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Jan. 9, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

26:31

2296 Objectivism, Philosophy and Self Defense

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, on Adam Versus the Man, Jan 8 2013.

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	Our next guest tonight.
	I'm so excited.
	We're so excited!
	This guy was my first Liberty YouTube video.
	My first!
	Which one was it?
	The one about voting with the imagery of politicians like throwing people's candy like back and forth above their heads burned in my mind.
	Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Canuckistanian Stefan Molyneux with the great Tour of the Colonies accent.
	Nobody knows who the fuck this man is, where he's from, or what he does, except for the fact that he is a professional stay-at-home father, which I'm incredibly jealous of.
	When I grow up, I want to be Stefan Molyneux.
	I want to be a stay-at-home dad and run a podcast.
	He is the host of freedomainradio.com and an incredible YouTube channel, youtube.com slash stephbot, with over 10 million views.
	And while I put out a shit ton of Random ridiculousness on YouTube like seven days a week.
	He puts out these videos that are true epiphanies for everybody who watches them.
	As you mentioned, Amanda, and we're excited to have you on as co-hosts when we bring Stefan back on here.
	And Stefan Molyneux, I don't know what else to say, but with our audience, you should need no introduction by now.
	Ladies and gentlemen, Stefan Molyneux.
	Well, thank you very much, and thanks for those kind words, Amanda.
	I think it only goes to show exactly what I tell my daughter on a regular basis, that strangers have the best candy.
	And I hope that, especially if they're in a windowless van driving slowly.
	But no, it's great to be back.
	How are you guys doing?
	Well, Stefan, what the hell is wrong with America?
	We're still talking about guns here.
	Really, we need help!
	We need help!
	Help us!
	We have no time for pleasantries tonight.
	Well, I mean, there's of course a huge amount that's wrong with America.
	A huge amount that's right with America in terms of its basic and essential philosophy, but there's quite a significant amount that's wrong with it.
	And the guns thing is interesting.
	I did a video recently where I pointed out that Everybody always said, and we saw this with Piers Morgan, you know, slowly wiping the Alex Jones spittle off his face, that he kept saying, well, what's the gun murder rate in England?
	And it was like 35 or something, as opposed to over 11,000 for America, but that doesn't have anything to do with it.
	Uh-oh.
	The Skype has stopped working.
	Oh, Skype stopped working?
	Windows is checking for a solution.
	Isn't Skype a British company?
	Maybe they took offense to what we were just saying about them.
	They're dear Piers Morgan.
	Why don't we restart Skype and see if we can get Molyneux back on here.
	I really thought the video that I did, I guess it was a week ago, there was the anti-NRA protest at their press conference in D.C. Total accident that I happened to be there.
	Happened to be dressed looking like a reporter.
	Didn't work for these people anyways.
	Blocking my camera, you know, as soon as they knew that I was...
	I had a bias when I was there.
	I got assaulted.
	I got assaulted at an anti-gun rally.
	Like, I mean, I hate to use the term assault in places like this, but it was a clear case of assault.
	A guy shoving his sign into my camera, shoving me back, and then when I got up against the fence, he actually turned, and you can see this in the video, and like shoulder-checked me.
	Like, he was a big dude.
	He was like six inches taller than me and like, you know, really big dopey looking guy and you can see in the video.
	But you'd think that would have ended the debate.
	Like, people would, you know, couldn't we just show that video to everybody in America and then like not talk about this anymore?
	But that would make too much sense.
	And that's really the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.
	And I just hope that no internet hiccups kept that from reaching your audience.
	Thank you so much.
	Stefan, it's you!
	No problem.
	That was really my entire message boiled down to in about the most potent 35 seconds of oratory that all human beings have ever experienced.
	So I'm just very glad that we didn't lose any of that and that that massive fireball of illumination is now lighting up the foreheads of your listeners.
	You're welcome.
	I think most of our audience has hair.
	Brilliant imagery.
	I love it.
	The metaphors, especially.
	How did you pack them all into 35 seconds?
	Well, you know me, I've never met a four I didn't like.
	There's no way.
	Let me have another one of these.
	It worked for Christopher Hitchens.
	I'm sure it'll work for me too.
	Caesar, bring me wine.
	Yeah, we should be drinking wine.
	No, no, no.
	As an anarchist, of course, this is the blood of newborns.
	Oh, right, right, right.
	So there is no way that you could have in 35 seconds told us what's wrong with America.
	Ah.
	Well, I mean, one of the things that you see studiously avoided in any conversations in American media about gun control Is that there are sort of two major factors that aren't talked about.
	One is the fact that there's a huge war on drugs and because America is the biggest market for drugs and has some of the strictest prohibitions, it tends to get the most gang-related activity and a majority of the murders are gang-related.
	And the second is the absolutely catastrophic Situation within large sections of the black community.
	I mean, you simply can't talk about, you know, people said to me, well, there's a very low homicide rate in Japan, but Japan is a highly homogenous, I mean, higher suicides in Japan, but Japan is a highly culturally homogenous population.
	And, you know, it's just everybody tiptoes around this basic fact that in certain concentrated highly dysfunctional areas of the black community, you have staggering amounts of crime which completely skews the numbers.
	And again, we're this weird place in society where the only things that matter are the things that nobody is talking about.
	It's like trying to figure out who's really pretty by looking at a negative.
	Of the picture.
	And so nobody's talking about the degree to which, you know, very localized urban black violence and that the high murder rate among and black on black violence, the immensely dysfunctional.
	Thomas Sowell talks about it and other people talk about it, but the mainstream media simply won't touch it with the 10-foot pole.
	And so you're sort of left with these ridiculous comparisons of America to England as if gun control is the only difference between the two cultures.
	So, you know, my take on firearms is largely inspired by one of your early podcasts.
	And for people that don't know, Stefan's early podcasts really lay out an incredible philosophical vision.
	And you can go back and listen to those.
	They're very timeless.
	And there was only one point in those early podcasts that came up where I had a little trouble with.
	And that's your concept of self-defense and non-violence.
	And obviously I'm totally with you on the ideals and the concepts, but on the issue of non-retaliation, I seem to have...
	I still want to be able to defend myself, even if only with pepper spray, even if the market demands that I don't use a firearm, but that I have a non-lethal taser instead.
	I still want to be able to use force in my defense.
	I'm also very excited to see that we are evolving past being a society where you can even make a credible case for guns ever being necessary for self-defense.
	As a libertarian, as an anarchist, how do you combine advocating for gun rights in the present and not having the government come and take away guns at all and yet not advocating self-defense or advocating a world in which how do you combine advocating for gun rights in the present and not having the government come and take away guns at
	Well, to be precise, my position has never been that self-defense is immoral.
	I mean, self-defense is a moral action.
	It's not required, but it's certainly...
	I mean, who's going to condemn someone?
	You know, someone comes running at you with, you know, 12 chainsaws and you have to shoot them in the knee to get them to stop or wherever.
	Yeah, I mean, I have no particular problem with that.
	Clearly, it's a situation we don't want to be in, right?
	I mean, that's a real extremity of self-defense.
	You know, like...
	It sort of reminds me that I remember reading a long time ago in an army manual that if you get a part of your body stuck to a frozen pole, the best thing to do is to pee on it because your pee is warm and it will get you off the frozen pole.
	So, yes, you can pee on yourself, but really, wouldn't it be better to just not have any part of you on the frozen pole to begin with?
	Of course, if it's your penis that's actually attached to the frozen pole, Then you've got some serious gymnastics to get yourself free.
	That doesn't happen in the military.
	I have a couple of videos on that which are really subscriber-only trauma centers.
	Stefan, Stefan, I don't know.
	You can legally and morally and virtuously defend yourself against violence, but boy, wouldn't it be great to not be in that position to begin with?
	Hold on, Stefan.
	Hold on, hold on.
	Having been in the military, I don't know what manual you are reading, but I just want to reassure people that, not that I'm encouraging people to enlist, but that if they are in the military or they might be considering it, getting your penis stuck to a frozen pole might not happen as often as you would get the impression from listening to Stefan Molyneux.
	Once again, titillating imagery from Stefan.
	Well, I actually met a rather chilly lady from Poland.
	I'm not sure what you were talking about.
	So this is all kinds of different.
	But anyway, so the important thing is the prevention thing, right?
	Unfortunately, we have no agencies within society at the moment that profit from the prevention of violence.
	And the prevention of violence is what we're all looking for.
	You know, we really don't want to have some extremity of radiation blast to cure us of some horrible illness.
	We want to not have that illness to begin with.
	So I have no problem with self-defense.
	I think that the focus on self-defense is a little heavy in libertarian circles.
	Of course, where violence comes from in general is from child abuse.
	And when you're a child, your capacity for self-defense against Caregiver or parental violence, which is 75% or 80% of the violence that is committed against children.
	I mean, you pretty much have no capacity for self-defense as a child.
	And so, you know, we can focus on it.
	I think it's fine.
	But really, I think what we should be doing is focusing on ways in which we can prevent violence from coming into people's lives.
	And that is around having a society which profits from peace.
	And unfortunately, we have a terrible society that profits from violence.
	Like, I just got a letter today from...
	Hold on a second, though.
	You've got to put that in...
	Let me keep moving.
	I make a lot more sense if I just keep moving and don't stop for questions.
	Is that okay?
	Hold on.
	You've got to put this in perspective because you say that society...
	He's taking it out of perspective, actually.
	Oh, hey.
	Hey, Stefan.
	Oh, wait.
	Who are you?
	I agree with your agreement with me.
	Should we continue?
	Well, I had an important question.
	Stefan is saucy.
	Where was I going with that?
	No, Stefan, you said...
	Victory!
	No, I disagree.
	I totally disagree with what you said.
	You said that society profits from violence and not from peace.
	I absolutely disagree.
	And you say that there's...
	No, our current society, like our current system, profits from violence and not from peace.
	Society as a whole, like the peaceful elements of society pay enormously, but there's no specific agency or entity that profits from peace.
	You seem to be confusing society and government.
	Government benefits from violence.
	Society suffers from violence.
	Society always benefits from peace.
	People in the government are part of society.
	People in the military, industrial, welfare, warfare, prison complex are part of society.
	So you're right.
	To be more precise than society, there are agencies which fundamentally run all of society at the point of a gun that profit enormously from violence.
	And there are no specific agencies at the moment that profit from the prevention of the factors which contribute to the rise of violence.
	In a free society, that would be entirely reversed.
	You had to have agencies that would vastly profit and, in fact, would only be profitable if they prevented violence from coming into being through, you know, some sort of intelligent intervention in any possibly traumatic early childhood experiences that people were having.
	And you would not have people who profit from violence at all because, you're right, violence as a whole is incredibly unprofitable for society as a whole.
	It's only profitable for specific people in the short run.
	So you're saying self-defense is not an immoral act, but what is your personal policy towards self-defense and why?
	My personal policy is avoid any situations where it will ever be necessary.
	Can you say with perfect assurance that that's never going to happen and that you can therefore not think through what you would do in certain circumstances if threatened?
	Well, I mean, if threatened for property, I will give property.
	I mean, I don't care that much about stuff.
	If threatened personally and if I'm armed, then yes, I will.
	I mean, if it's not about property, then I'm not going to go down without a fight.
	No, of course not.
	I mean, if my family is threatened, of course, and I have my gun with me, then I'm going to...
	Have that be part of the equation.
	But, you know, I'm very much one for avoidance and prevention rather than cure.
	Of course, in the current situation, if you get involved in a self-defense situation, ask George Zimmerman.
	It can get very political and very complicated and can eat up years of your life and cause untold stress and so on.
	Yeah, I mean, if there was a situation where, you know, I had weaponry and there was some just way to use it to prevent violence, harm to myself or others, yes, I would do that.
	I would regret being in the situation.
	I would regret having to do the action, but it would certainly be better than submitting.
	And if you could have a taser rather than a gun, I presume you'd choose the taser?
	I'm not entirely convinced of that.
	Tasers are significantly limited.
	What if it was a future taser that did whatever you wanted?
	It's from the future, man.
	You know what I want to talk about, Adam?
	If there's a non-lethal way of doing it, of course, right?
	I mean, that's better.
	If there's a way of disabling someone rather than harming or killing them in any permanent way, of course, right?
	But these are not always the situations that people are in, right?
	So like the two and a half million crimes that are prevented or avoided or reduced in danger from people who have weapons, I say, yeah, good for you.
	I mean, I don't think that you should wander through, you know, the back bush of Africa without a weapon in case some tiger is stalking you.
	Sorry, some lion is stalking you.
	Yes, I know, not a lot of tigers in Africa every time right there.
	But so if...
	You're in a place where there's lots of predators, yeah, then have a weapon.
	I mean, that's fine.
	I choose not to do a lot of wandering through places where there are a lot of predators, so that's my particular preference.
	but I think for the people who use guns in self-defense for people who have prevented harm to themselves and the studies are quite clear that people who use weapons when confronted with a criminal lose less property and suffer less physical injury as a result so it is actually a violence reducing thing but it's just kind of regretful that it's it's necessary at the moment and you know as a philosopher i'm really only interested in nutrition not surgery right
	so i'm interested in building the conditions or advocating for the conditions that will alleviate the need for these things at all um so but other people of course you know then surgeons have their place as well as nutritionists but i think that i'm much more into long-term solutions myself although yeah self-defense is necessary then then fine yeah Somebody in this room is the recent recipient of the 2012 Liberty Inspiration Award.
	And it's not me.
	It's not you.
	It's not Cesar.
	It's not Salad?
	It's this guy.
	It's Stefan Molyneux!
	Did we just get that over the wires, like, right now?
	No, I got it over the wire of my brain yesterday.
	Oh, yesterday.
	Well, congratulations, Stefan.
	Well, thanks.
	It really is amazing what kind of traction you get, you know, through extortion, blackmail and kidnapping.
	Because having studied politics for so long, I've realized that the best way to influence voting is through threats and bribes.
	And so I feel I've learned from my political masters and climbed to the top of the heat through various nefarious means.
	But I gratefully accept the award on the Academy's behalf.
	Absolutely.
	That was beautiful.
	Well, Stefan, if we may go back to guns, what's your best argument for the status gun grabber?
	For the status gun grabber?
	Did you catch Alex Jones on Piers Morgan?
	Yes, in fact.
	And I thought he was just on the show, but he actually seemed to be physically on him.
	Yeah.
	I mean, is Spittle an effective rebuttal?
	I don't know how many Frappuccinos that man powers his ego with first thing in the morning, but I imagine it's something like a diesel Trucksworth.
	And, I mean, there's quite a swing and set of Texas-sized cojones there to go in and launch that level of Spittle at the implacable British Reserve.
	So it's not the approach I would have taken, but, you know, I certainly do admire the man's Passion and energy.
	But I would simply say that nobody is for gun control.
	This is a ridiculous notion.
	Nobody in the whole world is for gun control.
	What they want is for guns to remain in the hands of a political monopoly.
	I mean, this is a really, really clear thing to understand.
	They don't want to get rid of guns.
	What they want to do is they want to centralize the use of guns in the hands of a political monopoly.
	And if people are willing to defend that, Then I simply assume they've never cracked the history book and have no right to say anything on the subject whatsoever.
	That's a very good point.
	Amanda, do we have any questions from the chat tonight?
	For Stefan?
	Yeah.
	Well, actually the chat is blowing up about Stefan.
	I don't know that all of it is completely appropriate as there has been so much titillating imagery thrown back and forth tonight.
	Stefan, have you ever had your penis frozen on a cold pole somewhere while you were in the military, which you never were?
	Well, I will know, and I will say this.
	I will say this.
	And, okay, brace yourselves.
	No, but I mean, for those who don't know, after high school, you know, I've been sort of on my own since I was about 15.
	And after high school, I was completely broke, and I wanted to go to college.
	And so what I did was I worked...
	As a prospector, a gold panner, a claim staker and so on in Northern Ontario for about a year and a half and then I did another summer a little bit later.
	And I did spend the entire winter up around the, not too far from the Arctic Circle, And in a tent, basically.
	I mean, a big tent with some heating and so on.
	But the coldest I think I've ever been was when, you know, after a while you get a little bit backwards and gamey, you know, after you squish around in your long johns and parker for a couple of weeks through the...
	I know it's like minus 30 or minus 40 outside, but I simply have to wash.
	And so you get your snow, you put it on your heater, and then you basically go outside, you take a deep breath of unholy courage, and you just basically wash yourself.
	I've never been to the point where, as I'm washing myself, The water is physically freezing.
	Like, you have to finish quickly because it's freezing on you as you're washing yourself.
	And, you know, but I'll tell you this.
	I've never felt so cold, but I've also never quite felt so clean in my life.
	Because, you know, shaving ice off you with a dial soap is just a wonderful kind of clean.
	Nothing I'd really want to reproduce.
	But I think that's probably the closest that I've come.
	So we do have a question here.
	This is from chatroom Henrik Grund.
	Stefan, what got you into liberty and have you always had those inclinations?
	I've not always had those inclinations.
	As I mentioned recently, I was a good-statist Christian young fellow, and then I sort of gave up on Christianity for a variety of reasons and moved more towards socialism in the good old 20th century tradition.
	Less God, more Stalin.
	I wasn't a communist, but I was a socialist, and I mean, it really was Seinrand, just reading The Fountainhead.
	It was just irresistible.
	I mean, it's deeply exciting literature, of course, right?
	But it was...
	The first time, I think, I'd really come in contact with non-statist nobility, right?
	Because nobility that you see when you're a kid, it's always statist in one form or another.
	It's always James Bond on His Majesty's Secret Service, and it's always some military thing, or it's always some super spy, or it's always someone doing the government's business.
	Like, the very definition of heroism is killing whoever the rulers point at.
	That basically was all that I was inculcated with.
	And the only other kinds of heroism that I'd kind of come in contact with were, you know, Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, this kind of, you know, weak-kneed, vaguely insipid kind of Christian do-goodery stuff, which I just never found particularly sinewy or...
	Look up to-able.
	But with Ayn Rand's characters, you get heroism without violence.
	I mean, that really is heroism without obeying orders.
	Heroism that is not designed to serve the murderous lusts and desire for power and control of the rulers that be.
	It's non-livestock...
	Confidence that Ayn Rand puts forward.
	I mean, that was deeply thrilling to me.
	And through Ayn Rand, of course, got into the economics of that.
	I didn't really learn about the Austrian school until much later.
	But that really got me interested in philosophy, the idea that there was a possible framework for answering some very significant questions.
	And I spent a good 20 years as an objectivist, and they were wonderful times.
	And then I just gave up trying to square the circle of voluntary taxation and slipped over to the great beyond of Anarchy.
	Well, hold on.
	That gets to another definitional issue.
	Would you not say that it is against the philosophical concept of objectivism itself, that the inconsistency is not being an objectivist versus being a libertarian, but the inconsistency is calling yourself objective while advocating for taxation?
	Yeah, I mean, I think now sort of looking back at it, any philosophy which names itself is already making a mistake.
	I mean, to call something objectivism, I mean, it's either good philosophy or it's bad philosophy.
	Like, we don't call good biology Dawkins Enzium or whatever it is, right?
	Right.
	And we don't call good...
	Good physics Einsteinism or Hawkinsianism or something like that.
	I mean, it's just good science or it's bad science.
	It's good economics or it's bad economics.
	You know, the Austrian versus the Chicago versus the Keynesian versus the monetary school and all.
	I mean, this tells you that the discipline is missing some very fundamental definitional issues and remains largely a...
	Academic power turf grab wars of infinitesimally small significance.
	And so, the fact that she had to call it objectivism rather than, this is just philosophy.
	Like, it's good philosophy, it's bad philosophy, and that's why, I mean, obviously it would be ridiculous to me to say, I never named my philosophy in the way that Ayn Rand did, but I just think, I'm trying to either do good philosophy, or if I make mistakes, it's bad philosophy, I need to correct it.
	But the idea that philosophy can ask these questions is important.
	For an objectivist, obviously, to have allegiance to reason and evidence is to be philosophical.
	To call yourself an objectivist is to set up something that's different from the word philosophy, and I think that's a mistake.
	I've always thought of objectivism as the how of philosophy, but now we're just parsing the words there, so I'll have to reconsider that, because it does have that connotation with Ayn Randianism specifically, where I've always thought objectivism is something as a rational way of doing philosophy.
	I've always considered your philosophy to be objective, to be, in that sense, good philosophy.
	Yeah, and I mean, one of the mistakes, you know, I hate to pick on that smoky vixen's corpse because she was just a fantastic human being, but I didn't like in particular, or even remotely, the aspect of, you know, come to me for the answers.
	You know, this is really not a good way to set up a school of philosophy.
	I mean, A school of philosophy is, here's how to think.
	Like, nobody has a seance consulting the 400-year past ghost of Francis Bacon to figure out which scientific theories are correct or not.
	Or, you know, nobody wears these bracelets that say, you know, what would Niels Bohr do?
	You simply have methodologies that are reproducible to everyone.
	You encourage their reproduction, and you will certainly ask and answer questions within a particular group.
	Or if there's someone really good at it, like me, maybe, you go and ask them.
	But the whole purpose is to reproduce The process, the methodology for other people and in other people to keep it away from the individual.
	Yes.
	Ladies and gentlemen, our guest has been Stefan Molyneux.
	Stefan, as always, thank you so much for joining us.
	If you want your own philosophical epiphany, the place to go is freedomainradio.com, youtube.com slash stephbot.
	And we're grateful to have him on as a friend of the show on a regular basis.
	And as we get smoother with our production and we get our Skype figured out, we'll be having him back on.
	Stefan, thank you so much for joining us.

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