July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hello, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. This is the Sunday Philosophy Call-In Show. | |
| 10 a.m. shop, soldiers. | |
| Every Sunday morning. | |
| So skip church and come to philosophy. | |
| So I hope you're doing well. | |
| Just an update for those who are curious about the documentary. | |
| It is going magnificently. | |
| I had a very famous documentarian read the script and listen to the narration that I did and he actually wrote me back in tears about the beauty of it and he felt the foundational power of it. | |
| So it's going very well. | |
| We have for now four animators and some bona fide big name musical geniuses Working on the score, I am now tens of thousands of dollars into this thing, so if you would like to help and allow me to keep both of my kidneys, which was not actually the original business plan, oh, dear Lord in heaven above, I would be enormously grateful for any support that you could throw my way or the team's way at freedomainradio.com. | |
| There's a little donate button, fdurl.com forward slash donate. | |
| Boy, that would be nice. | |
| And look, if you donate a bunch of money or a reasonable amount of money and you want me to throw your name or an internet pseudonym into the credits or website, I would be more than happy to. | |
| I think it's going to be such a thing of beauty and of power, you know, the basic argument that the problem with the world is fundamentally moral. | |
| It's not political. It's not economic. | |
| It's not procedural. It's not cultural. | |
| It's fundamentally a philosophical problem. | |
| In that we have set up at the very center of our society an entity dedicated and founded upon violating the very sacrosanct basic and essential moral rules that we have no problem teaching to five-year-olds. | |
| We do not capture the centralized hierarchies of society in the same moral net and that is really the cause of our failure as a society and the risk of the, frankly, end of civilization as we know it in the long run. | |
| So if you would like help spread the message, which I think is so important, please, freedomainradio.com forward slash donate. | |
| Gratefully appreciate it. So I put out a video, just before we get to the great callers, I put out a video which got some interesting responses. | |
| It was about the hostess and unions and immigration and all that kind of stuff. | |
| And one person wrote, and it's a comment that's kind of been sticking sideways in my craw, like a fishbone in the mouth of an eel. | |
| And so I'd like to share some thoughts about it, just to help you to understand what I think economic thinking, really empathetic thinking, is really all about. | |
| So this person wrote, well, you could increase the wages of workers if you cut the wages of management and or reduced the payments that went out to shareholders. | |
| Sound reasonable? Well, it shouldn't because it's really not healthy or wise or sensible or productive. | |
| In fact, it's entirely destructive. | |
| To think that you can just come up with some ideas, make some rules, and everything's going to be hunky-dory. | |
| Toasty, fine, peachy, keen after that. | |
| So let's take the idea for a spin and see how reasonable it looks in the real world. | |
| See, when you're going to come up with a rule, it's really dangerous to say, well, I have a rule, I've passed a rule, whether it's a law or just an idea, and therefore the problem is solved. | |
| No, because every rule you make is going to provoke a response. | |
| It's going to alter people's behavior on the other side of that rule. | |
| You just have to look at Charles Murray's losing ground for a very... | |
| Cogent analysis of the problems of the welfare state that was written many decades ago and holds equally true now. | |
| Whenever you make a rule, you change people's behavior. | |
| And so the problem that you're trying to solve has now changed as well. | |
| So let's say you try to implement this plan. | |
| Oh, we're going to boost the workers' wages by paying less management and or throwing fewer dividends out to the shareholders. | |
| Well, to affect a workforce of $18,000 in any measurable way, the first thing you'd have to do is cut salaries of executives by like 50% or something like that. | |
| So some guy who was making $200,000 now making $100,000, well, what's he going to do? | |
| He's going to quit. He's going to quit and he's going to take all of his... | |
| Heart cholesterol congestion expertise off to some other snack food company or some other business where he's gonna make $200,000 again. | |
| You can't just cut people's wages in half and not expect them to change their behavior based upon that plan. | |
| And that's a big problem because then you lose a whole lot of embedded expertise, customer relationships, union relationships, you lose relationships with suppliers and all of that kind of stuff and the work ethic and the dedication. | |
| And it's going to be pretty hard to hire new managers when they very quickly find out that one of the reasons so many new managers are coming in was that the last managers suddenly had their wages cut 50%. | |
| So you're going to have to hire people who are actually worth less than $100,000 but will take $100,000 to compensate for the risk that next year their salaries might be cut as well. | |
| So you're going to end up with people where you had people who made $200,000 a year. | |
| Now you're going to end up with people who are actually worth $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year. | |
| Do you not think that there might be a slight drop in quality of people like that? | |
| Because, of course, if they were worth $200,000 a year, they're not going to take a job for $100,000 a year, particularly when... | |
| The wages just got slashed recently. | |
| So it changes management behavior. | |
| changes your relationship with executives. | |
| And let's say you take another approach. | |
| You say, okay, well, we'll just cut our dividends to shareholders. | |
| Well, what happens? | |
| Oh, of course, a lot of existing management are shareholders. | |
| So the first thing they'll start doing is start selling their stocks. | |
| And that will send a signal to the marketplace for people to start dumping the stocks because something bad is going to happen. | |
| And even if you somehow magically prevent all of this stuff, the moment the news comes out, people are going to be on a fire sale, dumping their stocks off a cliff, which means that the market capitalization of the company is going to plummet. | |
| It's going to be really hard to raise investment. | |
| And the existing money that's flowing in through the stocks is not going to be available. | |
| It's going to fall catastrophically, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%. | |
| And then you just don't have any money to make capital improvements, and therefore your worker productivity is going to lag relative to other people who are going to invest more, so it doesn't help the workers there either. | |
| Now, people also said that the management at Hostess was really bad. | |
| Terrible management. They were just management sucky bad vacuum meatheads. | |
| And I don't know if it's true or not, but let's say it is true. | |
| It's important to understand why the management was so bad at Hostess. | |
| Well... When you're a manager, you want to effect change. | |
| You want to bring creativity and energy and ideas and all this kind of fun stuff to the environment. | |
| That's really what you want to do. | |
| Have a blast. Change things. | |
| Have an effect. Take risks. | |
| Design new things. And that involves risk and that involves the reorganization of the workforce and so on. | |
| And, you know, one of the things that the hostess unions were famous for was feather betting, right? | |
| Feather betting is when you put artificial work restrictions on people so that you can justify, quote, justify the hiring of additional workers so that you can get more union dues and so on and so forth. | |
| So if you were at Hostess, you had different trucks had to go out for bread as opposed to cakes, even if they were going to the same place, just so you could feather bed the unions. | |
| Now, of course, if you come in as a manager, the first thing you do is you say, well, that's stupid. | |
| Let's change that. And then, of course, you sit down with your legal department and they say, well, here's the entire bookshelf of union contracts from here until pretty much when the sun goes supernova or collapses into a white dwarf, and therefore we really can't make any of the changes that you want to make in the workforce. | |
| Okay, well, let's try putting more money into R&D. Let's try putting more money into marketing. | |
| Sorry, there isn't any. Why? | |
| Because we have these union contracts that require us to pay out massive pensions and healthcare benefits and other forms of benefits and so on. | |
| And so what happens is if you're a creative and energetic manager, you actually don't want to work anywhere near a state monopoly sanctioned cartel called a union. | |
| Because anything innovative and creative and risky that you want to put in place is going to be blocked and stymied, either by historical contracts or by new union threats. | |
| I mean, imagine Steve Jobs trying to work in some public sector union to make changes. | |
| I mean, his head would explode. | |
| He would just go completely mental, and he would probably rather become a street mime than continue in that career or that profession. | |
| So when you put a union in place, you actually fundamentally change the kind of managers who are willing and able to work in that kind of environment. | |
| You automatically drive off. | |
| It's like those Android apps that produce high-pitched wines, also known as Steph's Podcasts, to drive off mosquitoes. | |
| If you get a union in place and you get a whole load of government regulations and controls in place, the creative managers... | |
| Go elsewhere. They go to software. | |
| They go to places where there is not a union. | |
| They go become street mimes, or they go become actors, or they go do something else, rather than attempt to beat their creative heads against the indifferent bloody wall of state-sanctioned monopoly privilege. | |
| Now, I guess it sounds like I'm kind of crabbing on unions, and I can certainly see why people would get that impression, but I'm actually really not. | |
| It's a fundamental problem of corruption, of hierarchical violence, that it's really impossible to ask people to not take the fruits of evil, if the fruits of evil are not identified as evil. | |
| That's really, really important to understand. | |
| You can't go to some worker and say, listen man, I know that this union is promising you huge pension benefits, free healthcare, a 25% pay raise within a few years. | |
| But you really shouldn't take that. | |
| And you know why? Because it's going to really undermine the efficiency of manufacturing as a whole in this country. | |
| And so your kids' kids probably won't really have much of an opportunity to do what you're doing. | |
| This won't be a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle anymore. | |
| And so it's really not a good idea to take this money now and all these benefits now because down the road, it's going to be kind of tough for other people. | |
| Nobody's going to accept that. | |
| I mean, if you think that's a viable theory, you can test it. | |
| Again, don't take anything I say ever on faith or anyone, really. | |
| If you think that's a possibility, then all you have to do is head down to your local convenience store and when you see somebody who's won something on the lottery... | |
| Say to them that they really shouldn't take that money because the government's going to likely borrow or print it and that's going to be harmful to the economy as a whole and it's going to be something which is going to hit those who are poor on fixed incomes the hardest and the government has a forceful monopoly on gambling in most places and it's really immoral and illegitimate and counterproductive economically to the collective Borg whole and so on. | |
| How far are you going to get with that? | |
| You know, the guy's going to go, hey, get out of my way. | |
| I got 500 bucks to pick up. | |
| You can't reliably, legitimately, productively, practically ask people to refuse free goodies for the sake of an abstract economic or even an abstract moral principle. | |
| So it's not really the fault of the workers for taking these goodies. | |
| Is it the fault of the unions? | |
| Well, not really, I would say. | |
| I mean, if the government is going to grant you this monopoly privilege, and it certainly is a lot easier to boss around management than be bossed around by management, Well, if your particular skill is towards a sophistical kind of thuggish rhetoric, working class hero nonsense, then yeah, it beats working for a living by a whole lot, by a whole margin. | |
| It's not their fault, really, is it? | |
| The politicians' fault? Well, no, of course not. | |
| The politicians have to promise these goodies in order to get the money donated to them to get elected in the first place. | |
| So, whose fault is it? | |
| Well, it's your fault. See, this is what I do. | |
| I ask you for money, and then I insult you. | |
| When I say that it's your fault, I mean that if you really do genuinely understand the ethics behind these interactions, if you really do understand the evil and the immorality at the root of statism, and you're not tearing up the Well, it's kind of on you. | |
| You can't expect people who have their economic direct self-interest to vote themselves out or to avoid an economic benefit for the sake of an abstract negative that occurs generally to others in the future, possibly down the road. | |
| Well, that's not really going to happen. | |
| But if you're not making the moral case as often and as forcefully as you can, then it's kind of on you. | |
| Now, I'm not saying you have to. You don't have to make the moral case. | |
| You have to get by me. | |
| You've got to shut up and hand in a term paper which praises Lincoln. | |
| I don't know. But it is kind of on you. | |
| If you're studying this stuff and not bringing it into the world in a very forceful and passionate way, then it's kind of on you. | |
| If your knowledge of these ethical issues is not causing you to Evaluate and change your relationships to stand up tall and strong and proud for that which is right, peaceful, noble, voluntary and good. | |
| It's kind of on you. | |
| We are the only doctors who can see this plague and everyone who falls by the wayside as a result of this plague falls because we have not done enough. | |
| That is the price of knowledge. | |
| The price of knowledge, particularly moral knowledge, is always responsibility. | |
| Well, that's enough for my introduction. | |
| Thank you so much for listening, and let's get on to the callers! | |
| All right, well, first up today we have Sean. | |
| He's Sean the Sheep. | |
| Hello, how are you doing, man? Sean the Sheep. | |
| You know, I was called that name as a child, and I hated it, so thank you. | |
| Do you love it now? | |
| I'm so sorry. I love it now, yeah. | |
| Okay, so I'm really excited because I'm starting a philosophy school and I'm coming to you, the manager of the biggest philosophy school in the world for advice. | |
| Do you know we're up to a million views a month? | |
| Yeah, I read the thread. | |
| And you know what that means is because I asked for 50 cents a show. | |
| I have a half a million dollars coming to me next month. | |
| I can't wait. I've already picked out the Lamborghini slash helicopter slash transformer robot that I will be walking down Main Street in. | |
| So it's going to be very exciting next month. | |
| I think you should do your podcast from a helicopter. | |
| It would really add to the show. | |
| It would. Hang on. | |
| Okay. My low-tech helicopter. | |
| Thank you. All right. | |
| Go on. So how can I help you? | |
| So, yeah, I'm starting a philosophy school. | |
| I've rented a room, and I'm going to be doing my first... | |
| Actually, I don't like to call it a school. | |
| School is a disservice to the name. | |
| A room, Speaker's Corner. | |
| And I'm just thinking, like, I have no idea. | |
| I have no idea really how to approach it or how to just go for it. | |
| But I've just decided I'm getting a room, and I'm lucky because I'm in a situation where everyone around me wants to learn English. | |
| So I'm kind of providing philosophy and English. | |
| So basically the advertisement is learning English through self-knowledge, critical thinking and discussing important things in our lives. | |
| And that's the idea. | |
| So I'm going with that and my plan is to go full time with it and at the moment I just have one day and I want to see how it goes. | |
| Well, I just know from the man because I teach English here in Italy and I'm opening so many people's minds here and I'm having such great conversations with people that I'm just thinking I just need more room. | |
| Because a lot of the conversations I have are in class, you know, with people, and I can't take up too much of their time talking about how to abolish the state, although they do love it. | |
| So it's time to get a room to go full-time with this. | |
| So I just sent out a notice saying I'm doing it on donations, and I was only here today, and I've already got like five subscriptions, so I'm ready to go. | |
| Good for you, man. Well, I think Italy is... | |
| Europe is pretty primed. | |
| I mean, I'd love to do a European tour. | |
| Perhaps we'll aim to get one going next summer. | |
| Yeah, can I answer the guest speaker here? | |
| Yeah, Europe is pretty primed for it because they've got these... | |
| I mean, particularly Italy. | |
| I mean, that squat, man-whore, toad-faced... | |
| What's his name? Berlusconi. | |
| I mean, Rob Blagojevich looked like John Colt. | |
| And so I think that they've got some good reasons to be skeptical, if not downright cynical, about what their political system is and how, particularly among the young, you know, the sort of 18 to 24 demographic, it's pretty revolting how it's been going for them. | |
| So, yeah, good for you, man. | |
| And, you know, This subscription thing is good on many levels. | |
| It certainly keeps me hungry. | |
| It keeps me sharp. It keeps me wanting to innovate. | |
| I've got a bunch of emails from my recent introduction, well, the fascists around you, part one. | |
| People say, I can't believe it. After like 2,000 shows, I'm still learning new stuff. | |
| It's like, yes, that's because I like to eat. | |
| I mean, I like philosophy. Philosophy requires eating first. | |
| So yeah, it's a really – and of course it does bring down the cynicism level and it opens up the value. | |
| I mean I do what I do to spread philosophy and I like to have money to do that so that I can do things like a documentary. | |
| But if I have enough to eat and people are watching a lot of shows, I think that's good. | |
| So good for you. Yeah, I live hands and mouth at the moment as well. | |
| So I'm basically going to say, donations or food, just give it to me and I'll go. | |
| Just wind me up and I'll go and do it. | |
| But I'm thinking as well, but I can also then say I'll do a premium service where you won't have me writing on about philosophy, but I'll help you with your English exams just to help me take over if I ever get stuck. | |
| Now, do you have a question that you'd like to share with the listeners? | |
| Yeah, well, upholster, yeah, I have it here, but it's like... | |
| I don't have a website or anything, I just have it. | |
| I don't know, I'll put it in here. And in which town in Italy are you at? | |
| Stega. Okay, all right. | |
| All right, yeah, just so people are around and they hear this and they want to learn some philosophy, that's where they go. | |
| Yeah, and... | |
| And is there anything else that I can help you with in terms of just thoughts or advice? | |
| Actually, before I even ask that question, let me answer it very quickly. | |
| Someone, I guess, fairly prominent in the libertarian movement, who I actually really like, was saying, like, why is it Steph gets so many views? | |
| Well, I think the important thing to remember is, you know, my videos are still kicking around 10,000 views and podcasts and more. | |
| But the important thing is, it's just listen. | |
| Listen to where people are Listen to where their values can have the greatest traction. | |
| My goal has always been – I said from the very beginning, this is the philosophy of personal and political liberty, and the personal comes first. | |
| There's no conviction possible that compares to experience and implementation. | |
| So there's no one who can – I have put voluntarism into practice in my life. | |
| There's nothing that can substitute for that. | |
| This is why I always suggest to people, what you need to do is you need to look at where you can put voluntarism into place in your own life. | |
| Look at where you can reduce the amount of aggression and those who advocate aggression against you in your life and see what comes out of that. | |
| And what comes out of that is two things. | |
| One is that you realize how difficult it is and how much is being asked of people. | |
| And the second thing is that you realize that it's pretty great on the other side of that. | |
| It's not perfect, but it's pretty great. | |
| So... This is why I've always focused on listener conversations, on answering emails, whether on the show or just personally, and the Sunday, which is really the cornerstone of what it is that I do, because I get a sense of where people are at and where philosophy can be of the most value to them. | |
| And through that, an acceptance of, an advocacy of, the principle becomes founded on a kind of conviction that is pretty much irresistible. | |
| Just really listen to people and where philosophy can best help them because values start in the personal. | |
| Philosophy is the personal. | |
| It flows from the personal, but you can't have enough conviction to change the world unless you've changed your world first and know that it works. | |
| Did we lose Mr. Italy? | |
| No, I'm still here. It's Javier. | |
| It's a small town outside Italy. | |
| And how do you spell that? It's outside Milan, not outside Italy. | |
| Well, congratulations on what you're doing. | |
| I think that's fantastic. | |
| And do keep us posted if we can. | |
| If you get a website, send it to me and I'll put it on Facebook and we'll see if we can get more people. | |
| And of course, I hope that with the permission of your students, maybe you can record some of this stuff. | |
| You can put it on the web and sort of keep it forever. | |
| I think it's really, really important to try and get as much stuff archived and recorded. | |
| I remember there was some debate that the late Harry Brown had with some – I think it was a district attorney who was sort of pro-drug war, and I just never – and I would love to listen to that, but I don't think it was ever recorded. | |
| He reported it on his show when he was, of course, alive and alive. | |
| Try and get stuff recorded and try and get it out there. | |
| Whatever value you're creating can be magnified through the web and made infinite and made eternal. | |
| Do that if you can. | |
| Thanks, Emil. I appreciate that update and best of luck. | |
| If there's anything else I can do to help, please let me know. | |
| Okay, great. I want to say thanks to everyone in the community and you as well for inspiring me to go out there and try this new endeavor. | |
| Thanks, everyone. You will... | |
| It will be a life-changing thing. | |
| Everything that you try that is beyond your immediate grasp will change your life. | |
| And it's hard, but as Monique – no, Unique? | |
| As Unique says on Glee, dreams ain't free. | |
| All right. We move on to the next call. | |
| Thanks. Yes, next up today we have Kevin. | |
| Hello, Steph. Kev? | |
| I have a question. | |
| I have a couple questions, actually. | |
| It's pertaining mainly to anarcho-communism and how they are kind of similar to us, but I want to hear your insight on how they derived their rights, quote-unquote, contrast to ours. | |
| We have individual rights and they have more of a... | |
| More of a collectivized rights. | |
| Everybody owns the land rather than somebody homesteads it and then owns it. | |
| I want to know, what do you think about why are we more justified rather than them? | |
| What gives us our rights more than gives them their rights? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I would just say, again, I have difficulty with rights. | |
| I just prefer properties or consistency. | |
| I know that's an annoying thing, but... | |
| I'm no expert on anarcho-communism, and I do get criticized for this a fair amount, which, as I always say, don't criticize me on the web. | |
| Call me up. Let's have a debate. | |
| The thing is, I told this person that I'm coming from somebody else's standpoint. | |
| I like challenging myself. | |
| If I have a position and somebody else has another position, I try to put myself in the most Challenging position or challenging questions for myself. | |
| And this person gave a lot of challenging questions. | |
| And this person, his name is Arnakopak on YouTube. | |
| And he... | |
| I told him, you know, he's been making a lot of actually... | |
| Like an actual... | |
| Critique to one of your videos that I've seen before, but it's been a couple of months and I was like, why don't you just call on the show and then just have a debate? | |
| So I'm going to actually try to present his arguments to me and to you. | |
| Let me take a swing at it. | |
| I mean, this is what I understand about anarcho-communism. | |
| So anarcho-communism accepts the non-aggression principle. | |
| Yes, yes. But anarcho-communism and com, for sure, yeah. | |
| What they do is they make the assumption that property violates the non-aggression principle or at least property the means of production, right? | |
| So you can have your personal property, me having a toothbrush, although I guess me having my own toothbrush doesn't violate the ownership. | |
| But if I go and homestead some land, right? | |
| Let me see if I make that case. | |
| So if I go build a big fence around a land, a piece of land, then I have to use violence to defend people Who want to use that land? | |
| And that's a violation of the non-aggression principle. | |
| Because why should I, just by building some sort of magic fence, it doesn't turn property into another dimension. | |
| I don't pee on it like a dog does. | |
| I don't have my name inscribed on every atom and grain of dirt and tree. | |
| And so, if I'm going to enclose something, I remove it, the land, from... | |
| I remove other people's access to that land. | |
| And if other people come on my land, then I'm allowed to shoot them. | |
| But they're not addressing by simply walking on the land. | |
| The land should be held in common for everyone and for people to enclose the land and to then suddenly... | |
| How do I get this monopoly on land or the means of production and thus be able to initiate force to exclude other people from using it? | |
| They extend the non-aggression principle to include the enclosure or the ownership of Yeah, that's exactly what it is. | |
| It's exactly what their argument is. | |
| Exactly. The problem I have with it, I mean, first of all, I sympathize with the argument. | |
| I really do. But I think that one of the things to remember is that communism came out of a tradition in Europe where there was still a whole lot of aristocracy around. | |
| And it's important to remember that in communism, like when communism was being developed in the mid-19th century, land ownership... | |
| I mean, the enclosure movement was just winding down, and so what had happened was the aristocracy had basically kicked everyone off the land, and it's one of these things that – short-term pain, | |
| long-term gain. They kicked everyone off the land, and the reason they did that was because the land was becoming ridiculously fragmented because – You'd have a couple of acres and then you'd have, you know, three sons and you'd give them a little bit each and, you know, they'd have three sons and it was just becoming, I mean, you couldn't plow because you kept running up against other people's property and it became like some gerrymandered district. | |
| It just looked like an outline of a bunch of snakes all curled around each other and so because it became really profitable to farm for the first time really in human history, I would say, since the invention of sort of winter crops and, I mean, all the way back to the 12th century where they finally figured out I'm giving you a very, | |
| very simplified and very fast-moving view of And so then what happened was they all went into the city. | |
| They all flowed into the city. | |
| Now, it's good that they flowed into the city because, I mean, five to ten percent of the population starved to death throughout the Middle Ages every year. | |
| It's horrible. It's astounding. | |
| I mean they were producing three, four, five, up to ten times more food per acre than they used to and this gave the excess food which allows for a city, which allows for industrialization because you have a worker class in the city that can be fed by the agricultural efficiencies in the country. | |
| I mean it's a whole big thing but fundamentally what they were looking at was asshole aristocrats Owned the land, exercised their land rights and kicked all the people off the land. | |
| All the people then flowed into the city and because there was a huge influx of workers into the city, that heavily depressed wages. | |
| I understand the Industrial Revolution was still primarily a statist phenomenon because people were being herded around by the aristocracy and by the laws and all of that. | |
| They were being herded around like a bunch of sheep. | |
| They weren't free range. | |
| They weren't sort of And so what happened when they all went to the city, it drove the wages down enormously. | |
| And so this is one of the reasons why you had this Dickensian situation where people were paid very little and so on. | |
| Now, they were still doing better in general than they were in the country. | |
| It's really tough to measure poverty in the country. | |
| It's still alive in Europe. | |
| So, the other thing too, of course, is that through the patent system and through the money, it came to some degree from the aristocracy and some of the aristocrats did dabble in trade in the 19th century. | |
| But you had this framework where land ownership was unjust and the corporations manipulated the government heavily to control the means of production, to exercise some pretty unjust property rights and also to exercise some pretty unjust property rights and also to escape the consequences of pollution. | |
| The common law is pretty good at dealing with pollution but governments generally defer to the corporations as being much larger tax bases than other people. | |
| This is a funny thing where people think, well, you know, see corporations are just in it for the profit. | |
| So the entire environment of the development of the ownership of the means of production, not the entire environment. | |
| There were, of course, some entrepreneurs who did not use entirely scummy ways to gain power. | |
| But in general, the environment that communism was developing in was where there had been a whole bunch of serfs who had been owned like livestock. | |
| In fact, not even like, they were livestock, like livestock. | |
| by the aristocracy and then the aristocracy had kicked them all off to pursue the profits available to them through the enclosure movement and improvements in farming systems and so on. | |
| And they all got herded to the cities and they were preyed upon by some, you know, fairly asshole capitalists. | |
| Now there were some, you know, good guys as well in the 19th century and people who really did try and get the workers into better conditions, but it was not inconceivable To understand why the ownership of the means of production was considered predatory in the 19th century. | |
| Yeah, in that environment. | |
| I mean, we can understand this even now. | |
| Why do big companies love regulation? | |
| Because it makes it much harder, if not impossible, to compete with them. | |
| You know, when you have dozens of new regulations coming out a day and you don't have a legal department and you don't have clout in Washington. | |
| I mean, there's almost no bigger enemy to the free market than a big corporation because they've adapted themselves to a mercantilist slash fascist system. | |
| They've got their people in Washington and they have all of this. | |
| They've adapted to all these regulations. | |
| They've in fact driven and modeled a lot of these regulations in the phenomenon known as regulatory capture. | |
| And so, They have adapted themselves to this. | |
| I mean, they view the coming of the free market in the same way that big-ass dinosaurs view the coming of a meteor or whatever it was that caused them to all go the way of the dinosaurs, so to speak. | |
| And so I can really sympathize where that perspective comes from. | |
| The problem I have is that of consistency. | |
| You know, most communists and comms will not say that you must own Underwear and toothbrushes in common, you know, that if you own a toothbrush... | |
| This person doesn't necessarily think that he owns his body per se, which is kind of destructive in itself, you know, kind of ridiculous. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I would obviously, before dealing with abstracts, I would ask him about his childhood. | |
| I would, for sure, because, you know, because I'm an empiricist, I know that most people's, quote, beliefs come from a reaction to their childhoods, and it's an ex post facto way of covering up. | |
| Traumas that happened to them when they were young. | |
| And again, that's not my opinion. | |
| It's fairly well established, at least as well as these things can be established. | |
| But nonetheless, most people would say that your personal possessions are okay, and they would also say that you own yourself. | |
| See, communists have to say that the moment you morally condemn someone, you accept self-ownership. | |
| So the moment a communist says that, you know, capitalists are exploiters, boom! | |
| Well, you've just established self-ownership and moral ownership. | |
| Well, no, it's not that. | |
| It's just that they've said that they're responsible for being bad guys. | |
| The capitalists are bad guys and they're exploiters and therefore, you know, they're bad, right? | |
| I mean, almost every religion has to have its devil, right? | |
| Exactly. And so, once you've accepted self-ownership and you've accepted that capitalists are responsible for being, you know, predatory assholes, Then you've accepted self-ownership and you've accepted that people are responsible for the effects of their actions. | |
| So if you've accepted self-ownership and that you're responsible for the effects of your actions, then you've accepted the foundation of property rights. | |
| And I also can't see my way clear to creating a division between individual ownership of stuff and ownership of the means of production. | |
| So, I can't say, well, one of them has property rights and, you know, in an anarcho-communist paradise, if someone steals my toothbrush, I can go and get it back. | |
| But somehow, the means of production are excluded from that rule. | |
| Now, the difference is, of course, the means of production are harder to conceptualize the property rights. | |
| It's just tougher. If I go plant an apple tree and I go get some apples, that's kind of concrete. | |
| People can kind of understand that. | |
| But ownership of the means of production is difficult because the reality is very few people own the means of production. | |
| I mean, Steve Jobs did not own all the apple factories in his own personal way. | |
| It's very intricate. It's very complex and it's heavily dependent on contract and all of that kind of stuff. | |
| Understanding of economics in general. | |
| Yeah, I mean, so it's very abstract. | |
| So if they're, well, I own my toothbrush, okay, fine. | |
| I own my kidney, fine. But when you look at some big-ass factory, it's easy and you see, if you just look at it in the moment without the long-term view, without the cause and effect, then what you see is a bunch of people going to work and being paid a whole lot less and a few people making a whole bunch of money. | |
| But the factory is just kind of there and it's hard to look at the development. | |
| There are just ways of accumulating money and there are unjust ways of accumulating money. | |
| In the same way that there are just ways of having sex and there are unjust ways of having sex. | |
| So, looking at the development of the means of production is tough. | |
| Now, because existing capitalists, whether they are Randians or Keynesians, they have to deal with the state. | |
| They have to. And there are some people who relish that and there are some people who hate it. | |
| But either way, you've got to deal with it. | |
| And a failure to differentiate between Those who use the system for their own profit, eagerly and happily, and those who submit to an unjust regime for the sake of pursuing their dreams, the failure to differentiate those things is really tough. | |
| And the critique of the ownership of the means of production in land, in particular, was entirely fair. | |
| I mean, the aristocracy are the world's best murderers. | |
| I mean, that's how they got their land, was they They did service to the local warlord by slaughtering his enemies. | |
| And that's how generally you would get land in the past. | |
| It was the fruits of conquest. | |
| And so the idea that the people who actually work the land owe money to the world's best murderers in order to be able to eat is horrendous. | |
| I mean, it makes the mafia predation on a local neighborhood seem virtually benign in comparison. | |
| So their critique of that was fantastic. | |
| Somewhat warranted. Yeah, I mean, I can see that. | |
| I can see that. I mean, go tour some of the royalty in Europe. | |
| Go tour their houses. I mean, you know. | |
| It's just built on the bones of the poor. | |
| It's built on the bones of their victims. | |
| I mean, they're just mausoleums to murderous human entitlement and vanity. | |
| So I can really understand that criticism and the means of production. | |
| Yeah, I can understand that criticism, too. | |
| That there's sometimes quite a lot of political jiggering and injustice that goes into it. | |
| But in a free society, you know, I think it's really important to respect groups. | |
| And I won't withhold judgment from groups because that's disrespectful. | |
| You know, I mean, not a whole lot is being said in the media about the fact that like 93% of blacks voted for Obama. | |
| Well, imagine what would be said if there was only one white candidate And all the whites voted for that one white candidate. | |
| We're part of that 7%. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Good for you. Good for you for breaking the stereotype, man. | |
| But I mean, so, you know, when it comes to minorities, I just... | |
| I think that the best way to give respect to everyone is to hold them to the same standards as everyone else. | |
| And so I think that's... | |
| I just think that's a worthwhile thing. | |
| And so as far as the anarcho-communism thing goes... | |
| If they're going to accept property, if they're going to accept morality, morality is a recognition of self-ownership and of owning the effects of your actions. | |
| And so I just don't see why. | |
| Now, of course, why they'd want to complicate it by saying, well, there's these two classes of property and so on, right? | |
| If people want to freely contract So, sorry, to get back to the respect for the, my brain is scatter a little, I don't know why, but to get back to ownership, sorry, respect for the workers. | |
| I mean, the workers may be making entirely rational decisions about what they want to do with their life. | |
| Being a manager can be really stressful. | |
| Being a manager means you often will stay late. | |
| Being a manager means that you have to do a lot of travel, be away from your wife and kids or your husband and kids. | |
| And that's a challenge. | |
| So if a worker wants to stay a worker, you know, they want to come in and do their 37 and a half hours a week and then they want to go and, you know, do curling and darts and have hobbies and barbecues and cookouts and stuff, yeah, more power to them. | |
| Fantastic, right? I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. | |
| I mean, I've been a worker and I've been a manager. | |
| I've been an entrepreneur and I've been a, quote, wage slave. | |
| And both of them have their advantages and their disadvantages. | |
| You know, I'll tell you this. When you're a wage slave, when you go home, you're home. | |
| But when you're a manager, and particularly if you're an entrepreneur, you're never done. | |
| I mean, you're thinking about it all the time. | |
| It's not an invasion of a mind space because you kind of choose it, but, you know, mind space is pretty important in life in terms of peace of mind and all of that. | |
| And so, I just, I give the workers the respect of saying, okay, so this is the choice that you've made. | |
| You chose to make less money and have more time outside of work. | |
| Well, maybe you lack the capacity, maybe you lack the ambition, maybe you lack the desire, but it doesn't really matter. | |
| That's fine. That's fine. | |
| But it takes a real busybody to assume that something's wrong with a worker who just chooses to stay a worker. | |
| I mean, one of the, yeah, like, and one of the lack of respect. | |
| And one of the things that is really tough about being an intellectual Is that, you know, we're going to assume that, I mean, obviously Marx was a very intelligent guy and very well written, very well read, and so on. | |
| I mean, okay, he did run away from the problems of the labor theory of value for the best spent the last, what, 20 years of his life or 30 years of his life just avoiding all the accumulating evidence against his theory. | |
| So I will not say that he had the highest levels of integrity in the world, but for Marx to have been a factory worker would have been unbearable For Marx, right? | |
| And so what happens is it's a failure to recognize the difference in other people. | |
| So I would go mad being a factory worker for the rest of my life. | |
| But that doesn't mean that every factory worker is like me. | |
| For some of them it's fine. | |
| You know, you go to work, you put in your time, and then you go home. | |
| And that's fine. | |
| And so it's a lack of empathy with the differences in people. | |
| That I think is also a failure of this kind of approach as well. | |
| I mean, the one thing capitalism says is, you know, lots of people have different preferences and the free market will do its best to accommodate them wherever possible. | |
| And so when I was a manager, you know, sometimes my employees would be going out to To the pub after work and hanging out and whatever, and I would be like, no, I've got an RFP to do for tomorrow, so I've got to stay here. I mean, I didn't feel all kinds of powerful and liberated. | |
| I felt like a dray horse. | |
| Yeah, so those would be my responses to it. | |
| And of course, if people in a free society want to set up collective ownership... | |
| Yeah, we have no problem with that. | |
| That's perfectly fine. Exactly. | |
| I mean, it's going to be less contractually complex than it would be to set up a factory, and so people can do that, but I don't see that infusing your labor into something, as Locke says, investing your labor in something, enclosing something, I don't see that as a violation of the non-aggression principle, because your skin encloses your internal organs too, and we consider those fairly sacrosanct. | |
| So I try as much as possible to not have The sudden flip in things. | |
| I was watching one of your videos and some person was making some absurd comment and saying that breathing is a violation of the non-aggressive principles because you're initiating force other people to not breathe that air or not be able to buy a candy bar, forcing them into another market with one less candy bar. | |
| There's a scale that doesn't work like that necessarily. | |
| Moral scale, I would say. | |
| Right, right. And we accept that a woman has the right to say no to sex because she's the care and custodian of the naughty bits, right? | |
| And so, I mean, I just, I can't, I hate that flip that happens in philosophy where it's like, here's our moral reason. | |
| Now we're in upside down topsy-turvy world. | |
| Exactly. Oh my God. | |
| Yeah, it happens all the time. | |
| You can't initiate force. | |
| We're in the realm of the state. | |
| We must initiate force. There's no reference made to the prior. | |
| Or, you know, there are 10,000 gods out there who are completely ridiculous. | |
| Our god is the truth. | |
| It's just that flip. You've got to watch out for that flip all the time. | |
| It's the mark of trauma. | |
| It's the mark of a split, dissociated personality, in my opinion. | |
| So what do you do to To disenfranchise or just get rid of that flip, what do you do? | |
| What do you say? | |
| You work on your childhood. | |
| Okay. Right, because the flip comes from having parents who don't obey their own moral commandments and teachers and priests and other authority figures who don't obey their own moral commandments. | |
| I mean, so to adapt, so of course if you hit a child because the child is hitting someone, Then you're saying the child lacks restraint and is morally responsible for that but the adult must hit. | |
| The child must not hit even though the child is younger and more immature and so on. | |
| And that's wrong. The parent must hit because that's right and good and proper. | |
| You shouldn't bully to get what you want but you have to go to public school where the teachers use threats and through their unions, right? | |
| Threats and aggression and the property taxes is compelled and so on. | |
| And so your environment as a kid Is really kind of weird. | |
| I mean, I remember as a kid even thinking about the one with the priest. | |
| The one with the priest is really messed up. | |
| Because, you know, it's like, well, if God talks to everyone, why are you here? | |
| You know, like, if I want to go and have a chat with my best friend, I don't need to call up the priest and say, listen, I need to talk to you so that you can talk to my best friend so that Your best friend can then talk to you and you can tell me what he wants or what he needs or what he thinks. | |
| It's like, my friend is standing right next to me. | |
| Why on earth would I need to go to some other dude to talk to my best friend? | |
| And God, of course, is everywhere all the time. | |
| So the idea that God talks to everyone... | |
| That you even need to talk. | |
| Just didn't make a lot of sense to me. | |
| But this is the kind of stuff that is just constantly put into place. | |
| And of course, God openly comes down in pillars of fire and with flaming pterodactyls coming out of his nose to people regularly in the stories. | |
| And yet, in my life, nothing but silence and echoes, right? | |
| And so there's all of these weird, flippy things. | |
| I mean, I remember the threat of aggression. | |
| When I was a kid, I mean at home and in church and in the schools and so on, was just omnipresent. | |
| And yet violence was said to be really wrong. | |
| It's like, this is the flip. | |
| Until you can process that, the hypocrisy, right? | |
| If hypocrisy is something that as a child you have to avoid, and you do, you have to avoid seeing and acting on the hypocrisy of adults when you're a child. | |
| Because if you point out that hypocrisy, the aggression against you will only escalate. | |
| So you have to Avoid the hypocrisy, the flip in adult ethics and when you do that long enough it just becomes you can't even see it anymore because as a kid even seeing the hypocrisy can be registered on the faces of the adults around you and you will probably suffer for that, right? And if you don't see it for long enough it becomes invisible. | |
| It's like You know, if there's some annoying whiny sound that isn't, say, one of my podcasts, but if there's some annoying whiny sound, after a while, I mean physically, your ear will stop transmitting that information, right? | |
| You won't hear it until you sort of concentrate or whatever. | |
| So, if you avoid seeing hypocrisy for long enough, then you become split. | |
| And, you know, you can travel between these two worlds, violence is good, violence is bad, violence is this, The exact same is the opposite of violence but peace. | |
| You can go into these double-think worlds without even noticing the transition because that's just the terribly tragic fluid language that you've been waterboarded with as a kid. | |
| Pseudo-innate, basically, what happens. | |
| What do you mean? Oh, you mean... | |
| Yeah, what happens. | |
| Yeah, that's right. I mean, when you're learning a language, it's hard, but once you're fluent, you just open your mouth and you're up, right? | |
| Yeah. And so you have to go back and look at The moral hypocrisy that you had to ignore as a kid. | |
| Once you see the moral hypocrisy that you had to ignore as a kid, then it's very easy to see the moral hypocrisy in society, but if you haven't seen that consciously, then everything that you think about in terms of society is just a way of justifying what happened to yourself as a child, normalizing it, making it virtuous, so that you don't have to confront what happened to you. | |
| And of course, it's in everyone else's interest that you don't confront that too, right? | |
| Oh, definitely. Especially in our society. | |
| Yeah, so talk to him about his childhood. | |
| Find out what's going on that may be of relevance. | |
| And only after that stuff's been worked with and understood, I think, would I bother with the abstract stuff. | |
| Yeah, I think a lot of Other than childhood, which is a definite route for a lot of predispositions, but I think a lot of it would be understanding economics and just everyday life. | |
| I mean, you don't go to your neighbor's house and be like, well, all right, this is the new system we're going to come up with. | |
| Everybody's going to own your house, and you're going to own everybody else's house. | |
| Nobody really works in that. | |
| You own what you... | |
| Define it as yours. | |
| You own your house. | |
| You don't want everybody else owning your house. | |
| You don't want to own everybody else's house. | |
| It just doesn't work practically either. | |
| You don't do an oil change in the rental car. | |
| If you don't own something, then you don't actually have any investment in its retained value and its increased value. | |
| You just have to drive down. | |
| It's easy to see. We've all seen it a million times. | |
| You just walk or drive down some city block and you see some unowned lot and it's full of old shopping carts and crap and needles and weeds and shit like that. | |
| And then you just go to some guy's house and it's got a nice lawn. | |
| I mean, this is not hard to figure out. | |
| I mean, this is pretty obvious. | |
| And, you know, we can see this that when the costs of ill health tend to be socialized, then people take less good care of their health. | |
| In Mexico, it's just astounding how much obesity there is and how, you know, the increased diabetes is just going to take down the entire healthcare system. | |
| That's because of people individually paying for these risks and that doesn't kick in our save yourself thing when you don't individually pay for these things. | |
| Yes, I mean, there's lots of practical reasons as well, but I just think it's really important to try and stay as consistent as possible in a philosophy. | |
| And if you're going to have an inconsistency, then you've really got to work hard to figure out why and to make sure it doesn't come out of your history and all that. | |
| And if you just don't even think about that, you know, I mean, this is just science, right? | |
| I mean, if you say all these rocks are falling down, but this rock falls up, or these blue rocks fall up, I mean, what's the first thing that your scientific colleagues are going to say? | |
| You're wrong. Well, no. | |
| First they'll say, well, why? | |
| Why do these rocks fall up? | |
| What possibility is there in the quality called blue that reverses gravity? | |
| Now, I mean, they're probably going to say you're insane for even proposing it, but, you know, they'll maybe sort of stay open to it or whatever, right? | |
| But, of course, if you were a scientist and you said, if I slap the label Antigravity on these rocks, they will start to float up. | |
| Then they would say you're insane because you're not even talking about a physical property. | |
| Or if you said, if I can get enough people to believe that they can walk on water, then they can walk on water. | |
| Then you would be insane, right? | |
| But this is exactly what statism is. | |
| Right? Statism is, if I call a group the government, that which is evil becomes virtuous. | |
| I have reversed the properties of morality just by creating a label. | |
| I don't even have to paint them blue. | |
| I just create a label. | |
| Or if I get enough people to believe that something is virtuous, it becomes virtuous. | |
| Water, which is something we sink in, becomes something we can stand on. | |
| We don't see the insanity in the political realm, although we would clearly see it in the realm of physics because of the propaganda we've been subjected to. | |
| The relativism, yeah. | |
| Subjectivism. But what I would say as well, and I know you've got other callers, I don't want to take too much time, but, you know, anarcho-communists talk about, you know, the rights of the collective or whatever, and I always say, well, if you can't define individuals, then there's no possible way at all that you can define a collective, because what is a collective, you know? | |
| A collection of individuals. | |
| So if you can't define what you are, then you can't define a collective or a collective set of rights at all. | |
| Yeah, I mean, collective rights is just a fiction. | |
| And the reason that people like to invent collectives is because collectives have no voice. | |
| There's nothing more satisfying in terms of predation than creating a group or an entity which has no voice and then speaking for that entity. | |
| I mean, God has no voice. | |
| God doesn't speak to anyone. But if you can convince people that God is necessary, And then you can speak for God, then ka-ching, right? | |
| You're in the money for, you know, approximately 2012 years. | |
| Maybe even 2013. | |
| And the same thing, you can speak for the country, the will of the people, the group, the collective, the masses, the workers, whatever, right? | |
| I mean, collectors have no voice. | |
| Right. And so, they just become a giant sock puppet that you can use to impose your will on others, depending that you speak for some group. | |
| So, if you can invent some necessary group that has no voice, then Clearly, you're that voice, and certainly the working class, which is incredibly, incredibly offensive to somebody who came out of the working class. | |
| The idea that some privileged, usually rich, white kids... | |
| Yeah, usually they're academics. | |
| Usually the unalcoholic communists or any type of communist is just some type of academic or student or in some realm of academia, not usually in the working force, usually. | |
| Yeah, and I would also say, just to end up, it's also, I would say, an unmet childhood needs, right? | |
| I mean, it should be communist as a kid. | |
| When you're a kid, you should live in a communist paradise because you don't work and you get things provided for you and so on, right? | |
| And if you didn't get those needs met as a kid, then it's much more likely that you will be drawn to those beliefs as an adult. | |
| Anyway, so sorry, I've got to move on to the next caller. | |
| It's tempting. Definitely. Thank you. | |
| All right. All right, next up, we have three more callers today, so... | |
| Excuse me. | |
| Two more callers, so we'll give it a shot. | |
| Tiger Lily is up next. | |
| Hello. Hi, Stefan. Can you hear me? | |
| We can. How are you doing? Hello. Yay! | |
| I finally get to talk to you. | |
| I've been a big fan for about a year or so. | |
| I met you through Bill Bupert. | |
| Do you know who Bill Bupert is? | |
| Yes, I do. I do. | |
| How is the Bill? He is the first one that I heard that had the balls to actually say in front of a whole group of constitutional Oath Keepers that were talking about the slaughter, the murder of Jose Garena, a two-time Iraq veteran. | |
| It was about a year ago that they had this, or 18 months ago, this memorial service because SWAT killed him, I mean, in his house, and it was just such a grueling, appalling And you had all these Oath Keepers talking about how, well, it's not the police, it's the policies. | |
| And Bill Bupert in front of all of these people got up and he says, I've been listening to everybody talking about how it's not the police, it's the policies. | |
| I'm here to say bullshit. | |
| And I was like, oh, the first person I ever heard say that. | |
| And so I've been following him. | |
| He's the founder of ZeroGov.com. | |
| And I've been following him and numerous times he would mention your name and he'd spell it. | |
| And so finally I got up off my butt and I Googled you and I said, well, let me look at him. | |
| And let me tell you, I think I am your biggest fan next to your wife and your daughter. | |
| I am 52 years old almost and I literally go to sleep listening to your books or listening to something in my ears because I feel like I've got 51 years of deprogramming that needs to be done and I think that you're the best person to do it. | |
| So thank you for that. | |
| Thank you. I just wanted to mention, too, that I hope, given your gender, that you do not feel that balls are necessary to speak truth to power. | |
| Otherwise, you're going to be too short of a courage set, and I just wanted to mention that. | |
| I just love your quirky humor. | |
| I don't want to bore you with all my whole awakening and everything, but it basically was I'm a Helmet Choice activist, or I was a Helmet Choice activist two years ago. | |
| A Helmet Choice activist? | |
| I don't know what that means. Yes. | |
| In other words, I think in Canada, if you're on a motorcycle, you have to wear a helmet. | |
| I mean, there's no choice. Now, in the United States, a third of the states still require, like Canada, that you have to wear a helmet. | |
| Now, in 1969, I think it was, the feds came down and told all the states, you will make your motorcycle riders wear a helmet along with a seatbelt. | |
| In the cars, and if you don't, we're going to take away your funding for your highways. | |
| So that's how that started in the U.S., and then since then there was like a revolt and what have you. | |
| And so now a third of the states still require helmet, I call it helmet bondage. | |
| And I think it's cute that you talk about, you know, you've mentioned helmets sometimes like in a radical way in a And what I didn't realize, though, is that the whole helmet thing is like an indoctrination as well. | |
| Because, you know, it's like when people thought that the world was flat and, you know, people would say, well, obviously it's flat because, you know, you can't conceptualize the roundness of it. | |
| Well, it's kind of like there's a few people alive in the world who say, oh, a helmet saved my life. | |
| But how many people had been killed wearing a helmet, and if they were alive, they could say, you know what, if it wasn't for this damn helmet, I could have heard something. | |
| I wouldn't have been parachuted off of my motorcycle because of the wind, or I could have seen better and stuff like that. | |
| So I started to do a little bit of critical thinking that way. | |
| And that whole activism is what kind of got me, you know, a little critical thinking and to start questioning things. | |
| And I had already questioned my indoctrination, my religious indoctrination, which I grew up Southern Baptist. | |
| Okay, I'm Mexican in Indiana. | |
| My mother didn't know English. | |
| And my father was a wetback back in the 50s. | |
| And so I had a lot of indoctrination to overcome. | |
| And it wasn't until I realized that, you know, I could be murdered in a helmet state if I am not dressed the way these cops think that I'm supposed to be dressed. | |
| And the law is completely unenforceable. | |
| But anyways, and this is about helmet laws. | |
| I have a specific question that I want to ask because of all of this research that I've done that has exposed The statism to me, the evilness of statism. | |
| I went to legislative hearings and what have you and this one Senator Schneider, who's retired now, he actually said that giving Nevada the choice to wear a helmet is an abomination. | |
| So I went on and because he's like the low-hanging group and I can't really get in too much trouble, I wrote him a letter and I made it public and the letter was basically, hey, you're fat and I don't tell you what to eat. | |
| Right. And it got a whole lot of... | |
| And I noticed that in your bio it says that cooking is your hobby. | |
| Well, I would never deprive you of your hobby. | |
| And it's more likely that you'll be a public burden because of your eating choices than I will because of my choice of headgear while riding a motorcycle. | |
| So, anywho, my question is this. | |
| As I've been exposing things, as you know, as I... People, I think you described it one time, when you tell the truth to a statist or something, it's like you're throwing venomous spiders and venomous snakes at them and they withdraw at you. | |
| So I had this, I was on this Facebook group and I did this expose of a judge who said, Who found a guy not guilty, even though he was wearing a helmet that was like the size, it looked like a little tiny Frisbee on top of his head. | |
| Because the laws are enforceable, the judge had no choice but to find him not guilty, but he broke all kinds of rules to do that, and he was a total bully, and I did a really... | |
| I'm scathing video production of that and I got kicked off of this Facebook group and it's a motorcycle rights activism group because their leader, so-called leader who is a lawyer, a so-called constitutional lawyer, told them, hey, you got to get rid of either me or Ty, one of them has to go because I cannot be dealing even remotely associated with her because what she's doing is very dangerous. | |
| She's exposing this stuff and putting her ideology onto it. | |
| And so I got kicked out. | |
| Well, I was wondering, what is your take? | |
| What is your opinion? Is it worth it to even expose him? | |
| Because you mentioned that That when you expose me, or ostracism, I know, and that is so uncomfortable that it makes people think twice before doing stuff. | |
| Is it a violation of the universally preferred behaviors that I would expose this so-called constitutional lawyer for having kicked me out in a way that, | |
| you know, that was, I thought, you know, Wrong, but here he is talking about freedom and going back to a constitutional principle, and then he kicks me out, and that's the basic fundamental 1A, you know, freedom of expression, you know? | |
| So what is your take? | |
| How far should I go on this? | |
| That's a good question. | |
| I would guess that his motives is that maybe he would... | |
| Face some negative repercussions for his career if he were found to be associated with people who were talking trash about judges, right? | |
| I mean lawyers are kind of dependent on judges, right? | |
| So maybe he's concerned that some, I don't know, someone would complain or maybe he was concerned that some opposing lawyer would use this in some way. | |
| So my guess is that he's trying to protect his relationship with the judiciary. | |
| Would that be some kind of reasonable guess? | |
| Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. | |
| But I have seen, he's actually grown, because this happened about a year ago, and I listened to him, and he was a guest on a radio show, and somebody sent me the link, and they said, oh, listen to him. | |
| He sounds more like you now. | |
| So he's actually grown. | |
| He's actually, and maybe it was, I'd like to say that maybe it was a production like mine where you just flat out put it out there and show the evilness of this judge. | |
| Treating this defendant like an absolute master dominating his slave, although it pissed him off and he'll never admit that that was the thing that got him to think twice, it seems like he's already moving more towards our direction in terms of recognizing what's going on. | |
| So, I don't know. | |
| Well, let me ask you this. | |
| I mean, I certainly feel that this is a very strong issue for you, and I'll give you the basic checklist that I go through with myself when I feel very strongly about a moral issue. | |
| Did you have any problems with moral hypocrisy with authority figures when you were a child? | |
| Absolutely. Go on. | |
| Absolutely. Because I was raised Southern Baptist. | |
| And my father, he learned English and everything. | |
| He worked in the mills and stuff. | |
| And he would say things like, you know, he's very racist. | |
| And he would say things about black people and white people when, you know, the brown person. | |
| And yet, you know, one time I went to a believer in our Catholic school for one year. | |
| And that's another story. But I had a friend who was African-American and I brought her over to my house and I only brought her over because I didn't think my father was there. | |
| And he showed up and I was scared. | |
| I thought he was going to freak out and say, you know, we don't want any black people in my house or something. | |
| But no, he was so incredibly cordial and I'm like, what the hell? | |
| And, you know, those kind of inconsistencies and also the inconsistencies that I see now You know, where my mother, you know, it's like it was virtuous to beat us, you know, especially my little brother. | |
| She used to beat the crap out of my little brother because dancing is not allowed in the Southern Baptist, you know, in the culture that I was raised. | |
| And my brother, when he was little, I remember that he would be up So she grabbed him and she tied him to a chair in the basement and just got a branch and was beating the crap out of him and I'm upstairs with my hands over my ears Screaming, singing to myself, that sort of thing. | |
| So there was a lot of violence. | |
| And I also had the contradiction about my mother being a Southern Baptist and my father being a non-practicing Catholic. | |
| So she called my father, instead of honey, her term of endearment was punishment behind his back. | |
| That was her punishment because she didn't obey her parents to have married somebody who was a believer of the Jesus whole thing. | |
| And so I went to church and I prayed a lot for my father that he wouldn't go to hell. | |
| And then I was really pissed off at God because he killed my mother first. | |
| And that was like, what the hell? | |
| Why would my mother die this horrible cancerous death when she was the The picture of virtue according to what you're supposed to do according to the Bible. | |
| So that's kind of what woke me up a little bit. | |
| And unfortunately, I'm glad that she died first. | |
| Now in retrospect, because my mother, I got an opportunity to be closer to my father. | |
| And I got to see that my father, though he didn't go to church, though he swore and he drank a lot of alcohol, he's an alcoholic and he was a chain smoker, I got to see that my father actually had more virtue in him than my mother. | |
| In the sense that he was more true to his belief system and he wasn't as much of a hypocrite as my mother. | |
| And I got to understand what kind of made him tick a little bit. | |
| So it made me have more compassion for him. | |
| So yeah, I had a lot of contradictions in my life, Seth. | |
| Wow. What happened to your brother? | |
| He's spending some time in jail with O.J. Simpson right now. | |
| That's what happens! | |
| Well, what happened is that, first of all, the war on drugs, and this was when Bush did his minimum mandatory, and he had a young family, and he got caught in a sting operation, and he served four years because he refused to knock out anybody because he's got that mafia code going on. | |
| And so he got out after his four years, And then I helped him get a job and everything. | |
| So then he started, he got into drugs and then he started robbing like convenience stores. | |
| So he's in a halfway house now, which is not technically with O.J. Simpson, but he was with him for several years out there in Nevada. | |
| Oh man, I'm so sorry. | |
| I mean that's, you know, from the astounding amount of violence that he experienced at the hands of your mother. | |
| Yeah. It's not terribly shocking. | |
| I mean, as you're probably aware, these things are quite related. | |
| And I just, gosh, I'm so sorry to hear that. | |
| I mean, that's just horrible. And for what it's worth, if you talk to him, please pass along my incredible sympathy for what he suffered and the effect it's had on his life. | |
| I mean, you couldn't work to create somebody who was going to have addiction problems probably any harder than your mother did. | |
| So I'm very sorry for that. | |
| Well, thanks. And I appreciate what you do as far as the non-violent parenting thing, because my daughter has a 17-month-old child that's my grandson, and I've been sending her some stuff about, you know, and I myself beat the crap out of my children, thinking that was the right thing to do, because I didn't know any better. | |
| I have since apologized to them. | |
| I told them, please don't do that to your children. | |
| And given them some of the stuff that you've mentioned, I gave my daughter the book, Don't Do Drugs and Stay Out of School. | |
| And I read that. I sent that to my daughter. | |
| And my daughter is doing so much better of a job of raising her child than I ever did of my children. | |
| Because I was in my own indoctrination and in my own world and trying to Meet the expectations that were cultural for me. | |
| I'm out of that and I thank you for that. | |
| You're welcome and congratulations on turning it around with your own kids. | |
| That's good. | |
| That's good for you. My feeling is that to get drawn into this kind of exposure, it's almost like you're making the system personal and it's not that that's impossible but I'm always a bit at least for me I'm concerned with making the system personal right so I mean this guy's a lawyer he has to survive in the legal system which is not an easy thing to do and keep your integrity right so I think asking him to threaten his own legal profession for the sake of a Facebook post is asking quite a lot right and so I think The way that I would approach it, | |
| which doesn't mean anything, I'm just telling you what I would approach. | |
| The way that I would approach it is to say that the hypocrisy that this man is displaying is another reason why statism has to go. | |
| Because here's a guy who's really interested in freedom, who because he's involved in a state cartel, in a state monopoly called the law, ends up having to violate his own principles about freedom of expression and standing up for the truth. | |
| In order to maintain his standing or his status within his community. | |
| This is another example of why statism has to go, but to take him to task Would I think be personalizing a bad system? | |
| I don't know if this makes any sense, but it's making him, his choices are not independent of the system that he's operating in. | |
| Now, should he be a lawyer? | |
| I don't know, but it doesn't really matter because people don't spend eight years getting a law degree and articling and all that kind of crap and then say, hey, I'm an anarchist. | |
| I'm going to just throw it all and go and work at Denny's. | |
| People don't generally do that. | |
| So I think you could look at this as another tragic example. | |
| Of what statism does to people's integrity. | |
| I'm not saying to view him as a victim or anything like that, but he certainly is not... | |
| I mean, if he was in a free society, then this would not even be an issue. | |
| And I think that's what we want to try and get to, not necessarily fight each individual's adaptation to a destructive system. | |
| I think that's brilliant, Steph. | |
| You answered my... | |
| I knew... | |
| Of all people, because I've had advice one way or the other, you shouldn't take that, but I don't want to invest so much personal stuff in it, and I don't want to necessarily attack him, but I think that that would be a great, like, to highlight, an example, like I said, an example to show this is why statism has to go. | |
| I sure appreciate you taking the time and talking to me, Steph. | |
| I just love you at that and I keep promoting you everywhere I can. | |
| When is your documentary coming out? | |
| It's still up in the air. | |
| What's happening is that because I'm hiring more people and have better people, even better people involved, I want to make sure that the quality remains consistent throughout so we're doing a little bit of redos and so it'll probably still be Q1, like first couple of months of next year, that's my feeling. Hopefully earlier rather than later. | |
| But again, that sort of depends on the amount of cash that comes in and all that. | |
| But listen, anytime you want to call in, look, I mean, we just had a 20-minute convo. | |
| Hopefully it's going to save a lot of time, trouble, and difficulty for you. | |
| And I know it's going to help other people too. | |
| So anytime you have a question, you are welcome to call in. | |
| Thank you so much, and I sure am so sorry that I missed you. | |
| I could have seen you at the Liberty Festival in Las Vegas, because I live close to there. | |
| I'm living in, I call it Polyphonyville, Utah. | |
| We got away from there. | |
| My husband says, ah, there's too much stuff going on here, and I think that the sheriffs are going to come and just kill us because you're just stirring up the whole hornet that's around here, Willie. | |
| So anyways, I wish, but hopefully I'll get an opportunity to meet you in the future, Steph. | |
| Well, I'm trying to think. | |
| I mean, I'm going back to Texas next year and I'll certainly post about that and I'll probably be back in Vegas next summer. | |
| So it would be really great to shake your hand and we'll have a coffee. | |
| Oh, a latte. | |
| A good latte for you. A latte, absolutely. | |
| And thank you so much for all of your support of the show. | |
| I mean, it is the efforts of people like you that is what drives the growth. | |
| I mean, hopefully I've been putting out good stuff for years, but the reason it's growing is because people are sharing the material. | |
| So I really, really appreciate that. | |
| A lot of people, Steph. | |
| I mean, it gives me a sense of hope because the efforts of grassroots people like me are becoming synergized. | |
| They're synergizing. And I think it's just going to explode at any time. | |
| I'm just so excited about that. | |
| So it gives me hope. Thank you for what you did. | |
| I agree. Thank you so much. | |
| Have a good one. Bye-bye. All right, next up we have Ryan. | |
| Hello? Yes. | |
| Hi, how are you? I'm very well. | |
| How are you doing? Good. First of all, I just wanted to say a big thank you for everything you've done for me pretty much because I started questioning authority two years ago when I was 15, but I didn't have any real direction. | |
| I just kind of said, oh, everything's bullshit. | |
| Which, you know, is not a bad place to start from, but it's probably not the end place you want to stay at, right? | |
| Yeah, I remember after I saw your video story of your enslavement, I was talking to my friend, who we both agree that everything was bullshit, and I'm like, man, there's so much more than It's just bullshit. | |
| There's more to it than that. | |
| It's purposeful bullshit. | |
| That is quite different from ordinary bullshit. | |
| Thank you for that. | |
| I was just wondering if I could get your thoughts on university, though, because I'm getting to that time where I need to start making that kind of decisions of what I want to do with my life. | |
| I really have no idea. It's just becoming a problem. | |
| I live in the GTA, actually, so I know you went to the U of T, which is something I was considering slightly. | |
| Just maybe I could hear your thoughts about the university in general. | |
| What were you thinking? It's sort of like saying, I'm going to take a job. | |
| It's like, well, but what are you thinking of taking? | |
| I have no idea. I was maybe thinking going Undeclared, even though I don't know too much about how the undeclared system works. | |
| But then also psychology seems interesting to me. | |
| Right. Well, so years ago I had a friend who took a degree in economics and I was taking a degree in history and he ended up getting his PhD in economics becoming an economist and I was mulling over doing a PhD in history or whatever. | |
| And I said, you know, I ended up not doing it. | |
| We talked about it a little while afterwards. | |
| And he said something that was kind of interesting. | |
| He said, you know, if you have a degree in economics and you don't end up being a professor, Then there's still lots of great things you can do, right? | |
| You can work for banks, investment companies. | |
| Well, he didn't really like the Fed any more than I did, so he wasn't talking about that. | |
| But he basically said you can do a bunch of stuff with a degree even if it doesn't point you at academics. | |
| Now, if you have a PhD in history and you don't become an academic, What are you going to do? | |
| Well, of course, you could take the Tom Woods route and become a writer, a public speaker, a raconteur of all things liberty-based, but that takes a pretty singular ability, talent, and drive, and so on. | |
| So, if I were in your shoes, I would really encourage you to look for the long term. | |
| So, if you want to be an engineer, then you have to have an engineering degree and all that kind of stuff. | |
| If you want to be a lawyer, doctor, Or a biologist or something like that, then you have to have those credentials to get into the profession, as far as I understand it. | |
| Now, you want to be a computer programmer, you don't have to as much. | |
| In fact, I remember talking to a colleague when I was in the business world. | |
| He said that all of his programmers, except one, came from arts degrees or, you know, whatever, or had no degrees. | |
| If you want to be a programmer, then you have to go really learn stuff and build stuff and you're basically self-educating so that you can show people samples of your work and all that kind of stuff. | |
| But to take a general arts degree, I think, is becoming more challenging than it used to be. | |
| So when I was younger, I mean, I spent like, it was 1200 bucks to go, say, to the National Theatre School for a year. | |
| And so it was pretty cheap. | |
| Now, of course, you know, I deferred a lot of income and lived like a monk and all that, but it was pretty cheap to go. | |
| And I think the Masters in History has helped maybe a little in terms of credibility among newbies for what it is that I'm doing. | |
| And so I would think about more in terms of the long run. | |
| To go, you know, just get an undergraduate degree in history, it probably isn't going to mean that much. | |
| to potential employers. | |
| I don't know, because I don't know what people are looking for these days. | |
| When I was an employer, it wouldn't particularly matter that much. | |
| I was looking for people's ability to think and all that in the interview and that. | |
| So I think just in English, you get an undergraduate degree in English, you know, it's... | |
| Yeah, that's the thing. | |
| I don't have any... | |
| If I want to be a doctor, that makes perfect sense for me to want to go to university and you have really clear steps to Achieve that goal. | |
| But if you don't have an end goal, you think it's... | |
| But there's nothing wrong with waiting, right? | |
| There's nothing wrong with waiting to go to college, right? | |
| I mean, you don't have to go straight to college. | |
| You may want to try doing other things, see if there's a way that you can get into a work or career that you like without having to get a college degree. | |
| Obviously, all other things being equal, a college degree is a big negative. | |
| And especially now, I don't know, what is tuition these days at Canadian universities? | |
| Not quite sure. I think it was at York, it was like 600 bucks a course, a class. | |
| Okay, so you need, what, eight in a year or 10? | |
| Yeah. So for 5,000 bucks and all that, you know, for 5,000 bucks, you'll probably get some grants or scholarships maybe. | |
| And then there's a deferred income and all that kind of stuff. | |
| I don't think that going to college when you don't know what you want to do is a really great idea because college gives the illusion that you are doing something but it is activity without a goal and I always think activity without a goal is particularly a significant investment because you're talking about four years just to get an undergrad degree and you know that hundreds of thousands of dollars have lost economic opportunities and so on and so I think if you don't know what you do if you don't know what you want to do then going to college is not Always the best idea. | |
| Now, having said that, I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted. | |
| I was going to be a writer and an actor, so I went to, you know, English degree, theater school, and all that. | |
| And I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my history degree. | |
| So I just sort of want to be clear. | |
| I'm sort of speaking from some experience. | |
| Now, I happened to have the ability to work with computers, which I've been working on for, you know, since I was 11 years old. | |
| So that's how I ended up in the software realm. | |
| That didn't come anywhere out of my education. | |
| If I hadn't had that, I don't know, frankly, what I would be doing. | |
| But it wouldn't be particularly elevated. | |
| So, I mean, I think it's important to try and figure out where you might want to work. | |
| But if you really don't know, then getting involved in a four-year degree when you're not sure or you don't really know what you want to do with your life seems to me like a significant investment into the unknown, if that makes any sense. | |
| Right. And do you think it's kind of an expensive way to figure out what you want to do, especially if I did an undergraduate major? | |
| Yeah, so let's say that you choose some major or you say, oh, I really like history. | |
| Okay, so then you go get an undergraduate history degree, but then what? | |
| It's the then what that I think is really important when you look at higher education. | |
| So what is an undergraduate history degree going to do for you? | |
| Well, probably not much, so maybe you get a master's. | |
| Well, what's a master's going to do for you? | |
| Well, you can. Maybe you could go teach at high school or something like that if you want to be a teacher. | |
| But if you don't know any of that, then it seems tough to make a big investment in things to try and figure out what you should do. | |
| So, the other thing you could do, I don't know if you have adults in your life whose lives you think are cool, but if you do, you can go talk to them and say, well, how did you get where you are? | |
| Yeah, that's kind of what I've been going around, not so much lately, but just interviewing people, all kinds of people like lawyers, car salesmen, just various jobs, and asking them how they like the job, what they needed to get to where they were. | |
| Right. I interviewed someone from a bank, and he was pretty high up. | |
| His picture was everywhere in the bank, and he didn't need a He didn't have a degree at all. | |
| He wanted to become a chef and then he just did on-the-job training at the bank. | |
| That's another possibility. | |
| It's tough. | |
| If the tuition is not too bad, relative to inflation, it probably hasn't gone up a whole bunch since I was a kid. | |
| It's not bad. It's certainly not a bad thing. | |
| And these are all just my opinions, right? | |
| Nobody, obviously, can finally tell you what to do. | |
| It's not a bad thing to go undeclared, but I think if you're going to go undeclared, you have to go with the purpose of trying to figure out what you want to do. | |
| And, you know, if you want to become a history professor, then you can start to take those degrees. | |
| Or if you want to become a journalist, then, I don't know, maybe study journalism or whatever it is, right? | |
| But I think you have to be actively in the process of trying to figure out what you want to do. | |
| Don't stay passive no matter what you do, if that makes sense. | |
| Right, yeah. Just don't go... | |
| I mean, after high school, I went and worked as, you know, I've mentioned before, I went and worked as a geological assistant or whatever you want to call it, basically a gold pen or a prospector and all of that, and that eliminated a whole bunch of jobs for me. | |
| I mean, it wasn't like the bad thing to do. | |
| It was actually kind of fun in a way, but it really did eliminate a whole bunch of Jobs for me. | |
| I didn't want to do anything outside anymore. | |
| I didn't want to do anything in the geological sciences and a bunch of other things. | |
| So all those kinds of things ended up helping. | |
| So you can, of course, take time off and figure out what you want to do or figure out whether you want to go to school or not, if there's another opportunity or way to get where you want to get to. | |
| You can, of course, go undeclared, but my only suggestion is to really, really focus on trying to narrow down what it is you want to do no matter what. | |
| Okay, yeah, that sounds like good advice. | |
| I'll just add one more question, if I can. | |
| It's about dealing with status. | |
| In my school this year, there's a politics course. | |
| And it's kind of interesting how I've seen these people really start the political discussion and kind of even turning on each other. | |
| But I find it difficult to kind of stand back and listen to everything they're saying. | |
| How do you think I should deal with status, I guess? | |
| In what way? | |
| To the personal level, a lot of my friends are statists, and it's hard to have deeper relationships with them, I guess. | |
| Right. Right. | |
| And what kind of relationships do you want with a statist? | |
| For them not to be statists, I guess. | |
| It's kind of hard not to talk to any statists, you know what I mean? | |
| Right. Right. | |
| Well, I mean, the problem, of course, as I've mentioned before with the statists, is that a statist wants you thrown in jail for disagreeing with him, for following your conscience. | |
| Now, once you see that, it's a little bit tough to get back to talking about the weather, right? | |
| So, I mean, the only way that I know to get along with status is don't talk politics with them that's I mean there's nothing wrong with that I mean you don't have to you know bring out every the truth to everyone all the time so don't talk about politics with them and but recognize that if you do then you're you're crossing a line that's you know you're kind of this is Dr. | |
| Phil says it's kind of tough to unring that bell once you start in politics now the problem of course is the status I love to talk politics, at least some of them, right? | |
| So it's kind of tough. | |
| You can take the Justin Bieber approach. | |
| I've just read an interview with him because, you know, it's important to stay up at the competition. | |
| Three billion views. I am not catching up. | |
| I was wondering, do you want to join my punk rock band? | |
| I would love to join a band. | |
| It's very, very kind for you to offer, but... | |
| I think that, unfortunately, I've constructed a life where other priorities kind of take hold. | |
| So what I would say is he basically got into trouble talking about abortion or something. | |
| So when people ask me about politics, he says, you know, like, I think I'm just going to focus on being a musician and doing the best I can that way because I'm not, you know, I just get into trouble with that other stuff or whatever, right? | |
| Right, so there's a guy on a TV show who's a big fan of the show who wrote me a letter saying, you know, I keep getting interviewed and asking me about politics and stuff. | |
| You know, don't have to blow up your career. | |
| I can have a career of being an anarchist. | |
| In fact, that is my career, but I recognize it for other people. | |
| It's a little bit more of a delicate challenge. | |
| So you just say, well, my mother told me never to talk about sex, religion, and politics. | |
| I'll make an exception for sex just for this interview, but I'm still going to stay clear of the other two things. | |
| And, you know, I think that's fairly okay. | |
| So you cannot bring things up with status. | |
| Once you have brought things up with status, then it's kind of like a thorn in your side, right? | |
| It's kind of hard to ignore it. | |
| And so if you want to have a relationship with a status, I think you just have to steer clear of the status issue, right? | |
| I mean, like, if you want to be friends with a racist, you kind of not got to talk about race, right? | |
| Right. Yeah, and I know if I bring that up with everyone, it's just going to make everything really uncomfortable, you know? | |
| Yes, yeah, and that is a challenge, right? | |
| And I mean, statists are sublimely blind to their own evil. | |
| I mean, so some people crap at me for causing trouble within families, right, by saying that The family should be a voluntary institution and so on. | |
| We should no more accept abuse within the family than we would at work or in a marriage or anything like that. | |
| But the reality is that statists are unbelievably anti-family. | |
| Even if you just discount the welfare state and all of that, just look at the war on drugs. | |
| One of the reasons why black fatherlessness is so high is because of the war on drugs. | |
| And so statists can actually support the coercive removal of peaceful people from their wives and children and their caging and brutalizing. | |
| And yet the war on drugs is, to my knowledge, is almost never portrayed as anti-family. | |
| And people don't say to statists who are for the drug war or even for taxation, which is anti-family in that it usually drives two people have to go out and work to support a family. | |
| Nobody says to the statists who are for the drug war that they are anti-family, that they are causing a family breakdown on a scale unprecedented since the days of slavery. | |
| So you just have to recognize that they simply don't see what they're doing. | |
| They're like an infant with a pistol. | |
| They're just playing with it and they don't at this point see, for the most part, The consequences of what they're advocating. | |
| And if you point that out, it throws them into a stock relief, like a contrast to their former position. | |
| And that's something that they will resist quite strenuously. | |
| Yeah, okay. | |
| Thanks for that. I just wanted to say thank you for... | |
| I called before and gave me some advice about schooling because I just... | |
| Kind of don't fight and just kind of obey your teachers in a way, which I find a lot easier and less stressful. | |
| I think it's really helped me. | |
| So thank you very much for that. | |
| Oh, you're welcome. You know, it's important to recognize when you're in a compulsory system and not take ownership for the choices you make under compulsion. | |
| So I'm glad that that helped, and I certainly, you know, drop me a line if there's anything else I can do to help, and you know, keep me posted. | |
| I certainly wish you the best, and I hope that you find your joy and bliss in life. | |
| All right. Thank you very much. Thanks, man. | |
| One more caller to go. | |
| Next up, we have Nate. | |
| Nate, how many damn Nates do we have on this show? | |
| Anyway, go on. Nate. | |
| How are you doing? | |
| Can you hear me okay? Yeah. | |
| Okay. A while back, I had an interesting food conversation with my family, right? | |
| Specifically my mother. | |
| I was talking with her about things that were confronting my own past and childhood and learning empathy for myself. | |
| That way I could learn empathy for others, especially with my kids, right? | |
| She seemed totally open to it. | |
| She just sat there and listened, was talking. | |
| Well, she didn't talk. She just kind of active listening and said, okay, you know. | |
| And she said, yeah, I'm totally open to talk about anything with you. | |
| And she said, maybe I need to look into therapy for myself. | |
| I had an interesting conversation with her two days ago where I was talking with her about my younger brother who is 19 now. | |
| But he has had... | |
| Out of all three of the children in my family, I mean, we're all victims, but he definitely got the raw end of the stick. | |
| And because he was the youngest, I mean, divorce, manipulation by both parents about, you know, who's bad, who's good, I mean, they shouldn't do this, you know, all the kind of stuff that you feed children just to make yourself feel better. | |
| And so I was talking to her about that, and he had mentioned to her, because I've been talking to my brother a lot about, you know, Get to know who you are. | |
| I mean, work on yourself first, and then you'll be able to, you know, expand to different areas. | |
| But, you know, it's kind of the same thing that I've learned from here, and, you know, going through therapy myself, and I encouraged him to go do that. | |
| So he called my mom up and told her that he was, he had something that was really bothering him that he wanted to talk about. | |
| And it had to do with a lava lamp. | |
| I don't know if you remember those, you know, the lamp? | |
| Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So his father had... | |
| Screen savers of the 70s. | |
| Yes, definitely. And it was... | |
| Oh, anyway, so he said he had bought one. | |
| I mean, he got one bought for him by his father, and he brought it back home after the visitation was done for the week. | |
| And my mother took it away from him, and I don't know if this was immediate or not, but said... | |
| Sorry, but when did this happen? | |
| This was when he was younger. This was, I would say, maybe around when he was 13. | |
| So this was probably, this was like five or six years ago. | |
| Right, right, okay. But he's talking to her now because obviously there's something that bothered him, right? | |
| And just kind of brought it up. | |
| I don't know if he was testing the waters because I haven't had a conversation with him, only with my mother. | |
| And he said, you know, so she took it away from him and saying it was a fire danger and it got really hot and if it got knocked over it would cause a big deal. | |
| I mean, it could cause a fire. | |
| So she just kind of took it away with him, just like, yeah, it's too dangerous, not going to have it. | |
| Which, looking back now, as a parent myself, I was like, wow. | |
| But anyway, she kind of got upset in the fact that what she's told me out of her own mouth was, it's just a lava lamp. | |
| I mean, it's really not that big a deal. | |
| So then I said to her, I was like, well, I think you're being quite unfair in a way by you not being curious to why he would feel this way about something. | |
| It makes me question even our own relationship now. | |
| Of if you really are curious or that's really not that important to you, right? | |
| And I just told her I think it would be important that I would say that it was not even really about the lava lamp. | |
| It's about what happened in the interaction with that certain object and what action was taken because of that, right? | |
| Then she jumped in and she talked about, well, I just don't understand why he's just trying to blame me for all the things that have gone on wrong with him. | |
| He made choices, too, and he had just as much play in his growing up as I did. | |
| And I said, no, I'm sorry, that's why I totally disagree with you. | |
| You, from the time we were young to even when we were older, I mean, once you become an adult and you can Make your own choices, fine. | |
| I get that, right? But when you're a child, you are always, always the victim. | |
| And that really angered me that she would say something like that and try to put the blame on him because of what I would say now is like lazy parenting or parenting for your own self, justification for your own emotions. | |
| And I just kind of want to think what you think about that. | |
| If that was wrong, I actually don't think it was wrong. | |
| I think I approached that in a way that was... | |
| I told her that I disagree with that totally, 100%. | |
| Having children myself, and having empathy for them, and seeing where they're coming from, and putting myself in their situation, I totally disagree. | |
| I started talking about the power disparity between parents and children, and then she said, this would kind of tip it off. | |
| She said, well, I just put my trust in the Savior, And at that point, I really lost... | |
| I didn't lose it. | |
| I couldn't believe that was coming out of our mouth if we had to talk about being able to talk about everything else. | |
| I was like, okay. So I said, that's interesting. | |
| And we started talking about original sin and blah, blah, blah. | |
| But it just seemed to me that the conversation we had five months ago about being able to talk about stuff and examine the subject or ourselves closely without any hurt feelings, but just getting to know More about each other in a productive sense where we could both learn and grow. | |
| I just kind of feel that was kind of bullshit. | |
| Interesting. Okay. And what did she mean by put her trust in the Savior? | |
| Well, I was influenced with a Mormonism or the LDS Church, right? | |
| And so on and off throughout her life and my life, well, not so much for the past 15 years since I've become old enough to choose for myself. | |
| But her, I mean, she's had a space where she goes to church, off the church, goes back to church, and now she's on a really religious streak, which I suspect is because as time is waning, kicking off in her life, she's trying to justify whatever. | |
| I don't know. That's just kind of my own suspicion. | |
| But she's since gone back to church and has been really into it, I guess again, and trying to change her life and she said that she's dealt with all these things and there's so many things that I don't even know about that she's had to deal with and that she's kind of, it's unfair for her own children to judge her because they don't know what she was going through. | |
| I mean she said all this stuff and I just, yeah, so she's been really, she's been really heavily involved in religion. | |
| Okay, so your brother at 13 was responsible But your mother at 40 was not. | |
| Yes, I'm laughing because I totally get that and understand that. | |
| Because it makes absolutely no sense to me, whatsoever. | |
| Oh yeah, but it makes perfect sense to other people, right? | |
| To your mother, I would imagine, right? | |
| Yes, yes, yes. It's almost like she accused me of spitting in her face because I wanted to talk about, or my brother spitting in her face because we want to talk about stuff in the past that happened to us that has affected us, obviously. | |
| I have a lot of questions floating around in my head, so let me just spend a couple of minutes if we can. | |
| The lava lamp thing is fascinating to me. | |
| Why the lava lamp? | |
| I haven't had a conversation with my brother about it, but this was very frequent. | |
| I don't know if it was that his father would buy him something and then when he would bring it home after the weekend, Where if, what I can only, what I see now is if my parents didn't like it or they didn't approve of what he had, they would just take it away from him. | |
| And I don't know what special significance that this has to him specifically. | |
| I mean, I could ask him about this later. I can post it on the board or something and get back with that. | |
| But I mean, I remember the lava lamp in general, but I don't remember what he's specifically talking about with this. | |
| So I really don't know why the lava lamp or why that was the object that is attached as, you know, Some emotional value to it enough that you'd want to say something at this point. | |
| Right, right, right. | |
| You know, property is very important to children. | |
| I have to remind myself of this with Izzy. | |
| Like I was playing with Izzy the other day and we were doing this game, we were reading this book on a cactus and the phrase heavy rain came along and I picked up a pillow and dropped it on her head and say, wow, that's a heavy rain, do you feel that? | |
| And she started giggling. We started playing this game where she would be a bird flying around and the rain would fall on her and she'd Sort of fall down and then I'd have to revive her and I'd try that by tickling and she'd try not to laugh and all that kind of... | |
| It was a lot of fun. It was really a great game. | |
| But then at one point I couldn't get her to rouse by tickling or whatever so I started saying, oh okay well I guess I'll just have to eat all this chocolate in my pocket and then she'd go, hey I want some and pretend that. | |
| And she was fine with all of that and then at one point I said, well I guess I'll just have to have all the other children come over and play with your toys. | |
| And she actually got upset. | |
| And, you know, we talked about it for a while. | |
| I certainly apologize to her and all of that. | |
| But property and ownership is very, very important to children. | |
| It is, I mean, you know, you and I, we have all our stuff. | |
| But kids, you know, they don't earn their stuff. | |
| It just gets, you know, given to them or provided to them. | |
| But it is a kind of anchor in the world. | |
| I mean, being a parent, of course, it's really fascinating to see the degree to which the free market is actually Uncoerced human nature. | |
| My daughter has set up a frog shop in the living room and we haggle quite a bit over how much a frog costs and what various frogs are worth and whether lizards are worth more because they're bigger or you know all that kind of stuff. | |
| What's for sale and what isn't for sale and so I have to keep a big jar of coins handy just to engage in trade with my daughter. | |
| I mean it's fascinating and it's only come up over the last month or so but she's You know, she's got quite the froggy eBay going in the living room. | |
| And it's just fascinating how fluid and fluent she is with trade and value. | |
| And you can see her really calculating economics. | |
| And she's three. It's so innate for us to trade. | |
| And this is not... I didn't start up this game. | |
| I'm like, hey, let's play this trading game. | |
| She just spontaneously developed it and did it. | |
| And that is very interesting because that's her going through the process of comparative value, right? | |
| Do I want the frog more or do I want the shiny gold-looking coin more? | |
| Am I willing to relinquish property rights over one thing in order to gain property rights over something else? | |
| And, you know, she can keep the coins and she can use them to buy things at the gumball, whatever, right? | |
| And so, explaining to her what money means and having her really become fascinated by trade. | |
| At the moment, it's stuff for coins. | |
| It will become, I'm sure, stuff for... | |
| Bills? Well, no, stuff for other stuff, right? | |
| Trade rather than... Barter? | |
| Barter, I guess, yeah. So, yeah, so she really likes to sell her frogs. | |
| I guess that's what is going on. | |
| So, property and trade and ownership and all of this It's very, very important to children. | |
| So that I think is something to remember. | |
| So obviously, your mom's right in a way, it's just a lava lamp. | |
| But this is something that as a parent you have to really remember. | |
| You have to remember this, that it's not just a, right? | |
| There's almost nothing that's just a ha for kids. | |
| Everything is very, very important. | |
| And it has a very important Ramifications for personality, for space, for ownership, for rootedness in the world, for value, all of these kinds of things. | |
| Let me ask a seemingly related question. | |
| Hopefully it's somewhat related. Were your parents consistent? | |
| Do you mean inconsistent in their parenting or the way that they parented or in their own relationship? | |
| Could you clarify that please? Sorry, yeah, I mean, in the way that they parent, you said that your mother was in religion and then out of religion, and so in terms of how they approached ethics, I mean, you can approach ethics really badly and still be consistent, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. I would say that it was just that consistently bad. | |
| I mean, just because there was no, I was never, how I remember when growing up, there was really no justification. | |
| I mean, when I got older, of course, because I got bigger, right, there was justification applied to at that point. | |
| When I was younger, I heard a lot of phrase, you know, because I'm the parent, right? | |
| Because, you know, because I'm in charge. | |
| And there was no, and I mean, it was consistent in that way, where it kind of built up to me, where later when I was a teenager, like, this is quite bullshit to be honest with you. | |
| You tell me to do one thing, but then you turn around and do the exact same thing, like, right in my face. | |
| I just, I really had a problem with that. | |
| And I feel all this the same way for my brother and sister. | |
| So I would say, to answer your question, it was consistent in a, Not how we talk about parenting but almost like ad ethics. | |
| Now the lava lamp is the one where there's this sort of clear ball at the bottom like a big fish tank and then there's these blobs, these red blobs going up through the water, right? | |
| Yes, yes. It's not the one that goes back and forth like the wave, right? | |
| No, it's just the bubbles that go from top to bottom. | |
| Right. Right. And so I'm trying to think. | |
| So it would seem to me that it may have something to do with prejudice and empiricism. | |
| And I do this as a dad sometimes too. | |
| So my daughter will say, I want to do X. And I don't feel like it or don't want to or think it's a bad idea. | |
| I don't have a good reason. And I'll say, I don't think we should, and then she'll of course say why, which is her perfect writing, exactly what she should be saying. | |
| Yeah, and you know, at least 20% of the time, I sit there and I say, you know what? | |
| I don't have a good reason. | |
| I'm so sorry. Let's do it. | |
| I don't have a good reason. I'm so sorry. | |
| I have this impulse. | |
| I have this response, which comes out of my own history or whatever, but when she asks why, you know, I steadfastly refuse to try and make up an answer to justify My impulse, if that makes sense? | |
| Yeah, definitely, yes. So the question around the lava lamp would probably be something like, what he may be getting at is ex post facto justifications. | |
| Okay. In other words, Your mom didn't like the lava lamp or didn't want the lava lamp and didn't have any particular reason and then she made up a whole bunch of things like it could overheat and cause a fire. | |
| Yeah, okay. Yeah, I see that. Yeah. | |
| I mean, that's easy to solve, right? | |
| I mean, even back in the day you would call up, you'd Google it or you'd call up the manufacturer or whatever and you'd try and find out if there were any fire hazards with them, right? | |
| Yeah. Or not put it next to any curtains or anything, move it to an isolated area where if it did fall over there would be no chance of it, anything happening, blah blah blah. | |
| Yeah, you'd work something out. | |
| If you couldn't find out about the danger, you'd say, well let's run it in the bathtub for three days and make sure it doesn't overheat or something. | |
| You get an asbestos mat underneath for those hot plates and put it on. | |
| It's something like that, right? | |
| Yes. And so it probably has something to do with Trying to figure out whether parents have good rules with reasons you disagree with or whether they have bad rules that they create plausible excuses for. | |
| Okay, I'm following. | |
| Does that make any sense? Yeah, yeah. | |
| Which is exactly what would be essentially an excuse. | |
| Like maybe she just didn't like the lamp and so instead of saying, hey, I don't like that lamp because I don't want to take it away, who's going to say that to the kid, right? | |
| That lamp offends me. | |
| It could be anything. Maybe her parents had a lava lamp and she didn't like that when she was a kid. | |
| Maybe she just had a headache. I mean, literally can be that silly as a parent. | |
| Right? Yeah, definitely. You know, my daughter says, let's go out and make snow angels. | |
| Maybe I just have a headache. | |
| But if I'm not honest about that, then I'll, you know, oh, you know, I may make up something like, oh, you know, we'll be out there for 10 minutes and you'll just want to come back in. | |
| And it takes, you know, half an hour to get ready and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| And so I create all of these, quote, reasons. | |
| And what happens is my daughter then listens to that and then she doesn't, she says, it's too difficult for me to go outside, so let's just stay in. | |
| Like it becomes a universal then because I'm giving all these reasons rather than I have a headache and I don't want to do it right now. | |
| Let me take a pill or get a neck rub or stretch or workout or something and then we'll go. | |
| So if the parent makes up principles to justify immediate impulses, that is very problematic for the child. | |
| And of course, if she's saying that it's dangerous, then there's something in that which is disrespectful towards the judgment of your younger brother, right? | |
| Yeah. I can't believe you would bring this fire trap in. | |
| I mean, he's not saying, you know, let's go juggle knives with the local baby. | |
| Yeah, I see that. | |
| And basically, what I'm kind of saying is a lack of just honesty from the parent, from, I guess, from my mom to my... | |
| I'm just saying what it would be, what may be causing this whole issue with her. | |
| Does that make sense? Where she wasn't honest in her feelings about what it was and didn't want to talk about that. | |
| I guess that's where we're going to get mad because it wasn't that pure honesty brought forward, but rather an excuse or justification was made for something else. | |
| Does that make sense? Yeah, and when we get emotionally involved in things that seem inconsequential, it's usually because we're living in a kind of waking dream where We get fixated on something because it is metaphorically important to us. | |
| So the phrase that comes to my mind is bubbling up. | |
| Something is bubbling up. | |
| Something bloody is bubbling up. | |
| Because that's what it looks like, right? | |
| In a lava lamp. | |
| And so it may be that this sits in his mind because it is a metaphor for something larger, right? | |
| Yeah. For something that is more psychologically, metaphorically resonant, right? | |
| I mean, if you had a dream about a lava lamp, then something bloody bubbling up would be a reasonable way to approach the dream, right? | |
| But our memories are kind of like dreams. | |
| We remember certain things because they have metaphorical significance to us in the same way that they would in a dream. | |
| Like of all the things to remember, there's that one. | |
| Yeah. And again, if I were to go even further, I would say your mother said that it was too hot, it was a fire hazard, right? | |
| Yes, yes, yes. Did she talk to him about hell? | |
| I don't remember a case specifically where she, you know, sat me down or sat him down and we talked about what hell was, but we did have experience with the church about talking about that, right? | |
| So she brought you to a church where you had to obey because of a fear of hell, right? | |
| Oh yeah, that was a... | |
| I mean, I have to think that all religion being punished for doing bad things, you know, and the ultimate punishment being going to purgatory and burning up in flames. | |
| Right, so that also may be something metaphorically related, that your mother is warning about a fire hazard that isn't real. | |
| Does that make sense? Yes, it does. | |
| I'm not saying that's an answer, I'm just saying it's probably not anything to do with... | |
| Your mom's right, it's not about the lava lamp, but it's probably a way to approach things that has resonance via brother for a wide variety of reasons. | |
| So, what was taken away from your childhood because of the threat of hell? | |
| Well, reason, independence, judgment, virtue, integrity, Because it just became fear, right? | |
| Yes, yeah. So I had this precious thing that was taken away because there was fire hazard that was invented. | |
| I mean, in a sense, that to me is just the personhood, the individuation is taken away because of an imaginary fire hazard. | |
| Yeah, I see that definitely. | |
| I mean, it comes even more into play too, like with the whole religious thing as well. | |
| I mean... Whenever I hear someone talk about it, my initial response now is kind of to laugh. | |
| Not because I want to disrespect them, but to me, it's kind of funny. | |
| Just going straight to faith, quote-unquote. | |
| Yeah, and my mother said, too, when I was talking to her about this, and I said the same thing. | |
| Most likely, it's not even about the love lamp itself, like the actual material thing. | |
| It may have nothing to do with that whatsoever, other than I ended up with his. | |
| Or that was given to him as a gift, so therefore then he had that and that was his, then it was taken away from him. | |
| But there might be something even more and deeper. | |
| Oh, I guarantee you it's deeper. | |
| If this is the first topic that's coming up, it is deeper. | |
| That's why I'm really sort of talking about this stuff. | |
| Yeah. That's why I told her as well. | |
| And then when she said, well, I just don't understand why he's doing all this stuff to talk about my, you know, like talking about parents. | |
| I mean, do I need to blame my parents for everything that was going on bad with me? | |
| And it just kind of... | |
| There's a real immediate emotional response. | |
| I felt really, for her at least, I was uncomfortable to be able to talk about this sort of thing. | |
| I can totally understand. | |
| I mean, it's not easy, right? | |
| Well, no. This is part of the paradox. | |
| I get asked this question all the time, right? | |
| So I'll just give you the very brief answer. | |
| It's fine. Okay. Well, let's say that the parents are not responsible. | |
| Fantastic. Then you have to Apologize to the children for blaming them. | |
| If parents are not responsible, then clearly children are not responsible. | |
| What happens, of course, is that people want to dial up the responsibility for children and dial down the responsibility for parents, which is morally insane and incredibly corrupt. | |
| I mean, it's not corrupt until it's pointed out. | |
| You're kind of in an ignorant state of nature. | |
| But once it's pointed out, if you refuse to acknowledge it, then you become corrupt. | |
| Right? I mean, I'm not talking about your mom specifically, but just as a general principle. | |
| People who've done really bad things genuinely feel that the badness is being created in them through the moral exposure. | |
| And in a way, it's kind of true. | |
| Because you don't have moral responsibility until you have knowledge. | |
| And so, when you are spreading moral knowledge, you are creating self-attack in people who've done bad things. | |
| Now, some people, like the previous caller, will say, yes, I hit my kids. | |
| That was terrible. I've apologized to them and, you know, we're working it out and so on. | |
| Okay, that's making the best of a bad situation. | |
| I think that's very admirable, but other people don't respond in that way. | |
| Yeah. So, yeah, that's fine. | |
| People can say, I did... | |
| The best I could with the knowledge that I had. | |
| Okay, fine. Let's say that that's a valid principle. | |
| I'm not sure that it is, but let's say that it is. | |
| Fine, then any time that you punish your children, you were doing wrong by your own standards. | |
| Because surely, your children were doing the best they could with the knowledge that they had, given that they were six years old. | |
| Oh, thank you. That just clicked in my head, so I appreciate that very much. | |
| Before you even said it, I knew, like I said, you were going to say, so if you are not know Bible, then, I mean, if you don't have, if you're not claiming any responsibility for this, right, because you didn't know, then sure as hell, children are even less, there's no responsibility whatsoever, because they definitely don't know having to learn everything as they grow up. | |
| Exactly. You got it. You got it. | |
| But taking that defense away from people is very difficult, right, for them? | |
| Yeah. Because this is just what people do. | |
| You know, they blame their children and then they excuse themselves. | |
| In other words, they blame a six-year-old, giving him 100% moral responsibility, though he has no economic independence, no legal independence. | |
| He has no job. | |
| He has almost no knowledge of the world. | |
| His brain is ridiculously immature. | |
| It's not even a quarter of its way through to development yet. | |
| But somehow the child has 100% moral responsibility, and then when the child comes to the adult and says, I have problems with it, the parent says, well, I was doing the best I could with the knowledge that I had. | |
| So anyway, I don't want to beat the dead horse, but let me ask you or make one other little rant. | |
| Okay. And I'm just looking up the... | |
| Okay, so obviously she was big on the kids, right? | |
| Sorry, big on Jesus, right? | |
| Yeah. Okay. | |
| So, one of Jesus' most famous statements is, whatever you do unto the least among you, you do unto me, right? | |
| And I don't know of many sermons that says we should beat Jesus. | |
| Yes, definitely. | |
| Like with genuine seriousness. | |
| I mean, I know it's kind of a funny juxtaposition, but this is the cherry-picking that goes on. | |
| If you are a Christian and you accept the veracity of the Bible, then you accept that Jesus says, whatever you do to the children, you are doing to me. | |
| And unless you are allowed to spank your deity, Or hit your deity, then you are not a Christian if you hit your children. | |
| Because you're rejecting one of the most fundamental tenets of Jesus, which is that the greatest caring concern and peace should be provided to the least powerful in society, who are the children, obviously, right? | |
| And he's very specific about tender care towards children. | |
| And this is why I accept the fact that religion is unable to solve the problem of child abuse. | |
| Because certainly Christianity, you know, the amount of child striking in Christian households is high. | |
| And we've had 2,000 years of the most revered moral teacher in Western civilization. | |
| We've had 2,000 years of him saying, Well, do you remember how you didn't like it when people beat me up and put a crown of thorns on me and nailed me to a cross? | |
| When you hit children, you're kind of doing that same thing. | |
| We've had 2,000 years of that and the result has been that 90% of parents still hit their children. | |
| So, it doesn't work. | |
| There is no restraint upon moral impulses that occurs from religion to my knowledge. | |
| Because if you want to hit your children, you'll find spare the rod, spoil the child, right? | |
| And if you don't want to hit your children, you'll find whatever you did unto one of the least you did unto me. | |
| And so it is an infinite permission slip. | |
| It is not any kind of restraint. | |
| It's a diet book called Eat What You Want. | |
| Eat What Feels Right. | |
| That's not a diet book. | |
| That's just a permission slip, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah, so I would, and the obvious moral hypocrisy of giving a five-year-old 100% moral responsibility while claiming none as a 30-year-old is not exposed by this, and this is why philosophy has to supplant this stuff, because this stuff doesn't work. | |
| Because it's not consistent, people can cherry-pick whatever they want, and it's adapted itself that way, of course. | |
| Definitely. I understand. | |
| All right, well, thanks for taking my call. | |
| I greatly appreciate it, as always. | |
| You are very welcome, and I think that we are now done for the show for the day. | |
| Have yourselves a fantastically wonderful week. | |
| Remember, freedomainradio.com to donate, fdrurl.com forward slash donate. | |
| It is a hungry media quarter of feeding the beast of the documentary, but I think that you will be very proud and happy to have contributed and helped. | |
| And I will also tell you one other thing, which is that if you contribute and help with the documentary, and the documentary is as good as I think it is, and does as well, As I think it will do, I think you will have a very significant point of pride in your heart to have helped it to come about. | |
| So I hope that that will be some incentive for you. | |
| And if you missed the boat, I think you will probably regret it a little bit. | |
| So thank you so much, James, as always. | |
| Have yourselves a wonderful week, everyone. |
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