Oct. 18, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:19
4228 HOW TO STOP BEING AFRAID
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux here with Ethan, and Ethan and I are going to talk about some, well, my favorite topic in particular, which is the good old ethics, and he has some challenges to hurl at the magnificent edifice known as universally preferable behavior, and has got some alternative definitions that he'd like to work with, so Ethan, thanks a lot for taking the time tonight.
Thank you. I'm super excited as well.
So give me, before we get into, you know, the rustle and tussle and bustle, give me your sort of history with ethics, what draws you to the topic, and what your thoughts on evolution has been in that area.
All right. My history with ethics.
Well, I grew up mostly understanding ethics in the semi-socialist way of Poor people good, rich people bad, make sure poor people get the rich people's money, all that jazz.
No, the socialists love the poor so much they want to just keep making more of them.
Right, you know, multiply what you love.
But it was actually through you and Mike Cernovich that I really started to question that and then I read UPB about a year ago and It was actually, funnily enough, I read UPB while I was on the train to see you and Mike at A Night for Freedom.
Oh, the one in New York or the one in Washington?
Yeah, the one in New York.
Oh yeah, that was quite a night.
Wow. It was great fun.
Quite a night. Anywho, I've been fascinated with philosophy for as long as I can remember now, and your show has really helped me come into that.
But in particular, I've really started to explore ethics going from UPB, and it's been great, great fun to talk about it with Friends, and I'm super excited to now talk about it with the Master himself.
Thank you. Now, the issue with UPB, if you can do me a favor, just sort of indulge me for a moment.
If you could explain to me the general proof that UPB has for the bans on rape, assault, theft, and murder.
I just want to make sure, because a lot of people say, I don't like UPB, and it turns out that they're missing some sort of key component.
Because it is really, really tough to get a hold of, because...
As I've said before, it's kind of like understanding universally preferable behavior is like trying to do math with, you know, 10,000 trained monkeys screaming random numbers into your ear because we're so programmed with this NPC-based Call and answer echolocation response to moral problems.
Like, got a problem? Call the state.
Got a problem? Pass the law.
We're just so much used to that.
Got a problem? Redistribute income.
Got a problem? Force an equality of outcome situation through the state.
And so a lot of times when people oppose UPB or question UPB, not always, but a lot of times it's because they're missing some part of the flow.
So if you could just, let's take the UPB proof for the ban on...
I don't know. The easy one is theft.
You could do rape, but let's not start off the conversation rapey-like.
People always have this issue.
Why do you talk so much about rape?
Because rape is the one unambiguous moral situation.
If it's stealing, it's like, well, what if you're stealing something back?
Or if it's murder, it's like, well, what if it's self-defense?
Or what if it's a mistaken idea?
But rape is the one thing where there's never a justification for it.
So that's one of the reasons why it's easier to talk about that.
But I also understand it's less pleasant for people to hear about.
So how would you, if someone said to you, oh, you've read UPB, can you explain to me how it organizes the ban on stealing?
And again, this is not saying you agree with it, but if you could sort of give me the argument, that would be helpful.
Awesome.
Let's hope I get this because I have heard so many people on your call and shows mess this up.
Um...
If I'm remembering correctly, it is that stealing is not universally applicable as a law.
So if you have two people in a room and you say that stealing is morally good, then they can't both be good at the same time.
Or additionally, simply the act of stealing implies that the person being stolen from doesn't want that to happen.
And if it's a morally good action, then it becomes weird because they would be giving their consent in a way to have it stolen.
Yeah, that's very good.
I'm not sure I understand the technical application of the word weird in the realm of moral theory, but, you know, that's good.
So, yeah, just to sort of give that a bit of a bolster, if I say to you, stealing is universally preferable behavior, then I should want you to take something from me.
But if I want you to take something from me, It's not stealing.
Like if I invite you to a birthday party and I give you a piece of cake, you can't then say, I can't then say, he stole my cake, man!
So if I want you to take property, or the example I've given before is if I put an old lawnmower in front of the house with a sign saying, free, or take me, and then someone comes along and takes my lawnmower, I can't really call the cops and say, that guy stole my lawnmower because I want him to take the property.
In fact, I'm relieved if he does.
Because it saves me a trip to the recycle or to the dump or something like that.
So if stealing is universally preferable behavior, then stealing vanishes as a category because stealing is the taking of someone's property against his or her will.
And the same thing is true for theft rape.
Sorry, for assault, rape, and murder.
And so if it's wanted sexual activity, then it's seduction or lovemaking.
And if it's unwanted sexual activity, then it's rape.
And if rape becomes universally preferable behavior, then everyone should want to rape and be raped at the same time.
But if somebody wants to be raped, they can't be raped because it's, by definition, something that is unwanted.
So yeah, that's the very brief...
Well, actually, I find UPB to be mostly awesome, particularly in the proofs of what not to do and what is evil.
The main area that I want to talk about is virtue and a positive moral obligation, a thou shalt rather than just a thou shalt not.
And I have no problem with that, and I've heard that.
It's not so much a criticism as saying, you know, great house.
It'd be nice if there was a beautiful garden, too.
That's not an insult to the house.
That's just wanting to enhance it with a nice garden.
I get all of that, right?
But the problem, or at least the challenge that I have, is at least for me, we are so far from even having the basic four introduced.
You know, it's sort of like you're planning the elaborate rock garden with the tumbling waterfalls and the flamingos and so on, and we don't even have a hole in the ground for the house yet.
Because if we can get people to respect persons and property to the point where very few people steal, rape, assault, and murder, I think we're kind of already living in a paradise.
Now, that's sort of one of the issues that I have with.
It kind of overleaps the challenges of the present day to get people to achieve positive moral obligations when we damn well can't even get them to stop being addicted to evil.
So I think our work is kind of cut out for us as moralists to try and convince people to just stop stealing from each other, to stop assaulting each other, to stop raping and murdering each other.
And, of course, people will say, well, I don't know anyone who rapes, steals, assault, and murder, and it's like, yeah, but they vote for government policies which achieve exactly those ends, even down to rape with government prisons, where, like, 10% of male prisoners are raped sometimes, and war, you know, the initiation of the use of force against usually legally disarmed citizens, taxation is theft, and assault is what happens when you don't obey the government's commandments.
So there's a lot of it around, even if people aren't out there on the streets, Antifa-style, with a truncheon.
I think we're good to go.
I don't believe in universally preferable behavior, and therefore it's false, and therefore you shouldn't argue for it.
It's like, aha, you just did UPB by telling me that something is false, and therefore I should refrain from arguing from it.
So you can't oppose UPB without deploying UPB. But let's talk about some of the – you've given me some definitions, which I appreciate.
So some stuff to do with the dictionary definitions and how you wanted to approach the positive moral obligation side of things.
Mm-hmm. Shall I just do a quick walkthrough?
Yeah, let's do it. All right.
So just to start off, the dictionary definition of virtue is behavior showing high moral standards such as integrity, dignity, honor, decency, basic stuff.
Can I stop you already?
I hate to say so. So positive adjectives to me are not arguments.
You know, everyone says, well, dignity and honor and decency and integrity are all good.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's integrity to what?
Integrity to what, right? I mean, you could say some Nazi has integrity to the tenets of national socialism.
And so on. So integrity simply means fidelity to an ideal, but the ideal doesn't necessarily have to be the very highest moral standard that we can imagine.
Yes, you beat me exactly to my point.
This definition is pretty much useless because it is variable based on whatever moral standard the individual holds.
Just like you said. So, bam!
We're on the same page.
And then the definition that I believe you use in UPB, although it's not explicitly stated, is that virtue is morally good behavior or the opposite of evil behavior, such as respect for property rights or not murdering.
Does that sound about right?
Yeah, so... It's the avoidance or the rejection of a negative is pretty good.
You know, if you can go through your life without stealing or assaulting or raping or murdering, of course, raping and murdering are fairly uncommon, or supporting...
Somewhat cloudy ideologies that pursue that particular end.
So, for instance, I would consider it pretty immoral, aesthetically negative behavior to support, say, socialism, because socialism is a form of institutionalized theft and predation and violence and violation of the non-aggression principle, violation of property rights and so on.
And so that's pretty nasty.
I mean, you're not directly out there stealing yourself, but you're cheering on the people who are doing it, which is fundamentally the only thing that makes it possible, and you're covering up the actual violence within the system.
So morally good behavior is to respect property rights, but it also has to do with Identifying where people think that they're doing good but are in fact doing evil.
So, you know, talking about UPB, talking about the violence of taxation and so on, I would consider to be morally good.
But the problem is, of course, you can't enforce those things.
Like you can't throw someone in jail for failing to defend the free market, right?
That would be a violation of free speech and conscience and so on, right?
So I would love it if people would just stop doing the evil stuff.
That to me would be a pretty good step forward.
Let me give you one example.
So if you're a doctor and you've got a patient who's 400 pounds and a chain smoker and never exercises or anything like that, then would your goal be to say, I really want this guy to run a triathlon?
It would be like, well, no, I'd really like for this guy to stop smoking, to stop overeating, and to just get some exercise.
That would be a big achievement in terms of health.
And given that I view society as...
Pretty messed up philosophically.
Probably the most it's been messed up since the pre-Socratics.
But I would just like it if society could stop being addicted to the negative stuff.
And the positive virtues, to me, can come kind of afterwards.
Like after the guy's quit smoking, lost some weight, and is exercising, then we can start talking, you know, in a couple of years, probably after his system adjusts to something like, now you can start a triathlon training program or something.
Yeah. So that can segue nicely into one of my next points, which is that free will is not necessarily automatic or guaranteed to a person.
So, for instance, I've heard you reference before to people who, for instance, someone who's an alcoholic, Doesn't necessarily have a ton of free will in deciding whether or not to have another beer.
Does that sound about right? Okay, so if someone is an alcoholic, there are usually environmental and genetic predilections towards that.
Just a reminder to look at the camera.
But there are usually predilections towards that that are genetic and environmental.
There is a choice, of course, right?
And it's the old thing where you've got the two sons of an alcoholic and one of them becomes an alcoholic, the other one never touches a drink.
You can think of Donald Trump and his brother...
And the guy who's an alcoholic says, I'm an alcoholic because my father drank.
It's genetic. I have no choice.
He was my drinking buddy when I was 14 or whatever.
And the guy who's not an alcoholic, who never touches a drink, says, well, I don't touch a drink because my father was an alcoholic and I saw just how terrible it was.
So you do have a choice when you're young.
But of course, the longer you layer in alcoholism, the longer that you stunt your emotional maturity by turning to the bottle rather than to self-knowledge and virtue, the less chance and the less choice that you have.
So, you know, your first massive slice of cheesecake is a choice.
If you've had 300 of them in one year and you're now 100 pounds overweight, well, there's a bunch of stuff you don't have the choice to do.
do, but that's because prior to those limited choices, you made other choices that narrowed them down.
Okay.
Okay, so then So one thing that I have posited is that there are a series of identifiable inhibitors to free will.
So, for instance, you were talking about past decisions can be inhibitors to free will.
Genetics, in some cases, environment.
And so the Definition for virtue that I'd love to propose is virtue is behavior that helps to mitigate the inhibitors towards free will.
So, for instance, if you have a immense fear of confrontation because of Your childhood or some other experience or genetic predilection.
Everything turned into like a scream fest or you have a very high genetic predisposition towards agreeableness or something like that.
Yes. Practicing courage as a virtue can be very useful in gaining more options in your free will, which in turn gives you more options to be morally good and take responsibility for your actions.
I don't know. I see where you're coming from, but I guess I have somewhat of a problem with the idea that you're less moral once you have less free will.
I'm not sure that I would agree with that, Ethan, because if you have made choices that result in you having less free will, I don't think that you are less responsible for the result of those choices.
So it's sort of like saying, well, if you...
So you start off healthy, you make a bunch of bad health choices, you smoke, you drink too much, you don't exercise or whatever, and you get fat and wheezy and, you know, sodden your liver problems from alcohol and so on.
You're still fully responsible for your state of health.
So if somebody makes bad decisions, let's say they just start running with a bad crowd, right?
Like they run with the crowd that shoplifts, and they run with the crowd that does a lot of drugs, and they run with the crowd that steals cars and so on.
And then they get arrested, and maybe it's like they're one day past their 18th birthday, and now they have a record, and it's a big problem.
And it's like, you know...
I guess I could say I sympathize, but the person is still fully responsible for the choices that they made to end up in that situation.
So I'm not sure that the moral, like when your choices decline, I'm not sure that the moral standing declines.
So could we say that an individual who has had free will in the past, even if they don't have it now, is still fully responsible for their actions morally, but say an individual who's never had access To a full battery of free will is less morally responsible for their actions.
For instance, someone who was dramatically abused as a child or genetically has a lower IQ, let's say.
That's a very interesting question.
We'll take the abuse one first.
So, the primary issue with child abuse is the child abuser.
That's the primary and fundamental moral issue that occurs.
And the society that does not intervene in a positive way to deal with that child abuse and state of societies generally can't and won't and don't because nobody in particular profits from a child growing up in a healthy manner in a state of society.
In fact, They can actually profit from the child growing up dysfunctional.
The prisons can profit, the court system can profit, the psychologists and psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry and you name it, the welfare state, they can all, quote, profit from a kid growing up dysfunctional, which is why in a free society it would be a very different matter.
So I would say that the fundamental moral issue there is with whoever abused the child, usually the parents of course, and whoever did not intervene when they knew about the abuse.
Now somebody who has been abused as a child is more likely, of course, To become a criminal.
It's more likely to end up with ischemic heart disease, they're more likely to smoke, more likely to be promiscuous, more likely to use drugs, all these kinds of things.
And so from that standpoint, I think it's fair to say that it's much more of a challenge to be good if you've been abused as a child.
Now, I think that there are ways to mitigate that, which is, of course, for people to really understand this correlation and causation.
So if you sort of think back in the day, like in the 1950s, when the doctors said, ah, smoking is fine for you.
Why would you quit? There was like four out of five doctors recommend this brand of cigarettes and so on.
So did people really have a choice to...
A clear choice to quit when the doctor said it was fine for you, it wasn't bad for you at all, as opposed to when the info came out, I think it was in the 60s, where they said, man, this stuff is just terrible for you.
It's like the worst thing ever.
Then you have, of course, more of an incentive and more of a choice to quit.
And so if people know how bad child abuse is for your future potential, that gives them more responsibility.
That gives them more responsibility.
So for instance, we now know that there are some genetic elements to alcoholism.
And so if you say to the child of an alcoholic, drinking is very, very risky for you because you may have these genetic predispositions, or if you look at the indigenous North American population who lacks some enzymes to break down alcohol, you can say, look, this stuff is really bad for you.
And so, like, if a black guy goes out in the sun, he's less likely to get a sunburn than if some Irish white guy with blue eyes and red hair and freckles goes out into the sun.
Does that—so the Irish guy is—the white Irish guy is more susceptible than the sub-Saharan black to sunburn.
Does that mean— That the white guy and the black guy have the same responsibility for avoiding sunburns?
Well, you could say if the white guy doesn't know, then okay, it's somewhat equal.
But if the white guy knows he's going to get a sunburn more than the black guy, Then he now has the knowledge, he now has responsibility for his sunburn.
If he has no idea whatsoever, for whatever reason, then that could be more excusable.
So spreading the idea or spreading the correlation between child abuse and adult dysfunction creates more opportunities for people to avoid that dysfunction and therefore more moral responsibility for doing so.
So, awesome.
Awesome. So under UPB, would you say that that spreading of information would fall under the classification of a virtue?
So there are the five, let me just run through them quickly, so the five categories that I talk about in UPB. So one, of course, is in the middle, there's like morally neutral behaviors.
You know, like I'm going to walk to a coffee shop to get a coffee.
There's no moral content in that.
I need to go to the washer.
There's no moral content in that.
And then there are aesthetically preferable actions, which are things that are good but can't be universally enforced.
Politeness, being on time, consideration, charity, generosity, truth-telling, and so on.
And I mean truth-telling not in a court of law where you're under a legal obligation, but just telling the truth in general in your life, standing up for the good.
And those are aesthetically preferable actions.
We'd like to have them.
It would be good if you do those things.
You are to be praised for doing them.
But you can't be thrown in jail for telling a lie.
And you can't be thrown in jail for showing up late.
And you can't be thrown in jail for being rude.
And you can't be thrown in jail for being a bad dancer and getting drunk at your cousin's wedding and hitting on the bride.
You know, like, you can't.
And I go into the reasons for all of that.
If you and I, like I was a little bit late at some technical issues, a little bit late to the call tonight...
And, you know, you could have said, well, that's it.
Forget it. You know, you're late.
To the best deal. Yeah, yeah, you're late.
No, you could say, listen, I'm not going to do any more calls with this guy because he was like 15 minutes late and that's bad and so on.
And that's, you know, that's fine.
You can choose not to do it. I can choose to beg you to have the conversation or whatever.
But I'm not imposing my behavior upon you coercively if I'm simply late.
I mean, I'm not putting a gun to your head.
I'm not locking you in a basement and so on.
And you can avoid the situations simply by not engaging with me as a person to schedule events with or whatever.
So because I'm not imposing my aesthetically negative behavior like being late or being rude upon you by force, you don't have the right to use force in self-defense.
It's not the initiation of the use of force to be aesthetically negative.
It's praiseworthy to be aesthetically positive, tell the truth and so on.
It's negative to lie to people But these aren't things that people can...
You can't use force against people.
Now then, of course, there is a universally preferable behavior.
And, of course, the flip side of that...
Universally prescribed behavior or universally negative behavior or whatever.
And so you don't...
If I'm late to an appointment with you, as I was tonight, I'm still not imposing my will on you by force.
If I break into your house and put a gun to your head and say, give me your valuables, then I am, of course, imposing...
And you have no chance to escape, no chance to avoid, and we have self-defense and all that.
So... I would put sort of truth-telling and virtue in the category of aesthetically preferable actions.
They're better, they're nicer, they're good, but they do not come fully into the realm of good and evil, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and I recall there was a passage in UPP where you talked about traditional virtues like courage being also in the aesthetically positive realm or maybe in between aesthetically positive and universally preferable, basically very much encouraged.
So, I mean, you've got an example here, like discipline is one of your—and discipline is a very, very good one, right?
It is one of these Aristotelian means.
And look, honesty is also in the category of Aristotelian means as well, right?
So I remember many, many years ago reading a pretty funny little comment.
I think it was in Mad Magazine or it could have been a Reader's Digest or something like that.
And it was sort of like a husband's, and this is way back in the day.
I don't know if you even remember who Raquel Welch was, but she was this ravishing Italian goddess from many moons ago.
And in her prime, she was a tender slice of lady meat.
And so, you know, the wife comes up and says to her husband and says, hey, honey, what you thinking?
And the husband is thinking about Raquel Welch in a leather thong or something like that.
And it's, you know, you can be diplomatic and you can have an excess of honesty and so on.
You know, does this dress make me look whatever, right?
So, and something like discipline, you want to be in the middle, right?
Too much discipline and you really can't have any fun and you can't have a drag to be around and you become a grandma Nazi and stuff like that.
Too little discipline, you get lax and sloppy and lazy and so on.
So, I think with discipline, it's one of these, it's a virtue for sure.
I mean, it's a good thing to do.
You kind of have to watch it to some degree.
You can't See, if somebody lacks discipline, they don't exercise, they eat terrible food, they become unhealthy, Okay, that's bad, right?
But you can't throw someone in jail for not exercising.
You can't throw someone in jail for eating badly.
Now, if they then get diabetes and then they go and steal their medicine, okay, well now that's a different category.
So to me, discipline does fall into, again, courage, curiosity, discipline, honesty, humility.
These do all fall in the category of aesthetically preferable actions, but not things that I would defend through force or impose through force.
Right, right.
And so I guess the crux of the argument I'm trying to make that is slowly being picked apart and I'm trying to adapt on the fly is that...
So someone needs to have free choice in order for their actions to have moral content.
That doesn't necessarily mean that if someone is a murderer and they don't have free choice, don't stop them.
But we don't call a dingo evil.
But we do definitely keep our baby away from the dingo.
Right. So, if free will is necessary for someone to...
Oh, I've just noticed a hole in my argument.
I suppose someone can be performing an action that would be morally good even without free will, just accidentally.
Can you give me an example?
I don't think that's true, but I mean, it certainly could be true, but what's an example of that?
Well, so, if someone's just respecting property rights, that's a morally good action, and Most people most of the time are not stealing, raping, assaulting, or murdering.
And does everyone necessarily have free will in that situation?
Which situation exactly?
Like, for instance, if we go back to the fat guy who's eaten 600 slices of cheesecake, sitting on his couch eating another slice of cheesecake, he's not necessarily making free choices, but he's also Within the bounds of morally good because he's respecting property rights.
Why is he not making choices?
He's making a choice to eat the next piece of cheesecake, isn't he?
Right. Hmm.
Now, I would certainly say that he is acting in an aesthetically negative way, but he's not...
Yeah, he's right. He's not violating people's persons and property.
We wouldn't call him evil. We would call him irresponsible.
And there are extremities in which that irresponsibility can get damn close to being a really nasty human being.
So, for instance, if he has...
If he has children, like he's got three kids, he's got a wife who stays at home, and he's just courting a heart attack, you know, and he's just courting ill health and so on.
That's irresponsible to the point where it's getting mighty close to just downright being nasty because, you know, he drops dead of a heart attack and so on.
He can't play with his kids that much, and he can't chase them around, and he's pretty bad at hide-and-go-seek because he's the biggest thing in the house.
So it's pretty close, but again, it's just one of these things that...
It's up to his friends and family to intervene.
It's certainly not up to the police to come and take the cheesecake out of his hand.
Right, right.
Now, as far as you say, and I had said the same thing, I just wanted to clarify it again.
Right.
So, when you talked about most people aren't stealing over the course of their life, so I do have something in the book called The Coma Test, which is an approximation but a good mental...
Right. Right.
Right. And so when people have these positive obligations, like you have to give to the poor, it's like, okay, well, if you're sleeping, you're not giving to the poor.
If you're in a coma, you're not giving to the poor.
Does that mean you're evil? Because the opposite of good must be evil.
That's one of these basics, right?
Right. A guy in a coma is not being responsible.
He's not being disciplined.
But none of those things are universal positive moral obligations, right?
He's not raping. He's not stealing.
So from that standpoint, the coma test, I think, is important when it comes to evaluating individuals.
The other problem, though, is I think it's fair to say, and tell me if you think this is going astray, but I think it's fair to say that If you are in receipt of stolen goods, then you are not at your highest moral peak in the universe, right? So I don't know if you've ever had this.
I remember this is many years ago at a mall.
I was going to work.
I worked in a hardware store and I was going to work.
And a van, you know, kind of burnt rubber screeched up next to me.
And, you know, guys came out in the back and, you know, with...
Boxes of stereo equipment.
And they were like, you know, well, I'm just reselling what my cousin doesn't want anymore.
It's like, really? Your cousin had 12 stereos?
And he just doesn't want them anymore?
And am I going to get a receipt for this?
And, you know, anything like that.
And it was pretty shady stuff.
And there's reason, looking back even at the time, there was sort of reason to believe that this was not so much on the up and up.
There was good reasons why they were like...
70% off and no receipt and, you know, not a lot of stereo stores are on wheels.
But this one was, I think, for fairly good reason.
So if I'm a receipt of stolen goods, then...
That's pretty significant in terms of I am certainly enabled.
I'm in receipt of stolen property.
I'm profiting from theft, which is bad and I think would certainly be wrong.
Immoral. Evil. Insofar as if someone steals your car, even if they sell it to someone else, you're justified in using force to get it back.
Even if that person doesn't want to give it back, too bad.
It was still stolen. Now, that having been said, the big challenge in illuminating the world as it stands is that there are billions of people around the world in receipt of stolen goods, right?
I mean, there are the, you know, I think just the boomers as a whole who are, you know, have all these wonderful pensions and healthcare benefits and all these great things which they didn't pay for in taxes, which is one of the main reasons why there's such a huge and calamitous national debt.
And people who are getting welfare money and to a smaller degree, smaller degree, the people who are used government force to get into particular positions like affirmative action and other sorts of things where the employer is giving a job to someone outside of free market considerations because he's afraid of being sued or he's afraid of getting in trouble with the government for not meeting diversity quotas or something like that.
So in a sense, you're kind of in receipt of stolen property if you got a job because the guy who is hiring you is afraid of the government coming down and destroying his business and his life and auditing him or whatever.
So there is a lot of stolen money floating around in society.
The only saving grace, of course, is most people don't think it's stolen.
Most people think, well, it's just the system.
It's just a check.
And so I would not view those people as immoral in the same way that if you are buying a used car and you don't know that it's stolen and you genuinely believe that it is, maybe there's good forgery papers or whatever it is, like you have genuine reason to believe that it's a good thing to get the property, that it wasn't stolen, that like you have genuine reason to believe that it's a good thing to get You're still obligated to give it back once you find out it's stolen, but you're not immoral for buying it.
So most people exist in this state of, it seems fine.
You know, like the Social Security people, oh, we paid into it.
It's like, no, you didn't. No, you didn't.
Because there's, you know, like you're getting far more benefits than you ever paid into it.
And so most people do not believe that they're in receipt of stolen goods with the existing system, but they are.
And awakening them to that is the big challenge.
And they resist that knowledge.
Because if you love this car and you've got a really good price for it, you really don't want someone to come by and say, oh, by the way, that's stolen.
You've got to give it back.
You've lost your money and you don't have a car.
Sorry.
And so illuminating this reality for people is something that, I mean, I've been doing for years.
I'm sure you talk about it as well.
Because once people understand that they are kind of in receipt of stolen goods, particularly stolen from the unborn, which is a really horrible Fagin trick, then they are more morally responsible for what's going on.
I've certainly found that the term, this seems fine...
To be the spell of oncoming disaster.
Well, that's true. That's true.
Yeah, I published a video today. Seems fine.
Turns out there's an annoying little wine that actually isn't me, for once.
So, okay. Go ahead.
I just want to make sure I understand correctly, because this is fantastic.
So, the conventional understanding of morality is that the goal is to be good, and that there's a positive...
Positive obligation to do certain things that are within the realm of good.
So what I think you're telling me, and I want to make sure I understand correctly, is that good is not necessarily the immediate point, but there's actually a very narrow range of what falls into the category of good being things that are enforceable as positive actions such as respecting property rights.
Does that sound about right? I think, I mean, I think that's true.
I mean, sorry, that is true. But in general, it is expanding the definition of theft to include all real manifestations of that, right?
So if we had a society, and so in the past, it was legally impossible in some places to rape your wife, and this may be the case in In places in the here and now.
And the basic argument was you are morally obliged to give your wife money if you're working and she's raising your kids and you can't legally say no to your wife.
Nope, I'm cutting you off.
You don't get any money. And in the same way, She is not legally entitled to refuse sex to you, and therefore, for many places in history, even in the West, and some places, I think even now, you can't legally rape your wife.
Now, of course you can.
Absolutely. Of course you can.
It's wrong to rape any one wife.
So if you look at that expansion of the definition, Of rape to include male-female relations within marriage.
Up until recently, rape against men was barely even tracked, let alone defined at the federal level for sure, in America.
And so it's expanding that definition to include actions that previously were considered outside the scope of moral examination, right?
So the husband raping the wife It was, for a lot of times in history, outside the realm of moral examination.
It was like stealing your own property, you know, and it didn't make any sense, although, of course, it was immoral to do it.
So, expanding the definition is foundational to morality.
To take another example that's easy to chew on, slavery, right?
Right.
So, I mean, there were some races and some groups.
And this is not just blacks, of course, but we know there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Europeans taken by the Saracens, the Muslims in the Middle East through the Mediterranean and so on.
And so there was the concentration of the sense of personhood existed only in a small elite.
There were lots of slaves in the ancient world, lots of slaves across the world throughout history, now slaves, still millions and millions, tens of millions of slaves throughout the world as it stands.
So extending and expanding the question of personhood or the identity of personhood, what it is to be a human being from, say, the Athenian elite or the Roman elite to include all adult human beings of sound mind and body, that is an expansion.
Which is a huge moral progress.
So in the same way that I would say, well, look, we do have to have a talk about marital rape.
I mean, no, the man does not buy a vagina for 40 years.
That's just wrong, right?
But at the same time, we also do have to have a conversation about a man who doesn't want to financially support his wife.
These two sort of go hand in hand.
At least they would in a rational universe.
And so to me, in the same way we look at expanding the definition of theft to not just include a mugging, but to include redistribution of income, to include socialism, communism, fascism, to include totalitarianism, to include intergenerational debt, to include inflation, which is a form of theft that hits the poorest and those on fixed incomes hardest of all.
And to expand it to include things like taxation.
Because right now, just as in the ancient world, personhood was like an adult educated Athenian, usually over the age of 30.
Okay, it's like a tiny slice of people were people.
And everyone else had very few rights or were slaves or women or subjugated and so on.
There's a tiny little slice of people who were considered people.
If you look at some plantation in the Antebellum South, you might have, you know, 25 white guys and 500 slaves.
Right? So you have 5% of people who are people and everyone else is just a slave.
And that's wretched.
So right now we have a very small definition of what theft is.
It's shoplifting, you know, it could be white collar crime, it could be some Ponzi scheme, knocking someone over in an alley and taking their wallet or a pickpocket or whatever it is.
coercive income redistribution that occurs in the world that's relatively tiny that's like a tiny percentage of what's like five percent of what's going on and we're missing the big picture and so it's really impossible for me for human beings to be moral if you're a Roman slave owner and you look at your toiling slaves and you genuinely do not see them as human beings that they are just beasts of burden that they're just livestock and so on well that's wretched If you genuinely believe that, can you really be moral and free your slaves?
Kind of hard. But if you can extend and expand the definition of humanity to include all adults of sound mind and body, great.
And if you can extend and expand the concept or question of Theft to include coercive state actions and predatory central banking actions and unfunded liabilities and debts and so on.
Well, now we have a chance to really deal with the issue of theft, which is kind of distracted at the moment because we're looking at kind of rare individual actors rather than a whole system that we need to see.
Right. Okay.
So then it is correct to say that there are There are states or occurrences that can inhibit free will, but most of them, such as fear, aren't necessarily super important in the calculation because a choice is being made one way or another.
However, ignorance of a fact, for instance, not knowing that the state is a coercive entity, stands above the other inhibitors in terms of importance of combating that.
Yeah. If somebody is in a genuine state of nature with regards to their moral understanding, I give them a pass.
Until and unless they know.
Now, here's the problem, though.
Here's the problem, which is that when I was a kid growing up, I heard, as we all do back when the law was simpler...
That ignorance of the law is no excuse.
And the reason why ignorance of the law can't be an excuse is because if it was, everyone would just claim to be ignorant of the law, right?
I forgot armed robbery was illegal, is that old Steve Martin bit, right?
I forgot. I forgot.
I forgot where Judge Kavanaugh assaulted me sometime in the early 80s when my hair was big and my shoulder pads were wider than a dreadnought.
So here's the problem, is that has someone...
Have they avoided knowledge in order to remain in a state of nature with regards, let's just say, taxation and theft, right?
Have they ever heard the argument?
Has someone ever handed them a copy of, say, Atlas Shrugged or Bastiat or The Road to Serfdom or von Mises or New Rockwell or whatever it is, right?
Murray Rothbard, you name it.
Like, has someone ever brought this argument up?
Have they ever heard this argument?
Have they avoided the argument?
And that becomes, of course, it's unprovable.
Someone can say, by golly, I never had any clue, never had any idea whatsoever that taxation was theft.
It's like, we don't know.
We don't know if they avoided, if they saw that idea lurking somewhere around and ran from it and vanished from it and avoided it.
We don't know. That's the problem, is that ignorance of the law is an excuse, but it's virtually impossible to prove that someone is genuinely ignorant of the law.
Right. And that goes back to, like you said about the more traditional virtues like courage in UPB is that they can't fall into the category of morally good because they're not measurable.
Ignorance isn't measurable.
Right. And courage is often the result of a long process.
So you've probably heard, as everyone has, this moral argument that says All right, there's some guy, his wife is dying, and there's only one pharmacist in town who has a medicine that costs $10,000.
That will save her, but the guy, blah, blah, blah, he doesn't have the money, and can he go and steal it?
And if you say no, then you're just condemning this woman to death.
And if you say yes, then socialism, you know, like it's just this terrible argument, right?
So the real question, yeah, the real question is, I mean, just looking at it from a free society, the real question is something like this, a whole series of questions.
Why don't you have insurance? You know, because if you have insurance, then they'll pay for it.
Why don't you have $10,000?
I mean, if you don't have insurance, you saved money by not having to pay for insurance, so surely you put that money away somewhere because everybody knows bad things can randomly happen in life, right?
Why don't you take out a loan?
Why don't you take out a loan for $10,000?
Why don't you sell your car? Are you saying your car is more important than your wife's life?
Why don't you borrow against your house?
Why don't you borrow against your assets?
Why don't you sell four Bitcoins?
I mean, so all of these questions, I say, well, I don't have any of these things, I don't have any of these things, I don't have any of these things.
Okay, well, because everybody wants to give you this snapshot and they don't want to give you the whole time slices that came before.
The next question is, why don't you just go around to your friends and family And, you know, you've got 20 friends and family members, just ask each of them to cough up 500 bucks, and there's your 10 grand, and you're good to go, and you can pay them back over time, right?
Or you can ask each of them to give you 50 bucks, there's your 1,000 bucks, and you can use that as collateral with which to get a loan, right?
I mean, there's so many different things that you can do.
So... This idea that moral crises just emerge with no context.
They just emerge with no history, with no backdrop, with no background.
It's literally like a guy who's 400 pounds coming into the doctor's office.
The doctor says, dude, you're 400 pounds.
What happened? He's like, no, I was born this way.
My mother exploded like John Hurt in Aliens.
Like I just came out like a giant.
I was like rolling out like that boulder at the beginning of Indiana Jones.
I was born 400.
It's like, no, you weren't.
You were not born 400 pounds.
Something happened and you got that way.
So when someone has a failure of courage in the moment...
The big question to me is what led up to that?
What was all the backstory that led up to that?
And let's say somebody, you know, there's an old Albert Brooks movie, Defending Your Life.
It's pretty funny. It's about asking for a raise and this guy like just folds completely and immediately and all that.
And the question is, okay, well, why do you fault?
You know, he just doesn't...
The guy says, I want a $5,000 raise.
The guy says, 500 bucks. He's like, done.
You know, it's like, why do you fault?
Well, I would imagine it's because you had parents who bullied you and didn't give you scope to negotiate and all that.
Okay, well... So if you know that, shouldn't you be dealing with that?
Shouldn't you take some therapy, get some self-knowledge and role-play and practice?
Don't you go in prepared? You know, if I go in and I try and win Wimbledon, I'm going to end up with a racket sticking out of my ass like I've taken a rather rough dump, right?
Because I'm not ready.
I'm not prepared. I haven't been practicing, you know, four hours a day for 10 years or 15 years or whatever it is, right?
I'm just not ready. So I can't go into Wimbledon and win because I'm not ready.
And for moral crises, if you need courage, well, the less preparation you have made, the more courage you're going to need.
And if you know that you're afraid of something, trying to will courage is usually a terrible way to approach it.
What you want to do is practice and role play and deal with your issues and all that kind of stuff.
And then you'll find it a whole lot easier.
And so the virtues there are discipline, self-knowledge, self-examination, honesty, That's something I completely hadn't considered.
That's really interesting.
So, the need for virtue reduces...
Sure. We all know that there's going to be scary stuff in life.
And it is important to ready yourself for that process.
If you are startled, then it's a lot easier to lose your courage, right?
So I went to do these speeches in Australia, and I was...
I knew. I knew that there were going to be feral communists, leftists, and fascists out there protesting what I was doing and what Lauren Southern was doing.
And so I had to mentally prepare myself, you know, that there's going to be violence, that there's going to be, I mean, the night for freedom, right?
I mean, I was up there for five hours after the speech chatting with people and, you know, exchanging hugs and listening to stories and all that.
And partly that's because I wanted to meet the listeners.
And the other part was I knew that these feral leftists were downstairs and they did end up attacking some guy.
And they put a cop in a chokehold, some guy, and it's just a terrible mess.
So if I went down, I'm like, dum-de-dum-de-dum, everybody loves me, you know, and I go out and I get jumped, like, I'm going to need a lot of courage, I'm going to need a lot of self-defense, I'm going to, you know, put my judo to good use or whatever, right?
But if you go ahead and you say, okay, I'm going to need to stay close to security.
There is going to be violence.
I actually have a far less of a need for martial courage if I simply act in an intelligent way and accept that there is a risk out there rather than wade into trouble.
Fantastic.
I suppose it's a very clever little trick that gets pulled to lure people to focus more on embodying these positive virtues, these traditionally positive virtues and worry about, oh, I need to be more courageous, I need to be more disciplined, rather than worrying about the evil that's everywhere.
Well, and rather than having the preparation that you need.
So it is a classic abuse tactic as a whole to just take a bad father, right?
A bad father who verbally berates his son.
The best way to continue to humiliate the son after the son has grown up and has more independence and a larger physical size and as the father is aging and becoming less strong, the best way is to cripple someone and then mock them for not running.
So the father breaks down the will of the son, destroys the will of the son, turns the son into a fearful human being, and then says to the son, you lack courage.
It's insane, right?
It's like not feeding your child and then complaining that they lack strength to lift a piano.
It's like... So this focus on positive virtues is usually very abusive in my experience in history because society as a whole, you can't talk back to teachers.
You can't talk back to priests.
You can't talk back to parents.
You can't... You know, what are you?
You're smart-mouthing. You're back-talking.
You're, you know, being a snotty brat.
You're whatever, right? So you can't negotiate.
You can't negotiate. You're beaten down.
You're yelled at. Sometimes you're hit.
You're verbally abused and so on.
And then they say, well, it's important to have courage out there in the world.
You've got to have courage. And then when you don't have courage because you've been kind of broken up and nobody's talking about it, then they get to further berate you.
And so to cripple people.
And then to blame them for their lack of mobility is one of the ways in which these kinds of abuse is.
I'm always kind of concerned, not with you at all, my friend, but I'm kind of concerned about a focus on positive virtues because a lot of times it's like, you just got to have courage.
You just got to stand up for things.
It's like, the question is, why don't you?
Because I think courage is our natural birthright.
I mean, I'm a father and, you know, my daughter was...
Very assertive from very, very early on.
And that was her natural state.
And I'm sure some of that's genetic and so on.
But there is a certain amount of assertiveness that I see coming out of children who are raised well.
And, you know, she's diplomatic and she's sensitive and so on.
But she has a natural courage that I think is...
Inevitable to a child who's brought up in a peaceful and reasonable manner.
And if she beats me in a negotiation, she gets her way.
I mean, of course, right? I'm not going to, you know, being older is not an argument.
So I am somewhat concerned about these focuses on positive virtues very often is a way of further strip mining the rich veins of humiliation when society breaks people and then says, well, you're just terrible for being broken and it's all your fault and you've just got to be courageous and so on. you're just terrible for being broken and it's all your I think it's a way for society to just not look in the mirror and say, why are we producing all these broken people like this snowflake generation and the hysterical people on campuses and so on?
we can say, oh, you just got to suck it up and you got to be tougher and so on.
Yeah, okay. I mean, that's an argument.
And I'm not saying it's wrong in some way.
It's not wrong in every way.
But the more fundamental question is, why are these young people so frantic?
Why are they so hysterical?
Why are they so keyed up?
And the answer goes back to, you know, the moms went back to work.
They were dumped in daycares. They just don't have connections.
They... Their parents were busy and society is toxic.
And when you have a whole swath of people who are changing fundamentally in a generation or two, just saying, they lack virtue, they lack maturity, they lack wisdom, they've got to suck it up snowflakes.
It's like, yeah, I mean, I get that.
And I'm not saying that's entirely wrong.
But we also do have to sort of say, why is the conveyor belt of society putting out people differently?
I mean, everyone gets mad at Antifa, and I understand that.
I mean, really, I get mad at Antifa, too.
The question is, why are there so many people like that?
And the answer is usually, I think, because they're the shock troops sent out by the single moms to make sure the state doesn't stop giving them goodies.
And, you know, they're just white knighting for their single moms as a whole.
And the single mom's hatred of fathers is poured into the right and so on.
Anyway, so... The exhortation to positive virtue, I would much rather...
Instead of people saying, you should be more courageous, the real question is, why are you so afraid?
Now, once you figure out why you're so afraid and the emotional and historical roots of that...
Right.
Right. Because I had worked so much ahead of time to be mentally prepared for that, I felt no anxiety going up.
Now, it wasn't because I had a whole lot of courage.
I mean, I can be as fraidy cat as the next guy.
It's just that I was fully prepared.
Like, we had all the security, and I knew that there were going to be disruptions, and there were.
And that is just a reality.
So preparation, you know, it's that old Hamlet thing, you know, preparation, readiness is all, readiness is all.
And I would rather people work on self-knowledge than virtue because virtue kind of has to be teeth gritted and willed every single time.
Well, I guess another way of saying it, it's a whole lot easier to not eat chocolate if there's no chocolate in the house.
You know, how do you grit your teeth and dye it?
Well, you just stop buying the stuff that's bad for you.
You know, I haven't bought a box of cookies in probably 15 years.
I love cookies. I mean, I could just sit on a couch and eat cookies.
It's a bliss. I love it.
I love it when your teeth are twice the size because they've got...
You know, God forsaken chemicals stuck to them.
But I just, you can't buy it.
You can't buy it. You can't have that stuff around.
It's a whole lot easier with preparation to avoid the teeth gritting decay of willpower.
Right. Well, it's so crazy.
I've heard people, like, that strategy of seeking the self-knowledge rather than just trying to push through it with virtue of just not having cookies in the house.
I've heard people refer to stuff like that as, oh, that's just being clever.
Like, it's a bad thing.
Okay. What's wrong with clever?
You haven't fixed your addiction to cookies, but it's not an issue because I can't eat them anymore.
It's so nuts. And what you said about the anxiety really resonated.
I have so much to say. I'm sorry. I'm taking notes furiously.
Don't worry. It's recorded, but go ahead.
The thing you said about anxiety really resonated because, for instance, I was a little anxious before the call started because I don't get a lot of opportunities to really have my ideas firmly challenged.
And I'm downright terrifying. Everybody knows that.
Terrifying, I tell you. Super true.
I can see my daughter rolling your eyes already.
No, when I met you in person, I was basically quaking in my boots in the corner just because you were in the room.
But, you know, like I do all these business pitches day in and day out for years, and there's no anxiety going up there, but I don't get a lot of opportunities to have my ideas really challenged in this way, so it's a little anxiety-inducing because it's new.
Right. And the question of virtue to me, and I've said this in the show, but it hasn't been said for a while, so I appreciate the opportunity to bring it up again.
The foundational virtue is honesty.
So if you have a situation in which you're going to be nervous, you say to yourself, I'm going to be nervous.
It's an honest statement. And then you say to yourself, I don't want to be nervous.
Because that's another honest statement.
Would you love to just have that switch to turn off the nervousness, you know, like they do in Europe with migrants?
And then you say, okay, why am I nervous?
And you say, well, you know, I was in a similar situation when I was a kid and I got yelled at or humiliated or whatever it is.
Like there's some echo pattern or whatever it is.
You say, okay, well, was it just or fair or right what was done to me as a child?
Most times, of course, it wasn't.
Okay, so then I feel nervous it's going to happen again.
And the big unprocessed emotion usually is anger.
Because if you've been humiliated as a child, you comply.
And your fear is the internalization of the abuse, right?
So when I stood up to my mother, she would get very violent.
And it was dangerous.
Like, it was physically dangerous.
She was that violent.
So I had to internalize an inner mother, so to speak.
And the reason that I had to internalize the inner mother was so I wouldn't provoke the external mother.
So the internal mother would say, don't do that.
She's going to get mad. And so I'd stop.
And that meant that I didn't trip over my mother's anger and violence.
So I had to internalize that as a form of survival, as a form of safety and security, self-defense, you name it, right?
Yeah. So then what happens is you leave home.
You know, like I've been on my own since I was 15 years old, or at least without parents.
Yeah. But then you go out into the world and we're not designed to change our environment that much.
Like we really, we grew up in these tribes of like 50 people or 100 people.
Nothing changed for tens of thousands of years.
Nothing changed. So it wasn't like, well, there's your mom, but don't worry, all the other moms in the tribe are totally different.
It's like, no, they're not. So whatever worked for my mom would have worked for all of the elders, would have worked for all of the matriarchs, would have worked for all of the power structures.
But we have this weird society now where you can switch tribes.
We're totally not designed for that, any more than we're designed to digest monosodium glutamate and, you know, the other freaky corn syrup crap that goes on in our systems.
We're designed to pursue sugar because it gives us vitamins through eating fruit, and we're designed to like bright colors because it helps us find fruit, but, you know, M&M's cash is in on that by being shiny pebbles of pseudo-fruit that kill you, but, you know, I mean...
So we're not designed to shift tribes.
So what worked for me as a child should have continued to work for me for the rest of time, for the rest of my natural-born existence.
And then I should have inflicted that on my child so my child could then negotiate the prickly thorns of tribal absolutes and so on.
But we have this weird situation now where we can just flip out.
We can jump the tracks, right?
So I grew up with a crazy, violent mom.
And normally in the tribal history that we all evolved to adapt to, that would mean that everybody was crazy and violent.
You know, like full-on Aborigine style.
But now, I can switch out.
I can switch out and say, I can be around people who aren't crazy and violent.
And that's, we're not designed.
We're not designed for that.
It doesn't mean we can't do it, but it's not easy.
So then what you have to do is, I have to switch my values.
I have to challenge my inner mother, who provokes the anxiety, and I have to say, okay, that was appropriate when I was surrounded by or under the power of a violent and crazy person.
Now, I'm not under the power of a violent and crazy person.
Now that I'm not under the power of a violent, crazy person, what allowed me to survive in the past is now inhibiting my potential in the present.
Right? So it was perfectly rational to be scared of my mother.
She was big and violent. When I don't have big, violent people around me in my life...
It makes no sense to have that same reaction.
But you have to give that the respect.
Now, normally in our evolution, you couldn't get mad at your tribal elders because they'd just have you banished or killed or the women wouldn't have sex with you and your genetics would die on the vine and so on.
So anger in the face of injustice was usually one of the most self-destructive emotions that you could possibly have.
But now that you can switch out, how do you adapt to peaceful people when you're raised by violent people?
By getting angry at the violent people!
Now, you can't get angry at violent people if violent people are still in control of you because they'll mess you up six ways from Sunday.
Even if they do it through abuse or undermining or, you know, babysitting and harming your kids or talking your wife into divorcing you by constantly dissing you in her presence.
Like, there's so many ways that people can sabotage you when they can't be directly violent at you.
But how do you quiet The inner alter egos you develop to survive violence when you're not around violent people, well, you have to get mad at the violent people.
Because the anger is the defense mechanism that says, I'm now in a state of security.
That's what tells your body that you're in a state of security is you're allowed to get angry.
And this is why anger is so suppressed among particular groups in society, particularly whites.
I mean, I think we all know that. Because when you're angry, when you're allowed to be angry, it means that you're in a state of safety.
It means you're in a state of security.
And so the only way to reprogram your inner alter egos from surviving violence to embracing peace is to get angry at the violent people.
And that's an uncomfortable thing because it feels like you're just playing Russian roulette with your own social circles because we're never supposed to be able to do that historically.
And so getting angry at past injustice is a signal to your body that you've escaped it.
That you've escaped that past injustice, and you can afford to be angry at it now because the people around you are going to be supportive of your anger.
If you're angry at narcissistic, evil, violent people, they'll just hurt you even more.
But if you're around good, just, peaceful people, moral people, and you say, I'm really angry at these violent people from my history, they'll be like, yeah, I get that.
I'm angry at them too. I'm sorry that they hurt you.
That was terrible. And that way they're confirming to you that they're never going to do it themselves.
And it's hard.
It's really hard. But that requires...
The great virtue of honesty plus justice, because being angry at evildoers is what motivates us to be just.
And so all of these virtues are self-knowledge virtues, confrontation of history virtues, and that allows you to be more virtuous in the future, but it's not just white-knuckle, I'm gonna push through and be courageous no matter what, because that doesn't provide you any insights.
And what it does is it tends to erode your sense of security and confidence in yourself, Because you can't sustain it.
You can't sustain it.
You can't wake up every day and will yourself to be courageous.
Now, you can say, I'm committed to honesty, and I'm committed to curiosity, and I'm committed to justice, and I'm fine being angry at injustice and bad people and so on, and I want support and all of that.
That you can do. Because that's a journey.
That's an exploration. That's the curiosity virtue that you were talking about before.
But if you just try and overleap self-knowledge and just teeth grit yourself into courage, that is going to fail.
And through that failure, you're going to end up discrediting that virtue for yourself.
And you're going to end up self-abusing and saying, oh, I can't even be courageous.
I can't even do this one simple thing.
And boom! You're right back to your childhood.
This is so awesome. You're connecting so many dots for me right now.
What you're saying about the environment is...
So amazing because it also explains why simple environmental changes can be so powerful in helping us adopt new behaviors because it totally scrambles your preconceived notions about what works and why.
I mean, and everything you're saying fits right into my experience.
Like when I was a teenager, I was really unmotivated.
I just didn't want to do anything.
I couldn't bring myself to barely even get out of bed.
And my whole life I wanted to be a writer.
And when I was like Under 12, I wrote all the time.
But once I got into middle school and high school, I just stopped.
And I was so mad at myself and disappointed in myself because I thought something was wrong with me that I couldn't bring myself to just write.
And then much later, upon reflection, I realized that my father never read anything that I wrote when I handed it to him.
My mother never rewarded me for being motivated.
I remember there was this English teacher I respected so much.
And I just desperately wanted to get his opinion on my writing and I gave it to him and he said yeah I'm gonna read it I never read it and it was after that that I just never wrote again until I was finally able to get into a new environment and the motivation came back because I got into the free market and I realized that oh my god I get paid more if I do more and the motivation came flowing back and all of a sudden I was like oh my god I want to be an entrepreneur I want to get this job I want to work four jobs it's so much fun and then the writing came back when I met my now partner Right.
Right. Yeah.
Right? Because if you write, you want feedback.
And if you don't get feedback, it's very painful.
Because it means that people don't care about the products of your mind, which means they don't really care that much about you.
They don't have a lot of empathy for you.
They're kind of selfish. And they say these virtues, but they don't actually act upon them.
And being surrounded by selfish people is a very painful thing.
It's a very dangerous thing, too. Because selfish people, you can't rely upon them to have the basic human empathy to not do things that are hurtful to you.
So the writing wasn't the problem.
It was other people's indifference to your writing.
That was the problem. And so you had to avoid writing because otherwise you would be continually confirming other people's indifference to your preferences, your passions, the products of your mind, which is agony.
I mean, it's absolute agony.
And so it had to go dormant in the same way that snakes have to sleep through the winter.
Yeah. And...
Oh, I just lost the thought.
It'll come back if it's important. And I did have the same experience.
Well, no, sorry, I shouldn't say that.
My mother actually was, you know, for all I talk about her flaws, which are considerable, she was good with my writing.
She, you know, when I first started writing a book called In the Light, By the Light of an Alien Sun, which is actually, I didn't realize until later that the word sun has two meanings.
And it was a space science fiction story because I was reading a lot of Ray Bradbury and Heinlein at the time.
And I did have an English teacher who started reading out my novel in the classroom, and she got to a racy part, and I still remember her blushing in the entire class, laughing, and not in a cruel way, but just in a, it was kind of a fun, a little bit of a racy bit and all that, but... My mom was pretty good with that.
When I wrote a novel about the First World War, she gave me German to give to the soldiers and how to translate what the soldiers were saying in German and so on and put it in the book.
But her father was a writer as well and her brother was a writer.
So it was kind of in the family.
But she was very positive with my writing and gave me a lot of oxygen for that.
And nobody else.
Nobody else for many years.
So that was the one thing that we were able to do together, was sit down and go through the novels that I was working on.
I wrote an entire novel called The Jealous War.
When I was about 20, and then I wrote Revolutions when I was in my mid-20s, and she was pretty good and pretty enthusiastic about the writing, whereas, you know, other family members didn't care and never bothered and so on.
I do remember, though, when one family member came to a play that I'd written that was being produced in Toronto, being like, wow, it's really good, and it's like, The surprise is very punchable.
Fundamentally, very punchable.
Thank you for being shocked that my play was really good, and it was.
Yeah. I mean, it was just like you said.
Then my parents would be like, why aren't you more motivated?
You've got to get motivated. Oh, yes.
You see, they cripple you, and then they blame you for the effects of their crippling.
It's a one-two punch. It's so interesting how these...
I just find this fascinating how, looking back, you see these crazy patterns, because even like...
Even my first girlfriend, who was horribly abusive, one of the main things, she would justify her anger at me with, I was kind of stealing her thunder because she also wanted to be a writer, and she thought I was better than her.
And so she'd then hit me with a hardcover book or whatever.
Wait, did she admit that you were better than her? She did, which was so funny because it felt so good while I was getting beat with the book.
Yeah, no, the competition between men and women in the creative space is unfortunate, because men so often are just better.
Like, I'm sorry, it's a brain thing, I don't know if it's a frontal lobe thing, I don't know if it's an IQ thing or whatever, but, you know, there's a reason why there are very few female...
Directors of movies, of action movies in particular.
There's a reason why there are very few, if any, great female guitarists.
I'm sorry. It's just the way things...
We don't get to make life.
Can you give us this consolation prize?
We don't get to nurture actual human beings coming out of our bodies.
Can we write a nice poem or two?
No? Okay. All right. Excellent.
How else was she abusive?
Oh, just...
Sorry.
I shouldn't be so dismissive.
I mean to be dismissive because...
I don't want to get too personal, but you're asking, so it's fine.
You can say no. Sorry. I still need to talk my way through these things.
It's a work in progress.
She was abusive. Physically, she would regularly just beat the crap out of me with heavy implements.
One time in particular... What? Like irons?
What are you talking about? Not irons, but hardcover bound books, like those big textbooks.
Because we were still in high school during the time.
She was jealous of your writing and she beat you with a book?
This is like, if you put that in a book, it'd be like, that's too obvious, man.
Symbology is too powerful.
I think I'll have to put it in a book one day.
She beat your literary excellence with literary excellence.
Oh, man. Not the most subtle lady I've ever heard of.
Oh, my goodness. Absolutely not.
But Verbally Abusive 2, you know, Call Me Pathetic and all that jazz.
And... And also there was the classic, oh, that guy's so hot.
I want to have sex with him, but I won't have sex with you, even though you're my boyfriend.
Wow. That's a number and a half.
Holy crap. Yeah, no.
Tell me a smidge about your parents, if you don't mind.
I do have more to discuss about the moral end, but I'd love to go into the personal end a little bit here, if you'll humor me.
Yeah. So, funny you should ask about my parents.
The next thing I was going to tell you about is that there was one time where this girl did this hardcover beating thing directly in view of my mother, and my mother did and said nothing.
Right. For reasons that I'm sure are blindingly obvious to everybody outside the conversation, and maybe blindingly obvious to you, which is that she did not want to look in the mirror and say, how did I produce a man who could get abused in this kind of way?
What did I do to layer acceptance of this behavior into my son?
Yeah.
And my mom has some serious dislike of men.
She and my father divorced when I was three.
And I was mostly raised by my mom.
And she pretty much tried to raise me as much of a girl as she could.
Not to the point of putting me in dresses and telling me I'm a girl, but definitely imbuing those feminine aspects into me.
I couldn't stand up for myself, although that's not necessarily just a feminine aspect.
Wait, so you're saying that the shirt now has an explanation?
Oh! I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Here I am in jet-packed like a ninja.
I do have blue ones in my defense.
Pale blue YSU. No navy blue.
It's too masculine. You're gonna invade Cuba.
All right. That's so funny.
I'll have to tell my girlfriend that you mentioned navy blue.
She's been trying to get me into a navy blue suit for a long time.
I'm telling you, you gotta listen.
She's fighting the mom. She's fighting the mom who's putting you in beige ghost wear.
She's been fighting my mom for four years and she's been doing valiantly at it.
I can't thank her enough. I hope you're helping out a little there with that fight.
Oh yeah. No, I do my best.
Now, why did your parents...
Do you know why your dad left your mom?
I assume your dad left your mom.
Somewhat. My understanding of it growing up was just that they fought a lot and they didn't like each other anymore.
It doesn't help you much, right? From what I learned on your show...
Right. From what I learned on your show, I was encouraged to go ask them again.
And it was funny, I got two wildly different stories.
But my father claimed that my mother was just super manipulative and controlling and he couldn't stand her, which is true.
She is manipulative and controlling, but he really doesn't have a...
But I'm sure, my friend, that what he did was he sat down with you and he said, listen, my son Ethan, turns out I was a terrible judge of women because I chose the wrong woman to be your mother, and then I couldn't stand her, but I abandoned you as a three-year-old to take her on.
But here's what I've learned about how to avoid bad relationships.
And he starts telling you this before you even hit puberty, like late latency period, 9, 10, 11 years old.
He sits you down and he says, listen, man, I'm not good with women.
But man, did I ever learn a lot about how to avoid bad women?
Here's the red flags and here's the signs and here's the this and here's the that.
Or how long have you been in a relationship with the book beater?
The book beater was about two years, and he didn't even know that she was abusing me until I told him four years later.
Right. So he should have been helping you from day one figure out how to avoid the mistake that he made with your mom, with anyone else.
Right? Right. That's the least he owed you for abandoning you to a crazy woman's upbringing.
But, of course, you had to figure it out by yourself.
We're a generation of men raised by women.
I'm not sure another woman is exactly what we need.
Well, and it's so funny. I have this very clear memory.
I was an only child, but I had a really close friend growing up who I'm still very close with.
I mean, we're building a business together.
I think of him as my brother. And I remember one day I was at my father's house.
He hadn't noticed anything amiss, but I was really down because my girlfriend had, of course, been just beating the crap out of me physically, emotionally, all that jazz.
And he had no idea for two days that I was feeling down.
He didn't say anything. And my friend comes up to my room to hang out one day.
And he sees me for a split second, and he immediately says, what's wrong?
And I was like, wait a second, that's a thing that people can do?
Why can't my parents notice?
Right. Right.
And there's no good answer to that, because either they do notice, but they don't act on it, which is pretty cold-blooded, or they don't notice at all, which is even more cold-blooded.
There's no good way out of that room.
You've got to go in and ask the question, of course.
But there's no real good way out of it.
As far as the spine goes, with your father, once you're involved with a crazy woman and you have a child with a crazy woman, how the hell are you supposed to have a spine?
I mean, the state's on her side.
The family courts are going to be on her side.
Her friends are on her side.
No one's on your side. She's kind of got the whole weight of the state behind her and the whole weight of social opinion and power and all of that.
The whole point is you want to be around people to whom having a spine is not an affront.
Then you don't even need to be courageous.
I mean, my daughter can challenge me and disagree with me and, quote, fight me, and she...
Actually really likes it.
And I encourage it.
It's great. So she's not going to be around people who try and squish her because she's going to try and just get away from those people as quickly as possible.
I'm going to be in her life giving her guidance as she goes forward.
She's going to end up in situations where her virtues are not attacked but praised and rewarded.
And so wouldn't it be great if you didn't really need that much courage at all?
That would be fantastic. It's amazing how these spidery thoughts...
Fiddle their way into the mind and spin the webs because you're totally right.
Here I was. I realize now I had a bit of an unconscious thought of like, oh, if my father had just been more courageous, he would have done better raising me and thus I must be courageous.
But the point isn't necessarily the courage.
The point is all the decisions that led up to the need for courage.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
That's right. All right. So we finish up our ethics stuff.
I did have one more question to just like drive it way back.
In the conversation, because we went on such a wonderful chain, we were talking about just this, going back to the cause rather than trying to muscle your way through the problem.
And so I thought, well, right, it would be ridiculous to call Republicans cowardly or to say they just need to be more courageous in the face of overwhelming Antifa violence.
Well, and the mainstream media destroying their careers and Google having God knows what in their search histories and like there's a lot.
Right. Right.
And then, you know, the Antifa people are, like you said, sort of the soldiers sent out by the single moms, but maybe the single moms were abused as children.
My question is just, and I think this is a question you've gotten before, where does the buck stop in its just personal responsibility?
Is it both at the same time?
Is it, can you just clear that up for me?
The moment that you avoid necessary knowledge, you are responsible for the evasion.
Okay. So let's say you're a smoker back in the 60s or whatever, and you start to read these articles about, you know, smoking seems to be pretty bad for you.
Well, if you just toss them aside, if you refuse to read them, if you refuse to explore, if you refuse to learn, you refuse to understand, well, you're responsible now.
Before, okay, well, you could maybe have guessed that sucking burning leaves into your lungs might not be the optimal health ideal, but, you know, the doctors say, and there's lots of stuff that feels weird that's good for you, like you go to the dentist and they scrape the shit out of your teeth near the gum line, and it's like... Awful.
You know, but it's also like, what sadist accidentally helped humanity?
Ah, you know, it'd be great.
I had to scrape people along the jawline of the gumline.
Oh, it's so much fun.
They're going to squirm. Wait, it's good for them?
Oh, man! Totally ruined it.
That's my thought about how this all...
It came about, but that's because I've had some dental excitement lately, so that's probably my perspective alone.
And this is what the internet's so great for.
The internet has spread moral responsibility faster than any other human mechanism throughout history.
And it will never, ever be the same again.
And it's just a click away.
You know, like that old stone song, love, murder, rape, it's just a shot away.
Well, it's just a click away.
Truth, reason, evidence, facts, just a click away.
Hey, check out this video, man.
This guy makes some really good arguments.
Read my writing, mom, dad, teacher.
I'd really like your feedback, right?
I mean, that's... And you know what?
You really got a lot of feedback, didn't you?
You got a lot of feedback on you and your writing, which is you can't rouse people's interest in the products of your mind while they don't have a relationship with you.
So because arguments can be made so fluidly and so fluently, I don't particularly blame people in the 60s or the 70s or the 80s for chowing down on the mainstream narrative because that was only the mainstream narrative.
You know, I mean, I've never been to space.
Pretty sure the Earth is a sphere, you know?
I'm going with that one.
You know, I can do the Archimedes two sticks distant apart experiment if I need to.
Or I can watch a ship go over the horizon or whatever, but I'm down with that, right?
And... Because there was one centralized narrative, I mean, through most of the post-Roman Dark Ages, early Middle Ages, there was Christendom, right?
That was the one thing.
You didn't even get to read the Bible for the most part, and the Mass was conducted in Latin, and you just did what you were told, and there was no alternative way particularly to get information.
You get the printing press, and you get the translation of the Bible.
Into the vernacular, which had occurred before as well, but was really spread through the printing press.
Well, that's a whole different situation.
Now we have this ultimate printing press where you and I are going to have this conversation.
It's going to end up being watched by millions of people over time.
And the arguments that are in there are now available to everyone.
And you can even click.
You can even link to, oh, he said something good at an hour 40 or something.
You can click to that link right there.
It can be right there.
Right there. And so the excuse for a lack of knowledge now is in two areas.
The first is, will you share the information?
And the second is, will you consume what is shared?
So let's say somebody's watching this and they say, man, there's some great arguments and I know some people who could really benefit from this.
Okay, do you share? Okay.
Do you share it? Or is it like you're writing when you're a teenager?
You don't want to find out how indifferent people are to what you're passionate about.
Okay, but then you're avoiding knowledge.
We need to get certain, clear, empirical knowledge of how the people in our lives see us.
Do they care about us?
Are they interested in our thoughts, our ideas, our feelings, our histories?
Do they have empathy?
Right? Do they like us?
Do they view us as...
Like, do they want to get to know more and more about us as a positive...
Reaction to the relationship.
So if you don't share important stuff, it's because you don't want to be rejected.
And the knowledge you're avoiding is not the knowledge you're thinking of sharing.
The knowledge you're avoiding is, do people care about what I'm sharing?
Now, the moment you start avoiding that knowledge, you're responsible for those crappy relationships.
Because you know that you want to share what's important to you.
You know that you're not doing it because you're afraid people are indifferent.
So you're willing to put up with indifference rather than put it to the empirical test of, will you look at something I shared with you?
You don't have to agree with it, but it matters to me.
I care about it, and you should care about it because I care about it.
And so the moments that you refrain from being honest and open and vulnerable and yourself with the people around you, You're automatically accepting crappy relationships.
They're not even relationships.
It's just dry calculations of mutual utility and it's garbage.
It's garbage and it's crap.
It's junk food that doesn't even taste good.
So once you are in that situation, yeah, you're responsible for the quality of your relationships.
So if you refuse to share, then you're accepting low-quality relationships by definition.
If you share, then you can find the people who are interested in something because you shared it.
Maybe you share something somebody finds offensive, and they're like, wow, this really bothered me.
Like, what did you see in it?
Or, like, help me understand your perspective, because, I mean, this really...
Let me tell you, I really...
You know, like to say you raise an IQ or something, you share it.
It's like, man, this was like...
I was really uncomfortable watching this.
I felt like it was bad. I felt like it was wrong thinking, you know, like, help me understand why did you share this with me?
Not like, why the hell would you share this?
But why did, why? You know, we all think that the three Magic words in love are I love you.
It's not. It's tell me more.
Tell me more. Tell me more.
Tell me more. Tell me more. That's the only thing that has to do with love.
Everything else is bullshit. Tell me more are the three words that genuinely mean I love you.
Everything else is usually manipulation.
Not always, but usually. So if you fail or you refuse to share because you don't want to find out the truth about your relationships, then you fully own the crappy relationships you have going forward.
That's number one. Number two, if you refuse to consume something that somebody is sharing with you, Well, then you are saying that you don't want to know the person who sent something to you.
You don't want to know their perspective.
You don't want to know their thoughts.
You don't want to know their ideas.
And you are avoiding knowledge, not of the content, but of the person who sent it to you, right?
So you send something to a loved one and that person doesn't read it.
They're not avoiding the knowledge of what you sent.
They're avoiding the knowledge of you, of why you'd send it, of why you found it important.
Now, the moment that you avoid knowledge, the moment that you avoid showing a basic act of caring for someone in your life who sent you something that they care about, well, you're now responsible for Not just for your crappy relationships, but for the world as a whole being full of crappy relationships.
Because you are punishing someone with indifference who has showed vulnerability by asking you to see something and asking you to look at something.
It's a vulnerable thing. You know, you make pictures all the time.
Who's got the power in the room? The people with the money.
You're trying to buy a car.
You're trying to sell a car to someone who's got the power in the room.
It's the guy who may or may not buy the car.
Right? So the moment you're proposing something to someone, you're in a position of vulnerability.
And if you ever want to know the truth about people, be vulnerable.
Because vulnerability will tell you their level of empathy.
It will tell you very quickly, like almost instantaneously, it will tell you their capacity for love and curiosity and bonding and connection and all those kinds of friendship and trust and...
All of that will be revealed very quickly when you're vulnerable, which is why I say to people, if it's physically safe for you to do so, be vulnerable with the people in your life.
Tell them what you care about. Tell them what bothers you.
Tell them what you're happy about.
Tell them what you like and don't like about the past.
And if they treat you with coldness and contempt, but that's all you need to know.
Yeah. And those words you said, tell me more, I mean, they mean so much too, especially when you don't Get enough of that.
And it's so amazing how these habits just are so rooted in.
I keep coming back to this, but I'm discovering so much about philosophy and myself in this conversation.
It's so much fun. Good, good.
All right, well, let's close it down here.
I really do appreciate the call, and I just wanted to remind people that the book, Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof of Secular Ethics, is available for free at freedomandradio.com.
I really do want to thank You, of course, Ethan, for bringing these topics up.
And, you know, I'm glad you told me more, because it's really good to know these things.
We're all facing these challenges, like you, me, your girlfriend, everyone is facing these challenges of historical relationships that are often unsatisfying, that you kind of want to...
Bring to life or accept the death of and so on.
These are all big challenges and I just really want to strongly encourage people, pursue self-knowledge.
That is the fundamental virtue that you need and once you have that, you know, you don't need to fight the cold that you prevent and you don't need to fight the battles that you avoid, the unnecessary battles that you avoid and if you can avoid willpower and pursue self-knowledge instead, you will end up more powerful than anything willpower can give you in the long run.
