Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, answers listener questions on moral judgments, telling children about illnesses, fielding calls about abuse, self-defense, teaching children irrationality, the tea party, the failure of politics and more.
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Let's dip into the listener mailbag of questions, shall we? | |
| I have the following question. | |
| To what extent can one judge individuals as bad people if we acknowledge that people's behavior and attitudes are largely, if not totally, determined by their upbringing and the conditions that they're exposed to in their formative years? | |
| Can one even go as far as to say that blame is something that one can't assign to individuals, but instead only to the unfortunate circumstances that these individuals experienced? | |
| It's a great question. | |
| So people have bad childhoods. | |
| Bad childhoods in general produce bad outcomes unless somebody really works to counter those effects. | |
| So can we hold somebody responsible? | |
| Well, I generally don't hold people responsible any more than they do themselves or that they use the language of responsibility. | |
| So for instance, my mother had a bad childhood, a very bad childhood. | |
| But she used moral responsibility as a methodology of punishment when I was a child. | |
| And so she knew right and wrong, she knew good and bad, and she assigned responsibility to a A child at the age of three or four or five. | |
| I can remember my mom's rather hysterical moral lectures. | |
| So if an adult of, say, 30 is assigning a four-year-old moral responsibility, then the adult cannot claim to be excused from moral responsibility. | |
| That's just the nature of being a finger-wagging, judgmental guy, man or woman. | |
| And so you cannot conceivably have higher moral standards for a four-year-old than you do for a 30-year-old. | |
| So if somebody is using good and bad and right and wrong and being morally condemnatory or negative or critical in someone, then they understand that there's good and bad, right and wrong, and they are assigning moral responsibility to Other people around them. | |
| Funny thing about moral responsibility, you know, you think it's a gun that goes off in other people towards other people, but reality is it just goes off in your own face for the most part. | |
| So when people assign moral responsibility to others, particularly when they use it in a destructive way towards children, then by God, they are subject to the same moral evaluation and they cannot. | |
| They cannot. | |
| Assign infinite moral responsibility to a four or five or six year old, and then when that child grows up, they can say, well, you see, I didn't have any moral responsibility because I'd had a bad childhood. | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | |
| Live by the sword, die by the sword. | |
| That's the way of reality and logic. | |
| And the other thing, too, you know, Dr. | |
| Phil has been like the top-rated daytime TV show for like a decade. | |
| I mean, half of, it seems like half the bookstore itself, help books, I mean, the connection between childhood and adulthood, it's so incontrovertible, it's so well-known these days, that, you know, there's a tipping point when it comes to knowledge. | |
| You know, the first time someone comes up with antibiotics, you don't, you're not a bad doctor if you don't Give them to a patient, but after they've been around for a while, well, you know, they should at least be in your arsenal. | |
| And we are way past the tipping point for self-knowledge. | |
| The unexamined life is not worth living. | |
| The first commandment is know thyself. | |
| That's Socrates 2,500 years ago. | |
| The science or the discipline of psychology, you could argue, is 140, 130 years old. | |
| And certainly since the 60s, there's been a huge upswell in psychology departments, in self-help books, in all of this kind of stuff. | |
| So you can't really claim to be a remotely literate person and not have any idea about things like the unconscious, about things like projection, about how, there's all the basics of psychology and the need for consistent behavior and the need there's all the basics of psychology and the need for consistent behavior So anyway, that's my take on that. | |
| I'm wondering though, as everyone else might be, have you told Isabella about your diagnosis? | |
| This is my lymphoma, my cancer. | |
| I remember you mentioning in a podcast before that she is really interested in understanding diseases, and yes, of course I've talked to her about it. | |
| I mean, I'm bald. | |
| Can't miss that. | |
| I didn't want to portray it as an erratic fashion choice. | |
| So, what I told her was that when I had my neck fixed, they found some bug footprints in my body, but they couldn't find any bugs, which is kind of true. | |
| I mean, they certainly found lymphoma cells and aggressive ones as well, but since in subsequent scans and examinations, they've not found anything problematic. | |
| I'm going to go through medication through the summer to make sure the bugs didn't leave any babies behind that might grow. | |
| She's fine with it. | |
| She understands it. | |
| If I'm a little tired from time to time and need a nap, she's fine with it. | |
| She's fine. | |
| Of course, I cannot say To her that I'm faced with a life-threatening condition. | |
| That is not something that a four-year-old could even remotely process. | |
| Why do you feel all the calls about abuse, neglect, etc.? | |
| It seems really painful to me, and I have personally had a difficult time even trying to skirt around the edges in my own mind, let alone bring these things up with people around me. | |
| Well, I am customer focused. | |
| You know, I spent 15 years as an entrepreneur and so the idea of not talking about what people want to talk about It would be, to me, kind of incomprehensible. | |
| It's like coming up with a restaurant and making sure that there's nothing that people want on the menu. | |
| Well, if people want to talk about these things, I am perfectly happy to talk about them. | |
| The antidote to abuse is anger. | |
| This is something that, of course, makes the turn-the-other-cheek history of our Judeo-Christian philosophy uncomfortable, but, of course, as Nietzsche rightly pointed out, it was designed To help slaves feel passive-aggressively virtuous with being slaves, right? | |
| Which is why the meek shall inherit the earth and the rich shall go to hell and all this. | |
| When you're a slave, you can't fight really against the system. | |
| That is, so you have to passive-aggressively fantasize about a world wherein everything is upside down and you are the king and the king is the slave and so you've got heaven and hell. | |
| All of the psychological vengeance that resentment and entrapment give birth to. | |
| And so it's been well shown repeatedly that those who get angry about prior abuse are those less likely to repeat it. | |
| Now, in order to get angry about prior abuse, you have to re-experience it as the child did, without all the justice. | |
| Like when you were a kid, if your parents beat you up, You didn't know about their childhood and the unconscious and projection. | |
| I mean, you didn't know about those things. | |
| All you knew was that your caregivers were thrashing the living crap out of you and it was terrifying and it was awful and it was horrible and it was inescapable and you can't leave as a child. | |
| I mean, gosh, we get upset with men who beat up women or women who beat up men in adult relationships, but at least those are adult relationships. | |
| You chose to get in them and you can choose to leave. | |
| You have economic and legal independence and there are lots of people out there who will help you if you I want to get out. | |
| And of course you should get out of violent relationships in my opinion. | |
| But children don't have the choice. | |
| They didn't choose to be born into the families they're born into and they can't leave. | |
| And so we should have much greater sensitivity to the wrong stand to children than we should the wrong stand to anybody else in society. | |
| But quite the reverse is true in general. | |
| Society couldn't function if we put children's needs first. | |
| It would be so fundamentally rewritten that it would literally be a paradise on earth. | |
| So the way that I want to listen to people, there's nothing shameful about having suffered abuse. | |
| It's far better. | |
| Socrates said this, Jesus said it, it's better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. | |
| There is nothing shameful, nothing shameful at having been born into an abusive situation. | |
| There is only sympathy, pity, horror at the situation that comes from others. | |
| Any just and rational soul feels nothing but compassion for the childhood victims of abuse. | |
| It was not their choice to be there, and it is not their choice to stay there. | |
| They can't leave. | |
| Almost none of them can leave. | |
| And so to have suffered evil as a child is something that I will never turn my back on. | |
| I will never, ever turn my back on that. | |
| And I've had so many private conversations with people. | |
| It's not a podcast. | |
| They don't want it to be. | |
| That's perfectly fine. | |
| I'm just there to listen, and I'm there to at least provide some philosophical understanding of the situation, which is that the moment your parents, as I mentioned before, the moment your parents inflict moral condemnation on you, the moment they call you bad, then they are subject to exactly the same rules times a thousand that they're inflicting upon you. | |
| And so I listen to it because there's nothing shameful about it, because the main tool of the abuser is to isolate, which means to infect you with a sense of shame about having suffered evil. | |
| There is no shame, there is honor in suffering evil if you work to overcome it. | |
| So if people want to talk about it, I will listen and I will provide some moral, philosophical perspectives on it. | |
| And I will recommend that they talk to a therapist and really work on their issues. | |
| And I support their right to get angry at having suffered evil as helpless, independent children. | |
| Because that is the best one. | |
| I mean, A, that's true. | |
| Anger is the antidote. | |
| Anger is our antibodies against evil. | |
| And the first thing that evil wants to do is to disable our anger. | |
| The first thing that evil wants to do always is to disable our anger because our anger is that which pushes back against evil. | |
| And so I am not going to turn my back on people who've suffered child abuse. | |
| And if they want to talk about it, they can talk about it publicly, privately. | |
| I don't care. | |
| Through email, through Skype. | |
| Doesn't matter to me. | |
| And I remind them that they have every right to be angry, because I wish to awaken in them their fundamental defenses against evil, which prevents its transmission through to the next generation. | |
| If the status were coming to collectivize your home and property tomorrow, what would you do? | |
| I'm sure you know this was the experience of the Soviet-occupied citizenry who were then allowed to rent their own property back from the state in many cases. | |
| And is there any occasion where you'd be willing to take our arms? | |
| What about violence in defense of self and family? | |
| Sure, violence in defense of self and family is perfectly legitimate. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I have no problem with that whatsoever. | |
| If the government comes and says, we're going to take your home tomorrow, that happens to me every year. | |
| I mean, if I don't pay my property taxes, that's what they're going to do. | |
| They're going to come with guns and take my home and kick me out on the street. | |
| So I pay them off and do good. | |
| I mean, we are in the incredibly fortunate situation of not being burned to the stake, not being jailed, not being forced to drink hemlock, not being nailed to crosses for doing good. | |
| All we do is we pay the bastards off and we do good like they don't exist. | |
| All right. | |
| Hello, Steph. | |
| A libertarian sometime listener of your YouTube channel. | |
| Agree with your basic premises. | |
| I hope people don't agree with my basic premises. | |
| I hope that my basic premises are true and valid and proven. | |
| Please don't agree with me. | |
| That's not what philosophy is all about. | |
| Two and two make four. | |
| I agree with you. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Do two and two make four or not? | |
| I believe you've referenced peaceful parenting many times as a way forward to a stateless society. | |
| I agree children shouldn't be hit, but I was hanging out at relatives and actually saw the book referenced in this email's title laying on the coffee table. | |
| I'm sorry, I don't know what the email's title is. | |
| This couple does not speak, spank, or raise their voices at their children, yet I know they'll inculcate a strong belief in statism in their children. | |
| How is it dispatched with your assertion that a society which doesn't initiate aggression against children will lead to a stateless society? | |
| Well, I mean, there are two basic forms of aggression against children, verbal and physical. | |
| And the physical includes hitting, spanking, and withholding of physical necessities like health care and food and shelter and so on for children. | |
| And then there's verbal or emotional. | |
| And I got an email from a guy who said, you know, I used to be a Mormon. | |
| I left the church. | |
| I'm in love with this Mormon woman. | |
| She wants to have kids, thinking about getting married. | |
| She wants to stay in the church. | |
| What should I do? | |
| And my response was, well... | |
| Religion is a drug. | |
| If you as an adult want to take a drug, I don't approve of it, but my disapproval is, you know, just my disapproval. | |
| It's not like you're doing something evil if you inject heroin into the head of your eyeball or something into your eyeball. | |
| So if you want to take drugs, that's fine. | |
| If you and your partner want to take drugs, that's fine. | |
| You can't steal, right, and you can't initiate force to get your drugs or whatever, but if you want to take drugs, I think it's wrong, but lots of things I think are wrong. | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| Doesn't mean I'd lift a finger to stop it in any aggressive way. | |
| But you don't have the right to inject the drugs into your children. | |
| Sorry. | |
| You just don't. | |
| And it's the same thing with things that are false. | |
| If you want to believe in ghosts, if you want to believe in UFOs, if you want to believe also religion, statism, pantheism, whatever nonsense people believe in, that's the drug you can take as an adult. | |
| You do not have the right to inflict your crazy shit on your children. | |
| They are born rational. | |
| They are born philosophers. | |
| They are born pure. | |
| They are born perfect. | |
| They are born incredibly smart. | |
| Or as my daughter said about religion, that's just the way the world grew up, Daddy. | |
| They get it. | |
| They get it. | |
| You don't have the right to twist and torture your children's minds any more than you have the right to twist and torture your children's bodies. | |
| People say, oh my God, if somebody tattooed a child, it's like, well, they sent them to Sunday school. | |
| I send them to public school. | |
| It's almost as bad. | |
| So if you want to get married to somebody who's religious, that's fine. | |
| But you need to get a commitment from that person ahead of time that the children are going to... | |
| Be allowed to raise themselves or be raised rationally with no exposure to religiosity. | |
| And then when they become adults and they can understand the consequences of irrationality and they can understand the difference between truth and falsehood and they are not subject to the power of the parents. | |
| Not directly, emotionally, physically, biologically hardwired subject to the power of the parents. | |
| Then they can choose whatever crazy beliefs they want. | |
| You know, my daughter wants to go and become a... | |
| Fish-worshipping Rastafarian when she's an adult, that's fine. | |
| But I cannot inflict my fish-worshipping Rastafarian ways on her. | |
| I don't have the right to twist her brain towards irrationality any more than I have the right to tattoo her or snap off her fingers. | |
| So you can do whatever you want as adults. | |
| I may disapprove. | |
| Other rational people may disapprove. | |
| Who cares? | |
| You don't care about my disapproval. | |
| You should do it because it's right or wrong. | |
| But you do not have the right to dribble your crazy shit down your children's brains. | |
| I have a friend requesting some analysis on what differentiates anarcho-capitalism from that which the Tea Parties and Republicans or Conservatives are peddling. | |
| Well, I mean, that's a big topic and a very small topic. | |
| I will cheat and make it a very small topic. | |
| The Tea Party and Republicans and conservatives believe that there is a role for the state in usually a couple of things. | |
| You know, for John Stossel, it's like, what is it, pollution control and policing or something like that. | |
| You know, national defense, roads maybe, the law courts, policing maybe some prisons and so on. | |
| So they believe that smaller government is better and anarcho-capitalists accept that the initiation of force is immoral and power will always corrupt. | |
| And so, like myself, you know, we don't want a little cancer. | |
| We want no cancer because the cancer always regrows in the state. | |
| So, you know, one is the sort of practical thing, right? | |
| Like, it's fairly easy to make the case that the government shouldn't tell everyone who to get married to, right? | |
| It's a little tougher to make the case against welfare. | |
| It's tougher to make the case against roads. | |
| It's tougher to make the case against the police. | |
| It's tougher to make the case against national defense. | |
| It's tougher to make the case against the justice system, all this kind of stuff. | |
| Well, so it's tough. | |
| So what? | |
| I mean, the fact is that it's tough, but you just keep going because there's a principle called respect for property rights, non-aggression, You know, I'm not willing to go halfway on principle. | |
| I mean, fuck it. | |
| If I'm going to go halfway on principle, then I'm just going to slip back into the general matrix and swim with the current. | |
| Like, I'm not just going to sit there and say, well, I'm going to, you know, I've worked and understood, developed these principles, non-initiation force, respect for property rights. | |
| But there's this big giant black hole over there where I'm just going to let it all be violated and do whatever it wants. | |
| I mean, that's ridiculous. | |
| If you're going to go with principle, go with principle for heaven's sakes. | |
| You know, don't build three quarters of the bridge on engineering and the other quarter on prayer. | |
| I mean, the whole goddamn thing's just going to fall down there, right? | |
| Build the whole thing on prayer, in which case nobody's going to bother using it, or build the whole thing on engineering. | |
| But don't build most of it on principle and then get crazy shit going on for the rest of it. | |
| That's a huge waste of time. | |
| Huge waste of time. | |
| Go principle or go bullshit culture. | |
| Just don't do this halfway thing. | |
| It's just ridiculous. | |
| And it gives people an off-ramp to... | |
| The consistent execution of principles, which is very dangerous to the movement. | |
| I completely understand your aversion to any taxes, but what would you say to a community contract where a group of private citizens sign a general contract where they would pay a contribution towards any specific goal? | |
| Yeah, I get lots of these kinds of questions. | |
| Yeah, you know, if you've got a community, you want to buy a tract of land and don't sell the houses, don't sell the land to people, just sell, you know, rent based on a fulfillment of a contract, fine, you know, you can have your whatever. | |
| You know, it's pretty easy. | |
| I mean, does it initiate force or fraud? | |
| If not, then go to town. | |
| I've been watching... | |
| Your videos, and I must say your discourse of ideas and events, are truly a diamond in the rough and an inspiration. | |
| I've been pondering over an idea for some time, but I'd like your opinion. | |
| Certain personalities who claim to stand for libertarian ideals are themselves playing a sort of disinformation shell game. | |
| Alex Jones or Glenn Beck, who promote and espouse very rational libertarian ideals and philosophy alongside some very duff, fringe conspiracy theories, rob them of their legitimacy. | |
| Could these people actually be doing this intentionally as a way to marginalize and discredit the very real threat libertarian ideals pose to vested interests? | |
| Okay, so this is, you know, people like Glenn Beck. | |
| There's some stuff, I don't know, I've never watched his show, but I understand he's got some libertarian stuff and he's got some crazy fundamentalist Christian stuff as well. | |
| Well, it's, a lot of people speak to a market, right? | |
| So if you are A Christian libertarian and you are a public figure, then you have carved out for yourself a Christian libertarian audience. | |
| Now, if you get rid of your Christianity, you accept that there's no sky fairy ghosts with goblin wings, then you lose your audience, right? | |
| And it's a pretty huge and challenging problematic phase. | |
| People, when they go public, Usually will retain the same ideas from when they go public to when they're dead because that's their market. | |
| That's where they're getting their income. | |
| That's where they get their advertisers. | |
| That's their deal. | |
| And to change that is really tough. | |
| I was, of course, in the fortunate position of putting all my ideas out ahead of time before I even imagined there was a market. | |
| I've created a market for this approach to philosophy, or as I like to call it, philosophy. | |
| So they have a market, they have a product, they have a sale. | |
| And this doesn't mean that that's bad. | |
| I mean, I'm a free market guy, nothing wrong with markets and products and selling. | |
| But I don't think that they're intentionally doing it. | |
| I do think that people who have some rational ideas and then some crazy shit mixed in, It's like saying, this is the best soup, and there's only five drops of arsenic in it. | |
| Well, I must tell you, I don't want the soup at all. | |
| If you're going to be rational in your approach, you have to go 150%. | |
| You just have to follow where the reason and evidence leads and cast aside every opinion, everything within you that does not conform to reason and evidence, at least that which is somehow related to a truth statement. | |
| The people who go halfway, the people who go a third of the way, the people who go 97%, Yes, they are, you know, here's great soup, only some brain-killing poison. | |
| It is a huge problem. | |
| Nothing you can do about it, really. | |
| You've just got to keep making the case, you know, raise the flag, so to speak, and see who salutes. | |
| Given the natural variation between people, won't an anarchic free market favor those who are bestowed with natural talents? | |
| And if the situation were to persist, doesn't there grow a collective pressure within the majority outgroup to address this imbalance using their willpower? | |
| Doesn't intervention inevitably escalate to the creation of a state and then onto the downfall of the state? | |
| No. | |
| Of course there's natural variation between people. | |
| I mean, anybody who's been to a karaoke bar knows there's quite a bit of natural variation in singing ability. | |
| But the idea that... | |
| I mean... | |
| I don't know, millions of people work for Apple. | |
| And let's, you know, for the moment, put aside the mess that goes on in some of their factories in heavily totalitarian regimes. | |
| It's another time for another topic for another time. | |
| And do the millions of people who work for Apple and who enjoy working for Apple, do they hate the fact that Steve Jobs was a smart guy? | |
| No, they're probably quite happy that Steve Jobs was a smart guy. | |
| I mean, there's probably not a lot of people in Apple who were like, wow, Steve Jobs died. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| Now I can get that job. | |
| No, probably they were like, oh man, Steve Jobs died. | |
| That's a bummer. | |
| That's a negative thing. | |
| That's a bad thing. | |
| You know, when you see a movie, there's like three people's names or two people's names at the top of Brad Pitt and Morgan Friedman in whatever, right? | |
| But there's like 300 actors probably in the movie as a whole and thousands and thousands and thousands of people and tens or hundreds, usually hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the film. | |
| Now, let's say a week before shooting, Brad Pitt gets hit by a bus and Morgan Friedman, you know, gets his ears pecked off by a kestrel and can't film. | |
| Does everyone say, oh, fantastic, now we can all move up and we're all... | |
| No, the film is cancelled. | |
| Sorry, we got our investment based upon these named actors. | |
| And everyone's like, damn, Brad Pitt got hit by a bus and Morgan Freeman lost his ears to kestrel packing. | |
| What a bummer. | |
| That wasn't in the insurance. | |
| And everyone goes home. | |
| So are they happy that the high-talent people are not available? | |
| No, they're unhappy because that's why they have jobs, is to, you know, sort of be the sparkly tail after the comet of the high stars. | |
| So, no, I don't think that's the case. | |
| I mean, there may be some resentful people who are like, you know, I could do just as great a job and so on. | |
| But those people are, I mean, too crazy, too irrational, too much in the minority. | |
| And certainly in a free society, very few parents would allow that kind of nuttiness to continue. | |
| Hi, I was recently listening to your YouTube posting help. | |
| I'm a recovering political activist. | |
| History of the failure attached to the Libertarian Party in particular and political activism in general, shrinking the size and scope of the state. | |
| It got me thinking of one of the main critiques of statists in regards to the theory of a stateless society. | |
| The lack of success of stateless societies in the past and present and of promoters of anarchy since Lisandra Spooner. | |
| You always reject these arguments on the grounds that what existed in the past is no indicator of future trends. | |
| However, I've heard you many times refer to the 40-year failure of the Libertarian Party in achieving its goals, as well as the 200-year failure of political activism starting with the American Constitution, limiting the size and scope of government. | |
| My question is, why can you reference the history of the Libertarian Party and political activism as evidence for its uselessness, but opponents of anarchy can't reference its history as the same? | |
| That's a fine question. | |
| I think the answer is rank, bald-ass hypocrisy. | |
| Wait, sorry, that's a little too open-faced. | |
| Let me see if I can finagle something else in there. | |
| Now, always, always reject these arguments. | |
| So the success of stateless societies in the past A state of society is not the goal. | |
| I mean, if there was a button to push to get rid of the state tomorrow, I would not push it. | |
| I would not push it. | |
| I'd be really tempted, but I'd get the Kestrels finished feasting on Morgan Freeman's ears to come peck off my finger if I had to. | |
| Because we are not prepared as a species for freedom as yet. | |
| We are too smashed up as children by... | |
| By religion, by statism, by all too many parents who are hitting and abusing children. | |
| We're just too smashed up. | |
| We simply, we can't. | |
| You know, it's like people with smashed up limbs trying to do gymnastics. | |
| They just will hurt themselves and fall over. | |
| I mean, you just, you can't do it. | |
| We have to prepare ourselves for freedom. | |
| So stuff that happened in the past, you know, Somalia or ancient Ireland or whatever, these were still incredibly irrational and remain incredibly irrational societies. | |
| And the foundation is truth. | |
| The foundation is reason and evidence. | |
| The foundation is the rejection of the inertia of history, of the lies and falsehoods and manipulations of a generally sociopathic history for a clear-eyed and rational understanding of the world as it is. | |
| That is the foundation. | |
| The effect will be a state of the society, and it will be The respectful and peaceful raising of children and it will be the almost complete elimination of sociopathy and psychopathy and other Problematic, let's say, manifestations of human problems. | |
| It will be the elimination of almost all forms of mental illness, what is called mental illness, which is just irrational thinking that is hardened into what feels like a personality. | |
| But we are zombies compared to the future of humanity. | |
| I mean, what's coming is so vastly different. | |
| From what has been in the past, I mean, if you went to the Middle Ages, like 11th and 12th century, and you opened up MIT, I mean, you'd just get killed, right? | |
| Whereas now we can have MIT, right? | |
| And respect to a large degree of science and engineering and so on. | |
| But in the past, you just would get stoned to death, right? | |
| I mean, Just, I mean, go back with a flashlight to pygmies. | |
| I mean, they'll either worship you or kill you, but they won't have any kind of, you know, I shine a flashlight. | |
| Hey, a flashlight! | |
| Go to pygmies in the middle of the Amazon jungle and switch the flashlight in their eyes and you've got, you know, 900 poison darts sticking out your jugular in about a third of a second. | |
| So, I mean, the overman, the uberman, Nietzsche's idea of humanity able to surmount its history. | |
| But that's where we're heading, for sure. | |
| But it is as incomprehensible, the world in 100 or 200 years, We won't understand what people look like. | |
| We won't fathom what is called human nature. | |
| We can't. | |
| We're too smashed up. | |
| We're too suppressed. | |
| We're too ground down with lies and superstitions and violence, which we can't name as violence, and tribalism, which is considered to be strong but which is as fragile as a spiderweb in a high storm. | |
| We simply can't really conceive. | |
| I mean, those of us with children who are raising our children rationally can get pretty significant glimpses at what human nature is going to look like in the future. | |
| You know, the tenderness and the beauty and the depth and the concern and the compassion and the power and the courage of our children is something that is astonishingly humbling And painful to look at. | |
| I mean, to look at a clear-eyed, straight-backed, unbroken, rational, passionate child is to realize how cracked and broken the mirrors of our own history are and how smashed up and spider-like reconstituted and reassembled we are and how much we are dragging behind us of our histories that we can never unchain and how much Any tall and beautiful stature we have achieved, | |
| we have achieved as a result of re-stitching ourselves back together painfully and untwisting limbs and reattaching skin and moving noses back to the center of the face. | |
| We have reassembled ourselves like a reverse motion blown up Frankenstein. | |
| We have reassembled ourselves, those of us who can reason. | |
| But to not be broken in the first place? | |
| How astonishing, how incomprehensible, because that which is broken never regains its original shape. | |
| I mean, I put myself back together pretty well. | |
| I've got a great life, a wonderful wife, a loving daughter, a great friend, great friends. | |
| And that's wonderful for me, but I will never be somebody who wasn't smashed up and had to rebuild. | |
| I mean, I went to crazy family, abuse all over the place. | |
| My dad left when I was six months old. | |
| I was in boarding school. | |
| I was getting caned. | |
| I mean, I was dragged all over various continents, exposed to just... | |
| I was a choir boy. | |
| I was in church. | |
| I mean, just crazy shit all over the place for me when I was growing up. | |
| And I had it worse than most, but a lot of what I had was what the bulk of people had in terms of superstition and statism. | |
| And I think back of... | |
| I mean, the schools that I went to, both the public and the private schools, were just living hell, a brain squeezing monotony and fear and ugliness. | |
| I mean, we are ruled by monsters. | |
| And so you can reference the past for sure and you can say things haven't worked and we need to take a different approach. | |
| So when I look back and say political activism hasn't worked, well, That's because the goal of political activism is to achieve political freedom or at least reduce the size and power of the state. | |
| That has not worked. | |
| I mean, that's just a fact. | |
| I can reference facts, right? | |
| Now, but if somebody says that Ireland in the 8th century was the ideal human civilization, well, I have to say, no. | |
| If you say, did they not have a government? | |
| Yeah, they didn't have a government. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| But that's like saying in the 8th century... | |
| Ireland was not Nazi, and therefore it was the ideal society. | |
| It didn't have a state, and it wasn't Nazi, and it wasn't fascistic, and it wasn't communistic. | |
| But that doesn't mean that it was an ideal society. | |
| They just didn't happen to have a government, and there were things that worked, and there were things that can be learned about that. | |
| I think that's fine. | |
| There were still a crazy-ass bunch of superstitious Celtic blue-faced painted nutjobs, and they weren't sane, they weren't healthy, they weren't rational, they weren't scientific, they weren't philosophical. | |
| So the fact that they didn't have a government is like saying, well, you know... | |
| There was no Rastafarianism in 8th century Italy and therefore they were atheists. | |
| Well, no, it just happened. | |
| One thing wasn't there. | |
| That is problematic, but that doesn't mean that there weren't crazy other things that were hugely problematic. | |
| So anyway, I think that you can point out that looking at 8th century Ireland and saying, well, that's the ideal of a perfect human society and therefore statelessness doesn't work is fallacious. | |
| But if you have a goal that says we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of man-hours to reduce the size and power of the state and the state keeps growing, that's something that's a little different because then you're measuring something specific to goals that are entirely encapsulated in the mission statement of the organization. | |
| Rather than one particular historical effect called statelessness, like in Somalia or wherever, which is not a philosophical society. | |
| It simply has one aspect less with other aspects more so, like Somalia's crazy tribalism, fundamentalist religious, and hugely traumatized in terms of its child raising, like almost all of Africa. | |
| The fact that it doesn't have a government. | |
| Oh, look, a church fell down, therefore everyone's an atheist. | |
| Anyway, I just wanted to point that out, that it is a little bit different, I think, to look at the past specific agenda of a specific organization or to look at one problem that was missing from a particular society which was largely eclipsed by all the other problems which they had, which we don't have, like crazy medieval superstition and so on. | |
| Anyway, so I think I will leave it at that. | |
| Thank you so much for your patience and time and care and attention. | |
| As always, I guess it's the May 30th, 2013. | |
| So it's almost the end of the month. | |
| If you would like to help out, remember, this is all supported by you. | |
| Yes, you. | |
| No, no. | |
| Not the guy standing behind you. | |
| No, no. | |
| Not him. | |
| No, he's playing a game. | |
| You. | |
| You support this show. | |
| And so if you'd like to donate, I would hugely appreciate it. | |
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| Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. |