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Sept. 14, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:47
1747 Freedomain Radio E-Mails of the Week, September 14, 2010

Free markets versus tuna, human farming, and one of the most brilliant emails I've ever received - from a 15 year old no less!

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Hi everybody. Hope you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I thought we'd take class outside today.
So I hope that you will enjoy it.
Some listeners suggested a slight change of venue might be worthwhile and I can't say that I disagree.
We're outside in my backyard.
So this is emails of the week and I hope you're doing well.
It's September the 14th, 2010.
So somebody wrote, thanks for the barbecue.
It was great and I look forward to the next time.
Thank you so much. It was great to have everyone up here.
So this is the question or the comment that this fellow has.
I was reading this blog and I came up with a question for you blah blah blah.
So five. The market, free market I guess, is intrinsically incapable of pricing extinction and other shared or social costs of global production and consumption.
As I often note, the last wild tuna will fetch a handsome price when it's auctioned off in the Tokyo fish market.
Was the value of a wild species calculated by the market?
No. The market has no mechanism for pricing the value of a species or of the social cost of poisoned air and water.
The commons we all depend on.
Okay, so let's start with that.
Look, 99% of conversations about philosophy or economics or virtues or values is in the definition of terms, is in the language.
So, for instance, people say we need the government to protect our property from criminals.
Which is a meaningless statement because there's no definition in it.
What you actually need to say is once we understand that the government is funded through taxation and taxation is theft, then the proposition that is being put forward is we need theft to protect our property.
I mean that clearly is a ridiculous thing to say, but nonetheless people say it.
So it's all around the definitions.
You can't say we need organized institutional countrywide theft in order to protect our property because that's just an obvious contradiction.
So the key thing is to just get the definitions right.
Don't talk about the free market.
I've done it, you've done it, we've all done it, but I'm trying to move away from it.
Don't talk about the free market. Talk about Peace.
Talk about non-violent interactions.
Talk about pacifism. Talk about not using force to get things done.
But this is the criticism.
Look, there's no such thing as the last wild tuna.
That's never going to happen economically in a free market environment or in a peaceful, voluntary, interactive environment.
There's no such thing. We're never going to run out of oil.
We're never going to run out of diamonds.
We're never going to run out of these things.
It's never going to happen.
It can't happen in a voluntary society.
Why? Because as oil begins to become harder to find, then its price of production will go up slowly over time as fewer and fewer reserves are found or there's no way of making an artificial oil or anything like that.
The price of oil will slowly begin to go up and then some alternative will be created and it's a gentle and peaceful and nice transition.
To steal a metaphor from a competent economist, of which I am not, if you had a huge warehouse full of peanuts in shells and you were told to go and eat all the peanuts over time, you would never ever find the last peanut because there's a huge warehouse with millions of peanuts in it.
The first whole bunch of peanuts would be easy to find and then as time went on, you'd have more and more shells, right?
You're not allowed to take the shells out, let's say.
You'd have more and more shells and fewer and fewer peanuts and you'd never find the last peanut because it would be buried under millions of shells.
You're never going to find it. You'll just give up looking after a certain amount of time once it becomes hard enough.
So you just don't run out of things.
So there's no last wild tuna.
So he says the market has no mechanism for pricing in the value of a species.
Well, value is one of these terms of what does it mean?
Value to whom? Value in what sense?
How much would you pay to have preserved the dodo?
Would it be like 50% of your remaining earnings in your life?
Probably not. Would it be a penny?
Yeah, probably. So value is one of these things that in a peaceful and free market reflects people's general choices about economic and personal preferences.
And so the social costs of poisoned air and water, the commons We all depend on.
Now, as soon as somebody uses the word commons, for those who aren't familiar with this line of argumentation, what they're talking about is the problem of the commons.
And the problem of the commons is that, let's say that we're all farmers, and we have sheep, and there's a piece of common land in the middle, and we all want to let our sheep graze on the common land rather than on our own land, and so everybody lets their sheep wander all over the common land, the common land gets denuded, Or, it's actually less erotic than it sounds, it ends up having all of the grass eaten off it and then nobody has any place to put their sheep.
And this is considered to be an argument for the government, which is truly mind-blowing.
It's a truly mind-blowing piece of sophistry when you just take a moment to think about it.
I mean, nothing is more collectively owned than the government, because the government isn't even owned.
At least the farmers themselves are getting the negative results of letting their sheep graze on this common area.
But politicians and lobbyists and other...
Assholes who go into the government, they're just there temporarily, they get to print money, they get to steal money, they get to defer debts to future generations.
The government is the ultimate example of the problem of the commons.
To use the government to solve the problem of the commons, even if the problem of the commons was valid, and I would argue that it's not, to use the government to solve it is like using a guillotine to cure a headache.
I guess it's true that it's sort of solved, but the problem you end up with is far worse.
So the problem of the commons is simple.
Privatize it, privatize it, privatize it.
In other words, let people own it.
Let them make a bid on it, right?
So the farmer who is the most successful should be able to make a bid for a larger portion of the land, which he will then use in the most successful way.
In other words, the most economically productive way.
The problem of the commons only exists because someone is not allowed to own the commons.
So yeah, let people own the oceans, let people own the fish, let people make bids on it, because then they will have an incentive to preserve.
The natural resource.
So 400 years of cart fishing off the east coast of Canada was perfectly fine.
Perfectly fine until the government took it over and began setting quotas and then began to bow to political pressure to let people fish more and more and more because it gave them more income.
And also when the government lets people utilize resources faster, it gets more tax money out of them because it pushes them into higher tax brackets.
They get to sell more so the government reaps more rewards.
And now there's no cod and barely any other fish.
After 400 years, it took less than a generation for the government to completely enable the stripping of all of these resources.
So, can peaceful people find out a way to own and utilize resources in a way that preserves them?
Absolutely! If people care about, what is it, the last, what kind of fish?
Tuna. If people care about wild tuna, then they will buy up swaths of oceans, they will find ways to track the tuna, they will find ways to own the tuna.
Yeah, it's complicated, but so what?
People can get to the moon, people can figure out quantum physics, people can figure out how to own fish.
So, if people care about it, they'll find a way to preserve it.
If they don't care about it, then the government won't help because nobody will vote for it anyway.
So will peaceful and non-violent interactions be able to solve the problems of environmentalism?
Well, of course, because violence doesn't solve any problems.
So forget about the free market versus government regulation.
Are people allowed to point guns at each other to solve the problems of property?
Well, no, of course not. So that would be my argument.
He also says, it is also intrinsically, he means the market, incapable of pricing controls of resources I'm going to agree with that.
Although, again, talk about the free market presumes.
Well, the free market doesn't presume anything.
The free market just means you don't get to point a gun at somebody and steal their property.
That's all the free market means.
I mean, the free market is like saying non-rape.
Non-rape as opposed to rape, right?
So you get your sex voluntarily versus using the initiation of force or threats in order to rape someone.
So when somebody says free market, what they're talking about is non-rape as opposed to government, which is the initiation of force or fraud, which is violence.
So it's voluntarism versus violence.
It's not government versus free market.
It's important to define these terms.
Alright, so I think we can say enough about that.
Let's move on, shall we, to the next question?
Let's see here.
Hi, Steph. I'm a very regular follower of your Stephbot spot on YouTube.
Oh, and the people who've asked me why it's called Stephbot, I mean, that was just my Unreal Tournament name, which I typed in fairly randomly, and I got an account way back at the dawn of YouTube when you could have long videos, and now you can't have long videos, so I can't change the name.
That's the only reason. Let's see.
I have observed in my own behavior that I do clearly see the big picture or the big view in the abstract.
The challenge I have is quite different from most people.
I have trouble piecing in the details.
Thus, I mentioned the formula, some components anyway, for the recent boom and current bust.
I recently watched on Netflix streaming the frontline program The Warning.
The argument, of course, is that under-regulation caused the boom and the subsequent bust.
In an abstract way, I know that this is fundamentally incorrect and that some other components are missing, namely that the entire system was and is built unsustainably for a longer period anyway.
Therefore, injecting a conflicting but seemingly flawless ideology becomes flawed by assuming it is compatible with another far from perfect or sustainable system.
Look, so he says he wants a blog or a video to prove that the reason for the boom and bust wasn't the free market.
On the contrary, it was the capitalist government protected market, incorrectly named free market.
I've got some videos on that, on the housing boom and so on.
So, you know, some people come up to me with this story, and it's just a mythology.
I mean, it's so boring.
I mean, it's so relentlessly boring to hear people just consistently reiterate the same bullshit propaganda that you hear from all sources.
Like, there's still this story that it was somehow the free market which produced the boom of the 1920s, which followed with 14 years of depression that the government tried to solve, but the free market wouldn't let it be solved, and then it was the Second World War that ended The Great Depression and all.
This is the complete opposite of the truth.
The government swelled the money supply in the 20s by 60% and then collapsed it by more than a third.
It was the money supply that basically caused the boom of the 1920s and it was massive amounts of government control and protection and regulation, some of which It was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the day that caused the ongoing, continuing recession.
It's this violence that causes all of these problems.
It is not freedom, it is not voluntarism, it is not peaceful interaction that causes these kinds of problems.
So, I would say, the question to ask is, is somebody working with actual information or are they working with propaganda?
Are they working with the talking points from the mainstream media?
So, if somebody says, well, it was a lack of regulation that caused the boom and the bust.
Then I would ask them, well, what's your definition of regulation?
So it's government interference or government management of the marketplace and the economy that was smaller.
So what parts of it were smaller?
And so do they actually know anything about the actual facts, even if the facts are misrepresented?
Or are they just repeating a talking point that they've heard?
If they're just repeating a talking point, it's really hard to argue.
Because all they're doing is just repeating somebody has said that there was less regulation and that's what caused the bust.
That's the first question that I would establish whether somebody is talking out of their armpit or something more useful.
The second thing that I would ask is Well, money is the basic lifeblood of any economic system.
Yes, Venus Project people, I am a fan of money as long as it is voluntary.
I don't think that money should ever be coercively enforced and if you want to live without it, be my guest.
But money, which is the way to facilitate Money is the water by which the trade fish swim in.
It is a way of translating value from disparate items so that you don't have to do the ridiculous daisy chain of bartering.
If you want to trade an orange for a pair of shoes or a bag of oranges for a pair of shoes, you don't have to find 15 people in the middle with intermediate goods.
You can just use currency. So currency in a free system is going to be pretty important.
Currency is the most fundamental aspect of any economic system, and control over the currency is control over the economic system.
So that would be my first argument. And if they don't know the degree to which the Federal Reserve has manipulated money, has manipulated interest rates, then they just don't really have any competence to talk about it.
And then you just pat them on the head and they say, well, go back to your sandbox, go back to your mainstream media, because you don't have the facts.
You're just echoing empty talking points from empty heads in suits.
So, yeah, I don't really have anything...
It's like somebody comes up to you and starts a conversation in Mandarin, right?
They start a conversation in Mandarin.
And you speak Mandarin.
You're fluent, right? Maybe you're a native speaker.
Somebody comes up to you and they're speaking in Mandarin.
And you then start having a conversation where you're chatting about things in Mandarin.
And the moment that you reply to them, they just freeze up.
Because somebody has just taught them fanatically...
To speak that one sentence in Mandarin that they've come up to you.
And maybe they can speak it very well, but they've just been taught syllables.
They have not been taught a language.
They do not know anything outside of the little syllables that they have been taught.
And this is what 99% of discourse is in the world, is people with these, they've been taught syllables, they don't actually have a grasp of the language.
And so you can't have a conversation with somebody who thinks he speaks Mandarin because he's got one phrase out of a phrase book.
Because you start talking and they just stare at you like deer in the headlights.
Forget about the opinions.
Look for people's understanding of the basic facts.
And if they don't have an understanding of the basic facts, which will very quickly become evident, no problem.
No problem at all.
Then you can begin to teach them the basic facts.
Because either they're going to recognize that they don't know the basic facts or they're not.
If they recognize that they don't know the basic facts, then you can begin to instruct them on the basic facts.
I had a friend of mine from, we were college roommates, oh many moons ago, he came over recently and we had a great day together.
And he began to ask about the Federal Reserve and fiat currency and so on.
And he's got two PhDs.
The guy's got some brain cells.
And so he knew that he didn't know about these things, so I began to explain to them how it works and he began to understand it.
Just in the same way, like he's got a PhD in biology, so if I've got biological questions, I defer to his training and his expertise because there's a huge amount that I don't know about biology, which he's an expert in.
But if somebody doesn't know That they don't know.
If some dude doesn't know that he doesn't know but continues to talk on, then all he's doing is repeating mechanized, memorized phrases in Mandarin and thinking that he understands the language.
Well, you can't have a conversation with someone like that, in my opinion.
And it's really important to not reinforce somebody's delusions about their language capacities by pretending that you're having a conversation when they're just randomly spouting off memorized phrases.
All right, let's move on, shall we?
I don't have much to say about this one.
I just think it's worth repeating. This woman wrote to me, a friend, okay, a really hot friend, showed me your video a few weeks ago.
The story of your enslavement.
It changed my perspective. Well, thank you.
When the video ended, my friend turned to me with a smile, asking what I thought, and I told him the video made me want to cry.
I wanted to cry because I knew what you said was 100% true, yet I was going to go to work tomorrow like nothing had happened.
I get anarchy now.
Anarchy is love.
I know that, just to break out a lot, I know it sounds a little fruity, but there's a real essence of truth in that.
Love is virtue.
Love is our... Automatic response to virtue, if we're virtuous, right?
So if we're a virtuous person and we see somebody doing a virtuous action consistently and acting courageously and being praiseworthy and living with integrity and achieving good in the world, then we're going to automatically respond.
It's an emotional response.
Love can't be willed. Love can't be controlled.
Love can't be manipulated. Love can't be extracted like a bad tooth.
Love, like forgiveness, is a response, an innate and natural response to somebody else's actions.
Anarchy is the basic belief that human beings should not pull out guns to force each other to do stuff.
That violence, the initiation of force, is an immoral and ugly and brutal and self-destructive way to run society.
I believe that there's a huge amount of love in that.
I have a huge passion for the world and a huge love for a significant portion of my fellow carbon-based lifeforms.
So, I believe, anarchy is love.
I'm with you there. She goes on to say, I now see...
I see how I've been farmed my entire life, not just by religion, which never was able to get its hooks into deeply, and government, which thanks in part to you I'm backing away from, but my own family.
My parents love to pit one sibling against another, because inevitably one of them comes rushing to my parents, making them feel powerful and relevant.
They have farmed their own children.
It makes me so sad. The predicament of being both a victim and a perpetrator is overwhelming.
I hugely sympathize with that.
I've heard you say in many of your YouTube clips that it's a long conversation to get to this point.
I guess I agree. You can't show someone truth overnight because they won't believe what they're seeing.
It's too disparate from the false reality that they've grown accustomed to.
I've never felt such a crushing burden and such an empowering sense of truth and love at the same time before.
I don't know what to do with it all just yet, but I know I can't unsee what I've seen.
That's true. A mind, as someone said, a mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape.
The glimpse of what could be is worth drudging through the muck of what is.
Thanks for making your videos and your podcast.
Thanks for your message. I will help spread it, submitted by this fine lady.
Well, I appreciate that and I don't really have much to add.
Accept that you are not responsible for saving the world.
I am not responsible for saving the world.
I think if we want to, we can live a passionate kind of truth and through that we become a kind of transparent window through which people can see a new world.
We become like a portal through which people can see a better and freer and more loving and happier world.
We have to live free.
And to live like you have to go around saving everybody or enlightening everybody is actually to be a slave to illusion.
And the purpose of philosophy is happiness and freedom and love and truth.
Not enslavement to the illusions and errors and bigotry and prejudices and mistakes of other people.
Do not become enslaved to fixing other people.
That is not where the truth should lead.
And then what happens is people innately sense that you are a slave to the errors of others.
and will not follow you up the road to the shining city of the future just go live in that city and people will envy you or hate you but either way they will see that you represent a kind of freedom that part of them always desperately yearns for and then maybe maybe they will ask you about it but don't run around trying to fix everybody else and don't run around letting other people's errors crush your spirit purpose of philosophy is truth liberty virtue freedom And to be enslaved to the errors of others is not free.
Live free. Become an inspiration.
Become a portal through which people can see, like Stargate, like a time-space portal through which people can see a free life, a free world.
And maybe, just maybe, they will ask you about it and learn from it, and it will spread that way.
So I get the crushing sense of despair.
I totally understand that. We've all experienced it.
I just keep reminding myself that the purpose of philosophy is to be free myself and through my freedom, through my example, other people may be inspired.
Other people may be curious to reason things out, to ask questions of each other, to ask questions of me.
And be free. Be free that way.
People ask me, well, the state and this and that, or should I do this?
Live like there's no government. Pay them off and live free.
If a guy is coming into your store from the mafia and saying, you pay me $1,000 a month or I'll burn your store down, pay him $1,000 a month if you want.
But if you do that, don't pay him additionally with stress and anxiety and frustration and fear and rage.
Don't pay. What you have to pay to the government is involuntary.
It's coercive. It's violent. So pay it.
Or don't, whatever, right? But let's just say you're paying it, as most people do.
Pay it. But don't pay the voluntary tax of frustration and fear and rage.
That's up to you.
That's voluntary. Don't pay that one.
Don't give them a penny more than the pound of flesh they take.
Hello, I've been listening to your podcast for a few months now and really enjoy the learning process.
I was hoping you might recommend philosophers and philosophical writings to someone who wishes to learn more about philosophy and become a better philosopher.
I would love to take some philosophy courses, of which I have had only one, but I cannot afford to enroll in any classes.
Thank you for your time, and thank you for the wonderful discussion on philosophy.
I appreciate that. This is a long, long conversation, which I'm not going to get into here.
The time... Oh, 20 minutes.
Okay, we'll keep moving. You can't do a lot better than start with Socrates.
You can't do a lot better than start with that.
I think that's a good place to start.
I think it's a good place to get moving.
Socrates is great. Plato is slippery as hell and very dangerous, but it's worthwhile just thinking how he could have come up with this crazy dictatorships that he recommends.
It's worth reading. Aristotle is technical and can be a little dull.
We don't know what kind of writer he was because we only have his students' notes, so it's really slow going.
It pays off though, but he makes a lot of unfounded assertions, particularly in the realm of ethics and virtue.
So he's worth reading.
I think it's even worth reading Thomas Aquinas and some of the medieval scholastics just to see the arguments for God.
I think it's very well worthwhile.
Meditations on First Discourses I think is worth reading.
Sorry if I got the title wrong, it's been a while, but Descartes is It's worth reading.
Hume is worth reading if you don't mind getting your brain sandblasted into atoms because he is very skeptical and well worth reading though just to see what's left standing afterwards.
Hobbes is worth reading just to see a pretty virulent defense of the state.
Nietzsche is well worth reading.
I mean, he is a tricky poacher of illusion and sometimes he takes down some pretty vital beasts as well as shooting Holes into gas clouds, but he's well worth reading.
The aphorisms in particular are incredibly stimulating to thought and so on.
I recommend reading Freud just to understand the basis for the modern approach to self-knowledge, which is much more detailed than what Socrates recommended.
I think that's well worthwhile. Jung is a great guy to read.
I think Ayn Rand is a fantastic A philosopher to read.
I think her fiction is very gripping and compelling.
I think that her metaphysics and epistemology are fantastic, barely beyond reproach.
I have differences with politics and ethics, but well worth reading.
So that's just a very, very brief list.
But yeah, read.
But philosophy, in my view, is a conversation.
I'm incredibly a slave to Socrates, just as everybody who's come after him is.
I'm a slave to Socrates. I prefer to go into the market square and talk about truth and virtue.
And values in the vernacular, right?
I don't like highly technical phrases in philosophy.
I think that they're alienating.
I think it's like talking about, instead of saying a great white shark, saying carcharodon carcharious.
I don't think we need Latin terms for well-known beasts.
And I really am very much into going to the marketplace, don't be an academic, talk to people about virtue, listen to people, criticize and be criticized and continue to do the rough and tumble of carving out Truth and virtue from a chaotic and confusing world.
And that is my particular approach.
Philosophy is a conversation that is important to have.
It is not something that is fundamentally written down.
There's a reason why Socrates didn't write anything down, and he's the most famous philosopher, because he was only involved in conversation.
All right, last one.
Hello, Mr. Molyneux. I am a 15-year-old living in a pocket of suburbia in America.
Recently, I have become much more aware of what's really going on around me.
Last summer was a time of extensive reading on the labor movement, the history of public schooling, and the state-sanctioned entity known as the corporation, and its destructive nature.
Dude, you're a freaking great writer, I gotta tell you.
Although I now feel more learned and enlightened, I find myself constantly worrying about the state of the world.
I feel overwhelmed, as if I am caught between a rock And a hard place.
To one side, I am faced with the unbudging and age-old behemoth, the state.
On the other, the corporate form looms over me like a resource-eating monster.
Since I am still forced to go to school and I live in a fairly affluent community whose members are still more concerned with college degrees and interior decorating than they are with ethics or social action, I feel as if I am alone in my worldview.
Whenever I express my opinion that the purpose of life is to achieve happiness, I am labeled as a hedonist.
On top of that, I'm still trying to figure out what I believe in through research and introspection.
However, it is a difficult pursuit when there are a hundred faces staring at you telling you that what you stand for is wrong before you even know what you stand for in the first place.
Another problem that I run into is what I call ostentatious intellectualism.
Since I live in such an affluent community, a lot of kids try to act smart in my school, even if they don't really know what they're saying.
Nobody really knows how to enjoy life.
Or... Sorry...
Have a normal conversation.
Everything is a farce to my classmates, a facetious game where the most wordy and arrogant smartass is the winner.
And in a dog-eat-dog world like middle school, the winner takes all.
So here I am, wafting between the supposedly philosophical crowd who can speak big words but only as some sort of geekified display of dominance, or the Dionysian theater kids who are welcoming and easygoing but who also are extremely inconsistent and view life from a visceral and exclusively emotional perspective.
I won't even go into the atrocities that are committed by the materialistic popular crowd with their Abercrombie shirts, coach bags and other arbitrarily expensive signs of bourgeoisie decadence.
As you can see, it is very easy to feel alienated in this kind of environment.
By no means am I a loner.
I wish that I could cut past the BS and just have a good time with people who care.
I don't need them or even want them to be geniuses, just normal people who want to help the living conditions of themselves and others.
So what should I do to improve my quality of life in my mental and social space?
I find that every time I read an Emma Goldman essay or listen to a podcast like your own, I feel lost and detached as if I were thrown off a cliff while I was sleeping and have only recently just woken up.
It's a terrible feeling.
I don't want to upset my parents and my peers.
You know, don't bite the hand that feeds you.
I just don't like, I just don't feel like upsetting the apple cart and I have a very good personal relationship with my parents and on a superficial level I get along with nearly all my peers.
But how can I remain happy in the world?
I guess the bottom line is, now that I know this stuff, how should I deal with it?
And how can I change my life so that I'm making a difference on the inside and on the outside as well?
Can I still remain innocent and carefree now that I know this stuff?
I don't like the feeling of being jaded.
I hate feeling like I'm dooming my life to the same cycles of submission and domination.
Like I'm just a cog in the wheel, and that after leaving the box called school, I'll spend my life in another box called the office, unless I choose to steal my way through life, in which case I will end up in another box called prison.
It just makes me want to bang my head against the wall.
Steph, I know you are a busy man, but can you please help me with this?
Holy shit, dude. I swear to God, that is one of the most intelligent and well-written emails I have ever received, and I've received thousands and thousands of emails.
And you are 15 years old.
My God, man, this is incredible.
This is... A genius of communications ability.
So let me just be completely direct with you.
You are sitting on a goldmine and a treasure trove of language skills, of communication skills, of intelligence.
You are absolutely brilliant and you are an incredible, incredible communicator.
That is a stunning and awesome ability.
It is an incredible gift and I think that you should respect and take care of it as much as humanly possible.
Look, I'm gonna tell you my perspective.
Nobody can tell you what's right or wrong in this area in your life.
The aesthetics of how we navigate between hope and despair is a personal choice that everyone must make for himself or herself.
There is no one who can tell you how to navigate this, but I will tell you my thoughts, my thoughts only, and hopefully there will be of some use.
We who understand and get Values at their core, we who reason from first principles, we who are curious about improving the human condition, we who take philosophy and arguments and evidence and facts very seriously are anthropologists in a very primitive culture.
We are anthropologists in a very primitive culture.
It's like being dropped into some blue-painted pygmy village in the middle of the Amazon jungle.
We are trying to elevate, like, if you ever seen the movie 2001, there's this big black box that's trying to teach the apes to use tools.
That is where we are.
The light of truth is very startling to people.
You have a firm and deep and powerful constitution by which to handle and hold on to this truth, this illumination, this flare, this explosion that blinds people and alarms them.
If you had a flashlight in the jungle and you shone it into the face of primitive pygmies, they would be startled, they would scatter, they might attack you, they would believe that you were some kind of god or devil for coming into their midst with such powerful magic.
This is the truth. That we bring to those around us is startling, it is powerful, it is alarming, it is frightening.
It is exciting for some.
But it's important to recognize that you are a being of light, if I can put it that way, a being of illumination.
And you move like a demigod through the world that you live in, startling people into hatred or worship, or fight or flight.
I think it's very, very important to recognize the difference That living philosophically, the difference of living philosophically versus living with the matrix lies of culture.
Culture is that which is not true.
If it's true, it's philosophy.
Or at least good philosophy.
If it's true, it's science.
If it's true, it's mathematics.
If it's false, it's culture.
So you are bringing the truth to primitive and superstitious people, people addicted to the lies of culture.
Your country is best.
The president is your leader.
The government is here to protect you.
I mean, and many, many, many, countless others.
So you are bringing the truth to superstitious, easily frightened, easily alarmed, easily...
Sorry, I just lost power there.
So in a very real sense, right?
So think of abolitionism, right?
So the people who fought and died sometimes for the sake of ending slavery, in a very real sense, in a very real emotional and intellectual sense, they came from the future.
They came from a world where slavery was morally incomprehensible in terms of its virtue.
I don't mean this all over the world, but let's just say in the modern West, no politician would ever advocate for the reintroduction of slavery as it's commonly understood.
So they came from a world where slavery was genuinely and generally recognized as completely and totally immoral.
We are taking that principle, the non-initiation of force, and we are coming from a future where that is just accepted, where people will look back at the institution of the state.
The way that we look back upon the institution of slavery, like what the hell were people thinking?
And how could people have ever defended this?
Because the principle will be generally understood.
So the abolitionists came from a future that they lived in where slavery was completely immoral.
And they were attempting to bring back that technology called virtue, called integrity, called consistency, called truth, back To the primitive people they lived among.
And that is a very startling and scary thing, those of us who come from the future.
It is a very startling and scary thing for people to be exposed to that because what happens is when you come from the future, when you come from a world that you see and in a sense live in, where the non-initiation of force, to take one example, is a consistently recognized virtue and consistently applied virtue.
And it would be incomprehensible to not apply it consistently in that realm.
When we come back, that depth and that power, that bright burning firework in the eyes light of integrity and truth and rationality startles people into seeing And it can be the briefest moment, but it is a very powerful moment for people to see their own smallness, to see how their own addictions to the conformity and falsehoods of culture renders them inconsequential.
And that they're going to be washed into the ash bin of history like so many sands being clawed back by surf into the depths of the ocean to never be seen again.
The inconsequentiality of conformity To falsehoods is something that the illumination, the flash, the bright light of philosophy shows up in people that they live like vampires, without shadows, without casting any substance on the world.
It's terrifying for them.
When you bring the argument that slavery is immoral to somebody in the early 19th century, you are bringing not just an abstract argument, you are bringing a very concrete argument to them that you are supporting immorality.
When you bring that the initiation of force is immoral, that statism is immoral, you are saying to people, you are supporting an immoral institution, and you are thereby corrupt.
You may not be committing the crime, but you sure as hell are driving the getaway car, which makes the crime possible.
Support of the state makes the state possible.
So, I mean, I know this a lot and I hope that this is helpful.
This is just my perspective, right?
You have to navigate this yourself.
These are just things that I have found to be helpful and useful in my own pursuit of these topics that I thought when I was younger.
Not as young as you. You're way ahead of where I started.
I thought when I was younger that people accepted reason and evidence, and that's what formed their beliefs.
You might want to watch the Bomb and the Brain series I've done on YouTube for the argument against that, which took me long and painful years of study and beating my head against the wall to figure out.
But people do not respect reason and evidence much, or at least most people don't.
So I think patience, I think recognizing that the task is huge, And recognizing that we do not want to be enslaved to that task.
Imagine this, right?
How frustrating would it be?
I'm climbing a mountain, and it's a series of ridges, of steps going up.
But as I'm climbing up, I can only see one ridge at a time.
And every time I think that that's the top of the mountain, I want to get to the top of the mountain.
And there are 20 ridges going up the side of a huge mountain.
But I think it's a small mountain because I look up, I can't see the actual top.
I can only see the ridge that's just above me.
And I'm climbing, I'm climbing, get to that ridge.
It's like, oh my god, there's another ridge.
Oh my god, there's another ridge.
And I would get so frustrated, the whole thing.
Whereas if I go, okay, this mountain has 20 ridges.
If I'm going to climb it, this is going to be the deal.
Then I'm not going to get enraged and frustrated when I go over the ridge and see the next ridge.
Because I know that there's the next ridge.
Well, this is the biggest mountain there is.
This is the biggest mountain there is.
The non-initiation of force...
Peace, voluntarism in human relations is the biggest mountain of all.
And we've made progress.
We've made progress in the world.
We're able to have this conversation without going to jail.
We've made progress.
But it is a big mountain.
And if you don't enjoy the climb, if you can't find a way to enjoy the climb, I wouldn't do it.
I think you can. I know you can.
But I wouldn't do it.
If you love the climb, the bracing, exuberant climb to a glorious vista above the very roof of the world where the entire entirety of human thought lies beneath you in a beautiful tapestry of light and dark, of cities and forests of progress and retardation.
If you want that bracing glorious view where you are above the clouds but can see down through the clouds, if you want that vista of the world, if you want that glorious high bracing winds, clear air, blue deep skies,
northern lights and stars and planets and the very galaxies themselves wheeling above you, if you want that view and climb the mountain, But if you can't learn to love the climb, if you're looking for the summit, you will spend your whole time in bone-breaking frustration.
I hope that helps and congratulations again on the horsepower you have in your head.
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