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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:50
Is Anger Healthy?
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Hi everybody, it's Stephen Maldon from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Time to dip into the Listener Mailbag and find out who sent me some philosophical scorpions.
First of all, Dustin asks, why are so many young men and boys uninterested, apathetic, and noncommittal?
What and how do we fix this?
Oh my god, I can't believe you fell into the old guy whittling on a porch complaining, kids, get off my lawn!
When society has a problem with young men and boys, what they have a problem with is in fact society, but instead of trying to change society, which is quite tough, what they tend to do is to shame young men and boys.
From the perspective of a young man, just take a brief look at society and see what lovely things await you.
So, you are already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt due to the predatory sins of your democratic elders.
You have gone through terrible school.
Remember, those of us who went to school in the seventies and so on had a much better deal than the kids who go to school now because it was in the late sixties that teachers could no longer, they won the right to not be fired and this caused a slow deterioration in the quality of education.
Not immediately, right?
When socialist or fascist privileges get into a particular system, the system doesn't go haywire immediately because there are still good teachers in there who have to ride it out through retirement.
They don't just immediately become lazy.
But the next generation of teachers who come in are usually a very different crop.
It's like when you socialize the health care system, you get a bunch of doctors who are used to giving good service and they ride out their careers and still give good service.
But the new doctors, they don't do house calls.
And so quality of education is way worse The entertainment that's available outside the statist or government sphere is far superior.
I mean, you get, of course, on-demand pornography.
You get video games that are unbelievably realistic, absorbing, and addictive.
And what else do they have to look forward to?
Well, they can get themselves involved in higher education and graduate an average of $25,000 in debt to a job market that is pretty stagnant or declining.
You've seen real wages for people with high school educations decline 30% over the last 30 years, real middle-class wages have declined slightly or stagnated over the past 30 or 40 years, and taxes have risen enormously.
What can they look forward to?
Well, they can look forward to maybe getting involved with a woman and marrying that woman, and then if that woman, as 60 to 70 percent of women do, initiate a divorce on his ass, maybe even after cheating, he still has to pay her, especially if there are kids involved, you know, a good chunk of salary for the next 20 years, and has almost no recourse
to any kind of justice in the family court system particularly if she becomes vindictive and accuses him of abuse which he is automatically found guilty of pretty much with almost no recourse and so and as far as moving up in the world well you know the top heavy boomers are still occupying the majority of management positions so I can certainly understand.
I understand apathetic and non-committal What has society prepared for them?
What is available to them?
Let's say they do decide to marry, and let's say they marry well.
Let's say they have kids.
Well, what do they get to look forward to?
Well, they get to look forward to going to work for 50 hours a week, a long commute over bad, ancient, pothole-filled roads, and seeing their kids for maybe an hour or two a night, and then getting them up early the next day and doing the same thing again, with very little capacity to save.
in an environment where house prices are still enormously high.
I mean, this middle-class dream is dead.
And the middle-class dream was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right?
And this is why children and young men are not particularly interested in obeying society's rules these days, because the way that you restrain teenagers is you say, obey society's rules, and you get all this good stuff on the other side.
But if you don't have the good stuff anymore to offer them on the other side, then they have no particular interest in obeying society's rules or participating in society's games.
So really try to avoid the old guy whittling on a stick, mistaking his opportunities for the new kid's opportunities, mistaking the society that he built with the society that they inherited.
They inherited and don't do that thing where you blame the next generation for the very conditions that you probably supported the creation of during your youth and middle age.
When the youth are uninterested, when young men are on strike, which is basically what they are, which is why the birth rate is plummeting so much, when young men are on strike, you have to ask yourself what they're on strike against and what is it that they want.
But to provide the youth with what they want we would have to radically re-engineer society back to a bit more of a rational and just society, which would be to confront very powerful and vested and invested special interest groups, public sector workers, the voters as a whole, single moms, welfare recipients, the military-industrial complex, you name it.
And rather than do that we'd rather shame the young men for their lack of desire to chase after a mirage that we still believe is water.
So that would be my suggestion of that.
Now, Tyler writes, I often hear it said that the key to breaking the cycle of violence is anger.
But I don't think it's healthy to hold on to anger.
To me, holding on to anger is like drinking poison in the hopes of it killing your enemy.
I think the better emotion is outrage.
Anger has a negative connotation associated with it that outrage does not.
When I talk about these issues, I usually tell people that they should be outraged by the injustices done to them instead of angered.
Potato, potato, synonym, synonym.
The key to breaking the cycle of violence is anger.
This is fairly well established in psychological circles, that the people who get angry about the abuses done to them as children are the ones least likely to repeat those abuses when they become parents.
So, anger is healthy.
Now, anger is an emotion that is designed to provoke fight or flight.
So, if a parent has been abusive to you, then yes, be angry.
But be self-expressed with your anger, right?
Don't just go over and stew at the family dinner and not say anything.
That is not allowing your anger to change your situation, right?
I mean, if a bear charges at you out of the woods, you're going to get a lot of adrenaline, you're going to get a lot of fight or flight, and it's designed to have you fight or flee, right?
Or freeze, I guess, in some situations.
But anger is designed to propel you into action.
And so this is why I've always suggested if you have issues with your parents or anyone in your life, sit down and talk to them about it.
Firmly, directly, clearly, courageously and consistently until you either break through and get some sort of connection with the person, get an apology and figure out what you can do with the relationship from there.
Or you can take a break from the relationship if you continually get repeatedly abused when you express your true and honest experience and opinion of the person.
Anger traditionally has been described as a slave emotion, in a slave context, right?
was a, as Nietzsche pointed out, Christianity was a religion that appealed to slaves, which is why, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth and the poor shall become high and the high should become low.
It's an emotional philosophy of resentment against a hierarchy that you cannot change.
And so Christianity, of course, is quite negative towards anger because anger would tend to get slaves killed.
And it tends to promote his historical slave or sorry, his slave on slave attacks against each other.
So anybody who voices resistance towards the master would result in all the slaves being punished, sometimes killed or exiled.
So there's a lot of horizontal damping down of people's natural emotional anger responses to injustice because a slave can't solve the problem of injustice.
And this has come through, unfortunately, to modern times where largely Christian philosophy, and this is true of Judaism as well.
I don't know the degree to which it's true of Islam, but there is this feeling that anger is a bad emotion, which, of course, for slaves, it kind of is because you can't change anything about your circumstances.
But now we can.
We live in a society, and most of us live in a culture where you can choose to see people or not.
You're not bound to people in the way that you were in the Stone Age or, you know, 5,000 years ago or even 2,000 years ago.
So, anger, when you have been treated unjustly, the anger is designed to have you communicate, to right the injustice, or to leave the situation, in my opinion.
It's the fight or flight.
You fight for the truth, for the connection, for the healing in the relationship.
If you are repeatedly rejected, abused, ignored, avoided, and so on, then, you know, I think that the anger is there to tell you to take a break from that.
Anyway, so that's sort of my thought.
But what happens is people will often say, well, you have to see your family no matter what.
And that to me is like saying, well, you have to stay married no matter what.
Marriage is a voluntary institution.
When you're an adult, your family of origin is a voluntary institution, and your anger is designed to have you break through or break out.
This is my opinion about it.
Anyway.
Michael writes, or asks, when does a state become an empire?
Does it depend on the style of government, size of land, cultural conquest?
The point at which the Roman Republic became an empire seems rather arbitrary, and America had so many years of expansion, I'm tempted to call the 13 original confederated states an empire from the start.
Well, saying when does a state become an empire, State become an empire is like saying, it's like asking, when does a rapist become a serial rapist?
Well, when he rapes more than one person.
And a state already is an empire in that it has colonized its tax livestock, it's colonized its citizens, and it has subjected them to all of the whims of arbitrary, brutal, and ever-escalating political power.
So all states are fundamentally empires to their citizens.
A state becomes an empire when it starts to violently, either overtly or covertly, interfere with Other governments' ability to colonize their own citizens or continue to colonize their own citizens.
So a state becomes an empire when the principle of statism spills from one country to another.
So that would be my particular way of looking at it.
I was just wondering, asks Bianca, I was just wondering what you thought about the way children are often used as actors in movies, series, etc., even at ages where they wouldn't be able to distinguish between fact and fiction.
I often see movies where they throw a mother and child in a chaotic situation to add to the drama element of the movie, which worries me.
Do you think this experience leaves some kind of impression on these children that may cause them to have problems later down the line?
Well, first of all, children are very good at distinguishing fact from fiction from the age of about two.
Sometimes it's been even recorded at 18 months.
But about two onwards, they're fine with the line between fact and fiction.
So if you play with little children, toddlers, as I have for many years now, they will say, you know, let's play this game.
And then they go into the game, and they'll interrupt the game to say, well, you need to say this, or you need to do this in this part of the game.
And they go right back into the game.
So they don't have any problem distinguishing between fact and fiction.
Very early on.
What's interesting to me about, I'm just reading Charlotte's Web to my daughter, what's interesting to me is what you never or almost never see in children's literature is spanking.
That is something to me that is very interesting.
Imagine there was some sitcom, you know, Full House or whatever, where a child You know, gets their pants pulled down, pulled, you know, over someone's knee and, you know, hit repeatedly on the butt.
That would be... and that was sort of portrayed and shown on TV.
People would go mental!
There would be outraged letters to the... Oh my God, you can't show that!
That's abusive!
And so on, right?
But then 80 to 90 percent of parents are doing this anyway.
But if you portray it to them, then they're just completely shocked.
And that's because in order to get yourself into a state where you can hit a defenseless child in a, frankly, sexually humiliating way, you have to get into a different part of your personality, right?
You have to get into the self-righteous parental slash deity alter ego where you are raining down fiery self-righteous hell on a wayward and disobedient and naughty child.
You have to get into that alternate state.
You're not sitting watching TV and eating chips.
You're not in that alternate personality.
You're not in that alternate sadistic ego.
And so if you see what the sadistic alter ego is willing to do on a regular basis, if you see that and you're surprised by it, then you're not already in a state of mind where you're able to commit cruelty and therefore you're shocked by what you see and outraged and appalled and so on.
So this is sort of interesting.
The problem with Kids in movies, to me, is not the play element or the fantasy element or anything like that.
The problem with kids in movies is you're exposing them to agents.
You're exposing them to people who can make a lot of money off them, and therefore the child becomes a commodity with people who are Always looking for making a buck, really pretty much at any expense to the child.
There's always going to be more children who will replace any children that they use up and so on.
So my particular concern is exposing the children to the Hollywood machine or the machine of entertainment or whatever, because it's very predatory and it's very powerful and it's very profitable.
And so I think that's a huge problem.
Of course, you're interrupting their schooling, which, you know, may or may not be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the kind of education that they're getting.
And if the child does not have a very strong support structure, they're going to have a lot of vanity.
You know, like, oh, I'm in this commercial, or I'm in this TV show, or whatever.
And they're going to have a lot of vanity and prestige and status associated with that that's going to hollow out their true and authentic self.
So it's not necessarily the worst thing in the world.
I think your parents are very careful of this and that and the other.
It can be a very positive thing.
But as we've seen from what happens to a lot of child stars, It can be very destructive.
Mason writes, what are your thoughts on the idea that property rights and the NAP are simply subjectively thought up as the best possible way to maximize human happiness, freedom, and goodness?
No.
No, no, no, no.
Maximizing human happiness has nothing to do, nothing to do, with the truth or falsehood of ethics.
The idea that there's some sort of collective human happiness is, again, comes from religion where everyone has a soul that is potentially good and lovely and wonderful and kind and virtuous and blah blah blah.
But no, humanity is composed of predators and prey.
And the predators and prey exist both verbally and physically, right?
So the media are predatory in terms of language, exploitation, deception, lies, and the support of violence that the media consistently provides, like the cheerleading to the Iraq war, And the constant cheerleading of the state and patriotism and the attacks on anyone who's a free thinker.
This is what the media is, a verbal abuser.
They survive on lying and cheating and supporting.
They're the court toadies.
They are the jesters who make everyone laugh and forget that the king has blood on his hands at all times.
So then there's the physical predators who are the thieves and the police who go around collecting taxes and so on, whereas if you resist them they will shoot you in the knee or shoot you in the neck or shoot you somewhere.
And so, and this is, you know, there are the priests and so on who tell children that they're evil and that they infect them with an imaginary disease called sin which they then have to pay for the curing of for the rest of their natural-born life and so on.
So there's all these predators that prey in language and violence upon humanity.
The sociopaths, the psychopaths, the just plain evil among us who prey on us.
And then there are those of us who are like mammals at the feet of these giant George Chomp and blood-soaked dinosaurs just trying to not get squished or crushed by any of the imaginary rules and laws that they invent in order to ensnare, trap and enslave us.
So the idea that, you know, it's sort of like saying, okay, so we have a lion and we have a herd of lions and we have a herd of gazelles.
So how can we design a system that maximizes the happiness of the lions and the gazelles at the same time?
It's like, no, no, no, because they're in a win-lose situation.
Lion eats gazelle, gazelle unhappy and dead, right?
Gazelle gets away, lion unhappy and starving.
So humanity is, we're not brothers.
We're not all one big happy family.
We are an ecosystem of predators and prey.
And so the idea that you can find some collective human happiness that is going to work It's like saying, well, we've got a bunch of seals and a bunch of great white sharks, let's maximize everybody's happiness.
It's like, no, no, no, zero-sum game, predator-prey.
So, no.
Property Rights and the Non-Aggression Principle I go into in my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, a Rational, Rigorous, Logical Proof of Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights.
I do believe that in general society does well when it respects property rights and the non-aggression principle, but I would never ever say 2.
Where is the logical step between humans exhibiting ownership of themselves and self-ownership becoming a universal principle?
How do property rights emerge simply from the exclusive usage of our bodies?
Self-ownership being a universal principle to me would come out of you simply cannot argue against self-ownership without using self-ownership.
I, Steph, reject our ability to control our own bodies.
Let's just say I put that statement out there.
Now, forget about the content.
Everybody just starts chasing the content as if the content just magically appeared like the Ten Commandments or something like that, sky-written by herons with their tails on fire.
Forget the content of the argument.
First look at the form of the argument.
I, Steph, am saying I reject the principle that we control our own bodies.
Well, what have I just done?
I have exercised control over my breath, my larynx, my throat, my tongue, my teeth, my lips, my jaw, and all of that kind of good stuff in order to make an argument.
I have exercised very specific self-ownership to argue against the exercise or the possibility of self-ownership.
This is a logical fail.
Self-detonating argument, normative contradiction, whatever you want to call it, it fails.
It's like when I look into your eyes and say, language has no meaning.
It's a self... I mean, I've just exercised the meaning of language to say that language has no meaning.
It's a self-detonating argument.
So nobody can argue against self-ownership without exercising self-ownership.
If I write it, if I type it, I've still exercised self-ownership.
It's like people who type into a chat window that it's always unjust to have exclusive use of property.
It's like when you just typed with your keyboard, you have exclusive use of the property of your keyboard.
Forget about what people say.
Look at the process of them saying it.
That's where the true philosophy and universality appears.
So it is logically impossible to argue.
Against self-ownership without exercising self-ownership.
That's what makes it a universal principle.
It's not like physics, like it exists independently of our mind.
It's simply you can't argue against it.
Sorry, not possible.
And an argument that I create that travels through the air and into your ear, I have now adjusted the principles of matter, the properties of matter, by creating sound waves that go through the air, float into your ear, affect your thinking in one way or another, positively or negatively.
So I have created an argument and put it out into the world and people then say Steph's argument or your argument if they're looking at me and so on is correct or incorrect or whatever.
But they fully recognize that not only I have exercised self-ownership, but I am responsible for what it is that I have put into the world.
The argument is mine.
It's my argument.
Which has gone out into the world.
I have created sound waves that represent my argument through the exercise of self-ownership.
That self-ownership and the creation of property in the outside objective world.
You can't argue against it!
You can't!
You can try, but you're an idiot.
If you don't understand this principle, you're not fit for philosophy.
So, anyway, I just want to mention that.
Do you think certain criticisms of the homesteading principle, such as building a border fence around unused land or building a small house in somebody's untouched backyard, are property issues?
I'm not sure what that means, but you can clarify that if you'd like to send it.
Oh, sorry, there's a new line.
I missed that.
Property issues that have absolute, principled, axiomatic answers.
In other words, is there one solid, individual, objective truth to be found in each one of these cases?
All right.
Principle time.
Very, very important principle time.
This will be the last one I'll do in this chunk.
All right.
Some issues of property are clear-cut.
Right?
So I have spent 46 years taking tender, loving, perhaps even obsessive care of my internal organs.
I'm a big fan of kidneys, big fan of the spleen, down with the stomach.
My heart, huge fan.
I water them, I feed them, I exercise them.
I have taken really, really good care of my internal organs.
Right?
So I think we can all understand that I own my kidneys.
And if you have a kidney failure, you can ask me for a kidney, you can pay me for a kidney in a free society, but what you can't do is chloroform me and dig my kidney out with a rusty spoon, right?
So, kidneys, mine, we all understand that, right?
I mean, if we don't own our bodies, there's no such thing as rape, because rape is the, you know, aggressive use of somebody else's orifices, male or female, against their will, usually using violence and so on.
So, we own our own bodies.
I mean, obviously, we just went through that argument.
So that level of property, I don't think we have any issue with.
If I go out into the wilderness where nobody's there and I grow a bunch of crops and then you come and take them, clearly you've taken something that I have grown that wouldn't be there otherwise.
If I go fishing in a lake and I pull a fish out, What I've done is actually created property in a usable state.
The fish swimming down at the bottom of the lake is essentially not property because nobody can do anything with it.
They can't use it in an aquarium.
They can't fry it up.
They can't slap somebody with it in a comedy scene.
They can't do anything with the fish.
By pulling the fish out of the water, I've created usable property.
In the same way as transforming a tree into a house, I've created something that's usable in a way that's valuable.
So, most property is pretty obvious.
Now, there are some areas that are kind of fuzzy, right?
I mean, I get that.
Like, how big should an area be that you can enclose in order to build it or whatever?
I don't know.
I don't know.
And somehow people think that where this fuzzy stuff is, is where we need the government.
And that's the complete opposite of the truth, right?
So, in a free society, at some point, you go from child, who is the legal, moral responsibility and financial responsibility of your parents, to adult, who is, you know, a self-acting moral agent with economic independence, legal maturity and all the other rights, privileges and responsibilities of adulthood, right?
Traditionally, it's been, I don't know, 16 for driving, 18 for the military, 19 or 21 for drinking, all that kind of stuff, right?
It's important to be able to shoot people, but not to toast shooting people.
So, yeah, of course, we all get that a three-year-old is not morally and legally independent and responsible for what they do.
Of course, right?
We also know that a person of average intelligence who's 30 is responsible for what it is that they're doing.
Right, so is it 18, 17 and a half?
And we all get that it's kind of absurd that, you know, one second before you're 18, you're not responsible, and then, bing!
You know, now you're responsible, and so on.
There's fuzzy areas.
What's the right area?
I don't know.
As people get smarter, maybe the line between childhood and adulthood should go down.
I don't know.
And some areas of property are kind of tricky, kind of fuzzy, right?
And that's what we need a free society for.
Because these things, because they're fuzzy, they need to be constantly negotiated.
They need to be constantly negotiated.
Look, with my wife, there's a bunch of stuff we don't negotiate, right?
Let's not have orgies.
We don't really negotiate that every day.
Every other day, maybe, but not every day.
We don't negotiate that, because that's kind of a given in our relationship.
Not orgy people, as far as that goes.
We also don't negotiate, today I really, really want to set fire to our house.
Should I or shouldn't I?
We're kind of down with the no arson anywhere, let alone our own property.
We're kind of down with driving on the highway, in that Christopher Walken way, I really want to cross the median and see what it's like to smash into a truck coming the other way.
We're kind of down with not negotiating about that kind of stuff, right?
Now, other stuff we do negotiate about.
Should my daughter be able to run around a mall with no shoes on?
Well, I don't know.
We negotiate that with something that we're deciding, all that kind of stuff.
It doesn't really matter.
But there's a bunch of stuff which we do negotiate on.
There's a bunch of stuff we don't.
Now, the vast majority of property is pretty easy to understand, pretty clear.
You know, you go buy a house with a half acre, that's your house with a half acre, right?
I mean, whatever it is, right?
That's not that complicated.
You build a fence with your neighbors and so on.
And I, you know, I just don't think that a whole lot of people go and start building houses in other people's backyards.
That doesn't really seem to come up a whole lot in society.
But there are some areas which are kind of fuzzy and complicated, which is exactly why you need a non-governmental solution, because that's what you negotiate.
So, how many fish should villagers on a lake take every season?
Well, before there were governments, they'd all negotiate this among themselves.
And it worked actually beautifully.
You know, for 400 years, in eastern Canada, there was a conch fishery.
Because they knew that if they caught too many cod, next year there'd be no cod.
So it was all enforced through social ostracism, and everyone would get together, they'd all agree, and it worked out beautifully for 400 years.
Then the government came in and started setting quotas, and wanted more quotas.
They wanted to give more quotas because they'd get more votes, because people would get richer, and now there's no freaking cod on the East Coast.
After 400 years where you could basically walk from the trawler to the shore, there were so many damn fish, they're all gone.
Nuked by the state.
The state has really bad incentives for maintaining property in the long run, particularly a democratic state that eats the present for the sake of bribing the future, aka national debts and so on.
So where property is clear, there's no problems.
But where property is fuzzy, where property is complicated, where property is negotiable, you need the freedom to be able to negotiate with each other.
And that's how this kind of stuff should work.
So having government gets involved, you get patent trawls, intellectual property and Oh, just all kinds of nonsense.
I mean, the federal government owns a third of America, for God's sakes.
Do you not think that has a massive effect on the price and availability of the rest of the property in the US?
Not to mention the availability or non-availability of the property that they hold.
It's huge!
Having the government come in to deal...
with really complex situations is the exact opposite of what you want.
The government is just forced.
The government is just a gun to somebody's head, right?
So the more complicated the situation gets, the more freedom you need to continually adjust and negotiate these things, which is what would happen in a free society.
But people have this weird idea that the more complicated things get, the more you need a state.
Quite the opposite is true.
The more complicated things get, the more you need voluntarism and negotiation to solve these issues.
Because the government's never going to solve it.
The only chance it has of being solved is through the negotiation of equals.
And that's what would happen in a free society with citizens and their representatives.
I hope that this is helpful.
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