All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:28
Communicating Philosophy to Friends and Family
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Actually, it's not a question.
I would like to get some empathy or some idea about some strategy, because since I've been hearing your podcasts and check-ins from anarcho-capitalist and libertarian theories and reading and so on, I realized that I like this kind of philosophy, but it's quite difficult to think like this in Spain, in my country, or in the South Europe, because no one really does
I think just an anti-statist way of thinking, you know?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, I know.
So, it's just a question of how to deal with people who are your friends or relatives or family or something.
Because I would really like to, I don't know, make a website or a video or just to make, get people united to think, to just talk about this.
But it's a very difficult thing to do because all the people think that you're a fascist or totalitarian or whatever, but they don't want to listen to you, you know?
Sure.
I don't know, I don't know if you've ever talked to people from Spain or Italy who are just libertarian or maybe are not, but my question is if you've got any idea, so how to deal with this, when you feel isolated.
Actually, I only have one friend, which is a very good friend, very clever, and he's a curious guy.
And both, we are libertarian and we discuss all these things, blah, blah, blah.
But the rest of the people, I've never found no one who really wants to understand or make the abstraction or open your mind and try to understand other stuff.
Do you have any strategy or maybe anything you can say to deal with it?
Because it's kind of depressing.
Yeah, no, I understand.
I really do.
Thank you.
I mean, there clearly would be some opportunities among the Spanish youth.
The Spanish youth, of course, are screwed.
I mean, the unemployment is huge.
What is it?
Forty, fifty percent among the Spanish youth.
So, you know, they're very much in the position of, you know, this shit doesn't work.
And so then, you know, desperation and necessity are the midwives of change.
Unfortunately, because we remain impregnable to reason, for the most part as a species, it is only panic and trauma which will make us change, which is why things have to get so bad before they get better.
So, I want to sort of validate or agree with what you're saying.
I will tell you this, and I can't predict in any way shape or form the outcome of any of these conversations for you, but I will give you a prediction anyway, which is simply my prediction.
It's not the truth.
I believe that most people will cling to the tribe rather than the truth.
Most people cling to the tribe over the truth.
And what that means is that they side with the tribe and attack the truth teller.
Not everyone, but most people.
And I think I have enough experience in this now to have some authority in the subject matter.
Yeah, I agree.
So if you are going to bring this up with friends and family, it's important to be aware of the likely outcome.
that they will push you to retract your beliefs or simply avoid talking about them and if you continue to talk about them and if you confront them with the violence that they support in the form of the state, if you use the against me argument, there will likely be not a lot of people who will see the error of their ways and who will change their minds.
If people could reason Social change would be as fast as scientific change.
And scientific change is slowed down by a whole bunch of irrationality put in there by the coercive nature of state funding.
But if people could reason, then we wouldn't need 150 years to get rid of slavery or to gain equal rights for women or anything.
If people could reason, then it could happen in a day or two.
But because people can't reason, you have to just chip away at stuff.
And you have to make these micro advances, and this is why in most communities, even in scientific communities, the holders of the old views are not convinced.
They just die off and then new people come along.
But that's largely because of tenure.
It doesn't have anything to do... That's not the case with Apple's R&D labs, where people who want to use the glass from the from the Newton PDA, that they just hang in there and dominate that R&D department until they die or retire.
I mean, that doesn't happen in a market-facing discipline like high-tech R&D or whatever.
But it happens in institutions where the customer is not king, so it happens that, of course, academia is mostly statist, and scientific funding is, to a large degree, statist.
I mean, engineering funding is more private, but scientific funding is largely statist.
People don't listen to reason.
They will listen to money, which is why we need so many free interactions to make the world a better place, and why there's almost no point fighting against publicly funded belief systems.
I don't have to get into all the reasons why.
fighting against publicly funded belief systems.
Because, I mean, I don't have to get into all the reasons why I might do a podcast on it, but.
- Yeah, for sure.
- Publicly funded belief systems, they are, I mean, they are immune to change.
They are inherently vicious because they are unjust.
Unjust organizations are always the most vicious.
If you're going to bring this into your personal life, then your personal life is going to be very exciting, to say the least.
Just a little point.
It's exciting, but it's also quite depressing in an emotional way.
You know?
It's horrible.
Yeah, it's horrible.
I'm sorry, I'm using the word exciting like horrible.
No, exciting, I mean intellectually or in a rational way, it's very exciting.
But later on you go to drink a beer and some guy talks to you about Keynesianism and I have to make censorship on myself, you know?
Because not all the people would say, oh, this guy, where is he from?
No, no, he's talking about shit, you know?
Actually, my question, and you gave a very good response to me, but I'm focusing on the emotional strategy for dealing with it.
Yeah, there is no emotional strategy for dealing with immorality.
I don't know.
Fundamentally, your friends and family are in a state of nature.
They are like the oxen in the field when it comes to statism.
They are in a state of nature.
They have been propagandized by the state.
They have not been exposed to rational arguments, I would assume, for the immorality of state coercion.
There's this old argument, I think Dawkins makes it, where he says you cannot refer to a Muslim child, you can only refer to a child of Muslim parents, because a child cannot understand the consequences of particular religious ideologies, they can't judge independently or effectively, and you can't refer to, in a sense, adult status.
You can refer to adult indoctrination victims of statism.
Right?
So, they, you know, forgive them father for they know not what they do.
And so, everybody wants to cling to a state of nature when it comes to ethics, almost everyone, because what happens is when you wake people up to the immorality of the system that they're in, their lives become easier or harder?
Harder, I guess.
Harder, yeah, of course.
Of course.
Now there's a lot of jobs that they can't morally take.
Now the newspaper becomes an obituary of the future and of morality.
Almost everything that you read in there is some form of government violence spreading its bloody ink across the Agreed.
Right.
So they look at their society and what was before, you know, a sometimes clumsy balletic dance of history now becomes an orgiastic shark feeding frenzy on the young.
And so you awaken to a house of horrors.
You awaken to a world of zombies.
You awaken to a world that before you thought was a mall and now is a crypt where hands are coming out of the earth and strange and unholy things are in constant motion.
So how many people want to wake up to that?
Especially when it's, you know, because it's so hard to wake up, everybody wants to stay asleep.
And As Plato said, it's not the men who are afraid of the dark that we have to worry about, really, it's the men who are afraid of the light.
And so, do you want to wake up to a world of horror that you cannot change?
That's a really hard question.
Now, I do.
I do, because if I did not see the horror of the world, my world would be a horror.
I really want to emphasize that.
If I did not clearly see the horrors of the world, then my world, my family, my life, my friendships, my parenting, my marriage would be that horror.
The consequence, the consolation prize, I should say.
of waking up to the horror of the world, at least you can get it out of your own goddamn house.
Yeah, but just one more point.
Imagine I talk, the thing that you say to me, I talk all this speech to a friend of mine, and I do, I really check from books and I try to keep things on my mind, and later on the response would be, What about the poor?
Oh, because if you do this system, what about the poor?
Ah, George, it will be a dictatorship of the rich people.
They are talking too simplistic, because we don't have this kind of conversations about freedom here.
So, I certainly see your point, but...
I don't know, I would like to get some empathy about it because I think if you live in the United States or some English talk place, you have the words even more in your mouth, but here in Spain we just have regulation in our mouth, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry for my English, if not so good.
No, you're doing... No, please don't apologize.
I mean, I'm wildly impressed with anyone who learns any second language, and the fact that you can have a philosophical discussion in English is something to be immensely proud of.
I think that you're doing fantastically, so good for you.
Yeah, of course they're going to say, what about the poor?
And, I mean, you can say, well, violence is not solving the problem, is it?
The violence of the state is not solving the problem.
If you count the unemployed poor, if you count the rising poverty rate, and if you include the unfunded liabilities and the debt, and if you include inflation, the poor are getting worse off as the state is getting bigger.
So the one about the poor is a ridiculous argument because the poor, like, it was not a ridiculous argument in 1975, maybe 1985, maybe even 1995, but now the evidence is in that the poor are doing really, really badly.
Child poverty is increasing in Canada.
Sorry, go ahead.
I completely understand for this reason and maybe if you want it's my last statement.
I just wanted to ask for an emotional strategy because imagine you are in a table and there's nine people and you are the tenth.
The nine people will fight against you saying to you, what about the fourth, you know?
Although, if you talk with the reason, you talk with the facts, you talk with the statistics, no one of these few people, the curious or the open-minded people, is going to say, OK, let's listen to this guy, you know?
So for this reason it's depressing, although you say, no, because poverty and we can, in the last 15 years, we've changed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
It never ends with a fairly conclusion.
And sometimes I think to myself, you know what, I don't give a fuck, I want to make others think, but later on I relax and I keep learning libertarianism.
But when you have to talk with people here in Europe or in Spain or in Barcelona or whatever, I tell you, it's really, really hard.
No, it is hard.
And you don't have to.
Listen, listen, you don't have to.
You don't have... But you get this... No, look, I understand.
Listen, listen.
Listen, this is really important.
This is really important.
Yeah?
You want people to listen to reason and evidence, right?
Okay, it would be nice.
It would be nice.
But you need to listen to the reason and evidence that most people won't listen to reason and evidence, right?
You can't reject their irrationality.
While wishing that they were something else, because that's irrational.
You don't like people who reject reason and evidence, but you need to accept the reason and evidence that most people will not listen to reason and evidence.
The state is a fundamentalist religion.
That's a good point.
A state is a fundamentalist religion and it seems kind of precious for atheists to say well fundamentalist religious people reject reason and evidence.
Well that's the very definition of fundamentalist religion.
That's why they have a world called faith.
This is why they have a world called patriotism.
Patriotism is merely the faith of the religion of statism.
Agreed.
And so if you were arguing with religious fundamentalists and you were like, I can't believe, it's so frustrating that they keep rejecting reason and evidence, you're actually the one rejecting reason and evidence when you have a much higher standard than they do.
You know, what about the poor is the direct equivalent of Jesus saves?
It's not anything to do, it's just a way of warding off doubt and questions.
Yeah, but I like to talk about these things with the people I love, and I realize that I can tell just one friend, really deeply, and with no censorship involved.
And there are probably hundreds of thousands of people who envy you for your one friend.
They will listen to this show and they will envy you for your one friend.
But I think you need to relax into the real.
I'm sorry, that's a very obscure phrase.
To relax into the real is to take a deep breath and to stop fighting reality and to accept it for what it is, and that includes the social reality of the religion of statism.
Look, if you had a friend who was put in a Jehovah's Witness church from the age of 5 to the age of 18 for six to eight hours a day of instruction in how wonderful, virtuous, and necessary the Jehovah's Witness were.
And if he lived in an entire country, that was Jehovah's Witness.
And if he lived in an entire world, that was Jehovah's Witness.
And if he never had access or never saw any arguments against Jehovah's Witness, and if the only way he could get married and have children, which he was ordered to do, was to believe and accept the tenets of the Jehovah's Witness religion.
Are you questioning me?
No, then I think you would have some sympathy for the fact that he would react quite aggressively to any question of his indoctrination.
Because his environment, like, statism is universal.
Religion is not.
Right?
Atheism and agnosticism are the world's third largest religion.
So, atheism is far more prevalent than anarchism.
And also, there are very few children who spend 40 hours a week being indoctrinated in their religion.
Very few.
And there are very few children who spent their entire childhoods in a church.
But if you understand that statism is a religion and public school is its church, is its indoctrination.
Attempting to undo this, and in religion you were taught catechisms, and catechisms are just automatic responses to ward off any questions.
And in the government, in statism, you are taught automatic answers to ward off any questions.
And you see this, there's a documentary on, I think, Jesus Camp, where the children are told to chant, how do you know, how do you know, how do you know, to anyone who raises any questions of evolution.
They're taught, they are indoctrinated, they are rendered immune to reason by being taught these catechisms.
Now, of course, the astonishing madness of teaching children to chant, how do you know, at an evolutionist as opposed to a creationist or religious person as a whole.
I mean, it's so ridiculous, it's horrible.
The what about the roads, what about the poor, what about the old, what about the sick, what about the uneducated and so on.
These are not arguments.
These are catechisms.
And if people don't recognize them as catechisms, then you're not involved in any kind of debate.
I know, but do I have to leave my country?
No, because this is the whole world.
You may think that there's some utopia out there where this is less common, but you understand statism as a religion is virtually universal.
Yeah, I agree.
How many people, I mean take a million people, how many are outspoken anarchists?
Maybe 50?
Well, in Catalonia or in Barcelona, there's quite a few people being anarchists, but no one is pro-capitalist.
No, but I mean rational anarchists.
Yeah, not left anarchists, not anarcho-syndicalists, not communitarians, but, you know, like rational, private property, free market anarchists.
The people who actually have thought through and reject centralized coerciveness, which I know a lot of anarchists do, but they, you know, replace it with some local collective control instead.
You know, we would be incredibly lucky if it was one person in 10 million.
Whereas atheism and agnosticism is, I mean, gosh, in many places in the world it's 80 plus percent of the population.
In Japan, it's 80% of the population.
In China, it's, I think, over 50%.
In the northern Scandinavian countries, it's 70 to 80% of atheists and agnostics.
Even in Canada, a third of young people are a-religious, and in America, I think it's crept up to 10 or 15%, right?
But this is like thousands and thousands of times more than people who are knowledgeable and wise about about philosophy and who come to genuine, legitimate, useful, true, moral and valid conclusions based on reason and evidence and, you know, therefore reject the various superstitions of statism and religiosity and tribalism and all that kind of stuff.
So, I'm sorry to tell you, but you are as alone as you feel, but you are lucky to have a friend and you are also lucky to have
Yeah, for sure the internet is quite nice but a nice conversation or a social meeting where you can be with people with open minds and without censorship it would be nice also because listen to a bot Or checking a YouTube video or reading a book.
Sometimes it's not enough because it's not reciprocal.
Sorry to interrupt.
The last thing I'll say.
You must make an effort.
This is not going to come to you.
I go to conferences and I go and talk to people and I will spend, like if I go to a conference for two days, I'll speak for an hour maybe, but I will try and talk with people like the whole time I'm there.
Like the same way if you're crossing a desert you drink deep at each oasis, right?
So there are going to be libertarian groups, there are going to be rational anarchist groups.
Somebody just mentioned in the chat room there already is one in Spain.
Go to Galt's Gulch.
Travel to find these people.
You know, if it's a four-hour drive, make a four-hour drive.
Stay a weekend.
Arrange it.
Initiate it.
Make it happen.
We're so used to being passive in these situations, but make it happen.
I wanted the world to be more rational, so I'm doing my best to make that happen.
Which I completely sympathize, and I hope I don't sound like I'm not sympathetic.
I'm incredibly sympathetic.
It's very hard.
We are a tribal species, and when you question the tribe, the tribe can turn on you.
And so this is a delicate balance.
But find the people you can connect with.
And if you have to travel, and if you can only go once a month, then travel and go once a month and drink deep at the oasis of reason that can strengthen you for returning into the matrix.
I would not push my ideas on my friends and family, I would not even push the truth on friends and family, without being fully cognizant of the most likely outcome.
Which is, I mean, look, all cults disfellow people, right?
They disfellow people.
I mean, this happens all over the place.
I mean, in Amish, in Jehovah's Witness and so on, I think it's called disfellowship or unfellowship or something like that, where, you know, everybody in the community is ordered to ostracize you if you think for yourself, right?
And if you understand that statism is a fundamentalist religion, then you understand that if you persist with these beliefs, you are most likely going to be unfellowed.
In other words, if you keep disrupting the religious rituals of your friends' conversations, and you plant uncomfortable seeds of doubt in their mind, you will likely not be invited to the next party, or the next, or the next.
That's true.
I would like to develop something and I will deeply think about it, but sometimes when I'm depressed, I think if it's worth losing, you know?
But if I talk to you right now, I feel full of energy.
Right, and pursue that energy, but I just really want to recognize that if you look at statism as the most fundamentalist religion that exists, I mean the number of people who escape fundamentalist religions is far higher than the number of people who mentally escape statism, right?
It is a death grip on the soul of the species.
And if you approach statists with a recognition that they are in a state of nature, they know not what they do, they have been propagandized with some incredibly advanced methods, and there's almost no competition.
It's like, honestly, statism has the mental status and the mental authority in people's minds in the modern world in the 21st century that Roman Catholicism had in Europe, in Italy, in Rome, in say the 14th or 13th century they didn't know of other cultures they didn't know i mean to some degree i mean i guess they knew of the arabs and so on but but so so it's even worse than that right
because there were at least other uh religions i guess you could say are other religions analogous to other states - Yes.
Well, not necessarily, because most people accept statism as necessary and virtuous, whereas lots of people are skeptical about religion.
So I would I would just recognize that you are dealing with a universal fundamentalist religion.
Just take your steps accordingly.
If you can find people to speak with honestly about what's in your heart and in your mind, treasure those people.
But I'm going to tell you that if you confront fundamentalists with reason, the most likely result and the most universal result is shunning.
Yeah.
Which is a wonderful proof that anarchy works, right?
If you think about it.
They're not stoning you to death, they're just shunning you, and that brings most people back into line, so social ostracism is a very powerful weapon, and therefore we don't need a state.
So they're using an anarchic principle to defend a state.
Anyway, it's not particularly important, but you can have fun with statists.
You can go see a concert with a statist.
For sure.
You don't have to define your entire relationship according to moral principles.
You don't have to.
You know, that's a personal choice for everyone, but certainly there's no ethics that say you have to speak the truth at all times, in all places, to all people.
I mean, the truth is not a...
this is to quote from another novel I wrote called "Just Poor." Yeah?
The...
The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
You counter enemies, you counter opportunities, and sometimes you leave it in its scabbard.
This is my particular thought.
The other thing too is that there's something incredibly powerful about... Statism is the ultimate disfellowship because I mean, if you question the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons, they may shun you, but they're not going to throw you in jail.
But if you fundamentally disagree with the state, I mean, you get caged.
It's that primitive.
I mean, we understand.
If people questioned or disagreed with uh... the Jehovah's Witnesses and then they locked them in cages where they would be subject to brutalizations, beatings, knifings and rapes.
We would understand that to be beyond medieval in its primitive viciousness but people who disagree with the religion of the state are caged and brutalized and shanked and raped and beaten and starved and and so on.
So I just really wanted to to point that out, that we're dealing with a very ancient, very powerful mechanism that is far stronger than religion has ever been.
So, I just really want to point that out when you're dealing with people, to validate your feelings and to tell you that there's no particular solution, I think, that anyone can provide to you.
Yeah, yeah, I agree, I agree.
Thanks for your advice, it is quite useful.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
Now, I wanted to mention that our good friend Daniel Mackler will be hosting the Sunday show next week, for which I'm enormously pleased.
I, of course, will be in Anarchy in New York City.
I will be talking, I think, at 6 or 7 p.m.
on Saturday, and I think I'm around for a brunch on Sunday.
Looking forward to chatting with everyone, and thanks, James, as always.
Thanks, everyone, for a wonderfully engaging show.
You guys are the best, the best audience.
You know, I will occasionally listen to other shows, and I'm fiercely loyal to the brilliance, honesty, vulnerability, openness, and courage of this audience.
It is a It is a real privilege to be a part of your lives and thank you so much for your generosity in sharing your thoughts.
Thank you so much in keeping me in vittles and donations at fdrurl.com forward slash donate if you like.
Thank you of course to Mark for his incredibly generous Bitcoin donation recently and have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week everyone.
▲
Export Selection