3547 I’M STILL TALKING - Call In Show - December 28th, 2016
Question 1: [1:30] - “Should law reflect morality and if so what kind of morality should it reflect and why?”Question 2: [55:37] – “I can't seem to wrap my head around the justification of the electoral college. How can one really argue objectively that one citizen deserves a more weighted vote than another, determined by geographic location? I understand the benefits of having it. But how can one really argue against the basic concept of each citizen having exactly equal voting power? It seems to me like the electoral college is an affirmative action program for people living in smaller states.”Question 3: [1:24:40] – “I want to challenge this quote from your book, Universally Preferable Behaviour: ‘Ethics cannot be objectively defined as ‘that which is good for man’s survival.’ Certain individuals can survive very well by preying on others, so this definition of ethics does not overcome the problem of subjectivism. In biological terms, this would be analogous to describing evolutionary tendencies as ‘that which is good for life’s survival’ – this would make no sense. Human society is an ecosystem of competing interests, just as the rainforest is, and what is ‘good’ for one man so often comes at the expense of another.”“Objective ethics does not necessarily result from an objective reality, on what basis do you assume reality has the property of ethics? Ethics take the form of ideas within our minds, they are not observable in physical form. We dismiss divine beings and their commands for this same reason, so why not ethics?”Question 4: [2:04:21] – “Stefan has taken the position that Free Will is necessary for moral responsibility. Considering the lack of evidence for free will, could the non-existence of free will be compatible with an internal locus of control and therefore personal moral responsibility?”Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Ah, this show does take me back sometimes, my friends.
In this case, it's back to my youthful, cherub-faced introduction to the philosophy of law as an undergraduate course I took many moons ago.
Should law reflect morality?
And if so, which morality?
And to what extent?
Had a fine conversation with a lady about that.
The second caller...
I've ambivalently mixed feelings about.
We talked about the Electoral College and why it's there and its differentiation from the popular vote and so on.
and I'm not sure I got through to him, although I think I would give myself full points for trying repeatedly.
The third caller had questions about my approach to ethics, or I think a good philosophical approach to ethics, universally preferable behavior, and we had a good tussle about that.
And the fourth caller, well...
What's the relationship between determinism and not feeling like you're in control?
It may seem obvious.
Well, it certainly seemed obvious to me.
Not perhaps so, quite so much to the caller.
A great set of calls.
I really enjoyed them.
Please don't forget, if you're listening to this in 2017, it's the current year!
Please drop by freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
And you can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
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Be the place to go, me hearties!
Alright, well up first today we have Clare.
Clare wrote in and said, Should law reflect morality?
And if so, what kind of morality should it reflect and why?
That's from Clare.
Hello Clare, how are you doing?
I'm well, I'm well.
Hope you're well too.
I'm well, I'm well, thank you.
So, I guess the first question that pops into my mind is, what do you mean by law?
Because, I mean, this is sort of going back to my philosophy of law.
Sorry to ask you a question and then interrupt by it.
It goes back to my philosophy of law class as an undergraduate.
There's natural and positive law.
And positive law roughly states that the law is what is written in the books.
That that's what the law is.
And natural law says that the law should reflect some standard of morality that is reflected in what is written in the books.
And natural law, of course, is much more susceptible to the idea of the argument that there's an unjust law.
And in positive lore, which is just...
Whatever's written in the books is the lore.
Can there really be an unjust lore?
It's sort of like saying there's an impossible Dungeons& Dragons creature written in the Fiend Folio or the Monster Manual.
It doesn't really...
Or the rules for this video game are immoral.
It's just, well, what are the rules for this video game?
And that's how you play it.
And so...
My question is what do you mean by law?
Do you mean that that which is written down in the statute books or do you mean that the law is a sort of a tangible manifestation of a more abstract moral set of theories or a system?
Well, I mean by the law what is enforced and what will punish us if we break it.
You know, there are all sorts of moral laws that in theory exist but have no legal effect in that, you know, the police won't come and get you if you break them.
So, I mean, the only kind of law that really exists are laws that have been passed and, you know, are enforced by the state.
Right.
So by the definition of the law, you mean that which has been duly enacted by whatever law in Congress, I guess, in the U.S. or whatever law-making or law-creating entity is in society.
It has gone through the due process of becoming a law.
And so all of the statutes, the regulations, the tax laws, all that kind of stuff, all of this massive pile-to-the-sky system, Set of textbooks, of family law and all of this, that all of this would be the law and your question is should it represent some kind of morality?
Yes, exactly that.
Well, my question is, if the law is enacted by the state, then the state Always and forever remains in violation of its own legal standards, right?
Because the state says, for instance, thou shalt not counterfeit.
Yet, of course, the state grants private entities the legal right to counterfeit through central banking.
The law says thou shalt not use force to transfer property from one other human being to yourself.
Yet the state, through taxation, initiates the use of force to transfer property from citizens to The rulers or the bureaucrats or whoever's on the other side of the fiery fence of state power.
And so if we sort of understand that any law enacted by the state is going to be funded and enforced by the violation of a fundamental moral law, which is the non-aggression principle, do not initiate the use of force against others, then It's hard to imagine how laws in general could remain just.
I mean the foundation of the state is an unjust violation of a moral law.
It's the initiation of the use of force against usually legally disarmed or under armed citizens.
And so what would it mean to say The law should reflect a higher moral standard.
Now, in a free society, right, in a stateless society, then we have the capacity, and I talk about this in practical anarchy and everyday anarchy available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
There is the potential for a genuine moral law because you're not violating fundamental moral rules like the non-aggression principle in order to fund your laws.
So in a genuinely free society, there is competition for Legal remedies, right?
That there's a variety of institutions that are offering you solutions to challenges you would have with other people involving resources like contracts and the use of force in terms of being robbed or attacked or something like that.
Now the state, of course, doesn't have any competition and therefore it does not need to remain efficient, which is why laws tend to multiply beyond reason, beyond scope, beyond sanity.
The number of laws that are in Western countries are At truly deranged levels.
There's nobody...
They say, ah, ignorance of the law.
I was told this growing up.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
No excuse.
Ignorance of the law.
However, it's impossible to know the law.
It's completely and totally impossible.
There's no one person who knows the laws in the West.
It is a sort of balkanized patchwork of various specialties, a lot of whom disagree with each other and between them.
So the law has become this giant...
Unwieldy, bureaucratic, semi-totalitarian mess.
How do you know if you're in compliance with the laws, right?
I mean, some people say that on average, Americans break three federal laws every single day, though they try to be law-abiding.
And so clearly we don't have any reflection of morality, of basic moral principles in the law as it exists in the West at the moment, and I would sort of argue around the world.
There was, of course, under common law, which was a largely free market developed, or at least voluntarily developed legal system, there were basically only two rules, don't harm others and Or their property and keep your promises, right?
So keep your promises with contract law and don't harm others with criminal law, right?
So don't harm others or take their property and keep your word.
And that's about it.
Now that's Pretty easy to follow.
We expect a five-year-old in a social setting to be able to follow those rules because we get upset when the five-year-old hits another kid or takes their toy and so on.
To me, the law should be as simple and as basic.
Now, there may be permutations and complications that come out of that, but it should be something as simple as keep your promises and don't harm others or take their property.
And You know, there's self-defense and all of that, and there are complications in contracts and so on, but those two basic rules should be the central pillar of any legal system, and it's not, of course, that way.
Now, there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not more, of laws and regulations and Various layers, like all the way from federal down to your local municipal rules.
And it is multiplied beyond all sense.
And everyone has an incentive to start a new round of legislation.
Let's pass a new law!
Because it usually benefits someone or there's some particular appeasement that's going on, right?
So the media is involved in this too.
The media whips up these kinds of hysterias about various things.
Everyone gets really angry, or really upset, or really scared.
They're going to pass a law!
I'm going to pass a law!
And then they pass the law and then they move on to the next thing, right?
An easily goosed population without any stable relationship to fundamental moral principles is easy to startle into running into the ever-increasing shadow of the Mount Doom of state power.
And so I do believe, of course, that the law should ideally reflect basic moral principles.
The law should be really not much more It's more than a couple of pages long and the common law was quite simple in many ways.
It should be comprehensible to children because we expect children to follow moral rules.
But it never will be when there are governments.
As long as there are governments, the laws will multiply and multiply.
With the exception, I will say that there is an exception When laws are sort of founded on religious dogma, then they tend not to multiply beyond all reason in many ways because they are limited by the fact that if the religious dogma doesn't ask for certain things to be enforced, it's tough to make that case that they should be.
I mean, there are some things like traffic signals and so on that...
Holy texts don't cover.
But it is interesting that when religion is very strong, the laws tend not to multiply in the same way that they do when the supposed separation of church and state, if that makes sense.
So yeah, that would sort of be my argument.
The law should reflect moral standards, and it should be kept as simple as humanly possible.
Otherwise, the capacity for injustice escalates enormously.
Yes, you said something very interesting just now about the fact that laws based on religious dogma, as you say, are actually fewer than the kind of laws that would flourish The Ten Commandments versus the Federal Registry, which has hundreds of thousands of new regulations every year.
And I think it's Chesterton who said, when you get rid of the big laws, you don't end up with no laws, you end up with an infinity of tiny laws.
Yes, and you seem to have arrived at the sort of profound paradox of a theocracy perhaps giving us a smaller state than what we have now.
Well, if people obey moral rules, you don't need a big government.
And how do you get people to obey moral rules?
Well, philosophers have had a very, very bad track record of getting people to follow moral rules.
They just have.
And I would argue that prior to something like UPB, like my approach to secular ethics, universally preferable behavior, again, a free book at freedomainreader.com slash free, there was no way to explain to the general population why be good.
Why be good?
Now, in the absence of being able to explain to people why be good, If you can threaten and bribe them into being good through hell and through heaven, then they will obey, in general, they will obey those moral rules.
And if they are obeying those moral rules, then there's less need for an ever intrusive and ever escalating system of government courts and so on, right?
I mean, if people, for instance, would you really need family court if people chose their partners wisely?
And I think it was, I think Mike Cernovich may have tweeted this, but it's very interesting.
I was looking through it the other night.
If you sort of look up marriage test, it's something in the 1930s.
A psychologist and family counselor put together, it could have been a psychiatrist, a family doctor and a marriage counselor put together a whole series of questions to ask about your potential husband or your potential wife.
And you would score them And you would then get those results.
And it would give you some indication of whether they'd be a good husband or good wife.
And it was in the positive category and in the negative category as well.
Does the man flirt with other women when his wife or his girlfriend is around?
Those sorts of questions.
And so if people chose their marriage partners wisely, and if they then respected the vows that said, we are together till death do us part, Would you need a family court, really?
No.
Right?
And that's sort of one example.
If people respected property, then you would need much less overhead in terms of the government, and you'd need much less overhead in terms of all of the steps that people have to take to protect their property.
I was just reading about in Canada, here in Canada, in Mississauga, the police are reminding people, do not put The boxes for your expensive Christmas gifts out on the curb.
Do you know why?
Do you?
Do you?
Well, yes.
Well, the reason why is because thieves can go up and down the street, and they can see, ooh, this guy just got a 50-inch television that's, you know, whatever fantastic features, or they just got an Xbox One or a PS4 or whatever.
And so they got all these boxes out there, and then they know.
Because, of course, Christmas is a time when people, they travel, they go see family.
So they know, and they can go in and steal your stuff.
Because they know it's in there because you just put the box out for recycling.
It's very important.
Very important.
Don't put the boxes out.
You're going to get stolen from.
And well, if people respected property, you wouldn't need any of that stuff.
So the more you can get people to internalize and obey moral standards, the smaller government you can end up with.
And so theology...
It does that.
So people who believe the moral imperatives based on theology internalize those standards.
It's not perfect, but it doesn't turn into a pragmatic game of cat and mouse.
Because with the police, if you are a moral or a subjectivist or a relativist or whatever, then you say, well, the only sin is getting caught.
The only negative consequences that I'm going to experience from doing whatever immoral act you're contemplating, the only negative experience I'm going to receive from that is getting caught and punished.
Well, that will have to do though, won't it?
At least you get punished for stealing or whatever.
Right.
But it doesn't do that.
It doesn't do because the police can't catch everyone.
Perhaps if you made people believe in Big Brother or God, then you have a policeman in everyone's head.
Well, you do.
You do, of course.
And the police can't catch everyone.
The majority of crimes go completely unsolved.
And I've never really had to use the cops, but once I borrowed a friend's vacuum cleaner and I had a bunch of stuff to carry.
I left the vacuum cleaner by the elevator.
I was going to my car to drop some stuff off.
I came back to get the vacuum cleaner and it was gone.
Someone had taken it from the elevator landing area.
And so I called the cops and they said, well, you can come and fill out some paperwork if you want.
You know, but it was basically, you know, just file your insurance papers if you've got the serial number or whatever.
So, you know, what I did was I plastered pieces of paper up and down the apartment building saying, if you took this...
Vacuum cleaner.
It wasn't...
I wasn't giving it away.
I didn't leave it there because I wanted someone to take it.
It actually was not mine.
I need to return it.
So please put it, you know, no questions asked.
Just put it and I put my apartment.
And the next morning it was there.
I just opened.
It was there.
So somebody had returned it, which was nice.
So I had to sort of take matters into my...
Vigilante, Charles Bronson style with a nice font.
And...
So, I mean, that was nice, but if it becomes a game of cat and mouse, like the only problem is if I get caught, well, you can't possibly enforce that.
You can't ever have enough policemen to play that cat and mouse game effectively because the overhead becomes enormous.
At some point, you're just going to pay more for policemen than you're ever going to receive in the protection of your property.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm just saying that, but if you do catch them, at least they can be seen to be punished properly, you know, on the principle that justice must be seen to be done, you know, so that people have confidence in the system.
But if you don't even punish whatever is wrong, then, I mean, you know, the laws are very lenient now, and people feel that criminals aren't really punished, you know, anything like enough for, you know, the terrible things they've done.
Well, it's worse than that.
I think not only do they feel...
I think not only do people feel that criminals aren't punished that much anymore.
And that's typical.
When the left comes into power, standards of justice and punishment go out the window.
I mean, this is de Blasio versus Rudy Giuliani.
Just look at the crime statistics.
In Chicago, just over the past couple of years, enough people have been shot that it's beginning to approach...
It's called Chirac, right?
Spike Lee made a movie about that, I think.
And so, it is, I mean, when the left gets in, it all goes out the window.
Now, what the left does, of course, is they don't persecute criminals, but they do persecute Republicans and Christians and freethinkers and anybody who questions multiculturalism and anyone who commits hate crimes, of course, all of these hate crimes, well, I shouldn't say all, the vast majority of hate crimes that I've seen reported on recently have just turned out to be massive hoaxes, which again is a real shame and a real problem and thoroughly immoral.
Because, you know, there may well be hate crimes in the future, but nobody's going to believe them anymore because the left has been supporting all of this supposed hate crimes that are occurring, the vast majority, which I've read about, complete hoaxes.
So, it is sort of a left-right thing as well, but fundamentally, if...
If children don't respect their elders, then the elders can't transmit moral values to the children.
And this is why I think you get a lot of sort of amorality among the young.
And so people not only think or believe, and I think rightly so, at least over the past eight years, that criminals are not being punished, but they also feel that criminals are being punished.
Or immoral people are being rewarded.
And this occurs in a couple of levels.
So first of all, of course, to take sort of the big one that I think most people can agree with.
For a variety of reasons we've gone into before, of course, there was a financial crisis in 2007-2008.
And the banks were facing, well, a lot of financial problems.
And what happened was hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into the pockets of the banks as a bailout.
So the banks took home all the profits from all of their gambling.
And then when the gamble failed to pay off, they ran to the government and the government gave them all the money that they needed to survive and to flourish.
And so that's not how it works in Vegas.
I'm sorry?
And savers get no interest.
So, you know, prudence, you know, people who saved money for their, you know, pensions and everything, they, you know, they had no interest at all because it was zero or, you know, very little.
Yeah.
So bad people get rewarded.
Yeah.
Yeah, bad people get rewarded.
And, you know, the sort of petty local criminals is bad enough, and that has a direct impact on people's quality of life, particularly in bad neighborhoods.
But the bailout, I think, was seen by many as just a massive criminal conspiracy, as a giant shakedown.
Of course, one of the reasons why the government paid off the banks is that it was, you know, people say, well, why do you talk about critical of diversity, multiculturalism?
Why do you talk about race and IQ?
Well, financial crisis had a lot to do with that because it was perceived that blacks and Hispanics were getting fewer loans than they were.
They should have been getting relative to their proportion of the population.
But if you normalize by IQ and credit history and so on, it was perfectly in line.
It's perfectly fair.
Perfectly fair.
But because there was these rumblings and people were saying, well, you know, blacks and Hispanics are being discriminated against by the banks who apparently don't want to make money.
Because they're such racists like that makes any kind of sense.
But anyway, so the government forced the banks to give loans to minorities.
And then when the interest rates went up, these unqualified people couldn't support, couldn't figure out or follow, you know, the variable rate mortgages and so on.
They couldn't afford things.
And that's one of the things that got the housing crash up and running.
So, yeah, that was pretty bad.
So, yeah, that was a big deal.
And so yeah, that seemed kind of important.
So if the banks, I mean one of the shakedowns the banks had was we're going to expose how you forced us to lend to unqualified people and the People are going to get mad at you, the government, rather than us, the banks.
And the government was like, okay, here's the money.
I mean, this is my theory.
I have no proof of it.
I'm just something I sort of mull over from time to time.
What was the shakedown?
Why the hell?
So you see people like the banksters just getting criminally rewarded, and that's horrendous.
You see, of course, negative consequences failing to accrue to teachers, teachers who are bad, teachers who are abusive, teachers who, I mean, they still get paid.
They may take them out of the classroom, so they put them in these rubber rooms.
They still get paid.
And still get their retirements and health benefits and all that kind of stuff.
So they see that there's a huge amount of this stuff going on where people are just able to escape negative consequences for bad decisions using the power of the state all the way from criminals and all the way to the very top.
The invasion of Iraq, arguably along with the Arab Spring that was encouraged by Obama, Arguably, these led to the dominoes, which caused the collapse of some Middle Eastern countries, which caused a net outflow into Europe and so on.
And where's the punishment?
You go and invade a country based on a slam dunk.
So the CIA said it's a slam dunk that they have weapons of mass destruction.
Well, now it's okay, because now the CIA is saying that Putin changed the U.S. election.
You know, 50%.
Of Democrats believe that the Russians directly altered the election counts.
I mean, of course, the whole point of this is to delegitimize the presidency of Trump, right?
Achieving that end.
So I think people look at the law now, in many ways, as an instrument of oppression, an instrument of screwing the middle class in return for buying The votes of the poor and the allegiance of the wealthy.
I think they view it as a cat and mouse game.
I don't think that they think it's a shred of morality left in the law, that it is simply a club wielded to oppress people.
And that means that I think a lot of people have the feeling that if you can get away with it, good for you.
And this is one of the great fallouts.
The bankruptcy that was averted in the financial crisis...
Well, you have averted a financial bankruptcy, but at the cost of a moral bankruptcy.
Because once people saw, oh, well, you know, the rich and powerful boy, they get to not, they don't have to abide by the consequences of their decisions.
You know, they screw up, they start leveraging, you know, they have a 30 to 1, like, exposure to asset ratio, and they, so they lose 3%, they're toast, right?
Well, they get bailed out by the government.
And nobody even asks us, right?
We just have to pay the bill, right?
And the poor, well, they get angry and everyone knows now that the welfare is simply a riot prevention mechanism.
That's all it is.
The welfare state is not because it helps the poor.
The welfare state exists and continues.
Nobody can argue that it helps the poor.
The welfare state exists and continues because Everyone's afraid of riots if it doesn't.
That's all it's about.
It has nothing to do with helping the poor.
Now it's just paying people to not burn down their neighborhoods.
That's the whole deal.
Thomas Sowell, Dr.
Thomas Sowell, a great writer and economist.
His books are fantastic to read.
He was talking about, you know, when he was a kid in Harlem, You know, he was talking to some kids at a school a little while back and he was pointing at a park and he said, you know, I used to go walk my dog there.
I used to hang out there with the other kids and people are like horrified and no kid goes there now.
I mean, it's gang warfare and drugs and violence and, you know, I assume lots of rutty sex in the mangled remains of the bushes and so on.
And nobody goes there.
And he said, oh yeah, you know, it used to be so hot that we'd sleep on the fire escapes or we'd sleep on the roof or whatever.
And people were like, oh, you could never do that now.
Now, This is a massive decay of the neighborhood, a massive decay of the entire environment.
And it wasn't like things were all rosy and peachy between blacks and whites when Tom Sowell, who is now, I think, 86 when he was a little boy, but things have gotten much, much worse socially over time.
And so I think the middle class in particular They look at the poor and they say, okay, well, they're being bought off because they're threatening to the powers that be because they could get really angry and upset and burn down neighborhoods and riots and all of that.
And they've got the time to do it because they're not busy, you know, getting up and going to work.
The rich, well, the rich have got the eyes and ears of the government and the allegiance of the government because the government is dependent upon them and all that.
And the government doesn't want them exposing the government secrets and all of that.
The middle class, the nice people, but they're the ones who are just getting exploited and wrung dry like, you know, children chained to the basement in a vampire home.
And so I think that there is this feeling that it's just a free-for-all.
You know, there's a veneer of rules, there's a veneer of law, but I think people just view it as a, you know, end of the empire free-for-all.
And it's not reflective of any higher moral standards anymore.
Yeah, but don't you think, you know, we could go back to what it was before when things were working properly and, you know, people knew how to arrange their affairs because they knew good would be rewarded, prudent savings.
And, well, we could, in theory, go back to that again, couldn't we?
If this current system were overthrown.
Yeah.
The Western society has created such A set of self-defeating disaster policies that it's just going to take a strong stomach.
And the society with the most adherence, the society that has most strongly internalized its moral rules is the society that tends to spread.
It's the society that tends to grow because it's just efficient.
It's just efficient.
Not a lot of family courts and Yeah.
In Iraq, right?
So, yeah, I mean, either there's going to be some reformation within the West, which is going to be ugly and difficult now, right?
I mean, the welfare state, I've argued for...
25, 35 years away.
The welfare state is a complete disaster.
And it always has been and it always will be.
And the welfare state, of course, people don't talk about the welfare state and its role in the migrant crisis, but of course the migrants are coming to Europe for the welfare state.
The welfare state was laid out like this big sumptuous buffet of infinite cash is laid out.
And then all the starving people in the world swarmed the buffet.
And it's not going to last.
It's not going to last.
So, you know, the welfare state of the foundation.
Nobody wants to talk about that.
Nobody wants to talk about the welfare state of the foundation.
It's a sacred cow, though.
The welfare state, I mean.
So nobody's going to talk about getting rid of it because it's a sacred cow.
Oh, it's a sacred cow to women.
It's a sacred cow.
It's a single mom's date.
See, men, men, we can get drafted and be sent off to war.
That's not a sacred cow.
But boy, talk about ending food stamps and relying on private charity.
Now that's a sacred cow.
And this is the basic reality that because it's negative to women's interests, it's a sacred cow politically.
The fact that, you know, men may end up drafted in the coming European Civil War, potentially.
Well, that's not a sacred cow, but boy, you wouldn't want to reduce benefits to single moms because that's a sacred cow, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah, I mean, talking about single moms, you know, you sort of feel that, you know, if the government is a parent, then, you know...
Our parent is a single mum who has absolutely no control over her children, who are running wild, annoying lots of people by their out-of-control behaviour.
And I just remember this cartoon I used to see when I was a child, wait till your father gets home.
We don't have that anymore because, you know, most mums are single mums.
So there's even that threat to scare the kids.
Yeah, I mean, I sort of held on to my phallus helmet and decided to sink into the latest Bridget Jones movie.
And I don't know if there are any...
I haven't gone far enough into it to make spoilers, and I'll probably do a review at the end of it.
But, you know, she basically sleeps with two guys in the space of a couple of days, gets pregnant, has no idea who the father is.
It's so funny.
It's such a wonderful little comedy.
And it's like, no, no, this is horrifying.
This is horrifying.
She's not even that pretty.
So the whole scenario is utterly unlikely.
No, but guess what?
Guess what?
The men are ravishing.
Because, you know, that's just what happens.
You just happen to sleep with a billionaire in a yurt who's, like, staggeringly handsome.
It's Patrick Dempsey from Grey's Anatomy.
And yeah, he's a very, very good looking guy.
That's a lot of hair.
And the other one is, I can't remember his name, is a British actor, the guy who was in the King's speech.
And so yeah, you have a rich, powerful, handsome lawyer, and a billionaire, beautiful American guy, and they're both vying over who's going to be the father.
It's like, in what insane world is this what single motherhood looks like at the age of 43?
Like, in what insane world?
Right?
She never says, oh, well, now I've got to go on the dole, right?
And it's like...
And there's this young...
Yeah.
In a bad neighborhood.
It's hideous fantasy stuff.
But, of course, you can't say anything truthful.
I mean, teenagers believe it.
And there could be something into doing all this stuff and not getting the payoff they expect.
Yeah, so single moms, you know, out there...
Thoroughly undermining Western morals, Western values, you know, sucking like predatory leeches on the lifeblood of the middle class, you know, and pumping out spawn after spawn of usually highly destructive and dysfunctional children.
I don't blame the children, but we can certainly put some responsibilities on the moms who won't choose a decent guy to be the father of their children.
And a single mom's condemned.
No, they're praised, you see.
They're heroic.
They're wonderful.
They're fantastic.
They're excellent.
They're, you know, just...
Like there's a scene in this Bridget Jones movie.
It's completely mad.
Oh my god.
It's such a fantasy of just everyone should serve the needs of women.
Like I watched this Paranoid.
I think it's called Paranoid or Paranoid.
It's a British show.
And there's this woman in it who's in her late 30s.
She's a cop.
And she breaks up.
Her boyfriend breaks up with her.
And it turns out she's pregnant.
And you know what happens is there's some young, good-looking guy who ends up taking care of her and the other man's child.
You know, because he's just...
She's so great.
She's so cool.
And, you know, he's just such a great and nice guy.
And this is all about serving the needs of women, serving the needs of women, serving the needs of women.
Do not allow any reality to break into what's going on in the world of women.
And...
So you see these women making these terrible decisions and having children with shitty men and then, you know, feasting on the taxpayers' remains like a jackal on a downed zebra.
Well, the men should stop them, shouldn't they?
The men should what?
They should stop them.
They should stop this from happening.
Please.
How do men stop this from happening?
How do men stop this from happening?
Well, they could.
Well, I guess they did a bit by voting for Trump.
But, you know, it's so telling that...
No, no, no.
But women vote.
They outlive men, right?
So, in general, there are more female voters than male voters.
So, can't outvote them.
Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of it, you know, just sort of goes back to, you know, respecting the institution of marriage.
So, you know, if you do respect it, then you will have to follow the rules.
And rules are that you can only have sex with your spouse.
And, you know, you can't have sex with anyone else.
And if you do, you're going to get into trouble.
And it was observing this rule that just kept the whole show on the road.
But now everybody is sexually liberated.
And, you know, the decline of your civilization is what happens as a result.
Why did you go to men solving the problem?
Sorry?
You went to, like, well, men should stop this, right?
Why?
Why is it men's responsibility to control women's behavior?
Shouldn't women stop this?
Shouldn't women shame other women into...
Not being single moms, and shouldn't they ostracize them, and shouldn't they write lots of articles about how horrifying it is for, you know, all of this proliferation of single motherhood and so on?
Why is it men's responsibility?
Well, because you're stronger and smarter, aren't you?
Wait, so you're saying that men are stronger and smarter, and so do you think that women shouldn't have the vote?
I would narrow the franchise.
I mean, I wouldn't not give women the vote just because they're women.
But I'd say things like, only taxpayers should have the vote.
So that would cut out a lot of men and a lot of women.
And then you might repeal this sort of anti-discrimination legislation.
So I guess companies don't have to pay maternity pay.
And then you'll get fewer women at work.
Yeah, I mean, you saw this with the Trump campaign that Ivanka had to come out and talk about family leave for women and all that kind of stuff, right?
And, you know, I mean, as far as government policies go, giving women more time with their babies is not the worst thing in the world, but, you know, they still had to have...
Donald Trump is not going to end the welfare state, right?
No, I know.
I mean, you know, because there's just so many sacred cows just sort of blocking the exit everywhere.
No, you keep saying sacred cows.
It's women's needs.
Give me a sacred cow that's not a woman's need.
Maybe, I mean, I'm sure there are, and I'm popping in my mind at the moment, could be my prejudice, but what are the unmentionables?
Maternity pay is a sacred cow.
Well, that's a woman's need.
Sex discrimination legislation is a sacred cow.
Old age pension, sacred cow, that's a woman's needs, right?
No-fault divorce.
Oh yes, sacred cow.
You can't possibly put restrictions on divorce.
You see, it's got to be completely no-fault divorce.
So that's another woman's need.
So what else?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, if there were a rule saying you have constitutional right not to be taxed above a certain percentage of your income or something like that, then it would keep a lot of things under control.
Because, of course, you need some taxation for the state to exist and schools and roads and things to be maintained, but not above a certain amount.
But schools, no, no, no.
Government schools are also women's needs because there's a giant daycare system for women and a giant employment mechanism for women.
The vast majority of teachers, particularly the younger ages, are female.
And so you get a lot of, and so it's a giant work farm for women, and it's a giant place for women to place their kids during the day, because, you know, homeschooling and raising your own kids, apparently that's quite a lot of work.
So, yeah, I mean, all of this stuff comes out of, I mean, the whole welfare state.
Now, you could say the military-industrial complex doesn't particularly serve women's needs, and I'm fine with that.
Oh, I thought of one.
Foreign aid?
Well, I think that's sentimentality, right?
This is sentimentality.
And so, yeah, I mean, all of these sacred cows, I mean, all they are is things that women will get upset about if you touch them.
Because, you know, women are entitled, right?
I mean, the number of people, like, I do these things which say, well, there's, you know, there's no old age pension.
I paid into it my whole life.
It's like, no, you didn't.
Government took money from you, but they spent it all on you and your friends, and so it's all gone.
Well, I gave this con man my money, so therefore I should have all the goods.
It's like, no, he's a con man.
That's what happens when you give a con man your money.
You don't get the goods, right?
And how will women argue about it?
Well, they will argue about it.
You know this as well as I do.
They'll argue about it emotionally.
I'll say, well, need, and hurt, and upset, and literally shaking, and, you know, I mean, it'll all just be hysteria.
And it won't be any kind of moral argument.
It will all just be, well, who's going to feed the children of the single mom without the welfare state?
It's like, it's just emotional crap, you know?
I mean, and so...
We all know that if you touch women's benefits, and the state largely exists to shovel money from hardworking men to not-so-hardworking women, and so if you touch women's benefits, the women will scream and shriek and get very upset and call you all sorts of terrible names and do all the things that Three-year-olds do when you take away their lollipop.
Except the names will be much more caustic than anything a three-year-old could come up with.
And so, yeah, you touch what women...
The state exists to transfer at the moment, transfer money from men to women, from hard-working people to less-working people, in general, exceptions, but I've cited studies on this before.
And, yeah, if you try and touch that, then women will scream bloody murder and you'll be called a misogynist and tearful women and literally shaking and hungry children and sick people and, like, you'll just be heartless and cruel and cold and mean.
And you will basically, society and civilization will submerge into a porgy goop of estrogen-based feels.
And, you know, we'll see if it...
Rises again or not.
So, you know, can men solve this problem?
I mean, I guess we'll have to.
You know, I guess we'll have to because it doesn't look like it's coming from the female quarter.
But I mean, you know, you could sort of say, look, this is a problem.
I mean, Ann Coulter was the one who said that the female women shouldn't be allowed the vote.
And if they didn't, there would never be another Democrat government ever again.
So, you know, she actually said that.
And maybe there'll be one day a strong man, man enough to say, I'm going to narrow the franchise to taxpayers only.
Well, yeah, I mean, that would help to some degree.
Which is what anti-discrimination legislation is.
Yeah, I mean, that may help to some degree, but the reality is that there are now so many women employed by the government.
Like, it's insane how many women are employed by the government.
Like, as I've said in a previous show, if the government keeps printing and borrowing money, then women can live-action role-play as men.
No, but so if you've got, I don't know, was it 40% of women are employed?
Like, it's 40% of government workers are women.
I can't remember the exact number, but it's some massive amount in the States.
And are they taxpayers?
In the UK, too?
I don't know.
I don't know if we classify them as taxpayers because they're on the receiving end of tax dollars.
Okay, they pay some in taxes, but is someone, some woman who's pencil pushing her way to retirement at some You know, useless layer of educational bureaucracy in the government.
Is she a taxpayer?
I don't think so.
I think if you're in the free market, then you could literally, you know, I would say, well, if you are, if you're going to narrow the franchise, theoretically, I think you'd have to be on the paying end of taxpayers.
And if you're working for the government, you're on the receiving end of tax money.
So you'd have to be on the paying end of tax money for that to work.
Well, I mean, there are countries.
I think Hong Kong has a flat rate income tax of 20%.
So, you know, if somebody says, you know, elect me, make me president, and I promise you that you will never have to pay more than 20% flat rate income tax, that might work.
And, you know, obviously, the government has to run itself on that amount of tax.
But work for what?
What do you mean work?
I mean, you know, people might like the idea of not being taxed more than 20%, say, and vote for that.
I mean, it'd be men, of course, but, you know, you're still half the population, aren't you?
Well, but what's the point of reducing taxes if you can't reduce your expenditures, right?
I mean, so much of the Western government's bills is non-discretionary spending.
It's legislated.
You have to pay it.
So what are you going to do?
They'll make you have to pay all the stuff.
Right.
It's not optional.
We're just going to get by as a government, as a country, on a 20% flat rate income tax.
We're not going to, you know, this is what it should be.
And everything that, you know, goes out of that range will have to go.
Yes, but it can't go because it's legislated, right?
I mean, it's mandatory spending.
Now, you can try and overturn all of that, in which case you have to go to women, You have to go to women and you have to say...
Now, you go to the military-industrial complex to some degree, so I understand all of that.
But the military-industrial complex doesn't vote.
They do a lot of lobbying, for sure, right?
But you'd have to go to women and say, yeah, sorry, you're going to have to live on, you know, if you're on the welfare state, you're going to live on half or a third of what we've been paying you in terms of benefits.
Now, is that the end of the world?
No, because the average woman with a couple of kids on the welfare state gets over $60,000 to $70,000 in benefits.
So can she live on half of that?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, when I grew up, we were dirt poor.
But you have to go to women and you have to say, sorry, ladies, can't pay, can't do it.
And what are the women going to do?
Well, I guess we'll just have to wait for some sort of financial collapse or something, you know, if we're never going to do it.
What will the women do if you go to them and you say, no, can't do it, can't pay, can't do it?
Well, we're just saying, you know, we're going to vote.
Things are going to be different from now on.
Yes, of course, there'll be a lot of screaming and shouting, but I imagine there will be some people who think, hey, that's a really good idea.
Let's go for it.
That will be the men, I mean.
No?
Well, you know, can I share something with you?
It's just complete theory.
I have no...
I don't even know if I'll believe this tomorrow, but let me.
So, I don't think women want to have all these rights.
Because they're acting in a way that's going to guarantee that those rights are going to come to a crashing end.
When you see an addict, the guy who's addicted to cocaine, he doesn't want to be addicted to cocaine.
He'll either try and find a way to quit on his own, or what he'll do is he'll escalate things to the point where he just can't have cocaine.
He goes to jail, or he's completely broke, or he's dead.
When you're engaged in a truly escalating kind of addiction, you don't want the thing itself.
Because you're acting in a way that's for sure going to have it end in some manner, right?
I mean, like if you do cocaine, you know, once a month, you know, it's, you know, going to be kind of expensive, not great for your health, but it's kind of sustainable.
But if you keep escalating and escalating, then you're acting in a way like you really, really hate the thing you're addicted to.
You don't want it in your life and you're acting in a way that's going to have it not be in.
And so, you know, when I look at, you know, all these welcome refugees, little hearts and bunnies and shit like that over in Europe, and when I look at this claw of more and more and more, like this cryptkeeper grab everything and it's spying stuff that goes on in the single mother culture and all of that, I just, I don't, I don't think that women really want all these rights.
Because the way that they're acting, they can't possibly sustain it.
It's like they're trying to say, stop us.
We're crazy now.
Stop us.
Take this away from me.
We don't know.
The women in Europe know that the governments are already hugely in debt.
Can't pay their bills, right?
And they're saying, let's bring a million migrants in who we have to now pay.
God, God, ungodly amounts of money, right?
And so clearly they're saying, we don't want the society to continue the way it is.
Like, it's going to have to end.
I don't honestly know.
Like, the way that women are acting in Europe in particular, the way that women are acting, okay, we get it.
You don't want all of this stuff.
Maybe you want to go back and be married.
Maybe you want to go back and have kids, you know.
Not the end of the world if you do.
The housewives too tend to be the happiest people on the planet.
There's something to be said for that.
But the way that women are acting and voting, it's so ridiculously unsustainable that I can't help but think deep down that I just don't want this stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, sometimes I say, you know, hide the chocolates from me.
You know, hide the chips or whatever.
You know, so maybe they're kind of trying to say something like that.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, the way women are voting and all that, it's a cry.
It's a cry for help.
And again, I'm generalizing.
There are fantastic women for smaller government and lots of kucky lefty men around.
So I'm generalizing.
But the statistics are still pretty clear that there really wouldn't be a migrant crisis in the way that it's manifesting if it wasn't for women voters and women leaders.
I mean, this is just the way it is.
Yeah, and not having enough...
Children, of course, it's all part of feminism, you know, having fewer children, or if you have them, they're not, you know, productive citizens because of the bad parenting.
You know, there's just so much stuff happening to make things bad.
Right.
Right.
So, yeah, we'll see how this plays out.
But it's important to remember that the idea of universal suffrage and all of that, I mean, it's...
It's a pretty new idea.
It's, you know, in many countries, it's less than 100 years old.
It didn't last very long in ancient Greece or ancient Rome, did it?
That's a scary thought.
I don't know.
I mean, did a lot of women have the right to vote in ancient Greece and ancient Rome?
Oh, no, no.
I mean, you know, it's like, I know they had a kind of democracy in ancient Athens, but it didn't last very long, I mean.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you had multiculturalism.
You had mass infiltration of hostile or indifferent cultural elements, followed by a welfare state, followed by, yeah, increased liberties for women, followed by a collapse of the society.
I mean, femininity these days is just another government program.
Female nature is just another government program.
It's not anything real.
It's not anything organic.
It's not anything evolved.
It's not anything natural.
Masculinity is also a government program these days.
What do you mean?
Sorry?
What do you mean about masculinity being a government program?
I mean, you've got men being raised by single moms, being taught by women, being told by the culture that masculinity is toxic and that they're bad and they need to be drugged because they're broken and mentally ill because they're restless with this girl-centric, girly-centric universe of schools.
And so you have like anti-male rhetoric surrounding boys, particularly if you're a white male.
It's not so bad if you're Black or Hispanic because people are afraid of racism for that.
Nobody's afraid of racism against whites.
I mean, it's almost natural.
But so, yeah, I mean, the way that boys are being raised, I mean, the single motherhood is a government program and requires, you know, why is America in debt?
Because of single moms in general.
And why is there a welfare state?
Because of single moms.
So single motherhood Is a government program.
The effects of men, of boys, right?
Growing up without fathers has been well documented and I've gone into this many times in the show before.
The negative effects of growing up without a father.
Why are so many boys growing up without fathers?
Because of the government program called the welfare state slash single motherhood.
And why are so many boys growing up without exposure to male role models when they're young?
Why are there so many female teachers?
Well, because apparently any man who wants to work with children is de facto a pedophile.
Can you imagine that?
Well, a black wants to be a babysitter.
Well, he must be a ha, right?
I mean, you know, it's like, well, a Hispanic woman wants to work with children.
She must be a ha, right?
I mean, it's crazy, right?
But you can do this and get away with this male stuff because men are there to serve society.
Don't know how to find their own interests, although I think we're learning because we realize the consequences of not gathering together.
When there's identity politics going on, you have to gather together as a group and try and find a way to survive.
There's just no other.
The loners get picked off, and the males in particular are loners these days.
So, yeah, I mean, the fact that men are raised by single moms, so many men are raised by single moms, and taught by Female teachers throughout most of the youth and don't really come up to any kind of male role model often until they're in high school.
And even then the role models are generally Cucked up to hell and gone because of a highly lefty, girly bureaucracy in education.
And then they go to college and they hear more anti-male rhetoric and more female empowerment and more cisgender privilege and white male scum and all that.
So masculinity is a government program.
And it's supported by the government program called single motherhood and government schools and higher education and the media and all that.
So masculinity and femininity have drifted so far from what's organic.
That you do end up with, you know, being able to check off 53 categories of gender in a college application.
There's nothing organic about it at all anymore.
And there won't be until the government stops screwing around with our basic identities.
When will they stop screwing around with our gender identities?
I mean, it's just getting worse.
I mean, you know, you just get even crazier stuff being proposed, you know, like a gender neutral pronoun, you know.
But it's in the UK, it's in the States, in Canada.
I guess it'll spread all around the world.
Oh no, it won't spread all around the world.
It won't spread all around the world because all around the world, well, throughout most places, outside of the West and just about every place, women don't have nearly as much social power.
Women are there.
I mean, if you look at certain cultures, women are basically there to be breeding machines and that's how they hope to expand.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
I appreciate the call.
Always a great pleasure to chat.
Thank you for a stimulating conversation.
All right.
Bye.
Take care.
All right.
Up next, we have Colin.
Colin wrote in and said, I can't seem to wrap my head around the justification of the electoral college.
How can one really argue objectively that one citizen deserves a more weighted vote than another, determined by a geographic location?
I understand the benefits of having it, but how can one really argue against the basic concept of each citizen having exactly equal voting power?
It seems to me like the Electoral College is an affirmative action program for people living in smaller states.
That's from Colin.
Hey Colin, how you doing?
Hey, Stefan.
I'm well.
How about you?
I'm good.
I'm curious why you care about this.
Well, so, I guess...
I'm not saying you shouldn't, right?
When I say, why do you care about this?
I'm just curious.
Well, I was a political science major at UCLA. I graduated a few months ago, like six months ago.
But that's the short answer.
But the long answer...
I mean, do you mind if I go on a little 30-second rant about this?
You know, if you can keep your rent down to 30 seconds, you can have my job.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Maybe like 45.
All right.
So just to give a little context, I know this has become somewhat of a partisan issue lately.
Obviously, it's fueled mostly by the people that are upset about Hillary's loss, despite the fact that she won the popular vote.
But I'll just say, I guess I'll just say, I voted for Trump, so I'm not really...
Oh my god, she did not win the popular vote.
I know numerically, right?
But she did not win the popular vote because nobody was trying to get the popular vote.
You know, if the popular vote had been how you win, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote because that's what he would have focused on.
She didn't win the popular vote.
It's not like there were two votes going on simultaneously that both people were trying.
She did not win the popular vote because Donald Trump was not trying to win the popular vote.
Yes.
Okay, fair enough.
But I guess just for the purpose of why this has become an issue, obviously the mainstream media narrative currently is like, oh, you know, the Electoral College is such a bad idea because allegedly Hillary won the popular vote.
Right?
Would you agree with that?
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, I would just say to the media, then you don't understand how elections work, which I guess they didn't because they were so bad at predicting it.
But, you know, the moment someone brings that kind of stuff up, it's like, you are a sore fucking loser.
Get out of my face.
You know, that's because it's the way...
When you're popular, I was like, that's not how...
Not how it works, right?
I mean, it's sort of like saying, okay, it's true that Jimmy Connors in his prime beat me six love, six love, six love at Wimbledon, but I took more steps on the court, so that's gotta count for something.
No.
I ran more on the court, that's gotta count for something.
No.
I hit more forehands on the court, that's gotta count for something.
No.
Not how it works.
It's not how you play the game.
You know, as Bill Mitchell has pointed out, I mean, it's the number of games you win that get you the championship ring, not the number of points.
Like, you can score the most goals in the entire soccer league and still lose the soccer league.
Well, I score more goals than anyone else.
It's like, all you're saying is that you're a sore loser who doesn't know how to count the actual way you win.
Yeah, no, I totally agree.
And I know that it is irrelevant, ultimately.
And the Democrats had eight years to fix that goddamn problem if they wanted.
I know, and now suddenly they only care.
And they didn't, so shut up.
Not you.
They only care now, yeah.
They care because they lost and they suck at losing and they're sore losers and they're idiots and they're girls and they're whatever, right?
It's stupid, whiny crap.
That's all it is.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, they're pulling out everything they can possibly luster up at this point.
But that's not really my question, though.
I guess my question is, to answer your initial question, why do I care?
I mean, yeah, it's because it's been on the front page of a lot of...
You know, news, whatever.
But why do you care?
Why do you care what the left is saying?
Because of their sore loser tantrum-y shit.
Why do you care?
Well, it made me think about it.
And I'm questioning whether that is actually the best way to actually administer an election.
And I'm curious of your opinion on it.
Because, like I said in the question that...
That Michael stated that I wrote.
How can it be justified to diminish the power of anyone's vote?
Basically, I feel like all arguments for the Electoral College are kind of non-sequiturs to the argument of one person, one vote.
Well, I mean, I don't know all of the reasons behind the institutionalization of the Electoral College.
I can certainly see some arguments for it.
Because if you have a state in the bag, right, through the Electoral College, right, like the South is sort of pro-Republican, right?
And the sort of East Coast, New York, and the West Coast, California, are more pro-Democrat, right?
Yes.
Right.
So what you end up doing is if you're a...
Republican, you will try to go to those states that you can budge, right?
Yeah.
So you spend less time campaigning among the people who already agree with you, and you spend more time campaigning among people who are on the fence, right?
So you kind of focus your political energies on people who are on the fence, which is, you know, in some ways you could make a case.
That's kind of what you'd want to do in a republic, is to have The political candidates focus on the needs and preferences of those not who are already in the bag and so on.
So that's sort of one possibility.
Another possibility, of course, is when they were building America, they had to convince people to join, right?
And so how do you convince a tiny state to join when they say, well, why the hell would we join?
There's going to be some federal government.
We're going to be outvoted by everyone else with bigger populations, like other states with bigger populations.
So why the hell would we join?
So you have to find some way to entice them in, right?
And you say, no, no, no, it's going to be a little bit more equal than what you think.
It's not just going to be based on population, right?
Because also then, if you want to get your way, you're going to just move to the state with a bigger population.
Because if you want to get your way, and you're in Wyoming with 600,000 people, everyone's going to then move, and half the country's going to be unpopulated.
No one's going to move there because you've got no say in politics, right?
Well, you would have just as much say as anybody else in the country.
Right?
One man, one vote.
So it doesn't really matter where you move.
No, but there are states, right?
There are states, and people move to those states.
Like, Texas has a character.
California used to have a character, and now it's got a Hispanic.
Whatever, right?
So states have characters, and there are like-minded people and cultures within those states, right?
Yes.
And so those states wouldn't have wanted to join the union if they couldn't have some way of dealing with the fact that some of the other states had vastly bigger populations, find some way to keep their character and have a bigger voice.
Sure.
So you're saying that it's an incentive, it's like states are characterized as either red or blue, basically?
I don't know what that means, sorry.
Sorry, you're saying that states are characterized as either Republican or Democrat, and that incentivizes people to move towards them, like depending on their political affiliation?
No.
Larger states, right?
I mean, you'd just move to a larger state.
And yeah, of course, then it would adapt to certain cultures or whatever, for sure.
But yeah, I mean, how would you get people to join?
Well, how would I get people to join my state?
No, how would you get people to join America if there was no electoral college?
Because they'd say, well, no, listen, as a state, we've got...
How's the federal government going to benefit us?
The same way it benefits everybody else.
Well, no, because they would get outvoted, right?
I mean, if you're the biggest state in the union, you have a...
If it's just by population, then you have by far the biggest influence over federal government, right?
Well, but...
Yes, but I mean, I understand that, but it's also the most people have the most influence over the federal government.
Right, but states have characters.
But states are what?
I just feel like we're going around in circles here.
Sorry, sorry.
The quality is kind of poor.
What do you mean?
You're kind of breaking up a little bit.
It's weird because during the last couple of callers, I could hear everything just fine, but now it's kind of broken up.
Everything sounds great on my end.
Yeah, maybe just coming through down to your end.
Now, the other thing too is, let's just look at...
There are certain states that have a higher population of city dwellers, right?
And there are other states that would have a higher population of country dwellers, right?
Yes.
Now, let's say it's sort of one person, one vote.
Now, the city-dwelling states, Washington, D.C., let's say, lots of people in cities, versus, you know, Montana, Wyoming, and other places where lots of people in the country.
Now, do you think that people in the country have always the same interests as people in the city?
Oh, not even close.
Give me some examples of the differences in interest between these two groups.
Well, I guess the type of work that they do, for instance, like coal miners, for instance.
No one cares about that that lives in New York.
Because they're completely disconnected from it.
Right.
Yeah, I'm thinking more around political stuff.
Okay.
So, for instance, when it comes to Hiring illegal immigrants, I would imagine that people of the country, like farmers, would have a different perspective than people who live in the city, where it may not be quite as common, maybe in the construction industry and so on.
Oh, sure.
Manual labor jobs, that kind of thing.
Yeah, or it could be, of course, that if it comes to taxes, then people in the city would rather food get taxed before it's processed, And people in the country would rather the food get taxed after it's processed, right?
Sure, yes.
So, I mean, you could sort of go on and on like this all day, but the reality is that people in the city and people in the country do not always have the same interests.
Now, people in the city want food to be as cheap as possible, and people in the country want food to be as expensive as possible, right?
You understand, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Right.
And it is cheaper in some ways.
Per capita, it's cheaper to provide services to people in the city than it is to provide services to people in the country, right?
Yes.
So there's disparate values between people in the country and people in the city.
Now, so for states where there's a lower population, it's not just that they have a lower population.
they have different interests than the states with high populations.
In general, because the states with high populations have more urban dwellers and the states with smaller populations have more rural dwellers.
It's not perfect, but it's a rough gauge, right?
Yes, but I feel like that's kind of a different issue.
To me, it seems like you either kind of screw over the people in the city or you screw over the people...
Living, you know, in the, in more of like, you know, suburban farm, you know, smaller state geography.
So, but why wouldn't you just, because in return, okay, obviously they have different interests if you live in an urban or rural area, because of geography, you know, political interests, whatever.
But, but But it's kind of a zero-sum thing where if you give more to one, if you give a more weighted vote to people in a rural area, you are inevitably taking away voting power from someone in a city.
No, because there are more people in the city.
We just went through this.
There are more people in the city and fewer people in the country.
So to even it out, you have to give people in the country more of a say.
Because if the people in the country aren't happy, guess what?
Everyone moves to the city, no one's producing any food, and everyone starves to death.
I could see that, but I haven't heard anyone make that argument.
I mean, it just seems...
Well, then you get to figure your argument out on the fly.
That's good.
You're an educated guy.
What do you think of the argument?
I mean, fair enough.
I get it.
I mean, I guess that makes sense that agriculture could collapse if their interests are just completely oppressed.
But it just doesn't seem like...
I don't know.
I guess I'm just repeating myself.
That just seems like kind of a non sequitur to...
Isn't it the government's job to cater to the majority, the common interest?
What?
Isn't it the government's job to cater to the majority?
Yeah, the majority of people.
Like, just because...
Oh my god.
Is this what you learned in political science?
Trust me.
I didn't really take anything...
They didn't really talk about that.
No, seriously.
It's the government's job to cater to the majority?
Is that why, I don't know, in Europe, are they asking the people...
Are they giving a referendum out to the people saying, do you want a million Muslims in your country?
Are they doing referendums based on that?
No.
How on earth could it possibly be the government's job to cater to the majority of people?
Well I'm saying it should be.
Well, who cares what it should be?
I mean, you deal with what is in the world, not what should be.
I mean, your political science degree, you know, you don't take a physics degree and say, well, if we could fly, where would you go?
It's like, that's not physics, right?
You deal with the world as it is, not the world that it would be great if in an ideal sense, right?
Okay, yeah, sure.
In an ideal sense, all employees should be massively productive.
Therefore, I guess we don't ever need to fire everyone.
So let's get rid of all of those procedures.
Well, no, sorry.
Right?
I mean...
But it's kind of an issue at hand here, right?
I mean, people are...
I mean, it could have...
What is an issue at hand?
You know, like, the Electoral College is kind of at...
People are kind of...
People are speaking up.
Why do you care?
The Electoral College is not going to be abolished in any time soon.
Guaranteed.
I mean, the Republicans are pretty much in charge of the U.S. government for the next while.
It's not going to happen.
Nothing's going to change.
Yeah, absolutely.
Right?
And so what do you care?
And you can't affect it anyway.
Oh, you're right.
But it's just, it's a concept that is relevant.
No, you've got people in your life who are bitching to you about the electoral college and you want an answer for them, right?
Let's just be honest.
It's nothing to do with anything abstract.
You've got difficult conversations in your life about the Electoral College and you want an answer, right?
Sort of.
Okay, so if there are people in your life saying, well, the Electoral College is not one person, one vote, do you think it's a big problem that there's such a thing as lobbying?
Do you think that lobbying maybe sways the political process just a little bit more?
Oh, absolutely.
Do you think that foreign money flooding into the American political system, like the Saudi money flowing into, as they claim, Hillary Clinton's campaign, do you think that Carla Slim owning a significant portion of the New York Times might have something to do with it?
How about illegal immigrants voting?
Illegal immigrants voting.
Dead people.
Dead people apparently all lean to the left.
Guess if Carrie Fisher had died before the election, Hillary Clinton might have got one more vote.
Well, she probably did anyway.
But when it comes to affecting the election...
Do we really think that the Electoral College is the big issue, is the big problem?
No, I definitely don't.
How about the Democrats flooding the American political landscape with legal and illegal immigrants, all who are drawn from cultures who are going to vote for the left?
These things are vastly more important than the Electoral College.
So my question is again, why do you care?
Because...
The reason why I care is because it's become a partisan issue, and I'm fascinated by the fact that I almost agree with the side that I never agree with.
And that's why I care.
And I know there's a million more important issues in the world, but that doesn't really mean that we only have to talk about the top five or anything like that.
I mean, this is just kind of a theoretical...
Okay, let's say you're Wyoming, and it changes to direct voting.
Sure.
And let's say that you can snap your fingers and leave the union.
Why would you stay?
You've just lost a massive amount of influence.
Nobody's ever going to bother to come to your state or address its issues anymore or even think about you because you just don't have the population.
Maybe not Wyoming, but some low population state, right?
Why on earth would you ever be in the union anymore?
Well, you wouldn't.
Okay, so there's your answer.
But isn't that like an infringement?
Isn't that kind of like an affirmative action incentive to keep them there and as a result you get a more magnified voting power?
Well, if you want the states who are smaller in population to stay in the union, Then you have to give them proportionately higher representation than their mere population allows.
Because otherwise, they're not going to be interested in staying in the Union, and then you're going to have a breakup of America.
Now, if you say, well, I'm perfectly happy with the breakup of America and potential civil war, then sure, you can say, let's get rid of the Electoral College.
If you feel that that may not be a massively productive thing, I don't know, it may happen anyway.
But if you feel that may not be a massively productive thing, then maybe we can deal with the other six billion things that vastly more control the political process than anything as archaic as the Electoral College.
Sure, I understand that.
It just seems to me like it's an infringement on freedom, really, to put this in place.
Okay, what do you mean by an infringement of freedom?
Compared to what?
Compared to just...
I don't know.
I don't think there would be such unrest if everyone just knew that their vote had just as much power as any other guy or any other woman.
You don't think the left would be upset if there was not an electoral college?
I don't think that...
I don't think that anyone except for the people who have...
I don't think that anyone except for the people living in the smaller states would have a problem with it, obviously, because then their votes would obviously be worth more.
But how can you...
I just can't imagine them saying, like, wait a minute, you want our votes to be equal?
You can't do that.
That seems so hypocritical.
I don't understand what you mean.
You think the left would be happy.
If there was no electoral, you think they would not be contesting or feeling that Trump was not legitimate or, you know, some people on the left are saying, not my president.
You feel that that would not be happening if there was not an electoral college issue?
Well, I guess it depends on whether he won or not, because if he won, then they just complain about whatever system is in place.
Yeah, listen, don't be drawn into the left's game of give us this and we'll be satisfied.
Oh, absolutely.
No, listen, I'm not just talking to you, I'm talking to the audience as a whole.
Do not get drawn into the left's game of saying, they'll say this, we have a legitimate complaint and here are our reasons why.
Now, if you deal with these legitimate issues, we'll be perfectly fine and everything will be great and everything will be wonderful and we're never going to complain again.
Come on.
Have you never been nagged by someone?
No, I have not never.
I have been many times.
You've been nagged, right?
Absolutely.
Was there ever any way to satisfy the person who was nagging you and have them be happy forever?
No, there's not.
And I live in California.
It's not exactly, you know.
Yeah, don't get drawn into this.
It's not nag free or The electoral college stuff is complete bullshit.
It's just the left snagging.
And let's say that they could snap their fingers and get rid of the electoral college tomorrow.
It would just be something else.
If they don't get their way, they have hissy fits, they have tantrums, they stomp their little feet, and they hold their breath until they turn blue.
Though not, of course, until they do what some people would like.
But yeah, I mean, it's got nothing to do with the electoral college.
They really hate Trump.
They're addicted to power.
They've really failed.
You know, their affirmative action candidate, one, Barack Hussein Obama, ended up shredding and destroying the legitimacy and political success of the Democrats, right?
They put in their identity politics, affirmative action candidate.
And he did statistically on average what affirmative action candidates do, which is that they radically underperform, which is why there needs to be affirmative action in the eyes of some, right?
And so, yeah, why have they failed so much?
Because they embraced identity politics.
And they pushed race-baiting narratives and they said that they were really into diversity and then verbally abused everyone who disagreed with them because they lied, because they manufactured polls which had Hillary Clinton doing the wrong things and being overconfident.
And so the left, if they want to know why they lost the fucking election, look in the mirror.
Oh, you can't, because you're vampires.
You have no reflection whatsoever.
So don't get drawn into this.
It's got anything.
Yeah, if you want to ask the questions, sure, fine.
I mean, who cares, right?
I have better things to do with your life, and I'm sure you have better things to do with your life than trying to figure out ancient institutions you can't possibly change that aren't the cause of the problems of the election.
The left screwed themselves.
The left overplayed their hand.
If they'd been patient, if they'd not gone full-tilt identity politics, they might not have revolted so many people into Turning Trump.
If the left had not viciously attacked anyone who was pro-Trump, they might not have driven Trump support underground where they couldn't measure it or see it anymore.
If the left had not commissioned all of these bullshit polls designed to galvanize the base with how well Hillary Clinton was doing, they might not have become overconfident and she might not have retreated from public life, not given press conferences and not done as many outings as Donald Trump did.
This is classic government Public sector versus capitalist private sector.
Donald Trump was putting in his own money.
Hillary Clinton wasn't.
You know, Hillary Clinton with her caustic remark about Donald Trump, what kind of idiot loses over a billion dollars?
Well, she spent well over a billion dollars failing to become president.
With all her political lineage, with all the media, the academic, the starlets, the stars, everyone behind her, she still completely failed because she's Horribly boring, and she's a terrible nag.
Nobody likes that.
Deplorables.
Racist.
Xenophobic.
Islamophobic.
She's just like everyone's nightmare ex-wife.
And so she's got all the charisma.
Of, you know, a combination shuriken blowtorch fish across the forehead.
And so they lost because they nominated the wrong person.
They lost because they manipulated Bernie Sanders out of the...
I don't know if Bernie Sanders would have won, but it would at least have been an honest fight.
And they lost because they're all a bunch of government whack jobs up against free market people and government loses against the free market almost every single time.
Just look at the American Revolution versus the British troops and you'll see what I mean.
So the idea that this has anything to do with the Electoral College, I mean, it's just completely ridiculous.
And I don't know if you've ever had pathetic people in your life who consistently fuck up their own lives and what they do is blame absolutely everything but themselves.
Those people are exhausting.
And you can, if you want, say...
Oh, you know, well, I never became a great director because I never really had a good camera.
Oh, here's a good camera.
Well, I do have a good camera, but, you know, the problem is I don't have a computer to write my scripts on.
Oh, here's a computer.
Well, okay, I got a good camera.
I got a computer, but, you know, I just have to keep working, and I can't concentrate on making my movies because I just have to keep working, and it keeps distracting me.
Oh, okay.
Here's your camera.
Here's your computer, and I will pay for you to take a couple of months off to work on your movie.
Well, you know, I can start working on the movie, but the problem, like, you understand, at some point you realize that they're never going to be a movie maker, right?
Yeah, totally.
So, this is nothing, I mean, yeah, if you want to dick around with the electoral college, it's fine.
There's nothing wrong with asking those questions, but Jesus Christ on a stick, don't think it's got anything to do with the election.
It's just another piss-poor excuse of losers who can't accept that they fucked up.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, Trump says, oh, you know, I would have campaigned differently.
I believe it.
I'm sure he would have done it successfully.
But, you know, and obviously, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Didn't, sorry, didn't Obama say, well, if I'd been running for a third term, I would have won.
Oh, yeah.
Like, what, from Hawaii on, I mean, he went and campaigned for Hillary Clinton.
She didn't, didn't, he didn't do a damn thing for her.
Man's insane.
Yeah, it's, it's, that's ridiculous.
So, yeah, talk, smooth transition, right?
Yeah.
But the arguments I've been hearing around here are not...
I'm not saying that I am kind of like, wow, you're right, to the people that have been bitching at me.
Because, you know, they're all, you know, it enables the white supremacy states.
And obviously that is like a no credibility thing to say.
But I'm just saying that's kind of what jogged my thinking about this.
And I know, yeah, there's like a million more significant issues, but...
Oh, just tell them, would you be bitching about the Electoral College if Hillary won?
No, then shut up.
Yeah, of course not.
These people are wasting your time.
I mean, they're wasting your time.
Don't get drawn into bullshit non-narratives that are just emotional defenses.
This is just a big policy in life.
Just a big policy in life.
Just don't get drawn into people's bullshit excuses as to why they failed.
The Democrats, They failed.
And they failed with every conceivable method of support they could possibly, possibly have.
I mean, not to mention all the illegal immigrant votes, plus the fact that they were dangling citizenship, plus the fact that they imported, you know, boatloads and millions and millions of third world cultures all to vote for the left.
And they got the academics and they got the media and they've got, you know, everyone in there.
They got pollsters.
They've got, you know, a bunch of internet quote fact checking.
So, I mean, they've got everything.
They got the moderators.
I mean, you got the people leaking questions.
Leaking questions!
They still can't win.
They're terrible.
They're terrible at what they do because they have not been promoting on the basis of competence, but they've been promoting on the basis of identity politics.
Hillary Clinton was put forward not because she's a good campaigner, but because she's got a tube-shaped baby-maker Aimed at her knees.
That's why she was put into office.
She was put as the nomination.
They tried to get her into office based on identity politics.
And identity politics suck.
That is on the wrong side of history now.
The tide has turned on that.
I'm not saying it's completely gone.
Of course, right?
But the tide has turned on that.
And people are just tired of this bullshit.
And it worked with Barack Obama, and people saw the results of Barack Obama, doubling of the national debt, endless foreign catastrophes, just, you know, I mean, race-baiting, neighborhoods being burnt down, and, you know, the instigator-in-chief constantly sowing salt into everybody's ancient wounds.
So, yeah, people, they won with Barack Obama, and they thought the same identity politics.
Well, let's just switch from race to gender, and we'll do the same thing.
But, yeah.
Didn't work?
And it didn't work entirely because of Donald Trump and the internet.
But anyway, so I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I appreciate the call.
It's always fun to tassel over this stuff.
And listen, I mean, I probably haven't done anywhere near justice as to why there is an electoral college, but if people have more, please put it in the comments below the video or let us know.
I think it's interesting stuff, but it's not going to change.
I don't care.
I'm really happy that the Democrats are turning on the electoral college.
I think it's just wonderful.
You know, never interrupt your Alright, up next we have Joel.
Joel wrote in and said, I want to challenge this quote from your book, Universally Preferable Behavior.
Alright, start quote.
Ethics cannot be objectively defined as, that which is good for man's survival.
Certain individuals can survive very well by preying on others, so this definition of ethics does not overcome the problem of subjectivism.
In biological terms, this would be analogous to describing evolutionary tendencies as that which is good for life's survival.
This would make no sense.
Human society is an ecosystem of competing interests just as the rainforest is, and what is good for one man so often comes at the expense of another." My question for Stefan, objective ethics does not necessarily result from an objective reality.
On what basis do you assume reality has the property of ethics?
Ethics take the form of ideas within our minds.
They are not observable in physical form.
We dismiss divine beings and their commands for this same reason.
So why not ethics?
That's from Joel.
Hey Joel, I'm not sure what your question is out of that because there was just a whole bunch of stuff in there.
So maybe you can boil it down or we do them one at a time.
My question was actually a little...
Well, I'm glad we shortened it a little, because I'm not immortal.
Maybe you can boil it down to what you really want to ask.
Essentially, what I want to ask is, why do you assume that there is such thing as objective ethics, just because there's an objective reality?
Why does reality have to necessitate ethics as a property?
Why aren't ethics simply Something that humans construct for the purposes of social cohesion or our own self-interest within society.
You read the book, right?
Well, yeah, I did.
Okay, so what's my argument for it?
Don't just say I assume something when I've written an entire book proving it.
Okay, well, the quote that I quoted from your book, you dismiss the notion of deriving ethics from what is good for man's survival, and you do so on the basis that essentially what is good for one man is not necessarily good for another, and that this would necessitate conflict.
And my assertion is that...
Do you disagree with that?
Yes.
I don't necessarily...
You and I are disagreeing at the moment.
Exactly.
You disagree with my book, but you're saying that there can be one rule that benefits everyone.
No, that's not what I'm saying.
What you've said is that conflict arises from We have competing interests as human beings.
Let's put it this way, because I guess this has been lost on you.
I want to keep my iPad, you want to steal my iPad.
Yes.
Only one of us can get our way and be happy in the moment, right?
Of course.
If I keep my iPad, you don't get to steal it.
If you steal it, I don't.
Yeah.
So, if we say, well, a respect for property rights is good for everyone, well, it's not good for you if you want to steal something from me, right?
But what if I have property myself, and therefore, in society, property rights would benefit me because of...
Well, of course.
Of course you want to keep.
Of course you want to keep.
All the thieves want to keep what they've stolen, but that doesn't mean that thieves don't steal because they want...
To respect property.
Thieves steal, right?
Of course they steal, right?
My point was that in evolution, the universe itself does not seem to care whether you respect property rights or not.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We finish a point before we move on to the next one.
Okay.
Okay.
That which is good for man's survival.
Well, let me ask you this.
Do you think that Hillary Clinton has made more money through politics than she would have made as a private citizen?
They're worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Clintons.
Well, of course.
She'd be useless as a private citizen.
Well, she...
May not be useless, but she sure as hell probably wouldn't be making hundreds of millions of dollars, right?
The Saudis wouldn't have.
And we know this because the moment that she leaves office, right, her speaking fees plummet, right?
And her husband's speaking fees plummet, right?
So, has the government been good for Hillary Clinton?
Of course.
Has it been negative for all the people who have to pay For all of the bills that she's accumulating by selling off their interest to other people.
Well, of course, but it's been beneficial to Goldman Sachs and Saudi Arabia.
Okay, so it's been beneficial to a bunch of people, but it's been very negative to other people, right?
Yes.
Okay, so here we have a situation where one group is prospering at the expense of another group.
Essentially parasites.
Right.
Now, that which is good for man's survival, well, she's surviving very nicely.
Yeah, her strategy is working out for her.
It really is, right?
Yeah.
And so she would fight tooth and nail for a reduction in the power of the state that serves her financial interests or power, lust interests or whatever, whereas other people who are having to pay for it would also, would want a reduction in the size and power of the state, right?
Right.
Yeah.
So is it good to reduce the size and power of the state?
Well, it is for the people who are paying for it.
It's very bad for the people who are profiting from it.
Yeah.
I agree with that.
So we're in agreement, and you agree with my first statement.
That which is good for man's survival.
Well, for certain people, having a big, powerful government is very good for their survival.
For other people, it's very bad.
For some people, respecting property rights is very good for their survival.
for other people, violating property rights is very good for their survival.
Hmm.
Yes?
Thank you.
You keep saying yes, but I've just overturned your point and you're not admitting anything.
I don't understand.
Do you not know what we're talking about?
But that is my point.
My point is essentially exactly...
No, that's my point!
You just agreed with my point.
But isn't the point of universally preferable behavior that we have a set of morals with which we can objectively decide behavior for everybody that is apparently universally preferable?
Well, you just created a tautology, isn't universally preferable behavior that which is universally preferable for people?
You haven't added it, you've just restated the name of the theory.
No, but I'm saying, obviously there isn't a universal preference, because as you said, Hillary Clinton's preference is different to the average American citizen's preference.
So how can there be a universally preferable behavior that's applicable to Hillary Clinton and the average taxpayer?
Right.
And what I'm saying is that, as you quoted from the book, and I'm always enjoying how well I write, but ethics cannot be objectively defined as that which is good for man's survival.
Because there is no universal blob called man that is always going to benefit from the same ethics.
Some people benefit from a respect for property rights.
Some people benefit from a violation of property rights.
So property rights can't be, you can't say, well, we should respect property rights because it's good for everyone's survival.
Because it's not.
Some people flourish in the violation of property rights.
Well, of course.
So what my contention would be is why even have objective ethics at all?
Why not only construct ethics that are mutually beneficial between a society?
Most people in society benefit from property rights, so those people can work on developing a system which enforces them.
But why then go and assume that we have access to some objective ethical standards when we simply don't have the information or even cause to believe it exists?
So you keep talking about exists, like ethics exists, or you say that ethics don't exist, right?
I believe ethics are creations.
I don't believe they objectively exist independent of humanity.
Of course not.
And you know that that's exactly the position I repeatedly state in the book, right?
Yeah, but you state in the book this idea of universal...
No, no, no.
One step at a time.
One step at a time.
Just keep jumping off on things.
We have to come to...
The way that debates work, my friend, is we come to some kind of agreement and then we move on to a new topic.
Yeah, I understand.
I just keep jumping around like...
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Okay, so the entire book explains, in my entire book, that ethics do not exist in the way that a tree exists, or an atom, or gravity.
Yeah.
It's not written anywhere.
Property rights aren't inscribed anywhere in the nature of the universe.
It's not part of physics or anything.
It's not part of anything real in the objective universe.
So, of course, they don't exist.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be moral philosophy.
It would be physics, right?
So what?
That doesn't mean that it's subjective.
Mathematics doesn't exist.
Numbers don't exist.
The scientific method doesn't exist in the universe.
But that doesn't mean these things are subjective.
But mathematics describe operations in reality.
I can have two of something and another two of them and they add together to make four.
We can test mathematics in reality by applying them and observing how they operate.
And ethical systems We don't have the ability to test them in any kind of universal sense.
We only have the ability to test them in reference to ourselves in our own societies.
Yeah, absolutely we do.
Absolutely we do.
And again, I go over this and I'm always amazed that people read the book and then, or they claim they've read the book and don't seem to have read the book.
So the way that you would test ethics is through two methodologies and they're exactly the same as you would test them in science.
So the first thing you do is if somebody proposes a moral system, Is that you would look for universal consistency.
Internal logic, right?
And this is what you do in science.
In science, you first test the logic of the proposition.
And after you've validated the logic of the proposition, in other words, it's not self-contradictory.
It doesn't say, well, in order for my theory in biology to be true, then an elephant has to be exactly the same as a tsetse fly.
Whatever.
I mean, it's an extreme.
You would check it for internal consistency.
After it passes the test of internal consistency, you could then test it against the real-world experiments of various societies and see the results of those societies.
So, for instance, you would have an ethical theory which says respect for property rights.
I mean, it's not much of an ethical theory.
It's an ethical sort of statement, right?
A theory is more like what I talk about in UPB, but So you'd say respect for property rights is universally preferable behavior, right?
And then what you'd do is you'd say, okay, well, let's look at a society that had a fairly good respect for property rights.
And you could take, I don't know, 18th century Netherlands, maybe 19th century England, mid to late 19th century England, USA, you know, you could sort of look around and say, okay, well, as far as the history of the planet goes, it's fairly good for property rights.
And then you would say, okay, let's look at societies where there was no real respect for property rights.
And you would look at the communist countries and so on, central planning countries.
You'd look at Venezuela, the Soviet Union and so on.
You'd say, well, what was the outcome of those societies, right?
So you'd have a theory and then you'd have a practice.
Now, of course, the practice isn't perfect because human beings still have free will and there's not, you know, not everyone responds to incentives in the same way and so on.
But nonetheless, you would have, like if you had a theory which said the way that I'm going to attempt to catch an elephant is I'm going to put out, I don't know, what foods to elephant, let's say I want to catch a lion.
I say, well, I'm going to put out a bale of hay.
I'm going to try and catch a lion, right?
Well, you're not going to catch a lion because lions don't care about bales of hay.
If you put out a dead zebra, you might catch a lion.
Now, will you catch every lion in the vicinity?
No.
But certainly, if you have a theory which says lions are more interested in dead zebras than a bale of hay, then you're going to have more like catching, right?
If you put out dead zebra than a bale of hay.
Now, if the lion is full or whatever it is and the lion was kicked by a zebra and wants to avoid them at any cost, I don't know, right?
But in general, you'd have a hypothesis and you would have A test for that hypothesis.
So when it comes to ethical theories, people would put forward a proposition.
And you would then evaluate that proposition.
And you could do this for communism or fascism or anarchism or democracy or capitalism as a sort of economic theory.
And you'd say, okay, well, what are the What are the arguments in the moral theory?
What are the premises and the syllogisms?
And you would then say, well, can they be universalized?
And if they can't be universalized, then they're in the realm of aesthetics, not ethics.
And you would then evaluate it that way.
And so when I talk about universally preferable behavior, that is a methodology, sort of like how science refers to the methodology of science and the practice of science.
It refers to the scientific method and...
The scientific experiments or hypotheses that operate within the scientific method.
So UPB is a way of evaluating moral theories.
And I also put forward a number of moral theories around, you know, rape, theft, assault, and murder, and see if they pass the test of universally preferable behavior.
Are they universal?
Can they be preferred?
And are they in the realm of behavior rather than thought?
And through the book, of course, I say how They are passing the test of UPB and therefore can be accepted as valid moral theories.
Nowhere do I say that they exist in reality.
And while I get what you're saying, and maybe I worded my last statement a bit poorly, but your criteria for when you evaluate ethical systems, isn't that criteria essentially what is good for your own survival?
And if that criteria is not what is best for your own survival or the survival of your descendants, As we're evolutionally programmed to care about, on what basis do you determine whether ethics are even worthwhile or important?
I mean, the reasons why you even care about this is surely either an assumption or a reality.
I'm sorry, you're going to have to get to a question here.
The first part we already discussed, so I don't know if you weren't listening to that.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is, you say we need to have a universal, we need to test if our ethics are universalisable.
But on what basis, like, is that important?
Like, why is that an important characteristic of ethics?
I mean, why does it matter if they're universal or not?
What do you mean, why does it matter if they're universal or not?
Why does it matter?
Why is it important to have universal ethics?
Why can't we just have ethics that are contingent on our particular life and situation?
I don't know.
What does it mean?
I don't know what you mean.
Ethics that are contingent upon our personal life and situation.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm just being dense.
I don't know what the hell that means.
Like your example of Hillary Clinton.
Why would Hillary Clinton care about the non-aggression principle?
It doesn't serve her interests.
Her interests are better served by...
Doing as acting in whatever system of behavior she decides.
She obviously doesn't care about the same ethics that you care about or I care about because they don't serve her interests.
She's found a better way of serving her interests.
But she uses ethical arguments all the time.
Of course.
So ethics is important.
Look, if ethics wasn't important, she'd just say, oh yeah, I'm just going to tell you bullshit so I can rob you blind.
But she doesn't say that, does she?
But ethics obviously play on the emotions and the empathy that we feel for one another as normal human beings.
So then why are you asking me why ethics are important when you say people respond very strongly to ethics?
No, I'm asking you why a universal ethics is important, why a more subjective or ethics contingent on our biological makeup or our interaction with reality.
What is ethics contingent on our biological makeup?
I don't know what that means.
Let's get out of theory.
Give me a proposition.
Give me an ethical proposition.
Okay, so on your show, you are a self-proclaimed anarchist libertarian.
On your show, you frequently discuss very good points, which I agree with, about why Islamic immigration into Europe is a bad idea.
And why essentially non-white immigration?
No, no, no.
Give me something that's more universalizable than a continent and a particular group.
Give me an ethical statement about property rights or violence or lying or something that's just not so political and situational.
Give me a Ten Commandments kind of thing.
Okay.
Okay, well, if you have the capacity to violently take control of your community and lord over it, as a tribal lord, as humans used to do before we had civilizations, you did so because you were the most powerful.
You had the ability to essentially beat up anyone who challenged you, and anyone who could beat you up would defeat you, and they would become the new tribal lord.
You would have more access to resources.
You would essentially be law and order.
You'd have power, influence, and you'd have the most children.
You'd have more access to women than anybody else in the tribe.
So your genetics would be more likely to promulgate after your death.
Now, this is obviously very violent and aggressive, probably involves rape and all kinds of things.
Yeah, we would find this morally abhorrent today, but it was a successful strategy for that human in that instance.
And if you're a weak and feeble man who had empathy, too much empathy to go and be violent and act in that way, then you would very likely find it hard to reproduce.
And you would be essentially a slave and be co-opted.
So if we live on a planet and inside an ecosystem which benefits aggressive, manipulative and what by modern standards would be considered immoral behavior, then we have to ask why our morals seem to be in direct contradiction with nature.
I'm still not sure what the question is here.
Well, my question is, your ethics, I'm contending, are in contradiction with nature, because people like Hillary Clinton, or people who, like my example of the tribal leader, who have the ability to assert themselves...
What are you saying that Hillary Clinton, hang on, are you saying that a 70-year-old woman...
One, her position through force of arms, through her intense Greco-Roman wrestling skills, through her physical prowess in martial combat.
I'm not sure I'm following.
Are you going from masculine bonobo ape to woman who falls over into a van?
No, but she's able to command the strength of violent individuals to make up the government.
And how does she do that?
Well, through manipulative means, through the coercive system that's already been established, she simply manipulates her way to...
She gets away with it by appealing to morals, by appealing to universal ethics, by saying, well, these people are bigots and these people are racist and racism is objectively bad and universally bad and these people are immoral and they're Islamophobes and they're misogynists and this is all immoral and very bad and very wrong and very nasty and very evil.
But her behavior doesn't correlate with those beliefs.
No, no, forget that.
She's putting forward ethical theories, right?
And they're universal.
Ethics that she lives by are not necessarily what she says.
No, no, no.
I asked you for an ethical theory.
You're the one that has the ethical theory.
You've written a book on ethical theory.
I'm trying to ask you why your ethical theory doesn't seem to correlate with nature, why people who break your ethical theory manage to get all this power in.
I don't think you understand how philosophy works.
It's not my ethical theory.
This is a two-bit bullshit way of diminishing somebody else's perspective and sounding like you're smart when you're not saying anything intelligent at all.
Because it's not my ethical theory.
Let me finish my thought.
I have put forward an argument.
I have put forward a hypothesis.
Now, the hypothesis or the argument is valid or it's invalid.
In other words, it accords with internal consistency and empirical evidence or it doesn't.
Now, you can find a flaw in the argument And saying it may not apply to bonobos is not finding a flaw in the argument because I've never claimed it applies to bonobos.
So you can find a flaw in the argument.
Hang on, let me finish.
So the way that you do that is you pick up my free book and you get a pencil and you note what my arguments are.
And then what you do is you find out where the arguments are inconsistent, not with the standard that you've invented, like its relationship to nature or whatever the hell that means.
The way is you first of all find, is my argument inconsistent with itself?
Now, you've tried a bunch of those so far already, and you've failed, right?
Because you say, well, ethics don't exist.
I'm like, yeah, that's the whole point of the book, right?
And that's why it's a book of philosophy, not of physics.
And you said, well...
You know, people could all benefit from certain ethics, and it's like, nope, we lose, right?
So, the way you go through, and it's not your fault, and I'm sorry that you've been so badly taught by It's not your fault that you've been so badly educated in these matters.
And I say this with sympathy and compassion here.
But yeah, what you do is you go through and you...
I had to do this when I was studying philosophy and all that.
But you go through and you break down the arguments and you try to find an internal inconsistency or a contradiction.
And once you find that, then you call me up and we go through it.
And of course, if I have made an inconsistent, if I've made a self-contradictory statement or whatever, then I will thank you and I will correct it and all of that.
And when we have a discussion about that.
But saying my ethical system, which again is bullshit because it's not mine, it's an argument.
We deal with the argument, not where it comes from, right?
And we deal with that.
We don't deal with its relationship to nature or whatever you want to come up with.
That's how we would have debate about these things.
Sorry, go ahead.
My contention is that if you want to have a system of ethics, But obviously we live in nature, we live in the universe, so those ethics have to apply to the universe that we live in.
No, ethics don't apply to the universe, because the universe is not an ethical entity.
Human consciousness and free will are ethical entities, but no, physics has to apply to the universe.
Human consciousness is part of nature.
So, ethics have to work.
Like, they have to be something that works within nature.
We have to be able to...
If we live the ethical life, the virtuous life, it has to be the best life that we can live.
So, we have to determine...
I mean, these are all just subjective statements.
Works in nature, the best life we can live.
What the hell?
That doesn't mean anything.
Oh, fair enough.
No, it's like saying, well, you know, we've got to eat the food that tastes best and makes us the happiest.
Well, I don't know.
If it's your last meal, sure.
Why should we have ethics?
What do you believe the purpose of ethics are?
Why do we have them?
Why do you personally, Stefan Molyneux, live life based on ethics?
Do you receive benefit from those ethics?
Is that why?
I like not to be full of bullshit.
I like not to lie to myself and I like to know why I'm doing things.
And I also like to win debates and being really well trained and well researched in this area helps because I think in winning debates I make the world a better place.
It's not like a personal ego victory for me, but it does make the world a better place.
I, you know, when I talk to people about the good, about virtue, I want the world to be a better place.
I want the world to be a rational place.
And it was glaringly evident to me that we didn't have a good rational argument for ethics.
We either say, well, there's some amorphous benefit to them, you know, like eudaimonia that Aristotle would say, you know, a happiness of a life well lived.
Well, the problem is there are sadists out there and there are power junkies and very, very cruel people.
And they take...
Great pleasure in hurting other people and lying to other people and controlling other people.
So saying, well, reason equals virtue equals happiness is like, no, sorry, that doesn't work.
The sort of Kantian argument, the categorical imperative, you know, act in such a way that your particular action becomes a universal rule.
A, that's not really provable and it's not really something that actually happens.
I mean, because people act...
In exception to a general rule as often as humanly possible like the thief who can convince other people to respect property rights is going to make much more money as a thief so he has a great incentive to do that and of course if you're the strongest man in the village you'll say well I don't mind if all the tests of Where things go and how resources get allocated or on the basis of physical strength.
So he can universalize that based upon his own particular attributes.
I didn't agree with the Randian argument, the objectivist argument, for reasons I've gone into in a variety of videos.
I don't agree with the Rawlsian argument about the sort of middle road between socialism and capitalism for reasons I've gone into in a variety of podcasts.
I don't agree with the Pragmatic argument of the greatest good for the greatest number, which I've gone into in a bunch of parts.
So, you know, I wanted to know I was living a good life.
I wanted to know I was living a life with integrity, and I wanted to know why.
And so, I take enormous pleasure in examining the roots of ethics and in creating and promulgating ethical systems that are valid and solid and don't require the gods or governments for their enforcement.
And so...
You know, it's true.
It's good.
It's virtuous.
It's what's needed to save the world.
It makes me personally enormously happy and it allows me to do great good in the world.
It also allows me to instruct my daughter without thinking I'm just making stuff up because it's convenient or I don't want to pretend that her conformity to social norms is, you know, just out of fear or, you know, well, this is the way things are done or relativism.
So these are all, I mean, if you want the sort of personal explanation, these are all motivations for me.
Well, that's cool.
But those things obviously presuppose this notion of the good, or they presuppose an idea that there is a good that we can aspire to, but doesn't that require some kind of proof?
Yes, and I wrote a whole book proving it.
Yeah, but on our planet, success is determined.
Which other planet might we be talking about?
Please stop putting these book holders in the universe on this planet.
It's like, okay, let's just assume that you and I are both talking about this flat planet and let's keep going.
I mean, it would be nice if I could actually speak a few sentences without being cut off every single time.
Well, yes, but I don't mean to keep cutting you off, but you have to say something that if you say, well, how would you prove?
I wrote the whole book on proving this.
You can either find issue with the book, or I can move on to the next caller, but saying, well, why don't you prove this thing?
And I read your book proving it.
My issue is that on Earth, in the ecosystem, might is right, essentially.
That which succeeds, succeeds.
And that which fails, fails.
And force...
When applied, works.
And all throughout history we see this.
What is in the best interests of those who can make those interests manifest This is what happens.
This is evolution.
Whoever can come up with the best systems for asserting themselves and asserting their interests, whatever those interests may be, are the ones who achieve it.
And those who cannot compete...
And have you done a lot of the use of this kind of violence in your own personal life, my friend?
Is this how you've achieved your goals?
Is you've used violence, manipulation, bullying, control, and all that kind of stuff?
On a personal level, no.
Not very much.
So you're saying this is how nature works.
We're all part of nature, but this is not how you work.
So either it's not how nature works or you're not part of nature.
But Western society...
Are you a robot?
Are you from the future?
Come on.
I live in a Western society.
If you don't do this in your personal life, don't tell me this is how nature works.
Oh, it's might makes right.
Well, I used to bait.
I live in Australia.
I live in Australia.
Our country was co-opted and controlled by an invasion and genocide of the native people.
And we established a high trust and a relative free society.
Oh my god, man.
This is philosophy 101.
You say, this is how nature works.
Might makes right.
And I say, well, is this how you operate in your life?
And you say, no.
So your thesis has immediately fallen by the wayside.
You have disproven it through your own life.
If I try and be violent, I'll get thrown in jail.
So obviously there is another force that's more violent than myself, that is more capable and stronger than myself, which keeps me in line, which is the government.
So you want to steal and rape and kill people, and you're itching to do that.
You're dying.
You really, really want to do that, but you're terrified of jail.
Is that right?
That's not what I'm saying.
That is exactly what you're saying.
You're saying, might makes right, but unfortunately, my desire to have my personal might make right is constrained by the greater might of the state.
In other words, you really want might to make right in your life, but you're afraid of the government.
No, I'm happy for the government to enforce laws.
I would support the government.
I would have no issue with being, like say, a person who is a police officer or a military member.
They are part of the might which makes the right of our legal system without their force, without their sovereignty.
So might makes right is not for you, but for the state.
So you don't want to act that way personally in your life, right?
Well, it's less efficient.
If the state does it, then we can have a cooperative society, which is better for me because we can have a free market and we can work together on developing technology and trading with each other in industry.
And we can avoid the risks of violence, which are very high, between individuals and live in a relatively peaceful society, which is better for my future children.
It's better for my family and better for myself.
Well, I would have some issue with the idea that having basically a virtually all-powerful state using coercion everywhere makes for a cooperative society.
Well, you live in Canada.
Yeah, but that's because the state is what gives us rights.
I mean, if we don't have a state to enforce essentially a certain set of laws, then you're going to have competing interests of Different people who want to have sovereignty and different people who want to have power.
Yeah, nature read in Toothclaw.
I've read my Hobbes as well, and I've rebutted that a number of times as well, which I don't want to get into here.
But so you're happy that you don't have to use force and other people don't use force to resolve disputes to a large degree in your society, right?
Yeah, but I'm happy that the state that I live under uses force to prevent immigration of certain groups.
I'm happy that the state that I live under uses force to provide Certain checks and balances and certainty in my society.
So I'm happy for some use of force.
Does your government, does the Australian government, does it describe itself as an agency of violence that dominates you for your own benefit, or does it say that it's a good and moral entity, and is there an ethical theory behind what it does?
Well, I'm sure it proclaims to be moral and ethical, but that is essentially what a government is.
A government is force.
A government is violence.
But that's not how it portrays itself, right?
It portrays itself as a necessary and benevolent social agency, just as you have described it, right?
Right, so here we have a moral theory, which is ancient, right?
I mean, it goes back to Socrates and even the pre-Socratics, but its most, you know, common manifestation is in Hobbes.
And the argument goes something like this.
We surrender rights to the state so that we gain more rights thereby.
In other words, if there's no state, we're just hitting each other with sticks and stones and clubbing each other to death and, you know, raping women and stealing property.
Let me finish.
Let me finish.
So, without the state, with nature red in tooth and claw, we're just beating each other up and so on.
Now, by surrendering a certain amount of our autonomy for violence to the state, we get a far more peaceful society thereby.
So, by surrendering, say, 20% of my income to the state in the form of taxation, I get a protection of the remaining 80% of my income, which is infinitely higher than it would be if I didn't surrender 20% of my income to the state.
In a state of nature, I get maybe $1,000 worth of goods a year, but I'm constantly afraid that they're going to get stolen or someone's going to set fire to my yurt or something like that.
But if I surrender 20% of my income to the state, I get $20,000 a year, but I'm only paying $2,000 a year, so I'm really up A huge amount of money, right?
So I'm losing $2,000 a year, but I'm gaining $18,000 a year because in paying the $2,000 or $4,000 or whatever it's going to be, if it's 20%, $4,000.
So I'm up $16,000.
So I want to surrender some of my rights for the autonomy of coercion to the state so that the state protects me from other people who've also made the same social contract and we live a much more peaceful life.
Thereby.
So this is a moral theory.
It has something to do with consequences and something to do with, you know, that which is beneficial and so on.
So I understand this.
I mean, I've taken my introduction to political theory and all that kind of stuff.
So I understand that that's an argument for consequences and it's an argument for self-interest, you know, that you'll be a lot richer if you surrender cash to the state to protect your property because if you don't surrender cash to the state, you can't protect your property at all and you won't have anything.
There's an extension to that argument as well, which is that an entire society that's governed by the rule of law under this system will be a high trust and cooperative society, whereas in the absence of a centralized rule of law, competing systems of ideology and thought will cause a breakdown within that society in terms of the culture and the beliefs of each individual.
Different groups will try and assert different standards upon society which will But by this theory, once the government begins mass importing and subsidizing opposing ideologies into a particular country, then that government has lost its legitimacy, right?
Because it's no longer serving the needs of reducing conflict in society.
Yes, that's why I oppose immigration of incompatible cultural groups.
Right.
Right, and I mean I think from a mere pragmatic argument I can certainly understand that case.
I think that the governments in Europe are failing wretchedly in their fundamental Requirement to protect the life and interests of their citizens.
I think that all countries that are focusing on this kind of suicidal multiculturalism are failing in some fundamental way to protect the peace security and future of the citizens within that society.
I think we're in perfect agreement there.
But, you see, multiculturalism is put forward as an ethical theory.
You cannot fight an ethical theory with an appeal to consequences.
This is a foundational reality of just debating in the world.
You can only fight an ethical theory with an ethical theory.
You cannot fight an ethical theory through appeal to consequences because an ethical theory posits as something is the highest good.
Now the highest good in an ethical standpoint or from an ethical standpoint doesn't bow to mere inconvenience.
I mean, to sort of take a silly example, if your child is dying and needs $500 for a medicine that's going to save your child's life, and you don't have a lot of money, but you say, well, you know, I'd rather go and pick up a smartwatch.
Like, everyone would say, that is not good.
Well, but a smartwatch will make me happy.
You know, a smartwatch will tell me how many steps I've taken today.
Whatever they do, right?
So, we would understand that.
Yeah, but the reality is that when it comes to ethical questions, we don't allow mere pragmatism in general to overcome ethical ideals.
Well, it's just the way that nature works.
Sorry, it's the way the human mind works.
Concepts, ideological abstractions generally trump mere immediate practical concerns.
So you're saying that you agree with me, but you don't think it works, and that we need to create delusory ideological precepts for people to believe in, so as to coerce their behavior.
enough for me to move on to the next caller for reasons I think are pretty obvious.
The idea that as a philosopher trained in the pursuit of truth and I want to indoctrinate people.
I'm still talking.
I'm still talking that I want to indoctrinate people in false concepts for some.
And sorry, if that's what you think of me, then don't bother having a conversation with me because I'm clearly not up to your high moral standards.
Let's move on to the next caller then.
Thank you.
Alright, up next we have William.
William wrote in and said, Stefan has taken the position that free will is necessary for moral responsibility.
Taking into account the lack of evidence for free will, could the non-existence of free will be compatible with an internal locus of control and therefore personal moral responsibility?
That's from William.
Well, William, I don't know.
I don't understand the question.
I forgot that I snuck in that little piece of psychobabble.
Yeah, yeah.
No, please break it down for my ancient and...
I'm going to break it down.
I'm going to represent Wisconsin here, alma mater.
They're doing such wonderful things these days with their anti-whiteness classes, but oh man, oh gosh, okay.
I won't go on with that one.
That's a totally different topic.
I don't know if you've seen this yet, but...
All right, so...
Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, good, good, good.
I just didn't hear anything, so I must have really good audio then.
Great.
So, on free will, there's a few different theories.
I'll explain what my question meant.
Um, really what I'm thinking is, you know, generally you get, uh, one of the implications of determinism being kind of, uh, uh, some kind of a blame to the universe.
You know, you have a breakdown of kind of personal responsibility and all this.
Uh, so the question was kind of, uh, if you have the understanding and the teaching from a young age, um, and I see this as a negative side of the breakdown right now, that's coming from a lot of the social science determinism Which is a big argument in the 50s and 60s amongst psychologists.
Oh, Billy.
Yeah.
Billy.
Yeah.
I need you to take a deep breath.
I need you to focus.
Okay.
Please don't take me on big wandering the 50s and social sciences.
Just, you know, in order for us to have an efficient...
I don't mind if we get there, but let's not start there.
I'll boil it.
An internal locus of control is healthy.
And yet, to say you don't have free will sounds counter to that.
So I'm wondering, you know, could those be...
No, I don't think it does.
No?
No, I don't think it does.
Okay, yeah, let's hear it.
Look, if you don't have free will, you're not responsible, right?
If you don't have free will, you don't have a locus of control.
A locus of control is a somewhat technical term for do you think that you're the agent of your own life?
Do you think that your choices matter?
Do you think you have the capacity to make choices and bring them into effect?
So if you're in prison, you don't have a high locus of control.
If you're in the free market, you probably do.
So no, if you accept determinism, Then, clearly, you have no locus of control.
You have no moral responsibility.
There's no such thing as ethics.
There's no such thing as truth.
There's no such thing as falsehood.
There's no such thing as right and wrong.
Because all of these are preferred states that you should or ought to choose.
Now, if you don't believe in free will, then there's no such thing as a preferred state.
Right?
There's no such thing as good or bad.
If one rock, you know, the...
Rainwater and goes and undermines the sediment below a rock and rock slips and falls into another rock and the rock bounces down a hill.
There's no morality there and there's no preferred place for the rock to land.
It's not morally good if the rock lands in the stream and morally bad if the rock lands on the stream bank.
There's no preferred or unpreferred.
There's no moral.
And that's a purely deterministic situation, right?
Okay, I think that's actually a good one to dig into.
Because preferred states, that I would say is a difference between not a causal difference, but an emergent difference between living and unliving systems.
Now, to say a tree has free will I think that's crazy, definitely.
If free will does exist, trees certainly still don't have it.
Yet I would still say they have a, quote, preferred state.
And they express their preferred state by actually their morphology, where they'll express in a different pattern.
No, but they don't prefer that state.
Okay, so the preference is an emotional state that's only arising in maybe a neural network or something that's Well, sure.
I mean, a zebra has a preferred state called not being eaten.
Yes, yes, yes.
So it runs away.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
But it doesn't have a preferred...
These are mere emotional fight-or-flight responses.
There's no conception of death.
There's no, well, I can choose to live or I can choose to die.
I can, like...
I can choose these positive things, I can choose these negative things or whatever, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's simply an emotional response.
It's a purely instinct-driven, fight-or-flight response.
It's not a concept of life or death.
Oh, isn't this so incredible?
I'm running away.
Look at me.
I better get away.
There's no higher spot there.
The zebra is just...
It's like a knee-jerk reaction.
You just go.
And we know that because...
We do not charge the lion with murder.
Hey, they used to, though.
You know, they used to.
As a side note, it's funny.
There used to actually be trials for bears and such, and they would put them to death.
This was a thing.
But you're absolutely right.
We don't hold them morally responsible.
And I think, you know, the tying of that...
Yeah, I mean, you know, if we...
I think it's more the impracticality of it.
Wait, wait, what?
The impracticality of what?
The impracticality of trying to...
Use the legal system against natural forces.
We know that it's not going to work.
Are you saying the only reason we don't try lions for murder is impractical?
I mean, if we could...
Well, let's go beyond lions.
No, it's because lions don't have a sense of ethics.
They don't have a sense of concepts.
My definition of free will is our capacity...
To compare a proposed statement to an ideal standard.
Okay.
The lions don't have the capacity to compare what they're doing to an ideal standard.
I completely agree.
That's recursive logic.
When we compare to an ideal standard, we actually place ourselves in the future at that ideal standard.
And you were talking to previous guys, and I completely disagree that the reason I don't steal is because of the legal system.
It's because I actually, you know, I'm at a friend's house right now using his internet.
I occasionally put money inside of a jar that he has so that he can throw barbecues, right?
Why do I do that?
Because I like my friend.
I like to think that I'm leaving more behind here than I brought, right?
So I don't think the animals are doing that, right?
That's not what they're doing when they use preferred states.
My preferred state is good friendships.
I do all these things, but they don't have these Okay, dude, dude, dude, dude.
Okay, let's not talk about, hang on, let's not talk about lions and tip jars and shit like that.
I mean, you gotta, I feel like, you know those horses, they gotta have these blinders when they go down the gate.
Please, God, stay focused.
Okay, so clearly we don't have moral standards for animals because animals cannot conceive of moral ideals.
I guess it sounds like with the preferred states thing, that's a cognitive act.
That still doesn't imply an as-if actor.
And I guess that's why I started with these general theories of it.
So you come at it from being a prime mover.
I feel like we have to...
We're talking about implications of one or another.
No, no.
When it comes to free will, I look, I mean, first of all, I'll start empirically because it's the easiest place to start.
Right?
So the last caller said, well, you know, it's all nature and violence and blah, blah, blah.
And I said, okay, well, it all seems weird to me when people call me up for a debate and then say violence should trump, you know, violence is how things get sorted out.
It's like, you know, we're debating, right?
You know, we're having a conversation, right?
Yeah.
And so when people say, well, nature read in tooth and claw and we should dominate, the dominance is how nature works, and they're trying to convince me of this peacefully using an argument, I just start with the empiricism.
Like the fact that they're talking to me and trying to reason with me and they're trying to convince me that reason never achieves anything and it should all be up to force, it's like, well, then why aren't you hitting me over the head?
I'm glad you're not.
Reason is a force, right?
it is a force that-- - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. - Okay, let's hear it.
- No, the baby is not fighting.
Debating is not clubbing.
Oh, I didn't mean that.
No, I meant it's a conceptual force.
It's one that, you know, you don't...
No, no.
I'm using force in a very specific context.
You can't give me a homonym or a synonym.
And I understand it's used in more than one context.
But when I'm using force, like physical force, don't just say, well, reason is a kind of different force.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's influence is not violence, right?
So...
Trying to convince someone to buy something from you is not the same as stealing.
Dude, you've got to stop talking at the same time I'm talking.
It's driving me crazy.
I can't talk when you're yelling in my ear or talking in my ear.
Just let me finish my thought.
I'm not going down the road that reason is like force.
Reason is an influence.
Trying to convince someone to buy something from you is not the same as stealing from them.
I didn't mean that.
No, I didn't mean that.
Okay.
So when people are attempting to convince me of something, then of course they're saying by their very actions, you know, judge them by what they do.
I don't care what people's theories are in particular.
I care about the empiricism of their actions.
By their fruits shall ye know them, right?
I judge actions first.
And if there's an incompatibility between the theory and the action, I'm an empiricist, as I've always said.
Just as a scientist, if there's a contradiction between a hypothesis and a measured result, which wins?
If there's a contradiction between, oh, the evidence.
The evidence wins, of course.
Of course, right.
So if somebody's putting forward a theory, but their actions directly contradict their theory, I'm going to judge their actions.
I don't care about their theory.
I care about what they're doing.
And so if somebody is coming to me and saying, I wish to change your mind, and to convince you that I can't change your mind, and you have no mind to change, that it's all an illusion, well, then I have to ask them why they're trying to change my mind.
If they don't think I can change my mind.
Like, I don't think I can change the weather's mind, so I'm not out there King Lear-style yelling at the weather.
I don't think I can change the mind of a rock, so I'm not out there.
If a rock is in my way, I don't gently ask for it to move it, then leave a trail of Skittles and offer it some money to move to one side.
I don't attempt to reason with something which is determined.
I don't attempt to have a conversation with something that is not conscious and capable of choice or free will.
So, when people come to me and say, Steph, you've got to change your mind about free will, and you have to change your mind into accepting that you can't change your mind, that's a contradiction, obviously.
Their actions are completely contradicting their theory, which means psychological damage from early childhood, which we've talked about before with Kolarz.
One guy was a determinist.
He actually locked in his His bedroom for significant portions of his childhood by parents who never listened to him, so of course he had no control over his environment and susceptible to this kind of thinking.
It's not everyone, but usually there's some.
When the theory is so wildly out of line with the actions, it signifies a significant and often emotional disconnect within the personality.
Now, I like to debate.
I enjoy it.
I think it's productive for the world.
It's enjoyable for me.
And...
In order to debate, there are certain things I have to accept in order not to be a flaming rampant hypocrite.
I'm not calling you this.
I'm just saying that for me, right?
So there are certain things I have to accept.
I have to accept that there's a preferred state.
Otherwise, why the hell am I debating someone if it's not to try and convince them to think in a better way or more clearly or consistently have their thoughts more in alignment with reality?
So there has to be a preferred state, which means there has to be objective truth.
I don't debate people into, I like the color of Blue and you like the color red.
We don't have a big debate over which color is better, right?
Of course.
It's a subjective preference.
So there has to be objective truth.
There has to be preferred states.
There has to be the capacity to change people's minds.
There have to be standards that people are willing to adhere to, like consistency and evidence.
I mean, there's a whole host of things.
Language has to have meaning.
Otherwise, I'd just use random words and think I'm achieving the same.
So many things have to kind of come together for a debate to even happen.
And Hans Hermann Hoppe talks about this in something called Argumentation Ethics, which I'm not very familiar with at all, but I think it's something along these lines.
But if we accept that a debate is occurring and a debate is something we're willing to participate in, there are so many embedded things, so many questions in metaphysics and epistemology and ethics are so embedded in the very act of having a conversation and attempting to convince someone of something better.
So much is encapsulated and pushed into all of that, that if you unpack, The very act of having a debate, you can answer about 90% of the most fundamental questions in philosophy.
And what happens is people want to jump into having a debate without unpacking everything that having a debate means.
And that's why, I mean, along with the arguments for, that's why I accept free will.
Because if I didn't, I wouldn't debate.
I wouldn't have a show.
I wouldn't have love.
I wouldn't have happiness.
I wouldn't have pride.
Pride is definitely...
These aren't reasons why it's true.
Those are your motivations.
Well, it could be, but why do you think you think that, right?
So I guess...
Because it's true!
Because I just made the case for that!
Well, you know, the things that you're conscious of, right, those arise from unconscious states, of which you're unaware of the causes of, or...
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
The things I'm conscious of, hang on, hang on, hang on.
The things I'm conscious of arise out of unconscious states?
Yes.
You say that like that's completely obvious, and that seems like a huge case to make.
Maybe you'd like to make it.
So not all states are conscious ones, and just like the next word that I have is not in my consciousness until, really until kind of the moment it's arriving, right, in the conversation.
If there's a direction that I'm moving in, right, hopefully it's the point.
That That difference between a sensation of some kind of actual cognizant, you can hold it, a number, a symbol, something of this sort of word, or a whole sentence, and kind of the general idea of it, these things are themselves products of subconscious states of mind, right?
Such that it is possible to say, all right, well, are they going to choose the blue or the red?
And you can know prior to them being aware of having made the choice.
Yeah, but training matters, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Hang on, hang on.
If you've never tried to catch a ball and I throw you a ball, you're likely to not catch it.
But if you're a professional baseball player and I throw you a ball, yeah, it's kind of an automatic thing.
That's this funny commercial on the internet of some guys being interviewed, some baseball guys being, I think it's a baseball guy, being interviewed by some female reporter.
And he just narrowly prevents a ball from smashing into her head by reaching out and casually catching it and throwing.
I think it's not a realistic ad.
It's not a real thing that happened.
But he was able to do that, imagining that was a true story.
He's able to do that because he's had decades of practice catching balls, right?
Yeah.
So he's just able to reach out and sort of unconsciously block the ball from hitting the reporter's head because he's had a lot of practice.
So it's certainly true that I'm not particularly aware of every next word before it comes out in a sort of flow.
But they're not an accident.
But they're not an accident, and it's a result of a lot of prior thought and training.
So if I'd never thought about free will, then I would have a much less coherent position, a much less well-reasoned position than I have.
But the fact is that I have spent many, many years thinking about free will, and I've had many arguments about free will.
So what happens is not an accident.
So I would not argue that everything that is in consciousness arises from unconsciousness because the desire to train yourself into doing better at certain things is a result of a conscious decision, which then is going to result in better automatic or unconscious habits.
But that's just the result of training.
Like if a jazz pianist is going to play lovely, if occasionally discordant melodies, But that's because he sat down and consciously practiced jazz piano for many, many years, and so it's sort of a circular thing, right?
You get greater unconscious ability if you have greater conscious focus.
You have a really good point there, and I actually have a story that I'll make very short, because I've told it several times.
I trained a person to learn how to blend two sounds together.
This person was mentally retarded, which is now called general cognitive disability, whatever.
They keep making the words bigger to suit their PC interests.
So, you know, 20 years old, he had a short-term memory span of three digits, which means you can hold three things in your mind.
Most people have seven.
Other people have up to 12.
Anyhow, very limited.
And he couldn't figure out.
I figured out that he didn't know how to take, for instance, both sound ah and the sound buh, just a hard stop on the B, and blend them together.
I asked him to put them together.
Ah...
Buh, ah, buh, right?
And he would sit there and he'd go, ah, and you could see him struggle.
And then he'd go, buh.
And I told him to hold one hand and I said, hold ah in that hand.
And he put it up, ah.
Okay, hold B in that hand.
Buh, buh, buh.
And he looked at me and he was like, and I was like, now put them together.
And he was like, what do you mean?
And I was like, I can't tell you the answer because the answer is making the connection.
That's the answer.
The answer is the process.
And he was like, ah, and he's so frustrated.
And after weeks of doing this, and of course, you only can do something like this in a session for five minutes before he's exhausted.
All of a sudden, one day, the spark happened.
Boom.
Some kind of neuroplasticity clicked in the right way.
And he willed his way into, ah, and I saw the tension on his face.
And he'd cried about this before, getting to the point of just exhaustion.
And finally, he just He just put them together and he says, Ab.
And I'm like, what'd you say?
You know, I was like, oh, Eureka.
And he goes, Ab.
And I was like, what'd you do?
And he's like, I don't know.
I don't know.
What was that?
But he got better and better at it.
And eventually was able to start putting words together on his own.
Something that he couldn't have done before because if you can't link two sounds together, that's kind of a, you know, That's like not having legs and trying to walk, let alone run for a reading activity.
Yeah, I mean, there's a wonderful bit of vocal improvisation that Freddie Mercury does with Queen at the Rock in Rio Festival.
I think it's called Rock in Rio Blues.
It's this wonderful falsetto, and it's improvised to a large degree, but, you know, the guy's been singing publicly for decades at this point, and, you know, all the stuff he'd done in the studio and probably in the shower and stuff.
So, yeah, it's a remarkable feat until you remember all of the The practice that has gone into it.
So anyway, but let's finish up the thought.
If you don't mind, I'm going to wind up the show soon, but I'm certainly happy to have you have the last word or last question.
Hey, I don't blame you, and it's been really nice listening in.
Something I didn't say is how much I really appreciate the show.
I'll make, you know, I could go on and on with this topic, and I'll send you my notes afterwards, but really, I want to encourage all of the listeners to go ahead and pay for the show.
Pony up.
We really have to appreciate and give back to this conversation, not just with words like this, which I really appreciate the time to come on and discuss, but also with the kind of real resource allocations that put our money where our mouths are.
And all that.
So, hey, thanks a lot, Stefan and Mike, for putting all this stuff together.
My pleasure.
And just to remind people, you can go to freedomainradio.com slash donate to do all of that.
But sorry, go ahead.
Hey, I do, you know, I do 50 a month.
So...
Dude, that is incredibly kind.
Thank you so much.
Thanks very much for your call.
Thanks, of course, for your wonderfully kind support, my friend.
I hugely, hugely appreciate that.
Thank you, everyone, for making this the most exciting philosophy show ever, and I think ever in the future, because we're breaking such new ground here.
Everyone after us gets to deal with the river of broken ice that we've broken through.
So thanks everyone so much.
I guess I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and thanks to everyone who enjoyed the five hour Christmas special.
Yours to enjoy even when it's not Christmas time.
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