Stefan Molyneux is interviewed on TNS Radio about European public debt, the shattering of the European economic Union, and the endless fiscal failures of Western democracies.
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| Okay, good evening, everybody. | |
| This is Bryzer here on TNS Radio, and I hope you're all doing well. | |
| And at long last, summertime has arrived in the Emerald Isle. | |
| It's taken its time, but the last couple of days have been absolutely glorious, so I hope you're all enjoying it. | |
| And your special guest on tonight, I'm sure a lot of you will have heard of him, Stefan Molyneux, who is a radio host, and he's on the station, Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Stefan is also a self-described philosopher, author, historian, and a great voice for freedom and liberty out there. | |
| I think a lot of people will have heard what Stefan has had to talk about in the past. | |
| I think a lot of it will resonate with you. | |
| I'm very glad to have him on TNS Radio tonight to share his thoughts and views with us. | |
| So Stefan, welcome to TNS Radio. | |
| Thanks for joining us. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| It's a great pleasure. | |
| So Stefan, I suppose for a few people out there who don't know who you are, maybe you could maybe tell us how to start it for you. | |
| Sure, I'd be happy to. | |
| I guess I've been thinking and mulling things over. | |
| Can you hear me alright? | |
| Yeah, I can hear you now. | |
| I've been thinking and mulling things over for about 30 years or so. | |
| I sort of got into philosophy in my mid-teens through Ayn Rand and objectivism and studied some of it in school. | |
| I did a master's degree in history and then I worked as an entrepreneur for quite some time and enjoyed that and started getting back into writing and thinking and debating a little bit more. | |
| And then I started running a show because I had a long commute to my office. | |
| I ran a show out of my car. | |
| And through that, I began to publish them as podcasts, sort of the mid-2000s, and then began to find more and more receptivity to what I was talking about and then ended up going full-time a year or two later. | |
| And that's been my crazy gig ever since, which is to talk philosophy on the internet. | |
| And it's no ads, it's just donation-based. | |
| And that's how it runs. | |
| I'll be speaking in Brazil, in Las Vegas, in California, in Toronto. | |
| I'm doing a lot of speaking this summer and I'm enormously thrilled about how things are going. | |
| And now, of course, I'm breaking into the all-important Irish libertarian market through the thin edge of the wedge of your show, which is wonderful. | |
| That's it. | |
| It's all a global thing now. | |
| People are beginning to starve from their slumber. | |
| It's taken a while, but it's happening. | |
| I can see changes here as well. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| You did a radio show from your car. | |
| That was a good way to spend your time while you're commuting. | |
| Yeah, once you get sick of audiobooks, you might as well listen to yourself for a while. | |
| I mean, I was a debater in college and I debated across Canada and so on, so I really always enjoyed that aspect. | |
| And the business world has a lot of pragmatism, but it doesn't have a lot of idealism. | |
| After spending so much time in the business world as an entrepreneur, I really, really liked the idea of exercising the idealistic part of my brain a lot more, so that's where I started getting into The big challenge for me is working on ethics. | |
| It's all about the ethics. | |
| Traditionally, there have been two ways that ethics have been done or performed in society. | |
| One is that you have a God who will send you to hell if you don't obey or aren't good according to those dictates. | |
| Or you have a government that is going to arrest you and throw you in jail. | |
| If you don't do the right thing and neither of those I think have really solved the problem of morality and so I think finding a way that you can convince people of ethics and virtue without just appealing to self-interest, without just appealing in the objective sense, without just appealing to a fear of hell or a fear of prison, I think it's been a real challenge and I think a lot of philosophers have taken a run at it. | |
| I don't think they've been too successful. | |
| I've taken a run at it and I hope that I've been successful. | |
| We'll find out over time. | |
| But I think really helping people to understand what virtue is and why be virtuous without fear of punishment and without the rewards of heaven is a real challenge. | |
| And that's really a lot of what I've been working on. | |
| Yeah, I think ethics are very important. | |
| I think it's been lost a lot lately in today's society, hasn't it? | |
| Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of status-driven materialism. | |
| We have a lot of power-seeking. | |
| We have a lot of addictive behaviors, whether it's an addiction to power or to drugs or to sex or to status or material goods and so on. | |
| I was just thinking about this the other day. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Dare I even say kids these days? | |
| I probably shouldn't. | |
| But if I do allow myself since I'm now 45, I think I can say kids these days. | |
| And it was no different when I was younger. | |
| So this is not anything to do with kids in particular. | |
| But when I was younger, you know, what really mattered was whether you were really good on a skateboard. | |
| What really mattered was whether you were really good at Rubik's Cube. | |
| What really mattered was whether you knew how to break dance. | |
| What really mattered was the kind of car you had or the clothes you wore or whether you were really good at sports. | |
| And so all of these empty, shallow, materialistic human tricks and human adornments were considered to be the definition of the hierarchy and what gave you value when I was a kid. | |
| And it seems to be pretty much the same thing these days. | |
| And I think that's really tragic that after 2,500 years of philosophy, we still have this empty baboon-style tricks and adornment As a way of having status and value in this world, and there's not a lot of people who say that the value of a young person is measured by their integrity and commitment to virtue and moral courage. | |
| These things would be considered ridiculous, anachronistic and foolish to bring up. | |
| In any kind of youth hierarchical context, it's really tragic, you know, because whether you know how to break dance doesn't add a whole lot to your life's happiness, but whether you're a virtuous person with moral courage and integrity, that really does add a lot to your life happiness. | |
| So, yeah, I think we've kind of gone astray or stayed astray since I don't think we've got a particularly philosophical history. | |
| But the old call to self-knowledge and virtue is something that we still need to heed, I think. | |
| Did you study philosophy at the university? | |
| Yeah, I did. | |
| I studied history, which is a great discipline because you can wedge anything into history. | |
| I did some economics. | |
| My master's thesis was the history of philosophy, a particular thesis I had about the history of philosophy. | |
| So, yeah, I did study some. | |
| I mean, a lot of... | |
| What I have done has been self-taught or self-explained and of course I have a huge community. | |
| We have I think over 40 million downloads now and a very active message board. | |
| I have a very active inbox so I get great ideas and information from around the world now which has made it a whole lot easier to Surf on the intelligence of other people's thoughts. | |
| And of course, conversations with people like yourself around the world is a great perspective to get. | |
| Because this is not something that, you know, the conversations we have aren't going to show up on CNN anytime momentarily. | |
| So it's great. | |
| Yeah, I mean, philosophy is an interesting topic because it really deals with everything, doesn't it? | |
| It's reality and existence, what we're about, you know? | |
| So it's such a wide subject to talk about and it encompasses everything. | |
| Yeah, and the freer we are, the more important it is. | |
| So you don't really need nutritional advice when you are toiling away in some Soviet gulag with Ivan Denisovich because you just eat whatever pig slop and cabbage with beetles in it that they put in front of you. | |
| But the more choices you have about food, the more you need nutritional information. | |
| And we live in a society You know, even though our liberties are declining to some degree, we live in a society with a huge amount of choice. | |
| We can go work and live and be just about anything that we want to be. | |
| And so the more choices we have, the more we need some way of organizing these choices so that we don't have to wait for negative repercussions or positive repercussions to know whether things are good or bad for us. | |
| And so I think philosophy has become even more important as we've got more choices, but it seems to have become less important. | |
| And so we end up making our choices based upon You know, status or what's gonna get us late or what's gonna make us feel happy in the moment or what's gonna make us rich or whatever. | |
| And these things don't tend to lead to any particularly lasting happiness. | |
| Well, going on by what's going on here at the moment, we have a lot of people are saying that Ireland is going through much the same problems as Greece and Spain and that, you know, the problems are definitely there. | |
| I don't think we're quite as bad, but it's bad, okay? | |
| People are beginning to see that something is very wrong. | |
| They're not quite figuring it out yet, but it's getting there and I think A lot of us here on TNS Radio are getting out and trying to talk to people in a kind of a nice, gentle manner to explain to them what is happening in this world, what your government, your so-called friendly government is all about. | |
| And we have, I suppose, an opportunity here in a couple of, well, in a week or two, actually. | |
| We have a referendum, actually, it's next week, because of this European Fiscal Treaty. | |
| This is a great, I suppose if you want to call it an opportunity for Irish people to kind of stick the finger up to the EU because we've had enough of it here. | |
| But I watched a video on your website about voting and I have to say myself, I'm in two minds about it. | |
| Saying no to this European thing is maybe given a message to the so-called powers that be, and then also by not voting, you're not recognizing that this whole bloody thing exists anyway. | |
| So where would you stand on that? | |
| I mean, I listened to your talk last night actually, I thought it was very good, so do you want to maybe give us your viewpoint on that? | |
| Sure, sure. | |
| I don't vote and I haven't voted probably in about 20 years. | |
| I won't participate in a system and I won't give that system the satisfaction of imagining that it is giving me a choice. | |
| And I don't vote for the lesser of two evils. | |
| I don't participate in that system. | |
| I obey the law. | |
| I pay my taxes because, you know, having a gun pointed at my neck will have me walk quite a long way in the snow. | |
| But no, I don't imagine that I am going to I don't get involved in understanding political issues. | |
| I don't imagine that the government is doing anything other than trying to ensnare me into some particular trap. | |
| I don't imagine that if I vote for a smaller whip as a slave that I'm fundamentally opposing slavery. | |
| I'm fundamentally accepting slavery if I vote for a smaller whip and a nicer master. | |
| The smaller whips and the nicer masters never seem to get delivered and all I'm doing is legitimizing the whole damn system. | |
| So no, I'm not a big fan of voting. | |
| Certainly it's fine. | |
| It's not the initiation of force. | |
| It's not like you're going out and strangling a homeless guy with a bungee cord. | |
| So it's not like it's an immoral thing to do. | |
| But I do not find that knowing about politics and pretending that the politicians are going to listen to what it is that I say is all ridiculous. | |
| I mean, to vote about the EU would be to say that whatever they're telling you has anything to do with the truth. | |
| I mean, you all know how Greece got into the European Union was lying, fraud, and falsification. | |
| If you and I did that on our tax returns or a bank, we'd end up in jail. | |
| But these guys, they end up with millions of dollars in their bank account. | |
| They hid their deficit through various accounting trickeries for many years. | |
| And then when this came out, what happened? | |
| The government that lied and cheated and defrauded the European Union, the Greek government, What happened? | |
| Well, people shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars their way. | |
| Can you imagine? | |
| You lie and defraud and falsify your tax return and the government says, whoa, okay, well, that's fine. | |
| Let's give you 50 times your tax refund then. | |
| Or you lie on your mortgage application and when it's found out, you don't get prosecuted, you don't get any sanctions, you just get a free house. | |
| I mean, whatever they say has nothing to do with any truth. | |
| The Maastricht Treaty of 93 promised, what did it promise? | |
| It promised fiscal stability and responsibility and it had all of these rules, all of these rules about how the governments had to have only this percentage of debt to GDP and they had only this percentage of deficit at 3% or whatever. | |
| And only 60% of debt to GDP and all this. | |
| And everybody's just blown past it and it's all nonsense. | |
| So whoever voted for the Maastricht Treaty, they had to sit down and understand it and say, oh, okay, well, there's 3% of this deficit and 60% of debt to GDP and the stability and here's how it's going to be. | |
| And nothing about it was ever followed through and the complete opposite occurred. | |
| So everybody who spent all their time researching that stuff and voting on it We're just throwing dust into a whirlwind. | |
| Whatever they talk about has nothing to do with what is actually going to happen. | |
| It's a waste of time to learn about it. | |
| It's a subjugation to the system as a whole to participate in it. | |
| It's got to step back and damn the whole rotten structure. | |
| Was it J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs who was responsible for fiddling the books? | |
| I think it was Goldman Sachs who were jigging up the Greek falsehoods. | |
| Of course, nobody ever gets prosecuted. | |
| You steal a candy bar and you get arrested. | |
| You rob a bank and you get arrested, but a bank robs you and it's called fiscal responsibility and economic stability. | |
| No, I'm not going to pretend that these people who create all these treaties and rules and manifestos and constitutions, I'm not going to pretend that they're bound by anything or that their promises are ever worth a damn. | |
| I mean, who enforces all of this stuff? | |
| You're going to vote for something and nobody's going to enforce it. | |
| These people answer to no one. | |
| So, yeah, I've been thinking that I'll give it a miss from now on because, as I say, you're giving recognition to fiction, really, because that's all it is. | |
| It's just made-up stuff. | |
| A bunch of faceless bureaucrats are sitting in an office putting this stuff together. | |
| And it's a tyranny, you know? | |
| So, by either voting yes or no, I don't know if it's going to make any difference. | |
| I don't think it will. | |
| But if you're voting, you're saying that your opinion somehow matters to these people and that they're bound by whatever you vote for. | |
| And these things are just empirically and demonstrably not true. | |
| I mean, they're just not true. | |
| I mean, they're not bound by anything that you say. | |
| And, you know, the Greek government had the Greek citizens vote on, you know, do you want this particular solution where we haircut the banks or we don't want this particular solution of austerity and so on. | |
| The whole point is just to get the politicians to read the majority so they can just manipulate the majority. | |
| You're just participating in this disgusting public relations scheme where you're revealing your preferences in order to be manipulated. | |
| No, my preference is to have Nothing to do with the entire mess. | |
| I don't want you people running my currency. | |
| I don't want you people running my education. | |
| I don't want you people indebting my children. | |
| I don't want you people throwing innocent peaceful civilians in jail because they have the wrong kind of vegetation in their pocket. | |
| I don't like the debt. | |
| I don't like the war. | |
| I don't like the bailouts. | |
| I don't like the bribery. | |
| I don't like any of it. | |
| And so to sit there and think, well, I'm going to take a little thing off here and make this system somehow better, you know, it's a delusion. | |
| Yeah, and I suppose, what would you say, though, for people who want to maybe just make their voice heard, that maybe it's just a good thing just to maybe get out and just say, that maybe it's just a good thing just to maybe get out and just say, you know, no, or, well, even yes, I haven't seen many people who want to vote yes | |
| I think a lot of people have had enough because People are being thrown out of their homes now. | |
| People can't afford to pay their bills. | |
| They can't feed their families. | |
| It's hidden home. | |
| We had a Celtic tiger here. | |
| It was an illusion of a boom time. | |
| All came to nothing. | |
| People are struggling now. | |
| And they're angry. | |
| I suppose this is the way for them to vent it, isn't it? | |
| Through the ballot box. | |
| But when you kind of think about it a bit further, you have to kind of say, well, why bother? | |
| I think if nobody showed up to vote, that would be a real answer to whoever. | |
| Yeah, I mean, not voting is a vote against the system. | |
| Voting is a vote for the system because you believe that your vote is going to count and make your voice heard. | |
| I mean, when the hell have they ever cared about our voices being heard? | |
| I don't remember as a kid, like... | |
| I don't remember as a kid anyone ever saying to me, is this the kind of educational system that you want? | |
| Oh ye of the blue eyes and the blonde hair and the curious mind and the inquisitive heart and the intellectually demanding soul, do you really want to sit in a row with 30 other children in some dusty, smelly, hot classroom and watch some bored, alienated Overpaid, underworked teacher scratch up there and these squeaky little horrible cat noises on a blackboard and that's what we're going to call your education. | |
| And nobody ever asked me anything about that. | |
| They didn't ask me how I wanted to be educated. | |
| I mean, some studio that wants to sell Movies to kids, they do all of this market research and they test stories on kids and they figure out what kind of characters they'd like and they figure out how big their eyes should be to sell the pop to them and all that. | |
| They actually do care. | |
| I'm not saying it's benevolent, but they do care about what the kids want and what the kids think about, what the kids like. | |
| The government, why do they care? | |
| The head of the American Teachers Union said it very clearly. | |
| He said, I'll start caring about what kids want when kids start paying union dues. | |
| He's there to represent the teachers. | |
| Who represents the kids? | |
| Nobody. | |
| That doesn't change. | |
| To not vote is to vote. | |
| I'm not going to pretend that the system is participatory. | |
| I'm not going to pretend that there's any kind of contract. | |
| I'm not going to pretend Yeah, it's just... | |
| We have a chat room here. | |
| Stefan has a couple of questions coming in. | |
| One from allegedly Dave is, what do you think of Iceland's solution? | |
| We're getting kind of conflicting things because I saw something that all the mortgages were written off or something and I found out that that wasn't true. | |
| But, I mean, what I have to say is I do admire the people of Iceland for standing up for themselves and Doing the right thing. | |
| Now, whether they got the right people in place now or not remains to be seen, but at least they sent a good message, but we don't seem to hear very much of what's going on in Iceland, do we? | |
| No, and that probably means that I think what they did was they just gave a huge haircut to the banks. | |
| And okay, so fine. | |
| I mean, but how does that solve the problems of the system as a whole? | |
| I mean, let's say that Iceland does some great stuff, writes off a whole bunch of ridiculous debt, and what happens then? | |
| Well, They reset their economic system, and this is, of course, what happened with Ireland, the Irish tiger. | |
| Oh, let's lower taxes. | |
| Oh, let's invite a bunch of corporations over here. | |
| And there was some genuine economic gains to be gotten from all of that. | |
| So what happened was, well, people's income rose. | |
| And the same thing will happen in Iceland if they've done... | |
| I'm no expert on what happened in Iceland. | |
| If anybody wants to talk more about it, I think that'd be great. | |
| But it's not going to solve any fundamental problems. | |
| If Iceland does something that is economically sensible, Then it means more investment is going to flow to Iceland, more people are going to invest in Iceland, which means the whole thing is going to happen again. | |
| It's the same thing as they say, which happened in Ireland. | |
| You've got this Irish tiger. | |
| Oh, look, we're doing so well. | |
| We got so much money. | |
| Oh, it's great. | |
| And then what happens is they use that income, they use that wealth generation, they use that capital that's flowing into Ireland and the increases in salaries. | |
| They use that as collateral to borrow more and then, right, the smaller the government, the bigger the crash. | |
| That's what happens. | |
| That's the huge story of America as a whole. | |
| The smallest government that was ever created has now produced the largest government, because small governments create free trade. | |
| Free trade enhances wealth. | |
| The governments then grab all of that wealth and use it as collateral to borrow and bribe and plunder and wage wars and create empires, and then the whole thing comes crashing down. | |
| It's a story from the Roman Empire to the present. | |
| So if Iceland is doing something great, there may be some short-term benefits, but in the long run, I guarantee you, it would just make it worse again. | |
| Yeah, so, I mean, what we try to talk about here on TNS is the sovereignty, like, individual sovereignty and sovereignty for the country, for the nation, you know? | |
| So, we had it here thousands of years ago. | |
| We can get it back, like, we had our golden age, if you want to call it that. | |
| I think, also, there's something, you know, in the Irish psyche about losing one's home. | |
| And I think that is beginning to happen because of, you know, the so-called famine back in the 1840s, which actually was a genocide, by the way, but that's another story. | |
| Yeah, socially engineered, right, if I remember rightly. | |
| Yeah, so it's kind of, it's in our blood if you want, and no one likes to lose their home, and these, you know, There's a couple of people out there doing some great stuff at the moment, challenging these receivers and bailiffs and whatever. | |
| A lot of these warrants aren't even signed. | |
| People are losing their homes and people are committing suicide. | |
| It's getting bad, you know? | |
| So it's really vital now that we're out there trying to educate people a little bit how the financial system works, how the legal system works, that it doesn't, it's not in your interest, absolutely not, and how you can remain in your home and stand up to this, because if we don't do it, you know, all around the world, we're, well, we're into a tyranny. | |
| There's no other word for it. | |
| Well, and the reality is that nobody ever owned their homes anyway. | |
| I mean, this is the reality throughout the Western world is that the government owns your house and you have to rent it from the government through property taxes. | |
| And no matter how much money you give to the bank, the government is still going to own, right? | |
| So there are little old ladies in New York State where they had to raise property taxes or they didn't have to. | |
| They chose to raise property taxes. | |
| They can't afford to pay. | |
| And so, these women whose houses have been paid off for 30 years, they've raised their families, they've had grandkids there, maybe their husbands died there, and they're being forced out of their home because the government owns it and has decided. | |
| Now, the government has graciously allowed some of these little old ladies to come and work for the government for free to pay off their property taxes. | |
| So, it's kind of more indentured servitude. | |
| But, yeah, I mean, as long as there's property tax, there's no ownership. | |
| You're just buying off the thugs to hang onto your square footage. | |
| Well, I think we're one of the few countries in the Western world that doesn't have a property tax, but they're trying to bring it in. | |
| They brought in, I think, a household charge here last month and people had to register by the 31st of March. | |
| Now, the government kind of spun the story quite a lot and said maybe well over half the people registered, but I know it's a lot more than that. | |
| I haven't met anyone who has. | |
| But again, the word has gone out that if you sign up for this, you're going to have property taxes which are going to increase as the years go by. | |
| As it deteriorates, you're not going to be able to afford it and you're going to lose your home. | |
| It's about getting the information out to people now as quickly as possible. | |
| People need to be prepared and to be able to stand up on their own two feet and take responsibility for their actions as well. | |
| And how is the tax-resistant movement going in Ireland these days? | |
| It's going pretty well. | |
| I mean, there's talks going all over the country. | |
| I mean, it's kind of petered out a bit now because, you know, people who decided not to pay are just not paying, which is great. | |
| Now, they're also trying to bring in next year water charges as well. | |
| We don't pay water charges, but, I mean, we're the wettest country in the world. | |
| You know, every second day we've got a good shower of rain here. | |
| And people are resisting that as well. | |
| So we're having, you could say, peaceful resistance and non-compliance beginning to grow here, which I think is probably the best way to do this, to just not comply. | |
| And if people start doing that, then they start questioning, well, why do we pay income tax? | |
| Why do we pay all these other taxes? | |
| It's all about consent, so if we just pull away from that, well, we just don't consent. | |
| They can't force, they can't put everybody into jail, or fine everybody, you know? | |
| So, it's good to see that it's happening, and at long last, because I thought that we were, most Irish people were just sitting down and accepting all this austerity, you know, when it's just plainly wrong and a criminal as well. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I certainly think that the austerity is wrong insofar as it just goes to pay off banks that are getting a bunch of free stuff from the government. | |
| But I also think that you can't just look, I mean, I always try and urge people, you know, look in the mirror as well as look in the paper as far as all of this stuff goes. | |
| I mean, I've certainly been fighting the good fight for, as I said, over 30 years now. | |
| Boy, it would have been a whole lot easier to deal with this stuff 30 years ago. | |
| I mean, when the government was like, what, 40% the size that it is now and the debt was much less. | |
| And so people didn't want to listen to reason 30 years ago or 20 years ago or 10 years ago or 5 years ago, even 2 or 3 years ago. | |
| Certainly since the sort of 2008 and onwards recession slash depression, people have started to open their ears a little bit. | |
| But it is also people's lack of willingness to listen to reason, to stand up against that which is inevitable. | |
| I mean, there's no point waiting until you've got lung cancer to quit smoking. | |
| I mean, I guess it's fine to quit smoking, but let's do it ahead of time. | |
| Listen to the reason and evidence beforehand. | |
| So, I am a little bit concerned that people are suddenly just looking at the rule as the be and saying they're the only problem. | |
| But after talking to people, I've talked to thousands and thousands of people over 30 years and the number of people who are actually willing to listen to reason is probably, it's definitely in the single digits of percentage and probably not much above one. | |
| And I'm pretty good at talking about this stuff and I've got a fair amount of knowledge and I'm fairly convincing and fairly entertaining. | |
| And so I do have a little bit of concern where people just say, oh, it's everyone else that is the problem. | |
| But you've had a lot of people talking to a lot of people about this kind of stuff for many, many, many years. | |
| And, you know, if you refuse to listen, to just blame everyone else for your own refusal to listen seems a bit precious to me. | |
| Well, Tim, that's my thought. | |
| Tell me what you think. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| We have to look in the mirror and say, well, who's responsible for all this mess? | |
| In many ways, we are. | |
| We consented to it. | |
| We've let it up. | |
| People like their slavery. | |
| I know you talk about this on other videos about the human farm where we're being farmed and people like it. | |
| They think this is just the way it is and you don't question it and that's it. | |
| That's very sad. | |
| I think it's more than that they like it. | |
| I think that they praise it as virtuous. | |
| I'm sure you've had conversations with people where you say the welfare state is disastrous. | |
| In the US, they've spent almost $16 trillion fighting poverty since 1964, which is about the same size as the official US debt, far lower than the real debt. | |
| What's happened? | |
| You've got a huge number of poor people. | |
| You've got a huge number of broken up families. | |
| You've got a massive debt. | |
| You have collapsed economic opportunities. | |
| You've had stagnant or declining real wages. | |
| The welfare state has been statistically, almost without exception, a complete disaster for the poor. | |
| And this has been evident for many, many years. | |
| And it was beginning to be evident even when I began talking about this stuff 30 years ago, but certainly over the last 10 or 20 years, it's been completely evident. | |
| But you're bringing up these facts about how the welfare state is so unbelievably destructive to the poor, and all you get is slander about how you're just some rich capitalist pig who wants his nose in the trough and doesn't care how many poor coal-dusted-over children you step over to get your way. | |
| And so it's a little frustrating to see how upset people are getting now as if I sort of feel like I'm a doctor to someone, and I've said for 30 years, listen, Bob, you've got to stop smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. | |
| You've got to stop eating so many Cheetos because you're like 300 pounds. | |
| Your heart is about to bust. | |
| You've got to start taking better care of yourself. | |
| I tell him this year after year after year and he tells me that I'm a fool. | |
| I don't know what I'm talking about and then he gets really shocked and surprised when he gets sick. | |
| And then he says, why didn't you tell me something, Doc? | |
| I'm really angry at these cigarettes. | |
| I'm really angry at these Cheetos. | |
| I'm really angry at these cheeseburgers. | |
| And it's like, do you not have any reference to the conversation? | |
| Anyway, it's just something I wanted to mention. | |
| Because if people just get angry at the leaders, then that doesn't actually give them any ownership that they have. | |
| It makes them just blame throwers, which doesn't give them any power. | |
| Because about four years ago when I kind of woke up to all of this, I always kind of questioned things but I never was able to put my finger on it and it all came clear. | |
| And it's everything, it's not just government or taxes or anything like that, it's your own health, it's your own well-being, you know. | |
| I'm on a good diet now. | |
| I'm trying to do some exercise. | |
| I'm starting off trying to grow stuff now for myself and be self-sufficient and just slowly break away from it. | |
| I think that's the only way we can all do that at the moment. | |
| But if more and more people are doing it, You know, which I think is happening and I think the so-called powers that be know this and are getting kind of worried. | |
| So, you know, that's why this year could be, you know, something could happen, I don't know. | |
| We can't predict the future, but it's, you know, it's not looking great, that's for sure, but we can change it. | |
| It's all done. | |
| Yeah, and I think I've always wanted to tell people it's good to inform yourself about the larger socioeconomic realities of the evils we I saw this guy give a speech complaining about the high price of healthcare in the US. The guy was 300 pounds. | |
| It's like, you can't do anything about the policy of the US government on healthcare, but you can drop 150 pounds if you work at it. | |
| And so I'm very much around like, yeah, blame the powers that be, absolutely. | |
| They propagandized you. | |
| They sold you down the river. | |
| They rented your kids off to Chinese overlords for the sake of six quid to bribe people in the here and now. | |
| Absolutely wrong. | |
| Totally immoral. | |
| They start wars. | |
| They imprison people. | |
| Lie, they cheat, they steal, they counterfeit. | |
| I got all of that. | |
| I really do. | |
| And you can't do a damn thing about the system. | |
| But you can stop hitting your children. | |
| You can take care of yourself. | |
| You can forge better relationships with your neighbors. | |
| You can build a better community within your own life. | |
| You can stop smoking, stop drinking so much so that you can take care of your own health. | |
| All of these things are things that you can do which render the state. | |
| Don't have kids out of wedlock. | |
| It's one thing that people can do to make the world a better place. | |
| Finish high school. | |
| Don't have kids till you're 20 or at least. | |
| Things that you can do that are statistical and sensible that's going to make the world a better place. | |
| Plant a garden. | |
| I'm very much the Candide by Voltaire. | |
| It was very much around Don't worry about the world as a whole. | |
| Just take care of your own garden. | |
| I really try and focus people on that because staring at the massive weight of the global financial system and its endless predations upon the body politic and the citizens' spleen isn't going to do you anything but get you paralyzed with fear and frustration. | |
| But there's so much that people can do that has nothing to do. | |
| 70-80% of Illnesses are entirely the result of people's lifestyle choices. | |
| So it doesn't matter if you rail against the government and achieve 5% lower taxes if you then get heart disease or cancer because you've been living badly. | |
| Which one makes you more free? | |
| Well, it's having a healthy body rather than spending your precious energies fighting the powers that be. | |
| There's a couple of comments coming in here, like treat your neighbours as your family. | |
| Thanks Ponman, that's a good one. | |
| Another question there, sorry I have to scroll back here a bit. | |
| Could you ask Stefan what his idea of a society without statism would look like now? | |
| I know you talk about statism, you talk about anarchism, conservatism, capitalism, all these isms. | |
| Do you want to go into that a little bit? | |
| Let me take you on a journey. | |
| Statism, of course, is the idea that we need a monopoly minority A small group of individuals with a monopoly on the use of force, that's the best way to run society. | |
| But let me take you on a journey of a life. | |
| Let's pretend that tomorrow morning we wake up in a world without government. | |
| Well, my friends, we will be awoken by clouds rising up from our beds and floating across our rooms. | |
| Angels will weep sweet God's milk onto our tongues. | |
| We will be able to levitate, we will be able to walk through walls, and we will go to work As exotic dancers and we all have great hips, great flexibility, great gyrations and we will come home with massive amounts of money stuffed into our very tiny bikinis. | |
| If that doesn't sell it to you, I have the alternative view which is that we simply have a society of reason and peace and evidence. | |
| The initiation of force will be something that people accept as morally wrong, and anybody who suggests that we should initiate force to solve problems will be sort of akin to somebody who suggests that we grind up orphans and use them to feed cows that are hungry, or we bring back slavery, or we start beating up pregnant women in order to please the volcano gods. | |
| I mean, it would just be something that would sound so morally ridiculous that Uttering such a silly statement like we should use force to solve social problems would probably get you some consultation with a mental health specialist rather than be accepted as the general truism of society. | |
| So imagine a society Where people rejected the initiation of force. | |
| So in an extremity of self-defense, a bear is running at you with a chainsaw. | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| You know, make a bear rug. | |
| But if people rejected the initiation of force in society, just imagine what that would be like. | |
| No yelling at children. | |
| No hitting children. | |
| No intimidating children. | |
| No yelling at, intimidating or hitting your husband or your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend or your friends. | |
| No trolling on the internet, which is just an emotional abuse, another way of attacking people's well-being and There would be any problem that came up in society and there will always be problems in society. | |
| That's the nature of reality. | |
| People will say, how can we best get together to work to solve this problem? | |
| We will have agencies out there in the world who are working to minimize and reduce conflicts. | |
| So, you know, in the U.S., Violent crime has gone down by almost 20% to 25% over the past little while. | |
| Has the police budget gone down? | |
| Of course not. | |
| All they do is start prosecuting more innocent people in the war on drugs and so on. | |
| Imagine a world where we didn't have the hammer of the state Where we didn't have the law, where we didn't have prisons, where we didn't have the truncheon of the policeman as our sole way of even imagining how we could solve social problems. | |
| Imagine if that gun, that truncheon, that hammer was taken away from us. | |
| Then everything would stop looking like a nail. | |
| When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. | |
| Imagine, just imagine what it would be like if you had a problem with somebody or had a social problem that was showing, say, well, how can we best get together and solve this voluntarily? | |
| Would there still be bad people in a free society? | |
| Yeah, of course there'll still be bad people in a free society, but so what? | |
| I mean, there are still crazy white supremacist, racist jerks in the world right now, but that's not quite the same as there being slavery. | |
| They're easily avoidable. | |
| And they don't really have any impact on society as a whole. | |
| And so it is a society where the world is accepted as round, the sun and the moon are accepted as being as different sizes, the sun is accepted as being at the center of the solar system, and the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights are accepted as being the foundation for all civilized interactions. | |
| That would be a beautiful world to live in. | |
| It's a world without unjust imprisonment. | |
| It's a world without war. | |
| It's a world without debt. | |
| It's a world without the brain-shredding propaganda that passes for education in the public schools. | |
| It is a world of the intense conservation of resources because nothing wastes resources in the world like governments. | |
| Just think of 10% of US housing is sitting vacant. | |
| Think of all the trees That had to be cut down. | |
| Think of all of the steel that had to be dug up. | |
| Think of all the plastic that had to be fabricated. | |
| Think of all the paint that was slapped on those walls and think of all of the chemicals that went into making the grass grow. | |
| Think of how many resources were wasted just in the housing boom, just in the US alone. | |
| And you'd have an intense resource preservation because the free market is all about maximizing returns, which is about trying to use as few resources as possible to get the maximum return. | |
| Not the case with government at all. | |
| So people would be educated very quickly. | |
| They would be free to travel wherever they wanted. | |
| There'd be no passports because children would be raised peacefully. | |
| There'd be 95% less drug addiction and violence in society. | |
| You could travel and go and work and do anything that you wanted. | |
| Statistically, you'd be able to work for a day or two a week and sustain yourself in a very comfortable lifestyle. | |
| And the amount of progress in medicine and art and technology and society as a whole would be staggering and unfathomable, unbelievable. | |
| There'd be no bullying in schools because that's the result of hurting traumatized children in age-specific categories rather than ability-specific categories. | |
| It would just be a world that would be so beautiful That it's really hard for us to imagine what it would look like. | |
| We get little glimpses of it here and there when we have a great time with someone, but imagine if that great time radiated outwards to the world as a whole and everybody accepted in a social sense what they already accept in their personal lives, which is you don't go around hitting people and throwing them in jail when they displease you. | |
| What a world! | |
| I would love I hope that technology advances to the point where they can freeze my big-ass bald head and put it in an ice pack next to some Haagen-Dazs and unfreeze me to see it. | |
| I doubt I will see it in my lifetime. | |
| That's the thing where we see this in our lifetime. | |
| I think we are the guardians of the earth at the moment and we have a responsibility to the generations that are coming behind us to make sure that we leave it in a good place for them so they can carry on what needs to be done on this planet, where we evolve as spiritual beings, if you want to call it that. | |
| We need to Move away from all this kind of things, materialism, you know? | |
| I think it was a great comment, some philosopher, I think, that the most important things in life aren't things. | |
| You know, we have to look beyond all that. | |
| It's so, I think, they've done a very good job on humanity down through the last thousand or two thousand years. | |
| You know, they've programmed us to such a point where we don't even recognize that anymore. | |
| So it's going to take an awful lot of deprogramming to get us out of that, isn't it? | |
| Or can we wake up one day and suddenly, bang, everyone gets it. | |
| No, I don't think that's going to happen. | |
| The transmission of the truth depends upon the receptivity of the mind. | |
| And unfortunately, people's minds are sort of like foot-bound Chinese women from the 19th century. | |
| They forced their toes back into their heels and really warped and distorted all of their basically feet and ankles and heels. | |
| They had to hobble around in this excruciating agony their whole lives. | |
| This was the sort of tradition of the time. | |
| You couldn't ever get a great running team out of those women. | |
| You might be able to make them hobble a little bit better, but you basically had to raise a generation of women in China. | |
| It happened very quickly in a span of one generation. | |
| People just stopped doing this stuff. | |
| They just stopped torturing. | |
| The feet of women in this way and then you can begin to create a great set of athletes, a racing team and so on. | |
| But you can't do it with the people whose bodies have been warped and mutated. | |
| And you can't do it You know, you can't make a redwood out of a bonsai tree and you can't and vice versa. | |
| So I think that we have to focus on raising children peacefully and raising children without violence and raising children with the full respect that is due to them, which is even more respect than is due to your average adult because children are in a state of unchosenness, right? | |
| They didn't choose their parents, they didn't choose their environment or their country. | |
| And so they need the most consideration of any human being of all, and if we give them that, then they will grow up with the capacity to reason. | |
| It's been scientifically demonstrated that children who are traumatized and hurt and upset regularly throughout their childhood, whether it's through parental neglect or abuse or religious neglect or abuse, or through public schools or private schools even, That those children grow up with a significantly diminished capacity to think and therefore they can't usually be reached through reason anymore than you can ask a footbound Chinese woman to climb a hill or a mountain. | |
| And so I think we need to recognize the damage that has been done to most people and we need to sort of say, okay, we have to have a new crop of people who are able to see reason and evidence and the best way to do that is to raise our children and to encourage the raising of children without spanking, without Threats of abandonment and neglect with at least one parent home during the formative years rather than tossing them off to daycare and strangers or even extended family. | |
| And if we do that, then reason will win. | |
| But unfortunately right now, the words of reason are falling upon ears that cannot hear. | |
| And there's no way to make them hear because you can't undo the damage that's been done by a lifetime of indoctrination and harm. | |
| So we have to, I think, work on the next generation. | |
| Because unfortunately the children, as you say, are being educated now, they're in the hands of the government or the state for seven or eight hours a day. | |
| And for most families, you know, both parents are working just to try and make ends meet. | |
| And there's a lot of kids out there who are not growing up the right way, you know. | |
| They're learning all the wrong things. | |
| They're stuck in front of a TV or a computer most of the time. | |
| But the parents can do something about that. | |
| My car is 15 years old. | |
| I could get a new car, but that's less time with my daughter. | |
| Just put aside the material greed or the keeping up with the Joneses or having a bigger house. | |
| I'm not saying that everybody who works is in that situation, but people can move to a smaller town just for a couple of years. | |
| People give up a lot of money to go to college. | |
| Why not give up a lot of money for a couple of years? | |
| Just the first couple of years. | |
| It's all that matters. | |
| The first three or five years of your kid's life. | |
| That's really the foundation of their personalities. | |
| If you can do that, I think you've done more to make this world a better, more peaceful and happier place than anybody who could conceivably run for office or vote or any books you could write or any speeches you could make or anything like that. | |
| Another question coming in from BitchinBob. | |
| Can you ask Stefan how could he see Ireland survive if it defaulted on debts and declared itself sovereign again? | |
| Well, I mean, survive. | |
| I mean, how is it surviving now? | |
| Yeah, I mean, it would do better. | |
| I think what it is, again, is the programming. | |
| Because we read in the papers that if this treaty isn't passed, we're doomed. | |
| No, what they're talking about is, do not confuse the interests of the bankers with your interests. | |
| Do not confuse the interests of the ruling class with your interests. | |
| What they're saying is, look, if we disconnect or have some separation from the EU, is that what the referendum is to some degree about? | |
| It's basically the fiscal treaty. | |
| It's about handing over the powers of our financial, what we do here, to not Yeah, this is what they're saying. | |
| We've given it away to them. | |
| They will tell us how much taxes to be paid, all the usual stuff. | |
| It won't be coming from us. | |
| I think I understand. | |
| They're looking at Greece and Greece may be cooking up an exit scenario because it's such a basket case. | |
| What they're saying in the EU is that we don't have control over tax and spend policies in individual nations, but as a collective, we are responsible for the most irresponsible. | |
| This is why Germany, which has the most surplus, is now Paying off the Greek civil servants at the age of 50 who want to spend the rest of their lives on a Greek island somewhere. | |
| And so the EU was saying, look, if we're going to pay the bills, it's the old dad argument, right? | |
| If I'm going to pay the bills, then I have to set the rules. | |
| If you are going to keep banging up my car, my car, if you want to bang up your car, that's your deal. | |
| But if you want to bang up my car, I'm taking away the keys. | |
| And so they're saying, if the countries are not going to be responsible, Then they have to give up some economic sovereignty. | |
| I think that's the basic argument, right? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| If you're in charge, what do you most desperately need at the moment if you're in charge of a country in the European Union or North America? | |
| What you desperately need is access to capital because the amount of revenue that is generated through your tax receipts doesn't even come close to covering What it is that you need to pay, right? | |
| I mean, your unfunded liabilities and obligations, I mean, they're staggering. | |
| The amount of unfunded public sector pension debt is ridiculous. | |
| The amount of unfunded liability for the baby boomers retiring in terms of healthcare is ridiculous. | |
| So there's no way that governments have even close to enough money to cover their obligations. | |
| And that's at a time when interest rates are virtually zero and therefore the interest they're paying on their debt It's very low. | |
| So governments at the moment simply cannot continue to do what they're doing if they do not get access to loans. | |
| And so they desperately need access to loans. | |
| And so what is your government going to do? | |
| What would you do in their situation? | |
| It's a real question. | |
| Put on your evil hat, stroke your imaginary Stalin mustache and say, well, what would I do if I were in charge at the moment and was not a libertarian or a voluntarist? | |
| Well, they're looking at bringing out the big stick and beating us into submission, really, isn't it? | |
| No, you don't want to do that because that demoralizes your population. | |
| And if your population gets demoralized, then they get depressed, they get anxious, they get lazy, so to speak. | |
| They don't want to work as much. | |
| And so, no, if your cows get depressed, you don't get as much milk out of them. | |
| So you don't want to beat up the cows because that makes them too depressed. | |
| True, yeah. | |
| Again, I mean, there's a lot of solutions out there to the financial side of things. | |
| Did you ever hear of Mike? | |
| Remember, it's not a real solution. | |
| It's not a real long-term solution. | |
| It's a solution that's going to keep you in power and make you as much money in the short run. | |
| Have you ever heard of mathematically perfected economy? | |
| I have, but let me just finish this bit and get on to that. | |
| What I would do if I were in this situation is I'd say, I can't raise taxes to pay for my obligations. | |
| Because there's not enough tax revenue in the country to even come close to covering any obligations. | |
| I mean, if they taxed all of the money of the top 1% of income earners, 100% taxation for the top 1% of income earners in the US, it would cover a couple of weeks of US deficit spending. | |
| There's no conceivable way that the taxes can be raised enough To cover the spending obligations the government has. | |
| So raising taxes and plus you really piss people off when you raise taxes. | |
| You get voted out of office, right? | |
| So you can't raise taxes or if you can it's just going to be a big ugly battle. | |
| Now your second option is to go to say the public sector unions or the old people and say sorry there is no money to pay you. | |
| Well what happens if you do that? | |
| Well that's it. | |
| I'm out on strike and They go out and strike and you get the government of Walker in Wisconsin, you get a recall election, you get sued, you get campaigns against you, you get hate mail, you get people stomping up and down your daffodils in front of your house and you get bricks thrown through your window and you get riots and you get water cannons and rubber bits and people die. | |
| That's not what politicians want to do either. | |
| These are not morally brave people. | |
| You can't lower your spending and you can't raise your taxes. | |
| So, what are you going to do? | |
| Well, do we print our own money? | |
| Do we look after ourselves? | |
| Well, you can print your own money because you're in the EU. Yes, our hands are tied now. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| That's what Greece wants to do. | |
| They want to have a soft default by devaluing their currency. | |
| But they can't do that, right? | |
| Again, it's up to people in each country. | |
| Do they want in the EU and the Euro or out? | |
| Go back to their own currencies. | |
| Well, I'll tell you what they're going to do. | |
| What they're going to do is they're going to give up sovereignty in return for loans. | |
| Because if you can't raise taxes and you can't pay what you got, and you can't raise your taxes and you can't cut your spending, then you just need to borrow more. | |
| I mean, this is like the cocaine addict who's going to get more cocaine. | |
| And whatever, you know, cocaine addicts will sell their kidney to get cocaine. | |
| They'll sell their grandmother. | |
| And so the idea that they're going to not want to give up sovereignty in return for debt, I mean, politicians love power. | |
| Power is as addictive physiologically as cocaine. | |
| And so they don't want to give up their hit of power. | |
| They don't want to get lots of people angry at them. | |
| So they're going to give up some sovereignty in return for debt. | |
| Getting money. | |
| And now the money, of course, is nonsense. | |
| I mean, there's no one who's running a surplus in the EU, so it's all just magic printed nonsense, all monopoly money. | |
| But it staves off the disaster for just another little bit. | |
| Of course, it makes the disaster worse when it finally comes. | |
| But that's what they're going to do. | |
| They're going to give up their sovereignty in order to just buy another year or two of debt payments until they're out of office and then just let the next hapless sack Inherit the problem. | |
| That's why libertarians should not be running for office because, man, if you're holding that bag when it goes off, you just remembered it's the eternal terrorist. | |
| So, when you look at libertarians such as Ron Paul and what do you think, is he on the right track? | |
| I mean, I hear what he says and I agree with an awful lot he says, but again, I don't know. | |
| I mean, and again, you've got to look at governments or corporations. | |
| They're there trading for profit. | |
| You come a distant second in all of this, you know? | |
| Really, you know, and you talk about this yourself, do we need to go to some kind of, like, anarchy? | |
| I mean, I know people think anarchy is kind of less and whatever, but that's not what the word means at all. | |
| Do you want to maybe go into that a little bit? | |
| Yeah, sure. | |
| Is this where we need to be looking at? | |
| Is this where we need to be heading for? | |
| People use the word anarchy, and I understand that people have issues with it, but anarchy means two things, really, basically. | |
| The first thing anarchy technically means is, this is what the actual definition is, without rulers. | |
| People always take one R away from that, and they think it's without rules. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| It is without rulers. | |
| So, two people who are paying chess according to the rules of chess, do they have a third party telling them where to move their pieces or what's legal or not? | |
| No. | |
| If you had a third party who could make up your chess rules as you were playing, that would be lawlessness. | |
| That would be chaos. | |
| That would be unpredictable. | |
| That would be crazy. | |
| But if you have two people who both agree on the same rules, there are rules that they both agree on, but there's no ruler who's arbitrarily deciding that your rook can move this way and your pawn can move this way. | |
| What we currently have right now is actually all the attributes that are traditionally ascribed to Anarchy, which is we have chaos, we have lawlessness, we have social conflict, we have an unsustainable situation, we have riots in the streets, we have debt. | |
| I mean, it's terrible, it's terrible what has happened to society under the state, and it always will be. | |
| And so technically anarchy means without a ruler, without somebody who's got a gun to your neck telling you what to do based upon whatever arbitrary whims they can shove through, A highly power-addicted and highly financially dependent upon donors' legislative body. | |
| That's chaos. | |
| That's madness. | |
| That is just having no rules whatsoever. | |
| Because, I mean, in the U.S., they pass like 100,000 new laws every year. | |
| Nobody has any clue what's legal or not. | |
| Nobody has any clue how to stay on the right side of the law. | |
| There is no right side of the law. | |
| And so that, to me, is what is traditionally called anarchy, is currently exactly what we have. | |
| So anarchy, first and foremost, means without rulers. | |
| Now, if that's hard for people to understand, All it means is non-violence. | |
| That's all anarchy means. | |
| It's non-violence. | |
| Because how do people rule? | |
| They rule through the threat of force. | |
| Obey me or I'm going to send a bunch of guys in blue or black costumes to your house with guns who are going to put you in a box and take you to a little cage and lock you in that cage until your teeth fall out. | |
| When you say no rulers, what you mean is no violence, no institutionalized, hierarchical, oligarchical, pyramidical, political violence. | |
| That's all anarchy means is no little group of guys with all the guns in the world who get to lock other people up in cages if they disagree with them. | |
| That really isn't that hard a thing to understand. | |
| I know there's a lot of propaganda about it and all. | |
| It means no rulers and No guns to people's necks to force them to obey a little group of narcissistic sociopaths. | |
| That's all it really means. | |
| And that's how we run our lives. | |
| That's how we run our lives. | |
| Look, let's say I'm overweight and I want to lose weight. | |
| There's almost nobody in the world who would say, I am going to give a guy a gun. | |
| I'm going to disarm myself. | |
| I'm going to give a guy a gun and I'm going to call him Butch Cassidy, the nutritionist. | |
| What I'm going to do is, if I eat something that's not good for me, he's going to take a shot at me. | |
| If I keep doing it, he's going to start shooting off a finger. | |
| If I keep doing it, he's going to start shooting off a hand. | |
| That's how I'm going to solve my problem of weight gain. | |
| People don't think I'm going to give a guy a monopoly on violence against me in order to solve my personal problems. | |
| Well, how the hell are personal problems any different from social problems as a whole? | |
| It's just people, after all. | |
| So whether the guy is shooting off your fingers or just dragging you off to a cage doesn't really... | |
| If somebody has a problem, they think, oh, I'm smoking too much marijuana. | |
| So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hire a guy If he finds marijuana on me, he's going to put a gun to my neck, he's going to kick on my door, put a gun to my neck, and drag me off to a cage, to some disused rhino cage in the back house of an abandoned zoo, and he's going to lock me up there. | |
| I mean, you try selling that service through the Yellow Pages, you know? | |
| Improvement or caging, Incorporated. | |
| That's just not how people... | |
| Try and solve problems in their life. | |
| They may succeed or they may fail, but nobody ever says, I'm going to give a guy the right to use force against me if I go against even what I want, let alone what other people want. | |
| It's just a recognition that we are the world. | |
| We are the people. | |
| There's nothing magically different about social problems than our personal problems. | |
| We would never invent what's called a state to solve our own personal problems. | |
| So why on earth would we accept something that was just historically inflicted on us through the accidents and accumulations of generally moral crimes throughout human history? | |
| It's just like you look at your family and your home where you live. | |
| You have your own little kind of basic set of rules. | |
| You don't damage anything or hurt anybody or call anybody names. | |
| Everyone tries to be peaceful. | |
| And it works. | |
| When we go outside and you can't park here, you can't drive over the speed limit or you're going to get tickets and we're going to do this and we're going to extort you. | |
| It's crazy, you know? | |
| We're living in this kind of duality where we live peacefully. | |
| Most people are nice to our neighbours, most people are friendly, but yet we put up with this other stuff which is just, why? | |
| And that's what I try to say to people. | |
| Why do you allow this? | |
| Explain to me the disparity between your personal life and the life that you imagine from some society. | |
| What the hell is the difference? | |
| Society is just a whole bunch of people and those people have successes and failures, they have problems that need to be solved and not a person among them. | |
| Let's say you have a problem with a loud dog in your neighborhood. | |
| You don't get together with your neighbors and say, okay, one person gets a gun and gets to drag that dog away and shoot the owner if he resists and that's how we're going to solve the problem. | |
| No, you go over and talk to the guy and maybe you ostracize him if he doesn't. | |
| Maybe you don't invite him to the block party or whatever it is. | |
| You make his life different. | |
| Who knows? | |
| But you don't just grab guns and then wave them at people and think you're solving problems. | |
| But then when you flip over to the state, to the nation, to society as a whole, it's like everything's completely different. | |
| We've got a long history of that. | |
| Unfortunately, religion trains people in that way. | |
| Suddenly, the people in power have the complete opposite morality from that which they command. | |
| The people in power in the States say, don't use force to get what you want. | |
| Don't steal. | |
| Don't counterfeit. | |
| Then, of course, that is the actual foundation of their entire policy set. | |
| It's the initiation of force and theft through taxation and counterfeiting through fiat currency. | |
| And so they have these rules that they violently inflict upon the population, which is actually the foundation of their own power. | |
| And when a private citizen does it, it's completely evil. | |
| When a public citizen does it, when a, quote, public citizen or politician does it, it is virtuous. | |
| It is right. | |
| It is how things should be. | |
| But religion has trained us in this for many years, right? | |
| So if you look at the Old Testament deity, Yahweh, well, he says, Thou shalt not kill. | |
| Killing is wrong. | |
| Unless a lot of people are really pissing me off, then I'm going to send a rain down to drown everyone except Noah, his family, and 12,000 animals. | |
| He kills the whole world. | |
| And so this is the thing. | |
| You say, well, thou shalt not kill. | |
| That's your fundamental moral rule. | |
| But then God goes around basically blowing everyone up. | |
| The man is like missile command with a losing trackball. | |
| He just goes around blowing everyone up in the Old Testament. | |
| But you're not allowed to point out that contradiction and say, well, wait a second. | |
| If God says, thou shalt not kill, because it's evil, and God kills all the time, then God must be evil. | |
| I mean, obviously, that is not even complicated logically. | |
| But we're so trained to not see the opposite morality of those in power, the moral commandments that they give us that damn them infinitely more than they could ever damn us. | |
| There's no human being able to kill everyone. | |
| Only God can do that. | |
| And this is just one of six billion examples that you could pick out of any. | |
| It's not to pick on the Old Testament God. | |
| I mean, all the gods are ridiculous that way. | |
| But we're so trained to believe that the moral commandments are hurled down like thunderbolts from the gods of on high who are never touched by them and must never be judged by that which they inflict upon their livestock. | |
| But to extend morality vertically, to extend thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not counterfeit, thou shalt not initiate violence, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not assault, to extend that vertically eliminates any and all moral justifications for the state and it eliminates any and all moral justifications for the virtue of a deity But, | |
| of course, we're all trained that the rules are handed down by the masters, and it is evil to disobey the rules of the masters, and it is evil to hold the masters to the same rules they inflict upon us. | |
| This is just so core to the hierarchies that are currently destroying society that it's really hard to see for most people. | |
| A couple of more questions coming in. | |
| Does Stefan think that the rulers or government are the real rulers? | |
| I suppose he means, do they think they're entitled? | |
| They're like shadowy overlords behind the obvious overlords, is that right? | |
| Yeah, I think that's probably what he's trying to get there. | |
| I think everyone accepts that a small minority of pasty-faced, usually tubby white guys have a tough time ruling the world. | |
| Everyone's like, how the hell does this all happen? | |
| How does Silvio Berlusconi, this fat old Italian guy, how does he keep the young vital energies of the Italian youth at bay? | |
| I mean, they could take him with one hand. | |
| I think everyone kind of gets that there's got to be some shadowy stuff going on because you see a picture of these guys at the G7 or the G20, these men and women. | |
| I just picture them all naked because they're just a bunch of men and women. | |
| They're smarter. | |
| They obviously have some political charisma and some adeptness at manipulation and so on, capacity for verbal abuse and praise, public speaking and so on. | |
| But they're just a bunch of people and the idea that they're fit to run the levers of the world is ridiculous and embarrassing and will be viewed as a pathological mental illness in the years to come. | |
| But I think everyone understands that they can't do it on themselves. | |
| There's got to be something else. | |
| Now, people say, oh my god, there's a Jewish conspiracy, the bankers, lizard men. | |
| I mean, I don't really accept any of that, having studied philosophy for so long. | |
| The real rulers of the world are philosophers. | |
| I'm certainly not the first person to come up with this. | |
| There's no particular intelligence on my part. | |
| But when people say, well, if you don't like this country, you can just leave it, maybe they think they're coming up with something original, but that's straight out of Socrates' death speech from 2,500 years ago. | |
| When people say, if you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain, they're coming up with arguments that are really, really old. | |
| When they say, well, without the government, it will all descend into chaos. | |
| They're coming straight out of Hobbes Leviathan. | |
| They don't know that these dead white guys are sticking their hands up their butt and making their mouths move with nonsense syllables. | |
| They don't know that, but they're just repeating Nonsensical, power-serving lies told by philosophers throughout the ages. | |
| When people say, you know, there's no such thing as right and wrong, there's only the pragmatism of what works. | |
| Well, it's just Henry James, American pragmatism, a little bit of Nietzsche thrown in. | |
| When they are pro-state and anti-religious, as you tend to be on the left, or they're anti-state and pro-religious, as you tend to be on the right, They don't understand that they're just going through the basic duality of Greco-Roman versus Christian theological thought. | |
| I mean, they're not thinking for themselves. | |
| They're just echoing the slow-rolling, mossy-covered, dead skull boulders that have been rolling down the hill ever since these dead white guys put parchment to paper, a pen to paper. | |
| And so I believe that what is behind all of these immediate rulers is these large, unchallenged Thoughts that people may have probably never read in the original. | |
| They've just probably absorbed them through newspaper columns and books and popular movies or whatever. | |
| But what makes all of this stuff work is the unchallenged, erroneous axioms and arguments of long-dead philosophers, and that's where I've chosen to take my stand and fight my good fight, because I think until we can think correctly, society won't even come close to working morally. | |
| Okay, and I have another question there. | |
| Something about... | |
| Sorry, I'm scrolling back here. | |
| There's a lot of comments. | |
| The chat box is flying here tonight. | |
| What is the source of a man's rights, a man's rights, if it's not going to be a man's rights? | |
| A man obviously doesn't have rights like he has a kidney. | |
| I mean, it's not like an appendage that hangs off you, you know, that you've got to soap up in the shower and dry off. | |
| There is no rites that are attached to you. | |
| They are not woven through the essence of your being. | |
| Rites inhabits a human being in the same way that we imagine a soul inhabits a body, like there's some eternal essence of virtue or truth or righteousness or goodness or freedom or something that somehow attaches to the material. | |
| But, of course, as a rabid pro-scientific empiricist, I can't grant the existence of rights. | |
| They don't exist. | |
| They don't attach to the material. | |
| Consciousness is an effect of the brain, like gravity is an effect of matter, but rights are not an effect of being alive or being rational or being independent. | |
| So I don't think that rights is a clear way to talk about things. | |
| What I do think I sort of equated ethics with universally preferable behavior. | |
| So if you're going to make a statement about ethics, it has to be a statement that is universally preferable to all people at all times in all geographical locations. | |
| It should truly be universal. | |
| I mean, I like pistachio ice cream. | |
| It's not a statement of ethics because it's personal to me and maybe shared by other people, but it's not. | |
| Everybody has to like pistachio ice cream. | |
| In science, everybody has to be rational and everybody has to submit to the evidence, to empirical evidence. | |
| You don't have to do that, but if you're not doing that, you're not doing science. | |
| If you're saying the Wiccan witch doctor newt-eyed owl on my shoulder is telling me what this equation is, you're doing something weird, but you're not doing science. | |
| If you're going to do science, you've got to subject to reason and evidence. | |
| If you're going to do morality, you've got to have universally preferable behavior. | |
| So the non-initiation of force is amply justified by universally preferable behavior. | |
| In other words, murder cannot be achieved as a universally preferable behavior. | |
| If we say everyone must murder all the time, That can't logically be achieved. | |
| It is a self-detonating proposition. | |
| Even just two guys in a room can't both murder each other at the same time. | |
| I mean, even if they could physically somehow do it, they can't do it philosophically, they can't do it logically. | |
| Because murder has to be something that is unwanted. | |
| Just like rape has to be something that's unwanted, otherwise it's just, I don't know, kinky rough play or something. | |
| But, you know, rape and murder and theft and assault, these have to be things that are unwanted. | |
| If I lend something to someone, it's not theft. | |
| So if it's okay with me that they take something, it's lending, it's not theft. | |
| And so you can't have theft, rape, murder, and assault as universally preferable behavior because it means that two guys in the same room have got to both want these things and violently oppose these things at the same time. | |
| Logically, that's like saying a rock should fall up and down at the same time. | |
| It doesn't work. | |
| I've got a free book on my website at freedomainradio.com forward slash free. | |
| People can check out the more detailed arguments for the system of ethics. | |
| The non-initiation of force and the respect for property rights are the two basic things that are validated by this universally preferable behavior theory of ethics, which I think is good. | |
| I go with Aristotle who says, if your theory of ethics can be used to prove that rape is really good, I don't care what you say, you've done something wrong. | |
| It's just not the right way in some way. | |
| And so I think that to talk about rights is like doctors talking about the soul. | |
| I mean, even if you believe in the soul, it's not the province of doctors and it's not the province of rationalists or philosophers to talk about the soul because there's no material evidence and it doesn't have it attached to the body. | |
| There's no way to detect it and so it's exactly the same as not existing. | |
| And so I think we've got to pass away from the non-material. | |
| Because rights is fine if you get someone to accept that you have rights, then you've got a kind of weird contract between the two of you, or an implicit contract. | |
| And so rights is like dieting for thin people. | |
| Rights only works with people who respect them. | |
| And if people don't respect them, then you're shit out of luck. | |
| You've got no rights. | |
| And so the real challenge with virtue is to get people who don't agree with it to obey it, or at least recognize its authority. | |
| And so I'm really trying to aim the diet book at the fatties. | |
| And so I really want to make sure that people who don't agree with something like the non-aggression principle are bound to accept it based upon the rigor of the argument. | |
| And with rights, you're just kind of crossing your fingers and hoping that someone's going to accept them. | |
| And if they don't, then they just don't exist. | |
| And I'm not a big one for crossing my fingers and trying to leap across a chasm like that. | |
| Yeah, it's just, I don't know if you've ever heard of Brehen Law, Stefan? | |
| I have, but my expertise on it is probably not much beyond those two syllables. | |
| It jumped to the Irish law system, which was here for 8,000 years maybe, I don't know. | |
| As old as the rocks, anyway. | |
| And basically that system was based on anarchy, the way you described it as. | |
| But it was a perfect Yeah, it was 800 years, I think, that Ireland was in a state of statelessness. | |
| Very progressive. | |
| Again, it's all about non-violence. | |
| Even under common law, the injured party can call for an execution of the perpetrator of the crime. | |
| But under Breham law, that doesn't exist. | |
| But whoever the victim is can call for whatever punishment, as long as there's no one who gets hurt. | |
| The punishment for anyone who fails to obey the punishment is ostracism. | |
| The thing is, if you're living in a free society like that, no one's going to hurt anybody anyway. | |
| It's going to be very rare. | |
| Some guy's going to get a brain tumor and he's going to end up strangling some guy because he's crazy because he's got a brain tumor, but that's really a tragic illness rather than it is conscious evil. | |
| I think we have that system here. | |
| We can bring back the basic tenants of that. | |
| There we go. | |
| It's all here. | |
| It's credit worldwide for everybody. | |
| Get back to your roots. | |
| That's right. | |
| Stefan, you said you'd come on for an hour and a half. | |
| Are you still tied to that? | |
| Yes, I do actually have something else, but I'm happy to go for another 10 minutes or so if you have any more questions. | |
| Is this helpful? | |
| I just wanted to ask people in the chat room if this is useful and helpful and interesting to people. | |
| I always want to make sure that I'm doing something useful or interesting. | |
| There's another interesting comment as well earlier from Michael Hottinger. | |
| It says, science is greater than empiricism. | |
| What is metaphysics classically understood? | |
| How much does love weigh? | |
| What color is justice? | |
| He says, there are spiritual realities that transcend empiricism. | |
| Any comments on that one? | |
| Sure. | |
| Metaphysics is really, of course, the nature of the study of what is reality. | |
| There's a duality in metaphysics, right? | |
| So there's the traditional Aristotelian realm where they say, you know what's real is the stuff that you can touch, taste, measure, smell, you know, whatever. | |
| I mean, the stuff that you can ping a sonar off and have it come back to you, the stuff that you can bounce a light off and have it come back to you, the stuff that you can wrap with your knuckles, that's the real stuff in the world. | |
| And that's really all there is. | |
| And that's... | |
| That's the traditional Aristotelian, Lockean, Randian view of the world. | |
| It's one that I share because I just don't have the capacity to project my imagination into the world and think that things that aren't there are there. | |
| But on the other side, of course, you've got this whole... | |
| It's a Platonic realm of pure forms. | |
| It's the Augustinian realm of heaven. | |
| It really comes down to the idea that the will of the majority also falls into this mystical realm. | |
| Because the will is an attribute of the individual. | |
| It is not an attribute of anything called a majority. | |
| And so the will of the majority is just another mystical thing that people make up to justify bad things that they do. | |
| And so metaphysics is basically saying, well, what is real? | |
| And the Platonists will say, well, everything that you can touch is kind of a weird, pathetic, decayed shadow of that which is real. | |
| And that which is real is stuff that we experienced before we were born or after we're dead in this perfect world of heaven or pure forms or whatever. | |
| And so this little material realm that we're trapped into is just a pale shadow of the true, ideal, perfect God realm of infinite beauty, goodness, truth, and light and all that kind of stuff. | |
| And it's a lovely, compelling, you know, shove a birthday cake up your ass and ride on a horse of delusion kind of lovely thought. | |
| But, you know, it suffers from the rather deadly problem that it doesn't exist, right? | |
| I mean, that there's no evidence for it whatsoever. | |
| And, you know, there's two ways of solving the problem of universals. | |
| Like, how do we know a table is a table? | |
| Plato said, well, we know a table is a table because before we were born, we were floating in a world of pure forms and we saw a perfect table. | |
| And then after we're born, we see these echoes. | |
| And I mean, I think that's a very interesting bunch of nonsense. | |
| I wouldn't even tell that story to a child. | |
| It's so insane. | |
| You know, but again, it suffers from the not insignificant problem that it's It's false in every conceivable way that we don't exist before we were born. | |
| We don't have senses before we were born. | |
| There is no such thing as a concept that exists independent of the thought that creates it. | |
| It's false in every conceivable level that you could imagine and dangerously false as well. | |
| And so, when somebody says, I'm following the will of the majority, or democracy is there to enact the will of the majority, what they're basically saying is, I want to tell other people what to do, but I don't want to say it that boldly, so I'm going to make up this other nonsense, right? | |
| Like, the priest doesn't want to say, obey me. | |
| He wants to say, well, obey my imaginary friend called God who's telling me what to tell you. | |
| It's not me. | |
| Don't blame me. | |
| Blame this, you know, big teddy bear in the sky called God. | |
| He's telling you what to do. | |
| It's not my fault. | |
| But basically he's just telling you what to do. | |
| He's just calling it God rather than himself telling you what to do. | |
| And the same thing is true of the state, right? | |
| Obey the law! | |
| Well, the law doesn't exist. | |
| It's just a bunch of opinions. | |
| Law is an opinion with a gun. | |
| So what they're saying is obey me, but they want to say the law because it's less likely to provoke your resistance if you say the law. | |
| When you study metaphysics, you're saying, well, what is real and what is not real? | |
| What exists and what doesn't exist? | |
| What are the things and the spaces between the things? | |
| We've got this long tradition of stuff existing in some perfect realm and all of this stuff is just a pale shadow of it. | |
| And it's all complete and total bullshit that is used to manipulate, control and subjugate people. | |
| Because the people who all claim to know this perfect realm can never quite explain it to you, but because they know this perfect realm, they're the philosopher kings and they're the priests and they're the politicians, well, you just have to obey it, you see, because they can't quite explain it to you, but trust me, it's perfect and you've got to obey it. | |
| Well, no. | |
| I will obey reason and evidence. | |
| I will not obey mysticism and delusion. | |
| As far as the color of justice goes, I have always assumed that it's plaid for reasons that I really can't go into here. | |
| I think we are conscious beings and we are made up of energy, if you want to call it that. | |
| Just going from my own experiences, I don't push it on people. | |
| If people want to talk about it, fair enough. | |
| Certain things that have happened to me which you can't explain. | |
| There doesn't seem to be evidence for it, but it just seems to happen. | |
| Well, you see, the problem is when you say that things can't be explained, you're making a claim for human knowledge that goes forward to infinity. | |
| That's a pretty dangerous position to take, right? | |
| I mean, saying that no human being will ever be able to explain stuff which I can't explain at the moment is a very... | |
| Brave, I would say, to the point of foolhardy proposition. | |
| You can explain what happened or what you saw or whatever, but how or why, you know? | |
| It's kind of... | |
| And it does kind of send people to think, well, is there another deity or a god or is there alien life forms out there controlling things? | |
| Because, you know, just a few things that I've witnessed myself, but, you know, strange lights and stuff like that. | |
| Well, I'm pretty sure that aliens... | |
| I mean, of course, there are aliens out there. | |
| I mean, there's billions of galaxies and hundreds of billions of star systems and so on, of course. | |
| But as far as UFOs go, I mean, the only way that Any alien is going to be able to develop the technology for interstellar travel is if they have a free market. | |
| There's never going to be a government program. | |
| It's not going to be able to do that. | |
| Government programs can barely make two train tracks meet together in a desert. | |
| And so, you know, if you look at how technology froze under NASA, they're still using the same space shuttle 30 years later after watches have gone from... | |
| Sorry, after cell phones have gone from... | |
| Telephone booths do things that stick in your inner ear. | |
| So the only way that UFOs are ever going to show up here is if they're bringing a mall with them, if they're traders, if they're free market capitalists. | |
| That's the only way they're going to get that technology. | |
| It's not going to come out of a government program. | |
| So until the international mall of nine-headed space aliens open up on the front house of the White House lawn, the only way that they're going to show up is if they've got stuff to trade. | |
| And anything else, I think, is... | |
| It's not particularly credible, to me at least, until there's real clear scientific evidence either way. | |
| Yeah, actually, we'll just go back to the question I brought up earlier about mathematically perfected economy. | |
| You have heard of it, haven't you, Mike Montagna? | |
| I have, but again, my expertise is very, very, very minimal. | |
| Well, it's just a wonderful solution. | |
| Unfortunately, Mike is having a lot of trouble trying to get it out there, but I think it's difficult to kind of explain in some ways, but the basics of it is that you just take interest out of the whole equation, and money is created from your signature, which makes the promissory note, and when the promissory note is used and finished with you, it's out of circulation. | |
| And you start again, and there's no debt. | |
| According to Mike, if all governments adopt this, that's it. | |
| All our financial woes are over. | |
| Debt is eliminated. | |
| Even outstanding debt that we have at the moment, because we've all contributed in the past, it can be all wiped. | |
| There's a lot more to it because it's detailed. | |
| I think it's not so much difficult to understand, it's just quite very detailed. | |
| Even if that were true, governments would never do it. | |
| The whole point of governments is they have to be able to give you, at least offer you something for nothing. | |
| I think they even tried to do it in Iceland. | |
| I think the Icelandic government were interested, but I'm not sure how that happened. | |
| It doesn't look like they've adopted it because I think they would have adopted it by now. | |
| No, I mean, a government without debt is not a government. | |
| I mean, the whole system runs on debt because you have to be able to bribe voters. | |
| And if you bribe them with stuff you've taken from other voters, then you create as many enemies as friends and you can't get elected. | |
| So you have to borrow in order to be able to give something to people with the illusion of giving them something for free. | |
| And I mean, that game is almost at the end of its rope. | |
| But governments are not going to adopt a debt-free society because statism is I mean, if people want to run a system with no Interest, I think that's fine. | |
| I think there is a time value to money, but I would never use force to stop someone from doing that. | |
| But the idea that governments are going to adopt this, it's just never going to happen. | |
| The people who get into power understand that they have to give people the illusion of something for nothing, and the only way to do that is through debt, so it's not going to happen. | |
| Michael has come back with another question on the last topic. | |
| He says, what is wrong with having the humility to admit that reality transcends my human reason? | |
| Well, prove it to me. | |
| It's not a matter of humility or not, it's just a matter of facts or not. | |
| If somebody wants to show me that there's something out there that exists, then all they have to do is do it. | |
| If somebody wants to show me that the golf ball exists behind their back, show me the golf ball. | |
| I'm not going to commit to a golf ball existing behind somebody's back unless they show it to me or I can see it with mirrors or something. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Send an x-ray through their groin and find the golf ball past the two. | |
| I don't know. | |
| But if somebody wants to show me or show anyone for that matter that something exists, then take the standard of proof that is rational and empirical and show that. | |
| But to just assert that something exists that is counter to reason and evidence is simply to say that that which does not exist, exists. | |
| I mean, philosophically, it just can't work. | |
| It doesn't work. | |
| It's humility to say, my imagination doesn't create reality. | |
| There's nobody more humble than an empiricist. | |
| There's nobody more humble than a rationalist. | |
| Just because I want something to exist, like eternal life, like angels, like fairies, like leprechauns with their pots of gold, it's having the humility to say, just because I want something to exist or I can imagine something existing, That doesn't mean that it exists. | |
| The humility is to say that my imagination is bound by reason and evidence. | |
| That is a humble statement, saying that something exists just because I wanted to, or I was told that something exists, or it would be nice if something did exist. | |
| I mean, that is a crazy kind of intellectual arrogance that is unjustified philosophically. | |
| Okay, and let me just finish off. | |
| Just two questions here that are kind of similar. | |
| One is to think that these kids will have a great life and be okay when they become adults. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I mean, if I thought they did, that they would, I would work a lot less hard in philosophy. | |
| If I thought they wouldn't, I doubt I would have had kids. | |
| I think that the quality of my kids' life is, at least to some degree, to do with How much I and others are willing to work to try and achieve a free and reasonable society for them. | |
| I was not so helpless and hopeless that I felt that not having kids was the only solution, but I'm also not so... | |
| I don't believe enough that it's going to happen without my input that I'm not going to do it. | |
| It's like saying, do you think you'll get to shore? | |
| Well, I will if I keep paddling, but I'm not going to rely on the tide. | |
| And the other question is, I suppose what we like to ask guests is about our own solutions, what we all can do, what you're doing yourself, and I think this question is like, is there anything you can do that would change the world for the better? | |
| Sure, yeah. | |
| I'm always beating this drum. | |
| I'll beat it again. | |
| I mean, the evidence, the science, the psychology, the physiology, the medical knowledge is all very clear that to have a peaceful world, we need to raise our children peacefully. | |
| There is no shortcuts. | |
| There's no one guy you can vote into office who's going to make the world a better place for you. | |
| There's no vote that you can drop in a vote. | |
| That you can drop in a ballot box that's going to make the world a better place. | |
| This is a slow and steady wins the race. | |
| We have kids or those who we know who have kids or any kids we have any kind of influence over. | |
| We encourage peaceful and positive and non-aggressive parenting and that creates human beings who will have the capacity to reason and the capacity to live peacefully and who will not be addicted to drugs, sex, politics, dysfunctional behaviors, criminality and so on. | |
| That's how we do it. | |
| I've got a whole video series called The Bomb and the Brain. | |
| People can pick it up at FDRURL.com forward slash VIB and that steps everyone with expert interviews through the science of how peaceful parenting brings about a peaceful world. | |
| You just live the values in your life and that's how they transmit themselves through the world. | |
| That's the most Accurate, compelling and actionable statement that I can make. | |
| Live peace and the world will be peaceful. | |
| And living peace is in your life. | |
| It is not in politics or in economics or in academia. | |
| It is in your personal relationships with people. | |
| Reject, eschew and abjure the use of violence in your life and it shall spread. | |
| Surely, as pain spreads in water, it will spread to the world as a whole. | |
| Yeah, that's good. | |
| Actually, the questions are flying in now, Stefan. | |
| I'm sorry, but I do have to jump. | |
| Perhaps we can do this again. | |
| Please, please, thank yourself. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. | |
| There's a lot here to go into, and I see people are beginning to come out now with lots of questions, so I'd like to catch up. | |
| Yeah, maybe we can do it again, but listen, do thank your listeners so much for their input. | |
| I really do appreciate your time and questions as well. | |
| It was a most enjoyable conversation and I hope we can do it again sometime. | |
| We will indeed, Stefan. | |
| Do you want to give a plug again to Radio FreeDomainRadio.com? | |
| Yes, FreeDomainRadio. | |
| It's at FreeDomainRadio.com, of course. | |
| People can catch me. | |
| There's a whole, on the homepage there, there's a speaking tour. | |
| That I'm on this summer. | |
| You can catch me in early June. | |
| I'm hosting the Peter Schiff radio show and I'm hosting the Corbett Report on Monday nights. | |
| You can check that out online, corbettereport.com with two Ts. | |
| I'm everywhere, man. | |
| I hope that people will check out the material and thanks again for your time. | |
| Thanks very much, Stefan. | |
| We'll get you on again, maybe a couple of months down the line, see how things develop then. | |
| I'm sure it'll get more interesting, more development. | |
| Thanks a lot, Stefan, and we'll get you back again soon. | |
| So, everybody, that's Stefan Molyneux there. | |
| Thanks for joining us, Stefan, and we'll go and play a bit of music now, and I'll come back to you after that. | |
| Okay? |