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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:55
Zeitgeist Examined: Peter Joseph/Stefan Molyneux Debate Analysis
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Hi everybody, Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So, a lot of people have asked, and I'm going to give some thoughts about my recent debate with Peter Joseph of the Zeitgeist Movement.
Now, if you haven't watched it, not the end of the world.
I promise you there's going to be a lot of great stuff in this chat, even for those of you who have never watched the debate.
I mean, obviously, feel free to watch it, but you don't have to.
Um, my debating background, I don't know how much people prepare for a debate with me, but I'm quite good at it, and I've had many, many years of experience with it.
So, I first started debating at about the age of 15, I'm 47 now, so that's quite a Back in the days in high school when I had more hair than Chewbacca and in college I was a debater.
I was on the debating team and the very first year as a solo debater that I debated I came in seventh in Canada.
And so I've debated all the way through college.
I debated in the business world.
You do a lot of debating, a lot of arguing your point of view, a lot of discussions, a lot of negotiations.
I've done, I don't know, 20 or 30 debates with some significant heavy hitters.
With libertarian presidential candidates, with professors of law, with really, really good and smart people.
So I've got a lot of experience and I just generally think when you're going up against somebody with a lot of experience, you've really got to bring your A game, which means to be prepared.
I just want to point that out.
It doesn't mean I won or lost.
And in fact, the point of a debate is not for either person to win or lose.
The point of a debate is for the truth to win.
And fundamentally, the purpose of a debate is for ideas to be tested against rigorous, rational, and empirical counter-evidence, and for the audience and for the truth to win.
And if I go into a debate and I lose a point, so to speak, it's not a loss.
You know, like, I mean, if I'm about to brush my teeth with hemorrhoid cream and my wife says, Put the toothpaste on your bum.
No.
Wait.
Yes, brush your teeth with toothpaste.
Then have I lost because I was wrong?
No, I end up not brushing my teeth with hemorrhoid ointment.
And that's, you know, not a bad way to start the day.
So I haven't lost if I'm wrong.
I just don't end up with acid in my mouth.
So that's, I think, a very positive thing to go through.
So that's the purpose of the debate.
Now, both people who go into a debate, if they're honest, usually believe that they're correct, that they have reason and evidence on their side, and they're willing to put that to the test of somebody else's counter-arguments.
Like, if I think I'm a really great fencer, then I'm going to go in with my rapier-like wit and attempt to carve up the other person's...
face gear or whatever you do in fencing.
So anyway, we came into the debate, I'm going to assume, believing that we were right and being willing to test our propositions against challenges of reason and evidence.
For me, most of the preparation for a debate is in the three opening arguments.
I don't find any other number than three really works that well.
I chose my three very, very carefully.
This is not accidental.
I sort of mulled it over for quite a long time, discussed it, and so on, and I came up with the three arguments that I felt would be most effective in establishing the position for a voluntary society, for a stateless society, for what you may call anarchism, but basically is the non-aggression principle, expanded to include government, and therefore eliminating government.
In the same way, when you expand personhood to include slaves, you eliminate slavery.
Now, when you argue Against a free society, a voluntary society, an anarchic society, you basically can have only two approaches to discount it.
Now the first approach is, you say, human beings naturally lust after power and dominance over others, and therefore we need a government to keep that in check.
There's a war of all against all, this Hobbesian nature, red in tooth and claw, a bunch of people all biting and clawing over each other and trying to get to the top.
of the food chain.
Now, the problem with that, of course, is that if human beings naturally desire dominance and power over other human beings, you can't have a government.
Sorry.
Ignore it!
Because if human beings naturally want, desire dominance and power over others, well, the government is how they're going to achieve it, right?
If you have an institution at the very center of your society, That's entirely about dominating other people through force.
That's what its reason for being is.
That's its methodology.
That's its implementation.
That's its structure.
That's its nature.
Then you can't have a government because people will use that government to dominate others.
It's free evil.
If human beings are naturally inclined towards evil, you don't want free evil at the very center of your society because most people will use that to Crush down other people and so on, right?
So you can't use the human beings are prone to domination argument to overthrow the concept of a stateless society.
In fact, that's an argument for a stateless society.
I don't believe human beings are naturally anything.
All we are is adaptable.
But like, what is the shape of water?
It's the shape of whatever container you put it in.
And what's the shape of human soul?
Well, whatever culture, for the most part, whatever philosophy, whatever religion, whatever country you happen to be born into, well, lo and behold, that's what you usually end up being.
So, you know, the human nature argument doesn't work.
If people naturally desire power over others, then you can't have a government.
Now, what you can say is that if you want a different kind of society, what you can say, if you want to reject that, is you can say, well, currently human beings naturally desire power over others.
But in my new, future, fantastic society, people will be completely different.
If human beings naturally desire power over others, then having a centralized computer system that distributes goods to everyone, which is the Zeitgeist Plan, clearly won't work.
Because the programmers and the people in charge of the computers and so on are simply going to use that power, the power literally of life and death over others.
If you give people resources, they live.
If you don't, they die.
If human beings are naturally greedy and dominant and exploitive and abusive and they want power over others, then you can't have a central computer system programmed by and run by people.
Because they'll just use that power to dominate others.
So, if you have any kind of central planning, then you can't make the argument that people will be naturally evil and or naturally want power over others.
Because with central planning comes great, the ultimate power, the power in life or death, over hundreds of millions of people.
Right?
So, you have to, if you're going to have a central plan kind of society, a socialist or communist or centrally planned style society, then you have to say, That you're going to have some kind of new human being.
Now that new human being will not desire power over others.
Right?
The communist new man or the fascist talked about the new man.
Nietzsche of course talked about the Ubermensch or the man who sort of surmounts other men, over leaps himself and so on.
So you can have a sort of central planned authoritarian style society if You can have a new kind of human being who doesn't desire power over others.
Aha!
But if you can have a new society where people no longer desire power over others, Then you can have a stateless free market society because people will be kind, they will be generous, they won't exploit, they won't impose, they won't bully, they won't abuse, they won't exercise unjust power over others.
So let's have a free society where everybody trades freely and so on.
So this is what I needed to set up ahead of time and I couldn't do it directly.
So what I said was, I said right at the moment we don't have a free market.
Right?
We don't have a free market at the moment for three reasons.
One, government controls money.
Two, government controls education.
And three, governments have severely disrupted families.
The rise of single moms and just all the mess that's going on in the family at the moment.
I made these cases for very explicit reasons.
So money is the fundamental to almost all transactions in what's left of the free market.
If the government controls it, then there's no free market because everything that is to do with trade, unless it's pure barter, which is really, really tiny.
is to do with fiat currency.
Again, Bitcoin and so on are accepted, but the vast majority, and certainly to live in society to pay your taxes, you need government fiat money.
So it's not a free market.
The government controls education, which means the nature of human beings is incredibly shaped by 12 plus years of government indoctrination, and of course if you go through government Licensed and controlled schools, universities.
So you can have 20, 20 plus years of government indoctrination, which means that you're going to be a particular kind of human being.
The number of children who both parents work or the single mom works there in daycare and so on, this is because of the fundamental disruption of the family through the state.
And so human nature is controlled really fundamentally at the moment by the government.
Now, because human nature is controlled by the government, or shaped, I would say, by the government, you cannot use the human nature argument to oppose a stateless society.
I always understand that.
The government creates, to a large degree, who we are, right, by severely disrupting the family, by educating the children, and by controlling so much of our financial decisions by money, right?
So you can't say, well, people are just naturally materialistic, and they buy more stuff than they want, and they go into debt, and so on, and therefore you can't have a free society because this is the way people are, because people's desire to consume in the present rather than save for the future is conditioned by inflation, interest rates, the money supply, and so on.
They may not know it consciously, but they do it that way, right?
When interest rates go down, which the government wants to maintain, Make the interest rates go down to pay less money on the national debt.
When interest rates go down it encourages consumption in the present and discourages, in fact punishes, savings.
Because you can't get any money in interest from your savings account but inflation is running 5, 10 or 15 or 20 percent a year depending on how you measure it.
And so because the government supplies money, because the government controls money, because the government oversupplies money, People are materialistic and they consume more in the present than defer for the future, right?
So you can't say anything about human nature if the government controls people's adult choices through the money supply and if the government controls people's development through the disruption of the family, which means most parents will then put their children into government-licensed, government-sponsored, government-controlled daycares.
And then into government schools.
So you can't use any human nature argument against a free society when the government has created people as they are.
So you can't say, look around a government society and then say, well, people are not fit for freedom.
Freedom won't work because this is how people are.
Well, people haven't grown up in a state of freedom.
Right?
It's like saying, this guy in prison lacks initiative, because he's never gone out and started his own business.
Therefore, people in prison will never be entrepreneurs.
Well, the fact that he's in prison is why he hasn't started his own business, right?
So, the reason I started with these three arguments was to eliminate the human nature argument and hopefully to eliminate any comparisons between a future free society and our current existing society.
Do you understand?
Like, if you say, slaves can't be free because they're lazy and illiterate.
You're confusing cause and effect, right?
I mean, slaves are lazy, quote, lazy and illiterate because they're slaves.
Why are they lazy?
Because they don't get to keep any of the portion of their labor.
Why are they illiterate?
Well, why would you bother learning how to read?
And who would bother teaching you how to read?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, that's a fundamental logical fallacy.
When you say, well, the future can't be different from the present.
Because everything in the present determines the future.
Well, the whole point is that everything in the present is based upon specific conditions in the present.
If you change those conditions, you change what is possible, right?
So that's why I made these sort of three arguments to begin with.
Now, Peter said, after I made this case, he said, OK, I absolutely agree with everything you stated.
And I was like, bah!
I mean, that's like I'm trying to land a punch.
He just knocks himself out.
So he agrees that we don't have a free market.
He agrees the government controls all the money, the government controls education, the government has severely disrupted families and therefore we have a state-produced human being.
Now, once he agrees with everything that is stated, and I take that very seriously, when somebody says, I agree with you.
Like, I don't do business on contracts, right?
I hire people for this show and I don't do business on contracts.
I do business on handshakes.
Because people's word is essential to me.
And my word is essential to me as well.
If I make a promise, I will move heaven and earth to keep that promise or tell you if and why I can't and whatever I'm going to do about that.
So when someone says to me, I agree with everything you stated, I take that very seriously.
And I assume that the other person takes it seriously, too.
Now, if you agree with me about these three points, then there's some things you can no longer do in the debate.
Or you lose.
So you can no longer quote contemporary examples and relate them to a future society.
Because he's agreed that we don't have anything close to a free market.
And that human nature is corrupted by statism, therefore he cannot use any contemporary examples to talk about the free market, and he cannot use any arguments from human nature.
And so once I've blocked him from using any contemporary examples, and once I've blocked him from using the human nature argument, then I've kind of won the debate.
So for me, the truth has won, the audience has won, so he says, I agree with everything you stated.
Now, people seem to get upset with me for interrupting.
Well, it's a debate, people.
Come on.
I mean, grow up.
A debate is where you go back and forth.
A debate is not, he gives a speech and I give a speech.
A debate is back and forth.
And Peter himself said at the very beginning, you're free to interject throughout this.
He said to me, you're free to interject throughout this.
So, if you don't like me interjecting, then you obviously would be upset with Peter for making that the standard.
And of course I did wait for a while at the beginning for Peter to take a breath or ask me a question, or give me a chance to respond, but he really didn't, so I ended up having to barge in or whatever, right?
But, sorry, I mean, this is not him giving a speech.
When I interrupt, this is what he asked me to do.
So, get upset with him.
Now, what he says, what he said here, he said, so the first, let me just move aside so I can put this up, so you can put this up on the screen here.
So the first issue that jumps to me, says Peter, is what I call the denial of principle continuum.
Now, just to begin with, it's usually not a great idea to invent your own words.
There's lots of words around logic and fallacies and all that.
You don't really need to invent your own language because that makes it very hard for people to respond.
Like if I said I'm right because of the principle of I mean, that would be really hard for you to respond, because you've got to explain it all, we've got to use that same term.
So when people invent terms for logical fallacies, that's usually not a good sign.
So he said, the first issue that jumps to me is what I call the denial-of-principle continuum.
It's a continuum fallacy or a matter-of-degree fallacy.
Okay, so fallacy, of course, is a term to describe errors in logic.
This is the argument that presents two seemingly separate conditions that in truth cannot be considered distinct as the same principle actually exists behind both of them.
For example, the State, which of course I agree with your basic criticisms as far as facts, but the problem is that there's an erroneous separation of behaviour and the creation of the State from the underlined philosophical principles inherent and intense, I should say, inherent to the historical premise of the market system.
Now, my alarm bells began to go off a little bit here because he's using the word fallacy and erroneous and so on, but he's not actually showing me how I'm incorrect.
This is usually not a good sign.
When somebody says, well, your argument is subject to You know, the Martian android hairstyle fallacy, and then they never actually go to tell me what that fallacy is, then what they've done is they've stuck a label called fallacy to my arguments without actually proving it.
This is a sophist trick.
It's really unworthy of anybody who considers himself an intelligent and good communicator.
If you're going to tell someone that they're wrong, then you need to show someone that they're wrong.
Just saying that they're wrong, I mean, the fact that I would even need to say this is ridiculous, but just saying that someone is wrong It doesn't prove anything.
It only proves that you don't know what it means to say that someone's wrong.
Later in the debate, and we'll get to this, I said to him, I said, stop telling me that I'm wrong and show me that I'm wrong.
Stop calling my arguments a truncated frame of reference.
Stop calling my arguments simplistic, fallacious, and so on.
Tell me how they are.
Otherwise, you're just using an ad hominem against the argument.
So then he says, we'll put this back up here and move over a bit, he says, the market necessity of competition, self-preservation, differential advantage and self-interest does not and would never stop at the traditionally assumed edge of the market board game.
Is that monopoly?
Sorry, let me start again.
The market necessity of competition, self-preservation, differential advantage and self-interest does not and would never stop at the traditionally assumed edge of the market board game, if you will, where the referees stand.
It's like having a football game and assuming everyone is going to stay within the lines.
It's not like that when you consider what's at risk.
The state and its creation and its use for as a tool for differential advantage is simply another strategy or tool in the gaming strategy of competition.
I think that's an incredibly important point.
Now, point is one of these words, like, I don't know what it means.
I mean, you either make an argument with reason and evidence or you just make a statement.
If you make a statement, it's irrelevant to a debate.
A statement is irrelevant to a debate.
The only thing that matters in a debate is the reason and evidence you bring to your argument.
But let's look at this.
Okay, the necessity of competition.
Okay, competition.
There's no necessity for competition.
The market says, don't initiate force against other people.
That's all it says.
And you own your body and the effects of your actions.
Right?
And Peter accepted that because he said, Steph, your arguments or your position or your videos, alright?
So he accepts that I own myself and the effects of my actions.
And he talked about my documentary and my perspective and my videos and my channel.
So he knows that he owns himself and the effects of his actions.
That's taken for granted in a debate because you address the other person's arguments, which you know is an effect of their self-ownership.
So there's no necessity for competition.
There is competition a lot of times in the market.
But there's much more cooperation than there is competition.
The market is 99.999% Cooperation, right?
So when I would go up against another business person in a bid, one of us would win and one of us would lose.
But I cooperated with the printers to use the printing service.
I cooperated with the building owners to heat and service my building.
I cooperated with the car manufacturer to get the car to go and drive the proposal over.
I mean, you get it, right?
I cooperated with the notebook manufacturer for my computer and so on.
So it's mostly competition.
And then there's little bits of things where there is mostly cooperation, little bits of competition and so on.
So, but competition is not a violation of the non-aggression principle, right?
If you both, if two guys want to date a girl and she chooses one or the other, there's no violation of the non-aggression principle there, right?
Self-preservation.
The mock necessity of self-preservation.
I don't understand that at all.
I mean, if you lose a business contract, you don't die.
If your business goes out of business, you don't die.
So it's not self-preservation.
I don't really understand that.
Differential advantage.
I think that means the division of labor.
Specialization.
I don't know.
Then again, it's not a necessity.
It's just kind of what happens in a marketplace.
There's no necessity for it.
Like, there's a gun to your head.
You've got to do it or whatever, right?
It just generally tends to be more efficient.
And self-interest.
Well, okay, I don't know how self-interest is only related to the market.
I don't know how competition is only related to the market.
And I don't know how differential advantage is only related to the market.
Anyway, but he doesn't really make the case for that.
So he says, the market necessity of all these things does not and would never stop at the traditionally assumed edge of the market board game.
Well, he's just making a statement.
And I don't even know what stops.
What is the edge of the market board game?
What is he talking about?
I don't know.
He said, it's like having a football game and assuming everyone is going to stay within the lines.
Oh, it takes a musician and day trader to make such a bad analogy.
In football, really the whole point is to not stay inside the lines.
You get the football, you go to the end, and you make the touchdown, and you do your little dance.
You make a little love, get down tonight.
Ow!
But, oh, maybe a little more coffee.
I think that would help.
I'm out.
Slap the IV in.
So, having a football game, assuming everyone's going to stay within the lines, well, you don't stay within the lines.
And if he meant stay within the rules, well, yes, you do stay within the rules in a football game, otherwise you lose.
Right?
When you play tennis, nobody gets to serve three times.
I mean, assuming, nobody gets to serve twice if it goes in, right?
You don't get to use a howitzer, you don't get to get giant springy shoes, and so on.
You don't get to have a robot behind you hitting the balls if you miss them.
So, yes, you play within the lines, you play within the rules.
If you're going to use a sports metaphor, A, use it correctly, and B, understand that everybody in sports really does play within the rules, otherwise they lose, right?
You bend someone's finger back in MMA and you lose, right?
So anyway.
So it just doesn't make any sense.
And again, it's a statement, not any kind of proof.
Now the state and its creation and its use as a tool for differential advantage.
So what he's saying is that there were all these capitalist Corporations or these capitalist entities, these free market entities in a completely free society and they got together to create the state and to use it to dominate each other.
Is this historically completely false?
Anybody who believes that, I don't even know what to say to you.
The idea that there was this perfect free market and out of it emerged a state is just not even worth discussing.
And then he says, so even if you reset everything right now, and I had this conversation with another friend of mine recently that was trying to describe this circumstance, and they said if we just got all this stuff in place it would start to amalgamate and it would change things.
I guess this falls into the category of logical proof because my friend said it.
I mean, there's not any kind of argument.
He says that even if you reset everything right now, including a lot of the central bank issues you just talked about, removing the so-called state Again, once somebody says so-called, I don't know what they're arguing.
Are they saying it's not really the state?
I mean, are you changing the word?
I don't know.
He said, removing the so-called state, elements of the state would gravitate back towards force and coercion as you define it, regardless, because the principal economic observation of resource scarcity and the game theory of competition remains.
In this worldview, we'll always justify the need to maintain the advantage over other producers and groups by whatever means necessary, as history has proven.
Well, you see, he can't use any historical arguments because the free market as I have defined it has never existed.
So, he can't use contemporary examples, he can't use any past examples, right?
And so, the moment he starts talking about a state, he's talking about the past, which is not the free market.
And so, when he said that he agreed with me in the beginning, he was saying that because he couldn't find a way to disagree with me because you can't say the government doesn't control money, you can't say the government doesn't control education, you can't say the government hasn't disrupted the family.
So, as history has proven, it's just another one of these things that people say.
So he says, in other words, if you have a society that isn't structurally reinforcing the idealized behavior, it's not going to prevail as dominant.
This is stated because I hear you often speak of sort of ethical concepts within the structure, and anyone that's of course dealing with philosophy is obviously thinking about what appropriate behavior really is, which as an aside, I derive strictly from physical science.
I threw out my books on general philosophy a long time ago because they're dated.
They are antiquated.
They don't have an actual physical reference for the language and the concepts that are putting forward, but that's for another subject.
Well, I mean, yeah, throwing out general philosophy, I mean, throwing out your Aristotle and the three laws of logic is really not a very good thing to do if you want to be taken seriously as a thinker.
And this idea that this kind of socialism, this kind of central planning, that it's scientific, this is just an old communist argument, right?
That communism is based upon scientific principles and science, science, science.
It's just the general left, worship and materialism, hostility towards religion, which is then displaced into the ultimate authority of central planning.
Now, when he said that there's selfishness and exploitation in the market, I pointed out that in a free market your customers are with you voluntarily and if you don't please your customers then they'll go, they'll leave, they'll cancel their contracts, they'll go elsewhere, they'll never come to you in the first place if you get a bad reputation.
We try cheating people on eBay and see how long Your career there lasts.
It simply won't last.
You have to please your customers.
You have to give them what they want in a voluntary environment.
And then he responded with a personal anecdote.
Now, try to draw general principles from personal anecdotes is the definition of racism and bigotry, right?
So if I said, okay, so let me get into a story.
So he basically said, well, for five months I wasn't paid by my production company.
And he said, that's the true face of the market economy, my friend.
And he said, because they didn't pay him, and he hung around for five months.
Why you do that, I don't know, but he did.
And he said, well, he couldn't get his money back because they were in bankruptcy, that some guy who was working there was on his visa, and the visa was going to get taken away.
Actually, I guess I can get back to the middle now.
And the visa was going to get taken away, and the production company was a corporation, which meant that you couldn't get the money back from the owners.
And I pointed out, I said, well, First of all, bankruptcy proceedings, I think, are pretty bad, and they're run by the government.
Secondly, work visas are all run by the government.
And thirdly, corporations are illegal fictions invented by the government for the protection of the capitalists, the sort of company owners and so on, right?
And taking one example and generalizing it to everyone, it's kind of mental, right?
I mean, it's like me saying, well, I was cheated once by a black guy.
So all black guys are thieves.
You understand that?
A red-haired woman got angry at me once.
All red-headed women have rage issues.
That's obviously a leap I don't even need to explain, just how irrational that is.
But saying, I wasn't paid by my production company, and that's the true face of the market economy.
That is the market as a whole.
And of course, he can't use any examples because he's already agreed with me that what we have is not even close to a free market.
It's not even close to a free market.
It's like saying that a guy three days away from dying from lung cancer is fine because his toe doesn't have cancer.
Right?
So, he can't use any examples from anything that exists, from anything to do with history, from anything to do with existing conditions.
And as I pointed out, everything that he was complaining about was actually run by the state and not by the free market.
And again, that doesn't really It didn't really matter, right?
And, I mean, his mom, I think, worked for Child Protective Services.
His dad worked for the post office.
Like, he doesn't really have much experience in the free market, right?
Trading from home, you don't have any customers, right?
You don't know.
This is what I keep saying to people.
Like, if you ever run a company, I had the first guy's debate.
The guy called in and he said, this, that, and the other about the market, selfish, greedy, exploitative.
And he worked at NASA.
And I said, well, have you ever been an entrepreneur?
And he said, well, I self-published a book once.
No.
No, no, no.
Has your income ever been dependent upon pleasing people in the free market?
Or what's left of the free market?
I mean, mine is.
I take only donations.
Right?
I mean, I sell my books simply because it costs me money to produce them, but I get very little in the way of that.
It's all reliant upon donations.
So I have to please my customers.
I have to make them happy, while at the same time challenging them enough that it's worth listening.
Right?
So it's a really delicate balance.
And I think I'm doing a fairly good job at it.
And by the way, I say to people, the poor will be taken care of in a free society because people are quite charitable, therefore I rely on people's charity to produce this show.
That's quite a conscious decision I made very early on, to test the principles.
I would not be keen to advocate an anarchic society, a free society, where the poor are helped through charity, if I wasn't willing to submit to the risk of that myself, where I also rely on charity, without even providing tax receipts or anything.
I'm not a registered charity, for obvious reasons.
Look at the IRS scandal in the US.
So, he just, you know, it's like, I don't mean to overuse the black metaphor, but it's like, I'm a black guy, and I grew up in a black community, and I have obviously extended black family and friends, I really know the black culture, and this guy comes in, who grew up in an all-white neighborhood, who has no black friends, comes in and tells me all about the black experience.
It just is kind of, kind of grating.
You know, if you've not been an entrepreneur, if you've not, like, don't tell me all about the market if you've never been in it.
Because then everything that you have just comes from books and prejudice and bias and extrapolation of personal disasters and all that.
It's just not, I don't know, just not rational.
So, now let me move over.
So then he says, He said, there are two words I hear constantly you speak of in your community and in your general philosophical treatments.
One is coercion, the other is voluntarism.
Both of these terms, while accurate in your narrow use within economic and behavioral theory, are in truth irrevocably short-sighted when you compare it to the spectrum of real-life patterns and possibilities regarding the most relevant underlying component principles of those terms.
Let me give you an example, as I know, that might have sounded enormously extensive and intellectual.
Actually, it just sounded like bullshit to me.
You can call it extensive and intellectual if you want.
But this is, these little jabs, this is what kind of pissed me off after a while, right?
And not because I felt insulted, it's just, come on, don't be lazy, right?
So, both these terms, while accurate in your narrow use, what does narrow use mean?
What is that?
I'm squeezing through a chasm here?
Did I fall in a rock chasm?
I've got to cut my own arm off?
What the hell does that mean?
In truth, irrevocably short-sighted.
Well, what is a short-sighted principle?
2 and 2 makes 5.
Is that short-sighted, long-sighted, near-sighted, or is it seeing spots because it's at a Madonna concert?
I don't know.
But you see, nothing is being disproven here.
It's just adjectives are being stirred into the mix in a kind of poison-the-well, ad hominem-against-the-argument kind of stuff, right?
So he said, what's coercion?
He asked me for a definition.
I said, it's the initiation of force.
One sentence definition.
And he said, which you can contrast when I asked him to define structural violence later, so he said, so under the surface it's about imposing, it's about controlling, it's about abuse, it's about violence, it's about induced suffering.
Now, this is really kind of sleazy, right, frankly.
I mean, so he asks me what's coercion.
I say it's the initiation of force.
And then he says, well under the surface it's about this, it's about that, it's about the other, it's about induced suffering.
That's not what I said.
Said it's the initiation of force.
I didn't say it was about induced suffering.
What the hell does that mean?
I mean, surgery is induced suffering.
That's not violence.
If you've got to get a tooth pulled, that's induced suffering.
That's not violence because you consent to it for the sake of your oral health or whatever, right?
So he takes my definition and then he says, well, I'm just going to add whatever I want to it and use the phrase under the surface, like that means anything, right?
So then anything which inflicts suffering is the initiation of force.
So I guess if I'm addicted to alcohol and I quit, I get the detox, I get DTs or whatever, delirium tremens or whatever they are, that's induced suffering.
So any kind of suffering is violence, and this of course opens the gateway to hell known as structural violence which we'll get to in a sec.
He said, I want to ask a question then, because it's really about resolving suffering at its core.
It all becomes moot when it comes to the system process.
In the context of economics, I see your point, but let's get down to the core of this.
And I was saying, well, the infliction of suffering.
I mean, if I ask a woman out and she says no, and I really wanted to go out with her, I suffer.
If a woman breaks up with me, that's suffering.
Is that violence?
Well, of course not.
So, he took my definition of coercion, called the initiation of force.
Now, the initiation of force does not suit his purposes, so he redefines it as the infliction of suffering.
Which is not what I said.
At all.
It has nothing to do with what I said.
And then he said, well, if you've got 200 people dying of a disease versus 200,000 people dying of a disease, I think he meant a different disease, then obviously you're going to focus on the 200,000 people and so on.
And I don't know what the point of that was.
And I said, well, I don't see how that would necessarily follow.
Right?
So if it were true That only the most common diseases would ever get donations or ever get public attention, then I guess everybody would be focusing on ischemic heart disease, because that's the number one killer in the world.
And there'd be no money for anything else.
But of course, every single disease down to tiny fractions of the population gets funding, because people have personal stakes, personal issues and so on.
It doesn't necessarily follow that you're always going to.
This is the fallacy of central planning.
You look at these two numbers and you say, well of course we're going to focus on the 200,000.
Not necessarily.
What if the 200 happen to be the research team?
Again, I know it sounds nitpicky, but this is Socratic questioning.
You put forward a principle, somebody finds where that principle doesn't apply, and you have to refine the principle.
That's natural, right?
So, Alcibiades, I think, says to Socrates that the best life is a life of happiness, of physical pleasure.
And Socrates says, well, when you have an itch and you scratch it, it feels great.
So what you're saying is the best life is to have a perpetual itch, which you're perpetually scratching, and that's the best life.
That obviously doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, right?
And this idea, as we go back to the minute for a second, because this is a very important point.
Hopefully the others have been too, but this idea that we sacrifice the one for the many is complete and total utter nonsense.
And the people who put it forward, let me tell you what to say to the people who put this forward.
It's a really repulsive doctrine.
So do you know that Your organs, when you die, if you donate your organs, you will save the lives of on average seven people.
Sometimes it'll be more, sometimes it'll be less.
But on average, you will save the lives of seven people when you die.
What that means is that you are selfishly condemning seven people to death simply by staying alive.
Let me say that again.
By killing yourself right now in front of a hospital with an organ donor card signed and sealed, go cut your own throat in front of a hospital with the organ donor cards signed and sealed, you will be saving the lives of seven people.
In other words, the sacrifice of one life saves the life of seven.
Now how many people who talk about self-sacrifice and the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or the one, how many of them Say, and my next plan is to implement this philosophy with integrity by going and killing myself in front of a hospital with a signed organ donor card so that I can save the lives of seven people, sacrifice myself and save the lives of seven people.
Every breath you draw is another seven people who die because you are selfishly hanging on to your own organs, you bastard.
So the people who say, well, we've got these numbers and we'll sacrifice the few to take care of the many, and we'll allow 200 people to die to save 200,000.
It's all nonsense.
Just call their bluff.
Just call their bluff.
Say, whoa, I'm so sorry.
I mean, obviously, you are in a rush.
You've got to get down to the hospital and kill yourself and go save those seven people at the expense of your own life, because seven is a bigger number than one last time I checked.
And they'll say, well, that's not right.
Right?
I mean, it's all just mad.
It's not how people live, right?
It's not how people do.
All right, so let's go back to the same frame.
So Peter gives an example.
This is around structural violence and so on.
So he says, she's a single mother, this woman.
She gets fired from a job and it wasn't her fault.
She was fired.
They just had to downsize for whatever purpose.
Basic market correction.
She's unable to take care of her child.
The child can't.
She can't afford health care.
She can't afford to have a babysitter.
She deals with whatever she can, and she's loosely been able to take care of this child because of the pressures around her.
She doesn't have the means to do so.
Okay, why is she a single mother?
I mean, again, the number of women who are widows and mothers is completely tiny, right?
So she's a single mother because she chose an idiot or an asshole or a deadbeat to have a kid with, or some guy she doesn't like.
She gets fired from... So that wasn't her fault.
She gets fired from her job, and it wasn't her fault she was fired.
Well, what does that mean?
Why would she get fired if she did nothing wrong?
If she's profitable to the company, they will keep her.
Right?
Oh, they just had to downsize for whatever basic market correction.
Okay, so what that means is that she's Not able to cover her costs.
The company's not able to cover her costs.
So great!
So she will go and get another job.
Why not?
Why wouldn't she get another job?
Oh, the whole market is going down.
Well then, of course, we're back to the Federal Reserve and the Austrian theory of the market cycle and all that.
So anyway.
But why hasn't she saved her money, right?
I mean you need to have at least six to twelve months of expenses sitting in the bank because stuff can happen in life, right?
The horse and buggies can go out of business because some idiot invents the car, right?
So you've got to save.
Oh, she doesn't have enough money to save?
Well, then why did she become a mom if she doesn't have enough money, if she doesn't have any stability?
Where's her family?
Why doesn't she move in with her family?
Why doesn't that... Why don't her friends take care of her?
Why isn't she part of a friendly society?
Why isn't she part of a church where people can take care of her?
Why does nobody like her enough to put themselves out?
I mean, look, I'm earning a living of sorts by doing this stuff on the Internet.
People like me enough and like what I'm doing enough to send me money.
Why can't she do...
Has she not been generous to other people?
Has she not helped out other people so that they will help her out in return?
Where is their social net?
Right?
I mean, there's so many things that just invent these scenarios, right?
Bad things can happen, but these things don't just happen in isolation.
And then he said that the major cause of divorce is finance.
It's financial, right?
Problems with finances.
I mean, he gave something from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
I mean, it's not that it's wrong because of this.
It's a complete left-wing hack job of an organization.
I mean, they're the guys who designated some men's rights groups as hate crime groups.
It's just not a very credible source for me.
But I did look this stuff up, and so I found this quote.
In an article by Ron Lieber of the New York Times in 2009, the odds of a marriage ending in divorce due to finances is approximately 45%.
Many of the reasons behind this high rate are the lack of discussions couples have before they get married regarding their views on finances, what debt they're bringing into the marriage, experiences they have with budgets, what they envision their financial future to be, and many more.
In other words, it's not because they're broke, it's because they have dissimilar attitudes.
towards money.
One's a saver, one's a spender, one wants to consume now, one wants to consume later.
What they choose to spend money on, it could be some people choose to spend money on stuff, other people choose to spend money on experiences.
So it's true that there were financial conflicts that resulted in divorce, but it's not because they were broke, it's because they disagreed about money, which is not what his point was.
Another one, a recent national survey found, this is the one I found with the largest sample size.
A recent national survey found that the most common reason given for divorce was a lack of commitment, 73% said this was a major reason.
Other significant reasons included too much arguing, 56%.
56% infidelity, 55%.
Marrying too young, 46%.
Unrealistic expectations, 45%.
Lack of equality in the relationship, 44%.
Lack of preparation for marriage, 41%.
And abuse, 29%.
People gave more than one reason why it adds.
Now when I brought this up, it was surprising to me because I know a little bit about marriage and its demise.
So I did a quick look and I said, well, there's some facts that seem to contradict, right?
And then Peter said, and let's put this up here, Peter said, no, facts don't contradict anything.
It's kind of a remarkable statement to make.
And he didn't correct himself, and I don't believe he's corrected himself since.
Facts, he said, no, facts don't contradict anything.
And what he means by that is it means that his theory is impervious to evidence.
So, facts don't contradict anything.
My beliefs, my perspective, my arguments cannot be tainted by facts.
This is fundamentally a platonic ideal, which we can talk about perhaps another time.
He says, you can nitpick about certain issues all you want, but you're distracting from the actual structural violence issue that I'm trying to talk about.
Now, he actually brought out facts to support his argument.
So he brought up facts to support his argument, which is fine.
So his argument was supported by facts, and when I brought up counterexamples of facts, He said facts are irrelevant.
But if facts are irrelevant, why would you bring up facts to support your argument?
If facts are opposed to your argument, then you need to figure that out.
Same thing happened with Tom Willicott when I debated him.
And he said that private insurance companies would have a huge incentive to deny claims made by their customers.
And I pointed out that the government, Medicare and Medicaid, deny far more claims than private insurance companies do.
And again, he just completely ignores that.
The same thing when I debated Jake DiLiberto, and he said that the CIA was not taken by surprise with the fall of Russia.
And then I read a very clear article where they said the CIA was completely surprised by the fall of Russia.
People just ignore it and move on, right?
But if you're going to bring facts to the argument, then contrary facts can't just be brushed away.
I mean, you can do that, but it just means that you don't know what you're doing when it comes to making an argument.
So he said, so some of the issues in this conversation, in the sake of argument, you just, you run to do a little internet search and try to find something, you debunk something I've just said, which is corollary to what I'm actually pointing out.
And now, of course, my point was that, let's say that he's right, that financial stress restraint is a major cause of marital breakup.
Well, then the biggest single thing that most couples have to pay for is taxes.
So with no government, with a stateless society, you don't have taxes.
So that solves that problem.
The other thing, of course, is that the American GDP at the moment is about $15 trillion.
very credible economists have put together arguments that say if the regulatory burden on American business had remained at the levels that it was in the post-war period, right after the Second World War, then the national income would be $53 trillion, right, or more than three times, right?
So basically, you know, people would have, instead of the average salary being like $40,000 or $50,000 or $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, depending on where you are, it would be like $90,000, $120,000, $150,000.
Well, that would go a long way towards eliminating financial strain within marriage.
But that's a government-caused problem which the free market would solve.
Now, he kept saying the free market engages in mass murder.
I asked him three times, I believe, to clarify that.
I never got an answer.
He kept pointing out how the free market creates inequality.
Now, for that to be the case, then as central planning and government coercion grew, inequality should diminish, right?
But the reality is that as the market has diminished, inequality has risen, right?
I mean, the inequality between Ivan Denisovich and Boris Yeltsin would be enormous, right?
In other words, the inmate of a Soviet gulag in the head of the Politburo.
It would be a huge difference, right?
So in totalitarianism, there are massive differences in equality.
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention as well.
It was financial strain that caused marital breakups.
When society was poorer, when GDP was lower, then there should have been more marital breakups.
But that's not the case, unfortunately, for the theory.
Back in the post-war period, marriages were extraordinarily stable, particularly in the black community.
You know, the average household income was, you know, many times smaller than it is now.
As wealth increased in the 70s, divorce went up like 300%.
And so as wealth increased, divorce increased in general.
So the idea that somehow financial problems are the root cause of divorce is disproven by this sort of reality.
So let's get to this.
I'm almost done, I believe.
Not quite.
Oh, I'm off screen.
Dear God.
Let's be professional, shall we?
So he said, so the free market, I said, so the free market creates inequality.
Is that right?
Peter said, that's correct.
I said, so when cell phones were first introduced, they cost about $10,000 each.
Now you can get a cell phone, like a burner cell phone, for like 20 or 30 bucks.
That is somehow creating inequality in the distribution of cell phones in society.
And he said, that's a completely arbitrary example, because you're taking one instance of a particular service.
I said, it's not a real world example, because he kept talking about, well, I live in the real world, and I deal with the real world, and I deal with facts.
I said, it's not a real world example.
And Peter said, oh, it's a real world example, but it's completely contrary.
Well, sure, that's why I'm bringing it up.
You're saying the free market creates inequality, and I'm pointing out that Constantly driving the price of things down creates more equality.
Far more people have cell phones now than when they were first introduced.
The distribution of cell phones in society is much more equal.
And he said it's a real world example but it's completely contrary.
It's just completely absent of the point I'm trying to make in the broad statistical view.
So counterexamples can be brushed aside as irrelevant to the point that he's trying to make.
So he'll bring up empirically testable facts like does the free market creating inequality and then when information is showed that contradicts those facts he just says it's it's irrelevant because it doesn't prove my point my point i wish i could do that too anyway um so he said i'm speaking of pure statistics at one point oh nice let's put this back up sorry about the mic noise you He said, I'm speaking of pure statistics.
I'm speaking of research that's been done.
I'm speaking of the broad view.
I'm not speaking of the fact that, yes, there are more material possessions in the hands, and yes, and I said, dude, when I give you like five examples in a row, you can't just dismiss them all and say you're speaking of some broad view, right?
I mean, that's just substituting an abstraction for an example.
What I mean by that is you're saying the theory can completely survive information contrary to the theory.
And in fact, information contrary to the theory, which is supposed to be based on examples, information contrary to the theory is an annoyance.
Well, I guess it is, but that's not the point, whether it's annoying or not.
He said, no, because you're deviating from the broad concept, the broad statistical point I'm trying to make.
But I'm not deviating.
The facts are deviating from the point you're trying to make.
I'm not veering off.
I'm presenting information that's counter to the point you're trying to make.
He says, I agree with all of those points.
I'm not denying that.
I'm not denying the fact that, for example, the poor of the United States are much better off than the wealthy many hundreds of years ago, in material terms.
And that's another subject that I could go on a tangent on, but to stay within the points I'm trying to make here.
So, yes, you are right, but that's not the point I want to make, which is the opposite of what you're saying.
And then there was another big change, right?
So he said, the market system's inherent fundamental premise is based on scarcity.
It's based on the assumption of having to gain at a possible, and I said, no, no, no, that's just incorrect.
The free market system is based on a respect of property rights and the non-initiation of force.
Scarcity is a fact of nature.
So, he says, the market system's inherent fundamental premise is based on scarcity.
And I said, no.
Scarcity is a fact of nature.
It's not the market's fault that we die.
It's not the market's fault that we can't be in two places at the same time.
It's not the market's fault that resources are finite and human desires are infinite.
And so he said, scarcity is a fact of nature.
He admitted to that.
Scarcity is a fact of nature.
And so the point of that is that if scarcity is a fact of nature, then he can no longer blame the free market for scarcity.
Scarcity, he says, is a fact of nature.
This must mean he must change his argument and no longer blame the free market for scarcity.
But he did.
And then I pointed out that the free market, by its very definition, is a voluntary win-win exchange.
You know, you trade freely and both people, if they're trading freely, expect to be better off because of that.
And we got into a fight at this point.
I don't really want to put the text up if you want, but he said, once again, staff, you blockade.
And this is the concept of truncated frames of reference that I was in the midst of.
So he's calling my frame of reference truncated.
I guess that's easier than disproving something.
In a pure vacuum and in the void of space, these theories hold true.
Again, this is a platonic argument.
In other words, you can have perfect circles when there's nothing else drawing influence.
The fact of the matter is, we live in a constant continuum of pressures.
And he said, let's jump into voluntarism if you don't mind.
I don't use the same simplistic view as you do, and this will explain why.
And I said, I would really appreciate it if you would stop calling my view truncated and simplistic.
If you prove that my view is truncated and simplistic, you don't need the damn adjectives.
If you don't prove it, then it's just bullshit ad hominem, right?
So just refrain, if I can ask that intellectual respect, refrain from constantly insulting my position.
I don't believe I've constantly insulted yours.
And then, of course, he said, well, I'm sorry you were insulted and so on.
It's like, well, it is insulting to the position, right?
To say, well, you've got this limited, truncated frame of reference and it's simplistic and this and that.
These are not arguments.
They're just statements.
Lazy.
And he's saying the trade is coercive, voluntary trade is coercive.
I said, that seems to me like saying lovemaking is rape.
It just seems like you're just jamming two opposite things together and calling them the same.
And he's saying, because the act of trade itself is coercive.
I'm not saying that the, and I said, and how is the act of trade coercive?
And he said, because people have to trade in the system to survive unnecessarily.
They have to do something.
I don't really know.
You don't have to trade.
I mean, you don't have to go live in the woods.
You can go grow your own food.
You can do, I mean, you don't have to trade with anybody.
Nobody puts a gun to your headset and go to the market.
People just do it because it's efficient.
Because it makes sense to specialize.
Because it doesn't make sense for Wilt Chamberlain or whoever, some famous sports figure, who's still playing, I guess.
It doesn't make sense for these people to do their own typing.
They pay for other people to do that.
It doesn't make sense for Madonna to hang her own lights in her concert.
It's a division of labor.
It's what people want to do for the most part.
Nobody forces you to do it.
It just kind of makes sense, right?
Now here's another interesting challenge when it comes to changing the world.
Now if you're going to change the world, particularly if you want to change people's ethics, You either can convince them using reason and evidence or you kind of have to impose your will using bullying, domination, force, you name it.
And so one of the great challenges of people who want to improve the human condition is to find ways to explain it in terms and using language that the average person of average intelligence can follow and understand.
And if you get overly technical, if people can't understand what you're saying, but they have to do the right thing, they have to change, then you basically have to force them.
Right?
So you appeal to reason or you impose through force.
So let's put our word salad chef on the spot.
Peter Joseph, this is a quote from the debate.
And you can find things that I've said, you can take sentences that I've said, and you can take paragraphs that I've said.
The transcript has been done.
It's available at freedomainradio.com.
I don't think it will sound like this.
So he said, imposed ethical assumptions, behaviors and values, moral codes like you would see in the Bible or in traditional ethos that you would find with philosophers that talk about right and wrong, moral ethical assumptions that stand in contrast to the psychology inherent and generated by the operant reinforcers of a given social structure simply will not endure over time.
In other words, it's a psychological law of human adaptation that we will behave in-game according with what is actually serving our interests most effectively in any given social order, especially when it comes to our survival and quality of life.
It's fundamental operant conditioning.
I didn't pick this in any particular fashion.
It's just one out of many.
It's hard to know what's being talked about here.
And this is really tragic.
Because if you want to change the world, you have to explain to people what it is that you want, and you have to explain it in a way that they can process, that they can understand, that they can appreciate.
It doesn't mean they can necessarily reproduce all of the arguments, right?
They don't have to be able to build the car, but they do have to be able to drive the car.
And if, as a communicator, as a moralist, you can't find ways of simply explaining what you want or what you think is the best to people.
If it's really confusing, like I'm not unversed in political science.
I mean, I took a full year of study under Charles Taylor, not the dictator, but one of the most preeminent Canadian political scientists.
I mean, I really do understand quite a bit about political science.
I cannot understand what is going on with this man's language.
And generally when people use big words and frustrate a lot and so on again, It's confusing to understand.
It's a lot of fog and smoke and mirrors.
It's usually because they're hiding something they don't want to talk about.
Maybe even from themselves.
And so simple, clear, direct language is really important when you want to change the world.
If you can't manage that, if you can't convince people, if you can't even convince a knowledgeable expert like myself of what it is you're talking about, let alone whether it's correct or not.
Then you can't change the opinions of the man in the street.
You can only appeal to his greed or his resentment.
You can only be a demagogue if you can't communicate clearly.
There's a reason why I wrote my first book on anarchy.
It was called Everyday Anarchy, which is basically the argument that anarchy is all around us.
Anarchy is based... no central authority tells you who you should marry or What job you should take and so on.
That voluntarism is all around us.
It's not a weird and foreign concept that's being imposed from outside from some intergalactic space council.
It's what we live and breathe every day.
So this is a way of helping people to understand, based on everyday examples, what anarchy is and how it works, and that it works for them.
So this is a way of communicating something to someone that hits them where they live, that they can connect with.
And if you come up with this fundamental operant conditionings and whatever, I mean, you simply can't convince even knowledgeable people, you certainly can't convince people on the street of average intelligence.
So how on earth are you going to achieve what you want to achieve?
Well, you'll have to use force if you can't convince, and you can't convince with word salads like this.
So, I mean it obviously was disappointing, it wasn't particularly disappointing in terms of what I was expecting, but I thought it was interesting.
Now let me theorize for a second here, and I appreciate your indulgence in this.
Because to me it's always interesting when people hold beliefs like this, Which, to me, are simply not thought through.
They're not self-critical, and they are immune to reason and evidence.
When they contradict themselves, it doesn't matter.
When they agree with their opponent's position, they reverse themselves a second or two later and don't even notice.
They say that it's really bad to jam two opposite things together and call them the same.
This principle of continuum fallacy, or whatever it was called.
Jams volunteerism and coercion together and calls them the same.
So when people have that, dare I say, truncated frame of reference, I think I proved it, so I can say that.
But when people have that perspective, my question is why?
I mean, there's no evidence that supports it.
Rationality that sustains it.
So why?
Why?
And why, you know, if you have a great, like if the zeitgeisters have a fantastic way of producing goods incredibly cheaply, just go do it and you will blow every manufacturing corporation in the market away.
If you have ways of producing cell phones for a penny, go produce cell phones for a penny.
Go sell them.
And by God, you'll rule the economic universe, so to speak, right?
I mean, customers will flock to you.
You don't need to wait.
If the central planning is so incredibly efficient, start a factory based on those principles and outproduce everyone.
You don't need to wait.
It's like me saying, I have a teleportation device.
But I have to wait until everyone makes 10 billion dollars a year in order to sell it.
Well, how much does it cost?
A penny.
Well, why wait?
Just go do it now!
I mean, if it's so efficient, people, I mean, you'll just go do it.
You don't need to wait.
The other thing, of course, is that I don't care about their central planning Marxist mommy robot fantasy.
That's fine.
I think it's a fantasy.
Maybe I'm completely wrong.
Maybe Mises and Salerno and all the people who talk about the price calculation problem, maybe we're all completely wrong.
Eh, so what?
So what?
Then go do it and set it up.
Go get your land and build your city.
If you live in paradise and nobody has to work and everyone's happy, I'll be the first to knock on the door and say, can I come into the baby oil soaked biodome?
I'd love to do that.
That would be fantastic.
To have this be some universal thing.
Just go do it.
Nobody in a free society is going to interfere with what you do.
Just go get the land and homestead the land if there's land available in the world.
I mean people only live on three percent of the American continent.
I mean there's tons of places.
You just go homestead the land and build your city and if it's paradise people will go in.
You don't need to force anyone to do it.
It's completely compatible with the non-initiation of force and contracts.
People can sign away their property if they want.
You don't need to wait for the whole world to join you in your belief system.
That's the great thing about a free society.
It's a constant series of experiments on the best way to organize things.
But people obviously have to be free to leave and people have to be free of coercion.
So you don't have the right to coerce other people to join your society.
You don't have the right to prevent them from leaving if they want.
I can't do that either.
Nobody can do that and be moral.
So I don't see where the need for arguments are.
I, I, fundamentally I didn't really see the need for the debate.
If he's saying, well, we should do X, it's like, okay, go do X.
I don't want to stop you.
Go, go, go do it.
I mean, God, you know, we should have engine oil flavored ice cream.
Okay, go, go make some engine oil ice cream.
It's like the, uh, the stone clouds gathering guy, you know, we can make light bulbs that Because there is one that lasted a hundred years, yes, and it's three watts, it's had a constant temperature, it's almost never been moved.
So, yeah, I guess if you want three watts, you know, half a candle, sure.
But it's like, go build those things then!
You don't need to have an argument, right?
The only reason I have debates with people is, I mean, Peter Joseph has not rejected the initiation of the use of force for his system.
And this is where the moral problem lies.
He wants to compel you into his system and prevent you from leaving.
And this is where the immorality of the system lies.
But anyway, it's complete nonsense.
But why would people be drawn to this?
I have a theory.
Maybe it's true.
I think there's evidence for it.
Maybe it's true.
You can tell me what you think.
I'm always struck when people talk about the Venus Project or Jacque Fresco or Al Fresco, I think his name is.
That they want things to be provided to them basically for free, that they want to not be subject to the market, to competition, to jobs, to salaries, to wages, to any of those things that they want to be free to explore and to play and to create and have things provided to them.
And they don't really know or understand.
They just say it's some algorithm, which is, you know, whatever, right?
They don't really know how it's provided, but they just want things provided to them.
And I think that there's a very real human yearning for that, and I understand where it comes from.
This is the world of a child.
Right?
This is the world of a child.
Children should not have to worry about competition, or wages, or salaries, or earning a living, or paying taxes, or any of those things.
They should be free to create and explore, and mommy and daddy provide them resources, and they don't really know where they come from, or how they're achieved, or...
What they are, they're just like, I want that toy.
Can we afford it?
Yes or no?
I don't really know what money is or where it comes from.
I mean, my daughter sets up pet stores to sell her toys.
You know, she'll charge a dime for something expensive and, you know, $5,000 for a tiddlywink piece.
Right?
So, in early childhood, this is what the world is.
It is this great city where stuff is provided for you and you don't have to worry about being an adult.
You don't have to worry about money and jobs and all that kind of stuff.
And if your needs as a toddler, to be shielded from the necessities of adult production and consumption and trade and property and paperwork and contracts, if your need as a child to be shielded from all of that is not met, you will continue to have this yearning and you will be unprepared.
for the adult life of trade and negotiation and all these kinds of things.
You'll have this yearning.
And you probably will want to recreate this fantasy where your needs will be met in the future in order to avoid the pain of your needs not having been met in the past.
So I would assume that the people who are drawn to this movement have this yearning for the recreation of a childhood state in the future.
And this is why it's so compelling.
And this is why reason and evidence don't matter.
Because it's an emotional yearning that they have.
I actually really sympathize with that emotional yearning.
I think it's terrible that their needs weren't met.
When they were babies and when they were toddlers.
Because what they're attempting to recreate is the tyranny that results from an attempt to heal a broken history through social engineering in the future.
And I think it's really tragic.
Socrates said, know thyself, the first commandment, know thyself.
Know why you're interested in particular arguments, in particular ideas.
Understand what motives have occurred for you.
Therapy, I argue, is essential for everybody who wants to talk about reason, truth, evidence, philosophy, ethics, society, whatever.
To make sure that your ideological perspective is not serving some unmet emotional need from your childhood.
Scientifically, this is how it works.
Most people have an emotional impulse which they then argue after the fact.
Now, you probably have noticed that the zeitgeisters and other people, not just them, but they tend to react with condescension, hostility and so on when their beliefs are questioned.
And that's because when you dismantle an ideology that is an emotional defense for unmet needs in childhood, a lot of pain, panic, anxiety, anger, fear arise.
And they then react as if you're scaring them, as if you're making them angry, as if you're alarming them.
They react in an aggressive manner because they feel aggressed against.
Because the illusions that cover the uncomfortable feelings from early childhood are being penetrated.
And this is why the facts don't matter.
Because the purpose of a ridiculous theory like this is not for truth and evidence and compassion or anything.
It's to cover up unmet emotional needs that are very painful.
Now, the other thing, so structural violence was talked about a lot, and I think I understand something to do with it.
So structural violence is something to do with the structure of society that results in the suffering of people, which is why Peter Joseph wanted to change my meaning from the initiation of force to the infliction of suffering.
So hunger is structural violence, poverty is structural violence, and so on.
And he said, well, you know, dads will hit their kids because they're poor or they're under financial strain.
Marriages break up because of financial strain.
Now, if you grew up in a family where finances were a big problem, well, Mommy and Daddy have to go to work.
Well, why do Mommy and Daddy have to go to work and leave me alone, or leave me in a daycare, or leave me with people that I don't know?
No, no, they wouldn't leave you alone, but leave you in a daycare or whatever, right?
Because of money.
And therefore, money is the reason that I was left alone as a child, so therefore I don't like money.
You know, mom had to go and work, she had a job, and that's why mommy wasn't there to kiss me and cuddle with me and play with me.
Right?
Because she had a job.
Therefore jobs are bad.
The necessity for money, the necessity for jobs is why I didn't have a mommy when I was a baby, and therefore... And so what you have to do is you have to say, well it wasn't my mother's choice.
That she wasn't with me when I was a baby.
It's not that she wanted to work, she had to work.
And any system which forces people to work basically robs children of their mommies and that's very painful and therefore that is systemic violence.
And it seems that pretty much you just you find something negative, structural violence, you find something negative, something nobody likes, people without health care, people who are poor and so on, and then you say well that's structural violence and that's the free market.
And so basically it's just finding whatever negative things you can and attaching them to this concept called the free market as a kind of ad hominem.
It's not an argument, right?
Nobody can say how the free market produces all of these things given that the rise of human poverty from medieval Extreme poverty was the result of the free market.
You know, while these guys are off fantasizing about their robot cities and so on, people like myself, who are advocating for the free market, are helping drive an intellectual movement that has literally raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last 20 years.
Let me say that again.
While these guys are dreaming of and pretending they have an algorithm to satisfy all human needs with Star Trek teleporters and crap like that, not getting anything done to actually help the poor, people like myself are advocating for the free market, which in China and India alone, whatever free market has been allowed to grow has literally lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
It's the biggest escape from poverty that humanity has ever experienced in the history of the planet.
And you don't hear about it because, of course, it's about the free market.
You can't hear about the free market because you're not supposed to love your chains, right?
So I do think it's unmet needs.
It's not a concern for the poor.
It's unmet needs in childhood.
If you can blame the system, then you can Forgive your parents, then you don't have to blame your parents because it's the structure, it's the system, it's whatever that is causing all these problems.
And so if you change the system, but your parents aren't responsible for what they did, for any abandonment or neglect or abuse or whatever it was.
They're just victims of the system.
And the fact that neither of Peter Joffe's parents were anywhere close to the free market whatsoever would indicate that his problem should more rationally be with statism rather than with freedom, with the free market.
But from a child's perspective, right, Mommy don't go, Mommy don't go, Mommy has to go, Mommy has to go.
Mommy has to go because Mommy has a job.
Mommy has to have money to pay the bill, so Mommy has to go.
Money is bad.
Money takes money away from me and therefore money is bad.
Jobs are bad because they take money away from me.
It's a child's perspective and I have huge sympathy for that.
Fantasizing about these, you know, big giant electronic teats that will give you all the mother's milk that you want at no cost doesn't solve the problem of the emotional abandonment, neglect or abuse that most likely these people experience as children.
It actually will actually re-inflict it on others.
And we don't sort of have to get into the details of that.
There's just one last thing, if you appreciate your patience, one last thing I'd like to say.
Which is this.
Peter Joseph had a bad experience in the free market.
I've had mostly good experiences in the free market.
The difference is that I love the free market and he hates the free market.
Because he hates the free market and he hates money and he hates jobs, what kind of employee do you think he is?
Do you think he's a fun guy to work with?
Do you think he's enthusiastic?
Does he show up to work saying, how can I basically help this company?
How can I please customers?
How can I have a great time at work?
No!
He resents it.
He's grudging towards it.
He doesn't like it.
And the people that he sucks into this mindset also become shitty employees.
Bad at the free market.
This idea that we're stuck in these layers, this class constant, is nonsense!
If you're born into the bottom 20% of society, your kids have a 60% chance of getting out of that.
And they have a 60% chance, if they get out of it, of going up at least two rungs.
Right?
To the middle.
To the middle class.
Society is very flexible.
You're up and down.
Now, your enthusiasm and your embrace of trade, of markets, of capitalism, of freedom, of all that kind of stuff, has a lot to do with how successful you're going to be, assuming that you don't disappear into the maw of brain-eating government bureaucracies.
So, these beliefs, these ideas, they do not come without cost.
They come with enormous, significant cost.
Because I guarantee you, I would never ever want to sight guys through anywhere near my business because they would be resentful, they would be negative, they would spread negativity, they would drag their feet, they would bitch at everything, they would not want to be there or feel it was unnecessary to be there or there was this perfect world and I was the man keeping the... Like, you wouldn't want these people anywhere near your business.
And that's a huge problem.
Because if you hate the market, But in order to consume, you have to produce.
Fact of nature, fact of biology, fact of reality, don't blame me.
If you resent it all and if you hate it all and if you consider it unnecessary and you're being ground down and oppressed and all this kind of stuff, boy, talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you hate the market, the market will just walk on by.
We'll just walk on by.
And employers will just walk on by.
And what happens then is you end up being stuck in shitty, low-rent jobs.
Now, when you're at the lowest end of the economic spectrum, you have the worst managers.
Because any manager who's got any quality is going to... I'm not going to manage a Starbucks or a McDonald's or whatever.
Not that they're not fine companies.
It's just that I'm more skilled than that.
I can manage knowledge workers.
I can manage programmers.
I can manage a creative team.
I've been a director.
I can manage actors, I can manage stagehands and stage directors and art directors.
I'm just more skilled as a manager than that.
And so when you're working in a low-rent restaurant or a coffee shop or something, you don't have a good manager, almost by definition.
You may accidentally have one as he moves on to something better, but it's going to be pretty temporary.
And so if you are resentful and if you don't acquire the necessary skills and come to work with enthusiasm and positivity and want to get things done and want to make things better for everyone, you're going to get stuck in these low-rent jobs, being exposed to bad managers, and then you know what you're going to say?
Wow, capitalism really is a dead-end and exploitive system.
No!
That's your belief.
That's your self-fulfilling prophecy.
That is not what's left of the free market.
What's left of the free market will openly embrace and encourage people who provide value to their employers.
So it is not a belief system that is consequence-free.
I mean, no belief system is consequence-free, but this one is particularly, particularly important.
Because if you're wrong, I say this to the zeitgeisters, if you're wrong, if the free market is a benevolent and beneficent system, if it can provide the greatest opportunity for you to gain the freedom that money can bring and success can bring and autonomy, the autonomy that results in that can bring and richer people are happier.
Statistically, it's almost a uniform trend that the more money you get, the happier you are.
Because with more money comes F.U.
money.
Nobody can really boss you around and tell you what to do because you have enough money to make choices, to have choices.
And so, it is not consequence-free.
If you believe this stuff and you're wrong, you're condemning yourself to a life of crappiness, which is absolutely statistically unnecessary.
So please, if you've got this kind of childhood, go see a therapist.
Work on these issues.
I've been to therapy for years.
It is... I kiss it three times.
It's such an amazing thing if you get the right therapist.
You can deal with these childhood issues.
You don't have to fantasize about robot cities in the future that will give you everything you want.
You don't have to try and recreate the perfect toddlerhood at some point in the future, which will never happen.
You can actually deal with these emotional issues.
You can enter the free market with happiness, joy, confidence and positivity.
Unfortunately, you will have to start giving people responsibility in your life for their moral choices, particularly when you were a child.
That's a byproduct of maturing, is the granting of moral responsibility to other people.
One of the most significant characteristics of an immature person is that they don't hold people accountable for their decisions, right?
So this is why Peter Joseph gets angry at me But not at, say, dads who abuse their kids.
Right?
Do you understand?
Because dads who abuse their kids are part of a structural violence and therefore follow his theory, therefore they're okay.
He forgives them and doesn't blame them.
But me, who questions and punctures this delusion, he gets angry at me.
This is perfectly compatible.
But the idea that you get more angry at somebody who's debating you than you would at a guy who's hitting his children is so morally deranged that it can only be that it serves some sort of emotional need.
So please, please, whether you think I'm right or wrong or crazy or not, go see a therapist, deal with these issues, you know, take six months, take a year, maybe you guys are completely right, but please, please, make sure that this ideology is not serving some Unmet emotional need from your childhood, as almost every person's thinking is.
Just look this up scientifically, statistically.
Emotional impulses result in intellectual justifications.
Almost all moralizing and philosophy is an ex post facto justification for emotional problems.
And if you've been to therapy, and if you've done the work, by God you can be free of that stuff.
And really think clearly and rationally.
Not be defensive, not be hostile, not be resentful.
And it will give you the chance for success.
It will give you the chance to overcome The challenges of your own history and the deprivations or abuses that it probably contains.
So I urge you, don't assume that it's true.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and it will drag you down or keep you down in the dregs of the low-rent market system, which is not where you want to be.
You guys are too smart for that.
You're too verbally acute for that.
So please, please, just think about it.
Just think about calling up a therapist, or at least think about picking up some workbooks.
Nathaniel Brandon's got great stuff, John Bradshaw has some pretty good stuff.
Just think about the journey of self-exploration, the journey of understanding your own history, so that you can be free of any ex post facto intellectual justifications for emotional problems, which is almost universally the norm in humanity.
And I've not seen anything in this debate, or in the responses to it, or my previous two conversations about this, to indicate that the Zeitgeisters are free.
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