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Aug. 20, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

25:50

2196 Brazilian Wax! Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Preaches Libertarianism to Politicians

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses philosophy, atheism and libertarianism with a variety of Brazilian politicians, academics and intellectuals in Sao Paulo, at the invitation of the Brazilian Mises Institute.

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	We will be watching this moment the presentation of the founder and the Freedom Man Radio, entrepreneur and executive of the software.
	He graduated in history at McTree University, professor in philosophy at the University of Toronto, and also studied literature, history, economics and philosophy at York University.
	I call to the audience, Stefan Molinil.
	Hello?
	You can hear me alright?
	Thank you, thank you, first of all, so much for the invitation to come and speak.
	This is my first time speaking in South America, so I'm very, very excited to be here.
	I'm not going to leave the stage.
	You'll know the speech is over when someone tackles me, drags me off that way.
	I would like To talk about philosophy, as you know, I run the largest philosophy show in the world, which doesn't mean that I'm the best philosopher, it just means that I'm the one who has the best technology available to him at the current time.
	But I would really like to make a case, a strong case, for philosophy and why it is so essential and why I think it is really going to be that which saves the future.
	And I'm going to do a relatively short speech.
	For those who know my show, that's rare.
	And I really want to get questions, comments, issues, and so on.
	So, I'm going to start with a very big view of where society is at the moment.
	It may not be right in every detail, but I think it's an important perspective to have.
	Generally, there are two ways that we organize society.
	We organize social decisions.
	We organize ethics in society.
	Number one is through religion.
	Number two is through the state.
	Now, both of these have their carrots and their sticks.
	With religion, you get to go to heaven if you're good, not so much if you're not good.
	With the state, you get to retain your freedom if you obey the law, and you have to go to jail if you don't.
	Religion has its moral commandments, ten if I remember rightly, and the state has its laws.
	A few more than ten, if I remember rightly.
	Anybody know how many laws there are in Brazil at the moment?
	I'd say more than the hairs on my head, but that would not be a good metaphor.
	So I would argue that in history, we swing like a pendulum back and forth between the state and religious commandments.
	So here are some examples.
	So communism is atheistic in its essence, but it is a totalitarian horror in terms of the size and power of the state.
	If you look at North European countries, Scandinavia and Denmark and Switzerland, they are quite secular.
	Atheism, agnosticism run 70 to 75% in those countries.
	So they're more religious than communists, but they have a very large state.
	You have, I don't know, what is the income tax here in Brazil roughly?
	Should I not talk about the income tax?
	Maybe we'll just drop religion from the topic.
	Let me just over here and change that.
	Okay.
	We okay?
	All right.
	If there are any lightning bolts that come down, I promise you it is not a special effect.
	Call someone.
	Hopefully an ambulance and not a priest.
	In the US, there's the Republicans, the conservatives, they tend to be much more religious, but they favor a smaller government, a constitutionally limited republic.
	So there are lots of examples of how it's sort of like a balloon.
	You know, you push in one end and the other end pops out.
	So it generally tends to be that those people who are comfortable with a smaller state tend to be, again, this is a generalization, tend to be more religious.
	And those people, Who want a larger state tend to be a little bit more comfortable with agnosticism or atheism or a form of secular humanism.
	Now, both of these paradigms, I'm going to argue for a third one, but both of these paradigms Have been very well tested in the laboratory of history.
	Very well tested.
	Almost every conceivable combination of religiosity and statehood has been tried.
	Does this sound as ominous to you as it does to me?
	I feel like something really dramatic has to happen now.
	But let's just continue with the talk instead.
	And if you look at where religion has had its greatest powers, where really we've had theocracy, I'm really talking about the West in general, we could talk about the East another time, but in the West in general, Christendom had its greatest powers in terms of secular ruling and religious ruling throughout the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and there was some significant lack of progress, obviously economically and in terms of human rights and so on.
	So when you have a strong ascendancy of religion, you could make the case that there are...
	It does not...
	Get the kind of success that other forms have been tried.
	Of course, I think it's very easy for us to understand, particularly given the history of the 20th century, that when the state is in its ascendancy, it's just catastrophic.
	I don't know if you know, there's a researcher out of Hawaii who has calculated that, not counting war, governments just in the 20th century were responsible For anywhere between 160 and 200 million deaths.
	He calls it democide.
	It's something that we don't really understand.
	It's the murder or starvation of populations by governments.
	And if you add war in, I mean, it's just unholy.
	So, these are both very old institutions.
	Religiosity grew out, I would argue, out of a very primitive kind of superstition where we wanted to know how the world worked and why, but we didn't have the methodology, the scientific method, all of the structures of reason that came out of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.
	We didn't have those structures.
	We needed to have answers.
	We didn't have the structure for answers, and so we had beliefs in gods and so on.
	You can trace that throughout human history.
	The state is a very old human institution, the idea that society is a pyramid.
	There's a small number of people at the top who can impose their will through force on the rest of us.
	And that is very different from the economic and technological capacities that we have now.
	It's very, very important.
	The way I view our current structures for solving and organizing human society, for resolving human conflicts, it's sort of like if someone sent you an email with a YouTube video and you clicked on it, and you saw a video of a child playing with a gun.
	Wouldn't that be a terrifying thing to watch?
	Because you have very advanced technology, weaponry, in the hands of a very underdeveloped mind.
	Very, very dangerous.
	Statism and religiosity These are very old structures that we have inherited.
	They were not invented.
	They didn't go through market testing.
	They are not approved of us in a continual way.
	People talk about the social contract, but if it's not voluntary, I think we all understand it's not really a contract.
	There is a third way to approach the organization of society.
	And that third way is philosophy.
	Philosophy differs from religion because philosophy works with empiricism.
	Philosophy works from first principles and does not allow, cannot sustain, contradictions within the argument.
	This is the old Socratic method.
	If you've ever had one of these annoying Socratic gadflies, just keep asking you question after question until your head's spinning and it's just horrible.
	But it's an essential process.
	Philosophy, like science, does not allow contradictions to empirical evidence And does not allow contradictions within the argument.
	If you self-contradict yourself within the argument, it doesn't work.
	And it was about 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece that we first began to really dabble in philosophy.
	And philosophers have not had a great time of it in general in society.
	They have been poisoned, they have been crucified, they have been hanged, Driven out.
	They have been ostracized.
	It's tough.
	It's tough to bring reason to a lot of rolling down the hill kind of avalanche of history.
	But philosophy, I think, why it is so difficult for people is it is very unsentimental.
	It is not emotional.
	It does not respect history.
	It does not respect culture.
	So, When we look at the map in general, we see colors and we see lines and we see countries.
	But philosophy doesn't see that because that is a map, that is not the world.
	If I paint a picture of a green tree while looking at a tree that is bare, if I paint a picture of a lush tree while looking at a tree that is bare, my painting doesn't become the tree.
	I've got to come up with a good metaphor for thunder.
	I'll put that in the background.
	It'll come up, I'm sure.
	When a philosopher, I think when good philosophers look at the world, they see it clear and straight for what it is, which is that there is no magical line in the ground between countries.
	What there is in the world is there are people and there are things.
	There's land, mountains, rivers, trees, forests.
	Yeah, got all of that.
	But we look at things like countries and philosophically you can't sustain it.
	Because these lines exist in our heads and they exist in maps.
	They do not exist in the world.
	And without philosophy we have a great deal of difficulty understanding the world.
	So, how many of you are economics geeks like me and love to follow the euro crisis?
	Anyone?
	Euro?
	Oh, good!
	Okay, good.
	Oh, that means I need to know what I'm talking about.
	Hang on.
	Let me just look something up here on the internet.
	Euro crisis.
	But I just came from doing a talk in Texas.
	And they wanted me to do current events.
	So, you know, I put my hazmat suit on and I read papers.
	I read the Wall Street Journal cover to cover.
	And I couldn't help but notice that the articles in the Wall Street Journal about the euro crisis all had the same characteristic.
	I wonder if they're going to bail out Spain.
	Well, we know the answer to that now.
	What, 125 billion euros?
	I always feel like it should be Dr.
	Evil, you know?
	Did you see that movie?
	Billions.
	Who knows, right?
	It could just print this money.
	It could be monopoly money for all that matters.
	I mean, how can they all be in debt and lend to each other?
	It's mad.
	But they're all talking about, well, they're going to lend.
	Will Angela Merkel see her way past Germany's historical skepticism about bailouts after having spent $2 trillion on eastern Germany over the past 30 years?
	Will she see, will they end up, what are the bond traders going to do and, you know, what's the European Central Bank administration going to do?
	And all it was, was guessing the opinions of a tiny elite.
	I mean, that is fundamentally a bad religious exercise, like being an Aztec priest and reading chicken entrails.
	What are these people going to do?
	It's all just guessing opinions.
	There were no facts in the whole series of articles that I read.
	It must have been half a dozen of them.
	And do you know what else there wasn't in this?
	And it's something that we see so rarely, I don't think we even look for it anymore.
	But there was not one single ethical question in the entire analysis of a giant financial whirlpool that is sucking down the future of hundreds of millions of people and destroying the lives of the young like a forest fire on dry shrubbery.
	Unemployment rate in Greece for the young is over 50%, and that even counts people who are working for the government.
	Unemployment in Spain is reaching even higher.
	This is an entire population that is bereft of opportunity.
	And there's not one single ethical analysis.
	Because philosophy takes the European crisis apart very simply, very quickly and very easily.
	Let me give you an example.
	Go to a philosopher and say, Europe's in economic crisis.
	What's the problem?
	Well, they're printing too much money.
	Oh.
	What are they printing this money based on?
	Nothing.
	They're just printing presses, da-goo, da-goo, da-goo, da-goo, out it comes.
	Well, that's easy enough to solve.
	Just enforce your laws against counterfeiting.
	What?
	What, the people who enforce the laws are the counterfeiters?
	Well, there's your problem.
	Not hard to do.
	I hear that Brazil has some familiarity with the concept of tariffs.
	Tariffs are quite easy to analyze, morally.
	Very easy.
	Do you have the right to initiate the use of force against people freely trading?
	Of course not.
	Because people freely trading are not initiating the use of force against anyone.
	It's like chopping people's hands off for shaking hands.
	It's completely wrong.
	So of course it's very easy to figure this out.
	It's immoral.
	But we have this weird thing where if we make up a different word, we get a different reality.
	It is exactly the same as my daughter playing hide-and-seek by going...
	You can't see me!
	It's crazy.
	We take counterfeiting and we call it central banking and we think we've somehow changed the moral reality of what is occurring.
	We haven't.
	We need to invent all these words, of course, because we don't want to look at the world philosophically.
	We don't want to look at it straight.
	And the fascinating thing is that We consider ethics to be very complicated.
	You know, there was a guy on American television recently.
	He was a Harvard professor.
	Lord help us.
	And he had ethical questions that he said, I pose these ethical questions to my class, to my students.
	You're in a lifeboat.
	You know, it never goes well from there.
	You know, it's never like you're in a lifeboat and you've won the lottery.
	And, you know, you're...
	You're in a lifeboat, and down drops Karlyn Miranda in her prime.
	It's never that.
	You're in a lifeboat, and you're all starving, and there's a sick guy.
	Do you eat him first?
	Or, you know, the one with the trolley coming down.
	Which way are you going to throw the switch?
	How many people are you going to kill?
	We try to complicate ethics.
	But I will say to you that ethics is ridiculously simple.
	And I can prove it to you in one sentence.
	Anything that you can teach to a three-year-old cannot be that complicated.
	If we say ethics is too complicated for us, it's like saying, well, okay, three-year-olds should be toilet trained, but we can't expect that from adults.
	Because what do we say to our children?
	Don't lie.
	Don't steal.
	Don't hit.
	And then we grow up.
	And we create a society or submit to a society that violates all of those.
	Rules with every waking breath.
	And then we wonder why things go wrong in society.
	People are 100 or 200.
	You know how we look back at slavery and we're like, how could anyone could ever have imagined that that was okay?
	I think people are going to look back and say, well, we countenance the initiation of force at all times.
	Through taxation is the initiation of force.
	You may like it, you may agree with it, you may think it has utility, but it is the initiation of force.
	Tariffs are the initiation of force.
	Fire alarms are the initiation of interruptions, but not force.
	Is that better than the thunder?
	It's less theologically creepy, right?
	Okay, good.
	But we keep ignoring the basic violations of ethics in society, and then we wonder why things keep going so wrong.
	Do you know, for those economics geeks, you know, the great...
	Von Mises, the astoundingly great Von Mises, as early as the 1920s, was showing why socialism could never work.
	Because without prices, there's no objective way to determine subjective value.
	And there's no way to allocate resources unless people can freely bid for them in an open market.
	And thus, central planning, you know, can never work, will always collapse and waste ridiculous amounts of time and produce crappy cars and all that.
	With that insight, you don't need to worry that much about socialism when you sort of talk about it.
	Not only is it immoral, I would argue, because it initiates the use of force, violates persons and property.
	But it's also ridiculously inefficient.
	And when you see this kind of inefficiency, my argument is that you see it in the Euro, you see it in the American economy, you see it in Canadian healthcare all the time.
	A third of people can't get doctors, waiting lists of up to two years.
	Wherever you see this kind of inefficiency, when you see it in socialism, where do you go back?
	Calculation problem, the price problem, the lack of incentive problem, no personal property, no chance to gain.
	When you see all of these effects, That are catastrophic.
	We have this tendency to look back and think that there's got to be some incredibly complicated reason.
	If only they'd written the Maastricht Treaty just a little bit better, we'd be fine.
	If only we had a different central planner in charge of the economy.
	If only they were a little smarter or a little less corrupt or whatever, we'd be fine.
	But I would submit to you, That it is as simple as violating basic moral rules.
	You violate the basic moral rules and the cascade effect and the domino effect keeps flowing until we get it right, until we return to the same finger-wagging lectures we give to our three-year-olds.
	Do not steal, do not hit, do not lie.
	Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, if you prefer it in that context.
	If we build a society, if we imagine a society, if we can conceive of a society in conformity with the basic moral rules that we expect our 3- and 4-year-olds, but not our 30- and 40-year-olds to follow, I submit that we will turn things around because we are at an incredible crossroad, an incredible crossroad in society.
	Literally billions of people are alive because we have a relatively free market in the world.
	Literally billions of people.
	If you look at the population growth from the Middle Ages upwards, it's staggering.
	Literally billions of people's lives hang in the balance of whether we can continue to protect persons and property in an objective fashion.
	If we can't, it will be, I think, the greatest death toll that can be conceived of.
	I know it's an extreme scenario, but there's no question that if we cannot sustain the free market, the death toll will be enormous.
	And free markets are under attack all over the world because we forget, thou shalt not steal.
	Philosophy clarifies things in such a ridiculously easy way that It's hard to fathom how simple it is.
	You know, like if you get the right structure, everything makes sense.
	You know, way back in the day before Copernicus and Kepler, there was a Ptolemaic system of astronomy.
	They sort of thought the circle was the perfect shape of the deity.
	And so they said everything has to be a circle.
	And then, you know, when you go around the sun, Mars does this weird kind of...
	Samba step or something like it, just this retrograde motion.
	And they tried to fix this into all these perfect circles and so on.
	With the Earth at the center of the solar system, it got more and more complicated.
	And then, what happened?
	Well, some enterprising astronomers moved the Sun to the center of the solar system.
	Everything fell into place.
	All the complicated, endless, brain-bending calculations, the sheets and stacks of paper, the abacuses you had to fly back and forth like castanets, that all went away because they got the accurate representation of the solar system.
	They moved the Sun to the center.
	Earth went around.
	Mars went around the Earth.
	Everything made sense.
	You just need one equation.
	Our society is horrendously complex because we have not put the two basic principles of ethics at the center of our society.
	The non-aggression principle.
	Do not initiate force.
	Force is only valid in an extremity of self-defense.
	Do not initiate force against others.
	And property rights.
	They're really two sides of the same coin.
	Person is property.
	Personhood is property.
	Until we are willing to take the great leap of astronomy in ethics and put these principles at the center of our social thinking, I submit that we were going to get less free as time goes along.
	Society is going to seem more complex, harder to manage, and the rules will multiply and multiply until they cannot possibly be obeyed, and then we are all One bad glance from a guy in blue away from a jail cell.
	If we can move these principles to the center of our society, I believe we can taste the freedom that has never been experienced before.
	We can have a wealth that has never been experienced before.
	If we try to obey endless little rules, we are enslaved because they always multiply.
	If we obey the few very simple rules, The ones we teach our children.
	The ones which are enshrined in the common law of human history.
	If we are philosophical, then we are free.
	And I don't think there's any other way to do it.
	Thank you.
	That's it for my little speech.
	I'm happy to take questions or comments, criticisms.

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