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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:31
They Are Coming for Us
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mollen from Friedman Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
It's time for the listener grab bag of mail and questions.
But first, for those who want to know an update on my health, such as it stands, I must say it's actually pretty good.
I have not noticed much change.
I've done my first round of chemo a couple of weeks ago.
I have three more to go, at least according to The plan and I haven't had to adjust to really anything in my life.
I'm still working out as hard as I always did and I have a good energy.
The health care system continues to suck like an intergalactic vacuum.
Just two little examples.
So the other night I did have a sore throat and I was immunocompromised.
It was painful to swallow so I went to, it was a weekend, so I went to Emerge to have a doctor check it out and I got some antibiotics and I'm fine.
It's just because I was immunocompromised which is a low point in my white blood cell count.
as a result of the chemo.
And so they said, listen, you're doing chemo, so you need to go wait in this other room far away because there's lots of bugs around where people are.
And so I waited and I waited and I waited like two hours plus.
So then I went to go and raise holy hell with them because I was waiting too long.
And they said, oh no, we called your name, but you didn't come.
And it's like, because you told me to wait somewhere.
Anyway, so I had a few choice words with them, got the drugs I needed and was on my way.
The other was that I had the morning of my chemo, I had a scan, a full body scan to find if there were any other tumors in my body.
They handed me the results and no doctor has called me to walk me through them.
So I'd be Googling like mad.
I shouldn't laugh because it's serious stuff, but there's really no shortage of lunacy in a communist system.
Anyway, so let's move on.
So anyway, everything's going fine and it's much less problematic.
I've had almost no side effects from the chemo so far.
So good.
So thanks everyone for your advice and your support and your feedback.
All right, so we'll just go through.
I haven't read these yet, but I'm sure they will be useful.
So it says, what advice would you give to someone who has old scars from being a self-cutter from their younger years?
The cuts were done in mostly hidden areas, usually covered like the stomach legs, but most visible on the shoulders.
In summertime, it's uncomfortable to conceal them, but stares and often bluntly intrusive questions inevitably result when they're visible.
I'd really like your thoughts on this.
Thank you so much for all that you do to make this world a better place.
You're welcome.
Everything that I say here is just my amateur idiot internet opinion, so don't take anything seriously.
Just find whatever value you can.
Pan the endless drivel of sand for a few hopefully decent flecks of gold.
Self-cutting is, to my knowledge and understanding, a way of cutting through to intense self-alienation that occurs from abuse and in particular neglect as a child.
Your identity becomes foggy, your connection to your body, to your physicality becomes foggy and you pierce through it by cutting through the fog through your skin to have any kind of sensation and also of course for self-punishment as a result of an incredibly implanted and deep self-critical voice from verbally abused parents or teachers or priests.
So, you know, people who are bluntly intrusive, you know, there's an old statement, I can't remember who came up with it, but it's been attributed to a variety of people, it says, before you define yourself as depressed or anxious or manic or whatever it is, you know, just have a quick check to just make sure you're not in fact merely surrounded by assholes and that's sort of important.
So people who are so blunt, "Hey, what are all these scars?" I mean, a lot of my philosophy of personal interaction came from a fabulous roommate that I have who I'm still friends with after, oh God, a quarter century.
I've never felt younger.
And he was a very smart guy.
He's got a double PhD and does all kinds of cool stuff around the world with IP, helping people to deal with the mess that is IP.
Anyway, so he was one of his degrees in biology and he said that a very positive strategy is to treat people the very best you can when you first meet them and after that treat them in the same way that they treat you.
This can occur in a particular direction.
So I try to start off treating everybody politely and positively.
And if, you know, if they start to be jerks, my standards go down to meet theirs.
If I can't, if I'm not willing to escape the interaction at the time.
This happens with debates and stuff like that.
Anyway, so if people are bluntly rude to me, I can be bluntly rude back.
Right?
So these are self-medicating self-attacks that result from a neglected and or abused childhood, in my opinion.
And so, you could just say they're war wounds.
They're war wounds from the battleground of child abuse.
And if they have any empathy or sympathy, they'll ask you more.
And if they don't, which I imagine if they're bluntly intrusive, they probably don't want to deal with a lot of child abuse issues for obvious reasons.
So, Yeah, if people ask, just say, yeah, this is what I had to do to survive my childhood.
And if they have any more questions, hopefully you can talk about it from there.
In a free society, how would abuse of animals be treated?
So there are a couple of people who make snuff films on animals and a judge says it is protected by the First Amendment.
And again, the status societies are not dealing with this in any particularly positive way.
The subsidization of the meat industry results in I mean, massive environmental degradation, right?
Cow farts are worse CO2 emitters than all of the cars in the world, all of the machinery in the world.
So, how would abusive animals be treated?
Again, you have to go to course.
And why do people abuse animals?
People abuse animals because they have been treated so atrociously by their caregivers, particularly when they're very young.
It's called leveling, right?
So, when you are pushed down, when you are crushed, when you are abused, when you are neglected, which is in so many ways the worst form of abuse, at least statistically, Then you fear nonexistence.
You fear that you are the lowest on the totem pole.
And when a hierarchy is imposed upon a child, they will always try to find somebody lower on the hierarchy.
And so this is why children who are abused, right, torture animals, right?
It's the trifecta, right?
The most dangerous characteristics are bedwetting, abusive animals, and arson.
And so I mean, the Bedouin indicates where the development stopped in a pre-empathetic phase, and the arson is the desire to destroy or to mirror the destruction of the child's psyche, to mirror that externally.
And the abuse of animals shows that they are reproducing on helpless creatures that which was inflicted on them when they were a helpless creature, right?
An animal is to a child as a baby is to an adult, you know, helpless, independent, and powerless.
And so when people are doing that, so the best way to treat the abuse of animals is to recognize that those who abuse animals were abused.
Once you make that connection, once you see that the world is a Kabuki pantomime of early childhood, and I can tell you, I can see this so clearly as a parent, right?
I can see Where my daughter is in her development and then when I deal with people as adults I can very clearly see where their emotional development was stopped as a result of abuse or trauma or neglect.
Right, so my daughter is completely fascinated by my show and so she's asking me, she asked me about a Sunday show where I had The Determinist on and I was explaining to him that he thought everyone was like a rock or like the weather or rain or whatever and she was like, no, that's not the case.
I mean, I choose the way I want to choose it and so on.
So we talked about choice, what we can choose, what we can't choose, the issue of determinism and so on and she has great things to say, very intelligent things to say.
And so it's easy to see where people get stuck.
And if you can just see this, it's like, you know, if you look at a pier or a shoreline with some sort of cliff edge, you can see the layers, right?
The high and low water marks and so on.
This is what you see in people.
You see where their abuse is showing up, where their history of abuse is showing up.
And I mean, it's almost everywhere.
It's almost everywhere.
So if somebody has a sticker on their forehead or they're abusing animals or they have some... You say, okay, well, so this means you were abused as a child.
You know, and I'm sorry about that, but as long as people ignore the very obvious geistrous of abuse that show up in terms of people's behaviors, then this stuff can continue, and in fact will enhance, will continue.
So, in a free society, we're only going to have a free society when children are not being regularly hit.
I mean, at the very least, right?
So, two-thirds of women hit their children, six and under, three or more times a week.
Three or more times a week.
This goes on usually, I think 40% of people, kids in high school are still being smacked.
Six and under, they're being hit 150 times a year, right?
Yeah, 150 times a year.
And that's just what people admit to.
So 80 to 90 percent of parents are still spanking.
We don't know if the 10 to 20 percent of the others are telling the truth or not, or whether they're employing verbal abuse, or neglect, or avoidance, or other forms of coercive punishment.
So children being hit 150 times, so by the time that they're 10, right, they've been hit, you know, 12, 13, 1400 times by the primary caregiver who's supposed to be there to love and protect them.
And of course, this is going to have an effect on people's view of violence, on people's view of hierarchy, on people's view of their capacity to negotiate with those in power.
And so You know, you hit your kids a thousand times or more, BAM!
BAM!
BAM!
Of course that's going to have an effect on our perception of violence and hierarchy and negotiating with authority.
And it's going to have an effect on bullying and so on.
So this is the gravity that nobody can see.
This is the physics that very few people can see, but it's completely obvious.
We're only going to have a free society when people stop hitting their goddamn children all the time.
I mean, that's necessary but not sufficient.
I mean, until that is dealt with, we're just not going to have a free society.
Like somebody wrote to me and said, you know, he said he was horrified to hear someone at a mall, a woman at a mall say, this world would be a better place if children were hit more.
You know, how vile and horrifying is that?
But it's vile and horrifying, of course.
But what she's telling is the truth, right?
So she'd probably be some sort of evil nasty sociopath, right?
And that's like a lion saying the world would be a much better place if gazelles were not frightened of lions.
Well, yeah, of course.
It would be a lot easier for the lion to hunt and get their food.
They wouldn't have to chase the gazelle or whatever.
So sure, for evil people, it's a much better world if children are hit.
Because children will then submit to authority or bully other people or they'll act as horizontal enforcers, right?
Like the hierarchies that we see are really the effect of a horizontal desire and lust to attack each other for stepping out of the matrix.
I mean, she's right.
We are not all the same.
We're not all brothers, right?
The sociopaths and psychopaths and evil people among us.
are the predators, the only predators that really exist in the modern society, and they prey fundamentally upon children by abusing children, and then that creates those who prey upon adults, which gives us the belief that we need a state to protect us from those people, but of course those people run the state, so it's a real bait and switch.
So, but one is the issue of inheritance, the way of transferring ownership of property.
The mere act of enclosing a million acres of land doesn't hold up as original appropriation I wonder if inheriting a large amount of resources and not doing anything with them might not be a reason to invalidate that inheritance.
What do you think?
Inheritance, of course, if you make money you can leave it to whoever you want, but it's just property rights.
I don't think you can just say I own this million acres of something and you actually do have to enclose it, you have to do something with it.
The way that it works, and this somewhat comes out of a common law tradition, the way it works up here in Canada, and I say this as a guy who did gold panning and claim staking when I was in my late teens to save money for college, is that you go and you get mineral rights by pounding in stakes in a kilometer square, and then you have those mineral rights for a certain amount of time.
If you don't do anything with them, then they revert back to common ownership.
Could be a fine solution.
I don't know if they could be better or worse.
But yeah, I don't imagine that land that you've worked, land that you built a house on, well, you own that land and the house forever, right?
But if you have a whole bunch of land you don't do anything with and never – I was sure that there would be some way in which this would lapse back into unowned status after a certain amount of time.
At least that would be my guess based on sort of tradition.
But again, who knows?
So, Some studies say that people lie 200 times a day.
Others say it's much fewer, but they all agree that lying is part of our day-to-day life in society.
What really shocks me is the conclusion they have for this insight, that lying is important, that our society would collapse without it.
And even psychologists suggest not to tell the truth, but to find a middle way.
That's a good question.
I try to tell the truth, but the truth to me is not a standard that I owe to everyone.
And the reason being that is that the truth is something that requires a relationship.
something that requires a relationship.
So let's say that you were somebody who, and my very best friend, and you'd opened up a restaurant and you'd asked me to come over a week before it opened to try out some of the dishes.
And you really cared about my feedback.
I really cared about you as a friend.
I really want your restaurant to succeed.
So I try a sample of this food and then I say, I'm going to give you very, very detailed feedback because we have a relationship.
I'm going to tell you all of my experience of the food, what I liked about it, what I didn't like about it, how it was presented, the texture, the flavor, you know, anything that might be added or subtracted that might make it taste better based upon my knowledge.
So, I would give you a huge amount of feedback that I really cared about.
Whereas if I'm just driving through some town and I have some food and it was okay or whatever, then the waitress says, how was your food?
I said it was fine.
It was fine.
Is that really a lie?
Well, you know, I wouldn't say fine, you know, like yay, but it was okay.
But I'm not going to give a huge amount of feedback.
I don't really care about the restaurant.
I don't really care about the waitress.
I don't really care about the owner.
So, if you want the truth from someone, then the truth is usually a lengthy conversation, and the abbreviation of truth is usually equivocation, like you just sort of say something, it doesn't really mean much, it doesn't, you know, how are you doing?
Like people say to me on the, you know, how are you doing?
And I will say, fine, if I don't know them, right?
Whoever, I get into a taxi and the guy says, how are you doing today?
And I say, fine.
Do I say, well, I've got a little bit of nausea from chemo because look at this scar, Well, I don't want to have a big long conversation with the guy about my health.
I don't really like those people.
I don't like conversations about my health at all.
So, is that lying?
Well, generally I am kind of fine, but I am not going to get into a long conversation.
So the truth is not something you just sort of fire out there and just keep moving.
The truth is an in-depth conversation, if it has any real value at all.
And so that's important to understand that the truth is a conversation that is measured by intimacy.
I don't think you owe everyone the truth.
I don't think that's this abstract standard called the truth.
I remember Harry Brown years ago talking about his desire to tell the truth about anything and his landlady cooked him a pie and he ate the pie and he didn't like it very much and how was he possibly going to say anything to the landlady about the pie and all this kind of stuff.
That seems kind of convoluted to me.
So for me, the people that I care about, the people that I love, which includes you, these great listeners, I will always strive to tell the truth.
Because we have an in-depth conversation going on here in this philosophical back and forth.
So I will always work to tell you the truth, at least as I see it.
But if you're a taxi driver and I've got a five minute journey and you say, how are you doing today?
I'm probably just going to say, fine.
I mean, what does it mean to say the truth?
So let's say somebody has really garish makeup on and you see them on the bus.
They're sitting across from you on the bus and you don't say anything about it.
Like if a friend of yours was going out with really garish makeup, hopefully you'd say, look, tone it down or take it off because, you know, you look sort of like a LSD fluorescent clown based life form.
And so, if you don't say to the woman with the garish makeup, you've got really garish makeup and it doesn't look very good, if you're at a concert, someone next to you has really bad breath, do you say to them, listen man, you could be halitosis, go see a dentist, go figure this stuff out?
I don't know.
It's withholding that, again, it's all, if you see somebody who's overweight, you say, hey, I think you're overweight, put on some few pants, you might want to check that out or whatever.
I think that the truth is something that is earned in a relationship, and I don't think it's some sort of abstract principle where if somebody asks you how you're doing and you're not doing well, that you have to say, I'm not doing well.
There's a shorthand, which is, you know, fine, move on, right?
Whereas if somebody you really care about is asking you if you're doing well and you don't tell them the truth, I think that's problematic to intimacy.
So I hope that is enough equivocation to answer.
Do you have any role models?
That's interesting.
I used to have role models when I was younger, but I found role models fairly catastrophic, and so I have tried to avoid it.
I mean, I had a role model for Ayn Rand because she, of course, portrayed herself as a perfect avatar for novels when there were significant problems with her behavior.
And some significant limitations in her thinking around Palestinians, homosexuals, ethics and anarchism in particular.
And so when I first read Judgment Day, I think it was by Nathaniel Brandon about his days with Ayn Rand, I literally was devastated.
This was when I was in my early 20s, I think.
I was just astonished.
And this is before I heard about her multi-decade speed addiction and so on.
She was addicted to Uppers for weight control and, you know, the perpetual smoking and so on.
Again, these things are just her worship of smoking.
She had this habit of just whatever she did was the best and that really limits her capacity to grow.
So I have, you know, I was interested in Gandhi before I read about Paul Johnson's pretty brutal dissection of Gandhi.
Of course, Martin Luther King Jr.
until, you know, the plagiarism, the philandering, the affairs, the sexual addiction, as it seems.
So I've tried to really avoid role models and I don't have any.
Oh, and of course, the fictional ones as well.
But fictional role models are really sad.
I mean, that's like masturbating and think you have a girlfriend because the fictional role model doesn't even exist.
So I think that's I think self-knowledge is more important than finding other people to emulate.
Steph, I just found your content online.
Absolutely love it!
I never knew I was an anarchist.
Can you please recommend a source for rhetoric training?
You use it so well.
Thanks for all you do.
Jack.
Well, Jack, the only thing I can recommend is It's like that old thing, right?
You stop a guy in New York and say, excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?
He says, practice, practice, practice.
That's all it is.
I had the bad luck of having two crazy people around me when I was growing up and to just focus on my mother.
My mother was genuinely mad and a very sort of in your face, insistent, corner you in your room, talk for hours about crazy shit, kind of mad.
And so with these rabid weasels loose in my brain, I had to really work and fight hard to push back crazy.
And I did that, of course, with reason and evidence.
And I didn't do that too much with my mom because she would tend to get incredibly violent if confronted with the rationality for statements.
And I mean, just for example, right?
So when I was about 11, I was alone with her.
My brother went to England for a couple of years and she became convinced that one of my friends who came over had uh, had stolen her vacuum cleaner because she couldn't find it.
And she did this went on for like a week or two where she just demanded that I would call my friends up, bring them over.
She would cross examine them and so on.
And trying to make the case to her that my friends weren't very big on stealing appliances, I really had to work hard to stay sane in the face of that, not get sucked into that kind of paranoia.
And eventually, of course, somebody knocked on the door and said, thank you for lending me your vacuum and returned it to her, which she'd forgotten about.
But that kind of stuff just went on and on all the time just this crazy stuff coming in all the time and Fighting that back gave me a fairly well honed You know push back crazy with reason and evidence.
So that was a tragic kind of training that occurred when I was a child And she was in fact institutionalized after a while because she just was because of the irrationality overwhelmed her and she became sort of non-functional and And it never worked again and has remained nonfunctional ever since.
So you don't really want to necessarily have that kind of training.
But that was the kind of training where reason and evidence was something I just freaking clung to, you know, like a man with a log in a stormy sea.
So there was that.
And then, of course, when I was in college, I was on debating teams and I toured all over.
The very first year I did debating I think I was the sixth best in Canada.
I traveled all over Canada doing debating and so there was a lot of and of course you know having lots of debates with people all the time.
I think that's all very important.
I mean, Cicero is a great person to read if you want good debating tips.
Plato is a fantastic person to read.
I mean, just read the Socratic Dialogues.
You'll get just about the best debating tips that you can imagine.
But it's practice.
Just keep practicing.
Do you think the Golden Rule, which was before Christ I know, is similar to the Non-Aggression Principle?
I don't think that the non-aggression principle is the same as the Golden Rule.
So the Golden Rule, which is in a wide variety of belief systems, is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That, to me, is not a universal standard.
So, for instance, if you're the strongest man in the village, you might say that the person who is The person who can lift the most, and that's a universal rule.
I'm willing to have this as a universal rule.
The person who can lift the most is the person who should get the lion's share of the harvest, right?
That's a universal rule.
And so I'm willing to... I'll do unto you as you're willing to do unto me.
This is a universal rule.
Whoever can lift the most is the one who gets whatever, right?
That's not good.
It's not a good rule.
If you're a sadist, Then you might say, whoever can inflict the most pain on the other should get the majority of the harvest.
And the good people then suffer under the sadist rule, aka politics.
And so, the do unto others is not a particularly good rule, do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Again, as I keep pointing out, the at least minimum, I would say higher, but at least minimum 4% of the population are sociopaths, and the golden rule for them would be entirely different than it would be for people who have, you know, the 10 or 12 point psychic triangulation called empathy.
So, no.
Non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate force against others, is very different from the golden rule.
All right, so I think it could be arguable that the absence of religion has a lot to do with crime, whether it be on the market or on the streets.
What do you think?
Although religions have a fictitious or metaphoric nature, are they fundamental to culture, good moral value, or even your future education?
Do we have the capability of seeing what is right in religion when confronted with science that disproves archaic claims?
Also, when considering the oldest religions, is modern science really disproving anything they claimed at all?
We couldn't build the pyramids today.
They are perfect astronomically and geometrically.
Is that science the result of religion?
Religion is the result of that science of the hand at hand in this world that isn't always black and white.
Okay, so the absence of religion has a lot to do with crime, whether it be in the market or in the streets.
You can only make this case if you forget the degree to which religion has supported the state throughout history.
So I'll sort of give you, I'll give you two examples.
Russia in the late 19th century was incredibly religious.
Russian Orthodox was, I mean, almost universally religious.
And this proved to be no defense against totalitarian communism because communism and religion, I mean, they're pretty much the same damn thing.
The Jews who founded communism were Usually educated by rabbis and recognized that the world was becoming more materialistic and needed to invent another way by which words could rule mankind.
And so they invented things like class and the state and exploitation and so on, whereas before they had, you know, sin and the devil and the church.
And so communism is just a secular religion where state is substituted for God and the priests are the intellectuals in the same way that you had priests in the previous paradigm.
So, there was no defense against statism, against totalitarianism in religious cultures.
The second example, of course, would be Germany in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, of course.
Germany was by far the most religious country in Europe.
Germany had the ill fortune of going through such endless religious wars that Germany missed out on pretty much the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Age of Reason, Scientific Revolution, and so on.
and so maintained fundamentally medieval in its outlook and in its child raising, which was horrendously abusive.
And you can read Alice Miller and Lloyd DeMoss more on this.
The poisonous pedagogy that Alice Miller writes about, the fact that Hitler was beaten so hard by his father that Hitler ended up in a coma pretty regularly, of course, has huge effects on that.
But, of course, he would have had no power if other people had not been equally brutally treated.
And when he screamed at them, it evoked all of the ghosts of the nursery and the inner demons of early childhood, which then externalizes all of the pain onto other people and displaces the rage against the parents into rage against the others or outsiders or foreigners or Jews or gays or whatever.
And so, in these two examples, you have highly religious cultures, which provides no defense whatsoever, in fact, is a weak spot for the rise of totalitarianism.
China, of course, no Industrial Revolution, no Age of Reason, no Enlightenment, no secular anti-religious phase went through that culture.
And of course, this was no particular defense against the rise of communism.
which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
If you look at Islam, same thing.
Islam is essentially a medieval period.
It is yet to go through its reformation, its enlightenment, age of reason, scientific revolution in that.
So if you focus merely on private crime, which is inconsequential relative to public crime, you're many, many more times likely to be killed by governments than by some private criminal.
And of course, if you're in a country where you are penned in by some sort of totalitarian edict, which is all countries these days, right?
When you can't move, or people say, oh, if you don't like it, leave.
Well, Jesus Christ, what does that mean?
It's like saying to a zoo animal, if you don't like being in this cage, you can spend six years and Tens of thousands of dollars and endless hours of paperwork to get moved to another goddamn cage and that's the same as being free.
No.
So all countries, all tax farms are penning in their tax livestock because obvious reasons.
They don't want their cows wandering around.
And so there's no... So once you're in those situations and the country decides, the government decides to turn on you, you can't leave and you can't fight them so you just get killed, right?
A quarter of a billion people in the 20th century alone, outside of war, were murdered by their own governments.
And they were murdered by governments that had strong religiosity prior to the rise of the states, the rise of totalitarian states.
I mean, just look at Italy.
How well did Catholicism defend against fascism during the rise of Mussolini in the 1920s?
Well, it didn't.
In fact, they explicitly endorsed and condoned fascism and National Socialism in many ways.
So no, I don't grant religion any particular power to prevent evil.
In fact, it seems to me that the countries that are the least religious or who went through the most skeptical thinking tend to be the most resistant to totalitarianism.
And that's, I think, a pretty important thing.
Obviously, if you are good because of religion, then you are good because of orders, not because of rational, philosophical, independent thinking, not because you're comparing proposed standards of behavior to universal ideals, not because you're going through all the rigors of trying to work out a secular set of ethics and so on.
You are religious because you're ordered to be, because you're told to be, and because there are rewards and punishments.
There's a carrot and a stick.
And this is sliding the God out and sliding the state in doesn't change that paradigm.
So I think that religion makes cultures and countries incredibly susceptible to secular totalitarianism.
All right.
I wanted to ask if libertarian thinkers have some realistic ideas on how national interstate projects, such as freeways and high-speed trains, will be completed without centralized organization.
Will there be enough cooperation funds, etc.?
All of this stuff is, and I get drawn into these, and I'm really trying to avoid them.
But fundamentally, if people want it and are willing to pay for it, then it will happen.
This is the fundamental thing that I can say.
If people want it and are willing to pay for it, then entrepreneurs will figure out a way to provide it.
Of course, that's what free market entrepreneurs always do.
Freeways?
I mean, who even knows if we need freeways?
I mean, the freeways were put in after the Second World War, partly because Eisenhower, when he was a young man, had to do a long tour and went through terrible roads.
They were also put in there to make sure that troops could get around in the event of a nuclear war and so on.
So, I mean, who even knows if we need freeways?
Who has any idea whether the car-based culture makes the most sense?
The only reason we have a car-based culture Is that governments in the 1950s stole from future generations, because they didn't pay for this stuff.
This is what always happens.
They build all this crap and then they stiff the next generation with the bill, thus buying votes in the here and now.
Who knows if freeways are the way?
Who knows?
I mean, there's just no way to know.
We do know that nobody wanted freeways at the time, right, because they had to be forced to pay for them, right?
I mean, it had to be completed through the government, which means there was no free market demand, which means people either didn't want them or weren't willing to pay for them, or both.
So, I mean, lots of big train projects were done before governments and so on, but they were all corrupted by governments because all the politicians wanted the trains to go through their own districts, so this is nonsense, all right?
All right, so, In a liberal society where everyone both has the right to their life and a determination over their life, who makes decisions regarding things like suicide?
It was discussed that philosophically we would hope to see society move past that point, but before we evolve that far, before everyone has managed to grow, who makes these decisions?
Well, suicide, I mean, the person who's killing himself or herself is the person who makes that decision.
And suicide, to me, fundamentally, suicide is a rejection of the world, of the people in the world.
It's not a rejection of the world.
I can't really reject a tree and kill myself to escape sunshine.
No, to me, suicide, again, if it's not sort of end of life, terminal pain kind of thing, a Suicide is... I cannot stand living in a world with these people in it.
My fellow human race is so repulsive to me that I would choose non-existence rather than coexistence with the people around me.
And I think that's just horrendous.
It's unfortunately all too common.
I mean, you know, veterans...
I mean, the veterans of wars kill themselves, at least modern wars kill themselves on a regular basis.
It's just tragic.
You lose more to suicide than you do to enemy fire.
And this is, I think, comes out of the horror of living in a world that cheered them going to war, that cheered them coming back from war and does not look at the reality of what they've done and is not willing to look at the reality of what they did over there.
And so I think that the moral horror of people turning away from the violence they cheer is pretty repulsive.
Which kind of repercussions does growing up without a father have on a child?
Catastrophic.
I've got a whole presentation.
I'll link this in the low bar under the video.
There is no single predictor of a negative outcome for a child than growing up without a father.
It's more of a predictor than race, than ethnicity, than... It's not exactly the same.
then wealth or poverty, then geographical location, then whether you grew up in a ghetto or not.
The biggest single predictor for negative outcome for a child is to grow up without a father.
Full disclosure, I grew up without a father.
My father left my mother when I was only a few months old and moved to Africa.
So he was gone, baby, gone.
And it is very hard to grow up without a father.
The hardest thing about growing up without a father is the degree to which society ignores how hard it is to grow up without a father.
That which is acknowledged can be dealt with, right?
So society doesn't acknowledge the prevalence of child abuse.
Society does not acknowledge the prevalence of the catastrophic effects of growing up without a father.
And the reason that we don't is because all the single moms will get mad at you if you talk about how destructive it is for the child to grow up without a father.
And so once we acknowledge these things, we are 75% the way towards healing things.
But the more we resist and avoid this basic information, the more we continue to traumatize people, particularly children who are undergoing these kinds of things.
It is horrendous for a child to grow up without a father, and maybe I'll do a podcast at some point on how I overcome some of this stuff to the point where I'm a good father, but let's see here.
I have a question in mind.
In a stateless society, how could natural assets or resources such as rivers be regarded as any other form of private property while still maintaining a certain level of functionality?
Could not one company own and manage an entire stretch of river so that they have full access and control over the river and therefore its condition?
Would this not exclusively allow for monopolies of the provision of water?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know what's so bad about monopolies.
We all love monopolies, right?
I mean, women love having a monopoly over the provision of vagina, right?
I mean, that they can choose and they want to choose and they should choose who gets access to the snug hopper.
So, monopolies are fine.
I want a monopoly on my teeth.
I want a monopoly on my eyeballs.
So, if somebody's missing two eyes, I don't want them to take one of mine.
I'd really like to keep a monopoly on my kidneys.
So, monopolies are fine.
The essence of self-ownership is a monopoly of one.
So, and of course, people who fear monopolies and then say the solution is a state, it's like, I'm afraid of migraines, so let me get to guillotine to solve the problem.
So, when you say, isn't it most efficient for one company to own and manage an entire stretch of river?
That's an interesting question.
And the way that that will be answered in the free market is through the capacity to pay.
So let's say it's 10 times more efficient for one company to own the whole stretch of river.
Okay.
So then when it comes to bidding on the river or expending resources to homestead the river, then the company, the single company will be able to bid more, right?
So let's say that you are – we both have the same income and we're both broke.
But you want to bid on a computer to play games and I want to bid on a computer to build websites and make a million dollars.
Well, I'm going to be able to bid more on the computer because I'm going to use it to generate income than you are who's going to use it as a consumption good just to play games.
So if somebody is going to be able to make more money out of a resource, they're going to bid more for it.
This is why ownership tends to accumulate in a free market to those who can make the most efficient and productive use of resources.
So if it is more efficient for one company to own the bunch, Then that's what they'll do.
Assuming that the community approves.
Assuming that the community approves.
This is something really, really important to remember.
So let's say that the company does buy an entire stretch of river and then the people don't like that the company has that entire stretch of river.
Then they'll organize a boycott and the company will have to change their minds.
Or the company will have to make sure people don't mind it and then make sure that they're continually meeting with the residents around to make sure that they're happy with their ownership or whatever, right?
Anyway, I just want to sort of point out, monopolies of the provision of water.
Yeah, I know the idea.
Oh, only one company supplies water to a town and they can just jack up the prices and this and that and the other.
Well, I mean, this has been dealt with so many times.
I just, I really can't do it again.
Sorry about that.
I have a question about your ideas about evolution.
My ideas?
Yeah, yeah, I'm that smart.
Some Christians say there is evolution, but before the evolution God created the world.
Can that be true?
Can there be a creator before the evolution?
No, there can't be, because evolution goes from less complex to more complex, right?
Single-celled organisms all the way to, I don't know, Britney Spears' armpit or whatever.
God is the most complex being conceivable, and therefore God's existence would be directly counter to the progression of evolution from less complex to more complex and less sophisticated and more sophisticated.
So it's like saying, well, that which is conscious arises out of evolution.
That which is more complex arises out of evolution and can arise in no other way.
You can't have more complex before less complex.
That would be like human beings evolving into single-celled organisms.
That is completely the opposite of what happens in evolution.
And so saying, complex consciousness arises in a slow process of increasing complexity from simplicity, but the most complex consciousness pre-existed.
Well, that's saying that there's a path of evolution and then it was started by something completely opposite to the path of evolution.
I'm 100% on board with non-aggression and do not spank or hit my children.
Under any circumstances.
But I find myself using idle threats to coerce.
And this does not sit well with me.
At all.
And yet I cannot seem to stop this despite knowing I want to.
Eat!
Or else this, go to bed or, I use this tactic all the time, I need to break this habit badly, help.
Fantastic, great, great question.
So just this last week, my daughter likes chocolate, shockingly enough, and so last week my wife and I had a chat and we decided to put all the chocolate at her level and she can now eat as much chocolate as she wants.
You know, we give her feedback and say here's what we think and here's what we think would be better.
And I don't really eat much chocolate.
I try to stay away from sweets.
So, the bed is still a challenge because she needs sleep.
Sleep is like a pretty essential thing and she would love to stay up late.
So, for instance, the other day she got up at 5 o'clock in the morning.
Oh, God help us!
If only we had cows to milk, we'd be fine.
She got up at 5 o'clock in the morning and I was taking her for the evening and I said, here, special treat.
You can stay up as late as you want.
And she fell asleep on the couch at 10.30.
That's just not enough sleep for her.
That's not good for her developing body, developing brain to get that little sleep.
But the really, really important thing to understand is that when you do the or else, you are not negotiating.
And the purpose of – if you want your children to be successful, I think the key determiner of success is the capacity to negotiate.
If you can negotiate, your world is limitless.
If you can't negotiate, you're stuck in low-rent jobs with shitty bosses for the rest of your life.
And so you want to train them.
Look at all conflicts with children as an opportunity to – to negotiate.
And don't be afraid to be, of course, ruthlessly honest with the children and say, I'm tired of all this fighting.
I'm sick and tired of fighting.
Every single day, we fight about bedtime and I don't like it.
Let's figure out some way that we can not fight.
Have conversations with them.
You know, my daughter, when she gets to be 18, will literally have had hundreds of thousands of hours of practice negotiation, of real negotiation, which is practice, but real negotiation.
She'll know how to balance people's needs.
She'll know how to negotiate in a way that opens up opportunities.
She'll know that you negotiate until both people are relatively satisfied with the outcome.
Hundreds of thousands of hours of training in negotiation.
What capacity is that going to give her to be successful in life?
It's going to give her the very biggest possible capacity to be successful in life in whatever she chooses to do.
To have the confidence to confront authority, to have the confidence to rely on your own judgment and your own empirical evidence and your own reasoning, to recognize that there's a third party called reason and evidence that arbitrates disputes between anybody no matter what their
Authority over you this is all essential to raising happy and healthy children, and it's the single most important thing that you can do we can't have a free society until People have the capacity to compare authority to reason and evidence and you You train that's the most important thing I mean if my daughter could only learn one thing it would be negotiation much more important than reading writing arithmetic so anyway So in many podcasts and videos
You simply deny yourself that opportunity.
You sit down with your kids and say, listen, I've been having this habit, eat or else this.
The important thing is not that you eat this piece of broccoli, the important thing is that you learn how to manage your own food.
That's why we give my daughter all the chocolate she wants and she's going to learn how to navigate and negotiate her own diet.
Her own eating.
And we talk about the consequences and so on, and I suggest that she rinse her mouth after she's had a lot of sugar and so on, but she's really not eating that much, that's the interesting thing.
So just don't, and I say, I'm sorry for that, that's not a very good thing.
And you sit down and you plan.
If you parent in the moment, you'll almost always fail.
You'll almost always fail if you parent in the moment.
Parenting is all about the preparation, right?
So once you're in a conflict, if you haven't prepared your child for the conflict, you're already in a down, like a negative parenting situation.
Right?
So, if you're like, ah, kids, go to bed!
Go to bed or else!
Well, you're already in a negative situation.
So, what you need to do is, in the morning, say, I'm tired of this fighting about bedtime.
I'm sure you're tired of it, too.
So, let's try and figure out how we can just have a long conversation to negotiate how your bedtimes are going to work.
Right?
So, my daughter wakes up at night and comes to get us and, well, my wife, generally.
So I'm talking to her about it.
You know, mom needs her sleep and so on.
And so she said, well, I wake up, it's dark, I'm scared.
So we got her a nightlight, put it by the bed, and we talked about it all, and then she slept through the night.
Last night she said, oh, and I woke up, I looked at the nightlight, I remembered that mommy needs her sleep and so on.
So, whereas if you're in the middle of the night, you're saying, oh, go back to bed or else I'm tired, right?
You're already, so it's all about the preparation.
Proactive parenting is parenting.
Everything else is just a mess.
So it's all about getting in there before there's a problem or when you've identified a problem is going to recur and discussing and figuring out the rules and getting the commitment and writing it down and sorting it all out beforehand.
And then when it occurs, you have the leverage of integrity, of the child's integrity.
But of course, you first have to display your own integrity, blah, blah, blah, blah.
In many podcasts and videos, you say that the Christian faith causes the many wars of American presidents.
But why is the Christian faith the cause?
Many atheists, objectivists also support wars in foreign countries.
There are other atheists who support wars as well.
Well, so, okay, there's a subset of irrationality.
There's a superstructure called irrationality of which there are many subsets.
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, whatever, Buddhism, wherever you have non-philosophical assumptions that are culturally transmitted through intimidation and bribes, then you have a subset of irrationality.
It is irrationality that causes wars.
The manifestation in American presidents, and in the First and Second World Wars in particular, all the people who started and maintained them We're Christians!
So, that's kind of important.
But that doesn't mean that it's only Christian irrationality that is predicated on war.
So, of course, there are wars started by communists, but communism is another subsection of irrational authoritarianism.
So, irrational authoritarianism, the problem, Christianity is one flavor, statism is another flavor, which is divided into, you know, republics, democracies, dictatorships, the various kinds of fascists, socialists, communists, and so on.
And so there are people.
And objectivism, tragically, falls into the category of adherence to dogma.
And this doesn't mean that all objectivists adhere to dogma, but what it means is that, for instance, there should be debates in objectivism about the limitations of Ayn Rand's thinking, just as there should be debates in every thinker, including me, um about limitations in my thinking and there should be revisions uh on what ayn rand wrote and there should be some understanding of where she was correct and where she wasn't where she was part of the time and where she was with reason and evidence for all time and this is important
but the degree to which people just go look stuff up in ayn rand is the degree to which it has a religious element so yeah um it is irrational subject it is the subjugation of reason and evidence individual responsibility for thinking to um written texts whether it is the communist manifesto the bible or the virtue of selfishness so let's see here um i
How long will it take for a real free market anarchy to develop?
Okay, well I will I will end with this one.
It's been quite a long chat.
I appreciate your patience.
I hope it's been interesting.
It's a multi-generational process and it's a multi-generational process because people prefer the tribe to the truth.
Sorry, it's just a reality.
So I have been talking for many years about our need to put principle above relationships, right?
We will quickly, like you know this old saying, they say people who would trade liberty for security will find out that they end up with neither liberty nor security.
Well, so if you're into the non-aggression principle and you have a friend who supports statism, then if your friend wins and you act on your beliefs, then you're going to end up in jail and you're not going to have any contact with your friend, right?
Or your brother, your sister, your cousin, your second brother's dog catcher's uncle's roommate, who knows, right?
So, if the statist get their way and we act according to our conscience, then we're going to get thrown in jail, which means we don't have a relationship with anyone.
And so the statist is actually saying, if you obey your conscience, so if you don't pay the taxes that support the wars, if you don't obey the rules that keep the underclass trapped in poverty, if you don't pay the taxes which make the children indoctrinated to hate freedom, then you should be thrown in jail.
That's what the statist says.
The statist wants to ostracize us to a little tiny box, a rape room called the tiny cage.
And so my argument is that first of all somebody who wants me thrown in jail for following my conscience is no goddamn friend of mine and can't claim to have a shred of love for my integrity or existence.
So there's no capacity that a statist could ever claim to love me or want a relationship with me because they want me thrown in jail for following my own conscience and disagreeing with them morally.
I don't want them thrown in jail.
You want to go pay your money to a bunch of sociopaths to do stuff.
That's your choice.
It's your property.
So I don't want people thrown in jail for wanting to submit to a hierarchy, but people want me thrown in jail for following rational conscience.
So these assholes, frankly, want to break their relationships with me.
And also, if the continuing trends of statism continue, it is very clear that we will end up in a much more totalitarian situation.
This is, you know, an exponential growth in state power has occurred over the last hundred or so years.
This is not going to stop anytime soon unless we start to really put our money where our mouth is and live according to our principles.
Dig yourself deep into the ground, into the very bedrock of your principles and stand tall, visible, bright and shine your flares and searchlights into the very sky.
Society has like these hooks and they will hook around you and society will begin to turn.
Society turns when people stand publicly for their beliefs and accept the natural consequences of morality and the natural consequences of those around them who are counseling evil and wanting people in blue with guns to drag you away and throw you in rape rooms.
So, plant yourself deep with integrity and judge your relationships according to virtue, not according to history or biology or accident or geography or anything like that.
You judge your relationships according to virtue.
I do not hang with statists.
I don't.
Do not hang with status, because I simply cannot ignore that.
This is, I mean, this is basic.
I mean, this is not even that subtle, and it's completely obvious.
You know, if you're against racism, yay, then if you have a friend who's head of the KKK, what are you going to do?
Are you just going to go over to the KKK barbecue and pretend that nothing's happening?
Well, you can.
But then you're just ridiculous.
I mean, stop.
Just stop pretending to be an anti-racist if you choose bogus and shitty conversation over your virtues, values, and integrity.
Right?
So if you're against racism and you have a friend who is head of the KKK, then you have a decision to make.
You can say, well, my relationship with the racist is more important than My stand against racism, so I'm going to stop talking about being against racism and judge my actions empirically, right?
You judge other people by what they do, not what they say.
And you should judge yourself the same way.
How important are your values to you?
How important is the non-aggression principle?
How important is the respect for property rights?
How important is a non-violent world to you?
And if that world is important to you, then live by your goddamn values.
And if that world is not important to you, that's fine.
Then stop talking about it.
Don't give yourself the drug of talk when you are countering that with the reality of action.
Don't give yourself that comfort.
That's all I'm saying.
Don't bullshit yourself that you're a moral person if you're going to go hang with a KKK member.
If you're against antisemitism and a friend of yours is a Nazi, What are you going to do?
You can talk to him about it, of course.
Talk to him about it.
Give him a week or a month or a couple of months to deal with that.
But if he's still committed to anti-Semitism, to Nazism, and if you yourself are a Jew, if you're going to be in the sights of that person's government, if that person's government gets into power, Then what are you going to do?
Are you just going to go over to this Nazi gathering and have barbecues and play ping-pong and pretend that nothing's happening?
Well, you can, but you're really signing your own death warrant in the long run.
You understand that, right?
If you're children, for sure.
So, if you are against violence and there are people in your life who want you thrown in jail for disagreeing with them about moral issues, for following your own conscience in a purely peaceable manner, Don't hang with them.
I mean, try and change their minds, of course, right?
Try and change their minds.
But the reality is you can't have a relationship with people who want you thrown in jail for disagreeing with them.
And the reality is if you continue to support their beliefs or pretend that the difference of belief don't matter, you're going to be the first targeted when the state grows to the point where it's going to start targeting people like that.
And I will.
And my daughter will.
And my wife will.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
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