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Sept. 2, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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1744 To See the Farm is to Leave It'? - Freedomain Radio Emails of the Week Sep 8 2010

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio answers listener questions about real freedom, determinism, and dealing with children's temper tantrums...

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Waller from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well. Thank you everybody so much who took the time to trek up for the 2010 complimentary Free Domain Radio listener barbecue.
	For those who came for five days, thank you very much.
	It was great fun to have those in-depth chats.
	For those who just came for the barbecue, thank you so much.
	It was absolutely wonderful to meet you and I hope that you will come back next year.
	So this is the emails of the week into September the 8th, 2010.
	And the big topic has been...
	And let's have a look at some of the comments that I've received.
	I think it's really, really important, first and foremost, you know that old tagline for the movie Alien, you know, with that thing that comes out of a guy's chest?
	It's like the male version of childbirth.
	The old tagline for the movie, Alien, was in space, space.
	No one can hear you scream, scream, scream.
	And a similar thing is true in philosophy.
	In philosophy, no one can hear your opinions.
	Nobody can hear my opinions.
	Opinions are completely irrelevant to philosophy.
	It's like a book reviewer saying, I didn't like the font.
	I mean, it really is not relevant to the book itself, fundamentally.
	So, the one thing that I would strongly, strongly urge you to do, if you want to have some credibility with anybody who thinks really solidly, is barking out your upset or simply saying that something is wrong without proving it.
	It's just, it's noise, it's static, it's a waste of typing space.
	And I really would strongly urge you.
	So, somebody wrote to you and said...
	Steph, it looks like you fell in quite a lot of traps and failed to investigate for emotional reasons.
	I don't even know how you can objectively define free will, which if you can't, that would make it a false dichotomy.
	Just a string of words, kind of like an opinion.
	It seems like you fell into traps, but not actually an argument, so please try and, you know, find the flaws in what it is that I'm saying, or find counter-evidence.
	I'm absolutely happy to hear it.
	Another fellow wrote, Moral slash ethical thought can and does happen without any freedom.
	Freedom is not a requirement for these.
	It is only a requirement of responsibility, which is an afterthought of the happening.
	Well, so when you say it can happen without any freedom, that's simply a statement.
	That's just a statement.
	If you're designing a bridge and the client that you're designing it for has concerns about it standing in a hurricane, no client that's reasonable will simply hear you say, oh, it'll stand.
	Yeah, it'll stand. I mean, they're going to need some proof.
	They're going to need to see the calculations.
	They're going to need to see that kind of stuff.
	So I think that's really, really important.
	Just stating stuff without providing any proof, without providing any arguments, not really worth typing space.
	And so here's another example.
	Somebody wrote, you cannot call Katrina the hurricane immoral because Katrina cannot think about its actions and relate to it in a moral sense prior to it.
	Hitler, on the other hand, could neither, however, are to quote blame Both can be called, quote, bad, but only one can be called immoral in the context of a moral system.
	Neither is responsible.
	Again, these are just statements.
	These are just like me putting out something which says, free will exists, I'm right, there's just no argument against it.
	I mean, that would be shouting my opinions into the deep space of who gives a rat's ass.
	And I think that's really, really important.
	Your opinions are fine.
	Everybody's entitled to his or her own opinion.
	You're just not entitled to it being a fact or it being correct or it being rational or it being persuasive to anybody with any brainstem.
	So I think that's really, really important.
	Unfortunately, I've had a chance to read through most of the 500-odd responses that have flowed in.
	And quite sadly...
	There's just not really any rational argument.
	And, you know, I hate to say it because there's a lot of people who really care about these issues.
	And I'm very, very sorry that you've not gone through that kind of training or that kind of rigor or discovered that kind of thing for yourself.
	But... It is really, really important to find a logical contradiction in what it is that I'm saying or at the very least provide scientific counter evidence.
	That would be fascinating.
	To all the people who talk about quantum mechanics having something to do with either free will or the existence of Of God, life doesn't occur at the atomic level.
	Life begins to occur at the cellular level.
	And once you get to anything that is even visible under a microscope, quantum effects have long since vanished.
	And I will say this to the people who have responded in similar ways to the agnosticism video that I recently posted.
	Quantum mechanics has nothing to do with the existence of God.
	See, God is a term that we have historically inherited from people from thousands of years ago.
	And so you can't say 21st century science validates what people may have been saying 2,000 years ago or more.
	Because 2,000 years ago, they had no idea about quantum mechanics.
	And so you can't sort of say this goes backwards through time and validate stuff that was talked about in the past.
	It just doesn't work and I wish people would just stop doing it.
	It's just such an obviously silly con.
	I sort of point that out.
	I get this question quite a bit.
	Hey, Steph! Can you explain what you mean by, to see the farm is to leave it?
	Well, that is from my video, the story of your enslavement, and I will tell you very briefly what I mean by that.
	It is a bit of an esoteric statement.
	I always try to be very precise in the language that I use.
	So I compare countries to tax farms, to political and economic masters as farmers and as the general population, as the livestock that are allowed to be free because it makes them more productive and thus they can be skinned alive more in terms of taxation and debt and fiat currency deflation.
	So when I say to leave the farm, to see the farmers to leave the farm, I'm being very specific in my word.
	I'm not saying to see the farmers is to leave the farm.
	I'm not saying that to see the food pens or to see the fence.
	I'm saying to see the farm.
	What is the farm? Well, the great challenge of human society is to try to understand how a relatively small group of individuals can manage and control many, many, many times their size in terms of population.
	The ruling class is half a percent, maybe a percent of the general population.
	So how is it that one person out of 100 can get 99 people To follow just about their every whim.
	Well, the answer is that societies with hierarchies, i.e.
	religious or statist hierarchies, societies with hierarchies, we are very much tempted into looking at the top-down, right at the pyramid.
	We look at the top-down of the hierarchy and we think that we're understanding something, but we're really not.
	What's counterintuitive about hierarchies is that they are in fact Almost entirely horizontal.
	They are almost entirely horizontal.
	The cost of human ownership when you have 99 uncooperative livestock is simply not valid.
	It's why there are very few great white sharks in captivity, because they just don't respond well to captivity, whereas you've got tons and tons of nurse sharks and dolphins and clownfish, I guess.
	So, hierarchies are horizontal, which means that slaves attack each other for stepping out of line.
	And I've said this in a number of videos, but I might as well make it clear here, so it seems to be a little confusing.
	And there's more about this in my book, Real-Time Relationships, my free book at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	Slaves, we slaves, we attack each other for pointing out our manacles.
	We attack each other for pointing out the hierarchy.
	And it is our willingness to attack each other that is fundamentally what makes us ownable.
	Because the masters know that whoever points out the farm, whoever says we are actually enslaved, whoever points out the coercion, Of taxation, or the intergenerational violent predation of the national debt, or the savage injustice of the criminal and legal system, or the scathing immorality of war.
	Whoever points out these basic facts is going to be turned upon, and intellectually at least, and sometimes emotionally, rent limb from limb by his fellow slaves.
	It is our willingness to attack each other.
	It is our willingness to attack each other.
	It is our willingness to attack each other that allows the hierarchy to continue.
	The state is not in Washington.
	The state is not in Moscow.
	The state is not in Tehran.
	The state is not in London. The state is in the defensive savagery of your fellow citizen.
	Who will emotionally abuse you, attack you, reject you, and ostracize you for pointing out the basic truths of our environment.
	To see the farm is to leave the farm.
	The farm is the willingness of your fellow slaves to attack you for pointing out the truth.
	You simply, if you want to be free, in my experience and opinion, if you want to be free, you simply stop associating with people who will attack you for pointing out the basic moral, economic, and practical realities of our situation, of our life.
	The state survives, the state flourishes, the state exists only because slaves praise it and attack fellow slaves for questioning its moral foundation.
	The state is your fellow slaves.
	The people in Washington simply profit from our willingness to attack each other.
	And you can see this, of course, all the time on YouTube.
	It just becomes, and other places, my inbox, it's just kind of a boring, noisy hubbub.
	When you point out the reality of our enslavement, slaves freak out and lash out.
	And that's how the state survives.
	You don't need to believe me on this, of course.
	I mean, like everything that I say, subject it to your own reasoning and empiricism.
	All you have to do is ask yourself, where does the opposition to my commitment to freedom and truth and integrity and courage come from?
	Where does it come from? Where does the opposition come from?
	How many times have I been arrested?
	How many times have I been thrown in jail?
	How many times have I been attacked by the state for speaking about freedom?
	And then compare that to how many times you get attacked by friends and family and relatives and colleagues and co-workers and associates and acquaintances.
	Do you get attacked by your fellow slaves versus getting attacked by the state?
	It's simply a numbers game.
	The state is horizontal.
	The state only profits vertically because of the horizontal attacks of slave-on-slave enslavement.
	So, let's do another quick letter here.
	Thank you for your patience. Hello, Steph.
	I've listened to many of your podcasts already and have read most of your books.
	It is difficult to describe how thankful I am for what you gave me and others.
	Many things have changed in my life since I got in touch with Free Domain Radio.
	I became an anarchist, quit my political activities, and discovered a new way of thinking.
	Well, thank you. That's wonderful. For a long time, my main interests were politics, anarchy, and economics.
	But the fact that I have a beautiful wife and two fantastic children, 13 and 11, has led me to the relationship topics.
	Your child-raising podcasts and real-time relationships help me to discover my mistakes in raising my children.
	I was raised in an entrepreneur's household in a very conservative way.
	I had hard times because my mom died when I was six years old and I had to live with my stepmom.
	I did not accept her and so we had a lot of stress in our family.
	My dad was always hard-working and his parenting style was not really emotional.
	Unfortunately, I have two memories of the time before the death of my mom.
	The first I'm sorry, I'm not sure what the last sentence means.
	The first 10 years of my being a dad, I tried to make things different than my dad did, but now I know that I was not really successful.
	After I have realized that through Free Domain Radio, I talked to my kids about all these things and apologized for everything I did wrong.
	Oh, fantastic, magnificent.
	It is a hard thing to stand in front of your children and say, I'm sorry, I've done some things that are wrong.
	Tell me what your experience is.
	How can I be a better parent? I ask for your forgiveness.
	I commit to doing better.
	That is something I strongly encourage in everybody's personal relationships.
	The pizza place down the street from me will send me a questionnaire saying, how did we do this week?
	But how often do you do that with your wife, with your husbands, with your children, with your brothers, with your parents?
	What is your experience of being in a relationship with me?
	How can I do better? What have I done that could be better?
	So important to get that kind of feedback.
	Since then, he goes on, we have had a much better relationship.
	My daughter, for example, loves talking about God and philosophy.
	She understands universally preferable behavior.
	Children do. And we have very interesting discussions about our own behavior.
	My son is 11 and not so interested in these things.
	Now to my problem.
	There are moments when my children get really angry.
	My son, for example, loses control when he thinks we treat him unjustly.
	He yells and needs quite a time to calm down again.
	I know exactly what he yells because we yelled too when he was younger.
	I wish that we could turn back the time so that we could start our parenting with the knowledge of today.
	That's impossible, and the things we made wrong will never be deleted.
	If I could make a wish for a podcast topic, I would like you to talk about parenting possibilities for people like us who made mistakes, learned, and now tried to change.
	Thank you for your work, and sorry for my English.
	Your English is fantastic.
	I'm always impressed by people's command of a tricky language like English.
	Well, first of all, I just want to point out that for what it's worth, my opinion is that what you're doing is entirely and fundamentally heroic.
	This is how the world is saved.
	The world is saved through peaceful and positive and proactively generous and kind parenting.
	Refraining from raising your voices, calling names, obviously hitting, assaults of any kind, and not exposing your children to crazy people, this is how we, brick by brick, lay the foundations for a better and a new world.
	Too many of the people out there were raised so abysmally, or at least put into such revolting and disgusting public schools that are just like broken brain robots, spitting out fizzy sparks of irrationality and defensiveness, and they're almost impossible to reason with, and it's really not worth it.
	In science, it's well understood that the adherents of old theories never change their minds.
	They just eventually die out and they're replaced by people with clearer thinking or more modern thinking.
	And I'm sure the cycle begins again.
	And then the same thing is true of society.
	It's not so much worth arguing with your fellow defensive brain-bot explosion slaves.
	And it is much more worthwhile investing in peaceful and benevolent raising of children.
	So that children are actually able to reason as adults rather than having scar tissue from early traumas and abuse and then just creating ideologies to cover that up.
	So first of all, just fantastic for turning the corner, fantastic for changing things, fantastic for no longer yelling at your children, fantastic for apologizing to them.
	I can't tell you.
	I get a lot of emails from parents who are just making the most amazing and just beautiful changes in In the world.
	And that's the part of the show that I do that is the most meaningful to me.
	It is the most important to me.
	It is the most meaningful and important to the future and to the happiness of families wherein a peaceful world is going to inevitably grow.
	So thank you so much for everyone who is listening to the series on philosophical parenting, which is available on my podcast page on my website, and who are making the changes.
	I think it's just...
	I mean, that is just amazingly beautiful and thank you, thank you everybody so much for having the courage to make those changes.
	As far as this goes, this problem of rage, the only thing that I can suggest is first of all, of course, you have to model different behavior.
	You have to have apologized and you have to model different behavior, which you are doing.
	No raising your voice, no intimidation or bullying of your children.
	Fantastic. In the moment, it's very hard to bring down the escalation of a child's upset.
	In the moment, it's very hard to do that.
	I do that with my daughter sometimes.
	She's 20 months and she gets very agitated and passionate about things.
	And I will try to speak soothingly.
	I will tell her... Take a deep breath, honey.
	Take a deep breath. And we will try to get her to physically relax and take deep breaths.
	She's not able as yet to really vocalize what caused the emotions, but we do try and figure out.
	I certainly try and figure out the situation that is occurring.
	And I just try to get her to relax physically and to take deeper and slower breaths.
	And that tends to counteract the fight-or-flight mechanism.
	But I think the very important thing to do afterwards...
	Is to sit down with your son and just ask him, so you got really mad.
	I think I understand, but why do you think you got mad?
	What was it that got mad? And he's going to come up with stuff like, you did this, or someone did that, or someone did that.
	And it's like, yeah, but there are times when somebody does that and you don't get mad, or you do that to other people and they don't get mad.
	So it's not exactly that someone does that.
	The important thing with children, and I think he's at a reasonable age for this, particularly since you sound so smart.
	I'm sure that's hereditary.
	He probably is smarter than both of us combined in the long run.
	Is to help children to understand that their feelings are not generated directly through external events.
	So if somebody pricks me with a pen, do I not bleed?
	Well, yes.
	And so the pain of that is, if I get a bee sting, the pain of the bee sting is directly caused by external events.
	It's not my interpretation, but for emotions, as opposed to physical sensations, for emotions, there is the stimuli.
	There is the interpretation of the story, which then creates the emotional response.
	And the important thing is to understand and figure out what the interpretation or the story is about what happened.
	I mean, people try this with me all the time.
	Oh, Steph, you just put out a really bad argument.
	You should stick to your economics and your politics because this stuff, you're really bad and it's an embarrassment.
	One guy said, I hope you realize that...
	That everyone is laughing at you.
	What am I, 12?
	Maybe that works on a 12-year-old girl.
	I don't think it really works on an intelligent philosopher.
	But people try that, and what they're trying to do is to get me to internalize a critical voice.
	So that I'm, oh my god, people are laughing at me.
	Oh, I'm not good. I'm only an amateur.
	Well, of course, that's all true, but that doesn't mean I'm not any good.
	So... The important thing is to help your son to understand that it is not stimulus response, that it is not something happens in the outside world and anger is the inevitable result.
	There is a phase of interpretation that occurs in the mind.
	So when somebody is nasty to me, it's hard to say to me because it doesn't have anything to do with me at all, but if somebody's nasty online and I read it and they're nasty to me, To me, it's not like watching Mike Tyson come up with two fists.
	It's more just like watching I don't know, a dog with three legs trying to get over a fence.
	I mean, it's just, you know, it's kind of sad.
	You kind of want to help, but, you know, the dog's got to figure it out for himself.
	It's just a wounded brain lashing out.
	It doesn't have anything to do with me.
	It doesn't have anything to do with my arguments because the arguments are not referenced.
	And it also, of course, when somebody's very critical on the internet, all they're doing is telling me about their own inner critic, that this is what they experience.
	And so my understanding...
	Of that is really, really important.
	The last thing that I'll mention, so I hope that that helps, and please let me know if I've been full of complete nonsense and I'll try to take another swing at it, but, you know, slow breathing and you staying calm and you modeling calmer reactions to situations is important, and asking your son, what was the thought that happened between this and your feeling?
	And getting him to slow down and examine that is really important.
	Another thing that has popped up recently is I've been called, oh, shockingly, I've been called arrogant, which I think is quite interesting.
	And for those who think that I'm arrogant, I will point this out, which I think is really important.
	Yes, I have done a lot of work on free will.
	I've done a lot of work on ethics.
	I've done a lot of work on personal relationships.
	I've done some work on economics, a lot of work on politics and so on.
	And yeah, I claim to have solved, I believe that I have solved some significant problems.
	However, the very important thing, let's just take the case of ethics.
	This is the kind of insight that you just need to have if you're going to want to, I guess, play with the big boys in the brain bubble bath.
	Worst product ever.
	So I've written a big book on ethics, is my take on how you can have ethics without governments and gods.
	And people think that that's arrogant.
	I mean, good heavens, people, you've got to think a little bit more deeply than that.
	There's quite the opposite of arrogance.
	If I write a big book on ethics, what am I actually saying to people?
	What I'm actually saying to people is, I don't know what ethics is.
	I don't know what virtue is.
	I don't know. If I come up with a definition of free will that is original, I'm saying, I don't know what free will is.
	I don't know how it's defined, and this is my definition.
	I obviously wasn't born with these things.
	These are arguments that I have struggled to develop and propagate over the years.
	So... The degree to which...
	I mean, if you sort of look at my introduction to this sort of 18-part introduction to philosophy series, these are all things that I have developed answers for because I didn't know them.
	So a book saying, this is my argument for ethics, is an explicit admission that until I wrote the book, I didn't know what ethics was.
	Or until I came up with the theory, I didn't know what ethics was.
	Yeah. Trying to develop something new in an intellectual realm is to say that there is no answer out there that works for me.
	I don't know what the answer is, so I'm going to try and figure it out.
	So it is actually an action of humility to work on these topics rather than an act of arrogance.
	So I just wanted to point that out and to mention that so that people can, you know, try and remember some of the basics of human motivation.
	Anyway, thank you so much.
	I hope you have a wonderful week. I'm going to be off to speak at a libertarian pub night tonight, so that should be a lot of fun, and I'm sure I'll be able to post that in a couple of days.
	And thank you so much for all of your continued interest in philosophy.

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