Nov. 29, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:57:09
3140 ICE CREAM FASCISM - Call In Show - November 27th, 2015
Question 1: [1:31] - Aristotle poses "A is A". Aristotle tries to create rules to which this world conforms, but neglects to question 'what is this world?' Do our descriptions form what we perceive? Do you think that finding some answers to these questions can make our lives better? Is there any practical impact of such examinations on our day to day life?Question 2: [43:20] - I am a college student majoring Exercise Physiology with a focus in Biomedical Sciences. I am awaiting admissions decisions to medical schools and want to use my possible future career to spread peaceful parenting from a unique perspective. What are some potential ramifications of taking a specialty like pathology and applying it to philosophy? Question 3: [1:17:15] - Despite being a hardcore anarcho-capitalist and following the non-aggression principle towards my children, I have a disturbing feeling that I'm raising children who are going to be communists. I’m scared as hell, please help!Question 4: [2:14:40] - I've recently finished reading the novel "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Duma. The book left me pondering the overlap and or comparability of revenge with virtue. Can one seek to punish evil or seek revenge against someone who has done evil to them without seeking to advance virtue and still be good? Is the act of revenge or seeking retribution good, bad or simply an aesthetic preference? What of those who are harmed along the way? Is it permissible for people to be collateral damage in the promotion of virtue but not revenge?
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, we had a good show, a very interesting show tonight, covered a lot of ground.
The first guy was questioning Aristotle's logic and the relationship between logic, language, and reality.
A pretty fertile topic and something important to discuss for reasons that I kind of get into in the conversation.
Now, the second is a guy just about to head into med school, and he's interested in spreading peaceful parenting, and he wonders if there's a way to make it go viral, like a pathogen of virtue, which was a very interesting approach.
Third guy, a freaking out Parenting peaceful father who's concerned that his peaceful parenting techniques might be turning his children into rampant outright communists.
Surprising question and a surprising perspective on what happened.
The last caller, his first question was basically, he just finished reading the book The Count of Monte Cristo.
And he was wondering, what is the relationship between virtue and vengeance?
Revenge.
And then we talked about how he was spreading freedom.
And yes, if you have an apocalyptic frame of mind, this might be a useful conversation for you to listen to.
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As always, thank you so much for listening.
Let's strap in.
Alright, well up for us today is Mark.
Mark wrote in and said, Aristotle poses that A is A. Aristotle tries to create rules to which the world conforms, but neglects to question, what is this world?
Or do our descriptions form what we perceive?
These questions might seem useless, but rigorous use of language is showing us the limits of its use as shown by the open question.
What is it we perceive, and what is its relation to language?
Do you think that finding some answers to these questions can make our lives better?
Is there any practical impact of such examinations in our day-to-day life?
That's from Mark.
Hello, Mark.
Good evening.
How are you doing?
Hello.
Hello.
Doing fine.
Looking forward for the discussion.
I'm a big fan of the show, so...
I'm not sure that I understand the questions, which it means that, or the definitions or the issues, so I wonder if you could step me through it.
Don't be afraid to dumb it down quite a bit, pretend I'm like four years old and asking why I shouldn't hit Johnny and steal his candy, but what is it that you are, these questions around language, is it like the relationship between language and things?
In the real world and the incompleteness of that relationship?
I mean, I'm trying to understand what it is that we're going to be talking about tonight.
Yes.
Basically, you probably know the Cretan paradox.
The Cretan says all the Cretans are liars.
And now we cannot make the true value of this statement.
Right?
Do you know this paradox?
All Cretans are liars?
Yes, and it's Cretan who says that.
Right.
So if he's correct, then he's lying, therefore he can't be correct.
If he's telling the truth, then all Cretans can't be liars.
If he's lying, then all Cretans can't be liars.
So I don't know that it's a paradox, it's just something which can't ever be parsed out as true.
Or false.
Because if it's false, then it's true.
Right, but since something can't be both false and true at the same time, it's something that you just kind of shrug your shoulders and walk away from, because what would that have to do with philosophy, fundamentally?
Yes, in this case, we would expect that, but in Gettle's case, we were specifically trying to build a theory that has some strength,
And we arrived that even in this specifically artificially constructed theory, there are statements which are true, but unprovable.
Well, but I'm sorry, you're just asking me sort of a real-world philosophical issue.
Like, if someone came up to me and said, Steph, I always lie, right?
First of all, that's never going to happen, right?
People are not going to, you know, they may do it implicitly, like, hi, I'm running for office.
But they're not going to do it.
Steph, everything I say is a lie.
What do you think of that?
I'd be like, I don't know, I... I'd rather chat with people who aren't going to immediately propose an incomprehensible paradox to me and call me fussy, you know?
But I just...
In the real world of philosophy, since that's your question of real world, what would it matter to try and unravel such a thing?
We've got parenting to improve.
We've got wars to end.
We've got famines to dismantle.
We have national debts to reverse.
We have a huge amount of things to do in the world.
I don't know why I'd muck about in a corner with somebody throwing curveball, boomerang, bladed troll questions at me.
Why would I bother with someone like that?
I mean, I'm open to the answer.
I'm just not.
I'm thinking in the real world, like I'm at a party and someone says, oh, I'd really like to talk about peaceful parenting.
And someone else says...
I'm a liar all the time!
I know who I would speak with, and I just don't know why I'd waste my time with these cretins, right?
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't bother you at all that it's possible to construct such a paradox in language.
Because to me it shows the limit of knowledge based on language.
Not if you don't interact with people like that, it doesn't, right?
I mean, if someone wants to create a paradox like, I'm a liar all the time, I'm like, why would I bother?
Like, why would I want to spend my time trying to unravel something like that?
Either they're not a liar, but they're lying to me, in which case they are sometimes a liar.
But to say that I'm always lying or everything I say is a lie, I mean, it's not possible, right?
Because he's using words that are accurate to communicate.
That he's a liar, right?
If he can communicate the idea to me that he's lying, then he's using true, valid, and accurate words to describe his condition or his process as a human being.
So he's at least telling the truth insofar as he's using truthful words to describe his liar, his lying habits or process or whatever, in which case he's not a liar.
Like if he came up and said something completely...
Right?
Then I'd be like, okay, well, I guess maybe he's lying, maybe he's telling the truth, or maybe he's just having a seizure.
But the moment he comes up and forms a comprehensible sentence to me designed to communicate a particular proposition or truth statement, then he's already telling the truth insofar as he's picking the right words to communicate his idea.
And I just...
Yeah, why would I want to get in?
That's somebody who's like...
That's a pathological personality disorder.
Compulsive lying is a very, very disturbed personality structure.
And I don't think that I would...
I'm not going to try and play catch with someone who's trapped inside an iron lung.
And I'm not going to invite someone in a wheelchair to do cartwheels.
And this is no disrespect to physical disabilities, which have nothing to do with intellectual or moral disabilities.
But if somebody comes up and obviously has a twisted and pathological personality structure, why would I grace them with time, attention, and reasonable philosophy?
It wouldn't make any sense at all.
It'd be like someone sitting down and saying, I'd like to play chess with you, but whether I win or lose, I'm going to bite you.
It's like, okay, so the only way to win this game is not to play.
Troll!
Maybe people could construct that kind of thing, but why on earth would I want to have anything to do with someone like that when there's so much good that can be done in philosophy?
Yes, you bring up a valid point.
So you would say that reality does not contain paradoxes?
Well, define what you mean by paradox and define what you mean by reality.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what we're talking about.
I mean, I know what I would talk about with those terms, but if you're not talking about the same thing, we're liable to be just two ships that pass in the night.
Okay, so...
Yes, so our mathematicians have built a Principia Mathematica to be able to answer all the questions in the theory.
Giedel came up and said that all the systems that have this kind of strength, where you can express all these statements, will contain paradox.
And to me, that...
Sorry, we're trying to define either reality or paradox.
Saying something contains paradox is like, what is a floobie?
Well, a guy said something contains floobies.
Well, that doesn't help me know what a floobie is.
So what do you mean by paradox?
Yeah, I mean something where you cannot say if it's true or false, or you cannot tell...
Yeah, you cannot exactly tell what it is.
I would describe paradoxically.
I don't think that's exactly what a paradox is.
Okay.
I mean, if I say I had a dream about an elephant last night, you can't tell whether that's true or false.
You can't prove it or disprove it, and you never will be able to.
But that doesn't mean that what I'm posing is a paradox.
I'm simply posing a question for which there's no possible way to validate it and no possible null hypothesis, no way of proving or disproving the statement.
That is not a paradox.
That's just something that can't be established in any objective way.
So, could you then tell me what you consider?
Well, here's another example.
Like, if I say, I like jazz, right?
And I go to jazz concerts, and I buy Chick Corea, and, like, I buy jazz albums, and I know a lot about jazz, and maybe I play some trumpet or something, right?
And so, I say, I like jazz.
And you know that I've been to a bunch of jazz concerts, have all these jazz albums and so on, right?
Well, that could be a true statement.
But let's say that for some reason I'm just pretending to like jazz my whole life long, like I really, really hate it.
It sounds like, you know, random scritchy-scratchy canoodling of people practicing their instruments in a giant cacophony of anti-musicality.
You may try and figure out where I stand on jazz based on that.
But maybe I'm just faking it.
Maybe I said to my dying father, I'm going to pretend to like jazz my whole life.
And I don't actually like jazz.
So I can say I like jazz and there could be lots of physical evidence to support it.
Is that a provable statement?
I don't know.
Maybe what you could do is hook me up to some sort of MRI or something and see if the happy centers in my brain light up when I hear jazz.
But there's a subjective statement of preference for which there may be empirical evidence in my behavior.
There may be some medical evidence.
You could find a way to glean it and you could probably prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
But I could still be lying.
Maybe I found a way to fake the MRI. I don't know what I mean.
So these are things which you can't ever prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But I would not say that that is a paradox.
A paradox is an unresolvable contradiction somehow in the nature of reality.
Like a paradox would be something like, I mean this is not a perfect example, but something like this.
Can God make a stone that's too heavy for God to lift?
Now if God can create a stone that is too heavy for God to lift...
Then God is not all-powerful because God can't lift the stone which he created.
If it is impossible for God to create a stone too heavy for him to lift, then God is not all-powerful because he's barred from making a stone too heavy for him to lift.
That would be sort of a contradiction or a paradox.
That would be in the nature of the concept of a deity.
But since deities don't exist in reality, that is not a contradiction or a paradox within reality.
And isn't that previous example resolved that since God is all-powerful, He can decide at one point that He will lose His all-powerfulness and He will create that stone?
At that point where He creates the stone, He is not God anymore?
Yeah, yeah.
But then that puts God in a sequence of time that has him subject to time.
From Wiki, a paradox is a statement that apparently contradicts itself, and yet might be true or wrong at the same time.
Some logical paradoxes are known to be invalid arguments, but are still valuable in promoting critical thinking.
Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and of course axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined.
One example is Russell's paradox, I think that's named after the Terrier, which questions whether, quote, a list of all lists that do not contain themselves would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification of sets with properties or predicates were flawed.
Others, such as Curry's paradox, why is it tasty even though it burns my white throat, are not yet resolved.
Examples outside logic include the ship of Theseus from Philosophy, questioning whether a ship repaired over time By replacing each of its wooden parts would remain the same ship.
I talked about this in the show recently, how every seven years, pretty much approximately every single cell in your body has been replaced.
They don't all wait for the seven years and then shimmer in and out like you're on a teleporter.
But after about seven years, there are no cells remaining from your body from seven years ago.
They cycle in and out.
Are you the same person?
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, of course, right?
But are you composed of the same matter?
No.
So it's the old thing that if somebody could at an atomic level reproduce the painting, the Mona Lisa painting, or the Nat King Cole song for that matter, then if you could at an atomic level completely recreate the Mona Lisa and destroy the original, would you still have the Mona Lisa?
I mean, they're sort of interesting questions.
I actually posed some of these to my daughter at dinner.
You know, we did Puddle Pond Lake.
Puddle Pond Lake.
These are not paradoxes, but this is an example of the fuzzy edges of language.
So we did some puddle jumping earlier today, and I said, okay, so the puddle we jumped in, was that a puddle?
She said, yes.
I said, okay, well, a pond that we visited last week, is that a pond?
I didn't say a pond, but where we went.
She said, yes.
And I said, okay, well, this big lake that we once went boating on, is that at least, yeah, it's a lake, right?
So, Puddle Pond Lake.
Now, so I put my sort of two fingers on the table.
I said, okay, let's say the puddle is this big and the pond is this big, right?
Which is twice the size, right?
Puddle Pond.
She says, okay, Puddle Pond, right?
And then I just made my fingers a little bigger.
Is it still a puddle?
Is it a puddle?
Right?
And it's like, it's almost the same size as a pond.
Is it a puddle or a pond?
Well, it's mostly pond.
And I said, could it be a small pond or a large puddle, right?
And these are sort of definitional questions that are kind of fun to think about, but there's no particular answer A. I mean, there's one atom more and it, boom, transmogrifies from a puddle to a pond or a pond to a lake.
Oh, it's a shallow lake.
It's a shallow pond, therefore it's kind of like a puddle.
Or it's a deep pond.
Therefore, it's kind of like a lake.
But yet, nonetheless, most times when people say, we're going to the lake, if I picked you up and said, hey man, we're going to the lake, and then I drive you to a puddle, you'd be like, dude, what are you doing?
It's a puddle.
So, at the fuzzy edges of these definitions, this is a challenge.
Nobody knows exactly what is a tall person.
Well, a tall person in Africa, where people are very tall...
Outside of Pygmy's...
I don't know, Pygmy's South America.
But a tall person in Africa is a tall person.
A tall person in China may be a short person in Africa.
You know, we use the word tree to refer...
Just, I mean, outside of like logic trees or recursive trees in coding...
We use the word tree to refer to a sapling.
We got sapling, but we say, oh, it's a baby tree.
We refer to it a tree that is a deciduous tree or an evergreen tree.
They're both still trees.
A tree that's been dead for a year is a dead tree.
Still, we use the word tree.
A tree in summer with lots of leaves, lots of tree in winter.
There are times when a shrub is really tall.
Is it a tree or not?
I don't know.
That half shrub, half tree thing over there is probably what we'd say.
And, of course, we use the word tree to refer to lots of different trees, even though there's No identical tree in the world.
Like there's no tree that is exactly the same as another tree in any way shape.
I'm not even close, right?
No different branches and different root systems and so on.
We say tree and generally we mean the part that is above the ground.
Although a tree, of course, is as much below the ground as it is above the ground.
But we don't say the top half of the tree.
We just say tree.
And then, of course, we'd say, well, of course, there are roots and the tree goes as much underground as it does up into the air.
But we don't say...
You know, that's the top half of a tree.
When we say, oh, there's a house, we don't say, you know, outside of Florida and places or California up in Canada, you have basements, right?
So you don't say, well, that's the top three quarters of a house.
You know, we just say, well, that's a house, right?
So you can go slowly crazy thinking about all the ways in which language is useful And ridiculously imprecise.
Does tree capture everything about every tree?
Of course not.
There's the inside of the tree.
There are things living inside the tree.
There are termites.
There are ants.
There are animals who've burrowed into the roots.
And are currently feasting on them or whatever, right?
So, and the tree blurs into, there's no particular point at which this atom is a tree, and now this atom is the air, or this atom is the tree, and now this atom is the earth.
There's an overlap, like two fingers going together, right?
Because there's no particular demarcation.
Nonetheless, with all of this caveats in place with regards to language, nonetheless, a three-year-old knows what a tree is.
And that's, you know, the great challenge where you just have to accept when you really start to think about language, it is ridiculously imprecise and confusing and chaotic.
Yet nonetheless, it is incredibly valuable and useful and it is incredibly accurate in that if I say we're going to the lake, you don't expect me to drive you to a mall or to a tree or to a puddle or to a lake of fire or to a volcano or whatever it is, right?
Language, when you get into thinking about it, can kind of drive you crazy with its imprecision and the great challenge, which philosophers have been working on.
This is all the way back to the problem of concepts that Aristotle and Plato wrestled over.
And Aristotle said, well, we accumulate concepts based upon the essences, the similarities of the things that we regard in our life.
And we build them up over time through exposure to similar things.
Whereas Plato said, well, we get concepts or language in a sense.
The essence of language is because we float above the earth before we're born and we see a perfect tree.
And then when we come to earth, we see this vague shadow of the perfect tree.
And we know it's a tree because we have a vague memory of the perfect treeness in the world of forms that orbit the earth like Saturn's bits of a moon or something.
So when it comes to sort of incompleteness, yeah, every single thing that you say about language, you can get to the fuzzy edges of what it is defining.
And you can find stuff to pick apart.
Nonetheless, language is incredibly precise and incredibly useful and incredibly accurate in that if you say to a three-year-old, I'm giving you a candy, and then you give them a piece of bark...
They will be very, very disappointed.
And watching language and concept formation in my daughter, this is the first time I've really had a chance to watch that incredible eruption.
It's like watching some ancient city like Atlantis come up out of the ocean to watch concept and language formation occurring in a baby.
It is remarkable how incredibly precise and accurate language is in terms of how...
You communicate it, right?
I can't remember what they're called, but there's a word for the pretend words that your kids have when they can't say.
Like when my daughter wanted to say spider when she was a baby, she'd say, or grape was bagai.
And we knew what she meant.
She was just still working out how to operate the giant machinery of mouth and throat and tongue.
And teeth in order to get the right word out.
And we actually somewhere have a list of like 50 of these that we wrote down that she was working her way through.
And I was the same way when I was a kid.
When I was very young, there was only one other person in the family who knew what the hell I was saying and had to translate to the adults for me.
So at the fuzzy edges of language, we can go completely mental, wondering how on earth it can possibly work.
But it does.
And it works fantastically.
And I think that the disassembly of language and the disassembly of potential logical paradoxes is a fine hobby.
It's like whittling.
It's a fine hobby.
Why not?
Why not sit there with your nipple-high suspenders and make little things out of wood?
But it's not a job.
It's like a time waster.
And it's fun.
And maybe you can learn a few things here and there just as you can with whittling.
Like, ow, that hurts when you dig your knife in your skin.
But it's not the job of philosophy to work on that.
That is the leisure time of philosophy after the problems have been solved in the world.
But I believe that philosophy needs to be out there in the world solving the problems of the initiation of force against children, against citizens, against foreigners.
I mean, the initiation of irrationality against people subjugated to various ideologies and nationalisms and racisms and religions and so on.
We have enough to do out there in the world to make the world a better place.
And if we want to, after a good day out there in the trenches battling evil and sophistry and wrongdoing and delusion and manipulation and propaganda of every kind, if we want to relax and wonder what a tree really is, that's fine.
but it has as much relationship to building a house as whittling does.
Whittling will never get you a house, but it might be a decent way to relax after a hard day's work.
And that's how I view these questions of paradoxes and the edges and the fuzzy borders and this and that and the other.
Yeah, fine, if you've spent your day battling evil and you want to think about all of that kind of stuff, go for it.
But it's certainly not...
You know, if I say, hey, man, I'm going to build you a house, and you pay me $200,000, and I come over and I whittle, you'll be like, where's my house?
I'm like, this is what I call building a house.
And this questioning the fuzzy boundaries of definitions and so on is like whittling when we should be out there building houses.
And that's, I think, what society should be paying philosophers to do, is not to buck about with definitions and potential paradoxes, but to do something useful in the world.
Like if some guy came along and said, hey, man, I'll be your doctor.
You know, pay me $100 a month, I'll be your doctor.
And you then, I don't know, you got some weird growth on your hand and you, hey, I think I'm turning into a tree.
If you got some weird growth in your hand and you go to this doctor, you come to me and I'm supposed to be your doctor and I say, it's really interesting when you think about it, the fuzzy edges of the definitions between health and You know, what's healthy when you're 10 is not always healthy when you're 20 or 50.
Somebody who's in good health when they're 70 would not be in good health if they had the same characteristics when they were 15.
And I just give you all of these fuzzy definitional things.
I think part of you, and hopefully a big loud part of you, would be saying, well, that may be all very interesting, doctor, guy, but I've got this weird freaking growth on my hand.
Can you help me burn it off with fire?
Get me some holy water.
Get me some freeze ray.
Whatever you need to do, I've got to get this growth off my hand.
And I'd say, well, you know, what's interesting is that hand is a complicated question when it comes to the definition of halalala.
There could be paradoxes in the way that we use our hands or hands use us.
I mean, do we have the hand or does the hand have the body?
Right?
And you'd be like...
Growth, hand, burn, kelp, health, medicine.
And at some point you'd say, you are like a terrible doctor because I need you to help me with something.
And you're just like giving me these weird little definitional things.
And that to me is the world coming to philosophers, particularly academic philosophers, and saying, we're dying out here.
We're dying!
Things are going really, really badly.
Oh, war, child abuse, murder, rape.
Oh, God, collectivism of every single kind, delusion, darkness, manipulation, sophistry.
The giant boa constrictor of dead language has got us and is choking the living life out of us.
And we're like, you know, there are these interesting paradoxes around the logic of a deity.
And it's like, oh, growth on hand called evil, burn it with fire.
You're the only person who can.
And I think it's incredibly, I'm not saying putting you in this category of growth, it's incredibly irresponsible and vicious to say, I'm into thinking, I'm into philosophy, and I can't help you with the growth of evil on your hand.
I'd much rather talk about whether there really is such a thing as a hand.
Okay, that's the end of my rant, but that's sort of why I don't care that much about these things.
Yeah, of course, I agree with you about the applications.
I just had the idea that we can avoid this ambiguity of natural language and build some artificial language, like mathematics, without these paradoxes.
And it seems that these paradoxes are somehow inherent to language.
That's what Wait, do you really feel that this show in particular is suffering from a deficiency of mathematical language?
No.
Well...
Do you think if I had more algebra, we'd convince more parents not to hit their children?
I'm just curious what you feel is missing.
And you could be right.
Maybe we need a Khan Academy.
But I think that it's important upon me to try and fire people up with the virtue and with goodness and with consistency and all of that kind of stuff.
And, you know, as I've said before, I sort of model what I do, obviously, on Socrates because...
He was bald, too.
No, I mean, I model myself on Socrates.
So, you know, one day I may actually be accused of corrupting the young and not believing in the gods of the city.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, Socrates wasn't out there saying, well, you know, he wasn't scratching in the dirt trying to figure out how to get more algebraic equations or mathematical paradoxes.
He was talking with the people about how to live a virtuous life.
And that is...
I think I'm kind of missing because, you know, philosophy got hoovered up by the giant space-sucking Tatooine-based moor of theology for, I don't know, what, about 15 or 1700 years, depending on how you count it.
And then it got sucked up into academia and served the state, which is where it currently is.
And to me, what I'm doing and what I'm able to do, you know, with conversations like this, which, you know, I really, Mark, appreciate...
There are smart people in the world, and governments know that there are smart people in the world, and what they do is bribe them with benefits and titles in return for their silence about the evil doings of the rulers.
That's what academia is all about.
Ooh, are you smart?
All right, you seem like a really smart guy.
Ooh, are you good at talking?
Are you good at thinking?
Are you good at reasoning?
Do you have the respect of the people?
Shh!
Ooh.
Well, you can do a lot of damage to the powers that be.
Ooh, I got a great idea.
Come here.
Come here, little guy.
I got this wonderful thing.
I'm going to pay you like $150,000 a year, and you're only going to have to work...
Five hours a week.
Oh, you know what?
Every fifth year, you can just take off and just go do whatever the hell you want.
And oh, another thing too, you'll never, ever, ever be able to be fired.
And that's got to taste good.
Plus you'll have a bunch of undergraduates and graduate students all who want to sick your big giant philosophy PhD dick so that you can offer them the same goodies that you have.
And this is the great temptation that they are offering to people in the world.
And it is a way of drawing people into the ring of power, getting them to suck at the giant welfare teat of academia, thus rendering them beyond useless.
To the average person.
Philosophers should be among the crowd, speaking with the people, encouraging people to virtue, listening to people's concerns.
Philosophy should serve the people.
And philosophy has been co-opted by academics to serve the rulers.
And it serves the rulers in two ways.
Number one, they're not out there talking to the people trying to encourage people to virtue and strength and courage and nobility.
Number one.
Number two...
They make philosophy look as useless as tits on a bull.
They make philosophy look ridiculous and boring and pedantic and abstract and stupid and useless.
And it's really, really working well.
Like the whole Middle Eastern crisis right now.
There's no big red phone in the media room saying, shit, man, this is bad.
We got a moral crisis on our hand.
Pick up the red phone.
We gotta get a philosopher in here.
They do this with other things, right?
I mean, they do this with, oh, we have a big, complicated medical problem.
We'd better get a good doctor in here.
Get the doctor on, right?
With some public health crisis, get the epidemiologist on, not the epistemideologist on, right?
When was the last time that you ever heard the bat signal go out to the clouds with a big Socratic wreath on top saying, philosophers, we need you.
Now break out the philosophy.
Ah!
Take them out of the cryogenic chambers.
We only keep them for the biggest and gravest and most deadly emergencies that the species has ever known.
It's so bad.
In case of emergency, break abstraction.
They don't give the philosophers some oxygen to breathe.
We've got to get them out.
Retrieve philosophers.
Bring them to life.
Bring the electricity down like Frankenstein.
We've got to get the philosophers because we're doomed otherwise.
Nobody ever thinks of that.
And as far as the smartest people in the world, you know, there are the two top disciplines for intelligence.
And I'm just sort of raw IQ processing power.
The two top disciplines for intelligence.
Number one, physicist.
Number two, philosopher.
And as far as being useful to the world, physicists are kicking philosopher's asses.
Where is the philosophical Neil deGrasse Tyson?
Where is the philosophical Richard Dawkins?
Where is the great poet-philosopher who can bridge the gap between academics and the people?
I mean, Jesus, where is the philosophical Carl Sagan out there creating media for the public to consume?
And there's me, but I'm talking about PhD philosophers who've, you know, it's like you guys are taking millions of dollars of the public's money.
How about getting off your ivory tower asses and coming down actually helping the people?
Oh no, you see, because by sealing them off in these biochambers of academic uselessness, we render them very fragile and very delicate and they don't like to upset people.
They don't want anyone to get mad at them because they've been bought out.
And when you're bored out, you're taken off the battlefield, you lose all your battle skills, or you fail to develop them in the first place, and you become a fraidy cat.
And I'm sorry, this is where philosophy is.
Philosophy is absolutely desperately and totally needed by the world as a whole.
And where are the academic philosophers out there busting their butts to help people solve the genuine problems that beset the world?
The world is dying from a lack of philosophy.
The world is dying from a lack of principles.
Where the hell are These superheroes in mankind's time of greatest need.
These are the end times potentially for the slow and steady but uneven growth of civilization for the past thousand or two thousand years.
These are the end times.
And where are You know, there's ancient myths in just about every tribe that there was a great king of the past.
There was a great king in the past who fought against the enemies of the kingdom and vanquished the enemies of the kingdom.
And there's always the same myth if you look throughout history.
The myth is this, that in the time of the kingdom's greatest need, that ancient warrior will come back to earth and come back alive and destroy once more The deadly foes who threaten the life of the kingdom.
And this was used in Lord of the Rings, right?
Aragorn goes and gets the ghost army.
This is the standard myth.
And there is great power to this myth.
It gives people hope that the glories of the future can even remotely match the often imagined glories of the past.
But the real emotional driver mark behind this myth is that we have built this civilization on philosophy.
This civilization was not built on the free market.
It was not built on mercantilism.
It was not built on crony capitalism.
It was built on philosophy.
That's the only thing that sustains this civilization.
Innocent until proven guilty, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom of speech.
These are all fundamental philosophical principles that both require justification and require that people be philosophical enough to resolve their disputes without running to the state, without running to the police, without running to their guns.
And so the myth that the warriors will return in the kingdom's greatest need to free them from the ancient enemies that beset them in the past, that is the call for philosophers.
And the call has been going out for decades for philosophers to come and save the world.
From the predators, from the sophists, from the false teachers, from the false prophets.
The call has been going out.
The bat signal has been flicking and flicking and flicking and flicking.
And the people are dying from a lack of principles.
And the philosophers are all sealed up in their useless ivory towers, flicking back and forth these magically gathering cards of ultimate bullshit.
And they are literally fiddling while Rome burns, to use an analogy that is historically anachronistic.
There was no fiddle back in Nero's time, but...
This call is constantly going out to the philosophers, but because they've been absorbed into the jab-of-the-hut belly of the state, they care nothing for the people whose needs they are supposed to serve.
Philosophy is there to serve the people, just as medicine is there to serve the sick.
And the philosophers in academia are inside their sealed biosphere environment.
Of dusty inconsequentiality and are refusing the cries and clamors and literally blood-streaked falling hands on the outside of their pink biodome.
The faces pressed, the screaming, the deaths.
They play their useless card games in the depths of these empty chambers while the people die outside.
And then the people will break in and kill the philosophers at some point.
I mean, not literally, but this is what will happen.
This is what's happened throughout history.
I want philosophy to be front and center when it comes to solving social problems, which is why I'm here and not there.
So I think that's where philosophy needs to be.
I remember reading a long time ago in one of Ayn Rand's nonfiction works that during a time of intense crisis in America in the 1960s, There was, of course, Vietnam going on.
There were student riots, protests, racial tensions, cities burning down, imposition of the welfare state, massive amounts of corruption and predation at every level of government and even privately within society, the collapse of marriage, rises of divorce and so on.
And she said during this time of crisis, the American Philosophical Association got together and the number one issue on their conference brochure was, do nouns really exist?
Fuck them.
Fuck them, these parasitical people betraying leeches of power.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to say that to me this paradox was important because before I thought that it's possible to arrange a world in a clear and obvious matter, but this broke this idea.
And also that if I talk about, let's say, this paradox, people just don't listen to me.
But if I talk general philosophy, I get attacked.
So, yeah, you're right.
You will.
Listen, the moment philosophy touches the real needs and issues of the people, you'll get attacked.
Of course you will.
That's the job.
You know, I step into the ring with Muhammad Ali, and this is a weird thing.
He tries to hit me.
I don't know what his problem is.
I mean, geez, what the hell?
But that's the gig, right?
But you talked about Socrates, and what bothers me about him is that when he had the option to leave Athens, he didn't leave Athens.
So I wanted to ask you, if you had the option, would you leave?
Who says I don't?
Uh-huh.
Who says, I don't?
We have that option all the time.
Where was Socrates going to go?
Athens, the Athenian society, was the most philosophical, and it wanted to kill him.
And where was he going to go?
To another society, where things were going to be even worse.
You've got to take a stand at some point.
And I've, listen, for those, I've got a whole series, which I did, I don't know, six years ago, I think, called The Trial and Death of Socrates, which people should really watch because that's me wrestling, as Nietzsche has talked about, every philosopher wrestles with Socrates, and that's me wrestling with the giant forehead beast of Socratic thought and his ending and what it meant.
So I'm just going to refer people to The Trial and Death of Socrates.
I think it's a six-part series.
Really some of the best stuff I've ever done, if I do say so myself.
And, you know, on the top of the Mountain of Diamonds, it's the Arkenstone, but...
So people can go and check that out there.
So listen, man, I've got to move on to the next caller, but I really, really appreciate you bringing up this topic.
It certainly brings up something in me.
Okay, thank you.
Thanks, Mark.
Thanks for the show.
Bye.
Bye.
All right.
Okay, so for those who don't know, Mike will occasionally type helpful things to me.
And sometimes he'll type the following.
Thunder.
Thundercats.
Who?
Or, he will also write, your powers combined.
I am Captain Planet.
I don't know if he had a seizure or if this is some mistranslation of the serial box.
You were talking about summoning a philosopher as if a philosopher was a superhero to help the problems that are ongoing in the world today.
So I, of course, went back to my childhood in the cartoons that I watched with the heroes that were summoned.
So, that's where that came from.
Are the cats made of Thunder who?
Is that who?
No, no.
The main Thundercat is named Lion-O, I think.
And what's the villain?
You know, telling me their name.
That's not telling me anything.
The Flooboo is named Poobat.
Okay.
Does not help me with the Flooboo.
He's not made of Thunder, Steph, that I remember.
I'm going to have to go watch a clip after the show, but...
Are these cats post Indian food?
Who?
I don't know.
Anyway, so sometimes Mike is very helpful and the other times he just apparently wants to make me cross-eyed.
And Steph, always a helpful friend, points out when I'm not helpful and reads out my not helpfulness on the show.
Boy, I won't be self-conscious about sharing things in the future, Steph.
That'll work out great.
No, just, you know, share the helpful stuff.
Just kidding.
I knew I kind of knew what it was.
I've heard about the Thundercats.
I don't know who Captain Planet is.
Oh, you know, it might actually be fun to watch an old Captain Planet.
It's like the most amazing environmentalist propaganda ever.
You know, all the evil villains are just for no explicit reason.
All developers.
Well, they're all like evil capitalists, you know, or whatnot, who just wants to pollute the planet for no reason.
Doesn't make any money from it.
There's no profit in it.
You just, I just want to destroy the environment because I'm sheer evil.
I'm paving over Bambi's Meadow because...
And then they have this incredibly multicultural group of people with rings.
And each ring represents fire or water or some other earth element.
And they can summon Captain Planet to his green hair, which I've never quite figured out why.
And of course he beats the evil capitalists or people that want to tear down the rainforest for whatever reason.
Or does he just go to Washington and ask for regulations until they give up creating jobs?
Is that how he beats them?
I'm sure he doesn't use violence because the environmental...
Lobby has never been keen on that.
He can fly, too.
I don't know.
I shall smash you with a thundercat.
Ooh.
We could probably do this for quite a while, but we should probably, after I said I've got to move on to the next caller, we probably should.
Okay, if folks want a Captain Planet review, let us know.
Well, up next is Franklin.
Franklin wrote in and said, I am a college student majoring in exercise physiology with a focus on biomedical sciences.
I am awaiting admissions decisions to medical schools and want to use my possible future career to spread peaceful parenting from a unique perspective.
What are some potential ramifications of taking a specialty like pathology and applying it to philosophy?
As a main contributor to the advancement of medical science, I am intrigued at the potential of pathology as a vector for spreading philosophy amongst scientists.
That's from Franklin.
Now, Franklin, you realize that you sound almost exactly like a supervillain of heroism, right?
I'm going to spread virtue like a pathology.
Airborne, waterborne, I don't know.
I've got to get into the sewage system somehow.
We're talking metaphorically, right?
Not like some dust that makes people more rational, right?
Yes.
I have been told that I do sound like a supervillain sometimes, though.
Excellent.
We will ship you a bald cat and continue this on webcam.
All right.
Alright, so I don't really understand the question, but it sounds intriguing, so I wonder if you can break it out a little more.
Okay, it's a little complicated, which is why I wanted to talk about it, but pathology is just the study of disease, and it's a specialty in medicine that allows doctors to analyze new diseases, and they can...
You know, figure out how to differentiate different diseases and prescribe initial ways to deal with them.
And I was thinking that, you know, can we diagnose child abuse or something like that?
Oh, you mean could you take a brain scan and see the effects of child abuse on kids?
Basically.
Right.
Well, as far as I understand it, the answer to that at the moment is yes.
That you can see enlarged amygdala, you can see shrunken neofrontal cortexes, and so on.
You can see the effects of child abuse on scans at the moment, and it would be a very simple thing for people to be scanned for that.
But, of course, for a wide variety of reasons, that's not about to happen.
Yeah, and the reason for my questioning really is that I have got accepted recently, and There are a lot of specialties I could go into, and I'm just trying to think of the best way to get into something that will allow me to spread peaceful parenting.
Well, you know, it is a challenge.
It is a challenge, of course, when you try to help children.
Who gets mad, right?
Yeah.
Right?
The parents give him.
It's why teachers don't do it.
It's why a lot of doctors don't do it.
It's why it's a lot easier to say to parents, oh, I'll prescribe him a pill rather than, hey, would you like to not suck at parenting?
Right?
I mean, that is a big challenge.
I don't know anyone who's been able to solve that challenge.
I think you've just got to kind of grit your teeth and bear down on the problem and just walk through the fire or walk to the fire.
Right?
But when you try to...
You know, like, if you figured out in the public school system, if you figured out how to change it so that it really appealed to children and they woke up like, school?
Great!
You know, like, I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, it was like, there was this slow descent into the sticky and abyss of listlessness when it came to, like, Sunday night.
You know, like, Star Trek was on from five to six, and then six o'clock, you'd be like, oh, I guess it's school tomorrow.
You know, you just get this sort of slow...
And if you had figured out a way where kids would say, you know, not yay school, because that would mean that they didn't like home, but it was like, yeah, Monday, okay, so back to school.
It's cool, right?
It's good.
You know, like I sometimes won't work much on a Sunday, but it's not like Sunday night I'm like, oh, tomorrow...
Back to the greatest philosophy show in the universe.
Oh, right now.
I mean, I get to not watch Star Trek.
I get to be Star Trek as far as bringing new technology to the planet goes.
And no, Mike, I won't read that.
I know it's tempting, but I think he's back to...
Yeah, back into your philosophy pit.
Produce me some podcasts and you'll get some lotion to put on its skin.
Anyway...
So, if you did find some way to make school really great for kids, which is supposed to be the case, they're the primary customers.
Well, who would get upset?
There's all the teachers, right?
And all the administrators and everyone else who currently loves the existing system where they don't have to please the customer.
I mean, pleasing the customer, trust me, I have to do it every day?
Sucks.
No, I'm just kidding.
But I mean, it keeps you on the straight and narrow.
You have to do a good job.
You can't just do something half-assed and all that.
It's the same thing with trying to improve parenting in the world.
The big landmine of tripwire trigger guilt from people who've been bad parents is...
Big, silent, thou shalt not cross line.
None shall pass who make me feel guilty for having been a bad parent and so on.
Or for whom negative consequences might accrue.
And I don't think it's the men in particular, but that's neither here nor there.
So it is a challenge, you know.
I mean, I don't think other than sort of raising general awareness of good parenting practices, I don't think that there is any easy way to do it.
And I think it's tough for doctors, right?
I mean, because you may see clear signs of child abuse.
It's all very recent, right?
I mean, it was really up in the 1950s that one doctor, I can't remember his name, Began to question the number of, quote, falling down the stairs accidents that happened to kids repeatedly.
And he began to really examine the x-rays of these sort of broken bones and realized they were like twist fractures and so on that could not really have come from impact, but could only have come from physical violence.
And it was really only in, I think it was the mid to late 1950s, which is pretty recent when it comes to the world as a whole.
That's like a couple of generations.
And it was only very recently that That the degree of brutality towards children began to even be recognized as a potential issue.
You know, rape has been illegal.
The raping women has been illegal for thousands of years.
But actually abusing children, the idea that it is something which is a medical issue that needs to be addressed, it's very recent.
Very recent.
It is much newer than women's rights.
Vindication of the Rights of Women was written hundreds of years ago.
And the idea that children are deserving of the greatest moral protections in society and the most positive behavior...
It's such an incomprehensible thought for most people.
Like if you go to any reasonable person, at least in the West, and you say women should be legally equal to men, and they're like, well, yeah, of course.
Except feminists who think that they should be superior and get special benefits because they're so into empowering women that they have to have the government negotiate wages on their behalf.
Let me not go that way.
That way madness lies.
So the idea that children should be at the very center of the moral universe and should be afforded the greatest protections and the most liberties that are possible is incomprehensible for people.
I mean, if you tried to set up an adult job the way that you set up government schools...
People would look at you like you're a fascist.
Like you're, you know, well, I'm going to tell you where you can work and I'm going to tell you what time to show up and I'm going to send work home with you.
And if, at least when I was a kid, you know, if you don't do work to people's satisfactions, then I'm going to hit you on your bare ass with a cane or I'm going to hit you with a ruler or I'm going to scream at you or I'm going to make you stay late and write out lines for me.
People would look at you like you are an unholy fascist to treat adults this way.
Oh, and by the way, you know, I'm going to tell you exactly what you should do with every moment of the day, and you're going to have zero feedback whatsoever, and you can't quit.
And you can't quit at all.
And I'll pay you what I damn well feel like, and it's going to be a lot less than you want, but you have to suck it up.
Because if you don't go here, you don't come to this school, and you don't pay, you go to jail.
I mean, if you tried to set this up for adults, they'd say, you are a totalitarian asshole.
Nope.
Nope.
Just a school administrator and people who support it.
So the idea that we should have the highest moral standards for children as the citizens with the least power and the most dependents, that we should have the highest moral standards, is still largely incomprehensible.
Because, I mean, anytime...
And this is...
It sounds like I'm not talking about it, but I am.
And, you know, for more on the history of this, I've got an audiobook reading of Lloyd DeMoss' great book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which you can find at freedomainradio.com slash free.
Just scroll down.
It's on a podcast feed.
Just download and listen to it.
It's grim, but it's incredibly eye-opening.
It's like getting cataracts cut away with a blade saw.
It's not pretty, but you see better afterwards.
Yeah.
But the idea is so incomprehensible.
Like, you just talk about, like, go post the truth about spanking or the facts about spanking presentation, which we've got at youtube.com slash freedom and radio.
Just search for spanking.
Actually, don't search for spanking on YouTube as a whole.
Make sure you're on our channel.
But the idea...
You just post something like that and people say, well, but what if basically they say, well, what if my child is doing something I don't like or that could be dangerous?
Surely I should hit them then.
And of course, if you were to say that about women, you know, what if my wife is doing something I don't like or she's driving too fast or doing something that could be dangerous?
I get to deck her, right?
It's like incomprehensible that you wouldn't.
Well, you know, if you don't hit your women, if you don't beat your women up, Then they'll grow up disrespectful of authority.
I mean, this is like, where are we?
UAE? And, you know, women don't listen to reason.
You've got to punch them because, you know, they're just selfish and they're just mean and they're just irrational and immature and feeling-based.
I'm just waiting for people to cut that out of context.
It's the usual thing.
But...
How is my wife supposed to learn the difference between right and wrong if I don't hit her?
Well, not hitting her might help.
But it is very new.
There's something that's been said about revolutions.
It's always earlier than you think.
And that's true, because when you're in the midst of a revolution, and we're certainly doing a revolution here, but when you're in the midst of a revolution, when you're enmeshed in it, it's the product of many years of considered thought.
And you're so far ahead of the pack that you think...
That you're leading someone and you're like, wow, people are following me.
Lots and lots of people are following me.
Why are they screaming?
Boy, they seem to have a lot of torches and pitchforks.
They're not following me.
They're chasing me.
Run!
Right?
Because it's always earlier than you think.
Ah, my friends, fellow citizens, I stand upon this pulpit, I stand upon Calvary, and I say to you, hit not thy children, scream not at thy children, and do not terrify thy children with climate change and hell.
Because they can at least disbelieve in hell.
Do not abuse thy children.
Teach them gently and be nice to them.
Because as Jesus said, what you do to the least of them, so also do you do unto me.
And I've been to a lot of cathedrals.
I've never seen one picture of Jesus being spanked by a believer.
I'm sure that somewhere on the internet, I'm just frightened to look.
Jesusspank.net for the kinkiest shepherds in your flock.
And so you go out and you say this and it's perfectly reasonable to you, right?
You go, it's perfectly reasonable, right?
Because it's not a revolution to you, right?
It's just, okay, this is the way things are, right?
It is a revolution that is, to everyone else, not only incomprehensible, but evil, right?
It's one thing to have a scientific revolution.
It's another thing to have a revolution which recasts the light and shadow of good and evil, right?
Right?
It's like switching.
You've got a room full of statues with a light only at one end.
And you switch the light to the other side and everything that was in shadow is now in light and everything that was light is now in shadow.
And when you bring a moral revolution, well...
That which was virtuous has become evil, and that which was evil has become virtuous.
And so when you say to parents, well, hitting your children, yelling at your children, intimidating your children, bullying your children, is really counterproductive and destructive and is destroying the world.
And then?
And you should stop doing it.
Well, that is virtually unbearable.
And the first thing that people do is they run to each other for reinforcement about how virtuous they are and how bad you are.
And then they attack, right?
That's just the way things inevitably are going to go.
And the only reason you do it is because you care about the future and the security and safety and peace of mind of children.
And that's why you would do it.
So it's very new.
And most people, when they first encounter the idea of peaceful parenting, they genuinely have the thought across their mind that peaceful parenting is child abuse.
And that's often how they will cast it.
You know, in the same way that some people say, you know, in certain cultures, not beating your women is an act of contempt.
Beating your woman is an act of love.
Not beating your woman is an act of contempt or hatred or indifference, right?
And they recast it in this kind of way.
So people genuinely say not hitting your children Is destructive and immoral parenting, because kids just have no respect if you don't hit them.
Right?
And it's like, you know, try that.
You know, I really feel I need the respect of my employees, so I'm going to go around with a baseball bat and crack them on the back of the neck.
Because, you know, it's really important that they respect me as a manager and value my feedback.
Whap, whap, whap!
You know, suddenly you're like Robert De Niro in The Untouchables.
So, this...
The reorienting of that which is virtuous is, you know, and women's rights were very easy to achieve because men have evolved to please women.
Because women are the gatekeepers, at least they were, before socialists opened up the glory hole.
Women are the gatekeepers of sexual access.
And anybody who didn't please women didn't get to pass along those genes.
So for men, men's desire to please women is...
It's genetically selected.
I'm sure you understand all of that.
And so when women say we want, men are like, okay, how much, in what quantities, and can I get black lung procuring it for you?
Because, okay, as long as I get to pass my seed along, I don't care if I cough up my lung bits in some Eric Blair story.
So...
But children's rights, children's rights, childism, right?
So there's sexism and racism and nationalism and so on.
But childism, which is society's not even refusal to see children as moral agents in need of the most protection in society.
But childism is the genuine belief that initiating violence against children, both verbal and physical abuse against children.
It's virtuous and necessary, and it is the only way that virtue can exist in the world.
It's the only way that virtue can exist in the world.
That is really a tough thing to turn around.
Women at least could speak for themselves, and women could pull a Chirac and refuse to have sex.
They can refuse sexual access.
Children, what can they do?
They have no power.
They require other people to speak for them.
And, of course, by the time most children have grown up through these God-awful chambers of trauma, they're too smashed up to stand up for kids because they were broken down themselves as children.
It takes a willed act of Frankenstein-like reassembling to be able to stand up for children because you have to piece together what happened to you as a child to work through all that pain, and then you can stand, and then you can stand in a way that's incomprehensible and it's strength to people, but that's a topic for another time.
And so I'm sort of pointing out, I love the fact that you're interested in communicating peaceful parenting, and I do genuinely believe that social pathologies, like violence, like war, like rape, sexual predation of every kind, that these pathologies can be traced back To the pathology of child abuse, that it is something which, you know, you harm children verbally, physically, sexually.
It takes root in their soul, they grow up, and it spreads like a virus.
Right?
Violence is a set of epigenetics that wishes to reproduce just like every other organism in the world.
And it reproduces by fucking with children.
That's how it reproduces.
And the violent epigenetics, the epigenetic violent genes, They want to breathe, they want to reproduce, just like every bacteria in a petri dish wants to breathe and wants to reproduce.
And violence is their porn, right?
I mean, it is how this gene set of violence reproduces.
It reduces intelligence and lower IQ means more violence.
It increases fight or flight.
It reduces the neofrontal cortex capacity to intercept and interrupt and stamp down emotional Impulses, right?
You look at a guy funny, he's hit you before he's even know it.
Well, that's the violent gene that wishes to reproduce, and it's reproducing itself by hitting you.
By hitting you, it's activating the epigenetic gene set of violence in you, and that's how it reproduces.
For more on this, Dr.
Murray A. Strauss, who's been on this show, has got an article, which we'll link to below, but you can Google it.
It's called The Primordial Violence, Spanking Children, Psychological Development, Violence.
And crime.
Social dysfunction of every kind, virtually all social dysfunction, can be traced back to abuse and neglect in childhood.
And so whatever we can do to reduce that is how we stop this insanely evil virus of violence from reproducing.
It doesn't listen to reason, because violence is the antithesis of reason.
Why are you so against the initiation of force?
Because that's the opposite of philosophy.
It's like some doctor who's out there risking his life to fight Ebola and you say, well, what if you got against Ebola, man?
I mean, it's just a virus that's trying to survive like everything else.
It's like, yes, but at our expense.
Sorry.
I'm going to side with the bipeds over the bat-carried bushmeat brain fungus of Ebola.
And it's the same thing.
Well, why do I fight so strongly against violence?
Because it's the opposite of philosophy.
Philosophy is reason and negotiation and appeal to evidence.
It's the opposite of violence.
Violence is the domination of one person through fear and pain over another.
It's not philosophy.
It's the complete opposite.
Why do you fight so hard against something and everything, which is the exact opposite of everything that's virtuous and good?
Well, I don't have to ask that.
Why, as a doctor, would you fight against illness?
You know what being a doctor is, right?
That's kind of the key.
Sorry for that long ramble.
I want to get your thoughts on it, but those are some of the challenges that I see facing people who are promoting respect for children and fighting the insidious bigotry of childism around the world.
Well, a big part of what you said about how parents get very defensive.
I mean, I've seen this firsthand while shadowing other physicians, and that's why pediatrics is probably not even an option for me.
It's kind of crazy.
It makes it seem like you'd have to be a woman in order to be able to get in a few words to spread peaceful parenting, given the extra credibility you'd get.
Oh, I don't know, man.
Women turn on women like nobody's business.
Women, like, there's things that, oh, well, you know, if you're a black guy, you can talk about black issues and you're relatively okay.
No, you're not.
Oh, if you're a woman, you can talk about, you know, different women's issues and you're relatively okay.
No, look at the savagery that people treated Ayn Rand with.
She was a woman.
And she was a highly intelligent, professional woman, incredibly successful screenwriter, playwriter, novelist, public speaker.
One of the great geniuses of the 20th century.
Boom!
Vicious on her.
Margaret Thatcher, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin.
I mean, Bill Maher openly called her a See You Next Tuesday word.
I mean, and feminists didn't rush to her defense.
No, the only safe place to be is on the left when it comes to the media.
Being a woman won't help you at all if you're not on the left.
They'll just...
They'll just go insane against you.
I mean, look at Karen Strawn goes to give speeches.
And she has to face down things like bomb threats.
And someone like, I gave a speech at a men's rights conference in Detroit.
Bomb threats, threats of violence.
Anyone cover that?
Lots of women speaking there.
Karen Strawn was one of them.
I spoke there.
You've got to get up there saying, hey, I hope I make it to the end of the speech without being a human shadow on the back wall that's currently in the parking lot.
So the fact that you're a woman...
Look at Erin Pitsy.
She's been PIZZY. Just look at what happened to her.
She had to flee England because of bomb threats and death threats because she simply pointed out that women could sometimes participate in abuse.
Wow.
I mean, there's this idea that you get this halo.
Of invulnerability, if you're a woman speaking out about women's issues, I don't see the evidence for that at all.
I see equal amounts of viciousness coming towards women if women question the dominant narrative in the same way that, you know, if you're a black guy and you talk out against some of the excesses of certain radical black elements, you know, Uncle Tom and they're just vicious against you.
You know, Herman McCain from the last presidential run Was a real black.
Raised in Hawaii, half black, half white, not exactly from the hood.
Sorry, Herman Cain.
Herman Cain, a very successful black businessman, a very good public speaker and so on.
I mean, they just tore him down.
Him being black didn't give him...
But now, Obama's on the left, so he gets all of the...
Deep tissue massages that the mainstream media can lavish on him.
And Herman Cain, who was, I mean, you could argue, had much more of the genuine black experience in America compared to, you know, half-Muslim, all-tanned Mr.
Mochaccino.
But, I mean, they just tore him down.
They just tore him apart.
And, you know, left his body out for the vultures to pick at.
So, I think there is this fantasy that if you're a woman, you can get much further.
But I think if you talk to female activists, particularly to do with things like men's rights, I think they'd say that they're not feeling a whole lot of invulnerability in these issues.
Wow.
Yeah, I actually didn't.
Sorry, women won't save you.
That's what I'm saying.
No one is coming to save you.
You must do it yourself.
Damn it.
I was hoping to get an operation or something.
Oh, well.
Maybe then.
I don't know.
Well, I mean, I guess we have to just try to out-populate them or wait for them to die or something.
I don't know.
Well, the out-populating isn't going to happen because smarter people are breeding less and less intelligent people are breeding more.
Sorry about that.
Dystetics!
No.
Wave of the future.
Feel like you've had just a little bit too much human intelligence and high achievement?
We've got a solution for you.
We'll separate women from men and pay the least intelligent women to have the most children.
Plus, then we'll traumatize them and make sure that they don't breastfeed as much as possible by saying it interferes with their autonomy and personhood.
Then we'll put them in really, really terrible schools.
And if they have even an ounce of intelligence, we'll put them in increasingly deteriorating public schools.
Well, they'll stuff them to the gills with even lower achieving students to the point where they can't get any kind of education at all.
Welcome to the pinnacle of achievement in Western civilization called...
You know the studies that are out there?
That seem to point out that the late Victorian British people, or late Victorian Western Europeans, were an average of 13 IQ points smarter than we are today.
Wow.
13 IQ points!
That's a lot!
That is a lot.
That's the difference between barely scraping out of high school and doing a master's.
That is a very big IQ chunk, and...
Modern society is a brain parasite.
Like, it literally is eating the brains of the world.
There's a reason why zombie movies are so popular, because we all kind of get deep down that this is what's happening, is we're producing more and more people with fewer and fewer brains.
And fewer and fewer social skills, but we're actually working on a whole presentation about that, so...
I think out-breeding them might not be the strategy that's gonna work.
Wow.
Okay, uh...
This raises my confidence for the future.
Listen, I don't want you to imagine it's going to be easy.
Oh, no, no.
You know, because if you're going to climb Mount Everest and you think, well, you know, I've climbed four sand dunes before, how bad can it be?
You're not going to pack for the trip and you can freeze solid to the mountain above where any helicopter can rescue you.
It can have some pitiful satellite phone conversation to everyone to tell them that you're going to be dead soon.
Right, so...
It is not, you know, you need to gird yourself for the long run.
You know, this is not a battle that is going to be won.
You know, sooner or quickly, there's a great quote from Winston Churchill.
And he was talking, I think, in 1941 or 1942.
I can't remember exactly.
And he said, with regards to the war, this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning.
Of the end of the war.
It may, however, be the end of the beginning.
And his constant reaffirmation of where we were in the war at that time, in the fight against national socialism, which, you know, you win, of course, by voting in the Labour Party.
But anyway, his constant reminder to people that it's, what is he famous for?
This is going to be a long, ugly, bloody conflict.
I can promise you nothing but blood, sweat, toil, and tears.
That's all he's got to offer.
And we will fight them even with no hope of victory.
We will fight them on the seas, we will fight them on the oceans, we will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the mountains, even with no hope of victory, should it come to that.
And he was Chillingly realistic with regards to the task at hand.
And by not giving people a false hope, by reminding them that it is a marathon, you know, if you think that the race is 500 meters, you're going to run a particular way, which is going to be a wind sprint.
If you know that the race is 26 miles, you're going to pace yourself.
So that you can actually cross the finish line rather than have your heart explode at 501 meters, right?
So I want to be clear with you about...
And I've said this, of course, from the beginning of the show.
It's a long haul.
It's a long haul.
There's a lot of resistance.
And the great challenge with fighting immorality is when you're outnumbered by people who have immoral principles, they can cling to each other rather than see the truth.
They can run to other deluded people.
Like if there's the last member of religion, you maybe can talk him out of it.
But if there's a billion people in that religion, you start to make someone uneasy, they just run back to those other people who reinforce their prior prejudices.
So they become kind of an arm-in-arm, invulnerable wall of advancing irrationality.
So we have, of course, the greatest opportunity and hope and possibility that has ever existed in human history.
I mean, the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that this conversation is not just between you and I, It's going to be broadcast out to millions of people around the world.
No pressure.
But that is an incredibly unforeseen possibility.
Nobody guessed it.
Nobody guessed that this was going to be possible.
And the fact that we can have an un-gatekeeper conversation that can go out to millions of people around the world is an unprecedented shot in the arm for philosophy that is something we should be enormously grateful for.
The fact that we're having this conversation...
My friend, is exactly why if we work hard enough, not only can we win, we will win.
But we have to recognize that no one is going to move these rocks but us.
And while we move these rocks, people are going to throw rocks at us.
And sometimes they'll hit us and sometimes they're hurt and most times it'll miss.
But no one's going to move these rocks but us.
And after we've almost finished moving the rocks that clear the way to a freer future, everybody will immediately pretend they were on our side the whole time.
Right?
They'll come down from the mountains where they've been rolling boulders down to try and crush us, and they'll say, hey man, I've been with you from the beginning, you were totally right.
You know, once they see which way the tide is turning, they'll suddenly switch sides so that they can be on the winning side, and to their delightfully weird innocence, they actually...
Won't even remember the past as far as that goes.
So, you know, pace yourself and measure yourself.
We're going to cross the finish line and we're going to win, but only as long as we accept that it's A, going to be hard, and B, the moment we stop, we lose.
Right?
So this is like biking up a 45-degree incline.
Okay, it's going to be a bit of a haul.
Your legs are going to get pretty tired, and there's times where you wish you'd never got on the damn bike, but the moment you stop pedaling...
You give up everything you've gained.
So I just really want to give you that thing.
We're going to win, but only if we assume it's not going to happen if we don't work hard at it, and only if we remember that it's a marathon, not a sprint.
All right.
Well, I have a lot more clarity now, thanks to this conversation.
And I just want to let you know that I came from a really bad background And even though I was, or I still am, a very Christian-like person, you know, the peaceful parenting message was strong enough to keep me listening.
And as I got in more, I started applying more rationality, and it's amazing.
I went from being in the military, and now I'm I'm going to matriculate into med school.
And I feel like a lot of it could not have happened without this rationality.
Man, that's a beautiful thing to say.
And I hugely appreciate that.
And I've got to be honest about it.
You describe yourself as a Christian-like person.
I have no issues with that.
Call me up seven years ago.
We might have had a different conversation.
Yeah.
I don't mean to offend the Christians in the audience, but I have evolved.
So I have no problem.
And look, if Christianity has been part of turning you from a breaker of bodies to a healer of bodies, from somebody who disassembles people to somebody who puts them back together, praise be to Jesus.
I'm all for it.
And I appreciate your kind words about the effect that this show, this conversation has had on that process.
I feel incredibly honored to have been whatever part of that transformation in your soul That I've been a part of.
I'm incredibly honored and thank you so much for sharing that.
Well, thanks for helping and I look forward to continuing supporting the show.
And congratulations, Mr.
Future Good Doctor.
That's an amazing thing, especially as you say, you come from a difficult background.
To be able to achieve that level of focus and dedication is something to be intensely proud of.
And, you know, I'll call you if I ever do something with my elbow.
It hurts.
Thanks, man.
Keep us posted if you can.
All right.
All right.
Take care.
You too.
All right, up next is Radek.
He wrote in and said, Despite being a hardcore anarcho-capitalist and following the non-aggression principle towards my children, I have a disturbing feeling that I'm raising children who are going to be communists.
I'm scared as hell.
Please help.
Well, that's, uh, yeah, I was reading that, and I'm like, interesting, interesting, what?
So...
You racing a bunch of commies?
Really?
Yeah, I think so.
So I have that feeling that we, middle class, we are producing children and they are simply communists.
And the best way to solve the problem of the world, problem of the government, I think, It's probably stop raising communists because the communists, as such, they're dying out Because they have no real families.
They have not so many children.
And as a species, the communists, they're dying out.
But they're breeding.
They came into existence in middle-class families.
This is a core problem for me.
Are you saying that there's something about middle class families that encourages communism?
I think that, yes, yes, I think that child raising, as we're practicing it now in civilized societies, leads in some way, in some mysterious way, to produce communist mindset.
And I... Sorry, why...
Why is it mysterious?
I mean, isn't it a lot to do with the chicktatorship that young boys and girls go through where they, you know, half or two-thirds of them can go through the...
Almost to puberty and never encounter any kind of legitimate male authority figure raised by single moms or with distant or non-existent or divorced and gone dads.
The teachers of their young childhood experiences are all women.
And the dictates of society are all about sentimental fields rather than rational analysis.
And, you know, a lot of these women aren't that keen on teaching little boys how to think because...
Odds are they might end up out thinking they're teachers and the little girls too.
So I don't know that it's that mysterious.
We've put women in charge of childhood and women in charge of education.
And the result is that we've got a bunch of socialists running about.
You know, socialists, kids...
The feeling of weakness and dependence that they have mirrors the historical evolution of women's weakness and dependence on men because of being disabled by childbirth and breastfeeding for 15 to 20 years of their middle age, right?
Youth to middle age.
And so the idea that there's some mysterious agency out there that's just going to give you stuff because you're needy, well, that's a genuinely and generally and wonderfully feminine attitude.
It's not criticism of it.
It's just perfectly natural.
When we evolved as a species, women were disabled and required men and the rest of the tribe to bring them resources and couldn't fend for themselves and couldn't take care of their own children.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's perfectly natural.
And so to me, the lefty stuff has just kind of come out of this general perception that there's this giant resource machine in the sky that's supposed to rain goodies on you because you want and need stuff.
Well, that's the woman who's, you know, seven months pregnant who's got a baby hanging off each tit.
She needs that.
And so, you know, we did a whole show a couple of years ago on the degree to which giving women the vote has accelerated the tendency towards big government, big daddy, husband government.
And so I don't know that it's particularly mysterious, right?
Like, I mean, we're just working on a show, which I'll just touch on very briefly here, which is, you know, children have never been safer than in the modern West.
And parents have never been more frightened of bad things happening to their children.
Why is that?
Well, I sort of noticed when I was growing up that single moms are voracious consumers of women and children in peril stories.
You know, these like...
I thought he was a great guy.
Turns out he was a lizard-eyed sociopath.
Couldn't have guessed it from all the tats.
But there it is, you know.
And then chasing women in peril, trying to protect their children.
Single moms live to a large degree in that kind of world.
And it's projection from their own bad decisions.
We have to get into all of that.
But the fact is that women are...
Hardwired, I believe, to be more cautious around what their children do and to be more scared of negative things happening to their children.
There's nothing wrong with that.
It's a beautiful part of femininity, but you kind of need a man around.
It's the yin-yang to balance that out, right?
Yeah, you want to jump from the fifth step?
If you feel it's safe, go for it, you know?
And generally, they are.
I mean, I was raised free-range as a kid.
I was basically, I'd come home from school.
My mom was working.
I'd go out and play.
I'd be home.
I'd eat something.
I'd go out and play.
And then I'd come home and I'd go to bed.
And we'd just roam the neighborhood.
I'd roam the neighborhood and find friends.
We'd figure out something to do.
We never had any money or barely any money.
We'd figure out something to do.
We'd negotiate.
We'd solve problems.
We'd deal with any...
Difficult other kids through a variety of methods.
So for me, it's like spontaneous self-organization.
Yeah, that's my childhood.
That's not people's childhoods anymore.
Now everything's structured and you've got to go to Chuck E. Cheese or you've got to go to a movie or you've got to go here's three bucks for air hockey.
And you've got to go to some place where there are adults around.
And you've got to have play dates where the adults are around there to solve any problems you have.
And, right, so this central planned childhood is resulting in a whole bunch of socialist kids.
I mean, I get all of that.
That's not, you know, but that's just what happens when there's a giant nuclear shadow where the penis of the family used to be, right?
Men and women are complementary, two pieces of jigsaw puzzle that fit together, but they're different.
And the way that moms raise kids in general is different from the way that dads raise kids.
And they're both essential and they're both important.
And mom teach little kids about the fields and dads teach the bigger kids about risk.
There's nothing wrong with it.
And again, these are all gross generalizations, broad categories, dare I say.
So this idea that, oh, there's some weird, mysterious, gosh, what's happened?
Why are we getting so many socialists?
Well, I mean...
When you are out there taking risks as a child, roaming the neighborhood, going into the woods, having campfires and building your forts and trying to negotiate with other kids and so on, well, there's a lot of spontaneous self-organization and there's no authority to appeal to in resolving your disputes.
You know, if some kid doesn't behave in a way that you like or says, well, you just don't invite that kid to play or you go play somewhere else or whatever.
So I think it's pretty natural for kids to spontaneously self-organize when they don't have the adult butts hovering over all the time.
Or when they're not in a structured environment, but they have to go out and make their own fun.
My whole childhood was this glorious anarchy in a lot of ways.
I mean, weird dictatorship at home, but glorious anarchy outside of boarding school and school and the home where we were just spontaneously organizing things.
And there was no authority figure.
We just had to work things out horizontally.
So for me, I've experienced firsthand for many years the spontaneous self-organization of childhood when there are no authority figures around.
So the idea for me of not having an authority figure in society is like, well, that was the best part of my childhood, so let's have more of that.
Why not?
And this is pretty common for kids as a whole.
They don't have adults around that they'll solve their own issues.
And the books that I was reading were all about self-sufficient kids who didn't need adults to resolve their disputes and didn't have to run to mommy or daddy every time they got into a conflict that they just worked these things out horizontally.
And that certainly mirrored my own So I think that free-range kids, you know, where they can go and do their own thing and you're not constantly around solving their problems, is...
Where we were and when society was a lot more free and now that we've got...
It's not a nanny state.
It's nanny parenting, which is largely female-centric parenting that then translates into everyone thinking that you need some adults or bigger authority figure to resolve all your disputes because we're not trusting the kids to work out their own disputes.
And, of course, you do that within the family by resolving disputes with your children in a peaceful and productive way.
You know, like...
Peaceful parenting is not, I'm not saying that you're saying this, but just for people out there who may be somewhat new.
I'm always sort of conscious of new listeners coming into the conversation.
But peaceful parenting is not, I haven't yelled at or spanked my kids today.
That's like saying, having a great career is not having embezzled on any given day.
No, it's good that you didn't embezzle.
That's not quite the same as having a great career.
I didn't punch the customer.
Capitalist victory!
It's like, no, the fact that you didn't punch your customer is great.
Now you actually have to engage with and satisfy your customer's needs in a way that makes them want more and all that.
Peaceful parenting is modeling and interacting with your children in a way that helps them to solve disputes and conflicts with you so that they can then translate that into the outside world.
It's modeling the win-win interactions.
It's getting right in there at their level and explaining things to them in a way that they understand.
Through that, they can start to work out creative solutions with their friends because you've modeled that with them.
At home.
Peaceful parenting is a very engaged process.
You're not a peaceful parent if your kid spent four hours on the tablet and you didn't yell at them once.
That is a neglectful, unengaged parent.
And again, I'm not saying this is anything that you're saying.
I'm just sort of giving it in the bigger context.
You know, peaceful parenting is not unparenting.
You know, unparenting is they'll figure it all out themselves.
And That's just physiologically not true.
The human brain doesn't mature for women until their early twenties and for men until their late twenties.
And kids need a lot of guidance.
They need a lot of civilizing.
Engaged parenting is peaceful parenting.
Peaceful parenting is not the absence of violence.
Like, you know, when a murderer is asleep, he's not killing anyone except in his dreams.
It doesn't mean that he's a virtuous person.
He's just not doing a bad thing.
Now, it's great to stop hitting your children and yelling at them and threatening them and so on and putting them in timeouts.
It's like, it's good to stop doing that, but that's...
All that is, is you're not going in the wrong direction anymore.
It doesn't mean you're going in the right direction yet.
It just means you've decelerated the wrongs that you're doing, but then you need to replace all of that with negotiation and modeling of how to create win-win situations.
Because if you keep having win-lose situations, all they learn is that power wins, and there's no other way to resolve dispute.
Hence, you end up with...
Statism as a philosophy in society.
Well, people can't agree.
You just need a central power to make things happen, because that's how things were solved in my house, and that's all I've got to go on.
Let's not talk the abstractions, though, if you don't mind, about the origins of Communism in middle class families, and I'm sure that Jim Penman, who's been on this show, would agree with you about the degree to which you got socialist 60s out of the plenty of the 50s.
But let's talk about your parenting.
Is there something specific that you're doing or not doing that you think might be encouraging this kind of communism in your kids?
So I think my oldest child has the most communistic tendencies and we have spent the most time caring for her.
So my problem is that probably we are overdoing something.
Okay, but what do you think you might be overdoing?
Just give me some specifics.
I have a feeling that a communist mindset is simply a mechanism where people are getting stuff unearned in childhood.
So they're getting much too much They do not work for it.
They don't have an extended frustration to yearn for something.
They just get stuff, get attention, get everything what they need.
And this can lead to development of personality That is demanding for the whole life.
So this classical Obama phone lady in my eyes is simply a person who was always getting as a child everything she wanted probably.
And sorry, how old is your eldest?
Sorry, I don't want to talk about the obamophone lady.
I want to talk about your family.
How old is your daughter?
Son?
Doesn't matter.
How old is your eldest?
Twelve.
Twelve, okay.
And does the child have responsibilities in the household?
Not so much.
A little, but she doesn't like to do too much.
Of course she doesn't like to do them.
I mean...
Nobody likes doing chores.
Yay, I get to clean the bathroom.
What a great day for me, right?
I mean, of course, the tax time, yummy, right?
I mean, we all have things.
Ah, dentistry, great.
Can you just scrape my gums in a sadistic manner that I'm sure you enjoy that only happens to be helpful for my gums?
I mean, of course, she doesn't want to do that.
That's the whole point, right?
I mean, you wouldn't need discipline if everything in life was fun, right?
She wouldn't be alive if everything in life was fun.
But, um...
So there's things that she doesn't want to do that I assume are reasonable that she do, right?
right?
Is that fair to say?
I have simply a feeling that she No, no, no, no, no feelings.
I'm asking for specifics, right?
So you said that she does have some responsibilities in the household that she doesn't want to do, right?
Yes.
Okay.
And what happens if she doesn't do them?
Probably nothing.
What do you mean nothing?
Do you mean like it's exactly the same as if she is doing them?
Like there's no difference in your behavior?
I can't force it.
So if she doesn't...
But that's not your only choice.
That's not your only choice.
I mean, you have a job, I'm assuming, and you've had jobs in the past.
Nobody forces you to work.
They don't stand there saying, I'm gonna hit you with this cricket bat if you don't do your TPS report, right?
But there are consequences to you not working, right?
So it's not a matter of aggression or violence or intimidation or abuse or yelling or hitting.
I'm not saying you're considering any of those.
But if she...
I'll just make up a chore, right?
So maybe it's her job to clear the table after dinner, right?
I just make something up, right?
Now, the first thing, of course, that you need to get from her is agreement that that's a reasonable thing.
If you don't have agreement ahead of time, then you just end up having to escalate with aggression after the fact or pretend that there was no agreement.
So, and the way I've had conversations with kids about this is like, you know, she's like, well, I don't want to do stuff.
It's like, of course you don't want to do stuff.
I get that.
I mean, we all have that in life.
And when you're a baby, you should never have to do stuff you don't want to do.
When you're a baby.
But part of growing up is not being a baby anymore, right?
You go to the washroom when you have to go to the washroom.
You don't poop in your pants.
You don't have a good shirt when you feel like it.
You end up having freedom and liberties and all of that.
But with freedom comes responsibility.
And so when you're a baby, you don't have chores.
Your chore is don't fall down the stairs and eat your applesauce, right?
And so when you're a baby, you don't have a choice.
You don't have things that you're expected to do.
But as you grow up, that's the price of growing up.
You get to climb stairs on your own.
You get to go play outside if you want on your own.
Whatever.
You get to bathe yourself.
All these liberties and freedoms.
And you have to do jobs.
I said, do you think, you know, you can say, do you think my day is every single thing that I want to do no matter what?
It's all just a blissful stepping like a frog on a fantastic lily pad from joy to joy.
No.
Things that I want to do and things that I don't want to do.
And there's always going to be things in life that you don't want to do.
Right?
Now, there's ways to make it fun.
You know, like you're clearing the table.
I'm doing the dishes.
We can chat.
We can enjoy each other's company and so on.
So, you know, I would say you recognize that the tables, you know, at least until...
You know, Venus Project robot mummy arms come built into the ceiling that somehow the plates and the cutlery and the cups have to get from the table to the kitchen, right?
I think, you know, we all try and do it with your mind, you know, you can have fun with these covers.
They try it, lift, go, right?
Even if you had to do it with your mind, still have to do it.
They don't get there on their own.
Somebody has to do it.
Now, I'd go through the list of the things that I do during the day that is sort of my chores or whatever.
And, you know, I'd point out, you know, sometimes when I'm napping on the couch, the sun hits my eyes, I've got to turn my head.
Hell of a lot of work.
But you sort of point out, okay, so is it reasonable, you know, you have a day which is like 90% play, you know, if it's a weekend or whatever, and is it reasonable to say that out of the sort of, I don't know how your kids are, out of the 15 hours that you're awake, is it reasonable for you to do 20 minutes of chores?
Because if you don't do them, I have to do them.
Or mom has to do them, right?
So is it unreasonable to say out of the day of 15 hours, you do 20 minutes of chores?
Now, at some point, the kid's going to have to say yes, right?
I mean, they're not going to be completely unreasonable.
No, never any chores, no matter what.
Now, they can, of course, choose to reject chores, right?
In which case, you can choose to reject playing with them, right?
In the same way that I can choose not to do the TPS reports, and the company can choose not to pay me, right?
I mean, these are consequences.
It's not violent to fire someone if they're not doing a good job.
You can't fire your kids, of course, but you can refuse to play with them.
Because, you know, I would say something like, okay, well, if you choose not to do any chores, I have to do more chores.
That annoys me.
And that's unfair.
And that's an imposition upon me.
And that makes me not want to play with you.
So, fine.
Okay, you don't want to do chores.
I will clear the kitchen.
And I'm not going to pay you an allowance because I'm not going to give you money if you're not going to do any work.
Because if I give you money for no work, all I'm training you to do is a Bernie Sanders supporter.
I don't want to be an extra in the zombie movie of Bernie Sanders rallies.
So, you know, you don't have to do it.
I'm going to force you to do it.
But there are consequences.
The consequences are...
I'm going to be annoyed with you.
I'm not going to feel as positively inclined towards you because you're being selfish and unreasonable.
It's a reasonable thing to say, right?
If somebody's not willing to do any chores at the age of 12, that's just putting the work on you rather than stepping up and doing something decent.
Nobody's saying go get a job and pay half the bills in the family, but, you know, bring some damn plates from the table to the kitchen is not an unreasonable thing to say.
And if they don't want to do it, fine, okay.
Freedom for your children is freedom for you.
If they're free to not help out, you're free to not interact with them.
And hopefully interacting with you is a positive enough experience that that will mean something to them, right?
And to be honest, right?
You know, I can hear in your voice there's frustration with your kids not stepping up and doing chores or helping out around the house.
So be honest with that.
Say, look, this is a negative emotional experience for me.
The fact that you guys aren't helping up puts a lot more work on me.
And it takes away playtime because I don't feel like playing with you guys.
It's not like I've just done an hour of chores that you guys should have done that I don't want to do.
Now let's play Monopoly.
It's like I don't feel like it.
I don't feel happy about it.
I'm upset about it.
And I don't like that you're this way.
And you talk about it, right?
You don't lecture them and harangue them and make them feel bad.
You say, okay, well, what is your theory?
At what age do you think you should start doing chores?
Do you think you should ever start doing chores?
What's your theory?
What is your approach?
And having these conversations is really important.
And showing appreciation when they do the chores and so on is important as well.
Good TPS report.
Thank you very much.
I'll file it under.
Right?
So you can...
You can choose not to play with them.
I mean, obviously you've got to feed them, right?
I mean, drive them to school or whatever is going on in your household.
But, you know, if somebody is annoying to me, I don't want to interact with them at that time.
And being honest and having integrity to that so that they see the emotional impact that their decisions have on other people.
And on the quality of life of other people.
Now, hopefully you've been a good enough parent, and I'm sure you have, that making you unhappy, they care about that.
I mean, if they don't care about making you unhappy, you've got to rewind and start somewhere much earlier.
But I'm going to assume that you being justly unhappy with them being kind of selfish is something that bothers them and it's a sort of a negative experience for them.
Like if you've just won the lottery and you want to get fired, well, you know, fire me so I can get a severance package or whatever, right?
So being honest about your negative experiences based upon their behavior is really important.
And it teaches them that their decisions have impacts on other people.
And don't shield them from the reality that actions have emotional consequences.
Emotional consequences for other people.
And you can point out things that you've done for them.
You know, like, I mean, you could say, look, I mean...
If I went to...
Like, when we went to Florida...
I wouldn't be going to Disney World if I didn't have kids.
Now, I didn't hate Disney World and it was fun to be there, but I wouldn't have done that if I didn't have kids because then I'd just be some creepy guy in Disney World for no discernible reason.
But pointing out that...
You do things for them that is more for their benefit than yours is important.
Like once you've made the, quote, sacrifices for your children, when they get older, you can legitimately demand those sacrifices back.
And they can't really give you a logical reason as to why that shouldn't be reversible, right?
Whatever you do is universal, is universalizable when they get old enough, right?
And if they make a deal with you and then break a deal with you, I mean, my daughter does this occasionally.
She'll have some sweet thing and I'll say, oh, can I have a bite?
And she's like, no.
And I'm like, okay, no problem.
I appreciate that.
So now we don't have to share anything we get that's sweet.
Because you take their behavior and you universalize it.
Okay, so you know what?
And I said, actually, that's a good thing.
And she's like, why is that a good thing?
I said, well, maybe I'm getting something sweet and I now then don't have to share it with you.
And then she's like, wait a minute.
And so you take their behavior and you universalize it.
And you say, okay, well, if we can break deals with each other, then I don't have to keep my promises to you.
Okay, if you don't want to share a little bite of something you've got that's sweet, that looks tasty to me, that's fine.
I'm not going to get mad at you, but the consequence is I no longer feel bound to share things that I get that might be tasty to you.
Right?
And then you can, I don't know, you don't have to be petty.
You go out and order some ice cream the size of a small planet and dunk your whole head in it and say, oh, I don't think if I can finish this, but I'm going to throw it out anyway because I'm not going to share it.
Right?
But But universalize what they're doing, right?
So if your daughter doesn't want to do any chores, then the basic principle is, okay, we don't have to do things that are nice and helpful to other people.
They don't get to have their preferences that are not universalized, right?
The preferences must be universalized because that's teaching them empathy and basic philosophy, right?
So she says, well, I know I agreed.
To do this chore, but I'm just not going to do it.
I don't feel like it.
Or whatever, right?
With an eye roll of specific ability of teenage girls.
It's like, okay.
Okay, then there are consequences.
The consequence is that I'm no longer bound.
As I've said before, I refuse to have standards higher than the people I'm dealing with.
So if you make promises to me or you make commitments to me, my daughter, and you break those commitments to me and you feel fine with that, fine.
Then you understand that this is eroding my desire and willingness to keep my deals with you.
That is the consequence.
It's not a punishment.
It's a reality that I'm not going to sit here and slave away and keep all my promises to you if you don't keep your promises to me, right?
And that's, you know, when explaining this to my daughter, and she's not a big problem this way, it's just, right?
In explaining this to my daughter, I say, okay, let's say, do you remember when we were in the mall and there was some gumball machine and we put a quarter in?
And the gumball machine didn't spit out the money.
Did we think that was a good deal?
No, because we put the quarter in and we were going to watch this gumball.
She didn't even eat them.
She just collected them.
Watch this gumball sort of bounce down this little rolly thing, this counter thing.
It makes this annoying song.
It's half music that I'm sure has been sampled by Kanye West.
But anyway...
So I said, you know, we put the quarter in and we didn't get it.
The machine didn't keep its part of the deal.
Did we want to put more money into that?
And she said, no.
I said, that's it, exactly.
We put the quarter in.
We didn't get the gumball.
We didn't want to put in another quarter.
Because the machine didn't keep its part of the deal, so we didn't want to put any more money in.
When people don't keep their deals, you stop wanting to give them stuff.
You stop wanting to be helpful.
And I want her to know that on the receiving end so that she's never exploited in her life on the other end.
If other people don't keep their word to her, I want her to feel strong enough to say, I'm not putting another quarter in because you didn't give me a gumball.
The deal was put the quarter and get a gumball.
Don't get the gumball.
Don't get the quarter.
And just having that conversation, you can get to some really deep and fantastic places.
And I also say to her, listen, it's perfectly...
I would say to my daughter if she was 12, I'd say, it is perfectly understandable that you want me to do your chores.
Like, I totally get that.
When I was your age, and even now, I'd love it if other people could sit on the bike machine for 40 minutes.
That would be excellent, you know?
It's really not that exciting.
Yeah.
It's perfectly natural, and it's perfectly healthy, and I respect you for trying, right?
Because, you know, if you just kind of, okay, I'll do the chores, and it's going to be fine, like, that would not be right.
You know, you always got to try, always got to try and weasel things out, weasel out from things.
That's part of human progress.
I don't want to get up and change the channel.
I'm just going to invent a channel changer.
Good job, you know?
I don't want to walk across town and talk to someone.
I'm going to invent the phone.
Laziness is a jetpack for ingenuity and it's wonderful.
Like you'll see these Rube Goldberg machines where six million things happen and then an egg gets broken.
But I love this.
The fact that you want to not do your chores, that's why there's a dishwasher.
That's why there's air conditioning.
That's why there are houses because you don't want to hold up an umbrella all night while you're reading a book.
That's why we have roofs.
So the fact that she wants to weasel out, I respect it.
It's perfectly natural.
I absolutely can't allow it.
To happen in our relationship because I care.
If kids in particular get, you know, like you say, I really want to look forward to my time with you.
I really want to look forward to playing with you.
I really want to look forward to us having fun together.
This interferes with that.
I'm going to fiercely try and get you to do your chores so that I can selfishly get to continue enjoying playing with you.
That's what's in it for me.
I don't want things that interfere with my happiness and joy in spending time with you.
And you not doing your chores and you dragging your feet and it being difficult every single time, right?
That is interfering with my pleasure in parenting.
And I don't want anything to interfere with my pleasure with parenting because I didn't pay my parent to nag and have a bad time and get resentful.
That's a bad deal all around.
Bad deal for you, bad deal for me.
So I'm going to work fiercely to guard our fun.
And if there's things that you're doing that are interfering with our fun, I'm going to tell you.
And if there are things that I'm doing that are interfering with or fun, I want you to tell me too.
So you just have these conversations with kids and you can get to very deep places, very productive places to recognize it's perfectly natural for your daughter to not want to do her chores.
And it's perfectly natural.
For you to want to just not have this conflict because you don't know how it's going to go or what's going to happen and could it escalate and could it get worse?
Well, just I'll take these plates for the moment, right?
I understand it's perfectly natural for you to have those feelings too.
Just like it's perfectly natural to want chocolate rather than broccoli, you just can't live on chocolate.
It's not good for you, right?
So...
Make sure that you know that it's not a dominance thing.
It's not like, well...
I told you to do this, and if you're not doing it, that's an affront to my authority, and I'm going to make sure that you do this, right?
People don't respond to exhibitions of dominance in general, right?
Certainly not the way that you've raised your kids, I'm sure.
But delving into what's going on at a very deep level is important.
And, you know, appeal to universality as well, which is something like this.
It's like, okay, well, if I follow your rule, then I'm never going to do anything I don't want to, which means I don't feel like going to work some days, so I won't go to work some days, I'll get fired, and we'll end up living in a cardboard box down by the river.
So if I take your approach of not ever wanting to do things I don't want to do, clearly things will go pretty badly for the family.
And you'll be wishing that you had some plates to take to the kitchen, which we don't have either plates or a kitchen anymore.
So just help her understand that she's relying on other people doing things they don't want to do so that she cannot do things wrong.
That she doesn't want to do.
And that puts her outside the ring of consistency, right?
And, you know, I wouldn't use this example directly, but it's kind of like a thief.
A thief requires that other people make stuff rather than steal stuff.
Because if there's only thieves in the world, nobody will make anything.
There's nothing to steal.
Everyone starves to death, right?
So the thief requires that somebody make whatever it is he's going to steal.
And so the thief is kind of outside the universality of property rights.
I want you to imagine you have property rights so that I can violate your property rights.
I want to violate your property rights at the same time that I want to keep what I've stolen.
That's now my property because if some thief stole it from me, I'd be in some caper movie and I'd be really upset.
And I'd have to, I don't know, chase you with a 1960s suit on my back.
So...
Have her understand the depth to which this is foundational, right?
And also, you know, you can point out, you know, she's 12, right?
Smart enough to figure this stuff out.
She's saying, I would say to her too, look, if you end up Having a life where you don't do things that you don't want to do, you're going to have to surround yourself with hypocrites, with other people who will do a whole bunch of stuff that they don't want to do so that you can, right?
I mean, if you don't take the dishes, I have to take the dishes.
I don't want to take the dishes any more than you do, so you don't have to do anything that you want to do, and therefore I have to do more of what I don't want to do.
Now, if I let you get away with that...
I would be training you to be around spineless people who are codependent and frightened of rejection to the point where they just weasel up and cozy up to people and do all this other stuff just to have them around in their life.
You don't want to spend your life surrounded by low-rat Byzantine vermin like that.
That's a pretty gross group of people.
But those are the people you'll actually have to spend time with if you end up in this pattern of life of not wanting to do things you don't want to do.
You're going to have a whole bunch of people out there like...
You know, like some ancient emperor being carried by six swarthy guys with James Dornan butts.
People are going to have to carry you around and you're going to end up with people who don't have integrity and can't stand up for themselves and that's going to be a pretty gross existence for you to be in.
And also, you know, if you get older and when you get older you're going to get married and all that.
I mean, it sounds gross when you're 12, of course, right?
But how I behave is not going to be completely unrelated to how your husband is going to behave because, you know, I'm the guy you see around the house and all that.
And if you end up...
Not lifting a finger and having, therefore, other people have to work themselves to the bone around you.
What kind of husband are you going to get?
You're going to get some weaselly, spineless, codependent husband who's just willing to sweep up and scatter rose petals in front of you and sweep any uncomfortable dust behind you.
And that kind of person is going to drive you completely insane after a while because you need someone who's going to Stand up for what they believe in, who's going to confront you if you're acting badly, just as I want you to confront me if I'm acting badly.
You want somebody who's going to have that give and take, that frisson, that solid edges where you end and they begin and so on.
So that for a whole bunch of reasons, it's not about the plates.
And everyone kind of gets that deep down that with kids and chores, it's not about the plates.
Because, you know, for the most part, you know, kids carrying these wobbly plates, it's like, yeah, well, maybe you'll do a chore.
Maybe we'll just go buy new plates after sweeping up the remnants of the old one.
It's not very efficient to have kids do chores at the beginning, but it is important.
Now, my daughter has a series of chores.
She's got to do them.
I mean, there's times you have to be completely inflexible, right?
There are times where I know I've got something to do, but I just don't, I won't do it for whatever reason for a day or two if it can be postponed.
But you've got to do the stuff, right?
And she's like, well, I don't want to.
I'm like, yeah, I get that, and I respect you for trying not to.
But you've got to, because that's life.
You know, my job is to get you ready for adulthood.
And adulthood, believe it or not, there's things you don't want to do, right?
And, you know, I've got to do my books, I've got to do my taxes, I've got to do payroll, I've got to pay my bills.
And, you know, this is not like, oh, it's a climax of male orgasmic joy to write a check to the hydro company.
You know, And we're incredibly lucky.
I said, you know, we're incredibly lucky because we get to do a lot more fun stuff than just about anybody in history has ever gotten to do.
And, oh yeah, Mike's like, yeah, it's like, do I love doing show introductions?
We've got this new thing where we introduce the show.
And I'm like, oh, it's already packed away.
What colors did we have?
How drunk was I? How much beer do I need to have at 8 o'clock in the morning to read?
I never do a show drunk.
Oh yeah, and for years I've been promising Mike promo photos, but we just can't book the anaconda.
And, of course, the anaconda isn't, obviously, completely intimidated by my masculine features.
But, yeah, I mean, there's things that you've got to do.
If you don't want to do them, you've got to do them.
And, you know, I talked about this with regards to the show.
You know, I mean, you know, we do shows and then we do post-production.
Shows, fun.
Post-production, fun.
Not quite so much fun.
And yet, you know, without the post-production, we don't have a show.
So, I mean, just, you know, go to Bill Whittle's channel.
I mean, he's got post-production that makes me spontaneously eject drool onto my monitor, which means I've got to get a new monitor.
And, yeah, Mike, I'll get the photos done.
I'm just waiting for my scar to heal.
It's coming along.
And for my skin to stop aging.
And three more spots, I'm good to go.
But...
So that is...
That is the challenge in life.
Got to do things you don't want to do.
Got to do things you don't want to do.
And, you know, not helping your kids prepare for that with emotionally authentic consequences is not helping them in the long run.
Sorry for that long speech, my friend.
Does that sort of give any useful approaches that you might be able to use?
Oh yes, it's actually very accurate.
And I'm using the same strategy.
But the problem is I'm not alone.
And if you have a very, very loving mom at home, so-called helicopter mom, So it doesn't work well because women,
they are so emotional in a positive sense, they are so caring and so much giving that they completely disobey the rules of accountability and they just do whatever child needs and It develops in the direction that the children have the expectation that
everything is done for them just by definition or some other kid could do the chores.
So why me?
And this mental pattern It just gets embedded in the brain, I think.
Alright, so I've got to stop you there because you're talking about this helicopter parenting as some sort of love?
Yes.
No, it's not.
You're right, but women understand it so.
Okay, well...
So what?
I mean, men have particular understanding to the world that women criticize, and rightly so.
So, you know, I'm sure that your wife can handle it if you criticize something.
We'll put this link in the...
I'll just read a little bit here.
So this is from the Washington Post.
The title of the essay is...
Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation of children.
Julie Lithcott-Hames noticed a disturbing trend.
During her decade as dean of freshmen at Stanford University, incoming students were brilliant and accomplished and virtually flawless on paper.
But with each year, more of them seemed incapable of taking care of themselves.
At the same time, parents were becoming more and more involved in their children's lives.
They talked to their children multiple times a day and swooped in to personally intervene whenever something difficult happened.
From her former position at one of the world's most prestigious schools, Lithcott-Hames came to believe that mothers and fathers in affluent communities have been hobbling their children by trying so hard to make sure they succeed and by working so diligently to protect them from disappointment, failure, and hardship.
Such, quote, overhelping might assist children in developing impressive resumes for college admission, but it also robs them of the chance to learn who they are.
What they love and how to navigate the world.
And she's got a book called How to Raise an Adult, Break Free of the Over-Parenting Trap, and Prepare Your Kid for Success.
I have not read the book.
I just wanted to mention this article.
She wrote, We want so badly to help them by shepherding them from milestone to milestone and by shielding them from failure and pain.
But over-helping causes harm.
It can leave young adults without the strengths of skill, will, and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft A life.
And there is a...
She cites reams of statistics on the rise of depression and other mental and emotional health problems among the nation's young people.
She has seen the effects up close.
Lithcott Hames lives in Palo Alto, California, a community that, following a string of suicides in the past year, has undertaken a period of soul-searching about what parents can do to stem pressure that young children face.
And...
If you say to your child, like let's say your child wants to become a dancer.
Well, if you say, okay, I'll go take lessons for you, is that going to help her?
No.
No.
She's got to take the lessons.
She's got to learn the skills.
She's got to be able to do it.
And so, does your wife say, or does your wife encourage your daughter to not do her chores?
Does she say, oh, I'll do it, go play?
Sometimes, probably.
Or she just thinks she can do it much quicker and better, and it's wasting time to talk to children.
Is your wife better at math than your daughter is?
Yes.
So clearly then your wife should do your daughter's homework because she can do it much more quickly than your daughter can and much more efficiently, right?
Oh, they're doing it together.
What?
Yes.
No, no, no.
The homework is for your daughter.
No.
Your wife is doing your daughter's homework with her?
Yes.
Oh...
Oh my god!
But actually, it's a requirement because the public schools, they do not transfer enough knowledge and the children, they not...
Of course, if you're very intelligent, you can manage it, but on the average, the teachers, they assume that the parents teach the children Some...
Of course, it's unofficial, but...
Wait, so they're assuming that the parent is sitting down doing the homework with the kid?
Yes.
Because...
Now, have you listened in on this?
Is your daughter learning stuff?
I mean, the whole point of helping, like, you know, when your daughter...
You know, when your kids are learning to ride a bike, you help them, right?
You help them hold the handlebars, you put the training wheels on, but the whole point is that you stop after a while so they can do it themselves, right?
Like you help them learn how to climb up and down stairs so you don't do it when they're 12, right?
So is the point to detach your wife from the homework process?
And again, I mean, there's no studies that show that homework's any good.
I mean, that's a whole other educational question.
But the reality is that if there's a requirement to do work, The requirement is for your daughter to do the work, not your wife, right?
So, I mean, is the purpose to stop this at some point?
I mean, I hope relatively soon.
Oh, there's always the hope that a child at some age has developed so much that she can just carry on on herself.
But you find that out by not helping her and seeing if she passes or fails, right?
Yes, but if she fails, it's triggering, of course, in public school education, unimaginable pain, which is, of course...
What do you mean, unimaginable pain?
What do you mean?
She fails a test and she has unimaginable pain?
No, if she fails the whole year, so she has to repeat the year, she loses her friends.
And she loses.
Right.
And because your daughter knows that, she'll work hard at not failing.
That's a concept, of course.
No, that's a reality.
Yes.
Right?
I mean, of course she doesn't want to get left behind.
You don't want to be the kid shaving in grade 7, right?
I mean, okay, there were Italian kids in my class, right?
But, you know, if there are negative consequences to her not studying, then there'll be negative consequences.
Right?
Right.
Yes.
And she will learn to study, right?
I mean, she'll learn to do...
Look, and again, the public school and all this, there's a whole other kind of question.
But, you know, when I was a kid, I mean, I studied for a test or I didn't.
And if I didn't study for a test, I usually didn't do that well.
And if I did study, I would do well.
Unless it was English, in which case I was reading for fun anyway.
It was easy.
But...
That's your anxiety.
And the degree to which you allow your anxiety to have you step in and intervene in your daughter's life is the degree to which you are undermining her capacity to have responsibility and succeed in the future.
I mean, is this going to go on through college?
No, it's...
Do you think the longer it goes on, the easier it will be to transition out of it?
No, I don't think so.
Do you think it's better for her to fail now or better for her to fail in her fourth year of college, if she's going to fail?
Oh, it would be better to fail now, probably.
Right.
I think so.
Right.
So, it's your anxiety and probably your wife's anxiety.
What if she fails the test?
Why if she fails the test?
So what?
Failure is everywhere in life.
I've gone through a list of the things that I've screwed up and failed at in my life.
I shouldn't say embarrassingly long.
It just means, hey, I did stuff.
And a lot of stuff you do doesn't work, right?
So the capacity to handle failure is our only chance for success.
Because all success involves considerable risk.
And anything that people want as a whole...
It has lots of people trying to get it, which means you're competing against the best, everything that is desirable, and not a lot of competition to be a dishwasher, probably a lot of competition to star in a movie, right?
Because that's what a lot of people want to do.
And so, if you want to be a dishwasher, you might be the only person applying for the job.
If you want to be the lead in World War Z, then you've got Brad Pitt to compete against, who's quite a ferocious competitor when it comes to acting.
That's why he's a movie star.
If you want your children to succeed at anything other than the minimum, the bland average or below average, then they have to damn well get used to failure because every single time you want to do something great, you are more likely to fail than succeed.
Every single time you want to do something out of the ordinary, failure is by far your most likely outcome.
And You cannot succeed unless you make friends with failure.
Unless you recognize and accept that you can walk away from failure and still be a great person and still be a valuable person and in fact possibly a greater and more valuable person because you are no longer afraid of failure.
And so by shielding your daughter from failure you are shielding her from the capacity to succeed at anything other than the bare minimum in life in my opinion.
And the free world, the free market out there, doesn't care if she fails.
You're creating an unrealistic environment for her.
Now, of course, when she's a baby, well, you fell down those stairs.
Of course, you put the little gates up there and you make sure that her world is safe and you childproof the house because she's a baby.
You've got to transition out of that, though.
She's 12.
Which means she's got to start accepting ownership for her life.
And it's your anxiety, not hers, that is causing this.
You're managing your anxiety.
It's got nothing to do with her long-term success.
Because you and I both know that her long-term success is going to be contingent on her being able to accept the possibility of failure and work around it.
And this doesn't mean that she should fail.
At all.
I'm not saying, you know, have her fail so that she's like, I'm not saying don't push her off a bike so that she learns to not be afraid of me.
But if she falls, then she learns.
She falls, then she learns.
You know, as I've said to people before, I've said to kids before, pain is a teacher.
Pain is your body's way of trying to help you.
Pain is your body's way of saying, let's not do that again, right?
I mean, and, you know, pain is really annoying and it's really bad and it's really a negative experience.
And the degree to which it's a negative experience is the degree to which your body's trying to help you because the more dangerous a thing you've done and the more you've hurt your body, the more pain you're going to experience.
Therefore, the more aversive you're going to be to doing that again.
You know, if you go and eat some berry in the woods and it makes you sick, you don't eat the berries in the woods anymore, at least the ones that look like that.
So I'm not saying you want her to fail, but by shielding her from the consequences of her actions or her inactions.
And by catastrophizing immediately.
Like, if my wife doesn't help her with her math homework, she'll fail the whole year?
Come on.
That's not how it works.
She'll resent it.
She'll grudge it.
She'll end up doing it herself.
And maybe she'll fail a test or maybe she won't do very well on a test, in which case she'll see that actions have consequences.
But she's got to start sailing her own ship at one point.
And I'm not saying turn her loose to go work in a factory in some Dickensian model.
But what I'm saying is that it's not her feelings that you guys are concerned about.
It's your own feelings that if she fails, it's going to be really upsetting for her.
But it's your upset that you're concerned about.
you're managing your own feelings rather than what is best for her, in my opinion.
Oh, yes, it happens.
I think it is the last call with Bill Whittle.
It was about his Antifragility is probably the strategy.
The amygdala needs to be trained in negative stimuli in order to be able to accept risk.
And you don't want negative stimuli to suddenly show up in her adult life.
You don't want her negative stimuli, her lack of willingness to work hard or her lack of willingness to accept risk and so on.
You don't want that to show up when she's 24 and she's moved out.
The consequences of failure there are much more significant than the consequences of failing a math test now.
Right.
And she probably won't fail the mass test, right?
I mean, if you're listening to this show, you're a smart guy, you married a smart woman, and you've got smart kids, statistically and genetically speaking, that's most likely.
So she's not going to fail.
She's not going to bomb out of school.
She's not going to end up spending the next 10 years in grade 7 or 8, right?
Um, she needs to be comfortable with failure.
Look, I mean, I'm out here on the edge every day, pretty much, you put out a show.
I'd love all the shows to do what the European migrant crisis does.
Can't do it.
If you take that as a standard story, if you're an enslavement, what, at three and a half or four million views or whatever, every single one of my other thousands and thousands of podcasts and videos has been a complete and total failure relative to my number one video, right?
Yes.
And, um...
So what?
It's not like I'm doing shows that I know won't do well.
I just do the shows that I think are most interesting and that I'm most passionate about and that we're all most passionate about here.
And we put them out.
And sometimes a show we work on for a week does 10% of the views of a show we talk about for 10 minutes and I do in 15 minutes.
How am I going to keep doing shows if I'm like, oh man, this show...
Didn't do as many views as my biggest show ever.
I mean, come on.
That's not how you're going to get anything done in this life, you know.
Freddie Mercury never wrote another Bohemian Rhapsody, but I'm still glad that they kept recording, I guess.
But let's get to core question.
Is this overdoing problem not more important than spanking problem?
Why does it matter?
Why can't they both be important?
Oh, they can, of course.
Yeah, you don't have to prioritize one, because it's not an either-or.
It's not a logic gate here, right?
I mean, it's not an either-or.
You don't want to be yelling at and intimidating your children.
You don't want to be hitting your children, but you also don't want to be shielding them from the natural consequences of their actions.
Yes, yeah, of course.
And listen, read the books.
I mean, this is just my thoughts.
I don't have the biology behind it and so on.
Read the books on the experts that we develop self-respect through overcoming challenges and the degree to which we are shielded from challenges, we are shielded from self-respect.
And we develop these distorted views on what risk is.
Risk is cancer.
Risk is not, I might fail my bi-weekly test in algebra.
That's not risk.
Risk is really standing out for what you believe in despite negative consequences.
That's risky.
I only got a 65 on this.
It puts some things in perspective.
Of course, when you're 12, things are important and all that.
But the fact that she wants to stay with her friends and all of that, explain to her.
We're going to give you some, you know, you always want some freedom.
We're going to catch you some back of freedom.
Your daughter's not going to like it.
Your wife's not going to like it.
And maybe you won't like it either.
But so what?
You're showing her it's important to do things you don't want to do, even if what you don't want to do is stop helping.
But in the long run, in the long run, she won't even know how appreciative she is because she won't know what the alternative would have been.
Just mull it over, that's all.
All right.
Will you keep us posted about how it goes if you decide to make any decisions in this area?
I'd like to get some feedback on how it goes, no matter what you choose.
Oh, yes.
Decisions are made.
We can see how it's going to work in practice.
All right.
I've got to move on to the last caller because I'm a little lower on energy than I'd like to be today, which is no problem.
But I'm going to move on to the next caller, last caller.
But thanks so much for your call, man.
And please do try and keep us...
Keep us posted.
Okay.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thanks.
All my very best to you and your family as well.
Okay.
Bye.
Alright, well up next is Josh.
Josh wrote in and said, I've recently finished reading the novel The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas.
The book left me pondering the overlap and or comparability of revenge with virtue.
Can one seek to punish evil or seek revenge against someone who has done evil to them without seeking to advance virtue and still be good?
Is the act of revenge or seeking retribution good, bad, or simply an aesthetic preference?
What of those who are harmed along the way?
Is it permissible for people to be collateral damage in their promotion of virtue, but not revenge?
That's from Josh.
Alright.
Is this something because of the book or something that...
Are you plotting vengeance against the wrongdoer in general, or is this just because it came out of the book?
Actually, yeah, there is something in my personal life, yeah.
With that, I'll just give you the extreme quick run-through, and then if you have more questions, I'll go into it.
I worked for a company for a while, and the individual that I worked for had some very, very unsavory business practices, and did a number of things wrong to myself and other people.
And since then, I've started my own business.
And of course, I just want to be more financially independent for myself, but as well, I would really, really love to completely put him out of business.
And, you know, kind of wreck what he did, what he's built.
So, you know, it's not like I'm sitting here thinking, oh, well, how can I burn his trucks and, you know, do it that way?
But, you know, at the same time, too, yes, there is a revenge component to that.
But then I also began thinking about those things on a grander, larger scale, you know.
Because ultimately, when I read the book, the main thing that I kind of saw is, is And I sent an email on this, too, that it just kind of seems like a lot of the evil is committed in the world.
I just noticed it was from greed.
But then I got looking up as to what the definition of greed was, and I just saw it as a lot of subjective nonsense.
So I kind of came up with my own definition on it, and I don't know if it holds water or not philosophically, but I looked at it as it was with a willingness to break ethical standards in the pursuit of Or attempt to acquire something that's unearned.
So, I just don't know.
Is revenge permissible against greed or other immorality?
Well, yeah.
I mean, greed is one of these words that is bendy.
It's a yoga word.
It's very flexible.
So, revenge and virtue is a great question.
There's the current world and the world that is to be.
I don't like to spend too much time trying to figure out how to achieve justice in the world that is.
That's like trying to use a rotary dial to make a cell phone call.
In the world to be in the future, in an immediate sense, let's say you come home and you catch a robber Who just killed your family, right?
And you shoot him.
Would you put someone like that in jail?
Would I put someone like that in jail?
Are we pretending this is a situation where I'm some sort of judge or have the authority to do something of that nature?
No, it doesn't.
Like, would you approve of that person going to jail?
It doesn't matter whether you do it.
I mean, what would your moral opinion be?
Guy comes home, a robber's just killed his family, shoots the robber.
Okay, um...
Can I give you my simple answer and then my philosophical answer?
I view jail as cruel and unusual punishment, so I wouldn't do that against anyone, but I mean...
Would you support some sanction against him?
Yeah, I wouldn't hold the person accountable for, you know, shooting somebody for doing something like that, no.
Okay, so that's vengeance.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, because we could sit here and argue and say that maybe he could have subdued him and brought him to justice, but no, I mean, yeah, it is taking vengeance of that, yeah.
Assuming the guy's not, like you could say, he's waving a gun around, assuming it wasn't immediate self-defense, if you shoot a guy who's just shot your family or killed your family, is that, well, so if, and I'll keep my own opinions out of this for the moment, but if you're comfortable with that, then you're comfortable with vengeance, because that's a revenge killing, right?
You killed my family, I'll kill you, right?
That's a revenge killing.
Now the degree to which you stretch that out over time is somewhat less important Right, so let's say he does it a week later Right, you know the old revenge is the dish best served cold Well, then there's a time element involved in that if you're comfortable with it in the moment But you're not comfortable with it further down the road then you have an expiration date for vengeance Which is you know a bit of a a bit of a challenge now all All attempts at justice in a free society,
in a good society and so on, have some degree of retribution involved.
So let's say, well, you go and shoot the guy who killed your family, but you call the Freedom Cops or the Libertopia Brigade or whatever, and you initiate some course of action where this guy ends up receiving sanctions until he does something to whatever, right the wrong as best he can or whatever, right?
So is there to some degree vengeance in wishing those who've done you wrong to suffer in response to that?
Hard to say, right?
I mean, there's some...
It's not just, well, the abstract principle of justice has been served and society has been protected.
We are still apes without excess body hair.
And retaliation, I think, is part of a system of justice.
But, sorry, go ahead.
I was thinking more UPB-compliant revenge, if that makes sense.
Because in the book of The Count of Monte Cristo, he never, like, goes out and just, you know, starts slitting people's throats and You know, setting fire to their villages and that.
It was all the more, he just kind of ruined their lives.
So, like, let's just say, would this be appropriate for, I've just come, and this individual has just killed my family.
And as opposed to gunning him down like a dog on the spot, you know, we do use the quote-unquote, you know, Libertopia police in that.
And at which point, I'm able to get everybody in all society to know exactly who this individual is.
And his sentence is that absolutely no one will help him in any way, shape, or form.
And he's constantly having to be on the run, and we all watch him slowly starve to death.
Well, so hang on.
So what you're talking about is...
Hang on, hang on.
What you're talking about is speaking the truth in the hopes of provoking ostracism, right?
Yes.
Okay.
That's perfectly just, I think.
Or maybe then...
Yeah, okay, well done, yeah.
You're not initiating the use of force or fraud, you're speaking the truth, and you are hoping to provoke ostracism.
Now, this of course requires that society hold similar moral viewpoints than you do, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Right, so if you look at how the left tried to take down Joseph McCarthy, who was identifying a bunch of Soviet spies at the higher end of the State Department, But they attempted to provoke ostracism and to paint him in such a negative light that people just rejected him out of hand, right?
But if you're telling the truth about someone and that results in people not wanting to associate with them, you're telling the truth and you're not initiating the use of force, so I don't see how that could be considered an immoral action.
So, and even if it results in that individual's death, well, that's just a byproduct of truth and virtue being exercised in society in a non-violent way.
Well, see, here's the causality becomes a bit tricky, right?
When you say it results in his death, well, I don't know that that would be particularly causally That's explainable, right?
So if some guy killed your family and you told the truth and nobody wanted to have anything to do with him and then he starved to death, actually it would be him killing your family that set that in motion, not you telling the truth, right?
That is very true, yeah.
Right, so I wouldn't say that it's you telling the truth that, you know, caused him to whatever, right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, just keep the moral agency where the moral agency actually is.
I think, I mean, just pick some random guy and try and destroy his life, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And then I guess we have to say at which point is, as long as you're doing that, let's just say, for example, this is going to be a completely ridiculous example, but it just came to my mind.
You see the guy kick the puppy, but you're the host of some unbelievably influential internet radio podcast.
That eventually gets everybody to listen to what you say, and through your influence, you're able to get everybody to ostracize an individual over kicking a puppy.
I realize that's completely ridiculous.
But where does that draw the line on that?
Because, I mean, we, of course, would sit here and say, well, that's just justice.
No, no, but you see...
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Like, let's say...
Michael Brown, right?
The big...
The big young African-American fellow who strong-armed this cigar box out of this shop owner's store, right?
Well, the shop owner called the cops, apparently, or one of the customers, so I can't remember the exact story, but the cops were called over this shoplifting.
Now, that set events in motion that resulted in Michael Brown's being shot to death, right?
Right?
I mean, because if the cops hadn't been called, then...
Wilson wouldn't have confronted Michael Brown who was walking down the middle of the road with a cigar case under his hand when he just right near the store.
He did order him to get out of the street, but it's more than like...
No, no, no, hang on, hang on.
I don't want to get into the details of that, the whole presentation of that.
But what I'm saying is that the shop owner or whoever it was in the store who made the call to the cops about the robbery, were they responsible for Michael Brown's death?
No, Michael Brown was responsible for Michael Brown's death because of the choices that he made.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right, so that's important.
The wrongdoer is responsible for the choices that he makes.
And somebody who's telling the truth about a wrongdoer is not causal.
But the wrongdoer himself is causal.
Yeah, I guess too.
If some guy's a convicted rapist, and...
He wants to ask a girl you know out, or your sister, and you say to your sister, this guy's a convicted rapist.
Is it your fault she's not going out with him?
No.
Yeah, again, yeah.
That's a good point, yeah.
The other thing that really got me thinking about this, too, is that the number of people that call into the show, and that from my generation, the millennials, who seem to have a lot of hostility and anger, Towards the boomers for a very good reason.
With me, I actually don't really have too much hatred for the boomers.
For me, it comes for the generation that came before the greatest generation.
I don't know what that would be called.
But at the turn of the last century, I... I have a problem saying I have seething hatred for that generation, but they're all in the grave now and that's beyond any retribution.
Oh, you mean the people who fought, what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation, the people who fought in the Second World War, grew up in the Depression, that kind of stuff?
No, no, no.
Prior to them.
The turn of the century.
Oh, sorry, turn of the century.
Oh, so you mean the people who let the whole progressive movement go on and who let central banking be founded and didn't fight the growth of World War I and then let Versailles get implemented and then let the government become semi-fascistic during the Great Depression and didn't point out or fight against the rise of Hitler.
You mean that sort of generation?
Yeah, because the whole thing as I look at them is that they had just escaped, you know, the history of tyranny, oppression for so long, and then slowly but surely it was creeping back.
That was the time you could have made a hard stop.
By the time the boomers came around, there was already such bribery and distortion, religion was gone, but those were supposed to be people of moral character.
Wait a second here.
Oh, man.
Oh, dear.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Oh, I'm not taking...
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Okay, okay, okay.
I just heard you throw open your mouth.
No, no, just a mild pushback, if you'll be so very kind, just to indulge me.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, first of all, the generation that you're talking about, they were all raised in government schools.
Because the government education system, 1870s, 1880s, and so on, right?
A generation and a half, maybe even before these kids came of age, right?
So they were raised in government schools.
Secondly, of course, they did not have access to any kind of form of mass communication that is available.
Certainly now, but even in the 60s and 70s and 80s, with television, newspapers, magazines, and so on, there was a much greater capacity to join public discourse and influence events.
So you could go even further back and say, well, for me, the big problem is the 1800s.
Well, you can't say that after the 1850s, there was a big, giant civil war.
I mean, now, sure, it was fought on both sides extremely immoral grounds, but the point was that those people were willing to stand up and fight, and you can say that the people who were more or less willing to stand up and fight, that gene was kind of killed off in the biggest bloodbath America had ever seen.
And then they just kind of became a little more docile afterwards.
Right.
Now, but here's the challenge is that if you're going to start taking personal responsibility away from people because of circumstances or genetics or whatever, right?
You're going to have a tough time with that.
Saying, well, this generation has more moral responsibility.
This generation has less moral responsibility.
My particular approach, and take it for what it's worth, but my particular approach is I only compare people to their stated ideals.
That's all.
All I care about is I don't care about, well, was there this genetics or that genetics or was there this pattern or that pattern or were they exposed to this, that or the other?
All I care about is what did they say and what did they do?
And the greater the gap between their stated ideals and their actual actions is their degree of moral responsibility.
So the 60th generation with their pacifism and their sort of make love, not war kind of thing, it's like, okay, so you guys don't like using force to solve problems.
So what's with the socialist welfare state, right?
Or the people, like they say, well, we brought the welfare state in to help the poor.
And then they just never circle back to see if it's actually working, right?
Oh, we really care about helping the poor.
Oh, we're all about helping the poor.
Okay.
Okay.
Is spending a trillion dollars a year helping the poor?
No?
Okay.
Revisit it then, you bastards.
Right?
Circle back, you know?
Political power.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, whatever it is, right?
So, you know, whether to what degree people have moral response, I don't have the soul spy spell into other people's souls.
I don't know the degree to which, you know, Well, this person has 59.4% moral responsibility.
On the other hand, this generation had 63.2, so clearly there are a few percentage points more.
I have no idea.
No idea.
All I care about is people who say, well, I don't think we should use violence to solve social problems.
Well, you know, taxation is forced.
Like then, okay, moral responsibility.
You don't have moral responsibility until you hear the argument, because there's not many people who can come up with original moral arguments.
People don't have moral responsibility until they hear the moral argument.
Once they hear the moral argument, they have moral responsibility, which is why people love to sit in an echo chamber and be told over and over again the things they already believe, because that way they don't accumulate an excess of moral responsibility or any moral responsibility.
It's why the left goes to leftist outlets and the right goes to the rightist outlets and so on, because if they hear arguments counter to their perceptions, if people on the right hear leftist criticisms of foreign policy, if people on the left hear rightist criticisms of domestic policy, then their minds open and they expand and so on.
And you can see this in my The Truth About Bernie Sanders video where a bunch of socialists come in and just believe that taking a big giant snark dump on active intelligence does anything other than electrocute their ass.
It doesn't do any harm to the active intelligence.
It just makes them look like complete idiots for the most part.
It is frightening.
Because with that definition that I gave you for greed, because I wanted to see if that was philosophically sound, I tried putting that out on social media just to try and get some pushback.
And of course, the thing I got the most is that ethics are subjective, so therefore it's even more insane.
And I said, well, let's just go ahead.
I'm not going to get into that argument right now about whether ethics are or are not subjective, because that's just going to be a round robin.
You're never able to nail those people down with it.
So what I said is...
No, but maybe you can nail them up.
Sorry, just kidding.
What I just said is, well, let's just go ahead and say that individual ethics, whatever that is, is that let's just say I say my ethical standard is that I give 10% of my earnings to charity.
That is my ethical standard.
Well, now we have something objective to measure my actions against.
So if I'm not doing that, now you could say that I'm greedy.
So it's...
Even if ethics are subjective, this is something objective we can measure.
No, no, no, no, no, that's not it.
Well, why not?
Well, hang on a sec.
But I always find it funny too, people that ethics are subjective.
It's like, you know you're an anarchist now, right?
If ethics are objective, then we need universal non-aggression principle, which makes you an anarchist.
If ethics are subjective, then the government is a giant jazz fascist making sure that everyone likes jazz when jazz has a subjective taste.
We are the international ministry of you must eat ice cream and like it or we'll throw you in prison.
It's like, I don't think ice cream fascism or jazz fascism really makes a lot of sense to people.
But if ethics are subjective, you can't have a state with laws because laws are about the imposition of moral standards or ethical standards or power standards upon other people.
So the result of ethics being subjective is let's have an anarchic society and yet they never ever want to say that.
Are you ready for the powerful counter argument?
Yeah.
The Afro-Counter argument is racist, fascist.
Hey, are you white?
You're wrong by definition.
White ain't right, brother.
Yeah.
It's just one of those things, though.
As you're reading that, you just look at a man who had it.
I'm sorry, I'm going back to the book now.
You look at a man who had his life completely destroyed by, I think, what we can describe as what the state is comprised of, assholes around him.
And as a result, he went out and took vengeance.
Now, Alexander Dumas in the book was using a lot of trying to use the divine conduit, that that's all that the account of Monte Cristo was, was, you know, the conduit of God's wrath against evildoers.
So I didn't really get a whole lot of moral clarity in the idea of revenge from that, but it did just leave me pondering it.
So I guess kind of what we've come to the conclusion of is that as long as you stick within the confines of UPB and the person has actually done something immoral, it's pretty much open game?
Well, no.
Here's the thing, right?
I mean, if you decide to act on vengeance, you are taking on a significant risk.
Right?
And the significant risk is that You know, some guy pushes you in the mud.
So then you trip him up when he's carrying a tray of food.
So then he pushes you down the stairs.
So then you drive over his foot, right?
This escalation aspect of the Hatfield of Nikois, right?
Shooting across the Tennessee woods or whatever.
This escalation capacity for vengeance is significantly destabilizing and significantly risky.
Well, isn't that just personal preference, though?
No.
No, I mean, if two people live in the woods, they go fight it all day long, I guess, right?
Who cares, right?
But there is collateral damage.
You might fall down the stairs, land on someone, you know, whatever it is, right?
So this capacity for escalation is a challenge.
And one of the things that a sort of centralized justice system is supposed to do is take the individual escalation aspect out of it.
It was the government that put your brother in jail.
I didn't lock him up.
Right?
And so it makes people upset with the government and generally people don't escalate against the government or whatever, right?
So there is that aspect.
Now in a free society, you get the same thing.
The other thing, if you take vengeance, what if you make a mistake?
What if you make a mistake?
What if the guy's got a twin?
Right?
What if you're in some Jeremy Irons in the mirror situation?
What if the guy's got a twin?
And you go and you shoot this guy and you shot the wrong guy.
Or what if you thought it was this guy, but it turned out to be some other guy?
Or maybe you were set up and the clues all led to some guy, right?
Like there's that movie where the guy is, I wouldn't tell you, it's a backwards time movie, I can't remember what it's called.
But maybe someone wants you to go kill some guy, so they killed your family, and then they left his wallet there.
It doesn't have to always be the extreme of my family has been wiped out.
Whatever.
No, but that doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
What I'm pointing out is that if you take, quote, justice or the law into your own hands, you don't have the investigative capacities that a free market justice system would have, or even the government for that matter, unless you're in Detroit or Chicago or any other places where crimes are I think they're still working on who killed the pharaohs there because they're a little slow on getting things solved.
So if you decide to take revenge into your own hands rather than going through some more formal process where people are skilled at investigating.
I have an odd fondness for Michael Connolly novels.
And I find police procedurals quite interesting because the degree of work that, at least in this, I'm sure, somewhat idealized universe, that they have to go through in order to establish Innocence or potential innocence or guilt even to get to trial.
It's pretty huge.
And so I think most people, like if someone's done them some wrong, they don't want to take into their own hands because the possibility of mistake and the possibility of escalation are considerable.
And so I think for the most part, they'd like to make that phone call and get the experts in who are going to take over the liability for escalation and who are going to take over the liability of getting things wrong.
And I think most people will be very uncomfortable taking that kind of retribution into their own hands because of the significant risks involved.
You're not like you wouldn't call the cops?
No.
Absolutely not, especially not on something like that.
I never understood how people get any satisfaction from somebody going...
Wait, something like what?
I'm just saying, well, before...
Can I say this one question, too, before...
Because if I don't, I'm going to forget it.
Yeah.
Because you were talking about escalation, and it sounded a lot like potential problems to others.
You were talking about, you know, falling down the stairs and somebody else getting hurt, things of that nature, collateral damage.
Yeah.
And that was one question I asked in the original, is that if, now, if we win, there are going to be a lot, and by that I mean anarchists, there are going to be a lot of people a lot worse off.
There's probably going to be a lot of people that will die in the transition to a free society.
Because, I mean, if they don't...
No, no, no, no.
Dude, dude, dude, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Come on.
Come on, man.
A lot of people are going to die in the transition to a free society?
I don't think that's necessarily the case.
I mean, compared to what?
Compared to a non-free society?
Compared to a slow degradation of the economy?
People not having enough to eat because they can't keep the power grid on?
I think a lot fewer people are going to suffer in a transition to a free society.
Well, for us to get...
I talk about the United States when I say this.
But for us to get from where we are now to there, there are going to have to be a lot of giant social upheavals.
I mean, look at what happened with the Catholics and the Protestants.
And that wasn't even as big of a turning point in ideas as what this would be.
I mean, to go from a statist to a non-statist society, that's a lot more fundamental than Catholic and Protestant of I have slightly different ideas of who Jesus' best friend is.
Oh man, I disagree with just about every aspect of your historical analysis.
Christian theological battles cost the lives of about a third of Europeans over a couple of hundred year period, so those doctrinal disputes are huge.
I genuinely believe that We're not going to get to a free society until we have at least a generation of peaceful parents, peaceful parenting.
By that time, the transition will not be horrible.
In fact, it will be hugely beneficial for just about everyone.
The other thing, too, is that I've seen...
And we've got a whole presentation on this on the channel.
It's The Truth About Canada.
You know, Canada slashed a huge amount of welfare and social spending in the 90s.
A huge amount.
And people just went, okay, I'll get a job.
Yeah, it was a fun ride while it lasted, but, you know, if the gambler's out of money and he's broke, he doesn't trash the place, he just goes home.
It depends whether or not there's enough moral certainty to know why the transition is occurring.
If the transition is occurring because they're just out of money and everyone's apologetic and the crybaby trolls can go insane and everyone's going to be like, I get it, I understand, I feel it.
Right then, of course, there's going to be a big giant mess, right?
But if there's a genuine understanding, it's like, okay, well, this was a bad system.
It really didn't work.
And it's destroying the future of our children.
And, you know, it was a fun, crazy ride.
And now it's over.
So, you know, dust off your big girl panties and go get a job and go be responsible.
Oh, the single moms have enough.
Okay, well, the single moms can find some way to be great enough people that guys will want to be with them.
And...
Even with their kids.
People will adapt.
You know, we made it through the Ice Age.
You know, we made it through the little warm period in the medieval Ice Age.
We made it through the Black Death.
You know, we made it through the collapse of the Roman Empire.
You know, I think a shrinking in the welfare checks we'll be okay with.
Yeah, I'm just saying is that in all those things you also said, though, a lot of people died in that.
And the thing is that I'm saying, now, you said in the 90s, Canada cut back on welfare.
Okay, but...
They also just elected Justin Trudeau, and it's not like Canada's...
I'm not as well-versed, I'm sure, on Canadian fiscal policy or debt problems or banking as you are, but...
But nobody died when Canada cut back welfare.
That's my point.
Okay, I get that, but my point is that they're also right back to the welfare key, and I mean, sure, it's because they didn't suck the cow dry till it died.
I mean, when...
Yeah, and so what?
That's inevitable.
I'm saying that until children are raised in a different way, we're going to keep having these same problems.
And the treatment of children is certainly improving in many ways, although it's being undertow by the fact that government schools are getting worse.
But all you're telling me is, Steph, your theory is true.
Parenting has not been revolutionized, and therefore people are still drawn towards statism.
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
And if the government does run out of money, then...
People will be fine.
They'll just repudiate the debt, and they'll be at recess, and people will be fine.
If people understand that the system hasn't worked and it needs to change.
If people are like, oh, the evil, racist, capitalist, white, cisgendered overlords are keeping all the rightful cheddar from the people who need it.
This is why I keep fighting against the race baiting and the gender baiting and so on.
If we all get that we were on this weird ride that just led nowhere and we need to solve it and it just can't continue and we're all in it together, then we can solve the problem.
But if it turns into a war of all against all for the last fiat dollar on the planet, then yeah.
I mean, the fact that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are topping the left and right polls, everybody knows that the current system doesn't work.
The Bernie Sanders supporters want more of the same crazy stuff and the Donald Trump supporters want some more of the same crazy stuff in terms of foreign policy and some slightly better stuff domestically.
But I'm just concerned that if you're around there, if you're out there in the world saying, well, you know, I want a free society.
Prepare to die, millions of sheeple.
I'm a little concerned that you might want to work on your fucking marketing a little bit because I don't really think that's much of a rallying cry.
No, my thing is that I do want to...
Death to the underclass!
Freedom!
It's like, no, can you not say that, please?
Because I don't think it's true.
Well...
I don't want to sound overtly arrogant when I say this, but I think you've talked about the mouse utopia experiments.
I kind of feel like a lot of anarchists, especially anarcho-capitalists, are like the beautiful ones who are just sitting back going, well, y'all are about to die.
And just kind of one of those situations that you can...
You might want to hang out with some slightly nicer anarchists.
I thought you might want to hang out with some slightly more positive anarchists.
Like, I'm going to groom myself, you're all going to die.
You know, that's not a long dinner party for me.
That's sort of what I'm saying, you know.
Eat up!
Next is a course of proletariat side meat with HP sauce.
But...
I just want to point out that you may be drawn a little bit towards some nihilistic doom scenarios.
And, you know, maybe you're right.
I have looked at transitions quite a bit throughout history.
And if there's sufficient knowledge, the transition is pretty easy.
And if there's not sufficient knowledge, if people feel that they're being ripped off and that they're entitled to stuff and they don't understand why the system isn't working, then they tend to get more aggressive, right?
Like, if...
If I know my car is a rental, I don't phone up the cops because the Hertz guy takes it back, you know, because I know the deal.
It's a rental.
It's got to go back to Hertz, right?
As opposed to, hey, man, I just parked my car and this guy in a yellow jacket just stole it from me.
I just left it unattended for a moment and even put my luggage out.
I don't know.
Give me what's better mileage.
Guys, you got to come.
Where are you?
Hertz.
Did you have a contract with Hertz?
Sir, he's taking back the car that's his.
Oh!
Okay, I'm not upset anymore, right?
No vengeance, right?
So, if people know the deal, then they'll not mind the transition.
If they don't know the deal, they'll fight it tooth and nail.
But I'm concerned that by you saying...
Death to millions, it might not be that helpful to the cause at all.
Don't think by any stretch of the imagination I'm saying I want this to happen or I'm, you know...
I know you don't want it.
But if you want a transition to a free society and you believe it's death to the millions...
Then you kind of do need it in order to get to your utopia.
And I don't think it's necessary at all.
I think that the alternative will be death to millions, right?
Like wars and famines and every known thing in the universe.
But if you're going to say death to millions, man, you really, really got to be on solid ground and you've really got to have studied this stuff because otherwise you're kind of letting a whole bunch of nihilistic crazy spill out.
I think to the detriment of trying to bring about a free society.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I guess it's just one of those things that I've gotten to the point where I kind of talk with just nothing but anarchists.
What you've got to do is stop arguing on social media.
Because if there's anything that's going to provoke a desire for death to millions, it's trying to have arguments on social media, particularly around ethics.
You know, I get that, you know.
You know, then it becomes like...
I say we go up to the spaceship and nuke it for more of it, man.
Game over!
You're like Bill Patton in Aliens.
You've got to stay away from situations where reason is impotent.
Stay away from crazy people who deny reality.
Because then you'd be like, huh, world-ending plague of social dislocation and destruction.
Will it take down the people I'm arguing with on social media?
Okay.
I have some sympathy.
You've got to stay because they'll tempt you into a kind of nihilism and a kind of hatred of humanity.
And that's kind of their job, right?
I mean, if you argue, like if you dance with zombies, you're going to end up with rotting crap all over you and a very bad smell in your nose, right?
Just stay away from them and, you know, go with Pia Zadora in her prime.
I don't know.
I'm just making something up.
But just try and stay away from situations...
Where you can't gain traction with rationality.
And if you're arguing with stuff on social media, oh man, it's going to be something that's just going to provoke a whole lot of bad sentiment coming out of your spleen.
Yeah, well, you know, and then the whole time I've ever been on social...
Won't you take me to zombie town?
Won't you take me to zombie town?
Anyway, so...
Well, now, when it comes to peaceful parenting, I'm fully and 100% on board with you from the ethical standpoint of it and what I feel of that it would be the salt sowed in the earth that would keep the state from ever arising again.
But every single time, and that is when you look on social media or just at the world in general, whenever I hear about Peaceful parenting or ideas with the more traditional libertarian through education and that, I kind of almost feel like we're panda bears trying to outbreed rats in a city dump.
It's just kind of one of those things I'm just sitting around looking and going, number of games isn't good.
Worst buddy movie ever, but yeah, go on.
And because the whole thing I look at, too, is that a lot of liberals And, you know, American liberals, not European liberals, are very much into not spanking, peaceful, reasonable negotiation, but they're raising their kids to be socialists.
So when I hear that, I'm thinking basically you're talking about raising anarchists.
And like I'm saying, and I'll just use the analogy again, it's like trying to outbreed another species with panda bears.
Right, but you see, you don't talk to the parents.
Right?
When the kids grow up and become adults, and they say, well, we need a central authority, we need coercion, and then you say, well, how did your parents deal with disagreements with you?
Oh, they sat down and reasoned with me.
Okay, well, if we can do that with a five-year-old, can we not do that with a 25-year-old in society?
Right?
You talk to them and say, well, was violence the solution in your home?
No.
Now, if violence was the solution in their home, then their desire to get rid of the state is going to be proportionately less, because then you're saying violence is really bad, which they will then consciously hear as your parents were really violent, therefore really bad.
But if kids are being raised without coercion, so much the better.
Then we say, okay, well, coercion is not necessary for raising children.
We can assume that children are more irrational than the average adult.
Therefore, we don't need aggression in the organizing of society.
It's not exactly a slam dunk, but it's certainly something that's going to give them a lot more pause than if they were raised violently.
Well, just the thing is now, what I can say is one of the things that brought me to the anarchist camp, aside from just the logical argument, is that the aggressions there was in my household growing up, because there was a lot of that in my mind, well, yeah, that wasn't any good, and okay, yeah, I kind of see where the problems were.
So that was one thing that really attracted me to it.
Right.
Well, anyway, I mean, we've done a fair sprint around the mulberry bush.
I think that vengeance is a very risky thing to get into for the escalation and potential for mistake.
I think that most times, of course, we will try to prevent in a future society, prevent the kind of child's Abuse that results in criminality.
So I don't think it's going to be a big problem in the future.
Where these things do occur, I think people will defer to professionals who will take over the liability for the examination and investigation and prosecution of a crime.
What I'm doing is wrong.
I don't know what you're doing.
What are you doing?
Oh, you mean like wanting to get back at your former boss?
Yeah, wanting to just completely and utterly financially destroy him.
Well, I... If you're telling the truth, I mean, I personally think that vengeance is a pretty crappy way to spend your life.
I think it kind of drains a lot of joy out of your life.
You know, people will act badly against you in the hope of infecting you with hatred, right?
Like, oh, you're going to wake up and hate those guys.
I hate those people and so on.
And I don't know.
I think that's kind of letting them win in your head, right?
Either they take action or don't.
If you're not going to take action, just put them out of your mind because, I mean...
This guy, let's say he's just some really bad guy, whoever he is, okay, let him go be his bad guy.
Eventually, life will punish him no matter what, right?
The thing is, I take enjoyment from it, though.
And maybe it's just I'm a dark person.
But like I say, whenever it comes to, you know, whenever I see somebody who's just truly...
I don't want to use evil because that's a very, very strong word.
But whenever I see somebody who is like that...
And now, I can use an example in my life from the past of somebody who I thought was evil.
And that...
No, I really enjoy it.
It's...
Yeah, look, I mean, if you want to, but be careful which dog you're feeding, right?
Like every one of our personality attributes is a dog, and the dogs that win are the dogs we feed the most.
And if you feed the dog of hatred and vengeance and the desire to grind evil people's face into the dust and so on, okay, that's the dog that's going to win.
And that's going to be how your life grows to be defined.
That you're some grim, Gotham-based superhero who never smiles because there's another evil person in the world to somehow vanquish and conquer.
And I get that there is a satisfaction in seeing bad people bite the dust, for sure.
We all like it when the villain takes the final shot to the head.
I get that.
But, you know, my concern would be the degree to which it is not going to end up with you living a life that is going to be inspiring to others because you are, you know, the lone ranger on the dark trail of every piece of gunpowdered soul that is spilling its explosive residue across the landscape and the degree to which you're just I've
read a lot of Nietzsche.
So, the concern, the degree to which vengeance might be taking you away from happiness in your life.
This guy's a bad guy.
Yeah, you know, you're never going to run out of bad guys in the modern world to go chasing after.
I just think that it might end up being kind of exhausting and debilitating towards your future happiness, and it might strip you of some capacity for love.
and joy and devotion to better things in life.
So listen, I got to move on to the end of the show.
But thanks very much for your call.
Always fascinating to chat with Yowl is a joyful and blissful experience.
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