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Nov. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:57
2249 Democracy Is a Suggestion Box for Slaves
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Alright, ladies and gentlemen, our first guest tonight, joining us all the way from Canuckistan, Stefan Molyneux, founder and host of freedomainradio.com, the largest philosophy conversation in the world.
How many hundreds of millions of downloads?
I don't know, 12 million plus something views on his YouTube channel.
And I got to say, you know, I put out a lot of cheap shit and I'm getting, I'm almost creeping up on those numbers.
But there's something about those views for Stefan Molyneux.
I've said it once, I'll say it again.
A lot of those for the incredible videos that he has put out, laying out how the state relates to the individual, how the state came to be, how we are moving past it.
Each one of those represents an incredible life-changing epiphany for someone in their process of coming to the truth, the philosophy.
He's the author of a number of books, all of which I can say, you're like the only author with multiple books.
I can be like, yeah, I've read all of those.
But to be honest, I haven't read a single one because I'm way too lazy, but I've listened to all of them.
I've listened to everyone.
They're available for free because he doesn't believe in intellectual property.
The scam, I should say, that is intellectual property.
And we are grateful now that we have decent microphones in the studio.
We are worthy of his presence here in this room that looks like a grow room, had a love child with a spaceship.
And Stefan, welcome to the bridge.
It is an honor to have you on, on this night of all occasions.
Not just Guy Fawkes Day, but Election Eve and a third and fourth party debate.
Well, thank you, Iowa.
I always like getting those kinds of introductions.
You know, every word he says is a life-changing epiphany, epiphany, epiphany, because it's like, well, no pressure.
And just, you know, just showing up to chat and change everybody's spiritual course for all eternity.
So thank you for the invitation.
It's a real pleasure.
And congratulations on the new show and the new format.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
It's really exciting to be building out, and you're a huge inspiration in that and seeing everything that you've done.
We've got a lot of people joining us tonight in the studio because we've got the third party debate tonight.
We're really excited to see Jill Stein score off with Gary Johnson.
But, you know, I've got to ask you a much more important question, sir.
Who are you going to be voting for tomorrow?
I am going to be voting for sitting on the couch, probably dusting off some potato chips and having a nap to reading some Charles Dickens.
That's going to be my vote for probably a half hour to 45 minutes of me time rather than a half hour and 45 minutes of driving.
Into the rain time to do absolutely nothing but continue to pump up the volume of the squawk box of interstellar hypocrisy and democracy known as the modern state.
So I suggest to everyone stay home, vote for nobody by doing nothing, and that's doing quite something considerable.
Well, I don't know if you got exactly what I was insinuating there, because I did point out that you're in Canada right now, and that being the case, you would be like an extreme version of the nerdy kid from the Breakfast Club getting a fake ID that said he was like 80-something years old just so he could vote.
You would be crossing the border, breaking into the United States in order to vote in our election, but I don't think that's exactly something that Canadians are too interested in.
Sure.
No, I mean, we face the same nonsense up here.
It's, you know, draw the muskrats out of their holes so the predators can strike.
Get enough people to say that they want to get involved in the system and believe that they can do something to change the system by voting.
And lo and behold, the system remains and becomes and is sustained.
It's magically justified.
So don't participate in the magical ritual and keep your integrity clear of that swamp pit.
Well, we're talking about you being based out of Canada.
You do spend a lot of attention on the American political system and the American political process, and I know you're keeping up with things here, but why is it that if you're not an American, you should have an investment in paying attention?
Obviously, you're able to wake up a lot of people here, and you've found an incredible audience of people, especially under the alleged Well,
you know, it's like at the beginning of the good Star Wars film, the 1977 one, the first one, you know, the opening scene where there's a tiny little spaceship that's rocketing across the top of that planet, and then you go, wow, that's a pretty cool-looking spaceship.
It looks pretty big, right?
And then it pulls back and there's this, you know, unbelievable Star Destroyer, you know, big pizza slice of high-tech that's shooting away at it.
And it's really like the rest of the world is looking at you all because you're like the Death Star, and we're all Aldebaran, and so we do kind of track the Death Star when it's floating around.
It's like, where is that moon right now?
Is it gearing up?
Is it Is it using up any more particular power?
Are there any laser glints coming off it?
If you're looking across the bush in Africa and you think you see a tiger, well, you're going to spend quite a bit of time focusing on that area of your vision where you think a tiger might be.
Because otherwise you might end up, you know, headless.
And so the fact that, of course, the US has, what, nearly 800 military bases, is the biggest military spender by the rest of the world combined, has a kind of hair-trigger habit of bringing down drone strikes and leaving smoking craters where families used to be.
So, yeah, we pay a certain amount of attention to the US because it's scary and dangerous.
So it's worth paying attention to, I think.
So, are you at the point where you're handicapping the US election?
Do you have a take on who's going to win tomorrow?
Well, I thought originally it was going to be Obama.
I still think it will be Obama, simply because The public sector unions are in such desperate straits when it comes to having any kind of cash to pay off the pensions of the people who are retiring that they're just pouring unbelievable amounts of money.
And, of course, they can get people out.
They've got social pressure, ostracism, bullying, scare tactics, you know, fright clubs and all that.
I think that the public sector unions need Obama in for another four years just so they can continue to pick, clean the few bits of flesh left on the carcass of the unborn of the next generation.
So I think that Obama has that quote going for him and I think that's going to take a lot out of it.
The Republicans have lost, I think, any kind of credibility when it comes to small government.
I mean, what was their reaction to Sandy?
Free gas!
You know, price controls!
I mean, it's all just knee-jerk socialistic nonsense.
I mean, what is called on the right now is on the right, like on two issues, and 98 of the rest are completely on the left.
So, I don't think there's enough of a differentiator for people to go out and vote Romney, unless they just believe that, you know, adjectives of truth, and I shout hair, and suddenly I've got an afro.
So, I think that there's not going to be enough of a differentiator, and so people are generally going to lean left, which is where everyone is anyway.
And if you're going to go left, and if the public sector unions and all the other unions are keen on Obama, which of course they are, like 98% of the public sector money goes to Obama, then they're just going to fund and get people out and drive half-blind, half-ancient people out to scratch something next to Obama's name.
And I think that he's going to get in by a narrow margin, and you could argue that that's actually a fairly good thing.
Well, I've got to be honest.
I've been kind of surprised that the public conversation has turned out so negatively for Obama in the last month.
Obviously, most voters don't know where Benghazi is and don't care.
But that was definitely a wave of bad PR for the Obama administration.
And then the hurricane, I don't think that's helped.
But you're saying that the dependency and the ability of unions to come out will outweigh the enthusiasm gap, as it's referred to with what we're seeing, that Republican voters have a lot more, you know, and that's one of the things that's statistically measurable.
But, you know, all of this is kind of less relevant than what we see as the policy affects us.
And what I'm surprised, and as much as I want to say, like, well, of course it's going for Romney because of all the broader economic dynamics and this kind of thing, that...
If Obama hasn't started a war, it must mean he's pretty confident that he's going to be re-elected, right?
That he hasn't tried something really fucking crazy.
That was what Bush did, right?
That's the MO. You're in trouble electorally, start a war, get the rally around the leader effect.
Ali, do we have any questions from the chat for Stefan here?
Well, I think a lot of people in our chat are just getting to learn who you are, Stefan, so that's pretty exciting to see the two worlds come together.
I can't find any specific questions right now.
Maybe you should stop and explain why you would recommend that people don't vote tomorrow.
Well, I mean, it's kind of humiliating to beg for something you're never going to get.
You know, the politicians are never going to care about any particular individual.
Of course, statistically, it's completely meaningless and you're not going to affect anything whatsoever.
Except you're going to have this unclean sort of dog crap smell on your fingers for a couple of weeks that no amount of moral scrubbing is going to take off.
They don't listen to you.
They don't respond to you.
It is a sucker's game to get you to come in to validate the system, to validate what it is.
You choose the lesser of two evils.
And let's say you just think Obama is like 98% evil and Romney is 97% evil.
Well, Romney doesn't know that.
I mean, all he knows is you gave him a vote.
He's going to assume that you think he's 100% good.
You don't get to say, well, I hate both of these guys, but this is the guy I hate least.
So it's a positive action.
You are endorsing.
You are endorsing a candidate.
You are endorsing a system.
You are endorsing a whole political process.
And dear God in heaven, we claim to be empiricists, we claim to be historically interested and accurate.
We have been trying as a movement since the mid-18th freaking century to control the size and growth and power of the state through participation in the political process.
Can we get our heads out of our asses long enough to take a big, broad, hyper-spectrum, high-space, deep-space, deep-nine, side-of-the-moon look at the whole pattern and recognize that ever since we have been trying to control The government, using the government, from the corn wars, the corn laws, from the free trade movements of the 18th century, from the founding of the American Republic.
We've been trying to rein in this beast, using this beast's own tail, and it never works.
And the government keeps getting bigger.
In the 40 years since the founding of the American Libertarian Party, the government has grown about six to eight times in size, not necessarily even counting all of the accumulated debt and the deficits.
Are you sure you want to blame the Libertarian Party for that?
I'm not blaming it.
I'm not saying that it's entirely causal.
Although, of course, what happens is if you have something that doesn't work and you don't know it, you stop looking for other things.
So if you're confidently going through the woods saying, I know north is where the town is and north is actually where the desert is, then you are in big trouble because you're confidently striding off in direction...
In the direction of wrongness.
And so I really strongly urge people, let's stop assuming that it's politics and education.
That's all you ever hear from libertarians for the most part.
Well, you see, we get involved in the political process.
Now, we know we're not going to get anyone in to power, but we're going to educate people about what libertarianism is.
Education ain't going to do it.
Politics ain't going to do it.
We know education ain't going to do it because I know of at least 40 or 50...
Hardcore, free-market PhD economists who have pretty much government-controlled, government-managed, government-unionized, protected, and tenured positions.
So even if we got everyone a PhD in free-market economics, we still couldn't get them to take their noses out of the state's trough.
So educating people is not going to get them to stop wanting government.
They sent all the Tea Party.
All the Tea Partiers went to Washington with that coke-infused small government money, and what did they do?
Stuck their nose in the trough, pretty much balls deep, As soon as they got there.
And nobody's been able to get them out since.
So let's just recognize it is...
Balls deep in the trough?
Was that balls deep in the trough?
Yeah, I mean, they put their head in the trough and they pretty much go to their waist into the trough.
They just leave enough of their feet out that they can be pulled out to go out and re-elect so they can go back in.
Okay, just checking.
Stefan Waller does not mix metaphors, ladies and gentlemen.
No, I really just said...
Alright, so we have the third party debate tonight.
Stephon, we've got Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, the Green Party.
What do you think is the significance of this particular conversation?
What does it represent?
Boy, I don't, you know, it gives people a chance to analyze things that are never going to be achieved.
It gives people a chance to laugh at ludicrous theories.
It gives people a chance to, you know, to pretend that they're praying to Thor and achieving human freedom.
What are some of those ludicrous theories?
Well, okay, doesn't the green lady wants to...
She has a platform where she's going to provide a job to every able-bodied American.
Mm-hmm.
Unless she has an enormously big garden that needs weeding, I don't really know how she's going to do that except by using force or printing money or borrowing.
So this is a completely fascistic state of affairs.
I believe that Gary Johnson, who, you know, in many ways, of course, is more libertarian even than Ron Paul, he wants to, what is it, up to a 23% sales tax to replace all the other taxes that go on.
That's interesting.
Hold on.
More libertarian than Ron Paul.
You've got to define libertarian and then justify that.
Because I think most people in the movement, certainly most in our audience, have been of the mind that at least Ron's philosophical grounding would make him...
A volunteerist.
He is a volunteerist, at least self-proclaimed, and his policies seem to be the best possible way to move towards volunteerism based on his opinion and his understanding of government.
But Gary Johnson, not there.
How do you make the case that he's more libertarian?
Well, I would say around the abortion issue, I would say that around the immigration issue, that he's probably a little bit more on the libertarian aspect.
Because remember, there's what Ron Paul says on the freedom bus, right?
And then there's what Ron Paul has to say to everyone else, right?
I mean, and so the sort of voter-facing Ron Paul has some stickiness around some libertarian issues, to my knowledge.
And Gary Johnson has less, but...
You know, the fundamental thing, of course, is that they both still wanted to find ways to fund government, and neither of them are making the exquisitely simple moral case that taxation is force, that printing money is theft and counterfeiting, that borrowing money is enslaving the unborn, which even the ancient slavers had the civility to not do.
And so, they're not able to make the moral case and therefore they have to try and make some sort of pragmatic cause and effect argument.
You know, well, the economy will be better off.
Well, no, it won't.
Not for a whole bunch of people.
If you got a real free market tomorrow, probably a third of the population would fall into an economic hole that they may spend years or forever or never.
So, because they can't make that fundamental moral argument to the general population that we have turned into a blood-soaked, ping-pong ball-playing-with-eyeballs team of cannibals, turning on each other, attempting to turn the swords and guns of the state on each other, and selling off our children for the sake of a food stamp in the here and now, that we've turned into this It's an utterly heinous and cannibalistic society which has to be stopped because even if you're not religious, we can all go with thou shalt not steal.
They can't make that fundamental moral argument.
So the only argument they can really make is, well, let's return to the past or let's have a smaller government, let's have more opportunity, let's have a slightly better economy or a much better economy.
These are all arguments from effect.
But unfortunately, there are so many people who are tied into...
The government system and have adapted themselves like exquisitely detailed parasites to the existing government system.
That attempting to change it is going to create howls of protest like firing a cannon full of stakes into a vampire convention.
So it is just going to be a horrendous change.
Nobody should think it's going to be any different.
And if we don't have a moral cause with which to make that change, people aren't going to accept it.
People will accept incredible suffering for a moral cause they believe in.
Even if it's not true, you know, like fighting Nazis or whatever, right?
But if they don't have a moral cause, then they go for the argument from effect, and the argument from effect basically says, I'll get mine however I can.
And so neither of them, I think, can consistently make that moral case.
And so they're just not going to be enough of a leader to change the world the way it needs to be changed.
So we are paying attention to this because we are of the mind, even as anarchists, watching this debate of the belief that it is important, that it is something that affects society and that there will be some outcome that is significant one way or another.
If Obama wins, Going into a second term is different than being in his first term.
If it's Romney, there will be a direction of policy change because he represents a slightly different class of special interests or a different collection of various superclass interests that have been able to sponsor him and get behind him.
Do you think that there's anything we have to look forward to as libertarians in one outcome or the other?
Is there someone we should at least be hoping for?
Even if it's on the scale of, well, if Romney's president, then maybe the left will wake up and we'll have an anti-war movement again, even though there will probably be less people dying overseas.
Well, I mean, historically, entitlement spending goes up faster under Republicans than it does under Democrats.
So if you want a bigger government, vote Romney.
I mean, that's the way it goes.
Historically, there has been the belief...
Sorry, go ahead.
Because they get away with more, think they can get away with more big government when it sounds like small government and people buy that rhetoric?
Yeah, and also because the Democrats are in opposition and don't fight them.
Right?
I mean, so, you know, the government has a logic all in and of itself.
I mean, the political leaders are like a little tiny ant riding that big giant honking stone ball at the beginning of Indiana Jones.
They can lean one way or the other, but it's going to make a whole bit of difference.
The logic of the system is unfolding based upon contracts, decisions, and everything that was set up generations ago.
It's just on its last legs rolling its way forward.
Eight minutes before Jerry Garcia dies, it doesn't really matter if you ask him to put down that third cheeseburger.
He was done years ago, right?
It's just a matter of waiting.
But the one thing that will happen if Romney gets in is because we live in this bizarre situation I don't want anyone like that anywhere near...
The Reigns of Power when the horse jumps off the cliff.
Are you saying that Romney doesn't understand it or that he understands it and he's playing it?
Because that's an important distinction.
There might be limits to his understanding, certainly, but I think for the most part he knows what he's doing.
He's not unintelligent.
Well, I mean...
Intelligence doesn't have anything to do with it, because it's really around fundamental principles.
Anybody who understood the free market would not have introduced Obamacare to Massachusetts.
Well, a politician who understands how to pervert the free market in his own interest.
Oh, okay.
So, like, you mean he understands the free market the way that a torturer understands the human nervous system?
Yeah, okay.
Right, exactly.
That's not exactly what we want in Bauer, right?
But no, because when the system really goes to hell in a handbasket, we don't want any of the Republicans anywhere near the presidency, because...
Even though they do grow government faster than the Democrats in many ways, and even though Romney has clearly stated that he wants to increase the goddamn military budget.
I mean, this man is a psychopath.
I mean, he's just...
I mean, this is evil.
I mean, he is just a pretty fire-breathing Ken doll of blandness and evil.
And so, he wants to increase America's military budget.
I mean...
And so, just don't have anybody associated with the free market near the reins of power because, you know, what do they still say about George Bush?
Oh, you see, the financial crisis occurred because there was all this deregulation under George Bush and he was such a free market and he just said the banks should all regulate themselves.
Jesus, God in heaven, they're still talking about the free market being responsible for the 1929 crash and socialism and war saving capitalism.
Yeah, so let's not give them any more ammo for these horrifying fairy tales they use to choke the living crap out of the next generation.
I don't really think it matters in any practical sense who wins, but from an allegory fairy tale building sense, it has some small impact.
I mean, anyone who believes in the process after we went from George Bush to Obama, I mean, I made this podcast or video in 2008 just saying, okay, look, we have about as big a change as you could possibly get.
You know, a guy who came from a single mom in Kenya and a guy who was raised in the political oligarchy heart and center soul of the Death Star Empire.
And, you know, a guy who's more on the left and anti-colonial, and a guy who's more on the right and supposedly pro-free market, a guy whose leading influences were communists and heavy-duty socialists, and another guy whose leading influences were Ronald Reagan and Hayek and so on.
We have a massive change in the presidency between Bush and Obama.
There's never been a bigger change, to my knowledge, in any political system ever throughout history than between Bush and Obama.
And what changed?
Chad, do you have a question for Stohan?
No, no, no, no.
Eddie?
I wanted to ask Stefan, but, you know, Adam had mentioned, you know, possibly the anti-war movement being re-energized if Romney is put into office.
Now, wouldn't that be a better thing?
I mean, maybe we would end up seeing less suffering in the Middle East.
Well, but if you want the anti-war movement to be energized, then you need to drive government spending as quickly as possible.
I mean, the anti-war movement is energized when the government runs out of money and has to close its bases.
This is what happens to all empires.
Look at England after the Second World War, closed down the whole empire.
If you look at Russia after the fall of communism, closed down the whole empire.
What freed the average Roman citizen from about two decades worth of being conscripted into a hellish army with no antibiotics?
The Roman Empire ran out of money.
And so the anti-war movement isn't going to mean dipshit nothing.
I mean, it's a fart in the wind.
The anti-war movement, so to speak, is only going to happen when the American empire runs out of money.
I mean, this is Al-Qaeda's plan, is what they've argued for.
They did it to Russia and freed up Eastern Europe, and they're doing it again to America, and they're going to free up all of the areas where America currently has its...
You know, a horrible squid-soaked hegemony.
So, the anti-war movement, people can go out and protest all they want.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, the biggest anti-war movement in the world occurred at the beginning of the Iraq War, and it didn't mean a damn thing.
The empire will end when the money runs out to pay the soldiers, and that's all that history teaches.
So you're saying this goes back to you can protest all you want as long as you can pay your taxes, as long as the empire can fund itself, as long as they can print money, as long as they can borrow money, as long as they can put money behind war, there will be conflict.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Ellie?
Someone from the chat asks, so what you're saying, Stefan, is elect Republicans so they can run up the debt and the left will complain.
Well, maybe that person missed the opening statement about voting as a whole.
But no, don't.
Don't vote.
It's a Stockholm syndrome.
It's begging a God that doesn't exist for a mercy that will never come.
Don't vote, because it is a system of coercion.
It's not immoral to vote.
You're not going out and shooting someone, but you are involving yourself in a system of coercion, and you are begging against all historical evidence and all moral inevitability.
You are begging sociopaths, psychopaths, and torturers to give you a break.
Well, you know what happens when you show somebody who's really cruel what you want?
They will use it against you.
If you want freedom, at least you can get an hour's worth of freedom by not going to vote.
But don't show them that you expect it to come through them.
They will simply use that.
So people say, well, we want to be free of the government, and the Republicans are like, ooh, okay, they want to be free of the government.
Fantastic.
Let's talk about smaller government.
And that way, they will come and support us in wanting to be free of government, right?
Don't show them your needs.
I mean, it's like showing to a torturer, you know, it really hurts when you tap right here.
You know, that's the thing that hurts me the most.
So, what's he going to do?
It's like, oh, okay, well, I guess I know where to tap.
I mean, just don't show them your need.
Don't get exposed.
Don't show your preferences to these people.
You know, we're just going to have to grit our teeth and lay the foundations for what comes next.
And what is that?
Freedom!
Well, you know, what comes next is, you know, like any addict, if you don't learn through reason, you have to learn through experience.
If you, you know, if the intervention doesn't work and you're, you know, a drug gambling sex addict or whatever, then, yeah, you just have to wake up with three bodies and a hooker's panties on your head in a ditch outside Vegas not knowing where the hell you are.
And then maybe you'll say, hmm, maybe I should lay off the, you know, the blow and gambling and hookers or whatever.
So, you know, we have a society that has steadfastly refused to listen to reason, and so unfortunately they're going to have to be clubbed by the cudgels of experience, and then they'll shake their heads, and cooler and more reasonable heads will prevail.
You don't think that's going to be, for the average human being, a more peaceful transition as the state is just slowly rendered obsolete, maybe chunk by chunk.
You know, we look forward technologically and see what's coming.
We're about to see the 3D printer revolution.
So many exponential growth curves of human development are about to, you know, start getting to the vertical asymptote.
You don't think that's going to be a more powerful force than even any conscientious direction of society in reaction to a particularly bad experience with government?
Well, governments don't tend to slowly get smaller, right?
They're like pimples.
They grow and they...
And so they tend not to shrink in a slow period.
I mean, there's some managed, right?
So Canada cut like 20% of its government in the 90s because it was just being...
40 cents on the dollar in national debt, just on interest.
So there is some managed stuff.
That's not the case in America because you have the military industrial complex and you have the prison industrial complex and you have the medical state complex.
So there's a lot of stuff that's different.
But, you know, it's important to remember that society is not the government, right?
We all understand this.
Society is the opposite of government.
Society is that which is voluntary and chosen, and government is that which is enforced and violent.
But I repeat myself.
But remember, over a third of the world's economy operates outside of governments, right?
A government is just half the zoo and the rest of it is, you know, half the zoo is cages and the other half of the zoo is just a forest you can do whatever you want, so to speak.
And so, you know, when you're looking at at least a third, and some estimates go even higher than that...
At least a third of the world's economy is just people doing their thing outside of regulations, outside of taxation, outside of government control, outside of government courts and printisons and contracts and punishments and torts and all that and suing.
The society is already laying the foundations for statelessness by existing to a large degree statelessness already.
And so it's not like there'll be nothing there if the government shrinks considerably.
It's all those parallel mechanisms will simply...
You know, rush in to take their place, right?
If you grab, yank a big rock out of the water, it's not like the water continues to go around the hole, right?
I mean, something rushes in to fill it, and there's lots of stuff already there that's been refined for many decades and fine-tuned for many decades and is working beautifully.
that can come in and deal with these receding state functions.
Now we're very excited to be having you back on.
Oh.
You just lost sound there.
What?
Was the sound lagging?
I saw his mouth is moving and the sound stopped and then the sound came on.
Anyway, Stefan, we're really excited.
Alright, so we're having a few connection issues here, but I just want to say, we...
He's fucking with you.
Thanks, Stefan.
Maybe we won't have him back on on Friday.
Stefan, we're very excited to have you back on Friday.
And there's a way that you have of presenting these issues that really shows an incredible intellectual rigor and having thought things out.
And in doing so, you really invite people to ask the questions.
And most of us in the room are familiar with your work, and I think a number of people in our audience are as well.
But when you come back on Friday, I think Ali here, who's our new co-host, wanted to get into universally preferable behavior, which is really the foundational work.
I mean, you're in an incredible electronic book.
It's available for free, freedomainradio.com.
How is it that that is able to give you such a framework to develop everything else in the way that you look at the world as a libertarian?
Was that just a question for me or a general comment?
Well, give us a tease for what we're going to be talking about Friday, aside from the one other request we have from the chat room, because someone wanted to call you out along the lines, as I got to do a few months ago, around the subject of martial arts.
Yeah.
Stefan Molyneux vs.
Kokesh cage match coming up this Friday via Skype!
Don't make the hand noises.
I'm going to show you.
I only have one ab, but I will show you.
Okay, so as far as ethics go, look, I mean, historically society has organized itself around getting people to do good stuff, to be moral, to be good, either through threatening them with jail or threatening them with hell, or promising them heaven or letting them not be in jail or whatever.
And that sucks.
There's a terrible, terrible way of getting people to be good.
And so, in the absence of a really rigorous and solid philosophical justification for virtue, for goodness, for doing all that tasty crumpets of ethical goodness, we have to fall back on just pointing guns at people or pretending we're going to hurl them down into the everlasting pits of hell.
So, of course, I've spent many years working on a theory of ethics that can be used to make the case irrevocably and universally and irrefutably For ethics, and if people, of course, accept and understand this, then we have a scientific method for ethics.
And once you have a scientific method, you don't need religious wars anymore.
And fundamentally, if you count the state as another kind of religion, which it is, all ethics has been religious warfare throughout history.
We don't have a scientific method for ethics yet.
I've been working like hell on that.
I think it stood up pretty well.
I'll be happy to talk about it on Friday.
That ends the religious warfare and moves us to an age of reason, I hope.
Well, you still need to get a few more people to read it for it to have that effect.
But we'll get there.
That's the tipping point.
That's the tipping point.
Because two people will read it and then they'll tell two other people to read it and then they'll tell two other people to read it.
And next thing you know, all of these problems will be perfectly solved if we could all just figure out morality the way that Stefan Molyneux has.
Stefan, thank you so much for joining us.
The website is freedomainradio.com.
Please check it out, and if you'd like to, if you're in the audience and you have the time to listen to or read one of his books before Friday, Universally Preferable Behavior is a bit of a heavy read to get into off the bat.
Check out his YouTube channel for more of an introduction, youtube.com slash stepfbot, S-T-E-F-B-O-T. Search by most viewed.
He puts out a regular routine of really wonderful news commentary and interviews as well, but his top-viewed videos are his classics.
They're the ones that really lay out the philosophical framework, the sunset of the state, the story of your enslavement, the story of your un-enslavement, and it's a beautiful story, isn't it?
The documentary's coming.
The documentary is coming.
Yes, I got to help consult just a little bit, but I'm really excited to see what comes out of this.
But you know what?
Stefan's also working on a movie script.
He's like, oh, you've reminded me of that other project that I shelved for the documentary.
But I'm really excited to see more creative work from Stefan in the future.
Have you written all the philosophy books you can?
No, not necessarily, but I think the major ones are behind me or under my belt.
There's always more work to be doing.
I'm working on a book on parenting as well because I think that's a very important aspect of life to apply philosophy to and the non-aggression principle.
So, lots of good stuff coming, I hope.
Absolutely.
And we'll get into the critical role of peaceful or non-violent parenting as well when we have you back on Friday.
We'll have to explain exactly why.
And I'm with you here.
By the time we have peaceful parenting, we will have a voluntary society within the next generation if we don't have it sooner from technology.
So it's very exciting to see what role that will play in this development.
Stefan, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll have you back on Friday.
Thanks.
See you Friday.
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