Jan. 29, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:12:32
2897 Hogwarts Wizards of Human Manipulation - Wednesday Call In Show - January 28th, 2015
Why do academic history professors tend to be leftists given that history has shown socialism to be a complete failure time after time? Why are music and art important to the human species? If peaceful parenting makes a peaceful society, then why does Western Europe - which is mostly against spanking, demonstrated by their anti-spanking laws – have some of the most statist people in the world? I want to talk to a pregnant co-worker about peaceful parenting - where do I start? How do you approach someone productively who holds opinions so far from your own?
So, welcome to your regularly scheduled Wednesday night philosophy chat fest.
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So Mike, who do we have on first?
Alright, up first today is John.
John wrote in and said, Go on.
Hello there.
Just pointing out I'm from Brazil, not in the US, so the experience might be a bit different.
Yes, probably not a huge amount.
So, yeah, I mean, I had a debate with Vladimir Safatly when I was down in Sao Paulo for a conference some years ago, and you can check that out on YouTube if you want.
Is there more that you wanted to add to the question, or should I just plunge into what I think is a fairly coherent answer for once?
Well, actually, there's one thing I'd like to add before that marks as a difference from, I think, from Brazil, from the usual academia world.
I mean, if you don't mind, a very quick history lesson of Brazil here.
Please, go ahead.
All right, then.
You know, during the Cold War, Because of the threat of communism, the US started to help some dictatorial coupes in Latin America, which were mostly anti-communist, and Brazil was no exception.
And, well, when they rose to power here in Brazil in 1964, they went after all the communists, all the leftists, all the activists, and even people that weren't communists, just to imprison them, torture them and the like.
Even people that were on the right actually got captured by the dictatorship we had here.
And after it fell down, the start of the 80s, there was no...
No one was there to speak against communism or socialism or anything, because they immediately branded us pro-dictatorship.
If you are a right-winger, I mean, I'm not a right-winger anymore.
You would be considered, and you still are considered, you're supposed to be pro-dictatorship.
So there's not a lot of room to debate.
Unlike, I think, I mean, I don't know, but in the US or in Europe, you actually have conservatives or free market people debate with the leftist fellows.
So there's not a lot of opposition on the debate of ideas.
Yeah, I get it.
Does that make sense?
No, absolutely.
And the leftists, of course, have...
They're fetishes in South America.
Every time you hear Noam Chomsky, and I like Noam Chomsky, but every time you hear him talk, it's all about worker communes and so on and what he would consider, I think, his left anarchist utopia and Allende and all of these people who are considered on the left to be sort of heroes and the opportunities for South America.
American and Central American socialist utopias keeps getting messed up by all of these horrible right-wing dictatorships put in by the CIA and supported by the Chicago School of Free Market Economics and It's all kinds of horrifying.
And there's lots of writing on the left about the failed opportunities for peace and leftist egalitarian democracy and progress and human rights that go on in sort of Southern and Central America.
And that's a very, very broad way of putting it.
So I just, I mean, I think I get where that's coming from.
There is a reaction to These perceived right wing dictatorships going after these perceived left wing intellectuals and therefore if you're right wing you're obviously in sympathy with all the nasties.
So is that a fair approach?
Yes, yes, it is.
And while, let's see, and every group that is against the left is considered to be pro-dictatorship.
I mean, I'm free market guy, freedom and all that good stuff, and people would call me, like, oh, you must support the dictatorship ahead here, which is actually curious, because the Brazilian dictatorship during that time of it Actually created more nationalized industries, more states, corporations.
It was actually almost as much as the Soviet Union.
I think that's something.
You can call it a capitalist system if you're not interested in facts, but you're just interested in ideological power.
Like I just put out a couple of videos about Greece.
And, you know, there are people commenting who, with absolutely straight-faced typing, like no LOLs, no just kidding, no NSARC sort of HTML tags, it is genuinely saying that Greece and the Eurozone is suffering from an excess of capitalism.
And, oh man, that is...
That's like saying the Soviet Union was a heaven for capitalism, right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's like saying that the thieves in Saudi Arabia who get their hands cut off are suffering from an excess of mani-pedis.
I mean, it's madness.
But it is, of course, what you say if you're just an ideological bullshitter who's not you, but the people who just want power.
So I can tell you why I think there is so much leftism in the field of history.
And I was, you know, dragged ass backwards to the holly bush of Canadian leftism.
In every single school that I went to, there was just this entrenched leftism.
And it is so entrenched, and the people are so surrounded by an echo chamber, that to question this stuff is literally like saying, well, you know, slavery had some really good points.
We shouldn't just dismiss it out of hand.
They consider these arguments and these debates so done, so completed.
That it's like you want to return to Genghis Khan style rape and pillaging if you talk about the free market.
And it is a brutal, brutal environment for any kind of free thought.
And the annoying thing is that even on the left...
They get lazy and bored and entitled and with all of the attendant bullying, which comes from that kind of mindset because they don't get a workout from people who have opposing opinions.
This is why people who are from the free market school or even people from the right, like sort of traditional, American, kind of religious, pretty conservative, small...
Those people who come through academia are like the ultimate warriors, you know?
Oh!
Went through leftist school, retained value of free market, can lift trucks with my penis.
You know, like, they just, they just, I have such respect for people.
Now, if leftists come through, I don't know, I mean, I can't even think of a place that's right-wing higher education.
But if a leftist came through that kind of environment, I'd say, you know, good on you.
I mean, way to buck the tide.
You know, the swimmer who swims against the current develops a lot stronger muscles than the person intellectually dead floating downstream with tadpoles chewing on their nuts.
So, there is...
I have a huge amount of respect for people who come out of academia who retain the value of the free market.
But the reason for it, I believe, is that if you look at mythology and...
By this, I mean...
The fantasy genre, you know, there's two kinds of fighters in general.
There are those who fight with the sword, and there are those who fight with magic, with spells.
Now, that's really fascinating, and the way that it generally works in most fantasy role-playing games, or in most, is that the warriors start off relatively strong, they peak early, and then they don't get a huge amount stronger.
Now the wizards start off super weak, but end up with these 9th level spells that turn them into deities and that kind of stuff, right?
I know this sounds very abstract, but I really do have a point here that I think will be quite powerful.
Oh, I can understand that.
Yeah, I played my first shelf off of games, so I know that I can understand the analogy.
Okay, so when we look at a wizard, what is a wizard?
A wizard is somebody who changes the behavior of matter Using language and gestures.
Language and gestures are the two things that are used in public speaking and are used in shaping the ideas of those around you.
Now, any movement starts off hopeless and ends up unbelievably dominant if it succeeds.
Right?
Again, anti-slavery and so on started off like, are you crazy?
Blasphemy and so on.
And then ended up As the dominant, at least in the West, obviously the dominant paradigm that's not even questioned anymore.
Not that it should be, but...
So, I view university as Hogwarts.
See, university is where you go to learn the magic spells that move matter.
That change your physical environment.
Now that sounds kind of abstract, but it's actually very concrete.
So if you make the case for redistributionist taxation, you are taking a giant verbal scimitar and slashing years of people's lives and then moving their wealth, their labor, their time, their efforts to other people.
I mean, it's sort of like you get to I'm thinking of the second Star Wars film that came out.
I don't know what sequence it was, the fourth or something like that.
The Empire Strikes Back.
And in it, Luke Skywalker lifts the X-Wing out of the swamp.
On Dagobah or whatever.
He lifts it out of the swamp and moves it.
Now...
That's redistributionist taxation.
You are lifting massive amounts of wealth, physical things, because nobody cares about the money, they only care about what it buys.
You are lifting people's lives, you are carving off years of their life over the course of their paying of taxes, and you are moving all of that material, all of those goods, all of those services, from one group to another group, using only the power of words.
It's truly astounding when you think about it.
Think of a tariff wall.
It's like this giant magical force field.
You put up this giant force field and foreign goods can't get in.
It's like a giant shield spell for foreign sweaters or whatever the hell you're putting your tariff on.
You have the power as a word wizard.
You have the power to create mountains of fruit and lakes of butter and wine.
Because you can set up these weird agricultural tariffs where farmers get paid to destroy stuff.
You can, through language, you can set fire to entire fields of suspected drugs In South and Central America.
Through the power of wizardry, you can set fire to an entire country like Iraq.
You can, through the power of language, through the power of warmongering, you can corrupt and virtually destroy the entire genetic base, the entire genetic integrity of people around Fallujah.
With gene-destroying weaponry.
Through the power of language, you can turn paper into gold because you can get people to accept fiat currency in exchange for gold.
So, the most powerful magic, the most powerful force in the human universe is language.
And this is why magic users start off weak And end up incredibly powerful, far more dominant than those who merely wield the sword or the gun.
So the power of language is where the very intelligent people go to wield the greatest power.
Now this of course used to be religion.
And it is of course still to some degree.
Through the power of words, through the power of language, you can separate a foreskin from a baby's penis.
You can rip off a third of the skin of a baby boy's penis.
Through the power of language, you can cut a clitoris off a little girl.
Because it's only because of the belief systems that these things occur.
Through the power of language, You can effectively castrate someone and have them never have sex again if they go into, say, Catholic priesthood or something like that.
You have this incredible capacity and power of language.
And when you look at the power of language, the real warriors are in the ivory towers and the amateurs guard them with swords.
But the real power in the world is in language.
And so the people who are teaching you and the people who are studying are studying the magic of storytelling, the magic of fantasy, the magic of mannequinism or of creating opposite poles of moral alignment.
Those evil foreign capitalist fruit companies!
Bad!
The noble Peasants who just want to work on a collective and feed their...
Good!
And when you create that paradigm, you create a whole physics that moves materials and lives and goods and money and produce.
It moves it around the world, like telekinesis, like foreign aid.
It's just a language web, but what it does is like a giant magical catapult.
It rips resources out of the poor people of rich countries, flings them across oceans and has them land in the coffers of rich people in poor countries.
The amount of goods and services and lives That are ordered around and moved around like people are just levitated.
Their arms are separated and it's put over there.
And their money is separated and pulled in two and put over there.
It's all done through this incredible telekinesis of credible language and the construction of a moral edifice, the questioning of which makes you immoral.
And so if you are somebody who wants power in the world, study Language.
Study rhetoric.
Study sophistry.
Study the capacity to change people's minds without touching them or threatening them in any way, shape, or form.
Now, if you can sell that narrative to people, then you will get your way for generations.
Because the soldier's arm wears out.
He gets old.
He gets creaky.
He gets arthritis.
He...
Wants a nap.
But the language skills of the sophists, of the Hogwarts wizards of human manipulation, only tend to grow with age.
Which is why, in wizardry, it is the old who are the most powerful.
Whereas, of course, among the knights and the fighters, the physical fighters, it is the young Who are the most powerful.
And look at the way that it works in society.
This is my proof.
The young are physically stronger than the old.
Who rules society?
It is an oligarch of crypt keepers who rule society.
The old get benefits and free health care and pensions vastly out of proportion to anything they ever paid into.
And the young get debt and worse schools and less health care and lineups and inflation and 50% unemployment because wizards rule and the old are the best wizards.
So the reason the people on the left are in academia is that's where the power is.
It's like saying the old line, I don't know if it's true or not, attributed to the bank robber.
Why do you rob banks?
He's like, well, that's where the money is.
Well, why do you go to academia?
That's where the real power is.
That's where the real power is.
Now, if you wish to have the power to use language to rip apart human lives and move the produce and the materials and everything where you see fit, Like here's another force field that is entirely made up through language.
It's called a border.
See, you can walk up to here, you can walk up to this imaginary line and then bang!
No further!
You can go no further!
Because you've run into words!
Brazil!
Well, that's Argentina.
Well, that's Paraguay.
That's Mexico.
They're just words.
You have run into a magical force field called a border where you cannot pass.
None shall pass.
It's all made up.
And you need a magic spell book called a passport to get across, which you must buy from the wizards who've created the force field called a border in the first place.
When you look at the world, it is a shimmering tapestry of imaginary language that everybody thinks is completely real.
The matrix, as I've said before and will say again, is words.
Now, if you're interested in human freedom, then what you want to do is identify the irrationality and anti-empirical nature of the magic spells We are enslaved through language.
We are enslaved through sorcerers.
We are enslaved through wizards.
Wizardry is our true hierarchy.
And if you advocate for freedom, you do not want your words To be magic spells that order people around, that force people to obey, that drag them off to jail, that put them in costumes or uniforms and have them do things that would be murder and assault and kidnapping in any other context.
Because the great temptation of those of us who are great with language is to use it to control the resources of the world, to use our magic spells to rearrange the goods and services and human lives of this world.
But the people who are on the left wish to create language that gives them power.
And they wish to create stories and paradigms and artificial divisions that give them power.
They have gone full Boromir.
There's a ring of power called language.
You can use it to identify false narratives and to dispel the magic.
Dispel the magic.
Blow it away, because it only exists in the mind, and that which exists in the mind can usually be expelled through philosophy.
That is the exorcism of sophistry.
So it only, these things, these spells, it's like voodoo.
It's only if you believe in it does it have any power over you.
So the people on the left, they don't want to give up their power.
They want to use the traction of fantasy and morally compelling narratives.
To organize, order, control, manipulate, have power over humanity.
Those who are into the free market we are using our skills, our sophistry, our power of whatever language we can command to attempt to dispel the magic and to say that what most people call truth is actually magic and once they understand that it's magic They will also understand that what they call truth is merely a convincing lie.
And academia trains you so much in the matrix that you think it's real.
They train you so much in these narratives.
The evil rich, the virtuous poor, the necessity for the government to shield you from corporations and protect you from enemies and help the poor and heal the sick and the aged.
They just create this massive narrative that is so believable that you just voodoo yourself.
And we live in these bizarre, fascistic, crystalline mind structures of world wizards who came before us.
And almost nobody lives in anything as simple and prosaic as reality.
Reality is there are no countries.
Reality is government doesn't exist.
Reality is ethics is universal.
Reality is your income is not very good at predicting your ethics, right?
And the reality is that everyone who tells you that you must be their slave so that they can save you from an enemy is the enemy they're describing.
Is the enemy that they're describing.
And everybody knows this deep down.
Everybody knows that there's no such thing as government money.
Everybody knows that taxation is theft.
Everybody knows that inflation is theft.
Everybody knows that the welfare state traps the poor.
Everybody knows that government schools are getting worse and worse and worse.
Over the last 10 years, disability benefits in the US have gone up 50%, a third of those people.
Have another piece of fiction called a mental illness, which cannot be detected in any physical test, in any way, shape, or form.
Well, you see, you have chemical imbalances in your brain.
Really?
Would you like to show me that in some sort of chart or graph or blood test?
Well, no, we can't really do that because we have a magic spell book called the DSM-5, which casts a spell on you and then we get to pump chemicals into you, which make An imaginary disease into a real one, in my opinion.
So from gods to countries to cops to taxes, we live in the manic, obsessive control paradigm of manipulators who are insane relative to reality, but fundamentally sane When it comes to their use of power over humanity, who they view as livestock.
You cannot order an equal.
This is fundamental to all human relationships.
You cannot order an equal.
You can only order a subordinate.
And everybody who wishes to create orders wishes for themselves to be the farmer and the slaughterhouse technician and for you to be the livestock.
And there's no better way to do that What do you think?
Well, I do agree with you.
There's some validity to it.
I can see that just looking outside the window.
But I think there's something more.
There's one thing I noticed, or maybe just say that I didn't notice, that leftist academics, intellectuals, Along with politicians and bureaucrats, at least here in Brazil, I think they know that they can't produce anything that other people want, like anyone in the market would.
They know they are incompetent, they are mediocre, and therefore they just go with language.
But hang on, hang on, hang on.
No, but you're looking at the market like the market is only the free market.
But I don't think that that's true.
Because if I am a farmer, I cannot myself directly produce cow's milk, right?
Because A, not a cow, B, human being, C, male, right?
So I cannot produce cow's milk.
However, I can domesticate cows and produce far more cow's milk than if I could produce it directly, right?
Do you understand?
Like no individual as The famous iPencil essay goes, no individual knows how to produce a pencil.
But in coordination, a pencil can be produced, like a car.
Nobody knows how to make a car, but, you know, we've got enough people together to make a car.
They are productive.
You say, well, they're not productive, and therefore they go in.
They are incredibly productive.
I'm not saying it's moral, but they are incredibly productive.
Because if they weren't productive at all, they would have died out long ago, right?
Like, you don't see a lot of priests for Zeus these days, because that's one...
Fiction that fell.
And so, you know, don't underestimate.
You say, oh, well, they're not that competent.
In a free market, yeah, they'd have to get real jobs.
In a free market, hell, I'd have to get a real job because it'd be much less of what needs to get across from philosophy would need to get across from people, right?
Not a lot of abolitionists in Manhattan these days.
And so, you know, I wouldn't say, well, you know, they're so incompetent, they have to turn to language.
I think I just made a pretty good case that if you're competent in language and are an amoral power seeker, you are far more powerful than those who rule.
So I would...
In a free market, yes, absolutely.
They'd probably end up writing jingles for used car dealerships.
But...
With a state, you see, the state is the ring of power, right?
The state makes it valuable, incredibly valuable, to be a sophist.
The state is the fundamental fuel of sophistry, because sophistry allows you to control the state.
And when you can control the state, you have ultimate power.
And so the state is like this giant gravity well pulling sophists into its sticky, gruesome surface, so that they can shout, They're manacles of human control into the interstellar depths of our ignorance and They are incredibly good at it.
It's like the state It's a giant gravity well and creates lobbyists.
There wouldn't be lobbyists in a free market, right?
And it creates this massive financial superstructure that would not exist, at least not in its current form or anything to its current degree in a free market.
But in a more fundamental way, when the state exists, it creates a giant gravity well for the competence of language.
And the power of language to gain control of it.
Like, you know, it's like when the government controls religion, everybody who's religious wants to control the government.
And it creates, it turns priests into politicians.
And with the separation of church and state, then that tends to fall away.
But academia exists because, in its current form, because the state exists.
And also, of course, because the state guarantees things like a tenure, And sabbaticals and summers off and working five hours a week if you feel highly motivated as an academic.
So I would question the degree, John, to which they would be considered incompetent.
Yeah, yeah, I can understand that.
And they're certainly kicking our asses, right?
So I'd rather, you know, if we're losing in general, as we tend to be, I mean, I think the internet's turning that around, but historically the free market has tended to lose.
I wouldn't want the people who've been, I wouldn't want to sort of shout out to the people who've got their foot in my throat that they're not really very tough at all.
Yeah, I can understand that.
Well, here in Brazil, it never got a foothold anyway.
Free markets never got here.
I mean, we had fascist governments, socialist governments, social democrats, democratic governments we have right now.
We never had anything close to liberalism.
No, and to be fair, in the West, I would argue that the free market never came about as the result of anyone in power's dedication to the principles of the free market.
What happened was in England and in the Netherlands in particular, but even more so in England in the 18th century, the free market arguments for free trade, for open borders and so on.
I mentioned this before, but I wrote a novel years ago, set in the 18th century.
And I read a book called England's Treasure by Foreign Traffic.
And you had the corn laws repealed in the mid-19th century because all these restrictions on buying and selling of corn overseas and domestically.
And what happened was England figured out that if it relaxed medieval guild restrictions and if it allowed more property rights in land, Then what happened was it released people from the land, from subsistence farming, because as land got centralized and got more efficient, you ended up with this dense urban proletariat, which is also known as the giant soldier and sailor farm, right?
So they realized that if they brought some free market principles into play, they could have an empire, right?
And it wasn't because they had some fundamental dedication.
To self-ownership and to property rights, because if that was the case, they would have abolished themselves as a state.
But what they did was they said, wow, you know, if we...
If we allow people to trade freely, by God, we end up with a huge amount of treasure.
England's treasure by foreign traffic.
Not, isn't it great that we can all be free, but England will gain more treasure for the treasury.
More soldiers.
Right?
England became an empire because of the agricultural revolution.
The Industrial Revolution was an afterthought.
The Agricultural Revolution gave England the crop of soldiers and sailors, the excess crop of soldiers and sailors that it needed in order to have an empire.
Rome fell fundamentally because taxation and conscription only work in big cities and they kept raising conscription rates and lengths and they kept taxing more and more people, drove all the young people out of the city.
Therefore, they could not continue to impose these crazy taxes.
You can't go into the countryside and raise taxes.
You generally don't come back, right?
I mean, I want half your cows because I'm from the government.
Oh, what's that you've got there?
Oh, why is it going up my nose at high speed?
So everyone, the cities began to depopulate.
They could not get taxes.
The soldiers, they needed to sustain the empire.
Therefore, they had to start hiring mercenaries.
They had a declining tax base because the cities were depopulating.
Everyone was getting it because it was 20 years in the military and if you survived, all you got was an acre or two of land and your odds of survival weren't that great.
So they kept hiring all these mercenaries, kept hiring all these mercenaries, which raised the requirement for taxes at the time when the cities were depopulating, tax base was declining.
Next thing you know, they can't pay their mercenaries, and the mercenaries come and sack Rome, and bingo, bingo, bongo, Rome goes from like a million and a half people down to 17,000 in the space of a couple of years, and at least the western half just died.
So if you don't have the base of soldiers, you can't have an empire.
And so...
They didn't care about the free market.
They cared about getting more soldiers.
And if they privatized some of the land and they privatized some property rights and they destroyed the gills, they got the excess food production which allows for an urban proletariat to develop from which they can grab people for military service.
And they have the money to pay them because of the wealth that's being generated.
So I just wanted to point out, it's like you say, well, we never had the free market.
And that's Certainly true, I would argue, but I wouldn't argue that the West had some magical dedication to the free market.
I mean, George Washington, right?
I mean, approximately 12 minutes after the ink dries on the Constitution, he's riding down the Pennsylvania farmers with swords and muskets to impose a whiskey tax.
So, we've never come close to a free market.
That is principles.
We have come close to the ruling classes realizing that if they give the cows bigger stalls, they get more milk.
But that's not one step before turning the cows free.
That makes the cows more valuable to enslaved.
Does that make any sense?
Well, yes, it does.
And you could go on, because it didn't happen only in the West.
It happened in the East, too.
On the Chinese dynasties, it was pretty much like that.
If you don't mind, the Song dynasties were sort of free, and then came the Ming dynasties, closed and everything.
But yeah, it does make sense.
My point is, just because it's so alien, an idea.
Freedom is an alien idea here in Brazil.
That's my point.
Oh, I don't know.
Look, I mean, I don't mean to tell you about Brazil.
What do I know?
But if you were to pass a law saying the government's going to choose who you're going to marry, what would people say?
Well, it's kind of a conservative country here, so it's a 50-50 thing.
No, come on.
If there was a government passing a law saying the government chooses who you marry, people would be pretty upset, right?
Who you marry, yeah.
People go insane on that one.
Right, right.
And, you know, one of the challenges is why I sort of poke and prod at women through this show.
It's probably going to be taken out of context.
Anyway, why I keep sort of nagging at women for sort of female responsibility and so on is that we're not going to have a free market.
Until women get on board.
That's the one ingredient that has always been missing from Free market discussions is a women's commitment to the free market and we can see that very clearly I don't know how it goes down in Brazil, but certainly in America The voting patterns are very clear that women without husbands vote Democrat and women with husbands vote Republican.
They vote for smaller And we've gone to the reasons for that before.
Single moms vote for entitlement benefits and free health care and subsidized housing and SNAP benefits and all of that kind of stuff.
And for obvious reasons, because they don't have a husband to provide for them.
Whereas women who want to have kids who are married vote for smaller government because the government is taking away their husband's money.
In other words, their family's money to give to the single women and to the women single moms and so on.
So, until women get on board, we're basically just fighting in the wind.
And the degree to which I've tried to make this show female-friendly, I know sometimes it doesn't seem that way, but responsibility isn't always the most...
It doesn't always feel friendly.
It's like exercise.
It doesn't feel friendly in the moment, but it is friendly to your future.
But that's why we talk about relationships and...
And love and babies and parenting and so on.
And that stuff brings a lot of female listeners in to this show.
I mean, as far as our philosophy show goes, we have a pretty good coterie of, dare I say harem?
I actually dare not.
Because that's actually kind of mean.
But a pretty good coterie of female listeners.
Because if we can't get women on board, it doesn't really matter what we say in our blogs or academic journals or what gets published in Reason magazine, which I like and enjoy.
But until we can get women to understand this and really respect and appreciate the virtues and values of the free market, I think that's kind of tough.
So when it comes to marriage, well, a lot of women would be like, hey, you're going to choose who I get to marry, right?
Some men would be like, okay, great.
So it saves me from having to ask for dates and buy rings and stuff like that.
But a lot of women would be really upset.
And where the state limits the freedom of women...
Women get very upset about that, but where the state limits the freedom of men, women tend as a whole to not be quite as bothered, which is why I'm really trying to sensitize women to the needs of men, right?
To what hurts men, to what moves men, to what motivates men, to view us as full and deep human beings worthy of the same Rights, privileges and protections that women do.
In other words, men guarding their income is as powerful from a sort of evolutionary sexual reproduction resource standpoint as women guarding their vagina and their eggs from predation.
But anyway, we're a ways away from that but I just wanted to mention that.
Yeah, if you wouldn't mind me mentioning one thing.
Well, in that case, on male-female relations, no one went mental on the Falklands War when Margaret Thatcher, a woman who declared war on Argentina sent a lot of men to die for England, right?
Well, of course.
And if it had been a man sending thousands and thousands of women to go fight and die, people would go insane.
But men are just, you know, these interchangeable legs with penises and arms that can repair Electricity poles that women don't want to go up, you know, to really generalize.
But no, there is, absolutely.
I mean, Anita Sarkeesian receives a death threat, which is terrible, of course, and the whole world goes mental, and I'm not disagreeing with that.
But, you know, an entire men's rights conference that I spoke at last summer in Detroit received significant and a series of pretty credible bomb threats and death threats, and nobody cared.
Because that was just men getting together, right?
I mean, we're just still a very base biological species, right?
I mean, sperm are more common than eggs.
And eggs must be protected and shielded.
And sperm, you know, it's raining sperm, but eggs are diamonds.
And so it's just, it's hard.
But, you know, and this is why I keep nagging women to say, you know, we got to care about what men feel.
We got to care about what motivates men.
You know, when men don't like taxation, it's important for you to listen.
It's important for you to listen.
When men want smaller government, it's important for you to listen.
You've got to agree with everything, but it's really important to listen and to be curious about what men want and what men like.
And that, of course, is very foreign.
To people's thinking still, even now, after many people have been hammering for many years on the problems of male disposability, it is still so hard for people to push through the estrogen shield that seems to separate a woman's heart from a man's feelings.
Still, again, this is generalizations and there are lots of exceptions, but we've still got a ways to go.
Alright, listen, man, do you mind if I spend a good old chunk on this time?
Do you mind if we move on to the next topic?
Oh, sure, sure.
Thanks.
And good luck in your studies, man.
I mean, you will come out like a brute force of nature, you know, getting through all of this stuff.
Don't try and change the professor's minds too much, but, you know, speak up and you can certainly sway some of your fellow students as I did.
Yeah, I actually did once.
Last semester I debunked the great repression myth that the free market calls it and won the Salvador Allende nonsense in Chile if he was actually good and he wasn't.
Right, right.
No, and that is important.
I mean, when even the Federal Reserve Chairman says that the Fed caused a great...
Depression, it might be worth for other people to listen to him.
Well, thanks, John.
I appreciate it.
It's a great question.
Feel free to call back in anytime.
All right, then.
Thanks.
All right.
Thank you, John.
Up next today is Nick.
Nick wrote in with the question.
He answered our call for art-related questions.
So up front, thank you so much, Nick.
And this one might require a little more explanation.
But he wrote in and said, is music a mathematical construct that appeals to our natural inclinations to organize, or is it through exposure and nurturing that we learn to appreciate it?
What do you think?
Well, my honest opinion is I feel like you need to understand some part of music to actually make it or write it or understand it.
And I can't help but imagine that it's due to our inclination to organize things.
Just the idea that things are separated in octaves and...
All that jazz just really seems to make sense to me as a way to organize various sounds into what appeals to us.
However, I've come across a number of people who...
I'm trying to think of the best way to put this.
I like to use the analogy of thinking outside the box in this.
I know a number of people who...
They say they think outside the box, but I can't help but look at it and say, you're not even a stone's throw away from the box.
You're so far off base.
And I don't know if it's they've never understood it, or they just want to go their own way with it.
I'm not sure what the thinking is there.
Right.
I mean, I can go into some thoughts on music.
The other box stuff, maybe we can touch in at the end.
I kind of wanted this to go in music and art.
I was just kind of thinking of the theories of music and art, just kind of saying, should these really, are they guidelines that help us because they're something that we've all kind of agreed, yeah, that's aesthetically pleasing, or is it A mathematical construct that really makes sense and are pinning these things down.
Well, music, like almost everything else, I believe, serves a very strong evolutionary purpose.
And the purpose of music is varied and manifold.
I mean, I'm sure you have read about the many positive effects that musical training has on the brain.
And so music, like comedy, is a form of brain training.
And I think people can look all that stuff up.
I don't need to go over that.
That's pretty well explicated in psychology these days.
But I'm going to invite you into the world of goth.
So goth kids, I can say that because I'm going to be 49 this year.
I can start calling you.
Younger people, kids.
But goth kids and emo kids and punk kids and so on, well, what are they doing?
What they're doing is they are broadcasting their state of mind.
They're broadcasting fundamentally their histories to each other.
So a goth kid is broadcasting something very clear about her history or his history, and they're trying to find other people who have similar histories so they can mate.
Mm-hmm.
And so music is a way of finding people who are like yourself so that you can make children like yourself.
And so I think that's one aspect.
It's also a way of keeping out groups at bay.
I don't know, like when I was in university, when I was at McGill, a woman I was dating had a Chinese girl in the apartment, a little apartment, a little room next door.
And this Chinese woman played lots of Chinese opera.
And I mean, I'm pretty open-minded to a lot of music, love getting into new stuff.
Aboriginal throat singing and Chinese opera, that's a bridge too far for me.
You know, my tidy whitey brain just can't elastic.
I can't elastic out that far.
I can't rubberman myself around that tree.
And so that is a way of keeping groups separate.
To some degree and so if you know if you're Chinese and someone else likes your Chinese opera, you know that you have that history in common.
So I think there's a lot of Broadcasting of Compatibility doesn't mean mental health, but it's a broadcast of Compatibility, you know like I mean Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, you know, I mean Tragically found each other.
I mean there's a I mean, there's a documentary coming out about Kurt Cobain, which talks about how when he was young, in his early to mid-teens, his first sexual encounter was with an obese, retarded girl.
And therefore, he got so...
I think that's how he lost his virginity.
And he got so mocked by his friends for having sex for the first time, or any time, really, with an obese, retarded girl, that he went down and tried to kill himself by jumping on train tracks, but the train didn't come, or something like that.
Or what didn't show up.
I don't know, Courtney loves history, but I assume it's pretty horrifying.
And so it's a way for them to find each other, this grunge stuff.
So from Kurt Cobain's tragic history, his parents got divorced when he was young, he was humiliated, and lots of other, I'm sure, bad stuff happened.
So Kurt Cobain, his history manifests itself through his music, through the grunge, through the despair of And then goes out and he finds compatible people.
And then you put on a Queen album and they will all swarm you and try to kill you.
Not vice versa.
Yeah.
So music, I think, is a way of putting out this sort of echolocator.
You know, it's a way of shooting up a flare.
Is there anyone else around here who's like me, who's into this stuff?
And it doesn't have to be particular music.
It can be styles of music and particular bands.
You know, like, I'm in a Q107. You know, I'm in a mix 99.9.
I mean, whatever your radio station is, that's your...
So, and a lot of what you see in what's called culture, or particularly in personal attire and grooming and so on, is a way of broadcasting Your psychosocial development or lack thereof and trying to find people in the same niche.
So that's sort of one.
And the last thing I'll say about music, which is a huge topic and I appreciate bringing it up, is that a good, a popular musician is a musician who has empathy.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I like to sing a lot.
And it's always like, because you get used to your own voice, when you record it and play it back to you, it's like, oh, right.
That's why I'm not opening at Madison Square Gardens, right?
Because you hear the limitations that you don't hear in your own head when it's recorded and played back.
But really good musicians play in front of people and keep doing stuff until they get better and keep writing new songs or keep writing up new material until they get better.
And it always sort of irritates me when people get up at karaoke and just sing aggressively badly, especially when they're really loud, because it's pretty aggressive, and it's very unempathetic.
And I don't mean everyone has to sing beautifully, but, you know, pick something in your range and, you know, give it a good shot, but...
Yeah, I mean, don't take on bad out of hell unless you're actually meatloaf or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
So if you have, you know, you have a nice singing and you sing well and so on, then other people are going to enjoy hearing it.
It means that you've got an accurate reflection.
Whereas if you're singing off-key and badly all the time, it means that you don't know how you sound.
You don't actually have the capacity to empathize with people who are listening to you.
So I think...
A good musical capacity shows intelligence, it shows dedication, it shows follow-through, it shows commitment, it shows empathy because you're playing stuff that people like to hear.
So I think it has a lot of broadcasting of mental fitness, mental capacity, which of course, certainly in the Western world, and of course, I think the world as a whole, there generally is a selection bias for intelligence.
And competent musicians tend to be...
And I'm not talking like garage bands or, you know, but competent musicians tend to have, at least they know how they sound.
They heard themselves played back and they play what the crowd wants to hear and they write stuff that works and they have, I think, a reasonable amount of empathy.
Plus, of course, in a band in particular, you have to work with each other and you have to stay with the same people for a long time and through all the creative differences and the exhaustion of touring and the jet lag and the equipment not working and all that, right?
There's this old story, probably everybody knows it, David Lee Roth with Van Halen.
So David Lee Roth, they had this writer, this writer, like, list of demands.
And it just went on and on and on.
And he said that he wanted a bowl of M&Ms with no brown M&Ms in it.
Yeah, I've heard of this.
You've heard of this.
Do you know why he did that?
No, why?
I never understood the reason.
He didn't do it because he cares about brown M&Ms.
The Van Halen shows, I mean, they were a huge band back in the day.
I think their big heyday was late 70s and 80s.
But the reason that they put that, the reason that David Lee Roth...
Who's Jewish, but it doesn't really matter.
The reason he put that in his writer was because they had these giant shows which required an incredible attention to detail.
All the lights had to be hung really well, pointed the right way, the lasers, the flashpots, like everything had to...
They didn't want a flashbot going up their leg, and they didn't want a giant lighting set to fall on their audience.
So when there was a promoter or somebody setting up their stage, the band really wanted to know...
That they had paid attention to detail, read through the whole writer, and knew what the hell they were doing.
Now, they couldn't go and check everything, of course.
So the first thing that David Lee Roth would do when he got to a new stage that was set up is he'd go into the dressing room, look at the bowl of M&Ms, and see if he saw any brown ones.
Now, if he did see brown ones, he knew for a fact That the concert promoter had not read the writer in detail and had not followed its instructions to the letter.
And that meant that they had to go and check everything.
That's actually kind of smart.
So it didn't have anything to do with Brown M&M's.
You're just looking for a level of detail.
And that's a very intelligent way to do things.
You listen to some of Gene Simmons, the...
Paul Stanley was a singer, but he was a bass player or whatever for Kiss.
He's got some smart and challenging things to say about things.
And the last thing, of course, is just basic motor control.
To sing and hit the right notes is not easy, right?
Absolutely, yeah.
And even you hear great singers and so on, especially, of course, if they're rock singers, they've been touring for a while.
I mean, Freddie Mercury, like post- 79, you know, just sounded pretty rough and was straining a lot on things like I Want to Break Free because he just, other than the Live Aid set where he didn't have to save his voice because it was like a 15-minute set and they weren't on tour.
But it's hard.
It's hard to get those notes and to make it work and to give that performance.
And so, you know, the Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do, that's easy, you know, when you're just doing it here, you do it over and over again.
If you just get the notes off a little bit, Then it shows a less fine motor control of your voice.
And also, if somebody hits a bum note, do they even notice it?
Do they say, oops, I missed the note and try it again?
Or do they just keep plowing on?
That again shows, do they even know how they sound?
Do they know how they sound to other people and so on?
So I think there's lots of evolutionary, very important stuff that goes on with music.
And unlike sports, it's not a war rehearsal, although music is quite important.
Martial music is quite important to war.
But even a drummer, you've got to have the right rhythm.
You've got to be on the beat.
A backbeat that's narrow and hard to master, as Jim Morrison said.
And I think that shows a lot of...
A lot of, again, fine motor controls and dedication and competence.
Now, of course, apparently it was one of the worst things in the world to be married to Ringo Starr, but then I don't think anyone thought he was a fantastic drummer anyway.
But those are sort of my thoughts, but what do you think?
I mean, I absolutely agree.
I'm a musician myself, and I have a complete dedication to trying to actually learn every instrument at this point because...
What do you play?
Um...
I started off on guitar, but I now play bass, drums, keyboards.
I also sing.
I'm to the point where I just...
Oh man, could you give us some?
Can you give us something?
Um, yeah.
I mean, I have a guitar right here that I guess I could...
Do it!
Play a little something.
Do it!
With your perception You've got nothing to me You treat it like a battle That you're just
giving up Very cool.
Thank you so much for sharing.
I mean, I was like, to me, especially guitar, is like this massive mystery instrument of confidence.
Because I have these stubby little doll hands, Barbie's hands.
So I'm impressed with people who can get that Brian May massive spider thing going on the guitar.
Yeah, I actually have relatively small hands, and it's difficult, but I had the determination to keep going with it, so...
I'm getting somewhere, I think.
Beautiful.
Is there anything else you wanted to talk about with regards to the music?
Well, would you mind if we kind of switch to the realm of visual art in this discussion?
Sure.
So, like, I really kind of started off this question thinking about someone who is A friend of mine, but also a contemporary artist with me, and I sometimes bring up these theories of aesthetics saying,
well, oh yeah, you know, I don't really see, I'll say to them sometimes, I don't see any rule of thirds in your art, or I don't see any leading room in this picture or anything, and they just look at me like I have six heads.
But at least six heads would be following the rules of threes.
Yes.
So I'm just...
I'm curious.
But the thing that kind of gets me is that a lot of people look at his art and are just like, oh my god, that's so amazing.
It's astounding.
And I just look at it and I'm like, well...
I don't see the aesthetic appeal.
It looks like just a bunch of wavy lines.
I don't know.
Oh, yeah.
No, that modern art stuff.
There's a Canadian painting or painting sold in Canada called Pillar of Fire, which is three lines of color.
It's like, oh, man, I can do that.
Okay.
Or Jackson Pollock, right?
Jackson Pollock, there was a movie with Ed Harris about Jackson Pollock.
And, I mean, it basically was just watching him chart his old descent into suicidal madness.
And, you know, how to break your...
brain to the point where paint sprays out of your nose and hits a canvas in a way that indicates only derangement.
And I look, I have very, I mean, this is my particular bias.
It may be more than a bias.
I have a visceral revulsion towards a lot of modern art.
It's true of a lot of modern novels as well, because they just seem to be such elegant prose describing such unbelievable horrors, like Anne-Marie McDonald's Fall on Your Knees, is just an unbelievable series of gruesome, nightmarish horrors wrapped in the most astounding nightmarish horrors wrapped in the most astounding prose.
I mean, talk about putting makeup on a zombie.
It's all beautifully written, and what it describes is so unrelentingly horrifying.
I have a very tough time getting through modern novels.
I keep struggling and I'm dry, but modern art as well.
Modern art to me is one of these, seriously?
Really?
To me, you go back to someone like Angra, like someone who studied physiology and was incredibly adept with the paintbrush and could create pictures that seem to have light coming from within them.
I mean, that to me is incredible stuff.
Now I know the camera came along and took away a lot of the need for people to reproduce reality as it stands and so on, which I don't think is particularly true.
But I think that modern art to me is...
It's just the emperor's new clothes.
I mean, I think it just has to, again, there's some stuff that I like, but for the most part, modern art to me is just like, oh, come on, stop taking my goddamn money and go learn how to paint something that looks like something.
But, I mean, I also wonder why some of these people...
I kind of consider myself a modern artist because I don't really...
It's not the top of my list of things to do.
I'd rather focus on music.
But I'll at least try to pay attention to some of those basic theories.
Like, even the theories of, like, color saying, well, typically you want a lot of one color, some of another color, and just a little bit of another color, just to kind of break things up.
And I'll see these things where it's just like, oh, it's 17 colors that all have equal value.
I just don't understand that.
I don't understand why someone who wants to dedicate themselves to art wouldn't want to take the time to understand art.
What's valuable about it?
Well, visual art used to be about discipline and it used to be about study and it used to be about research.
You know, there are plenty of Renaissance painters who dissected human bodies to find out how the muscles moved under the skin.
And they would not paint the skin, they would paint the wrapping over the muscles.
And learning how to draw hands and paint hands.
Hands are just ridiculously difficult to paint.
But when I was growing up in England, there was a poor clay hanging in the flat or the apartment that we lived in.
And it was just this round circle with like two little diagonal squares for a mouth and all that.
And it always just struck me as like, that's what...
You know, crazy people strangle cats to stop that sneer in their minds.
Like, it just seems like really...
And there's this thing in art which is like...
In the Jackson Pollock movie, and I know it's just a movie, it's a dramatization, but the woman is like, you've broken through.
This has never been done before.
I have 17 colors that are completely incompatible.
But the innovation for innovation's sake, to me, is horrendous.
It's not just bad, it's horrendous.
A lot of Andy Warhol stuff...
Here's Elvis.
There's three of him, and they're different colors.
That's never been done before!
Right!
Because painters had pride in their craft in the past.
And this stuff has never been done before is like...
There's an old joke from Cheers where I can't remember Woody Harrelson's character's name.
But anyway, he's trying to make a new cocktail.
And I think Norm says, man, you should have stopped when you combined whiskey and trail mix.
It's never been done before.
There's a reason why it's never been done before.
And the degree to which artists face the state rather than the people has created this weird bureaucracy.
You know, bureaucrats are always superior and condescending, you know, like people at the DMV. Why don't you fill out your form properly?
Whoa, hey.
You don't say that at the ski slopes.
Just help you fill it out, right?
And artists have been decoupled By the state.
They've been decoupled from the marketplace.
And so they're free to basically jack off on a canvas and call it innovative.
And that to me is gross.
Face the marketplace.
Subjugate yourself to the marketplace.
It's like philosophy academics should be doing what I'm doing.
They should be quitting their jobs and doing what I'm doing.
Maybe they'd do a far better job.
Lots of people think they would.
Great!
I invite you to come into the marketplace, talk to the people, find out what matters to them, and help them with their lives!
And find some beautiful things, or make some beautiful things that people will enjoy.
And I suppose that becomes the biggest...
Go ahead.
I was just going to say, I suppose that becomes the biggest difference is...
I recognize the free market and trying to say, I need to have a marketable value that if I want to make this a career, I need to be able to eventually sell some of this stuff.
So I want there to be a general appeal to it.
And I guess that's what separates me from a lot of avant-garde and irrational artists, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, there's...
I mean, there's a real challenge because, of course, you want to be innovative.
You want to do new stuff, for sure.
But at the same time, like Mike just pointed out, the Piss Christ is one of the most famous pieces of egregious modern art.
1987 photograph that depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's urine.
That's never been done before!
Yeah, I remember that one.
In the past had some pride.
I mean, you've got the menstrual Virgin Mary.
And you've got photographs of vaginas.
And this art which you open the vagina and go through.
That's never been done before.
Well, actually, I think the other way, when I was smaller, had been done before.
But it is...
To me, it's repulsive.
And to me, it is an assault.
Upon the rational mind.
It is an assault upon coherence.
It is an assault upon sanity.
Because every artist creates that which is most important to the artist.
Now, and any commercial artist, and that always sounds bad, but commercial means that people are willing to pay you for what you're doing.
I am a commercial philosopher.
People are willing to subsidize me for what it is that I'm doing.
And, of course, there's lots of people.
People find that.
And it's the old aristocratic thing that happened.
It's like, oh, this land has been in my family 14 generations.
That man is merely a merchant.
He's merely a buyer and seller of dry goods.
I think it was Oscar Wilde who referred to 19th century American novels as dry goods, which I always found very funny for no particular reason.
But it's like, oh, he's subject to the marketplace.
I mean, how revolting, how repulsive, how common, how bourgeois.
Yeah.
I wish to rise above to a platonic ideal of art rather than grub about attempting to get people to give me shekels for my masterpieces.
And it's just like, oh my god, that is so horrendous.
I mean, those people may think that they sound like some sort of platonic rock gods of artistic futures.
To me, they just sound like Ross...
Geller in France with his keyboard.
I don't know if you've ever seen that, but it's really very funny.
Or actually maybe Ross with his bagpipes with Phoebe attempting to sing along, which you should absolutely look up.
It's one of the things that almost made me wet myself when I first saw it.
It was so funny.
But no, I think it's, you know, subject yourself to the people.
Subject yourself to the people, this isolated, I'm great but I won't ever put it to an empirical test.
No, look, great art has some, it's what people want.
It's what somebody wants.
Like you look at that piece of art and you're like, man, I want that.
And that would be a beautiful thing for me to have in my house.
Now, of course, you want a beautiful thing if beauty is something that motivates you.
Of course, there's lots of art that is disturbing or ugly or diseased or horrendous.
And this is in movies.
Years and years ago, there was a listener who suggested I watch a Studio Ghibli film.
And I literally felt like my sanity was being disassembled.
Through the course of watching one of those Japanese films and like it was truly like truly disturbing.
I could not make it.
I felt like I was just not going to sleep for a week if I kept going.
And there are those.
And this, again, I'm perfectly willing that this may be my limitations, but it just seemed so unbelievably disturbing and disturbed for that kind of art.
And there are people, of course, who love that stuff.
I remember when I was a kid, there was an animated movie called Heavy Metal.
That was pretty disturbing.
There's the movie Pink Floyd's The Wall, which I think is an incredible album.
We need to do a review of it.
And the movie is also very powerful, but nobody would ever call it beautiful.
But it is very visceral.
It is very powerful.
And it's always disappointed me the degree to which Roger Waters has disavowed the fundamental emotional drives of that, basically.
Basically, oh, you know, there was some guy spitting at me and I felt fascistic, so I thought I'd write an album about it.
It's like, dude, come on.
This is the matriarchal planet that everyone's living on.
Anyway.
Yeah, there was so much more to it that he could have openly talked about.
When artists shrug at their own depth, it always bothers me.
But probably it's the shrug that allows them to have the depth.
That's my guess.
But anyway.
And so, you know, Sylvia Plath as well.
I mean, Sylvia Plath is a novelist, writes really disturbing stuff.
You read The Bell Jar and it feels again like the language is being used to disassemble the bricks of your sanity.
And she was, I read a biography of hers years ago, and she was a pretty horrifying and horrible human being.
And, you know, Ted Hughes was a man she was married to who was a A poet who wrote a very good poem.
A number of good poems.
The Thought Fox is well worth reading.
And a lot of these people are horrifying people.
David Lynch would be another prime example.
I'm sorry?
David Lynch would be a prime example?
I don't know much about his personal life.
I don't know much about his personal life.
Heineken, fuck that shit!
Pabst Blue Ribbon!
Dennis Hopper is completely terrifying in that movie, of course.
So terrifying.
But some of the visuals, though, I just...
I love the cinematography in some of it, but...
Well, the opening shot, right?
Yeah.
This beautiful suburban street, and then you sort of go down into the grass and into the warring living beings of tiny stature.
You know, that's...
Amazing stuff.
And it's terrifying.
And don't get me wrong.
I mean, the movie Fight Club has got to be one of my top 10 movies.
Nobody would call it pretty.
But it is very powerful.
It's very visceral.
It's very foundational to particularly the male experience of the late 20th and 21st century.
And it is a very...
Passionate, wet fish to the face of a life unlived.
And so, you know, to me, something doesn't have to be beautiful for it to be powerful.
But if it's not going to be beautiful, at least it must be deep.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, nobody would call Macbeth a comedy.
It is a very dark play.
So dark that, of course, as you know, you're not supposed to ever say the name of the play in a theater for fear of bringing in.
You have to refer to it as the Scottish play, can't you?
Yeah.
When I was playing Macbeth in Montreal, I did mention it in the theatre, and that night, during a ferocious sword fight that I was in, the sword broke.
And then, the sword broke, and then I attempted to keep going, and then I swung back, and it got stuck in a piece of scenery.
And we were right in the middle of this highly choreographed sword fight that was very brutal and very exacting.
It would be very demanding and very precise.
And so I ended up having to basically just jump on the guy and pretend to strangle him as we wrestled offstage and all that.
But yeah, so that was the one time.
Of course, it doesn't mean anything.
It's just a coincidence.
But it was one of these exciting ad-lib moments.
You know, one thing you can't ad-lib much on in Shakespeare.
But you can ad-lib the sword fight if your sword breaks and then gets stuck in a piece of scenery.
Yeah.
Was there anything else you wanted to mention, Rhett?
I think you got me pretty much covered.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and answer my question, so thank you.
You're welcome.
And also, the last thing I mentioned, too, is that in a free market, at least, art is a wonderful satellite view of the psychosocial geography of a country or a culture or an environment.
One of the things that, if you sort of look at the 60s, right?
I mean, the 60s in music was kind of poppy, kind of boppy in the early part, right?
The Beatles and all that kind of stuff.
And then it kind of split later on, and it went, you know, kind of dark.
And, you know, Hendrix Monkeys.
You know, I mean, this is all.
And this is what Paul McCartney said, is that music is either like total pop or totally dark.
There's like nothing in the middle.
And this split in society between this sort of frothy pop and this really dark but powerful stuff that people were doing was very, very important.
And to me, it signaled the difference between kids growing up in married homes and kids growing up in single-parent homes.
Kids growing up in single-parent homes, like myself, we went dark.
You know, we went to the dark music.
Now, I've always had, I mean, I don't want to, everybody says this, oh, I had very widespread taste.
I may want to say that, you know, but, you know, I was, for me, it's the quality of the performance, and in particular, the quality of the singing.
Like, I can get as much into, yes, because John Anderson has this unbelievably gorgeous countertenor.
Yeah.
But, you know, obviously, Roger Waters' singing can take a little bit of getting used to, just to put it mildly.
Yeah.
This split, I think, was so important.
And then when you had even more nihilism erupting out of the 70s in the punk movement in England, I mean, this was a very, very dark time, a very socialist time, a very indebted time, a very time of great shortages, and a time of immense urban decay and the breakdown of community in England.
I can't remember when I grew up in England I was born in 66 and I grew up in the 70s and I left in 77 to come to Canada.
But I remember even in the 70s, we lived in a heavily run subsidized apartment.
It wasn't actually that bad.
But there was this row of bungalows.
You know, again, I sound like a door sign.
Got some bungalows.
But there were these bungalows out back of this building.
area that we all lived in and that's where the people on the dole were the people on welfare and that changed even from the early 70s till when I left I was really aware at the beginning that was bad you know there on the dole that was bad yeah but that changed even in the period of England that I was in that shifted To the point where, I mean, a lot of the punks were on the dole and on unemployment and so on.
And the quadrophenia thing where it's just that you go on the dole and then you don't have to have a job.
And it became something really acceptable.
To be on the recipient end or the receiving end of charity was really bad.
And then suddenly it wasn't.
Like single motherhood used to be really bad.
And then suddenly it wasn't.
You know, there's no mountain, then there's a mountain.
Or there is a mountain, then there's no mountain.
And social cohesion, social disapproval, and the involvement that people would have in their society to the point where they'd be willing to impose negative social opinions or even ostracisms on those they disagreed, that all vanished.
I think people were hugely relieved when the welfare state came in because now they didn't have to Be disapproving of people, right?
Like the Downton Abbey thing where one woman has an affair and then she's basically cast out of civilized society and has a very rough time of it.
I think people were very relieved when the government came along and said, okay, you don't have to worry about ostracizing anyone.
You don't have to worry about enforcing these social rules anymore.
You don't have to worry about conflict or confrontation or negative judgments.
We got it.
We'll just give them money so it's not on you.
And so, whew!
And now we can all just basically go back and picket our navels, watch our flat-screen TVs, and consider ourselves complete human beings.
And out of that social disintegration and this isolation, the welfare state generates this huge isolation.
You don't need neighbors that much when the government's sending you a check every month.
You don't have that uncertainty.
You don't need neighbors.
And certainly if you're home all the time, you don't need your neighbors to watch your kids or watch their kids.
Social cohesion Craters, cracks and shatters.
And I think that the punk movement came out of a lot of that dysfunctional isolation.
And so to me where the artistic sensibilities of particularly the youth are is a fantastic, although sometimes of course terrifying map Of where the world is, where society is, how well are we doing?
Just look at the art.
How happy are people?
Just look at the art.
You go through someone's record collection, I guess now their mp3 collection, and you'll see who they are.
For me, it's still a record collection.
I'll just let you know.
Okay.
Alright, well thanks man, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but yeah, listen, if you want us to splice in something longer, if you have something recorded, just shoot it to us and we'll put it in because it was nice stuff.
Yeah, I'd like to share some more of my music with you and I'd love to get any feedback or anything.
I'm still working on an album right now, so...
Give us like 30 seconds or 45 seconds of something you really like and we'll put it in.
Okay, wonderful, thanks.
Cool.
All right.
Thank you, Nick.
And open call again.
Anyone wants to call in with art, music, or literature questions, I mean, let me know.
We don't get too many of those on the show, and I always love listening to Steph talk about it.
So for my own personal selfish enjoyment, let us know if you want to call in on the show.
Your marketplace is Mike.
Alright, well up next is Dan.
Dan wrote in and said, if peaceful parenting makes a peaceful society, then why is Western Europe, who is mostly against spanking, demonstrated by their anti-spanking laws, some of the most statist people in the world?
Wow, some of the most statist people in the world!
All right.
I'm happy.
Maybe that was a little strong.
Yeah.
I'm thinking Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran.
You know, I'm not sure where Sweden necessarily would fit into that continuum.
It's like, thank goodness we're in Iran, because I hear Sweden is quite a theocracy.
Maybe in the Western world, we could say.
Okay.
Well, tell me, I mean, what is your standard for statism?
I guess I would say they have, you could say, confidence or they see the virtue in the state, it seems, more so than other Western societies.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I mean, I think it's an interesting question, but I think that peaceful parenting is not just anti-spanking.
And I know you know that, right?
I just want to be really clear.
Sure.
On that for other people.
I mean, if all you know about a marriage is that the man doesn't beat the wife and the wife doesn't beat the husband, I don't think you would automatically say, what a great marriage, right?
Definitely.
So the anti-spanking stuff, I think, is good and useful.
But I would argue that And I will say this particularly in the context of Western Europe, and this is just a thesis that immediately popped into my mind, so I apologize if this is not fully formed.
Not that it will be, but it just popped up in my head.
But Europe after the Second World War studied war no more.
It gave up on war.
Now that was partly because of The suicide of the West, which was characterized by the two unnecessary wars, the First and the Second World War.
The suicide of Christendom, the end of the paradigm of the post-Enlightenment civilization.
They gave up on war.
Partly because of the horrors and partly because nuclear weapons had made war damaging to the leaders and therefore the leaders suddenly found themselves with all these kinds of blessed are the peacemaker stuff.
So the question then becomes, why did parenting change so suddenly?
Parenting adapts to the politics around it.
So think of parents as a conveyor belt that produce what the state wants.
Now, once Europe gave up on war, parents Became more peaceful.
Do you know why that may be?
Say that one more time.
Once Europe gave up on war, European parents became more peaceful.
Do you know why that might have been?
Not off the top of my head.
Because warriors were no longer needed.
In fact, warriors would have been counterproductive.
You see, you produce criminals when you harm children.
Some of those all of those criminals are generally quite useful to the state because they either split into private criminals Who frighten the population and then the population feels the need for the police and the state and the courts and the jails and all that kind of stuff or they become public criminals who you put a uniform on and then they go and Kill and arrest and kidnap and whoever the government points at, right?
so the production of criminals is It's very useful to the state, unless the government is no longer in the business of war, right?
Now if the government is no longer in the business of war, then it is not as profitable for the government to have an excess of criminals.
And so it's interesting to me that right after the Second World War, Europeans began turning a lot more towards peace in their parenting.
And I think it's because the parents are kind of conveyor belt that produce what the society needs.
They are producers for the market demand of the state.
And the state said, okay, we're not doing war anymore.
And I'm not saying this is like some sort of...
It's a symbiotic relationship between parents and the state.
And I think that...
The peaceful parenting came about because war had become impossible and impractical.
Now, if you look at America, the most corporal punishment occurs in the South.
And in the South, mostly in the South, there are still, I think, 18 states that allow children to be hit or beaten at schools.
Now, where do the majority of soldiers in America come from?
Well, for those who watched American Sniper, it's not Manhattan.
Not a lot of Woody Allens out there in Iraq.
There are, of course...
A lot of Chris Kiles out there in Iraq.
Good old boys who have baseball caps and monotones and smirks instead of happiness.
So, where there is a demand for warriors, there is more brutal parenting.
Where the demand for warriors dries up, parents want their children to succeed in the society that they're putting their children in.
And if there is not a big demand for warriors, then they tend to be more peaceful in their parenting approach.
Peaceful parenting is...
it obviously means the non-initiation of force.
But that's like saying the free market simply means don't steal.
But that's not really what...
I mean, it's kind of important and it's necessary but not sufficient.
So not hitting your kids is great.
It's great.
But it is not enough for it to be peaceful parenting.
Peaceful parenting fundamentally means...
Refusing wherever humanly possible.
Refusing to impose your will upon your child.
Refusing to override your child's mind with your own preferences.
Now, I say wherever possible because they're not adults, right?
They are children.
Their minds are still developing.
They might want to eat fistfuls of sugar for three days or whatever, right?
But you give your children as much information as humanly possible, you draw everything out, you diagram it, you show them, you teach them about diabetes and tooth decay and you give them all of the information that they need so that they can make better decisions on their own.
And you negotiate wherever humanly possible and wherever, as I said, wherever humanly possible you refrain from imposing your will upon your children.
Now, In Europe, I don't really think that that's a fundamental principle of parenting.
You cannot have government schools and peaceful parenting.
Wherever you have government schools, don't have peaceful parenting.
And wherever you have religious indoctrination, there you cannot have peaceful parenting.
Because you can't explain and reason with and show empirical evidence and be philosophical about religion.
And you You can't say to your child, I'm not going to impose my will upon you.
Now go to the school that you generally don't want to go to.
I don't know about you, but certainly for me, didn't want to go, didn't want to do it.
And so the degree to which a society or parents in particular recognize that it is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, to impose your will upon a child is Wherever there's a capacity to not do that, when people understand that, then I think we're getting closer to peaceful parenting.
Because when you refuse to impose your will upon your child, it's sort of like when you refuse to steal and you're gonna respect property rights, well, you gotta do other things, right?
I mean, when the government stops controlling the economy, that's where you get the real fertility and growth within the free market.
And so if you bar the imposition of will in all your relationships, right?
I mean, statism is just one form of the imposition of will.
And telling your children what to do, making them do stuff, punishing, rewarding, and so on, that's just mini-statism.
I mean, the timeout corner is just a tiny jail.
It doesn't teach the child anything other than you're bigger.
And there are negative consequences.
But that...
It's a tiny jail, and that's, you know, pay your taxes, otherwise you go to jail.
We'll let you be free if you pay us off, right?
That's mafia.
I mean, it's the mafia.
You know, nothing's going to happen to your store if you pay us 500 bucks a month.
That's, you know...
So, this...
And it's a challenge.
I mean, it's a challenge.
I mean, most of us have this default position based upon our own childhoods, which is...
You impose your...
Make your kids do stuff.
When you don't let yourself have that as an option, a huge amount of fertility and creativity grows up.
You know, I want my child to do something.
I can't impose my will, can't make my child do it.
So how are we going to work it out?
It's a fascinating challenge.
And half the time I'm going into these conflicts, I don't have any clue how they're going to work out or what's going to happen.
So...
Merely not hitting?
Okay, great.
That's fantastic.
That's great.
But it's the first step in a thousand mile journey, which is to not impose will.
And I do this with listeners too.
I obviously have no capacity to impose my will on listeners, but I almost never tell anyone what to do.
I don't want anyone to ever substitute my judgment for their own judgment.
That would be a travesty and a tragedy of philosophical education.
Philosophical education to give you the principles to decide for yourself.
I'm not going to order your meals, maybe teach you a little bit about nutrition, and you can make your own decisions as you see fit.
So, as far as Europe goes, European societies are still Fundamentally about those in authority imposing their will on their subjects.
Whether it's God to mankind, priest to child, parent to child, state to citizen.
That paradigm still exists.
That paradigm has shifted to some degree from direct force with children to more manipulation.
But it's They still have a huge way to go in terms of recognizing their children as human beings worthy of free and independent thought and decision-making.
I mean, just to give you a tiny example.
I mean, it's a huge example, but it's just a tiny sliver of what goes on all around the world.
Children should not...
Be told about religion until they're adults.
I mean they can tell about like it's there are these beliefs and so on, but they should not be asked to subscribe to a particular religious faith until they are adults.
And now I know a lot of Europe is agnostic or atheist and so on.
I mean certainly in the Scandinavian northern countries, less so in obviously Italy and Portugal, Spain, France, Greece.
So I don't actually know about Greece, pretty Greek Orthodox a while back ago.
I don't know what it is still.
But parents should not.
That is an imposition of will, to tell your children that, you know, this being exists, and he loves you, and he died for you, and the sun will burn in hell, or go to heaven, or whatever, right?
That is an imposition of will.
That is not allowing the child to discover reality and think through problems for himself or herself.
Another one is government schools, as I mentioned.
It's inconceivable...
To most people that we would have the government assigned to you a job of the government's choosing simply because it was close to where you lived.
You weren't allowed to commute.
Illegal to commute.
You cannot go more than four and a half miles from your home to get a job.
And the government is going to choose which job you are going to go to.
And if you don't go to that job, by God, you're going to be in significant trouble.
You're going to go to jail.
I mean, if you tried to pass that for adults, they would go mental, and they'd say, that's fascism.
You cannot choose to me and assign to me where I'm going to go to work, simply because it happens to be near where I live.
And where I go to work has to be a government job, which is meaningless and useless and make work work.
And terrible, in general.
And so if you were to try to pass that for adults, you would be accused of the worst kind of fascism, and it would be considered inconceivable for adults to be subject to those kinds of restrictions.
But that's exactly how government schools work, in general.
I don't know all of the ins and outs of various European options, but Generally, it's the school that's closest to you that you get assigned to and you have to go and if you don't go you're in trouble.
And of course if you if you don't go you have to pay anyway.
It's changing To a tiny degree.
People are still only thinking that it's the choices of parents that matter.
So in America, 69% of Americans are keen on giving parents more choice when it comes to education.
In other words, you get a voucher, you can take it to a government school or a private school, or you can keep the money if you're homeschooling or whatever.
It's even 60% of Democrats, which tells you quite a bit about where the Democrat Party is.
But that's still about giving parents The choice.
The idea that we would give the vouchers to the children and let the children decide what schools were best for them with parental input and so on, right?
It's inconceivable.
I don't know if that would be the right solution.
I have no idea.
Obviously, I'm not a fan of status solutions of any kind.
But the idea that you would give children The money to decide for themselves or the choice of the options to decide for themselves how they were going to get educated is inconceivable.
And again, I don't know if that's the right answer or not, but it's never even discussed as a potential question.
Our capacity to look at children as full human beings worthy of the greatest protection and sensitivity and empathy and negotiation, they need it more than adults.
Because they are so subject to the whims of adults.
Children need the most volunteerism.
They need the maximum amount of negotiation.
Like, I don't need to negotiate that much with the restaurant manager.
Like, I either like the restaurant, in which case I'll go, or I don't like the restaurant, in which case I won't.
I don't need to negotiate.
I mean, maybe if there's some dispute about the bill or my food's cold or the manager might come over, but I don't really have to negotiate that much with the majority of people in my life.
You know, I didn't like the service on the airplane.
Choose a different airliner if I want, right?
But children don't have that choice of service providers.
It's parents, really, or parents are a bust, right?
And so your service has to be infinitely better when your customer's choice is more limited.
If you want the customer to really love your restaurant and they're forced to eat there, your food better be really great.
Now, of course, most people what they do is they take a government public sector union approach to parenting.
In other words, I have a captive customer, so I don't have to be that efficient.
I don't have to be that nice because where are they gonna go?
Right?
Gonna go live in the street?
They're gonna go hitchhike a ride to somewhere else?
No.
And it is fundamentally that paradigm that I need to challenge.
Because if we view the family not as a fundamentally socialistic institution, but as a fundamentally free market institution, in other words, if I parent as if my daughter has the choice to be parented by anyone in the world, then I am going to bring as much Quality to my relationship with my daughter as I can.
And it's the same thing with my wife.
My wife can leave me tomorrow.
She can go shack up with whoever she wants.
She's got choices.
And so, you know, the quality that I bring to bear as a husband and as a father and as a philosopher, as a podcaster, is very important.
You obviously can hang up on me.
People can stop donating to me tomorrow if they want.
So it's up to me to bring quality to this conversation.
In the same way, and most importantly, it's important for me to bring as much voluntarism as possible to my daughter who has the least choice.
In my entire environment.
Everybody else has more choice.
You do.
My wife does.
My friends do.
Everybody does.
I have more choice than my daughter, which is why I need to bring the most voluntarism to my daughter.
But what we do is we get lazy and we bring the least voluntarism to our daughters and sons and we do to them what we would never think of doing to adults.
So as far as Europe goes, I'm glad that there's been some anti-spanking measures.
You know, better a reduction in direct violence if at all possible.
However, there is, of course, still significant amounts of spanking going on, even where it's illegal, number one.
I've heard 15-20% sometimes, which is still a lot better than 80-90% in North America.
But it's still just the beginning.
And I don't know if they think they're done, but...
They're a long way from being done if they think, or if you think, that anti-spanking is peaceful parenting.
Oh yeah, I definitely don't.
I can relate to what you're saying as a child who was not spanked, but definitely manipulated and not peacefully parented.
I can definitely relate to the position.
I really wanted to hear your view on it, and I appreciate you sharing it with me.
It's like those super nanny shows.
Super nanny shows, it just seems to me, is a lot of livestock management.
We have to train your children out of these bad behaviors.
I know they've only got a certain amount of time and so on, but...
Yeah, it's rough.
But how do you change all that?
I apologize for interrupting.
Please go on.
Oh, that's all I had.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
And are you looking forward to being a dad yourself one day?
After I finished up therapy, I'm definitely considering it.
Good stuff, man.
Well, the world needs great parents more than almost anything else except oxygen and food and water.
So I hope that you'll add to the number.
Yeah, I agree.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Thanks.
Alright, up next is Nathan.
Nathan wrote in, and he said, My boss at work is pregnant and will be taking her maternity leave in about two to three weeks.
I want to discuss with her the subject of peaceful parenting, but I'm not sure where to start.
Her husband is military, which makes this conversation both a bit more daunting and critical.
Do you have any advice on how to approach someone productively who holds opinions so far differently than your own regarding the subject of peaceful parenting?
Yeah, I mean, I'm a big one for dip your toe in the water.
And just, you could, you know, if you're sitting down for lunch with her, you can just, I don't know, whip out your phone, glance at something and say, wow, this is a pretty interesting article about spanking or whatever, you know, and bring it up that, you know, the negative effects that seem to happen from spanking and so on and, you know, just share.
And if she's like, I can't wait to dangle that kid out of my Yo-yo umbilical so I can start batting it, batting it around like a pinata, then you're gonna have a tougher row to hoe, so to speak.
So I just dangle a little bit of information out and see if people are interested.
And, you know, a lot of it is planting seeds.
You never know what you're gonna say and when it's gonna hit someone.
I got engaged many, many years ago.
To the wrong woman.
And friends and family were just smiling.
Now, of course, in hindsight, to look at their smiles, they were a bit fixed and unblinking, like, hey, you got married.
You got engaged.
But one friend of mine's wife said, you know, I think people who are engaged are supposed to be kind of happier.
Now, that was just a little thing to say.
But I thought about it.
You know, when you are not authentic, when you are not evolved, when you are not...
When your locus of control is not between your two ears, it feels, at least it felt for me, maybe it does for other people too, it sort of felt like I'm on this conveyor belt.
Like...
Get out of high school...
Go to college, get a job, get married.
It's just on this conveyor belt.
And, you know, it's easier than stepping off the conveyor belt, which comes with minimal criticism but often dire consequences, and striking out for yourself on the road less traveled.
And just that woman's comment, people who are engaged, aren't they supposed to be quite a bit happier?
I just suddenly thought, Wow, you know what?
Am I even happy about being engaged?
Like, it's something that didn't...
It didn't even cross my mind and I brushed it off.
It didn't even cross my mind.
This is the disposable mail thing and my history and I don't have to get into details about it, but the reality is that was a seed that was planted that got me really thinking and broke off the engagement shortly after it's broke up the relationship and...
It was the right thing for both of us, without a doubt.
It would have been a disaster all around.
So little comments here and there can have a great deal of power.
You know, sometimes, I mean, for those of us in the know about these kinds of topics, suddenly it sort of feels like LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, trying to get a vote out of someone, you know, lots of heavy breathing and grabbing them by the lapels and, oh, you gotta get a...
And that tends to not be quite as effectual as dropping some seeds, seeing what happens.
And particularly with co-workers, right?
I mean, you don't know what tripwires you're going to be kicking up in people a lot of times, right?
I mean, so I think that...
Shooting up a few flares and just getting the lay of the land, I think is important.
I mean, I remember when I was giving a speech in Belize, I don't know, two years ago or something like that, I met a family, a very, very nice family.
And they had two kids, and my daughter was with me, my wife was with me.
And they all hit it off, and we hung out quite a bit.
It was really, really nice.
And I said something about spanking to the mom, and she got really flustered.
And she was like, well, I, you know, that's, I mean, everybody's different.
That really hasn't been our approach.
And I thought, well, wait a minute.
Most people I know who are pro-spanking are not exactly tentative and hesitant about it.
They tend to be pretty like, yep.
It's what you do.
You feed them, you help them sleep, you bathe them, you hit them.
It's what you do.
Take them to the doctor, take them to the dentist, take them out back by the shed.
And I remember being quite startled by that and thinking, well, it's not often that somebody who is...
Because I mentioned something about being against spanking, and she was very tentative about and hesitant about being pro-spanking, as I thought.
Anyway, so of course I asked her, I said, well, what did you hear me say?
And she said, oh, I... I thought you said that you were pro-spanking.
I'm like, oh my goodness.
I said, I'm sorry.
Whatever I mumbled, I apologize for.
But no, 150% anti-spanking.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
And we failed to talking about all this kind of stuff because she'd grown up in a spanking household.
Anyway, but it was a great chat.
And it wasn't like we changed each other's parenting in any kind of fundamental way.
But if it had been the case...
That I had been pro-spanking.
And this woman had said, well, you know, that's not really our approach and so on.
Then it would have been like, wait a minute.
I thought I had to, I thought I had to walk to Florida.
Are you saying there's airplanes?
Are you saying that it's not how it has to be?
You know, you just, hey, the big giant metal exploding box in the sky, the tube of death that gets you from A to B without killing you for the most part is worth looking into.
People simply may not have been around anyone who does anything differently.
And maybe their entire social circle and so on.
So hearing a little bit about another way of thinking might be the way to see about their receptivity.
And don't be disheartened.
You know, I have been doing...
Banging away on this microphone now for, I don't know, coming on eight years or something like that.
And I have no doubt, and we've got fairly good, reasonably decent information about, you know, hundreds of thousands of families have stopped hitting directly as a result of this show.
Why I want people to donate.
We can do better shows and try and grow more and get more.
I think it's a pretty good investment for my time, for your money, and for our combined resources.
Hundreds of thousands of families.
Two kids of family, double hundreds of thousands of kids growing up not being hit and with peaceful parenting principles which otherwise may not have and probably wouldn't have.
Three, four hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, five hundred thousand children who are being treated with gentleness, compassion, sincerity, negotiation rather than with aggression, hostility, control.
And perhaps violence.
That is not a bad eight years of work, which again with full gratitude is because of your support that I'm able to do this.
And some people have written and said that they heard the peaceful parenting message 10 or 15 times until it sunk in.
Click!
Oh my god, I get it, I get it, I get it.
And some people are like, It never even crossed my mind that this was a possibility to not impose my will upon my children wherever possible.
And the reports of course are fantastic about the family happiness and the peace and the peace of mind and the conflict reduction that has occurred in families where parents have given up the imposition of will.
And That, I mean, it's fantastic and wonderful and gratifying stuff.
And it takes a long time.
Something that has struck me many times, but more recently than in the past is, man, it's earlier than we think.
It's earlier than we think.
I put out this against me argument years ago saying, you know, sit down and talk with your family and talk with your friends and talk with the people in your life Remind them that when they support the state, they're supporting the use of violence against you.
The argument stands.
I think the argument is irrefutable.
But I think very few people have done it.
And that just means it's earlier than we think.
It's earlier in the evolution and revolution of human ethics and of reason and of peace and of voluntarism.
It's sooner.
Because we're social animals and we want to hang out with people.
We're not...
Cats or dogs when I hang out with people.
Because there's no particular movement in the direction of confronting personal relationships with the reality of statism, it's earlier than we think.
And that is an important thing to recognize and to understand.
Now, when it is earlier than you think, Then, snippets of information, possibilities, opportunities, is how you have to work at things.
Later in a movement, it's very different, but at the very beginning, and it is at the very beginning, I think, I think tentativity and opportunity is where you have to work.
Do you want to read this, Mike?
You pinged something?
Yeah, it's actually just got a really nice message today and I asked the parent if I could read it on the show and just got a reply back saying, yeah, so perfect timing.
He wrote and said, if you don't mind, I'd like to share a quick story with my daughter from the other day.
She will turn three years old next week.
We were both in the bath.
If you're not familiar with Japanese bathing, you bathe and clean in the shower first and then soak in the hot bath afterwards.
We were in the bathing phase.
My daughter asked me to get the toy that I had previously purchased for her.
The toy is basically a showerhead for kids.
It sucks up water from the base, and it was hanging out of my reach.
Being lazy, I said we could play with it once we were in the bath and that she should wait.
Her response?
Daddy, the reason you got that for me is so I could rinse off the soap in the shower, right?
My response?
You're right, sweetie pie.
That's why we got it.
Sorry, daddy was just being lazy.
Thanks again for sharing your experiences of wisdom.
The comment you said on the most recent show about your daughter not growing up in fear and being assertive reminded me of that moment.
Yeah.
And there is this weird thing that comes from people in authority and our parents and our temptation as parents, which is that If we back down, if we admit fault, that somehow we are diminished in the eyes of those around us, I actually found that not to be true.
You know, where I have admitted fault, where I have corrected misinformation or bad things to put out, I don't think that anyone, maybe a few people, but I mean, I don't think most people say, ah-ha, ah, you know, I've never listened to that guy again, he admitted fault!
You know, I think that's just wrong.
You know, our children...
Respect us when we are honest particularly when we ask honesty from them and I can almost guarantee you from to this parent that you are not going to have any trouble with your daughter Lying to you because you are admitting fault and telling the truth when you've made a mistake So she's always going to be open and communicating with you.
I think my daughter has lied once in her entire life And I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true chatting about it with her the other day.
She lied once in her entire life and It doesn't mean she doesn't sometimes bend the truth to get her way.
That's natural.
I think it's a natural tendency.
But as far as lying, yeah.
I mean, if you're that honest with your children and admit fault when you're wrong and listen to them and let them be in charge when they're right, you know, I mean, it's the idea that they'll love you less.
I don't know if that's just a paranoid fantasy from rigid personality structures or whatever, but that is a lovely thing to hear.
And congratulations.
On that, that's going to serve you enormously well.
You know, I don't think there's any need for the teenage years to be this angst-ridden conflict fest, but I think it happens, and the foundation for all of that is laid at this particular point and through these kinds of interactions.
The amount of trust your daughter's going to have in you and the amount of security she's going to have in your listening and in her own thinking.
You know, every time somebody imposes their will upon you, I think part of your brain just dies a little.
You know, it just dies off.
It's like putting a...
Sunflower in a basement.
I think it just, it's like a muscle that doesn't get exercised.
It just atrophies.
And whatever you don't, whatever you, whenever you impose your will on your children, I think it atrophies their will and their individuality and their authenticity.
So that's lovely to hear.
Did you have any other questions about that?
that or does that sort of make sense?
Or am I just talking to myself now?
Okay, good.
Sorry.
Yeah, I think you covered the subject in general.
The specific case I have poses a bit of a problem because the solution that you initially said was bring it up in passing in a smaller scale sense and react to their reaction.
But I barely know my manager.
I don't talk to her over lunch and whatnot.
I usually only see her once or twice a week.
And we exchange about two sentences each day we see each other.
She's approachable.
I could easily go up to her and start socializing.
And so I don't have that kind of rapport with her to begin with.
Well, you know, the best way to start A conversation with someone is through listening.
So if you don't have much of a rapport with her at the moment, then the first thing I would suggest if you want to try to influence her thinking in these matters is just ask her questions.
You know, I mean, they may be inappropriate or overly personal, but I've never really understood what inappropriate means.
It usually just means making people uncomfortable in a productive way.
But I think that...
Say, you know, what are you looking forward to about being a parent?
How much do you think you're going to parent the way that you were parented?
You know, are you going to do anything different?
I mean, are you going to do stuff the same?
Have you read any books?
You know, and not like cross-examining, but just ask questions, and she may have thought quite deeply about it, and you may have a wonderful conversation.
It may not have even crossed her mind that you should read a book or two on parenting, right?
And, you know, my comment would be, well, I mean, I did, and In the same way that I wouldn't buy a computer from the 1960s because I don't have a big basement, I also would not use parenting advice or methodologies from the 1960s.
Things change.
Things upgrade.
There's new stuff that's known about kids and parenting and all that kind of stuff and so on.
And then she may say, do you have any recommendations or whatever?
She may not.
But you're at least planting the seeds that...
She doesn't have to raise her children the way that she was raised.
And she, again, she may have thought of that already, in which case you may just be engaged in a pleasant conversation and she may have thought about it deeply and so on, right?
And I think just asking questions is a great way to...
I mean, there's times when I have a caller, I don't even talk for 20 minutes, I'm just asking questions if I don't know the lay of the land or if it's not more of a technical question.
Yeah.
The specific scenario that just my gut hunch is expecting this to play out is I bring up the subject and I have the intuition that she will dismiss it as if it's not my place to make comments on it because I'm 21, I don't have kids.
Well, but you see, if you're making comments, then that probably is not the best approach.
Yes, I would come at it from an abstract.
I'm not asserting my perspective on it.
That's the particular spot that I'm worried about is when I make the transition from asking questions to making some sort of implication.
Well, but no, no, no.
You cross that bridge when you come to it, right?
And don't overthink conversations.
That's a form of control, right?
So be flexible in the conversation.
And certainly, I think now, I mean, certainly as I get older and being a stay-at-home dad has cut my testosterone level like 40% at least.
Probably closer to 50 or 60, but I'm less, you know, I was certainly more sort of punchy and gung-ho when I was younger, even within this show, because I thought we were further ahead.
So what I would say now is that if you are not comfortable So you ask, I know, let's put this in a scenario.
You ask her these, you know, I'm gonna hit them every day, just like my daddy hit me, because that's the best parenting there could be, right?
I don't know.
Maybe she says something like that.
Probably wouldn't, but let's say she did, right?
Yeah.
Well, you're not obligated, right?
It's my job, not your job, right?
You're not obligated.
Because...
The important thing is when it comes to changing people's minds, certainly for people who are really resistant, less is more.
Now, you could say, well, you know, just FYI, say I'm not a parent.
I don't know, right?
But there does seem to be some research that says that spanking may not always be the best approach.
Right?
And then C. And then if she says, really?
I've not heard anything about that.
Then maybe there's a little bit more of an entree.
Or if she's like, ah, I've read that shit.
Those doctors don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
And they're so full of shit.
Their eyes are brown.
In which case, look, I mean, she's made her decision.
And I, you know, in that situation, I would not hugely pursue it.
Because, I mean, what is the point in provoking someone's defensive aggression when the whole point is to try and increase the amount of peace in the world, right?
Yeah.
Because in that moment she may be defensive.
Right?
But you don't know how that pebble is going to sink in her sea later.
Right?
That's a good way of looking at it.
You mentioning something that day might three days from now cause her to have a dream where she wakes up crying because she was hit as a kid.
I used to be more for the bull charging, you know, change the world, drag it along.
Now, I mean, this is not night and day.
I'm a little bit more like the butterfly effect now because I'm working with the empirical evidence of where things are.
I mean, come out of a libertarian community where their focus on the non-aggression principle is central to the entire philosophy.
Now even within that community, I have talked for years about spanking being a violation of the non-aggression principle.
And how big an impact have I had in libertarian parenting?
Some.
But it sure as hell hasn't become any kind of movement, right?
I'm trying to always be empirical and get the biofeedback of my relationship with ye olde planet and what's coming back and how things are going.
So I thought, ah, you know, these are blisteringly forceful arguments, I've got the experts, I've got the data, I've got the facts, and these people already agree with the principles.
So this one should be about as easy as it comes, right?
Yeah.
Well...
Well...
Apparently not, right?
So, I think now I'm sort of, you know, frontal assault not working.
We take to the sewers!
You know, whatever.
We sky write in a medium distance.
I think now it's more about planting seeds.
I mean, I know that's a cliche and all of that, but you don't have to win an argument in the moment to change someone's mind.
In fact, a lot of times if you win an argument, I mean, how many times have you in this show, I'm a pretty good debater, right?
I'm pretty skilled at this kind of stuff.
How many times in this show have people called up and when we've had a debate or, you know, how many times have they said, wow, you know what?
You make a great argument.
I'm convinced.
Other than Peter Joseph.
Yeah, I haven't.
I've been a longstanding listener and I haven't heard that once.
Yeah, I mean, maybe it's happened in a way I can't recall, but it's not common.
Now, that doesn't mean that I haven't affected that person's thinking or that they haven't affected my thinking.
You know, the amount of, like, mind-blowing information that we all hear at the But I mean the amount like there was some guy years ago Who was in the chat room And
he was talking about the degree of sexual exploitation of children throughout history.
And I was like, oh, come on.
Really?
Right?
I didn't really believe it.
He's like, no.
Here, go to psychohistory.com.
Read this.
So, of course, new information.
I won't go over.
Oh, my God.
Horrendous.
Horrendous stuff.
Well-documented.
Good researchers and substantiated stuff.
The bomb in the brain stuff.
Bombinthebrain.com if you want to go and check out these presentations.
Bombinthebrain stuff.
Blew my gourd.
Some of the race stuff we've been talking about blew my gourd.
Other stuff we've been looking at that we're still trying to screw our courage to the sticking place to release to the public sphere blows my gourd.
I mean, inbreeding versus outbreeding in world populations is a giant factor in human civilization.
Do you marry your cousins?
Not great for the gene pool as a whole.
And you can do more research into this as you want, but that's a huge topic.
I mean, a huge topic.
Biological basis for race.
That's a huge topic.
I don't know what to do with it.
I mean, so much information, still got to keep researching it.
But...
So my mind is hugely and regularly changed by a variety, varieties of new information.
I mean, the idea that World War II was an unnecessary war.
World War I, I think everyone gets like, what the hell happened there, right?
And there's really good arguments that World War II was completely unnecessary.
So anyway, so those of us who are swayed by new information and new facts, and me being one of them, that I put the arguments out there, and I don't just sort of walk on.
Dropped the argument, off we go.
I dropped the parachuters over the town.
We're flying back tonight.
I mean, I sort of say, okay, where did they go?
What happened?
What happened to these arguments?
I put these arguments out into the world.
What happened?
Put the argument, spanking, violation, and aggression.
Out into the world, what happened?
Against me, argument.
Out into the world, what happened?
Well, to a large degree, kind of nothing.
Not all, but to a large degree.
And that's a fact that if I want people to be empiricists, I need to be an empiricist with my own arguments and their effects.
I think UPB has done a lot of good in clarifying things for people and so on.
Still needs to be a better book, and that's a project I'm Gathering notes on to get working on.
But where the greatest impact, I think, of what I've been doing is, is in the parenting.
Is in the peaceful parenting.
Some of it from the libertarian community, but a lot of it not from that community.
And that, I think, is important information.
You know, I've...
Yeah, we talked about some positive experiences with Christianity.
It's because we've got a lot of Christian fans of this show, and they are some very nice people.
And again, that's just empirical evidence.
And lots of people making great arguments that say, look, we ditched religion, and we got giant governments.
Was that really such a great trade-off?
It's a pretty good argument.
It's a pretty good argument.
And so anyway, I mean, there's just lots of ways in which my thinking has changed over time.
And not a lot of it has been because people have cornered me and breathed heavily into my face with breath smelling of garlic and bottomless rationality.
A lot of it has been seeds planted.
And of course, seeing the effects of my effects in the world and what's working and what Doesn't.
So with regards to this woman, if it's a positive and curious conversation, fantastic, you know, then share your guts out, so to speak.
But if she's defensive, then having one tiny word in without pursuing it usually will get through someone's defenses a lot more than a frontal assault, right?
Yes.
So, planting seeds.
You know, I wish we were big enough for a frontal assault on irrationality, but I'm afraid, given our scarcity and sparsity, we still, I think, are in the planting seeds phase.
That makes sense.
Thank you.
I mean, you're right.
You're right that she should not hit her children, and the evidence is clear and so on.
But we have to woo more than we can order, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's one of the things I'm confident going into this conversation is I don't think she'll blow it off.
She has a personality where she's always very direct.
One of the reasons why I'm still working with her.
Good.
Nonetheless.
Well, do give us a chance to let us know how it goes.
I certainly will.
From her fetus, I would like to step into her fetus area and say, thanks.
You know, that's a really...
A very kind and great thing that you're doing to even take this on and consider it.
Thank you.
And also, Nathan, I'll just point out, too, a lot of people ask about parenting book recommendations.
It may not be the worst idea for a copy of Parent Effectiveness Training by Thomas Gordon or The Primordial Violence by Murray Strauss to just wind up on her desk with a note or something at one point.
You never know.
That kind of seed planting sure is helpful at times.
That's a good idea.
I'll take note of those right now.
Alright.
Well, thank you very much and let us know how it goes.
That's it, Mike.
That's it for our callers tonight.
Did we actually get through a show in about two hours?
We did.
Son of a bitch.
Four callers, two hours.
Steph, you didn't go like 90 minutes with the first caller.
What's wrong with you?
I don't know.
I was on a roll, but the roll ended.
The roll is just like a snowball.
Except there's no bottom to the mountain.
It's all mountain all the way down.
Well, thanks, everyone, and thanks, Mike, for setting up great callers.
Thanks to the callers.
Thanks to you, the listeners.
Thanks to the donors and supporters and sharers of this show.
If you can support us, hugely grateful.
Absolutely necessary.
You can buy some peaceful parenting in the world for not much a month at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And if you don't have any money, please don't send us your last $4.
Please, God.
Just, you know, share the videos if you can and all that.
So I really appreciate everyone's time and attention tonight.