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Oct. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:40
2226 Who Is Responsible for the Failures of Government?

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on the Vinny Eastwood show.

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I'm here today with the fabulous Stefan Molyneux, the host of Free Domain Radio.
Stefan, welcome again.
You know, haven't talked to you in a while, mate.
Oh, it's good to be back.
How are you doing, man?
I'm good, man.
I think the last time we talked was just before New Year's 2012.
We had a few predictions for the year, and I came up with my New Year's resolution.
2012!
Time to stop fucking around.
Ha ha ha ha!
Okay, I can see a t-shirt, possibly a tattoo, some skywriting, that could work.
So how is your life?
How is your activism?
How is your world-changing broadcasting brain?
Well, it's coming into a real heightened sense of things.
Have you ever seen the movie 300?
I have not, but I hear it has 300 abs per human being.
It does.
And the whole idea of what I was trying to reference here is that when things are speeding up, when you're under a lot more pressure and things like that, you get a heightened sense of things.
And other opportunities start to kind of open up all over the place.
Like I've been offered a radio show by two competing networks like last week kind of thing.
Congratulations.
I had to turn them down as a thing because they're not quite as good as American Freedom Radio.
I like the ad structure and basically the team there and all of that sort of thing.
So for the first time ever, I've had to turn down opportunities.
And this is a new experience for me.
That's good.
That's good.
Yeah, I'm always a little leery of radio.
I've had a bunch of offers.
I've mulled them over, but I... I really love the podcast.
I love the non-interruptions.
I love the cussability.
It's really hard for me to not stay in the podcast world.
It would have to be something quite extraordinary, so I'm very content with where things are.
Yeah, and ultimately it just comes down to show me the money.
If you're going to get me to do something for free, why should I sacrifice anything that I've got?
Right, right, right.
Because we're all in this for the money, baby.
There's no wealth like alternate media.
Oh yeah, totally.
It's a license to print money.
And in fact, if you ask truthers to pay you and stuff like that, that's almost guaranteed you won't get a show.
Well, you know what it is though?
I mean, for me, the voluntary payment thing, you know, like I have no ads, I'm totally donation-based.
It really, really makes me strive for quality, for innovation, for unusual stuff, for new approaches.
And that to me is kind of irresistible.
The more voluntary the relationship is, usually the more quality the relationship is, right?
There's no happy marriage if it's all arranged.
And so I really do like, I know this is not exactly maybe on topic for the show, but I really like the high wire act of pure donations because it really does challenge me to try and produce as much quality as possible.
I think that, again, you have to be on a similar playing field with your audience if you want to do that.
And I'm kind of like, why do one or the other?
Do both, preferably.
But the whole idea is to try and just survive yourself, right?
And if you get any more than what's necessary for your survival, you use that to improve the quality of the shows and things that you're doing and try to do more good with it sort of thing.
Money comes in and money goes out as they say.
For a truther, it's even faster.
It flows out like a tsunami.
Yeah.
I mean that guy, I can't remember his name.
I think he was an architect and he was just driving in his car one day, heard a bunch of 911 stuff.
That became his life.
He gave up his career.
I think he ended up losing his family.
You know, the truth can be a bit of a witch sometimes.
And for me, it's like if I get any money, it's like I'm just at the moment midstream producing a documentary on philosophy and the moral root or moral cause of the world's ills and ailments.
You know, we always describe it to politics or economic self-interest.
But to me, the fundamental problem with the world is that we have completely lost track of what it means to be a good human being, of what it means to be a righteous and noble and brave human being.
And so, yeah, now I'm just pouring thousands and thousands of dollars into a documentary because I think that's the important thing.
I would sure hate to hang on to all this money, have the economy go completely in the crapper without having spent it on something that might do something to avert the worst, or at least if the worst comes, to have enough people illuminated that the truth has a fighting chance, and that's always been my preference.
The whole innovation thing, I was just thinking about this, the New World Order apparatus and the music industry, film industry, all of that kind of stuff, they make you try and climb all these ladders and get up this hierarchy and things like that, and I'm like, I'm just going to build my own ladder.
Oh, yeah, I mean, the entertainment industry is unbelievably corrupt.
Do you know, I mean, Hollywood, you don't really hear much about it, of course, but Hollywood gets about a billion and a half dollars a year in tax breaks that it pursues very avidly and lobbies for very avidly.
And so it's funny because, you know, the movies are all kind of lefty and let's, you know, the poor people who need our help and the evil rich capitalists and all this and that and the other.
That kind of art can only come out of a psychological phenomenon called projection, which is that they are the greedy capitalists who are shafting the little guys because they're all about, well, we're all in this together.
We need a social safety net.
We need welfare, the poor people and so on.
But they are all the ones who are seeking out as massive a set of tax breaks as they can.
Well, who do they think is going to pay for all of the social programs that they keep promoting in their movies and all of the socialism that they keep promoting?
Like Michael Moore hotly pursued a million dollar tax break for one of his last – I think it was for capitalism.
And capitalism, a love story.
I mean, what does he think?
How does he think that million dollar shortfall gets paid up?
Well, it gets paid up by the government printing more money, which causes inflation for the poor people, which is just terrible.
Disastrous for people on fixed income.
You might as well be taking, you know, sticks of bread out of a granny's mouth, along with her dentures and her blue rinse.
Or it gets tax increases which generally fall upon those whose capital or labor is the least nimble.
So if you can do offshore accounts and all that kind of funky-dunky Penn and Teller Vegas shifter work, then you're fine.
But if you're kind of stuck plodding along in a salary position, you're taxed by the savage.
Or it's paid for through debt, which means that the unborn, the children-to-be are the ones who are going to have to pay Cash plus endless amounts of near-infinite interest.
So it's just so funny.
I mean, all these socialists, I mean, and most of the people in the arts world, I sort of come out of the arts world, incredibly lefty.
I mean, they seek out every single conceivable tax break that they can and then preach to all of us that we need to help out the poor.
I mean, it's just typical gut-busting, stomach-turning, basic human hypocrisy that just really seems to be the vogue these days.
Like all these people in Europe rioting over austerity measures, austerity measures, dear God in heaven.
I mean, all you have to do is look at the graphs.
Very Nick de Rougie, who's been on my show as an economist, produced a whole bunch of graphs.
It shows that spending has barely budged.
All that's happened is that the massive tumoresque growth in the welfare state has hit a slight wall as lenders are no longer willing to keep spraying the fire hose of infinite cash at governments.
So there's a slight slowdown in the rate of increase and everybody's saying that this is austerity.
It's like the 400-pound guy saying, well, what do you mean I'm not going to have 10,000 calories at my next meal?
What do you mean it's only going to be 9,900?
Oh my god, you're putting me on a starvation diet and All these people rioting and, oh man, it's just, ugh, it's stomach turning.
I mean, what has become of us as a civilization and as a species?
I'm almost done by rant, I promise.
What the hell has become of us?
I mean, we fought back the superstition of the Catholic...
We're a fundamentalist church, the equivalent of the Islamic church in many ways now.
We fought that back as a culture.
We brought forth science and reason, which, you know, to the credit had been kept by the church during the Dark Ages and kept by the Muslims during the Middle Ages.
But we fought forward with science and reason.
We beat back the fogs of superstition.
We beat back fascism, beat back Nazism.
People sacrificed immensely.
And now you say to people, well, listen, your pension might not be able to rise with inflation.
And rather than say, well, you know, it's a pretty good riot.
I get that everyone's in debt.
Everyone's like, no, tax the other guy.
I'm going to riot.
My God, what happened to our spine as a culture?
It's repulsive.
I think the spine was deliberately dissolved inch by inch, day by day, by an eclectic mix of mind control, poor diet, and basically complacency and convenience.
Well, I mean, look.
I mean, you're a young guy.
How long have you been pounding your head against this brick wall?
I don't know.
I don't think I ever started.
No, no, but I mean trying to change, trying to illuminate, trying to enlighten people.
Five years.
Five years, give it to me.
Five years.
All right.
And how's it been going for you overall?
What's your reception been like?
It's been extraordinarily good.
For the first three years, I wasn't even so much as able to buy myself a cup of coffee.
Other people would take me out for coffee.
That was how I was able to live without staying at home and being miserable the whole time.
And now, if I say to people, oh my god, I'm being kicked out of my house, I need like $2,500 or something like that to pay the bond and the rent in advance and blah blah blah to move into a new place, within 72 hours, I've got that money from the listeners.
It's like, wow!
I'm now trying to help people.
And as a result, people come back and directly help me.
Now, that's just me getting out there.
The problem is quantifying it and the effect that you have on the New World Order apparatus.
Has any of these politicians that I've been exposing on the radio and YouTube and stuff and ambushing in person with a camera, have any of them gone to jail?
No.
Have any of them been investigated?
No.
Are they still vaccinating everybody against their will?
Yeah.
Are they still selling aspartame to everyone?
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So, I mean, obviously it's great that you're getting some cash for what it is that you're doing.
That's a good measure.
That's a measure of your impact on individuals filtered by the internet, right?
So, you know, most people know like 100 or 200 people sort of growing up.
And if those 100 or 200 people, you know, friends, family, relatives and so on, schoolmates and all that, how many of those have you brought around to reason and evidence?
My family are now on side.
They used to think I was crazy.
I think my brother told me something in the car.
It was real funny.
He said, I asked him, do you think I'm crazy, bro?
And he's like, nah, I just think you need to grow up a bit, you know.
But now he's listening to my radio show and going, fra.
You're so talented and this is amazing.
And my sister Janine, she invited me to a skeptic society meeting.
She qualifies herself as a skeptic.
I don't know what that is.
What is a skeptic?
A skeptic.
Oh, sorry, sorry.
Colony accent threw me off a little there.
I'm back, baby.
I got it.
It's like some kind of a dick that has much skep.
Right.
Spring in their skips, so to speak.
And the subject matter was GMOs, genetic engineering, stuff like that.
And it was like, oh, a pro debate or a negative debate.
So there's this obviously very young, only fresh drafted out of university, totally brainwashed by the GMO Monsanto funded propaganda.
Saying, oh, it's all good.
It's great.
We're going to feed people.
It's going to be sweet as.
No mention of the rats with the giant tumors.
No mention of the Indian farmers getting exterminated.
No mention of the Terminator seeds.
No mention of the giant apparatus and all of that kind of stuff.
But she did mention, on the other hand, the possibility that because of Monsanto's patenting of foods and things of that nature, eventually they could control the entire world's food supply.
And my sister was very, very, very, very suspicious about that stuff, okay?
And she asked a question, and it wasn't answered to a satisfactory thing.
And on the way home, she asked me, Vinny, is this GMO agenda tied to chemtrails at all?
Gotcha.
It only takes a couple of times for somebody to see something and have it pring in their mind from other sources, maybe two or three, maybe even four or five, doesn't matter how many times it takes.
Everybody is possible to wake up, but the thing is, you can't force it.
They have to see it for themselves, kind of like the Matrix in a way.
So now my entire family, apart from my sister Marcy and Cherie, but the They never like me anyway.
They're still hitting the sand.
But my mother listens to my show now.
My dad's new wife and stuff like that does as well.
All of my friends are starting to become truthers and the top activists in the world.
You know, people like yourself, Stefan, you know, we're on a friendly, you know...
A basis and things like that.
It's because, you know, I'm not trying to force anybody into anything.
I'm just trying to speak my truth and how I feel in my heart.
And many people resonate with that.
Well, that's fantastic.
Good for you.
I find that, I mean, I have a pretty big audience, I guess.
We're just about 40, 45 million downloads since I started.
I really feel like, you know, it's like, you know, when they create jobs in the US, I think they need like 100, 150,000 new jobs a year just to keep pace with the growth and inflation.
So I just feel like we have to go out and build activists and build enlightened souls.
And it takes a lot of skill and it takes a lot of work.
And it's like making some incredibly complex pottery or something like that.
But, of course, the government schools are just pumping out these statist zombies at a rate that I don't know how we can keep up, how we can keep up.
And what I find astounding is, I guess it's not really astounding, but what I find a little shocking still even now is, I mean, if you look at the problems of the economy, I mean, the problems in all of the Western economies and massive government growth, Unfunded liabilities, like there's some estimates, fairly credible estimates from like university professors, the unfunded liabilities that the US government has are over $200 trillion.
Trillion!
It's completely unfathomable amounts of money that have been promised and spent and blown and so on.
And the same thing, of course, in Europe.
And you can't find a single person in the mainstream media who ever is saying, One of two things has happened.
Either people can't do basic math as voters, and they think that you can just keep spending and keep going into debt and keep spending forever.
And if they can't do basic math and they don't understand, that's not even economics.
That's just, how do I handle my allowance?
You know, this is not very complicated stuff.
They either have no understanding of money and no understanding of math, in which case the government schools are doing their job, so to speak, in which case we should change the government schooling system.
Or people have an understanding that this can't go on forever, that the day of reckoning the bill is coming out of the mail and coming into the mailbox and coming into your hand, usually with some wires and a cordite smell to it.
In which case, then you're sort of like somebody now who's like, well, yeah, I did smoke a pack a day for 30 years.
I can't believe I got sick.
I mean, who could have guessed?
It's unfathomable.
I mean, how is it possible that people can say with a straight face, That this comes as any kind of surprise.
I mean, it just astounds me.
I mean, and everybody's complicit in pretending that this was not all completely mathematically predictable.
And there's so many elements and ins and outs to it to even try and explain it to people.
It's like the depth of the conspiracy is so much that to understand it would make you go insane.
So if you've somehow managed to comprehend even a small part of this and you try to explain it to somebody else, they think, man, you're nuts.
And if I keep listening to you, I'll go nuts too.
So they avoid it.
Yeah, I think there is, it's that old Goebbels thing, you know, like if you're going to lie, Make it such a staggeringly huge lie that to cease believing it, it almost feels like to people that they cease existing.
You know, if you can get people to base their entire personality on falsehoods like nationalism, you know, like some sort of cultural reference like superstition or religiosity, if you can get people to found their entire personalities on lies that are so fundamental, they're like the laws of physics.
Then getting people to disbelieve in that lies, it almost feels like, I think it feels to people like you're turning them into ghosts, like you're in a sense killing their identity.
And that of course is an old, it's an old story, you know, you have to bury yourself in order to be resurrected.
But I think once the lie is so big that people base their personalities on it, unraveling the lie is like dissolving people.
And I think they react like there's some sort of attack.
Yeah, like somebody's poured acid on them or something.
Ah!
Yeah, yeah.
I'm melting.
Because it's not just what they believe and what they believe their relationship is to their society.
But it's, of course, all of their friends, their family.
It's also embedded.
It's also embedded in people that to ask people to begin to reason from first principles to simply look at evidence and to look at the numbers and to look at the facts.
And it's so strange, you know, because we all understand, like we all understand that If you're an advertising company and you get a contract from Coca-Cola, you're not going to produce an ad that says, Coca-Cola, excellent at rotting enamel, excellent at making you fat, excellent at causing throat problems.
That's the joy of Coke.
We all understand that if you are paid by Coca-Cola as an advertising company, you're going to produce...
People who have impossibly white teeth and possibly skinny bellies who don't drink Coca-Cola except possibly in the commercial, at which point they probably spit it out between takes.
But I mean, you understand.
But then when you say, well, wouldn't the same thing be true of government schools?
And people are just like, what?
No, no, no.
You see, government schools are completely objective.
But when an advertising company is paid by Coca-Cola, they skew everything to favor Coca-Cola.
It's like, but you believe the government is necessary.
You believe that force is not force.
It's a social contract.
You believe that taxation is voluntary.
You believe that without the government, it would be some radioactive wasteland of Mohawk hatchet-wielding lunatics on sidecar motorcycles screaming through things fighting over gas.
You believe these apocalyptic stories.
Do you not think that if...
Advertising companies are swayed by the dollars they receive that government schools and government teachers and government administrators and government principals, that they may not, in fact, be swayed by the money that they're receiving.
That's just, to me, that's as simple as putting a plug into a wall, but people just can't cross that divide so easily at all.
And you always find that the most complicated problems always have the simplest solutions, you know, like a complicated problem like the massive financial crisis and the multiple odd quadrillion dollars of debt that's floating out there somewhere.
Well, you could go into the complications of it, but the solution's quite simple.
How did the money get there?
Well, they pretended that it exists.
Well, why don't we just pretend that it doesn't exist?
Yeah, that's right.
That which can be wished into existence can be wished out of existence, you know?
It's like, you know what it is like?
It's like watching someone terrify themselves with their own freaking hand puppet.
That's what it's like.
It's like, it's your hand that's in the puppet, you idiot.
Put the hand down.
The puppet isn't going to get you, you know?
Or at least get another hand puppet to fight it.
But you're making up this stuff yourself.
Have you noticed that illusions can be so scary?
You know, it reminds me of War of the Worlds being put out on radio and everybody thought that there was a real alien invasion going on.
Yeah, I mean, people's relationship to reality is like watching those funniest videos with the cats that get startled by another cat in the mirror or the birds who attack the mirror thinking it's another bird.
It's like, this is just a reflection.
You're looking at yourself.
This is not an external predator.
Yeah, and then they go and punch themselves in the face real hard kind of thing because I don't like what's staring at them in the mirror.
It's stupid, man.
Okay, and this is the thing.
I think we've got to give people a bit of leeway here.
They got grown up.
They didn't know what was going on.
They got indoctrinated in the high school system, indoctrinated further than that in the university system, indoctrinated in their job as a lawyer or a doctor, indoctrinated by the news, indoctrinated by this, that and the other.
They barely hit a shot, mate.
You know, it's like a child born to a music teacher and a psychologist, for example, in England and Birmingham.
Would have a great better shot than perhaps somebody of the same perhaps genius capacity born to a warlord and a prostitute that he raped in southern Sudan.
So the situations that you put in kind of changed the things around you.
And I was wondering, Stefan, how did you actually wake up to go into all of this?
I mean, were you raised by people who were into this sort of gig already?
Or did you get real high up in a very professional field and then find out in a very nasty way how the truth comes crashing down on you?
Oh, that's a big question.
I think fundamentally, I just, I got really tired of working for a living.
Like, you know, if you get up every morning and you got to brush your teeth, you got to like shave, well, you don't have to shave, but some people have to shave.
And then you got to get in your car.
I had a long commute.
I'm like, man, it's hard work.
So I think I'll just become a podcaster.
And I'll reap massive financial rewards for yammering randomly into a microphone whenever the hell I feel like it.
And so for me, it's a gig.
No, I'm kidding.
No, so what happened for me was, I mean, I grew up with a lot of skepticism towards authority.
I mean, I think for whatever reason, I don't know how, I mean, I'm a dad, my daughter's, it's gonna be four in a couple of months.
And I see with her, all she's doing is, you know, she's universalizing.
She's universalizing.
She's universalizing all the time.
Right?
So she met a guy who had a mustache who was a bit startling to her.
And then for like months, she's like, ah, this guy's got a mustache.
You know, I think the mustache is what made him startling.
And, you know, I've just sort of reasoned her out of that and say, no, no, no.
It's not the mustache.
It was the ferrets coming out of his clothing.
No.
It was something...
So she's trying to universalize all the time.
And for some reason, I got...
I kept this universalization thing.
Because the universalization machine, which is human consciousness, which is concept formation and really philosophy and science, math, all the universalizations, all the concepts that we use to deal so effectively with the world, I kind of hung on to that.
And...
I remember very clearly, you know, when I was a kid, I was six, I went to boarding school.
Because, you know, it's really important to teach the ruling classes in England, just the right amount of empathy for the sufferers.
So I went to boarding school.
And this was back in the day, like, I mean, I'm sure they don't do this anymore.
But if you transgressed rules, you had caned.
I mean, they went seriously medieval, or I guess Victorian, on your high knee.
And yet you weren't allowed to have fights with other children.
And Being hit by an authority who tells you that violence is not a way to solve problems is, I mean, I think it breaks people's brains to be in those kinds of contradictions.
You know, like, you see this sometimes, floating around the world, you see parents, a parent hitting a child saying, don't hit your sister.
And it's like, Can we get that in a slow motion replay so you can see what you're doing?
And I remember just thinking that that stuff was all very strange.
I couldn't understand it.
Why do we have the rules that come from authority down that are absolutes?
I'm sorry, that they're horizontal, like kids can't use violence, but adults can use violence against kids.
I just...
And I, you know, I knew I couldn't solve it then.
I was a kid or whatever, right?
But I knew that there was just something kind of weird about it.
And then, I mean, I went through a sort of amoral phase in my sort of early teens where I didn't respect any of the rules of society, even the good rules, you know, like property and all that kind of stuff.
Because I was really, at that point, very convinced that what people called morality was just a sucker's game.
I mean, if you believe it, you're a slave.
And so you take what you want, just like the people in power do.
Just like the people who were our teachers did.
You know, if they didn't get what they wanted, they just went on strike.
And then if people tried to cross those picket lines, they just beat them up.
So for me, I really absorbed the lessons, and it was a dangerous period in my life.
Very dangerous.
It was a dark road.
Like this sort of Nietzschean thing where you say, well, morality is invented to enslave the masses.
And morality is something that you're told about with the hopes that you'll fall for it.
And then you won't be any competition to those who want to rule over you.
And so, you know, I threw the baby out with the bathwater and I went very amoral.
And...
That was not satisfying for me.
It was terrifying.
I felt like I was leaning over a very deep, dark cliff that I could really just step forward and fall forever.
And I really kind of panicked and freaked out about that possibility that not only was the morality I was taught a honey trap of enslavement, but that all rules, all morality could be that way.
Like maybe it was just what I was taught and maybe there was something else.
You know, I got into Ayn Rand and started reading more philosophy, and I felt that I really did, you know, with the non-aggression principle and respect for property rights and so on, I really did find that there was truth beyond the lies.
That if you unplug the matrix, everything doesn't go dark.
It seems like it's going dark, but there's something over the hill, you know, like the close encounters glow over the hill, something that you can make your way towards.
And that journey is like going across a desert.
You don't know when the desert's going to end.
You don't know if there's anyone over on the other side.
You might just keep going on and on to the end of the world and beyond.
But I did find that there was something on the other side.
I had a productive career in business and academics, worked in there or studied there for some time.
And then eventually just started podcasting with all the thoughts that accumulated over a couple of decades of mulling this stuff over.
A couple of decades of being a slave will help you think about things quite a bit, I think.
It does, yeah.
And so, yeah, I've really worked to delineate a system of ethics that doesn't rely on gods and governments.
I still am incredibly skeptical of the historical project called Virtue.
Sorry, I'll stop in just a second and monopolize your whole show.
But there's this historical thing, this project, and it's almost exclusively a government project.
I mean, philosophy, virtue, ethics, these are all government projects.
Because governments paid academics, governments tended to kill people or ostracize them or threaten them if they didn't conform with what was valuable for the government, which was useful for the government.
And so for me, morality has been a government program.
And government programs, as we all know, don't work.
They don't work.
So we've had, you know, for 5,000 years, A government program called Thou Shalt Not Kill, which culminated in what?
The 20th century was the most murderous century in the history of mankind.
A quarter of a billion people murdered by their own governments, not even counting war.
I mean, that's just internal genocides, labor camps, forced starvation, collectivized marches.
There's a word for that, isn't it?
Democide.
Democide, yeah.
And it's not a word you hear about much, of course, because it's too big a problem for people to even conceive.
I mean, it makes the Holocaust look like a punctuation mark in an endless scribe.
And so we've had a 5,000-year government program called Thou Shalt Not Kill, which has culminated in the most murderous century in the history of mankind.
That's not really a very successful program, but it is a successful government program, because that's what they do, is they produce the opposite of what they say they're going to do.
Well, that's incidentally a satanic principle.
Yeah, you come up with something which is a cover for what it is you're actually going to do, right?
So in the 1960s, you put these social programs in place to smooth out income disparities, which have now resulted in the very largest income disparities the Western world has seen probably since the late Middle Ages.
The trickle-down effect.
Yeah, I mean, it's all just – well, no, I'm thinking about the welfare state.
The welfare state was supposed to take money from the rich, give it to the poor, and smooth everyone out to kind of like a big bunched-around-the-middle-class kind of statistical cluster.
I mean, nothing could really be further than that.
We've polarized society, middle class is being eaten away like a donut hole and expanding.
You've got this rich and poor.
I mean, we're turning into a H.G. Wells novel, for God's sakes.
And so, yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical of the morality and the philosophy that has been handed down by state-sanctioned, state-supported, and state-paid representatives.
But I'm very interested in philosophy from the ground up, raw philosophy from first principles.
You know, the truth no matter what.
And that is something that still energizes and empowers me, and I think it has to be the salvation if we're going to achieve that.
Well, I actually have something to add in here.
It's just been happening recently.
Before I came on the show, I told you that Occupy Auckland has been a little bit...
Nasty to me.
I had a woman, Penny Bright, on my show.
She's a pretty hardcore activist.
Probably the most active activist in the country.
And it's not debatable.
She's won against the corrupt courts.
More times than anybody else in the country's history, basically.
You know, been arrested 22 times from council meetings and beat them 21 times in court.
And the other one's going to the International Human Rights Criminal Court in The Hague or something like that for being trespassed from a public building while it's in session.
Right?
It's never happened before.
So they're having this big row because she's found out, or at least claimed, that one of the people who was leading Occupy Auckland, Linda Wright, has connections to a company that Has a stated goal of preventing damage to business, you know, risk management.
It's called Consensus Limited.
And she's got links to US Marines and no activist background or anything of that nature before coming in and then making a beeline for the policy level.
Suspicious?
A little bit, maybe?
And so all you've got to do is ask, hey, is that true?
Do you have that company?
Do you think we've got an answer?
Of course not.
Now, for experienced activists like you and I, who understand many agendas are at play at all times, that sticks out.
And so I brought Penny on the show to explain this and things like this.
And sure enough, the Occupy movement, of which I've made more videos for, and members of theirs I've brought on radio and given them more media coverage than their entire media team has built by myself...
Are now attacking me and saying I'm corrupt and saying that I'm not being truthful and that I am, you know, insert irrational, angry insult here.
This is what you get when you tell the truth and you care not the consequence.
I wanted to know what the truth is and now I know what the truth is.
These people don't want to know what it is.
Yeah, there's an old quote that says, you can always tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.
Yeah, I mean, I like the anger of the Occupy Wall Streeters.
I like the moral outrage.
I like the hostility they have towards, you know, crapitalism.
That's crony capitalism, nothing to do with the free market.
It's much closer to fascism than anything else, where, you know, big corporations and big government work hand in hand to squash Entrepreneurship and innovation and challenges from smaller, leaner, younger, meaner companies.
But boy, you know, to me, if you're going to protest against something as deep and powerful as a fiat currency system, I mean, it's such a weird enemy to fight.
You know, I always thought the enemy was going to be like a big devil, a big demon, a big, you know, one of these, a boss level, you know, smoky torsoed, fire shooting from the eyeballs and cannibals coming out of the nipples.
I really thought it was going to be something like that.
But it's turned out to be a bunch of anemic, pasty, zombie-headed cryptkeeper bankers with a whole bunch of shiny, empty propagandists around them.
It really is a very empty vessel that we're fighting.
But if you're going to take on the monetary system, man, you better learn yourself some economics and you better learn yourself some gold standard history.
You better read some Rothbard, read some Hop, read some Hayek, you know, really learn the history of this stuff.
But I feel like they're just railing against the system without really looking at how it works and how it functions.
And I'm always a bit alarmed at how much energy goes in absent of knowledge.
It's sort of like if you're going to be a sniper then you better take off the blindfold otherwise you're going to hit a lot of innocents And this is the other thing.
I understand their reaction is the problem.
I know, because I've been there myself.
When you trust somebody, when you want to be part of it, when you've been arrested together, when you've been knocked around by the cops together, it makes you want to defend those people, no matter what happens to them.
And the fact of the matter is, I've basically just been with Penny Bright, the activist I mentioned earlier, a lot more...
Over a wide range of issues over a number of years than I have with the entire Occupy team who I've all talked to and stuff like that.
Because, well, basically, I haven't had the time or whatever other reason is there.
Point being, you can't get emotional about it.
You've got to look at the facts.
You've got to look at the evidence.
Unbiased.
Okay?
I admit that I am biased, but I'm going to try and look at the information unbiased anyway.
I've invited this Linda person to come on the show for an hour to explain her side of the story.
And I'll do it exactly for her, what I've done with Penny.
Not disagree with her, not contradict her, not make it an upsetting thing, but actually allow her to explain everything and just take it as good faith, and then I will refer back to what Penny said, have a look at what Linda said, and then make up my own mind, because in the middle is usually the truth.
It's the reason why both sides of major arguments, I believe, are always wrong.
Not most of the time, but always.
Because if there was a major side of an argument here and here, and no conclusion is ever met, it means neither of them could be correct.
Because if one of them was obviously correct and the others wasn't, there wouldn't be an argument going on.
It would end pretty freaking quickly, wouldn't it?
Right.
Right, yeah.
I mean, if somebody points at the sun and says there's a moon, you don't get a whole bunch of people I'm vociferously arguing either side.
But that's, I mean, that's a litmus test.
That's an x-ray of a human soul, so to speak, right?
I mean, I've had lots of critics, and I go on their shows, and I'm willing to be cross-examined and grilled.
I think that's great.
But a lot of people who criticize me, I mean, hey, I run a call-in show every Sunday.
I don't screen callers.
Come on by.
Let's have it out.
Let's have a debate and so on.
But, you know, a lot of people, it's...
It's not the truth that they're after.
It's something else.
It's some sort of power.
It's some sort of justification.
It's some psychological acting out.
And so they don't want to aim for the truth at all costs.
They aim for something else, for having an audience, for having an effect, for gaining prestige.
I mean, six million other things.
All the while criticizing everybody else who has the position and prestige that they want, of course.
Well, yeah, but that's natural.
I mean, that's inevitable.
And that's how it should be.
You know, anybody who gains prominence, I think it's very important that they be criticized.
I mean, imagine if somebody got the heavyweight title in boxing and then everyone else said, well, that's it.
No one's going to fight him because, you know, I mean, I think people should.
People should try and take my audience.
People should try and take your audience.
That's competition.
That means everyone gets better.
And the truth and the audience is served the very best.
So I think that's great.
I mean, obviously, if you're going to get into a boxing ring, you know, don't release a pterodactyl to attack the guy's junk.
You know, you've got rules.
Fight by rules.
But what happens is when people are caught in a lie or if they're caught in a contradiction, most people simply resort to slander.
I mean, it's all they do.
They just resort to slander or You know, arguments from effect or whatever it is.
You see this all the time.
I mean, how many times do you hear an intelligent critique of someone like Ayn Rand?
You don't.
Why did I just say, ah, she was a hypocrite because she took social security and therefore I have nothing to do with her philosophy.
Or she thought that selfishness was good and so I have nothing to do with her philosophy.
And it's like, man, oh man.
And this is, you know, we were talking earlier about, I mean, this is my frustration.
And, you know, it certainly could be the case that you're a lot better at communicating this stuff than I am, but having spent sort of 30 years now, I just turned 46.
Oh my god, it's so old!
But I spent about 30 years off and on.
I mean, I was in the business world for a long time, but this wasn't really a part of what I was up to, but Boy, you know, you can't get people to listen to a rational argument to save their lives.
I mean, I have, you know, listeners and all that, but it's a pretty small percentage of the population of the world as a whole, even though I try to make the shows pretty entertaining and enjoyable.
But people will continue to reject this stuff, and I find it, I strive for it, I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing, but I do find it hard, Vinny, to find a lot of sympathy in my heart.
I feel sort of like a doctor who's been saying to his friend who comes to him, he's this patient, you know, man, you're 375 pounds, you've got to lose some weight, man.
And you're smoking two packs a day, that's not good.
You've got to exercise.
And listen, you can't have a steady diet of Twizzlers and potato chips.
This is just not going to be good for you.
And you say this, and he's like, yeah, yeah, okay.
And then he finally gets sick, and then he's like, well, you've got to pay for my treatment now, man.
It's like, wait, I was the one telling you that this was all dangerous for many, many years.
You kept rejecting my advice, and now you're sick, and you're having a tantrum.
And it's like, it's really hard for me to find the love in my heart.
Are you able to achieve that?
Is this a deficiency on my shrunken, over-tanned raisin of a heart?
Well, it depends.
You know how you stick your flag out like a Jolly Roger or something like that?
All of a sudden, all the other pirates around you want to come over and have some rum with you.
You know what I'm saying?
And what I've noticed is that...
I don't actually know what you're saying.
This may be a...
The Jolly Roger...
But I'm a long way from the ocean, so you'll have to give me an inland metaphor.
Well, the Jolly Roger is the skull and crossbones pirate flag.
Oh yeah, no, I know that.
Alright, so when you've got your flag up, it identifies you as a pirate.
And so other pirates will be able to see you and they might actually come over and then hook up with you and stuff like that.
I mean, using it as a metaphor for truth as things and sticking your flag out and identifying who you are to the world.
I'm announcing it as I'm Vinnie Eastwood, I'm this, that, and the other.
What it does is it both opens you up to the camaraderie with the other – the criminals, i.e.
free-thinking people who want to help the earth.
They're the people who are criminals now.
And it also identifies you to the empire, like the Dutch East India Trading Company type ships and things like that who want to blow you out of the water.
And I've come to the conclusion that sticking your sail out in and of itself not only identifies you, But it also identifies who your enemies are and who your allies are via their actions.
Somebody comes at you, Stefan, and says, Stefan, you're a stupid piece of crap.
I don't care anything that you've got to say.
Frack you, frack that, you know, that kind of thing.
Block!
And you never hear from that person again.
Thank you.
You've just identified yourself and fallen into my trap of identifying people who I don't want to hang out with.
Thank you very much-a from Baralacha.
And I'm going to be going this way now because I've got 10 other people contacting me right at this particular moment who do like me, do want to help me, do want to have some fun and don't want to die and don't want to be slaves.
And I will spend my time with those people.
Thank you very much.
Okay?
There's 7 billion people on the planet.
Don't spend time and particularly do not spend emotional energy.
Those people who do not value you have any honor or any sense of objective truth because those people are like energy vampires and you have to invite them in.
Well, I agree with a lot of what you say.
But because of the empathy, do I feel any compassion for these people who get themselves into a stuck situation?
You know, I've got to say, I agree with you on a lot of that sentiment.
How can you?
Because is it a waste of our time?
Are we going to get anything back out of it?
Are they going to get anything out of it?
No.
They'll still keep falling over, breaking their ankles, and we'll still have to keep cleaning up after them.
There's an old guy who said, never have a girlfriend that has accidents all the time, because you'll be the one responsible for clearing up all those accidents.
And one of those might be 20 years of child support.
Yeah, so definitely.
You see?
And that's the thing.
You become who you associate with.
So I choose to...
And just this other day, this Occupy thing that I mentioned earlier, obviously, that factors into it as well as other things, emails that I get from listeners who are angry and things like this.
When I respond...
When I take the time to feel sorry for them and try to help them understand things, again, it identifies whether or not they're the kind of person.
So I've got empathy for everybody, but they only got one shot.
If they take it in instantly and go, oh, thanks, Vinny, that's cool.
I can see you're trying to help me.
I'll do better or whatever.
That's cool.
If they, on the other hand, do not accept my help, then you're on your own.
Okay, so I've got empathy for everybody until they don't want it from me.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I mean, it's as a principle that I had a college roommate who was a brilliant guy.
He's got like two PhDs since.
We're still in touch.
But he was studying biology at the time.
He said a great strategy is treat people the best you can the first time that you meet them.
And after that, treat them as they treat you.
And I think that's a pretty good strategy.
But what troubles me, of course, is you say, you know, I'll associate with people who are positive.
I'm entirely down with that.
I don't have negative vampire drainers in my...
I just don't do it.
I just, I mean, life is short, right?
And me opening my veins over a gutter isn't going to make me any stronger or the gutter any fuller.
But, of course, we live in this society where Where we have to involve ourselves with the muggles because the muggles are the majority, right?
And that's the challenge, right?
I mean, if we lived in a free society and there were people doing stuff that I thought was silly or foolish or self-destructive or ridiculous, well, they wouldn't have the power of the vote over me.
So I could sail on.
But the problem is that our fortunes are tied to the masses, right?
Because the mass is, you know, it's like, I think I will not engage with this bull in this small china shop.
It's like, well, it's a small china shop and it's a big bull.
And we can't exactly disengage, if that makes sense.
What was I going to say?
I was thinking about this.
My three favorite words.
I don't know.
Good.
Well, look, I'm glad it's nothing obvious because it was something obvious.
Oh, just pull that red lever by your desk that says change the world.
Oh, shoot.
I should have done that already.
And my three favorite words.
Oh, my three least favorite words.
Sorry.
I don't care.
So I'm willing to admit that I don't know.
But I will never not care about the answer.
I always want to know.
I don't want to purposely leave myself in the dark about anything.
I want to leave myself open.
But it's once I identify what it is that I'm interacting with.
You know how to spot a psychopath or a sociopath in your midst or something like that?
I don't think I have that skill.
Okay, well, the American Medical Journal defines a psychopath as somebody who's very nice and friendly and smiley when you first meet them, but ultimately doesn't have any depth to their character, no long-lasting relationships outside of business, and ultimately doesn't care about anybody but themselves.
And the likely industries that these people are to cluster is power centers, fame centers, because psychopaths are also all narcissistic, but not all narcissists are psychopaths.
Psychopaths do not have the ability to kind of have any emotional grab with other people.
They do not feel any guilt for the consequences of their actions, that kind of thing, as people like you and I would.
And I thought to myself, holy shitballs, that's every employer I've ever had.
And the three most likely industries these people are to cluster is business, media, and politics.
What would you say is the three most powerful pillars of society that control most of what we do?
And so it becomes of little surprise that our society, if you analyze it critically and openly, is psychopathic.
It's because these people get themselves to the top.
Because me, in order to get to the top of, say, an honest or allegedly honest, decent game like the Truth Movement, etc., whatever label you want to call on it.
I'm kind of sick of labels by this point.
But for me to do that, I would have to do a lot of work, manifest a massive reputation and build consecutively day-by-day relationships and productive working, networking and so on and so forth in order to advance level by level.
Psychopath does not need to.
Psychopath only needs to identify the person who's in the position that he's in, sabotage that person and then come in and replace them.
Okay, a similar thing works in the corporate structure.
You'll have three people vying for one top job with the CEO, two honest people, one psychopath.
The psychopath will come to the person who's hiring and he'll dust dirt on these other two people and completely lie and whatever.
And so they'll lose the job.
Psychopath will get it.
Well, sorry.
Let me just – having had some experience in the business world, I agree with you about a lot of that stuff.
But the problem with psychopaths is if you lack empathy, you can't serve your customers.
Because, you know, eventually, I mean, in a real-world scenario, I don't mean sort of capitalism, sort of corporate fascism, but in a real-world scenario...
Yeah, well, so unless your customers are psychopaths, in which case they're not going to have any loyalty, and it's really tough to build brand loyalty in that situation.
But what really matters...
I think there's a tipping point.
I'm so sorry to interrupt.
I'll be very quick here, but there's a tipping point because you say, well, there's three people vying for the CEO-ship.
If people are good at spotting psychopaths, then the psychopath won't win.
In other words, there have to be enough people around there who can't spot him or who secretly are like him that he can't be spotted.
Does that make any sense?
I'm sorry.
You'll have to rephrase it.
Well, let's say that there's a I mean, it's a board of directors that assigns a CEO. Now, if you've got three people vying for the job, two honest guys and a psychopath, there have to be a number of psychopaths already on the board for him to win.
Like, if they're all healthy people, all normal people, then they're going to go, hey, this guy's a psychopath.
Let's not give him the reins of power.
Well, that's true.
But there's also what are known as proto-psychopaths, who are not psychopaths themselves.
Have you ever seen a bully who has this kind of gaggle of cronies following him?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Who he intimidates and attacks and then uses...
Yeah, I used to read a Billy Bunter book.
There was a guy in that.
Yeah, they're like the remoras that feed off the shark kill, you know?
These little fish that hang around the shark jaws and just pick up whatever the shark doesn't finish off.
So that's usually how it happens.
And there'll be other people of moral conscience and things on the board who maybe don't see this thing going on in the background because psychopaths also, in general, have a high IQ as well.
And they learn from a very young age how to manipulate people, fake emotions, copy people's behavioral patterns and feed them back to them.
A psychopath will be able to, they're almost super empathic in a way, but without having any empathy.
It's really strange.
It's like Neo being able to see even though he hasn't gotten his eyes kind of thing.
They know somehow what makes you tick, what your desires are, and what kind of person you're looking to associate with, and then they mold themselves into it like an octopus feeds into the shape of a cube.
You can be incredibly sensitive to the needs of others without having a shred of empathy.
Just think of a torturer.
The best torturers know exactly what's going to hurt you the most.
And have zero empathy for how much it hurts you.
In fact, they probably get a kick out of it.
But they have to know all the pain points, exactly how it hurts.
And also, incidentally, if you want to torture somebody, ladies and gentlemen, give them lots of coffee.
Caffeine excites your nerves and stuff like that.
And makes it worse!
I thought that was quite an interesting one because my friend Clint, he makes the hottest chilli sauce in the world and he gave me a bottle of this stuff and he says, mate, do not try coffee after it, mate.
It does not help in any way, shape or form.
And of course, I didn't listen and I paid a very hefty price for it.
Which is what happens when you don't listen to people.
Particularly people who are trying to warn you off others and providing, and this is how you can tell the difference.
Somebody will say some bad thing about somebody else, then provide a little bit of link or a piece of evidence.
and then they'll say another bad thing about somebody else, and then they'll provide an example or a bit of evidence or something like that.
However, if it was somebody saying a bad thing and a bad thing and a bad thing and a bad thing and a bad thing and a bad thing and a bad thing and not actually providing any reference material or anything to fall back on and what have you, sometimes you can just go like, this person's just laying out a tirade based upon their personal opinion.
This is not factual evidence.
They're not actually really concerned about the truth.
They simply want their own opinion to get out there.
And I'm of the opinion, of course, ironically enough, that you've got to listen to everybody as often as you can.
And as I said before, somewhere in the middle is the truth.
But you've got to care about people.
You've got to care what they've got to say until such a point as you ascertain that you know for a fact that they don't give a flying frack what you've got to say and only care about themselves.
Because that's when you know, hey, this is a person I'm not going to get very far with.
I've got better things to do.
Yeah, I mean, the slander thing, of course, which is what I think what causes people to avoid tackling these kinds of personalities is because then you get a whole bunch of slander brought out.
But the slander only works because people aren't very critical thinkers, right?
So it sort of becomes a cycle, right?
So because people aren't critical thinkers, they're easier to manipulate, and they're more afraid of negative publicity because other people aren't critical thinkers.
So yeah, I just think that's an interesting kind of...
Cycle, I think, that gives the psychopaths more power.
Okay, well, Stefan, it's been lovely here with you today.
If you've got any grand philosophy from the mind of the Molyneux, please share it with the listeners.
Well, I was reading this article the other day.
It's called Eight Questions Philosophy Will Never Answer.
I'll leave your listeners with this.
And people can, of course, go to freedomainradio.com.
Podcasts are all free, no ads, free books.
The Forum is free and people can, you know, 10,000 people chatting about philosophy.
I hope people will check it out.
But one of the things, one of the standards that philosophy was never supposed to penetrate was there's no such thing as a better morality.
There's no such thing as the right morality.
You know, this is cultural relativism.
You know, everyone has their own way of doing things and your way is not necessarily the right way and you have to be tolerant of other people's different opinions and so on.
And it really provokes My inner child.
Because this is what we say to adults when adults want to stand up for something that is right and true and good.
Like, hey, let's stop pointing guns at each other as a species to get shit done.
Let's just try that.
Let's just, I mean, let's try it as a thought experiment.
What if we didn't have a violent control Over the instantaneous creation of generation enslaving debt, ass-wipe paper money.
What if we didn't have a violent monopoly on that?
What if we didn't have a violent monopoly on the endless indoctrination of children by the powers that be on how necessary the powers that be are and how you can never ever grow up from being a child.
You can never save for your own retirement.
You can never decide for yourself who you're going to help, what kind of charity is appropriate for you.
You can't even decide whether people should go mow down innocent civilians in foreign countries in your name.
Unthinkable that you should ever have the conscience to follow your conscience in those areas.
You're never allowed to grow up.
But this is what we say to people who are adults.
We say, eh, morality is kind of relative.
You know, it's You can't be imposing your moral systems on other people, and this is how we get dissolved into these spineless, needy, dependent, entitled jellyfish, screeching for the state to throw us a few more crumbs from the master's table, rioting in the streets if our goodies are even remotely cut off if there's one less piece of bread and one fewer Christian-eating lion circus to entertain us with.
But, but, and this is the big but, and people who remember their childhoods will know what I'm talking about here.
That is not how morality was inflicted or imposed upon us when we were children.
I distinctly remember if I had the urge to push another child and take his toy at the age of three or four, the other child who got upset and went to the teacher was not told, well, you can't impose your system of property on him.
Nothing really is good or bad.
It's, you know, it's cultural.
It's different.
You know, you have to not impose your Wanting to play with that toy on him.
No.
I was told, give the toy back.
Don't take.
Don't push.
Don't take his lunch money.
Don't take his lunch.
Don't splash him.
Don't throw sand at his face.
Don't use violence.
Don't use bad words.
Don't call names.
That's what I was taught as a child.
And there was none of this cultural bullshit, rings of satin fog around the essence of morality.
I was taught two basic things.
Don't take other people's stuff.
Don't use force.
Don't lie.
Don't call names.
And I think that's actually pretty true.
I think that if we just went back to the good old stuff that's on the wall of the kindergarten and sort of said, well, maybe that stuff is actually pretty good.
Maybe a respect for property rights.
Maybe a denial of slander.
Maybe honesty.
Maybe a rejection of the initiation of force.
Maybe these are things that aren't just good for three-year-olds which we tell them with complete and perfect absolutes, as perfect absolutes, that this is right and it is wrong to go take another kid's toy and it is wrong to push him in the dirt and it's wrong to kick him down.
It's wrong to take his coat.
Don't mess up his artwork.
Don't pee in his boots.
Whatever it is that's going on, we say this to children With all of the moral righteousness and absolutism of dear Yahweh himself handing down the Ten Commandments to Moses.
We are certain of it.
We know it.
And then when those children grow up and they say, hey, adults, remember all that shit you told me when I was a kid about not using force and not lying and not hurting others and not stealing from other people?
What the hell is it with this goddamn currency?
Are you kidding me?
Why the hell are all these wars going on?
Why the hell were my parents forced at gunpoint to pay for a school where I was instructed never to use force to get what you want?
Are you kidding me?
Is this some sort of weird, sartirian, existentialist, wet fart of a bad joke?
Are you kidding me?
It's mad!
So what if we just take those moral inscriptions in the kindergarten, which I think are right and true and good.
I got a free book on ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics.
Takes you all through the deep steps of proving that kindergarten stuff.
What if we just said, hey, you know that shit that was absolute when we're three?
Maybe it can be absolute when we're 30, or 35, or 55, or 95.
Or, if we truly get the free society we want, 335, because that's how long we'll be living without all the bad shit going on.
Maybe that stuff is true.
And if it is true, what does society look like if nobody gets to use force legitimately?
Nobody gets to initiate force legitimately?
If nobody gets to take anybody else's shit at gunpoint?
If nobody gets to push you down in the mud or piss in your boots or steal your artwork?
What if you are truly free, just as you were told to be free and let other people be free in kindergarten, What would that world look like?
My God, it would be paradise on Earth.
And we can achieve it.
We just need to stay true to what we were told when we were three.
In other words, you've got to make the illusion that you've been subjected to your entire life back into the truth, which it originally should be.
Yeah.
We just have to go.
You know, there's an old poem.
It says, there shall be no end to our journeys.
And the end of our journey shall be to return to the place that we first started, but know it for the first time.
And I think that's what we need with ethics.
Indeed.
Stefan, thank you very much for your time.
As always, good to have you on again sometime soon, my friend.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Vinny.
Thank you.
And you can check out his website, ladies and gentlemen, is it freedomainradio.com?
Freedomainradio.com.
And I'm also at youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
Yeah, yeah.
And Stefan is just like...
Sorry, for my listeners, if you want to give out your vital statistics, how rude of me, I almost didn't.
Where can people find your brain brilliance on the web?
You just Google Vinnie Eastwood.
The CIA knows where to find me.
Got it.
It's Vinnie with a Y, because it's the most important question.
Ah, good thing.
Otherwise, you'd just be doing IE, as in for example, which would not be very helpful.
Exactly.
And I don't want to be an example to anybody, you know.
Absolutely not.
Well, take care, Vinnie with a Y. I will talk to you soon.
Thanks, Stefan.
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