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Feb. 2, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:30
2086 Listener Emails Feb 2 2012

Solving property disputes without the state, free market education, and exploitation in freedom?

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Wollinger from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is, what is it, February the 2nd, 2012.
Listener emails of the week.
It's been a couple of weeks, months really, so sorry about that.
But work on the new documentary is coming along just beautifully.
And thank you so much to all of the volunteers who are helping out.
So, listener writes, says, Steph, I often hear you say that you are anti-statist.
I would love to be an anti-statist because I believe statism is dangerous.
Unfortunately, there is one fundamental problem with the idea of anti-statism that I cannot seem to solve.
"Without free markets, one cannot overcome the economic calculation problem, and without private property one cannot have free markets.
How is it possible to legitimize mutually exclusive claims on property without relying on some form of presumably representative collectivist entity?
If such an entity is in fact necessary, then how can one argue that it does not fall into the category of a state?" It's a great question.
Anti-statist? Yeah, I don't think I would object to being characterized that way.
But I'm anti-violence, which means that I'm pro-philosophical consistency and pro-reason and evidence.
I'm not anti-theist, I'm pro-philosophy.
I'm not anti-statist, particularly, this is sort of a subsection, but pro-peace.
Sorry, for those who don't know, I'm sure you do, but the economic calculation problem was described by von Mises and other Austrian school economists, which basically says that you can't have an efficient or effective allocation of resources without the price mechanism, and you cannot have the price mechanism function effectively without voluntary free trade.
So, the question then becomes, how can you have Mutually exclusive claims on property without relying on some sort of collectivist entity called the state.
How can you protect property without the state?
The first thing you have to understand, and it's blindingly obvious when it's pointed out, but the general fog of propaganda keeps us from seeing it.
But what you have to first understand, my friend, is that the state does not solve the problem of the protection of property.
Because the state is an entity which has the legal right to violate property pretty much at will.
They can pass pretty much whatever laws they want.
They can tax.
They can print money.
They can indebt future generations through national debts and so on.
So if you think that there's a problem with property, you do not solve it by creating an institution with the right to violate property at will.
That the solution to the problem of theft is not to create a legal monopoly on theft, which is called the state.
So the first thing you have to understand is that, I mean, the state is like this.
The state is to society as religion was and is to science.
Statism is a big, giant hole that people throw problems in Do not hear the distant cries of them falling and bouncing and think that they've been solved.
You don't create a monopoly of violence and think you've solved any problems at all.
And so the first thing, and we can't emphasize this enough, the first thing to recognize is that the state is not a solution to problems, right?
I mean, if you say, well, where did we come from?
Well, God made us. Well, that's not an answer, right?
I mean, that's an avoidance of an answer.
Statism is an avoidance of an answer.
Let me dip into my amateur self-knowledge bag here and say that...
Well, no, so before I say that, you can listen to Jeffrey Tucker's excellent book, It's a Jetson's World, where he talks about how tailgating parties and how parking lot spaces are staked out at sports games is a very effective way of seeing the spontaneous self-organization of property.
But the first thing to understand about property problems is why they occur in the first place.
People violate property rights as adults because their property and their personhood was violated as children.
People steal because their childhood was stolen from them.
I myself went through a shoplifting phase when I was in my early teens, during a particularly nihilistic phase of my life, which was just a terrible and awful time in my life.
And the reason that I was doing that was I had no belief in social rules.
I had no belief whatsoever in the validity of social rules simply because my childhood was so wretched and violent and everybody around me knew that this was occurring and nobody lifted a finger to do anything about it.
In fact, they would clam up whenever I would try to get any help.
And so if you have a really abused and destroyed childhood, then you look at society as a whole and you say, well, what virtue could you claim?
I mean, I was being mauled by parental lions and everybody just whistled and looked the other way.
And so when you grow up, you sort of live in a state of nature because you've penetrated to a pretty important core in the ethics of society, which is that when children can be horrendously mistreated in a society where everyone knows they're being mistreated.
I mean, I was in Small apartments with paper-thin walls.
Everybody knew the amount of violence and evil that was occurring in my house.
Then you recognize the moral problems in society.
Fundamentally, it's all around the protection of children.
They're not solved by religion and they're not solved by statism.
I was surrounded by government-educated or controlled teachers.
I was surrounded by priests.
I was surrounded by Christians, none of whom lifted a finger to save me.
And unfortunately, it's a tragically common phenomenon.
And so, the state and God do not solve the problem of ethics.
And so if you're really badly treated as a child and nobody does anything about it, which is almost certainly what's very likely to be the case, then you grow up with a contempt for social rules because you realize that people don't really live according to social rules, like immoral rules. They will let children be horrendously harmed in their midst and not do much of anything.
In fact, they will only become uncomfortable if the child brings it up, right?
If the child asks for help.
And so if you grow out of that kind of environment, you look at society and you say, well, you're just a bunch of mealy-mouthed scumbags.
You know, the moral rules that are put in place are ridiculous travestries, hypocrisies, ghosts that vanish with the sunlight of sadly clear thinking in adulthood.
And, I mean, my struggle as an adult...
has been to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, to recognize that society does not live by the rules that it preaches, because it does so little to protect children.
Society does not live by the rules that it preaches, but that does not mean that we cannot find the beauty of morality despite The wreckage of what society has done with what it calls ethics.
And so when children are treated better, then they won't grow up with a desire to steal.
They won't grow up with a desire to harm.
They won't grow up with a contemptuous disrespect for moral norms.
Anyway, so you can look at spontaneous self-organizations within society.
It is advantageous for people to respect property rights if they want to have a sort of peaceful and happy life.
And so you can look at these kind of spontaneous self-organizations that occur in the absence of state.
In a free society, there will be, of course, people who have contracts and you may, if you want, buy protection for your property so that if somebody harms it, you can get somebody to replace it for you.
That would sort of be an insurance. And then the insurance companies that would insure either your long-term contracts or your short-term contracts, if you wanted, or the protection of your property Would have a direct investment in making sure that thieves weren't produced, that people didn't break their word, and there would be tons of research and ways to help parents raise better kids so that that wouldn't be the temptation.
But what would happen, I believe, is that those who dealt well with others would end up paying less for their Contract insurance.
Those who protected their property well would pay less for their insurance.
And so as a result, since there would be, I mean, you know, you want the sort of Jiminy Cricket conscience, but you also want the economic incentive.
So those who kept their word would do better financially, would pay lower transaction costs, which generally would mean that those would, people who kept their words and did not succumb to Theft or whatever would end up doing better in the long run, and so there would be that incentive to make it work as well.
So I hope that helps, and it's not a perfect answer, but I think it's not too bad.
Hi, Steph. Somebody else writes, first let me say, I wish to thank you for opening my eyes to the reality of the world.
Well, I just light a match on a distant mountain.
You're the one who opened your eyes.
But I do have some questions.
If you already covered these in another video, I apologize, and could you send me the link?
In a free society, how will you deal with violence in foreign affairs?
If America becomes a free society, if China or Iran attacks us, who will defend us while still keeping the society free?
Well, that's a great question.
It's a common question, a national defense.
Again, the state doesn't solve the problem.
The state doesn't solve the problem.
And so, how is national defense being handled?
Well, of course, national defense is a bit of a misnomer, right?
What you want is freedom from violence, freedom from kidnapping, freedom from imprisonment, you know, arbitrary, unjust incursions against your persons and property.
You don't solve that with the government.
You say, oh, I'm afraid of China invading me, so I'm going to create a monopolistic, violent military-industrial complex that has the right And power to do whatever it wants pretty much with me.
That doesn't work. You don't solve the problem of the defense of property through the creation of an agency with a monopoly to violate property rights.
It doesn't solve the problem. And so the way to approach these questions is to think like an entrepreneur.
So instead of saying, lobbying the question to me, imagine that you're an entrepreneur who wants to sell somebody protection services.
Let's say that there's no state, but people are sort of concerned about, I don't know, the Friendly cannibals to the north, as John Stewart says, in Canada, going down and invading in the U.S. Well, you then, well, there's a market opportunity, which is how will you, in a cost-effective way, protect people from invasion by foreign countries?
So think about how you would make the pitch.
And I've spoken about this a number of times before, and it's in my free book, Practical Anarchy, so I won't go into any detail right now.
But instead of saying, well, there's a government function that works now, how would that be dealt with in a free society?
Recognize that the government functions don't work now.
And think of instead of being passively waiting for someone else to give you an answer, imagine being an entrepreneur giving a big monstrous Ironman style presentation about how you're going to try and get as many customers knowing that there are 10 other people behind you who are going to make other pitches.
So think of a sales pitch about how you would sell people, what models would you set up, what protections, what guarantees would you set up so that if people gave you money to buy weapons to defend them that you wouldn't turn your weapons on those people.
How would you give people those kinds of guarantees?
Because, sure as Sherlock, people recognize the danger because you get these questions all the time.
Oh my goodness, if I set up some defense agency that's going to protect me, won't they just turn on me?
Well, that's something that ingenious entrepreneurs will find a way to solve.
And I've thought of a bunch of ways, but I'm sure you'll be able to find some too.
All right. In a free society, how will we keep others from exploiting us?
Wall Street was a big factor in exploiting us during the Great Recession of 08.
And in a free society, what entity or factor will keep people from doing that to us again?
Well, I mean, exploitation is one of these tough and very charged words, so I will just touch on this briefly.
You know, Wall Street, you know, there are a bunch of guys with briefcases and pens and computers.
They can't steal from you.
They can't. They don't have any ninja accountant cat burglars that can shimmy up your inner thigh and lift your wallet with monkeys chewing through the hem of your pockets.
Although that would be a good business model.
Anyway, so...
Wall Street didn't do anything to you.
It's just a bunch of mostly out of shape.
I mean, trust me, I've worked when I was younger in a trading company.
These are not people who you really need to fear are, you know, going to use Finn McMissile lasers to cut a hole through your safe from outer space.
And so Wall Street was a big factor in exploiting us.
I mean, no.
No. They don't have any weapons.
It's the people with weapons that you need to deal with.
It's the people with weapons that you need to deal with.
And so, how are the people going to exploit us?
Well, let's look at the Wall Street situation.
Well, first of all, no intergenerational debt.
Because it would be private currency.
Private currency is going to be based on gold, or it's going to be based on some algorithms that make the generation of new currency very hard, like Bitcoin.
Or it's going to be based on a basket of commodities that ensure no rampant inflation or deflation because what people want out of currency is steady, predictable future prices.
Because, again, having been an entrepreneur myself for many years, not knowing the future price of things is really crazy-making, not knowing various exchange rates.
So currency will have to be stable.
Now, for currency to be stable, it will mean that...
It will have to be much less leveraged.
As a bank, you'll be able to borrow much less relative to your actual assets because otherwise you won't be able to guarantee any kind of stability.
And so people who want to buy into your currency, who want to use your currency, are going to demand stability in the currency.
When you have stability in the currency, then you can't have these kinds of predations where just people go apeshit having 30 to 1 or 40 to 1 leveraging, which means that if you lose just a couple of percentage points, you're completely wiped out.
I mean, the institution is wiped out.
The people who make all the bets are doing just great.
I mean, once you can create a significant amount of wealth in a status system, By jigging the system, by relying on the Fed to overprint money, by relying on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to help people with unsustainable mortgages.
You have the Community Reinvestment Act.
You have government promoting home ownership.
I mean, all of these are non-markets, violence-driven systems.
The Fed is a violent monopoly on currency.
And if you don't believe me, don't try starting up an alternative one because I need my listeners, but that's the reality.
So, yeah, you want a stable currency.
And a stable currency in a free market means that the people who run the currency will be the first on the hook.
So somebody wrote to me and said, well, in Switzerland, if a bank goes bust, the director's personal assets are first on the line to be sold, which is why banks in Switzerland don't go bust.
And that was the case, of course, in the past, in the West.
So how do you keep others from exploiting us?
Well, you don't create a central, massively armed monopoly on force that can use its massive sky laser of drone missile aggression to target anyone it dislikes and steal from the general population, steal from the unborn, invade, borrow, print. You know, you don't give people a monopoly of type whatever the hell you want into your own bank accounts and expect to have a stable currency.
So, anyway, let's see.
How will the free society work in a nutshell?
Roads, education, health, etc., without a government?
It seems it would be hard to maintain roads or education or health for a while, and how we would survive for that period.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. Nobody can answer these questions.
It's a fool's game to try and answer these questions.
I say, having just spent a few minutes trying to answer these questions.
But, I mean, I wanted to sort of point this out at the end.
There's lots of examples.
So when people say, how will a free society work in a nutshell?
What they're saying is, well, how will nonviolence work in human relationships?
Well, this letter is an example of, I mean, you're not putting a gun to my head.
We're reasoning together. So this letter would be an example of one.
But it just doesn't matter how it works.
First of all, it's not working now.
It's not working now.
Now, you know, we just have rotting teeth and morphine in our system.
I mean, our teeth aren't getting better.
We just can ignore the pain because there's debt.
There's, you know, there's staving off the horrendous tsunami of the inevitable collapse.
So it's not working right now.
I don't care how it works.
It's like if lots of women around are getting raped, Does it really matter how women will get married when you stop them getting raped?
No, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. All that matters is that we stop the women from getting raped because that's evil.
It doesn't matter how women will end up getting dates after we stop the rapes, but we have to stop that.
We have to stop that. Do the right thing, though the sky falls.
Do the right thing, let the chips fall where they may.
We must stop using violence to attempt to solve social problems.
What happens afterwards? Doesn't really matter.
It can't really be predicted. But we do have to focus on the fact that violence is not going to work.
And it isn't working most graphically at the moment.
All right. Steph Bart.
My teacher believes it's better that our American currency is off the gold standard.
The only reason I could think of was if we weren't the world reserve currency, our money would be worthless.
He claims it's worth what the government says it's worth.
So what if they just pull the plug and say it's now worth 20 cents?
Could you help me out? I'm asking you because I respect your opinion.
Please help. Well, first of all, I would not respect my opinion.
My opinion is nothing to respect.
I hopefully can make some reasonable arguments, but ditch my opinion.
This is what I would say to your teacher.
And if he wants to call into my Sunday show, 2 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time, he can feel free to.
But I would say to your teacher...
Okay, so you want to use this particular piece of green paper to represent money.
I don't. Am I free to disagree with you?
Am I free to bail out of this system which I consider corrupt and immoral and destructive?
Harmful to the poor? Harmful to the young?
Harmful to those on fixed incomes, particularly the elderly?
Harmful to the unborn who are laden down with debt prior to even popping out the birth canal?
Am I allowed to opt out of your system of green toilet paper fiat currency?
And if the guy says, well, no, you're not free to opt out.
I would be happy with people using force to make you stay in the currency.
Then it's like, well, I'm not going to pretend to debate with you.
There's a gun in the room. You don't get to reason with me.
Hey, Steph, I often find myself debating with people about anarcho-capitalism.
But one, I seem to keep coming unstuck on, and I was hoping you could answer a question for me.
I agree that state education is wrong.
However, in an anarchic society, what would happen to those children whose parents didn't care if they received an education?
Would there be any way to make sure everyone gets educated in an anarchic world?
Well, I mean, first you're assuming that this problem, again, you're assuming this problem is solved at the moment.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but you're assuming this problem is solved at the moment, but it's just not.
It's just not solved at the moment.
This problem is not solved at the moment.
I mean, there's lots of parents who don't really give much of a shit about their children's education.
How is that solved at the moment?
More than 50% dropout rate in many places in the US. People are graduating unable to fill out a job application, for heaven's sakes.
Unable to do basic math.
Unable to write a sentence.
Unable to coherently analyze an argument.
Unable to write a paragraph of cogent thought.
So it's not being solved at the moment.
So really, really make sure that you don't think you're standing on a stable ship of state and swimming off to some supposed anarchic, possible bikini wax island over the horizon.
That's not the way it is. State stuff doesn't work.
State stuff doesn't work.
So it's not being solved now.
We're not introducing risk into the equation.
You know, I mean, if you jump out, if you and I jump out of a plane, and you rip open your parachute, and a banana and a sandwich comes out, and you're plummeting to your death, and I sort of come down with you and say, I've got a parachute, are you really going to say to me, well, how big is your parachute, and what is the make of the parachute, and, you know, I think I'll just take my chances plummeting like a stone into the tarmac?
No. You'll be like, oh, thank you, thank you, whoomp, and away we go, right?
Anarchism is the parachute, statism is the plummet.
We've got to do something different.
We've got to do something different.
Because where we're heading to is a big fat target on the dustbin of history.
And, you know, I mean, my mom didn't care about my education.
She never did any homework with me.
I'd bring these, you know, these permission slips home and my mom wouldn't even know what grade I was in.
I think I did okay.
I mean, Now, I mean, I think that there's an optimum level of education.
I think there's some stuff that you need to teach kids.
But what is best and most sustainable and most valuable for society?
What raises people as responsible, peaceful, intelligent, able to negotiate, able to reason with, able to deal with disappointment, able to deal with rejection, non-volatile, non-drug addicted, non-criminally inclined?
How do you raise children like that?
We'll never know until society as a whole profits from having children like that come into the world, right?
You understand that the state has no interest in having healthy children in the world, right?
Because the state needs criminals to frighten us into Believing we need the state.
And the state also needs people who are comfortable with violence so that it has its enforcers to collect taxes and go and kill foreigners, right?
So the government is in the scare the population business and there's nothing better to scare the population with than their fellow citizens.
This is a fundamental problem of the state.
We can't have a free and peaceful society until children are raised peacefully.
But the state has no interest in that.
It really doesn't. I mean, there was an outcry recently.
A bunch of people sent me the links.
I'm sorry if I paraphrase this incorrectly, but it was about a...
I think it was an MP in England who said that one of the reasons we're having all these riots is that working parents have stopped hitting their children, have stopped spanking their children, and they don't have any discipline, and that's why all these terrible things are going on in England.
Well... The ruling classes want you to grow up frightened of authority, and there's no better way to get you frightened of authority than to have your parents hit you.
I understand. Managers, executives, they don't want competition from everyone.
They want worker drones, right?
They want worker drones.
The best way to make worker drones is to make sure that the quality of parenting remains as crappy as possible, to make sure that children are raised in as bullying a manner as possible, to make sure that children are yelled at and intimidated and frightened and ground down.
The rulers in society do not want children to be raised well because that increases competition for the high-level jobs, for the high-level positions that they kind of want to hang on to themselves.
I understand. I'm not saying that all the rulers are raised peacefully either, but it's a different kind of.
The rulers tend to get raised more with verbal abuse.
The criminal class gets raised with sexual abuse and abandonment and serious, serious physical abuse.
The worker drones get raised with milder forms of verbal abuse and spanking slash hitting, right?
The lower classes, more violent.
Middle classes, less violent.
Upper classes, it's more refined verbal abuse.
But that's where society is at the moment, so...
I'll take my chances with freedom.
Let's see here. I'm a fan of your work and agree with almost all of your points, but could you clarify how in a free market the rich cannot exploit the poor?
Could you at least clarify the causes of third world poverty, or at least direct me to a video where you've answered this?
I mean, the causes of third world poverty, I mean, certainly I'm no expert, so I'll just touch on what I know briefly.
Of course, there's a...
A massive history of exploitation by the First World through imperialism.
Various European empires scoured their way across these poor civilizations and raped the living crap out of the environment and the resources.
So Chomsky writes, I think, very powerfully about how about 125, 150 years of British colonial rule over India, the average Indian's salary did not increase at all over that 100, 150 years.
And if you compare that to what was happening in the relatively more free market of the Industrial Revolution, where worker salaries shot up considerably, I mean, it's night and day.
There is the history of colonialism.
There is, of course, a tragic history of socialism, right?
So one of the problems that happened after India declared independence from England in 1949, and there was the gruesome partition, was that Nehru was a British-trained socialist.
And so a lot of the nabobs and potentates and mandarins that were at the top of the Indian civil service and in the government We're British-trained socialists, and so they put all of the central planning, garbage, violence, violation of property rights, the restrictions of trades, high taxes, tariffs, all the usual garbage that takes a long, slow, meaty dump over any free market, they put in place in India.
And then that was finally sort of thrown over over the last decade or two, as this happened in China, and now you have tens of thousands of people rising from poverty to the middle class.
So, I mean, the fundamental cause It's my one-two drum, right?
The fundamental cause of economic stagnation is violations of property rights.
And the fundamental cause of hierarchy in society is the hierarchy within the family.
The state is in effect of the family.
And poverty is an effect of violence.
And so when you have governments that egregiously violate and interfere with free trade and entrepreneurship and property rights, including intellectual property rights, which are a violation of property rights, then you get poverty.
And of course now, you know, there's...
Because, I mean, the third world, I mean, there's lots of do-gooders in there throwing lots of money at dictators, which they then use to buy weapons.
There are governments selling weapons to all of these dictators and getting it at arms.
Treaties and subsidies for these dictators.
I mean, it's just brutal.
I mean, whenever human nature, human creativity, human productivity is like a massive giant helium balloon underwater.
It wants to rise. It wants to shoot up to the surface.
It wants to fly. And it has to be held down with enormous power, enormous force, enormous threats of violence.
And so wherever you see humanity ground into the dust, you've got to look at the boot on the neck because it's there.
Steph, how do you keep the motivation up?
I've been following a discussion on libertarian message boards where people feel feeling like they just don't have the power anymore to keep on fighting the good fight and bring the concepts of reason and anti-state philosophy to the people around them.
They are approaching their middle age, considering kids and all that, and seriously thinking about just giving in completely and accepting defeat.
Now, I'm young and quite new to these ideas, so of course I still have nearly unlimited patience and confidence.
So how do you keep all of your motivation for what it is that you're doing?
Um... It's a good question.
It's hard at times.
I mean, no question. Do you want to take that other pill, you know, that the guy with glasses has?
It is hard at times, for sure.
Uh... For me, the major gain in having a peaceful, voluntarist philosophy, or as I like to call it, philosophy, has really been in my personal life.
It has really been in my personal life.
It has been in the rejection of aggression in my personal life.
So I don't respond to aggressive attacks wherever they come from.
I don't have aggressive people in my life.
I don't use aggression in my personal relationships.
Doesn't mean I never get upset, I never get angry, but I don't use aggression.
That has created for me An unbelievable oasis.
A paradise.
Sometimes it feels like my home is the only star in the night sky.
And there are a few other stars of people I know out there who've also rejected aggression in their lives.
But the beauty and the glory and the joy of rejecting aggression in personal relationships makes everything worthwhile.
My daughter is three.
She tells me probably ten times an hour how much she loves me.
I love my wife so much.
She loves me so much.
I have great friendships.
And That is the payoff.
If you think that changing the world is changing some big external factor, then you will be enslaved, I think, in chasing the impossible.
If you want to gain real certainty about the values and virtues of nonviolence, then you live that in your own life.
You don't use aggression in your life.
You don't use intimidation. You don't raise your voice.
You don't call names.
You don't do any of that.
And particularly, you don't do that with your children, who did not choose you as a parent.
You chose to have children that didn't choose you as a parent.
I know that it works.
It's going to work in society because I know how well it works in my life.
I don't have fights in my life.
I don't fight with my wife.
I don't fight with my daughter.
We have an incredibly harmonious relationships.
I don't fight with friends.
We don't have those kinds of conflicts because we share the values of peace, of reason, of evidence.
Intimidation and aggression are so absolutely unnecessary in human relationships.
I mean, not only are they unproductive and destructive and sometimes immoral, but they're so astoundingly unnecessary.
You know, when I was a kid, I mean, I've achieved something.
When I was a kid, all my friends came...
I came from a single-mom household.
There was a lot of aggression and abuse and violence coming down from the moms.
It's one of the reasons why I wish that feminists would focus a little bit more on the moms' role in the cycle of violence.
I mean, I saw this so universally and a lot of bitterness towards ex-husbands and all that kind of stuff.
Lots of aggression and tension and fights and stress and storm and all that.
And I remember thinking, even when I was a kid, I can't remember how old I was.
I can't remember more than seven or eight.
Because I was still in boarding school when I was thinking of this.
I saw boarding school where you would get, you know, I would get caned.
I got caned once for climbing over a fence to get a ball.
That's how desperate and corrupt and hypocritical the society I grew up in was.
It's not that long ago. You get caned as a six-year-old for climbing over a fence to get a ball.
That's how hysterical and frightened that society was.
I mean, it still is in England.
It still is most places. But I remember as a kid thinking, what's so hard about just getting along?
Why do people yell at each other?
Why do they call names? Why do they shake fists in each other's faces?
Why do you cane kids?
I mean, why are people hitting?
Why are you screaming? Why are you throwing things?
And the reality is it's really not hard to get along.
It's hard to fight. It's hard to have that level of stress and strain and exhaustion.
That's hard. That to me is a hard life.
But it's not hard.
It's not hard to love.
It's not hard to get along, to Truly respect and admire the people in your life.
Just have people in your life that you can do that and try to be that for them.
So, what I'm so thankful for in philosophy, what I'm so thankful for is the degree of peace and love and clarity and beauty and intimacy and fun That it has brought to my life, my personal life. I mean, personal life is sort of redundant.
I mean, personal life is life.
That's my gratitude.
That's my gratitude.
I can't control, and I don't think you can control, whether the world can live in peace.
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