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Sept. 23, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:42:38

2003 Virtue, Freedom and the End of War

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	Hello. Hi, Stefan.
	Hi, how are you?
	Good, how are you? I'm just great, thanks.
	Well, I don't know how we wanted to do this, but I figured everybody would briefly introduce themselves and then whoever wanted to start off with a question would go ahead and go.
	You met me yesterday.
	I'm Shannon. I'm from Illinois.
	I'm Steph from Canada.
	Alright, I'm Dan and I'm from California.
	Hi, Steph. Big fan.
	Listening currently to Podcast 500 or so.
	I'm from Germany. Oh, that's the musical one.
	Yeah, I usually call up everyone who listens to that to apologize.
	Just in person. So this is good.
	This saves me one of 150,000 phone calls, I think.
	I'm glad. I'm glad. Living currently in Spain, studying Austrian economics.
	And that's cool, by the way.
	Well, it sure beats living in Austria and studying Spanish economics.
	Anyway... I'm Jordan, and I'm studying Econ at Loyola.
	That is a deep and manly voice, I gotta tell you, man.
	That's like, I felt that in my spine.
	So, good.
	And Ed? Hi, I'm Edward.
	I'm in upstate New York, and I work as computer programmer stuff, which I think, didn't you have a job doing that, a business?
	Yeah, I started off as a coder and then I went into sales and marketing because I lost my soul.
	It was a real tragedy. You put it down into Starbucks, you turn around, it's gone.
	It's like, oh man, I've got to get into sales now.
	My last impediment is gone.
	It's a great pleasure to talk to you.
	Yeah, we really appreciate it.
	So what's the story of the group you meet to discuss economics?
	Well, we all went to Mises University and Dan started this study group and we all joined and became instant friends.
	Fantastic. So, what was the journey towards the Mises Institute?
	I mean, did you guys come through RAND, Rothbard, self-study, electrocution, what happened?
	I personally started through Ron Paul in 2007.
	And then down my way, eventually, after reading Ayn Rand, of course.
	Right, right. I also started off with Ron Paul as well, and then I think after he didn't win the primaries, I just was so frustrated that I typed in capitalism without the government, and you came up.
	Really? The rest is history, yeah.
	That's good to know. And of course, since then, I've read Rothbard and everything else.
	I was looking for answers during the crisis because I could not figure out why it happened and then I stumbled across names like Rothbard and Mises.
	And after that, I've written a little book about problems of the established central banking system, and I found you, and you made me an anarchist.
	So thanks for that. I made you an anarchist.
	Oh, man. I'm so sorry.
	Now your life gets very exciting.
	I'm not the same as the idiots in balaclavas throwing chairs through a Starbucks window.
	Really, I'm not, but you may think that I am.
	I think we're all anarchists here, actually.
	And peaceful ones, of course.
	Right, right. How long has the study group been going on?
	We just did it right before Mises University because they test you down there if you want to be tested.
	Then we kind of cut out after school started and everything.
	This is the first time we've actually all been together again.
	I've never been to the Mises stuff.
	How did you like it? Ed actually won an honors thing.
	If you want to tell them about that.
	Yeah, the lectures are great because it's like pretty intense, like eight hours a day.
	For the whole week. And then at the end they have the examination where they bring you in and they ask you a bunch of questions like really fast and you have to answer them all.
	And so I passed that with honors.
	So that was pretty cool. What sort of questions?
	I always think of those Monty Python movies which you guys may be just too young for.
	What is your favorite color? What is the average speed of the Austrian swallow?
	Anyway, so what were the kind of questions that they were putting in?
	What's the difference between profit and interest?
	What's the difference between...
	Capital and capital goods.
	Explain the Austrian business cycle and the Chicago business cycle and how they're different.
	Water-diamond paradox.
	Which one? The water-diamond paradox.
	Okay, I don't know that one, so maybe you could tell me.
	Edward, you have honors, so please go ahead and explain something new to Stefan.
	The classical economists couldn't explain why diamonds Are so apparently useless and yet so valuable and water is so important to life and yet it costs so much.
	It costs so little. And what they didn't understand was marginal utility and how you have to look at not the whole group of the item but just an individual unit of the item.
	And because it's so plentiful water, an individual unit is pretty much worthless because there's just so much of it to use.
	But diamonds are so scarce and that's why they're valuable.
	Right, right, right. And what's the Chicago business cycle?
	It's really weird because they don't look at the actual crash.
	They just looked at what happens after the crash, especially with the Great Depression.
	They noticed that there was a blip in the financial markets, and then they noticed the Federal Reserve took a bunch of money out of the system, and then the crash got worse.
	They took money out of the system.
	That's why there's huge deflation.
	But they never explained why there was a boom and why it busted and all that.
	So if you have a deviation from the...
	Now, the Chicagoans, what's their relationship to Keynesianism?
	I'm sorry, go ahead. I said if you have a deviation, a strong one, from the quantity of money, which should, in the Chicago sense, always rise at the same level than the economy grows, then you have the problem and then the bust occurs.
	I think that's what the Chicago boys are saying.
	Right, right, okay, okay.
	And do you guys have any idea as to why you were drawn towards these ideas other than a shining diamond-hard set of intellectual integrity lasers?
	But was there anything that – I mean, was these hard ideas to come to?
	And I mean sort of just freedom, liberty, Ron Pauly stuff.
	Was that hard stuff to come to or was it anarchism that was harder to come to or did it all seem pretty obvious once you got into it?
	Well, I just wanted answers, and there was nobody that had a consistent set of principles out there that I could see.
	I always found flaws.
	I only became an anarchist about a year ago, and the minarchism stage is the longest stage.
	I switched from Democrat to Neocon to Libertarian.
	Minarchist or whatever fairly quickly, but the minarchism, getting over the whole state is what really takes a long time.
	But all I was trying to find was consistent principles and morality to live by.
	Right. And what was it about the existing culture that you grew up in or the society that you grew up in that you felt that those answers were even needed, right?
	Because a lot of people just take their sustenance from the well-traveled well of culture or religiosity or whatever and say, okay, well, that's good enough for the majority and it's fine for me.
	What do you think it was that had you or led you to be dissatisfied with the answers that were around?
	Yeah. I've always been dissatisfied with school and public education and college, and I'm really apathetic.
	It's my last year. And so I think I was just looking for something more, something more complicated, something more real.
	And I always found flaws in what teachers told me when I would go look up history and Oh, they were totally not telling me the truth about this.
	And so I started not to trust anybody and that's how I found my curiosity and just kept looking.
	I think for me was it more like I questioned always what I do myself.
	But then since I've discovered libertarianism and Austin economics and then philosophy and then your show, I learned a whole new approach Perceive the world and to question even more stuff, and I never stopped.
	And I think the hardest thing so far is not the political or the philosophical stuff, but the application of freedom in your own life and your relationships.
	What you were talking about, I think that's quite hard.
	And you don't stop at the stage.
	You questioned everything in your life, and I think this was quite hard and is quite hard for me.
	And you'd hope it would be, right?
	I mean, if freedom hasn't been achieved, Then you'd hope that what was needed to achieve it would be the hardest possible thing.
	Because otherwise it wouldn't make any sense, right?
	I mean, so, yeah, I agree with you.
	It's really, really hard. And that's actually, I think, in a weird way, that's kind of a positive.
	I mean, if we tried everything and nothing had worked, there'd be no chance, right?
	And there couldn't have been something out there that would just be easy because then it would have been done before.
	So you'd hope that it would just be something just mind-bendingly difficult.
	And yeah, I think that the personal integrity stuff is the hardest.
	So I'm with you there.
	I sympathize. And you got your reward because you're feeling much better since you're doing this?
	Was that to me? Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean there are times when it's really hard.
	There are times when I have that gravity well pull to the old life where I could hide out in minarchism and have debates in a very abstract sense.
	I miss that sometimes for sure.
	You know, the truth's a witch with a capital B. You know, once you've got it, there's really no turning back.
	You know, there's that old saying that says that the mind, once stretched by a new idea, never gains its original shape.
	And if that new idea happens to be true, so much the better.
	So, yeah, it's really hard.
	I mean, I wish I'd done it younger in a way, but I'm certainly glad that I did it before I got married and had kids.
	It made a big difference. I tell you one difficulty I've had, Stefan, even though I've been an anarchist now for a good three years, I'm always tempted to still somehow get involved in politics in some way, whether even voting for Ron Paul or something, because I just don't feel like there's any other options out there right now.
	Beyond what I can do in my own personal life, I mean, I can't force other people to adopt the philosophy.
	I can just explain it to them and just hope it'll catch on.
	They planted a seed. So I almost look at these almost utilitarian approaches.
	Well, you know, if he gets elected, then at least the state might get smaller, and that's something.
	Okay, and look, I mean that's not a perspective that I have, but I mean it's not like I've got any prescience into the future that means anything more than anything else.
	So step me through how voting for Ron Paul will work for shrinking – let's say shrinking the state.
	How's that?
	Give me the steps that that's going to occur.
	I don't mean this like I'm not trying to cross – like I'm not trying to strip you or anything.
	I'm genuinely curious what the reasoning is because I can't follow it, but that just may be a limitation on my part.
	Yeah, absolutely. I just think if he, and I don't plan on voting either, but it's something that I almost get torn to almost doing.
	At this point now, I haven't decided to vote, but one argument that people give towards me is, well, if he gets in, then the one immediate thing he could do, would be within his ability, is to bring the troops home, and he could also, through executive order, stop the Federal Reserve.
	So, I mean, those are two pretty large issues, and if he really did get in and did that, it would be a big benefit to all of us, I think.
	Now, does that mean that he would, I guess as commander-in-chief, he would declare an end to hostilities, and he would pull...
	Now, does he mean... Is the theory that it's the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, or is it the 700 military bases that he would like to close around the world?
	Depends on who you ask. I mean, I think...
	Most of the Ron Paulians would say at the bare minimum all the troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then at the bare minimum some of the bases, perhaps in South Korea or other zones where it's really tense.
	And so what is the current deployment of, I guess, the three major theaters that the U.S. is in?
	I mean, I'm sure he would pull troops home from Germany and Japan.
	It's not like those conflicts are about to flare up after simmering for 60-plus years.
	You know, they're just waiting, those Nazis.
	Would he pull the troops? So he'd pull home from the major theaters.
	I mean, that's got to be, what, 300,000, 400,000 troops?
	Right. Right. And he would bring them back.
	Would he decommission them from the military?
	Would that be the plan or would they stay in the military within the U.S.? I mean, would he fire them, right?
	Yeah, I don't know.
	And I think that question was interesting.
	It was posed to him at one point because it really was a counterargument to him because they said if they were decommissioned, then these troops would be without a job and be unemployed and we shouldn't treat our troops that way.
	Well, I mean, that's the least of it.
	I mean, not that that's unimportant, but you've got three or four hundred thousand kind of people who've gone through a lot, let's put it as charitably as possible, right?
	And, you know, have a great deal of knowledge of arms and so on.
	And so he would bring them home. And the idea is that that would save some money, and I'm sure that it would.
	But of course, there would have to be massive...
	I guess he wouldn't, right?
	Because, I mean, at the end of the Second World War...
	I think it's a true story that they were bringing all these troops home from the Second World War and the government was like, oh my god, we need the commission of transference of troops to civilians or something.
	And then by the time they'd got all that in place, the unemployment was down to like 3% and everyone had figured out what to do and where to go.
	So it did happen at the end of the Second World War, but I think most people would say… We need some sort of transition program or whatever to help ease these guys in.
	And of course, a lot of them, if they're close to pension, you just want to give them the pension, right?
	Because otherwise, they're going to be really pissed, right?
	And you don't want PTSD well with a good knowledge of arms, angry people sort of floating around.
	So, yeah, he'd have to up the pensions.
	There would be a lot of costs of decommissioning.
	He'd have to pay people off. And I'm not saying this is not why it shouldn't be done.
	It's just it's – I'm always – as an ex – The reason I say this is because I was the head of R&D for a software company so I couldn't just say my business plan is to build better software.
	I thought I'd have to really go through the steps of how it was going to happen and why I was making the decisions that I was going to make.
	And decommissioning this level of intensity is a pretty significant I'm just curious about how it would actually work.
	I mean that seems to me like a lot of – and of course there's no jobs for these people, right?
	So you'd have to give them unemployment or – I'm sorry?
	Most of them really don't have any skill sets.
	Well, yeah. I mean how many of them would just go and become mercenaries?
	I mean ironically enough.
	Well, that's what most of them do anyway.
	They become mercenaries or they're mall cops or something or police officers.
	Right, right. So, look, don't get me wrong.
	I mean, to bring the troops back would be a great thing.
	I mean, nobody wants these people out there, and I think that would be a pretty cool thing.
	Now, can he, as Commander-in-Chief, can he be overridden by Congress if he makes these decisions?
	I mean, do they get the two-thirds veto?
	They'd have to declare war, right?
	Oh, yeah. They don't do that anymore.
	They haven't done that for generations.
	Police actions. Right, so they wouldn't be able to override any of his troops.
	So he could basically just snap his fingers, say the troops are coming home, and the troops would be coming home, right?
	Yeah, that's certainly the impression he gives, and I'm skeptical of that myself.
	Well, what do you think the Islamic extremists would do or the – I mean even just the people whose sort of stated goal is to wreck the economy of the US? If Ron Paul were to do something that would be starting to save the economy of the US, that would be – meant that their last 10 or 20 years of sacrifice would have been in vain.
	I'm always wondering, Lexa, what does the other person do, right?
	Right. Because the goal of getting America into the Middle East legally – sorry, militarily – was the same as it's always been, which is to destroy empires, right?
	Because it is the graveyard of empires, is what Afghanistan has been called.
	And so if Ron Paul were to say, let's wind down the troops, what do you think the extremists in the Middle East would do?
	Well, they're going to do the best thing for them at least to get troops to not leave, and that would be to commit another attack.
	Right. Right.
	Right. And this – look, I'm not trying to say it can't happen.
	I mean, again, what do I know, right?
	Just some guy up in Canada. But this is the stuff that I would ask, which is – okay, so let's say there would be – If I were them, right?
	I mean, if I was just evil, then I would say, okay, well, so we can't probably escalate in Iraq and Afghanistan, but if we get people to attack from Iran, then that would be something which they've talked about for a while and so on, right?
	Or there'd be some big attack on the withdrawing troops or something like that, or some place where the troops, the discharge troops would congregate that would try and rebuild the war fever situation.
	I mean, it's tricky.
	That's all I'm sort of saying. There's lots of tricky things.
	And I'm not sure that there's compelling evidence that it would immediately begin to bring down the budget.
	In fact, you could argue that it would increase the budget because unemployment insurance retraining and all that kind of stuff could be pretty expensive.
	And, of course, if there is an attack that costs the economy money, as they always tend to do, that would be another blow.
	Anyway, I'm just – that's my – Do you think maybe once a major country goes down this road of militarism that it's just a road of no return, that there's no way to get yourself out of it?
	Oh, yeah. You get yourself out of it with economic collapse.
	Because that's what the plan is of the enemies, right?
	Because they don't want the guy after Ron Paul coming back, right?
	So I'm sure that they would say to Ron Paul, yay, thanks for talking about how crappy and evil the US foreign policy has been and why we're actually angry because Ron Paul to my knowledge is bang on about that kind of stuff.
	It's blowback for imperialism.
	I mean that's obvious to everyone except the majority of Americans.
	And so – but I think what they'd be concerned about is if America was down but not out economically, that the guy after Ron Paul would just – may come back or may start – I don't think they would be able to come back like with hundreds of thousands of troops, but they may start arming local – You know, groups that they like or don't like or something like that and they would be concerned that America would not stop its overseas meddling unless there was a fundamental change.
	And I guess you could argue that if Ron Paul was voted in, it would be representative of a fundamental change.
	But I think that they really want to make sure that America doesn't come back and the best way to do that is to really have it go through sort of Atlas Shrugged style denouement.
	And so, yeah, I mean, it's tough to extract.
	It's tough to extract. I mean, the way that you would do it in a sort of status scenario, I think the best way would be, I mean, you'd have to pay reparations, right?
	I mean that to me – because Rand Paul would basically be saying that this was an unjust and illegal war.
	That's why we're stopping it. And so if that's the case, then you need to pay reparations.
	Of course, the economy is not such in the US that you can pay reparations.
	To give apologies without reparations would be kind of – In a sense, more provocative than helpful.
	And so I don't know that reparations are possible.
	And of course, reparations are almost impossible to execute, right?
	As they found out after the First World War, because, you know, as Churchill pointed out after the First World War, it's like, okay, so...
	We said Germany owes us all this stuff.
	They didn't have any money, so we took like a million shoes from their factories.
	And we brought them to England, which put all of our local shoemakers out of business.
	So what the hell was the point of that?
	And so reparations are very hard to pay.
	I mean you just can't go around giving individual people money.
	So you've got to give it to some group and then that group isn't going to disperse it honorably or whatever or so.
	So it's tough. It's a really, really tough thing to get out.
	I mean, war is one of these bear traps, right?
	It's easy to get in and it's really, really hard.
	It's really, really hard to get out.
	Imperialist-type wars. I don't sort of mean the Second World War kind of stuff.
	I would like to add another argument, which I'm especially proud of because it's my own and it's not copied from staff.
	Well, I don't know why I would listen to it.
	Probably you said it in some other podcasts I haven't heard so far.
	But... From a strategic point of view it would be interesting because as economists we know that we always have to study what is unseen.
	So I would like to know what kind of impression it would make if all these people who are in the moment cheering for the next slave master, like Ron Paul, if this would be like channeled into a movement which says fuck it, I don't want government anymore and all these people were like protesting on the streets against voting against government and what kind of impact this has for the freedom movement.
	Well, I think that anarchism is going to stand to gain from the successes and the failures of the Ron Paul candidacy.
	I mean there's no doubt that Ron Paul has influenced a lot of people and I'm sort of so curious about what brought you guys together and a lot of it had to do with Ron Paul.
	So there's no question that Ron Paul has influenced a lot of people to get interested in liberty and a lot of people have invested a lot of time and energy and money into – Getting this dude on the top of the pyramid.
	And when it doesn't work, as it's not going to work, when it doesn't work, there's going to be a lot of, and now what?
	And, you know, I don't want to sound like I'm the vulture circling the political and death march, but there is the reality that people, I mean, I don't think some people will give up when it doesn't work and retire to despair, like Saruman to his tower or something, but I don't think that's It's not going to be the case for a lot of people.
	A lot of people are going to stick with it and say, OK, OK. We gave politics a really good shot.
	You had about the best candidate that libertarianism is ever likely to have.
	I mean he's a doctor.
	He's ex-military. He's a great speaker.
	He's a smart guy. He's brilliant.
	I mean he's been in Congress longer than Jurassic Park.
	So this is – you're not going to get another good candidate this good for a long, long, long time, certainly before whatever crash is going to happen.
	And so, yeah, if he doesn't get in, if he's not going to get in, then people are going to be looking for other ways to achieve freedom.
	And my approach is slow and steady wins the race.
	It's the tortoise and the hare.
	The hare is politics and the tortoise is personal relationships, peaceful parenting – Intervening in situations of child abuse.
	Doing what you can to uphold the non-aggression principle in your own life.
	That's where we need to go.
	But it's completely terrifying to everyone, which I absolutely understand.
	Okay. I have another question if nobody else wants.
	Go ahead. Okay.
	I have plenty of questions.
	Which one is the most interesting one?
	Okay, let's start with your favorite topic, Stefan.
	The state as a family.
	I just reviewed your video.
	Sorry, just want to interrupt you for that.
	You said, I'd like to start with your favorite topic, Stefan.
	I just thought that was kind of funny.
	Alright, let's talk about me.
	The parallels are obvious between the state and the family.
	You draw a lot of parallels there and it makes sense.
	But I've listened to a lot of them, but so far I cannot see really the claim that people cannot accept anarchy because it's totally related to the family and people are threatened because they see their family relationships either as father or as child or something.
	Threatened by that, and you're saying it's appearing on a subconscious level.
	Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
	Why this makes you think that?
	I know Christina has studied about this and is doing this with her work, but it's not totally clear to me.
	Can you elaborate a little bit? Yeah, I mean this is not anything to do with her.
	This is sort of just my theories and I hope you understand this is not – I can't prove this, right?
	I mean this is an argument which I think has some validity but it's certainly not in the realm of scientific proof.
	But anyway, so 90% of parents hit their children.
	They call it spanking, a lot of them, but the reality is there's no – in the adult world, there's no differentiation between spanking and hitting.
	Like if you – if I were to – if I had a girlfriend and I, in a non-consensual way, pulled down her pants and underwear and hit her on the buttocks hard enough to cause pain and hopefully what I would consider a change in behavior that would be beneficial – There's no defense called I was only spanking her, not hitting her. That would be assault.
	No question. I mean legally there's no differentiation.
	The only differentiation in the law around hitting is called spanking and it's for kids and it's not even worldwide.
	A lot of the European countries have banned it but in North America and in England it's still – this is the price of being an ex-colonial or a current colonial power is you have to brutalize the kids in order to get them to brutalize natives overseas.
	But anyway – So, when it comes to understanding the violence in society, the big question that libertarians have not answered, at least I've not seen a good answer that I would really think has been worked through, is why the hell is it so hard to get people to understand that taxation is force?
	Because almost 90% of libertarianism comes down to those three words.
	Taxation is force. Taxation is violence.
	And that's pretty easy to understand.
	I mean it's not hard to understand because everybody knows.
	I mean you know you get that letter from the IRS. I don't want to open, right?
	Because you know that it's – now you get a letter from your local drugstore and you're not frightened.
	You get a letter from the government. It's like everybody knows what is really going on.
	Everybody knows that it is violence.
	But I mean sure you guys have encountered this many times and you will many more times, which is – People won't.
	They freeze.
	They tense up. They really – and that occurs at a psychological level because it's not that hard.
	I mean taxation is force.
	It's about as tough as two and two make four.
	And – excuse me.
	So – So if people are having a great deal of difficulty with a very simple question or a very simple statement like taxation is force, we have to ask why.
	And again, this is partly just me as a human being, but sales training, marketing training, you have to figure out why somebody is saying no if you want to get them to say yes.
	And so a lot of what I've done is to sort of try and think about, okay, well, why?
	Why is this question so threatening for people?
	Why is identifying the foundation of violence that runs our society so tough for people?
	And it's not because people have a tough time.
	With negative concepts, right?
	So you say, you know, racism is quite prevalent.
	And people say, well, yeah, right?
	So, I mean, they get it.
	If you say, spousal abuse is a big problem, say, oh, yeah, you know, I got that, right?
	And so on, right?
	So people have the capacity to...
	Process and understand negative things.
	But when this taxation is forced thing comes, people just freeze up.
	Now, my answer is that if you want to look at why people have difficulty with abstract and remote concepts, you have to look at their personal lives first.
	That comes out of the science.
	It just comes out of the science of where psychology and neuroscience is at at the moment, which is that what happens in the brain is when people experience anxiety, significant spikes in anxiety, Their thinking center is shut down and what happens is they will make up magic words to get rid of the anxiety.
	And the magic words – the social contract is obviously the most common magical set of words, the spell that is invoked to keep the demon of truth at bay.
	So people say taxation is force.
	No, it's not. It's a social contract.
	We get to vote. We can change it.
	But that's not because people are thinking.
	It's because taxation is force, creates great anxiety within them, and they need to say these magic words to make that anxiety go away.
	And this is why these debates are so weird.
	And this is why it's just so hard.
	It's like pushing these two opposing giant magnets together to get these two basic thoughts to connect, taxation and force.
	And the way the mind works is that that stuff doesn't come out of nowhere.
	You don't get that defense.
	People don't – if nobody's had a history of violence, if nobody's had a history of abuse, if nobody's had a history of coercion or control or subjugation or domination or whatever, then they simply won't have those defenses.
	So if you imagine you go to some space alien 5,000 years after they've gotten rid of the state and you say taxation is forced, they'll be like, well, yeah.
	Taxation. Of course, yeah. I mean, they would not have those defenses.
	They wouldn't be freaky to them, to admit it.
	In the same way that we, you know, if you go to someone now and you say slavery is force or slavery is evil, people are going to say, most people are going to say, well, yeah, of course it is, right?
	They may disagree with how it was ended or whatever, but then nobody's going to say it's good.
	But if you go to somebody in the 17th century, somebody who's a slave owner or somebody who profits from it or whatever, and you say slavery is evil, they're going to get, right?
	Tense, angry, upset, right?
	And so if you want to figure out why people have trouble with taxation as force, you have to recognize that they already have these defenses in place.
	So the question is where do these defenses come from?
	Where does this automatic switch from force to supposed voluntarism through the social contract come from?
	Well, I think – I mean I can't prove it again, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the more – The wider and deeper and more unconscious the defenses are, the earlier they must have been implanted in the mind.
	I mean, I think that's just a general truism.
	Again, it doesn't prove anything conclusively, but it's generally the best place to look is the earliest.
	And so we look at early childhood for where these defenses may have come into place.
	And, you know, this is where we get to 90% of parents hit their kids and...
	Almost all parents will yell at their kids.
	I mean, being yelled at by somebody ten times your size is pretty terrifying when you – imagine being kidnapped by an ogre.
	He's responsible for your food and shelter and he's bellowing at you.
	I mean, this is terrifying. Or they'll send them to church where they're told that they're born evil and the best human being – the best man God in the world died because – They're bad because some woman listened to a talking snake or something, right?
	I mean, they're going to burn in hell if they don't listen to the priest and their parents and so on.
	That's pretty scary. And then they may go to daycare where they're pretty much terrorized by other traumatized kids.
	And then they're going to go to school where they're told what to do and where to go and how to sit.
	And then they notice that any kid who puts up any kind of fuss about this ends up on these medications that turn them kind of drooly and shrink their brain mass over time.
	And so I think that kids, you know, I'm painting a pretty dark picture.
	This certainly isn't true for all families.
	It certainly isn't true for my family, I think.
	It certainly isn't true for everyone, but it's true for a lot of people.
	Certainly the majority, if not the considerable majority, if not almost everyone.
	And so if people have – children go through this kind of Soviet style of parenting and the Soviet style of religiosity, particularly in the US, they go through this Soviet style of daycare where you've got to share all your toys, which is not necessarily great for young kids.
	You've got to nap at the same time.
	You've got to line up. You've got to be in a row.
	You've got to be quiet. You've got to do everything the same.
	That's not how children are designed.
	That's not how they're supposed to – To play and behave.
	And then they go to school where everything is regimented and they do that for another almost decade and a half.
	And so they live.
	Kids grow up in a world of spanking, of being yelled at, of – and I'm not talking about 24 hours a day, obviously, right?
	Lots of great times and penalties.
	But this is still – this is what most parents do for discipline is they threaten, they bully, they wheedle, cajole and bribe and also hit.
	And so the reason that people can't see that taxation is force is they can't see the violations of the NAP in their own childhoods.
	And they can't see them because they're so prevalent and so unacceptable to children that they have to learn to ignore all the violations of the NAP and to make up excuses for the violations of the NAP in their own childhood.
	So then when someone comes up and says taxation is force, They already – these defenses are already deeply embedded and ready to spring into action at a moment's notice at 100,000 volts to taser any stray thought that comes through that is similar to that.
	So anyway, I'm sorry for that extremely lengthy explanation and I recognize that that's more – I think we're making some headway, Stefan, because I've had parents who are advocates of spanking tell me how upset how they're seeing people complain or look at them strange when they spank their child in public.
	So I think there is a growing set of parents now that just don't like striking children and are very uncomfortable with other people doing it when they see it in public.
	Oh, but it's been the case for many decades, and this is a fairly conclusive proof if you accept the validity of the free market, as we all do, which is, did you ever see a television show where a child was spanked?
	I can't say I have.
	But that's fascinating.
	If everybody's so comfortable with spanking, Then why is it never portrayed on TV? Even in dramas, let alone sitcoms, except as, you know, I mean, maybe, I don't know, if it was set like the Waltons or whatever set sometime in the last century or whatever, But you never see it.
	And what you see is you see parents reasoning with their children.
	You see parents negotiating with their children.
	You see parents – you barely even see any timeouts unless you're watching Super Nanny.
	But you don't see that, and that's fascinating, right?
	Absolutely.
	I always thought it was ridiculous for people to say that spanking isn't – why?
	I thought it was ridiculous that they say it's not like similar to striking them, punching them, because what it comes down to is just a different degree or level of pain.
	It's no different than in any other way.
	Yeah, look, spanking has to be hard enough to elicit changes in behavior.
	So it's all a couple of little swats to the butt, but that's not what spanking is.
	That's more like horseplay or something.
	But spanking has to be enough that the child is in pain, the child is frightened, the child is crying, and the child also knows it's going to escalate if the behavior continues.
	Because it has to, because spanking elicits bad behavior.
	I mean, that's pretty statistically incontrovertible these days, that spanking shaves three to five IQ points off.
	Spanking produces the very behavior that is designed to discourage, as we all know.
	Spanking is just like a government program.
	It always produces the intended of its opposite effect.
	You know, oh, we want... Minimum wage to help the poor.
	Well, that means the poor are out of a job, right?
	We want welfare to help the poor.
	Oh, that means you've got a whole lot more poor who are now permanently dependent on the system.
	We need national defense because we want to be secure.
	Well, the result is planes fly into your buildings, right?
	It's the same thing with spanking.
	All violence produces the opposite of its intended and stated goal.
	And the same thing is true of that.
	So, yeah, and so the reality is that parents who say, well, you know, Well, if they've talked about their adult kids, say, you know, what was up with that spanking thing?
	Even if they disagree with it later, and they may say, well, we didn't know any different, but it's not true.
	It's like, did you ever turn on the Cosby show?
	Did you ever turn on Eight is Enough?
	Did you ever turn on Facts of Life?
	Or, you know, any of these kids' shows where there are kids, you had hundreds or thousands of hours of instruction on how to raise children without violence, because there was no violence.
	You can think of, they're all instruction manuals for parenting.
	And so everybody has known better since before Leave it to Beaver came out.
	But it's just hard for a lot of people to break these habits.
	Why do you think that human beings are so sensitive and so easy?
	And especially the last decade where we only had like, or like the last hundred years or so, where we had really the capacities to deal with these sorts of questions at all.
	But before that, thousands of years, we were living like in a very wretched environment.
	Why do you think these kind of very sensible feelings came about?
	Sorry, the sensible feelings, like why is it that we're traumatized as children by things?
	Yeah, so easily, because in your podcast you always talk about daily things which appeared and you get a strange feeling.
	And I have these feelings too, which only a word or something triggered something in me.
	Why do you think that human beings are so sensible and so easily vulnerable on a psychological level?
	If you look at the history of mankind, and in the wretched situation they always have been Yeah, I think it's a great question.
	Where I always go to that is I say, okay, well, let's say that you had a child who was not traumatized by spanking in the Stone Ages, right?
	How would that child have fared, do you think?
	Probably not. I don't know.
	It's the same because they don't have the time to deal with these sorts of questions.
	They probably feel anxiety acting it out and that's it.
	Well, okay. So let's say that – let's take a sort of contemporary example.
	So let's say that you're in some crazy religious sect that believes that hamsters are the second coming.
	Whatever, right? Something like that.
	I mean we all know it's gerbils, but let's pretend that it's hamsters for the moment, right?
	And you have kids in this environment, and you take them to be baptized in gerbil sweat or whatever it is, hamster sweat, and then they have to go to the front of the priest, and of course the kids don't have any clue what's going on.
	They just think that they're like rats without tails or whatever, and they don't obey their elders because they're not frightened.
	They're unintimidated by parental aggression.
	What's going to happen to those kids?
	They will suffer even greater harm than because then they need more violence to get the kids played online.
	Exactly. Exactly.
	And of course infanticide and child murder was extremely common throughout history.
	I've done some reading on this and you can go to psychohistory.com for more on this.
	But they just get killed.
	You know, because obviously they would be possessed of a very strong demon that was resisting the commandments of the hamster god, right?
	Yeah, that makes sense. And refusing to submit and obey, and they would just get killed, right?
	They would be the one sacrificed. I mean, the priests aren't going to sit there and say, oh, well, okay, if this kid isn't bothered by it, then I guess we'll have to reveal it's all a scam, right?
	Yeah, but...
	Okay, I understand this, but these...
	Reoccurrences of feelings which you cannot really explain when you're older, which is probably referring to that.
	I've read some Alice Miller as well and your childhood traumas and how your parents treated and this occurs later for you and you don't even know that.
	What does that make? I'm sorry, I just got a little confused about the question.
	If you could just restate it. Yeah, it makes sense in early childhood that you have these feelings.
	Your explanation makes perfect sense to me.
	But later, these feelings occur as well.
	For example, that somebody tells you something and this reminds you of your childhood subconsciously.
	You don't realize it because you don't know what's happened in your childhood.
	Because most people do not know that.
	Why do you think it's still happening years and years later and still a strong feeling in that way?
	Right, right. Well, remember of course that human beings were designed to adapt to a society that did not change.
	I think that's really, I mean, this modern society we have, Where I can raise my daughter extremely differently than the way that I was raised, I mean this would not be possible for most of human history.
	So for most of human history, the way that you were treated as a child was kind of the way you were going to be treated for the rest of your life.
	The king or the local slave lord could kill you at a whim and we didn't have any say in just about anything.
	That wasn't going to change and then you had to raise your kids that same way.
	So there wouldn't be a point in adulthood for most people throughout human history where you would get a kind of independence where the traumas that you experienced as a child would no longer serve you.
	Because basically you'd be passed from your parents to your priest to your military commander or to your mystical commander, your head priest or whatever, or you'd be passed to your local lord as a serf or a slave.
	So there would be no point at which...
	The domination or subjugation of you as a child would not be an appropriate adaptation response.
	Now, the modern world, God bless it, has got this amazing capacity where we can get really screwed up in our heads because we can have a different adulthood than the childhoods we experienced.
	But that was not the case for most of human history.
	For most of human history, the way that you were raised was entirely appropriate to the way that you would end up as an adult.
	Remember, of course, life expectancy is 20, 22, 25 years.
	So it really didn't make much sense.
	And the other thing that's true as well...
	Is that people in power are constantly paranoid about being overthrown.
	And so I believe that one of the reasons that people deny the immorality of those in power, i.e.
	taxation is theft, is because throughout most of human history, there'd be tons of spies of Stalin floating around.
	And so the spy of Stalin would sidle up to you in a pub and buy you a couple of drinks and then say, don't you think that's Stalin?
	He's a... He's a bit of a jerk, right?
	And the moment you'd say, yeah, he kind of is, be like, clink!
	You know, off you go to the gulag.
	And so people are used to denying even when directly asked about the immorality of those in power because it might be a trick by those in power to root out dissidents.
	And so people just find it a lot easier to deny.
	And, you know, I think they'd be programmed to do that.
	I'm curious, Stefan.
	I recall hearing you say before that you were a vegetarian.
	Is that correct? Great.
	I am. I am as well, and I'm just curious when and why you became one and whether that – you feel that ties in with your libertarianism.
	Well… It's pretty recent.
	And I've been mostly vegetarian.
	Before I got married, I went out with a girl, a woman who was a vegetarian as well.
	And so I sort of lost the habit of eating meat a long, long time ago, 10 or 12 years ago.
	No more. Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
	But yeah, so I sort of got out. I would eat meat maybe once every week or two.
	And that's mostly because I work out and I just couldn't be bothered.
	I'm lazy. I couldn't be bothered to look up everything I needed to look up to make sure I'd still be fine.
	And so I did all of that.
	But I was still eating meat on occasion.
	And then when I was doing the research for some of my videos, I looked into some slaughterhouse films and it was like, oh my gosh.
	I mean, I couldn't. I thought it was just unbelievable what was done to these animals.
	And I just couldn't.
	You know, when you make that connection, right?
	Because, yeah, meat, it tastes good and it's stuffed in a bun and, you know, it doesn't look anything like an animal.
	But when you make the connection to an animal that got something bolt shot through its head after being grown like a...
	It's hard to – like once you make that connection, I guess it's like the taxation is forced thing.
	It just doesn't go back for me.
	And so I became – yeah, so then I became – and my wife is a vegetarian.
	My daughter doesn't like meat. So it also was pretty inconvenient to buy meat and to cook it just for me.
	Yeah. So yeah, it was I guess a conjunction of factors.
	And as far as libertarianism goes, I think that – I mean I'm a big fan of treating animals well.
	And I think that one of the things that the state does is encourage people to treat animals really badly.
	I mean the amount of subsidies for meat production keeps the price down to the point where demand is really high.
	And I mean the ways the animals are treated, the antibiotics they're pumped full of and the – In many ways, the terrible living conditions that they experience.
	Again, it's not like the state is responsible for everything, but it certainly doesn't help.
	I mean, they say that it takes seven times the amount of energy to produce a pound of meat than a pound of wheat.
	Well, why is a pound of meat not seven times more expensive and plus, right?
	Well, because of subsidies and all that kind of stuff.
	So I don't consider it evil.
	To eat animals.
	I think that you can't have a social contract and are part of the moral sphere of humanity.
	But I think that it's disturbing the degree to which people don't make the connection between what they eat and the living creatures.
	I think the world would be a better place in many ways if fewer people ate meat or – except for perhaps medical reasons, if people gave up on it.
	But I consider that to be an effect.
	So if people are raised peacefully and there's no state, then I think the amount of meat eating – it's sort of like the abortion debate.
	I mean nobody wants abortions.
	But they are an effect of dysfunction within society and you can't deal with the effect.
	Libertarianism is all about dealing with the cause, not the effect, or philosophy certainly is.
	And so the reason that people eat meat is because it's cheap and it's culturally approved of and it's got a kind of cachet, like nobody has a barbecue with green peppers.
	And it's just considered to be the thing, right?
	Culture changes pretty quickly when economics change.
	And so if the economics change and if people are raised more sensitively around this kind of stuff, I think it would end pretty quickly, much like abortion.
	Jordan, do you have a question on UPB? Yeah, I read your book on UPB. But I'm having trouble understanding it.
	I'm not sure what you mean by universal.
	Because values are subjective, I don't see how you can have a universally preferable behavior.
	Well, you just gave me one, right?
	So you said values are subjective, right?
	Is that a universal statement?
	So if I say values are objective, am I wrong?
	Yes. Okay, no, and I'm not trying to trick you, right?
	I mean, I'm just saying that the moment you say X is Y, then you've got logic and consistency and empirical evidence and all of these sorts of things as a universal statement.
	I mean, this is why, you know, Hume's famous, you can't get an ought from an is, which tricked me for many years, is not true.
	And it's embedded within the very statement.
	So when Hume says you can't get an ought from an is, he's just got an ought from an is, or rather an is not, right?
	Which is to say, there are no objective values embedded in nature, like laws of physics.
	And therefore you can't say that there are, well, you just got an ought from an is, or an is not, right?
	So... When I say universal, the best place to start with ethics, or at least the ethics that I talk about, is to start with the scientific method.
	Because we all understand the scientific method, and it's pretty clear to us.
	So tell me this, what is universal in the scientific method?
	Or what does universality mean?
	Applicable to everybody, usable.
	I think more applicable to everything rather than everybody, right?
	All right.
	Yeah. Right, so if I make a claim about the acceleration of an object towards Earth, or if I make a claim that gases expand when heated, then that is a universal claim, right?
	So if it's a gas, no matter where it is, and you heat it, it's going to expand, right?
	That just means everywhere, all over the place.
	It means it's independent. It's not different in Spain than it is in Portugal.
	It's not different on the dark side of the moon than it is on the surface of the sun.
	It's not different. You know, it is a universal statement.
	It applies to all matter everywhere at all times.
	Does that sort of make... Like, speed of light is constant.
	It's not constant in Chicago and slightly different in San Francisco.
	It's constant, right?
	Yeah. And so for universality, in terms of UPB... Then what I'm saying is – or the way that UPB works with – so if you're going to make a statement about universally preferable behavior, if you're going to make a statement, then it has to be universal.
	I mean it's almost tautological but not quite.
	It's sort of like saying in science, if I'm going to make a statement that applies to all matter, then it has to apply to all matter.
	Otherwise, it's not universal, right?
	And so if I make a statement which says redheaded people tend to like chocolate ice cream slightly better, that is not a universal statement, sort of by definition.
	I mean, because it's about only redheaded people and it's not an absolute fact.
	It's whatever. It's just a tendency.
	And I don't know. Maybe it's true or not.
	I don't know. But if I'm going to say that...
	Theories which are universal have to be universal.
	That actually has some value, right?
	Because the moment you're talking about ethics, you have to be talking about universality.
	You have to be talking – in the same way, the moment you're talking about science, you have to be talking about universality.
	You have to be. Otherwise, if it's not universal, it's not science.
	And if a statement that you're making about preferred human behavior is not universal, It has nothing to do with morality.
	But if I point at an ostrich and say that's an elephant, that's a different matter, right?
	You can then correct me because I am making a false statement about reality, about something that is empirical, something that is universal, something that is true outside our own consciousness.
	Morality is universally preferable behavior.
	It's not thoughts because you can't morally judge a thought, even if you knew what it was.
	You can only morally judge an action, which is why thinking about killing someone doesn't land you in jail.
	Going out and killing them, which is an action, does.
	Morality has to be universal or it's not morality.
	It has to be something which is preferred Versus something that is not preferred, it has to be.
	So for instance, if I invent something called health medicine that prescribes arsenic for every conceivable illness, that's not medicine.
	That's murder. Medicine has to have a preferred state called health, right?
	It has to. And so if it's morality, it has to be universal.
	It has to be preferable.
	And it has to be about behavior.
	I mean, that to me is what, I mean, more than that is to me.
	I think I make a damn fine argument for it, which may be missing something.
	I'm not saying that's a complete and total definition of morality, but...
	That is what morality in its essence is.
	And so, again, I'm not saying that that is a complete and final answer convinces everyone, but that's the truth.
	If it ain't universal, it ain't morality.
	If it ain't preferable...
	You know, I had a dream about an elephant last night is not a statement of it's better to have dreams about elephants or it's worse or you should or I should throw you in jail if you don't have dreams about elephants.
	No, it's just a statement of my particular experience.
	I like sunsets.
	It's not a moral statement, right?
	And so analogize it to science is usually the best way of avoiding the mental static that we all have historically about ethics.
	Ethics is owned by gods and governments, right?
	Virtue is owned by gods.
	Morality is owned by gods and governments.
	Both of which are irrational and destructive elements.
	One relies on verbal abuse and one relies on physical abuse.
	And so we have lots of trauma in our heads about ethics.
	And so thinking clearly about ethics is really hard.
	It's like trying to compose a symphony while trying to outsurf a great white shark in a really high Patrick Swayze style wave.
	It's really hard. So the confusion is natural, and the confusion may be also because the book is imperfect, which I'm sure it is, but I hope that gives you some sense of at least the framework.
	And of course, I've talked a lot, and you can tell me just exactly where I've gone astray or where I could clarify things.
	That makes a lot of sense to me, but… Shit, I should put that in the book.
	Let me just make a note. Finally, somebody about UPB says, see, whenever I talk about it, people make sense.
	This is why I don't do debates on the boards about it, because it's just too easy to get all squidgy.
	But what I don't understand is how you can find a behavior that is universally preferred.
	Like the non-aggression principle isn't universally preferred.
	There are some people who might want others to attack them for some reason.
	People who enjoy it.
	Sure. Sure, but sorry, no, you mean like role-playing Six Dungeons-style stuff, like hot wax on the forehead?
	Yeah, okay, sure, but then that's not a violation of the NAP, right?
	And aggression, by its definition, has to be unwanted.
	Like, it's not rape if you want it, right?
	Well, you could want force used against you, but, like, unexpectedly.
	Yeah. Oh, you mean like, I'm thinking of, oh, what's that Peter Sellers movie where he's got an Oriental guy in the house who attacks him randomly just to keep him sharp?
	What is that? Is that Inspector Clouseau?
	It's the Pink Panther, right?
	It's Inspector Clouseau, right? Brilliant.
	Brilliant. Well, yeah, but unexpected doesn't mean unwanted, because what you want is for it to be unexpected, right?
	Well, when it's unexpected, there's no implicit contract between the...
	Oh, no. With Inspector Clouseau and that guy, there is an explicit contract, which is, you will be my manservant and you will attack me randomly.
	Yeah, just keep him honed on his skills and whatnot.
	Yeah, that is not a violation of the NAP any more than a karate contest is exactly the same as a mugging, right?
	Yeah. I mean, in a karate contest, the whole point is you don't know where the next blow is coming from.
	If you did, it wouldn't be much of a contest, right?
	Well, let's say I'm a...
	Oh, we're really going to go abstract now.
	We're going to go into space aliens with lasers and sharks.
	Anyway, no problem. What if I'm like a politician or something and I say, like, I really want to be mugged by someone on the street so then I can use that to...
	Increase the power of the police force or something like that.
	Boy, if only politicians had that level of self-sacrifice for their beliefs.
	Anyway, okay, so somebody like, or this death by cop, right?
	So somebody, some guy goes around waving a plague gun at cops so they'll shoot him, right?
	That's a good example. Okay, but that's suicide, right?
	I mean if I jump into a lion's cage rubbed in marinade, then that's – I mean the lion is not a man killer.
	I'm the one who put myself – it's like stepping in front of a speeding train does not make the train driver a murderer, right?
	So no, I mean, if you knowingly put yourself into the situation where you're going to get shot, right, then you are just a masochist.
	And so I don't think that that's a violation of the NAP. But sorry, I just wanted to correct something which is a common misperception.
	I try to be really precise in language, so I use preferable behavior rather than preferred behavior.
	The truth or falsehood of a theory is in no way, shape, or form dependent by its number of adherents.
	We know this as free market fans, right?
	Because the Austrian economics is by far the minority within the profession.
	But it's true and better than other theories.
	And so the fact that most people choose to violate the NAP does not invalidate the NAP. I mean, the fact that lots of people turn to the astrology page does not invalidate science.
	In fact, we know that astrology is nonsense because of science, right?
	We know that people who reject respect for the NAP don't do very well in their lives because the NAP is the only logically consistent way to approach human interactions.
	So, yeah, the fact that it's called preferable, not preferred.
	I mean, obviously, if everybody was perfectly moral, there would be no such thing as a need for morality, right?
	I mean, we don't need to lecture stones that they need to fall if pushed off a wall, right?
	Because they're just going to do it anyway.
	So morality is precisely because people act badly, right?
	If everybody ate exactly what was right for them in all situations, there'd be no such thing as the need for nutrition, right?
	Science of nutrition. I mean, we need nutrition because we want to eat chocolate cake, not asparagus.
	And so we need morality because people make bad decisions about how to live their lives and initiate force and fraud and all this sort of nasty stuff.
	So yeah, you need that. But the fact that people don't act morally, A, is the reason why we need it and B, has no relevance to a moral theory.
	I can give you the two seconds on the NAP if you sort of want to know how it grinds its way through UPB and comes out looking all kinds of shiny.
	Yeah, because I'm kind of confused about how the NAP is like an objective ethic.
	Sure. Sure, okay.
	Let's just take one example, which is murder, right?
	So murder, obviously, is the unwanted killing.
	If it's wanted, it's euthanasia or whatever, right?
	Suicide. But it's the unwanted killing of another human being, right?
	So murder, let's say we have a moral theory called murder is the highest moral value, right?
	Murder, everybody should murder.
	Murder is the best. There's nothing better than murder, right?
	Well, unfortunately, that can't work, logically.
	I mean obviously we know that a society like that would last 12 minutes but that's an argument from a fact and I'm certainly no utilitarian that way but the reality is it doesn't work logically.
	So you put two guys in a room, right?
	If I were there with you, we'd demonstrate this with hands on each other's throat but it's just a remote call.
	We won't do that. So put two guys in a room, one named Bob, one named Doug and you say to them, murder is universally preferable behavior.
	So what do they need to do to be moral?
	Exactly. Exactly.
	But they cannot murder each other.
	They cannot murder each other.
	Because if murder is universally preferable behavior, it cannot be both desired and rejected at the same time, right?
	We understand that. It cannot be the highest value and the lowest value at the same time.
	It cannot be both a positive and a negative value simultaneously, right?
	Because if it's the highest, it has to be positive, right?
	It can't be both positive and negative.
	But unfortunately, if Bob says, I'm going to go and strangle Doug because murder is UPB, so he goes and he tries to strangle Doug, right?
	Now, Doug, in order for it to be murder, Doug has to not want to be killed, right?
	Otherwise, it's euthanasia or suicide assist or whatever, right?
	Does that make sense? Yeah.
	Do you see where we're going? Yeah, I'm starting to understand it a lot better now.
	Yeah, it can't work. Because it can't be the highest value for both of them, but it can only be achievable if one of them really, really, really doesn't want it to happen.
	That's a logic fail, right?
	I mean, obviously it's kind of an evil doctrine, but the reason it's evil is because it can't be achieved.
	It logically contradicts itself the moment you try to And the same thing is true of theft.
	You say theft is the highest value.
	Okay, so Bob and Doug both have iPads and they each try to take it from each other.
	But it's only theft if someone doesn't want it to be stolen.
	Otherwise, they're lending it to each other, right?
	So again, you have theft as the highest and the lowest value simultaneously.
	Something you desperately desire to be good and something which – the virtue of which can only be achieved if it's strenuously resisted.
	Doesn't work, right? Same thing with assault.
	Same thing with rape.
	You understand. The big four in ethics, right?
	Theft, murder, rape, assault.
	All perfectly validated by UPB. Which is good.
	I mean, this is why we have these things in our moral vocabulary because they just fundamentally make sense, right?
	Logically. Right now, the respect for property rights, they can both achieve in the same room, right?
	If they both have iPads and they're going to respect each other's property rights, they can both achieve that simultaneously in perpetuity in the same room, right?
	They can both not beat each other up.
	They can both not kill each other.
	They can both respect each other's property.
	In the same room, in perpetuity, in a perfect state of equilibrium with no logical contradictions whatsoever, right?
	So it seems to me that...
	I guess what's confusing is calling it a universally preferable behavior.
	Because when you say it's universally preferable, you think it's something that every person is going to prefer.
	But really you're just saying it's the only thing that's logically consistent within the UPV framework.
	So I think that's where my confusion was.
	Right. And, you know, I've certainly – you are not alone in the masses of people who go through UBAB and go, what?
	What? What the hell is that bald motherfucker talking about?
	So, look, that's obviously a failure of mine.
	I've tried doing it with – I've tried doing it with slideshows.
	I've tried doing it with videos.
	I've got books. I've got podcasts.
	I still need to find the best way to communicate this, and that's just my struggle as an ethicist trying to communicate this stuff.
	So, I mean, I could cut myself some slack because it's hellaciously difficult stuff to think about clearly, but yes, you're absolutely right.
	Now, I think if you have a look at the book again, you'll see that everything I talk about here is in the book.
	But it's still really hard to understand for people and that's just something that I need to struggle with and you know when my daughter is slightly older and back in school and I have more than 12 minutes a day to think clearly then I will work on UPB version 2.0 and hopefully that will be clearer for people and it's questions like this that help me clarify how best to communicate about it.
	What makes logical consistency good?
	If for example I Because logic is something fundamental, right?
	And something natural, you could say, because we are dealing with that every day and we use it in everyday language.
	We're using that to understand the world.
	And if this is natural, for example, gravity is natural as well.
	But if I'm jumping out of the window and I'm going to die, this is pretty stupid, but I'm violating natural law.
	But am I evil now?
	So I cannot see why logic is then It's our mind to be good.
	You mean, why is logical consistency a value?
	No, why it's good. Because you say it's logical consistency, therefore it's good.
	It's logical consistent, therefore it's good.
	Right. And so for you, you could have a standard called logical inconsistency?
	No, I don't know if it's good or bad.
	It's nice to have it.
	I understand the word with that, but So, you're sort of more in the nihilistic category with regards to logic?
	No, I own the same preferences, but I don't call them objective or natural rights.
	Sorry, you don't think that logic is objective?
	I do. I like that.
	That was almost a question.
	I wasn't sure. You were like, is he going to question mark at that at the end?
	It's so much easier in Spanish, you know, than the question mark at the beginning.
	But anyway, but you do.
	I mean, whether you like it or not, logic is objective, right?
	Yeah, objective, right.
	Right. And it's consistent.
	I mean, consistency is one of the keys, right?
	Okay. So if you were to have a standard saying that...
	It is not better for logic to be consistent.
	It's neither better nor worse for any argument to be consistent or not consistent.
	That would be your statement.
	No, I'm not saying that it's not useful to validate an argument or something like that.
	No, no, no, no.
	Useful doesn't work in philosophy.
	Useful has no value in philosophy, right?
	Just to say it doesn't have any value in math.
	Things are either true or false, either valid or invalid, but useful doesn't matter.
	Yeah, okay, okay. We can say it's true, and universal preserve behavior is true, but it's logically consistent.
	But how can you get the step then, because it's true, it's good?
	I'm not sure that I said, if it's true, it's good.
	No, but you said it's logical consistency, therefore it's good.
	Maybe I did, and maybe that was in a different context.
	There are many things that are true that aren't good, right?
	I mean it's true that six million Jews and homosexuals and intellectuals were slaughtered in the death camps in Nazi Germany.
	I don't think that's good but it certainly is a true fact, right?
	I mean there's lots of things that are true that aren't – I mean two and two of four is a true statement but that doesn't mean it's good or bad.
	It's just not morally good or bad, right?
	It's just – it's true but that doesn't – truth and virtue are not the same thing, right?
	So – because – You can have something called follow mathematical logic and that's universal and it's preferable and it's behavior but it's not quite the same as morality.
	So, UPB, I mean, I've talked about this before.
	It's sort of an umbrella term because UPB actually works with science, math, engineering, and morality.
	So, I wouldn't say that certainly everything that is moral has to be UPB, but everything that is UPB does not have to be moral.
	I mean, science, I think, is UPB. If you want to say something true about the universe, you have to follow the scientific method.
	But that doesn't mean that you can't use the scientific method to invent some airborne zombie virus that turns everyone into democrats.
	I don't know. But so science can be used for evil, but science is still UPB in that if you want to say something true about the world, you have to use science.
	Yeah. But the reason why, if you say I'm agnostic about the value of logic, you haven't solved the problem of consistency.
	Because if you say that logic is not preferable to illogic, rationality is not preferable to irrationality, you're just creating another standard that people have to conform to.
	Which is that they should not say that one is preferable to the other.
	You haven't solved the problem of consistency.
	You haven't solved the problem of preferability.
	No, I would not say that.
	And so anything that you put forward as any kind of preference that is binding upon someone else involves consistency with that preferences.
	And so you can't have any kind of debate, can't have any kind of conversation about truth value or anything that is preferable and binding on the other person.
	Without there being a consistency with the principle.
	And so if consistency with the principle is innate and you can't escape it, then let's just be as consistent as possible.
	And that's, I think, logic and evidence.
	Yeah, I just cannot...
	It makes all sense to me.
	I'm using the same principle, so I'm not a nihilist.
	But I cannot just follow the step from...
	Saying something is true, something is logical, consistent, to something is good, objectively good or bad.
	What do you mean by good and bad in this context?
	It's telling people what is good and what is bad.
	Right? That's what moral is about.
	Well, sorry. Yeah, and as I said, just because something is true doesn't mean that it's moral.
	But it's a moral theory.
	I mean, the moon is round.
	Is that a moral statement?
	Now, UPB is a framework for evaluating theories, and one of the theories that it evaluates, and the one that I focus on, since it's the one that's the most important, I think, is morality.
	But if I say the moon is round, or the moon is a sphere, that is not a moral statement, right?
	Oh, so you're using UPB, and then you're saying, okay, this is logically consistent.
	You don't say this is a good theory.
	You're saying it's a logically consistent theory in the realm of ethics, right?
	Right. Well, okay, but if I put forward a theory which is supposed to be universal, it has to be logically consistent.
	Because reality is logical.
	Reality is consistent.
	And so if I'm going to say something true about...
	I mean, this is the whole point of science, right?
	It has to be reproducible. It has to be universal.
	It has to be, you know, the same everywhere, blah, blah, blah.
	And so if I'm going to say something which is true, it has to be both logical and universal.
	And so if I put forward a theory in science, let's say, that says, okay, the beginning of my theory is if I let go of this rock, it falls up and down simultaneously, then my theory is simply incorrect because that's not how matter works, right?
	Yeah. And so I can put forward a theory like that.
	It's just not true.
	That doesn't mean it's an evil theory.
	It just means it's kind of a waste of everyone's time and energy.
	It's just incorrect. And so if I'm going to put forward a moral theory, if it's incorrect in theory, then it fails.
	So if I say murder is UPB, then it fails.
	Now, if I then go and act like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, I go out and act on that theory, then I'm evil.
	So if I say murderous UPB, I make a logic fail as a thinker, that's just wrong.
	But if I then go and say, okay, let's go out and kill everyone, then I've just become evil, right?
	So there is a difference in that, right?
	Okay, good. Yeah, yeah. If I go out and do bad science, I'm not killing people, at least we hope, right?
	But moral theories are kind of different because if you act on irrational, self-contradictory moral theories, you end up with people being dead, right?
	So communism was a completely irrational theory, right?
	And the inaction of that irrational theory literally caused the death of hundreds of millions of people.
	Nazism, fascism, the god-awful mess that we're all trying to live through now, these are all based upon fundamentally self-contradictory and irrational moral theories.
	As simple as, theft is bad for this person, theft is good for this person, right?
	Theft is bad, counterfeiting is bad for the private citizen, counterfeiting is extremely moral and necessary for the people in the Federal Reserve.
	I mean this is just a contradictory theory, completely contradictory theory.
	And so the inaction of that contradictory theory is having disastrous consequences to people around the world.
	And that's the difference to me between ethical theories and other things which is that you get science wrong, you may waste time, waste energy.
	If you get a business wrong and you go and try and create some business that nobody wants, you've wasted some time and resources but people haven't gotten killed.
	Whereas if you get moral theories wrong, it is toxic to the species.
	And so I think that there's a much higher burden on moral theories than on any other theories because they just have – especially when there's a state in particular because that's what the state will run on.
	It has enormous consequences in society and that's why I think it's really essential to put moral theories through the grinder of reason and evidence.
	You resolved my problem.
	Thank you very much. I got it.
	What he means by that is he's just exhausted by the endless talk, and I can completely understand that.
	No, listen, I mean, I'd give it a shot.
	I mean, feel free to write me if you come up with something or you listen to this again and go like, hey, that guy's still full of shit.
	Just let me know. No, seriously.
	Why should I lie to you? Yeah.
	Well, no. It's just that sometimes, you know, you sort of, hey, that makes sense.
	Then you think about it later. It's like, eh, wait a minute.
	But so if that does happen, just let me know because it was a very enjoyable chat and you have a very challenging set of suppositions to come up against.
	So I really appreciated the work out.
	Stefan, I had a question about how you negotiate with your daughter.
	Like, if she wants chocolate cake for every meal, how do you go about dealing with that?
	Well, so far that hasn't happened.
	She certainly, obviously, because she's a human being, she wants chocolate more than she wants broccoli, although sometimes she'll really want vegetables.
	First of all, when she was very young, we just didn't give her that option, right?
	And that's an important thing to do, right?
	So we obviously did not give her chocolate icing when she was a baby because that would have primed her taste buds in a way that, you know, apple paste would have been much less enjoyable, right?
	So the first thing to do is to prevent that hunger from showing up too early.
	Now, when I felt that I could explain to her what was good for her and what was bad for her...
	Then we started – I started to introduce some sweets to her.
	I mean I want to give her the pleasure of sweet food because God knows it's really good, right?
	I don't want to deny her that.
	But it's the same thing about brushing her teeth, right?
	She just didn't want to have her teeth brushed and I mean it was really in despair and to really sit down with her.
	And go over it and go over it and I diagrammed it and, you know, I put little pieces of gum up to represent her teeth and I squirted stuff in there and say, this is icky, this is like, ew, this is like poo water in your teeth and all this kind of stuff, right?
	I have to keep them clean and so on.
	And it took a long time, but she did, you know, again, either she just gave up and let me brush her teeth or she should have accepted it.
	And it's the same thing, right?
	So she's had a cold, so we've been giving her a little bit more latitude in terms of eating, right?
	So I let her have some potato chips today and all that because she was just kind of miserable and it makes her feel a little better and doesn't do any harm really.
	But, you know, she wanted more.
	And I have to say, you know, look, this has got a lot of oil and fat.
	And if you eat too much, it's going to make you sick.
	And then you're going to go, you know, you kind of make it funny, right?
	And like you're seasick or whatever.
	And we say the same thing with candies, you know, that, you know, she would try to training her and would give her a reward of one single Skittle for doing that.
	But we, you know, she wants more and we have to say, look, I mean, if you have more, then we have to take you to see the dentist more often and we have to brush your teeth more and because of X, Y, and Z and blah, blah, blah, right?
	She doesn't understand weight gain or anything like that, of course, yet, but she can understand that she'll get a tummy ache, she'll feel sick and all of that.
	And, you know, for the most part, she's fantastic with that.
	I mean, she has a whole big bowl of like hundreds of Smarties and M&Ms and Skittles and all other gumballs and all this other kind of good stuff.
	And she will play with them, but she does not eat them.
	I've never seen her sneak one.
	I've never seen her eat one.
	She really does get it.
	And so it's just a matter of explaining.
	And I remember when I was a kid, I really used to resist brushing my teeth.
	I want to brush my teeth. I want to brush my teeth.
	And then I think I was five or six years old.
	I have a pretty distinct memory of this.
	I remember being in the bathroom and I was sort of lifting up my lips and licking my teeth.
	And I remember suddenly thinking, wait a minute.
	These are my teeth. If I don't brush them, I'm the one who's going to suffer.
	Ever since then, I've been real gung-ho on oral hygiene.
	It's unfortunate that people didn't take the time to explain it, but a lot of parenting is recognizing that I can spend an hour now And save myself 500 hours over the next 10 years.
	Or I can say I don't have time for this hour now and pay that 500 hours in 10-minute increments over the next, you know, thousand weeks.
	And so my approach is always, you know, just sit down and make sure, you know, the other impulse is to impose rules midway through, right?
	So she suddenly starts doing something new that I don't like and I just want to say no and I can't do that.
	Because what I have to do is I can't impose a rule midstream.
	I always have to explain a rule ahead of time before I impose it because otherwise I'm imposing it without reason.
	I'm imposing it based upon size, authority, dominance and so on and that's not something I ever want to do.
	I always want to and my wife and I will remind each other of this.
	Oh, no, no, we can't just impose a rule now, right?
	We have to sit down and explain it to her ahead of time.
	Otherwise, it's just a matter of the imposition of a rule from authority, which, of course, is the last thing that you want if you want to raise a free child.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, I was just curious because you don't go into a lot of detail in your videos or podcasts.
	You just briefly mention it.
	But what about, like, violence on TV? Do you just...
	Not expose her to that?
	Or do you explain that as well?
	We try to keep her away from it.
	She's seen a little bit. So yeah, she's seen some of it.
	I will wait for her to ask questions.
	I will say that's not very nice.
	That's not good. And we'll talk about it a little bit.
	But I don't want to explain violence to her any more than I want to explain death to her at the moment or taxes or, you know, the national debt.
	I mean, she's just too young.
	So, you know, I think she views it, you know, it's all cartoony.
	So she views it as a kind of dancing.
	And we try and steer her towards shows which don't like Tourist George or whatever.
	They don't have any of that sort of stuff in it.
	But occasionally you're watching something and it's like, whoa, where the hell did this come from?
	And I don't want to just switch it off.
	You can't see that because that just creates the forbidden fruit thing.
	And I can't switch it off without explaining why because then that's just another arbitrary imposition of rules to her without any explanation.
	So yeah, I mean try and minimize but you can't avoid it.
	And of course she's going to experience aggression in her life.
	And she already has, right?
	I mean, and so outside the family, like playing with other kids kind of thing.
	And I mean, nothing too bad or anything like that.
	But, you know, you can't pretend it doesn't exist in the world.
	I mean, she's even seen it.
	If she does not listen to you, do you let her feel consequences sometimes?
	Or is it not necessary because she's always believing you because you're always telling her the truth?
	No. No, God, she doesn't listen to me.
	She's still two, right? I mean, absolutely.
	No, she does – there are definitely times when she doesn't listen and those are challenges.
	So, of course, if she's doing anything dangerous, I immediately have to drop what I'm doing and go and deal with the situation obviously.
	But she has a habit which I think is common to every kid that I've ever known, which is if she's watching – Let's say she's watching some show that she likes and you've got to brush your teeth, then she'll just pretend she hasn't heard you.
	And then, you know, that's, I mean, that's in a natural.
	That's as natural as plants growing towards a light source.
	And so I will repeat myself two times and then I will say, uh-oh, Isabella's not listening.
	And the uh-oh is not a warning, but it's a change in tone, right?
	And that's not good, right?
	That's not a positive thing.
	It's annoying to me when I ask you something and you don't answer.
	I think it's not polite.
	It's not nice. And I will also, you know, because she's of course caught me not listening to her from time to time.
	And so she says, uh-oh, dad is not listening.
	It's exactly the same thing, right?
	And she has every right to call me on it, of course, because it's a universal standard.
	Yeah. But I just try to explain it to her in the same way that I try to explain why lying is bad.
	And that's a tough one because that's a tough explanation, right?
	Because she started experimenting with lying, which is exactly what she should be doing.
	But I don't want to just say, don't lie to me.
	What does that mean to a kid?
	That's just an arbitrary rule.
	But trying to explain it to her is really tough.
	It's tough to get into a two-and-a-half-year-old's mind and figure out how you can best explain because she doesn't understand concepts like trust, long-term health of relationships.
	So that's just something I have to be patient about and to recognize that the best way for her to end up not lying to me is for me to never lie to her.
	So those kinds of issues.
	Yeah, look, there will occasionally be negative consequences, right?
	Like, for instance, if for whatever reason – this is very rare – but if she's crying a lot while I'm driving, we just can't go.
	And that's because I can't drive safely while my baby is bawling in the back.
	I just – it's too hard to concentrate and I just don't feel confident.
	So I have to pull over and stop.
	It's not a punishment. It's just a reality.
	She had this game where she would pretend that it was hurting her when I was brushing her teeth.
	I knew it wasn't hurting her because we just took her to the dentist and the dentist said everything was great.
	And so I did say, look, if it's true that it keeps hurting you, then we have to go back to the dentist.
	Now, that's not a punishment.
	That's just a real consequence.
	And so the real consequences thing, but no, as far as timeouts and those kinds of punishments goes, or no dinner, I mean, that doesn't happen.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, I think that was Wolf's question.
	But yeah, it's very – I think everybody is really curious to see what – how itsy is.
	And I keep telling her, you better not screw up in life because a lot of it is writing on this parenting style.
	And no, listen, I'm telling you, it has worked out better than I could have ever imagined.
	Because I'm like a parental know-it-all long before I had kids, right?
	I shouldn't do this. You should do this, right?
	I mean, so God knows everybody was probably kind of curious when I had a kid, but I'm enormously relieved because, boy, I had a lot of apologizing to do if this hadn't worked out at all.
	But it's fantastic.
	I mean, she is so affectionate.
	I've got my first couple of I Love You's recently.
	I mean, oh my God, it's just incredible.
	I mean... She really, you know, she really enjoys our company.
	She really loves to spend time with us.
	And that just, that makes everything just so great.
	I mean, it's true in a marriage too, right?
	I mean, but every relationship.
	So, it's working out much, much better than I, I didn't think that we were going to be able to get by without timeouts.
	I didn't, I really wasn't sure that we'd be able to get by without threats of punishment or punishment itself.
	And, you know, as it turns out, it really is not only possible, but Fantastic.
	So, yeah, so far, more than so good.
	Edward, is there a question that you had for Stefan?
	I had a question.
	This was a philosophy that I talked about with this guy, James, who was also at Mrs.
	University, that we all know.
	And the view that we sort of discussed was that you're not really going to achieve liberty Practically, supporting Ron Paul or doing really anything, people are so stupid and prospects are so grim.
	So we were thinking, so what does it matter?
	Is there any point in doing anything to promote liberty?
	Is there anything wrong with just focusing on yourself and making money and using what we know about the world and about politics to You know, try to invest correctly and make more money.
	And what if we just forget about this whole world?
	How are we going to convince people? And how are we going to stop this policy?
	And how are we going to get this guy elected?
	What if we just focus on ourselves and try to make ourselves happy?
	Is there anything wrong with that philosophy?
	Well, aren't you – I mean, that's my approach, right?
	So I would say hopefully not because that's what I've been yelling about for years.
	So yeah, no, of course, I mean, get this guy elected, get that policy.
	No, no, that stuff's not going to work.
	I mean, look, that's just humility.
	I mean, this has been tried for 300 years or 350 years.
	People have been trying to use the state to control the state.
	I just don't think I'm smarter than Ayn Rand.
	I don't think I'm smarter than Murray Rothbard.
	I don't think I'm smarter than Von Mises.
	I don't think I'm smarter than Smith or Ricardo or all of the great thinkers, philosophers, economists.
	I'm not smarter than these people.
	And so if they failed...
	I don't think I'm going to succeed where scores of stone geniuses have failed.
	I can't be that grandiose.
	I can't be that insane as to think that I can do it.
	And so I have to just humbly accept the lessons of their failures, as I hope that people humbly accept the stuff that I'm failing at and not try and do it over and over again.
	So yeah, look, that stuff isn't going to work.
	I don't think that there's...
	I think there's a false dichotomy, which is it's politics or just money-making and nothing.
	I don't think that those two are the case.
	I think that the greatest freedom project I have is within the four walls of my own house.
	And that would occur whether I was podcasting, whether I was doing videos, whether I was speaking at conferences, whether I did anything.
	That occurred long before I started doing any of this stuff in my private life.
	And if I had never podcasted a syllable, if I had never done a video, never written an article, that level of freedom that I have achieved would have been by far the most important aspect of my freedom as a human being.
	So, yeah, what we can do, you know, you deal with what is close.
	And we invent these abstractions.
	Even these abstractions called let's win through politics, we invent those to avoid dealing with what is close.
	It's something I asked Nathaniel Brandon when I had him on the show.
	I was saying, look, I would rather have a happy marriage and 50% taxation than no taxation and a miserable marriage.
	And the way – who we choose to get married to and have kids with, who we choose to work with, who we choose to let into our lives, into our hearts, into our minds, into our very souls, who we are honest with, who we bear our souls to.
	These are questions that have nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with freeing the world because you can't free the world, right?
	I mean it's like trying to will a monsoon in India.
	You can imagine you can do it but you can't.
	And so we can only affect directly the relationships that we're involved in.
	And we can't even affect the other people in those relationships.
	We can only affect, to a large degree, our own choices and our own behavior.
	And the choices and behavior that we make in our own lives, in the only lives that we have, in the only lives that matter, our personal lives, those decisions are the root cause, I would argue, not just of our own personal freedom, because I think that's obvious, the most freedom that we can achieve.
	It's personal. But I also believe that that is how the future of freedom will look.
	Because it's like everybody's a statist.
	It's like everybody's fat.
	We live on an island of...
	5,000 people who weigh 400 pounds.
	And we weigh 400 pounds because we were raised in that environment.
	And we can go holler at everyone to lose weight, but it's not going to mean anything.
	It's not going to do anything.
	It's not going to solve anything. Nobody's going to listen because they're going to say, well, if losing weight is so great, why don't you drop some pounds, tubby?
	Right? And that's a perfectly valid question.
	And so if we want people to lose weight, if we want people to shed the excess fat of irrationality, Then we need to lose the weight ourselves and then we can run up and down stairs and we can do cartwheels and we can swim with the dolphins and do all this kind of stuff and we can live past 40.
	And then through that example, people will then say, hey, you know what?
	That guy looks pretty happy weighing 200, not 400 pounds.
	Maybe I can ask him how he did it.
	And then we can share. But we're not chasing around being unfree trying to make everyone else free because being a slave to the illusion of freeing others is to be even more of a slave than a statist because at least a statist gets the freedom of action that comes with social conformity and not chewing his own...
	Tongue off every time he sees a television show.
	He gets a lot more freedom by swimming with the current than libertarians get by trying to affect that which they cannot affect, which is other people's abstractions.
	So we start with our own relationships.
	We lose the weight ourselves.
	We become free in our own lives as much as humanly possible, and then we show people how freedom works and stop talking about it so much.
	I don't mean you guys, but that's the general approach that I've talked about.
	I have a last quick question.
	I can take this last one if that's okay, but please go ahead.
	Yeah, because for me it's 4.40 in the morning right now for me.
	Why are people feeling the stress killing other people?
	Because if you look again at the history and you see that it was like constantly war and we were talking about how badly children have been raised in the past and nowadays it's still relatively bad.
	Why do you think that people are feeling such a distress?
	Or is there a correlation between that it was getting better and better, correlating with better parenting methods?
	So you mean, why do people currently feel distress?
	Yeah, for example, why do people have a post-traumatic stress disorder?
	Because if these people are like, Propagandized and hit by their parents, don't have any future, and they're traumatized from the beginning, and then they go out of there, acting out their wage and killing other people.
	They normally should feel good because they're acting out what they're educated from the early beginnings of life.
	Yeah, I mean, certainly some people take great pleasure in killing.
	I mean, genuine sadists, right?
	I mean, like truly just way out there, people feel.
	But I think, I mean, what do I know?
	I don't know what a sadist really feels.
	But my guess would be that sadism is a way, like sadistic kind of killings are a way of relieving An unbearable internal agony.
	Like you know how you first take heroin.
	You don't know. I hope you don't know.
	But let's say you first take heroin, it's great.
	And then after a while though, you end up taking heroin just so you don't feel withdrawal.
	And, I mean, to me, that's the path of evil, right?
	I mean, obviously, people like to dominate others.
	Bullies get a pleasure out of dominating and bullying others because they've had their own internal hell, and they've felt so extremely powerless in their own life, and they've been exposed to such win-lose, abusive, destructive relationships that that's all they know, and it's the only power that they know to get is to dominate and brutalize other people.
	But what happens is that the pleasure that they get from the initial impulses to do that diminish, and they end up Dominating or bullying or, in extreme cases, even killing others just to avoid the hell of not doing it, right? The abyss, the internal agony.
	Now, of course, as far as PTSD goes, the agony comes from the fact that it's a UPP violation, that it's impossible to justify the murder of another human being except in an extremity of self-defense.
	Logically, you can't do it.
	And that which is illogical But which is acted upon is like a cramp in the brain.
	So when you try to do that, double think.
	You try to hold two opposing thoughts simultaneously.
	It's like I remember playing soccer with a guy once and he had a cramp in his – God, I should know these words.
	He had a cramp in the front of his thigh muscle and the back of his thigh muscle at the same time.
	And that was horrible because he couldn't stretch it out.
	Right? I mean, you get a cramp in your front muscle, you just, you know, you do your hoodless stretch and you stretch it out.
	But he couldn't because he had a cramp in both of his muscles.
	Both of his muscles were working at the same time when they should be working, right?
	Your pricep and your bicep should be working not both at the same time.
	That's like really bad for you.
	And so when you have a contradiction that you've acted on in such a fundamental way as taking another human being's life, you have created an agony of contradiction within your mind, which is that it is logically, you cannot logically justify that in any way, shape or form.
	I mean just some poor bastard over there in Iraq and I have great sympathy for these soldiers.
	They've been propagandized into murderous ghosts.
	But this guy is over there in Afghanistan or Iraq.
	I mean he knows if he's got any kind of internet access and even the curiosity that God gives a goose, he knows that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.
	He knows that the people in the Iraqi villages were no threat to him and his family in the United States.
	It's incomprehensible.
	So he knows that he's not acting in self-defense.
	He knows that.
	Even if he never asks a question, he knows that deep down.
	And yet, he is killed or participated in that.
	And he'll say, well, but they've got IEDs by the road and this and that.
	Well, yeah. Because you're invading their country, right?
	And... So he's got this contradiction in his mind and the brain is not good.
	The brain is a universalizing mechanism.
	The brain is a conceptualizing mechanism.
	I can see this with my daughter.
	That's all she does all day long.
	This is like this. This blue is like that blue.
	This crane is like the crane we saw yesterday in the car.
	This is like – all she's doing is trying to extract the essence, the Aristotelian essence, and apply it to every new thing she sees.
	And a moral horror, a moral contradiction that has been committed destroys the capacity of the mind to universalize, which is what it's for.
	And so the mind then fragments into, well, this thought can't touch this thought.
	It becomes fenced off. It becomes electrified.
	It becomes warded off.
	It becomes tightly controlled.
	It becomes fundamentally totalitarian.
	With a rigid censorship.
	With rigid control.
	Which is why the evil comes and then totalitarianism comes.
	The government is a state of mind.
	And so people who have grown up with bullying and who have become bullies and or victims, they will create and fit into a political system that mirrors that.
	And the schizophrenia of our system, our current system in the West, is reflective of our verbal commitment to children are everything.
	What do we say? Children are everything.
	Everything for the children. It's nothing I wouldn't do for my kids.
	Nothing I wouldn't do for my kids.
	Public school is funded by violence.
	Well, I can't talk about that.
	You just said you would do anything for your kids and you can't even talk about the violence at the root of how they're educated.
	So we have this contradiction.
	That we hold children up as these amazing, wonderful beings that we'll do anything for and then we'll dump them in daycares and go to work for 12 hours a day and then we'll spank them and then we won't take on the powers that control and bully our children in schools and in churches.
	These are the kind of contradictions, which is why politicians can talk very fluidly and passionately and powerfully about freedom and voluntarism and asking the rich to pay their share like the government ever damn well asks anyone anything.
	We can have all of these ideals that are completely disconnected from how we actually behave as a society.
	It all starts in the family.
	It all starts in the childhood.
	And until we can treat children consistent with our virtues, we will never get a social system consistent with the virtues spouted off by politicians, which means that there should not be politicians, but that's not going to happen until we fix things in the home.
	Hey, this is just after the conversation.
	I wanted to mention here too that PTSD is occurring now as opposed to in the past, also largely because in the past, warriors very rarely survived their wounds.
	Infection in the Middle Ages or in primitive societies was rampant and so on.
	So the fact that people are actually surviving going to war is rare.
	And so I just wanted to sort of point that out as well.
	Thanks a lot for coming and talking with us.
	Was it useful? Did you guys get some good stuff out of it?
	Fantastic. I'm very glad.
	And I hope that you guys obviously stay friends.
	Treasure this community.
	Treasure this community. I say this as a guy on the south side of 45 as of a few days ago.
	The community is everything.
	I think this Randian isolationism that I have occasionally embraced in my life is definitely not the way to go.
	I think the community is everything.
	So my last annoying bit of advice is to just if you have friends in the room, keep them for life if you can.
	It's well worth it. Thank you again.
	Thank you very much.

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