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Dec. 13, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:42
2279 The Best Way to Find a Lie Is To Look At Propaganda!
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Ladies and gentlemen, our guest tonight, the one and only, the great host of Freedom Aid Radio, the host of the StephBot YouTube channel with so many millions of views that represent so many powerful epiphanies for so many people, the great intellectual leader for so many in the freedom movement who has shown the way for so many...
That have come to libertarianism only to realize that it is only the beginning of your journey in philosophy.
I present to you the host of freedomainradio.com, Stefan Molyneux!
Wow, I really feel I should have a tearaway shirt and confetti cannons and some sort of exotic dances behind me.
Thank you for that very kind introduction.
I'm looking forward to taking calls.
There are really only two kinds of calls that I take.
The call of the wild and the call of nature.
Hopefully it will be the former.
I'm sure we'll get those from your listeners.
But thank you so much.
It's great to be back.
Yes.
Well, no, Stefan, that was the part when you were supposed to pull your pants down and run around the studio to introduce yourself to everybody.
You didn't get that part of the script?
Well, given that I'm on a webcam from the shoulders up, let's go with the I have pants on assumption.
That probably is for the best for the nightmares of your listeners.
So let's go with that as a possibility.
And then...
That's against the rules for Adam versus the man.
You didn't know that?
We're all dressed up from the waist up in the studio.
Well, it's a kilt.
So I feel that I am a hairy-legged Marilyn Monroe perched over the rising subway winds of your listeners' imaginations.
So do with that what you will.
Now, believe it or not, we actually have some serious topics to discuss tonight, and I am really excited to have you on.
We're not rushed, because you have a documentary coming out, and I want to come back to that.
Very excited that your manifesto is taking documentary form.
Very much looking forward to seeing that and promoting that.
But I've been on a bit of my own...
philosophical path lately in terms of looking forward to the next fifty to a hundred years and trying to combine what I know about philosophy what I can observe about technology what I know about human nature and social dynamics and government and social organization today and I can only describe what we're coming to as the asymptotes,
you know, that all of these exponential growth curves of the human experience of computing power, of productive capacity, of technological accomplishments, they're just going to go vertical, man.
It's going to be, like, we had Jeffrey Tucker on the show the other night.
And he compared it to, you know, night and day.
It seems like the state of nature, everything leading up to maybe the past couple thousands of years was darkness, and then the sun just started to peak over the horizon.
And in a sense, what we're experiencing now in 2012 It's just a hint of the sun peeking over the horizon, and then it's going to be light.
The human experience is going to be totally different.
We're going to take over the cosmos, and voluntarism will be as far distant a thought because it'll be such an obvious assumption that it won't be any more relevant than the basic principles of hygiene.
If this is true, if I'm right, that we're coming to this radically altered human experience, I can't see that libertarianism is still relevant.
Or even, as you so acutely point out, if the real cause of government as behavior exists, Is psychological disturbance.
Peaceful parenting being the way.
Is there even any point to advocating peaceful parenting as an intergenerational solution to the problem of statism when statism is going to be completely, ridiculously obsolete in two or three generations anyways?
So is the idea that technology is creating a momentum of information and sharing and communication that are breaking down enough barriers that we can remove hierarchy?
I didn't see the show with Jeff Ducker.
No, no, no, not hierarchy.
But if you understand, as I believe you do, that statism, like, you know, government doesn't exist.
It is not something that is.
It is a construct.
It is something that we do as a collection of behaviors of everybody who was a statist by voting or participating or going along with it, and that the root of it is psychological imbalance, and that one of the things that empowers us through technology is to have a better state of mental health.
And I fantasize about the days when we'll all have therapy robots in our living rooms, you know?
Like, it'll just...
Any time you express any unhealthy emotion, a little window will pop up and be like...
Would you like to talk about that?
And every time I look forward to these trends, though, I stop and I think, look at how they're already happening today.
Look at how technology first allowed us to have the leisure time to even come up with the word psychology, to recognize these things.
And then look at the way that the Internet provides a way for so many people to find therapy through anonymous communities or from just realizing that they're not alone.
Yeah, and I think also the degree to which science seems to be very clearly demonstrating the degree to which early childhood trauma leads to a wide variety of health and relational dysfunctions.
And the state fundamentally is a relational dysfunction.
It's an inability to negotiate which has to end up creating a vacuum of Why do people yell at their kids?
Because they don't know how to negotiate with their kids.
And why do kids bully other kids?
Because they don't know how to negotiate and get what they want in a win-win scenario.
If we get the market out to childhood, I think we'll be a whole lot better off.
So is this – are you with me though?
Is this – I mean do you see that this is going to be happening in the next couple of generations?
Whatever effect of positive mental health the internet has already had on society is going to be a thousandfold.
I mean at what point can we assume how far down the road do we at least by our current understanding of psychology have a population that is 100 percent healthy?
Well, 100 percent maybe aiming a little too high but I would say that – Yeah, I think that we can do it if we work really hard and promote the right values in society.
Nothing happens automatically.
You know, I was on a show last night and they said, well, where do you think society is heading?
And I said, well, it's heading where the most committed, the most passionate, and the ones with the best arguments are.
It's going where we want it to go.
If you and I are on a train and I say, hey Adam, where do you think this train is going?
It's on a track and so it's going to go someplace.
But if I'm driving and you say, hey Steph, where do you think this car is going?
It's like, where do you want it to go?
Let's turn the wheel and find out.
So I think the society will go where we want it to go if we work really hard.
I think that it could be two generations, you know, 50 years, 60 years, if we work really hard to promote peace and reason and win-win negotiations, if we withdraw from aggression against children as much as possible, and if we shun those who are beyond...
Recovery from a moral standpoint, like the sociopaths, the psychopaths, the people who don't have a conscience, you know, the 4% or whatever you want to count it of people who literally don't have a conscience.
If we try and isolate that gene from reproduction and keep it out of the social milieu, then I think we can do it relatively quickly.
If we wait for a sort of evolution to happen, then it's gonna be a lot longer.
Well, I agree that humanity has the ability to shape the form of history, and we can pull it in one direction or another, but are you completely rejecting what I understand as the Marxist dialectic of technology and economic circumstances being the greater determinants of economic organization and social organization?
I think he said, what was it, that the...
The steam engine gave us capitalism and our agriculture gave us feudalism, that kind of thing.
No, I mean the causes of the free market I think were fundamentally philosophical.
I mean it was a rediscovery of Roman law or the reapplicability of Roman law as we got an increasingly urbanized environment which gave rise to the intellectual class, which gave rise to the anti-clerical and the anti-aristocracy class and so on.
All of these things gave rise to the capacity.
And the printing press, for heaven's sakes, gave rise to the capacity for ideas to matter, for ideas to be shared.
And the better ideas won out and began to push back against the feudal aristocracy, against the feudal clerical classes and began to create room for win-win negotiations, for free trade.
The medieval guilds were pushed back and destroyed.
Mercantilism, in England in particular, and in the northern Scandinavian countries, was pushed back in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Free trade began to flourish because we had better ideas as a society, as a culture.
And then, of course, you know, the natural retrenchment of the ruling classes gave us the 20th century, a bloody century of wars, and now we're just trying to push back, get better ideas out there, more consistent, more peaceful ideas and say, "If you accept peace in this realm, why don't you accept peace in this realm?
If you're against war, why aren't you against banking?
If you're against theft, why aren't you against taxation?" Right, but if liberty Libertarianism, as a philosophy, isn't so much an expression of preference, but a discovery of something that is true.
Wouldn't you say that a tool is powerful for information sharing and discovering fundamental truths like the internet would eventually lead everyone to those fundamental truths of volunteerism?
Well, but Adam, I think that's to argue that only we get technology.
Well, the bad guys get technology too, right?
So what is it in California now that the sheriffs are trying to get funding for drones to fly over, you know, only for emergency response?
never ever to find you know these drones are going to have like face recognition technology they're going to have infrared technology to figure out heat sensors and so on to try and find the drug farms and all that kind of crap so all the technology that you and i and other you know virtuous night warriors of the coming dawn we get it's fantastic but the bad guys get it and they usually get it first and they have a much bigger budget for it and they tend to direct a lot of its development so i don't know that we can look at just one side of the equation if the bad guys are bad guys
Because of psychological deficiency, we know that any negative behavior, anything less than meeting human beings from the perspective of wanting to respect their individual humanity is less than productive for yourself and is based on some kind of psychopathy.
Wouldn't it be true that When they get the technologies that are coming to make themselves better and healthier, they simply won't be bad guys anymore?
At some point, doesn't the technology stop bad guys from existing in these terms if all of your definitions of bad guys are based on psychological deficiencies?
Well, so just help me understand how technology stops a bad guy from being a bad guy.
I just want to make sure I understand that.
You agree that bad guys are bad guys because of psychological deficiencies, correct?
Well, I think that just to be mildly technical, there are sort of three components that seem to come together to produce a really, really bad person.
One is there's some genetic predisposition.
There are about 10 or 12 aggression genes.
So if you have a genetic predisposition, usually some form of minor head injury plus abuse, then you get really, really bad guys.
But sociopathy and psychopathy, I mean, I'm no psychologist, but my understanding is that these positions or these traumas or these psychological states of mind are incurable because they don't actually seek a cure.
Psychopaths and sociopaths kind of like not having a conscience, and I can certainly imagine at times it might be quite a blessing.
And so I don't think they're going to cure themselves.
And, you know, the only thing I guess we could hope for is that either they don't breed or that they're somehow better parents than the way that they were parented or whatever.
Better parents, exactly.
And so if there is a genetic predisposition, that might be a separate problem.
But I would argue that a genetic predisposition does not necessarily, in any human being, necessarily manifest in them becoming a bad guy.
I don't think any— Agreed.
Okay, so any— Yeah, that's very true.
I mean, the genetic predisposition does not manifest itself in personality without a whole bunch of other things, and I assume some level of choice in there as well.
Alright, so if any human being can be raised in the right environment and be not a bad guy, eventually technology will give us the ability as parents to create a better environment for everybody, more so than the idea of advocating for peaceful parenting.
I mean, Dr.
Spock's book, right?
Revolution in how parenting was considered globally and brought so many people to be better parents because they were able to read a book.
and they were able to get that attention to the process of being a parent well that's a product of technology that's a product of having the leisure time to do that compared to the state of nature when you know everybody was hunting and gathering for 16 hours a day we come to the point where we're at today and we're able to be good parents and instead of being in little tribes where whoever can pick up the biggest rock is in charge We're where we're at today, where bad guys are able to diffuse their bad guyism through government.
Relatively few, in fact, fewer than ever before in human history, are committing violent acts against fellow human beings.
We have the statistical demonstrations of that.
This is the most peaceful time for you as an individual human being on this earth, in terms of the actual violence that you're likely to be subjected to in your lifetime.
And I can only see that...
All the motivations for statism, be they psychological deficiencies or wants, go away.
First of all, before we even get to this point that I'm hypothesizing is going to come about, that we will achieve a state of such great mental health that we won't have...
We will also have an incredible profusion of material goods that will make the materialism that is a driving factor in statism irrelevant.
So I would say that these things, while up to this point, or up to the sun coming over the horizon, you may be able to say that, yes, when Marx came up with this idea, it led to tens of millions of people being killed.
It was that, and you can point to that origin, that one idea, that one source led to this.
The good work of the American founders in advancing humankind towards a state of greater liberty changed the game, moved the ball forward.
And in the same sense, what I see coming in the next two or three generations with technology is going to address all of those problems and be a much greater determinant of how free we are as a society than anything that we can do conscientiously.
The fact that the internet is here and that it is connecting all of us, that the technology is going to empower us to get what we want, we are going to get what we want, and in order to get what we want, we are going to realize that using coercion is unproductive.
And I would say that while you can make that point in the case that the Marxist dialectic is only half true, that in the future, and even right today, how society is organized is going to be more determined by technology and economic conditions, namely Human computers that are far smarter than human brains, 3D printers in our homes, an absolute profusion of physical wealth.
Statism is going to be rendered obsolete by technology, not by academia or YouTubers or bloggers or podcasters.
Well, okay.
I mean, it's a very compelling vision, and I would really like to let robots haul us over the bristly, spiky hedge towards a better future.
The one thing that jumps into my mind is the idea that wealth is going to increase because, as you know, of course, over the past 30 or 40 years, real wages have declined.
With a massive profusion and proliferation of technology, real wages have declined.
And that doesn't even count the 85 odd trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities, the massive fiscal hole that Western society or at least the U.S. society is hanging over, Western society as a whole, with the possible exception of Canada.
But we have become poorer because, of course, the moment the government sniffs some sort of massive wealth production engine, it rushes in to tax and pillage it and use it as collateral to borrow against.
So I don't know that the wealth is going to flow to the people as a whole.
I think the wealth, if it is generated, is going to flow up to the state.
What about quality of life?
What about technological empowerment?
What about the fact that, you know, the car used to be the comparison?
You know, now, a hundred years ago, only the richest people had cars.
Now, even, you know, the poorest dude in the country at least can get beat up on a Civic, right?
That's the classic.
Well, cell phones.
Like, hey, it used to be that only rich people could get cell phones.
Next thing you know, everybody's going to have one in their contact lens.
So, and if it wasn't for the Internet, I wouldn't have gotten to listen to the wonderful Stefan Molyneux podcasts about a free society that even got me on this philosophical journey in the first place at freedomainradio.com.
So we go now to the phones.
203, you're on the air.
What's your name?
Where are you calling from?
203, go ahead, please.
Got a question from the chat.
All right.
Well, we're going to be taking calls.
If people want to join us, 567-314-1698.
What's the question from the chat, Derek?
Stefan, could you describe the difference between the hierarchies that exist in crony capitalism today and the hierarchies that free market capitalism will bring forth, and if those hierarchies would be bad like it is seen today?
Yeah, I mean...
You want to make sure that you don't use the same word for two opposite moral states, right?
So you wouldn't want to use the word rape for lovemaking and vice versa, or theft for charity.
Those are very distinct moral states.
It's really tough to use the word hierarchy for two opposing moral states.
So the crony capitalist thing that occurs at the moment, and I'm not particularly blaming the big corporations for doing this.
They have the responsibility and the drive to maximize profits, shareholder value, and so on.
But what they do is they go to the government and they write legislation.
They capture the regulatory agencies and they turn those regulatory agencies to enhance their own profits.
classic rent-seeking, keeping out all of the competitors, particularly the young and the nimble and the cheap, which is basically locking the productive teenagers up in government schools so they can't compete with the plumbers.
And so you've got all of these companies using the power of the state to enhance their own income, to keep competition out, and to generally enrich their own pockets while bleeding the social body pretty much to a state of terminal whiteness.
So that is the hierarchy that exists right now.
Companies would never invest in armies, because every company could invest in army, but if people are forced to pay for armies, police, regulatory agencies, then they will try and use that, capture that violence to enhance their own profits.
In a free society, there will be, of course, hierarchies.
I I mean, in terms of there probably will still be bosses and employees.
But of course, remember that employees are trained for 12 years straight to be drones, to be burger flippers, to be, you know, the economic illiterates and legal illiterates and entrepreneurial illiterates that the Prussian model of public school education, which we're all modeled on, was expressly designed for, to build soldiers and to build factory workers.
And that's still what it's doing.
So if you get people coming out of free market schools with much better skill sets, with work terms, with contacts, hierarchies will flatten out quite considerably.
There will be much higher turnover of companies in a free market.
So the 20th century in America was relatively free, at least up until the last couple of decades.
And if the...
Fortune 500 companies, or the top 100 companies that were around in 1900, I think two or three of them are still around right now.
And so there's a huge amount of turnover.
And wealth rises and falls.
They used to call this shirt sleeves to shirts to shirt sleeves again in three generations, the sort of arc of wealth.
So...
There's a lot greater turnover.
Those who are on top will go back down to the bottom.
Those who are on the bottom will climb their way back up.
There's constant churning as we generally go up the hill of wealth.
So there will be hierarchies, much greater flux, but the fundamental thing is that in a free market, If you rise to the top, it's because you're Brad Pitt and you're really good at getting people to come and see your movies or your abs or both.
And so, you know, we don't look at Brad Pitt and say, my God, what a monster, evil, capitalist, robber baron.
No, we say, damn, I should do more sit-ups.
Yeah, it's frustrating to me the way people will...
We'll idolize certain things like, you know, maybe like an actor or something, and that's okay.
But then, oh, this other corporation they don't like is bad because they want profits.
But they like so many profit seekers out there.
It's like, how can you possibly be so inconsistent?
And when everybody has a 3D printer in their home, they won't need to condition people to be factory workers anymore.
All right, we're going back to the phones now.
Nick, you're on the air.
Hey Adam, how are you?
Outstanding.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, no problem.
Okay, so I have two questions, but I'll ask the first one and then if I have time for the second one.
The first one, it's basically...
So your point with the whole technology thing, you say like, you know, we're going to a lot of chips in our brain and it seems like a hive mind and that sort of thing, but at the same time, information is only good as information.
It's not good or evil.
Like, we can get bad information from the internet.
We can get bad information From books, we can get bad at, you know, like statist people, like, you know, we'll get, like, fucking, I don't know, Bill Maher talking on his show and stuff.
And so the point is, you know...
Just having that technology available to us isn't necessarily going to be good for, you know, for society as a whole.
Hold on a second, hold on a second, but what if it was, the comparison is not there's good and bad information, the comparison is to back to when, you know, feudal times, when the only source of comparable information was The pastor and the Bible, and that was it.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
That was your only choice.
Don't people show a preference for truth over falsehood?
Like, I mean, unless people are just, they're really into this certain falsehood because it fulfills something in them psychologically.
You know, in general, on the internet, people look at their sources and things like that to determine whether or not something's good information.
Right, doesn't even, even if it's more information as a whole, even if there's good and bad, does that empower more good information to come to the top, Nick?
No, absolutely.
But at the same time, look at The Matrix, that movie.
And Steph made his whole video that I think really made me get into Steph, was The Matrix, how to break out of statism.
And the point is that people are going to want to believe what they want to believe, and if they want to believe in statism, and they're getting information that only validates what they want, And, you know, if this sort of technology was to be, like, implemented right now, if we were all of a sudden all able to do this, and we have the same mentality that we do now as a society, is that really going to help us move forward towards a stateless society?
Well, I think it can't help but change the mentality.
Stefan?
Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to mention something you said that if people really want to believe in the state.
I mean, the reality is that anytime there's propaganda, propaganda is covering up the fact that people don't want to believe that shit.
I mean, this is really important to understand.
Like, there's no propaganda when you're 13 that says, I think it's really, you know, it's really important that I sit you down and watch this instructional video on how...
Bodies of the opposite sex are really attractive to you.
Or the same sex, depending on how your pendulum swings.
I mean, that just happens on its own.
There's no propaganda.
I didn't have to sit my daughter down, you know, to watch a nine-hour government film saying sugar tastes really, really good.
And it's really, really important to stay up late because all the fun happens right after you to go to bed, which is mostly me face-planting on a desk and pretending I'm working.
So people don't want to believe in the state.
And you know that because there's a 12-year crater in people's minds of state propaganda.
And so I think that's where people, they have no interest in the state.
They don't believe in the state.
They don't accept the state.
They don't want the state.
In the same way that we know that people don't want King Yong Il in North Korea as their leader because they have to be terrorized, brutalized, frightened, you know, controlled and thrown in concentration camps and shot and starved so that they will worship this guy or at least pretend to.
So wherever there's propaganda, you know that that runs completely counter to what people actually believe and what they actually want, a.k.a. Sunday school.
So I think it's really important to understand.
People don't want to believe in the state.
If we can provide them alternatives that are rational and cohesive and coherent, then I think for some people it would be really scary and there's confirmation bias.
You know, the liberals run to the liberal sites and the conservatives turn on Fox and so on.
There's a lot of confirmation bias in the internet.
But at least the confirmation bias is personal rather than global to the particular ruling elite.
But I think that's important.
Some people, when you provide them an alternative, it's like you've just jackhammered an elephant that was sitting on their chest and they didn't even know it.
And they just can breathe for the first time in their lives.
So I think just keep providing people great arguments, engaging instruction.
And I think a lot of people will just run out from statism like you'd run out of a collapsing building, which is actually pretty close to the truth.
So you're suggesting that statism is sort of caused from a desperation of a lack of alternatives to, you know, thinking about society and the way things should be organized or not organized.
You think it's just they don't have the, they don't realize the options are there to think about differently?
Yeah, I mean, look, statism is the result of propaganda.
It's the result of being told that there's no violence, and if there is violence, you deserve it, and if there is violence and you don't deserve it, you better submit because there's some mythical social contract, and if you don't like any of that, then damn well leave the country.
As if we can't say, well, why don't you people leave the country?
We're not the ones waving guns around.
But statism just simply is the result of propaganda, which is why you need government schools.
Nobody wakes up believing that we need a monopoly of violence, that we can protect our property by giving a monopoly of violent people the right to strip our property at will, that we can protect our freedom by giving the right to a minority of violent people to incarcerate and torture us at will.
None of that makes any sense at all.
And when things don't make any sense but the majority of people believe them, you just have to look for the boot stamp of propaganda on people's forehead and that's all it results from.
And some people grow to love their propaganda.
You know, like they live inside this suit of armor called culture for so long that they end up just being an empty suit of armor with nothing but a ghost inside walking and clanking around and other people are just desperate to get out.
And that's, I think, how we can help them out.
But recognize that it is not, not, not a natural state or a natural human condition to believe in a hierarchy.
And we know that because of the propaganda that is needed to get people to believe this nonsense.
See, with schools becoming obsolete, just the idea of centralized education, I just, I can't see the state even holding on to its existence through all of these technological advances that are coming in the next couple generations.
Nick?
Yeah, I'm still here.
I definitely appreciate everything you both just said.
And, Steph, the one thing I do have to say, based on what you just said, is what about the confirmation bias?
What you've been talking about kind of recently is that you give people...
Information that's counter to what they truly, honestly believe in.
And it makes them just believe in those values even more.
Even though you prevented this rational, cohesive argument against it, for whatever psychological reason, they are still dead set against believing in statism or whatever else.
No, no, but you have to listen to what I said.
I said that they don't truly honestly believe it.
What happens in these experiments, my understanding is what happens is people are told a whole bunch of lies by people in authority.
And those people obviously are teachers, priests, and parents.
And they're told a whole bunch of lies as if they are pious in moral truths.
And what happens is it becomes extremely frightening emotionally, unsettling, destabilizing.
It feels like a little death.
I think wisdom sometimes has been called a little death, and I think that's actually quite an accurate expression of it.
Orgasms have also been called a little death, and the two are probably not that far apart.
But so the point is that they don't believe these things.
But if you have an emotional defense, in other words, if it is really unsettling for you to even imagine that you've been lied to by people on authority your whole life, Personal and sort of societal, then you'll simply run away from that knowledge because it's too alarming.
It disrupts your personal relationships.
This is the point I've been making, lo, these seven years since I started the show, is that virtue, truth, reason, honesty, philosophy, freedom, it disrupts your personal relationships because propaganda is channeled through schools and churches and through I mean, this is why libertarians have such an exciting time at Thanksgiving dinner where we often feel like the turkey on many levels.
And so it's really important to understand it messes with people's personal relationships.
If people aren't willing to hold the truth above personal relationships, right?
And that was Aristotle's basic argument, which he said when he was arguing against Plato's idea of the forms, he said...
I love Plato, but I must love the truth more than my friends.
And this, I think, is a very important thing.
If people want the truth and are willing to go through the disruption in personal relationships to get there and either heal those personal relationships or find better ones, good for them.
But most people will go back into the tribe of darkness, they will go back into the belly of the matrix, and they will pretend that the truth is a lie in order to live with the lie as truth.
Well, I suppose that's true about most confronted the first time, but if it was everybody, there'd certainly be no point to us doing this.
Nick, thank you so much for the call.
And Stefan, I think we have a tweet here that really is just for you from Liberty Panacea.
In 20 or 30 years, there will be forums for libertarians called, My Child is a Statist.
Where did I go wrong?
There are conversations like that there, aren't there?
I don't know.
Oh yeah, no, my child is a status.
Where did I go wrong?
Did Ron Paul start that thread?
I think that, yeah, I mean people have, you know, I have often suggested that it's not very healthy to have status in your life because statism is like an evil virus and it replicates itself through language and through behavior.
It's contagious and I don't like the idea of exposing my daughter to statism any more than I'd want her to You know, play beach volleyball at a leper colony.
And so, of course, the question then becomes, okay, well, what if your daughter becomes a statist?
Aha!
But that's, you know, that's just not going to happen.
Statism requires so much work, so much effort, so much propaganda that I would no more expect her to be a statist than I would expect her to wake up one day and be a full-fledged Zoroastrianism without ever having been exposed to the religion.
It's just not going to happen.
Trust me, she's not going to wake up learning how to speak Mandarin if you've never been exposed to Mandarin.
Anyway.
I know a woman who is a mother and claims to have been an anarchist her whole life, and her son is a statist, I guess, to some extent.
At least a minarchist.
And I just find that bizarre.
At least a minarchist.
All right, 646, you're on the air.
What's your name?
Where are you calling from?
Evan from New York.
What's up, Adam?
Hey, what's happening, Evan?
I have a quick question.
A while ago, Stefan did a podcast regarding drugs, and he wrote off drug use under roughly two categories.
Number one, it doesn't elucidate any truth in the universe.
If so, when you're off drugs, it's blatant to me.
That I have no way to do it.
Number two, we can't make you happier because it does make you happier.
Why aren't you on drugs all the time?
In the course of the podcast, he made two sort of assumptions that I'm questioning.
He roughly drew a bar chart on a blackboard where he kind of just had to happen in like utils in a sort of way that if I prefer steak instead of chicken, I can kind of assign a numerical number to that, which I'm wondering if he...
If he wants to go in more depth than that, is that truly how he believes happiness works?
In which case, my understanding is he's breaking severely from the Austrian school of Mises who would say that if I prefer X to Y, all you know is I prefer X to Y at that point in time.
My specific question is, in saying how clearly you can't be happier if you're on drugs, because why are you on drugs all the time, my question to Stefan Molyneux is specifically, have you ever ridden a roller coaster?
And if so, are you on one right now while you're on this podcast?
Unfortunately, this is a problem that I come up with from time to time, which is people reference arguments I made sort of five years ago or three million podcasts ago.
And unfortunately, I don't have all my podcasts on the tip of my tongue.
I will say, though, that there has been some very interesting work done with ecstasy and PTSD patients lately.
Sorry, go ahead.
I understand the truth of the universe one is bullshit, right?
Clearly, you don't see truth of the universe when you smoke TNT, for example.
But regarding it being a recreational thing, and the purpose of my life, I don't know, but yours is just from I have my dominant, right?
And if at some time I want to have a cocktail or have a cigarette or have marijuana, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
So my question is, would you agree with that currently?
Well, it depends what you mean by wrong.
I mean, is it immoral?
Of course not.
I mean, it's not immoral to do any of those things.
I do think, though, you know, so for instance, I mean, Gabor Mate is a physician who works in a sort of drug neighborhood in Vancouver in Canada.
And he's written a great book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
And his argument, which seems very scientific to me, he's got reams of data and explanations for it, seems to be that regular drug users, what tends to happen is, I'll try and keep this brief, and I'd really recommend the book, but You know, there's happy joy juice in our brain, which we get, you know, just by virtue of being alive.
Now, if people go through difficulties in childhood, then what happens is their happiness level goes down significantly.
So where the average person may be at 100, they end up like 20 or 30.
And this is just the result of trauma and difficulties in their childhood.
And what happens is then...
Let me finish.
What happens is then when they try drugs...
It boosts that more so than a regular person.
So a regular person might go from like 100 to 110 or 120.
But people who've had difficult childhoods, they go from like 20 or 30 to like 80 or 90.
And they're like, they actually will say like, I didn't know what it felt like to be normal or to be even remotely happy until I had a drug.
And then their former state of unhappiness, which for them was just the way life was, becomes kind of unbearable.
And this is sort of the addiction cycle that goes into it.
Now, if some people take drugs when they're at a happiness level of 100, and they got 100 to 120, and they're like, well, that was fun, and they may do it again, or they may not, or whatever.
In fact, I think it's only 8% of people who try heroin actually end up addicted.
And my argument, I think, or Gabor Maté's argument, if I can paraphrase, would be that they have difficulties in their childhood, they're unresolved, and so on.
cover up a personal problem, then clearly that's not going to work.
Like that, I mean, it's really understandable given the physiology of addiction, but it's really not a good idea.
If somebody wants to smoke a joint at the end of the day or, you know, whatever, and they're generally happy, I don't think that's a big issue.
I think that there probably would be other ways of achieving happiness that might be more fun and more sustainable, but I don't think...
I'm just really concerned about it as a cover-up for or a way of avoiding dealing with childhood trauma, because I think that obviously is very destructive for everyone around.
Evan?
Right.
I fully agree, and I fully agree to the extent that if someone's doing it to avoid reality, it's sort of more like a younger kid who has a miserable childhood, etc., etc., and they only are, quote-unquote, happy when they're getting high with their friends in the basement, that's a problem.
But I don't want to paint everyone with a broad...
Like Adam Kokesh, for example.
I think a lot of people on this call and listening...
might know that he's tried marijuana once in a while.
I would think that, you know, someone like Adam, who seems to have a shit together, for the most part, probably in a different category than, like, a 12-year-old who's, you know, on the verge of suicide or something, smoking weed, and claims that's the only thing to prevent killing.
Well, sorry, just to be really clear, when Adam says smoke a bowl, what he means is a very steaming latte.
Exactly.
So steaming that it looks like it's smoking.
And I certainly agree that, especially if you use homo milk and strong espresso, that it is very mind-altering.
So I really wanted to be clear for those.
Stefan, I have taken a strong stand.
I am no hypocrite.
I will not engage in your dangerous, statist drugging of people with caffeine.
I don't do caffeine.
I do.
And carbs.
I don't do carbs.
Unless they're in ice cream, because they don't count then.
All right, Evan, thank you so much for bringing that up.
I really appreciate that.
And Stefan has definitely some interesting work on the issue of drugs, as we do as well, in a different perspective.
We have a lot of callers I want to get to real quick here.
512, you're on the air.
What's your name?
Where are you calling from?
San Antonio, Texas.
Go ahead.
Hey, Steph.
So I just had a question for you.
So...
I've been reading a lot about the Austrian community lately.
Mainly, I know Walter Block was having some issues with you.
He made some comments in regards to Ron Paul.
And you were having a disagreement with him on that, obviously, because holding to some kind of Worship of the Constitution is obviously still an issue.
Do you think that one of the reasons why the Austrian School of Economics or some of the people in there are having issue with you is your views on child rearing and how that directly affects, you know, the people in the government?
I mean, I wouldn't want to hypothesize as to why people would have issues with me.
There are so many possible reasons as to why people might have issues with me.
It's like asking in a disco, where's this light coming from?
You know, there are 12 disco balls, 12 searchlights, and everyone's on ecstasy.
So there are so many possibilities as to why people might have an issue with me that I'd really feel I would do an injustice to those who don't like me by trying to narrow it down to something in particular.
Of course, it's not the job of a philosopher to be liked.
It's the job of the philosopher to pursue truth.
Certainly, I mean, I did a minor off-the-book debate with Walter Block in Vancouver last summer.
We're going to have a more formal debate at the Capitalism and Morality Seminar next summer in Vancouver.
So I hope people will come out to that.
He's a spanker.
He was a spanker as a parent.
And my argument is that spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Now, if my argument is correct and spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle, I mean, it certainly is not self-defense.
Then it's a big problem for a parent who has repeatedly struck a helpless independent child.
That's not a very good moral position to be in.
So I can really understand why people would have trouble if the argument is true.
But, of course, for libertarians to have trouble processing the non-aggression principle and its application is kind of tough to bear from a hypocritical standpoint because we're all running around saying to people, oh, taxation is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
How come that bothers you?
Or war is the initiation of the use of force, the debts, the slavery of the children and so on.
And we get – we pretend to be so baffled when people have trouble processing the logical consequences of the non-aggression principle.
So for people in the libertarian community to get emotionally volatile around spanking violates the non-aggression principle.
Maybe the argument's wrong.
I put out a whole paper about it.
It was published in the Phoenix E-zine and all that.
I've done podcasts and videos on it.
I've had experts all over the place telling me I've got whole reams of scientific data and statistics and charts and graphs, a boring amount of backup.
But maybe I and the experts are completely wrong.
In which case, you find data to refute it.
You don't just get all huffy and puffy and attack other positions.
So again, I don't know, but I do know that in the libertarian community, there is, of course, a strong Christian element.
Within the Christian element, not all Christians, but within the Christian element, there is a fair amount of spare the rod, spoil the child people.
And if people have been hitting children and there is a violation of the non-aggression principle, then they have spent their lives fighting things like the Fed and taxes and government and so on, because that's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Well, we should have done nothing and achieved nothing.
What is it?
Gary Johnson still got 1% of the vote, which is exactly the same percentage that people got in 1971 who were running for the libertarian office.
So 40 years later, it's exactly the same percentage.
So they've spent their whole life fighting the non-aggression principle and achieving nothing, less than nothing, while in their own homes they've been repeatedly violating the non-aggression principle against the most helpless independent members of their family.
That would be a pretty tough pill to swallow.
So again, I have no idea, but it could be something to do with that.
I certainly welcome debates and I would be happy to have debates with libertarians who have issues with me.
I'm always open to having debates with people.
But that would be a guess?
I don't know.
But I mean, you'd probably have to ask Walter and he may tell you that it's got nothing to do with that and maybe he'd be right.
Well, Stefan, I think voting libertarian is steady at 1%, give or take, because voting libertarian is a gateway to living libertarian.
You only do it once, and then the next cycle, by the next opportunity, you're better, and you've realized, you move on.
I think it's a positive sign that the libertarian party, as serving in that function, is pulling 1% of the voters out of the system every year, and then the next time they don't come back.
Well, maybe, except we'd have to make sure that nobody was re-voting Libertarian.
And I think that there seems to be a cycle of people in the Libertarian political movement.
And certainly for, you know, if it's a gateway to anarchism, then, you know, the hand you voted with is the hand that will never come clean.
You've got this Lady Macbeth feeling going on, you know, that steel wool, Botox, Clorox, it's not going to come clean.
But hopefully it is a gateway drug, and of course that is the argument for political action, that it sucks people out of the matrix, and they think they're going to some place called politics, and they're going to some place called the non-aggression principle, which is a whole different paradise.
Just one.
Did voting Libertarian hand the election to Democrats?
I'm sorry?
I don't think we're going to get Stefan into handicapping elections, but thank you for the call, San Antonio.
Sorry, did voting Libertarian give the Democrats the election?
I'm sure it had something to do with it, and I would really like to thank the Libertarians for that, because I'm very glad that the Democrats are going to be in power when the entitlement crunch comes, when the confrontation with the public sector unions comes.
So, you know, please, all Republicans and Libertarians, stay away from the Titanic.
It has already hit the iceberg.
We do not want to be at the helm when the ship goes down, else that's all we will be remembered for.
Yes, very, very astute, Stefan.
And that's unfortunately just all the time we have.
People should have been calling in earlier, really.
We're getting them in earlier.
People wait to the last...
Don't you guys go to midnight?
We go to midnight.
You don't have another guest.
We've got another guest coming in.
What was that?
I can't believe it.
Oh, sorry.
Do you have another guest?
Who follows me?
And not just yet in the same night, I know.
Oh, man.
Well, look, if they want to get my Adam Kokesh sloppy seconds, that's totally okay.
I just don't think that's nice, but I can understand it.
I'm calling from Hawaii.
It's my first time tuning in, so I'm a little bit off of the time zone.
Alright, go ahead, 808.
We've got time for just one more here.
Yeah, you know, I live in Hawaii, a democratic-controlled state.
I didn't personally vote this year, but I feel that a lot of libertarians holding out on voting kind of handed Obama the election.
Not that I believe in Romney or anything, but I believe that Romney would have hit the brakes a little bit as opposed to Obama hitting the gas pedal.
That's just my personal opinion.
I could be totally wrong, and I'm open to any discussion or debate about that.
That's just my personal opinion on that issue.
Do you have a question for Stéphane?
Thank you.
Yeah, what's it like in Hawaii?
I'm in Canada in December, so are you currently huddled in the basement in an igloo and wrapped in a caribou skin like Luke Skywalker on the planet of Hoth, or are you actually able to walk outside without your nipples turning into carbon diamonds?
Alright, well thank you so much for the call, all the way from Hawaii.
Stefan, I just want to ask one last question.
What do you really think of Christians within the liberty movement?
Well, all of them?
I don't know.
I try not to think in collective terms.
I think that the influence of Christianity is not necessarily the most positive thing when we're trying to get a vote of confidence from younger people.
Younger people are increasingly secular.
A population of Christianity has declined significantly, particularly in Canada, but also in the U.S. The number of people who are declaring themselves as atheists or agnostic is now, I think, up around 20% or so.
The younger people are much less likely to be religious and if they say, I believe in the state and a magical Jewish zombie whose father killed him because he didn't do anything wrong but other people did something wrong that they can't be blamed for because they didn't have free will and it involved an apple and a talking snake and we're really into the non-aggression principle, I'm just a little bit concerned that the good ideas get mixed in with the superstition and don't come out particularly smelling like roses.
I think that we need to have the same conversation within libertarianism which should not be a flavor of politics but a subset of philosophy like all human thought should be a subset of philosophy.
I think we need to have the same conversations around superstition within or religiosity within the libertarian community that we do have about the state outside the libertarian community just to make sure that we have the correct level of integrity and if it turns out that there are good reasons to believe in a deity Then I'll certainly change my position.
And if it turns out that there are good reasons not to believe in a deity, then we should always put reason ahead of personal preference because that's what we're asking society as a whole to do.
We should lead that way within our own community.
And I have absolute faith that in the long run, reason will triumph over preference that is unproductive for human happiness.
But Stefan, we've got just a minute left.
Thefreedomainradio.com documentary manifesto is coming.
Please tell us what we can do to bring it To reality, any sooner than anything we could possibly do to help out in the production of this documentary and what we can do to help share and distribute it and what we have to look forward to from your manifesto.
Well, we've taken a bit of a different approach to funding, to crowdfunding.
Mostly what we're doing is we're dealing in black market kidneys.
So if people, if you have like a spoon or a salad fork or tongs of any kind, if you could just mail me one kidney, not both, because obviously we need an audience.
Mail me one kidney.
We have them stacked up in a truck.
We will be handing them out in exchange for money, which we're going to use to fund the documentary.
Please don't send me any other organs.
Please.
It's really confusing.
I'm not really good at figuring out which is which.
So just kidneys and human kidneys, if preferable, and preferably your own.
So that's the funding model.
The documentary itself is really a case from first principles that what's going wrong in the world is Immorality.
It's not a bad policy.
It's not a bad president.
It's not this party versus that party.
It's not entitlements versus the military.
It's not about economic freedom.
It's fundamentally about virtue.
We violate the non-aggression principle.
We violate property rights.
If we do that enough as a person, we know that our lives go very badly.
And if we do that enough as a country, as a culture, as an entire civilization, then things are going to keep getting worse until we recognize the core moral principles that we're screwing up on repeatedly.
And get them right.
Things are just going to keep going wrong.
And the only thing that's going to change is the speed and the manner in which things are going wrong.
But the direction is still going to be the same.
So I'm really trying to have a Matrix Unplugged movie.
It's pretty funny.
It's pretty entertaining.
But I think it's very powerful in its arguments.
And I hope people walk out of watching that movie or step away from their computer after watching it into a very different world than the one they stepped into.
That really is the goal.
I want this to be a reprogramming or a deprogramming of the human conditions.
So no ambition is too high in the making of this documentary.
The animators are doing a fantastic job.
We have some unbelievable musical talent on board.
And so it's going to hopefully be done Q1 of next year, released for free.
There'll be DVD copies if people want that.
And, you know, I do want to send a request out if people want to donate.
I'm not expecting to make any money, but I'm hoping to make Some real change and some real impressions.
And for those who have donated, thank you.
Thank you so much.
You know, we're burning through, I think, about 10 or 12K a month in making it.
And so if anybody wants to help out, I would hugely appreciate it because I'm currently functioning on zero kidneys.
So that's not good.
So that's another reason why we want to get the movie finished because, you know, I'll need to pee.
Cool.
Oh, now I need to pee.
Stefan, thank you so much for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
It's been a blast.
As always, the website, freedomainradio.com.
We will have you back on as soon as we can come up with another excuse.
Thanks.
Now, go and enjoy your other guests, I insist.
All right.
Thank you again.
All right.
Take care.
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