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Sept. 23, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:03:14
2004 Freedomain Radio Agora IO Speech
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Time Text
Alright, so this is Stefan Molyneux live at the Agora Conference.
It is September the 23rd, 2011.
It is 7 p.m.
I hope that you are...
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. I am broadcasting from the Agora conference, which is being held online at the moment, and I hope that you can join us.
Well, I hope that you have joined us, and I guess we have 31 viewers on at the moment, so we will start in just a split second while I get my techno crappies together.
And thank you for your patience.
Of course, had to endure a slight browser crash, even though we've tested before.
But here we go. So, I would like to...
I'm just going to see if there's any way that people can contact me here.
I think we went through this once before.
And I don't see any messages, but I'm going to assume that we are live.
So this is communicating about freedom for the Agora.io conference and thanks so much George for inviting me back and the first thing I wanted to talk about here was that what seems to happen in the realm of freedom is that people will talk about Freedom in its most abstract sense.
In other words, a sense that has nothing to do with their daily lives, with the decisions that they can actually make in their daily lives.
And I think that's a real shame. I think that's a real problem.
What happens is, people will argue about abstract freedom, and then the closer that freedom gets to be implementable in their own lives, The closer it gets to being actionable in their own lives, the more it seems to dissipate and vanish, which I think is a real tragedy.
A real tragedy. It reminds me of what used to occur in the mid to late Middle Ages.
It was called scholasticism.
And you would have people writing these endless tracts about very esoteric theological questions.
So, for example, One question that came up in the later Middle Ages was, did Adam have a belly button?
This consumed more vellum than your average Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
The reason being that it was a very, very important and challenging question for the theocrats of the Middle Ages, because Adam was supposed to be made in God's image.
And God obviously doesn't have a belly button because he's God and was never born.
But Adam, if Adam has a belly button, then he can't be made in God's image.
If Adam does have a belly button, he's not made in God's image, but then we all are who have belly buttons.
But if Adam doesn't have a belly button, and Adam therefore is made in God's image, then we are less in God's image because we have belly buttons.
And the angels dancing on the head of a pin, all this kind of stuff.
And this occurred generally after the rediscovery of the ancient Greek texts which were pretty secular and of course when people discovered the virtue of people like Aristotle and Plato and Socrates there were lots of questions about does Socrates get to go to heaven because He was a good man, or does he get to go to heaven because he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, which he couldn't because he was 500 years prior to JC's birth?
So, these kinds of questions, when there was a lot of Greco-Roman classical skepticism about religion, these kinds of questions drew people in.
I argue that they drew people in like Flies into a spider's web.
You know, the more you move, the more you get bound up in these kinds of things.
I said, it was really tragic. Huge amounts of mental energy, huge amounts of great minds being consumed by these very esoteric and abstract and obtuse questions.
And I think that there's a lot less of that in the libertarian movement, but there's still more of it than I would like.
And so one of the tricks about communicating ideas of freedom, ideals of freedom, is that you're generally only allowed or encouraged to discuss aspects of liberty that people can't act on.
That they can't act on.
You know, with the exception of voting, which we can talk about a little later.
But people can't act on these principles.
You'll get drawn into these very esoteric debates.
So, one that came up a couple of years ago, which I've mentioned before on the show.
If you haven't seen the show, you'll know.
It's new for you, I guess. After 2,000 podcasts, all I have left is new for people who haven't seen the show yet.
But it's the idea that, you know, property rights are very important, and yet if you're hanging from a flagpole and you're going to kick in a window to dive into somebody's apartment, you're going to invade their property rather than die, which is that life is more important than property rights, therefore we need a welfare state, blah, blah, blah. And, of course, these things don't occur.
They don't occur in real life.
I can't think of a single recorded instance where either that's occurred or if it has occurred where the person has been really bothered by the invasion of his property by somebody who would otherwise have plummeted to his death.
I think that would be great. I mean, I just wish they would do it when I was podcasting.
Or doing a video, even better.
They would come kicking in my window and we would have a great discussion about property rights and I would have the thrill of having saved someone's life, however indirectly.
So, I mean, this stuff doesn't really happen.
Another one, of course, is...
If I put a toe on someone's property, can they shoot me?
Again, these are things that don't happen in the real world.
And so you're kind of allowed to discuss issues of philosophy and morality and liberty in these very abstract and obtuse areas where you can't really act.
There's nothing particularly real about it.
And so it's sort of like you're allowed to be brave In a fantasy game like Dungeons& Dragons, but you're not allowed to be brave in real life.
And so one of the things that I've talked about for many years and will continue, I'm sure, to talk about until they throw me in a hole in the ground with dirt in my eye, is that I think it's very important to take...
Let's just talk about discussions.
I've talked about other kinds of actions you can take to promote liberty, but let's just talk about discussions or debates.
There is something in the approach that people take in medical school that I find very interesting and very worthwhile.
So, in medical school, of course, you deal a lot with the most common ailments, and the ones that, you know, maybe the symptoms are a little hard to find, but the ailments are pretty common.
And again, I've not been to medical school, but, you know, I'm sure you deal with how to detect appendicitis, diabetes, various kinds of infections, and what to test for, and all these, you know, the common stuff, 90% of what.
People go to doctors for, and you may, of course, get warning signs for cancer.
Of course, I'm sure if you're a dermatologist, I know if you're a dermatologist, you'll get all the warning signs for skin cancers and all these other kinds of things.
And that to me is very instructive when it comes to thinking about how to communicate about liberty, which is...
Think of yourself in medical school.
So when someone comes up to you with one of these hanging from a flagpole, toe over the property line, somebody plants a flag on a new continent and claims the entire continent for themselves and so on.
Ask yourself, Whether these kinds of questions would really ever be taught or even asked in medical school, analogous to somebody who was sick.
So, you know, somebody comes in and their arm has fallen off and their toes are currently on fire, they're having a heart attack and an aneurysm and they have appendicitis and a blood clot, deep vein thrombosis or something.
What do you do? I don't know, you take some pictures and get into a medical journal, I suppose, but this is never going to happen in real life.
It's never going to happen in real life.
It's almost like every time you set up a rule, like property rights or non-aggression principle, people immediately are drawn to the exception.
And... I really think that's a pretty fatal trap because we end up arguing about really theoretical, non-existent, non-important kinds of issues in alternate dimensions with people who will never act in that way and situations that will never arise.
And what we do is we effectively remove our philosophical intelligence from What can actually create and make change within society?
I think that's truly, truly tragic.
And something which we should studiously try, as hard as we can, to avoid.
It's like it.
We vault over That which we can actually discuss and which is really obvious.
And then we go in hot pursuit of the really obtuse and the really abstract.
So, of course, in the Middle Ages, they should have been talking about what are the arguments for and against the existence of God.
And, of course, St. Augustine and other theologians were.
But, of course, for a variety of pretty terrifying reasons, a lot of skeptics and atheists weren't.
They should have been asking that question, not questions around how do you reconcile this Bible passage with this Bible passage, or does Adam have a belly button, or how many angels can dance on the head of the pin, and so on.
Can God create a rock so heavy that he himself cannot lift it?
Because God, of course, has arms.
No belly button, but arms. But I really think it's important when we're discussing things to talk about The real elephants in the room.
The initiation of force around taxation.
The initiation of force around a monopoly of money printing.
God help us. The initiation of force around war.
The initiation of force around the war on drugs.
The initiation of force, a little bit more delicately to put, around things like public school and so on.
I think those are really, really important.
In order to make that case, then you have to make a case for property rights, non-aggression principle, and then immediately people will try to draw you out into this really abstract realm of what would property rights be in a mining asteroid of Alpha Centauri in the year 2562.
And then when you can't answer those questions or have trouble with those questions, they'll say, aha, there's no foundation for property rights.
And of course, that's one half of the equation where we get drawn out of really dealing with the meat of the issue in the present.
The other is that We get drawn into the prognostication business about how the roads will be built, how the schools will be built, how the children will be educated, how the poor will get their IV drips in the far future.
And both of those are really, really bad traps to get involved with.
And I'd strongly suggest trying to stay away from them as much as humanly possible.
And to return to, look, say, look, even if We say that some realms of intellectual property are challenging, or homesteading asteroids may be challenging, or, or, or, or, or, or there may be property rights around fish in the ocean that may be challenging.
Absolutely. But I view us as physicians in a time of plague.
And physicians, in a time of plague, bound, we assume, by their Hippocratic oath, are going to try and help the people who are sick, yea verily, unto death, on their doorsteps, in the streets, lining the avenues, falling off bridges.
The really abstract, maybe possible problems are after the plague is dealt with.
So if you're in the doctor in the middle of a plague and someone comes up and says, you know, it would be really tough to treat a disease that came in from an asteroid that was silicon-based.
Yeah, okay, can you pass me some rubbing alcohol?
Can you get me a bandage?
Can you do me something useful?
Can you do me a solid and help out these people who are dying a plague here?
And let's not worry about the extraterrestrial vaccines that may fall from the sky 500 years from now.
Or someone could say, you're in the middle of a plague, and someone can say, you know, wow, you know, wouldn't it be terrible if...
AIDS was airborne?
We're like, yeah, that would be terrible if AIDS were airborne.
Can we deal with the plague that we have right in front of us without worrying about imaginary disaster scenarios that are very unlikely to happen at some point in the future?
Let's deal with what we have now.
And so in a sense, right, so people are constantly trying to draw you into...
Not debating things in the present.
It's really terrible and it's really challenging.
The real elephants in the room, people that kind of draw and draw you away.
Like if you really wanted a plague to continue, you try and engage, you tempt the doctors, you dangle these hooks in front of the doctors with these tasty intellectual tidbits that they might get really interested in.
And you would focus on that, and that would be what you would do to draw the doctors away from dealing with the plague currently coursing through the streets, making the gutters run yellow and red with vomit and blood.
You would try and draw them into helping actual patients by getting them involved in really abstract and obtuse discussions.
And in the same way that in the scholastic period in the later Middle Ages, a lot of these really esoteric questions that were floating around were a way of trying to avoid the elephant in the room of, you know, there are these intellectual giants we admire from the ancient world who had no concept of Christianity.
That's tricky, right?
I mean, the Romans, later Romans did, but the Greeks, classical Greeks certainly didn't.
That's really tricky, because it's kind of tough to say that Socrates is evil because he wasn't baptized.
So it's a way of distracting you from the core questions.
It's a way of keeping you away from the patients who you can really help and drawing you into these cloud castles of what-ifs.
And I think it's really to the detriment of the movement to just try and avoid those temptations.
They're really tempting because we feel, of course, that if we can dot every I and cross every T, if we can just cover every base, if we can answer every question, if we can...
Come up with credible solutions for every conceivable way in which the free market can solve goods, market failure goods, market problems, goods currently provided by governments.
If we can just find a way to answer every question, then we will change people's minds.
But I think that is not.
I mean, just to look at the profession of economics to see that.
I mean, economists for 300 years, they have a number of things that are not in dispute.
A lot of them, like Keynesianism, God, it's back, right?
I mean, but that's not, that's sort of, to some degree, in dispute.
The fact that free trade increases productivity, Absolutely not in dispute.
The fact that two people voluntarily trading both end up better is not under dispute.
And yet, these policies have not manifested themselves in any kind of consistent real-world policies, even after three, four hundred years of consistency among the profession.
So, if tens of thousands of economists over centuries cannot get a consensus in the general population about things as simple as free trade increases wealth, Or if free trade increases efficiency or the division of labor increases efficiency.
If people can't accept those basic ideas in the general population despite Their incontrovertible nature among the specialists who've been around for centuries and tens of thousands of them with Nobel Prizes and all these kinds of PhDs from really hoity-toity Ivy League schools.
If that can't be achieved, then it seems to me pretty impossible to imagine that any individual, no matter how eloquent and how great at getting ideas across...
Sorry, I just repeated myself, but hey!
It's filler, people. Give me a break.
No matter how eloquent we are, if tens of thousands of economists can't get simple ideas across the general population over four centuries, we really don't have a chance.
And of course, the questions are not designed to be answered.
No matter what Answer you come up with about how the roads will be built, there will be another question.
And even if you answer everything about how the roads will be built, they'll move on to some other topic, and some other topic, and some other topic, and you literally can spend the rest of your life just with one person who's skeptical, making these explanations.
And what you're doing is you're leaving the sick and dying in the streets and going up to the ivory tower to discuss philosophy rather than doing what you should be doing, I think, which is to talk about The basics of ethics in a free society and the reality of the evils that we face in a state of society.
The initiation of the use of force is the foundation of government.
Right? Sticking a gun in someone's ribs to get them to do what you want, to give you money, to give you their kids for educational purposes.
This is all wrong. It's wrong.
If people can't admit that that's wrong, if people can't admit that using violence to pretend to solve social problems, if they can't admit that's not wrong, move on.
Move on. It's triage.
If somebody doesn't have the intellectual and moral common sense of your average epileptic goose, then just keep moving.
And this is what you do, right?
If you're in a situation of a plague, there's lots of people around who you can't save.
There's some people around that you can save.
So you ask those questions, you know, is it wrong to use violence to get, as Mark Stevens says, is it wrong to supply goods and services at the point of a gun?
If somebody says no, it's not wrong, or they want to get drawn into some abstract discussion and won't take a stand on such a simple and basic issue, move on, move on, move on.
Lots of people are past help, are past hope, are too in the matrix, are too embedded in propaganda, are too embedded In the delusions of statism, keep moving.
Find those people who are like, huh, I never thought about that before.
I don't know. A pint of a gun?
Really? Tell me more about that.
That's weird. It doesn't make sense to me, but I'm willing to listen.
Those are the people that you want to talk to because they actually have ears.
Otherwise, you're trying to dance with statues.
You're just going to scratch yourself and maybe the statue will fall over, but you're never going to get any Busta Rhymes in.
Don't talk to people without ears.
Talk to people who can actually communicate, who can actually listen, who have intellectual curiosity, and keep moving and keep moving, but don't get embedded in discussions.
People do this with their families and their friends all the time.
Get involved in these discussions and go on and on for years.
They bleed energy from you.
Very often they will go nowhere.
I mean, sometimes they will. Lovely!
That's what we like to see, but often they will go nowhere.
And really try to avoid It's such a temptation, you know, oh, if I can get this person to understand one more thing, they're gonna be fine.
But the goal of most people when faced with new and challenging ideas, the goal of most people is to reject them and if they're even more cunning it is to paralyze the speaker of the great ideas with doubts and fears and insecurities and blah blah blah blah blah and they do that by coming up with esoteric impossible who cares questions and then saying if you fail to answer them then you lack intellectual integrity if you fail to answer my questions then you're just dogmatic if you fail to answer my questions you are not being consistent if you fail to answer my questions they set themselves up In the position of examiner,
and then you are the, you know, on your knees, hat in hand, Dickensian kind of supplicant who's trying to get them to approve your message, your ideas.
And don't fall into that.
You know, if people can't see the violence of the system, then debating them won't help.
This kind of aggression, like the aggression of statism, you see it or you don't.
I mean, you see it or you don't.
And seeing it doesn't mean you get it.
I mean, I'm still learning about it 30 years in.
But seeing it doesn't mean that you just automatically get it, no problem, anywhere, you know?
But it means that you're like, whoa, that electric shock of a new idea.
I'll give you one last example, then I'll see if there's a way to get questions from you delicious people.
There's a saying in science.
I'm not a scientist, God knows, so I don't know how true it is.
Maybe it's true. Probably seems true.
Which is to say that old ideas, people don't get deconverted from old ideas to new ideas.
You just wait for the people who believe in the old ideas to retire or die, and then the people who have the new ideas move in.
This is quite often the case.
And so even in the realm of science, where people are trained in empiricism, trained in rationality, trained in the scientific method, and their careers can be made by the acceptance of new ideas, and they'll have great friends among the younger people who have these new ideas.
So all of these people, and still even in the sciences, it takes a long, long time, and most people don't seem to be able to adjust too much to new ideas or new arguments or new ways of thinking, or better ways of thinking, more accurate ways.
So that's just, again, that's anecdotal, or Bromidal.
I don't know if it's true or not, but if it is true, that's another example that even scientists have real difficulty getting new ideas.
And that's just ego-based.
I mean, that's not even around morals.
That's not even around ethics.
Ethics are much more volatile than new scientific theories because ethics turn everybody's world topsy-turvy.
Ethics is a landmine.
Click! Oh dear, we're in the realm of ethics.
I better put on my blast furnace.
Anyway, so I hope that makes sense.
These are my approaches. Don't get involved in esoteric discussions.
Don't get involved in trying to answer every conceivable rotating disco ball question of future possibilities and solutions.
Just keep focusing on, you know, do you at least see the aggression and violence that's in our society at the moment?
Do you at least see that the war on drugs is immoral?
Do you at least see that taxation has moral problems?
Even if you don't agree with it, there are moral problems about it.
Taxation. If people see it, great.
Then they're in the amber zone of triage.
And if people don't see it, they're in the red and intellectually dead.
And I really believe you have to move on to people who can be saved.
And that efficiency principle is really, really important.
So, hey, 24 minutes.
Not too bad. I'll just see.
I know I went through this last time.
I think it was in February, where we tried to find a way for me to be able to Answer questions that people had.
And I'm just going to...
Let me just log on to Skype and see if old George is around.
And see if we can't...
Well, if anybody has any questions...
Oh, how could you have questions?
It's all just too clear for words, isn't it?
Let's see. If anyone knows, my Skype ID is s-t-e-f-a-n-m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x,
or I think you can post this on Facebook and you can let me know if there's any way to to communicate with people.
Last time I remember I think it was over on Facebook or something like that.
Yeah, if you have me on Facebook, if you could just send me a message or write in my wall about how to do that.
And we'll see if we can get any answers.
Yes.
Q&A! I like the Q&A. Let me just...
I'll just... Oh, somebody pinged me.
Ah! Pause the video feed so you don't hear yourself.
Oh, actually, no, I have my...
I don't have my speakers on so it should be okay ah here we go Alright, so just let me know if this is working okay.
And I've got...
Yeah, just let me know if...
Yay, it's back! Alright. I see you!
Arrr! Alright, so if anyone has any questions or comments, I'm wide open, baby.
I'm like the Bay of Fundy.
Almost exactly like the Bay of Fundy.
If you have any questions, comments, issues, I'm happy to discuss whatever my...
Oh, overhead lights.
Oh, so shiny forehead can help you.
So somebody wrote, Hey Steph, how would you respond to...
Claim that an anarchic society is impossible because you cannot get people to respect any type of property rights without a state to enforce them.
Okay, so if somebody made that argument to me, it would feign appendicitis?
No. Appendicitis?
Diabetes? A sore tooth?
Hair loss? Ah, I wouldn't have to fake hair loss.
So if somebody asked me that question, say, people don't respect property rights without a state, well, I would say that there's a contradiction.
I mean, it's a clear contradiction.
Because the state is a violation of property rights.
And so what you're saying is people don't believe in property rights Without a state.
But the state is composed of and defined as a group of people who can violate property rights at will.
So saying that the state, which is a violation of property rights, is a solution to a skepticism about property rights is...
is invalid.
That's just a logic fail.
And so I would just ask that person, you know, please rephrase your question with some level of intellectual consistency and try again.
As an addendum, will you punch this fellow in the face?
I would not punch him in the face.
Occasionally, I may be tempted in that way.
But, no. Yeah, I mean, obviously.
Yeah, so it is really funny.
And this is what people do all the time.
They will create a magical world of opposites.
They say, well, you need the state to enforce property rights.
The state is a violation of property rights.
I mean, George Orwell said once, you know, that this idea is so ludicrous, it would take an intellectual to believe it.
And the idea that you are going to protect property rights by creating a monopoly of force that can violate property rights at will is mad.
It's like, from a blank slate perspective, I said, okay, we need to create an agency that is going to steal half of people's money in order to protect their right to own money.
I mean, people would say, what?
But we've inherited this stuff, so it seems vaguely reasonable, but it's not.
I mean, it's not at all rational.
It's rolled down through the ages of culture, which means we have all this propaganda so that it doesn't look irrational to us.
But I mean, do that space alien thing coming to examine our social system and it'd be like, oh my god, how do these people not brush their eyeballs and put vising in their teeth every morning?
It makes no sense. Steph, the US is getting scarily Muslim-hating nationalism.
How can we fight that? Well, I mean, it's a tough question.
And I've gone all the way around the baseball diamond as far as fighting the good fight goes.
I mean, I used to be a little bit more aggressive and passionate and thumb at the table kind of stuff, but as the years have gone by, I've realized that it's earlier than we think.
So, you know, anger's great when you have a lot of people who get it.
When you don't have a lot of people who get it, then you just look like you're ranting in Klingon and people want to, you know, shoot you with a tranquilizer.
They don't understand. So, as far as combating anti-Islamic Well, I mean, the first thing, of course, is to recognize that Islam and Christianity share the same Old Testament and Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet and so on.
So there's a lot that's in common.
But Christians...
There's a time dilation or a time differential in terms of Islam versus Christianity.
Islam has not gone through its reformation yet.
Islam has not had a secular critique or semi-secular critique of the holy texts make its way through their society.
I mean, I'm not talking you sort of average Western nice Muslim next door.
I'm sort of talking like the real hardcore people over the Middle East and other places.
And so Islam has not gone through its reformation, and therefore Islam is a long way from coming to a post-Christian revolution.
I think it's important to remind Christians these days that they're not responsible for the Reformation.
The Reformation was done hundreds of years ago by others, and so they're the happy beneficiaries of other people's intelligence and virtue and courage and commitment and so on.
And to remember that it's not a Muslim's fault he's born a Muslim.
It's just the way he's brought up.
It's the way, it's environment.
And of course everybody who's religious should feel, if they look across the water and see a religion that is not pleasing to them, then they should be very grateful that they weren't born under that religion.
Because then they'd be looking across the water saying, well that religion is not pleasing to me and so on.
So I think that kind of humility I think is really important and can help diffuse some of this kind of stuff.
Again, among people who are capable of reason.
Let's see here. Is the NAP the only thing that really matters, or do you think other concerns might be necessary in a libertarian world?
Why and why not? Well, I mean, the NAP is theory and practice, right?
The NAP in theory is obviously important.
You do have to have a theory, I think, before you focus on a practice.
But no, I mean, to switch from one drum called statism to the other drum called parenting, it is much more important that parents not yell at and not hit their children, not spank their children.
It's much more important that parents do that than that they understand Murray Rothbard's work.
It's much more important that children are raised peacefully by socialists rather than hit by libertarians because the human brain changes so much under those kinds of stresses and fundamentally becomes almost incapable of reason down the road that the NAP in practice in the family Needs to be implemented,
I think, before we can get any really consistent arguments for NAP or UPP or property rights across the general population because people are just growing up in general these days too traumatized.
They're traumatized at home often and then they're propagandized in school and they're lectured to by priests and then they come out without any capacity to reason and very afraid of that incapacity and that's why they're so volatile to deal with.
So, you know, you don't have to understand Libertarian estoppel approaches to ethics and property and so on in order to make the commitment to not aggress against your children.
That's necessary before anything else is going to happen intellectually, I think.
I watched the four-hour debate yesterday about anarchism versus minarchism.
The last question was basically, how does one coexist in a state of society they were born into?
How do you get through the guilt?
You began to answer and the audio failed towards the end.
Have a look on my website.
The audio, I think, works on the podcast.
And if it doesn't, then email me the question and I will try to answer it in a video.
That's my debate with Michael Bednarik.
I would highly recommend it.
It's called How Much Government Is Necessary.
And I really do appreciate Michael taking the time.
And it was a very enjoyable debate.
It's available on YouTube and on my website at freedomainradio.com.
Oh, hypocrisy. Well, okay, I mean, sorry, hypocrisy.
That's quality broadcasting for you right there.
The hypocrisy of living in a state of society.
There is no hypocrisy for a freedom lover to live in a state of society.
There's no hypocrisy whatsoever.
When you are in a situation...
Virtue requires freedom.
Once you have violence in the mix, There's no more capacity for virtue than there is for lovemaking when someone's being raped.
The moment somebody starts violently aggressing against a woman sexually or a man, it's rape.
Lovemaking has vanished. And as soon as you have guns pointed at you by the state, there's no such thing as hypocrisy.
There are various survival strategies and some choose to resist.
I myself choose to pay taxes so that I continue doing what I'm doing.
I have no problem with those who choose to resist.
I hope they have no problem with those of us who choose to comply and take other approaches to it.
But they're not right or wrong, in my opinion, and I'm not right or wrong.
We're just both trying to survive in a situation of predation and there's no guilt.
I mean, if we're going to start bringing moral judgments into the equation, then what we need to do is look at the people who are Pointing the guns, not at the people who are dodging the bullets.
So, no, there's no guilt.
There's no hypocrisy. We didn't create the system, we didn't design it, we didn't approve it, we didn't support it, and so we're not bound by what happens afterwards.
I've seen other videos where you state, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you were originally influenced heavily by Ayn Rand.
What moved you away from her philosophy, and what particulars do you believe she got right?
Well, I'm still hugely influenced by Ayn Rand, and it would be impossible to be uninfluenced at this point by Ayn Rand.
I think, I mean, she was an incredible genius.
I mean, I think that needs, people need to understand that first.
I mean, there's a stone genius.
And, I mean, how many people have written some of the most popular and powerful works in a language that they didn't even learn until they were in their 20s?
I mean, it's amazing what she did when English isn't even her first language.
Her plots, her characters, they're vivid, they're powerful, they're electrifying.
Yeah, okay, there are problems.
There are problems. I don't mean to brush them over.
She was a little into the hot, hot, and heavy, dirty, nasty, aggressive sex.
But, you know, maybe that's a matter of personal taste, but I think that was a problem.
She obviously got homosexuality wrong, but...
This is prior to the biology that came out, certainly not too long after she died, perhaps even a little bit before.
She was wrong about the state.
These kinds of issues are really challenging because she knew it.
She knew it. So in Galt's Gulch there's no government.
And then the first thing that they do when they're leaving Galt's Gulch at the end of Atlas Shrugged, spoiler alert, is they try to fix the constitution to reinstate the government for everyone else.
So, in her ideal world there was no government, but she was not able to make the leap to anarchism.
I don't know if it's because she had personal animosities with anarchists, I don't know if she liked the attention of political people or wanted influence in that area, or if it was just too great a conceptual leap for her, but there was no successful answering If the non-initiation of force is the foundation of the objectivist philosophy, NAP and property rights, you can't have a government.
You can't. I mean, I'm sorry.
That just doesn't work.
Because the government is the initiation of self.
Well, voluntary taxation.
Well, if it's voluntary, it's not taxation.
That's like consensual rape.
It just doesn't work. And competing defense forces say, well, the government can have a monopoly on police and law courts and military and what the objective is like.
Well, if they have a monopoly, then they can initiate the use of force against competitors who are themselves peaceful, which violates the NAP. I mean, it just doesn't...
And I try, you know, I spent years running myself around in circles and creating thought balloons sort of akin to my lower intestine, just trying to square this circle, and it can't be done, and then you just have to let go of it in a big whoosh.
I mean, you just have to let go of it and say, hey, I'm down with her on the metaphysics, fantastic reality, beautiful.
Epistemology, bang on.
Ethics, very close, but have to go one step or two steps further.
And politics, we just don't see eye to eye.
To me, anybody who doesn't recognize that Ayn Rand was a genius is just themselves a fool.
It's one of my acid tests.
If somebody just starts dissing Ayn Rand, I mean, it's just like, oh man, you people.
You know, come on.
I know that they're just repeating stuff.
I know that they're second handers.
Because the way that people oppose Ayn Rand, Is they will take her more extreme statements, right?
Like the Palestinians are animals and so on.
They'll take her more extreme statements and bad statements, wrong statements, no question.
And they'll parade those out.
Or they'll say, well, Ayn Rand took Medicare and she took Social Security, so she's a hypocrite.
Therefore, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They'll take all of this kind of stuff.
And what they won't actually do is address her arguments.
And you have to work pretty hard to...
I mean, I think I'm a pretty smart fella.
It took me like 20 years to find some way to extend and improve upon, as I think, what Ayn Rand was doing.
And so when I see people throwing rocks at a cliff, I don't think that they're mountain climbers.
You know, people got to climb the mountain.
You got to tackle her.
And I mean, I learned this in grad school.
I mean, even if somebody whose ideas you dislike, you have to get into their skin.
You have to get into their ideas.
You have to tackle their ideas and, you know, find their flaws.
You can't just ad hominem.
And that's all you see with Iron Man stuff.
It's just ad hominem and argument by adjective and so on.
So, yeah, I would consider myself, honestly, in most particulars up to ethics and philosophy, I'm still an almost complete objectivist.
So I just feel that the consistency is...
You know, what Aristotle said about Plato's theory of the forms, we must love the truth more than our friends.
And hopefully our friends will love us for loving the truth more than them, and it will be a happy Jell-O based orgy of truthiness.
But I had to love the truth more than objectivism as a...
A fixed dogma, or a fixed scheme.
Which, you know, I like to think that if there was an afterlife, Ayn Rand would be blowing smoke down the chimney and saying, Good job!
I think it's good!
Or, you know, she probably sounds almost exactly like that.
Steph, I'm concerned the drone war will escalate into a World War III global genocide with this economy.
Thoughts? No, I don't feel that way.
I don't feel that there's a World War III apocalypse coming.
I don't feel that there are going to be those kinds of disasters.
I mean, the ruling classes have lasted 10,000 years, and they survived the Cold War when things looked a lot more dire, and they survived the Dark Ages, they survived the Black Death, they're surviving my podcast on the Internet.
Can you believe it? In my opinion, the next step is going to be a significant step towards freedom.
The next step in the evolution of society is going to be a significant step towards freedom.
Not because our rulers want us to be free or committed to any kind of freedom in principle, but because there's too many dependent Cows.
And when you have too many dependent cows, you've got to cull the herd.
And cull the herd doesn't mean kill people or whatever, right?
But they're going to turn on the old.
And they're going to turn a little bit on the sick.
Certainly going to turn on the old. They're going to means test the hell out of Social Security.
They're going to raise the retirement age.
They're just going to turn on these people.
You know, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
You lay down with the state, you wake up with fleas.
Well, I guess you lay down with fleas, you wake up with fleas.
And so, yeah, they're going to turn on the dependent class.
They're going to cut people off from welfare.
They're going to turn on the teachers. They're going to screw the public sector employees out of their pensions.
Because they can. Because they've got all the guns in the world.
I mean, they'll obviously protect the police, the enforcers, and they'll protect the courts, and they'll protect the prison guards because they need those as the enforcers.
It's going to be a big step towards freedom, and I think it's, you know, hopefully we can keep that momentum going.
But it's sort of like in China.
You know, they just got it. You know, communism ain't working.
Okay, let's screw everyone who's communist and turn towards the free market more.
Same thing in Russia.
Same thing's happening in India.
So the next step we're going to get is...
The dependent classes are going to get screwed.
There's going to be greater liberty for others.
There's going to be debt repudiation because you can't go the inflation route anymore.
And we're going to shake this off like a bad hangover.
That's my opinion.
I could be wrong.
So, um...
Jello-based orgy of truthiness.
Yeah, sometimes they do come out right.
You know, when I come up with metaphors, they're coming out syllable by syllable and I'm kind of watching them go by like a train coming out of my mouth.
So sometimes they work and sometimes they derail.
If you've got a chance, could you spend a few moments talking about Bitcoin and alternative currencies?
Please take other questions before this one.
Do we have other questions before this one?
No.
I have some videos on Bitcoin, and so I would sort of refer you to those.
I don't want to repeat myself more than absolutely necessary.
Lord knows it's happened before. So let's see.
How would you address Marxist and left anarchist claims that wage labor is slavery?
Well, I would first ask them to define the terms.
Slavery, of course, is when you are directly physically owned and controlled by somebody else who has the legal right to use violence to keep you where he wants you to be, to get you to do what he wants you to do.
He can initiate the use of force against you at will for any disobeying of his commandments or any fleeing of his geographical location.
So if we accept that as a rational definition of slavery, and you can be bought and sold like any other commodity and so on, then for people who say wage labor is slavery, then they're...
I mean, I don't know how to put this very nicely.
They're idiots. They're propagandizing idiots.
They're not being careful with the terms they use.
They are using extremist hyperbolic language.
They are muddying the waters.
They're not putting any clear definitions forward.
I would ask them to define slavery, and once we agreed on that slavery definition, I would say, well, how do you feel about Getting paid a wage relative to what we just defined and say, you know, come to think of it, that is kind of far apart.
And if they said that, okay, great, you know, that's really honest with you, well done, let's figure out how it's different.
Well, of course, there's, you know, no initiation of force, the person can leave at any time, they're not bound by a geographical area, they're blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
I mean, it's just not slavery.
It's an insult to slavery.
It's an insult to slavery to call wage labor slavery and, of course, it's an insult to wage laborers as well.
So, if the person was able to see that it was not the same, good.
You know, we all make mistakes, we all get caught up in our own language sometimes, so fantastic.
If they weren't, like if they doubled down and say, yeah, it is just like that, be like, you know, I'm sorry, I speak a language called truth, and you're well versed in some other forked tongue, and so we really don't speak the same language.
There's nothing I can say, really.
I mean, wage labor is very simple to understand.
Wage laborer is hiring a taxi.
That's all it is. I mean, you can walk 20 blocks if you want, and that's pretty tiring.
Or you can hire a cab, and you can get there much more quickly, but you have to pay the cab driver for owning the cab.
That's all wage slavery is.
You can make a chair using a hammer and a chisel and an axe and cutting down the tree and you can make your own varnish and you can drive it to the store and sell it and I guess some people do that.
Or you can say, I'm going to go to some guy who's got a factory that helps me make 20 chairs in the time that I could make 5 chairs by hand, and I'm going to pay that person a portion of my profits for the rental of their machines, which make me much more profitable.
That's all it is. You are renting machines from the factory owner in order to make your wages higher.
It's a win-win. It's a beautiful win-win.
And that's called wages.
There's nothing wrong with it.
And people who get those two things confused fundamentally are talking about bad experiences with their parents or early employers or priests or something.
They're not talking any kind of rationality about the real economy of the world.
Even now, I mean even now.
Alright, question...
These are all too short for questions.
Thank you.
Having employees is not a requirement for trade.
Yeah, absolutely. I can scrimp and save and open a factory and then I can rent out that stuff.
In the same way, I can scrimp and save and buy a cab and then I can rent out that cab to other people to get them to go faster.
You can walk if you want, you can build everything by hand, you know what I mean?
Or you can go and rent machines and make more money.
Do you see gold as a currency within five years?
Oh, no. No, no, no, no.
No. No, my God.
I mean, fiat currency is...
That's the essence of power.
I mean, you can't have a democracy.
You can't have a state without some sort of fiat currency or some sort of control over these things.
Because... You can't bribe people with their own money.
If you're using gold, then it's sort of like a zero-sum game.
You bribe all these people, and you take away from these people, and these people are happy that they're being bribed, and these people are really unhappy they're being stolen from, so they're going to get mad.
So you gain 100 votes for bribing people, you lose 100 votes because you're stealing from people.
If it's a zero-sum game, democracy doesn't work.
So the only way that you can get democracy to work is you bribe these hundred people with inflated currency and nobody loses anything for a year or two and then when they do it's so diffuse they can't connect it back to the original bribe and they can blame the storekeepers for raising the prices and all that.
I mean it has to have all this fog.
Fiat currency is the ultimate.
Foggy news that goes around the neck of humanity, they're never going to give that up in any conceivable future that I can think of.
I mean, yes, long time down the road and so on, but...
Certainly not in five years.
I mean, there may be alternative currencies.
There may be people working under the table for gold and so on, but there's just no way.
No one's going back on the gold standard.
I mean, can you imagine trying to pay off, what is it, in the U.S., $120, $150 trillion of unfunded liabilities?
You can't even pay that off with fiat currency, let alone gold.
The moment you go to gold, you default on the debt.
You can't pay Social Security.
You can't pay the unemployment insurance.
You can't pay pensions for public sector workers, which are underfunded by tens and tens of billions of dollars.
Hundreds of billions of dollars.
So, yeah. I mean, you just have a revolution right away.
You can't do it. Steph, do you think the likes of seasteading will make a difference in the minds of the general public?
Well, I hope so. I hope so.
I mean, the moment they get a platform up, I'm going out if I have to swim.
I really want to go and see what seasteading looks like.
And I'm hoping that...
I mean, of course, people go out there and maybe they'll start making drugs or whatever, and then legal drugs, and then that's all you'll hear about.
But it's my hope that it will have some effect on the minds of people for sure.
sure.
I think it's a very, very cool thing that they're doing.
Do you at least admit that this present situation is wage slavery?
I'm not sure what you mean by this present situation, and I'm not sure how you're defining wage slavery.
What we have in the modern world is two kinds of slavery.
They're both related. The first is debt slavery, and the second is inflation slavery.
Debt slavery, of course, is when you run up government debt, which then has to be paid or managed somehow by people who aren't even born yet.
Obviously, that's completely and foully immoral.
And all these people who are concerned with the rights of the unborn...
I mean, abortion is a problem for sure, but it's a very small problem relative to the debt slavery that the unborn are being sold into.
So, Vatican, get on it, because you're all about economic growth and virtue.
And inflation slavery, of course, is where your time and your savings are just stolen from you through the deflation of the value of your currency.
But those are things to do with the state.
I mean, they're entirely based on the state.
You can't have intergenerational debt slavery without the state, and you can't have inflation without the state.
Because if you had a private company that had issued a currency and started to inflate it, people would just dump that currency and go to a currency that was tied to some real value.
And why would people even invest in a fiat currency to begin with?
Anyway, so... Or use it.
They want it to be backed. So you just can't have these things without the state.
So I think wage slavery is the wrong word.
Because wage is a free market term, right?
And, you know, monopoly inflation and government debt, these are all status terms.
So when you start to talk about slavery, you're immediately talking about the state.
Slavery was like traditional, rural, 18th century slavery.
Agricultural slavery was entirely enforced by the state.
It could never have sustained itself in a free market.
Once the state stopped catching slaves and bringing them back, slavery would have ended in a day or two.
So whenever you're talking about slavery, you're talking about the state and you can't bring terms like wage into it because that's all free market stuff.
Alright.
Oh, sorry.
I'm sorry.
Casey in his latest conversation essentially predicted the collapse of the dollar within two to three years.
It would be great if you discussed that with him.
It would be. And look, I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a history grad podcaster in Canada, so if you're going to take financial information, for heaven's sakes, go to caseyresearch.com infinitely longer before you come to freedominradio.com.
There's no question that the dollar, in its current form, with its current valuation, in the current trends, simply cannot last.
Simply can't even remotely last.
But... That the dollar is only going to collapse if the government does not turn on its dependent classes.
And the government will turn on its dependent classes.
I mean, they eviscerated the pensions of people who had worked for 30 years or 40 years for the Communist Party in Russia.
They just ripped those pensions right out and Dump them in the ocean.
The same thing is going to happen again.
I mean, it's going to be brutal, and it is going to be a lesson into exactly why we should never get into these situations to begin with.
I mean, the harder a drug is to stop, the less you really ever want to start it.
And statism is a drug that is catastrophic to quit, which is why we should just never start it.
But I think Doug may be underestimating the degree to which the government is simply going to turn on the dependent classes and...
We'll see. So, Steph, do you think the idea of exploitation is invalid?
Is it impossible to exploit people?
Can only the state do that?
Can that not happen in the markets?
Well, that's a great question.
It's such a great question, I fear we may be out of time.
Yeah, it's a great question. Exploitation, yes, of course exploitation can happen without the government.
I mean, exploitation to me is presenting the worst argument as the better and profiting thereby.
I mean, that to me is... I mean, there's lots of different ways you can define it, but, you know, to best serve my argument, we'll do it this way.
That, to me, is what exploitation is most fundamentally about.
So, for instance, I'm an atheist, and so when I look at religion, what I see is children who are told various things which have no scientific or physical or rational or philosophical proof, in fact, are quite denied explicitly by all these disciplines, Children are told things that are not true, and they are then asked to pay for salvation from imaginary illnesses called sin for the rest of their lives.
That's exploitive. Does that involve the state?
No. I don't think so.
I don't think that we'll get a free society while there's still a significant amount of religiosity around, because it just distorts people's thinking too much.
It harms their minds, in my opinion, too much.
So there's an exploitation.
There will be people who...
You know, promise young gigolos who promise the sun, the moon and the stars to elderly widow ladies in return for sexual favors and romance and I'll marry you and then take off with their money.
That's exploitive, of course.
And that's not state-based and so on.
Anyway, so I think exploitation can certainly happen without the state.
Economic exploitation can certainly happen without the state.
I think that... There's a philosophy which says if you're in a deal with someone, you grind them down as much as you humanly can to get the best possible value for yourself out of that deal.
If the other person has to sell a house really quickly because there's a death in the family or they got divorced, then you can use that to shave off You know, 20% of the value of what you're going to offer them and then blah, blah, blah.
There is that philosophy.
I don't think that's really great.
It's obviously not immoral, immoral, but I don't think it's really great.
There are people who are very insecure and as a boss, you can either, you know, grind down their insecurities, sorry, you can either sustain their insecurities by being mean to them, which means they're less likely to ask for raises, less likely to, you know, want to compete with you for your job and so on.
I think that's kind of exploitive.
And that doesn't involve the state.
I think that as a boss you should try and build up people's self-esteem to the point where they become more competent and better.
So yeah, I think there's lots of ways in which people can be exploited without the state.
And of course it's those areas of exploitation that we should really focus on.
You know, pursuant to my earlier comments about focusing on that which we can control rather than being drawn into abstractions about the Federal Reserve and things we can control.
We should really control, minimize the amount of exploitation that we commit, oppose the exploitation that we see, because exploitation destroys cattle to cattle trust in the tax farm, and we need to lean on each other a lot more if we're going to start to dismantle this hierarchy.
Since states originally emerged out of religiosity, could there be a chance that it is a government-less society, where religion is still rampant, that a new state could eventually emerge out of it?
The Enlightenment was very skeptical towards religion, and I would argue that the American experiment emerged out of the Enlightenment, and the majority of the Founding Fathers were not Christians in the way that we understand them today.
Benjamin Franklin never darkened the door of a church, to most people's knowledge.
There were lots of agnostics and deists, people who believe there's some God out there who doesn't really interfere.
So, it's not...
Philosophy, one of the basic philosophies, our philosophy, is it's not personal.
It's not personal.
I don't dislike religion.
I don't dislike the state.
It's not personal. It's not like I have an animosity towards the state or religion or other kinds of falsehoods.
It's just false. I mean, it's just false doctrines.
These are not supported by science or reason or philosophy.
Statism isn't.
Utilitarianism isn't. Marxism isn't.
Keynesianism isn't.
Statism isn't. Religiosity isn't.
They're just not supported.
And, you know, I invite people to come and debate me.
I'm happy to debate anytime, anybody, anywhere about these things because I want to be correct.
I don't oppose religion for any psychological reason.
I don't oppose religion because I don't like the smell of incense or because I want to be the guy in the funny hat.
It's nothing to do with that. It's just these things aren't true and it's not personal to anyone or anything.
And if I'm wrong, then people can correct me and then I will apologize and reform my ideas around that which is true.
But the reality is that these things are not true, so they have to be exposed as not true.
What do you got here? Trying to figure out a way to ask this.
Do you have much trouble getting past people's religious beliefs when trying to explain statism?
I realize there are many levels of beliefs here.
I grew up in the Bible Belt and was very religious at a young age.
It can be extremely difficult at times, even having experienced it myself.
Of course, yeah. I mean, look, I mean, I was born Into Christianity.
I was in the church choir.
I was in boarding school.
I went to church.
God, it felt like every day. I went to church all the time.
And, you know, I would go to church with my aunts and my uncles and my cousins.
Church, church, church. I mean, I get it.
I mean, one of my very first books was a picture Bible.
And I went to Sunday school. And so I understand that.
I really do. I mean, there's a lot of...
I wish that was nice. There's a lot of indoctrination that goes on.
It has to be a lot of it, because when things are just so not true, and absurdly not true, then there has to be a lot of indoctrination.
I mean, you don't need a lot of indoctrination as a kid to like chocolate, right?
Because it's innately like, you know?
I don't need to send my daughter to don't skin your knee school five times a week, because she doesn't want to skin her knee, because it's painful.
So it is very hard.
It's very hard to overcome. And so I sympathize and I agree.
It is a difficult thing to change.
But we have to pursue the truth.
For me, I'm like, I'm 100% or zero.
I don't do this 20% thing.
I don't 80%. I'm 100%.
I said to myself, if I'm going to go for the truth, I'm going to go for the damn truth.
And I'm not going to cut any corners, and I'm not going to skirt any issues, and I'm not going to, you know, sort of build my roads around particularly sacred forests.
I mean, I'm either going to go full conformity and not offend people and have all of the nice ease of swimming with the current socially and getting along with everyone by going along with the flow, or I'm going to go full till boogie the truth.
truth I wasn't going to go anywhere in between so I hope that helps a little bit Stefan off topic but what do you think justice is I actually have a podcast on justice called The Superhero of Philosophy.
You can check that out. Again, you can just do a search on my website and you can find that.
Hey, George, are we done?
We've got an hour here.
I don't want to blow over anyone else's time.
Oh, time's even up for a few minutes.
Okay, well, listen, I want to be respectful of everyone else's time.
I'm sorry I lost a little track here, but I appreciate that.
Go on as long as you like.
Oh, that is a dangerous, dangerous thing to say to me, my friend.
All right. I went to Sunday school once.
The priest told me that people of all other faiths were going to burn in hell for all eternity.
My father was Protestant and my mother was castling.
Yep, a priest told me one of my parents was going to burn.
I was eight. If that's not mental child abuse, I'll eat boots.
Yes. Yes.
Oh, we just had a power failure.
Okay, well, I guess we're done.
We just had a power failure, and so we're done.
This is Stefan Molyneux from the AgoraFest.
Thank you so much for listening and watching.
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