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Oct. 23, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:34
1771 E-Mails of the Week, October 23, 2010

Bumfights, taking money from the government - and the ethics of vegetarianism...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyne from Freedom, Maine Radio.
Hope you're doing very well. It is October the 23rd, 2010.
Thank you everybody so much who came out to see me give the keynote speech at Libertopia in California last week.
It was great to meet everyone and it was great to meet the listeners for dinner.
Thank you so much for coming out and it was great to meet everyone for lunch at the At the conference on Sunday and highly, highly recommend that you come out.
I'm also going to let you know that myself and a few other philosophers and thinkers will be on a Liberty Cruise November of 2011.
You can check it out at fdrurl.com forward slash cruise.
So we've heard again from our brilliant 15-year-old.
He writes, I grimly acknowledge your tendency not only to thoroughly address an issue but also to assault it with a frying pan, shoot it in the head, impale it into the ground quarter and dice it, put it through a meat grinder and roast it over an open fire until it has not only been addressed but pulled apart and reconstituted into a completely different shape, taste and complexion and with 50% less fat to boot.
I suppose the NAP doesn't apply to concepts.
As an objectivist, how do you treat cultural vapidity?
Just to correct you, I'm not an objectivist.
I have a massive, massive respect for objectivism and I agree with almost all of objectivism in terms of reality and knowledge.
I part ways on ethics and politics.
I was a staunch objectivist for 20 years, but I overthrew it with anarchism and with my theory of ethics called universally preferable behavior, available for free on my website.
And so I'm not an objectivist, though I have a massive respect for objectivism.
And I don't like an ist kind.
I mean, I'm a philosopher. There's no such thing as a Darwinist.
There's only a biologist.
There's only the discipline, not the specific conclusions.
And therefore, I think objectivism made a massive mistake in calling itself an ism rather than simply being a discipline called philosophy.
So the question came to mind when a friend introduced me to bumfights.
This is a short-lived video craze where a dude filmed homeless people getting into stage fights.
In return, these bums received large sums of money, booze or cigarettes.
I was appalled when I heard this and after watching the videos online, I'm even more...
troubled. I'm often appalled at these disturbing events in the entertainment culture.
And it especially worries me that so many people dismiss it as harmless or even funny.
Maybe it's a reaction to the stoic puritanism that has dominated American culture.
From the 1650s to the 1950s, people are letting loose in a way that is just as destructive as the moral system that they are trying to fight.
Let's see. So he says, these issues seem to neither fall under the category of UPB nor APA. That's universally preferable behavior or aesthetically preferable actions.
Just in my theory of ethics, universally preferable behavior is don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, and so on.
And the proofs are all in the free book.
Aesthetically preferable actions are things like be on time and so on and keep your promises.
Not things which can be enforced through violence, but which are generally preferable.
I have looked, he says, to other objectivist writings to try and find out how this kind of thing could be treated, and nobody really seems to acknowledge the existence of such behaviors and nobody really seems to acknowledge the existence of such behaviors in most philosophical However, I believe that these are the most important behaviors to study philosophically, for everybody knows it's wrong to murder.
But nobody has a decisive answer for why such things as bumfights are morally repellent.
Well, I will take a stab at an answer, which I hope will make some kind of sense to you.
Bumfights is part of a general cultural phenomenon which revolves around repetition of child abuse.
So, let's just take a cliche, right?
So, elder siblings, if they're in particular kinds of family structures and have particular kinds of personalities, will sometimes devolve into provoking fights among other siblings and getting them into trouble and causing problems and so on.
And this can actually become quite abusive.
I have a whole podcast series on sibling abuse.
Which is extraordinarily prevalent within society.
Everybody looks at parents and so on.
And parents, of course, are responsible in the end run for the moral tone and civil or uncivil behavior within the family.
But this issue of sibling abuse is extraordinarily prevalent.
And it shows up, in my opinion or in my argument, in culture as a fear and hatred of corporations.
And a belief that the state can save us from corporations.
This comes from a fear and hatred of siblings and a belief that the parents can save us from siblings.
The reality, of course, is that the government creates and nurtures pretty nasty aspects of corporations, just as, unconsciously, parents will often create and nurture destructive aspects of one's sibling.
So, looking to the state to save us from corporations is looking to the person who's creating the victimization to save us from it.
It's the same thing with parents and families.
People who experience child abuse have a repetition compulsion.
I call it Simon the Boxer.
There's more about this in my free book, Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love.
But there is a repetition compulsion.
So if you are continually terrified as a child, then you will, as an adult, continue to seek out situations of stress, anxiety, and terror.
The reason for this is that when you're in a situation of overwhelming fear and attack, You can't control the situation.
You cannot master the situation.
The only thing that you can master is your fear.
That's the only thing. Controlling your fear, managing your fear becomes the only thing that you can control in the situation.
And human beings are drawn to control their environment.
In this case, you can't control an abusive external environment, but you can control your internal reactions.
So your sense of efficacy, your sense of control comes from managing the emotions that arise from external attack.
Managing and controlling your own fear.
The problem with that is that you're then drawn to recreate this as an adult even when there is no necessary external abuse that is occurring.
When you're a kid you can't get away from your family.
When you're an adult all too often we end up recreating what happened within our families because that is where our sense of control and efficacy is coming from and we have a desire to maintain control and so in the absence of the fear stimuli we will seek it out so that we can re-experience that sense of control that we had as children.
So, the bumfights thing, to me, would arise from people who have watched violence within the family and who have developed a taste for controlling their reactions to violence, to the point where they may have even become sadistically pleasurable.
They may even become sadistic in that they seek out this violence and they find it, quote, funny because it's all about managing their horror to violence and sometimes you can go too far.
the other way and you can begin to get off on violence.
So this would be people who've seen a lot of violence and have been so shocked and appalled by it they've gone all the way through to the other side where now they seek out this violence to manage their own reactions to minimize their horror of violence by laughing at it and so this to me is a repetition of child abuse for people who are watching it of course it is a repetition of child abuse from the people who are victimized by this and the reason is morally abhorrent although there's no direct violence involved There is a trading of cigarettes for fights and so on.
It is exploiting prior victims of child abuse rather than giving them the moral clarity and the deep emotional sympathy that they so need.
So, yes, it is not the initiation of force, but exploiting people who are incredibly susceptible to exploitation as a result of prior child abuse is like taking advantage of somebody who is developmentally handicapped.
I mean, it's like selling a $500 ping-pong ball to a guy who can't put a full sentence together.
Is that the initiation of force?
Not exactly, but it is pretty exploitive.
If you tell children, say, that a Santa Claus is real, lives under their bed and is very bad-tempered, Are you initiating force against them?
No. It's a kind of fraud, and it relies upon their dependence, both intellectually and financially, on you as the authority, as the parent.
So it's not the initiation of force, but it's extremely undesirable behavior.
So that's, I think, an explanation as to why.
So he goes on to talk about, he says, I have terrible memories of being on vacation in some resort, and seeing bourgeois twenty-somethings vomiting in a hot tub, and merely laughing when the hard-working staff grudgingly cleans it up.
I don't know what's scarier. The thought that reckless Dionysian hedonists are so plentiful, or the thought that reasonable Apollonian objectivists would permit such behavior to continue?
Unchecked. Yeah, look, I mean, I loathe drinking to excess.
I just think it's a pathetic and a self-erasing way to get along in society.
Now, so I'm not going to talk that much more about it.
I haven't been drunk since I was about 20, which is almost a quarter century ago.
So I just think it's vile.
I did go through a phase when I was 16 or 17 of drinking to excess on weekends and I just stopped.
It was maybe a month or two that I did it and I just found it to be terrible and I also found it to be embarrassing in that I was not myself when I was drinking and therefore I couldn't connect with anyone and and so I just thought it was a terrible thing.
So I am not at all a fan of drinking to excess.
I just think it's a very sad way to dissolve yourself into the collective Borg of idiocy.
But I think it's perfectly fine if you vomit in a hot tub.
Yeah, somebody else has to clean it up.
It's not universal because you don't want to clean it up.
And so I think that there is something undesirable about it.
So thank you very much.
This is a long time listener, a first time emailer.
Hello. My parents do not make much.
They rely on the state for additional money to survive.
My dad's salary is usually around $13,000.
My mom makes around 6,000 a year.
I'm currently living with them and attend college.
The reason I attend college is for the money and I also do plan on getting a part-time job.
I need money so I can start my own computer business.
Is my position morally justified?
Since the government takes the money from me and gives it back due to my economic status, what do you think?
Can this be dealt with using UPB? UPB, or ethics in general, applies to a situation of voluntarism.
So if I put a gun to your head and tell you to pull the trigger and blow away some innocent raccoon, you are not guilty of killing a raccoon.
I'm guilty of forcing you to do something.
So once violence enters the picture, morality exits the picture.
Just as when rape enters the picture, love and sex Exit the picture.
So, when you're in a situation of violence, which is living in a state of society, there's no such thing as what is the moral judgment of dealing with this situation.
Of course, the government is stealing from you, and in my opinion, yeah, if you take money back from the government, I have no problem with that.
I took some grants And some loans for my college.
It's important to remember just how much the costs of college have gone up because of government and state-protected unions and so on.
So, you know, that's ridiculous.
Why is your dad making so little?
Because of taxation and regulation and sales taxes and debt.
So I think that I would not worry about that.
You're in a situation of amorality.
I don't think that this means you should become a cop.
I think that there is a line still to be drawn.
But I think the important thing is live like there's no government.
Live like there's no government.
Pay them off and live like there's no government.
Don't wrap yourself up in the moral questions and conundrums of how should I be moral in an immoral situation.
I can guarantee you, status aren't thinking that way, so I'm not sure why we would bother, given that the situation is entirely immoral.
So, I wouldn't worry about it.
I'd still give you a metaphor, like suppose you're some restaurant owner and the mafia comes and demands a thousand dollars a month in protection money, and you decide to pay them.
So, you decide to pay them. Give them your thousand dollars.
Don't give them another moment's thought.
Don't pay the voluntary tax of worry and stress and paying attention.
If you're going to pay the thousand dollars a month, pay it so that you don't have to think about it at all anymore.
Focus on living a life that is free.
Don't let the state get in your head, right?
There's a state out there. It does not have to become a state of mind.
So, you know, pay the bastards off, live free, and don't worry about this.
We want to present ourselves authentically as free human beings, which means free from the stress and worry of how to act morally in an immoral situation.
There's no morality in this situation with the state.
It is a coerced and enforced situation and Just live free.
Don't worry about it. Just move ahead with your life.
Live like there's no government.
That's the best way to have no government in the long run.
Hey Steph, write somebody else.
One of the things that I have a bit of difficulty with in my talks with many other voluntarists is how they seem to be completely apathetic when it comes to the treatment of animals.
The logic seems to be that since animals have no moral responsibility, they deserve no moral consideration.
Something about this just rubs me the wrong way.
There seems to be something very inconsistent with trying to explain the principle of non-violence and voluntary interaction while chowing down a steak that came from a cow that no doubt lived a life filled with suffering only to be ended in a brutal and violent manner.
Well, This is a complex topic.
I'm going to just touch on it briefly.
I've done a bunch of podcasts on this.
You can just do a search on the website for more about this.
But I will say this.
About six months ago, I became a vegetarian.
And I think it's fantastic.
I think it is great.
I love it. There's a lot of benefits for me.
This is not particular to six months ago.
People have said, ooh, you're thinner, that's true.
I gained a bit of weight after writing all my books and being a little bit sedentary, but I've lost 20 or 30 pounds over the past two years.
So the weight loss has been helped by the vegetarianism for sure.
Paul McCartney once said that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everybody would be a vegetarian.
And I think that's quite true.
The reason that I became a vegetarian, I mean, I was mostly vegetarian before.
My wife is a vegetarian, has been since she was 12.
My daughter doesn't like meat at all, so I wasn't eating meat very much at all, maybe a couple of times a month.
But I sort of made that break to full vegetarianism, and yeah, it's better.
It's better. I'm not going to sort of go into all of the health benefits and details.
It is better. I feel better.
When I was doing research for one of my videos, I had to look at slaughterhouse videos.
You can find them on YouTube and you can watch them and it makes that connection between the goo on your plate and the living breathing animal that's being slaughtered in a brutal I don't consider it a moral absolute.
I don't consider people who eat an animal's flesh to be evil in the way that, you know, cannibal or, you know, babies for breakfast burritos people would be.
But I think that it's kind of preferable to not.
My suggestion would be just give it a try.
Just give it a try. I'll tell you one interesting side benefit from becoming a vegetarian is that Everything tastes better.
Food is like slutty meat for your taste buds.
It's easy flavor. You marinate, it's right there.
Juicy steak. You just eat it and there's tons of flavor.
But because of that easy flavor, I found that I was enjoying my other food less.
Now that I've gotten rid of meat, I find that I really enjoy the taste of food more.
Things like peanut butter and tofu and so on.
Don't forget to take your B12 and consult your doctor, nutritionist, blah blah blah.
But I would say Give it a try.
Give it a try. Just see.
I don't think it's a moral absolute.
I'm happy to not be participating in the slaughter of animals in a highly subsidized and very destructive industry.
It's not a moral thing.
Just give it a try.
See how you feel. Try it for a month.
Why not? It's going to save you money.
It's going to help keep your weight down.
I just think now all the paleo people, you can email me and tell me that I'm way wrong.
I'm just talking about my own personal experience.
I'm no nutritionist. I'm no doctor.
I'm just saying that I feel a lot better I still work out as hard as I always have, so that's not an issue.
Just take your vitamins. Just give it a try.
Just see how you feel.
And if you want some reinforcement, watch some of the slaughterhouse videos.
They are quite brutal.
Well, thank you again everybody so much for your wonderful time, attention and support.
I am trying out a new microphone that I bought with all the wonderful donations that came in after my last Nagfest video.
So, thank you so much for all of that.
I will be getting some better lighting because it's soon going to be just a little bit too chilly to do these outside with any degree of comfort.
And I look forward to seeing you soon.
I'm going to be at the Liberty Festival.
In Arizona in early December, I'm going to be speaking at the Libertarian Convention here in Canada, November the 6th.
And thank you so much for all of your support.
Please drop by the website to donate.
I hugely appreciate it. I will continue to pour in more money into making these shows even better.
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