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Jan. 19, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

19:03

2303 The History of Ethics: A Preview

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the history of ethics with Bobby Casey, Managing Director of Global Wealth Protection - www.globalwealthprotection.com.

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	Hi folks, Bobby Casey here.
	I am the Managing Director and Chief Bottle Washer for Global Wealth Protection and Organizer for Global Escape Hatch.
	I want to thank you guys for listening in today and watching our video.
	Today I am interviewing one of our guest speakers, Stefan Molyneux.
	Stefan runs the largest internet radio show, philosophy radio show on the internet with nearly 50 million people.
	He is also the 2012 Liberty Inspiration Award winner.
	He won that in front of Ron Paul and Tom Woods.
	You can find Stephan's website and his radio show online at freedomainradio.com.
	Stephan, thank you for joining me today.
	How are you doing today?
	Stephan, just great, Bobby.
	How are you doing?
	Very good.
	So, first of all, I want to thank you for agreeing to speak at our upcoming conference in Belize.
	For those of you watching this for the first time or ran across this video from an outside source, the conference website is www.globalescapehatch.com, and the conference is in Ambergris Quay, Belize, March 6th through 10th.
	We've got about 16 speakers from across the globe speaking on a variety of topics ranging from offshore banking, investments, asset protection, liberty-minded ideas, internet privacy, entrepreneurship, and much more.
	So again, Stephan, thanks for joining me on the recording today and also thanks for agreeing to speak.
	So, for the audience here, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background.
	Tell us who we're talking to and who we can expect to run into down in Belize.
	Sure.
	Well, I mean, obviously, thanks for the invitation.
	It's always a tough decision whether you want to stay in Canada In March and watch the snow melt down into the mud of Canada, basically turning everywhere you go into a World War I trench or go to Belize, which has the best snorkeling in the known universe.
	So it was not that tough a decision.
	I appreciate the invitation.
	Yeah, so I started out as an entrepreneur.
	Well, I started out as an academic.
	I got my master's in history, really focusing on the history of philosophy.
	From the University of Toronto and then went, oh my god, I've got an arts degree.
	What am I going to do?
	And so I ended up being an entrepreneur.
	I co-founded a company with my brother.
	We grew it.
	To about 40 employees and then sold it and then sold it again and stayed around in the software world off and on for a while.
	And then, you know, I guess like a boomerang, like a salmon, I swam upstream to sort of my first loves.
	And I had a long commute.
	I was living in one place, driving far to another, and I started recording thoughts I've had over the 30 years I've been interested in philosophy.
	I just started recording them in my car.
	I was tired of audiobooks, nothing good on the radio.
	Hey, I'll start a philosophy show.
	And so I started podcasting, this is sort of back in 05, 06.
	So, you know, really the dawn of this whole crazy modern media age and got some articles published and ended up after about a year of that, well, actually after about six months of that, people said, you know, I really like what you're doing.
	I'd love to donate.
	I'm like, I guess I'll take some money if you wanted to.
	I hadn't really thought about it.
	And so I set up a donation page, and then donations started coming in.
	And after six more months, I begged my wife to please let me play with the internet for a living, rather than drive.
	And work in the software field.
	And so she graciously allowed me to do that.
	And so that's what I did.
	I quit.
	Started doing this full time.
	And I guess in the five or so years since, it's been just a fantastic ride, a very exciting ride.
	And so that's where I'm at.
	I can speak at a whole bunch of conferences.
	I'm usually the Master of Ceremonies for the three-day festival at Libertopia.
	I speak at Porkfest, Freedom Fest.
	I was out there with Laissez-Faire Books.
	I've really worked on public speaking.
	I did some of it in sales and marketing in the business world, but trying to make philosophy a gripping, vital, and enjoyable and insightful topic is something that I really sweat myself to the bone to try and make.
	I'm really looking forward to chatting with people out here.
	I find that when you get a little older, I'm 46 now, when you get a little older, I find that I, and this is one of the reasons I started the show, I really wanted to look for patterns.
	You know, when you're young, you don't really look for patterns because you're just putting your nose to the grindstone if you're ambitious, you're working hard, you're trying to meet the right person.
	If you want to start a family, you're starting a family.
	But it's not really about patterns.
	It's about motion.
	It's about drive.
	It's about ambition.
	It's about achievement.
	But when you get a little older, I'm sort of in the middle, you know, hopefully, well, all fingers crossed, in the middle part of my life.
	You start looking for patterns, and of course you look for patterns in your own life.
	Why do I do what I do?
	How did I end up where I am?
	But you also, I think, if you're socially conscious, you look for patterns in the larger world.
	How did Western society get to this incredibly insane place where we have hundreds of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, where we have terrible, you know, crumbling schools and infrastructure, where we have monstrous deficits and debt, where the political process has been so abominably and utterly corrupted And the youth are now facing, you know, shorter lifespans, worse health, worse economic opportunities than their elders for the first time since the start of the Industrial Revolution a couple of hundred years ago.
	How on earth did we get here?
	And I think the answer lies in an examination of ethics and the degree to which we've drifted from The Socratic idea of ethics, that reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	The wheels came off that bus probably about 150 years ago, and it's just been a kind of decaying chaos in many ways.
	I mean, sort of socially and so on, technologically, but doing fantastically because of the vestiges of the free market and property rights.
	And I think that looking at the patterns, if we really want to change where the world's heading, which I think any responsible person wants to, we have to look at the ethical assumptions that underlie so much of our thinking that we're not aware of, and that's really what I want to talk about.
	In the speech is to help people to understand that where we are is not a mystery.
	It is the inevitable result of a whole bunch of ethical avoidances and errors that we've made or have been made for us by our intellectuals over the past hundred or so years.
	I really want to tell people what that is so they can look at the world and have it make sense.
	You know, with philosophy, it's like taking off one of those really foggy snorkel masks and just ripping it off your head and rinsing off your face and looking at the clear sky.
	It is really like, as Socrates pointed out in Plato's recounting, emerging from a cave of illusion into the clear light of day.
	I think that the most important part of philosophy is ethics, and ethics gives you the greatest clarity in understanding why the world is the way it is.
	I really want to try and sort of produce or share in hopefully as entertaining a manner as possible what I've learned in the couple of decades that I've been studying it and what we can do most effectively to change the future.
	Now, I'm curious.
	You mentioned the wheels came off the bus 150 years ago.
	By the way, nice reference to the snorkeling mask.
	You've really got Belize on your mind for March.
	You don't even want to know if I stood up while I'm wearing underneath this fairly important business shirt.
	But yes, it's just that basically it's a thong.
	But I'm going to have to get into that in any detail, but 150 years ago, so you could say.
	That's fine.
	I'm wearing superhero pants, so whatever.
	So, you mentioned the wheels came off the bus about 150 years ago.
	Why 150 years ago?
	What was the catalyst?
	Or was it just the boiling frog scenario, the snowball picking up speed?
	Why 150 years ago?
	Well, I'll try and do that briefly.
	I mean, there have been an enormous number of sociopathic, verbally acute, oratorically skilled people who have made a large amount of money off mankind through lying to people for a living, through telling them that if they don't hand over money to the witch doctor, the volcano god will be angry with them.
	If they don't submit to the will of the king, then the god will smite them down and send them to hell.
	And so basically they set up these disaster scenarios.
	You're not going to hurt my feelings.
	You're not going to have my feelings if you throw the mud against the megachurch, guys, so I'm fine with that.
	Yeah, I mean, so you set up these incredible scare scenarios.
	Pascal called it a wager.
	You know, well, if the results are so terrible, we might as well just believe, which only encourages people to make these results so terrible.
	And where they tended to be was in the priestly class.
	And unfortunately, there was a massive attack, well, unfortunately slash fortunately, there was a massive attack against the priestly class coming out of the Enlightenment, really led by Voltaire and some of the other French Enlightenment folks, who really began to rail against organized religion as it stood at the time.
	You could really argue that it started in the 16th century under Martin Luther railing against the indulgences of the Catholic Church and so on.
	But people really began to throw some pretty heavy stones against the crumbling brick wall of the church structures.
	And in many ways, in the 19th century, with the rise of wealth and food and materialism and so on, people began to be much less worried about or concerned with or frightened of or more dangerously paying money to people who frightened them with superstition.
	And so a lot of these people who adapted to the priestly class said, whoa, this ship's kind of not doing so well, so where else can we go that doesn't involve actually having to work for a living?
	And they charged over to the state.
	And so it's no coincidence that I think that as you saw the fall of socialism in the 19th, sorry, as you saw the fall of religiosity in the 19th century, you saw the rise of socialism and communism, because this is another place where verbally acute people can go and bamboozle.
	People with mythologies like, you know, the common good, the proletariat, noble worker, the social contract, whatever they could make up.
	What lies do I have to tell you to get you to give me money is these people's main reason for existing.
	In fact, as a parasite, their only way to exist.
	And so they began to carve out all of these secular religions, right, like socialism.
	And democracy and communism and fascism.
	And the rise of these secular religions was largely responsible in many ways for the wars of the 20th century.
	And we're just coming to the end of that cycle in the West.
	And this is why I think we just, you know, neither religion nor politics are great friends with philosophy, as many philosophers over history have found, much to their detriment.
	And so I think we really need to understand that if we define things from first principles, if we reason from first principles, we can get a wonderfully rational and virtuous system of ethics with no reference to the guns of government or the ghosts of religion or whatever, so the people can be good not out of fear, not out of fear of hell or jail, not out of a lust for heaven or freedom or political power, but out of a Truly rational impulse for virtue and goodness.
	That's been the huge challenge of philosophy.
	It has, I think, remained largely unfulfilled.
	There aren't many good answers as to why be good outside of gods and governments, and that's sort of been my mission for the last half decade or so, and I've got a free book on my website called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	If we can get the ethics to become a science, Then it's sort of like getting physics out of the hands of the priests and the alchemists and into the hands of scientists.
	You can see the progress that happens with that.
	Or getting resources out of the church and into the free market, we can see what happens with that.
	And so I'm really kind of excited to talk about The big major trends in the history of philosophy and how we got where we are and really what needs to do for philosophy finally to take center stage in society rather than being some academic library-bound discipline that you just talk about when you're vaguely high, possibly flying over Amsterdam.
	And so That, I think, is really what I'm excited to bring to the table.
	And, you know, it sounds like this is an audience who's, I think, going to be quite interested in that.
	Because, as I say, if you're rich, you're generally a little bit older, and you want to start to see patterns, and you also want to start to really do good with the years that you have left.
	And certainly, that's my focus as well.
	Very good.
	Well, I'm definitely looking forward to it.
	Now, you mentioned just a minute ago your book to download on your website, so maybe you could mention, and I'll say, too, for those listening, I have downloaded several of your books.
	I've read a couple of them.
	They're all on my Droid phone for my next flight, which is here in a couple of days.
	I'm ready to dig into your next book.
	They're quite intellectually stimulating, so thank you for that.
	Maybe you could talk just a little bit about your business, your radio show, what you talk about, and where people can find you and what you have on there.
	Oh, sure.
	So it's a podcast.
	I mean, I'm on the radio, but I don't run a radio show.
	I'm on other people's shows.
	But it's a podcast.
	It's a video series.
	It's a bunch of essays.
	There's a message board with over 10,000 people on it.
	And I guess we've got 13 or 14 million videos downloaded.
	The rest of the podcasts are downloaded.
	It's all free, no commercials, because I have the business sense of a big plate full of cheese string.
	At least as far as this media goes.
	The books are all free.
	The videos are all free.
	I'm working on a documentary at the moment, which is going to be released, yes, you guessed it, for free, just because I really, really want to get...
	Philosophy has been kind of an elite discipline for a long time.
	I really want to get philosophy into the hands of the masses, and so far, so good.
	And so, yeah, people go to freedomainradio.com.
	They can get all the free podcasts, all the free videos.
	The books are all free.
	I think you have to just pay a couple of bucks for the print versions, because...
	I can't absorb that cost, but if you want them in audiobook or EPUB or PDF or HTML or whatever, that's all free.
	So yeah, I hope people will check them out.
	I mean, I've tried to really...
	I was really struck by a philosophy professor I had in college who said...
	Socrates never used the word epistemology.
	Socrates didn't use a language that wasn't common to everyone.
	And he said that's one of the things that's most admirable about Socrates, which I kind of agree with.
	So I've tried to mix in bad jokes and hopefully not too crappy metaphors and an entertaining way of getting ideas across.
	And to try and resolutely avoid technical terms, because philosophy's got to be something you can put into your life.
	And if it's, you know, like chewing a broken set of ball bearings to chew through the syllables of the words you're being exposed to, that's just not going to happen.
	So yeah, everything's free.
	I hope people will check out the show.
	And I do a Sunday show every 10 o'clock with people coming in with questions about philosophy and life.
	So people are welcome to check that out.
	And of course, I'll be at the Global Escape Hatch Conference in Belize in March.
	Okay, very good.
	Well, thanks for your time.
	Thanks for joining us today.
	I'm going to hit you up with one more question before we leave.
	So you know a little bit about me, what I write about, what I do.
	I know you know a few of the other speakers coming.
	I'm sure you probably don't know all the speakers, but I know you talked about this before.
	You know a few of the other speakers.
	So for the people listening and watching that are still with us, that are still tolerating us, Give me one reason why you think they should be joining us in Belize, aside from the amazing snorkeling.
	Look, I mean, everybody's life runs fundamentally on ideas.
	And ideas to me, they're kind of like heart health.
	You know, like, your heart just does its thing.
	How many times a day do you sort of reach down and go, hey, is that thumper still thumping?
	You don't really think about it at all until you have a problem, and then that's really all you can think about.
	And we all run on ideas the same way our bodies run on hearts.
	We all run on ethics, we all run on sort of fundamental Are people good?
	Are people bad?
	Is violence necessary?
	Is taxation forced?
	What does it mean to be part of a society?
	What should we do with good people?
	How should good people act?
	What do we do with bad people?
	What makes bad people?
	Why are some people bad and some people good?
	We all have ideas about this.
	If they're not conscious, if they're not brought to the surface, then they're very dangerous because they can be manipulated very easily by people who can implant bad ideas into us and basically end up with us doing their bidding, whether we like it or not, whether we're conscious of it or not.
	So I think, certainly that would be my case for the philosophy side of things.
	Come and talk to people about things that are important.
	A number of years ago, I kind of gave up on small talk.
	When you get that you don't live forever, small talk becomes an optional tax that you don't want to pay.
	So come to Belize, come to this conference, because obviously I think you'll get great ideas about how to protect your wealth and you'll meet Some people who've achieved a great deal in their life, and those are always great people to talk with and be around.
	But you get to talk about really important things.
	I mean, not just asset protection, which is an important thing in terms of practical stuff, but you get to talk about important ideas.
	And unfortunately, We don't get enough of that in our lives, at least I don't think we do.
	And so come to talk about important ideas, come to meet great people, and come to share ideas.
	We all have bottled up great thoughts that we want to share with others.
	I think this is going to be one of those venues, it's true of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist conferences in general, And particularly more, sort of, quote, exclusive ones like this, you will get a chance to share ideas.
	And at the end of it, it's going to cost you some money.
	But at the end of life, from what I've heard, and I believe it's true, You don't remember the money.
	You don't remember.
	What you remember is events.
	What you remember is things that stand out.
	And I sort of try and design my life so that I don't sort of look back and say, well, that was a whole bunch of days that seemed kind of like the same.
	So things that you do that are different in life are things that you remember and things that enrich you and things that are deep and meaningful, I think, will really stand out.
	And I think those are really great memories to have.
	They're good experiences to have, but they're even better memories to have afterwards.
	So that would be my pitch.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Very good.
	Well, again, Stefan, thanks for joining me today.
	Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak to us today.
	And for those of you watching, again, the website, www.globalescapehatch.com.
	You can register today.
	The event is March 6th through 10th in Ambergris Key, Belize, and I look forward to seeing you there.
	Thanks.
	Take care.
	Have a good day.
	Take care.

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