3694 The Hidden History of Western Civilization | Tom Woods and Stefan Molyneux
With the regressive left's revisionist history sweeping academia and mainstream culture; what is the true hidden history of western civilization? Tom Woods joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the role of the Catholic Church in building western civilization, the impotence of mainstream media, practical/theoretical divisions within the libertarian community and much more!Dr. Tom Woods is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and the host of The Tom Woods Show. Dr. Woods is a New York Times bestselling author and has published twelve books including most recently “Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion,” “Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse” and “Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.”Website: http://www.tomwoods.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/ThomasEWoodsFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/ThomasEWoodsYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/TomWoodsTVReal Dissent: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-real-dissentRollback: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-rollbackThe Politically Incorrect Guide to American History: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-guide-to-historyMeltdown: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-meltdownNullification: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-nullification33 Questions: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-33-questionsHow the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-church-built-civilizationWe Who Dared to Say No to War: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-no-to-warThe Church and the Market: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-church-and-marketBack on the Road to Serfdom: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-serfdomThe Church Confronts Modernity: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-modernityWho Killed the Constitution: http://www.fdrurl.com/woods-killed-the-constitutionYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and the host of The Most Excellent Tom Woods Show.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and has published 12 books, because, you know, 13 would just be crazy, including, most recently, Real Dissent a Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion, Rollback, Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse and Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny, In the 21st century, his website is the appropriately named tomwoods.com and twitter.com.
I guess there's another one.
It's forward slash Thomas E. Woods.
Tom, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Hey, Stefan.
A pleasure to be here.
Thank you.
All right.
So, we're going to talk about some persecution topics, and we're going to talk a little bit about science and its history with the Church.
Now, persecution of Christians is something that is really underreported, and I really like to find those very important stories that are not getting enough attention, at least in the more secular world.
So I did some looking up, and Tom, as you're aware, of course, it's pretty horrifying.
Across the world, over 215 million Christians are facing intimidation, prison, even death for following their religious beliefs, and that is 1 in 12 Christians worldwide.
I wonder if you can give people a sense of the scope of the problem and how invisible it seems to be to our culture.
Well, the numbers you cite there are quite staggering, and I think one way to think about it I realize it's not fashionable, is to think, imagine if any other group of people in the world were being targeted in this way with those numbers.
We would never hear the end of it.
And that's good, nor should we.
But in this situation, you have to tune in to your YouTube channel or alternative media even to know that it's going on.
I mean, you get a fugitive article here and there in the New York Times, let's say, buried on page D17. But...
It's very much a sideshow.
Meanwhile, Middle East policy, foreign policy, obviously can very adversely affect Christian populations in the Middle East, but that's almost never a consideration.
It's, again, very much an afterthought.
So something's kind of fishy here, given that this is supposed to be the big oppressor group in the world, and yet when they're being wiped out, they can't even get a mention in the newspaper.
But what I find interesting is that If I look back in history, let's say I go back to the French Revolution, I can find atrocities being committed against Christians going back hundreds of years that almost nobody, certainly no young people, know anything about.
Young people I knew when I used to teach undergraduates, they knew a few things about the world.
They knew Lincoln freed the slaves.
They knew Hitler killed the Jews.
I take that back.
They knew two things.
Those are the two things they knew about the world.
And the idea that they knew about the reign of terror in the French Revolution, where people were killed in the most blood-curdling, horrifying ways.
Like they would dig ditches and then shoot people so they'd fall into the ditches.
Or they would tie men and women together and then send them out in boats and then drown them deliberately.
Sorry to interrupt, but a lot of people don't notice this because they think of it as a purely secular conflict.
But the amount of anti-Christian ferocity in the French Revolution is almost impossible to exaggerate.
It's unbelievable.
Swear allegiance to the new regime and priests willingly chose death rather than break their vows of allegiance to God.
Exactly.
An act of courage that is hard to imagine.
There were in the five figures of priests who wound up having to leave France altogether because by the end of the reign of terror, it wasn't even enough to offer your allegiance to the regime.
You had to abjure the priesthood altogether because you were still some kind of a danger because you had some kind of a divided allegiance.
So it was a horrifying and bizarre situation.
But of course, the whole point of the revolution was to start—it's the typical left-wing revolution.
We want to start society all over again from scratch.
And that means anybody who's kind of clinging to the old ways needs to be dispensed with.
And there ain't no way that's any older than the church, so we have to start that all over.
We're going to start and have a new calendar, which— Only an idiot followed.
Nobody followed that crazy French calendar.
All street names named after saints are going to be changed.
They actually guillotined statues of saints.
They chopped the heads off of statues.
Something bizarre about that.
And then we continue on.
If we look in the 20th century...
Again, most people don't know that much about the crimes of communism anymore.
They really don't.
Young people born after the Berlin Wall fell, they know nothing about it.
And there, again, Christians were very much targeted.
I mean, certainly in the Russian Revolution, they would deliberately, when they would raise churches, R-A-Z-E, and they would deliberately replace them with public restrooms as a way to indicate how they felt.
And my old friend who died some years ago, Joe Sobran, He recalls back in the probably late 70s, he took a tour of the Soviet Union, a guided tour.
And his tour guide got up and said, look at the wonderful religious liberty we enjoy in the Soviet Union.
Look at all these churches all around us.
And Joe asked, how many of those churches were built since 1917?
Of course, you know, blank out.
There is no answer to that.
The answer is zero.
And in fact, there was a case.
Of course, most of the Christians in the Soviet Union were Russian Orthodox, but there were some Russian Catholics, and I'm more familiar with the Catholic situation.
And there, the Catholic Church in Russia was targeted by Lenin on the grounds that we're suffering famine here.
And meanwhile, the church has all these elaborate and beautiful vessels and chalices made of precious metals.
And if only we could melt those down and sell them, then we could feed everybody.
But it's the selfish churches that are keeping these things to themselves.
So at the time, the pope, who was Benedict XV, actually offered that the Vatican would send a check in the equivalent amount of all the valuables that the Russians wanted to melt down.
And I shouldn't say the commies wanted to melt down and destroy.
We'll give you the equivalent amount and you can use it for famine relief.
Well, that offer was ignored because they don't really want the money.
They want the humiliation of a competing power center.
And in fact, when they did melt these things down and they did get the money, they didn't spend it on famine relief.
They spent they bought weapons from the Germans with it.
So, I mean, these are no nobody knows this stuff.
And yet you would think they should.
Right.
Well, and here's the thing, right.
Because I'm trying my very best not to associate the mainstream media with rank communism intellectually.
Like, I'm really...
They're not making it very easy, Tom.
They're really not making it very easy at all.
But because this kind of stuff where there's this...
You've written once that anti-Catholicism is the last remaining acceptable prejudice, I guess, along with just being against white males as a whole.
But this...
The whitewashing of the crimes that the left has committed against Christians, against priests, against religion as a whole, is something that has been an extraordinary awakening for me, and one of the reasons why I wanted to have this conversation, because when people wish to institute the new church of the state,
the church of individual conscience, the church of objective morality, the church of thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, stands in the way of this satanic drive and desire to own the world.
Communism is, to me, sort of an update of the great temptation that Satan gave to Jesus, that you can own the world and everything that's in it.
You can have control over everything that is material.
What is central planning?
Accept control over all the material elements of the world.
And it seems to me that the church does stand between these, to me, genuinely satanic forces in terms of how they execute their plans and execute everyone in the way.
The Church does stand between the power lust madness of mere materialism and the individuals who are going to be swept up in that awful machine.
Yeah, well, think just of even in our own lifetimes, what we observed in Eastern Europe, for example, when they elected Pope John Paul II in the late 70s, the You know, the cardinals were making a statement.
It's not like the church was rife with Polish popes.
This had not happened before.
They don't choose a pope from behind the Iron Curtain just at random like they drew lots and he got the short stick.
I mean, he he was obviously chosen to send a message.
And when he announced that one of the first things he wanted to do was to visit his native Poland, well, the communist regime was going berserk.
They were trying to think of how can we stop this visit?
And I am not joking.
Their first response was, well, tell the pope that everybody is sick and we cannot receive it.
But they realized that you can't do that indefinitely.
You know, you are going to get well at some point.
So they had to allow him to come and they hated every minute of it.
And he's bringing out crowds that were enormous.
And these are people who know that by coming to see him, they're making a statement.
And when they came to see him, some of the largest crowds you can imagine, the people for the first time fully appreciated their own numbers vis-a-vis the small numbers of the communists.
They realized, wait a minute, look at how many of us there are and how few of our oppressors there are.
And that began to get them thinking.
And we know that behind the scenes, he's working with Lech Wałęsa of Solidarity.
He makes several visits to Poland.
He's in contact with the resistance.
He's doing everything.
The Vatican is supplying them with, you know, photocopy machines and whatever can be done to bring about resistance.
And this is being done without violence, which is amazing, especially when you consider, you know, I'm going to be honest.
I mean, if I can't be honest with Stefan Molyneux, you know, where can I be honest?
Let's face it.
The left is in love with violence.
I mean, the funny thing is they talk about toleration and peace, but these are the least tolerant, least peaceful people in the world.
It's not to say there aren't some violent right-wingers, but there's no professor in America who's scared of right-wing crowds shutting him down.
Everybody knows that.
We all know that.
And likewise, given what we see on campuses today, I think we see the real nature of what the left is all about.
So it's all the more remarkable that the resistance of the left, by and large, was able to occur peacefully by large crowds and, again, with the church very much in the forefront.
I mean, it did get violent in Romania, but certainly in Poland, there was a peaceful resistance that ultimately shut them down.
And it's funny, when General Jaruzelski was receiving the Pope, you can see that, you know, one of them's at one end of the receiving room, one's at the other, there's a microphone in front of each one, and Jaruzelski, who is, you know, he's the new socialist man, right?
He doesn't need any of these old superstitions.
That man is trembling in his boots in the presence of John Paul II. There's something beautiful and dramatic about that.
Even if you don't believe in the Catholic Church and this isn't your bag, there's got to be something awesome about a peaceful man in white who's simply standing there giving a speech and the commie with his giant glasses, he looks like he's from another planet, is trembling.
Yeah, man.
I know whose side of that I'm on.
Well, and this, to me, is one of the great challenges.
And I think my ideal is philosophy in the long run.
But where things stand at the moment, society needs to organize, needs to have a way of respecting certain values, certain virtues.
And, you know, it's hard for me to go through the Ten Commandments and say, well, I completely disagree with these, because it's basic common sense and how you run things.
And so we have a choice at the moment in the world, which is society needs to be organized, and it's either going to be by individual conscience and a personal adherence to moral standards, or it's going to be external force and terror and jail and all this kind of stuff.
And it seems to me that the people who want more force have to do everything they can to shred the individual conscience, to shred the individual's relationship to virtue, which I think is facilitated by Christian theology almost like no other religion that I've studied.
Well, I certainly agree with that, and it means that therefore we – I mean, when I saw communism fall, and you and I lived to see that, I really thought, well, we are – it's just going to be up and up and up from there.
And obviously things are better with communism gone, you know, in its outward form.
There's no question about that.
But I did not anticipate the ferocity of what was left of the left.
I didn't anticipate – I mean, even just a few years ago, things weren't as crazy as they are now.
Where you feel like your career can be destroyed for just a fugitive remark here and there.
And so it really is you up against...
Well, really, all the major opinion molders, it's you up against the mainstream media, against the political class, and half the time, if you think the Republicans are going to stand up and defend you, you've got another thing coming.
The academics, the universities, all the opinion molders, entertainment, most people who are in entertainment are going to denounce you.
It is a very lonely thing, and you do feel like you're this isolated person who's got...
Some well-founded views about what the good life is all about, and you're up against an absolute monstrosity, just an overwhelming force.
And this is why, at this particular moment, it's at least a consolation.
As the left becomes more hysterical, we have the internet to communicate with each other so that we realize we're not crazy.
In fact, when I was in college, I used to write for a right-of-center magazine, and people used to say, We're good to go.
Everybody, all fashionable opinion thinks differently from you.
You might be tempted to think, wait a minute, am I the crazy one?
And then when you realize, no, no, no, hold on, hold on.
I look at the comments section of videos.
I watch, I see the huge numbers that good people are getting around the world.
I'm not crazy.
I'm not alone.
That's a valuable service in and of itself.
I don't know of any choir whose pastor says, all right, It's time for me to preach.
The choir can go outside and have a cigarette.
The choir is preached to, and they need to be preached to.
Well, it's funny because I try to – when you study enough history, you realize that oftentimes it's just the same story with different costumes over and over again.
And it is – you know, my Christian education as a child was learning about the early trials of Christianity and the opposition that Christians faced in the Roman Empire early on.
I mean, serious opposition, like more than just, oh, you've got mean comments on the internet, like lions, you know, gladiatorial combats, crucifixion, not just Jesus but his followers as well.
And it is to me, there is progress, you know, now we're facing mean tweets, we're not facing actual lions.
And there is violence at times, but it's not yet state funded, at least in America and a few other places.
But there is, don't you get this feeling of this eternal recurrence?
Like, okay, so now good people are facing down, you know, feral people addicted to violence who aren't good with their words.
You know, what you always hear as a kid, use your words, use your words.
Well, they're not using their words.
They're using stink bombs at deplorables, and they're using bricks, and they're setting fire to cops in France and so on.
And we have this choice, which goes all the way back to the French Revolution.
And it has struck me, given how passive the French seem to be in the onrushing demographic disasters that may overtake the country.
You know, you've got a pretty strong culture way back in the day.
But, you know, the French Revolution kills the most educated, drives away the most educated.
The Napoleonic Wars destroys the most courageous and any that left over were then finished off by the First and Second World Wars.
And what's left of the base, the spine of the French and other people within Europe?
And it does sort of feel like, again, we're sort of back to this early Roman, I guess, mid-Roman era of, you know, speaking truth to power, standing up against the mob, because that, I think, is the role of good people with verbal fluidity and moral courage.
You must stand up to the mob and say, stop, put down your pitchforks.
We need to reason about this stuff, because once you let slip the dogs of violence, they roam the landscape for hundreds of years.
You know, I'm calling to mind the famous letter that the Emperor Trajan wrote to Pliny, who wrote him to ask, what should I be doing about these Christians I encounter?
Should I be distinguishing between young and old, men and women?
Should I distinguish between Christians who are just quietly going about their business and ones who are just openly obnoxious about it?
And he was basically given a don't ask, don't tell instruction.
That as long as they don't bother you, just let them be.
And I think for a while, that's been kind of the understanding.
It's certainly understood that Christians can't have a position of prominence in American culture, but as long as they shut up, we'll leave them alone.
But now leaving them alone is just not fun enough for their opponents.
So now it has to be we have to search their consciences.
We have to see if maybe they've committed thought crime.
We have to see if they've made an errant remark here or there.
And I combine that with this, you know, that brief, I think, somewhat perhaps ongoing phenomenon of punching a Nazi.
You can punch a Nazi, they say, because the Nazi, even though he's not committing violence right now, he'll probably commit violence in the future.
So we can go ahead and punch them.
And that's a meritorious thing.
Of course, the trouble with that is by the, you know, according to the views of the hard left, everybody qualifies as a Nazi, almost everybody.
So if you can punch an unfashionable person today, tomorrow it'll be a guy who's, you know, well, somewhat more respectable, but he's on the verge of becoming a Nazi.
so we can punch him and...
And meanwhile, the violence is being – we're being accused of violence because we're accused of epistemic violence, whatever that's supposed to be, or we're accused of using words that are violence.
So our words are violence, but they're hitting us in the head with a brick is not violence.
I'll say one thing about this whole violence thing.
I was disappointed that Ann Coulter backed out of that Berkeley public speaking event because I know that her sponsors had backed out and they weren't going to back her up.
But I found out, of course, we found out later that the so-called Oath Keepers, who are law enforcement people, who are constitutionalist types, and I will certainly take those in a day like this kind of day and age, they said, we'll come and make sure nothing goes wrong.
And I I think the best thing that can happen at this moment is simply for the general public, most of whom I don't believe – they don't necessarily side with us, but they certainly don't side with people smashing windows and destroying a Starbucks or whatever.
The irony there is that Starbucks is as leftist as can be, and they still – they're not immune to getting the windows smashed.
But the best thing that can happen is for America to see clearly who these people are, what their methods are, what they're about, and what's going to happen next.
If we don't stop them.
And that Ann Coulter event would have brought that out with the cameras rolling.
And I know it's easy for me to say, here I am safely in my home in Florida.
Ann, go out to Berkeley and I'm right behind you.
But if you're going to commit to do that, I think you can't hand them a victory by saying, nah, you know what, on second thought, I better not.
Then don't commit to doing it in the first place.
Actually, I completely agree with you, and I think it would have been a rather large non-event, and she would have been able to give her speech.
And I think that the police and others had learned from the violence in California, previously to the point where I don't think they were going to allow it to happen again.
And this, you know, this punch-a-Nazi stuff, boy, you know, if only the left, the extreme left, the communists, Sort of hard socialist left didn't have such a habit of creating class enemies which they could then wipe out with impunity.
Because when you can use a label that you can attach to someone with no particular evidence...
I mean, who is a Nazi?
Somebody who wants immigration law enforced?
Okay, they're a Nazi.
Somebody who's skeptical of the wage gap?
Oh, they're a Nazi.
I mean, if you have this label you can attach to anyone that then gives you permission to use violence against them, that is such a strong habit.
of the left when they get into power.
And yeah, sure, they're all about diversity.
That's when they're worming their way in.
You know, once they're in, they don't want diversity.
Like, they claim diversity to get control of, say, a newspaper.
Once they're in, they only hire photocopies of themselves, and you couldn't get a libertarian within 10 miles of the place, let alone a rhino.
So yeah, the diversity is a way of softening your defenses so they can get in.
Once they get in, they don't want any diversity of thought or opinion whatsoever, and they really will enforce that in the most brutal ways.
And they don't say anything like, gosh, there aren't enough Scandinavians at this newspaper.
Or, gee, evangelical Christians are underrepresented in such and such group.
The thought never crosses their minds.
But unfortunately, a lot of naive people, I think, take them at their word.
Well, you know, maybe they're a little bit too rough around the edges, but they just want openness and inclusion.
That is the absolute last thing these people want.
And, you know, I visit campusreform.org a lot, which keeps me informed on what's going on around American and sometimes Canadian campuses.
And it's like every single day.
Every single day there are multiple horror shows that all involve we now run this place and you are going to be obedient or else.
And you know what?
We really don't even care if in your heart of hearts you disagree with us.
We're perfectly happy that you're terrorized into being publicly silent because that also gives us the jollies.
Well, the basic reality is – here's a quick translation for diversity – Diversity is, we welcome everyone who votes for the Democrats.
It doesn't matter what gender, what race, whatever.
If they vote for the Democrats, we consider them diverse.
If you're anywhere to the right of, I don't know...
And this comes right out of the new left of the 1960s.
Herbert Marcuse held exactly this view, and he was open about it, whereas some of them are a little more cagey about it.
Herbert Marcuse came right out and said, we cannot extend toleration to the so-called right wing.
And who knows how he would define, probably Bill Clinton would be right wing for Herbert Marcuse.
We cannot extend toleration to anti-progressive forces.
So they're just following...
It's not like they made this up in 2017.
They're just following in the footsteps of the 60s.
And the 60s are sometimes presented to us as this sainted time where morally sensitive individuals began to look around and see all the sins of the world around them.
And to some degree, some of them did see some sins.
I mean, certainly...
I think the Vietnam War was a big mistake strategically and morally.
But what you also got was this, this idea that whatever I oppose really doesn't have a right to exist.
And that's why even hosting a debate with somebody like a Jordan Peterson – have you had Jordan Peterson on?
Yes.
Okay.
I don't know why I'm even asking, of course.
Even hosting a debate with him is viewed as undermining – Minority communities or whoever they might be.
Because you are dignifying him.
You're suggesting that he has an opinion.
He doesn't have an opinion.
All he has is violence, even though he's never actually physically hurt anybody.
And by the way, could you imagine if the situation were reversed?
If we were actually out there physically, you know, hurling brickbats at people and breaking glass and saying, well, the real criminals are the ones who give nasty speeches.
You think anybody would believe that for one second?
No.
Well, I actually, as I'm getting older, Tom, I'm getting more and more of the opinion that the leftists only opposed the Vietnam War because it was attacking communists who were their friends.
That's sort of where I am as far as my thinking goes.
Because, you know, they all seem to be Berkeley, the home of free speech.
It's like, well, not so much anymore because now they own the place.
And so everyone's a revolutionary until they get the ring of power.
And then suddenly they want to use that power against everyone who's like them six minutes ago.
And also, let's talk a little bit about the Church's history regarding free speech, because I came from a sort of skeptical tradition where the story goes that, well, you know, you see, there was the torture of Galileo, there was the Inquisition, and the Church was ferocious on free speech, and then reading your book, which I really want to link to below, about the Church's history with regards to science and free speech.
I think I was pretty much bamboozled by some leftist critiques that really aren't giving the full picture.
I wonder if you can give people a sense of where the Catholic Church, at least, and other denominations, if you know them, where it stood on free speech throughout history, because I think it's been a little bit cherry-picked by leftists and presented to people as not what it was.
Well, no doubt it has, but at the same time we ought to acknowledge that in the same way that a lot of history that we look at does not conform to present day sensibilities, well neither will much of what we associate with the church.
There was an index of prohibited books, that's true, that existed.
At the same time, let's bear in mind what institution did more than any other in the world to create the modern university system.
Now, of course, maybe we should be condemning them for this in light of what's happened to them.
No, but it was created as a meritocracy, not as a way of getting students to endlessly fund their own leftist indoctrination.
So back in the day, I've got no problem with the university system.
They would have been smacked down quickly.
It was the internet of its day.
Yeah, plus they were studying real stuff.
They weren't studying whatever the heck they study these days.
But, for example, in the medieval universities, starting around the late 1100s, early 1200s, you had more robust, rational debate on a wider range of questions than maybe anywhere at any time up to that point.
In fact, that's why, if you look at Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, it's arranged the way it is.
It's arranged not as a series of chapters saying...
Here's my belief.
It's a question.
Question, question, question, question, question.
Because the whole of university life was organized around answering questions.
They would have disputations where different parties would argue two sides of a contentious topic and then...
You know, they would try to come up with some way to resolve the two sides.
That's what Thomas Aquinas was trying to do in his Summa, was to anticipate all possible objections to what he had to say, and then try to reply the best he could to the objections using reason, using authority, using all these sorts of arguments that he could use.
Now notice, in other words, he recognized that his opponents had arguments.
I mean, if the left had written the Summa Theologica, it would be all blank pages, right?
He recognizes that even people who disagree with him have arguments.
Now, let's reckon with them.
It'd be recipes for Molotov cocktails.
That's exactly what it would be.
But when you read – I mean, Aquinas will come up with arguments that his own opponents hadn't even thought of for their position.
he would come up with them, state them, and then refute them.
So he was very much a model of how a scholar behaves, and that was what university life was like.
And you had to engage in one of these disputations in order to get your degree, which is not at all what university life is like now, where professors, you know, they teach six hours a week, and then they're blogging or doing heaven knows what the rest of the time.
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to point out as well that the universities in the Catholic era during the founding were very much involved in serving the needs of the people.
You know, to me, this is a point you make in your book that Chesterton points out in his biography, St. Thomas Aquinas, that no philosophical system since the 16th century.
That's a long time ago.
That's 500 years.
No philosophical system since the 16th century has been faithful to what ordinary people call common sense.
And this is certainly something I've really tried for like 10 years now in the public sphere to break down philosophy into actionable, manageable thinking points, reasoning points, areas that people can debate on objectively.
Philosophy has to be turned back.
And theology is so wrapped up in philosophy, which we'll get to in a second, but a way of bringing philosophy or rational thinking or critical thinking to the masses was the purpose of a lot of this stuff.
And it really is hard to find, you could say, you know, some of the Roman legal theoreticians and some of the more practical aspects of Roman philosophy.
You've got to go back 2,500 years to Socrates to find someone or a sort of thought system that was so dedicated to walking among the people and helping them solve the challenges of being moral in a dangerous world.
And the cloistering of academia, far worse than anything which happened with the monks in the Dark Ages, the cloistering of intellectuals and them turning to the abstract, to this platonic ideals, to race politics, to identity politics, to all of this nonsense, has stripped people of the guidance to all of this nonsense, has stripped people of the guidance they need from clear and moral
And to me, going back and reading some of the stuff that was going on in the height of Catholic theology is finding very practical and applied philosophy that is so tragically absent and why I think society is spinning so out of control at the moment.
It's so funny to hear about the dead white males of Western civilization and we need diversity.
And then you look at Thomas Aquinas and look at his sources and Look at the people he cites.
Aristotle, from a civilization quite different from his.
I mean, it belongs to the West, but ancient Greece is quite different from the Europe of his day.
And he calls Aristotle the philosopher.
Obviously, the church fathers are sources.
But look at Maimonides, a Jewish source, is referred to repeatedly.
Muslim sources he respected, like Avicenna and Averroes.
So you have a man who, given the constraints of his age, is as acquainted with the thought of the known world to him as anyone could possibly be expected to be.
And he doesn't encounter this thought in order to say, well, these people are all stupid and they have nothing to contribute to me.
To the contrary, he would say, oh, a lot of times they have some insights, and sometimes they're half right and half wrong, and I have to correct them.
So he had exactly the attitude that you would want a scholar to have.
He has an attitude that is light years beyond what we see today among typical historians.
Now, I say historians because that's my field, and I have a particular resentment against them.
I should say scholars in general.
But you also talked about science.
Now, I know – when I was growing up, I got the usual caricature that science is based on reason, and the church was based on backwardness and stupidity.
So, of course, they're going to clash.
And that was the standard view for a long time, up through Andrew Dixon White's two-volume work on this so-called warfare between religion and theology and science and theology.
And then something happened in the mid-20th century.
We had a lot of scholars, most of them non-Catholic, interestingly, and I cite a lot of them in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization...
And they start going back and saying, well, wait a minute.
We've had in our heads this enlightenment prejudice for a long time, that everything good and sensible and rational came out of skeptical thinkers or atheists or whatever, and everything backward and idiotic we want to get away from came from the church.
Well, how about we go— We found with Joseph Schumpeter that really the first really systematic economic thinkers were not David Ricardo and Adam Smith, but the 16th century Spanish scholastic theologians at the University of Salamanca in particular.
Now Schumpeter was not any Catholic apologist by any means, but he said these were people who were talking about things like Prices, money, inflation, monopoly, wages, value, all the sorts of things economists talk about, they're talking about them.
And then you can just think of discipline after discipline.
When it came to the sciences, well, what we uncover is that, first of all, how did we ever get snookered into thinking that the civilization, the West, where science develops in a sustained way, it doesn't just burst and then It disintegrates.
It, in a sustained way, develops.
How could that develop in a civilization where the most influential institution is hostile to it?
Maybe there's something deeper here.
So there are a lot of things we could say about this.
One of them very quickly is, in the Book of Wisdom, which is referred to by Protestants as a deuterocanonical book, Wisdom 1121 says, God has ordered all things according to measure, number, and weight.
And that's a verse that there was a lot of exegesis about.
St.
Augustine reflected on it quite a bit.
And what people took from that is that God created the universe in a mathematical, orderly way.
Once you absorb that as part of the way you look at the world, you can start engaging in science.
You can do the scientific method because you expect that repeated experiments under the same conditions will yield you the same results because it's an orderly universe.
You expect to find mathematical relationships because it's an orderly universe.
Not all civilizations had that insight.
We just take this for granted, but as Albert Einstein said, you have no right to take that for granted.
We're just lucky that it turned out this way.
We have no right to assume this.
So, for example, the ancient Babylonians thought the universe was totally chaotic.
So, you know, does science develop there?
Well, of course not.
And even in Islam, where we're told an awful lot about the golden age of Islam and Islamic contributions to the sciences, well, there are some sciences where we do see that, like in optics, for example.
But the problem with Islam in this regard is that they would view this idea that the universe is orderly and that certain regularities have been built into it as an insult to the absolute sovereignty of God who can behave as arbitrarily as he wishes at any time.
Now obviously the Christians believe that God could perform a miracle and do things that we wouldn't expect.
But it's how would we recognize a miracle if the whole world were always chaotic?
It's only because there's a backdrop of order that we even recognize a miracle.
So with Islam, there was a difficulty in accepting the idea of secondary causation.
There was instead more or less the idea that God is directly intervening constantly.
And again, it's hard to get the scientific enterprise really going in a sustained way with that kind of assumption.
So there's a lot of stuff.
I mean, I happen to like the example just to show that when you're steeped in this kind of mentality, it helps you think properly about science.
Dmitry Mendeleev is coming up with the developing the first periodic table of the elements.
And as we know from our Chemistry courses, you know, you line up the elements in this way, in this table, and it kind of works, you know, because elements that are close to each other have similar characteristics.
And as he was lining them up, he got to a gap.
He couldn't find anything, any known element for atomic number 21.
But yet it doesn't work unless there's an element for 21.
If he assumes there's some undiscovered element there, and then he just continues to 22, it works.
So he came to the conclusion, totally unwarranted, but he came to the conclusion there must be something that we just haven't discovered yet.
So I'm going to leave this blank.
I mean, can you imagine the nerve of the guy?
I'm going to leave this blank, assuming that someday we'll discover what's in that gap.
Ten years later, the element scandium was discovered, atomic number 21.
It goes right in the gap.
So that's to say...
When you're in a civilization that takes certain features of the natural world for granted that are precursors and are necessary for doing science, It's not a surprise that that's the civilization that winds up doing science.
And I mean, believe me, there are many examples, many, many, many examples of priest scientists or the contributions of the Jesuits to science.
It's absolutely overwhelming, and that's why the science chapter of my book is the longest one, because I know I've got the toughest row to hoe there, because I know no one's going to believe me, because we've all been taught the opposite.
And I'll tell you, just to wrap this up really quickly, one thing that convinced me That the new way of looking at the history of the church and science had really taken root was there's a company online.
They used to be called the Teaching Company, and they're now called the Great Courses.
And they offer – they take really great college professors, and they record their courses, and they sell them.
And so I bought, just out of curiosity, the History of Science course.
Now, this company, they're not conservative.
They're not liberal.
They're not libertarian.
They're plain vanilla.
They just want people to buy their courses.
So they're not going to go out on a limb with some crazy interpretations.
I saw that even they were teaching that this view that the church has just been this implacable foe of science is not accepted by mainstream scholars anymore.
I thought, okay, this is really mainstream now if even these people are teaching it.
Right.
And I – you know, that's a great thing and I want to do a little bit more to reinforce what you're saying.
And again, the book is called How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
We'll put a link to it in the show notes.
You've got to read it.
It's very eye-opening.
And it turns me into, I thought I was being very original.
Turns out it was just being a cliche, which I'll get to in a second.
But the need to wrap faith in reason, the challenge between faith and reason.
There are, of course, religions that just throw away reason completely.
and don't have that struggle.
But the struggle between faith and reason is central, of course, to, well, this combination of Judeo-Christian plus Roman, and in particular, I would say, ancient Greek philosophy.
The church has not steamrolled over prior civilizations, but has had the much more challenging task of attempting to integrate non-Christian thinkers into a Christian worldview, which is a maturity of thought that other religions, I would say, not particularly great at in
But over six centuries, as you point out, this is a quote from the book, the Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment than any other and possibly all other institutions.
And the friendship towards, I mean, why did we have an industrial revolution?
Because before we had an agricultural revolution, you can't have an industrial revolution without an excess of labor in an urban environment, which requires an excess of food in a rural environment.
And the church was very powerful.
And you give so many examples of priests who are focusing very hard on trying to develop year-round crops like turnips or trying to figure out how to make the harness on a horse or an oxen so that when you pull it, it doesn't choke the horse, which allows you to plow much better.
The fact that the church was so interested in animal husbandry and agriculture is why we have a civilization And the reason why I said I was a cliche, Tom, is that, you know, it's the oldest and most boring story that you are fathered by a man, and then you rail against that man, and then you recognize that you are the child of that man and owe him some respect, this prodigal son.
And so for me, it's like I was raised as a Christian.
And then I railed against it.
And then in reading this and other works and so on, I realized that the very power to rail against the church, to some sense, was not only delivered but created by the church.
And it is a hard thing to look in the mirror and realize that you're kind of a cliche.
But it is important to retain our intellectual integrity and honesty in this area and to say that I was bamboozled by a lot of people who sold this story of the anti-scientific, anti-humanistic, anti-progress church.
But the facts are very, very clear.
We would not have the modern world, as you point out, without the protection of the classics, the extension of agriculture, of science, of physics, of astronomy, of biology that we got from the church.
Well, look, I've changed my mind on a couple of major things, too.
And it's not easy to do sometimes.
And the easiest thing in the world is to ignore it when there's a conflict between what I think and new information.
Just pretend it's not there.
Yeah, nuts to that.
You've got to live with integrity.
So I appreciate what you just said.
And you're right, there are so many stories.
The stories, for example, just about the monks and the monasteries, this wasn't even their goal.
Their goal was to sort of retreat from society and do their thing.
But during the Dark Ages, they were unexpectedly called to do something.
And by the way, the Dark Ages were dark not because the church was in charge, but because of the barbarian invasions everywhere.
And And then after those, a couple centuries after that, there were the 9th and 10th century invasions by the Muslims, the Magyars, and others coming in that were the Vikings that were very brutal.
And the nice thing about the monasteries in that case was they're sort of analogous to the Internet today.
My understanding as a tech illiterate is that the Internet is built so that even if there's like some nuclear attack, And some, you know, portion of it gets wiped out.
The rest of it can somehow replicate itself, like in Terminator 2, you know?
Well, likewise with the monasteries, because these monasteries contained, you know, all kinds of learning and advances in just even the way they ran the monastery.
They learned how to use water power.
They had more advanced technology than anybody.
But even if you wipe out a bunch of them, you can still rekindle civilization on the basis of the ones that remain.
And so they were these little outposts of civilization waiting for a better time.
And when better times developed and you got Charlemagne, well, you got the cathedral schools, the precursors of the university.
They're just waiting for the moment when there would be people who cared about learning anymore or people who were interested in this.
I mean, Charlemagne, for example, I'm not saying that he's my model and we should all imitate Charlemagne.
But what made him different from people who came before him was… Was that he said, you know, we actually are ruling over what was once a really great civilization, and I want to try to help bring that back.
So they would have little scholarly groups where each of them would take like an ancient Greek or Roman name, and they would all learn and teach each other.
And it was all very rudimentary, but their heart was in the right place.
And that's when the church said, okay, finally, somebody wants to work with us to try and put things back together.
And then when you mentioned astronomy, I mean...
There's so many bizarre things that you just wouldn't have thought of.
Like, for example, when Giovanni Cassini wanted to verify what Kepler was saying about planetary orbits, he did this using the best astronomical observatory available in his day, which happened to be the Basilica of San Petronio.
Because these Basilicas were built to function as astronomical observatories with the most precise instrumentation available at that time so that the date of Easter could be predicted because it's not – in the West, it's not the same all the time.
And you need to be able to observe different orbits and the moon and everything to figure it all out.
And so he went and used the Basilica of San Petronio to do his astronomical work.
So, I mean, who knew that, right?
It's just, it's like a huge garden of delight when you go to actually find out all this stuff that, you know, nobody ever taught you.
Nobody ever taught me.
So, in fact, for the longest time, I thought somebody should write a book with this title.
Because I know the Catholic Church plays this role, fundamental role in Western civilization.
And I just waited.
Nobody wrote it.
So I just said, all right, I will.
I am so not prepared to do this.
And so I just read and read and read.
So I'm learning on the job, really, while I was doing that.
And as a result, I mean, it's done very well.
I ended up doing a TV series based on it.
And it's had something like 13 or 14 foreign language translations available.
Even in languages that are nothing like English, like Korean.
There are people in Korea reading this book that I can't communicate with, and yet they're reading what I wrote.
That always blows me away.
Oh, it's funny.
I think 99% of culture, Tom, is just generated by people who are sick and tired of waiting for other people to generate culture.
Because, you know, especially the controversial stuff.
Like, I mean, we touch on a lot of controversial topics on this show.
And for me, mostly it's like, oh, I don't want to talk about this.
I'm sure someone else is.
Oh, I won't.
And then eventually it's like, oh, man, okay, fine.
Fine, I'll step forward and talk about it.
And for me, you know, because I have such a...
I mean, anybody who's into philosophy, of course, has this tendency...
Because of a lot of lack of knowledge of the stuff you write about in this book, we have a tendency to sort of jump over, you know, the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, and just head straight back to the ancient world, right?
Straight back to the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, and so on.
And it was until I read your book, I was not aware, and I'm going to give another quote where you're quoting Kenneth Clark.
People say people don't always realize that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in existence.
Our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne, and almost any classical text that survived until the 8th century has survived until today.
So for me to say, well, I'm just going to hop, skip, and jump over the Dark Ages and the theological time, it's like, so I can go and read this ancient text.
It's like, no, they only exist because of the church.
You can only skip over the church because of the church.
And it's just recognizing that.
Which, again, I just like, man, I just like to not be such a cliche, but, you know, it's just the way it happened to work out.
But the retention of this knowledge and the fight against, which I talked about recently with Dr.
Duke Pesta about the Crusades, the Muslim invasions, the Muslim taking over of Christian realms in the Middle East, and then increasingly up into Sicily they took over for hundreds of years, Spain.
All the way to the gates of Vienna.
It was not the Dark Ages because of the church.
The church was the only reason we ever got out of the Dark Ages, right?
It was the crippling socialism of the late Roman Empire, the endless imperialism.
Boy, it's a good thing that never repeated itself.
And the war and, you know, the fact that a million-plus Europeans were taken by the Muslims in the slave trade, the fact that you couldn't even live near the ocean.
In Europe because of the Mongol or Muslim pirates coming to take slaves, which again, lowers your nutritional value because you can't get any fish.
And so the fact that there's this terrible fire and there's this fireman in there...
Fighting this fire, eventually putting it out so we can build a new house and everyone says, oh no, that was the arsonist.
I mean, that is so unjust and unfair.
And, you know, maybe it takes being attacked on the internet to recognize that not all criticisms are particularly fair and valid for me to look at the church again and say, okay, well, that which birthed me culturally and intellectually, maybe it's not the arsonist.
Maybe it was fighting the fire and I need to give respect where it's due.
Well, that is very well said, and again, I appreciate that.
When you mention the Crusades, it's very disappointing to me that I have a libertarian audience that I love dearly, that have followed me through thick and thin, and I love these people.
But yet even some of them, they congratulate themselves on how unorthodox they are, but then they have a completely conventional view of the Crusades.
I had somebody on my page.
I was making a remark that I thought it was odd that the Libertarian Party had made a meme quoting from the Satanic Temple.
I just thought that was odd for PR reasons.
Odd decisions.
And somebody started lecturing me about, well, at least they don't belong to a church that forcibly tried to convert Muslims in the Crusades.
And I said, well, I don't belong to that church either.
What church are you talking about?
That did not happen.
There was no attempt to convert.
Most of the people in the Crusader kingdoms were Muslim.
So if it was an attempt at forcible conversion, it was the biggest failure in the history of mankind.
So it's not enough to just have unorthodox economics.
Maybe you've got to be fair to everybody.
And one final thing, Stefan, you were saying that a lot of times you cover topics and you say, I don't really want to have to do this, but nobody else is doing it, so I guess I'll do it.
I'm not saying this to flatter you, but I'm saying it I mean, the fact is, there are entire think tanks out there with budgets, I don't know, a thousand times larger than yours, 10,000 times larger than yours, that if they tried, they couldn't get one-tenth of the views you get on a YouTube video.
I mean, these are people who put you to sleep.
I wouldn't want my worst enemy listening to these people.
Maybe that's their plan.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you see my point?
You're one guy.
Now, I know you have a team around you, but you're one guy.
We're two guys.
That's the team.
You're two guys and a camera.
Two guys and a camera.
And somehow you've built up an empire and, you know, people criticize you and you get in trouble and you say the wrong thing and you cover the wrong topic.
But it makes no difference to you because you have this empire.
And if 3% of people don't like you, what possible difference does it make?
You can still go out there and produce content.
That is something that has got to be a consolation to us because this was impossible even 15 years ago.
It can conceive of what we do every day.
Well, yeah, we were just talking about this morning, Mike and I, that we're doing 150 million views and downloads a year.
That is truly astonishing.
And this is like me in a ping pong ball, basically.
I'm like a guy with no special effects, not even a table.
And so, yeah, I mean, but that's...
I think people recognize, and I think this is one of the reasons why these conversations...
Move people.
If people recognize, as I've always said, that philosophy or critical thinking is not about the conclusions any more than science is about the conclusions.
You know, people always want to say settled science.
And science is a process.
Philosophy is a process.
I dare say theology is a process.
There is no destination.
It is a continual process of refining the truth.
And so, without a doubt, you know, I was joking the other day that the The moral of this show seems to be, make friends and break friends, make friends and break friends, because I'm always moving into new territory, and people really like what I have to say, and then I get more information, maybe rubs up against some things that they believe that they don't like, and then they react.
But I think over time, although it costs individuals as you move forward, over time I think there's a kind of integrity in the process that I'm comfortable with.
And because I'm not wed to conclusions, but wed to a particular process, I think it...
It rubs people the wrong way a lot, but over time, I think you build up a kind of credibility that becomes somewhat irresistible.
And, you know, you can't fight a boxing match if you just stand in one place.
There's a lot of bobbing and ducking and weaving, but the goal, of course, remains to win the match.
And so I think that process of, you know, I mean, there are a lot of people who are going to be shocked that I'm talking to you, and they're going to be shocked at the content of what it is that I'm saying, you know.
But in my experience, I mean, the atheists and so on, And I've had a lot of friends in the atheist community and so on.
But it is kind of hard to miss, which is one of the reasons why these conversations to me are so important, Tom.
It's pretty hard to miss, and I've got the details and the data to back this up.
I'll put a link to the video below.
Man, atheists are addicted to socialism on the whole.
Man, they're addicted to leftism.
So removing a deity from the center of people's thinking has not done much other than create a power vacuum that is inhabited by...
A state which you can't ignore.
Man, you cannot ignore those people at all because they've got the guns, they've got the prisons, they've got the endless buckets of regulations, and they can come and mess your life up in a way that a Christian can't even conceive of and which it would be considered a sin to do because Christians have to convince you with the word because your individual sovereign conscience is the only path to get to heaven.
Not only has no moral content, but is actually immoral and it won't get you to heaven, it will get the Christian to hell.
And so this reality that religion, Christian religion, Christian theology allows you and encourages you to have your own conscience and pursue virtue as you see fit in conversation versus the atheist, generally socialist-leaning community that want to use all the guns of the state to force you into their particular moral corner,
that's impossible to miss, that there's far more freedom Well, I'll just say, I would say my audience is 50-50.
I've got half religious folks and half non-religious folks.
The vast bulk of the non-religious folks feel like it's no harm to them, obviously, what my views on this are.
Or some of them might say, this is the one deviation.
I think Murray Rothberg used to say, everybody's entitled to one deviation.
Well, this is Woods' deviation.
We'll let him have it.
But then there are the ones who, they will break with you permanently over this.
And I feel like, you know, if despite everything I've done, and I have produced...
If not at the Stefan Molyneux level, a pretty darn big amount of output.
You have more kids, so it's different.
And you write real books, though.
Who are all being raised to think the right way, by the way, and not even because I'm forcing them.
They just see – they have the woods' brain or something.
I don't know.
They're all good on stuff.
They get all the stuff.
I mean, if all that stuff – It's so insignificant to them that they could just say, well, this one thing about Woods, I never want to listen to again.
I don't want these people following me because that's creepy to me.
I've never understood why, especially for our people, there's such a problem with saying, you know, I disagree with this person on the following three things, but man, is he good on the other 97.
Have you noticed it's like impossible for our people to say that half the time?
Well, it's funny, too, because there is a kind of intellectual vanity to do with that.
Because, good heavens, I mean, if I could get 97% correct opinions quote over time, I'd be – I mean, that would be unimaginable.
That would be like platonic perfection.
So the idea that you can – If you disagree with 3% of what someone says, you can just disavow them and walk away.
First of all, you're looking for a platonic standard of perfection that actually is divine.
You're looking for a god, not a human being, because a god can be right 100% of the time, but a human being will never get close to that.
And secondly, it's saying that somehow you manifest that standard of being 100% right over time, and therefore you can impose these lofty standards of perfection on other people.
It is a mad, you know, the stunning Kruger effect that people who aren't smart and don't know how to do stuff think it's a lot easier than it is.
To all those people who are like, oh, you have bad thinking, 3% of the corner of your brain.
It's like, hey, man, I invite you to step out into the public sphere following only reason and evidence and pursue that to the best of your ability.
And duck and weave as new information comes your way.
You go out there and see what percentage you can achieve.
And man, if you can achieve 100%, I'll come work for you.
But it's a lot of people who just sit on the sidelines criticizing without actually being out there doing.
Well, that's legion.
And that's, I think, something that we have to recognize when we're sort of public intellectuals, that there are going to be those kinds of people.
The bad news is they can be mildly annoying.
The good news is they have actually no impact on the future whatsoever.
I know.
I'll just say this just to close this thing.
I talk about this a lot just because it was so instructive for me at the time.
I had this book in 2004 called The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and it attracted a lot of attention, positive and negative.
I mean, it was a New York Times bestseller for 12 weeks, did very well, but the left did not like it, and the neoconservatives did not like it.
Of course, I repeat myself there.
They were up in arms.
So far, I like it already, and it is actually a great book.
Thanks.
But the New York Times attacked it, the Boston Globe attacked it, and I was a young-ish scholar at that time, and I You know, I'd love to tell you that I was thrilled to be attacked by the New York Times because that gave me street cred.
I was a terrified kid, to be honest with you.
And I was wondering, does this ruin my career?
And you know what it turns out?
Not only didn't it, most people, first of all, most people never saw either article.
Most of the people who did were already going to be inclined not to like me anyway.
By the next day, those people have all forgotten my name.
People who were inclined to like me would read that and say, of course the New York Times is going to criticize him.
Big deal.
And they ignore it.
So if the New York Times and the Boston Globe can't take me down, then some guy leaving YouTube comments really has a lot of work ahead of him.
Well, it's different now because, I mean, I was attacked back in the day.
Now, back in the day, you said 2004, right?
So back in the day, there was no sort of internet tribe of like-minded people who could help set the record straight.
And now that, you know, we have friends and allies across all the political spectrum, like every person of good conscience, good mind and good heartedness who's willing to, again, pursue the reason and evidence stuff.
There are lots of people who are allies, you know, back in the dawn of the Internet and so on.
You know, the solitude that you talked about earlier, which the left aims to do, right?
Separate, isolate, attack.
You know, this is standard satanic Alinsky tactics.
It really has changed a lot just over the past half decade to the point now where, you know, when someone gets attacked, there are like a thousand people who are going to sort of rise up and, you know, try and give some perspective or rational analysis of the situation.
The power the media had in the past.
It was kind of weird in the middle because earlier on, you know, there was the old, you know, today's attack is tomorrow's fish wrapping or tomorrow's birdcage liner and so on.
Or like the old thing, I don't care what you say about me, just make sure you spell my name right.
Back in the day, you could get attacked and then it was gone.
And then there was a time where you could get attacked.
It would show up in Google searches, but you didn't have allies as yet.
And that, I think, was a particularly vulnerable time for a lot of people.
But that's all gone past now, particularly with the Trump administration and so on.
And whatever you think of them, they sure as hell have exposed how duplicitous and manipulative the mainstream media is.
So now I think it's a very different thing.
I think we've got that boat ashore that we're past the storm.
And now I think, you know, with building alliances and with all the people who are reasonable and productive on the Internet, who watch these kinds of things and respond very positively to it.
I think we're past that sort of dangerous whitewater narrows of the media having a lot of power, but not having allies as yet.
Yeah.
And by the way, that was exactly the period that I was in when that book came out.
That was the period when you could be attacked, but there was no chamber of people defending you.
And I remember there was a time when I thought, I think I have to go around now to every blog attacking me and defend myself.
And then I realized, you know what?
Nobody reads most of these blogs anyway.
And I'll tell you, not caring has been the most liberating thing in my life.
I mean, what I care about is I'm just saying what I think I need to say and doing what I need to do, and it's a miracle that I have a ton of people who just love that.
Even if they don't always agree with me, they stand by me.
I love these people.
This is great.
And so you're right.
You and I are able to live these amazing lives doing things we love doing, talking about interesting things with interesting people all day long, and we have an army of people who back us and support us.
So you know what?
If somebody at blah, blah, blah Institute doesn't want to be associated with me, Big deal.
You know, if I have an event, I get a ton of people showing up.
They have an event.
It's like five silver hairs, you know, and a cricket in the background.
I think the youthful demographics is certainly on our side.
And the other thing, just by the by, since we're talking about it, that helped me, Tom, was realizing that a lot of the people, most of the people who I respect and treasure and who've had huge influences on me intellectually, We're good to go.
Pontius Pilate, and we remember Jesus.
You know, we forget Miletus, and we remember Socrates.
And that reality that the trolls fade, but the shining light of thought remains, that's something that's a little tough to see in the moment.
But from a longer perspective in history, those stars are what define the night sky, and that's how we navigate.
Wow, that's, you know, that's such a beautiful thing to say.
And it really reminds me of my own ignorance, naivete, and maybe even arrogance.
Because when I genuinely thought, well, look, if they listen to my explanation of things, if they just read it, I mean, maybe they'll see my point better than these others.
I'll do a better job than those people did.
I honestly thought that.
Now I look back and I think, yeah, if those people had enemies, how do I expect to get through life without any?
And if I do, it means I'm doing really boring, plain vanilla stuff, and I'm not a plain vanilla kind of guy.
Well, it's funny too, because the goal of a moralist or the goal, I think, of a thinker, and I'm going to put you in that camp, whether you like it or not.
But the goal of a moralist, of course, is to aid virtue and harm the interests of evil.
There's no way to aid virtue without harming the interests of evil.
It's like saying, well, I really want to cure cancer, but I don't really want to harm the interests of any cancer cells.
It's like, well, you got to pick one or the other.
And of course, it is a shock when you aid virtue and harm the interests of evil, when evil notices and fights back.
That's what it's going to do.
But the first time it happens, it's like, whoa, I guess it is real.
All this stuff, all this negativity and this hostility and this immorality that I've been talking about lo these many years, it's now noticed me, it's there, and it is real, and it is kind of a shock.
And to me, the analogy is sort of like, well, maybe I've been a Christian for 30 years, but I never really believed in the devil until I started interfering with his labors.
And then he manifested in very, very visceral ways, I guess.
I, in my case, I have people who will attack me because they'll say they found something I wrote, you know, 25 years ago with one sentence they don't like.
And, you know, part of me says, well, look, that's, you know, I went through many intellectual phases when I was, what, in college?
I mean, come on, right?
What were you doing in college?
You know, right?
Half these people.
But I don't really take that.
I don't want them to think they've gotten under my skin.
Like, I got to rush and defend what I wrote 25 years ago.
You know, pfft.
I'm not intimidated by them.
And I was at first because I thought they were going to destroy me.
And then I realized, you know what?
I can make a go of this with or without those people.
And plus, you know, the more they attack me, the more people Google my name.
And by the way, the second time I was on the New York Times bestseller list was for my book on the financial crisis, on why it was not caused by capitalism, for heaven's sake.
So I wrote Meltdown.
That got on the bestseller list.
But this time, the Times did not review it.
When they reviewed the Politically Incorrect Guide...
So then the next time I was out, I was the only book on the list with no review.
They are not going to give me any more publicity than they absolutely have to.
So, I don't know.
They learned a little something.
All right.
I somehow, I think I twisted us onto this.
No, no.
This is the great part of the conversation.
Now, let's just finish up, if you don't mind, because there is, and we were talking about this briefly just at the beginning of the show, and since we're having a friendly, pleasant chat about every topic on the sun and moon, let's end up with this, because there is a challenge that is going on in the freedom-loving community, libertarian communities, the ANCAP communities, everyone from Rothbard to Hayek to Rand to you name it, right?
And there is this sense that this purity, this purism, this sort of idealism of what we want to talk about, the abstract ideals of small or no state, absolute non-aggression principle, perfect property rights, and so on.
And there is, I think, a collision between Platonism and Aristotelianism, if I can put it that way, or between scholasticism and applied theology, to put it more in Christian contexts.
And I've sort of made my cases, and we talked about this beforehand.
I know you've put a lot of thought into it, Tom.
Those of us who are working more in the practical sphere, who have for some time, as I have, I've got whole books on ethics and abstract and anarchism and so on, who worked in the theoretical sphere for many years, and I've certainly shifted my focus.
Quite considerably to more practical moments of the day, the current affairs, current news, and so on.
And you've done some of that as well.
Do you think there's a way to resolve some of the tensions of the conflict that is going on between the sort of abstract purists who seem a little bit disconnected with what needs to happen in the real world, even just to maintain the conversation about abstract ideological purity, and those who are more of the street fighters who are informed by ideology but are focusing more on achieving and those who are more of the street fighters who are informed by ideology but are focusing It does seem to be quite a tension.
I'd like it if the sort of yin and yang of theory and practice could work more seamlessly together, but there does seem to be this opposition.
It's like watching a Hydra fight itself in a way.
Well, I think I know exactly the conflict you're talking about.
And there are people on both sides who simply will not listen to the other side.
They don't think the other side has an argument.
But I would say most people on both sides of this would be willing to and be quite interested in hearing a debate between somebody who represents one and somebody who represents the other.
Now, when you say being involved in practical, you know, workaday things, no doubt part of that involves political questions and candidates and things like that.
And I myself, I kind of retired from politics after 2012, but I still have a rooting interest in some of what goes on.
And when there is a congressman like Thomas Massey who stands up to a bullying CNN reporter and says, no, I don't support a strike on Syria.
Well, I applaud.
I think just if you're a human, you have to applaud that.
And I also, I know I have many people, I really do cherish my friendships with them dearly who believe that absolute abstention from politics is almost a moral requirement for libertarians.
I understand that argument.
My concern is that if we're not at all there, given that most people get their political opinions from the headlines, then how are they ever going to hear about us?
So that would be my concern there.
So I don't mind if a libertarian says, well, look, I'm going to hold my nose and support such and such candidate because I think there are issues that matter a lot to me, and I think this guy is somewhat better than the other one, even though I know the whole game is...
I don't think there's any problem with that.
I mean, Lysander Spooner didn't think there was a problem with voting, and Murray Rothbard didn't think there was a problem with voting.
So right away, if we're just going to make an appeal to authority, I got two pretty darn good authorities who, if you're going to say they're not libertarians, then we don't even have to continue the discussion.
The other question is, I don't know if it's really a question of purity versus practicality, as much as it is How libertarians are willing to consider new questions that really had not arisen when these ideas were taking shape.
And some of these questions involve demographics, and they involve mass migration.
And the question becomes, can societies prosper and function?
I mean, can they persist when you have large...
I don't mean like a small group of minorities in different countries, but when these groups reach a certain critical point, does it get to a point where the society becomes ungovernable?
Because the different groups, instead of adhering to abstract principles of classical liberalism, instead become squabbling tribes struggling with each other.
Of course, the state only makes this worse because it gives each of these groups something to try to latch on to to beat the other groups with.
But I would say that definitely this large scale migration strengthens the state because it gives it social problems to try to go and quote unquote solve.
Why did Stalin deliberately try to mix ethnic Russians into the Baltic states?
Was it so that those Baltic peoples could encounter the benefits of diversity?
I mean, he wasn't that stupid.
He thought it was deliberately to try to undermine their societies, and then they become easier to break and easier to rule.
Now, these are facts.
These are facts.
And so the question becomes...
What are libertarians to make of this situation?
I don't immediately want to hear, hey, you're terrible, you're a bigot, you believe in aggression.
Quiet for a minute.
This is a serious question.
I mean, this could affect the course of history forever.
This could affect civilizations forever.
It is not obvious that if I took 30 million Americans and I dropped them in Singapore, that the culture of Singapore would survive.
It certainly would not.
And it is not collectivist to say that you care about the culture of Singapore.
Collectivism is when you're talking about an artificial grouping.
Otherwise, collectivism would be families.
That's not collectivist.
Or my chess club is not collectivist.
These are spontaneous, natural, organic associations of people.
And likewise, culture is a natural, spontaneous, organic expression of a people.
What collectivism is, is when you arbitrarily say, well, you're no longer a Russian or whatever, you're a Soviet, and all these republics, you're all the same, and you're all Soviets, and this is your identity, and we're going to shove this identity down your throat, that's collectivism.
But spontaneous groupings and spontaneous expressions of identity, that's not collectivism.
And I've seen a lot of libertarians kind of getting on my nerves, because for years I've tried to say, Libertarians are not the caricature that you make them out to be.
They're not atomistic individualists who care about nothing but individuals and individual rights and I want to have a tattoo on my forehead and that's the whole meaning of my life.
That is not who libertarians are.
And yet when these issues come up of, well, what does become of our society under these conditions that have never been, you know, or very, very rarely been deliberately tried, where there's been a deliberate attempt to scramble demographics.
All I can get from a lot of libertarians is, well, all I care about is, you know, my my at least my lawn will get mowed more cheaply.
You know, I mean, that's all they can think about.
Is there one individual situation?
And I feel like if that's the only way, if you can only think on that level, I don't think you're going to connect with a lot of people.
of people.
And plus, I'm not convinced that's the correct libertarian answer.
And I plus I'm not I'm not convinced that's the correct libertarian answer.
But it's so strange because libertarians seem to have this idea that immigration is not some giant government program.
It's so strange because libertarians seem to have this idea that immigration is not some giant government program.
And so it's like open borders, open borders.
And so it's like, open borders, open borders.
I mean, the immigration as it currently stands, certainly since 1965, is a massive giant government program.
I mean, immigration as it currently stands, certainly since 1965, is a massive giant government program.
It is paying people to come in.
It is paying people to come in.
It is giving them massive amounts of welfare.
It is giving them massive amounts of welfare.
It is isolating them from the economic and therefore cultural integration into the host society.
It is isolating them from the economic and therefore cultural integration into the host society.
Like, it's one thing, if people want to come to a free country, and they want to work, and they want to, because they love the country, they love the culture, that's one thing.
Like, it's one thing if people want to come to a free country and they want to work and they want to because they love the country, they love the culture.
That's one thing.
But when you pay people to come to your country, and then you pay them to live in their own isolated communities where they have no economic incentive, in fact, they have an economic disincentive, because they make less money if they try to integrate into the economy and into the culture of the host country.
It is a And this sort of repeating, which is open borders, borders of violations of the non-aggression principle and so on.
No, no, no.
The welfare state is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
The government program called bring people in and then pay them to not assimilate, that is a giant government program.
And the lack of skepticism.
And I think it's a sensitivity towards, you know, the great Satan of the modern era.
racism, racism, racism, and so on.
But the reality is that there are cultures that don't work with freedom.
And we know that because we look at the host countries.
You look at the countries in the third world, the countries in the Middle East, with the exception of Israel to a large degree, they just don't work with freedom.
And there are people in those cultures who would work very well with freedom.
But if you're importing people and paying them to come in and then paying them to not assimilate, you're not allowing the free market to choose the people who are going to best work within your society.
And so this idea that just, well, open borders is the way to go because they don't want to be called a racist, that is not a fundamentally libertarian position.
And I'm And I think it's really, this to me is one of the litmus tests.
Do you actually get what freedom means?
Because if you're going to talk about open borders without talking about the welfare state, and that used to be a common conversation among libertarians.
You can't have open borders and a welfare state.
You can have open borders without a welfare state, but not the two together.
I think this is where moral courage comes up.
Because if you're afraid of talking about basic libertarian principles because you're afraid of being called a racist, I wouldn't say that your moral courage is very top tier.
Right.
And look, obviously, what would I possibly benefit from raising this issue?
How could I possibly benefit from this other than to get a whole lot of grief from a whole lot of people?
I benefit in no way.
Nobody sends me a check in the mail.
I'm not getting a check for talking about this stuff, but I'm worried about it.
And I think it's a legitimate worry.
I mean, I think just saying we're going to get a whole lot of great new ethnic restaurants shows such a A moral and historical obtuseness.
When you look at when these large-scale social experiments have been tried, there aren't a huge number of success stories.
Instead, what you see is societies that break up, but they don't break up peacefully.
They fight and struggle.
And moreover, we could go on forever.
This is a whole separate topic.
But I think we should have some, but we should...
We should talk this out.
Everybody will be Hitler at that point.
If we can find somebody who will not use these childish, anti-intellectual smear words, then I'm all for a discussion.
I'd love to moderate one, whatever, but we've got to hash this thing out.
Yeah, I think history is very clear on the challenges and that the role of state power in the reorganization of demographics in the West is prodigious, and I would argue decisive.
It simply wouldn't happen without that.
Like in Europe, the government is supposed to have one job, which is to protect the citizens who are living in the country, and that includes, of course, prior immigrants.
And so creating this giant buffet of a welfare state and then refusing to enforce any borders Combined with participating in the destabilization of Middle Eastern and Third World regimes, well, that is a complete recipe for disaster.
And anyone who thinks that the 10 million plus Africans and other economic migrants who are currently massing in northern Africa, waiting for the weather to get a little better to cross over the Mediterranean into Europe, anyone who thinks that this is going to be an easy transition or an easy demographic alteration, I don't even know anyone who thinks that this is going to be an easy transition or
I mean, the lack of knowledge of history, the lack of knowledge of the challenges of, you know, culture plus diversity often does equal war, the people who don't understand all of that and who are just retreating in fear of throwing out the attack bombs of whatever nonsense leftist term they've been handed that day.
It's just not part of a conversation that civilized people can be involved in.
And it is, you know, I mean, the people who've come to the West from other cultures, other races, other ethnicities, who come to the West because they like the West, I want to protect their interests as much as anyone else's.
You know, people who've come from Nigeria because they want to be part of...
The Western experiment of freedom and separation of church and state and so on.
I want to protect their interests as well.
You know, if I have a favorite French restaurant and I don't want to go there and order something that's not French, I mean, that's just the way it works.
And so this is a challenge for libertarians.
And I think libertarians have a wonderful, wonderful richness of ideology and thought to add to this particular conversation.
But I do find that a lot of them are just recoiling on I don't know.
So there's that point.
I think it's just to pretend that this isn't a big deal or that this is motivated by hatred or something is very frustrating.
Especially when, as I say, I can find super-duper cosmopolitan people like Jefferson.
I mean, look, he loved the French Revolution and everything else, but he said, you know, what would happen if all these people came here?
Likewise, think of the example in New Hampshire, right?
The Free State Project.
The idea is, we're going to bring a lot of libertarians to New Hampshire for what purpose?
To change its form of government.
To change the way things work.
I hadn't thought of that.
That's a very good point.
But for some reason, when people who, as you say, there are countries and cultures in the world that have no experience with libertarianism, don't even know what it is.
If they come here, what, that's not going to change things?
Then we should abandon the Free State Project.
Well, and of course, if the left didn't think that the demographics was going to benefit their big government view of things, they wouldn't be bringing these people in anyway.
The left absolutely knows that it's going to change the voting patterns, and therefore the government and the culture of America and the West.
That's exactly why...
They're bringing them in.
So it seems like the only people who don't understand this are the people most committed to small government and big economic and personal liberties and so on, facing demographically certainly the biggest threat to libertarianism that has occurred since the foundation of communism.
The people who should understand this the best seem to be fleeing from the most important fight at the moment, and that is a little frustrating.
And they want to talk about, you know, I hate to, in effect, quote Bill Buckley, but They want to talk about demunicipalizing garbage collection or something or housing vouchers or whatever.
It's total nothingness that means nothing that will not make a difference.
If what you and I are worried about comes to pass, none of that stuff is going to matter.
None of it is going to matter anyway.
Right.
Well, Tom, I want to leave everyone on that high optimistic note of a call to action.
Just go and learn about these things and just have honest conversations and don't get dragged down into the leftist race-baiting or class-baiting muck of personal insults.
We need to deal with facts, and that's supposed to be our big gig as freedom thinkers or just thinkers as a whole.
So I just wanted to remind people, please check out tomwoods.com.
Follow Tom on Twitter, Thomas E. Woods, twitter.com slash Thomas E. Woods.
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