July 23, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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2176 Porc Therapy with Stephanie Murphy and Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio
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Welcome back to the show.
You're listening to Pork Therapy, live from Porkfest 2012.
Lots of porks in here, I guess you could say.
And the pork you find, of course, you know, a cute little cuddly animal, unofficial libertarian mascot, I guess you could say.
But yeah, I'm very happy to be here doing a live show with Stefan Molyneux.
And why don't you say hello?
It's a real pleasure to be here.
And I wanted to clarify for people who are listening in who are new, Porkfest is not a new stimulus package.
It is, in fact, a libertarian movement.
A libertarian show, a gathering, a convention, or something like that.
And there's still another day for people who want to come by?
Yes, exactly.
Porkfest is a week-long event, but if you can only make it for a few days, it's definitely worth it, in my opinion.
Anyway, and it's not a bacon gathering either.
There is some confusion about that, Porkfest.
So, Stefan has his own show, Free Domain Radio, which I've been listening to for quite a while, and it's been a great inspiration to me.
Well, thank you.
So, thank you for what you do.
Oh, it's a real pleasure, and it's a real honor, so...
All the good it does, such that it does, is a real pleasure.
Thank you for the feedback.
When you go to a place like Porkfest, you must meet a lot of people that you've never met before.
What are your impressions of meeting your listeners?
Without exception, wonderful.
Uniformly wonderful.
We do this kind of work a lot in isolation.
You push it out to wherever it's going, YouTube or some podcast place or whatever.
For you, it's live radio.
And the feedback, you know, you get some feedback, some trolls, some nice people, but to actually meet someone that your work has had such a positive impact on is really important.
I mean, to remember that there's people on the end of what it is that you're doing who are really listening.
Taking things seriously and implementing principles of ethics, virtue and integrity in their own lives and following your struggles or my struggles really as I attempt to do the same.
I've never met a listener.
I just don't want to give a big hug to and say thank you.
So, I mean, coming here and meeting the listeners is a really, really deep delight.
It's one of the main reasons that I come.
And also then it helps my daughter to understand that daddy's actually yelling at someone.
Rather than just up there in the room yelling, because I think that's what she thinks I do for a living is just a microphone that isn't even hooked up to anything.
So I think it's a relief for her in many ways.
Gotcha.
Yeah, and I can really relate to that.
I mean, I find this kind of work, you know, just connecting with people who hear your show, it can be a one-sided relationship sometimes because they're hearing you, but you don't know who's listening and who's out there.
And you don't know them necessarily, but then you get to meet them at a place like this, and it's just wonderful.
You put a face to the ether out there.
Yeah, and I think a lot of, particularly listeners who've listened to me for a long time, I think their impulse sometimes is to give me as much information in five minutes as I've given in five years, and that it actually comes out sort of somewhere between a fax and a mating call.
Are they talking like the micromachines guy?
Yeah, they're just like, okay, so Steph, I was in the show in 2008, and 2009 did this, and 2008 did this, and it's just like, it's a really, I mean, it's a lot of information to absorb right at once, which I really appreciate, because I get the impulse is to share back.
They're excited.
Yeah, and I think it's fantastic.
So I really, really appreciate that.
I always want to stop.
People want to take photographs.
And people, of course, they have cell phones now, which take a long time to take photographs.
So it goes from a warm smile to a frozen zombie mask.
In the time it takes, it's like, click!
There we go!
That's what we want.
Something my dentist would see.
Good thing there's video here, because that expression was prized.
Oh, good.
Well, if you want to freeze frame that, that will be my new logo.
So, you know, we're here at the Porcupine Freedom Festival and, you know, I've taken a lot from what you say about getting freedom now in your own life.
I mean, I know we're on this liberty in your lifetime thing.
just like Jake was saying earlier, you kind of can get liberty in your lifetime if you adjust certain things about your personal life, what you have the most influence over in your day-to-day activities, like your relationships with other people, the degree to which you know yourself, and lots of things you can control about your own the degree to which you know yourself, and lots of things So I want to ask you sort of what you think about the Free State Project.
Is it necessary to move somewhere?
Could there be benefits to moving somewhere for freedom, or what do you think?
I think if you can't find reasonable, intelligent, curious, philosophical people where you are, I think it is important.
I mean, either lure them to where you are.
I recommend honey bear traps, showing lots of leg.
There's lots of different things that you can do.
Depends on the leg.
Yeah, okay, you can do, not I can do.
Leg of lamb.
I would go for that.
That's right, yeah.
You know, open barbecues, messages to UFOs, whatever it is that you can do to lure people in, I think is good.
If you can't get any kind of social contact, The internet is great, and it's why we're kind of here, but it's no substitute in the end for real human contact, eye-to-eye stuff and so on, particularly if you've mastered the habit, as I have, of not blinking when talking to people.
I mean, would you agree that there's a kind of intensity to that that is quite captivating?
Eventually I'll just start screaming because my eyes are so dry.
But that's something, if you just practice that in the mirror, there's some effects, webcams, but face-to-face, I think people have found that that's quite gripping.
So I do think it's important to have people in your life that you meet on a regular basis that you can talk about.
It's a lonely life, living a world sometimes in a world of integrity, in a world where you see an ethical reality that other people...
Can't see, won't see, refuse to see, who knows?
So I think try and, you know, put out the call, meet people that you can face to face.
And if you can't, yeah, I mean, I think that one thing I've always really liked about the Free State Project is the incredible amount of heat and bugs that you can get.
I don't know if it's been in her skin, just walking down the street inhaling.
It means you never have to order any food.
It's just really vile.
High in protein.
High in protein and my wife's hair is like a slow protein supernova in the humidity which is really quite exciting.
We actually needed three guys to get her through a doorway because she's from Greece and so she obviously wants to come back.
So I think meeting people face to face, the great thing about the Free State Project is that a thousand people here Who are in the same spectrum of belief.
And you're not going to get along equally with all thousand, but you've got a heck of a lot more odds than the random people that you meet.
And also, the last thing I'll say, for once, is when you're in school, you meet people, right?
And maybe a little bit at work when you meet people, but certainly I've found when you get married and have kids and so on, it's tougher to meet new people.
I mean, you can trail them.
But you just get a lot of pepper spray, some phone calls, that kind of stuff.
But if you meet people of sort of like-minded philosophy and you can then meet them, you have a really common grounding and a great basis, I think, for a really productive relationship.
Yeah, you're going to share some values.
Yeah, you don't have to hide stuff.
You know, you don't have to be like philosophy or virtue.
It doesn't have to be like the slutty mistress you keep bundled up in some motel somewhere.
Or the gimp in the basement of that Tarantino movie, you know.
Would you like to come into the vault and see my ethics?
You know, it comes out in a leather-bound costume.
We can talk about that a little more later.
No, but you're right.
Or perhaps I'll just demonstrate it.
But that's what I like about the Free State Project.
I meet people and I have a lot in common already with people and I just don't have to pretend.
I don't have to test waters with people.
Oh, sure.
Ideas about peace and voluntarism are never something that one should be ashamed of, right?
I mean, not something you should hide.
No, you're not from Canada.
So, your philosophy isn't perceived as you want to grind up ill people and have them on a Vegemite sandwich.
So, it's a bit of a different thing.
You know, if you're an atheist as well, that can be a bit of a challenge.
In fact, I did a video a while back, Hatred of Atheists, where the statistics are that atheists are the most feared and hated group.
You know, it's like, whoa, Satan is moving in next door.
Thank God they're not atheists.
Yeah, about as trusted as rapists, right?
Cannibals, great!
Because I can always point them at Joe Marinade down the road.
So it is a challenge, but when you come here, at least people may not be atheists, but they're free thinkers enough to the point where it's not a big stickler, if that makes any sense.
So I really like coming here and not feeling like I have to, okay, okay, can I talk about this a little bit, push this a little bit?
You can just talk, I think, openly, and I think that's real relief.
I think we need that socially.
Well, I was about to say, I mean, even within the Free State Project, there are a lot of people who share many of my values, probably more than the, quote, outside world or your average models.
But, you know, not everybody is 100%, of course.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, look, I mean, and nobody is 100%.
People say to me, well, what do you do with people you disagree with?
It's like...
I disagree with myself all the time, but you always have these debates in your head about the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do or whether it's good to approach things this way or that way.
I'm constantly changing my mind about what is right and what is wrong, so I think that that's essential.
I mean, we need that in our relationships because we have that in our relationship with ourselves, I think.
Stefan, I'd like, if you could, would you hang with me for one more?
Well, I'll twist my arm.
All right.
I'm in.
Okay, this is Pork Therapy, live from Porkfest 2012.
There's more coming up.
Stick around.
It is the last segment of Pork Therapy live from Porcupine Freedom Festival 2012, and I'm so glad that you've joined me.
My name is Stephanie.
I'm sitting here with Stefan Molyneux.
That's right.
We cannot be on a first syllable basis because it would absolutely be confusing to everyone.
Well, Steph, what do you think about this?
I don't know, Steph.
Yeah, I'm going to get Steph Kinsella on.
It'll be like who's on first for about an hour, and nobody wants to hear that.
You know, that might be entertaining sometime.
Absolutely.
When we're really stretching the definition of the word entertaining, we should give it a shot.
Alright, so just a couple of business things.
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P-O-R-C-Therapy.com.
I give away all the archives of my shows for free.
And the show is on every Friday night, 10pm to 1am on the Liberty Radio Network.
So catch me live or catch me on the podcast, whatever you prefer.
And I thank you so much for listening.
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So, Steph, I wanted to ask you about atheism, because this is something that I think about a lot, talk about a lot.
Personally, where I started out on my journey to liberty or to greater freedom or whatever, I think everyone's born as an anarchist and an atheist.
They have to sort of be, or they don't have to, but they are sort of led away from that or indoctrinated away from that, and then maybe they come back to it over time as they're able to free their minds.
So for me, I started out questioning religion around age 12, 13, 14, and it led me to actually, I was looking at atheist websites back in the AOL days of the early 90s, and it led me to some sort of liberty-oriented websites, and that's kind of how I found out about liberty.
And so the two were always very closely related to me.
You know, over the years, I've, I don't know, I've kind of refined my views a little bit more and, you know, I consider myself a strong atheist, of course.
But I think it's so important not just to question the state, but also to question things, other mechanisms of control, sort of like religion and certain social norms.
And so I'm wondering if you could just speak to that a little bit.
You mentioned a little bit about atheists in the last segment, how they're distrusted, and I think this all relates.
But I think we're onto something really important because, you know, if you're believing in magical beings, if you're not questioning superstition, if you don't have that foundation of sort of logical clarity and consistency, then how are you going to be free?
How free are you?
Well, I mean, there's two entities that have traditionally owned I mean, I think we all get that ethics is really important.
We can't imagine a society where nobody's ethical, right?
And so the state and God have traditionally owned ethics.
And so one of the things that's happened throughout history, I actually just gave a speech on this in Brazil, which is not out yet, but I'll just touch on it briefly here, but it's sort of like you've got this balloon.
And you push one end in, and the other end bulges out.
And so what happens is, you can see this in history, there's this pendulum that swings back and forth.
And so think of when you have, and this is true of, think of Republicans and Democrats.
So Republicans tend to be smaller government, more God, and, you know, the secular godless Democrats are less God, more government.
And that's because You need this ethics.
And if you take away God, you need more of the state.
And if you take away more of the state, you need more of God.
Because people just feel that that ethical container just has to be kept filled.
But the strong atheists who are anarchists, it's really tough for people to conceive of, right?
So you could go from Say, Christianity to communism because communism is explicitly atheist, but you've built up this massive state which is supposed to take care of your ethics.
But if you take away the state, as an anarchist does or as a libertarian does, there's a tendency to want to backfill it in with religion because we have not solved the problem of ethics without gods and without governments, which means fundamentally without threats and punishment.
Right, without jail or hell.
Do you think it's about fear?
Or fear that there won't be order without some kind of...
Oh, I think it's...
Sorry to interrupt.
No, please.
I think as a parent, you get these questions.
You're like, my daughter is going through a lying face.
At least I think she is.
I don't know, I can't tell.
Because she's really good at it.
But...
But she's going through a phase where she's experimenting with lying.
She doesn't like her teeth getting brushed, so I asked her, did mama brush her teeth?
And she'll say, like, yes.
I mean, smiles, innocence, it's beautiful, it's perfect, you can bottle that, you get away with any crime, I'll be a politician.
But I repeat myself.
And so she is going to ask, well, why is lying wrong?
It's a great question.
You know, philosophers, I think, have done a really bad job of answering that.
And so religion will say, because you go to hell.
That's not an answer.
That's just a threat.
A threat is not philosophy.
A threat is the absence of an answer.
Whenever you threaten someone with jail or with hell, it's because you don't have an answer because it's illegal.
Well, that's not an answer.
I mean, that's begging the question.
Right.
So I think parents have this really big difficulty answering these, like, why shouldn't you lie?
Because it hurts my feelings.
Well, that's not an answer either, right?
That's like, I'll be sad is not a philosophical answer.
And so I think that philosophers have not done a good enough and hard enough job trying to find a way to prove ethics without the state and without God.
Until we do that, I think people are just going to be drawn back into the vacuum of the lack of ethics to some agency that's going to threaten on their behalf, whether it's God or the state, to get people to be good.
So I think we've got to really work this way.
I've spent so much time working on a theory of ethics that doesn't need God, in fact, won't work with God, and explicitly rejects the state.
So we have an answer that doesn't draw us back into these two paradigms, which are so dangerous.
Well, and you also spend a lot of time, and you're not the only one either, but you spend a lot of time working on trying to help people realize that they don't have to raise their children in an environment where they're constantly surrounded by authoritarianism.
And, of course, when you grow up in a place like that, it's like, no wonder people accept the state or God or all these threats of punishment.
It's because that's what they're used to, right?
Yeah, and I mean, I was asked by, because I gave somewhat of the speech to this Brazilian crew, and they're, of course, quite Well, it's true.
It's not a gun, but it is a metaphysical threat, which is worse than a gun, right?
So you don't have to actually put a gun.
You just have to threaten, right?
And hell is a worse threat than murder.
Because murder, you're dead.
Hell is forever.
People to be good in a religious paradigm, it's not all religions, but the tendency is you're going to threaten some sort of supernatural punishment, whether it's hell itself or not getting into heaven and being with your grandma or whatever, right?
I mean then, or going to limbo or something.
You are ending up threatening someone and people don't understand that when you threaten someone, It is a clear sign that you need an answer that you don't have.
And it's a desperate thing to overwhelm your lack of knowledge and to overwhelm the genuine questions of children with threats.
It cuts us off from real answers because then we think we have an answer when we don't.
And there's nothing more dangerous than thinking you have an answer when you don't because you stop looking.
Sure.
And then, you know, an entire generation or, you know, people grow up without their sort of critical thinking abilities intact and that affects all aspects of their lives.
And then when they become adults and they are threatened by the state, it fits.
It fits, exactly.
It fits the mental template.
And if they then say, well, I'm no longer religious, they then tend to become more statist because they still have that paradigm because of a lack of an answer.
It's supposedly solved by threats of punishment and until we can break that paradigm, which means the parents have to say, you know what, I don't actually know why you shouldn't lie.
But let's think about it.
Let's really try and reason it out.
I don't know why you shouldn't push that kid over and steal his stuff.
I know it's important.
I don't know.
But we've got to sit down and try and figure this out as a culture and go through that exquisite agony of not having an answer to our children or accepting that we don't have a good answer to our children as to why.
Because you say, well, you shouldn't take that kid's toy because he'll feel bad.
The kid says, well, it makes me feel good to take it.
So feelings are what goes, then I'll just take it because I feel good.
And if you feel bad, it's still even out because he's sad and I'm happy.
So he's minus two and I'm plus two.
Yay!
We're back to where we started and I've got the toy.
So we have these, well, I lie because I don't want to brush my teeth.
And why shouldn't you lie?
Well...
Yeah, you know, and so I think we've got to just recognize we don't have good answers for these things.
We need to examine answers and we need to recognize that threats of punishment, jail and hell are really the worst.
It's worse than having no answers because it's just threats.
It stops us from exploring what we need to and it creates a template of authoritarianism and punishment that follows kids all the way to the grave.
Yeah, well said.
And one last question before we're almost out of time.
But, you know, I see a lot of people who maybe would describe themselves as liberty lovers or even anarchists who are kind of coming at it from a reactionary angle.
And what I mean by that is that they're kind of just simply...
Anti-authoritarian, you know, and so authoritarianism can have that sort of consequence, too, where people end up arriving at liberty, but, you know, maybe there are some things that are kind of out of place.
Authority is a very good thing.
I think Michael Bakunin said it very well.
He said, people say, I reject authority nonsense.
When it comes to the making of my shoes, I defer to the authority of the shoemaker.
Authority can be very good.
You know, in my parenting, which I think is really the essence of what we need to work on, I try to view myself as a resource to my daughter.
I don't have authority over her, but I am a resource to her and I need to continue to make my case and explain why things are important and why things should be done or not be done and be open to changing based on her opinion.
If I'm a resource, and I felt this as a manager in the business world as well, to my employees I was not an authority, I was a resource to them that hopefully was going to make their day easier and better and that's why they didn't mind me getting paid more.
Like they would pay me themselves if they could.
And so if we view ourselves, those of us who have knowledge and wisdom as a resource We set up a fundamentally anti-statist and anti-religious paradigm that will benefit everyone, I think.
What a great note to end off the live show, Pork Therapy, Porkfest 2012 on.
Stefan, your website is freedomainradio.com.
Thank you very much.
My website is porktherapy.com, P-O-R-C-therapy.com.