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Aug. 23, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:46
2460 Should Hitler Have Been Punished?
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Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyly from Freedom Made Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Welcome to my blue period.
The regular camera will be back in operation soon, I hope.
So, listener questions.
Let's start with, hey, Steph!
Hey!
I like you and your show, but due to my 13 years of publicly funded education...
There's no such thing as the public.
Theft is not the same as funding, and it sure as hell wasn't education.
Other than that, I agree with the Holy Trinity of unholy effects.
He says, during my 13 years of publicly funded education, I may lack critical thinking skills.
Do you think so?
It's possible.
But how do I know it is not just confirmation bias?
How do I tell the difference between Socrates and the sophists?
The sophists have always been the traditional enemy of philosophers, and sophists are those who have the capacity to make the worst argument or the worst argument appear the better.
And there are a couple of tips and tricks for working with figuring out sophists.
So, the first, of course, is that the sophist will not work from first principles.
What is truth?
What is reality?
What is virtue?
These things need to be defined without reference to kind of like historical momentum and existing prejudice and the Ten Commandments or that which is considered to be taken for granted in society.
That stuff all gets thrown aside.
And you start working from first principles.
In other words, a space alien or somebody from another dimension should be able to follow the argument or somebody who's had no exposure to your culture whatsoever should be able to follow the argument.
That's philosophy.
The sophistry is all the stuff where there's all this kind of emotional manipulation and intimidation and you're a bad person if you don't believe it and if you don't care for the welfare state then clearly you hate the poor.
And libertarians just want the rich to get richer, and libertarians are defensive corporations, all that sort of stuff.
This is all sophistry.
It's all an argument from emotional intimidation.
And always be suspicious of anyone who puts an argument forward that requires an in-depth knowledge of existing culture or prior historical prejudices.
That's somebody who's just lassoing the momentum of history to drive the lemmings off yet another inevitable cliff of disaster.
So, critical thinking is...
One of the most fundamental questions that I've made the argument for in terms of philosophy that's important is, compared to what?
There's a philosophy professor from many years ago, and somebody came up to him and said, Hey, how's your wife?
And he said, Compared to what?
That's a great question.
That's a great answer, rather.
And this is important, right?
So this is virtuous.
Well, compared to what?
This is essential.
Compared to what?
This is true.
Compared to what?
Because with compared to what is by what objective standard?
Right, so in science, the compare to what is, well, if it's in accordance with the scientific method, if it's falsifiable, reproducible, blah-de-blah-de-blah, okay, so it's a valid theory.
Compare to what?
Compare to an invalid theory, which lacks logical consistency, or is rejected by empirical evidence, or is not reproducible by other people, or you name it.
So skeptical thinking is very important.
It really is the essence of humanity.
It's really the essence of us as a free species.
We're all born critical.
My daughter questions every piece of punctuation in the sentence, and that's exactly right.
But it's kind of knocked and beaten out of us, because for us to be critical is to dismantle a lot of the unjust, blood-soaked hierarchies that currently rule us and the world.
So...
Let's see here.
Ever since I've heard you, Steph, say that the formula for happiness is reason equals virtue equals happiness.
Oh, actually, that was Nietzsche talking about Socrates.
I just think it's a pretty good framework.
So, I have had a few original thoughts.
That's not one of them.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
I've slowly been working on it, starting with reason.
I got myself into therapy.
Great.
Started studying philosophy, primarily through this show.
And I think I've got a pretty decent grasp on the whole reason thing.
Good stuff, man.
I've recently started focusing more on virtue.
This, partly out of desperation, caught in that zone you've described in Happiness Part 2 between not getting the benefits of social conformity and not living as consistently with my values as I would like to be, and as a result of that being sometimes distinctly unhappy.
Okay, so you can watch This is Happiness Part 2.
It's a video or a podcast.
If you start to live with integrity, you can get caught in the null zone, which is where you're no longer comfortable with social prejudice and bigotry and blindness and stupidity and adherence to evil that characterizes culture as a whole.
Culture, the only important part of that is the first syllable, cult.
But yet you're not far enough over on the consistency thing to gain real happiness from it.
So it's a chasm which many a great man and woman have fallen into.
So, he says, I've worked mainly on honesty, and while there is always room for improvement, I feel confident I'm moving in the right direction.
The area giving me most problems is around courage.
I'm wondering how you see the evolution of virtue in general and courage in particular.
From an unphilosophical state to the kind of virtue that breeds lasting happiness.
What can I expect?
How difficult it is?
What kind of opportunities to look for?
And that sort of thing.
Okay.
Great questions.
Great questions.
I sympathize with the struggle.
There is no end to it.
At least I've not found one.
I've been doing this for over 30 years.
There is no end.
To the struggle for truth and virtue because it's very much swimming against the current.
When you swim against the current, the current doesn't stop.
You say, well, when does swimming against the current end?
Well, it doesn't.
You either go with the current or you continue to swim against it.
But let me tell you what the purpose of courage is.
The purpose of courage is to shoot a flare Up into the sky so that other people can see you.
That's what courage is for.
To shoot a flare up into the sky so that other people can see you.
Courage is not to overcome cowardice or to overcome vindictiveness or to overcome just general shitty behavior on the part of people because you can't forcibly change anybody's mind.
And so the reason that you act with courage is so that Other people who have some desire for virtue and consistency and integrity can see you.
And it's a good thing to be seen by other people who are capable of loving you and who are capable of being loved by you.
So courage is not to change the world.
Courage is not to overcome people's foolishness.
that doesn't work.
What it does do is it draws both enemies and friends to you, right?
I mean, the, you can't shoot up the flare so that only friends can see you.
Uh, and so one of the ways in which we find each other, we virtuous souls in the void, uh, we find each other through courage, but courage makes us visible to the predators, the sociopaths, then the sort of nasty stalkers and all that kind of stuff.
You know, well, it's the price you pay.
There's simply no way for the world to get better without people acting courageously.
One of the side effects, one of the shadows of courage is change in the future, but most importantly, it just gets you the kind of companions that you need, deserve, and actually have to have.
You really need them in this kind of journey.
Next, I've noticed that a great number of anarchist libertarian individuals also tend towards theism in their personal lives.
Needless to say, this is quite baffling to me, as on the one hand you have individuals who clearly reject the slave-master relationship in this life, yet they're quite happy to accept it in the next one.
For some reason, however, I find myself being forgiving of atheists for not being openly anarchist much more easily than I do anarchists not being atheists.
Sorry.
Forgiving of atheists for not being openly anarchists, anarchists for not being atheists.
It's probably because to me religion is so clearly immoral and untrue, but I'm wondering if you could comment on the phenomenon in general and talk about why you think so many people fall into this theistic cognitive trap.
Well...
A theist simply believes in things that are not real, and they believe in them because they were told to believe in them under threat of punishment as children.
Isn't it shocking and remarkable that Islamic parents tend to give birth to Islamic children?
As Dawkins has pointed out, Christian parents give birth to Christian children.
It is a sort of brain virus that is transmitted through the parent line.
What I don't mind so much about religious people is they don't pass laws that force me to conform to their irrationality.
Statists, on the other hand, which is, you know, an atheist who's a statist is just another theist.
They believe in a different kind of God called the state.
But a statist will want laws passed that force you to obey their commandments.
Most religions, at least Christianity in particular, and Judaism, rely on a personal conscience and on persuasion And unfortunately, they survive on the indoctrination of the helpless and dependent minds of children, but there is a lot more liberty, so to speak, in a theistic society which has no state than in a statist society which has no religion.
Now, an example of a statist society that's anti-religious would be the communist dictatorships of the 20th century, unlike the fascist ones, which were nicely wound up with Catholicism along with Nazism.
But the reason why is that we are raised in general in a subjugated position as children.
The vast majority of parents hit their children, and the majority of them hit three or four times a week.
And so parents have this do as I say, not as I do.
They have the hypocrisy of violent authority.
And so this is how we grow up.
This is the template.
I must always be subjugated to some power.
We're taught as children, it's very important, we're taught as children, That we are bad unless forcibly controlled, restrained, and put down.
Unless punished.
Unless stuff is threatened to be taken away from us.
We're given timeouts, which is a kind of local imprisonment.
Stuff is taken away from us, which is theft.
I mean, can you imagine if an employee doesn't do a good job saying, well, that's it.
I'm taking your car for two weeks.
Too bad.
It would not be legal, right?
But children can do anything because they have no power, right?
They're dependent.
We don't have the maturity to not be abusive and bullying when faced with a disparity of power between parents and children.
We're all still working on that.
So we're raised, whether in a theistic or non-theistic household, with the idea that we are basically bad, chaotic, disobedient, wrong, and we have to be forcibly restrained by a higher power that itself is not subjected to its own moral rules.
Let me just say that again.
It's very important.
We are perceived to be bad, undisciplined, ungrateful, chaotic, messy, unpleasant, difficult as children unless we are forcibly violently restrained through spanking of the threat of hell.
Violently and abusively restrained through a higher authority that itself is not subject to the rules it inflicts on children.
Parents will hit a child saying, don't hit.
Governments will say, taxation is moral, which is the forcible removal of property.
And then if you try and be a government yourself, it's illegal.
If you try and come up with a competing currency, it's illegal.
If you try and pass your own laws, it's illegal.
Parents and governments and gods violently control seething bad id-based humanity according to universal moral rules that they themselves are not subjected to, right?
God says, thou shalt not kill, and God spends most of the Old Testament performing pretty much a whole series of worldwide genocides and rapes and justifications for slavery and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, he murders everyone except Noah, his family, and the mysteriously able-to-survive koalas who are able to get a hold of eucalyptus leaves even though they're not in Australia.
So, anyway.
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
God lies throughout the Old and the New Testament.
Anyway, we have to get into the details.
So we have this template, and what happens is, when we grow up, let's say we don't confront the basic template, which is that it was immoral to be treated that way as children.
It was wrong.
It was violent.
It was degrading.
It was disgusting.
It was vile.
It was wretched to be treated that way as children.
And once we deal with that emotional baggage, then we can be free of hierarchy.
But if we concentrate our moral outrageous children on only one specific aspect of this kind of subjugation, like we get really angry at the state, well, we haven't broken the basic paradigm of being bad and need to be forcibly controlled.
So if we fight up against the state, we end up reinforcing, in a sense, our need for religion, because that paradigm has to survive unless it's confronted emotionally at a very deep and visceral and powerful level.
So, it's sort of like your balloon, right?
You push in one side of the balloon, the other side pushes out.
You push in one side, you say I'm an anarchist, a lot of times I'm a libertarian.
That need to be subjugated, if it's not confronted, will still be there, and therefore it reinforces religion.
Or you may say, I'm an atheist, and I don't believe in any of this nonsense, and therefore that breaks that subjugation on that standpoint, but if it's not confronted emotionally, it just reinforces religion.
Your communism or your, you know, people on the left who tend to be more pro-government tend to be more skeptical of religion.
People on the right who tend to be a more pro-free market tend to be more religious, right?
So the amount of subjugation remains at 100%.
You can drain the state down to 10% that just pumps up religion.
You can drain religion down to 10% or 0% that just simply bumps up statism, right?
Until you deal with it emotionally, the subjugation is going to find its root somewhere.
What advice would you give to me, a woman in her mid-twenties, working in the South as a bartender, in order to prepare for the inevitable catastrophic event of America's economic collapse?
I plan on getting my hands on some gold and other alternative currency.
Would you suggest getting off the grid, moving into the woods to live with the deer, leaving the country altogether?
Well, I mean, there's lots of places.
I mean, Jeff Berwick at the Dollar Vigilante and lots of other people are...
Able to get you second passports and get involved in this kind of stuff.
I think that's all really, really important.
I'll put some links below.
So you can look into that if you want.
You know, the US is the world's reserve currency, so...
If the U.S. currency goes tits up, then there's going to be a lot of economic dislocations.
First of all, don't be dependent on the government.
The government is just going to cut the dependents loose.
I mean, you can already start to see this happen because you have basically, I think in Detroit, you're paying for two retired government workers for every government worker that's currently there, right?
You have like three police forces, two of them are retired, you're paying the most for, and one is not responding to anyone because they have no money and the crime rates are rampant.
So don't be dependent on the government.
Work to become not dependent on the government for as much as you can, because the government is simply going to cut these people all loose when they run out of money, and it's going to be pretty gross.
I don't know.
Moving in the woods, live with the deer, that to me is not being free, and that is giving up the social discourse to the most irrational elements of society.
So I think that's not...
A great idea.
I think get some gold.
I think get some food.
Work on your intellectual capital.
Learn skills that can be bartered.
Become close with...
Get a community of people.
Get people that you know, that you love, that you care for, that you trust.
And try to avoid being dependent on the government for as much as possible.
Should Hitler have been punished if he did not himself kill anybody, assuming that his orders were followed voluntarily?
Well, his orders weren't followed voluntarily, at least for the people who executed most of the victims of his regime.
Well, yes, of course.
I mean, you can get punished, even if you don't kill anybody.
Um...
If I order someone's death, if I pay $50,000 to have someone killed, then I have not dirtied my hands with the murder, but clearly I am responsible for the murder, as is the person who killed.
A sort of tradition in common law, which means somewhat market-developed law rather than government bureaucracy and regulation.
There's sort of a tradition in common law that if you set events in motion that result in the death of someone, then that's on you.
So there's a case that a man goes into a convenience store, and he pulls out a gun.
And he's going to rob the place.
Now, the clerk pulls out a gun, shoots at him, misses, the bullet bounces off the wall, and hits someone, another customer, and kills him.
Well, who gets charged for the murder?
The thief.
The thief didn't even pull his trigger, he didn't shoot, but the clerk shot, bounced off something, and killed someone, and the thief is charged for the murder, because the thief set in motion the events that directly resulted in the death of Of the innocent bystander.
And so, yes, of course, if you set things in motion that directly result in the death of someone, then yeah, the involuntary death of someone, then of course you should be punished.
What is the definition of prejudice and bigotry?
Well, I assume you have a dictionary, so you can look them up.
But, I mean, to me, prejudice is simply confirmation bias and irrationality.
And bigotry is when you sort of enact that against the group.
A long question here, I'll cut it short.
Basically, a couple from the Netherlands who have to send their parents to a public school.
It is illegal to have things like the Sudbury School and homeschooling in these kinds of environments.
That's tough, you know, because if you tell your children, well, we have to send you to this place because the government requires it and will be thrown in jail, then it's clearly going to be a prison for them, and it's not going to be a prison for the other kids whose parents don't tell them the truth or don't know the truth about this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, government is a prison, and countries are a prison, and public schools are...
We're really the most sinister gulags of these prisons, perhaps outside of prisons themselves.
So, I would in general not talk about, you know, if we don't send you to this place, we're going to get thrown in jail, and if you don't go, they're going to take you from us and give you to some other parents.
That's really terrifying for children, and I don't think they have the emotional capacity to really process the unbelievable immorality of The system that they live in.
And I think it's kind of unfair to burden them with that, particularly when they're in the single digits of age and adjusting to school.
I mean, there are some Montessori schools, as you mentioned in the letters, I think are worth looking into.
They may be taught the same crap, but at least they'll be taught it more respectfully.
I think as a private school customer, you do have more say than you do in government schools.
And of course, in government schools, it may happen in private schools as well, but in government schools, there is this race to the bottom, like the lowest common denominator, the most common.
Disturbed, sociopathic, pathological children are the ones who tend to set the bar very low, and they tend to set the standard for social interaction.
If I had to send my child to public school, it would break my heart, but I would not tell my child all about the reasons for it and the system behind it.
When they got older, yes, but...
If they don't know it's a prison and you can't change that it is a prison, I would give them the chance to discover that later or to have it explained to them later.
Myers-Briggs personality test, have I taken it?
No.
It's like body type, you know, you can change it with exercise.
Personality test, you can change it with therapy or self-knowledge.
Neuroplasticity is one of these things I'm just concerned that it kind of casts a bit of a net around people and prevents them from growing in different ways.
Eminent domain.
So, I see a huge issue of communities in the geographical states of New York and California, but like a highway or oil pipeline between them.
How is it possible to negotiate with the hundreds, if not thousands, of potential landowners between them?
Even with eminent domain, special interests retard progress.
How would stateless private citizens who may also have unrelated special interests work out a better, less-than-perfect solution than what is now present in the U.S. under eminent domain?
Well...
You know, why do you need all these roads?
Right?
I mean, the roads were put in place after the Second World War to allow the army to move around the US in the event of a nuclear war.
That's what the interstate highway system was put in place for, fundamentally.
So, our entire transportation system is...
It's warped and distorted and remade in the image of coercive statism.
Why do we need all the roads?
Why do you need a road from New York to California or something like that?
Take a plane or don't go.
I mean, it's crazy, right?
So the reason why we have all these roads is there was eminent domain already and the government owns a third of the land in the United States, so you have all these roads already.
So it's the idea, you've got to watch this kind of stuff.
It's the idea, well, how do I recreate...
In a free society, that which has already occurred in a status society, well, that's not the point.
It's like saying, how do I recreate thousands of black guys picking cotton after we end slavery?
Well, the whole point is you don't.
You get combine harvesters or cotton picking machines or whatever it is, right?
So, no, you don't get to go and take other people's property.
If they don't want to sell, they don't want to sell.
Now, you can try and buy it up quietly and peacefully, and you could get a whole bunch of blind corporations so nobody could try and figure out what you were doing.
You could give that a shot for sure.
Let's say you can't.
Let's say you can't build some oil pipeline across the whole country.
So take the boat.
Build it underground.
Have giant catapults.
I don't know, whatever it is.
Whatever it is, it doesn't matter.
You still can't go around taking people's property from them against their will.
The freedom is like a river going down the side of a mountain.
There's this big rock in the middle.
The whole river doesn't stop.
It just finds some way around it.
It just goes around it and finds some other way to do it.
So, I'm not willing to break property for the sake of five cents less a liter for gasoline.
Sorry.
Find some other way to do it.
You don't get to just go and forcibly take people's property.
You can try and buy it up if you want, but no.
I don't get to do it.
Private judiciary.
How is authority implemented in a private society?
I.e., how would private property be protected or contracts be enforced when damages are sustained by one of the parties involved?
What prevents the offending party from silencing victims by intimidation or force?
Yeah, because that never happens with the state.
Who manages the creation of and maintains the standards of practice of the courts in a state of society and how is authority delegated to use force if necessary to recover damages?
Well, I don't know, first of all.
I mean, I've got some ideas, as have a lot of other people.
You can read David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom for this, or my own practical anarchy at freedomandradio.com forward slash free.
It is, by the way, free.
But who decides all of these things?
Well...
Customers decide all of these things.
Not the state, not some central authority.
You know, it's like saying, if the government was designing all these email programs, and they were, of course, crap, because it was the government who was doing them, they say, well, who would design the email programs in a free society?
It's like, well, fundamentally, it would be the customers.
Because you could design some email program in Braille Klingon or something like that, and, you know, three people might buy it.
By mistake, and then you'd go out of business or whatever.
So it's the customers, fundamentally, who design these things.
How are contracts enforced?
It's pretty easy, right?
So you and I engage in a contract for $10,000, and we pay maybe $100 each for some third-party insurance.
And then if I don't fulfill my end, if I'm going to pay you back $5,000 later, you're going to be whatever it is.
If I don't fulfill my end of the contract, then you get the monetary value from the insurance company, and they come after me for the money, and if I don't pay them, they simply downgrade my contract rating to the point where it's going to be almost impossible for me to get any kind of contract in the future.
This is how eBay works, right?
It's a rating system.
Governments in eBay, I mean, the vast majority of disputes are not...
Solved by the government, right?
You've got mediators, you've got visa, right?
You get some bad deal in another country, you simply call up visa and they go and work on it for you.
So you've got insurance, you've got private companies who are going to want to make sure you're happy as a customer.
And what do customers want?
They want the most effective solution for the cheapest possible price.
And there's going to be millions of geniuses working on that very problem.
And whoever can provide the cheapest, which means the least violent.
Violence is incredibly expensive.
The cheapest and most cost-effective and most efficient dispute resolution, well, they're going to gain the market share until someone else comes up with a better idea.
So I imagine it would be some kind of insurance, and of course, after 20 or 30 years of insuring contracts, your insurance will be like 50 cents per $10,000 or something like that.
And if you choose not to do the insurance, that's fine.
Then you just take the risk that nobody's going to come to your aid if the contract doesn't work out.
And if you repeatedly violate contracts, you're going to get rated down and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
What prevents the offending party from silencing victims by intimidation or force?
Well, what prevents it now?
I mean, try suing City Hall and see what happens, right?
Anyway, so...
What prevents?
Well...
It's expensive.
The average business person, they're not going to know hitmen.
They're not going to know people who are going to come and slash your...
They're not going to know mobsters.
They're not going to know these kinds of people.
So who on earth is going to silence you by intimidation or force?
I mean, that's not how business really works.
I mean, they'll use the government, but that's because it's there and they abandon their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders if they don't use government power to get more money.
And it's what they have to do.
So who prevents the offending party from silencing victims by intimidation of force?
Well, if an individual does it, then you'll trace it back to them, and then their contract rating will be completely nullified, and nobody will even want to sell them food or groceries or gas or anything like that.
Probably going to be driven out of society until they make restitution.
And if there's some insurance agency who starts using violence, well, they're going to have to hire it.
Someone's going to know about it.
And it's really going to add to their costs to do that.
And therefore, they're going to be economically inefficient relative to other companies.
All right.
What are your thoughts on the Declaration of Independence?
Well, I... I think it would have been fine if it had applied to every individual in America rather than a bunch of rich white guys who then started collecting taxes from everyone else.
So they're basically saying we're a breakaway gang of thugs from the British gang of thugs.
And it is a declaration of independence from them in that they no longer have to pay taxes.
They get to collect taxes.
George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion rode down and killed people to collect taxes from the farmers in Pennsylvania.
Very shortly after the revolution.
So the Declaration of Independence is just one mafia gang breaking away from another mafia gang.
they're independent, which means everyone else is subjugated, and it sure as heck didn't last long, and it certainly didn't apply to women, children, or blacks, or Chinese, or whatever, right?
What do you think about college today?
I have the opportunity to study economics and do have at least one ANACO capitalist as a professor.
That's great.
I do feel attracted to philosophy.
You once said that you don't think it would be a good idea to study philosophy at a university.
I'm already 30 years of age to, I think, get a job marketer, continue studying.
My sort of feeling about university is that it's a final thing to do if you need the professional designation to get a job, an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, whatever it is.
Sorry, that last one.
It's like a ghost of future.
That's just crap in my mouth.
But studying philosophy, I mean, I think you'll get much better training in philosophy by reading for yourself, by writing, by reading the greats, by debating with people, all that kind of stuff.
Philosophy is meant to be out there and lived, not just studied.
You go out there and be courageous, go out there and speak the truth and take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and that is the best way to live philosophy.
What is the best way to save someone from their own self-destructive behavior?
Would you suggest reverse psychology?
Oh, you mean like someone who has like a really lucrative career as a software entrepreneur who then quits that lucrative career to beg for money on the internet?
Anyway, we'll come back to that later.
Would you suggest reverse psychology or breaking off the relationship until they come to a reasoned understanding?
I'm concerned that my love for talking about the truth will make me appear to be unfun to the people around me.
I'm only 23 and don't want to lose my youthful, joyful, funny spark for curiosity at the start.
What do you think?
Well, you can't save someone from their own self-destructive behavior.
Sorry.
You can't do it.
I mean, don't attempt to achieve the impossible.
The best thing to do, I think, is sit down and talk to them, have the intervention.
This is all just amateur opinion now, as usual for me.
But you sit down with them and you explain to them how their behavior is self-destructive, you provide them evidence, you are resolute in your approach to the problem, and you refuse, you refuse to enable their behavior in any way.
If they say, hey, want to come out drinking?
No.
Absolutely not.
Hey, listen man, can you lend me some money?
I need to go out tonight.
No, absolutely not.
I am not supporting this in any way, shape, or form.
So, I would strongly suggest...
of any kind of support of self-destructive behavior.
Be available to people.
Remind them that what they're doing is self-destructive, at least in your view.
Be available to them.
Chat with people who will listen to reason or they have to listen to bitter, hard and hopefully not life-ending experience.
So...
Breaking off the relationship, as long as they're not harming you directly or indirectly, I would say stay available to the person, stay open to the person, but give them your perspective.
Do not enable their behavior.
Remain open to lines of communication if that's what you want to do, but remember, you can't change them.
My love for talking about the truth will make me appear unfun to the people around me.
Well, yes, it will, because idiots like to avoid any kind of important topic, right?
I mean, idiots talk about sports and the weather and politics and celebrities and this and that and the other.
So yes, of course you are going to appear unfun around you.
Sorry, but there are certain aspects of life that aren't, you know, a giddy, frothy mouth full of whipped cream.
There's some serious shit that we all have to deal with as a culture and as a society.
We're kind of heading off a cliff here, people.
So I'm sorry if, you know, bringing truth and reality to people causes them to label you unfun, but anybody who thinks that talking about anything important is unfun is It's probably not someone you really want to have in your life anyway.
I mean, you might as well, you know, stick your hand up the ass of a hand puppet and have it yodel hallelujah to you.
You're not going to get anything useful.
I think I will do the last question later, just to keep things relatively short.
Thank you so much, everybody, for making this show so incredible.
I love these questions.
I love you guys so much.
much.
I feel incredibly honored and humbled, thrilled, and privileged to get these kinds of questions.
I hope that my thoughts are of some use.
Nothing I say in these particular chats has any kind of authority.
Nothing I say in any of my conversations has any kind of authority.
Hopefully, only the reason and evidence has that kind of authority.
But I hugely, hugely appreciate the support that everyone's showing the show, the success that it's having.
A quarter million, three hundred thousand video views a week.
I mean, that's some damn fine shooting up sky beams of interstellar philosophy landing on the planet, which is, I think, the greatest philosophical landslide since Ayn Rand slash Socrates.
You know, that was 2,500 years.
I'm glad it hasn't been 2,500 years for the next one.
Thank you everyone so much.
If you would like to support the show, hey, if you've got no money, just share some shows, talk about the show.
That's totally fine.
I appreciate that, too.
If you have some extra change, hopefully not more than $2 sitting around, if you could send it to fdrurail.com forward slash donate.
We take some bitcoins, some litecoins, some cash, kidneys in a sealed bag with some ice.
I really appreciate that.
Thank you, everyone.
Have a wonderful week.
Don't forget!
Sunday mornings we have our call-in show at 10 o'clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time.
Screw you, West Coasters!
I'm sorry about that, but that's just the only time that I can really work it.
Have yourself a great week, everyone.
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