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Feb. 14, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:20
1851 Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed on 'Infrequently Asked Questions'

A hilarious take on current events.

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But, you know, for our return back from the holidays, we're thrilled that this is the one that would join us.
He's a pretty big name, a very big name in the Liberty community, especially amongst voluntarists.
He's the host of Freedom Main Radio, one of the podcasts that I listen to, certainly.
We have Stefan Molnou.
Stefan, welcome to Infrequently Asked Questions.
Thanks so much, guys. It's great to be here.
And am I right in assuming that I'm too late for the gay banter?
Did I miss all of that?
Have we moved on? Stefan, you're welcome to hit on me anytime, sir.
I should have sent you my Velvet Glove webcam that is really quite exquisitely animated, but perhaps we can save that for another show.
That sounds excellent.
Rick, maybe we could invite him to the Infrequently Asked Questions hot tub.
Yeah, the hot tub here in the Sovereign Studios.
Yeah, we have the Sovereign hot tub here in the Sovereign Studios here in the undisclosed location in southeastern Virginia.
Well, it is very true that my inspiration really comes from sitting in pretty much a Diet Pepsi of raw male sexuality.
So that, I think, would be a good approach for us.
And as long as people didn't mind the webcam feed fogging up a fair amount with the erotic rompings, I think that would be the way to go.
You know, I don't think they'd mind at all.
I think that they would not mind at all.
Let's hope, anyway. Worst porn ever!
With a celebrity like Stefan Molyneux on, our normal viewership would definitely increase for that.
Well, speaking of which, why don't you tell our audience, for those who haven't heard of you before, about your show, Three Domain Radio.
What's that all about? Well, it's a philosophy show and I hope I'm not tooting my own horn too much when I say that it's the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
You could say throughout history, but that's certainly not because of my genius as a philosopher, but just because the technology is so much better.
We've had about 25 million show downloads and accesses since the show began, and I guess I've spoken at a bunch of conferences, at the Liberty Forum, at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, at the Freedom Festival in Phoenix, at Libertopia.
I'm sort of doing a bit of a public speaking thing and I do shows.
I do a True News series which is a philosophical analysis of current events.
I like to talk about economics, obviously philosophy, psychology, relationships.
I think that personal freedom is where it's really at.
We can't control the state.
We can't end war by going topless or even bottomless as I've tried on many occasions.
But what we can do is we can Achieve as much honesty, freedom, passion and liberty in our own lives, in our personal relationships.
And it's my belief that that is actually how freedom is going to spread the fastest.
Not through political action, not through protests, not through getting jailed, but through living a kind of beacon of freedom Life that other people will want to emulate and be inspired by and then hopefully they will ask you how you achieved it and you can give them some insights into freedom and philosophy and integrity and rationality and all those kinds of good things.
So that's really the intent behind the show.
It's been running for I guess four or five years.
It's all free. It's commercial free.
I've written a bunch of books on ethics and relationships and atheism and those are all free.
And so, yeah, the website's freedomainradio.com.
I certainly invite anybody who's interested to come on by and check out the show.
We have I don't know, close to 9000 members on the message board who like to chat about philosophy and largely flame my hairstyle choices.
And so, yeah, I hope people will come by.
And that's that's basically the history of the show in a nutshell.
I used to be like a software executive and an entrepreneur.
And then I quit to do this full time.
And I just sort of I rely on donations.
So I'm like the guy cross-legged on the street corner with a cardboard sign saying, like Socrates did, will philosophize.
For food, and that's the gig that I'm involved in now.
Well, it certainly makes Infrequently Asked Bastions a much smarter show, at least for one week.
We take a much lighter approach and humorous approach to this whole thing.
We like to make fun of those bastards.
Well, I think that's a great argument.
Somebody posted a video, I don't know if you know this, but I think it was in, I guess, the late 60s, some 14-year-old kid got into John Lennon's hotel room when he was there with Yuko Ono doing a bed in our line or whatever it was, protesting, I think, the Vietnam War in Montreal, I think it was. And some 14-year-old kid came in with, like, a really bad tape deck and recorded a very quick interview with John Lennon.
One of the things, and somebody animated this, it actually won an Oscar.
It's a really cool animation. And what John Leonard said was he said, you know, that the powers that be They can't handle comedy.
They can't handle humor.
And I think that is something so fundamentally unafraid about humor that I think it is a hugely powerful weapon against the powers that be.
So I completely applaud what it is that you're doing.
And Lord knows, you know, fighting the Leviathan can get a little bit exhausting.
So it's really nice to have some shites and giggles from time to time as well.
Well, we do take a little bit of a different approach to having guests on.
We generally don't do the standard question and answer period.
We prefer to, if we can, we prefer to have more of a sort of co-host arrangement with our guests.
I don't know how long we have you this evening.
Do we have you for the duration of the show?
I can do about an hour, but I'm a stay-at-home dad.
My daughter, apparently, she's doing a slow reincarnation from some sort of Mennonite dairy farmer because she gets up at bone-crushing hours, and so I really shouldn't stay up too late.
Otherwise, it's kind of, you know, daddy pouring himself slowly down the stairs until he has his fourth cup of coffee in the morning.
So yeah, I can do about an hour and then I should do the old fart thing and turn in.
Okay, an hour's good.
An hour's good.
We have stuff on one for an hour.
Mike, do you have...
And then you can spend the second hour saying, "Well, damn, that was a huge mistake." And so you'll have a good series of things to talk about for the second hour.
Now that he's gone, can you believe how fake that accent is?
It's like a tour of the colonies.
What the hell does he think he's trying to pull?
The guy left England in 1977 and he's still milking the upper twit British accent?
Anyway, I'm just giving you guys some stuff to work with later, so hopefully that will actually work out well.
Well, I mean, I'm sure the British accent just kind of legitimizes all the crazy total nonsense that you constantly prattle on with.
Oh, come on. Look, it's an instant plus 10 IQ points.
Instant plus 10 IQ points to come across with a British accent.
And I don't know if you've seen a picture of me.
I'm like bald as an egg.
So I needed something with the ladies.
And it wasn't going to be my rainbow afro.
And so I really just had to, you know, milk the, hey, what for?
You know, as much as I possibly could.
Oh, I posted a picture of you on the website.
Oh, good. Okay. You can see your bulb paint there all over the place.
Beautiful. Oh, that's straight out of the Wikipedia article that I have pulled up here.
It's a hot link to the Wikipedia article.
I'm that lazy.
I didn't think they were downloading it.
Oh, it's funny. When I was at the Porkfest, there was a sort of a soapbox idol thing, like where people come up and give their rants.
And I was on the judging panel with Chris Lawless and some other guy whose name I completely forget at the moment.
I apologize. And all three of us are bald.
So what we started off the show by putting our three heads together in front of the cameras and saying, look, it's an ass and a half, which I actually thought was a pretty good intro.
Do you want to simmer with that image for a bit?
Do you need to take a pause here?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't want to consider that.
I'm sorry? I think one of them was probably Gardner Goldsmith.
He's balder than hell.
Right, right. Well, Mike, did you have any questions for Stefan before we move on?
No, I've got to say it's kind of surreal because I really hate talk radio as a general rule, or even podcasts.
I hate them. Really? Interesting career choice.
Unfortunately, you've been shackled to the microphone because of an ancient Egyptian curse, so it's a bummer, really.
You're like the Chippendiles saying, I hate that bumping and grinding, and what's with these little bow ties, and all this oil is disgusting!
Anyway, just having my phone call.
We would never say that.
No, that's true. That's true.
The oil is fine.
You're absolutely right. It's the peanut butter and all that other stuff that gets to be a real mess.
Crunchy or smooth? I have to know.
I will not be able to sleep unless I know whether it's crunchy or smooth.
I told him to get smooth.
Crunch always causes a problem.
Why does it sound like somebody's standing down a brick wall?
Oh, he's just doing a little dance number.
Well, it starts off crunchy, you see, but all too soon it ends up nice and smooth.
Very, very true, especially with the way Rick moves.
Well, I want to get your opinion, Stefan, on what do you think – Just give us your detailed opinion really about the whole WikiLeaks thing that's been the meme lately.
Just give us your thoughts just from beginning to end.
From beginning to end. Well, look, I mean, the WikiLeaks thing is beautiful.
It's beautiful. It is a complete sunrise.
Of light landing on the, you know, absolute stinkin' evil of the ruling classes.
It is beautiful.
Because, you see, the morality that we live under is like a big rock rolling down a mountainside towards a little village of average citizens.
It's only one way.
It only bounces down the hill.
It only goes one way.
But with WikiLeaks, it's going two ways, right?
So, you know, the government can...
Go through all of your bank accounts, can go through all of your health records, can, you know, send their ferret-y little spider cookie robots into every nook and cranny of your existence.
And here what's happening is they are getting a tiny taste of what it's like to be on the receiving end of that.
A tiny taste. And they're going completely...
Oh, they don't like it. Oh, they hate it.
They're going completely insane.
I mean, you've got dozens, literally dozens of US and Canadian and I think even a couple of Australian Nut job, dirtbag ass clowns at the top of the media in these countries calling for a literal mafia hit on this guy.
A literal mafia hit on this guy who has been very careful about what he's revealed, who has revealed his information only through, I mean, Der Spiegel and the New York Times and other mainstream articles have all published it first.
And have had far wider reach.
I mean, Assange is a complete genius when it comes to marketing, because he knows that if he just dumped 100,000 files somewhere out there on the internet, nobody would give a rat's ass, frankly, because it would take forever to comb through it.
But he sat down, he worked with all of these mainstream media organizations to release all this information, gave them exclusives.
Released all of this information through them.
Now, is the government calling for the assassination of the head of the New York Times?
Of course not! Because they need the New York Times to keep the docile masses lolling around, not seeing the thunder cloud of impending fiat currency disasters coming down.
So they're going after this guy.
You're seeing this The glove coming off the fist, the sword coming out of the scabbard, the velvet cover falling away from the gun, and you're seeing these hysterical, crazy sociopaths calling for the slaughter, the hit, It's like a scene out of a mafia movie.
And so I think it's pretty unsettling to people to see, oh my goodness, if we do one tenth of one tenth of one percent to the ruling classes that they've done to us, they call for murder.
I mean, it's completely insane, it's completely hysterical, and it's utterly revealing.
It's finally becoming light enough in the room that even people without the infrared goggles of philosophy and libertarianism and anarchism are actually seeing what is going on in the corridors of power.
So I take my hat off to him for that.
I mean, the man has balls of titanium.
I mean, he really is quite an astounding character.
And I mean, he has his own issues.
I mean, he was raised in a cult and he spent most of his teenage years on the run from one of his mother's slaughterous or murderous ex-boyfriends.
So he's got his own issues for sure.
And I'm not saying that he's a clear-eyed moral hero.
He has his flaws. He bangs around with the groupies, I would say, a little bit too much.
Dips his wick in a little bit of post-feminist acid.
But, you know, who among us is perfect?
I'm certainly not one to cast a stone in that direction.
So I think it's a beautiful and revealing thing.
And what's happening now, of course, is that the Bank of America is in this guy's sights, right?
And so what's happening is the Bank of America data, that he's got five gigs of emails and stuff, all considered to be Unbreachable and internal by the Bank of America.
And what's happening is, if the Bank of America knew that their foreclosures were illegal, because nobody owns these houses anymore, the deeds have been blown up and scattered to all the four winds, If the Bank of America foreclosed illegally, there's going to be lawsuits that will simply take them down.
There's no money left for bailouts.
He's doing an astounding job of exposing the corruptions in the US economic system and legal system, and I can't even call it a legal system, system of armed predation.
He's a beautiful, flawed, tragic, glorious hero.
I think he's just amazing.
Yeah, and he, uh, well, you touched very briefly on the thing that, um, I think you came up with it.
That is the concept of the gun in the room.
I think many of our listeners surely have heard of it.
For those who haven't, can you encapsulate really quickly, since I'm probably the one who originated that, right?
Yeah, yeah, okay, there's a guy in the room.
Any other questions? Okay, so the guy in the room is the reality.
I saw a presentation.
With Mike on the line, there's several of them, but go on.
There's only three within arms reached.
Beautiful. I thought you were just pleased to see me.
I saw a presentation recently.
I can't remember the guy's name, but it was a good presentation.
And one of the things he said, he said, you know, I had two friends who were older guys, and they were in the Second World War.
And one of the guys never talked about it, had nothing to do with his ex-military companions, never referenced anything about the war.
It was like it didn't even exist for him.
Whereas the other guy, You know, he had his war buddies.
They would get together every couple of months and they'd go drinking and they talked about it.
And he looked back on it fondly.
It's one of the best and most exciting times of his life.
And this guy asked his friends and said, well, what's the difference?
And the guy who was like gung ho about his war years said, oh, well, the difference is that I was in the Air Force.
And this other guy was in the infantry, right?
So I was floating above the clouds, and I didn't see any gore.
I mean, I saw bombs disappearing into the clouds.
I saw flashes. They were kind of pretty, but I didn't see anything.
He said the war, to me, was just like little puffs of smoke, you know, because the anti-aircraft fire would go up and try to shoot them down.
Whereas the other guy, the guy who never talked about it, who never went to any reunions, well he was in the infantry, right?
So he was going like field to field, house to house.
He was shooting people and stabbing people and, you know, war for him was like having someone's intestines blow up in your face.
I mean, it was just hideous, right?
And the problem is that everything that the government does is predicated On the initiation of force.
Every time anybody asks the government to do something, what they're doing is that somebody's going to take out a gun and make somebody else do it.
But the problem is we're so far removed from that gun that we're like the guy in the bomber.
We just see these little puffs of smoke and these flashes, but we don't actually see the carnage and violence that is occurring.
And the purpose of, I think, a lot of what we need to do as a movement is to tell people and remind people and nag people and bug the hell out of people to remind them.
That every time the government does something, passes a law, bans something, puts a restriction on something, subsidizes something, it's a gun in the room.
There's a gun in the room and it doesn't matter how many pretty words and constitutions and anthems and flags you pile on top of that gun, at the bottom of how we organize society is a hierarchical, aggressive, violent gun.
Being pointed at someone who forced them to do something they don't want to do.
Because if they wanted to do it, you wouldn't need a gun to force them.
And that's why I keep reminding people that there's a gun in the room, that that's what the government is.
Government is force. It is not eloquence.
No matter how well-spoken Barack Obama is, a government is violence.
And violence will never solve complex social problems.
It will only and forever make them worse, which is what we see happening all around us.
But because people can't see the gun, They can't identify the prompt?
I think you're absolutely right about that.
It's interesting what happens if you continue to remind the same people over and over about the group in the room in the discussion.
If you happen to have access to those same people, The first time you bring it up, they just kind of brush it off.
The second time you bring it up, they treat you as if you're a fanatic for bringing up the same thing a second, third, and fourth time.
After you've brought it up a few times, they start to try to develop arguments against it But then, after they've worked on trying to develop arguments against the gun in the room because they know you're going to bring it up, then, as they're trying to develop the arguments, they find themselves seeing the gun in the room somewhere along the way on an issue where they otherwise wouldn't have.
I've encountered this a few times.
Oh, absolutely.
How do you feel when you get A letter from the Internal Revenue Service or from the Canada Revenue Service.
I mean, how do you feel? Do you feel like, hey, great, you know, this is some part of the social contract that I'm sure is going to be really, really enjoyable.
No, you're like, oh, your blood drains into your feet and your hands are shaking.
It's like, oh, no, what's happened?
What have I not done or what have I forgotten or something?
What terrible news is this?
I mean, that's the relationship that we have because everybody knows.
That if you just get sent a bill for something that you weren't aware of or didn't know for $5,000, if you don't pay for it, if you don't pay it, they will come and take your stuff away.
And if you try and defend yourself like you would with anyone who comes to try and steal your stuff, I mean, they'll shoot you down.
They will shoot you down.
And that is the reality of taxation and regulation, that we are giving a small group of people all the guns in the planet, all the aircraft carriers, the nuclear weapons, the jails, the waterboarding equipment.
We're giving this lunatic minority All the weapons in the world and saying, great, I'm sure that's going to solve the problem.
And it's insane because we would never think of doing that in any other sphere whatsoever.
Like we'd never say, you know, like imagine if we lived in a free society, like it was, there would still be occasional private violence, but not just institutionalized nonsense.
Some free society and we said, oh, you know, I think education should be better.
So let's get the neighborhood watch, you know?
And what we're going to do is we're going to give the guy who loves guns the most all of the guns.
Everybody give him all of the guns and then he can just take whatever money he wants from us and then he can deal with the problem of education.
I mean, can you imagine that that would be the case?
Can you imagine saying, if you were an executive at some company, right, saying, well, our product isn't moving fast enough.
So what we really need to do is we need to develop a budget and we need to really arm a bunch of people so that they can go door to door and threaten the hell out of anyone who doesn't buy our product.
I mean, this isn't...
Oh, you know, so-and-so's having problems getting married, so let's kidnap someone for him.
I mean, you would never imagine that!
Except in the realm of the government, it seems all perfectly rational because that's what we're conditioned to.
Wait, you mean you guys will actually kidnap somebody on my behalf?
Like, despite the fact that I'm mildly pudgy, you can still kidnap somebody for me?
Well, my concern is that I don't think kidnapping would be enough because I feel that they would chew through just about any restraint after we showed you to her.
I assume it's a her.
It could be a her or a him or some magical cosmic blend of the two.
But I feel that it would be a fairly ferocious escape.
It would be one of those Roger Rabbit holes in the walls escape.
So I think that we may need more than that.
I'm thinking a self-programmable robot dog with goop.
That's my theory, but I'm certainly open to other suggestions.
I mean, that sounds pretty fine.
Actually, I do really like your comparison there and your example of a free society and then somebody just deciding to force everything on everybody else.
I know you're familiar, at least according to the originator of the School Sucks podcast, which is one of the very few podcasts, aside from your own, that I actually listen to.
Oh, Brett's great, yeah. That guy really works at his show.
I'm basically just coating some hapless recorder with a bunch of anarchist spittle.
But he really sits down and he really works at his show.
The content is fantastic, but the production values are also way out of the ballpark for anything I do.
Fantastic for him. I just wanted to give that shout out to him.
Yeah, oh, he's absolutely fantastic.
And the example you gave is very reminiscent of his opening podcast.
The first one he ever did was exactly that.
It was a discussion on education and somebody with a new business plan of pointing guns at people and making them support his business scheme.
And as I've said previously, I hate talk radio and I hate podcasts, but That was so fantastic that it's actually brought me to being a regular listener on his show.
SchoolSucksProject.org, I believe.
For anybody who's If you're not familiar with it, I strongly encourage you to listen to it.
And I apologize. It's schoolsucksproject.com.
And donate to him so that hopefully he can give up his regular gig and do it full-time.
So I just want to make that suggestion too.
Yes, absolutely. And also, of course, Free Domain Radio so that Stefan can have A nice house and home for his child who's...
Food. We like food.
Food to win.
Food to win, absolutely.
Rick, what else have we got here, man?
We're, shockingly enough, only through a half hour here.
Yeah, well, another...
The thing that I'd like to get your views on is the drug war, and as an extension of your thoughts on the drug war, what do you think about these recent developments in Portugal where they've all legalized the Virtually every drug,
at least in amounts that they don't consider to be trafficking, personal possession of drugs is entirely legal in Portugal.
And quietly enough, it's been that way for 10 years now.
They're marking the 10th anniversary of this.
And the world hasn't come down around their ears.
So what are your thoughts? Well, you know, the first thing that I truly hate is the language.
There is no war on drugs, right?
Like, they don't line a whole bunch of pot plants up and shoot them.
They don't incarcerate a whole bunch of dime bags.
They don't take a whole bunch of cocaine and throw it in prison.
It is not a war on drugs.
It is always a war on people.
It is never a war on drugs.
There's no such thing as the war on poverty.
There's only a war on people.
There's no such thing as a war on illiteracy.
There's no such thing as a war on inequality.
There's no such thing as a war on anything except people.
And that substitution Of drugs for people, I think is the first thing, and I'm not saying obviously that you support or endorsing this or whatever, but that's the first thing to notice is to really fight the language of the oppressors.
And I know I sound like, you know, Che Guevara with a fruity accent, but I think it is really important to deny the language of the oppressors, right?
It's not a war on drugs.
It's a war on people. And I genuinely believe that if you wouldn't be willing to put a gun to someone's head, Yourself?
Then you should damn well not be saying that it should happen for other people, right?
So, I mean, I can't imagine that this will ever happen in my life.
I mean, I've never been in even a fist fight or anything like that.
Maybe when I was a kid, you know, those little hand windmill gestures that you do with each other, but I've never been in any sort of violent, as an adult, any sort of violent situation.
But if, you know, if Lord heaven forfend and forbid, like something happened where I had to pull the trigger in order to save my family or something like that, well, I would hate to do it, but I would do it because I believe in the ethic of self-defense.
I would hopefully shoot to wound and not to kill and blah, blah, blah.
But yeah, if I had to, I would do it.
And so, people who say, well, yeah, I think that people should be thrown in jail.
Well, it's like, well, you know, because people say thrown in jail, you know, like you're tossing a ball or something.
It's like, no, these are people, you're pulling guns out and you're kidnapping and you're imprisoning them.
You're kidnapping them. You're saying that guys in blue costume should kidnap people with a gun to their head and shoot them if they resist being kidnapped because they have a piece of vegetable in their pocket That you don't like.
It's like, well, would you be willing to do that?
If you're willing to do that, then why don't you go and threaten people who are smoking weed?
Why don't you go to some fish concert or some, I don't know, Bob Marley reunion concert or some Dark Side of the Moon laser quest show and, you know, find somebody who smells a tad sweet and who has a whole bunch of Doritos on him and put a gun to his head and take him to your basement.
Because people would say, well, that would be insane.
Well, it doesn't matter whether you have a blue costume on or not.
It's morally insane either way.
So it is completely hellacious and horrendous.
And in America, to me, it's just driven by religion.
It's driven by the religious right.
You know, that old definition of puritanism, the terrible nagging fear that somebody somewhere is actually having a good time.
That's, I think, where a lot of America comes from in terms of religion.
And look, I mean, I've never taken drugs.
I don't think that they're that great.
But, you know, hey, if people want to do it, that's their business.
I would try and talk someone out of doing it, but, you know, it's their body, it's their brain, it's their life.
And so it makes sense that it occurs in Europe, which has become less religious over the years, considerably less religious over the years.
And it's shocking and tragic, of course, but inevitable, that we haven't heard more about this Portuguese example.
I did an actual podcast series where I read most of the legislation, and you're right, it's quite astounding.
Now, they still consider it trafficking, which is completely bizarre.
I mean, you can have it, but you can't get it delivered.
I mean, how do they think that people are going to grow it in their armpits?
I mean, how do people think that people are going to get it?
But it's certainly a step forward, and none of the disasters have occurred.
Everybody said, well, this is going to turn Portugal into a drug tourism zone, that everyone's going to come and get drugs in Portugal and so on, and none of that happened.
And usage rates have declined, and crime has declined, and everything that The Wire predicted in its fourth season, I think, has turned out to be completely true.
And, of course, the politicians, for the most part, are fairly helpless in the U.S. to stop it.
Not because there's any particular popular sentiment against it, but because you've got all of these lunatics who their souls have been entirely corrupted, corrupted and destroyed by holding guns to the necks of innocent fellow citizens for years or decades.
I mean, what are you going to do with these lunatics, with these killbots?
I mean, you're going to turn them loose to go and work at Wendy's?
I mean, that's insane, right?
They're trapped. It's like what Jefferson said about slavery.
We've got this wolf by the ears, and we can't kill him, and we can't let him go, and what are we going to do?
And the corruption that has occurred in the US military, in the CIA, in the police force, in the organized crime, Sorry, I use the word organized crime like it's separate from everything I just mentioned.
But the amount of corruption and money that is flowing back and forth.
Can you imagine? I mean, your average cop on the take, how eager is he to see drugs legalized?
Well, of course he's not, because it's a huge source of his illicit income.
So, yeah, and I mean, the budget of the DEA, I mean, if drugs were going to be legalized in the US, I mean, all of these entities would take extraordinary steps to keep it illegal, because that's where all their profits and corruption and money lie.
So it is a huge problem and you know the only thing that's countervailing the illegality of drugs is the fact that governments are always completely out of revenue so they're going to start trying to legalize and they're going to start trying to tax it but they're going to do a terrible job of it of course and they're going to keep the price so high that there'll still be a black market as you know so they can still keep their profits rolling in but It's a completely tragic situation and entirely unnecessary and so much human capital is being wasted and destroyed and butchered with this,
you know, sick and twisted, I mean, it's a minor form of genocide against people who like the urban.
I think it's just absolutely horrible.
Sorry, but you said co-host.
You did mean that I was going to talk for the entire show.
That's what you meant, right?
You guys, you can take a pee break.
You can even spiff if you like.
Anyway, go on. Stephan, we have a caller on the line.
If you don't mind, I'd like to bring him on and see what kind of question.
They probably have a question for you.
Are you up for taking a call?
Yeah, sure. What's your name and where are you calling from?
My name is Tony. I'm calling from Ohio.
I'm actually relatively near Utopia, Ohio.
I'm sure you guys are aware of what that is or where that is and why it's significant.
I was calling in actually to say thanks for the show and to thank Stefan for some of his videos that I've watched over time and seen on the internet and have given me some things to think about.
And I wanted to maybe ask a question, give a comment, whatever, real quickly, if that's okay.
Sure. And thank you very much for your kind words.
I appreciate that. And thank you very much for your kind words.
I appreciate that. Basically, I had written this blog and I It's in response to people talking about anarchy in a negative sense.
They asked the question, does nullification lead to anarchy?
And they used anarchy in such a negative way that I wrote a response to it.
I left it in the comic book box.
If you ever wanted to read it and you're ever bored, please do so.
I responded by saying it does, but it's because anarchy is not a negative thing.
And the one sentence that I wanted to convey to you and then ask the question is, I wrote, as long as it is voluntary and does no harm, To those not voluntarily associating, I don't care what sadistic or detrimental activity you want to partake in, and that goes double for government.
And that being said, I liked what you said when I was on hold, and you said that you're not anti-state, you're anti-violence, which is, I think, what my question pertains to.
My question is, is there any such thing as uniformity without coercion?
Yeah, I think there is.
And I think we see it all the time.
You know, one of the most powerful tools in society for making people sort of, quote, do the right thing is ostracism.
Now, ostracism sounds, you know, like it's like a bad word.
Because it sounds like you're shunning people in some medieval village to go and live on a mountain somewhere and starve to death slowly.
But ostracism is something that we practice all the time, right?
So, I mean, women practice ostracism when they don't want to go out with a guy.
They say no, right? When I was an employer, I would get 100 resumes sometimes for every job I was hiring, and I would say no to 99 of those people.
In a sense, ostracizing them from my place of employment.
Ostracism or the ability or the right to say no is very powerful in terms of social management, let's say.
And look, let's face it, there are some nutty people in the world and that's always going to be the case.
And society needs a way to encourage good behavior and discourage bad or destructive behavior.
And ostracism is incredibly powerful and it's become All the more powerful, the more technological that society has become.
So ostracism was a little bit tougher when you were sort of in ancient times where if you didn't like some people, you could just go, I don't know, go live and grow your own food or whatever.
But now when you live in a city, you're entirely dependent upon your survival to other people.
So if everybody just I don't know, woke up this morning and said, oh my god, we have this crazy cult leader living in our midst, then what would happen?
Well, The grocery stores wouldn't want to sell me food.
Well, if the grocery stores don't want to sell me food, what am I going to do?
I'm not going to start growing my own food because you can't grow chocolate bars on trees.
So what is it that I'm going to do?
Well, I'm going to have to find either some new place or I'm going to have to, you know, find some way to make amends to society so that people will start to Want to interact with me again.
Or maybe the electricity company says, you know what, we're going to invoke the, you're a jerk face clause in our contract and we're going to pull your electricity supply.
I mean, I'm making silly examples, right?
But you understand that if people in society are doing things that are detrimental to the people around them, Then, society has a huge, huge power, which is called not associating with that person, particularly economically.
If people didn't want to participate with me economically, I could not live in the society that I live in.
I mean, I don't know why I would go live in the woods or something.
That is a huge power that society has that should never be underestimated.
I think that it's more powerful than jail.
I think it's more powerful than violence.
And unfortunately, though, we don't have much to do with it because everything's being, quote, done by the government or handled by the government.
But it's a very powerful thing.
And I think that's something which we all have been part of.
We've all been rejected in life.
We all know how difficult that can be.
And if enough people reject us, it becomes very difficult to live in society.
So I would suggest that ostracism is a very powerful weapon, particularly given the interdependence of our economic society or our technologically advanced society.
And I would look at that as the primary tool of enforcing, I shouldn't say, of encouraging good behavior and discouraging destructive behavior in the world.
Thank you for your answer. I just wanted to add to that.
I think when I asked the question, perhaps I asked it kind of too generally.
What I was kind of getting at wasn't so much how do we make people behave in a society.
I mean, I agree with everything you said.
But what I was really getting at was the word uniformity.
Like people I see around the world, especially people that don't call themselves anarchists.
There are very few people that call themselves anarchists that are violent.
There are people all over the world that are violent, and they do it for the sake of uniformity.
Like, they want to be a purely capitalist or purely socialist or purely communist or purely this religion or that religion.
It's all in the name of uniformity of some type or another.
Everybody has to do what they want them to do.
So I guess what I was asking was, you know, if we have a world without coercion, aren't we being tolerant and just saying we're okay with not having uniformity?
Well, I think it's important to be precise.
I wouldn't say that it's ever possible to achieve a world without coercion.
Look, there's extremely powerful scientific evidence that's fairly conclusive that says that the tendency towards violence arises from child abuse.
So let's say we have a society where every child is raised peacefully and with love and they don't develop the brain issues that lead them to have impulse controls and excessive fight-or-flight mechanisms that lead them towards violence.
Someone's going to get hit by lightning, it's going to scramble his personality, and he's going to go on a rampage.
Somebody's going to get bumped in the head, somebody's going to...
I mean, who knows?
But there is still going to be violence in the world.
Because I get asked this question all the time when I'm sort of taking questions in public speaking engagements.
People say, well, what do you do with the paranoid, crazy sociopaths in society?
Well, my answer is, hey, let's start off by not giving them an army.
And control over the government.
That would be my first step.
Let's at least not give them all the fiat currency in the world to play their mad world games with.
So there is always going to be violence in the world, but the question is, Are we going to organize society according to some sort of moral standard, or are we going to organize society based on some crazy stuff that our distant ancestors inherited from Stone Age tribes five to ten thousand years ago?
And, of course, everybody recognizes that just about everything which people believed five to ten thousand years ago It has been proven completely false.
Completely and totally false.
Hey, guess what?
Tutankhamun was not a god.
He was just a little Egyptian boy whose penis went missing 5,000 years later.
So everything which people believed 5,000 or 10,000 years ago has been proven completely false, yet we still cling to this idea That a central coercive monopoly over the use of violence, which was an idea completely accepted five to ten thousand years ago, that that is still how we should organize society.
And that's, you know, hey, if people want to believe that, they can believe that.
But don't pretend that it's got anything to do with morality.
It's just some inherited crap that we got from ancient, ancient history.
And I always believe that if people believe that stuff, then they should take every other solution from five to ten thousand years ago.
And if they've got an infection, they shouldn't go get any antibiotics.
That's way too newfangled.
That's like anarchy, man.
You know, go get yourself a bucket of leeches.
That's the way that you need to solve those problems.
If you're a socialist, if you're a statist, you can't want painkillers.
Take some peyote if you've got a toothache.
You can't want an epidural if you're giving birth.
That wasn't around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
And you like the old solutions, not the new solutions.
And so that's my suggestion to people.
What else are you using from 5,000 to 10,000 years ago And nobody uses anything from that time, except the state.
And it's hard for people to change their minds about that, but if we're going to accept that the non-aggression principle, the non-initiation of force, is a moral good and the initiation of force of violence is a moral evil, Then there's zero room for a state in that equation.
Zero room. I mean, it's not a little bit, it's not a tiny bit, it's not an agnostic bit, it's not a smidgen, or even a tittle.
It is zero.
There is no room for a state in the equation called the initiation of force is wrong.
Now, if people say, well, I want to stay, it's fine.
Okay. Then you cannot say that the initiation of force is wrong because you've built your entire society around giving a small group of power-hungry people the monopoly to initiate force at will.
And then you can't claim that there's anything moral about it.
You're just putting a fresh coat of paint on the oldest skull mask in history, which is the violence of the state.
Would it be fair to say that all institutions fall under that same category, that we should look at all institutions if they're not voluntarily associated with, then they don't have any more Well, what institutions do you mean?
Well, any institution. A church, a megachurch in the case of modern day, or, you know, a corporation if it got out of hand, or any institution I feel is not an individual.
It doesn't, you know, operate as an individual.
It's got its own pretenses based around a collective, and for that reason it can't be trusted.
Well, look, I mean, you bring up the church, which is a very, very good thing to do because it's a very tough question.
The church doesn't have an army.
The church, I mean, at least not for some time.
Anyway, the church doesn't have an army.
The church doesn't have prisons in the here now, although they seem to be very keen on inventing prisons in the hereafter to threaten people with, at least a lot of churches do.
But the church is not the same as the state in terms of its initiation of force.
Now, that having been said, That having been said, there's a big, big but about religion, and that is that it is based upon telling lies to children who can't differentiate between truth and falsehood, and that is a very, very big problem.
And so, telling children that they have an imaginary disease called sin, that a guy who was born of his own father, who Walked on water, you know, who turned water into wine and made loaves and fishes out of, I don't know, popcorn and cow dung.
It's been a while since I read the Bible, but, you know, if you're going to say all of this nonsense to children as if it's true and then charge them to cure them from an imaginary illness called sin for the rest of their natural lives, that seems to me exactly the same as fraud.
I mean, I can't see how that's different from fraud.
I mean, you can't, as an adult, I can't sort of, as an adult, Create an imaginary illness, convince people that they have it, and then charge them to cure something which never existed in the first place.
That would be illegal, and I think it would be illegal or incredibly socially disapproved of under any rational system of social organization.
So, you know, I'm going to correct myself because I said nobody uses anything from 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Well, that's not true because people use two things from 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
They use gods and they use governments.
These are the two things that people use.
So it's good that you expanded it to the second one.
Because the reality is...
To treat them both as the same thing, Yeah, well, they're definitely two sides to the same coin, which is an irrational hierarchy.
One of them says, well, I speak for society as a whole.
I speak for the collective, I speak for the masses, and therefore what I say goes.
That's the state side.
The religious side is, I speak for God.
I speak for an invisible sky ghost that only I can hear.
Now, unfortunately, you can't hear him, but let me tell you, he's telling you to give me a bucket load and a half of cold, hard cash.
I mean, that's crazy, right?
And so I think religion is fraudulent and religion is incredibly destructive and we know that for a fact because if anyone tried to run a home for children or for adults of below average intelligence,
right, so adults who needed to be in a home because they were subpar in terms of intelligence, if anyone tried to run a home, even under the current laws, by telling These retarded adults, that the sky was full, the air was full of invisible ghosts that would suck out their eyeballs if they disobeyed the leader.
That man would be brought up on charges of abuse the next day, if not the same day.
And so, children are cognitively limited.
They're dependent upon the grace and goodness and honesty and integrity of their parents.
My daughter is two. She has no idea how the world works.
She's entirely dependent, I mean, other than the immediate physics of her environment.
She's tired to tell her the world is banana-shaped and is the nipple of an ancient Marmaduke deity and she would have to end up believing me because that's the way the brain works, right?
And so there's a huge amount of fraud that goes on with children.
Some of it results in nationalism and some of it results in religion, but I think you're right.
The church is not quite the same as the state in terms of the initiation of force, but it kind of doesn't need to be because it initiates so much fraud against children that it gets the same kind of payout anyway.
I want to, since we're closing in on the end of our time with you here, before we continue on with the show without you and complain about having had you on...
Absolutely. That would be my plan.
I'd like to... Did he even take one breath during that whole show?
What is he, like some jazz trumpet player who can breathe in through his nose and breathe out through his endlessly flapping gums?
It's astounding! Well, I'd like to finish up the hour with you with our own little Rorschach test that I've come up with here, and it is an article that I've Found over on BuzzFeed.com.
It's the 50 funniest headlines of 2010.
And I'd like just a really brief response.
We'll just go through the first, say, ten, maybe five.
The first thing that pops into your mind when I read these headlines.
The first headline reads, Woman charged with stealing underwear, comma, cheese.
Stealing underwear, cheese.
Well, I can only hope that she didn't store the cheese in the underwear that she was wearing out that she stole, or if she did, that there was something between the cheese and the parts that have no name, because that would be a serious aging of some very fermented cheese, and then I would strictly want that person to never ever be able to return that cheese.
That would be my first thought about that.
Keep the cheese! We'll take the underwear.
No, you know what? The cheese has been in contact with the underwear.
where we'll just burn the whole lot.
Second headline.
Seven inches is enough, Rim tells Jarvis.
7 inches is enough, Rim tells Jobs.
Well, I think that you have to probably be pretty insecure if you're going to be measuring penis size by your smartphone.
I certainly know that people have pretty intimate relationships with their smartphone, and sometimes I think, given the video capacities of smartphones, it seems to me quite likely that some men are gently shaking their chairs with a smartphone in one hand and something else in the other.
But I think that you wouldn't want to tie these things too closely together because of the possibility of radiation burns.
Third headline, Mother is Paralyzed in Freak Pole Dance Accidents.
Now, what I want to know is, was there a freak who was pole dancing, or was it just a freak accident?
Do you know what I mean? Like, that's really important.
Was it like some midget in a nun costume riding a unicorn that was doing a pole dance, and that was the freaky pole dance that then fell on the woman who was watching it?
Because I would obviously pay to see that.
But if it was just some really bizarre accident, then what I can perhaps, what I perhaps can think of Is that the woman who stole the cheese was a pole dancer.
See? And she went out to do her...
Anyway, we can go with that for a while, but let's get on to the next headline.
The fourth headline, Minneapolis will pay $160,000 to zombies.
Minneapolis will pay $160,000 to zombies.
Is that right? Yes.
Well, what that means is that Minneapolis is hiring public school teachers.
For cheap? For cheap, absolutely.
And that's not even a metaphor, because both of them eat brains for a living.
Fifth headline.
Last year, great tits produced stronger sperm bird study shows.
Well, I guess I'm trying to figure out how they milk the sperm from the birds.
I mean, that is going to be a very small and delicate piece of tweeter work that is going on down there.
And I've got to sort of wonder, too.
Like, I mean, I know there's some stupid jobs that I'm sure that's funded by the government or whatever, right?
But at what point in your career as a scientist do you just get that vision of yourself and say, what the hell am I doing with my time?
Like, I'm down here jacking off a jackfinch.
Like, what is it that I'm down here on my knees with a little set of tweezers trying to get some sperm out of a bird?
Maybe I've just taken a bit of a wrong turn and I should go get a real job for a living.
That's just, I guess, what I would expect to happen for someone like that, but unfortunately it doesn't happen very often.
Well, my first thought of that one was that flashing great tits was just obvious that it would produce more sperm.
Yeah, absolutely. It's a hill to climb.
Okay, so we'll just stop at the five and I guess we'll call it a night with Stefan Molnue.
We certainly have enjoyed our threesome with you this evening.
Fantastic threesome.
You know, I must tell you that those are words that I truly believed that I would be hearing with great pleasure in my life, just not in quite such a set of baritones.
That really is the only thing that spoiled those words for me, is A, the distance, and B, the hairy legs.
Other than that, I really feel that I've just crossed something entirely unexpected off my bucket list.
I don't know about Rick, but I'm willing to shave my legs.
I mean, you can shave your legs, right?
I mean, it's no big deal. It grows back.
You know, I'd have to really ask for waxing.
Shaving wouldn't be enough, because that stubble can just be murder.
I think we just have to go on full-on Brazilian napalm.
I think that's the way we'd have to go.
Ooh, you are asking quite a bit now, sir.
I really am. But hey, you know, I've been told it's worth it.
I'm just passing that along.
As we send you on with a parting gift of a jar of our special peanut butter, as we mentioned earlier, you can just grab one on the way out of the Sovereign Studios in the undisclosed location in southeastern Virginia.
And we do appreciate having had you on for the last hour, and it's going to make for great listening for the listeners who Download the podcast later on.
I know the live listeners have certainly enjoyed it.
And we have, too.
And once again, I want to thank you for having been on.
Ladies and gentlemen, this was Stephan Molmue.
Once again, he is the host of Free Domain Radio.
It can be found at freedomainradio.com.
You can find that at the top of the website.
I'll link there to...
Thanks for being on, Stefan.
Thanks for being back, guys. Have yourselves a great night.
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