Stefan Molyneux opens the listener mailbag to answer questions on the ethics of gambling, road safety in a free society, Ayn Rand's criticisms of anarchism and how a libertarian can survive in a liberal arts college.
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| Hi, everybody. | |
| It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Look, it's time to find the listeners' bags again. | |
| So reach over and just pretend like you're tying your shoe and cough. | |
| It's Listener Railbag time. | |
| Let's start with, I am 20 years old, and for my age, I'm pretty involved in the political process. | |
| And I constantly am disgusted with the direction that the government and, really, society as a whole is heading. | |
| The problem I have is most people my age Simply don't care about what is going on in this country unless it is American Idol or the power source of their Xbox is interrupted. | |
| What is a good way to get more people to pay attention to the world around them and understand that our actions affect tomorrow? | |
| I'm sorry to hear that you're involved in the political process. | |
| To me, that's like hearing somebody saying, help, I'm trapped in a slow-moving machinery that's eating my gonads. | |
| And I wouldn't assume that people who aren't involved in the political process aren't involved in society. | |
| It is very tempting in a state of society to mistake the government for society. | |
| And we do this all the time. | |
| I fall into this habit as well. | |
| We invaded Iraq or we have a welfare state. | |
| Society is the opposite of government. | |
| Society is all that in your life that is voluntary and chosen. | |
| And avoidable, right? | |
| So you can quit your job. | |
| You can get divorced. | |
| You could date some woman or divorce some guy or, you know, whatever you want. | |
| You can go to this restaurant or you can stay home. | |
| You can do anything you want. | |
| All of the stuff that's in your life that is chosen, that's society, right? | |
| We don't look at a prison as a society because nobody's there by choice. | |
| You know, we kidnap a friend and lock him in a dungeon. | |
| We say, hey, I'm creating a society. | |
| No, you're just kidnapping and incarcerating someone. | |
| So, government is that which is involuntary, that which is coercive, that which is indoctrinated, that which is enforced. | |
| That's the opposite of society. | |
| So, don't confuse government with society. | |
| That's really, really, really important. | |
| That's like mistaking the farmer and the chickens for good buddies or the slave owner and the slave as best friends because they share tea sometimes together. | |
| People my age simply don't care about what's going on in this country. | |
| Why should they? | |
| Why should they? | |
| Let's say you're going to teach them all about the Federal Reserve and how evil it is and how destructive it is. | |
| Well, what have you done for their life? | |
| You have subtracted about a million happy points from their Mario Brothers game, and what have you given them in return? | |
| He that increaseth knowledge, as the Bible says, increatheth sorrow. | |
| So why should they be involved in the political process? | |
| Why should they care? | |
| They can't change it. | |
| And the political process doesn't respond To the conscience of the individual, it responds to the needs of organized special interest groups. | |
| You know, whether there's the poor want their welfare, the rich want their handouts, the military industrial complex wants blood, guns, treasure, and the heads of youth. | |
| I mean, it responds to special concentrated special interest groups, public sector unions, teachers. | |
| I mean, it doesn't respond to the conscience of the individual. | |
| I mean, you need a free society for that. | |
| So I would forgive them. | |
| Maybe you can learn a little something from them. | |
| You're probably going to have a lot more fun perhaps watching an episode of American Idol than you will learning more about awful things in the world that you cannot change. | |
| Getting involved in politics is like being strapped into a chair and watching the botched surgery channel over and over and over again. | |
| You know, you can't change it. | |
| The surgeries are going to go horrible. | |
| People's eyes are going to pop out all over the place, and their tongue's going to end up spinning from a ceiling fan or some god-awful thing. | |
| You know, terrible things are going to happen, and you can't change any of it. | |
| And I, for one, am not a huge fan of the botched surgery channel, because I like stuff that gets me hot, and that doesn't. | |
| So, basically somebody said, I've been listening to your podcast for quite some time now. | |
| I wonder if you could do one on the ethics of gambling. | |
| I'm a professional poker player. | |
| Or at least he says, makes a good percentage of my income from poker. | |
| Oh, so I guess the professional part was a bluff. | |
| Okay, so there's bluffing and all this and that. | |
| What are the ethics of a gambling player? | |
| Okay, so I mean, not all gambling is cheating, but gambling is to a large degree, you know, bluffing and misrepresentation and so on. | |
| And gambling also is, those with more knowledge generally tend to do better. | |
| Like you go to Vegas and you start playing blackjack or something. | |
| The house generally wins because the blackjack dealers, they know almost the exact mathematical rules for when you hold them and when you fold them, as the guy who sells chickens said. | |
| And so it is basically a wealth transfer from the less knowledgeable to the more knowledgeable, often those who are better able to lie from those who are not as good at lying. | |
| It is, of course, it's kind of a negative sum game in that you usually pay someone for the place you gamble and then there's a transfer from the losers to the winners. | |
| I only Really gambled once in my life. | |
| Gosh, how old was I? I was in my late 20s, and I got a job as a programmer at a trading company, like a stock trading company. | |
| And my boss was a professional poker player. | |
| Yeah, he was a professional poker player on the side, semi-professional, whatever. | |
| And he invited me and a bunch of the other programmers to go gambling with him at some Fancy Toronto Club. | |
| I took a couple of hundred bucks out of the bank, just basically, fly away with my birdies, never to return. | |
| Let's call this an investment in professional ethics. | |
| But what happened was, I didn't know how to play very well, and so my moves could not be predicted. | |
| This also happened in the dating scene. | |
| What's he going to do? | |
| Is he going to walk up and say hi, or is he going to release a bat, or is he just going to take a dump in a bucket and say, hey, let's go out? | |
| But because I played randomly and nobody knew what the hell I was doing, I ended up winning quite a bit. | |
| And they would get frustrated because I would be like, hey, does this hand win? | |
| And they're like, yes, yeah. | |
| Fruity English bastard. | |
| And so they kept changing the games up. | |
| Texas Hold'em or whatever. | |
| They kept changing the games up. | |
| And I still didn't have any clue what was going on. | |
| Does this hand win, guys? | |
| I'm like, oh, you son of a... | |
| So I came out of there like 500 bucks up. | |
| And my... | |
| Way of thinking about it was that there's no conceivable way I'm ever going to have a better time gambling than accidentally winning 500 bucks having no clue what I'm doing, plus annoying people who are really anal about following the rules. | |
| There's nothing more enjoyable when you're around a bunch of people who are probably toilet trained at gunpoint and just really anal about things to accidentally win. | |
| Oh, it's delicious. | |
| It is just a lovely element of chaos in some severely repressed brain spasms. | |
| So, but when you gamble, you're basically saying you can't have a win-win negotiation. | |
| You can't trade for mutual advantage. | |
| I think that's, it's not immoral. | |
| It's a little predatory. | |
| And so I would recommend not doing it except for recreation. | |
| To make a living out of it is basically to prey upon people who aren't as good at lying or who don't have as much knowledge as you do. | |
| And so I think it's kind of predatory and it's not win-win. | |
| I don't think you want that template in your life overly much. | |
| So that's my sort of thought about it now. | |
| It's an aesthetic argument. | |
| Here in Australia, we are legally forced to vote. | |
| Otherwise, it's a $500 fine. | |
| A criminal record and your name in the media. | |
| Oh, but that's never a bad thing. | |
| Your name in the media? | |
| You know, we've always been testing the limits in this show that there's no such thing as bad publicity. | |
| So what action can I take in defiance without having the social branding of not taking responsibility in voting? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Why do you care? | |
| Why do you care? | |
| I mean, some guy comes up to you with a gun and says, you know, points a gun at you and says, I want you to, you know, tap your head, rub your belly in a circular motion, jump up and down, round and round while singing, you know, come to Jesus, hallelujah, all you angels from hell. | |
| So do it, and don't get shot, and then move on with your life. | |
| I mean, some violent, irrational person has just made you do something. | |
| Welcome to culture. | |
| So, you know, you can go and you can spoil the ballot if you want, if that's legal. | |
| Just go and, you know, check off every name or, you know, write in Bozo the Clown or I Want Candy or I Like Boobs or whatever the hell you feel like writing in and then just toss it in and then go. | |
| I mean, so people make you do irrational stuff all the time. | |
| You may remember a little thing called government schools, which probably take up a hell of a lot more time than voting does. | |
| So just go do it and forget about it. | |
| it. | |
| There's no big stand you're going to take. | |
| And if this is your big worry about how the government is making you do stuff, I would suggest you realign those priority matrices just a little bit. | |
| Hey! | |
| Could you respond to Ayn Rand's criticism of anarchism on a Q&A episode? | |
| Should I try doing Ayn Rand accent? | |
| No, come on, let me do it in an accident. | |
| Let me eat four stogies, some shrapnel, one Bolshevik and a statist. | |
| Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed. | |
| I don't know where I'm going with that. | |
| Okay, peaceful coexistence is impossible. | |
| Generic foreign, that's all I got. | |
| Apparently I was Martian, actually. | |
| Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. | |
| Um... | |
| Okay. | |
| But, of course, that's the state, and that's the law, and that's taxation, so I'm not sure that that's an attack against a voluntary society. | |
| So here's her big scenario. | |
| This is how she dismisses the entirety of a voluntarist thought. | |
| She says, suppose Mr. | |
| Smith, a customer of government A, this would be a DRO, it's not really a government, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. | |
| Jones, a customer of government B, has robbed him. | |
| A squad of police A proceeds to Mr. | |
| Jones' house and is met at the door by a squad of police B who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. | |
| Smith's complaint and do not recognize the authority of government A. What happens then? | |
| Well, you know, for a woman who growled at people continually for philosophizing in midstream... | |
| That's going to be fun on somebody's headphones. | |
| Sorry about that. | |
| If you were just going to sleep, I'll try and murmur some more. | |
| Go to sleep. | |
| Anyway. | |
| So what happens then? | |
| You don't philosophize in midstream. | |
| This possibility is so obvious, a possibility that this would have to be dealt with in advance by whoever was signing up for these contracts. | |
| So if you... | |
| The salesman for... | |
| DROA or dispute resolution organization. | |
| It's just my shorthand for whoever's going to handle your disputes. | |
| He comes by and he says, you know, I can sign you up for five bucks a month. | |
| And you say, great. | |
| Any limitations? | |
| He says, yeah. | |
| If we ever come across anybody who's not part of this DRO, we can't do anything. | |
| And your neighbor, for instance, is not part of the DRO. I can't do anything about it. | |
| Hey, you want to sign up? | |
| And be like... | |
| No, right? | |
| I mean, that'd be like the cell phone company calling up and saying, yeah, we can sign you out for like 50 bucks a month. | |
| A couple of limitations. | |
| Anybody who's not part of our network and currently has exactly the same cell phone that you have, including any scratch marks and fingerprints, and answers in exactly the same way and has the same pin can take your calls. | |
| Would you like to sign up? | |
| Of course. | |
| Or, you know, well, it's great. | |
| Our coverage is represented by this square. | |
| This is not a square that represents a map. | |
| This is the actual size of our coverage. | |
| So, want to sign up? | |
| Nobody's going to want to sign up. | |
| You can phone anyone, anywhere, go to different countries and exchange data. | |
| Or an email provider or an ISP who says, yeah, yeah, you can do email, but only to people on our network. | |
| You can't send or receive information to anybody not on our network. | |
| Well, of course, ISPs exchange information all the time. | |
| That's their selling point. | |
| This situation would never occur because no customer would want that kind of arrangement and therefore people would come up with better ways of doing it. | |
| Question. | |
| If I present strong evidence that vegans live longer, happier lives to my parents and they completely ignore me, do not even try to argue, does this mean that they are aware and have a moral responsibility to act by at least giving their other children The option of vegan meals. | |
| I must say, I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think this is an argument about animal rights, so I've dealt with that so many times before. | |
| I just can't do it again! | |
| 1. | |
| What is the best way to introduce skeptical thinking to a person who has some rational and some irrational views? | |
| Well, we all have some rational and irrational views. | |
| So I hope that you don't think that you're perfectly rational. | |
| That might be one of your irrational views. | |
| Because, you know, we all come from this crazy history. | |
| We all got indoctrinated. | |
| You know, the parents, the teachers, the priests, they all told us a bunch of nonsense, or at least most of them did. | |
| And we're all constantly lied to by the media. | |
| I'm with Mark Twain on this one. | |
| Anyone who reads the paper, sorry, anyone who doesn't read the paper is uninformed. | |
| Anyone who reads the paper is misinformed. | |
| So we've all got a bunch of nonsense in that. | |
| The best way to introduce skeptical thinking? | |
| Just read your Plato. | |
| I mean, read Plato's dialogues. | |
| I mean, don't read The Republic. | |
| I mean, read it, of course, but recognize that you're rubbing your face in Hitler's fascist anus of rational anti-thinking, irrational anti-thinking. | |
| I mean, the guy's a complete totalitarian. | |
| But if you read, I mean, the dialogues of Plato, I mean, it's fantastic. | |
| Plato's... | |
| Curiosity is the best way to introduce critical thinking. | |
| We all want to get people to the answers. | |
| You know, we all pick up artists, you know, we want to score, but getting people to change our minds, but change the minds to what we think is right. | |
| The best weapon is intellectual curiosity. | |
| Just ask people questions. | |
| If they get angry at you asking questions, Then don't particularly waste your time with them. | |
| If they appreciate, oh, I never thought of it that way before. | |
| I guess these ideas don't jive together based on what you're asking me. | |
| I don't really have a good answer for that. | |
| Isn't that interesting? | |
| I've got something new to explore intellectually. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Man, hold that person close to your heart. | |
| I'm a cyclist. | |
| If I were to be hit or knocked down by a car, how would I deal with this incident in a stateless society? | |
| If there are no police to call, the driver would just make off. | |
| Ugh. | |
| I may get their license plate number, but who would I contact to report this? | |
| I guess the same applies for normal car accidents also. | |
| I don't know why there'd be a license plate number in a free society, but okay. | |
| So the reason I mention this, although it's a pretty obscure question, is an important fallacy. | |
| The government does X. Government does X, you see? | |
| If there's no government, X will never get done. | |
| The slaves pick the cotton, you see? | |
| If we don't have slavery, the cotton will rot in the fields and we will all have no clothes. | |
| The undocumented aliens pick a lot of the fruit. | |
| If they're not undocumented aliens, if they become legal or whatever, Then nobody's going to pick the fruit and we're all going to starve to death. | |
| And this is all nonsense. | |
| Just because the government does something right now doesn't mean that if the government doesn't do it, it will never get done. | |
| Of course people want to make sure that their cars are, if they're hit, that people are going to pay and, you know, whatever, right? | |
| That's easy enough. | |
| I mean, insurance companies will give you vast discounts if you have GPSs on, and they'll give you even more discounts if you have cameras all around your car, and wouldn't that be a great way to make sure that people are safe drivers? | |
| Now, there's an economist who says that the best way to make people safe drivers put a big-ass iron spike pointing right at their chest coming out of their steering wheel. | |
| Because what happens with airbags is people just say, well, I got airbags. | |
| You know, Mario Andretti with a blindfold facing the wrong way is how they happen to drive. | |
| Seatbelts don't save lives. | |
| They actually cause wilder and more egregious accidents. | |
| And they save... | |
| To some degree, the lives of the people in the car, but who they really hurt are cyclists, motorbikes, motorbicyclists, and pedestrians, and so on. | |
| So, if people want this, and they do, there'll be tons of different ways to figure it out. | |
| And so, you know, people are going to have massive incentives to drive well. | |
| Speeding causes a lot of problems. | |
| Cars would be recharged for the road usage based upon GPSs. | |
| It's pretty easy to figure out if someone has sped. | |
| Let me give you a thought exercise for those of you who are relatively good at math. | |
| Okay. | |
| Let's say, like, I drive on a private highway up here called the 407, because I actually like motion in my driving, which is quite exciting, and the government roads are just parking lots. | |
| I mean, you got, like, hot dog vendors in the middle of the roads, and people selling you oranges, their little shows, hand puppets, and all. | |
| It's so slow. | |
| So I use the private highway whenever I can. | |
| So you go in one exit, and you are allowed to go 100 kilometers an hour. | |
| That's 12 light years for our American audience. | |
| You're allowed to go 100 kilometers an hour, and you go 10 kilometers in four minutes. | |
| Have you sped? | |
| Well, yeah, of course you have, right? | |
| Because you should be doing more or less, give or take, right, 10 kilometers in six minutes if you're allowed to go 100 kilometers an hour. | |
| You check in, you check out. | |
| Hey, Bob's your uncle, we found out whether you were speeding or not. | |
| Now, I don't know, in a free society, there may be no such thing as speeding. | |
| There's some areas in Europe where they've just taken away all the road signs and all the lane markers and all the traffic lights and all the merge lanes and everything. | |
| All the signs are gone and the traffic flow is improved and everything's going so much better. | |
| So, I don't know whether it would be or not. | |
| It's safer to not speed. | |
| Speeding would be very easy. | |
| You just get charged for going too fast, which would be an automatic process because, I mean, the police are never around. | |
| I think once in my whole life have I ever seen someone speed and then see a cop car go right after them. | |
| Once in my whole life, whereas this would be an automatic process. | |
| So all this kind of stuff would be dealt with very easily in a free society. | |
| What I would suggest is if you're a bicyclist, use the wonderful technology the market has developed and just get a camera on your bike. | |
| And if somebody hits you, take your camera to your local insurance company and they will go and get restitution for you. | |
| And there's tons of different ways that you're able to do it. | |
| So anyway, so how can we keep order on the roads without police? | |
| Boy, I mean, what is it, 30 to 35,000 deaths every year just on American roads? | |
| And that's mostly just people blowing their brains out in LA because they can't get anywhere. | |
| So, I mean, the idea that the roads are safe right now, boy, how could we possibly achieve this wonderful government level of safety that we have? | |
| If there is no police at all on the roads, won't even more people drive dangerously? | |
| I mean, everybody speeds here in Canada. | |
| I mean, it's a big-ass place, right? | |
| And, of course, the speeds were designed when cars were far less safe and highways were far less safe. | |
| So, you know, the fact that it's 100 kilometers an hour here on the major highways is a legacy of the past. | |
| And, boy, if you try going... | |
| Not that I ever do. | |
| But if you actually... | |
| No, I do this. | |
| If you go 100 kilometers an hour on the highways, it's quite dangerous because it looks like you're basically going backwards in time. | |
| All you see are these red shifts of cars testing the theory of relativity going fast ahead of you, banking up on the medians to try and get around corners and stuff. | |
| So almost nobody goes the speed limit. | |
| I'm a bit of a conservative driver, but I stay in the kiddie lane myself. | |
| But, I mean, it's not safe now. | |
| It's crazy. | |
| So, tons of different ways in which roads could be made a lot more safe, none of which would involve having guys with guns out there catching one in a million people. | |
| Alright, let's do this last one. | |
| I am currently attending a four-year liberal arts college which, surprise, surprise, is inundated with Marxist socialist principles and ideologies. | |
| These ideologies permeate both the students and the professors. | |
| And I'm in a Republican state. | |
| Do you have any advice for surviving the next three years of my life where my political or social opinions It could very well result in a poor grave. | |
| Okay, well, why do you want to do a liberal arts degree? | |
| Don't get me wrong. | |
| I took a liberal arts degree, so I'm not saying it's useless, although for a long time in the business world, I used some writing and presentation skills and so on. | |
| Why do you want to take it? | |
| I mean, my God, the economy is a disaster, and you may want to think about switching to something that's a little bit more... | |
| Cash, incentive-based at the end, or you may want to do something entrepreneurial. | |
| So my question would be, why would you want to do a liberal arts degree? | |
| Why do you want to do it where there's all these socialists? | |
| You can go to places where there's lots of libertarians, and you can hook into those. | |
| Of course, they're mostly in the econ department. | |
| I don't know a lot of libertarian English professors. | |
| But if you are taking seriously fruity, basket-weaving liberal arts stuff like I did, then It can be a sort of study your enemy situation. | |
| And you can have good debates. | |
| I liked it. | |
| I had good debates, pretty ferocious debates with most of my professors. | |
| I really wanted the rest of the class to see that there was a differing viewpoint. | |
| And most professors, I mean, they're Marxist, but they're not evil. | |
| I know that sounds like a contradiction, you know, like they're in the KKK, but they're not racist. | |
| But I never found them to be, there was one or two who, you know, just got that Satan stink coming off them and you just, you know, gathered up your soul like a virgin with their skirts and ran from the room. | |
| But most of them respected a genuine passion for truth. | |
| So, fake that, if you can. | |
| I mean, you have it, right? | |
| So, if they sense that you're really coming from a place where you're passionately committed to truth, then if you ably defend your position, you will get more out of your education than the conformist assembly line Marxist robots that they're going to turn most of the students into. | |
| American universities are factories of socialists. | |
| Ben Shapiro's got a whole book about this which you can check out. | |
| About how incredibly indoctrinating, to the left, American universities are. | |
| I mean, the left in America could not survive without universities. | |
| It could not survive without the media, which lands to the left. | |
| It certainly couldn't survive without government and private sector union money. | |
| It's an artificial entity. | |
| But you will get more out of your education by disagreeing with your professors. | |
| Because once you disagree with your professors, you have to do a much better job Of making your case. | |
| Like if you say to a Marxist professor, well, you see, given that the capitalists exploit the workers and given that blah, blah, blah, labor theory of value is valid, you don't have to footnote that because he already believes that. | |
| But if you say there are questions about whether capitalists exploit workers, then you've got to put a whole great argument in there because it's not the accepted bullshit. | |
| You actually have to really work that much harder to prove it. | |
| Why am I such a good debater? | |
| Because I damn well know that if I'm going up against a majority opinion, I better work that much harder to make a good case for what it is that I'm talking about. | |
| And that's what I did with professors. | |
| I mean, I got... | |
| I went through with flying colors, got an A on my final master's thesis and so on, even though the professor disagreed with me because I... I double-checked everything and I got all of the source documents and I made sure the translations were correct and I really worked to footnote everything. | |
| And you will get more out of your liberal arts education by recognizing that you can argue a very Different point of view from your professors, but you have to, have to, have to footnote and bookmark and back everything up and learn about literally 10 to 20 times more Than those who agree with the professor. | |
| But isn't that great? | |
| I mean, you are getting 10 to 20 times a better education by disagreeing with them, but doing so in a way that it's harder for them to nail you on. | |
| So I would, you know, if you want to keep going, keep going. | |
| But make sure that you dot your I's and cross your T's and make those arguments really count. | |
| And you will come out a very strong mind out of that process. | |
| When I was, I don't know, 10 or 11, I read a... | |
| A book of short stories, and one of them really stuck with me, and it was about a guy who wanted to enter a swimming contest. | |
| I don't remember why. | |
| He was mocked, or he was sneered at, or his trunks weren't cool or something, so he wasn't allowed to swim at the nice beach. | |
| He had to go and swim in the cold, fishy, seaweedy beach that had an undercurrent and this and that and the other. | |
| That's where he had to go and practice his swimming because he couldn't. | |
| He was too embarrassed and too mocked to go swim where the cool kids swam. | |
| So, you know, he goes and struggles. | |
| He gets up and swims, you know, digging kelp out of his nose and stuff like that and, you know, dead fish from between his nether regions. | |
| And what happens is, of course, he wins the race. | |
| And why does he win the race? | |
| Because he's been swimming against the current because he's unpopular. | |
| And therefore, he is stronger. | |
| So, I hope that's a lesson you can take to heart. | |
| Swim against the current. | |
| It's more fun. | |
| It's more bracing. | |
| And you, uh... | |
| You end up getting a lot stronger, and that's what the world really needs. |