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May 1, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:04:18

1901 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call In Show, 1 May 2011

The Royal Wedding, earning self-love, UPB and war, Dr Mom questions anarchism and national defense, friendship, history and intimacy...

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux.
	It is the 1st of May 2011.
	Happy May Day to all of the Red Silk Brethren workers out there.
	I hope you're having a wonderful day. Sunday, the day of rest for everyone.
	Except Breeze, I suppose.
	And thank you, everybody, so much who stepped up at the end of last month.
	April is a challenging month for donation-based businesses, particularly those with a fan base in the U.S. because the taxman swoops in like a shark and takes a fairly good rip of the jugular, leaving a little left over for… Remora, like me, looking to catch a few scraps from this overextended chewing metaphor.
	So thank you everybody who donated yesterday and signed up for new subscriptions.
	It is beyond appreciated.
	There are no words. Actually, there are probably about 50,000 words to say how appreciated it is, but I won't go into them all now.
	So thank you everybody so much.
	And just...
	A reminder that I will be speaking in New York in an outrageous Brooklyn accent and quite possibly a disco rainbow wig September the 10th.
	This is at September the 20th, 2011, and I hope that you will be able to join.
	If you're anywhere close to New York, it's at the Liberty Fest 2 in New York City.
	It's Tom Woods, Jack Hunter, Adam Kokesh, Jordan Page, and I think fairly far down the line in fine print, Stefan Molyneux.
	And you can check that out at LFNYC.com.
	Also, Libertopia.
	Sorry about all of this boring business, but Libertopia has extended their early bird specials.
	So you can go to Libertopia.org and you can sign up there.
	I think they've extended it through this month.
	I hope that you will come out October 21st to 23rd, San Diego, California.
	I will be emceeing and all of that.
	And Last but not least, I will be at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, which is...
	Porkfest.com, P-O-R-C, fest.com.
	And thanks to Stephanie for the interview recently.
	That is June 20th to 26th.
	It's a whole week, ladies and gentlemen, of freedom, relative freedom.
	And so I hope that you will be able to join that.
	If you sign up, you can use the promo code S-T-E-F-A-N, all caps, and that will get you, I think, 20% off your registration.
	So I hope that you will check that out.
	And I think the cruise is all booked up, and that's all done.
	It's a cruise, a Liberty cruise with myself and Wes Bertrand and Mark Ed to Free Talk Live.
	And I think that's about it, other than the barbecue, for what's going down.
	So let's move straight on to the true brains of the outfit.
	You! The fine listeners.
	And let me know.
	Also, I've been focusing a lot.
	I'm sort of juggling working on two books at the moment, but I'm also focusing on a lot of interviews lately.
	I've really quite enjoyed them.
	It's a bit of prep, actually quite a bit of prep, but I do like them.
	And if you don't like them, because the show really is designed to appeal to you sitting right there or standing, If you don't like them, just let me know and I will then do my usual interviewing of my hand puppets and sock puppets and toenails.
	That is the way that the podcast worked in the past and perhaps how they will work again in the future.
	But let me know. So, what's wrong with the British?
	Their enthusiasm is just as logical as a guy who cheers when his worms that eat his intestines perform their mating ritual.
	Well, this is what I would say about The Royal Wedding.
	It's great news.
	I think it's fantastic news.
	It's not so fantastic news that Charlie Veach got arrested for a thought crime, the crime of potentially deploying his, what he calls to do, AK-47, which is the microphone or the megaphone, and protesting the parasitic nuptial ritual.
	I'm not happy, of course, that he got arrested, now going to face court dates and trials and all that kind of stuff.
	That's no good. But, on the other hand, what is good is that the majority of British people did not care.
	About this $2.7 billion pillaging of the economy by the British royal family.
	I mean, everybody focuses, well, it was $80 million on security and so on.
	But of course, people got the day off.
	That's hard on the economy.
	And lots of people basically had money taken from them.
	If you're working hourly and you've got the day off, if you're getting paid hourly rather than salaried, in other words, if you're more in the private sector, then you're kind of hosed.
	People describing this nonsense as...
	It's pageantry!
	No, no, no, no, no, no.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Grade 3s making their own costumes.
	That's pageantry. It is a point of national pride.
	Oh, my God.
	Do you know... What it reminds me of, and I'm remembering this for many years later, but I think there's a scene in one of Robert De Niro, I think Robert De Niro's second film after Mean Streets, Taxi Driver with a horrendously young Jodie Foster.
	And in Taxi Driver, if memory serves me right, there's a scene where two guys have a scrap or a fragment of bathtub that's been sort of ground and broken up.
	They've got a fragment of bathtub And what they're doing is they're looking at the rings, the scum rings on the bathtub.
	And they say, oh, yeah, I think it was Errol Flynn's bathtub or something like that.
	And it's like, oh, here, you can see where the water level went up.
	Because another woman got in the bathtub.
	And they're like, oh, ha, ha, that's so sexy.
	Another woman got in the bathtub.
	And that is the level at which people at a distance are viewing these people, these descendants of warlords.
	This is the distance at which they're viewing it.
	National pride? National pride?
	I don't even know how to unpack that sentence.
	It's such an antonym of everything that is rational and moral and healthy and sane that it is national pride to have money taken from you so that people who've never had to work a day in their life and never will have to work a day in their life can Have people arrested so that they can take over public spaces and in a massive orgy of ostentatious wealth consumption put together a marriage.
	That will end in disaster.
	It will end in disaster.
	I mean, this is not... I'm not going out on any far limbs here by saying that royal marriages end in disaster.
	They just do.
	I mean, the whole environment is disastrous.
	I mean, if you had any sympathy and compassion for people in the royal family, you would simply demand that they not live this bizarre fishbowl Life of no reality, no consequences, no circumstances of any basic truth.
	You would simply take them out of that in the same way that if somebody was strung out on heroin, even though they may not like you to, the healthy thing to do would be to try to get them off the heroin as best as you could.
	There is an unreality to the royal's life that is so destructive to their happiness and to To the whole concept of society in England, I'm not the first to point this out, but the fact that you have the royals at the center and the pinnacle of British social life.
	It changes everything else that flows down from it.
	Everything then is measured in terms of quality and value relative to one's distance to these very, very strange, strange people who lived this very bizarre existence and who aren't free market, quite the opposite of free market.
	So the ideal is to be descended from warlords who were the best murderers of the day and to not work and to ponce around in uniforms and cut ribbons and be merely ornamental.
	It's like saying, don't be a baker.
	Be the plastic guy who goes on top of the wedding cake.
	That's the ideal.
	So I just sort of wanted to...
	To me, there is something awfully self-abasing to look up with respect at these people.
	I didn't watch any of this, of course, but to look up with respect at people Getting married on your money during a time when England is facing what is laughably called austerity measures, which means that they're going to roll back government spending by a few years.
	Austerity measures would be to go back to the government spending, say, of 1820.
	That to me would be austerity, though it still wouldn't be far enough.
	But to roll back government spending a few years is not exactly austerity.
	But that's what they have to call it because it sounds...
	It sounds more dramatic, I suppose.
	And yeah, I mean, look, I have some reservations about fairy tales for Isabella.
	You know, the prince is going to come and save you and ride off and live happily ever after and so on.
	I think that stuff is bad, bad for kids.
	And you can see the infection that takes hold and how long it continues when they're adults.
	What advice do I have – sorry, just since we get these questions in the chat room – what advice do I have for fellow Canadians on tomorrow's vote other than don't?
	And what do you think we will see from these statists in the aftermath?
	Well, I'll tell you.
	I'm glad to have an iPod touch, a little iPod touch, because if Isabella is watching a show or something, she quite likes Dora.
	So if she's watching your show, I'll watch and comment a little bit.
	But, you know, every now and then I'll sort of dip in to read some news or whatever and see if I can come up with anything useful for the Adam vs.
	the Man show. Remember, 7 p.m.
	Monday, 9 Eastern Standard Time on RT.com.
	I'm usually on Mondays.
	But I'll tell you what...
	is on the other side of struggling with the question of politics, is boredom with politics.
	Is boredom with politics...
	There is a suspension of disbelief that is necessary for art.
	The suspension of disbelief is you're sitting watching Hamlet.
	And you have to forget that you're in a probably uncomfortable, rather sticky and creaky seat watching people yell at a middle distance who've learned their lines and who aren't actually in Denmark plotting the murder of their uncle.
	And so you have to sort of suspend disbelief.
	And if you can't do that, and bad art doesn't allow you to do that, but if you can't do that, then it just becomes a rather boring and bad spectacle.
	And so the same thing is true of politics.
	People have – somebody put a poster I think somewhere up on Facebook of me and the caption was, Hitler's about to get into power.
	Don't vote. Okay.
	The idea that defensive voting is going to achieve something and so on.
	Look, if you want to vote, go vote.
	I mean, who am I to tell you what to do?
	I'm nobody to tell you what to do.
	I just sort of put forward arguments and it's up to you to process them as you see fit and if the arguments are compelling and so on and decide what you want to do from there.
	I'm not going to go and vote.
	I'm not. I think the last time I voted, I spoiled my ballot, and that was about it.
	I think those are counted. Maybe they're sort of reported as protest votes or something like that.
	But people don't know what you're protesting.
	Simply spoiling a ballot, it may mean that you are a Nazi who doesn't like all of the middle-of-the-road candidates.
	It could mean that you're a fascist.
	It could mean that, I don't know, you're a Molotov cocktail-throwing anarchist.
	Nobody knows what you're protesting when you do that kind of stuff, and it doesn't really matter.
	So no, I'm going to spend time with my family and maybe some friends and enjoy that particular piece of interaction.
	It's a multi-generational process to free the world.
	It's going to be a long, long time, measured in centuries.
	So I really don't think what you do tomorrow is going to be that important.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	So I had a question.
	It's basically like this morning I woke up and realized something pretty huge.
	Just to summarize, I woke up and realized that I've been going from thing to thing, person to person, organism to organism, trying to fill a void that my parents left in me through abandonment.
	I've been looking externally instead of internally.
	So I realized that my parents, by not giving a damn, have conditioned me to not have self-love and obviously be codependent.
	And I'm wondering how to grow the self-love in myself.
	And I got the idea aside from thinking about stuff and journaling and everything.
	Maybe it's just a matter of deciding what to do to show that I care for myself.
	Like taking better care of myself because I've got rather a problem with self-neglect.
	Right, right.
	Okay. Okay, there's no clear or absolute answer to this, so I'm just going to share with you some of my thoughts, and I also wanted to compliment you on what is an enormously brave and vulnerable question, because there's a lot that you're talking about there just by bringing this question up.
	So I first of all just wanted to really thank you for the trust.
	That you have shown in talking about this and I'll tell you some of the stuff that I've worked with and whether it fits for you will of course be up for you to decide but I'm not going to give you any kind of decisive answer but I'll tell you what I've thought about this in terms of growing self-love.
	So when I first began to look at my own history and really began to realize just how much went so wrong in the way that I was I hate to even say raised, but the way that I... The environment in which I grew up.
	And I began to, in my mind, divide this issue of self-love into two categories.
	And I had a vision.
	I think I even dreamt this.
	If I were to check my journal of the time, I'm sure I would find this dream because I remember it quite vividly.
	If you want to build...
	A castle called self-love.
	The first thing to recognize for me was that I was not starting on a level playing ground.
	I was starting with a crater.
	I was starting with where an asteroid of abuse and indifference and neglect and so on had struck the ground and And created a big smoking crater that was unstable and tricky to work with.
	And if I had tried to build my castle called Self-Love without recognizing that there was a smoking, unstable crater there, it would have just fallen down because I'm not building on something solid.
	So the first thing that I began to work on in the question of Self-Love...
	Was to say to myself, first of all, I need to repair the damage done before I start building.
	In other words, I have to undo the negative self-talk that I had inherited or had been inflicted on me.
	Before I could begin the actual active and positive process of building self-esteem.
	In other words, I had to stop ripping myself down before I could think about building myself up.
	So I mean what I did was – and this is why I always say talk to a therapist, talk to a therapist.
	But what I did was I began to list all of the ways in which I thought it had affected me, all of the negative experiences that I'd gone through, all of the abusive and destructive experiences I'd gone through as a child and as a teenager.
	What was the layout?
	What was the shape of the crater?
	How much smoke was in there? How many bodies were strewn around?
	And I began to undo that.
	And you undo that simply by differentiating the organic from the inflicted.
	The organic from the inflicted.
	And so I began to sort of say, well, here are things that I say to myself.
	You're this, you're that, you're the other, right?
	And then I looked to the source.
	Did this come from facts, right?
	Did this come from facts?
	So I say, I'm unimportant.
	I'm unimportant is one of the things.
	I don't matter. I'm unimportant was one of the things I said to myself when I was younger.
	I'm unimportant. I don't matter.
	And then I would say to myself, okay, well, where did that come from?
	What is the source of that crater, that particular crater called I'm not important?
	I'm inconsequential.
	And did it come from empirical facts?
	Well, of course not. It came from people's language around me when I was a child.
	And so the source of that crater was somebody else's asteroid.
	It wasn't the natural lay of the land.
	It wasn't something I'd done to myself.
	This is something that I had to adapt to or, as it felt at the time, or die.
	Because if somebody around you who has power over you as a child has a particular perspective or opinion of you, then to challenge that, for me at least, raised the possibility of escalation of abuse.
	So if people had the opinion, you're inconsequential, and if I were to oppose or fight that opinion, then that would cause an escalation, either of verbal or physical abuse.
	So just kind of – okay.
	I'll absorb and internalize that because tragically that is the safest thing that I can do in this environment.
	And we all have these – those of us who have gone through these kinds of histories, we all have these lists of statements about ourself.
	And you just – you trace them back to their source.
	And so there are the primary ones, which is just the way – which people explicitly or implicitly – the way that they interact with us, right?
	They either say you're X, Y, and Z, or through their actions they imply very concretely that you're X, Y, and Z. They may not say you're inconsequential, but if they never ask your opinion about everything or oppose every opinion that you have, that's pretty much the same thing, right?
	And so there is the primary statements, which are the statements made about you, explicitly or implicitly, and then there are the secondary effects of those statements.
	So if somebody says to you, or if the family mythology becomes, you're the clumsy one.
	Then it's entirely possible that as people are waiting for you to drop stuff and waiting to giggle at you dropping stuff or waiting to reinforce that stereotype that you may become clumsier.
	So then there's the you're clumsy and then there's the evidence that arises from the statement.
	And so it's important to differentiate those two because the second can look like evidence for the first, right?
	So if somebody says you're clumsy and then you become sort of self-conscious and don't want to drop anything and this and that and the other and then you end up dropping more or tripping because you're so worried about dropping whatever you're holding, then people will say, aha, you see, she is clumsy.
	But that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	So it's important to unravel that.
	So that's a process that you just kind of have to go through.
	I think you just have to differentiate, right?
	It's all about slicing and dicing, differentiating.
	From the blob called self, you must, I believe, slice and dice and differentiate yourself into that which impacted you from outside, that which you internalized, that which is organic to you, that which is natural to your being and so on.
	And this is with the idea of just trying to figure out what is you and what is the impact of others on you, both positively and negatively.
	And through that process, you can level out the crater in the ground.
	And you can make a flat ground.
	And that is solid enough to lay a foundation on.
	Now, the solid enough to lay a foundation on thing, the castle that you actually start building called self-love, maybe there's some shortcut I don't know about.
	But the shortcut that I have found, sorry, the only way that I have found to make it really work Is this.
	You simply have to do good.
	You simply have to do good.
	Self-esteem, fundamentally to me, is not a conversation with myself.
	Self-esteem for me, fundamentally, is the inevitable results of my objective actions.
	It's the inevitable results of my objective actions.
	So once I've got a level playing field and I'm starting to build this cathedral, then I have to say to myself, okay, well, what is good and virtuous behavior in this circumstance?
	And so if good behavior in this circumstance is, I don't know, having a conversation with someone when I'm scared to, even though I know it's necessary, then you just – I just would have to have that conversation.
	I just have to have that conversation.
	There are no particular shortcuts.
	I can't pretend that I did when I didn't.
	Well, I guess I could, but that's not very healthy.
	So you just have to do the right thing.
	So if you have certain things where you lack self-care – You just have to grit your teeth and you have to do that self-care.
	If you're avoiding going to the dentist, you just have to go to the dentist.
	You just have to do the stuff and your self-esteem accumulates from the objective evidence of what you're doing.
	If you want to apply for some job but you're scared of rejection, you just have to apply for the job.
	I mean, we're about, at least I'm about, reason and evidence, right?
	And so the reason is knowing the right thing to do and the evidence is have you actually done it or not.
	If you're afraid to speak up for yourself, if you're afraid to express your needs in your relationships, then I believe if it's the right thing to do, and I think it is, then yeah, honesty is the first virtue.
	So you are honest about your needs and preferences in relationships.
	You just have to do that stuff.
	And the actual actions that you take, those are the bricks by bricks that you build your positive self-love and self-regard out of.
	Not out of just a self-conversation.
	The undoing of the creator.
	Is, I think, a self-conversation.
	But the building of self-esteem and self-love, the building of that actual castle, that's empirical bricks.
	And that is the actions that you take in accordance with your virtues.
	Does that help at all?
	Right, right. Especially the second part.
	It was something along the lines of what I was thinking, too.
	Oh, good. That's good.
	For some reason, I want to tell you about...
	I've moved from my whole life.
	When I was young, I had stuffed animals.
	I had a dog. When I got older, I had friends.
	There was a dating relationship.
	I moved from thing to thing, trying to get love.
	And I just need that for myself to build that for myself.
	Yes, I think so.
	Because the great thing about only accepting empirical actions for yourself is that then it shall follow as night follows day.
	You shall only accept empirical actions from others.
	And that, to me, is the foundation of a moral life, which is not to accept people's intentions or their stated goals, but to work empirically from what they're actually doing.
	And that starts with you.
	That starts with you saying to yourself, I'm not going to accept mere good intentions.
	Well, I want self-love.
	Well, I want to be happy. It's like, what am I actually doing?
	To achieve it. And to me, self-love is as an essential project as if you're 300 pounds overweight, losing weight.
	And losing weight requires intentionality, but it certainly is not limited to intentionality.
	Right? So you can't lose weight unless you want to, but merely wanting to isn't going to do it.
	To lose weight, there are specific empirical actions that you need to take.
	You know, put down this piece of food and pick up that barbell or whatever it is that you're going to do that is sort of a safe and healthy way to lose weight.
	But your body will not respond to your intentions.
	Your body will only respond to your empirical actions.
	And through having that standard for yourself, you automatically – whatever standard we have for ourself is automatically the standard we're going to have for others, no matter what we say to ourselves consciously or not.
	I believe that whatever standard we fundamentally have for ourself – And the way to escape the danger of people's intentionality, you know, well, I was doing the best I could.
	Well, I didn't mean to hurt you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	You misunderstand. You don't get it.
	This is not my goal.
	I didn't really want to do that and so on, right?
	It's like if you have that standard for yourself where you can talk yourself in and out of things, then you'll have that standard for others.
	But the best way to save yourself from the exploitation of dangerous others is to have the standard called empiricism, which is the scientific standard, which is the philosophical standard, which is the free market standard.
	The way that you save yourself from manipulation by others is to have the standard called empiricism.
	Somebody says something that really hurts you, what they'll immediately say is, I didn't mean to hurt you.
	But that's not enough.
	Language isn't enough.
	And so you have to have the standard of empirical actions for yourself, and that will free you from manipulation by others, in my opinion.
	Fabulous. Thank you.
	You're very, very welcome and I hope it goes well and I also wanted to just congratulate you again.
	I know you've worked incredibly hard and I hope it's paying off, but congratulations on everything that you're doing to save yourself and also your future.
	If you have kids, marriage and so on, all of that I think will be proportionately better based upon your commitment, though I know it's tough.
	Yeah, yeah. All right.
	I think we had a question about UPV. It is completely okay to change topics.
	There is no set topic for this.
	Can you hear me?
	I sure can. Okay.
	Here's my brother. He has a question about it.
	Hey, brother.
	How are you? I'm good.
	How are you doing? I'm doing well.
	So, I've recently started reading UPV. I'm about halfway through, and I've seen some of your other videos, and I had a question about something that seemed contradictory.
	Please. So early in UPB you talk about middle truths and the null zone.
	And you give one specific example.
	A private man is paid to murder another man, you call him a gun for hire.
	Whereas if he puts on an army uniform and is told to go kill somebody, we call him a hero.
	And how one is theoretically in accordance with the greater truth, which is you shouldn't murder, but it seems like there's a middle zone where murdering is okay.
	Okay, yep. Later on in the book, you talk, and this is on page 88, you have a quote where you talk about if you get cancer, you can ask a surgeon to operate on you, and the reason when he stabs you, it's not immoral, is that the surgeon is asking as a surrogate self-defense agent.
	You talk about in your...
	In some of your other videos specifically about anarchy, about private defense contractors, and how one of the things that they could do is that if, for instance, a war or something was going to be started, you could, by setting up this private market sector for defense, you could pay people to defend you, and one of the methods they could use to defend a group of people would be to kill the leaders of the opposing movement.
	I don't understand how that's justified any more than the army is justified.
	In both situations, they're a surrogate acting for the interests of the people they're supposedly protecting.
	And while I understand the military runs off of taxation, and that's a whole different discussion, this is a purely moral and ethical dilemma that I'm having with myself.
	It's one of the few things I haven't been able to logic through.
	No, it's a great question. I really think it's a great question, and congratulations on piecing this stuff together.
	It's good. We want to make sure the pieces of the jigsaw fit together.
	So let me just make sure I fully grasp, and I'm sorry for my slightly sexy voice.
	I've just got a bit of a sore throat. Let me just make sure I understand your question before I answer it, because it would be really tragic if I didn't, and then tried to answer anyway.
	So... Yes.
	Okay. But compared to my argument about this null zone wherein one man goes and murders another man and he has a green costume versus not a green costume,
	people just kind of blank out about that moral distinction, right?
	But isn't the – when that happens, isn't that person wearing the green costume still, at least in theory, acting in the – for the surrogate defense of the group of people who live in the nation that he's supposedly defending?
	Right. No, that's a great point.
	But the key thing is the word murder.
	Okay. Right. So the man – murder is generally defined as going and killing somebody not in self-defense, right?
	Okay. So if I just go and, I don't know, stab some poor homeless guy, that's murder, right?
	Whereas if the homeless guy is running at me with a chainsaw and I shoot him, try and shoot him in the leg, but I accidentally hit him in the heart or whatever, that's not the same.
	I wouldn't be tried for murder, right?
	Because that would be under the protection of self-defense, right?
	Yes. Okay.
	So the key thing is a man who murders is initiating force, not in self-defense.
	And so when I say that the man in a green costume is doing the same thing, I do not mean that the man in a green costume is acting in self-defense.
	I mean that the man in a green costume is murdering, is initiating force, right?
	Right. So, I mean, for instance, I mean, it's pretty clear now, certainly, seven or eight years later, that Iraq was not about to drop bombs on America, right?
	Okay, yes.
	No, I understand that.
	Right, so they really can't claim self-defense for those actions.
	Now, you and I can't go over to Iraq as private citizens and just...
	You know, force people to do stuff or shoot them, right?
	But there's a difference if somebody puts on that green costume, people get kind of confused and they think that there's some sort of moral thing.
	Now, I think the key difference is the universality, right?
	So if I – like I clearly would have the right to dig a bullet out of my own body if I could, right?
	Nobody would say, well, you're stabbing yourself.
	You're trying to commit suicide. You're aggressing against yourself, right?
	So when I say to the surgeon, please cut out my bullet or my cancer or whatever, he's not doing anything that I'm not permitted to do myself, right?
	We're not setting up a different moral standard.
	We're just outsourcing it, right?
	True. But I feel like that argument doesn't hold up with the private defense contractors who can go and remove somebody from power using force who is, while the person that they're removing isn't the one holding the gun, they're the leader of the nation, say, that is going to be invading you.
	Well, yeah, and this comes into very complex cause and effect, and I really appreciate you bringing this up, and I'll make a note here for UPB2 that I'll be a little bit more clear about this.
	But we are assuming, of course, that when the leader says we're going to go and invade, I don't know, Ancapistan, whatever we call the free society, that his soldiers are going to do it,
	right? Right. Because if the soldiers aren't going to do it, so if there's some crazy homeless guy who calls himself El Presidente, who yells that we're going to go and invade Ancapistan, and no one's going to listen to him, then clearly to shoot him would not be a rational act of self-defense, right? True.
	So we're going to assume that the leader, in ordering the attacks to occur, the invasion to occur, that he's actually going to make it happen, right?
	Okay.
	We're also going to assume that if he is decommissioned in some way, whether that's shot fatally or disabled in some manner or whatever, that the invasion will not occur.
	Okay. Is that right?
	That all makes sense, but then when you apply this standard to something, for instance, let's take Al-Qaeda, who was an organization that got together and blew up the Twin Towers, as horrible as it was, wasn't, and I may be reading into this wrong, but I feel like most of the whole Iraq situation where the democracy thing was concerned, that was just a...
	A fumble. We're going to – we'll deal with that later.
	But at least in some level, the idea was to go in and at least kill al-Qaeda for our own defense purposes.
	But al-Qaeda was never – no, al-Qaeda was not in Iraq.
	Or – OK, not in Iraq, but wherever we're going.
	I think we're going to Afghanistan right now, somewhere.
	We were looking for bin Laden.
	Well, sure. And of course, I think America would have the right or a free society would have the right to deal with that as a criminal affair.
	To deal with that as a criminal affair.
	Okay. Right?
	And that's what they originally tried to do, right?
	Is that they went to the Afghani government and they said, we want bin Laden.
	Yeah. Give him to us.
	And the Afghani government said, well, where's your proof?
	Mm-hmm. Well, I'm not just to hand over citizens to you to do God knows what to, or they knew America was going to do horrendous things to Bin Laden.
	So they said, well, listen, I mean, based on due process, you have to provide us some evidence, because that's what it means to have some sort of, I don't know, what do they call those treaties where they hand over people?
	I'm sorry. I'm on cold meds.
	I'm stoned, man.
	Extradition treaties, right? So you have to have an extradition treaty means that you have to supply some evidence, right?
	You don't just get to say, well, Joe Bob has pissed me off, so give him to me so I can throw him in jail.
	So the Afghani government said, okay, you want bin Laden?
	Great. Then let's have the evidence that you need to provide in order for us to extradite bin Laden.
	And America refused to provide that evidence.
	Fair enough. And so there's no right then to go and invade the whole country.
	I mean certainly I think you would consider it fair.
	I believe that George W. Bush couldn't go to I think Switzerland to receive some award because he was going to get arrested for war crimes, right?
	So there are certainly some significant sections of the European population and even the European legal system who regards George Bush as a war criminal.
	Okay. And they need to, if they want to, arrest him and try him and provide the evidence in a rational context.
	What they don't get to do is start carpet bombing America, right?
	Yeah. So you would not consider that just, right?
	True. True. Even though I think there's far more evidence – anyway, let's not get into that.
	That's a whole other topic. Anyway, so the reality is that if somebody is in charge of an army and on their say-so the army invades, then they are causing the invasion.
	Okay. Yeah, and this kind of comes back.
	And sorry, this doesn't mean that the individual soldiers do not have a moral responsibility.
	They may or they may not have a moral responsibility.
	So, for instance, there are soldiers who in World War I – and this happened not just in World War I but has happened in most wars throughout history.
	There are soldiers who are told, you damn well get out of your trench and you go running across no man's land with your guns a-blazing or I'm going to shoot you in the head right now.
	Yeah. And this happened on both sides of the war in World War I continually.
	Yeah. It's very hard to get human beings to kill each other.
	It's very rare. Majority of people in the Second World War, majority of soldiers never fired the weapons at an enemy.
	And so in that situation, I think it's pretty hard to say to the poor bastard who has – who's basically being told to go and kill or be killed that he's morally responsible.
	This can sometimes be used in a deceptive manner.
	There's a book that recently came out about pirates and the way in which pirates organized themselves in the 17th and 18th centuries.
	It's really quite a fascinating book.
	But the number of pirates who were stolen and sort of coerced into being pirates was far fewer than it appeared because one of the things that happened was that they would pretend to go and steal people so that those people would then have the defense called iraqus.
	Yeah.
	Yeah. If the soldiers are being forced to be soldiers, and either they or their families are going to be imprisoned or killed if they're not, then what we do, I think morally, the way we look at it, is to say that the man who's running the army is exactly the same as a man in charge of robots that can't say no.
	So you don't shoot the robots, you shoot the guy who's going to throw the switch and make the robots attack you.
	Yeah, I mean, you laid that out in your section about choice.
	I definitely understand that.
	So, yeah, I mean, look, I think you and I both understand that a green costume does not change your moral nature.
	No. And that's really my argument.
	So a man who is acting in self-defense can do so whether he's in a green costume or not.
	Because the right is universal, it can be transferred to somebody else.
	Right? So I can ask someone to act as my bodyguard and that person gains the right to protect myself just as I gain the right to protect myself.
	And if it should turn out that somebody wrestles the gun from him and then I become his bodyguard by shooting the guy who's attacking him, nobody's going to say, well, that's different because you're not his bodyguard.
	They just say, well, that's a shame or whatever, but it's a universal standard.
	So I hope that helps.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
	I'll have to think about this for a bit.
	But yes, that definitely cleared up a lot.
	I appreciate – A, I appreciate that.
	B, really great questions.
	I mean I love the UPB discussions.
	They're the one things – not the one things.
	They are the discussions that most make my brain sweat coagulated blood because it's so hard.
	To work with UPB. It really, really is hard, hard, hard to work with UPB. If you've ever seen the movie WALL-E, this little robot goes around and he tries to get all of these little – he's in a mountain of garbage and he tries to squeeze them into these little boxes or whatever.
	Well, to me, it's like there's this mountain of garbage called ethics out there, and I feel like I'm trying to squeeze, and it's really, really hard to make this stuff work because I'm constantly falling into the quicksand of my historical propaganda with regards to ethics.
	So I really appreciate.
	Those are great questions. Please, please call back.
	Underline and critique and whatever we can do to beat this theory into a better shape, I hugely appreciate.
	And so, yeah, please call back in if you have any other questions.
	Well, not if, when you have other issues and problems with it, because I really do want to keep working to improve the way the theory is communicated.
	I still believe that it is the way to go, but I don't want to just assume that, so please come back.
	Sounds good. When I finish it, I'm sure I'll be back.
	All right. Thank you.
	You're very welcome. Why does currency have to be gold-based?
	Gold is just as useless as cash.
	The first time that gold was found valuable, I think he means in Libya, gold was cattle-based.
	Money is easy to print and when you limit the presses, it's better than chiseling underground with occasional genocide.
	Well, there is no particular reason… I don't generally believe that...
	Gold will be the de facto currency basis in a free market for a number of reasons.
	Gold is not fundamental to creating stability because there can be shortages of gold.
	There can be excesses of gold.
	People can buy it up and hoard it.
	So there's ways in which gold, while in the long run I think is pretty stable, contributes to currency instabilities in the short run.
	Also, what if somebody finds a way to fake gold, right?
	I mean, Lord knows we're doing some pretty funky stuff with molecular manipulation these days.
	What if somebody finds a way to turn pyrite into gold or something like that?
	Well, then you've got a whole big problem.
	I believe, I do believe that what's going to happen?
	In the future in a free society is that currency is going to be strongly tied to the objective production of goods and services within a society.
	So that the whole point of a rational currency is to have prices and interest predictable.
	That's what everybody wants is prices and interest.
	And of course interest is just a subset of prices, right?
	Interest is just the price of money over time.
	But to have prices to be known ahead of time, to be stable.
	I mean imagine what it would be like.
	Imagine how your decisions would be.
	What kind of paradise you would live in if you knew what the price of a house was going to be in 10 years.
	Now, there's some stuff, I mean, computers and so on, it's going to be tough to predict and supply and demand and blah, blah, blah.
	But if you knew what that was going to be like, if you had a fundamental predictability with regards to prices as a whole, then a massive amount of economic waste and pointless destruction will I mean,
	it's one of the things I have that I'm sort of impatient with regards to environmentalism, is that environmentalism should be studying currency and just about nothing else.
	Environmentalists should be studying currency and just about nothing else.
	Because when you think of the amount of wasted shit that gets built and spoilt and decays, because...
	Of screwed up manipulations of currency.
	Think of all of the houses. What?
	10-11% of US housing is vacant at the moment.
	Look at all of the amount of environmental damage that has been wreaked because of the Fed's manipulation of currency and interest rates and other ways in which the state promoted home ownership at the expense of long-term stability and retainability.
	Think of these ghost cities in China, built for millions or tens of millions of people, which have very few people living in it, because the apartments are like ten times the average salary.
	But they're built there because the government, with a centrally planned approach, wants stuff to be built.
	Wants stuff to be built, and so they go and build this stuff.
	So there's just a huge amount of problems.
	Just think of if...
	The roads, if the US highway system had not been built on deficit financing, which is only possible with a central bank, with a government-controlled private bank, how different society would look like, how much less dependency on oil there would be.
	If people actually had to pay for their public works projects out of their existing tax base and structure, if they didn't have deficit financing, let alone war.
	I mean, God, talk about environmental destruction.
	War is about as horrendous as you get, and it only can exist.
	War can only happen in its modern form because of deficit financing, currency manipulation, interest rate control, and central banking.
	So if environmentalists were merely empirical and wanted to actually solve the problem of the misallocation of resources, which is fundamentally what environmentalism is all about, then they would have to focus on currency.
	But currency is spectacularly unsexy.
	It's spectacularly unmotivating relative to pictures of baby seals and dead whales and so on.
	But anyway, I just sort of wanted to point that out.
	Hey, Stefan. Hello.
	Hi. I had a question about relationships.
	Oh, right. I guess I'm just experiencing some real fog and confusion in a particular area.
	I'm just wondering if maybe you might be able to point out Where I could maybe investigate further, but I'm in a place right now where I'm encountering a lot of difficulty in finding a good reason to get into a romantic relationship.
	Do you mean get into a particular romantic relationship or just a romantic relationship in general?
	Just in general.
	Right, okay. And this would be aside from, like right now, I'm not sure if I want to have kids, but I do know if I did want to, then it's like, okay, well, I know how important it would be to have a rich and very strong connection with someone, and that's something I want to pursue, but I guess right now I'm...
	I guess there's part of me that feels I should be looking for that, but I can't find a good reason as to why.
	Why? To be in a romantic relationship?
	Yes, yeah. Alright.
	What were your reasons before?
	I think my reasons before were because I wanted my needs met.
	Do you mean, like, okay, what kind of needs?
	Because, you know, when you're talking romance, we're talking about naughty bits as well, right?
	Yeah, yeah. Well, definitely, I was interested in sex.
	And I was interested in feeling like I was of value.
	Yeah, I mean, to be sexually desired is a pleasurable experience, right?
	Even if it's just with you and a mink hand puppet.
	Wait, sorry, let's not talk about my stuff.
	We'll get back into that later. Sorry, go on.
	Yeah, I'm just trying to think of what else is coming up.
	I mean, those were definitely important factors for me, just feeling attractive, feeling someone wants to be with me.
	Someone is, you know, that sense of being cared for.
	And I guess I feel like I'm doing a lot of that myself now.
	Right, right. For myself.
	And in terms of, I guess all I wanted to say is, in terms of intimacy and being able to be vulnerable, I feel like I've really developed some relationships lately that allow me to do so.
	Yeah, no, I mean, double entendre completely meant, you know, what need does romance serve when we don't need to fill a hole?
	Of course, I'd enjoy that double entendre for the moment before we move on.
	Should we just... Okay. No, but it's a real question, right?
	When I don't have dysfunctional needs that need to be met in a romantic relationship, then what is it for?
	Right? No, and look, I mean, I think that...
	People go through this when they have fundamental changes, so you're not alone in this at all, right?
	So for instance, right, so let's say somebody's a pretty heavy drinker, right?
	And so their social life and their friends and so on kind of revolve around drinking, right?
	What the hell happened to my voice there?
	Drinking! And so when they stop drinking, then they sort of say, okay, well, wait a sec.
	What is a friendship, right?
	Like, if it's not hanging out and getting drunk, if it's not going to bars, then what is a friendship, right?
	And that's a very, very important question to have, right?
	Whenever you make fundamental changes in your value systems, your relationships are called into question.
	That's why people don't really like to make fundamental changes in their values, right?
	Because it steps you off the conveyor belt onto, what, some opposite conveyor belt, some deep space, some endless falling, some rocket-propelled thing?
	We don't know, right? But it takes you off, right?
	There was somebody who posted on the board about problems they were having with a relativist, right?
	But if you abandon relativism for the self-contradictory foolishness that it is...
	It's not your relationship to virtue that fundamentally changes.
	I mean, I kind of think it is, but what shows up much more immediately is the change in your relationship with others, right?
	So you had a template called romance is good for X, Y, and Z, right?
	Good for sex, good for self-esteem, good for feeling valuable, good for feeling cared for, and so on, right?
	And now that you've been working with yourself – sorry, lots of double entendres.
	Now that you've been self-stimulating, now that you've been – I'm sorry, I'm trying to thump in the bishop.
	I don't know. But now that you've been working with yourself for a while, you don't need that kind of affirmation or reinforcement from others.
	I mean it's not like you don't need it at all, but you really don't need it as much, right?
	Yeah, yeah. And so now the question is, I don't think the question is, let me just be annoying and sweep aside your question.
	I don't think the question fundamentally is, you know, what is the point of romance?
	I think the question is more fundamentally, who do I want now that I don't need?
	Right. Does that sort of make sense?
	Right. It does.
	And, you know, I know that does.
	You're right. That's a great question.
	And I think I feel like a serious pang of some real despair, I guess, when you ask that question, because...
	I realize I'm really looking for a diamond in the rough here in a very extreme way.
	But is that despair even yours?
	Maybe it is.
	No, maybe it is, but maybe it isn't.
	Because I'll tell you, oh man, I will tell you, when you raise your standards, my friend, you would not believe, you would not believe the pain it causes people around you.
	Right? I mean just to take – again, to take that typical example which I think we can all identify with to some degree.
	When you say – like when I was in my – oh gosh, I was like 16 or so.
	I went through a phase of heavy drinking which lasted about three weekends and like drinking to the point of vomiting and drinking to the point of whatever, right?
	And I just got tired of it.
	I didn't like the hangover and the fun of drinking wasn't – it didn't match the, you know, just sitting around feeling half dead for most of my Sundays or whatever, right?
	And so I stopped doing it.
	And unfortunately, the friends that I had in that phase continued to do it.
	And it was difficult for them that I didn't want to do it, right?
	Right. And this could work any number of ways, right?
	So there were some friends that I had, like when I was sort of 14 or 15, we played a lot of Dungeons& Dragons because we were just in such high demand in the sexual arena that we needed to retreat from that.
	And anyway, let's not go on with that story.
	So, you know, 14 or 15, I played Dungeons& Dragons.
	And then 16 or 17, I didn't.
	And there were friends who didn't make that transition and continued into their 20s and 30s playing Dungeons& Dragons.
	And it was painful for them that I didn't want to anymore.
	So I think when you say, well, when I'm raising my standards, I feel despair, it may be that it's yours.
	It may also be that it's the internalized people around you who feel despair that you're raising your standards.
	Because it leaves them behind, because it excludes them from your future, unless they grow, which, if they're feeling a lot of despair, they may not, right?
	Right. Right.
	No, that's interesting. I don't know if this thought has any validity, but it just kind of sprang up.
	But I think part of me feels like it's so difficult to find someone who...
	Would value the same type of introspection and non-violence and they'd have the same values.
	Part of me feels like it's actually so difficult that it's almost accepted that it's impossible.
	So in that case, if that part of me actually accepts it, then it is going to make it difficult because I actually don't believe that person exists.
	Well, that person exists in you, right?
	Yeah, it does.
	Would you say that person exists in me?
	Yeah. Would you say that there may be a few dozen at least people scattered around the world who listen to the show who hold those values as well?
	Yes, yeah. Yeah, I would say probably tens of thousands by now, maybe more.
	The impossibility.
	I'm trying to think whether I should recycle this anecdote or not.
	I really wish. I feel like an old married couple with my listeners.
	I have no new stories.
	Everything I think is new is like, oh, no, no, you already said that in podcast.
	Yeah, yeah. Look, the impossibility is not rational because not only are you doing it, but you know of many, many other people who are doing it too.
	So the impossibility is not rational.
	And so I would argue that the impossibility doesn't come from you.
	The despair and the impossibility come from those around you.
	People avoid growth by saying that growth is impossible, or growth is a lie, or growth is pretense, or by attacking the person who's growing as arrogant, as, oh, he's suddenly too good for us, or whatever, right?
	And so what they want to say is that growth is impossible.
	And there certainly are times where growth damn well does feel impossible.
	It's hard, hard, hard, hard, right?
	Yeah. And the reason why people who aren't going to grow tend to dissociate from people who are growing is they don't want to see that it is possible because that raises anxiety within them.
	Right. That makes a lot of sense and I already feel like you've given me a very useful angle that I wasn't even, I was not thinking about at all.
	Yeah, always look for the empiricism of the emotions.
	And if the empiricism isn't there, first place to look is the emotions of those around you.
	In your head. People you may never meet again.
	People you may never meet again in your life will be in your head until the end of time.
	Well, the end of your time anyway, right?
	Occupying space and calling shots.
	I still have cynical thoughts about my marriage from time to time.
	It's pretty occasional now. From women I haven't seen in 10 years or 15 years.
	Because I know what they would say.
	Or about Free Debate Radio.
	Right. I know what people would say if I were to re-engage with them in my life.
	Because they're already saying it in my head. And I know that they haven't changed because they haven't contacted me to say good job or whatever, right?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. You're absolutely right.
	I really connect with that.
	Yeah. Somebody's asked what's wrong with Dungeons& Dragons.
	Yeah. Let's get on to the really important topic.
	There is nothing wrong with Dungeons& Dragons.
	I think Dungeons& Dragons, I found it to be an enormous blast.
	It was so much fun.
	It was incredibly vivid for the imagination.
	Hey, sorry about that. It sounds like Steph's...
	He's not connected, but it sounds like the audio cut off.
	So, Steph, if you can hear us...
	Sorry about that. Is that better?
	Yep, yep. Sorry, you wandered out, right?
	Yeah, so it became an exercise in statistics and so on.
	And then there were other guys who, you know, there's something fundamentally funny, at least to me, about Dungeons& Dragons, which is not mockery, but it's just generally funny.
	And... There was another guy who like every time it would veer into comedy would say like, guys, guys, let's get serious.
	Let's get serious about this.
	Stop fooling around. It's like you realize we're sitting in a dark basement eating greasy pizza and drinking RC Cola and talking about fighting gas bags with one eyes in our imaginations and now you're saying let's get serious.
	I don't quite follow that way of thinking.
	Yeah. But I think that Dungeons& Dragons ideally should be a preparation.
	It should be rehearsal for a courageous life in the same way that comic books should be a rehearsal for a courageous life.
	So I don't know.
	Gosh, it's been a while ago, maybe 10 or 12 years ago.
	I watched the original Superman with Christopher Reeves.
	And I found it quite moving that this, you know, because I was really into that film when it first came out in the late 70s.
	I bought the baseball cards and the gum and I had like posters and I drew him and all that kind of stuff.
	I was really into that film. And I hope that I imbibed at least some of that idea of courage and integrity and so on, just as I did with Ayn Rand's novels and so on.
	Excuse me. Oh, only one sneeze.
	Don't you hate that? Anyway. So I think that Dungeons& Dragons is fine, but you don't want to get stuck in rehearsal in life.
	Right? You don't want to get stuck in rehearsal.
	You don't want to get stuck on practice without actually playing the game.
	You don't want to get stuck rehearsing the play and never actually go out and audition.
	And so I think that the purpose of it is to give you courage and imagination and other sorts of skills in your life.
	And so I think that if you stay in Dungeons& Dragons, just as if you stay in comic books, you are staying in a rehearsal space rather than getting out and bringing those values to life in the world.
	So that would be my argument about that.
	It's not a particularly foundational moral argument, but that would be my approach.
	People have said the FDR dating site.
	Well... See, that is to say that the dating site called FDR should be set up by somebody else.
	But why should that be? You know, if you see somebody who's attractive on the board, you can always send them an email and say, hey, how's it hanging?
	And you can reply back short, shriveled, and almost slightly to the left.
	Hi, Steph. I hope it's okay.
	I'll just jump in here. Sure.
	You've got a little bit of cut out, but let's try it again.
	Okay, let me try this.
	My name is Sandra and I'm from Norway in Scandinavia.
	Oh, hi. You just pinged me on Facebook earlier today, right?
	Yes. I would just like to talk a little bit about my experience with promoting freedom here in Norway, and at the end I have a question for you.
	Please. So, I'm a strong believer in freedom, and my life has become much more enjoyable after I accepted the premises of non-aggression principle, and today I consider myself an anarcho-capitalist.
	It has made my relationship with my wife much better, and we recently became first-time parents to a beautiful little girl.
	Congratulations! Oh, how nice.
	How old is she? Oh, she's six weeks now.
	Oh, man. That's a fun age.
	Congratulations. Is she smiling yet?
	Yes, she's smiling. It's incredible.
	Of course she is. She's born to ANCAP parents.
	Of course she's smiling. Anyway, go ahead.
	So, I obviously want to give her the best possible outlook for life and make sure that she grows up with good moral values.
	And, yeah, that's my introduction.
	And so, you're from Canada.
	You at least live in Canada.
	And Norway and Canada...
	As by many people.
	Okay, speak up.
	Just try to mute my microphone higher.
	Well, just make sure you don't have anything running on the background.
	You might want to turn your wireless off if you're on a wired network just because it could eat up bandwidth.
	You never know if Windows is downloading some update or something like that.
	I have closed down most applications.
	Well, let me try and continue, if it's okay.
	Okay, that's good. Yeah, so a lot of people will compare Norway and Canada, both socialistic countries.
	As you might know, Norway in the 70s, we found oil with oil outside our coast.
	And with the help of American corporations, we started the oil industry, and we are one of the biggest oil exports today.
	And what we did, compared to a lot of Arabian nations, is that we put the income from the oil industry into a public oil fund, which now has about $120,000 per citizen.
	So when you're born in Norway, you actually have a wealth of $120,000 in the public sector, which the politicians use for stuff like school and healthcare and social services.
	Right. So obviously it's very hard to argue from a topic of economy and capitalism.
	It's basically impossible. Because people, we have so much money here, they don't care if you could get like 10% less tax or whatever.
	They just argued that they should get more salary.
	And we also, our salary is very high, so it's very hard for Norwegian corporations to actually export Norwegian manpower.
	And we have to, there's a lot of few things we actually do well in exporting, and one of them is oil and fish.
	So, we're also a highly nationalistic country.
	People have a lot of pride in our flag, in our hot motherland, yet the Norwegians are introverts.
	In my experience, they are actually very depressed people.
	It's not considered rude to bump into another person and not say excuse me.
	Also, people rarely smile to each other, which I try to do all the time.
	But still, we are rated very highly on surveys for happiness and Norway is on the top when it comes to a lot of welfare stuff.
	So, that is hard in an argument.
	So, obviously, I have to focus on morality.
	And I have been blogging about software development and technology for many years.
	And I just recently started blogging about freedom and anarcho-capitalism.
	Because I realized there was a huge lack of liberal material in Norwegian.
	So I've been trying to fill that market here in Norway.
	I've been translating some of your articles, some stuff from Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and I write some of my own original content.
	So, what I have focused a lot on until now is the war, because Norway is the biggest weapon export in the world, and number one is the number of citizens in our country.
	Novedians consider themselves very moral, and they have a view of our country as we're giving a lot of foreign aid.
	As I started in the beginning, we have a lot of cash flow.
	I mean, it's all invested in the stock market and bonds.
	But we have a lot of money that you give to Poor countries in Africa and I argue that's just destroying their economy because we have toll restrictions so we don't want to import too much of their goods.
	And also we are engaged in Afghanistan and we are also heavily engaged in Libya.
	And the news today was that probably Norwegian F-16s probably was part of the raid that killed the children of the Libyan leader, Gaddafi.
	So, up until now it's been very rewarding to actually find out about freedom and use my time to discuss and argue, especially in Norway, because every single individual here believes in the welfare state.
	All the politicians, basically from left to right, it's all just socialists.
	There's no real difference, as you have talked about in the podcasts, on who is in control of the country.
	So, one interesting thing from my experience is that the people that contact me and agree with me are mostly immigrants from other countries such as Germany and Eastern European countries who have come to Norway and are more open to ideas around freedom.
	So I'm hoping you might have some tips for how I can spend my time more productive in discussion in Norway, which is mainly filled with hardcore socialists and a lot of communists who want even more government control and regulations of the markets.
	Right. Right.
	Why do you want to?
	Because it gives me a lot of personal pleasure and obviously after we got our baby girl, it's much harder to get the time to actually do blogging.
	But I still feel a lot of joy from blogging and trying to spend the evenings when the girl is sleeping.
	It gives me a lot of pleasure basically.
	Right. Okay.
	And why do you think it gives you pleasure?
	I'm not disagreeing, I just make sure I understand.
	Yeah, yeah. I grew up in a Christian family, as well as other Norwegians.
	And one of the things I've experienced as I've looked into freedom and anarchy is that When you look back on your own childhood and all the questions and knowledge that you thought you had, it's basically just fantasy.
	I like to say that the state is like a religion because there's so much stuff we believe in that we've never received any rational arguments from.
	There's a lot of things I still believe in and I just spend time writing about.
	Right, right. I realize that a lot of questions are wrong.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to have to just answer because you're cutting out quite a bit and I don't want to have to edit this too much.
	It's a tough question.
	I think it's important to recognize that If you have arguments from a fact, in my opinion, and in my considerable, which is not to say decisive experience, if you have arguments from a fact, well, you know, we've got this debt or, you know, this is welfare creates dependence and this is permanent underclass and what's going to happen?
	When the poor run out of money or the government runs out of money to pay the poor and they say, oh, well, you know, we'll just cut the military.
	You're going to go round and round.
	If you have arguments from a fact with people, in other words, the effects of statism are bad.
	Well, frankly, the effects of statism for some people are very good.
	And so you just end up back and forth from perspective to perspective.
	Arguments from a fact are like saying this movie is good and this movie is bad.
	You know, even the worst movie has someone who loves it to death.
	I remember one of the not so good albums I ever bought in my life was Freddie Mercury's solo called Mr. Biggest.
	Bad Guy. And a friend of mine at theater school said it was his sister's favorite album.
	I was just like, blah! Other than living on my own, maybe even love me like there's no tomorrow.
	Anyway, so arguments from effect will get you round and round.
	And they can be, you know, fun, but it's just batting back and forth opinions and perspectives.
	The argument from morality, as I've argued for many years, is the way to approach it.
	Which is to say, it doesn't matter what effect the government has.
	It doesn't matter if poor kids get to go to college because the government is paying their way.
	It doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter If parents get to stay home because of generous tax credits from the government, it doesn't matter.
	What matters is only one thing.
	Is the initiation of force good or bad?
	Is it right or wrong? If the initiation of force is right, then we can't have a government because everybody has the right to initiate force and it shouldn't be granted to some and denied to others.
	If the initiation of force is wrong, By golly, we can't have a government because then the initiation of force must be denied to all and not to some.
	Now, that, of course, is a five- or ten-minute argument.
	And arguments from a fact can go on literally for centuries as they have.
	Right? Now, this is all perfectly obvious once you see it, and I'm sure you've seen it before.
	Let me give you the caveat emptor, the buyer beware.
	The argument from morality...
	Will detonate a good deal of your relationships.
	Once you lay down the argument for morality, there is no turning back.
	You have now defined in a very clear way what is good and what is evil.
	What is moral and what is immoral.
	And if that doesn't work, you can use the against me argument, which means that, okay, so you like this government program.
	Am I allowed to disagree with you without being shot?
	Without you wanting me thrown in jail.
	And just by the by, I try to keep up with criticisms of what I'm doing because I think it's obviously fair to criticize what I'm doing.
	And people have said that I have not been using this argument much with people, and that is quite true because I'm having people on for discussions of ideas.
	If I'm having people on for a debate, then I think that's – I think I'm pretty – Pretty firm and strong when it comes to debating with people, and I haven't had people on that I'm going to have a debate with, and I don't like to jump people with the argument for morality, the argument for effect, because most people have never experienced it before, and so I like to lead into it.
	I don't suggest you just drop that bomb on whoever is around.
	But it is going to be challenging for your relationships.
	Now, that having been said, you know, it's maybe somewhat valuable for your daughter as she grows up or other children that she grows up to have some playmates.
	It can be helpful.
	So you may want to sort of review that.
	I think the argument from effect is not even good as a hobby.
	But I think the argument from morality is so explosive that it risks relationships and it's worth reviewing whether you want to do that or not.
	Yeah, I'm already doing it.
	It has affected some relationships I have.
	But I consider myself a pretty...
	I have a strong personality, so I actually can...
	What should I say?
	I mean, I can stand up for what I believe in, and I also can easily use the argument for morality.
	But some of my friends, some of my good friends, really think I'm really crazy.
	Right, right. So anyway, that's my suggestion that if you want to – the argument from effect is like a fog that you can easily get lost in.
	But the argument from morality is like some volcano-spewing sky laser that either frees people or vaporizes the relationships.
	Listen, I've got a couple of other callers, so I hope you don't mind if I move on.
	But thank you so much for the update and please keep me posted.
	Thank you. Sorry, I think we have Dr.
	your mom from Mason, which I believe is a region in the south, not that she's in a jar.
	Hello.
	Hi.
	Oh.
	Oh, Mr. Molyneux, thanks for letting me on.
	This is Lee Heem.
	I was on as doctor mom one time because you published my letter about the economic issues of medicine, but we're having a, you may have the biggest philosophic discussion.
	We had a long lasting one in our household and this thing about defense is what My son wants me to say something about.
	Because he's convinced me, I have to say, you and you have convinced me about anarchy on every front except for defense.
	And I guess I cannot, I don't understand how in a totally anarchic society, so I'm going to be a minarchist, I guess, because I just don't understand how in a totally anarchic society you can deal with national defense because, or with defense, because It's one thing when George Washington said we shouldn't get involved in foreign wars, but it was easy back then because you knew when somebody was coming long in advance and it was a physical mobilization to your shore and you could get your army ready and get ready.
	But we just don't have that luxury now.
	We have warfare that's very asymmetric, and a few people with the right in a nation-state can be putting together a large weapon that can be shot on a missile over to us, and we We wouldn't, you know, we can't, you can't combat that because at the last minute you decide to make preparations.
	This takes a long time preparing, and I just don't see how you do that.
	And according to UPB, you say, well, if the third party is threatened, you know, if my friend is threatened by a third party, I have the right to take out that third party before he kills my friend.
	It's kind of similar in this situation, when you have a few states that are willing to, I mean, we could argue about Iraq, and I think some of the facts are not completely true, but everybody cites about going into Iraq, but You know, if you're threatening an ally of the United States, or if you're threatening us, you're doing it in such a way you can't combat that at the last minute.
	And I don't understand, I guess, how an anarchic society deals with that, because not everybody's going to be anarchic.
	I mean, maybe the whole world war and everybody was peaceful and calm, but I just don't see that ever happening, or that has never happened in world history.
	I think that's a very good question, very good objections.
	First of all, I agree with you completely that there is not going to be – everybody goes to bed one night and wakes up in a stateless world.
	There is going to be transitions that are going to be in some cases slow, in some cases faster.
	They're not going to be uniform.
	And that is how things are going to change.
	And if you look at something like religion, you can see that there are some Scandinavian countries where 70 to 80 percent of people are agnostic or atheist.
	And there are places in the south of the US, of course, and there are places in the Middle East where people are much more religious.
	So it is a – there are places where it's going to take longer.
	The way I sort of think of it is like it's like a field with holes in it.
	It's filled with rain.
	The sun comes out and some parts are going to dry faster and some parts are going to dry slower.
	And so I agree with you that we can't wave the magic wand and say, well, a stateless defense will be taken care of because there will be no such things as governments anywhere in the world.
	because that doesn't explain the transition times and the transition points.
	So I just wanted to reinforce that argument of yours.
	I also agree with you completely that weapons have become much less predictable, much more dangerous and much cheaper.
	So if you wanted to go and, I don't know, raise a city in the Middle Ages, it took a lot of manpower.
	It took a lot of sweat. And now, of course, you can piece together some dirty bomb.
	You can put some poison in the water supply.
	You can do stuff which is pretty cheap, which is very hard to – relatively hard to detect and relatively hard to counter.
	And, of course, it's incredibly destructive.
	So I really wanted to reinforce and sort of get behind the objections that you have.
	Was there anything that I missed in terms of – before I tried to at least answer these questions from my perspective?
	No, but I'll tell you. Water supply, you don't have to worry about.
	It's smallpox. It could kill 60 percent of the world, but go ahead.
	Oh, that's right. That's right.
	Now, the thing that I would like to say first and foremost is that, and please don't take this the wrong way, the fact that you can't imagine how it could be done doesn't mean that it can't be done.
	I'm not saying that's an answer, but I don't know how my computer works really.
	I mean, I sort of have a vague understanding of it, but that doesn't mean that my computer doesn't work.
	So the fact that you or I or any individual can't figure out How national – how defense, geographical defense can be provided without a government doesn't mean that it can't be provided.
	There's a famous short essay called I Pencil, which basically describes how no human being in the world knows how to make a pencil.
	Nobody can figure out how a pencil gets made.
	One person makes the lead.
	One person makes the paint.
	One person compresses and fixes up the wood.
	And one person makes the eraser and then another person mines the metal to make that little hoop that goes around the eraser.
	But nobody knows how to make a pencil.
	So the fact that we lack knowledge of how things will work in a free society doesn't mean that they won't work out.
	I'm not saying that's a perfect answer, but I think that's the first thing to recognize.
	I mean, as you pointed out, there were things that I didn't know about how medicine works that didn't mean that medicine didn't work or wasn't effective in some ways.
	So that's my first answer.
	The second is, when it comes to Defending against aggression, which is really what we're talking about, defending against violence.
	And in terms of Iraq, right?
	So you say, well, there are some people who may have been freed from Iraq and so on.
	But the important thing about Iraq is not the relationship or the effects of the troops on the ground in Iraq, because that is only an effect of a much more fundamental relationship, which is the right the US government has to initiate aggression against its own citizens in the form of taxation.
	It is the taxation and, of course, the control of currency and interest rates through the Federal Reserve that allows for these wars to occur.
	And so I don't think you want to skip over that part because that is the essence of it.
	That is the essence of it.
	I understand that.
	Right.
	Now, I'm not saying this answer is – I'm just sort of pointing out where I would focus your attention from an ethical standpoint.
	Now, when it comes to aggression from foreign nations, I would argue – and this is – again, I'm not saying any of this is a perfect argument because it's about future possibilities.
	But I would argue that because weapons are becoming much more dangerous, that is the very reason that we need to not have a very powerful government when it comes to foreign interventions.
	issues.
	So, you know, there's that old argument that the Muslims hate America for their freedoms, and that's why they attack.
	And of course, if that were true, then the Muslims should have been attacking even more ferociously in the 19th century, when Americans were a lot more free, and Muslims, even proportional to now, were a lot less free.
	But that, of course, didn't occur.
	And there are countries that are freer than the United States, economically and politically, and...
	Those countries don't get attacked by Muslim extremists.
	The reason, of course, that Muslim extremists attack the United States is because the United States is arming the dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, is intervening and overthrowing regimes, is funding revolutions and counter-revolutions and is generally helping to make life fairly wretched for the local citizenry of the region.
	And so an excess of government power when it comes to the military increases the danger to the local citizens rather than decreases it.
	And if we trace back some of the economic catastrophes that have overtaken the United States over the past few years to the decision to not just go to war, which of course required deficit financing, which required a control of interest rates, which drove the housing bubble and the which required a control of interest rates, which drove the housing bubble If we look at the fact that the creation of massive government departments like the Department of Homeland Security,
	and security, as if there already wasn't a Department of Defense and the FBI and the CIA and the police and the FBI and all that.
	That has also caused huge harm to Americans.
	I mean, it's a softer kind of harm.
	It's not like getting blown up in a trade tower, but it can be very devastating, of course, for the people who are facing or experiencing long-term unemployment.
	The argument that we need a government with a strong national defense in order to protect the citizenry fails I think on two counts.
	The first is that it can only have that by initiating aggression against its citizenry through taxes and through deficit financing.
	And also it gives those governments then the power to go around the world stirring up a bunch of hornet's nests which then fly over in the bellies of planes sometimes and do harm against the US citizenry.
	So there could be arguments about that.
	The second thing that I would suggest is that – and I've made this case before, so I'll keep it kind of brief – is that the question is motive.
	Why would somebody want to attack a stateless society?
	Well, if you look at Germany, why did Germany want to attack in 1939 – I think?
	Now, in a stateless society, there is no tax base to take over.
	You don't just get to go in and say, well, I'm now the new government, so all the money you were paying to the old government, you're now paying to me because there's no tax base to take over, which makes it far less – it's much less of an incentive to do that.
	It's like breaking into a bank where there is no money.
	Well, you only break into a bank because there is money.
	And so you can't take over.
	The second thing is that one thing I would want from a defense agency in a free society is...
	A way of guaranteeing, as far as was technologically feasible and cost effective, a way of guaranteeing that any weapons that I was paying for in terms of geographical defense could not be seized and turned against me.
	And, I mean, lots of different ways you can do that.
	You could do sort of biometric fingerprinting on the trigger fingers.
	You could do retina scans in order to launch stuff.
	You know, those kinds of things. And so that if somebody came in and tried to take over the weaponry, it would not function for them.
	These things are all technologically possible, which is not to say easy or I know how to do it, but I know that these things can be done.
	And so if there's no tax base to invade and take over, if there's no meddling in local affairs from the anarchic government, which of course there wouldn't be because there would be no anarchic government… And if technological safeguards were put in place to ensure that any invasion of a free society would not result in weapons being taken over and used against the citizens,
	I think that's about as close as you can get to guaranteeing that invasions and these kinds of acts of aggression aren't going to occur.
	Does that mean that they're completely impossible?
	Well, no, but I think we work, you know, like most people do with probabilities, right?
	Well, I guess I've heard that argument before, but before there was an America, first of all, we had wars of aggression with Islamic takeovers of lands, not because of what we were doing to them or anything.
	I mean, we can argue about right or wrong, and I guess I'd rather go on the ethical principles here, but in the practical aspects here.
	But I have to say, I just have to make this point that Islam broke out and the Wahhabists stormed across lots of the world before we did anything to them.
	So I'm not sure I'm ready to take the hit that this is all due to us.
	And people have conquered the barbarians, not necessarily against Rome, but There have been conquests for land and resources, and you're going to have, people are going to be richer in an anarchic society, so you are going to have land and resources.
	I don't buy that just because you don't have a standing army or you don't have a government and a taxation base, there's not banks that are going to be looting, it's land and resources.
	But the other point is, you know, this eye pencil analogy.
	The difference is, it doesn't, I don't need to develop a pen or a pencil immediately.
	The problem is, if, you know, smallpox, let's take smallpox for a minute, not a nuclear warhead, because when people think of weapons of mass destruction, they always think of nuclear warheads, which takes a nation-state, it does take a big...
	Big financial base and lots of scientific input.
	I mean, we trained Dr.
	Homs, who was Saddam's bomb maker at MIT, and he had a lot of money behind him building a project.
	So it takes a nation-state to build a bomb, but it doesn't take a nation-state to Yet, if you have a germ like smallpox, and we know it's out there in lots of different little labs around the world, it doesn't take a nation state to propagate that.
	And the other reason that people are attacked is for religious reasons.
	Like I said, I mentioned the Islamic jihad in 1762, before we were a nation state, but there was also, you know, we have the apocalyptics in Japan.
	I mean, they didn't get very far.
	But there are people that have motives that have nothing to do with robbing your bank.
	And if they get a hold of something like smallpox, It can be a devastating worldwide problem that only a coordinated effort ahead of time to think ahead and try to come up with some counteractivity makes sense.
	I just don't... You know, if we're all anarchic and we're all sitting around, we're not...
	Unless we somehow group together and create a defense intelligence agency like the agency, I just don't know how we're going to be aware of the problems out there.
	And I do think that time is a big problem.
	You don't have time. The reason, and if you disagree with government, you disagree with this principle, but the reason that the Constitution was written and given command authority of the President is that sometimes you don't even have time to have the Congress Act.
	Congress has to act and maintain military conflict, but if things happen fast, you have to have a commander-in-chief.
	And there's a reason that they did that, because they saw how warfare happens.
	And I'm just, I just, that's the part I don't get.
	I think we'd be a richer nation, we'd be a more moral nation, and everything without government.
	I agree with you on that at every point.
	But I still don't, I don't see, and just like you say, yeah, I don't know how to build a computer, but I understand in theory how it is, and I kind of see the point in I don't even see a pathway to this.
	Can you give me a pathway to how we protect ourselves against the rogue madman with the bad weapon?
	Well, sure. No.
	I can't guarantee any of that sort of stuff.
	But I will say this, that if what you're talking about is the most rational and cost-effective way to defend, then...
	The majority of people will do that.
	So if having a standing army with a, quote, commander-in-chief who has the right to commit those forces at will or whatever, if that is the best way for society to defend itself, then that's what the free market will provide.
	And they will make the arguments and they will make the case and they will provide the analysis and they will provide the statistics to prove their case.
	And The majority of people will agree to that and will do it.
	And you say, well, okay. If you say, well, what if the majority of people don't agree with that?
	Well, if the majority of people don't agree with that, then that won't happen in a democratic society either because the majority of people will not vote for that.
	So anything that is going to occur in a democracy requires a majority participation to work.
	And if the majority of people accept the case...
	That the current statist way of organizing national defense is the best and most effective and safest way to do it, then that's what the free market will reflect.
	And so you still don't need a government to achieve that.
	And you do, of course, one of the problems with governments...
	It's when you get a coercive solution in place like taxation and military funding, it tends to be extremely unresponsive to changes in the environment, to changes in the situation, to changes in technology.
	And so if at the moment this is – the way that the governments do it is the very best way to do it, then people will fund that.
	A majority of people will fund that and it will be voluntary and it will be effective.
	With the plus, of course, that as threats diminish – So will people's desire to fund these agencies, which is exactly what you want to have happen.
	And if threats increase, of course, then the funding will go up because they'll make the case for that.
	But it still can remain voluntary and still achieve everything that you want it to achieve without the risk of allowing a coercive institution to gain a monopoly of taxation and war powers.
	And your defense, your DRO or your defense organization, it will have the power to do things covertly.
	Because, you know, the free market generally responds to over-the-above-board market responses.
	I see the need.
	I see, you know, I respond to a demand.
	That's not always the case when you have asymmetric warfare.
	It may be that the majority of people don't see the problem.
	So is your DRO able to act somewhat independently?
	And if so, then how do you prevent it from becoming a bad guy on your own block?
	Well, I won't go into this – the whole book with the whole section about that.
	How do you prevent a DRO from becoming a new government in practical anarchy?
	So I won't go through the argument here if you want to.
	You can check that out. It's a free book on my website.
	But I'm sorry.
	I'm just trying to remember your first part right before I had my bite of banana.
	I'm just trying to remember your first point.
	What was it again? Well, maybe I don't remember either.
	I mean, my point is that not every— Oh, covert.
	I'm sorry. I remember now.
	Covert, yeah. Look, I don't pay—so if I have an insurance company, I don't pay for every detail of their policies.
	I pay for security, right?
	So if you have a defense agency, people aren't paying for whether it's covert or not.
	What they're paying for is two things.
	Maximum security and minimum cost.
	Right? That's what they want.
	The maximum security for the minimum cost.
	Now, if covert operations give them greater security and or less cost or some combination thereof, then that's what will happen because the free market will supply that.
	If they find out That these covert operations are being used in some negative or destructive way, then people will simply cancel their contracts with that DRO company and go with somebody who's not doing that.
	So it's the general free market.
	How do you prevent an insurance company from failing to pay its claims?
	Well… Through the legal system, of course, which would exist in a parallel form in a free society, and also through the fact that the contracts are voluntary, so that if an insurance company gets known for not paying off its claims, people would just cancel their contracts with that insurance company and go with one who has a better reputation.
	Of course, it might be too late when the defense contractor doesn't do the right thing.
	Well, sure, but all that means is that the defense contractor is going to have to work extra hard to make his case.
	To be as above board, to be as cost effective, because everybody's going to say, well, if I make a mistake on this, then I'm really toast, which just means that people are going to have to be really, really careful, and they're going to have to review, and there's going to have to be independent agencies that monitor this, and people are going to have to be extra special careful about this.
	Now, if you say, well, if all of that doesn't work, well, yeah, look, every system can fail, but...
	I genuinely believe that a free system has a way of re-energizing itself, of re-innovating itself, of rewriting itself, that a status system doesn't.
	I would not say...
	That the average American is well served in terms of security and sustainability.
	And sustainability, right?
	I mean, you can make yourself very secure by locking yourself in a box with no holes.
	It's just not very sustainable because, you know, we like oxygen, if I remember rightly.
	Right. So I don't think that the current defense establishment is serving Americans in terms of peace, in terms of sustainable security because it's so massively in debt and is causing problems overseas.
	So that is a system that to me – and I think there's good reason to argue – doesn't work.
	And I think there's good reason to believe that another system will work by not provoking foreign governments and foreign peoples.
	As you know, the people in Libya who were getting tear gassed – Picked up the tear gas canisters and saw it made in the USA. How is that going to make Libyans or the million-dead Iraqis or the families of the million-dead Iraqis, how is that going to make them feel about Americans?
	Well, pretty angry.
	If you remember how you felt on the morning of 9-11, how you wanted vengeance and how you felt angry, well, the Middle East is experiencing a 9-11 every day.
	And they probably feel pretty much the same as Americans and others did who were angry and rightly so about that horrible crime.
	So yeah, it may not be a perfect system.
	But the whole point is that it remains voluntary.
	It remains as efficient and as cheap as possible.
	And if it is too late at some point, then that's something that can happen to every system.
	I just generally believe that peace and voluntarism is going to provide better and more sustainable solutions.
	Well, thank you.
	Thank you.
	Well, I appreciate that you're not convinced, but I certainly do appreciate that you brought up some great arguments.
	If you have some time, feel free to page through some of Practical Anarchy.
	And also, let me just see if I can dig this up.
	I don't know if you're in the chat window, but I read a good monograph by Hans-Hurman Hoppe about the provision of national defense in a free society.
	And I will see if I can put this in the chat window.
	Yeah, we can get it.
	Yeah. The myth of national defense, I think it was.
	Let me put this in the chat window.
	Ooh, that's quite the URL. Let me try that again, Charlie.
	Well, I'll give you a couple books.
	I'd recommend the book Disinformation and also the book Saddam's Bomb Maker.
	It's about Dr. Hamza, who was the MIT-trained nuclear physicist who worked for Saddam.
	And there is a lot of disinformation out there about what You know, I'm not saying what we said.
	The reason we went into Iraq, I don't think was exactly why we said we went into Iraq.
	But nevertheless, I am kind of tired of hearing this mantra, oh, they didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
	Just because they didn't find a nuclear weapon sitting on the launch pad does not mean that they were not in the process of building a very aggressive nuclear weapons program and a bioweapons program.
	And we have their bioweaponeers.
	So we know there were issues.
	But that's too big a discussion to go in here.
	But there's some very good references there.
	All right. I will check those out.
	Anarchy in return. Thank you.
	It sounds like a fair exchange of hostages.
	Okay. All right.
	Thanks very much. Those are really, really great questions.
	Thanks, Sam. All right.
	And I could have used the against me argument.
	But anyway. So, do we have time?
	We have time for one more short question.
	Somebody's asked, how's the DRL? I'm sorry, go ahead.
	Hi. Did you want to take that question that you were about to say?
	No, no, no. Live is better than typed.
	Great. Thank you. First, I just need to say that it's a great honor to speak with you, and I've listened to all of your podcasts and read RTR. Wait.
	You're saying you've listened to all of them?
	All of them. Oh, shit.
	You mean I really have to come up with something new?
	Hang on. Let me lie down. I've got to put a cold compress on my head and see if I can come up with something new.
	Possible use of my time.
	I have no question.
	So my question has to do with a relationship that I had before I came to FDR. And it has to do with my friend.
	Let's call him Bob to use a throwback.
	So Bob...
	His political philosophy is basically fascistic.
	He is basically an advocate of what the most sort of potentially irrational and sort of conspiratorial anarchists sort of say is coming about, like a one-world government he thinks is ideal.
	I mean, it's just horrible and a brick wall, and I've asked him You know, if, like, if I decided not to pay taxes and sort of boycotted the government and stuff like that, like, you know, would you advocate that I be aggressed against for that?
	And, you know, in so many words, he did say yes.
	I mean, not even so many words.
	I'm pretty sure it was pretty direct.
	Well, you have to admire his integrity, if not necessarily his rationality, but you've got to admire people who stick to the logical principles.
	Conclusions of their premises. I mean, I think consistency is the surest road to wisdom, if wisdom is possible, because if he's not bothered by advocating violence against you, then at least there's some possibility of being wise about the relationship.
	But sorry, go on. Yes, no, I absolutely think that you're right about that, and he does make a big effort.
	I mean, he's a very intelligent man, and so he is very consistent, and I think he does have good integrity about some things.
	But, you know, it's been about two years that I've been talking to him about anarchy.
	And, you know, we're both 20 years old right now, so pretty young.
	And so, you know, I'm kind of...
	What? Young? I'm sorry.
	My bad ear. You just switched my hearing.
	Sorry, go on. Well, what I'm really looking for is sort of an idea from you as to...
	More signs that I can look for to say, you know, maybe I should look for closure on this relationship or I can continue on and hope that sort of I'm able to change his mind.
	Right. That's a very good question.
	And, you know, my usual caveat is I can't tell you.
	I can give you some ideas that I would try.
	But obviously, you know, a relationship.
	How long have you known the guy for? It's been about three years.
	We made friends senior year of high school, and we've been keeping in close touch when we went to college also, and we see each other a lot when we're both in New York City.
	Right, right. Right.
	Well, what was his childhood like?
	Well, he's from a pretty affluent family.
	They have just a wonderful Brownstone in Manhattan.
	Both of his parents went to Yale.
	I find them very nice people.
	When we have dinner together, it's always very nice.
	The thing that I see as potentially being there during his childhood is sort of a lack of being able to sort of go on his own initiative and make his own decisions and maybe like an over kind of controlling thing which makes sense with what you've said in the past.
	And do you know how your friend experienced what is usually called discipline when he was a child?
	I honestly can't say that I do.
	I feel remiss totally for not knowing that.
	No, it's not remiss because we're generally...
	It's a funny thing in society as a whole, right?
	And you can tell from this tone that I'm going to wax philosophical, but I'll try to keep it short.
	I'm ready. We're allowed to ask...
	About a lot of things. Political beliefs, religious beliefs sometimes as well.
	But when people are talking about the state, what they're talking about is authority and conformity and punishment.
	And that doesn't mean that the state is the only thing that has a relationship on these.
	I mean, in a free society, there will be authority, there will be conformity, and there will be punishment.
	It's just that authority is an overhead and conformity suppresses Creativity, which has an economic cost, and punishment is expensive.
	So in a free society, these things will work to be minimized.
	But when people are talking about authority and conformity and punishment, particularly when they're young, although it's not only when you're young.
	Most people go through their lives without examining this.
	Is the first question...
	That we should ask ourselves when we're talking about the state is, in order to remain objective, is what is my historical relationship with authority and conformity and punishment?
	Or, to put it another way, what is my historical relationship with virtue?
	And how was...
	Virtue and right behavior and good behavior inculcated in me when I was a child.
	Because if you don't know these things about yourself, then when you're talking about the government, it is undifferentiated, it is unanalyzed, and therefore, I think, can't be objective.
	Yes. I mean, I think that that is a great way to ask him, which is, you know, how were you taught about what's good and what's bad?
	And, you know, how did you learn about virtue?
	And then, although, of course, it's a little bit more delicate, asking about discipline.
	I don't know. I guess I needed, you know, some of your guidance to really know that that was what I needed to do or to remind me that that was what I needed to do.
	Yeah, what I found helpful is – and I had a conversation with a determinist about this.
	It was relatively recent, a couple of months ago.
	And the important thing is to reassure people that this is not about winning or losing the argument.
	So if somebody comes at me and says we should have a one-world government and you should be punished for not going along with the general social order of statism or whatever – Then I can interrupt them and I can say, well, okay, hang on.
	This is not to prove or disprove my case or your case, but just so that I can understand where you're coming from, I'd like to get a bit of a history because you're very certain about this kind of stuff.
	And maybe you're right, but I have sometimes found that people, particularly when they're younger, who are very certain about stuff, are going off the momentum of history of their childhoods.
	That's why it seems very clear to them, and that's why it seems so certain, because they're just kind of repeating and expanding upon what they experience as children.
	So this has no bearing on whether you are right or I'm right, but it is a way of exploring whether there may be influences that are causing our debates to not get anywhere.
	Because if you keep having a debate with someone and you don't get anywhere, it's because you're not talking about what's really going on.
	That's the most fantastic caveat.
	Yeah, and so just say, look, let's put aside the question of one world government and taxation and deficit financing and national banks and interest controls and let's put all of that aside.
	And let's just make sure that we don't have any historical debris that is interfering with us making progress in this conversation.
	And I think that's just a sensible thing to do in general, particularly when you have repetitive conflicts with people or you have debates that just seem to go round and round, and when debates get bewildering, and when debates seem to be like shifting sands or fog going through your brain, and when definitions change and nobody notices it, and when you get all of those, these are all signs, to me at least, of unconscious defenses.
	And if those unconscious defenses are not examined and are not understood, And are not bypassed in some way, then you're just not talking about what's really going on and you can't make any progress, if that makes any sense. I completely accept that.
	You know, like I've always sort of felt that it's like I'm having a debate with someone and I don't know that there's a sniper in a bell tower who's zoomed in on their forehead and is going to shoot them if they admit that they're wrong.
	Now, if I don't know that, then I'm going to be bewildered and confused by the lack of progress in the debate, right?
	Yeah. Like, if I don't see the sniper, if he doesn't say, hey, by the way, you see that laser, it's not just a moving zit, it's actually a sniper scope on my forehead, right?
	So if you don't know...
	That somebody has a, quote, sniper in the bell tower in a debate.
	And this is why debates about UPP can get so volatile and confusing for people.
	It's because to admit a lack of knowledge about virtue is to feel one's own personality unravel and one's own entire culture to unravel.
	Because if we confront a lack of knowledge of virtue in ourselves, what we do is we say, okay, holy crap.
	For like 20 years, I've been told what is right and what is wrong.
	And if society doesn't know what is right and what is wrong, but merely was using morality to get me to obey, that says some pretty damn terrible things about my society, about my culture as a whole, about its knowledge of virtue, about its knowledge of me wanting to be virtuous, but also about using my desire to be good to get me to conform To power.
	To get me to obey those in power.
	A knowledge of virtue combined with a use of virtue to control people is pretty damn nasty stuff.
	So when you're talking about ethics with people, you're pushing them close to this precipice of disintegration, of dissolution, of self, of authority, of culture, of country, of everything.
	Yeah, if you pull out the right part of the foundation, the whole building crumbles down.
	Right. And so there is a sniper at the bell tower for a lot of people when it comes to philosophical debates.
	Just as there is, like, if you're talking to people about aggression towards their children, if they're aggressing towards their kids, well, if they question that and if they begin to say, oh, my God, I really should not be attempting to, quote, instruct my child through aggression because all I'm teaching him to do Is to obey someone in power.
	And yet, I will never say to my child, obey me because I'm bigger and stronger.
	I will always say, you should do the right thing and obey me.
	It's good to obey me. And I'm going to punish you if you don't because you're bad.
	So I'm using morality as a guise to control somebody else when in fact I'm merely exerting the power of authority.
	Yeah, and that blowing up in someone's face is very painful.
	Oh, my God. Because then it's their own personal history.
	You know, my parents and their parents and my teachers.
	And then what I've been doing, you know, to have to apologize to a child.
	Oh, my God. Oh, my friend.
	It is a hard thing to do.
	I mean, I do it at least once a day.
	You know, Isabella was jumping off the couch the other day.
	And I had my legs crossed and I was sort of encouraging her.
	But she jumped too close to my leg.
	And she tried to avoid my leg.
	And then she fell and she turned her ankle a little bit.
	And she cried. No, I mean, I know it wasn't my fault.
	But nonetheless, I felt terrible.
	Terrible. Because it's like, oh man, I could have moved my leg before.
	I could have seen that coming. These are the things that you do when you're a parent.
	You expect omniscience and perfection and all these kinds of things.
	Yeah, absolutely. And I felt bad that she'd hurt herself.
	And I was like, oh, I'm so sorry.
	Oh, baby kicks. And then give a big hug and all that.
	And she was fine. But...
	That was just, I mean, that was mere accident and maybe even, you know, a tiny lack of forethought.
	It always seems obvious in hindsight, though you sometimes don't see this stuff ahead of time.
	And you're just like, I'm so sorry, and so on, right?
	And that's when it's inadvertent.
	I mean, if I'd actually spanked her and frightened her and yelled at her, and then I had to apologize to her for having done that like 50 times, it'd be like, oh, wow.
	Oh, it'd be horrendous.
	So with your friends, I think it's important to take the rightness and wrongness out of the conversation and simply to talk about you have some historical relationship with authority and with punishment and with conformity that I believe has led you to be more open to libertarianism, to anarchism, to voluntarism, just as I have.
	And your friend has most likely had some historical experience with these things that lends him to be more susceptible to these kinds of tyrannical or, as you say, fascistic ideas.
	If you don't know what those are, all you're doing is you're just pushing surface sounds around.
	You're not getting to the core of the problem.
	And you've probably heard the bomb in the brain stuff, but it might be worth reviewing that.
	Yeah, I've listened to that one actually a few times.
	Right. So that would be my suggestion.
	Certainly don't give up on friendships, in my opinion, because of differences in values.
	Don't give up on friendships because of differences in values.
	Because differences in values can be enormously productive in terms of understanding how history shapes values.
	You know, if you and your friend have different values and you can find in history what has led you to those differences in values.
	And that doesn't mean who's right and who's wrong.
	It just means differences, right?
	Then there's an enormous opportunity for knowledge, knowledge of your friend, knowledge of yourself, a much closer intimacy than arguing the surface of long-ago causes.
	Now, I do believe that if your friend simply refuses to talk about any historical precedence for his beliefs and still continues to advocate the use of violence against you and won't listen to reason and isn't curious about his own history, well, then you may have another choice.
	But a difference in values is an opportunity.
	To explore causes, which I think is a really wonderful opportunity.
	And a difference in values, I mean, obviously he's not pulling out a gun against you.
	We're talking pretty abstractions, right?
	A difference in values isn't like, well, I don't want to be robbed and you want to rob me.
	That's more of a difference of actions.
	But I would try and open that up and just remind him that it's nothing to do with who's right and who's wrong, but it's a way of trying to understand Where you both are coming from in terms of the discussion.
	So hopefully make a real breakthrough in terms of your friendship.
	Thanks so much. I mean, I really just can't thank you enough for everything you've done.
	And I can't wait to hopefully see you this summer at one of the events.
	And I hope you have a wonderful day.
	I certainly will.
	It is always a huge, huge pleasure to speak to listeners.
	I admire you guys so, so, so much.
	I also wanted to point out mises.org forward slash etexts forward slash defensemyth.pdf is the text that I forgot to mention earlier.
	Somebody had a question that they fired it off a number of times, so I'll just give a very quick answer, if you don't mind.
	Sorry for the quick answer.
	Just scroll up and find it.
	How does the DRO overcome self-sufficient persons, farmer, vital persons, world-known surgeon that cures people that nobody else can, and the mainstream media?
	A mainstream media celebrity portraying the DRO that judges it as evil and says that people have to go to the competition.
	Well, if somebody is a self-sufficient farmer, let's say that they're just somewhere out in the wilds in Montana, and I believe Montana is mostly wilds, then they actually, you know, that's the, if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?
	Well, if somebody who is completely self-sufficient doesn't have any effect on society, who really cares what they're doing?
	Somebody goes and lives in the woods and eats berries and whatever and lives in a cave and never interacts with anyone in civil society, who cares?
	Yeah. It doesn't matter now.
	Of course, if they come into civil society, they need to go to a dentist, they need to have an operation, they need to, I don't know, get some food they can't get anywhere else, then they're part of civil society and that will be the case.
	How does the DRO overcome vital persons, well-known surgeons that cures people that nobody else can?
	Well... There's nothing for the DRO to do about that.
	The DRO should respect his contracts or her contracts and that's usually dealt with in the price mechanism for one thing.
	So if the guy can cure people that nobody else can, we hope that of course he's going to train other people.
	We hope that he's going to share his knowledge and I think a lot of surgeons are very good and very helpful that way.
	But he will just simply be I would assume expensive and he may do some pro bono stuff and there may be charities that will help people to achieve him but that will be dealt with in the market.
	The mainstream media, mainstream media celebrity portraying the Dero that judges it as evil and says that people have to go to the competition.
	Well... DROs are not going to operate in terms of quality on hearsay.
	That simply wouldn't work.
	It doesn't work that way.
	So if a DRO judge is against a celebrity, then the DRO will have to provide, obviously, a very good case given the public nature of that celebrity.
	The DRO will probably submit that finding to a third judge, an appeals process or a third judge.
	And at some point, the celebrity is just going to look foolish.
	If the DRO's decision is overturned, Then – I mean I would assume like there would be some contract that says let's not go public until all of this stuff is resolved and that would be to the benefit and protection of both parties.
	But if the DRO's decision was overturned by a third party, then yeah, that would be a very important thing for the celebrity to say and it would be very important to – To help publicize that the DRO had made a mistake or done something wrong because that would encourage people to either go to another DRO or for the DRO to reform its policies so that this didn't happen or at least happened as little as possible.
	So I hope that that answers some questions.
	Thank you again everybody for all of your support.
	Freedomandradio.com forward slash donate.
	If you would like to help out with the conversation and looking for a couple of people to help me finish up the website, if you have HTML or.NET Nuke expertise, I would really appreciate that.
	So have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.
	I'm only here because of you at every level.
	And thank you, thank you, thank you for this amazing, wonderful and incredibly privileged opportunity that I have.

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