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Sept. 22, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:27
1999 Beautiful Freedom Part 2

I answer some questions from the last video - thank you so much for the great responses. :)

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Thanks everybody for your great, great questions and comments about the last video, Beautiful Freedom.
I'd like to read them and get back to you with some of my thoughts.
I love this comment. Those who defend a violent government or even a limited government believe that people are so bad and so irresponsible that they need to be controlled and provided for by a select few who are not bad and are very responsible and that they will represent the bad and irresponsible.
This doesn't sound crazy to them at all.
Go figure. But this is the double thing.
This is the challenge of being propagandized and slicing and dicing all of our loftily hurled concepts like fruit ninjas games into little component pieces.
Yeah, of course. If you believe that people are bad and evil and that's why we need a government, the bad and evil people will immediately be drawn to the government to gain political power and enact their bad and evil designs upon everyone else.
So, somebody else wrote, when Steph talks about protecting children, I don't think he realizes he is then a social engineer.
By one part of his logic, we should leave parents to their own devices to raise their kids however.
But, by another, we should engineer the children towards a social goal.
All social goals are considered violence in the nothing for free, free for all society.
Consistency, fail!
Maybe, but I don't think so.
It's often struck me as strange, not to compare children to dogs, but if I kick and beat my dog to the point where my dog goes crazy and bites someone, then I'm responsible.
I have to pay for that. And if I abuse my child to the point where the child becomes violent, destructive and harmful towards others...
Then, clearly, I should be paying the cost for it.
And parents don't always pay the cost for these sorts of things and quite often get off sort of scot-free.
If they raise a child who is destructive towards society, they're kind of off the hook.
And I don't think that that's fair.
Children who are raised, abused as they're raised, are violent and destructive and very expensive for society as a whole.
And the cost, of course, should accrue to the parents who've harmed them.
That seems to me entirely natural.
You break it, you have to fix it.
It's as true in a China store as it is with child raising.
So it's not to me that in a free society children or parents are just left to do whatever they want.
It's just that we want to rationally allocate expenses to people who cause destruction.
That's the only way to really minimize destruction in the long run, because people respond to incentives.
Basic axiom of economics.
People respond to incentives.
All resources are limited.
All desires are infinite.
And so we want a society where there's every encouragement to parents to raise their children peacefully and well, and every discouragement for them to do the opposite.
And this does not at all occur in the current society.
And we want a society that is free, where people, if they do well by their kids, that's great.
Then it's very cheap to put their kids in school.
It's very cheap to ensure their children against illnesses.
It's very cheap to ensure their children against vandalism, like children being vandals or arsonists or something like that, just because you've been raised well.
And it's easy to find out. Interview the kids, brain scans, easy peasy, nice and easy.
The parents who raise their children violently will have a much tougher time getting cheap insurance.
And again, is this perfect?
Of course it's not perfect.
But, you know, saying that the sun has sunspots is not to say that there's no difference between day and night.
So, somebody else writes, the state is not a violent thief because we legitimize the state.
While it has a monopoly on force, it is because we grant it that sovereignty.
If you are dissatisfied with your government, petition it for change.
If that doesn't work, by all means, stage a coup.
But when it comes down to it, while civil cases may be arbitrated by private third parties, criminal cases must be adjudicated by commonly recognized authority who has the capacity to exact justice through force.
Well, living in society with all of the great divisions of labor and economic productivity of being able to use currency and trade and all these kinds of things requires that other people want to do business with you and want to trade with you.
If you want to buy groceries, the grocery store owner has to want to do business with you.
If you want electricity, the electricity owner has to want to ship it to you.
If you perform crimes against humanity, the withdrawal of social cooperation and social approval is more than enough to deal with almost all the cases of criminality that can be imagined and I've got more on this in podcasts and so on but we underestimate the degree to which ostracism is a powerful, powerful, powerful mechanism For ensuring social compliance to reasonable rules like the non-initiation of force and the respect for property rights.
Studies have shown that people who are ostracized experience almost exactly the same symptoms as physical pain.
It's very painful for us to be ostracized.
I mean, we're a social species, we're a tribal species, we've kind of been developed and designed to go along with the social flow.
So ostracism is not only personally very painful, but it has a very powerful Economic effect in that if people don't want to do business with you, you can't live in society.
You just can't.
You end up maybe having to go out and find some place in the woods to go live, but people won't rent you an apartment or people won't sell you groceries.
Of course they want to because they want your money, but if you have egregiously violated basic civilized rules, then people aren't going to want to do business with you.
That's something that we have very instant availability.
reputation is something we can instantly get through the internet now.
And of course, you know, we want to have it protected and be safe and make sure it's not abused.
And people will, of course, want that.
But don't underestimate the degree to which ostracism is a very powerful tool for enforcing social compliance.
It's not really possible at the moment because we just lock people up.
And anyway, so yeah, so we don't need we don't need a central authority of with a monopoly on violence to prosecute criminal cases.
Because giving somebody a monopoly on violence is a criminal action to begin with.
Somebody exercising a monopoly on the initiation of force is a criminal action to begin with.
You can't protect property rights by nominating a gang to head power who has the right to strip you of half your property.
Can't do it. You cannot protect yourself against the non-initiation of force by granting certain individuals a monopoly on the initiation of force.
Right? That's like solving a headache with a guillotine.
No working. Anyway. So, somebody wrote, This is the human nature argument.
Human beings are X, therefore we need Y. But almost always you will find that human beings are X because we have a social system called Y. Women in the 19th century were considered flighty and irresponsible and foolish and prone to headaches and whatever.
I mean, hysterical was originally invented for the history, for the womb, right?
And why was this the case?
Is it because women are innately foolish and silly and inconsequential and uninterested in worldly matters?
No. Because they weren't allowed to own property or enter into contract or have a social or have an economic life outside of their husband?
No, of course not. Right?
Now, they don't want to work because they're being forced.
The force comes first.
The effect of the force comes afterwards.
And to say we need the force because of the effect of the force is to put the cart before the horse.
Human beings are not at all by nature greedy and violent.
Now, if they're raised violently, of course they will become violent.
This is true of all mammals, and probably other animals too.
You beat a dog often enough, that dog will become very aggressive.
If you beat the dog as a puppy in particular.
If you're aggressive against children, they will grow up greedy and violent.
But that's no argument for human nature that simply says that human beings respond to their circumstances.
Of course they do. And some of those changes through epigenetics can be permanent.
It changes your genes to be raised violently or peacefully.
So the human nature argument doesn't work.
And you can go to FDRURL.com forward slash BIB for the bomb in the brain explanation of this.
Lots of science behind it.
This is not just my opinion. Question.
What about if you were to make government and law enforcement a voluntary position?
That way you are guaranteed people who are there to help.
They do it because they want to, not the paycheck.
The police motto is people helping people.
But these days it is so far from that it is not even funny.
Well, yeah, I have no problem with a voluntary group of people.
I mean, they used to be called the guardian angels, right?
These people that hang around the subways and help people.
They used to be out here in Toronto, but...
But it's Canada, so what are they going to do?
You dropped your donut! Anyway, so yeah, that's fine.
But of course the government has no legal responsibility to protect you at all.
There was some woman whose three daughters were kidnapped by her estranged ex-husband who had a restraining order.
She went to the police.
She called them seven times, went down to the police station, begged them to help.
They pretty much ignored her. Her husband killed the kids.
She took the police to court.
And the court ruled that they have no obligation to enforce the law.
They have no obligation to protect you.
If your house gets burgled, can you go to the police for restitution?
Of course not. It's all nonsense. To serve and protect, yes.
But not you and me. The powers that be.
Our society will never be free because it is of zero benefit to those who would like to see everyone but themselves poor, sick, and dying.
We have let them get way too far in the agenda and now we are seeing the results.
It is certainly true that the people in power do some pretty wretched things and use morality first and foremost to control us.
We need to save them from this error.
It is not much fun.
I mean, there's a cheap and sleazy kind of thrill, I'm sure, at the exercise of power, but fundamentally it is self-destructive to exercise power.
I mean, think of the sort of towards the end of the Roman Empire, think of the Roman emperors.
They had children and grandchildren, perhaps even great-grandchildren.
Was it to their benefit to squeeze the lifeblood of the Republic out of the thinning veins of historical freedoms?
For the sake of petty socialism and bribing the poor, bread and circuses?
Of course not. The population of Rome went from like a million to 17,000 in a couple of years because it just got depopulated.
Everyone scattered to the countryside, people who didn't know how they held a farm.
It was not in their interest.
And we have to free the rulers from their delusions as well.
The delusion that power will bring security, that there is safety in domination.
We have to free them from this delusion.
Steph, you forget about crimes of passion, crimes of jealousy, rebellious teens, combative alcoholics, our innate competitiveness, emotional outbursts, impulsiveness, and plain spoiled people who will commit crimes, no matter what freedoms they have or how well they were raised.
You cannot simply erase the evolution of the human brain.
We are descendants of the best killers, sculpted for violence over a million years.
And you must take this into consideration when crafting solutions.
Remember, I'm not crafting solutions.
I'm not saying how the future will work.
I don't know what happens after we end slavery.
I'm just saying that slavery is immoral and impractical.
I can't believe it takes me so many podcasts and videos to say that, but that's the basic fact.
So, the physical reality, though, seems quite clear, and there's lots of science to back this up.
When children experience violence, brutality, control, domination, coercion, bullying, verbal, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, when they experience this, the fight-or-flight mechanism within the brain swells and gets larger.
Memory is impaired and destroyed.
And the neofrontal cortex, the seat of reasoning and the deferral of gratification, shrinks.
So you end up with this Yosemite Sam Freudian id raging beast with very little impulse control.
People lash out and then wonder what happened and then forget about it and do it again.
This is all... It's not human nature.
Not human nature. Not human nature.
Human beings adapt to their environment.
If your environment is peaceful and calm, then your system adapts to an environment of plenty and cooperation and you grow up friendly and happy and wanting to engage and interact with people.
If you experience violence and coercion, your...
The biological system assumes that you're in a situation of war and scarcity and want and destruction and win-lose, and then you grow up aggressive and grabby and violent.
This is one of the beautiful and terrible things about human nature, is it adapts itself to its circumstances.
And if we want to build a future of freedom in society, what we first need to do is to have people adapt to peace and freedom within the family.
From there, as night follows day, we shall end up with a society of peace and freedom.
It starts in the home, the hand, the rocks, the cradle.
writes the future.
Steph, I really like your channel.
I like what you have to say, but there is a difference between what should be and what can be.
We all know that statism does not work, but jumping off a faulty bus while it's driving is both scary and dangerous.
Sure, we will find other solutions for education, healthcare, welfare, and protection, but there will be a huge gap between that and Which will be dangerous, messy, painful, and even deadly.
That is why people keep doing the state of something.
Absolutely. No question.
I completely agree with you.
It's a great point. You simply cannot turn off the state.
And people ask, do you push a switch if you could turn off the state right now?
No. Absolutely not.
No question. Any more than you would simply take all the bars off a zoo and let the animals just wander out to their...
Starvation and death, right?
I mean, unfortunately, we have generations of people who've adapted to a coercive and brutal situation, who've been terribly or well miseducated or terribly educated by the state.
They are dependent. They haven't developed work skills.
They haven't got resumes. They don't have social skills.
You've got old people who've had money stolen from them who need retirement savings.
Oh, yeah. It's a multi-generational change.
You cannot pull the rug out.
The first thing we need is honesty.
The first thing we need is honesty about what it is that we live under.
We need to turn the lights on, have people look around and see the dungeon that they live in.
If you think you're in some pleasant meadow when you're in fact in a blood-soaked medieval dungeon of historical statism, you're not going to be able to make any intelligent decisions.
The first thing we need is honesty.
And once we have honesty, we can start to build something better.
First thing we need is honesty. No question.
You can't just suddenly turn off the state.
The state would recoagulate, would reform in its existing form because, you know, there is this cycle, right?
The state creates, the people creates, the state creates, the people creates, the state creates the people ad infinitum until somebody breaks the cycle, which is what philosophy is trying to do.
It's trying to get us to see the world that we live in so we can make better decisions.
Steph, as always, a stimulating and motivating video.
Thanks. The peaceful parenting non-aggression principle and basic anarchical views are spot on.
See, it's great. If you agree with me, you don't need any evidence.
But if you disagree with me, I will require evidence.
That's my level of intellectual integrity.
However, he says, I am a theist.
Would that make me an outcast in your future world?
Keep up your fantastic work.
Not among theists, so no.
Steph's view on a utopianistic type society is doomed to failure as it was for communism.
Instead of getting rid of the police and government with its affiliated branches of providing safety and regulatory environment for the society, why not work at improving just that?
Improve the police, the governments, and make them less violent, more efficient.
Let's face it, children aren't so innocent as Steph wants them to be portrayed.
Steph's adults are nothing but grown adults.
It doesn't matter what happens to the money after it's stolen.
It doesn't. It doesn't matter if somebody chops your hand off, if they give the sword to the Smithsonian as a donation.
That doesn't put your hand back on.
It is the initiation of force that is the problem, not the effects.
It doesn't matter what the effects are.
It doesn't matter what the effects are.
I mean, if you have arranged marriages, you force women to get married, and then you find ten women who have great marriages as a result, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether you have a happy or sad marriage after you are forced to get married.
It's the force that counts, the force that matters.
It doesn't matter. So, you can't reform what occurs beyond the bloody curtain of violence.
I don't care what's on the other side of the bloody curtain of violence.
I don't care. I don't want that bloody curtain of violence in society.
We can't use violence to solve complex social problems.
We can try, and we will forever fail and achieve the opposite of what we say we want.
So we have to put down the guns, then we'll talk.
But don't ask me to reform stuff with violence still in the room, because it can't be done.
I don't mean this comment to be insulting, but isn't this discussion pointless?
The world is not just going to flip a switch to suddenly become libertarian.
The change will take decades, if not centuries.
All that needs to happen for the transition to work is for the proponents to push ad nauseum for the change they want.
The problem of roads, healthcare, and defense aren't going to be lumped on society's plate all at the same time.
Absolutely right. Social change, whether it's rights for women, whether it's the abolition of slavery, 100 to 150 years minimum.
Maybe it's a little faster with these great tools that allow us to chat with each other, but it's not fast.
It's earlier than you think.
I have to keep reminding myself of this.
It's sooner than you think. It's sooner than you think.
We are on the journey of a thousand miles, maybe five steps in.
But, you know, the more honor to those of us who are fighting the fight.
I always wondered, when you talk about raising children with nonviolence, does this include things like books, movies, and games that have violence in them?
Just wondering, because I like playing games that have fighting in them, but I think of myself as a very nonviolent person.
Thank you in advance. I don't believe that the consuming or participation of media or video games or whatever that have violence in them makes you a violent person.
Any more than looking at porn makes you a rapist.
So I think that it's, I mean, slightly different categories because nobody's really hurt in the production of video games, whereas, of course, people in porn have grisly and terrible histories of sexual abuse as children.
I will say that you should probably be a little bit careful of your consumption of violence.
But no, I don't think it's that bad.
I try to keep my daughter away from that kind of stuff.
If it shows up suddenly in a video, we'll talk about it, but I try and keep it away.
There has never been a sustainable stateless society.
There have been perhaps times of political vacuums where no one sovereign could establish a monopoly on force or distant territories where the state could not consistently enforce its sovereignty.
Nevertheless, all societies seek the establishment of the state.
It is naive to presume that the state will wither away into a stateless society, even in the possible collapse of our current system.
Okay, so this is, you know, if there's a vacuum in society and the state fills that vacuum.
And if you get rid of one state, you will pull another state into it.
Yeah, I think the way that kids are raised now, that's true.
But... I mean, look, take two twins separated at birth.
You put one in Georgia in 1860.
That kid is going to grow up with particular views of racism that would be probably pretty abhorrent to us in the modern world.
Take that other kid, put him in some, I don't know, lefty, anti-racist, lefty in the good sense, lefty, anti-racist Manhattan condo with some very enlightened people, and he's not going to grow up with the same opinions about race.
So if all you're seeing is the kids from Georgia in the mid-19th century, you'll say, well, human nature is racist.
Well, of course, if you're taught that, then you...
If you only see English-speaking kids, it's human nature to speak English.
No, it's just what you happen to be taught.
So if we teach children to be self-sufficient and to reject hierarchical coercion and to not be frightened of authority but to look upon authority as a voluntary resource that helps them, which is what my goal as a parent is, and I think the goal of all good parents...
They're just not going to grow up wanting that.
There's not going to be a vacuum.
The need is always in the head, and if you don't create that need through propaganda and fear in the beginning, it won't need to be filled up later.
I can't help but think that Steph has a blindly optimistic outlook on the malleability of human nature.
He likens the end of aggression to the end of communicable diseases, or that violence is simply an artificially constructed language, which, unless taught, would be otherwise non-existent.
Man has a really nasty side to him, he always has, blah, blah, blah.
Well, yeah, okay, so, I mean...
You think you're talking about human nature, but you're not.
But this is the whole important thing about self-knowledge.
This is the very important thing about self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge frees you from what Jung called the dark side.
Look, when I was a kid, I shoplifted.
I had a bad temper.
I yelled at people.
I mean, and this happened in my early teens.
I got a job when I was 11 and stopped doing all of that, and I've been self-sufficient ever since, and, you know, a non-criminal, yay.
But... That's as a result of self-knowledge, right?
Really strong examination of the self, years of therapy.
I mean, that's what you aim for, is to know yourself.
Once you really know yourself, you don't make the mistake of projecting your personality We're good to go.
And it's very painful to look at people that you know who may be harmful or destructive or even evil and say they don't have to be that way, that this is the result of choices, as the Spanish proverb has it.
Our habits begin as cobwebs and end as chains.
They're not very burdensome to begin with, but they get heavier each time we make bad decisions.
It becomes harder to make a good decision and easier to make the next bad decision.
You know, every alcoholic becomes an alcoholic one drink at a time.
Every smoker starts smoking, not a pack a day right away.
So, you know, if you say man has a really nasty side to him, there are lots of people who don't have really nasty sides to them.
And you need to take that into account and try to figure out why.
And the answer, I think, lies in the science and psychology of peaceful parenting.
So thank you everyone so much.
I love these questions. I love these comments.
I genuinely believe that these are the smartest people around.
And I'm so honored that people take the time to watch these.
I'm so enormously grateful that people take such an interest and a passionate pleasure in what it is that I'm doing.
I continue to welcome all criticisms and corrections.
I'm sorry that I got the guy's name wrong who invented the vaccine.
I think I corrected it.
Somebody corrected me on it. Thank you.
Remember, you can donate to this show.
It is entirely... Funded by donations.
There's no ads and the books are all free.
It's at freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
Thank you so much and have yourself a great day.
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