Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, answers questions on the word believe, dealing with government workers, eating animal products, religious collectivism, preparing for therapy, chemotherapy, homeschooling, human capital and much more.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hello, hello everybody. | |
| Stefan Rolando from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| Listen to a mailbag this fine day of June 6, 2013. | |
| You tend to use the word believe frequently. | |
| I've always considered words like believe and hope to be squirrely concepts and tend to avoid them unless I want to be intentionally squirrely. | |
| Good name for a punk band. | |
| Intentionally squirrelly. | |
| Especially if you get that right. | |
| Anyway. | |
| Question. | |
| When you use the word in your lectures, what do you intend the meaning of believe to be? | |
| Many thanks for what you do. | |
| Well, belief is an assumption that I hold in my mind about the empirical effects of rational principles. | |
| So I believe that society will be wealthy, healthy, happy, and wise if we have an egalitarian, stateless society. | |
| I can't prove it. | |
| Because it's a future empiricism which can't be proved. | |
| I think that there's reasons to predict it, but you can't prove it. | |
| So belief generally has to do with the future empirical effects of rational principles. | |
| So if you were an anti-slavist in the 18th century, you would say, well, I believe that... | |
| People will generally be happier after the end of slavery over time in the long run. | |
| And that I also believe that agricultural productivity will go up when we're not relying on slaves. | |
| But I can't prove that. | |
| But that's the belief that I have about the effects of sticking to rational moral principles. | |
| So I believe that reason equals virtue equals happiness in general. | |
| I can't prove that for every individual, but I think it's a pretty good trend. | |
| So I hope that helps. | |
| What is the appropriate way to deal with people who are in government or the military or police, etc., since they tend to think they're already being moral and good people? | |
| Well, the way that you deal with the people who are in government or the military or the police is as you would any other predator. | |
| The bear doesn't think he's evil. | |
| The shark doesn't think he's evil for taking a chomp out of you. | |
| And so you certainly, I don't think it's worth trying to convert people who are in the line of duty to I mean, it's hard enough to convert people who don't have massive financial and emotional and moral investments in the system. | |
| If you think it's easy to convert people, just go talk to your cousin or bring up Stateless Society at your next Thanksgiving dinner and see how easy it is when you take The difficulty of coming to reason after a lifetime of socially inflicted propaganda, and you combine it with things like, well, this is my career, I believe I'm doing good, I've got a pension, this is my paycheck, and it becomes pretty much impossible. | |
| We keep an eye to the future and, you know, generally when a predator has great power, you appease and you roll over and you play dead. | |
| When a predator doesn't have great power, then you attempt to flee. | |
| But the state has almost infinite power over us and therefore I think that it's not their fault they're propagandized. | |
| I mean, this is sort of important. | |
| They don't wake up every morning and say, well, I could live in this free, stateless society, but instead I choose to do wickedness and evil all day. | |
| I mean, this is not their fault. | |
| I mean, you can't expect everyone to be a philosopher. | |
| I mean, philosophy is an incredibly specialized discipline that for me took about, I counted it up once, even as a couple of years ago, 35,000 hours of work to achieve at any kind of Reason, you simply cannot expect everyone to be a philosopher, and most people simply imbibe the cultural prejudices that are portrayed as virtue around them. | |
| It's really not their fault. | |
| And a gentle awakening, I think, is important, but I wouldn't necessarily try and do it while in the customs lineup. | |
| I agree, sorry, someone says, I agree that the change to freedom will probably take generations, but how big do you think is the risk of things going so far down tyranny road that there would be no way back, especially with these new police state technologies? | |
| So my proposal would be to do what we can for the future, peaceful education, and at the same time make sure that in the short term things don't get extreme. | |
| I think I agree about political action, so I'm in a dilemma. | |
| Well, there's no way to know how society is going to go because how society is going to go is going to come down To you, really. | |
| I mean, you who's watching this are going to draw a line in the sand at some point. | |
| And I don't mean with the state. | |
| You can't draw a line in the sand with a state that's like expecting a sandcastle to hold back the tide. | |
| But in your personal life, at some point, you either are or are not going to take a moral stand for the non-praise of violence. | |
| So at some point you're either going to make a stand for the reduction of the praise and worship of violence in your life, or you're not. | |
| It's either going to be a true cause or it's going to be a masturbatory calling, a hobby, so to speak. | |
| So in your life, you're either going to take a stand and say, listen, you status around me. | |
| You want me thrown in jail for following my conscience. | |
| I consider that morally unacceptable. | |
| You're going to take the high road and the lonely road and a challenging road, but that's going to be well. | |
| The inertia of history is almost unstoppable and it only can be stopped by people who are willing to take a principled stand. | |
| The people around you who are status want you thrown in jail for following your conscience. | |
| They literally want men in costumes to come, hold guns to your neck, drag you away in a van, throw you in a room where you may be repeatedly raped by other prisoners. | |
| That is their solution to you having a conscience. | |
| Now at some point, When you really get what this means and you look around you and you realize that the zombie films are not just a metaphor, When you realize this, when you truly get this emotionally, then you will take a truly principled stand. | |
| And if you put your roots down deep enough, the world begins to swing around you. | |
| That's the only way that moral progress occurs, is people get the principles and enact the principles in a very real and vivid way. | |
| And in enacting the principles, you give people a visceral choice that mere abstractions and mere argumentation and mere empirical evidence does not provide. | |
| If you say, look, if you want to hang out with me, you have to stop wanting me thrown in rape rooms for peaceful activities. | |
| Bare minimum. | |
| I mean, the fact that this even needs to be said shows you just how tragically wretched the state of the ethics of the world is. | |
| And a bumper sticker that says... | |
| Friends don't want friends caged for peaceful activities. | |
| Friends don't want friends raped for following their conscience. | |
| But this is the way of the world. | |
| This is the way the world is. | |
| So at some point, you're going to really get what it means to be surrounded by statists. | |
| That they are going to lash you to a paddy wagon and cheer as we sail off the Grand Canyon into the fiery pits of fascism and totalitarianism. | |
| and then they will blame you for not stopping the truck. | |
| This is the way of the world. | |
| Either you're going to take a stand on your beliefs and really live your values, thus providing a real and visceral choice to people, or you're going to continue to talk about it and blog about it and write about it and read about it, which I understand is very tempting and it's really great to believe that political action or the accumulation of abstract knowledge is somehow which I understand is very tempting and it's really great to believe that political action It won't. | |
| The world changes when people stand and put the very roots of their heels down to the center of the earth, stand on principle, and stop the direction of the world. | |
| And that's a lonely and frightening and frustrating process. | |
| And you don't have to do it. | |
| But if nobody does it, the world will not change. | |
| It will continue its headlong rush into fascism. | |
| If we do stand firm on our principles and say, if you want to be in my life, you have to reject the use of violence. | |
| If you want to have social intercourse with me, you have to drop the gun to my head. | |
| This is simply not acceptable. | |
| That makes it real to people. | |
| As long as we only keep talking about it, we are useful idiots. | |
| When we actually act on it and make decisions in our relationships on that which is true and moral and good, well then, well then, the world will change. | |
| It doesn't have anything to do with technology, unless you want to call integrity technology. | |
| Eating animal products such as milk, eggs, and meat all fund the industries who hurt the poor cows, pigs, and other beings. | |
| The demand for consumers creates more supply of evil and abuse, violating the non-aggression principle. | |
| The non-aggression principle requires an understanding of the non-aggression principle, which is why somebody with an IQ of 30 is not criminally responsible for aggressive actions. | |
| And so you can't be bound by something you do not understand, right? | |
| I mean, if I get you, let's assume that you're one of the 3% of Freedom Aid Radio listeners who doesn't speak Klingon. | |
| If I get you to sign a Klingon contract that you have no idea about and can't read and don't understand, are you actually bound by it? | |
| Well, no, of course not. | |
| You don't know what you're signing. | |
| Animals cannot understand philosophy. | |
| Animals cannot understand abstractions and property rights and the non-aggression principles and so on. | |
| And therefore, they are not covered by morality. | |
| Now, that does not mean that we should not be as kind to animals as possible. | |
| I think we should. | |
| And the best way to ensure that people are kind to animals is to treat people well as children. | |
| And it's well known that child abuse is heavily associated with Cruelty to animals, which doesn't mean that all children who are abused are cruel to animals, but almost all children who are cruel to animals are abused. | |
| And so the better treatment of children is the best way to ensure compassion towards animals. | |
| But we are so ridiculously short of compassion towards children, prisoners, victims of war, kids in public schools, intergenerational deaths. | |
| We are so ridiculously short of compassion for our fellow human beings who are potentially bound by the non-aggression principle and respect for property That to overleap the need for compassion to other human beings and hope to achieve it somehow vis-a-vis animals before human beings is to put the cart before the horse. | |
| Compassion towards children will flow into compassion towards others will flow into compassion towards animals, but the sequence has to be kindness to children results in kindness to adults results in kindness to animals. | |
| Trying to overleap it won't work. | |
| Stefan, could you see a possibility that your views on religion, and by extension the religious, as a type of collectivism? | |
| It is discriminatory, which is fine, of course, but to actually stereotype the religious without knowing them individually cannot be considered collectivist. | |
| If I understand the question, my critical views of religion, can I categorize every single religious person? | |
| Well, of course not. | |
| I mean, of course not. | |
| This is why I tend to criticize religion as a set of beliefs, as a set of superstitions, rather than saying, well, Joe, this religious guy is really bad. | |
| So you can't collectivize concepts, because concepts are collective in nature. | |
| The concept tree includes all the trees. | |
| It is a collective concept. | |
| Now, it doesn't mean that you're referring to each individual tree, but you're referring to the common characteristics of trees, whether they're deciduous or evergreen or whatever. | |
| And so you can't stereotype a collective because a collective is a broad-based concept. | |
| It's like saying that, do you call a hundred eggs a group of eggs? | |
| Yes. | |
| Do those eggs share characteristics? | |
| Well, of course, otherwise it'd be 99 eggs and an ant. | |
| And so you can't be blamed for collectivizing a concept. | |
| I mean, you can incorrectly collectivize a concept. | |
| So you could say, all religious people drink the sap of deciduous trees. | |
| Well, that's just an incorrect collectivization. | |
| But if you're criticizing a concept, it is by its very nature collective because it applies to a wide variety. | |
| It's the extraction of individual characteristics to a broad-based abstraction. | |
| Now, I'm either correct or incorrect in my characterizations of religiosity, but I can't be accused of any kind of collectivism when criticizing a concept. | |
| How should I prepare for therapy? | |
| What things should I note? | |
| I already have some ideas on what to talk about your experience would be valued. | |
| I searched the podcast and I know all philosophy is about self-knowledge. | |
| Not quite. | |
| The wiki I was reading about on the forum would surely help here. | |
| So to prepare for therapy, you know, you prepare for going to the dentist by brushing your teeth twice a day and flossing and so on. | |
| And if you want to get the best value, in my opinion, if you want to get the best value out of therapy, write down your dreams, talk about your inner thoughts and feelings, journal, read a whole bunch of books, do worksheets. | |
| John Bradshaw, Nathaniel Brandon have some great worksheets that you can work through to try and gain as much self-knowledge. | |
| And the important thing to remember about therapy, again, this is my opinion and my experience. | |
| When I was doing therapy, I was doing three hours a week, but I did 10 to 15 hours a week of journaling and dream analysis and inner conversations and debates and arguments and talked about it with friends and so on. | |
| So the majority of work occurs outside of therapy. | |
| I mean, think of physical therapy, right? | |
| You might be in for an hour in a week, but you've probably got many hours of exercises that you need to do outside of it. | |
| So if you want to get as much value as you can out of therapy, view the therapy as merely the beginning of the process during the week of doing the work. | |
| Don't just sort of sit there and then come back to the therapist, plop yourself down and say, fix me, brother! | |
| Why did you elect mainstream chemo and radiation treatment for your illness rather than a free-market, non-establishment treatment? | |
| Why do you trust the medical establishment when they engage in fraud, monopoly, coercion, propaganda, and collaboration with the state? | |
| They have probably already cured cancer but suppressed the cures. | |
| I mean, I get a lot of this. | |
| I have some listeners who are doctors who say that the course of treatment that I am taking statistically gives me the best chance of survival with my cancer. | |
| And so... | |
| If you have, you know, double-blind, well-funded, well-researched, well-documented experiments to prove to the contrary, as I've said to people before, I don't care about the medical establishment. | |
| I don't care about their relationship to the state fundamentally. | |
| What I care about is the data. | |
| And the data that I've researched show that my course of treatment, if I follow it through, will give me only a 1% to 2% chance of the cancer Recurring. | |
| I can live with that. | |
| And if there is a cure for cancer that is out there that has been suppressed, I would be really astonished. | |
| I know this has been around forever. | |
| Think of all of the illnesses that have been cured already. | |
| I mean, just look at smallpox and tuberculosis and, let's say, polio. | |
| These things have been cured. | |
| Malaria has, to a large degree, been cured and prevented. | |
| The idea that one of the worst scourges of mankind has somehow been cured but the cure has been sent into wraps is incomprehensible. | |
| People say, well, there's a multi-billion dollar cancer treatment industry. | |
| Well, so what? | |
| There was a multi-billion dollar, at the time, horse and carriage industry was displaced by cars and there was a polio treatment industry that was displaced by polio vaccines and so on. | |
| Remember, there's a huge amount of profit in curing or preventing cancer. | |
| Insurance companies, for instance, would much rather pay for a cheap cure than for an expensive treatment, which gives you still some chance of recurrence. | |
| So it's really, really important. | |
| You know, I strongly urge the libertarian community, do not indulge How important is homeschooling a child? | |
| What do you suggest to solve issues of friendships? | |
| Also, a child brought up by your standards is likely to be far more intelligent and open-minded than other children its age. | |
| How would this affect the child around those children? | |
| Is there any important aspect of public education which can be missed out in homeschooling, and how would you suggest to fill in these gaps? | |
| Well, I refer you to Dana Martin and Lorette Lynn, the Unplugged Mom, for more issues around homeschooling and education. | |
| I remain as yet largely theoretical. | |
| I think that it's not so important the category of education that your child enters into, but the fact that the child values and likes the education that he or she is receiving. | |
| As far as the issues of friendships go, I mean, what can I say? | |
| What can I say? | |
| Like, I mean, I have a Jewish background, and if I'd had a son, if he would be rejected by other Jews for me not circumcising him, well, too bad. | |
| You know, they neither get to meet my son nor his foreskin. | |
| I'm not going to mutilate my child's body or brain. | |
| For the sake of social conformity. | |
| There are times when that's going to be difficult. | |
| I get it. | |
| It's not fun at times. | |
| It's not pleasant. | |
| But I do not have the right to physically harm my child for the sake of social standards, whether that's some sort of tattoo, whether that is indoctrination in false beliefs, whether that is circumcision, whether that is anything. | |
| You name it. | |
| I simply don't have the right. | |
| I simply cannot elevate society To a position of moral standing where it dictates that I physically or mentally or emotionally harm my child. | |
| Can't do it. | |
| So what does that mean? | |
| Well, that means that my child is going to be less compatible with people who can't think. | |
| Ooh, what a problem that's going to be. | |
| She's going to be less compatible with frightened and superstitious children. | |
| She's going to be less compatible with mean and abusive children. | |
| It's a human shield, ladies and gentlemen. | |
| I'm currently in high school, and since I've started to become a lot more aware of the world around me, all I have felt like doing is slamming my head against a wall every time I listen to my teachers. | |
| I genuinely want to learn a lot of the things that are being taught, but the way schools are currently is so frustrating. | |
| Well, my actual question is, what is your views on education, and how do you deal with it when you were younger? | |
| Thanks for your time, Steph. | |
| I hope you can get to this. | |
| Keep up the thoughtful videos. | |
| You know, I mean, for the people who are still stuck in school, it's rough. | |
| So there's some stuff in school that can be helpful, right? | |
| I mean, mathematics, science, and some geography and so on, particularly the mathematics, you know, it gives you good training in logic, particularly the Euclidean stuff and so on, algebra and so on, vector calculus. | |
| These can all give you good training in logic. | |
| So not all of school is desperately bad. | |
| But what you can get out of school is a thorough understanding of how propaganda works, because I'm telling you, it ain't going to end when you leave school. | |
| It's not going to be so much in your face, but it's still going to be around. | |
| So you can really focus on how propaganda works. | |
| You know, one of the things that is a good mark of intelligence, I think, is the ability to argue an oppositional viewpoint or to enter into an oppositional viewpoint without feeling like you've lost your way completely. | |
| I've taken devil's advocate positions in countless debates, and I think I do a pretty good job of representing an opposing position. | |
| So the fact that you're being exposed to an opposing position is not like an infection, as long as you're conscious of the fact that you're being exposed to a false position. | |
| I personally, you know, you don't have much power in high school. | |
| If you fail at a high school, it has significantly negative impact in your future. | |
| And I do not assume that the teachers are going to be open to reason and evidence for a wide variety of reasons, but in particular because they are minions of the state. | |
| I mean, they're representatives of We're good to go. | |
| From Coca-Cola and say, listen, you should talk about the negative alkalinity of Coca-Cola. | |
| You should talk about how it rots your teeth. | |
| You should talk about how it gives people diabetes. | |
| You should talk about how it hurts people's throats. | |
| And you should mount a really effective advertising campaign against Coca-Cola. | |
| I mean, they'd look at you like you'd completely lost your mind. | |
| It's like, well, we get 100% of our income from Coca-Cola. | |
| Why on earth would we tell people the truth about Coca-Cola? | |
| You wouldn't expect an advertising agency to do that, and an advertising agency is less bound to Coca-Cola than a teacher is to the public school system. | |
| They're simply not going to argue against it. | |
| I mean, what you want to do if you're the state is to pay the representatives that teach the children. | |
| Then you don't have to have any edicts around propaganda or teach them this or don't teach them that. | |
| People simply follow their financial interests. | |
| people simply follow the benefits of power and justify power ex post facto or after the fact, according to some made-up moral bullshit. | |
| So until you... | |
| It's like saying to the salmon fighting a strong stream, swim perpendicular to the stream. | |
| I mean, they're not going to. | |
| They're going to follow the stream. | |
| The stream is the state, and the intellectuals and the teachers follow the state. | |
| And, you know, what is it that somebody said, what have scientists learned over the past couple of generations? | |
| And what I wrote back on Facebook was they have learned that government money is a whole lot easier than engineering, right, than building things for consumers. | |
| So do not attempt to change your environment, in my opinion. | |
| Do not attempt to change your fellow students to a large degree, and certainly in particular the teachers. | |
| You know, learn the ways and means of propaganda, pare it back to them what they need to hear. | |
| And don't take any moral stain for what you have to do at a coercive environment. | |
| Your parents are forced to pay, you're forced to go, and to get to the next level in life, you're pretty much forced to get the degree. | |
| And so you're in a situation of coercion and don't take any moral stain for parroting back what these idiots want to hear. | |
| All right. | |
| Hey, Steph. | |
| Since I've been putting a lot of effort into being a non-aggressor and just generally being a nice person, I've noticed that I feel really bad when I fail to walk the talk. | |
| I blame my parents for this, but since people don't make that connection, I feel a strong responsibility to take it upon myself and attack myself for my failure to be good. | |
| These slips don't occur often, but they stand out since I have become a much better person. | |
| Since you had a bad childhood yourself, and this might have to deal with the same I do, what do you think and feel when you fail to walk your talk? | |
| One of the greatest unspoken virtues is curiosity. | |
| Curiosity is the state of mind where you refuse to accept made-up answers to complex questions. | |
| Religion is the opposite of curiosity. | |
| Science is a curiosity-based profession, at least in the free market. | |
| You can't know for sure whether whatever you make is going to sell. | |
| And so curiosity is one of the greatest virtues Necessary but not sufficient to be virtuous virtues. | |
| So when I fail to walk my talk, I am simply curious about why. | |
| The idea of self-attacking, I mean, that is to be a government to yourself. | |
| That is to internalize statism and to say that, like an Old Testament God or like You know, Judge Judy, you are going to bang your gavel and sort of assign parts of yourself good or bad status and punish and reward and so on. | |
| Well, you don't want to internalize the state in your own mind. | |
| You don't want to internalize a Thunder God, Old Testament, lash the children kind of approach within yourself. | |
| To be truly free is not simply to reject the false hierarchies outside of your soul. | |
| But also to reject the false hierarchies within yourself. | |
| And it is really truly out of being free of the internal hierarchies that the external hierarchies will fall. | |
| Everything that happens in society is a mirror of what happens within the individual. | |
| And to reject statism, which is the initiation of force within yourself, you make a mistake or you back down from something. | |
| The important thing is just to be curious about why that happened and to be gentle and curious and to try and figure things out within yourself. | |
| That's the important thing. | |
| And that rejects the whole idea that morality is a judge-and-punish kind of environment within yourself. | |
| And so that would be my suggestion. | |
| To stay curious. | |
| To punish means that you already know the answer. | |
| The answer is, I did a bad thing. | |
| I have no integrity. | |
| I backed down before this important challenge. | |
| I didn't speak the truth in this situation. | |
| I'm bad. | |
| I'm failing to live up to my ideal. | |
| These are all assumptions. | |
| And curiosity means, I did not meet my ideals in this situation. | |
| I wonder why. | |
| But you see, self-attack is always premature because almost always we don't know why we fail to meet our standards. | |
| And to be curious is to Continue to have the possibility of trying to figure out why. | |
| That's what self-knowledge is. | |
| Self-judgment is the opposite of knowledge. | |
| In the Sunday show video, Reality is Conspiracy, you say that you cannot grant anyone the label of virtue. | |
| On the other hand, I've also heard you many times say that you love your listeners, the world, etc. | |
| I also understand that you adhere to Ayn Rand's definition of love in voluntary response to virtue. | |
| Since, as you say in the show, virtue is not easy, and you have no knowledge regarding the virtue of those you say you love, Then you must be referring to another kind of love. | |
| This has been bugging me for a while since I have a consumer of your podcasts and books. | |
| Now, I'm sorry. | |
| I put out so much material when people refer to me without quoting. | |
| It's a little tough for me to know what I was saying. | |
| I think what I was saying is that nobody should care about me granting them the label of virtue or not. | |
| The label of virtue is internal to A strong understanding of morality and a willingness to gradually step up your practice of morality in a world that is generally hostile to it. | |
| And the hostility towards people who act in a virtuous manner is naturally clear. | |
| There are not many shadows in a moonless night, but when the sun rises there are shadows everywhere. | |
| This is true. | |
| When virtue emerges in a social construct in society, then people become good and evil depending upon their relationship to that virtue. | |
| They do not feel evil beforehand, but once the sun of virtue rises, the shadows of their own immorality become stark and clear to them, which is why It is better to curse the light than to recognize darkness. | |
| So when virtue comes in to a social environment, people are divided, they are split, and they generally attack the virtue for showing them their own dark side. | |
| We all have a dark side, we all have A side that was propagandized, broken, scarred and is willing to come back to life and strike out at those against us at any time. | |
| That's a Jungian thing. | |
| You can look more into Carl Jung for some of the shadow side or the dark side. | |
| It's not a part of our human nature. | |
| It's just the scar tissue of our early upbringings. | |
| So I don't want people to... | |
| To worry about whether I would call them virtuous or not. | |
| What I do want people to think about is their own relationship to virtue and their own relationship to integrity and a gentleness and peace with the understanding that we're swimming against a very significant current, both within society and through our early propaganda within ourselves. | |
| I do love my listeners. | |
| My God, I mean, the courage that I get pouring into my inbox, the questions I get in the Sunday show, the level of The work that happens in listener conversations, the openness, the challenge. | |
| I mean, I think this is the best, personally, and not even just personally, I think objectively, this is the best show in the world. | |
| I mean, listen to this last Sunday show. | |
| I mean, this is the best, most stimulating, most challenging, most exciting show in the world. | |
| And, you know, one day the world will catch up to us few, we happy few, who have cannoned ourselves up through reason to the mountaintop to a view that will blind others but make us gasp with beauty. | |
| This is the best show in the world. | |
| I mean, if it wasn't, I'd go work for some show that I thought was the best. | |
| I think this is the best show in the world. | |
| I think we have the greatest listeners in the world. | |
| The courage that people show, the integrity, the struggle, I mean, it's magnificent. | |
| And I challenge people to find other shows with better listeners and better questions and greater intellectual content. | |
| So I do love the listeners. | |
| It doesn't mean I love them all. | |
| I just love the courage that they show and the integrity that they're showing. | |
| All right. | |
| What is your best argument to yelling parents? | |
| We have some relatives and friends who yell to their children. | |
| I think that's stupid. | |
| And when I comment on that, they will react as if I shouldn't get involved in their parenting. | |
| They're my kids. | |
| It's my wife. | |
| I'll beat her if I want. | |
| How would you feel isn't effective enough? | |
| Well, you may have heard something that Christians use. | |
| Blaise Pascal says, I think 18th century, 17th century French philosopher who wrote a very interesting book called Pensées, or Thoughts, which is worth reading. | |
| But he had something called Pascal's Wager, which says, look, if there's no God and you don't go to church, okay, you slept in a couple of Sundays. | |
| You've got some benefit, but not a huge benefit. | |
| If there is a God and he sends you to hell for not going to church, then you get an eternity of torture. | |
| And... | |
| That's not good. | |
| So the downside is much worse. | |
| So why not just go to church to hedge your bets? | |
| It's a pretty pathetic argument, of course, because you could get anyone to believe anything or act in any way whatsoever to do that, right? | |
| So you could say to people, listen, if you don't strangle your newborns, then you're going to burn in hell forever. | |
| And it's much worse to burn in hell forever than it is to go through the pain of strangling your newborns. | |
| So you don't become a Nazi, you'll burn in hell forever. | |
| You could say anything to anyone and all you have to do is escalate the punishment to the point where whatever they're doing in the present is less bad. | |
| It's a really wretched argument. | |
| But there is some interesting truth in that with regards to parenting. | |
| The payoff in parenting, generally, for people who want it, that is when you get older, you have some comfort through your children. | |
| Your children come over, they bring over their grandchildren, you have a big, happy family of biologically collected nesting. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| And I think that's a really nice aspect to old age. | |
| And I'm certainly looking forward to it with my own daughter, though. | |
| It seems like a long way away, and I hope the cancer lets me get there. | |
| But the important thing with people who spank is to recognize that they're spanking almost always because they were spanked in the past. | |
| So let's say they're 30 and they're spanking. | |
| Well, they're spanking because 30 years ago they were spanked. | |
| And then 30 years from now, Will be when they hope to have their grandkids over and stuff like that. | |
| So you have a 60 or 70 year span in the change of ethics. | |
| So you could say to them, you're hoping to reap the rewards 30 years in the future of what happened 30 years or so in the past. | |
| So 60 or 70 years is the span between when you were spanked and the moral evaluation that your adult children are going to have of your spanking in 30 years. | |
| Think of what's changed in 70 years. | |
| In the past, this is sort of, I mean, this is very, very important, right? | |
| So what was going on in, what, 1943? | |
| How were women treated? | |
| How were blacks treated? | |
| How were minorities treated? | |
| What was the general perception in 1943? | |
| I mean, let's say it was the war, we'll go back, 1933, right? | |
| I guess, I mean, the war, kind of everything went on hold. | |
| So in 1933, what were people's general perceptions of Jews, of minorities, of blacks, of women, of children, of And so on, and what were people's general sense of ethical norms. | |
| And yet what you're trying to do is, you know, in 2043, 30 years from now, when you hope your children are going to come over with their kids and all that, you're hoping that the ethical norms you got from the 1930s and the 1940s and kind of 1960s or whatever, they're going to hold firm and hold steady. | |
| I think that's a very great risk. | |
| You know, if we want to reap moral rewards 30 or 40 years in the future, then we need to live far better than 30 or 40 years in the past. | |
| And we need to live far better than the present. | |
| Right in the present, 80 to 90% of parents are still hitting their children and the remainder are doing stupid stuff like timeouts and so on. | |
| So your children are going to judge you by the moral standards of 30 or 40 years from now, which means you better be a hell of a lot better than the present and a hell of a lot better than the distant past when it comes to your parenting standards. | |
| In the same way that, you know, people in their 70s now generally tend to be more racist than people who are in their 20s and 30s and tend to be more homophobic than people in their 20s and 30s. | |
| So your children 30 years from now, when they're growing up and have children of their own, are going to view your childhood according to the moral standards of 30 years from now. | |
| Do you really, really want to take the risk that parenting standards are not going to improve significantly over the next 30 years? | |
| Just look at how they were 30, 40, or 50, or 60 years ago. | |
| Changed enormously. | |
| So I would strongly suggest that it's a huge risk to parent how you were parented. | |
| It's really getting stuck in the past, and it is not going to go well. | |
| Myself and thousands of other people like me, We're not going to stop. | |
| We're not going to stop promoting the non-aggression principle with regards to parenting. | |
| We're not going to stop railing against the evils of spanking and the abuse of what goes on in so many households around the world. | |
| We're not going to stop, and we're going to win. | |
| Because that's just the natural way of things. | |
| Ethics extends. | |
| Ethics expands. | |
| Look at the 10th century. | |
| Ethics basically was 2% of the population who were the nobility. | |
| Where is ethics now? | |
| It's vastly different, right? | |
| There's a perception of equality for women. | |
| There's an end of slavery. | |
| We're starting to get the first glimmer of extending human rights protections in a universal sense towards children. | |
| It's going to continue to spread. | |
| This is the future calling, wanting to give you peace with your children when you get older, because if you parent from 30 years ago, 30 years from now, Your kids aren't going to like it very much. | |
| They're going to have significant problems with it, and they're sure as hell not going to want you around their grandchildren if you're still a big one for spanking and yelling and timeouts and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Pascal's wager is not particularly relevant from a philosophical standpoint, but this is a little bit different because you want a parent according to the ethics of the future, not those of the past. | |
| Alright, what would be... | |
| Oh, here we go. | |
| I try to be very rational and reasonable in my life. | |
| I'm a scientist, but sometimes I catch myself suspending my doubts or questions when I know someone probably has already doubted or questioned themselves, e.g. | |
| other scientists who I know to be rational and applying the scientific method. | |
| Am I overlooking some pitfall here? | |
| I know we should really question everything or everyone to find the truth out, but is it okay in that instance? | |
| Well, our relationship to truth... | |
| Is always to some degree social. | |
| I mean, always to some degree social. | |
| I have not personally verified Einstein's general theory of relativity, but I accept it. | |
| I haven't personally measured the distance between the Earth and the Moon, but I accept it. | |
| Was it a quarter million miles or something like that? | |
| I haven't personally measured the amount of time it takes for light to get from the Sun to the Earth, eight minutes or so, 93 million miles, something like that. | |
| Anyway, I haven't personally verified any of these things, but I accept it to be true. | |
| I accept them to be true. | |
| I haven't personally verified a wide variety of scientific truths, which I accept. | |
| I haven't dug into the center of the Earth to find out if it really is molten lava or magma, but I accept it to be true. | |
| I haven't personally verified evolution, but read Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth. | |
| There's quite a lot of evidence for it. | |
| Even though there's some crap about it, too. | |
| The Scopes Monkey Trial was entirely a made-up tourist phenomenon, and those black-and-white moths that were supposed to show adaptation to soot in England were all colored and nailed to the tree. | |
| This terrible stuff has been falsified, and that's bad, and you can read more about that if you like. | |
| But I generally accept the validity of evolution. | |
| I'm not really sure what the alternative is, which is not a bad reason to be open to it, but there seems to be I think it's premature for lay people to say, there's an answer. | |
| I think, you know, with global warming. | |
| Could be true. | |
| Could be anthropogenic. | |
| Seems to be lots of doubt. | |
| Seems to be lots of fudge numbers. | |
| Seems to be lots of lying. | |
| And there sure is massive financial incentives to stoke the fires of anthropogenic global warming alarmism. | |
| And, of course, it's always more government. | |
| That's the answer. | |
| And that, you know, if all roads lead to Rome, guess all roads want to get to Rome. | |
| So I think it's fine. | |
| Doubt is essential to knowledge. | |
| I mean, if you don't have doubt, you don't have knowledge. | |
| If you don't have doubt, you have dogmatic answers provided to you by other people, usually for the cause of financial or sexual exploitation. | |
| So yeah, it's fine to doubt. | |
| Doubt is an uncomfortable sensation, but an exciting sensation. | |
| To not know is to be in the pursuit of Of knowledge. | |
| To know is fine as long as you're right. | |
| Because we do have to, you know, continue to build. | |
| You can't just keep throwing one brick into the mud and saying, I'm building a house. | |
| You do have to have a foundation that you can build on. | |
| So you can get the edifice of knowledge you can actually work on. | |
| You know, I mean, quantum mechanics is the entire reason we're able to talk. | |
| It's why computers work. | |
| It's all these kinds of things, right? | |
| So we do have to accept some knowledge as given, subject to revision if new information comes along. | |
| But there are some things that are just true. | |
| And there are some things that are established to such a degree that unless radically new information comes along, they are going to be true. | |
| Engineers take gravity as a constant. | |
| They don't usually build in plans and say, well, if gravity reverses itself tomorrow, we need to build a whole bunch of buttresses underneath the bridge. | |
| No, they accept it as a given. | |
| Could gravity reverse itself tomorrow? | |
| Seems unimaginable to think that it could, but... | |
| I mean, I guess the polarity of the Earth has reversed itself a few times, so I don't think gravity would change. | |
| That just seems to be a fixed principle of matter. | |
| But we're not going to wake up tomorrow and fire is going to be cold and snow is going to be hot. | |
| I mean, it's just basic properties of nature. | |
| So I accept all of those as given, and I don't, you know, speed of light is constant, and gravity is a valid phenomenon, and heat and cold relative to human senses are, you know, where they are. | |
| And nobody really worries about that kind of stuff tomorrow. | |
| But on the frontiers of knowledge, of course, there's uncertainty. | |
| And I think that's a wonderful place. | |
| I mean, the fact that there's uncertainty means we have places to go and more of reality to introduce our minds to and to learn from. | |
| Which I think is fantastic. | |
| So I think it's fine. | |
| There's lots of things that we rely on socially as true which we have not verified ourselves. | |
| I mean, could the moon landing be a massive elaborate hoax as some people say? | |
| I suppose it's possible. | |
| I don't really care about it in particular. | |
| It's not going to affect how I conduct myself morally today, tomorrow, or any time. | |
| But it's certainly interesting to examine, I guess, if you want to do that. | |
| But I think having... | |
| Beyond a reasonable doubt is a fairly good standard for truth. | |
| So, yeah, lots of people are doubting things. | |
| I think it's fine to doubt unless you have a great answer. | |
| But when it comes to ethics, you know, again, I've written Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, which is free at freedomainradio.com. | |
| And I don't... | |
| So I don't have any doubt about ethics and the universality of the non-aggression principle, respect for property rights, the right to self-defense, and so on. | |
| I've all worked those through logically and still have yet to hear any compelling arguments to the counter. | |
| If you have any, please call in to the Sunday show, 10 a.m. | |
| Eastern Standard Time, every Sunday. | |
| So I'm fine with ethics. | |
| But yeah, some of the empirical stuff, confusing and challenging. | |
| What would be an accurate philosophical definition of human capital? | |
| Well, just off the top of my head, and I think that what you're looking for more is an economic definition. | |
| Human capital is that which you accumulate within your own mind and body, which has financial value to others. | |
| So if you learn how to play piano and people are going to pay you 50 bucks a ticket to come and hear you play piano, then you have the human capital of being an excellent piano player. | |
| If you have learned some skill which people don't really care about, so if you have learned to play music backwards and people will only pay you one dollar, To listen to you as a kind of novelty, then you have less human capital whatsoever. | |
| If you've learned how to play piano by playing a piano with the keys all glued up so that they can't go down, then I guess you've learned how to play piano, but nobody's going to pay you to watch you thwunk piano that doesn't make any sounds. | |
| So human capital, I would say, is that which you have added which has It may not be economic value in particular. | |
| So in learning how to be a good parent, I think that I've got a lot of human capital that my daughter really values. | |
| And so that has helped me to create value in her, right? | |
| And love in her. | |
| So I shouldn't say that it's just economic. | |
| Certainly from an economic standpoint, it's generally how it is. | |
| But capital generally is... | |
| So you save money, and that gives you capital. | |
| And with capital, then, you can go and buy things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, right? | |
| So, you know, if you save $10 a week, then, you know, at the end of the year, you have $520 or whatever which you can then spend. | |
| And you, you know, so you say, oh, you can invest it, right? | |
| So capital usually, like a capital improvement, capital investments usually refer to savings, which are then converted into improvements in some process which produce savings. | |
| More goods and services on the other side, right? | |
| So if you invest in creating an assembly line where formerly the workers all swarmed around to create some vehicle, then the assembly line lets you produce twice as many vehicles, then that's a capital investment which produces economic growth. | |
| It's the same thing with human capital. | |
| The time that you spend learning piano is time that you're not spending getting paid for working as a waiter, right? | |
| So you lose the money that you have gotten paid for working as a waiter and instead You're spending time learning how to play the piano, or the time that you spend getting a degree is a time you're not spending earning money in some other way. | |
| And so all that income that is deferred, all of those skills that are deferred when you're spending four years in college, Well, you hope, of course, that I guess if you study petroleum engineering, which is the highest paid undergraduate degree you can get, then you've deferred all that income, but you then gain additional income through that deferral. | |
| So whatever you're doing to add to value that you provide to other people, that is human capital. | |
| And it's a pretty good thing to get because, you know, you can't drag around a factory with you, but your brain is generally between your ears. | |
| So, that's it for questions. | |
| If you want to get more questions coming in, I'll really appreciate them. | |
| Mailbag at freedomainradio.com. | |
| And, of course, if you find these discussions valuable, I'm thinking of getting a super snazzy desk and maybe a little bit of an office, sorry, sort of a... | |
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