2446 The Biggest Obstacle to the Liberty Movement.
What is the biggest obstacle to the liberty movement? An excerpt from Michael Shanklin's interview with Stefan Molyneux.
Aug. 7, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:19
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| We need to become a community that people envy. | |
| And I don't think we are a community that people envy yet. | |
| I don't think that we're very effective at dealing with bullies within our own community. | |
| I don't think that we hold ourselves to the highest standards of human interaction in our own community. | |
| I think that we can be self-indulgent, petty, vindictive, vicious. | |
| I think that our public personas are sometimes entirely out of sorts with our professed goals of nonviolence or at least of the non-aggression principle. | |
| I think there's ridiculous infighting. | |
| I think there's a lack of willingness to address essential questions like, does the non-aggression principle apply to spanking? | |
| I've written articles about it. | |
| I've talked about it for years. | |
| And I've yet to find many people in the libertarian movement who are even willing to think about engaging on this as a practical topic. | |
| But Jesus H. Christ on a stick. | |
| Spanking is something we can control. | |
| Federal Reserve, we can't do shit all about. | |
| We can't control foreign policy. | |
| We can't control government policy. | |
| But we can control whether we initiate the use of force against our own children. | |
| If we were to examine our own behavior rather than focus solely on the people over the hill whose actions we can't even approach, let alone change, I think we could do something truly incredible. | |
| If we were to have the highest standards of behavior on the internet, that would be pretty cool. | |
| People would say, wow, there's a movement where people actually behave respectfully and intelligently towards each other and they don't indulge in flame wars and they ask questions and they're curious and they're intelligent. | |
| I think that's really cool. | |
| I kind of maybe want me some of that. | |
| Or if we have, as a community, a commitment to nonviolence within the family, my goodness, we would have some pretty smart children. | |
| My goodness, we would have some pretty amazing children. | |
| We'd have children that people would go like, wow, there's a peaceful family. | |
| There's a family where people really enjoy each other's company. | |
| I want some of that. | |
| I don't know crap all about fiat currency and inflation, but I can see a productive, peaceful and happy community and I can accept and understand that and I can apply that in my own life. | |
| There's a community that's really into self-knowledge. | |
| This is the oldest commandment of Socrates, know thyself. | |
| Here's a community that is really committed to peaceful communication, to negotiation rather than aggression. | |
| Here's a community that supports each other, that encourages each other, that is willing to confront and clash intellectually in pursuit of the truth. | |
| But not in insulting, vicious, or denigrative ways. | |
| That would be such a departure for most people from particularly societies on the internet or societies that they may have known or whatever that people would just like it would be like, whoa, I think I see a slice of the future. | |
| I like it. | |
| Because every time we come up to people or we present ourselves as a community, what people perceive is what they receive is. | |
| These people want to run my life. | |
| And I know that's not what libertarianism or anarchism is about, but this is what they perceive, is that these people are coming to run my life. | |
| So when you see a bunch of Nazis walking down the street, you know that they want to run your life. | |
| You're like, well, I don't want these people running my life. | |
| Pretty scary. | |
| Pretty volatile. | |
| I want these people running my life. | |
| I don't want these people in charge. | |
| I don't want these people to organize society. | |
| I don't want to live in a society that these people like. | |
| Because if they're Nazis or communists, I don't want to live in the society that they like. | |
| But the question is, do people want to live in the society that libertarians like? | |
| Well, the first thing is that we have to show what that society looks like, which is not blog posts or abstract crap. | |
| It's how do we treat each other? | |
| How do we treat each other? | |
| How do we deal with bullies? | |
| Because we say, well, we don't need the state. | |
| Well, if we can't even manage our own community and deal with bullies in some way, either through reform or ostracism, then who the hell are we to talk about what works in society? | |
| First thing we want to do is show all of these principles at work within our own communities, within our own families, within our own interactions. | |
| What if libertarians had by far the lowest divorce rate? | |
| Because they really got along. | |
| They knew how to negotiate. | |
| They didn't use aggression. | |
| What if they had the smartest, best behaved, most accomplished kids because they didn't use any aggression against them? | |
| They homeschooled them. | |
| Whatever it took to raise this crop of healthy human beings for the first goddamn time in human history. | |
| What if there was an intelligence and a negotiation and a nonviolent confrontation where necessary about differences of agreement within the community? | |
| Wouldn't that be amazing? | |
| We've got to show people. | |
| We can't argue with them based on reason. | |
| People don't even know how to reason. | |
| We might as well be shouting at an ant in Mandarin when we bring arguments from Austrian economics to the average person. | |
| But they can appreciate what they can see tangibly. |
Export Selection