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July 9, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:06:59
2427 Pollution As Original Sin
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Okay, it's clarification time, my friends.
Stefan Mollen, even Free Domain Radio.
So I guess some kerfuffle came up from my recent video answering the six reasons why libertarians should reject the non-aggression principle, wherein I discussed pollution.
Now, okay, come on.
The first thing we all have to understand is that it's very hard for people to look at pollution objectively.
In the same way that it's hard for a Catholic to look at wrongdoing objectively.
Because pollution has been so demonized in modern culture It's so wrapped up with humans as cancer and original sin of breathing and,
you know, every Disney film where the lovely talking fluffy bunnies in the pristine forests get their homes and babies ripped from them by the faceless, waist-down legs of the evil capitalist land developer and so on, right?
It's all horribly and ridiculously ironic, like all of this stuff is.
It's not like they make these movies in the woods.
The movies are made in studios with computers and ink, and their films are flown all over the world.
Anyway, but it's all nonsense, and a lot of this stuff is nonsense.
I mean, I'll just give you a tiny example.
It's not pollution, it's just the amount of silliness that's in stories told to children.
So, I'm reading Charlotte's Web to my daughter and you know there's this lovely delightful childlike pig and there's this wise Gaia style spider named Charlotte and all of the animals have voices they all have voices except for anything and everything that the animals eat right see See,
Wilbur gets slops, you know, old donuts and stuff like that, and so of course they don't eat.
But the first thing he sees Charlotte do is kill and eat a fly.
Now, the fly doesn't say anything.
The spiders say stuff, but the flies don't, right?
And you can imagine what a different kind of story it would be if the fly was screaming, no, no, don't bite my head off, don't suck the juice out of my innards, I have my own children, I want to live, I want to be a painter, I want to dance!
Right?
I mean...
The victims of the animals never get a word, right?
Like in The Lion King, everyone talks except what the animals eat, right?
So when Simba goes out into his 40 days and 40 nights wilderness with the warthog and the meerkat, he eats bugs.
And the bugs don't scream and say, don't eat me, don't eat me, right?
Everything that the animals...
You're never shown...
Animals always talk, but you're never shown animals...
Victims talking, you know, screaming for mercy.
Don't...
Don't jaw me, bro.
I mean, it's all just nonsense.
I mean, it's fine nonsense, entertaining nonsense, and so on.
I'm pretty clear with Isabella about all of this stuff.
Because I don't want her to...
I don't want to get a sentimental view of nature.
But pollution is kind of subject to the same propaganda.
You can't watch a nature show without getting endless driveling tracts about how these species are all on the imminent verge of extinction and how man is destroying their habitat and they only have seconds left before their bounteous glory is wiped from the planet forever.
This is all just the intoning of original sin.
To exist is a sin.
This comes straight out of the Christian tradition, where to be alive is to be sinful.
And once people can get you to believe that to be alive is to be sinful, they own your ass.
Because you have no straight spine with which to stand up to The encroachments of unjust authority.
Why?
Because you're guilty for breathing, right?
You're bad for shitting.
You're evil for farting.
You're wrong for scratching yourself.
You're just wrong.
You're just wrong.
You're just bad.
Carbon footprints, it's just a new original sin.
Now, like, I mean, it's embarrassing to even have to say this, of course, but of course less pollution is good.
Of course less pollution is good.
Of course we should continue to strive and find ways to reduce pollution.
Yeah, but I guess what I'm always questioning is...
I mean, according to simple, are human beings alive?
Are human beings living longer?
Are human beings healthier?
We live in the least polluted time in history.
The current state of the world is the least polluted time in history, and yet all we ever hear about is pollution.
I mean, that's sort of the one issue that's really important.
If they can get you to feel guilty for being alive, If they can fill your brain with apocalyptic scenarios, then authorities and the media, they create in you such panic that you cannot stand up for your rights.
you cannot stand up for your freedoms that's really important to understand This idea that existence is bad, that consumption is evil.
I mean, we all have to consume to live.
And we all, every animal produces pollution just by being alive.
I mean, that's inevitable.
Consume air and produce carbon dioxide.
You fart.
Methane farts from cows are far more than all human activity in terms of producing CO2. Although, to be fair, some cows result from human activity.
I'm sure the majority do in terms of being farmed.
You know, we shit, we pee, we fart, we breathe out.
We need shelter.
It's not my fault that God put me in a cold climate without a nice furry coat.
Sorry, I need shelter.
It's a problem, but there it is.
I'm sorry that God placed so much bacteria in the world and so many viruses in the world that need to be cleaned out of my food and water.
Sorry, not my fault.
I did not design the world, and I would have some questions and comments for the blue printers that did, if they existed.
But to understand that we are told that to exist is evil, I mean, it just is original sin.
It is original sin.
If anyone can convince you that being alive puts you in the wrong, what the hell are you going to stand up for?
Right?
The media and the government are exactly the same as the artists and the priests, and pollution It's simply the new original sin.
You know, with the only difference being that original sin never existed.
And pollution does.
But what you never hear about is that in terms of human lifespan survival, health, we live in the least, like almost infinitely the least polluted time in human history.
We have never ever lived in an environment so conducive to human life, so protective of human health.
And it's one of these luxuries that occurs when you get far enough away from nature.
You can actually start to become sentimental about nature.
Right, so nature, for the most part, like nature is a place that we go to visit and we choose the prettiest and safest parts of nature to go and visit.
We go, you know, hiking in the Irondacks or along the Bruce Trail or Algonquin Park.
We go camping where the loons call out softly over the rippling azure Sunset drenched redness of a lake.
We go and sit outside and watch the shooting stars.
We watch nature shows which capture the most ethereal and beautiful and magnificent of the creatures and landscapes the world over.
We get prints by Ansel Adams and we hang them in our studies.
We get paintings of deep moody forests and we long for the sight of deer outside our window.
Nature is a vacation and we always choose the safest and most beautiful aspects of nature to go and visit.
I mean, To get a sense of the difference.
The next time you are camping with your family and you're kind of eating your smoky bacon flavor to everything over the fire and you're swatting bugs and you're trying not to touch the tent that's wet so that the water doesn't come in.
Sort of get up and announce in the morning, hey, I know we've got half eaten by bugs.
We slept on a tree root.
We're running out of water and everything tastes like soot.
But let's move here.
I mean, what would your family say?
Are you mad?
Nature, a nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there.
So that's the reality of pollution.
Yeah, it's not great to have pollution.
To be alive is to have pollution.
We should work to minimize pollution.
And in the free market, This is what people would do in a genuinely free market if they would always attempt to reduce pollution.
Now, pollution is waste, right?
I mean, if everything we ate could be directly converted into energy for our bodies, then we wouldn't need to shit anything.
Like, we'd have no poops at all.
And if everything we drank was used to, you know, keep our body liquefied and hydrated and all that kind of stuff, then we wouldn't need to pee.
If you could use every part of a process in terms of its energy, then there would be no pollution.
Even smoke is lost energy, right?
Burning wood is incredibly inefficient.
Burning coal is incredibly inefficient, like 99.9% of the energy is lost just to get a little bit of heat.
I mean, it's crazy.
It's crazy inefficient.
Capitalism is all about efficiency.
I mean, imagine if you came up with a process that turned soot into diamonds.
Do you think there'd be smokestacks?
Of course not!
people would trap the soot and change the soot into diamonds.
So people are always going to want to make industrial processes more efficient and These are all fundamentally important considerations.
People don't want pollution.
People work to minimize pollution.
Those who work most successfully to minimize pollution reduce Reduce two things in a free society.
One, they reduce waste, and two, they reduce liability.
Liability and waste are risks and inefficiencies in the free market, and there's a constant pressure to reduce them.
I mean, so, for those who haven't read it, I've got an article I wrote years ago called The Stateless Society, An Examination of Alternatives, wherein I put forward a A way that you would deal with, just say, air pollution.
You buy a house and you buy insurance against air pollution, which means that if your air becomes polluted, then the insurance company will deal with it.
They'll either find a way to reduce the pollution or they'll pay you enough to move that it will make you satisfied to move.
And so, what you've immediately done is you've created an incentive In a company or an organization, I call them dispute resolution organizations or DROs, you can call them whatever you want, it doesn't matter.
They're all guessing about the future.
But you've created an entity.
I hesitate to use the word corporation because that's also been heavily propagandized and is a government term anyway.
The corporation is not that far away from the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Military Industrial Complex, just another government created and sustained legal fiction.
But you've created an organization whose sole and major profit motive is keeping your air clean.
If they can keep your air clean, they make money.
If your air becomes dirty, they lose money.
That's all you need.
All you need is incentives.
That's all you need to solve problems is the correct incentives.
That's all you need.
And once you have an organization with the correct incentives, everything will follow from that.
And that's kind of confusing for people because we're so used to creating results, not incentives.
We're so used to creating results and not incentives that we're just used to ordering people around because we're used to ordering our kids around.
Rather than creating the correct incentives and allowing everything to flow from there.
What is it most people say?
We got a problem?
Pass the law.
Pass the law!
Dammit!
And that's not creating incentives.
I mean, I guess everything is creating incentives like if you go to jail, that's a disincentive.
If you keep your freedom, that's an incentive.
But that's an incentive that doesn't change.
It's just an end point.
Oh, I'll do what I have to do to stay out of jail.
It doesn't...
No creativity flows into it after that.
And of course, the government has no incentive fundamentally to reduce or eliminate pollution.
Eliminate is a stretch, but you know what I mean.
I mean, what fundamental incentive does it have?
In fact, the government has every incentive to maximize resource use while masking pollution.
Why is the Amazon forest being cut down?
Because the government wants to grow the economy immediately to get votes.
The government doesn't care about sustainability.
You know, it's so funny that people who believe in global warming, anthropogenic global warming that is solved by government fiat, government commandments, government force, it's so funny that a democracy with a two to four year cycle of power is somehow believed to be capable Of planning for a hundred-year window.
Right?
I mean, democracies that are so short-sighted that they're all catastrophically in debt and they've half-sterilized their own citizens in the demographic winter by creating really perverse incentives against getting married and having children.
I mean, can't even breed their own citizens and not run up Mind-numbing, catastrophic, needs-exponentials levels of debt.
But don't worry, it will protect the air a hundred years from now.
In the same way that it protects the economy a hundred years from now, and in the same way that there's lots of money set aside for Social Security and other retirement Ponzi scams, Again, an insult to Ponzi, at least that's voluntary.
Remember all that money that you've paid into your retirement plan, but it's all there for you because governments are very keen on protecting things, you know, 20 years from now, 30 years from now.
There's nothing there, just IOUs.
The richest generation with the most opportunities and the least taxes is now going to use the power of the state to steal their retirement from a poorer generation with far fewer opportunities and far higher taxes.
Oh, the vampire of the state.
How it breeds all these little vampires.
And no stake is at hand.
But, I mean, governments continually wreck economies.
The rainforests are cut down because the governments want to grow the economy As massively quickly as possible.
That's why there's so much air pollution in Japan.
Because, I mean, they're building all these artificial cities with nobody to live in them.
Just so they can say they've increased the GDP. And so they can get kickbacks from providing licenses.
Right?
I mean, the moment the government itself, quote, profits from the handing out of licenses and so on, then it's in the business of handing out licenses.
I mean, one of the reasons there was a housing...
Why are...
Why is the government so interested in housing?
Well, because the government profits a huge amount from housing.
They've got to hand out all these licenses, they get to license all these people who want to work on houses, land transfer taxes, all this kind of stuff.
When you build an apartment building, it's just going to sit there for 40 years, and you'll get property taxes and so on, but you're not selling any new licenses, I mean, other than the ones for the people who are maintaining it.
You're not getting any land...
I mean, the government profits from the continual consumption of resources because taxes are generally...
or income, I should say, is to a large degree in governments tied to the consumption of resources.
To the waste of resources, frankly.
You know, it's like, why is tobacco...
let's get from Noam Chomsky, why is tobacco legal?
And marijuana is illegal, well, because you can grow marijuana anywhere.
It's a freaking weed.
You can grow it in your flower box.
You can grow it in your basement.
You need industrial agri-crop nonsense to grow tobacco.
The government can't profit from you growing weed in your basement.
It won't even know you're doing it, but it can profit from tobacco.
So, of course, tobacco is legal because Well, do I need to say it?
Of course not.
You are smart enough, you people.
You brilliant listeners, you...
So once you create a DRO or an agency that has...
that its profit is keeping your air clean, then that's what they're going to do.
They're going to study the wind patterns.
They're going to make sure nobody builds factories in wind patterns.
Those factories might have emissions, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
If anybody starts to pollute your air, they're gonna go after them and they're gonna make sure that they don't do that through a variety of mechanisms, mostly to do with economic ostracism and so on.
They're gonna inform everyone that this company is polluting the air around Children and animals, and they'll have lurid campaigns and boycotting campaigns.
I mean, there's so much that can be done.
They just make it more trouble than it's worth to pollute.
And that's how they get their bread and butter, is keeping your air clean.
They have a direct, immediate, permanent incentive to keep your air clean.
And they know that there will be people who want to move, but who don't want to pay for their own move, who are going to be hoping that the air gets dirty.
So they're going to be setting up their own little monitoring stations and so on.
They may pay for a factory to put scrubbers in its smokestacks.
Because it's far cheaper to do that than it is to have 2,000 people downwind move.
I mean, I don't know how it's all going to play out.
It doesn't really matter.
I do know that people want clean air.
I know that.
I know people want clean water.
I know that people want clean soil.
I know they don't want talking nine-headed fruit coming out of some radioactive pile of dirt.
And what people want, the market provides.
The genius of billions of people in the market find a way to provide that which is essential to everyone.
And when the illusion of a solution is gone, then, shockingly, a real solution can occur.
When the illusion that religion answers anything is dispelled, then you can actually start to use science to get some real answers.
I mean, if you If you have an encyclopedia that's modern and you need to know the capital of Poland and you go and look it up, you have to go and look it up, then you don't also travel to Poland to ask someone because you've already got your answer and you've already looked it up.
It's the capital of Poland.
Ah, good, okay, so I don't need to look it up.
Sorry, I don't need to go and see it for myself because I've looked it up, assuming you trust the source.
It's not from the media.
And if you just think you have a question around ethics or how the world came to be or what is truth, you just look it up in the Bible.
Then you don't have to travel anywhere.
You don't have to actually work it out for yourself because, you know, you don't travel to find out the capital of Poland if you look it up in a trustworthy encyclopedia.
Note for my younger listeners, an encyclopedia was a large paper-bound internet that sat in your living room.
So, of course, people want as little pollution as possible.
This is why we have modern civilization, because people want as little pollution as possible.
People want as little pollution as possible.
It is possible to continually reduce pollution.
All that we need is a free society wherein people can actually get what they want in terms of minimizing pollution.
I mean, I'll give you some example of something that reduces human health and human lifespans I'll give you some example of something that reduces human health and human lifespans that's not Thank you.
Thank you.
So, for instance, fiat money is a form of pollution, I will argue.
Because fiat money It drives up the price of goods and services.
It drives up the price of gasoline.
It drives up the price of fruits and vegetables.
And therefore, anything which raises the price of fruits and vegetables relative to other foods is a cancer-causing agent.
A general ill-health-causing agent, right?
So, the fewer fruits and vegetables you eat, the more likely you are to get cancer.
And fear currency drives up the price of fruits and vegetables because they can't be compressed and compacted, right?
So, like you think of an oxo cube, right?
I mean, this is used for cooking.
It's this highly compact set of spices.
It comes in a tiny cube.
Well, transporting that It's relatively cheap compared to transporting, say, a green pepper.
Because if the green pepper arrives kind of crushed and smashed and broken, nobody's going to want to buy it, right?
So it costs a lot more, you know, per gram or per ounce to transport fruits and vegetables than it does to transport processed food, which doesn't need to be refrigerated, which can be stacked up as high as you want, and which, you know, can't really be harmed in terms of its appearance.
So, processed food is far cheaper, or I shouldn't say far cheaper, but processed food becomes cheaper relative to fresh food when fiat currency drives up the price of transportation, of gasoline and so on.
And if you're on a fixed income and you have much less food, money, because of inflation because of fiat currency, then fiat currency is Adding to your risk of cancer by raising the price of fresh fruits and vegetables.
It's a toxin.
As certain to increase risk as air pollution, as cigarette smoke.
But we don't think of fiat currency as a pollution.
But of course it is.
It raises the risks of pretty dire diseases.
It raises the risks of Of cancer, it raises the risks of heart disease, it raises the risks of other things, it raises the risks of obesity since processed food tends to make people fatter because processed food tastes less good because it's processed.
So what do they have to add?
Sugar and fat to make it taste better.
Sucrose, glucose, fructose and all those kinds of things.
Sucralose, aspartame, you name it.
Take the flavor out in order to transport it and put the flavor back in in ways that are bad for your health.
And so, in this way, I think we can clearly understand that fiat currency is a pollutant.
I mean, also, not to mention, of course, that fiat currency is what enables war.
You know, war is a massive pollutant.
Fiat currency enables the incredible extension of education To the point where we're still teaching math to 17 and 18 year olds.
Lord help us.
Anyway, so it is...
I mean, could the Chinese government be building fictitious cities, for instance, if it didn't have fiat currency?
Could America be doing the incredible environmental destruction that is occurring in Iraq and the American war machine in Iraq which uses as much gasoline in one day as the entire economy and billion people of India With all of the dirty bombs and shrapnel-busting shells that are used in these wars,
the radioactive substances and dust that is poured into the air with the half-life of pretty much the remainder of the planet.
We couldn't be doing any of this without fear currency.
Fear currency is the catalyst for significant pollution in the world.
But people who are really interested in pollution, at least I've never heard them once talk about fiat currency as a pollutant.
But it is, right?
But most importantly, the people who are interested in pollution, you know, beyond Lumberg, to a considerable exception, people interested in pollution, they don't really talk about the fact that we live in the least polluted time in human history.
And what I mean by that is, let me just look at water quality.
I mean, waterborne illnesses are terrible, just ridiculous in terms of mortality.
And our water is pretty clean, and our air is pretty clean, certainly cleaner than it was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago.
And, of course, the area of greatest environmental degradation, It's almost always and forever that where government power is the greatest, right?
I mean, people think the government solves the problem of the commons.
The government is the problem of the commons.
Now, anybody who's interested in the problem of the commons should be talking about fiat currency and government power.
Right?
I mean, the problem of the commons is the overuse of a resource which is collectively shared and owned.
In other words, the The overuse of a resource because it is unowned.
Well, the government is unowned.
Fiat currency is unowned.
People just passing through.
I mean, people in the government no more take care of the environment than you change the oil on a rental car.
They're just passing through.
I mean, they'll make noises, popular with the voters and so on, but it's just another way to break your back with an original sin.
All that kind of crap.
You know, pollutants are, you know, that which is harmful to human health.
You know, that which occurs in the environment that is harmful to human health.
And which is harder to avoid, right?
I mean, otherwise you classify a car that runs into you as a pollutant, right?
It's in the environment, it's harmful to your health and so on, right?
But, you know, it's in the environment.
It's hard to avoid, right?
Air pollution is pretty hard to avoid.
But what I meant, so people sort of misunderstood.
Because there's so much propaganda and people are so...
I think there's a wire across so much about evolution.
Sorry, about environmentalism and pollution.
I put the two words together.
Come up with evolution.
Isn't that helpful?
Not really.
People get their wires crossed so much because they just can't look at it rationally because it's been, you know, the whole point of propaganda is to get you to stop looking at things rationally.
If you really care about pollution, you'd say, okay, well, what's the biggest polluter?
Governments.
Oh, well, how do they do it?
Fiat currency and buying votes and debt.
Okay, well, then if we want to start reducing pollution, we have to reduce fiat currency, we have to reduce government, we have to reduce debt, right?
Debt is always, I mean, debt is a kind of pollution as well, right?
In that it robs the future earnings of innocent people, thus, when your standard of living is reduced, it's harder to buy your fresh fruits and vegetables and have clean water and all that kind of stuff.
So debt is a pollution as well.
And pollution really can be somewhat usefully outlined as excessive consumption in the present at the expense of the future.
Like burning down a whole forest because you're kind of chilly and then running out of wood the next day.
An excessive consumption of resources in the present.
At the expense of the future.
Well, that's the very definition of national debt, right?
National debt means that we're consuming more than we're producing in the present.
And that is definitely contributing to...
It contributes to pollution in the present, in that we are excessively using resources.
Housing booms and busts and all that.
I mean, good heavens, what a catastrophe for the environment it was.
To build so many houses that people don't need that 10% of the U.S. housing stock is uninhabited.
I mean, just think of all the energy that went into making all of those houses.
Man, God, it's horrendous!
So, you know, people are really interested in pollution.
The first thing they'd be doing is they'd be looking at it and saying, whoa, you know, whatever caused this housing boom was really bad for the environment.
Okay, what caused the housing boom?
Well, government policies, government fiat currency, government controls.
Government incentives.
Okay, so, you know, the government caused the housing boom and crash, and therefore that's terrible for the environment, so we've got to start reducing government power in these areas, right?
You never hear that.
Never, almost never hear of an environmentalist talking about fiat currency as catastrophic for the environment, but it is.
You know, a guy who goes into debt to buy nine cars, even if he doesn't drive them, it's pretty catastrophic to the environment.
All the energy it took to create those new cars, like that catch for clunkers thing, you know, oh, let's get the cars that pollute too much off the road.
Well, they're being replaced with new cars which took a huge amount of energy to produce and pollution.
So my argument with regards to cities...
Was that your average city provides you with, you know, fresh fruits and vegetables, clean water, relatively clean air, you know, comfortable amenities, healthcare, right?
I mean, boy, you want to talk about environmental problems to human health, how about getting appendicitis when you're three hours away from a hospital?
Well, that's not good.
Or a heart attack, for heaven's sakes, right?
It's gonna die.
So, you have access to, you know, close healthcare, to police, to, you know, whatever it is that is beneficial to you, at least in sort of the general mind of the population.
That is a very conducive environment to your health.
You can say, well, I don't want air pollution.
But the problem is, if you live in a city, all your food has to be delivered by roads.
All your water has to be cleaned by water treatment plants.
Right?
The bus you want to take has to run on something.
The bicycle that you want to drive I mean, obviously it was produced using energy and needs to be locked up against gates that required energy to extract from the earth.
But most importantly, people think that a bike is somehow environmentally friendly.
Well, certainly more environmentally friendly then.
A car, but biking is only possible because of cars, because that's where the roads are.
There wouldn't be all these roads if there weren't cars.
People wouldn't build them just for bikes.
Certainly not here in Canada, because you can use a bike half the year.
At least, I mean, you can.
I certainly have, but it's not that comfortable.
A bike doesn't do you a huge amount of good with a baby.
I mean, you can, but, ooh, kind of risky.
So, when you live in a city...
You live in an environment that is only possible and consume food that can only be brought to you and drink water that can only be brought to you and cleansed by actions which create pollution.
Do you see?
When you live in a city, you are axiomatically, fundamentally choosing the least pollution or the greatest safety that is possible.
Now, if you say, I want to live in a city with zero pollution, then you're saying, I want to live in a city that is the opposite of a city.
Like with zero man-made pollution, let's say.
Zero pollution is impossible.
You're saying, I want to live in a city that is the opposite of a city.
I mean, you can say that.
I mean, you can say whatever you want.
But it's quite mad.
I mean, if I said I want to live in a city with no roads and no buildings and no plumbing and no sewage and no toilets and no people, then, you know, I do not think that you are using that word with the correct knowledge and understanding.
Says Inigo Montoya, you kill my father, prepare to die.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Right?
You're saying, I really, really want my water to be really clean, but I also don't want it to be...
I don't want my water to be dirty, but at the same time, I don't want any energy used in cleaning it.
Well, you can't clean water.
You can't ensure water's potability without...
That water being cleaned somehow.
It's like saying, I want my dirty car cleaned, but I don't want anyone or anything to touch it, even water.
It's like, well, unfortunately, we cannot clean your car without touching it.
You cannot live in a city without man-made pollution.
And so, you know, when I say, well, if you don't want any man-made pollution, you should leave the city.
It's just like the state is saying, well, the country, love it or leave it.
Well, it's not the same at all.
There's no initiation of force.
To make you live in a city.
And look, I'm not saying you have to leave the city.
Look, you can live in a city and say, I don't want any pollution, any man-made pollution at all.
You can do anything you want.
You are not initiating the use of force by being an idiot.
It's the non-aggression principle, not the non-idiot principle.
It's not the NIP. It's the NAP. Right?
So you can live in a city.
Nobody's saying you have to leave the city if you want to live in a city with no man-made pollution.
You can stay.
You can stay and you protest, and you can stand on the street corner, assuming that you have the right to stand there.
You can stand on the street corner and you can say, I want to live in a city that's the opposite of the city, of a city.
You can do that.
You can do whatever you want.
You're not harming anyone.
You're just ridiculous, right?
That's all I'm saying.
We don't have to leave.
So I say, well, if you don't want any man-made pollution, you can go and live in the woods.
That's not forcing anyone.
If you genuinely do not want any man-made pollution, then you can go and live in the wilderness.
That's your choice.
But you don't have the choice to live in the city and not have man-made pollution.
You simply don't because a city is defined by, well, you guessed it, man-made pollution.
I mean, that's what a city is.
And man-made pollution is the least possible pollution.
You know, compared to cholera, typhus, flu, mosquitoes with God knows what illnesses, malaria, and so on.
I mean, that's the reality.
That's what a city is.
I really want to reiterate this point.
I don't think it can be reiterated too much.
Because we've got this perspective or this belief which says that the only pollution is man-made.
In other words, the only thing that's harmful to our bodies is stuff that's made by man.
And that's not true at all.
The vast majority of things that are harmful to our bodies are actually made by nature.
Unless we use man-made equipment, machinery, and so on to escape all of that.
So, I mean, I really want to...
By creating this artificial divide between man-made and natural...
We have this perspective that natural is healthy and man-made is unhealthy.
Nothing could be further from the actual reality.
Natural is exceedingly dangerous, incredibly dangerous.
Man-made is our protection from the natural dangers of, say, tigers or cholera or infections or bacteria or...
Extreme cold, or extreme heat, or starvation, or dying of thirst, and so on.
Like, you understand, when it comes to natural phenomenon that are harmful to human health, a drought is incredible pollution.
You know, significant portions of the European population throughout the Dark and Middle Ages would die of starvation.
Even if, you know, five or ten miles away there was a great crop, we just died.
You get a bad tooth, it spreads, you have a heart attack, you die.
Now, part of what, of course, is man-made and incredibly dangerous to human life is, in fact, men, right?
That's kind of important as well.
Club you over the head and, you know, rape your wife and all that.
But it's only if you take this, you know, princess-bride kind of idea, which is because you're distant from nature...
Somehow nature becomes more benevolent.
And nature is a great servant and a bitch goddess of a master, right?
I mean, she's a see you next Tuesday kind of entity.
And I spent a year and a half living in the woods.
And even with all the amenities that could be flown in by plane, it's hard living.
It's dangerous living.
So, we have this thing where, because we visit nature and nature is peaceful and beautiful and we hear the loons and we see the sunset and we have bug spray and we get to leave it, we think that nature is this beautiful thing and a wonderful thing and a natural thing and a healthy thing and that which is man-made is toxic.
I mean, this is such a fundamentally religious idea.
There was a Garden of Eden where everything was wonderful, and there was this noble savage idea where we all had, you know, tousled, perfectly shampooed and cleaned, carry Elwa's hair, and we ran through like Tarzan with no sunburns or skin blemishes and lots of healthy teeth.
We sort of ran through the jungle in natural abandon and so on.
I believe the psychological origin of all of this kind of madness is fundamentally that when we were born, we were healthy, and culture and religion and superstition and patriotism made us sick.
So this idea that way back in time was a healthy paradise, that...
God or society or the cult of culture kicked us out of, I mean, it resonates for us psychologically because we're all born rational, healthy, pure, good, virtuous, sensitive, I mean, with all the capacities of that and some of the manifestations of that, and yet we are thrown out of our natural healthy selves because...
There are all these bullies who like to lie to us and take money and other resources from us in order to cure us of imaginary illnesses and to provide us false pride.
The imaginary illness called original sin or the false pride of I'm an American or Rule Britannia or you know I just can't wait to see whether Prince Harry's sperm works or not.
Prince Andrew?
I don't know.
One of these damn princes.
Kneel before me, peasants.
My penis works.
Buy my picture.
Oh, it's so sad.
I got an email the other day from Maclean's Canadian magazine.
You know, the whole world waits with breastless anticipation for the child of Andrew and Kate or Bobby and Saki or whatever the hell their name is.
Madness.
It's so insane just what fairy tales we continue to inhabit and which continue to infest our minds.
Just tragic.
So, you know, we are susceptible because of the amount our brains and emotional apparatus are screwed up by, you know, parents, teachers and preachers.
We are susceptible to this fantasy that in the past was a golden age of purity and we have since become corrupted.
It's not rational at all.
It's completely anti-empirical.
You know, Monty Python had it right.
A guy going through the Middle Ages, right?
Ah, he must be a king.
How do you know?
Well, he hasn't got shit all over him.
It's kind of true.
It was a pretty revolting time.
People have written to me after I have talked about the dangers of the past and said, well, infant mortality was the big problem in the ancient world, and if you lived to be 20, you had pretty good odds of living into your 60s, and tooth decay was not such a problem before there was refined sugar and so on.
I don't know.
I mean, maybe that's true.
But if the best that can be offered is you only got to watch half your children and maybe your wife die in pregnancy, childbirth, and early infancy, that still doesn't seem that great to me.
It still doesn't seem that great to me.
So, in terms of pollution, man, I mean...
There's stories of Voltaire's time, sort of 18th century France, where the king would throw wide his doors, the balcony doors, and the air from Paris would waft in, and he would literally faint away with the stench, filth, and horror of that air.
You know, if you think cars pollute, try having a A city full of horses shitting all over the place, bringing all their flies and, I mean, yuck!
I mean, it's gross.
It's repulsive.
And people used to just take their feces and urine and just dump them out of their windows.
Where are you going to put it, right?
I mean, so that's pretty gross.
You think that water pollution is a modern problem.
I mean, some tribe of 100 people camps upstream and starts peeing and shitting in your stream.
Well, that's a big problem, right?
You know, a bunch of animals get sick and they die.
You know, half of them die and fall into your lake.
Well, you're in big trouble.
You've got bio-warfare pollution going on.
Genghis Khan was quite a pollutant, if I remember rightly.
I know I'm stretching the term, but I'm trying to uncouple the word pollution from people just thinking dioxins in the air.
Heavy metals in the water and so on.
I'm trying to get you to shake free of that delusion that somehow a factory is pollution.
No, a factory is generally, not always, but generally a factory.
A factory is protection from pollution.
If that factory is what is cleaning your water and providing you electricity, I mean, this is protection from pollution.
It is not pollution.
It is protection from pollution.
You know, it's like calling bug spray pollution.
Well, no, it's protection from the foreign substances and possibly illnesses that bug bites are going to give you.
It's like calling...
If you've ever had a house with well water, I know some people have got a house with well water, and they have all this filtering system to keep their well water clean.
And it's like saying the filtering system is pollution.
No, no, no, no.
The filtering system is protection from pollution.
A water treatment plant is not pollution.
It is protection from pollution.
A sewage system is not pollution.
It is protection from pollution.
Air filters in your car are not pollution.
they have protection from pollution.
And, I mean, I don't know the degree to it, and nobody ever will, but I don't know the degree to which...
Funny, like, I got to say that, like, well, if somebody will know, I must...
But I don't know the degree to which we'd have roads and cars if the government didn't pay for, well, pretend to pay for all the roads and shove the bill down the throat of the next generation or two.
But roads are not pollution.
Roads are healthy because they bring fresh fruits and vegetables to the masses in a city.
And they bring people who are having heart attacks to a hospital.
Right.
So, I really, really want to make this point repeatedly.
And this isn't, I mean, you understand, pollution is good.
I'm not saying that at all.
If we could get magical fairy elf unicorn dust to clean our water, yeah!
Wonderful!
You know, if mere concentration could clean E. coli out of food, fantastic!
Well, we'd concentrate, right?
Wouldn't assume the concentration didn't require a lot of food, right?
But I really want to help you to understand and redefine what is meant by pollution.
You can't live in a city and want zero pollution.
I mean, that's even more insane than living in the country and expecting zero bacteria, zero bugs, right?
Bacteria and bugs are why there is a landscape, you know?
I want flowers, but no bees!
No, no, no, no, no, right?
The only reason that We have flowers because of bees, or vice versa, or, you know, they're interrelated, symbiotic, mutually parasitical, I don't know, right?
But you can't, you know, I want frogs, but no tadpoles, right?
I want sunshine, but no sunburn!
I mean, it's all, you don't get to pick and choose these things.
I mean, you can pretend to, but it's silly.
It's ridiculous, right?
I want smoking, but no risk.
Well, you know, all smokers do, but that doesn't mean that you're going to get it, right?
You cannot have civilization without pollution.
The only alternative to the least possible...
I'm talking about a free market here, not what we have now.
But the only alternative to the least possible pollution of civilization is the greatest possible pollution of living in the woods.
You know, like, wherever you take a crap, it might end up in the water you drink.
Or animals might come along and pee in the water that you drink.
Or mosquitoes will lay their larvae in the water that you drink.
You're gonna get sick.
There's poison ivy, there's stinging insects, there's wolves, a bear, you name it.
Stuff that's bad for you in the woods.
Stuff that's unhealthy for you in the woods.
You go camping, that's one thing.
But even camping is not living in the woods.
You live in the woods, go live in the woods, right?
Camping is silly, right?
It can't be like going to a 3D IMAX movie and thinking you're watching a children's puppet show.
Shadow puppets or something.
It's not the same at all.
I remember when I was working up north as a gold banner and prospector and all that kind of stuff, you know, the times when we would be sleeping in the woods in a tent, it was kind of alarming.
You never know what's snuffling around out there.
It could be a bear, it could be any number of things.
I remember getting lost Well, I shouldn't say I didn't get lost.
I went on a hiking trip when I was in my teens for a couple of days to Algonquin Park.
And one of the guys who came along, kind of stupid, he actually had Crohn's disease.
He even knew it at the time, I think, but he decided not to use water purification tablets.
Oh, there's more pollution for you.
And he drank water and got really sick.
And so we did what all intelligent people do when in trouble in the woods.
We split up.
So I took the majority of stuff.
On my backpack, and another friend went, raced ahead with nothing on to get his parents, and this guy was sort of trudging along behind as fast as he could, which wasn't very fast, as you can imagine.
And I got lost, ended up spending a night alone in the woods, tied up my food to the tree and all that.
You know, not a very restful night at all.
That's...
And I had a tent, and I had food, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
I mean, just try wandering into the woods...
In, you know, shorts and a t-shirt and see how you do.
Well, that's nature.
Unpolluted.
Well, it's hard to get food.
You can't sleep.
It's itchy.
It's dangerous.
Bug-infested.
You know, bacteria-infested.
You know, we don't have to worry about those worms in India that go under your skin and you have to wind them out with a twig.
Yuck!
So the only people who have this nostalgia about nature are the people who have protected themselves from it enormously.
I know I'm laboring the point, as usual, but this is such an embedded prejudice that we have.
This idea that there's this natural world that's great and pure and 100% clean and wonderful and then human beings begin inserting pollution and it goes to 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, whatever percent.
It's complete fantasy.
Without the protection of civilization, human beings die like flies.
We don't do well in nature.
I mean, what the hell does?
We don't do well in sort of pure nature.
Now, of course, the other thing I would say is it's very much prejudice against people to say that a city is somehow unnatural.
A city is not unnatural at all, any more than a beaver dam is unnatural or a bird's nest is unnatural and so on.
And just all animals adapt their environment to suit their needs.
We're just really, really good at it.
So, you know, to say that a city is unnatural is...
Gosh, I mean, I... You know, there's a scene in a movie with Ed Norton and Ben Stiller.
A state of grace or something like that.
And Tia Leone, I think.
And I think there's a great line in it where he...
Ed Norton says to Tia Leone when they're in Central Park, I think it's him, he says, you know, all the people who don't live in New York, I mean, they're kind of kidding, right?
And I think that's interesting.
So for me, it's like, well, all the people who don't live with the amenities of civilization, you know, they're kind of kidding, right?
I mean, they can't be serious when they think that there's this Dungeons& Dragons medieval world of pure health and cleanliness and so on, and then the dark satanic mills came along and so on.
Yeah, building the first fortress against murderous Mother Nature was not pretty.
I get that.
And people don't want that kind of dirt and mess and ugliness and all that around.
I mean, I get that.
It makes perfect sense to me.
But, my God.
I mean, you know, remember the people vote with their feet.
You know, why?
I mean, there was the enclosure movement, which didn't help, for sure.
But lots of people get out of farms and get to a big city as soon as they humanly can.
Because, you know, life on a farm sucks.
It's just morning till sun up, till sun down, nonstop.
It's just, oh, my God.
It's horrendous.
And it sucks.
And people say, get out.
It's like tiny towns.
You've got to get out of this small town.
John Cougar, Melonhead, he might wax nostalgic about life in a small town, but he got out as soon as humanly possible, and lots of people follow directly in his loafer tracks, right?
So I would really like to redefine what it means, what people mean when they're talking about pollution, right?
I would really, really like to help people redefine and understand what is being talked about.
Pollution is just crap around that's harmful to your health.
That's really hard to avoid.
And, I mean, that encapsulates dioxins in the air and so on, but it also encapsulates a whole bunch of other things which the pollution of civilization protects us from.
Radiation can be healing.
It's not pollution if you need it to treat something in your body, right?
And all electricity is generated by pollution, but if you need a CAT scan, I'm sure you're pretty much okay with that, right?
Because that is protecting you against, you know, whatever ill health is ravaging your body or whatever.
And, you know, last but not least, let me just sort of mention this as sort of a personal thing.
You know, like, I am certainly not the measure of all that is, you know, good, noble, and pure, and healthy, but I will at least not, like, I will not call myself a hypocrite, or I will not set up a standard wherein I sort of immediately become a hypocrite.
That's just not the way that I want to do things.
Like, I just can't do it that way.
And I'm very, very conscious of these sort of normative contradictions, right?
These self-detonating statements.
Like, language has no meaning and all that.
I send you a letter saying mail never gets delivered and stuff.
I'm very sensitive to that kind of stuff.
It's really important to me that That I'm not caught in that kind of trap.
If I find myself engaging in a performative contradiction, then something is seriously awry.
Now, most people seem to be curiously immune to these kinds of contradictions.
They'll say there's no such thing as absolute truth and they don't understand or maybe they do and they just ignore it.
They don't really get that they've just contradicted themselves.
They say nothing is true.
Well, is that true?
It's just a contradiction and it's a pretty obvious contradiction.
It doesn't take an advanced degree in logic to figure this one out and yet most people are very, very comfortable with it.
I have a car, I have shelter, I use computers, I use medical technology and so on.
So, you know, all these kinds of things I consume.
Now, that doesn't mean that I'm right.
It just means that I can't consume these things and say that pollution is bad.
You know, people posting, sending me emails, you know, pollution is bad, and so on, and it's like, but you know that the computer that you use to type me these messages, like, you get that this is, you know, everything that you've just sent to me is...
It's the result of pollution, right?
I mean, the internet requires huge amounts of energy.
There are servers, your computer, your monitor, your electricity.
It's all massive amounts of electricity, right?
I mean, I don't know if people, like, I don't know how they can glibly extract themselves from what the hell it is that they're doing.
I guess it's just, you know, childhood crap or whatever, right?
Because it's got, it's so embedded.
I mean, it's just so weird to live among a whole bunch.
I mean, you know, it's the mom hitting the kid saying, don't hit, hitting is wrong or whatever, right?
But...
People send me this, you know, it's terrible!
Pollution is just terrible, you know, human beings are blight on civilization, you know, energy use is terrible, and it's like, but you just used a huge amount of energy, or relied upon it, in order to send me this message.
I couldn't read this message if what you're saying is true.
You're sending me this message while telling me that the energy used to send your message is bad, but you're willing to use it to send me this message.
This is just 99% of what it is that any competent thinker does is just keep pointing out to everyone that they're kind of mental, that they're saying things that they haven't thought about for a moment and that they're not comparing their own actions to any kind of reasonable ideal.
They've got an ideal, pollution is bad, but they're using pollution, the byproducts of pollution, in order to send me messages that pollution is bad.
They want to use pollution to send me a message that says nobody should want to use pollution.
Like, it's mad!
And, of course, the rational thing is to say, like, I know I'm using a lot of pollution to send you this message about how pollution is bad, but...
But as soon as they say that, they have to start really readjusting their viewpoints.
So anyway, sort of in conclusion, sorry this is so long, but it's such a...
I'm always interested when you see this mass paroxysm, this epilepsy of the hive mind that occurs when people just go nuts over a particular topic.
And I guess I could have expected this one.
You know, it's a pretty hot and bothered kind of topic for a lot of people.
And it's heavily, heavily propagandized.
And so it is interesting to see.
And I do try and sort of really puzzle it out.
And, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same until philosophy really begins to heal our terrible thinking.
And I really do think that this is sort of the second resurrection of original sin and all this kind of stuff, and just the general drive for people who want to control you to tell you that you're bad for breathing and then own everything that you do after that.
That's sort of, I think, quite important and quite a common issue.
So really, you know, don't accept that it's bad to breathe.
And, you know, yeah, we've got problems called pollution, but my God, we sure as hell aren't going to solve them by thinking that pollution is bad.
Because, man, you want to see some real pollution, you know, you stop using man-made pollution and you'll really get what goes on.
Thank you everyone so much.
If you would like to pollute my PayPal account with your hard-earned vittles and copex, I would really appreciate that.
You can go to fdrurl.com forward slash donate, and you can sign up for one time or repeat.
The donation is hugely appreciated.
Thank you so much, everyone.
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