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Sept. 30, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:30:41

2221 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call-In Show, September 30, 2012

How I Became Skeptical of Authority: 0:00 Being a Vegan among Carnivores: 31:00 The State as Parent: 82:12 Dealing With A Spanking Co-Parent: 111:16 Mainstream Acceptance of Voluntary Families: 131:00

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	Oh, good morning, good morning, good morning to you!
	How's everyone doing this morning?
	It is, oh my goodness, it's the end of the month.
	It's the end of the month as we know it.
	So, hope you're doing well.
	It's Steph, Sunday Philosophy Show, 10am, brothers and sisters, time for our morning preaching.
	So, you know, I was thinking the other day, I was thinking about...
	Things in my life that made me skeptical of authority.
	And I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this, either in the show or you can email me, host at freedomainradio.com.
	But I was thinking about things which made me skeptical towards authority.
	And by authority, you know, I don't just mean the government.
	But the government is only part of the authority that is in the world at the moment.
	I was excited.
	To see that Ann Coulter has come out with a new book called Mugged that I devoured in about two days, which is, she's worth reading.
	She is worth reading.
	Great research.
	She's a matrix unplugger.
	I know.
	She's Christian and she's a Republican and so on.
	But that's fine.
	I mean, you can read a Noam Chomsky critique of US foreign policy without becoming a socialist.
	And you can read Anne Coulter's critiques of secular humanism without becoming a fundamentalist.
	I don't think she's a fundamentalist, but she's smart and she's tough.
	You know, she takes a lot of beatings in the media and she really keeps going.
	So I would really recommend going through her books.
	They're really, really good.
	Anyway, and she's a funny writer, which is not easy to do.
	Trust me, I've tried and failed.
	So the authority, there's a couple of different authorities that I lost faith in, so to speak.
	The first was school authority.
	And of course, as you probably know, I went to boarding school for a couple of years when I was about six.
	And boarding school was kind of like, as you can imagine, a fear-based institution, or at least it was in the 70s.
	And in boarding school, Like I guess in most countries, the children were taught that their country, their culture was the best.
	Now it wasn't just better than other cultures.
	It was the best.
	The best that could be achieved.
	The best that could be created.
	And yet, all the children lived in fear.
	We lived in fear.
	Fear of getting caned.
	Fear of being locked up.
	Fear of having our rations cut.
	And that fear, I think, and you know, I didn't sort of process this all consciously at the time, but that fear had a lot to do with my skepticism towards authority.
	Because basically what I was being told was the very best that a society could come up with, the very best that a society could come up with, was A fear-based world for their children.
	That was ideal.
	See, and that's something that's very important.
	Because either it is objectively the very best for children to live in fear.
	And this wasn't just boarding school.
	I mean, obviously I lived in abject terror at home and at other schools as well.
	But either it was the very best thing in the world for children to live in fear of physical assault, of rejection, of entrapment, of solitary confinement, or it wasn't the very best for children but it was the very best world for the adults, for the children to live in that kind of fear.
	Now I couldn't really believe That it was the very best thing for the children to live in fear.
	I couldn't believe that.
	I just couldn't believe it.
	I mean, that's like going to a dentist with a toothache and the dentist saying, yay, that's perfect oral health.
	I'm not going to touch it.
	Hopefully it'll get worse.
	Well, that wasn't very believable to me as a child, that that was a good thing.
	But I did sort of slowly begin to believe that it was best for the Adults that the children lived in fear.
	It was the best thing for the adults that the children lived in fear.
	Now why?
	Why?
	Why would it be the best thing for the adults for the children to live in fear?
	And I mean the only thing that I could come up with and this is all very hazy when I was a kid but the only thing that I could come up with was how I felt When I lied.
	How I felt when I lied was like Bilbo with the ring on.
	You know, shaky, uncertain, wobbly, incorporeal.
	Even when I was lying out of necessity.
	And the only thing that I could think of was that the only reason you'd want children to live in fear is because you're afraid of children.
	Why would you be afraid of children?
	Because you're not telling the truth.
	See, people who aren't telling the truth always need to Back up the falsehood with aggression, with consequences.
	And so I think that's where I really began to wonder whether it was the best.
	Because I was told that this was the best society for me to live in.
	The society was fear-based, aggression-based, violence-based.
	I mean, just from a child's perspective, I didn't really know much about the state at that time.
	But I just remember thinking, that can't be true.
	Or if it is true, then what they should do is they should explain why we have to be so scared all the time.
	I mean, I wrote a novel.
	I wrote a novel.
	About boarding school many years ago.
	I never quite finished.
	I got about three quarters of the way through.
	So I really wanted to explore those memories.
	I did that in my early 20s.
	And they never explained, if this was the best of all possible worlds, why we had to be so scared.
	And that was suspicious.
	Because that's not exactly intuitive, why you'd have to be scared.
	You know, it's like, you get past St.
	Peter, you go into the cloudy gates of heaven, where...
	Genial middle class ladies are eating cream cheese.
	And they say, well, you finally come to heaven.
	It's the perfect place.
	Release the tigers!
	Run!
	You will now be hunted for eternity.
	It's like, I think what you call heaven is only right with the first two syllables.
	Sorry, the first two letters.
	And then I think it takes a bit of a downward turn after that.
	Because if it's the best of all possible worlds, what are the tigers doing here?
	And...
	If where I was growing up as a child was the best of all possible worlds, what are the predators doing here?
	What's the hitting?
	What's the screaming?
	What's the punishment?
	What's the heavy, back-breaking moralizing that kept occurring all the time?
	I mean, heavy, slow, sadistic moralizing was a cornerstone of my youth.
	And it was not believable.
	I couldn't sort of internalize that when I was being moralized at that I was a bad person.
	I just couldn't internalize that.
	I hung on to universality.
	I don't know how, but I hung on to universality.
	And I remember thinking, I'm scared of this person, that this person has authority and can punish me, can have me Caned or locked up.
	But if they're not using that power with any kind of compassion, the compassion that they instructed me to display towards other people, well then, whatever they're saying in terms of moralizing is scary, because moralizing was a precursor to punishment.
	It was scary, but it wasn't something that I could believe.
	Because whatever I was being criticized for as a child, morally criticized for, was always insignificant relative to the inhumanity of that moral criticism.
	So I think, I mean, I've been thinking about this just over the last couple of days as I've been grinding away in the documentary, which will fill you in in just a sec.
	Okay.
	But I think it was I couldn't absorb the words and make them my physics.
	You know, this is what a lot of people do, right?
	The words of the elders of the tribe become physics.
	They become unquestioned.
	You sort of wake up every morning and wonder whether you're going to obey gravity.
	I couldn't I couldn't make...
	The moral rules of the tribal elders, my physics.
	What I did, which is, I'm not saying it's a particularly conscious process, but what I did was, they were trying to give me principles.
	These are the principles of behavior.
	You know, don't hit, don't steal, don't humiliate, be nice.
	And in particular, there was a kid whose name was Grant.
	Who jumped wrong into a pool and actually became mentally retarded, mentally handicapped, I assume permanently.
	He went from being a fantastic football or soccer player to a poor kid who could barely run in a straight line.
	And we were instructed, and rightly so, to treat him with compassion and kindness and sympathy and so on.
	And Yet, of course, we as children were not treated the same way by those who had power over us.
	So they gave us principles.
	Don't hit, don't steal, be compassionate to those who are weaker or have less power than you.
	And what I did was I internalized those principles and then compare the principles of those in power, sorry, the actions of those in power to the principles they'd given me.
	I'm not supposed to hit.
	Why are you caning me?
	I'm supposed to be nicer to those weaker than me.
	So why are you being not nice to me?
	I'm supposed to show compassion.
	These were all the principles that were talked about in the church that I went to, dare I say.
	Religiously, we were taught compassion for the meek.
	Whatever thou do to the littlest children, you do also unto me, saith Jesus.
	And then we would be caned.
	It's like, why are you caning Jesus?
	Why are you hitting the God that you praise?
	And what I thirsted for What I was dying for, what I was so hungry for, was any kind of integrity.
	And by integrity I didn't mean that anyone acted perfectly.
	That's an impossible standard.
	What I meant by integrity was that I really wanted someone to acknowledge failing to meet the ideals.
	Or to explain to me why the ideals weren't different.
	Right, so when I was told, whatever you do to the children, you do to Jesus.
	So think about that.
	Love your enemies.
	Love your enemies.
	Well, but then if I broke some arcane, ridiculous rule, then I would get caned.
	But you're doing that to Jesus, and you're not loving me, who you're saying is doing the wrong thing.
	And by integrity, all I meant was, Or all I wanted was for someone to say, this is an exception to the rule.
	That's all I wanted.
	I mean, that wouldn't have the deviation.
	And that's what I mean by integrity.
	I recognize that I have given you these universal rules.
	I am now going to take out my cane and I'm going to violate these universal rules.
	And maybe there's an explanation.
	I mean, this is the same thing that happens with the realm of taxation, right?
	Don't use force to get what you want.
	Now, the tax collector is going to violate this universal rule, and here's the reasons why.
	But they can't say that, of course.
	They can't.
	Because the moment you acknowledge a deviation from a rule you're inflicting on a child, the rule loses its power over the child.
	And this is the This is the result of this hypocrisy.
	And this is why I say, ethics suck.
	And I was close, of course, to becoming a moral nihilist.
	Well, the discrepancy between what is said and what is done is that what is said is designed to enslave the children.
	I mean, if you look at the words and then you look at the disparity between the words and the deeds, then you will say, well, this is hypocritical and so on, right?
	But hypocrisy is not a standard that the system can be judged by because it wills it away or it escalates aggression against anybody in a subordinate position who questions the morality.
	I mean, you and I putting our heads together, we both know that if I had pointed out the ethical and theological immorality of caning a child for breaking some obscure rule that he didn't even know about,
	if I had said to the headmaster, as I pulled down my pants with a strange, strange world, If I had said to him, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to tell you that you have to stop, because you're not supposed to use violence.
	That's what I've always been taught.
	And so, obviously, if I'm not supposed to use violence at 6, then you, at 50, shouldn't be using violence.
	Also, Jesus says that whatever you do to the littlest among you, which would be me, I was the youngest in the school, to my memory.
	Whatever you do to the littlest among me, so you also do to me.
	So, unless you would cane Jesus...
	You can't cane me.
	we both know what would have happened if I had made that speech.
	Anybody in the chat room want to give me a clue?
	Yeah.
	We know.
	What would have happened?
	Escalation.
	Now you get two.
	Or three.
	Or four.
	Or five.
	extra hits with the cane.
	So, those kinds of situations, I just couldn't believe that this was the best world, that frightening children was the best world, that the massive that frightening children was the best world, that the massive discrepancy between the ideals and the actions was the best world.
	And so I had to figure out what it was for.
	What it was for.
	What were all these rules for?
	What was this morality for?
	And really, that's been a lifelong quest.
	I think I've solved it.
	But I think that was the big question.
	But in order to do that, you have to remember your childhood.
	And I think the big problem is that large majorities of people, particularly if they've been traumatized, they don't remember.
	I remember it all.
	I wish I didn't sometimes, but I remember it all.
	And with that memory comes clarity.
	So I just wanted to thank you for indulging me in the introduction and To mention that, I'm sorry that the documentary was originally early October, 1st of October.
	It's not going to be finished on time.
	Part of that is my fault.
	Part of that is the community's responsibility.
	Not exactly fault, but it took a while for the donations to crank up.
	And the donations are needed to buy software, to buy people's time, to do all of that kind of stuff.
	So we were behind on the donations that I was anticipating, which has reduced the amount of hours that can be dedicated to it.
	And also as a result of that, If there's not an excess of donations, then I feel that I still need to be producing shows and so on just to maintain the regular flow of donations.
	Because if I sort of vanish for two months, I feel or I'm concerned that that would have a negative impact on donations as a whole, particularly new people coming into the show.
	So again, for those who've donated, massive thanks.
	This is why it's happening.
	For those who haven't, I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
	Don't feel bad.
	That's certainly not the purpose of what I'm saying.
	But what I'm saying is that there is a cause and effect between resources and the project's completion.
	So it will be late.
	Unfortunately, I am going to be...
	Well, not unfortunately, but I'm going to be doing some speaking and some traveling and so on.
	So it will be delayed a while.
	I'm not sure exactly when, but certainly do hope to get it out before the election.
	So somebody has asked, what happens with all the pent-up anger about these things as a child?
	Hypocrisy and so on.
	I remember too, but there's just so much anger from seeing all of that.
	Good.
	You see, anger is an inoculation against repetition.
	This is not just my theory.
	This is pretty well established.
	That if you are angry about having been harmed as a child, your likelihood of harming others when you become an adult is vastly diminished.
	Let me read you a quote.
	This is from a fine laissez-faire book called Everything Voluntary from Politics to Parenting, edited by Schuyler J. Collins, which I picked up when I was down there.
	Again, if you want to join the laissez-faire book club, lfb.org forward slash Stefan, S-T-E-F-A-N. That's helpful for them.
	It's helpful for me.
	So I hope you will join.
	Ten bucks a month, get these great, great stuff.
	So let me read you a quote.
	This is from a fine psychotherapist named Robin Grill.
	He says, It's been shown that violent children come from violent or neglectful homes.
	This matter has been put to rest.
	But only about half of abused children grow up to be abusive.
	Why?
	Why?
	Individuals who remain convinced that verbal or physical assaults against them were deserved are significantly more likely to act out violently.
	This is also true for violence witnessed against others.
	Bandura 1973 refers to a study that found that children displayed much more imitation of violent behaviors depicted on video if these behaviors were approved by an adult.
	Less so if the adult was silent and even less if the adult expressed disapproval of the video of violence.
	Children who grow up believing that being hit is what they well deserved go on to be more accepting of and desensitized to violence in general.
	They are candidates for the ranks of bullies or victims or both.
	And this is, I mean, this is an essential point.
	This is an essential point.
	Why do I say to people who tell me if their childhood abuse that it was outrageous, that it was immoral, that it was disgusting, that it was vile, that it was evil?
	Well, because I want there to be less violence in the world.
	And people who aren't outraged about what they have suffered are much more likely to repeat violence.
	I mean, it's a verbal inoculation against the repetition of violence.
	Why do I tell people that the violence that they experience or the abuse or the neglect that they experience as children is outrageous and immoral?
	Because I don't want them to hit their children.
	Because I don't want them To neglect their children because I don't want them to abuse their children.
	You fire up anger against what you have suffered so you do not inflict that suffering on others because your anger is a line drawn in the sand.
	The depth of width of the Grand Canyon which says that violence was wrong and morality is the operating system.
	It is The physics of our future.
	Whatever we accept as moral, we will recreate.
	That which we approve, we will do.
	That which we reject, we will avoid.
	And so the reason that I remind people that what they suffered as children or as adults was outrageous, was immoral, was wrong, was in most cases criminal, is for the simple reason that I want to Grow old, and I want my daughter to grow up in a world that is less violent.
	And so, it is an inoculation against a repetition of violence to get angry about what you have suffered.
	So, yeah, this is the mark.
	I mean, not only is it immoral, not only is it wrong, no...
	It certainly is evil in many contexts.
	So the truth needs to be spoken, but the truth sets you free from repetition.
	And that's why I talk about these things.
	Because I want there to be less violence.
	And the antidote to a repetition of violence is outrage over the violence you have experienced.
	And the way that we achieve that rational and just outrage is through universal moral principles.
	Somebody wrote, I believe in spanking.
	Steph.
	Oh good, there's a few dots between there.
	It sounds like hitting and violence are normal, but when I was hit, I learned.
	It seems like if a parent hits the person for the same offense over and over, you simply can't tell a child to sit in the corner.
	Well, I understand that.
	I really understand and sympathize with your perspective, my friend.
	I do.
	I do.
	You want your child to do something.
	The child should be doing whatever it is you want them to be doing and you must exercise your power over that child to get the child to do whatever the child needs to do.
	I get that.
	I've experienced that.
	I really have.
	But you're making a whole bunch of assumptions there that aren't necessarily true.
	So first of all, of course, Why must the child do what you want the child to do?
	This is a fundamental question.
	That if you have recourse to aggression, to spanking, to time-outs, if you have access to those mechanics, then you kind of skip over why the child should do what you want the child to do.
	And so, It's like if you have a government, then all your solutions are going to involve laws.
	Anytime anybody has any kind of activism, anything that they want done, what's the first thing they do?
	They protest, they hold signs, they write congressmen, congresswomen, members of parliament, they try to get the government to do something.
	If the government wasn't there, then other solutions would be arrived at.
	Peaceful solutions.
	Community solutions.
	And so, if you didn't have the threat option as a parent, what kind of creativity could you come up with to encourage your child to do things that are beneficial?
	To help your child understand why things are beneficial?
	If you simply, like if you didn't have a state, this is the mistake that people make, right?
	And it's the same with parenting as it is with anarchy.
	People say, well, without the government, everybody would be running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
	No roads, no healthcare, poor people dying in the streets.
	People would simply stop functioning.
	And people have, of course, the same belief, and this belief comes first, which is that if I do not exercise power and control over my children, They will run into the streets, they will grab boiling pots of water from the stove, they will, whatever, right?
	And I'm telling you, it's not true.
	It's not true at all.
	I don't punish my daughter.
	I mean, any more than I would say, how do I get my wife to do what I want her to do?
	Well, the answer is, I hit her Or I lock her in the bathroom.
	Well, we all understand.
	It's like, why the hell should your wife do?
	I mean, who anointed you, Lord God, Master of the Omniverse?
	Why should your wife do what you want her to do?
	Why don't you have a conversation with her?
	Why don't you engage her and enroll her in something which is going to be beneficial to her?
	Why don't you question whether what you want her to do Is necessarily the ideal thing.
	And who gave you the right to use force to impose your will on others?
	We all understand that with wives.
	And we would look at someone who said, well, my wife wasn't ready to go to the movie on time.
	So I yelled at her.
	I yelled at her.
	And then I made her sit down on the stairs and think about what she'd done.
	And then when she still wouldn't get ready, I pulled down Her skirt and hit her.
	We would all recognize that this would be monstrous.
	And it's far, far, far worse with children.
	Far more monstrous with children.
	Your wife can tell you to go fuck yourself and she can walk out the door.
	She was there by choice.
	She got to take you on a dating test drive.
	For years, she chose to get engaged to you, chose to get married to you, can leave any time as a legal adult.
	Children didn't choose you as a parent and choose you and your environment to grow up in.
	They can't leave.
	They have no independence, no legal rights.
	They're not capable of living independently.
	So it's far more egregious To exercise power over a child than it is to exercise power over a spouse.
	Where the power disparity is the greatest, the moral sensitivity needs to be the highest.
	I mean, that's what I was always taught.
	And so, if you don't have the option of punishing your children, what other options will arise?
	If you don't have the option of forcing people to pay for public schools, does that mean there will be no education?
	No, we don't know.
	What will arise in the absence of violence?
	Options, choices, possibilities, growth.
	What arises when we ban rape?
	Well, I would argue The very first possibility, potential, of love.
	Where there is rape, there cannot be love.
	Where there is no rape, there can't be love.
	It's the potential for true, deep, meaningful, intimate, voluntary, peaceful, virtuous human relationships, which is the only relationships that there are.
	Everything else is just proximity.
	So, Sorry about that.
	Let's move on to the callers.
	Thank you for your patience.
	First up today we have Patty.
	Patty.
	Hi, can you hear me?
	I can.
	I was wondering if you were a very confident Patrick or a lady.
	Welcome to the show.
	How are you doing?
	I'm good.
	This is my first call.
	So I'm kind of nervous and excited at the same time.
	Excellent.
	Well, I initially was going to ask you a question about my relationship with animals, but as I was listening to you speak, I thought, what is really the most pressing issue that I'm dealing with right now?
	And, you know, my relationship with animals is probably the best thing in my life, so maybe I will ask you about something else if that's okay?
	It's absolutely okay.
	This is your show, my friend.
	All right.
	Well, I am a college professor and I've kind of come to the conclusion that I, when I'm interacting with the faculty members at my work, I teach anatomy and physiology by the way, I've actually changed my entire schedule so that I can avoid most of the people I work with, especially a few specific people, because I find them to be very confrontational.
	Both of them are older than I am, and one in particular is She seems to gain joy by putting me in my place.
	She has often made negative comments about me being a vegan.
	And I feel a lot of animosity from both of them.
	And it's gotten to the point that now I basically teach in the evenings and on Saturdays just to avoid them.
	I'm so sorry.
	First of all, I'm so sorry.
	I mean, that's awful.
	I mean, that's just shockingly awful.
	I mean, I assume this is something you care about, this is something that you love, you're passionate about, and these kinds of bullies are in the workforce.
	And listen, I mean, if it's any consolation, I changed my entire career to not have as much to do with people in the business world, so I sympathize with that.
	I really do.
	And the other thing I wanted to say, just before you go on, is, I mean, dear God in heaven, there are people in the world that you can legitimately have a problem with.
	I have no idea how a vegan...
	Can fit into that matrix.
	How on earth is you being a vegan caused for anyone's problem with anything?
	And there are big problems in the world.
	I just, I can't fathom, like, what?
	What is the story with the problem with veganism?
	What could they conceivably say?
	Well, one woman in particular, she teaches nutrition and they've asked me in my department to teach nutrition and I told them I cannot follow what the textbook supports because ethically I feel that animals should be respected and I also feel that physiologically that humans benefit from a diet high in fruit and vegetables and there are countless studies that have shown this and I feel that meat should be a very minimal part of a
	human diet, not the main part.
	So I just could not teach the course and there has been conflict based on that.
	So I just prefer teaching human anatomy and physiology, not nutrition.
	I just can't do that.
	So I think that may be where she's coming from.
	And also I think both of them are religious people And they've both made comments about, you know, the Bible and how in the Bible they say you are supposed to eat meat, Jesus ate fish, and all of this.
	And that really doesn't affect me too much because I don't really have any respect for the Bible whatsoever.
	They don't know that, though.
	They have no idea.
	Right, right.
	No, I understand.
	Yeah.
	Jesus also walked on water.
	I do have the urge sometimes to tell these people in a spring thaw lake to have a nice stroll.
	Sorry, go on.
	Well, it seems like lately...
	And here's another thing.
	Both of these ladies are...
	On my Facebook friendship list and I thought I had my Facebook settings very secure so that no one from work could see any of my posts because I try to keep all of that separate and apparently one of them found out that I liked a page that says religion poisons everything and she made some kind of derogatory comment about that which I didn't respond to because It wasn't a question
	that she posted.
	She just made a comment.
	And I thought, okay, well, that's fine.
	And the next day at work, I did run into her and she didn't say anything about it.
	And it's just...
	I mean, these types of things have been happening where I just feel like this strong animosity has kind of gotten to the point where...
	Well, I should say it's gone past the point.
	I remember several years ago going into work and my heart would start racing when I would...
	be interacting with one person in particular and I was very concerned as to why my body is responding so strongly to my interactions with this individual.
	I mean she would make comments about my weight a lot of times and she would make comments about how I look.
	I mean I would notice that she would never say these things to other people so I didn't know why she was picking on me in particular.
	And she would say things to me like, you know, I'm much older than you so I know these things and, I don't know, overall it's just very uncomfortable.
	And I guess this was made more prominent in my mind when I was thinking about what to ask you today or how to clarify my question because I have several meetings with her this week where I'm going to have to spend an hour or more Interacting with her and another person that I just find to be very uncomfortable.
	And it makes my job so...
	That's a part of my job I really detest.
	I mean, I love the teaching.
	I love interacting with the students.
	And if I could just focus on that, I would be very happy.
	But all of these other things kind of make me more anxious and...
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I totally get it.
	And I mean, I... I completely understand your response.
	I mean, I don't want to be presumptuous.
	I think I do.
	I really think that I do.
	And I'm certainly happy to answer any questions.
	I have some thoughts about what you're saying, but please don't let me interrupt you if you have more that you want to say or anything you want to ask.
	Well, I mean, I don't even know what the question is.
	I guess...
	I guess I don't know the best way for me to kind of calm myself and try to stay focused and stay true.
	I will say that I've only been listening to your podcast since maybe June or so, and I'm on podcast 150 around that area, so I'm way behind.
	Actually, you're way ahead from June.
	That's very fast.
	I was wondering why I felt like I was never shutting up, and now I know.
	I mean, I will say that my ability to speak with people and clarify what I'm saying has become much better since listening to your podcast, because now I feel like, oh, it's okay to be rational, and the way I think is normal, whereas, you know, all of these superstitious beliefs that I've been told that, you know, you have to do this because this is the norm, I feel more confident that I don't have to do it that way.
	That's great.
	And so I feel more confident talking to people, but I don't know, with her in particular, she's, you know, very, I just feel very overwhelmed in her presence.
	And I don't know if you have any suggestions about how I can maybe change that feeling within me, or if you have any kind of, I don't know.
	Okay, so if you lift your heel, there's a little button there.
	Not many of us know about it.
	It's called changing feelings.
	Well, let me ask a couple of questions first.
	Is this, and I always ask about childhood, because the important thing is, I mean, it sounds like you're being bullied at work, and I hugely sympathize with that.
	But the question is, do you have, or did you experience any bullying from inside the family, outside the family, extended family, teachers, priests, or whoever, when you were a child?
	When I was a child, I think things were okay.
	I mean, overall, there were a couple of...
	I mean, I think my mom in particular was a little bit overwhelmed as a mother in parenting, my younger brother and I. I know later on, my...
	I'm afraid I must interrupt you there.
	Yes.
	You are obviously a very nice young lady, and I think that's wonderful.
	But I'll tell you what I hear.
	When I hear overwhelmed, that sounds to me like an excuse.
	And the first question that I would ask is, an excuse for what?
	So what behavior was she engaging in that you feel is important to somewhat whitewash away with the phrase overwhelmed?
	Well, I guess this is probably due to my Catholic upbringing.
	I went to Catholic school for nine years, so I can see, yes, I'm being very nice and honoring my parents above all else.
	But not above the truth.
	Yes, above the truth.
	And there's only two incidents of Of where I remember my mom actually using physical force against me.
	And they stand out.
	And I always kind of diminish that because I think of all of the fun times I had with my mom and how she did so many great things with my brother and I. And then I kind of forgive her for those kind of two incidents where she was frustrated and overwhelmed.
	And what were those incidents?
	Well, I remember when I was maybe four years old, I was dancing in the living room and I think I knocked over a vase and it broke and my mom slapped me in the face.
	And then when I was 10, I had pneumonia and I think I was healing from the pneumonia, but I think for about a month or two, I was basically kept inside and my mom was taking care of me during that time.
	And my mom, I guess, was getting frustrated that she had spent the whole summer inside with me because I was very sick and I couldn't breathe.
	And it was a pretty severe case of pneumonia.
	And towards the end of that, the doctor said that I was getting better I could probably leave the house, but physically I was still very anxious because I would have these episodes where I couldn't breathe at all and it was very scary.
	I think I was developing some anxiety about leaving the house and being in an unfamiliar place and not being able to Find safety.
	And my mom really wanted to take me to the movie.
	And I said, no, I don't think I'm ready to go.
	And she's like, no, you have to go.
	This will be good for you.
	And she ended up choking me at one point because I didn't want to go.
	And I remember this very specifically.
	Choking you, that's a bit of a leap in the story.
	Yeah.
	Well, she was getting very angry with me.
	She was getting very angry.
	No, I get that.
	I get that choking someone requires anger ahead of time, but she was...
	I mean, you had a fear of being able to breathe and you'd spent all summer not breathing.
	That seems like a very startling thing to do to somebody who's got a fear of not breathing is to choke them, which of course involves not breathing, right?
	And it wasn't like she choked me very hard.
	She just put her hands...
	And I remember this because I was looking in the mirror and she was standing behind me and she put her hands around my neck and she started squeezing very tightly and I started crying and then she lifted her hands and...
	And then I ended up going to the movie anyway.
	And what was the aftermath of these two incidents?
	And look, I mean, I get these maybe sunspots on the sun, you know, dark things that happened, but obviously there's a lot of positive stuff too.
	So, I mean, I want to keep that.
	I don't want to focus on this to the exclusion of anything else.
	But these obviously are things that you remember that had a strong impact on you.
	And what was your mother's response after these incidents?
	What did she do?
	Um, I don't remember.
	I mean, I don't remember any consoling.
	Um, and...
	I mean, I know, like, as I grew up, I never felt consoled.
	I always felt like I had to deal with my own emotions on my own.
	So I think it was just kind of dropped after that, you know, after...
	It kind of goes in the memory hole.
	Yeah, and I think maybe she just maybe walked away and she needed to calm down and...
	But there was no rational discussion about, you know, you should go to the movie...
	No, like, oh my god, what did I just do?
	I'm so sorry, and that's whatever, right?
	No, there was nothing like that.
	And your father?
	My father was...
	He never physically abused me.
	He did that to my brother a few times, though.
	He was very...
	He was definitely the authoritarian in the family, the authority figure.
	But...
	He worked a lot and, you know, I remember my mom worked on weekends and so my dad was off on the weekends and so weekends were always a lot of fun with my dad because he would take us places.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	And what was your parents' relationship like?
	Um, terrible.
	I think I've only, I only saw them kiss once in my whole life.
	They never really showed a lot of affection.
	And, um, I mean, they're still married today, but it's for very dysfunctional reasons.
	I mean, overall, my family is extremely dysfunctional, so there's a lot of addiction, especially with my brother.
	And that kind of came later on.
	Early in the childhood, I guess things were a little bit better, but when my brother started becoming a teenager, then things just changed radically.
	Nice.
	I'm sorry about that.
	That's incredibly stressful for everyone.
	And I will, as I usually do, mention Gabor Maté's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
	Usually important to read if you've got any kind of addiction in the family, my opinion.
	What is that called?
	It's called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Maté.
	He's actually been on this show.
	He's, I think, in the third Zeitgeist movie.
	He's a doctor in Canada who's an expert on addiction.
	He works with a lot of addicts and In Vancouver, and he's done a lot of huge amount of work on the science of addiction and the physiology of addiction, which is really quite powerful.
	I mean, his basic thesis is that if we experience childhood trauma, and childhood trauma, see, this is a big topic, and I just touched on it very briefly here.
	You know, everybody thinks that childhood trauma is, you know, the big stuff.
	And of course it is, right?
	I mean, Abuse, assault, rape, all these kinds of things.
	Terrible, terrible for children.
	But, and I don't quite go as far as Alice Miller does in these categories, not that it matters, but just sort of as a yardstick.
	But a lack of a voice, even children who are never hit, the voices are never raised, but the parents...
	Don't give them a voice.
	Don't negotiate with them.
	Don't let them grow into autonomous and help them to negotiate and treat them with equal equality and respect and so on.
	This is difficult.
	This is traumatic.
	I believe, of course, the public school is traumatic for children.
	I mean, on a number of levels.
	I mean, there's, particularly for boys these days, right?
	There's the confinement, the irrational rules, the authoritarianism, the punishment.
	It's still rife.
	Even if it's not physical, a lot of places of punishment is still huge.
	The uselessness of the...
	I mean, going to public school is like being a government bureaucrat for 12 formative years.
	It's just...
	It's wretched.
	And, you know, there's religion, and then, of course, 80 to 90% of many parents are still...
	80 to 90% of parents are still spanking their children, and those who aren't are probably still raising their voice.
	So, it's a challenge.
	And then people say to me, well, what you're saying is then everybody is abused.
	Well...
	You see, this is the challenge.
	I think that there's an argument to be made that that is the case.
	Because even if you raise your children well, they're still living in a world with people who aren't raised well.
	And that's a challenge.
	So, anyway, I mean, there's still differences of degrees, but I don't think we have a healthy culture.
	I do not think we have a healthy culture at all.
	Is it healthier than the 18th century?
	Hell yeah!
	It certainly is.
	Healthier than the 18th century, healthier than the 19th century in some ways, yes.
	But we still have a hell of a long way to go.
	So I just sort of wanted to point that out up front.
	But the challenge, I think, is I am very keen as a father to ensure That my daughter grows up without a fear of authority.
	I mean, I have authority over my child.
	I have a moral responsibility for my child.
	I have a care of security and healthcare and all that.
	Right, so I want her to grow up with...
	Now, obviously, I know a huge amount about the world more than she does.
	I mean, she's three.
	On the other hand, she knows a huge amount...
	She knows more about a peaceful world than I do.
	Does that make any sense?
	She knows a lot more about what?
	A peaceful world than I do.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	I grew up in divorce, in acrimonious fighting and violence and abandonment and abuse and all that, and she hasn't, so she has as much to teach me About the effects of peace as I have to teach her about my knowledge of the world.
	And I would actually argue that her lesson is more important than mine.
	And so I want her to grow up without any fear of authority.
	I want her to view authority as a resource.
	You know, like the internet.
	I mean, the internet doesn't bully you, I hope.
	The internet is a place where you go to find out information, to look at stuff or whatever.
	And so I want her to view it as a resource.
	Now, your parents, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, tell me if I'm wandering astray, but your parents brought you up to obey.
	Not to think independently, not to think critically, not to come to your own conclusions, not to learn how to negotiate, not to learn how to become equals, which you...
	Come at, as a parent, by treating your children as much as possible, as equals, as soon as possible.
	And so because of that, you have a hierarchy.
	Now, I would argue that you don't like that hierarchy, and that's one of the reasons for your veganism.
	And this doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with your veganism.
	I mean, we all have psychological motivations for what we do.
	They have no bearing on the truth or falsehood of what we do, or the right or wrong of what we do.
	And I sympathize with your view of animals.
	I really do.
	I think we treat animals just atrociously.
	But I think that you want to not be in this hierarchy.
	That is correct.
	I see life all as equal.
	And I will say, like, when I was probably...
	Well, I've always had this affinity for animals, even as a young child, but...
	I remember the first dog that my family got, I felt more unconditional love from the dog than anybody in my family.
	And the bond with that animal, that dog in particular, just was very strong.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so, let me make a minor case here, and I hope this is not putting my theories on your situation, so again, just toss it out if it's not of value.
	But, Philosophy, tragically, is used at the moment to support hierarchy.
	Because I was listening very carefully, as I always try to when people are talking to me, and you used the phrase, she wants to put me in my place.
	And what you mean by that is, she wants to establish dominance over you, not through reason and evidence.
	Yes.
	Right?
	I was listening, did she make one...
	Has she made one reasoned argument against your position, or are these little bullying snippy asides?
	Well, I mean, she would say stuff like, I have this poster in my office That says cows are sentient beings.
	And it's just a, it's a picture of this woman with a cow and it's showing that there's love between the two of them.
	It's just a little cute poster I have and she comments that cows are not sentient beings.
	Cows have no souls.
	So I can't really consider that a reasonable argument.
	That is not a reasonable argument.
	Yes.
	Because you didn't, your poster doesn't say cows have souls.
	No, it doesn't.
	Sentient means aware, capable of processing information, capable of forming relationships, different from a rock or an amoeba.
	But, so no.
	And of course, I mean, this goes back to the Bible, right?
	I mean, God gives man dominion over everything that crawls on the ground and everything that swims in the oceans, that we are to the animals as God is to us, as the husband is to the wife, as the parents are to the children.
	It's all hierarchy.
	Right.
	Yes.
	And it's not rational hierarchy.
	It's insane hierarchy.
	Worship the God who says, thou shalt not kill, who kills almost the whole world in a fit of anger.
	Worship the God whose commandment is, whatever you do to the least of you, you do unto me, who then tells the father to go and grab his kid by the ear, drag him up to a high rock, and kill him.
	And then only at the end says, hey, just kidding.
	Good luck fixing your relationship with your child.
	See, it's all about hierarchy.
	Dominance, control, brutality, insecurity.
	You know the story of Job, right?
	Yes.
	The devil goes to God and says, well, that guy only loves you because he's rich.
	Okay, I'll take away his money.
	I'll take away his family.
	I'll kill all his children.
	I'll make him sick.
	I'll kill all his animals.
	I'll burn his house down.
	I mean, that's psychotic, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	God's just, he turns out, he looks like a jerk in that whole situation.
	I mean, you know, try doing this and say, you know, and saying to the police officer, no, I mean, this is a rational test to see if this woman really loves me to burn down her house and to inject AIDS and to kill her children.
	I just, I want to make sure that she still loves me after all of this.
	They'd say, you, sir, are completely evil and insane.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	But what they're saying is that arbitrary punishments can flow from the insecurity that can never be identified.
	And that's just designed to make you uneasy all the time, right?
	Yeah, and that's how I feel around this person.
	Right.
	So, let me tell you what I think might be occurring.
	And I hope this is not a theory of mine.
	So, are you sitting comfortably?
	I am.
	Sorry, I'm just getting over a bit of a cold.
	So...
	Alright, so, bullshit philosophy is used to justify hierarchy.
	I'm older, I'm bigger, I'm wiser, I have God on my side, I read it in some old book.
	These are all ways of avoiding having to reason and provide evidence.
	And this stuff is so fundamentally unbelievable to children that hysterical punishments must always be in the background of irrational absolutes coming From adults.
	Always.
	Because otherwise, children will just...
	I mean, they won't even cough and say bullshit.
	They won't say bullshit.
	In whatever phrase or form that they want, right?
	I mean, my daughter is incredibly skeptical.
	And she should be.
	That's how we should be as children.
	Now, real philosophy is the mortal enemy of sophistry, of The lies that prop up a brutal hierarchy.
	Because, I mean, universally preferable behavior, the theory of ethics that I work with, the universalization of ethics strips hierarchy.
	See, hierarchy exists to get resources without proof, to get resources without value.
	Hierarchy exists so people can get resources without providing value.
	I want my daughter to listen to me, and how do I get her to listen to me?
	How do I get her to do what I want her to do?
	Well, through being right, through providing value, and through admitting when I'm wrong.
	We go through this at least once or twice a day.
	She will say something, turns out she's right and I'm wrong.
	So we say that.
	I say, who was right?
	She says, I was.
	I say, who was wrong?
	Daddy was.
	You were.
	Yes, that's right.
	And then other times, it's the other way, right?
	So she learns to differentiate who's right and who's wrong.
	Now, hopefully, I'm right a little bit more than I'm wrong about more important things.
	And that way, as time goes along, I get to refer to those.
	So if I say, let's go do something, and she doesn't want to do it, I say, well, remember the last five things here, here, here, and here, and here, but you didn't want to go do them.
	We went to do them.
	It was a lot of fun.
	Will you trust me?
	But I've earned that because I have examples to provide to.
	And she usually will say, okay, I'll give it a try.
	And then if she doesn't have fun, I'll say, I was wrong.
	Now, this is the one category, and I have to admit that.
	This is a category where I said, let's go do something that didn't turn out to be fun for you.
	That makes it harder for me the next time that I wanted to go do something, because she's going to say, well, remember that time we didn't do something?
	It wasn't fun.
	So I have to be correct.
	I have to get a resource called her compliance, but I have to provide the value and the evidence that supports the proposition called do what daddy says.
	And we're constantly going over that.
	And it works beautifully.
	It requires humility, but I think anything that requires humility is a good thing.
	Especially when you're in a power relationship.
	Oh yeah, sorry, somebody said, I love this stuff, can admit when he's wrong.
	It's not that I admit when I'm wrong.
	Because that's like, okay, fine, I'm wrong.
	I say, I bring up the conversation.
	Who was right, who was wrong.
	So that she understands that being right and being wrong is the key thing.
	It's not that I'm the daddy and she's the child.
	Being right and being wrong is the key thing.
	And it's no punitive, it's just, you know, have to acknowledge when it's real.
	So true philosophy means that a hierarchy can exist, but a hierarchy can only exist based on value.
	I will let my dentist do god-awful things to my teeth.
	I mean, who would have guessed that that scraping stuff would be really good for you?
	But she has authority over my teeth because she has consistently been a great dentist who's provided great value.
	So we can have a hierarchy in society based upon the provision of value.
	The provision of value requires voluntarism.
	You don't know if value has been provided if it's not voluntary.
	In fact, you know that whoever is not Pursuing a voluntary relationship does not believe that he's providing value.
	To take a brutal example, the man who rapes clearly does not believe that he will get his sexual satisfaction in a voluntary environment.
	The man who steals does not believe that he will receive charity in a voluntary environment.
	Clearly, because he's taking all these risks and so on and so on.
	And so when you bring philosophy, and this is the moral arguments that you're bringing to bear, which is very difficult for people, when you bring true universality, when you bring a moral argument to a hierarchy that only uses morality to substitute punishment for value, right?
	It's not that I will give you a positive value if you listen to what I'm saying.
	It's that I will inflict a negative punishment on you If you don't do what I say.
	And so you're bringing true philosophy to a very primitive, brutal hierarchy that only uses sophistry or pseudo-philosophy in order to enable the punishment that substitutes for value.
	I can speak this fast because you're a college professor, so you're smart as a witness.
	And so you're bringing a fundamentally different paradigm.
	Now, when you bring a fundamentally different paradigm to a tribe, that is a revolutionary action.
	That is, I would argue, a fight-or-flight situation.
	When you challenge the morality of your elders, I think the base of your brain says, oh shit, are we going for revolution here?
	Are we going to depose?
	Are we taking on this whole freaking hierarchy?
	Well, damn, we're going to need some adrenaline!
	Right?
	That's true.
	And that's why the fight or flight is being activated on both sides.
	Because if you win, if you win, how do they look?
	Let's say everyone accepted your philosophy, your philosophy.
	And to say your, you know, it's not a good way of saying it.
	It's like saying your physics.
	I mean, it's either good physics or it's bad physics.
	True math or false math is not yours.
	But if the philosophical arguments that you are making are accepted by everyone around, including these women's children, what happens to their authority?
	They lose it all.
	They have to...
	It's worse than losing it all.
	They have to admit that they're wrong.
	It's worse than that.
	Oh, it's worse than that.
	And your amygdala gets this.
	Oh, look, I'm using anatomical terms for somebody who knows what they're talking about.
	Let's hope I don't screw it up.
	Right, but your amygdala, your hypothalamus, these all are getting something I think that you're not getting consciously, if you don't mind me saying so.
	No, I'm trying to connect to that reptilian brain.
	Okay, so what happens if the religious arguments are revealed as Invalid, bullying, and hypocritical.
	You say, well, the authority is taken away.
	No, it's worse than that.
	Well, they are...
	I mean...
	If they...
	I mean, if they understand...
	You're asking me if they understand...
	No, I didn't say do they understand.
	I'm saying what is the objective facts?
	If you take away...
	Like, if you substitute philosophy for this bullying hierarchy, the bullies who are at the top of the hierarchy are revealed as?
	Bullies at the top of the hierarchy.
	Oh, goodness.
	They're revealed as frauds, as fake, as the devil.
	I don't know.
	Well, they're revealed as bullies.
	Okay, okay, sorry.
	Right, so it's not that their moral authority is taken away, their moral authority is reversed.
	That's a big difference, right?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	It's the difference between, like, let's say you take my bike, and I come and take it back, and then I take your cat.
	That's worse than just, I got my bike back.
	I got my bike back and something else that you really treasure.
	So, this whole hierarchy, they have risen to the top of this hierarchy through an exquisite dedication and manipulation of the emotional bullying of sophistry.
	Now, if true philosophy wins, it's reversed.
	They go from the top to the...
	Bottom.
	Not to the middle, but to the bottom.
	Yes, to the bottom.
	Makes sense?
	Because in true philosophy, there is no hierarchy.
	There's just horizontal...
	Well, there's hierarchy based on value, based on reason and evidence, based on not bullying, not punishment, not put-downs, not insults, not verbal abuse, not manipulation.
	This stuff is all revealed very clearly in a philosophical world.
	Right.
	I mean, we live in a world that is so...
	Founded on verbal abuse, like I was talking with a friend of mine the other day, I was saying, you know, why there's some state in the US that's thinking about legalizing, not just decriminalizing, legalizing marijuana.
	And, I mean, the big problem with drug legalization is the bad conscience of the parents, right?
	So, if Gabor Maté's theory and the theories of other people in the field is correct that a drug addiction comes out of child abuse, Then the reason that so many people are against drug legalization is because they're bullies.
	They bullied their children, their children grew up with a deficiency of happy joy juice in the brain, which means that the first time they took drugs they felt normal and couldn't stand being themselves afterwards and that's where the addiction comes from.
	Well, the abusive parents who produce these dopamine-dependent children Are now attacking the drug dealers because the drug use is a symptom of their own bad parenting which they don't want to admit to.
	So they just keep on bullying.
	They bully the drug dealers.
	They bully the other drug users.
	They bully anybody who disagrees with them.
	They're just bully machines.
	And if it is If it changes to the point where voluntarism replaces...
	So the reason that they can't legalize drugs...
	A couple of reasons.
	I mean, this is, I think, relevant.
	But the first, of course, is that you can't save any money legalizing drugs.
	You get rid of all of these departments.
	Everybody just goes on.
	You have to pay their huge buyout and pensions and people just go on unemployment insurance because Lord knows how well they're suited to any private sexual job.
	And so you can't save any money.
	It's going to escalate.
	And then what happens, of course, if you legalize drugs is some idiot is going to Drive stoned and plow into some person and then the media is going to be, this politician X who legalized drugs, he now has blood on his hands because this person is dead as a result of his legalization of marijuana and all of these, you know, because there's a lot of pent-up guilt and hatred towards the symptoms of child abuse.
	And if you look at most of what the state fights, it's all just symptoms of child abuse.
	And this is because the parents don't like the symptoms that to any experienced eye says, wow, crap parent.
	Oh, this kid is addicted.
	Wow, that must have been a bad childhood.
	I mean, if people get that, right, then this idea that we should somehow solve this problem by throwing more adult victims of child abuse in jail where they can be further abused is ridiculous.
	I mean, once people see the connection with childhood, then the state solutions become ridiculous.
	And immoral, right?
	Immoral.
	If you're bringing reason and evidence, voluntarism and value and respect for animals to your environment, you're challenging the entire hierarchy and you are threatening these people with not just a loss of power, but opening the eyes of the people around them to who they are.
	Yeah.
	Which is not virtuous, which is where they currently believe they are and where the hierarchy supports them.
	Because virtue in a brute hierarchy means excellence in verbal abuse for the most part.
	That's correct.
	So if you replace that, then you are utterly casting them down from the heavens to hell.
	You don't think they're going to fight?
	To keep their position?
	Yeah, they're going to fight even more strongly and then they're going to pull out the big guns and become offended.
	And I've seen this happen, yes.
	And I say this, you know, you said, well, how do I calm myself?
	I'm not saying this, obviously, but what I'm trying to do is to place your fight or flight mechanism, which I think is what you're experiencing, in a context to tell you that you're right.
	And that's, I think, I think you just hit it there.
	My ability to put my feelings into an appropriate understanding so that, and I think that, you know, learning about, or learning with you as I've been listening to your podcast,
	I've been able to do that on so many levels where I would have these feelings before and then just listening to how, Learning how to think more rationally about the world that I live in has helped me immensely with being able to calm down and feel...
	More supported by my understanding.
	And I've become a very happy person because of that.
	I really have.
	And I feel much better in most of my interactions.
	But dealing with her in particular, it's gotten better as far as my response.
	But I think that because I've been able to calm myself down incrementally better and I'm avoiding them more so, I think it's making them a little bit more angry that they Can't control me as much.
	Yes, yes.
	I would also argue that you can't win.
	Right, yeah.
	In this environment.
	No, that's important.
	The fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in because we think we're going to do something.
	And it kicks in.
	And it's really early in this, right?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, I mean, it's gotten better, but I remember a few times where...
	She would say something to me and my heart would just start racing.
	It would feel like it was going to jump out of my chest and I just wanted to get away from her as fast as I could.
	Right.
	Right.
	Which is the fight plot.
	And the fight part of you, which I would recommend listening to.
	I mean, I have to get up and run away.
	But you're not at the fight part yet.
	And I would actually, I think that that's a correct interpretation.
	Right.
	Before the end of slavery, there was an underground railroad, right?
	Right.
	People didn't lead a slave rebellion because it was too early.
	The vast majority of people accepted that the Bible supported slavery and God dictated it, and therefore it was a good institution.
	You were helping these poor, benighted heathens to get to Jesus or whatever, right?
	And we are at the very beginning of the underground railroad phase, right?
	There's no...
	There's no possibility as yet of a general acceptance of, for instance, voluntarism in parenting.
	But that doesn't mean that nobody can be saved.
	There's no general acceptance.
	You know, almost half of Americans approve of domestically deployed drones to spy on people.
	There's no possibility of a general acceptance that taxation is theft.
	There's no possibility of a general acceptance that spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Even among libertarians, who are incredibly enthusiastic about the non-aggression principle, and I say this having had huge amounts of offline debates with libertarians about spanking and the non-aggression principle.
	So even those devoted to the non-aggression principle are having, like, it's unthinkable for them to apply it to children.
	It's very early.
	And so I don't think that you can win this.
	And knowing when to fight is very important.
	And it's too early.
	And I don't know if this is the healthiest response, but it seems like lately I've been feeling like I want to get away from everything.
	I've been thinking, I want to move to Ecuador and buy some land and just live off the land and live with the animals and just get away from it all.
	I'm not questioning, am I running or am I running and hiding again or do I need to face this?
	And I guess that's part of why I'm talking with you.
	Well, but you've got two false dichotomies there, right?
	So you either run or you fight.
	Right.
	But I don't think that those are the only two options.
	Obviously, there's good that you can do in your classroom.
	Obviously, right?
	You can expose people to positive and benevolent authority, to value-based authority, not punishment-based authority, and so on.
	So there's a lot...
	I mean, that doesn't mean you should sacrifice your blah, blah, blah, but there's a lot of good that you can do.
	You know, I'm sure that there are lots of people listening to this conversation, hundreds of thousands now who would love to be reincarnated as one of your pets.
	Oh...
	I think that would be lovely.
	So there's, you know, lots of good you can do.
	You, of course, I mean, if you, I don't know if you are or you're going to, you get married, have kids, huge amounts of fantastically wonderful things you can do.
	If you flee the world, you don't escape the world, right?
	Because you've only, right?
	It's the living in the woods thing.
	We can go live in the woods, but we haven't escaped the world because we're only doing what we're doing because the world is the way it is.
	We bring the world with us, the world becomes our cage, right?
	We're We're having a perpetual timeout on a piece of land because of the world.
	That means the world wins.
	So we have to stay and fight, I think.
	But we have to fight intelligently.
	And we have to fight with the full recognition of how early it is in the world.
	And that's true.
	And it is very clear to me that there is a long way to go.
	Just by the discussions I've had with people that I thought were somewhat rational, and it turns out that they fall...
	Pray to this brainwashing mentality of the state or of religion.
	So I do try to interact with those individuals a little bit more gently.
	And it makes me feel good that I can do that.
	That I can express myself that way.
	But it's just certain people that make me feel so small that I want to run away from.
	And I guess it's maybe just accepting that.
	Accepting that I have to learn how to Maybe look past those individuals and look towards the individuals that I can Enlightening.
	But you're still trying to come up with a plan that you can will.
	And I think that once you're talking about the base of the brain stuff, I don't think you can will it.
	Like, you know, you can't will the unconscious.
	You can't say, I'm going to have a dream about parasailing tonight, right?
	You may, but you'll probably be chased by pterodactyls, right?
	But, I mean, I think, and I get this, right?
	You're obviously a good analytical thinker, and you like plans, and you probably have lots of lists, which is great.
	But...
	This is, I think, just, this is a process of accepting the way the world is.
	Right?
	So the challenge, so there's people who try to make you feel small, and I'll give you a secret.
	It's a secret.
	The secret is that what you're feeling is not your smallest, but their smallness.
	Okay.
	Right?
	So people who, they dominate, they bully, they climb up a hierarchy of lies and threats.
	They have killed their souls.
	It's their non-existence.
	It's their tininess.
	That you're experiencing, not your own.
	It's kind of empathy with non-existence, which is a very difficult thing, and we tend to mistake that with ourselves.
	But I think the challenge, this, and I'm sorry, I'm going to move on, but this is the challenge.
	I really appreciate this.
	It's a fantastic call.
	I hope it's useful for you, too.
	Yes, it is.
	But the challenge is not, what should I do in these situations?
	Because that's to give yourself a plan, And it won't work.
	Because whatever you plan won't be what is actually occurring.
	Because people who are into hierarchies, people who get to the top of these dominance hierarchies, are incredibly sensitive to manipulating others.
	So whatever you come with as an agenda will be sniffed out by other people and disrupted, and then you go, oh man, I failed again.
	The challenge The way that you drive the bullies back is you stay centered.
	Because a plan, anytime you go into an interaction with a plan, you're going to manipulate.
	Because that's not being sensitive to your experience in the moment.
	And the moment you go in To manipulate somebody who's in a hierarchy, you will lose because you have a soul and they have manipulations and they're much more experienced.
	And the stakes are much higher for them.
	So they'll win.
	So once you have a plan with an interaction, you have a manipulation.
	And I will refer you back to your mother who had a plan called Let's Go to the Movie.
	Wow.
	And I, as a parent, have to dismantle my plans all the time.
	I have a goal.
	Let's go grocery shopping.
	Let's do this.
	Let's go to wherever.
	Let's go to the park.
	I have to, right?
	Because my daughter sometimes won't want to do it.
	And I have to undo the plan in my own mind and be with my daughter.
	Because plans, I mean this is very broadly speaking, but plans are manipulation.
	So you don't go in to an interaction with a plan, because that means manipulation, which means you're bringing a knife to a gunfight, right?
	Because you're going to lose.
	That makes sense.
	Because you don't have much habit in manipulation, and your stakes are much lower for you, and you're dealing with people who've got 50 years experience in manipulation, and the stakes are much higher, so you're just going to lose, right?
	That's a good point, yeah.
	So you go in and you say, my only goal here is to experience my experience.
	To stay with my own feelings in the interaction.
	Not to get the other person to do something, not to come out with a specific goal or agenda, but I am going to actually experience what it is like to sit in this room and interact with this person.
	I'm going to stay with my own feelings, my own emotional experience.
	No plan.
	Just being who you are in that environment.
	Oh, that's amazing.
	That's good.
	Is that a good plan?
	That's a great plan.
	Yeah.
	That's kind of like what my dogs do every day.
	They're just them.
	And let me know how it goes.
	You can just drop me a line if you want.
	I can virtually guarantee you That this will make you impossible to manipulate.
	If you don't go in the ring, you ain't in the fight.
	Yeah, that's true.
	And this is the way, staying centered is the way bullies sense that.
	Bullies will always try to figure out what you want.
	And then if they want to bribe you, they will provide it.
	And if they want to punish you, they will withdraw it.
	The only way to deal with a bully is to not have a plan.
	A plan is a desire.
	A plan is a big button, a lever outside of yourself.
	The bullies will grab and crank.
	Awesome.
	Thank you so much.
	That makes me feel a lot better.
	I really appreciate it.
	Oh, you're very welcome.
	And I want to thank you for what you're doing in the world.
	Thank you.
	I mean, holy crap.
	It's fantastic.
	It's fantastic.
	Yeah, it's hard.
	I get it.
	I mean, oh my God.
	It's hard sometimes.
	But I just really want to thank you for what it is that you're doing.
	And you sound a lot younger than me.
	So if after I die, you see a slightly bald looking ferret at a pet store with blue eyes, please bring it home because that's me coming back.
	I will do it.
	Fantastic.
	All right.
	Well, thank you so much.
	And do drop me a line.
	Let me know how it goes if you get a chance.
	I will.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Sorry, sorry, long calls.
	We can go a little bit over if we need to, but who's next?
	Next up we have JR. Yes, hello.
	Hello.
	Can you hear me?
	I can.
	Great.
	It's my first time calling also.
	I want to talk to you a bit about how I got to FDR in the first place.
	Sure.
	I used to be, I'm probably one of the only people on the board that had this past.
	I used to be an anarcho-communist.
	Yes.
	And I, well, it's been like three, four years since I gave that up, but what I was interested in particular was what you had to say about the, you know, the relationship with the family and how that affects sort of a person's You know, perception of Marxism, you know, how they developed those ideas, and, well, collectivism in general, you know what I mean?
	Yeah.
	So, I think it applies a lot to how I got to the ideas as well, in terms of, I guess, seeing the family, you know, as a collective, so to speak, you know what I mean?
	But I'm wondering, is there sometimes a distinction, like, Between both parents, can it be like the father can represent a different aspect from the mother?
	You know what I mean?
	In my view, I have this theory that the reason I became an anarcho-communist is because I associated my mother with the state and my father with capitalism.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, I – well, of course – yeah, I understand what you're saying.
	I would probably question some of those a little bit.
	So, for instance, the idea that the state should...
	I think one of the...
	I think it was Scott Pele, or whatever his name is, from 60 Minutes, who was asking Mitt Romney the other day, don't you think the government has a responsibility to provide health care to those who can't afford it?
	Yeah.
	Right, and I mean, what a...
	What a no-win question.
	I mean, this is why politics are just so ridiculous and why I'd never have any interest in politics.
	Because how are you supposed to answer that?
	I mean, you can't answer...
	I mean, if you say yes, then you're a socialist.
	And if you say no, then you want people to...
	To get sick and die.
	I mean, you can't win that.
	And so the only reason that people could even view that as a remotely legitimate question is because they view the government as a parental figure.
	And the question then gets translated into people's minds as, don't you think that parents should provide health care to their children who can't obviously afford it because they're children?
	Well, who's going to say no?
	Of course you have.
	So the confusion of the state with the parents...
	Is fundamental.
	And this is what almost everyone is talking about when they're talking about the state, is they're talking about their parents.
	So I would certainly agree with that assessment that the place to...
	And this is not just my theory, this has been fairly well established, that parenting styles have a huge predictive factor on people's political beliefs.
	But most fundamentally, people's addiction to the state comes out of an unwillingness, a refusal, or a rejection of the most necessary goal of parents, which is to have your children grow the hell up.
	To grow up.
	The reason that people transfer their allegiance from their parents to the state fundamentally is because they haven't grown up.
	Now, it's not just Parents, of course.
	It's teachers and preachers as well.
	You're not allowed to grow up.
	You're not allowed to make your own decisions.
	You're not allowed to negotiate.
	It's a top-down hierarchy.
	You're trained to look upon authority figures and to conform to the expectations of authority figures.
	And this is all very fundamental.
	Fundamental, it has a very powerful economic driver as well, which is that the ruling classes don't want entrepreneurs to compete with them.
	And so they train everyone through public schools to be drones, right?
	And not to think for themselves and not to take risks and to be afraid and to fear authority.
	Because it's a lot easier to bully people in the workplace if they fear authority.
	And so there's, you know, a lot of economic incentive and motive for all of that.
	And that's not, again, that's just not my theory.
	That was the express intention of the creation of the public school system was to bring in the Prussian model of hierarchy, dominance, fear, brutality and deference to those in authority so that the ruling classes would have much less chance to.
	Well, they'd be much less risky, and they have much less chance to be overthrown or questioned or anything like that.
	But if you say that your father would represent capitalism and your mother would represent communism, Then my first question would be, how on earth could that marriage...
	My mother represented the state, I meant.
	Your mother represented the state.
	Okay, so your mother represented coercion, and your father represented voluntarism?
	Well, but remember, I saw capitalism at that time as also coercive, you know what I mean?
	Yeah, okay, so what they call crapitalism or crony capitalism, right?
	Right, exactly.
	So the reason I think that is because my mother is...
	Well, she was and still is, sort of the liberal, compassionate, but authoritarian side kind of person.
	You know what I mean?
	Whereas my father was distant.
	He was the only person in the family that really worked.
	And I never really saw him.
	And at the same time, I didn't really have an idea of what capitalism really was.
	It was a distant concept to me even back then.
	So, I guess, in my view, I sort of associated him with that.
	You know what I mean?
	Because of that.
	Because it was a distant kind of emotionally empty thing for me.
	You know what I mean?
	My relationship with him.
	Right.
	So, if he represents trade or the market and he's cold and emotionally distant, then you would be much more susceptible to the propaganda that You know, corporations don't care about you, they'll exploit you, they're just selfish, and they're just in it for their own gain, and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Correct.
	Yeah, that's the basis of my theory, yeah.
	All right.
	And why...
	Oh, let me just stop for a sec, because you said that your father was the only one who really worked in your family?
	Right.
	Is parenting not work?
	Well, he...
	He was working from 7 to 8 p.m.
	at night.
	I didn't see him very much.
	Those are about the hours of a parent, so I'm trying to figure out.
	I'm not trying to pick on you.
	I'm genuinely curious as to why it's work to go outside the home and be paid, but it's not work to be inside the home and be paid.
	Because, I mean, stay-at-home moms, they get paid.
	Because, I mean, if you're a stay-at-home mom, you're not generating income.
	And so you get paid by the husband for your parenting.
	Right.
	Well, I'm not viewing this as how I see work now.
	I'm viewing it as how I saw work then.
	You know what I mean?
	So, back then, I didn't really have a concept.
	Well, no, but that doesn't answer the question.
	Because the question for me is, why would you not view, and it's not a criticism at all, I'm genuinely curious, why you would not view what your mother did as work?
	I haven't really thought of that.
	Well, let me ask you some questions, if you don't mind.
	Sure.
	Did she interact with you a lot, like play with you and all that kind of stuff?
	She talked to me more than my dad did, but I wouldn't say she played or did much together, no.
	Alright, so in a typical day when you were a child, I assume your mother was home because she said she wasn't working outside the home.
	Right.
	What would your mother be doing?
	Um, just, you know, tidying up the house.
	Um...
	You know, talking to her friends or just, you know, not really...
	I'm not really sure, honestly, what she did with most of her time when I wasn't there, but it didn't seem like it was much more than that.
	At least that's...
	Well, I mean, cleaning up the house doesn't mean that you can't...
	Cleaning up the house doesn't mean you can't spend time with your kids.
	I mean, Izzy and I, you know, one of our jobs is we clean the bathrooms together.
	I mean, and it can be a lot of fun and we chat and, you know, I mean, so, um, yeah, I don't, so would you say that your mother did not work very hard at her mothering?
	Is that right?
	Well, looking at it from that perspective, probably not, no.
	Right.
	And so, would it be fair to say...
	Sorry, no, go ahead.
	I mean, I'm saying she was, you know, communicative.
	She didn't speak to me a lot about my problems or whatever, but there wasn't that kind of, you know, that kind of interaction you're talking about where we did things together.
	That really didn't happen.
	So what would she talk to you about and what age are we talking here?
	All the way until I, you know, went to college.
	Just, you know, what happened at school, what's going on.
	Mainly it was all about school and superficial stuff like that.
	It was not too much intellectual conversation.
	What about emotional conversation?
	No, emotional, well, if it was based on a conflict in the house, whether it was between my dad or her or my sister, but it wasn't anything that really helped me, I don't think.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, it seems to me likely then, just, you know, amateur hour as usual, but it seems to me likely then that you may have grown up with some unmet emotional needs for intimacy, community, closeness, connectedness, and so on.
	Well, with my mother, it was strange because she came across always as very emotionally compassionate and In some way, I perceived it that way, but it was like it seemed kind of not very deep, you know what I mean?
	Or it was only, it was like she was not really empathizing with me, she was just projecting how she emotionally felt towards me, you know what I mean?
	It wasn't really a two-way relationship, you know what I mean?
	Yeah, no, I get that.
	And the other thing, too, in terms of compassion, I would assume that you would have liked your mother to play with you, Rather than talk to friends and clean the house.
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	Right, so as far as compassion goes, you know the first thing, compassion is not when you wait for someone to have a problem and then give them some sympathetic words.
	That's not compassion.
	Compassion to me is figuring out what other people legitimately want or need and, you know, providing that to the people that you love wherever humanly possible.
	Right, right.
	Well...
	And so...
	No, go ahead.
	Sorry.
	Yeah, so if you didn't get some stuff that you needed from your mom when you were a kid, then there are these unmet dependency needs, right?
	Right.
	And what most people do when they don't have a supportive culture to help them process this stuff, which we don't when it comes to parents, what most people do is they find a fantasy object that is going to fulfill the unmet emotional needs, which then makes them dependent upon some exterior organization, whether it's a state or religion or some other organization.
	So rather than deal with the pain of not having got what you want, you create a fantasy organization that is going to provide you what you want.
	And you work to create that.
	And in your case, it may have been anarcho-communism.
	Right.
	Thank you.
	Well, do you think it's valid, though, to say that I kind of associated her with the state?
	I mean, or is it more nuanced than that, I guess?
	Well, if you were an anarchist, or are an anarchist, then, of course, if you associate your parents with the state, then it's anger towards your parents, not the state that would be driving some of the emotional energy behind your convictions.
	Well, you know what has me believing that what I'm saying is probably accurate?
	It's that I think back to the people that I used to interact with in those times, you know, when I was an inaugural communist.
	And I swear, it had to be, you know, a healthy majority of them had serious dysfunctional, you know, problems with their family, you know?
	I was by no means an oddity, you know what I mean?
	Right.
	But you see, anarcho-communism doesn't solve the problem of hierarchy.
	Right.
	Right?
	I mean, because it's communism, then there's no private property.
	And because there's no private property, there's no capacity for spontaneous self-organization.
	There must be some council, some group, some who makes decisions about the allocations of property.
	There's no price mechanism, which means there can't be any kind of quasi-objective property.
	Allocations of property or resources and therefore it has to be a political process and so you end up dependent upon people's opinions and a hierarchy again.
	So it doesn't solve the problem of hierarchy.
	To me it would seem likely that...
	And look, I'm not trying to...
	Anarcho-capitalists can fall into this situation as well.
	Right.
	I mean, so, you know, I mean, and I've asked all these questions of myself, you know, there's some people who like to psychoanalyze me and try and figure out my motivations, and I don't mind that.
	I just wish they'd do a better job of it.
	You know, I just wish they'd be a little bit more sophisticated in their attempts.
	I mean, so, you know, a typical story for me might be something like this.
	Well, you know, Steph's dad left when he was very young, and the state became...
	His father, right?
	I mean, he was sent to boarding school, which was kind of like a state.
	It pretty was kind of a mini state.
	His mother became dependent upon the state for many of her resources.
	So the state became his father.
	And therefore, he grows up very angry at the state for failing to protect him from his mother.
	And so therefore, he's going to get Get his own back at his fantasy dad in the form of the state, and that's why he's an anarchist.
	I mean, there's the things that would be a little bit more sophisticated than the silly stuff that people write, which would be, you know, but of course, I mean, the reality is if I ask myself all these questions years and years and years ago, years and years, what is the relationship between my mother and Ayn Rand?
	These are very, very important questions for me to ask myself.
	So, I mean, my sort of relationship with all of these things is important.
	I mean, the reason that it's less credible that I'm acting out some unconscious self-ignorant method is because I have changed the way that I parent from how I'm parented.
	And you can only really do that by processing your past.
	And that doesn't mean I've got nothing left to process or everything's fine, but in terms of there being big blind spots for me, The other thing, too, is that, you know, it's interesting.
	A lot of people say, well, parents, you know, they're doing the best they can with the knowledge that they have and can't really blame parents and so on.
	I'm, you know, of course, you know, the main reason I had a daughter was so I could join the ranks of parents and thus be immune from criticism.
	Because, you see, I'm a parent who's doing the best I can with the resources that I have and therefore I shouldn't really be criticized.
	But, of course, people do continue to criticize even though I'm a parent and they tell me that I shouldn't judge parents.
	But I am a parent who shouldn't be judged.
	But they judge me anyway.
	Anyway, I just want to point out.
	That's the natural hypocrisy of this stuff.
	But yeah, I think it is important to ask what are the emotional drivers behind your philosophical convictions.
	And we have to look at those dispassionately because it doesn't mean that we're right or wrong about our political convictions.
	I mean, if there's a relationship between how you were parented and anarcho-communism, that doesn't make anarcho-communism right or wrong.
	I mean, if you watch Dr.
	Feynman's, Dr.
	Richard Feynman's, obviously a very famous physicist, he worked on that.
	I've read books of his years and years and years ago, and he's showing up on YouTube with a bunch of interviews.
	F-E-Y-N-M-A-N, I think.
	He talks about how his father would explain to him basic concepts of physics and, you know, what we knew and what we didn't know back in the day.
	So, obviously, his relationship with his father had a good deal to do with him becoming a physicist.
	But nobody would sit there and say, well, Dr.
	Feynman has submitted a physics paper, and we're going to determine whether it's true or false by examining his knowledge of his relationship with his father.
	I mean, that wouldn't be what we would do.
	If he was consistently self-sabotaging or causing problems, then it would be, you know, or if he was demonstrably wrong and wouldn't admit it, then that would be a worthwhile thing to examine.
	But yeah, I mean, there's no question that my childhood has had a motivating factor.
	In my political beliefs, or my philosophical arguments, and that doesn't make them right or wrong.
	But if, when disproven, I fight to the death and won't admit that I'm wrong and so on, then it's worth examining.
	I think it is worth asking these questions.
	I think they're very helpful just to make sure that you're not wasting time chasing ghosts who can never give you what you want.
	I mean, if you didn't get what you wanted as a child, there is no cure.
	There is no cure.
	And I'm very sorry for that.
	I'm very sorry for that.
	I'm very sorry for that.
	I really am.
	And, you know, just my thoughts is that Okay, so maybe the house is a little messy.
	Maybe some of your friends' relationships take a bit of a backseat for a while when your kids are very young.
	But I want my daughter to be holding my hand when I'm dying.
	I want her to know exactly what she meant to me and what she means to me.
	Right.
	And I have to earn that.
	I can't assume that.
	I want her to know what an unbelievable volcano supernova of positivity she is in my life.
	I want her to know that every day.
	That's why I ask her every day, did you feel loved today?
	How was your day?
	Is there any way your day could have been better?
	Is there anything I could have done differently?
	Really listen to those answers.
	And I want all of that You know, it's important to plan for the deathbed a little bit.
	Maybe not in your 20s so much.
	Oh, maybe more in your 20s, even so.
	But it's coming.
	You know, that conveyor belt with your coffin name on it is coming towards you day by day, inch by inch, unstoppably.
	And we don't even know how far it is away.
	Could be 40 years, could be 4 minutes.
	We don't know where the coffin is that is slithering its way on spider legs towards us.
	And so we do need to do the right thing.
	We do need to self-examine.
	We do need to understand where we're coming from.
	And we do need to prioritize.
	You know, my mother is old.
	I'm sure she's not long for this world.
	It's tragic.
	It's tragic that I cannot have a relationship with her.
	It's very sad.
	There is intimacy and depth in helping people into the great beyond.
	And I'm denied that.
	I'm denied that knowledge that she has.
	I'm denied all of that.
	And, I mean, this comes out of decisions that she made.
	So, I mean, this is a sort of vengeful part of me, so I just sort of share it with you as a part of me.
	But, you know, when I was a kid, I got seriously beaten up because I put a cup.
	I was playing with a friend.
	I got beaten up in front of the friend, in fact.
	I put a cup on a little end table that left one of those white rings that dries away, and it dried away in a couple of days.
	But my mother got so angry at that that she violently, of course, beat me up.
	And what I think of and what I see in my mind's eye as my mother gets older and older is she actually still has that end table.
	And that end table was much more important to her than I was.
	She wanted to protect the end table and demolish me.
	And so when she gets old and she's in a hospital bed and she's looking for a place to put her cup of water, she has her end table.
	Because that's where her priorities were.
	And that was the case for a lot of people when I was younger.
	And it's tragic.
	But these are the choices that we make.
	And, of course, because I'm aware of that, because I process that to a large degree, I never want anybody in my life to feel that they come second to stuff or to dust or to tidiness.
	I mean, I do these shows.
	I love these shows.
	It's great talking to all of you.
	It really is.
	I mean, it's an unbelievable high point of my week.
	It's an incredible privilege and honor.
	But I just don't want people who I love in my life to ever feel less than stuff or newspapers or mowing the lawn.
	I mean, these things need to be done.
	I understand that.
	I mean, I really do.
	I'm not saying, you know, sit and stare at people till you starve to death.
	But in the context, I never ever want to feel...
	I never want anyone to feel as I felt.
	And this is why it's so important to remember what you feel.
	If you can't self-empathize, you can't empathize with others.
	I remember how it felt to be aggressed against.
	And I don't want other people to feel that.
	Ever.
	Assuming that they're not...
	I mean I could definitely be harsh in my criticisms with people who are advocating violence against me.
	But that's fully in line with my belief that you treat people the best you can the first time you meet them and after that you treat them as they treat you.
	So I think it is worth self-examining and I think it is tragic if what you say, I'm sure I completely believe you, that your mother was interested in doing a lot of other things rather than interacting with you and playing with you and asking you what you wanted.
	Isn't it astounding that we can go through a relationship with parents or other people for 20 years without them ever sitting down and saying, what's your preference?
	How am I doing?
	As I said before, a pizza joint down the street sends me flyers with feedback.
	I picked up a sub from a shop the other day and at the bottom of the receipt was, go fill out this form of the internet about your sub experience and we'll give you free food.
	A sub shop asks, For my feedback and my preferences, it modifies its behavior accordingly.
	Every time I buy something from Amazon, they send me something saying, did you like it?
	Did you not like it?
	What's your thoughts?
	What's your feedback?
	Would you like to write a review?
	Feedback, feedback, feedback.
	But feedback requires voluntarism.
	And that's what I'm trying to promote in all relationships, state, family, religion.
	School.
	Voluntarism.
	Voluntarism is quality.
	There's no substitute and there are no shortcuts.
	There are no other ways to get to quality.
	So I hope that helps and I certainly do appreciate that You are thinking about these things, and it's very, very useful, I think.
	I appreciate you sharing that.
	I'm sorry, I don't think I had any hugely helpful insights, but I certainly appreciate you.
	No, no, that's all right.
	That corresponds a lot with where I am in my thought process right now.
	But the whole reason I came, I was so attracted to FDR was because You know, I realized that it offers something that you don't see anywhere in anarcho-communist communities.
	You know, here's someone actually talking about, you know, dealing with, you know, with applying freedom in your own personal relationship, you know what I mean?
	And I thought about it.
	I'm like, why is there no, you know, Stéphane Molyneux equivalent in the anarcho-communist community?
	And I came to realize, well, that would be almost anachronistic, wouldn't it?
	In a way.
	It doesn't make sense because those people don't, they're not really interested in...
	Yeah, look, if the political beliefs are a cover for prior trauma or a way of normalizing it or excusing it or avoiding it, then self-knowledge would be the opposite of that community, right?
	Right.
	I'm not interested in anything that doesn't come out of self-knowledge.
	Know thyself is the first commandment.
	I take that ugly bald bastard very seriously, Socrates.
	I mean, know thyself.
	I'm not saying he did a great job of it, otherwise he wouldn't have put a curse on the world that lasted 2,500 years when he was dying, but telling people to obey the state, that was his own lack of self-knowledge and his own passive-aggressive curse.
	I've got a whole series on YouTube about this called The Trial of the Death of Socrates.
	You can look more into the thesis, but If it doesn't come out of self-knowledge, then it is certain to be distorted.
	And the less it comes out of self-knowledge, the more not only is it distorted, but it has the capacity to distort other people's thinking.
	Yeah, I mean, look, I've had invitations out for years to anarcho-communists to come on the show and explain to me their thoughts and theories and so on.
	And, of course, it gives a great platform, hundreds of thousands of listeners, Quarter million downloads a week.
	Gives a great platform for people to get their ideas out.
	But they know that I'm going to ask them about themselves.
	Of course.
	Of course.
	If someone has an idea that they're very passionate about, the first thing that you need is to ask about the history.
	Because you can't, I mean, can't get to know people through abstractions.
	Particularly if those abstractions are covers for their own personal histories and an unwillingness or desire to avoid processing their past.
	You can get to know somebody by asking about their history.
	People, you know, first question, you know, how was your childhood?
	The first question is, how are you doing?
	What do you do for a living?
	How did you get here?
	Did you fly or did you crawl?
	Right?
	I mean, hi, how was your childhood?
	I mean, if you want to get to know someone.
	But that's taboo, right?
	Anyway, listen, I think we've got to do another quick caller before the end.
	I've got a couple of people waiting.
	Sorry for taking these long-ass chats, but I got to ride the beast as it comes.
	All right, thanks a lot.
	Alright, so up to you, but we have two more people left.
	First up, we have Nate.
	Yes.
	Oh, Nate, are you there?
	He fell asleep.
	No, sorry, can you hear me?
	I was being productive with my time.
	Oh, good.
	Well, you wouldn't want to do that by listening to the show.
	I always do chores or I do something while listening.
	It helps me think and the mind process go and everything, so...
	My question is in regard to parenting and the kind of dilemma which I'm faced now.
	About four months ago, I had a lot of change in my life.
	I've called them before and talked about that, you know, coming up in my family, telling them about these things I feel and truth and what that means to me.
	And it's pretty much as my life before has been destroyed, right?
	I've lost pretty much everything that I thought had meant something before and everything.
	But then it's been remade into something now, well, I'm starting to rebuild it into something that's a lot more positive and honestly something that I want.
	Now, in regards to that, I've lost, I mean, I'm getting divorced.
	I don't have the opportunity to see my kids.
	I'm going to be quitting my job, actually getting out of them.
	Sorry, why don't you have an opportunity to see your kids?
	Because I'm going to a different state with a mother.
	Sorry, the mother has moved to a different state?
	Yeah, she went two states away.
	After all this stuff came out, I started telling the truth about things and what I wanted in a relationship, and she just got scared.
	She couldn't deal with even talking about these things and left.
	Sorry, I don't...
	I mean, can she do that?
	I thought that there was some necessity to stay closer to the father.
	Yeah, she cannot do that, and we've talked about this, but I think about what that means.
	I've had this discussion with her, and I thought a lot about this, because all my friends...
	Well, my one true friend was telling me, he's like, look, that's not exactly right.
	And I said, you know what?
	You're right.
	I could.
	You know, I could get an attorney.
	I could have an injunction filed on the court.
	And then they would, if she didn't come back, then she would have, you know, or with a bench warrant or whatever, they would bring her back by force with our kids.
	But I think about that.
	What kind of trauma would that put the kids through?
	I thought about this for a lot, and I do not ever, ever, ever, ever again I want to be the one to put my kids through a trauma where they're upset or crying, because I've spanked before, I've been mad, but I've been going to therapy for six months now, working on myself, understanding my own corruptions, and moving past that.
	So when I thought about all this, I was like, I don't want to put them through anything where some strangers would come and take them away or bring them back.
	Can you move?
	Yes, that's what I'm going to do.
	That's my process.
	Okay, good, yeah.
	Yeah, because, I mean, obviously, if they don't see their dad, there's more trauma, right?
	Yes, I totally understand that, and I get that, and that's why I'm setting myself up and planning so I can get back to them 100% and be in their life all the time.
	Okay, good.
	Especially with what I'm about to tell you now.
	So, I was talking to my wife, well, I seem to be ex-wife, or the mother of my children, and About parenting, right?
	And I told her about, you know, I don't believe in spanking is, or I didn't call it spanking.
	I said hitting.
	I mean, you can call it spank if you want.
	That's what she does.
	That's what she calls it.
	But really, honestly, what you're doing is hitting your kid, is hitting our children, right?
	And I totally understand.
	I've spanked in the past, but I have, during research and listening to things, I've changed that opinion.
	I'm talking with a therapist and understand that those things are incorrect.
	And they're just wrong.
	They're wrong for the kids.
	Bottom line.
	And I told her these things and she said, well, I'm just going to continue to spank because I believe in it.
	And I was just like, I was kind of thinking, what do I do in that situation?
	And I brought this up to my therapist when I was talking to him.
	And he said, look, unfortunately, I mean, if there's abuse going on, like if they're being physically or mentally, emotionally abused, I can intercede and we can get that handled, right?
	But if there's not and it's just spanking, there's nothing a whole lot you can do.
	But he said what I could do was...
	Just be, what kind of the stuff that you've talked about, which I'm employing in my life now, is talk with them.
	Be actually there.
	Just not be there, sit on the floor playing with them, but ask them questions.
	Get involved in everything they do, who they are, help them to become the best individual that they want to, right?
	And to give them options, everything like that.
	And you said, that's honestly going to be the best way in the long run, where if they have conflicts within themselves, like, hey, why does mom spank and dad doesn't, and There's no violence at all when we go see dad, but mom gets upset and angry and yells at us.
	He's like, you're not going to make them choose sides.
	You're just going to say, hey, look, mom and dad do different things.
	Our parenting style is different.
	We do different things as opposed to how we see things differently, so we do things differently.
	Sorry, but that's not exactly true, right?
	Well, no, but this is what the therapist was telling me.
	He's like, yeah, that's not exactly true.
	I get it.
	It's...
	But to convey, I'm still learning.
	No, and look, I'm not saying I have a perfect solution.
	No.
	Not at all.
	I'm just, as long as you're conscious of the fact that you're going to be misrepresenting ethics to your children.
	Oh, yeah.
	Look, and I'm not saying that.
	That may be the right thing to do.
	I don't know.
	But I just really want you to be conscious of it so that you're aware of what you're doing and then can adapt it and adjust it if and when, you know, they're ready for the truth and so on.
	But it's not just a difference of opinion, right?
	It's not like, I like fish, she likes chicken.
	Yeah, I know what's talking about.
	Because you're really young right now, and it's the point where I don't want to influence their opinions about her in any way other than what they perceive and what they're able to comprehend and how they understand it as it comes to them.
	I want them to see the difference.
	And when they do this question, I will tell them, look, if we have a pet or something, we don't hit our pets.
	And the same thing is, you don't hit each other, and I don't hit you.
	And when they get to that point, I will let them know, like, hey, that's not right, because these are the things they were taught at school anyway, right?
	And the second issue, real quick, was I had another conversation.
	This took her back about four days ago.
	And she had sent me a picture of our kids, because now she got a job, and they're going to be going to daycare.
	I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old.
	And she sent me a picture of them sitting on this bench, and it upset me horribly because the younger one looked really sad.
	And the older one, he's kind of adjusted.
	He's been to preschool before, and so now he's going to kindergarten.
	Which I'm not okay with either.
	I would have preferred to homeschool than myself.
	But I see this picture, and my younger kid looks like he's really upset, right?
	And I feel intense sympathy and empathy for him because I can put myself in that situation, right?
	And I sent her a text message back and I said, look, I'm just going to be honest with you.
	That picture really upset me and I started crying almost immediately when I saw that and saw the look on his face.
	And it's like, this isn't right.
	This isn't right.
	I don't feel this is the right thing to be doing.
	And I said, look, I kind of feel like I failed in a way as of right now.
	And I said, what do you mean?
	She called me up like a minute after that and was telling me, well, the daycare is going to be the best thing for the kids and they need it.
	The structure, the social structure and everything.
	And they're going to teach them things in preschool that I wasn't.
	And I stopped right there and I said, wait a minute, okay.
	There's resources.
	This is not about money or anything like that.
	There's resources available that you can, you know, the internet's out there.
	You can get all these different websites about parenting styles and how to help teach your children things and how to encourage them to grow and to learn.
	And I got really upset about that.
	Not...
	Towards her, but I put it like this isn't what they need.
	What they need is to have their parents with them and to interact with them and to be there.
	I explained what I think.
	It's the parent's responsibility 100%.
	When you make that commitment to have a child, if you believe in any side of morality, ethics, you will be there in the best way possible.
	That means changing your whole entire outlook.
	If you truly care for the children, then that's what you'll do.
	Yeah.
	And I told her that, and she said, well, I just wasn't doing things.
	I was just playing with them, and I just don't want to do that.
	She doesn't want...
	She was just playing with them, and she considers that non-educational?
	Well, yeah.
	No, I told her that.
	Well, playing with them is good and everything.
	I understand that, but she doesn't want to help them...
	She doesn't want to help them to learn, like, to count or anything like that, or...
	I don't know.
	Or to teach them things like I would teach them, like, oh, you know, asking them questions...
	Wait, she doesn't want to teach them how to count?
	Well, all general aspects of education.
	Just as it continued to grow, she wasn't teaching them anything about sharing.
	She envisions they would get at daycare.
	You get what I'm saying?
	The interaction that they would get with other children while they were at daycare, they weren't getting with her is what she told me.
	Does she enjoy being a mother?
	Because, you know, I'm not trying to condition your answer, but the statistical fact is that most moms don't.
	I would say that she pays lip service to it, and she has the kids of the greatest, the most important thing in her life.
	But by her refusal not to even listen to the argument against hitting your children, I mean, your actions are telling me that you say one thing, but your actions are telling me that you really don't give a shit.
	Well, don't really give a shit.
	That's a very harsh phrase, right?
	I understand she's an ex and all that, but...
	No, no, no.
	That's probably not deep enough.
	And there's been...
	Yeah, that was...
	I apologize.
	I was a little over the top.
	No, no.
	It's a very dismissive phrase, and given that you're going to have a 20-year relationship with this mother of your children, I think you have to try and find a way to be more curious.
	No, definitely.
	I do whatever I can to not be inflammatory to the point where I don't want that anymore.
	We've had enough of that in our relationship.
	We don't need that to transfer that to the kids anymore than has already happened.
	I'm totally open.
	It's going to be as good as it possibly can be from here on out, but I'm not just going to lie down and not stand up for the things that are right for our children, right?
	Right.
	I'm not just going to roll over and say, okay, whatever you want, you know, because if I did that, I would not be fulfilling my responsibilities and not even caring and truly loving for my children.
	Right.
	And I forget where we were at before, a little minor tangent.
	Oh, I'm sorry.
	We were...
	I was asking whether she liked being...
	Oh, do you like my mother?
	Honestly, this goes to show you the corruptness of our relationship, or I just listened to one of your podcasts about fusion, and that's what our relationship was, was about fusion.
	I don't know.
	She says that she does, and the kids enjoy being around her.
	I think I've never had this opportunity to ask them that question recently, like face-to-face, and these conversations I want to have with them face-to-face because...
	That's more important to me so they can see me, see my reaction, see how I am, so I can kind of learn from example and see the calmness and reasoning and thinking.
	But honestly, I don't know.
	I honestly don't.
	She says she does, and she does fun things with them, but I don't think there's any interest in the things that are really fundamentally important that are going to help them be the best individuals possible in the long run.
	Right, right.
	Let me read you something.
	Just to maybe give you a sense of where your wife's emotions may be coming from.
	from.
	I don't know if this is true or not.
	So if you have more than one child, studies show that you have a negative impact on unhappiness.
	Most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still.
	That babies and toddlers are the hardest and that each successive child produces diminishing returns.
	Some of the studies are even grimmer.
	Robin Simon, a sociologist at Wake Forest University, says parents are more depressed than non-parents no matter what their circumstances, whether they're single or married, whether they have one child or four.
	The idea that parents are less happy than non-parents has become so commonplace in academia that it was big news last year when the Journal of Happiness Studies published a Scottish paper declaring the opposite was true.
	Contrary to much of the literature, said the introduction, our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large, and increasing in the number of children.
	Alas, the euphoria was short-lived.
	A few months later, the poor author discovered a coding error in his data, and the publication ran an erratum.
	After correcting the problem, it read, the main results of the paper no longer hold.
	The effects of children on life satisfaction of married individuals is small, often negative, and never statistically significant.
	Significant.
	And, you know, you can go on.
	But in general, parents have negative experiences of parenting.
	You know, statistical and in general, they really don't.
	Now, when the kids are sort of 6 to 12, they go to a latency period, it tends to improve.
	But toddlerhood and teenager-dom is just negative for parents.
	And this is an important thing.
	This is something that we, you know, we can't really admit as parents.
	And that I think is really, really important to understand.
	There is a kind of belief, right?
	So let me just give you a bit more information.
	So a bunch of psychologists in 2003 did a meta-analysis of 97 children and marital satisfaction studies stretching back to the 70s.
	Not only did they find that couples' overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids, they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last.
	Our current one most of all.
	Even more surprisingly, they found that parents' dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more childcare.
	And we don't really sort of need to go into the hypothesis.
	I'll share this on the podcast notes.
	But it is generally, for most people, it is a negative experience to have children.
	And it's a really long negative experience to have children.
	I mean, it's the rest of your life.
	Now, of course, I don't think that it is necessarily true for everyone and for everything.
	And countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children and happier parents, so in Denmark they tend to be happier.
	In the US it's particularly brutal as far as raising kids.
	There's just a smoking crater where families, that we sort of, like traditional families used to be, for a variety of reasons we've talked about before.
	But our inability to process the negative aspects of parenting Comes out somewhere.
	And it usually comes out as hostility towards or indifference towards our children.
	And so, I think it may be a useful conversation to have, if you can.
	I don't know what your relationship is like with your ex.
	But just to say, you know, there are all these studies that I was looking at.
	I mean, what's your experience?
	Do you think it's been a positive thing or a negative thing?
	You can have a very productive conversation about that.
	I mean, that's certainly not my experience of parenting.
	My experience of parenting is fantastic.
	I mean, that always sounds like a big advertisement for myself.
	But I mean, genuinely is true.
	And I think that the reason that people have a bad time with their children and why people get depressed is because most parents are acting badly towards their children.
	And when you act badly, you get sad, you get angry, you get frustrated.
	You know, when you do the wrong thing, there's a conscience which...
	It lays us low.
	And so I think that because people have not made the commitment to voluntary and nonviolent parenting and so on, then they generally end up with a more negative experience.
	We don't assume that people who hit their wives are very happy people.
	And we can't assume that people who hit their children are all kinds of happy and proud of what they're doing.
	So I think it's not anything innate to parenting.
	It is how parents act.
	I don't think that it's because there's a strong welfare state that happier parents.
	I think it's because those...
	I mean, Denmark has banned spanking for many, many years.
	So they have a sense of how children are and how they should be.
	And, you know, their humanity and empathy and so on.
	So I just really wanted to...
	To point out that she may not be like if this is all a cover story right you want to make sure you're dealing with the real issues in whatever interactions or at least not pretend to deal with the non-issue so she's like well I don't want to teach them how to count but the reality is I don't really enjoy parenting I'm not don't feel like I'm doing a good job I can't admit that so I need to put my kids somewhere else so that I can get some relief from who I am when I'm around my children and In other words, I'm putting mom outside the house by putting my children outside the house.
	If that's the reality, then talking about homeschooling resources isn't going to solve the problem, right?
	Gotcha.
	And so, yeah, my general principle is we either deal with the real issues or we just don't deal with them at all.
	But I'm not going to pretend issue my life away, right?
	Because it's just too frustrating.
	Yeah.
	First principles, right?
	Like you always say.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so I would have a conversation about that.
	Okay.
	I was going to bring that up.
	I also wanted to just tell you how amazingly impressive you are as a dad and how lucky, how lucky, incredibly lucky your children are to have you in their lives.
	And I mean, that's so astoundingly great that I know it's hard as hell, but...
	I mean, good for you, man.
	Fantastic for you.
	Good at getting therapy.
	I'm real sorry about the divorce.
	I mean, that's just tragic.
	But fantastic.
	I mean, I just don't have words.
	I have a lot of words, but I don't have enough words for my admiration for what it is you're doing.
	So thank you for everyone, I think I say, particularly your kids.
	But thank you so much for everything that you're doing, the sensitivity, compassion, commitment that you have to making your children's lives great.
	That is the most important thing in the world.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	Appreciate it.
	You're welcome.
	And yeah, let me know how it goes if you get a chance.
	Definitely, I will.
	Thanks.
	All right.
	If the last question is quick, but it's kind of late and I'm hungry, but...
	Asker, if it's quick, go right ahead.
	Hit me.
	I'm sorry that you got the tail end.
	I apologize for that.
	That's all right.
	I've called in four, so it's fine.
	Can you hear me all right?
	Yes, perfectly.
	Oh, great, great.
	Well, what I wanted to ask you was, I really enjoyed the lecture you gave about, called Essex Sucks.
	Oh, yeah, I've got the second part of that, actually.
	I only have the audio so far, but I hope to get the video soon, but thank you.
	Oh, yeah, it was very enlightening, very good, very good.
	But you posed a very enlightening Interesting question in that, and it was, why should we do the right thing?
	How do we have MPB and everything so that we can say, well, such and such a thing is wrong to do, and such and such a thing is the right thing to do.
	Then you gave the example of Jenkins Kahn, who was a bad, bad man, but also a very successful primate.
	But before that, I just want to quickly mention that I have a subscription to this newspaper every Sunday, this sort of socialist kind of newspaper.
	And it's because we don't have a libertarian newspaper.
	And the socialists, they're more likely to sort of stumble into something reasonable than the conservative newspaper.
	But my newspaper got stolen today, so I only have the internet version.
	But much to my pleasure, I found this.
	This article is a book written by psychology and she gets interviewed and it's called 80-90% of people experience unpleasantness from their childhoods.
	And then it goes on to say, and then in the interview, she says here, this journalist asks, how to determine if you should break off contact with your family.
	I just wanted to mention that they're sort of beginning to sort of point out that, hey, it's voluntary whether or not you want to be with your parents.
	So, just wanted to quick mention that.
	Let's get back to the thing with the...
	Sorry, let me just mention as well.
	I mean, it is slowly coming to the mainstream, right?
	I mean...
	Dr.
	Phil is pretty mainstream, obviously, in terms of psychology.
	He's got two past presidents of the American Psychological Association on his board and, you know, some of the most famous psychologists in the world.
	And there's a little thing here, which is on his website, which is approved by his board and all of that.
	So we can assume that this is mainstream psychology.
	And in an article on his website called, If You Were Abused, it says, The emotional wounds caused by parental abuse can last long beyond childhood.
	If you want to rebuild a relationship with your parent now that you're both adults, Dr.
	Phil has some advice.
	One, be heard.
	You won't be able to repair the relationship until your parent fully understands how the abuse has affected you.
	He or she may feel guilty, but you're the one who needs to be helped.
	Which is certainly, I mean, my advice has been sit down with your parents and so on, talk to them about your history and...
	So he's saying there's a standard here.
	Until your parents admit that they harmed you, you can't repair the relationship.
	It's impossible.
	So it's up to the parents, right?
	Redefine the relationship.
	It's up to you to express yourself.
	Tell your parent what you need now that you're not getting.
	Be honest and clear.
	This is your chance to say exactly what you need emotionally.
	Nothing can change the past, but you can create a new history with your parents.
	Treat each other as the people you are now.
	Fantastic.
	So talk about what you need.
	This is all stuff that I've said.
	Of course, I'm no psychologist, but this is just common sense.
	And most importantly, he says, or most new, I mean, this is very traditional, but what's new is do what is best for you.
	Consider the possibility that it may not be healthy to have any sort of relationship with your parents.
	It's a difficult pill to swallow and it should be used as the last option.
	However, it may be the option that helps you the most.
	And that's, I mean, I've certainly been saying that for years, that you can have as a possibility to not have a relationship with an abusive parent if you can't find a way to not be abused and to not have denial and all that sort of negative stuff.
	So, I mean, that's, you know, mainstream Dr.
	Phil stuff.
	This is all kind of new, at least as far as I know.
	And I was watching a Dr.
	Phil show the other day where he told...
	It was just a verbally abusive dad who was actually dying.
	He was very sick.
	And he said to the two teenage boys, you know, if you can't fix things with your dad, you need to move on.
	He said, honor thy mother and thy father doesn't mean that they walk all over you for the rest of your life.
	And so the idea of volunteerism within the adult...
	Well, those were even teenagers.
	They were sort of in their mid-teens, so it was quite a pretty radical step.
	And there was another show, actually, where...
	A woman was having lots of fights.
	A girl, she was 15.
	She had lots of fights with her family and at the end of the show he basically just took her out of the family.
	He sent her to another facility and he said you can stay there as long as you like.
	There was no Or no, with the goal of reintegrating or anything like that, he just took her out of the environment.
	So there does seem to be spreading in mainstream psychological circles the idea that it can be spoken of to have voluntarism in the adult-parent-child relationship in the same way that we do with the adult-spousal relationship.
	So it's coming along.
	It's, you know, it's slow, it's difficult, it's painful, and it runs up against the honor of their mother and their father, which is what Dr.
	Phil tried to address in his conversation with this...
	I think he was a 15-year-old boy who basically was saying you shouldn't have a relationship with your father if you can't get him to treat you, to not verbally abuse you.
	There was no sexual abuse, no physical abuse that I can recall in the show, but the father was pretty harsh verbally.
	And so it's, you know, it's coming.
	It's coming along, but it is, of course, a slow and difficult process.
	There's a lot of prejudice against the idea of voluntarism in adult-parent-child relationships.
	So anyway, the main thing that I just want to mention is because I just watched the article just before I called.
	Now, I was having a conversation with some of my friends because it was my birthday this Friday, so we were at the party and so before we got to, you know, we started talking and I And I started to sort of pose this question on to why should we do the right thing, since it seems to be so much better to do the wrong thing, to be bad.
	But being bad seems better than being good.
	So why should we?
	And so what I sort of try to say is that you need to do the right thing to get a reward, in a sense, because you need to do the right thing in order to be able...
	You need to be virtuous because love is the response to virtue.
	So you need people to love you, and you need to love yourself, and you can't do that unless you're virtuous.
	I don't know if that was sort of...
	Yeah, I mean, there's...
	But this is the carrot and the stick mentality, that you should be virtuous to gain the reward called love.
	But the problem, of course, with that is that being virtuous usually gathers you a lot more enmity than it does love, at least for the first while, right?
	We just remember back on the first caller who was having trouble with her colleagues for speaking about universal principles.
	So I don't think you can make an argument from effect for virtue.
	It's pretty hard in the world to be a good person and to advocate for virtue because...
	If you advocate for virtue, then you negatively impact the self-interest of immoral people who will then, you know, try to make your life difficult.
	So, you know, I don't think that we can make that case.
	It's like trying to say, well, we should be scientific because there's all these benefits to science.
	No, we should be scientific because that's the only way to determine truth from falsehood.
	Right?
	Being virtuous just means being honest.
	All virtue, as I said before, the first virtue is always honesty.
	And so the first virtue is, you know, why should we refrain from stealing?
	Because it's the only way...
	That we can conform to a universal principle.
	We say, why do I want to conform to a universal principle?
	Because that's called honesty.
	It's called being honest and being consistent, being factual.
	And because that's what we do anyway.
	We conform to the universal principle of gravity all the time.
	And so, if you're going to conform to a universal principle called physics, gravity, eating, sleeping, putting clothes on, not putting your gloves on your feet and your shoes on your hands, Then you've already got this principle called conform with universality.
	So rather than split your mind up into a thousand different areas called here's where I conform to universality and here's where I don't and so on and I'm gonna tell children that morality is absolute but I'm gonna tell adults that it's relative and right I mean just you know stop lying about I mean you but just stop lying about morality And just accept that these are just universal principles and we conform to them because that's called sanity, because that's called consistency, and because we can't be honest with ourselves if we break that.
	We have to end up lying to ourselves about all of that stuff, and that has negative effects.
	Those are scientifically...
	People who lie have negative effects in their brains.
	This is pretty easy to scan and to measure.
	I know that's an argument from effect, but...
	I just, you know, that's called universal consistency.
	And the moment you point out people's arguments are inconsistent, then they have a drive to make them consistent.
	And they usually do that by attacking you, try to make them consistent.
	But it causes people distress when their values are shown to be inconsistent, which is why people get so upset with taxation is theft.
	And so...
	We have it now.
	There are, I guess, a few people who don't care about consistency at all, like a sociopath or whatever, and you don't want to be getting into moral arguments with those people.
	That's like getting into a man-eating contest with a lion.
	He's going to win.
	So, yeah, that would be my...
	I just don't think you can say, well, you know, if you're virtuous, you'll get love.
	You can't make that guarantee, and you'll get a lot of enmity along the way.
	Yeah, that's the same thing.
	Why should we be libertarians?
	Why should we limit government power?
	Well, see, if we do that, then the engineers like me will make all kinds of cool shit.
	Yeah, we should have the free market because we'll get an iPhone 6 in our brain in six months.
	Well, I mean, I can't predict that and I don't care.
	You know, you can certainly say this to parents.
	You say, well, why should we oppose the state?
	Well, for the same reason that you tell your children not to belt other children.
	I mean, unless you're willing to say to your children, belting other children is fine, which parents aren't going to do, very few.
	Right?
	So then, okay, so why is the morality applicable to a four-year-old or a three-year-old but not a 30 or 40 or 50-year-old?
	I mean, come on.
	If you're going to have absolute moral standards with your kids, then stop bullshitting about how society should be run because we already know how it should be run.
	It should be run exactly along the principles that we tell our children.
	Or let's stop telling our children that and be consistent with everything's relative and, of course, if you can get your friends and You know, corner some kid who's got lunch money.
	Well, you outnumber him.
	You have a vote.
	You take his lunch money because that's how we run democracy.
	So that's what we should do for children.
	But whenever we try to take government ethics, so to speak, and apply them to how we raise our children, our stomachs churn, our stomachs turn, and we think it's repellent.
	Well, that's a clue right there.
	Well, as I said, you know, it's a – see, I have these friends because I lived in – Just when I moved from my hometown in Denmark, I moved to Aarhus.
	I don't know if you've heard of the town.
	It's the second biggest town in Denmark and has the university and the engineering college.
	So I moved there and the first place I got was this dormitory or this sort of like this old house with a lot of rooms in there.
	That was me and then all other were international students.
	I befriended many of them that I gotta say, I mean, I feel like I've had a lot of success trying to communicate these sort of rational principles and saying things like, you know, we should be rational, we should be virtuous and all of that.
	Some of them seem to put up defenses, like I was saying, well, honesty is virtue because it's universally preferred against dishonesty, right?
	And...
	Well, sorry, that's not quite correct.
	I mean, it's not universally preferred against dishonesty, because if it were universally preferred, we wouldn't need an ethical system, because there'd be...
	Anyway, we don't have to get into the technicalities of it, but the language is important to be precise.
	But, sorry, go on with your story.
	No, no, but please correct me.
	What is the correct way of saying it, then?
	Well, honesty is not universally preferred.
	Honesty is like nonviolence.
	I mean, it is preferred unless you're in a situation of violence.
	Then you've got self-defense, right?
	So, honesty is not preferred when you're in a situation of violence.
	You know, if a torturer says, where does it hurt the most when I do X? You obviously aren't going to...
	Well, I have to be honest with this person and tell him that it hurts the most when he does X, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, honesty is not a universal preference...
	But for something to be true it has to be universal and ethics is a claim of universal preferences.
	Otherwise it's aesthetics or personal preferences or whatever.
	It's almost a tautology but ethics is a claim of universal preference and if it's a claim of universal preference it actually has to be universal.
	That's all.
	If you're going to claim something is universal it has to be universal.
	Again that's almost a tautology but it is something that we forget so often.
	And so if the initiation of force is wrong, then it has to be universal, which means it's not different for a guy in a blue costume or a green costume or a politician or whoever, right?
	Guy or S-agent.
	I mean, it's universal.
	That's all.
	All we're saying is that if all warm-blooded creatures who suckle their young are mammals, then all warm-blooded creatures who suckle their young have to be mammals.
	You can't just create these magical exceptions.
	I'm going to put a hat on this lizard and call it a mammal, right?
	I mean, if you're going to make a universal statement, it has to be universal.
	That's all.
	You've got this inverse square law that is applicable to the entire universe.
	Then you can't create a corner of structure where it's not.
	I mean, you can, but then it's no longer universal.
	So that's all it is.
	If people are going to make claims about ethics, which are universal claims, they have to be universal.
	They cannot create magical exceptions.
	Then they're no longer talking about ethics.
	They're talking about, well, culture, frankly, but there's nothing.
	No, nothing is ethically binding on something which is not universal.
	I got a little confused there.
	Can you...
	I just want to be able to be precise and correct.
	Philosophy is not my field of study.
	But then, if someone came up to me and said, hey, listen, honesty is not really virtuous, how can I sort of prove to him, what logical thing could I say to him, other than, well, it's virtuous because it's universally preferred?
	No, but you don't see, but when somebody comes up to you With something like, honesty is not really virtuous.
	There's a couple of things.
	But the first thing you ask is questions.
	You don't try and give answers.
	Because you may not even be talking about the same thing at all.
	In fact, you're probably not.
	You know, when he says virtuous, does he mean personally advantageous in every situation?
	What does he even mean by the word virtue?
	You know, when people talk about the state, what are they talking about?
	Do they mean a benevolent, quasi-paternalistic social agency that exists to smooth out conflicts in society and help people?
	I mean, you don't even know what people are talking about.
	We don't, you know, if you're going to invent a new language, you have to, I mean, we're trying to take over these, take back the words, right?
	So I would ask, if somebody comes to me and says, honesty is not a virtue, then I would say, well, are you being honest right now?
	And if the person says yes, then I'd say, well, then you're not being virtuous.
	Is that right?
	So why are you inflicting a lack of virtue?
	And if the person says, well, I am being honest, says, okay, well, then what's the moral status of what you're doing?
	And then I would ask, well, what is morality?
	I mean, this is Socratic questioning.
	This is Socratic reasoning.
	You just got to read your Plato.
	I mean, he's the guy who wrote down everything he was supposed to have said.
	But you ask questions.
	What do you mean by virtue?
	What do you mean by honesty?
	What do you mean by, you know, what are your definitions of these terms?
	Everybody wants to rush in with colliding definitions and you end up not being talking about the same thing at all.
	Like when people say, "I want the states," what they mean is they want poor people to be helped.
	They want sick people to get medical care and so on, right?
	And now if you're arguing against that, then...
	To them, you're arguing against poor people getting help and sick people getting medical care.
	I mean, you can't win that argument because who doesn't want sick people?
	They all want sick people to get health care.
	But that's not what the state is.
	That's not the definition of the state.
	That's a bag of wish fulfillment that people can project all of their crazy unmet childhood needs into, in my opinion.
	But you just ask, what is it that you're talking about?
	What is our discussion here?
	What is virtue?
	What is truth?
	Where are you coming from?
	It's the asking.
	It's the asking that counts in philosophy, not the answers.
	Yeah.
	Well, listen, Steph, it was nice talking to you.
	I'm grateful you wanted to go over, but it also means that I need to get on my scooter right now to make it to the store before they close.
	Okay, go, go, go.
	And listen, call back.
	I love ethics.
	It's my favorite chat.
	So call back in next week if you get a chance, and we'll pick it up.
	Yeah, later.
	Okay, bye.
	Thanks, everyone.
	Don't forget, fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
	If you want to help out, it would be hugely appreciated.
	If we get enough donations, of course, we can get the movie out, get the resources to get the movie out by the election, which I would really like to do.
	But that, my friends, is a little bit more up to you than it is up to me.
	So thank you so much for all of your support and your help.
	And thanks for a great show.

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