Derrick Broze, host of Voice of the Resistance Radio, interviews Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, about the future of human liberty and the history of religion. http://www.facebook.com/voiceoftheresistanceradio
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| How are you doing, Stephan? I'm doing awesome. | |
| Welcome to Voice of Resistance Radio. | |
| I'm really happy to have you on and we've got a lot of people listening in, excited to hear what you have to say. | |
| So I guess let's get right into it. | |
| I guess for those who are uninitiated, maybe you could go into a little bit about who you are, how you got into this whole movement. | |
| Well, my name is Stefan Molyneux. | |
| I run Free Domain Radio at freedomainradio.com, which is the biggest philosophy conversation the world has ever seen. | |
| How's that? For an intro. | |
| And I sort of come out of the academic world. | |
| I sort of got my master's. | |
| I sort of got my master's. | |
| I totally got my master's, man, in history, mostly the history of philosophy at the University of Toronto. | |
| And then I went into the entrepreneurial world. | |
| I worked as a software entrepreneur for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years. | |
| And then I started, because I've been thinking about philosophy for 20 or 30 years, I started recording some thoughts in the car as I was driving to go to work, started publishing them, and then I eventually asked for donations, quit. | |
| My career and now this is my thing. | |
| I talk about philosophy with anybody who's interested and fortunately enough people are interested that I can keep body and soul together. | |
| Definitely. We've been keeping an eye on you over here and I know that, like I said, a lot of our listeners to my show regularly keep up with what you do and the whole voluntarist ideals is something that I try to push daily through my action and through my show as well. | |
| So I wanted to discuss Different aspects of how a society would look without any force. | |
| I was watching your response this morning to Jon Stewart and talking about these different ideas that are always proposed. | |
| Well, how would this work? How could we possibly exist without government? | |
| And I'd like you to elaborate a little bit more on how this society would work. | |
| Sure. Just beforehand, you know, there's voluntarism, there's anarchism, there's libertarianism. | |
| Frankly, the only ism that I like has a J in it. | |
| And I think that there's way too much fragmentation. | |
| To me, philosophy is sort of like science. | |
| There's no this kind of like Dawkins biology versus somebody. | |
| There's only good science and bad science, and there's only good philosophy and bad philosophy. | |
| Now, good philosophy is the philosophy that works from first principles in a very consistent manner, just in the same way that science does. | |
| And philosophy that is good has empiricism. | |
| In other words, a sort of moral system that's supposed to work should, if it is enacted properly, have good results. | |
| and a moral system which is illogical or irrational should, when enacted, like communism or socialism or fascism or our current corporate crony capitalism from hell, should have bad results. | |
| And so I really like philosophy that's first principles, reason all the way, with reference to evidence and all of that kind of good stuff. | |
| That, to me, is what philosophy is. | |
| And we either do it well, hopefully, or we do it badly. | |
| Now, philosophy that works, the philosophy that makes sense to me, and I think there's, hopefully it's not just to me, but to people as a whole, is the sort of two basic things that we need in the world to have peace. | |
| The first is we need to respect the non-initiation of force, the non-aggression principle, or the NAP. Which means thou shalt not initiate force against another human being. | |
| If you need to pull a few ninja Spider-Man moves and do some wall jumps to get away from people who are after you, then fine. | |
| You know, if you need to shoot some guy in the leg who's coming at you with a chainsaw, well... | |
| Try not to have people in your life who have chainsaws, but that's fine. | |
| Self-defense is okay because it's not the initiation. | |
| So non-initiation of force and, which is basically the same thing, but it looks at a different way, a respect for property rights. | |
| I own myself. I own the effects of my actions. | |
| Therefore, I own the property that I create. | |
| So non-initiation of force, respect for property rights. | |
| I mean, the non-initiation of force is basically just saying the most important property that you need to respect is another person's body, their flesh, their You know their physical space. | |
| And so, all violations are fundamentally property violations since humans have self-ownership. | |
| So, respect for property, non-initiation of force. | |
| Now, if we take those and move those to the center of our moral systems, like the same way you move the sun to the center of the model of the solar system, then click, everything, everything falls into place. | |
| Why our existing disasters don't work? | |
| Well, because the government has a monopoly on so many things. | |
| And monopoly means a violent monopoly. | |
| If you try to compete with the government in terms of currency, you can face terrible sanctions. | |
| If you try to start up your own bank without running through all the hoops, you will face terrible sanctions. | |
| If you want to not pay for the public indoctrination system, you will face terrible sanctions. | |
| If you want to not pay for a legal system that serves the rich and screws the poor, well, you will face terrible sanctions. | |
| So it's this violent monopoly is a violation of the non-aggression principle and is a violation of the respect for property rights. | |
| And as a result, you're seeing all these terrible things happening. | |
| Now, the terrible things that happen don't happen all at once. | |
| That's the trick, right? Heroin is great for a toothache. | |
| It just doesn't work in the long run to make you better. | |
| So, statism can do some great things in the short run, but unfortunately, the hangover, the backlash is terrible in the long run. | |
| So, really, that's the focus. | |
| Now, the question, of course, is how would society work? | |
| The answer is, I don't care and it doesn't matter. | |
| It doesn't matter. I mean, I've got books that are theorizing and so does lots of other people, but it doesn't matter. | |
| You say, well, how is cotton going to be picked after we free the slaves? | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| The only thing that matters, the only thing that matters is that slavery is immoral. | |
| The only thing that matters in society is not how roads are built without a government. | |
| But that forcing people to pay for roads, forcing people to have a monopoly is immoral. | |
| It is a violation of moral principles, and that's why we get these bad results. | |
| Definitely. You know, one of the critiques and one of the questions that somebody wanted me to propose to you is, so what do we do once we achieve our voluntarist free society with mutual association, mutual benefit, voluntary association, I mean, And somebody violates the non-aggression principle. | |
| How is that handled in this society? | |
| Well, there's two answers to that, and I'll do my very best to tamp it down and keep it brief. | |
| The first is that someone doesn't have a great childhood where they're raised without spanking, without being yelled at, without being confined, without being aggressed against, without being neglected, without being bullied, without being brutalized, without being abused. | |
| Somebody doesn't wake up one day and say, Hey, I'm going to go become a thief, or hey, I'm going to go become a rapist, or hey, I'm going to go beat someone up. | |
| The path to the violations of the non-aggression principle is long and layered, and I've actually got a YouTube video and podcast called How to Create a Monster, which goes into just one example of how much had to go wrong in someone's life for them to become a mall shooter. | |
| And so the problem is that you need to intervene very early. | |
| So you need to have a society where there's a lot of investment in how to raise children well and peacefully and nicely and calmly. | |
| And right now, we don't have that society. | |
| I mean, we've got a society that's doing its very best to bring a 21st century chainsaw to the traditional family, two parents, kids, and so on. | |
| And one parent home, if not both. | |
| We're just detonating the whole nuclear family with a nuclear blast and all that's left is a shadow of our former ideals. | |
| And that's just wretched and terrible and horrible. | |
| So we need a society that's going to really invest in kids. | |
| And what that means, of course, is that people need to suffer the consequences of bad parenting themselves. | |
| Right now, you raise a kid who becomes a criminal, you don't pay as a parent. | |
| Society pays as a whole. | |
| So that's a big problem. So we need... | |
| And I've got in my free book, Practical Anarchy, at freedomainradio.com forward slash free, there's an article on how a free society would have a much greater and deeper investment in the health of children. | |
| But secondly, if somebody does do something like that, well, then you can... | |
| If somebody starts to aggress against you, then you can use self-defense. | |
| So they face that risk. | |
| Right now... If people want to go start a war, they want to go cheer a war, or they want to go get some unjust benefit, they just need to go lobby the government, and then they get all that they want. | |
| And that's really terrible, because they don't face any of the risks of violence themselves. | |
| Whereas if you're going to go rob someone in an alley, at least you face the risks of that violence yourself. | |
| So you can use self-defense and also, of course, economic and social ostracism is an incredibly powerful tool that is just not used very much at the moment because we just have this medieval let's lock people up and throw away the key after ignoring the child abuse they suffered since they were born. | |
| And so, you simply would not, you know, if you violated these kinds of things, you would have to pay restitution. | |
| And if you didn't pay restitution, then it would be highly unlikely that anybody would want to do any business with you. | |
| In other words, nobody would want to sell you food or deliver electricity to you or rent you a house or let you walk on their roads. | |
| You would basically be pushed out of society until you made restitution. | |
| I see what you're saying. So, in our society that we're working towards, For one, the community would exist, the family model that has been eroded would be there, and most likely we would see less of, as you termed it, these monsters of society that are created by the system, that are created by, like you said, the destruction of the nuclear family and such. | |
| And I agree with you that we would see, most likely we would see future generations of people who are better equipped to take care of themselves, Better able to handle their emotions and to deal with themselves instead of looking for the government to answer. | |
| Yeah, I mean, look at everything that's going wrong with the family right now. | |
| I mean, you have a massive explosion in single mom households. | |
| It's not good for kids. | |
| I mean, there are some single moms out there who work really hard and do a great job, but statistically, it really stacks the odds against kids. | |
| You have a welfare system that promotes single parenthood. | |
| You have an educational system that, you know, further messes up the minds of kids by not teaching them how to think, but rather what to think, loading them down with facts and statistics and mechanical procedures that do nothing to nurture. | |
| Their creative intelligence. | |
| And then you have, you know, they come out of 12 or 13 years of education with virtually no economic skills whatsoever. | |
| And that's really terrible because then, you know, after they've graduated from grade 12 calculus, they have to go and flip burgers because they don't know how to do anything. | |
| And so they've got to go right back to the kindergarten of the economy. | |
| That really lowers people's incentive to stay in school and do the right thing. | |
| So... And this just, you know, of course, the national debt and crumbling infrastructure and the violence and the bullying, as more and more dysfunctional kids get into these schools, the schools become more and more violent and destructive, which further drives even, you know, more kids out. | |
| So at the moment, kids, and there's a great documentary, I actually interviewed the filmmaker for my show called The War on Kids, which is really, really well worth it. | |
| You can get it online. And, you know, what's happening to childhood is just awful. | |
| Childhood is sliding backwards in time in terms of quality at the same time as our technology and, you know, geek infrastructure is leaping ahead. | |
| Childhood is just falling behind and that is a tension that can't last. | |
| We have to get the quality of families and childhood up to the quality of our technology or we're really playing with fire. | |
| Definitely. You know, I wanted to get into a couple other aspects of this society. | |
| We've talked about now somewhat about education and dealing with family and children. | |
| One of the other things that we often see or that I see critiqued about a voluntary society is how the police force would work. | |
| So if you could kind of elaborate on your ideas on how the protective services would be handled. | |
| Well, so what you mean is like someone coming to break in to your house, that kind of thing? | |
| Yeah, exactly. I guess most people are still under the idea that they need Yeah, I mean, as somebody who's been doing this for a while, I'm sure you're in the same boat as well, and it's not people's fault because it's just the way that people are indoctrinated, but when people say, well, how would police protect you in a free society? | |
| There's kind of this weird thing where people are making the assumption that somehow it's happening now, like you're being protected in the current society, so how will we maintain the great level of protection in the future society? | |
| It's like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. | |
| First of all, four-fifths of people in American jails are there for non-violent crimes. | |
| In other words, non-crimes, where there's no complainant, there's no victim, and that's why the state has to prosecute. | |
| So the vast majority of people are being incarcerated for non-crimes, for things like gambling or prostitution, of course, the war on drugs and tax evasion, just things like that. | |
| No victim, no violation of contract, no initiation of force. | |
| And so what I think is more like these, the jail doors are thrown open for these people in a free society. | |
| Let's focus on the four-fifths of people whose lives are literally destroyed by this gulag, Apicalago, that exists within America, where America right now It has the highest, of course, per capita incarceration rate around the world, beating totalitarian China and North Korea, and has almost the same percentage of people in the incarceration system as occurred under Stalin, for heaven's sake. | |
| I mean, this is not working right now, and all of this stuff comes at the expense of the protection of property crimes and crimes of violence. | |
| The fact that people are focusing on homeland security and terrorism and drugs and all, I mean, who Who cares? | |
| What I want is for somebody to make sure people don't break into my house. | |
| So in a free society, first of all, you have many, many more resources available than you do now. | |
| And one problem in the current system... | |
| I buy home insurance to protect me against invasion or theft or something. | |
| What would make the most sense, I think, economically, is for the people who sell you home insurance to be responsible for the protection of your home. | |
| In other words, we want the insurance companies who we're paying for protection to actually provide that protection. | |
| Because it's to their interest to find out exactly what causes theft, exactly how to deal with it, and to make sure that theft is as profitless As possible, right? | |
| So you can, I don't know, voice-activated televisions. | |
| You know, so if somebody steals your television, they can't use it because it's got your voice print or retina scan. | |
| I know, whatever you can come up with that makes the stealing stuff less valuable. | |
| But the other thing, too, of course, is that in a free society, you don't have... | |
| You know, kids who are drawn into the drug war, who become thieves through the drug war, either as dealers or because they've got a drug habit and they need to sustain that habit, they have to go steal stuff. | |
| You don't have kids who are so bored and brain dead from this government indoctrination camps called schools that they'll just do anything to get out and throw away their future. | |
| You don't have a welfare state which creates single moms. | |
| And, of course, single moms are responsible for 70% or more of the criminals in the country. | |
| So you've got far fewer real criminals. | |
| You have far greater protection. | |
| And you have far fewer resources being squandered in the pursuit of non-criminals like drug users and drug dealers and so on. | |
| And so to me, it's like, what couldn't be better in a free society? | |
| How is it going to work down to the last detail? | |
| Who cares? But let's at least take the 70-80% of non-violent, non-criminals out of this horrible system at the moment. | |
| Definitely. You know, you're talking a lot of crazy ideas here, Stephan, about people living free without the thought of police and actions focusing on real issues instead of arresting people for victimless crimes. | |
| These are outlandish ideas. | |
| I'm not sure where you're coming from with them by that. | |
| I'm coming from the future. | |
| That's why I have no hair. | |
| It's that old Seinfeld episode. | |
| I'm doing good, man. Glad to have you back on the show. | |
| Let's continue with the conversation. | |
| As I said before, you guys, if you have any questions for Stefan, the lines are open. | |
| 347-324-3704. | |
| So I wanted to ask you, what are the most common, I guess, critiques of these ideas that you receive, that you, you know, have come up in conversation with you? | |
| Because I ran into a couple recently, and, you know, I'm just curious as to what are the most common misconceptions people have about a voluntary society? | |
| Well, I think one of the misconceptions that people have that comes up a lot, I mean, there's obviously the ones, well, how will X be provided? | |
| How will Rose be provided? | |
| How will poor kids be educated? | |
| Blah, blah, blah. And those, I think, are relatively easy to counter because you've got the, they're not being, it's not happening right now. | |
| That's sort of the first one. The second one is, there's lots of solutions that have occurred in the past, you know. | |
| The literacy rate was 95%, 96%, 97% in America before government education. | |
| They can only dream of half that now. | |
| And so the government took over roads. | |
| There were roads already with tolls. | |
| The government took them over and so on. | |
| So there's tons of ways to counter that. | |
| And again, the fundamental argument is it doesn't matter. | |
| It doesn't matter how a free society works. | |
| What matters is we stop putting guns in people's faces and think we're solving damn problems when we're not. | |
| So those are relatively easy to counter. | |
| But there's this weird thing that happens. | |
| You know, where people say, well, we can't, you know, in a free society, if a free society is only going to work, if everybody is perfect, if everybody is really good, and they think that we're going to be like these dreamy-eyed, dewy-eyed, rainbow-afro lambs, buying around, chewing on the cuds of liberty, but the moment a wolf comes in, ah, it's all over, you know, the moment some bad guy comes along, he's just going to take over society, and we're all just going back and go right back into the slaughterhouse, and nothing really could be further than the truth. | |
| The idea of a voluntary society or a stateless society or an anarchic society is not idealistic. | |
| What is idealistic is a status society. | |
| That is naive and dangerous. | |
| Because a status society carries with it the assumption that you're going to create this incredible hierarchy, this blood-soaked pyramid institutionalized hierarchical power. | |
| With the power to print money whenever it wants, the power to start wars, to incarcerate at will, to create laws at will, to bribe their friends and punish their enemies, and not one single evil guy is going to ever be interested in running that system. | |
| Never! You're only going to get really great guys at the top, and all the evil guys are going to be criminals in the alleys. | |
| They're never going to be congressmen or presidents or prime ministers or anything like that. | |
| It is the statist who is naive about human nature and the potential for evil. | |
| The anarchist or the voluntarist recognizes that human nature is corrupted by power, and to create a monolithic thing called the state, with all of the powers that it has, is only going to draw, like flies to caca, is only going to draw the most evil people to the top of that pyramid structure. | |
| And so, we cannot have a state because human nature is prone to wanting something for nothing, right? | |
| The desire for the unearned is the root of all evil. | |
| And so we recognize that you can't create this monster machine called the state and not end up with bad people driving it. | |
| The possibility of human evil is exactly why we can't have a state. | |
| And that's another thing that people get confused about. | |
| And so... And of course the path to it is always confusing to people too. | |
| But again, that doesn't really matter. | |
| I mean, it takes 100 to 150 years at minimum to really change society. | |
| If you look at the abolitionistic movement to end slavery or you look at the... | |
| The advocation for the equal rights for women, it took 100 to 150 years at a minimum. | |
| It's going to take multi-generations. | |
| So we don't even know what the world is going to look like when this thing even comes around. | |
| I mean, if you try to predict 150 years ago what society was going to look like in 2012, what was that, 1862, nobody would have a clue. | |
| You wouldn't guess. I mean, that was before the airplanes. | |
| I mean, so nobody, let alone the internet, let alone tanks or anything like nuclear weapons. | |
| So nobody would have a clue. | |
| What it's going to look like. Nobody knows what society is going to look like, so it doesn't matter. | |
| The only thing that we have to do is we have to go by basic moral principles. | |
| That's when things work. When you extend personhood to slaves, you've done a great moral service to mankind because you've taken a universal ethic and actually made it universal. | |
| Same thing when you apply it to women. | |
| We still need to, I think, fundamentally apply it to children. | |
| I was just reading today that in Florida, You can beat a child without even the parent's permission and you can't be sued for child abuse to the point where you can leave bruises, like beat with an implement paddles. | |
| Can you imagine? Can you imagine if I set up, I don't know, some women's shelter and I just was able to beat women at will and never be sued for it? | |
| I mean, that's just horrendous. | |
| So we still need to work on extending personhood to children, which is the most important class to extend full personhood to, because they're not exactly involuntary relationships with their parents. | |
| So they're the ones who are the most deserving of extra special human rights with whipped cream and a cherry on top. | |
| So we're still working on all this kind of stuff. | |
| And we've got a lot of stuff to do before we're ever going to see a stateless society. | |
| You know, let's at least get the proportion of parents hitting their children or spanking their children. | |
| Let's try and get that down from about 90% to, let's say, 0%. | |
| How long is that going to take? | |
| Generation or two? | |
| And then even then we'll have a long way to go. | |
| So it doesn't matter. | |
| These are all theoretical things. | |
| But let's at least start extending non-aggression principle and respect for property within our personal relationships. | |
| And let's let society take care of itself when our great-great-grandchildren finally overthrow this beast. | |
| Definitely. You know, I'm glad that you said that it's going to take a couple of generations because I think another problem that has kind of been ingrained to us as a society is this impatience and the need to... | |
| Well, we think that things need to be fixed right now and the only viable solution people can come up with is to... | |
| Give up their ability to change society and, you know, they give up responsibility and instead look to the government further to do that. | |
| And like I said, it's not going to happen tomorrow. | |
| This is a couple generations down the line, but if we decide that that means enough to us that we can focus on what our children, our grandchildren's world is going to be like that, then we can definitely make major change. | |
| I've got two more quick questions that have been put out here in the chat room for you. | |
| Somebody is asking where you stand on, and I guess, where a voluntary society would stand on gun rights. | |
| I mean, I think I know the answer to that, but I'll let you answer. | |
| I'm fine. I mean, I don't care who has weapons. | |
| I do care if they have a monopoly on nuclear weapons. | |
| That bothers me a little bit. | |
| So, I have no problem. | |
| I feel that... I would love to live in a world where self-defense through guns was unnecessary, but I think, again, that's going to take a long time. | |
| That's going to be a long time coming. | |
| I think that guns are fine. | |
| I think that guns are essential in the prevention of crime. | |
| I think that guns equalize self-defense for women, because women are generally smaller than weaker, but they get a whole lot more equal with a Smith& Wesson in their purse. | |
| And so I think that for the old, for the sick, for women, for people who are, you know, slighter of stature, I think guns are the great equalizer. | |
| And, you know, I fully accept the research that says that guns prevent millions of crimes a year. | |
| I fully also respect the argument that if you don't like guns, you don't need to have guns in your house. | |
| And that doesn't matter because the criminal doesn't know on your street who has guns and who doesn't. | |
| That's the great thing about it. And so I'm completely fine. | |
| If people don't want guns, then it's pretty easy. | |
| All they need to do is they need to buy up a tract of land, and they need to start a housing development, and they have to have as part of their contract, if you buy the housing development, it's like a condo agreement, you're not allowed to have weapons. | |
| And if people want to move there, great. | |
| And if they don't want to, they don't have to. | |
| But it's an entirely voluntary thing about gun ownership, and it should never ever cause a basic logical problem with banning guns. | |
| It's like, guns are bad, people can't have them. | |
| Okay, so we need to get a group of people with a whole bunch of guns to take away everyone else's guns. | |
| So wait a sec, guns are good for the police, but they're bad for the citizens? | |
| But the police are just people like the citizens, so how can they be good for one group of people and bad for another group of people? | |
| It just, it takes 10 seconds of logical analysis to demolish the argument that we need the state to restrict gun usage. | |
| So, you know, that's the rational reality, and so, you know, arguing against it is sort of ridiculous. | |
| Yeah, I would say I agree with you that, you know, if people want to have guns, they should have that right, and if they want to have a community that does not allow guns, then that should be the right as well. | |
| I think we've got a question here on the line for you. | |
| Let me see who we've got. Hello, who we got here? | |
| Hi, my name is Aaron from Florida. | |
| You know, Republicans seem to use The church and their religion to actually attack the government. | |
| Ooh, you know, the government's trying to take away our religious freedom. | |
| But I would like to hear what Stefan seems to think about. | |
| Does religion, do the churches actually enhance the state and our psychology towards accepting violence through a third party? | |
| And I'd like to hear what you think about that one more time. | |
| I mean, that's a big, complicated question. | |
| What's my time frame? | |
| You know, when people say quick questions, what they usually mean is quick answers. | |
| So, what's my time frame? | |
| Alright. So, I'll just touch on this very briefly. | |
| Look, historically, there's no question that the monarchy and the clergy went hand in hand. | |
| And what happened was the clergy would tell the people that the monarchy was given to them by God. | |
| In other words, that the king was placed there by God. | |
| And to disobey the king was to disobey God. | |
| And that was very, very important at a time when a sword and a bow and arrow made you pretty much the equal of everyone else. | |
| So, to overthrow a king, as Macbeth found when the king stayed in his castle overnight, was a pretty easy thing to do. | |
| And so, the king needed to get this mystical aura of divinity around him, and that's called the Divine Rite of Kings. | |
| Promoting the superstition of the legitimacy, the divine legitimacy of the king, what the kings did, as the warlords, as the mafia really, was they gave the clergy a monopoly on religion. | |
| And this was fine, of course, to some degree. | |
| Of course, it was pretty horrible in the Dark Ages through the early part of the Middle Ages. | |
| And then when the printing press came along and Martin Luther, the original, came along, translated the Bible into the vernacular, everybody picked and cherry-picked their own little bits from the Bible because the Bible, of course, is a hugely contradictory document. | |
| If you want to find anything in the Bible, you'll find some verse that justifies it. | |
| And so people took their own personal prejudices, had them reflected back to infinity by cherry-picking the Bible, and then you created a situation of religious war for a couple of hundred years in Europe, which just was devastating. | |
| And what basically happened was all of the religious denominations, the Calvinists, the Swingalians, the Lutherans, the you name it, right? | |
| The Anabaptists, they all tried to get control of the state and impose their religion on everyone else. | |
| And so this caused such horrible religious warfare throughout Europe that eventually the idea came along, look, we have to separate the church and state. | |
| Because we simply cannot have a state and have all of these competing religions trying to take it over because it's just civil war from here to eternity. | |
| There was a separation of church and state that occurred to a large degree in the West, which came out of exhaustion. | |
| Since then, certainly in American libertarianism, there is a strong anti-state element to it. | |
| That part, I think, is great and helpful. | |
| They disseminate a lot of Arguments against some of the economic viability and moral legitimacy of the state. | |
| You know, as a philosopher, I have to work from first principles and empirical evidence and so on, which doesn't lead me to believe in deities any more than it leads me to believe in a state. | |
| Both of them philosophically to me appear as collective fantasies born out of particular deprivations in childhood fundamentally. | |
| So, I don't think that we're going to end up with a height of religious state in this society. | |
| I think that if philosophy wins out, the state and existing religious institutions hopefully will face some considerable rational challenges. | |
| Definitely. Thank you for that question, caller, from Florida. | |
| And Stefan, I guess we're going to let you go for the day. | |
| I very much appreciate you coming on. | |
| Caleb from Odessa, Caleb from Liberty Fest West sends his regards and said thank you for helping out there, by the way. | |
| Oh, it's my pleasure. I appreciate you coming on the show. | |
| Be sure to tell everybody once again where they can find you at and hear more of your ideas. | |
| Sure. You can go to freedomainradio.com for everything's free, the books, the videos, the interviews, the podcasts, the message board. | |
| It's all free, so I hope people become and gorge themselves senseless faceplant in the big soup of philosophy. | |
| Awesome. Thank you, Stephan. | |
| You have a good day. I appreciate you coming on. |