All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 15, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:48
2093 An Introduction to Peace - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed on the Free Mind Report

Stefan Molyneux explains the moral reasoning and practical effects of a world without the violent hierarchy of statism.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome back to the Free Mind Report on the Logos Radio Network.
Our guest this evening is Stephan Molyneux from freedomainradio.com, and we welcome him to the show tonight.
Thank you for joining us.
It's my pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.
We got a chance to listen to you speak at Liberty Fest West this weekend.
Like we were saying earlier, I think all in all it was a good event, a good speaker lineup, and I think everybody there got to learn a little something new.
I think those events are really good to bring folks that may be uninitiated to give them the first opportunity to hear.
You know, someone be able to speak, you know, intentionally about, you know, these subjects of freedom, liberty, and such.
And you get to base universal principles, basing it not upon ideology or anything like that, but upon philosophy, which is my attraction to Stefan Molyneux's work, is that based upon this concept of universal ethics, which I think is probably applicable and can be used, and using it to advance the cause of liberty.
Yeah, I mean, there's this great temptation in the field of virtue to judge something by its consequences.
You know, Spock says the greatest good for the greatest number and so on, and this utilitarianism, this pragmatism, it seems to make sense.
It really seems, you know, when you want to cure a disease, you want to get the statistics and the data that says this disease is on its way to being cured.
But when you try to run a society based upon the greatest good for the greatest number, It tends to work out really, really badly.
So I like to go back to first principles, the non-aggression principle, the respect for property rights, all the stuff we were taught when organizing our galoshes in kindergarten.
What if all of that was just true all the way top to bottom?
Because when I was introduced to ethics as a kid, it wasn't conditional, it wasn't consequential, it wasn't utilitarian, it wasn't like, well, okay, you can take his lunch money, but...
Only if he's smaller than you, and only if he's richer than you, and then you can call it income redistribution.
No, I was, you know, theft is wrong, hitting is wrong, threatening is wrong, and I just, you know, it really stuck with me, and then as I got to be an adult, I'm like, hey, wait a minute, these rules seem to be broken all over the place.
You've got taxation, which is the initiation of force.
You've got kidnapping for peaceful activities, which is called...
You have arrest, you have imprisonment, and you have national debts, which is selling the unborn into slavery.
I mean, something's not right.
These kindergarten ethics are all cracked and broken.
And so I thought, well, what if we just took these kindergarten ethics and made them as universal as they were first explained to us?
What would society look like?
And that set me down a pretty wild path, I guess.
Well, I think it is possible to achieve the greatest amount of happiness while still respecting everyone's rights.
We're kind of taught that, well, the utilitarianism model is that, well, happiness is not possible for everyone, so from time to time we're going to have to abuse a minority.
Well, that's license for abuse, you know, time and time again.
We see that all the time.
Well, and one thing that's been interesting to me as I go through this is the cognitive dissonance.
It's like, okay, yes, stealing is wrong.
It's this axiom, it's this absolute truth that we're all taught, but then somehow the government gets the moral pass on that.
Where does that come in?
I mean, do you think that a lot of that comes from government schools?
Where does that disconnect come in?
Well, we're taught that ethics is designed to make the world a better place.
And I really believe that ethics has been designed or evolved, has evolved, to make the world a better place for evil people.
So, for instance, like if you were the only thief in the world, nobody else had figured it out that you could steal something, you'd have a pretty damn easy time of it, right?
Nobody would lock their doors, nobody would have a bank account, they'd just leave all their gold lying around.
So, if you were the only thief in the world, you'd have a really great time of it.
But, of course, if everybody was a thief, you'd all starve to death, right?
What happens generally is you get more and more thieves until the barrier to being a thief, like people's defense of their property, becomes so high or so difficult that people don't want them.
One more thief is not really that much more valuable.
So I believe that what the greatest thieves do is they teach you that stealing is wrong.
And then they create this exception for themselves and they call themselves the priesthood or they call themselves the state or whatever it is.
And what basically ethics is, is a way of reducing competition for theft.
If you can convince enough people that stealing is wrong, then it reduces the competition for you as a thief and you can set yourself up at the top of the pyramid and take all you want.
And everybody else, you know, they steal a candy bar, they feel terrible, but you steal $700 billion in a bailout and you can call yourself a virtuous salvation of the economic system.
That's what I think ethics is invented for, to serve evil people and to hamstring good people.
Well, and as we were talking earlier about government school indoctrination, you know, when you look at the families that were involved in implementing public education in the United States based on the Prussian model, I mean, it's these elite families that are involved with, you know, all the major banking You know, globally. And, you know, again, these lessons are taught, you know, to make children, you know, good, you know, citizens, good cogs in the machine, you know, good producers.
And I guess, you know, at the same time, condition them to not compete against this monopoly of theft.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's very, very clear.
It's a great point. I mean, first of all, they get us distracted with stuff like, there are commercials on TV and that's bad for your children because it's programming them.
It's like, no, no, no, no, wait, wait.
Even at my worst, I maybe saw an hour of commercials every day interspice with, you know, whatever I was watching.
But, you know, six, seven hours of straight-in-your-face, can't-escape, brain-deadening, soul-stultifying government miseducation, that has a real effect, because that has real authority to sit down by some commercials, you tune them out.
But so people get worried about propaganda in terms of merchandising, commercialising, maybe that's sort of an issue, but compared to...
This government indoctrination is completely nothing.
And yeah, the ruling class does not want you to compete with them.
So you're raised to be a worker.
You're raised to sit in a cubicle.
You're raised to turn a wrench on an assembly line.
You're not raised to compete with the elite.
And that really, the purpose of the public school is to keep people crushed, to keep people down.
And that way, the majority, like all the rich people, send their kids to private school, to Montessori, and they get the massive advantage where you're stuck in this sardine can of brain-deadening nonsense and then you come out barely able to think and barely able to fill out a job application and all you can do is take orders.
I mean, it's an incredible 18th century mindset of surf-like indoctrination that has drastically and terribly survived to the 21st century.
Well, people keep on talking about how the public school system has failed, how it's in trouble, but we've been studying the work of John Taylor Garda lately in preparation for the next movie project, and he talks about the fact that it hasn't failed, actually.
This is the prescribed solution to their problems.
It is the products they're producing at the public school system.
It's not failing, it's producing exactly the type of citizens they need.
And they need a hierarchy, they need a lower class, they need an upper class, they need a management class, and this is what is fulfilled through these systems.
I agree. I think that if I'm walking with you guys and I say, I really, really got to head north.
If I don't head north, I'm toast.
I got to head north. And I keep walking this particular direction.
And then you pull out a compass and you say, wait, dude, you're heading south.
That's not the way. And I know I'm going to keep going.
I really want to head north.
Look, I've got a compass. You're heading south.
If I just keep heading north, then clearly I only say that I want to head north.
Sorry, I just say that I want to head north and it doesn't matter.
If I ignore the compass, if I ignore the data, if I ignore the results of my experiment, then the experiment is achieving its purpose.
And although I will say this, I think there is a tension in the ruling classes about public education because I think the kids that are producing Are too dumb to compete in a knowledge economy.
And I think there's some change around that.
I think there's going to be some improvement in schooling.
Still going to keep the lid on, but I think they're going to try and bring the creative juices up a little bit because, I mean, when you've got less than half the population in America doesn't even complete high school, how on earth?
Are they going to compete with the highly educated workforces in Singapore, the growing workforces in India and China?
I think that they're going to have to spruce up the veal fattening pens a little bit, throw a bit of laser light in there just to keep our synapses firing because I just don't think we can compete anymore.
Well, and Gatto was bringing up that point that he's been asked by the government in China to come and speak several times because they have a problem with lack of imagination, innovation within their country.
And they're saying, what can they do within their school system structure to cultivate creativity?
And he's saying, well, your whole system is designed to stifle creativity.
And he said that they never change it and they keep asking him back over and over again.
You know, and, you know, so I think that that is evidence of, you know, what you're talking about.
They want their cake to eat it, too.
I mean, you know, they want to keep everyone oppressed, but, you know, they want to be able to compete in this future economy.
And so I think it's going to come to a head at some point that they're going to have to compromise on this and start, you know, bringing us into the next century.
Well, I frankly think that America, in my own opinion, actually, has kind of been written off.
We're getting ready to go into the dustbin of history.
I know that people are going to take the stage, and maybe this government or this hierarchy here will try to adapt.
I don't know, but we'll see. Well, but America does have the, as we sort of talked about at Liberty Fest West, America does have the most powerful libertarian tradition.
Significant portions of the American population know what the problem is and know what the solution is, that the problem is institutionalized coercion, coercion of any kind.
We all know that. Coercion of any kind, violence of any kind, except in an extremity of self-defense, is a massive catastrophe in the long run.
You know, it'll get you what you want in the short run.
You know, you get an iPad, you maybe can have sex with that woman, but, you know, if you've raped her, that's a really bad thing.
And if you've stolen the iPad, then you've started down a pretty bad road.
So theft and violence will get you what you want in the short run, but produce massive disasters in the long run.
I would argue that Americans probably know that Better than anyone.
I mean, America is the home of the revolutionary tradition.
It is the home of skepticism about government.
It is the home of some of the greatest free market thinkers in the history of the world.
It is the country that embraced Ayn Rand and objectivism.
So I think America has a pretty good diagnosis of the problem, you know, getting through the static, which is the amazing thing that the Internet can do.
The Internet is like a laser that can pierce through the clouds of Jupiter to get information out.
And I think that information is spreading pretty quickly.
Well, actually, you may be right on that because, you know, I've actually often considered maybe I should go somewhere else.
You know, this is a whole big planet.
Maybe I should go somewhere else that has a strong libertarian tradition where I can actually live in freedom.
And I've looked around and, frankly, there's, you know, there's very few options.
And America, you're right, does have a very strong libertarian tradition.
There's very few places in the world where people will talk at length and in depth about the philosophy of freedom and liberty.
That's here in America. Yeah, and sometimes, right, as you know, sometimes you've just got to stop and take a stand.
I mean, the running, the hiding, it's tempting.
I'm tempted probably every second week.
I'm like, hit the eject button here.
But I think, you know, if it's not us, who's it going to be?
And if it's not the truth, then lies will prevail.
I mean, as the old saying goes, the only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.
So I think we've got to stop and take a stand.
And, you know, North America is a pretty good place for that.
Well, and I think the biggest hurdle that we're up against right now is, you know, again, those people affected by the cognitive dissonance, that whenever you talk about the violence, theft, and fraud inherent in our government, that, well, you hate America.
You know, you're one of those blame America first crowd.
You know, whenever you're just pointing out the very obvious, you know, immorality of, you know, murdering your fellow human beings.
If I hated America, I would leave.
Exactly. All right, folks, you're listening to the Fremont Report on the Logos Radio Network.
We're going to be back after this with Stephan Molyneux from freedomainradio.com.
Welcome back to the Free Mind Report.
We are speaking with our guest tonight, Stephan Molyneux from freedomainradio.com.
If you want to join the conversation, as always, you're welcome to call 512-646-1984.
That's 512-646-1984.
We're pleased to have Stephan on tonight.
It's our pleasure. We had him on about two years ago, I believe, for the first time.
At the beginning of the first film project we did, and now we're having him here at the beginning of our second film project, so it's kind of weird.
But Stefan Molyneux is one of the premier exponents today of the concept of philosophy of voluntarism.
And I'd like Stefan to give a short overview of that to the audience for those of them unfamiliar with the concept.
So can you kind of explain to the audience what voluntarism is?
Sure. It's just the idea that the non-initiation of the use of force is universally preferable behavior.
It is what people should be aspiring to.
And that doesn't mean people always do.
Of course, you need morality because people want to do bad things.
The same reason you need...
The science of nutrition because people will eat things that are bad for them.
We want to eat things that are tasty but bad for us and we want to do things sometimes that are immoral because it's a good shortcut.
What if you simply organize society accepting and universalizing The basic moral principle that the initiation of force is wrong and we own ourselves, we own the effects of our actions and therefore property rights are valid and should not be violated.
It's astonishingly simple and it's exactly how we live our own lives.
People say, well, you show me an example of a society where this applies.
It's like, look in the mirror, look in the mirror.
This is you live like this.
If you want a job, you don't go kidnap the guy's Children and throw them in the trunk.
You know, if you want to date, you don't chloroform some woman and stuff her in the back of a windowless van.
You ask! And if you get rejected, you deal with it like a mature adult.
So people live this, they live this in depth, up to their eyeballs every single day.
Voluntarism, non-initiation of force, a respect for property rights.
So what if, what if we took the radical notion of saying that which is good for 90% of the population, for 95% of the population, for 99% of the population, what if we go just one percentage point more?
To the political leaders, to the brutalizing classes, to the police, to the prison guards, to the soldiers.
What if we just said, look, I don't care what your costume is.
I don't care what your title is.
I don't care if you go under a big round dome and blow lots of paper around with your hot air speeches.
What if it is simply wrong universally to initiate the use of force?
What would society look like? Well, it simplifies things enormously.
It's like, you know, they used to way back in the day, back in the Greeks, the Greek day, ancient Greeks.
They used to have the Earth at the center of the solar system and everything kind of went around it.
And it got really complicated because Mars sort of flips in a retrograde motion going backwards and they had to invent this Ptolemaic system.
It was crazy. Circles within circles to explain and figure out where the planets were.
Ah, but if you take the Sun, put it at the center of the solar system, bop, bop, bop, you know, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and so on, rotating around, everything falls into place.
You only need like two equations.
That was the Copernican revolution.
And if you take the non-aggression principle and property rights and put them at the center of society, then all of the escalating, growing, cancerous, vile mess that we see growing all around us.
Debts and wars and incarcerations where you have massive amounts of the U.S. population in jail.
I mean, similar amounts of the U.S. population in jail than were in the Gulag Apicalago under Stalin.
I mean, it is totalitarian.
More, okay? Good. Well, that's the last time I read.
They're saying now even there's more African-Americans in American jails than there were slaves during the early part of American history.
Right. At least there was an underground railroad for slaves.
So what if we just took non-aggression and property rights, put them at the center of how we thought about how society should be run?
What would that look like? Well, it solves a huge, huge number of problems.
You don't have to create the secondary class of people in blue costumes who can initiate force and people in green costumes who can initiate force.
And people with little gavels and funny wigs who can order people to be kidnapped and thrown in jail virtually at a whim.
You don't have endless law books, three and a half million words in a tax code.
You don't have national debts.
You don't have any of this stuff.
And If it works in our personal life and we all accept that non-violence, peaceful resolutions of conflict, it all works in our personal lives, what if we just said, well, the world is only people, so let's get rid of these artificial distinctions called the state, called the prisons, called the law courts, called the soldiers, and called the police?
What if we simply, everybody was a human being?
Of course, there's still going to be evil people.
There's still going to be people who want to do bad things.
But that's the whole point of a free and voluntary society.
Which is, yes, we recognize that there are going to be evil people who want to do bad things.
That's why we cannot have a government.
Because that's exactly where those people go.
That's exactly where those people go.
You say we have a government to control evil, government ends up controlled by evil, massively armed with everybody else, pretty much disarmed all the time.
It is far too dangerous.
It's like giving the psychopath superpowers.
Yeah, people say to me, what are you going to do with a murderous psycho killer in a free society?
My answer is, hey, let's not give them an army.
How's that? Let's at least not give them all the nuclear weapons in the world and the capacity to invade countries at will.
Let's at least start there and see where we go.
Well, that's what I've often said is like if George Bush had just been my neighbor, his evil would have been confined to his yard and maybe the block.
And yeah, it would have been bad dealing with this really bad neighbor.
But that's where his evil or whatever you want to call it, his psychopathy would have been confined.
But instead of this system, we give him control of the most powerful military on the earth.
And he's able to project his psychopathy across the globe and kill a million people in foreign countries.
That is the price of this.
Yeah, I know I can't add anything to that.
I think that's brilliant. So really, it's just the universalization of ethics, a universalization of ethics.
And we know, we know from science, we know from medicine that when you universalize principles in the right way, massive advances, right?
Human race is a couple of hundred thousand years old.
It's really over and only in the last 200 years that we've made any progress whatsoever.
Why? Because we extended property rights, because we extended the rights of personhood, first to the serfs, then to the working classes, then to the women, then to the minorities, we just need to keep extending the rights and responsibilities of personhood all the way up to the stratosphere, all the way up to the ruling classes, and take down these brutal edifices that keep their inhumanity floating above us, lashing down with these fiery whips of incomprehensible Anti-ethics.
We just need to keep pushing forward and extending personhood, down to children, up to the ruling classes, to everyone, and then we will have a society of true egalitarianism of opportunity, whereas what we have right now is corporate fascistic hell, which is only going to get worse.
And like all people who have an addiction, we hope that reason will prevail before brutal experiences has to teach us, and that really is our goal.
So people will learn. Violence doesn't work.
It doesn't work at a social level.
It doesn't work at a personal level.
We need to figure that out.
We need to learn that because our addictions are going to take us straight off a cliff otherwise.
Well, I know at the Liberty Fest West, Catherine Bleich was talking about, you know, this concept of, you know, laws do not make me be a good person.
You know, they don't make you do anything.
You know, ultimately, you know, if we choose to do the right thing or the wrong thing, that decision comes from inside each and every one of us.
And I've been saying this for years that the fundamental problem is not government, it's not laws, it's not any of that stuff.
It's a fundamental sickness that people have inside their Their own minds and their own spirits that they've decided to abandon what they know to be intrinsically true and right.
Well, yeah, I mean, I know what you're saying.
It sounds like you're drifting towards what might be called original sin.
I know it's not necessarily in the religious context, but remember, huge amounts of propaganda.
If human beings were naturally irrational and naturally prone to respecting hierarchies, regardless of the ethical content of those hierarchies, you wouldn't need 13 years of propaganda.
Like, who needs propaganda when you're 13 to...
You know, get a boner at a swimming pool when you see an attractive woman in a bikini, right?
You don't need, oh my God, I don't know what to do with this thing down here.
I better go consult a whole bunch of textbooks and get this drilled into me.
What does the government say about this?
But I mean, you don't need that.
I don't need propaganda to prefer chocolate over broccoli because that is innate.
But It is not innate for us to subjugate ourselves to a hierarchy.
It is not innate for us to live in fear.
It is not innate for us to worship war.
It is not innate for us to drape the dead in flags and call them heroes.
That is not innate, because if it was innate, we wouldn't need so much propaganda to end up believing that stuff.
And they would need force to back it up.
And that is, I guess, a testament to the destiny of the human individual is that they need force to force these things down our throats.
And for the benefits of our audience and for myself, what is force, Stefan?
What is force? Our forces using weapons or threats thereof or threats of personal injury or the deprivation of freedom to get your way.
I mean, people say, it's completely bizarre when you think about it, people say the governments reflect the will of the people.
That is the complete opposite.
You couldn't be more opposite if you tried.
The government reflects the exact opposite of the will of the people.
iPods represent the will of the people.
Britney Spears represents the will of the people.
I'm not saying we always agree with it, but it does.
For better or worse, she does reflect the will of the people.
Hannah Montana, Pink Floyd.
These are because they're voluntarily chosen in a free society, more or less, right?
But everything the government does is enforced.
You have to do it, or they will throw you in a cage for...
An indeterminate period of time until you apologize, grovel, and then suffer the consequences for the rest of your life.
The government, because they have to force you, you know for a fact that the population doesn't want...
Why do we know that the population doesn't want the welfare state?
Because they get thrown in jail if they don't support it.
People like the United Way, they support the United Way, their blood drives them.
That's voluntary. That does reflect the will of the people.
But the state is a mirror image of the will of the people in the same way that rape, You may not know everything about the rape situation, but you sure as hell know, the woman does not want to have sex with that guy.
That's why it's rape. It's the difference between theft and charity.
The government is exactly what people don't want to do, otherwise they wouldn't need to point guns at us to make us do it.
Well, I mean, I guess that's really what it boils down to because all of the components that make up government can be found within the private sector other than the monopoly of force.
I mean, so really when you come down to the major component of government is the monopoly of force.
It's not like I go around the coffee shop with a baseball bat and demand a cup of coffee like Stefan was saying earlier.
You know, I engage in a free exchange because I want a cup of coffee.
I give them the symbol of my labor and I get a cup of coffee.
Or you can go down to a trade.
You can go sing a couple of songs and ask them for a coffee.
You can go offer to clean up some stuff.
You can go offer to give backups to the people, the baristas.
I mean, there's tons of things you can do other than tons of ways to get a coffee.
You can grow coffee beans. There's so many options right now.
But one of the precepts, I guess, of voluntarism is that disengagement from the political process.
And that's where a lot of libertarians have a real hard time bridging the gap.
And I started out as a constitutionalist.
And there's nothing wrong with the Constitution in itself.
It's a really great document.
But, you know, I've kind of moved beyond that.
And a lot of libertarians have problems bridging the gap between these principles, which they agree with, and disengagement from the political process.
So how are we to achieve these things without voting for someone?
Well, look, I mean, just look at the founding father documents.
I mean, all men are created equal.
Great.
Then you don't have the right to tax me because that is a monopoly right.
Consent government by and for the consent of the government.
Great! If my consent is involved, then it's not a government.
It's an agency that can provide me some kind of defense with competition with other agencies or maybe some other kind of currency.
All you have to do is look at the actual document.
It completely dispels the mythology of the state right up front.
Well, I've looked on there for my signature, and I can't find it.
I never remember actually agreeing to be bound by that.
No, no, I don't believe I'm actually bound by that document.
So, yeah, I find that interesting.
You know, and maybe on the other side, we can get into a little bit about, you know, we're talking about that disconnect between, you know, the voluntarism and engaging in the system.
And, you know, I think some people come from the perspective of, you know, well, it's self-defense, and others say, well, you know, it's still untrue.
You know, it's, you know, You need to be truthful with people about what the outcome can be of someone like Ron Paul getting into office.
So maybe we can get into a little more of that on the other side.
All right, folks, this is a little bit of a longer break.
Again, if you want to call in, it's 512-646-1984, 512-646-1984.
And you can check out Stephan's website at freedomainradio.com.
You're listening to the free mind report and we're gonna be back in just a couple of minutes Welcome back to the free mind report Tonight is Wednesday, February 15, 2012.
We are speaking with Stephan Molyneux from freedomainradio.com.
We were talking about voluntarism a little bit before the break and that disconnect between the anarchists and the men-anarchists.
You know, people that engage in the system and then others that say just totally disengage whatsoever.
I can only speak to that from my personal experience.
You know, I still engage in the Ron Paul campaign as a voluntarist just because I enjoy giving them a hard time.
I like going to CPAC and just, you know, watching the neocons squirm at it, you know.
But, I mean, that's really...
I think the extent of what I can hope can be achieved because obviously the man's not just going to come in and change things overnight.
You've got hundreds of thousands of people just absolutely 100% dependent on the system.
And that's how such a small segment of the ruling class can exert such control because they've enlisted the rest of the population to support the social structure.
Against their own interest.
How do you address that disconnect between the anarchists and the men-anarchists?
Well, I mean, it's reason and evidence is the way that we have to try and resolve these differences.
I really understand the draw to politics.
Way back in the day, I wrote a manifesto, I started a political party, and I was going to take on the system that way.
So I really understand the appeal, but I think that we have to step back from this cycle, right?
Because you could argue from the beginning of classical liberalism 150 years ago, people have tried to use politics to control the state.
How's that working? Let's look at the big picture view.
How's that working? The Libertarian Party was founded 40 years ago, 41 years ago, I guess.
And how's it working?
I think they talked out at 1.2% of the electorate.
Yeah, and I mean, Ron Paul is doing fantastically well.
I mean, you know, hats off where hats off are due.
But it is not working.
And, you know, we've poured hundreds of millions of dollars, heaven knows how many person hours into this approach.
And we have ended up with a state that is, I mean, five times larger than it was a generation, generation and a half ago, not even counting the national debt and the unfunded liabilities, where it is fundamentally, it's a complete tumor.
So, you know, we always get mad at the government because it has these programs that achieve the opposite of its goals and nobody ever stops and says, let's reassess, let's reassess.
So if we criticize the government, right, this is the bitch about being a critic, is that you are subject to that, the standards that you use to criticize others.
So let's look at ourselves as a movement and say, is it working?
It really is not working.
It really is not working. And as you've pointed out, People are, what is it, 40% of Americans get a significant or primary or major portion, if not the totality of their income from the government, and that doesn't even count all of the people who are spin-off industries from the government and so on.
You couldn't control the government in 1850 when this was going on.
You couldn't even control the government in 1776.
You end up with this secretive...
A constitutional congress that jams something down people's throats that they don't have a closed door meeting.
Eighty years later, you've got a civil war.
As much as I respect Michael Bednarik during his class on It's Good to be King or whatever, I enjoyed it.
There were some very good aspects to it, but I kept trying to bring up Shea's Rebellion.
He was like, oh, we'll talk about that later.
Yeah, so you can't control it.
You couldn't control the government under...
Barry Goldwater had this whole program to reduce the government.
He was supported by Ayn Rand, and this was in the 60s when the government was one-fifth the size it is now with far fewer dependents.
If you couldn't do it back then, how on earth do you say, oh, the Internet?
Well, but the Internet is an equal opportunity medium, right?
Bad people use it as well as good people, so it doesn't give us any particular advantage.
It's like, we have...
We have cavalry!
Well, they have cavalry. Okay, well, that cancels each other out.
So I don't think that, you know, we have to be skeptical.
And I think there's really good reasons as to why politics don't work.
I think that it's a fundamental misunderstanding that the government is not top-down laws.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding that menarchists and libertarians have, and some anarchists do.
The government is not top-down rules.
There's not a small number of people at the top pointing guns at everyone.
Because we outnumber them so much that it can't work that way.
Like there's this old story, I think it was ancient Greece again, where one of the senators put a bill forward and said, we need to get all of the slaves to wear orange armbands.
And the other senator said, are you crazy?
If they all wear orange armbands, they'll realize how many there are and how few of us there are and we'll be toast.
The only way the state can be sustained is if we're willing to attack each other for questioning the state.
Well, divine conquer, you know, the false left-right paradigm, I think, is really at the crux of that.
But, you know, I mean, things like, you know, we were talking about the petition of redress of grievances, right?
You know, we go in, we say, well, we're going to try to get, you know, legislation passed.
I'm going to write a letter. Back up.
They take a step back.
We set them back a little bit, you know, but then they just repackage it, come at us twice as strong.
I mean, look at the North American NAFTA superhighway.
You know, here in Oklahoma, there's actually a young kid and his brother, 14 years old, actually put the kibosh on it here.
And now they just continue to move forward with it.
And, you know, we got senators and everybody else that are just creating these little corridor gateways in the cities.
And eventually it'll just be here anyway.
And they find ways to circumvent any legislation that was set up to oppose it.
I mean, they're always going to be coming at us.
And, you know, they say, well, eternal vigilance, etc., etc.
But, you know, I mean, at some point, you know, we run out of steam.
We don't have the funds.
I mean, are we supposed to be watching these politicians every minute of our day to make sure they're not screwing us over?
Because they are. Yeah, I mean, don't you want to have a slightly more enjoyable life than having to monitor sociopaths with weapons all day long when you have very little chance of changing?
And look... Base economic need always trumps ideology, which is why people like government sector workers who want their pensions, they're gonna go full-tilt boogie to get those pensions.
For you and I, it's an ideological hobby at best.
It's just not something that we're gonna go to the wall for.
You know, we're not gonna go chase Governor Walker out because he does something we don't like in Wisconsin.
But people who've got base economic need, they're going to be driven to do that.
They're going to fight to the death to do that because that's, as they see it, their survival.
It's that or nothing. For us, it's just a hobby.
You can't ever get the general population which has diverse interests and very diluted gains to be made from opposing specific interests, specific special interest groups.
Those special interest groups will go to the wall.
The sugar industry gets millions of dollars from subsidies.
What does it cost the average American?
A couple of bucks a year.
So they have a couple bucks worth of year of interest to try and fight these multi-million dollar concentrated interests.
It's never going to work.
I mean, if there was intrinsic transparency built into the system, I believe that it would be enough of a deterrent that we wouldn't have to monitor these people.
They would be too afraid of being caught because everything that they do would be scrutinized.
But how are you going to get them to enact the legislation to, you know, I mean, you can't even get them to stop phoning themselves pay raises.
Well, you do it like you do anything.
No, come on. Look, they audited the Fed and they found out that the Fed handed out trillions of dollars, including some money to Libya.
Libya! Libya! Libya, for heaven's sakes, right?
You know, Churchill funds Hitler.
I mean, it's just crazy.
And what has that achieved?
I mean, it's great. I mean, it's interesting.
You know, wow, they really are handing out a lot of this monopoly money to a lot of really bad people.
I mean, everybody who's...
All around libertarianism, Austrian economics knows that already.
It goes out into the media. I mean, the whole puff piece of the lead-up to the war in Iraq turned out to be complete nonsense, as anybody with any brains knew ahead of time.
And so all of that has turned out to be a lie.
I mean, the lies that are repeated over and over again, all the pensions are underfunded, the national debt is catastrophic, the schools are terrible.
All of this is common knowledge.
But what changes? Because they've got all the guns, and we don't.
So we're allowed to throw all the spitballs we want at the giant wall of coercion.
It's not going to dent a damn thing.
The only thing, the only thing that is going to take down the state is a peaceful laying down of verbal arms with each other.
So that when we start to criticize the state, when we start to criticize the use of violence that is the foundation of statism...
Other people have got to take a deep breath and say, hey, you know, this is alarming to me.
This is weird to me.
This freaks me out. But I'm willing to listen because we're in a bad state and we need new ideas.
And this is a new idea.
Well, it's a very old idea, but it's universalized.
And that's what we need from people, and that's what we need to be persistent in, is in demanding the respect to have our position heard, to have our arguments heard, to have the evidence that our arguments crystallize and organize heard.
And everybody who denies the hearing of a just, powerful and reasoned argument is an agent Of the state.
That is the state.
The rejection of reason, the rejection of evidence, the social ostracism, the attack.
That is the state. And everybody who does that is complicit.
And we have to continue to urge, to request, to charm, and to demand the right to be heard.
Well, and it's morally wrong, and as you've pointed out in your podcasts and YouTube videos, that slavery was morally wrong.
Nobody sits around and goes, well, how are we going to clothe them?
How are we going to get them a job? This and that.
And you just stop, and you figure out how to go from there, because it was just morally wrong, so you put the kibosh on it.
Now, one thing that I see over and over again is just, if we can point the government's guns in the direction that I agree with, then everything's going to be okay.
And, you know, there's a lot of people in this movement, and I think, you know, there's some validity to it that oppose, you know, illegal immigration because it is being used for, you know, to further globalization.
You know, okay, I get that point of it, but really, you know, I've moved before, you know, and these people are just moving, and I've flown in the airplane, and I look out the window, and I don't see any lines.
And they just decided to move from one place to the other.
Well, to that end, Oklahoma passed some legislation.
They were going to be tough on illegal immigration.
And they passed this legislation in Oklahoma only.
And it just basically pushed all of the cheap labor out to the surrounding states, which caused their cost of production to go down, caused Oklahoma's cost of production to go up.
And now they're having to subsidize, take more taxpayer money.
And that was the whole reason that they began the legislation to begin with, because allegedly these illegal aliens are taking up all these services and the tax money.
Yeah, I mean, there's such a crushing lack of empathy to what it's like to live as an illegal.
Imagine, I mean, just imagine, terrified every time you see any kind of authority.
Terrified every time there's a knock at the door you don't expect.
Terrified every time there's a phone call or a letter with an official stamp.
Terrified. Everything.
You have no recourse to any kind of redress.
You can't ever call 911.
You're terrified every time there's a cop anywhere around you on the highway.
I mean, that is a wretched, hideous existence.
The lack of empathy for that is brutal.
And if people think that it's going to harm immigrants rather than their own freedom, then they're sadly mistaken.
And I think it's terrible. People have to say to themselves, Why on earth are people coming to America?
Is it still the land of opportunity?
No. Why is it that all the Mexicans are heading north, let's say, in a large number?
Well, there's a number of reasons.
The war on drugs is a big reason, because they have nuked a whole bunch of farmers' fields and other crop areas in Mexico.
One big thing is the corn subsidies.
They subsidize the corn.
Now the Mexican farmers can't compete because they're actually selling it under the cost of production.
Put them out of business. They go into the city areas.
There's no jobs, so they move north to work on the farms here.
Right, and I mean, the corruption in, remember, the Mexican currency went, you know, boobs up not a decade or a decade and a half ago, and it was entirely bailed out.
This was, you know, this was the bailout that set the stage for the bailout of 08 and 09.
And so, you know, all of the corruption gets subsidized.
The fact that the war on drugs raises the price of drugs, the American agricultural produce is dumped on the world market, At below cost because of the subsidies, not just for ethanol, but all of these products are sold off.
Ridiculous. This is one of the reasons third world farmers have got no food and can't compete.
You can't compete with almost free.
So American agricultural subsidies, the drug wars, the foreign policy, the subsidies, they're just wretched.
And so stop interfering in other people's countries and maybe they'll stop having to flee to yours.
Exactly. It's again that divide and conquer.
Let's fight the poor, impoverished people that are just coming here because of the policies of this government.
Well, they've got us fighting them instead of the people that are instituting the policies.
Folks, you're listening to the Freemind Report on the Logos Radio Network, and we're going to be back right after this.
Welcome back to the Freemind Report.
We are speaking tonight with Stephan Molyneux from freedomainradio.com.
It's been great so far.
This is going to be our final segment.
And I just appreciate you joining us this evening.
So, Stefan, what do you see as the future of liberty in this country?
I mean, is it going to come about through failure of the system?
Because I kind of like, I don't know what's going to happen.
I don't know if it's going to be just the system is so absurd that it's going to fall flat on its face, people are going to have to come up with better solutions, or are people going to wake up and start discussing these issues amongst themselves and try to bring about a more voluntary society?
What do you think is going to happen concerning the status of individual rights in the world?
Well, that's an easy question.
I thought you guys would come up with something tough.
Well, look, it's up to us.
I mean, how is it going to...
It's like saying to the captain of a ship, which way is the boat going to go?
Well, it depends which way we spin the wheel.
And, you know, if you look at sort of recent examples, you know, the two that come to mind is the collapse of socialism under the Weimar Republic in the 1920s led to Hitler.
That's double plus ungood.
The collapse of communism...
In China and in Russia led to something that was not Hitlerian, right?
It led to something that was better.
The collapse of socialism as an ideology, this is the greatest curse that England left was to train all of the intellectuals in India in the post-war period in socialism.
The collapse of socialism has led to 30,000 to 50,000 families or people in And so, you know, it's the French Revolution versus the American Revolution.
What is the difference? The difference is knowledge.
The difference is an accurate diagnosis of the ailment.
I think that as long as we keep throwing these sky beams of truth right up against the low hanging clouds, writing the truth, proclaiming the truth, being loud, being absurd, being funny, being passionate, being whatever it takes.
To get people's attention, we know what the problem is, we know what the illness is, and we know what the cure is.
The illness is force, and the cure is peace.
Not pacifism, but peace.
And if we continue, you know, the most consistent argument, as Ayn Rand said, will always win.
But it has to be consistently and passionately and repeatedly applied.
So if we keep doing what we're doing, if we keep talking about We're good to go.
Because once you know the cause, you know the cure.
If you know the cause is violence, you know the cure is peace.
And if we keep doing what we're doing, then the crisis Will be the death throes of the most ancient evil, the last great remaining evil in human society.
I mean, they've got rid of racism to a large degree, got rid of sexism to a large degree, got rid of slavery to a large degree.
The state is the one piece of prehistoric technology that still dominates us with this leather-bound Genghis Khan boot on our neck.
We have to shrug this thing off.
We have to outgrow this monstrously ancient and evil institution, and we can do it.
But we have to accurately diagnose, repeatedly predict, and then repeatedly trumpet and proclaim the cure.
Then this will be an incredible opportunity, an incredible opportunity, the likes of which has never been seen before in human history, for mankind to take flight and be free forever.
You don't go backwards that much in history.
You know, slavery is not about to come back.
We're not about to throw women back and barefoot in the kitchen pregnant only.
Things don't go backwards.
And once we vault this last barrier to human freedom, the sky is not even close to the limit.
The solar system isn't the limit.
Maybe the galaxy is the limit, but that's about it.
Well, I've been saying that we're either on the precipice of a new dark age or a new renaissance.
I think it's a new renaissance.
I'm hopeful on that. And I think that active participation, being out there, talking to your friends and family, Just being out there on the streets, we hand out flyers, DVDs, things to expose this type of corruption, these ideas, and hold these people accountable.
I think all of that adds to this global awakening that we're seeing.
Even Brzezinski said that they're facing a challenge like they've never seen before.
Unlike no other time in history, the world's population is becoming politically awake.
You know, and that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
Well, the human brain is talking to itself through the information revolution like it never has before in recorded history.
Stefan, you live in Canada, and I'm curious about this.
How would you compare the state of freedom in Canada versus the United States?
Well, it's interesting because ideologically, America has a lot stronger commitment to liberty, but in a practical sense, Canada's understated approach to liberty is really not so loud, but really quite effective.
And so Canada did not have a massive stimulus package that has mired us in recession.
And so the recession that we had was relatively brief, and this has happened before.
We have a conservative government that is really conservative.
You know, they don't really care about gay rights, reproductive rights, and so on, but they do care about the economy.
Canada in the 90s went through a shrinkage of 20 to 25 percent, I think it was, of the state as a whole because interest costs were eating up like 40 cents on the dollar.
We don't have an empire.
We do have socialized medicine, but America has mostly socialized medicine anyway, but just with, you know, fascistic private profit interests feeding off the general teat.
So, you know, our military is a joke.
Our natural resources, wealth is enormous.
The population has a tendency of live and let live and leave the other alone.
We don't have ambitious foreign policy.
We're not tempted to run the world.
We don't have 10,000 sharpened sticks poking into every hornet's nest in the world.
Thus, we do not fear retaliation from extremist elements.
It's not bad. You know, it's not bad.
Per capita debt is not too wretched.
The housing crisis may come our way, but I don't think it's going to be as bad as it was in the U.S.
You can get a reasonable level of taxation if you're self-employed.
And free trade within the provinces is in many ways higher than it is between the states in America.
And last but not least, we're now sending our trade east-west rather than north-south because I think, you know, with the prime minister is right now over in Canada licking the toes of the new emperors so that to make sure that we keep the ships flowing back and forth because I think we get that, you know, America is receding from world dominance and so we need to sort you know, America is receding from world dominance and so we need to sort of spread our Now, I use the word we entirely entirely.
I'm going to get six million emails saying, what do you mean we?
But, you know, it's just a colloquialism.
I do the same thing. It's so ingrained, you know.
Talking about the government, you're like saying, well, you know, we're going to attack.
It's like, wait, no, I'm not going to attack anybody, you know.
I can't refer to myself as a current, you know, member of the, involuntary member of the tax farm called Canada.
Every time, it makes it a bit cumbersome to talk about this stuff.
So, yeah. Do you have any speaking engagements coming up?
Yeah, I do, actually.
In July, I think it is, I'll be in Vancouver at the seminar called Capitalism and Morality.
I'm so looking forward to that.
I get to present my theory of ethics, which is available for free on my website.
I send no ads and nothing like that.
It's called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
It's virtue without gods and virtue without governments and it's an entirely self-contained theory.
I'm going to use audience members to demonstrate the theory, distribute toy guns and demonstrate the theory so that people really get it.
I get two and a half hours over the course of a day.
I'm completely thrilled to be doing that.
I should be back in Libertopia in October and the Porcupine Freedom Festival hopefully in the summer.
I've got some stuff going down.
I'll be talking remotely at the Georgia Libertarian Convention in a week or two.
So, yeah, it's, you know, the tendrils are out.
Well, very nice.
And at freedomainradio.com, folks can get your podcasts, your YouTube videos that you put out, and also some of the books that you've written.
And I think you just say that if you get some value from it, you know, donate what you think you got the value from.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's the business model invented by a man with the business sense of cheese string It is, you know, take what you want and leave a tip if you like.
It's a tip jar. I used to be, like I said, for a real job.
I was a software entrepreneur, you know, built-in company and all that.
But I sort of, you know, got bitten by the bug of trying to make the world a better place.
So if people like the work, then, you know, they can contribute to keep me in vittles and shelter because, you know, it gets cold and hungry up here in the Canadian winter.
But yeah, it's a donation-based model entirely.
Yeah, we catch a little bit of heat for trying to sell the documentary.
You know, it's like, well, that should be free.
And I'm like, well, so should plane tickets and cameras.
But they're not. You know, it's always amazing to me because it's a libertarian community.
The number of free riders is truly appalling.
It's like, can you just go read economics in one lesson or something like that?
You know, just... Forget that, you know, at least try to have 1% of the generosity of your average churchgoer.
That's sort of all I'm asking, you know.
But, you know, I guess people, they're used to getting everything for free and they don't quite make that connection.
Well, they're still just being forced to have to buy everything or being forced to have money extracted from their pockets.
They see an opportunity and they just snatch it up.
Yeah. Well, Stephan, we thank you for joining us this evening, and we look forward to watching your videos and podcasts as they come out.
It's always good information on freedomainradio.com.
Again, thank you for joining us tonight.
Folks, you're listening to the Free Mind Report on the Logos Radio Network.
Our website is freemindreport.com.
I highly encourage you to go there, check it out, check out the podcast.
▲
Export Selection