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Dec. 11, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:22:43

2055 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show Dec 11 2011

A criticism of UPB, assaulting a younger sibling, and the gruesome results of a nomadic culture being attacked by an agricultural culture, what this does to property rights...

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
	Hope you're doing very well. It is the Sunday show, December the 11th, 2011.
	Ho ho ho ho!
	Bald, relatively clean-shaven Santa brings you Christmas thought goodies in his sleigh bells.
	So... Again, I like to pass along the good news, good stuff that this show garners with your help and support and participation.
	So this is something that a fine lady wrote to me, posted on the internet, said, Many, many thanks go to Stefan for helping me to convey the importance of nonviolent parenting to my husband.
	While I could talk all day about the benefits and implement them while I dealt with our seven-year-old son, he still had the, well, sometimes they just need to be spanked, etc., mentality.
	He never understood why our son would listen and respond well to me when I spoke calmly and rationally, but not when my husband tried.
	Consistency being the key, a child doesn't trust a sometimes rational adult.
	Since having him watch Stefan's videos, he saw the mirror image of himself in our son's reactions towards his father.
	And I am so very grateful that we are completely on the same page now, not only for my husband, but also for our son, who is the true beneficiary.
	And she also posted something just to clarify.
	She said, our kids are four and two.
	I stay at home and have been the main disciplinary parent.
	I have tried to explain to my husband that yelling and threatening don't work.
	He just gets annoyed with that way of thinking and has said that, we will try it your way until it stops working.
	Then I will have to get the belt.
	To which my response is to be completely resistant.
	He uses the, I was raised with the belt and I turned out fine excuse.
	I don't point it out to him, but he is a very irritable person by nature with a short fuse.
	I just say that I wasn't and also turned out fine.
	It's hard for me as a person who tries to constantly learn and move forward to even begin to accept that hitting your child is ever an answer.
	It is an easy outlet of frustration and not one of intelligent recognition of psychology and behavior.
	It is passed down from generation to generation and hopefully I will be here again telling you he has begun to see that there are other ways.
	Well, I think that is unbelievably and powerfully and movingly heroic.
	Heroism is something that is so misdiagnosed and so misportrayed in the culture.
	The cultural depiction of heroism is like Fake boobs.
	You know, they're big, they're tinny, they're gross.
	You might be able to rest a coffee cup on them, but you wouldn't want to let them near anyone who needs a drink at a very young age.
	And it's all distorted.
	It's made ridiculous.
	You have to have a cape and superpowers to do something heroic, or you have to be in a war to do something heroic.
	But that is not true. Heroism is available to all of us all the time in standing up for the protection and welfare of children.
	I have no doubt that this woman is testing the limits of a court of marital getting along together well, and I hugely admire that.
	And to the husband, I hope you don't mind me talking man-to-man if you consider someone with an accent like this vaguely manly, but, dude, taking a belt to a two-year-old and a four-year-old?
	That is not good. That is really not good.
	That is only going to teach them terror and obedience to fear.
	And they are going to look upon you as a man who can turn into a terrifying monster seemingly at random.
	And that is not the relationship that you want with your children going forward.
	And the exercise, of course, that I think helps people overcome this approach to discipline is, I mean, just imagine, you know, you get a memo at work, you get a memo at work, and that memo says, from now on,
	Anyone who is found to have made a mistake at work, to have sent a document out with a typo, to have gotten a bad review from any customer or client, or to have not received a very good mark on a performance evaluation, we have found a giant 60-foot robot that is going to come in and pin them down on its shaking knee And hit them hard with a massive piece of leather,
	thick leather with studs that is about a foot wide, and this will be on their vulnerable buttocks or legs or some other painful area.
	If you were to get a memo like this, you would think that this would be absolutely outrageous, legally actionable, a complete violation of any reasonable norms of employment.
	But this is how you will appear.
	To your son and to your daughter, when you come at them with a belt, remember, you are about ten times their size.
	You are about ten times their size.
	You would never imagine using your physical power to hit a woman who was half your size.
	You would never imagine using a physical power to hit a man who was half your size with glasses.
	That would be an admission of failure.
	When you have great strength, the lightest touch is evidence of the greatest maturity.
	I would say particularly with men.
	Men have greater strength, men have greater power, but it's the light touch of our great muscles that is the true heroism of a mature and masculine soul.
	So, you need to not think about hitting your children with a belt.
	You need to not think about hitting your children at all.
	And I know that you feel that you came out fine.
	But the fact, just look at this possibility, the fact that you're willing and Except as rational and healthy, hitting a defenseless, helpless, dependent child for a mistake.
	And there is nothing, and I say this as a stay-at-home dad to a three-year-old, highly active three-year-old, there is nothing that a child can do at that or any age that is anything other than a mistake at that time.
	Or if it is a resistance or a problem, the first place to look is the cause within your own parenting.
	We do not meet children as adults.
	We shape children.
	And remember, a good carpenter never blames his tools.
	A good potter does not blame the wheel or the clay, but rather the shaping of his own hands on that which he is attempting to build.
	And the first place that a parent needs to look when frustrated and angry is into the mirror, because we are the primary drivers of our child's development.
	And we are the hands that mold the clay.
	We are the gentle chisel that chips at the statue of adulthood we wish to create.
	And to use violence in that is simply going to split that which you are trying to grow.
	And it is going to cause, in my opinion, irreparable harm in your relationship with your children if they feel that if they can make mistakes you can come roaring down on them with massive whips of punishment against their tender flesh.
	And then how are they going to return to playing with you?
	I mean, imagine if some giant, Andre the giant stranger, decks you on a bus, or physically humiliates you, even just by pulling down your trousers or your pants and pinching your buttocks on a bus.
	Would you want to go for drinks with that person the next day?
	The simple reality, my friends, is that I want parents to have great relationships with their children.
	I really want parents to have great relationships with their children.
	And the move towards the extension of personhood to children is already underway and is utterly, completely, and totally unstoppable.
	The extension of full personhood Personhood with whipped cream and cherries on top.
	Extra personhood because of their weak and dependent and helpless states.
	Extra personhood is on its way to enveloping children and it's not going to take long.
	It is not going to take long.
	For it to be complete.
	This has already happened with blacks.
	This has already happened with other minorities.
	This has already happened with other religions.
	This has already happened with women.
	The natural extension of personhood to humanity, to aspects of humanity, to areas within humanity that have formerly been denied.
	It's already happened to slaves.
	There's no slavery anymore.
	Women are considered equal. Minorities are considered equal, and rightly so.
	This extension is unstoppable.
	It is irreversible. It is going to happen.
	And your children are going to grow up smarter than you.
	They're going to grow up smarter than me.
	My daughter is already far smarter than I was at her age, and there is no question that that is going to continue.
	They're going to grow up smarter with greater abilities for concepts, and therefore for memory, and therefore for empathy, and therefore for morality.
	And they're going to be aware Given the prevalence of information about spanking and other forms of corporal punishment on the internet, they're going to be aware that this was considered wrong by significant sections of the population.
	They're going to know from their own mother that she considered it wrong and tried to talk you out of it.
	So what I'm begging you, my friend, please, please do not roll the dice and hope that this movement is somehow going to reverse itself.
	That this is some sort of tidal work that is going to draw this truth back into the ocean depths to be lost forever.
	No, this is going to continue to extend and expand.
	It is irreversible. Do not take that chance.
	For the immediate satisfaction of inflicting a will-based power on your children out of frustration and anger, do not give yourself that cheap and base satisfaction at the expense of the long-term relationship that you can have with your children.
	Don't succumb to that devil.
	Don't give in to that temptation.
	Because your children will grow up wiser and better than you, as my children will grow up wiser and better than me.
	Don't have them when they grow up look upon you as a medieval brute who did not listen to reason.
	Don't let that happen to your relationship with your children.
	Sit down with them. Apologize to them.
	Make the commitment not to raise your voice, not to hit them, not to threaten them, not to punish them, but rather to encourage them and to enroll them in the success called cooperation and listening.
	Nobody can listen to that which is shouted.
	Nobody can learn from that which is struck.
	And nobody can grow in the acid rain of overhanging power.
	Do not teach your children to succumb to power alone or they will remain effective slaves long after they leave your shadow because there will be lots of people in the world who will want to frighten them and bully them and beat down on them.
	Do not teach them that language.
	Do not teach them submission to power because we need strong souls to fight the encroaching storms of power in the world.
	Don't break them before sending them out to others who will be happy to keep breaking them, but have them grow up strong and whole and proud and in love and worshipping you and adoring you as a shelter from the storm, not as the random lightning that splits them in two.
	And not only will your children love you for that, But the future and the free people that upstanding, unbroken souls will create will thank you and your children as well.
	So I hope that you will listen to this, and thank you so much for listening to this.
	And now let's move on to the Sunday show.
	I will talk to you soon. All right, we've got Astel's Acola.
	Go for it, Guy. Hi, Stefan.
	Hi. Hi, so I'm studying UPB right now and I have a few questions, is that okay?
	Please, love to talk about UPB. Okay, so actually I read it almost to full with notes and I'm working from notes because I just started yesterday.
	But I have a lot of problems with universability.
	I don't think you argued it, and also with the foundations.
	But let's start with...
	I understand you're claiming that a norm which, if applied, means someone has to resist it.
	Then that is a contradiction.
	Am I correct?
	I'm not sure. If someone says you ought to do that and that, and say rape or say murder, because such an action requires the victim to resist,
	then he needs to resist something that is true, that is virtuous, Sorry, this is the argument for two men in a room, and if you say murder is universally preferable behavior, then it cannot be universally preferable for both men at the same time, and therefore you have a contradiction.
	It's like saying it's universally true that everything you let go of falls to the ground, but then you let go of a helium balloon and it falls upwards, then your theory is not correct.
	So yeah, if contradictions are required for a statement of universality, if it cannot be universal, Yeah, that's the way it would go.
	Okay, so what I think is that there is here a confusion between norms in general.
	When I say norms, I mean, you know, ought, you ought to, and the term right, which are specific norms.
	What I mean is that from the fact one should do x, does not follow, he should not prohibit another from doing x.
	What I mean, when we are talking about normative propositions, you are to do death and death.
	We are judging actions, we are not judging results.
	You understand what I'm saying? I understand what you're saying, but are we at least on the same page that if I claim that something is universally preferable, Then it has to be universally preferable.
	It can't simultaneously be universally preferable and universally not preferable.
	Or the opposite of preferable, i.e.
	resisted. Okay.
	So, morality say, I think it's moral for everyone to go to the moon.
	When we are judging actions, what you should do, an act...
	I'm sorry, that would not be a statement of universally preferable behavior.
	Because there would be no reason To be specific to the moon, right?
	Yeah, yeah. I'm just saying that as an example.
	Let's just say we adopt that as a morality.
	As long as everybody acts with the goal of arriving to the moon, they are acting morally.
	No, no, sorry. But that's not a moral statement.
	So we can't say, let's pretend it's a moral statement, right?
	That's like saying, let's pretend mathematically that two and two make five.
	It's like, well, two and two make five is not mathematically correct, so there's no point even starting with that.
	So if you say everyone should go to the moon, that's not a moral statement.
	And therefore, it's not contained within UPP. And UPP would reject that as a moral statement because it's not universal.
	I don't understand. It's not a valid one.
	It's not one that is binding, but it's a normative proposition.
	You agree? Yeah, sure.
	You can't say it's moral that everyone should go to the moon.
	No, I'm not claiming that it's actually moral.
	I want to examine, say two people adopt the religion that going to the moon is what they should do.
	Okay? As long as they act with the intent of getting to the moon, they are acting morally.
	They are in conformity with the moral proposition.
	No, because it's not a moral proposition.
	No, if you go to Wikipedia, you'll see that that's a normative proposition.
	Well, sure, but I can also say that creationism is science, but it's not.
	Lots of people will make claims towards morality, Some people will say that it's moral to circumcise an infant boy.
	Other people will say that it's moral to rip off the clitoris of a young female.
	And they will be wrong.
	I'm not saying that it's a binding normative proposition.
	I'm just saying that that's a normative proposition.
	And some actions are in conformity with that and some actions are not.
	Okay. Okay, so actions that are in conformity with this normative proposition are actions that are goal-oriented, their goal.
	The goal of the action is to arrive at the moon.
	That's a moral action.
	That's a proper action.
	I'm sorry, I really feel that we're going in circles here because you keep calling it a moral action and I'm saying what it's not.
	Okay, can you give me an example of a normative proposition, a moral proposition, which you think is wrong?
	It's not a moral proposition, but let's just say it.
	Sure. Theft is universally preferable behavior.
	Okay, so not to involve no property rights, so let's say murder is universally preferable?
	Let's go with rape. It's usually a little easier.
	Rape is universally preferable behavior.
	Great. So, when we are talking, you should rate, right?
	You should force someone to do X. When we are judging actions, an action whose goal is to force someone to do X is proper.
	No, no, no. Sorry to interrupt, but in UPP I'm very, very clear that UPP cannot judge actions.
	UPP can only judge theories.
	Okay, let's examine someone proposed the normative proposition.
	Everyone should always rape.
	Everyone should always rape.
	Yeah, okay.
	Yeah, everyone should always rape.
	Okay.
	What he is saying is that the goal of the actions that people act should be raping.
	Thank you.
	Up to now, I'm okay?
	Because an action is the use of means towards an end.
	So what he's saying, the end should be raping.
	So when we are judging an act to be moral or not moral, we're asking what the goal of the action.
	If the goal of the action is to rape, then it is proper.
	It is a moral action.
	Okay? Well, I would...
	Sorry, an action can't be specifically moral.
	Insofar as an experiment is not specifically scientific or not, right?
	Because you can have some experiments that are not scientific, right?
	I mean, you could experiment. I mean, look at all the alchemy experiments of the Middle Ages or...
	Let me finish, let me finish, let me finish, let me finish, let me finish.
	Or you could do a sort of verbal call of your friends about the validity of astrology and so on.
	So you could do experiments that would not be scientific and you can have actions That are moral or not moral.
	But if your action called performing an experiment is in accordance with the scientific method, then it is a scientific experiment.
	Now, if your action is in accordance with a moral theory, then you could call that action in accordance with a moral theory in the same way you call an experiment that is scientific in accordance with the scientific method.
	But the actions themselves are neither moral nor immoral, but the actions may be in conformity with the moral theory, if that makes any sense.
	Okay, that does make sense.
	The actions are in conformity with the moral theory.
	Now, when you argue against those theories and say that they are internally contradictory, you do it by examining them.
	And show they come to a contradiction.
	So that's what I want to do with you, because I think there's a problem there.
	So let's adopt the moral theory, the norm, which you say is internally contradictory.
	Everybody should murder.
	Okay? No, sorry.
	Everybody should always rape.
	Okay. More technically, rape is universally preferable behavior.
	Yes, but Okay, in the terms of the theory, everybody should, ought to rape.
	All the time.
	Now, if every action that is goal-oriented towards raping by that theory is inconformity, is moral by that theory, is proper by that...
	So, now, I come to say that from the fact One should do X does not follow that it should not prohibit another man from doing X. That's a conflation of the term, right? No, it really does.
	It really does. And you just need to think of the two men in the room, right?
	So, if the theory is everyone should always rape, then clearly the two men should rape each other at the same time, right?
	And clearly, right after they've raped...
	Let me finish.
	Let me finish. Because everyone should always rape.
	So anybody who's not currently raping someone is not performing a moral action.
	Now, of course, there are times when people can't rape.
	No, that's not true. Because if you wish to go to the moon, you have to first build a spaceship.
	Your actions need to be goal-oriented.
	Towards the moon, it doesn't mean you are actually flying to the moon at every instant.
	No, no, no, sorry, but the proposition is, sorry to interrupt, but the proposition, everybody should always rape.
	Right? So there's no goal-oriented stuff here.
	I mean, it's universally preferable behavior.
	So there's not a distinction between preparing to rape and rape.
	Everybody Everybody must always rape, or everybody should always rape, does not allow for preparation.
	But a baby, when it is born, it is not rape.
	I think it's an absurd way to look at it.
	When we are looking at the norm, we are saying you ought to do X. That means the goal of your action is X. I'm not saying something that is not everyone in philosophy will say.
	But what you're doing is you're saying that something is universally preferred, but at the same time, not doing it is valid if you're preparing to do it.
	Is that correct? Every action you should take should do it in order to rape.
	It doesn't mean you're at any moment raping, because maybe you should take previous steps.
	You can derive norms from norms.
	If I want to rape, then I fresh mask by a knife.
	You've broken universality, because then you're saying there are two steps.
	There's the action and then the preparation.
	But that's no longer universal.
	Why? Because the action is not the same, because the planning is not the same as the execution.
	I'm sorry? If you want to rape someone, you need to first grab him.
	That's not raping.
	No, I understand. So that means that there's two sections now, right?
	So then there's planning and execution.
	And those two things are not the same.
	And therefore, since there's a category called planning and a category called execution, then it's no longer universal because you've broken into it that it's okay or moral to not rape, if you're planning to rape, and then it's moral to rape.
	But that's broken the universality into planning and execution.
	That's a part of the rape. An action is, when we're judging an action, we are judging it by the goal.
	It's the use of means towards an end.
	And while the end is raping, the action is rape.
	If I now take a sword and I pull it out, and then I kill you, when I pull the sword, it was to murder you also.
	The goals of my action are in conformity with the I should kill you.
	Yeah, but I mean, obviously, the planning is not Identical to the execution because it's necessary but not sufficient, right?
	So you might be planning to rape someone and then you just might not be able to get an erection, right?
	And then you're not going to rape them.
	It would just be assault or something else.
	So the planning is not sufficient for, it's not equivalent to the execution.
	But let's drop that because I think we're not making much progress there.
	And let's move on to the other way of looking at it, which is to say that two men in the room, let's say one of them has planned and is actually raping the other.
	Yes. But if rape is universally preferable, then the other man must also want to be raped, right?
	No. Let's say the norm is everybody choose rape.
	Right. And therefore rape is a universal value and therefore it should be wanted or encouraged by the other man.
	No. We're saying that everybody's goal should be to rape.
	It doesn't mean That if someone else wants to rape you, you need to allow him.
	That's the confusion between rights and norms in general.
	You're assuming a specific kind of norms that are rights, which means you also have the right to prohibit someone else.
	You have the right to control and to prohibit.
	That's a right. That's not a norm in general.
	I'm not sure where rights come in.
	I'm certainly not a fan of rights myself.
	Okay, so if you are saying that everybody should rape, it does not follow that I need to help other people rape.
	It means that I should rape.
	It doesn't mean I should help someone else rape.
	But it's a universal value.
	Everyone means, which means the other guy in the room should do it to you.
	It's everyone should. Yes, everyone should.
	Goal should be to rape.
	It does not follow I need to help him rape.
	No, because it's a universal value.
	Everyone should rape, which means the guy in the room should rape.
	And therefore, if it's a value for you that everyone should rape, of course you should help the other guy rape, because everyone, including the guy you're in the room with, should rape.
	I mean, I can't make it any clearer than that.
	If everybody needs to play tacky, it means I should help other people play tacky?
	I'm sorry, you play what? I need to play tacky.
	Well, everybody. Let's imagine someone who is an egoist.
	Let's examine an egoist normative proposition.
	Someone says everybody should only take care of themselves, regardless of other people.
	Okay? So that, by definition, I don't need to care about other people once.
	If I want to murder him and he wants to murder me because that's our desire, there's no contradiction implied because our norm says...
	No, no, no, no. But that's a statement of personal preference.
	The egoistic statement you made does not conform to UPB. Okay.
	Where is the contradiction?
	Well, the contradiction is to say that everyone should act in a way that pleases them.
	So if I want to go kill someone, clearly they don't want to be killed.
	And therefore it can't be sustained because I want to kill them.
	They don't want to be killed. And therefore if I impose my will, I'm saying that only I should act on that which is preferable.
	In other words, I've taken out the universality of it and denied the other person the right, for want of a better word, to that which I claim is universal.
	And so it's broken the universality of it.
	Then it's become a I like ice cream rather than ice cream is made of dairy products.
	It's gone from a universal objective Truth or statement to a subjective personal preference, which means it's no longer in the category of morality, but rather in aesthetics or something like that.
	Well, the fact your norm, by definition, I think what the problem is, is that we are not clearly defining the meaning of the norms.
	So an action is the use of means towards an end, and your body is also a mean, and a gun can also be a mean, etc.
	When you are specifying a norm, everybody should do whatever they want, should eat as much ice cream they want, or should rape, you are specifying the goal of the action.
	Every action that conforms, that is The goal of the action, the use of means is towards the goal specified is ethical, is in conformity with this norm.
	When you say everybody should take care of themselves, as long as their actions conform to that norm, even if that means that someone else is hurt or someone else, there's a conflict involved and everybody acts In their own interests, they both act normally by that norm.
	It's by the definition. That's where the confusion comes, because you are assuming that if a norm is universally applied to every man, that means that every man must also respect Resolve conflict in an equal fashion, if you understand what I mean.
	I'm sorry I don't, and I'm going to have to move on just because I feel like we're kind of going round in circles.
	Let me mull over what it is that you're saying.
	Maybe there's something obvious that I'm missing, but I'm going to move on to the next caller or to questions within the chat room just because I feel like we're repeating ourselves.
	It doesn't mean that you're wrong.
	It certainly doesn't mean that I'm wrong, but let me finish.
	Yeah, let me just finish.
	Let me mull it over and see if I'll listen to this again.
	But I'm not feeling that we're making much progress.
	And I'm just looking in the chat room that people would like to move on to a new topic.
	So I must listen to the – I am a slave to the majority.
	But thank you so much for calling in.
	I always really appreciate the feedback on ethics.
	And you may really have – Something of value here that I'm just not able to see at the moment.
	But let me listen to this again when I sort of compile the podcast and see if I can figure out what you're saying.
	It's not anything to do with you.
	I mean, I think you're being quite clear, but maybe there's just something I'm not able to put together at the moment.
	But let me just mull it over and maybe you can call in next week if there's something I haven't understood.
	Okay, Stefan. Thank you.
	Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
	I appreciate that. All right.
	Stop raping the ice cream on the moon.
	I think that really should be the motto of Freedom Aid Radio.
	That should make everything clear.
	All right. Do we have a question in the chat room?
	Sorry if I missed some, but I'm just scrolling up.
	We've actually gotten several people on the call.
	Next is Steven. Steven Reno.
	I am all ears. Like an elephant.
	But with no trunk. Hello?
	Hello? I kind of sprung it out.
	There he is. You did.
	Hey, how are you guys doing?
	Hi. Hey there.
	I'm great. How are you doing? I'm very well.
	Thanks for taking the call. Wow.
	Where are we? Yes.
	The question I have, Steph, is that I've been trying to do some child abuse intervention on the mean streets of New York City.
	Uh-oh.
	Somebody's ringing here.
	And all I have is some stuff from preventchildabuse.org.
	And I'm wondering if you have any suggestions as to what you would like to see, or if anybody else has any suggestions, like what I could maybe create like what I could maybe create some business cards for parents to hand out to them
	other than this stuff that's published by the state.
	Maybe I'm not being clear, but...
	Because PreventChildAbuseNewYork.org, it's like, I don't know.
	I hand it out to these people when they're either going to swing at their kid or they're beating their kid.
	Or if I just see them walking down the street, I'm like, hey, here's some information.
	I make up this story that there's a friend of mine who has kids and they find that the tools here are really helpful as a preventative measure.
	Maybe you'll find it helpful too.
	Generally, the response is positive, but I feel like I'd really rather be promoting FDR than the states.
	I don't see this contradiction myself.
	If you are helping people to avoid abusing their kids, I think that's promoting philosophy.
	I mean, both in terms of reasoning with the parents and also creating, hopefully, environments in which the children can reason without fear.
	So, again, I wouldn't sort of think about promoting philosophy rather than FDR, if that makes any sense, because I am the worst marketer in the world.
	I want no brand awareness for myself, and I want no brand awareness for Free Domain Radio.
	I only want brand awareness for philosophy.
	So, whatever you're doing to help people be rational, particularly when they're in situations of power or positions of power like parents are, I mean, you're helping them be rational, helping the kids grow in a much less fearful environment, which allows them to be rational.
	That's promoting not just philosophy, which we'd like to promote philosophy right now.
	But the reality is that human beings are almost very few of us are ready for philosophy because most people are too traumatized to be able to think clearly.
	Again, you know, 90% of parents hitting their kids and so on.
	Terrible public schools, you know, a completely false and sophistical media and, you know, religiosity still rampant and so on.
	So we're creating, you know, we're not able to plant the seeds yet.
	We're not able to harvest. We're not able to cook.
	We ain't able to eat the tasty, warm, gooey bread called philosophical wisdom.
	What we're doing right now is we're just trying to hack Some of the ice off the earth so that we can think about plowing it in order to plant.
	So, I mean, I think that's sort of where we are in the growth of philosophy.
	So, whatever you can do to create fertile ground for the seeds of wisdom to fall on, I think is magnificent and wonderful.
	I don't think that has anything to do with freedom in radio.
	Obviously, I think it's a great resource.
	I mean, otherwise I'd go work for some other resource.
	But I hope that makes sense.
	That, I think, is the goal.
	And so, look, if there's great information On a government-sponsored website about child abuse, fantastic.
	I mean, I think that's great.
	I mean, the technical facts are technical facts regardless of their source, right?
	I mean, the old argument that when Hitler says two and two makes four, that doesn't invalidate mathematics, right?
	And so I would think about that as, you know, it's the old thing.
	I don't know what her politics are, but she still cleans my teeth very well.
	So if that makes any sense, it doesn't really matter.
	Right, right. And I'm wondering why I'm getting hung up on that.
	Maybe it doesn't matter.
	Maybe it's a moot point. Well, no, it matters that you're hung up on it.
	I mean, that matters.
	And also, it matters that you're using the phrase hung up, which is a bit derogatory towards yourself.
	Right, right.
	Right? So, is it because, I mean, oh, maybe it's this.
	Tell me if this rings a bell.
	Are you seduced by the thigh-high boots of the one fell swoop philosophical maiden?
	You know, the one fell swoop.
	We are going to change the world in one fell swoop.
	In other words, I can't send someone to compromise material because otherwise I won't be able to change the world as quickly as I want because they may End up more pro-statist even if they stop hitting their kids.
	I wouldn't disagree with that.
	That is a very lukewarm positive.
	Let me check with my pocket lawyer who appears to be having no comment but is leaning towards the acceptance of the possible truth of your unverifiable statement in a way that I can't quite confirm.
	I think I was thrown by the boot metaphor.
	That might be just something else.
	Being hung up on that idea of...
	In a perfect world, I'd be handing these monsters who are beating their kids on the subway or screaming at them or pulling the kids' arm out of their socket for whatever reason...
	I'd be handing them some information that's not statist-sponsored, that's promoting FDR, and the child is saved from any further abuse.
	That's the ideal that's in my head.
	Well, and look, I mean, the place to test that, and look, I appreciate that, and don't get me wrong, I am entirely in the arms of that grim seductress called One Fell Swoop, That bewitching witchy goddess.
	Because that's what we want.
	But, I mean, I'm always about the empirical verification.
	And start local. You know, think globally, act locally.
	So, the place to test out the one fell swoop theory is in your closest relationships, right?
	Because that's where you have the longest history, the most love, the most bonds, the most...
	Intimacy, and you should be treated with the most respect.
	And also, in your personal relationships, you have the capacity for the, you know, multiple, multifarious conversations that are always part of the one fell swoop.
	Like, you don't say to someone, taxation is forced, and then they go, oh my goodness, so we saved the world by helping children live peaceful lives when they're young?
	I mean, they're not going to make that.
	I certainly didn't. I don't think anyone makes that leap right away.
	Maybe some people do, but they're certainly smarter than I am.
	But in your personal relationships, it should be, if one fell swoop is possible, it should be in your personal relationships where you're able to affect that most.
	Now if you're not able to affect one fell swoop in your personal relationships, having that as a standard even unconsciously for people you meet on the street, who you are approaching during a time of psychological distress and upset if they're not being nice to their kids, Clearly, if you can't achieve the one fell swoop in your personal relationships, then you can't achieve it with strangers.
	I think that would be a fair thing to say.
	And to go one step further, if you could not achieve the one fell swoop in your own heart and mind, then again, expecting it from others and from strangers would be, I think, unrealistic.
	And what it would be is to set you up for frustration.
	Remember, remember, remember, the great trap that the world sets to those who want to change it is frustration.
	And the way that the world sets that trap is by luring you into the arena of social change and then inflicting and infecting you with unrealistic expectations.
	Right. And then you will become frustrated and you will withdraw from the arena and the world will sail on merrily over the cliff undisturbed in its course.
	It is one of the fundamental, right?
	And it's the way the body works, right?
	Right. Your viruses get into a fight and exhaust the cold, sorry, your antibodies get into a fight and exhaust the cold cells and munch them up, right?
	So the defense of society is to inflict unrealistic expectations on the part of those who want to change society to the point where they get frustrated and they either then stop trying to change society or they're trying to change society while appearing frustrated, unhappy, irritable and enraged which means that people can judge them by their demeanor and reject their arguments out of hand, right?
	Absolutely. And that speaks...
	Sorry, I know that was a big tangent, but I hope it makes some sense.
	No, not at all. No, it was not a tangent at all.
	It was actually right on the money.
	That actually speaks to a lot of what I've been feeling since I've been taking up interventions, I guess, for lack of a better word.
	Sorry, the reason I wanted to sort of reinforce your experience, I think, in that it's not accidental that we expect people to listen to reason because everyone says that they listen to reason.
	Right? Everyone says that they base their decisions, particularly their moral decisions, on reason and evidence, right?
	I mean, people who yell at their kids People who believe and will make the case or who hit their kids genuinely believe, I hope and I've heard, I have no reason to disbelieve, they genuinely believe that it's the best way to do it.
	People who rely on the state genuinely believe or who support the state that that is the best way to do it.
	People who are religious believe that religion is true.
	They don't say, well, it's just something I was told or It's just something that I believe for no reason.
	They say that there's all of these reasons.
	So people constantly use the ex post facto reason and evidence argument as to why they believe what they believe.
	And then what happens is you give them better reason and evidence and you disprove their existing reason and evidence and it doesn't change.
	If an icicle is dripping away from a bucket and then you sort of move that icicle over to the bucket then the water should drip into the bucket.
	Sure. And everyone says, well, the water pool of my beliefs is just the drip of reason and evidence.
	But when you move that, it should change.
	But it doesn't, right? And that's something to accept and to understand about the world.
	Right. People don't use reason and evidence...
	People do not derive their beliefs from reason and evidence.
	They have their beliefs which are inflicted upon them without reason and evidence but rather through aggression and then in order to overcome the humiliation of having been pounded into ridiculous positions like religiosity and culture and nationalism and statism and all of that, in order to avoid the humiliation of having had irrational beliefs aggressively pounded into them under threat, people say Okay, there's reason and evidence, and therefore it wasn't humiliating.
	It was just an acceptance of the truth.
	And then when you bring reason and evidence, you expose that earlier wound, which is why people shy away and avoid.
	I don't know if this makes any sense, but I hope that helps a bit.
	No, I'm following. It's clear.
	I appreciate it. I think part of what might be...
	I think there's an aspect of guilt for me, a feeling of guilt, that...
	Like, when I'm watching this stuff going down, you know, these kids getting beaten.
	You know, there's guilt.
	There's... I just got an echo here.
	Sorry. It's...
	Guilt. But guilt about what?
	Like, that you can't do more?
	Guilt that I can't do more?
	Yes, definitely.
	Guilt that...
	Guilt about...
	Having participated in beating up my little brother when I was a kid.
	Guilt about, you know, mistakes in the past that I've made.
	And I think it's kind of morphed into some kind of unrealistic, like trying to absolve myself of, you know, Things I've done in the past.
	Things that were not great, but given the circumstances I was in at the time, I really had no choice, and I was a minor.
	Sorry, you mean to hit your brother?
	Yeah, beating up my brother and stuff.
	really and why did you beat up your brother I was it seemed to be it was what was being done to me so I did it to him Why is that an inevitable?
	I'm not trying to criticize you.
	I'm just trying to understand your reasoning as a kid, right?
	I didn't do it all the time. I don't think that's the case.
	No, but I don't think that's the case for all children, right?
	Right, right. I mean, I was, again, not to sort of, I mean, but I was not, yeah, I didn't end up hitting other kids, and I was sort of beaten down, although I didn't have a younger brother, so that may have been one of the causal factors, but I mean, there were other smaller kids on the playground and stuff like that.
	So, again, I don't claim any moral superiority because I was just a kid, but that didn't occur for me.
	And I'm just wondering if you feel that it was an absolute that it occurs for you.
	In other words, all children who are aggressed against will in turn aggress younger children?
	The conditions at home...
	My father was a medal-winning boxer in Ireland as a young man.
	And that's how all conflicts were resolved with regard to me.
	You mean he would hit you? Yeah.
	I'm so sorry. Oh, thanks.
	Yeah, well, I mean, you know, he's still alive.
	It's amazing about boxes, you know, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but the thought that just popped into my mind, I'm sure you know more about boxing than I do, but what I do know about boxing...
	Is that there are, you know, featherweights and welterweights and bantamweights and all that, right?
	So there are people who are very strictly categorized by size, right?
	Yeah. And you are absolutely not allowed to have a fight with someone that you are larger than by even 10 or 15%, right?
	Right. Even in boxing, there are rules against that.
	Isn't that sad? It's really sad.
	It's pathetic. But of course, if you're 10 times the size and...
	The other, quote, boxer can't leave and is dependent upon you as a child, then go to town, right?
	Definitely. I mean, that's the strange thing about boxing, is you're very much told to never hit smaller people.
	But that doesn't seem to translate to the home life, and I'm so sorry about that.
	I appreciate that.
	But it's, you know, it was a strange setup.
	As the older of two boys, I was expected to watch my younger brother.
	I was given these You know, responsibilities that were not mine.
	They shouldn't have been mine.
	At least I don't feel they should have been.
	Sure. You know, but I mean...
	But I mean, obviously that wasn't your brother's fault, right?
	Definitely not. Definitely not.
	Right. But the reasoning and the logic was if something were to go wrong, if he was doing something that would have gotten him hurt Or, you know, if he... Or if he'd broken something, it would be you, right?
	It would be on me. Right.
	It would be on me. And it would fall on me.
	So I'm like, well, I'm not getting my ass kicked.
	You know, because he wasn't getting his ass kicked.
	The abuse was primarily focused on me as far as I know.
	And how old were you when you were put in charge of your brother?
	Um... That's a tough question.
	I can't really specifically say.
	I think it was just kind of a process, like a slow process, but the earliest recollection would be maybe five, six.
	I remember actually running into the house to tell my mother that my brother was shoving mud into his mouth.
	I think he was three or four.
	Right. So, yeah, I was pretty young when I was given the task of making sure that, I guess, he behaves.
	I mean, how does a five-year-old make those types of judgments?
	I don't know.
	But, yeah, there's a lot of...
	It was a very unfair situation.
	And the dynamic...
	In the family, I did a lot of work in therapy, opening up the birth order and everything.
	Essentially, my father was the youngest in his family, and then at seven years old, there was another child brought into his family, and he was kicked out of the baby position of the family,
	of seven. So I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but I think when my father married my mother and I showed up when I was born, I think I became his baby brother.
	So when you were born, your father may have viewed you as his baby brother?
	In terms of usurping his family position.
	So like my father married my mother.
	And he was like, well, he was probably marrying his mother.
	Right. But again, sorry, again, this is to say that birth order somehow determines how kids are treated.
	But it doesn't.
	I mean, I've seen siblings, I mean, be incredibly...
	concerned and tender and caring and helpful towards their younger siblings or their babies.
	I've seen siblings who don't hit each other.
	The birth order does not trump virtue or choice.
	It doesn't program us, right?
	In other words, if your father saw you as a younger sibling and he'd been raised in a peaceful, positive and And happy environment, then that would have granted him extra tenderness towards you, not extra aggression.
	Do you see what I mean? Right.
	Well, he wasn't. He was traumatized.
	No, I get that he wasn't.
	Yeah, he was. But it's not the birth order at all that determines that.
	Oh, I'm not necessarily suggesting that birth order is...
	Always going to be a necessary and sufficient condition.
	But, I mean, the way that I would phrase it, and please understand, there's nothing that I can do to phrase anything in your family that trumps your thoughts and experience, right?
	But this is the way that I would phrase it, is that, yeah, it may have been true that I was a trigger for my father's rage or anger.
	But this was as a result of the fact that he did not deal with his own childhood issues, that he did not process, that he had been harmed by his parents.
	And as a result of him not processing that, he ended up acting out against me, which he's fully responsible for.
	Right.
	So the birth may have been some sort of trigger, but the trigger is only there because the person has not processed what has occurred.
	Now, not processed is a pretty neutral phrase, right?
	But did you ever get in trouble for hitting your brother?
	Oh yeah, yeah. Right, so hitting children was wrong.
	And this is the part that is so hard for people to grasp.
	And I'm not saying it's hard for you.
	I'm just getting this back from, you know, I put out a couple of videos recently that people took some quite umbrage at.
	I'm sort of trying to process why, and I think it's because if somebody is consistent but wrong, and even morally wrong but consistent, then I think that forgiveness is, in time, at least a reasonable response.
	But if someone is not consistent but is rather hypocritical, Then I think that forgiveness becomes much harder.
	Right? So if your dad was like, well, I use violence to solve problems.
	And so if I get pulled over by a cop, I'm going to deck the cop.
	And if my boss bugs me at work, I'm going to clock him one.
	And if the priest says something I don't like, I'm going to march right up there and deck him on the altar.
	Because violence is a great way to solve problems, right?
	Right. But, I mean, how often is that really the case?
	Aren't the people who bully children usually the most obsequious and deferential when it comes to authority?
	Right. And so you say, well, violence was how my father dealt with stuff.
	Now, you did say within the family, but that's important.
	That means it wasn't a universal premise.
	It wasn't a universal moral rule.
	And what that means is that your father knew very well that violence was a really bad way to solve problems because when he got pulled over in a car by a policeman, he didn't punch the cop, right?
	Right. And so he was perfectly capable of restraining his temper and he was perfectly aware that violence is a really terrible way to solve problems in almost every area of life except parenting.
	But why would that be the exception?
	Are you putting a question to me?
	Well, I mean, I think it's a pretty obvious question and an obvious answer.
	Yeah, it's rhetorical. It is rhetorical, but I think that's important.
	And, you know, because I was talking about, you know, people sort of say, like I did this video on the boomers, and people were saying, but the boomers were propagandized, and the boomers were taught by, you know, government schools and blah, blah, blah, blah, and the Federal Reserve and this and that.
	It's like, yeah, that's all true. That's all true.
	But the boomers constantly lectured me about personal responsibility.
	I mean, that was universal.
	Every boomer in authority that I ever met lectured me or someone in the same room about personal responsibility, paying your debts, and a million other things.
	Don't join a gang. Hey, let's vote for the guys who'll give us stuff.
	There's no such thing as a free lunch.
	If you spend your allowance, you've spent your allowance.
	You can't have your cake and eat it too.
	You can't be a little bit pregnant.
	Use your words, not your fists.
	Right. That was a great video.
	Oh, thanks. You're welcome. And so, my issue with the boomers, yeah, I get that they were propagandized.
	I have great sympathy for that.
	I really do. But until humanity notices, as a species, That we know everything that there is to know about being moral already?
	We can't progress.
	It's the hypocrisy.
	I get the indoctrination.
	I really get the indoctrination.
	But the hypocrisy is still very clear.
	And that's the issue that needs to be dealt with.
	You know, there are very few people in the world that I I have so little respect for that I will withdraw any moral responsibility from.
	Right? I mean, a man-eating shark has no moral responsibility.
	But there are very few people I will put in the same category as a man-eating shark, because that is to say that they have no humanity, they have no capacity, and obviously certain people who are mentally handicapped and so on would fall into a diminished moral capacity and so on.
	But it takes an enormous amount of eroded or impossible respect in order to take away somebody's moral capacity.
	And people could say, okay, well, boomers or whoever, they're not responsible.
	They have no moral responsibility because of the Federal Reserve.
	Well, that's really tough to argue.
	Because it's really tough to argue that people are not morally responsible when they used morality all the time when they had power.
	It's like saying somebody is not able to fold paper when they're standing behind a table full of the most complicated origami you can imagine.
	If the origami's there, they know how to fold friggin' paper!
	And if the moral rules are created and inflicted, and if you think back on how you were parented, I'm sure you'll be able to find one or two moral rules in there.
	You should take care of your brother!
	Well, I think that's more the parent's job than the sibling, considerably.
	But if you look at the moral rules, wherever you see the moral rule, you will see, almost invariably, a hypocritical exemption for power.
	As I've argued before, that's why moral rules are implemented.
	I'm sorry to give you a big, long lecture.
	I hope it's of some utility for you.
	No, I'm not feeling lectured.
	I'm not. Oh, good. Well, it's the first time for everything.
	Good. But that's the key.
	We can say that there's an entire generation of parents, of priests, of boomers, of Gen Xers, of Gen Yers, whoever.
	Entire generation that have no moral responsibility.
	If they have no moral responsibility, then we're not bound by any of the things that they said morally because they were speaking in a language that they did not understand, right?
	And that's testable, right?
	So if people are speaking, if I pretend to speak Mandarin, I don't come out with really great sentences in Mandarin, right?
	I may occasionally have, you know, a recognizable phrase or maybe even in a word, but if I'm pretending to speak Mandarin without comprehension, I will not say anything comprehensible.
	Or if I do, it's entirely accidental, right?
	Shoshani. Hey!
	Oh, sorry. I thought you were saying something about my mama.
	But... And so if the boomers or whoever are not morally responsible, then that just simply means that they were only pretending to speak Mandarin, which means there should have been no consistency in their moral pronouncements.
	But the moment that somebody has consistency in their moral pronouncements or who claims are universal and claims reward and punishment based upon that universal, then we cannot say that they're not morally responsible because you can't say somebody...
	Doesn't speak Mandarin if they're able to make perfectly formed, rational, coherent, responsive sentences in Mandarin.
	Then they speak Mandarin. No, it was complete insanity.
	The rules were changing all the time in my family of origin.
	I mean, at one minute everything would be fine and like this is how things get done and whatever.
	And then, you know, and a couple of hours later everything is completely different.
	It was so confusing.
	So confusing. And I realized things were really fucked up when...
	I think I was...
	I must have been six or seven.
	My brother must have been...
	He's only a year and a half younger than I am.
	And we received boxing gloves as a Christmas present.
	And I'm like, why...
	I said to my father, why did you give us boxing gloves?
	And he said, well, you know, in his best Irish brogue, sure, well, you know, you're going to beat the shit out of each other anyway.
	You might as well do it with boxing gloves on.
	And at that moment, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	That was confusing, but it was also revealing, and it helped me to, I don't know, But he was, of course, in a position to make that prediction because he was the central reason why that prediction was going to come true, right?
	He was almost ensuring it.
	Yeah, yeah. He was encouraging it because now he doesn't have to be held responsible for anything that happened and neither does my mother where she sat by and watched and also participated in it either directly or indirectly.
	So now, you know, My relationship with my brother, he sees me as the aggressor.
	You know, he'll text me death threats on occasion.
	Oh boy. And it's really, it's tearing me apart.
	And I'm like, I haven't seen this guy.
	I can't go near him.
	You know, he lives in another state.
	But I can't go near him because he's just, like, as soon as we're in proximity, he just gets violent and angry around me.
	Which is completely understandable, but...
	Well, no, no. See, again, you say completely understandable.
	I'm not sure that it is.
	Your brother's an adult now, right?
	Yeah. The mantle of moral responsibility falls upon him.
	Like it or not. Like it or not.
	Look, I mean, I can't tell you how much my heart is just torn in two listening to your experiences as a kid.
	I mean, oh my god, I'm so, so sorry about a terrible experience.
	And to be enrolled and enlisted in this hierarchy of aggression and violence is brutal and heartbreaking and I really really I mean I hugely sympathize.
	You're only a year older than your brother and children get a lot of slack in my book when it comes to moral situations particularly when they're in situations of violence so my question is if your brother is so angry at you because of violence How does he feel about your parents?
	Well, they're buying him off.
	He's been living off of them for 30 years.
	They've been bailing him out of jail.
	They've been getting him in and out of training programs so he can hold down a job.
	And that's, I mean, that's so gruesomely predictable.
	I mean, I was going to say it, but I didn't want to interrupt you with that.
	Of course, he's not negative towards them.
	Right, right. So then you have a principle.
	You see, violence within the family was really bad.
	But my brother at the age of five, you know, was really terrible.
	But my father at 30 or 40 or however old he was at this time, he's great.
	I mean, you see, that's a complete distortion of values.
	Complete. I mean, it's complete inversal of values, really.
	Right. Now, I want to be perfectly clear that I was no angel.
	I mean, even as a teenager, you know, I was really hard on my brother.
	But it was, you know, there was a divorce, and the father wasn't around, so the mother had won custody, and it was just the three of us in a house in another part of the state.
	And all the same, you know, codes of behavior had been, you know, I guess more or less beaten into me.
	So I I kept on beating on my brother.
	But it wasn't...
	At some point, sorry, but at some point, you must have not wanted to do that, right?
	Oh, yeah. And you certainly kind of felt good doing it, right?
	There were times when it was...
	It felt...
	The only aspect of it that felt good, for lack of a better word, Would be that it was kind of like, hey, you know, how does it feel?
	How does it feel?
	What do you mean? He was exempt for the most part, as far as I know, from anything that I had received physically.
	Except through you, right?
	Except through me. Right.
	So, I mean, what was it like when you were a teenager?
	When did you guys...
	When did you stop hitting him?
	Probably 15, 16.
	And why? I knew it was wrong.
	And I knew that I was...
	I had anger that was so explosive that I was getting bigger.
	I had gone through this huge growth spurt and I was a lot bigger than he was all of a sudden.
	And I realized that my blows were actually really starting to have a far worse effect.
	And I'm like, this is not right.
	I can't be doing this anymore.
	In addition to that, I was thrown out of the house, out of my mother's house.
	So I had to live, I had nowhere else to go.
	It was either a foster home or go back and move in with my father.
	So it was partly, it was partly that, like I started to realize that all this stuff was coming back to haunt me.
	You know, my brother was like, yeah, you know, he was telling everybody, all of his friends that his brother beats the shit out of him all the time.
	And I'm like, wow, yeah, that's right.
	I did. And it was coming out in the wash.
	And I was like, holy shit.
	I wasn't expecting to be holding the bag on this.
	But empirically, it was true.
	I was beating the shit out of them.
	What do you mean by that? What would that mean?
	What would what mean? I mean, what does that look like?
	I mean, people use these phrases, you know, like beating the shit out, but that's pretty colloquial.
	I mean, would you like punch him closed fist in the face?
	I mean, did he get bloody noses, black eyes?
	No, no, it wasn't anything like that.
	It was mostly just...
	I'd hit him in the back.
	I'd punch him in the back. I'd punch him in the shoulder.
	It wasn't like brutal...
	Right, right. There was no blood.
	It wasn't like Fight Club, right?
	No, it's definitely not Fight Club.
	Although there was one drunken instance where I did hit him in the face and he had some bruises on his face.
	And it's that...
	And the guilt is just...
	I can't even...
	It's horrendous guilt.
	It's horrendous guilt. Right.
	Right. I mean, I'm so sorry.
	I'm so sorry. I mean, I'm so sorry about the circumstances.
	I mean, it's hard because, you know, you know, at least I hope you know for a fact that if you had not been taught that language, you wouldn't have inflicted it on your brother.
	I guarantee you.
	I guarantee you that if you had not experienced violence, you would not have become violent.
	It was the only way for...
	It was just the way that every single aspect of my development was handled in that manner.
	I was like...
	Right, but, sorry, but I think if that was in fact the only way, you wouldn't feel guilt.
	Because there's two things that I'm hearing from you as a whole.
	One is that I was like a rock rolling down a hill.
	I had no choice. It was predetermined.
	This was the environment. This is what I reproduced.
	And you extended that upwards into the generation, at least that came before, to some degree.
	You know, there was this birth order.
	His parents were aggressive and so on, my dads.
	But if that were true, if that were entirely true, then I'm not sure where the guilt would come from.
	And maybe it is true. I mean, what do I know?
	I'm just some guy in a red room.
	But if it were true, then I'm not sure that you would feel Guilt.
	Right. So what does the guilt tell you?
	Or why is there guilt?
	I don't know if the guilt's right or wrong.
	What do I know? I'm just curious, genuinely and curious.
	I really appreciate your honesty in this.
	It's very helpful to me. What does your guilt tell you about your responsibility?
	I think it's telling me that there was a point when I knew And I chose to ignore the truth.
	And when was that point?
	What's the case against you?
	We always got to know the case against us, whether we agree with it or not.
	We've got to know the case against us, right?
	Right.
	Right.
	So what's the case against you?
	The case against me is that there was a point when I knew what was being done to me was wrong.
	What was being done to me by my parents was wrong.
	And that was a very early experience.
	I think it was about four.
	But it's just...
	I think I started to realize that it was...
	What I was doing was wrong was probably like as early as seven, or...
	So what your parents was wrong was around four and what you were doing to your brother was around seven?
	When I realized The case against me is that when I was seven, I knew that what was going on and what I was doing was wrong.
	Around seven. Okay, but it went on for almost another ten years, right?
	Right. And so the case against you, the prosecutory case against you, would be what about that ten years?
	That I was cognizant of my actions.
	And that I was using my brother as a punching bag as I was also being used as a punching bag.
	No, that's not the prosecutorial case, because again, you've gone back to causality, right?
	Yes, that's correct. There's an excuse in there, right?
	Again, please understand, I'm not agreeing with the prosecutor here, but I think it's always important for us to know what the case against us is, right?
	Right. So...
	What is the no excuse? Because the prosecutor doesn't give you excuses, right?
	Right. So, 10 years after you knew it was wrong...
	I continued.
	Right. So why?
	I must have...
	Well, I... I was given permission to do so.
	That's an excuse. That's not what the prosecutor would say.
	Because you feel guilt, right? But the guilt's got to be because there's a case against you that you accept.
	Whether it's true or not, I don't know, right?
	That I either was or am a sadist.
	Go on.
	And those aspects.
	The truth of that as being a possibility is a truth that I can hardly bear.
	Thank you.
	Did you hit other children?
	There was one instance.
	Yeah, there was one instance.
	But obviously not nearly as often as you hit your brother.
	No. Did you tease your brother?
	Did you verbally abuse him? Not that much.
	Not that I recall. Actually, I remember it actually turning around on me.
	I'd gained a lot of weight at one point after, um, I had gained some weight and he, I, he would just call me names, you know, about my weight, fat shit. he would just call me names, you know, about my And then he'd, he'd be able to outrun me cause I couldn't catch him.
	You know, a lot of humiliation and stuff.
	And did he ever hit you back when he, I guess he must have at some point gone through his head, right?
	Yeah, yeah, he had given me a bloody lip, you know, in the presence of my parents.
	They were watching me beating on his back, and they'd be like, don't hit him so hard.
	And I'm like, don't hit him so hard.
	I'm like, well, how hard should I hit him?
	And they were watching this going on, and then he turned around and hit me in the face.
	Remember, I gave you the gloves.
	Yeah, right. So he turned around and hit me and gave me a bloody lip.
	And I was like, look, he drew blood.
	And they're like, well, that's what you get.
	I'm going, right.
	But I knew, I'm like, but I never drew blood.
	You know, I never hit him so hard that he...
	And I drew blood, and he'd be like, well, tough shit.
	Do you remember what his face looked like as a kid when you would hit him, like as a little kid?
	Well, I wouldn't hit him in the face.
	It was usually, like, I'd just throw him on the ground and just punch him in the back.
	Well, but at some point you would see his face, I mean, when you were rushing at him or with that intent.
	Oh, sure, yeah, sure, yeah. He'd be scared.
	And what did that look like? It was just fear.
	It was just anxiety and just...
	Holy shit, here we go again.
	And helplessness, I would assume, because, I mean, even at a year, you've got significant size and strength, right?
	Well, yeah, year after year.
	year.
	I mean, he, you know, some years we'd be closer in size, some years we wouldn't be.
	So, yeah, I mean, getting I was taught really well.
	You know, how to throw a beating.
	And what do you think your motive was for it?
	I mean, you may have been taught that, but I'm trying to get my daughter to eat her vegetables, right?
	So just being taught something doesn't mean that you want to do it, right?
	So what was your motive?
	In doing it, and it's not just because you were taught.
	I'm sure your parents taught you lots of stuff that you didn't want to learn or didn't like or whatever, right?
	Right. What was the attraction?
	what was the benefit what was the payoff after you hit him you felt when you were going to attack him I felt relief.
	I felt power.
	The power to do what?
	I felt control over a situation where otherwise I just didn't feel like I had any control.
	And what was the control over?
	Because you obviously felt powerless or helpless and then you exercised control.
	But what was the control over that you were exercising?
	I think I was just trying to control what I was experiencing at the hands of my father and my mother.
	Right. And how did attacking your brother give you that experience?
	In retrospect, I don't...
	It didn't.
	It didn't. It couldn't have.
	Because, and I'm just trying to be clear, and again, I don't have any hidden answers here, and I really appreciate you talking about this, but when you saw that fear and you saw that panic and you saw that helplessness, that had to be your object, right?
	That had to be what you wanted in the moment.
	Because that's what you would consistently achieve, right?
	So how did that fear feed you?
	What did that fear that you provoked, what did that ameliorate with you?
	How did that help you?
	I think it gave me an out to see what I was becoming.
	Thank you.
	I was becoming a monster.
	I sort of get the impression that there was a devil called fear that you could drive into your brother and escape yourself.
	Yeah. It's like a ritual, you know, like cast out the demon called fear into your brother to give you some relief from the terror that you were experiencing.
	Definitely. Does that make sense?
	Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I was able, it was just, it was, it kicked the dog.
	Pass the buck. It's...
	Yeah, but that doesn't give you any emotional...
	That's just a phrase, right?
	That doesn't really give you any emotional understanding.
	No, it doesn't. So, let's say that you had summoned from some otherworldly paradise of virtue, you had summoned the ability, the capacity, the willpower to treat your brother with kindness rather than violence.
	What would that have caused within you?
	What would that have triggered within you to do that?
	I mean, if you'd said to your brother during a time of violence within the family, right?
	If you had said to your brother, listen, that was terrifying.
	For me, I mean, it must be even more terrifying for you because you're younger.
	Right. Let's go into the backyard.
	Let's climb the treehouse.
	Let's go into the woods. Let's go someplace.
	And I want to give you a hug to make you feel better.
	I want to talk to you about what I'm feeling.
	I want to ask you what you're feeling.
	I want to tell you that what we're both going through is horrible.
	The answer is love.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's what it would have...
	I would have and could have...
	Experienced. Compassion.
	Understanding. And an ally.
	Somebody who could share and sympathize with the horror that you were experiencing.
	Somebody who you could have had a secret alliance with.
	You know, a touching, a holding of the hands under the table.
	Right. While the words are flying like daggers.
	Right. You could have been part of a team.
	You could have been in the woeful club called us, right?
	right?
	Yeah.
	And drawn strength from that.
	Right.
	Right.
	And what was the price of love for you?
	Thank you.
	What made drinking almost like a vampire the fear of your brother?
	What made that preferable to whatever would have followed from compassion and sympathy and love for him?
	Which, of course, is nothing more or less than compassion, sympathy and love for yourself.
	At the time, it's so...
	You know, it was so long ago and I don't want to make...
	My perception at the time was that the cost would have been survival, my survival.
	If you had demonstrated compassion and love at the age of five or six or seven, how would your father have experienced that, do you think?
	If you had shown him the noble reaction to violence, how would he have experienced that?
	A threat. Seeing a seven-year-old, yeah.
	A major, major threat.
	And there may have been...
	I don't think it was...
	I think I may have been able to do that.
	Under certain circumstances, but apparently not enough or I didn't have.
	I don't know the tools or something that like I didn't.
	We were being pulled from school to school every year.
	So I I didn't have a sense of ally like.
	The idea of having like making a friend was really pretty foreign to me.
	I was always the new kid in school.
	Okay, let's go back. Sorry, let's go.
	We're going back to history.
	I want to get back to the immediate moment.
	Sure, sure. And a phrase popped into my head, and I may be entirely unjust in characterizing your father this way, and it may be entirely out of accordance with your experience, but you can tell me, if this makes any sense to you, that if your father had seen you treating your brother with love and compassion, kindness, and support, The phrase that popped into my head was, got a couple of fags for sons.
	Yeah. That makes sense.
	Couple of sissies.
	Yeah. Here's the gloves.
	Yeah, yeah. Here's the gloves.
	You're starting to remind me of two little...
	Little princess fairies and here's some gloves and if I can't make a man out of you, well then you're going to make men out of you.
	You're going to make men out of yourselves or some bullshit.
	Yeah, it's always, you know, I get these emails, you know, Steph, you've got to toughen you.
	The world's full of tough people, hard people, brutal people.
	You've got to toughen your daughter up so she can...
	No. I will never call maturing a child Sorry, let me phrase that.
	Let's say I had a son, because we're talking about sons in your case.
	I will never say that turning my son into a terrified slave is making him tough.
	It's like saying you strengthen a dog by breaking him in two, by cracking his spine.
	All that means is he drags his ass around And dies And of course Most people are talking about the world They're just talking about themselves You must break your child because I broke mine.
	You must break your child because I was broken, and I won't admit it.
	And so I must make it parenting, virtuous parenting.
	I must turn the evil that was done unto me into a virtue.
	Otherwise, I have to recognize the moral truth of my condition.
	And you get, right, that I mean, obviously we're talking about your family, but we're also talking about a free society because in this metaphor, in this analogy, the state is your dad and the citizens are the siblings, right?
	We turn on each other, we turn on each other, we turn on each other.
	And compassion to the broken breeds rage in the abusers because they know that they should be doing that themselves.
	So, I mean, I certainly appreciate, I know it was a long call, and I certainly appreciate you talking about this.
	I certainly sense, I feel that there's an absence of emotional connection for you with this matter, which I completely understand.
	But I would examine, and again, if I were in your shoes, you could do whatever you want, but if I were in your shoes, I would write down the case against me.
	Not for the sake of fanning these flames, but for the sake of making it conscious.
	Right. Because you can't argue against something that is implicit, right?
	You know, the unconscious is always passive-aggressive, right?
	So you've got some art teacher, you give them a picture, and they kind of wrinkle their nose and look away and sneer.
	And you say, well, you don't like it?
	And they're like, no, it's good.
	You can't argue against that, right?
	Because it's sneery, it's implicit, it's unconscious, it's hidden.
	You can't argue against something that is merely implicit.
	You can argue against explicit stuff.
	And so if there is a case against you, if you fear that you may be sadistic, if you are ashamed of the perception that you may have had more moral responsibility in the past, I don't know.
	I don't know. But make the case against you explicit so you can have an honest debate with your prosecutor.
	make the case against you explicit.
	Right.
	And then have an honest debate with the prosecution.
	Thank you.
	Okay. And again, I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry. I mean, this is a shitty sandwich to have to chew through, and I wish you'd been served a different meal as a kid.
	I wish you'd been served the entire opposite meal.
	But I think you can pull some great knowledge and virtue out of that gruesome history.
	It does not make the history good.
	But it's as good as you can get with the history you have.
	Right. You know, nobody ever wants to have a heart attack, but people who have heart attacks often end up exercising and eating better afterwards.
	Right. And can actually end up healthier than if they'd never had a heart attack.
	Right. And that's my suggestion.
	And I just, I mean, I feel nothing but sorrow and sympathy for your history.
	And I really just wanted to extend that to you.
	I appreciate that. And I could be a pretty judgmental bastard, so I hope that gives you some context or perspective.
	No, it was difficult to go into this part of the content, because I know some of your history includes an older brother.
	Right, and I didn't want to color that, and I hope I didn't, but that was certainly part of what I was asking about.
	I mean, that's partly selfish.
	I hope it was still useful to you.
	No, and it's really, and I thought it would be good to discuss this with you as somebody who has been on the receiving end.
	Because I can't do that with, at least I feel at this point in my life that I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that with my own younger brother.
	Whether this is, you know.
	Inappropriate or not, I'm not really sure, or convoluting or whatever, but to summarize, to go back to the original part of the call is that I guess this kind of explains or at least helps me see why I'm feeling what I'm feeling when I approach a parent that's beating on their kids.
	Yes, yes. I mean, there certainly is a child in your universe who needs some saving, but I don't think he's outside your skin.
	And I know that the inner child stuff sounds kind of freaky and, you know, gay and all that, but it is really, I think it is really important.
	I mean, I know, I know.
	I mean, I'm not entirely without a chest hair or two.
	And I know that it feels kind of like, oh, go cradle your inner child and you get all kinds of Stuart Smalley visions going off in your head.
	But it is really important that the child is the father of the man.
	And our early experiences have massive amounts of information that can free us from repetition.
	And I don't know if you're married or if you have kids, but if you're not and you want those things, I want you to be a great dad.
	I'm telling you it's possible.
	I'm telling you it's possible.
	But, you know, we first save ourselves, right?
	That old thing, that little inscription on the airplane right in front of you, right?
	Right. The mask drops, put it on yourself first and then help those around you.
	Right, right, right. Well, thank you very much for your taking this call and going, helping me consider things that I hadn't before.
	I really appreciate it and really thank you for going all this time with the call and I hope I didn't Hug up too much of the air.
	No, no. That's my call, not yours.
	So I appreciate that. And yeah, do drop me a line.
	Let me know how you're doing if you get a chance.
	And I wish you the best of luck with this.
	Thanks so much. Thanks.
	Hey, look, we've got the maximum number of people we've ever had at the live chat.
	It's good to know. Good thing we upgraded that server.
	Thank you, my donators.
	All right. Did we have another caller or have we got some questions from the chat room I've seen?
	We have several people on the line.
	All right. All right. We may go a little over.
	Let's go. Yeah. Josefina.
	Josefina. I apologize.
	I don't know how to say your name. You're up next.
	Yeah. Hi. Here's Alec, actually.
	And... Alec. Well, that's a long way from what he pronounced.
	Okay. Go ahead. Josefina is sitting right next to me.
	Hello. Hi.
	Greetings from Bavaria, Germany.
	Yeah. I have talked to you...
	On the show in 1981.
	And I made a criticism of your environmental stance.
	And then a couple of...
	And I have been very busy. I wanted to come up and talk to you about this again earlier.
	But I didn't have the time.
	But now I'm here. Hi, Mollius.
	I just saw somewhere in RT Media you...
	I repeated again the sentence which I argumented against, which was, you need wealth in order to protect the environment.
	And I said, no, wealth is like actually creating the damage to the environment.
	And then in the end of that show, we talked about the Kindle and how it...
	Yes, I remember. Yeah, you remember, good.
	Oh no, have you dug up stuff about how the Kindle is environmentally unfriendly and I'm doomed?
	Yeah, I mean...
	All right, let's hear it. Hey, if you have, I'm all about the evidence.
	So if you've got opposing evidence, let's hear it.
	Well, I just came across a word, and I think it hits it quite well, and it's called economic metabolism.
	And that is, I think, hits it quite well because you're right that, of course, a Kindle saves paper.
	If you only look at the Kindle itself, if you take only the resources which are required for the Kindle, I'm sorry, but just for those who weren't in that conversation, I didn't say that the Kindle saves only paper.
	It saves all the manufacturing energy, the oil, like to make the books, the inks, the prints, the energy it takes to drive the books from the manufacturer to the warehouse to the bookstore and also to return the books that aren't sold.
	So it's not just the paper I wanted to point out.
	Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm also...
	Yeah, well, anyways, the thing is that it's like...
	Also, for the Kindle, you need, again, just like the books or whatever, you need a lot of resources.
	I mean, you need the whole system there in order to create them.
	But actually, I just wanted to hit out that word and say, what did I want to say?
	Well, just that I still don't agree and I noticed that you have not changed your Well, let me be clear and just slice and dice the argument a little bit.
	I certainly agree that wealth consumes resources.
	I certainly agree with that.
	Because wealth really is the transformation of natural resources.
	Usually we don't consider a water running by our house that makes us rich.
	So it's not just the presence of natural resources, but it is the transformation of those natural resources into some finished good, whether that finished good is a loaf of bread or a Plasma TV or a car or something, but it is the transformation of natural resources and that certainly uses up resources and that certainly consumes energy and so on.
	So I think that you and I would agree on that.
	I think the differentiation, if I remember right, tell me if I'm wrong.
	What I argued was that in a free market situation, the company that can figure out how to produce With the lowest resource consumption is the company that will win out in the marketplace.
	And so the price of a resource has something to do with how hard it is to produce and how scarce it is and all that kind of stuff.
	And so if a company can figure out how to use half the resources in the production of some good, if it can figure out how to use half the resources Then it will win out in the marketplace, all other things being equal because it is able to sell the product for less because it uses fewer resources.
	Now, to find ways of lowering resource consumption requires capital investment.
	It requires research and development, right?
	And so my argument is that in order to find out how to lower resource consumption, you need an excess of wealth in order to Fund the research and development that helps you to end up lowering the resource consumption.
	I think that was sort of my argument.
	But I certainly agree with you that wealth consumes resources.
	But I mean, you see that argument works when you use it in a free market, but we're not living in a free market, so that approach doesn't work.
	And I just think that it's like...
	Yeah, I mean, of course.
	If people read your work, They will, you know, see what this is all about, what you're talking of.
	But if I would just switch on, you know, RT Media and see a guy there saying, like, wealth creates, protects the environment, you need wealth to protect the environment, and only take that as the basis of Well, but TV is 20-second soundbites, right?
	And I think it is a true and defensible statement that you need wealth to protect the environment.
	It's just not a complete analysis of the picture, but there's just no way on television that you get those kinds of opportunities to make those kinds of cases unless you have some sort of more formalized debate.
	But I think I had six minutes on RT, of which half was debating with the woman, and I certainly tried to put An argument forward.
	But I agree with you. It certainly is not a complete argument.
	And, you know, hopefully that draws people into researching more about my perspective or other people's perspectives on environmental protection.
	But yes, I certainly agree with you.
	And I also can imagine that it must have been a little bit frustrating to hear me say the same thing.
	It's like, wait a second, we just had a debate about this and now this guy appears to have hit the reset button and is just saying the same A thing that we just had a debate about, that's not very honest.
	And I can certainly understand that perspective.
	Yeah. Anyways, that wasn't really actually what I wanted to talk about.
	I just wanted to hit that subject a little bit.
	But what was bugging me since a couple of months where I was thinking of is like I clearly...
	It's about property rights.
	And... Wait, your lady friend doesn't have any questions, does she?
	Do you? No, not for the moment.
	Not for the moment. Do you have maybe a conversation you'd like to have about who talks more in your relationship and whether that's egalitarian or equal?
	I mean, I'm just looking for some alternative topics to property rights, which I'm happy to talk about.
	I just wanted to know if there was anything from your perspective that would be important to talk about.
	No, I mean, I have to confess that I am not really familiarized with Free Domain Radio.
	This is the first time I'm actually participating.
	And I mean, I discovered, I kind of like started listening a little bit through Alec.
	And it just took my attention, your term UPB, right?
	Alec was telling me there is a universal...
	Preferable behavior.
	Preferable behavior. I mean, as I said, I am not that familiarized.
	And I was going to ask you more or less, how would you explain that?
	Of course, like if it's not like, again, repeating everything.
	No, I'll do it. I'll do it for sure.
	Yeah, I will do it for sure.
	I just, you know, I'm half German myself.
	And... I know something about how talkative German men can be, and so I just wanted to make sure that we gave you the opportunity to ask or to talk if that was your particular design.
	Thank you very much. Also, this show can sometimes be called, I guess this metaphor would work in Bavaria, a sausage fest, which means that there are a lot of men on the show.
	I'm always interested in having...
	This makes sense to you, Sausage Fest?
	Yes? I just wanted to make sense that if we get women to talk, I think that's nice.
	Anyway, so we'll do property rights, and then I'll give you a brief thingy on UPB if that happens.
	Okay, thank you. I mean, I have asked you that question also.
	Should we say Brad first?
	Anyway. Yeah, yeah.
	So I just question myself, how do I come from...
	The property rights from my own body, which I totally agree, like, you know, my body belongs to me and no one has a right to intervene with my body unless with my confirmation.
	And I just, I mean, I do understand the jump of when I produce something that that also can, I can claim the property rights to an unclaimed land or to anything what I produce myself by my own energy and transform it into a good.
	Yeah, but you already talked about this.
	We just finished talking about this.
	Let me tell you why. You just said that it was my argument on the Russian television show, right?
	Oh no, this is completely different.
	This is a different subject.
	I'm not referring to the creating wealth thing.
	No, no, I know. I understand that.
	But you said it was my argument, right?
	What? Well, I made an argument on the RT show about wealth or whatever, right?
	And you said, Steph, that was your argument on the RT show, right?
	In other words, you're saying that I own the effects of my actions.
	Yeah. That it's my argument.
	Yeah. So that's not my body, right?
	Once it goes onto RT and it goes digitized and blah, blah, blah, right?
	It's not my body anymore, but you're still saying it's my argument because it's something that I produced with my body and you identified it, I think correctly, as my argument.
	Yeah. So just look at the argument as a good, as a thing that was produced, whether it's bits or paper or writing or whatever.
	It's something that I produced, and you, I think, correctly identified it as my argument.
	In other words, that is a good that I have produced that I am responsible for that wouldn't exist if I had not produced it, and therefore it's my argument.
	So I think if you look back at calling it my argument, you've got a good basis for property rights.
	Yeah, exactly. I've got that.
	I've just got this mind game inside of me, like questioning of like, well, I have this perception of property rights because of all the information I have in the environment, which, I mean, like, you know, how I've been brought up, the whole society, civilization, you know, how the world works.
	But I was just wondering...
	That might be false.
	Maybe that's not the way how it's right.
	Maybe those rights are just not right.
	I don't know. Am I expressing that?
	No, I understand. First of all, I appreciate you coming from...
	I think it's very important to come from a blank slate perspective.
	To say, what if I was a space alien coming in?
	Perhaps reptilian in nature.
	There's a nod to the chat room. But perhaps, like if I were a space alien coming in and I knew nothing about human society, nothing about human morality or religion or history or nationalism, how would I view this strange ant farm called planet Earth, right?
	So I think it's really important to take that perspective.
	That, to me, is philosophical. And it's also scientific, because science tries to look at everything with fresh eyes, you know, free of prejudice and history.
	It doesn't always succeed, and Lord knows I don't either, but I think that's a good perspective.
	So I think it's great to question that stuff.
	But, certainly, if we own our own bodies, which nobody can argue against self-ownership without exercising the self-ownership called making an argument, so that's just, that to me is, you simply have to accept that, or, you know, there's no reality in reason or evidence.
	And so, if we own our own bodies, then we must own the effects of our actions.
	We must. Because our body is just a thing, and the stuff we produce is just more things.
	Now, In regards to things like unowned land, I really get this, and I get this question a lot, and it's a great question, which is, you know, what asshole appointed some guy who fenced in land, the perpetual owner of that land from here to eternity, just because he happened to be there two steps ahead of the next guy?
	Right? And I think that's a great question.
	The first thing I would recognize is to say that The enclosure of land, like you fenced land, that's all government stuff.
	That's not how the free market has decided or determined what is valid property.
	Remember, property and the enforcement of property is all run by the government.
	That's what Proudhon meant when he said property is theft.
	What he means is that all property rights that are enforced by the government are effectively theft because the government is using violence to enforce them.
	And the vast majority of what is called wealth in society is at least aided and abetted by state force, right?
	Think sort of copyright laws and patents and all this kind of stuff.
	But... Or, you know, the entire financial sector which runs off fiat currency and, you know, the regulation which is created in order to be ignored.
	So I don't know for sure how property rights within land would work.
	I do know... From personal experience as a gold prospector in my youth that you would enclose a particular area of land by pounding stakes into sort of four corners and you would get the mineral rights for a certain amount of time but if you did not develop those mineral rights then it would revert, the land would revert back to a state of nature.
	That's how it works, at least how it worked 20 years ago here in Canada.
	So I think A rational system would be, okay, if you go and enclose some piece of land, like you build fences all the way around it, then it's yours.
	But if you don't develop it within five or six years, then it reverts back to a state of nature and anyone else can claim it and you've got to do something with it.
	I think that's sort of how it would work rationally.
	But I think what's most fundamental to understand about land ownership is that no one cares about owning land.
	We only care about the goods that can be produced from that land.
	Right? So if I said to you, hey, listen, my...
	Germanic friend, I have a great piece of land in Bavaria, and I want you to give me 500,000 euros for it, but I'm never going to tell you where it is.
	You wouldn't give me any money for it, right?
	No. No, right?
	Because it would be meaningless to you, because you wouldn't be able to do anything with it.
	Or if I were to say to you, well, I will tell you where it is, But you can't ever visit it, you can't ever rent it out, you can't ever have it developed, you just have to leave it in a completely pristine state, but you can't even go and look at it, then you would not give me any money for that either, I assume?
	No. Right, but if I said, listen, you can plant food, you can rent it out, you can let people park their recreational vehicles there, you can You know, build hot tubs on it.
	You can, you know, whatever, right?
	Then you would have something.
	But what's actually being, what the property is really what you can do with the land, right?
	Or if I said, well, you're allowed to plant wheat on it, but you're not allowed to harvest that wheat.
	You'd say, well, that's sort of pointless.
	I mean, what's the point of that, right? It's just going to fall over and just rot in the ground.
	So it's what you can carry off from the land.
	And whether what you carry off is great memories of a beautiful view or photographs or whatever it is, those are material goods as well in my opinion.
	So it's what you can carry off from the land.
	It's what you can do with the land.
	It's what you value you can add to the land that matters.
	The land ownership itself is merely the means to the end for what you can build on that land or take off that land or value that can be extracted from that land.
	So just looking at the fencing issue, I think, is to miss the point of land ownership, which is what can be produced.
	And once you're producing something, then you've invested your labor in the land and turned it into a capital or goods producing entity.
	And I think everybody would accept that your ownership is then pretty cemented.
	But isn't that a very Western perspective?
	I mean, like a very...
	I mean, I think there are still some communities that would appreciate the land because of other characteristics.
	I'm explaining myself, like indigenous people, for example, would understand or would have a relationship towards the land.
	I think from a different perspective, a totally different one, right?
	Not like what is going to be produced with the land or through the land, or even if it's like material, I don't know, goods that are attached with some type of community or even like a feeling, you know, like, oh, I was born in that land and that's why I want that land or I want to be there.
	But I think there are some other perspectives that are more like, that see the land as something, for example, living, or something you can relate with.
	I don't know. Sure.
	And I think, I mean, I think that then people who want, like, so there's some people who want to plant crops on land, and there are other people who want to keep that land in its natural state for hiking or camping or whatever.
	I know that's not exactly what you're saying, but is that sort of one distinction that you mean?
	I mean, there are different types of functions from the land.
	You can use the land for different things.
	Right, but I think you're also talking about different conceptions of property rights as a whole, right?
	So, for instance, Native American Indians would, they didn't have, at least some of the tribes were hunter-gatherers, right?
	So they didn't have an agricultural-based society.
	They would follow the buffalo herds or the bison herds around and live off the berries and nuts.
	They would not have the same conception of property as everyone else, right?
	Yes, yes, totally. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about, like the different conception of the rights.
	I don't really think they even had the same idea of what is the ownership, what do you own, right?
	Well, no, sorry.
	Again, I'm no expert on this, but my understanding is that there was still Ownership and property rights in those cultures.
	So, for instance, I mean, if you're following around a buffalo herd, then you are going to kill some of those buffalo and you're going to eat them and you're going to make clothes that make you look like Rackle Welsh a million years ago out of the hide and so on.
	And that is still the consumption of resources in a really fixed and finite way.
	So there was property rights over the herd, But there was not property rights over the land, if that makes sense.
	Like, they exercised property rights over the herd in the same way that a farmer would exercise property rights over his livestock in terms of killing and eating them and making leather chaps or whatever.
	So the exercise of property rights is just around a moving resource, like fishing, rather than farming, if that makes any sense.
	Okay. Okay, yes, I think I understand that point.
	I mean, I'm just...
	Sorry, but I will say this, that when you get a hunter-gatherer society colliding with a farming society, then you have pretty conflicting property right definitions occurring.
	Because the hunter-gatherer society, let's say the buffalo following society, it needs a lot of land, and it doesn't care about the land, really.
	It only cares about the buffalo.
	Mm-hmm. And so it doesn't want to domesticate the buffalo because the buffalo need to roam.
	Buffalo, they got to roam.
	I hear that's important for them.
	They are rambling men.
	And so they need lots of land for the buffalo to roam, whereas the farmers want to enclose the land and not have buffalo stomp all over their crops.
	And so when you get a hunting society...
	Meeting up with, let's say, a farming society, which is sort of the Native Americans and other cultures meeting up with Western agricultural or manufacturing-based societies, then you have a significant conflict and a significant problem.
	And I obviously don't – there's no magical solutions to all of this.
	I mean, a number of them have been tried.
	But I'm not sure that it's really clear to argue or obvious to argue which one should win out.
	And I think that's your point. Like, why is the enclosing the land society's conception of property rights or exercise of property rights better than the, you know, the hunter-gatherer conception of property rights, which is we don't care about the land, we only care about the herd. Mm-hmm.
	So, yeah, I mean, I'd have to think, I don't have anything intelligent to add other than I can totally see the conflict and I'm not sure that I can objectively say which one is better or worse.
	I don't think it's possible, but there definitely is a conflict.
	Yeah, I mean, just like I was just pointing out, pointing out that there are different perspectives, you know, like to relate with land.
	I mean, I think just our civilized world culture Likes to separate between the human being, the natural world, and then it's far and it's supernatural.
	And I mean, yeah, and I think these indigenous cultures, they just didn't make this separation.
	I mean, it's like...
	I mean, how they...
	Where am I going to...
	No, look, I think I understand what you're saying, and tell me if I'm wrong.
	I mean, there is a separation between man and nature that comes out of the Judeo-Christian world, right?
	In that all of nature is created to be subservient to man, just as man is created to be subservient to God, and only man has a soul.
	And only man is divinely created and implanted with the divine soul, and therefore man is separate from nature, and all of nature is under his dominion, and his relationship is with God and not with nature, and nature's relationship is with each other and not with God, and the only relationship nature has with man is to be subjugated and utilized.
	It is a terrible and false belief, right?
	I mean, we have no soul. We weren't created by God.
	We are animals, just like all the other mammals with, you know, a slightly couple extra folds in the frontal lobes.
	And so I don't agree.
	It's a completely false proposition, but, you know, I mean, how many propositions from 2,000 years ago are still valid today?
	I mean, so I agree with you.
	Now, I don't think that...
	I mean, this idea that the Native American Indians lived in complete harmony with nature and peaceful society, that seems to me, at least to the degree that I've read about it, to be pretty much a myth.
	They had wars.
	They were brutal towards their women and towards their children, of course, right?
	Any society which is not evolving...
	is being brutal towards women and brutal towards children because they're indoctrinating and not allowing them to think for themselves or challenge preconceptions and they were intensely mystical societies and with mysticism almost always seems to come internecine violence and so in terms of how these two societies collide it seems to me that the pattern is always the same that the technological advancements that are inherent in an agricultural society We'll always trump the relative technological primitiveness of a hunter-gatherer society.
	So, in a sense, it doesn't matter what the morality is.
	It's like trying to figure out the morality of homo sapiens versus the Neanderthals.
	It doesn't really matter because those conflicts are all largely done now and they were unfortunately decided through brute force And the agricultural societies, because of superior technology, which really only occurs in an agricultural society for a variety of reasons, will end up just decimating the hunter-gatherer society.
	But I think that there is a sort of guilt-laced idealization of the hunter-gatherer society, but at least the stuff that I've read, it was pretty brutal too.
	Yeah, definitely. Well, I think we are also generalizing in many senses.
	I mean, we're saying indigenous people, right?
	Sorry, I'm trying to think of a sense in which we're not generalizing, because I agree with you, we're generalizing completely.
	Sometimes you have to generalize, right?
	It's something necessary sometimes.
	But I'm just saying, I mean, like, I don't know.
	I mean, I think you're talking about Native Americans, and I mean, I know there are many, for example, matriarchies out there, like still, like, I mean, not many, actually, very few, but that would actually put in, like, that would be the opposite of some of the examples you were giving of how, like, evolving...
	You're talking about Angela Merkel, right?
	I mean... The only matriarchy I know of was England in the 80s.
	I know that there were some matriarchal communities.
	I don't really know that much.
	I mean, I'm not really the one who raised this topic about nature and human, and the human being is Alec, and I don't feel close to that topic, but I'm just trying to give my point of view.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's somebody who seems to be quite insistent that I mentioned Chuck Norris in this conversation.
	And I think it is important to mention that the only differentiator between whether the hunter-gatherer society wins or the agricultural society wins is which side Chuck Norris chooses.
	And I think that's just important to mention.
	And then we will continue.
	Just because somebody's been pestering me to mention something about Chuck Norris.
	Okay, good, wonderful.
	It's a nice way to get out of it.
	No, but to get out of this, we're getting very, I mean, I'm a little bit confused already of what I was trying to express at the beginning.
	But anyways, if you want to continue.
	Yes, nice. Or maybe you want to explain now the term I was talking about.
	Oh yeah, universally preferable behavior.
	Yeah. All right.
	Well, the way that I generally explain it is in a song.
	So let me just get the right pitch.
	No, I'm kidding.
	Don't be frightened.
	I kid everyone.
	Quick, turn off the speaker.
	I have struggled for many years to find a way of developing a system of ethics that relies neither on the coercive power of the state nor relies on the irrational mysticism of religion.
	neither of which I consider to be a satisfactory explanation for the problem of ethics.
	And so A couple of years ago, I just basically sat down at a desk with a big pot of coffee.
	And that may have helped. It may have hindered me.
	I don't know. But when I said, I am not going to get up from this desk.
	I don't care if I have to pee on the floor and crap my pants.
	I am not getting up from this desk until I have a framework of ethics that can be rationally sustained and also is supported by the evidence around the world that does not rely on the hierarchical power of state coercion or On mystical revelations from imaginary sky buddies.
	And so I did.
	I did do my very best to come up with that.
	And I came up with basically a system that is slavishly derived from the sciences.
	I'm a huge fan of the scientific method, as I'm sure you're aware now.
	I've said it. And the one thing that I've noticed from the scientific method is it relies on two essential aspects or categories.
	And the first is that a theory has to be logically consistent.
	This is true in, obviously, all of the sciences, right?
	Biology and physics and, I mean, in the practical sciences like engineering and mathematics and all the rational disciplines.
	And this is true, of course, in philosophy, at least, we hope.
	So a theory has to be internally consistent, consistent with reason.
	And if it passes that first test, then we get to the point where we can say, okay, let's put it to the test in terms of physical things.
	We'll run some sort of experiment.
	And so I said, okay, well, since science, since the scientific method is by far the most successful mental discipline that human beings have ever come up with, ever come up with, because it is the one thing that has differentiated us from the ancient world, really from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, pre-Renaissance, pre-Enlightenment and onwards.
	And science has made far more leaps in progress of the human condition over the past 200 years than was achieved in the entire multi-billion year history of the planet.
	And I think that we can also make the same case for the free market, but certainly science is the most successful human system.
	And so if morality is going to be at all valid, it can't oppose basic principles of science.
	So the first thing that we need to accept or expect or demand really from a moral system, any system of what I call universally preferable behavior, is that it has to be logically consistent.
	It has to be internally consistent with itself.
	And so I use a framework which I call universally preferable behavior, which has these two demands.
	It's got to be internally consistent, any moral standard that's put forward, and it also has to explain the evidence, right?
	So if you have a moral system that is internally consistent and predicts that communism will be a great success, then you've got a problem with your moral system.
	Because communism was not, as you are more aware of, I think, even than I am, having...
	You know, given up a good chunk of your income to the Germans devoured by communism for, you know, 60 or I guess 40 odd years.
	So, a theory has to be internally consistent.
	It has to agree with the evidence.
	Those were the two standards. Now, I threw another standard on top of that, which was to say, and I take this straight from Aristotle.
	Aristotle said, look, you can come up with a moral system.
	You can come up with a moral argument.
	You can come up with a moral framework.
	But if your moral framework spits out that rape is really, really good, you've made a mistake.
	I mean, I don't care how logical it is.
	You've made a mistake.
	In the same way that you can have a very logical system of physics or whatever, but if it spits out that a rock should fall upwards when dropped at the equator, Then you've made a mistake.
	I mean, you know, we don't have to go test every rock.
	We just know it. And so there were four categories of morality that I wanted to test using this framework.
	The first was no murder, right?
	Obviously. If you have a moral system that says the best thing you can do is to murder everyone, unless you're an Old Testament deity, that's just not good.
	That just can't be right.
	The second one I wanted was no rape, of course, right?
	And the third I wanted was no assault, no beating people up.
	And the fourth that I wanted was no theft, right?
	A respect for property rights. And so I dutifully came up with the framework and ran all of these four major moral axioms, I would say, through this.
	And yay! Lo and behold, they all popped out.
	Now, it also had to...
	Deal with what I call aesthetically preferable actions, right?
	So if you and I are going to meet for dinner at 7 o'clock and you show up at 8 o'clock and you just didn't feel like coming on time, that's not good.
	I mean, we can say that that's not a good thing, but it's not something that I can lock you up for, right?
	So there had to be things which it would have to recognize a category of stuff that was preferable and even universally preferable But it did not give the people the right to incarcerate someone for being late or for chewing their gum too loudly or whatever it is, right? So I really wanted the moral system to fit with the commonly accepted human axioms because that just sort of made sense.
	And I have a good deal of respect for the collective common law wisdom of mankind.
	So... So I worked through this and of course there's a free book at freedomainradio.com forward slash free called universally preferable behavior a rational proof of secular ethics and you can look at the examples that I cite you can look at the framework and you can you know if you find flaws in it of course please let me know I would really love to improve it there have been some suggestions for clarities for clarification which I think would be really helpful on version two But that's the basic idea behind it.
	I think it's been a good success so far and I'm sure it can still Be improved upon, but that's basically the idea behind it.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah, yeah, totally. I would have to read it, though, because...
	No, no, you can just accept that I'm right without actually having to read.
	No, I'm kidding. Yes, yes. No, because it seems a little bit more complicated than I expected, or at least, like, that it needs a little bit more of a study, right, than just...
	Oh, yeah. I'm not going to start, like, asking you stuff or, like, trying to criticize it when I don't know it, like, deep and analyzing it, you know, a little bit more.
	Right, right, right.
	Yes, no, and I agree, and I would hope that proof of ethics would be really tough, because if it wasn't, it would really suck that we didn't have one yet, right?
	I mean, so I would strongly suggest it's an audiobook, it's in PDF, they're all free, you have to pay a couple of bucks.
	For the print edition, because it's not free to me, but I hope that you will take a shot at it.
	And I mean, I think that's the most important thing around, you know, we need to have a good clarity and rationality in a system of ethics.
	Yeah. Okay.
	Thanks. Yeah.
	All right. And yes, Chuck Norris is the person who created the reptilians, who created humans.
	Okay. I do know it.
	New York City meet up tonight at flight 151, 151 8th Avenue, New York, New York.
	What time? Eight?
	I don't know. What? Oh, sorry.
	Sorry. This is somebody in the chat room.
	I'm sorry. I've left two people behind.
	I'm done with y'all. Oh, the difference between...
	Somebody's asked the difference between fraud and lying.
	I have no idea what the legal definition is, but the way that I would define it...
	Oh, 6.30. 6.30 p.m.
	The difference between fraud and lying.
	Fraud is knowingly lying in a situation where somebody suffers a significant material disadvantage and has lost money.
	So if I tell you that it's raining when it's not raining, that's lying.
	But it doesn't cause you any material disadvantage.
	If I tell you that I'm going to ship you an iPad if you ship me $500 and I'm lying about that, then you've just lost $500.
	And so that's the difference, I think.
	Okay. Okay.
	Sorry. So, yeah, thanks so much.
	Feel free to call back in if you have, you know, bring that famous Kantian-German rigorous logic to bear on, you know, anything that I say.
	I appreciate you letting me get away with massive generalizations about most of the human race, and I appreciate that.
	I recognize, as I always do, that there are, you know, countless exceptions to all of that.
	And if you do find an example of a matriarchy...
	Nowadays. That would be...
	Yeah, please, please ship me stuff.
	Or even if it's not something current, would it be any...
	Because I'm pretty sure there is.
	As I said, I haven't really researched, but I'm very sure there were, maybe.
	I mean, I don't know if it's correct there, but yeah, for sure.
	It's a great picture, the one in the chat.
	Johnny Depp is there. Oh, is there Johnny Depp?
	What does he say? I don't know.
	I mean, someone, you know, kind of like...
	Johnny Depp says, if you love two people at the same time...
	Oops, now it flicks up again.
	It's very difficult. Oh, if you love two people at the same time, choose the second one, because if you really love the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second.
	Okay. All right.
	We'll call that philosophy.
	Yeah, it's a good one. Okay, well, thank you very much, Stefan.
	Yeah, thanks. Thank you very much.
	Bye. Bye.
	All right. So...
	Do you have to cause someone lost to be fraud or is attempting it fraud?
	Well, it would be attempted fraud versus actual fraud in the same way there's attempted theft versus actual theft.
	Do I have any theories on flow or being in the zone?
	How to achieve it more consistently?
	First of all, I'm so sorry that you've had to repeat that question so many times.
	I know you came up with it last week, maybe even the week before.
	I do apologize for that.
	To me, flow has a lot to do with Don't look down.
	I mean, I swear that half the time, if not more than half the time, I'm doing a podcast, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
	I'm just waiting for the words to come, particularly when I go into the jokey metaphors and so on.
	I'm just hoping that the words come out as my mouth is working.
	I hope that these syllables come out of the wet noise hole that is currently flapping.
	And... It's really just about don't look down unless you're reading.
	If you are crossing a chasm on a rope, it's pretty important to not look down because that's going to freak you out.
	And certainly the scope and size and power and majesty of what it is that I'm trying to achieve or what we're trying to achieve here that...
	It's so monstrous that I just have to grit my teeth and not look down.
	Because if I do, I will falter.
	I don't want to falter. I want to falter for the right reasons.
	The better reason and evidence comes along.
	I think it's something I read many, many years ago.
	It was from a woman who was a fundraiser and a very popular and powerful one.
	She was also a socialist. It doesn't matter what her name is, but she's quite a famous Canadian.
	And she said, you know, if you want to get something done, you just act like it's getting done and it'll happen.
	So if you want to put together a gala and you need a bunch of celebrities to come, some gala dinner to raise money for charity, then you call the celebrities and you say, listen, there's this gala coming on.
	Do you want to come? Not, would you like there to be a gala?
	But this gala is happening and, you know, I hope that you can make it and here's why you should come and here's how it will benefit you and here's how, more importantly, it will benefit others and so on.
	And I remember reading that probably 15 maybe 17 years ago and I thought it was really great I mean if you want to get something done you just act like it's getting done and that's how it happens you just say to people there's a gala dinner that's happening I hope you'll come and that way you end up with a gala dinner and a bunch of people coming and so you don't ask you just tell people stuff's going down and so yeah I wanted to have the best and brightest and Most enticing,
	enjoyable, challenging, alarming philosophy show that the world had ever seen.
	And thanks in large, large, large part to the brilliance of listeners like today and great conversations, the honesty, the openness, the irascibility of the listeners, we have, I think, achieved that.
	And that really was the plan.
	You can't ask for things in this world.
	You need to just go and do them and wait for the world to catch up if it's interested.
	I would love to come to England to visit, and we will work on that.
	A question for the season.
	He said, I got in a small discussion with someone about it.
	I'm wondering your opinion on telling children about a magical fat man who lives on one of the most inhospitable places on earth, Guantanamo, whose primary job it is to use slave labor of small stunted beings to create presents For children.
	When I told this person that I did not plan to lie to my children about this Santa, I was told that I would deprive my children and not let them have fun for the season.
	I get this question a lot, particularly this time of year.
	Santa be Satan. Look, Santa's a guy in a suit.
	Santa is a guy in a suit.
	My daughter, we go to the mall and there's a guy in a suit.
	And that's fine.
	And she says, there's a guy in a suit.
	And I say, yeah, there's a guy in a suit.
	He's dressing up like Santa.
	She understands that. She understands that there's no man with a yellow hat who has a monkey, that it's just a cartoon.
	She's completely fine.
	She says, if she was trying to eat something the other day, she shouldn't have eaten.
	And I said, don't eat it. And she said, Dada, I'm just pretending.
	Or she was telling me to be a grandfather clock because she's currently quite enticed by them.
	And I said, let's play the clapping game.
	And she said, no, Dada, grandfather clocks don't have hands.
	I didn't, of course, explain to her the double meaning of the word hands with clocks, but she's perfectly fine navigating between reality and make-believe.
	And so, yeah, I mean, you know, there's a story called Santa Claus, and people like to tell this story.
	And here's a guy who is dressing up like that story.
	You know, I don't think that delusion is fantasy, is magical, is fun.
	And particularly, of course, when people use Santa, like, if you don't do what I tell you to do, then you're not going to get presents.
	Well, of course, Santa's just democracy, right?
	I mean, that's preparing children entirely too much to lobby politicians when they get older and to say, well, okay, if I do obey the law or if I do follow the herd, then I will get all these goodies.
	And if I don't, Then I won't.
	And so I'm always concerned about magical gift givers in situations of moral authority, whether they're Jesus or the state.
	They cause me concern because that's quite the opposite of rational understanding and philosophy.
	And I'm afraid that the lines are clearly drawn and we are sworn enemies to the chubby man who's always housed by...
	The chubby suit that's always housing an alcoholic of some kind or another.
	And so... So yeah, I mean...
	You know, it's a fun story.
	Nothing wrong with fun stories.
	All right. Well, I think, I mean, we've certainly gone over, and I appreciate that.
	And thank you. Oh, my God.
	How can I thank you people enough?
	How, how, how can I thank you people enough for everything that you do?
	Your participation, your interest, your financial support, your emotional support, your support of the conversation.
	Don't forget, philosophers like to...
	To buy a goodie or two for Christmas, though I am entirely enslaved in buying fun things for Freedom Aid Radio.
	If you would like to send some donations to Freedom Aid Radio, it's of course massively appreciated.
	I never feel, you know, wildly comfortable asking, but it is a necessary part of what needs to be done.
	And so if you'd like to go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donations, I would really appreciate that.
	And FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
	If you want to post this on Facebook, anywhere that you can, I would really appreciate that.
	Why do we cast the net?
	The better. I'm still working off and on on a script for a documentary.
	That's going to take some cash, but I think that it will be a very, very important thing.
	Is the next Summer Barbecue going to be scheduled close enough to Porkfest so we can attend both on one plane trip?
	I hope so. I want to have Stan's babies.
	I appreciate that. If you just turn over a little bit and you might need to get a USB adapter, but I think we can probably work that out.
	And I'm just afraid it won't be particularly enjoyable for you, but that's nothing new given my skills.
	So, next summer barbecue in England.
	I don't think it's called a barbecue.
	Isn't it called a fry up or something like that?
	But yes, so thanks everyone.
	I guess we get a chance to talk.
	Yeah, we talk again before Christmas.
	Yeah, of course we did. We'll talk again on the 18th and then maybe we'll do a Christmas Day show or maybe on Monday we'll figure that out.
	But thank you so much.
	And of course, a last apology to people who misunderstood my Herman Cain video.
	I certainly was not saying that he was a good candidate.
	I am, of course, an anarchist, but I still think that there was...
	Oh, fry up his breakfast. Okay.
	Nothing better than the opening scene of With Nail and I. Just makes you never want to even visit England for the food or to bring your own food or just turn to cannibalism rather than eat all that fried stuff.
	Anyway, thank you so much.

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