All Episodes
Previous Next
July 25, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:11:45
2438 A Fetish for the Apocalypse - A Conversation with Charles Veitch
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, hello everybody.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
This is a juicy, tasty morsel of a chat I had with Charlie Veitch of the Love Police.
And I hope that you will enjoy it.
He had some great questions on a wide variety of topics, all of which were incredibly interesting and enjoyable, at least for me.
So I hope that you will enjoy it again.
This is a conversation between me, Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedom Main Radio.
FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
And the great Charlie Beach of the Love Police.
I've just got a few points set up here.
I don't want this to be anything formal.
I want it to be a kind of more relaxed look at the kind of light.
I'm going to take my shirt off then.
Yeah, take your shirt off.
No, I'm just kidding.
Nobody wants to see this body at the moment.
The chicken chest.
Exactly.
So I just want it to be very relaxed.
I'm not going to grill you or ask you anything.
Actually, I'm just going to carry on with the first question.
I think a very big point to raise is your Zimmerman video, the original one.
I think that's going to hit a million views at the rate it's going in the next couple of weeks, probably.
It's at 740 now, and it's been mirrored on a whole bunch of other people's sites.
So if you put that together with the podcast, I assume it's about the same in terms of downloads, you know, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5 million.
So it may have actually had a measurable tiny little effect on public opinion in this terrible tragedy.
So for that, I'm grateful.
Well, I think it's kind of an interesting thing to comment on as a kind of social commentator in that you did manage, I think, to, as we say in internet lingo, rustle a few jimmies out there in the internet world.
And what I found very interesting about your video, I think it was logical and you did say, you know, unfortunately we live in a status system and The only thing the state should logically find him is not guilty because it's not beyond a reasonable doubt as to what happened.
I tie this into a video I watched of yours when someone was trying to talk to you about Nazi history and the revisionism of Nazi history.
You told a story about when you were at university that the teacher threw a ruler at someone and then said, what happened here?
Ten different people gave ten different accounts and that was what happened there.
I agree with you.
I don't think the jury could have found them anything other than not guilty, but this is a very controversial thing for some people.
And don't you find, Stefan, that this goes to show you that truth for people is tribal.
It's not rational.
Yeah, I think there's certainly...
I mean, obviously, if you were to look at the Trayvon supporters, for want of a better word, I'm sure you would find that they would be largely black or liberals, you know, sort of left-wing.
And the media, of course, is...
You can read these media accounts of the entire thing and never once see that all of the evidence, both physical and eyewitness, points to the fact that Trayvon attacked...
Martin and got him into a sort of ground and pound situation where he had reasonable fear for his life and health.
I've gone through entire media reports where they say, well, there was an altercation between the two or whatever it was, right?
And without anybody ever pointing out the basic fact that all the evidence points to the fact that Trayvon initiated the attack and, you know, had the advantage the whole time and pressed his advantage to the point where Zimmerman had reasonable grounds to fear for his life or at least his brain, you know, pounded against the concrete and so on.
And yeah, it certainly is possible that he waved his gun around.
But there's no witnesses to any of that and there's no physical evidence for it.
And in the absence of witnesses and physical evidence, the only witness testimony that stands is whoever was there.
And the only one who was there at the beginning of the altercation was Zimmerman.
And without any evidence of the contrary...
I mean, whether he says it's true or not doesn't matter.
There's still no evidence whatsoever that he pulled out his gun or that he chased this kid down.
There's significant evidence that Trayvon had time to go to his father's house and come back.
So this idea that he was cornered and chased down and so on, he was only 70 yards from his father's house, which for an energetic and former footballer would be a very simple thing within a couple of seconds to get home.
So it is one of these situations which is...
It's really tragic on just about every level, and I think there's no person alive who wouldn't rather this young man be alive still.
But the idea that somehow Zimmerman caused it by getting out of his car just, to me, stretches causality beyond the breaking point.
Absolutely.
I think it's interesting to kind of reference the reaction to the Rodney King beating videos from the 90s in LA, the early 90s, how that was very much a very clear-cut video thing where we had direct evidence of White police men beating a black man, and L.A. burned for days, and there was the riots.
And I think maybe on a kind of deeper level, Stefan, maybe at a subconscious level, maybe the public does understand that maybe there isn't enough evidence, and this has just turned into a crazy media-related race-baiting witch hunt.
There isn't enough evidence to find him guilty.
And so maybe that's why we haven't seen any reaction similar to the L.A. riots in 92, I think it was.
Yeah, I think things have changed a little bit and certainly the Rodney King incident was problematic too in that the video was heavily edited down to the point where, you know, there were two other black men in Rodney King's car.
The police didn't beat them because they surrendered Rodney King because he was on probation, because he was speeding at 130 miles an hour through a residential street, because he had a history of crime and violence and would have gone back to jail because he had drugs in his system and so on.
And he opted to fight, you know, almost to the death.
And so it wasn't pure race.
And because if it was pure race that had beaten all three of the men, it was only the one who, you know, violently resisted and attacked the cops and refused to be subdued who got beaten.
So even that one was a problematic situation.
And not just a sort of pure racism.
And the whole incident was videotaped, but it was only the last part that was shown on TV. The first part where the other people were arrested peacefully and he decided to fight the cops with everything he had.
That was not shown.
And of course, that gave people a very skeptical view or very problematic view of that incident.
But I think things have changed quite a bit.
I think, you know, Ann Coulter's got a book out.
how after the OJ trial, it became a little bit tougher to pull the race card.
I mean, OJ, too, to a lot of people, was just so obviously guilty.
And the fact that a significant portion of blacks were celebrating the release of what seemed to be a pretty clear case of a double homicide, it became a little bit tougher to sort of believe in that sort of, well, it's all just pure racism and blacks are always the victims.
So I think there has been some change around that.
And I'm very happy to see that there generally are peaceful protests, which, you know, we encourage.
I think that's a great thing.
But it also shows me why, you know, reason and evidence are so essential in these kinds of situations, because, you know, if it were up to the mob, it would have been an out and out lynching.
And that's precisely what we don't want in any kind of rational system of law and order.
That kind of ties into a question I've just come up with now, actually.
Do you think the media, in what they've done in reporting the Zimmerman case, have been amoral in that they're just rationally going for sensationalism and more views and more madness?
Or do you think there's something deeper at play, something darker or more racist?
Well, the government, first of all, you know, one of the great tragedies, as so many people have pointed out, is that the, I mean, the murders by blacks that have occurred, you know, just over the past week, black deaths, I mean, at everyone's hands, but of course, 94, 95% of the murders.
Of black victims are murdered by other blacks.
It's like, why does Trayvon Martin's life have so much value just because he was murdered by a non-black, whereas all of the blacks who are murdered by other blacks don't seem to have as much value?
I think that's a huge problem.
The media do love to spin the racist angle.
It's one of these things that gets people talking, that gets views, that gets eyeballs, that gets people glued to their sets, and so on.
So race is just one of these things that...
In America remains such a sore spot.
I think it's continually rekindled as a huge problem.
But I think the media did some pretty immoral stuff, too.
I mean, the editing of the George Zimmerman tape where they edited out the police dispatcher asking for him to identify the race so that he said, well, he looks suspicious.
He looks black.
You know, that sounds more racist.
But the actual tape was, he looks suspicious.
Oh, what race is he, white, black, or Hispanic?
He said, well, he looks black.
He was responding.
So he's suing NBC for that.
And I think that was pretty immoral.
I think talking about the trial and the verdict without pointing out that all the evidence points to the fact that Trayvon Martin initiated an attack, you can't talk about a self-defense verdict without talking about who initiated the attack.
I think that's highly prejudicial.
And, of course, the government is served by the media.
The media serves the government, and the government can't lose in any way, shape, or form When racial tensions are provoked.
The government wins no matter what when race bombs hit the pavement.
Because what are they talking about now?
Well, let's repeal Stand Your Ground, even though Stand Your Ground has nothing to do with the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case, and even though blacks actually disproportionately use that as a defense, and I think positively so.
They're talking about let's repeal.
It was a handgun that was the problem.
Let's start talking about gun control.
Let's start passing laws that say neighborhood watch people can't have guns.
I mean, they can't lose because it's going to be a further restriction on people's liberty and capacity for self-defense.
They can't lose from that standpoint.
And let's say there were lots of riots.
Well, then, of course, whenever there are riots, people feel, well, we need the government to protect us from those riots.
So when you provoke animosity among the livestock, Everybody then wants the government to step in and intervene and to protect them and to take away rights.
So the media is simply serving their dark master of the state at all times and that would seem to be the most likely explanation as to why all of this race-baiting and division is occurring.
Absolutely.
Do you think there is something fundamental to the human sentient experience on earth that It wants to create power play and this animosity between peoples.
Because when you get, say, 20 people and lock them in a house all summer, they'll start fighting and creating small subgroups.
So I wonder if maybe statism and government, the kind of governmentality, is this fundamental to the human experience as kind of hairless apes evolved over millions of years?
Or is this a kind of rational creation of man Knowing how to rationally understand the psychology of the masses.
Yeah, I have a tough time with the concept of human nature because human nature seems to be so conditioned by experience.
The one thing we are is adaptable.
It's like saying, what is the shape of water?
Well, the shape of water is whatever container you put it in.
That becomes the shape of water.
You put it in a bong.
Hey, look, it looks like a bong.
You put it in a cup.
Hey, look, it looks like a cup.
So the one thing I think that we are as a species is fundamentally adaptable.
The state is the shadow cast by a lack of capacity to negotiate.
A thief is not able to negotiate.
A rapist is not able to negotiate.
A murderer clearly is not able to negotiate.
The lack of capacity to negotiate creates the obelisk, the 2001 monolith that results in the shadow called the state.
And this is why, of course, negotiation techniques are not taught in any government schools, because in government schools, fundamentally, you're not allowed to negotiate.
You can't argue with the teacher.
You can't change your course schedules.
You have to raise your hand to go to the toilet like some ridiculous Soviet-era prisoner.
And so the government is heavily opposed to people learning how to negotiate.
And negotiation is one of the most fundamental skills.
I mean, all price is negotiation.
Marriage is negotiation.
You ask, you don't enforce.
You know, your job is all about negotiation.
Your relationships with people is all about negotiation.
It's the most fundamental human skill required for civilized and peaceful society, and it's nowhere taught in religion.
It's nowhere taught in government schools, and it's very rarely taught Within the family.
I mean, my daughter is four and a half now and we've been negotiating with her for about the last three years.
And she's good.
I mean, sometimes she sounds like one of those barkers, you know, in a sort of cattle auction in Arkansas or something like that.
And she's really good at negotiating and she's very strong-willed at that.
And as a consequence, she never has to yell and she never has to hit because there's always room for negotiation.
So I think if we have the capacity to To negotiate, that would be a lot.
And again, to go back to the Zimmerman-Trayvon thing, to me, fundamentally, that's a failure of negotiation.
I mean, plastered all over the gated community in Sanford was, you know, this is a neighborhood watch community.
Neighborhood watchers are going to be out there.
And of course, Trayvon should have been introduced to that when he came to visit.
If I were Trayvon's dad, regardless of his race, I would have taken him over to the neighborhood watch captain.
I'd have introduced him.
I'd have said, here, my son is coming to stay with us for an indefinite amount of time.
He's had some trouble.
So he may look a little shady.
He's had some trouble with drugs.
He's had some trouble with school, but he's a good kid.
And, you know, he introduced, shake hands.
And that way, when Zimmerman saw him at night, he would have said, oh, I know that kid.
He's supposed to be here.
Maybe he's lost.
He would have gone out and, you know, maybe helped him or maybe just stayed in his car and gone home.
So this is a fundamental negotiation that failed To occur, that should have occurred.
In a gated community, if you're going to have someone coming to stay with you who matches the physical description of a bunch of people who've been thieving like locusts, then of course you go and introduce that person.
That's just proactive negotiation, introduction, good social skills, preventative problems, and so on.
You know, if Zimmerman had gone out and said, you know, excuse me, I'm from the Neighborhood Watch, I just want to make, you know, whatever, right?
That could have been one thing.
Trayvon Martin had said, why are you following me?
What's going on?
That would be a negotiation, even if he told them to screw off.
I'm going to visit my dad.
That's a kind of negotiation.
but none of that occurred and there was simply a pretty savage attack.
And that comes from a whole history of non-negotiations.
So I think I just did this whole podcast series on negotiation because it is just so important when it comes to getting things done.
And I think if we start teaching our kids from a very early age how to negotiate, how to get what they want without intimidation, without violence, without threats, without calling on the airstrike called the government and so on, I think we could end up in a society where the government becomes extraneous.
Absolutely.
But Stefan, isn't there a difficulty?
Say we raise our children to understand reason and to wish to negotiate peacefully and never initiate violence, but we throw them out there into the world with all the state-educated and all the indoctrinated children with the government and the whole idea of hierarchy in their minds, then how do you negotiate with someone who is unreasonable or anti-rational?
Well, you don't.
I mean, that's the point.
I mean, I don't want my daughter to try and negotiate with crazy people because you can't.
I mean, you can't.
But the whole point is to steer clear of those kinds of people.
And there are enough people in the world who are raised not insane.
I mean, we're not like the first atheists in the Middle Ages or something like that.
You know, there are enough people out there that you can have people around you to varying degrees who are willing to negotiate and you can help enhance them.
No, I certainly don't want to.
You know, it's like that old, oh my God, there was a movie around when I was a kid.
You may never have heard of it called War Games.
They talk about nuclear war.
It's a funny game.
The only way to win is not to play.
And that is when negotiating with crazy people, it is a funny game.
The only way to win is not to play.
That's the only way I've been able to solve it.
So do you see a revolution that's going to happen slowly through education and nonviolence and raising children in the right way that eventually the minority, as they travel through the zombie hordes, and as you've just talked about trying to maybe avoid interacting too much with their craziness, you think maybe as the numbers get more and more...
Well, do you think that's how it's going to be, a peaceful revolution through raising children in the right way?
Yeah, and you know, there's things that you can do to accelerate that process.
But yeah, fundamentally, I think that's the only real chance that we have.
I mean, people who've suffered a lot as children, this has been very well scientifically documented and established that people who've been harmed as children They simply do not have the capacity to reason, at least not without a huge amount of work, which, unfortunately, the desire to be rational is one of the first things that gets broken.
So we really are asking too much of the majority of people, if they've been really significantly harmed as children, to enter into a peaceful, rational debate.
It's too painful for them, and they really have lacked the skill set that takes years to develop.
It's like suddenly talking to someone in Japanese who's never been exposed to Japanese.
Maybe after years of study they could learn it, but they're just not going to learn from you talking to them in that language.
So I think there's things that we can do to accelerate that process, but that's why I focus so heavily on No, don't spank and reason with your children and spend time with your children and give your children your time, attention, focus and guidance.
And that's, I think, the fastest way that we can bring about a peaceful society.
It is, you know, tragically going to be an intergenerational change like all the other revolutions in history.
Absolutely.
Do you think culturally at the moment, Stefan, with these two films you've reviewed recently, Man of Steel and World War Z or Z, there's so many films in the Walking Dead series, the Falling Sky series on TV, it's all very apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic.
Do you think there is a kind of fevered insanity that's maybe oscillating powerfully in the subconscious of the public that Maybe they're so kind of far gone that maybe the system wants to crash itself.
Maybe the superorganism is perhaps coming to understand that it can't carry on.
It's going to annihilate itself unless it crashes in some way.
Do you think there is a fetish for the apocalypse at the moment?
Yeah.
I was just enjoying your language.
No, no, that was a delicious word salad.
Let me just wipe my mouth here.
That was just like a full-on face cannon of great language, so I just really wanted to tell you I have a remarkable tan, but unfortunately I've lost one of my eyebrows.
Other than that, it was perfect.
No, that was great.
I think that, you know, it's the question I've asked of a bunch of experts, and it's hard to get a good answer, you know, is are we getting healthier or sicker as a species in terms of our mental health?
I think that there's a significant argument to be made that we are getting sicker.
Sociopathy has doubled over the past 15 years among the youth.
Mental health problems now afflict, depending on how you count it, between 25 to 40 percent of young American females.
And one in four women in America are on antidepressants.
Now, some of this, of course, is expanded diagnosis and all of the horrible profit motives of state-driven pharmaceutical companies and the tragedy of the horrible schools that would rather drug children like the Soviet system rather than adapt to anything reasonable and peaceful and free.
But I do think that people are getting...
Kind of crazier.
And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we are sort of designed historically to have four adults around for every child.
It's sort of extended tribalism.
There were about four adults around guiding and giving feedback to every child and children who grew up communally.
And now, the majority of children are put in daycares, of course, and there you have a ratio, when the kids get a little older, of sort of 20 to 25 or even higher of children to each adult.
And when children no longer have the capacity to be guided by adults, to have their personality shaped and reasoned by adults, What happens is they become peer-oriented.
And when the peer orientation always tends to devolve to the lowest common denominator, to the most harmed child who's the most bullying and sociopathic, it tends to cluster around.
The children tend to sort of cluster around that.
That's how that virus tends to spread without adult interference.
It's the lowest common denominator child horizontal peer relationship that tends to infect all the other children.
And so I think that there is a huge problem, this failure to launch issue where adulthood is just not that attractive.
To a lot of young people.
Here I am telling you all about young people.
I think you'll enjoy this.
But I mean, what's that enticing about adulthood for young people?
I mean, you know, you can move out of your parents' place, but, you know, your parents probably have a pretty nice place.
And you're going to go in some ridiculously piece of overpriced housing where you're going to have to live with three or four other people in some crummy little back room.
And you're not going to be able to afford a car.
And you're not going to be able to save any money.
And your wages are going to get eaten up through taxes.
And, you know, for men, of course, marriage remains a huge risk just in terms of what can happen in a divorce.
Alimony and particularly child support are heavily skewed towards the female at the expense of the male.
So, yeah, it's just a it's not, you know, society is not that enticing.
It hasn't created this wonderful, enticing adulthood.
And that's what you have to do to rein in young people and to get them to follow society's rules.
You got to give them some goodies, man.
You got to give them some benefits.
If you can't give them the benefits, then they won't follow the rules.
That's the deal.
If you tame your id, we'll give you all these goodies.
You'll get a great place, you'll get to get married, you'll get to have independence, you'll get a car, and that's what we pay you for obeying society's rules.
Right or wrong, that's the traditional deal, and society just doesn't have the goodies to hand out anymore.
And the skepticism that the young people have towards society's management, particularly the elderly, of the economy, of the job situation, of the environment, of the currency system, which is Even if you don't follow the intricacies of the Federal Reserve Act, children know that they've been sold at auction to a bunch of foreign banksters by the pound for the sake of appeasing people in the here and now.
So what respect do young people have for society and its rules?
And I think that's causing a lot of problems.
So I think the zombie movies about the coming catastrophe, whatever you want to call it, I think has some real validity that the kids are not all right.
Absolutely.
Well, yeah, I mean, the kind of movie industry is a reflection of society, and society is a slower-moving Hollywood movie towards the kind of zombie apocalypse, and it does seem to kind of self-reflect in that way.
Fantastic.
I've got a few light-hearted questions, just videos I've seen on your channel, on other people's channels as well.
His name of his channel is Stormcloud's Gathering, and you had him on to talk to you.
Yes.
And it was very different.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on, hang on.
My migraine is coming back.
Let me just...
Oh, must massage.
Big, giant bowling ball.
Okay, go on.
I'm ready.
No, I have not seen the documentary on light bulbs.
Sorry, go on.
Yeah, and I think it's of note because it was so different than the average kind of video you get on your channel or on his channel.
And I think I saw it first on his channel and then on yours.
And it kind of just...
I don't even know what to say, I mean, or where that went, or what he was saying that you were lying about, or there was something about Mexico that seemed to be very important.
Yes.
Yeah, but, no, I like his videos.
They're quite well put together and kind of very good YouTube, you know, the good YouTube blogs about, you know, his opinions about what's happening.
But did it just get to a point in that conversation, Stefan, where you...
Looking at a principle that you said, you don't believe me, then there's no point talking on.
Is that how it got to it?
Well, yeah.
I mean, look, if somebody's going to call me a liar, then how can you possibly have a conversation with the person?
Particularly if they say, but you're a liar, and I have no evidence for it whatsoever.
I don't know what the hell they were talking about.
Documentary?
I mean, what the hell do I know?
I don't know what the hell they're talking about.
And so, yes, if somebody accuses me of, you know, well, you watched this documentary and you agreed with it.
And it's like, well, I don't remember the documentary and I certainly don't agree with the thesis.
You're lying!
Okay, well, I don't really know...
What to say from here?
I'm certainly not going to repeat that I don't know about the documentary.
I mean, what would be the point?
You heard me the first time.
And if you're going to call me a liar without evidence, then, you know, it's not a civilized conversation.
And it was not a bad time to end the chat, you know, which had kind of been devolving for a while because his argument was, you know, well, in the backwaters of Mexico, people do stuff for each other without the government, and therefore anarchism doesn't work.
And I just...
You know, I try to follow people's logic, try to put myself in their shoes.
I just, you know, those were Steve Martin's cruel shoes.
I just couldn't quite make it.
So, you know, again, not the worst chat in the world.
But some people are, you know, if they don't have a history of debating, I mean, debating is quite a skill.
It's, you know, it's quite, it's not something you just sort of pick up.
And I've been doing it for like 30 years or so.
And, you know, the first time I tried debating in a club in university, I was like the seventh best in Canada because I'd, you know, been debating since I was a little kid.
And so if you just don't have experience in how to debate and how to construct a rational argument, how to oppose somebody's reason and evidence, then it just turns into a ramble fest and always gets strangely emotionally intense because that deficiency kind of comes out.
So, yeah, I mean, I didn't mind the chat too much, but I was kind of ready to hit the eject button at the end.
No, that's great.
I think it's interesting what you say about debating there, but I get very frustrated with watching debates, and I do get frustrated at some of the statists that you debate from time to time on your channel.
But I find that there's this person's reality bubble and this person's reality bubble, and they don't quite overlap, and the wording, the language, it doesn't quite It doesn't quite hook, and you try and use reason to hook into them, and they're impervious to reason.
It's because it's an emotionally held belief.
But I like to have a term to say that people are trapped in the prison of semantics.
The language is the prison you can't quite express.
You might disagree, I think.
Maybe you think.
Maybe we can express ourselves fully with language, but with debating, I think it kind of comes back to what you're saying about children, like, trying to maybe avoid the unreasonable.
You must get very frustrated, like, debating some unreasonable people.
Well, yeah, I mean, I primarily debate for the audience, not to change the mind of the other person.
That's why I do it publicly rather than privately.
I mean, I want people to see, hopefully, some decent arguments and so on.
But the majority of people's positions, and again, just for anybody who ends up listening to this, fdurl.com forward slash bib, the Bomb and the Brain series that I've done, you know, very clearly shows the science that most people have an emotional attachment.
To a particular perspective that arises out of their history and maybe trauma or maybe just imprinting or programming from, you know, a church or culture or parents or whatever.
So most people have an emotional attachment to a particular perspective.
And what they do is they then rush out and do all this confirmation bias.
You know, so I'm pro-global warming.
Okay, I'm going to go and read all this pro-global warming stuff.
I'm anti-global warming.
Oh, I'm going to read all this anti-global.
And the internet, of course, is pretty good for that because it's such a wide buffet that you can pick all the foods you like pretty easily.
And so most people's belief systems are emotionally driven.
With these little decorations of pseudo-rational arguments on top.
And they've studied this very clearly.
You can see the emotional impulse precedes the rational argument, and the rational argument tends to tail after it.
Well, of course, everybody claims that they're driven by reason and evidence.
It's really, they're driven by emotion.
And this, of course, is the case, again, to talk about the trial we were talking about earlier.
You can see that the people who believe that Zimmerman was a murderer immerse themselves in information that supports that and reinforces it.
And the people who believe the opposite...
I actually didn't go into that particular...
I don't know.
I'm curious about it.
I did get a lot of anti-Zimmerman stuff from the media and went in to try to find the information that I thought was the most relevant.
So if you know that ahead of time, that people are not...
You know, if I say, well, Charlie, I really, really want to go north, and I start walking in some particular direction, and then you, you know, you whip out your compass and you say, actually, Steph, that's south, and I just keep going, then clearly I don't want to go north.
I just want to go in that direction.
I'm calling it north.
And, you know, when you pull out a compass, the reason and evidence and the facts of the matter, most people will not change.
Their perspective or their opinion.
They will simply change the topic.
They will move on to some arguments.
They'll add hominem.
They'll withdraw.
And because they're protecting their emotional attachment, they don't want to know that what they call rational is an emotional, irrational attachment.
Because then they actually have to deal with it as trauma, as having been lied to by people in authority, as an emotional pain, as a stripping of their fundamental human right.
To have clear thinking, critical thinking and so on.
They don't want to deal with that.
And I understand that's a painful thing to do.
That's a difficult thing to do.
So, you know, kind of knowing that ahead of time, I don't usually wander in and say, oh, well, you know, I've given somebody rational arguments and therefore they're going to change their mind.
I just...
I don't expect that.
I try to provide that when people give me better arguments, but I don't expect that.
Irrational expectations lead to suffering.
They're one of the primary causes of suffering, so I try to remind myself that that's not likely to be the case, and that there's not that irrational expectation.
Absolutely.
There's a man who is suffering at the moment.
His name is Adam Kokesh, who is currently He's being held in a jail and prison in America for his actions on Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. Adam calls himself an anarchist and a kind of a voluntarist.
He's got his own show and stuff.
What is your opinion on Adam's actions?
Do you think he's right in what he's doing or wrong in what he's doing?
It's a complex question.
First and foremost, I would focus on the actions of the state when it comes to determining what was right and wrong in this situation.
Now clearly, in a free society, like in an anarchic, in a truly free society, the fact that he had some mushrooms in his house, Would be of no more importance than the fact that he might have some arugula up his nose.
Like it just, who cares, right?
I mean, this would not be, you know, unless he'd signed some document that said, don't store this stuff in your house or whatever.
Somebody was renting a house from someone or whatever.
But it would, so there would be no issues with that.
I imagine in a truly free society, the fact that he may have cocked his shotgun, I mean, I guess they would be privately owned or whatever, assuming he didn't break anyone's rules.
Nobody would care about that.
He didn't do any harm to anyone.
And so the fact that he would be arrested for these things clearly signifies the initiation of the use of force on the part of the state.
So that is, you know, in a sort of rational, just situation, this would be that would be the immoral action would be to kidnap him and to force him in, you know, to sit in his underwear after throwing a flash bang grenade into his face, into his front foyer to have him sit, unable to go to the washroom into his front foyer to have him sit, unable to go to What I read was that he was put in a tiny cell, freezing cold, not allowed to have any clothes, insects swarming all over his cell, not allowed to make a phone call.
That is stone evil.
That is stone reprehensible.
And that to me is one of the very definitions of cruel and unusual punishment, which is supposed to be against the Constitution, which just shows that we live in this, you know, lawless.
What we live in now is what what people think of as anarchy.
You know, there's the cliche of anarchy is lawlessness and everyone can do what they want.
And the biggest gang can do whatever they want.
It's like, that's the government.
That's exactly what we have.
It's the biggest gang is doing whatever they want.
This is, you know, the government is in classic cases of projection, takes all the evils that it does and tells people that that's what freedom is like.
And that law and order, which is what we get in a state of freedom, is what the government is doing, which is exactly the cliche of anarchy.
The biggest gang with the biggest costumes gets to do whatever they want.
So, yeah, I understand where Adam, I think I understand where Adam is coming from, which is that he wishes to, show the brutality inherent in what the government is doing.
I personally think it's too early for civil disobedience for a variety of reasons because I believe that the media controls the narrative.
And therefore, they will simply portray Adam as, you know, an unstable individual with post-traumatic stress disorder who is a drug user and so on, and a traumatized veteran.
And so they will simply control the narrative.
And because people live in the matrix of the media language...
They will not perceive it any differently.
I mean, if you remember, there was a dentist and his wife who did not pay their taxes, and they were surrounded by armed guards of the Death Star guards of the federal government or whatever it was.
And what did that change?
I mean, they were just portrayed as a bunch of crazy people who didn't want to pay the taxes because they hated the poor and wanted them to starve or something like that.
And so I think that it's really tough to get the message across.
If the people don't understand the philosophy, then acting on the philosophy is going to look crazy.
And I think people are still a long way away from understanding the basic philosophy that taxation is theft, that the government is centralized and organized coercion.
Until people understand that, I think that it's too easy to reframe what people are doing as just nutty, ridiculous behavior and dangerous.
I wonder if the statists and the general masses would consider people like yourself or myself or Adam completely insane.
I'm not saying that there's parallel in our work, but I'm just saying that do you think that reason to an unreasonable person looks batshit crazy?
Well, I think probably closer to the To the greatest integrity in our principles, it would look crazy, like government is the initiation of force and so on.
I tend to focus on values that people already have and extend those.
Because if somebody already has a value, then asking them to extend it a little bit is not insane.
You're just asking them to live with integrity.
So, for instance, when I talk about nonviolence with regards to parenting, what I can do is point out to people that you never see a child getting spanked on television.
Never see a child getting spanked on television.
If you think of all the sitcoms you've seen where there are kids around, I've never once, I think on the Waltons, like...
50 years ago, some kid was taken out to the woodshed.
But even that was off screen.
And again, that's 50 years ago.
If you look at any of the shows since like the 60s, I never saw Leave it to Beaver getting spanked.
And none of these kids ever got spanked.
And so we must have some sympathy to the non-spanking position.
Because if you imagine doing a sitcom these days where some child got spanked on screen, like full-on red-cheeked spanked, People would go insane.
I mean, they would literally lose their minds.
You would get incredible boycotts and letters would pour in.
It would be all...
Like, people would go insane because they would actually see what most parents are still doing, but they'd see it portrayed into them when they're not in an angry state, when it would bypass the defenses of rage that they get themselves into, the alter egos they get themselves into to harm their children.
So when you say, listen, is it better to reason with children or to hit them?
Most people would say, well, it's better to reason.
You know, is it better?
If you could be a great parent without spanking, would you be interested in that?
I think most people would say, well, yeah.
Whereas if you say, would you like to live in a society with no government?
People, you know, they can't imagine.
So I think focusing on what people already accept as positive.
You know, in that, you know, a lot of European countries have banned spanking.
Spanking is banned in all schools in Canada.
I think it's true in England as well.
And in most places in the U.S., there's still some states where you can spank in the South, particularly, of course, the source of a lot of military men.
You can't get military men without physical abuse.
And so I think that people are leaning that way.
Spanking is on the decline.
So asking them to be more consistent that way is not insane.
Now, some people will say, well, if you don't hit kids, that's insane and irresponsible.
Parenting just keeps moving.
But I think a majority of people would be interested in that as an approach.
And you don't see spanking on super nanny or nanny...
SOS or 911 or whatever it is called.
So there is a...
And you can point to, you know, the American Academy of Pediatrics is against spanking.
Again, banned in most European countries and so on.
So you can point towards the science and evidence that it's, you know, better for kids.
And you can point to the science and evidence that, you know, spanking reduces IQ, increases antisocial behavior, criminality, drug abuse, promiscuity, smoking, drinking.
All of that have been positively correlated with spanking.
So you've got lots of evidence.
You've got a lot of social prejudice.
Against spanking as an ideal and so from there you can really I think start to change how people raise their kids and you know much like when you stop using the government you get all this incredible like I don't know if you've read any of the stuff that's going on in Detroit where the government has basically ceased providing fundamental services.
It's incredible!
I mean you've got Private buses rolling around where you just have to text them and they'll come pick you up.
You know, you can drink on them.
They've got free Wi-Fi, free music, rechargeable stuff for your phones.
They'll pick you up and drop you off wherever you want and they're cheaper than the government buses and way more convenient.
And much less dangerous.
And this is just one of, you know, people are coming up with their own private security, their own police forces and stuff like that.
Whenever the government stops doing stuff, you get this flowering of creativity.
It's the same thing with parenting.
When you take aggression and violence off the table for your parenting, amazing, wonderful things come out in terms of negotiation and peace.
So I think to not look insane, you have to try and stretch where people already are rather than hit them sideways with something they consider just incomprehensible.
No, absolutely.
Moving on to a question here I have.
Talking about organizations and, say, states and corporations and military industrial complexes, does corruption and fascism, in your opinion, Steph, creep into every organization?
Do organizations take on a life of their own, like a cult?
Are they even sentient?
This is the thing.
Because as soon as you start getting the party members want to keep the party alive instead of just maybe behaving rationally themselves.
I don't know.
Maybe that's tied in together.
But does corruption and fascism creep into every organization?
I would certainly argue that the tendency of corruption creeps into every organization which is not voluntary.
Every organization that is not voluntary will corrupt itself into like a true, almost a caricature of evil.
The only counteraction to corruption is voluntarism because everybody has this tendency to become corrupt because we're mammals.
We can't overcome that.
We all want to not do a whole lot of work and have fruit rain down from the ceiling fan into our mouths whenever we get hungry.
We all want to minimize how much work we do and maximize the resources we get.
And there's no better way of doing that than to outsource violence to a third party and get the fruits of whatever violence is taken, right?
So, I mean, if you can set up a tax system, then you get all this free money.
If you can set up a fiat currency system, you get all this free money.
If you can get the government to block foreign imports of sweaters and you're in the sweater business, you can raise prices.
If you can get the government to ban scabs so that you have a monopoly on the workforce, then you get all this free money.
So we have this tendency.
To want to use violence to get stuff for free.
Now, without the government, you have to actually use violence yourself.
And that's not quite so palatable for people because it's kind of risky.
You know, if I want to go steal someone's watch, well, he might have a gun.
He might know jujitsu.
He might have, you know, three friends hiding under his coat.
I don't know.
He might have, you know, attack monkeys in his boots.
And so people don't, you know, that's the countenance, right?
So if you can't outsource the violence to a third party, you have to do it yourself, then people are much less likely to do it.
So that is one way to do it.
The other thing, too, is that corruption is incredibly inefficient, right?
I mean, a company that is corrupt is just going to have to charge more or offer less to its customers.
And so one of the first signs that corruption is occurring or inefficiency is occurring, corruption and inefficiency sort of two sides of the same coin, It's that you can't compete with companies or organizations that aren't corrupt.
And so voluntarism, in other words, not being able to outsource to this monolith of death star of evil called the state, means that the price of your goods or the quality of your services is going to reflect the degree of corruption within the organization.
The price is a wonderful signal that things are going awry in an organization.
So if the executives in a company just start quadrupling their wages without providing any additional value, Well, that's going to reflect itself in the share price decline.
It's going to reflect itself in the price they have to charge.
It's going to reflect itself in the disgust of people who work for them who are going to start looking for other jobs.
So the market provides very clear signals and then customers stay away from those companies and they generally either die or reform.
But when you have the wall of violence between customers and the providers of service, then corruption remains unchecked because there's no competition and you can't avoid Having to pay for the service and so whenever you have coercion particularly institutionalized coercion then you have no way for the market to provide a check and balance for increasing corruption within any organization.
Oh, absolutely.
So you're saying the free market is a self-regulating organism in a way.
Well, it's the best one we have.
Yeah.
I mean, there's no guarantee.
I mean, there may still be corruption and whatever, right?
But it's certainly the best thing we have, right?
Because who watches the watchers is sort of the key question always throughout society.
Oh, we've got a censorship bureau.
Well, who takes care of those?
Oh, we have the police to combat crime.
Well, who combats the criminals who may be in the police force?
The only way that I know of to have who watches the watchers is to have volunteerism.
Go ahead.
So yeah, I agree.
To me, the public, the court of public opinion, if we can't trust ourselves, what's the point of us being alive?
We might as well commit suicide in the Albert Camus absurdist sense.
What's the point of living if we're not living by first principles as respecting the individual?
And this is why I do, I think, like yourself, I have a soft spot for Ayn Rand, or Ayn Rand, however you pronounce her name.
I think you pronounce her name...
Something like that.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
She said that, like, communism is the tyranny of the individual by the many.
And I think that's so wonderfully put.
Like, the tyranny of the individual by the many.
And so, like, I have a question here, which I think here, right?
Is communism-socialism-statism a rational choice for people who are perhaps not exceptional?
Well, it depends what you mean by rational.
So if by rational you mean, can people who are really good at...
Yeah, so can people who are really good at politics and verbal manipulation, verbal intimidation, you know, general verbally fluent sociopathy, yeah, I mean, a status system is really good for people who have evil skills and who want to escape the consequences of their actions, for sure.
Just like a quarter of people in Asia have some relationship to Genghis Khan.
Was rape, pillage, murder, and genocide really great for Genghis Khan's genes?
Absolutely it was.
So if you're sort of looking in an amoral gene reproduction resource gathering sense, Then yes, there is some rationality.
I mean, Barack Obama is making a whole lot more money and having a whole lot more power in a status system than he would in a free society.
I get that.
That makes sense.
Now, but if by rational, are you talking about morally consistent, objectively defensible, philosophically sound?
Well, no.
Not at all.
And of course, when the system collapses, then none of it looks rational at all anymore.
Do you think people- does everyone have a moral basis, a guilty conscience, do you think, Stefan?
Or are we stuck really in, sorry to keep using the zombie metaphor, but are they just, you know, kind of just automatons?
Are they zombies?
Because I like to think that they have, everyone has a conscience and it'll eat them to pieces and destroy them eventually if they act, you know, evil and irrational.
But I think you said Stalin died peacefully in his sleep, had a great time, drank wine, ate lots of meat.
I think wonderful time.
Three categories of people, Charlie.
First of all, the people who have a conscience.
And the majority of the population as a whole.
And then there are people who have no conscience, right?
The sociopaths and psychopaths have.
Statistically, they're about 1 in 25.
Now, the 1 in 25 is a statist measure, right?
And so if you and I were to measure it according to real philosophical or principles, I bet you'd be many times higher than that.
Right, because they would view people who are cops enforcing the drug wars as having a conscience, whereas we might question that to some degree, right?
So it's at a minimum 4% of the population doesn't have a conscience.
So there's people who have a conscience, there's people who have no conscience, and then there's people who have an anti-conscience, which means that they actually take pleasure in harming others, right?
So they've done studies where they show people, you know, intentionally harmed people in videos or whatever.
So somebody intentionally getting their hand to spike through with a hammer and a nail or something like that.
Now, majority of people recoil.
You know, the sociopaths are kind of indifferent.
Does it serve my needs or not?
I don't really care.
But there is also a significant portion of the population whose pleasure center in their brain lights up when they see human suffering.
And it is orgasmic for them at some point.
So they gain significant pleasure and joy out of causing harm to other people.
You know, the stuff I think is generally, I would argue, traced back to childhood and so on.
But the reality is that, you know, there are people who will help you.
There are people who will help you if it serves their interests and then cast you aside when they don't.
And then there are people who will take the greatest pleasure in their life out of actually harming you, either psychologically or materially or whatever it is.
And so, you know, these are the three species of human beings, I guess you would argue.
And the most refined of them generally tend to rise to the top of our society.
And we really are run by, you know, crazy evil people.
Because, I mean, who wants power over other human beings?
What a ridiculous vanity that is.
I mean, I don't know how you should live.
I don't know how other people should live.
I know there's a couple of things they shouldn't do.
You know, don't steal, don't kill, don't rip.
But I don't know how people should live.
And the idea that I would run around commanding everyone with the power of a gun on what to do.
I mean, you really literally have to be insane to think that that's justified or reasonable.
You have to just have no empathy for other people.
And these are all the people who pass laws and are in charge.
No, I think, you know, you're absolutely right.
I mean, it is an absolute sickness, I think, statism and the kind of desire to kind of dominate it.
It shows a kind of very deep insecurity that a man or woman has to want to dominate others.
I mean, I think this leads nicely into the kind of last section of the questions I want to ask you, if we can get a bit more spiritual.
I don't know if you know much about my films, but I like to kind of try and extrapolate and look at the kind of the meta-narrative, the very bigger picture.
I know there is a kind of debate, like, is it all mine or is it all matter?
But, you know, even Spock in Star Trek, he, I think it was Kirk said to him one day in the original Star Trek, he said, look, I know you claim to be 100% logical, but you must have a kind of emotional drive to drive you.
So I guess the question, Stefan, is would you say you are, are you a spiritual man and what drives you emotionally?
Oh, so you're saving all the easy questions to the end.
What drives me emotionally?
Three little guys in a hat.
Well, I think the word spiritual, just to define it for me, the word spiritual would be to, like we have this neofrontal cortex, it's like the crowning achievement of our Development, but it sits on top of a variety of other mental systems that are incredibly important, right?
So there's the unconscious or the subconscious, depending on how you want to use the phrase.
And there's also what's called the gut, right?
There's a second brain in our midriff, you know, gut instinct and so on.
What it actually does function as a kind of brain.
And so the unconscious has been shown in studies to be 7,000 to 8,000 times faster at processing information than the conscious mind.
I sort of view the conscious mind as like a laser.
It's really great for specific things, but it doesn't illuminate the landscape very much.
Whereas to me, the unconscious is like dim sunlight or a full moon.
It gives you enough to navigate by, but you can't see anything in any great detail.
And so I definitely would view myself as spiritual in the sense that if you simply rely on your conscious rational mind, then you are voluntarily handing away from your decision-making capacity literally hundreds of millions of years of evolution specifically designed to help you process things rationally and with integrity and to notice things about reality.
I don't know if you've read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, which is how much information we can process unconsciously in just a tiny fraction of a second.
And so I'd recommend the book just because it shows the power of the unconscious mind.
So I don't believe that there is immaterial aspects or there are immaterial aspects to my consciousness, but I certainly do accept that relying on the conscious mind alone It's living with probably 5% of your potential as a human being.
And I think that's truly a tragic and diminished and dwarf-like place to live.
I really love the full-bodied, full-mind, full integration like meditation and yoga and all these kinds of things.
The mind-body integration I think is absolutely essential and I don't think we can really have strength enough to change the world unless we engage all the full dimensions of our being.
And to think that that just sits a couple of square inches right above your eyebrows I think is to miss out on what it means to be truly human, and truly animal, and truly a mammal.
Yeah, so what would you say, what are the emotions that drive you?
David Hume said that, what was it, a reason is the slave to the passions.
What passion is your reason a slave to, Stefan?
What passion is my reason a slave to?
Well, to me, I know what Hume said.
This is an age-old issue in Western philosophy, the mind-body dichotomy.
I don't view the emotions and reason as being opposites.
Reason can lead you astray, and the emotions can bring you home.
When you get a funny feeling about someone but they don't appear to be problematic, well, trust your gut.
At least explore that option.
Reason has its value and so do the emotions.
It's like saying, well, all you ever need to do handyman work is a hammer.
Well, no, there's other things you need.
Reason is just one tool in our box, and I don't think that it's opposed to the passions fundamentally.
I think if the passions have been programmed by irrational people, then you have some, right, so if you were raised really religious, or if you were raised really patriotic to some unholy regime, then sure, your conscious mind and your reasoning is gonna have some trouble with your emotions, but that's not the fault of the emotions, right?
That's the fault of the indoctrination that you experience when you're young.
But my fundamental passion is I really wish that people could understand how much fun it is To really think.
To really think with your whole body and your whole brain, with your whole being.
To really think, to reason, to surrender to the higher power of reason and evidence.
I really wish people could get how much fun that is.
Of course, there's a huge hump to get over.
Whenever you start to think for yourself, bang, you run up against the prejudices of everyone around you.
And everyone around you who can't be asked to think, or doesn't want to think, or is intimidated by thinking, or whom, To whom thinking is going to reveal bad aspects of their personality to you or to themselves, well, they're going to oppose you.
I wish people could see beyond the smoke and fury of beginning to think to the incredible paradise and oasis that lies on the other side of that.
In the same way, people who are really overweight, I wish they could see through the first 30 days of dieting to all the great stuff they can get on the other side of losing weight and so on.
So I wish that people could really see that.
I sort of try and show that kind of happiness and joy that could come out of really thinking and taking on the evils of the world.
I think it was Andrew Breitbart who said you can walk towards the fire and have a great time.
And, you know, there is great nobility in opposing the evils of the world and in harming the interests of evil people, which is inevitable for the growth of goodness.
You know, when they ended slavery, there were a whole bunch of people who hated that.
They made their living off transporting slaves or selling slaves or catching slaves or branding slaves and suddenly they were out of work and they hated it.
All progress of mankind harms the interests of evil people who refuse to change.
We can enjoy that.
Everybody loves playing video games where they fight.
Everybody loves going to see movies where there's fighting between good and evil.
But you can do that without ever getting a bruise.
I wish people could learn to enjoy that a little bit more and not be so frightened of the bad opinions of bad people, if that makes any sense.
Absolutely.
I think this brings me very nicely to my last question that I have here.
You talk about fighting evil and so forth, and I agree with you 100%.
My philosophy of life is to try and You know, speak out.
And like yourself, I release videos and I speak out in public and on the street with the authority and status that the way I see is wrong.
And you've taken some hits for that too, right?
Some very difficult emotional hits from some of the work that you've done and some of the doubts that you've expressed about various movements in libertarianism.
I mean, it's hard, right?
Yeah, it is very hard.
I got emotionally sucked into the conspiracy theory world for many years, and that kind of taught me something very, very profound, is that the truth, in a sense, was tribal for me.
I found a new tribe of people that accepted me and praised me and said wonderful things, and I got emotionally sucked into it, and I put my reason and logic aside.
But part of, for me, an issue we have in the UK here is council tax.
It just seems like an arbitrary tax on being alive.
These services are forced upon you to pay tax.
People do get jailed from time to time, very rarely.
I've been just not paying that for quite a few years now.
The letters from the courts, their empty threat levels seem to be getting higher and higher.
I'm jesting.
I don't know how empty they are.
But you had a caller a couple of weeks ago that mentioned something about paying tax or not paying tax.
I did a video about this actually a couple of days ago, mentioning this.
I was in my garden.
And I understood.
I could totally understand from a philosophical, rational point of view.
Pay your tax.
Don't get thrown in jail by black-booted thugs and get taken away from your wife and kids.
But to me, I have a difficulty with Just, you know, paying tax in that sense, I think we should, I don't know, I don't know what I'm trying to ask you or how I'm trying to phrase this, but I think you get what I'm getting at.
Well, it's morally repugnant to you, right?
I mean, the tax is being used to oppress people, it's being used for wars, it's being used to jail people unjustly, it's being used to, you're a father, is that right?
Yes, I am, yeah.
Yeah, so I mean, the tax is being used as collateral to drive your children into debt.
I mean, it's morally repugnant.
So I completely understand the sentiment for sure.
I really do.
And I don't sort of blithely go and pay the extortion for breathing known as taxation, particularly knowing some of the tax money goes to some things that I would voluntarily support anyway.
But Of course, I don't like the compulsion, and I certainly don't like the use to which it is put.
You know, here in Canada, there's a little bit less war, but the tax is being used to pay off a whole bunch of native Canadian, sort of native Canadian chiefs who then, you know, end up oppressing their own people and keeping them stuck on reservations where the young people die from drinking photocopy of fluid.
Their lives are so horrendous.
So there's a huge amount of, and it's going, of course, into education to propagandize the next generation on how wonderful and necessary the state is and how awful freedom is and so on.
I completely understand all of that.
I mean, the moral repugnance is towards this coercion and what it's used for.
I certainly don't take lightly, and I certainly don't want to wish that away.
Does that sort of help you see sort of where I see where you're coming from?
Yeah, it does.
It does.
Thank you.
But you advised the guy to carry on paying his taxes, and I felt it was kind of...
I kind of felt...
I don't know, maybe...
Yeah, I was saddened to hear you say that because your videos are very much about being absolutely opposed to statism and so forth.
And then the guy, I think he mentioned not paying tax.
And then you said, you know, do it.
Pay your tax.
I'll give you the briefcase.
So there's nothing immoral about paying taxes.
Because you are in a situation of coercion, right?
So if some guy comes up to you in an alleyway, sticks his knife in your ribs, like right against your ribs, and says, give me your watch, is it moral or not moral to give him your watch?
Well, there's no answer to that.
You know, if you want to fight him, I guess you can fight him.
I think it's too dangerous.
I personally would not risk dying for a watch.
I certainly would not risk grave bodily injury, a punctured lung, whatever, for a watch.
Just give him his watch.
And don't go down that alley again, I guess, right?
So I can't give anyone any moral advice on whether to or to not pay taxes.
I certainly think that you can't win the future from a jail cell.
I certainly think that we can't make the case on how to be free when we go to a jail cell.
The vast majority of people believe that people in jail are bad and wrong.
The vast majority of people Believe that the taxes you pay goes to provide essential services to the poor, to the sick, to the needy, which otherwise would never be provided.
I mean, the vast majority of Americans, for instance, have no idea, no idea that none of their income tax goes to provide any services whatsoever, that it simply goes to pay interest on the debt and to fund the soft, infinite theft of the fiat currency system.
They have no idea.
They think that if you're withholding taxes...
That you are condemning the poor to dying on the streets.
This is the narrative.
And with that narrative in place, they think you should go to jail for not paying your taxes and you're a bad person for doing so.
Can you change their mind from within a tax cage?
I don't see so.
I don't see so at all.
And, you know, I've not seen, you know, with Wesley Snipes went to jail and Lauren Hill just went to jail for nonpayment of taxes and so on.
And if you look at the comments section below these things, just as if you look at the comments section for the Adam Kokesh arrest, people are like, yeah.
You know, I mean, this is the law.
I mean, people need services.
If you don't pay your taxes, then, you know, poor people's houses and apartment buildings are gonna burn down because there's no fire protection.
There's no firemen, right?
So this is genuinely what people think.
It's not true.
I mean, none of it's just quite the opposite of the truth.
But this is where people are.
And, you know, tragically, it's like being an abolitionist in the 15th century, and people say, well, Without slaves who God has ordained to be enslaved by the white man, right?
That the black men are inferior and God has decreed that white men have dominion over black men.
And who are you to argue with God?
And by the way, if we didn't have The slaves to gather our crops, we would all starve to death.
Then if you said, I think we should free the slaves, then they say, well, you go against God and you want us all to starve to death.
How can you win that argument?
Especially if even advocating that argument puts you in jail.
You know, there's something that's so essential about any kind of revolution, which is that it's always earlier than you think.
It's always earlier than you think.
Because you and I, who've been working in this field for years and years and years, we know people pretty much who are like us.
And we forget what it's like outside or back in the cages or back in the human zoo called the state and how we look to them.
We forget that because we surround ourselves, and wisely so, with people who are free, with people who think rationally, with people who accept reason and evidence, with people who know the truth about the system.
But you know that great speech about the matrix is most people if you try and unplug them will fight you viciously because that's life as they know it.
That is truth.
That is reality.
And you know unfortunately the government has massive amounts of hostages who will significantly suffer even if we could snap our fingers tomorrow.
Like Detroit is running out of money.
I mean there are billions and billions of dollars in debt.
Unfunded liabilities for their pensions.
I think three and a half billion dollars or something like that.
And so they're looking at cutting pensions.
To pay 40 cents on the dollar is going just to service the debt.
Well, I mean, these people are going to suffer horrendously.
I mean, they're only getting like $1,800, $1,900 on average a month for their pensions.
And, you know, if they get cut, it's going to be pretty horrendous.
The government has hostages, which, you know, if you talk about cutting government, that's who they're going to hurt first.
They're not going to hurt the bankers.
My God, I mean, no way, right?
Because the bankers run the whole damn system.
That's a good analogy.
It's a very good analogy.
They have hostages.
Yeah, everybody who's dependent on the government who's not super rich is a hostage.
And they have these hostages so that we can't fire the metaphorical bullets of reason and scare them away.
They've got all these hostages.
To me, I think we still have to make the case so that people might even remotely understand why we would commit civil disobedience and for them to understand why that might be occurring.
I think we're still at least a generation away.
I mean, libertarianism in the US, which is pretty much the whole principles that the US was founded on, which they teach in the school, the founding principles of government, government by and for the people, the government that is feared by the people is a tyranny, the government that fears its people might in some way be freedom, that it was a republic, not a democracy, that it was strictly bound by the limits of the Constitution.
All of this stuff is taught to American kids.
And the libertarianism that is put forward these days is still way more statist than the original founding principles of America.
And yet libertarianism has almost never polled above 1% in presidential elections.
And this is with all the kids being taught about how wonderful libertarianism is.
And so I think it's way too early for us to be able to go out and go flame out in any kind of civil disobedience scenario and have it not be portrayed and very successfully portrayed as good riddance, poor hating lawbreakers.
If you don't like it, leave and stuff like that.
It's just so early.
Nelson Mandela was able to convert, I don't mean this in any cynical way, but he was able to convert his 27-year incarceration into heroic status only because apartheid was recognized as a moral evil by the vast majority of the population.
Until there's a live aid against taxation...
You know, there was that song, I ain't gonna play Sunsetty.
Well, until there's, you know, ain't gonna pay my taxes, you know, until Bono is getting behind your course, you know, it's too early.
Until there's some sort of popular cultural revolution and education of people, until there are rap songs about it, until there are t-shirts about it, until it becomes cool.
To understand these issues.
To reframe what we're doing as irrational self.
It's too foreign.
It's too alien to people's lack of thinking.
And I don't know.
I mean, we got the internet, but so do the bad guys.
So I think we're making progress.
So are the bad guys.
That's my general argument.
And if parenting is the key, then getting your ass thrown in jail at the expense of your children is going exactly in the wrong direction.
No, Luke.
I guess that is a very good point.
I'm not saying that's proof.
I'm not saying I have the answer.
This is just an argument.
I'm not saying this is any kind of conclusive thing.
I just want to be really clear about it.
And therefore, nobody should...
I don't know.
I don't know.
But this is just my argument's perspective.
I want to be clear about this.
It's not any kind of open and shut, tied-up case.
No, of course.
I mean, there's arguments.
There's still, like, a time and a place for the right level of revolutionary act or insurrectionary act or, you know, at the moment, you know, talk.
But one thing I think, if we can end on a positive note, Stefan, you mention often through your videos, which I enjoy so much on YouTube and may you carry on making them for decades, is that it's better to be alive today, even as a kind of, like, not very rich person in the kind of Western world, than it was, say, In ancient Sumeria or ancient Egypt or any time apart from now.
We are getting freer.
We discussed earlier how we're getting crazier, but there does seem to be.
It's a bit wonky now with the war on terror thing that's gone a bit mad, but I think there are reasons to be positive.
The fact that we can share these ideas openly on public forums shows that There is hope.
Yeah, I mean, the world has never had a better chance of sanity than the present.
You know, if you look at ancient Rome 2500 years ago, the number of people who could be exposed to philosophical thinking was maybe a tenth of one percent of the population.
If you look at the Middle Ages, I mean, it was virtually zero.
In the Dark Ages, it was effectively zero.
The number of people who could be exposed to philosophy In the past was a tiny, tiny percentage of the population.
Now, I mean, it's incredible.
I mean, I've had, I don't know, I haven't done the numbers recently, probably about 55 million downloads of my show.
And I mean, this is just one of many, many shows, some of which are more successful.
I mean, but just talking from my, 55 million lightning strikes of philosophy in the world.
I mean, if I was a professor, I'd get to maybe teach, I don't know, 50 kids a year for 20 years?
And that's not a lot.
It's really not a lot.
But if you look at it now, if I'm gonna get a million hits on the Zimmerman video, well that's a million arguments against the crazy perspectives of the mainstream culture.
Impossible beforehand.
Impossible beforehand.
And so I would argue that the possibility of reason, the possibility of truth, the possibility of a philosophical methodology spreading in the world.
I don't care about the conclusions of philosophy.
I care about the methodology of philosophy.
Teaching people how to think, teaching people how to reason, teaching people how to confront their prejudices, teaching people how to deal with crazy emotions that result from early trauma or indoctrination.
I mean, that's an incredible opportunity.
We can throw the whole world on the couch now in a way that's never been possible before.
I mean, prior to the internet, I would have had a career as a software guy and, you know, I would have been buried and, you know, nobody would have ever visited my grave except my immediate family.
Now we have the capacity to bring reason and evidence to the world in a way that has been completely and functionally impossible.
I mean, I can log onto YouTube and I can see the most amazing arguments and perspectives.
I can go read foreign newspapers which show a world outside the obsidian biosphere of culture that I happen to live in.
I can view perspectives, instant translations from all over the world.
The possibility of fragmenting that blind searchlight of culture into the disco ball You know, fragmented disco ball of rational thought is unprecedented in the world.
And it's true that the world is getting crazier, but, you know, sometimes you get that dip before you get the flight.
Sometimes you get that stumble before you get the sprint.
And I think that we have an incredible once in Earth's history opportunity to bring reason to the world.
The crazy people are always going to have their motives to make people more crazy.
Crazy is a virus that spreads through language.
But sanity is also health that spreads through language.
And we've never had a bigger amphitheater.
We've never had a bigger opportunity to bring reason to the masses.
And my God, I wouldn't want to be alive 100 years from now.
And I wouldn't have wanted to bother 100 years in the past.
But right now is really the eye of the hurricane to bring peace to the world.
Absolutely.
It is incredibly unique times.
As you say, once in Earth's history, it isn't just one in 10,000 years.
The super global connectivity we have now, the massive data rates that are instantly communicated all over the world.
It's incredible.
It's fantastic.
Stefan, I've really enjoyed the last hour and 10 minutes speaking to you.
It's a massive pleasure.
I'm a big fan of your work.
I wish you all the best for now.
Thank you very, very much.
It's been really, really good fun.
My pleasure.
It's been a real pleasure, too.
Let's do it again soon.
For my listeners, to find your work, where's the best place they can go?
My name, Charles Veach.
Type it into Google.
It's all linked now.
Google, YouTube, Google Plus.
So just my name.
I just type in The Love Police.
Thank you.
The Love Police.
Take care, Charlie.
All the best then to you and your family.
And give your kid a kiss for me.
And to you and yours, Stefan.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
▲
Export Selection