The fundamental problem with modern politics, the bottomless cynicism of the voting public, how the ruling class will maintain its power, and the moment that modern education truly died.
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| And good evening, everybody. Welcome to Truth Transmission. | |
| I'm your host, Jay Kettle. It is currently 7.07 here on the East Coast. | |
| We're broadcasting live out of West Stretton, New Jersey. | |
| Our official chat is located at truthtransmission.com forward slash live. | |
| If you're listening on Vaughn Live, TwitCam, etc., etc., you can find our official chat there. | |
| And this evening's guest is Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio, and he was voted recently one of the top ten figures in alternative media. | |
| Yeah, I didn't even know this was going on, but somebody sent me the link, and I am catching up to David Icke, and I think that's the important place to be in alternative media. | |
| Catching up to David Icke? | |
| Yeah. Yeah, he's pretty big. | |
| He's pretty up there, I have to say. | |
| He sold a lot of books. Right. | |
| So there are a couple topics that I wanted to run by, and I want to start off with the 2010 – or excuse me, 2012. | |
| What am I saying? 2012 presidential race is going to be going on because, of course, we have libertarian candidates and regular republican neoconservative nutjob candidates. | |
| People that are going to be running and, you know, the Democrats, etc. | |
| And obviously, you're more of a right-wing philosopher because I would say that anarchism or what you preach falls more to the right, I would say, than it would to, you know, liberal big government. | |
| I would say you're the opposite of that. | |
| So, what are your thoughts on the 2012 presidential candidates? | |
| And of course, Ron Paul's running in the Republican primary, but what are your thoughts on the whole situation? | |
| Well, I must confess to, I only follow it through occasional perusing of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, just because I think he's funny. | |
| So, it is the usual clusterfrag of hypocrisy and deceit. | |
| You know, and I would say with the exception of Ron Paul, who is taking a pretty principled position, and of course a lot of his principles I'm sure you and I would agree with, and some of them certainly I would not agree with, but I haven't been following it hugely because it just seems... | |
| I don't know if it's because I'm older and therefore have experienced more and maybe a little bit more cynical in some ways, but it seems nuttier than it used to be. | |
| I mean... Michelle Bachmann seems nuttier than Hillary Clinton. | |
| I mean, this husband of hers who apparently has allegedly run some sort of cure your gay teenagers through the love of Jesus kind of thing, which doesn't seem to me quite the right approach to man love. | |
| But anyway, it just seems kind of nutty, the whole field, and the religiosity I think I used to classify myself as leaning a little bit more towards the right, | |
| but that's only because I didn't really notice the undercurrent of religious fundamentalism that is so common among fiscal conservatives and Republicans. | |
| I find, in a weird way, I have equal sympathy To many of the Republican arguments and to many of the Democrat arguments. | |
| So I don't like the religious fundamentalism. | |
| I don't like the rejection of certain aspects of science or a lot of science that seems to go on. | |
| I don't like some of the homophobia that seems to run through some of the fundamentalist Christian side. | |
| But on the other hand, I at least like some of their talk about fiscal responsibility, even if they never quite seem to be able to achieve it. | |
| On the other hand, with the left, I appreciate their criticisms of big corporations. | |
| I share most of those criticisms. | |
| Corporations are monstrous beasts created for and maintained by the state in order to create privilege for the rich in return for which they get donations from the rich to maintain their political control. | |
| So I think some of those criticisms are great. | |
| But at the same time, there's this veneration of the public sector, which of course is where they get on the left most of their political donations. | |
| This is true here in Canada, as it is in the United States. | |
| And of course, they are for a sort of soft socialism. | |
| I love their critiques of the war, and I don't like the militarism of the right-wing Republican Party. | |
| So it's... | |
| It's hard to choose which flavor of crap you want in your sandwich, so that's why I try and stay away from the buffet as a whole. | |
| Well, one of the... You mentioned Michelle Bachman, and I've watched some of her videos, and this woman is about as stupid as you get. | |
| Now, I'm not religious. | |
| I think that religion is a bane on society. | |
| I take a very Richard Dawkins approach to that realm of things. | |
| I think that it's not good, and this woman's sort of, you know, gays are the devils. | |
| You know, we need to cure them of their homosexuality and things like that. | |
| And it's almost comical because we live in the 21st century. | |
| I think that in many other countries we all sort of view each other as humans and yet these people are not equal to you and people are going to vote for this woman too, which is the bad part. | |
| Americans are going to vote for her. | |
| Yeah, and too, you know, Jesus seemed pretty dewy-eyed, and you had 12 guys hanging around commando with each other, unmarried. | |
| I don't know, it just seems like, well, of course, I mean, the fundamental problem with Christianity and homosexuality, and this is true for most of the major religions, is that There's this perception that man is made in God's image. | |
| And so if there's any deviation among men, and one of the most significant deviations, and this doesn't mean deviant, just to mean sort of deviations for our masculinity, is heterosexuality versus homosexuality. | |
| And I think that's one of the reasons why there is this primitive response. | |
| So, you know, if there are gay men and straight men, and man is created in God's image, then God has to be either gay or straight. | |
| And if he's straight, then gay is bad. | |
| And if he's gay, well, we can't think about that at all. | |
| So I do think that there is a problem. | |
| Of course, a lot of the ethics in the Bible are inherited from sun-baked Bedouin lunatics from thousands of years ago who thought that epilepsy was a sign of infestation by demons. | |
| And so homosexuality would not be something that would be understood biologically or from an evolutionary standpoint. | |
| So there is this sort of fear and rejection of it. | |
| And I think it's genuinely tragic. | |
| I mean, there's nothing... Broken or wrong about gay men and gay women. | |
| I think they're fantastic. They're great additions to the culture. | |
| I went to theatre school for a couple of years, so I had some friends who were either gay or coming out of the closet at the time. | |
| Wonderful, sensitive, intelligent, creative human beings, fully worthy of everyone's respect in the world, particularly for the challenges that they go through based upon the after effects of the Judeo-Christian culture. | |
| So I do sort of look at this like it's looking through a lens of highly coiffed medievalism strolling up to the platform. | |
| That's my concern. And it's funny because prior to the advent of Judeo-Christian culture into Europe and of course other parts of the world, when you look at Greece or Rome or most other parts of the Mediterranean world, it was very accepted in Sparta, the most manly of men. | |
| Their lovers were not their wives. | |
| It was their friends. It was their male counterparts. | |
| In Athens, teachers used to take young student boys in exchange for their knowledge. | |
| And then, of course, Judaism and Christianity come along and say, this is no longer okay. | |
| Men can no longer love men. | |
| And then you have people like Michelle Bachman in 2012 and Mitt Romney running on the platform that we're going to keep marriage sacred. | |
| But by whose standards? Yours? | |
| Yeah, and I mean, even Ron Paul, who has a lot of, I think, some commendable flexibility in this issue, has some question. | |
| You know, he says it's okay for the states to define marriage as that between a man and a woman. | |
| But although he says that's in the current context and he would ideally elect the government out of the marriage business altogether, which I think I would support. | |
| But it's a challenge, you know. | |
| I mean, and it's a challenge on the right. | |
| It's a challenge on the left. I was just reading up here in Canada that there's an election coming up here. | |
| And the teachers unions have dinged all of their members for I think it was 65 bucks or something like that and that gives them a couple of million dollars of a sort of war chest for the political campaigns that are coming up. | |
| Now any politician of course who's got any brains at all and I think politicians they may not be good but they ain't dumb. | |
| They know that if they say anything negative about public school teachers, about tenure, about benefits, about summers off, if they attempt to reform or change the system in any way that is considered negative by the teachers or their unions, that they're going to have a couple of million bucks worth of negative ads shown against them. | |
| And so on the left, there is that same issue of being held hostage by a particular constituency. | |
| On the right, it has a lot to do with evangelical Christians. | |
| On the left, It has a lot to do with the unjust recipients of state goodies in the form of public sector unions. | |
| You know, you kick over these scorpions at your peril as a politician that really narrows and limits the debate to that which is inoffensive, you know, like rah-rah America and let's build a bridge to the shining city of the 21st century and all these poetical, nonsensical, empty-headed, carbonated metaphors that mean nothing to anyone. | |
| You can talk about that kind of stuff, but the moment you start to talk about anything specific, you're toast. | |
| Like, you can talk about cutting government in general, but the moment you start talking about cutting... | |
| Particularly large programs, in particular, you're going to be toast because you're going to rouse all of the negative or attack ads that can come out of those special interest groups. | |
| To me, it's just an exercise in blandness. | |
| I think that the political process as a whole is akin to pickpockets. | |
| They work in two usually. | |
| One guy will bump into you and then the other guy will pick your pocket. | |
| While you're being jostled, your pocket gets picked. | |
| The media and the election and the politicians and the glitz and the balloons and the songs and the stump speeches and so on, they are the guy who bumps into you and then the government is the guy who actually picks your pocket. | |
| And so I try to keep my eye on my wallet and avoid the lumbering elephants and donkeys trying to bump into me. | |
| Well, sure. And the other thing is that we have a lot of people in, let's say the South and the Midwest. | |
| I mean, I would say the Northeast is a very educated area, at least for the most part. | |
| And not so many people in this area are as blinded by this blind patriotism as they are in some other parts of the country. | |
| So you also have the issue of all these people waving the American flag and saying, our government is doing the right thing all the time. | |
| And they are just completely blind to the fact that their pocket is being picked. | |
| Well, sorry, let me just say, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I just read something recently that I'm going to release as a podcast. | |
| What would be your guess as to the percentage of Americans who feel that the powers of the federal government are legitimately derived from the consent of the governed? | |
| 30%, 40%? | |
| 19%. Wow! | |
| Wow! Less than one-fifth of the population believes that the federal government is justified in its powers and then that those powers come from the people or from the consent of the people. | |
| Less than one in five Americans. | |
| So, look, I agree with you. | |
| I mean, there still are, of course, a lot of fist-pounding, flag-waving, white picket fence-jumping people out there, you know, praising this. | |
| But, I mean, the amount of cynicism, the amount of Crap that people have been force-fed, particularly over the past three years, since 2007, 2008, since we see people being turfed out of their homes despite the fact that nobody seems to have clear title, | |
| when we see people who've paid off their homes or bought their homes in cash getting kicked out of their homes, when you see returning veterans getting kicked out of their homes, and when you see bankers swallowing like Like a boa constrictor mouthing an antelope, swallowing these enormous bailouts at the huge expense of the citizenry and of the future. | |
| I think that the amount of popular resentment, which you saw boiling over in England recently, the amount of popular resentment that is out there, the amount of cynicism, disgust and revulsion towards the state, I think I've never seen anything like it, but it's extraordinarily powerful. | |
| And the riots in England were pretty bad, and of course we have a rising debt here in the United States, and that sort of brings me to my next question. | |
| First of all, is it going to get any better? | |
| Because it doesn't really feel like it to me. | |
| To be honest with you, Stefan, I'm thinking about becoming an expatriate and moving to South America, because I'm done with it, and especially if anybody like Michelle Bachman or Mitt Romney gets elected to the government in 2012, I have a planned vacation next year for South America. | |
| And depending on the results of the election, I'm going to either stay down there and buy a house or come back to the US. Is it going to get better? | |
| I mean, you know, is anything going to happen here? | |
| Are we just going to be sort of wallowing on our own shit for the next couple of years? | |
| Oh, it's more than a couple of years. | |
| I mean, Japan is now entering its... | |
| I think it's close to its third decade of recession since its housing market crash. | |
| It's, you know, Jake, it's a pretty painful subject for me because I... I mean, I think like most people, I love or loved the idea of America. | |
| You know, like a small government, locally involved citizenry, charities helping out people in a private context, and isolationism not getting wrapped up and entangled in the blood-soaked octopus fangs of worldwide conflicts. | |
| I loved the idea of a free America and By God, ever since 2001, and it's been accelerating, it feels even more now. | |
| It has just been watching a loved one go through a blender in a slow, screeching, banshee wail of agony. | |
| So I find it extraordinarily painful to watch what is happening to America, and I find it quite painful to see what is happening to Europe as well. | |
| I mean, it is The Death of the West. | |
| It's a show series I did about 18 months ago, I think. | |
| And of course I did Statism is Dead as a Philosophy a couple of years ago and I think it was about five years ago I said it's going to be five to fifteen years that we're going to see the real unraveling. | |
| I feel that that's very much on schedule. | |
| I said that when Obama went in there was going to be nothing more than an expansion of state powers and he was going to keep none of his fundamental promises and in fact he was going to enact the exact opposite policies that he had spoken about all of which has come true. | |
| Not because I'm any kind of genius it's just that you don't need to be a genius to say that somebody who's a Terminally addicted to heroin is not going to get any better before they die. | |
| But the system has far gone beyond the point of slowdown or return. | |
| And so the future, certainly in the sort of three to five to seven year window, looks pretty damn grim indeed. | |
| And that's unfortunate because a lot of people who are now in their old age remember the days of literally the white picket fence America with the house and the dog and you could be a janitor at a school and put two kids through college and have money for retirement. | |
| But the generation that I'm in and the generation that is coming after me, kids who are in middle school now and things like that, they're going to have it even harder of a time. | |
| Now, do you think that this is simply going to affect the United States and larger countries? | |
| Because let's say I do move to Ecuador, I do move to some South American country, will I still be hit there? | |
| Will I still be affected in the same way that I would here? | |
| No, no, certainly not in the same way that you would here. | |
| I mean, in South America, they have an enormous skepticism and hatred of government already. | |
| I mean, these countries went through, I mean, It had a lot to do with American foreign policy, which we don't have to get into much detail here, but these countries went through astoundingly destructive times in the 70s and the 80s. | |
| They went through hyperinflation, they went through currency collapses. | |
| They view government as a necessary evil that you have to live with and you can form as little as humanly possible. | |
| They're sort of a fast-forward, a post-economic collapse of the view that Americans are going to have towards their government. | |
| So it's going to affect you for sure. | |
| It's certainly not going to affect you as much. | |
| But I think it's also important to remember that in America, as is true throughout the West as a whole, there are three basic classes. | |
| There are the productive classes, rapidly diminishing. | |
| There are the parasitical classes, and this includes corporations all the way down to people on welfare. | |
| And there are the political classes, the ruling classes. | |
| The ruling classes are not stupid. | |
| Boy, if they were, wouldn't we be even dumber for being ruled by them? | |
| I'm going to ascribe to them astonishing feats of intellectual brilliance, because otherwise it's just too damn humiliating. | |
| But they are not dumb, and they know that they have taken from the productive classes in order to buy votes from the dependent classes too much, too hard, too deep, and too long. | |
| So when they start running out of money, they are simply... | |
| They're going to use all their rhetorical talents and they are going to, of course, bring the mainstream media right along with them. | |
| They're going to start talking about the necessity for shared sacrifice. | |
| They're going to talk about battling the demon of debt. | |
| They're going to talk about, you know, this is the new war. | |
| It's not the war on terror. | |
| It's the war on error. | |
| It's the war on debt. | |
| It's the war on dependency. | |
| And there's going to be all kinds of tough talking stuff out there about how we need to double up and eat cat food and make sacrifices to save. | |
| Now they're going to be all about the children, all the poor children. | |
| We've got to save the economy of the children and they're going to whip people into a self-sacrificing frenzy and all of that's going to be to diminish the payments and the protections to the dependent classes. | |
| And they are going to liberalize things for the productive classes. | |
| To me, it's not going to be sort of like end of Atlas Shrugged situation where the whole world's going up in flames. | |
| There's simply going to be a readjustment. | |
| This ruling structure of society has lasted, you could really argue, since the formation of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. | |
| It is not going to end in five years. | |
| They are simply going to adapt and they're going to adapt by freeing up the productive classes and screwing the dependent classes and then everyone It's going to blame the free market. | |
| That's sadly inevitable. | |
| Well, isn't that what always happens? | |
| They blame it on the free market? Sure. | |
| Of course. I mean, absolutely. I mean, this is the genius of inventing the sort of middle class and the shopkeepers and so on is that when the prices go up, people don't phone their congressman. | |
| They get mad at the shopkeeper. | |
| This is a buffer, right? | |
| This distractible scapegoat that people can pretend is the cause or source of their problems. | |
| When you get fired because of some really crappy government policy, you don't write a letter to Obama, you get really mad at the guy who fired you and then you get really mad at the poor Chinese worker who, quote, underbid you without ever wondering how it's possible. | |
| For somebody in a foreign country to underbid you or why underbidding you simply doesn't open up even more economic opportunities since the division of labor and getting stuff cheaper is supposed to make the economy grow, at least according to all rational methodologies of economics that I've ever heard about. | |
| But you get mad at the guy who fired you or you get mad at the other Chinese worker. | |
| It's just a great way of distracting people from the real issues. | |
| Now, the other thing that I think is also contributing to this is that people are getting dumber and dumber, and that's part of the failed education system that I want to talk about next, which I know that you like to talk about the education system. | |
| Now, I saw an article that's been floating around, and I know that I shared it on Facebook about the psychology of students and how they're trapped in sort of a prison-like setting in these schools. | |
| They're in now. And it's not just public education, it's private education, too. | |
| Even if you send your child to a private school, I mean, he's still stuck in a prison, basically. | |
| It's somewhere where you sit for eight hours a day, and you're pounded by government-approved bullshit until you want to throw yourself out the second story window. | |
| And I went through it. | |
| I'm sure you went through it. I know that most people who are watching us went through it. | |
| So... Why is it that they make these schools like prisons? | |
| Why is it that our education system is failing? | |
| Why is it that we're so far behind in areas like philosophy, science? | |
| I mean, Japan is blowing us out of the water. | |
| We cannot compete with their scientists. | |
| I mean, their scientists are brilliant. | |
| So, I mean, why is this happening? | |
| Why is the education system, to put it blatantly, why does it blow? | |
| Well, it blows because it sucks. | |
| I mean, there was a big change, which I think has gone under-reported or under-recognized in the 1960s when teachers, of course, teachers' unions after many years of striving for this, gained tenure, gained the inability to Fundamental inability to be fired. | |
| I'm sure you've heard of these rubber rooms in New York where these teachers who have done just wretched things. | |
| Students are sitting there at a cost of about $100 million a year just sitting there for 8 hours a day doing nothing because they can't be fired. | |
| They got full benefits, full salary. | |
| They sit there for 8 hours a day or 6 hours a day doing nothing because they can't be fired. | |
| And like 1 out of 53 doctors loses their license. | |
| 1 out of 90 odd lawyers loses their license. | |
| I think it's 1 out of 2500 teachers will ever lose their license. | |
| What happened in the 1960s was teachers couldn't get fired anymore. | |
| It's just an inevitable fact of human nature that when you do not face risk, you do not strive. | |
| Expecting teachers to strive for excellence in the existing communists is a communist system. | |
| It's like expecting the average Soviet worker in 1960s Stalinist Russia To work his fingers to the bone trying to become an entrepreneur. | |
| These things don't happen. | |
| Human beings respond to incentives and they respond to disincentives. | |
| And so teachers could no longer be fired. | |
| Not only did that make the quality of teaching for long-term teachers go down, there were still exceptions, but it meant that a whole different kind of person came into the fray. | |
| It's looking at who wants to go to Silicon Valley to start a software company versus who wants to go and work at the post office. | |
| Well, if you turn a Remotely free market system into the post office which is what kind of happened when you couldn't fire teachers anymore. | |
| It changes the whole culture. It changes the whole structure. | |
| It draws an entirely different kind of person into becoming a teacher and the price of that has been paid. | |
| The reason that the school system sucks is very simple and it's very basic and everybody knows it and nobody will talk about it. | |
| It's because the children are not customers and the parents are not customers. | |
| The children and our customers and the parents and our customers. | |
| A recent head of the American Teachers Union said, the moment the children start paying union dues, basically I'll give a shit about what they want. | |
| And that is the reality. | |
| The system harvests children. | |
| It kidnaps children. It collects children. | |
| And that benefits the state because it frees the mothers to go out and go to work and get taxed. | |
| It benefits the people who are crappy teachers and don't want to get fired. | |
| It benefits the whole There's a layer of corrupt bureaucracy at the top of these teachers' unions, and it benefits particularly the democratic politicians who get millions and millions of dollars in campaign donations to maintain the status quo. | |
| What is absent is the choice of parents and the choice of children. | |
| And until that is rectified, everything else is simply going to be moving chess pieces around squares rather than getting to a new game. | |
| Well, basically what your options are in the current system, and I know it's like this in New Jersey, you can go to free public school, and the public school in my town, I live in a suburb of a large city, and the city that I live next to is not, there's a lot of crime. | |
| But our neighborhood is nice. | |
| What happens is that there's a huge influx of people from the city who say, I live with my aunt, And we're going to go to this school here. | |
| So, now they're not living with their aunt. | |
| They're coming from the city. So, this school here has gone way down. | |
| And you have a couple of options. | |
| You can send your child to Ewing High. | |
| You can send them to Hun, Lawrenceville, or... | |
| Or, you know, petty or whatever, and those schools all cost $30,000 to $60,000 a year. | |
| Now, how many people can afford that? | |
| How many parents can afford a school that costs $30,000 a year? | |
| Basically, if your father is not on the payroll of Philip Morris USA or Lockheed Martin, you ain't going there, you know? | |
| So, I mean, the choice is so little. | |
| Oh, it's... | |
| I genuinely believe that in the future they're going to look back and wonder in our society where the hell was our love for our children. | |
| As a collective, of course individual parents, most of them I think love their children, but as a collective, as a society, if you've ever watched some of the documentaries on education, I think the most recent one is Waiting for Superman. | |
| I mean, it's unbelievably heartbreaking to see the desperation That these parents have that their children are going to get any kind of decent damn education. | |
| John Stossel had a series on education where they took some kid that had been in public school system for I think close on a decade and had learned virtually nothing and they took him to I think it was a Sylvan or some sort of private mentoring or tutoring service where you know in a couple of weeks he learned how to read fluently and write better and I mean, | |
| the amount of destruction of the mind, the body, the spirit that is going on in these schools, I mean, it is a howl of a completely blighted present and a completely destroyed future that is rising. | |
| From the ashes of these human brain melting furnaces and we simply won't address this as a society. | |
| The only thing that we've managed to, this is what we call progress in discussions about the state is at least people are saying more money isn't what is needed because the amount of money that's spent on students is so ridiculously high that people at least, at least that has stopped where it says okay we just get another couple of thousand dollars per student and we'll be fine. | |
| I guess you could call that progress, but until we as a society are going to love our children enough to the point where we're going to take on these bastards who run this system and support the good teachers who want a free system, what we sow with the young we will reap as we age. | |
| Well, the other thing is that we also have, we encourage students, go to college, everybody get an education. | |
| It's what you need. You need to stay in the system for as long as you can. | |
| Now, everybody goes to college, right? | |
| In the 60s, not everybody went to college. | |
| You could go down to the state and get a job without a college degree. | |
| You could go down to DeLaval as a weapons manufacturer around here and get a job without a college degree. | |
| If you wanted to be a scientist or a lawyer or a doctor, you went and got a degree. | |
| Now everybody gets a degree, okay? | |
| People get degrees in things like communications, which basically means a bunch of frat boys party all weekend. | |
| And they come out, and okay, well now everybody has a college degree, right? | |
| Well, that college degree is worth diddly-squat. | |
| Because everybody has one. | |
| So are we really raising our standards by continuing to put people through this? | |
| And we also raise people in schools to be subservient to a boss or to the government and say, okay, we're going to work for someone as opposed to going out there and trying to start your own business, trying to be an entrepreneur or be a thinker or an innovator. | |
| No, no, no. Schools are designed to keep the poor from competing with the rich. | |
| Schools are designed to castrate the brains of the poor because the poor will always undercut the rich. | |
| When I first started, I came from a really poor background. | |
| When I started in the software field, I was making not that much money. | |
| It was all the money in the world. I was completely happy to do that. | |
| When I had to eat my own toenails and Cheetos and whatever I could find behind the couch when I was an entrepreneur, I was just happy to be doing it. | |
| You're going to be able to undercut the rich people. | |
| That's how capitalism is supposed to renew. | |
| It's how the free market is supposed to renew itself. | |
| So if you have achieved wealth, the first thing you want is a completely terrible system of education or miseducation or indoctrination or brain scrubbing erasure. | |
| For the poor, particularly the poor and the young, because they're lean, they're hungry, they're going to undercut you, they're going to renew the system and they're going to threaten your profits. | |
| So, oh yeah, it's just a way of keeping these kids locked in the basement of dependency and idiocy. | |
| It's unbelievable. | |
| It is a genocide of the mind. | |
| I don't think there are phrases strong enough that I could use to describe my absolute outrage at what is done to the young and what was done to you and I as well. | |
| I mean, how much do we have to recover? | |
| from all of these frontal lobotomies and these called modern education I live with my parents. | |
| I'm trying to start an international webcasting company. | |
| And you know what? If I have to live here for the next five years in order for me to get the dream that I want, I'll do it. | |
| And I'm willing to put in that sort of dedication. | |
| But a lot of people are taught not to do that. | |
| They're taught not to have that dedication, but to have dedication to making David Rockefeller rich. | |
| And making... | |
| You know, President Bush rich, etc., etc. | |
| They don't have that sort of drive to make themselves wealthy and to make themselves successful and fulfilled. | |
| And the other thing is that we measure success based on how much money we make, not how happy you are. | |
| Well, and what has fallen by the wayside is on-the-job training. | |
| I mean, if you want, say, let's say you go into communications, you want to be a radio personality or something like that, well, Go work at a radio station. | |
| I mean, God, go learn the business that way. | |
| What the hell do you need to be in school for four years to do that? | |
| Or anything. If you want to be a writer, go write. | |
| Go, you know, write to some writer and say, I'll go pick up your groceries and your dry cleaning in exchange for writing lessons. | |
| I mean, and that way you get in, you get connections to an agent. | |
| There's like six million. I mean, did Brad Pitt have to go to four years of acting school to land a role? | |
| No, he had to go to four years of tight abs sit-up school. | |
| But that's a different story. But on-the-job training is the way it's going to go. | |
| But of course, on-the-job training has been killed by the unions in the trades, right? | |
| I mean, so now you want to be a plumber. | |
| Okay, you don't have to go to college, but you've got to be a plumber's bitch for, what, three, five, seven years. | |
| I mean, it's completely medieval. | |
| So many of the avenues for people to have reasonable incomes have been killed. | |
| Gutted. American manufacturing has been completely gutted and outsourced, and that was the route where you could get to a middle-class income. | |
| Without going to college, then you'd have the money to put your kids in college. | |
| That's all been completely detonated in most of the West and particularly the United States. | |
| And so this whole class of dependent people has arisen and this whole culture of dependency has arisen. | |
| And there's no way to pay for it all, and when that shite hits the fan, it's going to spatter pretty damn hard. | |
| So, what would you say is your solution to getting out of this sort of rut that we're in, especially with education? | |
| How do you get out of that? | |
| How do you go from a system that is completely falling apart? | |
| How do you go from a system where everybody's ingrained Go to public elementary school, public middle school. | |
| If you can afford it, if you can afford $60,000 or $50,000 a year to get a private education, do it. | |
| And then go ahead to a university and pay another $10,000, $20,000 a year to get a degree that when you graduate, 3.1 million people in the United States can't find work after getting their college degree. | |
| Well, I mean, to be fair, the unemployment rate among college graduates is lower, significantly lower than in general, but I don't know if that's skewed towards race or whatever. | |
| But my solution is very simple. | |
| It's ridiculously simple, and my solution is if you're going to have kids, stay home with them. | |
| Stay home with them. | |
| That solves so many social problems that there's really no way to describe it positively enough, right? | |
| So, I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad now for over two and a half years. | |
| I love it and I wouldn't trade it for the world. | |
| Stay home with your kids. | |
| Yeah, you have to make sacrifices. | |
| Yeah, you don't get as much money in the bank, although, you know, when you factor in, you know, driving and an extra car and daycare and taxes and all that, it probably doesn't work out that dissimilar. | |
| But people sort of think nothing of taking a very low standard of living for four years to get a college degree. | |
| Well, why not have a lower standard of living for four years or five years or six years so you can raise your children? | |
| Now, you may find that you can find a way to make that work so that you can not only stay home with your kids and educate them properly to begin with and give them all of that close bonding and fun and happiness and security that leads them to be happier and peaceful people as adults. | |
| You may find that there's a way to homeschool or to unschool them or to find something like the Sudbury Valley schools where a four-year-old has the same vote as a principal and the teachers can be fired by the students every year. | |
| And there's no curriculum, there's no homework, there's no classes, there's no exams. | |
| The children are just there to learn whatever they want to learn and the faculty is there to facilitate that if requested. | |
| There's places and ways that you can go. | |
| You can join up with other families to get unschooling or at least homeschooling going. | |
| So there's lots of ways that you get. | |
| To me it's all about the kids. | |
| It's all about the kids. Don't have enough cogs left in their minds turning that you can hook any kind of rational argument in and reel any conclusions into your boat. | |
| But if we can get the young, if we can get parents close to the young rather than shipping off to these daycares and seeing them for an hour or two a day, and if we can get people to stay home, we can get people to reject the existing public school system in favor of homeschooling or unschooling or alternative ways of educating, That to me is this slow process of brick by brick building a different future. | |
| And that's why, since that's what I genuinely believe and have lots of evidence for work, I'm less interested in who's talking what on some podium with balloons behind them for an election. | |
| Now, another thing that I have to point out is that homeschooling has also got a very bad rap, mostly because of evangelical Christians. | |
| Most of the children who are homeschooled in the United States are homeschooled by their parents who are evangelical Christians, and they teach them things like evolution is not real, and, you know... | |
| Yeah, but, sorry, still, their math comprehension, their reading comprehension is still vastly above what it is in public school. | |
| So, at least... | |
| And I have... | |
| I have more sympathy in some ways with evangelical Christians teaching their children than I do with public school education, because at least evangelical Christians are teaching their children some values. | |
| I don't agree with a lot of those values. | |
| I certainly don't agree with the source of those values. | |
| The problem, I mean, one of the reasons why public school is so boring is it's so irrelevant. | |
| The reason it's so irrelevant is you can't teach anything that is interesting to children, that has relevance, that is going to have an effect on their life. | |
| Because the moment you do that, there's going to be 10, 20, 30 parents rushing into the principal's office claiming to be enormously offended at what it is you're teaching their children because it conflicts with the values they're trying to teach at home. | |
| You've got all these different cultures, all these different religions and atheists and agnostics and all... | |
| All putting their kids into public school, which means you can't touch any fundamental subject of philosophy or values or anything which is going to really help people live a better life, because the moment you touch on any of that stuff, you're going to offend huge constituents of the population. | |
| So let's say that you want to teach the non-aggression principle. | |
| Well, then the kid's going to go home and say, Daddy, the initiation of force is wrong, so why do you put on that blue costume and take tax money from people every day? | |
| Well, the dad's going to call you up and say, are you teaching my kid that I'm some kind of criminal? | |
| Well, no. Teacher wants to go through that. | |
| You start talking about evolution or you start talking about respect for property rights and how that conflicts with some of the existing social structures like the redistribution of wealth and then you're going to get some A kid going home saying to his mom, hey, as a social worker, aren't you involved in the violent theft of people's property? | |
| So you can't teach anything of value or of interest or substance or truth, relevant truth. | |
| You have to teach just these boring inconsequentialities that offend no one, instruct no one, and motivate no one. | |
| I think that's the greatest tragedy. | |
| I agree with that. | |
| I like the way you worded that. | |
| And I'm in favor of more of the Greek style of classroom where you have sort of the teacher there as a mentor and the students go off and sort of make their own conclusions and evaluations and try to learn. | |
| As opposed to being... | |
| See, I mean, a lot of kids find it boring because they're sat there with a chalkboard saying, okay, now we're going to do this, and it works like this, and then when you question it, they say, oh, just be quiet now, I just need to finish the lesson. | |
| Like, are you really interested in trying to teach these kids something? | |
| Sorry, imagine if I tried to teach my daughter how to walk by tying her to a chair and walking up and down in front of her, saying, it's like this. | |
| You see, you balance one leg like this, and you swing your arms a little bit, and no, no, don't get up! | |
| I'm teaching you how to walk. | |
| You sit there. It's like, well, she's not going to learn how to walk. | |
| She's going to learn how to be really annoyed and angry at her dad with good reason. | |
| But yeah, I mean, absolutely. Children learn by doing. | |
| My daughter struggles every day to create new concepts, to learn new words. | |
| She blows my mind with the stuff she comes up with. | |
| There's no homework. | |
| There's no tests. | |
| There's no pass or fail grades. | |
| There's no organized instruction. | |
| I mean, I'll talk to her about words and I'll sort of show her. | |
| But it's all part of just play and exploring the world. | |
| That's how we learn. | |
| That's how all primates learn. | |
| That's how all animals learn. | |
| And we've turned it into this artificial, sterile, bound to the chair, daydreaming you any other place in God's green earth, while someone up there makes unpleasant squeaking noises and boars the living crap out of you with their inconsequentialities. | |
| But there's no way, shape, or form you wouldn't train a dog like that, and yet we instruct our children for a decade and a half in this nonsense. | |
| The other thing that I think is really, really, really, just, I can't believe, is that we don't understand that, you know, if somebody doesn't want to be there, they're not going to learn anything, but you continue to teach them. | |
| The other thing is... No, sorry. | |
| They will learn something. They will learn that you have to submit to stuff that is repulsive to you, and that prepares them for a life in a democratic state of society. | |
| But anyway, go on. Well, they won't learn anything significant or substantial that will help them. | |
| No. And the other thing is you sort of have this overachieving type. | |
| And I don't know if I'm using the right word, but... | |
| You have all these high school kids competing to get into these best colleges, and the only reason that they're studying, the only reason they're getting A's on a test is because they want to get into college. | |
| It's not because they're learning anything. | |
| It's not because they give a shit. | |
| It's because they simply need to get the grade. | |
| I don't care about history. | |
| I don't care about math. | |
| I don't care about science. | |
| I just care about getting a grade on the test and studying hard and completely stressing, why do kids smoke well? | |
| I'll tell you why they smoke. | |
| Because of that. | |
| Because of what they have to deal with. | |
| And so much of this pressure is put on them for the grade as opposed to for the knowledge. | |
| I'll be honest with you. When I was in high school, I totally understood a lot of concepts that were out there. | |
| A lot of the philosophy, a lot of the history, but I could never get a good grade on a test. | |
| I just didn't care. It's worse than that because genuine knowledge is going to get you graded worse than no knowledge. | |
| So any kind of genuine, rational knowledge is going to get you downgraded because it's going to go against all of the prejudices of the system. | |
| I mean, if you have a patriotic teacher and you bring up some of the genuine knowledge about the horrendous inequalities of the early American system and, of course, what happened to 5 million Native Americans killed for land and so on. | |
| I mean, you bring any of that stuff up, any genuine knowledge, and I'm not saying that's the only knowledge, or if you have some Someone who's a complete revisionist historian who's only down and looks at only the negatives of the earth and you bring in some of the positives. | |
| If you bring in anything balanced, if you bring a full, rich, rounded perspective, you're going to get marked down. | |
| There's no question. I mean, I think we've all experienced that. | |
| I certainly experienced that all the way through graduate school. | |
| Oh, absolutely. I remember several times getting beaten down, not only by a teacher, but by other students, just my own peers. | |
| Yeah, sorry, 19th century America, you bring some of DeLorenzo's arguments about the robber barons weren't robber barons and so on, and the government was not saving us from evil monopolies that were exploiting the people, or you start talking about some of the positive aspects of the Industrial Revolution, You just toast. | |
| Sorry, I interrupted you, but I just wanted to mention that. | |
| What's funny is I was talking about not invading other countries for political reasons. | |
| Like, hey, let's not massacre other populations with our CIA. And all of a sudden, no, Iraq was okay. | |
| And I was like, what? | |
| I'm advocating human rights, really? | |
| You want to jump down my throat? | |
| Yeah, and of course, if you start... | |
| I mean this is the fundamental contradiction within our society that is going to go one way or the other inexorably which is that you teach children that force is wrong. | |
| You should not try and solve your problems with your fists or pushing. | |
| You should talk things out and yet the children are never allowed to talk out their differences with the teacher. | |
| They're never allowed to bring their own perspectives and preferences to bear on their own education. | |
| And their parents sure as hell aren't given a damn bit of choice about whether to fund and what to fund. | |
| That is all achieved through force, through violence. | |
| And so there's this fundamental contradiction. | |
| It doesn't take anybody over the age of four can figure out that contradiction. | |
| And the fact that nobody talks about it is a fundamental aspect of our educational system. | |
| That it's so fundamentally and inexorably hypocritical in that it teaches helpless children to not use force. | |
| While powerful adults are legitimate in the use of force. | |
| And in fact for them to not use force would be wrong. | |
| To not have public education would be wrong. | |
| To not use violence in the extraction of money to pay idiots to indoctrinate your children, that would be wrong. | |
| Yet the moment one child uses aggression to get what he wants, that's just wrong! | |
| And the fact that you can't ever talk about that, that would be the first thing that any intelligent student would notice. | |
| And we all know what would happen to a student who brought that up in class. | |
| Oh, sure. And of course, it also – it's very unfortunate that we can't sort of – okay, what I think is – What is important to point out is that there's always a sort of spread multiculturalism, spread acceptance, but the minute that you come out with an idea that doesn't fit into their world of what multiculturalism and acceptance is, you just, you're out. | |
| You get ostracized because of it. | |
| You have to accept everybody, right? | |
| But you can't, you know, once you come out with something that they don't accept, there's a big problem. | |
| Yeah, I mean, at the moment that you say that not all cultures are equally rational, That the fact that the Western culture has had 2500 mostly bumpy but not irrelevant years of philosophical thinking is quite different from other cultures which haven't. | |
| That some aggregation of very hard-earned and bloody wisdom in the Western culture has value relative to other cultures that have not gone through that process. | |
| The fact that Christianity went through a fragmentation and then a reformation is significant relative to say the Islamic culture which is not. | |
| Those are differences that are not unimportant and the moment you bring them up, of course, oh yeah, you'll get slandered with all kinds of nonsense. | |
| And it's unfortunate, you know, and the other thing is that I I always had a tendency to speak out against religion. | |
| I always had a tendency to say, why should I, you know, because it would be multicultural, but I said, why should I respect the irrational? | |
| Why should I respect something that simply does not make sense? | |
| And again, it would be one of those things where, oh no, that's bad, you can't, but they could criticize me for being an atheist, all they wanted. | |
| Well, of course. I mean, I actually read the Bible when I was quite young, and I think it was Winston Churchill's son who said this, that there's no greater cure for religiosity than reading the Bible cover to cover. | |
| So, I mean, I remember being quite young and people saying that you can't criticize religion, you have to respect religion. | |
| It's like, okay, well, what if I said that religious people should be put to death? | |
| Would that be bad? Yes. | |
| Well, if you read the Old Testament, that's exactly what it says about a wide variety of people, including me. | |
| Who is not a believer. | |
| And suddenly, you can't talk about that, right? | |
| I mean, it's, you know, it's gross to look at. | |
| I mean, so much of exploring the ideas that run society is like, you know, kicking over a fish to find the maggots underneath. | |
| It's hideous. And everybody says, well, our society was built on Judeo-Christian principles. | |
| Well, that's not quite a society that I want to live in, thanks, because it's full of misogyny. | |
| It's full of racism. Oh, our society, oh my god, our society has survived only through its rejection. | |
| Of these mad edicts like, you know, kill your child if he questions you, kill sorcerers, kill witches, kill atheists, kill... | |
| I mean, it's just a bloodfest. | |
| It's a genocide fest, this religiosity. | |
| It condones slavery. | |
| It condones selling your daughters into sexual rape submission. | |
| I mean, it's exactly as you would expect. | |
| Its ethics are as advanced as its physics and biology. | |
| It's exactly what you would expect from an extremely primitive Bloody, patriarchal, hierarchical, violent culture. | |
| And the idea that this modern world has been built on the ethics of 5,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago is like saying that the space shuttle has been built on the blueprints of Egyptian hieroglyphics. | |
| It's a complete opposite. | |
| It's true. We've only got a culture to the degree to which we have managed to push back the irrational and aggressions of religiosity. | |
| What's funny is prior to the advent of Christianity into Rome, under the Emperor Constantine, religion and society was somewhat more advanced. | |
| I mean, if you look at the religions of the ancients, science, biology, math, those were all things that whenever they discovered something new, like Pythagoras, when he discovered Pythagorean's theorem, it wasn't, oh my God, God is dead. | |
| It was no... Now, you know, I'm going to venerate, you know, because I now have knowledge that I did not previously have. | |
| When you find that out in Christian society, kill him now. | |
| So I feel as if that we digressed, that we went backwards. | |
| We went from having a very, you know, if you look at the Roman Empire from its, you know, when the empire was under paganism, you know, the Roman pantheon, everybody was accepted. | |
| All religions were incorporated and there was a certain cohesion within the empire that didn't exist after the advent of Christianity when people began to kill each other because... | |
| Yeah, I mean, of course, at the beginning of Rome and all the way through to the Christian era, there was an avenue of temples and it was like a mall. | |
| You go up and you sort of... | |
| And so the religions were all facing each other and so there was no particular belief that one religion was perfectly true because you just, you know, you turn to the other side of the street and there's some... | |
| It's an octopus-headed god that you can go worship if you want. | |
| And the same thing is true. And the reason, as you know, the reason the Christians were persecuted had nothing to do with the content of their beliefs. | |
| It had to do with the fact that they were incredibly aggressive monotheists who believed that all of the other gods were in fact devils and were trashing both literally and figuratively The other religions and that's why they were persecuted because they were causing so much trouble with their monotheism. | |
| Oh, it's a huge step backward and that's what the Dark Ages were all about and then the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the ancient Greek philosophers through good friends, the Muslims who kept Aristotle alive through our own terrible Dark Ages and the regrowth of science. | |
| I mean this all had to do with pushing back this incredibly primitive The brain-sucking parasite of ancient religiosity and monotheistic religiosity is very dangerous because it breeds a security and knowledge based only upon a destruction of alternatives, and that is a very dangerous place to be. | |
| And that's why I find that, you know, I don't like it when people lump all religion together, because just as all cultures are not philosophically equals, neither are all religions either. | |
| So, and as I said, it's, you know, the Roman Empire made sacrifices to the Judeo-Christian God as a sign of goodwill towards the Christians, and basically what the Christians said was, F you, you're still wrong. | |
| And they said, well, we're not going to have this, and they decided to start killing them off. | |
| So, you know, I think there's no doubt that the ancient Christians were the terrorists of Rome. | |
| I mean, that's how they were perceived. As far as I've read, that's how they were directly perceived by the emperors. | |
| Sure, and it's rational because when you have these people going around basically saying that everything is evil and you're evil and that everything that you believe is evil, I mean, even Constantine knew that he couldn't, because, I mean, many of his generals and other high-ranking older Patricians in Rome during the time of its conversion, they were pagan, and he knew that, like, if he tried to force this on them, it wouldn't be good. | |
| You know, I feel as if Constantine already knew, like, this is not going to be good for my empire. | |
| Yeah, but he was interested in the retention of power, not the pursuit of philosophical truth. | |
| There's so much discussion at the moment because the empirical evidence for the success of religion versus the success of science, not to mention the success of the free market. | |
| The verdict is in that the jury is not even hung. | |
| It's so obvious the degree to which free markets and science has benefited humanity relative to Oh, my God. | |
| I mean, the astonishing destruction that has been wreaked by religion over the years that it is harder and harder to maintain. | |
| I mean, I think, I mean, the statistics seem to be pretty clear that within two or three generations, religion is going to be mostly gone, at least in the West. | |
| I mean, as long as we continue to speak the truth as clearly and as positively as possible. | |
| So I consider it to be a pretty fading force, which doesn't mean that it's not pretty intimidating in the here and now. | |
| Sure, and one of the biggest things that I'm afraid of is that these same religious fundamentalists, like the evangelicals or the Baptists or whoever, getting into positions of power, that scares me senseless. | |
| And it's not because of reasons they would say, like, oh, that's because you're afraid of God. | |
| No, it's because I'm afraid of what kind of damage you could do because you're all fucking nuts. | |
| Well, I mean, these are people, I mean, it's a significant percentage that 30 or 40% of Americans genuinely believe that Christ is going to return in their lifetime and that it's the end of the world. | |
| I mean, I assume that these people also have political power. | |
| I don't really like the idea that people who have access to nuclear weapons believe that the end of the world is nigh. | |
| That is not something you'd want on the job description or the resume of somebody applying for that position. | |
| Of course not. And it's sad because I feel as if these people, first of all, have no respect for the earth and no respect for the things around them because they think that they're going to, you know, there's something else to look forward to anyway and not just something that, you know. | |
| And also there's this sort of divine mandate coming down and giving them these powers. | |
| Well, these powers are invested in me by God, you know, so I can do whatever I want. | |
| And it's sad. It's sad that we're destroying the earth, that we're destroying ourselves, destroying our culture because of ideas that faith without reason is not a virtue. | |
| It's a vice. It's not something that's okay. | |
| Well, faith without reason is bigotry, no matter which way you cut it. | |
| If I believe blacks are inferior without any evidence, not that there is any evidence, but if I believe that, that's just called bigotry. | |
| I mean, it's just bigotry, but of course we have to call it something else when we're talking about religion. | |
| Of course. Well, unfortunately, that brings us to the end of the hour. | |
| Stefan, thanks so much for coming on. | |
| I really appreciate it. It's been good. | |
| Everybody go check out freedomainradio.com. | |
| That's freedomainradio.com. | |
| And when's your call-in show? What time is it again? | |
| We do Sundays at 2 p.m. | |
| Eastern Standard Time. The instructions are on the website. | |
| All right. Good stuff. So everybody check that out on Sunday at 2 p.m. | |
| Eastern Time. And coming up next after the break is going to be Adam McCullough from Republican Liberty Caucus to talk about why Adam Bitterman resigned from his chair of vice president. | |
| So, Stefan, thanks again for coming on. | |
| Thanks, Jacob. It's my pleasure. |