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Jan. 9, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:52:37

1825 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call in Show, 9 January 2011

The darkest dream you may ever hear, good news about keeping people out of the military, and the power of ethics, and ethics of power.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Hope you're doing very well. It is Sunday the 9th of January 2011, and as I'm sure you are aware, there has been a tragedy, a shooting in Arizona.
	And a congressperson has been shot.
	This is Gabrielle Giffords, Arizona congresswoman, formerly a Republican, I think, who became a Democrat, who has a mixture of left and right-wing policies.
	She is for the health care bill.
	She's also for stricter controls over moving slash immigration policies.
	And she is an advocate of gun ownership.
	And her shooter is Jared Lee.
	Now, I've heard a bunch of pronunciations.
	Lochner, Launer.
	It's L-O-U-G-H-N-E-R, which is interesting because if you spell it like doe, with the O-U-G-H silent, he actually becomes loner, which is actually, I think, quite appropriate in many ways.
	Now, I don't obviously know much about it, and nobody does, but I'll toss my two cents in for anybody who's interested.
	The history of this guy, he's 21, some people say 22, some people say 21, but he's very young.
	And he was living at home with his parents.
	And over the past... A year or two, he's been exhibiting increasingly delusional behavior.
	There are YouTube videos, apparently, where he is saying that there's an invisible parrot on his shoulder, that he wants to add letters to the English language and numbers to the numeric system.
	And he talks about conspiracy theories and the fiat currency.
	Okay, well, that one's not a conspiracy theory.
	And he lists, of course, among his books that he likes some Ayn Rand.
	So, of course, people are going to say that's responsible.
	He lists some George Orwell, which probably people aren't going to say, a responsible Alice Through the Looking Glass, I'm sure Lewis Carroll gets off the hook, Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto, and he was a pot smoker who apparently was not very keen on religion, so naturally all pot smokers and all people who are skeptical of religion are going to be cast into this camp of craziness.
	Everybody's going to try and make as much political hay out of this tragedy and disaster as they can.
	What that means, of course, is that additional government controls, additional government regulations, additional paranoia, additional security, additional bills to the taxpayer, or rather the future taxpayers who aren't even born yet.
	And that is natural and inevitable.
	Whenever something like this occurs, there is an extension and expansion of state power, as if the massive extensions and expansions of state power in the past We're not enough.
	Just a little bit more, and we'll all be safe.
	Now, interestingly, about 30 years ago, in Congress, there was virtually no security of any kind.
	Not even a little bit.
	You could go in, you could wander the halls, you could knock on people's doors, there was virtually no police presence whatsoever.
	And then a series of bombs and the anthrax scare, of course, after 9-11 led to vastly increased security.
	But it's very interesting.
	If you go all the way back to the beginning of American history, American presidents such as Jefferson, he actually swam naked in the river near the White House and had chats with perhaps somewhat surprised constituents while he was hanging naked and dangling to the four breezes.
	So this is the degree to which the increases in state power lend themselves to increases in violence as a whole.
	Now, it is, of course, completely tragic.
	This woman has been shot through the head.
	A nine-year-old girl was also murdered.
	She was actually in a horrifying circumstance of fate.
	She was born on 9-11, and she was nine years old, and she died in this just absolutely appalling and horrible way.
	That having been said, this woman was on the Armed Services Committee.
	Therefore, she was responsible for running, at least to some degree, these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have claimed the lives of over a million people.
	It will be a good day.
	In human history when you receive, let's just say, even one-tenth of one percent of empathy, shock, horror, and sympathy for the victims of America's wars as we do for those who are running them.
	I do feel sympathy, of course, for this woman.
	I feel much more sympathy for the victims of the wars that she's helping to prosecute.
	I'm sorry to say it, but it is a basic fact that this is the reality of what happens.
	The other, I think, thing that's interesting is, I think it's fairly safe to say that this Jared fellow is mentally ill.
	This is obviously I'm not competent to give a diagnosis and this is at a great distance.
	But about six months ago, he was in college and he disrupted the classrooms with shouting out nonsensical and confusing phrases to the point where the administration suspended him from school.
	And they called the parents in for a meeting, his parents in for the meeting, and told him that they told Jared's parents that he was unwell, mentally ill, and that they would not accept him back into the school until he got clearance from a mental health evaluation.
	He dropped out in October, a spokesperson for the college said...
	And this is something you won't hear about, I doubt.
	There are a couple of things you're not going to hear about, and I'm not going to talk about the mainstream stuff because you can get that anywhere.
	The things that you're not going to hear about this tragedy are, first and foremost, what on earth were this boy's parents doing?
	He lives in their house.
	They're paying his bills. To my mind, that makes you sort of morally responsible for what it is that your child is doing.
	Because in a sense, and he was an adult, so I mean to be fair, but by paying his bills, they're shielding him from the consequences of his craziness, right?
	So if he's out there and he has a job and he's going crazy, then he's going to need to contact social services.
	He doesn't have a safety net, so at least in terms of the family.
	But if you're paying the guy's bills and giving him his computer and his internet access so he can post MySpace and YouTube videos and if you're giving him all of these resources then you're kind of responsible for him.
	And so the responsibility really falls upon the parents who were informed according to the college officials who were informed of his deteriorating mental health status.
	Nobody knows as far as I can tell whether he did receive psychiatric treatment or whether he did receive a mental health evaluation.
	It seems somewhat unlikely because he did not go back to school.
	So either he received the mental health evaluation and failed Or he received it and passed, in which case he would have been back in school.
	So it seems unlikely that he did.
	I think that the parents have remained completely invisible.
	I mean, they were mentioned in one news article out of the dozens that I perused last night.
	The parents have received only passing mention as if they're completely incidental.
	This Jared guy was creating videos where he's wearing a garbage bag setting fire to the American flag.
	He's living in a house with two parents.
	Do they not notice that he's going crazy?
	Do they not notice that he's going insane?
	If he has gone insane, then his moral responsibility becomes extremely lessened, if not eliminated, in the same way that you don't punish a dog who's got rabies.
	If I have a dog and the dog gets rabid and I don't do anything about that dog and it goes out and savages someone, if I don't get it treated, if I don't get it cured, Then I'm morally responsible for what my sick dog does, and I think that you're not going to hear much about where the parents are in all of this.
	The other thing that I can almost guarantee you're not going to hear about is whether or not he was on psychotropic meds.
	The first thing that I thought of, which is I'm sure true for many people who know anything about this topic, when you hear about these kinds of savage acts of violence, is Whether he's on psychiatric medication.
	He described what he called conscience dreaming.
	And I'm sure that he mistook the word conscience for conscious.
	This obviously intelligent guy, his reading and writing skills, again, is a complete indictment of the public school system, but it's almost too blasé to even mention.
	He talked about conscious dreaming.
	He talked about feeling like he was sleepwalking.
	And this is something that has occurred for a lot of people who've ended up committing these acts of violence that they feel completely dissociated from themselves.
	There was one report of a fellow who went to bed and woke up in an institution because apparently he'd shown up at school with a gun and he had no memory of this occurring.
	And he was also on these meds.
	The Columbine killers, of course, were on these meds.
	The Virginia Tech shooters' medical records were very quickly sealed and nothing was revealed about that, although he had spent time in a psychiatric facility at least one night.
	And he also talked about, or seemed to, Jared, seemed to talk about quite powerfully about his lack of sleep.
	So sleeplessness, a sense of dissociation, a feeling like he's sleepwalking, conscious dreaming, an inability to differentiate between reality and non-reality combined with violent impulses.
	Again, I'm no diagnostician and you could take everything that I say with a huge grain of salt, but to my knowledge, these are extremely consistent with the effects of these kinds of meds.
	The other thing which we haven't heard about, and again, it may just be because it's a weekend, it may be that this, I'm guessing this stuff isn't going to be pursued.
	It's the degree to which he had been on medication for mental illness or mental health problems throughout his time in school.
	As a child, as a teenager, these things are depressingly common.
	This kind of drugging of, quote, problem children is depressingly common in the U.S. educational system.
	I doubt anyone's going to look very deeply into that because, I mean, there are huge and powerful interests out there that don't want these kinds of correlations to come out about the correlation between delusional acts of violence and these kinds of medications.
	So you're not going to hear much about that.
	Was he under the care of a psychiatrist?
	If the psychiatrist was taking care of him, wouldn't the psychiatrist have done a simple Google?
	Psychiatrists, of course, are supposed to ask, are you experiencing any thoughts of harm to yourself or towards others?
	And he was quite delusional and aggressive in his videos.
	Wouldn't the psychiatrist have done a quick Google rather than relying on the self-reporting of somebody who's obviously quite deranged?
	So you won't hear about the parents.
	You won't hear about the meds.
	And when you think about it, of course...
	The teachers he had for 14 years or 13 years...
	We had care, custody, and control over him and were responsible for him.
	His parents had him for 21 or 22 years and were responsible for taking care of him and were obviously, I would say, deficient in that regard.
	So it won't be looking at the people who actually had contact with him and who had care over him.
	The only people who seemed to have acted in any way to respond to his growing delusions were the officials at the college he was attending, but it may well have been too late at that point.
	My guess, he was abused as a child.
	My guess, he'd been on antipsychotic or Ritalin or other sorts of psychotropic meds for quite some time, or he'd been prescribed them more recently.
	He may have been going through a withdrawal.
	What does this mean about the moral culpability?
	Well, that's a very complex question.
	But what's going to happen, of course, is people are going to try and associate him with Sarah Palin's crosshairs on her campaign map and saying that's the problem.
	They're going to try and associate it with him reading certain books.
	They're going to try and associate it with his drug use.
	They're going to try and associate it with his agnosticism or skepticism towards religion.
	Everybody's going to sail right over the only salient points around there, which is parents, teachers...
	Mental health professionals and medication, that's the only thing that people should be looking at, which means, of course, that it's the only thing that people will never look at.
	And I hope I'm wrong about that, but I'm not holding my breath, because people just want to go on a witch hunt.
	And the last thing I'll say about this awful situation is that all of the tough guy politicians, congressmen and other politicians, judges, have been fairly unanimous in calling for this Young man, obviously delusional, to feel the full weight of the law, and it would not at all surprise me if he ended up facing the death penalty.
	And they talk about this wanton and senseless taking of life and that this young man needs to accept the full consequences of his actions in taking the lives of others.
	Well, that of course is master-to-slave language.
	Because this young man murdered, without a doubt, a number of people, including a child.
	Hideous, reprehensible, and vile.
	What about George Bush starting a war that has claimed the lives of a million people?
	Is he never going to be held legally accountable for a million murders or more when this young man must face, or probably will face, the death penalty if he's not declared insane, which seems unlikely?
	He will face the death penalty for these murders when he was obviously in a delusional state, while George Bush, who starts wars while not in a delusional state, gets a presidential library, a book deal, and a pension.
	These are the morally squalid times that we live in, but we're doing our best to lighten the darkness.
	Let's move on with the show.
	Thank you so much for your indulgence for that opening rant.
	James, who do we have on the list?
	I believe we have...
	Who's up and ready to go?
	Yep. Okay.
	I have a dream, and I guess it's not too much less gruesome than the story you just told.
	So, warning there.
	Okay, so I'll just read it to you, or maybe I could just have you read it, Steph.
	Okay. Sure.
	Do you want to put it in Skype or the chat window?
	I'll put it in Skype.
	I feel pretty embarrassed because it's pretty...
	I mean, it sounds kind of gruesome, but I want to figure it out.
	I'm not seeing anything yet.
	Should we move on to another caller while you get ready?
	Um, I posted it in Skype.
	Oh, sorry, my mistake. Yeah, my mistake.
	Sorry, I was looking for it in the chat window, which...
	Alright, what have we got here?
	So this is the dream, I was going to die, is this the one?
	Yeah. Okay, so you wrote, I was going to die, so they took out my organs because I had signed up for donating them.
	And they took out my heart and some other organ, at least, and I was waiting for death.
	But I still didn't die.
	I sat up and waited. One guy who was a blood elf was taking my heart.
	Sorry? Sorry, no, I'll have a note on the blood elf if that's at all significant.
	Oh yeah, I got it. Blood elves are high elf characters in World of Warcraft who named themselves Blood Elf in memory of their fallen comrades.
	When their kingdom was besieged by the Undead Scourge, an innumerous army of dead commanded by an evil necromancer or evil necromancers, which happened to be one of several emotionally moving elements for me in the lore of World of Warcraft.
	Do you mind if I skip the rest of the Blood Elves thing?
	Yeah, sure. Okay.
	So one guy who was a Blood Elf was taking my heart somewhere, but after some time I realized that he had dropped my heart on the floor, which also mysteriously had become two hearts.
	Each heart sat a few feet from each other.
	Despite indecision, I strongly feel or felt that the one nearest me was mine.
	And it could have been that either heart was my other extricated organ.
	I had no knowledge of which organ they had removed.
	I sat and wondered what had happened to the blood elf and realized he had been murdered mysteriously.
	So then a friend or something like that offered to resurrect my heart, also in a way that you can do in World of Warcraft.
	And as I looked at him holding the heart, I could see that And raising it would cause it to turn into an animal, so I had some reservations about it.
	Still, I let him do it, and I hoped that I could get the heart from the animal so I could get it placed in my chest.
	Unfortunately, that never came to pass, as no one came to do an operation.
	I remember waiting forever just to die.
	I even ate something, and as soon as I swallowed, I could feel it hurt, troubling my system because my heart needed to be there to beat faster when I ate.
	I remember noting the details in the dream, but I still didn't die, and I was just waiting forever.
	It all really freaked me out to the point where I just woke up and I realized I wasn't dying right now, that I still had my organs.
	I felt so grateful to be alive.
	Going back to the dream in detail though, I guess some extra little things are like I guess I was put on this metal sheet like a giant baking pan and my mom sat me down and was saying all kinds of things that I figured would be last words.
	I exclaimed how these would be my last moments beyond the appearance of being nurturing my mom Just smiled and didn't care and left.
	It turns out that since I didn't die within those minutes, I instead spent maybe a few hours or something with my friends.
	My friends from middle school and high school.
	I didn't seem to choose who I would be with in those final moments.
	Alright. And what happened the day before the stream?
	Well, I had...
	C and I were having some trouble.
	We were thinking about moving out and separating.
	Right. And I guess I was really, really emotional.
	And there was a lot of Self-attack or something, like...
	I... I... Oh yeah, like...
	Oh yeah, this is really important.
	Um... I... I figured that, you know, I can only be...
	I can only be alone because...
	Every...
	Every relationship I seem to have, even if it's just, like, a friendship, it always seems to...
	It always seems to turn the lid.
	Um... What do you mean by lead?
	It's the opposite of the Midas touch.
	No, I understand that, but what does lead mean?
	I mean, it turns to lead. I understand the metaphor, but you mean it ends, is that right?
	Yeah, I can't maintain any healthy relationships.
	Well, sorry, what is that?
	Do you mean that you enter into healthy relationships that you can't maintain, or you can't enter into healthy relationships?
	Well, I guess it could be like I can't enter into any healthy relationships.
	Okay. So you had a potential breakup with your boyfriend the day before this dream, right?
	Yeah. Right.
	Okay. And is there anything else you wanted to let me know about before we have a look at the content?
	Yeah. I made some notes after I woke up that I kept needing to remind myself to breathe and that my heart works.
	But, I mean, it was kind of hard.
	It was a conscious effort because I kept holding my breath.
	And my boyfriend was like...
	Patting my back to help me with breathing but like it felt like he was like prodding me and I was like Afraid my organs were going to rupture like my skin was too soft because I was dead or dying Right and what do you think the dream is about?
	Um I did a lot of research on the blood elf part but um I'm not sure uh I'm not sure
	I know since it was repeated several times that I was waiting for death and beyond all reasonable physics that I still didn't die and that was shocking.
	I can say I know that's significant.
	Alright, let me ask you this.
	If you can just picture like a totally honest, aware, enlightened, goddess-like part of yourself that can see the past, the present and the future and knows the very best and most truthful things about your life, what would that part of you say about the nature of your relationships well what's coming to mind is
	um is is also things something that i i that occurred recently was i realized that um with the help of one of your podcasts that i have an addiction to helplessness So all my relationships that I've had have complemented that addiction and reinforced it.
	Right, but you know that you're aware enough in this conversation to know that what you said is not true, right?
	That you have an addiction to helplessness.
	What's wrong about that?
	What's not true about that?
	Well, is it that I'm just saying that about myself in isolation?
	As if you had no history.
	Yeah, I mean, my parents, they definitely really, really set me up for that.
	I mean, even until I moved out.
	Oh, dang.
	Let me try putting it another way that I think will be more accurate.
	Okay. Helplessness was an essential survival strategy while I was growing up.
	Yeah. No, there's a big difference.
	Yeah, it's a coping mechanism.
	No, it's more than coping.
	Coping is like, you know, my pet died, right?
	I said survival.
	Yeah, right, right.
	My parents probably would have killed me.
	Well, without necessarily going to whether they would have or wouldn't have, children don't push that envelope.
	They don't take that risk, right?
	Yeah. If they're in a situation of violence, which I know that you were, then children don't see, they don't want to go and see where does the violence end?
	How far do we go before my parents stop aggressing?
	Children don't, they don't roll those dice.
	We're not programmed biologically to roll those dice, right?
	Right. Yeah.
	So don't own your helplessness.
	Yes, it's a survival strategy that you likely had to pursue as a child to survive.
	And it has left you with significant challenges in your relationships as an adult.
	But don't own it like you just have this random addiction, like you just, you know, picked it out of a jar voluntarily.
	Yeah. Oh, I don't, I mean, I don't think I'm owning it.
	I just, it was a different way that I thought about it the other day, that I have an addiction like that.
	Well, the way that you communicated to me, like, I listen very precisely in the way that you, I'm not trying to criticize you, I'm simply pointing it out, that the language that you used was of ownership in isolation.
	I'm just pointing out that since isolation is part of the dream, the fact that you described your difficulties in isolation to your history is probably related.
	That's why I'm sort of pausing and just pointing this out.
	Okay. Speaking of addictions, though, the other thing that I wrote down about blood elves is that they have an addiction to magic.
	I don't know what the heck magic...
	Well, magic is always magical thinking, right?
	Magic is always magical thinking.
	Okay, yeah.
	I mean, the way I look at it, I'm not saying this is some scientific fact, but whenever you see magic in a story or magic in a game or something like that, it always represents magical thinking.
	Right, so people who can cast a spell are people who imagine that they have powers that they don't have.
	Or people who have, you know, they cast spells of invulnerability.
	That is the belief that if I dissociate, I will be safe.
	But the reality is that if you dissociate, you're far from safe.
	Spells where you cast fireballs and blow things up is the magical thinking that rage will cause.
	Be effective when rage is very ineffective in terms of bringing happiness.
	It's just, you know, these are just sort of examples off the top of my head, but it is magical thinking that magic to me almost represents.
	Again, whether that's true or not, I don't know, but that's certainly my first approach.
	All right, so let's look at the dream.
	Okay. Why didn't you say, and again, this is not a criticism, I'm just asking in the dream, why didn't you say, don't take my organs, I'm not dead yet?
	I was pretty sure that I was going to die.
	But there's no pretext for that.
	Well, yeah. I mean, so the dream, I think, is telling you that if you don't speak up about your needs and your preferences, bad things result.
	I mean, in this dream, of course, significantly bad things result, right?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Because you are passive and Because you think you might die, so have my organs.
	Well, that turns it from a potential to a certainty, right?
	Right. In fact, it's like have my organs because I signed some paper years ago.
	Right, right. Which is, again, I think taking on an obligation as if it's voluntary, which of course you can revoke, and no one would sign any paper which said take my organs while I still have a chance of living or I am still alive, right?
	Right. So it's a false contract, right?
	And this could be a contract that is generally socially perceived to be between children and parents.
	You know, we took care of you, now you take care of us, or whatever.
	that could be one of those sorts of contracts that may be being examined in the dream um yes okay um Okay, so I'm just looking at it.
	So one guy who was a blood elf was taking my heart somewhere.
	He said, after some time I realized that he dropped my heart on the floor, which also mysteriously had become two hearts.
	Each heart sat a few feet from each other.
	Despite indecision, I strongly feel or felt that the one nearest me was mine.
	And it could have been that the other heart was my other extricated organ.
	I'm not sure what that means. Like it was a spleen or a kidney or something?
	Right, because I had no knowledge of what else they took out.
	It was just two things and I knew that one was my heart.
	Right, right. So I'm just skipping over the next part.
	So I remember waiting forever just to die.
	And this is hopelessness, right?
	This is despair. This is...
	There is no way back, if that makes any sense, right?
	So before they took your organs, you might live, right?
	Yeah. But now they've taken your organs.
	There's no way back, right?
	So the indecision or the passivity earlier has led now to a state where you're going into...
	Really limbo, right? I get the sense, and tell me if I'm wrong, I get the sense that death would have been a relief in this dream?
	Yes. Right.
	So it's worse to lose your organs and not die than it would be to just die, right?
	Right. Right.
	I think this is an optimistic dream.
	Oh. Go on.
	And I think that the optimism is when you wake up.
	What did you feel when you woke up?
	I was so grateful to be alive and I still had all my organs.
	Right. Right.
	You didn't die. Your death is a fantasy.
	Your death is a delusion.
	You're not dead. Sometimes the dream's message is what you feel when you wake up, right?
	Yeah. Sometimes the truth about the dream is your reaction to it on waking.
	Like, you know, you always have these dreams about, I didn't study for this test, or I'm naked in a public place.
	Love those dreams. But you sort of feel relieved when you wake up.
	And that means that it's, you know, it's not the end of the world if you didn't study for a test.
	It's not the end of the world if you're naked in a public place.
	And the relief that you felt upon waking is that you're not dead.
	I mean, that's a good feeling, right?
	Yeah.
	So in that sense, the horror is there to stimulate the feeling of relief, of happiness, and of an attachment to life.
	Because in the dream, you have no attachment to life.
	You don't even try and stop them removing your organs.
	Then you're just sitting there like a turnip waiting to die, right?
	right?
	Yes.
	But when you wake up, you're like, I'm so glad I have my organs.
	I'm so glad that I'm alive.
	I'm so glad that I'm not dying.
	Right?
	So it's like, take life by the horns.
	Yes! Yes!
	Yes! It is a stimulation dream, in my opinion.
	That makes sense. Relish your life.
	Relish the choices that you have.
	Because, look, sister, one day you're going to be on that deathbed, right?
	Yeah. So will you, so will I, so will everybody on this call.
	Except Walt Disney. We're going to be on that deathbed.
	And we will be trying to figure out whether we're going to give up our organs to somebody else.
	And we will be looking back upon our lives.
	And I can't imagine, I can't imagine that we're going to look back upon our lives and say, I wish I had expressed fewer of my honest needs and thoughts and desires and preferences.
	I wish I had hid more from the world.
	I wish I had stayed silent from the world.
	I wish I had stayed small from the world.
	I wish I had self-erased more.
	I wish I had been more of a ghost.
	I wish I had been less substantial.
	I wish I had been less visible.
	I wish I had been less passionate.
	I wish I had been less connected.
	We're never going to look back and say any of those things.
	Right? So the hand of death can reach down through the years.
	And tickle us into laughter.
	And the happiness that you felt upon waking up, I think, is a way of your unconscious saying, you're not dying, so don't act as if you are.
	Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
	Yeah. I feel sad.
	I think you hit something.
	Yeah, you know, you swing long enough.
	You know, I'm like a guy with a, you know, blindfolded kid with a pinata stick.
	I'm either going to hit some uncle in the nads and we're going to get famous on America's home videos or we're actually going to get some brain candy.
	But yeah, I think that the dream is saying it's time to speak.
	It's time to express your preferences.
	It's time to not conform.
	It's time to not be invisible.
	That that survival strategy...
	It's no longer necessary, and with all due sympathy to the fact that it was, it's not needed anymore.
	Yeah. And you're not...
	The dream, I think, is also saying that you're not dependent on other people to resurrect your heart, right?
	Yeah. It doesn't work in the dream anyway, right?
	Some friend comes along, he's going to resurrect your heart, and it doesn't work, right?
	Yeah. It's not up to other people.
	To make the blood flow in your veins.
	It's not up to other people to give you life, to give you substance, right?
	Because that is, I mean, the essence of codependency is I am nothing if I am not in a relationship.
	I am nothing if I'm not bouncing off people, right?
	I am, I'm like bat sonar, right?
	Unless I bounce back from something, I just go into nothing.
	And the idea that somebody else is responsible for your resurrection, the dream is also saying, is not true.
	Because you resurrect yourself just by waking up from this dream of death.
	It's you, not somebody else, right?
	Right, right. Because you get freaked out by dying.
	Somebody doesn't come in the dream and shake you awake.
	You get freaked out by your death to the point where you recoil into a kind of vibrant life and a kind of joy at your existence, right?
	Right. It's up to you to self-defibrillate.
	Right? Clear! Right?
	It's not other people. If you wait for other people to do it, they won't.
	Not because they don't care, but because they can't.
	I can't express what you want.
	I can guess at it, but I cannot express what you want because I am not you.
	And so if you're not present in your relationships with yourself, with others, expressing what you want, negotiating, being present, speaking and listening, not being passive, not waiting for other people to charge you with life or bring you back to life or resurrect you, Or return your organs.
	Then nobody else can do that for you.
	And that's why in the dream, you wake yourself.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	And I think it's a good added bonus, like...
	For a wake-up call because of the sensation I was feeling right after the dream.
	It's telling me that I'm still not acting like I'm alive.
	Right. And the last thing that I would say is that the dream is giving you a lot of forgiveness because the part about your mom, this is all just my impressions, of course, you can discard them as you see fit, but you say you're put on a giant metal sheet like a giant baking pan.
	Well, as a man who was present for the birth of his daughter, that's where they put babies right after birth.
	Oh. To weigh them.
	And there's also an association with an oven, and it's an old truism that a bun in the oven means being pregnant, right?
	And there is actually an old story, and I can't for the life of me remember the source, so take it with all the skepticism you want.
	But there was an old story about a guy, a boy who hid in an oven while his family was killed.
	And this was the myth.
	The truth of it was that his mother was killed while he was pregnant, but he was delivered through a C-section.
	But the myth was that he hid in an oven, right?
	So an oven where you put your food and it bakes and it rises and you bring it out.
	This is a metaphor for pregnancy.
	So if this is true, if this is what your unconscious is working with, then it's saying it was from before you were born, which is a huge get out of jail free card as far as the effects, right?
	Yeah.
	So I just wanted to...
	That's a possibility for that aspect of the dream.
	But yeah, I think it's time to wake up and speak.
	And to not be afraid of isolation.
	Because you should not be in relationships because you're afraid of being alone.
	That was a very expressive sound.
	Which you know. I mean, I'm not telling you anything.
	It's like I don't really believe that's why I'm in relationships.
	It's like, I'm not afraid of being alone.
	What are you talking about? I've always been alone.
	It's like, it's more like I'm afraid of not being alone, if that makes sense, because you can be alone even though you're in a relationship.
	Well, you can never be so alone as when you're in a relationship but lonely, right?
	There is no loneliness like...
	Because if you're just alone, then you have your own needs, your own thoughts, you can do what you want, but if you're in a relationship where you feel alone, then you have a lot of distractions and eclipsing of yourself that doesn't occur when you are in fact alone, right?
	That's the idea of lonely in a crowd, or definitely there's no loneliness like proximity without intimacy.
	Yeah. Yeah, like that.
	I'll go with that. I'll go with that.
	All right. Listen, was that good enough?
	I mean, obviously, we could spend more time on the dream, but I want to make sure we have other callers.
	And we have a live guest! A live guest!
	Is that okay?
	No, that was good.
	Thank you. All right.
	So, we'll call him Trixie.
	No, it's... Jake is here, returning from a place which has no name, but is much warmer than the snow belt that we currently find ourselves in.
	And you have nothing but mad praise for everything I've said over the past six months?
	I have questions.
	Oh no! Yeah, it's been really nice to be able to catch up on some podcasts recently.
	And so I've been listening to a lot because I'm not working at the moment, which is great.
	So I've been catching up.
	And one of the things that...
	I had a couple of questions, things that I've been thinking about that...
	But I would like to clarify in my mind and wonder what you thought, and especially about morality.
	So the first thing was, there's two ideas about morality that we talk about, which have made a huge impression on me.
	And I remember very clearly the first time...
	I heard you talk about the argument for morality running the world and about it being really impossible for anyone to not have a sense of their own morality, even if they have to twist it to make it fit with what they're doing.
	So the strength of the argument for morality is an incredibly powerful idea that we talk about a lot and work with in understanding how people work.
	But there's another idea also, which is the strength of cost benefit in people's lives.
	And we've also talked about how, you know, really, when cost benefit, you know, when people are looking at how an idea is going to affect them, they can just twist around the ideas until that actually fits with their own cost benefit.
	So the cost benefit is really important to them.
	And I wonder if you could sort of these two ideas, you know, can you talk about how how they actually work without contradicting each other?
	Sure.
	I just wanted to ask if anybody else has another dream or something easier to to work on.
	That would be no, those are those are great questions.
	I was just making notes for a podcast on this.
	So this works out well.
	Two birds with one stone.
	So I'll just give you the brief overview, and then you can tell me if it makes any sense.
	To create a universal rule where you are the exception is the greatest cost-benefit that you can imagine, right?
	So to create a universal rule called currency must be based on gold, except my currency, or my dollars, which I can just print at will, is the most cost-effective thing that you can do, just in terms of cost-benefit.
	To say nobody should steal in the whole world except for me means that your job as a thief is going to be ridiculously easy because no one's going to have any locks on their doors because for the world to guard against one thief would mean they wouldn't bother, right?
	They wouldn't bother. So your job as a thief, if you can get everyone to accept property rights except for you, then your job as a thief becomes incredibly easy.
	Which is what happens when there's only one thief, more people are drawn to become thieves because it's so easy.
	To the point where people begin to take countermeasures against being a thief and then the value or ease of being a thief goes down until there's a kind of equilibrium, if that makes...
	Does that sort of make any sense so far?
	And we see this not just for material, but for psychological benefit, right?
	So teachers say that you should not use violence to get what you want.
	But of course their funding is based upon state violence and so on, so they create a rule for everyone in the classroom which they themselves are exempted from, which is highly profitable.
	You couldn't run a classroom if the children acted like the adults.
	And used collective coercion to get what they wanted.
	It simply couldn't be allowed.
	The government says, I can tax, but you can't.
	Because that's the only way that governments can work.
	If the ethic of taxation is universalized, then I say, well, I impose a $10,000 tax on you.
	And you say, well, I impose a $10,000 tax on you.
	And everything becomes a wash, right?
	So the only way that exploitation...
	Any kind can work in my view is if somebody creates a universal value, gets other people to accept it, and then exempts themselves.
	Now, the first way that people do that is they claim that the value is universal, and they hope that no one's going to point out the exemption until annoying people like us come along and point out the exemptions that are in the universal values.
	And then the claim is made that they are not really exemptions.
	So the social contract is invoked, and you see it's not really exemptions or whatever.
	And if you continue to pursue that, you end up with this, you provoke this rage, which
	Yeah. And for that to be universalized,
	which is to say wherever there is mental deficiency we are allowed to hit, would mean that we should obviously be doing it with Alzheimer's patients.
	And you can also say, I mean, I'm in my mid-40s now, so I know that my brain is not quite what it was when I was 25.
	It's better in some ways, and I'm forgetful about a few minor things in other ways.
	So if you have your parents in your 50s, you can say, okay, so when you become forgetful because you're just getting a little bit older, then I'm allowed to spank you because cognitive deficiency should be corrected through violence, right?
	And they would, of course, if you said that to your parents, they'd be appalled.
	And they'd say, well, no, you're not allowed to hit me if I'm forgetful.
	It's like, but when I was a kid, right, the other problem with the universalization of spanking in that way is that people say that you should be aggressive towards people who are cognitively deficient, i.e. children, because they can't reason, but also that children are bad and wrong.
	And those two things are not, can't be equated, right?
	If children are cognitively deficient, then they can't be wrong because they're not aware of the consequences of their actions.
	So if you're punishing children for being bad, then it must be because they're morally responsible, and therefore not cognitively deficient.
	But if you're punishing children for merely being cognitively deficient, then it can't be because they are bad or wrong.
	So all of these contradictions, when you begin to comb into them and expose them, people try fogging, they try not having the conversation, they try backing away, because you are...
	Undoing the cost-benefit analysis of what has been occurring for them.
	The last thing I'll say is that even from a larger perspective, being aggressive towards your children was up until very recently, and I don't mean this show, but up until recently as a whole, was a no-brainer for aggressive parents because there were no negative consequences.
	Like beating your wife in the 19th century, what was the negative consequence?
	They couldn't leave, they couldn't enter into contracts, they had no real property rights, they had no legal equality.
	And divorce was impossible for the most part because of religiosity and the fact that it legally wasn't possible.
	So if you were a wife-beater, then you really accrued no negative consequences from a material standpoint.
	But now if you're a wife-beater, all these organizations are saying that's unacceptable, they're encouraging the wife to leave and to take the children and to get alimony, so there are negative consequences that accrue.
	And one of the things that I've always been focusing on is, look, there should be negative consequences to attacking your children.
	I mean, there should be. I mean, nobody can really do much at the time, but at least the option to not be in the relationship when the child gets older should be there.
	Hopefully that will put the brakes on, you know, give some people who aren't...
	Just gonna act on principle some pause or some consideration to change their mind So I think that cost-benefit analysis is there's this constant desire Create a universal rule and exempt yourself and hope that nobody notices and that is what most people call ethics if that makes any sense Right,
	right. So in which case just to come back to the examples that you gave it would be that the teacher in that classroom that's making a universal rule The teacher is basically using morality effectively as a weapon and the kids are trying to conform to what they imagine is a universal rule without having the contradiction masked for them,
	so to speak. So the children are running on the argument for morality, whereas the teacher is really running on a cost-benefit and is just using the argument for morality.
	Well, yeah, that's exactly right.
	And for the people in the chat room, we'll check this out.
	So when I was a kid, and so respond to this if you can, when I was a kid, the teacher, I would have always told you, you have to respect your teachers.
	You know, you have to respect your teachers.
	I myself was caned, was made to sit in a corner, had my hands slapped, was verbally and publicly humiliated and called names and so on by my teachers.
	So they put forward the universal value called respect.
	Right? But they did not...
	There was an exemption for them with me.
	I had to respect them because respect was a value.
	They did not have to treat me with respect.
	Right? And so, is it universal or is it not?
	Right? If it's universal, then they need to treat me with respect because it's reciprocal.
	In fact... I mean, how many times did you feel respected as a child by the adults around you who constantly talked about the need to respect others?
	Well, I mean...
	Do we even need to...
	Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think of any examples.
	I'm having a look at the chat window as well.
	Yeah, so one guy's saying, I was made to stand up on tiptoe with my nose inside a small circle on the blackboard.
	And how many times?
	Not once. I saw teachers do some astounding abuse.
	Someone says, I was also caught chewing gum and forced to wear it on my nose for the entire day.
	And, yeah, I mean, this is all completely ratchet, right?
	But this is the rule called respect.
	Treat people with respect.
	But the people in authority...
	Don't want it to be the mere exercise of power.
	They can't just say, well, it's not a matter of respect.
	I'm bigger than you.
	Because what happens is kids always get bigger than adults.
	So that strategy doesn't work.
	You can't say, it's just because I'm bigger and I have the power.
	I get to cane you because I'm bigger and stronger and I can hold you down.
	Because that sows the seeds for when the kids, particularly the boys, are 12 and 13 and 14 and are younger and stronger and more resilient than their adults to simply turn the tables and say, well, now I have the power, so I'm going to hit you when you displease me.
	So they have to put it forward as a universal value.
	They have to completely exempt themselves and they have to hope that, to dear God in heaven, that no philosophy comes along that points out these ridiculous contradictions and exposes the exercise of power with the deep knowledge of the value of ethics.
	And this is a complicated topic, right?
	But if you expose that people exercise power over you while claiming it to be ethical, that is the greatest conceivable corruption.
	Because a gorilla that wants to eat you is going to exercise power over you because he's bigger and he's stronger.
	But he's not going to say it's a social contract, right?
	He's not going to say that it's a matter of loyalty that you allow yourself to be eaten.
	He's just going to exercise power.
	So we don't call the gorilla morally culpable.
	I mean, we may put him down or something if he keeps attacking people, but we don't say that he's morally culpable.
	But somebody who uses ethics knows the power of ethics.
	Knows that the exemption is key, knows that the infliction of universalization is key, has a deep knowledge both of ethics and the strong, strong desire of children to conform to ethical norms.
	And so to use that in the service of brute power is the greatest conceivable corruption and is the source of all other corruptions in the world when it occurs with children.
	Just in terms of the way that we think about approaching other people, You could say, well, for people who haven't been abusers, for people who haven't really, in a sense, gone so far beyond that they can't get their lives on track, you can make the argument from morality to those people.
	And because we all inherently are trying to get universal moral rules and to be in line with them, That the argument for morality can work with some people who haven't been abusers themselves.
	We can also do something else, which is we can just try and change the cost-benefit.
	And that would be, for example, use ostracism so that it's actually harder to be abusive and so forth.
	And that's something that we can use for people who are, when you make the argument for morality, they're just going to evade and dodge and whatever because they're in a position where they're using morality or have used morality.
	So is it that we're saying that the argument for morality in a sense is...
	For people who still haven't been compromised, so to speak, and for the rest, we've got the cost-benefit.
	Or are we also saying, look, for all of us, actually, cost-benefit still, at some level, is an important thing that drives us.
	Do you see what I mean?
	Is it both? Well, I think they're two sides of the same coin.
	For people who have...
	Prayed upon others using these false arguments for morality, universality with an exception for me or my group or my clan.
	For those people, they've either completed that, and the simple example is parents who've abused kids.
	Like, the kids are adults or whatever, right?
	Can't go back, can't undo it or whatever.
	They're going to dig in, for the most part.
	I mean, with rare exceptions, very rare exceptions.
	But for the most part, you can put a lot of money on them just digging in.
	And fighting it virtually to the death.
	Because there is no possibility of restitution that the child would accept.
	So where there's no restitution, then people cornered rats, right?
	They fight to the death. There's no possibility of undoing it.
	There are people who are kind of on the fulcrum.
	They've used it, but they don't feel good about it.
	And they are kind of looking for a better way.
	I mean, this is parents and teachers and other people, even priests, I think.
	And they can be swayed.
	And they're swayed with universality, but they're also swayed with cost-benefit analysis.
	I think the two go hand in hand, because I think that philosophy is idealistic and practical, and I don't think there's any contradiction between the two.
	There are people who have been on the receiving end, and of course this generally is age-specific, though not entirely.
	So younger people who've been on the receiving end of this kind of control from people who have these arguments, with the exceptions for those in power...
	Those people have not exploited others, but rather have been exploited by these arguments, and so the cost-benefit for them for accepting these arguments Is very positive, but the cost is a true view of the relationships that they have.
	So there is a great benefit in that they are not personally guilty of exploiting others through these mechanisms.
	But what it does is it turns the light on about the nature of those who had power over them when they were young, and that is a huge problem.
	So a typical example is you have a parent who says, tell the truth.
	Honesty is a virtue, right?
	And then you start to talk to that parent about issues you had with the family structure or with parenting or abuse or whatever has been going on.
	And you get excuses and evasions and this and that.
	They won't be honest.
	They won't tell the truth, right?
	And that's an awful moment because then you say, well, they know the value of truth.
	They know the virtue of truth.
	They know that truth should be told because they told me all about it, not just from a state point of power, like you will tell me the truth because I'm bigger and stronger, but you will tell me the truth or you should tell me the truth because honesty is a virtue, a universal virtue that you should conform to.
	It's out of my hands. It's a universal virtue.
	You're just like gravity. It's out of my hands.
	I can't grant you an exemption.
	And so when you confront your parents about things that have gone on and they won't tell the truth, Then there's just awful sickening chasm that opens up in your heart where you say, okay, they know the value of truth.
	I'm not speaking to them in a language they don't understand because they told me the value of truth when I was a kid.
	That it was a moral virtue, a moral value, that I should be honest and true.
	And now when it's uncomfortable for them to tell the truth, that value is completely vanished.
	And now I become bothersome and negative and disruptive and problematic for asking for the truth.
	Like they invent a new ethic.
	Sometimes it's more of an aesthetic, but it's kind of a new ethic called, you're just hung up on the past.
	I didn't ask for this conversation.
	I already talked about this.
	If I don't remember, why do you keep pestering me?
	Why do you keep bothering me?
	So if formally resisting the truth was a vice, now when you question your parents, resisting the truth becomes a virtue and pursuing the truth becomes a vice.
	There's this flip. And the people who do this kind of flip, and I'm not saying everyone does it consciously, but the people who do this flip are desperately concerned that it's going to be seen, noticed, and pointed out, because that is the collapse of hierarchy.
	That is the collapse of traditional authority to universalize ethics.
	And particularly when we remember that ethics are far less applicable to children than they are to adults.
	Far less applicable to children.
	Whereas quite the opposite is true.
	We apply in society the most stringent and powerful and top heavy ethics to children while granting adults almost every excuse in the book.
	And that is a complete confirmation of the fact that ethics is a mask for children.
	And this is out of this parental effectiveness training book, right?
	That all you're teaching your children when you make them do stuff is that you're bigger and stronger.
	And if you cloak it in ethics, it actually becomes even worse because then this turnaround revealing both the knowledge of ethics as a way of exercising power, which is hugely corrupt, is always sort of sitting in the wings waiting to come on stage.
	And that's very stressful for people.
	Does that make sense? Absolutely.
	And I guess you could say that even...
	With people who haven't significantly compromised themselves in terms of being abusive and so forth, you still have to have both the argument for morality and a cost-benefit.
	Because if the argument for morality was like, well, just go and starve on the streets, then that would be a significant problem.
	You've got to be able to address...
	Both the so-called idealistic side and also what it means in terms of material survival to people, because people have to find a way to live.
	And that's not going to go away, so we've got to address that too.
	Right. And the greatest power in ethics is that it is self-policing.
	The mere exercise of power is not self-policing.
	So if I lock you in a basement because I drugged you or whatever, then you do not feel any loyalty or necessity to stay in the basement.
	You do not internalize that if it's the mere exercise of power.
	You may conform or obey, like if I am out there holding someone up with a gun, they may give me their wallet, but they will only do so out of a mere cost-benefit analysis.
	No ethics are involved.
	It's not like it's virtuous to give it up.
	I'm giving it up as a part of a social contract or I'm donating to the poor guy with a gun or whatever.
	So the reason that morals are so effective is that morals, people internalize them and they become self-policing.
	And so it becomes much less onerous to rule people who have imbibed immorality than it does to rule them through brute force alone.
	Because brute force gains no allegiance.
	You will gain conformity, but you will gain no allegiance, right?
	So if the teacher says you have to sit in your seat because I'm bigger and stronger than you, the kid may sit in his seat, but he will not become self-policing.
	He will not say I should, to be a good person, sit in my seat.
	He'll just say, well, okay, so you're bigger and stronger.
	I'll sit here.
	And he'll seethe, and he'll bide his time, and he'll wait, and he'll work out, and he'll, you know, hopefully hope to get bitten by a radioactive spider or something.
	in the absence of ethics, the mere exercise of power only creates compliance It does not create self-policing, self-attack.
	It does not create an ideal that people feel they're falling short of by not obeying, that they will then self-police, right?
	So like the Muslim idea, which is that you have, you know, an angel on one shoulder recording your good deeds and an angel on another shoulder recording your bad deeds and these get tallied up.
	People internalize that.
	They don't say, well, I'm going to pray five times a day because if I don't, I'm going to get beaten up or something.
	Because then they will do it, but they don't think it's a good thing.
	They don't internalize it. But if you believe that God is watching you and it's virtuous to do these good things and you're going to go to hell if you don't and it'll be your fault, then you will self-police and you will become obsessed with yourself.
	It's the difference between the beginning and the end of 1984.
	At the beginning, Winston Smith obeys because they have power.
	At the end, he obeys because he's internalized The ethic of subservience to the collective.
	And the self-policing is the great goldmine of human history.
	If you can get people to imbibe an ethic, they will self-police and they will police each other.
	They will attack each other. And then you almost don't need to lift a finger to get the obedience.
	Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much.
	Prison experiment was, in a sense, even more telling because there, there wasn't even an authority figure telling them what to do.
	They just took on roles because they had taken on board that morality so deeply that if they had a victim role or an abuser role, they just started playing it out.
	In a sense, that shows how deeply that...
	That's imprinting of kind of morality with an exception goes.
	Right. So for those who don't know, and it's pretty well known, so I just touched on it briefly, the prison experiment was done in the 60s before the ethics commissions were sort of fired up and a bunch of, because there's actually a documentary which I'd love to see one day.
	I haven't seen it yet. Milgram took a bunch of college students and randomly assigned them to prisoners or guards in a simulated prison and was curious just what was going to happen.
	The experiment was slated to run for quite some time but he had to stop it after a few days because of explosions of savagery and sadism and beatings and humiliations and so on.
	And because power is so co-joined in people's minds with morality, then it can go one of both ways.
	So people either have power already and then automatically use morality to maintain that power.
	I mean, it's a human instinct that is as deep as needing to pee or eat.
	So if you have power, you're going to use morality to justify it.
	That's inevitable. But what's interesting is that if you gain power through this randomized experiment, you gain power, you immediately...
	Within your own mind, use morality.
	Morality and power become so congiant.
	He was disobeying me.
	I'm the authority. He was disobeying me.
	He was being bad. I punished him.
	Punishment is morality, right?
	At least in the human mind, we'll punish a dog or whatever.
	It's not moral. So if you gain power, you will immediately start ex post facto justifying that according to morality.
	No question. You could randomly switch bankers with poor people, and within two days, the exact same class consciousness would emerge, I'm sure, that this would be how it would play out.
	So you can't have power without...
	Justifying it from a moral standpoint in the way that we work.
	Because there is no greater power than morality.
	So our desire for efficiency as organisms, which all carbon-based organisms have that desire for efficiency, the desire for efficiency means if I have power, I must immediately begin to use morality.
	If I get power accidentally, I must immediately begin to use morality.
	If I am subjugated, I must immediately begin to use what Nietzsche would call the slave morality, which is to make a virtue out of subjugation.
	No matter what I do, I have to make a virtue out of it, whether I'm master or slave or anywhere in between.
	And the fact that morality is the shadow of power has been what has messed up philosophy, in my opinion, since its very inception.
	If we say that power is the shadow of morality, then we have a different equation entirely.
	Morality is an effect of power, a justification of power, an extension and expansion of power.
	If we say that morality is larger than power, then power as we understand it now entirely dissipates.
	Can you imagine having a disagreement?
	Imagine having a disagreement with someone prior to philosophy.
	Having a disagreement with someone without having access to a single moral argument or an argument from superiority or inferiority or anything like that.
	If you watch movies or TV shows, all you see is people jockeying for the high moral ground all the time.
	I mean, we can't even imagine having power without morality.
	And I'm going to do more of a show on this, but someone posted on the board about Chinese moms and the degree to which they use just terrifying aggression to cause their children to play bits of piano better to the point where the woman said she wouldn't let her daughter get up to pee or eat or drink until she had played this piano piece perfectly.
	And she said she had actually, she couldn't speak.
	She'd shouted herself hoarse, screaming at her daughter to do this piece better.
	And that is another kind of morality.
	And that is the morality called excellence.
	In the movie Magnolia, Tom Cruise plays that really sleazy, screw-em-and-leave-em kind of guy.
	And he's enraged at someone at his organization.
	He says something like, you need to just do your job!
	That excellence becomes another kind of morality, and that's what you see in economic organizations like corporations and so on, that excellence has become a kind of morality and a kind of perfection.
	But trying to get people to do stuff without using a moral argument is virtually incomprehensible.
	It's virtually incomprehensible to parents to say to your children, I want you to do this, not this, without putting it in moral terms of good and bad and right and wrong.
	It is impossible for political hierarchies to exist without using moral arguments.
	It's impossible for religious hierarchies to exist without using moral arguments.
	If you take away the moral arguments from these power structures, which is exactly what philosophy does, by truly universalizing that which is only claimed to be universal, I mean, the whole thing collapses, which is why philosophy has been so forever opposed by all hierarchies.
	It absolutely undoes this, you know, human predation.
	Good, good.
	And the live experience is that there's almost no oxygen left in the room for these poor people, but for other people.
	All right, so we do have time for another caller, in fact, if we have anybody else who wanted to jump in.
	If I may, Price, Steph, what would you go back to if philosophy was no longer such a great necessity for...
	IT? Theater?
	Underwear model? Well, you're assuming my dress at the moment as it stands.
	You know the way newsreaders only dress above the desk.
	Yeah, if philosophy were no longer such an issue, I would very simply go back to novel writing.
	Creative writing was my great passion, which I was into long before I started working this hard in philosophy.
	So yeah, that's what I would head back to, and that's what I would like to do more of.
	But I think that philosophy is more important than fiction at the moment.
	Yeah, assuming Steph is underwear, right?
	At least on his legs. Hello?
	Is this on? Hello?
	Am I on? You sure are?
	Okay. You kind of covered it at the beginning with your prologue, but I need to have some kind of guidance to where to go next with my therapy and blah, blah, blah.
	The short story is November really shouldn't have happened.
	And after an endless parade of people dropping dead, people trying to sue me, my children losing their school, blah, blah, blah, I ended up in the mental institution.
	Court ordered to stay 30 days.
	I lost the man who replaced my father in my life in November.
	Historically, it's the month my son died.
	So it was not good.
	And I got out of the court Pickle by getting another court order against me to take a large amount of Seroquel, which is an antipsychotic, and Celexa, which is a happy pill.
	The combination of the two gives me severe hypotension when I move, postural hypotension.
	And I can't seem to get out of it.
	But with that aside, I've been going for the anorexia for a year now, and I'm that hamster on the wheel going around and around, and I can't seem to get off it.
	You know, I make such good decisions for the kids, and I can't do anything for myself, and I don't understand that.
	So what I kind of need is your opinion on those meds and maybe a way to get away from, because the government owns me.
	Well, I think that, I mean, look, I hugely feel for your predicament.
	In fact, calling it a predicament is vastly underrating what it is you're going through.
	I mean, it just sounds completely awful.
	I mean, I completely understand how you might feel like the song goes, wake me up when November ends.
	It sounds like an absolutely horrible month for you.
	It was. It was. Unfortunately, I mean, this is so far outside the realm of philosophy that I can't give you advice, obviously, on meds or treatment or what's going on with your therapist.
	That's not something that philosophy can really handle, other than to sort of give you human-to-human massive compassion and sympathy for what it is that you're going through.
	But I don't really feel that I can give you any particular advice because it's not a philosophical issue that you're dealing with.
	As far as I understand it, it's a mental health issue, which is not quite the same, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, it does. I was just hoping.
	Well, look, I can give you the milk of human kindness and sympathy.
	That I can absolutely do, because that I think is important, and I'm absolutely sorry.
	I know a little bit about your history from a prior call-in, and I'm appalled at how you were treated when you were younger.
	I can see the effects, I think, as everyone can, and how much you have had to We're good to go.
	Completely and totally sympathize with what you're going through.
	I wish there were a magic wand that philosophy could wave to make this stuff right itself or fix itself.
	Of course there isn't. But I do commend you on the work that you're doing as far as staying in the conversation with the therapist.
	And I think that is absolutely wise.
	Well, my therapist is great.
	My psychiatrist is evil.
	And the people that were detaining me legally...
	In the hospital, we're horrid.
	You know, they lock you up and then they give you all of two friggin' minutes a day.
	That's it. I've certainly heard that before and I don't doubt you for a moment that there is unfortunately a complete mismatch of incentives between what is financially good for the system and what is emotionally good for the patients.
	I completely am with you as far as that goes.
	This is unfortunately just the effects of So increasing therapy would be the way to go, right? Well, yeah.
	I mean, I'm a huge fan of talk therapy.
	Again, I have no idea about the circumstances.
	I just think that talk therapy is the way to go unless there are significant medical reasons to go otherwise.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	Just work as hard as you can at that.
	And I think that's the best shot.
	Well, thank you, Ben. You're very welcome.
	And again, I just want to say how sorry I am that you happen to face and deal with all this kind of stuff.
	I mean, it is a truly tragic aftermath of where you came from.
	And I'm so sorry.
	Thank you. Alright.
	Next. Do we have?
	Do we have? Otherwise, we're going to talk about lawyers.
	I'm going to warn you.
	Or are we going to talk about Izzy?
	I don't know of anyone else that's on deck, so feel free.
	I think DJ Mike wants to come in.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, let me see.
	Let me get him. I just wait for this new guy.
	Well, I'm waiting for the new guy to come in.
	Oh, yeah. Oh, man.
	Izzy. Oh, what an absolute delight.
	It's amazing to me.
	Literally over the past three days, her imaginative play has gone from zero to light speed.
	So we were just a couple of days ago playing in the Red Room, and she was pretending to stir with a little pen cap.
	We have all these toys, but this is what she actually plays with.
	Hello? Yeah, sorry, just one sec.
	Let me just finish this tale and we'll go straight to you.
	We have a little coaster up here, a little cork coaster, and she was pretending to stir something with that.
	And I just, you know, out of playfulness said, let's bake something.
	And she was like, yeah, yeah, let's bake cheesecake.
	I'm like, well, yeah, absolutely.
	I'm down for that. And so we turned the couch into a fridge.
	We turned a box into the oven.
	And, you know, we pretended to crack the eggs and the cream cheese and roll the goo at the bottom and all that.
	And she totally got into it.
	Like, she knew where the eggs were.
	She knew where the milk was.
	She pretended to throw things in the garbage.
	I drew some dials on the box and called it the oven.
	She put it in.
	She turned the dial.
	She pretended to bake it.
	She took it out.
	She pretended it was hot.
	She blew on it.
	She cut it up.
	She gave pieces that we ended up, all three of us, just hurling imaginary food at each other, which was too much fun for words.
	And it really is amazing because that is new and unprecedented in this.
	And this degree of explosion in fantasy play is amazing.
	The degree to which she'll pass into this realm of fantasy play with no, obviously, no disorientation, no confusion between what is real and what is not.
	And the fact that she can replicate it on her own, right?
	So you can leave her alone. She'll just start baking stuff.
	And, oh, I made you a gingerbread cookie and she'll hand me the coaster.
	And then I, of course, get it.
	really mad at her because it's not a real gingerbread cookie and I've been fooled again.
	But it's so much fun to see this just massive eruption of fantasy play that is just a complete delight to see.
	And it's earlier than I thought.
	I mean, what do I know?
	I'm not a big expert on child development, but it's just so much fun.
	It is just a whole other level of play.
	And somebody gave us a little coffee maker.
	And she demanded cups.
	And she pretended to pour cream and to pour coffee.
	And she gave us coffee. And she made us clink the glasses and all of that.
	Because it was... It was coffee time, and oh man, it is just too much fun for words, and it's a complete delight.
	I always thought these things were more gradual, you know, like languages kind of from uh-oh to more complex things.
	It's more gradual. But this is just like zero to light speed in like a day.
	And I don't know if it was like we could have done it earlier, but we didn't, or whether it just happens that way, but it was just amazing.
	It really is. Other than philosophy, it's the best fantasy food you'll ever eat.
	So I just wanted to mention that.
	Sorry, have we had somebody else on the call?
	Yeah, Steph, it's DJ Mike.
	Yo! I just wanted to give some positive feedback because a couple of important things have happened in my life that FDR has been a part of.
	And the first thing is that through some of the podcasts, I've been able to talk a friend of mine out of joining the Marine Corps.
	Oh, dude. Oh, dude.
	Talk about saving a soul and the souls of all who come afterwards.
	Oh, my God. That's just fantastic.
	Go on. He really responded well to the conversation you had with the gentleman about being a doctor and the military.
	So that was tremendously helpful in that realm.
	But in another realm, too, I'm really trying to help this guy along with learning philosophy and...
	One of the things that's been instrumental in that is actually your appearances on the Alex Jones show.
	I've been able to approach my friend through the realm of a little bit of conspiracy theories where he's interested in.
	But when he heard your first appearance on the whole Tax Lives talk thing, it really made him think about it.
	I started introducing more of your podcasts and videos to him.
	I think he's really coming through with this.
	I just want to say thank you very much.
	And not only has my friend listened to Alex Jones for that, but I've gotten my father more interested in your stuff via Alex Jones.
	And I think it's really just going to reach a lot more people that way.
	And so I just wanted to hear your thoughts on what it's like to do that kind of a show and get the message out.
	Well, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I found it a very enjoyable show to do.
	I thought that he was a fun co-host.
	I thought that he had great questions.
	I thought he had great comments.
	I thought that he took my metaphors and litter Saturn V rocket underneath them and put them perhaps into a far orbit.
	But it's not like I couldn't be accused of doing the same thing from more than time to time.
	So, yeah, look, I mean, I'm sure we have our differences.
	I know that we have our differences.
	But my main concern is to bring philosophy to his audience, as I'm sure his main concern is to a smaller degree, of course, because the audience is smaller, to bring his show to my audience.
	So fundamentally, we're not talking to each other.
	We're talking to each other's audience, and I think that is a worthwhile pursuit.
	And it wasn't like I didn't mull it over, but I'm certainly glad with going on the show, and it was very nice to be back, and I hope that we can do it again.
	Excellent. Yeah, you know, he does do a lot of metaphors, and he goes on these rants sometimes that just take him to places where, I don't know, there are sometimes further stretches than your rants and your metaphors, so I think it's pretty amusing.
	So what you're trying to say is that we're going the same direction, he just goes a little further.
	You know what else?
	I also did realize I really do treasure and value and need to thank donators for giving me the opportunity to do shows without commercials.
	I really, really want to thank everybody who's donated.
	hugely because being on the Alex Jones show, as it is when I'm on other shows, whether like the Max Keiser or the No State Project or other shows where there are commercials, it just reminds me what a treasure and a blessing it is to be able to do shows without commercials, to not have those kinds of interruptions, to not have to slice and dice, it just reminds me what a treasure and a blessing it is to be able to do shows without commercials, to not have those kinds of interruptions, to not I will tell you about the algae that can clean your toilet water into water you can drink with or whatever.
	I don't know, right?
	I mean, I'm really, really wanted to express my ecstatic, immense and enormous appreciation to the donators personally.
	It would not even remotely be the same show if we had commercials.
	I mean, it wouldn't even be close.
	And I've had some offers and not some fairly good offers given the reach of the show as far as commercials go.
	People saying, I think the one that was the most tempting was the foot rub from Beyonce during every show.
	If I took commercials and I said, we'll clone her and maybe because I have two feet.
	Come on. I'm a star!
	But I'll be in my trailer.
	Call my agent. I can't work like this!
	Anyway, coming back from that...
	Beyonce moment. It is a huge privilege to be able to do it without commercials and that is entirely due to the generosity and not just of the financial donators but of course the people who have helped promote Free Domain Radio and talk about it like you with your friends introduce new people to it because through that the net of donators gets cast wider and wider so I thank you a million times and a million fold and I will never do commercials in the show.
	That will never happen. Because I couldn't imagine, particularly the listener conversations, hold that thought while we cut the commercial and come back.
	I think that would be brutal.
	So I'm enormously pleased and grateful at that opportunity.
	So please, go on. Well, that's pretty much it.
	I just really wanted to say thank you for that.
	Do you have any plans of doing any further shows with him?
	Well, I mean, I'm always open to it.
	I know that... He's been getting some very positive feedback over the shows that we've had, so I'm sure we'll do more again in the future.
	It certainly could happen.
	Who knows where from here?
	I'm always keen to do media appearances.
	I prepare, I research, I practice, and I always try to represent the community in its best possible light, given the limitations of my frenetic personality.
	So, please, if there's things that you think I can do better or differently when I'm doing these kinds of conversations with people, I am absolutely open to feedback and correction.
	I know that I represent, so to speak, some of this community in a more public sphere, and I always want to do so in a way that makes you proud and delighted and happy at what I've done.
	So if there's anything that I can do that can be improved upon or changed or better other than ditching the fruitiest of fruity accents, I would really appreciate you letting me know at host at freedomainradio.com.
	I always want to please the community because you guys are the only reason that I'm able to do what I do.
	Excellent, Steph. Well, have a good day.
	Thank you so much. And pass along, if you dare, my congratulations to the non-Marine.
	That is fantastic news.
	And I think it may take him a long time to realize just what a great move that was.
	But that is, you know, that makes some of the stress, strains, and tribulations of what we do all worthwhile.
	So thank you. Thank you so much.
	And look, people who've donated and supported the show, this is not me doing it.
	This is me doing it with you.
	And without you, there is no this doing it.
	There's a slogan for you.
	Without you, there is no this doing it.
	But you can translate that into something vaguely coherent in your mind.
	But no, everybody who supported and donated, you know, take a bow yourself.
	There's, you know, the people who have avoided these kinds of things.
	things.
	And I wish I had time to share the emails that I get from people who have abandoned aggression in raising their kids, people who've abandoned aggression in their marriage, people who have gotten out of abusive relationships, the people who have gotten out of public service, people who've quit the police force.
	I mean, there is a big effect in what we're doing here.
	I wish I had time to share and I wish I had the time to ask everyone if I can post their emails and follow it all up.
	But I can tell you that there's a lot of change out there at the personal and actionable level, which is the only place the change can really occur.
	So if you've supported the show, these are the effects that you can take pride in at having really, really enabled the So, thanks everyone so much.
	Alright. I have time for another one.
	Oh, we can stop early. Or I can talk about lawyers.
	It's not a threat, it's a warning.
	Yeah, Solomon Kahn of Kahn Academy.
	I think that he would be a very interesting person to interview.
	Unfortunately, because I've seen a lot of Star Trek, I just have to open up with, Khan!
	Or something like that.
	But I'm sure that he's heard that before from people who have zero dignity and self-respect.
	So that would be fun.
	So where's the problem? All right.
	All right. Let's talk about lawyers.
	Last chance. Do not talk about lawyers.
	Oh, yeah. We have another in-house question.
	No, it's more of a comment, really.
	I just wanted to say after...
	No, I just wanted to say, you know, it's nice, but please, could you put some clothes on?
	Because it's a bit distracting.
	All right, I can give you one eye patch.
	How's that? No, thank you.
	I appreciate it. I wanted to say, I was thinking when you were talking about Izzy, that...
	I just wanted to share an experience that I had because I've seen lots of people, friends of mine who've had children and I've had the experience of going around and visiting them and I've had the opportunity to come and visit you guys on our way on holiday and on our way back which has just been great fun and for me you know going to visit friends with children I have a lot of memories of Just quite a lot of stress involved in that experience because there'll be this moment when you go and visit friends,
	when the baby or the child wants to do something that is inconvenient for the parents.
	For me, there's this, oh God, where's this going to go?
	Also, I think, am I going to have to intervene?
	What could I say?
	Especially if it's people that you know and so forth.
	It's often actually quite a stressful experience for me doing that.
	I just wanted to say that it's been such fun.
	It's just been great seeing your relationship with each other and with Izzy.
	We had such a great time on our way down to holiday when we went walking around the mall with Izzy.
	It's just so relaxed.
	It makes a huge difference.
	You can actually see the effect it has on other people as well because you can see that people in shops and so forth, they were actually really nice and really relaxed about the fact that we were wandering around and looking at things.
	I think it's because There is a lack of tension in the atmosphere.
	And there's still a lot of negotiation and disagreement going on with Izzy.
	And Izzy is saying that there are things that she doesn't want to do or there are things that she does want to do that are not what was originally planned and so forth.
	So it's not like... There's just no stress because, you know, Izzy is in some way, I don't know, super quote obedient or something.
	There's a huge amount of negotiation going on, but it's very gentle and it works really well.
	You know, so... There'll be a negotiation about when we're going to leave, and there'll be a discussion about it, and Izzy has a preference, and then when we're in the mall, for example, Steph was saying that we need to go, but we decided to stay for longer, but then Izzy agreed to go later on, and it works just really, really well.
	And I also noticed that when there are times when Izzy wants to do something, you two sort of get help from each other in terms of thinking about...
	Like with the cushions today, you know, there'll be, you know...
	Yeah, just, I mean, I didn't know if you wanted to, if you didn't want me to go into details, but...
	Details are, I think, very important.
	So, yeah, so we had great fun jumping up and down on cushions and building forts and climbing through forts and so forth, and we'd been doing it for quite a while, and so I can't remember, Steph or Christina said, you know, should we put away the...
	I think Christina said, should we put away the cushions?
	And I think Izzy said, yeah, okay, and we started to put away the cushions, and then Izzy said, no...
	Keep them out. And there was this moment like, you know, well, we've actually been doing it for quite a while.
	And she had said, yeah, let's put them away.
	And now she's saying no.
	So it was sort of like, well, how do we respond to this moment?
	And there was just a brief interlude where Steph and Christina were just, you know, basically checking in on each other.
	Like, what do you think? And so we decided they decided that, yeah, I mean, why not leave the cushions out?
	We'll carry on playing and so forth.
	But it was a very relaxed negotiation between everyone.
	And, you know, Izzy is just a total delight.
	You know, she's talking all the time.
	She's communicating about everything.
	We're walking around. She's doing all sorts of funny things, like she's really interested in exit signs and fans, but they're too high to actually reach for.
	So she does this thing, we're walking around the mall, where she keeps pointing out green exit signs and then saying, too high.
	And Steph or somebody will say, is it too high?
	And then she'll do this, reaching up, like putting her hands up in the air, and then, yep, too high.
	But she's also extremely relaxed and very, very...
	Very good at negotiation.
	She does have preferences, and they don't always align with other people's preferences.
	And she's assertive about preferences, but she's also fine about agreeing.
	We were playing with coasters, and she actually started throwing coasters, because that was starting to get a bit dangerous.
	So Steph and Christina took them away.
	First we said no. First we said no, that's right.
	And talked to her about, no, because you can hurt yourself, you can have an owie and so forth.
	And she was still pretty keen on throwing the coasters.
	But again, there was a lot of talking about...
	What the effect is and it can hurt you and so forth.
	And then she was fine about it.
	And there wasn't, you know, there wasn't a discussion at all.
	She didn't come back to the coasters.
	And a lot of times that's the kind of situation where I would have seen in the past with other people's kids.
	Yeah. And they would have been like, I want to talk about the coasters.
	The kid would clearly want to go back to it because it's like, this was something tense that I want to know, like what was going on there, you know?
	And And I feel thwarted and, you know, so it would just become an endless kind of point of tension.
	I just wanted to say it's been great fun and just really, really relaxing.
	Yeah, we were just talking about this downstairs that one of the counterintuitive things that I've sort of puzzled out is that when you're a parent and your kid says, I want to do X, and you say no, then if they continue to want to do it, the idea is, well, I shouldn't give way because that's going to be, I'm going to spoil them or it's going to be a lack of discipline or it's going to cause more problems.
	So you feel like you've got to just be firm and stick your ground and so on.
	And I haven't been doing that.
	I mean, very rarely, but it's necessary.
	And it's really worked out well because what I've really understood about being a parent is that your kids don't care what you say.
	They're going to do what you do.
	So if you're intransigent and you, you know, this is how it is and that's no negotiation, then your kids will imbibe that and that will be who they will be.
	So then when they want something, they will become intransigent.
	So that intransigence just leads to further escalation.
	If you're like, well, I don't really want to stay in the mall for another 10 minutes, but okay.
	Then what they see is they see you giving up your preferences for the sake of their preferences.
	And what I found is that Izzy is actually capable of doing that because she's seeing that behavior modeled.
	And so you actually get a lot more peace and agreement through giving up your preferences than you do from maintaining them with some sort of false idea of discipline.
	So showing her that kind of behavior elicits that kind of behavior, which is a big leap of faith from how I was raised, but it really does seem to be working out well.
	And so, yeah, I'm very pleased about that for sure.
	Yeah.
	And it means that, um, I'm sure it means that for her, um, Getting your preferences met isn't this kind of oasis in the desert that you have to really scramble for because when is the next time that that's ever going to happen?
	It's something that she's clearly quite relaxed about.
	Oh, all right then. I get my preferences met enough that I'm not that invested in arguing about it.
	If it's really something that's not going to work, fine.
	She's got that easygoing attitude, which for those of us who Did not have our preferences met in this way, I think you can get a lot more invested in like, no, I need to get my way just because you've got the history of not having, quote, had your way or had your preferences met.
	All right. James, do we have anyone else who wants to chat or are we going to go to Adventures with Loyal Land?
	I'll do one more spot check, but no one else has been added.
	So, if you want us to go for it, it's 15 minutes left.
	Alright. So, the question is, how would lawyers work in a stateless society?
	Jake, do you want to take that one? Bet you could.
	Give it a shot. Well, I mean, I think...
	Okay, yeah, on the spot here.
	Okay, so there is a valid use in dispute resolution, and there are things like objective rules that people can agree to if they're going to make agreements and so forth.
	So I imagine the way that lawyers would work in a...
	In a voluntary society is that there would be a person who would offer their services basically as a dispute resolver.
	And rather than going there, once you'd had the dispute, you'd go in advance if you want to make a deal and say, you know, you're an objective third party.
	These are the terms that we're both agreeing to.
	And we both agree that if something goes wrong, then, you know, we'll look to your organization to help us resolve it.
	Do you think that there would be...
	I mean, lawyers are overhead, right?
	I mean, like accountants are overhead.
	Society would be better served, at least economically, without them.
	So there would be a pressure economically to not have lawyers.
	Do you think that they would still be necessary in a free society?
	And if so, to what degree? I imagine they'd be much less necessary.
	I mean, I know that in business...
	You almost know that wherever the lawyers come in, it's just a huge cost and a pain in the arse.
	And if you can avoid it in any way, then you absolutely will do.
	So I can imagine, for example, in the way that you have standard...
	You know, like the GNU software license or whatever, if people want to distribute their stuff in various open source ways.
	I mean, I don't think anybody even reads whatever that is, but they know like, oh, I want to do open source.
	So yeah, I'm releasing this under that license.
	I'm sure there'd be 101 like standard...
	This is a normal commercial deal.
	So let's just use, in a sense, that normal commercial thing.
	And also, we'll get a friend who we both trust to hold a certain amount of money in trust.
	And if we disagree, that money can help resolve the dispute.
	You wouldn't need a lawyer for that.
	but wherever you've got projects which are going to involve a huge number of people like let's say it's a huge infrastructure project or something that goes over years and years then that's maybe the kind of situation where you might have specialized people who really would just be you know dealing with all the super technical things like well if i'm paying in money now but i'm not going to get money until 10 years then how do i know if you don't if this doesn't work you know so that's the kind of situation
	but i should imagine that it'd be tiny in comparison to to what we've got now yeah i think also um where lawyers i think would be more important is in property crimes crimes of violence and so on But it's often struck me that the legal system that we have now, of course, it's frozen in time, the way that all of this nonsense is frozen in time.
	There's been some advances because of science like DNA testing and so on.
	But I think that there would be a huge investment in lie detection technology in a future society or a free society.
	Because right now...
	It seems to me, again, I'm no expert on this, but I've heard that lie detectors can be 80-90%.
	Accurate. In conjunction with other things and with multiple tests and so on.
	Whereas eyewitnesses are tragically inept.
	Like, I mean, the amount of eyewitness problems that have been revealed through the court system, through DNA testing and so on.
	People who swear up and down that this was the guy who beat them up and so on.
	Completely wrong. Rape victims, just completely wrong.
	And those, of course, are people who, you know, they're up close and personal with their attacker.
	So I think that given the unreliability of eyewitnesses and there would be a much more scientific approach to the establishment of what actually happened.
	So it would be lie detectors, it would be forensic evidence, DNA evidence, much less on rhetorical tricks and that kind of stuff, because this whole system has been frozen in time since the state took it over in the Enlightenment, and it hasn't really had the same level of scientific advancement that everything else has had.
	So I think you'd be more scientists and fewer lawyers, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, and the one thing that we do know is that it's a nationalized industry, because law is controlled by the state.
	So effectively, lawyers, even though they may be private companies, their law itself has been nationalized.
	And so... Anything, like any other nationalized industry, is going to be extremely bureaucratic and inefficient and is going to have all of the benefits to those who are in the system because they get the protection of a monopoly on dispute resolution, resolution on law.
	Yeah, the obsolescence drive or the obsolescence tendency doesn't work in nationalized industries.
	So Microsoft would love to get rid of its computer programmers, right?
	Because they wouldn't have to pay them, right?
	They're in a sense overhead.
	Now they're a necessary overhead for the creation of code.
	But if you could get rid of them, then they would.
	Roads would love to get rid of traffic lights if they were privatized.
	But unfortunately, and inevitably, when you have a nationalized industry, the obsolescence never occurs, because there's no downward pressure on prices.
	There's no competition to eliminate positions.
	And so yeah, I mean, the existing legal system has all of the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles on a holiday.
	And yeah, So yeah, there is no drive to eliminate.
	In fact, there's only a drive to escalate costs and prices.
	I mean, in Canada, there's a tragic shortage of lawyers to the point where lawyers are charging $500- $600 an hour.
	I mean, that's insane.
	Any profession which has that kind of rate should be drawing more and more people in until it's driven down to something sensible and reasonable.
	But of course, through the law colleges and through the government, they have a legal monopoly on who gets to enter the profession.
	And the people who are making $500, $600 an hour, they sure as hell don't want new people to come into the profession and drive the costs down.
	So, yeah, it is tragic.
	And it's one of the ways in which...
	We, you know, funny thing to say, well, what if we didn't have access to lawyers?
	It's like, you tell me that the average person in this country who has a legal problem is going to go to a lawyer at 500 bucks an hour for many years and expect any kind of restitution.
	We live in a state of the worst conceivable anarchy where actual dispute resolution is impossible for the vast majority of people and is used generally as an aggressive mechanism by people in power to keep other people down.
	Like, I'll threaten to sue you or whatever.
	So the actual dispute resolution is not available to people, but it's illegal to come up with alternatives.
	And that really is a true statelessness without even the benefit of spontaneous organization.
	So I hope that helps.
	What is my opinion on chemtrails?
	I don't know much about it.
	My understanding is that chemtrails refers to the idea that there's something that the planes are putting out that is bad for people, that the contrails or chemical trails are plain.
	I don't know enough about it, and I don't, you know, the theories, and I hesitate to call them conspiracy theories because I think that's a pejorative that's not necessary.
	Theories are neither conspiratorial or not, that it is true or false.
	I stay away from...
	Theories that are not philosophical, that require significant amounts of technical expertise.
	I mean, I'm a philosopher, I'm not an engineer.
	I'm a doctor, not a corrobotist.
	But I try and stay away from that kind of stuff, simply because I don't have the expertise.
	You know, so people say, well, the buildings fell in 9-11 because this, that, and the other.
	I don't know. I'm not a structural engineer.
	There are lots of contradictory claims.
	I don't claim to have the expertise to know who on earth is telling the truth.
	Other than I assume the government is not telling the truth, but...
	Contrails, yes, that's right.
	Yeah, so I don't know whether it's true or not.
	I don't know why the birds fell around the world the other day.
	I don't know any of this stuff, and I can't really comment on it.
	Oh, yeah, we have a theory.
	Yeah, because the thing is that when birds die, they can't fly anymore, so that's why they fell out in the sky.
	I'm sorry, you have to stretch that into at least a 20 minute explanation that everyone groans at the end.
	It's far too concise for this show.
	Why do birds appear whenever you are near?
	Just like me, they long to be close to you.
	Alright, we're going to descend into song if nobody has any more questions.
	Please. Wait, wait.
	Just if you're interested, and if anyone else is interested, we're going to have next week for the Psychology Book Club, we're going to have a chat about the Milgram obedience experiments.
	And if you haven't read the book, there is a short documentary that Milgram actually made, so I'll stick a link to that on the board.
	But I think it's a really interesting book, not just for psychology, And personal growth, but also for sort of liberty and freedom sort of issues.
	So, yeah, that'll be next weekend.
	Yeah, you really want to check out the Psychology Book Club.
	It is fantastic.
	Right, James, you had an announcement?
	Yes. Assuming, and I'm just going to go with this, that the barbecue is going to be on the 30th of July, I'm going to start researching group rates.
	And if you are interested, go to the forum, go to the general messages section, and it should be a sticky post near the top.
	Just put in a vote or leave a comment on the thread.
	So that I have enough information.
	I'd like to start shopping for that around the beginning of February so we can get a really good chance for a really good deal.
	We can always add rooms.
	We've been able to do that, but based on the trajectory the last couple of years, I'd like to hit a really good deal on this one.
	I'll keep pounding that until people start voting.
	Yeah, please do. And I set up the damn link, but I can't remember it now.
	I'll get the link. Yeah, if you can come to meando.com forward slash FDR BBQ2010. Anyway, I'll check it out.
	But yeah, really, if you can come to the barbecue, you should come.
	I mean, it's free, drinks and food, and we love to host the gatherings, and it is a great deal of fun.
	Come for a couple of days. We do karaoke, we do hiking, we do sports, we do truly brain-destroying drinking games.
	No, okay, we don't really do that. But yeah, it's a great conversation, great company, and...
	I put on some clothes for part of it last year because I couldn't find my big bottle of SPF 30 and my small bottle of SPF 9 million.
	So yeah, you should come up.
	Look, it's our gold scotch. It is our chance to be around people who get philosophy, who understand the concepts that I think reason reveals and you can talk about without any fear of getting those funny looks and that vague ostracism of don't go there.
	You can talk about what's ever on your mind.
	It is enormously funny.
	The number of witty people in FDR is truly not astounding, I guess, because it's a function of intelligence.
	But I'm pretty sure that it'll be the smartest and wisest and funniest group that you'll meet with all year.
	So I hope that you can make it up to the barbecue in Mississauga this summer.
	It's going to be quite a lot of people this year, I would assume, if the growth continues as it has been.
	So I hope that you will be able to make it up.
	And Jake, how do people find out more about the Psychology Book Club?
	Psychologybookclub.org. And I think that should take you to the Facebook page.
	We are going to set up this month a proper downloadable podcast stream for the previous discussions.
	And there is a link in the diamond section of the board as well.
	And if you look up on Facebook, Psychology Book Club, you should find it.
	Thank you. And it's amiando.com, A-M-I-A-N-D-O.com forward slash FDR2011.html.
	That's about as unfriendly as a name as I could come up with.
	And I really, really hope that you will be able to join us.
	It's a great meeting face-to-face and it's a lot of fun.
	I look forward to it absolutely every year.
	Thank you. Alright, last call.
	Last call. You can tap in something of your lack.
	Oh, and this is not exactly a public thing.
	Sorry about that. Steph, did you want to get a conference room together?
	A conference room? You mean for the barbecue?
	Yeah. No.
	No? Okay. No, I think we can probably just do one more year packed to the gills at our place.
	And after that, we might go to a more formal resort or area.
	But no, I think we'll survive one more year.
	Okay. I just wanted to get that information, too.
	Thank you. Thanks.
	I also just wanted to do a big public shout-out of thanks to Phil, who is working on the new website, Feverishly, with a partner in China.
	And... I think it's a thing of beauty, and I'm very, very pleased.
	I'm very, very pleased with it.
	Yeah, I will make an FDR URL. Let's just do fdrurl.com forward slash 2011.
	That will be the link to the barbecue.
	Please sign up, because we need to know how much food to order for everyone.
	Are infants capable of virtue?
	Well, I've... I would say that not before a year.
	That would be my sort of personal experience.
	But I think that certainly choices seem to accrue pretty quickly after that.
	And there has been some evidence, even scientifically, of children as long as 9 to 12 months showing signs of empathy and so on.
	But unfortunately, you simply...
	Children are born...
	Too early biologically, you know, there's this big complex biological mess called human birth, right?
	I mean, if you look at what a baby horse can do, they can stand within hours of coming out of the womb.
	Dolphins can swim right away and so on.
	Even baby elephants can walk around very quickly after coming out of the womb.
	Human infants can't walk for, you know, 9, 10, 11 months until after they come out of the womb.
	The reason for that, of course, is that really the first six to eight months of life should more probably be called the fourth trimester.
	That children, human infants are born Far premature relative in terms of their abilities relative to other animals.
	But the reason for that is that, you know, we need these, particularly in my case, these giant melon heads, right?
	We have these big heads.
	And so if we waited any longer to be born, we'd like split the mom in two.
	So we are born premature.
	And it's much better to not think of infants as isolated entities or individuals.
	Infants are, for the first, let's say, eight or nine months of their life for sure, infants are a system, an ecosystem with the, let's just say mom, although in my case I was pretty involved as well, but fundamentally with breastfeeding, with physical contact and so on.
	The baby and the mom are completing gestation in the first nine months of the baby's life.
	It is not a sovereign individual in the way that we would think of other mammals.
	So because of that, you can't assign moral responsibility to an infant even if we took out of the factor their youth.
	Because the baby's development is being strongly completed or interrupted or interfered with by the actions and reactions and intimacy of the primary caregiver.
	So you can't look at...
	Like, you can't say...
	If the mom smokes, you can't say that the kid is making bad lung choices, right?
	I mean, the kid is just imbibing whatever the mom is imbibing.
	And in the same way, an infant is simply completing its gestation based upon what its mom...
	What his or her mom is doing.
	And so you can't look at the infant as a separate agent, I think, biologically and certainly not morally.
	So I think that's just a very...
	I was very cognizant of that, the degree to which Isabella was still gestating, so to speak, during the first nine months of her life.
	And I think that's really, really important for people to understand that the baby isn't born and then is just the person that they are.
	The foundations of the baby's personality and identity and nervous system and brain...
	It's all being laid down as if the baby were still in the womb.
	It really should be relative to its physical capacities.
	And that's really, really important to remember if you're a parent.
	If you're not a parent too and you're looking at people.
	Well, listen, we've hit 4 o'clock.
	I would like to thank the eloquent co-host and questioner slash cross-examiner, Jake, for dropping by.
	And I hope that you have a wonderful week.
	Thank you everybody so much for your support, as always.
	I hope to see you. We're good to go.
	The online experience.
	And yeah, there'll be a lot of silhouettes.
	That's right, because a lot of people don't have avatars.
	So we'll get an excess of silhouettes, and we'll call you Anon.
	And that way we can say, we'll be here, Anon, and start with Shakespeare.
	Oh, listen, before the show really slides down in quality.

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