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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:22:22
Your Soul Has Been Sold for Gold - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed
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Well, Stefan, you know, I've heard a lot about you over the last couple of years.
Since I've started my show, a number of people over the years have told me that you and I needed to get in contact.
And many people have asked me if I had studied your work.
And over the last couple of months, I finally...
I found some time to squeeze some in.
And on top of that, I did a three-part series with Larkin Rose, and he's been on my show four times.
And during that series, a number of people suggested having you on the show as a...
Follow up to sort of go into some of the philosophies, some of the machinations that might work behind a true free or anarchy, anarchical society, if that's how it's pronounced.
And so I wanted to go into that with you.
Wanted to go into non-violent or non-aggressive child rearing with you.
Wanted to talk with you some about currency and gold, silver, things like that.
And I sent you a reference yesterday called the Babylonian Woe that I would like to discuss somewhat.
And so I just kind of wanted to work from there and see where things go.
So anyway, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much.
And just for my listeners to make sure that they can get a hold of your show if you wanted to give out your website.
Mine is freedomainradio.com, but let's make sure we share and share alike.
Yeah, definitely. And mine is gnosticmedia.com.
G-N-O-S-T-I-C-media.com.
Excellent. Alright, so would you like to start off by telling us a little bit about yourself?
And basically, what do you do?
Who is Stefan Molyneux?
Ah, the eternal question.
Well, I run Freedom Main Radio, which is the biggest philosophy show in the world.
Now, you could really say, as far as media goes, that's the Taller Than Mickey Rooney contest, but we've had, I think, about 40 million downloads.
I speak at conferences, and mostly libertarian conferences, about...
I'm very focused, as you say, on peaceful parenting.
I think that philosophy begins at home.
And if we believe in self-ownership and we accept the non-aggression principle, which is thou shalt not initiate the use of force of fraud against your fellow man, woman, child, citizen, transgender, gay, lesbian, person of color, or whoever...
Then, of course, the first place that we want to do that is in our own personal relationships.
If we want the world to lose weight, we need to become lean ourselves.
And if we want the world to accept nonviolence, we need to practice nonviolence in our own lives.
No aggression, no intimidation, particularly with children who are, of course, the least voluntary of all relationships in the world.
That's just a biological fact.
If I scream at my wife, she can leave me.
If I scream at my child, well, the child pretty much just has to shut up and take it.
So... So, you know, I focus on, you know, the macro in terms of society as a whole and a free society, a society without government, a society based on voluntary association.
And it's really down to the micro level.
I've been a stay-at-home dad for a little over three years now and love it.
My daughter is the most amazing human being that I think I will ever meet.
And I am very relieved that the theories I've been talking about, Lo, these many years about peaceful parenting do work out absolutely beautifully.
She is... Very polite, very considerate, very thoughtful, very passionate, and very energetic young lady.
And so I've been trying to share that journey with listeners as well.
And I am likewise a...
I'm a stay-at-home father, a single father at that, and unfortunately my divorce situation doesn't allow me to practice many of the things that my ex and I agreed upon before the breakup, that she decided after the breakup to go ahead and put him in government schools and have him vaccinated and all of this sort of thing, so it's a real...
Conundrum for me in a place of heartache to say the least.
You know, and you mentioned speaking at libertarian conventions.
If someone votes libertarian, aren't they violating the very principles of freedom?
I don't believe The war of ideas until people begin to accept reason and evidence.
And the science seems very clear on this, that people reject reason and evidence because they have been traumatized.
Is it more that they reject reason or that they reject evidence?
See, what I think is happening here, and we talk about this a lot on my show, is that There's been a switch in the way people think.
Rather than asking who, what, where, when first, they try and determine why.
They try and come up with the reason before they look at the evidence.
And that's the real some of the problem, in my opinion, is that the conclusion is now before the evidence.
Yeah, and scientifically this has been very well established.
People have an emotional reaction to a particular topic, and only after their emotional reaction do their cognitive centers kick in, and their cognitive centers kick in to justify their initial emotion.
There's this deep brain programming that occurs in culture, which is that if you can get people to be upset, offended, angry, recoil, then you've won the non-argument, because the person who is, quote, upsetting you Yeah,
I think. Yeah, and so what happens is people then think, what they do is they get to say, well, you know, Steph is a cold, nasty guy who just wants to hang on to his tax money and doesn't spend it all on himself and doesn't want to help out his fellow man.
And because they can jump to that conclusion and paint that big, broad, immoral brush all over my shiny dome, then what happens is they don't actually have to listen to any arguments.
It's like if you and I came up to someone who said, you know, I really think we've got to bring back slavery.
It'd be like, you know, that's just such an offensive position.
I don't even care to listen to your arguments about it.
So if they can get people who talk about volunteerism and freedom and, you know, peace and not spanking your kids and not screaming at your kids, if they can just be painted as these crazy, outlandish, immoral people, then people can just turn the switch off.
They don't have to listen to your arguments anymore.
They don't have to look at the evidence.
And that's how they make all of these nasty arguments just go away.
And basically, people just walk around with air horns in the aviary of human thought, scaring all the birds with the brightest plumage away.
And they never have...
The slightest eagle of truth land on their heads.
Okay, so I may have taken that metaphor just one step too far, not for the first time and not for the last.
So until people can actually reason and accept evidence, then we can't win because we're debating in a language that people can't speak, which is reason and evidence.
And scientifically and psychologically, people can only accept reason and evidence or have a chance to if they're raised in a more peaceful environment.
So we kind of need to breed a population that's ready to accept, you know, scientific, economic, philosophical arguments because most people get offended, recoil, wave the magic wand of being upset and make, poof, all of the ideas that trouble them disappear and you can't win that kind of fight.
It's like that old saying, you know...
You can't really play chess with a pigeon because the pigeon is just going to knock over all of the pieces.
It's going to shit on your board and then it's going to strut around like it's one.
And that's basically what debating with the average person is like.
Exactly. Good metaphor.
You know, when my son was, in fact, I think it was the week of his third birthday, we had gone down to Peru, and we're in the hostel, and it's 7.30, 8 o'clock in the morning.
And all of a sudden...
My son just, he flips out and starts throwing a temper tantrum and he's going on and on for like 45 minutes and we're trying everything that we could possibly figure out, you know, what's going on.
He's just like, just out of control and he's usually very well behaved and everything.
And so after much consideration, we decided for the first time, and this is probably two days after his third birthday or something, that we were going to try to spank our son to see if that worked.
We had never spanked him before.
So we sat down together and had him in between us, and he's still flipping out there.
And so then we tell him what we're going to do and everything if he doesn't settle down.
And he's never been spanked before, so he doesn't get it.
And so then, after counting, I swat him on the butt, and then he turns around and smacks me in the face.
Seems reasonable to me. I mean, if you did that to me, I'd probably have a similar reaction as well.
Exactly, and that was my exact response, was that, wow, you know, that was...
Perfectly reasonable.
I hit him. He hit me.
And so, you know, and I think we had tried it one other time after that.
You know, just complete failure.
And, you know, I was in my own child rearing.
I was the type of child who was whipped often with a leather belt.
I'm so sorry. Oh, yeah.
And, I mean, this was probably like a weekly thing, at least.
And also, as a child growing up, You know, like if I asked a question about something, why is this?
Why would that? It was the always and forevermore, the because I told you so, right?
So, you know, it's been really interesting because I had never used the I told you so on my son.
And, you know, a few years ago we discovered this book, One, Two, Three Magic, that just completely solved all of the The problems with outbreaks, and almost never do I get past one anymore before my son knocks off what he was doing,
and that's the end of it. Taking all of that in context, let's talk about peaceful child rearing, and let's go with your experience from there.
Recently, I heard you on Lorette Lynn's Unplugged Mom podcast talking about some of this.
And your own personal experience.
And let's also go into some of the philosophical background of this whole idea behind not spanking and not forcing our children to do things that they don't want to do, the I told you so mentality.
Yeah, there is a...
I think it's a very fundamental mistake that parents and citizens and people as a whole make, which is we have a weird kind of arrogance about how our society runs.
And children, you see, must adapt To our society.
Because, don't you know, our society is just so healthy and just so great that if there's any deviation between the child's natural impulses and the society that the child lives in, well clearly you've got to take the grinder of society and sand down the child to match that.
And that's a weird kind of arrogance.
Now this occurs within religion, this occurs within nationalism, this occurs within culture as a whole, like Greece is best or Turkey is best or America is best.
We have this weird thing where if there's a conflict between the child's identity and the existing social belief system, We never question the social belief system.
We never look towards the child and say, wow, you are coming from a very original, unpropagandized, untaught place.
So maybe you have something really important to add to the conversation.
You know, in the 18th century, there was a big tradition that was started by Voltaire and a number of other thinkers, which is they pretended that they were describing, say, the French court of one of the Louis, and from the eyes of somebody who came the French court of one of the Louis, and from the eyes of somebody who came from the New World, who came from America, like a, And it was all completely bizarre.
You know, they would look at all the rituals and the bowing and the funny powdered wigs and the dancing, and they would just be like, this is completely bizarre.
They wouldn't understand it.
And that's a way of trying to get people to understand the foreignness of their own culture to somebody else.
And really, I think that's the view of children.
Children grow up in a culture, and they're told that this is how society runs.
You see, we've got a bunch of people at the top.
They have all the guns in the world, and they tell us what to do, but we praise them, and we think that they're great.
And we have a government that takes half of our property in order to protect us from people who might take our property.
We have the government who can grab us, kidnap us, throw in the back of a windowsill fan, throw us in jail, because we're afraid of people who might use violence against us.
And we believe in sky ghosts that nobody has ever seen, which is one of the 10,000 ghosts that the world believes in as a whole.
But the other 9,999 are completely ridiculous.
and we laugh at them, those funny Hindu goddesses with the eight arms.
We instead worship, you know, this hippy-looking guy who walks on water and comes back from the dead.
That's totally sensible. All the other religions are really crazy, but this one is really, really sensible.
I mean, I could go on and on, right?
Oh, and now you have to go to school.
You're in a natural state of curiosity.
You learned how to crawl, how to roll over, how to walk, how to talk, how to read, and how to do math and all of that.
You did that just as part of your daily activity.
You have a hunger for knowledge. You ask why all the time, and you really want to know what's going on.
But now, we have to harness that natural curiosity, joy, creativity and exploration of the world, this hunger, this thirst, this drive to know, and we have to seal it up in a bunch of little rows and dusty desks with some ancient teacher up there squeaking away and yelling at you if you put a foot wrong.
This is what we call a healthy society.
Yeah, we've got huge amounts of the population in jail.
Oh, I'm sorry about this.
We have used you.
We have used your flesh, blood, curiosity, brains, intelligence and creativity.
As collateral to borrow from all the bankers in the world against you.
So sorry, we have sold you into slavery before you were even born.
We still have wars.
We have drug addiction promiscuity.
We have a divorce rate of 50%.
We have public sectors that are completely out of control.
And all of this is our society.
But it's so healthy and so great and so wonderful.
By God, if you deviate from this society, you are wrong.
And you must be conformed to this society.
That's an insane kind of arrogance.
The beginning of wisdom is always humility.
It is always a statement, I don't know.
And anybody who can look at the society that we have, the recessions, inflation, housing crashes, unemployment of 20-22%, if you look at things rationally, endless wars, anybody who can look at that society and say that this society has the right to Force children to conform to that society because it is just so right and just and healthy is so sick that you can't even speak a language called health with that person.
It will probably make their head explode.
So what I sort of start with is to say, look, My daughter is coming from an original place.
She's coming from a place where she is not propagandized.
I, unfortunately, was heavily propagandized and it took me years and years, decades and decades to overcome most of it and I'll never be done because you can't ever be somebody who wasn't propagandized.
But I want to look at my daughter and say, if you have a criticism, if you have a question, if you have something that doesn't make sense to you in the world, I am not going to assume that you're just this, you know, pat-pat cute dumb kid who needs to be instructed either aggressively or with that Horrible kind of condescending patience that people would have.
Well, it's like this, kid.
I'm just going to say, you know, we need to have the respect to say that the original eyes of this world looking at this twisted, monstrous, hellacious, Sorin-infested edifice called culture, that they may actually have something of use, something of skepticism, something of incomprehension at the logical riddles we have infested this world with and the degree something of incomprehension at the logical riddles we have infested this world with and the degree to which they wrap around Let's give them the credit that they may be right and all of our history needs to be called into question.
But that's not what happens.
People, you know, they club the kids with culture.
And, you know, emphasis on the first syllable of that.
There is a cult in culture.
Isn't that the truth?
Alright, so let's get into some of your own experience with your daughter and the philosophical understanding behind peaceful or non-violent, non-coercive child-rearing.
What are some of the main tenets?
I wish I could say it was something new or interesting, but it's really not.
I'm sure it's not, but for a large majority of the audience, and recently I have a friend, an old friend of mine, we've been friends for about 22 years, and he's got a son that's about three, and he was having all kinds of behavioral problems with his son in the effing threes, which are worse than the terrible twos, of course.
And so, you know, he was talking about, you know, how his wife spanking and, you know, all these problems they were having.
So I give him my copy of the 123 Magic book.
And he comes back a few weeks later with it just going, wow.
Wow. That made all the difference in the world.
I'm like, yeah, it's all just about consistency and following through with what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it.
They've had this whole change around in their family in just a few weeks of all this struggle of using force and spanking and everything.
They said he had gotten to three twice in the last two weeks.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, if people want to understand peaceful parenting, I think that we just need to look at how the culture views marriage.
I mean, we would never say to somebody who was, let's say you had a husband who was, you know, twice the size of his wife and would, you know, hit her with a belt.
When she displeased him or disagreed with him or didn't obey him, we would recognize very clearly that that was an abusive situation.
It wouldn't fundamentally be any different if he hit her with his hand on her bare butt.
And so all that's happening is an extension, right?
I'm a philosopher, which means all I do, I have one mantra, universalize, universalize, universalize.
If there's a rule, let's universalize it.
And two of the great rules I got out of feminism in the 70s and 80s.
One, violence is unacceptable in a personal relationship.
Two, where there is a disparity of power, The ethical requirements of the person with the most power are the highest of anything, right?
So co-workers can date, that's fine, but a boss can't date a secretary because the boss has undue power over the secretary.
So you put those two principles together.
Violence is unacceptable in a personal relationship.
Aggression, intimidation, verbal abuse, bullying, put-downs, all of these things are unacceptable in a personal relationship and where you have the most power in a relationship is where you have the most responsibility to act with the highest moral standards.
Put those two things together, throw in a little seasoning called the non-aggression principle, and parents do not have the right to hit their children.
Parents do not have the right to aggress against their children.
Parents do not have the right to put their children down.
They do not have the right to threaten their children.
And you take away those tools, and a huge amount of very exciting things happen in parent-child relationships.
I would say, really, the first thing that happens is the capacity for genuine love and affection.
You really can't have love in a relationship where there's physical intimidation, violence, aggression, put-downs, verbal abuse, neglect.
You see this all the time.
Parents want to leave the park and they say to their four-year-old kid, well, that's it.
We're leaving and they just start walking off.
I mean, that's incredibly threatening to a child.
Abandonment equals death.
So really, you're just threatening the child with being eaten by wolves.
That's not good. So it's just taking the principles which we all accept in adult-adult relationships and turning them, instead of horizontally, just turning them vertically and saying that, you see, a wife can leave a husband.
Children cannot leave the parent.
A wife can leave the husband.
Children cannot leave the parent.
So if you sort of imagine if you had a wife who was, it was an arranged marriage, like she was forced to marry you and you wanted her to love you, then you would have to act unbelievably wonderfully towards her to overcome the involuntary nature of that relationship.
And it's the same thing, right?
The children are involuntarily attached to their parents.
It's not a bad thing. It's not a good thing.
It's just a biological fact.
Children don't choose parents.
Parents choose to have children.
So the lack of choice, the lack of options, the lack of voluntarism on the part of the children raises the standards for parents to the highest conceivable moral standard of behavior.
So it's really just taking those things and saying, look, I'm just not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it. Yeah, it's frustrating.
So what? I get frustrated at my boss at work.
That doesn't mean that I march him, haul down his dockers and spank him on his hairy, spotty ass.
That's just not what we do in life.
We find other ways, other things to do it.
If the bank bounces a check that they shouldn't have, I don't get to go in with a belt and whack the bank manager.
I mean, that's just not how we do things in a civilized world, and that's especially what we need in society.
You raise kids with a fear of authority, you raise kids with aggression and the understanding that those in the most power can do the most violence, then they grow up speaking the language of statism.
They're going to accept a violent hierarchical oligarchy called the state because it simply mirrors the way that they've experienced the family.
If you want to get rid of the state, you have to have peaceful parenting.
If you want to get rid of aggression in society, you have to get rid of aggression at home.
This is nothing new. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
It all starts really at home.
We start with the child rearing.
Get rid of the violence out of the child rearing so that we can work towards a non-violent, non-coercive, non-totalitarian, non-statist society.
And all of these things build on one another, and as the audience should already be well aware with my interview with Larkin Rose, or the series, That, you know, you can't have government without violence, because the government is always going to be there to tax the people and to enforce the rule of law, quote unquote, so that they can maintain their power and control.
And so, you know, it all stems from the child rearing, and then on top of that, the education system.
And, go ahead.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think you're right.
I mean, the educational system requires that children be fairly well broken before they even come into that system.
So, yeah, whatever people can do to keep their kids out of the public school system, I would heartily applaud.
It's a revolutionary action.
I mean, imagine if parents, you know, at least one of them would stay home with the kid for the first couple of years, which I think is very important.
And we're to raise that child in a respectful negotiating manner and the studies show children can begin to negotiate at 14 to 16 months of age.
Children can begin to notice patterns of behavior at 12 months of age.
Children who've been spanked before their first year show significantly worse behavioral problems than children who were never spanked.
Spanking increases aggression, it decreases IQ, it causes social problems.
What would you...
See, as a parent myself, what could one possibly spank a 12-month-old for?
That doesn't even, I can't, you know, there's only five things, four things that a child, a baby cries over.
You know, it either needs food, it needs to be burped, it's wet, you know, or constipated, or, you know, there's only a handful of things that a child needs, whether it's cold or it's hot, you know, and that's really it.
And if you take care of those things all of the time, then the child would never be crying or freaking out or anything.
And I just don't even understand at all the concept of how a parent could spank a 12-month-old, in my opinion, baby.
Yeah, and of course, the majority of parents do hit their children before the age of one, and upwards of 90% of parents use spanking over the course of their children's childhoods.
I mean, this is unbelievable. This is still staggering.
In the 21st century, we're still employing these medieval brutalizing techniques.
I mean, this just needs to stop.
I mean... Most parents, if they want to buy a new car, they don't just say, well, I'm going to go buy exactly the car my dad or my mom did.
They do research. They figure out what they want.
You're going to buy an iPad or a tablet or an Asus or whatever.
You're going to do the research and find out what you want.
People spend more time figuring out which goddamn cell phone plan they should have than figuring out how they're going to parent their kids in a peaceful and positive way.
Checking out the latest research.
Pick up Alison Gopnik.
She's been on my show, The Philosophical Baby.
Look at her TED talk. What babies can do, how they can interact.
They are the genius of the species.
If we can get 1% of what babies can do, we'll pretty much be able to levitate.
People need to recognize that parenting is an incredible responsibility.
They need to spend a little bit more time, a lot more time, a hell of a lot more time, an infinite amount of more time.
Figuring out how they're going to parent according to the latest research and technologies, and not just photocopying what happened in the past.
That is lazy, and that is inexcusable.
I couldn't agree with you more, to say the least.
Let's get into, well, what's your educational background?
Well, I went to boarding school when I was six.
Talk about learning about your how to rule an empire, British brutalization of childhood.
Now, how did you get into boarding school?
What was that about? Well...
It was the boarding school my father went to, and he had such a wonderful time.
He just didn't want to deny me the same opportunity.
So I went there for a couple of years.
This was in England, and then I did some schooling in England, moved to Canada when I was 11, did my education in Canada.
I did a couple of years of an English Lit degree.
I did a couple of years of acting and playwriting at the National Theatre School.
I finished my undergraduate in history, did a master's degree in history, did a master's thesis at the University of Toronto, did a master's thesis on the history of philosophy.
And then I became an entrepreneur in the software world where I worked for, I don't know, 12 or 14 years as a developer, chief technical officer, director of marketing and sales dude and just all around entrepreneurial guy.
I sold the company, took some time off, worked a little bit more and then I started podcasting on a long commute that I had to go to work.
And a couple of years ago, I decided to continue my entrepreneurial business sense of cheese string approach and I started doing this full time and I rely, no ads, everything's free, just rely on donations and it's not too bad.
It's not too bad. It definitely is a high quality way to spend your time.
I agree. And although it's not easy, and of course my show, I survive off my book sales and off donations as well, and it's a lot of work and the reward isn't great, or at least the monetary reward isn't great, but the personal and having the time with my son and everything is very great.
And that is stuff that you could, of course, never get back.
But... You know, when you, with your upbringing, did you, would you call yourself, were you well off or, you know, going to boarding schools?
A lot of people in the United States think that you were probably well off or something like that.
No, mine is a sort of sadly typical 70s story, late 60s, 70s stories.
My parents got married and they divorced within I think about six months after I was born.
My father then paid for my boarding school for two years and then didn't.
No, it was the typical sad story.
A single mom, dad was in another continent and he had trouble getting money out of the country because of the laws there.
And, you know, we were broke.
I mean, we had no car.
My mother suffered from significant mental issues and ended up being institutionalized when I was in my early teens.
And I was sort of on my own from the age of 15 or so onwards.
And so, yeah, we were just dead broke.
You know, eviction notices. You know, I joined a swim team which had a $7 entrance fee.
I had to keep pretending that I'd forgotten it at home.
You know, the usual typical sad, broke-ass story.
So, yeah. Yeah, I think I've certainly seen a lot of different aspects on the class ladder, so to speak.
I started off extremely low-rent, went to boarding school where I was surrounded by more rich kids, was in a pretty good school with a lot of rich kids in Canada, and of course in the university system there's a lot of rich kids.
So I think I've seen a lot of different kinds of spectrums from that standpoint, enough to realize that You know, wealth, as the story says, it can't buy you love, it can't buy you happiness, and very often it shields you from a reality of change that you desperately need.
How did you get involved in studying anarchy?
Well, again, I would say it's probably a pretty typical route.
Pretty typical. Well, most people don't end up in anarchy, so...
That's true. That's true. Well, for those who do, I mean, my best friend as a teenager was really into the band Rush.
The drummer for the band Rush was really into Ayn Rand, so he handed me a copy of The Fountainhead, and wow, you know, from no interest in philosophy, I just was completely absorbed, fascinated, and obsessed by it, and that obsession has remained fairly constant for the past years.
I guess it's almost 30 years now.
What I find ironic in Ayn Rand's work is her complete neglect of the Appeal to authority that runs through a lot of her work and, of course, the blindness of the statist ideas.
But, you know, at the same time, if you can see that she very often puts her logic before her grammar and doesn't quite fact check things well, you can actually go through her work and through Leonard Peikoff's work and...
Filter out a lot of very valuable information, but you need to have good tools on, otherwise you end up, you know, like a lot of the people in the LA area do, worshipping money.
Yeah, it's... I mean, I think Ayn Rand was a, you know, gorgeously brilliant writer and thinker and a tragically flawed philosopher.
You know, philosophers, you know, if you're going to have these basic premises, and if you don't have basic premises, you're not doing philosophy.
If you don't have basic premises, you know, the non-aggression principle.
I want to say axioms because I think they can be proven.
Let's just say these basic principles, right?
I swear by my life and my love of it, she wrote, that I will not live my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for my sake.
I think that's a pretty fuzzy, that's like the objectivist greeting card from hell.
What does that really mean?
Well, she was very much against the non-initiation of force.
And then, of course, she was very pro-aggressive foreign policy.
She was very pro-constitution.
She believed that we needed a government.
Oh, sure. Well, just to interrupt you, Leonard Peikoff, who is one of the biggest philosophers behind her work, I mean, I've got a lot of his philosophy lectures and his work on logic and stuff like that, which is fantastic, but if you catch him on CNN,
he's talking about how the government needs bases in the Middle East so we can go bomb a whole bunch of people that don't follow along with our For an invasion into their country, into their territory, when nothing was, you know, it's not self-defense here.
Are you saying that there's a Jewish influence in objectivism?
I think you might be right.
Or Zionist, right?
Yeah. No, I understand that.
I was tiptoeing around the Zionist issue with that, but go ahead and drag it right out into the forefront.
That's perfectly fine. No, I mean, I think that's a pretty frank and well-known issue.
It is. Well, not for everyone, but it's becoming frank and well-known, I think, with shows like ours constantly bringing this stuff up.
You know, there's a...
Where do you park your movement?
It's a big challenge for everyone.
I really like the story of Howard Rook.
In other words, you act as principled as you can, and you let the chips fall where they may.
I think that's the way objectivism started, but it's not where it led to, and I think that's a real challenge.
I mean, God help me, if I ever appoint an intellectual heir, oh my goodness, what a dare!
What a terrible thing that would be to do.
Why would you need an intellectual heir?
If you're doing good philosophy, then you're doing good philosophy.
You don't need to appoint someone to guard your philosophy.
Darwin didn't appoint an intellectual heir to Darwinism.
I mean, people just kept studying biology and affirmed or denied whatever his principle.
You don't have an intellectual heir to Aristotle or to Einstein.
Even Plato based everything on this appeal to authority, having the philosophers We're good to go.
To beat us up and take our money to do whatever.
And he said that you should only have five times the average person's wealth.
Well, then at what point do you club the person?
How does that work without some aggression?
And then immediately this enlightened philosopher king is no more.
Right, right. And this is the great tragedy of Western thought.
So with Plato, it's like, well, I really like the fact that he had a lot of respect for women.
I really like the fact that he was opposed to slavery.
I just don't like the hellish totalitarianism of his social organization.
And then you sort of flip over to Aristotle and you're like, well, I really like his free market.
I really like his science stuff.
I really don't like the fact that he had no respect for women and supported slavery.
And this still continues into the sort of democratic-republican paradigm now.
And it's like... Can't we just get somebody who's consistent with their principles?
So that's what I've tried to learn.
I think it was really because Plato became a slave that made him aware of the poignant problem of slavery.
That's a very good point. That's a very good point.
But even that emotionally driven understanding is frustrating, right?
Because philosophy, I think, is about, you know, establishing principles with reason and evidence and then you just got to let them roll.
And if they smash over your treasured houses and they, you know, make big scars in the ground, that's too bad.
That just means things need to change.
I think with a lot of movements, and I think about objectivism in this way, it started off with these great principles, and then it kind of hardened into a bunch of conclusions.
And then people circled around, they circled the wagon around these conclusions, and they just guarded them.
And that, to me, is the death knell of a philosophy.
And I have huge respect for objectivism and other rational philosophies, but I have no respect for the defending of positions, for the defending of conclusions.
Philosophy is not about conclusions.
Philosophy is about methodology.
The scientific method is not about E equals MC squared, right?
That is a proposition that is validated through the scientific method, but it is the process that is everything.
It is the methodology that is everything, not any particular conclusion.
And, I mean, I say this from hard-won experience, that I had to give up a lot of beliefs that I had in the realm of, I mean, I started out as a Christian, as a socialist, as, you know, blindly pro-family, no matter what the personal cost is.
And as an objectivist and an agnostic, but you just have to keep letting these principles work and you have to keep following through with as much rigor and passion and conviction and empiricism as you can, constantly checking everything that you've done, constantly opening yourself to more and more criticism.
That's the only way that it can really work.
And the great temptation is to say, well...
I've done this work for 10 years or 20 years.
So now I'm done.
I've done all of these areas.
They're all sorted out. They're all concluded.
That's done. And it's never done.
It's never done. And that, of course, is a great challenge.
What you can do is you can reach a point where you've done all of the grammar.
And by grammar, we teach on my show, we talk a lot about the trivium.
And the trivium is grammar, logic, rhetoric.
And general grammar is the words that make up the components of reality.
So, you know, tree, bus, street, wall, brick, book, whatever it may be, or the data in a book, etc.
Asking who, what, where, and when.
That's grammar. Logic is why.
Rhetoric is how. And so, by always going into this stage and asking these questions, then you can...
Always know where the information came from and how you built it up so that you're not caught in any single dogma.
But what you can do is you get to a point where you can say, I've analyzed all of the known data available.
And based on that, the answer as of now Through this systematic process that I've gone through to drive this conclusion, having removed the contradictions and the fallacies and everything, I can say that this is the answer.
This is the truth. I know, using the Trivium, that if any new information comes in, rather than blocking it out with fallacies, killing the messenger, poisoning the well, using ad hominems, whatever we do to prevent new information from coming in, I know via the Trivium, in the logic aspect, if new information comes in, I can't use fallacies to block it out.
I have to ask who, what, where and when and process it back through so then I build on the foundation of information that is already existing there and then it has to be filtered in and I have to sit there you know you have to sit in and and process that information remove all of the contradictions and then you know once that new information is in then you can pass it on to other people as to where you are at that specific point with that bit of information Right.
Yeah, I mean, I have a fear and loathing and moral repugnance towards communism or fascism, whatever.
Now, I mean, if we come across some society on the polar caps of Mars, which is entirely communist and incredibly efficient at allocating resources, then, you know, have to reevaluate.
But I think that Austrian praxeological argument, which says that you simply cannot have an efficient allocation of resources without the price mechanism, and you cannot have a price mechanism that is...
Anything close to reality without the free market, that just seems inescapable.
You can't escape that.
I have no belief that we will ever find a functioning, prosperous, happy and peaceful communist society that is more than a family and three dogs.
You know, what's ironic of that is I lived in Serbia during the war under Milosevic there, and it was a communist country.
And I've got to tell you, and nobody cared for Milosevic, but people had much more personal freedom and civil liberties freedoms there than I've ever had in this country.
And so I always thought that a stark contrast, that we were going over there to, you know, bring freedom and all of this stuff.
But there were all of these hidden agendas with the Albanian balie and stuff that dates back into World War II that we don't need to get into here.
But, you know, interesting...
Well, the average Iraqi and Afghani, even under their dictatorships, was freer than the average American in prison.
So, if America really wants to bring freedom to the benighted population of the world, repeal the drug laws, repeal the tax laws, and you're going to get half or more of people out of prison, which is millions of people out of prison, just like that.
Well, that's where they make all their money, is one, the illegal drug war, and the illegal heroin trade.
I mean, the British Crown has been trading heroin for centuries.
Yeah, that's a well-proved history there that is another off-topic.
So what they do is these elites, first they ban the drugs and then create a black market and put the people in prison.
They're punishing the people over the very laws that they create and everything.
Meanwhile, they're the ones who are making all of this money off of the black market.
The state of California probably couldn't even survive without all of the black market drug money running through it.
I forget the dollar amounts, but it's a massive amount of money every year.
Well, and even if we discount that, I'm not saying we should, but even if we just take, for the people who don't want to pursue that sort of area of knowledge, just look at the hundreds of billions of dollars in the prison industrial complex.
I mean, that's all very clear.
I mean, the hundreds of billions of dollars that go into this enforcement provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of Semi-evil people If people don't want to do that research,
they have to understand that the government is making a huge amount of money and exercising a huge amount of power, which for people in power is even more important than money, just based on making these drugs illegal.
Unfortunately, I think we've passed...
In 1984, there's that great scene where Winston Smith goes in to talk to the old guy in the bar about life before the revolution.
He can't remember a damn thing because he's too old.
I think we passed over that threshold.
They could, after 13 years...
They could get rid of prohibition because people remembered what it was like before prohibition, but there's not many people now who remember what it was like before the drug war came in.
It's really tragic.
Now people just associate the violence of the drug war With drugs, which is completely the opposite of what is true.
The violence of the drug war is because of the illegality of drugs, but people can't remember what it was like beforehand, and I think that's why it's becoming harder and harder to repeal, and of course the entrenched interests are that much greater in the maintenance of these horrible ghastly gulags.
Let's get into property raids.
You know, what I want to do is discuss property rights and the basic premise, the basic philosophy behind property rights, starting with the ownership of yourself and moving onward from there.
Sure. If we look at something as simple as words, right?
So imagine you've got three people, A, B, and C, involved in a debate.
And person A says, we own ourselves, we own the effects of our actions.
And then person B turns to person C and says, I disagree with your argument.
Person C is going to say, what are you talking about?
I didn't make that argument. Person A did.
They made that argument. So go talk to that person.
That is a fundamental affirmation, both of self-ownership and of the ownership of the effects of our actions, right?
If I own myself, then I must own the effects of our actions.
If I own myself, if I own my larynx, my lungs, my tongue, my gums, my endlessly flapping lips, then I must clearly be responsible for or have created the words that come out of my mouth.
And so I am responsible for the effects of my actions.
I own, so to speak, the effects of my actions.
This is how we can say that somebody who strangles someone should go to jail because they have created that strangling.
They've used their hands to create the death of another person.
They've strangled someone. And so they own that death.
They are responsible for that death.
Or another way of putting it is to say that death would not have occurred without their exercise of self-ownership in the strangling of that person.
And so self-ownership and owning the effects of one's actions It's so foundational, you can't debate against it.
You can't debate against it.
Because the moment you do, the moment I say, listen, dude, I don't own myself, and I don't own the effects of my actions, then the person is exercising self-ownership, in other words, generating a stream of words to establish a proposition.
They are exercising self-ownership.
And they are accusing you of having a false argument.
In other words, they are describing the argument to you.
You created the argument. You are responsible for that argument.
In other words, you own the effects of your actions.
And they are owning the effects of their own actions in making the argument.
I know this is a horribly convoluted way of putting it, but you can't argue against property rights, self-ownership, and owning the effects of actions without exercising property.
Self-ownership by making an argument and owning the effects of your actions and ascribing the ownership of the effects of actions to others.
It's impossible to debate against it without accepting it.
It's like me yelling into your ear that sound doesn't exist.
Well, I'm assuming sound does exist because I'm yelling into your ear.
Or me saying to you, dude!
Words have no meaning.
Well, if you understand what I've said, then words do have meaning.
And if you don't understand what I said, and I don't believe that words have any meaning, why would I say words have no meaning?
Because that would be choosing words that have meaning to convey the idea that words have no meaning.
These self-detonating statements are everywhere in contemporary philosophy, everywhere in the contemporary discourse on society, on economics, on politics in particular.
It's crazy everywhere, everywhere.
Well, you know, and the whole thing against people being able to find any form of truth at that point as well, and I think, you know, is based directly off of this whole issue of, or you can see it as connected to this whole issue of self-ownership.
And, you know, such as David Harriman goes into, again from the Ayn Rand Institute, Anyway, I'm losing my train of thought there, but just tying that into objectivist philosophy and understanding that it is all about self-ownership, your observations in the world, taking control of the things that you can and moving forward and denying those that aren't yours and that you can't.
Right. Yeah, no, I think that's an excellent point.
If I understand what you're saying, it's sort of like, it's like trying to argue against empiricism.
You can't argue against empiricism because empiricism is the evidence of the senses.
And you cannot argue against the evidence of the senses.
Without using the evidence of the census, right?
So if I'm talking to you and saying the census are invalid, then I'm relying on your ears or your eyes or, you know, I can use braille and your touch.
You can't argue against it.
And there's all of this Kantian irrationality and arguing against cause and effect also.
And if I throw a snowball at your face from, you know, from five feet away, you're going to flinch and you're going to move.
You know, if Kant was... Here in the room with us, and I threw a snowball at him, he would move.
And I could say, see, your philosophy of cause and effect or against cause and effect is invalid.
And that was his whole thing.
And I think it was done intentionally, as Harriman points out, and the spread of this Kantian irrationality of not being able to discover truth, of, okay, if...
If we can't know truth, if we can't know reality and what's around us, then therefore we have, you know, do what thou wilt, I think, is the direction I'm trying to get there, okay?
Yeah, you see this everywhere where you see this with people misusing the concept of quantum physics.
You see this with people saying God exists outside of time or there's an alternate dimension.
Basically what it is, it's very simple and it's very tragic, is that somebody says to me, two and two make five.
And I say, no, two and two make four.
And they say, okay, I accept that in this little limited realm, two and two make four, but I'm going to invent another realm where two and two make five, and then I'm going to claim to be right in that realm.
And, I mean, that's just, I mean, it is literally, it's insane.
It is literally, not even figuratively insane.
If I take two of something and I take two of something and I put these two together, I'm going to get four every time.
Well, I mean, why don't people only reserve this for the most abstract realms?
But my argument is if you believe a particular ideal, then don't save it for some bullshit abstract realm that nobody cares about.
Do it in the real world. You know, go to a movie theater.
And say, oh, the ticket is $13.
No, no, no. I'm going to create an alternate movie theater where I can come in for free, so I'm just going to walk through the doors.
It's the secret. You know, go to a car dealership and say, I'm going to create an alternate universe where I've already given you the money for this car and I'm just going to drive it off the lot.
I mean, the people, they don't do that in real life.
They save all of this insanity for ethics, for virtue, for social organization, where errors and contradictions always serve the people in power.
That's why these things are invented, too.
And you mentioned quantum physics.
Quantum physics, you know, again, back to David Harriman, who I had on my show last year about this time.
You know, quantum physics, and he pretty much...
He does a pretty thorough beat-up job on quantum physics, showing it as the latest religion.
See, as you very well know, logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
So quantum physics is essentially the art or the philosophy or the religion of putting as many contradictions, up to twelve I think is what they can, eleven or twelve they can maximize now, into the same spot.
Whereas logic, you remove the contradictions.
In quantum physics, you try and cram as many of them in there as possible.
In 90 years since they've been developing quantum physics, they haven't really made any significant advances that they can show are specifically related to quantum physics that things like the upcoming plasma physics can't refute.
Go ahead. Well, I'm certainly no expert on physics, but from what I've read from very renowned experts in the field, which I really do accept, quantum physics cancels out long before you get to the realm of sensual perception.
So quantum physics, there may be quantum flux and weird crazy shit going on deep down in the subatomic particles, for sure.
I've got no problem with that. But there's no impact on philosophy whatsoever, because there's no quantum defense called...
Yes, I did drive the bus at the homeless guy, but I was hoping that Quantum Flux would push my bus forward three seconds and I'd drive right past him.
Oh, okay, well then you didn't kill him so you can go scot-free.
Right, kind of like Harry Potter or something.
Yeah, there is no magic at the central.
Right. They have nothing to do with moral philosophy.
There is a philosophy of science, which I think is very interesting around that area, but who gives a shit about that fundamentally?
There's a couple of specialists who do it and some engineers.
Fantastic. Good for them. But in the realm of society, in the realm of what actually needs to be done in society, whether you should hit your kids or not, or whether we should have taxation or not, what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's evil, quantum mechanics has absolutely nothing to do with it because all quantum fluxes cancel out long before you get to the realm of sensual reality as we perceive it.
Right. And being that we have to base everything that we know on five sense reality, that poses a problem for quantum physics is essentially what I'm getting at.
And so, I mean, you know, there's...
Anyway, read David Harriman's book, The Logical Leap, may be of interest to you, as well as his...
His lecture series, The Philosophic Corruption of Physics, which is excellent.
It's a, I think, probably six or twelve hour lecture series where he goes in and breaks down all of the problems and shows how all of these things do in fact stem from Immanuel Kant.
Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, he was the latest in a long series of people from Plato and even before him to invent a realm called crazy, to invent a realm called insanity, where stupid, antithetical, anti-rational, anti-empirical beliefs can be placed as if they're still true.
I mean, it's just completely insane.
I mean, let's say I come sell you.
I'm going to sell you a house. I'm going to sell you a house.
I take a million dollars, and then I drive you out, and there's just an empty lot there.
And I say, no, no, no, no, no.
You see, the house is a quantum house.
The house is a new omenal house.
The house exists in the platonic realm of pure form.
And it's like, what the hell does that mean?
Do I have a house or not? No.
It's just that simple.
But people want to create this alternate realm called things that are insane so they can put exploitive, irrational, destructive beliefs in and still pretend that they're Drew.
And it just, it's crazy.
I mean, you cannot hand in a math exam to your teacher with an incorrect answer and then claim that they can't give you an F because it could be correct in another dimension.
I mean, if people want to make that case, I always ask them, okay, how is this working in your life?
Forget about the abstract philosophy, right?
How does this change your life?
What decisions do you make that are different in your life, in your negotiations, in your relationships, in your virtues, based upon this information?
And I've yet to have anyone who said anything that has affected any of their life changed anything in their life.
It's just a big, abstract, crazy bag that people can put their irrational ideals in and pretend that they don't have to give them up.
Stefan, I also heard you discussing finance and the Austrian philosophy, Austrian money philosophy, and some of the things that you had said were that, for instance, without...
There is no fiat currency or paper currency and I wanted to take you to challenge on that and yesterday I sent you a book by a guy by the name of David Astle wrote it.
It's called The Babylonian Woe and in this book he shows how The Babylonian bankers who controlled the gold and silver supply actually would use the temples as holding places or banks for the money back then.
It was then that they realized and if they could Keep the kings in line with them.
They realized that essentially they could bring in and hold as much gold as they wanted and that they could issue receipts for what they were holding and that the issue of fiat money was never tied to the gold.
But he goes into much deeper issues with gold and silver than that, showing how gold and silver have always been tied directly to slavery and to impoverishing countries.
And this is how The bankers have in fact subverted freedom and sovereign states time and time again throughout history.
So I wanted to discuss these ideas with you and get your thoughts and your feedback on your direction from it and see what you think.
Well, I will not claim to be an expert in ancient Babylonian banking history, although of course it would make me a great hit at dinner parties.
I can guarantee you.
Let's say you've got two currencies.
It's important to be precise about at least what I mean.
I don't own the definition, but what I mean by fiat currency is a monopoly currency backed by nothing.
Backed by nothing. And if you have...
So all fiat currency starts out the same way.
And it's usually sort of in the free market.
So if you look at the 18th, 19th century banking in America, it kind of started the same way.
Which is people wanted to carry around gold, but they didn't want to lose it or get it stolen.
And so what they would do is they would go to the bank and they'd say...
They'd get a check out.
You know, this is an ounce of gold to Steph.
And then they take it to another bank where they can cash it in.
And if anyone stole that piece of paper, they couldn't get the gold, right?
So there was a way of...
I think, though, I don't know if you had a chance to read over the book that I sent you at all, but what...
What David Astle shows is that the bankers, it was their intentional effort to get various societies, ancient cultures, to accept gold and silver as the main monetary thing of trade.
Like, for instance, Sparta, and he goes into ancient Sparta, how they use leather and little pieces of leather, and that the intention and purpose of doing that was that every time that the money itself had a commodity value that it became corrupted so the idea was and of course they had to subvert the system of money the idea was that by using something readily available like strips of leather or shells or sticks as England did You know,
various cultures have done this.
Ancient Rome used iron that they would spoil with vinegar to keep it from being usable, intentionally, so that it would keep it completely worthless as a commodity.
And that was the only way that they were able to keep their money systems from being corrupted.
How do you prevent other people from using money?
How do you prevent? Well, first you have to define what money is.
And that, you know, what is accepted in a culture as money happens by fiat.
You know, and Stephen Zarlinga goes into this heavily in his book, you know, and I don't agree with his status conclusions in the last chapter or two, but he gives a very detailed history of You know, how whatever is money in that culture is fiat.
Well, no, sorry, but that's not answering the question.
So let's say that you and I are trading in leather, and some bank likes gold, right?
How does the bank make us stop using leather and start using gold?
Well, see, and see, that was the whole issue, was that the Babylonian bankers, they were the ones that brought in and forced people onto the gold system.
How did they force people onto the gold system?
Did they hire armies?
That's what they did was they manipulated the trade and things around various kingdoms and areas.
And this is all laid out very explicitly in the citation that I sent you, the history of this.
But Stephen Zerlinga, who I've had on my show a number of times as well, and he can explain this far better than I can, he shows how the gold and silver were always corrupted In several ways.
Well, the first way being that gold and silver always had to be mined and it was accessed strictly by slaves that got the gold and silver.
But that there was wear on the gold and silver because of being carried around, it broke down, so it naturally had its own inflation value and things like this.
And so, you know, these guys show that outside influences have always pushed gold into the cultures who have fought against using it, like the Spartans did.
I want to explain where I'm coming from around this because, look, I understand that there's moneyed influencers that want you to use their currency, of course, right?
But there's two ways that governments prevent or discourage alternate currencies.
The first is by simply making them illegal.
And, you know, anybody who's found using those currencies suffers some sort of god-awful penalty.
And the bankers like that, right?
Because the bankers like getting the big bully called the state to enforce their edicts.
That's number one. And number two is the government will only accept This is the big one.
The government will only accept tax payments in a particular form of currency.
In other words, you can't exist within that society without having that currency.
And so what these governments did have, in fact, was they did have systems of trade for dealing with outside cultures with whatever money they had, like Sparta did this as well.
But within Sparta, you weren't You weren't allowed to have gold and silver jewelry specifically because of the constant corruption from the commodity value of the money.
And so eventually when Sparta began to crumble, it was because they allowed the gold and silver in.
It was their allowance of this new money that could be commodified and that they could then hold in these temple banks and hand out Paper receipts that created this ability for them to hoard this value and then manipulate the people and the cultures.
So by doing these practices they were able to control The flow of gold and silver in the culture, and in every case, and I believe Zarlenga gives 22 case histories throughout, you know, from ancient history to the present, of every single culture based on gold and silver, how they collapsed based on these specific banking practices.
And then David Astle follows up very explicitly with the ancient history of how they built the system around the temples and everything, and how they manipulated that.
It's all required to settle government debts in gold and silver.
They won't accept leather. All I'm saying is that in a free society right now, though, in every case throughout history, if you look at case histories, every single time a society has gone to gold and silver, the entire society has been corrupted and enslaved.
And I think that as a freedom movement, If this issue is not studied very carefully and, you know, if gold and silver are constantly being pushed, you know, and every day the value of gold is decided twice a day in England.
It's just, you know, they control the value of gold just like they do with, you know, diamonds, the blood diamonds.
You know, you scoop them up with buckets on the sand of...
But to my knowledge, there's not been, I mean, outside of very primitive cultures, there's not been a currency that has operated without the requirement of...
Paying for state taxation or state services in that currency, which hasn't existed without a ban on competing currencies, and therefore we can't look at those currencies as being part of the free market at all.
Well, see, you know, and this is one case that Zorlinga brings up is the greenback, and of course this is always argued against by the Austrians, but the failure of understanding there is that the British ships put printing presses right outside the borders of the country and started flooding the economy with fake greenbacks, and that's what caused it to fail.
And that should be very instructive to people as a whole, that the inflation of a currency is an act of war.
I mean, that's something that is really, really important.
People say the government's here to protect us, but the government is the biggest inflator of currency.
That is actually an act of war.
Well, see, and Zarlinga, again, goes, and I've, you know, like I said, I had him on my show four or five times, and he goes through very detailed.
First of all, if a system of money has no value, and, you know, it's like, you know, you can make it in a way so that, you know, whatever, that it can't be In every instance, historically, gold and silver have brought about the enslavement.
You keep saying the same thing, though, as if I'm not even talking, right?
I mean, you keep saying the same thing. The problem is not gold and silver.
The problem is not gold and silver.
The problem is the violence and monopoly at the state services.
It is gold and silver, and it's not...
These states who have caused that every time, and this is why, you know, and it's hard for me to articulate it because I didn't write these books like these experts that I'm referring you to, which is why I was hoping you would, you know, scan through the book that I sent you.
But if you look at that, it is gold and silver.
It's not the government's.
And David Astle proves, as does Zarlenga, through these case histories.
All right, well, let's move this topic.
Well, maybe we can resuscitate this after I've had a look at the material because I can't debate with the knowledge vacuum.
Well, okay.
Well, I can take that.
So, all right.
So, with that… Oh, but let me just say this.
I have no particular allegiance to gold and silver as a form of currency.
I don't care how people trade or whether they trade.
They can trade badger nipples for all I care.
What I do care about is that people are not forced to use currency, that they're not roped into having to use a particular currency either through having other currencies or competing currencies forcibly disallowed through state monopoly on currency controls.
Or they are forced to settle on chosen quote debts like taxation or payment for government services in a specific currency because that creates an entirely artificial demand for that currency.
So I think that people may use gold and silver.
I don't think that in the future they will use gold and silver because it is still subject to significant – I don't think there is no gold.
I don't think there is enough gold, but most of the gold in the world either came from one, slavery, or two, killing 15 million natives across the Americas by the Spanish.
So this is where most of our gold came from, and it's not enough to even fund a day in the United States.
I mean, there isn't enough.
All that happens is the price of gold will go up if it's not enough.
But I'm not a huge, because gold is going to be subject to fluctuations.
I mean, if you look at what gold did to the Spanish...
Sorry, go ahead. You're not really letting me finish the sentence here, so I'll let you speak.
I'm sorry. Well, my main issue, what I was getting at, is that every time a commodity...
Something of value is used for the money every time it's going to be corrupted and those people subverted and enslaved.
And I think that needs to be paid close attention to.
So you wouldn't use a commodity-based currency, right?
I think it's absolutely detrimental.
And if you study the case histories in those two sources that I've put forth, you'll see that it's absolutely essential to stay away from commodity-backed currencies.
And you should be free to do that, of course.
And you should be free to use whatever currency or no currency or barter or whatever that you want.
The issue is not that.
The issue is commodity-based currencies have always been used to enslave those populations.
So yeah, I might decide to use this or that particular commodity-backed currency.
That's beside the point. The point is if you use a commodity-backed currency, it's going to lead to the enslavement of that culture.
You mean even if there's no state?
Well, if you can create it without a state, well, no, yes, absolutely, it would happen without the state because it would happen through the bankers.
The bankers would create that debt outside of the state.
Okay, sorry, so let's just take an example.
So let's say we live in, you know, Free Planet, Libertopia, and there's some people who like to trade in gold and silver.
There's other people who might want sort of Bitcoin or some sort of e-currency.
How is it that these people are going to be enslaved?
It's the control of the gold and silver like currently and for the last three or four thousand years the gold trade has been completely controlled and dominated.
So while this person might be freely trading in their opinion in gold and silver, in the back the entire The value of gold and silver, how much is out there and available to the public, has been controlled and manipulated.
So they're still, even though they're doing it freely by their own choice, they're still being controlled and manipulated behind the scenes, which is the issue behind that.
Sorry, you say controlled and manipulated, but what does that mean?
You mean they have reserves that they don't put into the market?
Absolutely, just like De Beers' diamond company has.
That's a state cartel. That's a government cartel.
Well, De Beers is supposed to be a private industry.
No, it's a corporation.
It was set up by...
It was set up by the Cecil Rhodes Foundation and all of the elites.
I get that there's government interlockings with that, which is the idea behind it.
Just step me through this.
I'm not trying to be skeptical.
I really want to understand the idea.
Are you saying that the value of gold is kept artificially high because people hold gold in reserve?
I am saying that the value of gold is always manipulated.
It's kept artificially high or low.
They will restrict the flow of gold.
They will flood gold.
As Astell points out, this has been done for many centuries.
So then people would stop using gold, right?
They'd start using some Bitcoin or currencies or something else, right?
That's what I'm getting at is that you have to use something like a bitcoin or whatever it may be, strips of leather that don't have a commodity value.
Okay, so then if people are dissatisfied with gold as a medium of exchange or silver because it's being controlled by some group, then they will simply stop doing that.
They will stop using that and they will start using something else.
If gold turns out to be like the Edsel of the currency options, then people will simply stop using it, right?
But that's the thing, is every time a society tries to be free, it's through gold and silver that they get co-opted.
So this is why I'm bringing this topic up.
No, but sorry, explain to me how people will, like, so let's say I don't like gold and silver, so I'll just start using Bitcoin instead.
How does that enslave me?
Well, if Bitcoin, to my knowledge, is not a commodity-based money, is it?
Well, it's semi-commodity in that it takes electricity and other resources to...
Well, isn't a Bitcoin just like a...
I've never seen them or...
Well, let's just say it's not. It's certainly not in the same way that gold is.
So if I want to start using Bitcoins and not gold, how does that end up with me being enslaved?
Again, I don't want to sound overly skeptical.
I'm just really trying to understand the idea.
I'm trying to clarify the terms we're using.
Is Bitcoin a commodity-based money or is it not?
If it's just a digital thing in a computer, then it's not a commodity technically.
It's just an idea that we agree on.
So then Bitcoin could not be used to enslave you is what I'm saying.
It has to be a commodity-based money.
When you go to the bank...
How the bankers do this, or in the ancient temples, they didn't need the governments.
If you were carrying around gold, you were still going to be tired of carrying it, or the fear of somebody robbing you, so you were going to take it to your local temple, where the bankers worked, and you were going to deposit your money in the local temple.
They would give you a receipt.
This is the start of fiat money right here.
The temple didn't care.
If what they held in their reserves was actually to equal the amount of the receipts they gave out.
So this is the start of the subversion process right here, and it bears nothing on government whatsoever.
It bears on the commodity.
Let's move on, and I'll have a look at that book, and we'll maybe have another conversation.
I can't conceive of how people can be forced into using a self-destructive currency How people can continue to use a self-destructing currency unless they're forced into it.
I mean, how many people really want to continue using fiat currency dollars?
It's just that they have to pay off the government with it and they're not allowed to use alternatives.
So that, to me, is the way that it works.
But anyway, let's move on to another topic because I don't have enough knowledge to challenge those positions.
But there's a few things that you're mixing there.
Fiat money doesn't have to be something that has private banker inflation attached to it, first off.
So, yes, we are paying for the use of our money to the government or the bankers or whatever of this non-commodity-backed fiat money when we're being taxed for it.
That's obvious. That's a given.
But that doesn't mean that a type of fiat money can't be created that doesn't have this automatic tax or hidden inflation built into it.
And so, you know, those are two very separate things that Zarlinga and Astle go into.
Alright, did you have another topic that you wanted to cover before the end of the show?
Well, we're at about, what, we're getting close to an hour and a half here.
So, you know, I'm sorry to get, you know, I wasn't trying to get riled up here.
It's just, you know, it's very hard for me to explain because I haven't...
Oh, look, it's okay if we disagree.
That's survivable, right? Well, it's not about...
The only reason why two people disagree on something is because they're not on the same page looking at the same ideas and then removing the contradictions so that they can come to a single identified truth.
I'll have this guy on my show, and I'm certainly interested in this idea.
I've never heard of it before, so it's a good opportunity for me to learn something.
David Astle is dead, just so you know.
Alright, so I'll have him on as a seance, and then we'll be proving two illogical ideas, at least for my idea.
Sure, but Zarlinga is alive and well, and he can talk about this stuff.
Like I said, I don't agree with his conclusions with his bill in the Senate right now with Denis Kucinich and handing that over to the state, but I think he is on to something in his overall philosophy and the case histories there that he provides.
And so those are issues that I wanted to raise there, and I wasn't trying to No, that's good.
I mean, it was a spirited back and forth.
I think that's fine. So, well, regarding personal freedom and anarchy, what do you think is the single most important concept that people need to understand?
I'd like to frame that as a positive, but I don't think that the world is quite ready yet for a positive.
The positive, of course, is that peace works and is the only functional and sustainable organization matrix in society.
But I think that the most important idea I think that people need to understand now is that the world is getting worse and worse because violence doesn't work.
Violence doesn't work in the long run.
In the short run, violence works really well.
I mean, if I just snatch someone's iPad from a coffee table at a Starbucks, I've got me an iPad and yay!
You know, I didn't have to work to get it and so it works really well for me in the short run.
But in the long run, of course, it's just disastrous for society as a whole.
Nicotine is really good for your pleasure centers in the brain in the moment.
It's really bad for your lungs and other attached body parts in the long run.
What I really want people to understand and to get, and it's such a hard thing to get.
It's so easy to get in our personal lives.
It's so hard to get socially because of all our propaganda.
But for people to genuinely understand That the problem with the world has been the escalation of violence over the past 120, 130 years.
The escalation of violence that has occurred in the world is why the world is getting worse and worse.
And in particular, the escalation of aggression, control, taxation and debt since the end of the gold standard in 73 has been pretty catastrophic.
The problems that we are grappling now with were problems that were largely being solved.
So a problem of poverty.
Poverty was being eliminated 1% a year, reduction in poverty until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs went into place.
So people, if they could just understand when they look, pick up the newspaper and look at all of these symptoms, right?
National debts are going up.
The war continues.
More people in prison.
Lower educational scores for children.
Fewer people employed.
More people unemployed.
Riots when you attempt to restrain the predations of public sector pensions and so on.
If they look at all of these symptoms and they just look at them as disconnected, jangly negatives floating in a void, then they can't do anything about them because there's no root cause.
To deal with any of these things.
But if we understand that these are all the hydra heads that come off the body called coercion, The coercion takes many forms.
The coercion is forcing parents to pay for education that they probably don't agree with.
In fact, we know they don't agree with it because they have to be forced to pay for it.
The coercion comes in being forced to use the currency.
The coercion comes in unwanted, unprocessed, unchosen debts like national debts or taxation or other forms of regulations.
You don't choose these contracts.
They are inflicted and enforced upon you against your will.
That is an escalation of violence.
Wars, of course, obviously. Prisons, of course, obviously.
The majority of Americans in prisons are there for nonviolent crimes.
In other words, non-crimes.
If we understand that all of these stars going out one by one, the stars of the Enlightenment and the human civilization going out one by one, it's because there are these big-ass clouds called coercion floating over the human landscape.
If we can't see the clouds, we can't understand why the stars are going out and we just keep blinking and rubbing our eyes going, well, maybe they'll come back.
But until we look at the root cause of coercion in our families, in our churches, in our educational systems as a whole, in our societies, through our government agencies, if we don't see the root cause of the catastrophes that are engulfing us, we simply will remain completely and totally unable to solve them.
And because people are so used to, if there's a problem, pass a law.
If there's a problem, lobby the government.
If we need something solved or something needs to get better, let's give the government more power.
If people don't understand that that is feeding the beast that is eating us all, I mean, we all know historically where this ends up and it is not a pretty place at all.
Indeed it's not.
And would you like to give out the titles of your books?
All of them? Okay.
Well, I've got The Handbook of Human Ownership, A Manual for New Tax Farmers.
That is a satirical speech to be given to the new president of the United States.
I have Against the Gods, An Examination of Agnosticism.
I have everyday anarchy and practical anarchy, which are two arguments for the existing prevalence of anarchy and how we know and can prove that it's going to work in society as a whole.
Universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, which is my argument for self-ownership and the non-aggression principle.
On truth, the tyranny of illusion, which is our relationship to culture, real-time relationships, which is how to bring philosophy into your personal life.
And I've got a novel called The God of Atheists, a comedy novel, and another novel called Revolutions, which takes place shortly before the 1917 revolution in Russia.
and uh And yeah, those are my books.
They're all free. You can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash free, download the PDF. I'm going to get the EPUBs up there very shortly.
MP3s, audiobooks are all available there.
So I hope that people will go and check those out.
Great, Stefan. And thank you so much.
And thank you for your time and for this follow-up interview in our Freedom and Anarchy series, essentially.
Well, fantastic. Thank you so much.
I really, really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope we get to do it again.
Yeah, likewise. And take care.
Have a good day. All right.
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