All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 20, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:01:20
3387 Bald Ape Meat Puppets - Call In Show - August 19th, 2016
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, hello, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Just before we start, oh, please remember, August is a lean and hungry month for those of us who rely on your support.
So please, please help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
We need your help more now than ever to bring the great work we're doing to the world.
So please, please, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
All right, great set of callers tonight.
I was talking about an issue that's been close to my heart for many years, which is how do charitable organizations, especially in third world countries, how can they make a positive impact without creating dependency and negatively affecting local economies?
How do we help without hurting?
That's a great, great question, and we went into that in significant detail.
Now, the second caller, we had a woman calling in saying, how could we get women to like men and respect men more again?
And wouldn't it be nice if we could also help women to become more patriotic, more attracted to the culture, at least the Western culture that so often protects them?
We had a great conversation about the incentives that lead women and men away from each other towards hostility towards each other and what might change or what might have to change in order to improve that.
The next caller, I got pretty emotional in this one, which I guess was not too surprising in hindsight, which was the question a woman called in to ask, what evidence can you use to establish the possibility of God?
Not absolute proof, but what do I think the strongest arguments are for the existence of God?
And that was a very deep and powerful conversation.
I really appreciate her bringing up that topic.
Now, the last caller was a woman who had come to America from Venezuela and wanted to know whether I thought Donald Trump was the American Chavez and how would you compare these two characters?
How would you compare Obama and Chavez?
And what are the parallels between what's going on in Venezuela, this economic decline and near social collapse, and what is going on in America?
So, I mean, I find the history of Venezuela in particular fascinating.
It was one of the top four economies in the world as recently as the middle of the last century, and then it began its 50-plus year fall from grace into the socialist hellhole it is now.
The parallels are not exactly wide and distant, so we had a great conversation about that.
So thanks again, everyone, so much for listening, for watching, for supporting the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Let's get started.
Alright, well up first today we have Evan.
Evan wrote in and said, How can charitable organizations, especially in third world countries, make a positive impact without creating dependency and negatively affecting local economies?
Simply put, how do we help without hurting?
I've been working in the same nonprofit organization in a very poor part of Central America for nearly 10 years.
This issue has weighed heavily on my mind since I've come to understand how people respond to incentives and And how toxic the welfare state can be to society, in large parts due to the influence of the arguments and evidence you presented in your show.
Specifically, I'm greatly concerned about our adopt-a-student programs, reduced incentives to earn-slash-work, and mental-slash-dental clinics, competing with other local clinics, using tax-free U.S. donations, which I can expand on more in detail should you take the call.
We're taking the call.
Thank you for all that you do.
That's from Evan.
Oh, hey, Evan.
How are you doing?
Hey, Stefan.
Doing well.
Hope you are, too.
I am.
I am.
Thank you very much.
Do you want to give me...
I knew a woman who worked in non-governmental organizations, charitable organizations in Central America for quite some time, and this is not the first time I've heard some of these frustrations, so I understand it.
Do you want to give some more...
Sure.
I mean, I think this is, like you said, an issue that I would think most organizations face that are in extreme poverty situations.
We're obtaining resources voluntarily, so no use of force.
I know there's a tax incentive, but compared to the welfare state...
That's less force.
That's good.
Right.
But otherwise, by comparison, there's no force being used, so we're not coercing people to obtain the resources, but what we do with it is what concerns me.
So, like I said, herding instead of helping along those same lines as a welfare program.
I'm just curious, you know, I can tell you more about our specific programs, but in a broad sense also, just sort of how you philosophically see how we can help people in dire need.
I mean, much more dire need than we see here in the States.
I don't know if you want to start with my specific examples or take it at a broad level.
I'm happy to go either way, but ultimately my concern is just that we're so blinded by the dire need and that we're driven by our emotions that we may not see the consequences of some of the things that we choose to do and end up in the long run hurting more than they but ultimately my concern is just that we're so blinded by And I know that it's not possible to predict that necessarily, but I think there's a lot we could do To anticipate those consequences.
And I'm not sure it's really a conversation that is had very often.
At least in my experience, I haven't heard much of it.
It's just very emotionally driven, very motivated by, you know, we just need to help these people.
They're in desperate need.
And there's no real thought taken to see, alright, what is this going to do in 10, 20, 30 years to this community or this group of people?
And that's what concerns me.
Right.
I mean, you bring up such a sort of powerful series of questions and problems that, you know, we could almost do a whole week on this topic and still have some places to go.
We won't.
Because, you know, people are already like, dude, don't you sleep?
So many shows.
But the question of the alleviation of poverty is...
Obviously, people care.
You know, people care.
You know, we see, as I did when I was a kid, you know, these starving kids in Africa or India, and it breaks your heart in six million different ways.
And I remember Marlon Brando, of all people, not obviously a guy who had much trouble getting a hold of food, but at least later in his life.
But he was making some movie in India, I think, and he...
He would get out of his car and sort of meet the kids.
The kids would all want stuff.
He'd give them all the money, everything that he had on him.
And the director, I think he was working with, didn't.
And Brando turned to him and said, well, why?
Why doesn't this break your heart?
He's like, yeah, but they'll be back tomorrow and there'll be more of them.
And that sort of always struck me as a very powerful two ways of looking at it.
And it's also important, of course, to recognize That in the abstract we know that bad life decisions for a lot of people need to lead to suffering so that they will change their own approach and also so that other people will see that warning sign and say...
Yeah, better not do that.
On the other hand, it's very tough to say no to someone face to face.
You know, that's the pathological altruism that runs through a good portion of the world's population.
And I don't consider myself immune to it necessarily.
So these are big, big challenges.
Now, one thing that has happened over the last little while That is really really important is there's been two giant waves of getting people out of poverty and the first was sort of a 18th 19th century in terms of the agricultural revolution producing the excess food which I've talked about a bunch of times on the show which then leads to the Industrial Revolution which produces excess capital or at least additional capital and The people got out of poverty that way and even with the huge drags
of the world wars and depressions and recessions and fiat currency and all of that there has been some significant progress towards wealthy societies in the West.
So that's the first.
Now the second is for about the last quarter century nearly a billion people around the world have been taken out of extreme poverty or have Worked their way out of extreme poverty and that is a truly astonishing number.
A billion people have been taken out of poverty.
Now, of course, a lot of that is in India.
India was bequeathed socialism by the By the British Raj intellectuals who all swarmed over there and brought socialism with them.
And then they had a couple of generations of socialism.
Then they got sick of it.
They became more free market reformed.
And that's helped a lot within India, right?
I mean, I've talked about various ethnic IQs and all that kind of stuff.
But...
To me, the IQ stuff doesn't matter if there's market opportunity.
If there's market opportunity, the rising tide lifts all boats and everyone does, I think, as well as reasonably can be expected or is possible.
So this change, of course, in China, the transition from a starvation-level communist economy To more free market reforms.
Of course, it's far from perfect, but then who are we to talk, right?
Free market reforms have helped there.
The end of grinding poverty for a lot of people in the USSR, in Russia, and the sort of satellite states in Eastern Europe.
There has been a huge number of market reforms that have, you know, between 1990 and 2010, the number of people in poverty Fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries.
From 43% to 21%, that's a reduction of about a billion people.
And this is something, of course, we don't hear about.
Why?
Because it's not central planning that's doing it.
Because it's not socialism that's doing it.
It's not income redistribution.
It's not taxes.
It's not subsidies.
It's not tariffs.
It's the free market.
Now, of course, if this had been the result of a government plan, this would be trumpeted.
There'd be fireworks every night.
But because it is, in my...
For my argument, and I think that there's a lot of evidence for this, it's the shrinking of interference of productive trade from the state.
The state's getting out of the way.
Let us be.
Let us trade.
Let us live.
Because it is a free market phenomenon that is actually achieving what socialism only promises and never delivers, it's not visible.
I heard a little bit of a huh from you when we were talking about this.
Is this something that you're familiar with?
No, I wasn't aware of those statistics.
And like you said, it's not something that's trumpeted, of course.
But yeah, it sounds like we're making great progress as a world.
You wouldn't know that, but I guess that's the case.
In this specific context in the country we're working in, It's unfortunate that I don't think we have IQ working in our favor.
There is an obscene amount of our selected behavior, you know, as you call it with the RK selection theory.
There's virtually no deferral of gratification.
There's a very high fertility rate.
Everyone lives day to day.
There's no worry about tomorrow when it gets here sort of thing.
No concern for time.
A lot of what we do is frustrated by that because here we are coming from our society and trying to change things, but you're working with a people group that may not even be capable of that.
I think that definitely plays a part compared to India or China.
I think that's a significant barrier.
And we have a lot of single family, I mean single parent households.
Single mom, we can say.
And a big part of that in our specific community that's very unique is chronic kidney failure of an unknown cause in this specific community is rampant.
Men die.
At the age of 30, 35.
Not to mention the fact that the culture itself is single motherhood run amok.
On top of that, you have men dying at the age of 35 that have fathered children and they're not just disappearing, they're dying.
The kidney is not rapid.
It's not like you get hit by a bus, right?
It's expensive and slow and consumes a lot of resources if it's a slow failure, right?
Yeah, slow.
There's reason to believe it's either something due to water or something due to the agricultural pesticides being used.
That's been a well-known suspicion, but we haven't determined.
We have some scientists actually working with us to try to determine the cause, but it's specific to some sugarcane production areas that are in this country and other pineapple and banana plants, things like that.
Curious.
But all that to say, there's a lot going against us.
And my concern is not to really alleviate poverty in the sense that I want their economy to match our economy as quickly as possible.
They seem very content in their circumstances.
And I've learned myself from living there that...
I don't need everything that I have.
I've felt some independence from the world in the sense that it's great that I have things, but I'm able to see some meaning in life beyond that, and so I wouldn't want to poison them with this consumerism that we have or anything like that, but they all want things.
They all have a deep desire to have stuff, and that could definitely drive a market, and it does.
So, I think the big concern on my part is just specifically with our programs is de-incentivizing Good things that they may do by our failed attempts at improving their culture, improving this little micro-economy in this town, that we might actually be de-incentivizing progress.
And I can talk a little more about those.
Okay, so before we get to that, I want to gather some facts for some of the stuff I was sort of throwing out earlier.
Most of the...
This is from The Economist.
It says, most of the credit must go...
This is reducing poverty.
Most of the credit must go to capitalism and free trade for they enable economies to grow.
And it was growth principally that has eased destitution.
Poverty rates started to collapse towards the end of the 20th century largely because developing country growth accelerated from an average annual rate of 4.3% in 1960 to 2000 to 6% In 2000 to 2010.
About two-thirds of poverty reduction within a country comes from growth.
Greater equality also helps contributing The other third, a 1% increase in incomes in the most unequal countries produces a mere 0.6% reduction in poverty.
In the most equal countries, it yields a 4.3% cut.
China is responsible for three quarters of the achievement, right, of this billion.
Its economy has been growing so fast that even though inequality is rising fast, extreme poverty is disappearing.
China pulled 680 million people out of misery.
Between 1981 and 2010.
That is astonishing.
Reducing its extreme poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to 10% now.
Now, that is truly astonishing.
Now, they say here poorer governance in India and Africa, the next two targets, means that China's experience is unlikely to be swiftly replicated there.
And, you know, maybe the IQ has something to do with it.
Another reason is that the bare achievement of pulling people over the $1.25 a day line has been relatively easy in the past few years because so many people were just below it.
When growth makes them even slightly better off, it hauls them over the line.
With fewer people just below the official misery limit, it would be more difficult to push large numbers over it.
So...
This is really, really important.
One of the greatest achievements in all of human history was China, right?
680 million people out of extreme poverty in merely 29 years.
In 29 years, extreme poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to 10% now.
Now, if there are people in the world who claim to care about the poor, who claim to care About helping others who claim to care about wanting a better life for people.
This, I believe, is the single greatest erasure of poverty in all of human history and everybody and their dog and their brother and their panda bear should be over there studying, researching, figuring out what China did to pull almost 700 million people out of poverty in 29 years.
Shouldn't that be exactly where all of the altruistic, wannabe, NGO helping people, that should be what they have studied, and this should be all that they're studying, because it is the greatest erasure of poverty, I believe, in all of human history.
And you probably haven't even heard much about it, and you're in the biz, right?
Yep, not a peep.
I had no idea it was that drastic.
What do you think of that?
I think I'm going to read a lot more about China over the past three or four decades.
As I mentioned, though, I'm pretty concerned that we're not working with the same group of people as far as IQ goes, and that could be a significant factor.
Personally, I think there's a lot of room for IQ growth to occur.
The upper limit remains unknown.
Obviously, early childhood traumas, starvation, and parasites that exist within the body and bleed off nutrients from a developing brain and other forms of diseases that cripple people.
Africa has still got a lot of tariffs, and that is a big problem as well.
You know, what happened with China is it allowed private business to grow.
During the middle of this process, I guess a little bit later on, I was in China in the year 2000, For business.
I was there for a couple of weeks.
A fascinating, fascinating experience.
And going down to the market, I mean, the energy.
To see the love of capitalism and the excitement of the market, you kind of have to go to developing countries.
Because they are so hungry.
They've been held down for so long and constrained and kept from our natural barter tendencies for so long.
That this whole idea, you know, we've got this sense of...
There's this sense of stagnation, you know, China, you know, the Mandarins, and for thousands of years, very little change.
Well, this, of course, because of statism, because of government control of everything.
When, from what I saw, the Chinese had the opportunity to put those giant brains to work.
They were just like hamsters, hyper-hamsters on a treadmill.
They just went for it.
And that was an enormous change and an enormous growth.
Now, the problem is...
And this is the great challenge with the spread of the free market, is that the people who most care about the poor are the ones who want to, quote, help the most, to do the most, to set up the most, to transfer the most, to do for the most.
But the problem is, is that helping the poor is almost all about getting out of their way.
Getting the government out of their way, getting tradition to some degree out of their way, and opening up their capacity to grow, to trade, to invest, to save, to spend.
So we all want to help people, but helping usually means getting out of their way.
Now, the challenge of course is that if you want to really help people, Evan, then a lot of people want to do Nice things.
You know, look, we built you a well.
Look, we're building you a dam.
Look, we're bringing you medicine.
Look, we're bringing you food.
We're doing all this wonderful stuff for you.
Look, we're going to bring you water filters.
And I get all of that.
And I, you know, I feel the pull for that kind of stuff.
However, that's not what the facts say really help the poor.
In order to help the poor, you don't bring them stuff and have them thank you.
You oppose their enemies and it's a lot less pleasant.
In other words, you have to go to the states, maybe to the unions, to the regulators, to the government sectors and so on.
And we'll talk about this in this show when we talk about Venezuela later.
But you have to attack and push back entrenched interests who are controlling the poor, who are using the poorest livestock, who are, you know, they've taken over the utilities.
You know, in Venezuela, it was that the government nationalized a bunch of different industries, in particular the oil.
So to help the poor, bringing them stuff, they'll say, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.
And they get stuck in poverty and things will often get worse.
To help the poor, you need to attack the entrenched interests that are keeping the poor away from the free market, that they're keeping the opportunities away from the poor.
Now, it's a lot nicer to bring people fresh water and have them thank you, and I'm not saying that's not important, but that's what people gravitate towards, whereas taking on government monopolies and opposing bureaucracies and political systems, that's a little less pleasant at times, and so people are drawn more towards the stuff that feels good in the moment rather than the difficult stuff that achieves good in the long run.
Yeah and for us I mean the things that you're listing off are the things that generate the most revenue as far as donations.
So I mean people love to give toward water filtration and education and medical and dental clinics and student sponsorship like we have and it's easy to raise money for that in comparison To the sort of thing you're talking about, it would be, I would think, difficult to raise funds for something like that.
You would just need to be a business person or an activist in that world on your own without needing...
I'm sorry to interrupt, Evan.
It's not just that.
I'll keep this brief.
And if you sort of want to get a sense of this, you can look into a book called The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein for more on this.
If you actually bring free market principles to try and help the poor, the left will attack you vociferously, endlessly.
They will slander you.
They will call you monstrous.
They will call you Appeasing dictators, you'll show up in movies, you'll show up in sting songs, you know, because when the socialist Allende was overthrown and Pinochet got in, Pinochet has become the poster boy for all that is immoral in South and Central American politics.
And the Chicago boys, the Friedmanites who went down, and I talked about this in the Venezuela presentation comparing Venezuela to Pinochet to Chile.
Well, if you go down and you actually implement free market principles, the left will mess you up.
They will corner you.
They will attack you.
They will try to do the usual things.
They try to destroy your reputation.
They try to disrupt or destroy your source of income.
And this is why you don't hear about the fact that communist China switched to more free market principles and 680 million people climbed out of poverty in about a generation.
Because that goes against the pathological altruism slash political control that the left sells to people.
So it's not just that while the people who are going to go in there fighting these institutions are going to have an ugly time event, they're going to have an ugly time back home.
Because the left does not want the market to work.
Because the left are a bunch of...
OCD busybodies who want to control people and if the market self-organizes and the market really helps the poor, they don't want it.
That's why the Democrats are always opposing school choice, giving vouchers and letting parents choose.
No, no, no.
You see, if choice and voluntarism and spontaneous self-organization works, what the hell do these OCD busybodies have to do with their day?
Yeah, and that's definitely causing me to question even more some of the things that we are doing that I think is pretty poisonous to the local economy.
I mentioned our clinic.
It's funded through gringo money.
We're there based on donations we got, and we could potentially be putting other clinics out of business that were started You know, on the backs of locals that they raised the money themselves, they saved, they worked hard, and here we come with our several hundred thousand dollars of funding and we set up this nice clinic and we charge lower prices and we think we're helping, but it's destroying things.
And that's one of the big things that's weighed on me is that, you know, we kind of get cheered on for that from, I guess, mostly leftists.
Because it looks like it helps.
It gives people access to resources they didn't have and people like that.
And it's attractive and it sounds romantic.
But my concern, as I stated in the question, is just are we hurting more than we're helping with that specific thing because of those consequences?
It's concerning to me.
Right.
Well, I mean, this is a huge issue.
Sorry, I keep repeating that like I'm adding some illumination to the topic.
I'm sorry for that.
You have to look at the general market incentives.
Market incentives work in non-market situations strongly, if not more strongly, than they do even in market situations.
So when you have charities that help the poor, that are funded by the presence of the poor, Then to eliminate the poor is to eliminate their own business.
To eliminate poverty is to eliminate their own business.
And this is one of the reasons why charity is so difficult.
When I give to charities, what I'm looking for is a track record of success.
So if there's some group out there that says, you know, we're going to help the poor, what I want to see is the income of the poor going up over time.
Right.
Working themselves out of a job.
Right.
As opposed to, well, we brought them, we built them this dam, we dug them this water well, we gave them these antibiotics.
Fine.
But what I want to know is not, what are you doing to maintain the poor?
Right.
Right.
But through your efforts, is the income and opportunities and market presence of the poor expanding and increasing?
And that is the great challenge.
And this is why the left doesn't talk about things like, well, the free market actually solves the problem of poverty more than any other single factor in the history of the world.
People have been giving to the poor since the beginning of time.
I mean, Jesus, you know, takes his, sell everything you have and give the money to the poor and then follow me.
And this sort of altruism of giving to the poor has been going on since the dawn of time, but it took the agricultural free market industrial revolution to solve the problem of poverty at least in the West for the vast majority of people.
And it took free market reforms in India and in China and to some degree in Africa to change things around.
And there are labs all over the place.
There are labs all over the place.
If you just looked back in the day, you looked at...
Berlin.
Berlin was in East Germany and was divided into East and West Berlin, and West Berlin was great and East Berlin was crap.
Germany itself, divided into two.
You know, it's like the twins experiment.
You divide Germany into two after the Second World War.
Here, here's a whole bunch of stuff to the Soviets, and here's a whole bunch of stuff to Europe, to the West.
And the East...
It was god-awful.
I just watched Bridge of Spies where, I don't know how the hell they recreate the stuff, but it's, you know, there is no sunlight in East Berlin or East Germany.
And so you have these labs where you take the same country, the same culture, the same biology, the same ethnicity, the same language, slice it down the middle, throw one side to communism, put the other side to capitalism, and it was very easy to see.
What happened as a result?
And so all of these labs that have been shown, you know, 70 years of communism in Russia, a complete and total disaster.
And if you look at the National Socialists in Germany, a complete and social, a total disaster.
And if you look at what happened in communism from the late 1940s onwards, under the communists, under Mao and so on, and...
The complete and total disaster.
And so all of these are staring everybody down in the face.
Capitalism versus communism.
Free market versus central planning.
And so much effort is put forward by the left to shield people from the basic knowledge that the way you help people is stop trying to help them.
The way that you help people is get out of their way.
That's how you help people.
That is very hard.
In a free market environment, the charity that gets the most money is the one that's most likely to put itself out of business.
Because the business of the free market is to give you more.
That's the praxeological definition of free trade, right?
It's the old example.
I have a dollar.
You have a pen.
I give you the dollar for the pen.
We both do it voluntarily.
Clearly, you're better off with the dollar than the pen and clearly I'm better off with the pen than the dollar because otherwise we wouldn't have made the trade.
So we both have won in that voluntary transaction, in that voluntary interaction.
That's the beauty of the free market.
Everybody's better off.
It doesn't mean you always get everything you want.
But in that moment, it is win-win for that trade.
So the free market, by its very definition, aims to increase your satisfaction, to increase your happiness, to increase or at least diminish your unhappiness.
And that fundamental equation in the free market is why people end up better off and they end up richer.
Now, The question is, poverty programs, is their incentive to make you richer in the long run?
No.
Their incentive is to maintain you.
And again, I'm just talking sort of bold economic bear incentive.
What King Lear referred to as the bear forked animal.
You know, the head like a kid's drawing of a body.
That the goal of government charity is not to end poverty.
And the very people who are drawn into government charity...
People who don't understand the free market.
Why?
Because they're...
Going into government service.
And so they are automatically blind to the coercive nature of the state to the violent control based on the state.
And then to go to other countries, you see, who gets let in to work?
Let's just say some godforsaken place somewhere in the third world with some, you know, the usual corrupt hellhole of a government and all of that.
Well, who gets in?
Is the government going to let, in general, a very corrupt and controlling government to A quasi-fascistic or communist or socialist or whatever it is, a hypermarket controlled government, are they going to want to let in a whole bunch of free marketers who are going to start agitating for a diminishment of state power?
Of course not.
Who are they going to let in?
They're going to let in people who will keep the population relatively content with the status quo.
Oh look, I'm happier now because there's antibiotics and there's a free clinic and my water is cleaner and whatever.
And that is great because the services provided by the non-governmental organizations and the charities are services that the government would otherwise have to provide themselves.
So if the government can get stuff done for its population for free...
Yeah, why not?
Sure.
Sounds good.
Sounds great to me.
And that's exactly what we're doing.
That's why we're working on the giant big chatty forehead robot to do these shows, right?
Right.
The very people who are allowed to operate in corrupt environments tend to be people who aren't challenging the corruption that is at the root of the poverty.
Yep, I definitely see that.
We're giving free healthcare or subsidized healthcare while the government in our country is building monuments to their president and putting light up trees along the highway.
Yeah, I mean, of course, so it makes a lot of sense.
I think I'm probably going to start advocating...
Sorry to interrupt just before you go on.
And who wants to bother in that country trying to become a doctor if you guys are handing out health service for free?
Yeah, true.
We actually employ local doctors to do it, but same thing, but at least it's coming from American money.
I was just going to say, I think I'll probably start to emphasize job creation.
I think at least we could...
Give some people some way to earn an income that they may not have had, and that's a positive input into the economy.
We're still using resources that were donated, but we're at least giving people a purpose.
They're learning skills.
I've always wanted to do that instead of giving away.
Give someone a job.
It'd be far better to To spend $100 a month paying some guy to pick up trash on the street than just giving him $100.
I don't know if we start there or what we do.
Evan, this is the very curse of the developmental aid mindset.
You're saying, well, maybe we can just pay people to do work rather than pay them to do nothing, right?
Which means that I've not gotten across what I'm talking about yet.
What I'm talking about is instead of creating, quote, government jobs using, as you call it, gringo money to pay people to dig ditches and fill them in again, what you would want to do is figure out what is restraining people from pursuing their dreams in the free market.
What are the laws that are preventing them?
What is the infrastructure that is preventing them?
Is there corruption?
Is there bribery?
Is there other government monopolies that keep people out of particular markets?
Because what you're saying is, well, let's take the money that is donated to us and create imaginary jobs that, you know, pretend there's necessary stuff to do.
Well, I would hope they wouldn't be imaginary things.
I used a poor example, but, you know, I think a big part of China might have been.
But you don't know.
You don't know.
You have no idea what is the most valuable use of someone's time because there's no price mechanism at work.
Yeah.
And so you don't know if the garbage needs to be picked up or somebody needs to learn how to fix a lawnmower or somebody needs to learn how to climb a tree and get a coconut.
I don't know either.
I have no idea.
That's why we need a price system.
That's why we need the free market.
Nobody knows what people should be doing for how much money.
That is a matter of supply and demand.
So the argument I think would be...
Help remove barriers.
Yeah, help remove barriers.
How can we talk to the government?
Because look...
For some reason, I don't know what that reason is, and I'm sure the people in the comments will tell us all about it, and I appreciate the Borg brain of this show.
But, somehow, Friedman and the Chicago Boys were able to convince Pinochet about the virtues of the free market.
Somehow, they were able to do it.
It's like the guy we talked about in the presentation we did on the German...
And this guy in the post-war period, he just got the free market.
And he free marketed up the whole joint.
And he just got out of everyone's way, normalized the currency and so on.
And that...
Was how it worked.
So if you can say, well, I don't know what people should be doing for how much, with what resources, how often a day, where, in what occupation, in what, I mean, nobody knows, right?
That's what the market is all about.
It's this complex web, ever-shifting web of supply and demand.
So it wouldn't be like, okay, well, instead of paying people to sit around, we'll pay them to pick up garbage.
It's like, okay, so instead of welfare, we've got workfare.
But that doesn't get you any closer to the free market.
It's true.
I see that.
Well, it's given me a lot to think about.
I'm not sure what I can do.
In this country we're working in, it would be quite a swing for it to land where you're describing, but I know it would be possible with the right arguments and the right discussions with the right people.
It just seems a long way off.
Oh, it is.
It is.
Like all good solutions, it seems, you know, daunting.
There's a book, I'm holding it up here, that I read.
It's a little older now.
So many notes and it's crazy.
But it's called The White Man's Burden, Why the West's Effort to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.
It's by William Easterly.
And it's a good book.
He kind of falls into the same trap, which is like, all this stuff doesn't work.
All this government stuff doesn't work.
So the solution is, we need different government stuff.
So that's a good book to read.
It talks basically very strongly about the limitations of government aid.
And compared to what the free market has done, it's less than a drop in the bucket.
bucket and a lot of the foreign aid tends to harden existing structures because the way that governments sometimes change is that there's a discontented population and the government has to respond to the needs of the population or it loses legitimacy.
When the money is flowing in from outside, then the governments are less responsive to the people.
And so it tends to ossify, it tends to fossilize, to harden capacities for change within a society.
And And again, this is all having been said.
Nobody wants to say no to hungry people.
Nobody wants to say no to hungry people.
I understand why all of this stuff happens.
And this is just the very, very big picture.
You can still continue to do the existing aid.
While focusing on attempting to convince those in the government of the values and virtues of the free market, which has occasionally happened throughout history, but I think is well worth pursuing.
Yeah, I appreciate the wisdom.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your question.
Feel free to call back in and let us know how it goes.
I would love to hear.
Yeah, if you ever want to come visit a warm place when it's cold up there, we can host you for a visit.
Very kind.
I appreciate that.
Thank you so much.
Evan, a great pleasure chatting.
Thanks.
Alright, well up next is Jessica.
Jessica wrote in and said, How do we get women to be patriotic again?
Women in the West have been taught to question their instincts when it comes to real threats and overreact to imaginary threats.
The example I can give is women who would rather let a guy with an axe get on the elevator with them than possibly seem rude and get off and tell him to take the next one, but act offended if a man holds a door open for them.
I see this with the female response to the immigration crisis.
The bigger problem is they don't realize the real threats, both physical and existential, that our men face.
With one brother in the military and another in law enforcement, I know whose lives will be on the line if things get bad, but most of my female friends seem to be fine with letting the migration of those who don't support Western values That's
from Jessica.
Well, let me ask you this, if you don't mind.
What was your journey towards the perspectives that you have That's a good question.
I had a friend that referred to a book, probably when I was about 21, called The Manipulated Man by Esther Velar.
And I remember reading that and just kind of starting to be more aware of what men did for women, the sacrifices, this kind of code that men And then just kind of continuing to listen to different speakers like you and reading books like that,
I started to kind of analyze more just all the kind of knee-jerk reactions that I would have towards things that men did or things that I saw in the media and just personally started questioning, like, is that authentic?
Is that accurate?
You know, is that really a correct portrayal of What I know about the men in my life and the way that they behave and the honor that they have and the sacrifices that they make.
And it just didn't seem to jive.
And so I started feeling that way.
But then as things kind of progressed and I saw my girlfriends treating their husbands and their partners and people in their life, men in their life, with kind of just disdain and disrespect and And I try to talk to them a little bit about that and try to, you know, guide them towards maybe not being so critical.
And they don't quite seem to get it.
So I had another friend whose girlfriend started a feminist wine club.
And again, they sit around, again, complaining about men.
And I went just out of morbid curiosity and obviously, I don't know.
Wanted to change their minds, wanted to help them see that men aren't the enemy, but they seem quite committed to that belief.
Yeah, you know, I'm not an expert in marketing, Jessica, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a feminist wine club is not necessarily the best name for that particular gathering, especially when it's spoken and not spelled.
Yes, yes, I would agree.
All right, all right.
So, you've got two major things, right?
One is patriotism, which of course is for systems within a country, and the other is towards men as a whole, right?
Correct.
All right.
Which would you like to start with?
Oh, let's start with men.
Do you mind?
Okay.
Okay, sorry.
I asked you a question and then I answered it for you.
I apologize for that, but you can mention it to the Feminist Wine Club then.
Okay.
I'll let you know that you mansplained it to me.
That's fine.
Yeah, please.
Oh, absolutely.
So, Jessica, you know, one of the big problems is that men have made themselves obsolete in many, many ways.
And they've done that through government and through technology.
So, back in the day, women would get cold.
And, you know, 100, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, 2,000 years ago, Women would get cold.
And so a woman would be sitting there, cozied up, breastfeeding the baby in the cave or the hut or whatever it is.
The woman would be cold.
So what would happen?
She would hope that a man would come and either keep her warm or that he would go out and find wood and fire and then hopefully eventually build a shelter for her.
Right.
So she's cold and she's pregnant or breastfeeding or there are kids around.
She doesn't want to take the kids out into the cold.
So she's going to say to the man, I'm cold.
And that's fine.
This is not a criticism of it.
It's like perfectly rational.
You know, if I was the one breastfeeding and I was the one who needed to keep my womb warm, then I'd say, go get it.
Get me some fire.
Get me some heat.
Right?
Right.
And so the man would go and get some fire and rub some sticks and whatever it was going to be, right?
And then he'd hope that he'd have sex when he's warm enough.
But that's the topic for him.
for another time.
But so this would be the case, right?
If it's raining and there's a hole in the roof, the woman says, go fix the hole in the roof because it's dripping all over here on the fire and I'm cold again, right?
And this is not to say that this was one-sided, You know, if the baby's crying, generally, it's the mom who'll go, you know, back then, I gotta sleep, I gotta hunt in the morning, go take care of the baby and try and have him not cry because I'm tired, right?
And if the woman felt like, I don't know, the leg of a deer, right?
Again, she's pregnant, she's breastfeeding, whatever it is, right?
And toddlers all over, hanging off her.
What's she going to say?
I mean, saying she's going to need help.
Go get me the leg of a deer.
Yeah.
Because I don't feel sexy when I'm hungry.
Or whatever it's going to be, right?
So generally, the woman would say a lot of times to the man, get me this, fix me that, do something for me.
And generally, it's get me resources and keep me comfortable.
Again, I have no problem with it.
It sounds entitled, but it's not because it's damn hard work being pregnant and breastfeeding and raising kids.
And I mean, so it's not like the woman's just sitting around You know, watching the caveman equivalent of Telemundo while eating bonbons from a chip-dusted chest or anything.
She's working hard.
And of course, while the man's out hunting and he's out chopping wood and he's out fixing the roof and all of that, you know, she's probably doing some gardening and she's keeping some animals, domestic animals alive and all of that.
So it's a shared relationship, a shared relationship, but it's kind of divvied up for, again, reasons of...
You know, it's hard for us to remember, of course, that our biology evolved at a time when women were basically pregnant from 13 to 40.
You know, not a lot of chasing down the gazelle, you know, when you're six months pregnant, you know.
Honey, your kid's just born with dreams of floating in space and I'm flying!
Right, so what's happened, of course, is that Through the process of the free market and the fact that, you know, women control 70 to 80% of domestic expenditures and therefore men want to market to women, when a woman is cold now, what does she do?
I can get it myself.
Look!
There's a tiny little dial.
It's all done.
Right?
Because the men...
Bastard male betrayers that they are.
Oh yeah, you can sell the women and screw your brethren, right?
But men have automated and made things so easy that they've kind of put their value in the distance, in the abstract, right?
I mean, if a woman feels like some meat, she doesn't have to go hunting.
What's she going to do?
She can have it delivered.
She can...
Yeah, phone up someplace and have usually a male farmer butcher some cow and ship it in a car or a truck designed by men and often driven by men to some supermarket, often run by men, and then someone's going to drive it to her house and maybe she'll give him a tip, right?
So it's kind of this male chain that has eliminated the value of individual men already.
For that purpose, right?
So there's very little that a woman can do.
I mean, good God, you know, when I was a kid, it was like, you hold the door for the woman who's holding the groceries.
Right.
And now what happens?
Now they get angry and, you know, you don't need to hold that for me or I can do it myself, which is...
Well, but she can.
It takes away the opportunity for the men to also be generous and have chivalry and show...
You know, that they're able to give and provide as well.
Well, that did happen for a little while, for sure.
And I'm not going to pretend you're old enough to remember the transition.
But it did happen for a little while in the 70s.
But what happened then, Jessica, was magic Star Trek laser eye door openers occurred, right?
When was the last time when your hands were full that you needed to open a door to get out of a grocery store?
This is true.
Yep.
Boom!
Once more, men have made themselves completely irrelevant, and then we wonder why women are having a tough time seeing our value, right?
Right.
So I won't get into all of that, because everyone can spin that as far as they want and understand sort of what it is that I'm talking about.
So that's the one area...
less valuable for women because women can basically buy all of the services or most of the services that men used to provide in a sort of non-sexual context and women are not much barred from doing what they used to need men to do, right?
I mean, every now and then it's like, I can't open this jar, you know.
But, you know, you can even get machines for that, right?
For people who've got arthritis or whatever.
So, from that standpoint, the physical protection and security and safety and expertise and willingness to work for men has, at least in the urban environment, has largely been eliminated.
So, can't see much value there.
Now, the second is not just the technology or the labor, but the capital, the resources, right?
And so males have been replaced in one circumstance by technology and in the other by government because what women would need men for is resources.
You've got to have money to pay for the heating system and you've got to have money to pay for whatever it is that you've got the technologies doing that men used to do.
And so a man would still be valuable if that were the case.
And again, I'm talking about women who want kids and not necessarily single women or women who don't want kids.
It's not really particularly relevant, but most women do want kids and do have kids.
So the first people to betray the value of men were capitalists and technologists, and the second were politicians and central banks.
Because women need resources if they're going to raise kids.
And so what happens is governments then hand resources that they generally take mostly from men and give them to women.
Right?
Because men pay the majority of taxes and women receive the majority of benefits.
Single moms in particular.
You know, the welfare state is a single mom state and all that kind of stuff.
Yep.
So...
Men are not necessary for things that women couldn't do because they were pregnant, because you can just pick up the phone, you can hit a dial, you can throw a switch.
We need light, you know?
It used to be a big deal.
Like, to get light in the 19th century was insane.
I mean, you had to go out in a tiny, tiny boat.
you had to find the largest mammal that exists on the planet and you had to throw the equivalent of a tiny toothpick into its eyeball.
And you had to find some way that that toothpick was going to stay in the eyeball and you had to beat and drown and kill this thing that was basically the size of Scotland when you were basically standing on a popsicle stick.
It was insane.
And then you'd have to get it to shore.
And then you'd have to do the unbelievably disgusting work of hacking this giant mammal, this whale, up and finding some methodology that I consider to be pure satanic alchemy to get the oil out of the flesh of the whale and into a lamp.
And that's like, oh my god.
I just want some light.
Why does it have to be Captain Ahab and the white whale?
Just give me some light.
No.
To give you the light, we have to go and do this popsicle eyeball toothpick thing, drag some whale home, hang it up by its ass, strip it with hooks, boil it.
I don't know what voodoo that went on to get that stuff.
Thank god I don't need to know.
So that a woman could finish her Jane Austen novel after the sun goes down.
Now, this may not have been hugely visible to the woman who wanted to finish the Jane Austen novel after the sun went down, but she had some sense that out there, in the storm, in the spray, in the sea, awash with the blood and beating tails and things thumping down on men and diving them down to Davy Jones' lock, and there was some titanic masculine energy out there that I was getting of the oil that lets her flip the pages in comfort.
But now...
Flip a light.
Oh, look!
Thank you, Mr.
Edison!
So, it's vanished and the need for women to depend upon men for resources has vanished.
Has vanished.
And women can get resources from the state and they get labor from technology.
And of course, they use the resources from the state to pay for the technology which replaces the male labor.
Now, It's not that shocking, I would say, Jessica, that women have found it relatively comfortable to hold men in contempt.
Why?
We already got what we need from you, right?
Because the only other thing, right?
Women need resources.
Women need technology.
Women need stuff done.
And the fact that male labor has replaced male labor, right?
Intellectual labor has replaced physical labor.
All right.
What else do women need?
Well, they want sex.
And, you know, in the general sexual marketplace value scenario, well, I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know when I say it's not awfully complicated for women to get sex from men.
One thing that she can do is breathe.
Be alive, which for the majority of men is...
You know what they're into.
There will be a small minority of Alice Cooper fans who may go another direction, but for the most part, pulse, availability, willingness, you're in!
Right?
I mean, they've done these studies six million different ways from Sunday where You know, there's guys in bars and some attractive woman comes up and says, I'll meet you in my room.
And the guys are like, score!
Right?
And then some guy comes up to the women and he's, meet me in my room.
And she's like, pepper spray!
So it's a different scenario.
So the only thing that can't be automated outside of, you know, I guess, masturbation and pornography, but the only thing that can't be automated that men provide to women now is something that is very easy for women to get, at least when they're young and From what I understand about STD transmission rates in old age homes, even when they get a little on the liver-spotted side.
So what?
You know, men, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are they good for?
We've made ourselves redundant under the current situation.
I mean, even the market was largely developed by men, republics, political philosophy, all of these things have made men less and less relevant and important to women.
So the only place...
Where women are even remotely in the market of needing men is a place where women have all the power, which is the sexual marketplace, right?
Which is that men are asking and women are saying yes or no.
So the only place where there's any kind of voluntary trade between men and women is an environment where women completely dominate And men are like, looking like, you know, I don't know, begging puppies or squawking birds, please feed me with some sex.
And so I think it's, you know, when you are in a situation where everybody wants you and you have all the power, well, you know, power kind of corrupts.
Now, what used to limit that, of course, in the past, and promise I'll shut up in a second, but what used to limit that in the past was, sure, a woman could have sex with any man she wants, assuming she's not, you know, Got some leg growing out of a forehead, although again, I'm sure there's a minority of people who've got a website about that.
What used to limit that sexual power of women was the risk, right?
If you have great power without great risk, then you get great corruption.
And of course, the woman could get any man to sleep with her, but she gets pregnant, her reputation is destroyed, she's got to keep the kid up for adoption, she's got to be sent away as they used to in the past and have the kid somewhere, or she's got to get an abortion and the word might get out and her family's going to shame her, and it was just terrible.
Or she has the kid, in which case no man really wants to marry her and she's got to live at home and her life is, you know, she's never going to have a job because she's got to take care of the kids.
So there was, there's great power in the demand curve for female sexuality, but the women also faced great risk, which is why they had to curb that power in order to find the right man But, you know, with the general abortion on demand and the welfare state, the single mothers are fine, who cares?
Alimony, child support, you name it.
That risk is gone, but the power still remains.
So I think it's relatively easy for women.
We've removed shame from our society, too.
Sorry, go ahead.
I said we've removed shame from society, too, in terms of, like, that would be something that would, in the past, have been looked down upon if a woman were sleeping around and having children with people, you know, out of wedlock.
And now we've actually gotten rid of that as well.
Well...
I hate to correct you from the testicular perspective, Jessica, but it is true that we have removed shame from society, but not for everyone.
Only for women.
Women have got the shame-begone penumbra of estrogen feminist shield all around them.
No slut-shaming!
However, however, any man who tries to point out the, and I can say this from personal experience, any man who tries to point out that sluts make terrible wives, that women who sleep around a lot are almost certain to divorce you and have, you know, your balls nicely sewn up by a bunch of lawyers with the ungreased your balls nicely sewn up by a bunch of lawyers with the ungreased dildos in some godforsaken So it is anyone who tries to restrain female behavior now for the good of kids or whatever, it talks about single motherhood or talks about sexual restraint or whatever.
Ah, you're just some Victorian prude.
And of course, there's patriarchy, there's rape culture.
Men are supposed to look at their entire being with shame.
We are rough.
We are tough.
We excrete strange smells and stranger fluids.
We have skid marks in our underwear and we dominate and we oppress and we have done throughout history and we're racist and we're sexist and we're God knows what, right?
I mean, so, yeah, shame has been, you know, scrubbed free of the female hierarchy of values, but it hasn't gone from the world.
It's just grown up and gone to live forever.
In dark and smelly places where men dwell.
Yeah.
And I would say, so going back to the original thing that I mentioned is also that my brother fought in Iraq and my other brother is a police officer.
So the one thing that men are providing above and beyond what females are providing in society is security, you know, the protection of not only our country, but also our communities.
And I think that's where I am getting frustrated with women is that they're Helping to breed and encourage more bad behavior, which is again putting people that, especially in particular men, who put their lives on the line more at risk.
And that's what I don't quite understand is why women see that.
Sorry, can you just break that out a little bit more?
I want to make sure I'm following what you're saying.
Yeah, so, you know, the men in particular are overrepresented in law enforcement and in the military.
So, my question or my remark would be, you know, women have been encouraging more, you know, again, removing that shame, but removing the shame of bad behavior in their children, in themselves, kind of letting people get away with things that they shouldn't be allowed to.
And then, of course, with, you know, what's happening around the world and with this desire to be more concerned with strangers that are coming from overseas or coming into our communities, Caring more about strangers than caring about the men who are protecting and securing our communities.
Oh, yeah.
So the idea, of course, that women have a problem with rape culture, but when you look at rape statistics from certain third-world cultures, that doesn't exist, right?
They just can't focus on that, right?
Yeah, they would rather put our men on the line, again, kind of Western men on the line, rather than seeming to actually Realize that there's other people in the world that don't necessarily wish us well.
And they're willing to, you know, again, accuse men here of horrible behavior, but not necessarily give them the benefit of the doubt and actually see the honor and the accomplishments and all the things you were pointing out earlier on the innovation.
Giving them credit for that, they're willing to throw them under the bus for the smallest infractions without holding others to the same standard.
Yeah, whoever is attacked is the best.
That is the only thing you need to know about modern culture.
And I don't mean you, Jessica, I just mean the planet as a whole.
Whoever's being attacked is automatically the best person in the situation.
Because the people who are avoided are the people who will cause you lots of trouble back if you attack them, right?
So there's groups that are vaulted over completely and nobody criticizes.
And then the people who are shamed and attacked are the people who have the most respect for women, the most respect for culture, the most respect for law and order, who have the most self-restraint, who have the capacity to defer gratification, who are most committed to free speech.
So your virtues have become not something that people praise you for, but something that people attack you for.
And that is, it is a weird, twisted Alice in Wonderland world, which is really, I think, fairly well understood by a lot of people on the web.
A lot of people, a lot of netizens, as they used to be called, and if they're still called it anymore.
But a lot of people on the web say, oh, this person's being attacked.
They must have something really great to say.
They must have something really interesting to say.
At least I won't be bored.
Whereas the people who are not attacked, well, it's because they are less – probably going to be less rational and measured in their response to – the attacks.
So it has become this weird thing where the heroes are known by the tracer bullets, like wherever they're heading.
Most times, that is where the heroes are.
And that has changed, well, quite a bit from when I was younger.
All right.
So we sort of did the male thing.
Patriotic, well...
Men...
I don't know.
Tell me what you think.
This is just my sort of...
Not quite off the cuff.
I sort of thought about it today.
But this is sort of my thoughts, Jessica.
Tell me what you think.
Okay.
I think that the way it works is that men love the country and women love the men.
And the reason for that is that women are not called upon to defend the country, but women are called upon to defend their men.
Right?
Women don't get drafted to defend the country.
The geographical integrity of the culture is maintained by men.
Because there was no draft.
So men have to have an emotional relationship with the country because they might fight and die for it, whereas women won't fight and die for the country in general because they don't get drafted and have not historically been used in warfare.
And so men have to love the country and women have to love the men.
But whether women love the country in the same way, I don't know that biologically that would have developed in the same way, but that's just my thought.
I certainly don't want to tell you the experience of women.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, I could definitely see that being, you know, a component of it.
I mean, I know growing up, you know, a lot of the, it kind of goes into pop culture, but, you know, you see all these celebrities that are traveling around the world and helping, you know, countries outside of the United States, and you don't necessarily see,
I mean, it used to be that, you know, Hollywood starlets used to go, and they would, you know, go meet with soldiers overseas and try to represent, and you would aspire to that, that you wanted to support The men in the military, but we've kind of, aside from comedians, I don't necessarily think that from a pop culture standpoint, women are seeing as many examples of that as we used to have in the past.
I think it's more glorification of, you know, kind of people going out into the world and, you know, serving other countries, serving other people, which is not a bad thing.
But I can definitely see the You know, they don't necessarily have this desire to give back to their own communities.
They feel this push to do something outside of their...
to look out for the welfare of others besides their own communities and also maybe for men outside of their own communities.
Right.
Yeah, and I mean, it used to be that being a man in uniform would significantly increase your sexual market value because the women would enjoy the culture of the West and knew that the culture of the West had to be defended against hostile cultures and therefore would have a special affection for the men who would perform it used to be that being a man in uniform would significantly increase your
And the same thing is true not just in terms of overseas with the soldiers, but with the police domestically because women wanted protection from criminals and therefore had a special affection for the cops who were able to do what women couldn't necessarily do, which some men can do, which is sort of physically defend themselves against that kind which is sort of physically defend themselves against that kind of criminal predation.
And now it's kind of...
Men who are in uniform have higher sexual market value in some circles, but I think that's more for benefits and job security and pensions and death benefits than it is necessarily for the respect for the culture that the men are guarding.
Yeah, no, I would agree with that.
And again, going back to what you were talking about earlier, you know, men in uniform aren't necessarily because they represent very truly the patriarchy There might even be more of a repellence in that as well.
Right.
Just kind of that knee-jerk reaction of like, oh, you know, he's, you know, ultra-male or something, and that could be contradictory to my kind of mediocre femaleness or something.
And a lot of women, you know, the question is, so single moms and so on, a lot of women are kind of nervous.
And I get that.
I mean, if I was sort of like half my size and everybody else was, you know, I guess relatively huge and much stronger than me, could overpower me at any given time.
And I've mentioned this before, but there is, gosh, what's the Mindy Project?
Mindy Kaling's sitcom.
And, you know, in it, whenever she's startled, she's like, oh, axe murderer!
You know, she's like, you know, she's living in New York.
She's a single woman.
It's like, oh, God, somebody's trying to kill me.
Whatever it is, right?
Right.
And that is kind of a comedic thing.
But, but, but.
There is that sense of vulnerability that women have.
And of course, that's perfectly valid and valuable.
I was reading an interview with Alison Gopnik, Dr.
Alison Gopnik, who was on this show many years ago and wrote a book called The Philosophical Baby.
She's got a new book out and she basically is saying, I sure wish, you know, now that I'm a grandmother, I'm much more relaxed, but I sure wish I hadn't worried as much when I was a mom.
Because nothing I worried about ever...
It came to pass and all of that nervousness and worry that I had.
And that's a beautiful part of the feminine personality or feminine...
It's not all women, of course, but, you know, I think it's a relatively prevalent trait to worry and be concerned.
And without the balancing of the male perspective, which, you know, the combination is the best, I think, of course, as we would expect from evolution, then you grew up with...
Some pretty high-strung and nervous men.
Some kind of worry-warts men.
And that becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If the moms don't have much respect for men or feel that men are necessary, they raise a generation of men either by putting them in daycare or whatever.
But single moms raise a generation of men that are harder to respect because they didn't respect their fathers, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and they raise a generation of girls that also don't see respect towards men As something that they should aspire to or that they should even embrace or live up to.
So, yeah.
So the solution is simple and brutal.
Look, we've come to a solution.
The solution is danger.
The solution is the recognition of risk, the acceptance of the reality of risk.
And what I mean by that is government's going to run out of money.
I've said it before.
I'll say it again.
Government's going to run out of money.
And when the government runs out of money, if it was more of a monoculture, the government running out of money wouldn't be so bad.
But in a more fragmented multicultural situation, when the government runs out of money, things can get quite exciting.
And there will be Danger.
I don't necessarily mean roaming gangs of, you know, feral whoever's, but what I mean is that when women can't get the money deposited to their bank account by the state anymore, what's going to happen?
They'll probably go back to having that man go out hunting for that deer leg for them.
Well, whatever it's going to be, they'll be like, oh, wait, is that gig up?
We're not doing that anymore?
Oh.
Okay.
I guess mom is doing some sit-ups and getting into something low-cut.
I don't know, whatever it's going to be, right?
But women are going to recognize the need for men because the government is not taking resources and handing it to them for free.
Well, for their vote, basically.
So women are going to say, well, I need resources.
And boy, these kids tangled around my ankles are making it just a little bit difficult for me to go out and get what What needs to be done, done, so I guess I'm going to need someone to do it for me.
And then the value of men will re-emerge.
Now, hopefully it's not due to some god-awful civil war or whatever it is.
That's, you know, something that may be a whole different situation.
But the minimum is going to be, hey, government's running out of money.
And women are going to need men to do stuff for them.
Again, the automation is still going to be there.
It's still, you know, I mean, if you've got a whole bunch of kids, you probably don't have a whole bunch of market skills because you've had a whole bunch of kids, particularly, of course, if you've been on welfare.
So going out into the marketplace doesn't make any sense, really.
I mean, and I've known a number of couples who've gone through this basic equation where they say, okay, well, I can make X amount of dollars if I go out to work, says the woman, but it's going to cost me X amount of dollars to pay someone to take care of my children.
And it doesn't really make any sense, which is, of course, why feminists are constantly talking about how dangerous men are.
Because that makes women nervous.
I've got to maintain my job skills.
Because if he turns into a lizard man, or if he starts becoming sexually attracted to tree roots, or, or, or, I've got to keep my...
What if he just decides to run away and become a mine or go pick grapes in Queensland or become a cartoonist?
Whatever it is, right?
I mean, what if he falls in love with his karaoke career and doesn't want to go to work anymore?
Whatever, right?
Men have got to be portrayed as inconstant so that women feel they need to maintain their job skills.
So they'll go back to work even if it makes no sense and they make no money.
Even if it costs them money, they will be worried about that.
So I think that women, it doesn't make much sense for them to go to work if they've got to pay someone to take care of their couple of kids.
So they're just going to need a man to Again, and wouldn't you know it, when women or anyone need someone else, it's a little bit tougher to scorn and insult them, don't you find?
I would agree with that, yes.
I'm sure there'll still be some habits.
Now, the question, of course, is that men have really woken the hell up in many ways, right?
I mean, so men are like, nope.
No, it's too late now, sister.
You can't say that you want me and respect me when you basically are looking at me as a vertical ATM with a nutsack, right?
That's not what we want, right?
I mean, so that's what men are saying.
So, you know, I think it behooves women to up their respect for men.
Before it becomes a naked transaction of, we need resources, we have boobs, please help us out, or you're bad.
You know, shaming men has been so overused over the past couple of decades.
I think it's like the racism thing, like it's just kind of, who cares?
Oh, men are shamed again.
Oh, men are bad again.
Oh, men are broken girls again.
Oh, there's something wrong with men again.
You know, it's like that, there's an old, there's a study, if I remember rightly, where Men can't hear, certain men can't hear the frequency of their wife's voice.
Like, they stop hearing it if the marriage isn't good.
I don't want to say Hillary Clinton, but, you know, I think a lot of men get PTSD flashbacks.
Yeah, yeah, you know, that kind of shrill thing, you know, like that Fran Drescher slash the mom on Seinfeld.
But that's...
Repetition, pushing the shame button, it doesn't last forever.
It doesn't work forever.
I think men are burned out on it.
I think they're angry.
I think they're distant.
I think they're reserved.
And I think they're like, you know, you tell me to man up again, I'm never coming back.
And I think that is going to be the big price to be paid.
And it is a tragic and terrible thing, Jessica, that this lesson needs to be learned and it is going to be a very harsh lesson.
That is going to last down the ages.
Like, women at some point are going to say, hey, remember when we treated men like shit for half a century?
What happened then?
Wait, are we still on?
Did you fall asleep?
No, I'm here.
Okay, good.
You didn't fall asleep, right?
Okay, that's fine.
I understand.
That's why I stand.
I had to put myself to sleep.
Yeah, no, no.
And that's what makes me nervous again, seeing the The treatment of these men, the treatment of, you know, again, the men that I care about in my lives, in my life, sorry, lives.
But yeah, that's what I'm concerned about is that they're going to eventually just walk.
They're going to hit a wall.
And, you know, I'm kind of seeing it in some of the younger people that I know where marriage is not something they even desire.
Relationships aren't something that they even desire.
It's too much work.
It's too much burden.
And they'd rather just...
Not even bother, and I can't say that I blame them.
Right, but see, you'll be fine.
Because you'll have this show as evidence.
This show will be dated.
It will be up there.
It will be verified that Jessica was out there trying to help men before the shite hit the fan.
So listen, I mean, it's not, you know, well, it's not like, clearly, I mean, like, people aren't going to say, oh, boy, that Jessica, that Lauren Southern, you know, that Ann Coulter, boy, they were just terrible people, always dogging on men and so on, right?
Yeah.
And you are now carved into the very stratosphere.
You have your own constellation of Jessicaville, which tells a story of support for men and sympathy for men, and you shall be worshipped by many torsoed, abs-slaved slaves.
So don't worry, you'll be carried in like Milo Yiannopoulos on a speech.
You'll be carried in in a throne and men will prostrate themselves before you.
And so, yeah, you'll be fine.
Because a lot of men just, they have no experience of a feminine woman.
They don't even know what that is.
And that's our selected thing, right?
I mean, the single moms have to take on the roles of masculinity and femininity, and they just don't know what a feminine woman is.
Because a femininity flowers, I think, grows to its greatest potential in a relationship with a secure and stable provider, a man in general.
And you can have the government replace your husband, but the government can't replace your husband.
And you can have the government send you money, But that's no substitute for love.
And so women are getting the resources that they want.
It's sort of like masturbation is a substitute for lovemaking.
I mean, I guess there are certain similarities in some of the mechanics, but there's no similarities in terms of the human connection.
And so I would say that...
It will be a great gift for women when reality reestablishes itself, and it will be a great gift for men.
How we can talk people out of that when the incentives are still so skewed, I don't want to try.
I'm just not going to try because I don't think most people will change based on reason and evidence.
They will change based on Tigers in the room on significant risks and dangers in the moment.
And then it matters that you've made good arguments before, but most people won't at all listen when you have reasonable things to say.
I mean, outside of this wonderful audience.
But people will remember that you had reasonable things to say when you're proven correct.
Well, I hope that's true.
And I appreciate everything that you do with your show and the fact that you talk about these things, because I think there are people tuning in, obviously.
So, yeah, I appreciate you.
All right.
Well, I know a phone call breakup sentence when I hear it, so I really appreciate it.
I'm just kidding.
I appreciate your call.
No, no, I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding.
Listen, I hugely appreciate the call, Jessica.
I'm sorry if you hit a bit of a gusher when it came to language that I have about this stuff, but I appreciate you letting me rant and great sets of questions.
You're certainly welcome back anytime you like.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Bye.
Alright, up next is Amy.
Amy wrote in and said, That's from Amy.
Hello, Amy.
How are you doing tonight?
Can we establish the possibility of Amy?
You can.
I hit the mute button.
Oh, it's okay.
I only do that about four times a week, so no problem.
No problem at all.
Thanks for calling in.
It's a great, great question.
Oh, okay.
Great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
Do you want to talk a little bit about your thoughts on it so that I can gather mine?
No, I'm just kidding.
I'm ready.
But if there's some sort of more background you want to give or anything that you wanted to add to what you were talking about?
I guess, you know, not really.
I mean, I haven't listened to all of your stuff or read all of your stuff, but I was just, you know, I... What?
What?
Come on, there's only 3,400 podcasts and eight books.
What have you been doing with your...
I'm just kidding.
But, you know, I just wanted to, and I heard, what prompted me to call in was, I think, you know, you do a lot of shows, but one of your more recent shows that, to me, didn't sound like it really went well, was sort of like two people not communicating well.
And so my thought was, why don't I call in and see if, you know, like I said, no, you know, very low pressure.
I don't, you know, You know, I was an agnostic atheist.
I became a Catholic over a series of years.
And I'm not going to come into this saying, you have to believe what I believe, because I can't offer you, like I said in the question, I can't offer you Scientific mathematical proof.
I actually also have a degree in geology.
But on the other hand, I've come to think differently of it, right?
And have a belief that was different from what I had before.
So I was just interested to see if basically you kind of argue the other side.
If there was something that you could latch on to maybe so that why people believe what they do about God seems more...
Reasonable, basically.
No, that makes very good sense to me, and I have been thinking about this a lot lately, so I'd like to thank Baal for sending you.
But no, I mean, it's a great question.
And for me, the most powerful argument in the God is possible, call them as you put it, Is, I have a very exciting brain to live in.
It's just fireworks and gymnastics and Cirque du Soleil, like, from when I wake up until when I finally tamp it down and go to bed.
And I find it hard to fathom how a couple of pounds of wetware of chemicals and electricity and Cells and mere biological processes can produce everything that seems to spontaneously combust and be created within my mind.
The dreams at night, the inspirations during the day, the poetry of some of my speeches, which are not rehearsed, not completely on the fly.
I think about the questions before, but the idea that I am a mere meat machine with this level of inspiration and reason and poetry and language and spontaneity and creativity.
You know, this Vesuvius firework that seems to go up from my shoulders to the very stratosphere, it feels like the depth of my experience, the Profundity of some of the thoughts that I have, the insights that I have, the depth with which I reach people in these conversations seems impossible to encase within this little skull egg of tiny dimensions.
When we look into the universe and we can contain the universe within our mind, you know, we can conceptualize the length and breadth and depth of the universe.
The idea that we can look into the universe and understand and process and engineer and what is it Matt Damon says?
Science up this bastard or what he says in The Martian.
The idea that we can encapsulate the universe within mental processes within our mind.
The fact that we can send a spaceship past the moons of Jupiter.
Because we can take the unfathomable distance between us and Jupiter and reduce it to a series of equations and controls and processes and gravity wells and you name it.
The idea that we can take a near infinite universe, fold it up.
You know, you can't fold a piece of paper more than seven times.
Oh yes, I've tried.
But we can take the universe and we can fold it up and encapsulate it within the wetware of our few pound brain.
It seems functionally, biologically, technically, physically absolutely impossible for a mere few pounds of flesh to take and fold the entire universe and place it within and think beyond it.
And so what our brains are able to do is so incomprehensible for me to be tied into mere matter.
That the idea of the soul, the idea of a spark of divinity, the idea of being a shard of the divine, encased in the meat robot suit, is to me one of the most compelling arguments.
Now, for me, where does the universe come from?
To me, that doesn't...
It doesn't matter nearly as much for me the existence of God or where the universe comes from.
What matters to me is that we care where the universe comes from.
We really care about it.
How retarded and ridiculous is that?
For, you know, a bald ape meat puppet to say, yeah, but that thing, you know, 14 billion years ago, that's where we've really got to focus a lot of our mental energies.
It's like, how the hell does that put a caribou leg on my plate?
It doesn't.
Why do we care?
Why do we care where the universe came from?
We sure as hell do.
Why?
How can we have infinity...
In mortality?
How can we have abstracts in the concrete of an encased piece of meat?
How can we have the grandest concepts that span the universe through all of time?
They don't just grow the billions of light years across the universe, they grow the billions of years back in time.
How can that be folded up and encapsulated in this tiny little flesh prison of a skull, a spine, And some short circuits.
Why do we care?
Why do we care about ethics?
Why do we even have a concept of God?
Why do we have a concept of virtue?
Why do we have a concept of self-sacrifice that is larger than our life itself?
So that is not obviously a syllogistic argument, but to me that is an experiential argument that I remember from when I was a child.
Where I said, I cannot conceive how it is possible that we unsteady, eyesight failing balding apes can partake so deeply of eternity and infinity without having some fragment of eternity and infinity within us.
It's like being drunk without alcohol.
Very nice.
So Very nice.
Is that the slow clap from the last few?
That's really what I was looking for.
Just some sense that people struggle with it.
It's such a huge concept.
Everybody does.
To have something you can hang on to and say, okay, maybe it isn't quite so crazy that people go there with this, with God, right?
And that's all I was looking for.
That last phone call was, at least the one I heard, it wasn't good.
So the question is, I mean, do you want to ask me a question?
Where do you want to go?
I mean, I'm satisfied.
You answered my question.
Yeah.
Well, you know what they say, when you've sold, stop selling.
There is...
There's more.
There's more, which is...
And again, this is very personal to me, but maybe it...
I'm sure it has resonance with you as a Catholic, but...
You know, I... I care so much about honesty and truth and directness and accuracy and universality and philosophy, ethics.
I care so much about these things and I'm not sure I know why.
Now, if we say that God is truth, God is virtue, God is consistency, then one of the ways in which I would say That the root of my caring for these things, that the root of it comes from, you know the way they say that life may have landed on the earth from an asteroid, flaming through, boom, hits the ground.
That I may have been infected slash inspired with the hypomanic desire for consistency and integrity and truth and virtue and honesty Because of the meteor soul that fell into the arid meat of my innards.
You know, that it is almost like an infection or inspiration of divine virtue to care so much about these things, sometimes to my detriment, right?
I mean, if I was not this way inclined with sort of my verbal skills and my charisma, it could have been the sky's the limit.
It could have been, you know, just about anything that I wanted.
But my inability or unwillingness to compromise, this ferocious pushback I have against limiting honesty, limiting empirical evidence, limiting arguments, my willingness to lose family and friendships for the sake of truth and integrity, which is not much Of a biological imperative.
Evolution should have weeded me out like a million and a half years ago.
Right?
Makes no sense.
Sure, I'll give up the capacity to breed and have friends and have a family of origin because abstractions!
Because truth and virtue that nobody likes and nobody will support and I will be attacked and condemned for.
Yay, evolution!
You are off the island!
Well, I can tell you like a related story.
Please, help me!
Help you!
All right.
So, when I grew up, I grew up as sort of – I did go to – it's CCD for Catholics, right?
Or now it's changed, whatever.
Sorry, you did go what?
CCD, Sunday school.
All right?
So – but my family was not religious, right?
And when you grow up Catholic, you don't know anything about the Bible.
So, the – Oh, come on.
There's some nice stories.
You color them in, right?
I know.
So anyway, but I remember I was 19 and I was at college.
And I was lonely and depressed and going through...
What would college freshmen do, really?
I mean, you're just away from home.
It's stressful.
And so I walked over to the science building, which my school was out west, or it is still out west, but this particular building had been situated so that a trolley wouldn't run through the middle of the campus.
So it's angled quite comically on a green that faces a road that ends at the college, right?
And it was made out of sandstone.
It was built around the turn of the century.
And emblazoned on it is, ye shall know the truth and it will set you free.
Ye shall know the truth and it will set you free.
And I remember thinking, I wanted that more than anything.
I wanted the freedom of knowing the truth, right?
And, you know, it's one of those things that, you know, most of my college is a blur, but that stuck out in my mind, right?
And, you know, life goes on.
I won't bore you with, like, 20 years of life history there, but As I've gone on, what I've noticed is that the closer you get to truth, the closer you are to a kind of freedom, a kind of peace, right?
That people who lie to themselves all the time can never have, right?
And I was a little embarrassed to discover about maybe kind of 10 years into my journey here, and that's from John.
That's from the Gospel according to John.
And I was like, Whoa.
You know, whoa.
Where did that come from?
And that was kind of part of that journey that brought me back into Catholicism because it was like what I thought I knew about Christianity, about God, about that kind of stuff.
It was all a cartoon, right?
And what had struck me on this building, emblazoned in stone was It was something I had already had.
I mean, I already had it there.
I was raised Catholic.
I had this piece of information, but somehow I had to be sitting in a building all by myself.
It's a strange thing.
And I don't know where I'm going with that other than just to say that I understand that.
I mean, I understand the attraction to the truth.
Because I felt it, you know, and I felt, like I said, to be, I consider a more, you know, a more authentic freedom than I've ever known.
It's painful.
I mean, it's painful as all get out.
You have to be wrong all the time.
It's, ugh.
But if you can get there, wow.
You know, just wow.
Just, anyway, that's...
That's the first wow, just wow I've ever heard on the internet that I really liked.
Because, you know, I appreciate it.
Now, normally it's this horrible sophist thing, but no, that was really, really great.
That was really great.
Can I share something else with you?
Absolutely.
It's just between us, okay.
Go ahead.
Wait, is this being recorded?
All right.
A few times, Amy, I would dearly love to have been taking orders rather than making decisions.
Now, taking orders sounds negative and harsh.
I don't mean it that way at all.
What I mean is that in this headlong march to bring reason and evidence to the world, I've certainly understood, and of course I was raised religious, and I've certainly understood that if I could, you know, that cheesy line from A country song, Let Jesus Take the Wheel.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Right?
It's cheesy, but I like the song.
It's cheesy, but it's powerful.
Yeah.
Because, you know, there's times where I would have loved the idea of saying, I'm doing God's will.
God has built me and instructed me and inspires me and motivates me to do what I'm doing.
It is his goal.
I am merely his agent.
I am a chess piece.
I am filled with the power and depth of divinity.
And it is the approval of divine eternity that I must satisfy.
Not the opinions Of my mortal and horizontal tribe.
That it is the deepest and most powerful and most virtuous perspective and scope in the universe that I must align myself with and that I am filled with and that I am motivated by and whose approval I must seek, not the inconstant flickering Socratic flames against the wall of a transitory experience that will be over all too soon.
That I am To quote the Blues Brothers, I am on a mission from God.
And that's tongue-in-cheek, but it's also not.
Because it would be great to think that I had the omnipotent backup of omniscient eternity in some of the conflicts that I have with the world that is.
And that the reward...
Which sometimes feels elusive, not often, but sometimes the reward feels elusive, but that the reward would be guaranteed no matter what the outcome.
That I would fly to a benevolent and beneficial home of divine approval and applause, no matter what happened in my life.
I can really, really understand the draw of that perspective.
Because it gives you strength to believe that, right?
Yes.
There's some dangers with it, but yes.
Wait, the megalomaniacal narcissism?
Everything I do is divinely sanctioned, and I can do no wrong, and God is whoever wins.
No, I get all of that, and I would never be tempted to that, because this perspective that I have, Amy, or this, dare I call it a temptation, right?
But it is out of humility.
It is out of humility.
It is not out of grandiosity, it is out of humility.
To transfer the demands of being a philosopher to the infinite shoulders of divine strength is an act of humility, not an act of trying to own or ride divinity for my own purposes.
You know, if I say I can't carry something, that's an act of humility.
Yes.
If I say I want a giant divine robot exoskeleton Iron Man suit in order to take over the world, that's a little bit different from humility, and that's not what I mean.
Yeah, I mean, that's...
It is.
I mean, when, you know, when Christianity talks about...
Being reborn, right?
Well, in order to be reborn, something has to die, right?
And what has to die?
I mean, you know, to me, you know, if you've never read, say, like, Mere Christianity or G.K. Chesterton, you know, even just with, you know, just with an open mind and to look at these thinkers from just even the 20th century...
There's just an incredible amount of thought that goes into it.
And part of what they're saying is what had to die, especially like for C.S. Lewis, he even puts it in Mere Christianity, but was like this sense of, this concept of, you know, that ego.
You know, the ego has to die before you can be reborn and say...
Okay, I'm handing this over.
But it's painful.
I mean, it's painful.
C.S. Lewis has a great line of apologetics, and one of them is the great divorce.
And, you know, there's no fire and brimstone.
There's no, you know, hell.
He describes hell accurately but with a completely modern terminology to understand it better.
And so what he does in The Great Divorce, he has a young man dream, right?
And what he dreams of is starting in a place that everybody would sort of recognize as hell, right?
It's the city that is in a twilight fog.
There's no place to go.
There's no bars.
Nobody talks to each other.
I remember you had said in one of the snippets of the previous shows, you had said when you were young, you know, that when you had been with other people, that was the time you felt most alone and most, you know, most confined, which that's a paradox, actually, right?
You know, that you're surrounded by people, but you feel alone.
And so CES Lewis does this great job of creating a world like that, you know, full of people, but nobody talks to each other.
Nobody has any pleasure.
You know, none of that.
And then, but this man in the dream gets on a bus, you know, very, very 20th century, right?
He gets on a bus, and he goes to essentially purgatory.
And what's interesting to me is that he spends a lot of time in what's the equivalent of purgatory, and he talks about the idea that it's painful, right?
It's not...
You know, Christianity can offer people a lot of comfort, but first, there's a lot of work to be done.
And a lot of people, it's hard because, you know, we live in a society of Christians, and you'll encounter a lot of people who kind of want to skip over that work, right?
I'm not going to say I'm doing it perfectly or all the time or anything like that.
I just know that there is work.
You know, I agree with C.S. Lewis.
You know, There's a hump there, and something that has to die, something that's going to be painful, right?
So, you know, in the sense that...
The freedom, the idea that you could put this on the shoulders, there's a temperament.
There's a hold back from sort of that boundless ego.
You're not that boundless, but that monumental sort of...
The vanity.
You know, I'm charging ahead with God's stuff, right?
God is always at my back.
Well, no, you're...
As a Christian, hopefully what you're always trying to do is look back over your shoulder and make sure you're really still aligned with God and not demanding the other way around, that God is...
You know, going your way kind of thing.
Yeah, God is a propulsion, not a goal.
Yeah.
And the humility, the vanity is what needs to die.
And, I mean, I've gone through that with philosophy, and I still go through that sometimes.
The vanity of, I think I'm right, but the reason and evidence point in the other direction.
And I... I regularly shock a listening world with what seems incomprehensible twists in my direction.
What are you now?
Are you an atheist?
Are you an anarchist?
Are you this?
Are you that?
And that is humility for me.
That is, okay, what is the evidence?
What new information do I have?
But I tell you, Amy, I mean, One of the things that would be nicer, and again, this is not an argument, but one of the things that would be nicer is surrendering yourself to abstract principles feels like being slowly run over by a glacier.
Because you are surrendering yourself to things which are not human, to mere, not sentient, to abstract principles, to reason and evidence.
To be a slave to reason and evidence is not to love your master.
Because your master is not a person.
It's not a consciousness.
It has no virtue.
Reason and evidence are abstractions.
To surrender yourself to reason and evidence, to oppose your all-too-human ego with mere abstract, cold, inhuman principles feels like, hey, I wonder if I can wake up today and enslave myself to a robot, to an abstract mechanical principle.
And the idea of surrendering my ego to an all-loving father figure, to a consciousness that I can love, then I am not a slave because I'm in love.
And if the slave loves his master, is he really a slave?
And that idea that I can surrender to something I can love, rather than something that is an abstract principle, is...
What is that old phrase?
Hamlet says it in a much darker context.
"'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." Because it has not escaped me.
Even years ago, when I would talk about it, Amy, it has not escaped me that vanity is at the root of the state.
Vanity is at the root of socialism, of central planning, of communism, of fascism.
Because the idea that someone can figure out what other people can do and will not be corrupted by power Is to say that human beings can gain the power of a god without becoming a devil.
I don't believe human beings can gain the power of a god without becoming a devil.
That is how devils are created.
Yes.
Isn't that how Satan was created?
I shall be as God, he said.
Yes.
Yes.
Pride, actually.
Vanity, you know, because, you know, vanity would be a part of pride, right?
Well, to me, no.
See, to me, pride can be shared.
You know, you and I can be proud of the instruments that we mastered.
Vanity to me means I'm special.
I'm exempt from the law.
I'm the one who should dominate.
I'm the one who should use force.
And it's the creation of an eddy or a backwater of opposite values, like the state.
I can initiate the use of force.
I can order you around.
I can print my own currency.
I can declare war.
I can control.
I can condemn.
I can jail.
I can punish.
But no one else can.
No other institution can.
That to me is devilish and the degree to which communism and socialism have their atheistic elements, it's almost like they want to get rid of God so that human vanity can take control of the earth.
Yeah.
There's nothing I can disagree with, yes.
It's tough.
I've had a lot of these kinds of discussions online, and sometimes I'll surprise...
By the way, I'm very pleasantly surprised at how this is turning out.
This conversation's wonderful.
But I've had conversations with atheists that haven't been quite so wonderful, and sometimes I will apparently kind of shock...
Sometimes atheists will get kind of this idea that Not believing in God gives them some sort of extra morality or superior morality than the people that they meet.
And I'll say, well, look, if I look at the body counts, if I just look at body counts, right?
And you look at the 20th century, you know, what a nightmare the 20th century was, you know, in terms of...
You've got Holdemore.
You've got Holocaust.
You've got the Cultural Revolution.
I think the Khmer Rouge, too.
I want to add that.
That's another communist.
I'm trying to remember if I got my history right.
I mean, just unbelievable.
I mean, killing in factories.
And they're all atheists.
I'm willing to buy that I'm...
Not better than anybody else.
Yeah, that's for sure.
But I don't know if atheism really improves human nature.
I'm not sure I'm willing to go there with that moment.
And yeah, I mean, that's, you know, that's why, you know, this concept we're going to take, you know, somehow...
And I think, you know, when I talk to people online, they're concerned about evil.
I mean, the thing is, it's universal, right?
This concern about evil.
And there's this sense that I get is that they want people to be good.
You know, they want them to be good.
So they're looking and saying, okay, oh my goodness, religion.
You know, look at the terrible things people have done for religion.
Let's just...
You know, let's carve that out of them, and it's done, and we've made them good.
And I'm like, you know, and it's a difficult concept to say, no, we can't carve anything out of anybody.
You know, we have to work with what we've got, right?
What's in front of us, you know?
And there's no evidence that carving religion or God out of somebody It's going to improve the situation.
And I will also state the converse.
That is, forcing people into religion doesn't seem to do a heck of a lot of good either.
You know, it's not, you know, I cringe.
You know, I'll sometimes talk to fellow Catholics and they're like, well, let's force Catholicism.
Well, no.
No, we've missed the point, right?
I can't save a soul by forcing them to do what I want them to do, right?
It has to be, Christianity is very clear on the point.
The point is to love God.
I can't love somebody who's Being forced on me, right?
So, you know, they're difficult conversations sometimes, because I think there's just this, ironically, this universal want to have things better, to have people be good.
But there's a lot of rabbit holes that people fall into.
You know, it's difficult stuff.
And how do we, you know, how do we limit, Amy, the will of human dominance?
Right?
How do we limit the will of human dominance?
Because there are so many rewards, material rewards, power rewards, you know, we are so wired to love power.
And of course, there are some arguments around original sin, there's some arguments around dopamine and how you get more resources by climbing up the hierarchy of the tribe.
But we, for whatever reason, we are so hardwired to love power over others.
And how do we counter that?
How good have atheists been at pushing back the universal human hunger for dominating other human beings?
And this is why, you know, when I talk about the problems I have with, not atheism as a sort of set of arguments, but atheism as a social and political manifestation.
How do we push back, right?
The non-aggression principle is live and let live.
Unless you are initiating force against me, I shall never initiate force against you.
But the problem is, of course, it's so valuable to initiate force against others.
Especially in the form of the state.
It is so incredibly profitable.
Look at how much money politicians make after they're in power.
Look at how hungry they are to stay in politics long after they retire.
They're addicts.
They love it.
They need it.
And to have people walk up to your throne and kiss your ring and to be able to bestow gifts and to be able to bestow punishments on people...
If there is a devil in our heart, that is what he most hungers for, and that is what he most promises us paradise will look like.
Power, control over other human beings to be one of the few lone farmers on the planet of human livestock.
That is what human beings thirst and are desperate for at the moment, in the future, peaceful parenting, whatever, right?
But right now, that is where human beings are.
How do we push back against the hunger To bully, indoctrinate, control, exploit, subjugate other human beings.
And I don't know that atheism has a strong answer for that.
I think that in certain elements of certain belief systems, and we're talking here about Christianity in particular, there is a pushback against the thirst for power.
Because you have infinite power.
I want to say that rules over you but that you are accountable to.
And that infinite power vastly dwarfs anything you can achieve against your fellow man.
And that infinite power demands and requires for virtue to exist that you give people their choices.
There is no virtue without choice in Christianity.
And so the idea that we are going to bully and dominate and control other people clearly would be a demonic impulse in this theological approach because by dominating other people, we destroy virtue in the world.
We destroy the capacity for virtue in the world.
It is only charity if it is voluntary, if it is the welfare state It is compulsive.
It is coercive.
And that eradicates virtue and its possibility in the world.
You know, when I go to church every week, it's an exercise in love your neighbor.
Because, you know, I believe that socialism, communism, it violates a commandment.
Thou shall not steal.
Right?
It's not...
It's not a work of charity to tell the government to go up to tell your legislators to take from an atheist, a Jew, agnostic, and do your charity work.
That's not charity.
That's something, but it's not.
And I believe that's why the moral reason Why socialism and communism fail.
It just starts all wrong.
You've just stolen.
What end point do you imagine you're getting out of that?
You know, and it's difficult because at least, you know, just as a subculture, especially in American Catholicism, it's sort of like, you know, it's great to give to the poor as a voluntary method.
I mean, I was listening to that conversation before.
I don't, you know, I have less worries about, say, a free medical clinic or, say, you know, a A school or even a church being built, you know, in a town, you know, versus giving away money.
But, you know, in the end, when you, you know, but that operation, at least, you know, as you had mentioned in that particular podcast, it's all voluntary.
At the very least, we can say people gave that out of their own pocket, right?
So whatever damage it does is going to be exponentially less than, you know, if it does cause damage, then Being forced into it.
So, you know, it's difficult.
And it's just one of those things, you know, when I went back to Christianity, I said, you know, I'm just going to have to deal with this.
This is part of what God is asking me to do, is to deal with this moment, you know, and to deal with this culture that, you know, we need to think about.
You know, it needs to be rethought, basically.
Yeah.
And it's not, to me, it is very well put, of course.
And I just wanted to add that for me, it's impossible to ignore the fact that Christians are not trying to scream down people with different opinions.
And that is coming from the left, and that is coming from the much more secular perspectives in society.
Because, of course, if virtue to exist, it must be chosen.
That means that there must be a dedication to freedom of speech.
Yes.
Right?
You must listen to your enemies.
You must accept that they have a perspective that you must work with.
You cannot scream people down and force them to accept a particular perspective because they have not chosen it, it will not stick, and God does not recognize the virtue of perspectives that arise from fear or bullying or threats.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, because I remember in one of the other segments of a podcast, you said you'd stated it so beautifully, you know, actually the concept of free will to somebody, you know, I think the caller was about 20 or so, but yeah, you know, very, what you had just stated and had stated in that previous podcast, without choice, you know, whatever I'm compelled to do is nothing.
It's not a virtue.
It's something I have to do.
So, you know, it's not really a virtue that I pay my taxes.
I mean, that's something that I have to do, right?
But if I give to a charity, you know, if I well researched a charity, and I've given up something that I really wanted, well, I made a choice that wasn't compelled.
And that's a virtue.
So, which doesn't happen very often, actually.
Everything that I do is dependent upon the virtue called freedom of speech.
And if Christian theology, modern Christian theology at least, supports the concept of debate, of freedom of speech, of conversations, rather than compulsion and threat and coercion, then...
It's, you know, it's hard to avoid when you look at the protests that greeted Warren Farrell's speeches, that greet Milo Yiannopoulos' speeches, that greet other conservative speeches or critical or skeptical of feminist speeches or critical or skeptical of socialist speeches.
The intolerance of the regressive left has a demonic aspect because they genuinely believe that you are a better person if they can force you to shut up.
Yeah.
And that is not the theological perspective.
I mean, if you could force somehow an atheist to stop talking about atheism, that does not make him any more virtuous in the eyes of God.
It means that his capacity for virtue has diminished and your capacity for virtue has reversed.
Yes, yes, exactly.
I mean, I also feel, you know, I watch those protests too, and I feel, I also tend to feel a little sorry for them, because at least, you know, I remember being that young.
I mean, it feels like, you know, ages ago, 42, but, you know, I didn't really have a strong family background.
It was, you know, a few family issues, but, you know, I remember being really lost, you And when I see those kids, like, scream, you know, like their children, you know, like little toddlers almost, and I'm like, you know, they do have the responsibility.
They are adults.
They are, you know, 18 to 21.
But then I'm also like, you know, what happened just five years ago?
You know, and I'm not even talking about Christianity or religion, you know, but what happened that their lives are so empty that their thought...
They're so empty and insecure that somebody just walking onto a campus to give a talk that they could just ignore or go bowling or go to a movie, but they're going to sit there and scream?
What happened?
When I think about decay in society, I'm looking at that and thinking that's the future, right?
What happened?
And that's the vanity.
That's people who say, I know you're wrong before I've even heard your argument and your argument is immoral and you're evil and you must be stopped from speaking.
That is the demonic vanity of certainty prior to knowledge.
And that is the same thing with the central planning.
I know how you should live your life.
I know exactly what you should buy and what you should sell and where you should live and how you should be educated and your profession and maybe even who you should marry.
That is a demonic form of narcissistic megalomania that means that there's nothing above you that's pushing down on you and saying, be humble, at least relative to me.
Yes.
If there is nothing bigger than man, How does man avoid the lust for power?
I don't know the answer to that.
Clearly, universally preferable behavior hasn't solved all the problems in the world.
Clearly, 99.9%.
And these are, I fully, look, I accept, just because, you know, people are going to be surprised at what I'm saying, and I fully accept that these are all arguments from effect, right?
You said personal observations of a fall into the God is possible column.
And the thought that keeps roaming around in my head is, what is more likely for people with God, with the Christian God?
What is more likely for people without God?
And that remains an open question for me.
Because, I mean, there's lots of evidence and I could spend the rest of my life attempting to collate it.
But the secular societies are dying.
Yes.
And the religious societies are expanding.
And that is a piece of evidence that is pretty consequential to me and certainly was not really available to me just as recently as a few years ago.
Oh, yeah.
I mean...
I offer what I see just from spending 10 years of my life, 10-15 years, as agnostic, close to atheist, and then making what I would call a very gradual transition into Catholicism.
I had read of a woman who was Jewish, and they were completely not observing.
They decided they wanted to get back into the religion, so they made a point of just going slow.
I mean, it was one of those things where I decided, you know what, if this God is real that created the universe, you know, took four billion years, you know, because I believe everything about evolution and Big Bang, there's nothing that conflicts me personally with all of that and God.
If he took four billion years, he's probably not going to be all that impressed that I took two weeks to turn my life around or whatever.
I had a family to consider too.
We took it slow.
You know, there's sort of this gradual change, right?
And it's hard because, you know, if I get the science geek out in me, you know, I didn't hold every single variable in my life the same, right?
So I can't, you know, I can only have got, you know, sort of this, you know, before Catholicism, you know, return to Catholicism and after.
There's other things going on in my life too.
But, you know, from my perspective, what I see that, you know, as I've I've gotten more into the habit of praying and things like that.
At least I feel, and I can't prove it, but I feel like my temper has improved.
My patience has improved.
And I'm at a point where before children, from a completely secular, especially feminist point of view, children are a burden.
They show up, they mess up your lives, they mess up your career, their money, their time, their effort, right?
And then if you can kind of get to a point where you almost flip the script, almost, right?
Well, I've got God now, and life isn't easy, right?
I mean, life is this strange, half-fragile, half-hearty thing that life keeps appearing, but it's very fragile, right?
And all of a sudden, Life is a gift.
It's not a burden, right?
And yes, you still have to worry about money.
Yes, you still have to be responsible and those kinds of things.
But you're also less responsible for...
This is going to sound weird, but you're also less responsible for the parenting in general.
And that's not to say you neglect your children.
Please don't even go there.
That's not what I'm saying.
But what I'm saying is that You know, God has given you this gift of a child, and God has created this child, right?
Your job is to get that child to productive adulthood, right?
And that's actually a gift, right?
Because this child doesn't even have to be here, right?
So that's your job.
It's a stewardship job, almost.
And it's a joyful stewardship job.
And in that sense, and not every person who is religious, I'm aware, you know, there's a lot of religious people who are like, you know, grim up, you know, that's the way to go.
But to me, that's not what I wanted out of Christianity.
I felt like I needed, I didn't feel like I needed to have Christianity be a slog.
I felt like, you know, I looked at it and I thought, you know, I don't think Christianity is supposed to be a slog, right?
And so, you know, for me now, I'm like...
I would love to have more children.
It's just not a big deal.
The burden is not so much as it was when I was sort of just alone.
And I'm really alone.
I had my husband.
I love him and all that kind of stuff.
But it's just not as hard, I guess, as well I can say.
And it's a more joyful thing.
That might be part, at least from my eyes, that's part of maybe what the secret sauce is.
It's not, you know, to be able to say, and it is objectively a burden, but to add something more to it.
You know, to add an element of joy.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, as I've become more immersed into the issue of different intelligent levels, The degree to which philosophy can replace religion for the majority of people is an open question for me.
I don't know the answer.
If the only way that people can understand the power of the unconscious is by anthropomorphizing it into a deity, which is the case I've made in...
Books before.
And maybe, I mean, maybe I don't have anywhere close to the capacity to understand everything that's going on in my mind.
And if there's a way of abstracting it to a deity and that gives you a way of working with it, that's more productive.
Again, philosophically, I understand all of this.
I'm not sort of wooing myself or fogging myself out of rigorous arguments I've made in the past.
I'm fully conscious of that.
But I don't know a way to encapsulate everything that goes on in my mind in my mind.
And where do I put and what is my relationship to all of the things that occur in my mind and in my body and in my experience that I don't have any direct access to?
And again, this is not philosophy.
This is just the challenge of where I'm at.
And if I am fairly unique in my intellectual capacities, Am I expecting everyone to be Beethoven?
Why do you listen to music when you can just make music?
Well, and these are questions I don't have an answer to, but they're important because if the left has its way, then a lot of the people that I like hearing, I can't hear.
Yeah, I know.
A lot of people who like hearing me might not hear me if the left, the more regressive left has its way.
So these are not abstract questions and getting them wrong would be fatal to my dreams, to my passions, to my motivations, to my dedications.
So it is I danced before in ignorance.
Now I know it's a minefield and I really have to be more careful where I'm putting my feet.
Yeah, well, sometimes you just have to have those experiences, so...
Right.
Well, listen, Amy, what a fantastic conversation.
I hope that it was interesting to you.
I found it fascinating, and I really, really appreciate your perspective, as I say, to you as to others, but you're welcome back anytime.
And I really appreciate you, you know, bringing this topic to an atheist.
Hey, I wonder if you could tell me how God could exist.
That is...
Clearly you were sent by Jesus.
But no, I appreciate that question and it gave me some room and some scope to discuss things that I have really, really been thinking about and I don't have any strong answers to, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak of these things.
Oh, no problem.
My pleasure to come on the show, so thank you.
Thanks, Emil.
All right.
Alright, up next is R. Marys.
She wrote in and said, I'm a Venezuelan immigrant to America, and many fellow Venezuelans and American media portray Donald Trump as the American version of Chavez.
How would you compare these two characters?
How would you compare Obama and Chavez?
What are the parallels between the situation in Venezuela before Chavez and communism and the current situation in the United States?
And what are the differences?
Well, hello.
How are you doing this evening?
Hi, I'm fine.
And you?
I'm very well, thank you.
Is there anything you wanted to add before we dive into this side-by-side comparison?
Well, I can tell you I can give a different perspective because I grew up in Venezuela.
I was born and raised there and I grew up there before Chavez and after Chavez.
And then I come into this country and I'm seeing things and I just would like to know your perspective.
Right, right.
You know the history.
I'm somewhat aware of the history.
Do you mind if I just bring people up to speed with a little bit of the history that I think is relevant before we start talking about the person?
Of course.
So, Venezuela is teetering on the brink of, it seems to me at least, fairly significant economic and social collapse.
Is that too strong a way to put it?
You've certainly got more experience there than I do.
No, I think it's quite correct and it's destroyed.
My country is destroyed.
Right.
That was my impression.
And this is one of the huge tragedies of Venezuela and other countries as well, Argentina and Brazil.
You know, from the 1920s to the 1960s, It was incredible.
Huge economic prosperity.
I mean, discovery of oil reserves.
What is it?
Largest in the world?
Bigger than Saudi Arabia?
It's crazy.
I think so, yes.
I mean, not only was Venezuela the richest country in Latin America.
This will blow people's minds looking at where it is now.
But Venezuela in 1950 had the fourth highest per capita GDP in the world.
In the world.
Now think of the G7, think of the Western countries.
1950 had the fourth highest per capita GDP in the world.
Now, of course, Europe had gone through the war and so on, but nonetheless, it was really something.
Now, during this time period, you know, we always think that democracy is the solution.
I mean, Venezuela was governed by a variety of military or quasi-military governments, but it had a stable monetary policy.
It had clear legal property rights.
Pretty low taxation and very low foreign debt and public debt.
So, like, looking just at the 1950s and onwards, Venezuela is like, boom, going to be a world power right on the brink of tipping over into a truly sustainable, potentially sustainable first world economy.
And it was, as is so often the case, There was a sort of right-leaning or military dictatorship.
And in 1958, as is so often the case, this left-leaning reformists put an end to this sort of quasi-military dictatorship.
And this, of course, is, you know, communists are involved in this, and socialists are involved in this, and I'm sure the Comintern had its finger in there somewhere.
More political revolutionary arm of Soviet Russia and so on.
And what do they do?
Well, they go through the usual socialistic land reform and land redistribution and takes the property holdings of the wealthy landed classes and distributes them in very inefficient ways, not based on productivity or cost or price or anything like that.
And then they jack up the Tax rates, and they went from, like, 12% to 36%, and, of course, lots of complex layers of taxation, and, of course, because they've got all this money, they start spending like crazy, and, of course, it seems like, wow, you know, we're paying more taxes, but look, all these great services we're getting, because it's all debt-based, and it's all, you know, just kicking the can down the road, and...
So, 74 to 79, under Carlos Andres Perez, this is when the state completely metastasized.
It just went nuts.
Iron industry, petroleum industry, the steel industry, all nationalized.
Ah, they belong to the people!
So, we'll let the bureaucrats and the politicians take them over and pretend it's the people.
And, of course, they used all these oil revenues, massive social spending, and...
You know, financing its import substitution programs and trying to create some sort of local competence in various industries.
1976, nail in the coffin, right?
Chavez is kind of an effect of these.
1976, the petroleum industry is taken over by the government.
And that, of course, is a huge industry and was responsible for a lot of the economic growth, if not the majority of it, from the 20s until the 50s.
And so, of course, it cranks money through the government, and they can use that as collateral to borrow even more.
And there were, of course, very high oil prices.
OPEC was doing its jack-up oil prices under Jimmy Carter, and this is when you had the lines around the block in America for oil and so on.
That, you know, for a while you're flying high with all this borrowing and you're flying high with these incredibly high oil prices.
And it was a strong currency, right?
The Bolivar.
Is that Bolivar?
Bolivar?
Yes, Bolivar.
Bolivar.
Bolivar.
It was one of the strongest currencies all throughout Latin America from the 50s to the 80s.
And then October 1983, known as Black Friday in Venezuela, the Bolivar.
Had the biggest devaluation in its entire history and this just, of course, you know, the government's printing money and, you know, the usual socialist nightmare that goes on when the government gets control.
How am I doing so far?
Is this relatively close to what you have heard or no?
Yes, this is what we learned in school.
History, yes, is accurate.
Okay, good, good.
I'm glad you're learning this stuff because it wouldn't be taught in American schools if this was the history it was to some extent.
So the end of the 1980s, the whole thing's starting to come apart, right?
You've got massive debt, crazy unsustainable spending programs, and of course, economic regulations.
Boy, what do the leftists love to do?
They love to control and choke like weeds, like algae on a Florida beach.
They just cram up the economic regulations.
And of course, this creates massive inefficiencies.
You devalue the money, which means that you've got to have this crazy protectionist trade policy.
And you've got increased poverty, economic stagnation, and so on.
And of course, once the high oil prices weren't propping up all the spending, boom, you get economic stagnation.
And starting in the 1990s, well, Venezuela had kind of turned into a petrostate.
And it was either going to go under or it needed some market reforms, like it needed to return to some of its free market principles.
So, you know, they got...
Some money from the IMF and in return they, you know, reduced tariffs and tried to reduce some gas subsidies and liberalize some of the economy and that, you know, gave it a little bit of breathing room but inflation was never really falling below 30% throughout the 90s which was a giant mess and makes it very, very difficult to plan For the future.
And so there was kind of a lukewarm market reforms, but people didn't really believe in them much, and they didn't have a huge amount of effect.
And Hugo Chavez, who was a lieutenant colonel at the time, was an attempted coup in 92.
It sounds like the beginning of a bad rap song.
And they...
He didn't get into power at that point, did he?
No, he didn't.
And later, in February, I don't remember what year.
I think it was next year or two years later, he attended another coup.
But they all went to jail.
And then Rafael Caldera, during his second...
He freed them.
He pardoned them, so they got out of jail.
So, according to some experts, the average annual per capita GDP growth from 1960 to 1997 was minus 0.1%.
And I believe it.
I'm not sure if that's the right number.
And if I'm honest, Before Chavez, I really didn't care about politics.
And after him and after all this disaster, I do care about politics.
But the problem in Venezuela, they were not communists per se.
Chavez came to power saying that we've been here in this country.
This is a great country, but the politicians are all corrupted.
We have had corruption for 40 years and blah, blah, blah, blah, and only two parties.
Are the ones that can control Venezuela.
So it's time to change that.
So, but it's true.
The policies, they were corrupted, and the policies were not the best.
But there were many people that were thinkers.
For example, there was Arturo Gussler-Pietri.
He would say a thousand times, you have to sow The oil, the soil, like a plant.
He used to say this because he said, all the money that you get from the oil industry, just put it there in the primary sector.
Let's get the industry's Working.
Let's work with tourism.
If we work only with tourism, we will be super rich.
Because Venezuela, you have everything.
Where I am from, from Maracaibo, is super hot all the time.
But we have a lake and it's fresh and then you're bored and you take a plane and in 45 minutes you are in the mountains and you can see the snow.
But they never did that because they didn't care.
Bureaucracy and it was corrupted.
It's true.
But then Chavez happened.
And it was worse.
Well, and sorry, just to set that stage, so by 1998, 50% of the Venezuelan population is living under poverty.
Because, of course, the economy is shrinking, there's massive inflation, and the population is growing faster.
And so there's less money to go around.
And so, yeah, Chavez gets in power, and he's, oh, we're going to change everything, we're going to make everyone wealthy again.
And man, did he ever hit the gas on messing up the economy, on controlling socialism, just the whole mess of it all.
He took over more and more industries.
You've got exchange controls, price controls, and they've used the PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, as just this giant mechanism for buying votes and selling jobs and all that kind of stuff.
And he turned into the kind of dictator, or at least semi-dictator, using the The country's judicial system to persecute those who disagree with him.
You know, again, the usual expansion of state power followed by pursuit of anybody who criticizes that.
And it was a mess.
Using voting machines that he bought himself to make sure that he was taking power.
Right, right.
So, I mean, it took a long time.
To to hit this kind of mess right I mean a half century since the socialists really first started to get in power and began bleeding away all of the wealth that had been accumulated since the 1920s during a relatively free market prosperous not involved in European wars and and big oil revenues kind of environment you start bleeding that away and it's like that old saying about you know some guy said Said to a friend of his went bankrupt and the guy said how did you go bankrupt and he said very slowly?
And then all of a sudden, right?
And this, it's like a slow decline, slow decline, feels like it's going to be a soft landing, and then boom, the country just falls off the cliff.
And this is, of course, the West is risking all of this as well.
Exactly.
Yeah, so the idea that Donald Trump is going to nationalize all of these different industries, the idea that he's going to put in currency exchange controls and massive extensive price controls and that he's going to manipulate the judicial system to persecute anybody who disagrees with him, I mean, this is not...
Even remotely, what is going to happen.
I mean, the opposite in many ways.
I mean, this guy's piling more and more taxes and regulations on.
Donald Trump wants to simplify the tax code and reduce regulations.
The only possibility of any overlap that I can think of is in the realm of tariffs.
But I believe that Donald Trump is using tariffs to get better trade deals, not that he's dying to make a big giant economic wall around America because he's been an international businessman for all of his career, at least most of his career.
So the idea that he's going to want to cut off trade around the world with America, I don't find particularly believable.
I assume it's a position of leverage.
And of course, if he can replace tariffs Income taxes with tariffs, well, that's basically how the Founding Fathers founded the country and got the country going.
So, saying that that's somehow anti-American is to say that the beginning of America is somehow anti-American.
So, I think that not only is he not similar, there's many ways in which he's the direct and polar opposite.
I totally agree with that.
Many people compare him with Chavez because According to them, he's arrogant and he's promising and promising things that he cannot fulfill and blah blah blah blah, but I don't really think that they are that similar, not even in personality.
Chavez was in the military force, Donald Trump is in the workforce, like he is the one creating jobs for everybody, whether they like it or not.
Yeah, Donald Trump is a creature of the market.
Exactly.
Chavez came out of the military and went into politics and as far as I know it, never ran a damn business in his life.
Never.
Never had any understanding of market forces.
Never had to deal with bureaucrats who were chipping away at his profit margins.
Never had to deal with incalcitrant government unions.
Never faced the loss of his personal capital or his entrepreneurial abilities because of all of this.
So I would put him much closer, Chavez would be much closer to the Obama camp in that they both had this mysterious follow me off the cliff.
My friendly lemmings kind of appeal to certain sections of the population and they had a charisma or a personality structure that allowed other people to project hopes and dreams into them.
And they made wild promises that they had no particular capacity to fulfill.
And if you compare what they promised versus what was achieved, you know, you can look at Chavez with the economy and Obama with the economy and Obama with race relations and Obama with foreign relations and Obama and Secretary of State, former Secretary of State Clinton, SOS.
stability in the Middle East.
What they promised versus what they delivered was so completely opposite that I would put Chavez is on the left and the Democrats are more on the left.
So the idea that you compare Chavez to Donald Trump would be to me, you'd want to do that to avoid the inevitable comparisons to people like Obama and Hillary Clinton.
And I agree with that.
And another similarity that I see is that Chavez and the government here, they always have a scapegoat because I've been trying to do this, but it hasn't worked because, well, because of this and this and that.
In the case of Venezuela, it's the empire, the US. They are the scapegoat.
Right.
And of course, Trump wants to I'm not wildly familiar with Hugo Chavez's running platforms, but I'm pretty sure it didn't have much to do with lowering corporate tax rates.
You know, Trump wants to take them from the current sky-high levels down to the levels of, say, Germany, which remains an economic powerhouse and so on.
So, you know, Trump's policies don't violate mathematical or economic laws, and he's not...
He's not on the left.
I mean, this idea, he's arrogant.
I don't know.
Arrogant is just what idiots say about annoying opinions they can't disprove.
He's arrogant!
I mean, what does that mean?
Two and two make four.
Don't be so arrogant.
It's like, well, am I right or am I wrong?
Well, we're all different.
It's just an adjective that people shoot when they can't shoot down an argument.
We're all different.
This is a diverse world, so everybody is different.
I see that they compare Trump with Chavez because of their personality, but as you said, clearly has nothing to do with the way they They manage economy.
For example, the platform for Chavez was very similar to the platform of the government here.
Oh, you vote for me?
I'll give you a dishwasher or a washing machine.
Or, like they did here, oh, I'll give you a phone, a cell phone.
Right.
Right.
And this borrowing from the future in order to bribe the present is – it's banana republic stuff.
And it used to be an embarrassment in America to buy votes by promising free stuff and to make people dependent on the state so that they'll always vote to keep the state big and they'll never vote for tax breaks.
I mean people don't vote for tax breaks if they don't pay taxes.
And they kind of get that their money comes to them from other people's taxes.
And so people who are dependent on state money or state jobs or state controls or state subsidies or state protections or whatever, of course, people who are dependent on state money are going to be against tax breaks because they get that that means it's going to mean less money coming to them.
Exactly.
Papa State is there and he's going to take care of me.
Many, many people in Venezuela, when Chavez was giving them their share or whatever they call it, well, I don't need to get a job because the government is giving me this amount every month.
And besides, if I go and look for a job, I'm going to get less money.
So I prefer that Papa State takes care of me.
I see that that is happening here.
I saw this documentary about Ayn Rand, and she predicted that if we continue, this country continue the way she saw it, she saw the situation back then.
And she said that if we continue that way, we're going to end as a socialist slash communist country.
And sadly, I think it's kind of happening slowly but surely.
I saw things in Venezuela that I'm seeing here and I'm really scared.
And I really don't know what to do for people to wake up. - Well, you know, I don't know how to wake people up either other than by doing sort of what I'm doing.
And if there's a better way, I'll hopefully start doing that or follow whoever does that.
I do think that Ayn Rand is entirely unrecognized for the amount of predictions that she made that are true.
Now, Danconia Copper from Francisco Danconia, where was that mine?
Francisco Danconia?
I think he was one of the characters of Atlas Shrug.
No, you're right about that, but he's got the copper mine.
I think so.
No, no, no, the wine.
He was the guy who owned the wine factory or something like that?
No, he had copper.
He had copper factory and he...
Sorry, I'm not going to give any spoilers because people should absolutely read that book.
But let me just...
Mike, if you can have a look at this, look this up because it was in a central or southern American country that he had this copper mine.
And the fact that she dealt around the world in Atlas Shrugged talked about Europe and talked about South and Central America and so on was important because she was predicting that if...
The government's continued to pursue these socialist policies, then the economies are going to collapse and people are going to end up hunting pigeons and bats and all this kind of stuff.
And the fact that this has all come true, and she wrote Atlas Shrugged a couple of years before the socialists took over in Venezuela.
So the fact that she's able to see through the tunnel of time more than a half a century to where Venezuela is now while writing about it in the 1950s, well, come on.
I mean, the people got to give her some credit for that, but I doubt they will because a lot of people want to keep trying to control all of these things, all of these people.
Sorry, go ahead.
They want to control you.
They want to control even what you think or what you say.
They rob your dignity because how can you have dignity if you don't feel useful for the community, if you don't have a job, if you don't provide for yourself and for your family?
Right, right.
And there is of course the great offer.
The great offer that the state will make, which is that we will find a way to suspend reality for your benefit forever.
We will find a way to suspend mathematics for your benefit forever.
We will find a way to suspend the laws of economics for your benefit forever.
And this, you know, with reference to the great last call with Amy with regards to this is the deal that the devil offers.
This is the devilish deal.
I will suspend reality.
For your benefit, forever.
And of course, since the devil nor human beings have no capacity to change the laws of nature, of mathematics, of human nature, of economics, there is no possibility that nature can be suspended forever, that reality can be suspended forever, that mathematics can be suspended forever.
That is the delusion.
And people act as the idiot, right?
In a farming family, you know, there's one in every family.
Of course.
And, you know, what you have to do in a farm is you have to eat and you have to keep your seed crop for planting in the spring.
Now, if you want to have a full-bellied, big-ass, burp-alicious winter, all you have to do is eat your seed crop.
It's right there.
You can make it into bread.
You can spin it into flax.
You can bake it in a cake.
You can make a muffin.
You can snort it.
You can eat your seed crop.
And, you know, come January, February, March, it's starting to look pretty good because you're hungry.
It's no accident that in England there's this Starve yourself Lent thing that happens late in winter.
It's like, well, we got no food anyway other than our seed crop, so we might as well make a festival out of not eating.
Yay.
And, you know, there's always the idiot.
And the idiot says, oh, come on, let's just have some of that seed crop.
It'll be fine.
It'll be fine.
Nobody's going to know.
And he'll go and take it.
Go and take it.
And you know, maybe it's okay, but the problem is, if you eat 5% of the seed crop, you've got 5% less to plant in the spring now, don't you?
And so you have a little bit of less money next winter.
And so a little bit of fewer crops, less food next winter.
So next winter comes along, and the guy who was hungry before is more hungry now because you've got less food.
So he's got more incentive.
To eat some of that seed crop.
Oh, om nom nom nom nom.
So good.
Let's grind it up.
I can make a paste.
I can make a snowman.
Are we going to eat that?
Make it out of wheat.
And so he eats another 10% of the seed crop and everyone's like, oh man, well, we barely made it through that winter.
Not next winter for sure.
We're not going to eat any more seed crop.
But the problem is 5% the first year, 10% the second year, you're now down 15% of your seed crop.
So next winter is really hard to get through to the spring.
So you eat, and you plant, and you eat, and you plant, and you eat away at your seed crop.
And then one day, one day, you've eaten everything that you've grown, you've got no seed crop, and it's November.
And that's what happens.
How do you starve to death?
Very slowly, then all at once.
How do you go bankrupt?
Very slowly, then all at once.
How do you experience social collapse?
Very slowly, and then all at once.
And it took 50 years for Venezuela.
The welfare state has been running in America and in Europe for 50 odd years.
It started with a little bit more capital, and of course, there have been some additional innovations and some remnants of the free market along the way.
But those are the stakes that are coming up in the American election.
Do we have any more seed crops to eat?
I don't think so.
I don't think America can make it through another winter.
Metaphorically.
Yeah, and talking about winter and crops and pilgrims and Puritans, people don't know or don't remember, or maybe because they're not teaching that in school, that this country started as a communist country.
If you see it that way, because everybody had to work together to get the crops, and everybody had to cooperate, and what happened?
Everybody was starving.
And then what was the solution?
You're responsible for this piece of the land, you're responsible for this one, and if you work, you eat.
If you don't work, you don't eat.
And that's what made this country great.
Because you're an individual, you're responsible for you, for yourself, for your well-being, and if I'm helping myself, if I am somebody, I am helping my community.
But many people don't see that, don't remember that, or don't learn that.
Right.
Right.
How do people learn these lessons?
How do you awake from a daze of unreality?
Well, you wake up from pain.
You wake up from suffering.
Most people don't wake up from reason.
They don't want to.
They think that One more day, one more year.
It'll work around.
It'll turn around.
Something will get better.
Something will improve.
Magic will happen.
The oil price will go up.
Something will change.
There'll be some new invention, you know, like John Galt's invention in Atlas Truck.
There'll be something that makes it go for another generation.
And of course, but that's already happened to the computers.
Computers made it go for another generation.
Would have never made it otherwise.
And maybe there will be some magic new thing, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.
Maybe there'll be teleportation.
Who knows?
Nobody knows.
Nobody knows, but I wouldn't put my...
Maybe I don't need to go hunting.
Maybe a healthy moose will just trip and fall right in front of me.
Yeah, maybe.
But I wouldn't put a lot of money on it.
And it's a big risk to take.
And so what will wake people up is pain.
There's no way that it cannot be painful at the moment.
Because even if everybody said, wow, you know, we've got to go free market tomorrow.
We've got to shrink the state.
We've got to open up trade options.
We've got to get rid of bureaucracy.
We've got to get rid of regulations.
We've got to just trade, trade, trade.
Freedom, freedom, freedom.
Property, property, property.
Well, it's going to be painful no matter what.
Sorry?
That's what's killing this country.
I mean, I am a teacher by trade, right?
But I could do something else.
I could start my own business.
I can prepare coffee and I can prepare muffins.
And I always get compliments.
And people tell me, oh, you should open your own cafe.
And when I think, all the things that I have to go through All the permits and all the laws and all the rules and blah blah blah blah.
I say, you know what?
It's not worth it and I don't have time or the money to invest to do this.
I don't think that this country was founded with so many rules and so many laws and so many permits.
It was free market.
I have something to offer.
You like it, you buy it.
If you don't like it, you don't come back.
But if you like it, maybe you will tell your friends and then I will make money and they will be happy.
Right.
Right.
And it's that level of simplicity that we need to get back to.
Exactly.
This constant hyper-regulatory state.
It's like...
It's sort of like being asleep and a spider is making its web across your nose and across your mouth.
And you don't wake up from it.
It's not any single thread that's the problem, but sooner or later, you just ain't getting enough air.
And the problem is, of course, is that you're a paralyzing spider.
So by the time you realize you don't have enough air, you can't wake up and tear the webs from your face.
It's too late.
It's too late.
You know, the bad habits that start as spiderwebs end up as chains.
And so, I mean, in America or other Western countries, if the welfare state ended tomorrow, Of course, people would be happier in the long run, but it would be a lot of pain in the short run.
People have adapted to it.
There's a big change that they would have to go through.
And it would be a great deal of suffering.
Of course, it will be less than if it happens of its own accord.
But of course, governments don't like to initiate actions which are perceived as painful by the population.
I mean, other than war, right?
Because war, you know, patriotism and all that.
But governments don't like to initiate actions that cause pain to the population.
They are willing to let things get so bad that they can say, wow, it's really terrible that this happened, and so we'll try to fix it.
We'll try to fix it.
Exactly, they created a problem.
If they ended it tomorrow, the suffering would be relatively short, but it would be quite intense.
And the longer it goes, the worse it's going to be.
How much would have to change now in Venezuela?
For people to become free.
Because, of course, now you've got a couple of generations who've grown up in this socialist hellhole.
What's happened to their entrepreneurial instincts?
Well, as it turns out, as I saw in China in, I guess, 16 years ago, in the markets in China, I mean, these guys had been under communism for a generation or two or three.
And...
They were able to become entrepreneurs fairly easily.
So it's hard to say.
But the sooner the problems would be dealt with, the easier it would be.
But there would still be quite a bit of pain now.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And it would take a person, probably somebody who is not a politician, to do that.
Yeah, Trump's coming in and he's telling the truth.
System's unsustainable.
It's not going to work.
We've got too many people dependent on the state.
I'm sorry if you don't like the fact that math is math, but don't get mad at me.
He's arrogant because he's quoting accurate numbers.
It's like, well, I think actually you're arrogant in thinking that numbers can be wished away on a whim.
How many managers are there that are arrogant?
I don't care.
If you do what you have to do with, it's okay and it's working and the numbers are there.
Why would you care if they are arrogant?
They're doing their job.
Oh yeah, and the arrogance is the people who, Donald Trump's never going to run, Brexit will kill us all and destroy the British economy, and I mean, the scaremongers of the arrogant people, the people who say, well, if there was no welfare state, all the poor people would starve and die in the streets, and if the government didn't control healthcare, all the poor people and sick people would starve and die in You don't know.
You don't have a clue.
Fear-mongering is the ultimate arrogance because it's claiming that you know for certain the disasters that are going to result from Future choices and future actions.
And that's the beauty.
The future is a haze.
That's why we need principles because we can't predict the future.
We don't know the outcomes of our actions.
We don't know the fog of war or the fog of friendship sometimes.
So we need principles because nobody knows what's around the corner of five minutes from now.
So that arrogance is on the part of the pundits who say they know for sure what's going to happen for better or for worse when certain events occur.
That is hubris beyond imagination.
Exactly.
I agree.
I'm so glad that you're saying this because many people in Venezuela, they say, oh, do you like Trump?
They say, I never liked him.
But what are you going to do?
Who are you going to vote for?
Seriously.
And not because he's like Chavez and Trump is the American Chavez.
And I understand that they've never been here.
And they don't know.
But I feel that I'm in a place that I have some privilege or I have this advantage that I have lived in Venezuela before and after Chavez.
And I'm living here and I see things I can compare.
But I'm glad that somebody like you is seeing it, somebody who is unbiased and maybe the message will get there.
Well, I'm sort of in a unique position To talk about these things because I've been so enormously skeptical of politics for most of my life as a public intellectual.
So hopefully when I say things that are interesting and I have evidence behind them, people listen because they know I'm just not another political hack, but have been significantly opposed to political action for most of my public career because...
What choices really were there that could ever achieve any kind of power?
But here's the thing.
This is sort of, Maria, this is the last thing that I sort of wanted to say, which is not to say the last thing we can talk about.
But, you know, people can afford to be lazy if they're rich.
People can afford to not think if they're subsidized.
And that's really, really important to understand.
So people who are like, Trump is X, Trump is Chavez, Trump is Hitler, Trump is Jiminy Cricket, Trump is a Smurf, Trump is Orange, Trump is Cheetos on my face, Trump, or whatever it is that people are saying, they can afford to say stupid, inconsequential stuff because there's no particular reward for them in thinking clearly.
And there may, in fact, be significant negatives for them in thinking clearly.
Thinking is hard.
And thinking which brings you up against social opposition.
Oh, you find this positive about Trump?
You're crazy.
You're a racist.
You're a...
Like, who cares, right?
You know, as Tom Sowell said, a racist is just a conservative who won an argument with a liberal.
But...
So people can afford to indulge in stupid, bigoted, prejudiced, idiotic non-thinking if the government's paying them whether they think well or not, right?
Exactly.
If you get think tank funding because you oppose Trump, okay, well, why would you want to think clearly, like blindly oppose Trump, you know?
Why would you want to think clearly about it?
You know, it's an old saying that says it is impossible to make a man understand something when his income depends upon him not understanding that thing.
And so if you're going to face like eye-rolling and I can't believe it and social ostracism and academic or career problems or, you know, your girlfriend is going to get mad at you because you hate whoever, right?
I mean, you know, then okay.
There's a lot of reasons to not think.
In the same way, you don't go to the grocery store when your house is full of groceries.
Unless you're meatloaf.
But anyway.
You don't go hunting when you have already got food.
And you don't think when thinking gives you negative outcomes.
And not thinking...
Doesn't harm you.
In fact, not thinking, oh, I'll just get my money from the government.
Where's that money coming from?
How is it sustainable?
How is it going to last?
What's going to happen when it runs out?
You know what the national debt is.
You know what the deficit is.
You know what the unfunded liabilities are.
You know there's nothing in Social Security.
You know that it can't possibly last.
You know that mathematics is inevitable.
Thinking that the government is going to spend forever is like thinking you're going to live forever.
It is irrational, childish thinking.
So what is the negatives of refusing to think when the government is subsidizing your very active non-thinking?
Or why would you think when somebody else is thinking for you?
Well, yeah, they're doing all the work, right?
Yeah, somebody's opening that cafe that can get taxed so these people can get their welfare.
Somebody's working hard creating some business so that it can be taxed so other people can get the welfare.
Somebody's thinking.
Somebody's getting up.
Somebody's working.
Somebody's taking the risks.
Somebody is doing the work that other people are profiting from.
And so what is the harm for them of saying stupid stuff like, Trump is Chavez?
Doesn't matter.
Because they don't have to be right.
They don't have to think.
They just got to wait in the mail for the check to come.
Wait for the check to come in the mail.
Now, that changes, of course, when the government runs out of money.
When the government runs out of money, suddenly you gotta start thinking, and pretty quickly.
And that will change.
And then, you know...
People who don't think won't do very well and people who do think will do well.
Right now, people who don't think are doing just fine, thank you very much, and the people who are thinking and working hard tend to be doing rather poorly because they're getting taxed and choked with regulations and tariffed and scorned and called exploiters and, you know, when Obamacare is hitting their...
I mean it's just not a lot of fun for entrepreneurs these days.
Not at all.
If you've got to go hunt, you know, if you wait too long, well, you're really hungry when you go hunting.
And that doesn't give you a lot of energy for running and throwing and grabbing and whatever it is, right?
So at some point, it just becomes easier to get up and go hunt rather than stay hungry.
And so then you've got to plan and you've got to do all that thinking and track and get your team together and sharpen your spears and You work and think because it's easier to work and think, and the government has kept that reality away from people for generations, but it'll come back pretty quick.
I totally agree.
Now, I think what you mentioned about the government running out of money, that would make a good show how the government can run out of money.
What can we do about it?
That would be a great question.
I will add it to the list, near infinite, of shows I would like to do.
Because, yeah, there's lots of historical examples.
I mean, people can just look at my fabulous presentation on the fall of Rome for more on that.
I know it's a bit of a mouthful, but you can take it in bites.
YouTube will remember where you were when you pick it back up.
But I really, really appreciate the call.
And listen, from somebody from Venezuela who's seen all of this stuff go down, Thank you so much for calling in.
What great callers.
You know, I say this every week, and I feel it even more strongly every week.
I am honored and privileged to be At the heart of these amazing conversations.
And thank you, of course, so much to everyone for calling in.
Thank you very much.
Honestly, for your curiosity.
Yeah, for your stimulation of what it is that we do.
I'm immensely proud of bringing these conversations to the world.
If you want to help us out, you know, August is a hungry month.
August is a lean month.
I know people are getting ready to go back to school.
They're buying stuff.
They may be going on vacation.
They may be taking vacations.
But please remember your friendly philosopher and his need for carbs and protein.
If you can go please to freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You can sign up for a subscription, 20 bucks a month.
You know, it's less than a coffee a day and it really does help the world.
And you can also go to...
FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
If you've got some shopping to do, it helps us out.
It doesn't cost you anything to use our affiliate link.
You can, of course, follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux and FDRpodcast.com to share the shows, to review the shows.
And last but not least, youtube.com slash freedomainradio.
Well, you're probably already here if you're watching this.
Thank you so much for all of your support.
It's more necessary now than ever, and we need it more than we've ever needed it before, as I think the world does too.
So fdrurl.com slash donate.
Thanks everyone so much.
Have a great, great weekend.
▲
Export Selection