Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

July 4, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

18:49

1943 E-Mails of the Week, July 5, 2011

http://www.fdrurl.com/bib Great philosophical questions from brilliant listeners answered by Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Moly from Freedomain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well. It's outdoorsy time, my ladies and gentlemen.
	Time for listener emails.
	These are from YouTube. Steph, there seems to be two types of adult human beings, good and evil.
	Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the more I learn, the more it seems the old tales of good versus evil are true.
	There are people who can change and feel morality in their guts, and there are people who do not.
	Well, I agree.
	I'm a moralist. And for a moralist to say there's no evil people is like a dietician saying there are no fat people.
	The whole purpose of a moralist is to encourage people towards virtue and to shun evil.
	And so, yes, I agree with a lot of the Christians who say that the greatest trick the devil was able to pull off in humanity, was convincing them that he did not exist.
	And there's been a lot of Focus on the elimination of evil as a moral category, substituting understanding and sympathy and empathy and all these kinds of things, which I think is just showing your weak spot to a torturer, saying, hey, Mr. Torturer, it really hurts when I do this.
	So what's he going to do? He's going to do that.
	There are also the people who don't know yet, who are ill-informed or uninformed or what have you.
	And I think those people we have some sympathy for, right?
	So there's a third category, which is people who are, in a sense, neither good nor bad, but in a state of nature, relative to virtue.
	And those people, I think, require gentle, positive, encouraging illumination.
	Now, once they have moral knowledge, then they have moral responsibility.
	That is eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
	Once you give somebody the black and white rotating disco light of morality, they are now responsible for dancing to the tune of virtue.
	Sorry, that metaphor kind of got away from me.
	But yeah, absolutely. And to me, the definition of evil people are those who use morality to control and subjugate others, who create moral categories that are supposed to be universal, but who then reject the universal application to themselves.
	A simple example is a public school teacher who says to the children, don't use aggression to get what you want, and then goes and petitions her union to force taxpayers to increase their salary or benefits.
	She's using or he's using violence to get what he wants.
	And that may be just out of ignorance, but once the teacher hears that argument, then he or she has a moral responsibility which he didn't have before.
	So yeah, this is why morality is so alarming to people in power, because they use morality.
	Morality was invented, is used as a tool to subjugate people, to turn them into self-attacking, cringing slaves.
	Who only beg for ethical mercy from the clause of their masters.
	The ethics do not apply to the masters.
	Only and forever is it a slave morality.
	And the power of the philosopher is to extend the moral principles that everyone accepts to include even the masters.
	And then, lo and behold, ladies and gentlemen, we have no more masters.
	Hi Steph, I'm a big fan of your videos and I've sent them to friends and family in the hopes that they too can come to their senses.
	I personally enjoy your videos regarding parenting as well and look forward to more of them.
	I find it interesting, looking at the history of your videos, that first you were more interested in debunking organized religion and then moved on to government.
	My own discovery was similar.
	I was brought up Orthodox Jewish.
	First, I read as many books as I could find about evolution and then atheism to make sense of religion.
	I chose atheism.
	Well, it's not a choice. It's an acceptance.
	And then I read about history and governments.
	I'm now an anarchist. Have you noticed a pattern with people that first they debunk the more ridiculous claim of religion and then move on to government?
	I think that's very true. And I think that the answer for that or the reason for that is very simple, which is not to say obvious, which is that we encounter religious propaganda sooner than we encounter status propaganda.
	So children, of course, are baptized and We get all of that propaganda from Sunday school, from when we were very young, from, I remember having my Bible stories of Jesus with pop-ups and all this kind of stuff.
	And so, yeah, it happens that we receive propaganda earlier about religion and then later we receive the propaganda about the state.
	And so, yeah, it makes perfect sense to me that we would end up wanting to debunk religion before we wanted to debunk the state.
	And, of course, Fundamentally, we debunk religion for exactly the same reason that we debunk the state.
	Because, you see, in religion, there is a third invisible party called God, right?
	So there's the priest, and then there's the parishioners, the congregation, and then there's the third invisible party called God.
	God, you see, has no voice.
	And so he has to speak through the priest to the congregation.
	This gives the madness of the priest absolute power.
	You see, this religion is giving the madness of the priest absolute power.
	Power. And, lo and behold, when you look at the state, you have the citizens, you have the politicians, and you have democracy, you have the social good, you have the collective, you have the country.
	You have the Constitution.
	Anything which doesn't have a voice and doesn't fundamentally exist, my invisible friend is always right and he only speaks through me.
	That is narcissistic, grandiose, madness made, absolute reason and truth through the fantasies of the subjugated.
	So it's exactly the same reason.
	Anybody who can invent an omniscient and omnipotent third party who can get you to believe that that third party only speaks through him has owned you For life and in religion in the beyond.
	So yes, I think that's very true.
	Trying to keep these short?
	I started having a notion in my head lately.
	How can we resist the subjugation of our lives in non-violent means from a government that is completely willing to imprison us, hurt us, kill us if we do not obey?
	So I guess this message is a two-part question.
	In what ways can people resist the current statism or resist statism non-violently?
	Great question. If we do not wish to fund wars or terrible social programs doomed to fail by not paying taxes, the IRS will take all that we have.
	Is it moral to respond with violence to those who would take our freedom and our wealth that we have gathered from blood, sweat, and toil?
	And let me just get this last page here.
	Well, this is my answer and I'm going to keep this very short because I get this question all the time.
	What do I do? What do I do?
	What do I do? Well, first of all, even if I didn't have an answer about what to do, the truth of my statements or falsehood of my statements would remain.
	But if you want to save the world, if you want to free the future, you have to stop looking for short-term gains.
	You have to stop looking for the immediate.
	We cannot dismantle the state.
	We cannot end war. We cannot end unjust imprisonment.
	We cannot end the war on drugs.
	We cannot end the permanent calcification of the underclass of the poor.
	Through political action, through speech, through willpower, through eloquence, through anything that we have at our fingertips.
	The only way to end the predations of oligarchical, hierarchical violence is through peaceful, positive, pacifist parenting.
	That's all there is.
	And as far as what you can do to end the violence in the world, we end the violence against children.
	If you want to check out the reasons for this, fdurl.com forward slash b-i-b, Bomb and the Brain series.
	Give you all the science behind this.
	Human beings are not born predatory.
	We are not born violent.
	We are not born dominating.
	We are not born aggressive.
	We are not born exploitive.
	We are made that way.
	We are carved that way.
	Our brains are shaped that way.
	We are created like evil statues through the blows of those who have authority over us when we are children.
	That is the sum Total.
	The Alpha and the Omega of human aggression is early childhood experiences.
	Aggression against us, whether it's physical aggression from our parents, sexual aggression from anybody who has power over us, or even most tragically, in many ways, the verbal abuse and aggression of politicians and parents and priests and teachers.
	If you want to make the world a peaceful place, we have to stop raising budding predators through aggression against children.
	Now, what can you do about this? Obviously, if you're a parent or going to be a parent, please, please, please, please study peaceful parenting techniques.
	You do not need to raise your voice.
	I have never raised my voice.
	I have an incredibly strong-willed and wildly energetic daughter of two and a half.
	And we negotiate all the time.
	I have never raised my voice at her.
	I have never called her a name.
	I've never threatened her.
	I've never punished her.
	And she is an absolute, true, deep joy and delight.
	And she has never been aggressive towards another human being because I don't teach her that language.
	I don't show her that language, that evil serpent-tongued language.
	of criticism and put-downs and abuse and threats and violence.
	That is a confession of failure as a parent and as a moral human being.
	So please, please, please do not use violence against your children and then, sure as night follows day, we shall not have violence in society as a whole.
	That's the first thing. Now, if you don't have kids, you probably know somebody who has kids and you can do what I do, which is anytime you see aggression against a child, You intervene, and you intervene as peacefully and positively as possible.
	So you say, you see a child being spanked, you know, you can say, look, spanking reduces IQ points.
	Spanking has been statistically and scientifically shown to increase aggression.
	Spanking may cow and break a child in the moment, but when the tide turns, when things reverse, in puberty, when the child gets bigger, and you're no longer doing this, but you're doing this, when the child gets bigger, The child will turn on you and accept the same hormonally-driven tyrannosaurus vengeance against you that you meted out when you were big and powerful and could strike down the child.
	When you hit a child, when you bully against a child, when you aggress against a child, all you are teaching a child is that might makes right.
	And if that's all you're teaching your child, his might will grow, and your might will diminish, and he will turn on you, and your life as a parent will become incredibly difficult and stressful as your children age.
	So, talk to parents.
	Talk to anybody you know who's got parents.
	Give them parental effectiveness training.
	Send them to nospank.net.
	Send them to any of my materials about peaceful parenting.
	I've got a whole feed about how to resolve conflicts with children without using a shred of aggression.
	With using good humor and patience and positivity.
	And that is the best thing that you can do.
	Forget about the state. We cannot act against aircraft carriers.
	We cannot dismantle nuclear weapons with our words.
	We cannot unravel armies with our eloquence.
	All we can do is cut this evil and blood-soaked river of the human compulsion to violence off at the source.
	And the source is aggression against children.
	So, last but not least.
	Hi, sorry to bother you, but I've really been struggling to answer this question.
	Is government really that bad?
	I love learning about anarchism, and I completely agree that the initiation of force is immoral, but I can't help to think that sometimes is the government that bad?
	I mean, I live in Canada, and I think everybody I ask will tell me that I live in a good country with freedoms.
	I always hear that we are a free country.
	Why get rid of a system that seems to be working?
	When I think about it, I can probably do pretty much anything I want in Canada within the law.
	Well, that's true. The law, for the most part, seems fair.
	I don't see any huge advantages of getting rid of the government.
	Maybe instead just reform our system.
	That is a great question.
	That's a great question. And Canada is a pretty good example.
	I live in Canada. It's considered to be one of the nicer countries around.
	And it is. I mean, let's not pretend it's not.
	But we do not judge The value of a system by its immediate effects.
	There are two ways to judge the value of a system.
	One is the ethics, the fundamental morality of the system, and the second is its long-term effects.
	So, for instance, If we're going to judge, say, taking heroin, by the first 10 minutes after you take heroin, how's it going to feel?
	They're like, damn! I can't believe I ever took anything else!
	Why would I not spend my entire life on this joyful multi-orgasmic brain spasm?
	Well, because there are long-term negative effects.
	So, why would you ever quit smoking?
	Because your next cigarette is a great solution to the problem of addiction because you get rid of the pain of addiction by having your next cigarette.
	It's only in the long term that we find the value or non-value of particular systems.
	So we need to look at the long term.
	Now, any system which is unsustainable is fundamentally based on immorality because the moral is the practical.
	I'm with Aristotle, I'm with Rand, I'm with a lot of other philosophers in this area.
	The moral is the practical. Canadian system is unsustainable.
	The Canadian system is unsustainable.
	This is a young man, I guarantee you, or a young woman who is not facing any significant health issues and is not having glorious and wonderful access to the Soviet array of waiting lists that await people who need medical care in Canada, or is probably not one of the millions of Canadians who cannot get access to a doctor and have to rely on emergency room medicine, which is the most catastrophic and wasteful and time-consuming of all.
	So, the system is unsustainable.
	Any system that is in consistent debt is unsustainable.
	And when we look at an unsustainable system, we look at the morality of the system first and foremost.
	A man who eats 10,000 calories a day is having a great time of it while he's eating, but that is unsustainable from a longevity standpoint.
	A man who smokes, like Stieg Larsson, 60 cigarettes a day and has 20 cups of coffee a day is really not having any problems with his addictions in the short run.
	It is only in the long run that the issues show up.
	The Canadian system is unsustainable.
	Canada is catastrophically in debt.
	Canada faces an aging population.
	Canada faces a diminishing work base of younger workers who, by the way, can barely get jobs as it stands.
	Canadian housing crisis, sorry, Canadian housing is in a bubble and Canada has the vast majority of its banking holdings are based on U.S. dollars and the U.S. dollar is going to go south relatively soon.
	Canada has sold off the vast majority of its gold over the past few decades because those people in power want to trade fiat, bullshit, paper, ass wiping currency for actual tangible assets.
	So the Canadian system is unsustainable.
	A man who is Borrowing a million dollars a year looks like he has a fabulous lifestyle.
	And you're like, why am I working so hard when he could have all this stuff?
	He's got the same job as me, but he's infinitely wealthier.
	Well, he's in debt.
	And when he's in debt and can't pay it back, those chickens are going to come home to roost him.
	And so, sure, it looks fine at the moment.
	There's no question it looks fine at the moment.
	And for the baby boomers, Sorry, even that word tastes metallic and it's like licking a battery of narcissistic immorality.
	The baby boomers who received several dollars in government benefits for every dollar they paid in taxes, I bet loved the system completely and built up an enormous amount of personal wealth from raping the future.
	But it doesn't last.
	And that which doesn't last is fundamentally immoral.
	Immoral at its core.
	So, it's not a question.
	Government is the wrong definition.
	The government is the wrong definition.
	I mean, if you define raping as dating, it really confuses the issue.
	Government is the wrong way to look at it.
	Government is simply a label.
	It's like saying, is the church really that bad?
	Well, do you mean the building?
	Do you mean a system of beliefs? Do you mean this?
	No. The church survives on lying to and terrifying children by pretending the most evil fairy tales in the world are true and have them bound up in its oily, snaky, God-ridden tentacles for the rest of their lives.
	Sorry, I have a big backyard, but as you can see, it is under a flight path, so I hope you'll forgive my desire for a little bit of sunlight and my slowly reddening head.
	So, religion is the wrong way to look at it.
	The church is the wrong way to look at it.
	Is it moral to terrify children with lies and buy false forgiveness for non-existent illnesses like original sin for the rest of their lives.
	Is that immoral? Is it immoral to say to children that there is a God who is watching them and who will judge even their thoughts and that the best man, the most moral man in the universe, was murdered because they, the children, were evil and immoral because a talking snake convinced a woman to convince a man to eat an apple?
	And therefore you need to give me money and time and resources and hand over me, your children, to infect With these vile lies for the rest of their lives and have them pay me and their children's children pay me.
	And by the way, some of us want a piece of your son's dick.
	Well, is that moral? Of course it's not moral.
	Forget about the term government.
	Self-government could mean self-control, but what you want to say is, is the initiation of force moral or immoral?
	You've answered your own question. If the initiation of force is immoral, then what we would expect is an unsustainable system if it is based upon that.
	If you build a house on sand, it's going to fall down.
	If you build a boat on land, it ain't going to sail.
	If the system is immoral, one of the ways that you can tell is that it ain't going to last.
	And so, yeah, system seems fine right now, I guess, in a way, sorta.
	But taxes keep going up.
	The tax base keeps shrinking.
	The economic system is creaking and splitting at the rafters.
	We are the Titanic that hit the iceberg about a generation ago.
	Yes, it takes a long time to sink.
	But don't imagine the ship's okay, because we ain't down yet.

▲