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Sept. 16, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:33:17

1995 Word Murder: Verbal Abuse and the Non-Aggression Principle

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	Good evening and welcome to this edition of eRadio.
	Tonight our guest is, once again, Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio and Aaron Moritz, also known as Say Days Ago from The Infinite Yes, who's also my partner in the upcoming Troll film.
	First of all, I'm going to have Stefan.
	Welcome to the show. Go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience.
	Oh, hi. My name is Stefan Molyneux.
	I am the host of Free Domain Radio, which is at, shockingly enough, freedomainradio.com, which is, I guess, the largest and most popular philosophy show In the world, in history, entirely due to my cosmic-spanning genius.
	Actually, no, it's mostly just the technology, but I like to take a little bit of credit.
	And I guess, have I been on your show two times before?
	You've been on mine. We did a debate.
	Yeah, yeah. I don't think it was twice.
	This would be the second time.
	It was probably so good that it felt like once.
	It was quite a long show.
	This is my modesty moment, so...
	Right. Aaron, go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience.
	Hey, my name is Aaron Moritz.
	I make a lot of YouTube videos.
	You can check all those out at theinfinityes.com.
	With no E in infinite?
	Yeah, or with the E. However you want to spell it, it will work.
	Oh, okay, good, good.
	Well, tonight I actually have Stefan on to talk about some things that we, you know, this is, in other words, this is not really a debate show.
	It's more like an elaboration on some things that we agree upon.
	in particular about the issue of the non-aggression principle Stefan had agreed to be involved in the project to make the troll film we're going to be recording some of that obviously today for the footage that will be used in the film and it has to do with the topic of the concept that the non-aggression principle should apply to basically verbal and written aggression which ends up being mental abuse and aggression and Stefan when we talked about this previously You had discussed that you had actually stumbled across research that there was actually a very strong potential for actual physical damage from mental abuse.
	Yeah, so I think that we just—there's two big categories, I think, that we want to talk about.
	And the first is adult to adult, and the second is adult to a child, and in particular, parent to child.
	It's always important to remember that in any relatively free society, adult to adult relationships are voluntary and optional and so on.
	And so if somebody's being a real jerk to you or some friend is just calling your names or whatever, then you can just click the unfriend button and you have all of those kinds of choices as an adult.
	But, of course, children are not in voluntary relationships.
	This is not a bad thing. It's just a fact of biology that children are dependent upon their parents and can't, you know, switcheroo their parents to people who suit them better.
	And so, with the parent-child relationship, there are two factors.
	One is the lack of voluntarism within the relationship, and the second is the developmental aspect that is occurring when the child is growing up.
	So I'm not responsible if my neighbor gets fat, but I am responsible if my daughter gets fat, because I'm buying the food and I'm controlling to some degree her intake and so on.
	And so I think those are two really important distinctions.
	And so where I think I would have a tough time Coming down that, you know, calling someone stupid as an adult is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	You know, repeatedly calling your child stupid, I think, is definitely, it has distinct effects upon, you know, lifelong effects upon depression, upon risk for substance abuse and...
	Dysfunctions like smoking and excess drinking and promiscuity and so on.
	And it has measurable effects on the brain.
	And so I think because children are, in a sense, in a prisoner situation with regards to their parents.
	Again, that sounds all negative, but I'm just talking about the biological reality of dependence.
	Parents who verbally abuse and emotionally abuse, and those two things are worth distinguishing.
	Verbal abuse is calling your child names, you know, fatty, stupid, idiot, that kind of stuff.
	Whereas emotional abuse is sort of the manipulation and the guilting and the threats of the withdrawal of affection and all that kind of stuff.
	And both of those things have distinct negative effects upon the development of the child's brain.
	In fact, the same brain areas light up when the child is verbally abused as when the child is physically hit.
	And there are many studies which show that verbal abuse and emotional abuse have more negative, longer-term and deeper effects than physical abuse.
	And so I think that the parent-child relationship is where we want to focus the most attention.
	And for the final reason, of course, being That the best inoculation against verbal abuse as an adult is not to be verbally abused as a child because then you're just much less likely to be bullied as an adult.
	Do those distinctions make sense to you guys?
	Oh yeah, it certainly makes sense.
	In addition, it also kind of plays into the topic that I was discussing as well because cyber harassment, cyber bullying is actually taking place against children on the internet and it's leading to them committing suicide.
	So it's It is interesting.
	When it comes down to the non-aggression principle as applied to adults, I tend to think of it...
	In fact, I got some libertarian friends of mine who agree about this.
	For example, in the Libertarian Party, there's a lot of ad hominem, a lot of personal attack in common discussion.
	It's like an effort to shame somebody into going along with whatever it is that you think or you feel.
	As a result, you're essentially being aggressive with someone to try to get them, you know, even if they don't agree with you, at least shut up about it so that nobody listening will, you know, take your side of the, you know, the conversation serious.
	I'm sorry to interrupt. Just speaking of aggression, if you could back off from your mic a bit, it's just getting kind of buzzy in my ears.
	Sure, is that better? I feel assaulted!
	Yeah, thanks. Yeah, no, I think that's true.
	And then, of course, we can all imagine these scenarios wherein verbal aggression can result in harm to someone.
	There's a A film, I think it's called Dog Bites Man, where some crazy guy makes his way into an elderly woman's apartment.
	She invites him in because he's a glib talker.
	And then he starts yelling at her until she has a heart attack and dies.
	Language is a potential kind of toxin in the same way that food is a potential kind of toxin.
	And so language, you know, food goes into your mouth and can be poisoned, particularly if it is poisoned, and words go into your ear and have an effect on your brain in the same way that food has an effect on your physiology, except, of course, when you're developing, the changes in your brain can be permanent.
	And so people often think the non-aggression principle is like punching and kicking and stabbing and shooting and so on.
	Of course those things are, but how often do we experience those, you know, on a daily or weekly or annual basis?
	I mean, never, hopefully. But, in terms of verbal abuse and emotional abuse, this is much, much more common.
	I would also argue that physical abuse, violence, physical violence It's almost always predated by some form of verbal abuse.
	So imagine the Germans in the 1930s, the amount of propaganda that they imbibed about how evil the Jews were was enormous.
	I mean, the final solution, the Holocaust didn't come out of nowhere.
	Think of some southerner who's participating in the lynching of some poor black man.
	How much racism, verbal abuse against blacks has he imbibed since he was a child?
	How much fear and hatred and contempt and disgust has he imbibed verbally before he's able to participate in such a heinous crime?
	So I would say that verbal abuse and emotional abuse, if you really want to deal with the problems of physical violence, you really have to start with verbal and emotional abuse.
	They're necessary but not sufficient preconditions for physical violence.
	Now, well, we've also, you know, because of course, like, my initial point about this has to do with the internet, at least when it comes to do with the films, you know, we have actually, through our research for the film, we've come up with more than one example of things that have happened on the internet that have resulted in violence in real life.
	There was actually somebody, I can't remember the lady's name, because it's been a while since I looked at the file, but Aaron, somebody wrote to you about this, actually, about An individual who just took things pretty far with this poor lady and there was really nothing she could do about it.
	She was just endlessly harassed by this guy.
	We've had several links and articles that we've brought up in the past about how this gets taken so far.
	Alright, so anyway, I was basically getting at the issue of, more specifically at least what I'm dealing with, is when it comes to the fact that people I think that especially when we're talking about political discussions or discussions that affect the future of mankind,
	that when we bring each other's personalities into the issue or more specifically someone's personal life or things along that line, that essentially we're attacking the person In order to detract away from the conversation at hand.
	And I've seen so many different, you know, people who have tried to change the world, like politicians or whatever, who've essentially been rendered completely incapable of effecting change because of the fact that, you know, somebody decided to drag the fact that maybe they had an illicit affair 10 years ago into the conversation or any number of other ways that people use aggressive speech You know, to try to distract the audience away also.
	I mean, we talk about school.
	It seems like, you know, you learn this in high school, the idea that, you know, it's an acceptable way to, quote unquote, win an argument by just openly attacking the person that it is that you're debating with, rather than actually going, you know, into the meat of the conversation itself.
	And in discussions with some people about this, I felt that That was another example of essentially using force or coercion or intimidation in order to affect social change, which, to me, in spirit, violates the non-aggression principle.
	Well, I mean, it's a complicated set of issues, and I certainly can't claim to be definitive on them, but I would say that there are certain places in which the personality of the person is an appropriate thing to focus on, I think.
	So, for instance, you never see a diet book with a fat guy in the cover.
	I mean, if you did, that would be like a bad joke.
	You'd be like, what are you talking about, right?
	I mean, there's no guy who runs Stop Smoking seminars who stops up those seminars by lighting up a cigarette.
	I mean, it just doesn't happen, right?
	It would be bad. It would be ridiculous.
	And so there are times when it's important to focus on the person before the content.
	You know, I was in the entrepreneurial field and I hired lots of people, and so if somebody showed up to a job interview, you know, wearing, I don't know, a thong and a scuba top, a snorkel, they may be very well qualified, but they don't really understand how to present themselves.
	So that's just going to have an effect.
	You show up for a first date, You know, smelly and unshaven straight from the gym, that's going to have an effect.
	So, you know, life is short and we don't have time to evaluate everybody's arguments all the way through to the end.
	So we do have to have an efficiency principle, which is, I'm just not going to take diet advice from a fat guy.
	He may be right. He may be the best dietitian in the world, but either he has followed his own diet, in which case it doesn't work, or he hasn't followed his own diet, in which case he doesn't really believe in it.
	Again, he may be right, but given the efficiency principle that we all have with life is finite and time is precious, we have to make decisions.
	And so I think there are times When it is important to look at the person before you look.
	If you go to a psychologist for help with depression and he interrupts his first session to tell you that he's thinking of taking his own life, he may have the greatest psychological theories in the world, but you just probably wouldn't feel very secure trusting your mental health to such a person.
	I think there are times when it's appropriate to look at the person But that's usually not what happens in these kinds of situations.
	I just sort of wanted to point that out.
	Oh, yeah. I mean, obviously, I'm not going to listen to, say, a racist about my opinion on people of other races or something to that effect.
	But unfortunately, if it was something like that, it would be less fallacious.
	It's when it's stuff that has nothing to do with anything that you're talking about.
	Because I happen to be overweight, I deal with that constantly.
	It's like we're having an argument about, say, economics, and then suddenly we're talking about how you're fat, fat, fat every other sentence because the person...
	I think it's actually a reaction to people being insecure about themselves because maybe the argument isn't going in a direction that they would like.
	So now they want the audience to be thinking about, well, man, that guy's fat, and therefore I'm going to start laughing at him and I don't want to be associated with the guy who's getting laughed at, so therefore, I'm just going to go along with this other guy's side of the argument.
	Yeah, if I had a dime for every bold joke that I heard.
	No, I agree, but I think that something deeper is going on there, and this is just, again, we want to try and dig as deep as we can to understand these kinds of issues, which I think we're all interested in doing.
	I believe that...
	Human beings from day one almost are so astoundingly propagandized by church, by school, often by their parents.
	They're so propagandized that our belief systems are like 10-ton trucks standing on mile-high toothpicks.
	They're very unstable.
	They're very delicate. And so the only thing that keeps them aloft is everyone saying, we don't touch those beliefs.
	And of course, the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist have gone through this, I think, as much as anybody else.
	Which is, you know, we don't touch these beliefs because if we do, we're going to find out that they're not based on anything.
	And so when people come in with foundational arguments, this occurs in economics, in psychology, in philosophy in particular, ethics in particular, and of course in parenting, child raising and so on, when people come in with foundational challenges to existing beliefs, Everybody feels like their whole world is about to collapse, is hanging by a thread they didn't even know was there.
	They thought they were standing on solid ground, it turns out that they're, you know, jumping up and down on a cloud and about to plummet.
	And so I think people really lash out in ways because they feel aggressed against, but it's their illusions.
	That are being aggressed against, so to speak, by reasonable, rational, empirical arguments.
	And so if you look at the way that, say, certain religious people react to something like evolution, you know, it threatens a worldview, it threatens certain things that are said in the Bible, and they tend to lash out.
	This is not the case with all, but it's a case with enough that it's worth noting.
	And so when you threaten people's false beliefs, they get really upset because it threatens everything about their social reality.
	In other words, if they find out they've been propagandized, then they have to look at the people who propagandized them, you know, their beloved priests, their maybe good memory of their teachers, maybe certain things about what their parents did.
	And then they have this feeling, okay, so if I accept the truth you're telling me and I attempted to bring it to the relationships that I have, how are those relationships going to And the sad truth is that most relationships, a lot of relationships, cannot survive a growth from prejudice or ideology to philosophy or science or truth.
	They're very unstable.
	They rest on propaganda.
	If that propaganda is questioned or overturned, then the relationship itself is very often threatened and very often terminal.
	So people feel that by bringing the truth To them, you are, in a sense, threatening their entire social reality.
	And that's very scary for people that they do tend to lash out at that.
	Right. That's definitely the case.
	And I think that people don't even realize that, you know, that they're engaged in that behavior.
	I think it's also, it's like a defense mechanism.
	And I keep coming back to the way that children interact in schools, you know, the way that they essentially are even encouraged to kind of, you know, even if they don't physically push each other around, it's, The never-ending fight to keep people conformed.
	And that's the funny part about it, really, is that the other children, say the popular children, don't actually have any real authority, but they still manage to assume authority, and they enforce it sometimes through physical violence, but also just through mental violence and mocking and ridicule and harassment.
	And it has a very serious effect On children in general, they go through...
	I honestly think that's actually the core of a lot of these violent outbursts that you see, the Columbine kind of shootings, things like that.
	And I don't obviously by any means endorse what those children did in response, but I think that rather than looking maybe at violent video games and movies that people have been watching forever for these incidents of violence, we should probably be looking into the way that The social dynamic within the school works, and you tell the teachers about it when you're one of those kids, you tell the principals, and they just kind of look at you blankly because they don't have a solution.
	Well, you can't solve the problem of bullying within the schools until you change the schools fundamentally.
	I mean, you can't say to children, you should not use aggression and force to get what you want when the children aren't there by choice.
	I mean, that's the craziest thing to ask of children.
	Children are herded at gunpoint, literally at gunpoint, into those schools.
	In other words, if they don't want to go or if their parents don't pay the property taxes that are forced out of them in order to support these Damned institutions.
	Their parents are going to get thrown in jail.
	If their parents resist being thrown in jail, their parents are going to get shot.
	So, I mean, this is a basic reality that is very hard for people to look at.
	The degree to which we live in a murder-based society.
	We're just going to throw laws at people, throw them in jail, shoot them if they resist.
	That's how we get stuff done in our society.
	And it is contemptible. It is barbaric.
	It is primitive. It is destructive.
	It is eating the world. By its own tale.
	And so to me, to look at, and this is what people do all the time, not you of course, it's what people do all the time, is they see these huge problems in society and they say, well the problem, we need to fix the kids.
	No, no, no, no. You need to fix the environment the kids are in.
	You know, if animals are behaving weirdly because they're in a zoo, lecturing the animals isn't going to help.
	You have to set them free. And so until education is set free, From this historical, oppression-based, coercive, violent, indoctrination center called the modern school, there's no possibility of dealing with the problem of bullying, because the kids are bullied to be there, and they're simply reflecting the environment that they're in.
	Well, no, I absolutely agree with that.
	And I remember I actually linked the video that you put up earlier about how we kind of, you know, create an environment.
	I mean, obviously, you don't have to sell us too much on that in the Zeitgeist movement.
	We always believe the environment is the issue.
	But, you know, the fact that, you know, we do kind of introduce them to violence from the very beginning in the notion that they're forced to be there.
	I know that when I was going to school, especially towards the end, I mean, it didn't help that I was in a bad neighborhood.
	And, you know, it was, you know, basically there was a siege mentality because you really could get shot after school, you know, directly.
	And obviously not by members of the state at that point, but they weren't really in effect doing anything about it.
	You just kind of felt trapped the whole time you were there.
	And then you expect kids to learn in that situation.
	It's not conducive at all.
	Well, and one of the other systems is going to win.
	I mean, for adults, we have a society of relative freedom.
	You can choose your own profession.
	You can choose to get married or not, and who to get married to, and so on.
	So for adults, we guard these...
	Freedoms to our chest.
	We fiercely guard them.
	And yet children live in this totalitarian North Korean Stalinist nightmare where everything is socialized, everything is communized in the worst conceivable ways.
	The children don't have a choice to be there.
	The teachers can't be fired.
	The parents can't choose a different situation.
	And so the whole thing is compulsory.
	And when you have a compulsory environment, a totalitarian environment for children, How on earth can you expect to protect and defend a free society as they grow up?
	These things are completely at war, and unfortunately, the totalitarian side is winning.
	Now, going back to the topic of the issue of aggression and the ways that it affects us and the ways that it damages us, I mean, a lot of the work, like Dr.
	Gabor Mate goes through, you know, talks about a lot of that stuff, and also that it has very permanent physical effects on you later in life.
	You gave a lot of really great statistics about the very real effects of, you know, stress and corporal punishment used on children in one of your videos.
	And I think that, you know, very similar things apply to adults.
	Obviously, you know, I remember domestic violence in my home, you know, from my stepfather to my mother.
	He worked in a very stressful environment and then came home and was inclined to drink alcohol to solve that problem and then, of course, became violent afterwards.
	You know, I think that particularly when it comes to the internet, I don't think people really realize, or maybe they do, but they don't realize enough that they're dealing with human beings on the other side.
	And so they kind of feel inclined maybe to get a little bit of personal revenge in the same way that a bully would physically, only they're doing it psychologically, and the internet provides them an avenue to do this with.
	I think one of the big things about what I want to say to people, though, is that I don't advocate by any means trying to regulate the internet or introducing some kind of rules.
	It's more about hoping that we can awaken people in society to recognize the fact that we have this great gift of communication and that if we abuse it, that's actually what's going to lead to society being more interested in limiting it.
	I still never support legislation to do these kinds of restrictions, but on the same token, The more violent activity that takes place.
	It's like all the people who don't want anybody to own firearms.
	The more violence there is, the more these people feel that that's an acceptable solution.
	It's fear. People become afraid.
	They become afraid of firearms, then they become afraid of the internet.
	I actually just found a link.
	I don't know if you looked at it earlier, but there's a fellow who just got put in jail for two months for harassing a A couple of families who had just had loved ones died.
	He, for some reason, took it upon himself to go to their Facebook groups and start making really, really off-color jokes about how two children died.
	Children died. These people kind of hide behind the concept of free speech.
	Well, I should be able to say whatever I want.
	And while I don't think throwing the guy in jail is going to make the situation any better at the same token, those are the people that I think are, in my opinion, the most dangerous when it comes to Internet regulation.
	Yeah, I mean, certainly regulation is only going to deal temporarily with the symptom, and it's not going to deal with the course.
	I mean, I think that the psychology of it seems fairly clear, at least to me here.
	What do I know? But people steal because they've been stolen from, because their childhoods have been stolen from.
	People lack empathy for others because they have not received empathy for themselves as children.
	I mean, asking somebody as an adult to speak the language of empathy when they've never been taught the language of empathy It's like asking somebody to suddenly break into fluent Mandarin when they've never been exposed to the language before.
	They don't speak that language and it's a long, painful, difficult, labor, time and money intensive process to teach somebody the steps that were bypassed for them as children.
	In the first couple of years of life, 90% of your personality is shaped by your environment.
	And if you miss the windows of brain development around empathy and so on, the mirror neurons which allow you to really empathize with the effects of your actions on others, You've just damn well missed those windows and it seems almost impossible to circle back and fix it.
	If somebody didn't get enough Vitamins, when they were growing up as a kid, it doesn't help to pour extra vitamins into them as adults.
	They just miss that window, and that's what they're left with physically, and the same thing seems to occur with development of the brain.
	If you miss the window of growth, it's really hard.
	I think it can be done, but it's really hard, and it's really painful to do it later.
	Some arm broken as a kid and it sets really badly and no one takes care of it.
	Yes, you can do rehab as an adult to make it somewhat better, but it's a long, painful, difficult and expensive process.
	Which is why I think we really have to start focusing on prevention rather than cure.
	Because the people who are the most damaged are usually the least interested in trying to fix themselves because their damage is that they project all of their dysfunction onto everyone else.
	And so they think they're fine and everyone else is an idiot.
	And so they're the last people who will go for that kind of help, which is why I think the best thing we can do is to focus on raising a generation which has less of this and recognize that it's almost impossible to fix people who are that broken.
	Yeah, I understand. Now, I wanted to draw Aaron into the conversation.
	Now, Aaron, you did a video about the, basically kind of, you know, more elaborations on the concept of the non-aggression principle.
	I know you and I had discussed the topic before as well.
	So why don't you go ahead and give your commentary and then let's bounce that off of Stefan and see what he thinks.
	Basically, it was a pretty short video.
	I just went into kind of what we've been talking about with verbal aggression and how it will result in physical aggression and just non-communication.
	You're not going to get anything fixed or you're not going to reach any conclusions by Verbally aggressing against one another.
	And also, I talked about, which is something else you've brought up to me, Neil, aggression against the environment, or how doing things that harm the environment obviously will have effects on real people.
	And if you are, say, polluting the air, you're basically aggressing against everybody who will be breathing that air.
	Yes, I agree with that.
	And I guess that kind of gets into the property rights is how libertarians would approach that.
	But Stefan, what do you think about the idea of the non-aggression principle also being applied to the earth that everybody lives on?
	I mean, I think that's perfectly valid.
	There's no question.
	I mean, if I tie someone up in my garage and leave the car running, that's attempted murder because I'm putting toxins into their lungs.
	Make the garage a little bigger and replace the car with a smokestack and the principle still applies.
	There's no question in my mind that pouring crap into the air that people are going to end up breathing and developing emphysema or other lung issues from is an absolute act of aggression.
	It doesn't matter how fast the poison is, you know, within certain limits.
	It doesn't really matter how fast the poison is.
	If it's still poison, then that's an issue and that's something that I've written about this quite extensively, so I won't bore you with the details, but there's lots of creative and intelligent solutions that will be brought to bear.
	Unfortunately, it doesn't happen in a status society because the government has so much power and the corporations have so much money that the corporations will simply take over the government and get preferential legislation.
	Interestingly enough, at least for me, interestingly enough, The old common law system was designed to solve this, right?
	So if I polluted a stream that ran past my neighbor, then I would owe him the damages of that.
	This is sort of way back Middle Ages and forward.
	This was true of air pollution as well.
	Originally, when the smokestacks began to come up in the Industrial Revolution, all the apple farmers took these people to court and said, your soot is coating my apples and I'm losing all this money, so you better deal with this soot, otherwise you've got to pay us for all these apples.
	That raised the cost of production so much that it wasn't going to work out.
	But the government, and I'm sure that there was money that handed from capitalists to magistrate at this point, the government said, well, you know, basically we're getting more tax revenue out of the factories than we are out of the apple farmers, so sucks to be you.
	We're going to let them pollute whatever they want.
	And so with the government, you either get a hit or a miss, and that's about it.
	And in this case, it was a substantial miss that led to a huge amount of pollution that Could have been avoided.
	There's lots of ways to do it, but there's no question.
	You harm people.
	You don't have to touch people to harm them.
	Some guy's standing at the edge of a cliff, and I run up to him and go, and he takes a step backwards and falls to his death.
	I've killed him as surely as if I put a bullet through his heart.
	I mean, I don't have to touch someone to do them significant harm, and the pollutants Whether they're through verbal abuse or smokestacks or, you know, just about anything else you could name that has a direct and measurable harmful impact on other people's well-being, yeah, I think that is all subject to the non-aggression principle.
	That's actually, you know, that's an excellent and humorous addition to all of that.
	I guess that's, you know, it's an interesting question that I posed because when I looked at that link, I was reading an article about that and then I found myself kind of in a quandary and I was reading the comments and There were people arguing on both sides of it.
	Well, it's this kid's free speech to go to these people's Facebook memorial websites where all of his friends and loved ones are remembering their dead children and say whatever he wants.
	But on the other side of it, it's like, wow, why would anybody ever abuse their free speech that way?
	I guess you find yourself in a quandary.
	It's like you're angry at the guy.
	I can tell you why. I can tell you why.
	Look, I'm no psychic, but this doesn't take a lot of psychic ability.
	I can tell you why. People lash out like that for a very simple reason, which is that there is a massive code of silence about child abuse in our society.
	So I can guarantee you that this jerk, and let's not be You know, entirely flattering in our choice of words.
	It's pretty accurate. This jerk, let's say he's 20, I guarantee you that he was abused by his family, by his parents probably, or other caregivers, or other people who had authority over him.
	He was very badly abused, and he was in an environment where nobody did anything about it.
	And so he has got a lot of anger and contempt and scorn and rage towards a society That says over and over again, Oh, children!
	We're all about the children.
	We care so much about the children and family bonds are so wonderful.
	And he turns on the TV and he sees every sitcom in the known universe where the parents are kind.
	And have you ever seen any kid get spanked in a sitcom or any kind of family drama?
	Never, except by a bad guy.
	Parents never raise their voice.
	They never verbally abuse. They never emotionally abuse.
	They never physically abuse. They never sexually abuse.
	And so he knows that society is entirely down with what peaceful and positive and philosophical parenting looks like because it's all you ever see from the Cosby Show to Family Ties to the new one, Modern Family.
	It's all peaceful, positive, happy, great parenting and everybody loves to watch it because that's That's what people claim that they want, and that's what people claim that they value, and yet he was probably treated like complete crap by his family, and everybody knew about it, and no one stepped in to do a damn thing about it,
	and so he's got this rage against a society that knows what the right thing to do is, worships the right thing at the altar of the media, and doesn't do the right thing when it comes to stepping in to actually do something to protect children who are being hurt.
	That's where almost all of these people come from.
	That actually makes a lot of sense, and it's kind of obvious to me, and it's one of the things I hope to touch on in the film when I'm talking about particularly the kind of people we're dealing with here, because there are people who really let this kind of stuff bother them.
	They'll send me messages, yeah, this guy, he's talking about me, and he's talking about my wife, and all this other garbage.
	I'm like, well, have you ever considered the quality of the person in question, and The moment somebody's decided that that behavior is appropriate, they should kind of drop off your radar as being anybody you should ever be concerned about their opinion of you.
	Usually, they kind of get that, and it's a good way to kind of help digest it.
	In addition to that, the person in question in the article apparently is an alcoholic who just lives in his mom's basement and just drinks alcohol all the time.
	And he supposedly has Asperger's syndrome or whatever that is.
	And as a result, just thought it would be funny to go ruin some people's grieving process.
	So obviously, as you pointed out in the statistics that you quoted in your spanking video, that people who are involved with that are more likely to develop alcoholism and all these other negative traits.
	And it is unexpressed anger that they're taking out on other people.
	Even the more mild trolls, there's one that I deal with fairly regularly.
	I caught him once on his own forum at one point just admitting to somebody that in person he's a very meek and mild personality and that he goes to the internet to get out his aggressions.
	I imagine that what is probably happening is he's getting stressed out or I'm sure you've heard the term, well, God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal, in reference to firearms being the great equalizer.
	Now everybody can be violent.
	It doesn't matter if the guy's bigger than you.
	You can just pull a trigger and you can take him down.
	The internet creates an atmosphere where anybody can be a bully.
	It doesn't matter how big you are.
	You can be completely anonymous about it and you can get your, I guess, rocks off, but it's not healthy to do that.
	And I think what's even worse is that we as a society don't turn and look at that behavior for what it is and call it out.
	Oh yeah, trolls are only effective because people have a hard time seeing them, there's no question.
	But I sort of think, first of all, I think how unutterably miserable these people must be on the inside.
	I mean, I get angry about it sometimes, but fundamentally it's truly just tragic and awful.
	How unhappy these people must be.
	Character assassination is one of these things.
	It's a gun that goes off in your own face.
	The bullets never hit.
	They just go off in your own face.
	And the other thing I think as well is that it's like a temptation that is reinforcing the sort of behavior, the choices that people make to be aggressive.
	It doesn't matter if it's on the internet or wherever people choose to be aggressive.
	You know, there's an old Spanish proverb that says, habits begin as cobwebs and end up as chains.
	You know, so at the beginning, there's just, ah, you know, I feel a little better doing that.
	And then you're like, ah, but I really shouldn't.
	Oh, you know, I feel a little better.
	Do it again and then do it again.
	And it changes who you are to do this kind of...
	In the long run, and it doesn't even take very long, weeks if not months, it changes who you are as a human being.
	And I think that what is happening is people are taking the train tracks of their habits and then they're pointing them away from the uphill...
	Sunny, wonderful mountaintops with a beautiful view of the future and they're taking it down into a dark, festering, mortar-type valley from which it's very, very hard, if not impossible, to back out from.
	And so every time people act out this way anywhere in their life, where they lash out or they put someone down or they hurt someone to make them feel better, Each one of these things is not terminal.
	You know, it's like each donut doesn't make you a diabetic, but after a certain amount of time, damn it, you're just a diabetic and you can't go back.
	And so it's each individual choice to do it that is so heartbreaking.
	And people, I think if they knew where that road led, they'd run from it screaming.
	But each individual choice, like each individual cigarette feels good in the moment and stopping feels bad.
	But if people knew the sort of spiritual lung cancer they were heading for that is truly terminal and it's the worst kind of illness because it would kill your soul without killing your body and then you become one of the walking dead and the most dangerous specimens of humanity.
	And so I think it is truly tragic the degree to which people take these little hits I've seen research that it actually alters your brain chemistry over time.
	Apparently lying does the same thing, but any kind of behavior that you repeat over and over again, especially If it's something that has a chemical effect, and, you know, we tend to forget that our brains are basically chemical computers, you know, you repeat any kind of behavior over and over again,
	especially if you're doing it for some kind of emotional fix, you know, at the end of the day, emotions are basically just chemicals too, and if you, you know, repeat the same one over and over again, you will create an addiction, especially if you're doing it in some way to unhealthily self-medicate yourself.
	The people whose Self-esteem has been destroyed by a bully somewhere else or trying to self-medicate that by trying to take it from someone else.
	Yeah, and I think the soul dies when the restitutions for the wrongs you've done can no longer be achieved, right?
	So if I say to you, I don't know, some fit of anger, I say, oh, you're a stupid jerk or something.
	I can't remember. I can't imagine I would say something.
	But if I did say something like that and it hurts your feelings, I could call you back up and I could say, oh, man, look, I... There's no excuse for that.
	That was completely wrong.
	What can I do to make it up to you?
	Tell me how you're doing. That was just a terrible, terrible thing to do.
	I took ownership for it and I took responsibility for it and I tried to make amends.
	I could repair it and it would take some time, but so on.
	If you hurt someone personally, then you can do stuff to To offer restitution for what it is that you've done.
	The problem with the internet is it's a no-mulligan planet out there on the internet.
	If you go lash out at people anonymously, you go lash out at people wherever, then you don't know the harm you've done and you can't create restitution for the harm.
	Because maybe you can call the person who you've harmed and try and sort it out or solve it, but everyone else who's been harmed by watching it or, you know, in general, you've contributed to the disintegration of human civility on the planet.
	You really can't do it.
	And, of course, if you're a professional nasty guy on the web, then you've put out lots of this kind of stuff in lots and lots of places, and then you can't undo it.
	And once you can't undo the wrongs you've done, I think you're done as far as spiritual growth goes.
	Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
	And I think it's actually amazing to me over the course of my studies just how much energy some of these people put into this.
	You know, there are blogs where people just spend all of their time, you know, internet stalking other people looking for ways to embarrass them or, you know, taking their photos.
	And, you know, it's like they keep it up on such a regular basis.
	You got to wonder to yourself, what else in this person's life are they neglecting?
	To keep this going.
	Like, I hope they're not a parent who's not spending time with their children because instead they have to go work on this blog where they're harassing this person who they've never met and likely never will meet to deal with whatever demons are going on inside them.
	Well, yeah, of course they're not dealing with any of those demons, right?
	I mean, that's the point. It's a distraction.
	I mean, yeah, it's a distraction.
	I read one study once that said that the majority of people who are bullies have impotence issues.
	I mean, not spiritual impotence, but like, you know, Dick Skywood impotence issues.
	And, you know, that of course is a pretty troubling thing, I would imagine, so that may be some driver behind it.
	But yeah, it's not a much-studied phenomenon, which I think is a real shame.
	And it is something that relies upon...
	A troll can't act alone, right?
	I mean, a troll has to have...
	People who will fuel the fire, right?
	I mean, and this is true of bullies as a whole.
	And I think if we were better at seeing dysfunction, I mean, first, if we were better at seeing dysfunction, then we could actually perhaps even reach out to try and help I mean, I had a guy on my board, I wouldn't call him a total troll, but he was pretty verbally aggressive and I asked him to start posting a couple of years ago.
	And he came back and he said, listen, you know, I'm sorry, I get it.
	And I'm like, hey, come on back, you know, I don't have time or energy to hold grudges.
	And he's been great, you know, he's been really helpful and creating a lot of positive interactions and giving great information on the message board, on the website.
	And so, you know, people can learn and they can grow and they come back.
	And yeah, the people who are banned, of course, will often make some kind of stink.
	And I just think that's silly.
	Being on someone's message board, it's like being on a date.
	So if the date doesn't work out, let's say I go out with some girl and then she doesn't want to go out with me again and so I set up a blog, I don't know, Cursing her in every way imaginable.
	I think people would kind of understand that she probably did make a good decision to not go out with me again, if that's the kind of guy.
	That I am. And so I think that there is this real tragedy.
	Lots of people are very verbally acute.
	Bullies can often be very verbally skilled.
	And you just kind of think, boy, if you could turn that kind of power for good.
	I mean, imagine the good that could be done in the world if people took that kind of negative energy and put it into something positive.
	But that's a pretty hard supertaker to turn around after a time.
	Yeah, I agree. Now, Aaron, did you have anything further as far as commentary on what we've said so far?
	No, I've just been listening.
	You guys are good.
	You're going at it. Oh, and I've been banned, too.
	I used to be an objectivist, and it doesn't really matter the names of the places, but I would occasionally post some of the stuff that I thought would be of interest to objectivists, because that's very close to the anarchist position.
	And I got kicked off a couple of objectivist boards just because people found out that I was an anarchist.
	And, you know, I mean, if I were a troll, then I would immediately go back and censorship and totalitarianism and if you don't agree with everyone here, they'll just ban you and I'd start creating blogs and I don't know, whatever, right?
	It's like, good lord, if they're a message board, if they don't want me around, that's no problem.
	I've got a life. But yeah, it is hard to get into the mindset.
	But again, I go back to what agony, what pain deep down these people must be going through.
	That this seems like a good use of time.
	That this seems like the only gift that they feel they can or want to or are able to give to the world is that kind of negative and destructive energy.
	And again, it's not the Internet in particular.
	It's all over the place. But, I mean, how, my goodness, I mean, how much agony must you be in that this feels like a good thing to do with your time?
	Well, yeah, and I've been trying to emphasize that.
	Unfortunately, well, it really depends, and, like, you kind of brought up an interesting point in regards to them needing an audience, and, like, if it's just the average troll that you're dealing with, you know, just some guy who's, you know, being a jerk, you can just hit ignore, and that'll be the end of it, because he's really looking to get a rise out of you, Unfortunately, there are some people out there that are devoted to something else.
	They run in packs.
	That's another thing. These people even have websites where they go gather and compare notes on their ability to cyber-harass people, and they pat each other on the back.
	Whether you're responding at that point is optional.
	They totally are like, oh, did you see this thing I did?
	Yeah, I made this great YouTube video, and it totally crushed this guy.
	So they will just feed it, you know, they feed it to each other, you know, basically.
	And also, if they have a motive, like, for example, one of the guys who is a blog where he harasses me, flat out stated that he would stop doing it if I left the Zeitgeist movement.
	So he basically threatened me, he stated, you know, if you continue to be part of this political action movement, I'm going to continue to post links about your personal life that are mostly made up.
	I'm going to continue to You know, take, you know, clippings that I've gotten off of your Facebook and I'm going to continue to make fun of your children.
	And, you know, at that point, that's another reason why it feels like it's a violation of the non-aggression principle, because he's trying to affect my behavior and he's going to terrorize me until I go along with it.
	And there are people who do this.
	And I, you know, once again, I don't think that they recognize it, you know, in just in general speech on a day to day basis.
	It's like I'm threatening your self-esteem.
	And if I start my argument with, well, you're stupid for believing this way, I'm already at that point trying to engage you on a level that's not intellectual.
	I'm trying to push you into believing the way I want you to believe, or even just conceding because you don't want to look bad in front of all the people who are listening, which is also, I feel, an issue of aggression.
	If you're ridiculing somebody, it goes beyond just the issue of trying to hurt someone's feelings.
	It's the fact that A, you're distracting the audience away from the weakness of your own argument.
	In other words, you're trying to basically throw a smoke bomb down, so to speak, to keep people from really thinking about how bad your own argument looks, which is bad for everybody in this situation.
	And B, you are trying at that point to humiliate the person into going along with you or at least retreating.
	And both of these things, I think, hold back mankind so much.
	In so many of the debates that I've seen, you know, this is one of the reasons why discussing things with you was so refreshing, because if you remember, like Michael Badnerick, I don't know if you keep track of anything that goes on in the Libertarian Party, one of the first things, because they brought him back to make a speech, because people were interested in him because of his constitution classes that people were watching during the Ron Paul Revolution, and And he came up and they were expecting him to give like a rah-rah speech to revitalize the Libertarian Party.
	And he just went in there like swinging.
	He was like, you guys can't sell ice water in the desert.
	That was his word. And he said, and largely because, you know, you constantly bicker and fight.
	You spend endless amounts of time on ad hominem attacks and personal attacks.
	And anybody who doesn't agree with you just a little bit, you start screaming at them that they're a socialist.
	It occurred to me that he was absolutely right, and I remember all of that when I was a big part of the Libertarian Party.
	I remember being under siege the whole time by the supposed freethinking society that was spending all of its time insulting anyone that did not think exactly like them.
	Yes. I like Michael.
	I mean, I had a very four-hour debate with him, which was just completely delightful, at Drexel University in Philadelphia a couple of years ago.
	And I think he's a smart guy.
	He's obviously passionately, passionately!
	I mean, I don't think I've met anyone who's so passionately committed to a particular cause.
	And I think he's...
	He's really taken some hits for it, and so I have a lot of admiration for what he's done.
	There's the narcissism of small differences.
	It's called the vanity of small differences.
	When you're close to somebody in ideology, you feel that differences are much larger because you engage with those people more than somebody who's completely on the opposite side.
	I got a lot of very, very positive comments about the debate that we had About a variety of economic and political issues because it was an enjoyable debate.
	I think we all respected each other's viewpoint.
	People who aren't trained in a rational methodology tend to view debates or conflicts as wind loops.
	Like either I'm going to crush you or you're going to crush me.
	And this is simply people who've been raised without any philosophy or without any science or without any objective third-party discipline, you know, like reason or the scientific method or mathematical validity or whatever.
	It doesn't have to be personal, you know.
	The best argument should win, and everybody benefits from the best argument winning, but so many people...
	It's like sports. One guy wins.
	There's no win-win in sports.
	One guy wins and one guy loses.
	Like war. One guy wins, one guy loses.
	But that's not the way that I think...
	Philosophy or productive human encounters work.
	Productive human encounters is, I'll bring my ideas, you'll bring your ideas, we'll bring our best arguments, and if you beat me, then I've actually gained something really valuable, which is a better argument and better knowledge, and vice versa.
	So, you can't lose, if you have an objective third party, a rational way of resolving disputes.
	If you don't have that, which is why religions tend to be so much at war, which is why governments tend to be so violent and destructive, because that's all just win-lose.
	Politics and religion and other things is just win-lose.
	There's no win-win. And so this is, I think, where we try to bring as much rationality and empiricism to debates as possible, because then everybody can win, and your ego isn't invested because it's not win-lose, and your status is not knocked down in some primitive totem pole kind of way,
	because you don't have this jeering, idiotic crowd saying, you know, Christ, That's actually the exact goal that I would hope that people would have with communication.
	I've definitely had much more positive experiences when everybody respected everyone else than I ever did listening to people sling mud at one another.
	It actually, in so many ways, I feel, has hindered mankind's ability to communicate and meet on certain issues.
	I'm sure, for example, you and I's debate about resource-based economics versus anarcho-capitalist economics definitely taught people more on both sides of the debate than, say, the argument I could have had,
	say, with that Rudy Davis fellow, although he was doing his best to be nice, Some of the other people that I've debated with in the past who just spend all of their time, it doesn't take long before we're talking about you're fat, or you're this, or you're an idiot, or...
	Or a socialist, or you're in league with the devil, or you just want...
	Like this thing they just had where Ron Paul was asked if somebody doesn't have insurance, should they just be allowed to die?
	Like the only choice that we have is to use violence and debt And protectionism to inflate the cost of healthcare and to subsidize it by selling off the unborn to creditors.
	That's the only choice. It's that side or letting them starve to death.
	There's no other choice in the universe called charity or voluntarism or prevention or advancements in medicine or getting rid of regulations and getting rid of restrictions on entry to the medical field and letting midwives practice and So that people can get cheaper.
	Like, there's no other choices.
	It's either the system we have right now or letting them starve to death.
	I mean, letting them die for want of medical care.
	And so some people said, yeah, he should be allowed to die.
	And suddenly it all became about that and not about anything else.
	About, oh, these Ron Paul supporters, they want people to die who are sick and so on.
	It's like, ugh. God Almighty, you know, this is the 21st damn century.
	You know, we can listen to messages from interstellar space.
	We can bounce lasers off the moon.
	We can send spacecraft out of the solar system.
	Can we raise the debate standards of mankind a little bit past Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal levels?
	That's so essential for us to move forward.
	Absolutely. Especially when you're dealing with things that are so important.
	You'd think that we'd have to be able to put these things aside.
	You'd have to be able to put these personal issues aside.
	I've seen so many good conversations end because people have decided to drag it down to that level that real productive conversations, real good exchanges of ideas were being had and then all of a sudden we're discussing something completely unrelated and stupid and immature, childish even. And it's amazing the kind of people who get away with it, people that we believe are our leaders, we let them get away with that.
	And the funny thing is that people are conscious of it, but they just choose not to do anything about it.
	That's just the way it is.
	Yeah, and of course my argument would be that all you're seeing is the effects of early child abuse.
	That people's fight-or-flight mechanism is overwhelming.
	Their neofrontal cortex is overwhelming their capacity to deal with emotional discomfort and to pursue the truth anyway.
	And that just, I mean, you know, the brain science seems very clear that early trauma leads people to have an exaggerated fight-or-flight mechanism that very easily overwhelms their restraint and rationality centers in their mind.
	So all I see when I see that stuff going on is I see, you know, frightened and bullied children who got really big and really powerful and never grew up.
	Very true. Very true.
	Taken to its worst extreme, I'm afraid.
	I've always asked people, you know, it'd be interesting to look, for example, into the history of somebody like Adolf Hitler.
	You know, what happened to him when he was a child?
	Oh, that's known, actually.
	That's known. I mean, he was viciously beaten by his father.
	I'll give a plug for a book.
	I've read it as an audiobook, though I didn't write it.
	It's written by Lloyd DeMoss.
	It's on my website. It's free.
	It's called The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
	And it's a very, very well-researched, historically and scientifically and neurochemically, a very well-researched book that I've tried to put as much energy as I can into getting out there because I think it's so important.
	It's called The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
	It's at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	It is free. And it's well worth either listening to or reading, because I think it makes a very strong case that war has its origins in child abuse, and the countries that go to war are the countries that have had the most unbelievably wretched childhoods.
	And Germany understood, Germans understood this very well after the Second World War, My family is half German and half Irish.
	They were sort of on opposite sides of the war in the Second World War.
	And when my cousins would come over in the late 60s and early 70s to play, my German cousins would come over.
	They weren't even allowed to touch guns.
	They weren't allowed to play war.
	They were encouraged to work out differences reasonably because the Germans really got that the war came out of Just unbelievably medieval ways that they raised children in the 19th and early 20th century.
	And this is one of the reasons why the German economy is so strong, and one of the reasons why the two most abusive countries in the Western world, England and America, are the ones most consistently going To war.
	So the countries that treat their children the worst are the countries that end up going to war because war is the overwhelming of rage in the face of possible diplomacy and that is directly analogous to the amygdala overwhelming the neofrontal cortex and taking away choice and replacing it with brute rage and lust and greed for power.
	Okay, a caller wants to be added to the call.
	I'm going to go ahead and put them on now.
	Caller from the 713 area code, you're on the air.
	Great. Hi, guys.
	How are you doing? I'm just listening, and I'm in the middle of reading a book by Gordon Newfield and Gabor Matei.
	It's called Hold On to Your Kids, Why Parents Should Matter More Than Peers.
	And all of these behaviors that you're discussing tonight can be directly linked to our being in a peer-oriented culture, a peer-oriented society.
	Peer-oriented kids Growing up being peer-oriented adults as well.
	But I don't know if you're familiar with the book or the terminology I'm discussing right now, are you?
	I've not read the book, but I've heard the arguments and I think it's a very good one.
	Yeah, it's that peer-oriented kids, when you have kids or other kids, they're peers because they're attachment figures, they're role models, and they are not mature themselves.
	Any sign of vulnerability is attacked, first off, by this peer-oriented culture.
	And any kind of maturation is stifled as a result of it because their attachment to an adult caregiving parent or parenting caregiver, to quote them, is gone.
	They don't have that That adult figure that is loving and encourages questioning things and being an individual and all these things.
	So it ends up happening.
	It's like a Lord of the Flies kind of what you want to do.
	In that book, they actually discuss some kids, some other kids.
	and the kids actually like held some girl's head in water.
	He was smoking a cigarette while he was doing it, being cool in front of his friends.
	This is a group thing.
	And they were just cold about the whole thing because being vulnerable is, I mean, if you're vulnerable, then you're attacked.
	So you learn to never become vulnerable, so you never learn to mature.
	So therefore you have all these people attacking each other like they're three years old.
	So they have a preschool mentality, but they're adult bodies.
	Let me just, I'd like to comment on that, and that's a great point that you're raising, and I'm going to have a short rant, and I'm going to use extreme terms, but, you know, it's just really because I feel so passionately about this topic.
	Like, a different type of thing.
	Adults are extraordinarily absent from the lives of children these days.
	Adults, I'll say it again, adults are extraordinarily absent from the lives of children these days.
	I, myself, am a stay-at-home dad and have been for, I guess, coming up for three years now, and I plan to do it for the foreseeable future.
	And it's very different from the way that I was raised.
	When I was raised, you know, I was in daycares.
	And when you're in a daycare, you have, and I worked in a daycare, no matter how much you want to care about the kids, you have lots of children and relatively few adults.
	And so the children are going to end up spending more time with each other than they are with the adults.
	But children need adults.
	They need adults around them to demonstrate what maturity looks like, to help them to resolve disputes, to help guide them.
	Into being less greedy, learning how to share.
	I mean, children are primitive, let's face it, and they're charming and beautiful that way, but they really need adults.
	And adults have largely been stripped out of children's lives over the last generation or two simply because it's a combination of two things, right?
	I mean, so one is the feminism said to women, some feminism said to women, go out and work, that's your way to be fulfilled.
	And yet still, you know, a lot of women wanted kids and then ended up going out to work.
	And it's like, I don't understand why you would have children and then have other people raise them and raise them badly.
	It's always going to be the case when the children vastly outnumber the parents.
	And the second thing is, When women went out to work, that created a huge amount of collateral, because you could tax women's work, but you couldn't tax women's child raising and housework, created a huge amount of collateral for the government to expand, for the government to use the tax income from women to borrow more, to go into greater deficits, to bribe more people, to the point now where taxes are so high, That very few women can choose to stay home, even if they want to.
	So children are growing up without much adult, one-on-one time, where they actually learn how to become a civilized human being.
	And you're right, it's this horizontal, under-the-table, Lord of the Flies, kick, grab, take, steal, pinch, spit, whatever.
	It tends to go down to the lowest common denominator.
	And if you look at how celebrity culture works, it's exactly the same as preschool.
	When you're a kid, if you're a little boy, what do you care about?
	You care about superheroes and dinosaurs and big, scary, strong things.
	And this grows up to become superheroes in the movies and wrestlers and guys who work out and have six-packs and all that kind of crap.
	And so you end up with this exaggerated celebrity culture.
	It's like a direct mirror of what goes on when children are very young.
	They don't aspire to be good, virtuous, wise, helpful, healthy people.
	They aspire to be big and strong.
	They want to be princesses and dress up and be attractive and all this kind of stuff.
	And then this mutated celebrity culture is directly coming out of the fact that children are using each other as value models, which is not a good idea, and they're not having nearly enough time.
	with adults to learn how to grow into civilized and mature human beings and that is crushing the progress of the species.
	That's actually very accurate and I believe you had Dr.
	Gabor Mate on your show at one point.
	I've had him twice on mine as well and he echoed everything that you just said about how we don't have enough adult supervision.
	Kids are just kind of raised around kids and therefore they're not really evolving.
	They're not going further And sorry, just to be clear, he didn't talk about that on my...
	I'm not trying to steal his ideas without crediting him.
	I just thought of this stuff. It's good to know he's coming along to the way I'm thinking about it, though.
	No, but I just wanted to be clear about it.
	Oh, no, that's just what he said on my show.
	I didn't get a chance to watch the one that you had with him.
	I just... Just kidding.
	Yeah, so, no, and I... So, it's good.
	I mean, anything that Dr.
	Mete says that I happen to coincidentally say, I'm very proud of, because I think he's just great, so...
	But yes, that's a great point that the caller brought up, and thank you so much for mentioning that.
	And what was the name of the book again?
	It was Hold On to Your Kids by Dr.
	Gabor Mate. Very good book.
	I recommend it to everyone.
	And to those of you who are interested, you can go to v-radio.org, and you can go to the archives, and you can get, I believe I've interviewed Dr.
	Gabor Mate three times on the show.
	I'd have to go look. It's been a while.
	And speaking of which, just for a quick shameless plug, where can they look for the episode where you talk to Dr.
	DeBoer? Oh, it's youtube.com forward slash free domain radio.
	You can just do a search in there.
	Or mate, free domain, or whatever.
	M-A-T-A-G-A-B-O-R-M-A-T. Funky little E with an excellent tegu or something.
	But yeah, you can find him there.
	He's fantastic. I mean, I think he's very honest.
	and he's got a kind of slow Gandalf kind of wisdom to him, which I think is really very attractive, and he's a great writer, too.
	His books are highly recommended, and The Realm of the Hungry Ghost is a very powerful work.
	So, yeah, he's great.
	Excellent.
	But, yeah, I think you'd really like, particularly after discussing it with you a little bit, I think you'd really like his ideas about parenting and all that.
	But anyway, now...
	We move on also to the value of using and understanding logical fallacies and how they are used against people to prevent them from thinking.
	This is actually one of the major things I want to focus on in my film, to try to help people learn these things as kind of like a self-defense for the mind.
	There are so many different ways that other people will try to, quote-unquote, pull the wool over your eyes with various little tricks.
	The straw man, the red herring, the ad hominem.
	I think that one of the major reasons why I suggest to people that they need to educate their brains on how to recognize these tactics is that it's the best way to defend yourself.
	Even if we were to regulate the internet, one of the other things that I've been stumbling across in my research is that governments, corporations, have all plugged into this notion that the internet and popular opinion, and more specifically, making something look unpopular, is extremely powerful.
	They use these tactics willy-nilly.
	They have people pretend to be consumers going to other people's websites and slamming on their products like the Xbox 360.
	There might be people from Sony on those forums saying, I hate this system.
	I despise it. This is why.
	This is why. We've got evidence.
	There's a Tea Party lecture that you can watch where they say to do this for Any liberal book, just do searches on Amazon and rate all the liberal books at one star, even if you haven't read them, and then rate all the conservative books five stars, even if you haven't read them.
	And I understand these people are passionate, but at that point, it's kind of a question I tell people is that you need to learn how to be able to think and how to prevent other people from keeping you from thinking, and that's the best way to defend yourself against a lot of these tactics.
	What do you think about that?
	Well, I'll tell you.
	And I'm going to say this without a shred of humility, and then people can tell me what an arrogant jerk I am.
	But I genuinely believe that I'm not going to stroll up to Eric Clapton and start jamming with him.
	Because I suck at the guitar.
	And I know that I suck at the guitar.
	I've tried. I really have.
	Played it till my fingers bled as the Canuck sings.
	But I just suck at the guitar.
	I did ten years of violin.
	I wasn't too bad at the violin.
	But guitar is just bad all over.
	I just can't get it down.
	But I recognize that.
	Even though I spent, I don't know, how many hours trying to learn the damn thing, I could do one song badly.
	I mean, it's embarrassing. I had to stop.
	I just had to stop. But I know about that.
	And I genuinely believe that the statistics seem to be it takes about 10,000 hours to become really good at something.
	Really, like, really fluently good at something.
	It takes about 10,000 hours.
	One of the reasons the Beatles were so good is they went to Hamburg for a couple of years and played for 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day.
	I mean, this is one of the reasons they're so good.
	People don't understand that about philosophy.
	Every damn fool who can type thinks that he can debate philosophy or understands philosophy or know how a rational argument works.
	And I think that we're born pretty rational.
	My daughter's two and a half and can out-argue me sometimes.
	I mean, she's just really, really rational.
	So we're born that way, but it's replaced with all this junk that serves the powers that be.
	But I get that one of the things I've done is, since the age of 16 or so, I have been working really hard on philosophy, and I have totaled it up.
	I have about 30,000 hours of philosophy under my belt over the past almost 30 years now.
	And so, I'm good at it.
	I mean, I'm certainly not immune to mistakes or all these kinds of things, but I'm pretty good at it.
	And I respect that. I don't think that because I've seen a couple of Bruce Lee films that I can jump into a black belt judo competition and do anything other than get my ass kicked and fall over.
	So I recognize that, but the problem is that people don't recognize that.
	And this is a point that Herbert Spencer made in the 19th century.
	He says, you know, it's not bad to have opinions about economics.
	It's just that when you don't know how little you know, you can be very dangerous.
	And this is very true when it comes to things like ethics and philosophy and And even debating.
	Look, it takes a lot of training to debate.
	I mean, I started debating formally when I was in, I guess, 16 or 17 in high school.
	I debated all through university, went all over Canada and some parts of North America doing these Formal professional debates.
	It takes a long time to learn how to do it properly and to learn how to, you know, you don't just give some idiot on the street corner a knife and say, my appendix is hurting, can you just get to work?
	No, you want someone who studied it for a hell of a long time so they don't screw it up.
	And the same thing is true when it comes to debate.
	So for me, you know, I sort of feel like I'm a prize fighter who's been training for like 20 years and has really quick footwork and a couple of championship titles under his belt.
	And these little girl guides come in and start swinging with their cute little fists thinking that they're doing some damage.
	And it's like... You need to train.
	There's no shortcuts.
	You need to learn this stuff.
	And it's embarrassing for me to see how many people wade into debating, having no idea, having no idea how to establish an argument, how to support with evidence, how to avoid the common logical fallacies, which we've all been trained into using by all the crap we learned in high school and junior high school.
	But people don't know how little they know, and they get really sensitive when you try to point that out, right?
	To me, it's just watching a bunch of idiots wade into a field of expertise with loud opinions who know almost nothing about what they're doing and are just getting in the way of people who do.
	And then afterwards, of course, they don't have to do any of the studying that you and I have done.
	They can just call me fat and you bald and then focus on that for a while and then they've won.
	Because, of course, We stop talking to them, which in the aggression language means...
	He's running away!
	Yeah, he's running away! He can't take the power of my arguments!
	Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.
	Yeah, no, absolutely. But this is the price of helping to do our little bit to save the world.
	I mean, this is... You know, you have to deal with the fact that debate and philosophy and argumentation and economics, just one of these areas that...
	You know, everybody who's an idiot thinks that they know what they're doing.
	And look, I do meet some people who, you know, school me on various things.
	I've corrected myself on air in the face of superior arguments.
	I think that's wonderful. I think it's fantastic.
	But people who don't know how to do it and don't know that they don't know, well, see, that's not a big deal, right?
	But if I go into some judo competition, you know, pretend to kick and fall over, everyone's going to laugh at me.
	But the problem is that when, you know, you and I go into debate with someone and, you know, they start saying, you're fat and you're bald, everyone cheers them, right?
	So the audience is also part of the problem.
	But that's been the case ever since the days of Socrates.
	Until the audience gets that there is a skill set that people need to learn, that they need to have grown up, that they need to have dealt with some of their personal issues in order to debate things like ethics without triggering their own or other people's defenses, that they need to...
	Socrates said, know thyself.
	Know thyself. That is the beginning of wisdom.
	That is the beginning of wisdom because until you know who you are, you can't study the world.
	So many people just want to go out there storming out trying to solve all the problems in the world without having looked in the mirror first and they end up doing so much damage.
	It's incalculable. Absolutely.
	Something actually that pops in my mind about it is that when somebody is truly secure in themselves, they are extremely quick to admit when they're wrong because You don't want to be wrong.
	There's two ways to look at that.
	You can either pretend that you're not wrong and try to convince everyone else that you're not wrong and then insult the other person so that they're not paying attention to the fact that you were in fact wrong.
	Or you can say, I don't want to be wrong.
	So I adopt a new idea and then now I'm no longer wrong because now if somebody asked me about that same topic, I'd give the correct answer because I know the correct answer because I learned something from my intellectual exchange that I had with somebody the other day.
	And I realize that not everybody gets that.
	There are people, for example, who communicate with me, you know, who say, you know, VTV, you know, using my, like, you know, internet call sign, I rarely see you, you know, admit that you're wrong.
	And I say that's actually because rarely do I ever get involved in a conversation about things that I don't, you know, where I don't know what I'm talking about.
	I'm very in touch with my own weaknesses and the things that I'm not any good at.
	So I just don't get into arguments like that.
	I know, for example, I'm terrible at math.
	I have a learning disability in math.
	There's no point in me arguing math with anybody.
	Why would I? And when somebody does say something that makes more sense, and I go, oh, yeah, you're right, and then I just keep talking.
	It doesn't need to be a big knock-down, drag-out fight where two people are going at it, and then eventually, after three hours of yelling insults at each other where the other guy concedes, that actually makes it less likely that the person is going to admit that they're wrong, because now you've drawn their ego into it.
	Yeah, so even if you look at the language you used at the beginning, say, you're wrong or I'm wrong, well, my identity is not associated with my arguments.
	The two are very separate. You know, I put forward a particular argument, and of course I would prefer to be right than for the argument to be corrected, but if the argument turns out to be incorrect, Then an argument that I made is incorrect or an argument that I've made is wrong or an argument that I made is fallacious or self-contradicture or whatever.
	It doesn't conform with the evidence.
	But that's not me. That's an argument that I have created.
	That doesn't mean that I as a human being, as an entity, am wrong in some existential way.
	It's like, no, I just, you know, I made an argument that was But that's not, oh, I'm wrong or you're wrong.
	It's like, you know, I think that we could think better together.
	I mean, that's the way I always try to approach debates.
	You know, I think that we could think better together.
	And generally that turns out to be the case.
	Absolutely. And I think that mankind in general will do better when we have these kinds of exchanges without any kind of fear.
	I think that fear is the best way to deactivate the brain because of the fight or flight that you were talking about earlier.
	And as soon as you've invoked something that makes somebody afraid, they're thinking less.
	They're not thinking more.
	And then it becomes win-lose.
	It becomes the gazelle and the hungry lion.
	Like, either the gazelle gets away and the lion gets hungrier, or the lion catches the gazelle and the gazelle gets dead.
	And that's the level, unfortunately, that we're so often working at.
	But see, this is the way it all comes back to childhood, is I consistently beat the same damn drum.
	You know, if you have a toy, if we're three years old, and you have a toy, and I have a toy, and I want the toy, and I take it from you, then I have the toy and you don't.
	That's win-lose. But the toy is like the truth, and people are like, I yank it from you, and now you don't have it, and I have it, and I'm better, and you're crying, and I'm dancing.
	But this is the level of...
	Children have a tough time conceiving of win-win negotiations.
	Very tough time. And that's exactly how they should be, by the way, because children grow to get resources, because throughout most of history there weren't enough resources to feed children.
	So children had to be aggressive in getting their resources and not sharing, because otherwise they would often die from starvation or neglect or want or whatever.
	And so I'm very glad that my daughter doesn't like to share.
	I mean, it would be weird if she did.
	It would be like some sort of, well, you reincarnated as a tiny little Mother Teresa here.
	That's no good. So I'm very, you know, but she needs to understand that she's in a situation of abundance that, you know, if I take something, she can still have something and she can share with other kids and she can learn to enjoy other kids playing.
	You play with other kids.
	But this is the level at which people get stuck, and so they end up with the truth being a toy that they have to grab violently from someone else so that the other person cries and they are victorious.
	Again, it's a lack of parental involvement, a lack of authority involvement that teaches them how sharing is beneficial in the long run, but it requires a longer view, of course, in effect, than children are born with.
	Again, there's nothing wrong with the kids.
	They're doing exactly what they should be doing.
	My argument is that the adults in their life aren't.
	Right. I think, actually, that there is somebody else who's interested in calling in, and I know you need to go soon, so I won't take too much longer on this, but I do want to thank you for being on tonight, and go ahead and give the, once again, give the link to your website, and, you know, basically the people who are interested in hearing more of your work.
	Sure, it's freedomainradio.com.
	If you want to check out the video series that I think is most relevant to what we're talking about, it's called The Bomb in the Brain.
	The True Roots of Human Violence.
	You can go to FDRURL.com forward slash B-I-B and don't do a search for my name and spanking videos because Dear God, you will see some stuff that I did when I was younger that's completely unholy with a llama and a ping-pong battle and a vat of jello.
	But maybe if you just stick to my YouTube channel and search for it there, you might bypass the stuff that will make you wish you were blind, or may actually make you blind yourself.
	That has been recorded, so I hope that helps.
	Excellent. Well, let me go ahead and bring this person on.
	Caller from the 631 area code, you're on the air.
	Hello, how are you doing?
	I was listening to the conversation and it was very profound.
	I agree with a lot of the points.
	I notice when I speak with people that are very aggressive in debating, being open-minded seems to be whenever you agree with them.
	It's brought me to a new form of delivery for certain things.
	One thing I did notice with the non-aggression principle, what I've noticed is for things that I don't feel are good or for the betterment of the planet and people, I don't support.
	And I realize that if you want to get rid of something without violence, the best way is to starve it.
	And any time you give something to it, it'll come back to life.
	And, you know, it's very important.
	The two of you brought up some pretty good points in debates.
	I've kind of categorized it.
	When somebody tries to take it somewhere else, I realize that that is like an evasive and also projection.
	So if I'm, say, if I talk about something that's wrong right now, if it's modern-day slavery...
	Somebody might say, well, you know, they had slavery at this time.
	And I say, well, that's projection.
	You know, we're not talking about slavery 300 years ago.
	We're talking about right now.
	And I wouldn't want to say a majority, but sometimes it seems to be.
	People seem to be actually mentally less.
	You know, even a lot of people that have graduated college and I think it's Russell Blaylock.
	He produced a video talking about they are producing less people with higher IQs and more people with lower IQs, directly linked to food and what they're putting in the water and just not having more natural I've noticed when I come in here,
	since I've been a child, you've had Pepsi or soda and sugar.
	And there has never been a shortage.
	Anytime I come in here, you'll always have those two items.
	But to find an organic apple or an unsprayed orange, you might have it and you might not.
	So, you know, that also, but then also the fact that I can pay less for an apple sprayed with something like poison, but I have to pay more for an apple that isn't sprayed with poison.
	Well, I find this interesting.
	It is a bit of a tangent, and we don't have a lot of time left.
	I think actually Stefan would point out that one of the other things that's lowering IQs is this child abuse issue.
	You talked about that as well, if you want to comment on that, Stefan, that statistically children are coming out with lower IQs because of child abuse and spanking.
	Yeah, I mean statistics vary, but there does seem to be a trend upwards in child abuse.
	Whether that's an increase in the reporting of child abuse or the incidence of child abuse, you can't know for sure.
	Child abuse tends to be increasing, particularly in America and in the UK. You see the myth of the dumb American?
	Well, no.
	The reality is that American children tend to get more abuse, which means that they result in 3 to 5 point less IQ, and that's significant.
	That's a significant amount of intelligence that gets shaved off just through spanking.
	That's just through spanking, let alone other forms of abuse.
	40% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ is going to come back within the next 40 years.
	These people have not been taught critical thinking.
	You can't be taught critical thinking and be a fundamentalist.
	The two are polar, polar, polar opposites.
	Or, if you are, you have a huge split in your personality where one part is medieval and one part is scientific, which is also very dangerous.
	I would agree with that. Now, the problem is, of course, that people who can't afford the more expensive apples are better off having some form of apples.
	I don't think it's necessarily poisons in the environment, though I don't think those are very good.
	I think education has gotten a hell of a lot worse since the 1960s when it became impossible to fire teachers.
	But it takes a while, because you've still got good teachers from the old system, in the same way that NASA did a lot of good engineering in the 1960s and 1970s, and now sucks.
	Because it takes a long time for the original ethic to be replaced with the sort of bureaucratic ethics, so schools are a lot worse.
	Peers don't educate each other nearly to the extent that adults will educate children, and so less exposure to adults means less exposure to education and more exposure to the emotionally terrifying interactions often With peers.
	So with worse education, I think the food has gotten worse simply because people have less time to cook quality meals.
	And I agree with you with all of that.
	Video games, again, I love video games myself.
	No problem with video games whatsoever.
	But they will teach your fight and flight mechanism and your stimulus response and your motor skills.
	They don't teach you philosophy.
	They don't teach you ethics. They don't teach you virtue.
	They don't teach you deferral of gratification, in quite the opposite in a way.
	So, I mean, you could go on and on.
	There's a cluster, a huge number of factors.
	Education, lack of access to adulthood, overexposure to peers, some bad food, child abuse increases, the continuation.
	Ninety percent of children in America are spanked.
	It's horrendous, horrendous.
	And so I think that there is a sort of dumbing down.
	On the other hand, other improvements have been pushing up IQ, but I think that's in different segments within society.
	And if you put that into sort of government schools with the sort of socialized housing that goes on in government projects where so many people are sort of single parents, Single-parent households headed by women are very bad for boys, bad for girls too, and so there's a huge amount of this underclass of people who are under-stimulated, who don't see people work and thus have less of an incentive to get an education and to defer gratification and take those crap jobs that get your first foot on the rung of the ladder.
	All of these things are contributing, I think, to a great dumbing down.
	I think I've certainly noticed it, and I think you're not alone in that.
	The last thing I would say is to remember what George Carlin said.
	You know how dumb the average person is?
	Well, half of them are even dumber.
	And I think that's just something to remember.
	It's sad but true. Thank you for calling in.
	Did you have a final point?
	Yeah. What I do notice from the 70s, 80s, and 90s and now is that from back then, the problem with the child abuse, the unnatural foods, and what I've seen to be a perpetual state of immaturity We basically have a vast amount of adults that aren't mature.
	And behavior that we can look at from adults in America and a lot around Western countries around the world is a very immature view.
	You'll find a few that can think logically and reasonably and we'll see that violence isn't the answer.
	But many of them Politics will show us this clearly.
	We have immature people that are in powerful places that use might as right and massive tools like television, radio, and newspapers to brainwash the people.
	I mean, we can clearly see from this past week that just happened the amount of propaganda that was going into actually celebrate death.
	And a girl made a very good point.
	She said, look, I don't celebrate my grandmother's death.
	She goes, I might celebrate her birthday that she's been passed, but to celebrate the funeral day is just morbid.
	And it's very close to people worshiping in a church, you know?
	A woman's breast is illegal to see, which gives us life.
	So the symbol of life is illegal.
	But to see a man...
	Almost naked on a piece of wood with a little bit of blood and in a suffering stance.
	That's not only legal, but it's worshipped.
	So it's actually a culture of worshipping suffering and death by immature adults, which are putting the children through torture as they're growing up.
	It's terrible.
	And he made a good point with the peers.
	Or keeping people also in immaturity because the kids are growing up and video games, you know, I used to play them a lot and I do think that they are a mode of programming that goes beyond what we even think we might be doing.
	We could be playing a game thinking it's a flight simulator, but who knows?
	We're watching a lighted box, a square lighted box that is a tool similar to what hypnotists use.
	So it really could be a form of hypnotizing.
	When I see... A child that will recognize a McDonald's symbol or a Pepsi symbol but doesn't know a leaf that goes to a certain tree, I start to realize we might know things that doesn't really matter.
	What does really matter more?
	How to create a sustainable planet, plant food, know the seasons, know when something's ripe, or know You know, symbols from media and pop stars and when a video game comes out or a movie.
	So just logical sense.
	Common sense I don't like to call it because it's really uncommon.
	So I guess that was the point that I really wanted to make.
	Okay, well, thank you very much.
	And obviously, you should consider being a panelist on a future show.
	Obviously, you have a lot to say.
	Let's just turn the show to that guy who listened to him all night.
	I think that was just great.
	Beautifully put.
	I mean, I couldn't argue with...
	With the thing that you said. I think that was just beautifully and movingly put.
	And I even abandoned a bad joke just to continue this thing.
	And that's hard for me to do.
	That's my addiction. Okay.
	Well, I guess then to cap things off, because I know you need to leave.
	Basically, the whole point of all of this was to try to get people to look at the non-aggression principle for what its original purpose was and to kind of expand their thinking on it.
	Because we live in a world now Where you can affect social change without just walking up and punching somebody in the face.
	You know, we live in a world where you can destroy somebody's image, their reputation so easily that in a way that, you know, we never would have conceived of before.
	We live in a world where people are conditioned just to kind of believe what they read.
	They don't really think very heavily on it and it makes it very easy for somebody to take that route to make, you know, affect social change.
	In addition to that, We touched a little bit on the fact that, and I'm glad that you agreed, in many cases, because there's so much argument about the global warming thing, I've noticed that many libertarians are anti-environmental in any way, which I think is kind of an unfortunate rubber banding snapback effect.
	It's not like we shouldn't care about the environment at all just because global warming may or may not be a hoax.
	But that's another example, actually, of the kind of cages people put themselves in mentally.
	But as far as the non-aggression principle when it comes to issues like verbal, written aggression, we've gone over the fact that it has a psychological impact on people clearly.
	I mean, it's causing suicide in some cases, so it's affecting and it's hurting people.
	And if that's the means by which that you want to affect whether or not you've quote-unquote won or lost an argument, then I think actually something that you said the first time that I interviewed you kind of came to mind Was when we were discussing, you know, the issue of different ways that people were treating the Zeitgeist Movement and you were like, these people need to get therapy and learn how to communicate.
	Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that is true.
	and I you know it's for their own sake more than anyone else I mean the future that they're creating for themselves through these kinds of actions is I mean it's tragic I mean I'm I've seen it again I've seen it in my own life and it's boy if people could see the road that they're heading down where it ends up they'd run back but again you know everybody has that choice and everybody has to accept the consequences of what they do absolutely well thank you once again Stefan for being on tonight
	I would like to talk to you personally about the parenting issue a little bit more at some point off the air, and I look forward to future shows.
	What do you have coming up on Free Domain Radio?
	Well, I'm doing some traveling.
	I'm the emcee at a big conference out on the West Coast called Libertopia.
	I just came back from New York last weekend where I spoke at Liberty Fest 2.
	And then I'm going on a liberty cruise because, you know, my job is just too tough for words.
	And so I'm doing some speaking engagements coming up.
	I'm working on a new book at the moment, and I'm planning on having an online debate about the merits of political action.
	With a very well-respected libertarian academic.
	So yeah, these are the things that are going on.
	And the usual dribbles of interviews where real experts put my eloquence to shame.
	So the usual. All right.
	Well, thanks again, Stefan.
	And I'm sure we'll end up finding some clips from this conversation that'll end up in the film.
	And if you come up with anything later that you'd like to add, by all means, you have my Skype.
	And if there's ever another conversation you want to have, we can do that as well.
	And thanks again for obviously telling your listeners you were going to be on here tonight, and I did the same.
	And just even at the end of the day, we have to support independent media because I'd really much rather that people are listening to you, even if I don't agree with everything that you say Politically, I'd much rather they were watching you than, say, Fox News or some of the other people who have their heads shoved up Sarah Palin's derriere, who have no idea what they're talking about.
	You make people think.
	And it's the fact that, actually, that I can respect you, even though I don't agree with everything you say, and that you and I can have these conversations.
	And this is, I feel, what I'm hoping is the model of That my film can help people try to achieve is to put down the axe and to start really communicating as human beings.
	Yes, and that debates should be win-win, and they should be enjoyable.
	They should be like jamming.
	You know, musicians should be like a jazz jam, something where you can all go in different directions, but you can make some beautiful music, and that the sum is greater than its parts, and I think that's the most productive conversations that can come out.
	And once you get involved in those conversations, you know, that win-lose, dick-measuring stuff just doesn't really hold any appeal anymore.
	So thank you very much for having me on the show.
	As always, it was a really great pleasure.
	And I just wish Aaron had let us get more of a word in Edgewise.
	I mean, I really felt like I was fighting a tsunami of speech with that fella.
	But anyway, maybe next time. Yeah, I guess.
	Well, he was commenting in the chat.
	Did he actually fall asleep? I heard a thump.
	No, he's here. He was really enjoying listening to us talk, so he didn't want to interrupt.
	Thank you. All right.
	Well, I'll talk to you guys soon, and thanks again for the invite.

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