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June 28, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:40
2415 Passing Freaking Laws for Liberty??? Stefan Molyneux's Listener Mailbag

Is saving money universally preferable? Does physical appearance matter? Is it a responsibility of parents to leave their children inheritance?

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Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
It is your friendly neighborhood, giant thumb-looking life form.
I hope you're doing well.
So these are listener questions.
Thanks, as always, for sending them in.
If you have more listener questions, different listener questions, you can send them to mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
So, I've been thinking about the concept of saving money.
I've always been very inclined to do so, but it makes my life much easier.
And it makes my life much easier.
I have no doubt that keeping a nest egg is moral and probably universally preferable.
But is amassing and keeping a massive amount of money moral?
So, a small savings moral.
Given that money doesn't buy happiness, although I haven't yet, once I amass enough to be comfortable, shouldn't I put it to productive use, given that the hedonic treadmill will result in no additional happiness beyond a certain standard of living?
Well, you can't not put money to good use.
I mean, it's pretty much impossible.
In a sort of free society, you know, the fiat currency, yes, white paper nonsense we've got is what we've got, but in a free society, so let's say you amass a million dollars.
What are you going to do?
Well, if you put it in the bank, the bank's going to use it to lend out to entrepreneurs and raise a standard of living and invest in capital equipment and upgrade worker productivity.
Let's say you stuff it under your mattress and take it out of circulation.
Rational currency, that actually increases the value of everyone else's money because there's less money in circulation, which means there's more purchasing power for the money that remains in circulation.
If you go and spend it, well, you're transferring money, hopefully, to things that buy you happiness, and that's not a bad thing, and then those people are going to use it to do whatever they do with it, right?
Are you saying, should you give money to charity?
Well, charity is a very, very tricky thing, my friend.
There's lots of economic arguments that say that Bill Gates is currently handing out nets in Africa or mosquito nets in Africa, that he would have actually done much better for the world economy and the creation of jobs and wealth and getting people out of poverty than...
If you just stayed at Microsoft and continued to build the value of Microsoft.
Charity is a really, really difficult thing.
Charity was all over the place in the Middle Ages.
You know, people gave 10% or more of their income to the church and there was charitable impulses all over the place.
Same is true in Islamic societies, lots of charity, and yet the world was wretchedly poor.
If you think of the socialist policies of communist policies in India and China from the post-Second World War period up until the 1990s, massive charity and the government took a whole bunch of money.
It's not exactly charity, but there was massive redistribution of income from the wealthy or the middle class to the poor.
That was what communism, socialism is all about, this redistribution of income.
And everybody was wretchedly poor and they regularly starved to death.
When they stopped worrying about charity and the redistribution of income and actually allowed people to pursue their own economic self-interest, you've got 50,000 people a month coming out of poverty.
Over the last 15 to 20 years, there's been hundreds of millions of people who've escaped poverty in the world.
It has been the largest single consistent focused net reduction in human misery and human history.
but you don't hear about it, of course, because it's a free market phenomenon, and the general leftist, sody, squid-sucking tentacle brains that make up the media can't fit that into the narrative of their pointy little Marxist brains, and so you don't hear about it, but it is nonetheless a fact.
So beware charity.
Charity, I think, is a very important, targeted thing for people who are on the down and out and need a little bit of help to get back on their feet.
But charity is like heroin.
But charity is like heroin.
It's like morphine.
You can use it for a surgery, but you can't make it a habit.
And so I would really, really recommend being very, very skeptical about charity.
Charity generally is something that people perform to make themselves feel better rather than actually to help people.
Helping people is a lot to do with moral toughness and a lot to do with strict adherence to moral principles and the assination of responsibility.
People generally, their lives go out of control because they don't have a locus of control.
They don't have a feeling that they themselves are the authors of their own destiny, that they're behind the wheel.
And the more that they rely on other people to bail them out, the less that helps them feel in control of their own lives.
Consequences can be a great teacher, and I do believe that there's a necessity for a buffer, particularly for children who, if they're in dire situations, are through no fault of their own.
But charity is something that we kind of move to as a response to human misery, but it is something like...
There was a recent article about a guy, an economist in Africa, pleading with the West to stop doing all this goddamn wealth transfer, right?
The foreign aid and so on, which is a way of taking money from the poor people of rich countries and giving it to the rich people of poor countries.
It causes corruption, destroys local And entrepreneurship particularly destroys local farming.
You take all this Western agricultural produce and you dump it in African markets and all you're doing is destroying local farming and you give it to the governments and the governments then give it to their supporters and it's how they buy power and it just completely corrupts the entire...
And this has been known for decades, but people can't stop it because they have this illusion that charity is somehow the highest moral ideal.
Well, charity is something that is incredibly difficult to perform in a way that genuinely and permanently benefits the recipient and it sure as heck isn't going to be achieved by the government.
So, yeah, save your money, make your money, give it to your kids, but don't have this idea that somehow accumulating money or putting it at a bank is not good.
I would not say that keeping a nest egg is universally preferable.
Absolutely not.
Universally means all places at all times, right?
And, you know, if you have six weeks to live, I don't think the nest egg is really your very first concern.
You'd probably burn through it in the pursuit of as much happiness as you could in the short run.
Next question.
Recently, I got into a heated debate with a family member about the book Knowledge vs.
Experience.
They're theoretical vs.
practical knowledge.
I basically kept explaining that everyone has different ways of learning certain topics, but still he denied my point.
I was wondering what would be the best way to approach this dilemma.
Also, another point I would like to bring up is that every time I get into any kind of debate with this family member, all he responds with is that I'm too young to know about the topic and I just haven't experienced it personally.
What would be the best way to respond to this?
I'm not sure about the theoretical versus practical knowledge.
You can give me some more details about that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you hear about this nonsense.
When people say that you lack...
Incommunicable experience in a topic and therefore have no relevance to it.
Fundamentally, it's a Platonic argument.
So Plato said that there was this other realm that if you were enlightened, Buddhism and so on, that you would then grasp this ineffable truth about the universe and it can't really be communicated, but you have to defer to people who've gone there just because they've seen beyond the hand puppets of false cave-like reality and so on.
And it is an extraordinary pile of dictatorial bullshit.
It is, you know, people who say, well, there's this ineffable experience that until you've experienced it, you don't know the truth.
And therefore, because I've experienced it and you haven't, you have to defer to me no matter what.
But this is just a wonderful way of saying I don't have a way of rationally or empirically responding to your argument.
And therefore...
Or I've been proven wrong, and therefore I'm going to retreat into this foggy realm of incommunicable accumulation of wisdom through experience or whatever.
I mean, it's all nonsense.
I mean, all you have to do is try this in a math test, right?
Two and two make five, and the teacher says, that's wrong.
You sit down with the teacher and say...
No, man, you don't get it.
Like, I have traveled to the realm of 2 and 2 making 5, and it's beyond the little cave walls of your experience, man.
And once you poke your finger through that matrix and you open yourself to the possibility of two and two making five, you can ride a unicorn through that vagina portal to this birth of another universe that is beyond your understanding.
I've been there.
I've touched it.
I've felt it, man.
I've in fact probably molested it once or twice.
And I come back with that knowledge that tells you that two and two make five.
And if you think that two and two make four, all you're doing is showing me how limited your little box-like, cube-like, unexperienced, quote, thinking is, man.
And all I can tell you is that you're wrong.
And you've just got to ride that unicorn through the vagina portal and molest this other dimension and come back with the true tales of deep-tongued experience from beyond the stars.
Yes.
So, I get that grade, right?
And that is, um, nonsense.
I mean, I heard this all the time, you know, I'd criticize parenting before I became a parent.
People are like, man, you don't understand!
You're not a parent!
Right?
Um...
Which is, you know, it's literally the direct equivalent of saying, you know, hitting your wife is wrong.
And somebody's saying, well, you don't understand.
You're not married to my wife, man.
You'd hit her too.
Come on!
Don't you get it?
Well, doesn't really have any effect on the principle.
So, yeah, it's just a way of people saying, I don't have a rebuttal, so I'm going to pretend that knowledge accumulates like wrinkles in a sunburn, and unless you've gotten old or had too much sun exposure, you don't get it.
So...
It's a confession.
I mean, most of what people say is a confession of error.
Just all you have to do is listen for it.
Okay.
I'm writing this email to ask you about opinions of appearance and whose really matters.
Mine?
Yours?
Your own?
Your loved ones?
I don't know.
I think no one's opinion matters, but my girlfriend disagrees.
So I really want to get Stefan's rundown of why does or doesn't appearance matter?
Could you also allude to what changes in a person's perspective?
How can that help one become more accepting of what they perceive as unpleasant appearance or to become less deluded in perception of oneself?
So I assume this means how you present yourself and are you groomed?
Do you have yellow teeth?
Do you have body odor?
Are you wearing your T-shirt inside out?
You know, a pair of duct tape for underwear.
Yeah, appearance matters.
And it matters rationally.
So, to me, that's sort of like a bell curve, right?
You know, that sort of extreme ends, right?
So, the extreme ends, Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot, At one point in a book somewhere, she says, you know, he would prefer to have a gunshot on his chest than a speck of dust on his white linen suit or something like that.
Now, that's a little anal and hysterical.
But, yeah, appearance matters because life is short, right?
Everything which adds to your efficiency in processing other people is very helpful.
So I could show up to a job interview, like in a paint-stained T-shirt and some ragged-ass Daisy Duke shorts, and...
Does that actually have direct relevance to my skills on the job?
Well, it kind of does, right?
So let's say that it's a salesperson's job that I'm trying to go for.
Well, a salesperson has to know what is appropriate and inappropriate in a particular situation.
They have to understand the business environment.
They have to understand how they land or how their appearance or how they're...
Being, as a whole, affects other people.
So, if I show up in a ratty old t-shirt and a pain-stained Daisy Dukes, I'm saying I don't understand the business world, I don't understand what's appropriate, and I don't know how I'm landing for other people, and that renders me immediately unqualified for a job which requires that.
So, that's important, right?
I mean, if you show up for a first date with a woman that you really like, and you haven't showered, and you haven't brushed your teeth, you got, you know, half a stem of asparagus hanging out your nose or whatever, Well, that says that you don't understand how you land for other people and the importance of conforming to things that are not irrational, right?
So I think that there is a certain amount of appearance that's important.
Now, of course, if you're over-focused on the other extreme, on the Hercule Poirot scheme of things, you're over-focused on appearance, then you've become somebody who presents rather than is and who manipulates through exteriors.
It bugs me a little bit that libertarians have this kind of like motorcycle gang, hippie, dippy way of presenting themselves that's just kind of ridiculous.
And, you know, to me, it's like, you know, overall, lose a few pounds, get a haircut, shave or beard or commit to some damn thing or another.
You know, when we are bringing radical ideas, if our appearance is off-putting as well, it's easier for people to dismiss us.
And rightly so.
I mean, I don't think that this is a bad thing.
You know, it certainly is true that somebody who presents themselves in some really extreme fashion doesn't, like is actually correct.
Let's say I got some swastika tattoo on my forehead.
I think I have room.
Let's say I got a swastika and I did my presentations with a big-ass swastika tattoo on my forehead.
Now, I didn't reference it, and everything I said was perfectly rational.
Would that be a problem?
Well, of course it would be a problem.
Of course it would be a problem.
Because I have chosen to get a big ass swastika tattoo on my forehead.
It has no bearing on the rational content of my arguments, but it does say that I am the kind of person who got a big-ass swastika tattoo, have kept it, and I'm presenting it in video format and not referencing it, which is kind of confusing and off-putting to people.
So it does speak to my judgment.
It speaks to my ability to understand how I land for other people, my empathy on how it is.
Appearance has something to do with empathy.
It's a way of stepping into somebody else's Manolo Blahnik's and saying, how do I come across to this other person?
Kind of important.
So those who have off-putting appearances and attempt to change people as a whole, to change society as a whole, are showing that they lack empathy for how it is that they're received and how difficult it is to receive unusual or scary ideas from somebody who looks both unusual and or scary.
So, if you're showing through your lack of concern or care about your appearance or that you're making your message harder to...
You say, oh, I really want to change the world, and then you present yourself in a way that makes it really hard for people to listen to what you're saying.
You're saying that, well, I prefer the laziness of my appearance over actually changing the world.
Well, if your goal is to change the world, then adjust your appearance to make yourself as palatable as possible so that people can actually focus on your ideas rather than on, you know, your...
Spiky rainbow dreadlocks or whatever it is, right?
Your yellow armpit stains or whatever it is.
Show that you have empathy for how it is that you received and show that you have a commitment to your ideals that's over and above your particular habits of appearance.
So, yeah, it matters.
Life is short and we all have to make decisions very quickly.
So, I have a question.
Sorry, I have a problem with this issue for a while now.
My parents have spent most of their life working very hard to support the family.
And I know they want to leave it All to us in inheritance.
I feel very uneasy about this and I think they should use the money to enjoy their retirement instead because they earned it.
My siblings don't seem to share this view.
Is it correct or moral to expect inheritance from your parents who are responsible for bringing you into this world?
Is it a responsibility of parents to leave their children inheritance?
No.
No.
I mean, the property remains that of the parents.
I mean, this is assuming that the children have reached some age of economic maturity, right?
Early 20s or whatever, late teens, depending on, you know, going to college or not.
But no, I mean, obviously, if your kids are 10, you need to have some money set aside in case something happens to you so that they have money for their upbringing.
But no, you don't have to give your kids a penny.
And it is a risky thing.
Just Google Eaton's four sons in Canada.
Excuse me.
And you'll sort of see that there's a problem.
I mean, when kids inherit a lot of money, it is the trasterfarian curse, right?
It is generally a problem.
I mean, I came from a completely broke-ass welfare single-mom home.
That gave me a great deal of hunger.
I got my first job when I was 9 or 10.
I got my first job at a bookstore when I was 11.
I've been working pretty solidly ever since.
And the development of that work ethic came out of a desperate desire to escape You know, the squalid, brain-squeezing isolation tank called poverty.
And that's a good thing.
Now my daughter is going to get a little bit more money than I did when I was, you know, when I sort of grew up and grew up.
I've been on my own since I was about 15, sort of paying my own bills and so on.
And that probably was a little bit too early.
But no, I mean, you should not expect inheritance from your parents.
I mean, it's their property fundamentally.
If they want to give it to you, you can choose to keep it or choose to give it away or choose to whatever it is you're going to do with it.
But it's not a responsibility for parents to leave their children in inheritance because the most important thing you give to your children is not money but skills, right?
And that's...
You create in them human capital, the ability to negotiate, the ability to have self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, the ability to socialize, the ability to enjoy life, the ability to have fun, the ability to not be self-conscious, the ability for a relaxed and happy sexuality.
All these things are taught and instructed and modeled by parents.
That's the stuff you want to get from your parents, not a bunch of fiat currency.
If you have the human capital from your parents, then you don't have to worry about yourself economically.
If you have the money but not the human capital, your life will be a misery of people exploiting you and you feeling perpetually alone because you don't know if people like you for your money or yourself.
There's no harm in giving your kids money, I guess.
I'm certainly not planning on giving my daughter a whole lot because...
The other thing, too, is that if you think as a parent you're going to give your kids money, sometimes that's because you feel you haven't given them enough human capital.
Anyway.
Hi, Steph.
In your YouTube video, Exploring Buddhism, at 2035 through 2055, you said, if your husband or wife get snatched, black-backed, or killed, this is a significant mental anguish to deal with because somebody has done an evil action in your environment.
In your YouTube video, Life in a Mental Zombie Apocalypse, at 16 through 1605, you said, in reference to 9-11, nothing causes human responses because people have different responses to the same event.
These ideas appear contradictory to me.
Would you please explain how they are not contradictory to you?
Well, you're assuming they're not contradictory to me, but I don't think they are.
So when you are talking about emotional reactions, you generally have to go with the majority.
So for the majority of people, if their wife gets killed, that's a pretty bad thing.
99% of people are pretty sad when their spouse gets killed.
Now, of course, if you're the husband who's paid someone to go kill his wife, you're probably quite happy that this has occurred.
When it comes to dealing with the vast majority of cases, you have sort of two choices.
You can either say, you know, if your wife gets killed, you're going to feel bad.
That's a bad thing.
Unless you're the guy who...
Like, you put these footnotes in everywhere, which makes it almost impossible to hear what it is that you're saying.
Right?
It's just a...
It's a convention of speech that if you're dealing with the vast majority of cases, right?
So most people, you know, if you get cancer, you're unhappy, right?
Somebody actually wants to die or wants to leave a life inheritance to their kids and is completely broke, might actually be happy.
But You don't have to put asterisks in every single time you're talking about the vast majority of cases.
So it's true that most people, their wife gets killed, it's bad.
For a few people, it's actually a good thing.
So yeah, that's just a convention and people can spend their lives if they want coming through me.
What other people say and finding some bizarre or very rare exceptions to a general principle that's stated, but that is sort of my response to that.
I'm not just going to footnote, and I'm not saying this is for you, out of paranoia to every potential nitpicker who comes along and can find some bizarre contrary example to what it is that I'm saying, I'm simply not going to footnote everything.
It will be impossible to listen to, and other people will lose the thread.
Let me give you an example.
I'm going to use this example in another video.
If I'm teaching medical ethics and I say, don't give chemotherapy to people who don't have cancer.
And then some guy in the back says, wait a minute, what if you give chemotherapy to somebody who doesn't have cancer and it turns out that they had an undetected form of cancer, the chemotherapy actually cures them?
Is that possible?
Yeah, it's possible.
I said, okay, fine.
But generally it's a principle, do not give chemotherapy to somebody who doesn't have cancer.
And then the guy in the back says, excuse me, what if you get chemotherapy and then you're in hospital getting your chemotherapy and you have a heart attack that would have been fatal if you'd not actually already been in hospital?
Then didn't chemotherapy actually save your life?
Yes.
Okay, that's certainly possible, but still, nonetheless, as a general principle, you can't give chemotherapy to people who don't have cancer.
Now, let's move.
Excuse me?
Yes?
Okay, so let's say somebody is suicidal, and you give them chemotherapy, because they're suicidal because they're so lonely, and you give them chemotherapy.
And then they meet a nurse while they're getting chemotherapy, and they end up falling in love and getting married, and he doesn't kill himself because he's not lonely anymore.
Doesn't chemotherapy save his life?
Yes, I suppose that is.
Like, you understand.
So you simply don't give chemotherapy to people who don't have cancer.
Can you invent circumstances or situations where chemotherapy can save somebody's life who doesn't actually have cancer?
Absolutely you can.
Don't give chemotherapy to people who don't have cancer.
That's just a rule.
You can put in, accept under this situation, accept under this situation, accept in this situation.
Don't give it.
Just don't do it.
Sorry.
Yeah, but it doesn't matter.
Don't give chemotherapy.
You can't come up with every single conceivable exception.
Just have a rule.
I mean, people do this all the time.
Don't steal people's property.
Well, if you're in a desert and somebody has a bottle of water that they're only going to sell you for a million dollars, you don't have a million dollars, are you just supposed to, like, die of thirst rather than steal his bottle of water?
Let's say you have a gun and he's got up to ten bottles, a million bottles of water, but they only give you one for a million dollars, you don't have a million dollars, can you just not take it?
Like, you're just going to die rather than, you know, you're going to respect property rights and die?
I mean, it's just like, oh my god.
Don't steal.
I mean, we have bigger things to deal with than outlandish, otherworldly, who-gives-a-shit situations.
You know, we currently are dealing with a plague of theft and immorality and evil in the world.
It is a plague.
And those of us who have committed to ending this plague are like doctors.
And if you're in a plague and they're just bringing in doctors and you're just trying to save as many people as you possibly can and they're cutting off this and injecting that and so on, right?
And then somebody says, wait a minute, I can think of a situation where, you know, somebody getting the plague might be a good thing because of...
Right?
So everybody stop.
Everybody stop helping the plague victims because under a situation that might possibly occur once every 10,000 years, somebody might actually want the plague.
So we don't know that for sure, so let's stop helping anybody with the plague.
You understand this is just a kind of paralysis.
The exceptions to the general rules are created, and I'll deal with this in more philosophical rigor in another show, but this is a curse.
It's people trying to paralyze you so that you don't actually help people.
So, anyways, I won't point that out.
Hello, I've been listening to your podcast for about a year.
I love what you're doing.
Thank you.
I wanted to know what your thoughts are on horror movies.
I'm personally disgusted by them and can't understand why anybody would watch or create one.
It seems to me you have to be very disturbed.
However, I can't tell if I should feel this way or if I'm overly sensitive, as I have yet to find another person who feels the same way.
When I say horror film, I mean the gory type, not films that simply make you jump.
Yeah, well, see, I mean, horror films are the manifestation of an inner gruesome Torture.
Inner gruesomeness, right?
So if you see a film where, you know, zombies suck out people's eyeballs and, you know, piss down their severed head and neck or whatever it is, you have to think and understand.
I mean, I've actually made a movie, not a horror movie, but it's a huge amount of work.
Months and months of work.
And I saw a talk when I was at...
I took my film to the Hollywood Film Festival and saw a talk from Norman Jewison.
Norman Jewison is a funny guy.
He's a good director.
Anyway, he said, being a director is this.
You know, you spend years waiting for the right script, and then you spend months waiting for the right actress and the crew that you want to get together, and then you spend another month scouting for locations, and then you spend, you know, days or weeks setting up for a particular shot, and you do your rehearsals and so on, and then you're finally ready after years and years to make your film.
And, you know, the camera guy says, listen, we've only got one take because we're losing the light.
And you've got to do it in like 90 seconds.
That's what movie making is.
Huge amount of crap.
So people, they have to try and figure out what is the best way to simulate eyeballs popping out of somebody's head.
They have to really work on that.
They have to make the model of the head.
They have to try all these, I don't know, egg yolks or whatever it is.
They have to try all these different egg whites, I guess.
They have to try all these different things.
It's a way of stimulating the most gruesome things that you can imagine.
They have to do thousands of takes, or hundreds of takes, or dozens of takes.
They have to find just the right sound effects that really make people wince.
They have to edit it.
So this level of obsession with the production of gore comes out of a brutalized and sadistic childhood.
I mean, this is clear.
I mean, that level of obsession with recreating the physical destruction of the human body is the result of the emotional, sexual, or abusive destruction of somebody's personality, which they're then recreating, and which they will then deny that it has anything to do with that.
Oh, man, it's just a little fun.
I just like a little gore.
Don't be so...
Right?
And that's because they're not in contact with how much they have been destroyed as children, and therefore they're out there recreating and reproducing it, right?
That which we don't acknowledge, emotionally, we tend to inflict on others.
And so people who have not acknowledged their own horror, the horror of their own childhoods, and some incredibly sadistic stuff that they experienced...
They will then be recreating that in an obsessive-compulsive way to others, while at the same time saying it's all in good fun and it's all goofy, silly, campy, ridiculous nonsense.
But no, it is a very serious recreation of horror.
And until society recognizes these kinds of manifestations, they're just going to keep continuing.
After listening to this past Sunday show, how do I know if I can't think?
Well, just read a book on logic.
Read a book on critical thinking.
I mean, just compare what it is that you do to the standards, right?
How do you know if you're not doing science?
Study the scientific method and find out.
Steph, what do you think of voluntary segregation, where like-minded people form a small nation?
Okay.
Human diversity is such that there may always be those who wish to own or be slaves.
Okay.
Instead of trying to convert the...
Yes, but only temporarily and only in leather-based nipple hot wax dungeon scenarios and only because there's a safe word.
I've heard.
Instead of trying to convert the horde, the herd, I think, into the same personality type, why not simply move where people uphold your same set of core values?
These places may only be small cities, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, of course.
Studies have shown fairly consistently that people who have the similar or the same philosophical or cultural or religious values tend to be happier living in neighborhoods of like-minded people.
I mean, that sort of makes sense.
So yeah, I mean, go for it.
I think that the human community is artificially separated.
By our addiction to the irrational superstitions of culture and religiosity and nationalism and so on, right?
You know, the Tower of Babel story, that they were building a tower to see God, and God struck it down and cursed them all with the inability to understand each other's language, and that's why everyone got separated.
The human community is incredibly separated by culture.
Just imagine, some Islamic kid grows up in the wilds of Afghanistan.
He's going to have all these weird-ass cultural values.
But if he was, you know, teleported to your house and adopted and grew up as your brother, he'd have very similar values to you, right?
And you'd have a huge amount more in common, of course, than you would with some guy.
You don't speak his language.
There's hugely different cultural values out in the back ass of Afghanistan.
So this is all artificial divisions, right?
It's all artificial.
The purpose of abusers is to isolate, and this is what nationalism, they do this at the personal level, they isolate you from people around you, but they also do this at a national level by creating you're the best and having you wed your identity to this collective bullshit, and therefore you have to continue to maintain this collective bullshit, otherwise you feel your personality dying or crumbling or falling away into a void within you, which is for most people worse than death.
So, culture is a way of isolating people and it is fundamentally an abusive thing to do, to raise children with irrational absolutes and culture and religion and all sorts of stuff fundamentally.
It really harms their brain.
So, in the future, when people are philosophical and rational and so on, they're way more in common.
So, I don't think they'll feel this need to sort of exclude and exclude and exclude, but certainly people are free to do so.
You just buy the land, build the houses, do whatever you like.
Not initiating force, but don't call them nations, that's all.
All right.
I was watching one of your videos and you were talking about music and how dangerous it was because it was hypnotizing.
I know that movies and TV shows are dangerous too because of the propaganda.
I was thinking about pornography.
What's your philosophical view about porn?
Well, I mean, the first reality to understand is that pornography is almost exclusively inhabited by people who were abused as children and are reenacting that abuse in the same way as a horror movie thing.
They're reenacting that abuse for others I think we're good to go.
With adult bodies and so on.
So it's pretty problematic from that standpoint.
From a sort of biological standpoint, watching sex is a turn on for every species that I've ever heard about it being studied on.
You know, I mean, that deep heart Beatle porn, you know, the Beatle guy shows up to repair the photocop.
Anyway, you know, the other Beatles guy is doing that.
70s music in the background and so on.
Or so I've heard.
So, the fact that we are sexually excited by seeing sex makes perfect sense, right?
Because that means that it's mating season or whatever.
I guess human females are the only ones who don't have a mating season.
But it means that sex is around and we better get some sperm in there so that we can reproduce our genes.
There's nothing morally wrong with looking at sex and being excited by sex.
I mean, that's biological.
We can't fight that.
But I think it is important to be aware that the people in it are generally from pretty wretched backgrounds and there's a pretty exploitive industry.
All right.
My wife, with whom I've had discussions about libertarianism, blah, blah, blah, was not keen to see a future way to drive his license wasn't required by law.
Yeah, okay.
So, obviously, most people who want drive on roads want other people who know how to drive on roads, for sure.
And so, the road companies and the people who give you insurance and all of that will require particular demonstrations of competency before they will insure you.
And I doubt that they would insure you at all if you had not ever, right?
So...
Do you think professional sports would exist in a free society?
That's a great question.
It's a great question.
Okay, first thing to understand about professional sports is that they developed as rehearsals for, you know, like clubbing other people with a head or the jawbone of an ass, a fundamental brutal war.
Professional sports, or sports really as a whole, developed, and you can see the similarities to wartime, right?
Two pretty much identical groups of people but with different costumes are both battling in, you know, artificial externally created environments.
This is war.
I mean, think of the trenches of World War I and World War II. I mean, one of the great problems that happened in World War I Everybody thought it was going to be over by Christmas when it started in 1914.
And at Christmas time, everybody stopped fighting and they all went, the British and the Germans all came out to the middle of no man's land and played soccer and they didn't actually want to kill each other.
Then this was a huge problem that they recognized that the guys across in the other trench were pretty much like them, even though there was culture and language disparities.
And they began to have to shoot people who weren't fighting.
I mean, they had to start killing their own soldiers who weren't fighting to make that incentive higher.
So sports is a way of rehearsing war.
This is a very, very important thing.
And you can see that the more war-hungry the nation, the more obsessed it generally tends to be with sports.
So think of England and America, two sports of Asian nations.
These are the two nations that went into Iraq and so on and have this sort of historical or current empire addiction.
And this is not, I mean, this is well known.
The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, is the old statement from England, that sports are training for war.
And it also trains the spectators to cheer artificial divisions just based on local geographical.
One of the things I remember when I was just a little, little kid, I kind of been more than five or six or four, maybe five or six.
So I grew up in England, in London, and my local team was Crystal Palace, who were terrible.
And there was West Ham United with some other team, and some kid was taunting me about Crystal Palace.
And I do remember saying, I said, but that's just...
I mean, you just happen to be born over there.
I happen to be born here.
This isn't my team.
It's accidental, right?
I mean, I guess that was a little philosophical precocity.
So, I mean, if we don't have this irrationality of the war lust and the my team good, other team bad, and this addiction to focusing on anyone who's geographically closer to me in a tribal sense is good, and everybody who's on the other side is the enemy and so on.
I mean, sports fundamentally is irrational.
I mean, I don't mean playing sports.
Playing sports is a lot of fun.
But going and cheering sports teams and so on, it's completely irrational, because you have to...
You have to forget that the other team is just like you, just happen to be from somewhere else, right?
I mean, my brother and I used to go when we were little kids.
They used to be...
I don't know if they're still called Penny Dreadful.
There was a theater that would show these little scraps of cartoons and little short movies and so on.
And you'd pay like 10 pence to go in and get two hours of little movies and so on.
And one of them was the usual ragtag loser sports teams and so on.
And...
What happened was I was watching this thing.
I guess I was seven or eight.
I was watching it and it was pretty clear to me.
It's like, okay, so we're focusing on this team and therefore we want them to win.
And then the other team comes on the pitch and we want them to lose.
But if the cameras had been on the other side and we'd focus on the other team, then we'd want that team.
It's all arbitrary.
It's all nonsense.
So what people have to do is they have to make up this moral stuff like, you know, Ralph Macchio, the karate kid, he is really a good guy.
We focus on how nice he is and this and that.
But the other kids are really mean and the other karate school is really...
I mean, I'm bad.
You have to create all these moral divisions to overcome the fact that it's all just arbitrary bullshit.
Crystal Palace would import a whole bunch of, like, the soccer team or the football team that I was supposed to cheer.
They would import a whole bunch of players from, like, Trinidad and Tobago and so on.
These guys with thick accents who are just like, I represent them.
You know, it's like, how am I supposed to?
I can't even hear what you're saying.
You obviously don't come from anywhere around here, so how am I supposed to?
Or it's like, this player is really bad because he's on the opposing.
Oh, he got transferred to my team.
He's really good.
I mean, this is insane, right?
So you have to just pretend that it's not insane in order to value it.
And pretending things aren't insane that are, it's kind of not a good idea.
Sports, of course, massively subsidized, right?
I mean, staggeringly subsidized.
Would they even exist without government subsidies?
It seems, you know, people will indulge their insanity if they don't have to pay much for it.
But the moment they start having to pay for their real cost, then they'll give up their war loss, they'll give up their opposition to drugs to the point where they want people thrown in jail for having the wrong bits of vegetation hanging in their pockets.
So, sports fans aren't really that enthusiastic, otherwise they wouldn't need all these subsidies.
And of course, the other thing too, I mean, sports are just completely brutal on the players.
I mean, they just wreck players' lives continually.
70% of NBA players are broke within five years of finishing their careers.
I think the proportion is even higher on NFL players.
They're physically destroyed.
They end up with concussions, with shattered knees, bad backs.
I mean, they're just completely grueling.
I think the top-ranked tennis player just to have it.
had to have his toe replaced with like some cyborg nonsense because it had been curling on these hard courts for years.
So it's just brutal.
I mean, it really is a form of gladiatorial combat.
And if we had empathy for how destructive it is to the bodies of the sports people, well, anyway.
So yeah, I think, I don't know, it's hard to, it's really hard to say.
I think that people would play a lot more sports rather than watch sports, which is, I don't know.
To me, you know, somebody says, let's come over and watch the game.
It's like, no, no, let's go and have a game, right?
That's like the equivalent of somebody saying, would you rather watch porn or have sex?
It's like, well, I know which one I'm down for.
Would you rather watch sports or play sports?
Well, I think people would still enjoy sports.
They're fun, they're social, they're great exercise and so on.
I mean, Lord, I've played or...
I was thinking about this while I got the question.
Sports that I've played in an organized fashion, soccer, squash, I played years of tennis, I was on the swim team, did pretty well, a water polo, I've done water skiing, skydiving.
Lordy.
Lacrosse?
Not much.
But, I mean, it just goes on and on.
I mean, the amount of sports that I've played, I'm a pretty athletic guy.
Anyway, so.
Love sports.
I think the professional sports stuff has just stayed as tribal nonsense.
Okay.
Recent stories about the NSA's shadowy Project Prism imply that government surveillance via technology is increasing.
Do you agree that the Internet is a capitalist invention used to benefit the state?
If we can't trust what is rapidly becoming the paramount distributor of information, media, and resources for youth especially, then all we seem to be is doing with embracing technology and accepting yet another cage.
Well, of course.
I mean, the technology was invented by the government and, well, based upon research in the private sector, and then it was commercialized, I guess, starting in the late 80s.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, this is what happens.
You get progress in the free market, the government takes it over and uses it for evil.
I mean, this is such a principle now, barely even worth repeating.
Technology is created in the free market, and then it is taken over and used for evil by the government.
I mean, when you innovate in the free market, all you're doing is you are giving evil people magic.
So, until we get rid of the government, like in a sort of philosophical, permanent sense, We're just going to continue to feed evil.
You often say that government actions do not reflect the will of the people, but precisely what people do not want.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be a need to be a law to force them to comply.
And I totally agree with that.
What about laws abolishing slavery, violence against women, or child abuse?
At the beginning, could it be virtuous to force bad behavior out of existence?
That would be an argument of freedom.
Okay, so...
Yeah, I mean, so there's this argument that, you know, the government abolished slavery, and so on.
Well...
It's debatable.
I mean, first of all, the government laws are that which created and enabled slavery.
That's really, really important to understand.
There's no slavery without government.
Because if you have to pay the price yourself of catching your own slaves who escape, it quickly becomes economically impossible.
It becomes much cheaper to pay them as laborers than it is to try and cage them where they're constantly trying to escape.
So the fact that you got to socialize the cost of catching and returning the slaves, you got to socialize the cost of the entire slave market and so on and so...
No, it's not possible to have slavery without the government.
And, you know, what happened when the slavery was abolished?
Well, you got Jim Crow laws, you got the welfare state, you got the drafting of blacks, primarily blacks, when it came to various wars.
And of course, there are 600,000 dead Americans in the Civil War who may have some question about the value of their life in producing this kind of stuff.
And of course, very shortly after you abolished slavery, you got fiat currency, which is a very insidious form of slavery, right?
I mean, it's like getting killed by a noxious gas that you can't smell, taste, or anything, rather than with a baseball bat.
Well, the end result is the same.
I mean, we're all enslaved in this nonsense.
We're enslaved through taxation, we're enslaved through inflation, and we're enslaved particularly unborn through national debt.
So the fact that we get to choose our own occupation, but we're still, more than half of our lives are taken from us by force, is not the idea that slavery has ended.
It's shifted to a more productive form, which means that the government can grow even faster.
I would really question that.
So, laws abolishing child abuse.
Child abuse and violence against women has always been pretty much frowned upon.
And certainly, violence against women has been illegal.
This rule of thumb is a complete myth, right?
That you could beat your wife with a stick no bigger than thumb.
It's just an urban myth.
And I accepted it for some time, too.
You can't double-check everything.
It was not true.
Yeah, I don't know.
Laws against child abuse?
We can ban circumcision, I guess.
That's child abuse.
I think government schools are wretchedly difficult and dangerous for children's developing brains, but we force the children to go there.
Certainly, without a doubt, national debt is child abuse, but that's something we're all addicted to.
So, you know, just because something's written down on paper, don't think that it's vanished from the world.
Usually it's just a way of camouflaging it.
I have a question about losing passion.
I went into architecture.
No, I did this one.
Sorry.
Can a libertarianism or voluntarist society have room for borders?
Well, not national borders, no, but property borders, of course.
Really enjoy the videos and podcasts.
I've often heard you refer to Ayn Rand's works, Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead.
Do you think men like John Galt and Howard Rock really exist?
Have you met anyone that comes close?
And most importantly, do you think they would ever have made good fathers?
None of Ayn Rand's heroes ever had children.
How many kids were abandoned by their fathers in their quest for real metal or the perfect motor?
Yeah, I mean, they tend to be workaholics.
They tend to be emotionally cold, and they tend to plan and calculate rather than have genuine warm mammalian instincts.
So I like them as, like, sculpture.
You know, like, I mean, David is a beautiful sculpture, but that doesn't mean you've got to stand there with your balls in the wind sucking your stomach in for your whole life.
I mean, that's a freeze-frame moment in time designed to Appeal to aesthetic beauty rather than something that's...
And Ayn Rand said this.
She said, characters are not recipes for a living.
They are ideals.
No, they don't exist.
They have no histories.
They have no histories.
They have no childhoods.
This is really, really important.
John Galt, Howard Rourke, I mean, the other heroes, they have no childhoods.
Where you do have families, like with Hank Reardon, the families are pathological and destructive.
Where you do have families like Peter Keating and his mom...
The family, the mom is parasitical and destructive.
So Howard Rourke doesn't get calls from a mother he doesn't particularly like and have to deal with that, right?
He's just, he comes, you know, out of, he was just abandoned as a kid, worked his way and has no particular trauma because of that.
So, Ayn Rand herself confessed she did not understand psychology.
So, she didn't understand early childhood.
She was rumored, and I think it's true, but she was rumored to have had an abortion, and that, of course, has a particular relationship to one's capacity to empathize with children.
So, I mean, if you've killed one in your womb, it's a little bit trickier to empathize in the future.
So...
So it is tough.
I think that the focus on abstract ideals rather than intimate human connection is quite difficult and dangerous.
And this is why Ayn Rand's works didn't change the world, because they didn't focus on parenting and early childhood and so on.
I think two kids show up in Gold's Gulch at one point, but it's very much in passing.
And objectivism and libertarianism is not focused on parenting, because it's a lot easier to focus on abstracts, you know, the Federal Reserve and the creature from Jekyll Island, rather than it is to attempt to apply the non-aggression principle in the most important and influential and formative human relationship, which is the parent-child relationship.
I got that pretty early.
I've been working for six or seven years to focus on that and get people to change that because I really do follow the facts and follow the reasoning, which is childhood is the future.
The shape of society is the interactions of early childhood.
That our greatest abstractions usually come from our earliest traumas or happinesses.
And so I think it's great.
She's a wonderful philosopher, fantastic writer, incredible woman, but didn't get it at all in terms of how to actually change the world, which is to change how we treat our children.
You can't reason with people who have no capacity to reason, and the capacity to reason comes out of an untraumatized childhood.
You can watch my series, The Bomb and the Brain, for the proof of that.
FDRURL.com forward slash BIB. Do you have any suggestions on how not to exist in a near constant state ranging from irritation to rage at the short-sightedness of people?
Well, you know, I've been working for 30 years to bring reason to the world, and it's mostly been a failure.
I mean, it's mostly been failure, but that's true of life in general.
Most things that you do fail.
Think of the two best writers in the English language are considered to be Shakespeare and Dickens, and most of their plays and novels are not that great.
even the very best, have a success rate of maybe 10% or 20% of real success in the best stuff that they create.
So if the very, very best we can get is 10% to 20%, then I think for most of us, working at 5% to 10% is pretty much a very high goal.
How many of my videos are really, really successful?
Well, and if you think about how much the Beatles played, they played for years and years before they became successful.
They played more in a year in Germany than most bands play their entire lifetime.
So most of their music playing was simply unsuccessful.
And if you look at, you know, someone like Paul McCartney, who hasn't written a hit in like 30 years, well, most of he had a very concentrated span of like 10 years where he did some amazing, obviously fantastic work.
And, you know, some scatterings of stuff after that.
But the majority of his time writing and playing music is a failure, right?
I mean, again, in terms of, like, his peak success.
So most of what you do in life is going to be a failure.
You've got to make peace with that, otherwise you're just going to feel that...
You know?
And the better you get, the more failures show up, right?
I mean, so if you are a model, I mean, if I get a pimple, who gives a shit, right?
But if I'm a face model who's, you know, attempting to sell cream, I get a pimple, I'm like, I can't work until it goes away or whatever, right?
And God, what if it leaves a scar kind of thing, right?
What if it, you know, so you just become more paranoid.
As you get to the top, failure becomes more problematic.
And then you have succeeded, and then you're worried if you're going to continue to succeed.
Anyway, so So, most people will not listen to reason.
I mean, the percentage of people who will have reason to change their mind, probably not more than one or two percent of the population.
That's why I say it's a multi-generational change.
Most people are too broken.
I mean, it's like trying to dance with a malfunctioning robot.
I mean, you're probably just going to get injured.
So, just to accept that as the reality, I think it's kind of important.
If you have a standard called, people should listen to me, and they don't, then you're going to be constantly frustrated.
I think we're good to go.
At least that might give them some contact with brain matter, but that's not the way the world is.
And people will...
You know, they will get what's coming to them.
Unfortunately, if you don't listen to reason, then you have to learn from bitter experience.
And so if you feel that vengeance needs to be taken against the irrational herd, don't worry.
It will.
It will be taken against the irrational herd.
We suffer through our irrationalities both at a personal level and at a collective level.
Now, it is a shame, of course, that at a collective level we are all tied to the same truck and some blind idiot driver Is causing all of these problems when it comes to, you know, we're all trapped in there and so on.
So when society goes down, it's going to be a huge problem.
But there's things we can do to prepare for that.
And you can look into that, of course, on your own.
I've mentioned that a bunch of times before.
So at least be prepared for interruptions in the food supply, interruptions in the economy and so on.
If it never happens, fantastic.
If it does happen, you know, better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
So even in that kind of crash, we can do far better than the majority.
But no, they will, you know, they will crash, you know?
It's like getting mad at the guy who's not getting a job, doesn't have a lot of money, he's not getting a job, he's sitting home by the pool, you know, watching videos and drinking beer.
You know, oh man, I can't believe I'm getting up and going to work.
Well...
He's going to get what's kind.
He's going to end up broke.
He's going to end up, you know, in a complete mess and legal trouble.
So, you know, people, you know, when I was in my 20s and I was doing all my self-work and I was doing therapy and, you know, lots of people were like, oh, man, you know, basically you're really broken.
You've got to be really broken, Steph, because you have to do all this self-work.
That's terrible for you.
I'm doing great, but I'm so sorry that, you know, oh, you poor guy or whatever, right?
Well, you know, in the 30s and 40s, that's all began to turn around.
People see the results of not doing the self-work compared to me.
So, you know, don't have to worry about, you know, getting mad at people and thinking bad things should happen to them.
Bad things will happen to them.
Really bad things will happen to them who don't listen to reason.
And, you know, I can't say whether that's right or wrong, but people who do wrong in this world gain immediate satisfaction.
But I can see from the people even close to me What happens to people who've done wrong to others and have not had the maturity or sense to make restitution and apologize?
Oh, my God.
It is like, I mean, for people who've done me harm as a child, seeing how their lives have played out, oh, man, I don't have a cruel enough bone in my body to wish the impact that their conscience has, the evisceration, I'm shocked at the devil called the conscience.
It is a horrendous, monstrous being.
So, listen, it's been a pretty long show.
We've got more to do.
But I will take a break.
Thank you so much for listening.
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