Aug. 30, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:36
2782 The Conviction of Officer Darren Wilson
Would there be policy reforms if Officer Darren Wilson was guilty of killing Michael Brown execution style? How do I talk to my young Christian daughter about my atheism in an empathetic way without it being traumatizing? Why is it that in today's day and age we see so much police brutality and police playing judge, jury, and executioner? Why don't we put more value into arresting criminals and bringing them to a court for any crimes that may have been committed instead of putting them down on the spot?
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So we have gone from 1.5 million video views last month to 2.6 over the last 30 days.
Thank you so much for helping spread the value and power of philosophy, world, philosophy, philosophy, world.
We're very excited here at the mothership.
A question from a listener.
This is going to be a couple of listener questions.
Steph, I was confused by a comment in particular in your video on the Michael Brown killing and the general situation in Ferguson.
You said, if it was determined later that the police officer was guilty of killing Michael Brown execution style, he would be convicted and there would be a series of reforms.
This idea runs counter to what you have stated several times previously, that there could be no real accountability in status monopolies because there is no ability to fire...
The people, right?
You can't fire the post office, you can't fire people in government, you can't fire public school teachers.
In fact, you're forced to pay for public school, whether you have children, whether you agree with it, whether you approve of it, or whether you're taking your children elsewhere or homeschooling them, you're still forced.
And if you're forced to pay for meals at a restaurant, even whether you eat there or not, whether you like the meals or not, then the restaurant is not going to be fundamentally customer-sensitive.
Voluntarism is quality.
Like, if the government forced everyone to get married to someone of the government's choosing, there would not be a lot of roses and chocolates and wooing, and we'd have no poetry, fundamentally, and nobody would learn to play guitar or whatever it is, right?
So when you force people into a relationship, you lose a huge amount of quality.
I think that's kind of fundamental to human nature.
So the statement you made in the video, says the listener, implies that you feel substantially confident that such an aforementioned outcome, in other words, that if Officer Wilson were found to have executed Michael Brown, some video arose where The narrative that was put forward initially that they were just walking down the middle of the street.
The cop assaulted them, tried to pull in Michael Brown through the window.
Michael Brown then ran away and he was shot down in the back.
If that occurred, which physically can't occur because the bullets all entered Michael Brown from the front, but let's say that that initial narrative were to be the case, I said, well, yeah, Michael Brown would go to prison and the reforms would be put in place.
Now, what's important to understand is I never said successful reforms would be put into place.
And governments are responsive to the population, but only to the degree that it serves the government, right?
So let's sort of give you an analogy.
And I've got a video called The Story of Your Enslavement, which you can check out more, which basically compares taxpayers to livestock and a country to a tax farm.
So if you have a bunch of cows in stalls and you put them in these tiny stalls because you can just cram more cows in and it's cheaper to heat the barn or whatever...
Now, if the cows, and this has actually happened, if the cows end up so confined in the barn that they're banging their heads back and forth and they're getting injuries and infections and so on, then what you'll do is you will respond to the self-harm of the cows by widening the stalls.
Right?
And that will stop the cows from banging their heads against the wall because they're so claustrophobic and, I assume, frustrated and angry and all that.
Now, that's not because you care about the freedom of the cows, but because it is cheaper for you to have wider stalls and fewer cows than it is for you to continually treat the cows for head injuries from banging their heads against the walls of the stalls.
And so, you could say, well, if the cows were saying, wow, the farmer really is responsive to us, it's like, no, the farmer is responsive to his own self-interest in that it's cheaper for him to have wider stalls than it is for him to have cows with bloody heads that get infected and so on.
So, if it were determined that Officer Wilson murdered, like openly executed and murdered Michael Brown, I mean, the outcry would be absolutely staggeringly enormous from all quarters.
I mean, that would be a repulsive abuse of power.
And so what would happen is they would, I'm sure, end up trying and convicting this guy.
The reason, not because the government is particularly concerned with justice, but because...
It would be very expensive for them not to.
Because there'd be more riots and all these problems and so on, right?
And they would put a whole bunch of flashy reforms in place.
And those reforms would not, in particular, work in the long run.
But certainly, there is a response to the taxpayers.
If the taxpayers find something generally repulsive to the point wherein the government may feel that its own, quote, profitability is threatened, then it will change its behavior.
But not because It's really concerned with the health and welfare of its citizens.
And the important thing to remember, too, of course, is that government is very interested, certainly on the left in particular, though on the right it's more interested in dependence from the military-industrial complex, but on the left, heavily invested in dependence on the government.
So one of the great tragedies of the 20th century was that In the post-Second World War period in America, poverty was declining by one percentage point every single year.
Poverty was declining by one percentage point every single year.
Within a decade or two from the 1960s, Virtually all involuntary poverty would have been eliminated.
In other words, unless you wanted to be a monk, or you were trying to be an internet philosopher, or you were writing books and giving up on income, then you would have ended up with no involuntary poverty to speak of.
And then when the welfare state intervened, poverty stopped declining and then sort of maintained, bumped up and down a little bit.
It started to rise more recently.
And that is really tragic.
And in particular, this was negatively affecting the black community the most.
And whenever there's a rise in wealth in society, existing governments have an incentive to create and maintain a dependent population because it's guaranteed votes.
Pretty much, right?
So people on welfare or people in the military-industrial complex, in other words, the rich and the poor welfare, do not have an objective standpoint with which to evaluate the proposals of politicians.
It's a direct conflict of interest.
Can you objectively vote on whether welfare is good or bad, right or wrong, if you yourself have adapted to and are dependent upon welfare?
Well, certainly wouldn't be allowed in the private sector.
That would be direct conflict of interest.
So there are responses to the government, but they're generally around maintaining and increasing the power of the government.
So here's another question.
A listener writes, My 12-year-old daughter lives in a hyper-Christian house with my ex.
My daughter saw a Facebook post about my atheism, got upset, and is now questioning both me and the Christian faith.
How do I approach this in an empathetic way without traumatizing my child?
That is a very tough question.
And I am very sorry that the world is putting you, my friend, in this situation.
It is a very tough situation.
And there is a kind of self-censorship that can be put in place because of social media.
In other words, people are afraid of talking about various things for fear of being doxxed or having their personal details outed and so on.
So, how do you approach this in an empathetic way?
Your daughter is 12, and she lives in a hyper-Christian house with your ex-wife.
It is a very tough situation, and I think that the key thing with children is to listen.
Children have an unbelievable amount of things to say.
My daughter sometimes will actually start talking before she even wakes up, like she'll start talking in her dreams, and then she'll wake up, she'll continue talking.
And she talks pretty much for most of the day.
And the reason that she talks, I actually asked her the other day, why do you think you talk so much?
This came up in a call-in show.
And she said, because I want to share my mind, which I thought was a lovely way of putting it.
But I think more fundamentally, she's...
She talks because she's listened to.
Listening is like this gravity well.
It's like a black hole next to a gaseous star.
It pulls brain matter across the ether.
And to listen to a child is so, so important.
Children have so much To say.
Everything is new.
Everything is exciting.
They have so many questions that, you know, if I'm watching a documentary with my daughter, I'll pause.
Like, we'll watch.
It's like 30 seconds.
I've got to pause and spend five minutes explaining things because everything is so new for children.
And putting yourself back in that mindset is very exciting.
So...
I think asking your daughter what she thinks, asking your daughter what she feels about it is really important.
There's an old Marilyn Manson quote about the Columbine shooters where somebody asked, what would you say to those shooters before they shot if you had a chance?
And he said, well, I wouldn't say anything, I'd just listen, which apparently is what nobody else did.
And so I think that, what do you think?
What do you feel?
How does that make you look at the world?
It's the most important thing for children.
Now, unfortunately, when people have false beliefs and power, then they tend to demand that those they have power of are conformed to their false beliefs.
And this is true for a wide variety of false beliefs.
I've said from the very beginning, and even before I became a parent, that the key thing in parenting is not to impose conclusions upon the child, but to impose a methodology upon the child.
I'm going to impose a methodology that still sounds kind of Stalin-esque, I guess.
But what I mean by that is...
I can get my daughter to memorize a whole bunch of mathematical things, you know, 9 times 12, 14 times 12, 14 times 6.
I can just get her to memorize all those things...
But that doesn't really help her learn math.
That just helps her learn rote memorization, which is not the end of the world, but doesn't really help her learn math.
What I want to do is teach her how to calculate things for herself so that she can process all mathematical questions or challenges to the best of her ability.
So don't teach conclusions.
Teach methodology is the key to a self-sustaining educational approach.
And so I certainly would not say to your daughter, well, there is no God, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
I mean, that doesn't teach her anything other than your conclusions.
And with your conclusions, she can either accept them because you have power and authority over her, which is teaching her to subjugate herself to authority, or she's going to reject them because somebody else, i.e.
your ex, has power and authority over her and is saying there is a God, which means that she's then going to End up colliding and subjugating herself to that person's authority, and the non-subjugation to authority is the essence of a civilized life.
I mean, we think for ourselves, we reason for ourselves, and we talk and listen in rational conversations with others.
So now that the cat is out of the bag, the Schrodinger's cat, I suppose, is out of the bag, I think it's really important to listen to things.
If you can talk about things with your ex, I think that's important.
I actually dated a woman who was Christian when I was in my 20s, but I couldn't continue the relationship because we talked about getting married and having kids.
And I said I would never want my children to be taken to church and told that religion was true prior to the capacity to reason and prior to the capacity to become independent.
And the woman I was dating basically said, no, that's not how it's going to work.
If I have kids, they have to come to church and I'm going to teach them about God is real and God is love and blah, blah, blah.
And I said, well, we can't move forward because I can't subject my children to...
And it would be the same thing if I was...
Dating an atheist woman and she said, well, we're just going to tell the kids there's no God and it's all wrong and it's all lies and it's all nonsense and that's called education.
No, I mean, that's just two sides of the same coin.
You don't teach children conclusions, you teach them methodologies, how to think, not what to think.
So if you can talk about things with your ex, say, look, I'm sorry.
I can't pretend I'm not an atheist on the planet because my daughter might see her Facebook post.
I mean, that is a self-censorship that goes beyond the pale.
You could say I'm not ashamed of my atheism.
I think there's very good reasons for it.
I get that it collides with your belief system, but I hope that we can give our daughter the room to develop her own thinking skills, which is what is going to serve her throughout life and what is going to make her an independent and successful and powerful human being is the capacity to reason on her own. which is what is going to serve her throughout life So we give her a methodology for thinking, and then she will hopefully come to the right And I would say that would be the best.
Now, if your ex is just going to dig in and say, well, no, you're leading her down the primrose path to Satan's armpit.
She's going to go to hell.
You're going to go to hell.
Well, it's very tough.
It's very tough because then your daughter is...
Torn between two belief systems.
One, I would argue, is objective and empirical.
The other is faith-based and fundamentally dictatorial in that how do you get people to believe false things?
Well, you bribe them and you threaten them.
And this is what heaven and hell is fundamentally all about.
Why would you even be interested in false beliefs if there was not threats and rewards?
So...
I would assume, well, if you married a Christian woman, then you were at some point religious, and you can tell her the emotional sides, I would say, of the very difficult transition from religion to atheism, which I myself went through.
It is a great challenge, and share with her some of your challenges around that.
I wish I could give you any kind of magic answer to this, but I think sharing your thoughts and feelings, asking your child, For her thoughts and feelings, I think it's really important.
I certainly would not take the opportunity to train her in the conclusions of Atheism, because she's still a long way away from independence.
And if, as you say, it's a hyper-Christian household, then that's going to set her up for a staggering amount of conflict with the woman who is in charge of her childhood.
And I think that's not something that you want to put her through.
So, again, like most things with children, it's far more in the listening than it is in the saying.
So, another listener writes, why is it that in today's day and age we see so much police brutality and police playing judge, jury, and executioner?
The killings of Michael Brown, Kelly Thomas, Eric Garner, and James Boyd come to mind.
From my perspective, each of these deaths could easily have been avoided if law enforcement had sought nonviolent ways to resolve the situation.
Kelly Thomas' death seems the only questionable case in which a taser or stun gun wasn't or wouldn't have been effective.
Why don't we put more value into arresting criminals and bringing them to a court for any crimes that may have been committed instead of putting them down on the spot?
Well, okay, so again, very good questions and issues.
And first of all, very few people in America end up in court.
I think it's only 2% or 3% of people who are arrested end up with their day in court.
What happens is the American legal system does not permit the bribery of people except with years or decades of their own freedom.
So what happens is people who are arrested and charged with offenses are told that they will go to jail for years or decades unless they plead down to a lesser charge, in which case their sentence will be significantly reduced.
And that is how the system works, or rather, this is how the system destroys lives at the moment.
The American legal system is, you know, like a blind nine-year-old kid in a crowded room with an Uzi, just spraying bullets randomly and hitting people randomly and destroying lives randomly.
There are huge amounts of the American legal system that in a rational society would not be present.
You know, the war on drugs, the war against people with regards to taxation, and of course it excludes the vast majority of people who commit the most crimes, i.e.
those at the top of Wall Street provide lots of money to politicians.
Wall Street is the biggest donor to political campaigns.
In return, They get immunity pretty much from prosecution for criminal activities.
And if they are prosecuted, it's prosecuted through the horrible, immoral legal shield of a corporation where you can take out profits but never legal accountability.
And then they are fined.
And the fines are generally paid off through loans from the government, through the top program, and so on.
But anyway, it's a whole other topic.
So very few people are...
When I see somebody has been convicted of a crime...
That ain't because there was a huge preponderance of evidence.
For the most part, again, 2% to 3% of American cases end up in a trial situation.
Most times when they say somebody was convicted of a crime, what they really mean is, We bribed this person with years of freedom in order to confess to something.
And this is fundamentally Soviet.
I mean, this is like the confessions that Solzhenitsyn writes about in the Gulag Apikalago, the confessions that are beaten out of people, where they just sign, or in 1984, where they just sign whatever, in order to stop being beaten.
And so in order to get out of jail, quicker people confess to a whole bunch of things, but to take it all seriously, or to assume that there's some objective process going on, is fundamentally mistaken and even in places like Detroit and so on where there are murder cases They take years and years and years to get resolved.
A lot of witnesses die off or move away or whatever it is.
So it becomes, it's all nonsense.
It's a prison industrial complex where human beings, like in that scene from Pink Floyd's The Wall where the kids are falling into the sausage grinder, human beings are ground up and destroyed in order to terrify the population, in order to feed the prison industrial complex, in order to pad the pockets of lawyers and prosecutors and judges and prison guards and so on.
It is absolutely horrendous.
And in the future, if they will look back upon this time with the same horror that we look back on totalitarian aspects of totalitarian regimes in the past, America has more people per capita in prisons than were in Stalin's concentration camps in the past.
It's truly stunning.
So, there's two ways to look at this question, in my humble opinion, about, you know, why are all these deaths happening.
So, the first is sort of the immediate question.
And my understanding, which has been fairly backed up by a number of people who've actually very well backed up by a number of people who've contacted me, Is that if you are a law enforcement officer and somebody is charging you with intent to kill, you aim for center mass.
You can't aim for legs, you can't aim for arms.
In the rush of adrenaline and so on, with all of this stuff going on, the idea that you could just shoot someone's legs out from under them and they won't...
Harm you is fiction.
You shoot for center mass and you shoot to kill when somebody is trying to attack you.
If they're high on PCP, you have to shoot a running and moving and weaving target who may be high on PCP. You don't know, right?
In which case they may not even feel it.
A lot of people who are shot don't even feel it until later.
They continue doing whatever they're doing and then they go, oh my god, I got shot!
And then it sort of hits them.
But with the cortisol and adrenaline, the fight-or-flight mechanism is going on.
If it's enhanced by particular drugs that make you immune to pain, then shooting out someone's legs is a very tricky business.
You have maybe two seconds, at least in the Mike Brown case, two or three seconds before the person's on you.
And even if they just crash into you, that can cause you considerable harm as well.
So, the reality is that if you charge a police officer, then the police officer, at least in America, is trained to shoot you and to kill you.
And that's what happened.
Although I think, as far as I understand it, Officer Wilson did try to shoot Michael Brown in the arms.
There are arm wounds.
And then, when that did not stop him, he performed what's called a double tap, which is two shots to the head.
So that's the way that the officers are trained at the moment.
I can't speak to that other than to say that self-defense is, at least, if you want to really defend yourself, then you shoot to kill.
Again, I'll link some articles below, but you can read more about this.
So in that particular moment, in that particular situation, then that is...
That is the way that you defend yourself, at least according to best practices in law enforcement.
That is the way you defend yourself in the moment.
As far as everything that led up to this, and this is, of course, the great tragedy with all of these things, is there no possible way that there's any better way that these things could be done?
Well, you know, in Detroit, they've basically given up on law enforcement.
You get a recorded message saying, basically, good luck, you're on your own.
And so private law enforcement agencies or private dispute resolution agencies, private protection agencies have sprung into being, as generally happens when statists I mean, if you only pay doctors for curing people, then they're not going to spend much time on prevention.
And if you only pay police for responding to crimes, they're not going to have much incentive to work to prevent crimes.
Criminality is almost exclusively the result of significant child abuse.
You can look at FDRURL.com slash BIB. You can listen to the experts I've talked to about this.
The correlation between child abuse and criminality is highly substantial.
Now, this doesn't mean that everyone who's abused as a child is a criminal, but it does mean that almost all criminals were abused as children.
Now, to what degree does society, or a state of society, or a government-run society, to what degree Do they have an incentive to prevent crime in the next generation by focusing on best parenting practices in the current generation?
Well, none really.
They're going to offend and annoy a lot of voting parents, they're going to protect a lot of non-voting children, and the rewards are going to flow into society long after the politicians leave office.
So there's no incentive really to focus on the relationship between better parenting and a more peaceful planet in the current system.
It's one of the great tragedies of The current system.
And I've got free books at freedomainradio.com slash free, Practical Anarchy and Everyday Anarchy, which will talk about the importance between this.
But we already know that the inoculation for human violence is peaceful parenting.
And so, saying, well, how is this all going to work in the future, to me, is what it doesn't really need to.
Once we apply the peaceful parenting practices, we don't hit, we don't yell, we negotiate, and then we don't have a violent world.
It's...
Polio in the 1930s was a terrifying disease.
You swim in one public swimming pool where there's a polio virus and you can end up paralyzed or dead or in an iron lung for life.
And people would say, of course, at that state, in the future, they'd say, well, how will a future society deal with polio?
And the reality is we really don't have to deal with polio in the West because we have inoculations, right?
We have...
The injections which keep polio at bay or smallpox or whatever it is.
And so we don't deal with polio because we know how to...
We have antidotes.
We have preventative measures for polio that make it a virtual non-issue in society.
So in the future, we say, how are we going to deal with all these shootings and this violence and these cops and so on?
Well, once we get the peaceful parenting paradigm...
Triple P. Once we get the peaceful parenting paradigm across, then we are going to grow human beings...
Who are not going to be violent.
There will be occasional violence.
People will get brain tumors.
For whatever reason, they may have some dysfunction in the biology, which is going to cause them to become aggressive and violent.
But it's going to be exceedingly rare.
Not as common as it is now.
You can't work to restrain violence that well in a system which kind of feeds off child abuse.
But if we work to focus on spreading the message of peaceful parenting, then we can start to grow human beings who are fundamentally going to be a different species, who are going to be peaceful, who are going to be reasonable.
I've been a stay-at-home parent for five and a half years, going on six now, I guess.
And I've never seen my daughter do anything aggressive.
She's very good at negotiating, and she's very sensitive to other people's needs.
She's always very tough when it comes to dealing with people who are negative.
Not that she's really the occasional kid she sees at the playground or whatever.
She's very assertive and all that.
So, at least from the sample size of one, if you never hit, never punish, never yell, and continually negotiate with your children, then they will grow up to be non-violent.
And then people will look back at the violence of our current society in the way that we look back at the bubonic plague or the smallpox epidemics or the flu epidemics of the 1920s that were caused by people, soldiers coming home from The First World War.
We will look back at the polio and we'll say, gosh, what a terrible time.
I'm so glad that's been cured.
Thank you so much, of course, as always, for listening.
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The link is below EOE. And have yourselves a wonderful day.
