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Sept. 23, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:37
2002 True News: The Wall Street Protests
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Well, thanks for joining us tonight.
Now, I'm sure that you've heard about the Occupy Wall Street protests by now.
Certainly have. Certainly have.
A great, deep, and wretched tragedy, in my opinion.
And why is that? Well...
Because they're uninformed.
And I really, really understand the impulse that is driving them to do this.
I applaud the moral fortitude.
I applaud the youthful courage.
And I just repudiate the solutions that are being put forward.
Yes, of course, the general population has been raped and pillaged by the financial sector.
But what is astounding to me?
What is astounding to me?
I would imagine that most of the people at these protests are from the left, right?
So they're more on the socialist communist side, which, you know, is fine as far as arguments go.
And yet they have this belief, right?
So they know that the government has been complicit in all of this stuff.
They know that the government is dependent upon the financial institutions for money to continue to bribe the general population into getting votes.
They know that the government has started They know all of this about the government.
And what is their damn solution to the problem of financial corruption?
Let's have the government do something about it.
Let's have the government put a tax on financial transactions.
Let's have the government repeal the repeal of Glass-Steagall.
Let's have government swoop in and do all of this wonderful stuff because these financial institutions are like wayward children that have eaten too much candy and the government, like a parent, needs to come in and take away all the Halloween bags.
It's completely insane.
It's completely insane.
The government, of course, is fundamentally behind all of this.
The financial corruptions that they're protesting are a mere effect of the fundamental problem in society, which is always and forever a moral problem, not a problem of legal technicality, not a problem of financial rejiggery, not a problem of insufficient oversight.
My God! They passed!
Over 50,000 pieces of additional regulations during Bush's term when he was supposed to be the big deregulation guy.
It's all madness.
It's madness. They're out there camping as part of the way the system's cancer grows, which is that they're out there protesting against the effects of government power, which is financial corruption.
And what they want to solve the effects of government power, what is it, ladies and gentlemen?
It's more government power!
And that is just horrendous.
They don't know the degree to which they are contributing to the mess and creating even more disasters in the future.
So while I applaud their courage, it's like somebody who's 12 years old who's had, you know, that little...
Operation game where you try and pick things out of someone's innards without hitting the buzzer.
It's like watching someone who's played a couple of games of Operation attempting to bravely do a tracheotomy on a choking guy.
You may admire the impulse, but by God, the effect of it is going to be gruesome.
Now, they've been camping out there, as you know, since, I believe, Saturday.
Last Saturday, mind you.
And there's been a lot of police brutality.
I want your opinion on how you think the police are handling themselves out there.
And we obviously know that the police are the strong arm of the government and that they are there to break up protests.
I think that we can both agree on that they're doing the right thing by peacefully protesting.
Yeah, I mean, sure, protest away.
I mean, changing the world is 99.999% intelligent education and then 0.0001% advocacy.
And everybody wants to jump straight into the advocacy and wave signs and chant and kumbaya and camp out.
That's the very last thing you do after you've spent significant amounts of time, thousands and thousands of hours studying the problem so you can figure out what's really going on.
Now, as far as the police goes, I mean, it's...
It's madness.
It's complete madness. I mean, so if you're in the financial sector, head of Goldman Sachs or whoever, then you can threaten the government to take down the entire financial system and you can, through this threat, get 700 or more billion dollars stolen from...
Unborn taxpayers. And what do you get?
You get a letter saying, don't worry, we're never going to track where this money goes and you can never be prosecuted for any of its misuse.
So not only do you get to steal to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in the financial sector, but you get an infinite get out of jail free card as well, which guarantees you immunity from any future prosecution for whatever happens to that money.
And that's called the law!
That's called staying within the law.
That is called being a law-abiding citizen.
It's stealing 700 billion dollars.
Ah, you see, so if you're in the bank, you can steal hundreds of billions of dollars and get a pardon until the end of time.
But if you stand outside the bank, you're going to get pepper sprayed and you're going to get arrested.
And what I find so astounding about these protesters is they're protesting the police action.
But the police is the state.
The very state that they want to solve the problem of financial corruption and predation is the very state that is pepper-spraying them for a peaceful protest.
As soon as people can put these two things together in their head, and I don't know, Jake, why it's so It's damn hard for people to put this plug into this socket and say, it's the same state.
There's not a good state.
There's not a good fairy and a bad fairy.
There's not a good cop and a bad cop.
There's not a nice state and a bad state.
There's not a state of Barack Obama, which is good, and a state of George H.W. Bush, which is bad.
It's the same state.
The one that is arresting these people is the same one that they're asking to solve all of these complex financial predations.
The state that gave these institutions $700 billion of taxpayer money without any consultation and against incredible and vociferous operation from the taxpayers.
It's the same state that you're asking to solve these problems.
It's the same state that created these problems.
Once people look at the state and see it as a unified entity, rather than some fragmented disco ball of wishful projection, they will actually understand that begging the mafia to solve the problem of crime is a futile, ridiculous, and embarrassing thing to do.
So, if you were to give the Occupy Wall Street protesters, let's say, a tip, tell them what sort of reform do you think would be more advantageous to their cause other than asking the state?
And I'm not saying that is a challenging question, but I'm curious to know.
Well, I mean, you're not ready.
You're not ready. You're not ready.
You need to put down the signs.
You need to pick up some books.
And fundamentally, you need to go back to the kindergarten morality that we all learned way back in the day when we were fresh out of diapers, which is you don't steal.
You don't hit. You don't punch.
You don't push. You don't use force to get what you want.
Now, the protesters are peaceful.
That's fantastic. But the problem in society is the initiation of the use of force.
It is not a problem of law.
It is not a problem of finances.
It is not fundamentally even a problem of government.
It's fundamentally a problem.
A society is founded and rooted upon The initiation of force to get things done.
You want to help poor people?
Let's go steal from the taxpayers.
You want to help old people? Let's go steal from the taxpayers.
You want to help sick people?
Let's go steal from the taxpayers.
You want to go help people overseas who are poor and starving?
You've got to steal from the taxpayers.
Everything that we think of.
Whenever you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
When you have a government, almost nobody can think of any other solution.
Then pass a law, have more regulations, give the state more power and that's going to solve everything.
But the state has been growing in power ever since, fundamentally since 1913 when the Federal Reserve came into being which gave them the ability To type whatever they want into their own bank accounts.
The state has been growing like a cancer.
The state has more power now than any government in history has ever dreamed of having.
And the problem is getting worse and worse and worse.
The correlation of the problems getting worse and the state growing is very clear.
Because violence causes destruction.
It's like heroin. It gives you a short-term high and a long-term catastrophe.
So you need to stop asking the government to solve problems.
You need to Ask the government to solve problems in the way that you're solving problems, which is peacefully, non-violently, without the opinion backed by a gun we call the law.
Get the government to start putting down its guns, to stop controlling human beings in the way that you're protesting.
Then you will be taking a genuine step forward, not just to solving these problems, but down the road of genuine human liberty.
But until you're willing to stop asking people with guns to solve your problems, you have no right to expect those problems to be solved.
Sure, because everybody wants to...
Well, anyway, I won't go into a little diatribe about that right now, but...
It seems only fair. I have now been diatribing for a few minutes, so...
Oh, that's okay. Because I want to get a lot covered tonight, and obviously these guys are protesting corporations, because the corporations did mess up, and of course the government gave them the leeway to do so.
Why do you say the corporations messed up?
Well, a lot of these – no one's held accountable in a corporation.
It's the entity itself.
So let's say that I own a corporation and our board makes a decision to rate – to give out bad mortgages if I'm a bank.
Instead of anybody being held responsible, it's the entity that is held responsible.
No, they've made a fortune.
How have they messed up? I mean, the purpose of a company is to make money and if you create a condition where you are going to hand people stolen money, then it would be irresponsible and counterproductive for a corporation to not do that.
Sorry, I'm not saying it's right or anything like that, but a corporation is there to make money.
And asking corporations to not make money is like asking old people to not cash their social security checks because there's no money there.
Old people are going to cash their social security checks because it's free money.
And corporations are going to take $700 billion?
I mean, would you say no?
I mean, who would say no? I don't see how they've messed up.
They made a fortune in the housing bubble, and then they got off scot-free, not just from their losses, but they got bonuses!
I mean, so it's like you go to a casino, you gamble all your money, and you make a huge amount of money, and then you lose a huge amount of money, and some guy comes in and covers your losses and gives you even more money.
How is that messing up as a gambler?
That's everybody's fantasy.
I misspoke.
You are right.
It's the government gambling and giving away money that they know that they're probably not going to get back anyway and that they really can't afford to give.
Well then, sorry to interrupt, but even if the government does get the money back from the corporations, it ain't going back to the people.
Oh no, it's going to go back to themselves.
It's going to go back to more perks for the people in office.
So do you think that the protesters are protesting the wrong sector?
They're protesting the private as opposed to the public?
Well... People tend to pick on the least powerful entities.
Now, corporations look all kinds of powerful, but they're really not.
Corporations are just mutant beasts of financial and legal irresponsibility created by the state.
And so the way that it basically works is governments give business owners legal immunity from losses, right?
So if you make money as a corporation, you pull money out of that corporation.
And you get to buy a house and you get to buy 10 cars and all that kind of crap.
But then if your corporation loses money, you don't have to give any of that stuff back.
It's just like a one-way money hose that just hoovers money out of the corporation, but if the corporation ever loses money, you never have to put it back in.
And, of course, it's a legal shield.
If your corporation pollutes, then your corporation has to pay.
Like the Bank of America and all these other companies, not to mention the pharmaceutical companies, who've been hit with hundreds of millions of dollars of fines for illegal activities.
Who has to pay that?
The shareholders, the employees, the people who aren't hired, the people who would have otherwise gotten raises.
I mean, the actual managers...
They don't go to jail. The managers don't have to give any of the money back for the illegal activities they profited from.
So corporations just this big magic shield given out to the capitalist class in return for support of the existing system and in return for donations through their corporations to politicians.
So it's a game.
But none of this is possible.
It's only possible because of corporations.
It's only possible because of the government.
It's only possible because of the monopoly of force and the monopoly of incarceration, the power that the government has.
Pepsi-Cola isn't going to start waging wars and throwing people in jail for not obeying its rules, but only the government can do that, so you've got to go to the source.
So I want to go to a chat room for a question here.
Question is from the chat room.
It says, he doesn't think corporations control the government by buying and paying for their campaigns and lobbyists.
Your response? But what are they controlling?
That's my question. What are they controlling?
I mean, what are they controlling in the government?
What they're controlling is law.
What they're controlling is violence.
So yeah, look, I mean, if you're a store owner in a mafia neighborhood and you give some money to the mafia so that the mafia stops some other store from coming in or whatever, right?
Deflates the tires on your competitors' delivery trucks or whatever.
Yeah, that's really bad.
But what you're bribing and what you're controlling is the mafia's willingness to use force.
I just watched this documentary on Atlas Shrugged called The Prophecy of Ayn Rand, I think.
And a guy, a Silicon Valley guy, he said something very clear.
He said, you know, when I first became really successful in business, it was always the same thing.
All these politicians would come in.
They'd come in and they'd, you know...
I'd sit down across my desk and they'd say something like the following.
They'd say, well, you know, I'm on a committee and we're just about to pass a whole bunch of laws affecting your business and I'd really like to make sure that your business comes out on top as we pass all of these laws.
And so, you know, anything that you can do, any feedback you can give me, anything that we can do to talk about that will help me give you preferential breaks in this legislation, I'd really appreciate that.
That would be fantastic. Oh, and by the way, I was just wondering how much you might be able to donate to my re-election campaign.
I mean, that's clear. It's a complete shakedown.
Asking corporations to not get involved in this game when the government prints all of the money, when the government can throw whoever it wants in jail at any time, when the government starts wars and locks up what?
God knows what percentage of the citizenry in America is in jail now.
It's higher than China. It's almost as much as it was in Soviet Russia.
Asking businesses not to play the game called guns when the state has a monopoly on violence and they can be shut down.
I mean, not only will they not get preferential legislation, they'll be on the other side of negative legislation.
Asking them not to play this game is irrational.
I mean, it's never going to happen.
We have to go to the source, get the government to put down its guns before we ask people to start acting morally.
So, it... Now, let me go ahead and ask you your opinion on the next system, and I may have asked you this before, because I have...
As we've discussed many times before, I have a great respect for the Greeks.
And they...
I don't know how much of a status system they had, but when democracy was instilled, people began to read philosophy, they began to educate themselves, because we don't really have democracy here, do we, Stefan?
We have... I don't want to say totalitarianism, but we're moving towards it.
We're moving towards more, it's a passive control.
It's a bribe-ocracy.
I mean, the Congress has 8% of the citizens' approval, and American distrust of the state, particularly at the federal level, has reached completely catastrophic plague-like proportions, and yet they still get to rule.
Can you imagine any business where 100% of its customers had gone down to 8% approval?
I mean, that business would be out of business in a day or two.
It would have failed, right. Oh, completely, yeah.
But of course, you don't fail when you've got all the guns in the world, right?
You're saying the Occupy Wall Street protesters should pick up books and understand the philosophy and understand what's happening, the philosophy of the state, etc., etc.?
Yeah, they're in the wrong place. They're in the effect of the problem, not the cause of the problem.
I know some of them have gone out in front of the Federal Reserve, and I think that's more intelligent, but these people are not going to give up their power because some scruffy people set up tents.
I mean, come on! This is the oldest, greatest beast that has forever devoured the heart, flesh, soul, and mind of mankind.
It's not going to give up its power that way.
There's more intelligent ways to approach getting the state to give up its power Camping and protesting and asking the state to expand its power to solve your problems is beyond wishful thinking.
I mean, it's active collusion with the beast.
Now, this is my other question for you.
And maybe since you brought up, you know, when you said that the protesters should be educating themselves in reading, I think that the entire population should be doing that more overly.
And I know that you would agree with that.
But one of the solutions that I have been thinking of, because, you know, when I sit here by myself in my underpants, you know, staring at the wall, I like to think about philosophy.
And... Hey, whatever works for you, man.
Yeah, right? And one of the things I was thinking about was democracy.
But not just state democracy.
We're talking true democracy. Democracy of the people.
Like they had in Greece, where everybody voted.
Every citizen of Athens would take a vote.
Well, sorry, but everybody and every citizen of Athens were not exactly the same category, right?
Women, slaves, captives.
We're talking, God, 500 BC, we're talking over 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago.
Well, with Socrates, we're talking 2500 BC, and it was a very small percentage of the population who were legally allowed to participate in politics, of everybody who lived in the polis.
Well, I mean, obviously, in the United States, we don't have the same bias or the same thought process that they had in Greece as far as who can vote and who can't vote, etc., etc.
I mean, anybody, man or woman over the age of 18, can participate, or should, or, you know, we have the illusion of being able to participate in government.
And I say the illusion because, you know, the next question is, does your vote really count?
Well, it's not whether you vote, it's, right, I mean, if I said to you, Jake, I'm going to marry you off to Lady A or Lady B, and you can vote between the two, you would, of course, want the third checkbox called None of the Above, because I'd like to make my own damn choice, thank you very much.
Right. And so until government includes none of the above, it's not freedom.
It's not freedom. Do we want to be beaten by this guy or this guy?
That's not freedom. Do you want us to break this leg or this leg?
Sure. That's not freedom. Until there's none of the above, it's all nonsense.
So, well, the question that I wanted to ask you is, if we instilled a more democratic-like system, do you think it would solve a lot of the problems that we have with the state today?
Because we have a representative republic, or a democratic republic, where we vote on our representatives and our representatives vote on our laws.
But if we were to vote on our laws ourselves, as they did in Athens, even though it was that small percent of white land-owning males in Athens citizens, do you think that would solve some of the problems that we have with the state today?
Well, no. Let's say that you find some way to go back to the government of 1912, which, I don't know, was like one-tenth or one-fifteenth the size that it is now.
Okay, so that would happen.
And if there was some magic way to do it, I don't think there is, but if there was, so what would happen?
Well, you'd have a small government.
You would have a huge growth in the economy because we're sort of in a post-war world in terms of like major landmass wars among the Western powers.
We're kind of in a post-war world.
So there's this huge economic growth.
You know, 8, 10, 12, 14 percent a year would result from that.
And what would happen is then people would say, wow, I'm rich.
And then the government would say, ooh, you're rich.
That means we get more money.
That means that we can tax you more and you still have more than enough to live on.
So if the economy is growing at 5% per year, we can raise taxes at 5%.
If it's growing at 10% a year, we can raise taxes at 5% a year and people will still feel richer because they'll be getting 5% more money after taxes.
And so you will get a huge amount of economic growth which is only going to feed the cancer of the state that you've just shrunken down.
It's no accident that the smallest government in the world, America, 1776, has now become the largest government in history.
Because small grows big.
All that small does is it creates food for the cancer.
It creates healthy flesh for the cancer to feed on.
Small is just a way of gathering up all of the fish you're going to throw in the shark tank down the road.
And so even if you find some way to shrink government, all you're doing is you're laying the foundation for the government to expand and explode all over again.
It is just something we have to stop as a concept as a whole.
Alright, well, humor me and let me respond to that very quickly.
Please. I'm not insinuating that we should shrink the government.
I'm insinuating decomposing the government as of what it is today and instilling a different system, the very base Athenian democracy, which is where you, I mean you obviously live in Canada, but let's say you live in the States, where you, me, all my chatters, all my viewers, all my podcast listeners, everybody, all your listeners, that we all got an individual vote.
So let's say that we were going to vote to, I don't know, increase military spending in the Middle East.
Well, we would vote on that, and I'm sure that most people would say, well, let's not do that.
Let's not make an unintelligent decision.
Because prior to the Athenian democracy in Athens, people were illiterate under the tyrants.
People couldn't read, they couldn't write, they didn't understand basic logic or philosophy.
Within ten years of that democracy being in place in Athens, those people became educated.
They were able to participate in that system.
And they were able to make informed decisions because they were forced to think about, well, now we have to think about our national security interests on an individual level.
So you and I, or whoever, let's say somebody who never thinks about politics would then have to begin to think about it because it's no longer a system where We have the luxury of not thinking about it because we don't have representatives to make those decisions for us anymore.
We need to actually be involved and make decisions for our own lives.
But just help me understand this.
Why do we need a system?
I mean, let's take it as you say voting.
Well, we already have a system like that called the free market, right?
So everybody who buys an iPad is voting for the success of the iPad and of Apple.
And if you want the Galaxy Tab or you want some other thing, then you can buy some other thing.
And so you can have, I mean, look at the grocery store.
What's on the shelf of the grocery store is exactly what people want as far as they can figure out whoever owns the grocery store.
And so if you like a particular brand of cereal and enough people like it too, it'll be there.
And if nobody wants it, it won't be there.
So we get to vote all the time.
You get to vote with who you go out with.
You get to vote with the foods you buy.
You get to vote with the TV shows you watch.
You get to vote with the websites you visit.
So voting or...
Choosing something out of a multitude of options is part of our continual process of interacting with each other, both in the free market and, you know, you choose your friends, you choose where you live, you choose your occupation.
And it's not win-lose.
So I'm not sure, since we have an example of a perfectly functioning democracy of choice called our personal lives and our economic lives, why do we need a system which is able to impose its will majority to minority?
I just don't see why that's necessary.
Okay. I mean, I just wanted to throw that question out there and I wanted to get your opinion on it because some people believe in the switch back to that sort of very baseline democracy.
And look, they can try that. So if they want to say, okay, I would like, Steph, I want to make that case to you that this is how we should make decisions, I'd be like, hey, maybe that's a good idea.
Let's try it out. But what I don't want is this is now the system and you have to make decisions this way.
And if you don't, or you don't obey the decisions that come out of it, then you're thrown in jail.
No, no, no, no. I'm happy for there to be petri dishes of system exploration and system invention and system testing.
I think that's great. But there can't be one system, one ring that binds them.
It almost goes on that middle finger fundamentally.
Yeah, exactly. You can't have that.
I mean, Tolkien was an anarchist, and let's not be frightened of that which old academics can handle.
Yeah. And actually, what's interesting is, and I want to talk to you a little bit about this later, I'm going to be interviewing Noam Chomsky in December.
Ah, fantastic. Are you a fan of his by any chance?
I am a fan of his analysis of power and his analysis of foreign policy.
I am not a fan of his appeal to leftist populism for domestic solutions, but that's neither here nor there.
There's lots of stuff that he and I, I think, would have a great deal of fun chatting about, and I'm sure you will as well.
Sure. Well, I wanted to ask you about the Occupy Wall Street stuff for the first part of our program.
We're going to take a quick break, and then when I come back, I actually do want to speak to you about foreign policy because there are points that I feel the need to touch on that I think are pertinent, and I've actually gotten some emails asking me to talk to you about this very subject.
Excellent. I want to fill that last half hour, but stay with us.
We're going to take about a five-minute break.
Ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to Truth Transmission.
I'm your host, Jay Kettle. We'll be back in about five minutes.
We're going to be listening, or we're going to be talking with Stefan about foreign policy, which I know that I got some of your emails about it, and I hope that those who send me the emails are watching this evening so you guys can get involved in the conversation.
And of course, if you have any questions or comments, you can email me at jake at truthtransmission.com.
That comes right to my desk.
And feel free to do so, because I love to hear your feedback.
We will be right back. Stay with us and enjoy the music.
And welcome back to Truth Transmission.
I'm my host, Jake Kettle, and thanks for being with us this evening.
Well, I mean...
Mainstream media needs capital just like everyone else, and it's the Goldman Sachs of the world that holds the keys to the castle at the moment, and so they're not going to get that involved in it.
And it raises really uncomfortable questions for people.
We all like to live in a society we believe is just, is fair, is moral, and to see young, idealistic people energetic, committed young people getting tasered, gassed, herded like cattle, dragged off to jail when they're protesting against A predation on the body politic that is vampiric and almost satanic in its scope and depth makes a lot of people kind of uncomfortable.
It's like why you never see pictures of the victims of American foreign policy in the media.
It's just too much of a truth.
It taps too hard on the aquarium glass of the matrix that people's brains petrify in.
So people shy away from that kind of stuff.
You're not going to see a lot of this. In the same way, you're not going to see any intelligent analysis of Ron Paul's positions or views.
It just... It raises too many uncomfortable questions and people can switch channels very easily if they don't want to see stuff.
That's true. And actually, funny enough, I believe that my producer told me that Fox News didn't even recognize it.
He said, oh, we don't know what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, it's a massive protest.
And I mean, it's a massive energy of protesting.
And yeah, people don't want to see that.
They don't want to see, they just don't want to lift the lid and look at the actual mechanics.
You know, it's like what Bismarck said about Laws.
Laws are like sausages.
You really don't want to see how they get made.
And the decisions that go on in our so-called democracy are such a gruesome and predatory parasitism that people just don't want to see.
They ask too many questions.
Or even one question in this area is too many for most people.
That's true, but I want to move on from the mainstream media cover to some foreign policy.
Like I said, I got some emails about it, and American foreign policy is very aggressive, and that's to put it lightly, I'm sure.
And a lot of people don't understand.
See, this is what upsets me, is that we have an attitude in the United States that we need to kill the terrorists, also known as the brown people.
We need to...
We have a huge military, we need to be aggressive, we need to bomb people, we need to initiate wars that are expensive, that cost the people money, that many people don't support anymore.
And there's also, I believe, a religious undertone to these wars as well, because obviously the evangelical Christian right is very in support of the war, you know, regaining the Holy Land, that whole very archaic point of view in my opinion.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that should make everybody question religiosity, which is why the most religious nation, by far, the most religious nation in the West is also the most warlike.
Anybody who recognizes that correlation should take a long, hard look at religion and its effects.
So, yeah, I think there is a religious element to it.
It's not driven by idealism of helping, obviously, foreigners to become free.
That's all nonsense.
And some people say, well, it's driven by the need to acquire resources, you know, the minerals and the oil and so on.
But that doesn't really stand up to much rational scrutiny.
I mean, if you look at one of the greatest resources, in fact, the greatest resource I would argue for the last 50 years has been the invention of computers.
And computers and the Internet and all of that didn't come about because you invaded Yemen, for Christ's sake.
I mean, it came about because the free market was allowed to operate to some degree to the point where innovation continually occurred.
And so the idea that we're cozying up to Saudi Arabia and we, of course, I mean...
Speaking collectively as a human being, Americans are cozying up to the Saudis and giving them hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid and invading Iraq.
If it's for the oil, it's not for the oil, because the oil comes because the people need to sell it, not because you're giving them I don't think it has anything to do with that.
I think it has to do with the fact that overgrown sadists in uniforms like to push little monopoly markers around a map, not recognizing the amount of bloodshed that they're unleashing upon the world.
They're just Mentally weird.
And if you give people that kind of power, then you're going to draw the most unstable and sadistic people into those positions of power where they're going to do whatever it is that they feel like doing that particular day.
And so, yeah, as far as foreign policy goes, it's a big game for people, and the stakes are monstrous for the victims and completely light or non-existent for the perpetrators.
And so with that kind of imbalance and an infinite funding spigot, I mean, of course you're gonna get these kinds of disasters. - One of the most interesting things I find, at least with the United States population, is that a lot of people refuse to blame America for anything that's happened.
Yeah, you get called the blame America first crowd, right?
As if America even exists.
I mean, there's no such thing.
It's a line on a map.
It's an imaginary thing.
It's an imaginary entity. Sorry, go on.
Right. It's funny because if you look at our history in the Middle East, people always point to 9-11, we needed to go to war, but we have to look to ourselves and our own foreign policy during the Cold War before we can even begin to blame anyone else other than ourselves for our actions, especially with 9-11 and things like that.
We've radicalized these people by going into the Middle East during the Cold War, by funding them against the Russians, by giving them the very weapons that they go And then attack us with that military training and knowledge that they received in the 80s and the 70s and 80s.
We are trying to put geopolitical borders around people who have no concept of them.
They live within tribes. We can't do that.
It's not possible. It's not going to happen.
Iraq and Afghanistan to them are just very sort of vague lines that are drawn on the map by Western culture.
It doesn't really mean anything to them.
They're Kurds and they're And they're Sunni and they're Shiite.
They're not Afghani. So it's very vague to them.
And we always say, well, they came and they attacked us, but...
They didn't attack us because of our philosophy that we're free or that we're a strong nation.
They attacked us because our CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, was in the Middle East mucking around in the internal affairs of foreign nations, supporting paramilitary groups all over the Middle East.
To attack the Russians.
And you know what? The other thing is that a lot of people don't realize 9-11, and Noam Chomsky talked about this, 9-11 was a beacon of light for many countries.
Why? Because the Israelis could up their, and I'm almost quoting Noam Chomsky, the Israelis could up their atrocities against the Palestinians in the name of terror, the Russians against the Chechians, the Indonesians against their little rebel group.
They're fighting against the Chinese in West China.
And a lot of people don't understand that.
It's like it doesn't even exist to them.
Yeah, I mean, you're never going to solve the problem of conflicts of this nature until you can at least put yourself in the other person's shoes.
That doesn't mean that you agree with everything they do, but that basic level of empathy, which is not to say sympathy, but empathy.
It's like, you have to understand that from the Middle East, I mean, it's all new to Americans.
Oh, we're over there in the Middle East, but for the people in the Middle East, it's like, Damn!
Are these white bastards back again?
Oh, my God!
They never stop. I mean, they go all the way back to the Crusades and all the way through the British and European attempts to control the land, all the way through the 20s, the Buffer Declaration, all the way through the CIA overthrowing the legitimately elected government in Iran in the 50s.
They go all—I mean, the funding of Saddam Hussein.
They—like, we— We're all there all the time.
And any time we're not there is a brief respite.
We're just going through the revolving door to come back.
So the amount of control and manipulation and violence and blood-soaked propping up of dictatorships that these people have had to suffer through is something that you have to...
I mean, if you want to do anything intelligent with this, you have to understand that.
Not you, but people have to understand that.
And, you know, as far as Israel goes, I mean, the perspective is...
Quite simple in many ways, which is, why the hell did the Palestinians have to pay for what the German government did?
I mean, that makes no sense in any rational system of justice, even if you accept statism and you accept the International Hague, the sort of Courts of Law, if you accept Nuremberg, you simply can't find any path that makes the Palestinian people in the Middle East, in the original site where Israel is now, where they are responsible for the Holocaust.
What the hell did the Palestinians have to do with the Holocaust?
Nothing. So, of course, the only reason that Israel is there is because of their crazy superstitions, right?
And so, I mean, again, Israel's there and it's going to stay and all that, but at least to understand where these people are coming from, it had nothing.
I mean, you carve off a section of Germany because of what the Germans did, and I don't think you'd get much opposition.
Take what Brazil offered, a piece of Brazil, or take a piece of Switzerland, what Switzerland offered after the war, and put it there.
But to go right into the hornet's nest of historical enemies for the sake of religious superstitions, I mean, you know, the problems caused by superstition just never seem to end, and that's one of the reasons why I think you have to stand pretty firm against it.
Many problems are caused by superstition.
You're 100% right. Look at the...
And I know that we've discussed this in the past.
It's sort of deviating from foreign policy for a moment.
But I mean, look at the... Look at what I like to call child abuse that goes on among religious communities, the Mormons and some of the evangelicals out west.
You know, if you leave the Mormons, you know, or I mean, even the Amish.
Look at the Amish. I mean, can you imagine any more of a people lacking in logic than the Amish?
No offense to anyone who's an Amish person, but they live in the 17th century because God is against technology.
I mean, get real. Get real.
Yeah, but that sums up, I think, the atheist position quite substantially.
No, look, I mean, this is something that, I mean, with religion, and the three major religions, of course, I mean, the one thing that is incredibly offensive about the Bible is that it commands Christians and Muslims and Jews to put...
People like me to death.
People who don't accept the existence of these supernatural beings.
And that's just highly offensive.
My friends who are gay are also commanded to be butchered.
Now, of course, I mean, the number of religious people who would actually follow these instructions are completely tiny, but that doesn't really matter fundamentally.
You're still worshipping as all-powerful and all-moral a being who commands you to kill unbelievers and gays and witches.
I mean, the list kind of goes on and on. I mean, it takes a lot of willpower to ignore that kind of stuff.
And the only sympathy that I can give to most religious people is I can simply assume they have not read the Bible.
I mean, reading the Bible is about the best cure for superstition and religiosity that you can imagine.
I can simply assume that they haven't read it.
That's the only thing that I can assume.
But I think it's really incumbent if you're going to join a club that you read the rules.
I think that's a really, really, mildly responsible thing to do.
It's the first step. And so, yeah, I just try not to get into debates with people until like, well, have you read the Bible?
No. Okay, well, then you need to read the Bible.
I mean, I've done it cover to cover.
And if you haven't done that, then there's really not much to discuss because you're not really a Christian if you haven't read the Bible.
And if you have read the Bible, you're probably not a Christian anymore.
Sure. It's one of those things that really gets under my skin.
You know, I'm not going to mention any names here, but I wanted to get your opinion on this as well since we're on the topic of religion.
We'll go back to foreign policy and how I'm going to tie religion into it completely in another second.
But I was talking to a girl.
And, you know, relatively attractive, nice girl.
And I asked her, she's a Christian, and I asked her, I said, do you date atheists?
And her answer, and this is very, very, I don't want to call it funny because I would rather call it sad.
She had said to me, quote, And I'll quote from the actual conversation.
I said, why not?
She said, I would never date an atheist.
I said, why not? I said, we're great people.
And she said to me, but we would see things very differently.
It would complicate things. Plus, I believe that God tells me not to be unequally yoked, which means not to marry an unsaved person.
And I believe dating is interviewing for marriage.
Sure. I think that's all perfectly rational, given the perspective she's coming from.
I mean, that makes perfect sense to me.
I was interested in a woman when I was doing my master's degree, and we really hit it off.
She was very smart and funny and all of that, but she was very religious.
And when we started to get interested in each other, we sat across and I said, okay, well, this is a challenge because I am a strong atheist.
And I said, okay, so, I mean, for me, you can't tell kids stuff is true when it's controversial.
I mean, you can tell kids that two and two make four, you can tell kids that the world is round, but you can't tell people that this particular Jewish zombie needs to be present in their hearts to save their soul, because some point in the past, some rib woman convinced a guy made from dust that a talking snake told her that to eat a magical apple was the right thing.
I mean, that's all... So I said, you know, like, if we did get married, if we did have kids, then they would have to be free to choose religion as they got older.
And she wouldn't have it.
She said, no, no, no, they have to.
They have to come to church with me.
They have to, you know, they're going to go to Sunday school.
And I said, well, you know, that's a shame.
I mean, you're a great person, but I couldn't subject kids to that kind of what I would view as just outright indoctrination.
And it is – but where she's coming from, I mean, it makes perfect sense.
I mean, if she genuinely believes that atheists are going to go to hell, that atheists are sinners who have spurned Christ, and if she has kids, If they don't get washed with the magic water and accept that they're born evil and need to be cleansed by the murder of the greatest and most noble human being in history that they're responsible for because of this dust guy and the rib woman, well, it makes perfect sense.
You don't have kids to throw them in a bonfire and you don't have kids to expose them to atheism so they'll end up in hell forever.
I mean, from her perspective, it makes sense, which is what is so dangerous about these kinds of beliefs.
And for us, it doesn't make any sense.
Why? Because we don't believe that.
We don't hold that belief because...
Because it's not true. Yeah, exactly.
The belief is a challenging...
I'm sorry to nag you in this.
It just came up for me in another debate recently.
It's not that I don't believe in it.
Because that just says belief.
I mean, it's just not true.
I mean, it's simply...
It's not like I... I just don't believe in God.
I mean, that's like a person.
I don't like ice cream. No.
There is no such entity.
I mean, there is no such thing as consciousness without matter.
There's no such thing as incredibly evolved without any evolution.
There's no such thing as omniscient and omnipotent at the same time.
Because if you're omniscient, you can change anything that you want.
But if you're omniscient, then you know what you're going to do in the future, and therefore you're powerless to change it.
So you can't be both omniscient, and the list goes on and on.
You can't have self-contradictory entities.
God is like a square circle.
You know ahead of time, without having to hunt all over the universe, that there's no such thing as a square circle.
I don't believe that two and two make four.
I know that two and two make four, and that there's no answer whatsoever.
That is compatible with that, that isn't the same thing.
So these things aren't true.
They don't exist. Gods in general don't exist.
Specific gods that are specific to your cultural location that you happen to be born into simply are invalid.
And it is really just a testament to the amount of indoctrination that people get, that that's not obvious to people, and it is really tragic, and I think it really, really harms children.
And now I'm going to also turn this around and relate this again.
People who hold these very strong, for lack of a better word, religious beliefs, they're not happy keeping it to themselves.
They're not happy allowing just themselves to believe it and their families, etc.
But they feel the need to not only push that on the rest of the country, but also push it on the rest of the world, as we saw with Israel and the whole reconquering of these people are heathens.
And you know that there's a religious undertone to it.
I mean, it's very... It's unlikely that these people truly...
And I've heard many times, oh, well, this has nothing to do with my religion.
But it does, because there's that underlying moral code, there's that underlying...
Belief system that affects a lot of what you do.
If I'm a religious person and I see a naked woman and I'm not supposed to have sex before I'm married, and she wants to have sex with me, I'm gonna say no.
Why? Because of that underlying moral code.
If I see the state of Israel be under attack by Palestinians, I'm going to support them because of an underlying religious code.
Not because the state really belongs there or because they're doing good things, but because my religion tells me that they need to rebuild the temple.
Well, yeah, look, I mean, I can understand why religious people want to push religion.
I mean, I push philosophy.
I push atheism.
I push all the rational conclusions that I can store up into a billion and a half podcasts.
So I don't mind proselytizing.
I'm a proselytizer myself.
So I think that's fine.
But I do think that it is unfair...
To tell children this stuff as if it is just absolutely true and to not give them the perspective that there are lots of people who believe differently, there are people who believe things that we don't believe and they are just as convinced in their beliefs as we are in ours.
I mean, look, I'm not going to teach my daughter That, you know, UPB or my theory of ethics is valid and true.
I'm not going to teach her that anarchism is the only consistent application of the non-aggression principle.
I'm not going to teach her about atheism.
I'm just going to teach her how to think.
I'm not going to give her the contents of her mind.
I'm going to give her the methodology of her mind.
And unfortunately, in a tragedy that is truly cosmic, dare I say, biblical in its scope, when you instruct a child in a particular religion, You are injecting the contents of that child's mind.
And to do that, you have to specifically reject particular methodologies.
You have to reject skepticism regarding text.
You have to push away a scientific approach to things.
You have to push away knowledge of other religions, particularly when they're young.
You have to push away the true history of your own religion.
And you have to push away empiricism.
You have to push away rational analysis And you create this hole where you dump in this, you know, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary kind of manger scene with no context and no methodology.
That, I believe, is very harmful for a child's capacity to think in the long run because there's a whole area of their mind where reason and science and evidence and philosophy and logic and all of that have to take a very wide berth.
It creates a black hole.
Of empty, shiny conformity in child's minds.
I think that parents do not have the right to do that.
You can believe if you choose to believe as an adult.
That's fantastic. I think, you know, go more power to you.
I mean, frankly, I could care less.
But it's when you take the unshaped, open, curious, frankly scientific mind of a child and bend it towards your own particular religious approaches and prejudices.
I consider that to be destructive to a child's minds.
It's irresponsible on the part of the parents and it really should not be encouraged at all.
But unfortunately, if it's not encouraged, or if parents don't do that, all parents know that religion is done in a generation.
I have a personal belief, Stefan, and I'm not sure if you know this, and this is my own personal belief.
I don't claim to know the answer.
And whenever someone asks me directly, well, you know, what do you think happens when we die, or what do you think?
I usually say, well, I don't know, because I don't think there's any way to know what happens when we die.
Sure we know. Sure we know.
We know exactly what happens when we die.
I mean, there's no, because we have a perfect example of non-existence.
I mean, where were you in the 18th century?
I was not there.
You didn't exist. Were you waiting?
Were you in some antechamber?
Were you floating in some platonic cloud looking for the right parents to latch onto at your moment of birth?
No. We know exactly what the 23rd century is going to be like for us because we know exactly what the 18th century was like for us.
We know that we did not exist before we were born.
And we know exactly what happens when we die, which is exactly the same damn thing.
So I don't think there's, I mean, to me at least, there's no doubt about that.
I mean, why would it be any different?
Non-existence before versus non-existence afterwards, exactly the same state.
Sure. I mean, again, I don't know, and I'm not taking a position of whether or not I do, of claiming to know either way.
I just don't know. Well, you do know about the prior, right?
You do know about the 18th century. I know about the prior, but I do not know about the future.
So that's why, you know, and that's part of my reasoning.
I don't profess a specific belief on what happens after we die.
I may have a tendency, I think A or I think B, but I'm not going to take a standard position on that.
Sorry, but why would non-existence be different after death than before birth?
I mean, if we have an eternal aspect to us, it would have to have been there before we were born, right?
Because it would be eternal. Logically, it would have to be there, right?
So clearly there's nothing eternal in us because we would then have known about it before we were born, right?
Well, let me digress here and humor me and allow me to pursue that momentarily.
And again, I'm just playing devil's advocate.
Please, yeah. Because I know that I get a lot of hate on your YouTube videos.
This guy's stupid. Well, I'm just letting you...
Hey, you got some real praise, too.
You got some real praise, too. Don't worry about the haters.
For all of you guys who are going to say things like that right now, I'm just playing devil's advocate.
I'm not professing a belief.
But I've done some extensive research on reincarnation and things like that in past lives under hypnosis and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And I'm not saying that I believe that, but...
There are cases where I think it's possible that someone could have a past life.
So maybe it's not particularly non-existence.
It is existence in a separate form, existence in another form.
Personally, and I'm not going to go into why I believe this or how I know it because I don't want to incriminate myself over the air, but...
In my personal belief, and part of this relies on the science of remote viewing, and if you don't really take the case studies of that and read them, I don't know how well people will understand it, of non-local consciousness, meaning that our consciousness is not completely local to our own minds, but that expands outwards, and there's a non-local consciousness within the universe itself.
Have you ever done any studies of remote viewing?
Have you ever read anything about that? Well, yeah, no, certainly over the years I've heard lots of non-scientific beliefs have come up and people have talked about.
Past lives and astral travel and psychic phenomenon and so on.
And, you know, my response has always been the same, which is, hey, you know, send me the double-blind scientific studies that show that this is a fact.
Don't send me my cousin had a dream where or, you know, this person was able to speak some language that they didn't know.
But all of that is just reported.
I need to see the science.
And if there is a science, that's fantastic.
And if there isn't, then you just have to not believe that stuff until the science ends.
There are a few, and again, I'm not committing one way or the other right now, but there are double-blind case studies that have been done and have been conducted by the CIA, have been conducted by other, by SRI, under the supervision of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Dr. Harold Puthoff. Well, you send me the links, and we'll put them on the video, and I'll let the genius scientific Borgmine of the Freedom Aid Radio listenership come over that stuff immediately.
And hey, you know, if there's stuff out there that's been proven, then I'll absolutely, you know, you adapt your mind like water to a container to whatever reason and evidence shows.
And there are actually links to interviews with a lot of the guys who participated in Project Stargate, which was the original, or, well, the Russians started it, but which was the American Research Project.
Done by the government and also paralleled on the civilian side by SRI on remote viewing.
And I've interviewed a lot of the guys who were in the project themselves.
I mean, obviously, they know far more about the science of it than I do.
But if you take remote viewing as a credible science, which some do and some don't, I mean, it really depends on...
Well, wait a minute.
But it's not a matter of opinion, right?
It's a credible science or it's not, right?
How do I word this? People may have disputes about evolution, but that's only because of superstition, right?
But people don't say...
Some people accept physics as a science and some people don't.
People who don't are just...
There are disputes about remote viewing.
I mean there are people – and most of the people that I've run into who don't like it refuse to read the case studies, which I think is ridiculous.
I've met – No, I don't know that it's ridiculous.
I mean we have a finite amount of time in this life, right?
And we can't – You know, there are 10,000 gods, so you don't have to read every single one of their etymologies to know whether they're valid or not.
So we do have to sort of sift through stuff and make decisions.
I mean, so is the idea that consciousness is not the sort of mechanical actions of the brain, it's not the electrical and biochemical energy within the brain, but it is something that can travel outside the brain?
They are not 100% sure of how the science works, but they are sure that… Sorry, what percentage are they sure?
I would give it about a 50-50.
There's a split within the scientists who have researched this.
They're not sure exactly if it's a non-local consciousness, and there's about 50, I would say, that believe that, and some of that is spearheaded by Russell T. Sorry, is there some way that they can track the energy of the mind leaving the brain and traveling some other place?
They can see it moving like a sort of fuzzy spot of light energy or magnetic energy?
Here's the real issue with that.
Like I said, I read it and that's why I can't concretely profess a specific opinion because When you look at the actual studies where they've done remote viewing on targets where the CIA has already surveyed on the ground, they're getting very good results.
They're getting a high percentage of accuracy.
But the other problem is they're not sure how these guys are actually remote viewing it.
And some attribute it to non-local consciousness.
Others attribute it... And that's really the best solution that they have is the non-local consciousness at the moment.
But I've personally – and if you go on the Monroe Institute's website, there are files that you can listen to of people doing remote viewing sessions.
And the way it's done is somebody comes in with a suitcase.
There's an envelope. Inside the envelope is a coordinate or a word.
They give it to the person who is the control, who's guiding the person through the remote viewing session.
Now, the guy who's guiding the remote viewer doesn't know the contents of the envelope until it's open, and the remote viewer does not know the contents.
Oh, so it's sort of like a psychic phenomenon, in a sense, where they know the answer that statistically they shouldn't know?
Well, it's not just that.
It's that there are sites that are classified that they would have no knowledge of, that they're successfully using CRV, which is Controlled Remote Viewing, and you can view the manual for free online, that they're getting a high accuracy rate No, no, no, no, no. Listen, I hate to say this, you know, because I think you're a nice guy and I've enjoyed the show.
But this is not true.
I mean, this stuff just isn't true.
Look, there have been so many psychic experiments that have been done over the past 2,500 years.
And to my...
Certain knowledge, because I looked into this somewhat recently when someone brought this up on the website, there is no statistical way in which anybody has been able to beat random when it comes to viewing things that they can't view, where there's proper scientific controls in the experiment.
The amazing James Randi has had a million dollars, a million dollars sitting in a bank account for decades, waiting for anybody who can show that they can do better than random when it comes to Psychic phenomenon or out-of-mind phenomenon and so on.
This prize has remained unclaimed.
The scientific community, if this were ever proven, would be beside itself, electrified.
It would be a bigger discovery than Newton's laws of physics or Einsteinian physics.
It would be a bigger discovery than evolution if this had actually happened.
If this had actually happened.
So I'm afraid I must call bullcrap on this one.
Okay, and I'll say fair enough to that.
Well, no, it's not fair enough.
It's not fair enough. I mean, either I'm right or I'm wrong.
I mean, the amount of cover-up there would have to be if this had been proven.
I mean, scientists, this would make a scientist's career for the next 10,000 years to be able to prove this.
And so if there were, and these are pretty cheap experiments, right?
I mean, because you just get someone who can do it and it costs you like 50 bucks or 200 bucks.
It's not like you need to build a 20 trillion dollars CERN reactor or something.
So this stuff is cheap. It's easy to reproduce.
You could film it. You could get scientists in.
You could publish it. This would be, I mean, a change in the way that we understand everything about the mind, about the universe, about everything.
The idea that the mind was independent of the brain.
It could travel away from the brain.
Would be like saying your heartbeat can leave your heart and go and see a show downtown.
I mean, it would blow everybody's mind so much that there's no way this could be kept under wraps.
So, I just can't buy it for a second.
Now, I mean, send me the links by all means.
But, you know, you're going to have to be really strict with yourself about this.
Because if you want to be out there talking about the truth, this is truth transmission, right?
Then you have to have that responsibility to the truth.
I don't mean to lecture you, and I'm sorry to be annoying, and I hope I'm not being condescending or paternalistic.
But if you're going to put truth transmission, you have to be as skeptical about things, propositions, as the name demands truth transmission.
So if you send me these links, I will have a look at them.
I will have people in the know have a look at them.
But if they come back bogus, you've got to drop this.
You've got to drop it because you've got the word truth in, and that's a very important word to have in the title of your show.
Again, I was playing devil's advocate.
This is not my personal belief.
I'm going off based on the interviews that I've conducted and some of the research that I've done on this specific topic.
And I think I've interviewed almost every one of them.
Not quite every one of them.
I know that Ingo Swann is in poor health and I can't interview him, but I've interviewed a good majority of them.
I think it's interesting. I think it needs to be looked at.
But again, I... Anyway, listen, I don't want to...
Send me the links and I'll have a look.
But I mean, I don't want to spend more time on this because I think it's nonsense.
But by all means, send me the links.
How do we digress to this topic?
I don't know. You brought it up.
Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, I was trying to go down a certain route and that was...
It turned out bad. But yeah, I'm just saying, look, if this stuff comes back baloney, then you've got to drop it.
I mean, you just have to drop it.
Or you've got to change the name of your show to Things I Like to Believe, not Truth.
Things I Like to Believe, Transmission, or whatever, right?
But I mean, I held myself to the same standard, and I've had to reject massive amounts of things that I've believed for a long time based upon a strict adherence to reason and evidence, but that's what the truth is.
So I just want to be annoying about that, as usual.
And that's fine.
I mean, the whole concept of the program...
That we do here. I mean, we have guests on.
They talk about their side. I mean, I try not to take an opinion because that's just, you know, I'm sort of an impartial person here.
And then I let my viewer decide as to what they choose to believe.
And like I said, I have you on, but I also interview Noam Chomsky, and he says two different things, but it all depends on what sort of evidence that you're presenting on.
Yes, I wouldn't necessarily put consciousness leaving the brain as the same category as what's ideal foreign policy.
I mean, those things are, of course, open to some discussion, but anyway, let's drop that, and I guess what, we've come up to the end of our evening?
Yes, we have. We actually have come up to the end of the evening, but...
Well, thanks so much for the invitation, as always.
I always find it fascinating, and I always enjoy the feedback that I get from your listeners.
Oh, yeah, and people like having you, you know, what I have you on.
People really do enjoy that, and I'm not surprised, because you are an interesting human being.
Thank you very much, and have such a great evening.
And I enjoy this as well.
It's always a stimulating conversation.
Beautiful. All right, have a great evening, man.
Thanks again for the invite. Thanks again.
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