Stefan Molyneux responds to YouTube comment criticism of his “Why I Was Wrong About Socialism” video.0:12 - "I think being Libertarian is something like being a hermit type person, who is living on his own desert island where everything is up to that person, who can do what they want because they are on their own. They can build their own society anyway they want it to be. They can survive or die, achieve or fail, but ultimately they are on their own. I think in the perfect Libertarian society there could be other people, but every person would have their own desert island."4:13 - "It's very obviously easy to reject self ownership. "Owning your own body and owning the effects." Ego is an illusion and choices are made by biological, deterministic processes. Your entire worldview is fucked to the point where you deny any conclusions that don't depend on some your view of the importance of agency."7:51 - "The fundamental difference between a factory and a toothbrush is the collective benefit you dimwit. You keep saying you can't create artificial distinctions, but here you are claiming a priori that property rights and personal responsibility is and ought to be more important than consequentialism. How is that not subjective? The hypocrisy and low brow philosophizing on this channel is just pathetic to watch. That's why it's a youtube show."12:51 - "The earth being the center of the universe is not necessarily false. It is only a model. 2+3=4 can be proven false. You can not prove or disprove any central point of orientation in the universe. But I will agree that the earth being the center is a more complicated model to ingest."13:49 - "SM always has two things he mindlessly bangs on that makes his "freedomain" radio such a farce. 1) government is evil, but he never analyses what government is and what other forces are relative to government, how it could change ... the whole discussion and idea is juvenile and superficial. 2) collectivism and socialism, communism whatever. Again, superficial sloganeering He talks about freedom with the real intent being to support powerful private interests which will take your freedom away when government is not there to be influenced by you. Every one of his talks and videos suffers from these propagandistic themes."Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Let us dive into the squirrely stratosphere of YouTube comments, see if we can peel some common sense out of sometimes what appears to be mostly forehead typing.
First question, I think being libertarian is something like being a hermit type person who is living on his own desert island where everything is up to that person who can do what they want because they are on their own.
They can build their own society any way they want it to be.
They can survive or die, achieve or fail, but ultimately they are on their own.
I think in the perfect libertarian society there could be other people, but every person would have their own desert island.
Okay, y'all need to understand what libertarianism is.
It is not a Darwinian protoplasm of everyone eating everyone else for food and nutrition and fun and hunting.
Libertarianism is basically the principle that we should not initiate force against each other.
Let me repeat that.
We should not initiate force against each other.
Some guy runs at me with a chainsaw.
Yeah, okay.
I'll shoot him in the ankle with a bow and arrow, try and save myself.
We cannot initiate force against others.
Now, We're kind of all bound up into this big, squirrely, Gordian knot, blood-soaked mess of a highly violently enforced social contract.
You've got to pay your taxes.
You've got to contribute to the welfare state.
You've got to subject yourself to the corporate predations through government subsidies to corporations.
You've got to pay for roads.
You've got to pay for public schools.
And if you don't do all of these things, why look?
Some friendly cats in blue will show up at your door with a gun.
And if you resist, they will shoot you.
Now that's the way things currently work.
And what happens is, because society currently lurches along in its blood-soaked Frankenstein kind of way, with this massive amount of violence at its core, people think, well, if you remove that core of violence, by golly, there'll be no society.
Which is sort of like saying, well...
If people aren't allowed to rape each other, there'll never be any lovemaking.
There'll be no kids.
So, if you want a non-rape society, well, I guess everyone will be masturbating in their own desert island, creating a sticky, childless apocalypse of keyboards you wouldn't want to buy for any price on eBay.
So, it's really quite simple.
The non-initiation of force.
Can we deal with each other peacefully?
Can we reason with each other?
Can we negotiate with each other?
Libertarianism doesn't mean no charity.
Just because the government forces you to give money to poor people, thus trapping them in poverty at the moment, you can see my presentation called The Truth About Poverty for more on that, just because the government forces you to give to poor people doesn't mean that poor people won't be taken care of if the government doesn't force you.
Just because the government forces you to pay for public school Let's say education, because indoctrination is not a word that people educated in public school often know.
Just because you're forced to pay for government public schools does not mean that if you're not forced to pay for it, no one will get educated.
The government has taken over so many essential social functions for so long that people genuinely believe if the government doesn't do it, it just won't happen.
No roads!
Without the government and so on.
So this idea that you can't interact with people if you are willing to interact with them peacefully, which is what this person is basically saying, well, it doesn't make any sense at all.
And just as a note, just in general, YouTubers...
Do everyone a favor.
You need to address someone's arguments.
Coming up with windy generalities about your feels and what you think and my impression is and it seems to me that.
It's all nonsense.
You're just immediately setting up a giant crane-like straw fallacy that you can have fun attacking if you want, but that's like trying to procreate with a Japanese sex robot.
Might be fun for you, kind of gross for everyone else to watch, and you're not going to get really any kids out of it.
Although you might want to run that thing through the dishwasher.
So, I did a video about self-ownership.
I was called I Was Wrong About Socialism.
And somebody wrote back and said, It's very obviously easy to reject self-ownership.
Owning your body and owning the effects.
Ego is an illusion.
And choices are made by biological deterministic processes.
Your entire worldview is effed to the point where you deny any conclusions that don't depend on some your view of the importance of agency.
You know, obviously, a bit of a tailspin at the end.
Wasn't really quite able to walk away from that landing, but...
This is the challenge, and it requires that you actually think rather than just react.
I mean, I'm telling you this.
There's nothing that will turn you more against public schools than being a public intellectual.
Because if you're a public intellectual, you put forward original and challenging and well-thought-out arguments, hopefully, to the masses.
and then you watch the masses do something like this.
Bleh!
Gurgh!
Gurgh!
La la la la!
La la la la!
I can't hear you!
You're wrong because I feel that you're wrong.
My impression is that your argument is the complete opposite of your argument, and then I'm just going to say that it's wrong.
The data you got has funding sources that I might not agree with, therefore numbers are backwards and wrong.
Anyway, I could go on like that, but it would give both of us a headache, I'm sure.
So, yeah, we own ourselves.
We own the effects of our actions.
Now, this person says that they are rejecting that.
And they say, your entire worldview, referring to me.
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedom Aid Radio.
They say, your entire worldview, the entire worldview that I have that I put out on YouTube.
Now, once you get this, you can never go back.
So wait for a moment.
It will come to you like...
So when the person says to me, Steph, your entire worldview that you own the effects of your actions is wrong.
Well, how does he know I have a worldview?
Because I used my self-control over my body to produce an argument and put it out on the internet.
And he correctly identifies that argument as having originated from me.
Steph, your self-control, your ownership of the effects of your actions, your argument, I reject because I reject that anyone has control over their body and can produce an argument.
You can't do it, my friends.
You just can't do it.
The moment that you say to me, Steph, your argument is incorrect about self-ownership, you are ascribing to me self-ownership that I am responsible for, I have created and propagated these arguments using my body.
Next up, dance routines from space.
But you can't reject it, and...
People don't seem to understand that they need to look at how they're arguing before what they're arguing.
And saying to me, your entire worldview is wrong about self-ownership is affirming self-ownership that I have created a worldview and propagated it out on the internet.
Also, I guess this is true in the internet as a whole.
There is always a fairly 1.0 correlation between level of aggression and stupidity of argument.
That's just one of these things you have to get used to when you're a public intellectual.
So, in Why I Changed My Mind About Socialism, I talked about you have to have the same property rights for toothbrushes of factory.
And this person says, the fundamental difference between a factory and a toothbrush is the collective benefit, you dimwit.
You keep saying you can't create artificial distinctions, but here you are claiming a priori that property rights and personal responsibility is and ought to be more important than consequentialism.
How is that not subjective?
The hypocrisy and lowbrow philosophizing on this channel is just pathetic to watch.
That's why it's a YouTube show!
Decaf as a whole may help you think a little bit more.
Or just, you know, scaling back on the hookah-ass snorting of cocaine or whatever.
But it's a little tough to understand this.
What is a collective benefit?
Look, if I go out and buy a toothbrush and I brush my teeth...
That is a collective benefit.
Why is that?
Because if I brush my teeth, you have to pay less for dental care because I am reducing the demand for cavity filling and other gum problems or whatever it is, right?
Also, it's a collective benefit in that if I don't have a toothache, I can work and therefore contribute some value to society and so on.
So I don't understand this collective benefit.
I mean, you brushing your teeth has an impact on me.
Me brushing my teeth has an impact on you.
I can't go and play with my daughter if my teeth are aching or throbbing or whatever.
So this idea, collective benefit, you dimwit!
It's funny stuff.
You keep saying you can't create artificial divisions, but here you are claiming a priority that property rights and personal responsibility is and ought to be more important than consequentialism.
I made an argument for that, and the argument is not addressed.
Other than, how is that not subjective?
Two and two is four.
How is that not subjective?
Oh look, I won!
Getting angry, calling someone a dimwit, and throwing some stupid rhetorical questions at them makes you look like a moron.
I'm sorry to put it so bluntly.
But you need to understand, thinking is hard.
It's hard even if you're well trained.
It's hard even if you've gone through some education in how to think, and I certainly have.
It's hard to do.
And so the idea that you're just, you know, I've got 40,000 hours invested in philosophy, I'm pretty well educated in the topic, read a lot, written a lot, and have the world's most popular philosophy show, but I'm just an idiot in your eyes.
And this is sort of the Donning-Kruger effect, which is that you have to kind of be good at something to appreciate how good someone else is at something.
Like if somebody hands me some advanced paper in physics, I don't know if it's good or not, because I'm not a physicist and I can't judge it.
And this is the problem.
We can judge things like so-and-so is a good singer or not such a great singer, although there's still quite a bit of disagreement in that area.
We can say so-and-so is a good football player, a good basketball player, or not such...
Even if we can't play...
The game or sing that well, we can usually judge that kind of stuff.
But thinking is something kind of different.
Thinking is not obvious.
Thinking requires that you know how to think in order to know that you can't think.
And people who make these kinds of arguments, not arguments, you keep seeing me if you cruise by YouTube every now and then, I'll just throw in, not an argument, not an argument, not an argument, because people don't even know what an argument is and how to dismantle it.
And an argument is, you know, a series of propositions, as the Monty Python guys say, put forward to establish a proposition.
A series of arguments put forward to establish a proposition.
And if you wish to dismantle an argument, you need to find logical inconsistencies within the argument, or you need to find empirical data that counteracts the premises, the principles, or the conclusions.
You have to analyze the argument.
Just saying, how is that not subjective?
Hypocrisy!
Lowbrow philosophizing on this channel is just pathetic to watch.
And people think that they're attacking me.
I'm actually on the other side of the bathroom mirror.
You're a bird attacking your own reflection, thinking that you're a heavyweight champion.
Look, I'm good at philosophy.
Really, really good at philosophy.
Doesn't mean, of course, you should accept everything that I say.
Although, you know, if your doctor has been right for 20 years, you don't necessarily have to fight back against every single diagnosis.
Just a thought.
You know, trust can be earned.
Trust can be gained.
And I've been really, really right over the last decade as a public intellectual.
So...
At some point, you might want to give up absolutely opposing everything I say because, you know, trust is earned.
Otherwise, you know, you're like that crazy paranoid husband who still thinks his wife is cheating on him even though she's been fully faithful to him for 10 years.
After a while, skepticism with a reliable source just starts to look like selfish paranoia.
But that's perhaps a topic for another time.
So someone else wrote...
In the same video, the Earth being the center of the universe is not necessarily false.
It is only a model.
2 plus 3 equals 4 can be proven false.
You cannot prove or disprove any central point of orientation in the universe.
But I will agree that the Earth being the center is a more complicated model to ingest.
Right.
There is no center to the universe.
Now, you could say, if the Big Bang theory is valid, and I know that there's some doubt about that, but you could say, well, the center of the universe is the beginning of where the Big Bang sort of went out from, but that's definitely not where the Earth is.
So, the odds of the Earth being right at the center of the Big Bang are so infinitesimally small that that's not the way it can work.
So, I don't think that the universe has any recognized center, and so...
You could go to the outward bounds, work your way back, and so on, but that's not where the Earth is.
So, yeah, it is in fact provable or disprovable as to whether the Earth is the center of the universe.
So, I wrote, I said in a show, you can't have any idea of who watches the watchers, which is why the very idea of government is so dangerous.
So this is the basic idea behind a voluntary society, an anarchic society, is the government is there because evil people are dangerous and could do you harm.
But of course, those evil people will inevitably be drawn towards being in the government because the government is free evil without consequences.
And so the idea of a government to protect us from evil is crazy because if everyone's good, we don't need a government.
If everyone's evil, government will never work because it'll be full of evil people and evil voters will vote for evil policies.
If the majority of people are evil and the minority of people are good, the government can't work in a democracy at least because the evil people will vote in their representatives and use the government's power to oppress the good.
If there is a majority Of good people and a minority of evil people, then the evil people will gravitate to that which gives the most power to inflict evil on good people, which is the government.
So there's no scenario under which government can produce good effects for evil people.
I mean, outside of the Platonic Philosopher King model and so on, which doesn't seem to work out in reality at all.
So in reply, a YouTuber says, SM always has two things.
He mindlessly bangs on that makes his free domain radio such a farce.
First of all, I'd just like to thank everyone for the last name sociopathic coldness by which they were.
Molyneux says this.
And this is first initial, last initial.
Can't say Steph or Stefan or anything like that.
Last name, vicious coldness.
I remember that from boarding school.
Mr.
Molyneux.
Always has two things he mindlessly bangs on.
Two things that he mindlessly...
makes me sound like I'm a polygamist.
Two things that he mindlessly bangs on that makes his, quote, free domain radio such a farce.
One.
And of course, that's poisoning the well, right?
If you're good at disproving someone's argument, you don't need to insult their argument ahead of time.
The moment you start insulting someone's argument ahead of time, most likely and most often, it's because you don't have a good rebuttal.
If you have a good rebuttal, let the other person talk, then calmly dismantle the argument.
I know, I get upset sometimes as well.
It doesn't necessarily mean you don't have a good argument, but 99 times out of 100, people poison the well in this way, mindlessly banging on and such a farce and so on.
They're programming you to have a negative view of, in this case, my arguments, which makes you inevitably more sympathetic.
to the criticism of it.
So, as soon as you say the argument's retarded, it's a farce, you might as he bangs on, and so on, you're being programmed to agree with the criticizer of the argument prior to the actual criticism, and that is because the criticism is weak.
If the criticism was strong, you wouldn't need to do that ahead of time.
That would be automatically implanted in the mind of the person reading your argument afterwards.
So apparently these are the two things that I mindlessly bang on about.
Number one, government is evil.
But he never analyzes what government is and what other forces are relative to government, how it could change.
The whole discussion and idea is juvenile and superficial.
Oh, I mean, what could he even say?
Juvenile and superficial.
Well, did you prove anything?
No.
So, first of all, the fact that government relies upon and requires the initiation of the use of force puts it into the category of immorality.
That's not my fault, that's just the way that logic works.
If the initiation of force is immoral, and government relies upon the initiation of force, then government is a subset of the general category of immorality or evil.
Other things are also evil that aren't government, such as going to strangle a hobo or kicking a cat or whatever it is, right?
So those are the initiations of force, and they would be immoral, but they're not immoral in a general category, if that makes any sense.
So governments always and forever are immoral because they're the initiation of force against citizens.
Somebody hitting someone is not necessarily immoral.
It could be self-defense and so on, right?
So, when people say, and this is, you know, just skepticism and clear thinking 101, right?
I have over 3,000 shows.
Yes, it's been quite a productive decade.
I have over 3,000 shows, and a lot of them are quite long.
So, if someone tells you, Stefan Molyneux has never dealt...
Listen to me referring to myself in the third person like Bernie Sanders.
If someone says to you, Stefan Molyneux has never dealt with this issue, he's never actually analyzed what government is.
Oh yes, I've got seven or eight books as well.
And I've been on a whole bunch of other people's shows.
So I've done a lot of talking over the last ten years.
And I wasn't exactly a monk before that.
So when someone says, well, Stefan Molyneux has never analyzed what government is...
I guess the obvious question would be, okay, have you listened to all the shows?
Are you sure?
I mean, he's got two whole books on anarchy, everyday anarchy and practical anarchy, which you can get a hold of at freedomainradio.com slash free.
So, what other forces are relative to government?
I never talk about corporations.
Of course, right?
So, how it could change?
I never, ever talk about how government could change.
Of course, I've done dozens and dozens and dozens of shows on the transition from where we are to a peaceful society, and that is generally through peaceful parenting.
So, the whole discussion and idea is juvenile and superficial.
So the guy says he knows, like, Freud's letters, Sigmund Freud's letters run, I don't know, 24 volumes or something like that.
So if I say with alacrity that Freud never talked about communism and its Jewish influence in Russia, never!
It's like, really?
You've read all 24 volumes?
Anyway, so when people say, I've never done this, I've never done that, or whatever, right?
And then he says, two, collectivism and socialism, communism, whatever.
Again, superficial sloganeering.
So I actually make arguments, and his rebuttal is, whatever, are totally wrong.
Like, that's just way off-field.
It's so off-field, it's kind of on-field in opposite world again.
I mean, that's just, so he accuses me of superficial sloganism when he basically just says, whatever.
He's referring to me, he says, he talks about freedom with the real intent being to support powerful private interests, which will take your freedom away when government is not there to be influenced by you.
Every one of his talks and videos suffer from these propagandistic themes.
He talks about freedom with the real intent being to support powerful private interests, which will take your freedom away when government is not there to be influenced by you.
Right.
You see, because you can choose not to buy Pepsi, but you can't choose to not pay your taxes.
This is why...
In a free market, again, corporations in the current sphere are not exactly free market entities, but you can choose not to go to a restaurant, and that actually has a huge influence on the restaurant.
You cannot choose not to participate in your government.
So the idea that private interests, and by private he means voluntary, and that's the definition of the difference between a private and a public interest, is that a private interest cannot directly initiate the use of force against you, whereas the government can.
Pepsi cannot pass a law raising my taxes.
Now, they can lobby the government, this, that, and the other.
That's why I said directly, I get it, I get it.
But private interests cannot initiate the use of force against you and thus are responsive to your initiation of action to interact with them.
You've got to go to the restaurant, you've got to order, you've got to pay in order for the restaurant to benefit from you.
Government just raises your taxes, sucks it up like an anteater with an ant from the source of your income for the most part.
And so the idea that governments are highly, highly responsive to your preferences, whereas private corporations or private restaurants or soda manufacturers aren't, well...
That's just ridiculous.
Every one of his talks and videos suffers from these propagandistic themes.
So, again, I'm on the other side of the mirror.
I'm watching a bird attack itself and considering itself champion of the world.
So I'll take a break here.
Thank you so much for listening.
I actually do kind of enjoy these comments.
Sometimes they're a little bit like nails on a blackboard to a highly sensitive songbird, which would be me.
But I do appreciate the fact that people are listening and making comments.
And it does help.
Me to really, really dig in and entrench myself in my bitter, deep World War I-style mustard gas hatred against public schools, which are scrubbing from the species the capacity to even pretend to things.
Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
Thank you so much for watching.
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