Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Aug. 25, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:06:45

1735 School Sucks / Freedomain Radio - Heroism and Statism

Brett Veinotte. host of School Sucks and Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discuss heroism, statism and the lies of history.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Kids are not defective.
	Part 8. Heroism.
	A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
	and today.
	Hi, everyone, everyone, and welcome back to School Sucks Podcast for August 26, 2010.
	It's Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio will be my guest, and we will explore and discuss the topic of heroism in today's show.
	But before we get to that, I just kind of want to set the stage and explain what exactly we're shooting for here with this show.
	This episode will be kind of a combination.
	We're going to revisit some of the topics that were explored in the previous series, American History F, but also bring those ideas full circle and show how they relate to this current series, Kids Are Not Defective.
	In the History series, I did two shows with Gardner Goldsmith from Liberty Conspiracy podcast.
	Both were entitled, Let's Make a Hero.
	One show focused on Abraham Lincoln, the other on Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
	Now, I think it pretty much goes without saying, in this government education system that just about all of us are forced to go through, heroes are made, manufactured, invented, exaggerated from, well, people who actually existed into these mythical characters.
	Now, where do they find the real people to elevate to the status of superhero?
	Well, surprise!
	They're the people who populate the government, especially people who have very high positions of power.
	But these Department of Education folks, the academics, the university statist intellectual types, They seem to have a special place in their cold black hearts for those in power from the past who did the most to expand the size and scope and power of the federal government.
	However they had to do it.
	I mean, if they had to step over a few hundred thousand dead bodies to get it done, heroic.
	And we thank them for saving us from depression, from fascism, from the country being torn apart, whatever.
	We're grateful. And if we don't spend all of our gratitude on these aristocrats and central planners who want nothing more in life, And to have all kinds of power over other people.
	Then they get that power, and then they get completely shit-faced on that power.
	If we don't spend all our gratitude on them, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Wilson, those types, we might have a little bit left over for the people who put on costumes and then shoot at people when they're told to by people in better decorated costumes.
	And these are the heroes of government school.
	Now this is clearly demented because it's making heroes out of people who are not heroic at all.
	One group, just basically authoritarian sociopaths who are also like narcissistic enough to think that they have this gift where they know what's right or they know what's good for tens if not hundreds of thousands if not millions of total strangers.
	And the other group, these unquestioning And willing, sacrificial, fleshy bullet shields in front of some nationalistic mythology, who, for the most part, do exactly what they're told, no matter what they're told.
	Those are the heroes of government school.
	So, while in the history series I wanted to point out just the dishonesty and backward-ass batshit insanity of lionizing these kinds of people, I didn't get to bring the idea full circle.
	Because what I think is most sinister about this is how much it diminishes our own power.
	Throughout the entire process of our government school education, our personal power is stripped away and stripped away in new ways year after year.
	While at the same time, we sit there in our history classes and our civics classes and maybe even our English classes, and we watch from our lowly position as these other people that I've been describing are elevated into the heavens.
	And we learn that heroism, courage, bravery, nobility, these things are not accessible.
	Some people are extraordinary, but most people are not.
	The rewards for you, students, are to sit still and be like everybody else.
	It's not heroic, but it's preferable.
	And you should really take that.
	Because after all, student, you're not George Washington.
	You're not Martin Luther King.
	So, stop daydreaming.
	Because of this patriotic, nationalistic, mythology, hero-worshipping that we're exposed to in school.
	I think that most people...
	And this is nothing new.
	This is not something that's unique to government school.
	Like I said, if you have a mythology, and those people are the standard for hero, most people are never going to be heroes, and they know it by those definitions.
	So if people even want a taste of what it's like to be heroic, they have to turn to fantasy.
	Now in the 21st century, in our culture, these fantasies are science fiction, they're comic books, and they're video games.
	So, we turn to Aquaman, to Wonder Woman, to Star Wars, to Lord of the Rings, to the Wonder Twins, the ambiguously gay duo.
	There's plenty of choices. There's no shortage of fantasy superheroes.
	But we learn from a very young age, and I really believe that most of it comes through these messages in school, where we're trained in this nationalism, where we're trained in this patriotism, that we can never be heroic.
	Stefan Molyneux, four months ago, did two videos covering the perceived unattainability of heroism.
	And what he does in these two videos, so important and so long overdue, the words heroism, heroic, and hero are words desperately in need of new definitions.
	And I really believe that these videos that Steph put together, as well as many other podcasts that he has put out, accomplish that redefinition in a very important and powerful way.
	If you think about it, so many people would be so apprehensive about even referring to themselves as heroic, even around their closest friends, when we consider how we've been trained to feel Heroism is so unattainable, so not for us.
	And that's something that I really think needs to change.
	I also think that you'll be relieved to learn that you don't need to go out and get a costume.
	No lust for power is required.
	You will not even be called upon to commit senseless acts of self-sacrifice.
	This is something that can be accomplished in the short term.
	And sure, it takes a lot of courage and perseverance.
	That last word, perseverance, reminds me of something that I want to add.
	Towards the end of the discussion, Steph asked me for my own understanding, my own definition of heroism.
	And sometimes when I'm asked to think on my feet, I'm really happy with the responses that I give.
	I say, wow, that was clear and succinct.
	Other times, a bunch of words just kind of start coming out of my mouth.
	And when they stop, I hope they made a sentence.
	And this was a little bit closer to the latter.
	So I wanted to take a few minutes just to clarify and maybe elaborate a little bit on my understanding of this concept.
	Heroism is personal, I believe.
	I think that when you want to be perceived as heroic, the most important person, the person you should be most concerned about having that perception, is you, yourself.
	Not somebody else, not your parents, not your teachers, not some fan club.
	But you. So here's a visualization.
	And like I said, my goal here was clarification, so I hope this doesn't make things even more foggy.
	But I would ask you to imagine a series of concentric circles with you or me or whoever at the center.
	And each circle moving away from the center represents an area where we have less influence, power, and control in our own lives.
	So, at the center is ourselves.
	And beyond that, probably be our friends.
	Beyond that would probably be our family.
	Beyond that would probably be whatever cultural or religious beliefs were imposed on us.
	If we're still in school, the circle beyond that might be that whole scene.
	Our teachers, our principal, the rules.
	And in the outermost circle, we would have the state in that outer rim.
	Bound, at this point, today, by nothing.
	Just getting bigger and more powerful all the time.
	I think Steph would agree with me, and actually I know he would agree with me, because I've heard him say this several times, that one of the reasons why libertarian ideas have failed, one of the reasons why the philosophy of liberty is not nearly as popular as it obviously should be, is that a lot of people who are promoting it are not living it on a personal level.
	If we picture all of these circles, when most people start to understand the economic, the educational, the political, they jump right to the outer rim.
	And they start there, talking about the Federal Reserve and the military-industrial complex.
	I even devoted a fair amount of time to that during this introduction.
	And believe me, I am very guilty of this myself in the past.
	And I've even swallowed quite a few bitter pills in the past year while doing this show.
	So I feel like I'm speaking from experience here.
	But I believe the place we should be starting is where we have the most influence.
	With ourselves, with our own lives, with our own thoughts and emotions, then when we have an understanding of truth on that level, when we have some self-knowledge, then we can put that into action.
	We can go to our friends.
	We can go to our families.
	We can start to take apart our cultural or religious mythologies that were imposed on us.
	Then we can deal with school, and then, with a lot of practice and a lot of hard-earned self-knowledge, we can take these ideas to the state.
	But you don't start there.
	I remember this guy 15 years ago in Texas.
	He thought he was the Messiah.
	I mean, talk about a very low level of self-knowledge.
	He took on the state, kind of by accident.
	It wasn't his goal. But he got shot and firebombed.
	And a lot of innocent people around him got killed.
	That's not where you start.
	And I think as long as most people remain trapped in that innermost circle, their lives completely run over by fear, uncertainty, incomprehensible emotion, well, everything that goes on beyond that circle, in the outer circles, is just going to continue.
	Shallow relationships, empty and meaningless friendships, tumultuous family life, Religious fantasies and, of course, the state.
	If everybody traps themselves in a life, a personal life, that is not free, what's to stop them?
	So when it comes to the concept of heroism, I mentioned the word perseverance.
	I think you're going to need it.
	Because as you try to break free from each of these circles, you are going to be fought at every level.
	First you might deal with ridicule or even ostracism from friends or colleagues, co-workers.
	And then you're going to have to deal with shaming and guilting from family.
	Beyond that you have the knee-jerk outrage You might have the threat of eternal damnation as you ask many of the same questions about whatever religion was imposed on you.
	And school?
	You'll have the punishments, detentions, suspensions, whatever.
	And beyond all of that, you have the state.
	Prison, bullets, threats, fines, who knows?
	But of all of these circles to break, I really believe that for so many people, myself included, the biggest fight, the most important fight, is the first one, the personal one.
	Where we have to kind of weigh integrity versus conformity.
	Because conformity seems so easy and so rewarding throughout most of our childhood and adolescence.
	As we really have to challenge these dictatorships that have been built for us in our minds by the circles that surround it, by family, by culture, by the state itself, through our schools.
	But if you can get free of that, and you understand this stuff, and you're willing to act on that understanding, and you're willing to say to people, hey, have you ever noticed this gun that is pointed at you?
	When you're willing to talk with people about how you feel children should be raised.
	When you get all of that, you don't need to wait.
	For somebody else to tell you you're doing a good job, that's how school worked.
	You don't need to wait for somebody else to tell you that you're worthy of that term, heroic.
	It's personal.
	Imagine this.
	Imagine that the only thing you know about some 30-year-old guy is that he is really, really, really into comic books.
	Thank you.
	Now, comic books are all about courage and heroism and nobility and fighting and triumphing over evil.
	This thirty-year-old man is constantly immersed in these heroic tales.
	What do you picture when you think of such a man?
	Do you picture a hero?
	Or not so much?
	Would this change if, instead of being into comic books, this man was a fanboy of Star Trek or Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica or Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars?
	Isn't it odd when you think that those men who are the most into heroic fiction tend to be the least heroic people around?
	Actually, it isn't that odd.
	Because that is exactly what comic books and science fiction and fantasy are designed to do.
	What is the basic message of, say, Star Wars?
	Sure, it's that heroism and courage can exist.
	But where? Why, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
	You see, heroism is never where you are.
	It is never something that you can achieve on your own.
	In these stories you don't actually have to do anything in your own life to become a hero.
	All you have to do is sit around and whine until some old dude in an old blanket comes along and whisks you off to a life of adventure and combat.
	This also works if you have furry feet.
	It might be an owl though if you're forced to live under the stairs.
	All these mythologies, which have remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, are entirely about enslaving you and turning you into useful cannon fodder for your masters.
	In all these tales, a depressed life of dumb chores and crushed opportunities gets magically transformed into heroic and always violent adventures when an older man comes and takes you away.
	All this is just designed to make you want to go to war when the state comes to kidnap you.
	Real heroism, however, is something very different from what is always portrayed.
	Real heroism is something that you can achieve now, today, in the next hour, if you want.
	Does not require you to be bitten by a radioactive spider, or exposed to a gamma ray bomb blast, or cosmic radiation, or be injected with a super soldier serum, or pilot giant god-like robots, or get a blood transfusion from a demon and bang a succubus.
	Or drink radioactive wastewater in your fishbowl.
	Or crash land from the planet Krypton.
	Or be sprayed by chemicals that were struck by lightning.
	Or have a magical ring.
	Or be blinded by more of this omnipresent radioactive stuff.
	Or die and make a deal with a demon to return to the living world with superpowers.
	Or have rare DNA mutations.
	Or yet another magical sword.
	Or just have the ability to talk to squirrels.
	All these stories have exactly the same message.
	Heroism is not for you.
	Heroism is for other times, other places, other worlds, other circumstances, which will never, ever happen to you.
	You must wait for someone to come and turn you into a hero.
	And that man will never come.
	You are allowed to be heroic in your imagination because that way heroism remains an otherworldly fantasy posing no danger to the powers that be.
	You're just not allowed to be heroic in your own life.
	But the world will never be saved without heroes.
	You are constantly being trained to be heroic only in the service of your masters.
	Only in slaughter and sacrifice and subjugation.
	But there is no heroism in serving your masters.
	Real heroism is questioning why you have masters at all.
	All these stories, all these fantasies, all these superpowers are designed to steal heroism from you, to make it impossible and fantastical and remote and unachievable, and make you useful to your masters as a hitman, if needed.
	What is the opposite of this?
	Well, the opposite of fantasy is philosophy.
	The opposite of mythology is integrity.
	And integrity is truth in action.
	Integrity does not require laser swords, rings of power, magic or starships or mutant genes.
	You can be heroic and start the process of truly saving the world before the sun goes down to night.
	And when the sun rises tomorrow, you will be a different person.
	And the world will be brighter by one true hero.
	My guest today is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Stefan, how are you? I am just great, Brett.
	Thank you so much for having me on the show.
	It's my pleasure.
	I'm glad to finally have you on School Socks after I've had the privilege of being on Free Domain a few times at this point.
	And one of the things that I was interested in exploring was a while back when I was covering some topics in American history.
	I did a couple of shows with a gentleman named Gardner Goldsmith from Liberty Conspiracy Podcast.
	We covered Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, and how...
	We looked at how heroes are kind of manufactured in our history.
	You recently did a couple of excellent videos on heroism with a slightly different take, coming at it from a different angle.
	One of the ideas that you present in the video is that So many of these stories from science fiction and fantasy and comic books are sort of recycling these archetypes and narratives and motifs basically centered around the idea of this mundane life of a young protagonist That is transformed overnight into a life of adventure and heroism when this father figure,
	Morpheus, Gandalf, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, if we want to go that far...
	It comes to kind of take them under their wing and take them away.
	And you talk about how this is very much kind of suggestive of the idea of the Uncle Sam figure or the government coming to take these young men to war as that's their only shot.
	I think you and I would both agree that obviously there's no collusion among the creators of these stories towards some pro-military end.
	Do you think that all of these people who create these stories, do you think they're responding to a desire, part of a psyche that's already there, that already exists in young people?
	Well, I think so. I really do.
	I think that human beings have a hunger for morality.
	I've always believed that, that we are fundamentally driven by ethics.
	If you doubt that, then all you have to do is look at the degree of control that is exerted over the ethical narrative.
	I was just responding to some criticisms last night and you come across the social safety net.
	Well, that is an attempt to control the narrative over state coercion.
	He said, we voluntarily cooperate to provide aid and help to those in need.
	That is a way of attempting to control and frame the moral conversation in society.
	The way it always works, of course, is that you take that which is coercive and you reframe it as that which is voluntary and vice versa.
	So people will say that what the government does is voluntary because of a social contract or because of our participation in a democratic society or something like that.
	So that's voluntary.
	That's us getting together to solve problems when the government does stuff.
	But then they will talk about that when people don't have access to economic opportunities or they lose their jobs or whatever, that that is a coercive situation that they're somehow being aggressed against.
	So the voluntary free market is reframed as a coercive institution and the government is reframed as a voluntary institution.
	The reason that that's so essential is that if you call the government by what it is, which realistically and basically it is a...
	A gang of people with the right to initiate violence at will.
	Then the whole moral foundation of society crumbles.
	And so there's a huge amount of control over the moral narrative because people are driven by morality to such a degree.
	So people have a great hunger for heroism, for courage.
	They love it, they love it, they love it.
	But, but, but, and it's a very big but.
	It's a but so big it could show up in a Jay-Z video.
	The but is...
	That actually being heroic is really, really terrifying.
	So people want – it's like a drug.
	People want – they'll take a drug because they want the positive effect of happiness or freedom or – but they don't want to actually work to earn it in the same way that people will, I don't know, get plastic surgery rather than accept their aging or get their stomach staples rather than control their diets or whatever.
	So people want the effect of virtue.
	They want to feel that they are being courageous, but they don't actually want to go through the really difficult and hideous steps, which is to do with the virtue that you can achieve in your life.
	So the virtue, as I argue in the video, the virtue you can achieve in your life is to stand up for truth and virtue and goodness, to accurately identify the coercive nature of our society, to accurately reject and oppose and sometimes even fight in a grim pitched battle of words.
	Fight, fight, fight to help people to understand that the problems that are occurring in society result from violence.
	They do not result from voluntarism.
	That is just one of many particular approaches to courage that you could have, but we're mostly a libertarian audience, so that's a pretty important one.
	Now, that's a courage that you can get out of your chair and do today, now, right now.
	And so people desperately don't want to do that because as you and I both know, and as most people know who are listening to this, that's a really difficult and painful and harsh thing to do.
	It has huge effects on your relationships to stand up for what is virtuous and to clearly define what is evil.
	It puts people into opposing camps.
	It provokes a lot of hostility and problems.
	So we get pitched all of these stories about heroism that is dependent upon other people and other situations and other circumstances that you just have to sit around passively like Luke Skywalker, drink your blue milk and whine about your life until Obi-Wan Kenobi comes in and gives you your daddy's blue penis sword and away you go into the stars.
	And it's the same thing with Gandalf coming to Frodo and it's always Peter Parker is a geek until he gets bitten by the radioactive spider.
	Superman doesn't earn his powers.
	He just comes from Krypton. He doesn't achieve them on his own.
	It's always some external circumstance that builds up people's capacity for heroism.
	What that is basically saying is you have to rely on other people, on other things, on circumstances to be heroic.
	In other words, don't worry about being heroic in your own life, through your own choice, through your own commitment to your values.
	That's never even discussed.
	It's not even on the table.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And there, Obi-Wan Kenobi is political power.
	So it's like, well, you can be a hero if you become president, which is one out of 300 million people at the time.
	I guess fewer then. So the other magic that comes into your hands, the ring of power or the laser sword or whatever, the other magic that comes into your hand is political power.
	And if you gain control of political power, then you can do heroic things.
	Of course, very few people will ever gain political power.
	So I really, really wanted to point out that heroism is something you can do now.
	And this fake heroism of daydreaming about magical powers that other people will grant you or other circumstances will grant you is just a way of keeping people passive and keeping them from doing actual morally great things and morally challenging things within their own lives.
	And that's why I oppose that idea so much.
	Yeah, and I think it's a really important redefinition of the term heroism as well.
	And just to go back to Luke and Obi-Wan for a minute, you put in the first video, I believe, which is called Heroism Parts 1 and 2 on YouTube.
	StephBot is the name of your channel.
	You put some interesting emphasis on that phrase, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, which I think to most people, especially young people, is what heroism feels like.
	And if you're watching those videos of all those clips from all these movies and comics and fantasy stories that you assembled, the most accessible, the most plausible hero, by the old definition, is a billionaire vigilante who dresses up like a bat.
	That is the most realistic shot that anybody has at anything that's in that video.
	Heroism traditionally is something that is very, very inaccessible.
	The idea that I would put forward, if you look at the The narrative of our American history that we get in school, this mythology, it's back to that paternalism.
	The first people that were taught to worship are called the Founding Fathers.
	And it's sort of like they lay down this courage and this virtue and this foresight and everybody who comes along to step into the presidency after them are just inheritors of all that.
	That's very, very, very inaccessible.
	I think the way we're made to feel about that, and even when it isn't some wealthy, elitist aristocrat who gets all this manufactured credit as the story is spun to make them look like a hero, sometimes there's people who do not fit into that archetype, and they're just too...
	Their impact or their power or their courage is just too much to ignore.
	An example that I think about, and this was something that when we talked about civil disobedience six months ago, you, Wes, Lauren and I, and we didn't touch on this.
	It's something that I did mean to cover, though.
	Rosa Parks, a story that we all learn about in school, about this woman who decided one day, out of the blue, To not sit at the back of the bus like she was told.
	And this story is completely made up.
	Was there a woman named Rosa Parks?
	Yes. Was she courageous?
	Yes. Did she do this thing?
	Yes. But the idea that she just decided to do it out of the blue one day conceals the fact that she was somebody who was connected to a network of people that said, this is what we're going to do.
	This is what's going to happen.
	You're going to be taken to jail.
	We're going to work together.
	We're going to support each other.
	Hides the idea that that was something that it was just ordinary people, you know, being courageous, standing up against mistreatment and oppression.
	Even when the people don't fit into the presidential archetype, they're reinvented by the history as these lone courageous revolutionaries when that really just was not the truth.
	I think that's an excellent point.
	Rosa Parks, I think, also shows the degree to which you have to reframe status activities as private activities.
	The government has a big problem, which is that morals change over time.
	Originally, people were unfortunately down and supportive of the racism of the Jim Crow laws and the two-fifths voting laws and so on.
	And so the government exploited that and oppressed minorities and, of course, continues to do because now, right, the new blacks are the illegal immigrants and so everybody can beat up on them.
	But what happens is that morality evolves, which means that the basic principle of morality, which is universalization, right, what is good for one person must be good for another and vice versa.
	So that basic principle of universalization continues to expand, and then the government, as morality grows, government actions are revealed as immoral, right?
	So the reason why the Rosa Parks story was so trumpeted by statist intellectuals is because who are the villains in the Rosa Parks story?
	The villains are the cafes, the restaurants, the bus companies, and so on.
	It's reframed As someone heroically standing up to the bigotry in the free market.
	The private industry was the bigots that they were standing up to.
	Of course, it's complete nonsense.
	Anybody who takes a moment to think about it knows that buses cater to the poorest sections of society and those are the blacks.
	So the idea that the buses would humiliate their main customers would be completely counter to any sane economics.
	And of course it's not true. I mean, the buses didn't want to segregate the buses.
	They were forced to do so by the state.
	But the government control and monopolization of the racist laws, that all has to vanish from history.
	And what has to be opposed is, again, the free market, voluntarism, private.
	So that's why that story is so important because nobody thinks she's protesting against the government.
	They think she's protesting against a bus company.
	But the bus company was just doing what the government ordered it to do.
	But that part has to be forgotten.
	Right.
	So it's again, it's reframed that this is not.
	Well, this was something that was statutory in a lot of places in the South.
	I think they called these Jim Crow laws, these laws that were forced on minorities that just existed for the purpose of perpetuating racism, that it wasn't a problem of statutory law.
	Yeah, you're right.
	It was a problem of, you know, private business interest and restaurant owners wanting to exercise prejudice against these people, which only hurts them.
	You're right.
	Absolutely.
	About the bus company.
	But restaurants that have somebody at the door kind of saying, well, you can come in.
	You can't come in.
	I don't like the way you look.
	Probably don't stay in business that long.
	I think that's a really important point, that all of that was stuff that was imposed on them.
	And then, of course, when...
	Throughout the 1960s, as the civil rights movement accelerated, the government said, especially Kennedy and then more so Johnson, this is a parade that we can jump in front of.
	We can pretend we're leading it.
	And today, if you ask people who are fans of Kennedy and Johnson, they're now even convinced that the entire parade was for them.
	People now believe that the Civil Rights Act, I think it was 1964, the Civil Rights Act extended equality to blacks against the hostility of private businesses who catered to blacks.
	I mean, it's complete reverse.
	I just want to make one more point about the founding fathers, which is that this is another problem that the government faces, is that they have to say that the founding of the country, and this is true almost universally because I heard the same nonsense in England, but the founding of the country was a heroic group of individuals fighting against tyranny to establish freedom.
	They took it upon themselves.
	They waged war. They fought with pamphlets and with muskets or swords or whatever, and they fought against the tyranny, and they overturned the tyranny, and they established peace, and it was that.
	And therefore, we owe everything to those founding fathers or the Tudors or whoever it is that is considered to be those base heroes.
	The problem the government then faces is that the government then becomes tyrannical.
	And so the moral of the story should be, and it is in certain parts of America, the moral of the story should be that you should fight to overturn tyranny.
	The mythology can't continue that way because that's only for the founding fathers.
	Everybody afterwards should not have the same initiative that the founding fathers had.
	That should not be allowed.
	So this is why these myths of passivity and waiting for someone to come and turn you into a hero, right?
	I mean, the founding fathers weren't sitting around waiting for radioactive spiders to bite them to get their superpowers.
	They acted volitionally, and let's just accept the narrative for its face value.
	We probably don't, but let's just accept it at its face value.
	They got out of bed.
	They said, by golly, I'm going to fight tyranny today, and they just went ahead and did it.
	They didn't wait for somebody else to come and turn them into a hero.
	But you can't continue that narrative after the new government has been instituted because that encourages other people to do what the founders did and fight against tyranny.
	So now the narrative has to turn around.
	You have to praise the founding fathers for their courage, for the revolutionary war, for their excellence in military leadership and their proactive natures and their convictions and their virtues.
	But everyone after that has to be told to just sit around and wait until somebody taps you on the shoulder to turn you into a hero, usually putting you in a foreign field with a domestic gun to shoot the innocent.
	Right, because the people in the years that followed the revolution, the people who tried to replicate essentially what was considered heroic in the fight against the British Empire, in the case of Shays' Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, people who spoke out against the policies of John Adams, yeah, that was kind of the opposite.
	That revolutionary spirit was no longer virtuous.
	Oh, yes. See, when we do it, it's a virtuous revolution.
	When you do it, it's disobedience and anarchy.
	I mean, you have to reframe the morality of it always, always, always.
	And it's interesting, too.
	A couple of things we've talked about made this other thought pop into my mind.
	Now, I used to teach history, and I spent a lot of time in the 20th century, and we talked about racism, and we talked about the Alien and Sedition Act, and those two things always make me think of Woodrow Wilson, who was the President of the United States through the 19-teens.
	As far as I'm concerned, he was one of the Worst people who ever held any kind of power in this country.
	And that's really, really saying something.
	And as I started to evaluate the textbooks that were available to me when I was teaching this subject, I was kind of interested in how far will they go?
	How far will they take this let's make a hero thing?
	And They'll take it as far as Woodrow Wilson.
	I'm just picking a couple of events out of thin air here.
	Invading Mexico in 1914, the interventions in Haiti, the open hostility towards African Americans, the Creel Committee.
	The Espionage Act.
	And of course, you know, just picking, seeing this overseas conflict saying, I like these imperial powers.
	I like, you know, these murderous imperial powers.
	I'm going to be on their side against this other one.
	And then those, you know, the British and the French became...
	Well, the Germans became the enemy.
	Of all the things that this man did, if you look at a history textbook, and I know right now that I left out a bunch of stuff, but if you look at a textbook that covers his administration, he too is heroic.
	It's amazing. It is amazing.
	What is hidden? And you would see, I mean, when we kind of put all this together, the concept of heroism as it's always been defined for us just seems so far away.
	Yeah, and it really is designed for that.
	I mean, they say that the victors write the history.
	I always thought when I was a kid that was two countries, you know, like so England gets to write the history of the Second World War because they won, blah, blah, blah.
	But the fact is that the government always wins and it is the government that writes the history of the government.
	And the history of the government, I mean, This president was the man most responsible, the single man most responsible for the Second World War that can be conceived of.
	I mean, Wilson's 14 points, which people talk about these 14 points like they mean anything, but then people talk about the Constitution like it means something.
	The 14 points were never once implemented.
	They were promised to everyone.
	In fact, Germany laid down its arms on the basis of Wilson's 14 points and the guarantee of all of this.
	Not a single one of those points was ever implemented for any of the losers.
	So it was a huge con game.
	But people talk about it like the fiat currency is the real currency.
	Absolutely. We just look at the outcome.
	I know I've heard you cover this before, but the World War in two parts versus two different wars.
	It was very much the US intervention led by Wilson that contributed to the Second World War coming about at all.
	That's your position on that as well, I assume, right?
	Right, right, for sure.
	For sure, because, I mean, they were – actually, Germany had the upper hand in 1917 and not so much of an upper hand that it would have crushed the Allies, but what would have happened is they would have all just gone home, right?
	And that would actually have been a very, very important thing to happen for the First World War.
	If they'd fought for that long and that many tens of millions of people had died and they'd all just go home with the boundaries largely intact, there would have been much less likelihood of a Second World War because people would have said, well, what the hell did we fight that last one for?
	Nothing changed after all that bloodshed, so let's not do another war.
	But when you've got America compiling in, then the allies have so much strength and power that they can crush the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its allies into dust and impose the most brutal peace on them, and then war seems to have some sort of effect, some sort of big change, so people are much more likely to go for it next time.
	Absolutely. So this could be a half-hour podcast.
	It could be a six-hour podcast if we wanted to start diving into any of these many subjects that we've already covered a little bit deeper.
	Let me ask you this, though.
	When you look at your own life, Brett, what is it that you define as heroic within your life and your choices?
	I think that it has, over the past couple of years, now I haven't mastered this and I think that I could still do a much better job.
	I think really kind of holding the truth as a higher value than professional convenience, than the acceptance of friends, than the acceptance of family.
	I think that once I started to get in just from my own personal story, once I started to get excited about these ideas and think that these things were worth sharing with people, Realizing the amount of resistance, the amount of attack that would come back at somebody who presented these things and then wanting to keep going.
	Even if we had to clear some people out of the way as far as these are not good relationships, this is not productive.
	Am I understanding the question correctly?
	Yeah, I think so. I think you're talking about...
	I mean, for me, heroism is fundamentally defined as...
	doing shit that you know is right, even though it's really hard.
	I mean, it really just comes down to something.
	Because there's stuff that we get really good at just because we like doing it.
	Like you like playing tennis, you get really good at tennis or whatever.
	We don't call somebody who's good at tennis heroic, I mean, unless they've pushed through some hideous injury and all that, right?
	So it has to be something that has quality, that has excellence.
	I think we generally understand that it has to have moral quality and moral excellence, and it has to be hard to achieve.
	And that, I think, fits into what you're saying, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I think it's really...
	It all...
	It's important, I think, that once you realize the violence that is underneath all this, you need to be working in some respect to make it visible.
	Now, when I started this show, I've learned a lot, obviously, in the last year that I've done it.
	I looked at everything that everyone else was doing, what you did, what Wes Bertrand did, what the guys in Keen do with Free Talk Live, and I said, do I have a niche?
	Is there something that I know about?
	Is there something that I have experience with where I can start trying to make some of this violence visible, talking about something that I have some knowledge or I have some expertise in?
	And that was education because I had worked in the system for many, many years.
	And I think that everybody just needs to make an effort to do that somehow.
	I just had a wonderful conversation with that girl.
	I don't know if you're familiar with her yet at this point, Erica Goldson, who gave that valedictorian speech.
	Yeah, I did.
	I was actually going to do a little podcast on that speech.
	I appreciated you bringing it up, but I do have a good chat with her.
	I thought we had a really nice chat and I thought that was incredibly courageous what she did.
	I think that once you see it, you kind of have to say it.
	Obviously, you want to be tactful about how you do it, but I think just doing nothing or saying nothing or saying, I can't change anything, I'm just one person, whatever, which is what most people unfortunately say, is certainly safe, but it's not productive, I guess, is the best way.
	Well, yeah. I'm sure you don't mean it this way.
	I would quibble with the word safe.
	I think that we have a conscience.
	I really believe that, in that we have a core of us that compares what we do to the standards that we claim, and you can call it hypocrisy or whatever.
	But I think that deep down, there's an aspect of our mind that universalizes.
	That's pretty obvious to me, because...
	If I roll a ball to my 20-month-old daughter, she'll pick it up every time because she's universalized it.
	It's not like, oh, this ball is going to turn into a pigeon.
	So she knows these universal principles.
	The whole point of her sort of exploring the world is to figure out the universal principles.
	And so from a very early age on, we are trying to figure out these universal principles.
	To go from, you know, physics to virtue is not that huge a leap.
	And so I think that if we accept or we say to ourselves, violence is bad, and there's almost nobody in the world.
	I mean, even Hitler said it was self-defense because Germany was being encircled and all that, right?
	So everyone says that violence is bad.
	And then if the dots are connected for you, and it doesn't take long for any reasonably intelligent person, if the dots are connected to you about statism and violence, And you know that violence is bad and it's revealed to you that statism is violence, then if you turn away from that, I think it does come at great personal cost.
	To me, ethics is sort of like dentistry.
	You can avoid going to the dentist, but it's really going to cost you in the long run.
	And I think the same thing is true.
	There is a temporary relief in turning away from The truly stupendous challenges, and they are absolutely, I've always tried to emphasize this in my show, and I'm sure you have as well, the choice to stand up for truth, reason, virtue, and evidence is really like throwing yourself off a cliff and hoping that someone's going to throw you a parachute halfway down.
	It is just terrifying, and I still find it nerve-wracking at times.
	It's still a frightening thing to do.
	I think that the cost of not doing it accrues in a slow and difficult way.
	And I think that there's a point of no return where you've told yourself so many lies, you've avoided things for so long, you've justified your actions so long that you really can't dig yourself out of that hole anymore.
	And so I've always been sort of cognizant and concerned about that possibility, which is why the individual acts of heroism that I'm able to sort of cough up like hairballs every day, those I think accrue to.
	A stronger sense of self and pride.
	I think you can be proud of the things that are hard and right that you do.
	But I think the cost of not doing it, it's real easy in the moment, but I think it's just death in the long run.
	Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you mention choice, when you start showing people, I think this could go right down to the personal level with family and these unchosen positive obligations.
	That's a topic for another time.
	But all the way up to how we evaluate the political world or the culture that surrounds us.
	And you show people that choice actually exists in how you can feel about these things and how you can approach these things that they've always just kind of accepted that, no, there's no choice about any of this stuff.
	These are absolutes.
	And when you start to show them that choice exists there kind of seems to be this terror in a lot of people that they didn't want to be shown that.
	They didn't want to know that they could have a choice about not only how to feel but also what to do.
	Right. Right. And I think that it's a sort of rippling echo, like lots of stones in a pool.
	It all echoes out to everyone's relationships.
	One of the things that I was very cognizant of when I began to really delve into philosophy...
	I hope that my theory of ethics is going to keep standing, so it's not arbitrary.
	But if you say that the initiation of force is immoral, then the challenge that you face is that support for the initiation of force can't be good.
	You can't have an evil action and support for it being a good thing.
	You can't have it being evil to rob a bank, but the getaway car driver is a good guy.
	And so the challenge that I have always wrestled with, and I continue to wrestle with it, Brad, it's a huge challenge, is if we're going to define the state as immoral, then what is the moral status?
	Of people who support the state.
	Well, clearly, I think to begin with, there is no moral status because they've been propagandized and they don't see the gun in the room and so on.
	But when they do see it, when you point it out and you're patient with it and as positive as possible and as encouraging as possible...
	What happens? I call it dropping the E-bomb because it's the evil bomb.
	If the state is evil, supporting the state can't be moral.
	It's not the same as the evil of the people who pull the trigger, but it definitely can't be a good thing.
	The problem is that when evil, like the serpent in the garden, when the question of evil or corruption or morality or immorality comes into any relationship that you have, It is a very explosive moment.
	It is a very, very difficult time and people, understandably, I think they shy away from it.
	I think you can see people stagger backwards within one conversation or even over the course of centuries when for so long it's easy for whatever reason to call something virtuous when it is exposed as evil or when it is exposed as evil people will sort of backpedal to this position that it's necessary.
	Obviously, they want to start with good versus evil.
	They want to start with right versus wrong.
	It should be sufficient to show people that if something is evil, it should stop.
	You should certainly not support it.
	That's a frustrating thing that I've noticed in conversation, but I also noticed that it's kind of a trend in history as well.
	When they can't do it's good anymore, they kind of retreat to that it's necessary position.
	Yeah, or it's necessary or it's relative.
	Right. Or they go to the argument from effect, which is that, well, there's people that are dependent on the state and can't change it.
	I think this is where you began many years ago with the argument for morality, that so much political conversation exists in arguments for practicality and pragmatism in effects,
	because people who support The people who are participating in politics, they want to talk in terms of virtue, they want to talk in terms of good, We're good and they're bad, but they kind of all seem to know that they really have no right to be in that territory.
	And I've found that the more interactions I've had with them, the more they wind up in the realm of the practical.
	And they kind of get away from the moral pretty quickly when you start talking about things like the non-aggression axiom.
	Right, and practicality is not universal.
	I mean, ethics is universal and that's why it has such great power, but practicality is not universal.
	I mean, they use this argument.
	I was listening to your Drapomania article or podcast the other day, which was great.
	So they defined it as mental illness to run away from your masters, but practicality is clearly a subjective thing, right?
	So it is practical for people on the receiving end of government largesse to want that to continue, but it's not practical for people on the giving end, so to speak, of that largesse.
	So practicality immediately fragments into competing interests, and it no longer can be universal.
	So then what happens is when you talk about The practicality is not being practical or not being universal.
	Then they go right back to the morality and say, well, then you're selfish because you don't want to help the poor and you go right back to ethics.
	People, they gravitate back towards ethics.
	You can see this in conversations all the time.
	You can't hold a position just based on practicality because it's not universal and the state by definition is universal in a geographical area because the laws are constant, at least to some degree.
	Yeah, that's a really good point, that practicality is situational.
	It wasn't too long ago I was having a conversation with family about relationships and I remember a while back Talking about the non-aggression principle with somebody and kind of going through, you know, this is what initiating force is.
	Obviously physical violence, but then theft.
	And they stopped me and they said, well, when I was little, I was poor and I stole things sometimes so me and my family could have food.
	And it's interesting to see how people can become these politicians of their personal lives.
	Sure. They want to start with, it was good.
	But my response was, don't pretend that it was good.
	Just say that it was wrong, but you felt like it was necessary.
	It was wrong, but you felt like you didn't know any better.
	But don't try to frame it as virtuous because then you have to apply that consistently.
	So if it was okay for you to steal when you were poor, now if you, that you're wealthy, come home from work one day, And you find somebody in your house packing up boxes of your stuff, I guess you don't mind if he can show you his W-2s and he's below his income level or he's completely unemployed or homeless.
	And certainly, if you apply that consistently, you wouldn't mind if he came back the next day with all of his friends.
	Yeah, people will retreat from that very quickly, but they want to start there.
	And on the political end, I think it's the same as well.
	Like George Bush, when the invasion of Iraq was happening, he didn't say, yeah, it's going to look really bad, lots of property destruction, lots of death, but as far as the people who helped me get elected and fund my campaigns are concerned, if you could just step into their shoes for a minute and see how good this is for them, you would really understand why we did this stuff.
	That was not what he said.
	He said, this is a struggle to save civilization.
	This is, we're good, they're evil.
	So everybody starts there, but most people outside, most people who are not coming from this position of non-aggression, they're all retreating pretty quickly once the questions begin.
	Yeah, I know what you mean about the poverty and stealing thing.
	Not to sort of blow the trumpets of my own harsh history, but I mean, I was damn hungry as a teenager and I asked people for food.
	People are pretty nice.
	I mean, my brother and I, we would hang out at friends' places during...
	It's dinner time and people would always feed us and there was always help coming our way.
	There was no sort of explicit admission of the problems at home, but there was always help coming in one way or one form or another.
	You don't actually have to steal. People think that stealing has something to do with material resource transfer.
	I mean, stealing is a huge psychological issue that has to do with feeling like you've had your own childhood stolen from you and so you steal back.
	It's a really complex, I think, cluster of psychological issues in my opinion.
	But it's not just, you know, a man is hungry and so he steals.
	I mean, go up to anybody and say, I'm really hungry.
	Most people, I mean, if they know you at all, and most people have someone who knows them, they'll give you some food, they'll give you some help, or you can go to the church, or you can go to a soup kitchen or stuff like that.
	People don't steal just because they want stuff.
	Anyway, I know that's a bit of a tangent, but I just think it's much more complicated than that.
	Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I agree.
	Now I know as far as today is concerned, we're up against kind of a hard break here, so a couple of thoughts from those videos, a couple of lines that I felt were particularly powerful.
	True heroism makes violence visible, and to cover up evil is to serve evil.
	If we could kind of summarize, if you were going to give, you know, my audience, I'm shooting for people who are in high school or recent graduates, if you were going to give them, maybe not a specific strategy, but some kind of motivation to start pursuing this kind of heroism in their own life, what would you suggest?
	Well, I think that Time is short.
	It took 200 years for women's rights to really flourish.
	It took maybe 150, 175 years for slavery to end.
	I don't think we have that kind of time.
	I don't mean to be Mr.
	Alarmist, but I think that the trend of the increases in government power, the fact that there's no new continent to go to where you can escape slavery, I would also say to young people that, man, you guys want to grow up free.
	You want to grow up without massive...
	Throat throttling debt hanging off your necks like balls of steel.
	You want to grow up with some capacity for freedom.
	You don't want to be teenagers under the control of the schools and maybe under the control of your parents and then launch yourself into society and then be under the control of the government for the rest of your life, which is even worse because that's a childhood you never are allowed to outgrow.
	So I would say that time is really of the essence.
	It's a hell of a lot to ask From young people.
	It really is a hell of a lot to ask from young people.
	But at least the question or the challenge is being thrown down, is being thrown forward, that there is an enormous amount that you can do to help carve a channel towards a freer future than the one that is rolling your way.
	There's a huge amount that you can do.
	Study, learn, understand ethics, economics, communication, debating, logic.
	Passion. Pour yourself into a mission to free the future.
	That is powerful.
	That is powerful. It is the best video game in the world.
	Philosophy is the most extreme sport, the most three-dimensional video game that you will ever experience.
	I'd say, you know, put down your nunchucks, your Wii controllers.
	Put down your Xbox controllers.
	There is a better, higher stakes, more powerful game out there called the truth and fighting for real freedom in the future, which is really not going to be up to my generation.
	It may not even be up to Brett's generation and a half down, half a generation down.
	But it really is going to come down to what young people are going to do in the future.
	Be passionate about the truth.
	Be courageous in the communication of the evils of violence.
	Be steadfast.
	Be resolute.
	Cry when you have to.
	Laugh when you feel like it.
	But above all, dedicate yourself to the truth.
	It will pay off for you personally, even if it never pays off socially.
	Even if you can't free the world, you can through integrity, through virtue, through passion for the truth, through communication, through integrity, through courage.
	Even if you don't free the world, you will have better relationships.
	You will have a greater marriage.
	You will be a better parent.
	And that is something you get.
	And it's a pretty damn great consolation prize, even if we don't achieve the greatest prize of freeing the world.
	Outstanding. Well, thank you very much for coming on.
	I really appreciate it.
	I look forward to you being able to come back soon so we can discuss some of the other topics that we had planned, but we can leave it there for today.
	And thank you very much. My website for your audience is schoolsexproject.com, and your website for my audience is freedomain.com.
	Freedomainradio.com. Freedomainradio.com.
	How do I not know that?
	Oh, you know what? It happens to me, too.
	I mean, I think I just called FDR Freedomain Radio.
	And for those who haven't had a chance, please check out Brett's great speech from the 2010 Liberty Forum.
	You can find it on his website.
	I mean, all of your podcasts are great, but I thought that was really good in particular.
	And I think I've only mentioned it once on my show that you were there the year before.
	The Against Me argument, which was right upstairs from where I was, is an excellent speech as well.
	Even though some of that material is covered in the heroism videos, that's definitely worth checking out.
	A lot of good audience participation in that video.
	So, Steph, thanks again. I really appreciate it.
	I look forward to talking to you more in the future.

▲