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Dec. 23, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:05:17

2061 The Biggest Freedom News of 2011 - And What 2012 Has In Store!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web, discusses current and future events with Vinny Eastwood.

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	Welcome to this very special presentation of the Vinnie Eastwood Show, the Christmas special, if you will, with one of the most influential and infamous, even, social commentators of our times, the fabulous Stefan Molyneux.
	Stefan, welcome to the Vinnie Eastwood Show.
	Thanks, Vinnie. It's good to be back. Could you just explain a little bit about, you know, who you are and what it is you do in terms of the audience?
	Sure. My name is Stefan Molyneux.
	I run a philosophy show, I dare say the philosophy show on the web, called Free Domain Radio at freedomainradio.com.
	Where I have, embarrassingly to say, over 2,500 shows, seven or eight books available.
	Everything's free. It's commercial-free.
	It's a donation-based model. And I try to reason from first principles to solve the problems of ethics, society, politics, relationships, the world.
	Philosophy is like the all-science, the all-discipline.
	It encompasses everything.
	And so... We're good to go.
	Truth can really help them live better, more powerful, more effective lives.
	I would say that at the moment in particular, I feel that we're kind of at a crux, at a crossroads, at a very challenging point in human history.
	I think that now more than ever, we need to be able to make decisions according to first principles, according to Deep integrity according to the moral courage that is necessary to fight back the darkening bat wings of these times.
	So that's my calling.
	I was originally... I mean, I studied at the National Theatre School.
	I went to English.
	I wrote English in college.
	I wrote some plays, some novels.
	I was a software entrepreneur for about 15 years, and then I just started doing this stuff and found that...
	It's a calling. I mean, the other stuff was a job and it was fun, but this is a real calling and I'm very, very pleased and privileged to be able to do it.
	So you're like the Batman of philosophy.
	Tell me how. Do I have a vaguely gay sidekick?
	Do I have a jet propelled car?
	Do I have a utility? Well, I do have a utility belt, but I just use that for role playing.
	Well, I guess there's a little Batman in all of us.
	Wanting to stamp out evil and injustice wherever you see it with whatever weapons you got.
	And in some cases, the weapon that's most dangerous to the enemy is your mind.
	And philosophy, I think, is a great idea to expand your understanding of just who it is we are and where it is we're going.
	And very rarely is that ever considered in government.
	Right. We can't do good unless we know what is true.
	And philosophy, fundamentally, is the art of separating truth from falsehood, that which is real from that which is imaginary.
	And we live, I would argue, in a matrix of words.
	Descartes, many, I guess, 250 odd years ago, wrote a book where he said, what if, and this was a terrifying thought to, I mean, if you really delve into the thought, it can be kind of terrifying.
	He said, what if I'm like a brain in a tank and everything that I feel and perceive and experience is a dream controlled by some sort of demon?
	How would I ever know what is true?
	How would I ever fight my way through to what was real?
	It's the matrix argument, and I believe that we live in a matrix of language, of words, of propaganda, of indoctrination, and fighting your way free of that is...
	It's like a...
	the image that comes to mind is, you know, you're in a submarine that cracks and it's not too far below the surface, but you have to fight your way to the surface, to the air, to that which is breathable rather than living in this artificial containment of culture.
	And I don't mean culture, I don't mean sort of, I'm an enemy of culture, but by culture, I don't mean, you know, the arts.
	I mean, everything which is not true according to science and reason.
	You know, my country is better than your country.
	My history is better than your history.
	My God is better than your God.
	My government is better than your government.
	My army is better than your army.
	All of that seems to be deeply in culture.
	As in the cult part of culture.
	Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, philosophy tries to sweep all of that aside and says, okay, we're going to start with a blank page here.
	We're going to try and resist as much as possible to be sucked into the black hole of historical momentum, that which our culture or society treasures, and say, okay, I'm just going to approach this like...
	A big giant baby space alien at the end of 2001 and look at the world and see what is real and what is not.
	And that is a very alarming and challenging thing to do because what is not real fundamentally is the moral legitimacy of political hierarchies.
	And that is something that when you first begin to see it, It shook me to the core, and I think it shakes people to the core when you realize that, you know, we're just a bunch of mammals using morals to try and climb up on top of each other and exploit each other to the max, and philosophy is the enemy of that, and therefore it is the enemy of all that is unjust and political.
	Well, but I repeat myself.
	Well, you know, like I say, in the end, everything goes back to the beginning.
	Yeah, I mean, certainly the beginning would be, you know, one of the first principles.
	What is true? What is right? What is good?
	And these things can be analyzed and understood philosophically, but it's like a series of dominoes that go down.
	Or it's like, you know, you think, oh, I got a little piece of lint on my sweater, and you pull that piece of lint off, it turns to be the one piece of thread that's holding it all together, and you end up standing...
	You know, with no top on. And so philosophy, by starting from first principles, really does set the individual against the culture that he's in.
	And I think that's healthy. I mean, I sort of view original thinkers as the sort of random genes that move the species forward.
	If we all just did what our ancestors did, we'd all still be, you know, sitting in caves, picking lice out of each other's hair.
	And the forward momentum is the dropkick.
	You mentioned first principles.
	What exactly are the first principles?
	Is there like a list of them? Yeah, I mean, Aristotle came up with a good set, I think, as sort of the three basic laws of logic.
	So, the first law is that A is A, an object is itself and nothing else.
	And the second is to say that an object cannot be both itself and something else at the same time.
	So, an elephant can't be both an elephant and a painting at the same time.
	If you're going to compare two things, it's either one or the other.
	And so if something's true, then it's true.
	If you're putting forward a proposition that's supposed to be universal, that claims to be universal, not I like ice cream, but this is true for everyone at all times, then it's either true or it's false.
	And it has to be either true or false.
	It can't sort of be... Somewhere in the middle.
	So, first principles are things that you just can't get away from, you just can't escape.
	So, for instance, you and I are talking and we're using language.
	Now, if I were to put forward the argument to you, Vinnie, and say, language is incomprehensible, that would be a violation of first principles or what you could call a self-detonating argument.
	A self-detonating argument is an argument that implodes itself through the uttering.
	So, if I say language is meaningless, Then I'm relying on the fact that language has meaning to communicate that language has no meaning.
	Or if I yell in your ear and say, sound does not exist, well, because I'm yelling in your ear, I'm assuming that sound does exist.
	So if I say, sound doesn't exist, right?
	Or if I say to you, I have no self-ownership, but I'm using my own body to make an argument against my own ownership of my own body, because I'm using my vocal cords and my tongue and my lips and my mouth and all that to make the sounds.
	So, this is sort of where you get the basics of philosophy.
	The things which, if you reject them, then you simply cannot have a conversation about truth with anyone.
	The moment you try to convince someone of something, the moment you try to establish something as true, the moment you try to correct someone, you make so many massive assumptions that...
	Everybody wants to vault over those and just start debating all of these details, but if you look at the amount of assumptions built in to me basically saying, Vinny, I'm right and you're wrong, or my argument is right and your argument is wrong.
	Well, I'm accepting that I exist.
	I'm accepting that you exist. I accept that you're responsible for your argument, because I call it your argument.
	I'm accepting that I'm responsible for my argument.
	I accept that sound exists.
	I accept that an objective medium exists between the two of us, sound waves and air.
	I accept that language has meaning.
	I accept that there's something called universal truth, which is better than error.
	And I say, you don't just obey me, like my opinion, like you have to like ice cream, but I'm saying you must obey an indifferent, external, third-party thing called philosophy, reason, evidence, and truth.
	So if you look at how much is built in to simply the act of having a debate, of having an argument, then you've solved a huge number.
	But everybody, you know, they'd like to come up and say, there's no such thing as absolute truth, which of course is an absolute truth statement that says there's no such thing as absolute truth.
	Or they'll say, everything is subjective, but they're using objective language and an objective medium called sound waves and the senses.
	Or they'll say, the senses have no meaning, but...
	Well, the senses are always in error, or the senses have error, but they're using language to communicate through the ears, through the senses, or through writing, that the senses have error.
	So, if you accept that which is embedded in the act of having an argument, you've solved 90% of philosophical problems, but everyone just wants to leap over that and just start debating all these inconsequentials.
	Makes you wonder who's benefiting from a lack of philosophical argument.
	Well, that's a great question.
	Language can be manipulated, and reality cannot.
	So, language can be manipulated.
	So, I can't go into a field, I mean, I guess I can, but it won't work, go into a field and yell at the ground, give me wheat!
	I can go out there, I guess, like King Lear and yell at the storm, but if I yell at the storm, I don't get a roof over my head.
	So, you can't go and manipulate reality.
	Right? Like, I can't jump off a cliff and suddenly say, I can fly!
	And then flap my way off into the sunset.
	And I can't yell at a cow and turn it into a steak.
	So, reality can't be manipulated, but human beings can be.
	And this is why people focus on using language to control people.
	Right? So, if I say...
	Like, I can't yell at the ground and get wheat.
	But I can say to a farmer, listen, I have an invisible friend...
	Who is going to punish you after you die if you don't give me 10% of your wheat.
	And so I can't yell at the ground to make it give me wheat, but I can manipulate and sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt into people and have them hedge their bets by creating massive supernatural punishments to get them to give me wheat.
	So I can't yell at the ground to give me wheat, but I can yell at people to give me wheat, and that's fundamentally why I almost sometimes think that's why language was developed as a tool of predation.
	It sounds like you were just describing the bailouts to me.
	Go ahead. Tell me what you mean.
	I think that's interesting. Well, it's just how the bailouts are just basically making up all this fake stuff and telling everybody that you need to give us all this fake stuff, otherwise we'll implode your fake stuff and make you real suffer.
	Oh, yeah. I mean, there's no question that the argument put forward to the political classes by the economic classes was pure, concentrated, grade A uranium terrorism.
	There's no question of that.
	If you threaten people to blow up their buildings, and if they don't give you money, clearly that's just terrorism and evil and immoral.
	I thought that was just you as foreign policy.
	Yeah, but if you say, well, we're going to detonate, the entire economic system is going to detonate, and millions of people are going to starve unless you give us a couple of trillion dollars.
	I mean, how is that different from, you know, an entirely sophisticated and highly profitable bank robbery, or rather population robbery, which is what it always is.
	So, yeah, I agree.
	I mean, you just create these...
	Pascal, Blaise Pascal, 18th century philosopher, said that...
	17th century, sorry.
	He said that, you know, there was this wager, you know, like you should believe in God because...
	If you believe in God, and there is no God, you've lost a couple of Sundays, you know, you could have slept in or whatever, and you've got some water sprinkled on your head.
	It's no biggie, right? But if you don't believe in God, and there is a Christian God who'll send you to hell, or some other God who'll send you to hell, then you may have saved yourself a couple of Sundays, but then you spend eternity in hellfire and so on.
	And so he just basically said, the wager is, just err on the side of caution.
	Just in case there is one, it's worth it.
	And of course, all that does is it encourages people to come up with the most catastrophic scenarios in order to prey upon others.
	And of course, you heard this all the time.
	You heard this all the time. If we don't get $2 trillion this weekend, Or a trillion dollars this weekend, the entire financial system of the world is going to collapse.
	It's like some ancient civilization and some witch doctor going, if you don't give me 12 virgins and all your gold, there will be a great plague upon your entire crops and they will fail and there will be floods and droughts and all terrible things will happen.
	Oh, it's pure voodoo.
	It's the Federal Voodoo Reserve.
	Yeah. No, it is. And, you know, they give you the sense of urgency.
	I mean, and then it has to be done right now.
	But of course, then they say it has to be done in secret.
	And so you can't get the details until years afterwards.
	And I mean, oh, yeah, it was a complete shakedown and a very effective one and a very powerful one.
	And I mean, what the hell do politicians fundamentally know about all of this stuff?
	They spend their time campaigning, not learning.
	And so it's an incredibly powerful and effective thing.
	And you see this happening all the time.
	All the time you see this happening.
	If we don't go fight those enemies, they're going to come and kill us in our beds, right?
	What did they say about the war on terror?
	We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.
	And, you know, the weapons of mass destruction, we don't want the smoking gun to show up in the form of a mushroom cloud.
	I mean, all you do is create these catastrophic results for people.
	You panic them, you stimulate their amygdala in fight or flight response, and they will just hand over their firstborn.
	People want to survive.
	And if you scare them with enough ugly things, and this is how the state fundamentally works.
	It works on terror and it works on violence.
	And so people, and even in a softer way, right?
	So people will say, well, without the government welfare programs, the poor will starve in the And that's another argument from apocalypse.
	That's what I call them. It's an argument from apocalypse.
	And you know that somebody is full of entirely perfect-level grade-A bullshit when they use the argument from apocalypse.
	If we don't do X, if we don't have government-run education, nobody will be educated.
	You know, if we don't have government pensions, then all of the old people will be eating each other like starving cats in a burlap bag.
	It's just an argument from Apocalypse and it's all nonsense.
	It's when people want to stick their hands in your pocket, you know, they have somebody else bump into you to distract you.
	And the argument from Apocalypse is what distracts you and then you, you know, reach into your pocket and your money's all gone.
	But what's funny is when you tell people about this kind of stuff and that they're doing it all deliberately, they call you a fear monger.
	We're not the ones mongering fear here.
	Have you watched mainstream media ever?
	Well, you know, the mainstream media is entirely fear-mongery.
	I mean, you can see this happening with the Ron Paul racist newsletter complaints for the third decade, I think, they're going into this stuff.
	And it's funny, you know, and the other thing is, it's a conspiracy theory.
	Like, if you say that people in power might have, could conceivably have, interests in common with other people in power, or that human beings have a talent For using language and fear and control and indoctrination to control others.
	When you look around the world, you'd say, well, of course.
	I sort of feel sometimes like, you know, we're like a herd of gazelle, you know, and there are all these lions and they're sort of circling around us.
	And I'm sort of going up to the other gazelles and I'm saying, you know what, I think these lions might be working together.
	You're a conspiracy theorist!
	You know, it's like, well, even lions hunt instinctively in packs.
	Do we not think the ruling classes do that too?
	I mean, of course they do. Yeah, yeah.
	We have a similar joke here in New Zealand where there's a group of sheep and a sheepdog and a farmer and one of the sheep is standing apart from the rest of the herd and he goes, hey, I think the farmer and the dog might be working together.
	They say, shut up Trevor, you and all that conspiracy stuff.
	That's the reason why it's so interesting, isn't it, Stefan, is that for the first time in history, the exact same thing is going on in virtually every single country at the exact same time.
	And it's true testament to the power of these global elite filthy scumbaggery types, is that they really have gained control of the world.
	Yes. Oh, no, there's no question.
	In fact, they've gained control not just of the physical world, but they've gained control through time because they have stolen trillions of dollars, untold trillions of dollars from the future in the forms of national debts and the forms of unfunded liabilities for all of these sheep-tending, pacifying, domesticating programs. They've actually stolen through time.
	I mean, it really is – they're like evil overlords or something.
	I mean, they've really – Are absolutely brilliant.
	I mean, and that they can create a massive crater where the future could be, where our children's children are going to have to stagger through as yoked, tax-based slaves.
	It's astoundingly wonderful in its evil.
	You know, it's like it's a wonderful black, dark comic opera that is going on.
	Although I will say this, though, Vinny, that I will say that...
	Sorry, go ahead. You use the word evil.
	I talked to somebody at the Occupy protest yesterday, and she agreed that, yes, this is all evil, but they never use the word evil to describe the problems when they're at Occupy.
	They always use the word greedy, because, you know...
	Look, a fact's a fact, and you have a look at the facts, you have a look through history, you have a look at the history of all these people and all the people that are currently in power now and what all their backgrounds are, what their intentions are, and you can see it as nothing less than evil, based on the facts alone,
	opinion assigned. And people, for some reason, they think as a public relations type message that you need to retract on calling something out for what it is, because it'll turn people off, as if the truth itself is too harsh for people to take, ergo, we need to soften the blow.
	Do you agree with that approach, or do you think that it should all just be a sledgehammer to the face truth?
	Oh yeah, no, the hour is getting late, as the man sang.
	No, we absolutely need to pull out all the stops and not be afraid of simple and clear rhetoric.
	Look, the word evil is used a lot in the world, and almost always it's used incorrectly.
	And so...
	Somebody who is pulled over and has an unlit joint in the armrest of his car could go to jail.
	And we don't throw people in jail for being good, and we don't throw people in jail for having different tastes in food.
	We throw people in jail because they're evil, because they're immoral, because they must be punished.
	And so we're willing to say that some guy with a piece of wrapped up vegetation who's doing no harm to anyone, he's not using it while he's driving, which could be dangerous, but that man is evil.
	And yet we will not say to people who start unjust wars that cause millions of people to be displaced and hundreds of thousands or over a million Iraqis to be slaughtered, we won't call those people evil.
	The people who steal from the future, we will not call them evil.
	The people who run up debts, we will not call them evil.
	And it really is astounding.
	Even if we were to accept that the guy with the joint is evil, which of course he's not, but even if we were to accept that, let's get our damn priorities straight and look at who is actually doing the real evil in the world.
	And what I was going to say earlier is that the one thing that I will say that is...
	I progress, you know, the progress of the moral march up this ice cliff to the future, which we sometimes feel like we're sort of digging our teeth in and climbing up that way in our toenails.
	The moral march up the cliff is in inches.
	It's measured in inches. And the one thing that is positive is...
	It's that the ruling classes used to profit and prey and appease their sadistic impulses through world wars.
	I mean, that was a story of the 20th century.
	Now, it's just theft rather than murder.
	That's what we call the growth or the progress of the species.
	They're just... It's stealing from us now.
	They're not actually getting us killed by the millions, at least not directly.
	So, from that standpoint, I mean, you have to sort of look at a battle of inches.
	There has been some progress.
	Now, I would say part of that is sort of the moral awareness and part of that is the internet.
	And part of that also, of course, is the fact that the ruling classes are subjected to war in a way that they weren't before because of nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction.
	You can't just order a war like you could in the First and Second World Wars and be safe At home, you're actually subject to it now.
	So, you know, as soon as the rulers were threatened by weapons, they actually found a way to negotiate or steal without quite as much slaughter, or at least not as much slaughter among the people who have weapons of mass destruction.
	So, again, it's not a lot to hang your hat on, but it is progress of a kind.
	Well, going back to the gazelles, as you talked about, with the lions circling around, I don't see it as kind of like a war of attrition of a one front or anything like that.
	I think it's a complete 360 degree front and the lions are moving in inch by inch by every degree.
	And that's...
	What people have to recognise is that it's not an isolated problem, it is not an exclusive problem, it is everybody's problem, and it really is everybody's problem, right here, right now, in every single way.
	If you're sitting anywhere, at any point, in a modern city today, you are being poisoned.
	Straight away. And a lot of the stuff, all this wireless electricity and EMF waves and everything like that, there's plenty of alternatives available that are actually even cheaper and easier to make that don't emit all those dangerous waves that make people sick.
	Actually, I think I just read a report that Wi-Fi somewhat disables sperm cells.
	Anyway. We have an incredibly low sperm count now.
	All over the place, don't we?
	In the Western world, men, sperm count down like 70%, 80%, 90%.
	It's out of control.
	I come from a family of five kids and, you know, the rest of them have like eight, ten kids or whatever.
	And then you have a look at families nowadays.
	One, two, maybe three's like, wow, wow.
	Everybody's being eugenicized.
	Yeah, I mean, I think there's some sperm count issues.
	I mean, people, of course, are getting stuck in.
	I mean, you have to go to college to even get some rescuing from the crap education you get throughout your childhood and teenage years, so that delays people getting started.
	When the economy is bad, people breed less.
	Yeah, definitely. The demographics of population replacement in the West is a slowly falling tombstone on our culture.
	But this is what happens to people who don't defend the values that they inherited.
	We inherited values of skepticism against big government.
	We inherited values of skepticism against big religion.
	We inherited values of skepticism against all forms of unjust authority.
	And... We just tossed them aside.
	We just dropped them. After the Second World War, when all of the socialist intellectuals who'd produced the living hells of national socialism and fascism in Italy and communism in Russia, when they all fled the collapsing cathedrals of their violent fantasies and they all came to North America, they just, you know, through the GI Bill, they just infected all the new people coming back from the war with all the socialism, and then we got that, you know, lo and behold, a generation later.
	It's just, you know, as the time gets longer, as the turnaround gets harder, I think basically the only way that people are going to change, and this is, you see this very commonly throughout history in Arab Spring, is to do with people were starving, because when you live on two bucks a day and the price of wheat doubles, then you're toast, unless you have a revolution.
	Tiananmen Square, I mean, the students were starving.
	They weren't just idealists standing up to tanks for the sake of democracy.
	They were hungry. And unfortunately, if you don't make decisions according to reason and evidence, you end up having to make decisions at an extremity according to urgent biological needs like food and water.
	And I think it's going to have to come to that because people simply seem unrousable in a fundamental way.
	I think there's been too much dumbing down.
	I think there's been too much avoidance.
	I think there's too much shame among the older people in particular about the world that they're sending down the pipe to their children.
	So I think, you know, much though we've struggled, most of us have struggled for many decades to wake people up I don't think it's going to be quick or fast enough to avoid a significant change.
	Hopefully people will wake up when they're hungry because they're not waking up when they're being reasoned with.
	Well, I think there will be an accelerating course of that time, but I believe wholeheartedly that it's not just waking up people that we need to be focusing on.
	It's also what happens, you know, just in your daily life.
	What do you do after you wake up?
	You go to work. And that's what people need to do, is not only wake up to the new world or to go to work against it.
	Motivating people to start their own radio shows, their own websites, blogs, start supporting...
	Well, and confront the damn people in your life.
	You know, people, sorry to interrupt, but people don't want to upset the people in their life.
	Oh, there he goes again off on his thing.
	Oh, there he goes on his libertarian thing.
	Oh, there he goes talking about Ron Paul again.
	Or there he goes talking about this, that, and the other.
	I mean, people say, well, I don't want to bother my family, I don't want to bother my friends, and so on.
	Well, you know what will bother them?
	Dictatorship. I think that will bother them a whole lot more than being nagged at about dinner to wake up to the reality of where the world is and where it's heading.
	This is, you know, classic pre-tyranny movements that are occurring in the world today, and...
	Bother people. You know, bother people because, you know, the worst thing you want to do is, I don't know, just stand in some detention camp with someone saying, well, you know, at least I didn't disturb your dinner three Thanksgivings ago.
	Aren't you happy? Yeah, yeah.
	Well, it's like Alex Jones always says, you have been warned.
	I think you have to sound growler, but yeah, I guess I get the point.
	And it is tough. Of course, people don't want to hear, and everybody sort of believes that tomorrow's going to be kind of like yesterday.
	And historically, that's not what happens.
	On that point, you know how people sometimes don't get a positive response when they tell people about, you know, the truth?
	And they start to hold a pin on their fellow man.
	They start to get kind of upset with them and call them sheeple and slaves and be derogatory and all that kind of jazz.
	You ever feel like that?
	You ever feel like, oh, these people are just scum as well, maybe the New World Order's right?
	I've actually talked to many people who have done some deep research, and they've found themselves agreeing with the New World Order that, yes, we do need to be controlled.
	Yes, we don't know what's good for ourselves.
	I can't understand that mentality because most of the people that I meet are genuine, decent, hardworking, and honorable individuals.
	So how could a society where honorable, decent, hardworking individuals figure stuff out for themselves?
	How could that go wrong?
	Well, and I agree with you.
	Most of the people I meet are very nice and cordial and pleasant and polite and concerned and considerate and so on, right?
	I mean... People, I'm carrying my daughter, people will open the door.
	People are very civil. But you see, that is what I call community.
	That is what I call the world that we live in.
	And that is a great world, and that is a wonderful world.
	And I really like that world.
	That's the world where you tip your waiter well, if your waiter does a good job.
	That's the world where you give up your seat on the bus to the pregnant lady.
	And that is a real world.
	It's a wonderful world that we live in.
	That's not the world that...
	The world lives in, right?
	The world lives in these weird hierarchies where politicians can pass laws at whim to throw people in jail indefinitely without trial, where they can start wars, where they can steal from future generations.
	There's this weird, twisted medieval helmet that is on the normal, smiling, happy, fleshy head of humanity, which we really have to look at very critically.
	Most people are very nice, and most people would never imagine using force To compel you to do what they want, right?
	I mean, they'll come knock on the door, they'll ask for money, and maybe you'll give them, maybe you won't, but they'll have charity.
	But they would never dream of taking a gun, you know, putting it square on your forehead and say, give me money for my good cause, or, you know, I'm going to shoot you, or I'm going to kidnap you, I'm going to put you in my windowless van and throw you in my basement.
	They would never imagine that.
	And that is the virtue of humanity that we must trust.
	And it's not an imaginary trust.
	It's a very real trust.
	Most people, I believe, are good in social circumstances.
	And that's the trust mentality within the general community, but when you visit into hierarchical structures in major organizations such as government, business, or the media, you have a very, very different structure indeed, where it's not necessarily about loyalty and politeness and being kind and judicially discreet about things and what have you.
	It's about getting to the top.
	Kind of like on a pond, you notice if it goes stagnant, the scum floats right to the top.
	Right, right, right.
	And the challenge is always to say to people, this basic decency and voluntarism that you live in, like you want a job, you'd never imagine kidnapping the guy's kids until he gives you the job.
	If you want a date with a woman, you'd never imagine putting a burlap sack over her head and dragging her into a car.
	You ask and you accept rejection like any mature person.
	If you're an actor, you want a job, you go for an audition.
	If they say no, you're upset, but that's it.
	Trying to say to people that this is the world that we want.
	This is the world that you have when you interact with your fellow man on a face-to-face basis.
	That is the world that we want.
	That is paradise.
	That is utopia. That is peace. It is not perfect because it's life and life is messy, but it is sustainable and it is peaceful and it is good.
	But getting people to say, okay, well, how I deal with people in my life is how people should be dealt with in general in their lives.
	People have a very tough time, right?
	They have a tough time piercing through that layer of bullshit where morality gets reversed, right?
	So you and I can't use violence to achieve some good that we want, but the government can, and must, and is considered good.
	It's evil if we do it, boink, you flip it around.
	It's virtuous for the government to do it.
	If a guy in a foreign country kills someone and he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he's a murderer.
	If he's wearing a green costume, he might be a hero, he might get a pension, he might get a parade.
	It's this weird, you just do this flip, this reverse, where suddenly you're in a black-is-white, up-is-down moral antiverse, where good has become evil and evil has become good.
	And getting people to see that the world that we live in, where we interact with each other on a daily basis, That is how society should work.
	That is the way society does work.
	And we've got to combat this opposite, negative, ugly, medieval, vicious world of brutality that is currently used to rule what are, in general, very good and very nice people.
	But getting them to take a stand with you on the wall is the tough part, right?
	Isn't it funny though that all the good, nice, decent people who live in this world get badly affected by it, and because they've had bad experiences, like perhaps going to war in Iraq, they come home with lots of trauma and wind up becoming bad people.
	Because nobody helps them through it other than giving them pharmaceutical drugs and everybody.
	It's like these people are a manufactoryum of scumbaggery.
	If you enter into the structure, you will not come out of it an honest, decent person if you've been in there long enough.
	No, and you know that there are more deaths from suicide than combat in the U.S. military.
	I think it's around 5,000 a year veterans kill themselves.
	What's one of the main side effects of antidepressant drugs that they're giving all the soldiers?
	Suicidality and violence, yeah.
	Connection!
	Bingo!
	Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
	We can't make that connection, Stefan, because it might threaten the profit margins of certain giant pharmaceutical major death factoriums.
	Yeah, no, it's brutal.
	I mean, cattle are dispatched more humanely than some of these people who go through these grueling combat tours, come home and put on these, you know, vicious drugs and then kill.
	I mean, it's just brutal. I mean, if somebody did that to a cow, you know, it's amazing.
	You know, the government has laws against cockfighting.
	Because, you see, that's cruel.
	It's cruel to put two birds in a ring and have them fight.
	That's what the government has laws against.
	And I think some sports guy in the US got fined or went to jail for getting involved in cockfighting, you see, because that's wrong.
	That's brutal. But war gets you yellow ribbons on the car and parades.
	It really is.
	You know, just trying to square these circles is mad.
	Unless you were a returning Vietnam vet.
	Yeah, or the Gulf War vets with these mysterious maladies that they got from potentially radioactive weapons and so on.
	I mean, it's hideous. And there's also the vaccines that they put them on.
	When they say, sign your life away on this dotted line, they mean it.
	They own you for life.
	And many of the people there who experience going through military testing is basically almost all combat now is really considered testing, isn't it?
	Because they've got all new weapons and all new vaccines and all new pills and something like 25% to 35% of active duty, you know, combat troops in Iraq are on medications as well.
	So it's a massive festival in there.
	How many private corporations are involved with contracting to military intelligence or even just setting up the bases, building them, that kind of thing?
	Huge quantity of money tied up in all this.
	Well, that's because the government doesn't do a damn thing, pretty much, right?
	I mean, you don't see the United Way, a private charity, going saying, well, you know what, we better subcontract out to the Department of Health and Welfare from the government so we can really get some effective stuff done.
	Oh, it's because the government can't get anything done.
	It gets all clogged up with bureaucracy and paperwork and make work, so they have to hire people to actually get things done.
	And yeah, of course, governments love to be able to hand out money outside the bureaucracy because it guarantees further vote buying and donations from big corporations.
	It is part of the, you know, there's this terrible set of events that are put in motion, Vinny, you know, when When a society just sort of says, okay, you know, it's almost like they say we give up.
	We're just going to hand over all this power to the government, and we're just going to hope to God that it's going to solve the problem that we're throwing at it.
	You know, poverty or education or peace or defense or whatever.
	You're going to throw this at the government, but you set it in this terrible series of events get set in motion.
	I mean, you're just talking about these meds.
	Just reading a good book called Anatomy of an Epidemic.
	Well, the guy talks about, you know, after the Second World War, the government began to seriously fund mental health.
	And what happened?
	Well, you know, it went down the mudslide pit.
	You know, in the 1960s, in certain years, one in three Americans was on a psychotropic drug.
	In... You know, Valium or what was called Milktown back then and all these other things which are all touted as the new miracle cures.
	One in three!
	And of course, you set up this system where the people who are paying for it don't write the prescriptions and the people who are writing the prescriptions don't pay for it.
	So the doctors can hand out this stuff to people rather than have them examine their own lives or say, you know, the reason you feel anxious, Leonardo DiCaprio, is because you're on the Titanic and it's sinking and you damn well should be anxious and you should damn well get to a lifeboat.
	No, no, no. Just give people some drugs and say everything's fine.
	You know, maybe your porthole has tilted.
	It's not like the water is tilting or anything.
	It's not like we're going down. And so you set these terrible things in motion.
	The moment you hand over a monopoly of medical care to government, either in terms of licensing or genuine socialist healthcare system, the moment you turn over things to the government, you set in motion these terrible series of events.
	It's like this horrible Goldberg machine.
	That just ends up with machetes and guillotines.
	It's just hideous. And people don't see that at the beginning, but I think we're closer to the end in seeing how it's working now or not.
	Yeah, yeah. Well, wrapping up 2011, what in your mind have been the major events of 2011?
	I'll let you start with that one while I gather my thoughts, if that's all right.
	I was thinking Libya.
	Libya is one of the major things that really kind of stuck out for me in 2011.
	And also Fukushima, that giant freaking earthquake, that's a real rough one there.
	The second Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand where we lost 158 people.
	And it's amazing when you look back on years as somebody who reports the news, just how much of those events actually involve fear, pain and suffering and death.
	Yeah, I think that I would view 2011 as the year of the collapse of statism as a philosophy.
	I think I did a series in, I think it was 2009, where I said statism is dead as a philosophy, and I think that we really saw the last death throes of statism as a philosophy in 2011.
	The approval rating of Congress at the moment in America is 6%.
	And that's, you know, congressmen, their kids, their mistresses, their gay bathroom stall sex partners, their constituents, those who are dependent upon them for handouts and goodies.
	But effectively, there's almost zero support for government in the United States.
	I'm not sure where it is elsewhere in the world.
	I have not heard of...
	A major government program initiative that has had any traction or any success.
	You know, there's massive opposition to the bailouts.
	There's exhaustion with climate change and a perception that governments just have no intention.
	I mean, Canada signed Kyoto and our emissions have gone up 24% since then and we just pulled out of Kyoto because we were about to get hit with billions of dollars in penalties.
	And so everyone gets that it's not solving any problems.
	They're not solving any problems, and they've created far more problems than they've attempted to solve.
	And the shit has really hit the fan, you know, with the baby boomers retiring and the pension schemes and public sector workers being so vastly underfunded, the healthcare systems unable to take in the massive influx that's going to be occurring of an aging population, lack of new tax livestock to pay for, you know, not only lack of savings but massive debt as we go into this demographic twilight.
	So I think the biggest thing in 2011 has just been a massive collapse in belief in the state as an agency that can solve problems.
	And I think compared to, I mean, I started doing this kind of activism almost 30 years ago.
	And back then, I mean, you couldn't criticize the government without people looking at you like you were coming out of a children's party having shot Santa Claus in the kneecap.
	I mean, you couldn't do it.
	And now, I mean, the level of hostility and skepticism, fear and antagonism towards government is just astounding.
	And I think it's an intellectual powder keg just waiting to be let.
	Yeah, that's right, actually.
	I mean, I'm, as you can tell, pretty vocal against the government and talk about it around lots and lots of different people.
	And very, very rarely do I have somebody who actually defends the government.
	They're like, well, yep, yep, you're right.
	And they ask him, you can't trust him, and you can't do this, you can't do that.
	They're going to take that from you.
	They're going to take this from you.
	It's as if the government is a never-ending black hole vampire.
	If it doesn't just crush you, it'll certainly suck the lifeblood out of you.
	Well, and I mean, I grew up in England in the 1970s when, I mean, I couldn't miss all of the stuff that was going on.
	Obviously, there were the IRA attacks and we were always told as kids even to watch out for unattended shopping bags in bus shelters and stuff like that.
	That was our, you know, war on terror, so to speak.
	But back in the day when Margaret Thatcher tried to, you know, privatize that which had been formerly nationalized by the Labour government after the Second World War, the coal and gas and oil, all the stuff that was going on in England.
	I mean, there were coal strikes in winter where people were freezing to death.
	But the majority of the population seemed to be behind the unions.
	And you've got all of these Norma Rae movies about these sort of proud, happy unions and so on.
	And now, I guess it's 30 years later or 25 years later...
	No, 30 or more years later, 40 years later now, it's a completely different kettle of fish.
	Now government unions are, I think, rightly perceived as a bunch of entitled whiners who are like fat cells in the arteries of the economy.
	And people have really got a lot of skepticism.
	Like, for instance, they're talking about the post office in the U.S. is facing massive cuts and this and that.
	Nobody seems to give a shit.
	I mean, in the past, this would have been, you know, protests in the streets and save our postal workers, our noble, heroic, you know, postal workers, and now people just like, yeah, you know, screw them.
	I mean, it's nothing but junk mail anyway.
	I get everything through email, and I can't stop these people from stuffing pizza coupons in my house.
	So it really is, you know, when was the last time that anybody credibly put forward the argument that we can improve government education by giving it more money?
	You don't hear that argument anymore because everybody gets that it's got nothing to do with more money.
	And this is incredible.
	What a collapse in a socialist run that really, you could say, began in the West in the sort of mid to late 19th century, took a real step forward with Fabian socialism at the turn of the last century, and then took a massive step forward when socialism got the magic monopoly money of centrally printed fiat currency with the and then took a massive step forward when socialism got the magic monopoly money of centrally printed fiat I mean, that party is coming to an end, and it has been 150 years of progressively diminishing
	Now, with the exception, and it's very important to mention that, of course, with the exception of women and minorities who damn well should have got their equality long before, but...
	This death of the idea that we can just shovel problems, you know, just catapult problems over the old medieval bloody fence of statism and have magic elves of murder work on them to the benefit of all.
	Nobody believes that anymore.
	Nobody puts that forward credibly.
	I mean, a few old dinosaurs like Paul Krugman say, well, the problem with the stimulus package is it wasn't big enough.
	You try telling that to the average American that the banks should have gotten more of their money and see how well it flies.
	But this is very different from what it was 30 years ago.
	Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm sure that's something his girlfriend told him, is that it's just not big enough.
	Yeah, I need more of a stimulus package than your soup strainer can provide.
	And if there's no stimulus, there might be ramp deflation.
	That's right, followed by depression.
	And stagflation.
	You mean if you go to a stag party, you inflate?
	Yeah, I can believe that. I like reindeer, you know, and a tight pantyhose.
	Anyway. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
	In fact, I have some reindeer regalia that I could put on my head, but we'll save that for another Christmas episode.
	You'll need a widescreen video camera for that, for sure.
	Yeah, that's true, that's true.
	And they must have blinking lights.
	I mean, this is our Christmas special, and it is quite festive, I think we'll agree.
	Yes, yes, yes, yes. Sorry, but that's fantastic.
	So the fact that there's been a collapse in...
	In support for the state, this is why I say I really believe 2012 is going to be a crossroads, because with a collapse in an existing paradigm comes the potential for good things to happen or really, really bad things to happen.
	This is the way that the pendulum swings, right?
	I think as the pendulum swings back and forth, things get better and worse at the same time.
	Well, yeah, certainly in any improvement in society, things are going to get better for some and worse for others.
	And they're generally going to get worse for everyone to begin with, right?
	I mean, that's just, you know...
	So, I mean, if you sort of look at Russia at the turn of the century, you had the sort of moderate Democrats fighting against the, you know, crazy, rabid Bolsheviks.
	And there was an improvement.
	And, you know, for I think a decade or so, Russia began to function more or less like on its way to Western democracy and capitalism.
	the serfs were liberated and so on.
	And then there was a backlash.
	And this is what always happens when there's some growing freedoms, is there's always a backlash against that from the people who are preying on the evils, right?
	When, when the evil gets beaten back, they, you know, they attack.
	I mean, you look at what's happening with Governor Walker in Wisconsin when he tries to take on the public sector unions in very minor ways.
	I mean, they go completely hysterical.
	They have recall elections, they have massive protests, sit-ins, they're throwing bricks through windows, I mean, the death threats.
	I mean, this is what happens when you try to do any good in the world, is you attract all the evil, rabid vampire bats on the planet.
	And that's, of course, I mean, it's actually a great sign that Ron Paul's being attacked, because it means that he's actually having some impact.
	If he wasn't having any impact, he wouldn't be attacked.
	So I think it's really, really important, because if people say...
	Well, you know, we're sick of the current system.
	We don't believe in the current system.
	The current system sucks and must be fundamentally changed.
	If they say, well, the problem is freedom.
	The problem is the free market.
	The problem is capitalism or corporations or whatever you want to call it.
	There's some element of voluntarism and free trade.
	Then, I mean, you're just going to end up in a socialist hell, you know, for a couple of generations before people learn that lesson.
	So we hope it doesn't have to get worse before it gets better.
	But if we can make the point...
	That it is not voluntarism that has failed.
	It is violence that has failed.
	It's violence that always and forever will fail in an individual's life and in a society's life.
	We all understand that a man who beats his wife cannot beat the love into her.
	And we all understand that a parent who beats his or her child cannot beat the love into that child.
	We also understand that if you use state violence to achieve your ends, you will not You will not jail virtue.
	You will not indebt virtue into society.
	So as long as we get people to understand that it is violence that has failed, then we can begin to look at ways that we can restructure society without this core predatory monopoly of force at the center of society and align it so that society is like you and a waiter.
	It's like you and a date. It's like you and a job applicant.
	It's like you and a job interviewer.
	That's how society should be structured.
	That's how it works. So we've just got to stay down this Gorgoth of force and extract it from society.
	We've outgrown it.
	Well, I think the personification of what we're talking about here is probably Occupy Wall Street, because that's going on all over the world, all the people recognizing that there's so many problems that we can't even produce a list of demands about which problems all need to be solved.
	And being demonized in the media, and as you said, that's a good sign, isn't it?
	But here's an interesting thing.
	With Auckland Occupy, they moved out yesterday.
	Just going to another park or something happened because they had been told to leave.
	And guess how many police showed up to evict them?
	Was it five to one?
	Not one.
	No police showed up to evict them?
	Not one. Wow.
	I couldn't see a cop anywhere.
	And the protesters were packing up their own stuff.
	And the police had submitted evidence in court supporting the protesters' right to be them.
	And the judge overruled it.
	And they just asked him to leave.
	That's a blow against my prejudice and I'm completely overjoyed to have been so wrong.
	That's a delightful thing to hear.
	I mean, that's a wonderful thing to hear.
	So that's a peaceful resolution that we can all be looking at as a good example.
	Look what they've done in New Zealand.
	And use no pepper spray, just use the court, and the people are lawfully obliged to do it, so they do it.
	They'll just go somewhere else, set up another occupation camp just down the road at another park.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm no expert on the Occupy movement, but I don't think that they are knowledgeable enough.
	It takes a lot of deep research, study, and thought to figure out what the world's problems are.
	I mean, before I started broadcasting, I was sort of thinking for 20 years or more.
	And I think that a lot of them are, you know, hippie socialists, frankly, and I think they may be working in the wrong direction.
	I think they are working in the wrong direction, which is fine.
	You know, my question is always not whether somebody's right or wrong, but are they open to reason and evidence?
	Because, Lord knows, we all make mistakes, we all go the wrong direction at times, but, you know, we've got to reorient ourselves according to reason and evidence and philosophy, and that's Where I'm not sure that they're going to make that leap.
	But, you know, time will tell for sure.
	Well, see, a symbol can be used for whatever purposes you want, as far as I'm concerned.
	And for me, that's what Occupy really is.
	It's simply a symbol.
	All those other people who can't go out there and camp out and all that kind of thing, who do want change, who still have to pay the bills and do their radio shows and all of that kind of stuff, They can't be there to represent.
	They would if they could.
	But, as it turns out, the only people who go down there are the people that, for a large extent, don't represent their views.
	So it's a strange situation.
	We've got ourselves in here.
	And I think that's what humanity is really about, ultimately.
	There's a whole bunch of people with incredibly different ideas coming together and just doing something together anyway, despite the fact that they disagree on a lot of things.
	Yeah, and as long as the... As long as the protesters are accepting that there's something fundamentally wrong, to put it as mildly as possible, with our current system, fantastic.
	Then they're going to start looking. You know, if you don't think you're lost, you're never going to check your map.
	And they're checking their map. I hope that they find the North Star of reason, evidence, and philosophy.
	But at least they're stopping to check their map.
	And I think that's fantastic. Now moving on from 2011 and Occupy, we want to talk about 2012 and what might be in store for us in the future.
	We've got a whole bunch of plans the government's had in New Zealand here, selling off state assets, signing up Trans-Pacific Partnership agreements, the equivalent of NAFTA or GATT. Bringing us into, let's say, an Oceania Union, and there's a whole bunch of messy, nasty sort of stuff to take away people's civil rights, copyright laws, and, well, basically, it's just exactly the same as what's happening in America.
	Well, I've made this argument for many years that you're going to see...
	I mean, the government has gained a huge amount of power from its dependent classes, right?
	So you create a massive group of people who are dependent on the US. And in the US, it's insane.
	It's gone from like 15% to almost 40% of people who depend upon the government for a significant portion or majority or all of their income.
	Yeah. And so the government has basically bought votes through bribery and through the bribery of magic money through debt and inflation.
	And so the government has taken that approach to gathering and maintaining its power.
	And that game is up.
	That game is done.
	It's over. And one of the reasons why I believe that the financial collapse happened when it did and the reason that there was so much money transferred out is that there's no money.
	There's no money. Get as much as you can before everybody goes into the vault and see that it's empty.
	Just scrape the last few bits of gold off the floor.
	So, what is going to happen, and you will begin to see it, I think, this coming in 2012, is that the government will simply start to talk about sacrifice.
	This is what governments always do.
	They'll either start a war, or they'll print lots of money.
	I don't think that there'll be many more wars.
	I think there's a lot of war exhaustion in the West, and war skepticism and the anti-war movement, while it's not been able to prevent any wars that we know of, has created a war skepticism that has made the rulers more hesitant in plunging into more foreign murder fests.
	I do think, though, that the dependent classes, the government's going to turn on them, and there's going to be a significant realignment where the government is going to start to value the entrepreneurs and the producers and the corporations.
	The media is going to follow suit with positive portrayals of corporations and business and how it benefits people.
	And you'll start to see a little bit of an influence of free market economics seep into it.
	You can see this happening already that the standard evil villains in movies are no longer always just big real estate developers or oil tycoons or whatever.
	But you're starting to see evil villains show up in terms of people on the lower classes dependent on the government and also people in government, bureaucrats.
	And you can even see the odd villain showing up as a union leader against is unheard of in the past.
	And so there's going to be this reorientation towards, you know, you've got to start standing on your own two feet, independence and sacrifice and courage.
	And, you know, we've all got to tighten our belts.
	We've all got to pull together. And, you know, I mean, it won't be here's some free cat food for the old people, but there's definitely going to be, because the cupboard is bare, everyone's going to have to be asked to tighten their belts.
	These people are not going to go down with the ship.
	They're very smart at running the human farm.
	And they recognize they've got too many dependent cattle and they don't have enough cattle producing milk.
	So they're just going to change the story.
	It's going to be, you know, like 1984.
	We have always been at war with East Asia.
	So they're just going to change the story.
	And the new story is going to be that, you know, we need to stand on our own two feet.
	We've become too dependent on government.
	You know, we... You know, people have become too entitled, there's too much fat in the system, and there'll be this whole new narrative that's going to allow the government to shed a bunch of jobs, kick people into the private sector, where, you know, they'll adapt.
	I mean, people fight like crazy against change, but when change comes, almost everyone just adapts and is usually happier thereby.
	So, I think that there's a significant possibility of increases in liberty through 2012 and 2013.
	But it's going to be very hard because there's a lot of people who are going to suffer enormously.
	Think of people who've got four kids on welfare and no dads around.
	It's going to be very, very hard.
	Unfortunately, that's what it has to be.
	If it wasn't hard to quit heroin, everybody would start using heroin when they got upset.
	It's hard to quit addictions and that's why you shouldn't get involved in them to begin with.
	This is one of the worst addictions of all.
	But, I mean, that's sort of the one side.
	Now, the other side is that if the narrative of, you know, force and dependence has failed, if that narrative doesn't succeed, then the other narrative is, you know, these bastard capitalists have stolen from the old people, and then there'll be just this, you know, like...
	Robespierre, Reign of Terror, against the last remnants of the productive classes, and then we're all going to go in the shitter together.
	It's going to be like, you know, we're going to be watching our own feet go into the woodcheper like in Fargo.
	So I think that we're poised between the two, and I think it's very important to pump the narrative forward, the true narrative.
	Which is that we've got to stop using force to try and get what we want collectively.
	It's always going to result in these kinds of disasters.
	Once we get people to put down the gun and talk to each other, we have a chance.
	If we can't make that work, then we're going to hit another dark age for sure.
	I think you're right. And that was something that occurred to me a couple of days ago.
	You can't force anybody to do anything.
	And you really shouldn't.
	Because you never get the result that you want by forcing somebody to do something that they don't want to do.
	Yeah, I mean, just to go back to our earlier thing, remember how in the, I think it was in the early 1950s when the government began to take over the mental health care field?
	Yeah, I remember that. I was there.
	It was tiny, right? I mean, so their point, their goal was, you know, well, we're just going to mop up the last few bits of problems in the mental health field, and now...
	You've got over a thousand Americans every day becoming permanently or semi-permanly disabled through mental illness and so on.
	You've got a massive multiplication of mental disorders, endless drugging of children as young as two or three years old.
	I mean, this is what happens.
	Say, oh, we're going to make everybody mentally healthier by having the government come in.
	You always get the opposite of what you want when you use force.
	And it can't be sustained.
	And, you know, we just have to keep...
	Keep guiding ourselves. Look back down at that compass.
	Look back down at that principle.
	Is this violent? Is this peaceful?
	Is this violent? Is this voluntary?
	Is this a gun or is this a handshake?
	And every time it's a gun, we've got to say, no, this is not how we can run society because we know where this leads.
	And I just hope that we can get that narrative out.
	Suffice to say, also the product of propagandistic manipulation of the masses and general mind control of sorts.
	That's another thing that's really difficult because also while they might just very well hit you with a billy club or spray you in the face with pepper spray, they'll also brainwash you and your entire family and community with BS over the airways for the entirety of your life so that you probably won't even wake up from it, especially if you've also been to public school.
	You know, Vinny, I appreciate that, and I understand that, but I can't give people the out called brainwashing anymore.
	Not since the internet. I just can't.
	And not since, like, I did a show recently about criticizing the baby boomers, and lots of boomers, of course, wrote to me and said, well, you know, the money was stolen from us, and so, you know, it's like, well, okay, let's say that it was.
	Does that mean you now get to steal from the young?
	No. The money was stolen from you and you didn't rise up and protest it.
	I mean, I knew and my friends all knew that we were never going to get our pensions back when we were 12 and 13.
	It wasn't that hard to figure out.
	Or, you know, they'd say, well, we only had three television stations.
	It was all Walter Cronkite, and we never got the truth, and this and that and the other.
	But there was dissident media even back then.
	There were libraries. There were, you know, ways to educate yourself.
	I mean, there was Robert Lefebvre.
	There was Ayn Rand.
	There were lots of people writing even in the 50s and earlier.
	Von Mises was writing from the 20s and onwards.
	You could get a hold of this information, but I do grant that it was harder to do it back in the day.
	But, you know, post-internet, I mean, for the last 15 years or so, I can't give people the out when the truth is a click away.
	I can't give people the out called propaganda when there's this unbelievable...
	It's an astoundingly inventive and engaging instantaneous human library of rational thought and evidence that's out there.
	You really have to work hard to avoid any kind of mention of the peace that's possible in the world.
	So, I can't give people that out anymore.
	I'd love to in a way, because it would be nicer.
	You know, if you'd said in the past, you know, well, the way that, you know, imagine if everybody had access to the full freedom, the full library of human freedom at the click of a button in everybody's household immediately, or there was, you know, huge thousands of free podcasts and audio books and articles that people could get and download and listen to wirelessly anywhere in the house or put them in their car.
	And, you know, you'd say, well, wow, that's about as good as we could conceivably get as far as the propagation of freedom went.
	You can't get any better.
	I mean, we're supposed to telepathically beam the messages of freedom into people's head using some Vulcan mind meld?
	I mean, this is as accessible and as possible as it's ever going to get.
	They do have these monodirectional speakers where you can point the beam at somebody, they're going to be up to a couple of 200 meters away or something, and only they can hear it.
	Is that right? I believe I've been called a monodirectional speaker at times.
	Well, see, there's no limits to technology as far as I'm concerned, nor is there limit to human potential.
	Because that's ultimately what I feel defines our species, is that we're an ever-changing, you know, multicellular organism that almost has an elaborate history where, well, basically, we've done it all.
	There's nothing new under the sun.
	So, you know, the future, I feel, is always a bright place to look because, hey, it's never as dark as it could be right now.
	No, and certainly the knowledge spread of human thought has occurred to such a degree that it can, short of an asteroid taking out the whole planet, it can't ever be undone.
	So even if there's a step backwards, it's not going to be as far back as it ever was, neither will it be as long as it was in the past.
	But again, it really just comes down to the decisions that people make and the commitment that people make.
	If you have the knowledge, you have a responsibility.
	I mean, if you... If you get a medical degree and some guy's choking to death in a restaurant, you really kind of got to get up and give him a Heimlich.
	You know, you may not save him, but you should try.
	Because once you gather knowledge, you have responsibility.
	And I know a lot of libertarians don't like that because they say, ah, you're making a social contract.
	I got to do this, right? Well, but you've gathered the knowledge.
	And if you know how to cure someone and that person is sick, then that's what you've decided to study.
	If you've decided to study to become a doctor, you damn well got to go and help the sick people.
	And if you've studied thought and you've studied freedom and economics and philosophy, you got to go.
	You know, there's really not much point, you know, spending 20 years learning combat only to run away from a necessary and just war.
	And so I really, really urge people to, you know, take the fight to those around them.
	I mean, we've got to work hard.
	If we don't wake people up, they will curse us in the long run.
	Though they may curse us now for trying, they will curse us in the long run if we lose because they will lose everything then.
	Yeah, yeah. Waking people up is kind of, I approach it sort of like I did in my sales job, is when you're doing telesales, you'll just go on to the next person if this person really ain't willing to listen to you.
	Because otherwise you're just wasting your freaking time.
	You might use it as just a, you might want to humour them or something like that.
	Maybe you've got some time to waste and you're not really bothered about it.
	Because you know those kinds of people, don't you, Stefan?
	The ones who obviously have got it all figured out and think they know everything.
	And anything that you're saying that they haven't heard before, oh, it's crazy, it's nuts, it's just absolutely ridiculous.
	You know, they call us conspiracy theorists, and I've got a definition for you.
	I think you might appreciate it.
	A conspiracy theorist is somebody who thinks that powerful and influential people use their power and influence to gain more power and influence because they want it.
	And a coincidence theorist is somebody who thinks that everything happens by sheer coincidence.
	There's no backdoor meetings, there's no secret bills, there's no military research projects, there's nothing, nothing, nothing.
	Which one of those two sounds like they should be committed for being completely insane?
	Right, right.
	And need a Thorzine drip.
	Listen, I'm sorry, I've got another call coming up, but I really wanted to thank you for taking the time.
	I'm sorry we couldn't do this on the show, but, you know, it still gets out to tens of thousands of people anyway, so I really appreciate that.
	And as always, it was a real pleasure, and it's always fascinating to me to see sunlight over somebody's shoulder when I'm in the midst of these sticky and depths of cold winter.
	It was actually the middle of the night.
	That's just my natural glow.
	Ha! That's beautiful.
	That's really quite a...
	I get that kind of shine, but you have a little bit more hair in the way of your scalp than I do, so it doesn't quite work as well for me.
	Well, you've got that shiny, clean bowling ball look going for you.
	It's fantastic. Mr. Clean, here to help.
	Thank you so much, Stefan Molyneux.
	And can you plug your website before you go?
	Oh yeah, it's freedomainradio.com.
	FreeDomainRadio.com, FreeDomainRadio.com, FreeDomainRadio.com, because in a propagandistic celebration, you've got to repeat it three times.
	Oh yeah, sorry, I just wanted to mention too, I've just finished an audiobook reading of Jeffrey Tucker's book, It's a Jetson's World, which you can get at FDRURL.com forward slash Jetson.
	I highly recommend it.
	He's a great writer, and there's lots of great stuff on intellectual property for those who are interested in that topic.
	All right, awesome. Thank you, Stefan.
	You have yourself a fabulous Christmas and a happy new year.
	Merry Christmas to all your listeners as well.

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