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Jan. 12, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:57

2883 The End of the World - Saturday Call In Show - January 10th, 2015

Can Universally Preferable Behavior (UPB) be used without a legitimate theory of property rights? Are property rights enough to determine if an action is unethical? After the recent terror attacks in Paris, France - will it be possible to finally have an honest conversation about multiculturalism? There has been a call to "Unify the Republic" against terrorism at all costs - but due to the emotional sensitivity of this question - will the challenges of multiculturalism go unspoken?

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	Good evening everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well!
	It is Saturday night and we are ready for our Philosophy Fest.
	There has been, of course, quite a lot to think about philosophically this week after the terrible and terrifying attacks against, I don't know, pretty left, slightly communist Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris and editors and other people.
	And I also watched Atlas Shrugged Part 3.
	Now let me tell you something.
	I have on occasion been slightly non-extra positive with regards to religion.
	And I've talked about a variety of religions.
	We've talked a little bit about Islam, some Christianity, some Judaism and so on.
	Zoroastrianism thrown in for good measure.
	And because that was the birthplace of Freddie Mercury, who was the only deity I will cede My mind too.
	But let me tell you something about Atlas Shrugged part three.
	Making cameos were the following.
	Number one, Ron Paul.
	Number two, Sean Hannity.
	Number three, Glenn Beck.
	Now, why is that interesting?
	It's fascinating to me and humbling to me, frankly.
	In that they are all Christians.
	And, like, not a little bit on Sundays Christians, but they are full-tilt boogie Christians.
	Mike, you know this.
	Which denomination is Glenn Beck?
	Is he Mormon?
	Yeah, I believe Glenn Beck is Mormon.
	And Ron Paul is evangelical of a kind I'm not sure I know the details of, neither with Sean Hannity.
	But this amazing...
	It's amazing to me because...
	and impressive.
	Because Ayn Rand was like a fierce, fierce atheist.
	And these Christians are coming on, doing cameos, supporting a movie based on a novel written by an out-and-out, full-tilt, no-bumpers atheist.
	And I thought that was really impressive and a little bit humbling.
	And it tells me something because...
	And I don't know anything about...
	I interviewed the...
	I think it was the director or the producer for the first one, for the Atlas Shrug Part 1.
	And I don't know, obviously, anything that went on behind the scenes with this movie.
	I was invited down, but I couldn't fit it into the schedule.
	And I don't know if they reached out to prominent atheists.
	But if they did, I thought it was very interesting that Christians would go and support an atheist movie about smaller government.
	And I don't know that atheists would support an atheist movie about smaller government.
	So I found that humbling.
	I found that quite inspiring and has softened my heart quite a bit.
	I mean, you know, the arguments are the arguments.
	You know, I have to...
	Bow to the arguments as a whole.
	I've made them.
	I stand behind them because they're really not my arguments.
	They're arguments that either pass the test of logic and evidence or they don't.
	So that's not up to me.
	But I will tell you, I found it impressive.
	I found it generous.
	I found it committed.
	And I'm humbled.
	What can I tell you?
	I don't even know what to say other than that.
	That's given me some significant pause and some significant thoughts to mull over with regards to the generosity of Christians in the commitment to smaller government in America willing to appear in a movie that, if people then go and read the book, will act against their religious interest significantly, but for their interest towards a smaller government.
	So, To Ron Paul, to Sean Hannity, and to Glenn Beck, I am impressed.
	Thank you for the example.
	It has really made me think a lot about collaboration and hands across the waters and all that kind of stuff.
	So I appreciate the lesson.
	It's most instructive.
	I don't know, Mike.
	What do you think?
	I mean, is that interesting to you?
	I find it interesting.
	Ron Paul doesn't surprise me too much, and I've listened to some of Glenn Beck's stuff, and kind of where he's coming from these days, that doesn't surprise me.
	I don't know hardly anything about where Sean Hannity is these days, so that's a complete unknown.
	But I certainly have noticed the trend of religious individuals being far more supportive of the ideas of a smaller government than atheists.
	I mean, I can count trying to think of atheists that aren't like hardcore leftist, hardcore communist.
	I mean, there's not a lot.
	There's really not a lot.
	Pendulet?
	Yeah, Pendulet's an atheist libertarian.
	I mean, he's certainly he's the biggest name that's an atheist libertarian.
	But I mean, after that point, it drops off pretty considerably.
	I mean.
	Yeah, I thought it was interesting.
	And again, I don't even know what to think of it as much yet, but it warmed my heart and it humbled some of my spiky edges around the realm of statism and religion.
	So I don't even know what to make of it yet.
	I just wanted to share my experience.
	It was with some surprise that I saw these cameos of people passionately talking about an atheist in very positive ways, or an atheist story, participating within an atheist story.
	So What can I tell you?
	I mean, if that's a love your enemy moment, that was quite interesting and instructive.
	So, you know, with regards to...
	We'll get to this with the third caller, but I just want to mention a few things before we do.
	The attacks, I don't know what to say in any conclusive way.
	And my mind is racing in 12 million different directions, none of which are conclusive.
	The attacks in France.
	One of the things that always frustrates me is the degree to which government programs are introduced to deal with the effects of government programs.
	So one thing that's frustrating for me is the degree to which minority communities have embraced statism.
	I mean, slavery in America and throughout the world was a government program.
	Slavery was a government program.
	It was enforced by It was subsidized by the government.
	People were forced to be on the lookout for court slaves and were punished if they didn't join in slave patrols or return escaped slaves.
	The contracts were all enforced in government courts and enshrined in government law and subsidized.
	Of course, the navy, which opened up a lot of these countries, sailors were forced to join.
	When I was growing up, my brother had a metal mug for his birthday year.
	And he had this metal mug.
	And the bottom was glass.
	And in England, you still can find, at least you could when I was there last, you could find pubs where you get these glasses and the tankards, I guess they'd call, and the bottom is glass.
	Now, why did England develop this tradition of glass-bottomed, The reason for it is because if you took the king's coin, then they could drag you off and make you a sailor for heaven knows how long, years.
	And so one of the tricks that government agents would do is they would put a coin into someone's tankard of ale.
	Assume not milk, ale.
	You wouldn't probably want a milk drinker on your ship, but ale.
	And so one of the things, so if your lips touched the glass, which had the king's coin in it, you assumed to have taken the king's coin and could then be dragged off to be a sailor.
	And so what you would do is before you drank, you would lift it up and make sure there were no coins in the bottom of the tankard.
	And that's what the glass bottom was for.
	And that's the degree to which human beings were preyed on and forced to join these aqua-born murder gangs known as navies.
	So slavery was this massive government program, massive tribal program that went on for tens of thousands of years.
	And then when we finally shuck off slavery, oh, now we need more laws.
	Now we need affirmative action.
	Now we need this, that, and the other.
	And it's like, God, can we just stop replacing government programs with government programs?
	And immigration is a government program, multigrational.
	Multiculturalism is to a large degree a government program.
	Doesn't mean the cultures won't mix and won't enjoy each other's music and food and dances and movies and all this kinds of stuff.
	But since countries are a government program, immigration is a government program in a way that moving is not.
	You know, I can move 3,000 miles away if I want.
	I can move 3,000 miles away.
	Only if I go west.
	I can probably move a thousand miles away if I go east.
	I just can't move a hundred miles south because there's a border.
	But Canada is so enormous.
	Someone told me this story shortly after I moved to Canada.
	On the west coast is British Columbia.
	And right in the middle, I guess, a little bit towards the east side is Toronto.
	So a guy from London...
	Who was sending his daughter over to visit relatives in British Columbia.
	A guy from London calls up the relatives in British Columbia and says, listen, she's going to be landing in Toronto.
	Can you meet her there?
	And the people from British Columbia said, well, you meet her there.
	You're closer.
	That's how big Canada is.
	But you can only go east-west, north-south, evil.
	East-west, wonderful, no problems.
	Islam in Africa is to some degree a government government.
	Program.
	State-sponsored mullahs spread through French, Equatoria, Africa, through Algiers and so on, and spread Islam.
	I mean, there's all these government programs and the degree to which these are all government programs.
	Immigration, slavery, law.
	Sharia is a government program because there's not a strong distinction between religious and secular, if any, really, in Islam.
	All these government programs.
	Colonialism.
	Understand this.
	I need to be really clear on this.
	Colonialism was not a European thing.
	It was not a white thing.
	It was a government program.
	Colonialism was a giant government program.
	Look at almost all of history and you see these giant, amorphous, vicious, scalding, acidic, barb-throwing Organisms called government programs all jostling.
	War is a government program.
	Childhood is increasingly becoming a government program.
	Marriage is a government program.
	Adoption is a government program.
	Fertility is largely becoming a government program.
	And language is, to a large degree, In controversial areas becoming a government program.
	France has many laws abridging freedom of speech.
	You can't talk about this, you can't talk about that.
	People go to jail for this, the other, whatever.
	Up until recently, Canada had similar laws in certain areas.
	And France's commitment to free speech is not as strong as is portrayed.
	This is something that has been crumbling in the West and has always had an uncertain spread or depth or strength in the West.
	And so all of these government programs, countries, in many cases religions, what you can say, what you can't, these are all government programs.
	How do we Oppose government programs, which are the initiation of the use of force.
	Well, we have to go back to first principles.
	We have to go back to questioning and opposing the initiation of the use of force in all of its forms.
	In all of its forms.
	How many atrocities did the government program called colonialism in all of its forms inflict upon indigenous populations?
	You know, when capitalists go there, what do they do?
	They trade.
	They trade.
	Which is, praxeologically, a win-win negotiation.
	They trade.
	But when governments go, they enslave.
	At some point, we will understand that this whole spread hegemonic initiation of force, known as the state, is the problem.
	It's not going to happen tomorrow.
	You know, with 100 million plus downloads, we're certainly pushing the needle in that public discussion through this conversation, for which I incredibly and deeply and humbly thank you for giving me the means to achieve and giving me the participation in your kindness through this conversation to make known.
	But as long as we are distracted by the fundamental superstition of tribalism, We will forever exacerbate the very problems that we're trying to solve.
	So that's it for the intro.
	Thanks for your patience.
	Who do we have on first?
	Marco wrote in and said, can you...
	Oh no!
	Sorry.
	You know, I had a side bet that that was going to happen.
	You knew it.
	You knew it.
	Believe it or not, my six-year-old daughter totally knows almost everything that's about to come out of my mouth, so don't feel bad if it's ridiculously predictable.
	Marco wrote in and said, can UPB be used without a theory of legitimate property rights?
	And if not, isn't it redundant since property rights are enough to determine if an action is unethical?
	Okay, so we're back on rights, right?
	Yes, I think we are.
	Okay.
	And UPB is, I think, a very good theory of property rights.
	Because UPB... In order to prove ethics, we must first prove self-ownership.
	Right?
	Which is why if I, you know, walk up behind you with narrowed eyes and a clear head and cold cock you in the back of the head, I've assaulted you.
	Whereas if you're standing next to me on a bus and I have a completely unforeseen epileptic attack and elbow you in the side, I'm not assaulting you and nobody would press charges, right?
	Because in one, I'm in control of my body and in the other, I'm not.
	So in the cold cocking example, I have self-ownership and in the epilepsy example, I don't, right?
	So that aspect, I think, is...
	It's important.
	So you can't have a theory of ethics without first establishing self-ownership.
	And the book is available for free for anybody who wants to read it or to listen to it at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	It's called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	You can't have property rights without self-ownership any more than you can have ethics without self-ownership.
	So to me, the sort of upside-down point of the pyramid is self-ownership.
	Once you've established that, Which is ownership of my own body.
	Control over aspects of my own body.
	And therefore, almost axiomatically, but certainly praxeologically, it means I own myself and therefore I own the effects of my actions.
	I own what I make.
	I own what I break.
	I own the murder if I strangle someone.
	So self-ownership, ownership of the body, ownership of the effects of one's actions...
	It's the root of both ethics and property rights.
	And so, given that no one can steal my eyeball, you know, because they have no eyes and I have two.
	Like, nobody can just outviolet, jelly, gloster, king, leer my eyeball and then use it for themselves because it's mine.
	My eyeball!
	No taking my eyeball!
	No taking my eyeball!
	Because, I mean, that's something I've fed and watered and nurtured and grown and watered and taken to the optometrist to get checked out and so on.
	So, given that my eye is just part of my body and is...
	My property is something I control and something that I have created and maintained.
	It's exactly the same as if I have, you know, planted and watered a crop of plants and enclosed a piece of land.
	It's just exactly the same as my eyeball.
	It's just the effects of my actions.
	Whether it's attached to my body or not doesn't fundamentally matter.
	Which is to say the nervous system is not the boundaries of valid property rights.
	Whatever you create, whatever you make, you own as the effects of your actions.
	Because if you don't own the crops that you have grown, then you can't be said to own a murder you've committed or a rape that you've committed.
	You do own it because you have used your body to do something and you own the effects of that, whether it's for good, neutral, or ill.
	So...
	So I think that to say...
	Well, UPB requires property rights is to say, well, ethics requires property rights.
	But I don't think that ethics and property rights can be distinguished.
	I think they both arise out of the unarguable essence of self-ownership.
	And I say unarguable because you cannot argue against self-ownership without exercising self-ownership, without making your hand write something, or your vocal cords produce sound, or you're tracing something in the sky with an airplane, whatever it is you're going to do.
	You can't argue against self-ownership without first using self-ownership.
	And therefore, to argue against self-ownership is a self-detonating argument, which dismisses people from, not you, dismisses people from a rational examination of the question.
	So I wouldn't view them as a dichotomy.
	To me, property rights arise from self-ownership.
	Ethics require property rights, require self-ownership.
	And I don't view them as separate categories.
	So that's it for my speechifying, if you want to tell me what you think.
	Oh, sure.
	No, property rights...
	Our ethics for me.
	You described that correctly.
	But what you said, that property rights can be derived from us using our own bodies.
	That's our argumentation ethics, right?
	Well, I'm certainly no expert on argumentation ethics.
	But what I would say is that you cannot argue against...
	Like, let's say you're arguing against my position.
	Well, you know it's my position because it's my brain and my body that have produced the argument.
	So you would then say, well, Steph, your argument is incorrect.
	But the moment you've said your argument, you're saying that I'm responsible, causal for and own the words that I have put out, you know, through this microphone, through the Ethernet cables, through whatever it is, right?
	To your ear.
	So the moment that you are in a debate with someone, you have to look at all of the implicit assumptions, right?
	Self-ownership, Ownership of the other person.
	The other person exists as an objective medium for resolving disputes called reality, which you can use sound waves or visual or whatever to scan for stuff.
	That a person is responsible not just for his own body, but for the effects of his actions.
	In this case, it's an argument, the sound waves that are going out across the ether between us.
	And I think that, again, I'm not an expert on argumentation ethics, but I think that Hoppe's approach is...
	is implicit within the act of having a debate or even having a conversation.
	And you cannot overturn any of the principles that you are using to have a debate.
	You simply can't rationally overturn that which is necessary to have a debate.
	You can not have a debate if you want, but then you're out of the equation of human communication and so on.
	So I certainly agree.
	I mean, to me, that these self-detonating arguments, you know, there's no such thing as objective reality.
	It's like, well, you're using objective reality to communicate that there's no such thing as objective reality.
	How do I even know that you exist?
	Well, one of the reasons is because you're talking to me and all this kind of stuff, right?
	So...
	Again, I don't want to get into too much of a debate about the relationship between UPB and argumentation ethics.
	Because, again, I'm no expert on argumentation ethics.
	But I think where UPB goes further is to validate bans on rape, murder, and assault, and theft, which are the four major bans.
	I don't know where argumentation ethics handles that or how.
	Actually, that's precisely my second point.
	Because once you establish property rights in the way you said...
	I have some problems with that too, but we can discuss that later, maybe.
	But once you establish property rights in that way, you own yourself and the results of your actions, then anything on top of that is not needed to show that murder, theft and rape is immoral.
	Oh, I'm certainly, look, if you can cut a big chunk out of UPB, I'd be thrilled to hear about it.
	Okay, so take me through how rape is immoral based upon self-ownership.
	If you own yourself, then you have the right to stop others from using you.
	So if somebody else uses you against your will, then that's immoral, according to property rights.
	Well, no, no, no.
	You've just described an action and attached the word immoral to it.
	I don't think you've made a case for it.
	Like I'm saying, prove your theorem, and you say, well, my theory is right.
	Well, that's not proving the theory, that's just adding the word right to the end of your theory, right?
	So take me through self-ownership to the immorality of rape.
	Well, here I think we have a bigger discrepancy, because I don't think morality can be objective at all.
	I think morality is a subjective preference.
	Wait, did you just call something immoral?
	I'm sorry, what?
	Didn't you just say that, and therefore rape is immoral or something like that?
	Yes, yes.
	I was using morality in a different way than I usually do.
	I think you can say that rape is unethical according to self-ownership, but I think that's all you can say.
	But no, why is rape unethical according to self-ownership?
	Because if you say that those things that violate self-ownership are unethical, then rape...
	No, no, no.
	You're just making a statement that's not an argument, right?
	You're just saying, well, anything which violates self-ownership is immoral.
	Why?
	Why?
	That's just a statement.
	And if you agree with it, fantastic.
	But if you don't, you haven't convinced anyone, right?
	No, I agree.
	I think that's no way to objectively prove that self-ownership is the correct way to approach ethics at all.
	Oh, so you disagree with, so you found a flaw in UPP? Yes, yes, you could see that too, yes.
	Okay, where and what is it?
	I really want to make sure that's not wrong.
	Obviously, it's my biggest thing, so yeah, let's fix it up.
	Well, simply when talking with somebody, just the fact that you can use your body doesn't follow that you own your body.
	I don't see any way how that logically follows necessarily.
	I mean, theoretically, a slave could make an argument.
	Are you exercising control over your own body to make the argument?
	Or is it possession of some kind or some sort of mind control from someone or someone else?
	We're just using your body.
	So you are using your body right now.
	You're exercising self-ownership to make your argument.
	I'm exercising self-control.
	Not necessarily ownership.
	Control, ownership, I mean, potato, potato, it doesn't usually matter, right?
	No, no, it's the same thing.
	But it's not someone else who's doing it, it's you, right?
	It's your brain that is controlling your body to produce these arguments, right?
	I sure hope so.
	Well, come on, I mean, let's not get overly sophisticated here, right?
	I mean, you are, right?
	Sorry, I slipped a joke in there.
	No, I know, I know.
	Yes, I use my body, but I don't see that you can derive from that that I own it, necessarily.
	I mean, there's no...
	Can anyone else use it?
	Can anyone else...
	Can anyone else directly control your body?
	And I don't mean putting a gun to your head and making you say stuff because that's not directly controlling your body.
	Is there any other brain attached to your brain stem that can control your body directly?
	No.
	Okay, so you and only you can use your body.
	Yes.
	Okay, so how is that not ownership?
	Well, because ownership means that I have the right to exclude others.
	The mere fact that I'm using my body doesn't necessarily mean that I have the right to exclude anybody else.
	No, no, no.
	There's no one else who can use your body directly.
	Oh, sure you can.
	I mean, if somebody rapes me, they are using my body.
	No, no, no.
	They're not using your body.
	Because they are...
	They're violating, but they don't have direct...
	Rape does not give you ownership over another person's brainstem.
	You don't possess them.
	You don't inhabit them.
	You don't take control of their body.
	Because otherwise, there couldn't be any such thing as rape.
	Because if rape gave me control over someone else, or the desire to rape gave me control over someone else, I would simply mentally inhabit that person's body and have them say yes to whatever it is I wanted to do.
	And if that were recorded, that would be enough to show that it wasn't rape in general, right?
	Rape results from you violently not wanting someone to have sexual congress with you in some form.
	And the fact that you don't want them to and they do means that they don't own you, that you don't want them to do that.
	Does that make sense?
	I know what you're saying, but no, I still don't see that it follows.
	I mean, they don't have perfect control over me while they rape me, but neither do I. I can't do anything I want with my body.
	I'm limited.
	But they are using my body.
	I mean, if I'm using my car...
	Wait, wait.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	What do you mean?
	Are you saying that omnipotence is the definition of self-ownership?
	That in order to have ownership...
	In other words, you don't own a car unless it can travel at the speed of light or burrow through rock or turn into a fish.
	I mean, the fact that you can't do whatever you want is no definition of self-ownership or not.
	No, I agree.
	I was merely replying to you saying that because somebody doesn't have complete control over me, they can't possibly own me.
	I don't know.
	I don't have complete control over my car.
	No, no, they don't.
	I own it.
	No, no, they don't.
	If somebody's raping you, they don't even have partial control over you.
	Well, I mean...
	Because they cannot directly...
	They cannot directly affect self-ownership over your body because they cannot wire into your neurological system.
	Well, they can make my arm move, but they can pin it down and hold it down.
	Absolutely.
	But that's still not jacked into your brainstem.
	They still cannot change your body's movements from the inside.
	You still exercise self-ownership, right?
	I mean, it's like saying I don't have freedom of movement because I'm in an airplane that's taking off or whatever.
	I mean, with the choice element removed and so on.
	But restrictions on movement don't violate self-ownership.
	No, I mean, I agree with that.
	But there's still the problem that simply because I use something, I don't see how property rights will follow for that automatically.
	I mean...
	I do use myself and I find it moral on a personal level that I have the right to exclude others from using myself.
	But I don't think you can establish it objectively.
	Well, UPB does that?
	No, I don't think it does.
	Okay, tell me where the arguments are false.
	And if you don't remember them, I can go over them.
	No, I'm still fixed on this one argument that I think is the same as in argumentation ethics.
	Just because you use something doesn't follow that you have the right to exclude others from using it.
	I mean, we can talk about...
	No, I get that.
	I get that.
	Of course.
	Just because I'm using a rental car doesn't mean that I get to keep it.
	Right?
	I mean, if somebody lends me a shovel, I'm using it, it doesn't mean I get to keep it.
	I mean, this is elementary.
	I don't know why that's...
	It's not just that.
	For example, if I, I don't know, build a house.
	I built it, I'm using it, but I don't think it logically follows that I can exclude others from using it.
	I mean, I agree with that.
	Okay, so no, but it's not about you.
	I mean, it's like physics is not about one green rock at the bottom of your garden.
	It's not about you.
	The moment you start talking about ethics, you're talking about universal principles, universally, as I call it, universally preferable behavior.
	So it isn't a question of You and your house.
	The moment people start talking about ethics like, well, it's just my body or it's just my house or it's just this spoon, then they're not talking about ethics.
	The question isn't, can you rationally exclude someone from using your house?
	The question is, is it universally preferable behavior to violate everybody's persons and property at will?
	Can it be universalized?
	Logically, clearly, it can't.
	Because if I say, well, I have the right to violate your person at will, then the only way that goes from a personal being an asshole, not you, but me, being an asshole scenario, the only way that gets into the realm of ethics is if we say, everyone must violate everyone else all the time.
	Because it's universally preferable behavior.
	Now, it is neither rationally nor practically possible for every human being to violate every other human being at the same time, no matter how many Bob Guccione films we may have watched in the 70s involving Romans.
	So, it can't be.
	That violations of persons and property can be universally preferable behavior.
	Now, respect of persons and property can be universally preferable behavior.
	In fact, it's the only relationship between persons and property that can be universally preferable behavior.
	And that's how we work it, right?
	So, you can't have two people in the same room, both with a moral imperative to steal each other's property.
	Because if they both have a moral imperative, if it's morally good to steal each other's property, then both people must want to steal and be stolen from.
	But if you want to be stolen from, it's not stealing anymore.
	It's only stealing when I take something you don't want me to take, right?
	Like if you leave an old washing machine out on your front yard with a big sign that says, take me, and I take it, I'm doing you a favor.
	I'm saving you a trip to the dump, right?
	And so...
	It doesn't matter whether you say, well, I build a house, how do I rationally get the right to exclude other people?
	You've got to universalize it to all human beings under all circumstances.
	Okay, can I maybe ask you a question to clarify what I'm trying to say?
	No, no, no, because this is not me saying stuff and then you go on off on a tangent.
	I've made at least three or four significant arguments here that you're not responding to.
	So, We're either going to have a debate about this stuff or we're not, but I'm not going to pretend that we are when I make arguments that you don't respond to but want to go on with something else.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	Let me get back then.
	When you said that theft could be universally preferable if everybody wanted to steal from everybody else at the same time.
	No, no, no.
	Not wanted to.
	Everybody, because it's universal.
	Oh, sorry.
	Everybody would steal.
	Yeah.
	No, not would.
	Must.
	Everybody must steal from everyone else at the same time.
	Can that logically be sustained?
	Of course not.
	Okay.
	So at least we have something here, right?
	Where if it's universal, we can't do it.
	Can everyone murder everyone else at the same time?
	It would be pretty hard, no.
	I don't think it's possible.
	But can people, can everyone respect, can everyone not murder everyone else at the same time?
	Is that logically achievable?
	Yes, it is.
	Okay, good.
	Can everyone respect everyone else's property at the same time?
	Is that achievable?
	Yes.
	Can everyone not rape other people at the same time?
	Is that achievable?
	Yes, every not doing is achievable.
	Okay, and assault.
	And again, this is very abbreviated, but...
	But I mean, look, if we say, can everybody say hi to everybody else at the same time?
	I don't think they can, right?
	No.
	So is saying hi not universally preferable behavior?
	Right, which is why it's the non-aggression principle.
	In other words, it's refraining from doing evil that is the essence of ethics.
	This is why a refraining, this is why a thou shalt not...
	A thou shalt not, it's infinitely less restrictive than a thou shalt.
	And so you can't have as universally preferable behavior everyone say hi to each other at the same time.
	Because ethics fundamentally is passive.
	Ethics fundamentally is not going and stealing and not going and raping and not going to beat people up and not going to strangle people.
	It's fundamentally passive, at least necessary but not sufficient.
	I understand.
	But when you say that everybody saying hi to everybody else is not universally preferable behavior, Doesn't that mean that saying hi is immoral?
	All right, hang on a sec.
	Okay, so if...
	If not...
	Sorry, if saying...
	If not saying hi to everyone is not universally preferable behavior...
	No, if saying hi is not universally preferable behavior.
	If saying hi to everyone is not universally preferable behavior...
	Doesn't that mean that saying hi is immoral?
	Because if murdering everybody is not universally preferable behavior, then murdering somebody, murdering in general, sorry, is immoral, right?
	Oh, yeah, no.
	And the reason for that, and I've got a section in UPB on this, because you could say, well, it could be universally preferable behavior to not eat fish on Fridays.
	Mm-hmm.
	But the problem is, is that when you say universally, you can't just say universally equals one day of the week, or a particular food that you might eat, or a particular word that you might say, like the word hi.
	I can't talk to everybody in the world at the same time.
	I can't do that.
	So that means, according to what you said before, that talking is not universally preferable behavior, so it's immoral.
	Wait, talking is not universally preferable?
	No.
	Okay, so, I mean, there's another aspect of UPB called the coma test, right, which is a challenge to positive behavior.
	No, but this is negative behavior.
	We're trying to find out that if talking violates universally preferable behavior, and according to that test, you put forward before, that if something can't be done to everybody at the same time, then by that standard, talking fails the universally preferable behavior test, right?
	No, but...
	Okay.
	Well, so the coma test means that...
	That someone in a coma can't be acting in an immoral manner, right?
	And someone in a coma is not violating persons or property, right?
	Yes.
	And so talking can't be...
	I mean, it's a first challenge.
	It's not the only one, but it's a good first challenge.
	Which is that talking can't be universally preferable behavior.
	Because a man in a coma can't talk, right?
	And so if a positive action is required...
	Then it doesn't pass the coma test.
	This is why I say that ethics in its first iteration is passive.
	It's the non-initiation of force.
	It's the non-inflicting of force.
	Other people's behavior.
	There are times, you know, there are people who lack vocal cords, would we say, they can't be moral.
	Is the presence or absence of vocal cords a moral category?
	Well, no, it's not a moral category, right?
	A gay person isn't good if they have vocal cords, and they're evil if they don't have vocal cords, right?
	So you can't create something that is universal and then say, well, it only applies to people who have Vocal chords or tongues or are awake.
	That's not universal.
	Universal is everywhere all the time.
	And so you can't take a specific action like talking or eating fish on Fridays and then plug it into UPB because it's not universal at that point.
	Well, talking isn't that specific.
	I mean, and the...
	Wait, wait, hang on, hang on.
	Are you then denying that somebody, if we put that forward, that would mean that somebody who is unable to talk for whatever reason Is evil.
	And somebody who is able to talk is moral, if they're talking.
	Would you think that's a sustainable thesis?
	No, I'm trying to prove the exact opposite.
	That somebody who does talk is immoral.
	Not talking is good.
	But talking is immoral, according to what you presented.
	Wait, not talking is good?
	Yeah, like not murdering.
	To murder someone is bad.
	Because we can't murder each other at the same time.
	Not murdering is good.
	On the other hand, talking is bad because we can't talk to everybody else in the world at the same time.
	So not talking is good.
	No, no, but it doesn't mean everybody in the world.
	That was one example I gave, right?
	So the example is two people in a room.
	So two people in a room, if you remember the argument I gave, two people in a room cannot both steal From each other at the same time, right?
	Okay.
	Stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior for two people in a room, right?
	Okay.
	I think you accepted that.
	Yeah, you accepted that before, okay?
	So, the sort of how many people, it's, you know, the little lab of two people, right?
	Now, two people, two people in a room, can they both talk at the same time?
	Well, they can talk, yeah, but they won't understand each other.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	I mean, maybe they're talking on cell phones.
	I don't know.
	But okay.
	But they can physically both talk at the same time.
	Yeah, I mean, they're not having conversation, so...
	No, no, but you didn't say conversation.
	You said talking.
	So I'm going with your argument here.
	Yeah, I said talking because it was everybody in the world.
	You need to get into the habit of, like, when I'm talking, because you're funny.
	We have this conversation about two people talking at the same time, and half the time I'm talking, you're talking.
	I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
	Okay, so you go ahead.
	Say what you need to say, and then I'll get back to my point.
	Okay.
	I can exchange talking with having a conversation.
	No, that's not universal.
	I mean, but I can find actions that cannot be performed by two people at the same time, besides murder, besides rape, and besides theft.
	The first thing that comes to mind is spooning.
	Maybe it's a bit silly, but two people can't spoon each other from behind at the same time.
	That's completely logical.
	Right?
	Two people cannot spoon each other at the same time.
	Not from behind.
	I mean, somebody has to be the little spoon.
	I'm sorry if this is silly.
	But it's the first thing that came to mind.
	Okay, no, that's fine.
	So according to this criteria, spooning is not universally preferable behavior and thus it's immoral.
	Spooning is not universally, spooning cannot be universally preferable behavior. Therefore, it is immoral.
	According to this criteria?
	According to others?
	No, no.
	Again, you're trying to ask me to condense a 350 or 400-page book into a very short conversation, I guess because you haven't read the book, because there's a whole section on this stuff as well.
	So, rape, theft, murder, and assault cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	And there's a whole reason as to why that becomes immoral because there are subsections of imposing one's violent will on another, right?
	And so the question of self-defense, the question of the initiation of force is dealt with in the book.
	These are subsections of can two people, can it be moral for two people to violently impose their will on each other at the same time and both have that as a great value?
	Well, of course not, right?
	So these are subsections.
	The sort of four violations that I talked about are subsections of violently imposing unwanted will on someone else.
	And that can't be done.
	Now, spooning is a subsection called, can two people arrange their bodies in a way that is comfortable and pleasing for them at the same time so that both of them are happy?
	Well, yeah, of course they can't.
	But that's not part of the category called violently imposing unwanted behavior on another person, which is the theft, rape, murder, and assault category.
	And so what you're talking about is not the specific action of spooning, but the larger question of the category of the action.
	Now, if both people want to spoon, then neither of them is violently imposing will upon the other, and therefore it's perfectly compatible with moral behavior.
	I guess that would be...
	Neutral behavior.
	We've got sort of three categories.
	Well, good and evil, aesthetically preferable actions, and aesthetically negative actions, and then neutral, right?
	So good and evil is like rape and murder.
	Aesthetically preferable is like being on time, and neutral is running for the bus in no particular, right?
	So what you're trying to do is you're trying to make specific actions into universals, and that doesn't work.
	And so...
	The category of spooning would be under, can two people both arrange their bodies in a, or can, let's go even wider than that, right?
	Can two people not impose their violent will on each other in the same room at the same time?
	Yeah, of course they can, right?
	And so that would fall under the category of morally neutral actions because neither of them is imposing their will upon the other in a violent and aggressive manner.
	Whereas the other categories of rape, theft and murder and so on fail that logical test because you cannot have two people in the same room both who have the ideal of violently imposing each other's unwanted actions on the other because the moment they both have that universal the actions can't be unwanted and it all falls apart if they both want it Then it doesn't fall apart.
	They can both achieve that within the framework of UPB. So when you have these challenges and I think?
	So basically divided up all the actions into those who are violent actions against the property of somebody and those who aren't.
	I mean, this is the division that we're using here.
	Or am I wrong?
	Well, I don't think that it fundamentally needs property unless you just want to define self-ownership.
	But it's just a logical construct, right?
	Two people cannot both want something as the highest value and not want it.
	As the lowest value at the same time.
	That's just logically impossible.
	It's like going north and south at the same time, right?
	It just doesn't work, right?
	And so, when you have, in a confined, let's just say, model situation, when you have a confined, in a confined and model situation, you have universally preferable behavior that is both the, you know, universally preferable and universally ideal.
	The opposite of preferable.
	I don't even know what the non-preferable or anti-preferable or hate.
	Something that's universally loved and hated or the highest value and the lowest non-value at the same time, that fails a logical test.
	So the imposition of will, the imposition of aggressive will on another cannot be universally preferable behavior because not everyone can both want to inflict their will and not want to have Their own will inflicted by someone else, because it's universal.
	All wills can inflict on each other can't work logically.
	Because if you and I are both trying to steal each other's wallet, it's only theft if I don't want you to steal my wallet.
	But since we're both human beings and we both possess will, if we say all wills can violently aggress against others, well, I don't want you to take my wallet.
	And so I'm saying, well, my will gets to violently aggress against you, but your will doesn't get to violently aggress against me.
	Bingo, bango, bongo.
	No universality.
	Therefore, it's not ethics anymore.
	It doesn't work.
	So I don't think it's necessary for the self-ownership and property rights and so on.
	It's simply the logical construct that doesn't work.
	If I just could try to condense your argument, so I'm sure what I'm responding to.
	You're saying that two people can't be both for theft because theft implies that one of them is against Detection, right?
	So it can possibly be universally preferable.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Now, what about me denying somebody the use of my car?
	I mean...
	But you're just saying theft again, right?
	You've got to forget the car example.
	It's like you keep getting dragged down to this minutiae.
	It's not about the car.
	Rephrase that as an ethical statement, not as a statement of an individual report to a police officer.
	Well, I'm not sure how to do that, but I didn't mean...
	No, you can.
	You can.
	You can.
	So, the way to do it is to say, denying someone else the use of your car, right?
	So, somebody wants...
	It's your car, and somebody wants to take it from you, and you say no, right?
	No, you can't, yes.
	Okay.
	How would you abstract that to a principle?
	Well, I'm denying somebody access to a good...
	That's not a principle.
	That's just a tiny example, right?
	What is the principle?
	It's a thou shalt or thou shalt not.
	That's the principle, right?
	Or what is universally preferable behavior?
	What would be not specific to a car, but everything?
	That philosophy is everything.
	Not this car or this person.
	I'm sorry, I'm a bit lost here.
	I'm sorry?
	I'm a bit lost here.
	I mean, the example with theft would be thou shalt not steal.
	But with denying something, the principle would be thou shall not deny.
	But that's the same thing.
	No, no, no.
	Like if I... If I have my wallet in a fanny pack and it's zipped up, I don't want you to take it.
	Am I denying you taking my wallet?
	I guess it's zipped up, right?
	But talking about the wallet and the zip doesn't matter.
	The fundamental thing would be, does everyone have the right to take everyone else's possessions against their will?
	Well, no.
	Because that can't be universalized.
	I'm going one step before that.
	I'm saying, does everybody have the right to deny people access to stuff?
	Does everyone have the right to deny everybody access to stuff?
	I think once you're using the word stuff, you're probably not in the realm of philosophy because that's just such a non-specific word.
	I don't even know what to say.
	I'm sorry.
	I don't know how to phrase it better.
	It's three and a half.
	Does everyone have the right to take everyone else's property against their will?
	Well, this comes back to do you have the right to do something to someone against his or her will?
	Well, no.
	Because everyone has a will, and if one will wins and the other will loses, then you don't have universality.
	Because if Bob gets to violently impose his will on Doug, but it's universal, then Doug also gets to violently impose his will on Bob.
	And that doesn't work logically, because the only way you'd violently impose your will, and everyone gets to violently impose their will on everyone else.
	That can't work.
	The imposition of will must be the very highest value then.
	The violent imposition of will is universally preferable behavior.
	But that can't be right because if you want to steal my wallet and the aggressive imposition of will is the highest value, is the universally preferable behavior, then I must be like, here, take my wallet.
	That's really good.
	I want that wallet back.
	Now you have to give it back to me.
	No theft can occur.
	We're just passing something back and forth that we both want each other to have because it's a universally preferable behavior to take people's stuff.
	So there's no theft that's occurring.
	And therefore theft cannot exist if it's universally preferable because everybody wants everyone to steal and everybody wants everyone to have their property and then have it back and blah blah blah blah blah.
	And two people cannot violently impose their will on each other simultaneously.
	Have that as the highest value because the moment you have it as the highest value, you don't need violence anymore.
	Any more than if I want you to take the broken lawnmower off my porch, you don't need to come in as a cat burglar in the middle of the night and steal it.
	It's like, just take the damn thing.
	I want it.
	It says, take me right there.
	It's not theft if I want you to have it.
	And so theft can only occur if somebody does.
	Anyway, I think we've got to move on because I've made the same argument about a billion times, so we're going to move on to caller number three.
	But I really appreciate you bringing up some excellent, excellent points.
	Thank you.
	Thank you very much, Mike.
	Alright, now with the current events question, we have Nils.
	He wrote in and said, with the emotion going on after the recent events in France and the national call to, quote-unquote, unify the republic at all costs against terror, the question of multiculturalism will be very hard to pose.
	How could this very sensitive matter be addressed after such trauma?
	Hi.
	Hi Nils, how are you doing?
	Good, and you?
	I'm well, thank you.
	Yeah, just if I can sum up another way, you mentioned in your previous video on the French attacks a perfect storm of cultural incompatibility that is occurring right now in France.
	I'm sorry, cultural what?
	Incompatibility.
	You mentioned it in your video.
	I think it's a very good way of summing up the problem we have here.
	In the eye of the storm, when we have this thing happening here, to see everyone act in a way of Absolutely refusing to talk about certain things and at a time where they defend the freedom of expression.
	So it's a very strange time and it seems that those matters, such as multiculturalism, are going to be even harder to address here.
	So I wanted your take on this.
	Yeah, I mean, so multiculturalism is a challenge to say the least.
	You know, you always hear this stuff, diversity is our strength, diversity is our strength.
	It's hard for me to think of a, you know, limited knowledge and all that, but it's hard for me to think of a group or a culture or a country with really divergent cultures that gets along hunky-dory and integrates and all sings kumbaya at the same football games.
	I mean, You've got Ireland, Kosovo.
	You've got various places in Africa with tribal warfare.
	You have, you know, racial gangs in prison.
	Prisons segregate by culture and race almost exclusively unless forced to integrate.
	So, it's hard, you know, I don't...
	The answer for me is, God, let's make everyone rational.
	Let's make everyone philosophical.
	And then we'll all get along because we'll all have the same objective methodology for determining right from wrong.
	And that's not about to happen.
	We're working on it, but it's not about to happen.
	And so, when it comes to France in particular, well, we have non-philosophical cultures who are trying to get along.
	And historically, this doesn't tend to work out very well.
	Now, I personally would love to live in a world where I don't care who lives where.
	I don't.
	That to me is like not the big thing on my list is to try and mentally sort everyone as to where they should live or shouldn't live or anything like that.
	But unfortunately, France, of course, with its colonial history...
	With exploitation of colonial countries.
	And that's a mixed bag because a lot of the colonial, ex-colonial countries are doing a lot better than the countries that weren't colonized.
	So there's lots of complexity about all of that.
	But the West has really fucked up a lot of third world countries.
	They've fucked it up with foreign aid.
	They've fucked it up with war.
	They've fucked it up with agricultural dumping.
	They've fucked it up with massive arms sales to a bunch of sociopathic kleptocrats who are supposed to be in charge of these human zoos.
	And so when you, you know, when you set fire to your neighbor's house, don't be shocked if he ends up on your sidewalk.
	So intervention in other countries, you know, the Founding Fathers had some pretty good principles.
	You know, trade and culture exchanges with everyone, war and entangling alliances with none, with no one.
	That was a pretty good plan, which, like all pretty good plans, lasted about as long as a candle in a typhoon.
	It's a pretty good plan.
	Go trade with people.
	Don't go fight with them.
	Don't sell them weapons.
	Don't enter into contracts.
	Don't get service agreements for how long you can leave their military 60, 70 years after the Second World War.
	Don't get involved in the domino theory and don't get involved in police actions in Korea and don't start fighting in Vietnam and don't put Agent Orange up the noses of all the unborn in Cambodia and just don't do all of this stupid shit that fucks up the world.
	Which people don't actually want.
	The population, the citizens as a whole, they don't want any of this shit.
	Nobody wants the war on terror.
	Nobody wants NATO. Nobody wants arms sales overseas.
	This is all easy to understand.
	And everybody knows that nobody wants this.
	Everybody in charge knows that nobody wants this.
	How?
	Because they've got to put a gun to your head to get you to pay for it.
	It's one of the ways you know that they don't want it.
	You know, like there's this thing going on about rape culture at the moment.
	Rape culture!
	Because rape is denied.
	Rape is justified.
	Rape is avoided.
	Rape is excluded.
	And rape victims are shamed.
	Actually, that's all just men.
	And you can watch my presentation on the truth about rape culture from all on that.
	Rape culture only applies to men in general.
	But there's this exquisite sensitivity...
	Particularly on college campuses, where rules are coming out, like, well, you have to get, you see, verbal assent to every stage of the seduction.
	Verbal assent.
	Can I unhook your bra?
	Can I kiss your neck?
	Can my fingers go here?
	Can my baby oil-soaked caterpillar of fetishness go there?
	Wouldn't it be nice if consent culture...
	Around seduction was also applied to taxation.
	Every single step of policies in the government, they had to ask for your explicit yes or no.
	And if you said no, they had to apologize, take a step back, and go home.
	People say, ah, you know, but in America, the soldiers aren't conscripted.
	Yeah, maybe.
	Maybe.
	But the money sure is.
	The money is conscripted to pay for them and that's really all you need to build an army is the money to pay them.
	All volunteer!
	Really?
	Can my money be volunteer too?
	No!
	Then it's not volunteer!
	So...
	I don't care where people live.
	I don't care where anyone goes.
	I just...
	I don't care.
	But when you have a system...
	Where government programs call colonialism and war and foreign aid and arms sales and agricultural dumping and the war on drugs.
	When you have all of these wicked, vicious government programs that have turned formerly habitable countries into literal or virtual or real hellscapes of inhospitability.
	And then, like France, you say, oh yeah, you know, all the relatives can come over from Algiers and so on.
	And you have another government program called citizenship.
	And you have another government program called the welfare state.
	And you have another government program called control of language.
	You have another government program called public schools.
	And you have another government program called zoning and rent control.
	Which herds people into these ghettos!
	You have these government programs that segregate and exclude people.
	Then you're going to get lots of conflicts.
	And when you have a government program called the majority rules, then you have the great plum of political power, which is if you can get a majority and if you can shame other people into agreeing with you, then you get the power, you get the control, you get all the guns in the known universe.
	to rain down upon your enemies.
	So how do you sell multiculturalism?
	I don't think you can.
	Look, people want to live among other cultures.
	Fantastic.
	I grew up among other cultures.
	I've dated from other cultures.
	I have friends from other cultures.
	Beautiful.
	The friends I keep are the rational ones.
	The ones who can think.
	The ones who accept reason and evidence, as I try to.
	And we have the culture, the great missing culture in the world called sanity!
	Sanity!
	He drew a picture of this.
	They shot up this.
	He ran over here.
	They brought down bombs on this.
	This guy said that we should still examine the number of people in the Holocaust.
	And then this guy got thrown in jail for saying, ah!
	Right?
	Everyone's looking at the details.
	Everyone's missing the big picture.
	The big picture is we're all herded around in human zoos.
	We're all controlled.
	We're all indoctrinated.
	We're all propagandized.
	We're all bribed.
	They say among the underprivileged youth in France, ah, you see, the problem is lack of opportunity.
	Alienation.
	Okay, fine.
	How friendly is France towards job creation?
	Let me give you a hint.
	If you could never ever get divorced, how many people would get married?
	Not many.
	How easy is it to fire someone in France?
	Yeah.
	Really, really, really hard.
	And so people don't get hired.
	How easy is it to start a business?
	How many taxes and regulations are you going to face if you start a business in France?
	How much scope is there for entrepreneurial activities?
	And how many of the fat, squalid, middle class and above people are using all the power of the state to keep the hyper-competitive poor from evolving to compete with them?
	You know, the older generations are almost always dinosaurs and the younger generations are almost always mammals.
	Lean, fast, adaptable.
	Look, we can regulate our own body temperature!
	Isn't that great?
	You give birth to eggs?
	How primitive!
	How medieval!
	How possible is it for people who immigrate to France to get jobs, start businesses?
	How many licenses are required in France to open a barber shop for God's sake?
	Probably a stack like a phone book.
	So I think that these eruptions, and look, I also take very seriously the complaints from people, Muslims and others, very seriously complaints from other people.
	Oh yeah, 12 cartoonists got shot, that's terrible.
	Or 12 journalists, I don't think they were journalists, but whatever.
	They got shot, that's terrible.
	But some drone strike rains down on a wedding party in a Muslim country and nobody even notices.
	It is a little bit precious for me, given the amount of slaughter that has occurred in Muslim countries over the past couple of decades, not to mention the last decade and a year, two years now, I guess almost, in Iraq,
	for Westerners to beat their breasts in horror that 12 people got shot When the war in Iraq alone has been estimated to be responsible to close to 1 million fucking deaths.
	May I jump in?
	Yeah, please.
	Yeah, it's even closer to us than the Iraq war because France refused to act in Iraq in 2003.
	But just if you take Libya, which is just alone 100,000 civilian deaths, I'm not sure, but I think France engaged the Air Army planes to go to Libya before even NATO gave the order to Maybe act.
	And those people in the street today, their tax money is used to go bomb thousands of civilians.
	And then you have this and this whole situation when At the same time they claim that nothing must be said about Islam and nothing must be said and it has nothing to do with Islam.
	It was amazing the two last days to just listen to the people saying that Islam is a complete religion of peace and it has nothing to do with it.
	It's becoming sick, you know, almost to witness the things going on and how people are so emotive.
	And this is quite fascinating and it's sad to be able to notice it this much in those sad times.
	But today, 700,000 people came in the streets.
	Just by citizen initiative, and it's quite amazing to see how people were very emotive, but everyone in unison were saying, it has nothing to do about Islam, and it's not a multiculturalism thing, it has nothing.
	We are all together behind the nation and the state, all like...
	You know, saying this, like, preaching, and yet their money is taken at gunpoint to bomb civilians.
	And the whole thing is getting so sick, so sickening that it's a bit of a nightmare, you know?
	It's quite weird.
	You know, when you apply violent pressure against a tribe, all you do is unify the tribe.
	And what you do is you strip that tribe of the discontents that are coming from within, because everyone's like, well, the bombs are coming from outside.
	So we all band together and that's the enemy.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And this intervention in other countries Creates this genuine emergency wherein self-criticism within those countries is completely overshadowed by not wanting to be killed by the next drone or bomb.
	Or, you know, maybe, I don't know, there's some countries that receive a lot of, I'm thinking African, that receive a lot of foreign aid.
	Which props up these dictatorships.
	They sell these weapons to these dictators.
	I mean, how many times are grenades coming back over the war with the made in USA signs or made in England or France as well?
	Pretty big arms dealer.
	Yeah.
	And if you look at these countries, they look at their governments and they see locals with Western hands up their asses.
	They see the money and arms flow back to these Western governments.
	And that's a very real and tangible and important and something that seems to be only visible outside the empire of the West.
	We don't see it.
	We don't see it.
	Oh, well, we see we're giving the money.
	This must be good.
	It must be great.
	But you cannot wealth transfer your way to poverty.
	Sorry, you cannot wealth transfer your way to wealth.
	Only it will forever lead to poverty.
	Like wealth transfer, it's like I need a blood transfusion.
	Now take some from my left arm and put it in my right arm and be sure to spill a lot along the way.
	Was that ever going to make you healthy?
	No, it's just going to make you dead quicker.
	So this interference, this constant interference is not even remotely a strong enough word.
	This slaughterhouse that's being created by Western arms sales, foreign aid, propping up these governments, agricultural dumping, which sounds relatively innocuous like free bread, but it destroys local farmers, destroys local economy, and makes people dependent upon the state.
	Because everything you give to these countries, you give through the state.
	Therefore, everybody wants to gain control of the state.
	And the state becomes the source of everything that you need to survive.
	And you can buy votes.
	And you can get your friends into power.
	And you can punish your enemies.
	And that makes everything fascism when you give money.
	They're not taking water bombers full of $100 bills and dropping them over the slums.
	They go to the governments or government-controlled agencies, even NGOs.
	And it centralizes everything.
	The economy, the society, the favors, the benefits.
	By pumping all of this money at the state, it centralizes everything in the society around the state.
	And then we stand and scratch our heads and say, well, this seems kind of totalitarian.
	I wonder why.
	And it makes the governments unresponsive to the people.
	They are responsive to Western governments, but they are unresponsive to the people because whatever legitimacy governments may have in a theoretical sense would come out of the support of the people.
	The governments getting money from foreign aid and weapons from foreign governments, prop-ups from foreign governments, do not need to respond to their own people, do not need to address the discontents of their own people.
	And then the less Their own people respect their own government, the more difficult they become, and therefore the more weapons these governments need from the West.
	The vicious cycle continues.
	We don't see it.
	It is unreported.
	You open up USA Today, you see pictures of Americans who died in the war.
	There's no Iraqi death count.
	At all.
	So, I absolutely completely and I viscerally get and understand the complaints of saying, look at the pile of bodies and see how many of this pile of bodies over the last 50 or 60 years.
	Hell, go even further than that.
	Back.
	The Ottoman Empire.
	The carving up a division of the Middle East after the First World War, after the Second World War.
	Look at the pile of bodies.
	How many of them have turbans?
	A lot!
	A lot more!
	A lot more!
	There's an old, vile statement that is made about the Jews that say, they cry out in pain while they're hitting you, which is just a way of...
	Well, it's anti-Semitic, it's nasty, but...
	But these governments, these...
	Citizens, most of whom are blind and ignorant to the reality and deliberately shielded from the reality of their government's foreign policies and arms sales and despotic propping up.
	But to be overseas, to be overseas and to look at France, to be overseas in one of the client colonies of Western power, and to look at the The legitimate horror expressed by the French, which I understand that too.
	It's horrifying.
	To see that from overseas and to say, but what's happening there is nothing compared to what's happening here.
	And you as people who voted a democracy over there in France should bloody well educate yourself about what's happening overseas.
	About all the entanglements and brutalities that your governments are getting up to.
	I'm not saying you can stop it.
	But you should educate yourselves about it.
	The view from outside the empire is not the same as the view from inside the empire.
	And the extremist, some of the extremist Muslims What is their goal?
	Their goal is to get the troops out of Saudi Arabia.
	It's to get people to stop killing Muslims, these governments to stop killing Muslims and supplying arms sales to regimes that they find reprehensible.
	I mean, I would like there to be less arms sales in the world.
	I'd like there to be no foreign aid, which is taking money from the poor people of rich countries and giving it to the rich people in poor countries.
	It's complex.
	Outside of let's stop the initiation of force, let's be skeptical about the use of force at a personal or institutional level to achieve productive change.
	You don't change people's minds by mocking and blaspheming.
	You don't.
	You simply don't.
	It's reason and evidence and patient and courageous explanation.
	It is not Some mockery.
	And I mean, these guys, I mean, they had pictures of, I think, the Father and Son and the Holy Ghost in some daisy chain buggery scenario.
	I mean, they really were.
	I mean, it's always the case with free speech.
	You never get to defend Voltaire.
	It's always Larry Flint and the less, whatever, right?
	So it's complex.
	Yeah, and just another thing which is quite scary and which I'm pretty sure will never be talked about in France is I sent to Mike a study which was done which shows the The degree of the way the people are favorable to ISIS in three countries in Europe,
	France, Germany, and Great Britain, and the number of people who are favorable to ISIS ID in France is 16%, with 3% being in very much favor of ISIS. Wait, is that 16% of the entire population?
	Yes.
	The survey was taken by a thousand people and it seems quite legit and only 31% of people were very unfavorable to ISIS. It's like a third of the country is actually informed and quite reasonable and that's another thing which is quite scary regarding this extremism.
	People are getting in the street and Maybe a lot of them, I don't know, I don't have much of an opinion on it, and it's just so emotive, you know, and it's quite strange.
	But those statistics are very scary.
	I don't know what you think of those numbers.
	I mean, yeah, I mean, they are, you know, this is not where I do my work.
	So, I mean, I can tell you, you know, that those numbers are surprisingly high to me.
	But...
	The reality is that to solve these problems in the long run is going to be a multi-generational challenge.
	Absolutely.
	And there is going to have to be some clarity about the role of culture and the capacities for different cultures to integrate.
	And I don't have any answers as far as that goes.
	Because those would always have to do with government policy.
	And I have, as a rule, and a rule I struck to fairly well, steadfastly tried to avoid any policy proposals in the realm of the state.
	For obvious reasons.
	So, if people around the world, as they're doing, If they listen to the message of peaceful parenting and negotiation and reason and evidence when it comes to being a dad and a mom, then these problems will begin to ameliorate off their own accord without any big drama and confrontation and civil war and all this kind of stuff.
	And that's the only realm that I can work in because there's no other realm that does not involve the initiation of force.
	There's no other realm that does not involve the initiation of force.
	I propose and forward and cry from the skies if I can the non-initiation of force.
	And peaceful parenting is the only solution that does not require the initiation of force or any attempt to manage the initiation of force such as voting or whatever it is, right?
	So you can say, ah, well, you should deport these people and you should bring these people in and put these laws in.
	But that's not where I work.
	I work on the non-initiation force.
	It's the only thing that's going to work.
	It's the only thing that's going to work.
	No, absolutely.
	I wasn't expecting any policy advice or anything like this.
	I wouldn't expect this from you.
	It seems so hard to approach in a philosophic manner people and subjects and matters when people are so I don't know, so emotive and it seems like reason, even in those times, is kind of lost, you know?
	And it makes everything harder, even like talking about childhood, it's those guys who committed the attacks, most of them seem to have kind of adverse childhood placing in homecares around...
	Weren't they?
	They were orphans, is that right?
	Yeah, the two guys They were placed in the two brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo, they were placed in a home care at 12.
	And the other guy of the other killing, he was in a very big family.
	It says something about his father as well.
	Sorry, the two gunmen who shot up Charlie Hebdo, they were actually removed by the state from their parents' home?
	I think their mother died when they were around 12 years old, and then they were placed in a home care, even though, from what I read, their father was still alive.
	So, yeah, by the government, I would guess.
	I'm not sure about this at all, so don't take it for sure.
	But, yeah, for sure they were in a home care at 12, both of them together.
	So they were raised by the government, basically, from early...
	From almost teenage years onwards.
	Yeah.
	And what is amazing, with the three guys, all the witness, all the character witness we have heard until now, they say that they were actually kind of normal guys and quiet guys, and they all went...
	Two of the three, they went in prison for, like, minor crimes, like...
	It didn't say, but probably like stealing a car or some drug dealing.
	And then they met a guy in a government prison again.
	They met a guy who apparently converted them a self-proclaimed imam in a prison.
	And yeah, also this prison step was apparently completely changing them.
	And afterwards, one of them went to Syria and then was arrested and went to prison again.
	And the other one tried to Make an escape of a terrorist, but that was after prison.
	And before that, they all seemed to be quite not crazy, like a lot of people are saying, like there are barbers and crazy people.
	No, they were not crazy people, definitely not.
	Do we have any information about their father?
	No, not on the brothers.
	It says that they were in the home care at 12, and then afterwards they were kind of loved at 18.
	Well, it can't be, if the mother died, they would go into home care if there was no father, right?
	If there was a father, then the father would take over.
	I guess the father was judged unable to take care of them because I read something, a mention of the father still being alive, but they had no other siblings.
	Maybe no contact with the father or whatever, right?
	Yeah.
	Or maybe the father died earlier too.
	And the reason that I'm saying is that the role of prison in radicalizing people is...
	And radicalizing is, again, a challenging word to just apologize for using the mainstream language, but the role of prison in radicalizing people is significant, right?
	And of course, there's concerns in France that people are going to go over and fight with the Muslim extremists and then come back, right, and bring all of that back with them.
	On this way, it's quite amazing that all the people that are caught either going there or coming back in Syria and Libya and Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, all those countries...
	They are all put in the same department of the same prison, which is quite, like, they say it's to avoid contamination of whole prisons, so they put all the guys in the same area, in the same prison.
	So, it might not contaminate everyone, but it's still a A culture of very dangerous...
	It doesn't dilute either.
	And the reason I'm saying this is that if they grew up without a father, my guess would be that they may have an increased susceptibility to father figures.
	So, yeah, I mean, it's sad.
	It's heartbreaking all around.
	I'm bouncing, as I said at the beginning of the show, I'm bouncing around a lot of different perspectives.
	I remain more committed to focusing on...
	Peace among parents and children, peace among friends, peace among families, peace among lovers, peace among husbands and wives.
	Where values are compatible, let's be rational.
	Let's be philosophical.
	Let's commit to building the only long-term foundation for human peace that I think has ever been shown to work in a consistent way, which has to do with childhood.
	We have a population...
	Around the world, this is not specific to any group in particular, but we have a population around the world that is significantly traumatized.
	It's traumatized by a wide variety of hierarchical mechanisms and by prior traumas.
	You know, we're in many ways as a species still crawling out of the caves.
	I mean, true with retina capable iPads, but we're still crawling out of the caves from a biological standpoint in many ways.
	And I think my goal remains as strong as ever and as more committed as ever to continue to focus on teaching people how to think rather than what to think and really trying to focus on helping people really understand the degree to which I think it's going to be peaceful parenting or the end of the world.
	I mean, that's a strong way to put it.
	Genuinely believe that.
	That it's going to be peaceful parenting or Or it's going to be the end of the world.
	I mean, it's just going to take for any bunch of lunatics from any denomination to get some kind of bomb, to provoke some kind of conflagration, to put some radioactive stuff somewhere.
	We are an intensely vulnerable society as a whole.
	I mean, the weapons are out there.
	The destructive powers that can filter down into the hands of unstable people is significant.
	We are in an arms race.
	You know, it's the guns or the hugs.
	I mean, that sounds trite.
	That may sound like a Hallmark card, but it's absolutely and completely true.
	We are in an arms race.
	We shoot or we hug.
	You know, we hit our children with the hands at the end of our arms or we don't.
	And we as a species need to get this inflection point.
	We need to get how important this is, how essential this is, how nothing else matters but this.
	We are in an arms race.
	We love our children or we hate the world.
	We open our hearts or bullets open our heads.
	We find ways to break the cycle of violence or the cycle of violence will break us.
	It is a matter of will.
	It is a matter of perspective.
	It is a matter of dedication.
	So many of us throughout history and I count myself lucky every day that I've never had to go to war the first in a couple of generations within my family on both sides.
	I've never had to go to war.
	I've never had to stare down the barrel of a gun and liquefy someone else's personality at medium distance or slide a bayonet into their ribs and twist To do maximum damage and watch the bowels and intestines spill out all over the muddy ground.
	I've never had to do that.
	I have the gift and the luxury of...
	I can't say a more difficult war because I can't imagine anything more difficult than what happened in the wars of the 20th century.
	But a more abstract war, a more challenging war, a war to wake people up to the necessity of kisses not snarls in the face of the developing minds of our tender-hearted children.
	That that is the war that I have chosen.
	And in some ways the war that has chosen me.
	And all of the evidence, all of the facts, all of the studies, and all of the philosophy points In exactly the same direction.
	We indulge our irrationalities at the peril of the planet.
	Now, before the swords could only kill so many people, now we have swords the size of the skies that can decapitate the entire population of a continent relatively quickly.
	We have moved so far forward in our government program Of near-infinite destruction.
	That unless we catch up and overtake it with our parenting, it will overtake us like a tsunami of fire and bury us in a Pompeii style of ashes which may not be recoverable.
	It is that important.
	You know, and I go on this show and I say to people, oh, you know, send me some money, do some good.
	freedominradio.com slash donate, help us out.
	It's not because I want to build a palace of gold.
	I understand, and I hope that people listening to this are beginning to understand that we are in an arms race.
	We kiss each other or we eat each other.
	Really, this is where we are heading.
	There are unstable and violent elements the world over.
	You would love nothing more than to provoke a conflict that depopulated the planet.
	And it's a button to kill millions.
	And it's a generation of dedication and commitment to raise the new crop of a peaceful harvest.
	To destroy a life takes but an instant.
	To grow a life takes decades.
	Of dedication and commitment and a steadfast rejection to the aggression and cycle of violence that has bound so many of us, so uselessly, so pointlessly, up in its grip.
	This is the only thing that will work.
	Deterrence doesn't work.
	Invasion doesn't work.
	Look at this.
	We've got a human goddamn story going back 100, 150,000 years.
	And the end result of 150,000 years of intense and focused and purposeful human development is that we have now come to the precipice of the volcano of the end.
	This has been the result of all of our progress.
	Just scientific revolution on.
	What are we talking?
	500 years.
	Industrial Revolution onward, 200 years.
	Agricultural Revolution onwards, three, four hundred years.
	Nah, five, six, seven, depending on when you count it.
	Of this hundred, hundred and fifty thousand years, we have a tiny sliver of human progress that has brought us to the edge of this volcano, and it's almost like we have to get to the edge of this volcano so that we can lose the grip of the past, lose the grip of history.
	God, can't we be addicts who don't have to destroy their lives in order to quit their addiction?
	To control, to bullying, to punishment, to rewards, to spanking, to confinement, to timeouts, to shitty schools, to yelling, to name-calling, to control, to bullying.
	It's almost like there are radical elements pushing us closer and closer and closer to the fire as a species.
	Almost saying, it's peace or us.
	It's peace or this.
	It's peace or it's nothing.
	And we are just a hot rock of nuclear shadows which aliens will visit in a million years and say, once contained life.
	There may even be some great art down there, but it's all melted.
	Come back in another million years, maybe the half-life will have gone away.
	That's all we might have to offer.
	Those who have the vision of what might happen with escalation, the escalation doesn't even have to be fundamentally so terrifyingly dramatic.
	It can just be the population frightened by the effects of the actions of the rulers, running more to the rulers, who then provoke more actions that frighten the people, who run more to the skirts of the rulers, and we end up with these giants of fantasy protection.
	We scurry beneath their feet.
	They said about Caesar, he doth bestrive the world like a colossus, and this is how small we will feel in the face of the perceived necessity for our rulers to save us from the effects of their own brutalities.
	Our sense of individuality, our sense of personhood is shrinking.
	Like these old TVs, this is back in the day, Long before flat screen TVs, you should turn the TVs off and they'd shrink to a tiny point of hard light that would then fade.
	And if you stared at it, you might get that tiny point of light for another minute or two would just fade.
	I think that our sense of power, our sense of authority, our sense of autonomy, our sense of capacity to have an effect in the world is, boom, fading out like the hard bright light of a broken television.
	It may not end with a bang, it may end with a whimper, but unless we dedicate ourselves to this non-stop promulgation and propagation of peaceful parenting, it may end with a bang, it may only end with a whimper, but unless we work for peaceful, secure serenity for our children, it is goddamn well going to end one way or the other.
	Nils today.
	Yeah, it's just the precipice, you know.
	That's it.
	And it's quite...
	You have a remarkable way of putting it and I admire your...
	It's not optimism, but your courage because sometimes it feels kind of weird, you know, and it's...
	I'm glad that you're here, that a lot of people and a lot of books and stuff, I feel less and less alone, but the precipice is right next to us.
	I can't help myself to be a bit terrified.
	Yeah, well, you should.
	Like you said, this fear is probably the best engine we can have to move forward and to keep on going.
	But yeah, it's tough.
	It's tough.
	It is absolutely terrifying.
	It is absolutely terrifying.
	I don't know if you have kids, but if you have kids, the vulnerability that you have in the face of the future is exquisitely painful.
	I don't have kids, but every time I know it's the solution, it's just The old thing, I was thinking this for a while when I was younger, and it's just, is it a crime to put a child in this world, you know, this whole thing?
	But I believe it's not, but still, I'm terrified, and I think I would be even more terrified if I was a father, but still, it's such a responsibility, you know, it's...
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, it's...
	You know, when you have a kid, you're lashed in, right?
	You can't give up on the future because you're making someone who's going to live there.
	Or you've made someone who's going to live there.
	And since you've made someone who's going to live in the future, you might as well take a stab at making the future too, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, I've been listening to a lot of Thomas Sowell lately.
	S-O-W-E-L-L. You can find lots of his interviews on...
	On YouTube, and he's actually openly said, I think he's 80-plus years old now, and he's said, I'm glad I'm so old so I won't have to see what's coming.
	And an interviewer gave him two quotes.
	I'm going to paraphrase both of them probably badly, but one was, you know, facts are stubborn things.
	They steadfastly refuse to adapt to our preferences.
	That's number one.
	And number two, the quote was, never underestimate The difficulty of changing people's minds if you're armed only with reason and evidence.
	He said he falls on the ladder.
	And just as they say about all revolutions, it's earlier than you think.
	Because those of us who are in the movement, those of us who are the movement, are seeing all of the benefits and around people who are doing the same thing.
	And then you go back out into the muggle world of brutality.
	And you recognize, fuck, it's earlier than we think.
	You and I speak Esperanto, but everyone else is still doing Pigden.
	But, and he also, you know, the interviewer was saying, well, things get better, you know, and he's like, yeah, but as Rome declined, things got better a little bit here and there too.
	But there is a point of no return.
	There is a point of no return.
	For him, it was Obama's second term, I said in the interview before.
	There is a point of no return.
	I don't believe there is a point of no return while there is...
	Still capacity for good people to make loud noises.
	You never know who you're going to influence, who you're going to change, whose life you're going to affect.
	The person you're talking to might scream in your face and call you an asshole.
	But the person three tables over might have overheard you.
	Or even the person call you an asshole I mean, I get messages when people said, oh God, I thought you were like the biggest asshole for the longest time.
	Kept listening, kept listening, and I'm like, I get it.
	I've had people apologize for being negative and hostile, and then like, oh, we get it, right?
	Be nice to children.
	Ooh, what a bad guy.
	Be nice to children.
	I mean, that's like one step down from C. Kyle!
	Be nice to children.
	Ooh!
	What a revolutionary.
	But you never know.
	You never know who you're going to influence.
	You never know.
	Six degrees of separation.
	You never know where things are going to go.
	I started this in my car for fun.
	And we got over 100 million downloads now.
	That's a lot of people.
	That's a lot of people who've been exposed to some pretty decent philosophy.
	Some pretty strong arguments for the non-initiation of force in one's own life.
	I'll read you something.
	I was supposed to do this at the beginning of the show, but I didn't.
	This is from a guy, he wrote, I've listened many times to our conversation from the show in September, brimming with insight.
	I also had been cataloging times that I would yell, raise my voice, order about, or otherwise speak harshly to my children.
	I noted how I was feeling prior, what was happening, their reaction, the amount of escalation, and how I felt afterwards.
	I needed to do this to track down the drivers within me, prior and post-incident.
	Listening to that conversation gave me a lot of keys to figuring out the quote, data.
	I started my New Year's resolution early at the beginning of the holiday break on the 19th.
	I stayed home with my kids for two weeks and did not yell or raise my voice the whole time and have continued not to.
	The keys have been to notice the ineffectiveness and such, but moreover, it was noticing that I couldn't get rid of the parental voices yelling at them.
	We yell at other people because other people in our heads are yelling at us from history.
	That's my paraphrase.
	Go back to the guy's letter.
	I had to recognize that the parental voices are with me forever and that I have to be very conscious in the moment with my kids to keep my frame of mind authentic.
	Keeping the parental voices out of the moment.
	What this whole experience has taught me It's who my authenticity makes me.
	Being truly authentic, I am not a yeller, nor do I like being one or want to be one.
	The authentic me enjoys the nuances of decisions that my children make on their own and wants to see more of their minds work without control from me.
	The authentic self does not have to control the immediate environment It has been a truly amazing few weeks.
	I still have a lot of work to do, but the world has changed by a large degree for me and my kids.
	I have seen how I can change.
	Thank you all for the earth-moving conversation.
	And that's how we do it.
	That's how it's done.
	Mad props, respect, recognition, all the medals of the multiverse heaping down upon the brave heart of this father and the mother who are part of this amazing progress.
	That's how we do it.
	That's how it is done.
	There is no other way.
	This desire for a shortcut, this desire for Oh, if I vote, or if I write a blog post about the Federal Reserve, I get that.
	I mean, that stuff's interesting.
	I like to do shows on that stuff too, and that's great.
	But in terms of what actually moves the world, rather than what stimulates minds, what changes hearts, what changes actions.
	Learning about the Fed, what does it change what you do other than reading about the Fed, right?
	That's how it works.
	And that's the only way.
	That it works.
	The improvements in parenting are the improvements in civilization.
	Civilized parenting is civilization.
	Peaceful parenting is a peaceful world.
	And all shortcuts lead straight back into the past.
	But we're much better armed than we were.
	And we cannot go backwards.
	We cannot go backwards.
	We can only go forwards And we must go forwards with as much resolution and with as much of a revolution in the peacefulness of our parenting.
	We must go forward with that resolution at the same pace as our technology.
	because if the technology wins and we have not improved, I believe it will be nighttime forever in one form or another.
	Is there anything you wanted to add?
	No, I would say just, you know, amen to what you just said.
	You're right, there must not be a point of no return, and I also completely refuse it, but it's such a work, such an endeavor.
	It's good to hear somebody else say it.
	I'm glad you're here, and thank you for your work, and I think you definitely pointed the One of the solutions, if not the best solution, definitely.
	So thank you for your dedication.
	Yeah, and listen, I understand the fear, and I appreciate everything you say.
	It's very, very kind.
	I understand the fear.
	Look, man, if it was easy, it would have been done already.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right?
	You know, it's not a spectacularly great film, but there's some, oh gosh, what's it called?
	Some film, a league of their own.
	With the fine thespian M. Donna.
	And...
	I think Geena Davis is the one who says, oh, this is hard, this is hard.
	And...
	Tom Hanks says, if it was easy, everybody would do it.
	It would be a major league baseball, whatever.
	And if it was easy, it would have already been done.
	And if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
	It is very, very hard.
	And produces blowback...
	It produces hostility.
	It produces challenges.
	You know, and I'm sorry.
	You know, the longer we've left it, the harder it is to do to improve parenting.
	But until someone can show me better reason and evidence and science, I have to go with the facts.
	I have to go with the principles.
	I am not a sophist.
	Thank you, everybody, so much for your time and attention.
	If you want to help out the show, freedominradio.com slash donate.
	We need your help.
	And I believe it is one of the best dollars you can spend for the future we all want to live in or leave to those who come after us.

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