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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:16
Idle No More? A Philosophy of Native Rights
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So, speaking of philosophy majors, Ed, okay, we've got, we've had, we've meant for a while to bring this fellow on the show, and I think that, well, that we haven't, I'm just going to blame it on you.
Sound good?
Okay, sure.
Honestly, there's no good reason that we've kept him off for so long.
I said at the beginning of the show, you know, we want to help this Canadian philosopher, this fellow.
Really, you know, get the word out about him that he's out there.
You know, we want to make sure that we help with that.
In truth, again, I speak in jest.
This is Canada's premier liberty philosopher.
He's listened to around the world.
He is viewed around the world.
You can find any number of his publications online.
Also at freedomainradio.com.
Also, that is online.
Sometimes I make myself feel like I'm 80.
OK, but anyway, we're going to bring on the line now is Stephane Molyneux.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
And it is a pleasure to have you on.
Thanks, I like that introduction.
Canada's premier liberty philosopher is like, I am the blondest guy in Sierra Leone.
You know, I don't know how long that list is, you know.
It's like my brother when I was growing up, you know, if I just crapped at him or whatever, he'd be like, come on, who's your favorite brother?
Who's your favorite brother out of all the brothers you have?
Of course, I had only one brother.
So he fit the bill of the favorite and least favorite at the same time.
But listen, it sounds good if you don't know the context, and that's what I'm all about.
Well, honestly, I mean, amongst liberty philosophers around the world, you know, I don't know anybody else, really, who does it full-time on the web with the exposure that you have.
So, frankly, premier liberty philosopher, at least in the hemisphere that you're in.
So, I don't know.
I think that the title is well-deserved, even if you don't… Well, I appreciate that, and we are, of course, approaching 50 million downloads of the show.
I guess with your audience that would be 50 million and two.
Boom!
And I'm counting you as the two.
No, I'm kidding.
I have a lot of passive aggression.
For those who don't know the background to this sordid interview, I was contacted yesterday by the fine hosts here saying, we have gone through every conceivable guest we might have.
They're either unavailable in a morgue.
They've turned into mimes and therefore aren't very good for podcasting.
So, dear God, we are right down at the bottom of the list.
Steph, can you come on the show tomorrow?
And that is a late-night drunken booty call.
And I would like to say that I have the pride to not accept it, but since I'm here, I really can't say that.
Well, honestly, you know, it's really unfortunate because things really did start to discombobulate for us just about a day and a half ago.
Well, like I said to you in my message, Steph, I didn't mean to make you feel like the less pretty girl at the ball, but here we are.
No, I'm happy to be here.
Whatever circumstances work to bring us together, that your cleaning ladies were unavailable for an interview, that your hamsters still haven't mastered multidimensional speech, whatever it is that has occurred to bring us together, I'm happy because it's a good show.
Those hamsters are close, I'll have you know.
So, Steph, let's get into something.
I wanted to get your take on something in particular.
Now, for those who've been paying attention to the Canadian political scene, first off, we offer our apologies for your mental damage, but also, you may have noticed the Idle No More movement in Canada.
We talked about it on our previous show, and it certainly hasn't dropped off in terms of relevance.
Idle No More is out there, and it is active.
But I wanted to talk about a birthright to land.
So we've got this concept that if you were there first, you and your descendants have land.
That you have a certain sort of claim to that land.
And I'm curious, Steph, what your take on this is in regards to that concept.
Do you believe that we can have a birthright a claim that is born of lineage to a certain chunk of land?
Yeah, I don't think so.
I think that's really hard to defend.
I mean, the native issues, and this is true not, of course, just in Canada, though we have as a country a very sordid history of dealing with the native population, but in general there's a collision between individual property rights within land, which of course is fundamentally around You know, hunting, but mostly focused, of course, on agriculture.
And building houses and so on.
But fundamentally, it's sort of around agriculture.
And when cultures based upon private ownership of land come into collision with nomadic cultures, I mean, there's a huge mismatch, right?
Because in the nomadic culture, you're basically following the hunt, right?
You're following the herds, you're following the hunt, and so your property right, so to speak, is on the move, right?
It's got four legs.
A bird stuck to its ass and it's heading off into the tundra.
And so the challenge is when you have property rights that are individual land-based, I mean, your wheat is not in transit.
You plant your fruit trees and they're not picking up their skirts and sashaying off into the sunset.
And so having ownership over land and a fixed resource like crops or a house or whatever,
versus having quote ownership or or control over something in motion is is a real challenge it's a real challenge and unfortunately the way it's attempted to be solved in most western countries when they encounter these kinds of different cultures is communism is is collectivism is is treating the indigenous population as a mass and and a group and i think that's that's been really tragic so
I mean, as you probably know, we've got a Department of Indian Affairs up here in Canada, which is where I thought you would sign up to get some kinky fun with the First Nations people, but that's not what it is.
After many repeated phone calls, I actually can't call them anymore.
But you have $7 billion a year being spent on about 700,000 people.
That's $10,000 a head.
So imagine if you really wanted to solve the problem, you'd put all that money, $10,000 a year into an annuity, and then anyone born now would pull a clear quarter million dollars when they turned 18.
But of course, that's not how it works because government agencies never work to put themselves out of work.
And so you have this just tragic and ridiculous situation where the money is generally given to the tribal heads, and then the tribal heads dispense it, which is kind of weird.
It's like, hey, I'm going to give you a job, but I'm going to pay your grandfather, and he'll give you money if he likes what you're doing.
I mean, that's just not how we would ever deal with people outside of a particular localized ethnic community.
uh... a geographical group and i mean it's just really tragic and so what what people are afraid of and i think this is what this woman who is on this uh... i think uh... fish broth diet uh... to choose a set of programs and some of the special yes so so she's basically one of the things she's very concerned about is that individual native canadians of first nations people might actually got you know well god take your petticoats up a bit let's just get out the smelling salts
They might actually have the right to buy and sell their own land on a reservation.
Can you imagine?
I mean, giving the same rights to Native Canadians that other North Americans have had for hundreds of years?
I mean, it's unthinkable, because everyone's afraid they're going to sell their land and then, you know, break up this sort of tribal, quote, cohesion and so on.
I don't think you can hold people hostage.
Let them buy and sell their own land.
I mean, treat them as individuals, not as a collective, and see what happens.
Sure.
I think it goes deeper than that, too, Steph, because We have in Canada, a fantastically racist piece of legislation called, of course, the Indian Act.
And we've talked about it on the show here before, that the Indian Act is essentially a top-down controlling act that controls a lot of things.
I think people in general might not know about how deep the control runs.
I mean, even to, if a native band wants to pass a bylaw, it has to be considered and approved by Indian Affairs.
There, until very recently, there were provisions, or was it, I can't remember, there was something about you couldn't sell produce produced on reserve to non-natives.
There have been so many obstructions here from government that has absolutely crushed any possibility of a native sort of independence.
And when we talk about I think removing that government influence, that giant hand that is so, in my mind, oppressive.
It's terrible.
When we talk about that, I see the response is often an accusation that what I want to do is bring a colonial sort of attitude and model to reserve life, to Indian life in Canada.
But this is colonial!
This is colonial!
Telling people how they can use their own property, treating them like children, putting the control over their lives and resources into the hands of often corrupt tribal elders.
I mean, that is colonial.
Treating people as equals, treating people as responsible, right?
I mean, one of the problems with trying to deal sensibly with Native issues is that there's such a terrible amount of guilt-ridden sentimentality, and sentimentality can, I think, be rightly viewed as an unwillingness to grant people the responsibility of making their own decisions.
And I just think it is colonial to say to people how you can use your resources.
I mean, try and build some capital investment on native lands.
I mean, the number of hoops that you would have to jump through legally is so catastrophic and so high that almost no investment gets put into these places, which is why, I mean, the average Canadian income for a family of four is $26,000-$27,000 a year on an Indian reservation.
It's about 11,000.
And that's because there's no private... I mean, this is the difference between East Germany and West Germany.
I mean, they're stuck in this complete socialist central planning nightmare.
Something out of, you know, Khrushchev's wet dream of infinite government ownership.
It's just horrible.
We know exactly how to create wealth.
It's private property.
It's the rule of law.
It's contracts.
It's all that kind of good stuff.
Non-aggression principle.
And it's not being applied.
We have these completely separate standards.
And it is...
It's tragic.
The closer you get to government power, the worse your income tends to get.
You can see this with ghettos in the US.
You can see this with the reservations.
I think the only people who could even remotely defend this kind of system are people who've never been exposed to it.
After high school, I wanted to go to college, but I was flat broke, so I got a job as a gold panner and a prospector way up in Northern Ontario, and there were a lot of Indian reservations around up there.
I mean, and it was savagely wretched what was going on.
I mean, I'd come out of the bar at one o'clock in the morning, and there'd be like, you know, dirty three-year-old kids with no pants and no underwear wandering around while their parents were drinking.
I was driving back to the camp one night after being in town, and there's this woman stumbling and staggering along the side of the road.
It's a native woman, and I stop the car and ask if she's okay.
And she said, no, I'm not okay.
I was in the back of a pickup truck being driven back to the reservation with four other guys in the truck, and they wanted blowjobs, and I wouldn't give them one, and they threw me out of the car without even slowing down.
So, of course, I take her to the hospital.
I make sure she's doing okay, I mean, at least in the moment.
But, I mean, this is not universal because, I mean, some native entrepreneurs are doing fantastically, but it is savage what is going on.
It is shameful.
And anybody who wants to maintain the status quo, I can only assume, has never been anywhere close to the kind of horrors that are going on there.
And see, Seth, you bring up a good point, talking about how they treat each other in their communities.
And it's horrible.
And when we point these things out, or some people point these things out, we get thrown a racist label, gets put on people who try to criticize them.
I'm not quite sure where I was going with that.
No, no, because trying to understand, sorry, but trying to understand how these situations are so disastrous, right?
So it's sort of like saying, well, so what you're saying is that they treat each other badly because they're somehow inferior as a species or a race, and nothing could be further from the truth.
We know this.
We know this very clearly.
There's no doubt as to, this has nothing to do with racism whatsoever.
It's frankly to do with ethics and economics.
Like, are we going to say, like, you know how, for instance, in India, like 30, 40, 50,000 people a month are coming out of poverty into the middle class.
Over the last 10, 15 years, a greater proportion of human beings have escaped poverty than at any time prior, like to the previous 4 trillion years or whatever it is, right?
And are we going to say, well, you see, the reason that, you know, Indians and Chinese and other people who are now gaining a huge amount of wealth, the reason they didn't do it before was that they were just genetically lazy as culture, as a species.
But somehow, weirdly, their genetics just magically changed when they got access to a free market and the rule of law and private property.
Their genes just evolved in the space.
It just happened to coincide with this massive increase in their political and economic freedoms.
No.
If I was in that situation, I would almost certainly be the same way.
If you were in the situation the natives are – what happened with Russians?
Were they just genetically not entrepreneurial under Stalin?
No.
They just didn't have private property and the rule of law.
And when you give groups the individual responsibility, private property in the rule of law, you're no longer dealing with them as collective entities, you're no longer giving money to their leaders, where it trickles down depending on favoritism and corruption.
Magically, suddenly, their capacities enormously change.
And so this is just another example of collectivized, communistic, socialistic, common ownership, political money and And what it does to a culture, it's got nothing to do with the race, it's just to do with treating them immorally.
So, Steph, we're talking with Stephan Molyneux with freedomainradio.com.
Steph, do you believe that this is something that natives in Canada are getting caught up in, this identity?
But by this, I should explain this better, I think that one of the major Mistakes the native movement in Canada makes is first off being a native movement And not and not clinging to the idea that they too are just other human beings Do you think that I'm on the right track here that there's an identification of?
Flaw here in this idea that they are different.
They are natives and we are not and there's a clear separation Do you think that they should abandon that?
Well, I you know, I I think that they would abandon that, except that it's highly profitable for them to pursue it, at least for their leaders, right?
So, let's say that the majority of the native population really enjoys, you know, hunting, trapping, fishing, whatever it is, right?
So, I mean, when I used to work up in northern Ontario, we would hire the natives to do some of our sort of claim staking, particularly to cut parts through the bush because they were just so good at it and all this experience and so on.
So if the majority of Native Canadians, Native Americans, want to have that kind of life, Lord knows at least here in Canada, which is like 0.01% populated, there's enough room for them to pursue that, then what we do is we stop treating them as a collective, right?
So you say, okay, there's some historical obligations, here's your money, here's your land, and it's individual, you can buy and sell.
So if 90% of the tribe want to continue their way of life, then giving them all private ownership of their land is not a problem, because they're not going to sell their land.
They're going to use it for their hunting, trapping, fishing, whatever it is that they want to do.
But nobody in a million years believed that that's ever going to happen, which is why it's not achieved, and one of the reasons why this woman is on this diet, this hunger strike.
Sorry, I shouldn't call it a diet.
It's a hunger strike.
Why she's on this hunger strike is that she's terrified that... Well, okay, but she's eating less than I would in any particular eight-minute period.
But everybody knows that if you give... I mean, this has been done before.
I think it was Wyoming about a hundred and fifty years ago.
They simply gave land plots to all the Indians and they said, look, I mean, here you go.
Here's your land and here's some money and we're done.
And like within a generation, the land was all sold off and they'd all joined the free market, such as it was.
And that's right.
So nobody believes That if natives have the choice, as individuals, not as tribes or collectives or whatever, as individuals, nobody believes that if you give them all this land and the money that's owed to them, historically, fine, whatever, right?
I mean, nobody is alive who took the land, but okay, right?
But they would sell the land off, most likely, and they would join society.
And people don't want that, because it's highly profitable, frankly, to keep them farmed on these reservations, like hostages, like crops.
And to pretend that there's some sort of collective notion.
It's incredibly profitable.
Seven billion dollars a year at a minimum of profitability, both the government agencies and for the tribal chiefs and so on.
But that's just horrendous.
I mean, let's not stop treating these people as children, as hostages.
Give them, each individually, their money.
Give them the same framework of law.
And if they choose not to exercise it, that's fine.
If they all want to live collectively and hunt and fish, I mean, I don't care.
Do what you want.
But for those who want something different, I really hate the idea that they don't, for instance, have the right To use their tribal lands as collateral.
They can't buy and sell it.
I mean, how insane is that?
Yeah, I was reading an article about Idle No More and the title of the article was, natives should stop subsidizing Canada.
So stop subsidizing Canadians.
And what he was referring to was all the infrastructure and the power and the coal and the natural resources that are being extracted from their natives' land, and he was basically saying that these criminal treaties were signed, and this is actually still our land, and we are actually providing Canadians with more, even though they weren't the ones that set that stuff up.
It seems to me that this is just... You know, the more I think about this, it seems like it's more of a socialist movement.
It's not really a native movement, is it?
It seems like it's a socialist movement.
Maybe I've been thinking about it the wrong way, because I really have been trying to determine what is the validity of that clear separation.
You know, I talked to you, Ed, about the fact that, I mean, I mentioned my Semitic heritage.
Yes.
It's fun.
It doesn't really actually mean much of anything to me, right?
And I've mentioned before as well about how having a claim to land in Israel doesn't make any sense to me.
I don't have any interest in land in Israel, but there is a legal right that exists for me to take land.
Yeah.
I don't know if that's correct, but yeah, when you talk about, that really did click with me.
When you talk about how the assertion is, you know, Natives are subsidizing Canada.
Well, that's it, isn't it?
I think that collective ownership, the collective rule, it is just kind of a socialist movement.
So, I don't mean to seem cruel, but I'm really discounting it the more I think of it.
So, I don't know, Steph, maybe I'm off on the wrong track here, but that's what it seems like to me.
No, I mean, I think that's exactly right.
I mean, if they want to be independent of Canadian society, then of course they could be independent of Canadian society.
But that means fundamentally, get your hand out of my wallet.
And if they don't want to be independent of Canadian society, if they want to be part of Canadian society, then be part of Canadian society, which means be subject to the same laws and obligations, whatever it is.
I don't even want that.
You say that fundamentally, get your hand out of my wallet.
For me it's not even really that, because really in terms of proportion, Native Canadians, I guess by direct subsidy, have their hand in my wallet in a more shallow fashion than some others.
But I mean, in terms of just general philosophy, I think it's very odd to Okay, I said it like this before.
If you are a native organization and you are appealing to government to continue to meet your treaty obligations, work with us properly, all this, and it's been going on for years and years and years, it seems like a battered housewife saying, you know, if only my husband would stop hitting me, the relationship it seems like a battered housewife saying, you know, if only my husband would stop hitting me, the relationship will
So why would the native peoples as a movement, if this really is a movement, a group sort of idea, just remove yourselves from the bloody relationship?
I don't see why one would cling to treaties that have been so badly abused over many years under an Indian Act that at one point had Indian agents that could direct council meetings.
I mean, don't get me started on Indian agents.
That is another absolute travesty.
of warping humanity.
The intention of the Indian Act and the reservations was to essentially just put them on these small little areas so they would just die off and we're not going to worry about them anymore.
You used to have to get a certificate of permission to bloody well leave the place.
This is not humanity.
This is not a system from which moral good arises.
It is a system from which moral good can only arise once it's burnt to the ground.
I see Native reservations as concentration camps.
That's how I see them and that's how they were originally set up.
So I see them just as an extension of that.
What are your thoughts, Steph?
Well, I think concentration camps is pretty strong because concentration camps were around direct You know, shoot them in the head, extermination, or, you know, Zoloft, or, sorry, not Zoloft, but Zyklon B, or whatever it is that they were putting in this.
I mean, certainly Canada has, I think, been, if I remember rightly, it's been accused of the war crime of genocide against the native population.
There's certainly, I mean, the whole residential school system where the Roman Catholic Church hired known murderers and pedophiles and put them in charge of children, and also the other areas where the government purposefully infected children and let tooth rot set in in order to study the effects.
I mean the inhumanity of what has gone on in the past is something truly horrifying and of course you would think that it would then be you sort of have a relationship between the natives and the government somewhat similar at least in terms of ideology between the Jews and Nazis as in let's not have to be in charge anymore but unfortunately that's just there's too much money there's too much power flowing that way And that tends to corrupt.
Free money and power, particularly those that flow through the violence of the state, do tend to corrupt all that it comes in contact with and I think that's what's been occurring.
It's like that old saying that I think Jefferson had about slavery.
We've got a wolf by the ears and we can't let it go and we can't let it eat us and we're really kind of stuck.
So what happens?
I mean, what benefit would there be in any particular politician?
People have such ridiculous, sentimental, and guilt-ridden views of this whole situation that if you were to try to change anything, there would be, of course, armed revolts, and the media would be like showing pictures of sad-eyed natives looking off into the sunset about further betrayal by the forked-tongue white man or whatever it is.
So you're not in a situation where any kind of rational discourse... It's like race in the US.
It's almost impossible to have an objective, rational discourse about it because there's it's so much emotional volatility so much corruption so much money sloshing around and uh... it's you know i don't think it would be to any particular benefit of any particular politician to to take this issue on That's it.
I really think that's the crux of the issue for me here.
These people are no different than any other people.
They are no different than myself.
They are no different than anybody else in terms of their core humanity.
These are just other human beings.
And I really don't like those lines of division that we create, those lines of division that are embraced in order to Further, or supposedly, further the benefits of a group of people.
Honestly, the more we are removed from our independent powers of self-determination, the less better off we'll be in the long term, or even in the short term.
None of this makes any sense to me.
I guess I get so frustrated.
The incentive system is screwed up, the way that we treat them, the way that they treat their kids.
You know, it's like to really fix this problem, we really need to raise the children differently and stop subsidizing and stop... But again, you say something like that, like stop subsidizing them, to stop allowing them special rights, and you get called a racist, even by... Some liberals would say this.
Isn't that crazy?
I want to treat them as equals.
You racist!
Now wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Wasn't that the whole point of egalitarianism?
Wasn't that the whole point of not being like, do you want me to treat them differently or not?
If you want me to treat them differently, then that's racism.
If you want me to treat them the same and you call me a racist, then your whole program doesn't make any sense.
But we know, we know, I mean, God, can we not learn this lesson from the 20th century?
That whatever you socialize turns to crap and violence and ugliness and abuse and debt and dysfunction and mess.
And whatever you privatize gets better, improves, gets more efficient, gets more productive, gets more moral, achieves some sort of dignity where people have responsibility and so on.
Whatever you socialize turns to crap, whatever you privatize improves.
That's the basic lesson of the 20th century and I guess my cry would be Can we at least start to think maybe a little bit about the possibility of treating native Canadians with the same respect we accord to the goddamn wheat?
You know, now we've privatized some aspects of buying and selling wheat.
You know, we've moved some of that from central management into the free market.
Can we at least think of treating human beings with the same respect, dignity and independence and ethics with which we will treat a farm crop?
I think that would not be a bad thing to consider.
I think a good start would be allowing them to own property on reserve.
I don't know, that just seems like a pretty... And on the reserve!
Honestly, drop in the bucket.
That's right.
I think it's just a drop in the bucket.
Again, I look at the Indian Act, I see a racist piece of legislation, one of those incredibly controlling.
It makes as much sense to me as a Jewish act.
So, Ethan, think about that then.
Okay, so the Indian Act is a racist piece of legislation.
Then why are the The Native leaders supporting it.
We need to end off this segment here due to timing conflict.
But we, I mean, honestly, we could get into the entire industry of bureaucracy that exists within First Nations and how it's just another government, right?
You get down to it, because we complain endlessly about the government here on this show, that that is whitey government, if you want to call it that, in the context of this discussion.
But honestly, it's government, government, government.
It's all the same bloody thing.
You get down to it.
It is people who want to control the actions and even the intentions of others.
Bang on.
Even if they don't want – you can't control others' intentions, but never mind.
This all goes completely over.
It's completely ignored.
Human action is ignored in favor of a particular agenda because of a utopian worldview.
It is absolutely nonsensical and ridiculous.
I think I'm gonna have to go and dump a bucket of cold water on myself.
So, Steph, thank you so much for coming on the show and providing your insight into this.
Honestly, I'd make this discussion a good hour or two long if I could, but it is nonetheless a pleasure to have you here for the short time we were able.
Oh, and my pleasure.
I just wanted to mention as we close out that, you know, the woman who's on the hunger strike She was begging for lots of resources because apparently her people, her 1,500 or 1,800 person community in the middle of nowhere was doing badly and it turns out that audits have shown that millions of dollars went missing or is unaccounted for from 2005 onwards.
And so it's just another scam.
It's just another scam and it comes at the expense of incredibly high drug abuse of course as we know, alcohol abuse, child abuse, Suicides, drinking copier fluid because it's the only way you can stagger through the day.
It is a true apocalypse of the human spirit that is occurring in these black holes of socialism that remain as the rest of the world struggles to free itself of collectivism.
We seem to be embedding it even further in some of the most vulnerable communities and it's their very vulnerability that leads them open to that kind of exploitation and we're not going to get anywhere listening to politicians or native activists.
We just have to go back to the ethics and say People are people, and whatever we accord and respect and require in ourselves, a free market in land, a free market in goods and services, a free market in labor and capital, well, we know that works.
We know that's virtuous.
We know that's good.
And we just need to keep working to extend that across the human landscape as much as possible.
In the face of dictatorships in North Korea, in the face of still socialist bureaucracies all around the world, in the face of the You see, in the face of fiat currency and in the face of these terrible black souls of central planning left over from a very primitive state of mind as far as economics and virtue goes.
And we just keep pushing.
That's all we can do.
Indeed.
We may not get anywhere listening to politicians, but indeed we may get somewhere listening to Stefan Molyneux.
So thanks again, Stef.
I really do appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
And we'll speak again.
My pleasure.
Have a great show, guys.
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