So your wife is dying of an illness, and the pharmacist will not sell you the pill, or who are you going to eat on a lifeboat, or which streetcar switch are you going to pull to save which group of people? All this nonsense is designed to distract you from the real ethics you can achieve in your own life right now.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Yeah, is this Stefan Molyneux? | |
| I think this is. | |
| No, this is his hand puppet. | |
| Stefan Molyneux is currently undergoing his usual head waxing, but his hand puppet is available to talk. | |
| Oh, cool. | |
| Well, Stefan, we had some... | |
| Thank you so much for calling in, by the way. | |
| We've been talking about you a couple of times tonight because what we're dealing with at this exact moment... | |
| Now, I will leave it to you by... | |
| By all means, whatever you want to talk about, we'll talk about. | |
| But what we're on about right now is moral dilemmas, the sophist choices of the world, and how do they apply to the non-aggression principle. | |
| Do you have an opinion on that? | |
| Yes. | |
| So, you know, there's the classic one, which is the guy's wife is sick, and there's a druggist, like a pharmacist, who's got the medicine to save the wife, but he won't sell the medicine to the man because he wants $10,000, and the man doesn't have $10,000 for the pill that will save his wife. | |
| Is the man justified in going in and stealing the pill to save his wife? | |
| Is money more important than human life itself? | |
| And I mean, these are a dime a dozen, rightly. | |
| There's a streetcar hurtling down the tracks, and if you throw... | |
| There's the switch. | |
| It goes down one track and kills 10 old people. | |
| And if you go down the other track, it kills, you know, four young people, a kitten, and a pregnant woman. | |
| And a Klingon. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I just like to throw a few things in to spice it up a little. | |
| And these are all nonsense. | |
| And what they're designed to do is to paralyze you. | |
| Because none of this crap ever happens in your life. | |
| Like... | |
| I didn't get my driver's license until I was 32, godforsaken years old. | |
| I rode buses, streetcars, subways the whole time. | |
| I never once saw a streetcar hurtling down the tracks, and I was given the only switch that could save or damn entire collections of people. | |
| And so this is all nonsense. | |
| People who make medicines want to make sure that they get into the hands of people. | |
| Nobody's going to charge $10,000 for one pill. | |
| And let's say that they do. | |
| Okay, well, you buy it on a loan, or you get friends to help in, or you offer to clean the guy's car for the next 20 years. | |
| You can find some way to make it happen. | |
| But they give you these artificial scenarios where it's like, well, the guy won't sell you to it, so do you steal it? | |
| It's like, well, why are those the only two options? | |
| Right, I actually... | |
| No, go ahead. | |
| I was going to say, I had a conversation with a buddy of mine who's... | |
| He's a liberal, but he's interested in libertarianism, and he said that he picked up a, quote-unquote, libertarian magazine this week, and there were a bunch of moral dilemma-type questions in this libertarian magazine. | |
| And the questions he was presenting to me, I was saying, okay, so I've got to be transported back to 1952, nobody has any sort of communication with one another, and every person I deal with is a psychopath. | |
| And that's the dilemma that you're giving me. | |
| And I tend to agree with you. | |
| These are the situations that they tried to give us that somehow discredits anarchism or libertarianism or our philosophy. | |
| You just have to pile on absurdity on absurdity to make this thing go away. | |
| Yeah, and you wouldn't treat doctors that way. | |
| Like, if you were training a doctor, you wouldn't say, okay, so a guy comes into the ER, he has a heart attack, a stroke, one of his eyes is exploded, and there's a boa constrictor attacking his arm, and one alien egg is coming out of his chest at the same time. | |
| Quick, what do you do? | |
| And you're like, well, I don't know. | |
| You see, medicine doesn't work. | |
| I mean, this is ridiculous stuff. | |
| I mean, just don't deal with this stuff in real life. | |
| So it's just designed to paralyze you. | |
| You know, the moral courage that we need as human beings is available to us any moment of the day that we're in conversation with people to point out the violence of statism, to point out the inhumanity of the welfare state, to point out the imperialism of the warfare state, and to stand true and hold fast to the non-aggression principle and respect for property rights. | |
| We can do that if we want, every waking moment of every day, and I know sometimes it feels like we do. | |
| But that's the stuff that morality can help us to do. | |
| All of this other stuff is just imaginary, ridiculous nonsense. | |
| I mean, it literally is trying to figure out how the spleen of a Klingon works. | |
| I mean, it's all just made-up nonsense. | |
| And so it's just designed to get you focusing on stuff you can't change and will never happen rather than give you the moral courage to actually make a productive and positive change in the world you live in. | |
| Thank you. | |
| So, Stefan, I'm deep in the middle of finals week in a political science major. | |
| And so I have to ask you while I've got you on here, I just wrote a kind of a long essay question. | |
| And the question was... | |
| The question was, is democracy good or bad? | |
| What's your stance on that, and what do you see the future going? | |
| Or how do you see the future coming about? | |
| You've got to back up all your answers with all the philosophers throughout all the time, going back to Socrates. | |
| You're assuming that I won't, right? | |
| And you guys can take a nap. | |
| No, I know that you're a fan of Socrates. | |
| And I've seen you online reading The Trial of Socrates, which, you know, that was one of the big influences. | |
| In fact, the way I got into Stefan Molyneux was through Socrates, I think. | |
| No, actually, that's not true. | |
| It was through atheism. | |
| That's where I got to Stefan Molyneux. | |
| I got through Stefan Molyneux through Ben Farmer. | |
| And, Stefan, I will say that Ben Farmer has coined the phrase that Stefan Molyneux is the modern-day Socrates. | |
| Well, that's very kind, Seth. | |
| Yeah, Ben is often the gateway drug to me, so that's very nice. | |
| And of course, I do occasionally take the back door to Socrates, as I guess a lot of his students did at the time, so I really appreciate those kind words. | |
| But see, democracy, good or bad, it's a very prejudicial question, because democracy is simply one way of organizing violence. | |
| So, it's like saying, is a mob composed of red-haired people that's currently stringing up some horrible, you know, some poor minority? | |
| You know, is the mob of red-haired people really bad? | |
| It's like, well, what do red-haired people have to do with anything? | |
| It's the mob that's the problem. | |
| What does democracy have to do with anything? | |
| It's violence that is the problem. | |
| It's like saying, well, let's say we have a gang that only rapes Chinese women. | |
| Is that bad? | |
| It's like... | |
| The rape part, yes, the Chinese women is not particularly relevant. | |
| Obviously, it's not good for the Chinese women, but the rape part is the problem. | |
| And democracy is just one way of organizing violence in society or disorganizing society through violence. | |
| It's mob rule. | |
| It's gang rule. | |
| It's the rule of the brute and indoctrinated blind majority. | |
| And it relies upon, like all status systems, it relies upon the initiation of force, the selling off of children, the indoctrination of the young, the general falsification and hollowing out of philosophy through the endless lies of culture and superstition and patriotism and nationalism, all this kind of nonsense. | |
| It requires the recasting of people in blue from criminals to heroes, of people in green from criminals to heroes, and all of this moral falseness completely hollows out and excavates any real, true, deep, and virtuous moral instinct the species possesses. | |
| So democracy is one form of organizing it. | |
| It's just under the umbrella of violence is wrong. | |
| The initiation of force is wrong, whether it's a fist to the face or a ballot in the box. | |
| Can I ask you a loaded question, then, in that regard? | |
| And that is, I'm going to tell you what my response to that question was, and then you've already filled in your response. | |
| But tell me how wrong or right I was in this. | |
| And the way I saw the future in this final question was that technology and innovation is going to make government seem more and more irrelevant as we go along. | |
| And eventually, hopefully, and this is the only peaceful way I see to the end of government, is that we just kind of start ignoring it eventually, that society just goes, eh, we've kind of solved that on our own with innovation, technology, and eventually government will just, | |
| government, democracies always implode, and eventually this government will implode, but if we can make society to where we don't even feel it, well, that's The next evolution of human society. | |
| I guess my question is, am I going to get an A or an F on that? | |
| I think that's a good argument. | |
| I think that's a good argument. | |
| The problem, of course, is that the technology that liberates us from government also allows government to control, monitor, tax, regulate us to the nth degree. | |
| So technology is a real double-edged sword when it comes to the state. | |
| It gives us the opportunity to have these conversations. | |
| It gives me the opportunity to have like 50 million shows downloaded about philosophy. | |
| But it also gives the government the power to monitor and control us enormously. | |
| So, it's a real race. | |
| Now, are we actually on the radio or can I use a strong word? | |
| You do your thing. | |
| It's uncensored. | |
| Say whatever the fuck you want. | |
| Uncensored. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, the problem, if we really want to free ourselves from the government, we have to become much less assholes. | |
| There will be far fewer assholes in the world than there are right now. | |
| Because you understand, like, social programs are primarily for people that no one likes. | |
| Let's say that you spend your life in a community. | |
| Let's say it's a church or whatever. | |
| I'm an atheist, but let's say it's a church. | |
| And you spend your life in that community and you do really nice, good things for people. | |
| You know, when people's pets die, you come over with, you know, caramel custard pie and a shovel. | |
| You help them. | |
| You know, you babysit people's kids. | |
| You help them out when they are in trouble and all this kind of stuff. | |
| So then, if you get old and you don't have a lot of money, people are going to help you back. | |
| You know, reciprocal altruism It's very powerful. | |
| I mean, it's certainly how my show works, so I can tell you from firsthand experience, it's very powerful. | |
| And so, the social programs are for people that no one likes. | |
| They're for people who got old and didn't save any money. | |
| And so weren't responsible. | |
| They didn't do nice things for their community, so their community doesn't want to help them out. | |
| Maybe they alienated their kids because, you know, if you're nice to your kids, they're going to want to take care of you when you get old. | |
| If you don't have any kids, then you should save the money you would have otherwise spent on kids. | |
| If you're good to your community, your community will help you back. | |
| So the people who are on welfare, the people who are on old age pensions and so on, for the most part, these are people who've not contributed as much to their community and therefore they have a desperate insecurity in their old age. | |
| But if we're nicer people as a whole and we're more communally involved as a whole, we won't need these social programs. | |
| But that means getting off our couch and getting to know our neighbors and that seems to be quite a struggle for a lot of people. | |
| But isn't part of creating I'm sorry. | |
| It isn't part of creating a good society. | |
| The ability for the free market to take care of these people. | |
| So we're not against the social safety net per se. | |
| We're against the forced social safety net. | |
| So shouldn't the free market be able to pick up on these ideas? | |
| And shouldn't if... | |
| I keep saying should, and of course you know that that's ridiculous. | |
| But if... | |
| If a government decides that, hey, our number one goal is to make ourselves redundant, couldn't we see a slow, gradual throwing off of government by government agencies? | |
| I guess that's my question. | |
| Is a government capable of creating this society? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I mean, look, so violent crime in the United States has dropped, I think, about 40% over the past 10 years. | |
| And so we should have far less need, right? | |
| We should have far less need of police. | |
| And so, of course, all that's happened is they've invented other crazy, ridiculous wars, you know, like hunting terrorists in Wichita and stuff like that, and locking up even more people for non-violent, carrying the wrong piece of vegetation nonsense crimes. | |
| And so, the governments will not—nobody votes to put themselves out of a job. | |
| Governments do not vote to shrink their own budgets. | |
| Everything that is left unspent is usually reduced from the next year's budget, so everybody has a massive incentive to continue to grow the government. | |
| Sure, but let me ask you this question. | |
| If the liberty movement were to decide that our goal is to infiltrate government with that being our number one priority, which is to diminish government where it has become redundant and allow innovation and technology to take over where it can... | |
| Should that be a goal of the Liberty Movement? | |
| Is that a reasonable goal? | |
| But that's a testable hypothesis, right? | |
| If you have a theory that you can infiltrate a criminal gang, And get it to turn to virtue or curtail its criminal activities. | |
| You don't want to start with the very biggest criminal gang of all, right? | |
| You don't want to start with the federal government or the local government. | |
| What you want to do is start with some local crime gang. | |
| You know, some local car thief gang. | |
| You join that car thief gang and you get them to start cleaning cars or washing cars or detailing cars rather than stealing them. | |
| or at least get them to cut their car thefts in half, or whatever it is. | |
| You join some break-and-enter gang, and you get them to redecorate and to put up Christmas ornaments instead of stealing people's iPads and computers or whatever they steal. | |
| And if you can do that, if you can join a criminal gang and turn it towards some virtuous or at least some less criminal activity, well, that's great. | |
| You've proved that theory, and then you can start with the mafia, and you can get bigger and bigger, and eventually you can work your way up to the government. | |
| But, of course, we all know that you can't join a car thief gang and get them to start cleaning cars rather than stealing them, so expecting it to be any different with the government, I think, is a fantasy. | |
| Right. | |
| So you, like me, Stefan, are an empiricist, and we just kind of need some evidence to suggest that would be the case. | |
| Is joining the government not one of the tools that we have available to us, though? | |
| And this is something that I argue with Caleb about. | |
| You know, I'm an anarchist. | |
| Stephan, I've met you before. | |
| We've talked about this. | |
| Caleb is in the same boat. | |
| But Caleb is more along the lines of, you know, I've just rejected government. | |
| I'm not doing it. | |
| I'm not going in. | |
| But the way I see it is I have three tools available to me to change society. | |
| One is politics. | |
| Number two is activism, and number three is violent revolution, and I'll never take on number three. | |
| So I've got politics and activism, and I feel like I'm justified in going after politics, but I'd like to hear your take on it. | |
| Why are those the only three? | |
| Well, are there others? | |
| I'm certainly interested in the others. | |
| Sure there is. | |
| There's a much more important one, in my opinion, that you can actually do something about and which will directly and measurably reduce the amount of violence in the world and which will build, according to science and empirical evidence, is the surest and most certain way to build a peaceful society. | |
| Are you going to tell me to start having loads of kids? | |
| Are you going to start telling me to have loads of kids? | |
| Is that what you're about to tell me? | |
| No, unless they do something with the allocation of wombs in Texas, I would not suggest that you have loads of children, or even try, because I'm sure that no matter how big your beer gut may be getting, they're not going to have enough room in there, what with all the manly parts. | |
| So, not you in particular, no. | |
| No, you don't have to have any kids. | |
| You don't have to have any kids to do this. | |
| Okay, okay, go ahead. | |
| Well, of course, you probably know people who have children. | |
| You know people who want to have children. | |
| You know people who have, you know, all the naughty bits necessary to make children. | |
| And so what you do is you spend time, effort and energy convincing them not to hit their children. | |
| And not to aggress their children, not to raise their voices against their children, not to threaten their children, not to punish their children, and if it's any feasible possibility, for sure as hell not to send their children into what we euphemistically call public schools, but we're in fact brain mincing, sit an elephant on the frontal lobes of your poor children, drug camps for endless indoctrination. | |
| So I do have a bone to pick with you on this. | |
| The only reason I'm brave enough to mention it is because I have met you and you are probably my main hero at this point. | |
| So, there's been a lot of infighting in the liberty movement. | |
| Since the election is over, we're no longer united, so we've got this faction against this faction. | |
| Sorry, we were united before the election. | |
| Did I miss something? | |
| Sorry, go on. | |
| No, you have nothing to do with this other than I think it's great. | |
| I think it reminds me of the rap battles that went on in the early 90s that was kind of the golden era of hip-hop. | |
| And it's also kind of reminiscent of... | |
| Of wrestle strategy. | |
| You know, Wrestlemania, WWE, WWE, you know, those guys. | |
| So I have suggested that we all get into rap battles with one another. | |
| And I was so ambitious as to say that I would be the heel. | |
| Ben wants to take on you, Sean. | |
| Only in an entertainment sense, to be the heel to the Stefan Molyneux face of the Liberty Movement. | |
| I think that's fantastic. | |
| I will rap battle you anytime. | |
| I think that would just be hilarious. | |
| I think that would be too much fun for words. | |
| Now, when it comes to rap, I really wanted to be clear. | |
| When it comes to rap, I always think of rap videos, I'm not the big beefy guy up front. | |
| I tend to be the lady in tassels, shaking her thing and perhaps juicily washing a car in the background. | |
| So our outfits may be a little bit different, but our commitment, I'm sure, will be equal. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, mine would be shoulder pads with spikes on them. | |
| And that was kind of the point. | |
| But then I was challenged with someone said, well, what would you attack him on? | |
| And it took me an entire day. | |
| And I finally came up with something. | |
| You came up with it on the fly. | |
| I challenged you on the radio. | |
| What in the world could you possibly challenge? | |
| What could you possibly challenge Stefan Molyneux about? | |
| What could you possibly challenge Stefan Molyneux about? | |
| And here's the only thing I could come up with. | |
| Okay. | |
| Why do you take raising children advice from a dude whose children are less than five years old? | |
| Maybe that child will end up being terrible someday. | |
| You have no idea! | |
| Dr. | |
| Spock, that was the thing that I cited. | |
| Dr. | |
| Spock, back in the day, was the child-rearing dude. | |
| And he had a couple of kids who committed suicide. | |
| Now, I'm not saying I think you're wrong, Stefan, but if I'm gonna play heel to Stefan Molyneux's face, that would be the angle I would take. | |
| So, how's your daughter doing? | |
| Really, is my real question, and I'm being genuine. | |
| How's your daughter doing? | |
| Well, she's fantastic. | |
| I mean, she is an unbelievable delight. | |
| She's not yet four. | |
| And, you know, she's reading a couple of words. | |
| She can count to over a hundred. | |
| She is a fantastic debater. | |
| She's very strong-willed. | |
| She's incredibly energetic. | |
| Absolutely nonstop. | |
| She's a great traveler. | |
| We've now taken her to a wide variety of places. | |
| She's a great negotiator. | |
| And she's just, I mean, I keep forgetting how small she is. | |
| Like, we have some seemingly quite adult conversations. | |
| Third party is, everybody feels that she's also delightful as well. | |
| We were at a A fair the other day, she was doing some crafts and the lady actually said, that is the most polite child I've ever seen. | |
| I don't care how old she is. | |
| That's the most polite child. | |
| She says, please and thank you for everything, not because we demand or insist upon it, but just because that's how she's been raised. | |
| She's very caring of animals. | |
| We go to pet stores, she holds all the animals, all the All the pet store owners and staff say she's just fantastic, incredibly gentle with them, and she's still working on the sharing thing. | |
| I mean, she's three and all that, so she's great. | |
| Now, of course, why should you listen to the parenting advice from someone whose kids are not yet five? | |
| Because the first five years are actually the most important, right? | |
| My job as a parent now, she's almost four. | |
| My job as a parent is probably 80% done. | |
| Now it's just a matter of minor course corrections if things come up as we go forward. | |
| But you should take advice from me on parenting, not because of how my daughter turns out, but because it is in conformity with the principles that we all espouse. | |
| Spanking is clearly a violation of the non-aggression principle. | |
| It's not a matter of self-defense. | |
| And so spanking is clearly a violation of the non-aggression principle, and that's why we shouldn't do it. | |
| Not because, well, in the long run, whatever, your kids may be happy. | |
| I mean, statistically they will be, but it just violates our principles. | |
| Yeah, and that's exactly the answer I was looking for. | |
| I mean, you're a huge person hitting a tiny person. | |
| How can you possibly think that that's okay? | |
| And I've seen things pop up on Facebook this week. | |
| This week I saw a meme pop up on Facebook saying, I pray that I don't live in a world where people don't spank their children. | |
| Because this non-spanking leads to, and it was like a picture of a gang, leads to this gang membership, is what the implication was. | |
| And I just, I've been responding to all of them saying, you mean the world that we live in currently, where Children get hit all the time and the world is terrible? | |
| Is that the world you're talking about? | |
| Because, like you said, statistically, the kids who don't get hit don't want to hit. | |
| They don't want to hit. | |
| I was spanked a little bit while I was a child. | |
| But I was also taught, hey, you stick up for the underdog. | |
| You know, if somebody is being a bully, you fight the bully. | |
| And I was, I guess, lucky enough to be an athletic kid as I was growing up. | |
| And I was a nerd, but I was also on the football team, and I was the president of the choir. | |
| It was just a weird dichotomy of... | |
| I'm willing to stick up for Caleb to hold his hand up. | |
| Are you getting residuals from Glee? | |
| I mean, it sounds almost exactly like the inspiration for the TV show. | |
| So I hope that you're getting some good residuals from that. | |
| Yeah, I was totally in the vocal, in that kind of a choir too. | |
| And let me tell you, it was a badass name. | |
| We were called Black Magic. | |
| But yeah, it was the show choir. | |
| I was in the show choir. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| But you know what? | |
| That's where the girls were. | |
| Well, I hear that Greed is a TV show, though. | |
| I haven't watched TV in well over six months. | |
| But Siphan, back to what you were saying about your daughter getting compliments in the pet store. | |
| As a father of four, I get those same kind of compliments. | |
| And of all the compliments I've ever gotten in the world, It's, Caleb, your daughter is the sweetest thing. | |
| Your kids are so well-behaved. | |
| They've got such good manners. | |
| They're so polite. | |
| They're so kind with the children. | |
| And that is the greatest compliment I've ever had. | |
| I admittedly have long ago spanked my children, and I have since gotten down on my knees and asked for the forgiveness and told them why I was doing so on the Reformation that I've come to on realizing that Just because my dad did it, or my granddad did it, or great-great, and you go on and on and on, it doesn't make it okay now. | |
| And one other thing I'd like to add is I heard your interview with John Bush on his radio show a couple three weeks ago, and I could hear you interjecting so politely. | |
| Your daughter would, a three-year-old, and come up to you and say, Daddy, I don't know what she's saying. | |
| I loved your interaction with their hands, sweetie. | |
| You didn't give a crap who was listening, who was, what people, the audience would think. | |
| You were there for your daughter. | |
| And I would personally, as a father, I would like to thank you for doing such thing. | |
| That meant a whole lot to me, that you would take that time, even during a radio broadcast, to be the same person that you are that you talk about, As you are while you're on the radio. | |
| Hang on, baby. | |
| I'll be right back. | |
| Yeah, I appreciate that. | |
| First of all, I just really, really want to compliment you on what you did with your kids, like in terms of apologizing and so on. | |
| We all make mistakes as parents, as husbands, as people. | |
| And I really just massively respect you for that, for what it's worth. | |
| I mean, you obviously don't live for my respect, but I just wanted to pass along. | |
| That's an incredibly brave... | |
| I've never done a show with her before. | |
| It came about that this is sort of what happened. | |
| Actually, she wasn't even interrupting me. | |
| She was trying to help me with my show. | |
| She's completely fascinated. | |
| I don't know how to explain this in a way that makes her not sound creepy. | |
| She's completely fascinated by diseases. | |
| She wants to know all about injections and diseases. | |
| I don't know. | |
| She says she wants to be a doctor, but she also wants to be a And what happened was I mentioned something about people being overweight and so on, and she was very, very insistent that, and quietly so, but she was very insistent that I tell everyone about the dangers of diabetes and how you have to end up having an injection every day, and it can also owie your eyes. | |
| So she just really wanted to make sure I got that information across to the listening audience, and so... | |
| She was very keen on that, but I didn't really want to take the show in that direction. | |
| But I appreciate that. | |
| That's very kind, and I really hugely respect what you did with your own kids, and it sounds like they're very lucky. | |
| Yeah, I don't have any children, so I really don't have a dog in the fight here, I guess, is how they say in Texas. | |
| I don't know what they say. | |
| I don't have a dog in the fight. | |
| I think it's a condom in the igloo. | |
| I don't know why. | |
| There's no igloos in Texas. | |
| There are none igloos in Texas. | |
| Stefan, what are you doing in the next couple of weeks? | |
| You want to plug anything? | |
| What am I doing in the next? | |
| Well, I will be speaking in Belize. | |
| I hope that people will check that out. | |
| They can get the link on my website. | |
| That's in March. | |
| Next couple of weeks while I'm working away on this documentary. | |
| Baby! | |
| The documentary is my major beast of consumption at the moment. | |
| We've got a couple of animators, some serious musical talent, and, you know, we're just grinding our way through putting the provocative and hopefully intelligent images to the text. | |
| And it's called, modestly, it's called Truth! | |
| The Free Domain Radio Documentary. | |
| And so really it's designed to be a Matrix Unplug movie, which hopefully will do for libertarianism what Zeitgeist did for Marxist robots and give people a way of getting into our way of thinking or hopefully just thinking about what's wrong with the world, looking at it from a moral standpoint, which hopefully will do for libertarianism what Zeitgeist did for Marxist robots and give people a way of getting into our way of thinking or hopefully just thinking about what's wrong with the world, looking at it from a moral standpoint, | |
| But really the violation of the non-aggression principle and property rights is what's sailing us off a cliff so that we don't end up doing this Thelma and the Wii-style fireball down at the canyon, things that need to happen to change stuff. | |
| So that's been my major project this year and hopefully going to get it done in Q1 of next year. | |
| I think that's fantastic. | |
| And since I've got you here and I'm not going to hold you forever… I promise, but since I do have you here, I'm going to ask you a final style question, which is, who are your favorite philosophers and how do you see their philosophies playing out in the future? | |
| Well, I mean, it all does start with Socrates. | |
| The Socratic method is, you know, that sort of, oh, so you know what justice is. | |
| Can you give me an example? | |
| Oh, that's an example of what justice is. | |
| Well, that principle would also apply to this. | |
| Is this also an example of justice? | |
| No, it's not. | |
| So that sort of combing back and forth. | |
| To try and figure out how you kind of drill down on a concept to make it consistent, to make it rational, to make it universal. | |
| I mean, that's the best. | |
| Plato, I find creepy, skin-crawly, nasty, just horrible all around. | |
| Although, of course, he had respect for women, which was pretty rare in ancient Rome. | |
| Aristotle's ethics are, you know, a trumpet call of sounds good, feels good, but doesn't really add up to much, in my opinion. | |
| But... | |
| His metaphysics and epistemology was great. | |
| His defense of slavery and attacks on the rights of women was not so edifying. | |
| I don't find much use for the Romans because they were all so pompous and so focused upon the empire and politics and winning the hearts and minds of an empty-headed mass that it was really kind. | |
| Skip over most of the theologians of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, although St. | |
| Augustine did have some interesting moral arguments. | |
| But I was certainly influenced by Nietzsche, more for his provocative style of thought. | |
| He's not really a philosopher. | |
| He's an aphorist, really, so he doesn't really work for his principles. | |
| He just keeps pounding you from every direction and messing up your preconceptions to the point where it's like cracking a giant glowing ball covered in cooled off lava. | |
| It exposes the white light underneath to have these chips and cracks from Nietzsche coming in from every direction. | |
| But for me, the big one was Ayn Rand. | |
| She was the real thunderbolt that brought philosophy to life For me, in a very real and powerful way. | |
| And I spent 20 years, you know, studying her and thinking about her, along with the associated luminaries that were around. | |
| I got into psychology through Nathaniel Brandon, and read a lot of the sort of Hayekians and All that kind of stuff and didn't know anything really about Rothbard or Mises until a few short years ago. | |
| So those would be very, very quick sort of stuff. | |
| But I've actually been influenced in many ways more by artists than by philosophers and by historians, in a sense even more than artists. | |
| Paul Johnson is a great historian who's written a fantastic history of the 20th century and a great book called Intellectuals. | |
| Which basically has the thesis that the intellectuals of the 20th century sought to displace the priests as the arbiters of social ethics. | |
| This is a Christopher Hitchens-style approach, you know, his irony in art and men of letters and so on, that we can create a kind of secular morality that obviously displaces that of priesthood. | |
| And he examined all of these 20th century intellectuals. | |
| And the lives that they lived were just unrelentingly chaotic and generally immoral. | |
| And so he did Shelley and Hemingway and Bertolt Brecht and other writers and thinkers and so on. | |
| Just monstrous, most of them. | |
| And that sort of gave me a great deal of skepticism about the modern, secular, ethical solutions that were being put forward in the world. | |
| And so, yeah, sort of a combination of all of these and a good philosophy proffer to throughout my college days, put that together, strike it with lightning and boredom with the business world. | |
| And you have, I guess, what ends up being the biggest philosophy show around, which is free-demand radio. | |
| And so, yeah, all of these influences came together. | |
| I know that's a real sprint through a very rapid series of impressions, but I've really tried to cast aside as much as possible and really work from first principles. | |
| Where do you think we're going as a species? | |
| How do you think the most moral way to freedom is? | |
| I know you wrote a book called Universally Preferential Behavior, which we boosted on the show earlier tonight. | |
| Could you use the right title? | |
| It's universally preferred behavior. | |
| Preferred as opposed to preferential? | |
| Okay. | |
| Yeah, if you don't mind. | |
| Just in case people ended up Googling it. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Universally preferred behavior. | |
| Universally preferable behavior. | |
| Oh, Jesus, I'm never going to get it right anymore. | |
| No problem. | |
| It's tricky. | |
| Universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of circular ethics. | |
| But let me answer the first part of your question as briefly as I can. | |
| I personally don't like the idea of sort of where are we going, because that would indicate that we're on some kind of train track. | |
| You know, like you can say, where's this train track going? | |
| You know, and it's like, oh, where's this train going? | |
| Well, it's going to Exeter or whatever it is, right? | |
| But when you're driving a car, if I turn to you and I say, where's this car going? | |
| That wouldn't really make any sense. | |
| Where do you want to go? | |
| Where are you going to push the gas and turn the wheels in? | |
| And that to me is, you know, where's society going? | |
| Well, frankly, it's going wherever the most damn well dedicated, passionate, intelligent, and committed people say it's going. | |
| That's where society is going. | |
| It's where people like us damn well say that it's going. | |
| Because the majority of people are just like helium balloons in a windstorm. | |
| They will just minimize effort, maximize input. | |
| Sorry, they'll minimize expenditures of effort and maximize input of resources and just go along with the flow, take the path of least resistance, whatever that happens to be. | |
| So the people who are the most committed will always determine where society goes. | |
| And of course, there are people who are committed on the imperial side, and there are people who are committed on the rebel side. | |
| And, you know, those stormtroopers all kind of look the same to me, but they certainly want to keep their paycheck. | |
| And so, where society is going is where we choose for it to go. | |
| You know, people who are more consistent will generally win in the long run. | |
| People who are more passionate and committed, who don't back down, who continue to fight the good fight, we win. | |
| So, you know, where's society going? | |
| Wherever we hit the gas and turn the wheel to. | |
| So, in the current state of affairs that we're in, are the statists the most boisterous? | |
| Because we keep voting and we want to quote both the bums out and rewrite new laws. | |
| I mean, I don't mean to get up on a tear, but I'm battling, as an activist here in my local community, the oil company bullies who are essentially writing laws through the Texas legislature. | |
| And I actually work in the oil field industry, and I'm actually speaking out and excluding everything. | |
| Does money win, I think, is really what your ultimate point. | |
| Does money win? | |
| Are those the most boisterous people, or are people like me, as an activist? | |
| He's more of a philosopher and, you know, take a political strategy. | |
| I'm more of the one to get out there, you know, filming the people, filming the people trespassing on lands in Cardinal, Texas. | |
| But you said the people that are the most boisterous are the ones. | |
| It seems to me like the ones that are winning are the fascists. | |
| Yeah, I didn't say boisterous. | |
| For me, changing the world is obviously a very long-term proposition. | |
| For me, philosophy is always like nutrition. | |
| Nutrition, of course, is all about prevention, right? | |
| Like if you feel, I don't know what the symptoms are, your chest goes numb, your arm starts to hurt, and your heart starts stopping, right? | |
| You're having a heart attack or something, you don't call up a nutritionist, right? | |
| Because the nutritionist is going to say, well, maybe you should have changed your diet 10 years ago, but right now you need to call the hospital. | |
| And so, in the short run, It's all about the powers that be and the influence that they have and the violence that they're willing to muster on behalf of whatever cause they're pretending is virtuous. | |
| So, in the short run, the muscularity of political power always wins. | |
| Of course, right? | |
| Because the cost-benefit analysis for most people means to just go with the flow. | |
| But it is philosophy and ideas which shape society in the long run. | |
| I don't believe that there's any short-term solution to the expansion of state power. | |
| We need to look at an intergenerational change. | |
| We need to look at a multi-generational change. | |
| I mean, I take this from my own experience, 30 years of working in this field, for the most part. | |
| And also just from history. | |
| Abolition of slavery took about 150 years. | |
| Getting equal rights for women took about 150 years. | |
| I mean, I think we can accelerate that to some degree, because we have the internet, but of course so do the bad guys. | |
| But it is a multi-generational change. | |
| We have to encourage people to be peaceful towards their children, because that is what they can do. | |
| And I don't just mean that those of us who don't have children can't do anything. | |
| I mean, we can intervene if we see something happening. | |
| We can report. | |
| We can encourage. | |
| We can, you know, communicate about these things. | |
| If we raise a generation of children without threatening them, they will actually have the intelligence to process libertarian arguments. | |
| Take a high level of intelligence to process. | |
| And unfortunately, too many people are traumatized as children to the point where they cannot process rational arguments. | |
| This is not my opinion. | |
| This is fairly well documented scientifically, that most people have an emotionally volatile reaction to an idea, and only then afterwards do they make up some reason as to why it has to be false, which is why we get all this nonsense. | |
| What about the roads? | |
| What about these crazy, ridiculous lifeboat scenarios? | |
| It's because people find our arguments emotionally frightening and they lack the self-knowledge, the awareness and the maturity to intercept their own emotional impulses, to examine them and to think rationally. | |
| They're just bouncing like pinballs off their emotional defenses. | |
| We need to raise a generation of children who is smart enough and not traumatized so that they can... | |
| Accept basic reason and evidence. | |
| It's far too rare in the population at the moment and we can't win over the population as a whole With people who are so blinded. | |
| We really are like trying to gather a bunch of blind people to win an archery contest. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| We need to raise a generation of children whose eyes aren't being put out so that we can win this archery contest. | |
| But right now, the level of intelligence and commitment it takes is so rare relative to the capacities of the general population that we need to breed people who are worthy of our ideas and able to accept them without freaking out. | |
| And I think that's exactly the answer. | |
| You've got to raise your kids to believe in the non-aggression principle in order to live in a society that has the non-aggression principle. | |
| Stefan Molyneux, I'd like to thank you so much for being on the show tonight. | |
| It's been just an absolute pleasure. | |
| And I tell you what, if I end up Coming after you as far as being like a WWE wrestling heel. | |
| You know, I hope you take it in the spirit that it's mint. | |
| Oh, listen, I appreciate that. | |
| I just, I really want to warn you ahead of time that because I've never studied martial arts, I'm a real biter. | |
| So I'm just going to let you know that ahead of time, that there's no clean fight on this side of the parallel. | |
| That's fine, because I'm a squealer. | |
| And I tell you what, Caleb, it's been a wonderful show tonight. | |
| Stephon, thank you so much for calling in. | |
| We're just flat out of time. | |
| We could go on for hours on this, but hopefully we'll have it back on again. | |
| That has been Stephon Molyneux. | |
| You can check out his work at freedomainradio.com. | |
| This is Caleb Leverett of the Caleb Leverett Radio Show on... | |
| LibertyMovementRadio.com Thank you so much. | |
| We'll see you all next week on Monday. | |
| Peace out. |