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March 26, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:50
1876 Anarchy Q and A - The Freedomain Radio presentation at the Agora I/O Conference

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio takes audience questions at the Agora Conference.

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Hello, hello. Sorry about the late start.
Just when you need your computer to act beautifully, it crashes!
But we're all alive now.
Thank you everybody so much for joining us and thank you so much to George for the Agora.io opportunity for you to see me with good old Coke bottle glasses.
So I hope everybody's having a great weekend and I hope everybody's really enjoying the conference.
I'm just waiting to make sure the chat room is up and running.
And that I can actually get some questions.
The idea behind this is we all have this significant challenge of trying to communicate freedom, peace, reason, and hopefully some good old ethical philosophy to the wide world as a whole.
And it is a hugely challenging task.
It does sometimes feel like you're lifting an elephant with a Toothpick!
So I wanted to share some insights that I've had about communicating this kind of stuff to people and hopefully get some questions from people about challenges that you may be facing in the realm of communicating with others.
So while I get started logging in, I just wanted to Put out a few thoughts that I've had over, oh lord, almost three decades of trying to talk about this kind of stuff.
And hopefully it will be of some use to you.
The first thing that I wanted to talk about was to remind people that In general, and as a whole, there are two kinds of people who are interested in philosophical debates or debates about peace and reason and freedom and all those kinds of good things.
The first kind of person is the kind of person who, when exposed to a new idea, you know, chews it over slowly and understands and wants to, or tries to understand, strives to understand.
And that kind of person is the person you really want to sink your mental teeth into in a very sort of positive way.
These kinds of people are curious and open-minded and Don't take the easy road of being offended or morally critical or condemnatory or any of those kinds of things when it comes to talking to you about freedom and peace and reason and all those kinds of good things.
I'll just say philosophy because that's the way that it works for me.
And so that is something that I highly, highly recommend, getting involved with people like that, getting engaged with people like that, because that also becomes a two-way street.
And the two-way street that's great about that is that hopefully you can learn something about...
The way that other people think.
Ideally, philosophy should be the exchange of ideas between two people.
And those ideas should be mutual, right?
So you should learn and you should teach.
It shouldn't just be a sort of master-student relationship, at least in my opinion.
And that is something that I would strongly recommend getting involved with, for sure.
Those kinds of people you really want to keep close to you because that can really be a wonderful lifelong relationship where you can teach and learn and do all those kinds of good things.
I think when you get involved with people like that, it's pretty self-evident and it works out really well.
But the other kind of people are not such a joy and a pleasure to get involved with.
The other kinds of people are those Who seem to take, dare I say, sadistic, a dark delight, let's say.
They take a dark delight in throwing roadblocks in the way of any kind of rational argument.
And these are the people, you know, you start to talk from first principles about the non-aggression principle and the respect for property rights, which I think we're all, you know, pretty much down with.
And those people will sort of almost immediately We end up with a, you know, what about the roads and what about the poor and what about the sick and what about the old and they go immediately away from the argument from principle.
And they go straight towards the argument from effect.
Yeah, so the second kind of people are the people, the moment they hear a new idea, it creates a great deal of emotional tension for them, especially if it's a moral idea.
Nothing gets people more cranked more quickly than ethics, virtue, morality, goodness, and peace and reason and philosophy.
And so when you meet people like that, what happens is all too tragically and all too often is that they end up...
It's kind of an emotional self-management thing.
They deal with their anxiety by throwing roadblocks in your way.
And this is not a positive situation.
It's not a situation...
Like, I can't think of somebody...
I mean, there may be somebody, but I can't think of somebody at the moment who I've had conversations with who's had significant and repetitive objections to the idea of a free society, who has then gone on to accept first principles, right?
So, people are either working in the realm of principles, Non-aggression, respect for property rights, or they're working in the realm of pragmatism or utilitarianism, i.e.
the greatest good for the greatest number.
And that second one doesn't work.
It doesn't ever lead somebody to be a principled and committed person.
Anarchist or even libertarian, because they can always interrupt first principles with an argument from effect.
So they can always say, well, you know, the old thing where, so property rights are absolute, so a starving guy shouldn't steal a banana, he should just die, right?
Those kinds of people, they just come up with these exceptions to a rule, thus imagining that there are no rules as a result.
And that is pretty tragic.
And that is a pretty...
A bad thing to get involved with.
Those kinds of people never ever, in my experience, maybe people have got some way of doing it.
People who have understood the principles, why we argue from first principles.
They may have some questions and some objections around, well, how could this work or how could that work?
But they tend to not be endless objections.
And they tend to get the principles of solving these kinds of problems using a peaceful and free society, using that paradigm.
They tend to get those principles relatively quickly.
And that is usually a very good, good thing.
And those are the kinds of people you really want to get involved in.
Alright, well let's keep going then while I look for the chatroom.
So, ways in which you can tell the difference between the curious and the yes-buts, right?
The yes-but personality. Well, yes, but what about the roads?
Well, yes, but what about the poor?
Well, yes, but what about national defense?
Well, yes, but what about the sick and so on?
Those kinds of people How do we find them?
And how do we differentiate when we get into a debate with people?
How do we differentiate between the curious and the yes-but people?
Well, those are tricky, tricky questions.
And these are some topics that I'll see there's some ways of approaching it that I have that I've been able to find that I think will be will be helpful.
The first thing is to look for people who are I'm not prone to offense, right?
Because offense is the cheapest way of rebutting an argument.
It's not really rebutting an argument, right?
It's sort of an, I can't remember the technical term, but it's like an ad hominem against the argument itself.
Well, only a bad person would believe this argument, or only somebody who didn't care about the poor would want to get rid of the welfare state, and therefore, since you don't care about the poor, your argument is invalid.
That, of course, is a logical fallacy that has probably a couple of different names.
But that is something that you don't want to get involved in.
So the moment that the attack becomes sort of personal, or the moment that a negative moral weight is sort of hung on your shoulders, that is usually a sign that you're not going to end up with a very open-minded person.
I mean, it's cowardly, it's judgmental, it's negative, and it doesn't tend to lead.
It becomes a win-lose situation then.
The moment somebody raises the moral stakes of a debate, it becomes a win-lose situation.
You really can't get any wisdom and any positive interchange of advice and of ideas.
You can't get any of that in a win-lose situation.
So the moment somebody is in a debate with you and frames it as a win-lose, I care about the poor.
You don't care about the poor.
I care that we have roads.
You want everyone to drag themselves around by their teeth or something like that.
Then it becomes a win-lose and the stakes get very high.
And the moment something becomes a win-lose, what happens is people really dig in.
You always want to try and aim for, as much as possible, a win-win situation.
There are some exceptions to this when you are in a sort of formal debate with somebody who's strongly committed to an opposite opinion.
Then you absolutely can, I think, go a little bit more for the jugular because then your relationship is really with the audience, like winning over the audience rather than winning over the person you're debating with.
So I think that's a bit of a different situation.
But in the situation where you're sort of just on a one-on-one and hopefully having some kind of more positive interaction, then you can, I think, much more safely go with trying to find win-win.
And if you can't find win-win, It's usually not a great idea to continue.
Because you don't want to lose your own pleasure and joy and sort of motivation for this kind of stuff.
And that's, I think, a really, really important thing to try and recall.
So trying to find people who don't have that kind of win-lose mentality, I think is really important.
I think it's really essential to try and avoid that kind of stuff.
So that's the first standard that I would have.
The second is, I mean, there's nothing wrong with practical objections to whatever it is that you're arguing from.
So you say, well, you know, the government shouldn't be in the welfare business because the initiation of force is wrong and doesn't lead to good things in the long run.
And somebody says, well, what about the poor?
They're not immediately being confrontational.
What they're doing is they're going with the typical assumption that when you have a solution in place, Called the welfare state.
That it is actually designed to help the poor.
And therefore, since the poor need to be helped, you need something to replace it.
And I think that's valid. I think that's fair.
But if you provide an answer that seems reasonable, or is reasonable, you know, something along the lines of, A, I don't agree that it does help the poor.
I think it creates the dependent underclass.
And what is going to happen to this dependent underclass?
When the government runs out of money, what is going to happen to these people?
And that is a pretty important question to ask, right?
So you can always sort of put it back on the person and say, what happens to these people when the government runs out of money?
I think that's well worth asking.
And the second is...
To sort of make the argument something like, well, do you believe in a democracy that politics or political programs to some degree reflect the will of the majority?
So it's a good question to ask somebody.
Say, okay, so you think that the welfare state helps the poor.
Do you believe that the welfare state reflects, at least to some degree, reflects the will of the people?
Now, if the person says no, the welfare state does not reflect the will of the people, Then you have a whole other opportunity to talk about alternatives to the state, to democracy, which I think is worthwhile.
But just about everyone will say...
That it does reflect the will of the people, at least to some degree.
If it does reflect the will of the people, then we know that at least 51% of people really, really want to help the poor.
That's the demographic stem of democracy.
If a particular government program reflects the will of the people, then at least 51% of the people in society want to help the poor.
And you can of course say that most of the people who want to help the poor have some capacity to help the poor.
And so since there are some people who can't help the poor, they're poor, they're sick, right?
So it's probably 60 or 65 percent or even more of people really, really want to help the poor.
And so we know that in a free society that at least 60 to 65 percent of people are going to want to substantially invest in helping the poor because it's already reflected in the welfare state.
The mistake they're making, of course, is thinking that the government is doing that in any achievable and sustainable way.
So that would be the second This does take a little bit of research, but it's well worth looking into the friendly societies.
That occurred in the past, right?
So where poor people would sort of get together and create these societies where they would pool their resources and they would get preferential insurance rates and preferential medical care rates and all these kinds of good things.
They would do all of that.
And these societies reduced or largely eliminated risk for the vast majority of the poor, like 95, 96, 97% of people would get, say, healthcare in this way at vastly reduced rates, at rates that were affordable, hugely affordable relative to what's going on today.
And I actually have been meaning to interview a guy that I met recently who's more of an expert on this because I think it's well worth understanding.
That the impulse to help the poor merely takes its current political manifestation in the welfare state.
Even if we assume that in general people want to help the poor and this is how they believe it can be achieved, which I think is fine.
But there's an impulse to help the poor that generates the welfare state.
And if the welfare state isn't there, then the impulse to help the poor will simply be generated.
In another way, right?
So it's like if there's a guy at a buffet, right, and he's really, really hungry, and you say, we're taking the steak away, right?
He's not just going to stand at the buffet, look down at the hole where the steak was, and faint.
He's going to go, oh, pork chops to the left, and there's tofu to the right.
I'm a vegetarian, so I would go for the tofu, but that's, you know, if...
If a particular avenue is not available for the guy to eat, he's not going to starve to death.
He is going to take another avenue.
And if the impulse to help the poor is there in society and is reflected in the welfare state, if the welfare state goes away, that impulse to help the poor will simply take another, and I believe much more productive and sustainable, route forward.
So, that is...
Now, this took, what, like five or ten minutes to explain.
And I'm not saying that, you know, this immediately means that this person is then going to go, aha!
In a state, the society is the way to go.
But I think that it is reasonable to say that it's a good enough of an answer that people will have...
They'd have a good reason.
To be curious about where things are going to go from there.
To realize that there is some kind of answer that works.
And so that's another thing.
And if the people don't go down that road, like if they won't even go that far and they immediately start throwing objection after objection in, then...
Nice hipster specs.
Okay, good. Now, the idea behind this, of course, was to get your Q&As about this, and hopefully to get some...
Yeah, thanks for the specs.
I'm 44, I'm 45 this year, and as my optometrist says, almost nobody gets to their mid-40s without needing reading glasses of some kind.
So let's go straight to the questions.
Okay, so Steph, what if someone doesn't agree with your version of morality, i.e.
the only way they can see of solving the problems of society is by pointing a gun at someone?
Well, the first thing I would say is that I don't think it's my version of morality any more than, I don't know, evolution is Darwin's version of biology.
It either is valid or isn't in my sort of free book on my website at freedomainradio.com called Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proven Secular Ethics, I think makes a strong case to that.
But if people say, like if somebody's in a debate with you and they say, we should solve problems in society by pointing guns at people, there's two responses that I would have to that.
The first is duck.
The first is to say, well, why are you debating with me now rather than pointing a gun at me?
And if the person says, well, it's because I don't have a gun on me, then I would not debate with that person.
I think it's very important not to give a brutal advocate of violence the veneer of civility.
You don't debate with people who are willing to point guns at you.
Don't pretend that it's a debate, right?
So, the first thing I'd say was you and I are having a rational discussion, or at least one of us is rational, but we're having a debate.
And so if you think that might makes right, why are you having a debate rather than using force, right?
So the person is not living his values if he's engaged in the debate, but he believes that might makes right.
Now, that's sort of the first response that I would have.
The second response that I would have is that if we believe That violence is the preferable way to solve problems in this world, then that does not mean that a state is valid at all.
Because what that means is that since anything which is moral has to be universal, otherwise it's just a local preference, like cultural or like I like ice cream or something.
So it has to be universal if it's to be ethics.
And if might makes right is a universal value, then everybody should be able to exercise it.
And we should not have a legal monopoly on force that, say taxation, taxation is theft.
And so if taxation is moral, then everyone has the right to tax and everybody just cancels out each other's taxation.
You tax me 10,000, I tax you 11,000, right?
I mean, that doesn't really work at all.
So I think that might be my response to that and see where they go with that.
How does one handle the idea that moderation is moral as in You're just an extremist.
Well, an extremist is an interesting phrase, right?
So what I would say to that is, let's say you have cancer, and you go to your doctor, and your doctor says, well, you know, I can give you a pill that will cure your cancer 100%, but I don't want to be an extremist.
Do you want me to be a moderate and only cure your cancer 50%?
Or if you have an infection and the guy says, well, it's going to take 12 antibiotic pills to cure your infection.
But, you know, I don't want to give you 12.
That seems kind of extreme.
I'm going to give you 6 and we'll just cross our fingers.
How's that? And that is, you know, to be called an extremist is...
Not too valid. Like, if you're driving down the highway and you stay in your lane, are you an extreme lane stayer?
I mean, if you go into oncoming traffic, should you sort of half go into oncoming traffic to be moderate?
No, of course not. This comes from an old idea from Aristotle, the idea of the Aristotelian meme.
Which is that an excess of anger is called chronic irritability or rage.
And a deficiency of anger is called being a pushover.
And the right amount of anger is good.
Or if you have too much courage, you're foolhardy and you're like that pasty-faced younger brother who always goes over the line in a World War I movie and gets his ass chewed up by bullets.
That's foolhardy. If you have a deficiency of courage, then you're a coward.
You need the right amount of courage.
So this idea of this moderation...
But Aristotle never, ever, ever meant that we should have a moderate amount of axe murdering or raping or whatever, right?
That's not what he meant.
He just meant in the more positive virtues, it can be tough to find the middle way.
But he didn't mean that there was a middle way between good and evil.
So I would...
We all want extreme stuff, right?
I mean, let's say you just buy an iPad...
And there's only four pixels that are not working.
You say, well, I don't want them all to work because that would be pretty extreme pixel working.
You know, of course you want them all to work, right?
Of course. So extremism is just a word that is used for people who are uncomfortable with standards.
And everybody is an extremist about what they want and like in their own lives, in their own way.
So that I would just try and help the person point out that they really are pro extremist when it comes to a bunch of things Let's see here a close friend likes the idea of freedom But worries about the following if the government were to end the connections and infrastructure held By entities such as the military industrial complex would remain he believes that these entities would be powerful enough to prevent Competition and become tyrannical.
I have failed to convince him otherwise.
Please Please help. That's a tricky one.
Okay, look, I mean, it's important to understand what the transition between freedom, between statism and freedom is going to look like.
And of course, I can't do this very much justice in a few minutes, but I'll give you just a very brief overview of how I think it's going to work.
I mean, the government is going to sell off.
I mean, this is going to happen anyway.
The government is going to sell off a whole bunch of its stuff.
And there is going to be a general shift of resources from the public sector to the private sector, as the US government and other governments around Europe and so on, as they all run out of money, they're just going to sell the crap out of everything they have.
And it's going to be a kind of transition.
That is going to result in a diminishment of the state.
And that to me is the way that it's going to go.
As long as we keep pounding the moral argument.
Morality always wins in the long run.
The more consistent position, as Ayn Rand said, will always win.
And so as long as we keep pounding the moral argument and first principles, the government is going to, through fiscal necessity and through the bowing to the inevitable superiority of the non-aggression principle argument, Is going to begin to devolve itself.
So it's not going to be like the statist rapture, you know, where everybody who likes the state...
Oh, let's just sit and dream for a moment, shall we?
Where everybody who likes the state is suddenly going to beam up and go into the Starship Enterprise of Statism, which was actually a very statist vessel.
Not a lot of traitors, just those evil Ferengi and a very military hierarchy.
But enough about Star Trek.
So there is going to be a transition time.
I think that the argument would be something like, well, if you end slavery, there's still going to be whips and chains and stocks and ships that were used to transport slavery, and therefore slavery is just going to start up again.
No. Slavery only works when the government enforces it, when the government goes and catches the slaves and brings them back.
That's the only way that slavery ever, ever worked.
So, if military hardware, either people are going to buy it or they're going to destroy it.
Now, if people buy it, they're going to be buying it because they're in the free market trying to provide defense services in the diminishing requirement for defense services that would be required in a stateless society.
Or a stageless world. But a whole bunch of them would be decommissioned, right?
I mean, what did they do with all of the auction blocks and shackles and manacles and so on when they got rid of slavery?
Well, I mean, I guess a few people bought them for curiosities, but most of them would be just melted down or recycled or something else.
They would just get rid of them because these things are expensive to maintain.
And if there's no market demand for them, or little, then they'll just go away.
That would be my suggestion about how to answer.
I know it's not a perfect answer, and maybe I'll put some more thought into it, but that would be my approach.
Steph, when contemplating...
Oh, sorry, scrolling a bit here.
When contemplating anarchism and the non-aggression principle philosophy, the subject of children is the most difficult.
And you have even said that you have had to use force once or twice with your gorgeous daughter.
I get lost in debates when it comes to children.
And I... Sorry, I falter...
And I falter. How does the state of society deal with children?
Is that what you mean?
Well, again, this is a general principled way of approaching it.
First of all, the current system does not deal with children.
It does not deal with children.
I mean, one out of three boys and two out of three girls report being sexually molested as children.
So there is almost no protection when it comes to children in the current society.
In fact, and of course, if you can't public school as abusive, which I'm sure in the future they will, There's just no protection of children in the existing system.
Child abuse remains relatively rampant, and if you count forcing parents to go to work and turn their children over to high-rotation daycares, and I worked in a daycare when I was a teenager, so I have some experience of this, that may be considered highly negative in the future as well.
I mean, standard child-rearing practices, which seem normal at the time, very often appear completely weird in the future, right?
So the fact that Most people would, particularly middle class and up in the past, would farm their children off to wet nurses and wouldn't see them for the first couple of years of their life was perfectly normal in France in the 18th century and appears completely weird and wrong to us now.
And I think that two parents working in daycare is going to be that way in the future.
So statism is very harmful for children at the moment.
It fails to protect them from abusive parents.
It puts them in these horrible schools and it...
It doesn't protect them in the way they need to be protected.
Now, in the future, and I have a chapter in my free book, Practical Anarchy, on my website at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
I have a chapter on the protection of children, which I won't go into much here.
I just want to sort of mention very briefly that there's two things, I think, that will be characteristic of the protection of children in the future.
The first is that child abuse leads to very specific and measurable damage to the brain and to the central nervous system, even if it's only verbal abuse.
And that, of course, you'd simply do a brain scan for.
And you would see if it was developing and society would intervene, of course, right?
The reason society would intervene...
Is that the costs of abused children who then grow up to be criminals or even worse politicians, those children are very expensive to society and the cost would accrue to the parents, right?
So if you were to run a school, you wouldn't want budding little sociopaths in your school because it would be very hard for the other children to learn, it would negatively affect the teaching process, it would be difficult and problematic and so on, right?
So if you had those kinds of I mean, we already do that for things like nutrition and so on with children if they're too thin, if they have deficiencies in various things.
So, I would suggest that these kinds of scams would be done very often.
I also believe that, you know, there are very few parents who wake up and say, how can I most harm my child today?
I think that most parents just make a series of very bad decisions and end up in these kinds of situations.
And so if there is signs of child abuse, which would be very clear medically and very clear socially, then society would intervene.
And the way that society would intervene is fundamentally financially.
I mean, assuming that there was not a sort of close-knit community that could intervene.
Society would intervene financially.
And so what would happen is the DROs who are providing, you know, healthcare and insurance would say, look, we can't insure these children until this abuse gets dealt with, like until these signs of abuse get ameliorated or resolved.
So here are some free parenting classes.
And if you go to these parenting classes, we will then cut the rates of insurance for your children by 50% or 75%, you know, like driver's ed, right?
You go to driver's ed classes, you get a reduction in the price of your insurance.
And so that's the way that it will work in the future.
Children are very expensive if they are abused.
They tend to be much higher incidence of nicotine addiction, alcoholism, promiscuity, drug addiction, violent behavior, a continuation of abuse.
These are the effects of child abuse in the future, very expensive to society as a whole.
And so society, at the moment, these costs get shifted to the taxpayer as a whole.
I mean, nobody goes and says, well, you produced this murderer, this appearance, so now you've got to go and pay for his incarceration.
And so society pays, right?
The burdens of abused children get shifted to the taxpayers and not to the parents who are responsible for raising them, which would not be the case.
Is it going to be perfect?
No. People will always slip through the cracks.
But these cracks will be far wider, given the Grand Canyon that we currently have.
So, yeah.
And, of course, the other thing, too, is that children will be much less of a burden in the future, because the horror that we have of child labor may be ameliorated to the point where children may want to do...
You know, I mean, there are some genius kids, I'm sure, who would love to be doing some web design for money at the age of nine.
Why not, if that's what they want to do?
So I think that that's, you know, lemonade stands and all these kinds of things.
Why not have kids do that more in the future?
And I think that this extended period called adolescence would probably be curtailed.
You wouldn't be in school doing retarded stuff until you're 18.
So children would have a lot more flexibility.
They may be out of the nest sooner if they wanted to.
And of course, they would learn by doing rather than just by sitting and being blared at by incompetent teachers.
So anyway, that's very...
A very brief overview of how I think things would work in a freer society.
And yeah, keep hitting me with questions if you want.
I really do appreciate those great, great, great questions.
Oh, yeah. And look, as far as using force against my daughter, yes, there have been one or two times when I have needed to hold her down to change her diaper if she really needs a diaper change and for whatever reason she's...
But I don't consider that.
I consider that part of universality.
So, for instance, if somebody is choking on a chicken wing or something and I decide to give them the high-milch maneuver, I don't ask their permission beforehand.
I basically just assault them and hopefully dislodge the food, and I bet that they're very happy afterwards.
If somebody's having an epileptic attack and I restrain them or put a piece of wood between their teeth so they don't bite their tongue off, I'm sure they're very happy afterwards.
And I'm absolutely convinced that in the future, my daughter will say, that she's very glad that I was able to change her diaper so she didn't get...
Some sort of terrible rash when she was younger.
So I don't consider that specific to children at all because she's not able to understand the consequences of her actions just as somebody may not be able to give permission during the Heimlich maneuver and somebody is not able to give permission during an epileptic attack.
It's very similar, as I've mentioned before, to some blind guy wandering into traffic.
I mean, of course you're going to stop it.
And if you have to knock him down, you'll knock him down.
And he's going to say, holy crap, thank you so much, right?
I can't believe I was about to wander into traffic.
You don't just say, well, you know, I don't want to initiate force.
I'm going to let this guy get creamed by a Mack truck.
No, of course not, right? So, yeah, I think that that is not a violation of the NAP. Medical advice, don't do that to someone who is having an epileptic attack.
I absolutely, you know, I'm speaking with no knowledge and experience of epileptic attacks, so please don't take anything I'm saying with anything other than, you know, they're just metaphors, of course, right?
So, yes, thank you.
Steph, what do all of us have in common that have made the necessary paradigm change to, quote, get it?
That is a great question.
In the very, very first Freedom in Radio Sunday show we had, my lord, probably four or five years ago, we asked that very question.
And I don't think we came to a firm conclusion.
This is just root beer, in case you're wondering.
Diet root beer, even. I think that there are some things that we have in common.
I think that most of the people I've known who get it I went through some experience of solitariness as children and therefore became more able to sustain themselves in the absence of social approval.
I think that's quite important.
And that may be either illness or moving from one place to another or having some way in which social attachments were interrupted, thus allowing us to be more self-sustaining and to deal with social disapproval, which can be very significant in this field.
So I think that has something to do with it.
I think intelligence. I mean, I don't know if you've listened to the Sunday shows that I do, but man alive, I mean, these people are just brilliant.
I mean, the people who call in, the people who have...
I mean, the questions that you're asking here, they're just genius, right?
I mean, they're brilliant right to the core questions.
So it's a matter of intelligence. I think that there is...
A non-splitting of the personality, right?
So a lot of people, they kind of split themselves, right?
So they say, well, I'm against violence, and then they invent the social contract, which justifies violence, and they're able to live with these two opposing double-think ideas simultaneously.
And the people that I've found who get it are people who aren't able to do that, right?
So you get the contradictory ideas.
Some people can just wish them into their opposite corners and continue as if nothing happened.
But there are those of us who get these opposing ideas and we can't just wish them away.
So we have to keep chewing and resolving them.
I think that's a matter of intelligence and also some emotional maturity as well.
So I think that's the way.
Let's see, Steph, how much prosperity nowadays do you think is really made offerbacks by the government and its corporations that would not be as easy to replicate in a decentralized society?
Sorry about that, but he's scrolling kind of crazy.
Well, look, we would be many times richer, many times richer now.
I would say a factor of at least four times richer now without the state.
And I think that's even just in the post-war period.
So, I mean, that counts non-taxation, that counts the non-rise in, that counts the national debt.
If you count the national debt, it's probably 10 or more times richer.
But we would be far richer now. This is a great tragedy.
The fork in the road that was taken, particularly in the 1960s under LBJ's Great Society, And of course the military industrial complex booster shot called the Vietnam War put us on a path of fiscal decay and destruction and eliminated the possibility that the poor would be largely moved into the middle class.
So, yeah, it is genuinely tragic.
Of course, I mean, there's some things that are relatively cheaper now because they're paid for through national debt, right?
I mean, one of the reasons that the people from the 1960s onwards were able to accumulate such wealth is because so much of what they wanted was paid for through debt and sort of dumped down to future generations.
So I think that we would be far richer.
There would be some stuff that we would pay for, but it would be much, much cheaper than it is right now, particularly healthcare.
And so there would be no particular need to have welfare state programs if we were as wealthy as we were continuing to be in the post-war period.
So that would be my...
Yeah, somebody said I was an only child who moved around a lot.
And that, you know...
There's something, I think Robert Louis Stevenson, the Treasure Island and Kidnapped writer, he was a brilliant writer, a brilliant adventure writer of the class of Alexandre Dumas.
And he had tuberculosis for like half his childhood and spent his time in bed, you know, coming up with imaginary friends and characters and so on.
So I think that's...
So here's a, sorry, somebody said, do you have a preferred type of mental health professional?
Here in the South, I get a lot of theist shrinks.
Well, I'm certainly no expert in this.
I went myself through several years of therapy for three hours a week.
I actually had an entire team and a catheter, interestingly enough.
But I will say this, that it doesn't particularly matter.
I would argue it doesn't hugely matter.
If your shrink is a theist, my shrink was not a theist, but was a mystic.
It doesn't matter if your dentist is a statist.
It matters that they're a good dentist.
And so I think if it comes to emotional connectivity and so on, if somebody's really good at emotional connectivity, really gets the unconscious, work with that person.
I mean, I think it's better if they're closer in terms of philosophy or to something rational, but I don't think it's essential.
And certainly I would suggest that don't bring religion itself into conversations about the self.
I would say this, though.
I would say that organized religion is not very helpful in terms of self-knowledge because it projects far too much of the unconscious into the universe as a whole.
I mean, I believe that we have a God within us called the unconscious, which is the accumulated wisdom and experience of a couple of billion years of evolution.
The instincts that we have, the dreams that we have, these are all amazing, powerful things that we can use to really help us in our lives.
So I think that we have this.
If somebody projects that into the realm of God, they won't be able to help you deal with the true God, which is your own unconscious.
Again, I've written about this in my free book.
I sound like Mr. Pitchman, but it's all free.
It's called Against the Gods, again, at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
Yeah, a good status therapist? I wouldn't...
I wouldn't work on that so much.
Financial independence should be the primary goal, somebody writes, of all freedom fighters.
What do you recommend?
Financial independence should be a primary goal of all freedom fighters.
What do you recommend? Well, I mean, there's two basics, right, if you want to get financial independence.
It comes down to two things.
One, raise your income.
Two, lower your expenses.
That's really all there is to it.
There's no magic sauce and If you can find ways of building value that can sustain itself, like, I mean, I have these podcasts which people donate for, which are accumulating in value over time at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
So if you can create repetitive income through writing a book or through creating a website that accepts donations or some other form of value, then you can decouple, you know, hourly labor from continued value, right?
So hourly labor, you're always going to have problems in that if you stop working, you stop making money.
If you can find some way of creating a sustainable income, Through some massive pyramid scheme or Amway.
No, I'm just kidding. But through some way of creating something of value that people will donate for or pay for in a repetitive way, I think that's great.
But the important thing is, yeah, try and stay out of debt as much as possible.
Try and convert whatever money you have into something that actually is something, you know, like a house or gold or something like that.
But yeah, it really just comes down to get your expenses below your income or get your income above your expenses and really, really work to try and keep yourself as free as possible that way.
Can you talk more about the parallels between statism and religion?
Both involve people willing to force others to believe in an imaginary concept, force being more prevalent with statism.
Well, I agree with you about force being more prevalent with statism, but that's only for adults.
It's only for adults.
For children, the propaganda and fraud of religion is incredibly heavily pounded into children.
I mean, it's just astounding.
I mean, I certainly remember when I was a kid hearing talks about Jesus and blood and hell and punishment and damnation and...
I mean, it was just, it terrified the living crap out of me.
And that is really abusive.
I mean, it's horrendously abusive.
And verbal abuse, it's been shown, has longer-lasting and more deleterious effects than physical abuse.
So, physical abuse is what is applied to adults.
But it's a verbal abuse, a cult religion that is applied to children.
And... I would argue it's hard to say which one is worse.
I would rather have not had religious instruction, and since I'm going to pay my taxes anyway, I would rather not have had religious instruction as a child, because statism is not particularly used against children.
It's used against their parents to pay for things like public school and so on.
But I think that both are abusive, and I don't believe that you can rank physical abuse as worse than verbal abuse, which is And remember, you know, verbal abuse can include things like sending threatening letters, death threats, right? Well, I mean, what is hell other than an ultimate death threat, right, of eternal torture in the smoky arms of Satan?
So I think that, you know, eternal death threats leveled against children, eternal guilt threats of Jesus died because you're bad, because Adam, you know, let the talking snake convince him that an apple was good when it was evil.
I mean, this is ridiculous fairy tales that we live in.
I think that religion is just as damaging and just as brutal towards people.
It just takes a slightly different form.
James Martin said that libertarianism has never grown because there's a limited amount of libertarians born into this generation.
Do you believe this is the case?
I do not believe this is the case and I'm going to just end with this because I know that we're running up on the hour.
Thank you everybody so much for your patience as I got started here.
Libertarianism It's not going to grow, in my strong opinion, until libertarians start taking the ideas a whole lot more seriously than we do in general.
I've made this argument many times before, and it's a very controversial argument, so I'm sorry if it's upsetting for people, but...
If you're against slavery, you don't hang out with pro-slavery people.
You try to make the case, but if you're against wife-beating, you don't hang out with wife-beaters.
You have to make your choices in this life based upon your values, in my opinion, or toss out your values and just hang out with whoever you like, but don't pretend to have...
Moral values. If you have moral values, then you have to live by them, or it's complete bullshit.
And it's actually bad for the movement if people claim to have values and then don't live by them, because all they're saying is that the values, even if you understand them, they're not going to make any difference to your life, that the values can't be implemented.
So I strongly suggest to people that if we define the state as evil and we define the support of the state as necessary, For its continuance, then support of the state is immoral.
And if we believe that, if we define that as immoral, and we continue to hang out with people we openly define as immoral, A, I think that's really bad for relationships.
You shouldn't be in relationships with people you define as evil.
And secondly, it won't ever grow, because people get that even we don't take our ideas very seriously.
So that's my argument to that.
Now we're at 1.57. I think George said it could go to 1.55.
So I just wanted to thank everybody so much for coming out.
And again, I apologize for this sort of stalled intro.
And to thank everybody for absolutely wonderful, amazing, and fantastic questions that are coming up the pipe.
I really, really do appreciate it.
And I have a Sunday show tomorrow, 2 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. You can just go to the Free Domain Radio website or fdrurl.com forward slash chat.
If you want to ask more questions or have more conversations, it's a...
The talk show so we can talk back and forth, which is my preferred way for boring people.
So thank you everybody so much.
I really, really do appreciate it.
And thanks again to George for setting this great conference up and for inviting me in as a, should I say speaker, babbler.
As a babbler. That would be my way to describe it, perhaps.
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