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July 16, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:10
1954 Emails of the Week July 14 2011 - Santa, Murder, Rape, Freud, Abuse - and Peaceful Parenting!

Emails of the week from Freedomain Radio, July 14, 2011.

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Hey everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. It is July the 14th, 2011.
I hope that you will come and see me at Liberty Fest 2 in New York, September the 10th, 2011, lfnyc.com.
So here are some listener emails.
First, just wondered, because I have a child on the way.
Congratulations, my friend! What are you going to tell your daughter about Santa?
Will you tell her the truth? I'm not sure what to do.
Would be great if you did a video about this.
Well, I am a philosopher, which means that I focus on telling the truth.
Honesty is the first of all virtues, because without honesty, no other virtues are possible.
And so, yeah, I will tell her the truth.
I'm not going to tell her Santa doesn't exist, because he's right there in the mall, grabbing kids and putting them on his lap.
But I will tell her that he is a fun story.
You know, when we were in Libertopia last year and a giant turtle played with her, a guy in a giant turtle suit, I didn't tell her it was a real turtle.
I said it was a guy in a turtle suit and that's a guy in a Santa suit.
So you just tell them the truth.
And also tell them the truth that some kids are not told the truth.
And, you know, maybe you can let their parents break it to them.
So, another one. How are you, Steph?
I've spoken with you online via email, your Sunday radio show, Liberty Fest chat, etc.
Love your show, podcasts, books, YouTubes, everything, baby.
You've been a massive inspiration to me and my life.
Thank you. I was going to buy some of your books in hard copy, but ran into a financial bump.
So I couldn't at this time, but I am starting an internship this summer.
So once I get my first paycheck, expect a donation.
Well, thank you very much.
I do like to eat, so I appreciate the donations.
Now, the situation and the question a friend and I were discussing certain things, such as private law and a truly free society when the subject of rape came up.
Long story short, I ended up getting excited and made the statement that, in general, those who commit rape, in my mind, forfeit their right, and so to spend any more money on these people is worthless.
All rapists should be eliminated by that, I assume.
You're talking about the death penalty.
While my statement may not necessarily hold true in my mind by and large, the reality of the situation is that those who commit such acts are more or less better off dead.
Well, that presupposes a whole chunk of knowledge that you can't usually be really certain of.
So, how do you know for sure that a man or woman charged with rape is in fact a rapist?
It may not be the case. It could be a lie put forward.
It could be a delusion.
Somebody could be mentally ill. There could be many, many things.
Now, there are times, you know, maybe you've got video and DNA evidence and semen evidence and this and that and the other.
But just look at what happened to Dominique Strauss-Kahn recently.
It is really, really risky to say, I know for sure about the truth of a situation to the point where I'm willing to pull the trigger on somebody else's forehead.
That is a very, very tough situation to come by.
Now, I agree with you that you should not spend money on people who've been convicted of a crime.
Of course, it's completely ridiculous and would never be the case in a free society for sure.
The old idea of justice in sort of Anglo-Saxon history was called the Wareguild.
And what it basically was, was if I stole your cow, I owed you two cows, right?
One cow to resent another cow for all your trouble.
And so restitution was the name of the game, and particularly financial restitution.
So if I beat you up, I would owe you 100 gold coins or whatever.
And this was how we balanced out, or this is how the culture in the time balanced out restitution and crime and so on.
Right now, what happens is all victims of crime in our state of society are victimized twice.
They're victimized by the criminals.
They're very likely also victimized, I guess, three times.
They're victimized by the criminals.
They're very likely victimized by the criminal justice system, which actually is not a contradiction in terms, but a truth in advertising slogan, a criminal justice system.
And then they're victimized again by having to pay for the taxes to keep the convicted in prison.
This, of course, is never how it would work in a free society.
In a free society, if you were attacked by somebody, you would get restitution.
The restitution wouldn't be to the point where you'd want to be attacked by such said person, because then people would just do it for profit.
But it would be some way of alleviating the sting, pain, ugliness, post-traumatic stress disorder or anything else that came along as a result of the attack.
I've got chapters on this in my free book, Practical Anarchy.
All my free books, I might as well go through them, are available on my website.
We've got Untruth, the Tyranny of Illusion, which is my introduction to philosophy in a social context.
We have Untruth, sorry, we have Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics.
These are all free PDF and audiobooks.
Real-time relationships. The logic of love.
We have everyday anarchy.
Practical anarchy. We have against the gods.
How not to achieve freedom, which is my argument against political and professorial or academic action to promote freedom.
And the new one, the Handbook of Human Ownership, a manual for new tax farmers.
So I hope you will go and check those out at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
So let's see here.
He's... He's come to the real question.
Just as you would, Stefan, if a female is being raped and acts in self-defense and kills the man, this is assumed to be fine, as she did what she needed to do to survive.
His murder slash death was justified due to his actions.
At what point is the taking of his life not moral?
Is it 30 seconds after the rape is finished?
Is it the last insertion of the penis that dictates rape is not happening, therefore there is no self-defense?
Would it be immoral for her to find the rapist two weeks later on the street and then go and stab him then?
Nobody can answer these questions.
This is exactly why we can't have a state.
The state is an attempt to create absolute answers to relative questions.
There is no... Absolute answer about when the shimmering nano-field of self-defense evaporates.
Is it ten minutes afterwards?
Five minutes afterwards? At what point ahead of time can she shoot someone in the head?
If he says he's gonna rape her, but he's only joking, what happens then?
If he says he's gonna rape her and then begins to joke a little further or, you know, not that that's funny, but you understand, right?
If you think a guy is going to hit you, but he's only scratching his head, you get to belt him on and say, well, he was going to hit me.
But these are all questions that you can't answer.
There's no objective...
There's no way to apply moral rules called rape is wrong and self-defense is moral.
There's no way to apply those to every conceivable situation.
You will always find one situation.
If you slice this pie thin enough, you will end up with a slice that you can't eat.
You will always find some situation where the moral rule cannot be applied.
This is why you need. A private justice system that is continually trying to find rules that are effective, that are suitable, that are appropriate, that are justified, that are flexible.
You need that so much.
That's why you can't ever have a government system, because some of these cases are really complex and difficult to answer.
And when anything is complex and difficult to answer, the last place you want to put it in is in the hands of well-armed, brain-dead bureaucrats.
That is my answer to that.
You can't ever provide an answer for it.
But the reality is, look, here's the basic reality.
Don't mistake the future for the present.
Don't mistake the future for the present.
If you want to eliminate rape, or at least reduce it substantially, first thing you need to do is get rid of the government.
Government is a rape machine.
If you look at the army, the prevalence of rape within the army, both within the service and between the service and the civilians that they interact with in these war zones, rape is endemic in these systems.
If you look at prisons run by the government, rape is endemic in the prisons.
If you look at some of these boot camps run or licensed by the government where judges have been recently convicted of throwing Young men and women into these horrendous bootcamp situations.
Rape is also occurring there.
So yeah, if you're interested in getting rid of rape, first thing you do is get rid of the government.
And then you can worry about the other things.
For me, you just got to look at the biggest problem first.
This is not an insult. This is just something we're not used to doing.
This is the way I look at it.
Come to a town. A third of the population is dying of cholera.
Rape! My God! I mean, one out of three boys and I've read somewhere two out of three girls have complained about sexual assault at some point in their childhood, for heaven's sakes.
Anyway, you come to a town, people are keeling over dying of cholera.
And you quickly figure out that it's in the water system.
It's in the plumbing. It's in the sewers.
It's in the whole water delivery system.
So, what's your first plan?
Is it to sit there and say, well, you know, what about if an asteroid tumbling through space that has a cholera bacteria on it hits someone's swimming pool, they then go in and drink it?
That's, you know, we've really got to set up an asteroid shield for these swimming pools.
No, you say, well, first thing we deal with...
It's the water supply. And then, once that's dealt with, let's figure out how much cholera there really is left over.
And it's the same thing with rape.
You've got to get rid of the government if you want to eliminate a good chunk of adult rape.
You've got to get rid of the government. And then you can see what's left over.
Of course, the only way to get rid of the government in the long run is to raise children peacefully and non-violently and as equals in as many respects as is possible in every situation.
And then if you raise children peacefully, you're not going to end up with rapists.
Rapists are people who were sexually assaulted or abused or raped themselves as children.
It's almost a one-to-one correlation.
From what I've read, and it's my strong opinion, that if children are raised peacefully and with a healthy regard to their own body and sexuality and with appropriate boundaries, there's no way, unless someone has some bizarre brain tumor, which is the moral equivalent of the cholera-laden asteroid hitting a swimming pool, you're not going to have to worry about rape.
By the time the state is gone, children are raised so well, you're not going to need to worry about rapists.
So... Yay,
brother! Good job! I just want to tell you that everything you say is striking a power chord in my heart.
You are a great man doing phenomenal work and no one else's philosophy speaks to me like yours.
Just something about your beliefs and convictions feels right and the way you deliver them is unrivaled.
Please, for the sake of the slaves, stay strong, healthy and committed to the cause.
I know you will. Thank you again for opening my mind's eye and giving me a certain understanding of myself that I never knew to be possible.
I am truly grateful to you.
If you ever want to talk philosophy with a 20-year-old, or if you have any questions or statements whatsoever, give me a ring.
It would be a very exciting thing to be able to speak to you one day.
If we do not ever get the pleasure to talk after this, I want to say good luck, good health.
And much success for you in the future, Stefan.
Well, thank you. That's a beautiful message to hear.
I will, of course, you know, with all gratitude and pleasure in what you're saying, thank you so much.
But if you think that I have a passionate and engaging or charismatic delivery, just be careful.
Because remember, it's not me who's right.
It's truth and evidence that's right.
If what I'm saying conforms to truth, reason, and evidence, fantastic!
Then let's charge over the hill of validation together and enjoy the fruits of the valley of rightness.
I like that place. But remember, don't take what I say at face value.
You have to be Mildly cautious when you come across somebody who really clicks with you because you wouldn't want to get swept along in any mistakes or errors that I have been making so enjoy this I'm very very glad very very happy but remember it's truth and evidence not me that you need to incorporate into your life all right let's see something about the roads I think I'll skip that do you believe in a God or a higher power no Let's see.
Do you think that Socrates' revenge, elevating the power of the state and its laws, was subconscious, conscious, or a fluke, which can only be seen as revenge in hindsight?
This is my six-part series, The Trial and Death of Socrates.
I would strongly recommend having a look for it on YouTube.
It's some of my proudest work.
I'm very emotional for me.
But in it, I argue that Socrates' vengeance against the people who were forcing him to drink hemlock was to praise the power of the state.
And what this man writes is, do you think that the tribulations which are taking place in Greece right now could be the culmination of Socrates' revenge?
Whether subconscious, conscious, or in hindsight?
In other words, do you think things are going to calm down?
Or has the vast middle group between the virtuous and the evil finally begun to recognize the evil for what it is?
I do not believe that tribulations breed wisdom.
Tribulations for people not already in the habit of searching for reason and evidence and wisdom tend to make people's beliefs and prejudices and superstitions harden.
Somebody who's religious is not going to find God because he gets cancer.
More likely he's going to become more religious.
You have to be on the path To wisdom before tribulations will accelerate that.
Tribulations simply make your current path faster.
If it's towards truth, great, you go faster.
If it's deep in the shrouded, bloody, mystical fist of error, you just get crushed even smaller.
So... Can you name me the three most influential books in your life which have made you a more introspective philosopher?
I would have a tough time bringing that down to three.
I read a lot of Freud in my teens and early 20s and thought he was just fantastic.
And he's actually been rehabilitated recently.
There's a study that came out of Europe.
Recently, that proved that if you try to forget something, you actually start to forget it, which is Freud's theory of repression.
So there's quite a lot of evidence that a lot of what Freud said is more and more correct.
Freud's great, disastrous, literally globe-crushing mistake, corruption, cowardice, whatever you call it, was, he was, of course, when he was dealing with hysteria.
In Vienna, in the late 19th century, his patients, who were considered hysterics, and most of them were women, would come to him and say, I can't see when their eyes were perfectly fine.
I can't feel my legs when their legs were perfectly fine.
These were called hysterics. And in conversations with Freud, they said the same thing over and over.
They said, well, Dr.
Freud, I was raped as a child. I was raped as a child.
I was sexually abused as a child.
I was molested as a child.
This was said over and over and over and over again.
And he began to publish these findings.
And the great massive globe-spanning underground of child abusers and molesters and pedophiles rose up and attacked him.
Attacked him through every conceivable angle that they could think of.
And he blinked.
He blinked, and I mean, I can understand that.
It's a scary thing. And he said, well, okay, there can't be this many rape victims in Viennese society.
There can't be this many women being raped as children, men being raped as children, so it's a fantasy!
And this is where you get the Oedipus complex, or the Electra complex, right?
The Electra complex is that the little girl fantasizes about sleeping with her father sexually.
And it's a fantasy. And so if they report it happening, it's just a child's fantasy.
It wasn't something that actually happened that daddy raped the girl or the mom raped the boy.
And he blinked and he transformed these statements of agonizing truth.
Into a completely anti-scientific recasting as wish-fulfillment fantasy, thus taking the genuine crime of the abusers and making it the imagined crime of the victims.
I genuinely, I can't prove this, but I genuinely believe that if Freud had not Blinked at this moment if he had not recast the genuine stories of sexual abuse into fantasy stories, thus blaming the victim and absolving the parent.
In fact, making the parent a victim.
Making the raping parent a victim of false allegations based upon the primordial incestual sexual fantasies of the child.
If he had not backed down from the truth, and we now know it is pretty much the truth.
I mean, the prevalence of child rape around the world is staggering.
If he had not backed down, I genuinely believe there would not have been a World War I. I'll talk about that more another time.
I just wanted to say, write somebody else.
I thought your interview on Alex Jones was very well done.
I've been on his show a couple of times, and I do find him quite an exciting person to match metaphor generators with.
I listen to Jones during the day and am also a fan of yours.
I think it's great that you brought your wonderful message to a new audience.
Although I may not agree with everything you say...
I greatly appreciate the manner in which you deliver your message of first principles and non-aggression.
I point people to your channel as often as I can.
Thank you so much. Yeah, look, I agree that it's fun to be on Alex Jones' show.
I like Alex. He's got a great deal of passion.
You know, he and I don't see eye to eye on everything, but that's okay.
I don't see eye to eye with myself about last week, so that's all right.
And I guess this is another...
It's a comment that I will get with some regularity.
So let's say I have some statist on my show and I'm interviewing him about his arguments or his book or his perspectives and people are like...
Steph, you scurvy chicken shit.
Why aren't you pulling out the against me argument or the anarchist argument against this guy?
Why aren't you attacking his positions?
Well, the simple answer is because it's not a debate.
It's an interview. When you go to interview for a job, you don't expect the guy across the desk from you to give you his resume, the guy who's interviewing you.
If it's a debate, then it's a debate.
And if I want to have a debate with somebody, I'll say, hey, let's have a debate.
And I don't think I've ever pulled any punches in a debate that I've had, whether publicly or on YouTube.
But these are not debates.
These are interviews where I am trying to elucidate or help the person express his position to my audience.
If I say to people, listen, I want to have a debate with you, the most likelihood is that they'll say no because a debate takes a lot of preparation.
It can take a week or two of fairly full-time preparation.
So that's why debates are kind of few and far between.
They take a lot of work. So, yeah, that's the reality.
I recognize that it's not a debate, but an interview, so that's not what it's for.
So, last one, it says, Thank you!
Your parenting videos are just amazing.
The non-aggression principle has literally opened up a whole new world between me and my son.
No yelling, no hitting, no power authority is the best way to get your child's attention.
Share your love, teach them, and prepare them for adult life.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
I have to say, it was a tough go with this mother when I began implementing your philosophy, not mine.
But when we're with other parents who are yelling at their children instead of talking to them, we realize how silly and dangerous their behavior is.
Thank you. You've given me so much insight into the most important thing in my life, my son and our family.
I can't thank you enough.
Well, I'll tell you, my friend, you not yelling at, not hitting and not aggressing against your son and your wife, opting into peaceful parenting, that...
It swells my heart like a cosmic explosion of helium balloons.
I really, really, really appreciate that, and I get at least an email or two a day from parents who have decided to turn down the rod, to spare the rod, and...
Like and love and act on that love for their own children.
That is the very best thing that can happen in the world.
That is the very best message to get out of philosophy, that the non-aggression principles applies to children.
First and foremost, if it does not apply to children, it will never be accepted in the world.
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