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April 18, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:46:08
2127 How to Achieve Freedom - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio interviewed on Red Ice Radio
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Welcome to Red Ice Radio, Stefan.
It's really good to have you with us. First of all, thank you for taking the time talking with us here today.
It's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.
You bet. This is going to be a really interesting free domain radio.
I've been enjoying many of your podcasts and philosophical presentations and discussions for some time now.
I like this idea of getting to the core of Of what things really are.
A while back, even, I went back to your 2006 archives and kind of listened to the early podcasts that you did in the beginning, really addressing some of the fundamentals.
And I think that's something we could maybe, you know, do a little bit here as well today.
But before we, you know, get started and get going in a sense, at the outset for potential newcomers to you and to your work, Stefan, why Free Domain Radio?
You mean why the title or why the show as a whole?
Why the whole website?
Why the show? Well, I believe that ethics and virtue and good behavior and right thinking are the most essential ingredients to the happiness of the world.
And this is, of course, not my idea at all.
This goes all the way back to Socrates, to the pre-Socratics over 2,500 years ago.
But I have felt, and I've been really working in philosophy both Educationally and just personally for 30 odd years and I've really been dissatisfied with philosophy.
I think philosophy to use an ancient Greek term, sucketh, it does not do a very good job.
Philosophy has still not solved the problem of ethics.
Why be good? What is goodness?
And in the absence of a rational argument for virtue, a sort of power vacuum is created because everybody needs to know how to live.
If you don't have a rational philosophical answer as to how to live, it creates this vacuum in human life and into that vacuum rush governments and gods and all sorts of false virtues.
Sophists, as Socrates used to say, people who are skilled at making the worst argument appear the better.
I've really had the goal to try and discover the roots of evil, the roots of injustice and dysfunction in society.
and at the same time try to provide a rational system of ethics that are incontrovertible and this is a great challenge you know as Hume famously pointed out you can't get an ought from an is And so how ought we to live, what should we do, has been largely left to personal preference, culture, law, God help us, and gods, God help us.
And so I really had that goal to try and figure out the roots of dysfunction and evil behavior and to provide a rational argument for incontrovertible secular ethics.
So, in a sense, in other words, what we're talking about here is basically the meaning of life, right?
One of the most fundamental questions that there is as human beings, as I mentioned, you know, for those who are thinking, for those who are interested, we're just trying to figure out what is it all about?
What are we doing here? Where do we come from?
And what's the point, right? Yeah, and how should I live?
You know, what does it mean to be courageous?
What does it mean to be virtuous?
What does it mean to stand for your convictions?
What are convictions?
Are they personal bias?
Are they cultural imprinting?
Are they religious texts?
Are they adherence to the ever-shifting kaleidoscopic landscape of hell we call the modern legal system?
Is it status?
Is it-- I mean, we've got so many-- and almost every moment, we have an infinity of decisions How do we organize those decisions?
How do we know what is the right thing to do?
And I don't think that we know that at the moment.
And that's fine. I mean, it's fine that we don't know it, but we don't know that we don't know it.
And so we have to organize society.
We have to organize our lives.
And if we don't know what we're doing from an ethics standpoint, and I would argue that we really haven't known ever since the...
The first Reformation, you know, 16th, 17th century, with the breakup of Christendom into myriad, frankly, warring sects of different moral and religious interpretations of the Bible.
We really haven't known which way is up, and as the old saying goes, we haven't known our own asses from a hole in the ground.
And so we've substituted democracy, which is a very bad substitute for ethics because it's just majority rule.
And we've substituted a kind of sentimentality and a kind of dealing with the symptoms like, oh, we have poor people.
Let's take some money through the power and the force of the state from some rich people and give it to some poor people.
And we call that solving the problem because we lack philosophical values and we don't have any way of standing against the ever-increasing and ever-encroaching problems.
You know, black vulture wings of power that are wrapping themselves around our neck.
We don't have any line in the sand to draw.
We don't have any way of standing after that because all we really have is majority rule and the pragmatism of the moment and that never stands against growing evil.
Absolutely. In a sense, this is about virtue, right?
We want to try to do good things, as you mentioned, in a sense.
And at the same time, these are the components, from my perspective in a way, that actually allows humanity to be manipulated, in a sense.
These are the emotional strings that they pull, in a sense, to actually try to steer humanity into these, you know, well, either towards a certain point of view or just for easing when it comes to population control.
Any comments on that?
Yeah, I mean, we all want to be good.
I mean, with the exception of the odd sociopath.
I mean, we all want to be good.
And it is that very desire for virtue that is used by those in charge to control and subjugate us.
Because what do they define as virtue?
Well, they define virtue as adherence to the ruling class.
Lo and behold! You know, I mean, it's like the old argument in Christendom, which is, well, you want to be virtuous, that's great.
Well, God says that to be virtuous, you have to obey the secular rulers.
Because they are appointed there by God and everything that they say is divine.
Or you have to obey the Pope or the priest or whatever.
It's like, hey, aren't these the people in charge who are teaching me that it's a virtue for me to obey the people in charge?
That can't be right!
That can't be the way it works.
It just seems entirely too self-serving.
And of course, obedience to any human being We have a void of ethics in the modern world, but there is also, it's sort of co-joined with this, there's a terrible fear of moral responsibility, of self-responsibility, and so because We are so used to associating virtue with self-attack, you know?
Like, if I'm bad, I go to hell.
And hell might be self-attack, it might be, you know, the Christian or other religious versions of hell.
And so we're just used to, like, if we're not good, we just get punished.
We get thrown in jail, we get sent to the corner, we have to wear a dunce cap, we get drugged, we get ostracized, we get fined, we get whatever, right?
All it is is about punishment.
And so we have this fear of virtue, because virtue is always associated with punishment.
And so anyone who I'll call you the majority.
I'll call you a priest. I'll call you the law.
I'll call you a cop. I'll call you a soldier.
I'll call you whatever you want.
Just take this burden of moral responsibility away from me.
And with that, we give away our souls, our children, and our future.
I mean, that's an unholy bargain.
So, what is the remedy to some of these things?
Is it to simply educate ourselves, get better information?
Or is there certain components within mankind that we maybe not need to get rid of, but we need to understand them better?
Yeah, I think education is a really tricky word.
I mean, who's going to be against it?
Obviously, education. But education is one of these things like we say it or we wave it around like a magic wand.
Like, oh, we just need education and things will get better.
But education in what?
About what? To what degree?
Resulting in what behavior?
Education is like, we need to gain knowledge.
Well, you know, I could study the digestive tract of the tapeworm, and I've gained knowledge, but has it actually affected the world in a virtuous way?
No, of course not. So, I don't think it's knowledge.
I think that we don't need more knowledge about virtue.
And this, like, I think that everything we need to know to be virtuous, we kind of learn our first day of kindergarten, right?
What are the basic rules? Don't hit.
Don't push. Don't steal, don't scream, don't call names, don't grab, right?
Don't steal and don't initiate force against your fellow ruddy cheeks little carpet runner.
And it's not a greater knowledge of ethics, it is merely actually putting into practice the ethics we already believe, right?
So if I'm a guy who's, I don't know, 400 pounds, and my entire bookshelf is lined With diet books, I think it's fair to say that buying another diet book isn't going to solve my problem.
More education isn't going to solve the problem of my obesity.
What I need to do is put down the donut, put down the cheesecake, put down the potato chips, whatever it is that I'm eating or a combination of things that I'm eating is bad for me.
I actually need to put what I already know into action.
I don't need You know, it's like buying a gym membership doesn't make you healthy and reading another book doesn't make you wise.
And so I think that all we need to do is we need to accept and recognize that there are two basic moral principles.
They're two sides of the same coin.
The first is the non-aggression principle.
Thou shalt not initiate force against man, woman, or child.
And the other is a respect for property rights.
That we own ourselves, we own the effects of our actions, and whatever we create in the world we are responsible for, for good or ill, material or moral.
And there's almost nobody, almost nobody will argue against those.
People might rack their brains trying to come up with weird exceptions or whatever, but almost nobody would argue against those.
And if we simply stop our sort of mental ferret in a triple espresso on a running wheel approach to things and just say, okay, let's just say, I mean, I think there's good philosophical arguments as to why the non-aggression principle and property rights are valid, but let's just say we accept those, what would that mean in society if we were to actually accept and practice the non-initiation of force?
Well, it would mean that you can't have a government because the government is defined as A group of individuals with the legal right and obligation to initiate force in a given geographical area.
Through laws, through taxation, through debt, through currency monopolies, through preferential policies for all the godforsaken corporations that litter and stain and crater the human soul.
And we would have to accept that.
We would have to accept that spanking is wrong.
Spanking is the initiation of force.
Spanking against children.
Consenting adults, that's another matter, but against children.
Intimidation. Verbal abuse, of course, is incredibly destructive to children.
So if we had the non-initiation of force or aggression in our lives, the human landscape would look unbelievably different.
There'd be no fiat currency.
There'd be no national debts.
There'd be no governments. There would be spontaneously self-organizing communities that were all trying to make things as harmonious as possible and accrue the costs of evil to those who are performing it.
It would be an unbelievably different landscape.
That is not really a philosophical revolution.
That's a revolution of integrity to what we already believe.
That's a huge challenge, but I don't think that more knowledge is necessary.
I think it's a matter of actually hitting the gas while we turn the steering wheel.
That's all we really need to do because we already know where to go, which is non-aggression principle, respect for property rights, the kindergarten ethics.
We've just got to put the rubber on the road.
Now, if we touch upon that first one of non-aggression, there are obviously grey areas here as well.
Violence to me is kind of, that's a sliding scale as well.
We have things that might not be perceived to be violence by one part, but actually it's being perceived as such by the other.
So how do we approach those kinds of problems, do you think?
Could you give me some examples?
Well, for instance, if we talk about the government, if we go back to that idea again, that from their perspective or another person's perspective, To, for instance, force somebody to pay tax might not be a violent act, you know, from their point of view.
But to me it is. To me it's someone who's enforcing something to me, but not from their point of view.
But philosophy, like science and mathematics, has zero respect for my point of view, or your point of view, or somebody else's point of view.
Point of view automatically translates in philosophical terms into false.
I mean, it's not my point of view that 2 and 2 make 4.
It's not my point of view that the Moon orbits the Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun orbits the Milky Way.
That is not my point of view.
People can't legitimately have a different point of view about the speed of light.
One person is wrong.
One person is right or both people are wrong, if people have differing opinions.
Philosophy doesn't respect or recognize the point of view.
Point of view is like, I like opera, you like jazz.
Yeah, philosophy doesn't have much to say about that.
But forcing people to sing opera at gunpoint, philosophy has something to say about that.
And so, somebody can say, well, I don't believe that the initiation of force is, the taxation is the initiation of force.
It's like, well, then you're incorrect.
Like, I'm sorry, but you're incorrect because if you don't pay your taxes and you haven't signed a contract, right?
I mean, if I sign a contract to buy a car and then they ship me the car and then I don't pay, then of course I'm stealing the car, right?
I'm initiating force again. I'm defrauding someone and that's different.
But nobody signs a contract.
You know, there's no... a fetus at the moment that has signed a contract to enter into the world like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt because of the bribing democracy of the previous couple of generations they don't sign a contract and therefore they're not responsible philosophy clearly states there's no such thing as unchosen positive obligations in other words things you have to do rather than things you should refrain from doing and so if somebody says well taxation is not theft Then they're basically saying that rape is consensual.
Well, no. Of course, the whole point of rape is that it's not consensual.
The whole point of taxation is that it is not chosen and not avoidable.
It is not contracted, it is not chosen, and it is not avoidable.
So if somebody says, well, my perspective is that rape isn't violence, rape is consensual, you have to say, well, look, I mean, I'm sorry, but you just have to go back to the basic dictionary and figure out what these words mean, because obviously you're confused.
Very interesting. Also, what comes up here, in a sense, is that perception, or as you mentioned, point of view, is not within the construct of reality, in a sense.
Is that correct?
I mean, if you're describing reality, you could be describing someone's point of view.
You know, my friend Bob really likes pistachio ice cream.
I mean, we assume that that's a true statement.
It's not particularly philosophically important, other than the true-false distinction.
But... When you are describing a transaction, then, and if you are extrapolating it to some sort of universal, then you have to be accurate about it.
This is the scientific method, right?
The scientific method doesn't really have much to say about Bob likes pistachio ice cream, but it does have something to say about the inverse square law or the fact that gases expand when heated, or it has things to say about that.
If I say all gases expand when heated, that's a rule, that is a hypothesis, that is a theorem that I'm putting forward, which, you know, we need to Test against empirical evidence and so on.
Science has a lot to say about that and science will be the ultimate determinant of whether that proposition or hypothesis is true or false.
If I say that You know, through natural selection and through random gene mutation and through survival adaptability, we end up with ever-growing and ever more complex organisms.
And that's how human beings came to be from the first single-celled organisms.
Well, that's testable.
That's a hypothesis that can go out there.
You check the fossil records.
You look for any inconsistencies or incongruities with this.
You're never going to be able to fill in all the gaps because, I mean, the number of Fossils that are available relative to the beings that existed is completely tiny.
It's like one in every billion animals left a tiny trace of itself.
But that's a hypothesis, and that's not open to just someone's opinion.
Like someone can say, well, I prefer that Zeus breathed life into a centaur, which then gave birth to a human being through its eyeball.
The scientist is going to say, that may be a fun story, but it's not true.
But in a sense, then, that means that if we don't have enough information about something, that means we cannot determine if it is the truth, in a sense.
Such as? Well, let's take the fossil record again.
And this debate of why they turn up in certain areas of the world, let's say.
They turn up on a mountain somewhere.
And then you have an argumentation point.
Well, that means that we had a flood 6,000 years ago.
And the other point says, no, that actually means that the mountain was actually the bedrock underneath the ocean, you know, a while back.
So we can't know what the truth is.
Well, you may be able to know in time.
But, I mean, I think you and I both know that the only people who argue against evolution are religious people.
And what is strange and I think fundamentally hypocritical about the religious arguments against evolution is that they say, I've just had a debate with a guy, oh, there's irreducible complexity or there's this tiny little discrepancy or that hasn't, there's the gap here hasn't been filled in.
In other words, they have this unbelievably high standard of proof for evolution.
They're looking for any conceivable possible flaw, problem, contradiction, something.
Something that they can use to bring down the edifice of evolution.
It's an incredibly high standard of proof that they have.
And if they were to take even 1% of that high standard of proof and apply it to religion, they'd no longer be religious.
So it's just sad, of course, to see.
And obviously it's completely self-serving and it's a desire to maintain the belief in a deity or a series of deities.
When there's no evidence, they're just, you know, wow.
You know, the theory of evolution has to be perfect and flawless in order for me to accept it.
But I will accept the Bible on faith.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You can't have this massively high standard for evolution and say it's not proven because of this, this, and this gap, and then just turn around and accept these ancient scribblings as ultimate truth based on faith.
I mean, if you have a high standard of proof, fantastic.
I think that's great. Then have a high standard of proof for everything.
And evolution is certainly a far more consistent and rational, infinitely more consistent and rational and proven theory relative to any form of theism or superstition.
Right. It needs to be equal across the board in that sense.
Confirmation bias. This is obviously a problem.
If one's mind is already made up, we head out to try to find the evidence that supports that.
How do you think that we begin to move away from that?
Because this is, in some cases, even an unconscious process.
Yeah, it is. And I mean, I'm certainly prey to it.
I think everyone is.
You become invested in a worldview.
You become invested in a philosophical approach, which you've hopefully reasoned from first principles and applied evidence to or tested it relative to evidence.
Then when you come across information that is opposing it, it's hard.
Your natural tendency is to want to push it away.
And of course, that's when you should most embrace it.
Because, you know, we really do want to make sure.
But of course, the other thing that's true is that the people who are pushing information have an agenda.
People who are pushing information have an agenda.
And so I think it's okay to be skeptical even of the stuff that goes against your worldview.
I mean, be skeptical of the stuff that goes with it and the stuff that goes against it and so on.
I think skepticism is okay, but I also think that we also have to rationally evaluate the biases that are out there and look for as wide a set of information.
But again, the most fundamentally important information that we have, we already know.
And so confirmation bias is really only, I think, a big problem for people who are looking to distract themselves from the basic fact that they need to put down their moral cheesecakes and pick up a piece of ethical broccoli, right, to become healthier.
Confirmation bias is, you know, people who are heavily invested in sort of pro or con global warming, they get really up and bothered about this.
There's this debate that's going on at the moment about some Democratic woman critiqued Ann Romney because Ann Romney apparently was telling her husband, oh, women are really focused on economic issues and poverty and problems and this and that.
And she said, well, this is basically a rich woman who's never worked a day in her life.
And everyone's like, oh, but she raised five children.
Isn't that work? And it's like, no, clearly she was talking about an economic job.
Clearly she was talking about the fact that she doesn't really have much in common with women who are struggling to make ends meet.
But this is the nonsense that people get involved in.
It's in order to distract themselves from the basic reality that we already know everything we need to know to make the world a morally perfect place.
We just don't want to do it.
You know, God, give me salvation.
Just not today. Just not right now.
And it's like, philosophy has given me everything that I need.
In fact, my first grade kindergarten teacher gave me everything I need to live a moral life.
I just don't want to, so I'm going to distract myself with every bit of nonsense and trivia under the sun.
Do you think most people really know this, though?
Do they have these processes within them?
Do everybody have them? I guarantee you that people know this.
I guarantee you that people know this, and you can see this.
I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, and I'm around a lot of other parents.
You know, one parent's kid grabs another parent's toy.
What does the parent say?
Do they say, good, now get his daddy's wallet and we'll call ourselves the IRS. No, they say that's wrong.
You don't grab. Some kid pushes another kid, which is very rare.
The parents at home and they're appalled.
Oh my goodness, don't you can't do that or whatever, right?
And so, yeah, I mean, everybody knows this all the time.
And the reason we know they know it is the government can't call what it does what it does, right?
Government can't say, please pay your theft bill.
They have to invent a new word for it, right?
They don't talk about mass murder.
They talk about war, and they generally mean defensive war.
We were provoked. We are only retaliating and blah, blah.
Everybody says that. So the fact that leaders cannot call what they're doing by its true and proper name, they have to invent this alternate language, right?
This is like... They don't say, you have to obey our opinions or we'll shoot you.
They say, obedience to law is a virtue.
They don't say...
We would really like to use your children as collateral and sell them off to foreign bankers because we want to bribe our friends in the here and now to get elected.
No, they say we have a duty to care for the old and the sick and the poor and that's what your contributions are achieving through taxation.
So the fact that we have to invent this alternate language is because Everybody knows that if you call the thing by its proper name, it would end, right?
You can't ever fundamentally fight evil because the moment that people understand it's evil, they'll stop doing it.
All that you can do is fight obfuscation and misdirection and sophistry and all of the slimy, greased, oily lies that the slippery genius of language can attain and achieve.
All you have to do is continue to throw the light on all of the The false definitions that are put forward.
If you're in the swimming and you grab an octopus, the first thing he does is squirt out all of this ink to hide itself so that it can get away.
I mean, that's what culture, that's what governments, that's what false teachings do.
They just squirt out a bunch of false definitions and confuse and to baffle anyone.
But no, everybody knows what they need to do and you see this every day in the playground.
So that doesn't necessarily mean that language in itself is a problem.
It's actually just how we are How we don't cut through the language, in a sense, and actually look at it for what really is being said.
Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah.
I mean, Gertrude Stein, many years ago, of course, a famous writer herself and a great discoverer and nurturer of talent.
She basically, and this was quite famous for a while in the 30s and 40s, she wrote a very short poem called A Rose is a Rose is a Rose.
And it's ridiculous. It sounds stupid, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
Because, you know, people were saying, you know, a rose is like a red flower of desire that hangs from the sky and nettings of fire from a bulbous sunset that looks like a clown's nose on fire.
You know, they would say a rose is like this.
A rose is analogous.
And language was getting so complicated.
And so she basically said, look, let's get back to the basic language.
And Ernest Hemingway was involved and invested in this as well.
Let's just get back to the basic language.
The beginning of wisdom, as somebody wrote, is to call things by their proper names and to not live in the platonic world of words, but to live in the world of reality and have words be imperfectly derived from reality.
What we do now is we create these words and then we go and crawl up the ass of those words and live in the rectum of falsehood forever.
You know, we can call it the will of the majority.
We don't call it brute rule.
You know, I mean, our whole lives as kids, what are we told by our parents and our teachers?
Think for yourself. Don't go along with the crowd.
If everybody was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off it too?
At the moment we become adults, it's like, obey the will of the majority.
It's like, what? Can you people make up your minds if you have them?
It's very interesting.
If we for a moment go back to the idea of doing what is right, this drive in a sense that we have within us then.
Do you believe that that is part of our, I don't know what to call it, genetic physical makeup or are these social constructs that are actually taught to us on some level?
I think, I mean, I think that morality fundamentally, and I think this is very easy to prove, but morality was invented not to make people good, but to reduce competition for bad people.
So if you're a thief in the world, and you're the only thief that the world, that is in the world, you have a pretty easy time of it.
Because nobody locks anything up.
No, and if people, they lose, if you go and take something from someone, they'll just assume that they misplaced it or lent it to someone and forgot about it or whatever.
So if you can convince everyone in the world to not be a thief, if you want to be a thief, that's the very best thing that you can do.
And this is how ethics need to be understood and approached.
That they are a form of control that is designed to reduce competition for evil people.
And so we are taught that violence is bad.
And yet the rulers use violence to get what they want all the time.
Violence, debt, enslavement, selling off the young.
They do every form of horrible iniquity that can be imagined.
All the while teaching us that these very iniquities are bad.
Well, why did they do that? They do that so that we don't compete with them in iniquity.
So that they can be the most powerful and largest thieves.
So that they can be the most powerful and largest counterfeiters.
So that they can be the largest and most powerful murderers.
They convince us that all of these things are wrong.
And that is, I mean, that goes way back in time.
Martin Luther argued for this in the 16th century.
I mean, it was, you know, where he basically said, well, how do you resolve an eye for an eye versus turn the other cheek?
Well, turn the other cheek is you to your rulers.
An eye for an eye is the ruler to you.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, ethics were invented not to make people good, but to allow evil people free reign and reduce competition from other people.
If you're a warlord and you can convince other people that being a warlord is bad, then you've got a monopoly of being a warlord.
And it's a lot easier to be a warlord if no one's competing with you.
So this is the basis of things called patriotism.
You know, worship your ruler.
Well, the ruler only became the ruler by killing off the last ruler.
So he sure as hell isn't living by worship your ruler.
You're supposed to live by that.
He's never supposed to live by that.
So if we understand that, then we understand that to question or to, not to question, sorry, let me rephrase that.
To understand and to point out the unbelievable hypocrisy called morality in society.
That a child stealing another child's toy is unequivocally wrong, but a ruler stealing from the population through debt and taxation and inflation is virtuous, is to have infinitely higher moral standards about the unbelievably inconsequential actions of a three-year-old, those we have incredibly high moral standards for.
The three-year-old with a toy, absolutely wrong.
You know, that George Bush invading Iraq and Afghanistan is defending the country.
So we have infinitely higher moral standards for three-year-olds and their inconsequential actions, and then we completely reverse those moral standards when people start events of demotion that get more than a million people killed.
And so we understand that pointing out the hypocrisy of morality in society, or, to be more accurate, actually Applying morality in the universal way in which it is inflicted upon us, right? So we're told that stealing is wrong.
It's a universal rule. Thou shalt not steal.
And then we point out that the rulers steal.
That's something you can't do, because throughout history, anybody who actually tried to apply universals, the universals that we were all taught, that were the essence of the moral rules that were inflicted on us, anyone who said, oh, this is universal, okay, let's apply it universally.
Bam! They would just get killed or ostracized.
And so we kind of swallowed this stuff and I think that the truth-tellers, the philosophers, the reasoners, the people who listened deeply and reflected back accurately the universality that was claimed, they just got killed.
And those of us who just kind of bit our lips and cheered or went along with the hypocrisy, well, we survived.
So it is a hard thing to do.
It really goes against our survival instincts in a way to say, oh, is this a universal ethic?
Great! Let's make it universal.
Which means that everyone who ruled over me was unjust and invalid, and all our existing and current rulers are unjust and invalid.
Well, since the rulers invent morality in order to keep themselves and make themselves more powerful rulers, if If the rational extension of the morality they inflict gets rid of them as rulers, as a sort of moral justification, well, they're not going to be pleased at that any more than if you grab the gun from the mugger and point it back at him, he ain't pleased at that either.
Do you think that these universal ethics are in the process of changing?
We hear discussions about moral relativism in a sense that what is good and what is bad can and should be argued in a sense.
Do you feel that that's a good discussion to have or is that just furtherance of this idea that you're talking about that morals is for some and not for others?
Yeah, I mean look, the absolute ethics Absolute universal ethics is what is inflicted upon those with less power by those who have more power in order to Keep them powerless and to keep them subjugated I mean if you can teach the cows to police themselves Then you don't even need to be you don't need to build electric fences and you get much more productivity If you can teach the sheep to be their own sheepdogs,
then you don't have to get a sheepdog It's just cheaper to own human beings if you can get them to self attack and attack each other and And so when you're children, you're taught about these universal ethics that you are just subject to and you will be punished for disobeying.
However, when you get older and you attempt to universalize these ethics and say, well, wait a sec, if it's wrong for me to steal, how is it okay for the government to steal?
If it is wrong for me to counterfeit money, how is it okay for the central bank or the Federal Reserve to counterfeit money?
Wait a second, if it's wrong for me to initiate the use of force to get what I want, then why do my teachers support Tax theft from my parents in order to pay their salaries.
So you grow up and you start to do this, and suddenly you're told that everything is relative.
Right? That's the defense to the curious and independent mind, is to suddenly, you know, you inflict all of these absolutes upon kids, and then when the kids grow up and start actually applying these absolutes the way they were taught, suddenly, whoop, everything has to become relative, and, you know, it's very primitive and immature thinking to this black and white stuff.
Right, right. So what would you argue to somebody here?
I mean, we're in Sweden here.
This is socialism.
Well, it's wrapped in corporatism, obviously, today of fascism in the true sense of the word.
But here, obviously, the tax issue is a virtue because this is about helping other people.
So that's what that is being thrown out as.
So it's more difficult to maybe cut through the language of that.
How would you talk to somebody who has that point of view?
I mean, you can certainly go for what I call the against me argument.
I would just chip around at the edges to find if somebody is even remotely interested in thinking.
And if they're not, I'm sorry, life is short, I've got to move on.
There's tons of people who want to learn how to think, and if somebody doesn't want to, that's fine.
But what I would do is I would say, can you just play this?
Let's do a little role play. So you play your typical Swedish socialist matrix dweller, a muggle, and he would say, you know, taxation is good, it helps the poor, and so on.
Then I would say, well, we live in a democracy, correct?
What we're supposed to do. But yeah, the person says, oh, of course.
Yeah. And so the policies that the state pursues reflects the will of the majority, right?
Is that true? The person says yes?
Yeah. Don't have to say the person says, just for the sake of efficiency.
Just put on that headlessness for a moment.
Got it. Okay, so would you say that you have met a lot of people who...
Do you vehemently resist the idea of helping the poor or the sick?
No. No.
The vast majority of people really, really do want to give money to help the sick and the old and the poor.
That's been your experience, is that true?
Yeah. So why do we need the government to enforce it?
If people are going to do this anyway, Isn't this like having a law compelling teenage boys to be interested in teenage girls?
I mean, they're going to do it anyway, far more so than the law whatever.
Because, you see, when you have the government, then you have fiat currency, you have national debts, you have the possibility of corruption, you have the possibility of mismanagement.
I don't know what it is in Sweden, but certainly over here in North America, 70 to 80% of the money never even makes it to the poor.
It gets swallowed up by the bureaucracy.
Same here. Yeah, so if people want to help, since you've already admitted that the vast majority of people already want to help the poor, we actually don't need any laws.
In fact, the laws are preventing money from getting to the poor by getting it all swallowed up in the bureaucracy.
And also, of course, what is going to happen to the poor when the government runs out of money to pay its debts, what is going to happen then?
So what do you think somebody would say to that?
Well, exactly.
The argument, I think, from that person would be, well, if you took that away, then people wouldn't pay.
You know, they wouldn't help each other.
Oh, so then the government's policies do not reflect the will of the majority, and we live in a dictatorship.
Well, exactly. No, but what would they say to that?
What would they say to that? Well, this is the thing.
Since I don't have that logic, I don't know what that person would say at that point, because from my point of view, I would just, like, I'm with you on this point, you know?
Well, I wouldn't expect somebody to, of course, immediately become a voluntarist or anything, but what I would be looking for is that moment where somebody says, huh, You know, I'm not saying I agree with you, but I've never really thought of it like that.
That's all I'm looking for is, is there a little chink in the blind, foggy, propagandistic head helmet that was all sort of fixed upon us as children?
Is there a possibility of getting any sound through the ear mufflers of statist nonsense?
And if somebody's like, huh, you know, I don't know the answer to that, or I'm sure there is one, but I've never thought of it that way.
I don't expect everyone of course you don't agree usually in a fundamental change of values but if they just start evading and prattling on the usual nonsense because this is what people do right people say that the government reflects the will of the majority and that's what gives it legitimacy and then if you say well then we don't need the government because the majority is going to do it anyway they suddenly say well it doesn't and if they notice that that's a contradiction Then they've got three brain cells still rattling around and you can grow more with that.
You only need a little bit. But if they're so messed up intellectually and so vacant spiritually that they just don't even notice those contradictions, then it's like, okay, I will put the little plug back into the base of your brain, go back to your happy little matrix, I've got to keep moving because you are beyond help.
Okay, well that's a really interesting point because what if...
What if that is happening on such a mass scale?
I mean, we have a perception almost in some cases that the government makes the sun go up, you know, and they provide air.
And so how do you...
I mean, if the whole population in a country...
I mean, almost, I would say, there are a lot of, you know, dissidents, if we can call it that, in Sweden, too.
But, I mean, the majority, I think, actually don't ponder these questions.
So, is the country lost?
Is the people lost?
Is there any way to go...
You know, pierce through that, in your view.
I think that it's a lot easier than people think.
And, I mean, so look at the two examples that I've used before, we just touched on very briefly, slavery and equal rights for women.
You know, I mean, throughout history, people had no example of a non-slave-owning, non-slave-trading society, a non-slave-trading society.
There was no such thing.
And so for the abolitionists, and it only took them 150 odd years to make this change in human society, when everybody fully accepted, not only that slavery was necessary, but that slavery was good.
Slavery was like the white man's burden.
We have to take these savages and teach them Jesus so they get to heaven.
And so it was a positive virtue to have and to own slaves.
And everybody thought, well, if we free the slaves, they're just going to, you know, wander around in little circles, fall into a ditch and die of hunger because, you know, they're so retarded.
And so that didn't take that long.
It just took a lot of commitment.
It took a lot of commitment and it took a lot of, you know, unsung heroes who put great strain on their personal relationships by continuing to champion the truth and took grave risks with their own personal liberties and freedoms to do that.
Same thing with rights for women. But it's different with the non-aggression principle because with the non-aggression principle, that's how everybody lives in their own life.
I mean, almost without exception.
I've never met somebody who said, you know, well, You know, I really want a job.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna find some guy who runs a company I want to work at.
I'm gonna follow his kids to school.
I'm gonna jump them with a burlap sack and chloroform to put them in the back of a windowless van.
I'm gonna phone him and say, dude, you got to give me a job or you'll never see your children again.
I've never, and if I met someone like that, I'd run screaming, right?
But I've never met someone like that.
Everyone's like, oh, I gotta try and get a job.
I'll put my best foot forward. I'll wear a good suit.
I'll practice my interview skills or whatever.
In the same way, I've never listened to someone who said, you know, I'm really attracted to this woman, so I'm going to slip a drug in her drink and then You know, carry her off to Mexico at a bath escape and force some shaman to marry us.
That's not what people do. They ask the woman out.
If a woman says no, they're like, go lick their wounds or whatever.
So everybody accepts and lives and respects the non-aggression principle and respect for property rights.
It's just a matter of pushing back that fog and having it actually be the universal principle that it was all damn well taught to us as.
What about the justification of the behavior?
If we go back to the government again, on some level they might justify that this is for the good of all, and they think that they're doing the right thing.
Now, what is that?
Are they just convinced by their own delusion?
I would ask that person, how can you possibly know what is good for all?
Human beings are very different.
That's a statement of astounding intellectual arrogance, to say, I know what is good for everyone.
I know what is good for the poor.
You know, because charities, private charities, they have a kind of tough love.
In other words, yeah, they want to help the poor, but there's a difference between a woman who, you know, let's just say, a man and woman get married, they have three kids, and, you know, the wife dies in some freak accident, and...
The insurance company doesn't pay up and the dad has to take care of the kids.
He's got no extended family. I mean, holy crap.
Sympathy. Massive sympathy. I'd love to help someone like that.
There's quite a bit of difference between that and some guy who goes drinking into the track and loses all of his money.
Right? And to differentiate between Involuntary and voluntary poverty is pretty important.
It's very important, in fact.
Because if you help the people who are involuntarily poor, you don't breed more poor.
But if you help the people who are voluntarily poor, then you create more.
And so, I don't know.
And I don't have any answers, you understand.
I don't know how best to help all the poor people in the world.
I do believe that we should give them freedom.
I do believe, you know, I'm talking about sort of third world situations.
But I don't know...
If a poor guy is poor because he's practicing a vow of poverty or because he's studying to be a neurosurgeon and is willing to accept that poverty for now or if he's saving up to start a great business or if he's just lazy sitting in his parents' basement playing video games or if he's, you know, he's got a substance abuse problem or whatever.
I have no idea.
How to help all the poor people in the world.
I would like to donate to people who would make it their life's work to help those people, and charities and all would figure out the best way to help people.
But we all know that there's this thing called enabling, which is that if you subsidize people's bad decisions, lo and behold, you get more bad decisions.
It's basically economics. Whatever you tax, you decrease.
Whatever you subsidize, increase. If you tax productivity, you decrease productivity.
If you subsidize immorality of bad decisions, you get more of those.
So if somebody would have come to me and say...
Government X program or Government Y approach is for the good of all.
I'd be like, wow, you are like the most genius, smartest, you are a human God.
Because God knows everything.
And a man who says, or a woman who says, I know what is best for everyone, is like, whoa!
And I don't just mean like, it's best for everyone to not be strangled.
I'm like, but that positive actions.
I know what they should do specifically.
Not a thou shalt not, but a thou shalt.
I mean, that person is like, whoa, tell me what the stock price of Apple is going to be in six years.
Tell me where Bigfoot is.
Tell me where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.
I mean, you know everything, so let's mine this knowledge.
In this world of globalism, the world's problem is now...
Anyway, all of our responsibility, it feels like.
Do you think that that's also another level to the manipulation of the intrinsic virtue that most people have?
And this is, again, shifting away from local problems.
If we talk about what you mentioned before, that we have these organizations that are going to help all the world's poor people.
Instead of maybe me just helping the person I can see on the street immediately, in a sense, like, okay, you know, I'll give you a little bit of money so you can, you know, buy yourself something to eat, for example.
Do you think, so, the globalist thing here, in a sense, do you think that that's detrimental to humanity, or is it something good?
Yeah, I know what you're saying.
At least I think I do, and tell me if I'm wrong.
You know, this old slogan of the environmentalist movement, think globally, act locally.
Right. I think that...
Libertarians and anarchists and voluntarists and the Wall Street protests and so on, I think, you know, with all due humility, I think that they've got it pretty much bass-ackwards.
People who are libertarians love to talk about Federal Reserve and fiat currency and the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and, you know, all of this.
And libertarians, I'm sure, in Europe are dealing with similar kinds of issues.
And yet...
We can't change or affect any of those things directly.
You can't change or affect any of those things directly, right?
So, you know, in the US, there's this massive tragedy that goes on where children who are put on These psychotropic medications, right?
Ritalin and all these other kinds of mind, frankly, I think mind-destroying medications for what are considered to be largely, if not totally, non-existent, quote, illnesses.
Well, it's terrible. I mean, it's just awful because the schools are so dysfunctional and they become so female-centric that a lot of the boys in particular are just bored out of their gourds and restless and so on.
But rather than adjust the school system, you drug the children.
This is a standard Soviet model.
Society is dysfunctional, we'll drug the dissidents.
Like, that is so messed up, it's hard to even put words to it.
But it's, you know, why does it happen?
It happens because the, I mean, you've got huge numbers of single-parent households and other forms of dysfunctionality within the households, dysfunctional neighborhoods largely run by the government, the ghettos and so on, public housing and welfare and so on, the drug war creating this You know, festering class of money-gorged criminal parasites.
And of course, if the kid gets classified as mentally disabled, then the parents get more money.
They're paid to put their kid on drugs, fundamentally.
And the school gets more money.
And so there's massive...
And the parents don't pay because the government pays the drug companies.
So the drug companies push it.
The schools push it. Some of the parents prefer the extra money.
And it's easier for the teachers.
And it absolves the adults of all responsibilities.
So you get this horrible situation.
Where it's inevitable that more and more of these kids are going to be drugged.
Knowing that, what the hell does it do?
I can't change it. You can't change it.
I mean, I guess we could go on some smash-her-head-against-the-wall-for-an-ternity crusade and maybe we would make a tiny dent in a tiny section of it.
But there's not much we can do.
But libertarians, I mean, I go around sometimes asking people, does spanking violate the non-aggression principle?
And people look at me like I'm suddenly broken into fluent Klingon with a Scottish accent.
And it's like, but that's a relief.
See, we can do something about whether we spank our children.
We can do something. about whether we spank our children and so it's considered to be a weird non sequitur to bring libertarian ethics into a sphere which libertarians can actually change and control I have a hundred percent control over whether I hit my child and yet you can talk from here to eternity about the federal reserve which no one can do a damn bit about but the moment you start talking about not hitting your own children which is A much more important application of the non-aggression principle than some big-ass Federal Reserve thing.
People are like, whoa, whoa.
What's he talking about? Why on earth would we be talking about this?
Let's get back to the Federal Reserve.
And it's like, no, no, no, no. No.
We have these values.
We damn well live by them in our own lives.
And forget about shooting arrows at the moons we can never hit.
Let's actually... Do what we can in our own lives to apply these values.
But people look at you like you're weird or crazy.
Like, why on earth would we be talking about the fact that there's not a substantial libertarian literature on peaceful parenting is a complete shame.
And I think it's shameful for the movement because it means that we are only living the values in areas we cannot affect.
And we are refusing to apply them to areas we can.
And that is astounding hypocrisy.
Absolutely. That's a really good point.
point I think that a lot of people lose the plot in that sense and that when they begin to focus on on well fairly unattainable goals in a sense without focusing on what they can do in their you know their surrounding basically we're going to take a break in a little bit here Stefan but I want to ask you one more thing
How you think that the conversation, if any, is going on the level of the pharmaceutical companies, the governments and the schools, and to a certain extent, even the parents that are putting these children on these SSRI and Ritalin drugs, what have you.
I mean, are we talking about a...
A conscious conspiracy in that sense, a plan that, yep, let's do this for the sake of both money and manipulation of the population, or is that conversation, that level of awareness, not even in there?
Is this something that just happened, in a way?
What do you think? It happens as a result of statism.
I mean, statism just creates these completely bizarre incentives, which are unbelievably counterproductive.
I mean, I don't think that, you know, a bunch of guys got together in a smoke-filled room and plotted it all out, but You know, lions hunt in packs.
That doesn't mean that they have to go, oh, they have to do all these football plans and diagrams ahead of time.
They just kind of know what to do.
It is traditional in human society.
And when I say human society, I mean a status society because this top-down hierarchical brutality has been the norm.
It's been the universal, almost.
It is inevitable for human society to Attempt to reduce adult conflicts at the expense of the children and children are sacrificed at all levels of culture and in all societies in order to maintain the illusion of concordance among adults and in this situation The decisions made in the past about the welfare state and so on has produced unbelievably destructive families and dysfunctional families.
I mean, we are living in a state of acute and chronic family crisis and people don't really talk about it.
I think I remember reading somewhere in Sweden again, a single motherhood is really on the rise.
Incredibly deleterious to children.
And this is the oldest agenda of all radical ideologies and statism in the welfare state is a very radical ideology Because a radical ideology is one that uses violence to get its way, which is not philosophy, and it's not reason, and it's not evidence, it's not science, it's not math, it's not engineering.
It is the state that uses violence to get its way.
And the more you have a government, and the more you support the government, the more you are a terrorist, the more you are a radical.
Who advocates the use of force.
People don't see it because they just think, oh, it's passing laws or whatever.
But if you look at the actual reality that when you ask the government to do something, a gun's going to get pointed at someone, a gun's going to get pointed at many people, a gun's going to get pointed at millions of people, and a gun is even going to get pointed at the unborn in the forms of the debt to pay off whatever wank jobbery you want from the state.
That's right. But so the government, you know, these terrible...
Kids in schools and terrible I mean sort of unfortunate they're just in an unfortunate situation and the school can't change to accommodate them because the school is protected by the violence of forced taxation the school is protected by the violence of monopoly and Unions, right?
Because according to Marxist theory, there should never be government unions because unions are only necessary because of the profit motive of the capitalists.
The government doesn't even have a profit motive.
It should never be unions, according to any kind of socialist or Marxist theory in the government.
But of course, they're there because they profit people.
And so you can't change the school.
You can't go and undo the welfare state.
And the teachers sure as hell don't want to change.
The parents don't want to change. And so what are you going to do?
Well, you're going to drug them. And the reason that they advocate the drugs is because pharmaceutical companies give politicians money to get elected.
And so politicians will then, this is statistically absolutely incontrovertible, whoever donates to you gets preferential legislation.
They just found out that a bunch of corporations who donated to Obama have gotten, lo and behold, massive reductions in their corporate tax rates.
Of course, business people aren't stupid.
They don't give money for nothing. They give money as an investment.
There's almost no better investment than a congressman or a congresswoman.
You get up to 200 times An ROI just for giving them campaign money.
And so the pharmaceutical companies want to sell drugs, and they can't sell it to the parents, because if you're going to try and say to the parents, here, you need to spend $1,000 a month on medication for your kid, they'll be like, okay, you show me the illness, and you show me how you're curing it.
And of course, they can't even show the illness, let alone how they're curing it.
and so the government pays and people don't even get that mad about the taxes because the taxes don't go up when the government starts paying for all this medication because they just borrow and print it so people get hit with debt down the road or inflation which not one person in a thousand can translate back to any government program in particular So it's just that, you know, when you introduce coercion as the basic way of getting things done in society, the ripple effect is just unbelievable.
It reaches everywhere, and then people mistake that for society.
You know, violence is not society.
Violence is criminality.
What we're looking at, the effects of what we look at is not, culture is not even society.
It is violence that is scarring and marring the human landscape.
And now we can't imagine living without the shadow of the gun and the sword and the jail, We're hanging over us all the time and it's become so omnipresent.
It's like if you live in a cloudy sky the whole time and somebody says, look, it's cloudy.
You say, no, it's not cloudy. That's just the sky.
And we've lived under this for so long.
People say there's violence in the system and people say there's no violence.
It's just the system. We're in a lot of trouble, but the best thing, obviously, is to recognize the problem that we are facing, begin to talk about them, begin to share them with as many people who are willing to listen as possible, so we can begin to think about some of these things.
And obviously, you do a very good job, as it were, over on Free Domain Radio.
Where people can check out a lot more of this kind of material on your website.
Tons of webcasts and stuff.
You have a couple of books out there as well.
Go ahead and mention some of those, if you will, Stefan.
Sure. The first thing to mention is they're all free, free, free.
So, freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
I have books on a philosophical introduction to culture.
We touched on my approach, or I think it's a very good approach.
It's called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
I have a comedy book called A manual for new tax farmers, which is a sort of comedy speech given to politicians about how to indoctrinate the masses.
Got books on how to bring philosophy and peace into your relationships.
I have books on agnosticism and atheism.
All of it's free. I mean, it's a donation-based model, so if you enjoy and find them worthwhile, I'm dropping a few kroner my way.
Sorry, what's the currency kroner?
Yeah, that's right. Well, I guess you guys eat euros now, right?
No, no, we've stayed away from it.
Still on the kroner, good for you. Oh, yeah.
Boy, I mean, you must have been some people patting themselves on the back at the moment about that, right?
Oh, God. We could be going down the sinkhole with grease right now if we hadn't made that decision.
I remember. So, yeah, people can drop by.
I have lots of webcasts.
I do a Sunday show at 2 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time every Sunday.
People can call in with questions and criticisms and corrections and so on.
Yeah, it's all free.
I just invite people to, you know, dig deep and eat deep on the buffet and, you know, leave a tip if you find it worthwhile.
All right, very good. Freedomandradio.com.
We have a lot more to discuss and we are going to do so after this short break.
Stay with us and we'll be right back with more.
Welcome back, everybody.
We are talking with Stefan Molyneux from freedomainradio.com.
We are scraping the surface, if you will, on some of the concepts and ideas that he has been discussing and presenting on his website.
And we have much more to discuss.
What about if we begin with the idea of no government?
This is something that scares a lot of people.
They say, what? No police, no law, no fire department, etc.
How do you address some of these issues, Stefan?
Yeah, I mean, I completely understand that.
And, you know, if it's any consolation to people hearing the idea, I had exactly the same reaction.
So it only takes a moment's reflection, but it's not easy.
It's not an easy reflection, but it takes a moment's reflection to recognize that The fact that the government has a monopoly on services at the moment does not mean that without the government, there would be no services of that kind, right?
I mean, it's like saying, wait a minute, the slaves pick the food.
And so are you saying that if we free the slaves, no one will pick the food and we'll all starve to death?
It doesn't make any sense, right?
It's because people want food that the slaves are picking the food.
And people do need third parties, objective, rational, helpful third parties to help them to resolve disputes, contract disputes, disputes about violence or whatever, trespassing, you name it, right?
Child custody, whatever.
So the fact that the government currently provides these services at the point of a gun, and usually at the point of a gun prevents anyone else from providing these services, doesn't mean that they won't be provided if the government isn't there, right?
So people say, well, the government is, quote, helping poor people, which is not, but let's say it was.
The government is helping poor people.
So if the government stops helping poor people, the poor people will starve to death.
This, I mean, this just makes no sense.
And it doesn't take a lot of thought to understand that it makes no sense.
It's just, that's the propaganda, and that's what we're used to.
And so you just say, okay, yeah, people have a need and a desire for these things.
And so there are 10 billion entrepreneurs the world over who will want to find effective and intelligent ways to provide this.
People do want to help the poor.
People do care about the poor.
Americans give I think it was like $150 billion a year in charity.
And that's when they're getting taxed at 40 or 50%.
So imagine how much money would be available to help the poor.
And imagine how effective.
The help to the poor would be in a free society.
Right now, the government has to just say that it's helping the poor.
And everyone's like, woohoo, I guess the problem's solved.
And they don't really think about it that much further.
But I think we can understand when real wages for the poor and middle class have stagnated or declined for 40 years.
When you have a massive army of unemployed, when you have national debts, which are going to destroy even more job opportunities, when education gets worse and worse, and again, I can't speak specifically to your country, but this is true certainly in Canada and the US and in England and other places in Europe.
It's not helping the poor.
See, the government doesn't actually have to do What it says it's going to do, it just kind of has to pretend to do it.
It just has to make a lot of noise about doing it.
And then everyone just assumes that the problem has been solved.
Right. Well, just to comment on that, this is exactly what is happening in Sweden when it comes to the healthcare system, for example.
The monopoly that the government has on providing this service means that they have no competition, meaning they actually can provide an inferior product, if we can call it such.
And people also don't then develop a reference framework for what this is.
So this is all they know.
And so whatever the government provides, this is the only thing that actually exists.
So people can't even complain on that.
It's horrible. Right.
And people, I mean, unfortunately, with healthcare and so on, we're kind of getting old enough.
It's been in place for so long that it's hard to remember what it's like beforehand.
You know, so it's like the drug war.
I mean, people assume that the government is doing something to control or get rid of drug use in society.
I mean, that's not even close to true.
Ever since, you know, Congress after the Second World War gave a monopoly on prescriptions to doctors, I mean, the use of prescription drugs has gone through the roof.
The drugging of children is epidemic.
Legal drugging of children.
One in four American women last year alone was on antidepressants.
Antidepressants is complete quackery.
And so the idea that the government is doing something to reduce drugs, I mean, I'm sure you know, I mean, it's such common knowledge, right, that the original ingredient in Coca-Cola was...
Cocaine. Right.
And so throughout the entire 19th century, early parts of the 20th century, cocaine could be bought in liquid sugar form by children.
Were there any drug gangs running across the United States at that time?
Not as far as I know.
No! No, because it was legal!
And so people just say, oh my goodness, if they make drugs illegal again, then there'll be this...
It's like, nobody would suggest this, but even if you were to suggest, let's put cocaine back in Coca-Cola, people would go, oh my goodness, you can't, you can't be...
It would be chaos.
That wasn't the case.
I mean, I'm not saying coke should contain cocaine and it should be given to children, but even when it was...
There were no drug gangs. There was no mass murderers.
Mexico wasn't under a reign of drug lord terror.
There wasn't bullets or, you know, you take the silver bullet or you take the silver bribe to survive in politics.
There wasn't a massive prison system that was...
Anyway, it doesn't happen in history, but people just take this assumption like, well, there's this massive...
A forceful, aggressive, violent entity.
It must be there to solve some problem, and if we get rid of that entity, whatever problem it's claiming to solve is gonna be 10 times worse.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
How well did the American defense systems work for a whole couple of thousand of New Yorkers on 9-11?
Not very well at all.
And you'd think America would be about the easiest country in the world to protect.
It's got huge oceans on either side, it's got peaceful neighbors to the north and the south, not threatened by anyone, and yet it's been in what?
A hundred wars since its inception?
No, because this is not about defense, it's about offense.
So, yeah, it's just, it's weird.
It's like a cartoon universe that people live in.
Like, you know, in these cartoon universes, there's a river with a big rock in the middle, and then somebody pulls out the rock, and the river just keeps going around the hole.
I think it's some weird Roger Rabbit physics going on there.
And so people think, well, if we take the boulder called the government out of the stream, the water is just going to magically go around it and never fill in the hole.
It's like, well, the first thing is that people will find better ways of doing it, far better ways, more sustainable ways of doing it.
If there is a need that will be fulfilled in some case by people, that's what you're saying?
Yeah, and you can bring this directly into debates with people.
I've done this countless times. People say...
Without the government, who will help the poor?
I said, well, will you help them? Of course I will.
Well, I will too. So, that's two of us.
Keep asking. Keep asking people.
If people didn't want to help the poor, these government programs wouldn't even be in place.
The fact that they're there means we don't need the government to do it.
So, if we talk about this switch, in a sense, then over from top-down control hierarchy to bottom-up self-organization, as I've heard some people refer to it.
Sorry to interrupt. Sure.
Violence to voluntarism.
From rape to lovemaking, from theft to charity.
I mean, I try to be as clear about it, because otherwise it sounds like it's a different strategy.
You know, we'll decentralize this organization and have less, you know.
No, it's replacing the gun with a handshake.
It is reducing...
The legitimate initiation of violence within society.
It's getting people out of jail.
It's giving people opportunities.
It's allowing for a sustainable economy.
It's minimizing our use of resources because there's no bigger waster of resources than the government.
Look at all these monstrous cities being built for nothing in China.
Look at the housing boom in the US. Environmentalists should be all over this housing boom and trace it right back to the Federal Reserve System that fueled it.
And they don't.
Think of the amount of trees that were cut down, the amount of energy that was expended, building, what, 10% of the US housing system is now just sitting empty.
What an unbelievable waste of resources.
I mean, the amount of destruction in the Middle East through wars and all of that, I mean, it's just astounding.
Government builds all these free roads and suddenly the whole world is dependent on oil, which has its own harmful effects upon the environment.
So it's around minimizing our footprint in nature.
It's about just replacing guns with grins.
You know, so I really want to be really clear about it.
It doesn't matter what shape society takes afterwards.
What matters is we stop pointing guns at each other and call it civilization.
Okay, and that's a really good point.
But there's still an issue of kind of implementing some of these ideas.
And what I'm asking is, do you see this happening on the individual level, or is this an organization, in a sense, coming in and doing it?
I mean, it all comes...
I think that there's lots of people who argue.
I'm the audiobook reader for Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
Lots of people who argue, you can go to psychohistory.com to check out more of these experts, that the history of the world is the history of childhood, that the way that society looks is the way that children are raised.
And so if we want to change society in any fundamental way, then we change the way we raise children.
I mean, and then children grow up entirely differently.
I mean, I understand this. If you're born to some crazy-ass jihadist Islamic extremist, you're going to grow up as an Islamic, probably an extremist.
And if you're born to, you know, a very peaceful Baptist in Minnesota, you're going to grow up with an affinity for snow, baptism, peace, and I don't know, what do they eat in Minnesota?
Maple syrup. It's a herring, like the Swedes, right?
Yeah, I'm sure it is. So children adapt to their environment, and if you want to change society in any fundamental way, you have to have children adapt to an environment in the home That is different from society as a whole.
And that way when they adapt to society at home, when they adapt to their immediate environment as children, they will carry that change forward as they grow up into society.
So if we reject, if we reject, if we reject the use of aggression and violence, intimidation, humiliation, scorn, punishment, manipulation, control, propaganda, lies, falsehoods, you name it.
If we simply tell our children the truth, Anachronism.
I think this is a very interesting point you bring up here.
Now, I don't know how aware you are of some people who work out there.
For instance, Janice Barcello, we had her on the program recently.
She talked about, I don't want to misrepresent her ideas here in any way, but just to be brief about this.
She mentioned, for instance, that hospital births actually are a very, very traumatizing experience for a young child.
Hence, you have a problem before the child is even basically in, has come into the world.
And so I'm back to that problem again.
If we, for a moment, allow that to be the truth then, in a sense, what do we do to Change that.
We can do it on an individual level, but in your view, if this is a massive traumatizing event, and then on top of that you might have circumcision and all kinds of weird stuff happening, how do you say that we move away from that?
Science is very clear that it's even prior to any of that.
I mean, from conception onwards, the health and stress and fears of the mother...
Human beings are different species depending on our...
Environment. And the environment is medical, it's physical, it's emotional, and it starts from, or you could even argue before the moment of conception, depending on the quality of the sperm and the egg, based upon the parents' health and stress levels and so on.
You know, we say, you know, man, the common family, we're all the same.
But scientifically, medically, psychologically, factually, we're not the same.
Children who were raised brutally grow up to be predatory.
In general, not 100%, but in general.
And our genes are turned on and off depending on our environment.
So many of our genes. So you end up with a different species.
If you have a stressed mom who screams at beats and neglects her child, you end up with a different animal.
A different animal. A predatory animal for the most part.
If you raise a child peacefully and calmly and lovingly and with negotiation, you end up with...
A different kind of animal.
We are not all the same.
We are a different species.
And, of course, the greatest predator on man is man.
And so we breed these predators through these brutalized childhoods, and those predators then take over and kill and kill and kill.
I mean, just in the last century alone, 250 million Innocent people were murdered by their own governments, not even including war, just domestically.
And the total number of private murders was 9 million and change.
And so we create these incredibly predatory animals, these incredibly sleek and sophisticated verbal abusers and physical abusers.
The verbal abusers are the ones who are really great with rhetoric, and the physical abusers are the enforcers, and they both come from these incredibly destructive backgrounds.
And we breed our own predators, and we breed our own prey.
And so we have to recognize that in order to take this master-slave relationship out of society, in order to take this owner and owned, this farmer and livestock, this predator and prey relationship, Where we worship those who use us only as cynical collateral to extend their own power and enrich their own clans, we have to. We have to stop using hierarchy with our children.
We have to stop using punishment with our children in order for there not to be punishment in society as a whole.
As long as we continue to speak that language with our kids, they'll grow up fluent in the language of power, subjugation, and the state.
How do you think that would change the world if we, for a moment, then take that worldview and apply it to the reality we have today?
Would that be difficult in your view?
Meaning that, okay, the child from their parents' point of view then wouldn't be traumatized, they wouldn't be subjected to this violence.
But as things exist now, there are plenty in the world, in the school system and everything else, that they would experience this.
So it's a cycle of abuse.
How do we break away from that, do you think?
I mean, you just have to not hit your kids.
I mean, I wish it were more complicated.
I wish there was a big manifesto.
Don't hit your kids. Don't call them names.
Do whatever it takes to spend the first couple of years home with them.
Sorry? Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying then is, if the government is doing that through the school penalization systems there, they get humiliated and abused there, in a way.
Well then, take your kids out of school.
Homeschooling, forbidden in Sweden.
Can you private school? Yes you can but at the same time the curriculum is still being that centralized decision from the government so it doesn't really matter this is just about who operates the school but they can't really determine what direction the school is going in.
Right. I mean, I think that you can get more responsiveness out of private schools than you will out of public schools.
And also, in private schools, the children are less likely to mingle with more traumatized children because they come from parents who want to put their kids in private schools.
It's not perfect, but it's definitely a stretch in the right direction.
And, you know, that's a sacrifice.
Of course it is. Of course it is.
But changing the world requires sacrifice, going along with the flow, doesn't it?
Oh, here we go. Here we go. I've heard that before.
But also, I mean, when the kids get old enough, you can tell them the truth.
I mean, you have to expose, you know, you don't want to expose the true horror of so much of the world to your children at an inappropriate age, but...
That's a good point.
To tell them the truth. I mean, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm forced to send you to school, and I'm forced to pay for it.
And if I don't send you to school, men with blue suits, blue costumes, you know, like Halloween...
Men with blue costumes and guns are going to come to my house and drag me away, and I will not see you for a very, very long time, if ever.
Now, I'm not saying you say this when they're four going to school, but, you know, when they become teenagers and, you know, I believe it is incumbent upon parents.
Sorry? And the damage isn't already done then at that point?
Well, I mean, you have to introduce this truth to them slowly, but, you know, if you have to turn over your children to others to raise, I think that we owe our children the truth.
I agree. I can't tell my daughter to tell me the truth if I'm not going to tell her the truth.
I mean, in an age-appropriate way and so on.
Sure. But we owe our children the truth.
And, you know, we have a virtue called honesty in my family, and I ask my daughter to live by it, and my wife lives by it, and I live by it too.
So if she asks the question, I will give her an age-appropriate answer that is truthful.
And if they understand that we're all forced into doing this, then...
They'll at least have an accurate representation of their society, which, you know, it's the truth.
Can we talk a bit more about that?
What is truth?
Is it something objective?
Is it subjective?
This is a problem I've been dealing with for a long time.
How to explain something to somebody.
We can talk, for instance, about a particular event.
You will have two different versions of this, depending on the perspective of the two individuals that are experiencing the truth.
What's your view on this?
I think, first and foremost, I mean, truth is statements which conform to reason and evidence.
I mean, I know that's not a hugely mind-blowing definition or anything like that.
Truth is the echo of an angel's honesty crying on your tongue.
But, I mean, truth has to be that which conforms with reason and evidence, right?
So if I point at the sky and the sky is blue, then I can say the sky is blue.
Now some colorblind kind will come along and say the sky is gray and he will be right for his perspective but he's wrong because the sky is blue he just can only see gray and so we can look at the wavelength of the sky and say look the wavelength falls into the spectrum called blue and so we have things that we can say that are true you know the mountain is higher than the valley the the ocean is wetter than the desert And so on.
The tree is taller than the shrub.
And so there are things that we can say that are objectively true.
They conform to the self-consistent and they conform to the evidence.
And that's true. And I'm very much a slave to the scientific method from that standpoint that you and I have a hypothesis.
You first check it for internal consistency.
And if it passes the internal logic test, then you can then test it against empirical reality, right?
So if you have a A scientific theory which says that, you know, at this point, the theory is true.
If a rock falls up and down at the same time, be like, I don't think we need to go test this because, you know, that's just not going to happen.
So I think we check for a logical consistency and then we verify it with empirical evidence.
And, you know, the great and awful thing about the 20th century is it's been a monstrous laboratory of social experimentation in social forms of good and evil.
I mean, we've had some vestiges of a republic.
We've had social democracies.
We've had fascism.
We've had communism. We've had left anarchism in Spain in the 30s.
We've had, you know, even experiments in statelessness going on in Somalia and some experiments.
But, you know, it's like a church caved in and now everyone thinks that everyone's an atheist.
But we've had a wide variety of social experimentation that's been going on.
And, of course, any rigorous and...
Truthful, philosophical statement about morality has to take into account these things.
I mean, the basic of any morality has to at least show why communism failed, why fascism failed, why National Socialism or Nazism was so destructive.
And why America, which was the experiment in the very smallest government that could be conceived in this or any other age, has now turned in the very largest government that history has ever seen.
A rational system of ethics just needs to explain these things, not down to every last detail, but at least explain the trends.
And so that, I think, was where you're going to get truth from.
Interesting. What's your view if we, just for a moment, talk more about America?
Some people argue Maybe not that it really matters, but it could be fun to get your take on this.
Is America changing?
Is it being more socialized in your view?
You mean moving more to the left?
Yes. Oh, yeah, indisputably.
I mean, it is really the worst of both worlds because it is moving to the left domestically and it's moving to the right imperially or in terms of foreign policy.
Militarily, yeah. I mean, it's the worst of both worlds.
I mean, it has this...
Bichromatic from hell non-rainbow of just two parties because they've made it pretty much illegal or impossible to get any other party going.
And so on the left, yeah, they accurately analyze foreign policy as evil and immoral and then use the exact same initiation of force in an attempt to solve every social problem they can get their hands on domestically.
On the other hand, you've got the people on the right who say we should stop using force internally, you know, end the welfare state and so on.
But then, you know, let's go bomb the hell out of the Iranians.
So, you know, where do you want the bomb to land?
In your house?
On your front yard?
Or both? That's the wonderful choice facing the average voter in America these days.
And that's natural.
I mean, America was so free and so productive for so long.
And I just mean economically, mostly for middle class whites.
But, you know, still, that's something that, you know, my argument has been for many years that If you become free economically, you generate so much wealth that the wealth can then be used as collateral and tax revenue to grow the government.
And you can see this happening all over the world.
I mean, Japan had this incredible economy in the post-war period and then has now been, what, in its 21st or 22nd year of recession and has a debt-to-GDP ratio over 220%.
And same thing with Ireland.
Ireland was the Irish tiger, you know, was doing fantastically.
It lowered taxes. It had more of a free market.
And now, you know, it's one of the most heavily indebted countries in the world.
And you can see this all over the place.
Freedom is food for tyranny because it gives so much wealth that the governments can just grow and grow and grow.
And then they, you know, like any cancer, they overwhelm the body politic and destroy it.
So will this inevitably lead to collapse, which might be a fix in a way?
Well, yeah. I mean, inevitability is a tough word in history, but I think it's as close as we can get.
Because you can have a movement that fundamentally changes society, but that movement is a multi-generational movement.
It has to be, because it involves child raising.
And so as long as you have a generation left, you've got a shot.
You've got a chance. But we don't have a generation left.
Not even close. And so there's not enough chance, there's not enough time to make the foundational changes in how we raise children before The economic disasters hit and so unfortunately it's probably you know 20 years ago maybe if we'd started really really pushing it then but there was no internet really back then and you know people like us weren't talking much or weren't allowed to talk and so it's too late to make the intergenerational change but I think that that's what we need to do because raising children peacefully will give them the best chance to steer the country even from where it goes into a better direction.
So how do you see this playing out, though, if we stick to this idea that it is too late in your view?
What is next on the plate with our current behavior as you see it?
And again, is it a collapse if something like that actually happens?
Is that a new opportunity to rebuild in a way or try a new method, right?
I think it is an opportunity.
The play of the future is pretty simple because it's happened so many times before and as long as we have governments it will continue to happen.
There is an ever-increasing use of force in society and you can look at the bailouts and you can look at national debts and all of this is just continuing to escalate beyond all imaginable reason.
And these, you know, mathematically that which cannot continue will not continue.
And you then have a crisis.
And the crisis occurs primarily in the food supply.
We have this incredibly delicate and oil-dependent food supply.
And so there's a crisis in the food supply.
And then price controls come in because the free market gets blamed for, freedom always gets blamed for the effects of tyranny.
And then price control comes in, which then leads to shortages, which leads to the government taking over more and more of the food supply, which leads to more shortages.
And it's at this moment, of course, that the true fork of the road shows up, which is people either listen to the government and blame freedom for the effects of violence.
They blame voluntary traitors for the effects of the violent policies of the state, in which case you end up with a tyranny.
I mean, there's no question of that.
I mean, an unbelievably black and long-lasting tyranny because the free market has provided so many technological goodies to governments that I can't even imagine how you would escape that kind of tyranny.
I mean, the surveillance, the technology, the computers, the chips, RFIDs, GPSs.
I mean, I don't even know how you give me.
Who knows, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So that, on the other hand, if people start waking the hell up and listening to those of us who've been talking about this for decades and saying, you know, we were right, we were right.
This welfare state wasn't going to work.
The war on drugs wasn't going to work.
Taxation was going to produce more disasters.
Freedom was going to produce tyranny.
And, you know, it's really damn well time you started listening to us because if you stop listening to us now or you don't start now, then we are going into a night which may never see another dawn.
And so you just have to raise your voice as loud as you can and be as insistent and as annoying.
And as enraging sometimes as possible, because people damn well need to understand that it is not freedom that has failed.
It is not freedom that is failing us.
It is not voluntarism. It is not trade that is failing us.
It is the violence of this Stone Age relic we still place at the center of our society.
You place an agency of violence at the center of your society, and then you wonder why the hell things are going wrong?
I mean, people in the future will look back and just wonder how we managed to tie our shoelaces in the morning.
If we get that far, yeah.
What is freedom, in your view?
I mean, there are two freedoms, I think, essentially.
Philosophically, freedom is freedom from illusion.
And I think that's really the only fundamental freedom there is, is freedom from illusion.
Now if you have freedom from illusion, then you end up with freedom from the more tangible effect, which is freedom from violence.
Freedom from violence is the effect of freedom from illusion.
So the illusion is that taxes are voluntary, that there's a social contract, that the will of the majority is being served when special interests bribe politicians to lie to everyone and sell off the kids.
So if you free yourselves from the illusions, of the society that you live in and you look at it for what it actually is which is an oligarchical hierarchy founded on violence and repression and enslavement and imprisonment if you wake up from the matrix then you have freedom from illusion and if enough people do that then the society the evils of the society are revealed and as I said before you can't fight evil all you can do is expose it because once people see evil they recoil from it So does that mean that it's dependent on,
maybe not a majority, but it's a numbers game?
We have to have X amount of people for this to work.
Is that what you're saying? Oh yeah, of course.
One enlightened man goes the way of Socrates, right?
Of course, yeah.
This is why I and you and many other people, of course, are working so hard to bring as much illumination as possible.
I've had over 40 million show downloads and just past 10 million views on YouTube.
And, you know, that's, what, eight seconds of a Lady Gaga video or something.
But it is, you know, it's, you know, I, through the technology and through, you know, the kindness of show hosts like yourselves and the intelligence and commitment of your listeners and my listeners, you know, we have a reach that was impossible.
You know, the internet is the second, it's like the Gutenberg printing press round two.
Right. It brings communication that formerly would have been completely impossible to the instantaneous consumption of any interested party.
I mean, that's unprecedented, unfathomable.
I mean, bad guys get it as well as us, the good guys, so it's not a surefire win.
But it does make for a greater chance for human liberty.
You know, with new technology, the tyrants are always racing the liberators, you know, because everyone gets it.
And we just got to run like hell.
And shout at the top of our lungs and offend and knock people over if they get in the way because we absolutely need to get this message out there because, boy, you know, if we fail, I don't know how many people are going to have a chance to succeed after us.
Yeah, I agree. Specifically when the technological advancement is now at a stage where it's frightening.
The scientific dictatorship and the technological wonders that the tyrannical dictators have at their disposal is very, very frightening.
If we for a moment just talk about the internet in the context of good and bad again, We hear internet has created more filth than ever, if one chooses to look at it from that point of view.
This is just now a vehicle for pedophiles and therefore we have to shut down the internet.
At the same time, you can argue, It's created, like you did, one of the wonders of the world of communication, exchange of ideas, and actually beginning to reach new heights.
Do you think that we have to simply have an acceptance of both of these polarities being Online being on the internet?
It's more like we just need to change our attitude towards it, that these are components of the human being.
We have good and bad in us, so hence it is going to produce these things.
Or do you see that, no, we have to work actively towards shutting down and turning off all these so-called evil and wicked people who are using the internet?
What do you think? Well, I mean, obviously pedophilia is an unimaginably evil crime.
I don't believe that the government is particularly anti-pedophilia.
I mean, it still gives tax breaks to churches, and in particular the Catholic Church, and the reports of the pedophilia from priests were around for decades before the government did anything.
When the government was running the native, I don't know what the hell to call them.
What's the politically, the native Canadians here, the First Nations, I think they're called these days, the original inhabitants.
You're talking about Kevin and his kind of work.
Yeah, they, I mean, they were just unbelievable rapes and abuses of the kids and the government did nothing.
It took like 40 years or 50 years for even a vague apology to come out.
Public school teachers are, I think, 800 times more likely to sexually abuse your children even than priests are, and I don't see the government doing a hell of a lot about that.
They won't even fire public school teachers who've been convicted of molesting children.
They just put them, maybe they'll segregate them in these rubber rooms.
So I don't really believe that the government gives a high holy hell about pedophilia.
I do think, though, that they recognize that it's a hot-button issue to scare the population with.
And... I don't know.
I have no idea what the correlation is.
I've heard some studies that say that additional access to pornography reduces the incidence of rape because it allows people to masturbate rather than go out and jump someone.
I don't know what the truth is about child pornography.
Obviously, it's better for people to consume child pornography than it is for them to go and rape children.
I'd rather that neither of them were occurring, of course.
But I don't believe that the government gives a rat's ass about pedophilia in any fundamental way.
I mean, if the government was really against rape, then they would reform the prisons, which are, you know, rape central.
So, you know, to me, it's just a hot-button issue that, you know, oh, well, let's make sure that there's...
No child pornography on the internet, well...
Right. This is the excuse we hear, obviously, all the time.
They're playing this card, yeah.
Yeah, obviously, yes, it would be great.
I would love it if people didn't blow their minds up with hard drugs, and I would love it if people, you know, read more Aristotle.
But, you know, you can't use the government to solve these issues, because it's not...
I mean, it's just never going to work.
Because the government... Has not, to my knowledge, ever published information that says, okay, if you want to solve the problem of pedophilia, then you need to look at the source of pedophilia.
And the source of pedophilia is that pedophiles themselves were raped as children.
And so you need to do whatever you can to reduce the incidence of rape among children in order to reduce pedophilia in the long run.
And which means that you need to do whatever you can to reduce the incidence, not exclusively, but statistically to a large degree, Of single parenthood, because the children of single parents are much more likely to be victimized than the children of dual parents.
So that would be, I know, this is just off the top of my head.
So, you know, people are outraged.
I'm, you know, obviously send me letters to correct and I'll certainly read them on the air.
But off the top of my head, if somebody would say to me, well, you know, we read to get rid of, you know, pedophilia, I'd be like, yes, we do.
We really, really do. And so let's stop our sports fetish.
There's a lot of it going on there as well.
But But we need to look at the source and we need to figure out what the triggers are.
We need to look at the risk factors and we need to intelligently work to reduce those risk factors because there's no point slapping a law on a symptom and thinking you've solved the problem.
That's right. Absolutely. This is about stopping that cycle of abuse.
And at least as far as I heard, some of the latest studies done on the subject is that there is more abuse of children than ever before in the world.
And if this continues, again, it's another...
Doomsday scenario, if you will, in a way, because if this isn't stopped, if we don't stop these cycles, that is going to mean that eventually, down the road, everybody is going to be an abused child.
So everybody in the world is going to have these afflictions, which is absolutely horrible.
So in your view, does this need to be addressed more openly?
Do we need to face our problems first in order to try to solve them?
How do we go about this, in your view?
Sorry, if you could be a bit more specific with the question.
I don't want to go on a tangential ramble and find that it didn't hit what you were looking for.
Absolutely. In your view, do you think that Simply beginning to address the problem, talking about this openly, getting the information out there, because this is a subject where people, they shy away from it, because it's difficult, obviously, emotionally and so forth.
Yeah, look, I mean, what to do is, if you have kids, obviously, raise them peacefully.
Everybody knows kids, everybody knows parents, and sit down and talk about it with their parents.
You know, I've got a presentation on the web called The Truth About Spanking.
I've got interviews with Dr.
Elizabeth Gershoff, who's a subject matter expert about the The fact that spanking reduces IQ points, that spanking is indistinguishable in its effects from actual physical abuse, like beating the kids and so on, that it increases aggression, that, you know, so obviously don't spank your kids.
But, you know, I think a lot of people in the Nordic countries have given up on that already.
Don't lie to your children, you know, don't tell them things that aren't true.
Reveal to them the things that are illusory, like countries.
Don't get them hooked on sports fetish.
My team's jerseys are beating your team's jerseys.
I mean, this is all just nonsense. It's completely unjustifiable.
I mean, sports are fun.
I love sports myself. I love playing sports.
But it's a hobby.
It's not a... You know, this ritualized warfare and nonsense like that.
I mean, we've just got to stop putting our children in these ridiculous hysterical situations like nationalist rallies, like sports events, and just tell them the truth about this stuff, that this is all just people who you can't think, can't reason, and just hysterical because they lack any kind of depth to their personalities.
Yeah, don't yell at them. Don't punish them.
Reason with them. Refrain from all acts of aggression or threats of abandonment or ostracism with your children.
And sit down with other people.
Even if you don't have kids, I'm sure you know people who have kids who are going to have kids.
Sit down and talk about it.
Make that commitment as families, as communities.
Be in people's faces if you have to because the future hangs in the balance.
The future depends upon us treating our children a hell of a lot better than we've been treating them historically.
Apologize to them. For the national debt.
I mean, let's at least have the honesty as a culture to say, we're sorry, we sold you all down the river to Chinese bankers, but we really wanted to make sure that we didn't piss off the unions that were around at the time, or the bankers, or the executives, or the corporations, or the welfare recipients, you name it.
At least let's as a society apologize to our kids for the mess that we've made in the world and the debts that we've placed them in.
And that will give us the humility to stop lecturing our children about the best way to live, because I don't think there's much empirical proof that we know a damn thing about it, otherwise we wouldn't be giving them such a crap sandwich and saying smile when you eat it.
Okay, well, do you think that a child needs discipline?
I mean, I've been in classrooms here in Sweden where the children, basically, they run the class and the teacher can't say anything, basically.
It's kind of gone in the opposite, in reverse almost, in a sense.
This is really strange.
Because the children are obviously testing the boundaries.
Children aren't adults yet, so it might be difficult to reason with them on every level.
How do you view that when it comes to discipline then?
I don't think that discipline is an appropriate word for children any more than discipline.
You know, we used to talk about disciplining our wives.
If our wives got out of line, we'd discipline them.
No, children obviously need exposure to values, and children need exposure to limits.
Of course they do. I mean, naturally.
We all do. I mean, if I go to some foreign country and I don't know the Local customs, I'm going to need someone to tell me, no, you lick the pinky rather than shake the hand or whatever.
I mean, of course.
So we need people to instruct children on, you know, decent behavior and, you know, limit their behavior and so on.
But that's from a patient reason standpoint.
Because look, either children are too young to understand rationality, in which case yelling at or hitting them is even more brutal than if they can.
Or they're old enough to be reasoned with, in which case you should damn well go to their level and figure out how to reason with them.
And Alison Gopnik is a pretty famous psychologist.
She's also been on my show. She's got a book called The Philosophical Baby.
Children can do statistical reasoning at nine months of age.
They can begin to show moral judgment.
At 13 or 14 months of age, do not underestimate how powerful and how capable infants and babies and children are.
Now the situation where the children are running the classroom, it means that, in my opinion, it would mean that the parents, if there's not an intimate relationship, There's not a close relationship.
They have not developed empathy and self-regard.
Children who are not closely bonded to parents.
This is all opinion, right? So I don't have any proof of this.
This is my experience. Children who are not closely bonded to a parent are kind of wild.
They have trouble having conversations.
They don't have focus. They go for stimulation and they go for herd behavior rather than individuation and depth.
You know, the true meaning and depth and power of human life is in Is in conversing, is in language, is in the intimacy that comes from vulnerability and honesty.
Children who've not been exposed to that have their heads filled with a kind of multimedia static that has them leaving footprints on the ceiling and not able to sit.
I mean, if I sit with my daughter and we have a conversation, she's, you know, from when she was two and a half onwards, she's now three and a half.
We can go 45 minutes just sitting there having a chat.
I'm not saying this is like, you know, and every hour we spend 45 minutes doing this, but we can do that.
And she really, really enjoys those times, as do I. And she's not going to blend into some sort of manic herd because she's got intimacy.
And through intimacy, we develop groundedness.
We develop a self. We develop connection.
We develop limits. We develop empathy, right?
Because remember, the kids... Absolutely.
This is a very good point as well.
I want to ask you a little bit about this.
You know, I remember about 30 years ago, the government assigned pediatricians, you know, they said kind of stupid things like, let your child You know, cry until they fall asleep, basically.
Things like that. I remember my mom has told me things about how she was given a certain set of instructions, which they obviously claim are based on a scientific rational approach, but they are completely counterintuitive to how she wanted to act.
So we have an issue right there as well about the science.
Just because they claim it's science doesn't mean that it's sound science.
Yeah, I mean, this is why, I mean, in the absence of scientific proof, you need moral principles.
And the moral principle is, if a child cries, you go.
And if a child is defiant, or if a child is angry, or if a child is aggressive, Your job as a parent is to figure out why that is occurring.
Not to punish the symptoms without getting to the root cause.
Because the child is expressing something through that aggression.
They may be expressing loneliness.
They may be expressing that they are missing out on developmental phase that they need to either get now or circle back and recreate.
They may be expressing jealousy of attention paid to another sibling.
They may be expressing something that you actually need to find out about.
You know, we are addicted as a culture, this is again the result of having religion and state at the center of our moral and social universe, we are addicted to managing symptoms, not finding root causes.
You know, I mean, religion is so indifferent to root causes that it has to use threats of hell to get people to change their behavior.
Because it won't sit down there and figure out the root causes.
And because, of course, the root causes have a lot to do with religious instruction.
In other words, instruction about things that aren't true already.
And so we simply, we see a problem, we want to Sort of point a gun at it and make it go away.
We want to hit it with a hammer and play whack-a-mole with all this stuff.
Oh, there are people on drugs.
Well, let's throw them in jail and let's throw their dealers in jail.
Or, you know, oh, people want stuff that we can't pay for.
Well, rather than have conflicts, we deal with the real source of the issue, which is, of course, governments having a monopoly and a union.
You can't have both. And then we'll just borrow money or we'll print money and we'll solve it that way.
It's all nonsense. And this reflects itself in the home.
If your children are behaviorally challenged, then you've got to go and find, with all humility and self-criticism, you've got to find the root cause of that.
And it's in the parenting. It's in the environment.
It's in this extended family.
It's somewhere. But it certainly is not an aid to the child.
There's no devil that children are born into that need to be swatted out with any kind of aggression.
And there's no excuses in your view about this because people argue time, they don't have enough time, they're working maybe two jobs even in some cases, and they've handed over the responsibility to the government, to the school.
No, nobody forces people to have children.
Nobody forces people to have children.
Exactly. But if you have the child saying, I don't have the time, well, the child is here.
You have to make the time. Yeah.
Look, I mean, I was writing two or three books a year before I became a full-time dad, and I've stopped doing that because I chose to become a parent.
It's not my daughter's fault that I want to do some other thing sometime.
I mean, she didn't choose to be here.
She didn't choose to have me as a dad.
She didn't choose to be born into this family.
I've got to woo her more than I woo my wife to make her a happy member of this family, to overcome the involuntary nature of her position here.
And so, no, there's no excuses.
If you chose to have the children, then you have to choose to raise the children or give them to somebody who will.
But, no, I don't have much patience for that kind of stuff.
People who choose to have children and then cry victimhood, I mean, at least then be consistent and then never blame your child for anything.
I mean, if you can be excused for not being a great and committed parent, then you can't ever blame your child for anything because you can't have higher moral standards for a 5-year-old than you do for a 40-year-old.
Yeah, and unfortunately we have people who are having unwanted children and they, you know, whoops, it happened, etc.
There's a lot of things like that happening in the world.
But that's just what it is.
If so much is hinged on parenting, in your view, how does one learn good information about this, about parenting?
I think that some of it is knowledge and some of it is willpower.
I mean, a book that I think is very good is Parental Effectiveness Training.
This is about how to negotiate with your kids and to get to the root causes of things.
Reading up on developmental psychology, I think it's Alan Bloom and Alison Gopnik are the two areas, two writers in this area who are very powerful.
And make great scientifically, you know, based arguments for the efficacy of the child's mind and the morality of the child's soul.
And I mean, I have my own humble contributions on my website under the podcast page.
I've got a feed for my arguments for and experiences with what I call philosophical parenting or peaceful parenting.
So, you know, I think gaining knowledge is really, really important, but a lot of it just comes out of the commitment to not use aggression.
If you just, you know, you've Count to ten.
Bite your tongue. Go for a walk.
Hand your kid to your spouse or whatever, or a neighbor.
But you don't do it.
You don't do it. Zero tolerance is what I was always taught.
Zero tolerance for children bullying each other.
Zero tolerance. Well, I think it's time that we scurry that moral principle up the authority ladder a little bit and say zero tolerance for parents using aggression in the raising of their children.
If you simply reject the use of Aggression or violence in the raising of your children, it's amazing what shows up.
You know, we were talking about if you get rid of the government, all these other things will show up.
Well, if you simply don't have that in your arsenal, so to speak, if you simply don't have aggression, dominance, power, yelling, hitting, punishment, timeouts, if you don't have that in your vocabulary, you won't believe the words that will come out of your mouth.
I mean, it would just, it will blow your mind.
And it will help you to understand that when you get rid of violence, you don't create a power vacuum that draws more violence.
You create an incredibly fertile opportunity for benevolent and positive human communication.
And, you know, if we try that with our kids, you will never believe that we need to state because, you know, it's the only thing that can provide these services.
If you, as a parent or as a partner, as a boyfriend, this is not just parents, children, it's boyfriend, girlfriend, it's friend, friend.
You don't yell, don't call names, don't intimidate, don't threaten, don't write.
You won't believe what will arise to take its place.
You know, you put down...
The sword and the volcano of the world erupts in flowers.
I mean, it's a weird kind of thing that happens, but, you know, just give it a shot and you'll see what I mean.
I don't mean you, but, you know, listeners.
I got it. No, it's really good.
This has been very, very interesting and, of course, enlightening.
Very interesting hearing from your perspective about your theories, about your philosophy.
And we certainly, you know, have much more to discuss about this.
But for now, we have to refer people to your website for more, of course.
Go ahead and give us your URL again.
And, of course, mention if there's something else you want to give out there about books or any other material, Stefan.
No, I think it's really just the website, freedomainradio.com.
Unfortunately, my speaking engagements are, I think, exclusively North American so far this year.
I certainly hope to get over to Europe, but in order to do that, I need there to be a poll.
As a voluntary, eat-what-you-chat philosopher, I don't have the money to go jaunting around Europe, but I certainly hope to get over there either later this year or next year.
But yeah, freedomainradio.com.
Just, you know, come, enjoy, gorge yourself, download and read.
And there's a community with like 10,000 people talking philosophy.
Join that if you like Sunday shows.
I do, you know, if you have a particular question, I'm happy to do a one-on-one chat, which we may publish as a podcast.
So, you know, just try and make myself as available to people as possible.
And I hope that people will get sparked by a rabid interest in philosophy, whether that keeps them on my side or somewhere else.
It's much less important to me than that the fire is lit to begin with.
Right, very good. Thank you so much for your time today, Stefan, and keep up the good philosophizing.
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