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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:37
Cutting Services or Raising Taxes? | Charlie Veitch and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
It's Defend Molony from Freedom Aid Radio.
I am here with the inestimable love cop, Charlie Veitch.
And we're going to have a chat about all things to do with a deficiency of hair on the head and an excess of hair.
I think if we blend our heads together, we get a normal head of hair.
So thanks so much for taking the time, Charlie.
I just want to make sure at the beginning you get a chance to put out your contact information so that people know how to find you.
Okay, thanks, Steph.
It's an absolute pleasure to be on with what I consider to be one of YouTube's sentience heavyweights.
And the lack of your hair, I think, is attributable to the cosmic rays of reality and reason bursting out of that cranium.
Can I tell you my theory about hair loss?
I think you might find it interesting.
No, but I would pan down if we needed proof of that.
But my theory is that hair is a kind of protein, right?
And I feel, or I think I believe, that if you have too many thoughts, if your brain is growing and strengthening too much, then it runs out of food to eat from within your body.
And what it does, like a Like a kid sucking up a piece of spaghetti, it sucks your hair back in and uses that to feed the thinking.
And you'll notice, the proof for this is really subtle, because you'll notice that the frontal lobes is where the hair all goes, but if you look at the back here, this is like the lower brain.
This is just like breathing and heart and all that.
It doesn't do anything useful and you can't improve it.
So it doesn't need the hair back here, so it doesn't eat it.
But up here, where the real thinking goes on, So what I'm basically trying to say is that your jaw looks quite unintelligent to me.
That's really what I'm trying to get at.
I totally understood that.
And also when you look at Charles Darwin, he thought so quickly.
Charles Darwin sucked his hair through.
It didn't even eat it.
It came bursting out here in a giant Osama Bin Laden-style evolutionary beard.
That's right, and you will notice that people like Charles Manson, crazy people and so on, who aren't particularly wise, they have the beard, the hair, the whole thing.
So I just sort of want to point it out that it does seem to be a parallel.
The science is not conclusive, but let's just say it remains a possibility in the realm of the insane.
Indeed, I agree.
And for me, in my immature level, it's a personal rebellion against my finance days when I used to be very clean-shaven and sell investments to people and so forth.
But yeah, I am Charlie Veitch.
You can type in TheLovePolice into Google.
It's also cveitch.org or on YouTube.
It's just the Cveitch channel.
Like Steph, I never knew the Cveitch channel was going to be used for anything other than small musings on a very small scale.
I'd just like to thank you, Steph, for finally speaking to me.
I know that a lot of people spoke on my forum and on your forum, saying that we should clash and argue and come together finally and discuss a few things.
And I'm happy to say that I do watch your videos religiously.
It's weird.
You've become almost like a fixture in my bedroom, but not in that way, in a good way.
You need to order the Donator Only Rubber Kit, but we'll talk about that perhaps after the show's over.
Yeah, so I like to flatter myself in thinking that you're perhaps the kind of evil brain behind the operations and I try and go out there on the street with a megaphone or otherwise and implement that kind of anarchist feeling into the streets of London or Cambridge or wherever I may be.
So my first point, Stefan, I want to touch upon, I watched a review of yours of the film Avatar, which I agreed About 99% with everything you said but there was one thing which struck me as someone who's reading Kropotkin and Emma Golding and all sorts of other anarchist books and who has always since a very early age known I was an anarchist without that label anarchist you saw in the film that because it's a big Hollywood production by James Cameron
That they have to walk, like you say, the adult way of dealing with evil is to kind of walk away from it rather than confront it.
And that got me thinking about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
It got me thinking of Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
It got me thinking of, you know, protesters who might be fighting against the police.
I just wanted to clarify with you, Stefan, how do you see, not just from the film Avatar, but how do you see people in a kind of last stand situation, which I guess applies to the Navi in Avatar.
How do they move away from evil in the real world?
I'm glad you started me off with a nice easy question.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Moving away from evil, in my opinion, is a multi-generational process and it's something that was hard for me to accept because I so desperately want and yearn To breathe the free air of a liberated nation, or I guess if it's really liberated, a non-nation.
But statistically, from my experience of going at this for, it's almost 30 years now that I've been pounding away at this, and my understanding of I am, I tell you.
I'm getting into my mid-forties and I started in my mid-teens with Ayn Rand, so it is coming up there.
My study of history is that the fundamental kind of change that we're talking about here, getting rid of the state, is bigger than getting rid of slavery.
Getting rid of the state is bigger than trying to eliminate racism.
Getting rid of the state is bigger than trying to get rid of inequalities for women, because it is the biggest and most fundamental change that needs to occur.
If you get rid of the state, in my strong belief and opinion, Almost all other prejudices and inequalities will fall away because so many of them, like mushrooms in a dark and wet place, fester, feed and grow in the shadow or bosom of the state.
And so it is the biggest change in history.
No change as fundamental even as slavery has taken less than 150 plus years.
Now, we can go a little bit faster because of the Internet, and we have this capacity for communication that didn't exist before, but we're not alone in that.
If only free-thinking philosophers had the Internet, we'd move further ahead, but we're not the only people who can use it to communicate.
It does get used to strengthen everybody else's irrational prejudices.
Someone, I think on Facebook, coined the term Statanists, which I thought was actually pretty good.
But my argument and approach for the end of evil is that evil, fundamentally, you can't fight it.
You can't fight it because it's never perceived as evil.
That's the problem.
If you correctly identify something as evil, then it's done.
It's over with.
The only real evils exist through propaganda, through the draping of virtue.
over the fist of evil.
And so, getting people to see evil is the only battle that we really have as truth-tellers, as philosophers, as anarchists, as thinkers, or atheists.
Just getting people to see the truth is the only thing that matters.
And as soon as they see evil for what it is, evil loses all of its power, right?
Evil is that, you know, the vision is throwing the ring into Mount Doom.
You know, it just collapses the whole tower.
Everything falls apart after that.
And so that is really the challenge, is to consistently focus on illuminating what evil is, how it is defined, where it manifests.
And so once people see it, it loses all of its power.
But as we all know, vampires need to be invited in.
Witches, if you remember the old Conan movie, witches appear as very saucy and attractive ladies and only then sort of, you know, they reveal the sort of crypt keeper with boobs within.
And so we really are just continually, I think, just shining the light or in a sense spraying that mist of air to the lasers of evil so people can see it.
Because once they see it, they reject it.
But if they can't see it...
Or if they define it as the good, then you really can't get anywhere.
It is really, to me, just an intellectual exercise that is grueling and seemingly endless to just continue to define and point out the reality, nature, and location of evil.
After that, after people see it, it vanishes almost immediately.
I think I see what you're saying.
In a way, I don't want to use religious metaphors, but they're very useful because they are cultural memes.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he wasn't there, that he was an angel, or that he was this knight in shining armour.
One thing I like to say, just to keep it comedic, I like to say, very similar to what you're saying, I go out there with my megaphone and my camera, and I like to shine a light up the arsehole of evil.
Because once it's bathed in light, it flutters like a fish floundering out of water and doesn't know what to do with itself.
And what I find very useful about the medium of the camera, which if we want to get esoteric about it, I like to get very thinking about the occult and say that my camera is the all-seeing eye, and it's backed by this big hairy man who has the ability to go and stick it in places which it normally wouldn't go.
And there was a film of yours I was watching which you said, talking about It's not about the past of Wikileaks.
It's more about the future of Wikileaks because of the Bank of America releases.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
You said... Say we are calling statism evil, which we both are.
That's where we kind of merge.
And what statism really doesn't want is for anyone to hold a mirror up to it whatsoever.
But coming back to my original question, would you ever... Okay, maybe it's easier if I rephrase it this way.
Do you see a differentiation between self-defense and offense on the physical 3D matrix plane?
Alright, let me make sure I understand it.
So, is this the barricades question?
Like, if and when is it appropriate to go to the barricades?
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, because for me, say a film like 300, or The Counterfeiters, or The Lives of Others, a German film, or Avatar, which you reviewed in that video, I saw that as very much a kind of last stand of the Spartans against the Persian invasion, and something needed to be done.
And though I philosophically and rationally agree with you 100%, there is never a state where I would want to offensively go and kill someone's children because every single soldier or policeman is someone's child.
But, say you are in the kind of last stand at the Alamo, you know, and there's like, say there is definite evil coming towards you, would you ever, as a philosopher, ever say that in the 3D world?
Like, forgetting about the esoteric and the occult for one second and all the truthers and all that lot, Are we justified morally to defend ourselves against evil using whichever means necessary in the physical world?
Yeah, I mean, there's no question that self-defense extends to defending yourself against the agents of the state.
However, from a practical standpoint, it's just suicide.
I mean, because you can't win.
And you can't win, not because they have all the weapons, which they do, but you can't win because the state controls the narrative.
The state controls the narrative.
What that means is that you will be portrayed as a lawless, renegade, suicide, crazy, deranged, right?
I mean, they're trying to pin The gold standard on Jared Lochner, the guy who shot Kathy Giffords and all those other people, right?
And, of course, I shouldn't be saying Kathy Giffords and all those other people because it's not like she's more important as a politician.
But, you know, they keep hammering that he was into, you know, the gold standard and he felt that fiat currency was a problem.
I mean, like Murray Rothbard, or Mises, or other people, or Hayek, who were into gold-backed currency, are also potential shooters.
I mean, it's just insane, right?
But the government controls the narrative.
So what that means is that people don't live in the world of what happened.
People don't live in the world of what happened.
People live in the world of narrative.
People live in fairy tales.
People live in the shifting matrix of adjectives and descriptors.
And so, because of that, whatever you do is never going to be perceived as what you're doing.
So the reality is, if some guy comes to collect your house because of back payment of taxes or whatever, and you decide to defend yourself, Then people won't see that one guy in a blue costume is coming to take the property of another guy, and that's theft, and this guy is legitimately defending himself against an unjust predation.
That's not what people will see at all.
What people will see is an officer of the law is trying to enforce the social contract and collect what is justly due and duly owed to the government, and this selfish guy who doesn't want to give up a penny to help the poor and clothe
The naked and give medicine to the sick is selfishly gunning down or shooting at a cop and regretfully they have to call in reinforcements because this guy is simply not paying what he's owed and he's not pulling with the team and he's opposing help for the poor.
See, people don't live in reality.
They live in narrative.
They live in the media.
They don't live in the real world.
That is the ultimate matrix.
And so, since the media will create the reality that is convenient to those in power, any stand that is taken by anybody, no matter how morally justified, is simply going to be used to discredit the arguments.
Right, so if you or I took a stand, then all that would happen is people would say, well, this is the result of not accepting the legitimate authority of the state.
And all that will happen is anarchism will take another 10 or 20 steps backwards in terms of legitimacy.
People won't learn through example, as yet.
They need to learn through argument.
They need to learn through consistency.
You need to shine your flashlight of truth up the ass of evil to find the polyps of inconsistency, or something like that.
All we have at the moment is argument, because anything we do is going to be reframed to the advantage of those in power.
Like, the worst thing that could ever happen is we get a libertarian into power, right?
Because then the libertarian will be the last guy on the Titanic when it goes down, right?
The moment the captain says to the second-in-command, uh, hey, you're in charge, right?
You know you've already hit the iceberg, right?
And he doesn't want to go down as the guy who goes down with the ship.
So, until people can pierce through the matrix of language and narrative and media metaphor to the actual truth, there's no point.
In fact, it's counterproductive to do anything that involves taking a moral stand.
I also agree with that.
When I'm trying to connect with higher consciousness or any of these other hippie phrases which we like to use, I sometimes see the all-pervasive nature of the physical monopoly that the state has on violence.
I mean, I could, for example, start a small cell of anarchists and start doing petrol bombings against things we consider very evil, make sure we don't kill anyone.
But the nature of surveillance nowadays, the nature of the Special Armed Forces, the nature of the police, they would have us in jail for the rest of our lives within a week, and then paint us, as you say, as white domestic extremist terrorists in league with Al-Qaeda and the FARC in Colombia.
And Chavez.
So I was watching a poem of yours.
You used some very good CGI animation of a flower bursting through the cracks.
I can't remember the name, but it was kind of like half prose, half poetry.
And you said one of the reasons why, in this kind of reality construct, we do have the state controlling the narrative, we do have everyone around us on the kind of horizontal plane, not on the kind of vertical state plane, but everyone around us almost like agents of the Matrix, to use the metaphor from the film.
It's because it makes the video game of reality that much more beautiful, that much more poignant, that much more difficult.
And the fact that the state has special forces, nuclear weapons, heat-seeking missiles, forces us to be a lot more beautiful and a lot more creative with our freedom.
So do you think, Steph, I don't know if you're a spiritual man.
I hate to use the word spirituality because it comes with this whole hocus-pocus, fairytale, historical attachment of bollocks to it.
But do you think, in some sort of scientific way or in some sort of philosophical way, the game itself, the game in inverted commas, is set up in this way in order to create a more beautiful novelty generation?
You know, that was a fantastic question, but I'm afraid I lost track of the actual question.
I do apologize for that.
If you could rephrase, I would appreciate that.
I just want to make sure I'm answering something that you're really asking and not sort of picking what I like out of what you said.
So if you could just rephrase that.
I'm going to give you the kind of shortened version.
Reality is as it is at this forefront of space-time.
Do you believe it's this evil in this way Because that is the kind of reality that our higher consciousness or whichever scientific holographic universe gave to us in order to be creative?
Or do you think we're just fucked up and if we don't turn this ship around we're all doomed?
I don't think that we're fucked up at all.
I think that If you look at the simple biological approach to life, you know, which is that every cell or every piece of DNA wants to replicate itself with the least amount of effort and gain control of the greatest amount of resources.
So if you just look at the human animal rather than the rational animal, just look at the human beings as a mammal, then the control and ownership of other human beings is the greatest resource, right?
So if you can control plants, you've got agriculture.
If you can control livestock, you have dairy farming or pig farming or whatever.
If you can control human beings, you have a state.
And the people who control human beings are very, very, very efficient at getting the most resources for the least amount of effort.
I mean, I'm not saying people in the state don't work hard.
I just read this thing about Schwarzenegger leaving his kids for... what was it?
six or eight years to run California, or to preside upon California running itself into the ground.
What a tragic, ridiculous thing to do.
I mean, you need to spend time with your kids, not getting messed up in the state.
But anyway.
So the human animal, by controlling other human animals, gains incredible resources.
Taxation is extremely efficient for gathering resources to the ruling class.
And the ruling class is following a biological mechanism of control and a biological drive for control and the gaining of resources.
There's nothing irrational from a merely material standpoint, from a merely biological standpoint.
What they're doing is perfectly rational and perfectly sensible and perfectly, quote, right.
Sorry to interrupt.
You mean from the genetic pool of their families and their ancestors to maintain their peak?
Yeah, absolutely, to reproduce, right?
Now, the problem though, the reason that philosophy comes into it, is that the greed of the ruling class leads them to want to control human beings, not by force, but by ethics.
Because force destroys the creative capacity of a human being.
So you can force someone to build your pyramid, you can't force someone to want to be an architect and design for you beautiful buildings.
You can't do that.
And so if you want to unleash the creativity of your human lifestyle, then what you need to do is stop putting them in physical cages and put them instead in mental cages.
Self-reinforcing, self-enslaving mental cages.
And the best way is through ethics.
I'm sorry?
Free-range humans, yeah.
You know, if the cows don't see the fence, they think that they're free, right?
Now, if everybody does see the fence, but they pretend that they don't, right?
And so, the reason that the ruling class is going to end, inevitably and eventually, and I just mean sort of in terms of their power, I hope that the people themselves continue, but it's because human beings are controlled through the mechanism called universal ethics.
But that amazing power, right?
So again, to use the Lord of the Rings metaphor, right?
So Sauron poured a huge amount of his power into this ring, and through this ring he gained even more power, but he became vulnerable, because if that ring were destroyed, he would be reduced to a little wraith that had nothing of any use, any power to it.
But this is what the ruling classes do.
So they create this ring called universal morality, and they inflict it and teach it on children through religion and through statist indoctrination.
They pour so much of their power into this ring called virtue.
And then this ring goes out into the world.
Now we, hobbits, we take up this ring and we say, OK, then if universal ethics is how you rule us, but they really are universal, then let's turn these around and see how they apply to you and whether they apply to you.
And so in a sense, the ruling class gives us the gift called universal ethics which we then use to eliminate the power of the ruling class in the same way that Sauron gave Gandalf the gift called the ring which was used to eliminate Sauron and that's the thing that we need to keep hammering is the universality of the ethics that are used to enslave us Absolutely.
I'm sometimes, Steph, in absolute awe at the psychological, as you say, the kind of mental prison of the enemy.
Sorry to use the term enemy, I know I shouldn't.
But I am in absolute almost I am starstruck by what they have constructed, and I am, in fact, very thankful for my adversaries, and I hope you are as well, as a philosopher, that you were, you know, born in this world with these challenges in order for... It's almost like a very powerful puzzle that we have to kind of deconstruct.
I wanted to ask you some advice, because I do consider you one of the kind of voices of reason, the kind of talking heads of reason from YouTube.
There's a major, major, major, probably the biggest one Britain has seen for a long time, protest.
Have you been keeping up with the student protests on the news in Britain?
Not intimately, but tangentially.
I may have some useful things to add.
So you know what will happen there.
I'm going along with a group of anarchists and truthers and so forth to have a kind of protest within a protest, a kind of fractal within a fractal.
And what we want to do is to try and educate the 100,000 or 200,000 angry students and trade unionists civil servants and police officers who are there to say, look, why don't we just walk away?
Just walk away from the state and we'll do it for free.
We'll start our own stuff.
But if you had any advice for me or my friends or something that we, a message we could share to the people who will obviously be frustrated at the lowering of the state handouts and they'll start smashing buildings and punching policemen in the face and getting their pictures taken on the right wing press and saying, violent anarchists.
What would your message, Steph, be?
That's a great question.
Kudos for taking on that challenge.
It's huge.
There's two approaches.
The one I've already talked about, which is to keep hammering on the universal ethics side of it.
There's this phrase that's been rolling around in my head around democracy.
Democracy is all about, I want stuff for free.
And when I don't get stuff for free, and free always means at the expense of others, usually the unborn in terms of debt, but when you don't get something for free you get to throw a tantrum.
And this is all that really is occurring in society is a bunch of kids, a bunch of hyped up immature kids in a grocery store with a diminishing pile of candy all throwing tantrums because they're not getting what they want.
So it's a very immature, but this is the level at which the state leaves us after 15,000 hours of indoctrination, maybe 15,000 years too.
So you keep hammering on the universal ethics.
I think that's important.
But there's a huge false dichotomy, and this is a stroke of sheer genius on the part of the ruling classes.
There's a huge dichotomy that's rolling down towards us like this, you know, the thunderball at the beginning of Indiana Jones.
And the dichotomy is this.
It's a false dichotomy.
It is, do you want to cut benefits to the needy, or do you want to raise taxes?
This is what's being talked about.
And it's complete and total shite.
It is like such a steaming pile of bullshit.
If it were a human being, its eyes and hair would be brown.
It is extraordinarily ridiculous what a proposition it would be.
Because there's a third alternative that you will never ever see discussed.
Which is, well, what about just reducing state power?
So they say, well, when it comes to health care, do you want to cut cancer treatments for the elderly or do you want to raise taxes?
And of course no one is going to go on record as saying, I want to cut cancer treatments for the elderly.
Of course not, even though in the U.S.
cancer victims have the same survival rates if they're in Medicare as if they're completely uninsured, which is tragic but inevitable.
So the third option called, well, if we want to lower, why not just lower the price of medical care by getting rid of licensing and getting rid of restrictions into entry.
Whenever you see high prices, all that you're seeing is barriers to entry.
So how about just, you know, you take your blood sample to a machine and it dispenses your antibiotics if you have an infection.
You know, it'll be about the same price as buying a can of pop.
But no, you have to go to a guy with 20 years experience who does the blood work for you.
I mean, there's so many things that you could do to reduce these costs.
For the students in England, the dichotomy is, well, do you want to cut off your cat food coupons to the elderly, or are you guys willing to pay a little bit more in terms of tuition?
And to say, no, I don't want to pay more in terms of tuition, is considered selfish because it's slave-on-slave violence, right?
This is something I've talked about in a number of videos.
Well, the answer to education is, well, let's stop the government monopolizing it.
Let's stop the government monopolizing education.
You know, get rid of fucking tenure.
You know, get rid of these professors who work three hours a week for 150 large a year and take every third year off for a sabbatical and go to conferences in goddamn Hawaii every other week.
I mean, it's ridiculous how much these people are paid for just a shit little amount of work.
So how about that?
Instead of saying, well, let's keep subsidizing the students, which is not really happening.
What's happening is the universities are being subsidized.
Let's cut off all of the restrictions to entry.
Let's let whoever can prove even a reasonable amount of competence to his customers be allowed to grant degrees.
Let's take away that monopoly.
Let's take away the degree requirement to get into a variety of fields, even like architecture and medicine and so on, and let's get rid of all of these ridiculous subsidies to these professors and to these colleges, and then university can be done probably in about a year for about five hundred to a thousand pounds.
Done.
Done and dusted.
But nobody will ever talk about that.
Nobody will ever talk about that.
All they'll ever talk about is cut essential spending or raise taxes.
The idea of actually letting go of the grip of the state on the productive throats of the nation, that can't ever be discussed, because everybody knows that that's fucking impossible.
It's never on the table.
It's never on the table.
And so what I want to say to these students is, you want all of these goodies from the government, didn't your mother ever tell you, don't take fucking candy from strangers?
You always know where that's going to lead.
Exactly.
And the way I like to see it, as well, is a choice from the state, like the false dichotomy you were saying, is as useless as the state itself.
And I've been on the radio interview recently and someone says, Charlie, what do you feel about the legalization of marijuana or cannabis or skunk?
And I used to be all for the state legalizing cannabis, but then you kind of take it to the next level of the onion glare of reality and go, hold on a second, if I were to campaign for the state to legalize marijuana, I would be saying that the state has a moral precedent and an ability to decide whether it's legal or not.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I mean, I used to be more in favor of political action, but I'm with you.
I don't beg for my freedom from anyone.
I don't beg, say, please give me back a few bucks a year.
Please don't pass another law.
I'm not going to beg these assholes for my freedom.
Fuck them.
Fuck them.
I'm not going to beg.
I'm not going to beg.
And that, to me, it just creates a cringing, vermin-style supplication We have to be more gorgeous than the state.
We have to be more thrilling than the state.
We have to be more courageous than the state.
We have to be incandescent relative to the spider hands of the state.
Begging your master for another five minutes off on a Saturday is just confirmation that you're never going to be free, and it just swells the power of the master and makes everybody feel a kind of inward revulsion at your desire for freedom.
So fuck him.
Yeah, two lashes instead of one?
Go for it.
But I'm not kneeling down.
Absolutely Stefan, neither am I. And I feel, in a way, the kind of mental emancipation as soon as... because it is very difficult and I'm... I've just turned 30 years old and I did philosophy at university.
I have to admit, I did it at Edinburgh University.
I was more interested in clubbing and girls and smoking weed and not attending class.
So it's taken me 30 years to really emancipate my mind to think outside statism.
Well, I'm sorry, I just wanted to point out that that's really good.
I mean, I'm not too dumb, and you did it quicker than me, so, you know, all hats off to you.
Yeah, but this is because I watched your videos.
You weren't watching your videos.
Oh, right, right.
I guess that's true.
Okay.
But if I'd read my rough part, it might have been easier.
But anyway, go on.
Yeah, so my train of thought, I've lost it.
Let me try and find it back.
I'm so sorry, you were talking about it took you 30 years to get out of the mental emancipation.
You were clubbing, not girls, but clubbing comma girls at Edinburgh University while you were studying philosophy.
That's right, and to me, you know, the kind of movement which I'm loosely attached to is called the truth movement, and I hate that label because I don't think there is any objective truth ever possible, but for me, the mental emancipation, it's almost like a very slow Like a very slow release of endorphins and serotonin that I'll have with me for the rest of my existence.
And there's not really anything a policeman or a tax collector or the social services, not that I have kids, but there's not really anything they can do that would ever try and scare me otherwise because they can come and I would go, ah, you've lost the game.
You're initiating violence.
I win morally.
That's it.
There's nothing you can do to me.
And I just want anyone who's watching this video Please don't be scared by the word anarchy.
Move away from the kind of public, as you say, the grand narrative that the state controls of what anarchy means.
Read some theory.
And to me... Oh yeah, I found my train of thought now, Steph.
In the Western world, in the Western industrialized nations, even though we are still slaves, we do have a few more freedoms than, say, Saudi Arabia or China, because our leaders realize, as I've learned from your films, we are much more productive when we are free range.
But I think we have just about, as a Western civilized species, thrown off the shackles of religionism.
Do you feel, Steph, that now with the advent of the internet as the technological footprint of consciousness, do you feel that now that we've thrown off religionism, and I feel in Britain we have, in Sweden, in Canada, many places, will we throw off statism within our lifetimes?
I don't believe so.
I think that people have a very strong desire for the truth.
Children want to know the truth about everything.
Chuck.
Anyway, people have a very strong desire for the truth.
Children want to know the truth about everything.
Unfortunately, society rests on all of these shaky house of cards mountains of extraordinary bullshit.
And so when children start going in and swinging around, in a sense, the club of truth, all the society trembles.
And everybody who's living in this stack of cards, this house of cards, trembles with fear that it's all going to come down.
So children are punished.
aggressed against for the truth.
And so what happens is, again, we're mammals, right?
If you take a rat and you punish it for going left, it will never go left.
I mean, it will just stop doing it.
And so human beings, we as children in particular, we are punished for asking the truth, for asking for the truth, for demanding the truth.
And so what happens is people gain, that they get this block about truth.
Truth equals being attacked.
Truth equals punishment.
Truth is like putting your hand in a blender.
So people who are interested in freedom and reason and universal ethics or whatever, when we say to people, here's the truth, what we're basically saying to people is put your hand in a blender.
And switch it to frappe.
And people don't want to do that.
We are averse to truth, not because it's anything in human nature, but simply because we are adaptive mammals who have been punished.
for asking about the truth.
Every kid has this thought.
When you're a kid, for instance, if you kill a guy in peacetime, you go to jail.
If you kill a guy in wartime, you get a pension and a medal.
And every kid goes, like, what the hell is that all about?
And no adult can ever explain it, of course, other than by implying or openly stating that it's immoral to even ask that question.
So even our desire for ethics is used against us as children.
The only way that people are going to be able to accept the truth is if the truth becomes less frightening to them.
And the only way the truth is going to become less frightening to them is if parents raise their children with peace and with curiosity and without all of these sacred cows that we feed to our children and make them sick with mysticism for the rest of their days.
Parents have to raise their children without aggression, they have to raise their children without violence, they have to raise their children without myths.
The parents have to subject even themselves and their own most sacred cows, as I will with my daughter, to the scrutiny and skepticism and curiosity of children.
Once that process begins, and that is a tough process, that is a lengthy process, then human beings can actually begin to explore the truth without being in some electrode-prodded maze like in a rat's experiment where their brains have been so traumatized that they don't know which way is up and they do know that everywhere the truth is they get a whack in the forehead.
So that process of raising children peacefully, letting children explore the truth so that children grow up with less fear of the truth is a slow process and that is multi-generational.
Absolutely, and I'm glad you raised upon the multi-generational there because I'm going to I do think a lot of people worry, myself included, in terms of the state is now almost like a cornered, wounded beast, like a rabid beast.
And what we see in terms of advances in genetic manipulation, in terms of surveillance, in terms of you know, kind of skirmishes around the world and kind of saber rattling is almost like the kind of desperate last attempts of the state.
And I say last attempts.
I know you've just answered the question.
You don't think it might be in our lifetime.
I am more optimistic than that.
I think there is a kind of level of chaotic love and sexiness and kind of dynamic joy that we can bring to people that will make them move away from the state.
But we see in the news now Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao of China meeting up and they're all saying, ah, we support your rise of this powerful state.
For me, Steph, there is something I find so incredibly eerie and terrifying and machine-like.
I mean, the British and American and Canadian state is bad enough, but the Chinese cultural indoctrination, to me, it's almost like I'm, I don't, I mean, I'm not xenophobic, but it's almost like I'm looking at an alien race from outer space!
And to me, say we did in the Western world, in the countries I've mentioned, we did manage, and this is just a massive thought experiment, throw off the shackles of statism, I don't think so.
It's a good question.
How do we defend ourselves as a free land?
How would we defend ourselves against aggressive states?
have now.
Let's go and farm them.
They've got all this great knowledge.
Let's farm them the way we farm the guys in China and impose our one-child policy.
We'll do this.
We'll restrict travel.
Do you think the emancipation from statism is something...
I'm asking you 10 questions.
No, no.
It's a good question.
How do we defend ourselves as a free land?
How would we defend ourselves against aggressive states?
Because it's not all going to happen at once, of course, right?
Well, first of all, I mean, there's a very...
And I talk about this in my free book, practical anarchy, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
It's at freedomainradio.com forward slash free for people who want to download it for free or read it online for free.
But first of all, there's a basic Historical fact that no nuclear power has ever been attacked.
So no geographical area that has nuclear weapons has ever been attacked.
It's mutually assured destruction.
It's the ultimate deterrent.
So given that that's the case, let's say that you're in a country of, like America, 300 million people or whatever.
It costs maybe three hundred million dollars a year to run a couple of nukes and keep them in silos, so this would be a dollar a year from everyone, and let's say half of the people can't pay, that's two dollars a year.
Let's say half of the people don't care about paying, so it's four dollars a year.
I would pay four dollars a year to ensure that I wasn't going to be invaded by another country.
I think just about everyone would, and those who didn't want to, other people would double up or whatever.
So it's not expensive to defend, right?
National defense is very cheap.
National offense, or invading other countries around the world, particularly the Middle East and south of Russia, that is expensive.
So defense is actually very cheap.
Plus, of course, there's no restriction on weaponry, no state restriction on weaponry.
There may be insurance restrictions on weaponry in a free country.
But most importantly, you can't invade A non-country.
Because the reason, like so, take Germany invading France in 1940.
Why did Germany invade France in 1940?
Well, two reasons.
One, it wanted the weaponry, so it wanted the guns and it wanted the tanks so that it could use them.
But number two, and most importantly, it wanted to collect the taxes.
So the reason that people invade other countries is to take over the tax system and so that you can reap all of the domesticated cows' taxes.
But in a free society there is no tax collection system and there is no vast amount of weaponry because you just have defensive nukes.
So you'd go into this country and there'd be all these people, but there would be no government for you to take over and start taxing people with.
So then you'd have to try and create an entire tax system in a fervently anti-tax culture where you don't know what weapons everyone has.
There's just no way.
There's no way that that would ever happen.
In the same way that If you're standing like a fork in the road and you want to take over two guys, and one guy has a farm where the cows are already domesticated and you already have your shipments and you already have your economics set up and your payroll and all that, so if you go and take over that guy's farm, you just put yourself in his place and you get all the milk and everybody shows up to work, that's all running beautifully.
Whereas another guy just has a big empty A lot with a whole bunch of jungle and wood stuff in it, right?
Where you'd have to go in and you'd have to make your own farm.
Of course you're going to go for the farm that already exists and take that one over, rather than go to just some wilderness, in a sense, which is completely disorganized, where there's no existing farm you can take over.
It's just not economically productive to take over a non-enslaved area, if that makes any sense.
Yeah.
One doesn't need to be a philosopher or even an intelligent person to see that it's a lot harder to domesticate wild animals or wild humans than it is to re-domesticate domesticated animals.
My next question, Steph, is one which many people have asked me because I go out there on the street and I say my whole line Don't be scared, and so forth, without stakes.
But then they say to me, OK, well, are you against corporations?
And I say, well, big evil corporations that use violence, like Halliburton, backed by the American government, or British oil companies, which are backed by MI6, which assassinate people, yes.
But then they say to me, Charlie, how do you feel, like, how are you so certain that companies, like voluntary syndicates, wouldn't bring in their own private militias to enforce their own terror upon the people.
So, Steph, how would you answer that?
If people say to you, Steph, oh, well, you want to get rid of the state, well then, you know, Shell would just have a Shell private army.
Right, right, right.
Well, I mean, this is the tragedy of people who don't know anything about economics.
And it really is a tragedy.
This is just a scare story.
Because, let's say that there's Shell and there's Exxon in a free society.
And Shell, at some crazy ass board meeting, the CEO says, that's it, I've had it with this fucking competition.
Let's just go and get a huge army of black helicopters populated by squids with lasers and I want barrels of monkeys and I want all the pathogens and I want every ghastly thing in the world to rain down on our customers because I've had it with trying to win them over with commercials.
It's time to kidnap their children and lock them up with termites and that's how we're going to get our money.
And let's say the entire board is insane and decides to go along with this.
Well, Then what happens is this company, Company A, let's say, they have to start raising the prices of their oil.
Why?
Because they have to go and buy all this shit, right?
So let's say it costs them half a billion dollars to go.
That money has to come from somewhere.
And so what's going to happen is they're going to have to raise the prices on their customers.
Or they're going to have to go heavily into debt, which their shareholders aren't going to want.
And they're also, so immediately people will say, well, I don't want to pay another dollar a gallon for gas.
I mean, that's crazy.
So they'll just go to the other company.
And then this company will be starved of resources.
Now, everybody in the business world would know this up front, and I have spent some time as an entrepreneur and on board, so this is what happens.
When you try and present a business plan to a board of directors, the first thing you get is 12 million questions about how it's not going to work.
So if I say, listen, I want half a billion dollars to go and make our own army, Then the immediate thing is, how are we going to pay for this?
Well, we're going to increase the customer's price?
Well, then everyone's just going to go to our competition, so forget that, right?
So that's just... Now, let's say even if that passes, though, you then have to go find somebody who's willing to sell you half a billion dollars' worth of arms.
And that's going to be pretty visible, and where are you going to store them?
Everybody's going to be completely aware that you're bringing in all of these helicopters with squids with lasers on their tentacles or whatever.
So everyone's going to see it, and then everyone's going to say, well, shit, I'm not buying from these guys, they're making an army!
And so forget it.
The last thing I want is another state back, so I'm just going to stop doing business with these guys.
And the electricity company is going to stop sending you electricity.
And the water company is going to stop sending you water.
And everybody's going to just close ranks and say, fuck off, you assholes.
We are not taking this shit anymore.
We're not going back to the Middle Ages.
We're not going back to the 21st century.
We're not going back to statism.
So set all these squids free, and let's move on.
Absolutely.
Steph, that's fantastic, and I agree.
I mean, you're right.
Where would they find the money to raise an army?
But then people say, I explain to them what you've just said, and then they go, Could quite cheaply and on the sly hire, say, 12 highly trained Bosnian assassins and cause havoc that way.
Or they may, as Noam Chomsky calls it, they may manufacture consent in the public by buying the media and so forth.
Well, sorry, but if they start buying the media, again, they go into debt, they have to start to raise all of this capital to do it, which means they have to raise the prices of their... Even if they start taking over all the media, what that means is that people want to be fed lies.
But if people want to be fed lies, we're not in a free society already.
People who are raised in a free society are going to be much more productive and much more free.
They don't have to wait until they're 25 to start their real jobs.
They can do it at 15 or whatever.
I've been mostly on my own since I was 15.
I've had a job since I was 11.
Loved it!
Loved the freedom, loved the productivity.
But there won't be all of these massive delays.
People are going to get an education that is going to teach them critical thinking and reasoning.
They're not going to be as easy prey for sophists and manipulators.
They're going to be skeptical.
They're going to be philosophical.
They're going to know about economics.
And look, if people are really worried... I did a speech in Phoenix last month.
at Ernie Hancock's Freedom Summit, and I'll just give you the very, very brief synopsis of it here.
But what I like to do with people like that, Charlie, is I say, okay, well, let's say, let's take the worst case scenario.
So I'm Defense Company A, and I provide geographical defense, or for, you know, some combination of geographical defense for this area of land.
Well, the first thing is I'm going to have to sell my services to people, and the first question I'm going to get asked is, well, how the hell do we know, Steph, that you're not going to be some clusterfuck asshole and take over our, you know, we're going to give you all this money for defense and then you're going to just take us over?
And I'll be like, OK, so let's say I'm the skeptical customer and you're the defense company.
How are you going to sell me?
Turn it around.
Instead of you providing the answers, which they can then just shoot down, flip it around.
Turn it around.
Say, OK, you sell me your defense services.
So let's try that.
So let's say I'm the skeptical customer and you are the defense agency who wants my business.
And I say, well, how do I know you're not going to just turn on me?
What would you say?
I don't know.
Well, you would probably say something like... I mean, if you've never been much of an entrepreneur, then there's no reason you'd know this stuff, but you'd say stuff like, OK, well, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to tell you exactly how many tanks or bombs or aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons I have every year.
And I guarantee I'm never going to go over that, for sure.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put $10 million into an account and anybody who finds, I'm going to open up my entire facilities to everyone, anybody who finds that I have a single bullet more than I claim, I will give them the $10 million.
Anybody can come in and look around.
Top, bottom, all the doors are unlocked.
Everything's an open book.
You can check it out online.
You can fly webcam drones through my facilities if you want.
You can do anything that you want.
And if you find that I've overstated anything, Then I will give you this ten million dollars.
I mean, that's just one way you could do it.
I mean, there could be any number of other ways, but you would need to find some way of reassuring people.
That you were never ever going to turn on them.
And companies like, there'd be a hundred defense companies trying to compete to be the safest for people to trust, if that makes any sense.
And of course, any company that did start building additional guns and bombs and planes, they would have to raise their prices to pay for it.
And that would be a clear signal to everyone that they were up to no good.
Like they'd either go to some big loan, they'd have to go to a bank for half a billion dollars to build up their army, and the bank would say, what the hell are you doing?
I'm not going to give you this money to build an army because I'm a bank.
I don't want there to be a big army here.
Or they'd have to charge their customers, or they'd have to pay less money to their shareholders, in which case the shareholders would dump the stock and they'd all go out of business.
So, when you have a free society, there's a very fine equilibrium in terms of prices and charging and stock dividends and all of that.
If you start trying to do some massive financial transaction for the sake of taking over a geographical area, you're going to send 12 million signals.
It's going to be like hurling a massive boulder into a small pond in terms of the ripple effect that's going to show up in the economy.
Everyone's going to see it right away and is going to know exactly what you're up to and is going to just stop paying you their money and you're going to collapse.
So people, they're not going to do that.
No, I agree, and I think the majority of violence that we have in our society is incredibly unnatural, and it stems from the indoctrination of the state.
Because if we think of the human being as, say, a chimpanzee with an overclocked graphics card for a brain, there is no... there is really no... Which is prone to crashing, as all overclocked video cards are, I have found, to my chagrin.
But anyway, go on.
Yeah, there's no real evolution.
Well, let's look at the animal kingdom.
They like to fight, the males fight for supremacy, but they very rarely kill each other, and they never kill each other en masse.
There is no, as you were talking about the biological rationality of the elites.
There is something which statism manages to hack in the kind of natural human psyche to convince all these young men or young men and women in the Western world to put on these uniforms and go and kill each other en masse.
So I do agree with you to a certain extent without that kind of statism people would be a lot more free to go And also, I have great optimism in the general public.
95% of them, without influence, want a peaceful life, without intrusion, without people sticking a sword in their eyeball, without people putting a bullet in their son's head.
So I agree, people would be very concerned that companies, say if Microsoft started, you know, it would leak, it would leak straight away if they started hiring assassins, if they started killing Sun Microsystems execs and so forth, and no one would want to have a Microsoft computer.
And there is something about the state using the whole Hollywood, I saw your review of the film Iron Man, I think you were spot on, the kind of glorification of the kind of machine-like violence, which indoctrinates children to a great extent.
And it happened to me, Steph, like, I like to consider myself an enlightened young individual on the quest of enlightenment, but I joined the armed forces when I was 21 years old after September the 11th, and when spectacular things like that happen, and I know you're not a truther and you don't want to get into the whole whodunit aspect because and I know you're not a truther and you don't want to get into the whole whodunit aspect No, I'm sorry to interrupt.
I just want to keep your thought about the armed services stuff.
The reason that I don't get involved in 9-11 is it's not a philosophical issue.
It's a forensics issue.
It's a criminal issue.
It's not something that you can reason through from first principles.
There's either going to be evidence or there isn't.
There's either going to be an admission or there's going to be proof or there isn't.
But you can't reason about it from first principles.
That's sort of why I don't... It's just not a philosophical issue and I'm a philosopher.
But sorry, go on with your armed forces thing.
Yeah, the armed forces thing.
I joined the armed forces because I believed there was a terrorist hiding behind my sofa with a big caveman beard, which I'm now sporting now, to slit my family's throat.
So it kind of helps me stay less angry at the general population when I see them joining the armed forces, or if I see my friends joining the police force, because As you say, the grand narrative is so poetic and so all-encompassing that I am in absolute awe.
But it makes it very fun doing what I do with The Love Police, and I hope you've seen a few of my films going out there with a megaphone.
Oh, I have.
I would do that, but it's It's cold in Canada and there's only certain limits for me in terms of the course and having my nuts bang together like two frozen Faberge eggs is not really on my list of top ten things to do for the course, so I just stay and sweat and scream in my room.
But, you know, all kudos for you for going out.
I think that's really impressive.
Because I think I'm in two minds because I'm unfortunately a kind of resentful, bitter, angry male mammal.
in this world and I get very angry and the lies which I believed in when I was younger, I do hold this kind of residual resentment in my heart which I still try and overcome.
And every once in a while on YouTube I'll do a video where I'm like, oh my god, I've lost all hope.
Maybe one gigantic big showdown of human beings and we'll battle it out and may the best idea win, which I know is wrong on a philosophical level.
But just so that I don't keep battering my head against the kind of state or against the kind of horizontal line of people who will do anything to uphold the state, What do you think my next step should be?
Because I've got this kind of big group of people who watch my films.
There's this big momentum going now in London and so forth.
A lot of people say you should travel here, you should travel there.
But I do feel my gift is I'm able to speak very clearly with a megaphone or otherwise in a big crowd of people and kind of shock people and create some big scene.
But what do you think would be the next steps for me?
Well, I can't obviously tell you what the next step is for you.
I can tell you what I think is the most useful thing to do.
If it's a multi-generational change, then we need to focus on parenting.
And if you're not a parent, there's still a huge, huge, huge amount that you can do.
You can help people to understand the effects of child abuse, the physical effects on their brain.
I've got a whole video series where I interview a subject matter expert and go through the biological effects of child abuse on the brain, which renders people to be violent and susceptible to impulses.
The average victim of child abuse loses about twenty years of his life because of a variety of dysfunctional behaviors that are generally produced through child abuse.
So if we want people to not hunger after power, if we want people to not aggress against others, if we want people to be able to think and reason without the static of prior abuse clogging up their mental tubes, then we need to find ways in which we can promote the peaceful and positive raising of children.
One of the things that I and a lot of my listeners do is anytime we see a child mistreated in public, we intervene.
That is a very powerful and important thing that you can do.
If you see a child being hit, if you see a child being yelled at, if you see a child being frightened in public, you intervene.
You don't have to do it aggressively, you don't have to scream at people, you can do it very calmly, you can do it very peacefully, but you need to let that child know that this is not a standard of behavior that is acceptable in society.
It's funny, if you saw some woman being slapped on the bus by some big burly guy, I'm sure you would do something about it.
And the size differential is even bigger with parents' child.
So I think one of the most important things that we can do to bring about a free world is to intervene if we see it in public, if we know someone in our friendships, if we know somebody in our extended family who is mistreating the children, you sit down, you intervene, you work through it.
If you come across someone who is the victim of child abuse, you give them moral sympathy, you give them moral clarity and deep sympathy for what they've experienced, the wounded animal that they are.
That kind of moral clarity, that kind of sympathy, that kind of very assertive intervention in the mistreatment of children is the greatest conceivable thing that we can do.
Because until human beings can reason clearly, we can't get a philosophically free world.
And until children are aggressed against far less than they are now, We're simply not going to have human beings who are able to think consistently and clearly at a productive level.
I know that's a little off the beaten path for you.
I think there's a lot of science that backs this up.
It is for sure going to work and you can go to psychohistory.com for more on this or on my website.
An audiobook reading of Lloyd DeMoss' book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which is available for free, where the history of war, the history of predation, the history of statism, the history of tyranny, is all founded upon the way children are treated in society.
The state is an effect of the family.
The state is the shadow cast by parenting.
And until parenting changes, all we're doing is just shouting at the shadow, trying to get it to move, when we just need to take down this nasty, brutish statue of destructive parenting, and then the shadow goes of its own accord.
That's my calling, and I came to it regretfully, somewhat resentfully, and with great resistance, because I wanted to do a lot of other things, but that's where the science and the evidence and the psychology and the facts have led me to.
Certainly I would invite you to look at some of the material that's out there about this, but I think focusing on helping people to raise their children better, and if you become a father, and Lord knows It is easier to breed than convert.
Then I'm sure you will raise your children in the true spirit of freedom and peace.
That is the biggest thing that we can do.
Too many people are just, you know, they're bad broken brain robots and they can't do anything to change their current behavior.
But we can raise children to think more critically, clearly and freely through opposing child abuse wherever we see it.
Steph, I'd just like to thank you massively for that answer because whilst you were speaking to me You kind of gave me the answer in a way which I've been looking for within myself.
I'd just like to add to what you said to all the viewers or listeners hearing this.
Look at one of Steph's videos called We Read What We Sow, where he touches upon these points in terms of parenting.
And you're right, the kind of fractal kind of reverberation of the family and how people view their parents is the way they view the state and the kind of state is the family.
And I asked you and then you kind of answered in a kind of roundabout way, which is very personal to you.
But in a way, yeah, we need to.
Well, I'll speak about me and I need to kind of, I reckon, become almost that kind of rebellious, mischievous kind of hacking alternative for children.
And I've done love police stuff outside colleges of people who are like 15 to 18.
And they absolutely love it.
And they come up to me in the street and say, you're that guy from that video.
And maybe I need to maybe even aim a bit younger, much like the state and religion.
They're very aware that if they get children in the first few years of life, that they are broken and bruised brains for the rest of their life.
So I.
I look at my YouTube statistics and unfortunately it's bizarre.
I'm 30.
70% of my viewers are aged between 35 and 55, so I am preaching to the converted.
I think you're absolutely right.
There is a way where if we are going to try and be militant in terms of putting virtue into the world, I think I do need to kind of... I hate to use the word target, but...
You're right!
Anarchists are targeting our children!
I know what you mean.
It's tough because the children are sealed up in this obsidian biosphere of the family when they're very young, and that's very tough.
Obviously, you can't reach in and change things, for the most part, at that level unless you know the family quite well.
So you're right, it is a great challenge.
I've done a series with a couple of, I think, great libertarian thinkers on libertarian parenting.
I've got a feed available on my podcast page entirely devoted to philosophical parenting.
I get so many emails from parents who, you know, this is the most satisfying thing that I do, is to help parents to reject the initiation of force against their children.
The non-aggression principle.
The non-aggression principle.
applies the most to children because children are not involuntary relationships.
My daughter did not choose to be born to me as a father.
What I want to do is be such a good dad and such a fun dad and such a helpful dad that if she had the choice of all the dads in the world, she would choose me.
That's what I sort of live by in terms of how I parent.
But the non-aggression principle, if it doesn't apply to children, it will never apply to society as a whole.
If we violate the non-aggression principle, and that doesn't just mean hitting, that means verbal abuse, raising your voice, using your size and power to intimidate children in any way whatsoever.
If we violate the non-aggression principle with children, we will never gain peace in the world, we will never get rid of vertical hierarchies, we will never get rid of tyrannies, we will never get rid of superstition and delusion, because these are all scar tissue responses to abusive authority.
And we will never ever get people who are willing to stand on their own two feet, if all we've done is chop them down as children.
So the non-aggression principle, which is a foundation of libertarianism and anarchism, the non-aggression principle must Always, first and foremost, apply consistently to children within the family, or all we're doing is farting in the wind, as far as anything else goes.
Man, Steph.
Steph, it's been really mind-opening and really, really nice to speak to you, and it's really good to finally share ideas with someone who I do respect on a rational, logical level.
So, yeah, I mean, we've done an hour now.
If there's anything else you'd like to add in closing, No, just put out my website for your listeners.
It's freedomainradio.com or you can go to youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
Listen, it's been a real pleasure and you've had some fantastic questions.
I've really, really enjoyed the conversation.
If you just want to do your stats again for my listeners to make sure they can find your info, that would be great.
Sure, it's www.cveitch.org or just very simply type in The Love Police into Google and you'll see hundreds of my films.
So thank you very much everyone for watching.
Thanks Charlie, it's what you said.
Thanks Steph, all the best.
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