Topics include: Historical Arguments against Voting, A Public School Teacher Calls Stefan Molyneux Out! How Can I Argue against the Government That Saved My Life?Rational Property Arguments. What Is Virtue?
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| Good morning, everybody. | |
| Hope you're doing well, it's Steph. | |
| It is 10 o'clock on the 7th of October. | |
| I hope you'll come to Libertopia, just three days left, to buy your two days left to buy your tickets online, Libertopia.org. | |
| I will be there incessantly hogging the microphone. | |
| As usual. | |
| So, I hope that you will be able to check that out. | |
| Also check out my interview on Reason TV. It took them a while, but I think they did a good editing job and managed to splice me and Pamela Anderson together to the point where we only bring one larger boob to the interview, which would be me, of course. | |
| So, I hope you're doing well. | |
| I guess we are getting close to voting time. | |
| It's voting time for the sheeple. | |
| And... | |
| Herbert Spencer was a very cool, well worth looking into 19th century thinker, philosopher, sociologist, an all-round intellectual raconteur. | |
| And he said something interesting. | |
| You know, it's always amazing to me how nothing new is new. | |
| So, you know, you hear these arguments from people about voting. | |
| They say, well, if you don't vote, you can't complain. | |
| Well... | |
| Of course, George Carlin has some good stuff on that, but Herbert Spencer talked about this in the 19th century. | |
| Oh, these arguments are so old. | |
| And he said something along the lines of the following. | |
| He said, ah, ah, ah, I see how this works. | |
| So, if you vote and your candidate wins, clearly you can't complain because you got what you wanted. | |
| If you vote and your candidate does not win, you can't complain. | |
| Because you agreed to participate in the process and you agreed to participate by the majority decision. | |
| You voluntarily participated in the process and therefore you can't complain, much as if you can't complain if you lose your money at a casino when you are voluntarily there. | |
| So you can't complain if your candidate wins. | |
| You can't complain if your candidate loses. | |
| If you don't vote at all, you can't complain because you did not participate in the process. | |
| Hmm, I wonder what the common thread is in all of these different... | |
| Choices. | |
| Well, of course, the common thread is, you can't complain! | |
| And I think that's nonsense. | |
| There's a good article on Reason.com about voting, which I'll just sort of touch on here, but of course your vote is meaningless. | |
| There's been no vote in history, to the knowledge of the writer, to my knowledge, to the knowledge of anyone else, that has ever been decided by a single vote. | |
| So there is no There's no, your vote is meaningless. | |
| It is not going to decide the election in any way she performed. | |
| Ah, but then people get all Kantian on your intellectual hiney, which is really close to medieval, on your hiney. | |
| And they say, ah, but what if nobody voted? | |
| And then you were the only person who voted, then you would decide the whole election. | |
| Or what if nobody voted? | |
| Then the system would lose all legitimacy, to which the anarchists can only say, hells to the air! | |
| I think we're down for that. | |
| But this is funny, you know, the canteen argument is interesting. | |
| It is an interesting argument, and I've had some requests to deconstruct it over the years, which I will get to one of these fine days after the late-night bleary-eyed slog of the documentary, the Bataan death march to the illumination of the planet, is complete. | |
| But you don't really find the canteen argument used a lot in non-coercive situations. | |
| Right, so imagine... | |
| I call you up and say, hey, let's go see a movie. | |
| Finding Nemo is playing again in 3D. Let's go see Finding Nemo. | |
| To which you would not reply, I don't think you would reply, to say, Steph, are you crazy? | |
| We can't conceivably go and see Finding Nemo in 3D anymore. | |
| Because what if everybody in the whole world decides to go and see this showing at this theater of Finding Nemo in 3D? The lineup would be six or seven billion deep and we would never get a chance to see the movie. | |
| Hey, let's go to Wasaga Beach this weekend! | |
| No, because what if everyone in the world decides to go to Wasaga Beach this weekend? | |
| We will have to walk Over people's heads for statistically about a mile and a half out to the ocean before we got any waves. | |
| So that's no good. | |
| Let's go fishing! | |
| No, what if everyone in the entire world decides to go fishing at that spot in that moment? | |
| Scare all the fish away. | |
| That's a lot of people. | |
| Let's drive downtown. | |
| Okay, it is 3 a.m. | |
| on a Sunday, but what if everyone in the world decides to drive downtown? | |
| The traffic will be unbelievable! | |
| You get the point. | |
| We continually make choices. | |
| In fact, the vast majority of the choices that we make are predicated on almost everyone else in the world not making that same choice. | |
| Ooh, there's a cute girl at the bar. | |
| I think I would go and ask her to dance. | |
| I hope that not everyone in the world comes in and asks her to dance because that would be kind of confusing for her. | |
| Or if it's not everyone in the world, I sure hope that Brad Pitt doesn't come in and ask her to dance. | |
| Because I can compete with a Danny DeVito on stilts. | |
| I cannot compete with Brad Pitt in a wetsuit. | |
| The wetsuit is the key. | |
| And so we are continually doing all of these things. | |
| We are continually making plans on the assumption that almost everyone in the entire world is not going to do. | |
| What it is that we want to do. | |
| In fact, I can't think of a single, non-coercive, non-fraudulent activity, like, sorry, that we do predicated on everyone else doing the same thing. | |
| I mean, we'd like to. | |
| I mean, you know, I'm going to steal something. | |
| I sure hope everyone in the whole world doesn't steal. | |
| But that's not how we... | |
| So this idea that the Kantian, the categorical imperative can be used in non-coercive situations, And voting is a non-coercive activity. | |
| It's not a non-coercive environment because you are attempting to have your voice heard about which way the guns point. | |
| And there's a thought experiment someone came up with which says if an innocent child were being tied to a stick and there were a hundred soldiers Or people who were going to shoot that child and all the bullets were going to hit at the same time and no one could tell whose was whose. | |
| And someone came along and said, would you like to be the 101st one to pull the trigger? | |
| No, no, there's no punishment if you don't. | |
| Well, of course we wouldn't, right? | |
| We wouldn't involve ourselves in the use of violence if it was simple and easy for us to not do that. | |
| And that really is the reality. | |
| You know, it's always coming up with the words. | |
| And, you know, if you're in the chat window listening to the show, give me some words. | |
| You know, a lot of life has to do with just having the right language. | |
| A lot of moral decisions just have... | |
| It's just all about having the right language. | |
| So, people say, did you vote? | |
| They say, no. | |
| Why didn't you vote? | |
| What's the matter with you? | |
| Well, you know, when I was brought up, I was told not to get involved in gang activity. | |
| Did you vote? | |
| No. | |
| Why didn't you vote? | |
| Well, my vote is meaningless. | |
| It's not going to decide the election. | |
| Even if it did decide the election, there's no guarantee whatsoever. | |
| In fact, there's every indication to the contrary. | |
| There's no guarantee whatsoever that the politician is going to do what he or she says we're going to do. | |
| So, given that it's not going to make any difference, I can't control the outcome, It's a violent system to begin with. | |
| I chose to stay home and spend an hour playing with my children, which is a definite plus for me, rather than driving, which always takes the risk of getting creamed by a truck. | |
| So I decided not to do something that even with a mild risk of fatality and is a meaningless exercise involving yourself in a violent system where you have no control over the outcome anyway. | |
| I try not to get involved in useless, violent, dangerous activities. | |
| The real question is, what lies are you telling yourself that made you go and vote? | |
| And also because voting is an equality thing, right? | |
| So if there was some tennis tournament which included a vast, the vast majority of the participants in the tennis tournament didn't even know which way To hold the racket. | |
| Never even heard of the word tennis. | |
| Didn't know what the tennis ball was. | |
| Sort of like if you go to the Middle East and there's some outback Muslim village elders who've never been on a plane before taking the trip to Mecca. | |
| They don't know how to use the seats. | |
| They sort of kneel on the seats and look over the back and never been exposed to it. | |
| So if I'm an expert tennis player and I've been playing tennis, I've got 30,000 hours of practice I'm a top-seeded tennis player. | |
| And there's some tournament where every non-playing tennis buffoon wants to go in and play tennis. | |
| I wouldn't participate in that. | |
| It would be silly. | |
| It would be pointless. | |
| And the staggering interstellar ignorance of your average voter is something you need to take into account. | |
| If you've studied anything to do with philosophy, with politics, non-aggression principle, libertarianism, anarchism, You name it. | |
| Then you are vastly more informed than literally 99.99999% of the voters who live in the matrix. | |
| And once you're out of the matrix, the meaningless rituals inside the matrix are revealed as meaningless. | |
| You don't participate. | |
| I'm too skilled in political theory, in philosophy, in In social understanding. | |
| I am too skilled to go into an even contest with the ignorant. | |
| It would be embarrassing. | |
| It's like Roger Federer showing up at some local introduce your kids to tennis week and blasting tennis balls at your five-year-olds. | |
| The interstellar ignorance and delusions of the average voter, it's not their fault, it's just the matrix they live in. | |
| I'm not going to go in and pretend that we're all equal. | |
| I mean that's ridiculous. | |
| Have some respect for your own knowledge. | |
| Have some respect for your own skill. | |
| And be empirical. | |
| The ignorance of the average voter is truly astounding. | |
| It is. | |
| Human ignorance is the dark matter that the physicists keep looking for. | |
| This is all empirical facts. | |
| I mean, You can just look up how people answer questions about politics. | |
| You know, people think that foreign aid is like 20 or 30 percent of the U.S. budget. | |
| I think it's maybe 2 percent or 1 percent. | |
| No, even less than that. | |
| that is a tiny tiny fraction Scott Pelley of 60 minutes was asking Romney don't you think the government has a should provide health care to those who can't afford it | |
| Don't you think there should be a magic fairy that can conjure medical expertise and resources out of thin air at no cost to anyone and provide it to the poor people who are sick and unwell through no fault of their own? | |
| I mean, it's a trap! | |
| These are all just nonsense questions. | |
| I'm working on helping out sick people. | |
| What are you doing? | |
| Well, I'm working on a magic fairy prototype that pulls in Magic doctors from an interstellar dimension and gives free healthcare, manufactures pills out of nothing, and provides them to healthcare, provides healthcare to the poor. | |
| Yeah, good luck with that. | |
| So anyway, I just want to mention that since we needed a few time to queue up the callers, that, I mean, this voting thing, do what you want, but you are descending to participation as an equal in a truly ignorant rabble. | |
| And most, of course, most of the people will fight any kind of knowledge that you bring to them a tooth and nail. | |
| And I guess I'll conclude with the famous quote. | |
| Two famous quotes from Churchill. | |
| The first is, the best cure for democratic tendencies or belief in democracy is five minutes conversation with your average voter. | |
| He said this after decades in politics. | |
| So number one. | |
| And number two, he said, democracy is the worst system of government conceivable except for all of those others that have been tried from time to time. | |
| And I sort of agree with that. | |
| I like living where I'm living versus just about any other place in the world, otherwise I'd be in that other place. | |
| But he's right. | |
| Democracy is about the worst system of government except all of those others that have been tried from time to time. | |
| So let's stop trying them. | |
| All right, let's move on to the callers. | |
| Thank you for your patience. | |
| First up today, we have Tremblay. | |
| Tremblay, how are you? | |
| Hello, I'm doing great. | |
| How are you? | |
| You cannot be calling in with a name like Tremblay and not have a gruesome Quebecois gutter accent. | |
| It's not possible. | |
| So you'll have to try it again with an outrageous French accent. | |
| You have to pretend to be the candle in Beauty and the Beast. | |
| So, yes, I am from Quebec, although I do live in Ottawa. | |
| Well, you've cleaned up nicely, let me tell you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Quebec Quebecois, the Cockney of Paris. | |
| Anyway, sorry, go on. | |
| Basically, I was calling because I would like to know how to help with the anger issue, because I'm I'm always talking about the government with almost everybody that I meet. | |
| I have trouble speaking about anything else. | |
| And it's starting to annoy people and it's affecting my relationships. | |
| For example, with my parents, every time they complain about something, I always point out that, well, the whole reason why you complain about this is because the government does this and that and that. | |
| Basically, it annoys everybody and I just can't figure out how to stop talking about it, no matter how I try. | |
| I also get very angry in my head, so every time I hear about something the government does that I don't like, I always get very angry. | |
| And it's affecting my relationship with my girlfriend. | |
| For example, I got a subpoena recently, about two days ago, and I have to show up in court. | |
| And apparently there's nothing I can do about it. | |
| I have to drive two hours to Montreal, and I have to be there. | |
| And I've talked to three different lawyers. | |
| There's no way I can avoid it. | |
| I cannot go to court and... | |
| But you can, but you go to jail, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| They'll send the police after me. | |
| They'll have an arrest warrant to bring me to court if I don't show up. | |
| So I'm extremely angered about it and I've been shutting down for about two days. | |
| I haven't really talked to my girlfriend. | |
| I've just been standing there being very silent compared to usual and it just really affects me. | |
| I'm trying to To grow outside of that, to don't let these things affect me, but I don't seem to be able to. | |
| Right. | |
| Now, just for those who are listening who are not knee-deep in the frozen tundra called Canada, avoiding talking about politics in Ottawa is like avoiding talking about transvestites in Montreal, or avoiding talking about Coffee in Colombia or politics in Washington. | |
| It is the capital. | |
| It is the Houses of Parliament there in Canada. | |
| So it's a political town. | |
| Is that fair to say? | |
| All right. | |
| So these are great questions. | |
| And look, I sympathize. | |
| I sympathize. | |
| I mean, it's my job and it drives me a little baddie sometimes. | |
| And I sometimes can't sort of shake a kind of sense of foreboding, right? | |
| Or of almost of dread of where the society is heading and What's going to happen and so on. | |
| So I sympathize. | |
| I think that having a goal of not having it affect you is not realistic. | |
| Right? | |
| Because that would be to not have a brain and a nervous system. | |
| So I think saying... | |
| I mean, I know we all have this Zen fantasy sometimes that when we're really bothered by something that We can unplug something and sort of rise up in a lotus position and look at the squalling, mauling herd of complaining, empty-headed animals called human beings like we would look at an anthill, like, isn't that curious? | |
| I don't want to squish any, but I'm kind of interested in studying how they work and with this sort of wry, amused smile float above the turmoil of the land and not be bothered by it. | |
| So there is this fantasy and this desire, and this is what is portrayed a lot in movies, right? | |
| You know, the Zen master, the David Carradine, the whatever, right? | |
| The Mr. Miyagi. | |
| These are the people who recognize it. | |
| I said, yeah, if you can just wait, please. | |
| We're just in the middle of a call. | |
| These are the people who see the problems of humanity but kind of rise above it with a wry and detached smile. | |
| And that is not healthy. | |
| Everything that is portrayed as a response to crisis in the media is almost the exact opposite of what you should be doing. | |
| Like, every solution that is portrayed in politics is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. | |
| Oh, healthcare costs are too expensive. | |
| Let's have more government regulation. | |
| Nope, that's the opposite of what you should be doing. | |
| Well, I'm concerned about the education of poor children, particularly disadvantaged poor children who live in the inner cities, in government housing, who have single parents. | |
| Let's have government schools. | |
| Let's have a welfare state. | |
| Nope! | |
| That's the exact opposite of what you should be doing. | |
| Violence seems to be causing a lot of problems in society. | |
| I've got a great idea. | |
| Let's double down on the violence. | |
| Well, this, of course, is just addiction. | |
| A gambling addict believes that the solution to his increasing debt is an ever-escalation in his gambling. | |
| Throwdowns. | |
| This is classic addiction behavior. | |
| The actions that got you into trouble must be doubled down to get you out of trouble. | |
| So the idea that you should become detached from the world and that that's wisdom and maturity is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. | |
| If you walk into a hospital and you've got some rabid ferret hanging off your arm, fangs deep into your elbow, You don't want the doctor to take a wry step back and say, hmm, how fascinating it is to see one mammal attached to another mammal in a thrilling embrace of the cycle of life. | |
| No, you want him to, like, call stat weasel or whatever the hell it is that they do and get 60 guys in there to de-rabies you and detach the ferret and, you know, you want them to freak out a little bit. | |
| You want them to panic a little bit. | |
| You want them to do something. | |
| And so I think having it not bother you is not wise. | |
| It's going to set you up for failure. | |
| And you don't want to be the kind of person who is not bothered by impending catastrophe. | |
| Because that's being a psychopath, right? | |
| The people who aren't troubled by... | |
| That is not wisdom. | |
| That is not Zen maturity. | |
| That is not a Buddhist detachment from all the squalling masses of humanity. | |
| That's called being a cold-hearted, unfeeling, stone-faced psychopath. | |
| You don't want that. | |
| You really don't want that. | |
| So, let me just... | |
| That's it for my sort of speech about don't detach yourself from the world. | |
| And now is the time on Free Domain Radio where I ask the questions about you. | |
| You ready? | |
| Yes. | |
| What was your exposure to anger when you were a child? | |
| Almost none. | |
| My parents were very, very calm. | |
| My father stayed at home. | |
| There was not a lot of anger when I was younger. | |
| Go on. | |
| However, I was pretty much the only one that was angry in my family. | |
| I became more and more angry as I grew up at about 12 all the way to, I would say, like 24 years old. | |
| I got angry very, very easily about I snapped and started screaming very easily. | |
| Eventually, I stopped doing that. | |
| But what were you angry about at that time? | |
| Well, I don't know. | |
| It's just like when people asked me or put me in something that I was uncomfortable. | |
| I was just angry that things didn't work out the way I wanted them to work out. | |
| Okay, so if you didn't get your way, then you would get angry when you were... | |
| Okay, and what were those ages again? | |
| Up to 24 and you said around puberty? | |
| Is that right? | |
| 12? | |
| 12 to 24. | |
| Up to 24, okay. | |
| And was your father your primary caregiver, you said? | |
| Yes. | |
| And so when you would start to get angry, Which you say you don't remember happening as a child but started happening in your early teens. | |
| When you would get angry, how would your father help you with that situation? | |
| Well, he would try to just talk about it and see why I was angry and ask me to be less angry. | |
| And how did that work? | |
| Well, it did help. | |
| At least it prevented it from escalating even more. | |
| But I had to go through, I had to realize it myself that I had to stop being angry, which I did at 24. | |
| Alright, and what about your mother? | |
| My mother is the most calm person. | |
| I've never seen her being angry or raise her voice once in her life. | |
| She's very, very, very, very calm. | |
| And do you know if there's anything that happens? | |
| Because, sorry, is it that you were not You didn't really experience any unusual anger when you were a child until your early teens. | |
| Is that right? | |
| Pretty much, yeah. | |
| And what happened, if anything, when you were in your early teens that changed this for you, do you think? | |
| I think it's more like I was more... | |
| I had more interaction with other people, I think. | |
| I was pretty shielded with my parents, so I don't think that I really had confrontation of any kind for those first 12 years. | |
| And I think when I started having confrontation with others, I was not very prepared. | |
| Sorry, when you say you had no confrontations with others, what about in school? | |
| Well, I was mostly like a silent person sitting in my own corner. | |
| So, I just did things on my own mostly. | |
| And did you have conflicts with friends? | |
| A little bit, but yeah, nothing to really... | |
| Well, of course, there had to be conflict with friends, but nothing really stands out. | |
| Alright. | |
| And do you think that there was anything in your parents' life that They could have been angry about or that it would not have been too surprising for them to be angry about or upset about? | |
| Well, yeah. | |
| Well, they would have been upset if I had done things that were not... | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I mean, sorry, in their life, I mean, were they treated unjustly? | |
| Were there problems at work? | |
| Were they treated unjustly by family or friends at any point where some upset would not have been crazy? | |
| Well, yes. | |
| My father has an issue with his mother. | |
| His father died when he was very young, like four years old. | |
| And his mother had to take charge of a large family, about 10 kids. | |
| And to her, she really got scared, I think, when that happened, because she's responsible for now 10 kids on her own. | |
| And how old was she? | |
| She was about 30. | |
| She had 10 children? | |
| Yes. | |
| I guess this is before the quiet revolution, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay, all right. | |
| So, go on. | |
| And before women could easily go into the workplace, so she had to take care of everybody on her own, and I think that she basically freaked out, and she hid my father a lot, and she was very angry all the time at all of our kids. | |
| So it really, even today, he has trouble speaking to his mother, my dad. | |
| So I think that really, really affected him. | |
| So your father was hit a lot by his mother and she was angry at her children a lot. | |
| I mean, you started off with the excuse, right? | |
| I just wanted to point that out, right? | |
| That's true. | |
| You started off with the excuse and then you explained the behavior. | |
| I mean, we don't have to dig into that now. | |
| It's just, I just want to sort of point that out. | |
| That's quite common, right? | |
| My grandmother behaved really badly. | |
| I'm not going to tell you that. | |
| First, I'm going to give you all the reasons why, and then I'm going to tell you what she did. | |
| I just wanted to mention that. | |
| That may be a bit of a habit in your family. | |
| Okay, so your father was hit, and of course, when you have 10 children and one parent who is doing something to have money, right? | |
| I mean, I don't know if she's working or what. | |
| Maybe it's the state or maybe it's other people or charities or whatever. | |
| But there's not a whole lot of parent to go around for 10 children, right? | |
| She worked. | |
| She worked? | |
| Okay, so where did your father go? | |
| Did they go in daycare? | |
| No, they stayed at home and took care of each other, like all the kids. | |
| Oh, so one of them was a teenager when your grandfather died? | |
| Yeah, one of them was about 14. | |
| And my dad was the second youngest, so he was about like 12 or so. | |
| Right. | |
| And basically they just grew up together with my grandmother. | |
| So when your father was about 12 and his father died, he and one other older sibling were kind of put in charge throughout the day of eight children. | |
| Yes. | |
| Wow. | |
| And did your grandmother ever remarry? | |
| I don't think she didn't remarry. | |
| I think she had a boyfriend when she was 80 or something. | |
| And that's about it. | |
| All right. | |
| And do you know the degree to which her extended family pitched in this extremely difficult situation? | |
| I don't think a lot happened. | |
| I don't know all the details, but I don't think a lot happened. | |
| She was mostly on her own, I believe. | |
| I mean, I assume with ten kids she's Catholic and there would be a big church environment. | |
| I mean, they would help out with the sudden death of a father of ten kids, right? | |
| Perhaps, but I've never heard anything about... | |
| What I heard is mostly that they were on their own. | |
| They did have some welfare help, but it was almost nothing back then. | |
| Alright, so let me test your emotional radar here. | |
| Your father, his father died when he was 12, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| And look, there's just no way that he could have emotionally processed that given that he was suddenly in charge of eight kids throughout the day, right? | |
| Five days a week. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right, so what is common between you and your father in terms of the ages we've been talking about? | |
| When did you start to get angry? | |
| What is common between me and my father? | |
| Yeah, at what age did you start to get angry? | |
| About 12. | |
| At what age did your father lose his father and become a young parent to 10 children? | |
| About 12. | |
| Right. | |
| So you see there's a pattern, a potential pattern here, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| Yes. | |
| So, I would imagine, and, you know, don't let me tell you anything that isn't true according to your experience. | |
| I'm just going to tell you that I imagine that your father is not very emotionally expressive. | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| Is that true? | |
| That is true. | |
| Right. | |
| So, for people who have not processed their emotions, and I'm not saying I blame your father for this in any way, not that it would matter what somebody on the internet thinks, but if your father has not processed his emotions, then when you reach the age of his trauma, it's going to provoke a lot of emotions in him. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And... | |
| Jung has a statement which says there's no greater effect on the lives of children than the unlived lives of the parents. | |
| Your father, I would imagine, did not have an overly fun and free teenage experience, right? | |
| That's right. | |
| So, I think that... | |
| And the other thing, too, is that your father would have some stuff to be angry about. | |
| And if he's never... | |
| If you're overly angry and they're underly angry, that's not an unusual pendulum. | |
| Okay. | |
| Like, if they don't express any anger, but they are angry, then the passive-aggressive thing is to provoke anger in other people. | |
| I mean, that's what people who can't express their own anger do, is they provoke anger in other people and then reject other people's anger. | |
| It's a way of controlling their own emotions and also of demonizing anger, right? | |
| Yeah, okay, yeah. | |
| So, if I were you, I mean, obviously, I'm going to make my usual pitch. | |
| Therapy is fantastic, and with the right therapist, it's a life-changing experience and all these sorts of great things, but I think that it's worth talking to your parents about their childhoods. | |
| I mean, I don't know that we can really know people without knowing their childhoods. | |
| And we've been kind of avoiding this conversation because I know how loaded it is. | |
| So perhaps that was a mistake that I've made. | |
| Well, I mean, mistake or not, I don't know. | |
| I would be hesitant to start putting it into these or those categories. | |
| But I would talk to them about their childhoods. | |
| It's the only way that I know to really get close to people. | |
| It's not like you only have to talk about But you need to know what has shaped the people in your life. | |
| And of course, I'm always talking to my daughter about my childhood. | |
| I mean, for a number of reasons. | |
| One, of course, she's intensely curious. | |
| She's always asking me for stories about my childhood. | |
| And secondly, because I really want her to understand that I was as small as she is. | |
| So that she gets a sense that I grew up, that I was a child, that I made mistakes, that I continue to make mistakes. | |
| But there are, I'm not saying your parents, but there's a lot of parents who, they're like professional parents. | |
| It's like they have no histories. | |
| They just, you know, they were big when the child was small and they were just bigger and they stay bigger and they never humanize themselves or never allow that to occur. | |
| That they are flawed people like everyone with Difficulties in their histories, like everyone, some of which are processed and some of which is not, like everyone. | |
| So I would have conversations about that. | |
| Because if your dad, and you can obviously talk about this with your mom as well, but if your parents suffered traumas, and look, I mean, that's pretty bad. | |
| Sudden death, eight kids on your plate when you're 12. | |
| God, I mean, that's crazy. | |
| And if that's not processed, it's going to have a huge effect on you. | |
| So I would focus on all that history, childhood, deep understanding of your origins. | |
| I wouldn't focus on clamping down on the effects. | |
| So that would be my suggestion. | |
| And I think that's the best way to approach it. | |
| And I'm really sorry about the subpoena thing. | |
| I'm really sorry about the subpoena thing. | |
| But you understand, it's not on you, right? | |
| I mean, it's, like, if you get mugged, yeah, it's really upsetting. | |
| But it's got no moral standing on you. | |
| And so, yeah, I'm sorry about it, but it's, you know, somebody wrote on my YouTube the other day, on a YouTube video, said, I'm no more responsible for what my government does than Jodie Foster is for Reagan getting shot. | |
| You know, she had a stalker who was trying to get her attention and shot Reagan and all that. | |
| In fact, even less. | |
| I mean, Jodie Foster put herself in the public eye, right? | |
| And if I remember rightly, that may get you a few stalkers. | |
| But it's not on you. | |
| And just, you know, view it as a day trip. | |
| And you can view it anthropologically. | |
| I'm going into the belly of the beast. | |
| I wonder what it looks like in there. | |
| I mean, you can do it in a way that it's not going to be like, oh, those bastards are stealing my day kind of thing. | |
| Yeah, try to change it any... | |
| No, God no. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| No, you know, trying to change ignorance is like trying to wrestle fog. | |
| I mean, there's no purchase. | |
| Ignorance is nimble because it can't be caught by anything. | |
| Ignorance is a rejection of reason and evidence, and therefore it cannot be caught by anything. | |
| And so I really, you know, the ignorance of the people around you, the ignorance of your horizontal slave masters called citizens... | |
| Is impossible to fix. | |
| I mean, I think that's the important thing to understand. | |
| If you get angry... | |
| And I don't mean get upset about terrible things that happen. | |
| I mean, of course, we're human beings. | |
| But I think anger is an overestimation of the capacity of change in another person. | |
| Right? | |
| So, if I saw a man... | |
| Walking towards a busy street, I would yell at him to stop. | |
| But if I was a long way away and I knew that he was deaf, I wouldn't yell, right? | |
| I mean, I might, but it would just be a reaction. | |
| It wouldn't be anything that I would... | |
| Or if I didn't yell, I wouldn't say later, oh, I should have yelled. | |
| It's like, no, he's deaf. | |
| He can't hear you, right? | |
| And so action is aimed at securing a result. | |
| Any repetitive actions that do not secure... | |
| The stated result are in fact securing another result that is unstated. | |
| And if you get angry at your fellow citizens, that is because you have the stated goal of changing their minds, right? | |
| Yeah, that's true. | |
| But in order to change someone's mind, they have to have a standard of truth that is higher than their own prejudices, right? | |
| Their own particular perspectives, their own opinions, their own beliefs. | |
| Yes. | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Yes. | |
| And this is why philosophy is so hard to spread, because you need philosophy in someone else's mind in order to spread philosophy in someone's mind. | |
| They need to have a standard of truth that is higher than their existing biases, and then you can reason with them, and then you can provide evidence which will change their minds. | |
| But to have a standard of truth that is higher than your own opinions is already to have philosophy. | |
| And so you need philosophy in people's minds in order to teach them philosophy. | |
| It's really frustrating, but once you accept it, it's a lot easier to understand, right? | |
| So it's like if I wanted to teach someone who speaks Mandarin, and I said, well, I'm going to teach you English, but first I need you to know English. | |
| The person would be like, I'm sorry, what? | |
| I need to be really fluent in English in order for you to teach me English. | |
| I don't understand. | |
| This is why philosophy has made so little progress in 2,500 years. | |
| And this is why I focus on parenting and intergenerational change because you can't change a mind that is not a mind. | |
| You can't change opinions with facts because opinions are, in essence, a rejection of facts. | |
| It's like trying to get a Klan member to marry a black person. | |
| They've already declared their prejudice by being A Klan member, so they're not going to marry a black person. | |
| As soon as you marry this black person, I can cure you of racism. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| It's the racism that's going to help me avoid the black, right? | |
| Do you understand? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, you know, don't piss into the wind. | |
| It just blows on your legs, right? | |
| Don't waste your energies trying to change the minds of people who are immune to reason and evidence as a result of their own prior traumas and their own conformity, what Ayn Rand called the social metaphysics, or social metaphysicians, people who base... | |
| They're opinions not upon what is true, but upon what is generally accepted or popular or easier in the moment. | |
| So, in a sense, like in a very real sense, society is like a bunch of ants. | |
| Same level of self-knowledge, same dedication to evidence, same focus on the truth at any costs, and so on. | |
| And if you accept that and recognize that trying to implant philosophy in people's minds, which requires philosophy in the first place, It can be just wished away. | |
| Right. | |
| It's like trying to develop physics from your nightly dreams. | |
| You can't do it because there's no objective standard. | |
| Right. | |
| The person who wrote the subpoena is basically the least likely to be converted, right? | |
| So there's no point of getting angry against this person. | |
| Well, see, now you're... | |
| You say there's no point getting angry. | |
| But if you are angry, telling yourself that isn't going to help. | |
| I mean, curing anger, and I had some temper in me when I was younger, but curing anger is a long-term process. | |
| Anger is a form of hope. | |
| That's what I'm saying, right? | |
| Anger is a form of hope. | |
| And I think that hope is very dangerous. | |
| I just recently argued this in My Enemy the Soul. | |
| But hope is a very dangerous emotion because hope will impel you to action and hope will attempt to bring you closer to people and hope will attempt you to work to resolve situations or problems or ignorance or whatever. | |
| Right. | |
| The first question I ask myself is is there hope in this? | |
| Okay. | |
| Right? | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| Is there hope? | |
| And If you're not 12, right, and you're older than that now, then you have empirical evidence. | |
| It's their hope. | |
| And if there's not, anger, the reason we hang on to anger is to avoid the despair of hopelessness. | |
| And the despair of hopelessness is essential to go through. | |
| Whenever you stop doing something, like, if you're addicted to anger, I'm not saying you are, but if you are, then you're an addict, right? | |
| And if you're an addict, then the behavior that you're engaging in is to avoid some other emotion. | |
| And we keep these false hopes, like there's this old myth of the Will of the Wisp, this floating light that would lead people into marshes and they'd get lost there and all that. | |
| Well, that light is hope. | |
| Leads you into marsh, you get lost. | |
| And a lot of what I do is designed to eradicate false hopes. | |
| This is why I say to the political people, go for it! | |
| I know it's not going to work, but you need to know that. | |
| So you need to put everything and a half into what it is that you're doing. | |
| And that way, you cure. | |
| And the same thing is true if people are embedded in abusive relationships, I say, go talk to people, go talk to people, until you break through or you break out. | |
| If you break through, fantastic. | |
| If you can continue to try and you continue to get abused and it escalates and eventually your hope is going to extinguish. | |
| And that's called freedom. | |
| The only freedom is freedom from illusion, fundamentally. | |
| And your activities in the political realm have not changed people. | |
| In fact, it's only alienated people. | |
| And so... | |
| I would examine that. | |
| You want other people, right? | |
| We always have to deliver values before anybody else will accept them. | |
| If you want other people to accept reason and evidence, then you need to first accept the reason and evidence that other people don't accept reason and evidence, right? | |
| So, anyway, that's hopefully the end of not too useless a lecture, but it's a great question for sure. | |
| Thank you, Stefan. | |
| You're very welcome, man. | |
| Do drop me a line. | |
| Let me know how it goes. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Sorry, somebody is confused by anger as a form of hope. | |
| Well, if you're on a spaceship going to Mars and something happens to your oxygen and you think you might make it, you're going to feel all these emotions, right? | |
| At some point, if you're halfway to Mars and you run out of air, there's absolutely no possibility that you will survive. | |
| Zero possibility whatsoever. | |
| And at some point, you're going to accept that and you're going to be resigned to your fate. | |
| I mean, that doesn't happen if it just blows up, but if you have, you know, a couple of days, you're going to go through a lot of emotions and you're going to, oh, what can I do? | |
| What can I do? | |
| And the anger is trying to find a way out of the situation. | |
| I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm upset. | |
| But at some point, you're going to get, well, that's it. | |
| I'm going to die. | |
| I'm going to run out of air and I'm going to die. | |
| Now, at that point, well, you're no longer angry because you've given up hope that you can survive the situation. | |
| Alright, let's move on. | |
| Next up today, we have Dave. | |
| Davey, Davey, give me your question, too. | |
| Go ahead, my friend. | |
| Yeah, I'm a public high school teacher. | |
| I watch his show all the time, and I hear you talk about public teachers. | |
| Public high school teachers. | |
| Can I insert the word trash in that? | |
| You hear me talk trash about public school teachers. | |
| But anyway, go on. | |
| Right. | |
| But if you listen to the show, you certainly would not be in the general demographic, I think. | |
| But please, go on. | |
| Right, well, so let me set this up. | |
| I watch your show all the time. | |
| I was already, as a teacher, kind of an outstander because I was a Ron Paul supporter. | |
| I think I came across your channel, saw one of your videos where you were saying, you know, you shouldn't vote at all. | |
| And I was totally agreed with it. | |
| So I started watching the guy with the bald head with the red room and you were like Max Headroom on my screen for a while. | |
| Yes, but it's cunningly the red has been covered up with the black. | |
| I know. | |
| These are the two colors of anarchy and that's what I'm working on. | |
| Anyway, go on. | |
| It threw me off. | |
| I did hear you talking about two weeks ago about teachers and lesson planning. | |
| I hear you also talk about how often teachers teach on average, those types of things. | |
| And also, you know, the way you talk about public school teachers is kind of like the way I think about police. | |
| If I don't like the institution, you know, I don't like police. | |
| We just kind of assume that they all hold certain beliefs or that they all support the system. | |
| Sorry, when you say we assume that, what does that mean? | |
| Because you suddenly went from Steph, you say this, to we assume this, and that's kind of a switch, right? | |
| Or that, you know, that teachers just support the system that they're in, that they support the government system, that they want it to... | |
| To be fair, I mean, there is a system, and there are a lot of teachers protesting any kind of cut in... | |
| Tenure and all that kind of stuff. | |
| I've never said that all teachers believe the same thing. | |
| I mean, that's a form of collectivism. | |
| Right. | |
| I'm not saying that you, you know, I just mean the The general portrayal. | |
| And I mean, I think it's normal. | |
| But I know you've also said, I was recently listening to one of your talks on how we win arguments, how we win political arguments, and you said you have talked to a lot of teachers that are not crazy about the system. | |
| They don't agree with it. | |
| You've talked to politicians that they don't agree with the system. | |
| You've talked to police and they don't agree with the system. | |
| So there's plenty of people within the system that don't agree. | |
| But I thought I would love to just ask me questions as a public school teacher about what are my thoughts about the system, just so that listeners could hear, you know, there are public school teachers that think this way. | |
| I think that's perfectly fair. | |
| So, what are your thoughts about the system? | |
| So, more specific, something more specific about it. | |
| About taxation, about forcing people to go... | |
| No, I don't particularly care about the tax argument, which is... | |
| I mean, if you want to talk about it, that's fine. | |
| But I guess a question that I would have is how, if at all, do you smuggle clear thinking into your environment? | |
| Well, I'm fairly new to the profession, so... | |
| Oh, I know. | |
| I can taste the newness. | |
| In fact, I can taste the hope. | |
| It tastes like chicken. | |
| Yeah, I mean, that makes it worse when you had hopes starting out. | |
| You know, you come in just naive. | |
| You want to just do something noble. | |
| That's why I became a teacher and got into the system, but I'm also looking at the system as a whole. | |
| Okay, so let's back up. | |
| My skepticism is fine, so correct me where I'm wrong. | |
| But you say you wanted to do something noble? | |
| Yes. | |
| And was that because you had a lot of really noble public school teachers when you were growing up? | |
| You know, I had some decent school teachers when I grew up. | |
| Oh, no, no. | |
| I didn't say decent. | |
| Sorry to be annoying. | |
| We have to be precise, right? | |
| You said that you wanted to do something noble. | |
| And I'm not disagreeing with that. | |
| I'm just trying to understand where that came from, right? | |
| So, for instance, when I got into philosophy, I did want to do something noble. | |
| And that's because, to me, there are a lot of insanely brave and courageous philosophers, far braver than I'll ever have to be throughout history. | |
| And so I sort of had precedents to work on. | |
| I don't recall, from my own experience and from none of the people that I've talked to, noble public school teachers. | |
| The only noble public school teachers seem to be like, you know, the standard deliverer guy, John Taylor Gatto. | |
| They're the ones who seem to get pushed or kicked out or leave the system in abject horror. | |
| So, that's my question. | |
| So, if you thought that public school teaching was noble, it must have been because you had noble public school teachers as an example, right? | |
| Well, I did. | |
| I mean, I had some, and my field is my math teachers, my math classes, you know, I respected them. | |
| I'm not going to say that, you know, they were blowing my socks off. | |
| Public school wasn't that way for me. | |
| So was it fairly true that you didn't have noble examples before you wanted to go and do this noble thing? | |
| Not noble like you're saying, like you said, the gentleman from Stand and Delivered. | |
| Not like that, not necessarily, but they did. | |
| Noble is a word, sorry to interrupt, but noble is a word that public school teachers use a lot, right? | |
| It's all for the kids, but it's a word that is talked about a lot without really any Evidence, other than the fact that unions and other public school teachers seem to want to push noble people out of the profession as quickly as possible, which is why, what is it, a 50% dropout rate in the first five years? | |
| Right, yeah, it's more than that. | |
| I think it's like 50% in the first two years and then 50% more after the first five years. | |
| So it's really... | |
| Like Michelle Rhee, right? | |
| I'm sure you know the story of Michelle Rhee, the woman who took on the Washington public school educational system and actually improved the results. | |
| of the students after many years of incredible decline. | |
| She fired teachers, she reformed schools, she fired principals, and she was kicked out. | |
| Right. | |
| I mean, she had a plan which was going to allow teachers to earn six-figure salaries if they improved the marks of the students, and you didn't even have to join this plan. | |
| You could just stay on your own plan, and everything was guaranteed, and the union wouldn't even let it come to a vote, and nobody protested that. | |
| So, the evidence does not seem to be that there's anything noble, because noble to me would be, noble is when you sacrifice your own interests for the good of needy others, or your own immediate shallow interests, right? | |
| Prestige, money, security, or whatever it is, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I can't think of or see in some fairly extensive, you know, I've seen John Taylor Gatto speak, and I interviewed a whole bunch of people and read a whole bunch of books. | |
| I haven't seen nobility in the public school teaching profession. | |
| And this doesn't mean that individual teachers, I don't know, can't be noble or whatever. | |
| But if you've had a 12-year exposure to a system that is pretty crappy, and then you say, well, I really want to go into the system to do good and be noble, I just have to admit some skepticism, if that makes any sense. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, not to get hung up on that. | |
| I mean, the reason that I said that was just compared to, you know, other professions that I was considering just educating kids or, you know, making something good for kids or... | |
| Okay, great. | |
| So, educating kids. | |
| So, how do you bring a true education, you know, reason, evidence, ethics, all that kind of stuff, how do you bring critical thinking into your classes? | |
| Well, I mean, I would not necessarily say that, you know, we're kind of forced within the system just to deal with what we're given, the curriculum that we teach. | |
| So we don't actually get to choose, the teachers don't get to choose themselves. | |
| It's really that we have to kind of shovel what's already there. | |
| So I'm not the best person to ask, you know, how do I change it all? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I didn't ask how you change it all. | |
| You said that you went in to do something noble. | |
| Now, something noble would be to teach kids how to think critically. | |
| Right. | |
| And so I'm asking how you do that, because you brought up the nobility thing, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Okay, so how do you bring reason, evidence, and critical thinking to your kids? | |
| You say, well, there's this lesson plan. | |
| Sure, there's a lesson plan, but you're the one actually talking. | |
| There's lots of different examples you can give and stuff like that, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, the lesson plan, I mean, that was something that I wanted to address, just, you know, we could go back to that. | |
| I just kind of wanted to just let you pick my brain on some things, though. | |
| But the Oh, I'm trying to pick your brain and you're not giving me an answer if you've noticed, right? | |
| I'm asking how you bring critical thinking to your students and you're not answering. | |
| And it's fine if you're not answering. | |
| You don't have to, of course. | |
| It's just a show. | |
| But I just really want to be telling you that I'm aware that you're not answering. | |
| Oh, I know. | |
| Because we got caught up on the word nobility, and I was just kind of trying to give a reason why I went into it, because it seemed like something better than just trying to sell, be a salesman, or better than this profession, or better than this profession, because it seemed like a good thing. | |
| I'm sorry, what's wrong with being a salesman? | |
| Being a salesman is being in a voluntary win-win negotiation, right? | |
| Being a salesman is... | |
| You have to attempt to convince someone of the benefit of your product without the use of state force. | |
| That's a voluntary... | |
| So you're looking at the public school profession, the teacher's profession, which is, as you know, as a Ron Paul supporter, you know, is funded on coercion, is exploitive of children, promotes incompetence, and tends to push out competence, and anybody who does care about the children gets ejected from the system. | |
| And so you're holding that coercive, exploitive, destructive system as somehow noble and more superior than a voluntary exchange of values called an economic interaction or attempting to convince someone of the voluntary value of your product rather than being able to coercively enforce it. | |
| I'm just not sure how you get to call teaching noble and a voluntary interaction called being a salesperson as less noble. | |
| I wouldn't, and I'm not really actually trying to portray that, so I apologize if I did. | |
| I was just saying, having tried different professions, usually when you're within the profession, if you're in a business trying to sell things, usually you're just trying to impress your boss. | |
| So it's not really that you go to work with the cause of, I'm going to sell great things and support entrepreneurship today. | |
| You really just try to impress the boss or something like that. | |
| Or if you worked an hourly job, you were really just... | |
| You know, sometimes a slave to your boss or a slave to the cause. | |
| Or a slave to the business. | |
| Okay, so now you're using the word slave to a voluntary interaction where you are being paid by someone to do something. | |
| So that's a slave interaction, but there's a possibility for nobility in a coercive environment like public schools. | |
| Are you sure you're a free market supporter? | |
| Because this is all perfect Marxism, right? | |
| Well, I think I'm just getting caught up on, you know, the definitions of words. | |
| I was just trying to explain why I started out as a teacher. | |
| Because I do not agree with, you know, basically the public school system now. | |
| I don't agree with forcing anybody to go to school. | |
| I don't agree with, you know, the use of force at all. | |
| I don't agree with getting the funny... | |
| And you have to hide this from the children, right? | |
| Well, I mean, yeah. | |
| I mean... | |
| Now, I haven't been teaching that long, so this is, you know, fairly recent that I've come to, you know, just understand your explanation. | |
| Sorry, how long have you been a teacher for? | |
| This is my third year as a teacher. | |
| And when did you get into Ron Paul? | |
| Was it 08? | |
| No, it was in this last election, but I mean, so like libertarianism, like the last year or two, so after I had become a teacher... | |
| Oh, so after you became a teacher, you got into libertarianism? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| All right. | |
| And for that, I sympathize, right? | |
| Because that's not the easiest progression in the world, to say the least, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And so, I mean, I wasn't all that big of a public school supporter. | |
| It's not really that. | |
| I was just trying to give an explanation why I thought being a teacher would be a good idea. | |
| I'm not knocking any other profession. | |
| I'm just saying the experience that I had in other professions. | |
| No, come on. | |
| Come on. | |
| Let's be honest. | |
| You started saying that you could do some noble stuff or you wanted to do noble stuff. | |
| And you did disparage other professions. | |
| You said that being a salesman... | |
| I mean, let's be fair. | |
| These opinions don't particularly offend me. | |
| They're very commonplace. | |
| But when you say that you weren't trying to do these things, I mean, you may not have consciously been trying to do them. | |
| And you'll hear this when you listen back to this on the show, that that is what you were doing. | |
| Whether you wanted to or not is immaterial. | |
| I mean, that's what you were doing, right? | |
| Yeah, and that wasn't my intention. | |
| It was just to explain my experience with what I had, you know, places I had worked and things. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay. | |
| And is there anything else? | |
| Because we got a whole bunch of callers on the line. | |
| Is there anything else that you wanted to mention before we move on? | |
| Well, if there was any questions, you know, like I said, that you wanted to ask me about, you know, do I support certain things within schooling? | |
| If you wanted to ask me anything like that. | |
| Well, no, because if I'm asking you as a teacher, if I'm asking you just as a person, that's not a particularly interesting conversation. | |
| If I'm asking you as a teacher, do you support the system and you say no, but you're participating within it and you're hiding the immorality of the system from the very children that it's exploiting, then... | |
| That's not particularly noble, right? | |
| So if you go into a system founded on coercion, and then you actively hide that coercion from the children, and pretend that it's not there, I don't see that as noble. | |
| I don't see hiding the coercive nature of the system that they're truly enslaved in, and really that their parents are. | |
| They're really just the excuse. | |
| So you're in this System where you tell children don't use force to get what you want, but your union, again, I'm not saying this is voluntary, you have to be in the union, but they use coercion all the time to get what they want, and you can't say this to the children. | |
| You can't say to the children, well, you shouldn't use force to get what you want, but I'm paid through the coercion of state violence. | |
| There's so much that you have to hide from the children that it's hard to see, with all sympathy, you didn't invent the system and so on, and teaching is a great profession, but there's so much that you have to hide Right. | |
| Like I said, this is something I've come to recently, so I mean, that was not my intention to go. | |
| If I would have known it would have been like that, or if I would have, you know, had the same mindset or the same philosophies that I had now, I would not even be going into the system, so it's just... | |
| Well, or you would be, sorry, or you might be going into the system and you're going to say, well, I am not going to hide the truth of the system from the children. | |
| Right. | |
| And that doesn't mean that I'm going to, you know... | |
| Lecture them every day about libertarianism, right? | |
| But, you know, if the children are being aggressive, then you can say, well, the rules are that you're not allowed to be aggressive. | |
| Now, the reality is, and I don't agree with this, you can say this, but the reality is, of course, that this whole environment is aggressive, right? | |
| I mean, if your parents don't pay taxes that support my salary, they go to jail. | |
| If you don't come to school, you know, you... | |
| You can be found a truancy and your parents can go to jail. | |
| Most of the money that's going into the system, 75% or more of the new money that goes into the system, just goes to pay people who aren't even teaching retiree benefits and so on. | |
| If anyone tries to stop that, they'll go to jail. | |
| There's a lot of coercion That's in the environment as a whole, but you're not allowed to do it. | |
| That's the system. | |
| I don't agree with it. | |
| I'm trying to wake you up to the way things are, and I'm sorry that this is the system. | |
| It's not something I'm proud of. | |
| I didn't create it, and I'm trying to be honest within it. | |
| But those are the facts. | |
| Right. | |
| I'm not saying you should do that, understand? | |
| I'm really not. | |
| I mean, I can't even imagine what the results of that would be. | |
| I mean, because, of course, you know, all teachers know that the children go home and talk to their parents. | |
| Hey, what did you learn at school today? | |
| I learned that I'm in prison. | |
| I don't want to go back, right? | |
| So I understand that this may not be the most Right, kids. | |
| And thus you are contributing to, you know, their corruption. | |
| I mean, like it or not. | |
| And I'm not saying that you want to or anything like that, but isn't that the nature of the system? | |
| Right, yeah. | |
| Well, there were a couple Okay, so one thing that you talk about all the time is how often school teachers teach. | |
| So one is that they teach on an average under three hours a day. | |
| That was one of the things you talked about, right? | |
| Yeah, actually, well, it's not one of the things that I talk about. | |
| It's one of the things that I read from a book. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, but yeah, I mean, certainly there are a number of books out there who've tried to do this analysis of how often... | |
| Teachers are actually teaching children during the day. | |
| But sorry, go on. | |
| And I'm guessing that was elementary school? | |
| Because when I heard you explaining it, it was saying that, you know, they have recess and they have other things. | |
| So that was referring to elementary? | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| Because I know I teach myself, I have to teach four and a half hours a day. | |
| But... | |
| And that's direct classroom instruction? | |
| Yeah, that's actual time just scheduled to teach classes. | |
| And there's no recess or, you know, in high school, it's nothing like that. | |
| And that's not time between classes? | |
| And again, I'm just trying to be really precise. | |
| You're actually opening your mouth, talking to students who are already settled and waiting to learn? | |
| Or is that, you know, well, they got five minutes to settle and this and that? | |
| No, there's five minutes before that, then they come in for an hour and a half class, five minutes, and then they come in for an hour and a half, and I teach three one-and-a-half-hour classes. | |
| Okay, but with ten minutes in between? | |
| Like five minutes to leave, five minutes to come in? | |
| Five minutes, and then the class starts, and then one-and-a-half hours later, you get another five minutes to go to the next class. | |
| Okay, so in three classes, that's half an hour less than what you're saying, right? | |
| No, I'm saying that you could add an extra 15 minutes for three classes then, because they actually have extra time on there. | |
| Maybe my math is, you're the math teacher, but just help me understand this. | |
| If you're teaching three classes, which there are five minutes before and five minutes after, that's six times five or three times ten, which is 30 minutes. | |
| Of the four and a half hours where the children are going from one class to another, Right. | |
| And that does not count as the part of the hour and a half. | |
| So the hour and a half starts after you've had five minutes to get to class. | |
| Oh, I see. | |
| I see. | |
| My mistake. | |
| I apologize. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, I think that's good to know. | |
| That's good to know. | |
| So you're teaching, is it four and a half hours a day? | |
| It's four and a half hours a day, and that's pretty much in my state. | |
| I'm from Texas. | |
| But another thing that I found interesting, I mean, I would have thought, you know, well, that's still not a lot of work. | |
| Four and a half hours for most people's workday is not very long. | |
| I would have thought, you know, the instruction time is that's when the teacher's actually doing the quote-unquote work. | |
| But then when we look at China... | |
| I looked at China and how their teachers teach, which their teachers are excellent. | |
| I've seen how their teachers teach. | |
| And they spend only one and a half hours a day teaching. | |
| They teach two 45-minute classes, and the rest of the day they teach or they work with their master teacher, which is like a mentor. | |
| And they do go and spend time in the classroom while he or she is teaching and learn from a better teacher. | |
| And they spend most of the rest of their day six to seven hours just planning with their master teacher. | |
| So only one and a half hours is spent in China teaching per day. | |
| And do you feel that Chinese teachers are excellent? | |
| Oh, I mean, I've seen the way they are. | |
| I don't know. | |
| They do excellent in our culture. | |
| I mean, that's not going to make, you know, our culture want to learn. | |
| But I mean, from what I understand of the Chinese culture... | |
| Individualism, critical thinking, reason and evidence, philosophy, not really strong in the Chinese culture. | |
| Not strong, but if you look inside their schools, I mean, it's more of the Prussian style like you talk about. | |
| It's even worse like that. | |
| But they're actually, the kids themselves and the families, they support what they're doing. | |
| At least, you know, they're going for it. | |
| Well, that they support what they're doing is not, I mean, Hitler was voted in democratically, right? | |
| That's not always a great argument as to the virtue of the system. | |
| And it would, of course, it would be fascinating to see what would happen to a Chinese teacher who decided to pull out some Lao Tse and really start to, or some Socrates and start to teach some critical thinking, how long that person would... | |
| It would last in that system. | |
| I would imagine it would be measured in the milliseconds. | |
| As far as just them reaching their intended goal within a school or within their government, however you want to look at it, they intended to teach this material and they're kicking butt at that. | |
| They're doing good at what they intended to do. | |
| I'm not supporting the virtue of it. | |
| I'm just saying that they made this goal and they reached it. | |
| I don't have any particular problem With how long teachers work. | |
| Because for me to have a problem... | |
| I mean, I think it's... | |
| Teachers say, oh, we work so hard, we work so hard. | |
| And I think that there's some... | |
| You know, my issue is with teachers saying that they work so hard. | |
| And my issue is not with teachers should be teaching 10 hours a day. | |
| Because that would be crazy. | |
| I have no idea. | |
| I have no idea how long teachers should teach. | |
| I have no idea whatsoever. | |
| Now, when teachers tell me, well, we work so hard, well, of course, I'm going to have some questions with that. | |
| And you say four and a half hours, it's good to know. | |
| I'm good to know, sorry. | |
| Because I don't know what is optimal learning for 21st century, incredibly intelligent children. | |
| The schooling system was designed for children about half as intelligent as children now, just based on the Flynn effect, right? | |
| IQ goes up every generation. | |
| Right. | |
| And it was designed, you know, pre... | |
| Computers, pre-internet, pre-cellphones, pre-whatever, right? | |
| I'm quite interested in the unschooling thing where children don't go to school and nobody has to spend any hours a day being a formal teacher. | |
| I think that's quite a fascinating idea. | |
| So I don't think you should work more. | |
| I mean, maybe you should work less. | |
| Maybe you should be available as a tutor to help out unschooled or homeschooled kids. | |
| I don't know. | |
| So I just sort of wanted to... | |
| So if you say, well, you know, the teachers in China... | |
| Only work an hour and a half. | |
| I don't know if that's better or worse. | |
| I don't know if that's right or wrong. | |
| It's certainly different. | |
| But I just wanted to sort of point that out. | |
| I was just making the point on that, you know, because I think it would seem that it would be correlated. | |
| Okay, they only work, teachers only work two and a half hours a day, according to studies. | |
| It doesn't seem like they're doing much work. | |
| So, I mean, obviously they're not working that hard. | |
| That means they should have bad results. | |
| No wonder they're having bad results. | |
| But then when you find out some teachers are only teaching an hour and a half a day and they're kicking our butt... | |
| It's not... | |
| Well, somebody's just written... | |
| Sorry to interrupt. | |
| Somebody's written on the chat room, very few Chinese go to school after the age of 11, and the ones that continue under high school are highly motivated. | |
| And remember, in China, the nail that sticks up will be hammered down. | |
| They are the bork. | |
| No individual thinking. | |
| All are obedient or kicked out of school. | |
| So, I mean, again, I don't know, but that is... | |
| That would point to, you know, that would point to why they're able to be successful in that way or see, you know, what they report the numbers as. | |
| Those are basically, you know, only their top kids only make it through. | |
| So that would be true, and that's a fair point. | |
| All right, listen, we got more callers. | |
| So I really appreciate you calling in, and I hope that you will consider bringing some critical thinking, which, you know, obviously you have to some degree. | |
| Think about bringing that in to your classrooms. | |
| And if you do, I certainly would be interested if you would drop me a line, let me know how it goes. | |
| All right. | |
| Thanks a lot for having me on the show. | |
| Thanks, man. | |
| Bye. | |
| Next we have Loki. | |
| Loki. | |
| Hey. | |
| Hey. | |
| Okay, you can hear me good. | |
| All right. | |
| Take care. | |
| So, shall we go for the logical slash discussion topic, or are we going to go for the emotional depths of the soul reaching into my personal past? | |
| Well, this be your show, my brother, so whatever you want to talk about, I'm happy to listen. | |
| I'm going to force you to take a pick. | |
| Oh, let's do logic. | |
| Let's do logic. | |
| I like me the logic. | |
| Okay, you like the logic. | |
| Alright, so I've been looking into this and I've been really having a lot of time with this and I believe that this is a really tough one. | |
| I believe that property ownership is actually a convention of the populace and it's a Convention of the, did you say populist? | |
| Yes. | |
| It is a socially acceptable concept of property ownership. | |
| Why do you think it's a convention? | |
| Sorry, just to interrupt. | |
| I just want to make sure I understand where you're coming from in the beginning. | |
| Why do you think it's a convention of the populist? | |
| The reason I ask that is it seems to me people are entirely very keen on abandoning property. | |
| Well, certainly they may be. | |
| They may be. | |
| I mean, they want to pay their taxes. | |
| They attack anyone who suggests that the taxes are immoral. | |
| They really love national debt. | |
| And national debts are a violation of property rights of the next generation. | |
| I mean, people's violation of property seems to be, you know, I wish it were a convention of the populace. | |
| It would make our job a lot easier. | |
| Don't strawman me there. | |
| That's... | |
| Okay. | |
| I'm not trying to strawman you. | |
| I'm just trying to understand where you're going from, my brother. | |
| Alright. | |
| Well, we both would agree that if you have a state society, if you have a government society, that the population has bequeathed all that they own to the throne, so let's just screw that whole idea because that's just bullshit. | |
| Okay. | |
| Alright. | |
| Look. | |
| Let's assume that we're dealing with an anarchist society, a society of people who have decided that the initiation of violence, the initiation of force, is unacceptable. | |
| So we've accepted this premise in that we'll not initiate force, we'll not initiate violence. | |
| And you as a person who's homesteaded a property or homesteaded a property, I don't know, a block of marble of some sort and you go ahead and make yourself a nice little statue of some sort. | |
| Sorry to be annoying, but that's because who dug up the marble and so on. | |
| Let's just say that I build A cottage in an unowned area in the deep north of Canada. | |
| Okay. | |
| All right. | |
| Let's start with the cottage. | |
| And I cut down the trees and I, you know, I built sewage plants or whatever. | |
| Okay. | |
| So let's just say that I have a cottage that I have built, a little hut that I built. | |
| Okay. | |
| You've cut down the trees. | |
| You've built yourself a cottage. | |
| You've got your cottage all good and ready to go. | |
| And I didn't even need to build the saw because I'm really good at martial arts. | |
| So those trees, they don't have a freaking chance. | |
| I'm just telling you. | |
| I mean, I MMA'd their ass, turned them into powder, into toothpicks with one blow of my art. | |
| Are you trying to dig on me on the freaking martial arts thing? | |
| I'm just kidding. | |
| Go on. | |
| Go on. | |
| Okay, so... | |
| Remember, I'm brave with a microphone. | |
| Anyway, go on. | |
| Alright, well, let's just assume that, yes, you've built yourself your cottage out of whatever, and Judo chopped it, as Rashmiki would say. | |
| You've got your cottage there, and the premise of the society that we have is kind of like what the Zeitgeist Movement or the Venus Project has decided to make their claim upon, is that, well, we've got, you know, Replicators that can just instantly replicate whatever it is that you want. | |
| So nobody has any claim to ownership, at least perpetuity of ownership, for an item or a structure or whatever the hell that is. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. | |
| Sorry, how does me building a cottage tie into the replicator idea? | |
| Okay, well... | |
| The general concept of the Zeitgeist Movement and the Zuhini's project is that, well, we've got these machines that can make everything that you've ever wanted at the snap of a venture, right? | |
| And it kind of reduces the rarity or the scarcity of a lot of products. | |
| Not really. | |
| Well, I mean, I agree. | |
| No, because, look, I mean, you need the power to power the machines. | |
| Somebody needs to invent the machines. | |
| You need to divert resources to build the machines. | |
| And each one of those machines can only produce, I assume, one good at a time. | |
| And so which goods is it going to produce for whom? | |
| And so what are you going to do when the resources to produce those goods become scarce? | |
| Having a replicator, there is no way to jump out of the laws of economics. | |
| There is no way to do it. | |
| And so the idea that we can somehow get rid of scarcity with replicant machines does not matter. | |
| It doesn't cease to exist. | |
| Like we have like a hundred times more food now than we did in the Middle Ages. | |
| Probably a thousand times if you look at, right? | |
| And so in a sense, but does that mean that there's no need for economics in food? | |
| No, of course there's every need for economics in food. | |
| In fact, we only have all of this excess food because there's some economics, some free market principles still operating in the agricultural industry. | |
| So the idea that Email is this massive replicant system, right? | |
| But we still have to fight spam, and every time we read an email, it takes a few seconds out of our life and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So the idea that there's some replicant that will allow you to vault out of the laws of economics, I don't think is valid. | |
| Anyway, but go on. | |
| You know what? | |
| I completely agree with you. | |
| I have no argument there, and the price system obviously... | |
| It helps you analyze these things. | |
| I'm not really talking about that, but the point is that they're trying to look at it as the concept. | |
| I brought it up as a side, I suppose, that it's kind of like this concept. | |
| Bottom line is that their perspective in This theoretical perspective. | |
| I must say that after reviewing the concept and boiling it around and so on, the logical assumption, the logical conclusion that you must get to is that property ownership must exist in order to have a really productive society. | |
| A society that actually ends up achieving anything worth crap requires this. | |
| However, When I was trying to apply the concepts of universal preferable behavior, the UPB construct you've created in your book, which is obviously... | |
| It's kind of like a scientific method of understanding how to deal with concepts and positions. | |
| And so the position is that I will take, and let's see if we can apply UPB to it, is that... | |
| I'm going to assert that no one has that current usage and current ownership. | |
| When I use the word ownership, I really don't really mean ownership because that concept actually means something different. | |
| Sorry, I have a feeling because... | |
| I think we're sort of floundering around a little bit here, so let me just ask you this question, right? | |
| Because everybody, and I fell into this trap too, so I apologize for that. | |
| Let's just, we need to talk vaginas. | |
| That's the key. | |
| That is the Sunday morning church that we need to attend. | |
| We need to talk vaginas, right? | |
| So, does a woman have a right to exclusive use of her vagina? | |
| Wait, wait, wait. | |
| Let me clarify that, but there's very, very clear, obvious... | |
| Okay, a person who is a person or any object of their body, whether it be their anus, their vagina, or their whatever, it doesn't matter. | |
| The armpit. | |
| The armpit for the truly kinky. | |
| And the unshaven armpit for the truly, truly kinky, i.e. | |
| the French people. | |
| But go on. | |
| They are in perpetual usership of the object or the item when it is their own personal body. | |
| Even when they're asleep, they are using their body to whatever. | |
| So, they have primary usership of the molecules that make up their armpit. | |
| And The fact is that we have the various different chemicals and electrons and whatever. | |
| Okay, listen, I've got to get you to get to a question. | |
| I'm allowed to have monologues, but I'm afraid you can't. | |
| So if you can get to a question, then we can move on with the conversation. | |
| Otherwise, we can call back when you've got a question. | |
| No, bottom line is that primary usership or While currently using something, you have ownership of it, temporal ownership. | |
| And if you put down the sandwich and decide that you're going to go ahead and hammer on a nail and somebody picks up your sandwich and starts to eat it, they've got ownership of it because you have discarded your ownership of it. | |
| Ownership can be transitory as a concept. | |
| And it is a societal convention that we choose to adopt that says, alright, realistically, if we're going to have a reasonable society, a society that's actually going to have progress and actually achieve something of value, we actually have to assume that, yes, you can have... | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | |
| That's not what we get. | |
| We can't get ethics from an argument, from a fact. | |
| For the good of society as a whole, there is no such thing as society as a whole. | |
| It's like saying, for the good of unicorns, I must be allowed to rape people. | |
| I mean, I'm not saying that's what you're saying. | |
| Let me just finish because I'm still trying to understand where you're coming from. | |
| The reason that we have to accept property rights is you can't deny them without asserting them. | |
| I mean, this just fails UPB right off the bat. | |
| You can't argue against self-ownership and the effects of self-ownership without exercising self-ownership, making an argument, which is the effect of self-ownership, which is your argument. | |
| So this is how we don't have to, for the good of society as a whole and all that, because it is to the advantage of particular individuals that property rights are violated repetitively. | |
| So I just want to point out that we don't need lots of abstract things. | |
| We just need to look at the argument itself and say you can't... | |
| Anyway, so listen, I'm going to give you one more point, but we've got lots of people in the queue, so go ahead. | |
| But very clearly what you've said there is an establishment of temporal or current values. | |
| Property rights, not perpetual property rights. | |
| You have made a claim of, if I'm going to make a statement, and I'm a person who is making that statement, I have made a statement, and thus I own my statement, and I am... | |
| Yeah, but that's just reality. | |
| Look, if I wrote a book called... | |
| Let me just finish. | |
| No, temporal doesn't change, because reality doesn't change. | |
| I wrote a book called Practical Anarchy in, I don't know, 2007-2008, and it will never be Ever that somebody else wrote that book. | |
| Oh, I did? | |
| That book will never, ever have been written by somebody else. | |
| So as far as the effects of my ownership, it is until the end of time I wrote that book. | |
| No, I did. | |
| I wrote the same exact book. | |
| I wrote the same exact book. | |
| I typed it in my computer exactly word for word. | |
| I happen to be looking at you. | |
| No, no. | |
| You typed the book. | |
| Yes, but you know what? | |
| That's like saying that a photocopy of Mona Lisa is exactly the same as Leonardo da Vinci, which is of course not. | |
| It's not a photocopy. | |
| It's actually derived by my physical actions and so on. | |
| But bottom line is you know that IP laws don't exist. | |
| You know that copy... | |
| I didn't say anything about copyright. | |
| I didn't say anything about copyright. | |
| It is a fact. | |
| And look, we're going to have to move on to another caller because we're kind of going in circles. | |
| But it is a fact from here until the end of time that I wrote that book. | |
| That doesn't mean that I support copyrights. | |
| I'm just saying that it is a fact from now, from the time I wrote the book until the end of time that I wrote the book. | |
| We can share the same expression of thought and the same thing. | |
| One ownership does not preclude the other. | |
| That's a conflagration of the term ownership. | |
| Ownership of a person's exacting behavior does not necessarily mean ownership in perpetuity of the results of that labor. | |
| If I shoot somebody, I own the action. | |
| I don't own the dead body for the rest of time. | |
| The dead body is the property of the family or whatever the societal convention is. | |
| It is not, you know, I am responsible for what I've acted, what my actions were. | |
| I am not perpetual owner of everything that the result of my action was for all time unless we agree upon it as a society. | |
| All right. | |
| I think that's an interesting point. | |
| I will have to mull it over. | |
| And in that mulling, I will have to move on to another caller because otherwise we're going to be doing this into the wee hours of tonight. | |
| But thank you so much for your call. | |
| Yes, go ahead. | |
| One quick question before you go. | |
| You're going to be in California and... | |
| I just wanted to know what Libertopia... | |
| What are the dates and so on? | |
| Just so that we can get that plug-in because I think it's an awesome experience. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| You've got to go to Libertopia. | |
| I mean, especially if you have kids. | |
| I mean, oh, my God. | |
| It's fantastic. | |
| Great kids' activities. | |
| It is in one of the most beautiful areas of the world, literally. | |
| And so you can go to Libertopia.org today and tomorrow. | |
| They take Bitcoin, for goodness sakes. | |
| So you can finally turn that digits into something useful. | |
| And I'm going to be the master of ceremonies. | |
| I'm going to be hosting the whole thing. | |
| I'll be on stage for three days. | |
| I'll be opening and closing speeches. | |
| Will be me. | |
| I mean, and look, I mean, maybe you think I suck, which, you know, occasionally I will agree with you. | |
| But there's, you know, Jeff Berwick's going to be there. | |
| Richard Barty, the great Richard Barty, who actually is becoming closer and closer to an Ewok as time goes by in terms of his look. | |
| Peter Bose, Doug Casey. | |
| Gary Sharkey! | |
| And Skye Conway, of course, is running it and all that. | |
| David Friedman, who also brings Hobbit Town to Foster Gamble. | |
| David Gordon. | |
| Oh, hey, David Gordon! | |
| That would be nice to see. | |
| That would be fun. | |
| Anyway, Ernie Hancock and all that. | |
| So there's just going to be some fantastic... | |
| Steph Kinsella's going to be there. | |
| And he's a guy you want to talk to. | |
| What are the dates specifically, the dates that we need to be there? | |
| Excuse me. | |
| So it starts Thursday until the 11th. | |
| That would be next 13th. | |
| 11th, 12th, of course. | |
| And Saturday the 13th and Sunday the 14th. | |
| It's going to be some juicy, juicy stuff. | |
| And it's going to be just great. | |
| I'm going to be doing a whole bunch of speeches. | |
| I'll be on a whole bunch of panels. | |
| And it's going to be... | |
| I've been just my third year there. | |
| I was MC last year. | |
| And it is... | |
| I hate to say it because there's lots of great events. | |
| If you're not into living rough, then go to Libertopia. | |
| And if you're into living rough, go to Porkfest, then Libertopia. | |
| But it is just fantastic. | |
| Well, thank you. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| And I look forward to seeing you if I can somehow get myself out to California. | |
| It's a great opportunity. | |
| You have to. | |
| Look, you have to. | |
| I mean, listen, life – these are studies, right? | |
| Studies show that life is enriched through a variety of memories. | |
| And you just – you got to go. | |
| You got to go because, you know, we live solitary lives as rational thinkers and you need to be around out of the rational thinkers. | |
| Just, you know, it's an old quote from – Some writer that was quoted in a fairly good movie called Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins says, we read to know that we're not alone. | |
| Well, we go meet people to know that we're not alone. | |
| It is an incredible recharge. | |
| And it is a vision of the future. | |
| Because this slice of people who believe in voluntarism and peace is a window to the future. | |
| It's like time travel. | |
| And, I mean, who wouldn't want to go for some time traveling? | |
| So I would highly recommend it. | |
| Well, I thank you for being such a great voice for Reason and for Logic, and I hope that I'll be able to have some sit-down time and talk with you again about these abstract concepts of temporal or permanent property ownership and things like that. | |
| I really think that you add so much to the knowledge of humanity as a whole, and I think that I can bring some Additional value, and I hope that we can really make the world tick the way that we know that it can hum like a beautiful, explosive, productive, just amazing experience that everyone would benefit from. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| All right. | |
| Well, let's move on to the next corner. | |
| Thank you for your comments. | |
| All right. | |
| Next up, we have Josh. | |
| Hello. | |
| Hello. | |
| Hi! | |
| Can you hear me, Steph? | |
| I can. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| I'm on my Skype mobile, so it's the first test run, and I'm in a big room, so I'm not actually in the toilet. | |
| It's a bit echoey. | |
| Unless your toilet is a very big room, like you need lots of room for thrashing around and so on. | |
| No, thanks for taking my call. | |
| I actually interviewed you from Australia when I was there back in about four months ago or something like that. | |
| Yes, I remember. | |
| How are things? | |
| Yeah, good, good. | |
| I've actually moved to Berlin now with my wife and we've enjoyed the end of the summer here and it's just absolutely beautiful. | |
| One thing I wanted to talk to you about was that, you know, I've been a big advocate for anarchist philosophy and voluntarism for a long time, and I've gone on about it and on about it to people. | |
| And then about a year and a half ago, I had my aortic valve I had to get replaced in my heart. | |
| And the Australian system is such that I've, you know, over my time working, I've paid into the tax system and this and that by force. | |
| You know, of course, the whole procedure was free and in and out and it was amazing and the surgeons were absolutely stunning and, you know, I mean, and the nurses, my God, what they have to put up with is phenomenal when I was in ICU, you know, seeing them really. | |
| What they do is really just, you know, words can't explain. | |
| I mean, there's a woman staring, one woman or one person per person I had a woman, but one person per person in the ICU, in the intensive care unit, and they're staring at a monitor full of graphs of your monitor just all night long, just staring. | |
| I mean, if I look at a computer for a while, I just fall asleep, but these people just sit there. | |
| And anyway, it's amazing. | |
| But what my real problem sort of afterwards was, was I'd go on about anything, and I still stand absolutely by that philosophy, but it's really hard to talk to people about it now, I find, people that are close to me, because then straight away they say, well, what about, you know, you had your heart fixed by that system, and if you had to pay for it, there was no way you could afford it. | |
| And it's true, I couldn't have afforded it. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. | |
| A whole bunch of stuff flowing there together, right? | |
| So, I mean, the important thing is to separate the source of the problem from the effects of the problem, right? | |
| So if I go steal $1,000 and give $1,000 to charity, and then somebody says, you shouldn't have stolen that money, if I then say, oh, so what you're saying is you're against charity, then that's clearly messed up, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| So nobody's against you getting your aortic valve replaced. | |
| I mean, I think that I'm sure the pig happily gave up his life so that you could walk tall. | |
| So, I mean, nobody is against that. | |
| Oh, sorry, what I meant was the Borg robot. | |
| Yeah, people... | |
| Right. | |
| No, I'm not going to make any more jokes about my... | |
| No, I'm still vegetarian. | |
| It's all right. | |
| So, no... | |
| Well, you don't eat it, right? | |
| But nobody is saying that you shouldn't have that, right? | |
| Nobody is saying that you should have died. | |
| I mean, this, of course, is not the case at all. | |
| But if you say that you can't afford it, well, we don't know. | |
| The likelihood is that you could have it. | |
| Because, and there's a couple of reasons for that. | |
| Of course, you know, healthcare costs go up enormously because government limits this and regulates that and the tort system is really bad for the other and all that. | |
| So, I mean, healthcare costs used to be going down and then they went up like crazy and people say, ah, well that's because of technology. | |
| But the point is technology is to make things cheaper and on. | |
| So, did you, when you were in Australia, were you required to have regular physical checkups? | |
| No, but I did anyway. | |
| Okay, good. | |
| So that's the sort of point as well. | |
| It was a genetic issue. | |
| And was there any way that it could have been detectable ahead of time? | |
| Yeah, I actually detected it because I'm very tall. | |
| So they detected it just from a general checkup when I was a teenager. | |
| They said, oh, actually, you've got a misshapen valve here. | |
| It's not doing anything badly right now, but in the future, you might need to get it replaced. | |
| So every couple of years, I went and had an ultrasound and got it checked out. | |
| Right, okay. | |
| Now, you understand that just from a cold-eyed economic standpoint... | |
| You're way more profitable alive than dead, right? | |
| Right, so let's say in a free society, let's say you have health insurance and life insurance. | |
| Let's just say. | |
| Now, if you have health insurance, by the same company that gives you life insurance, they really, really don't want you to die, right? | |
| For two reasons. | |
| One, if you die, then they have to pay out your life insurance policy. | |
| And number two, if you die, you won't be paying them a whole lot more premiums, right? | |
| Because you will be, as I mentioned, dead. | |
| So a company where you have this kind of insurance, they want to keep you alive. | |
| It's estimated that people earn a million or two million dollars over the course of their life. | |
| And so anything that's less than that is... | |
| You know, more or less, you know, give or take. | |
| It's productive and positive for people to lend to you if you pay them back or if you've got insurance, then they want to keep all of that stuff and so. | |
| So, you know, if you had any kind of insurance, and I would want health insurance from the same company that gives me life insurance to make sure that they have as much incentive as possible to keep me alive. | |
| And so this would have been taken care of. | |
| Now, let's say you didn't have any of this stuff and so on. | |
| Well, lots of people who care about you, who love you, they would be happy to help out. | |
| Doctors, of course, used to give lots of pro bono stuff. | |
| To healthy young people. | |
| And of course, you know, you would have decided to stay alive. | |
| And you wanted to stay alive. | |
| So you would have said, yeah, I'll pay you back, you know, a thousand bucks every two months for the next 20 years, just so I'm not dead. | |
| Like there's this guy in Canada. | |
| The government would not, I think he had liver cancer. | |
| And the government said, well, you're too far gone. | |
| You can't get, you know, I'm not going to get you. | |
| I'm just going to let you die. | |
| And why? | |
| Well, the government doesn't pay out any Life insurance. | |
| In fact, they're kind of on the hook for your retirement pension. | |
| So, in a sense, I'm not saying that they want you to die, but... | |
| No, economically, yeah. | |
| So, he sold his house, he went to England, and he spent, I don't know how much money on a procedure in England, and now he's fine. | |
| And now he's suing the government, saying, look, you guys refuse treatment for me. | |
| I went to England, I got treatment. | |
| And people were like, oh, that's, you know, horrifying. | |
| I mean, he had to sell his house, and it's like, but what the hell? | |
| You're going to get buried in his house? | |
| I mean, what the hell does a house do for you if you're dead? | |
| So there's ways to do it. | |
| So nobody is saying that you shouldn't have this procedure. | |
| And yes, you are alive because the government did what the government paid. | |
| But of course, it wasn't the system that kept you alive. | |
| It was the doctors. | |
| It wasn't the coercion at the root of how the doctors were paid that kept you alive. | |
| It was the doctors themselves. | |
| And it's not like there would be no doctors in a free society. | |
| I think there'd be much better and more effective ones. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| You see the fall in price in the healthcare system in Asia. | |
| The whole medical tourism trade in Asia is huge. | |
| It's not as advanced in some ways. | |
| Of course, if you look at things like plastic surgery and laser eye surgery, the prices for those things have gone down enormously. | |
| Because they're not as embedded in the government system. | |
| So, look, I mean, I get it. | |
| I really do understand it, right? | |
| There is a sense of like, well, you people saved my life. | |
| How can I fight against a system that pays you? | |
| No, and... | |
| I get that part. | |
| The problem now is that I've moved to Berlin and my sister here, I've talked to her a lot about stuff and she sort of gets it, but she always makes these little digs, for instance. | |
| And this is another thing I've had to sort of battle with. | |
| I haven't got the most money in the world. | |
| I've sort of saved a bit and this and that to get over here to be with my father a bit more. | |
| You know, over here you have to have health insurance. | |
| You have to have it. | |
| But there's private health insurance, which is really, really expensive. | |
| You know, it's really expensive. | |
| And then there is private public health insurance, which is kind of... | |
| It's a strange mixture, but it's a lot cheaper and they have to take you if you can't afford it because everyone has to have health insurance. | |
| But it's backed by the government. | |
| Anyway, I ended up having to go with them because I just couldn't afford the full private health insurance. | |
| And sorry, but just to be clear, this is one of the problems with the words public and private, because public and private seem to create this sphere called, well, here's the government, and that's public. | |
| And over here is the free market, and that's private. | |
| But, of course, we both know that healthcare in Germany is a long way away from the free market. | |
| All these licensing and restrictions and massive educational requirements, and I don't know if they allow midwives or whatever, just, you know, the general crowding out of Other practitioners, plus the government granted monopoly on the dispensing of medication and all that. | |
| Even the quote private is a hell of a long way from the free market. | |
| So I just want to point that out. | |
| And of course it is expensive and part of the reason it is expensive is you're having to pay a lot of taxes for the quote public system. | |
| So anyway, I don't want to mention that. | |
| And not only that, they're having to compete. | |
| Right, right. | |
| So they're having to compete with super cheap, which most people are in. | |
| And they have to pay a lot of taxes at which they have to pass along the cost to you, right? | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| And so, yeah, I mean, it's very biased. | |
| But, you know, that then is difficult. | |
| Plus, my wife wants to learn German. | |
| So we went to a private German school and they wanted a thousand euros for four weeks of two lessons a week of three hours or something like that. | |
| And then we went and someone passes a link to the Volksschule, which is the public school sort of version. | |
| And it's 150 euros for four hours a day every day for four weeks. | |
| And so, of course, I'm going to do that because I just want my wife to learn German. | |
| I'm not just going to throw money in the wind and say, oh, I'm going to do it that way. | |
| I keep having to make these choices financially and economically, make these choices which go against my ethics. | |
| Sorry, why did they go against your ethics? | |
| Well, because the public school that my wife went to to learn German is subsidized by all these taxpayers who are paying all these taxes. | |
| Well, but sorry, but the profits of the private school are subsidized, right? | |
| I'm going to assume that in the private school, you still have to have a government licensed teacher, right? | |
| Yeah, I'm not sure. | |
| Yeah, I'm guessing. | |
| And I'm sure they have to be licensed, and I'm sure they pay for those licenses, and I'm sure that there's some kind of restriction. | |
| I'm not sure, because this is just basic language learning. | |
| I'm not sure if there's much license. | |
| It's not like children's school, it's not like public school in terms of that. | |
| The private language school was just a language school with someone that I'm assuming... | |
| If you're on your computer, why not just Google it and find out if they're licensed or not? | |
| And if they are, of course, then you're subsidizing They're rent-seekers because they're going to up their price based on that. | |
| Of course, they have to pay all these taxes and they have to follow all of these rules and get licenses and pay corporate taxes on their profits and so on, all of the costs of which they have to pass along. | |
| For me, it's these sort of choices and then I get these sort of little digs. | |
| They're not these digs, but my sister, she's working as a public school teacher. | |
| I don't try to dig it or anything like that, but of course, I get these little digs from her. | |
| They're very subtle and I know she doesn't mean them by hard, but she's like, not digs, but they're sort of like, for instance, she would say, oh, we're going to go with the fog screw, and she said, It's just way more cheaper, and I just could use the money elsewhere at the moment. | |
| I should be like, yeah, well, that's because they're not doing it for profit, whereas the private ones are just all for profit. | |
| And I just couldn't be bothered then going into the big spiel. | |
| So I kind of feel like now more and more after all these things, my heart thing, my school thing, then the insurance thing and over and over, I'm starting to feel like if I post something on Facebook saying, you know, the standard anarcho sort of news stuff or something that might look at this, this would be so much better if, you know, these sort of posts. | |
| And if I do that, then I get these like What are you going on about? | |
| It's this sort of upward battle against people. | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| I would say that that's because your conflicts are implicit rather than explicit. | |
| Swimming against the stream is kind of tired, so get in a boat. | |
| Sit down with your sister and say, look, we have this conflict and I can understand where you're coming from. | |
| You know, this system saved my life. | |
| I choose to get government-subsidized things rather than pay artificially inflated prices for private school things. | |
| And I just went to one German website. | |
| I was listening, I really was, where it seems to be about the biggest. | |
| You don't actually have to yell when you do German, but I really feel that it enhances the language a lot. | |
| And they say... | |
| Actually, those are just acronyms, but they sound like a vague mix between German and traditional stereotyped kamikaze Japanese. | |
| But they do seem to be quite pleased that they are accredited by so many, I assume, government institutions or quasi-government institutions. | |
| So... | |
| So you sit down with your sister and say, look, I can understand that it seems like I'm biting the hand that feeds me. | |
| I understand that I am choosing to pay less money in order to, well, save money, right? | |
| But I'm also paying taxes, and this will come back to me that way. | |
| But this is sort of my whole point, that this is how the system is problematic. | |
| So even I, who disagree with the whole system, find myself... | |
| Participating in the system. | |
| So that's, you know, understand that that's difficult for me. | |
| And it's not that I'm ungrateful. | |
| And it's not that I, you know, don't want the same things that I got for other people. | |
| I want more of them, right? | |
| I mean, I assume that Australia and like all the other Western countries is kind of in debt and, you know, what's going to happen to all of these wonderful, quote, magically free procedures, which you actually did call it free. | |
| You know, that's of course not true. | |
| But what's going to happen to all of these procedures when the government can't pay its own bills, right? | |
| When the government can't pay the doctors anymore. | |
| That's kind of what I'm concerned about. | |
| But just have that conversation and say, if you feel that I'm being hypocritical, which I can understand. | |
| Like, if sitting in your shoes, I can really understand why I should put your shoes on my feet rather than sit on them because it's kind of painful with the stilettos facing up. | |
| Well, it's not 16 shoes, so good luck. | |
| So when I'm canoeing in your shoes down the Rhine. | |
| But... | |
| But you have the conversation. | |
| The digs are really annoying. | |
| Because the digs are a way of trying to put the other person in a position where they feel negatively about what they're doing without actually having to go through and argue, right? | |
| So I just did this interview with Reason magazine and someone sent me, someone was posting about how, oh, you know, Steph's a joke. | |
| His arguments would be laughed out of any graduate school philosophy course and he's only popular on the internet because there's uneducated people who think he's, whatever, right? | |
| And I think, you know, to me that's all very nice, you know? | |
| But how about actually disproving one of my arguments, you know, rather than just saying other people would laugh at his arguments and he's not a real philosopher and so on. | |
| And, you know, I would agree with that. | |
| But I agree that lots of people would laugh at my arguments, and I don't know what it is to be a real philosopher. | |
| I don't know, what is that? | |
| Is that, you know, is it a tattoo? | |
| Is it, I don't know. | |
| A certain club you have to lie on. | |
| A certain club. | |
| But, you know, to me, you know, when I was programming, I was a programmer. | |
| When I do philosophy, I'm a philosopher. | |
| But anyway. | |
| But the reality is that this is, it's not an argument. | |
| Right? | |
| So for people to imply that you're hypocritical is still not an argument. | |
| And when I say argument, I don't mean a fight, right? | |
| But it's not fair. | |
| Because look, if you are, I don't think you are, but if you are being hypocritical, then your sister should want to really help you with that. | |
| And what that means is she should want to sit down and really help you because being hypocritical is bad for your brain. | |
| It's manipulative, it causes you to lie to yourself, it alienates you from honest and meaning well-intentioned people, it means that you have to put fences around certain conversational topics, you end up becoming a little mini dictatorship in your own inner state. | |
| The state fundamentally is just the state of mind. | |
| What happens in politics mirrors what happens in the mind. | |
| So she should want to sit down and help you with that, not give you little digs. | |
| And if she doesn't think you're being hypocritical... | |
| Because I sort of punished myself a little bit as well, because it's like, what am I doing here? | |
| I'm, you know, sucking off other people and this and that. | |
| But, you know, really, I just think, well, no, economically, I'm in this situation, and this is, and I've, you know, I mean, the thing is, yeah, I don't know, I don't know, yeah, it's kind of, I just... | |
| No, but it bothers you, it bothers you because, I mean, part of you agrees with it, right? | |
| I mean, if part of you didn't agree with it, then it wouldn't bother you, right? | |
| If people say, I've got the most ridiculous-looking mohawk that they've ever seen, that doesn't really bother me, right? | |
| And if people slander what I'm saying without providing any counter-arguments, it doesn't bother me. | |
| It literally, I mean, I know this sounds like all kinds of zen, it literally doesn't bother me. | |
| All they're doing is punching themselves in the face and thinking they're winning an argument, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Right, so... | |
| Like, I read that kind of stuff. | |
| I'm like, hey, I do a show every Sunday. | |
| I've never refused, to my memory, a listener conversation. | |
| If people want to take me to task, you know, that this guy, this public school teacher contacted me early in the week, said, I'd like to talk to you about public school teacher's perspective. | |
| Yes, great! | |
| You know, has anyone ever come on and said, I disagree with you when I've said, get this person off the air as quickly as possible, right? | |
| Bring it on. | |
| Seriously. | |
| I mean, you know. | |
| And so... | |
| If somebody has a significant issue, they need to talk about it with you openly and clearly. | |
| Get it out on the table. | |
| Because this stuff is going to eat away at you without clarity. | |
| And if you then reject what your sister is saying, you will only be able to do so by downgrading her. | |
| In your mind. | |
| And that's going to be harmful to your relationship. | |
| I think you just got to have this stuff out. | |
| You know, say all the things that you want to say to me, I would say to this person. | |
| Say all the negative things that you want to say. | |
| You know, do you think I'm a hypocrite? | |
| Tell me I'm a hypocrite. | |
| Let's get it. | |
| Let's hash it out. | |
| Because it's harmful to our relationship for this little Chinese water torture of negative comments to be coming between us. | |
| And it's coming between me and myself. | |
| Siblings have a huge impact on how we think about ourselves. | |
| I mean... | |
| And this is something I agree, and I think that's a good resolution to go and definitely talk to. | |
| But then I think, what about all the people on my friends on Facebook and stuff that communicate through me from Facebook? | |
| You know, they all know that I've had surgery. | |
| Not all of them, but... | |
| And, you know, I can't do a big spiel about what my feelings are. | |
| I mean, maybe I can, but on Facebook and then, you know, have... | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't really want to have a public debate. | |
| If people are dissing you on Facebook, invite them to have a conversation with you and then put it out as a show. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Look, you can't lose, I mean, other than people who are just outright abusive, you can't lose for being corrected. | |
| Can't lose. | |
| Because, look, if you invite people to come and debate you, And I tell you this from six years' experience of saying to people who think I'm an idiot, come, tell me how I'm an idiot. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And the number of people who actually want to do it is like 1%, or maybe 0.1%. | |
| And so I get that it's got nothing to do with me. | |
| Look, I mean, I've got 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners. | |
| I mean, this is a big-ass show. | |
| I've got as many subscribers almost as Reason TV. And so it's a big chance to put your dukes up, step in the ring with me, and knock me flat. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And, I mean, there's a bit of a martial metaphor, but if there are people who think that you're being hypocritical and someone is like, and not with an adversary, like, just come on, tell me, tell me. | |
| Because if I am being hypocritical, I want to know. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| Well, thanks for your counsel on that. | |
| I hope that you will. | |
| And let me know if this is ever a show. | |
| I would like to hear it. | |
| And the other thing too, sorry, is that it also gives you the wonderful ability to dismiss people. | |
| Oh! | |
| Dismissing people. | |
| You know, I read years and years ago, I used to read the Harvard Business Review when I was in business, being a corrupt salesman, as our schoolteacher friend was saying. | |
| But I read an article that had a huge impact on me, which was, I don't remember the name of it, but the general gist of it was, That it's very important to fire some customers if you're in business. | |
| You know, everybody assumes that just having a customer is a great thing, but why assume that? | |
| Again, we need to submit that to reason and evidence. | |
| And it turns out that, you know, I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's like 10% of customers take up like 70 or 80% of your resources. | |
| Fire those customers. | |
| Like, is the customer profitable not just in your Ins and outs, but in the resources that they're taking from your organization as a whole. | |
| Very important. | |
| So being able to get rid of people, being able to fire people, being able to dismiss people is very important. | |
| And one of the great things about people who are, you know, putting you down or saying you're this, you're that, you know, invite them in. | |
| You know, come in. | |
| And I don't just invite them in privately. | |
| Like, I will do a live public debate with them. | |
| Right? | |
| I'm not going to edit it. | |
| You know, I don't have control over it. | |
| I can't decide if I'm wrong to not publish it. | |
| Live public debate. | |
| And people don't want to do that. | |
| And the wonderful thing is, I get to then just dismiss them. | |
| Yay! | |
| Fantastic. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| The customer is not always right. | |
| Yeah, it's great. | |
| It's great, because then it means that they're actually not... | |
| They have no benevolence towards me. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| Because if I'm wrong, and I'm... | |
| And also, it's important... | |
| And it's not just benevolence for me, because I'm a public intellectual... | |
| And because I will broadcast the full debate, if I'm proven wrong, they get to help out hundreds of thousands of people correct themselves. | |
| Hundreds of thousands of people will listen to me be corrected. | |
| And the chance to correct erroneous thinking in hundreds of thousands of people and to prove me wrong I mean, you'd have to really not like humanity at all to not take that opportunity to correct. | |
| I mean, if you care about correcting people, because people are, you know, saying that I'm an idiot, and you obviously care about truth and falsehood and correct and incorrect, to have the chance to, and this is why I'm saying do it as a show, to publicly expose me as an idiot and all that kind of stuff, and to correct... | |
| The thinking of hundreds of thousands of people. | |
| People who are professors, they spend their whole career to reach like 5,000 people, 10,000 people maybe. | |
| Yeah, so you get the chance to correct erroneous thinking in hundreds of thousands of people. | |
| And it should be very easy because I'm an idiot, right? | |
| I mean, it should just be very... | |
| Well, I don't know. | |
| I think you're underselling yourself there, but the... | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I mean, according to these people's perspective, I'm an idiot. | |
| And therefore it should be incredibly easy to correct me. | |
| I see. | |
| And it will go out to hundreds of thousands of people. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And you'll get significant ranking rights by taking down the biggest falsehood show on the web. | |
| So I'm just pointing out that they then don't care about truth and falsehood. | |
| They don't care about correcting erroneous thinking. | |
| I mean, it's obviously just some emotional reaction because of their own immaturity and lack of self-knowledge and blah-de-blah-de-blah. | |
| So that's why it's important to invite people in. | |
| The people who care about you will have the conversation. | |
| The people who are just out flinging their own monkey poo around will not. | |
| And then will pretend that they'll just make... | |
| But you get to dismiss them, which is very, very valuable. | |
| But you're a fantastic masturbator, see? | |
| That's the thing. | |
| Well, if I understood you correctly, I would say that it's all about the practice. | |
| Which is why one problem is bi-sized and the other one is human-sized. | |
| Anyway. | |
| Can I get on to the last one? | |
| Just to keep going. | |
| Thank you very much, Stefan. | |
| But one last quick thing that the problem was, you know, sometimes you get frightened of having these debates and then getting cut down and then on the drive home you think, that's what I should have said, damn it! | |
| But you're very good at thinking on your feet. | |
| Well, I mean, there's some preparation you should do and you can always, of course, put an addendum in, but But as long as you're honest in the debate, then I don't think that you'll have a problem. | |
| So if somebody says something that you think is like, wow, that really hits a chord on me, I find myself really responding to that. | |
| And if you're sort of honest about that, I don't think you'll ever go back and say, I really should have lied, rather than being truthful in that debate. | |
| So as long as you're honest in the debate, then I think that you really can't go wrong. | |
| Well, thank you very, very much. | |
| Have a wonderful rest of a Sunday. | |
| Oh, thank you. | |
| So far, so good. | |
| It's always a pleasure talking with us. | |
| Thanks for your counsel. | |
| And enjoy your very first German winter. | |
| Ah! | |
| It will be wonderful. | |
| I'll have to go out and buy a jacket pretty soon. | |
| Oh, yeah, a jacket. | |
| Getting chilly. | |
| I would suggest a tent with a fireplace with several anywhere to carry you around, but that's up to you. | |
| All right, do we have one more caller, Mr. | |
| J? Yes, we do. | |
| And at the risk of being completely obvious, there's not going to be a show next week, right? | |
| There will not be a show next week, but thank you for being completely obvious. | |
| Okay. | |
| And there will be one the week after? | |
| Is that right? | |
| I will get back to you on that. | |
| Okay. | |
| No problem. | |
| But I'm not sure when we're back from that, so I will double check. | |
| But thank you for reminding me. | |
| No show. | |
| Next week, it just came to me. | |
| I will drop you an email as well. | |
| All right. | |
| Next up, last caller today, we have Sean. | |
| Sean, how are you? | |
| Thank you for your patience. | |
| I am fantastic. | |
| How are you, Steph? | |
| Great, thanks. | |
| Good one. | |
| I have a terribly embarrassing problem. | |
| I've been listening to your show for about three years and I have no idea what virtue is. | |
| Sorry, just for those of you who don't speak his accent, he said three years, not tree years. | |
| Because tree years is confusing because trees, of course, have rings which indicate lots of years. | |
| So I just wanted to mention, for those who don't speak, I assume Scottish, then... | |
| Not Scottish, Irish. | |
| Irish! | |
| Sorry, the Sean could have been an indication there. | |
| Sorry, I meant to say Irish. | |
| For those of you who don't speak, he said three. | |
| I'm just going to insert the H there. | |
| Okay, so virtue is the issue that you have. | |
| Yes, very difficult and slippery thing to define properly, I find. | |
| Actually, I put a thread on the board, and I was thinking, okay, with UPB, we know what's not good. | |
| And after that, we have a giant tub of actions that are just not bad. | |
| So how do we then categorize them as virtuous actions? | |
| Right, right. | |
| Well, I mean, virtue is a lot trickier than... | |
| Vice, right? | |
| I mean, thou shalt not is very, very specific. | |
| Thou shalt is very difficult. | |
| And virtue, of course, is a problem because there are no unchosen positive obligations. | |
| You don't have to be virtuous and so on. | |
| So I did actually do a series last, I think, March on virtue. | |
| I think it's a three-part series. | |
| So you can go and listen to those. | |
| I literally listened just before the show because I've been thinking about this for about two weeks. | |
| And then I said, OK, I'll have a listen to your... | |
| It was the first one you did. | |
| Right. | |
| And you're still not clear about it. | |
| Yeah, it was like you kind of said, this is virtue, and then you just dived in and said, courage is a virtue. | |
| And then you kind of gave two examples. | |
| You said, like, I'll just take two. | |
| You had to stand up at an anti-racism meeting and say racism is bad. | |
| It's not really a virtuous action. | |
| And then obviously none of the virtuous action is standing up and becoming an abolitionist in the past would have been a very virtuous action. | |
| But you're saying that courage is a virtue, but it also would take me a lot of courage to go out and rob someone on the street with a knife. | |
| So it's kind of difficult to pin down exactly which actions are virtuous. | |
| I've been thinking about it. | |
| I've been trying to be virtuous for a few years now. | |
| I have no idea what it is. | |
| It's a pretty big mistake. | |
| Well, let me ask you a question. | |
| You know, obviously as a society, we've come a long way from the caves, right? | |
| And infant sacrifice and rape and murder and theft as pretty much the reason to get up in the morning and not brush your haggard teeth. | |
| What Are the greatest benefits that you enjoy in society that have resulted from the courageous actions of other people in the past? | |
| Being, I suppose, relatively more free than a lot of people were in the past. | |
| Not probably worrying too much about being, you know, clubs to death on my way to get some food. | |
| Right, so the fact that people have fought For thousands of years to limit the power of the state and has, you know, to some degree been quite successful. | |
| I mean, if you look at economic freedom even in the modern era in the West compared to that of the Middle Ages, I mean, it's far, far better, right? | |
| But that took some real fighting, right? | |
| That took some, I mean, that was a tussle and a half, to say the least, to push back medieval protectionism. | |
| And yes, sometimes it was done because the farm owners recognized that it was more productive to do so and blah blah. | |
| They wanted to fund the empire and And imperialism and so on. | |
| But nonetheless, there was a fight and the corn laws and other kinds of ways of opening up the enclosure movement also problematic. | |
| There wasn't many ways to open up agricultural productivity and so on. | |
| And so there are fights that people had in the past that I think we can safely say were overall negative to them. | |
| Because when you free up the economy, it takes quite a while for the benefits to flow back to you in any way that's proportional to the disutility of the fight, if that makes any sense, right? | |
| So let's say the economy starts to grow 3% or 4% a year. | |
| Well, you may get some of that, you may not, but it'd take a long time for it to feel at an hourly rate and for the stress that it was worth it for you, right? | |
| So, UPB is... | |
| Universally preferable behavior through time, of course, right? | |
| And yesterday, today, and tomorrow, geographically, and so on. | |
| But virtue, to me, has something to do with the stuff that I'm really glad that I have that came out of other people's courageous actions and virtuous actions in the past. | |
| That is really cool, right? | |
| So, I mean, for women to have equality under the law, which was not exactly the case throughout most of human history, What's the result of 200 plus years of incredible courage on the part of mostly women, some men, the racial equality that has been to some degree achieved, where now atheists can look at blacks and say, man, you don't know anything about discrimination. | |
| You can get a black guy elected president, you can't get an atheist elected president to save your life. | |
| And so all of those, but that was the result of a huge amount of difficult and fractious and problematic behavior. | |
| Courageous behavior on the part of activists and other writers and thinkers and so on. | |
| So you talk about this being courageous, but then if you think about this side of sacrificing yourself for something, And if you look at objectivism, obviously sacrificing yourself for something is a big no-no. | |
| So there's a difficulty I have there as well. | |
| Whereas, in a way, you seem like you're approaching it by saying that a lot of what we're doing is sort of a sacrifice for the future. | |
| But then again, it doesn't feel like that. | |
| I still feel great when I do good actions and when I live with integrity, when I'm honest and when I have some courage. | |
| An action that I believe is great is maybe a placebo, but I don't know. | |
| Well, look, I mean... | |
| I hate to pull the parent thing, but Ayn Rand didn't have kids and had very little exposure to children. | |
| So it's kind of, I mean, her definition of sacrifice didn't include having children. | |
| And I think it's kind of hard to understand sacrifice if you don't have kids. | |
| Or if you don't have a lot of exposure to kids and spend a lot of time with kids. | |
| Because, you know, kids are... | |
| I'm sorry? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I haven't had a great deal of time around kids enough. | |
| Yeah, I mean, look, so when your kid is sick or your kid is just having bad dreams and is up for the third time in the night, you know, it's not number one for you to go and deal with that, right? | |
| I mean, later it's like, oh yeah, remember that time when you got up and we watched cartoons at three o'clock in the morning or whatever? | |
| But, I mean, there's sacrifice in that, and that is for the sake of a long-term future. | |
| And I was somewhat surprised at the degree of sacrifice that was required in the moment, right? | |
| But I mean, there is such a wonderfully great thing that comes out of that. | |
| A human being. | |
| The greatest thing ever. | |
| And so, I think it's a little tough to get the sacrifice thing. | |
| You have a larger goal called raising a human being, which is wonderful and fantastic and amazing. | |
| My heart flutters like a flock of startled geese in joy when my daughter rushes up and tells me how much she loves me and kisses me on the cheek and all that. | |
| We were at a fair yesterday and she was doing crafts and this woman said, it's amazing, your daughter is like the most polite person. | |
| Child, not even toddler, the most polite child that I've ever seen. | |
| She said, please and thank you for everything. | |
| She was perfectly charming. | |
| We've heard these reports from a variety of different people. | |
| I mean, this is great because, you know, respect begets respect. | |
| Politeness begets politeness. | |
| So you have this great long-term goal called raising a child. | |
| And, of course, there's a lot in it in the moment that you don't particularly want to do. | |
| I mean, there's fun parts to it, but there's stuff in there that, you know, I wouldn't be, you know, spending a year walking around after a rolling ball like Frankenstein with a back injury. | |
| But I did that with my daughter when she was learning how to walk and move around and all that. | |
| But you see, you're doing it out of love. | |
| You're doing it out of love. | |
| It's not like the kind of altruistic sacrifice where you're throwing yourself bullets for the state in that kind of way and trying to say virtue. | |
| Yeah, I'm doing it out of love. | |
| I'm doing it out of excitement. | |
| And I mean, there's the growth and the step forward and all that kind of stuff. | |
| But it's a multi-decade project, of course. | |
| And parenting never really ends, I think. | |
| Kids are always going to need some help, some guidance. | |
| And even when you're dying, you can teach them something about dying, which will be helpful to them in time eventually. | |
| So, you know, this idea that sacrificing... | |
| A lower value for a higher value. | |
| I've never taken this on, and I don't want to take this on in any depth right now because it's been a long show, but it's kind of not right. | |
| I mean, people always behave for some reason. | |
| And so if somebody agrees with a bad person in the moment because they want to get along with that person, then they're not sacrificing a lower value for a higher value in the moment. | |
| They want to get along with that person, avoid conflict, and that's what they're doing. | |
| That's their highest value in the moment. | |
| Now, you could say... | |
| They're sacrificing their long-term happiness for their short-term gains, right? | |
| Like a smoker who lights up another cigarette. | |
| Well, you're sacrificing your long-term happiness for your short-term happiness. | |
| But in that moment, his higher value is to have a cigarette rather than not have a cigarette. | |
| So people, it's hard to argue that people, I mean, again, this is sort of a praxeological thing, but it's hard to argue that people in the moment are consciously and knowingly doing something they don't want to do. | |
| Because, empirically, whatever they're doing is what they want to do. | |
| Now, we may argue with their priorities and so on, but it's hard for me to understand the argument that says that you should sacrifice higher values for lower values because that's not what actually happens in the world. | |
| You know, so people will always make an argument that, well, they'll try and reformulate your values. | |
| So that obedience to the collective is a virtue and that's good and therefore you're pursuing virtue by submitting yourself to the religion or to the tribe or to the country or to the race or to the nation or whatever. | |
| And so I think that people always do act in the moment with their highest values. | |
| Now I would argue that virtue is to try and extend those higher values so that discomfort in the moment It's placed in context with gains as a whole. | |
| And I really want the world to be a better place. | |
| Lots of people do, of course, I don't claim any monopoly on that, but I would love to see a world free of war. | |
| I would love to see a world free of unjust incarceration. | |
| I would like to see a world free of child abuse and so on, murder, theft, legal and illegal. | |
| And also, I would like to provide, I've always wanted to provide, to others what was denied me as a child. | |
| I mean, if you have spent a lot of time really hungry, you cannot step over a hungry person. | |
| I mean, just because you get it, you understand it, you know it. | |
| So if you really remember what it was like to be hungry, you kind of can't just ignore hungry people. | |
| And so I know what it was like, for instance, to not be supported in a history of child abuse, to have no social recognition of how terrible that was and so on. | |
| So yeah, I will provide that to others because I remember what it was like to live without that. | |
| And that's why I say that, you know, the first virtue is always honesty. | |
| And memory really is the root of virtue. | |
| Because if you have memory, you have empathy. | |
| And if you have empathy, then you can universalize in a truly In deep fashion rather than intellectually, which is, and again, so this is all kind of abstract stuff, but if you extend your definition of what is productive and positive in the world, even just for you, right? | |
| So I don't want to be dying of lung cancer in 20 years, so I'm going to stop smoking now. | |
| It's going to be uncomfortable, and I don't want my marriage to mess up, so I'm not going to have this affair. | |
| I don't want to destroy my relationship with my kids, so I'm not going to drink. | |
| I'm not going to scream and yell, hit, beat them, whatever, right? | |
| Yeah, so it's sort of relative in a way. | |
| I think, what would I love for my friends to have? | |
| I should at least be that myself if I want to have friends who are that way. | |
| Yeah, and I want good things for the world, and I know, at least according to the best science and experts in the field, I know how to achieve the best things for the world, which is to Advocate for improved parenting, to sympathize and validate the upset and anger of people who've been abused as children, because that is the best way to inoculate them against the repetition of the cycle and to protect their children in the future. | |
| And so, I mean, I sort of go on and on. | |
| But these are the things that are proven, scientifically proven, not, oh, it'd be great if this politician saved us, right? | |
| Which is... | |
| Empirically disproven, but I have a quirky habit called I like to do what works. | |
| And so look at the evidence and so on. | |
| And so a virtue to me is to extend that which is positive and beneficial and universal and true and advocated in the world And there's no question that that is going to come with negative repercussions, right? | |
| If nobody's attacking you, you're just not doing enough good yet. | |
| Because to do good is to promote virtue. | |
| And when you promote virtue, you harm the interests of non-virtuous people, of bad people. | |
| And so that can be obviously challenging at times and so on. | |
| And so, yeah, you have to Look at the big picture and look at the long-term things and do that which is right. | |
| Now, I understand I'm sort of defining virtue as doing that which is right and so on, but I think that we've had this conversation, not just one today, but in general long enough that we have a sense of what is necessary and what is right. | |
| You know, a non-aggression principle in one's personal lives reflecting then out of society as a whole and so on. | |
| Yeah, so, but if we have the long view, then the sacrifices are worth it. | |
| But if we don't have the long view, then we'll be tempted to compromise. | |
| Thoreau said, the only long-term investment that never fails is virtue. | |
| It's a nice quote. | |
| Well, it depends. | |
| Again, it depends what you mean by failure. | |
| It can fail. | |
| I mean, people got burned at the stake for telling scientific truths to the church. | |
| Yeah, but because of that, though, we are free to speak it. | |
| Right, and so that which we've inherited, that we consider valuable and beneficial... | |
| I think we can, you know, fairly say the pay it forward kind of thing, right? | |
| You know, like I really, if you say, look, I really, really appreciate this charity. | |
| You know, this charity has been fantastic. | |
| It really saved me when that guy gave me 10 bucks to go get lunch when I was starving. | |
| Then if you see a really hungry person and say, well, I'm never going to give that guy 10 bucks, even though he's starving. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, that just, I just don't think that would really happen if you really remember what it was like to be hungry. | |
| So, if you've received benefits, then to pay those benefits forward seems to me like a good thing. | |
| It's not, you don't have to, you don't get thrown in jail for not doing it, but it's kind of hypocritical to say, well, I really appreciate and I'm hugely valuable and my life is happy because of the sacrifices other people made in the past to make a better world, but I'm not going to lift a finger or make any sacrifices to make a better world in the future. | |
| I mean, that is kind of selfish, right? | |
| And it is hypocritical. | |
| Saying, I really appreciate these benefits, but I'm not going to create any benefits. | |
| Okay, yeah, great. | |
| Thanks for answering. | |
| Oh, you're welcome. | |
| Oh yes, Liberty Forum in Toronto, Saturday, November the 3rd. | |
| When is your keynote speech? | |
| I don't know. | |
| But I will be there all day. | |
| So I hope that you will come out all day. | |
| And I'll be around all day. | |
| You know, I mean, I love, love, love to chat with listeners and critics and all that. | |
| So I'll be around, you know, let's do lunch. | |
| And so that's what I'm all about. | |
| So if you'll be there, I will be there too. | |
| All right. | |
| Well, thanks everybody so much. | |
| I'm sorry that I could have done more time on the virtue topic and maybe I'll do a show on it and take on this challenge of altruism versus self-interest. | |
| But you guys are just brilliant Brilliant! | |
| Brilliant! | |
| Thank you so much for all of your support. | |
| And sorry that the documentary is a little late, but I'm going into a bit of a travel fest, so it's going to be a little delayed. |