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June 30, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:22:36

2418 Freedomain Radio Call In Show June 30th, 2013

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	Good morning, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, June the 30th, 2013.
	I hope that you're doing well.
	I actually did get out to see a movie this week.
	I went to go and see World War Z, or for our American friends, World War Z. Anyway, I'm going to do a review on it.
	I thought it was a very interesting film.
	It is fascinating to watch Brad Pitt's helmet-like hair, completely impervious to all elements of nature.
	I say that out of pure envy, of course.
	But it was an interesting film.
	I thought it was a very zeitgeisty kind of film.
	And so I'll do a review on it later.
	Sorry for the late start, but we are all ready to roll.
	I won't do a big introduction, other than to say we did lose about 10 subscribers.
	Over my last video, at least I think some of it was over my last video, where I talked about the childhood origins of horror films and the philosophy of pornography.
	I think people were disappointed that it was merely the philosophy of pornography and not a demonstration.
	But if you'd like to fill in the gaps left by the subscribers who have left in horrified outrage, then please feel free to sign up at fdrurl.com forward slash donate or just go to freedomandradio.com.
	And click on the subscribe button.
	It is all massively, massively appreciated.
	Donations down a little bit from last month, but I am still not eyeing my toes with a bottle of ketchup in my hand.
	Yet!
	But perhaps soon.
	So, let's move on to the listeners.
	And also, I wanted to mention one other thing, that Mike, the great Michael, who has inspired my hairdo for the last few months, has decided to take over the helm of the Sunday show.
	And...
	After a Mano nipple fight with James, he has conquered and has taken over the elevated post.
	So thanks so much, of course, to James for the last few years for all of the amazing, wonderful, delicious, delectable, deep-fried help that he has provided the show.
	And he has set up the entire technical setup for the Sunday show, which allows for the streaming.
	He's been very gracious in handling the callers.
	And in my diva-like emotional rants, he has been fairly well adept at mailing me the correct medication.
	So thanks to James.
	Of course, thanks to Mike for taking over, at least for the foreseeable future.
	And the show couldn't have been what it was without James.
	And we'll find out what kind of show it is now with Mike, won't we?
	Won't we, Mike?
	Yes, we will.
	All right.
	So if we'd like to bring up the first caller.
	I'm sorry for Jeff was unable to make it today.
	He was unavoidably detained.
	He was actually at the Vatican providing the case against intellectual property.
	And he went through.
	They have these little, I guess, semi-dimensional portals.
	And unfortunately, they found two and I think a third demons in his bow tie.
	So he has been unavoidably detained while they sort of performed some sort of exorcism.
	That will result in him only wearing a bow tie for the next show.
	So we can only hope for video for that.
	So I look forward to have Jeff back.
	But unfortunately, he's actually in transit and was a little confused about his schedule.
	But we will get him back on all too soon.
	So thanks for your patience as we get started.
	I am all ears for the first caller.
	All right, Michael, you're the first caller today.
	Go ahead.
	Yes.
	Hello.
	Hello, Michael.
	Hello.
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, please go ahead.
	Yes, excellent.
	Hi, Steph.
	I was going to ask you today about the topic of the ethics of involving children in political protest.
	So I had a couple of scenarios for you, and it would be interesting to see what sort of yardstick that you can use in order to determine what is ethical and what's not ethical.
	So I had one scenario of fanatical Christians holding signs in front of an abortion clinic, and the children are probably around about the age of five, so they're sort of aware of the people around them and their reaction to them.
	However, they're still being cajoled by their parents to protest and hold signs.
	And then there's another scenario which actually happened here in Australia a while ago.
	There was a guy, a pretty popular guy on our morning show, and he said something about mothers breastfeeding in public.
	And then, you know, the next morning a whole group of mothers came out and protested on national live TV feeding their babies.
	So they were there feeding the babies.
	I'm guessing not feeding their babies with spoons.
	That would be my guess.
	That they were having up a whole buffet shelf of boobs.
	Is that right?
	Yes.
	No, no, no.
	The babies were being fed by exposed friends.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Made for good TB. But yeah, still using the baby as a political tool.
	Even though the baby may not be aware of what's going on.
	I was just interested to get your take on is it ethical to use those children in that way?
	Well, I think for the babies and the breastfeeding, I mean all the babies care is that they've got a face full of boob and some good nutrients and antibodies flowing into their system.
	I don't think that there's any particular problem with that.
	I think involving a five-year-old in an abortion protest is not great to say the least.
	This is something that a child I mean, if you've explained abortion in great detail to a five-year-old, I think that is wildly inappropriate.
	It is way too much information to bring to bear on a tender and developing mind.
	So if you have explained the entire process and causality and legality of abortion to a five-year-old, I think that's way off base.
	Way off base.
	And I think it's incredibly destructive.
	So if the child's there with knowledge, that's really bad.
	If the child's there without knowledge, then they're just a prop.
	And I think that's not fair to the child.
	The other thing, too, is you don't know how these protests are going to go.
	You don't know if people are going to be arrested.
	You don't know if there might be some violence.
	You don't know what might happen.
	And I think bringing children into that environment is not great.
	But I think, to me, the most important aspect of the politicization of childhood has to do with environmentalism.
	Environmentalism is inflicted upon children in truly apocalyptic, destructive, abusive, and catastrophic ways from incredibly early on in their lives.
	And this idea, you know, that the planet is dying, that the oceans are dying, that pollution is, you know, human beings are a cancer on the planet and so on.
	And, you know, we have only minutes to live at time.
	And this is just terrible.
	Like, it got to the point...
	Like, I love nature shows.
	I think nature is gorgeous and beautiful and mysterious and fascinating and all this kind of stuff.
	But it got to the point where I actually have given up watching a good chunk of nature shows because I simply...
	Cannot bear at the end of every single nature show is the same goddamn thing at the end of every single nature show It's some guy saying but these precious species are being hunted into extinction by those awful bipeds known as human beings Oceans have only minutes to live and they have pictures of oil spills and then of course inevitably they talk about global warming and the this this this This catastrophic self-laceration of the planet that human beings are supposed to be engaged in.
	And I would just like to enjoy nature without being lectured to about the imminent demise of the planet.
	It really does put a slight downward spin on my enjoyment of nature.
	And, you know, it's not that I don't believe we should protect the environment.
	I think protecting the environment is very important.
	What bothers me, of course, is that it is simply always and forever.
	A call for more government, more power, more control.
	And it is just another way that the state grows.
	And nobody ever talks about the degree to which the state is facilitating the pillaging and rape of the planet for the sake of short-term profits.
	I mean, particularly democracies.
	They just want to generate short-term profits at the expense of long-term sustainability.
	And so if environmentalists were really responsible, they would look into free market solutions much more often and talk about them much more often.
	But they're not.
	They're just the usual state toady fear mongers who have us hand over our liberties and remaining independence to the power of the state.
	I mean, the war on environmental predation is functionally, propagandistically indistinguishable from the war on terror.
	It's just a way of creating an endless battle that can never be fought, which allows us to believe that we're surrendering our liberties for a good cause.
	And this propagandization of children about The imminent demise of the planet is truly wretched and one of the reasons that I would have a great deal of problems with any teacher who started teaching my daughter about the dire state of the planet and how we're all about to die.
	That is simply something that is unbelievably destructive to put into children's heads.
	Children take that stuff very seriously.
	And it has a huge effect on their capacity to plan for the long term.
	So for me, I think that what you're talking about is pretty minor relative to the propagandization that goes into environmentalism, how it's inflicted upon children, how they all have to sit there and sing about the birds and the flowers and the bees and how we're killing them all for the sake of capitalism, which is all nonsense and a complete lie, but really does give them a strong sense that life is not sustainable.
	That the world around them is monstrous.
	Like I was just reading about how there are 25% more shows this year about serial killers than there was last year.
	And one of the reasons why you see so much violence on television these days and why we have this addiction to serial killers is because violent crime is going down.
	So if you actually look at the world, you can...
	I feel a lot safer and better about the world as a whole.
	And unfortunately, if you look at the media, you must be kept in a constant state of anxiety and fear, particularly of your fellow men, and with the idea that the government is your savior.
	And I just wanted to point that out, that violent crime has gone down enormously rapidly over the last decade, decade and a half, and the media in its ever helpful way is rushing in to fill the gap With ever-increasing depictions of serial killers around the world, none of whom actually end up happening to be in uniform, which is, of course, why there's no truth in advertising or no truth in propaganda.
	But sorry for that minor tension, but that's sort of where I would stand on those issues, if that helps.
	Yeah, so I was sort of looking at these pretty obvious examples of a protest going on.
	Behind our backs, it's going on in the classrooms and on TV and the nature shows.
	There's always that underlying message that humans are sort of a scourge or a virus that are affecting the planet.
	Is it ethical to propagandise people with a message that is pro-liberty or pro-freedom?
	I think there was an example, I was talking to someone and they mentioned an example in Mexico that in their telenovelas they started, the government asked or forced the TV producers to put in people learning to read and write.
	So the characters instead of just, you'd still have coma patients and things like that in these novellas, but you also have characters learning how to read and write and showing how the benefits that happen to them.
	And they recorded like a massive increase in the people, the number of people attending reading and writing classes.
	So I guess my question is, is it ethical to Send out these messages that they don't appeal to reason or people's judgment, but they sort of slide in there into the subconscious, but it may have a positive impact on their life.
	So I guess, especially with children, is it ethical to appeal to that?
	Yeah, I mean, providing positive messages through art is, I think, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that.
	I mean, we all learn a lot from that kind of stuff.
	I mean, I started reading Ayn Rand's fiction before I started reading her nonfiction, that alone are the philosophical.
	No, I shouldn't say that.
	I read Nietzsche beforehand.
	But for the most part, the artistic depiction of excellence or moral high ideals is a fine thing, and I think there's nothing wrong with that at all.
	As long as it's backed up by good arguments, and as long as the artistic depiction of virtue is a gateway drug to the actual study of virtue, and I think that's fine.
	The question, of course, in Mexico, which is covered up by the propaganda, I would imagine, is why are so many people not I mean, the government's in control of the education of children in Mexico, so why the hell aren't they able to read?
	And what is their motivation to read if, for instance, the welfare state in Mexico, which is very strong, is going to provide them with an income without working?
	And what is their incentive to read if there are massive barriers to starting your own business or becoming any kind of entrepreneur, which would be a huge incentive to read.
	You know, it costs hundreds of dollars to start a business in Mexico, which for most poor people is millions of dollars to us.
	It doesn't sort of mean anything to them.
	In terms of a barrier they can surmount.
	So the question to me, which is more fundamental than should we propagandize people learning how to read, is why the hell don't they learn how to read already?
	And the answer would be, I would assume, you know, state barriers in terms of terrible education that they're forced to attend and that because they're forced to attend and pay for, they can't afford private education.
	And a massive...
	I mean, if you get out of the way of people, they can do amazing things.
	And so why is it they don't have to read?
	Because they probably have very few economic opportunities because of the amount of restrictions.
	I mean, as soon as you get wealthy people in charge of a government, they start erecting barriers to the poor people.
	Poor people are always something that is the thorn in the paw of the lion of the rich because poor people are willing to work really damn hard and they're willing to accept a lot less pay than rich people.
	And so they are always going, there's a constant wheel, right?
	In a free market society, there's a constant wheel.
	People get rich And what do they do?
	They start raising their standard of living.
	They start spending a lot of money.
	They start buying their fancy cars and their fancy houses and so on.
	And then what happens is they find themselves unable to compete with the poor who then start the next cycle.
	And this is all to the efficiency and growth of the wealth of the economy as a whole.
	But the problem is as soon as people But realize, and it doesn't take long for rich people to realize this, that they can use the power of the state to start creating licenses, to start creating barriers to entry, to start creating, you know, formal professional qualifications that you have to pass in order to compete.
	And the moment that they realize that if they can tie Educational dollars to property values, then they are immediately going to ensure that the poor get the worst possible education.
	And so you give them a bad education, you give them a bad environment, you encourage independence among single moms so the dads aren't around, which means that the children are going to be far less economically successful.
	You raise a whole bunch of licenses and barriers and regulatory barriers to competing with the rich, and lo and behold, the rich can keep their high wealth and their high income without worrying about You know, the poor people jumping in and competing with them, and thus forcing them to lower their standard of living to compete with the poor.
	I mean, this is natural, and I'm sure this is what has happened in Mexico as well, which is why you get this Upper middle class that is very political and very small, and you get this massive amount of poor people who, in any free market society, would outcompete the rich very quickly and very easily.
	And, I mean, you know, rich people get kind of lazy.
	You know, the second generation, third generation, they don't have the same fire in the belly, but the poor, who are ambitious, have huge fire in the belly.
	And so the first order of business when you have a government for the rich is to take control of the government and ensure that the poor can't compete with them.
	And I'm sure that is something to do with why there's illiteracy among the poor And it's not going to be solved by a soap opera.
	Yeah, I guess it comes back to why they're watching the soap operas during the day anyway.
	Right, because they've got the bread and circuses, which is their consolation prize for not having freedom, independence and economic opportunity.
	Did you have any other questions?
	Mm-hmm.
	I actually had a really interesting dream the other night, if you'd be prepared to hear me out.
	That I don't think I can do because we have a lot of people in the line, but if you'd like to hang on to it, we can perhaps do it next.
	I love doing the dreams, but we have a lot of people on the line, and dreams are usually very lengthy, so if you can write it down, hang on to it.
	Maybe we can do it next week.
	Yeah, now I've got it written down.
	Beautiful.
	Okay.
	Thanks for your time.
	Dear God, did I actually do the first caller in less than an hour?
	Oh my God!
	Now we must observe 28 minutes of silence in honor and respect of the first caller being disposed of in less than an hour.
	That should bring us to an hour, right?
	Alright, sorry, next caller.
	Alright, DeSalle, you were up next.
	Go ahead.
	Hi.
	Hi, Stefan.
	I can hear you.
	Please go ahead.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, thanks for your work.
	I've been listening to you for, let's say, one year.
	I have got some kind of self-knowledge, but thanks to you for your work, and I think your disease would go faster than we expect.
	Today I'm trying to ask you about this thing called involvement in politics, because...
	Called what, sorry?
	Involvement in politics.
	Oh, involvement in politics.
	Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, I think that when you say that when we raise our children, like, we...
	Without healing, spanking, they got like they will be moral and then they don't like to initiate force against others.
	But, and let's say that happened and let's say that 50% of people were as good and they became like good guys.
	But after 50%, the other 50%, they are not like Reds.
	So, like what we say, that philosophical way.
	So, I think after that, The people who like to be free, there will be 50%, and who don't like to be free, let's say there will be 50%.
	So, the 50% would like to vote, and the other 50% don't like to vote.
	So, I was thinking at that time, there will be pretty much conflict among, like, the country would split on two, like, some kind of those kind of thing.
	And then, if Let's say the example of Turkey, it was, I don't know if the people were 50-50, kind of 50% supporting the demonstrator and 50% the government.
	Same kind of situation happens and then let's say we, who wants a free society, comes for demonstration and then the government starts using force.
	And, like, what happened in Turkey?
	Like, they're using weapons, chemical weapons, and deterring people everywhere.
	So I was thinking about that.
	What do you think it happens after that?
	If no one, like, Ron Paul, is in...
	I was thinking, like, if...
	I don't mean the government, but just the representatives, like the senators, if there are enough senators in, like, government, then...
	They could tell the president at that time that don't use force or some kind of thing, but I don't know what you think about that, like involvement in politics.
	So what you're trying to do, if I understand it correctly, is you're trying to divine the effects of truth and reason and virtue, right?
	Like, what's going to happen if we don't hit our children?
	What's going to happen if we reject violence in our lives?
	What's going to happen if we proclaim the virtue of the non-aggression principle and the respect for property rights?
	What is the effect going to be?
	What is the ripple effect going to be?
	And how is it going to play out?
	That's sort of your question, right?
	No, but I was thinking there would be, like, if nobody involved in politics, like good guys, like Ron Paul and you and me, or let's say who knows the pre-market things, then like if 50% of us are good guys and let's say we don't want to rule,
	but other 50% like someday after two generations, that kind of thing happened, then there will be much more blood set, like there will be kind of war, I think, because If there are, like, representatives like Ron Paul or good guys are in office, then they can actually stop the bad guys from the top using force to the demonstrator who want free society or something like that.
	So to prevent this kind of war situation or, I don't know, I'm thinking too much or I don't know.
	Well, again, you're trying to figure out What the effects are or what the strategy is for the spread of virtue and reason and philosophy in the world.
	And I would disagree that this is possible to predict or plan for or control in any way shape or form.
	Right?
	So when we get a message like that we accept or we understand is virtuous and good.
	Non-aggression principle, let's just say.
	Non-aggression principle.
	We get that message and Then the first thing we generally tend to do after we accept it is to worry about its implementation and to try and figure out in the future what's going to happen in terms of how this is going to spread in society and what the effects are going to be of various people believing it and what strategies we should take for implementing it.
	And I think that fundamentally that is a political way of approaching a philosophical problem and philosophy, I believe, rejects politics as a whole.
	What you do, in my opinion, is forget about what happens.
	Forget about the infinite domino falling down effect of what happens when you proclaim virtue.
	Because it's way out of your control.
	It doesn't matter.
	You can't control the responses of the bad people who don't like the spread of virtue.
	You can't figure out how it's going to play out.
	To try and strategize, Is, I think, irrational.
	I think what you can do is you can say, well, if I accept the non-aggression principle, I'm first going to enact it in my own life.
	If I accept the non-aggression principle, I am going to proclaim its virtue with, you know, rational examples and good reasoning to the people around me.
	And people are either going to accept it or they're going to reject it.
	And if they accept it, fantastic.
	We're brothers and it's spread.
	If we reject it, if they reject it, then you can make your choices about the degree to which you want to have contact with people who want you thrown in jail for following your conscience.
	That is going to take a lifetime.
	Simply living it and being vocal where appropriate in spreading it, that's going to take you a lifetime.
	The idea that those of us outside the state can strategize how to control the state, Is a delusion.
	The state and its adherents have adapted to political control literally for tens of thousands of years.
	The state has evolved in terms of propaganda, in terms of power structures, in terms of dependent classes, all of these things has adapted itself for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
	You know, I think, what, Homo sapiens, a couple of hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years old, and it's had a political or hierarchical violence structure for all of that time.
	Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution has allowed it to adapt itself and evolve itself into a perfect beast of control, which is why it's so successful all over the world.
	And the idea that we can somehow go in and take this over and turn it to good, I think is simply a way of inviting us into inconsequentiality.
	You can't change the state.
	You can't go in and make it a good organization.
	You can't go in and control its violence.
	You can't go in and control its effect any more than you can join the mafia and turn it into a benevolent charity.
	That's not what the mafia is for.
	That's not what the government is for.
	We proclaim virtue, we try to live independent of the state, and we reject the use of aggression in our own lives, and we spread it where appropriate and where possible, as powerfully as we can.
	That's the work of a lifetime.
	And I believe that is something that you can actually achieve.
	You can control your own actions, you cannot control other people.
	And so you can always invent a disaster scenario for anything that you want.
	Right?
	You can always invent a disaster scenario for anything that you want.
	But you cannot rationally live your life according to disaster scenarios.
	You can't because they can be made up for anything that you want.
	Well, I could quit smoking But, you know, but if I quit smoking, maybe I'll get so stressed that I'll crash my car.
	So I better smoke.
	I better keep smoking.
	You know, maybe I'll get so stressed that I don't notice a bus coming along the street.
	Or maybe if I quit smoking, I won't sleep and then I'll be so tired that I fall down some stairs and break my...
	You can always invent a disaster scenario to make you do anything, but it doesn't really have anything to do with reality.
	The idea that you're going to get good people In government, and then those good people in government are going to restrain the immorality of government, I think is a fantasy.
	I don't see where it's happened in the past.
	I don't see where, you know, I mean the Soviet Union didn't fall because you had good people in government.
	The Soviet Union fell because Without price, there's no economic efficiency and they simply ran out of money and the dictatorship crumbled.
	And they didn't even have money to pay the troops, which is why they didn't suppress the population and try for another round of dictatorship.
	And, of course, I do believe that there had been improvements in child rearing in Russia.
	During the course of communism in some ways, certainly in Eastern Europe, there had been significant improvements, and you can actually trace the development of more benevolent forms of government into a rejection of violence against children a generation or two before.
	You can check out Robin Grills' book, sorry, not the actress, the psychologist, Robin Grills' book, Parenting for a Peaceful World, for more on that.
	But just focus on the personal virtues and spreading those in your community, and for heaven's sakes, do not jump into the open mouth of The great white shark called the state and think you can grab its fins from the inside and make it swim where you want to.
	You'll just end up digested and shit out in a little stream.
	No, but I just, yeah, that's correct.
	I know about, I don't think I get involved in the state like anyway, but I think that the people don't understand the language other than politics, like in some part from where I come.
	They think that politics is the greatest good, and then if I want...
	Actually, I tend to come to this kind of philosophy about truth due to Ron Paul, because I was also the same kind of guy.
	I mean, do you understand what I mean?
	That if I start speaking only the language of a philosopher or economist, they don't give a seat.
	They just...
	I don't know if...
	I don't know, but I'm going to...
	Okay, look, let me give you another way of approaching this, if you want.
	So, if you want to get involved in the state to reduce the power of the state, you can test this theory quite easily in your own life.
	Everybody knows somebody who is taking benefits from the state, right?
	I mean, welfare, child supplements, tax refunds, whatever it's going to be, they're taking some sort of benefit, getting some sort of money from the state.
	Some sort of benefit from the state.
	Now clearly, if we are to shrink the state, people must voluntarily give up their benefits from the state.
	I mean, of course, right?
	Because if everybody continues to want all the benefits from the state, the state will only grow and never shrink.
	So if you have the power of rhetoric, if you have the power of personality, if you have the power of persuasion to the point where you can achieve, I don't mean you, but anyone can achieve power in politics by telling people to give up state benefits, Then you can try that first and foremost in those around you.
	So find somebody who's on welfare and talk them out of taking welfare.
	Find somebody who's on Social Security or old age pensions and talk them out of taking those benefits.
	And if you find that impossible, in other words, if people say, no, I'm going to continue to take these benefits, then you know exactly what the path of the politician is.
	Because the path of the politician is going to have to at some point say, look, we have been living beyond our means for about...
	Thirty generations, and in particular over the last two or three generations, we have been living way beyond our means.
	We've racked up this huge debt.
	It is absolutely unfair for the children to be handed this debt, so we are going to have to put in the kind of austerity that will make your head spin.
	I'm very sorry, but if you live beyond your means, you have to accept the consequences of our actions.
	You know, how many times did we say to our children, Oh, well, if you blew all of your allowance on candy, then guess what?
	You don't get any more money until next week.
	This is going to teach you some sort of financial discipline.
	Oh, my God, the hypocrites that we are, most of us.
	Right, so whoever's going to have to say, oh, the national debt, I'm sorry, that's the problem is not the politicians, the problem is your greed.
	Everybody knows that we're spending beyond our means, everybody knows that this is unsustainable, and I'm here to tell you that it's your fault as a citizen for not pushing back when the government offers you goodies, for accepting goodies, for rioting when the goodies are withheld.
	You know, you two-year-old greed mongers, which is actually an insult to two-year-olds, are the ones feasting upon the next generation like a bunch of vampires, and I'm here to tell you we have to stop.
	We have to stop.
	This is completely disrespectful to the next generation.
	It is completely disrespectful to math, to reality, to virtue.
	To be these kinds of parasites on the unborn is utterly unjust and unjustified.
	And so we have to stop.
	Go make that speech.
	And if people are like, yeah, you're right!
	This has been a terrible, terrible mistake that we've made.
	We better give up a whole lot of these benefits and live in vastly reduced circumstances to not pile our debts upon the next generation.
	Well, if you can make that case as a politician and people will vote you in, then it's possible.
	But you can try that case in people in your own life.
	You'll have much more chance to, you'll have a much greater ability to, like, so for instance, right, so teachers get summers off, government school teachers get summers off.
	It's completely ridiculous.
	It's completely unjust.
	I mean, they work five or six hours a day during the week, and then they get all their summers off, not to mention massive pension and healthcare benefits and so on.
	So all you have to do is to say, look, at the very least, at the very least, what you should do is spend your summers tutoring poor kids for free.
	I mean, you can't go and work in the school because the school is closed, but go and tutor poor kids for free.
	And that's a way of paying back these unjust benefits that you're getting.
	Now, if you can convince your aunt or your sister or whatever to go and tutor poor kids for free in the summer as a way of giving back to a society that they're kind of pillaging from, Well, great.
	And you'll have much more chance doing that with your aunt, your uncle, your sister than you will with some anonymous person if you're making a political speech.
	But I can guarantee you it's not going to happen.
	Nobody is going to give up these unjust benefits.
	We have become too petty, too greedy.
	The statism has, like a cast around our arm, rendered us completely weak and pathetic.
	As a culture, we have become dependent, greedy, grasping, whiny, entitled, narcissistic, and incredibly parasitical upon the innocent.
	And this is what happens with the state.
	I mean, it weakens human beings.
	Any kind of moral fiber just vanishes from them, and we...
	As a culture that has overthrown the centrality of superstition in our political process, separated church from state, created the free market, founded the scientific method, and gone through incredible hardships, have now just become a bunch of hysterical, whiny, incompetent, desperate, pitiful people.
	And you can't just, I mean, the generation is a complete waste.
	You can't repair them.
	You can't fix them.
	They've just become too whiny and entitled.
	So the idea that you can somehow get elected Without lying to the people is ridiculous.
	And people who think that I'm wrong, hey, you know, please, prove me wrong.
	Go talk to your people around you.
	Get them to give up their unjust government benefits.
	Then have them all call in.
	Tell me how it worked.
	I'll give you the microphone for a whole Sunday show, for 10 Sunday shows if you want, where you can bring the message out that has been so effective in your personal life in getting people to give up their unjust government benefits.
	And I will be happy to give you the biggest platform that philosophy's ever had through this show to make your case to the people.
	And then I will kiss your feet as being somebody who's entirely wrong and biased and ridiculous in his arguments and in his predictions.
	But if you can't do that, then forget about trying to gain power.
	Because if you try to gain power in government by telling people they have to give up their unjust benefits, you're never going to get voted in.
	And if you can't change the people's minds around you, who you've got lifelong bonds and history with and endless opportunities to talk with, you certainly aren't going to be able to do it in political speeches and on the radio and so on.
	The people have become so weak that all they want to be is flattered.
	All they want to be is lied to.
	I mean, we're completely addicted to fantasy.
	I mean, the fantasy of the state as virtue, of violence as goodness, we've become so addicted to that that You know, our virtues have become like the teeth of a meth addict, just brittle and falling out.
	And to my mind, this is beyond repair.
	And this is why we have to focus on intergenerational solutions and forget about politics.
	I mean, either you lie to get in, in which case you've just, I mean, God, I mean, I don't know what kind of stinky ass life you live by lying to people to their face and flattering the incompetent masses for years in order to gain power and then somehow reverse and think you're not just going to face a revolt and get kicked out.
	I mean, Jesus, look what happened to Thatcher.
	She didn't Said a poll tax and then she had a revolt which was minor relative to what she wanted to do.
	It's just not going to work.
	The people are too corrupted to listen to the truth as a whole and particularly from politicians.
	All they want to do is be told that they're great, that they deserve everything, that there are no problems and just to be lied to and flattered.
	And this is the sad little specimens we've become.
	But I know that's genuinely good people who think they can do good for the society.
	They're taking the political path as the highest, like, good thing to do.
	So I was thinking, like, and I try to talk with them, like, those kind of people who think that the best social work is, like, politics.
	I try to talk with them that the government or, let's say, the politics in general, it's like the wind.
	And I say that the wind is thunder.
	It try to take all the...
	Everything from the society.
	And they say that, no, no, no, stop.
	It's the pillar of a house.
	And then, what?
	And I cannot, like, talk with them, like, anymore.
	I tell them that voting is kind of, like, forcing others indirectly, but they don't listen.
	So, I don't know what's the next step I do.
	I just speak, like, post in Facebook, speak, or...
	Do something that's valuable.
	What do you think?
	What do you suggest?
	I don't know.
	Well, I mean, the odds of finding people who can think in your immediate circle, probably approximately the odds of finding an albino under your bed.
	It's not something that I would, if your bed is welded to the floor.
	So, I mean, the number of people who can actually think, and I don't mean by that that they're trained, but people who, when faced with new information, Have the capacity to pause in their evaluation of things and to try and incorporate new information into their belief system.
	I mean, it's one in ten thousand, maybe one in a thousand if you're really lucky.
	And so the odds of finding somebody who can think in your Blood relative circle, it's very, very low.
	I mean, I'm sorry, this is just the reality of things.
	It's like saying, well, I'm only going to be friends with people who, like David Bowie, have different colored eyes.
	And then saying, well, I keep talking to all these people who have the same colored eyes, and it's not working out.
	It's like, well, if you're looking for something that rare, you've got to cast your net wider, which means you have to join social groups, you have to get out of the internet, you have to try and find people who can think.
	And try and set up meetup groups around.
	I mean, if you live in any reasonably sized city, you know, 50,000, 100,000 or anything larger than that, yeah, there might be a dozen people in a city of 100,000 who can think, in which case, they're as lonely as you are, they're as frustrated as you are by talking to the Grim Braindead statues of their immediate circle.
	So, cast your net on the internet and try and find people like that.
	I mean, we who have the tribe called Thought, which is really the opposite of a tribe, we who have the tribe called Thought have got to shoot up flares, because we sure as hell ain't going to find each other in the trackless wastes of modern zombie empty-headed nonsense.
	So...
	Don't imagine you can somehow statistically find it in your immediate circle from history.
	Maybe you can, but the odds are pretty low.
	But to satisfy your need for intelligent conversation, you just have to cast your net wider.
	Those of us who can read, those of us who can think, It's like we're cast back in time to a savanna of letterless savages and it's really, I mean, don't pretend that people can think who've clearly shown to you that they can't and will actually oppose and attack any kind of thought.
	And just cast your net wider, go out on the internet, try and find people, you know, but as long as you are going to an empty buffet thinking you can somehow eat, all you're going to do is slowly starve to death.
	It's time to find a new restaurant.
	Yeah.
	But what about, like, if I know some people are really good and they want to take, like, the path of politics, then what do I say to them?
	Well, look, I'm going to have to move on to the next caller because I keep giving you answers and you keep asking me what the answer is.
	So either my answers aren't working for you or they're not listening.
	But either way, I've got to move on to the next caller.
	But thank you so much for your questions.
	I certainly wish you the best of luck.
	Have a listen to this again because I've given you a whole bunch of different approaches to try and solve this problem.
	And I get the sense that the despair is you're like, okay, that's fine, but how do I fix my immediate circle?
	You can't.
	Okay, that's fine, but how do I fix my immediate circle?
	You can't.
	Okay, that's fine, but how do I fix my immediate circle, or what do I do?
	So I've given you my answers.
	They may be bad answers, they may be wrong answers, but have a listen again, and I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	But thank you so much for your input.
	Yeah, thanks.
	Thanks for your great work.
	Yeah, bye-bye.
	All right, Daniel, you're up next.
	Hey guys!
	Hello!
	I guess you can hear me pretty well.
	So let me start by telling you a little bit about myself.
	I'm a little bit nervous, maybe you can hear it.
	So I've been searching the truth, or let's say the truth, for about three years.
	I'm in my early twenties and living in Germany.
	And I've been learning stuff a lot about human behavior and psychology as well as propaganda and manipulation by certain institutions and stuff.
	And somehow over the years I'm feeling pretty masked about my friends when I'm around them because they're all like...
	I'm sorry, pretty what about my friends?
	I'm feeling masked about my friends.
	Oh, masked.
	So you have to cover up your true thoughts and feelings?
	Yeah, right, right, right.
	Because most of my friends are kind of propagandized and they believe all the things they have said by media and government and stuff.
	They don't really possess the ability to criticize or critically think about stuff like that.
	And it's really bothering me because I have the feeling I have no one to talk to about stuff that's really concerning me.
	And I can't really openly speak about so-called truth I've found over the years.
	And I can't also relax and hang out and watch TV with them because I just see through bullshit that's on the TV. For example, two days ago or something I was watching TV with my friend and it was some dance show, I don't know, where you have three jury members and some guys are dancing and whatnot.
	I could see, because I learned a lot about human behavior, I could see that the jury is not authentically judging the people, but instead watching what the producer is saying.
	You know what I mean?
	Because usually the jury is set up by, I don't know, three people, and they all say what they think about the performance.
	And then they just say, okay, that was good or that was not good.
	But I could see that they're lying.
	Like some weird emotional act was judged very good.
	But while they said it was good, they were just shook their heads and stuttering, saying, oh yeah, that was really good.
	And they let them go to the next round.
	But I could see that they were lying, you know?
	And my friends couldn't see that and they just said, oh, well, that was unexpected and stuff like that.
	But things like that are really bothering me because I can't enjoy watching TV anymore or hanging around with my friends, you know?
	And what's your question?
	Yeah, my question is if you ever experience something like that or if you have any Any comment on how I could deal with that?
	What do you think?
	Do you think I've ever experienced anything like that?
	Yeah, probably a bit.
	Yeah, of course.
	But how did you deal with that?
	I mean, I like my friends and I can talk about a lot of things with them, but When I see them just blindly obeying stuff like that, it makes me angry and it kind of starts to destroy friendship, you know?
	It's really bothering me.
	The example that you gave of, you know, I'm not going to make any particular jokes about Germans blindly following authority because I think those jokes have all been made before.
	It makes you angry.
	It makes most of us scared.
	But this example that you gave is somewhat innocuous, right?
	I mean, in that this doesn't do you any particular harm if a dance competition is judged non-objectively.
	I mean, it's a pretty innocuous example, but it must mean something deeper for you, right?
	In Germany, I think a couple of years ago, they were talking about adding a 1% tax to men or to single people, people who weren't married and who weren't having children.
	Of course, this is going to be the next step in attempting to deal with the demographic winter, particularly in Europe, although it's certainly happening here in Canada and to a smaller degree in the United States.
	So if your friends were all like, yeah, we should have a 5% tax on unmarried people who don't have kids or whatever, then that's something where people are going to take your money by force, whereas this is a...
	Dance show, judging.
	Does that make sense?
	So you gave me an example of a blindness among your friends that is no harm to you directly, if that makes any sense?
	Yeah, yeah, right.
	Yeah, you're right because when I see this blindness in those, I don't know, relaxing activities I can just assume that this blindness also Like, applies to stuff that's, in the end, concerning me.
	Like, as you said, they're just saying, okay, we need more tax on these people and less on these people and stuff, and they just don't see through that offer, then they just plan to say, yeah, that's really good, the government says it, so it must be true and stuff like that.
	And in the end, I'm paying more or something, or I'm paying But not for people that are not entitled to that money.
	I don't know.
	It really sucks because I think people lost the ability to critically think and to just see through manipulation.
	And in the end, it's just unfair society, I think.
	Well, sorry, let me be a bit clear.
	It may give you some sympathy, but also some resolution.
	People have not lost the ability to critically think.
	People are born with the ability to critically think.
	People are punished for critical thinking.
	When you bring critical thinking to people, what you're doing is you're evoking all of the punishments that they experience as children for true critical thinking.
	So if they were raised religious, they had doubts about the existence of non-existent things that make no sense.
	They had doubts about the virtue of a god who drowns Infants in the crib because their parents are not obeying his arbitrary commandments.
	They have doubts about a book that condones slavery and child rape and so on, and the murder and rape of innocent civilians in a town that's been conquered.
	They have questions, and they ask those questions, and they are attacked and mocked and humiliated and punished for having those questions.
	A child who is hit by a mom when the mom says, don't hit.
	Has some critical questions to ask of that mother, which is why is it bad for me at the age of five to hit someone, but it's really great for you at the age of 35 to hit someone.
	How has that hit me, right?
	Why is it bad for me to hit a child as a child, but for you to hit a child as an adult is somehow virtuous and so on.
	These are all questions that Children want to ask their parents.
	I know this for a fact because my daughter is continually asking me these kinds of questions.
	She's looking for, not looking for like trying to find, but just curious about my level of integrity with the values that I put forward, right?
	When I say that we don't use aggression to get what we want, she's constantly scanning to find out if I'm actually using aggression.
	She's trying to find out if I have integrity or if I'm just using rules to control her.
	And so she's constantly asking me critical questions about what it is that I do and what it is I believe and how it is that I implement things and so on.
	So she's born with the, and I haven't told her, listen, it's really important for you to question what it is that I do and to compare my ideals with my behavior and blood.
	I mean, this is just what she does naturally.
	Skepticism, science, philosophy, critical thinking, these are as innate to our species as, you know, four fingers and a thumb on each hand.
	And...
	This is what must be actively attacked, criticized, mocked, humiliated and punished repeatedly in children.
	So it's not that they, you know, just somehow lost, like they misplaced their keys, they just lost the ability to critically think.
	They were born with this birthright, with this ability, with this massive necessity to critically think.
	And it was punished and attacked out of them by parents, by teachers, by preachers and other authority figures in their lives.
	And what was given in return were grades and toys and knickknacks and video games and movies and, you know, the empty, smiling, vacuous pat-pat on the head that comes from people who've successfully crushed yet another tender young human spirit.
	So, they haven't just lost themselves, they have been methodically broken on the wheel of lies of superstition and culture and nationalism and general adult brutal hypocrisy.
	All hypocrisy results in brutality because the hypocrisy that doesn't enforce itself through brutality doesn't last.
	And so they're broken.
	They're wounded.
	I mean, I look at most people like I look at the Chinese women of the 19th century who had their feet broken, smashed up, and their toes curled in in a series of incredibly excruciating contortions.
	Their toes curled into their feet, and their feet were bound and so on.
	And I look at people hobbling around.
	I don't say, well, they just misplaced their healthy feet.
	I see...
	And recognize that their natural feet were curved, smashed, broken, and the bones were contorted and they can now only hobble around in great agony with their toes smashed into their heels in a permanent way that can't be fixed.
	And that's fundamentally not the problem.
	The problem is not that people...
	Have been broken.
	The problem is that they think they're not, right?
	Because if you don't remember out of trauma the degree to which your mind was smashed up by your culture and you hang around other people whose minds are all smashed up and you watch TV and watch news broadcasts and read people on the internet whose minds were all smashed up by culture, Then you don't feel smashed up anymore.
	You feel normal.
	This is normal.
	And you feel normal by associating yourself with everyone who's been smashed up the same way.
	And most people are kind of smashed up the same way.
	And so, you can look at them, I think, with some great sympathy.
	Unfortunately, those whose brains are smashed up, one of the first things to go is the knowledge that you've been smashed up.
	Like, it doesn't work to break people if they know that they've been broken.
	The whole point of breaking people It's so that they love Big Brother in the Winston Smith 1984 way.
	The whole point is not that they pretend to love Big Brother, not that they can fake it, not that they can mount the words but not feel the sentiments.
	The whole point is that they must be broken to the point where they genuinely love Big Brother and they have nothing but contempt for their former errors and they would betray exactly the same people but voluntarily this time that you had to fight to get them to betray before.
	I mean, the story of 1984 is the story of childhood.
	It is not the story of a future dystopia.
	It is the story of all too many children's actual childhood and how they grow up to...
	I mean, the clue is the word big brother, right?
	That this is a family structure that is being talked about.
	So, with your friends, I mean, we live in a world of broken-brained zombies.
	I mean, this is This is a spoiler for World War Z. I'll do more of this in the review.
	So, cover your ears if you haven't seen the movie and want to be surprised.
	But in World War Z, the zombies are everywhere and multiplying.
	And the way to protect yourself from the zombies is to make yourself very sick.
	Well, this is conformity with an insane culture, that the only way you can pass unnoticed among those whose brains have been broken to the point where they're actually breaking other people's brains now is to pretend that you are equally as broken, to cheer with the soccer teams, to sing the hymns to the state called national anthems with everyone else, and to shut your mouth when people say the most ludicrous, destructive, and sometimes evil stuff, to pretend that you are a zombie.
	It's the best way to survive in a world of zombies.
	And the moment that you say, I'm not a zombie, they're like, fresh brains!
	Fresh brains!
	Num-num time!
	Break out the ketchup of the deep fryer.
	We are going to have ourselves some frontal lobe sandwich.
	And so it is a highly dangerous thing to be the food of the undead and to openly advertise yourself as the food of the undead.
	It's like wandering into Smorgs Dragon Lair with a whole bunch of marinade between your nuts.
	It's just the way that you get eaten.
	So, you know, it is a risky and tricky situation, and I and all the other philosophers in the world who've got any honesty have always said at the beginning that this is going to be a very tricky and dangerous path, and it is going to bring you into significant conflict with people around you who are going to mock, attack, ostracize, and reject you for any kind of truth that you're going to bring to bear on the situation.
	Because People whose feet are bound and crushed and broken, who only hang around and deal with and talk with and know other people whose feet are also crushed and bound and broken, they don't feel broken.
	They feel normal.
	Until they see somebody with healthy feet running.
	And then, the natural human tendency for people with broken brains is to blame the healthy, not those who attack them, right?
	When you have smashed up feet and can't get anywhere and can only hobble around in great agony, but everyone around you is the same, then you don't feel broken until you see somebody running past, you know, whooping with joy, with their feet healed.
	And then you feel your brokenness.
	And your brokenness manifests itself in feeling resentment towards the man with healthy feet who's running past, whooping with joy.
	Because like, well, I wouldn't have felt broken if your feet weren't healthy.
	They don't feel resentment at the people who broke their feet.
	They feel resentment at the people who've revealed through their own health that their feet are broken.
	And when you bring reason and evidence to bear on people with broken brains, they resent you for pointing out to them implicitly that their brains are broken.
	And the first person they're going to attack is not the people who actually broke their brains, but the people who through their health revealed their brokenness.
	And this is why To be healthy and to bring critical questions to most people is to only arouse enmity and resentment.
	That is confirmation of how broken their brains are, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, of course.
	You make a very good point because it applies perfectly to my life as you described it.
	Like the one person with healthy legs is around so many people with broken legs.
	And that raises the question to myself, what's even the purpose of living in this world?
	Where most people just blindly do something because they don't want to hear what's the truth.
	I really question what's the purpose of life then.
	Yeah, I mean if you have to sit in a wheelchair for nine-tenths of your life because anytime you get up people attack you.
	It's pretty hard.
	I mean who wants to sit in a wheelchair and pretend to be crippled?
	Which is what you have to do when you're among the people who are broken.
	And this is why I say don't You know, try and help people, try and heal people, but if they're going to attack you for being healthy, get out.
	Find people who are going to be able to play basketball with you.
	You know, find people who are going to revel and relish your health.
	You know, sitting in a wheelchair your whole life to make those stuck in wheelchairs feel more comfortable is not doing much good for the world.
	I don't think it's doing much good for yourself, and fundamentally it's not doing much good to the people in the wheelchairs.
	There are not many people in wheelchairs who really don't want other people around them to walk.
	I mean, that would be pretty pathological.
	So, find people who you can be healthy with.
	I can't stress this often enough.
	Find people that you can be healthy with.
	Because crushing your potential and restricting your mind back down to the brokenness of the people around you You know, it's like reading about a guy who was bitten by a shark, you know, rubbing fish oil on your ass and jumping into a shark tank.
	It doesn't make the guy bitten by the shark unbitten, it just means that the shark gets one more person.
	Or sharks get one more people.
	Be healthy, outgrow the brokenness, and find people.
	Wherever they are, find people, and move there if you have to.
	Let's say you find, you know, I remember, so years ago, I was really attracted to a woman, and she was going to move to another city.
	And I thought we had a shot for something really great.
	And my friends were saying to me, oh, that's terrible.
	You know, she's going to move to another city.
	What are you going to do?
	I said, I'm going to move to that city.
	I mean, like, are we going to move to that city?
	What do you think I'm going to do?
	I mean, if that's the chance for love, if that's the chance for connection, if that's the chance for a future together, if that's the chance to be with somebody who's healthy, I will move to that city.
	I mean, it's not even a half-brainer, that's a no-brainer.
	If there's a group of friends in another city that you can really connect with, then go move to that city or go somewhere where the people are healthy.
	Or at least where you can build on that foundation of a desire for health.
	Life is short.
	Life is short and being around broken people who you are afraid to be honest with is just a way of putting your days through a bloody-ass cheese grater.
	You're just wasting and dying yourself.
	You're not making them any healthier.
	All you're doing is injuring yourself and possibly in permanent ways.
	Shoot the flares up.
	Find people in the world who you can be healthy with and go to them or have them come to you and have a circle of people that you can grow with.
	I know it's hard.
	It sucks.
	But, you know, in the past We were nomads.
	We had to follow where the food was.
	Well, I'm saying follow where the intellectual food is.
	We had to outrun tigers.
	Now we simply have to move away from the zombies.
	This is sustenance.
	You say, well, why is life worth living if I'm surrounded by broken people?
	It's a fine question.
	But the surrounded by broken people is not an absolute.
	There are hundreds of thousands of listeners to this show.
	There are hundreds of thousands of listeners to other shows where people talk about truth and reason and curiosity and self-knowledge and philosophy.
	We're not that rare.
	It's not you, me and, you know, somebody's intelligent dog.
	But you have to work to find them.
	Don't be passive.
	Passivity is part of the broken brain stuff.
	I mean, initiative is something that we all have to take.
	We all have to take.
	You know, it sucks that we have to take initiative to find a tribe that's not insane, but that's the reality and our forebearers and our ancestors had to do a hell of a lot more.
	You know, people who were stuck in Eastern Europe or England or Ireland or France or Germany in the past, I mean, they picked up and they left everyone they knew to move to America for some economic opportunities.
	I mean, they had to change languages, they had to endure a six-week dangerous crossing on the boats, they had to be quarantined, they had to go and start a new life with like five dimes in their pocket.
	This is the kind of fiber that we used to have, where we would take initiative and find a new world, find a better world, find a world where we can be free to speak our minds.
	If you are around people who attack you for honesty, you might as well be in a gulag.
	It is censorship, it is self-abdication, it's self-erasure.
	You might as well be working for Pravda under Stalin because you can't speak the truth and you can't live the truth and the truth is dangerous to you.
	Do not live in an environment where you have to be allergic to honesty because the hives that produces may never go away.
	We used to cross oceans to achieve freedom.
	We are not asked to do as much as that anymore.
	But deep down within us is the fiber of a noble Western culture which gives us the strength to make the changes necessary in our life to allow us to speak honestly to those around us.
	And yes, speak honestly to the people in your life and see if you can find people around you who can be honest.
	But dammit, we have the internet where we can actually find each other across the trackless wastes, the human zombies we call modern culture and modern tax farms.
	We can actually find each other, move there, find the people who you can be honest with.
	Because every day you spend hiding your light because of the blindness of people around you is just another day where your light may go out for good.
	So find people and go to them or get them to come to you.
	And that will make the question of is life worth living irrelevant.
	Does that make any sense?
	Yeah.
	I mean, thank you so much for that.
	Pretty much helped me a lot.
	You've answered all my questions so far and your analogies are very good, very helpful to learn stuff.
	And yeah, I think I'm better off now.
	Good.
	And I'm very sorry that this is the choice before you.
	I really am.
	I wish that...
	Sometimes wish it was a generation or two down the road or all the libertarians and freedom fighters a couple of generations ago had focused on peaceful parenting and then we'd all have a whole lot of an easier job now.
	But all I can say is that the earlier the fight, the greater the honor.
	That's the only consolation prize that you get.
	But I wish you the very best of luck.
	Please feel free to use the Freedom Aid Radio message board if you would like to...
	If you can't find anyone, please send me your city info.
	I will post it on Facebook and try and facilitate any kind of meetings.
	There's a meetup.com for free domain radio.
	You can find it on the website.
	Please try and find people that you can talk with.
	Do not expire in silence when there is a world of conversation to be had.
	Okay, thank you.
	You're very welcome.
	All the best.
	Bye.
	Alright, Ben, you are up next.
	Hey, Steph.
	Hello, Ben, how are you doing?
	Alright, how are you?
	I'm well, thank you.
	So, I had a little bit of a conflict that I wanted to kind of briefly share with you, kind of share the major threads of it for me and then get your reaction.
	Do I need to write something down?
	How complicated is this?
	I don't think it's very...
	It's not very complicated.
	Okay, go for it.
	So I guess I'll just dive into it.
	So I have...
	It's an internal conflict.
	I'm wondering...
	I have this question, like, come up sometimes.
	It's like, how...
	How much do I want to talk about the state kind of in public...
	publicly?
	I think we have a theme.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Um...
	And, basically, when certain things happen, like the recent NSA stuff, or different things I might see, or the way people have reacted in the general population to, like, the Snowden guy and stuff like that, sometimes I get a part that comes up in me that gets quite scared, I guess.
	Like, I think about, like, the prison population currently in the United States.
	I think about, like, Government's tendencies in the past to just kind of disappear people in mass and different things like that.
	So a part of me comes up that gets quite scared and thinks like...
	I don't know.
	Like, I don't want to be...
	I don't want to be a martyr.
	Especially for...
	Speaking about something that I don't think has a lot of traction.
	Like talking to people about politics.
	Like, I'm sort of with...
	With you on this idea that basically most people can't think about politics rationally or about many things rationally because of childhood trauma, because of the state of parenting currently.
	And also because of their own choices.
	Sorry.
	I'm not a determinist.
	Childhood does not determine adults.
	Yeah, just one point.
	It's also because of their own choices.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	They're not sort of robots from childhood.
	There are still choices involved in the rejection of rational information, which, you know, there's constant forks in the road until near the very end.
	There are still constant forks in the road, and people are still making choices and are responsible for those choices.
	So...
	Most people will say, look, if you get new information, you should alter your belief system to incorporate the new information.
	Most people will say that as an ideal.
	There are very few people who say, reject information in order to maintain your prejudice, right?
	So most people have as the ideal that new information should breed new ideas and new arguments, and existing belief structures should incorporate new information, and Some people do that, right?
	So I've got a video out that's been watched by almost 50,000 people, not to mention how many people have listened to the podcast, called The Facts About Spanking.
	And I do get lots of emails from people who've said, damn, that's really bad.
	I can't believe how the negative effects of spanking that have been established scientifically.
	Therefore, I am not going to spank.
	I apologize to my kids.
	I didn't know and blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, those are people who get new information and they change their behavior based upon the new information.
	People who say, yeah, you know, I've listened to your arguments about politics and I've, you know, tried to I've tried to get people to accept things in my own life that I'm supposed to try and get them to accept politically.
	I've tried to get friends and family to accept things that I'm expecting strangers to accept through politics.
	I can't even get my friends and family to accept them.
	Therefore, politics isn't going to work.
	And therefore, whatever.
	I've, you know, focused more on parenting or personal freedom or whatever.
	And so there are some people who will listen to coherent arguments and change their beliefs and their behavior.
	But of course, and you just have to look at the comments section for the facts about spanking for people who are like, oh...
	What's the problem with a little light tap on the butt administered in love for the sake of discipline and kids these days have it so easy and they're so lazy and they're so spoiled and they're so entitled that, you know, this is the problem of this generation.
	No discipline left anymore.
	In which case new information is bouncing off them.
	But that's a choice.
	That is a choice.
	Once you get exposed, the argument that the mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape, pretty true.
	Pretty true.
	And the people who reject that information and people who are never exposed to it have some, I guess, primordial Adam and Eve style innocence.
	But once you are exposed to new information, you gain a moral choice that most people fundamentally, frankly, just resent.
	Okay.
	Don't tell me that now I have a moral choice where before I didn't because I wish to recapture my old innocence, which is why people so often steadfastly refuse to even hear new arguments because they don't want to have the choice that information and better arguments provides them.
	So I agree that bad childhoods do definitely make thinking harder.
	But the knowledge that bad childhoods make thinking harder is so well known and so well accepted.
	People who lack any kind of psychological insight have only done so now because they have steadfastly rejected psychological information, you know, around things like self-knowledge and the effects of childhood trauma and so on.
	This is all so well known that you really have to Have avoided it like the plague or rejected it like the plague.
	I mean, good heavens, Dr.
	Phil is the number one daytime TV show.
	It seems like sometimes half the damn bookstore is filled with cause and effect self-knowledge or psychology books.
	And so you really have to have avoided it like the plague.
	I mean, you can even see in popular shows that people say, oh, he's like this way, but then he had a really bad childhood and this has an effect and so on, right?
	And so this is common knowledge now.
	Anybody who claims that they don't have any idea about the effects of childhood on adulthood either has been living in a cave, literally, or is lying.
	They still have some responsibility.
	I just want to point that out.
	You can't excuse somebody because of a bad childhood.
	That's like excusing somebody for being an alcoholic because their dad was an alcoholic.
	And it's like, dude, you saw how bad drinking was.
	You experienced how bad drinking was.
	Don't be ridiculous.
	Of course, you of all people should not be drinking.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, I don't want to say it's determined or whatever.
	There's lots of trauma in the world, and certainly the evidence is that very, very, very few people are actually working on it.
	So basically, yeah, I've got this part that comes up sometimes when I see these events happening, like the NSA and stuff, and it's sort of like, why...
	Why do I want to put my, well, there's a part of me that wonders how much, how dangerous it is to sort of publicly talk about, to be critical of the state, right?
	And so, it's like, well, a childhood is really the core of all this stuff, and it's, then it's like, why, sorry, I'm getting a little confused.
	I don't, Why are you interested in the NSA and Snowden and all this kind of stuff?
	Why does it matter?
	What do you care about?
	I'm not saying you shouldn't.
	I'm really trying to understand why that you're involved and care about and trying to talk about this kind of stuff.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	Are you hoping, let me just make a guess here, because if you don't know, you don't know, but are you hoping that somehow the state is going to step over a line that is going to cause people to recoil against the state?
	No, I don't think that something like that's going to happen.
	What I'm wondering is, how rational is it for me to be kind of worried that maybe it's Maybe it's a good idea not to talk so much publicly about the state.
	Just focus on childhood.
	Keep myself safe.
	Don't be a martyr for something that's not all that effective anyway.
	So I have a part of me that says that, and then another part of me that says, You're totally paranoid.
	There's no reason...
	The state would never come after some guy like me.
	Who am I? I'm no threat in the short run to the state.
	No, no, listen.
	First of all, you're not paranoid that the state will go after you if you are anti-state.
	This can happen.
	But it will only happen to the degree with which you are successful in being anti-state, right?
	Right, so the only way that you escape retribution from the state is if you are futile in your opposition to the state.
	Yay!
	They don't care about me because I'm not harming any of their interests in particular, right?
	Evil will always retaliate.
	Of course it will.
	Of course it will.
	I mean, the NSA thing, I mean, they've, of course, openly and bold-facedly been lying about it for many years.
	You know, anybody with half a brain, I mean, the government is never going to give up that treasure trove of information.
	It just gives them too much power to have all of that information.
	I've always lived like the government can see everything that I do.
	I mean, anybody who doesn't believe that, I think, is just deluded and have got to be kidding themselves at some fundamental level.
	To me, if somebody is capable of strangling someone to death, The idea that they've also stolen a cell phone does not come as a shock to me.
	I mean, this is a very fundamental thing to understand about the state.
	The state will lock up innocent people to be repeatedly raped by brutes and sleep soundly at night.
	You know, prosecutors put people in jail for nonviolent crimes all the time and take their bonuses and they're happy and feel perfectly content and satisfied that they've done a wonderful day's work in making the world a better place.
	Cops manufacture evidence all the time and put people in jail based upon nonsense and lies that they've made up, and then they go to sleep and sleep the sleep of the righteous.
	And so if a government is capable, say, of murdering a million plus Iraqis because they manufactured these imaginary weapons of mass destruction, then they're capable of what is effectively a genocide against an innocent civilian population.
	Now, the idea then that they might also be looking at your phone records, that the idea that this could come as a shock to people, it's just astounding.
	It's like, well, okay, that guy did definitely strangle and twist the necks of 12 kittens and four puppies, but did you know he also underfeeds his goldfish?
	My god!
	The goldfish is starving!
	Right?
	I mean, it's like, how can you possibly be shocked about the goldfish when he's standing in a pile of pet bodies?
	I mean, I just...
	Once you get that the state is capable of murder, rape, genocide, the wholesale indebtedness of the unborn, then the idea that they're doing little things like checking your emails, I mean, how can this conceivably come as a shock?
	This shock is just like this manufactured Blanche Dubois outrage.
	You know, like in Blanche Dubois, in the play...
	A streetcar named Desire by Tennessee Williams.
	Blanche Dubois, you know, if it moves and has a penis, she'll sit on it.
	I mean, she'll just sleep with anything and everyone that moves.
	And then she's like, but I can't abide an unwashed grape.
	I simply won't eat an unwashed grape because I'm just so delicate and pure.
	You know, it's like I really think that if you, you know, stopped humping everything with a pulse, it might be a little bit more believable that you would be so shocked and appalled about an unwashed grape.
	And so all of this is just manufactured nonsense.
	I mean, it's all just completely ridiculous that people are.
	So, of course, people aren't going to be shocked by the NSA thing.
	I mean, they'll pretend to be shocked because it sells newspapers and all that kind of crap.
	But, I mean, good heavens.
	I mean, okay, so that's, I mean, of all the things that the government has done over the past 50 years, say, You know, tracking your cell phone is 12,643,512 on their list of bad things that they've done.
	I mean, would you rather have the government track the websites that you go to or would you rather the government drop a bunker buster accidentally on your fucking village?
	You know, I mean, the outrages that the American population is subject to outside of going into the prison system are all fairly innocuous relative to the evils that are done in the name of empire overseas.
	But, you know, this is natural.
	I mean, people who support the empire are fundamentally bullies.
	You know, and the one thing that's always true about a bully, universally everywhere, all the time, is that a bully will pound the living shit out of 12 bespectacled frail boys, But if one of those frail boys accidentally kicks him in the shin while he goes down in a flurry of meat-fisted blows, the bully will be outraged and appalled.
	Outraged and appalled.
	I mean, my mom spent, you know, the first 14 years of her life pounding the living shit out of me.
	The moment I threatened to hit her back, she was shot and appalled.
	Oh, such aggression.
	Oh, I can't abide in unpeeled grapes.
	You know, it's just, this is just natural.
	And so, yeah, the evils that people, I mean, secretly relish the evils that their governments do overseas.
	And I mean, it couldn't continue otherwise.
	And yet when the government does something even mildly negative to them, I mean, they just pretend to be shocked and outraged.
	I mean, it's just now because this is natural.
	I mean, status and breeds bullies almost universally.
	I just wanted to point that out, but please get back to your actual useful point.
	Yeah, I guess I'm still trying to figure out what's important about this whole I think one of the questions that I was looking for your insight on is what's prudent right now for someone like me?
	What is maybe too much criticizing the government too publicly?
	Sorry, but why do you want to criticize the government?
	That's my question.
	For what?
	In the hopes of doing what?
	That's a good question.
	That's a good question.
	I think maybe there's even a part of me that sort of says that I should for some reason, and maybe that's something for me to look at too.
	Is that part of you the government part of you?
	Hey, come out and we can see you.
	Shoot up some flares.
	We can't find you in this grass, man.
	I mean, what I really care about is childhood and improving childhood and doing my own stuff.
	That's what I really care about.
	You're never going to go to jail for not hitting your kids.
	Right?
	You're never going to go to jail for saying to people they shouldn't hit their kids.
	Right.
	Now, you say to people, don't pay your taxes while you're counseling breaking the law, and that's not a good thing to do.
	I never do that.
	People pay your taxes.
	Obey the law.
	Absolutely.
	And then don't hit your kids.
	Right?
	Because you really can't You know, you can't take someone to jail.
	You can't sue someone for not hitting their kids enough.
	You just can't do that.
	And the other thing that's great is that politicians only care about their own current power, right?
	Why do they care about Snowden?
	They care about Snowden because he is actually exposing something that is negative about them in the present.
	It has an effect on their political power.
	If you don't hit your children, you harm no interest of any current politician whatsoever.
	Unless that politician is hitting their kids and they get mad about that or whatever, but you know, can't avoid that particular risk.
	And so if you focus on getting people to live virtuously in their own lives, it does nothing to the current power of the government whatsoever.
	Because it's a multi-generational change.
	It does nothing to the existing power of the government, and so they're not going to care.
	Future politicians who won't have as much power down the road, well, that's, you know, they're not even born yet.
	I mean, who cares?
	They're not going to even notice that which is missing.
	So focus on personal virtues and focus on integrity in your own life.
	I mean, if you want to criticize the government, I mean, you still have the right to do so.
	I mean, there is an amendment which says you have the right of free speech.
	But I would certainly veer away from counseling disobedience to the law, overthrowing the government, all this kind of stuff.
	I mean, it's never going to work.
	It's not practical, and who cares, right?
	You still have the right to criticize the government, just like you have the right to, you know, people have always said, oh, Steph, you should incorporate as a charity.
	After the recent IRS scandals, even though I'm not an American, I think we can understand why I did not pursue that particular path.
	But...
	If you want to talk about the government, you know, I do my true news segments.
	I'll talk about the government.
	I've got no problem with that.
	But I have no illusions whatsoever that me talking about the government in my show is going to budge one regulation off the books of the government at all or slow down its growth or its expansion whatsoever.
	To me, talking about politics is the gateway drug to actually talking about the real stuff that matters, which is personal integrity and the way you treat your friends and family and children.
	That, to me, is, you know, hey, lure them in with the...
	With the bait of the state and, you know, do the bait and switch and talk about the stuff that they can actually control, which causes many people to recoil and run in the opposite direction back into political campaigning.
	Fine, everybody has their choices and their responsibilities, and maybe I've got my head completely up my ass so far that my eyes have turned brown, and I'm completely wrong.
	But I don't think the science stats and facts point to that.
	But for me, it's all about just getting people to live with integrity.
	And the reason I talk about the state is to help people to understand that political action is not going to work.
	It's simply not going to work.
	It is too well-trained a predator to take down with words.
	Right, yeah.
	No, I'm here.
	Sorry, the last thing I'll say is that we have this belief maybe that one more outrage from the government is going to wake people up.
	No, no, no, no.
	I mean, you find me a time in history when people are economically comfortable and one more outrage from the government causes them to change anything fundamental.
	I mean, people change things fundamentally because they can't eat.
	I mean, this is how pathetic we are as a species or how pathetic we've become.
	That it's only when we can't eat that we begin to question Our political environment and our economic environment and our levels of liberty and so on.
	And then it's basically just to demand a slave master with a whip in only one hand rather than two.
	This is how broken we are.
	This is how smashed up we are.
	The idea that we could live without somebody autographs around at gunpoint is incomprehensible to us.
	And it's completely tragic.
	I mean, we are at a very low point.
	In our development.
	And our broken-brainedness is such an epidemic that it's become what people call human nature.
	But there is no example that I know of in history where people revolt against an encroaching state while they remain economically comfortable.
	And when they become economically uncomfortable to the point where they revolt, they don't revolt against the state, they revolt against a particular manifestation Of a particular political structure, and they simply want that replaced with someone else, right?
	Like, this guy's beating me up too much.
	My boyfriend is beating me up too much.
	So, I really want a boyfriend who beats me up a little less.
	I mean, we would all recognize that that is not exactly functional, to put it mildly.
	And, I mean, Nazi Germany.
	I mean, Hitler spent 15 or so years trying to get into power after the failed Munich Putsch.
	And he said, hey, we're going to do this all legally.
	We're going to do this all perfectly legally.
	And he was very open about what he wanted to do.
	He was very open about all of the political tyrannies that he wanted to put in place and the exterminations that he wanted to bring to bear.
	And so what happened?
	Did people revolt against it?
	No.
	I mean, they went down into death in the tens of millions rather than question the structure that they live under.
	People in the West are so broken, they would literally rather die than change their minds about the state.
	And I don't mean that metaphorically.
	They would literally rather die than question the state, right?
	Because if the state is going to get them killed, they go almost universally willingly into the fire.
	Government opens the door and points and they all walk into the fire.
	People go to war, they allow themselves to be bombed, and they simply do not resist.
	This is how passive and broken we've become as a species, and that breaking begins in the crib.
	And so if we think that somehow the government reading the metadata of your emails is going to provoke people into some kind of reality about the state, just remember that the Second World War caused the deaths of more than 40 million people.
	and destroyed an entire continent and what emerged were governments that grew stronger than ever so even if you could somehow recreate now you never would want to but if you could somehow recreate the disaster of the Second World War it would only strengthen statism because that's what it did and therefore anything short of the Second World War is not going to change any people's minds because the Second World War didn't change people's minds about the necessity and value of the state And you still hear the same arguments that we need the state for protection
	from enemies after a quarter of a billion people were murdered even outside of war by their own governments in the 20th century.
	So there is no amount of enacted catastrophe that will change people's minds about the state.
	They would literally rather die by the tens of millions than question the necessity and value of having a political monopoly in violent control of many if not most aspects of their lives.
	You know, people in the First World War, mothers and fathers, lost 10 million young men to the trench furnace of the First World War.
	And did they then question the value of having governments that enacted the greatest concentrated slaughter at that time in the history of the world?
	No.
	People can send Four of my, I think four siblings in one of my family's generations died in the First World War.
	So people like mothers and fathers can send four sons, maybe this is all four children that they have, they can send all four of their sons to a trench where they can be bayoneted and gassed and turned into red mist from mortars and the bodies can never be found and maybe you just find three teeth stuck embedded in a tree, a foot from a shell blast.
	And those children who come back, those young men who come back, can be shell-shocked to the point where they dribble on themselves in a sanatorium for the next 60 years.
	So your children can be literally disassembled by governments, in wars started by governments, and people will still say, let's vote for the next guy.
	People will still remain addicted to a political hierarchy and will find it incomprehensible and offensive that this could even be questioned, even after Four of their flesh and blood children have been blown up in a completely useless inter-family warfare such as the First World War.
	So, do not hold out hope.
	That is an illusion.
	Do not hold out hope that the government is going to do something so egregious that people will change their minds about statism.
	Because nothing compares to the First and Second World Wars and governments emerged stronger.
	Out of those, more socialist, more centralized, more hierarchical, with a greater capacity to run up debts and sell off the unborn.
	So even after that, you know, I mean, they spent 70 years fighting communism, and most of the Communist Manifesto has been implemented in the United States.
	I mean, it doesn't matter how many people are going to die, people will still remain addicted to this ideology, which means it has to be something other than A disaster that will wake people up because you can't get more disasters than happened in the 20th century and governments emerge stronger than ever.
	It has to be something else and this is why I focus on childhood.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I think I feel further validated these kind of thoughts like the state does what it wants.
	It's dangerous.
	It's not really useful to focus on that in terms of making change.
	I started feeling more curious about why part of me wants to talk about it and why part of me says that I should.
	I think this is helpful and I look forward to listening to it again.
	Thank you for bringing up obviously a very, very important topic.
	Yeah.
	Just very, very briefly I wanted to echo something you said earlier you were talking about.
	Like, going out and finding people who you can be yourself with, basically.
	And I just want to say, for those people who are wondering about that and thinking about that, it's really challenging, but it is totally worth it.
	I have some really great friends around me now who I can just be myself around, and it's totally worth the struggle.
	So I just wanted to echo that very briefly.
	Yeah, I mean, we can't have love without shared virtue, and if you surround yourself with people who attack you for your virtues, you literally will never know love.
	You will only know fear and hiding and shame.
	And therefore, your virtues become your punishments, and this is not really what virtue is for.
	So, you know, for the sake of simply enjoying the beautiful air cloud called love, the magic carpet ride, find people who reward not punish you for your virtues.
	All right.
	Well, thank you for great questions.
	These have all been wonderful, wonderful questions, and I hope that I can muster up some reasonably sound responses to them.
	And we have another caller?
	Let's move on.
	Thanks a lot, Steph.
	Thank you, man.
	Hello, Stephan.
	Can you hear me?
	Dan, go ahead.
	Hello?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Stephan?
	Yes, can you hear me?
	Cool, thank you.
	Thank you so much for taking my call.
	I have a question.
	Yes, I can hear you.
	I have a question today, and it's about ethics and morality, and I wanted to get your perspective on this.
	Last Friday, on a Facebook post in a forum for a group of mostly relationship coaches and seminar leaders, somebody posted a...
	A practice in consenting violence for couples in support of, and I quote, their connection and relationship and feeling something together that is hard to access or stuck.
	I want to just read a little bit about what they wrote.
	Hang on, I've got to put my contradiction helmet on first, because I'm still working with consent and violence.
	But okay, let me just put on my contradiction helmet so that when my head explodes, I'll be able to not have to scrape it off the wall and push it back into my ear.
	So, okay, I believe I'm strapped in.
	I think I'm ready.
	Give me a scanner's moment.
	Go ahead, brother.
	Cool.
	So just to read exactly what was written, I don't want to change any words.
	So she wrote, consenting violence in relationship.
	And she said, last night I facilitated intention and consenting violence between a dear friend and her partner.
	It was the first time I have practiced this kind of facilitation.
	And thankfully, it went very well.
	And I think it was incredibly valuable for all of us.
	Without sharing the content of what went down last night, I want to share the formula and ingredients that I think are critical to allowing this to be valuable and not destructive.
	So here is the formula we used last night, and you can just stop me whenever you feel you should.
	So number one, get consent from both people that one is going to physically strike or push the other.
	Get a safe word from one receiving and any other boundaries they might need.
	Give context that this is to move energy without words and to use as little words as possible.
	Give context that this is in support of their connection and relationship and feeling something together that is hard to access Give context that the intent is not to hurt the other person, but to allow the partner to move their energy and hold space for that.
	There's a couple of other steps, two, three, four, and five.
	Sorry, to move their energy and hold space for that.
	So the idea is that you can hit or push your partner But they have a safe word.
	By the way, just from personal experience, I will absolutely tell you that the worst safe phrase in the history of S&M Dungeons is that the worst safe phrase is, twist off my nipple with a cobra head.
	I just wanted to point out that is the worst safe phrase ever.
	Do not use that safe phrase, particularly if you are reenacting key scenes from Indiana Jones.
	So the idea is that you strike your partner or push your partner or act physically aggressively towards your partner in order for what?
	What is the idea behind this?
	The idea is to, and I'm going to just quote again, in support of their connection and relationship and feeling something together that is hard to access or stuck.
	You mean that they kind of hate each other but they'd be nice about it but if you hit your partner then you're expressing your hate for that person?
	I'm still kind of confused itself.
	I actually posted it in the Skype chat, the other steps for it.
	First of all, why is this madness important to you?
	Well, this is a community that is really good at Sorry, and it's the way that they develop empathy having couples strike each other?
	No, this is like something that's like, you know, when I saw this, like the way I replied to it, I asked, I was like, is this the best way to move energy?
	I strongly object to this whole scenario of practice.
	But why are you interested in this community at all?
	I don't understand.
	Help me understand why this is even remotely.
	I mean, this is...
	I mean, you know, I'm no expert in anything.
	I'm very open about any of that stuff.
	But I can't conceive of a way in which couples get closer together by hitting each other.
	Like, I simply cannot conceive of how that can possibly be productive.
	But my question, clearly it's not exactly mainstream couples cancelling to belt each other.
	So it's kind of way off the grid as far as even normal couples interventions would go.
	So why is this of interest to you at all?
	I'm not saying it shouldn't be.
	I'm just trying to understand why.
	Yeah, so this is not a typical thing.
	This is something that was completely off the deep end for the first time that I've ever seen this, and I was strongly objecting to it.
	Everything else that I have seen done is usually pretty good as far as getting empathy, and this is just something out of left field that I completely objected to.
	And how did the community as a whole respond to this?
	How did this community as a whole that you think is healthy or virtuous, how did the community as a whole respond to the let's hit each other therapy?
	Most of it was like, wow, yoga violence.
	You really held the space really well.
	This is interesting.
	Some of it.
	I posted on this and I said that I was like, is this the best way to move energy?
	I strongly object to this whole scenario of practice.
	I was like, if we are to believe that physically hitting each other is going to foster growth, I was like, we have seriously taken a wrong turn somewhere and fallen off a steep clip.
	I was like, the moral compass is broken.
	I was like, if this is sadomasochism where one is getting pleasure out of pain or humiliation and they're both consenting to it, I was like, maybe I can roll with that, but consenting violence is an oxymoron.
	I was like, if this is good, then are we to conclude that couples who hit each other is sometimes good for a relationship?
	I was like, I'm deeply bothered by this and I was strongly I urge you to stop it.
	And what is the response?
	So, some people were like, oh, you know, who am I to judge?
	There's no such thing as the true moral norm.
	Don't be such a square, man.
	Think outside the box.
	Anyway, go on.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	And this is a community that really prides itself, I would say, to being open to all perspectives and welcoming all different kinds of ideas.
	Accept that the possibility that there is an objective morality.
	Like, accept that.
	Because as soon as that gets put in there, it's like, you know, I am...
	Well, the comment that I got was something along the lines of like, oh, yeah, so why don't you all tell us what's right or wrong, you know, sarcastically.
	And, you know, I feel like this is wrong.
	I'm pretty clear that...
	They're not thinking correctly about this, and what's important to me is that, for the most part, this is a complete anomaly.
	For the most part, they're actually, and this is just one person, one post, one time.
	No, you're missing the point.
	It's not an anomaly because they're relativists.
	There's no such thing as an anomaly when you're a relativist because all is permitted and the only thing that is not permitted is to say that something is not permitted.
	The only thing that is not permitted is any kind of objective or moral judgment.
	And so this is not an anomaly because relativism includes all possible actions except for any kind of independent or objective moral judgment.
	And so I don't see how this is an anomaly, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, there's pluralism, there's, you know, oh, there's no absolutes except the ones that they say, kind of thing.
	And I'm really saddened by this kind of practice, and I just wanted to make sure that I'm thinking about...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I mean, I understand that you're saddened, but given the philosophy of the group, on what grounds would you have the right to be surprised?
	I mean, people, they mean what they say.
	I mean, when people are relatives, they're not screwing around, right?
	They're genuinely committed to relativism.
	I mean, because those of us whose principles are based on reason and evidence, we don't really get what it's like to be truly dogmatic, to just cling to a prejudicial or irrational belief structure for entirely emotional and screwed up reasons.
	Scientists often fail to understand what it really means to be religious.
	Sam Harris actually does a fairly good job of understanding what it really means to be religious is you take that shit really seriously.
	It's not fooling around.
	It's not, you know, Sunday best, let's have some wine and crackers and sing some songs and then talk about our business deals.
	I mean, people who are really religious take this stuff really seriously.
	And people who are relativists, they're not screwing around.
	It's not an affectation.
	It's not, well, I'm a relativist, but you know, when push really comes to shove, I'm gonna break out my absolutist side.
	I mean, they really are serious about relativism.
	Like the same way statists, they really are serious about the virtue and value of the government ordering people around with guns.
	And so, the idea that this group does something, to me, pretty egregious and dangerous.
	Dangerous!
	I mean, people punching each other.
	I mean, you can break a nose.
	You can knock a nose into the brain.
	You can break teeth.
	Somebody can fall.
	Somebody could...
	I mean, who knows what's going to happen with this?
	You unleash the tornado of violence.
	You don't know exactly where it's going to go.
	Somebody might have some sort of psychotic break and just keep pounding someone and then pound anyone who tries to take...
	I mean, who knows?
	You unleash the...
	Demon of violence in an enclosed area, you don't know how safe or dangerous it is.
	I mean, this is one of 10 million objections to the whole situation, but they are relativists, right?
	So if something egregious is proposed in the group, on what possible grounds would they disapprove of it?
	Because they're relativists, so they're serious about their relativism.
	Yeah.
	Like the only way that you'd be surprised is if you thought they weren't serious about their relativism.
	So either they're posers and pretenders and hypocrites or they genuinely have integrity to relativism which means that they're going to get behind whatever crazy shit is going on because you can't judge anything, right?
	Yeah.
	So they're fine with people hitting each other.
	The only thing that they draw the line at is somebody pointing out that people hitting each other is not really that great.
	So they do have moral standards and moral courage.
	It's just not applied to people hitting each other and encouraging people to hit each other under the guise of, I don't know, moving someone's energy.
	What the fuck does that mean?
	Anyway, so the only person that they criticize is the person critical of people punching each other.
	So, I mean, their standards are very clear and they're not, you know, I take people very seriously when they put forward their beliefs and their ideals.
	You know, people who are pro-state, I take it very seriously.
	They want people thrown in jail.
	They want people.
	And they know what happens to people in jail.
	They want repetitive gang rape for people who want to smoke some weed.
	Or sell some weed or buy some weed or whatever, right?
	They're not kidding.
	Because when you point it out to them, they don't change their opinion.
	Like somebody who's a faux relativist, they're like, oh yeah, man, I'm kind of like, I'll say that I'm a relativist because relative chicks are really hot and I want to get laid.
	I'll say that, you know, like I'll go down to Occupy Wall Street in the hope of banging some, you know, nappy-haired hippy chick or something like that, right?
	I mean, that's just faux, right, whatever, right?
	I mean, it's poser nonsense, right?
	But people who are really serious about it, you know, they mean it.
	I mean, relativists really—I take people very seriously.
	When they put forward their—I didn't when I was younger because I just—I thought everybody was just pretending because their beliefs were so insane.
	I couldn't imagine how somebody could be a relativist.
	Or they're like, well, you know, I just never really thought about it, but now you point out that I'm not a relativist because I criticize people who question relativism or people who say, oh, there's no such thing as any kind of absolute.
	Well, that's an absolute, isn't it?
	You just said no such thing.
	And I thought when I was younger, I thought they'd say, whoa, you're right.
	I just said there's no such thing as an absolute, but that's an absolute.
	I never thought about that before.
	And the reason I thought that was I made the grandiose narcissistic fundamental error of projecting my personality and my integrity onto the world.
	So the first time I read stuff that contradicted my socialism or my Christianity, I was like, whoa, that's like a really good argument.
	I never thought of that.
	Oh my God, I'm gonna have to reevaluate everything.
	My first time I read the argument, I was a socialist.
	First time I read the argument that taxation is theft, I'm like, whoa.
	How could I disagree with that?
	Because it certainly is the forcible removal of property against someone's will, so how is that?
	I mean, the first time you read the arguments, for me, it was like, whoa.
	You know, it stopped my train and its tracks, flipped it around, sent it the other direction, turned it into an airplane, and then a spaceship, and then interstellar travel took flight.
	And because that was my reaction or my response to superior arguments and objective evidence, I made the fundamental mistake of thinking that I was like other human beings or that they were like me.
	And so when I received contradictory arguments that were superior and evidence that was incontrovertible, I had No choice, it felt like, but to change my mind.
	Of course, because I'm not a prejudicial retarded idiot zombie head.
	And it took years to realize that this is far from the normal human reaction to contradictory, superior arguments and incontrovertible evidence.
	And it took me a long time to believe that crazy people aren't kidding.
	Like, I thought they were just kind of, you know, oh, well, you know, they just didn't get better information, and when I make the case, it's, you know, of course they're going to see it, just the way that I saw it when somebody made the case to me.
	Ah, of course.
	Crazy people there.
	I mean, they're kind of kidding, right?
	I mean, it's just an affectation.
	It's just lack of knowledge.
	It's just, you know, whatever.
	They're just pretending in a weird way.
	But they're not.
	They're not.
	They're genuinely, seriously committed to being insane.
	And to them, you look insane and they have this amazing ability.
	You know, they're like Nero in The Matrix with bullets as reason and evidence.
	Whoa!
	You know, they're going backwards and they're spiraling past them and they just, you know, they can just will all this weaponry of reason and evidence away.
	They just don't like an argument, will it away, wish it away.
	Use weird emotional tricks, a little bit of aggression, a little bit of condescension, just will it away.
	I mean, crazy people aren't kidding.
	I mean, crazy is their god.
	And they are theistic to the point of nihilism and self-annihilation if necessary.
	So when you have a group that are relativists, that openly claim there's no standards, no objectivity, no morality and stuff, they're not kidding.
	And so when you raise a moral objection to people punching each other under the guise of mental health and they then scorn and attack you, it's because they're relativists and they're not kidding.
	It's not an affectation.
	They're not like, well, we were relativists until people started punching each other and then, whoa, we kind of woke up from that crazy dream.
	I mean, they don't wake up.
	I mean, you shake them.
	Most people, you shake them, they wake up.
	These people, you shake them, they don't wake up.
	They just spit venom at you while they're sleeping.
	Anyway, they take people seriously when they tell you what their beliefs are.
	I made this mistake all the time.
	Well, you know, she's a pretty normal girl, this girl that I'm dating.
	I mean, okay, she thinks she has minor psychic powers, but other than that, you know, she's, you know, she's, you know, puts her shoes on the right feet.
	She doesn't wear her dress on her head.
	And so, you know, she has a job and, you know, she...
	Keeps a house and her cats are still alive.
	So, you know, she's got these little quirks called, I believe I have minor psychic powers.
	And I thought that it was compartmentalized, like kind of boxed off for the main personality, you know, like a little eccentric quirk or whatever like that, you know, like, you know, she's normal, she's just a little scared of snakes.
	Okay, I can live with that.
	But it's foundational.
	I mean, the people's beliefs about reality, people's beliefs about the brain, It's foundational and, you know, recognizing that crazy is not just a little part of people, but for most people it is their essential deity.
	It is the flag they kneel before.
	It is the Mecca they pray to.
	It is the air they breathe.
	It is the environment they inhabit.
	It is the physics.
	I mean, they're not kidding.
	And like, once you accept that, then you can get and accept just how people aren't going to change because you make better arguments.
	A few people will.
	I mean, a few people will.
	A few people have somehow retained some shreds of reason and integrity and a capacity to actually think.
	But it's enormously in the minority.
	Just look at the number of Crazy women that men date, or shallow, crazy men that women date.
	I mean, the evidence is right there, and they'll just continue to do it.
	So anyway, I just want to point that out, that if you get the people as serious about what they proclaim, this should not come as a shock.
	Yeah, in a way, I'm not surprised.
	I have this hope that I can convince, or change, or help them see something that they haven't seen, kind of wake them up from the Matrix.
	Sure.
	What's most upsetting is the whole thing of they accept all different perspectives, except this one, except the fact that there might be the possibility that there might be an objective morality here.
	Crazy people don't like boundaries, right?
	Yeah, it triggers everybody.
	The whole point of crazy is to have no boundaries, right?
	To have delusions and illusions means to have no boundaries, to have no restraint upon your behavior, to all is permitted.
	I mean, this is a character logic of fundamental brain or personality disorder.
	To be resentful at any kind of limits, any kind of restraint, any kind of standards is fundamental to craziness.
	And the people who deny The standards of reality or reason do so because a very fundamental personality disorder is in my amateur opinion.
	And it's worth, you know, I mean, if you have a group that you care about, it's worth bringing some rational arguments to them.
	You never know, you know, might reach one or two people out of a thousand.
	But the majority of people are, I mean...
	Devil wedded to their delusions.
	And, you know, they view any attempt to separate them from their delusions as you attempting to take out their spleen with a rusty spoon.
	So just be aware of that and, you know, know that the vast majority of people are simply going to reject and attack you for bringing reason to them.
	And they're all going to sort of gang up together and reinforce their own craziness and going to expel you like you want your immune system to expel a virus.
	I mean, because crazy is very well defended and very well rooted in most people.
	Yeah, there's almost like a part of me that if they actually were to expel me out of this community, it would really show the hypocrisy of what they claim to be doing.
	But even then, I still think and totally see that it still might not change too many minds.
	No, no, listen.
	Crazy accepts anything except sane, right?
	And so I would encourage you to be more proactive.
	Not wait to get kicked out, but to review what people are honestly telling you about what they mean.
	You know, we are empiricists.
	We are empiricists.
	This is the foundation of philosophy.
	Reason itself comes from the stability of atoms and the predictability of physical laws.
	And as empiricists, we must accept the empirical evidence of what people tell us about who they are and what they believe.
	It's not rational to make up Some magic, invisible sanity buried deep in people's craziness that you just have to pick the lock to find.
	You know, like, there's this Christian belief in the soul, which is that there's essential goodness in everyone.
	And you just have to find a way to connect them to Jesus and power up their virtue, and woo!
	You know, fireworks come out of a wet cave.
	But the reality is that there is no healthy person buried inside crazy people.
	Any more than, you know, if you have...
	Some cirrhosis-ridden liver.
	The surgeons don't have some sort of witchery rain dance that they do to summon your magical, ethereal, spiritual, back-up, healthy liver, right?
	They give you a liver transplant or whatever it is or put you on dialysis.
	I don't know.
	No, dialysis for kidneys.
	But they do something, right?
	Whatever the hell cleans your blood or something.
	So there's no magical backup healthy organs inside our body that some magical ritual, some philosophy, some series of syllables is going to summon into existence and get it to replace the diseased organs.
	If you have a diseased organ, then you've got to fix it or replace it or repair it or bypass it in some way.
	It's the same thing with the brain.
	There's no magical healthy backup brain that you can just reach into and find.
	You know, if somebody's willing to submit to, you know, reason and evidence, then maybe they can, after years, work to repair it, the same way that somebody who's got a diseased organ who submits to the proper regimen of health and medicine can restore or find some way to be healthy again.
	But it's not going to happen because somebody just says words.
	I mean, it's going to have to happen because the person then becomes thoroughly committed to it.
	But there's no, you know, when people say, I'm a mystic, I'm religious, I am spiritual, I am I am a Buddhist.
	I am a relativist.
	I am a statist.
	They're not kidding.
	And there's no backup philosophy in there that you kind of reach through and dig out like a child under a broken building.
	I mean, that is who they are.
	And I accept that after years of, you know, trying to reject it and in my best hope imagining that the power of my eloquence could unlock the hidden reason reservoirs of people and, you know, like taking a finger out of a dike, bring forth an eruption of philosophy from them.
	No, it's not in there.
	It's not in there.
	The rational backup brain is no more in there than, you know, the spiritual...
	It's a fantasy that we cling to in order to avoid the reality that when people tell us what their beliefs are, they're telling us the truth.
	And they almost always genuinely mean it.
	And as empiricists, I think we should respect that.
	I accept what people say.
	When they say what they believe.
	And I don't believe that there's some backup sanity there just in case of crazy, in case of too much crazy, break glass and you will get, you know, the chloroform on crazy sanity will flow out into the air and will all become rational.
	You know, reason is a language that we learn.
	You know, I don't know Japanese.
	There's no hidden Japanese brain in there that somebody can just reach in and activate.
	You know, it's just not there.
	And sane is a language that you have to learn to speak or rather you have to Not be punished for speaking.
	It's pretty natural.
	But when somebody says, I don't speak Japanese, I mean, I genuinely accept that they're telling me the truth.
	And I don't then start speaking to them in Japanese.
	Maybe they're lying, but you see, if they're lying about it, I don't want to spend any time with them anyway, right?
	I mean, if they're lying about their beliefs, then it's almost worse.
	Then they don't even have integrity to crazy.
	They only have integrity to manipulation, which is impossible to connect with.
	People who are addicted to manipulation, you can't ever figure out what's going on in them, because there is nothing going on in them other than trying to control other people through various tricks and schemes.
	So, yeah, when somebody says, I don't speak Japanese, I don't start speaking to them in Japanese in the hopes that somehow their backup hidden Japanese language box is going to open up, you know, like, it's just not there.
	So, yeah, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, the thing, like, I still want to, like, the scariest thing to talk about with these people or anyone is the conversation of morality.
	And I do inject that as much as I can to kind of just question and check where someone is coming from.
	And sometimes it comes through, sometimes it doesn't.
	And for me, it has the biggest fear of me being ostracized because of it.
	And I still think that it's really important.
	And I'm committed to not Really putting up with that relativist point of view.
	And I'm totally open to the idea that I may not change people's ideas, but I'm not going to settle and accept or sit back because it is important.
	Right.
	It certainly is important.
	And I applaud you for bringing these topics to people.
	You know, most people, they have...
	An illness called crazy, and we have a cure.
	And the cure is not a pill, the cure is Physical rehabilitation of a wounded organ called the brain, which is much more painful than rehabilitating a smashed up or replaced knee.
	I mean, if you replace, you know, physical rehabilitation, a friend of mine, not really a friend anymore, but he was into judo and he got his legs smashed up and a twist break on his knee and it took him months of incredibly painful rehab to regain his mobility.
	And...
	You know, I mean, he did it, of course, right?
	I mean, that's what people do, but there's no moral element to that.
	Like, nobody's gonna attack you personally for rehabilitating your knee.
	But if you are attempting to rehabilitate another smashed-up organ called your brain, people will then attack you, shamelessly, repeatedly, and hysterically.
	Not everyone, but, you know, I make everyone paranoid, but this is, I think, my experience and the experience of just about everyone I've talked to who's gone through this, or attempted to go through this kind of process.
	I really appreciate that you're bringing this potential for rehabilitation to people's broken brains.
	Most people react.
	And some people will grab at that rehabilitation potential like a drowning man in a storm-tossed sea grabbing at a log.
	And you are to be, I think, enormously praised for providing that choice to the few people who are willing to grab onto it and to grow with it and to really work to change, knowing what it's going to do to their For want of a better word, relationships, which are usually just the addiction of shared delusion.
	You know, two heroin addicts are addicted to the illusion of a relationship almost as much as they are to heroin.
	The only thing they have in common is heroin.
	And the same thing is true with most relationships.
	The only thing that people have in common is shared delusions that they desperately cling to and reinforce in each other.
	That's not the same as having a relationship.
	That's just the same as sharing an addiction.
	I think you're enormously to be praised, in my opinion, for bringing reason and evidence to the world.
	It is a slow and painful process.
	We do have this massive accelerant called the internet, but you know, so do crazy people.
	It's not like it's mutually escalated weaponry, so to speak.
	But I really do thank you for at least giving some people the perspective of some kind of objective thinking, some kind of standards outside of the whims of the community.
	Most people will reject it with hostility.
	But for the few people that you actually can get rehabilitation urgency through to, I think that's just fantastic because it sure wouldn't happen without what you're doing.
	And I really appreciate hearing that from you.
	And I also want to say that I'm really grateful for the ways that you have inspired me to think for myself.
	Your contribution to me and the world is notable.
	And I just want to say that I wish you a speedy recovery and hope you live a very, very long life.
	And I want to thank you for everything that you do.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much.
	I'm just rounding the corner to my last My last chemo session is next week, next Wednesday.
	And then I get a month off and then do a bit of radiation.
	And so far...
	I mean, I know that it's going to be kind of rough after next week.
	This third round was rougher than the first two rounds put together.
	And I'm sure the last round will be rougher still.
	But it's certainly something manageable so far.
	And it certainly is something that is better than I thought it was going to be.
	And I still retain all of the emotional benefits of...
	A potentially fatal illness and depth and richness and, in a sense, fueled up courage and clarity that it gives me.
	So I appreciate your kind words.
	I certainly do intend to be around, to be the gadfly in society's onion dip for quite some time.
	So thank you for your kind words.
	And I think we have time for one more caller.
	Yeah, Mike, go ahead.
	Excellent.
	Thank you for taking my call, Steph.
	My pleasure.
	I'm really happy to hear that you're beating the cancer as well.
	That's awesome.
	Well, I am the vehicle for the medicine beating the cancer.
	I mean, I want to avoid personal, like, I won, because then people who don't win, I don't want them to feel bad, right?
	I mean, you obviously have a positive state of mind, I think helps, but I'm just watching the medicine mow down, whatever might be in there.
	So, there's a certain amount that I can do to help that process, but, you know, it's not me versus the cancer, because I would not win that likely, because it would just spread.
	So I just want to point that out.
	I mean, and I don't mean to be annoying and nitpicky, but I just don't want people who succumb to this illness to feel that they just didn't beat it the way that I did.
	That's not, I think, how it works.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Sure.
	I'm just glad you're still living.
	That's all I'm trying to say.
	Yes, me too.
	Thank you.
	I've got a purely analytic, conceptual question for you today.
	I'm just really confused about your application of the crucial concept of existence.
	On one hand, you say that concepts do not exist.
	That concepts do not exist in the video understanding concepts.
	I'm still on the screen, I'm sorry.
	Wow, you really are going back to the vault.
	I did that in one of my old offices on a lunch break when I was still employed in a...
	I don't know what to call it.
	It's not a real job.
	This feels like a real job, but in a former incarnation of my skill set, I guess you could say.
	So this is the one where I hold on the CD. Yeah, you don't even have the Red Room background.
	Oh my god.
	Yeah, I mean, whoa.
	Whoa, dude.
	I mean, that's pretty cool.
	I'm glad that people are still watching those old videos, and I'm sure that I will still stand by what I said then, but please go ahead with the question.
	Sure.
	So you say that concepts do not exist in that video, and you apply that consistently when you say that countries and governments and other concepts don't exist in other videos and other content that you've released.
	But then you've said on multiple occasions, such as in your book Against the Gods, that concepts like energy and consciousness exist.
	Now that's clearly a contradiction.
	So to help me wrap my head around this term, could you just clarify the definition of exist for me?
	Yeah, no, that's a great point.
	Let me see if I can clarify that.
	So, when we describe a group of trees as a forest, clearly we are not changing anything outside of our consciousness, right?
	It's not like we're putting some net over the forest that has some sort of objective existence, a net around the trees, right?
	So we're not changing...
	When we describe something, yeah, we've just created an idea within our own mind, but it does not exist outside of our consciousness, right?
	Yeah, but it doesn't change anything in the world external to consciousness, right?
	Well, external to consciousness, I don't understand.
	Your brain is kind of, there's atoms that are moving in your brain, and that's a relationship that, and you're understanding relationships in your brain.
	Yeah, but what I'm saying is that a concept does not exist in external reality, outside the brain.
	It doesn't have objective independent existence.
	What do we mean by exist?
	That's what I'm trying to define.
	Well, is it objectively detectable as matter, energy, or the effects thereof?
	Well, isn't energy a concept?
	Energy is the concept of movement or work?
	Yes, but the concept exists as energy or a particular configuration of neurons within my brain, right?
	The neurons exist, sure.
	Right, so let me try another example.
	So if I have a dream about an elephant, the dream about the elephant exists or is a process that has occurred within my brain, right?
	A process does not exist, right?
	Let's say that I have genuinely had the experience of dreaming of an elephant.
	If I've had a dream about an elephant.
	But I have not created an elephant in the world.
	So I've had the subjective experience, a very vivid one, of having a dream about an elephant, but that dream exists or has occurred within my brain, but it does not occur in the world outside of my brain.
	So elephants exist because they're objects with location in reality.
	That's what exist means.
	Objects with location.
	Well, objects or, you know, does gravity exist?
	I mean, it's there, but it's, you know, it's a relationship.
	Right, so, I mean, gravity doesn't have an object that exists in a location, but it definitely is an effect of matter, right?
	Yes.
	Gravity is an effect of object, yeah.
	It's a relationship.
	So, ideas exist within our head, but they do not exist in objective reality, outside of our heads.
	See, that would be a contradiction, though, because an idea is not an object.
	An idea is a relationship between objects and your brain.
	But does gravity exist?
	No.
	Gravity is a relationship.
	But gravity is real, right?
	I mean, you can't will it away.
	You can't jump off a bridge and float, right?
	Post-Flintstones.
	Well, gravity happens.
	Right, gravity happens.
	Yeah, gravity can be measured and gravity certainly has a location in space because gravity is relational.
	I think the inverse square law says gravity is relational and proportional to the size of mass and proximity to mass and so on.
	So it's a very specific effect of matter that has location and has effects.
	I mean, this is why we're going around the Sun and not spinning off into deep space and getting cold, right?
	Right, but it's not gravity that's doing that.
	Gravity is the description of what's happening, but gravity is not out there pulling me to Earth.
	There's no such thing as gravity that's reaching up from the Earth and pulling me down toward it.
	I agree that gravity doesn't have arms.
	That's our description.
	I am with you on that, for sure.
	But do you accept, at least, that there are things, concepts that exist within our minds...
	The things that occur within our minds do not directly occur in the world itself, right?
	Right, it's just our brain's interactions between the atoms and our brain.
	Right, so if I believe in a deity, if I believe in God, the belief exists within my mind.
	But God does not exist outside of my mind.
	I'm sorry?
	I can't understand when we say a belief exists.
	How does that make any sense?
	Well, I don't understand that question.
	I mean, are you saying that beliefs don't exist?
	Are they part of your soul?
	Are they part of some other dimension?
	I mean, if I have a belief that is a configuration of neurons within my brain, that is different than if I didn't have that belief.
	Like, if I believe in God, then there's a certain pattern or configuration of neurons that represents that belief.
	And if I don't believe in God, then there's a different pattern or configuration of neurons that represents the absence of belief or acceptance of the scientific method or whatever it is, right?
	Right, but a pattern is still a concept.
	A pattern is still a concept.
	A neuron is not a belief.
	Right, and an atom is not life, but that doesn't mean that we can't be alive, right?
	Any particular neuron is not a belief, but a belief must have some kind of configuration of neurons.
	Otherwise, beliefs have no physical basis and are a soul or something completely immaterial.
	No, a belief is kind of just a verb.
	It's an action.
	It's an action between the neurons.
	Okay, fine.
	It's an action between the neurons.
	That's fine.
	But it still has physical properties, right?
	It must.
	Otherwise, beliefs would not exist in reality, and therefore, how could we ever experience them?
	We don't experience beliefs.
	Belief is a certain type of experience.
	We don't experience beliefs.
	Beliefs are a certain type of experience.
	Right.
	Do you not see any contradiction in what you're saying?
	So people who are religious, when they are praying, have different brain scans than people who are not religious who are pretending to pray.
	They can see different areas of the brain lighting up in religious people.
	In fact, they can even stimulate religious experiences in non-religious people by stimulating particular areas of the brain.
	So our beliefs can be physically mapped and measured in the brain.
	Now, not down to real specific details like what kind of god you believe in or whatever.
	But people who are religious have different brain scans than people who are not religious.
	The different areas of the brain light up and so on.
	And so that would indicate that beliefs have a physical basis.
	I mean, it would indicate that there's processes that occur in your brain.
	And that corresponds with the concepts that you're talking about, like religious concepts.
	Fantastic.
	Whether you want to call them processes, relationship between neurons, there is some physical basis within the brain for the beliefs that we have.
	And I don't mean that it's determined by the physical process, but if you believe something, then that belief has some physical manifestation in some form or another in your brain.
	Because to say otherwise would be to say that beliefs are independent of any kind of matter and energy, which would be to admit the existence of a soul or something like that, which would be irrational, I think.
	Yeah, I'm not trying to argue for a soul, but what do we mean by physical then?
	Because physical is a term that we're using to describe beliefs, and I don't understand how beliefs could be physical.
	Well, if they're not spiritual, what are they?
	Like, if they're not a soul-based thing, what are beliefs then?
	If they have no physical manifestation or you have no understanding how they could be physical, where would they come from?
	I mean, it's either physical or it's the soul, right?
	I mean, there's no plan C. It's conceptual.
	I mean, it's either physical or it's conceptual, and it's conceptual.
	And what is conceptual?
	It's a concept.
	No, I understand what conceptual means it's a concept, but what does that mean?
	Does that mean that there's no physical basis for a concept?
	It means that it's a relationship between physical objects.
	Physical objects are that which has shape.
	A belief doesn't have a particular shape.
	I don't know what you mean.
	I mean, the concept color doesn't have a color, but it's still a valid concept, right?
	And beliefs may in fact have a shape because of course neurons firing create a particular constellation and it may be the neurons firing that are the constellation of a particular belief and how it manifests itself within the brain.
	In fact I would argue that probably is the case.
	So beliefs, the thoughts that we have must have a physical manifestation in the brain.
	I'm sorry?
	But constellations are still concepts.
	That's still a concept.
	It's not physical.
	A constellation is not physical.
	Because physical means specifically a finite object or that which has shape.
	Okay.
	We have to go to the basics here because we're just not on the same page.
	So you've got three neurons.
	A, B, and C. Okay?
	Just think of this, right?
	You can even draw it out if you want.
	A, B, and C. Now, if energy goes from A to B, How could energy move?
	Just hang on.
	Look, if you don't know the biology of the brain, then we can't have this conversation, right?
	But if energy goes from A to C, then you are an atheist.
	Energy cannot move, Steph.
	Energy cannot move.
	Because energy is movements.
	Energy is movements.
	Energy is movement.
	Energy is motion.
	Energy is the motion of an object.
	It's not moving in itself.
	Potential energy is not motion, right?
	Find energy.
	Energy is not...
	No, listen, listen, come on.
	If you don't know this stuff, we can have this conversation.
	So, kinetic energy, potential energy is I take a ball and I lift it above my head.
	And I'm just standing there.
	I've created potential energy because I have raised the ball above the ground.
	When I let the ball go, that's kinetic energy and the ball falls, right?
	So, if I'm standing there like a statue with the ball held up, there's no motion, but there's certainly energy.
	It's just called potential energy, right?
	Does energy have a shape?
	What?
	What are you talking about?
	Am I correct about kinetic and potential energy or am I incorrect?
	How can I imagine energy moving from neuron A to B if energy does not have a shape?
	What would be moving from A to B? Okay, I'm sorry, you simply, you have to read, I'll give you some suggestions.
	I mean, you can read, I don't know, The Science of Evil by Simon Baron Cohen just happens to be, you can read about neuroplasticity, you can read about how neurons fire within the brain, you can figure out, you know, but you just need to read this stuff because you're talking about stuff that you don't understand.
	It's like saying, you know, what song does a concept sing if it had a voice?
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know what we're talking about.
	It seems kind of incoherent.
	So I'm going to end this part of the conversation with great regret.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to have to finish this part of the conversation with great regret.
	I'm going to make the case to people who have a little bit more knowledge about how the brain works, about the differentiation that I have between concepts and existence.
	So I do thank you.
	It's a great question to bring up.
	I'm just sorry we weren't able to meet in reality about the science.
	So from my perspective, and I think it's more than my perspective, this is sort of an argument that I make.
	That the concept called forest exists as a particular configuration within our brain.
	And, you know, if we had detailed enough scans, maybe we could find it.
	I don't know.
	But people who believe in God, the belief in God exists as a particular configuration within their brain.
	But their belief does not translate into a change in existence outside the brain.
	This is foundational to philosophy.
	Why do we need philosophy?
	Because we make mistakes in our concepts and we need to check our concepts against reason and evidence, right?
	The capacity of the brain to make mistakes is why we need philosophy, why we need science, why we need double-blind experiments and so on.
	Our ability to make patterns based on personal experience, confirmation bias.
	I mean, all the logical fallacies.
	The Texas sharpshooting All of the biases which we are naturally subjected to and the reason we're subjected to is because life is short.
	We are mortal and therefore we don't have forever to test everything and so we have to have particular biases around confirmation.
	It's kind of efficient and a lot of times we're right.
	But we need philosophy because we make mistakes in our concepts in particular.
	In the same way we need nutrition because everything that tastes good isn't necessarily good for us and everything which tastes bad isn't necessarily bad for us.
	So we need the science of nutrition because our preferences lead us astray.
	And we need the discipline of philosophy and science and so on because our preferences, intellectual preferences can lead us astray.
	So, faulty concepts like God exists or countries exist or whatever.
	Faulty concepts exist within our mind as particular configurations, but they do not exist in the world outside of our minds.
	Now, correct concepts Do exist within like we have a concept called gases expand when heated or whatever Well gases do in fact expand when heated and so the the concepts exist within our mind and happens to accurately describe that which occurs in objective reality But concepts which exists in our mind which do exist I mean they're real they don't come from some spiritual otherworldly platonic soul realm or anything like that.
	They do exist as Particular configurations within our brain.
	They simply do not accurately reflect or or describe or predict that which occurs in Within reality.
	So I may have a belief that doing a particular dance is going to make it rain.
	That belief exists within my head.
	And maybe sometimes I do that dance and it does begin to rain.
	But the causality is incorrect.
	If I say it rains because I did this particular dance, then the configuration in my brain is incorrect.
	With regards to how it describes or predicts objective reality.
	So when I say concepts don't exist, what I mean is that they don't exist in objective reality.
	Now that seems like a weird argument, but some people believe that concepts do exist.
	There's a concept called God, which people believe has an external existence.
	There's a concept called a soul.
	There's a concept called a collective.
	There's a concept called a country.
	You know, there's a concept called a team.
	And people all believe that this exists in objective reality.
	There's a whole platonic concept which says that not only do concepts exist in reality, but concepts are superior to everything that occurs in reality.
	And if you have a concept and you're enlightened enough and your concept contradicts What actually exists in reality, the concept is superior and the concept wins.
	So if through Plato's enlightened, you know, ground up unicorn horns up the ass enlightenment, if that tells me that all tables actually have invisible unicorns on them, Or invisible phoenixes bursting into flames on them.
	Well, according to the Platonic idea, if that's based on enlightenment, then that's true.
	And anyone who can't see those things, and of course nobody can, is incorrect.
	And if my concept of tables includes phoenixes on flames on top of the tables, that's correct, because concepts rule over instances.
	Now, the Aristotelian idea is to say, and the Randian idea and so on, and even at the more extreme ends, the Humean skeptical idea is to say that concepts are derived from instances, and in any conflict between a concept and an instance, the instance wins.
	So if I say all tables have invisible flaming phoenixes on them, phoenixi?
	I don't know, anyway, many phoenixes.
	If nobody can find any of those things, then my concept is incorrect and I have to redefine it so that it's like tables without flaming phoenixes on them.
	And so when I say that concepts don't exist in reality, I mean that they don't exist in external objective reality.
	They do certainly exist as electrical, biochemical configurations, neuron relationships, whatever you want to call them.
	They do exist in the brain, right?
	A belief in God exists in the brain.
	It is incorrect in that it postulates that there is a God outside of consciousness that you simply believe because it's true, But it's not true, right?
	So concepts exist within the brain, they do not exist in objective reality, and they are only valid to the degree that they accurately describe, identify, and predict that which occurs in external objective reality.
	Now, I can't say that concepts exist in reality because they don't.
	They exist within the brain.
	I can't say concepts don't exist at all because they do exist within the brain.
	So this is the dichotomy.
	I hope that sort of makes some kind of sense.
	That which occurs within the brain, which claims to be an accurate description of reality, In order to be valid must do what it claims to do and accurately describe reality.
	If it fails to accurately describe reality or predict reality or quantify reality or whatever, then it is an invalid concept and must be rejected as erroneous, right?
	A concept which claims a truth value external to consciousness must in fact contain a truth value that is external to consciousness.
	And so if I say leprechauns exist and then they don't, well then I must Change that, because I'm saying leprechauns exist.
	The concept of leprechauns exists within my mind, which is true if I believe it.
	But that leprechauns exist in objective external reality, outside the mind, right?
	And so, all processes of consciousness are subject to error, and we verify that through testing against empirical objective reality, and if we are rational, and if we are honest, then the truth claims that we have in concepts that claim to accurately describe or predict reality.
	If they don't, we adjust them so that they do.
	Or we put them on hold until we get more and better information.
	And this really is the process of philosophy, is to use reason and evidence to compare truth claims of concepts to what actually occurs in reality, and to continually adjust the concepts as being inferior to reality, as being imperfectly derived from the instances.
	So I hope that makes some kind of sense.
	I'm sorry if that conversation was a little frustrating to people, but occasionally.
	There are people, of course, who don't want to particularly even really explore the concepts, let alone change their minds.
	Happens to all of us.
	That's it for callers.
	I thank you everybody so much for just such wonderful calls coming in.
	Massively appreciated.
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	This is Stefan Molyneux signing off for another Sunday show.
	I will see you.
	22 hours and six days from today, unless I'm raffling my guts I'm from chemo, in which case I won't.
	But thank you very much.
	We'll keep you posted.
	And please do wish me luck this week.
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	All the best.
	This is Stefan Molyneux.

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