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April 18, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:43
2126 Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed on Liberty Cap Talk Live!

Stefan Molyneux discusses libertarianism, anarchism, Ron Paul and the future of freedom on Liberty Cap Talk Live.

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Right. Let's table that just for about a half hour or so, because our next guest is on with us right now.
He is the host of Freedom Main Radio.
He is a well-known libertarian, or actually more like a voluntarious anarchist, I should say.
And he's actually been hosting his own radio show for a number of years.
He's been well-known in the movement by itself, and he's got lots of listeners.
He's very controversial at what he does.
Please welcome our very good friend, Stefan Molyneux!
Hello and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to your most exciting and non-rave-filled Saturday evening of political discussions.
We are going to hit the clubs later.
That's my assumption.
Yeah, that's my assumption too.
So, you know, I want to thank you for coming on the show tonight because it's just me and my guest panel, my partner in crime, was not able to make it tonight.
But he did say in advance, you know, thank you for coming on for The Nury Fame, just so you know.
But Having said that, I do want to thank you for coming on because you've been on a libertarian, or more or less, to be more accurate, to be more precise, the anarchist circles for quite a long time now.
And you have been pretty much on talk radio for a long time.
I've listened to a lot of your stuff over the years.
I have to say, You've impressed the shit out of me, Stefan.
Well, I hope you were near something porcelain and bowl-like when that occurred, because if the podcast is so good that you blast your pants in public, I guess that's a kind of compliment that I would have to take, really, on both sides of the fence.
To start off tonight, I guess the big question I want to ask you, Stefan, is, you know, first of all, How did you get into this movement of ours?
And how did you get into this radio show business?
What makes you so fucking popular?
There's one of those questions I don't think I'll be able to answer because it mystifies me, but I mean, I got into it.
I mean, I had a lot, I guess, that sort of prepared me for it.
I studied voice and singing and acting and fencing, which is very good for debating and fighting and all that when I was in theater school.
I was a debater when I was younger.
I was an entrepreneur, so I did lots of presentations.
So I'm sort of used to talking in front of people.
I did a lot of education, sort of college and graduate school in history and with some philosophy and some economics thrown in.
Yeah. Yeah, I've studied this stuff for a long time.
I've got a monster passion for philosophy.
I do believe that philosophy is the skyhook that needs to yank the collar of humanity out of the muck of superstition and statism and all of the historical mud and goo that keeps us from rising to our full height.
I've got a massive passion for ethics and for innovative ways to apply the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights in our own life.
So I've really tried to make It actionable.
I mean, sort of my big thing, you know, the slogan of the show has been like Free Domain Radio, the logic of personal and political freedom.
And it's the personal that comes first.
Where can we apply the non-aggression principle in our own lives?
You know, libertarianism has a bit of a habit of, you know, firing blistering reason arrows at the unattainable moon.
And it's good exercise, but it doesn't actually hit anything.
And I try to sort of have a philosophy that is compelling, rational, supported by evidence, and actionable, I think, within your own life.
And I think it's that kind of traction that has helped make the show popular.
And I think the fact that I think I have really smart listeners.
And now a whole new group of really smart listeners and co-hosts.
So I think that's really helped as well.
I've got to tell you, this is the first time I've ever heard your voice.
Is that right? I do occasionally play one of Beelzebub's minions in Nightmares, so you may have heard it before, but you just may have heard it in the background going, rhubarbum, rhubarbum, or something like that.
I do want to, you know, give you kudos, Stefan, because I think that you bring up a lot of issues on your show that a lot of podcasters out there really don't want to do it.
And, you know, you'll touch any topics.
I mean, it's no holds barred for you, whether it's, you know, education, politics, elections, religion, you name it.
I mean, it's no holds barred for you 100%.
What really gets you all fired up and so stoked on any one of these issues on your show?
You mean sort of what gets me the most passionate?
Yes. Is that religion?
No, it's not religion, actually.
I feel I've sort of combed that back 40, back and forth quite a bit.
I think the thing that gets me the most passionate, Todd and Co...
Wait, let's do introductions.
Hi, I'm Jeannie.
Hi, Jeannie. And we've got Will...
Good evening, I'm Will.
We've got Will Grigg from...
Lewrockwell.com.
There you have it. Right, right.
Look, I mean, I'm very, very keen on, I don't think that we're going to be able to reason people into being free or desiring freedom.
Like, you can only reason people into, like, out of beliefs that they've been reasoned into.
And most people have just had this, you know, the hot brain stamp of propaganda impressed onto their frontal lobes until there's little left but a smoking impression of a donkey and an elephant.
Right. And so I don't think that there's much we can do to reason people, but what we can do is we can lead by example.
And so one of the things I've been encouraging for many years is for libertarians to fully embrace the non-aggression principle in parenting and to not spank, to not yell, to not intimidate, to not threaten abandonment, to not throw them in daycare and so on, but work as hard as much as possible to really show the non-aggression principle.
There's lots of science behind as to why that is so good and why that is so necessary.
And I think if we as a community have like the greatest kids in the world, isn't that the most wonderful and compelling argument for the non-aggression principle in a sphere that people can do something about?
I mean, you know, you read G. Edward Griffin about the Fed and your eyeballs go to that Roger Rabbit thing and your ears start rotating and, you know, your hair flies off your head.
But there's nothing you can do about it fundamentally.
You can go pound some lawn signs and send some donations to your favorite political campaign, but that doesn't necessarily really translate to much, if anything.
But if we can show how volunteerism works in our personal relationships, in our parenting, if we have these amazing...
Statistically, they're going to be smarter kids, they're going to be more confident, they're going to be better able to concentrate, better able to process long-term consequences, and much, much less susceptible...
To all of the ill effects of a harsh childhood such as drug use, criminality, lack of success in school or in work, health problems, promiscuity, all these kinds of things.
So if we can as a community say, okay, we've made the case for the government being smaller for about...
Oh, I don't know. You could say 300 years since, you know, the late Enlightenment and certainly from the classical liberals from the mid-19th century.
It's been over 150 years from the Libertarian Party Foundation in 71.
It's been, you know, 40 years.
You could have a shrug, what, 60 years or 55.
So we've made the case for a huge number of years, centuries, decades, whatever you want to call it.
And the government has just kept getting bigger and bigger.
So let's try reinventing our approach and say, OK, instead of looking outwards and shooting arrows at the moon, what we're going to do is we're going to look inwards within our community and say, where's the place that we can best apply and most convincingly apply with the empirical evidence of having great kids grow up?
How can we apply that?
And I, you know, I've been a stay at home dad now for three years.
I'm really putting this to practice, you know, because I've been nagging people about parenting for so long that eventually I felt, geez, I better become a parent.
Otherwise, I'm not going to have any credibility.
And really, that was the whole point.
I said to my wife, honey, honey, you'll need to take a couple extra shots.
Trust me, it's for the show.
And, you know, she was obviously good with that.
And it really does work.
You know, it really does work.
And so that's what I think gets me most passionate.
Something we can do, something that's demonstrable, scientifically supported, and very compelling for any society or society as a whole.
It's not going to get convinced by the reason and evidence.
We'll at least get convinced by the empirical evidence of what we're able to do in our own communities.
Right. You know, I think, you know, with all of the politics that's pervasive and floating throughout our entire society, you know, we're seeing the GOP presidential election, we're seeing everything going on.
I will tell you this, Stefan, and I think a beam of light has finally hit me, that I don't think politics Is the salvation to our problems?
I remember a number of years ago when Lou Rockwell was on the Bill Moyer show on PBS and he basically made the statement, well, I don't think politics is the answer to our salvation.
And then next thing you know, Ron comes around and he says he's running for president.
Oh yeah, vote for Ron Paul!
Yeah, yeah, vote for Ron Paul!
Then James' mind after the Ron Paul campaign says, I don't think politics is the answer to our salvation.
Then he turns around and says, yes, vote for Ron Paul.
Yeah, join the campaign.
Vote for Ron Paul. Now, we're seeing the Paul campaign not going anywhere much to do about nothing this campaign season.
I think he's made some inroads.
I think he's done some wonderful stuff.
But... Getting the GOP nomination, I just don't...
I think he's done a lot more than others have, than I've seen in my lifetime.
And I'm 38 years old.
So, I mean, I'm not saying I've been around the block, and I mean, I'm going through my own Great Depression now, which really makes me weird when I sit down and talk to my grandma.
Yeah. But to say, I mean, we have a presidential candidate now that, in my opinion, rivals FDR and can actually make A difference can change why we're all complaining about our political system and why it's failing us.
I mean, this man wants to change that.
He's not trying to buy into the one that already exists.
He wants to change it.
So I think he's done a lot.
I think that the primary value of Dr.
Paul's campaign has to do with making visible and pronounceable in public Some of the things that have been considered to be unspeakable heresies.
Previously, to give you an example from my personal experience, when I had the privilege a couple of months ago of introducing Dr.
Paul here in Boise, we had several thousand people, probably between three and four thousand people, at the hockey stadium, almost all of whom, of course, are traditional conservative-leaning Idaho voters.
Many of them are LDS, and others were evangelical Christian, and in the course of introducing Dr.
Paul, I made a blatant and unvarnished pitch for the legalization of drugs, and the audience applauded.
Imagine that.
In one of the most pious assemblies of some of the most socially conservative people in the country.
Where do you consider to be the most conservative people?
Parts of the country, in the Midwest, where it's being run up through Mexico and people are dying and kids are being shot.
Or, you know, in Oklahoma, where meth addiction is so rampant, you cannot walk out the door without smelling that smell.
Sure. Well, unless his name is Juan Valdez and he looks like Speedy Gonzales.
I guess so.
But, you know, but that's the whole thing, Stefan.
I mean... The whole political season is saturated with these three morons we've got.
Well, actually, the two biggest morons, in my opinion, are Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.
I don't think he counts. He bounced a check.
He's gone. I don't think he can.
He underscores his status as a moron, I think.
I would think that bouncing a check would be sort of a prerequisite for becoming president.
Especially when you're getting millions of dollars and campaign money.
Exactly! This man is getting millions of dollars, everybody else's dollars, every taxpayer, everybody who put their hopes in this man.
He's getting money out of their pocket, and what is he doing with it?
He can't even pay a $500 check.
Yeah, that's critical to his job description.
Disregard, he's no longer in the race, as far as I'm concerned.
But none of that is Rick Santorum.
He's thrown in the towel, which, you know, which everybody...
You know, so the point, I think, Stefan, is...
Where do we go from here?
Do you think that education is our best hope right now, as opposed to this political system?
I mean, I hear conservatives every single election say this evening going, we've got to save the country!
We've got to, you know, save, you know, from the liberal media, the liberal media, the liberal media, and then all of a sudden, you know...
I'm sorry, that's funny.
I'll give you my two cents worth and see if it makes any sense.
You know, one of the great challenges of critical thinking, as I'm sure you're all aware, is you have to approach things as if you know nothing.
You know, I always love this Socrates thing, you know, explain it to me like I'm three years old.
And I've always found that to be a very powerful thing because we get so swept up in the momentum of what we believe to be possible or what other people are enthusiastic about or what the media is saying or, you know, whatever.
But if we look at this completely dispassionately, like we were space aliens, like that big giant-ass baby floating around Earth at the end of 2001.
We're looking at this, we say, what would we say?
We'd say, okay, so you want to shrink the power of the state through government.
Yes. Through politics.
Okay. How long have you been doing that?
Well, many, many years. And how big is the government now compared to when you started?
Well, you know, 10 to 20 times bigger.
I think we're all by hell 9,000.
No, but this would be the critical questions that you would...
I'm used to this because I used to give presentations to potential investors and I would give pitches for software development and you'd get hit with 20,000 questions.
Yeah, but did you explain it to children?
But no, here's the other thing.
You'd say, okay, did you ever have a candidate before...
I asked if you had explained it to children.
No, I don't have that.
I can't tell horror stories to children.
It's just... I think it's important to.
I'm too embarrassed to introduce the world to my daughter.
I'm just hoping it's going to shape up a little bit before I have to explain what war is.
But the other thing I would say is, did you ever have a candidate who wanted to shrink government significantly before?
Say, yeah, we've had tons of them.
We've had Ronald Reagan. We've had George Bush, both George Bushes.
You had Barry Goldwater.
You had Eisenhower.
Lots of people have wanted to shrink government in the past.
And you'd say, well, how did it go?
Well, the government grew significantly under each one of their tenures.
And... And so you'd say, okay, well, if you were unable to shrink government when it was 10% of the size that it is now, what makes you think that you can do it now?
If you can't lift a 10-pound weight, what makes you think you can lift a 100-pound weight?
I think we just have to be critical.
We go back and forth between these two things over and over again as a community.
Is it politics or is it education?
Is it politics or is it education?
Is it politics or education? It's neither.
It's neither. We have to think outside those boxes.
Well, I don't even understand why education is coming into the mix.
That should be a given. If you're not educating your children and you're not educating yourself, then just go away.
So, you're not even in the game as far as I'm concerned.
Every day should be a learning experience.
If you're not learning something new every single day and you're not teaching your child something new every single day, then you are wasting your time.
In general. But education is a big topic, right?
What do we educate people about?
And I don't think educating people about the gold standard and the Federal Reserve is going to do much at all.
I think we should recognize that the existing, the true social change, and there's almost no bigger change than going to small and no government from the largest government in the world.
We should be teaching our children how to can and how to garden, not about economics, because we all know that's not going to last.
But that won't help other people.
I mean, that will help them. But I think we should be advancing the...
Oh, canning and gardening help plenty of people.
I'm sorry, go ahead. I said canning and gardening help plenty of people.
And, you know, you ask a child how to can vegetables today.
And they'll look at you like you're crazy.
But let me ask you this, Stefan.
What about some of the disobedience or passive resistance?
I think that's, what is that going to do?
I mean, you have to remember how that translates to the general population.
We never get, I mean, for most people, they get their information from the media, the mainstream media, which means we never get direct connection to them.
And you can see how Ron Paul has been excluded and distorted and everyone goes all weird about these newsletters from 20 years ago or whatever.
And so the undistorted clear message, you can sometimes get through the internet, but people already have to be curious and thinking outside the box.
The majority of people, when they receive information about civil disobedience, they see a bunch of nutjobs who are out there protesting for things that they can't really understand, discontented about things that make no sense to them.
And a lot of them say, good riddance, go to jail.
I mean, how does that help anybody?
But what about the people, like, for example, and I know the gang at Free Talk Live, you know, who are in New Hampshire.
They're part of the Free State Project.
They've got this one organization that basically has, you know, a lot of loosely...
A number of members, you know, who are supposedly leading by themselves.
I'm not even sure I'd buy into that.
But, you know, let's say a topic that's true, a lot of them are engaging in civil disobedience, or some might even call it passive resistance, one way or the other.
I just don't think if education is not the answer, if politics is not the answer, And if passive resistance and disobedience aren't also the answer, then what is the answer?
Yeah, I mean, it's taking the principles that we...
I think there's two.
One is less controversial.
One is more controversial. I'll just touch on the less controversial one.
I mentioned it already. The first is we take the non-aggression principle and we apply it to our own children and we encourage other people to do the same.
We don't talk about politics, the Federal Reserve, the gold standard, this and that.
We advance the scientifically validated empirical case About the destructive effects of spanking, of single parenthood, of aggression against children.
We tell people the scientific fact that children who are in daycare, babies who are in daycare, toddlers who are in daycare for 20 hours or more a week experience exactly the same symptoms as infants actually.
It's separation syndrome.
I'm a mother of three.
None of my kids ever went to daycare.
And it's because they are trying to break up that family unit.
The sooner they drive the wedge in that family unit, the sooner they can start installing your child.
Well, I want to turn this over to the panel.
So, Rob, do you have any questions for...
Let me just touch on the second one very briefly.
The reality of politics is when people want to pass a law against you, when people support the drug war, they are supporting the initiation of force against you.
When people support the tax laws, they are supporting the initiation of force against you.
We keep that all very abstract, but there's something very powerful about looking someone in the eye across the table and saying, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Are you saying that you want men to come with guns to my house, kidnap me and throw me in jail and shoot me if I resist, if I disagree with you on this issue?
Can you look me in the eye and tell me that?
That is a very powerful thing to do.
That brings the reality of what people support.
Not some abstract thing called the law or the state or something like that, but it's the very real invocation of the ultimate demons of humanity, which are those who are willing to initiate the use of force For the sake of social control, pillaging, and destruction.
And so when people want to call up those demons, I think we should be very frank and honest about what it is that they're actually doing.
And is it going to be easy to sustain a relationship with somebody who wants you kidnapped and thrown in prison for disagreeing with him?
I think it can be tough to sustain that, but I think that is the reality of what happens.
No, it's not. I'm telling you right now, I couldn't, I couldn't, I was married to one of those.
I was married to a military officer.
And I'm telling you right now, I did not like it.
I did not like knowing what he was doing.
I did not like even having an idea of what he could possibly be doing.
And I look at my son today, he's 16 years old, and a 16-year-old boy was killed for the sins of his father by one of our drone attacks.
And I look at my son, a carnal son, a general son now, and it scares me to death.
Yeah. Did you have a—anyone of you two have a question for him?
I was very interested to address something that Stefan has discussed on a number of different videos that I've seen and in a number of lectures I've listened to, and that is the nature of the state as a shared fiction that supposedly justifies the use of aggressive force.
I think, Stefan, if I'm not mistaken, you're the one who talked about the principle of the gun in the room.
As a way of digesting the state to its essentials, and when you talk about living and making vivid and tangible, the non-aggression principle is pretty much the only, if you will, temporal salvation for our society, the only way that we're going to reconstitute civilization.
I think that that's exactly what we need to do, and I think one key part of the process would be to try to encourage by storytelling, if you will, People to delegitimize the use of aggressive violence and to find ways of politely but insistently socially ostracizing those who are agents of aggressive violence,
whether we're talking about military officers or police officers or others who are the totems of shared fiction called the state.
That's one of the reasons why I focus so obsessively, some might say, on the quotidian crimes committed in the name of law and order.
To get people to understand, from the perspective of the question of the initiation of force, that they shouldn't be making idols and heroes out of people who are the agents of official coercion.
Those idols and heroes are their fathers.
You're asking us to turn half of our youth against their fathers, their mothers.
To turn them against what they're doing.
Well, I think slowly our soldiers are waking up.
They're against what they're doing.
So they're teaching their children that as well.
I think here's what I think is going on is that I think that they are basically learning slowly and slowly as it may be that what they're being taught is wrong.
That what they're being taught is bullshit.
And it's not really...
You know, something that they've been told truthfully throughout their lives, particularly in, say, you know...
History class? Just class, in the schools, what their parents are telling them, what their families are telling them, what the media is telling them.
I think a lot of young people can see right through that.
They may not be able to take that.
The best book I ever read was Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Which volume? Both of them.
It's a Talmud, if we were to be honest about the volume and number of lies that are being told.
I'm sorry? Go ahead.
Finish your thought. Sorry.
No, I was just saying that in terms of the discussion of trying to turn people against The parents, the fathers specifically, are carrying out these functions.
I'm hoping, and one of the really optimistic things I've seen in the Ron Paul movement here, is that it seems as if there's a generational schism that's developed here that separates people who are on the sunshine side of,
let's say, 40 from those who are Bill O'Reilly's natural constituency, but the people who What are primarily interested in the government is an agency of vengeance against people they consider to be socially unacceptable.
That's sort of the cranky authoritarian cohort that makes up for Fox News' demographic.
The people on the Sunshine side of 40 who question around Ron Paul, it seems, Are the sort of people who are starting to focus on what is done rather than who is doing it.
I think they're focusing on why it's being done.
And that's the important part.
Well, not really the why, but also the what.
Is the what in question a form of force or fraud?
That's why the Federal Reserve issue resonates with people that age.
You know, by what supposed authority does the Federal Reserve do what it does?
That's a question they're asking about all kinds of things that the people who represent this entity calling itself the state are involved in.
The drug war is a really good example of that.
By what authority are doors kicked in and people thrown to the floor and dogs shot and children terrorized?
Don't forget our U.S. soldiers guarding the poppy fields over in Afghanistan.
The drug war is a huge joke.
And with the gun trafficking and everything that just came out, it just proved it was a joke.
Okay. And not only was it a joke, but our government was making money off of it.
Period. Okay.
But... Let's continue on with what we're discussing with Savan here.
I'm sorry, I just wanted to mention the question of what is the state?
We really have to define what it is that we're fighting, and I know we've all done this within our own minds and our own hearts.
The one that I work with is the state is...
The effect of our willingness as citizens to attack each other for telling the truth.
The state profits from that.
And if we weren't willing to attack each other for telling the truth, there would be no state.
I mean, I'm very, very much convinced of that.
Sorry, I've asked this question of many, many people I've talked to in speeches and said, how many of you have gone to jail for your beliefs?
And, you know, a few people will put up their hands.
And then I say, and how many of you have experienced social attack and ostracism for your beliefs?
And that everybody, every single person, every single time has put their hands up.
You see, it's the slave-on-slave violence that produces the masters.
If we stop attacking each other, then we can't be kept down.
And so we really do have to point out that when people are supporting the state, they're supporting the initiation of force against their fellow citizens.
And once people see that, that it's not supporting some abstract thing, but it's supporting a tangible gun pointed at a tangible person cowering in fear, wetting themselves, people will recoil from that.
Most people recoil from evil.
There's a very small number of people who are Evil sociopaths or psychopaths who yearn for it.
But most people, when they see evil, they recoil from it.
But what happens with propaganda is the evil is obscured.
It's turned into virtue. You know, the shit sandwich is all covered with icing.
And what we have to do is unmask the violence into the room.
Point out the gun that's in the room with the state.
Point out the gun that's in the room when people are calling for state intervention.
People will recoil from the violence once they see it.
But in the same way you never pick up a US newspaper and see pictures of the victims of the foreign wars on the cover.
There's no censorship.
There's no law. It's just not done.
Because that would actually be to work to end the war.
Don't give them any ideas.
Yeah, don't give them any of the reality of what's happening over there.
Because otherwise it will end.
And they're much more concerned with applying and supporting people's fantasies and taking their 50 cents rather than actually ending a war.
And by the way, Jeannie, do you have any questions for Siphan before I ask a little more on the alarm bell?
No, I think I'm doing a pretty good job asking my own.
Sorry about that, Siphan.
Okay. What about you, Will?
You got any other questions or no?
I'm just really provoked by the idea here that in order to Do something about dispelling the shared fiction that empowers this entity called the state.
We have to work on the idea of non-aggression as the organizing principle at the home.
And coming out of my background, I had a religious upbringing where my parents were not particularly stern or authoritarian.
There was an element of, if you will, corporate punishment, but it was never excessive and it was never vindictive.
But I've been exposed in some of the congregations where I worshiped.
To the idea that it's necessary to break the spirit of a child.
I've actually heard people say that.
People for whom I, at the time, in any case, entertained a certain...
That's just sad. No, that's evil.
I mean, that is an objective moral wrong, and it's something that should offend people down to their elemental nature as an individual, I think.
But I find that that's something that is sort of the crimson thread connecting a lot of these issues here.
This idea of order through domination begins with that attitude toward raising children.
And it's a subject that, once again, I've come into sort of the middle of my adulthood, such as it is, where a few years ago I resolved that I was going to change the way that I disciplined our own children.
My wife and I are parents of six.
And we have homeschooled them as long as our circumstances permitted.
They don't permit that anymore.
That's one thing that I would love to change.
If circumstances change to allow it, I would love to go back to homeschooling.
It's a little bit difficult to explain to people who have been so inured to the idea that you can only have organization through the exercise of overawing force.
That you can be teaching non-aggression.
Why do you feel like you have to have such organization?
Well, why don't you understand that organization is the result of free cooperation as opposed to organization being something that is coming out of the anvil of official coercion?
We used to talk about disciplining our wives, and we don't talk about that anymore.
And I would also say that we should not talk about disciplining our children.
I don't think they need discipline.
In my experience, they have not.
My daughter has not.
I mean, she requires some guidance and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
But as far as discipline and punishment goes, it's almost non-existent.
I think I put her in her crib maybe once or twice.
I'm sorry.
If my child is not doing well in school, if any of them are not pulling good grades, then, yeah, that computer's gone.
And, yeah, that's discipline.
Okay.
Well, that's simply the infliction of a consequence.
That's not finding out the root cause of the issue.
That's not empowering the child to figure out these things out on its own.
Yeah, he's too busy playing video games.
He's not doing his homework.
Okay. I mean, that being said, but, you know, but, Stefan, I wanted to ask you, you know, probably this one important question here.
And we'll have to table that disagreement for another time, guys.
But what I do want to ask you, Sivan, is what would you like the libertarian movement to do as far as activism is concerned?
And to tack on to that question, the next question would be, Exactly what should the liberty movement, which comprises anarchists, voluntarians, and libertarians, what should they learn about the states, about themselves, about how they interact with people who are not on our side?
How do we get people to see our way through You know, through voluntary cooperative means and not through the course of our new state.
Well, I'm very much an empiricist, and so I always say start with the science.
Start with the science of how people come to be who they are.
Start with the science of how people reason or make decisions or don't make decisions or don't reason.
And the science, you know, I'll just throw this out to your listeners, fdurl.com forward slash bib.
I've got a whole series called The Bomb and the Brain, which goes into this.
I'll just touch on it briefly. But most people do not...
Arrive at conclusions based on reason and evidence.
They have conclusions traumatically inflicted on them by a church or by a bad parent, not all parents, but a bad parent or by Lord knows government schools and the media.
So they get all these conclusions forcefully and aggressively inflicted upon them.
And then they go, in confirmation bias, they just go and seek out that which confirms that which they have already had inflicted upon them.
And if reason and evidence comes their ways, it goes in contradiction to their beliefs, they simply throw it aside.
They just, they will it away.
You can see this happen with people, and you can even see it happening on brain scans.
People have emotional reactions, and then the reasoning centers light up to justify the emotional reaction.
And so until... I disagree.
Sorry. Well, sorry.
No, go ahead. I disagree.
I disagree. I mean, I strongly believe that a person can experience the most horrendous things in their lives and still maintain an open mind.
Well, of course.
And I think I'm evidence of that.
Well, of course. Look, I mean, but you're like somebody who's, you know, George Burns smoked until he was 100.
But that doesn't mean smoking isn't dangerous for you.
Of course, there are some people who go through very difficult things in their life and end up with the capacity to still think.
But that's very much in the minority.
I mean, some people walk away from running at 100 miles an hour into a brick wall.
That doesn't mean that's a good idea or a good thing to do.
So because we're lucky doesn't mean that the odds aren't against most people who have difficult childhoods.
And so if we want to change the world, we have to look at how the world is constituted.
We have to understand how the human mind develops in the existing society, which, because it's not free, particularly it is not free for children.
Of course, 15,000 hours of brain-deadening, mind-stultifying indoctrination would, you know, turn Albert Einstein into Pee Wee Herman's dumber brother.
And so we have to understand that kids go through a very, very difficult time at home, in church, and in school so often.
And so we have to understand that We have a great challenge.
Just throwing more books at them, throwing more recent evidence, it does not penetrate.
And so I think we need to abandon that.
I think we need to recognize the science.
We need to recognize the failures of the last few hundred years.
We need to hunker down and we need to look at each other across the table and say, okay, we need to demonstrate to society how this is going to work.
And we need to show people how well this is going to work.
And we need to start with that which we can control.
The great demon in the world lures our ideals and our values and has us cast them into the void of that which we cannot control and spend our energies bicycling without even anything between our legs.
And we're just wasting time and we're spinning in the wind.
What we need to do, forget about politics, forget about PhDs, forget about websites and blogs, and focus on...
Really putting the non-aggression principle to work in our own families, in our own relationships.
And yes, we say, or at least I argue, that ostracism is a very powerful social tool.
I do not break bread with statists.
Now, that doesn't mean I won't have conversations with them.
I'll make the arguments and I'll give them a couple of months, maybe even up to a year.
But if they continue to resist, if they continue to support a regime that wants me thrown in jail for acting on my own conscience, then I cannot break bread with them.
That is a very powerful thing to do.
And these are things that we can control and we can affect.
But it's much harder than pounding a lawn sign and walking in a demonstration.
Thank you, Stefan, for being with us tonight.
I know we had gone a little bit longer than we scheduled, but that's okay.
You are a really incredible guy.
Yeah, one person in the chat room, I think his name goes by the name of Blah Blue, he goes, Stefan is a moral superhero.
Does he have an outfit yet?
You should be very happy that you do not have my mesh-long webcam feed running right now, or you would not consider me superheroic, but somebody who perhaps should do just a few more sit-ups.
You've got to get in shape for your gig as the front man for Iron Maiden.
Yeah, I thought that was great.
Some listener did that. I want to throw in one more bonus question from one of the users in the chat room.
How do you see the future of Freedom Main Radio?
What do I see as the future of Freedom Main Radio?
You know, slowly spreading my media empire through time and space.
I would like to go backwards in time and capture the mindset of Louis XVII and slowly work my way forward then.
Working my tendrils of philosophy into human history to the point where we can avert World War I and yet all still be born.
And, you know, obviously then brush aside the Great Depression by bringing Lou Rockwell and Murray Rothbard back in time with me with a megaphone and a helicopter, which will blow everybody's mind.
And they will just go out there from place to place and say, look, we're so advanced.
We have this incredible rotating fan on top of this thing that looks like a dragonfly and we can fly.
And we're going to blow everybody's mind, explain to them what's going to happen in the future.
And we're going to help people to understand that taxation is forced by basically lifting the wallets in a secretive way from all of the secret service agents and IRS agents that we can.
And then they're going to go, oh, my God, we've been stolen from and say, ha!
See how it feels? And then we're going to keep moving, and we're going to make sure that people get philosophy instead of drugs during the 60s, and we're going to help wean America off its addiction to oil by having it substitute brill cream.
I think Ronald Reagan had more than enough to go around.
Yeah, we're going to keep plowing forward, and basically we're going to rewrite the future so that our cause is already won from going back into the past.
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