April 2, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:04:21
2942 The Chains of Racial Identity - Call In Show - April 1st, 2015
As a mixed-race, American man, and I am deeply concerned about the increasing racial tension in America. Worse, I know that I am - at least, incrementally - part of the problem. I have experienced both white privilege and black disadvantage, white pride and black shame. In certain circumstances, I have even felt black privilege and white disadvantage, black pride and white shame. I believe that racial identity is a fiction to some degree; However, from a practical standpoint, I do not believe that human beings can completely overcome the instinct to stereotype others based on their physical features. How can I both humbly and proudly carry all the pieces of my real identity, racial pieces included? | Given the libertarian understanding of fiat currency and the banking system - what is the ethical approach to debt – such as long term mortgages?
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Wednesday night in the city.
That time again for us to share our deepest thoughts, fears, hopes and dreams on the Free Domain Radio call-in show.
Thanks to the callers.
It is April 1st today and I guess every year we get messages saying, hey, was that last video you put on April Fools?
No, no, just the Stefan's Fools.
But no, I once or twice I have done Practical jokes.
Oh boy, I was young.
So when I was working up north, there was a guy, he and I had a sort of joshing, joking relationship.
This is when I worked as a gold pan or a prospector and stuff.
And we got, there were a couple of stuffed wolves in the basement of this large we were staying at.
And there were some guys who were up there hunting for a bear.
With crossbows and feral dogs.
Just random stuff that people do.
And we got a tape recording of the dogs growling and then when he was in the shower, we put the wolves right outside his shower and then hit the tape, hit the playback of the dogs growling.
And that was, I guess, the last practical joke I played when I was, I don't know, 19 or something like that.
And it's mostly just because I'm trying to de-dick myself over time.
Uh, because, um, the practical jokes is, is, it, it relies on trust.
Uh, it relies on vulnerability and it's a power grab and it's, you know, kind of cruel.
Like, you know, those funniest videos where it's like, Hey, let's wake up the sleeping guy with firecrackers.
It's like, that's just, that's just mean.
I mean, it's just like, let's taser.
So I mean, it just, it's just mean.
And, um, so I don't, uh, I don't go in for that kind of stuff.
I'm not going to do any videos where it's like, I've decided to run for office and here's my platform and here's the website and here's the pack and all that kind of stuff.
No, because it's just not how I think a trust relationship is supposed to go.
And if there's one thing this show relies on, two things this show relies on, three things this show relies on, me showing up and your donations, freedomainradio.com slash donate, And a trust relationship.
So no, I'm not going to blow that away for a couple of cheek giggles, mostly at other people's expense.
All right, Mike, who do we have?
All right.
Well, Sam is up first today.
And Sam wrote in.
It's a bit long, but I'm going to read the whole thing.
His letter said, I'm a 35-year-old single, mixed-race American man, and I am deeply concerned about the increasing racial tension in America.
Worse, I know that I am at least incrementally part of the problem.
These days, I am not so solid on my own racial identity.
I like to think of that confusion as a good thing that has resulted from a developing ego that is more focused on its broader identity as a professional, a friend, a thinker, and a striver.
However, the facts on the ground are these.
Genetically speaking, I am a mix of white, black, and Native American, and I feel a strong sense of identity with both my European and African heritage.
I am somewhat curious about my Native American heritage, but less so, as this part of my heritage is only genetic without much of a cultural connection.
So focusing on the African and European aspects of my genetic and cultural heritage, I will say that I've always found myself in an odd spot.
I feel I have experienced both white privilege and black disadvantage, white pride and black shame.
In certain circumstances, I have even felt black privilege and white disadvantage, black pride and white shame.
My question for Mr.
Molyneux is this.
I believe that racial identity is a fiction to some degree.
However, from a practical standpoint, I do not believe that human beings can completely overcome the instinct to stereotype others based on their physical features.
So I know that I have, incrementally, contributed to the racial unrest in this country by not accepting this reality and living as a malcontent.
Instead of accepting the reality that everyone is, at least, somewhat racist and reckoning with this fact.
I have spent years of my life caught up in the silly notion that I deserve a better reality, a reality where racial biases do not exist.
In other words, while I would be foolish not to acknowledge that my racial identity, or lack thereof, has been a factor in my life's outcomes, I also know that I have spent far too much time fixated on this instead of working within the total reality of my life, racial realities included.
Stefan, I know you have lived your whole life as a white male, but I wonder if philosophy has an answer.
How can I move past the male contentness and work happily within all the limitations of my real life?
How can I both humbly and proudly carry all the pieces of my real identity, racial pieces included?
Wow, that's a great letter.
And it's a very important topic.
And so I appreciate you bringing it up.
Thank you.
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Now, is there anything you wanted to add to what you wrote in?
I'm going to say no for now and let you just ask me questions because I feel like it was kind of a long-winded introduction.
No, listen, nothing that's honest can be long-winded.
Well, let's see.
What would I add?
Well, at the moment, I am living in a mostly white community, which is fine for the most part.
I have a decent job.
I'm single, although I think I can say without much of an ego that I'm a physically attractive man by almost anybody's standards.
I feel like my racial identity...
Wait, do we have a Skype photo here?
We do.
Sunglasses.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah, that's pretty hot.
Okay.
Confirmed.
Confirmed.
Right.
And I just want to say that, like, when I go over to my mind, I know you're an empiricist.
I feel like the race, at least some sort of identity stuff is getting in my way.
And I know that I'm an...
...tributed all the race identity.
However, that's a thing.
And I don't want to say I'm struggling with it, but it's kind of in the question.
It's like malcontentedness for me.
And actually...
I want to borrow from a video I recently watched from you where you talk about slavery and how it creates a situation between master and slave where the master tells you to do it.
You don't really have freedom, but you have freedom to resist.
You're talking about procrastination using this.
I feel like I experienced some of this because I feel like basically I'm a born Democrat.
I'm a natural-born liberal.
I'm joking here, but you know what I mean?
How race identity plays so much into politics.
Oh, so because you have other race elements, people assume your politics, right?
Well, actually, what I was meaning is, as I'm a natural-born Democrat, is it's assumed that I'm going to be a Democrat when I was first born, and I was sort of indoctrinated into that.
And I sort of bought into the idea of the welfare state and blah, blah, blah for most of my life.
And it's been a pretty rude awakening.
Some of it was happening before I started listening to your podcast, which has only been a month and a half.
And I've consumed some other stuff online, some videos and such.
So by the way, I feel like I've done about 60 videos.
So I owe you 30 bucks, which I'm going to get to you.
Anyway, yeah, so basically I feel like I've groomed as a Democrat to be part of that whole machine, to be part of that whole welfare state thing because of my race.
I'm darker skin because I have darker ethnicity.
And there's a lot of anger, honestly, in me because I don't believe in it anymore.
I feel like I've been had.
I can think of affirmative action programs, things of this nature, and how they've affected my life.
I don't think it's overall in a positive way.
I don't think it's played well for my self-esteem.
And I've just been listening to some of the stuff you've been teaching about how, what do you say, that welfare state actually serves to isolate people?
And so I'm increasingly concerned with that.
So obviously welfare, the idea of the welfare state and as it relates to minorities is a big part of what's on my mind and what I'm thinking about here.
So let me just, Sam, just before we get in, so you brought up sort of how you were groomed.
That's kind of a sinister phrase because it has this sort of pedophilia air to it.
You know, groomed.
Come here, kid.
Remember, strangers have the best candy and inside every windowless van is a paradise.
But what does that mean when you say that with regards to sort of welfare state of government programs, you were groomed?
What attitudes were there present when you were growing up about these institutions?
That was the way it was supposed to be.
The underprivileged, which I strongly suggest that minorities are supposed to be on some kind of government dole.
We're supposed to have our affirmative action.
We're supposed to have preferential treatment in hiring practices, acceptance in- What's the...
Yeah, okay, so supposed to, but what's the...
Is there a rationale that's put forward about that?
Like, why?
Is it like, you know, white people owe us because of historical injustice against minorities?
Yeah, white people, because of historical injustices, sure.
And then the other piece is that the idea that it's what's best for everyone in the end.
Because if you sort of like, you know, bring up minority groups so that everyone's just even-steven across the board, then everyone's going to benefit.
There'll be less tension in the world and so on and so forth.
So it's sort of like a shakedown.
Like, hey, nice white society you got going on here.
It'd be a real shame if we got unhappy with it.
So perhaps you'd like to give us some money.
I've come to see it that way.
I've come to see it that way.
It's been good pain.
Well, needful pain, anyway.
To sort of, I guess, really...
Because for me, I can feel the change on a body level to the way I was before and...
The way I think now.
Because I don't believe any of that anymore.
I'm sort of seeing the light as a word about, you know, statism and, you know, the first aggression principle and this.
But anyway, I just, you know...
So I'm admitting to being a malcontent or having a history of that.
And so that's sort of what I am.
Sorry to interrupt, just before we get to that.
I've always been curious about this, and I've talked about this with some other people, but I'd really like to get your thoughts on this or what you've experienced.
What is the view of white societies from minority communities?
I mean, I know that's a big question.
Sorry, Stephen.
I lost you for a few seconds.
Could you repeat the entire thing?
What is the view of white societies from within the minority communities?
I'm going to be honest.
It's easier because we're talking through the phone.
I think there's a view of there's a view of admiration and some jealousy.
I mean, you know, as a realist, I think I am, it's hard not to admire the overall white society in terms of, you know, clearly there's a greater sense of community there.
I mean, obviously there's any other counter-examples, and those are going to be mostly anecdotal.
But I think that overall, I think that And who's to know why?
There's a sense of admiration.
There's a sense of jealousy.
There's a sense of fear.
Because...
How are these people going to react to me?
If something about the way I look or the way I sound or the way I walk and talk is offensive just based on me being me?
It's important to have a sense of self-esteem as an individual minority.
However, you've got to be honest with yourself and say, okay, so there's a framework here where You're dealing with a race that's overall more powerful than yours is, and how do I deal with that peacefully and with acceptance?
Maybe we can't go back in time and change everything.
To me, I can't speak for everybody, but I feel that way.
I've heard people say things that allude to that.
You see things said vaguely in the media where it's alluding to this.
And so then I guess...
Is this making sense to you, sir?
No, it is.
It is.
I'm just...
I mean, white society has done some amazing and horrifying things.
I mean, not much for the middle ground, really.
It's like, hey, let's wire together the entire planet using technology.
And look, nuclear weapons.
It's like, ah!
You know, like the market side and the artistic and creative side of white society, pretty unmatched, I think, by other cultures throughout history.
But boy, you know, the unbelievable slaughterhouse of the 20th century, particularly in Western Europe, is...
When you say white people, do you include Jewish people in your...
Well, that's a good question.
I mean, I know some Jewish people, I think it was Mike Wallace who was asked, are you white?
He's like, no, I'm not white, I'm Jewish.
So I don't know.
I mean, the question of Judaism as a religion or ethnicity or a culture seems to be one of these whirly gig revolving doors of – Well, you can obviously see that there's a – if we're trying to look at it from a genetic framework, then it gets to be pretty easy to pair Jewish people with the rest of Caucasians if you insist on that.
I'm just curious because just to get a grasp on what your overall reckoning of what it means to be what it might be – Yeah, I mean, I would say that, obviously, Jews in Western Europe, and there's a, you know, of course, multi-millennial history of Jews in Western Europe...
I would assume that they're part of Western European culture.
Of course, they have their own fragmentation, but there's so much fragmentation as well.
People look at white culture as the whites, but that's as crazy as me looking at black culture around the world and saying, the blacks.
I think there's quite a lot of difference in the black cultures.
And I mean, if there was sort of one unified white culture, it's sort of hard to understand why there was this kind of giant slaughterhouse of world wars of whites mostly murdering each other.
I mean, you know, in my family, half British Irish and half German, the two sides of the families were at war for a good portion of the 20th century.
So it's hard to sort of get that in some sort of unified context within my own mind, you know, you know.
But I was just curious.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, it seems like the average white man has a better philosophical understanding as it relates to societal factors than the average black man.
And I remember hearing you say something about...
You hate culture.
You love philosophy.
Philosophy is to culture.
Something is to something.
I think that...
Science to superstition.
Yes, yes, yes.
I think that maybe some of the admiration that the black so-called race and other races feel towards the white race has to do with that.
And of course, culture then becomes the perception, at least, that there's a bit stronger philosophy governing white society.
And then so culture becomes, what I want to say, a weight against that.
And I think that, you know, as I'm sure white people experience, culture is a weight against their own advancement.
So, yeah, I mean, the weight of...
You know, it's hard to say white, because, I mean, I sort of say Western European, as I've sort of talked about the Freedom Club, of which there are lots of non-whites who've contributed magnificently.
So I'm just going to say European to be a little bit more inclusive of others.
But for me, the weight of European achievements...
For somebody who's as intellectually ambitious as I am and who, when I was younger, was artistically ambitious as a playwright and an actor and a novelist, the weight of Western European achievements is intimidating.
You know, when you want to be a writer, I mean, I'm the kind of guy, like, if I'm going to do something, I want to do it.
I want to be the best.
I want to be the best.
I mean, not like I'm happy to be third best in the world.
I want to be the best.
I just, I mean, you're certainly not going to get it if you don't aim for it.
And aiming for it sure as hell doesn't mean you're going to get it.
But, you know, you want to be, I want to be the best.
Now, if you grow up in England...
You know, you've got some pretty challenging writing to beat if you want to be the best writer.
You've got your Dickens and your Shakespeare's and so on.
And so, you know, when I was like, you know, if I'm going to be a writer, man, I'm going to aim for the top, you know, the best writer.
And that, the intimidation of those achievements, I mean, if you want to be a great composer, then you've got some pretty intimidating company to try and beat.
And so for me, the weight of European achievements...
Was intimidating as hell.
And that's nothing to say of what happened when I decided to turn my attentions to philosophy.
And art for me was a way of getting philosophy out.
So philosophy was underlying the art from the beginning.
And of course in philosophy the European tradition is...
Truly awe-inspiring.
And the idea of saying, well, I want to be the best in that field is crazy.
I mean, it's like madness.
So for me, that weight of achievement and, of course, the...
The free market developed the technology and the wealth which allowed the sinister side of Europeans to go truly malevolent, right?
I mean, to create a state and weaponry and military that was, you know, damn close at some points to wiping out the entire planet.
So for me, looking at the achievements of Western Europe and wanting to match myself to sort of climb the highest spire of ambition I could find...
And hopefully find some place in those constellations.
That was really intimidating.
And that's really spurred me on in whatever it was that I was...
Trying to achieve.
Wanted to be the best.
Wanted to be the best.
I mean, I don't know how actors do it who are just, you know, like I get a couple of roles on TV shows from time to time.
If you can't be Brando, don't bother.
Now, that's not true for everyone and that shouldn't be true for everyone.
It's just my particular approach to things.
I just do the best when I aim the highest.
And what's, I guess, always been sort of a little bit confusing to me is when other races or cultures come into contact with that And I don't just mean like, but really like live among it and so on, these sort of fruits of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, all that kind of stuff.
Why not say, damn, these guys set the bar pretty high for achievement, so that's going to be a spur to my ambition.
It seems really kind of sad to me to see sort of Western European achievements and say...
Welfare state.
That's what I'm going to get out of it, is the welfare state.
Like, why not get out of it at this incredible spur to, like, you think white people are good, let's do even better.
Right, yeah, and well, it's an ego thing, right?
I mean, because, you know, you can't accept your, how that contact that you talked about, how that changes your ego and your identity.
I mean, what I was kind of thinking of when I wrote my email of somebody who's experienced, like, Black privilege and white privilege.
I was kind of like a superstar athlete in high school, and I was just rolling over all these skinny white kids in wrestling.
I found that it was obviously something that's noticed in my athletic prowess, and certainly any intelligent person could connect it to my race, but What I experienced was some people, some white people were put out by it, and some white people did have that attitude basically you're talking about.
It's like, this guy's got some musculature that I wasn't born with, but I'm going to work out with him.
Wait, sorry.
Do you mean, and I'm no expert in this area, but do you mean sort of from the black side of your heritage, sort of the narrower hips, faster, fire muscles, denser bones, that kind of stuff?
Yeah, well, I've come to accept the idea that slavery is a genetic crucible that primed African Americans for the athletic prowess that they enjoy today, dominating the major sports and so on and so forth.
So to me, I guess that's an example of black privilege, a born privilege of Having a musculature that gave me advantage in terms of speed and strength over a great deal of my white people that I was competing against in wrestling in high school and part of college.
But see, now that...
The thing is...
Another thing I want to say here is I totally get what you're saying.
It's like, okay, so in the face of Western European achievement, why cop an attitude?
Why not say, okay, why not be inspired by it?
I think there's something in black culture largely that says that that is geared toward just denying it altogether, which is...
Wait, sorry, denying their achievements?
Denying their achievements.
Denying, you know, what it...
What it says, you know, denying what it says, denying your own admiration, you know, and...
Well, it doesn't necessarily mean admiration for me at all.
I mean, it can be annoyance that someone's, that there's sort of this high bar somewhere.
I mean, I think white people to some degree have this relationship with the groups that do better than white people.
I mean, to take that sort of Christian, Western European thing...
So, for instance, of course, in engineering school, whites have a challenge competing with the Asians, right?
Because the Asians are really good, it seems, at that kind of stuff.
But, of course, Asians have a higher per capita income than whites.
And then standing, you know, almost monolithic in their capacity to dominate a variety of intellectual and artistic and business endeavors or fields are the Jews, particularly the Ashkenazi Jews.
You know, who have this like crazy average IQ of like 122, 124 or something like that.
And the degree to which Jews kick butt around the world in terms of their achievements is to me one of these things is like, well, that's a really high, it's a higher bar.
I mean, it's not like the whites, Western European Christian whites are at the top of the heap.
You know, they're not.
And so looking at the capacities and abilities and incomes and achievements of other races, other cultures, you know, there's lots of places for white people to look up and say, okay, there's, you know, what I love about the Jews is the degree to which they talk about or embody.
What human potential can look like.
And I find that a significant spur to ambition.
And, you know, what one man can do, another man can do, to some degree.
And so I like it when the bar gets higher, although it's admiration and sometimes it's annoying.
Oh, right.
Yeah, I mean, it can rub your ego.
I think, okay, so it seems like kind of Maybe that's part of the answer to my question.
I don't know what word you use.
The word that keeps coming to my mind is admire others for their achievements.
Admire other races for their achievements.
Jews, white people, Asians, and be inspired by that or get competitive, get more serious.
How about For me, somebody who has such a loose racial identity, is that a privilege?
I mean, I don't even know anymore.
Well, let's get to that in a sec.
And I'm sort of consciously bookmarking that.
But Sam, do you think, because, you know, why not go full volatile here?
I mean, because it seems to me that if you look at a group that has achieved both great and terrible things...
Then, of course, you want to try and achieve the great things and avoid the terrible things, which is, do the good and avoid the bad.
That's sort of the basic tagline of the show.
But when a group looks at, let's just say, I don't know, Hispanics look at whites or whatever, and if part of the approach, and we're generalizing ridiculously here, but if part of the approach is You know, those colonial bastards, they owe us, let's get welfare or whatever, right?
Then, is there not an implicit downgrading of one's own culture in that?
Yeah.
Isn't there something which says, well, we can't possibly do that?
Absolutely.
And so the best we can hope for is to be manipulative and parasitical.
And again, that's not even remotely all or even the majority, but there's some portion of it.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I can't remember for the life of me who it was, but they were talking about how liberals have a philosophy, basically, and I think it's the work he used, and But it's basically the same thing.
There's a philosophy behind what liberals do, but it's unspoken.
And he, you know, I'm not a Republican, but this is his claim.
He claimed that Republicans have a philosophy, and it's a spoken philosophy.
So, you know, I think, I can't speak for him, but he might say that this is the, that that's the unspoken philosophy, the Democratic way of being.
Like, we have to accept, without ever talking about it, oh, you know, the personal degradation, racial degradation by the fact that, by idea that we've gotten my handouts in my life.
And it just, it doesn't feel good.
It doesn't, this is, you know, brought to my attention, well, it wasn't brought to my attention for the first time, because I'm sure I thought of it, but in my early days of college, a white person, a very close weight friend of mine, basically brought up the same, the same issue that you're taking with it, and it made my stomach churn, because I realized I knew it, and I thought of it before, but I didn't realize how obvious it was to everybody else, and I kind of sort of felt embarrassed.
So thank you for bringing that.
Well, there's no reason for you to feel embarrassed, I mean, because you don't want any sort of collective, you don't want to take any burdens of a collective identity, because you're an individual and all that.
But, I mean, it's something that's bothered me, and I've mentioned it on the show before, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
But it always bothers me when there's unconscious or implicit higher standards for whites than there are for non-whites.
Yeah.
And that really bothers me.
I'll just give you an example of one.
So whites are supposed to be not racist at all.
And even a whiff of racism among a white person, this howling mob of political correctness comes out and nails the scalp to a tree or whatever, right?
And okay, let's say, I think that's kind of a hysterical standard, but let's say that's the standard, right?
In other words, so whites have had, according to the general narrative, whites have had this history of oppressing other races and other cultures and being racist and dominant and all this kind of stuff.
And then, I think around, you know, midnight on June 1st, 1964, that was supposed to be Done.
Over with.
Whites now must no longer be racist in any way, shape, or form.
They're done.
It's 100%.
The past is cut off.
There's no continuity in history.
All the patriarchy, all the exploitation, all the racism, gone, done, over, finished, the end.
Your time ran out.
But then why is it only white people?
There's this implicit racism in that because nobody says, well, this should be true for all of us.
The history should be gone and done with, and it should all be over.
Because the blacks will say, and not all, but some blacks will say when dysfunction within the community, What do they say?
You know, it's the two sides of the same evil coin, which is slavery and racism.
Why are we doing bad as a community?
Slavery and racism.
Slavery and racism.
So blacks, for blacks, the momentum of history is an excuse.
They're allowed to sort of coast to some degree downhill on this momentum of history.
But whites are not allowed to have any momentum of history because they just have this amazing ability to just cut off history and remake themselves completely anew.
Whereas blacks...
Continue to be pulled under by the racism and slavery and weight of history arguments and all that kind of stuff.
But isn't that having lower standards for blacks than it is for whites?
If whites are supposed to be completely over history and as if it never happened, but you'd never accept that for blacks, there's kind of implicit racism in that against the blacks.
Well, I think if we're going to, you know, improve the racial situation in America, in North America...
I think that one of the things you need is to have compassion and understanding for where people's racist attitudes are coming from.
It's hard to do, but it's...
So, yeah, so I don't expect, you know, every, like, racial attitude or thought, you know, to just go away for white people.
That's ridiculous.
I mean, it's part of, you know, I just feel like, you know, racism is just a piece of xenophobia, and xenophobia is probably in our DNA, I think.
And so...
Sorry, do you mean just, like, tell me what you mean by racism, because, you know...
Okay, so when I use the word racism, I try to restrict it to somebody is not necessarily in direct competition with me for advancement in this world, but they're still opposing my advancement because of my race.
When I use the word racism, I try to restrict it to that.
Okay, so let me just make sure I understand this.
If you and I are up for the same job, I don't want you to get the job, but not because you're not.
Let's say you and I are not up for the same job.
If we're not up for the same job, I don't want you to get this job because I just dislike the fact that you have this mixed race or you're a different race or whatever, right?
Right.
And maybe you work in the same office, but you're not even on the same advancement track.
You're in a different field or whatever, but you still don't like seeing me move forward because of my racial identity or how you perceive my racial identity.
Well, okay, but let me ask you this.
And so when I hear definitions of racism, I mean, again, I've never denied that racism exists and so on.
But...
When I hear definitions of racism, I always try and figure out if there's even a remotely rational basis for anxiety around a particular topic.
Right?
And if there isn't, then it's racism.
And if there is, it may still be racism, but it may also be tinged with something else, right?
So I think there's a fairly...
Because minorities have a stronger sense of racial identity and racial collectivism than the majority does.
Do you think that's a fair thing to say?
Yeah, I think I see that.
So I'm just trying to imagine how some guy...
I don't think I would feel this way.
In fact, I know I wouldn't.
But I'm trying to think of some guy, like some white guy, and there's a management position opening up.
And there's a black guy who's going up against the white guy.
Do you think the white guy might be concerned that if the black guy...
Becomes the boss, that the black guy out of racial solidarity might be more predisposed to hiring other blacks?
Yeah, I could see that.
And so now my definition of racism, I can see, isn't as tidy as it was.
I understand.
I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong.
I'm just saying that that's a remotely rational reason as to why somebody might be concerned about that.
Now, the black guy might be concerned about that with the white guy.
If the white guy is very pro-white and anti-minority, then the black guy obviously would not want the white guy to get into the boss's chair because he would fear the same thing from the white guy.
Okay, so let's say that you have a sense of who this African-American person is and he's not that way, and you search your own feelings.
You really just don't want him to have the job because it rubs your ego to...
Because he's black.
Because he's black and he's in charge.
Yeah, I think that would be pretty clear racism then.
If it just comes down to everything else being equal but because he's black.
Then, yeah, I think that would definitely be pretty clear racism.
And you raised a very important point, for sure.
I mean, I'm just...
Because racism has become one of these airstrikes that is called in against people.
And I'm always trying to find, okay, is there some reason, right?
So, like, some people feel concerned around black youths.
And the people who feel the most concerns around black youths are other blacks, right?
Because I think it was Jesse Jackson who said, it's tragic that after 20 years...
Of working in the field, if I hear footsteps around me at night, I turn around and it's not a black, a group of black youths, I'm relieved, right?
And so feeling anxiety, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it's something like the 3% of the American population is black males, 15 to 36, and they commit like out of 3% of the population, they're doing 33% of the crimes, right?
And so, sort of anxiety around black youths is not, it may be racism.
I mean, certainly, if it's a bunch of black youths playing Dungeons and Dragons, then yes, if you feel anxious around.
I mean, assuming they're not doing it live, right, with figurines and dice.
Or if they're, you know, a fear of black youths who are, I don't know, performing Tai Chi in the park.
Then that would be racist.
So I'm always, again, this doesn't excuse and it doesn't eliminate the racism that exists, but I think we also not, there's such a rush to judgment and jumping to conclusions of, aha, racism.
Well, I totally agree.
The word racism has become a shotgun blast because you're trying to hit as much as you can.
No two people mean the same thing When people accuse me of being racist, my rebuttal these days when I'm not being racist is I'm discussing a race-related topic.
And so I'll use that to delineate between what's become my operational definition of racism and when I'm talking about race because for whatever reason I want to, but without a sense of...
Because you'll never hear me saying, oh, those Chinese don't deserve...
You know, this, that, and the third because they're, you know, that shape of their eyes or whatever.
I'm not that kind, but yeah.
And, of course, the challenge with racism as well and The degree to which this is all clear is obviously still up in the air.
I think one of the challenges with racism as well is fundamentally the question, can one say anything in general about other groups?
Right.
And I think it's a fascinating question.
Now, can one say anything in general about other groups?
Biologically, of course we can, right?
I mean, absolutely.
Asians tend to be shorter, and there's a variety of other things that could be said.
But we can say things in general around other groups.
And saying things in general around other groups...
Doesn't matter and is irrelevant when evaluating individuals, right?
So yeah, Asian guys are shorter, but I certainly can't tell for sure that the next Asian guy I meet is going to be shorter.
He could be some towering giant, right?
Right, right.
And we're having a race-related discussion right now, and this is what some people would call racist.
They'd find a way to construe it as racist.
Oh, because we're discussing race in any way, shape, or form, that must be racist.
Well, the argument that race is a social construct, in other words, there's absolutely zero difference between any of the races except for what exists in our paranoid and feverish and xenophobic imaginations, I don't believe is true.
Fundamentally.
And I think that, like, for instance, if you were a doctor and you treated all of your patients the same regardless of their race, you would probably be sued for malpractice because there are particular biological differences between the races.
And so I don't think you can just say, well, race is merely...
And some people have said this and some people who are into genetics have said this.
And so I get all of that.
And I'm simply saying my opinion.
I'm not a geneticist.
But from what I've read, there are some particular differences between the races.
And there are, I think about, I don't know them obviously off the top of my head, 50 or 60 various different markers that delineate the races.
Now, we are, of course, one species.
Right.
We're a lot closer than the sort of dogs in terms of similarities and we all interbreed and all that.
But there are genetic differences.
And can we say that that results in us being able to say that there are general characteristics of races?
I think the fascinating thing is I'd really...
If we didn't live in a government-centered society, my question is, who would even really care about general differences?
Now, it could be possible that insurance companies might care for specific medical issues.
Some groups would be more prone to various different types of ailments and illnesses and so on.
But I wonder, like, if we didn't live in a government-centered society, if we lived in a truly free or an anarchic society, Who would really care about making general statements about various groups?
I mean, you would deal with the individuals that you met.
And that would be what you would do.
And I just, I wonder the degree to which, like, at the moment, there's this thing going on in Indiana.
It's a mild segue, but I think it sort of complements.
And then I'll shut up and let you talk about the stuff that means something to you, means more to you.
But in Indiana, there's this law that was simply proposed recently, which basically is trying to say that if you're a Christian, you can't be compelled to provide services to people whose lifestyle you consider offensive or against your beliefs or whatever.
So there's a famous case of a woman who's a baker and a gay couple asked her to bake a cake.
For them and she refused and she was brought up in all these charges and for every complaint she gets a $2,000 fine so a lot of gay lobby groups phoned in all these complaints and the bills just piled up and all that and it's I think it's a terrible situation.
Of course, you know, if you're a photographer and you're a Christian photographer, she should be free to not associate with who she wants to not associate with.
I mean, of course, right?
I mean, it's so tragic that the gay lobby and this, of course, has nothing to do with...
Why would you want to go there if you're gay and they have that attitude?
That's why as an African American, I'll be damned if I understand why African Americans want to force their way into like golf clubs where they're, you know, country clubs where they're not wanted.
Why would you want to be there?
Isn't it degrading yourself?
But I'm sorry.
Yeah.
But I mean, the only reason that this is even an issue is because we live in a government society.
And the only reason that this law, as far as I understand it, the only reason why this law really exists is because of all these anti-discrimination measures.
And I don't believe that a doctor...
Who is morally opposed to birth control should be forced to provide birth control or prescribe birth control.
I mean, I just think there's no point having ethics if you're not allowed to follow them and you're not initiating force against others and so on and people who want birth control can just go to a different doctor.
So there is this weird thing around why are we so...
I think it's fair to say in America, obsessed by race.
And I think a lot of it has to do with simply the fact that everyone's trying to grab the power of the state.
I view race in America as a modern form of religious warfare.
And religious warfare, when the government has the power To regulate beliefs, then everybody with beliefs attempts to gain control of the state.
When the state has the power to grant favors and withdraw favors or impose penalties, which is the tax and redistributionist system, on one belief set versus another belief set, one group versus another group, then just like the religious warfare that happened in England prior to the end of the Reformation, You had all of these religious groups trying to gain power over the state in order to impose their vision on everyone else.
And I view, because the state has so much power to regulate, to control, to bribe, to provide advantages to, I view modern race relations in America merely as a form of religious civil war, very analogous in many ways to what happened in Europe a couple hundred years ago.
Well, you know, I'm starting to come around to the viewpoint that it is sort of like racial division is being played up in order for liberals, Democrats to secure...
African-American votes, minority votes.
I'm simply too old.
I'm a grown-ass man, and I know better than to believe that there's this group of people that are just so concerned about my well-being because I'm a minority, because of course they're not.
They're concerned about themselves.
That's the way people are.
They're concerned that if they're not concerned about you, they're going to be called racist.
They're going to be called racist.
They're not going to get my vote.
Preemptive strike.
Well, one of the things...
Sorry, let me just go on in a sec.
I just wanted to mention, so this is genetically conditioned characteristics that vary between major racial groups.
Body size and proportions.
Cranial size and shape.
Pigmentation, obviously, of the hair, skin, and eyes.
Hair form and distribution.
Number of vertebrae.
Did you know that the number of vertebrae differentiates between the races?
Fingerprints, bone density, basic metabolic rate, sweating, consistency of earwax, age of eruption of the permanent teeth, fissural patterns on the surface.
It sounds like I'm auditioning for bones or something.
Fissural patterns on the surfaces of the teeth, blood groups, chronic diseases, frequency of twinning.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, that's right.
Because in the black communities, there are a much greater frequency of there being twins, and it's less so in the Caucasian community and extremely rare in the Asian community.
Male to female birth ratios are different between the race's visual and auditory acuity.
Proportion of colorblindness is different between the races.
Length of gestation period, physical maturity at birth, they sort of go on and on.
So those can't all be social constructs that are results of prejudice in society.
Sorry, Sam, I interrupted you.
Go ahead.
Well, I like that you're an empiricist, but to me, it's all common sense.
I mean, when I look at a family, just another family, they may be black, they may be whatever, there's characteristics that, oh, that family's just this way, that family's that way.
They smile a lot, they laugh a lot.
Or maybe they're more quiet.
They all look a certain way.
If I can see that within one family unit, I mean, what's a race other than a super family?
I feel like it's always been common sense to me, but any time I would stack two bricks of common sense about race...
Somebody would, some power would come in, my parents, whoever, and sort of sweep that away.
You know, you can't think this.
You can't know this.
Blah, blah, blah.
Because that gets in the way of our agenda of, you know, your marching orders to be a Democrat.
You're supposed to believe in the welfare state.
We need this shit, you know?
We want you to grow up and make that.
I guess that's how I experienced it.
One of the things that really changed my mind about a lot of things was, I guess you probably know who Geraldine Ferraro is.
Yeah.
Was she a Latino politician in the States?
No.
She may be Latin, but she's white in appearance, and she was...
I'm guessing she's probably Italian, but she was...
Oh, yeah.
Ferraro.
Yeah.
I think that's...
I meant Latin like ancient Latin.
No, I'm kidding.
Go ahead.
So she ran for vice president under Mondale and lost.
Now, Barack Obama has been a terribly weak president.
That's another story.
But when Barack Obama was running for election, it was starting to become more and more clear that he was going to be a real challenge to Hillary Clinton.
She came in with the comment that he was lucky that He's black.
Now, maybe that's true, but surely somebody like Ferraro knows that the black vote has been instrumental for every Democratic president since Kennedy.
So the idea that—that's where, to me, that's somebody in the Democrat establishment really showing their stripes, really showing what they're— You know, what they really feel, what they really believe.
Because basically, she's basically saying, we resent you for not getting in line, giving us your votes, because we decided we wanted to have a woman president just go around.
And not saying that there wouldn't be many great things about having a female president.
I waited anxiously.
And I wait having a strong black president, which we didn't get this time.
But...
You see what I'm saying there?
It starts to become...
When you really listen to what people are saying and you start to see what's really motivating, this is ridiculous.
How did we...
We're being used.
Stephen A. Smith, a famous black sports commentator in the United States, made this simple argument.
It's like, you know, black people should shop around.
Talk to Republicans.
See about what they can do for specific concerns within the black community.
Don't be owned by one party under the assumption that they're representing your best interests.
Like, they just think you're neat and they just care about you.
It's ridiculous.
Oh, yeah.
No, anybody who thinks that politicians care about them rather than their votes is, you know, is like a woman with giant tits and a low cap top thinking that all the attention she gets is for her personality.
No, and I mean, the Democrats have made in the US have made like some unbelievable comments about race and particularly about Obama.
I mean, didn't Biden say of Obama that he's good because he's articulate and clean?
I mean, that's astounding.
And also, so this is a reported former U.S. President Bill Clinton had taken a racial jibe at Barack Obama in 2008 saying, this guy would have been carrying our bags, a report claimed recently.
Yeah.
Which is funny.
I mean, I can tell you.
Yeah.
He said to Ted Kennedy, he tried to convince the liberal to endorse his wife.
And there's one attributed to Clinton in the 2010 book.
There was a book called Game Change, and Clinton was supposed to have said about Barack Obama, a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.
Yeah.
And there's some truly astounding stuff.
Hard-working Americans euphemism that Hillary Clinton was constantly using.
It was, you know, Greg Giraldo.
Hello?
Yep.
Oh, you're still there.
I heard a click.
Somebody...
Okay.
Greg Giraldo had this great bit about hardworking Americans and how it was an obvious euphemism that just meant white people weren't going to vote for you.
Hardworking Americans...
Yeah, no, I think, honestly, you know, I prefer, you know, to some degree, open, racist, white men from the South, because Democrats, with their supposed egalitarian viewpoints, are much more likely to just act weird around you when you actually show up.
And that's something that I wanted to get into, because, I mean, not only are you a minority, of course, but you're I mean, you're a minority in a bunch of minorities, right?
Because of your racially mixed heritage.
I mean, so I just...
I was curious.
I mean, what's it like for you socially?
I mean, isn't that one of the challenges of being racially mixed is...
Where are your homies, so to speak?
Where do you sort of...
You know, I have...
So I live in this town.
I work in oil and gas.
And so this town is kind of just a work camp.
So it's just basically, you know, the people closest to you, whatever.
So my friends are the white people that live in my apartment complex just out of experience.
And I've had black friends.
I don't...
I remember, because I thought you might ask something like this, I remember now kind of what I wanted to say.
I don't feel like I necessarily had a strong sense of status or place at the table in either the white or the black race.
There's been a sense in me, and I'm perfectly willing to analyze this further as it might just be an excuse for me not...
Getting the most out of my life, but there's a feeling in me that That, God, if I were just white, I would have this much more.
Like, I would have that.
I would be more respected in this context.
Or if I were just, like, full-blooded black, I would be more respected in this context.
I have this cousin.
I love him.
He looks like the notorious B.I.G. But he is the king of his social context.
And he has this smoking-hot black chick that Who I would just love, you know, to even get a date with.
Well, I can't do it, you know, because he, you know, and he's talked about, you know, analyzing social dynamics and how he built himself up to that to have basically the queen of his sort of social context.
I feel like I don't want to say that's been denied me because that would be like defeatist, but maybe How is he the king of his social context?
Well, he got involved with his black fraternity at an early age, like the first year or two he was in college, and he started building a community around him.
A community in which he's not the elected leader, but he's seen as a leader.
He's an organizer in terms of the interests of that community, and he's seen as a strong, dignified, noble man.
And so he's reaping the rewards.
I don't feel like...
So he contributes a lot though, right?
Absolutely.
Everybody wants to be the alpha, but you get to be the alpha because you provide people value.
Oh, absolutely.
And he, you know, he, I admire him greatly.
He talked about how coming to understand the social dynamics and how, you know, you advance yourself in order to attract a female.
He said he understood that basically when he was a teenager.
I think I just caught up.
I read this chintzy book that was very helpful.
I read The Game.
Maybe you've heard of it.
Yeah, it's what signifiers or what markers women are looking for in a mate, right?
Right.
And it's written by this guy who is a pickup artist.
So I got kind of a very sleazy initiation slash, what I want to say, rude awakening into what it really took to achieve a mate.
Because these guys are just trying to sleep with every woman they could and kind of maybe played up some licentiousness in me.
But anyway, I forgot what my point was.
We were talking about sort of where you fit in.
And I don't mean to imply you could say everywhere.
It may be a completely inappropriate question, not sort of politically incorrect.
Well, in fairness, I knew a...
A dude who was almost my exact same racial makeup.
We weren't related, but people thought we were.
That's how much we looked alike.
And he seemed to have no issues in college.
So I feel like maybe it just wasn't a hang-up for him because he had his fill of...
I mean, I know that you're not into multiple partners, but it didn't seem to be a barrier for him in terms of whatever...
Racially identified woman he was after.
He was a gregarious guy.
Everybody liked him.
How much are we hung up on race?
You said, how much am I hung up on race?
How much is that getting in my way?
It's an interesting thing where if you say that I mean, it's easier said than done.
But if you say, I'm not going to focus on race, it would be really interesting to see how many other people would around you.
How do you mean?
If I'm saying this out loud or I'm saying it in my head?
No, just in your head.
So if I'm saying in my head, I'm not going to...
Like if you say, look, race is just not going to be part of my equation.
Like it's not going to be part of how I deal with the world.
Right.
And so the question is...
And it would be very interesting to see what would happen to the people around you.
I mean, if we just sort of take the assumption, let's just say for a moment, race is a social construct.
And if we were to say, okay, well, I'm going to...
Because honestly, this is how I don't really...
I think maybe once or twice where it seemed relevant, I've asked the race of a caller.
Okay.
And I, you know...
I found out sometimes afterwards this person who called in was this race or that race.
I don't see how it makes any difference.
So if you sort of live like race is not that important a topic, I wonder the degree to which...
I mean, this is Morgan Freeman, right?
I mean, Morgan Freeman 101, where he basically says, can we just stop talking about it?
Can we just...
Stop talking about it, and let's just say we're all part of the human race.
I think it would be really interesting to see what would happen if we live like there is no particular relevance to race.
Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, I watched your truth about race something, and where you're talking about how basically facts about the Gardner, Trayvon Martin, And one other case were sort of skewed and pieces were taken out of quotes and rearranged in a certain way.
And, you know, my own experience is I've seen people who've been able to navigate these kinds of things.
I don't know.
Maybe it's time.
Maybe I need to shut the fuck up.
I mean, maybe I need to stop fixating on it.
Well, I wonder, yeah, because...
I don't think we really know the extent of what race is doing in society because we're kind of obsessed by it.
Right.
It's gotten to the point where...
I remember having this conversation with a friend of mine when I was younger where the only way you can tell the race of a particular criminal is if it's not mentioned.
Like if there's some newspaper article, a group of youths, you know, or be on the lookout for this guy.
And it's like the only way you know what race is, if he's Asian, he's an Asian guy.
If he's white, there's a white guy.
If he's black, it's like you have to read between the lines, so to speak.
And I remember also being really surprised when I was a kid.
This is back when I was very young in the ways of race obsession.
But there was a...
One of these, we would go and see a kid's movie, and there was one of these government-sponsored ads, which was supposed to convince you to stay in school.
You know, stay in school, stay in school, stay in school.
Now, Sam, can you imagine, can you guess which, what was the race and gender of the kid who was supposedly about to drop out of school?
I don't know.
Black, maybe?
Or it could be any.
That's not what necessarily pops in my head, but just the way you ask the question.
No, because you've got to think politically correct, right?
It was, in fact, an Asian woman, like an Asian girl.
Now, I don't have the statistics off the top of my head, but I'm fairly convinced that of the I'm going to drop out of school group, I don't think that Asian girls are exactly overrepresented.
I don't think there's a huge problem in the Asian girl community that there's massive amounts of dropping out of school.
And so, again, it's this kind of weird inverse world.
Now, I don't know, because Canada has a different population and a different history, no slavery and all that, But, I don't know, maybe the proportions are high for blacks or whatever.
Maybe it's black.
But if you had done a stay-in-school promo and there had been a young black man who was trying to decide whether to stay in school or not, people would have got upset, right?
Yeah, no, yeah.
And so you have to put in this, the only people who aren't going to get upset Are the Asian moms of Asian girls?
Because they're going to look at that and they're going to say, well, that's not a problem in our community, really, so I don't mind.
So you're in this weird inverse world.
Where you're trying to convince kids to stay in school, and the only kid you can put in the lead role is the kid who's least likely to drop out of school, because they're the only people who aren't going to get offended.
And so you end up in this weird, you kind of map things in backwards and in reverse, right?
Right, yeah, because we're so politically correct that we're in our own way.
And the facts wouldn't matter.
The facts wouldn't matter.
I mean, I don't know, Mike, if you have a sec, if you can look up if there's any ethnicity dropout rates in Canada or rates of dropout from high school.
But the facts don't matter.
So if you were to make that commercial and you put a young black man in there and people would say, oh, that's racist, then you would say, well, but statistically they are the most likely to drop out of school and that's who we want to target.
We actually want to do good here.
I mean, then it doesn't matter.
Facts don't matter.
Well, yeah.
I mean, that's the ego at work.
I mean, it's just the ego hates facts.
I mean, or the resistant ego or whatever that's resisting change to its identity, its way of seeing the world.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I would like I think to drop the topic of race, I think would be nice because it would be really interesting to see.
What the effects were or what race would be like in society if we weren't obsessed and paranoid about it all the time.
Well, it's been suggested to me many times that, you know, it's an area of fixation for me.
I feel like a lot of this has been really driven home by my father, who's come to be really embittered.
You know, about his standing in society.
But then, I gotta be honest, I just feel like he's just not a very hardworking person, not a hardworking, focused individual.
It's just easier to blame white people for his It's personal failings than to take it on himself.
He's been greatly traumatized over the years because of financial deals and things that have gone bad.
I think he's really...
I absorbed a lot of this.
Obviously, some of it's real, but I absorbed a lot of this.
The thing is, the fact that I focused on it, the fact that he's brought so much of my focus to it.
It's just...
And I feel that there's some hypocrisy there because he married and is still married to a white woman.
It's like, why are you?
So the ire, I understand he feels towards what he considers racial injustice.
Is understandable.
However, when you have a mixed race family, you're driving a wedge into your own family.
It's like, well, what am I supposed to do with this, Pop?
You know, like...
And at what point, you know, at what point does this defensive racism, as I've talked about on this show before, become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
So, I mean, if there's a young black man out there, or a young Hispanic man, or whatever, who...
You can't get ahead.
Whitey will crush you every time.
Well, then how hard are they going to work?
Or if you do get ahead and you've gotten ahead through some government program, you've undermined yourself because people are talking about you behind your back.
Did he really earn that?
Is he just here because he's African-American or whatever?
Yeah.
I tried graduate school.
I have a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
I tried graduate school, and I really had the sense that I probably shouldn't be there, at least in that particular graduate program.
I probably wasn't qualified, and I wondered if they kind of...
If I was accepted just because of my race identity and if other people...
I wondered...
Actually, I felt that that was probably true and I wondered how many people were aware of it in my cohort.
And as a result, tragically, employers don't know either.
Yeah, and it doesn't help.
So you graduate and this makes the degree less valuable for all people who may have got in through affirmative action.
This is one of the reasons why college becomes less attractive.
And so, you know, my sort of basic, again, as an empiricist, my basic opinion would be something like this.
Is that, I don't know, let's just pick the black community for what, you know, because they seem to be doing the worst of the communities in the U.S. So I'm perfectly willing to accept the thesis of racism if blacks do exactly what Asians do and still don't succeed.
Right.
Then, absolutely, I'm willing to accept that racism is the most likely explanation.
But there was a study done recently in America where Asian, Hispanic, white, and black kids were asked, what's the lowest grade you get before your parents get angry?
Yeah.
Okay.
This is going to be interesting.
Go ahead.
Well, as you can imagine, right?
It goes down the traditional slice that you see in socioeconomic evaluations of the races.
Asians are at the top.
If I bring home an A-, my parents are incensed, right?
Yeah.
And for whites, I think it was a B+. And for Hispanics, this is off the top of my head.
For the Hispanics, it was like a B-, and for the blacks, it was like a C +, or a C, or something like that.
In Japan...
The kids are doing four hours of homework a day, and in America, kids are doing four hours of homework a week.
Now, I'm not a huge fan of homework.
I'm not saying right or wrong or whatever, but once, like, if the black community is doing everything that the Asian community is doing, right?
So we just did a show, which I haven't released yet, The Truth About Single Moms, and we point out that black kids are watching 12 to 13 hours of screen time a day.
Get out, really?
I'm telling you.
I think for whites it was like 6, which is still crazy high.
And that's really bad.
You know, and of course...
8 hours and 36 minutes for white children between the ages of 8 and 18.
13 hours for Hispanic children and 12 hours and 59 minutes for black children.
And what was it?
6 hours and 37 for whites?
8.36 for whites.
Is it 8.36 a day, right?
So 8.36 is jaw-dropping.
But, you know, 13 is even more jaw-dropping.
Holy God.
And I don't know.
I don't think there were Asians in there.
And so these are things that can be done.
You know, marry the woman you're going to have kids with.
How about that?
Yeah.
Turn off the screens, have more conversations, read some books.
There's things that the black community can do is simply look at, and look, white communities can do this too.
Look at Asians are just about the most successful.
I was watching this show the other day, and it was like, Musical prodigy!
This young person can play Chopin and Mozart and so on.
Did anyone think it was going to be...
Sadly, did anyone not know it was going to be an Asian kid?
Of course it was an Asian kid, right?
And so...
So white people can look at the Asian community and say, well, they're doing much better than whites as a whole.
And so there's things that we...
Now, if whites do everything that Asians do and still don't do well, then we have the paradox of white societies preferring Asian people.
I don't know what that's all about.
But anyway.
So even if there is all this racism out there, If black families can do, can emulate the most successful groups, which are not whites but Asians, if they can do what the Asians do and they still can't get ahead, well then we've got a lot closer.
But right now, because the markers are so different between these communities, it's really hard to say what's racism and what's bad decision.
And of course there's racism, but there are also bad decisions.
And my concern is that the sort of You know, pointing out your dad, the sort of excuse, which may or may not be an excuse, but if it is an excuse, it's really tragic.
You know, one of the great things about being white is you don't get any excuses.
And that's the same thing with being Asians.
What do you mean you got an A-?
Right?
That's terrible.
And so, if you grow up without excuses, and you grow up with, you're responsible for where you end up.
Then I think you have the best chance of success.
It's brutal and it's hard at the time and there's lots of times when everybody would love excuses but I'm really troubled by the degree to which excuses are handed out to various minority groups.
I think that's where the real racism is.
Yeah, well, no, and I think my concern with that is that it seems like part of the overall indoctrination.
And realistically, going all the way back to when we first talk about race issues to our kids, we need to think about When I was talking, when it was discussed with me, I remember the first time I really became aware of slavery and what that meant.
And because I had to look around the room...
And I'm like, okay, these people's ancestors enslaved my ancestors.
So, you know, I'm not saying withhold that, but I'm saying, doesn't it occur in any way this might be a traumatic experience for children?
And it might set the tone for the rest of their life and maybe be careful about how we present this information a little bit.
And again, I'm not advocating censorship altogether, but...
I mean, I don't have children.
I mean, I don't know if you can relate to what I'm trying to say there or not.
Oh, no.
Listen, I mean, my background is Irish and the Irish were bought and sold as slaves as well.
But that's just one thing.
But just the idea of what are we saying to our young people?
What are we saying to our young minorities when we are...
Because I remember when I was in college, I finally stood up for the first time in my life because my father was pretty violent, and so I was afraid of him.
And I started speaking out, but not super outspoken, just letting my opinion go.
I would ask questions like, shouldn't we at least talk about when affirmative action might end?
Nobody even wants to talk about it.
Let's assume for a second that affirmative action is exactly what America needed exactly when it needed.
Can't we talk about when this might end?
Can't we talk about when entitlement programs in colleges and hiring practices might end based on race?
Because the other thing that really concerns me is this creates a backspring of resentment that probably wasn't there before.
What if you create racist people through this process?
Well, also, just to remind, and we've got, of course, the truth about slavery as a presentation, but I think it was about 4% of whites in the South owned slaves.
So saying, well, their ancestors owned these people's ancestors, really not the case.
Right.
Then there's been very many times in this conversation that maybe I should have said the average or some of them or something like that.
Very few.
Yeah.
As a shorthand, a lot of times I'll just say white people, you know, knowing better, but...
But this is the challenge, right?
That the moment we start to aggregate in that way, there are so many exceptions and footnotes and asterisks and so on.
But it's like one of those things, have you ever, yeah, you've been in college, right?
So you read these articles where it's like, I think Steph Kinsella's written a few.
It's like three lines and then like 300 lines of footnotes underneath.
And that's sometimes what happens when you start talking about aggregates.
And then it's just like, oh, Lord, what do we even talk about now?
Yes, well, yeah, and it's important, and that would have been a good time to insert a footnote, so thank you for that, because I'm aware, of course, that there's a small minority of white people in the South who own slaves, and...
I want to move on to the next caller, although I've really enjoyed this call, but you have used the word malcontentedness a number of times, and I'm wondering if you want to unpack that a little bit more.
I always try to get back to the actionable stuff, and I think, Sam, that the most actionable stuff that we can talk about is the malcontentedness that you feel or would like to feel less of.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, just the...
So, malcontent, never mind racial malcontent for a while, just like, oh, I gotta brush my teeth.
I can't just go to bed.
I gotta brush my teeth.
We feel sometimes the resistance.
Again, giving you credit, your talk that you did on procrastination made me think of that and how you related it to...
But what I really want to get past is just the malcontent, the malcontentedness, which is, you know, telling me that I deserve more than I have, you know, because this assumption somewhere stuck in my head somewhere that I might just be better off, you know, have more automatically if I were white or if I were at least a solid racial identity.
No, Asian.
Asian, exactly.
Statistically, you want to be Asian or you want to be...
Do you know how I can become Asian?
I don't know.
I think in your frappe of genetic reconstruction, I'm sure you can blend something in.
There you go.
But no, yeah.
No, but this is the thing.
Asian privilege is statistically the reality.
But people don't like Asian privilege because Asians are in a minority.
In fundamentally still largely white countries.
And it goes against the racial little white narrative for people to remember that if there's any privilege in the world, and I don't think privilege is the right word, it's Asian privilege.
So forget about, you know, leap over mere whiteness.
Go for pure Asian.
That's where you want to get to if you want to have the best outcome statistically in just about any society.
So if I have kids, maybe I want them to learn Chinese or something.
But I feel like I was kind of...
I don't want to seem like I'm dodging.
When I'm talking about this malcontent of just dealing with the fact that, okay, dude, you're black.
You don't deserve anything more.
You're black, white, Native American.
You just live your black, white, Native American-ass life.
Do what you can.
And make friends of, you know...
Where you can find them and develop, what I want to say, connections and a community of your own and try to create win-win situations where you can.
There's still this lingering kind of malcontent of not being able to actualize that and sort of like whining on the inside.
Sam, let me ask you a very indelicate question.
Sure.
When it comes to harm that's been inflicted on your life, is it some sort of abstract white privilege that has harmed you the most, or is it your father's violence?
Absolutely, without a question, my father's violence.
I mean, I think it's fair to say, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, of course, but I think it's fair to say, Sam, that you've been far more oppressed by a black than by a white.
Yeah.
Yeah, no.
Not because of his blackness, but just because your father happened to be black and violent, right?
Mm-hmm.
Now, as far as that goes, I think that's a really important thing to recognize, which is that the challenges that you faced were as the result of your father's violence towards you That was the pretty...
I would imagine that was the most significant traumatic and destructive thing that happened in your life.
Yeah, and my mother too.
And what was your mother up to when you were a kid?
You know, she handed out her fair share of beatings.
She never had the guts to protect me.
She was pretty much compliant with my father's...
It was a means of what they would have both called punishment, or well, discipline, you know, but they were, you know, it was a lot of corporal punishment, a lot of physical aggression, and there was always a threat of violence when, it's not like, I wasn't one of those things where I was getting beat on constantly within the edge of my life, but I was always...
No, it was pretty rough, right?
I mean, you said two to three times a week?
You were hit by belts, switches, kitchen spoons, mostly by your father, right?
Not the entire time.
There was definitely periods that was two or three times a week, maybe more.
I was getting beaten on.
Mostly by my father.
My mother, she'd do her part every once in a while.
What she felt was her part anyway.
I've reflected at great length and it can't be overlooked about the violence and how it's made me angry and violent and that can be I mean, I can just tie that to my parents, who they are.
And if there's a movement out there, right?
And if there's a movement out there that says, Sam, your violence and your aggression is a just response to racist white people and a racist society, that takes the heat off your family, right?
Yeah.
That means that you don't have to look at your family as...
You know, this biracial, whack-a-mole environment that you grew up in.
You don't have to look at your family and say, these are moral choices that my family make.
And of course, corporal punishment in black households is higher than it is in whites, and God knows it's high.
I enough in whites.
But if there's a lot of hitting of kids in the black culture and then the kids grow up and there are all these people out there saying, ah, you know, you're angry because you're oppressed and there's whitey and there's racism and there's privilege and you don't have it and they're going to keep you down.
What it does is it channels that anger and that resentment and that fear and that trauma out of the family and into this general nonsense ether called abstract society, which is also incredibly destructive to the black community because it's only by turning the anger back in the family and dealing with which is also incredibly destructive to the black community because it's only by turning the anger back in the
Blaming white people for violence in the black community in the household against kids is a great way of making sure that this IQ shaving down aggression against children continues in the black community.
Well, I think one of the reasons that black people are so aggressive, and maybe I should insert in general or average against our kids, is because some sort of transference from slave discipline.
I also think, I don't know if there's any research that's ever done, but my personal thought is one of the reasons there's such an absentee problem with black fathers is because we are trained to believe that it's our duty to beat our kids.
And when we think about Our own experiences, how horrible that was, we'd rather just flake out and not be a dad.
Because if we're a dad and we're present, that's part of our duty as a father.
We need to beat our children.
I don't know how you'd research that.
I don't know how you'd design it.
Well, no, but black illegitimacy was far lower in the 1950s, like three times lower in the 1950s than it is now.
And corporal punishment was also stronger.
In some ways, I don't know.
Actually, I don't know the facts for that.
I was thinking about it.
So, I think taking the problems in the black family and saying slavery, you face the huge challenge that many factors within the black family were far better in the 1950s than they are in 2015.
And that is, what, 65 years further away from slavery.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's a theory that's been bandied about for a lot.
That's something you hear.
So I don't know...
But let's say it was.
So shouldn't that be an additional incentive to commit to peaceful parenting?
See, that's my concern, is that if people say, oh, okay, so blacks hit their kids more because of slavery.
Okay, now that we have that knowledge and we find slavery a reprehensible institution, which of course it was morally evil to, there are no words for how morally evil it was, but then shouldn't that be even more of an incentive to commit to peaceful parenting?
Since if that theory is true, I don't know if it's true or not, but it seems it's like, well, we hit our kids because of slavery, so bang, bang, bang, right?
It's like, no!
How is that honoring the suffering of the slaves to continue the legacy?
Well, it's the whole thing of—it's an ego thing, though.
It's like the slave master hit me.
It's reminding somebody of the pecking order, at least as the theory goes, at least as it's been expressed to me.
But yeah, absolutely right.
That could better serve as an inspiration for ending the cycle of violence because you don't want your children— To think like slaves, you don't transfer an identity as a slave to your children.
I will never hit my children.
I mean, I've come to realize the ridiculousness of that.
And so I hope I have kids someday because I think I've got a lot to offer as a father, a potential father, but I just can't get that figured out quite so...
I mean, if you're a listener to this show and you don't breed, I'm coming over to your house and smacking you upside the head.
You know, just with a book.
But no, I mean, you know, you've got the self-knowledge and so on.
But I was, you know, it's not the ridiculousness.
Like if I referred to slavery as ridiculous, that would be not a great, I mean, the kind of assault that you received was not ridiculous.
It was downright evil.
I'm not saying your parents are irredeemably evil or anything like that, but I think we do have to have some moral standard which says that beating kids with implements two to three times a week, if that's not evil, then there's no such thing as evil.
Do you have a definition that you're working on for evil?
Sure.
I've got a bunch of shows about it, but very briefly, evil is when you use standards to justify your own actions.
As moral.
And then when those standards are applied to your own actions, suddenly everything reverses.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Okay.
Because then you can't claim an insanity defense because you're right.
So it's basically hypocrisy.
Yeah, definitely.
Enacted and violent moral hypocrisy is, to me, how you know whether there's evil going on, right?
So, you know, the example I've used before is if you say, well, you know, you hit your kids because, you know, they don't listen, then do you get to hit your parents when they're old if they don't listen?
You know, you hit your kids because their brains are still developing and they need to know what's, you know, they're cognizantly deficient and so you need to use violence because you can't use your words.
It's like, okay, so when your parents get older and they are maybe a little senile or having senior moments, then do you hit them?
Are you allowed to spank them because they're not doing what they should?
Well, of course, people would say, well, of course you're not allowed to hit old people who are forgetful, but you're allowed to hit kids who are forgetful.
It's like, well, wait a second here.
How the fuck is this different?
Morally, it's hard to make the case that it's somehow fundamentally opposite.
It's so funny to hear people defend that have been the victims of corporal punishment defend it, and it's just because they want to have respect.
For their parents.
They don't want to hate their parents.
They don't want to have to analyze what they've done to them.
Well, I'll give you another example, right?
So a lot of parents, if their kids confront them about being beaten or spanked or whatever, they say, well, you know, it's how I grew up.
It's everyone was doing it.
It was just the accepted norm, right?
But when I was a kid, if you ever tried using that excuse while everybody else was doing it, what did the teacher say?
If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it?
Would you do it too?
Right.
So, you know, at the age of six or seven, you have this standard which says you cannot blame what you do on what everyone else is doing.
But then when these same people, and your parents say this to you as well, but then when you grow up, And you apply this standard instead of against a six-year-old, against a 30-year-old who was a parent when you were young, suddenly it's like, oh, well, everyone was doing it, so it was okay.
Right?
So this is the immorality of having moral standards that you inflict on children, but then when those same children grow up and apply those same moral standards to you, somehow it's completely opposite.
Mike, you had some data on spanking?
Yeah, this is a good time to plug The Primordial Violence, Spanking Children's Psychological Development, Violence, and Crime by Murray A. Strauss, which is the Bible for any type of statistic or research when it comes to corporal punishment.
And this is on page 257 for those who would like to check up on it.
He says, three race or ethnic groups were compared, whites, blacks, and other.
Overall, in 1968, there was little difference in the percent who approved of spanking.
Over 90% of all three groups thought spanking was necessary.
The trends in approval of spanking for each ethnic group reveal large decreases in approval of spanking for both whites and others over the 26-year period.
This goes up to 1994.
For blacks, a decrease in approval of spanking was much less than for other ethnic groups.
14 percentage points for this period compared with 26 percentage points for whites and 32 percentage points for the other category.
Around 1968, just looking at the chart, blacks appear to be close to the 100%, and whites are pretty close to that, maybe 96 or 98.
And now it appears, just looking at it, for black, it's 82%, and for white, 66%.
That's as of 1994.
Okay.
Right.
So it can't just be slavery if blacks and whites started out with spanking approvals about the same.
It can't just be one, right?
So anyway, I don't understand how to sum this up, other than to say the following, and I'll give you the last word then, because it's only fair.
Which is, you know, as an empiricist, I really...
I remain agnostic about the prevalence of racism.
The existence of racism, I don't doubt, but the prevalence of racism.
And racism as the sole cause for disparity in various groups, economic, educational, familial, marital, and social success, I view as unverified.
It's unverified.
And I would love to see it verified one way or the other.
And the best way to do that is for those groups who are doing poorly to study the groups who are doing really well, and those are the Asians, and mimic their behaviors.
And do what?
Nobody's asking anyone to invent the wheel from scratch, right?
Just look at the Asians and say, and this is true for whites too, look at the Asians and say, well, what are the Asians doing?
Let's get some of that.
Let's drink deep from the copper cup of Asian privilege and see where we end up.
Now, if blacks do what Asians do, and still...
If whites remain disadvantaged economically, then I think we're closer to finding some evidence for the racism.
But if whites are so racist, it seems hard to imagine why Asians do so much better than whites, because I can't imagine how racism would not include Asians and blacks and Hispanics and so on.
All in the same big bag.
So, yeah, I mean, there are always people out there who are going to not like what you're doing.
I mean, yeah, it's tough being black.
You know, try being an atheist.
I mean, there are no Reverend Jesse Jacksons out there protecting everyone who's negatively spoken of as an atheist.
Atheists are less trusted than rapists in some areas of America.
And that's not a good company to be keeping.
So there is, of course, lots of people out there who are going to have problems with what you do.
And you can either screw up your own life because there are haters out there, or you can give a very elegant screw you to the haters by emulating the best around you and disproving them through the gritty raising up of your own community.
And I think that would be best for everyone.
And so I'll give you the last word.
Actually, I want to say something kind of off topic.
I really appreciate what you're doing.
This month and a half I've been listening to your podcast.
It's been transformative.
And I want to say to the listeners out there that this man is doing important work.
And let's make sure he and his staff are getting supported.
And let's go ahead and contribute.
And so he's free of the advertising and everything like that.
He's able to say what he needs to say.
And, yeah, I appreciate you very much having me on the show.
And I appreciate the talk, sir.
Well, I appreciate that, too.
I'll even forgive you for referring to me as Cyrus, though I'm 800 years old.
I was in the Army, so I've had a trouble.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So the anti-statist anarchist you need to bring your army training to bear on.
That's fine.
No, I appreciate it.
Listen, I mean, we are brothers.
I mean, we are clear cognitive thinkers who work with reason and evidence.
And, you know, closer to you than the vast majority of my fellow whiteys.
So, you know, we are brothers in thought.
And that's where we should all be residing as human beings.
So I really thank you for your call.
I hope you'll drop us a line and let us know how it's going.
And you're welcome back anytime.
Thank you so much.
Have a good day.
Good night.
All right.
Take care.
Yeah.
Thank you, Sam.
Dismissed!
All right.
Well, up next is Caleb.
Caleb wrote in and said, what is the philosophical approach to long-term debt, such as mortgages, if you know that the markets and currency are highly manipulated and likely to collapse?
You might want to parse that out a little bit, Caleb.
So, yeah.
So, you know, where this conversation comes from is ultimately, you know, trying to plan out a financial future in a time of uncertainty.
That's a high level, right?
It's a different way of saying it.
What brought on the question was, is, you know, a situation, a discussion that I had at work talking about refinancing, and it was very much a conversation that was You know, inside the system, right?
This is the pros and cons of refinancing, and do you pay your mortgage off early?
And I found myself thinking, you know, it's inside the matrix, right?
You're a good citizen if you have a good credit score, and you can refinance, and it's all good.
But how do we plan for the future if we know that, say, for example, the dollar is essentially a debt instrument, and the It's being inflated, and now we have Yellen, the Fed chairman, has basically said, I don't know what we're doing.
We're just going to keep on trucking.
And ultimately, this is going to lead to nothing.
And that left me wondering, well, is there a philosophical commentary on how we deal with essentially – Our word and trust and something like debt.
How do we plan if we know that the other side is stacked against us and that it's systematically dishonest?
You know, is the plan okay?
Technically, there's no philosophical content in terms of morality that can be applied to a coercive and deceptive situation.
Right?
When you are in a state of compulsion, when you're a victim of compulsion, there is no fundamental moral argument that can be made.
Do you have the right of self-defense?
Like, let's see, if you're kidnapped, right?
Do you have the right of self-defense?
Absolutely.
Do you have the right to use violence to free yourself?
Absolutely.
Are you morally obligated to do so?
You are not.
Right?
It's...
You have the capacity, but nobody can force you to do it.
Because that would be to say, well, you're in the wrong...
Sorry, the other people are in the wrong for applying force to you, and then you must be forced to defend yourself against that force.
That means the initiation of force is both good and bad.
It doesn't pass UPB. And so, if you are...
Since we are all in this deceptive, multi-level marketing fantasy camp of fiat currency...
Then the choices that you make should obviously stay within the law.
But the choices that you make have no moral dimension, right?
Because you're in a situation that you would never choose to be in, that is deceptive and coercive and so on.
So when you're in the victim of a universally accepted fraud, then staying within the law There is no fundamental, it's moral to do this and it's not moral to do that, if that makes sense.
Because if we're going to bring morality into the equation, the first place we need to put it to is to fiat currency itself, which is just wrong as a whole.
Right.
So, for example, strategic default.
In that case, if I'm understanding it correctly, you're operating inside the system.
To simply say, okay, bank, here's the keys, we're going to walk away, is there's no...
There's no sort of moral aspect to walking away from your side of the mortgage agreement, for example.
Well, see, I mean, sorry, that's a little bit, I thought you meant sort of larger investment strategies and so on.
That, I mean, if you can't pay your debts, you can't pay your debts, right?
I mean, you can't get, if you're not the Federal Reserve, you can't get blood from a stone, right?
Right.
And so, it's generally better to pay your debts if you can, right?
I mean, you wouldn't do that, you know, if you borrowed 20 bucks from a friend and you had the money to pay him back, you wouldn't feel good about not paying him back, right?
So, if you can't pay your debts, you can't pay your debts.
And then you can follow whatever the legal requirements are for discharging those debts or eliminating those debts as much as possible.
But...
I generally have a, and this could be just a sort of middle class bourgeois preference, I generally have a preference for fixed assets rather than debt.
And so I am quite a fan of trying to get debt free as much as possible.
And that is...
That's my general preference.
I'm not going to say that's any kind of universal preference or certainly no moral aspect to it.
There's nothing immoral with borrowing and paying interest.
It's all perfectly fine.
But I'm a big one for if you can get debt free, I think that's generally a better place to be.
Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense.
Obviously, ultimately, if we were to look at the mathematics of it, the The interest on the debt is, in a way, looking at it slavery.
I've heard it put that way by certain people.
I don't think anything that you voluntarily sign, knowing the consequences, can be considered slavery.
And this is an old Christian notion that usury is the same as theft.
And that's not...
I think it's also in...
Islam as well, but it's not it's not it's not I mean that there's a there's a time value to money we would rather have something now Than next year and so because everybody would rather have something now the next year There's a greater demand for things now than in the future and because there's a greater demand for things now in the future you can sell money For more money now than you can sell for later and that the more money that you sell money for is called interest and So I don't think,
you know, you could either live in your car for 15 years and save up to buy a condo, or you can buy a condo and pay interest every month and have the pleasure of living not in your car for 15 years.
So I don't think that there's anything, again, free market based.
There's nothing that's wrong or immoral or enslaving.
I don't know.
The monetary system as it actually operates, and then applying that back to the decisions that I'm making, right?
As philosophy gets into morals, and morals essentially advises you on your decision-making.
How do you make decisions given the knowledge and understanding that the system is essentially stacked against you from a systemic standpoint?
Can you give me, and I don't, because I don't know much about how to abandon a house, I mean, can you give me a sort of more concrete example of a choice that you might make?
Yeah, so I mean, investment strategies or, you know, taking a job based on a certain level of income, it's, those would be two of them, right?
And I guess where this is coming from is, I recently did some research on, I really wanted to understand what the dollar was.
What is the system?
And I got into it and I understand, okay, well, the dollar is essentially a co-traded IOU between the Fed and the Treasury.
And that, you know, essentially those dollars are lent out and then, you know, fractional reserve multiplies those.
We essentially have dollars being lent out.
There's no value behind them, but then you have to turn around and pay interest on that.
I absolutely agree with you with the economics of the time value of money, and I have no question on interest rates in general, but how do you then reconcile that knowledge that the person lending you this basically created it out of nothing, and yet they can take your house if something goes wrong and And you default.
That's wrong to me.
Oh, it is wrong.
Yeah, absolutely.
Morally, it's wrong.
I mean, yeah, when you, again, like most people, when I was younger, it's like, well, people put the money in the bank, and then the bank lends that money out.
It's like, no, it's not how it works.
They just create the money to lend to you and then they have an asset called your house, which they can collect on.
Yeah, I mean, it's a ridiculous, horrifying scam that is monstrous in every dimension.
So as far as what is what goes on, you know, they have the law on their side.
So you got to pay your debts, you know, that's the obligation.
Of course, what you can do is, you know, try and work through through bitcoins and so on.
And there may be tax implications for those that they could be treated as assets and so on.
But I don't think you can you can't go Wild West and it would be, I think, wrong to do so because you're gonna end up in jail.
And that's not where you can, I think, do much to help the world become a better place.
I don't have any particular advice.
I pay my bills and I try to remain as debt-free as I can.
But the system as a whole is what it is.
We have massive and significant complaints about the economic system that we live under.
But it's still the best time to live in history.
I mean, like, I mean, that's the problem, right?
I mean, you can focus on the negatives from here to kingdom come, and Lord knows there are lots of them, but I can't think of a better time than I'd like to live.
I mean, except maybe the future, which I'm aiming to get at step by step.
But, you know, focus on, I would say, focus on all the amazing things that the remnants of the free market is kicking our way, like this conversation and the capacity to have this conversation.
So, I generally just work within the system financially, try and stay debt-free and try and minimize your spending and rejoice and enjoy this amazing system that we live in.
I mean, we have the remnants of free speech, we have the remnants of the free market, we have ever-escalating technological capacities and, you know, are constantly, well, often improving healthcare treatments and so on.
I mean, there's amazing things going on in the world and You know, when you think back in time when you could be the king of France, you open the palace windows at Versailles and he fainted from the stench because, of course, there were very few sewage systems.
Basically, people just took their shit and dumped it out their windows in the street.
And that old Monty Python joke is like, hey, he's a king.
How do you know?
Well, he hasn't got shit all over him.
I mean, we live in this incredible utopia.
Of a society relative to what has happened in the past and yes, there's a lot of corruption.
Yes, there's a lot of fiat currency.
Yes, there's a lot of debt, but Humanity is still going through its progress.
You know, there's still an enormous amount to do we are still marginally evolved apes with giant lasers waving from our hairy palms and there is an enormous amount to do and There's only one way to get there and one way to do it, which is to continually cry our philosophical yaw from the very rooftops and cloud castles of the world to the point where humanity listens and wises up over time.
We are part of the general accelerant of the species that makes the world a better place, painfully and slowly and against great resistance.
But if I were you...
I would try to look at all of the amazing and wonderful things that are going on in your life rather than, well, what should I do under this terrible fiat currency system?
It is better than being paid in human teeth or seashells or salt or, you know, all of the other things that have been used in primitive societies throughout history as currency.
Yes, it is a swipe toilet paper, but it also gets to buy us tablets, which never existed before, except in the stone and commanding kind brought down by Charlton Heston from bad CGI mountains.
So, sorry about that sort of tangential rant, but there are wonderful things occurring in the world.
And this is the greatest opportunity Humanity has ever had for significant progress and compressed progress.
The kind of progress that we see in the realm of technology.
I mean, trying to explain to my daughter what life was like when I was a child, I don't even know what to say.
I mean, it's like trying to explain the IMAX to a jellyfish.
It was just completely different than everything that's going on now.
And, you know, my childhood when I was a kid was a hell of a lot closer to Socrates' childhood than my childhood is to my daughters and we're just a generation apart.
Admittedly a wide generation.
But we are right on the edge, right on the edge of...
The most incredible growth opportunity in terms of ethics and human progress that the world has ever seen.
We don't need to have hundreds of years of religious warfare.
We don't need to have 800 years of a dark age.
We don't need to have any of these things.
We just need to unclog our ears and listen to reason.
And there's never been a better capacity to bring the megaphone of philosophy up to the collective ear of mankind and whisper, joke, yawp, belt, bleat and scream the elemental truths of ethics into the mind, hearts and souls of the species.
And I think it's an incredible time to be alive.
And I may, should I ever have the opportunity to live for a thousand years, I might find a The 900 after the first 100 is significantly less exciting, interesting, and stimulating than the first 100.
So I would not want to be anyone else, anywhere else, any other time.
And I think that's something to really celebrate.
It is, and I appreciate that.
A lot of times when you first understand and kind of get out of the cave, as it were, and see what's going on, it can be a bit shocking to really...
And you can end up fixating on the negatives as opposed to the positives.
So it actually was not really a tangent as much as a good way of zooming out and seeing a little better perspective on what's taking place, and yet having the wisdom to make moral decisions and ultimately understand that, you know, be honest, pay your debts as you can, but if something happens, Then it's, you know, that's beyond your control.
That, you know, there's a lot of other more positive things taking place.
And that's actually rather reassuring to hear because it can get me down on occasion.
Oh, no.
No, more than on occasion.
You know, more than on occasion.
I mean, we are like doctors.
It's hard to remember there are healthy people.
Everyone you talk to is sick.
There was a picture that struck me.
It was snapped by, I think, an EMT. An EMT, I think, is the name of the people who help with ambulances and so on.
And it was a doctor who was just basically leaning over a railing, sobbing because his patient had died.
And, I mean, being a doctor, of course, particularly in a hospital, is pretty grueling.
And you basically see people on the worst days of their lives and often the last days of their lives.
And we are physicians of the moral ailments of mankind.
And Because we need to look at and delve into the heart of darkness of human evils and manipulations, it can weary us down.
It can.
And that's the inevitable occupational hazard of being a moralist.
And I think just about everybody who listens to this show in any consistent way is a moralist.
And a moralist job is to fight evil.
And there are many philosophies in the world that discount the existence of evil.
I just had a conversation with a Canadian writer and thinker, William Gairdner.
And we were discussing the invisibility or the skepticism towards evil.
Right?
I mean, a giant asshole flies 149 innocent people into a plane, in a plane, into a Mountain.
And that is about as evil a thing as can be imagined.
Now, if the guy had a brain tumor or whatever, that was something that was happening, it's a different matter.
But imagine you wake up in the morning and you get into an airplane and the captain says, you know, let's get prepared for the landing.
And you say, well, hopefully or maybe, you know, because you're planning this.
And you calculatedly lock the cabin door shut.
You push the button, it takes you down to a low altitude.
Everybody starts screaming.
And I gotta imagine, there was a sick smile on this son of a bitch's face as he slaughtered 149 innocent people, flying them into a mountain.
Now, absent any biological underlying causation, if that's not evil, there's no such thing as evil.
And all you hear about is mental illness.
Well, he was just ill, you see, like he had cancer or MS or diabetes.
He was just ill, you see.
Well, that's a great camouflage for the evildoers in society to pretend that evil is simply a kind of illness or that evil is a kind of ignorance or evil arises out of, let's just give ISIS jobs poverty.
Notwithstanding the fact that certainly of the terrorists involved in 9-11, The vast majority of them were middle class or higher, and a good deal of them had advanced degrees.
So we need to, not just for ourselves, but for society as a whole, remind people of the reality of evil.
And the fundamental battle that we're in is, what's the old saying, the greatest trick that the devil ever pulled was convincing humanity he did not exist.
And the reason that that's true, even for atheists, is that evil people wish to discount the reality and existence of evil.
And so we need to remind ourselves of evil.
We need to remind humanity of evil, which provokes evil.
That's natural.
That's the nature of the beast.
And it is hard.
It is hard and it's a thankless task because most people even virtuous people do not like to be reminded of evildoers and evil actions because they then get kicked off their infinite beanbags of complacency and have to actually get up and do something in the world to make the world a better place and People don't really want to do that.
They want other people to take care of evil.
They want other people to take care of wrongdoing wrongdoers and So there is it's not I think it's not just on occasion I think it is an occupational hazard that we all need to be aware of and conscious of.
That by constantly rooting around and exposing and reminding people of the existence and power of evil.
We are going to be wearied by that and we are going to be disgusted by that at times and it is going to be exhausting and at times we have to remember to drink deep of the beauty and joy in the world as well and if we don't I think that we are surrendering something very important and also not unimportantly we are showing people that virtue is exhausting and virtuous debilitating and virtue makes you bitter and Philosophy makes
you depressed and anxious and unhappy.
That is kind of true if you let it be true, but it's not innately or necessarily true.
We're not going to vanquish evil.
We are not going to slam evil as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would want to do, at least back in the 80s.
We are not, you know, the Power Rangers aren't going to slam evil.
In fact, I think one of the Power Rangers just stabbed someone in real life, one of the ex-Power Rangers.
So we are not going to conquer evil any more than any doctor is going to conquer all disease.
But we can make significant steps towards it.
And like all moralists, we will not be thanked for a generation or two, which does not do us that much good in the moment.
But we are simply paying forward the great and golden gifts of virtue and philosophy that we received from past heroes.
We are doing our own little work of heroism and paying it forward to other people who will also themselves never finish the task, but will get a hell of a lot closer than we are.
And that's part of the great story of improving the species despite its protestations that we are part of.
And it is the most noble task, but it is the longest lasting and in some ways.
Well, that's very good.
I appreciate that.
You know, I think if I were to trace back my original question, that, you know, I think that that was, you know, mostly just a symptom of the frustration that I was feeling that you unpacked.
How do you handle these situations?
I didn't know what you were talking about particularly, which usually means that there's an underlying emotional driver, and that's what I was sort of trying to zero in on.
Right.
Yeah, no, and you're correct.
It's very interesting because at my work, we have essentially a speech club, Toastmasters, if you're familiar with that.
And I did a speech, and I find that I have an audience.
I actually did a speech on Toastmasters.
The dollar system and explaining, you know, this is ultimately, you know, what the dollar is and some of the shortfalls and inflation.
And I said it was very informational.
And I didn't really call anyone to a conclusion or a call to action or any of that, because I was just hoping to kind of wake them up.
And, you know, I had this speech planned for a while.
And I think I delivered it very well.
Now, what was interesting is the guy that came up behind me I did his third in a series of speeches for the benefits of good credit.
And there was jokes around Albert, you know, you didn't stumble into a finance class.
But I felt like I was kind of trying to wake people up that there's a system here that you're in, and the next guy up was talking about how to be a good citizen inside of it, right?
The benefits of essentially doing this.
And I was like, wow, this...
How do I deal with essentially trying to wave the flag and not have people reject the concepts?
My profession is sales, and a lot of what I do is...
And you've done it in the past.
You have to present a new reality to people.
And if you just tell them, they oftentimes reject it, which you probably...
Quite familiar with.
And so that's part of why I've been struggling with this.
Here's a very rubber-meets-the-road example of how do we help people better their lives and understand morality and honesty?
And how do we help them see that a lot of what they operate in is essentially designed to take things away from them?
Without them getting angry and upset and reacting.
Yeah.
No, and...
But you also have to recognize, I would say, that you're pushing against rational ignorance, right?
In that, what is the payoff for them to learn about this system?
How is it going to add to their happiness?
And what you're saying to me, I think, is can I find some way that they're going to benefit from knowing about this stuff?
Some way that they can make better economic decisions and so on.
But...
I think that is a challenge that we face.
Well, certainly the challenge I faced when starting up the show, which was, how am I going to fight against rational ignorance?
Which is, I can't change it, so why study it?
It's just going to make me unhappy.
Where's the net benefit in knowing this stuff about the dollar and fiat currency and so on?
What is the net benefit?
And this, to me, is one of the things that libertarianism It's a work in progress, I guess you could say, which is that, well, let's say I find all about how terrible the war on drugs is and how many people are incarcerated.
Well, what does that do for me in terms of my life's happiness?
I can't change it.
I can't go bust these people out, right?
And I can't, you know, change it.
And so I've just spent a lot of time and energy learning stuff that makes me unhappy that I can't change.
And that's why I sort of said at the beginning of all of this, you know, my very sixth podcast was on self-defense as a concept, but most of us are aggressed against in our family where self-defense as children is practically mostly impossible.
And so lots of libertarians talk about the concept of self-defense, but I brought it right back to, well, can we even act on it for the most part?
And most of us who experience aggression experience it as children when we can't really do much about it.
And that aspect of things is really, I think, a great challenge.
My answer has been, let's figure out how we can apply philosophy in our own lives, voluntarism in relationships.
Non-aggression principle in parenting.
Virtue in reducing violence, not by studying fiat currency and the drug war, which are fine to study if it interests you, but what can we do to reduce violence in the world?
Well, the most prevalent violence in the world is violence against children masquerading as discipline in parenting.
And that we can do something about that in our own families, in families that we have any kind of influence over, that we can act on.
In studying the family, in studying parenting, in studying spanking, in studying the effects of aggression against children, thebombinthebrain.com, you can go for more on this.
I am trying to unite theory with actionable practice.
And there is no excuse called rational ignorance when it comes to virtues that we can actually affect, change, and bring to bear on the people around us and on our own lives as well.
All of my studying of economics and so on has had some value in business, but it is the studying of parenting and the family that And relationships that has given me the most freedom and given me the greatest capacity to improve my exercise of virtue in this life.
And so there is frustration for those of us who wish to bring unactionable moral clarity to those around us.
But you will get a huge amount of resistance because they're like, well, don't tell me what I can't change.
Like it's the old thing that would you want to know the day of your death?
I don't.
Because if I know it for sure, I can't change it, right?
And so the veil of rational ignorance is very strong in people.
And that's why my particular approach has been, okay, let's talk virtue, but let's talk the virtue we can do something about.
Something tangible, measurable, that is going to actionably reduce...
And legally reduce the prevalence of violence and aggression in this world.
And that is around relationships in the family.
So that's been my answer.
Maybe there are other answers out there.
But I think you are going to face this frustration quite regularly of people resisting a knowledge of...
It's like, do you want to take the red pill if there's no resistance movement?
And you just end up living in a cave?
Well, no.
You don't want to take the red pill if there's no resistance movement.
If you can't win against the robots, if you can't free yourself from living life as a battery for the ruling classes, then why would you want that red pill?
I wouldn't.
It would make no sense.
But if there is a resistance movement, if there's something you can do to legally, morally, and practically oppose the spread of violence in the world, then I think the red pill is worth it.
But if it's simply going to take you out of the matrix and put you in hell, it's a tough case to make, right?
Yeah, I've often told people that ignorance is bliss, and I'm not very ignorant.
So those are my suggestions.
And of course, if you can come up with other solutions, I'm always happy to hear about where philosophy can be brought into practice.
It's very good.
Excellent conversation, Stefan.
I really appreciate it.
All right.
Well, thanks everyone for an amazing and powerful show.
These are the highlights of my week as far as non-family time.
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