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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:30
God is the Universe!
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Hi, everybody. Stephen Marlin from Freedom Made Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Listen to your questions.
Oh, right. Are there any subjects you changed your view on considerably since you started your philosophy show?
And if positive, what and why?
Well, when I was younger, based upon, I think, the science that was available then, and I did this very early on in the show, I talked about a possible theory that homosexuality was the result of imprinting in one's early life through same-sex sexual exploitation as a child.
And I've since seen much better data or newer data that has caused me to revise that opinion.
And again, I'm sorry for any offense that may have caused.
And I now am firmly in the camp that it's genetics based upon what happens in the womb.
I think that's the major one that I've changed my mind on.
I've had about a billion factual corrections that I've read out at the show.
That is just the limitations of one guy who's a typist.
So... So I hope that makes sense.
So he also writes a while ago, my beloved grandfather was about to die and before his death he often talked about how he anticipated the process of dying as well as what is to come afterwards, the afterlife in heaven and so on, which was the reason that he'd been so confident and devoid of fear.
I still wonder if it would have been really been better to try and convince him of rationality and reality such as the non-existence of God.
What would you have done?
I would not withhold or attempt to change the religious comfort of a dying man any more than I would withhold any other opiate from him to ease his process.
Dying is a pretty fundamental confrontation that we must all face.
We never actually meet death because where we are, death is not.
Where death is, we are not. We don't actually meet, but the flyby, of course, is pretty powerful.
So if a man has lived his life on the assumption of the existence of a deity, then he's made millions of decisions and taught lots of people and instructed his children and so on, participated in a community, pursued certain things, avoided other things based upon this belief system.
I don't particularly think that it's wise or kind or useful or productive to try and take that away from somebody who's dying.
I think that it would make A life, like the view back on your life as pretty wretched.
And the other thing too is, you know, we don't want to add stress to the dying and certainly changing foundational beliefs is quite stressful for a lot of people.
So I would say, um, Sim Kumbaya nod, close his hand and let him slip softly into the great beyond.
That would be my thought. Some older members of my family might die in the next few years.
And since basically my entire family is religious, the funerals are going to be embedded into a religious ceremony in church.
Would you attend if you had been fond of the person that died or rather not?
You can be in a church Without being religious.
It's not like the air of the church is infectious with little God viruses, right?
You can go into the church. You can pay your respects.
You can sing some hymns.
I mean, the songs can be nice.
I was a choir boy when I was younger in church.
So you can go into a church, and I've been to churches as an adult, and it's not particularly bad.
You're there to see the person. The religious rituals are not particularly important if you're there to pay respects and talk to other people about The one thing that religion does get right that I think a lot of other belief systems don't is that ritual and symbolism are very powerful within the mind.
The unconscious takes up a significant portion of The subconscious, as we know from dreams and our responses to art, works on symbols, on symbology, what Jung used to call the Mandelas and other kinds of symbolism.
So I think that religion has evolved to succeed, partly because it recognizes and respects the power of symbols in helping us deal with major life transitions, and this is why religious rituals tend to concentrate around birth and marriage and puberty and death and so on.
So I think it would behoove the philosophical movement, the rationalist movement, to work a little bit more on art.
I've certainly done my part, written some novels and plays and so on, and poems.
But I think we need to work a little bit more with the symbolic, emotional aspect of the mind, which is nothing to be sneezed at or sneered at.
It is, statistically, it's been shown to have about 9,000 times the processing power of the conscious mind.
And so that is the part of our mind that has evolved in I don't think it's something that would be scrubbed from A rational society, because it's irrational to reject that which is true, and the unconscious is powerful, it's never going to leave us, and it works on symbols and rituals.
So I think that's a...
I would go. I can listen to people talk all day about God.
It doesn't change the reality of atheism, and so that's fine.
On UPB, you always emphasize that murder is immoral because two people cannot murder each other simultaneously.
However, why might murder, theoretically not, be just morally neutral, like breathing, for instance?
This is a question that has been dealt with, I would dare say, countless times, but it's not quite countless.
It's a number of times on the show. So you can do a search on the website very briefly.
Murder is immoral is not quite the UPB-compliant way of saying it, right?
Because immoral means so many things to so many people.
This is why I try to avoid that kind of language when discussing things about universally preferable behavior, which, for those who don't know, is this theory of ethics, which you can get for free on my website.
So what's more correct to say, more precise to say, is that murder cannot be universally preferable behavior.
And the reasons for that is that two men cannot simultaneously murder each other because murder is something that is unwanted, right?
Two men cannot simultaneously steal from each other.
Two men cannot simultaneously rape each other.
Two men cannot continually or simultaneously assault each other because, you know, rape, theft, murder, and assault are by definition something which is not wanted by the other person, right?
I mean... If the other person, quote, wants to be raped, then it's S&M, it's rough sex, it's rough trade, but it's not rape because there's consent in the moment.
And so you can't universalize that which is good for one person and vehemently opposed by another person because they can't both universally prefer rape.
Because the moment they both universally prefer it, it's not rape anymore, right?
You understand? Now, the reason that murder cannot be neutral is that murder...
Is the imposition of will on somebody else.
So then we say, okay, well, it's universally preferable behavior to inflict your will on other people.
Well, that can't be the case.
Because if I come up to you and say, it's universally good for me to inflict my will to want to kill you, then you say, well, it's universally preferable for me to inflict my will to not be killed, and then we both cancel each other out.
Therefore, it can't work from a universality standpoint.
I don't quite understand how you determine whether some UPB has anything to do with morality or not.
For example, why is stealing morally wrong, but eating is morally neutral?
Well, because two men in a room cannot both steal from each other.
Because if they both value stealing, it's not stealing.
It's the transfer of property voluntarily and positively, and therefore it is exchange, it's trade, it's charity, but it's not stealing.
Two men in a room can both eat together.
They can both simultaneously eat.
Eating can be... I mean, can't say it's universally preferable behavior because you can't eat forever, you know, sleep or get sick or whatever, right?
But two men at least, it's morally neutral behavior and I go into the reasons for that in the book.
So, right, there's aesthetically preferable actions which is like being on time, being polite and so on, not yelling at people.
Those are aesthetically preferable actions for reasons I go into in the book.
There's universally preferable behavior which is the morality of things and then there's morally neutral behavior like I went for a walk.
Is that good or bad? It's nicer to be on time.
It's really great to not murder people, but it doesn't matter if you go for a walk or not, fundamentally.
So, again, you can go into the categories in the book.
Is exhibitionism in public an act of violence?
So I guess this is somebody who, you know, the dirty old woman in a raincoat who opens her, see, breaking the pedophilia stereotype.
The dirty old woman in a raincoat who flashes her saggy boobs at children.
Is that an act of violence?
I would not say that that is an act of violence.
So, for instance, If you have a butcher shop and you kill animals in full view of everyone walking by on the street, you cut their throats, they're squealing and screaming and so on, and the children can look and see this and so on, well, frankly, I wouldn't do that to kids, but we all have to gloss over the reality of how our meat is provided.
As Paul McCartney said, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everybody would be a vegetarian.
But it is not the initiation of force to show somebody your genitals.
And therefore, I don't think you are right in using violence to retaliate against somebody who's not initiating the use of force against you.
It definitely is not aesthetically preferable behavior because it is upsetting to children, traumatic to children and so on.
But how much of that is traumatic because we have all the usual religious hangups about physicality and sexuality and so on?
I don't know. Certainly in the African tribes, women with their boobs out do not seem to be overly traumatic to children.
But what I would say is that if the society just didn't approve of it, then it would be Aesthetically negative, right?
So if you were on somebody else's property and you did this, they would order you off their property, right?
That would be their response to it and this would happen progressively and then you'd end up, right?
So if you're in your own house and you have your windows open and you're having sex with a microwaved watermelon in full view of the children playing in the street, this would be dealt with through neighbors ostracizing, through a bad reputation and so on.
That would be dealt with just fine.
Where is the actual gun in the room in terms of the fiat money system?
If I decide just to trade with gold and I find a trade partner who accepts it, how is the legal tender forced upon me?
I cannot remember you having ever spoken of it yet.
Oh, well, I mean, the gun in the room.
People get confused about this because there's such an anti-capitalist prejudice and anti-corporatist prejudice because people assume that what we have now is capitalism and they assume that the corporate structure right now is how it would be in a free society, which is...
Absolutely not true.
Anything that the government touches with its laws cannot and will not be replicated in a free society.
It will not be replicated in a free society.
And so because the government is forcing it means it's not what people want.
The government has to enforce corporate law because it's not what people want.
If it's what people want, there's no law that says that teenage boys and girls should find each other physically attractive, and if you don't, you're going to go to jail.
There's no law that says you've got to like chocolate.
This is what people want. It's what they like.
The laws are specifically what people don't want.
People say that there's a social contract or that the government reflects the will of the people.
The exact opposite is true.
When force is involved, we know that at least one of the parties of that doesn't want it.
Right? So if I come up to you, I'm a homeless guy, hey, look, I'm getting the beard for it.
But if I come up to you and I say, I'm hungry, give me five dollars, please, I need something to eat.
Now, if you give me five bucks, then you get the happiness of heaven.
Help someone, I get the five bucks, it's voluntary.
If I come up with a knife and say, give me five bucks, when you give me the five bucks, you know for sure you don't want to.
Or at least we know for sure that I don't think you want to because I got a knife there.
Wherever there's violence in an interaction, praxeologically, fundamentally, you know that it is win-lose.
So everything that the government touches, everything that has a law about it is win-lose.
It is not what the people want, at least not what all the people want.
And certainly one person in the interaction does not want that.
So when it comes to fiat currency, people say, well, the Federal Reserve is a private bank.
It's nonsense. It's nonsense.
The government... We'll only accept payment for taxes in fiat dollars.
So you have to get fiat dollars to pay off the tax masters, right?
I mean, this is the currency of the tax farm.
You have to have that to pay it off.
If you want to pay any government bill, if you want to pay for any license, if you want to pay for any of these things, the government is so involved in the economy, and the government only accepts Federal Reserve notes to pay, and therefore you have to have, I mean, unless you're living in the woods in case who cares, you have to have Federal Reserve notes in order to pay for things.
The government, I mean...
The Fed is appointed by Congress.
The Fed is politically sensitive, and you can see the statistics about this.
Just do a search for Feds and elections, Federal Reserve money policy and elections.
You'll see that it's very politically motivated.
But most fundamentally, if you just try and set up a competing currency, right, just try and set up a competing currency and see what happens.
We've seen it before. I mean, I don't mean something like Bitcoin.
It's different because it's, you know, Encrypted and shared by all the computers and so on.
But try and set up.
Introduce your own kind of dollars and try and get that set up and you will be quickly found that this is a government monopoly.
So the violence then will be against you.
Okay, so it's great questions.
Thank you so much. I'm sorry, that one was from February.
Oh, God. Corporations are fictional constructs that protect the elite from the consequences of risk.
Well, so in the past, and this is actually true until quite recently in the financial sector, if a financial company went bankrupt, the directors would be personally liable for what happened.
This was up into the mid to late 20th century, and this is one of the reasons why there was such care and caution, and you didn't have the same kind of bubbles and crashes until this all started in the 80s.
I mean, you still had bubbles and crashes, but they were driven by fiat currency.
But this sort of began to change, and you had these corporate shields.
So the corporate shield is, I have a corporation, and if the corporation makes money, I take money out of the corporation, put it in my personal bank account.
If the corporation does something wrong or bad or goes bankrupt, people cannot reach them to try and take my personal money back through the corporation.
So it's a one-way profit. When the corporation's making money, I can take money out and take it and buy whatever I want.
But then if the corporation does something wrong, it's the corporation that finds my money does not flow back in to the corporation.
This is a complete recipe.
I mean, if you suggested, I'll do a video on this one day, but if you suggested status solutions in a free society, everybody would think you're insane.
They only seem sane because they've been around for so long and they're so normalized by the media.
So the Bank of America gets fined.
Do the executives lose any of their own personal income?
No. BP gets fined.
Did the executives lose any of their personal income?
No. The corporation gets fined, and that's like a hand puppet that smacks around the workers, right?
The corporation gets fined. What happens?
Fewer people get hired, which means more workers are out of jobs.
There's less money around for raises, less money around for bonuses.
People get fired. Or, you know, hey, my bank got fined because they did a bad thing.
Yay, I feel so vindicated.
And then what happens is... Your fees go up because the bank has to pay off the fine.
So the customers who were screwed end up being the ones who pay the fine because the executives can't be pursued because of the legal shield of the corporation.
So it's just a way of keeping the ruling classes together and making sure that the corporate elites are pro-status because they're so embedded into the gruesome protections that are offered.
Life in prison for rapists and murderers means keeping them fed.
I think they can be put to work to provide their own sustenance to a large extent with incentives such as more food or creature comforts if they ever achieve greater productivity.
You need a non-coercive way to fund prisons, and this is where I'm looking for input from free thinkers.
I have done some stuff on prisons.
I'm not... I mean, certainly what we have right now is not what people want, for the aforementioned reason that force is being used to produce this stuff.
So, for sure, what we have now is not what people want.
How would prisons work in a free society?
Well, of course, prevention is key, and making sure that we have entities in society, including parents, who profit from the good raising of children is really essential.
Right now, people kind of profit from the bad raising of children in many ways.
So if you live in a religious community and you inflict horrible ideas of hell and punishment and eternal damnation and worshipping a god who kills people and instructs fathers to murder their children and only stops them at the last minute, boy...
As Mada Kairusha says, things were never quite the same between those two again.
But you are positively rewarded economically and socially for teaching your children these things if you are in a religious society.
And if you teach your children that these things are not true, then you are negatively incented to do that, right?
Because you have problems with the other parents, you know, the usual stuff that happens where, oh, don't go to the atheist's house, right?
Go to the Muslim's house instead.
So that is something that is where society is at the moment.
Parents are also negatively incented for raising their children to be free-spirited critical thinkers because then if they put them in the public school system, they're very likely to end up in a terrible situation where the teachers or school psychologists or principal are going to be heavily recommending drugging the children because the children will be restless and bored and critical and You can't have 20 or 30 kids in a room with a teacher unless their spirits have already been broken.
So right now, there are negative incentives aplenty to having children be taught to think freely.
I mean, children talk about gods.
They talk about immortality.
I mean, this is what kids do.
They're fascinated by all these topics.
And it can be It can be quite challenging, right, if you're a parent.
And so right now, there are lots of negative incentives for critical thinking and free thought.
And this really doesn't have anything to do with atheism fundamentally.
It just has to do with critical thinking.
And in the future, of course, we want a society where there are positive incentives for peaceful and effective child raising and negative consequences.
So, for instance, in America, you get additional payments if you're on Social Security or disability or welfare.
You get additional payments if your kid is diagnosed with a mental disorder.
So you get free meds and you get additional payments.
So, in fact, It is, you are positively incented to have your kids be problematic, right?
So in Australia, in some outback, I think it was, if your child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome, you get additional payments.
So some of the pregnant women were drinking like fishes, right?
They're drinking alcohol all over the place, hoping to get a kid with the money ticket of fetal alcohol syndrome.
Monstrous. But people respond to incentives, the basic reality of economics, right?
All desires are limitless, all resources are finite, and people respond to incentives.
And right now, the incentives are to harm children.
This is against, I think, the basic wishes of most parents, but people adapt to their current tribe.
And that's what we're, you know...
We'd rather be unhappy than dead, for the most part.
We'd rather be conformist than isolated and pray to predators at night and any wandering idiot who comes along with a hatchet.
So... We tend to conform to our tribe, and it tends to be pretty brutal on children to get them to conform to the tribe because you can't call it conformity, right?
Because you're asking kids not to be conformist with other people, right?
If everyone ran off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?
So you don't want your kids to be conformist with their peers, but you want them to conform to other adults in society, and it's very dangerous historically if they don't, right?
Try raising a free-thinking child in the Middle Ages.
They would be stuck on a rotisserie quicker than you could imagine.
So I think that in the future we want these kinds of incentives in place where if you raise a child peacefully and rationally and so on, they're going to be cheaper to educate because they're going to be more self-sufficient, fewer problems, fewer problems with authority, fewer problems with fighting with other kids, fewer problems with vandalism and arson and animal torture or whatever, right, if you raise them peacefully. And so we want a system, of course, in place where the true costs of child abuse accrue to the abusers and that's going to be the greatest incentive for them to change.
So, again, that's all around prevention.
But let's just say someone does go and...
I don't know. I mean, it's just incomprehensible.
So if someone's raised peacefully and lovingly, they're not going to become a rapist and a murderer.
Now, maybe they get a brain tumor, maybe they get an iron spike through the head and so on, but then their moral responsibility is, let's say, somewhat diminished.
I guess take out the tumor and throw it in a prison cell.
But it's sort of incomprehensible to me that a child raised peacefully and lovingly is going to just suddenly turn into some serial killer axe murderer without any cause.
That's like expecting someone to spontaneously speak Mandarin who's never been exposed to it.
I just can't imagine there's no science that I've ever seen that would show that that is possible.
I mean, people do say, well, psychopaths come from good families, but I mean, where's the proof?
This is what families who they say they're good or they've got other kids who aren't bad.
Who knows?
Who knows what happens?
Who knows what happens at nighttime behind closed doors, in an uncle's house, at a summer camp?
Who knows what happens?
I know that this is a non-falsifiable claim and all that, but to me, there's a very high barrier, a very high bar that these theories have to overcome who say that sociopathy or evil or psychopathy can come from perfectly loving and happy parents.
Who knows? Anyway, so if somebody stole from me, I would want restitution, right?
And society can quite easily get restitution.
Society, particularly a modern complex society, has the most amazing Power.
And that power is that if people don't want to participate with you economically, you can't survive in the town.
People don't want to sell you food.
They don't want to deliver your electricity or your water.
They don't want to pick up your garbage. They don't want to do anything for you.
Then you simply have to leave until you obey.
And since with the internet and all this, it's pretty universal.
If people have been found guilty of doing wrong, they're going to be put into a database, I think.
This is what I would want. I don't know what's actually going to happen.
This would be my theory. Maybe it's just sort of my entrepreneur talking, but...
People are going to be put into a database.
And then it's like, well, this guy was found guilty of theft and he's not paying any restitution.
And people say, well, I don't want you in my store.
And maybe a few people would.
But then the people who process all their payments would say, oh, you processed payments for a guy who was found guilty of theft and didn't pay any restitution, so I don't want to deal.
Visa's not going to deal with you anymore.
PayPal's not going to deal with you. Whoever's not going to deal with you anymore.
Because you're sort of aiding and abetting.
And all of this is voluntary. All of this is, if somebody's doing something really distasteful, I don't want to do business with them.
That's all voluntary. Right?
There's no initiation of force.
And that's as cheap as you can get.
So, you see this all the time, right?
I mean, you see this in stores sometimes.
You know, so-and-so is not allowed into this store.
I don't want to do business with this person.
Somebody screws you up.
On eBay, you don't go back, right?
Of course, right? So this kind of ostracism is an incredibly powerful tool that is not there or used because people just, you know, call the cops or whatever.
So I would want restitution for something that was stolen from me and maybe a little bit of extra money for my time.
Not so much that it became profitable to make up accusations.
It's a fine line. And so, yeah, people would, if someone stole from me, if someone stole $1,000 from me, then the DRO would say they're sort of Conflict Resolution Agency would say, okay, so you owe $1,500 to this guy and $500 to us for prosecuting or investigating or whatever, right? And so he's got to pay that off.
If he doesn't pay that off, then they begin to disconnect his services, right?
Sorry, I'm going to inform the water company.
And if the water company continues to serve you, that's fine.
But then I'm going to inform everyone that the water company is continuing to serve someone who is found guilty of a crime.
And the other water companies would throw this up on advertisements and so on.
Can you believe they're supplying water to criminals who don't pay restitution?
This would all be enforced.
Trust me. I mean, I've been in the business world for many, many years.
This would all be enforced.
Reputation is everything in the business world.
Like in the free business world.
So this is how it would work.
The person would pay restitution. Now, in terms of violent crimes, I mean, it would obviously be a lot more.
And I would hope, right? I would hope that somebody who'd stole from me would go through therapy or counseling to figure out the source of their issues, why they feel so entitled.
Generally, people steal because they were stolen from as children, right?
Their happiness, their life, their freedom, their independence, their physical integrity, their security, their love was all stolen from them.
And the society around them did nothing to help or protect them.
So they grew up with a very feral sense of society, that society is a bunch of lying-ass Hypocrites who talk a lot about how they want to protect children, but they don't do a goddamn thing to lift a finger to protect children.
So screw them. I'm going to get what I want.
Society's rules are bullshit because they don't lift a finger to protect children, even though everybody knew that I as a child was being harmed or whatever.
So society is just a load of hypocritical bullshit priests.
And so if I'm going to go and take something, nobody ever helped me.
Everybody screwed me over. So I have a state of nature relationship with society.
Now, of course, if society...
Changes that and responds in a positive and helpful way to children being abused, then children will feel a reciprocity in a social contract, right?
I mean, theft is basically there is no social contract.
Society is a bunch of hypocrites.
They lie and cheat and steal, and therefore, why would I want to respect their integrity if they never did anything to help me as I was violated or cruelly treated as a child?
People steal because they were stolen from.
I mean, the presence of pedophilia and child rape in the formation of rapists is well known.
People rape because they were raped.
Not just because they were raped, but because they were raped, and society as a whole didn't do anything to help them.
Didn't do anything to help them.
When you don't help a child who's being harmed, you are helping to breed future criminality, and God help us politicians, and soldiers, and policemen.
So helping out children is the best way to free the future.
This, I think, is all fairly well.
Well established. So yeah, I would want someone to go through therapy.
I don't want someone to be locked in a cage if they've done something wrong.
If they're unrecoverable, then yes, they have to be ejected from society, in which case they've got to go live in the woods.
They can't go near anyone.
They can't go near anyone's property.
And maybe what would happen is...
Somebody who was, you know, complete out-and-out sociopath, couldn't be cured, couldn't be helped, had no interest in it, then they would be set up in some enclosed area which would not be terribly uncomfortable just to keep them segregated from society.
And I would be happy to pay for that just because I don't want that person kind of roaming around.
And they wouldn't really have much of a choice because nobody would want them on their property.
So that's where they'd have to go or leave society completely.
So that would be my suggestion.
Again, who knows? But I think that would work.
Can you explain natural and supernatural from your point of view?
Sure, natural is reason and evidence, and supernatural is imagination and bullshit.
What is real for you? This is not a valid question.
If it is real, then it's not just real for me, right?
If it is real, it means it's external to consciousness, exists independently of perception, and so on.
And, you know, I've never seen The Dark Side of the Moon, even though I did flip over the album cover, but I do accept that it's there, and it's not just real for me, right?
So if it's just for me, then it's not real.
It's just my personal subjective preference, which is real in my own mind, but not real outside my own consciousness.
My preference for... The great band Queen.
My preference for that does not exist independent of my consciousness, although it should.
Absolutely. It should be really a law of physics in the musical universe, but we're still working on that.
So if it's real, it's not just real for me.
So this is not a particularly valid thing.
Why can't the universe be God?
Because we already have the word universe, right?
So... Why can't all the fish in the world be God?
Well, because we have a category called fish, which doesn't include uncaused, supernatural, infinite agents that contradict their own properties, right?
So the universe can't be God because God is a specific knowledge claim about consciousness without matter, about omniscience, about omnipotence, about uncaused and eternality and I think?
God is a negation of thought.
I mean, fundamentally. God is a negation of thought.
It's like saying, what's the opposite of a stone?
Well, I don't know.
Not a stone? I don't know.
God is composed of everything that human beings are not and could never be.
God is consciousness without matter.
Well, there's no such thing as consciousness without matter.
Consciousness is an effect of the brain, like gravity is an effect of mass.
So having consciousness without the brain is just the opposite of what consciousness is.
Human beings don't live forever, but you can imagine.
I guess when you're a kid, maybe you live forever, you can imagine it.
So, saying eternal is simply the opposite of what a human being is, right?
Omniscient, well, we're not omniscient, and it's being comprehensible to imagine omniscience.
Omnipotent, we're not omnipotent.
So, everything is just the opposite of our properties, right?
It's taking one little smidgen, like consciousness and knowledge and power, extrapolating it to infinity, which makes it the opposite of everything biological and human.
So, God is the opposite of humanity, and there's no property called consciousness without matter in the universe.
Right? And so, because the way we detect things in the universe is matter, energy, or the effects thereof.
Right? So if there's no matter and no energy, we can't detect anything.
And so God is either completely forever indetectable, which is exactly the same as saying God does not exist.
Right? It's like if I give my kid a present that's an empty box and I say, no, there is a toy in there.
You just can't touch, taste, smell, feel, or detect it in any conceivable way.
Well, how is that different from saying it doesn't exist?
It's not different at all. So if you say, if the universe is God, then what you're saying is non-existence is the same as existence.
The universe is defined as that which exists in the space between it.
And so... If you say that God, who doesn't have any material form or anything like that and is entirely self-contradictory, right?
I mean, you can't be both all-knowing and all-powerful, because if you're all-knowing, you know what you're going to do tomorrow.
And if you're all-powerful, you can change what you're going to do tomorrow, which would invalidate your knowledge.
I mean, this is just one of many issues with the concepts of deities, but the universe is that which exists, that which can be empirically measured, and God is completely the opposite.
So it's like saying, why can't the stone be an opposite of a stone?
Why does having a god mean enslavement?
Well, I mean, if you're a deist, I suppose, and you think that God just wound up the clock and is just watching it run with no particular interference, I guess I don't really know what the difference is between that and not having a God other than you've chased away the magic demon of doubt about where the universe came from, which fundamentally, who really cares?
I mean, it's an interesting subject to ask about, but we're only particularly interested in it because of religion.
I mean, how the universe came into being doesn't have any particular relevance about whether I spank my kid or yell at people or go strangle hobos or whatever.
So, why does having a god mean enslavement?
Well, it's because if the god If God has rules, right, then you obey those rules because God is all good, all powerful, all knowing, and will, you know, burn you to a Krispy Kreme donut fried soul brain food after death.
And so you have to obey that deity.
And since the deity doesn't exist, you are obeying words that people wrote down while claiming to be the deity.
So you're just obeying a person.
But you are obeying a person who either knows there's no deity but just recognizes this is the best way to get people to obey him or her which means that you're dealing with a complete manipulative sociopath which means that you're actually obeying evil or you are obeying the words of somebody who wrote down the commandments of God genuinely believing that an infinite being was speaking in his skull that he was hearing voices and the voices were issuing him commandments which are eternal and perfect and pure and good And then you're just obeying someone who's crazy then,
right? I mean, this is deranged, crazy thinking.
So you're either obeying evil or you're obeying a crazy.
It's probably a mix of both, but you're certainly not obeying philosophy, reason, evidence, and you certainly are not obeying virtue.
virtue is not ever, ever, ever accepting the orders of other people on their say-so.
Integrity and virtue is thinking for yourself with your reason and evidence at your disposal, hopefully with guides from people who know stuff that's useful, but obedience to language, particularly when the language is axiomatically generated by evil or crazy or both, is not You are a slave to other people's language and you are obeying words as if words were God's because there is no God.
There are only the words written down by people who say they represent God or were inspired by God or something.
Some of these are a little...
Couldn't it be like mass and energy?
Well, again, sorry, I already sort of answered that.
It's supernatural, the nutrition of the natural, and vice versa in an infinite way.
This is what my friend Peter Boghossian calls a deepity, which is just, you know, could not God be just the reflection of man's yearning for truth in the universe?
I don't know. It doesn't mean anything.
It's just a deepity. It sounds deep, but, you know, you pull it apart, and it has all of the validity of Deepak Chopra's mutterings about quantum physics.
Have you ever considered how population growth affects economic inequality?
In any system the population will almost increase exponentially, barring areas with cultural exceptions, Korea, Japan, which means that not even the fastest growing economy will be able to produce a sufficient number of jobs to cater to said population.
Oh boy, where would I even start?
The best contraception is industrialization, right?
So when children die pretty regularly and when you need a lot of labor, then you have a lot of kids.
And you don't need to invest a whole lot of education in your children to get them to go plow the back 40 or chase old yeller and catch the mule or whatever, right?
But if you live in an advanced industrial economy, a knowledge-based economy, then your children require – well, first of all, your children will live because you've got science and medicine and all these kinds of good things.
They're much more likely to live. And secondly, you have to invest a huge amount into bringing them to productivity, bringing them to value, right?
Their worth is going to be measured not by what they can do, which is sort of the agricultural economy or the sort of primitive industrial revolution economy.
Your children are not going to get paid by what they do, but they're going to get paid according to what they know.
And if they don't know much, they won't get paid much.
So you have to inject them with a huge amount of knowledge and skills, negotiation skills, self-criticism skills, all that kind of good stuff, which makes you a very valuable knowledge worker.
And so since your kids are going to live and you have to invest more into each of them, you're going to have fewer of them.
And that's just the way things work, right?
So I don't think that there's any particular problem with population growth.
In a free market, a population equilibrium will work out.
No problem. And that's what's happened historically.
This funny thing about the fastest growing economy will be able to produce a sufficient number of jobs to cater to said population.
I mean, it's really important to understand that The economy is not like a machine producing jobs that people then have to go and fill.
Not what the economy is, really.
Everybody who...
Let's just use the current paradigm.
They graduate from college and they want a job.
Well... Does stuff need to be done in the world?
Of course! I mean, my God, I look around my house.
Anyway, stuff needs to be done in the world, always.
There's always something that needs to be done, that needs to be fixed, that needs to be invented, that needs to be taken somewhere, that somebody needs to be told something, somebody needs to be healed, something always needs to be done.
And if it doesn't need to be done right now, it needs to be done so it's not going to happen later, right?
So there's always something that needs to be done.
So there's no shortage of demand for labor at all, because there's always something that needs to be done.
The question is, will somebody want to go and do that?
Well, this is where the equilibrium of price and wage and demand and supply works itself out.
There's always something that needs to be done.
And since there are always people who want to do something so that they can go and buy stuff, there will be that equilibrium.
And if stuff needs to be done and people aren't being paid enough, they'll have to end up getting paid more.
And if a whole bunch of stuff needs to be done and a whole bunch of people want to do it, that will drive the wages down until you get this equilibrium.
So more people means there's more people to get things done.
There's also more people who need things done, right?
So they need maybe a car after they graduate.
They need an apartment. They need whatever it is they're going to do.
Or maybe they want to go travel and pick grapes in Queensland.
I don't know. So there's more people who want things done, more things that need to be done for those people, and more people who want to do things.
Sorry, that sounds kind of ridiculous.
But this all works out in the free market.
But there's not like a machine that spits out jobs and you just have to kind of grab them, right?
That on the waterfront stuff is only when there's a huge amount of state involvement, right?
All right, so...
I'm currently serving in the U.S. Army Infantry, trying to identify as a conscientious objector.
I have a question I'd like to ask you. I've searched your videos for a direct answer to this question.
I have limited time on my hands, as I'm sure you do as well.
Also, I must ask your forgiveness, a statist in having the audacity to ask questions of a philosopher, of your statist directly, but I must exhaust every avenue, and I'm sure it's one you've answered many times.
Do you believe there is any instance in which a person can use physical force if it is his own defense or the defense of a loved one?
P.S. You are one of the few people who have spread the message that has saved me from a life of statism a thousand times.
Thank you. Well, thank you.
And my God, I mean, thank you so much for this incredibly grueling process that you're going through in terms of getting out of the military.
I spoke to a bunch of people in New York who had gone through the same process when I was there speaking the other weekend.
I will literally take my hat off if I had one for your kind of courage.
It's more than I've ever had to face in terms of moral courage and I am so incredibly grateful for what it is that you do in this area that I'm absolutely no one humbled in getting a...
Thank you so much.
Yes, absolutely. You can use physical force in your own defense.
Absolutely. The Philosophy of Self-Defense is a podcast.
It's a video, I think. It's definitely an article.
I won't go into all the arguments here.
Self-defense as a reactionary state is perfectly UPB compliant.
Because somebody who comes to attack you is saying, I want to impose my will upon you.
I want you to obey me.
I want to harm you. And that can't be universalized, right?
Because if it's universalized, the person says, well, I don't want to be harmed.
They collide and stop, so to speak, right?
The unstoppable force hits the immovable object.
And so you can use force in self-defense because it's actually just taking the premise of the person who's attacking you.
The person who's attacking you says, I want to use force to get you to do what I want.
Okay, so let's universalize that.
Now I can use force to get you to stop doing what you're doing to me, right?
So yes, self-defense is perfectly valid.
And that's a very brief explanation.
There's more of it in the article. So yes, please do.
Recently discovered you on YouTube and have really enjoyed consuming your materials.
I find that I have much in common with your way of thinking.
Ooh. Sorry.
My way of thinking?
It's either thinking or it's not.
It's good thinking or it's not good thinking.
And if it's not good thinking, it's not thinking.
So, it's refreshing to see millions of others are interested as well.
True that. My question revolves around the concept of state violence and how it relates to what I perceive is your belief that violence in self-defense is justified.
I'm trying to reconcile how state violence, if performed in self-defense, is wrong.
Not obvious violence like the military killing, but the analogous violence such as laws designed to protect citizens or regulations designed to protect citizens and so on.
So, of course, the problem with state violence is how it's funded, not its effects, right?
So, can I be generous with goods I've stolen?
No, because I've stolen them.
I don't have the right to give them out to somebody else.
So the problem with the state is not that it protects people from marauding elk or something.
The problem is that it funds itself by initiating the use of force against others.
The foundation of the state is taxation.
The foundation of the state is a coercive monopoly.
The foundation of the state is the violent initiation of force.
And what happens after that is everybody wants to skip over that part.
And we're trying to skip over that part.
But the really important thing is that the state is funded and founded on the initiation of force.
And therefore, everything that happens after that is sort of immaterial.
You know, it's sort of immaterial.
So If I kidnap someone and brainwash them into marrying me, is that a valid marriage?
Well, no, of course not because I kidnap them and everything that happens after that is kind of tainted by that.
So that's the important aspect to focus on when it comes to state power.
It's the initiation of force.
If the initiation of force is moral, then everybody can do it, but then it can't be universally preferable behavior for reasons I've talked about before.
If the initiation of force is not moral, then the government is tragically in a moral agency, which is a real shame because, you know, it'd be much better to reform it if it could be reformed than to recognize that it can't be morally justified.
So we are in that tight corner.
But I think that we actually do want to take a run at this problem, finally, of human coercion, human violence, human evil, and really solve it once and for all.
So thank you so much for your time, everyone.
Thank you so much for your continued support and donations.
I'm sorry that the movie is taking a while.
Sean Lennon and Peter Drungle are helping me, yes, it's that Sean, with the music, helping me with the music.
They're making some great music and I'm just going, ooh, that's great music.
And so it's taking a little while.
Sorry about the delays. And thank you everybody so much.
If you'd like to support the show, you know, I do this show...
Completely voluntarily. Don't inflict it on anyone.
And I don't have any commercials.
I just did a debate with Aaron from Strong Clouds Gathering.
Kind of interesting, right? So he's cynical about how people will help others.
And he's cynical about the market in some ways.
But he's got ads all over his videos.
I don't know if he accepts donations or not, but he take ads all over his videos.
Kind of interesting to me. All right?
I mean... But if I talk about voluntarism as a way to help the poor, if I talk about people's generosity as a way to help the poor, then I have to put my money where my mouth is and rely on donations.
I mean, it's not like that's the only business model that can work, but if I'm saying voluntarism will work to solve the problems of poverty and undereducation or whatever we want to call it, ignorance and illiteracy and so on, then it would be kind of hypocritical for me to charge for everything because then I would be saying that I can't rely on people's voluntary generosity then it would be kind of hypocritical for me to charge for everything because then I would be saying that I So it was a very conscious and purposeful decision for me to specifically avoid ads.
I mean, I've been offered a lot of money to put ads on things, but I don't want to do that and not because I have any problem with ads.
That's a free market.
No problem with that.
But if I'm going to talk about how voluntarism and generosity is going to solve the problem of poverty, why wouldn't I assume it would solve my problem of poverty?
And why wouldn't I assume that people's generosity would help fund education for everyone who wants it through these videos and podcasts and books and articles and you name it, speeches?
So if you really believe that voluntarism will help, you know, throw a few shekels my way.
It was always gratefully accepted, and I try to put it to as good a use as possible.
I don't charge for my speeches and all that kind of stuff, and sometimes I even have to pay my own way to get out there.
I spent a lot more money going to New York than I got from going to New York.
So if you'd like to help fund it out, I would really appreciate it.
FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
Thank you so much, everyone.
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