. | |
| The seat of self-ownership is the mind, of course, which is why, if I strangle some guy, all of me goes to jail, not just my hands. | |
| If I'm not responsible for the effects of my actions, if I do not own what I do, then there is no such thing as morality, of course, and we're kind of back to demonic possession. | |
| If I am responsible for actions, throwing a ball, and the effects of my actions, breaking a window, then we have established the basis for property rights. | |
| Now, some people will argue that self-ownership is invalid, but this is a classic self-detonating statement. | |
| If I want to argue that self-ownership is invalid, I must first exercise self-ownership by making the argument using my body in some manner. | |
| Typing, speaking, miming, hand puppets, something. | |
| If I type an argument into a message board, then I am exercising self-ownership by formulating thoughts within my own brain and then exercising the exclusive use over my hands in order to make the argument. | |
| Since I must exercise exclusive self-ownership in order to argue against exclusive self-ownership, I'm basically dropping a large stinky bomb of cosmic fail on the message board. | |
| A guy on the Free Domain radio message board once posted that we are not responsible for the effects of our actions, and so I posted that we were. | |
| He intensified his argument, and I then replied that I completely agreed with him and had never disagreed. | |
| He immediately reposted my earlier argument, saying, You just said this! | |
| Ah, I do love the smell of self-detonating arguments in the morning. | |
| They smell like burning troll. | |
| So he was affirming that I was responsible for my argument, the effects of my actions, while arguing that people are not responsible for the effects of their actions. | |
| Naturally, he recognized his own contradiction and apologized for holding a position so utterly at odds with his own actions. | |
| Just kidding. I mean, this is the internet. | |
| Like, any fertile garden bullshit is its major fuel. | |
| So, if you're in a three-way, no, no, no, no, conversation, and person A argues against the ownership of actions, try replying to person B instead. | |
| Person A will immediately protest, saying that he made the argument, not person B. See, philosophy really isn't that hard. | |
| It just takes social balls of steel. | |
| Excuse me, who the heck is this? | |
| I've got balls of steel. | |
| Balls of steel, what is that? | |
| You can't argue against property rights without first using property rights. | |
| Making an argument requires exercising exclusive use over your own body. | |
| Typing something into a chat room requires exclusive use of a keyboard. | |
| The server has to be owned. | |
| I'm sure you get the point. | |
| How does this help us understand the concepts of land ownership or homesteading? | |
| Well, the first thing to understand is that no one cares about land at all. | |
| We only care about what it can produce. | |
| Crops, a hole in the ground to put a house in, a place for our cattle to graze, and so on. | |
| I mean, how much would you pay me for an acre of land in the Amazon if I refused to tell you where it was? | |
| Or if I stipulated that you could never use it for anything or even look at it? | |
| It is not land that is fundamentally owned, but the products of the land. | |
| The land is not created, but the products are. | |
| Just as a man is responsible for, i.e. | |
| owns, the argument he creates in a debate, an effect of self-ownership, a man is responsible for, i.e. | |
| owns, crops that he plants, grows and harvests from a piece of land. | |
| My argument does not exist in the world if I do not communicate it, and crops do not exist if you don't plant and harvest them. | |
| It is this bringing things into existence that is the essence of property. | |
| It is not stealing from someone else, but rather creating something new that establishes property. | |
| Things are not owned. | |
| They are created. | |
| Now remember, this is a very short introduction. | |
| My point here is not to solve all conceivable problems of property rights, but rather to introduce you to the power of identifying self-detonating statements about property rights so you can vault over the bridge-lurking trolls squatters, no doubt, and get to the real meat of discussing property rights, rather than endlessly fussing over whether self-ownership and the ownership of resulting actions is valid to begin with. | |
| Like all self-detonating statements, denying property rights requires exercising property rights. | |
| If someone doesn't know this, no problem, let them know. | |
| If they then get it, fantastic, move on to some real philosophy. | |
| If they deny or fog or evade or attack, then they're either not smart enough to understand basic contradictions, in which case give them a lollipop and a pat on the head and send them back to the sandbox. | |
| Or they're just manipulative trolls bent on messing with your head. |
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