Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, talks with Adam.Kokesh on the left wing versus the right-wing paradigm in politics, and its relationship to family structures -- to understand politics, you really need to understand these facts! First interview in the AVTM 3.0 format. Please provide feedback to help improve on this first effort!
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| Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first interview with the new format of Adam vs. | |
| The Man 3.0. | |
| I'm very honored tonight to be joined by my good friend and host of Freedomain Radio at freedomainradio.com, a philosopher who has really done a lot to guide the freedom movement from Ontario, Canada. | |
| But here in the United States, he's had quite an impact as well as around the world with his philosophy podcast, one of the most popular in the world. | |
| Stefan, thank you so much for being with us tonight. | |
| Thanks, Adam. It's great to be back. | |
| Now, your video, the last video that I saw you put out, went into the model of the government as family. | |
| And it's kind of a metaphor and it's kind of a psychological explanation of people's attitudes Towards government, why we have liberalism, conservatism, but it really can be applied a lot of different ways. | |
| Why don't you start by explaining how people sort of transpose their vision for what a family should be onto their vision of what government is or should be or could be. | |
| That's a great point. | |
| And the way that I think that it works is first and foremost, when we grow up in a family, it's kind of socialistic, if not downright communistic. | |
| I mean, there's no trade as we would sort of understand in the free market within the family. | |
| You know, children are pretty helpless and dependent and the parents do everything for them and educate them and sort of keep them safe and secure and well fed and their parents have to provide food and health care. | |
| So it's a huge welfare state that goes on within the family and that's exactly how it should be. | |
| I mean, there's no other way that it could conceivably work given the helplessness of children. | |
| You don't want to try to break that down economically. | |
| You don't want to go and say, well, the children are providing something of economic benefit for the parents because they are giving them the comfort of knowledge that their genes will be carried on to the next generation, their legacy will live on, and because there's that voluntary exchange of things of value, | |
| it still technically can be analyzed as a free market in that sense, as long as you expand your ideas of what are goods and services to include all of these Sort of what we would have previously, in economic terms, referred to as intangibles. | |
| Yeah, I mean, until cuddles become currency, there's just no way that a family can run on a free market model. | |
| So we kind of grew up in this socialistic environment. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. But isn't it free market? | |
| If people are there voluntarily, if the children, if people are raising their children properly, by your definition, of peaceful parenting, and they're not initiating force against their children for any reason, They're not engaging in spanking or anything like that. | |
| And the children are staying there voluntarily. | |
| Isn't it still, even if you're not doing the accounting on a minute-to-minute basis, the fundamental exchange of I'm going to live with you, you are going to Do what you do as a child that makes me happy as a parent and I'm going to continue to support you and take care of you and feed you and clothe you and provide you with healthcare as a parent. | |
| Isn't that still technically a free market exchange or at least relationship? | |
| I wouldn't say so, no, because, I mean, for instance, I'm responsible for providing healthcare for my daughter. | |
| I'm not responsible, at least in a free market system, I'm not responsible for providing healthcare to you. | |
| You know, I have to take my daughter to the dentist or I'm a delinquent parent. | |
| That's not the case with my neighbor down the street. | |
| So, there is an obligation, given that children are involuntary prisoners of the household, and of course you hope to make the prison as happy as it can be so they don't ever want to leave, or at least not when they're young. | |
| But we have a responsibility to provide things for our kids, and I think if people don't grow out of that, if they're not encouraged to grow up and grow out of that, then it's very easy to look at society as a whole as a mirror of the family, with the government as mom and dad, and I would argue with sort of corporations or bosses as elder siblings who have significant influence but no direct kind of power in the way that parents do. | |
| And in the government model, sort of government as parent model, It's really interesting, and there's lots of studies around that seem to back this up, that if you have a sort of more maternally dominated family structure, then you're going to be more into socialism and communism. | |
| And if you have a more paternally, sort of traditional Old Testament grim dad kind of thing, then you tend to be leaning more towards the right. | |
| And it's one of the biggest predictors, it's the family structure, one of the biggest predictors of how your political beliefs Are going to play out. | |
| And I think it mirrors, as I talked about in the video, how this works in many religions, where you have a sort of God, the father, you have some sort of intermediary, whether it's Jesus or the devil, who has been created by God. | |
| This represents more of siblings. | |
| And these are analogous to sort of governments and corporations and other entities that are considered to be more parallel. | |
| Than the states themselves. | |
| And so when we go into society, unless we have a good deal of self-knowledge about how our family environment shaped our thinking and how we view the world, it's very easy to slip into things make sense to us because it mirrors what our experience in the family has been. | |
| And if we don't know how our own family experience has shaped our beliefs, then we really are susceptible to these kinds of ideologies, because they kind of fit like a key into a lock. | |
| They just click and fit into our historical experiences, and then it just makes sense. | |
| You know, like the argument says, well, we had a financial crisis because of deregulation. | |
| Well, that's a clear play into the family. | |
| You know, like, if I don't set limits for these kids, they're just going to run roughshod all over the house. | |
| They're going to drink pop until it runs out of their nose. | |
| They're going to eat sugar until their fingertips vibrate. | |
| And so I have to put limits and controls on these kids or they're going to run rampant. | |
| And so when people hear, well, deregulation caused these corporations slash siblings to go completely out of control and to drink themselves silly full of punch at the birthday party, it makes sense to people, even though the empirical evidence is completely the opposite, that there was 50,000 more regulations put in during the Bush period that led right up to the financial crash. | |
| But it makes sense because people haven't processed family stuff. | |
| And therefore, irrational political ideologies just kind of make sense to them, even though they're not rational. | |
| Oh, now you're edging towards what's going on right now with the Occupy Wall Street protests. | |
| And I want to come back to that, because that's kind of the public sentiment you seem to be touching on there. | |
| And you've been talking about that lately as well. | |
| And as much as I... Have demonstrated a certain disdain for the people there, as I know you have as well, because there's a certain amount of willful ignorance on display. | |
| I do want to come back to that because it's a fascinating phenomenon. | |
| It really is a national movement, and it's a very important conversation, but I want to get this philosophy down first before getting to apply it to that. | |
| I want to go back for a second to the model of the government as family or how we get our idea for government from family because this isn't a particularly new or novel idea. | |
| It's new to be able to apply it to current events and to be able to separate people from How they are using that in the current manifestation of statism by accepting this model that the government can somehow be a parent figure. | |
| But the first I heard of this was from George Lakoff, and he was the hyper-liberal Berkeley professor, totally fit the archetype of that, and he was looking at the list of conservative positions, typical conservative American mainstream positions, and was like, There's nothing unifying that brings these together. | |
| This doesn't make any sense. | |
| There's no central theme. | |
| There's no underlying principle. | |
| And then he said, but wait a second. | |
| And this was his epiphany. | |
| He said, I believe in the opposite of all of these things. | |
| Therefore, whatever I am saying about them as a coherent body of thought, as something... | |
| That's supposed to be philosophically, logically consistent must also apply to my body of thinking. | |
| And so he came up with, well, the conservatives must be that domineering, that offensive, authoritarian, fascist. | |
| That's why conservatives are the way they are, because they have that strict father upbringing in their family, and the way that he presents it is quite condemnable. | |
| But he then says... | |
| liberalism he doesn't say it's the mother he doesn't have the intellectual integrity to say well it must be the opposite or to even even consider that he says the liberal model must be based on the two-parent nurturing Family model. | |
| No reason that half of society got it wrong by leaving out the mother part. | |
| Did the other part leave out the father? | |
| Didn't ask that question, but it seems like there's a certain intellectual arrogance to say, well, my political system, my set of political beliefs is the two-parent nurturing positive model of the family. | |
| How would you respond to that? | |
| Well, look, the first thing I would say to this guy is, look, if you consider your opponent's position to be entirely irrational, but you hate everything that they believe in, then you must also be irrational. | |
| Because it's just a mirror image of the same thing. | |
| But he said, mine is better because it's not based on one parent, it's based on two. | |
| Yeah, that's no good because the whole point is to outgrow this kind of stuff and to grow into a mature, independent adult. | |
| Look, if you look at the left wing or the liberal position in the United States, what is it about? | |
| It's about taking care of people who don't have enough money or resources. | |
| It's about feeding the hungry. | |
| It's about providing health care. | |
| It's about providing shelter. | |
| It's about providing protection. | |
| These are all maternal things. | |
| This is what stay-at-home moms do with their kids. | |
| When they're hungry, they bring them food. | |
| They bring them to the doctor. | |
| When they're sick, they do all of these things. | |
| And it's also about, what is the liberal position? | |
| It's about taking care of the aged through Social Security. | |
| That's a traditional female role, to take care of the aged. | |
| And therefore, all of the things that you look in liberalism is really around what the traditional maternal role has been within the family. | |
| If you look on the right, if you look at the Republican position, It's a toughness and a strength towards external enemies. | |
| Well, that's your traditional warrior masculine role. | |
| It's tough on crime, and stand up for yourself, and no coddling, and no welfare, and all of this kind of stuff. | |
| It's about stand on your own two feet, and sometimes I think in an overly harsh way. | |
| But that's just traditional masculine stuff. | |
| And so, we kind of veer between the two of them. | |
| And whereas men want to give you more freedom to make your own mistakes, which is analogous to, I mean, my wife and I. It's a traditional thing that goes on in families that if my daughter wants to jump from the fourth step and she thinks she can, I'll be like, I'll cross my fingers and say, go for it, honey. Whereas my wife will be like, no, no, no, no, right? | |
| So, the Republican thing, and it's more free market that way, is, you know, you go out and stand on your own two feet. | |
| If you're knocked down, you get back up again. | |
| You learn through the school of hard knocks. | |
| Whereas women, for traditional feminine or matriarchal role, is like to be more the soft place to land, to be more careful, to be more cautious, to be more considerate, more egalitarian, to not show preference. | |
| In the masculine model, differences in ability are a good thing. | |
| You know, like if someone's really great at something, a really great sports hero or whatever, we give them the gold. | |
| Oftentimes, you'll mock the weakling, whereas moms tend to be much more egalitarian and everyone gets first prize and I love everybody's pictures and so on, which is the egalitarianism that shows up in socialism and communism and liberalism and so on. | |
| So to me, it's all very, very clear. | |
| And it's not an argument against any of these positions. | |
| It's just an argument for if you don't have the self-knowledge to know how your family influenced you, then you're just going to be susceptible to a lot of crazy stuff that you don't have filters on because it just, again, fits like a key into a lock in your own history. | |
| Or maybe to put it another way, succumb to the temptation of having government give you the comfort of creating an environment through the force of mass social organization through a violent system that sort of mimics in a disgusting way, recreates that family life that you grew up with, | |
| right? Yeah, and of course, if you look at what a lot of women have been interested in or on the left have been interested in, it's having the government replace traditional masculine roles to be a provider. | |
| Well, the government is now the provider for about 10 million American families headed by single moms. | |
| And, you know, the government has to be the provider. | |
| Now the government has to provide health care. | |
| The government has to provide housing. | |
| This is all stuff that the traditional male role was to do. | |
| It's sort of a vicious cycle. | |
| So as we ask the government to fulfill what men used to fulfill within the family, it provides some relief to single moms or to widowed. | |
| But what happens is it creates an environment where men become less important within the family, which means that they're less likely to stick around, which means that you're going to need even more resources from the government. | |
| So like 90% of welfare cases are single moms. | |
| The whole society is sort of centered around single moms in terms of the amount of criminals that come out of single parents' home, the amount of welfare and resources that they need, health care that they need, the fact that because they're a single parent, they can't care for aging parents as well as teenage kids, and therefore they need Social Security. | |
| It's really been driven a lot by what's happened to the family, by the state, and for the state. | |
| It's a really bad, vicious circle, and I'm not sure exactly how we're going to get out of it other than, you know, switch the lights on and let's see what's really going on. | |
| Okay, well, let's jump ahead for a second and connect this to current events because I do want to connect this to what's going on with Occupy Wall Street but in a much larger sense because Occupy Wall Street is now legitimately a national movement. | |
| It is something that I don't think is sustainable but has demonstrated that it has sustained itself for a decent period of time and I think by virtue of that represents a significant chunk of the sentiment of the American people. | |
| There are a lot of people who see it and support it and while most people aren't going to get in the street for something as Seemingly purposeless as as this or perhaps ideologically misguided there is something behind this and and the people who are in the occupations in DC and in New York throughout the country do represent a much broader sentiment, | |
| but they also represent in in this model that you describe An attitude towards the government and towards the great father figure that we have in the country today, Barack Obama. | |
| How do you think that attitude, because it's people turning to the government to create solutions to problems that were created by the government, going after Wall Street, so misguided. | |
| It's political Stockholm Syndrome to not go after the people that are actually holding the guns to everybody's head to keep the system in place. | |
| Right. Now, this fits into the sibling model, and the sibling model is very much underrepresented, I think, in the research and the way that people think about this stuff. | |
| Sibling relationships are enormously powerful and impactful on kids, and this is just the tip of the iceberg of all peer relationships, especially for those of us forced into the little narrow sandwich wedge of same-age school classrooms. | |
| But in the sibling model, if you have 50% or more of sibling relationships are classified as abusive through modern research, So if you have a sibling who's teasing you, beating you up, picking on you, annoying you, bugging you in really destructive ways, your temptation, of course, is to say, you know, mom, he's bugging me, he took my stuff, he hit me, he pushed me over, he punched me, or something like that. | |
| And so you have this belief that you can use the parent or appeal to the parent to save you from the sibling. | |
| But the reality is, of course, that the sibling is dysfunctional because the parents are dysfunctional, most likely. | |
| And people can't really see that within the family because it's a very painful thing to see. | |
| It causes you to kind of give up hope when you don't really have many options to go elsewhere within your family or from your family. | |
| And so this, to me, is the only way that I can understand how people can say corporations are a big problem And all people who've studied the matter in any rational detail know that corporations are created and sustained by the state. | |
| I mean, the legal protections are all created and enforced by the guns of the government. | |
| So when people say, well, corporations are a big, bad problem, big, bad corporations are greedy and nasty and blah, blah, blah. | |
| That they then appeal to the government. | |
| But it's the government who created these corporations. | |
| And in the same way, it comes from the family where if your sibling is being abusive, you appeal to the parent, but the parent isn't going to fix the problem. | |
| The parent's probably just going to make things worse by going and pounding on the sibling who's then going to turn and pound on you when the parent goes away. | |
| So that's the only way that I can understand how people still think that deregulation caused the problem and how people think that if you appeal to the government to save you from the very corporations that they've created, that you're going to end up with something better than what came before. | |
| It has to come from the family. | |
| Otherwise, people are just stone-turtle-brained retarded, and that's a scary thing to contemplate. | |
| So I'm giving them the out of this sort of family history thing in the hopes that they can still be reached through reason, and I think that is the case. | |
| Well, reason and therapy, perhaps. | |
| I mean, maybe it's not always that deep, because that's what's so interesting about this theory is that this model, and not just as a metaphor, but as a model for explaining the way that people think and approach government, it really Can show how normal experiences become manifest as things that are inappropriate much larger than we might be tempted to recognize as somehow psychosis or someone necessarily needing therapy. | |
| Most people don't look at the protesters And say, you need therapy. | |
| That's what's going to solve this. | |
| A boss, maybe. Maybe. | |
| I don't know. Some of them. All right. | |
| So let me bring this now to a note of activism and empowerment, because you're able to do incredible things with your podcast, with your online broadcast, being able to wake people up, to spread the message of freedom, a real message of liberty based on love for fellow human beings, respect for other people's rights, and You're able to stay almost completely outside of the matrix, very conveniently in that role. | |
| And you know, a lot of your supporters, myself included, like to step into the matrix every now and then and maybe reach into people's brains and go and wiggle our fingers around and do things that way instead of just standing outside and waiting for them to come to this message on their own, but getting in and throwing down and interacting and being a part of things. | |
| In that vein, I'd like to get your take on what an effort to impeach Obama at this point could mean for the country. | |
| Now let me pitch it to you first before I get your response because there are a couple benefits. | |
| Now a lot of people who are the real purist anarchist voluntarists might say, oh no, any interaction with the state is wrong. | |
| But first of all, In calling for something, can we be sure that the results of what we are calling for would be positive? | |
| And I'm almost 100% certain the results of impeaching Obama, if it happened, if it went through, would be positive. | |
| We might even stop him from going to war with Iran at this point. | |
| I mean, that in and of itself makes it a very exciting possibility. | |
| But even if that wasn't the case, There are two main things that could be accomplished by that, or I think that would serve the cause of liberty, is that it would lead to a lot of people questioning the validity of the authority of the president based on violations of the rule of law, of the Constitution. And in doing so, help people look back and see, yeah, every president... | |
| As long as we can remember, at least in our lifetimes, has violated the Constitution in grossly offensive ways, but also that if we succeed in this, what is really an appeal to government, perhaps asking Congressman Paul or Congressman Kucinich, | |
| To file articles of impeachment, if they were to be voted on and there were to be an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, we would be effectively turning a big branch of the government on the other branch. | |
| We would be turning elements of the government against themselves, thereby taking away their opportunities to take away the freedoms from the rest of us, and possibly taking away the possibility of Starting a war with Iran, I mean, saving millions of lives potentially. | |
| You know, I know you're not inclined to that, but what would you think of such an effort? | |
| Is it something that you would support in the sense that you would support getting the message out, getting people to consider that we should impeach Obama? | |
| I think there's a lot to be said for it, and I can feel sort of the earth tremble beneath my feet as I... What I really like about political action, Adam, is Either it works, I don't think it will, but either it works, in which case some advantage has occurred, or it doesn't work, in which case people give up on the state as an entity. | |
| So, for instance, let's say there's a huge movement to impeach Obama, and you could get him on so many different things. | |
| There's something for everybody of every ideology to jump on board for at this point. | |
| That's the thing, is you give people one unifying thing. | |
| It's not like, This nebulous occupation movement, it's one thing that I think really everybody's got a reason to get behind at this point. | |
| Yeah, I mean, even there was a 2005 law that said that government loans, government grants or loans to businesses could not have lower precedents if the business went bankrupt than anything else. | |
| And I think it was Solyndra was the company that went bankrupt recently that had lots of Obama appointees floating around it. | |
| And investors pulled out, like connected investors pulled out $75 million before anybody else got a chance to have a look at it. | |
| That's completely illegal. I mean, it's complete fraud. | |
| You try that in the private sector, you're going to jail for years. | |
| So, even something as minor as that, relative to all the other crimes, I mean, ordering hits on American citizens, I mean, this is just, it really is jaw-dropping. | |
| I mean, even, I am never too surprised when bad things happen, but when you hear people, you know, hear presidents or high-up officials ordering hits on America, I mean, it's just astounding. | |
| So, I think there is value in trying to think about this impeachment process, because Trying to find some constitutional limit to the imperial presidency is a very interesting exercise. | |
| If you can find some way to do it, Then I think, as you say, you've achieved some sort of short-term good. | |
| If all you've done is prevented a war with Iran, fantastic. | |
| I mean, think of what might have happened if Bill Clinton hadn't got swirled up in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. | |
| If he might have continued his interventions in Kosovo from the late 90s, it might have gotten even worse. | |
| So dragging these people into legal vortexes can paralyze them in other areas, which a paralyzed government official is It's always a good thing. | |
| And so, yeah, it's either going to work, in which case some limits have been at least temporarily imposed, or it's not going to work, in which case people can begin to go down the path that you and I are carving to look for other alternatives to statism as a whole. | |
| All right. Thank you very much for your time tonight. | |
| I really appreciate it, Stefan. My pleasure, and welcome back. |