Stefan Molyneux talks to Jeffrey Tucker about his recent Lymphoma diagnosis, chemotherapy treatments, the drive to hide, shame, support, friendship, half of a donut, and the experience of telling the world that you have cancer.
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| How's the audio video? | |
| Oh, it's great. | |
| It looks really good. | |
| One, two, three. | |
| Smooth as silk, my brother. | |
| Good. | |
| Okay. | |
| Yeah, my voice is going to sound unusually. | |
| You know, I came down with like a virus yesterday. | |
| And I mean, I was feeling sorry for myself, you know, and took some steroids and stuff like that. | |
| So now I'm in the weird situation of not knowing if I'm, you know, sick or well, you know, because the drugs are masking, you know, the reality in some way. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Which isn't a bad thing, really. | |
| Nope. | |
| No, indeed. | |
| It was actually yesterday when I saw your video, so that was very interesting. | |
| It made me not feel so sorry for myself, actually. | |
| Well, I'll tell you something interesting. | |
| I don't know what your relationship is with problems. | |
| Life is full of problems, right? | |
| And life, in a sense, is a... | |
| Not is a problem, but I think I've had this belief for many, many years that life should be relatively smooth, and the problems are like... | |
| Bad. | |
| Negative. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, like, shouldn't have problems. | |
| Like, 100% happiness is life with no problems. | |
| And, you know, 10% problems makes you 90% happier. | |
| 50% problems makes you 50% happier and so on. | |
| And since I got this diagnosis, I'm like, I think that's actually not correct. | |
| I think that's actually not a true way to look at it. | |
| So for instance, so like, let's say, I don't know, like a month ago, I think like everyone, you've got your problems, things are going well, things are going badly. | |
| And I thought, you know, boy, would I ever be happy to have the problems I had last month? | |
| You know, that would be fantastic to have the problems I had last month. | |
| Now, I don't believe this is going to be fatal or anything, but if it was, at some point I'd be sitting in a hospital bed staring up at those always discolored ceilings and saying, I would just be happy to have any problems. | |
| Because, you know, when you're dead, you have no problems. | |
| At least that's the secular theory. | |
| So I think that's been really interesting for me to have a change in the relationship to what I perceive as problems in life and problems in the world. | |
| That we are problem-solving machines and that problems are actually kind of like the weight to our muscle. | |
| They do strengthen us and so on. | |
| So I think from that standpoint, I mean, this is just one of six million things that have been going through my head since I got the diagnosis. | |
| Tell me this. | |
| Well, most life problems you feel like maybe you, they're especially fresh depending on how much control you believe you have over them, right? | |
| So if it's a problem of a debt and you see a way to earn some more money to pay it off, then the answer is there. | |
| But something like lymphoma is a little bit murky, right? | |
| So does that add to the confusion and the sense of things? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty science-based when it comes to treatment. | |
| I've been certainly getting some very interesting recommendations about things that I can do. | |
| But I'm pretty science-based as far as that goes. | |
| I guess one of the things that I first thought of was... | |
| The domino effect of additional stress, you know, stress is tough on the system. | |
| And so when you get a diagnosis, my sort of concern was then you kind of cave and you get these dominoes, you know? | |
| Like, oh, I'm sick. | |
| So then you get really stressed about being sick and that makes you sicker. | |
| And then you're like, oh my God, I'm sicker and I'm really stressed about that. | |
| And then you go and get some blood work and it's like, oh man, you know, this is... | |
| And I was concerned about that kind of snowball effect. | |
| So for me... | |
| I mean, it sort of was an effort of will, but it's actually not really an effort of will anymore to just say, I'm going to relax into cancer. | |
| I am going to relax into cancer. | |
| And that's a strange thing to even contemplate for me in the past, but it is actually a very possible and positive thing to occur. | |
| And you're still... | |
| Yeah, sorry, go ahead. | |
| You've been dealing with this for about three weeks, the diagnosis? | |
| Yeah, a little, almost three and a half weeks, and I started my chemo on Monday. | |
| So I've had my first round of chemo. | |
| Okay. | |
| Which has been astonishingly mild. | |
| Again, I mean, this is something that sometimes hits people who are older or more frail, but I'm very robust and healthy, so I think that my body is able to take it a lot better. | |
| But, yeah, so it's been, I guess, yeah, almost closer to four weeks now. | |
| Yeah, closer to four weeks. | |
| And it is... | |
| Well, I'm sure you've been reading a ton about the subject. | |
| What do you think about this common view that I've often heard that one's attitude that one takes towards these things has a lot to do with one's prospects and pace of healing? | |
| That is fairly scientifically validated. | |
| The great, delightful, and lovely Stephanie Murphy, who is quite well-educated in the subject, sent me some information about that, that you're... | |
| I mean, I believe that the mind-body link is very strong. | |
| It's very strong. | |
| I don't think you can will yourself in and out of things. | |
| I mean, I think I just had some bad luck. | |
| I mean, I eat well. | |
| I have a good weight. | |
| I exercise a lot. | |
| I don't smoke. | |
| I barely drink. | |
| Yeah, so the genetics appear to be the issue. | |
| And so, unfortunately, you just have some bad luck. | |
| The prognosis is positive. | |
| But I do think that you have to find... | |
| A real reason to have the hunger to marshal all of your body's energies into cure. | |
| And that to me is about having a future that you can design that is even happier than your past. | |
| I think that's a very important thing to work on. | |
| And so for me, you know, the troubles and tribbles of all the stuff that rolls around in your head, or at least rolls around in my head all the time, the good and the bad and the frankly insignificant stuff that happens on the day-to-day relative to the big picture of your life's happiness, I think trying to focus on How could this be an opportunity for an even better life? | |
| And again, I know this all sounds like the happy cancer hallmark card, but it is really true. | |
| It is really true that you can find something incredibly positive out of these kinds of things. | |
| Not to the point where you say yay, but to the point where you say out of what is happening, some really, really positive stuff can occur. | |
| And that to me has just been fantastic. | |
| I mentioned this to you on email, and I might as well re-say it here, but in the handful of cases I've known of people that I've been close to who have had cancer or had a child with cancer or something like that, they all have said the same thing to me, that they sense that people tend to avoid them. | |
| After the diagnosis becomes public knowledge. | |
| And then I've also talked to the people who are avoiding and asked them why are they doing this. | |
| And they always say the same things. | |
| They say, well, I'm afraid I won't be able to say the right thing. | |
| I'm afraid I'll say something wrong and kind of screw things up, you know? | |
| Or, well, then maybe they rationalize and say, well, I think maybe the person just wants to be left alone and I would just be bugging her. | |
| But unfortunately for the victim, It's terrible because you go from having a normal life to suddenly feeling alone and isolated in a strange way. | |
| So, I've just noticed this pattern. | |
| So far, what has been the response of your listeners and your fans? | |
| Have people been open with you? | |
| Or do you sense any of that weird anxiety that people have? | |
| You know, it's... | |
| It's complicated, as you can imagine. | |
| I certainly feel a bit of, I don't know if it's a guy thing or whatever, just crawl under a rock and lick your wounds until you get better and then come out holding a motorcycle above your head or something like that. | |
| And I think that's natural. | |
| But no, for the most part, people have been great. | |
| That's great. | |
| When you're a public figure, of course, it's... | |
| You are a vessel for projection. | |
| You know that happens, right? | |
| People project the good and the bad stuff. | |
| Sometimes, of course, people are dealing a lot more with their own feelings rather than focusing on you as an individual, which, again, makes sense. | |
| It's just part of the way things are. | |
| People have been fantastic. | |
| Some friends have come up to stay for the week. | |
| That's been really great. | |
| We've got lots of offers for people who want to come up and help. | |
| I definitely want to absorb that. | |
| I don't want it to be in the house alone with your daughter. | |
| Having those kinds of conversations have been great. | |
| I'm going to try and make it out to see and speak to people. | |
| It really depends where the white blood cell count will be. | |
| I'm low at some points during the chemo, so I may be more susceptible to infections. | |
| Particularly, I don't want to do that in another country. | |
| So there may be some limitations, but I really want to, you know, I don't want to vanish and disappear. | |
| I think staying in contact with people is, you know, there's something kind of more collective about an illness than there is about some other things. | |
| Because, I mean, we're all going to face something like this at some point in our lives. | |
| I mean, that's, you know, something kills you eventually, right? | |
| But this is a collective experience. | |
| And of course, people have gone through this with their parents, they've gone through this with grandparents, and so on. | |
| So I think it can be more of a communal experience, and I definitely don't want to hide. | |
| But there is also a kind of funny thing, I don't know if it's just me, but there's also a vague feeling of like, I don't know. | |
| Is it shameful to be ill? | |
| Did you do something wrong? | |
| You know what I mean? | |
| I don't know if the wages of sin or something like that, but there is a little bit of that sort of stuff that happens as well, and I've really been trying to make sure I don't go down. | |
| I'll tell you, I had a funny thing happen to me a few years ago. | |
| I went into the doctor, and I was having some chest pains, and I said, I don't know, doctor, it just won't go away. | |
| It just won't go away. | |
| And of course, the truth is that everybody is always worried about, you know, maybe I have cancer. | |
| I mean, most of us go through our lives wondering, maybe I have cancer of the foot. | |
| Maybe I have cancer of the shoulder. | |
| You know, you always wonder... | |
| So he said, well, you know, we'll take a scan. | |
| So he scanned my chest and he said, unfortunately, we found a spot. | |
| So I want to rush you into, you know, whatever that crazy machine is. | |
| So you could just imagine. | |
| I was just, you know, in a meltdown. | |
| I went to the, you know, I had the little Zoom thing and then they're looking at the screen. | |
| I could see them through the glass door. | |
| They're all kind of staring at this picture of me, you know, and I'm not allowed. | |
| And you're like, don't anyone do this. | |
| Don't anyone do this. | |
| That's not what you want. | |
| That's not the mime that you want to cross yourself here. | |
| Don't like... | |
| I'm like, el diablo! | |
| Well, they had these poker faces on there staring at it. | |
| So I just couldn't stand it. | |
| So I actually walked into the lab room. | |
| I said, what the hell? | |
| What does it say? | |
| And they're like, well, it's a little strange because we don't see anything. | |
| And so then the doctor comes in and says, well, apparently they just didn't clean the lens well on the eczema. | |
| So this is a whole day. | |
| Meanwhile, I had texted everybody, you know, These doom messages, you know. | |
| So I went through this upheaval and by the end of the day, of course, everything was perfect. | |
| But yeah, it was a weird kind of experience to suddenly have this sense of there's something inside of me that's potentially dangerous, you know. | |
| Oh, you feel like your legs are caught in a bear trap you can't even see. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, of course, because you want to do something. | |
| You want to, you know, there's a fire, run away from it. | |
| There's a bear, run away from it. | |
| There's a wolf, fight it. | |
| But this is like... | |
| Right. | |
| You. | |
| And it's a very... | |
| Because it stimulates a fight-or-flight response, which is the worst thing that can occur for your future health. | |
| So, I mean, it is a really kind of zen reversal thing that you have to work on, which... | |
| Maybe that's why cancer is so terrifying to people and why it's just such a special kind of enemy, you know? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because we don't really know what to do with it, and there's so much uncertainty, and it marshals such internal resources that you have to use, and as you say, it's a big public thing, and it can be just ghastly. | |
| Let me put a scenario before you. | |
| I'd like your response to it, because for some reason this incident stands out in my mind. | |
| Some years ago, there was a hurricane in my neighborhood, and it blew all night. | |
| Terrible things happened, and we all woke up the next morning, and trees were down. | |
| You know, all electricity was out. | |
| Water was out. | |
| It was a calamity. | |
| And everybody came pouring out of their houses with a sense of sadness, but also determination to do something about it. | |
| And I was kind of walking around the neighborhood, and there was one particular house that had a whole tree that fell on it. | |
| I think it might have killed one of the, or at least injured one of the children in the house. | |
| The whole thing was smashed to smithereens. | |
| We all looked at that and said, basically, there but for the grace of God go I. | |
| Thank God that didn't happen to me. | |
| And we all tried to help them. | |
| And we had a sense almost of good fortune. | |
| I mean, even though all of us had been afflicted by terrible tragedy, the sense that it could have been worse, not just because that one house was down, but just an overwhelming sense that it could have been worse, was kind of the thing that I think made everybody hopeful. | |
| In a way. | |
| Do you think there's anything to that story? | |
| I mean, I just observed at the time, because I was wondering, why isn't everybody walking around in a state of misery? | |
| You know, why were we all kind of feeling energetic, like, let's fix this up? | |
| You know, I mean, it was an interesting thing. | |
| Well, there is definitely something in it, because happiness is a lot about a scale in your life. | |
| And part of aging is to keep adjusting your scale, right? | |
| I mean, I'm 46 now. | |
| I mean, I can't do what I could do when I was 20, right? | |
| So part of it is sort of about adjusting your scale. | |
| I had a conversation with my daughter the other day, which I thought was something along these lines. | |
| So some friends were staying, and we're actually... | |
| I'm doing something on the deck with power washing it and going to stain it and all that kind of stuff. | |
| I love doing that kind of physical stuff because, you know, so much of what we do is this weird blops on the internet kind of crap, right? | |
| So I look to actually do something. | |
| It's like, hey, I did that, you know, as opposed to there's some bits on the server somewhere that people are downloading. | |
| And so I went out to get some lunch for everyone who was helping out. | |
| And the woman wanted a donut, so I was going to get her a donut. | |
| And I said to Isabel, and Isabel, my daughter, said, I want a donut. | |
| I want a donut. | |
| And I was like, well, you know, that's a... | |
| I try to, you know, I'm like five times or eight times per size or something. | |
| So I think a donut the size of like a tractor wheel. | |
| And it's like, that's not good, right? | |
| So I said, well, you can have half a donut. | |
| And she was, you know, upset. | |
| You know, and I started to pause her and I say, look, you know, like literally 30 seconds ago, you weren't even thinking about a donut. | |
| And now... | |
| Yeah. | |
| the donuts that's missing. | |
| And so actually getting a half a donut is making you sadder than when you weren't going to have any donut at all. | |
| And we had a great conversation about that kind of expectation. | |
| So I think that is the half a donut thing is sort of rolling around in my brain because there are inevitably problems in life. | |
| The idea that the only good sailing is light breeze, calm seas, and everything else is a problem is not true. | |
| There are always going to be problems. | |
| And I think I've sort of tensed myself against problems and disasters in my life, you know, that there's a bad thing and a negative way, as I was saying at the beginning. | |
| So, yes, a hurricane came through. | |
| That's a problem and things are going to have to be fixed. | |
| But that is life. | |
| This is what happens. | |
| This is even the case with me. | |
| Seeing the people in the hospital who are much worse prognosis than I have, it's like, I'm not that. | |
| That's a good thing. | |
| That's a positive thing. | |
| If this is the only health scare I have in my life, and I'm actually incredibly gratified and really surprised at the number of doctors who listen to my show, I guess because they talk a lot about health care, all sending me very positive information and outcomes and so on. | |
| You know, it could be a million times worse for me. | |
| And so if this is the major health scare I have in my life, I actually, you know, until I get old, I'm still doing pretty well because my health, I mean, I've never spent the night in a hospital for this little neck operation. | |
| That's the first time I've ever been under. | |
| I've never broken a bone. | |
| I've never had any kind of illness as an adult. | |
| So if this is it, you know, I can live with that. | |
| And there's a lot worse news that could have come out. | |
| In the U.S., there's a lot of private foundations and charities that have chipped in to provide really great services for people undergoing chemo and dealing with cancer and that sort of thing, where you can stay in apartments. | |
| If it's serious chemo that takes several days with radiation or whatever, they have apartments for you. | |
| Whole communities where you get to know other people and can talk. | |
| I would tell the people who are going through something similar. | |
| And it's all provided by private money, for the most part, actually, despite the gazillion dollars spent by the state. | |
| I mean, once you actually get sick, you're depending on things like McDonald's, a charity. | |
| Is that same thing available in Canada? | |
| Well, less so, of course, because the treatments are all paid for. | |
| I mean, I did look into treatments in the U.S., which are really quite prohibitive. | |
| But the treatments are all paid for. | |
| There is some stuff in particular for people who have tertiary costs, right? | |
| So you still have to pay for your drugs and so on, right? | |
| So that's an expense. | |
| For people who have, you know, obviously, I mean, the most horrible thing, right? | |
| I mean, if your child gets ill with some particularly dire ailment, then, you know, it's your time off work, it's coming down, it's, you know, all of the tertiary expenses which the healthcare system obviously doesn't and can't really cost. | |
| Yeah, there are some charities definitely involved and the hospitals do do a lot of charitable work. | |
| The McDonald's up here as well has the sick kids for people whose children have cancers and so on. | |
| So I think there is a natural sympathy for ailments. | |
| I mean, and even for ailments that people cause themselves, you know, like 70 to 80 percent of ailments are like results of lifestyle choices and stuff like that. | |
| But I think, you know, once somebody's sick, I think most people, you know, who have any kind of throbbing muscle in their chest, I think are like, wow, that's, you know, that's really unfortunate. | |
| What can we do to help? | |
| And that's something that I've always sort of relied on and understood, you know. | |
| I mean, I work on charitable donations which are fine. | |
| There is a lot of that up here as well. | |
| There's people not too far from us whose kids are sick and we've donated and we've helped them to raise funds for the tertiary expenses which can't be covered. | |
| I think there is a real humanity about that. | |
| This is a shadow we all live under, whether we know it or not. | |
| Well, this is all also part of what you and I would call society. | |
| It's integral to the market economy, right? | |
| I mean, it's just human beings serving each other, helping each other out, struggling together to make the best of the plight of this world. | |
| And this is actually what annoys me so much about these claims that we need Massive government policies. | |
| Because they not only take away resources that could otherwise be used for doing good, but the programs themselves are actually very often unreachable. | |
| I remember some years ago I encountered a seriously disabled A kid who was maybe a teenager and wondering why with all the vast social apparatus, government apparatus in place to serve the disabled, this kid seemed to be so much on his own, you know, just alone with his family, raising money for his wheelchair, raising money for every bit of treatment. | |
| And I actually looked into it and tried to contact government agencies, and I found it nearly impossible to navigate the bureaucracies, and so did he. | |
| They're not responsive. | |
| Well, what's so tragic, Jeff, is the degree to which, because people think that the issue is taken care of, all of the tertiary scaffolding of natural, tribal human society doesn't come into effect. | |
| Because people are like... | |
| Well, the poor, you know, I mean, I pay all my taxes. | |
| There are like six million government agencies and services and education and this and that. | |
| So you don't see a lot of people like, you know, we'll talk about the people who fall through the cracks, the poor kids who need an education. | |
| Well, I mean, good heavens, people would mentor them, they would help them out and so on. | |
| But because it's like, well, there's public schools and all this stuff, so they're getting their education. | |
| So we assume the problem is dealt with. | |
| There's nothing worse, I think, in life than thinking a problem is dealt with when it's not, because then you're just not, it's not even on your radar, but the problem usually continues to deteriorate. | |
| And so I think, I wonder with this young man, if people had recognized that, oh, didn't have the fantasy that he was being taken care of by the state, to what degree other things would rush in to fill that. | |
| I mean, I'm certain that there would be much better resources available for him in that A sense of personal responsibility. | |
| And then an entrepreneurship that comes with looking for charitable opportunities. | |
| Instead of just figuring that, well, I gave it the office by force. | |
| So I don't have to worry about it. | |
| There's a serious displacement. | |
| And in a strange way, we live in a very cruel world, despite the welfare state. | |
| And maybe because of it, actually. | |
| I think because. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's weird. | |
| It's like a laissez-faire society would actually, in a sense, be less selfish in that conventional sense of the term. | |
| Because you'd have a greater sense of connection. | |
| Like, well, I have a direct responsibility for solving problems myself with my community rather than always relying on this mystical entity out there to take care of everything. | |
| Well, and of course, even just the basic economics… I mean, the system has, quote, made a fortune off all the problems that I've had, which would not be at all the case in a free market society. | |
| I mean, this basic problem of incentives, which we've all, you know, all libertarians and anarchists have talked about for years, that they're making good coin off delays, misdiagnosis and that kind of stuff, and treatment. | |
| Whereas, you know, early prevention and all that kind of stuff for, you know, getting it out before it turns rancid would be a very different situation. | |
| Thank you. | |
| ways to be grateful for the half a donut. | |
| I mean, what if I'd been in Iraq and something like this had grown in my neck, right? | |
| Because this is something I talked about recently. | |
| What an incredible gift it is to even have the resources around government provided, though they are taxed, though I've been to provide them. | |
| What an incredible resource it is to have available to me, which is not available to most people in the world. | |
| So that's another thing to be incredibly grateful for. | |
| This is a natural segue. | |
| And I have to tell you my own response to watching your hour-long, really video documentary on the Iraq War, which I watched in its entirety and with not the slightest temptation to look away from the screen. | |
| I was just amazed by it. | |
| I think is easily the best presentation on the Iraq war. | |
| And I was thinking this morning that if I were going to send it to anybody who didn't really know that much about a subject, which is like practically everybody, if I were going to send one thing, I would send the link to your video. | |
| I mean, I think it's that good. | |
| It's masterfully done. | |
| And it really prompted a lot of thoughts inside of me. | |
| I don't write about war that much. | |
| I care about it. | |
| I'm against war, but I can only do so much. | |
| I tend to write about other subjects. | |
| And I almost felt a sense of, like, I had unjustly neglected this topic. | |
| I mean, the horror that you outlined was intriguing. | |
| So that was one thing I thought. | |
| Second thing I thought was, I can't, and that's what I wanted to ask you, how do you account for people's lack of interest in what our governments are doing to people abroad? | |
| How do you make sense of that? | |
| You know, it's, I'm just sort of goosebumps up my neck just thinking about it. | |
| There was something, I felt the presentation was long enough, so I didn't add this. | |
| But what I wanted to say very briefly at the end was, and also I wanted it to be accessible to more people on the left, right, who are quite pro for government, for social programs, but against imperialism. | |
| Right. | |
| Is that if you look at the soulless monsters who are at the top of our government and who are enacting these unbelievable brain-staggering horrors overseas, and the media that is complicit in keeping the information from the people abroad. | |
| so it has to show up in things like the Boston bombings and so on. | |
| This is how unspoken information always comes out some other way. | |
| That these are the same people that you want to educate your children. | |
| That these are the same people that you want to take care of when you're sick. | |
| That these are the same people that you want to protect you from bad food, bad medicine. | |
| It's the same people. | |
| This is what is so amazing to me. | |
| That if you look at something like the Iraq War, I think the reason people look away from it is that these are considered to be the white knights of all socialills in our society. | |
| These are the guys who ride over the cavalry, who save us from all the bad things in the world that we imagine. | |
| And when we look at what they're doing in this particular situation and environment, I think it pushes these opposite magnets together in people's heads to the point where it's almost like there's a personality disassembling. | |
| That can occur when you try and put these two things together. | |
| The same people who are putting these ungodly radiations into the lungs of Iraqi children and doing all of these astonishing evils are the same people that you're running to save you from price gouging from Wall Street. | |
| And I think for people to try and put those two things together is really... | |
| It's really very hard. | |
| And I think it's almost impossible. | |
| So they just ignore it? | |
| Yeah, and that way they can talk about sequestration, they can talk about budgets, they can talk about this law or SOPA or whatever. | |
| They can focus on this detritus without looking at the big... | |
| Truly an Old Testament moral view of this monstrous beast squatting above us, crapping all over our future and our children. | |
| I think that for people to look at the evil that this system is capable of, it just short-circuits them when they say, oh yes, but it would be great if it took care of our health. | |
| My God, I mean, just talk to the natives, right? | |
| I mean, they've been under government control for hundreds of years, and their entire civilization has been completely destroyed. | |
| And they remain, you know, broken, addicted, messed up, horrifying remnants of their former selves. | |
| You know, it is really like that wood chipper in Fargo, putting stuff into the state. | |
| And I think that people have such trouble... | |
| And I knew this was going to be a video that wasn't going to get a lot of traction. | |
| I really wanted to put it out there so the information was available for those who did. | |
| But it's really hard to look at that stuff. | |
| It's like finding your bride strangling a hobo. | |
| What does that say about your marriage? | |
| Well, she'll be a great mom. | |
| But you're right. | |
| People do avoid these things, and probably they're going to avoid that video, which they shouldn't, because it's only an hour, and it gives you a full education in the whole situation. | |
| But I've thought for some time that the easiest way to ruin a dinner party is to bring up the reality of U.S. imperialism abroad. | |
| And just to point out... | |
| The carnage of that day, which you can find out by going to antiwar.com or whatever and just raise it at a dinner party. | |
| Isn't it awful what the U.S. did to that wedding in Afghanistan? | |
| Just dropped that bomb right there on there and killed seven people? | |
| I mean, that will ruin the dinner party. | |
| It's almost impolite to mention the reality about what's going on. | |
| That's the ethos I sense, anyway, in this country. | |
| Nobody wants to taste the blood on their fork, you know? | |
| I mean, nobody wants to taste the blood in their meat. | |
| A lot of the wealth in the U.S., of course, is generated from the free market or the remnants thereof, but so much of the wealth is generated from predation and violence. | |
| I mean, from the counterfeiting of the fiat currencies to government contracts to prison contracts to military contracts. | |
| I mean, so much of the wealth is going back to a true, you know, veil of tears and bloodshed that there's so much. | |
| so much of it washing around the streets. | |
| You know, it's like that old door song, "Blood in the streets, it's up to my ankles." There is, in late empire, there is such a horrendous, the money is driven like a vampire through the streets, just able to get at whatever jugular it can. | |
| And I think for people to look at the source of what is even the last twitches of wealth, The American economy is dead, but after things die, they twitch for a little while. | |
| And I think for people to see where the actual wealth is coming from, for a lot of people, it's just horrendous. | |
| It's brutal. | |
| And of course, at the dinner party thing, in the upper classes, for people to say, where is my money actually coming from? | |
| And what is the price of what is occurring? | |
| I think it's quite horrifying for them. | |
| And it would impel them to a kind of action. | |
| And I think that when we feel... | |
| That we can't act to change our situation. | |
| I think we try to avoid information that stimulates us. | |
| I sort of think, you know, when you freeze to death, apparently, like I worked up north as a gold panner for my late teens, and they always said, you know, if you start feeling really warm, come inside. | |
| If you feel like you're just going to curl up and have a nice nap in the snowbank, then come inside because that's not good. | |
| And I think that when your body says, well, we can't... | |
| We can't change our situation. | |
| Therefore, we're going to avoid information that's going to make us uncomfortable. | |
| I think people feel so paralyzed to change their situation. | |
| The government is so big. | |
| The political system is so impenetrable to change. | |
| It's so self-protecting. | |
| Their social circles are so avoidant of any information. | |
| I think people feel paralyzed. | |
| As a result, it's like, why would I look at something that's horrible that I can't change? | |
| Why would I want to be awake for this operation, so to speak? | |
| Right. | |
| But the ignorance is a problem because people misdiagnose situations that they should be able to assess with some realism. | |
| After 9-11, my very first thought was, well, there you go. | |
| This is what happens when you have troops in 150 countries, when you prop up horrible dictators abroad, when you're sending taxpayers abroad to invade people's land and When you starve people out with sanctions. | |
| And I thought, well, at long last, the American people are going to wake up to the cost of empire and demand an end to it. | |
| I swear to you, Stefan, that was my first thought. | |
| Harry Bray had the same thought, yeah. | |
| I believed that for a day. | |
| And then woke up the next day and saw no evidence that this sensibility had struck anybody but myself. | |
| It went the other way. | |
| It went the other way. | |
| It's like, hey, you've got lung cancer. | |
| Wow, I better smoke more. | |
| I mean, this is so bizarre. | |
| Well, I mean, it's almost like people didn't even understand that any of this was going on. | |
| I mean, truly, people think, well, look what's happening. | |
| I was held in my backyard barbecue. | |
| I'm watching my football game. | |
| I'm minding my own business. | |
| And then these horrible foreign peoples are coming in and bombing us for no good reason. | |
| But that was really... | |
| Really, that was the sense. | |
| Americans mostly think about this country as a kind of a peaceful, commercial republic that's being unjustly targeted by weirdos with strange religions. | |
| I mean, that's the prevailing attitude, and it's just entirely based on absence of information or unwillingness to look at the truth. | |
| Well, the reality is, Jeff, I mean, I think that this is fairly incontrovertible. | |
| I'm certainly happy to hear arguments of the contrary, but the reality is that most people will choose to die rather than question conformity. | |
| I mean, we know that because people sign up for wars, they will show up for the draft. | |
| There are very few conscientious objectors, very few people trying to get out of the army once they understand what it's all about. | |
| And most people... | |
| This has some moral elements to it, but it also has, I think, some basic biological elements that were tribally based throughout most of our evolution. | |
| And if you went against the tribe, you neither got to reproduce with the women nor hunt with the people and get the protection at night, and therefore you'd be out in the woods alone and your genes would die off. | |
| So anybody who questioned or challenged the ethics of the tribe would usually be rejected, ostracized, and abandoned, and therefore those genes just didn't come along. | |
| What came along were Well, if I'm going to die without the tribe, I might as well go fight for the tribe because at least they have a chance to live in battle. | |
| But if the tribe rejects me, I'm dead. | |
| Or at least my genes don't get passed along, which from an evolutionary standpoint is pretty much the same thing. | |
| And so one of the things that I have been so conscious of and working so hard to try and get people to understand is that I mean, this is what I was talking about in Naganoches, that our ethics are so far behind our technology. | |
| I mean, it's unbelievable. | |
| You know, you could do this when we were, you know, hatches and swords and all that. | |
| That's one thing. | |
| but these bunker-busting bombs and these horrible radioactive weapons that are being used on battlefields, I mean, it is a little mini-nuclear war that's occurring in Iraq with a half-life of four billion years that we have to find a way to catch up. | |
| I mean, the double-convulsive near-suicide of Western civilization in the First and Second World War was, I mean, we're not going to get a third round at that. | |
| And ways to fight off some of the irrational doctrines like Islam and other fundamentalists and things, and some of the radical leftist, socialist, communist, fascist stuff that's still sweeping around the world. | |
| we have got to start catching up with our technology uh with our ethics and we have to start outgrowing the the limitations of our evolutionary sort of pseudo morality biology and so i think i was intrigued by your talk i I mean, that talk was very interesting to me because I never really thought about the ways in which our, and I hope that you've posted that somewhere, I think you have, the ways in which our conventional ethical systems have been distorted for... | |
| Basically forever. | |
| Because state intellectuals or elite intellectuals have tried to conform ethics to the prevailing regime. | |
| And you gave a whole series of examples of this. | |
| That every single ethical system always seems to try to make room for the state to be able to get away with its stuff. | |
| Whatever it's doing, you've got to come up with an ethical system that carves out a special place. | |
| For the state to continue to engage in its looting and its terror and its stealing and its murders. | |
| And that kind of poisons the rest of the ethical system by itself. | |
| And that was, I think, the way I understood your talking. | |
| And the progress has been terrible. | |
| Progress has been terrible. | |
| Then you went even one step further, and I love this, and it sounds like an outlandish claim, but you said that we now have, for the first time in history, the opportunity, because of communication technology, because we now really fully see the evil of, you know, the aggressive apparatus that rules us, to have a conversation about consistent, principled, ethical systems. | |
| And you said this, that this, for the first time in history, This opportunity is available to us right now. | |
| And that was very intriguing. | |
| Oh, we are right below... | |
| I mean, we're right below an unbelievable, unprecedented, never occurred, and never will occur again, potential for honest communication about virtue. | |
| Unfiltered by the state, unfiltered by superstition, unfiltered by fear, other than, you know, the usual fears of putting your heart and mind out there in public, but... | |
| It is what I really feel like, you know, a guy on top of a mountain with, like, thunderbolts in his hands. | |
| Just because of the technology, we do have an incredible opportunity to have an honest conversation from first principles without being deviated by greed for status or greed for money or afraid of repercussions or punishments. | |
| It is completely unique. | |
| And the state doesn't get this at all. | |
| And, of course, any change that will occur is not going to be part of the... | |
| The career lifespan of any real current politician. | |
| But it is a unique opportunity, and that's one of the reasons I've been working, you know, on thousands of shows. | |
| I've been working so hard to try and get people to understand that, I mean, it's one of the things I like to say to people, and I want to say this even to libertarians. | |
| It's like, we all know where this goes without significant muscular, intellectual, and moral intervention. | |
| We all know. | |
| This story has been written a thousand times before. | |
| We all know where the expansion of the state leads, particularly with its current trajectories. | |
| And I think that we need to have a little bit more of a sterner moral center. | |
| I say this to myself, too, because I don't meet my own standards at least half the time during the day. | |
| But it's what I try to remind myself, that the muscularity of our moral consistent response, I think, needs to be very strenuous because we are really attempting to undo a story that has had such momentum throughout history. | |
| And we are trying to awaken people who are so invested in sleepwalking off a cliff. | |
| And with the technology we have, we simply can't afford to do it again. | |
| The Marxists used to talk about consciousness raising as being their first job. | |
| And really, I think it's a good description of our first job. | |
| Just to draw attention to the reality. | |
| And to conjure up an idealism that people haven't usually always held in the past. | |
| Yeah, and just to try and connect people to... | |
| We love the stories of heroism. | |
| We love stories of integrity. | |
| We love stories of heroism. | |
| We love the stories of a great film, Twelve Angry Men. | |
| I'm sure you've seen it, about a man who stands up for an unjustly accused... | |
| Ooh, spoiler! | |
| A man who stands up for aid, potentially unjustly... | |
| So somebody who stands in the face of social pressure for that which is right. | |
| And we admire the Rosa Parks, and we admire the Martin Luther Kings, and we admire the Gandhis, and so on, even though some of their methodologies and results were questionable at best. | |
| But we love those stories. | |
| And I just want to try and tell people you don't have to watch them. | |
| You don't have to just watch these stories. | |
| You can be that story. | |
| You can climb into the movie that made you weep with joy and made your life feel beautiful for two hours. | |
| hours, you can climb into that and be that and not just watch it from afar as an impotent spectator, which really is what those things are designed to do. | |
| They're designed to give you the feeling of moral satisfaction without actually having to go through the challenges of it. | |
| Sometimes I think it's a little bit more enervating than it is energizing, but people can make those choices. | |
| They can push people around them in their lives to confront the evils of the system that they unconsciously and with all due innocence support, but we really - And then every possible way. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. | |
| And in every possible way, not participate in the system. | |
| I've been thinking about this the last year a lot, that there's so many opportunities we have to decline to accept the nudge in the direction that the state's giving us. | |
| And the state is nudging us all the time to use its services, to obey the Fed by going into massive debt, for example. | |
| you know, to never think outside the system that they've set up for us to live within. | |
| And there's perfectly, there's a thousand perfectly legal ways to get outside this central apparatus. | |
| But it takes a little bit of courage, some creativity, a willingness to be told by others, "I don't think what you're doing is very smart or very wise." I think you should just go along and stop trying to fight the system. | |
| So it takes this little bit of personal initiative, but the payoff is huge. | |
| I mean, to live a freer life. | |
| And to have more choice and to feel a greater sense of self-determination over your affairs is a magnificent thing. | |
| I mean, you feel like when you've made even small steps to get out of debt or to... | |
| Try a different educational route or to change jobs even though you feel trapped in one, you know, just because you want to exercise your human rights. | |
| It's a wonderful feeling. | |
| You feel more human, actually, because that's our destiny, you know? | |
| Isn't it our destiny to make choices and to be free? | |
| So the freer we can make our own lives, the more we can get a taste of what the whole of society could be like. | |
| I agree with all of that. | |
| I think for me, Something that shows up for me even more pressingly, perhaps because I've dealt with at least some of those issues, Jeff, is I feel that the government is like this big giant spider web that is constantly interfering with an expression of basic human virtues. | |
| And the two virtues that I think it most interferes with are honesty and compassion. | |
| And so, you know, you were talking about the dinner party, you know, and I think we all feel this a little bit, you know, I was talking with people on airplanes, I'm not happy to chat with just about anyone, and, you know, it's like, do I get into it, do I not, you know, talk about it or not, you know, people you meet socially or whatever, and people who say stuff that, you know, do you say something or not? | |
| And so I think that the basic honesty of having conversations about ethics, about the system, about the coercion, about the basic idea that we're not done in our evolution as a species. | |
| There's this weird thing where everyone thinks, well, the last thing was tough, like getting rid of slavery, racism, sexism. | |
| But now we're done. | |
| It's the end of history, as the guy wrote. | |
| And I think that the basic honesty, the censorship, the soft, webby censorship between us all, that there's so many things that are difficult, really difficult to talk about, that people are volatile in their response to. | |
| That is really, really tough. | |
| Like, I was on a show with a couple of atheists. | |
| I'm going to cross myself now. | |
| I was on a show with a couple of atheists a while back, and even approaching with them the concept of a voluntary society, I mean, boy, we're not very rational for people who claim to follow reason and evidence. | |
| Yeah, I mean, and so there's this weird censorship where, you know, people are willing to have you thrown in jail for disagreeing with them. | |
| They're willing to support that. | |
| They're willing to do all of this crazy stuff. | |
| Or if you, as you say, if you bring up what's happening in Iraq, you know, I mean, Noam Chomsky wrote an article yesterday just about how the Boston bombings are like a tiny one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of a taste of what America is inflicting in other, and not just America, but other imperialist nations are inflicting overseas. | |
| And just to even try and make that connection that there are people in Iraq who are suffering in ways that we can't even conceive of. | |
| I mean, the people here, I mean, it's unbelievably awful to have your leg blown off, but you get medevaced to a state-of-the-art medical facility, and you live. | |
| This is not what is happening in Iraq. | |
| You know, I mean, you get leukemia from one of these radioactive weapons and there's almost nobody to treat you and there's almost no treatments even if you can find a doctor. | |
| But to bring up that basic honesty of what the truth is and the basic compassion to get people to try to connect with other human beings who, you know, are a little further away and maybe a slightly different color, I think that censorship is really, I feel like I'm just constantly pushing through these soft kind of resisty, foggy, spiderwebby kind of censorship things where basic honesty and compassion seems to be hard to connect with people. | |
| I think the spiderweb is a good metaphor, really, because flying to the web and stick, right? | |
| And it's not a bonk-bonk. | |
| It's not a hard resistance, right? | |
| But it's a soft kind of... | |
| People don't fight you. | |
| They just kind of, you know, kind of back away a little. | |
| And they just kind of avoid and dodge a little. | |
| It's not... | |
| You can't ever... | |
| You know, I mean, a fight to me is much better, but this kind of soft, just like... | |
| They just kind of disconnect from the conversation, and I think that's very hard to really have a productive moral conversation in that kind of environment. | |
| I think your word honesty is kind of a good way to sum up the work that you're doing, and it's not just about foreign policy. | |
| It's not just about domestic policy and taxes and economics and familial ethics and these kind of things. | |
| I think with the video you put out yesterday, just to return to the old topic, there's very... | |
| It was very honest and very open and moving. | |
| And I think if people watch it carefully, you'll see a kind of an illustration of Thank you. | |
| It's not an easy thing to chat about, but I really try to be as direct and open as possible. | |
| Not to sugarcoat, but also not to doom and gloom and to give people a full perspective. | |
| And to remind people that it's really hard. | |
| I mean, there's something for me that has been so humbling about being part of a public philosophical process that it's really hard to know what's good and bad in life. | |
| I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous because we're supposed to know, you know, your philosophy, you know, all these things. | |
| But, I mean, gosh, you know, I had some trouble with the media four or five years ago and after that the show just took off and the time I thought, oh, wow, that's really bad. | |
| They're calling me all these terrible names. | |
| And then it's like the show just went gangbusters after that. | |
| I don't know, in a sense, I don't know necessarily what's the good or bad stuff because I'm just wrong quite a lot. | |
| That is so true. | |
| Yeah, you can't anticipate. | |
| I mean, we are oftentimes presumptuous in thinking, okay, that's a good thing, but this is a bad thing. | |
| This is an advance. | |
| This is a setback. | |
| Actually, history often has different plans. | |
| If you're doing new things, yes. | |
| I mean, if you crash your car off a cliff, yes, that's a bad thing. | |
| But if you're doing new things, it's really, really hard to know because you're in uncharted territory. | |
| What's over the next hill that no one's been to before? | |
| You can make a guess, but you're probably not going to be correct. | |
| So I've really tried to resist anticipation, resist the idea that I know whether something in advance is going to be good or bad, positive or negative. | |
| And that gives me, I think, a real openness to be more in the present. | |
| Because, of course, if you think you know what the next thing is and whether it's good or bad, I mean, if I can keep... | |
| I mean, let's say... | |
| And I genuinely believe this will be the case. | |
| So let's say I'm fully cured, no remissions and all that. | |
| If I can keep... | |
| The happiness, the centeredness, the peace of mind, the perspective, and I'm going to work to keep that. | |
| I know everybody turns into an asshole two months after they get better, but anyway, if I can keep that. | |
| Oh, is that true? | |
| I've heard that, you know, everyone makes all these vows when they get sick, and then, you know, two months later, they're like, I can't believe I got a tax bill! | |
| I stubbed my toe! | |
| This is the worst day ever! | |
| Where's my half a donut? | |
| Yeah, that's funny. | |
| I didn't know that. | |
| Well, isn't that interesting? | |
| It's like the lottery thing, right? | |
| Everybody's happy when the lottery and a year later they wish they'd never won it. | |
| But I think there's a way to keep it. | |
| I mean, I think there's a way to keep it. | |
| And I say this in all humility, sincerity, and hope that if the prognosis goes as well as I'm going to do my very best to make it go and as everyone tells me is good, if I can keep the value from this ailment without the ailment, I'm telling you, it's really close to being worth it. | |
| It's really... | |
| And I may find, you know, five years from now, I might look back and say, damn... | |
| Did that ever shake the cobwebs out and wake me up to the beauty of life and to the perspective that was necessary for doing the high-flying act that I think we're all doing in our culture? | |
| So I don't know. | |
| I refuse to say it's a bad thing. | |
| That, to me, is claiming a knowledge I simply don't possess and for which I have ample evidence that I've been wrong so many times before that it would be ridiculous for me to claim to possess something like that. | |
| So that's sort of where I'm coming from. | |
| I'm entirely open to this being a gift. | |
| I know that sounds completely insane, but I'm entirely open to the possibility, because so far, it has been. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, I mean, you know that there are probably by now millions of us that are keeping you in our thoughts, and I have to tell you that my prayers are so far been incredibly ineffective, and I don't know how to count for that. | |
| Maybe we need to talk about that sometime. | |
| But I do know people who have better... | |
| Maybe the phone line isn't connected to this house, but anyway. | |
| But anyway, you're always in our thoughts, and I hope that you continue to share, you know, because we want to learn with you. | |
| And again, this is a common experience which we're all going to go through at some point or another, whether directly sooner or indirectly later, hopefully. | |
| But I will certainly keep... | |
| I don't want to hide this. | |
| This is an important thing. | |
| And philosophy has, to me at least so far, the greatest value in this area than almost anything else other than parenting and marriage and friendship that I've experienced. | |
| So I do want to show people at least my experience of how philosophy and wisdom can hopefully help navigate some of these whitewaters. | |
| So listen, I do actually have to, my guests are going to be leaving soon, so I do have to go and help them out. | |
| Thank you for spending the time. | |
| Oh, my pleasure. | |
| I really appreciate it. | |
| This is last minute, and I just wanted to talk to you. | |
| You know, it's funny, like I mentioned to you earlier, this avoidance thing that people sometimes have. | |
| Ever since I observed that that goes on, I always want to do the opposite, because that's what we want to do. | |
| We want to talk, and we want to be friends with our friends. | |
| So thank you so much, Stefan, for taking the time today. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| Take care. |