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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:47
The Civil Rights Movement Non-Violence Myth - Stefan Molyneux Hosts the Peter Schiff Radio Show
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Oh, good morning, brothers and sisters.
I hope you're doing well.
This is Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
I hope that you are having an absolutely wonderful morning.
Welcome to your week.
So we're going to have a very interesting show today.
No, no, no, we don't have any People who are going to be joining us for interviews, this is going to be your show, ladies and gentlemen.
So don't forget to call in at 855-4-SHIFT.
That's 855-472-4433.
Let's you and I chat today.
That's 855-472-4433.
Let's you and I chat today.
That's what we want to do.
So today, as you may remember or may know, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Day.
He's actually the only American citizen who gets his own holiday.
All the presidents are kind of thrown up in a big frappe monkey barrel called President's Day, and everybody else has Mother's Day, each individual mom.
But he gets his own day, and what a figure in American history he has been.
I'd like to give you perhaps another dimension to the Martin Luther King phenomenon.
Very interesting guy.
What an orator!
As a guy who does a little bit of public speaking myself, he is the Freddie Mercury of passionate speechifying.
He really hits some absolutely thrilling notes.
What a gorgeous voice, what an amazing presence.
But, uh, let's round out the portrait, shall we?
There's no light without shadow, and there's no depth without shading.
So let's, uh, round out the portrait of, uh, good old MLK.
Actually, he was born Michael.
Michael King.
Uh, sounds a little bit more like a wrestler.
Uh, but, uh, his father, who was named Daddy King, which I'm sure he was a rapper before rap became, uh, that popular.
But, uh, changed his name when he was five.
Do you know he actually fell in love with a white woman?
At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, during the late 1940s, King fell in love with a German cafeteria employee named Betty.
And all the seminarians that he was with, the white and the blacks, really talked him out of it.
His father thought he was marrying down, not because she was white, but because she was, I guess, a cafeteria worker.
And he was really upset by this.
It really apparently left quite a scar with him.
And he also, and again this is just Interesting doesn't really have any relevance to his character, but he did reportedly try to commit suicide when he was 12 So his grandmother left him sorry his parents went out and said stay home and take care of your younger brother I think was he was 12 his younger brother was 6 But he went out to go and see a parade.
It wasn't supposed to and he came home, and he found his grandmother had died and His younger brother had slid down a banister crashed into his grandmother now that didn't actually kill her she had a heart attack It's kind of unrelated But really, he ended up trying to jump out of a window.
He was just so distraught.
What a difficult thing to experience as a child.
Tragically, this man, who was a man of God, and a man of virtue, and someone who felt very comfortable in his role of being the moral instructor of mankind, Well, he had a few moral challenges he was unable to overcome, to put it as charitably as possible.
A massive plagiarist.
Now, in the annals of 20th century crimes, you know, plagiarism isn't even in the top one billion, but it is an important aspect of character, or revealer of character.
So his wife gave over all his papers to a university.
They began going through all his papers and so on, and they found what they called extensive plagiaries in his academic papers, including his 1955 dissertation for his doctoral degree at Boston University.
And this is pretty wretched.
You know, it's interesting.
When he was at a black college, when he was younger, he was like a C plus student, which I think is good enough to be president.
I think that's right.
But then when he got to a white college, he suddenly was an A student.
Maybe he got smarter.
Maybe there was some different standards.
Who knows?
But what he didn't get was more honest.
When Boston University founded a commission to look into his plagiarism, they found that 45% of the first part and 21% of the second part of his dissertation was stolen.
Like plagiarism is a spectrum, right?
You can just, like, pass ideas off as your own while rewording them without giving credit, but this is just outright copy and paste.
I guess back before there was such a thing as copy and paste.
I think the only people who did copy and paste back in those days were people who were giving ransom notes.
Cut them out of newspapers.
But he just basically stole them.
Now this would, you would just be disqualified as having a doctorate if you plagiarized at all, let alone plagiarized massive portions.
His I Have a Dream speech, one of the most amazing and powerful speeches.
You know, as a philosopher, I have some trouble with sophists and rhetoricians, people who just are thrilling to listen to.
They kind of lower your emotional defenses.
You know, there's a great scene in the movie where they talk about how King George had this stuttering problem.
And he's watching Hitler give these speeches and he's like, wow, you know, he's really good at giving speeches.
And people who are really good at giving speeches are usually troublesome to the rational pursuit of virtue among the species.
But his I Have a Dream speech was plagiarized.
Not all of it, large sections of it, even down to the naming of the mountain ranges.
So he stole that, a lot of it, from someone else.
He had a huge problem with, I guess the Latin phrase would be, keeping it in his pants.
I don't know, I don't speak Latin.
He was a serial adulterer, wretched.
I mean, look, I'm kind of old-fashioned this way.
I think if you do make a vow as a minister before God and the congregation and your conscience to be faithful to your wife, and then people are afraid, like women are afraid to pick up pencils near you, then you're kind of not doing the right side of the ethical walk.
He slept repeatedly with just about everyone.
He also, because he was under surveillance, J. Edgar Hoover put him under surveillance because he was surrounding himself with communists, although he himself never openly said he was a Marxist.
According to hearsay, according to reports of people who knew him, he privately admitted to being a Marxist, and he certainly expressed sympathy with Marxism, although of course he didn't like the atheism of Marxism.
When they had him under surveillance, they would record him in hotels, and they would record him all over the place, and, I mean, the man was a lech.
Not that unknown for public figures to have, I guess, a fairly voracious great white shark of a sexual appetite, but he really did exercise himself rather strenuously, if there were Olympics.
In the infidelity set, he would have gotten definitely a silver.
I mean, I guess John F. Kennedy would probably go for the gold.
It's hard to say.
But yeah, he basically slept a lot, and it was really, really difficult.
The FBI, you know, rampant scumbags that they can be, they tape-recorded him having sex, and then they sent this recording to his wife.
Yuck.
I mean, it's just gross.
I mean, infidelity is gross.
Recording it and sending it to the wife is gross as well.
This will cause a huge problem for his marriage and so on.
He had his failings, to say the least.
Now one of the things I think that's interesting about very positive and powerful public figures, very inspiring public figures, of course he is one of the most inspiring people, I think he comes in second in terms of like who people think, I can't remember who's first, the most inspiring figure of the 20th century, comes in second.
And let's remember that they do have feet of clay.
We can have flaws and still achieve greatness.
Let's not elevate them to sainthood.
But let's come back.
We've got a caller.
We're going to talk about non-aggression.
This is Stefan Molyneux for The Peter Schiff Show.
We will be back in just a second.
and thank you so much for your attention.
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Hello, hello, everybody.
Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Welcome to your Monday.
We are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.
Day by chatting a little bit about his life.
But first, and most importantly, we have ourselves a caller.
Ladies and gentlemen, please call in.
We have no guests other than you.
It's all reserved for you, my friends.
You can call in 855-4-SHIFT.
That's 855-472-44.
Mr. Rob, you wish to talk about non-aggression?
I hope you won't be yelling at me.
Are you on the line?
Yes, I am.
Hello, Stefan.
Good morning.
How are you doing, my friend?
I'm doing good.
Good.
Great.
Yourself?
I'm well, thank you.
What is your question?
What's on your mind?
I get a little confused sometimes about principles of non-aggression, like how you apply them in life.
When you live in such an aggressive world with aggressive people that have primitive ways that are built into them from one of the cavemen, fight and flight, and aggressive tendencies, people they try to park in the same spot at the same time, and they get out and they want to fight each other, and a lot of times those people are college-educated, smart people, compassionate people, but that urge will come out in them anyway.
I kind of see using that non-aggression principle, it's kind of hard in this time and age, maybe in like a thousand years when people are more evolved, sort of like comparing cavemen to us right now, but sort of like we evolved to this point right now to where we can sort of comprehend and use empathy instead of just a tool to keep babies alive, you know, like cavemen probably had Right, right.
Let me just interrupt you for a sec there, because some of the audience may not be wildly familiar.
So the non-aggression principle is foundational to libertarian philosophy.
It's certainly foundational to the philosophy that I talk about.
And that is, thou shalt not initiate, initiate the use of force against thy fellow man.
And it means self-defense is fine, but you cannot initiate the use of force.
You can respond to it.
Now the important thing to remember is that people grow up in a violent society, and they grow up in violent families.
This is a strong statement, so let me sort of clarify that.
90% of children are hit by their parents.
It's called spanking, but it's hitting.
Euphemisms say it's taxation, but it's theft.
Euphemisms are the enemy of clarity.
As Confucius says, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
So children are hit.
Now, it's not just 90% of children.
40% of parents hit babies.
And spanking or hitting tends to peak around the ages of sort of two to five.
These are formational Times when the brain is developing when the nervous system is developing and they create often near permanent effects in the brain so people grow up in very aggressive households.
People hit rather than reason with their children, and there's absolutely no reason to hit.
It's destructive to children.
The efficacy is denied by major psychological and health groups.
There is a 93% consistency among research into spanking, which tells very clearly that spanking is harmful.
And unnecessary.
Spanking lowers IQ.
Spanking raises aggressiveness.
It undermines social skills.
It has a whole plethora.
It increases chances for adult depression and so on.
It has a whole plethora of negative results.
But this is how children grow up.
And then, a lot of times, they're put into daycare.
And daycare means very little child-to-adult interactions.
It's all horizontal.
It's all peer-based.
And then, of course, we criticize them.
We criticize them and they get to be teenagers.
Say, well, you're too susceptible to your peer group.
But parents who put their kids in daycare are setting that up, setting that up.
You focus on your peer group.
Now, when you focus on your peer group as a kid, it tends to go to the lowest common denominator.
In other words, the most aggressive person tends to set the tone for the entire group, especially when they can do it behind the teacher's back or the daycare worker's back.
I worked in a daycare when I was a teenager for a couple of years.
I've sort of seen this stuff firsthand.
It's really rough.
Yeah, I would never have my kids in a daycare.
I would never allow it.
I would have my wife stay home.
Yeah, that's great.
I stay home with my daughter.
Then they go to school, and what happens to them in school?
More peer pressure and really boring classes, and what's the point of all of this?
So people go through these very aggressive upbringings, and you may have excessively fundamentalist parents telling the child that if they're greedy, if they think any kind of sexual thoughts, then they might burn in hell forever.
You know, this sort of really crazy, aggressive, hellfire and damnation approach to ethics.
Yeah, kids take that very seriously.
They believe in Santa if you tell them it's real.
They trust their parents.
That's serious stuff.
They really, really believe that.
And so when they grow up, they have, a lot of times, not all kids and not all families and not all circumstances, but they grow up and they're kind of hardwired for aggression based upon how they're raised.
And so what you're dealing with, with a lot of people in the world, is you're dealing with traumatized apes.
I mean, insofar as, you know, one of the things that happens with childhood trauma is the neofrontal cortex, like the seat of reasoning and the seat of the inhibition of impulse, is fundamentally atrophied.
And they can see this in brain scans.
The fight-or-flight mechanism down in the base of the brain, the hypothalamus is enlarged.
The neofrontal cortex, which you have about a quarter of a second to intercept an impulse, Some impulses in the brain go directly into action.
Like if you've ever touched a hot stove, right?
Your hand jerks back before you even feel that it's hot, because the stimulus goes up your arm to your spine.
The spine says, ah, that's hot!
And then pulls your hand back, and only then do you feel the pain.
A very short amount of time to interrupt a stimulus, like hitting someone or getting angry.
And once people go down the road of fight or flight, it's really, really tough to rein it back in.
Which is why people in anger management programs are all about the prevention of escalation.
Once you start to escalate, it's really tough to come back down from that escalation.
So people... Yeah, go ahead.
You're saying that by hitting, abusing children, corporal punishment in schools, spanking children when they're little and not reasoning with them, you're nurturing the primitive part of the brain You know, the very primitive, violent part of the brain, the fight or flight part of the brain, and you're not doing anything for the reasoning side of the brain.
Well, it's worse than that, sorry.
It's not that you're not doing anything for the reasoning part, you're actually, you're causing it to atrophy.
You know, studies have shown very clearly that children can do moral reasoning at the age of seven or eight months.
So children, they put these experiments in front of babies, people do nice stuff, they share, they take care of, they comfort, and the babies respond more positively than if somebody does mean stuff, like grabs.
I mean, they just, their pupils dilate, they pay more attention, they smile, they gurgle, they respond.
They know the difference between good and bad behavior at seven months of age!
And they develop empathy 14 or 15 months.
Sorry, go ahead.
So how do we stop, uh, because it's more than just, um, parents.
You're also influenced, uh, you have, you have men with guns that pull you over for traffic stops that threaten you, scare you.
Uh, you have the prison system.
You have, uh, authority figures.
Uh, you have a lot of things that, that, uh, that make you feel negative through your life.
And, you know, you're saying that you can, uh, prevent a lot of this through parenting, but how do you prevent it, uh, As far as the legal system and police, that's got to have an effect on people too.
Sorry, you understand, you can't.
There's that old serenity prayer, God grant me the courage to change things, I can't.
The calm to accept the things I can't change.
The wisdom to know the difference.
You can't change the legal system.
You can't change the operations of the Federal Reserve.
You can't end the war in Iraq.
You can't change foreign policy.
You can't end the war on drugs.
You can talk to people about this stuff and maybe they'll listen, maybe they won't.
But the spread of virtue starts with your own actions.
Hang on, we got a break coming up in a sec.
Let me just finish this point and we can continue after the break.
It's a great topic.
You can only control your own actions, and so I always focus on what you can do to bring peace in your own life.
You can reject the use of violence in your personal relationships, particularly in your parenting.
We'll talk more about this after the break.
This is Devan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
Please feel free to call in 855-4-SCHIFF.
We'll talk to you in a sec.
We now return to the Peter Schiff Show.
Call in now.
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855-4-SHIFT.
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Rebel Radio, the Peter Schiff Show.
All right, we are back.
This is Dan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I'm chatting with Rob about aggression and the challenge of living peacefully in a world that seems to be so aggressive.
I'll give you a tiny example of just how crazy the world is.
So, it's Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, and we were talking about Martin Luther King Jr.
at the beginning of the show.
And Martin Luther King Jr.
is considered to be committed to the principle of Non-aggression right he is a peaceful guy like Gandhi.
He wants to do things peacefully Yet he was for forced income redistribution He was a socialist he surrounded himself with uh... marxists uh... and and communists uh... and and you know to people who are younger these days that may not mean that much but communism was like the hyper al-qaeda of the sixties fifty sixty seventies all the way into the eighties uh... they were the greatest threat to world peace the the death count of communism is far greater than that of nazism is in the hundreds of millions of people
And so can you imagine a public figure these days being revered and getting his own name day if he was surrounded by Al-Qaeda advisors, by people who were... and if he'd also attended an Al-Qaeda training camp when he was younger.
There are reports that Martin Luther King attended with Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of the bus company in Alabama by moving to the front of the bus, which actually, I mean, she was also trained as a communist and She wasn't fighting the bus company.
The bus company was forced by law to put blacks at the back of the bus.
And this is the weird thing.
So Martin Luther King is considered to be going for peaceful change.
He wants peaceful change.
And people genuinely believe that.
But he wanted the government to initiate the use of force to achieve his goals.
This is how crazy the world is.
People see violence as a terrible thing and they don't really understand that the government is an agency of violence.
This is not my theory.
This is not a libertarian theory.
Barack Obama, you can do a search for this on the web, has very clearly stated that the government is a monopoly of force.
The government is a monopoly of violence.
Political power, as Chairman Mao said, grows out of the barrel.
of a gun.
And that is fundamental.
So people who call for the government to solve problems are calling for violence.
The more complex the problem, the worse violence is at solving it.
Violence can solve some problems.
Guy running at me with a chainsaw, maybe I can shoot him in the leg if I have to.
Solves that problem.
Not a complex problem.
Don't want to be chomped up into little bits by Matthew McConaughey wearing a goalie mask.
So, we shoot the guy in the leg.
But things like racism, things like income inequalities, things like lack of opportunities, things like poverty, things like single parenthood, these are very deep and complex social problems.
Just waving guns around doesn't make any sense.
Trying to solve complex social problems using the state is like trying to create a beautiful painting with a machine gun.
All you get is holes in the canvas.
Recoil, aches, and a smell of cordite in the air.
We don't see the amount of violence that we have in society because we exclude the state from the category of violence, we exclude spanking from the category of violence, and we exclude telling children about hellfire and damnation from the category of verbal abuse.
If I take an adult and I threaten to set him on fire, I'll go to jail for threatening murder.
But if you tell children they'll burn forever, that's not considered in the same category of violence.
So until we actually take the principle of non-aggression, including verbal aggression, verbal abuse, verbal threats, until we scoop the government into The moral biosphere of that, which is good and bad, until we actually make this a universal principle, we're still going to be dealing with all of these traumatized apes who can't even see violence for what it is, who don't even know the amount of violence that they live in, and therefore can't see how it spills out of them.
Rob, does that make any sense to you?
Or does that make any sense at all?
Yeah, it does.
But it just seems like the odds are against us, because there's so many aggressive people that have been in power Generation after generation, their children's minds are already twisted.
Their minds are twisted.
They don't see us as people.
They see us as a dollar or a worker.
And how do you change all those millions of people to think another way when they're already caught in that cycle of aggression?
And it just seems like you really can't do it without being aggressive yourself.
Well, I don't think that will work.
I think voluntarism is the way to go, and I've sort of talked about that.
Just don't imagine you can change people, right?
That is not how things work in society.
Of course, I mean, the odds are against us for sure.
We're vastly outnumbered by people who don't think.
This has always been the case with people who do think, vastly outnumbered by people, some people who don't think and some people who can't think because they're just too traumatized.
I mean, we've just talked about spanking.
There's a study, Kaiser Permanente has been doing this study with tens of thousands of people.
Run by dr. Vincent Felitti who's actually been on you can check out my channel at youtube.com forward slash free domain radio and He's got something called the adverse childhood The ACE study, right?
Adverse Childhood Experiences.
And they question people and they find out, you know, what have your childhoods been like and, you know, did you suffer abuse and neglect and divorce and family members in prison, substance abuse issues and so on.
Shockingly high figures.
And people with substantial child abuse in their history have an average life expectancy 20 years less than other people.
They have 43 times, not 43% more, 43 times the risk
of getting addicted to drugs and higher risks of uh... alcoholism and smoking and uh... teenage pregnancy and and uh... lower incomes it is catastrophic and you can't change that in the world i mean it's it's a gruesome thing to even think about how many children are being harmed at the moment during the course of this show but you can tell people about it you can inform people about a lot of people still think that spanking is necessary and good and they consider the alternative to spanking uh... to be catastrophic
So, anyway, let's move on to our next caller.
Thank you so much, Rob.
Next up, we have Emeka.
Is that how we pronounce it?
Yeah, it's Emeka.
Oh, hi.
How are you doing?
What's in your mind this morning?
It's really good to have the opportunity to speak to you.
I've been listening to you for the last three years.
And I would just like to talk to you about, like, where do you get the energy to go and talk about a lot of these issues?
Because, you know, I'm 25 years old, and I've been, like, debating with people about a lot of these issues for a little while.
I realize that most people who feel the strongest about things, like, who think that, you know, people should be thrown in jail for, like, using drugs, or who think that people should be harmed for going against their opinions, they generally don't know anything about the subject that they're talking about.
I just think that it's generally kind of a waste of time to really talk to a lot of people.
Like, just from one experience I had, I talked to one of my fellow classmates about, like, ending the war on drugs, and, like, the war on drugs is a complete disaster.
I give them all the facts and figures about the war on drugs, and usually the people don't even know how many people die of drugs.
They don't know that alcohol kills five times as many people as all illicit drugs use combined.
But they still, it doesn't faze them.
It's like, I still want drugs to be legal, because I think it's bad, and that's generally the mindset that they have.
And I don't think there's anything you really can do, because they're in there, at least they're adults, and they can't think.
I'm just going to re-ask what you said.
They cannot think, or they don't want to think.
Yeah.
No, I mean, first of all, thank you for listening to the show.
I appreciate that.
But it's important to remember there's a very well-established thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's Dunning, K-R-U-G-E-R, I guess, like the Rand.
It's a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate.
This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.
I guess they use big words so that the unskilled won't be able to read it.
The less people know, the more they think they know.
The less good they are at things, the more good they think they are at things.
Obviously, this is because they don't actually test themselves against that, which is competent people and so on.
So, this is just something to recognize.
Vanity is a mark of ignorance, and the people who score lowest in tests beforehand always think that they're going to score the highest on tests.
So people will tend to overestimate their own level of skill, and also they will fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
Right?
I can't tell, looking at a physics paper, I can't tell if it's good physics or not.
Like, you have to be really good at physics to tell a good physicist from a bad physicist.
So they don't understand, because they're not good at things, they don't understand what it is to be good at something, and they can't recognize someone who is good at something.
They fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy, and they also fail to recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill.
So if you'd start to teach someone how to think, they won't sit there and say, wow, I really didn't know how to think before.
Oh my god, I can't believe how many arguments I got into and how many people I told I was just all right when I didn't even know how to think.
No, they think, well I guess I knew how to think like 90% and I guess I'm going up to 100% or maybe even 150% now.
So, when you're dealing with, like if you've studied something for a long time, I calculated it up after reading one of Malcolm Gladwell's books about excellence and all that, 10,000 hours, I went like 40,000 hours into philosophy, it's crazy!
I got almost 3,000 shows on philosophy.
So I've studied it for a long time.
I got a graduate degree, a master's degree.
My whole thesis was on history, big themes in history of Western philosophy.
So I've studied a lot of philosophy in my life.
And yet people will come up and argue with me like I'm, you know, just some guy.
I run the biggest, most popular philosophy show the world has ever seen.
Greatest philosophical conversation in history, largely because of the technology I own.
And people just come up and say, well, you're wrong because of this.
And they've studied nothing!
And they know nothing at all!
And they don't know that they don't know.
And they're aggressive about their incompetence.
And this is a very well-known phenomenon.
So the thing to do, in my opinion, or at least what I do, I can't tell you what to do.
I tell you what I do.
I try to limit my exposure to the muggles, to the people who don't have the magic of thought.
I view ignorance as a form of toxin, or as radiation.
There's no hazmat suit that can prevent ignorance from annoying you or rubbing off on you.
But you can manage your exposure to the toxin, right?
You can jump in with your hazmat suit on, you can get what you need, and you can get out again!
Because otherwise you're gonna get stuck in there, and your bones would dissolve in the radiation of other people's ignorance.
So limit your exposure.
You know, go in, do your stuff, get back out again.
But try and stay around smart people, humble people, knowledgeable people.
Like We are going to take a short break.
We'll be back taking more callers.
855-4-SHIFT.
That's 472-4433.
We will be right back.
That's 472-4433.
We will be right back.
Make your word hurt.
They're trying to show us who's in the right.
They're trying to tell us who we should fight.
Hey, stand up.
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Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux sitting in for Peter Schiff.
I hope that you are doing well.
We were just talking to a caller who said, how can I possibly tread water in the squirming, sea-squid-infested ocean of ignorance in which I find myself in the general population?
And we were just talking.
I'll do a little bit more on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is something to sniff deeply into your brain and to really, really understand You really can't have what we call democracy unless people think that they're experts and stuff.
You know, people, oh, I know what foreign policy ought to be with regards to North Korea.
And I know whether we should allow drilling in the Arctic.
And I know exactly how much the government should spend to revive the economy.
And I know that we shouldn't have gold-backed currency.
And I know, like, the amount of things that people have to vote on require that they be absolute experts in everything.
And as we can see, as we can see from one Barack Obama, even being, as he claims to be, a professor in constitutional law, It doesn't really help you understand the Constitution very much, because so much of what he does is, well, I guess it's a constitutional or unrelated to the Constitution and related to an imperial presidential dictatorship.
But we'll get to that perhaps later in the show.
So what are the supporting studies for this Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that the less competent people are, the better they think they are at things.
So they set out to test this hypothesis on Cornell undergraduates.
So in a series of studies, they examined the subject's self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor.
Humor is a really tough thing to judge in yourself.
I think one of the best comedians around is Joe Rogan, and I've been on his show twice.
I think Peter's going on this week.
I love that guy.
Incredibly funny.
I mean, I would have kissed his forehead, except that I would be really afraid that my bad sense of humor would steal all of his good humor, and he'd end up with no career other than podcasting.
Oh, let me tell you what a tragedy that can be.
Actually, it's great.
After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank.
The competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated them.
Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability, although test scores put them in the 12th percentile.
The 12th.
That is a dozen points of idiocy.
The 12th percentile.
That's really... You know, if you can quadruple your score and you still don't pass, that's 48.
If you give them four times their score, they're still below a 50.
So there's the 12th percentile.
These are people who, you know, you have to put little arrows on the carpet to make sure they actually go through the door rather than just repeatedly walk into the doorframe.
So they're in the 12th percentile, and they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd percentile.
The 62nd percentile.
More than five times their actual competence.
This is what they estimated themselves to be.
These are all people in psychology, although I would assume that most of these people will end up in politics, vastly overestimating their capacity to run everybody's lives to the point of a gun.
People with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence.
So, generally, participants who found tasks to be quite easy erroneously assumed to some extent that tasks must also be easy for others.
A follow-up study suggests that grossly incompetent students improved their ability to estimate their rank after minimal tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked.
So they could get a little bit better.
Once they learned a little bit more, then they became a little bit more humble.
And this is an old Old argument.
Shakespeare said that the idiot thinks that he is a wise man, but the wise man knows that he's a fool, right?
Socrates said that I know nothing, and that is really the beginning of things, and this is Descartes' philosophy that I'm going to start with I know nothing and try and build a philosophy out of that, which is good.
I think this is a great way to start things.
Sort of a little interesting thing here, too.
Studies on the Dunning-Kruger effect tend to focus on American test subjects.
A study of some East Asian subjects suggested that something like the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect may operate on self-assessment and motivation to improve.
East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities and see underachievement as a chance to improve themselves and get along with others.
See, if you think you're already good at something, you tend to stop trying to improve it.
So, you know, if you're driving home and you get there, You kind of stopped driving.
Yes, you've arrived, right?
And when I was chatting with Joe Rogan before the last time we did a show together, he said, you know, it's doom as a comedian to think that you can't get better.
You can always get better.
And the moment you stop thinking that, you stop being funny.
And all people who've achieved excellence have, like, achieve excellence more than in their own minds.
Achieve excellence.
They know what they have lacked.
They've worked hard to gain those skills.
And That's how they achieve.
There's no other way.
You have to recognize the gap between where you are and where you could be, or where excellence is, and then you have to work to close that gap.
So, anyway, we've got a caller.
Leo.
What's on your mind, brother?
How you doing?
How you doing, Stephan?
Good to talk to you.
Nice to chat with you.
I want to try to be a force for good in the world.
I've been listening to yours and other people's podcasts, and I I believe I'm experiencing some sort of, I don't know how to say it, like a cognitive dissonance because of this.
Part of me feels that, you know, we can like fight the good fights, spread the word, practice the non-aggressive action and philosophy, and do all that, and at the same time, part of me believes that there might be some giant, or a very large, or at least an event limited to the United States where there is a major economic collapse, or like a bio-warfare attack,
You know, something got awful just to kind of, like, for the fetus to, you know, ratch up the next level and keep things going on.
So my question is, sometimes I feel like, you know, I want to have even my own podcast.
I want to, you know, engage in dialogue and stuff, but part of me also wants to actually spend time, you know, learning how to garden, how to dress wounds, learning how to, you know, build things You know, to be ready in case something like that does happen.
So you're talking about skill sets.
You know, these skills are relative to today's world, but I think it is possible at any day.
I mean, I live in a large United States city where there's no land, there's no nothing, you know, like as far as gardening and stuff.
And I want to, you know, I feel like I'm in a bad position if something were to happen, you know.
So I, you know, on the one hand, I want to engage philosophy with people and learn and get better and read more books and start a podcast.
But at the same time, I feel like maybe I should just start, you know, planting and learning these other skills, like stitching clothes, you know.
I read some stuff, you know.
My mom is sick with diabetes, and I just started recently dressing the wounds, and I realized how little I knew, even though I'm from a science background, you know.
So, real world experiences versus, like, you know, philosophically, you know, winning arguments, basically, you know.
All right, well, listen, Leo, hang on the line, because I just got a call from Peter.
He says that he's really hungry, and what that means is we have to do a commercial, so he gets some kibbles.
So we're going to take a short commercial break.
I think what you're asking is hope in the face of paralysis, and this is an essential, essential topic.
So I will try and squeeze out some hope.
Actually, I have some good answers for you, I think.
We will take a short break.
We'll come back.
Feel free to call in 855-472-4433.
855-472-4433.
We'll be back after the break with some Hope Babies.
We'll be back after the break.
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I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.
Your money.
Your stories.
Your freedom.
The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters in the Quest for Truth.
This is Dan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio sitting in Or Peter Schiff.
Oh, I know when they decided to make a virtue out of selfishness.
I believe it's when I first refused to share my bottle at about the age of three months.
It's really been that way ever since.
Hope you're having a great morning.
This is hour two of the show and we were just talking with Leo who said, Steph, what is this thing called hope?
I have opened the demon chest of Pandora's box and they've all flown out and crapped on my eyeballs.
But is there a glowing fairy of hope?
at the bottom of the chest.
Well, I'm here to tell you, I am that glowing fairy of hope.
I am the Richard Simmons of good feeling positivity.
Look, one of the great things about studying history is it makes you really glad that you're looking at it from a distance.
You know, history, for the most part, is an endless catalogue of disease and crime and death and childbirth and war and genocides and hunger, starvation, predation, rape.
You know, it is a horror show.
Why did they need to invent hell?
I mean, you get to keep living and that's your punishment.
Or in the immortal words of Monty... It's a long string of love in history, you know?
Yeah, it's horrible.
Monty Python had it right, and I'll paraphrase for the radio audience, but in a very funny film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there's a king going down a village which is covered with excrement, and one village returns and the other is Oh, that must be a king!
The other one says, how do you know?
Well, he hasn't got crap all over him.
And that's kind of what must be alive in history.
Now, what have we got today?
I am sitting here in a comfortable room.
I am talking to a microphone going across North America, on the Internet, throughout the world, for all of history.
Oh my God, I just realized that.
I'm kidding.
But I am sitting very comfortably as a philosopher, talking truth to power as best I can, fighting the evils that be.
And what's happening?
Well, if you do a search on how philosophers ended throughout history, it usually was like a mafia movie.
You know, there's that Strauss music and slow-motion gunfire and philosophers spattering up against the wall.
Just like early scientists under the grip of Catholicism, they came to rather inflammatory ends quite often.
And so it was pretty, pretty bad.
And some of the punishments throughout history, they come up with some lovely ones.
You know, these sadists who run the planet.
Uh, there was one called, you know, being drawn and quartered was nice.
Uh, you cut you into four pieces.
There was another nice one where they would tie a horse to each one of your limbs, and then the horses, they would whip the horses in opposite directions and pull you apart.
That was particularly tasty.
And then, of course, the dogs would feast on your intestines, though I'm sure that was not the worst part of it all, because you're not really concerned with it at that point.
If you look at medieval torture chambers... Hang on, you're gonna just... I'm sorry, this is the part, this is the part where I have to finish my speech and I'll listen, but...
So throughout history, it's a freak show, it's a torture show, it's a house of horrors.
And philosophers come to really bad ends.
You know, Socrates is notable for living a few months until the ships came back, and then being able to down his own hemlock.
Mostly it was much more brutal than that.
And, you know, what are the negative consequences of speaking truth to power these days?
Oh, I don't know.
Some people might type bad things about you.
Ooh!
Typing.
Now you've got me.
Right?
There may be trolls.
But most of human history is wretched and horrifying and just a complete horror show.
And most people died young of tooth problems.
So every time you go to a dentist, kiss them deeply.
Assuming you don't have gingivitis.
It's a beautiful time to be alive.
Yeah, there is evil in the world.
There are problems in the world.
But the problems are not like cholera and Genghis Khan killing you.
The problems are inflation and debt.
And these are real problems.
Don't get me wrong.
They're real problems.
But if you could choose any time in history up to now to be alive, you would choose now of any time.
Now the future, you know, yeah, the future will be even better, I believe, if good people work hard to achieve that.
But now is the time that you'd want to be alive.
I certainly, like even go back 50 years, I wouldn't want to do any of that sort of stuff.
So we have an incredibly beneficial opportunity.
We have no gatekeepers in the communication.
You and I will have this conversation we've never met and there's no gatekeepers.
There are no gatekeepers.
I can do a podcast, you can do a podcast, we can publish, we can write, we don't have to go through all of the media channels controlled by the powers that be, licensed by the powers that be, influenced by the powers that be, all the media channels who call calling up a government official the same as doing journalism and therefore they're dependent upon information given by the government and therefore they never fundamentally criticize the government.
Yuck!
I mean, the idea of pretending to be some sociopathic lefty, oh, better repeat myself, and trying to join the mainstream media is like, makes my skin crawl.
Like I can't even, I shouldn't do that on air, because it just makes my whole spine do like a little wave.
So we have this unbelievable opportunity to speak to the world, to speak truth to power.
We are protected by the vestiges of the Bill of Rights.
We are protected by the vestiges of common law.
And we have this incredible opportunity to speak to the world!
Never happened before in history to speak to the world!
And I get three million hits a month.
That's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
And that is what is possible.
Peter's show, which you can catch up at the archives at shiftradio.com, gets huge amounts of hits.
Peter's out there speaking all over the world.
And all of his speeches get out there onto YouTube and are there forever.
And anybody can study anything.
Major universities put their entire courses online for free.
We have an unprecedented access to knowledge.
The cost of doing research... I did my master's before even CD-ROMs came out.
I had to read everything.
Just after I did my master's, you could buy a CD-ROM of all the great philosophical works in history.
I could have just done a search for the terms I wanted.
So we can search, we can do research, all of this stuff is available to us.
We can speak to the world and nobody's in the way.
All we have to do is screw our courage to the sticking place, speak truth to power, broadcast loud the reality of virtue and truth, and the world can listen.
This has never happened before in history.
So we are going to win because the human mind tends towards consistency.
Oh, there's a That's pretty much equivalent to Workers of the World Unite, right?
The human mind tends towards consistency.
There's the worst bumper sticker for philosophy in the history of the known universe.
But we do!
Like when I taught my daughter the word for chair, I didn't have to tell her about all the other chairs and that they should be called chairs too.
She just knew.
We tend towards universality.
We tend towards consistency, which is why science works so well, mathematics works so well, physics works so well.
We're still working on philosophy, but we tend towards consistency.
The more consistent argument, We'll always win, and philosophy has the more consistent argument.
I've got a free book called Universally Preferable Behavior, which is an argument for rational ethics, without gods, without governments.
So we can achieve this incredible thing called consistency.
Yeah, taxation is theft.
I'm sorry, that's just the reality.
It is the initiation of forces, the forcible transfer of property against someone's will.
That is theft.
The war on drugs is the war on people.
It is the initiation of force against people peacefully pursuing their own enlightenment and enjoyment of Dark Side of the Moon.
So, we have this incredible opportunity.
Take hope.
Take courage.
It is the best time to be.
After it gets easier, it won't be nearly as much fun.
This is Stefan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
Looking for callers?
Call on in.
855-4-SHIFT-47244333.
I look forward to chatting with you.
We'll be back right after the break.
The Peter Schiff Show.
The Peter Schiff Show.
To President Obama, Madame Pelosi, and all of the socialist econ professors across America, we're sorry.
Peter Schiff is back on the air!
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
This is Stefan Molyneux sitting in for the one and the only Peter Schiff.
I hope that you're doing well.
Hope you're having a great, great Monday.
So, we've got some callers on the line.
Let's move on to our next one.
I think it's Kumar from Ontario, and you know what they say.
Good brains grow in Ontario!
So, Kumar, how are you?
How are you on the line?
I'm good.
I'm really good.
Thank you so much for Thank you for having me on the show, Stephan.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Thank you.
I have a small question.
It's about the rationale behind property rights.
I'd like to start it by saying that throughout history, especially with regards to land property, the core has been what you hold is what you own.
And it's either realized by brute force or maybe a pseudo sense of ownership that is sponsored by the power of state and through paperwork or rules and regulations.
And I was wondering, in an anarchist paradigm, it would obviously be voluntary.
But when there is a difference in opinion, especially language or the knowledge about the property, for example, a person who was born in a place full of gold mines or gold deposits might not know what it's used for, but if somebody knows it and he has an idea for making use of it, he probably has a better advantage.
And how would there be... Sorry, just make sure you get to a specific question because I'm not sure what you're asking.
I was wondering how would be the rationale behind property rights in the next paradigm where there is no state to enforce through legislation or rule?
So for those, I can hear the teacups rattling in the listenership, but because we use the A word, anarchic.
And for those who don't know, I accept that the non-aggression principle, which is the non-initiation of force when expanded to universality, means that the state is morally not legitimate.
The state, of course, is an ancient institution, but so is slavery and the subjugation of women and so on.
So it is looking for the next thing.
It's a multigenerational change.
It's not around the corner, but certainly the extension of the non-aggression principle to a universal principle requires that we look for alternatives Other than a centralized oligopoly of extreme violence to try and solve social problems.
Now the question of property rights, a lot of people who are voluntarists or anarchists, I mean Marxist himself said the state would wither away, kind of didn't mention how that was going to happen.
Magic!
The government will be exposed to sunlight and vanish into a poof of empiric dust.
But lots of people are this way inclined to look for voluntary solutions.
Charlie Chaplin?
Great philosopher, also anarchist, J. R. R. R. Tolkien, despite the fact that he named his last book, The Return of the King, was that way, was an anarchist, Noam Chomsky and so on.
And yeah, I count myself among that inevitable lot of accepting the universal validity of the non-aggression principle.
Now, property rights, they arise fundamentally out of self-ownership.
You own yourself.
Now, one of the great things about philosophy is you can't slice and dice stuff up.
It's like science.
You can't say, all balloons filled with helium in air rise upwards.
Except red ones.
Or ones shaped like a Mickey Mouse.
Or condoms.
Right?
You have to have a universal statement.
All gases expand when heated.
And so on.
Same thing's true of philosophy.
The same thing is true of philosophy.
You can't have a distinction between the material in your body and the material outside your body.
Right?
Self-ownership is, I own myself, I own the effects of my actions.
Right?
If I go strangle some hobo, I own that murder.
I am responsible for that murder.
That murder is, quote, mine, which is why I get prosecuted, not the guy next to me, or the guy finds me, or the hobo, or my hands, or whatever.
It's me.
And so on.
So, I own my kidney.
I own my eyeballs.
I have been nurturing them and taking care of them below these many, many years.
So I own myself.
I own the effects of my actions.
Now, if the effects of my actions is crime, then I own the crime and I'm responsible for it and I would pay whatever penalty there would be.
And if I make a house, then I own the house.
You can't say, well, I'm responsible for my crimes, but I'm not responsible for my property.
Crime and property are both effects of my actions in the world.
Self-ownership leads to ownership.
of stuff.
Now this universal principle applies, obviously universally, but applies to one's body and the effects of one's actions.
One of the things that's hard for people to see as immoral is taking property.
The redistribution of wealth, the word re there, the prefix re is like it was somehow distributed, we're just shuffling it around, right?
Wealth is earned, right?
Now, if someone said, what we need to do, you see, is we need to redistribute eyeballs.
Some people are born blind and some people are born with two eyeballs.
So we need to take one eyeball out in some out-vile jelly.
I played Gloucester in King Lear when I was in theater school.
And, uh, we need to remove eyeballs from one person and distribute it among... People would be, like, shocked and appalled.
You know, you have two kidneys.
You selfish, selfish capitalist.
You have two kidneys and some poor people have, uh, no functioning kidneys.
Who are you to condemn them to a life of dialysis?
You must give up one of your kidneys for this poor person who has, uh, no functioning kidneys.
So, you know, snort this, uh, we're gonna put chloroform on you and take it out with a rusty spoon.
Why?
Because we're socialists and that's the kind of quality we aim for.
Now, if we wanted to redistribute body parts, this would be macabre.
This would be a horror movie.
This would be a freak show, and people would morally recoil against that.
But my eyes are my property, and the money that I earn is my property.
Philosophy does not fundamentally recognize a distinction between various forms of property.
The property rights are the property rights.
I have as much right to the house that I build, to the land that I homestead, as I do to my eyeballs and my kidney.
Right, we don't sit there and say to women, you know, you women with all your eggs, you know, there are some women out there who can't have children.
They don't have eggs, they're endometriosis, Lord knows what.
You selfish women with all this excess fertility, we're gonna go in there, scoop out those eggs, and redistribute them among the infertile.
Well, this would be considered horrific.
But you can take people's money, which is their time and their life, at gunpoint.
So, Property rights arise from self-ownership.
You own yourself.
You own the effects of your actions.
Self-ownership is just a biological reality.
You know, you can put a gun to my head and tell me to lift my arm, but you cannot lift my arm directly.
I can do that.
You can't.
Right?
That's the way the wiring works.
You know, you can't blame me.
I can turn the lights on in my house.
I can't flip a switch in my house and turn the lights off in a place in Mumbai, India.
Right?
Assuming the correct wiring is not in place.
Right?
So, that's just the reality.
You own yourself.
You own the effects of your actions.
There's no fundamental distinction between your body and what you produce or create.
Now, I can choose to give an eyeball to someone, I can choose to give money to someone, I can choose to give a kidney, or give an egg if I'm a woman, or give an egg if I'm a man.
It's just, you know, less human, right?
But I can't initiate the use of force to transfer property, whether it's biological property or physical property.
And all politics is designed to obscure that basic fact.
To create different characteristics or categories of property.
Your biological property is sacrosanct.
But your physical property outside your body is open to being stolen from.
And it's less obviously violent.
Right?
There's always going to be violence in taking something out of your body.
It's always going to be.
But you can hand over your property at gunpoint and it looks a whole lot less violent.
So moving property around is much easier to propagandize than taking people's body parts and applying them to other people's needs.
And this is one of the great tragedies.
Philosophically, we understand there's no difference.
Politically, well, it's really well camouflaged through the compliance under the threat of overwhelming force.
We will be right back.
We have callers aplenty.
I'm looking forward to the conversations.
Stefan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
We will talk to you right after the break.
break the peter shift show we now return to the peter shift show Call in now.
855-4-SCHIFF.
That's 855-472-4433.
The Peter Schiff Show.
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
This is Stefan Molyneux sitting in for the great Peter Schiff.
Thank you so much for listening in, and thank you so much for the call.
It's great I say no, I don't need to brag about how warm it is.
San Diego, have you called in to brag about how warm it is down there compared to the crazy ice fist known as Canada?
I'm sorry?
I say no, I don't need to brag about how warm it is.
Too many people know about it already.
Yeah.
Oh, man, it was just wretched up here.
Over Christmas, we had no power for like seven days.
Yeah, I believe it.
You know, when it's minus 20, you kind of notice that.
You wake up in the morning, it feels like your sheet's like you're sleeping in a snowbank.
And when your first, you know, your first breath of the morning you can see, it's usually time to bail and get a hotel.
But hotel rooms were hard to get.
I really felt like I was in some biblical reenactment, you know, trudging from hotel to hotel around Christmas trying to find room at the inn.
It's just terrible.
Honey, don't give birth in a barn.
Anyway, so what's on your mind?
How can I help you?
Yeah, okay.
Just a brief bit of background.
You know, I read Ayn Rand in the mid-60s.
In the late 60s, I went to New York City and took all the courses that Leonard Peacock taught at Brooklyn Poly, and then went away for a career in retail computer system development.
I'm retired now, but But with that background, I've carried it with me my whole life, and I've got a notion about altruism and its understanding and promotion in the country today.
You always hear stuff about how you have the haves and the have-nots, or you have the social justice theory, or the greater good theory, or equality theory.
They're all reflections of the same thing.
And my observation is that most people think that that kind of breaks the population into two groups, you know, the ones with a lot of stuff and the ones without much stuff.
And, you know, my contention is it really breaks it into three groups, the two groups that I mentioned before, but the third administrative group that decides who belongs in the other two groups.
And I think, you know, that the people who often want to be The people who promote a lot of altruistic theories basically kind of want to wind up being in the administrative group.
And I'd just kind of like to get your impression on that.
Yeah.
I mean, look, the slice and dice of humanity is an important exercise.
I agree with you that haves and have-nots is I think a problematic formulation, because to have is maybe the result of stealing or the result of theft.
Sorry, stealing or theft are the results of political action, which is the same thing, or it may be the result of creation or earning.
So if I have a computer, I could have stolen it, or I could have traded for it, or I could have, I guess, built it or whatever from sand and prayer.
So, the way that I view it is the two important categories from a political standpoint are those who profit from violence and those who are victimized through violence.
Those, I think, are the two most important categories.
And when we see that clearly, I think, I like the categories that provide solutions.
Right.
So, you know, you've got a group here who doesn't have cancer, you've got a group here who does have cancer, let's give medicine to the group who has cancer.
The sort of implied kind of solution is in the definition.
And so if we look at society, that there's a massive gun called the state, and there are people on one side of it with their hand on the trigger, and there are people on the other side of that with their head in the muzzle.
That is the fundamental distinction, I think, in society.
Who has the gun?
And who has the gun pointed at them?
I think those are the two.
And there are people who have the gun who are politicians.
There are people who have the gun who are military industrial complex.
The financial services industry and the bailouts were on the receiving end of stolen money.
Some of the poor people who get welfare on the receiving end of the stolen money and people who get quote free or subsidized health care are on the receiving end of stolen money.
So there are lots of disparate groups from rich to poor who are on the receiving end Of the fruits of violence, the spoils of the hidden war called the state.
And then there are people who are on the other side, right?
Who get to print whatever money they want, get to type whatever they want into their own bank accounts, get to start wars, get to use force to reward their friends and punish their enemies, which is really the basis of politics.
And I think in that formulation, of the division within society between those who profit from violence and those who cough up, to avoid violence, cough up their money and all, and their children, to government schools.
There is implicit in that division, I would argue, a remedy.
And the remedy is quite simple.
I mean, four words to save the planet.
Four words to solve the vast majority of evils in the world and the four words are put down the gun put down the gun let's reason together as a species on ways to solve problems that don't involve violence you know whether the gun can be spanking the gun can be screaming at someone the gun can be threatening someone with hellfire and damnation and the gun is a law and the gun is debt
You know, picking the pockets of the unborn is not a very noble endeavor for a society to be engaged in.
And the gun is war, and the gun is bonds.
Sell bonds to fund something to bribe voters into voting you in in the here and now, and the bill gets due thirty years later after your long debt as a politician or certainly out of office.
Philosophy can't work with a gun in the room.
Love can't exist with a knife to the throat.
Reason cannot coexist with force.
So we are in a pretty philosophical state in the world.
We are trying to lay the foundations for possible philosophy, for possible reason, for possible virtue.
Everybody is drawn to the gun.
It's like a giant black hole of gravity that everybody is drawn towards the gun.
Got a problem?
Pass a law.
Got a problem?
Write to your congressman.
If you feel blacks have been oppressed, then of course they have an American history.
Get a law!
Get a law!
Pass a law, everybody!
That's how we're gonna solve the problem.
More guns!
More force!
More violence!
That's the way to solve all of this complexity.
Got a thick Gordian knot?
Don't puzzle at it with your little fingertips.
Call in an airstrike.
Kaboom!
And now look at that.
We have no problem.
We have no planet, but we have no problem.
So those would be the divisions that I think are useful because they do contain the remedy.
Put down the gun and then we can talk.
What do you think?
Yes.
I have to agree with you to a point, but I don't think you're fundamental enough.
Almost all of these uses of the gun and uses of force are political and economic.
You know, are from the world of, or the philosophy of politics and economics.
But more fundamentally in philosophy is ethics.
And they always justify the use of the force to establish the ethic that they want.
And the ethic they want is the altruism.
And the altruism, it always winds up being believable to many people because they've heard it their whole life.
But because of the three groups that it defines, it winds up benefiting the people who go for the administrative side of it.
Do you follow that?
Yeah, no, I can certainly understand where you're coming from.
And I think the division that you have is helpful.
Altruism, for those who don't know, and this is Defined differently in the objectivist canon than it is in most people's understanding, altruism is considered to be niceness and kindness and charity.
But in the objectivist or the Ayn Rand lexicon, altruism is the willful sacrifice of a lower value for a higher value.
And you're told to sacrifice your happiness for the sake of other people who themselves will never particularly end up happy.
You're told to sacrifice your property for the sake of the poor, even though that just makes everyone poor.
And so you're told to sacrifice, to sacrifice, to sacrifice.
And not for the sake of a greater good, a personal greater good, right?
So when you become a parent, you sacrifice a lot of sleep, you sacrifice a lot of money, you sacrifice a lot of time.
But it's worth it if, you know, you love your kids and all that.
It's something you voluntarily choose to do.
When you enter into marriage, a monogamous marriage, you sacrifice chasing women.
Again, assuming you're not Martin Luther King.
Hey, see, I'm tying that whole thing back in.
You sacrifice the pursuit of other women, sex with other women, and all of that.
Is that a sacrifice?
Well, not for me.
I love my wife.
So, in the Rand thing, it's you sacrifice a higher value to a lower value.
You take something that is greater and more important and more virtuous and you sacrifice it for the lesser and you lose the greater value.
I think it's fine.
I think the philosophical basis of it is interesting and I think has value.
But I think most fundamentally, people recoil from violence.
They don't like violence.
You know, there's no law that says you can't print pictures of the Iraqi victims of the American invasion, of which there are about a million, and another couple of million people have fled the country.
The entire infrastructure has been destroyed.
Weapons that they have used, the depleted uranium shells that they used against, like, what, three Iraqi tanks have irradiated the air, caused massive increases in leukemia and birth defects and so on.
Now, there's no law that says you can't publish those pictures or talk about those stories, but the American media just doesn't do it.
Because people don't like to see the effects of violence.
They like it covered up.
They like it.
They don't mind blood money.
They just want it washed first.
Right?
They don't mind getting evil, but they like it in a nice wrapping with a bow tie.
They don't mind a corpse in the room, as long as it's perfumed.
So, people don't like evil very much, therefore you have to dress it up as good.
That is the hope of the species.
If people loved evil, then we'd just be surrounded by open sadists and there'd be no hope for humanity.
But people don't like evil, so you have to cover it up.
So you have to say, it's not theft, it's taxation.
Right?
It's not the forced redistribution of money at gunpoint.
It's helping the poor and so on.
So you have to dress violence in the language of voluntarism to sell it to the public.
Because if you call things by what they are, people recoil from it.
They really find it problematic to see the naked power and force of the state on display.
They like to think it's charity.
Not force.
Not theft.
This is Stefan Molyneux for the Peter Schiff Show.
Oh, we are getting close to the end, but we've got another segment to go and another caller to chat with.
Thank you so much for your time.
We will be back right after the break in the news.
The Peter Schiff Show.
The Peter Schiff Show.
I can't believe it's our last segment.
I am heartbroken.
I think I'm just going to keep doing the show while they unplug things because it's so much fun to chat with you guys.
This is The Peter Schiff Show.
I can't believe it's our last segment.
I am heartbroken.
I think I'm just going to keep doing the show while they unplug things because it's so much fun to chat with you guys.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
We've been doing a caller-heavy show.
I hope to do another one tomorrow.
Got no guests booked.
It's all going to be about chatting with you.
If you'd like to chat more outside of the show, I do a call-in show Wednesday nights, 8 p.m.
and Sunday mornings, 10 a.m.
You can find out more at freedomainradio.com.
So, our last caller of the day.
We have a short segment, which means you're going to ask the most grippingly, incredibly interesting question, and then I'm going to have to cut you off.
So, I tell you that ahead of time.
But we have a little bit of time.
Joel, what's on your mind?
Hi Stefan, thanks for having me on your show again.
I have a quick question for you.
Maybe it's because I'm so obsessed with liberty, but every time when I talk to people, either they really seem not to care and think that the government is the solution of everything, or they think that the government must solve this, and that government has the right to do something.
When I keep explaining that the government isn't different from you or I, it's nothing Yes.
than a gun barrel pointing to my head.
Do you think that there is any hope for our generation to see an improvement towards liberty, even if we wouldn't live through our libertarian free society?
But do you have any hope that we would progress towards that? - Yes.
Now, there is, you know, turning around a supertanker is a challenge.
You know, you need your scuba gear, you need your depth charges.
I don't know, I'm not a sailor.
But to turn around a supertanker, like once you spin the wheel, what does it take, like two miles to turn the thing around?
So once you spin the wheel, it still takes a long, you're still going a long way in that same direction before you turn around.
Now to change something as fundamental as a state, which is to say coercive-centric society, into a voluntary peaceful society, There's no bigger change in human history.
Slavery ended.
Great, you know?
A vile, immoral institution.
But, unfortunately, slavery was replaced by free-range serfdom wherein you get to choose your own occupation and they found it better to enslave part of your income and more profitable to enslave part of your income than you.
as an individual as a whole.
Slavery is just economically inefficient, which is why we tend to play whack-a-mole with evil in the world.
Whack!
Oh good, we got rid of slavery.
Oh, income tax!
And the enslavement of the unborn through national debt.
So it just keeps going round and round.
But there is progress.
There is progress.
The way that I measure progress isn't anything to do with politics, because I view politics as an effect of people's early childhood experiences.
And it's a weird one.
I'll just touch on it briefly.
But it's an important topic.
When you say to people coercion is immoral, and you say to people spanking is coercion, what they hear is, my parents did bad things to me.
And there's a whole lot of tribal, emotional, honor-thy-mother-and-thy-father defenses that kick into place emotionally.
Most people don't reason.
You can go to fdrurl.com forward slash vib for all the science behind this.
Most people don't reason.
They have very strong emotional reactions, and then they justify those things after the fact with sophistry.
Most people do not reason from first principles.
They're just bouncing like a pinball.
For that metaphor, please consult your parents.
They just bounce like a pinball off their emotional reactions.
So, to reduce the amount of institutional violence within society, we first need to reduce the amount of coercion within the family.
The state is an effect of the family.
This is my argument.
I'm not saying I'm proving it in this.
I'm just telling you this is what my argument is.
Spanking is declining.
I mean, among the very young, it's pretty pitiful.
In the last 40 years, it's gone down from 96% to 93% of parents spanking two- to five-year-olds.
But among older kids, it's gone down from, you know, two-thirds to a third.
It's gone down by half among older kids.
That's positive.
That's a positive development.
And so I would argue that as we continue to work at the only coercion that we can control, our own fists, our own open hands, our own smacking, as we continue to focus on diminishing the coercion that we can control, which is, I would argue, and many other people have argued, the foundation for the justification, the emotional justification for social coercion.
If you solve problems by hitting children, then you solve problems with laws.
Right?
If spanking is moral, then laws are moral.
If the initiation of force in the family is moral, the initiation of force in society is moral.
People don't make moral decisions based on abstract principles, but personal experiences.
And if their personal experience is of the justified use of violence against them as helpless children, then they will emotionally justify that in society as a whole.
And they will respond with incredulity, if not downright horror, at any suggestion to the contrary.
So, there is progress made in the reduction of violence in the world.
The progress is being made in the realm of aggression against children.
It's slow.
And of course, in a lot of European countries, it's just outright illegal.
And they've done a lot.
Sweden, when they made, in the 70s, they made spanking illegal.
And they put, you know, on children's milk cartons and cereal boxes, they put this in ways that kids could understand.
Your parents are not allowed to hit you anymore?
They're breaking the law, if they do.
And I know that sounds all kinds of a well-you-can-report-your-parents-and-so-on, but what it meant was that parents kind of stopped doing it, in a lot of ways.
Not 100%, but, you know, a lot.
There was a reduction.
And youth violence did reduce in Sweden.
Now, to be fair, it reduced across Europe as well, even in the countries which didn't.
Get rid of spanking, but spanking is on the decline, and youth violence is on the decline.
When youth violence is on the decline, which is the majority of criminals, of young, right?
Not many people when they're 60 say, Hey!
Let's start a motorcycle gang and knock over Korean convenience store owners, right?
That's not what most people's plans are at that age.
Nobody sits there, Hey, I'm 70!
I think I'll start smoking, too.
But violence against children is on the way down, and violence from youths, from teenagers, is on the way down.
And this is well correlated in the social sciences.
You spank your kids, you raise the chances of them becoming criminals when they are teenagers.
Now, if criminality goes down, people feel they need the state less.
Right?
I mean, do you buy a lot of insurance for demonic possession if you're not a fundamentalist?
No!
There's not a risk that you feel you worry about.
If you don't believe in UFOs, you're not going to buy UFO butt protection.
Or whatever it is, since they seem to be inordinately interested in our reverse innards.
So, we reduce violence against children.
This reduces criminality among the young, makes people feel they need the state less, and begins to look at it as an unnecessary overhead rather than a perceived necessary bulwark against the violence of the young.
Oh!
Thank you for a great question.
We are just out of time.
It breaks my heart.
Great show.
Thank you so much for the call.
It's a great show, like my show, I just know.
Great callers, great questions.
I hope that I've done them some justice.
I will be back in the morning.
If you'd like to chat about more philosophy, we'll be doing some current events.
And thanks, of course, to the crew.
Thanks to Peter Schiff for letting me in the chair.
The fool!
Madman!
Madman, I tell you!
And thanks to all the callers.
It was a really, really pleasurable time.
We will talk tomorrow morning, 10 a.m.
Eastern Standard Sharp.
I hope you will be here.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Have a fantastic day.
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