Sept. 12, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:45
3822 The Rise of Anarchy in America? | Michael Malice and Stefan Molyneux
Order "The Art of the Argument" Now: http://www.artoftheargument.comWe Need Your Support: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donateIn the latest edition of our mock debate series, Michael Malice joins the program to debate the viability of Anarcho-Capitalism with Stefan Molyneux's evil statist twin. Michael Malice is a writer, television commentator, the author of many books including “Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il” and the host of "YOUR WELCOME" with Michael Malice on Compound Media. Website: http://www.michaelmalice.comCompound Media: http://www.compoundmedia.comBook: http://www.kimjongilbook.comFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/michaelmaliceTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/michaelmaliceYour 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
Warning. The views, sophistry, and non-arguments expressed by Stefan Molyneux in this mock debate are not supported, endorsed, or recommended by Stefan Molyneux.
Watching or listening to this video while operating heavy machinery is not an argument.
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio here with a good friend, soon-to-be bitter mortal ideological enemy, Michael Malice.
He is a writer, television commentator, the author of many books, including Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography of Kim Jong-il and the host of Your Welcome on Compound Media.
You can find more of Michael's work at michaelmalice.com and, of course, compoundmedia.com.
Michael, thank you so much for taking the time today.
I prefer the term frenemy.
Yeah. Friend of me with benefits, but we won't be filming that.
So, Michael, I have heard through the grapevine that you subscribe to To a belief system I can generally only refer to as psychotic, delusional, or at least error prone in its syllogisms and soundness of its arguments.
For those who've not heard the full tapestry of madness that you call an ideology, I was just wondering if you could expand upon it.
So that the audience can grab their popcorn and their...
I guess these days you make debates with fart noises in your mouth.
So I wonder if you could just tell people where it is that you're coming from so we can try and unpack your worldview and return you to sanity.
Absolutely. My worldview, which is absolutely insane, is called Molyneurism.
And it is based on the absurd belief that...
Never heard of it! But it sounds nuts to me!
It is based on the absurd belief, other people popularly known it as anarchism.
It is based on the absurd belief that everyone is an owner in their own person and that everyone has whatever rights that they...
I blogged that up.
Can we edit that out? Absolutely.
Okay. You know we're leaving this in, right?
That's our first instance of sophistry is to not edit out a misstatement at your part.
But what we're going to do is just loop that for about an hour and then just say, victory!
Okay, come on. It's based on the idea that everyone is a self-owner and that the guiding principle for social relations is what we call the non-aggression principle, meaning you are not in a position to aggress against another person through force or fraud.
And if someone does initiate force against you, then you have the right to retaliate.
And this very simple principle is the basis of all interpersonal relationships.
Well, so as an anarchist, there's a couple of things I wanted to mention.
First of all, I can't believe I'm the only one dressed in black.
Second of all, I really appreciate you not mistaking me for a Starbucks window and hurling a garbage can through me.
That's very, very enjoyable.
But when it comes to anarchism, of course, myself, like everybody else who's not in your...
Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah, the word anarchist has two completely different meanings.
And in the sense that you're describing, they really refer to this kind of social chaos and a lack of hierarchy.
My version of anarchism stems from the basic belief that nature, all nature, is essentially hierarchical.
That without the absence of a kind of imposed authority, you're still going to have a sorting out process where some people are going to be natural leaders.
We see this in any relationship.
In a household, you see this among your friends.
And you see it in different contexts.
For example, if I'm talking to my literary agent, he's going to have authority over me in one sense.
But if I'm talking to my friends about writing, then they're going to be deferring to me.
So they're of the belief that all of this kind of hierarchy is imposed by the state, whereas my version of anarchism holds that it's the state that enforces a false hierarchy and forces people to submit to others at the barrel of a gun.
All right. So, I guess second only to repealing gravity with the snap of a finger is your particular goal here in your ideal society would be, you know, you snap your fingers and there's no such thing as the state, there's no such thing as the law, there's no such thing as police, there's no such thing as courts, and government-provided services all vanish like morning dew or morning fog.
And if you...
Snap your fingers and the state vanishes, taxation vanishes, income redistribution vanishes, education vanishes, healthcare services vanish.
Do you not think that the stereotypical Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome nightmare of warring tribes battling over the last drops of gasoline would quite quickly emerge?
In other words, are not people restrained by the power of the state and in a sense forced to act in a more civil manner for fear of consequences?
No, I don't think that's the case because we see it right now already.
99.99% of our interactions are anarchist ones.
If I have a dispute with, let's say, a department store over a sweater, the possibility of me calling the police is virtually nil.
There's a stated policy and maybe I could take a loss on that sweater not being able to return it.
Most stores, actually, it's the other way around.
It's disgusting and dirty.
They'll still give you store credit for it.
So it is absolutely a myth to say that without the state that you would have all these problems in the same way that say, well, if I snap my fingers and all the exorcists vanish, we'd all be possessed by demons.
Well, that's not the case. So it is a bit of sophistry to say that we have this order due to the state.
And in fact, although I agree with you, if government, which is a several trillion dollar institution, vanished overnight, there would be in the short term An enormous sense of transition, just like if you snap your fingers and, let's say, Google vanished overnight, there would be an enormous sense of transition.
But if you look at any industry where the government is not involved in the central sense, like food or fashion, you have so many choices.
You even have websites telling you which choices to make, depending on your personal preferences.
Whereas if you have the government, you have one choice, and that choice is always going to be a horrible one, specifically, as you said, with education or with the police.
Okay, so we've got our first tangible number.
And here's where I'm going to assess the honor and integrity of your debating skills and adjust my own approach accordingly.
Because the first thing you said, which was concrete and tangible, Michael, was that, what was it, 99.9% of your interactions are voluntary.
Is that correct? All right.
Just in terms of my own life, skipping very quickly over a few of the majors.
I was born in a state-funded hospital.
Well, that's government.
I was taken home on state-funded roads.
The water in my house was regulated and provided by the state, as was a good degree of the electricity.
My home was protected. The home of my parents was protected by the state.
The car drove on the roads and was maintained according to standards set by the state.
I was put in government. Daycare went to government.
Education and a government-subsidized university.
And I dealt in the business world as an entrepreneur with licensed corporations that were licensed by the government and wrote contracts and enforced contracts according to standards provided by the government.
You kind of get the idea that for me to say, well, it's only one in a thousand or one in 10,000 of my interactions that has anything to do with the government, it's everywhere.
It's all around us. It's like the force, you know, except with slightly less electricity unless you count tasers for people who disobey.
So the idea that we are largely voluntary beings and the state is just some tiny little fly speck in the corner of the room seems to me entirely unsupported by evidence and empirical evidence just in my own life.
So how do you square that circle?
Well, first of all, I mean, anything having to do with you being born and being on the road is certainly not a function of voluntary behavior.
This is your parents' choices, and I'm sure they made those decisions for you, so that's a bit secondary.
But my point is, when you're working in business and you're dealing with the government or you're having water from your sink, These are things that government is involved in, but they're still voluntary associations in the sense that you don't have any other choice.
Government has monopoly on that water.
If you had other choices, you might absolutely have, you know, in the same way that we used to have church and state, right?
And you had to be a member of that church.
Now, when you have separation of church and state, to some extent, at least in the states, There are still plenty of people who go to church.
So if you wanted to have some kind of voluntary state that provides some kind of service you want to back to them, that would certainly exist for people whose religion is effectively the state.
But for those of us who have other options, the idea that I'm ever calling the police or the idea that If you force a monopoly on me, therefore I have to work with you.
Yeah, the government is invasive.
But in terms of human interaction, like when I'm on the subway, if I'm going to a store, if I'm at work, those are all voluntary, peaceful interactions.
And the point is, the odds of there being some kind of violent dispute that the state is necessary are very, very, very low.
How often have you called the police?
Well, I don't want to get into sort of my personal life, and I certainly hope not to call them during the course of this beatdown, although you might need it in terms of self-defense.
You brought up your personal life, and now you're saying you don't want to get into your personal life.
You told me your life story. Well, let's put it to you this way.
So you're saying that we don't really need to deal with the state very much at all.
I don't know how much taxes you pay, but it seems to me there's quite a bit of involvement every time I buy anything in Canada.
They take half a kidney out through my nose.
But this is what it seems like to me, because I think you may be missing some of the public choice aspects of where the state is and the protective nature that it has in society.
So let me just give you an analogy, which I know.
I know it's not proof, but it's just a way of illustrating where I think your position is ridiculous.
So let's say that there's a giant dam.
You live in a little village at the bottom of a mountain, and there's a giant dam that has been constructed to keep trillions of gallons of water away from you.
And you sit there and you say, well, the dam is completely useless.
Why on earth do we need it?
Let's take the dam down.
I want a better view. Because it's totally dry down here.
So why do we need this dam?
And it's like, well, sure, it's dry because there's the dam.
And so the fact that you don't need to call the police very much, if at all, is because everyone knows that you could call the police and because of that they conform.
And we see this very simply replicated in every kind of natural disaster, right?
So there were these disasters, these hurricanes hit Florida just a day or two or so ago.
And immediately, you've got looting.
Immediately, you've got, you know, a breakdown in social order.
You've got people who won't obey.
You've got people pillaging, ripping off.
You've got rapes. You've got assaults.
You've got all of this. So it's like saying, well, you know, it's pretty peaceful.
We don't need the state. It's like, well, it's only peaceful because everyone knows you can call the police.
And that, it's like saying, well, I don't know why we need any security cameras because nobody's stealing anything from the store.
And it's like, but because that's...
Because there are security cameras.
So you get this wonderful protection from the state and then you say, well, I don't really need much protection from the state.
Yeah, try living without it. Go to Florida or go to Katrina in the middle of a natural disaster and just see how wonderful things are.
I don't know where to start unpacking all that lovely fairytale story, but let's start from the beginning.
First of all, the fact that looting exists is a function of the state.
If government worked to protect you, you wouldn't have looting.
The fact is, it's the government that disarms the citizenry.
It makes them unable to protect themselves, or if you're not the kind of person who wants to have your own gun or weaponry, you're unable to hire security to keep your store safe.
And the claim that you have that criminals don't commit crimes because they know you can call the police is simply demonstrably false.
A survey of criminals shows that they do not think long-term, that punishment is not a deterrent for them, that they're only thinking rage at the moment, just like animals.
So the idea that they know that you can call the government, yeah, they know, actually, that you can't defend yourself.
And they know that if you are going to call the government, they are going to be there in 10 minutes.
So they have that 10-minute window to do what they want.
And further, they also know that since they have a short window and the consequences will be dire if the government arrives, They had better do as much damage as possible in a short period of time.
So, if anything, having that ineffective government as the only mechanism of security encourages crimes to be more frequent and to be worse, which is something it sounds like you're in favor of.
And frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn about this.
Well, don't just kiss me on the staircase later.
But, okay, so, I mean, if you have a wand, Michael, in this particular debate called myth, you know, I'd like you to show it to me, and we really showed it to six.
Like, in other words, if you have a wand, There we go.
You have a wand. You can wave it, and you can just say, well, facts are myths, and therefore I'm correct.
You know, that's a pretty cool thing.
There's actually no need to study debating at all.
It's like having a money printer and then saying, I'm a great entrepreneur.
Because when I was talking about the looting...
When I was talking about the looting that occurs in the absence of state power, you said, well, it's nice to believe in all of these myths.
These are not myths.
I mean, the fact that when state power is diminished or erased from a particular area due to a natural disaster, the feral noble savages come out and start grabbing everything in sight.
And there have been tweets all over the internet of police saying, we're going to try and arrest people when we get back and so on.
So the fact that when social order decays, looting and other crimes of violence occurs, You can call it a myth if you want, but that just means that you don't have the facts at hand.
Secondly, you said, well, you can't hire security.
Of course you can hire security. You can hire security guards.
You can hire private investigators.
You can all these kind of things. And if you think that a diminishment of state power in no way escalates crime, I invite you to research a little something called the Ferguson effect, which came out, of course, when police decided, or somewhat rationally in terms of just self-preservation, decided to do less policing in black neighborhoods, poor black neighborhoods, because they were afraid.
Of getting the same kind of treatment As the cop who shot Michael Brown was going to get and others.
And so when the Ferguson effect clearly shows that when police stop intervening in local neighborhoods, shootings go up, crime goes up, and robberies go up, rapes go up.
So the idea that it's just some kind of myth that a diminishment of state power leads to an increase in violence, I don't even like, I mean, we could spend the rest of the hour just me providing examples for that, and maybe your wand would run out of its magic charges.
Well, first of all, by definition, Iran can't run out of magic, so you already don't know what you're talking about, number one.
Number two is, I'm not talking about a diminishment of state power, I'm talking about its abolition, but let's go back to specifically that hurricane story, because what you like to do is throw out three or five examples, as statists like to do, and then by the time I'm done unpacking one fallacy, you move on to this other magic dam that you built, another magic village.
The looting in Florida was not necessarily a function of the lack of state power.
It's a function of the lack of population.
And what happens is, you find this in Eastern Europe and many other countries, when the people leave, what's left behind is often destroyed.
Now, what the market does is, if there is a service, it anticipates what people want.
And you would have insurance on these places.
You would have some kind of better locks or so on and so forth.
But it's precisely the state that wants people to be unsafe because it wants people to have a need for itself.
Now, you're talking about Ferguson.
I agree with you. Your point is, if the government promises that its basic job is to provide the protection of people and property, and the government can say, well, we're just not going to do our job, you have to pay for the consequences.
Can you imagine, for example, if you had a cable provider, and the cable provider says, we're going to give you cable one month for your costs every month, and then they say, you know what, we're not liking the weather right now, we're just going to cut your cable, and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's what you're advocating for every single industry, and that's absolutely insane.
In fact, every industry, when you don't have the government running it, it only gets money by providing a service that you need or want.
It is only government that can take your money and at the same time blatantly and explicitly tell you, we're not going to provide that service we promised, and that's even the law.
For example, the Supreme Court said social security money is not your property, so we're going to tax you, we're going to take wherever we want, and if you get anything, you should be lucky for it.
That's the exact opposite of how the market works, and it's the market that would drive our anarchism.
Right. So what you're doing is, I call it the okay fallacy.
So here, let me just hold up the little thing here.
That's the symbol of my supremacy, you know.
Well, no. So here's the okay fallacy.
So here's what happens is, see, I hold up my hands like this, and I have a hole.
Now, you see this little hole here?
People are going to make a GIF out of that for sure.
So you see that little hole here?
This is an area...
Where I have no hand.
You see? There's a little hole there.
And then what you do is you say, Steph has no hand.
Why? Because there was a hole.
So what you're doing is you're saying, in these particular circumstances, the government is doing a bad job.
And yeah, I agree with Social Security.
It's not doing a great job.
Maybe there should be a lockbox.
I don't know. But you're saying, okay, well, here's an example of where the government does a bad job.
And... I agree with you.
Government is not perfect. Government needs the democratic process.
It needs an informed and engaged citizenry.
It needs robust debate to improve.
And not everything the government does is perfect, just as I'm sure you would say, not everything that happens in the free market is perfect.
So saying, well, here's a bad government program, therefore we should abolish all government.
I mean, that's not... Look, there's no hand because there's a hole there.
I mean, this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
You can't paint everything with that brush of incompetence and say the entire structure has to go.
There's a hole in the dam. Bomb the dam.
I mean, come on. I don't know about babies and brushes, but I will speak to one thing that you said that I think is very cogent to why everything you're saying is a house of cards built on fallacies and a holy cow and a monkey wrench.
I'm just going to throw every metaphor at you.
You said that government needs an informed and engaged citizenry.
This is something that has never existed and can never exist.
The vast majority of people, A, have way too much time, spending way too much time to worry about their own lives, to worry about politics, and B, the issues involved are so complicated and so intense that they're never going to be in a position to have a articulate, informed place on every single issue.
What happens then is you have politicians whose job it is to expropriate as much as they can from the masses, and because this is their job, they're going to have much more time, much more information, and they know how the system works, And what ends up happening is the population is screwed and ends up being told this is for your own good.
And you see this over and over with every single government program ever, including war, which is the government that's absolute worst, where how many people are sent to die and being told and valorized this is a good thing.
Whereas my position is maybe it's a good thing if those people stayed behind and didn't have to come home and cast it.
Well, you know, I'm not going to do much to argue against the Karsket argument because not many people won't end up there either.
And the war is a whole other question, whether there's a just war, whether war in self-defense.
And you talked about self-defense at a personal level.
Self-defense at a national level is equally as valid, and therefore the government can have a role in that.
But here's the thing. You don't have to be an expert in something in order to be able to judge it, right?
So this is...
This is exactly what happens with everything that we do.
Let's just take going to the dentist, right?
You're not a dentist. I'm not a dentist.
But that doesn't mean we can't judge the quality of a dentist, right?
We can look up his reviews or her reviews.
We can talk to patients. We can talk to the dentist.
We can ask particular questions.
We can look at their education.
We can do a variety.
We can get recommendations from friends and family.
You don't have to be an expert.
That's just a fallacy. I can't judge anything about a restaurant because I'm not a cook there.
Well, of course, you can put the food in your mouth and see how it tastes and see how you feel the next morning.
So the idea that we need to be an expert in everything in order to be able to judge it is just another fallacy that people use to try and push away and engage citizenship's involvement in a democracy.
You can judge somebody's intelligence and past skills and abilities and resumes and so on.
People do this when they hire all the time.
They get a resume. They call up some people for references and so on.
They decide whether to hire a We're good to go.
Then explain to me, Michael, why every time a government program is threatened to be curtailed, everyone takes to the streets and sets fire to everything.
Surely it's wonderful.
I mean, that's not what happened when slavery was abolished.
The slaves didn't just set fire to everything.
So, no, no, no, we still want to be slaves.
They were like, woohoo, off with the chains and, you know, on with the motion.
So if government is such a negative thing to everyone, why does everyone fight so hard to defend it?
Well, you touched on something that I think is actually another big fallacy, which is this.
If I'm going to a dentist, I am hiring someone for a specific purpose, right, to fix the quality of my teeth and my gums.
What if I had to hire someone who is both my dentist and my lawyer and my chef and my maid and my security guard and my cop and my prostitute?
The idea that I would have the capacity to find one person who fits all those slots and it would be optimized for all of them is absurd.
Yet that is exactly what's happening when you're forcing me to vote for a politician.
Not only do I only have two, or in Canada's case, three choices, I have to find someone who I like their views on abortion and immigration and war and fiscal policy and censorship.
So it's absolutely impossible to find someone who will be optimal for one of those things, probably, given that my Three choices.
How many dentists can you choose from?
Thousands. But I have to find someone who is good at each of these things.
It becomes exponentially more difficult.
At the end of the day, I'm going to have someone who absolutely does not represent my view.
And further, the idea that I actually get to choose this person is false.
Because as you know, my vote is statistically irrelevant.
And whether I vote or not, I'm still going to be forced to that choice.
So what the actual analogy would be is, if you need a dentist, then you and a bunch of people pick a name at random at the phone booth.
And that guy is going to be the one sawing in your teeth.
And you better hope that he has a DDS. Okay, so if I understand this correctly, you're saying no one should be in charge because no one can be an expert at a wide variety of things.
So in other words, according to- No, no, no, no, that's not what I said.
That's not what I said. I said, you said, if I want someone, I hire a dentist, right?
And I have the capacity to judge them.
What I'm saying is it's not humanly possible to find someone who fits 10 different slots because just the- Of course it is.
Of course it is. You're such a big fan of the free market, Michael.
Have you never heard of a CEO? Think of a company like General Electric or Samsung or Sony or, you know, you name it.
Companies that have, you know, 50 different markets in 100 different countries.
Well, one guy, usually a guy, ends up in charge.
Now, I say, well, he doesn't speak all these different languages and he doesn't know everything about accounting and tax law and each one of these demands and he doesn't know everything about the electronics and the engineering.
Of course not. But are you saying that CEOs don't exist, that they can't figure out who's good to hire and there's no particular?
Boy, you could end up starting a company with no executives and you could save a huge amount.
Some of these CEOs get paid a lot of money.
You should stop this interview, go start a company and not have a CEO because you just can't have expertise in a bunch of different things.
Neither I nor you have the capacity to choose who would be a better CEO of GE given five different candidates.
And that is exactly my point.
And that role is very specific.
They are trying to grow a business. Now, if you want to have someone who's going to be the head of GE and also the head of the army, which is the commander-in-chief, and also is going to be appointing Supreme Court justices, the idea that the average layman will have the capacity to choose between those and having two forced choices is absurd.
Well, of course, they don't do all of these things themselves.
They have experts and they have people they consult with and so on.
So, you know, just as the CEO of General Electric, when trying to make a decision about manufacturing in Vietnam, is going to consult a local expert and try to run through that information.
So, of course, nobody's expecting somebody to be omniscient about the idea that we can't have somebody in charge who has varying degrees of effectiveness.
And of course, yes, you and I cannot choose the ideal CEO of a multinational company.
But so what? I mean, that's up to the shareholders.
That's up to the employees to see if they like working for him.
That's up to the executives who they recommend.
Just as in a democracy, you've got hundreds of millions of voters who are all going together like shareholders in a company and voting for who should be in charge.
No, because when I'm a shareholder, I love this, by the way.
This is really fun.
By the way, I'm still playing evil stiff.
Okay, go on. It's pretty obvious.
When I'm the shareholder of a company, I'm putting my money where my mouth is.
If I'm picking a bad CEO, I'm the one who has to suffer those losses, and I'm the one who's going to have the costs, and I'm quite literally invested in a company.
Right. It's the same thing. Let's do one point at a time.
If you're investing in a CEO, then you are putting up your money.
If you're voting for someone, they could increase your taxes.
They could pursue disastrous policies.
They could go into an unjust war.
They could draft your children. Are you telling me that voters don't have anything at stake when it comes to voting?
Correct. First of all, I feel like, what was that, Ross Perot with Al Gore?
Can I finish? Can I finish?
Voters do not have the same, it's not the same parallel as with the shareholder and CEO. For example, if I'm a shareholder, I can divest, I can lead the company.
As a voter, I have no choice but to be a member of this organization.
And number two is, as a shareholder, my percent of the vote is exactly proportional to my investment in the company and how much I invest.
Have a self-interest in making the company better.
As a voter, everyone, me and even someone, you know, with an 85 IQ such as yourself, have an equal vote.
Oh, salty.
Have an equal vote and it's not even equal.
Because, for example, in the American system, as a New Yorker, I have much less of a share of the vote for the president as someone in a swing state.
So it is absolutely not a peril.
And number two is just the idea that I have to be forced to be part of this organization and forced to kind of be lumped in with people who I despise just goes against human nature and decency.
All I really got from that word salad was that you're a swinger.
So to continue to another area, because I think we've threshed that particular cornfield to the point of atomization, to go on to another particular area, here's my concern about this, you know, Hobbesian nightmarish world of dog-eat-dog and, you know, dogs living with cats and pigeons attacking your eyeballs to wake you up in the morning.
Do you need a moment? I'm sorry, did I just win?
Oh, come on, use a coffee out the nose.
That was worth it. No, no, it's not coffee.
It's a purple juice.
Purple drank? Is that what you say?
Okay, got it. All right, you and Trayvon.
Oh my goodness!
You did not just do that, Michael, did you?
Of course, I like it.
So you've got a belief system that you're trying to tell is right to me while you are literally drinking the Kool-Aid on the show.
As you know, in Jonestown, it was flavoring.
And as you also know, dogs do not eat dogs even in nature.
Oh, are you kidding me? Put a dead dog in front of a bunch of hyenas and see if they don't go for it.
Hyenas are not dogs. Really?
Yes. And they're matriarchal also.
So if you want to follow that system, and the females have a penis, so go ahead for it.
Okay. It's true.
Look it up. I guess you're just into ladyboy hyena dogs as a side issue as being a swinger.
So we'll just put that bookmark aside and perhaps return to it later with some visual aids.
All right. So let us talk about another particular area.
You said that human beings naturally gravitate towards hierarchies, if I remember rightly, early on.
Not only human beings, animals as well.
Animals as well. Although we are technically animals.
All right. So...
If human beings naturally gravitate towards a hierarchy, right now there is a hierarchy of competence bound within the rule of law.
You know, we're not allowed to use force against each other.
We must keep our word.
You know, we've got civil law, we've got criminal law, there's tort law, and so on.
We are bound to behave with each other reasonably within a system of law that punishes people who use force or fraud to get what they want.
And therefore, there's kind of a meritocracy.
And listen, I've got nothing against the free market.
I'm not talking about communism.
You know, I personally would love to see the state a whole lot smaller.
I think it's got its fingers in way too many pies, and I think that there's too much capacity for corruption when people have too much power.
So, you know, I'm with you down to whatever level, right?
I mean, let's take it down.
Let's just not take it to, you know, nothing, you know.
Sometimes you get a sunburn, that doesn't mean you want to live down with the mushrooms under the kitchen sink, right?
You need a little bit of a balance there.
I'm sort of in the Aristotelian mean thing, too much state versus too little.
But here's my concern.
Take away the rule of law, the standard for how society operates, and courts and prison systems, and the capacity to appeal to a final arbiter in social disputes, whether they're economic or coercive or criminal in nature.
You're still going to get a hierarchy, but that hierarchy is going to be based on a Hobbesian nature read in tooth and claw.
Because there are violent people in society, there are coercive people in society, there are sadists and psychopaths and sociopaths and all kinds of nasty specimens who are generally kept in restraint from attacking the general population only by the threat of the rule of law.
And if you take that away, you're going to end up with a hierarchy based upon who can pile the most human skulls in their basement.
You're going to end up with a hierarchy based on violence where good men are going to die like dogs and the feral end up in charge of everything.
Genghis Khan style. I mean, there was no state restraining Genghis Khan as he rampaged his way across the landscape.
Well, if you're asking the question, who could have the most skulls piled up in their basement, the answer is always government.
If you compare how many murders are committed in any country, the amount that that compares to the amount of people who are killed in wars of choice is miniscule.
That's number one. And number two is, I agree with you that there are always going to be sadists and psychopaths.
But when you have a government which provides a monopoly on the use of force over a gigantic area, That is drawing them to a magnet like flies to poop.
So there's no better way to empower sadists and psychopaths by then giving them a veneer of respectability, by giving them a mechanism to control the lives of literally everyone, and then by putting them in history books as these great heroes.
And in fact, if there's one thing psychopaths are good at, and sociopaths, it is being charming, being glib, and never being held accountable, and that is precisely the model of every politician.
So you would then categorize all of the founding fathers as sadists and psychopaths and sociopaths because they put themselves in charge of a state.
And you would include people like Margaret Thatcher.
You would include Donald Trump.
You would include everybody who seeks for and gains political power to be a psychopath or a sociopath or a sadist or something like that.
Is that my understanding? Well, I would not speak on people on an individual level other than yourself.
But at the same time, there's very clearly, and these are just individual data points.
I don't know the founding fathers. I don't know what the context was like at that time, to be fair.
But you have a theory. Shouldn't you look things up to see if they conform to your theory?
Well, the theory is that no psychiatrist should judge people that they haven't met.
And the idea that the idea of psychopathy, which is a fairly recent psychological evaluation.
Are you saying that then they were evil because they wish to be in charge of a government?
Most of them, yeah. Oh, yeah.
So most of the founding fathers would be evil.
Hold on, hold on. I judge people on their actions, not on their ideology, right?
Because someone might have so-called evil ideas, but they can be perfectly nice people.
If you are someone who has the blood of thousands on your hands, I don't know if it's useful to call a person evil on an individual level, but certainly the system that you're part and parcel of I don't understand how someone could feel comfortable sending thousands of people to war and sleep at night and still consider themselves a human being with a moral conscience.
Well, because human beings like going to war and you either beat or you are beaten.
I mean, this is the way human society has worked since people first figured out how to hit each other on the head with rocks, which was something that happened before there were even people.
Chimpanzees cannibalize each other literally.
So the idea that we're never going to have to have any war, that it's, you know, the traditional kumbaya hugs around the campfire and let's all roast marshmallows rather than each other is a fantasy based upon a very cursory and basic examination of human history that we're a bunch of warring tribes.
And we like getting resources from other tribes rather than doing the hard work to get those resources ourselves to grow them or hunt them or whatever.
And so the idea that, well, everybody who defends themselves from a warring tribe is just evil, I mean, that is the kind of belief.
It's amazing to me. You're like an argument against evolution because this kind of thinking should never have evolved to survive.
It's like, hey...
Let's go hug the tigers!
It's like, I can't believe that gene has survived into 2017.
I mean, I actually think that's fantastic.
Your ancestors must have been extraordinarily good at hiding.
I mean, that is, you know, or running, or some combination thereof.
Or surrendering, I suppose. Well, I am very small, so I am pretty good at hiding, number one.
And I agree with you. I am an argument against evolution.
I'm an argument for creationism, because just like Athena, I came directly from God.
Well, that explains the wand.
Stephen Pinker did a great book about this called The Better Angels of Our Nature.
There's this idea that, in one sense, we are the same people we were during the times of Pharaoh.
But in another sense, as humanity and human civilization has changed over thousands of years, we have changed very slowly, very slowly, in very fundamental ways.
And by all accounts, we are living longer.
We are far more peaceful.
There are fewer wars. The wars are less violent.
And this is a trajectory he did the math that you can check over time.
It used to be back in the day, you can read about this in the Bible, for example.
If you go to war with another country, your goal is to kill literally every single one of them, except maybe you take the women and make them your own bounty.
Nowadays, the idea that you would have some kind of war With another country and kill everyone there is regarded almost universally as abhorrent.
And you see this with North Korea where many people, there's only a few crazy conservatives who are saying, just bomb them to hell.
And even many people on the right or on the left are like, this is insanity.
We should care about the innocent civilians.
And this is a great sign of progress.
And this is what anarchism means, is respecting other people.
I'm not waiting. Let me just finish this point.
As an end to themselves and rather than a means to some kind of end of your own, which is what the state wants.
All right, quick question.
So you're saying that in the modern world, the modern world is more peaceful?
Correct. All right. Now, let's compare the world today as it was, say, 500 years ago.
Would you say that...
No, let's just go back.
Let's say 200 years, right? Would you say that governments, as percentage of GDP, as number of laws, numbers of regulations, and so on, would you say...
Or amount of resources they can use, right?
Amount of dollars they can consume and spend.
Would you say that governments are, A, bigger now than they were 200 years ago, or B, smaller?
Bigger, absolutely. All right.
So what you're saying is that as governments have gotten bigger, society has gotten more peaceful.
And I'm not sure why you've switched sides.
You know what we're going to do? We just take these videos, we're going to switch them.
And then maybe we'll just, because you seem to have just completely switched over.
And it's like, hey, we're playing tennis.
And it's like, now we're just playing doubles against nothing.
Because you're basically completely reinforcing my thesis that bigger states mean more peace.
And we know why the Cold War never went to a hot war, why it was all proxy wars and economic wars and weird combinations of boycotts and subsidies and all that.
Why? Because the governments were big enough and powerful enough to have nuclear weapons.
So the fact that governments were big and could destroy the world many, many times over is why peace reigned between communism and capitalism in terms of no nuclear intervention, no nuclear confrontation for decade after decade after decade.
If the governments had been smaller, as they were before the intervention of nuclear weapons, they did not have this kind of power.
When they were smaller, well, you had the First World War and the Second World War.
So as governments have gotten bigger, look at that.
We have more peace, as you say.
I like how you jumped from 200 years ago to the first World War and the second World War.
Now, I'm not a historian, but my belief— I'm talking about a plane.
It's a gradation over time.
It's not a snapshot. It's not an absolute smooth line, as you know.
And you're also making the very simple fallacy of correlation and causation.
In a very similar sense, 200 years ago, we were last short, and Napoleon, I think, was my height.
He was my height.
The idea that, well, since people have gotten taller— Therefore, we've gotten more peaceful, would be as easy an argument to make.
And in fact... No, you said war is the province of the state, and we're talking about a lack of war.
This is not height. This is exactly the same category.
You just said lack of war, and then you brought up World War I and World War II, which were the most destructive wars in world history.
Right. And when governments got bigger, when they got nuclear weapons, we've had less war.
That's true, to some extent.
Good. So then we're saying more government is more peace.
But it's not a straight line.
I never said it was a straight line.
You know, I never said it was a straight line.
It's like population doesn't go up in a straight line.
That doesn't mean there's no trend.
This is a straight line. The point is when governments are at their biggest, which is what World War I and World War II was, and you had these absolute monarchies, when you had totalitarianism both in Russia And Germany, that is when war is most likely and it's most deadly.
Governments had their greatest power in nuclear weapons and that resulted in a Cold War that never turned hot.
We all know there would have been World War III otherwise.
See, that's the problem.
See, if you say we all know that there's really no point in any of us speaking and you should just make decisions for all of us, so we very much easily see that the heart of every state is a Stalinist.
And in fact, I think one's an anagram of the other.
Well, see, but now you're saying that because I think that there's value in the state and it promotes social peace when it's kept at a reasonable size, now you're saying, well, that means you defend communism.
I mean, of course, communism is terrible and it's destructive and it's murderous and so on.
And it's terrible because that's when the state is no longer your servant, but your master.
And you want the state to serve you in terms of protecting your person and your property.
You want a much smaller state than we have right now.
I mean, I have some more sympathy for the founding fathers than you do in that I respect them for creating a very small state and attempting to, you know, bind it down with the chains of the Constitution.
Unfortunately, as Benjamin Franklin said, after they got out of designing the government and the woman said, what kind of government did you design?
And they said, well, a republic if you can keep it.
And unfortunately, I would say due to bad communications technology, a lack of education and the fact that people really didn't have much free time back in the day, they weren't able to control.
The size and the power of the state.
If we return back to a smaller government with all of this amazing communication technology we have now, we can keep it small and maintain the vision of John Locke, who I guess you also assume is an agent of evil for talking about a small government, and we can keep it small.
John Locke's an agent of evil in that he says that all human beings are essentially the same.
So in that regard, he says all human beings are essentially evil.
He said this in his second treatise, that human beings are effectively interchangeable.
But I agree with you.
By your own admission, The Constitution is not workable.
He said, or if you can keep it, it didn't work.
It has never worked as promised.
And that is the basis of fraud.
Now, if you went to, you saying the government's my servant, how do I fire it?
If I went to buy a vacuum cleaner and the vacuum cleaner always blows and it never sucks, what is the, how could you sit there with a straight face and advocate for it?
And that's exactly what you're doing.
You're saying, if we go back to the Constitution, when has the Constitution worked as your advocated?
Well, now all I'm getting is, do you want to have sex with vacuum cleaners?
I don't know why we're going in a strange direction at all times.
Why is that so strange?
All right, you got me there. I don't have an answer to that one.
I really don't have an answer to that one.
What an argument! So, the question of how you maintain a small state is a big and complicated one.
How do you fire your government?
Well, it happens every two years or every four years depending on where you are and what's going on politically.
For instance, there was a choice between Hillary who put forward particular proposals World War III and so on.
And there was Donald Trump who put forward other proposals, which to a large degree remain proposals.
But there was a choice that was made, and you saw a huge swing just in a couple of years between Obama and Hillary, right, between...
2012, 2016, and so on, you saw a huge swing in the Rust Belt states and Pennsylvania and other places where people said, I'm tired of being broke.
I'm tired of not having a job.
Here's a guy who's got business expertise.
Here's a guy who's going to repeal regulations.
Here's a guy who's going to shrink the state, cut taxes, control immigration, which is driving down wages.
And people made a choice.
Now, that choice was unforeseen, except for a few people, myself included, and Coulter, other people, and so on, right?
But the fact is that we knew that there was going to be a sea change, that people were frustrated, and now better communications technology gets information out that beforehand was not able to get out.
Like, when we talk about before the Pony Express, for heaven's sakes, you can't have a very informed population.
Where they're- People don't even know what's happening in the next village.
And so back in the day, you had, of course, control over newspapers by a small number of corporations who were not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act, as they should have been.
The aggregation of news media into a small number of corporations that control the narrative has now been shattered by the internet.
We now have the technology to get the right information into people's hands, and now they're focusing on shrinking the state.
The system is working exactly as it should.
Do you think the state is currently your servant, and Canada especially?
Let's talk about your boy, Mr.
Trudeau. Is the state your servant or your master in Canada?
It's currently in transition.
I think it's transitioning from, you know, one state to another.
There was, of course, a small state history in Canada, and it wasn't actually up until quite recently.
And it's interesting when people always think, oh, Canada is a socialist thing.
And it's like, yeah, well, we do have socialized health care, which generally means get in line and wait like a person in the Ukraine in 1954 for a loaf of bread.
So we do have that, but we don't have a giant military-industrial complex.
You know, we don't have 750 military bases overseas.
And there is a skills-based immigration system that means you don't just get all the flotsam of the world washing up on your shores, you know, Sicily-style.
And taxes in Canada, for quite a long time, I'm not sure where it is right now, but a couple of years ago, taxes in Canada were effectively lower.
And then in the US again, because it's not the world's policeman and so on.
So things are complicated. There's not a First Amendment.
There is somewhat of a Second Amendment, though it's not quite as codified.
And it is complex.
So, you know, I would say that Canada is somewhere between New Hampshire and Berkeley, somewhere in flyover country.
I'm not sure where the wind is going to take it at this point, but I'm certainly doing what I can to point it in the right direction.
I have to break character because I don't know what to do with that beautiful answer.
The point is...
I'm distracting you with verbal agility.
We'll get into the sophistry of this afterwards.
Peter, here's some tits.
Feel like concentrating? The point is this.
Let's suppose I have diabetes, and you're effectively telling me I have to choose between Coke and Pepsi.
And both of these I regard as deadly.
Or let's suppose I fallaciously regard them as deadly.
I don't even have diabetes. I self-diagnose because I read something on Weapon.
At the same time, you're saying, well, it's for your own good, and you have to drink whatever you have to drink.
At a certain point, you have to allow people to have the dignity of choosing and making their own choices.
And when you have a state, And they can.
Listen, if you live in a...
Go ahead, go ahead. When you have governments and you have your neighbors, if you have your neighbors deciding who you were close to or what music you listen to and so on and so forth, the technology you speak of is a function of the market.
And this is exactly what brought down the system.
Wait, internet and so on is a function just of the market?
You know who invented it, right?
Who developed it, who paid for its entire development, who set up the initial infrastructure, who developed the protocols, all state-funded, largely military-funded.
Al Gore. Al Gore. Right.
So here's the thing. You're saying there's no choice.
Of course there's choice. Of course there's choice.
I mean, there are hundreds of countries throughout the world.
Look, if you live in a town and some business comes in and starts doing something in the town, maybe they're making ghetto blasters and testing them at high volume in the backyard, or maybe they're putting out something in the air that you don't particularly like.
Some people are like, well, you know, I get double the salary, I can live in this town, so I get a little bit of air pollution, but that's okay because I can retire someplace clean.
20 years earlier, my system can reset itself, no problem.
So what happens in that town if something happens in the environment that you don't like?
You move to another town or you move to another state and you can move to another country.
You have tons of choices in the world.
There are hundreds of countries in the world with every variety.
If you want a lot of free market, Hong Kong is right there waiting for you.
If you want Sharia law, I believe there are 18 countries around the world that you can go and get that in.
If you want, you know, no centralized state power and state apparatus, Somalia is a wonderful example of exactly where you can go to taste deep of the libertarian paradise that you wish to imbibe.
And this is exactly how America was founded.
People said, well, I'm tired of the aristocracies.
I'm tired of the control.
I'm tired of the tradition.
I'm tired of the stifling and the lack of the free market in Europe and in other places in the world.
So we're going to take a six-week god-awful voyage where pregnant women are going to die like flies across the Atlantic and land on Plymouth Rock.
And that change of locale, which is the foundation of America, was incredibly far infinitely more arduous than hopping on a plane and getting a business license in Hong Kong.
So you have an enormous amount of choice within a country, between countries, so the idea that there's not a free market of countries all jostling for your time, skills, and abilities is a fallacy.
Well, I think what you're speaking to comes to the heart of this argument where you said, if I'm living in a town and someone's manufacturing ghetto blasters and blasting them at full volume, I can get up and leave.
That just breaks down to a mixed right argument.
You're saying that because you have more people and you have more power, therefore you have the ability to dictate and it's incumbent on me to get out of the apartment and that's just not how the way it is.
For example, if I have a lease and I have two roommates who are terrible and my name's on the lease, they're the ones who have to leave.
It's not a function of the majority.
No, no, but you don't get to impose your will on other people.
So you can't say shut down a manufacturing plant in your town that you find too noisy or puts out the wrong kind of smell every second Sunday.
You don't get to shut that entire thing down.
This happens all the time. There's a gold mine.
Oh, look, the gold mine is out of gold, and now it becomes a ghost town, and people move somewhere else.
People are continually moving to seek out better opportunities.
What, you force people to stay in the gold town because they just lived there before?
They all starved to death? No. We're a roaming species looking for opportunities.
Well, you can absolutely shut down that factory if it's polluting and aggressing into your space.
Only with the state! How are you going to do it without the state?
You can absolutely do it with torts, and it's a very simple process.
Oh, you mean the torts that are adjudicated in state courts?
You mean those ones? No, not necessarily.
You could have private arbitration.
We already have private arbitration right now.
And the fact is, if you deliver to yourself a monopoly through might, for example, if I was the government, I said only shoes can be bought through the government and provided by the government.
And then I complain, and you go, look, if it wasn't for me, you wouldn't have any shoes.
That's exactly what you're arguing.
The government has imposed on itself an effective monopoly on law and then is saying, well, if you want law, you have to come through us.
That's circular reasoning. That's not giving me choices.
And that's also basically declaring itself the sole provider of a very neat service and claiming that it's the optimal solution for it.
Whereas if there was competition, very easily you'd find that there's other choices.
Even if those choices were wrong, they still might be better for me and for you in certain circumstances.
Of course, there is competition. You admitted it yourself.
There's private arbitration. And there is competition in that various political parties will propose ways of running the law and running the government, and you can choose between them.
It's exactly like Coke or Pepsi or whatever.
I mean, and of course, if you don't like what is being provided, let's say you go to the store, and you go to the beer store, and they only have, I don't know, whatever crappy beer you...
I'm not going to say anything because it's going to offend someone in the comment section who's meat and bread and life and...
Anyway, so let's just say you go to the beer store and there's no beer that you like.
Well, you know what you can do?
You can start brewing your own beer.
You can become an entrepreneur and you can sell it.
That is called a market opportunity, which for someone who seems to like the free market, you think you'd be more aware of.
There's no pizza near where I live.
It's a market failure. No, no, no.
It's a market opportunity. So if the political parties are not providing what it is that you think they should provide, guess what?
You can go and start a political party.
It happens all the time.
And This way, you can bring your offerings to the marketplace of voters and see if you can get enough takers.
So there's lots of opportunities that mirror the free market that goes on in the state, and there is competition to the state.
As you point out, private arbitration, there are private roads, there are private schools, there are lots of options.
I mean, you obviously understand perfectly well that these are...
Different competitors to the state are not operating under their playing field.
And not only, for example, if I have a private school, my customers still have to be taxed to pay for that public school.
So it's not the same as, let's suppose, in the food industry where you have Coke and Pepsi, but a certain percentage of Coke and Pepsi's monies have to go used to make Dasani or whatever it is.
So the point is you are taking and forcing the competition to be much lower.
And it sounds like you agree that competition is a good thing.
So the best way to find things that are cheaper and provide better services for everyone.
And the best way to have that is to have as much competition as possible.
And the same thing would apply to fashion, would apply to security industry, which applies to food, which applies to security.
Well, of course you pay for government schools, even if you don't use them.
Of course you do. Because if you don't pay for government schools, you're going to end up entire swaths of your community is completely unable to read, is unable to reason, can't do any math, can't figure anything out.
Oh, you think that you want the entire country to be like the backwaters of Detroit?
Are you kidding me? I mean, you pay in the same way that even if you don't have a car, you pay for roads.
Why? Because groceries get delivered and ambulances can come and get you and take you to often a government-funded hospital so you can get treatment for your illnesses.
So the fact is, of course you pay for things you don't use in the state because you use them anyway.
You use people's understanding of the law to make sure that they obey the law.
You use people's capacity to read and to reason.
You use their capacity to do math all the time.
And so the idea that, well, you know, my kids can get educated and to hell with everyone else.
They can wander a desolate landscape of idiocy for the rest of time because that's never going to have any impact on me.
That's a kind of insular, isolated, atomic view of society that doesn't help promote the basic understanding that we're part of a social fabric.
And yeah, sometimes we have to just give stuff to other people.
We have to surrender some of our resources to other people.
Some of it is out of compassion and niceness, and some of it out of the basic rational calculation that if other people grow feral at some point, that's going to have an impact on us, and that input could be fatal.
Who are you to determine how much is reasonable for me to get to these roads?
And how are you determining that number?
I don't. The voters do as a whole.
The politicians put forward proposals and the voters choose what they think is reasonable.
You may disagree with that, in which case you can vote for someone else or start your own political party.
Or move to Somalia.
Those are three choices.
That's not bad choices, you know?
I mean, those aren't bad choices in the world.
In all fairness, as someone who's born in the Soviet Union, those aren't bad choices.
I mean, if guns ahead, if these are the three choices I have, I'm perfectly fine with that situation, as it sounds like you are as well.
My point is this. The idea that voting is like a marketplace, again, we talked about this a little earlier.
In a marketplace, whoever has more money who has earned it, who has a vested interest in a given product or service, they are going to have much more of a voice in how that is run.
And for example, I would, as I'm sure you would agree, I would much rather have almost 100% of the voice in how to raise my kids as opposed to sitting down with everyone in my apartment building and having some kind of equitable discussion.
And it's the same thing with any other system.
But no, you have that anyway.
You have that anyway because there are rules against child abuse that are decided upon in society.
There are rules that you say you have to provide certain things like medical care and so on.
You don't get to beat your kids up and so on.
So the idea that, well, I'm just going to completely independently outside of society determine how to do things is going to end up with complete atomization, fragmentation, no standard rules.
Massive amounts of abuse.
You wouldn't, I'm sure, but a bunch of lunatics would love to beat the hell out of their kids every time they disagree.
We have laws against that. In your world, in your environment, no laws, no rules.
People can do whatever the hell they want.
So the idea that there's no social standards that you need to partake of, I think, is not kind of fundamentally how human beings work.
We're tribal animals. We're good to go.
Well, I mean, you brought up public schools.
There's no better example than institutionalized child abuse when you have teachers who are people who couldn't compete in the marketplace of ideas, whose job it is to break the spirits of children and basically put them to temporary prisons every day.
So if you want a good example of having child abuse spread as violently as possible and as widespread as possible, that's the public school system.
Well, I know that there are some states where corporal punishment is still allowed in America, but certainly it's not been legal in most European countries for decades.
So the idea that I'm talking about beating kids and now you're suddenly saying, well, some teachers may be a little bit more sympathetic to Hillary and that's the same as beating the kid with a shoe.
I think that may be just a little bit of a leap.
I don't think it's beating kids in the shoe.
I think it's psychological breaking them at an early age.
And this has been the goal of every statist, is to have them molded into good citizens, which is code for, of submissive obedience.
And you're against atomization, which is fair.
I'm against atomization as well.
But what I'm against is the opposite of atomization, where people become solos automatons and complete vassals of the state.
And the way to do that is through the public education system.
Right. The soulless automatons argument.
Okay, good. So you've driven the souls out of people and therefore you've won.
It's some sort of exorcism more than an argument.
Let me ask you a very practical question about the society with no rules.
Let's say Bob's daughter gets raped.
Now, what Bob does at the moment is he calls up the police, and the police go and question the person who they think may have done it.
And if he doesn't have an alibi, if he's got motive, means, and opportunity, they will continue to pursue.
If they find physical evidence or witnesses and so on, then they will charge him, and then it will go through a trial if he doesn't plead guilty.
So there's a whole series of things that are set in motion.
Everybody understands how it works.
It's pretty universal across a particular country in particular.
The idea that you're saying that everyone understands how it works, I just had grand jury duty, and in all seriousness, I don't think either of us understand how the court system really works until we've actually been- No, no, no.
I'm not saying everyone's a lawyer.
I understand how a dentist works.
They try and take care of your teeth, and they do things that seem counterintuitive, like scratch the hell out of your skull and make you better.
But everyone understands what you do if Bob's daughter gets raped.
What you do is you call the cops, and the cops will start to take it from there.
That doesn't mean everyone's a lawyer, but it means everyone kind of fundamentally understands how the system works.
Every detail, every... No, of course not, right?
No, we don't understand how the system works because you and I don't know what it's like.
I mean, I can't speak for you. I don't know what it's like to be arrested and have to go through some kind of very long legal trial with possibility of felony at stake.
I don't know how that actually works in practice.
Well, again, you don't have to be arrested to understand.
I mean, you can watch some legal dramas.
You can watch some courtroom documentaries.
You can watch a bunch of things. But people understand.
You go to jail if you're convicted of a crime.
And people, I mean, I know there's fuzzy edges around the crimes and so on.
But, you know, everybody kind of knows.
You go beat someone up.
You go murder someone and so on.
Then you're going to get arrested if there's evidence.
You're going to go through a trial.
And if it's beyond a reasonable doubt, you're going to jail.
But you're hand-waving a lot because you're based on legal dramas.
For example, you're an author as well.
If you look at how publishing is portrayed in media, in movies or in TV, it's not even close to the real system.
And again, this is kind of a sidebar, but I don't think either of us really knows on a ground level what it's like going through a long legal process and how much that costs, what the possibilities are of getting off or getting arrested, get sent to prison unfairly.
So I don't think – again, this is a very big sidebar.
And again, if you had competition, you would have things be cheaper.
You would have things be more efficient.
You wouldn't have these cases that last five years.
And there would be much more of an incentive to wrap things up and different court systems would compete in order to deliver justice fairly and cheaper and quickly.
So different court systems.
How exciting. So different court systems.
So give me an understanding.
And again, I do reject the thing that we need to know the emotional journey of the criminal in order to understand how law works, right?
I mean, so we need to understand everything.
Like if you have a heart attack, you probably go through some kind of treatment.
I don't need to know what it's like to go through that treatment to know that there's some kind of treatment for a heart attack.
But let's talk about this magical, you know, my little pony of freedom world of Ancapistan.
And how does it work?
So Bob's daughter gets raped.
What happens now?
What happens from here? I like the idea that using My Little Pony is pejorative with this audience.
I don't think that's going to work very well.
No, no, no. It's a description of a beautiful place that exists solely between your own ears.
That's not true. There's many other people who have been there.
And I'm sure they'll weigh in on the comments below.
The fact is, let me use another parallel example.
You said we don't need to know the journey of the criminal.
That's fair. How about this?
Let's suppose, God forbid, you get cancer.
We know that you get chemo.
However, we don't know what that's really like.
And there's different kinds of chemo.
And in certain cases, you're going to have to make different choices based on which process is better for you and yourself.
Different circumstances, different types of cancer, just like there's different types of felonies and different types of how those are judged.
So again, if you had choice, things might be better for you in certain circumstances, better for you in other circumstances.
At the very least, it would be cheaper for everyone in every circumstance because when you have competition, it drives up costs.
When you have competition, it drives up costs?
Drives down costs. Drives down costs.
Okay, good. I just wanted to make sure I understood that.
Okay, so let's get back to Bob and his traumatized daughter.
What happens? I mean, I am not a lawyer, neither are you.
No, no, no, not in the court system now, in this stateless society of imagination.
Here's the thing. This is like asking this question.
What would the fashion industry look like if the government did provide all our clothes for us?
And the answer is, that's absurd.
It doesn't. But if you and I sat down for days, for years, for hours, we could never imagine what the fashion industry actually is.
Because when you don't have government involved, you have millions of people, designers, seamstresses, people who make fabrics and so forth, operating on micro levels and building this very, very big system through their own unique individual choices.
It would be the same thing. You can't design something as complex.
And even now, the legal system is not designed from the head of Zeus by one person.
It has been the work. Of millions of lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, defendants, working incrementally to make the system better and better.
And frankly, the more people who are involved in this process, who have an interest in it, and who are informed, as opposed to any stick in the mud who has their own ill-informed opinion about, you know, who knows what, that is how things get better.
And that is what the market and anarchism allows people to do.
Well, that's a lot of syllables saying no comment, I refuse to answer, and I haven't got a clue.
So we should let go of that which is keeping us afloat in the idea that some magical sea creature is going to take us up on its back and get us to shore.
We have a system that is flawed, obviously.
All human systems are flawed.
We are merely mortal and we're prone to corruption and error and self-justification and so on, except me in this...
Oh, wait!
Sorry, slipped character for a moment.
Right, I'm back in.
I'm back in, baby. All right, evil Spock has returned without the beard.
So you're basically saying you don't know.
So we should give up a system that works lurchingly well, reasonably well, as you point out.
Crime is going down. Violence is going down.
The system as a whole, human life is getting longer and so on.
And we should give all of that up for a leap in the dark to something you can't even describe.
I don't think human beings really...
I think you, just in general, you know, guy to guy, I think you need to provide a little bit more hair glitter in that particular formulation.
I think you need to provide just a little bit more, you know, fishnet stocking, swing of the purse, shake of the butt.
You've got to give something that's going to entice people to give up something that works for the sake of a leap into dark to something you can't even describe.
I agree with you in this case.
I'm not interested in persuading huge swaths of people.
I think that is the democratic model.
That's not something I'm against.
Oh, you want a sort of platonic series of philosopher kings who dominate things for everyone else?
Can they be Aristotelian kings?
Is that okay? Sadly, no.
He was quite a fan of a limited republic, so to speak.
The theoretically limited republic, which we've never seen in practice anywhere on Earth.
Well, let's just say that the Republic of the Founding Fathers was a whole lot smaller than it is now.
Sure. And what happened to it immediately?
The second and third Congress, they had the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Every single constitutional amendment, except for the fourth, has been violently destroyed by its own practitioners.
So human beings are corrupted by power.
And you say instead of one centralized agency that poor people can have a vote in, right?
We'll get to the dollar democracy in a second because that's a big issue with this voluntary society that you talk about.
So instead of poor people, for instance, having a vote that is equivalent to a rich person and thus bringing the interests of the poor...
into the social discussion of the allocation of resources or where society goes.
What you'd rather have instead of one place that is susceptible to corruption is a whole bunch of private corporations which are going to be equally susceptible to corruption and which the rich are going to dominate.
You know the old joke, you know, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars and you can't pay, you're in trouble.
If you owe the bank a billion dollars and you can't pay, the bank's in trouble and they're going to try and make every accommodation they possibly can.
The poor vanish because in your system, it's a dollar democracy.
Who influences public debate?
Who owns the corporations?
Who manages what happens in the media?
Well, the rich people do. Now, right now, the rich have to pay attention to the poor because the poor have an equal vote to the rich.
If, in your system, we end up with a dollar democracy, the interests of the poor are going to completely vanish.
They're going to submerge. They're going to be a complete, like, Brazilian-style...
A system where you have a small number of rich people, a large number of disenfranchised people, right now that's only balanced by the one person, one vote system of democracy in a dollar democracy.
The poor vanish from society's equations.
As you very well know, it's precisely governments that are strongest, where you have this kind of clack of very rich at the very bottom, no middle class, and then a huge swath of poor.
We see this over and over in every major state of this country.
And I agree with you, but here's where you're wrong.
Right now, there will always be more poor people than rich people, just as a function of how statistics play out.
So what you're saying is, That huge number of corps, if they each have one vote, should actually have more of a say than those rich people, of how those rich people live their lives.
So what you have in practice is democracy, is people who don't know how to run business at all, telling people who know how to run business well to run those business poorly.
And these huge inefficiencies might just sound like no big deal, but when it comes out in real life, what those inefficiencies mean is deaths due to people not having healthcare allocated, starvation in extreme cases, a lack of access to education.
Every single economic inefficiency translates to real-life problems, to real-life people.
This is what happens when you empower politicians who have no clues about anything other than law to meddle in every single industry possible on earth.
So you don't feel that the corporations are going to become corrupt?
You don't feel that they pose any particular danger to the security?
They're never going to fail to pay out on their insurance.
They're never going to fail to negotiate with some other agency for dealing with rape or whatever fantasy scenario of hamster wheel and this is going on.
They're never going to have any corruption.
There are never going to be any problems with those big large capitalist corporations.
And somehow there's a magic shield at the top of corporations that prevents people from becoming corrupt that you say happens with the state.
There is no bigger, more corrupt corporations than the government.
And in fact, the corruption is so endemic that it is a given that everyone who is working for the government is corrupt and is going to break their word and people joke about it and are cynical about it.
Whereas when you have corporations which are private, and absolutely there's a lot of collusion between corporations and government, but when you have corporations that are private, There's much more accountability to the shareholders and to the public, and you see this all the time on social media when some corporation does something or another and they're quickly shamed into correct behavior, whereas the government is shameless and faceless because the people who are putting these policies into practice are bureaucrats who are never held accountable to everyone.
A good example of this is Lois Lerner from the IRS who is targeting right-wing groups brazenly and has had no consequences whatsoever.
Well, I'm sure she'll get a book deal.
I wouldn't say there have been no consequences.
There may be, you know, she's definitely the toast of the town in certain leftist circles and she's gained a great amount of, I'm sure that, you know, Woody Guthrie's great, great, great grandson will be coming up with folk songs about how Noble Lois protected us from the evil white supremacist conservatives and all that.
So she'll have lots of consequences.
Just, you know, I agree that none of them will in particular be negative.
Good job, Jeff Sessions.
Well done. See, that's what I call democracy.
All right, let's just close off with this bit, because I don't mind discussing the inner physiology of orcs and elves.
Like, I don't mind that at all.
Like, I don't mind discussing fantasy scenarios and, you know, who could win?
Would it be Aquaman or Superman or would it be the Flash?
I'm sorry? Are you kidding? Superman over Aquaman?
Are you crazy? No, no, not if we move everything to the planet Krypton.
See, you gotta always think of this.
I'm concerned that you don't think things through because he doesn't have superpowers on Krypton.
Krypton doesn't exist!
Well, something like it. Are you saying there was only one in the entire universe?
The matter that made up Krypton has never appeared anywhere else?
It's one singular point in the theory to find something like it.
Or go back in time.
You know, Superman turns back time.
You go back in time. You dump him on Krypton in a fish tank with Aquaman.
Aquaman slapping him silly with a mermaid tail.
I'm just telling you that right now.
Why would Aquaman not be in the ocean but in a fish tank?
You're not making any sense. Well, you can't move a whole ocean to Krypton.
Anyway, I feel like we may be drifting a tiny bit.
We'll make that the next debate, which superhero wins and what won.
But, you know, I don't mind expending mental energy in these kinds of debates, Michael.
And I appreciate it's a fun chat about things that'll never happen.
Like in the same way, I have a bike machine.
And I know it's not going to take me anywhere, but, you know, it exercises my muscles.
The view doesn't change.
It's still, you know, drops of sweat and fiberglass on the wall of the basement.
So, here's my question, though.
Let's say that I get sucked up through the cocaine nose of your fantasy future, right?
And let's say that I live in the brain of, you know, wonderful Somalia across the planet.
And my question is...
What's the road from here to there?
Even if it could be possible, even if this leap into the dark had you land on the back of a pony that could fly, how on earth could this be anything other than a purely theoretical exercise?
How on earth could we possibly get from here to there?
That is a great, great question.
And here's my answer whenever I get asked that question.
Let's suppose we went back in time to 1980, which is not that long ago.
You and I remember it pretty well.
Wait, wait, hang on. Wait, wait.
I'm still working on it.
I still got to gel it up, baby.
Now it's just this.
Scratch, scratch. Ear, ear.
Little bit of comb in the nose. But back then, man, nice Billy Idol spike job going on.
You know, without all the STDs.
Okay, so please go ahead.
We're back in 1980. Youth, baby!
All right, go for it. Superman took us back to 1980, and you and I were having a debate about whether we should have censorship of books.
And you said, well, we should have free speech.
And I said, well, what if there's books that are dangerous, like Child Pornography or My Comp or something like that?
And we're talking back and forth, you know, where do we draw the line?
And a time traveler appears in 2017, and he says, you guys are wasting your time, because in 2017, you will be able to take any book and make as many copies as you want, infinite, and you can send them anywhere on Earth, at the speed of light, at the press of a button, and only someone who, like magic, only someone who knows a magic word called a password can open that book, and how much does this all cost?
It's free. We would look at that person as a crazy person.
And yet, in fact, that's the status quo today.
So the way to transition— Well, unless you run afoul of people and they target your DNS's, in which case you get shut out from the internet.
But all right, let's just go back to 1980 and say this is where we go.
But even in that case, that book has not been destroyed and can still be infinitely replicated.
The point is, it's not a function of persuasion.
It's a function of technology and keeping people who are going to have those same wrong ideas from being able to implement those ideas in practice and having the argument effectively become superfluous and secondary.
All right, so we have the final magic wand of the magic show called Technology.
Got it! All right, so let's end here.
And now this, of course, for those who don't know, Michael and I share the same philosophy when it comes to a state, the society, and the eventual goal of achieving an egalitarian and truly free society without this primitive, god-awful mechanism developed during the Stone Age called the state.
I I will allow people to advocate for the state, but then they have to use Stone Age medicine.
And they have to use Stone Age technology.
If you're cold, you have to start a fire using your own nose hairs and concentration.
That's my particular...
So what's interesting is that, of course, I've had these debates...
Oh, I guess I became an ANCAP probably about...
14 or 15 years ago.
Before that, I was a small government minarchist in the sort of the objectivist vein, and I've had these debates.
Now, a lot of times I've been in your position versus somebody who's like a regular old government, me talking about, you know, like the government that deals with like national defense, which we didn't get to, and the courts, the law system, and so on.
But it was really interesting to try the other...
And it really is, because it's such a cheat to do that side, because it is the mainstream view, so you have all of this flow.
You're swimming with the current, and you can use words that everybody thinks they know, but they don't.
Right. Freedom, you know, for you, it means freedom from, and for me, the non-initiation of force, right?
Freedom from the non-initiation of force.
What other people mean is freedom from criminals provided by the state, you know?
So even the word freedom is really tough.
So I think you did a great job, but it really helped me understand just how easy it is.
You know, it's like, look, I can lift a car!
It's like, well, it's easy if you've got a crane on top pulling it up, which is when you would go with the dominant narrative, that works.
So give me some of the tricks that you were working with during your side of the debate.
Look, let me just make two points.
Because my focus is so much on technology being what saves us and being not a Democrat, I almost never get into debates like this.
Because since you and I are both somewhat public figures, I would much rather have my views put out there, if you agree with me, you agree, if you don't, you don't, rather than argue with someone one-on-one.
The cost-benefit is not there.
Plus, when you argue with someone who's a statist, usually it just hurts your social relationship with them, because they'll start perceiving you as a horrible person, and then it's going to have all sorts of consequences.
Sorry to interrupt, but you do have to pull out the, according to the non-aggression principle, the status is supporting evil.
That can put a bit of a pull on the old chumminess.
Absolutely. But it also was a bit of a cognitive dissonance, I don't know if that would be the term I would use, to watch you, with your same affect, arguing all these points.
And it was a little kind of like parallel universe thing.
Oh yeah, I know. So it was hard to kind of maintain the straight face and wonder who I was talking to the whole time.
So I was trying to keep up in two different veins.
And I truly apologize for not calling you a racist or a sexist or a misogynist.
I truly apologize for not rising to the truly...
I didn't bring up the roads and I never accused you of wanting poor people to starve in the gutter and sick people to die in the streets.
So I obviously didn't get quite that far in terms of the...
Although, you know, we certainly did try and put the little zingers in, which I think actually adds a little bit of spice to the meal.
But it was interesting because...
It's so hard to undo this matrix of language that goes around with the support of the state and the false equivalency.
So one of the things I was trying to do was to take market concepts and apply them to the state, which you hear all the time.
Sure, there's competition.
You have competition on who points the gun at you.
No, that's not really. Would you rather be kidnapped by this guy or this guy?
Hey, man, you got a choice at least.
It's like... So trying to constantly conflate political processes with a free market process was kind of the gravity well I was trying to drag you in.
And you resisted very manfully.
I think I got some bite marks, which, you know, I will treasure forever.
And probably Michelle Field-style put them out there on the internet.
But I would say that...
Hey, hey, hey. Have some respect.
The woman was almost killed. It really was like watching a Star Wars trailer, just that amazing survival techniques that went on.
So yeah, this constant conflation of trying to say that, you know, like the shareholders are the same as voters and CEOs are the same as politicians and constantly trying to trip you up by saying, well, you want the free market and politics operates like the free market, therefore you should like that.
And that is something I've experienced a lot of when I debate.
Well, I think that's a very effective tool on their part, because theoretically, on some level, it has a coherence to it.
And there's a plausibility to it, and it's kind of like, you know, if you and I and five other people got together and had a company, and we all sat around and discussed things, we would come to an equitable solution.
It might not be what you would want, not be what I would want, but we'd be comfortable with the result.
So to kind of extrapolate that into the government, it's coming from a place that's rooted in truth.
Although they take it to a ridiculous degree, that completely loses touch with reality.
And of course, if you were in a truly free society and they proposed the state thing, it would seem completely insane to you.
you, but because we're generally raised and educated by the state and by mainstream media that relies upon the state.
I mean, not only are they generally leftists and want a bigger government, but one of the things you'll see, they'll criticize lawyers in TV shows and movies.
They don't criticize judges, though, very often.
Why?
Because these guys end up being adjudicated in front of judges a lot for copyright infringement and stuff like that, right?
So they never want to really make fun of the system because they themselves are subjected to the system.
You'll see that there's not a lot of anti-union movies.
Why?
Because...
They need union members to make the movies because they have a death grip on production.
So there is a lot of propaganda that says the state is needed and the state manifests social choice and so on.
And the fact that it doesn't, of course, is something that's really, really buried.
And that's a huge uphill climb to make when you're arguing against the dominant narrative.
I'm going to say one more point.
Mike Cernovich gave it to me.
You know how 1984 speaks about how controlling language controls thought.
I was trilingual by the time I was five, and I thought that was very, very important for me because it teaches me to think conceptually and study linguistically.
I was hanging out with Cernovich a few months ago, and he pointed out to me, I came from the Soviet Union when I was two.
He said, I'm a refugee, and I don't think of myself as a refugee because I'm white.
That's the other thing. It was a complete mind-blowing moment because until he pointed that out, I was escaping the Soviet Union.
My family very much left everything behind for a better life in America.
And he goes, because you don't fit this certain demographic archetype of what a refugee looks like and acts like and is fleeing from, you don't think of yourself in those terms, but you are.
And it was absolutely true.
Well, and far more dangerous than many of the countries that people flee from in many ways.
Oh, absolutely. Another thing that I also tried to do was not just drag free market into politics, but to drag politics into the free market.
So taking political examples and layering them over corporations, you know, like when I said, oh, so there can't be a CEO because, right?
So trying to conflate these two is beautiful as far as the status argument goes.
Because if you can say that the two are the same, then you wanting to get rid of one but not the other looks like an irrational prejudice.
So this, like me constantly trying to conflate these two things is really, really essential to undoing your kinds of arguments.
Because then if I can get people to think that politics is the same as the free market, then nobody has any idea why you want to get rid of one versus the other.
And of course, whenever I use the phrase, you know, corporations, big corporations, multinational corporations, these are trigger points that have been set in people's minds like little bombs to just, oh, they're terrible.
Like I was, what's this old video game, like Unreal Tournament where the corporation sets up death matches.
But like, you know, it becomes this sort of Roman gladiatorial situation.
And kids have been... Raised so much to see, well, there's this lovely park and now there's this evil condo developer who wants to plow it under and all the bunnies are going to end up living in the sewers and being eaten by giant rats and stuff, right?
So this corporation thing has become such a hot button.
And it's hard to bypass that because, you know, you have to then, well, corporations are created by the state through charters.
They're not part of the free market.
They're like licenses to print money and avoid legal consequences handed out to...
It's really hard to undo all of that stuff.
And that's why I kept punching the corporation buzzword because that turns people off from, and then they think, okay, so instead of one government, which is a problem, we end up with 100 governments, i.e.
corporations. And that is a tough thing to fight against as well.
Well, I think another very good pro-statist argument, which I don't think you really hit, but you kind of hinted at, is we have a pretty good in the West.
I mean, especially compared to historically and in other countries right now.
And at the same time, the government is pervasive and everywhere.
So they can say, things are pretty good.
The government is here. Therefore, things are pretty good because the government is here.
It's a coherent syllogism that is pretty persuasive.
Well, and we did that with the world has become more peaceful, and governments have gotten bigger.
Now, that's a tough thing to argue against without going real deep.
But it's like, well, sure, if you pay a bunch of people, then, you know, if you've got a giant welfare state that's dumping huge amounts of money into problematic communities, then yeah, I guess people will commit fewer crimes in the same way that fewer crimes get committed if you pay off the mafia.
They don't set fire to your store.
That doesn't mean crime has gone down.
It just means it's been shifted to a different thing.
Which is holding people hostage for the sake of riots in order to dump money in communities.
So that's one aspect of things as well.
And the other thing is that the world has gotten better as a result of the free market, but the government keeps picking into that and saying, well, no, no, you see, it's because of us.
It's like, well, the government's been around forever.
Why is it only in the last 200 years that things have gotten better because of the free market?
Now, the government loves to jump on the back of the guy climbing the mountain and saying, look, I have a jetpack.
It's magic. But it's not real.
And that's a tough thing for people to differentiate.
And it's very hard for people to understand that the veneer of civilization is what gives the government the ability to commit crime on such a large scale.
The senators are in suits, they have an Arab decorum, and they're robbing far more from you than any kind of someone on the street would.
Just like the mafia dog has a suit.
He's very distinguished, he's got his pink ring and so on and so forth.
Classy man. It's very hard to reconcile for most people that this is actually large-scale theft on a national, international level.
Right. And, you know, another thing to say is, like, you know, the guy who quits working and just lives off credit cards, you know, everyone, you know, he can say, well, working is for suckers, you know?
Like, I mean, my life is way better now that I've quit working.
I can sit by the pool. I can, you know, listen to 10cc and sip a light beer all afternoon.
And it's a wonderful life.
And, of course, the argument to that is, yeah, but what happens when you run out of money, right?
What happens when you can't pay your debts anymore and you can't, you know, shuffle jump your liabilities from one...
Bucket of debt to another, then you're going to lose your house.
So you can say, well, sure, I guess society's doing okay right now, but the West is tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt.
Social security is going to need a bailout many times larger than the banks needed.
So sure, if you're living off credit and printed money, things seem fine, but you have to look at the long-term picture.
How is the debt going to be paid off?
How are the unfunded liabilities, which are north of 10 times the entire American GDP, what's going to happen?
And because the ANCAPs or the voluntarists are always in the defensive position trying to turn it around and saying, okay, how are you going to pay off the debt?
How are you going to deal with all these unfunded liabilities?
Well, they're going to eventually have to turn to needing the free market and say, okay, well, so then your system is parasitical off the free market because if people aren't generating the money or more money, then you can't possibly pay off the debt.
But again, that's a tough pivot for a lot of people to have.
I think he also used a very effective technique, and you didn't mention, which is for the status, there's a lot of preloaded speeches and rants that they're programmed.
They can get them through the press, social media, and basically it's like three paragraphs of slogans, which are non sequiturs, and present the appearance of thought and coherent thought, because they're using concepts and using words, and they're nothing of the kind.
But since the person has them loaded as a speech, you can just bulldoze over another one conversationally, and since everyone's heard it frequently, It gives it the air of truth and plausibility.
Oh, yeah. No, so for instance, I mean, I remember this from my college days all the way up to grad school.
You know, if you mentioned in a paper you were working on or a thesis and you said, well, you know, the capitalist class does exploit the workers in the third world or something, right?
You wouldn't need to provide a footnote for that.
Right. Because everyone's like, well, yes.
If I say that the Sun is the center of the solar system, I don't need to reference Copernicus and Galileo and Tycho Brahe.
Everyone knows that, so you don't need a footnote for it.
And this is the same way.
When people have complex ideas that slip real easy into the mental gullet, you have to sort of say, okay, why is that so easy?
Saying that, well, corporations exploit labor in the third world and so on...
And this is one of the things that made me, I think, good at some of this stuff, is swimming against the current.
I had to footnote everything. And the footnotes had to have footnotes, and the footnotes of the footnotes had to have footnotes, and so on.
And that is tough, because when people don't need proof for something, that's where they're the most propagandized.
And you always have to be cautious of where you don't need proof for something, where it just, again, seems to slice like a pelican with a little fish, you know, straight down the gullet with no interruption.
And that's really tough, how much you're arguing against that kind of no-footnote-needed kind of assumption in the general population.
Nothing gives you the air of certainty so much as the quasi-religion that is statism.
Because when you have it kind of received directly from the divine, and you didn't receive it for reason, you're not going to be able to disprove it via reason.
It's just going straight into your head.
And it's very hard to knock it out.
The constant, of course, downgrading of the idea is, I mean, it's a programming trick, right?
So to constantly refer to, you know, your fantasy and your imagination and your utopia, as much as can be done, and you have to be careful of this in debates, right?
And not to you, the general audience.
Whenever language is wrapped around your arguments that tend to make them dissociated from anything to do with reality, like when they're constantly put into a fantasy category or a utopian fantasy or the fallacy of perfection, you know, oh, so nothing bad will ever happen in your perfect world.
And it's like... People who make those kinds of arguments, they're trying to paint you as some sort of platonic idealist, and they're hooking into that basic idea that to be an idealist versus a pragmatist is to be dissociated from the real world.
You know, this whole division, Ayn Rand pointed this out a lot, between theory and practice.
Oh, communism works great in theory, but in practice it's like, no, no, no.
If it doesn't work well in practice, it's bad in theory.
It's like, well, theoretically, my bridge should stand, and the theory of the bridge is perfect.
Now, the fact that it collapsed is completely unrelated to the theory.
It's like, no, if your bridge collapsed, you made a mistake in your theory.
So this constant driving of a principled argument into the realm of unreality and abstractions and platonic dissociation from anything empirical, that is a way of weakening an argument without ever having to address the principles it contains.
And it's also very strongly when buttressed with, well, no one else thinks this way.
So not only are your ideas impossible, they're also crazy.
And I didn't quite get to this, although I did go back.
Trying to get you to dis-historical figures is another trick, right?
And you didn't fall, I mean, you fell into it, so to speak, but there was no other way to do it, because you had to have integrity with your beliefs.
But, you know, people love the founding fathers, and if they're, well, the founding fathers were evil, then that's a way of making people dislike you Just because, right?
Because they've received a huge amount of propaganda about the Founding Fathers.
My relationship with them is a little more complicated, but that's also not an argument.
I reckon you could be completely right, but that's sort of where I'm coming from.
So that as well hasn't existed before in history.
And if it hasn't, somehow it can't exist in the future.
That is another very cheap way.
You know, it's like, oh, well, you know, point to a non-slavery society before the end of slavery.
It didn't exist. Are you saying then we can't get rid of slavery?
Right. Because it tries to hook into people's sense of empiricism.
Well, I've never seen Bigfoot and unicorns can't exist, so now you're saying they could exist in the future.
The fact that something hasn't existed in the past, the very fact that we're having a conversation using webcams and the internet, that wasn't possible like 30 years ago.
And are you saying it's not happening now?
But this trying to make your arguments appear unreal, idealistic, abstract, and so on, is a very powerful way of undermining their credibility without actually having to address the principles.
And I think it's an honest one, because if they can't wrap their heads around it, and it comes from a place of egotism, therefore this can't possibly be true.
Most people regard truth that way.
If I can't understand it, it can't possibly be true.
Whereas if I talk to Stephen Hawking, and you did, and he's explaining physics, I would bet money he's telling the truth, and we just don't know what the hell he's talking about.
Well, yeah. I mean, I remember when I first encountered the general theory relatively, I'm like, no way.
Can't be true. Can't be true.
When I run, I get fatter?
No, no, no, no. That can't be true.
So, no, it is – oh, wait, there was one other one that popped into my head that happened pretty early on.
Oh, yeah, so asking for you to define the terms is kind of an invitation, and also it turns into a punishment, right?
Yes. And the most important thing, and this is something which I was able to get away with because you're, you know, still a pretty nice guy, but it is you go hard at an argument – And somewhat insultingly, and again, without really addressing the core principles.
I never actually addressed the principle.
I never addressed the non-aggression principle.
I never addressed any of that stuff.
So you go hard at mocking an argument and characterizing it as foolish, and then you change the subject.
And this constant dance is a really, really—I see this all the time in debates, you know?
And I think at one point I said, well, you know, we've moaned that particular, you know, it's like— No, we haven't.
We haven't come to any conclusions whatsoever.
And this happens when people call into my show.
Like, they'll give me 10 big, confused, messy arguments.
I'll address one and they'll say, well, let's move on.
And it's like, no, let's not move on because we haven't resolved anything.
And this constantly being in motion, this like Muhammad Ali, you know, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
That is one of the reasons why people think that debates get nowhere because nothing's ever resolved.
If you start to lose, you just change the topic or bring up another objection or move somewhere else.
And we also tend to agree with the person who's dominating the conversation just simply because of body language and tone.
So even if that person was wrong, the fact that they're dictating when we're moving on makes it seem like they're smarter and more informed and more truthful.
Well, and what if I make a couple of cheesy jokes that make people laugh?
That opens them up to be more sympathetic to my ideas, because especially if I have the dominant narrative and I'm making people laugh, it pushes you further and further into a corner, which is unjust based upon your principles, called ridiculousness.
And then what happens is people start to root for me, and they don't even know that they're doing it.
I become the person they want to win.
You know, it's like I remember when I was a kid, my brother and I used to go to these movies like Ten pennies used to be able to get and see all these movies.
And they were short movies. And I remember the first time I saw a sports, it was about a soccer team.
And, you know, like the soccer team was, you know, the down and outs.
And, you know, you saw all their family histories, you know, like when you see on the...
The Olympics, right? Oh, he came from this small town, he did this and that.
So then you know that person and now you know who to root for.
And I remember thinking when I was a little kid, I remember thinking, okay, but if it was the other team and we followed their family history, then we want that team to win.
And so if you can try and manipulate people, not you, but if a debate partner can try to manipulate people into liking that person, then you end up rooting for that person and that conditions everything you hear.
Yes. Everything you hear.
And you then, the person who's more gesticular, who's making fun, who's joking and so on, becomes more likable in a way.
And then you want that person to win, particularly if, of course, if I win, people don't have to change their worldview.
And people will fight like crazy to protect their worldview, which is basically to protect their relationships.
Because if you change your worldview, as you pointed out, relationships can get kind of haywire.
Yeah. So then they have an ego investment in me being right, and therefore they want me to be right, and oh my god, it just becomes so difficult to dislodge that kind of thinking.
And we saw them try to reverse engineer this with the Hillary campaign, where so much of it is she's your pal, she's your mom, she's your abuela, whatever it was.
She's just like you. They couldn't make it happen because she's a mummy crossed with a succubus.
But the point is, this is something they very intentionally tried to do much more than put over her political views.
It was to make her relatable and your pal and someone you want to root for against this evil monster thug who's basically about to rape her.
Well, and you see this kind of garbage all over the place.
There's the chance, which are not arguments, but more a form of hypnosis and virtue signaling.
And there's the thing I've never quite understood, the I stand with X. You know, it's like, first of all, you're probably sitting while you type it.
And, you know, loyalty to what?
I stand with Charles Manson.
I mean, what does that mean?
I stand with so-and-so.
It's like, it's a way of...
Being good, but it has no particular, but what it does is it ties into people's loyalty.
You know, one of the things that I think people are desperately short of these days is loyalty because most people don't have a shred of principles.
They just kind of survive like minnows under the foot of an elephant trying to get by.
And so you can't ever trust people.
Most people don't have a sense of what, or a clue what trust is or having people really have their back or having people stand for them and really get behind them because they're in the right and they're good and they know why and people have principles because, you know, All principles require discomfort.
If it wasn't discomfort, we wouldn't need principles.
Like, you need nutrition information because if you eat what you like, you're going to die a young death.
And so I think when this programming comes in where people say, I stand with so-and-so, it ties into people's hunger for loyalty and for people to stand with them because most times society is just this big whirligig of backstabbing.
And most people know or suspect or are afraid of that they don't have the capacity to stand on their own and that they would do much better as a pack or as a school of fish rather than the isolated person who, in their mind, might become a target.
Right, right. So I really, really enjoyed it.
It was great fun. I think that's what I thought.
I'm sorry? I thought you were getting completely eviscerated.
It was great fun.
I really enjoyed it.
I think it was Aristotle and certainly Christopher Hitchens who said that if you really do want to be able to dismantle a view, you need to be able to inhabit it fully and understand how the mechanics of that view work.
And if you want to take down an enemy tank, you better get the blueprints and study it pretty hard.
Or if you want to beat an enemy team, you study all their plays and figure out how they work.
And so for me, I've played devil's advocate before, although it's been quite a while since I've done it on this show.
Lauren Southern drew the straw last time.
But I really would recommend it to people.
If you're having trouble overcoming a particular debate, just switch the roles.
And you can really try and figure out how the mechanics work.
Of these arguments work, and then they become much easier to dismantle.
So I just wanted to remind people, you know, the book, Dear Reader, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il is a great book, and you can check out You're Welcome Now.
Explain to me the absence of the apostrophe.
I do not. Okay, so I had a friend.
It drives me crazy when people correct other people on Twitter with spelling.
I know I was Brooklyn's spelling me champion in 1987.
So I had a friend, Eliza, she was a lawyer.
She always deposited me Y-U-R. So I intentionally would spell it wrong, Y-U-R, like you're welcome.
Then I added another mistake.
It was all in capitals. Then I added unnecessary quotes.
So there's three mistakes.
So people who have a second-grade level of intelligence will be like, oh, there's a typo, and not catch the other two, whereas actually smart people will be like, wait a minute, something's going on here, I don't necessarily get it, but there's clearly three mistakes and there must be some intentionality.
So it's a great filter.
All right. And I just wanted to point out that since we set up this debate, the following song has been going through my head.
Go ask Malice when he's 10 feet tall.
All right. So michaelmalice.com and compoundmedia.com for more of Mike's work.
I really, really appreciate that. I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
