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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:00
School Shootings, Social Violence, Abortion and the Rule of the Lizard Kings!
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Alright, welcome back, Occupiers.
I'm Julie. I'm your host tonight.
And on the line now, I have Stefan Molyneux.
Good evening, Stefan. Hello, hello, Julie.
Hello, Occupiers. How are you occupying your time these days?
Oh, I'm sorry, Stefan.
I didn't have you on the air.
No problem. That was just the best intro in the history of radio, but we'll try and recreate it later.
Well, I did tell them a bit about you earlier.
I told them that you're a blogger, an essayist, an author, a philosopher, and that you host freedomainradio.com.
And I'm a fan, so anyone who's listening because they're friends with me on Facebook knows that I am constantly posting your video posts or your video podcasts all the time.
And so I'm very excited to have you on the show this evening.
Well, thank you. And thank you so much for doing that.
I really appreciate that. I mean, it's that kind of grassroots thing that hopefully spreads critical thinking, reason, evidence, science, economics, all the good stuff out to the world.
So I really appreciate that. Oh, yeah.
Reason, hopefully someday we'll take over and we can think with more than just a materialistic mind in our world.
And it seems to be the way where I'm from.
Everything is about status and what you own as opposed to who you are and what you do.
It's always struck me that the word possession is used usually in two ways.
The word possession is used for things that you own, but it's also used as being inhabited by an evil spirit.
He's possessed. He's a victim of possession.
I think there's some truth in that.
I think that you have to be careful that what you own doesn't end up owning you, that you end up a slave to stuff, which almost always makes you alienated from people.
I appreciate that.
That skepticism about ownership is a good thing.
Yes. Well, some of the things that have been going on, and this is kind of probably a downer topic, but it's something that needs to be talked about.
We've had another school shooting.
I think there's been a couple this week, actually, in Cleveland, is the one I'm most familiar with.
And, you know, I am familiar with your work, so I know that you have theories on why these types of things happen, and I thought maybe you could share them.
Share with us about Right.
I mean, you could say it's a downer topic, but it is a very, very important topic.
The U.S. leads the Western world in child abuse, which is not the number one, yay, USA, that you want to be.
So, for instance, this is all very conservative.
The real numbers are probably far higher than this, but the statistics are pretty clear that a bare minimum, 20,000 children over the past decade have been murdered And most of those are under the age of four, a significant proportion of them are under the age of one.
To put that in context, that's more than twice the casualties of the foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More than twice the casualties of war are the casualties of deranged parenting.
That is not good. That is really not good.
The extension of psychotropic drugs to toddlers, to you have children of three and four and five being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, being put on heavy, heavy brain-altering medications for no verifiable medical ailment whatsoever, to my knowledge.
And, you know, people can correct me if they want, but I've studied this pretty hard.
I've had experts on my show.
There is no recognizable...
Or detectable medical condition that these drugs can cure or that has even been identified.
It is really playing Russian roulette with developing brains and it is really bad.
If you look at the growth of single parent families, this is also not good for children and you could argue, I think, quite well that it's not good in particular.
So, for instance, if you take the black population in the U.S. and the white population, the black population has a disproportionately higher level of crime.
But if you factor in, or rather if you take out the factor of single parenthood, the crime disparity between whites and blacks vanishes.
And so I think that, you know, two parents working is not good for kids.
Unfortunately, that's become sort of the norm.
Now, for the first time in history in America, I think?
So, you know, we have single parent households, which are bad for kids.
We have two parents working, which puts kids into the Lord of the Flies scenario of daycare, where they end up relying on peers rather than any legitimate and good authority figures.
You have drugging of kids, which has homicidal side effects, suicidal side effects.
It really harms children's brains and their capacity to make rational decisions.
You have the displacement of parental authority figures and teacher authority figures because the teachers are just wrangling these crazed kids these days who are coming out of these broken homes and out of these drug treatments and all of this.
And so you have this peer pressure.
You have the shallowing out of youth culture.
And I think that it is a terrible thing.
I think it is going to keep occurring until, in America, 90% of parents, as I'm sure you're aware, are still hitting their children.
They call it spanking, but they're still hitting their children, and so I think we need to stop hitting children.
I think we need to have two parents and at least one of them stay home at least for the first couple of years to really have that bond, that empathy, that development that is so necessary for the children to develop empathy and compassion and self-care and self-esteem.
We need to stop drugging them.
We need to get them out of government schools, into homeschools, into better schools, any alternative than you can find to these tamped-down prison-designed lack of concentration camps we call public education.
And until we start looking hard in the mirror as parents, we can continue to lay blame on stupid-ass answers like video games and the prevalence of guns and instead start looking at what kind of culture do we have where this seems like a viable option to an unfortunate number of teenagers.
And until we start looking critically at ourselves as a culture, I think this stuff is just going to continue.
End of rant. Occupy is a lot about protesting and activism, but I think another piece of Occupy for most Of the people that I've met in Occupy is an inner revolution of the individual, you know, taking responsibility for themselves and, you know, the things that, you know, affect not only their everyday life but the lives of everybody in the world.
You know, like some realization that, you know, we are all connected, you know, like every other species on the planet.
We are necessary. We have a purpose.
and working towards the goal of becoming unified as a people so that we don't have to alienate our children or resort to anger all the time in every situation and not really have any tools of mindfulness that we can move forward with our children when things get very chaotic.
Yeah.
Do you know what's tragic?
A tragic statistic, Julie, is I think it's house sizes now are about twice the size that they used to be 20 or 30 years ago.
So the houses that are being built and owned now, 2,500, 3,000 square feet as opposed to 1,200, 1,500, 1,700 square feet 20 or 30 years ago.
What a tragic and ridiculous compromise to make to end up working two jobs to have a house where you and your children are gone for most of the day because you have to go and work and your children have to go to daycare or have to go with grandma.
They have to go somewhere else other than the parents who actually conceived and brought them to term and gave birth to them.
And you end up going to work to pay for this house that's empty most of the time, where you're not spending quality time with your kids, downsize your house, spend time at home with your children.
That is the foundation for a free and peaceful society, is children who feel valued and nurtured and worshipped and respected and cared for and interacted with and praised and surrounded by enthusiasm and joy and happiness.
That is how We break down these Stone Age hierarchies that arise out of the maltreatment fundamentally of children, as many have argued, and I certainly argue.
So just for instance, just, you know, it's not a sacrifice to get half the size of a house that you're used to.
It's exactly probably how most people were raised in those kinds of houses.
So give up the second job.
Downsize your home. I mean, a lot of people tragically made that deal with the devil.
They got a bigger home, didn't get to keep it anyway, ended up in bankruptcy or debt.
So, you know, downsize and, you know, upsize your parenting and downsize your materialism and that is the best revolution I think the planet can receive.
I agree. I agree.
I often wonder what it is, like, I don't have children and I'm not in a relationship or looking at marriage or anything like that.
I, you know, I work my lousy job and I, you know, make very modest money and I wonder what freedom is a lot of the times if it's not just Living more meagerly so that I have more time to myself to develop what I would really like to do with my life since I didn't have an opportunity to do that when I should have or when we say we should have.
There never seems to be a right time for self.
It's always giving away to make money.
It's getting so much harder.
We're looking at $7 a gallon here.
I'm in Utica, New York.
Not too far from Ontario.
And, you know, it's very bad here.
I mean, our neighborhoods look like ghost towns.
You know, we have high crime rates.
We have schools shutting down.
We have, you know, 150 teachers being laid off.
I just, I sometimes wonder, you know, not many people in my community are feeling like an activist or like there's something to do about the situation.
Is there something about learned helplessness where we just kind of give up, throw our hands up, and say, oh well, you know, you only live once, I'm just going to enjoy it, not worry about it, type of attitude?
Yeah, I think that is terrible.
There's a great cure for it that's very obvious, and it's so obvious that nobody wants to do it, or very few people want to do it.
The devil of helplessness points your activist heart at an institution you have no control over and will never have the capacity as an individual to affect.
So the devil... It takes your eyes and says, do not look at that which you can control, that which is within arm's reach.
Look at the monster edifices.
Look at the military-industrial complex.
Look at international trade treaties.
Look at factories in China that are treating workers badly.
Look at child labor in Singapore.
Look at the Federal Reserve.
Look at the Department of Education.
Look at the national debt.
Look at all these things.
And they are to us as individuals like the Berlin Wall to a tiny ant.
It can look and it can stare and it can say, damn, that's a big wall.
Whoa, that's a big wall.
And what can it do?
It can't do anything.
It can barely climb it, let alone push it over.
And so the great danger of activism is to focus on the things that you can't control.
So you say gas is very expensive.
It is. But that's only if you're using Federal Reserve notes.
I mean, if you're paying in gold, gas is cheaper now than it's ever been.
It's just because of the inflationary habits of the last couple of years as they've tried to paper over this smoking crater called the American economy.
They've tried just carpet bombing it with fiat currency and of course that's going to make everything more expensive.
And so my argument has been for many years Forget about the institutions.
Forget about the institutions.
Forget about the big picture.
I know that's an odd thing for a philosopher to say, but forget about the big picture.
What matters, what you can do, what you can change, turn away from the institutions and turn towards the relationships in your life.
Turn towards the relationships that you have with your lovers and your husbands, your wives, particularly with your children, with your extended family.
Improve the quality of those relationships.
Bring the virtues of honesty and intimacy and integrity and compassion to those relationships because...
Sure as day follows night, the relationships are the foundation of the institutions in the future.
The institutions we're dealing with now were founded in the relationships that people had in the war, the Second World War, the post-war period, and so on.
The people running those institutions can't change their history, can't change the way their brains were formed by their early attachments and relationships.
So if you want to change the world, you start with the greatest and most invisible lever of all, Let me ask you a question.
If there were 100,000 people That can either get together for like a community picnic or go protest ALEC. What do you think?
Do you think spending that time with the people in your community is as effective as highlighting the corruption in an institution like ALEC?
Yeah, I mean, I would say that the best thing that could be done is for the parents to get together.
And, of course, a lot of parents are still hitting their kids.
A lot of parents, if they're not hitting their kids, they're still yelling at them or threatening them or putting them in timeouts or, you know, withdrawal of affection or whatever.
And to just sort of put your heads together as parents and say, okay, you know, I don't think this is good.
I don't think this is right.
I wouldn't treat a dog because I wouldn't hit my dog for not listening to me.
I mean, if I did, I would be a pretty bad person.
So I think the people need to get through.
It's not just parents. Anyone, anyone who's got anything to do with kids, which is all of us because we've all been kids.
We all know kids in our neighborhood.
We all know kids in our extended family or acquaintances, friends, friendships, and so on.
To get together and say, you know, this is bad stuff.
You know, hitting kids, whatever you call it, it is scientifically indistinguishable from physical abuse.
The child experiences spanking the same way, the same way.
It has exactly the same developmental effects as physical abuse, according to the science.
And so let's stop this.
We can't control the Federal Reserve.
I can't control whether I hit my child.
I can't control the Department of Education.
I can't control the quality of public schools.
I can't get metal detectors out of these brain-encasing prisons.
But what I can do is I can make a vow to never raise my voice at my children, to never intimidate them, to never threaten them.
Let's all get together as communities and try and figure out how we can do that.
What kind of support structures do we need?
How can we help each other achieve that goal of the peaceful raising of children?
That is the biggest blow I think to these medieval hierarchies that we're still struggling under.
Great. Listen, I don't want to hug Stefan the whole hour, so if you have a question or a comment or a question for Stefan, give us a call, 760-454-8841.
I have some other things.
I listened to The Gun in the Room several times on different media that you did, and for our listeners here who may not be aware of the theory of the gun in the room, maybe you'd like to share?
Sure. The gun in the room is a demand...
You know, I was saying earlier to start demanding more integrity and more honesty in your relationships.
The gun in the room is to recognize that every law is force.
Every law is...
A sort of paper cover over the reality of a gun in the room.
So if you have a law that says you have to have a license before you open a lemonade stand for the protection of the public, okay, well, what you're saying is that you're willing to shoot people Who opened a lemonade stand without some people's permission.
Because if you're not willing to shoot people, then it's not a law.
Because every law that the government passes, every statute, every regulation, every piece of the tax code, all six million words of it, these are all...
Putting guns in the room of human interaction.
You think that marijuana is bad and it should be banned.
Well, you recognize that you're going to point, let me be completely stereotypical here, you're going to point a gun towards some guy with dreadlocks and army pants, army shorts probably, and a hacky sack, that you are willing to introduce a gun Into human relationships in order to get your way.
That is the basis of the state.
The basis of the state is the initiation of force.
Not self-defense. Self-defense is valid and morally acceptable, even legal, for everyone.
But the state is about the initiation of force.
You say, ah, we should stop Japanese imports.
We should slap a tariff on those things.
Okay, well, what you're saying is people who don't pay that...
Additional amount of money should be threatened with a gun and if they resist then they should be shot.
And if you say, well, I think the minimum wage should be increased, what you're doing is you're saying, just to be, I mean, you can argue about the effects of it, but the moral reality of it is very simple and very basic.
You say, there should be a minimum wage and it should be $8 an hour.
Okay, what you're saying is, if somebody wants to voluntarily work for $6 an hour, and somebody wants to voluntarily hire them for $6 an hour, and they do that, that you're going to introduce a gun into that relationship.
And you are going to fine people, and if they don't pay those fines, you're going to drag them to a court, and if they don't obey, and if they resist, and if they pull a gun in self-defense, you're going to shoot them down.
That is the reality of invoking the state.
That is the reality of invoking the state.
You're against prostitution.
I'm against prostitution too, but the way that we deal with prostitution is through compassion, the sort of gabber-matte approach of compassion and recognize that people do not end up in that field usually without significant problems in their life, and you extend compassion and try and deal with it.
Same thing with drug addiction and alcoholism and so on.
You try and deal with these things in a way that shows human compassion.
You do not just go around introducing infinite guns, pointing at people, and think that you've achieved a damn thing.
Other than making the world a more dangerous and violent place for everyone.
And we can see, we can see, the war on drugs does not work.
The war on poverty does not work.
We have more poor people now than when we started.
The war on illiteracy does not work.
You got in the US, almost half the population doesn't even graduate from high school.
And even those who do need remedial courses in how to fill out a damn job application doesn't work.
Anyway, I could go on.
Government controlling health care doesn't work.
I mean, I'm appalled that when I left school, I didn't know anything about my credit score.
I didn't know anything about loans.
The first time I got a car, I was so excited, I never even asked them what my interest rate was.
Right. So you've got people saying, well, how come these people signed these mortgages with these variable rate kick-ins three years down the road and didn't know and didn't plan?
It's like, well, let's look at the people who had them to educate for 12 years straight.
Why didn't they learn anything about this stuff?
It's kind of important to know.
Why don't we teach kids about entrepreneurship?
Why don't we teach kids about how to run a business, how to start a business, alternative ways of earning an income other than going to work?
Because the management class, the executive class, they don't want the competition.
They want a bunch of nice little worker drones, worker bees.
We're a damn hive.
We're not a society.
I know.
Well, you know, I wanted to say a comment, too, about what you were saying earlier about the laws regarding prostitution, the criminalization of drugs, and things of that nature.
Alan Watts used to refer to those things as some sherry laws.
And these were moral laws based on religion or someone's idea of what was right and wrong.
Yeah, what's that old quote?
It says, Puritanism, America is founded on Puritanism.
Puritanism is the nagging feeling that someone, somewhere, is having fun.
It must be stopped.
Sorry, go ahead. I've often said, you know, especially with the...
They can call it a war on women's rights, but it really is a war on women.
I mean, they just won't stop trying to control their bodies.
I mean, instead of educating women and getting them in a better position where they won't be getting themselves into situations like that, they seem to be obsessed with making their medical choices into laws.
You mean the abortion debate in the U.S.? Well, yeah.
Well, now they've passed the personhood law in Virginia.
So now a zygote is a person, you know, and now if you want to consider abortion, now you have to have a transvaginal ultrasound, whether the doctor thinks you need it or not, which, you know, some women change their mind and, you know, an invasive procedure like that could, you know, put a, you know, very fragile pregnancy into, you know, a crisis.
Right. You know, you're really supposed to only do those things if they're absolutely necessary.
Right. Yeah, and of course, there's so many things you could do.
I mean, I think we all recognize that abortion is a pretty bad thing to have to go through for all parties and particularly for the fetus, but there's so many things you can do to get rid of that.
I mean, to eliminate the cause.
I mean, let's deal with the welfare state that's producing so many single-parent households.
A woman who has a child with the father, she ends up losing a lot of money if they get married.
And so they don't do that.
And of course, the kid then grows up without the, you know, and if it's a daughter who grows up without a dad, then she's got the hunger for the male love.
And then any hairy legged boy who comes along and blows kisses in her ears, you know, and that kind of stuff can just get completely messed up.
How about lowering the barriers to adoption?
How about allowing for a free market in babies?
So the young woman can sell the baby to a middle-aged professional couple who can't have kids for some reason.
I mean, let's do all of that stuff rather than, hey, let's pass a law and make it illegal, which is simply going to drive it underground and cause more problems.
But of course, nobody wants to deal with these root causes.
And damn, oh, damn, I don't mean to go on a religion rant, but don't you just wish that the busybody fundamentalists had one-tenth of one percent of the care for foreign adults who speak a different language than they do for the unborn fetuses within their own shores?
I mean, that's just astounding.
Absolutely.
These are not people who are out there marching and protesting against the mass destruction of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghanis.
They're adults, for heaven's sakes.
What about your compassion for their lives as opposed to, well, we've got to, but of course it comes back to the fact that in most cultures, infants are a resource, whereas foreigners are a threat.
It's got nothing to do with ethics.
It's just age-old tribalism where, of course, you don't want women to have abortions if you're in a particular religion because the kid will be someone who will adhere to that religion and will then have kids of their own.
So it's easier to indoctrinate the young than it is to convert others.
So others are expendable and the young must be kept.
And if the woman gives up the kid for adoption, then it means it's going to be raised by somebody else who's in the same faith.
So that also expands the faith.
I mean, it's all to do with the expansion of irrational doctrine.
It has nothing to do with any ethics that I can imagine whatsoever.
Right, but the way it's sold is like it's such a holy thing, and they're so concerned about these bunch of cells that haven't really formed into a child yet.
Let's be honest. In the first stages of conception, we can argue about when life starts or not, but a woman should always have control over her own body.
I think we can all agree on that.
Yeah, and I would...
Yeah, I know. I think that's right.
I mean, you're right. It's a gray area, and there's lots of hairs to be split.
But, I mean, that happens. When does a child become an adult?
That's a gray area, too.
We find ways to navigate and negotiate that within society.
You know, it is tragic.
I mean, the number of abortions is truly tragic.
And I think, I mean, every reasonable man and woman does not want women to go through that experience.
I think it harms the woman.
I think it is difficult to, I mean, some women I've talked to about it, you know, every...
Quote, birthday, you know, they still feel melancholic and it's a difficult and dangerous thing to go through and it would be rather, everybody would rather there be less of it, but let's deal with this as an intelligent society rather than just imagining that we just introduce another gun in the room and everything just gets hunky-dory.
I mean, it's just, it's nonsense, but this is the addiction we have, you know?
I think for a lot of women, like myself, the thing is, is like when you look down the roads at laws that were passed, so it starts out as a personhood bill and You know, they have to have this ultrasound.
And next thing you know, they're going to be accusing women of trying to miscarry on purpose.
And, you know, what does a frustration look like for a woman who can't be trusted with her own body?
I mean, really, I mean, how far down the rabbit hole are we going to go?
And I think when you look at it that way, you have to say, you know, even though...
I'm not saying that I'm...
You know, they make it sound like you're, you know, against life if you're pro-choice.
What I'm pro-choice is that each person has control over their own life and that we start to form ways to support women who have to make these decisions so they don't feel hopeless, they don't feel like they're on their own, and create a network of people who care about people.
And help them rather than, you know, give them an option to, you know, kill a possible baby or, you know, be a murderer or, you know, or have a baby that they feel that they can't raise, you know.
And part of that is the pressure in our society to keep up with culture and all these, you know, weird things that people put so much emphasis on that actually have nothing to do with what life is really about, in my opinion.
You know, you get trapped in that mindset, you know?
You want to be young and have fun, and you don't think about the long-term effect of a decision like that, I think, especially when you're young.
Yeah, and I will believe people more when they care about the unborn when they start dealing with the national debt, because the national debt, of course, is selling off the unborn to whoever, you know, anybody in the world who can hand you a buck to bribe your voters with, you'll sell off the unborn.
So when people stop enslaving the unborn through national debt, then I'll start listening to their concern about the fetus.
Right. I agree.
But, you know, the reason I brought that up is because I was saying that often it feels like a new inquisition.
Well, this is the great tragedy and horror, really, of statism, which is the idea that, oh, we've got a problem, let's pass a law.
You know, that old saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Oh, we've got a problem, let's pass a law.
Well, we don't like these drug users.
Okay, let's pass Well, we feel that children aren't being well-educated.
Let's pass another law! You know, I don't like this prostitution soliciting down the street.
Let's pass another law!
And I have problems with abortion.
Let's pass another law!
And it's just retarded.
I mean, it's tragic and retarded.
Well, I shouldn't say nobody, that's an exaggeration.
Very, very few people are intelligently looking at root causes, at root causes, and saying, let's deal with the problem at the source.
Let's not deal with the manifestation of the problem through pointing guns at people.
Let's try and figure out the true, genuine, and deep socioeconomic causes of these things and deal with that.
But that's asking a lot, and it seems to be too much from just about everyone educated by the state to say, let's not use the state for everything.
Right. And it is difficult.
I mean, I spend a lot of time just trying to even keep up with the things that are going on right now, let alone the history of what's happened and how things got to where they are.
And for someone who wasn't able to attend higher ed and dropped out of school, I can tell you it has been very difficult to make hide in our hair and to establish what I truly believe based on fact, as I can prove it to myself.
Which seems to be something that's very hard for people to do, is to find something that's legitimate.
If we had a very clear vision of what the truth was, and we didn't feel so deluded from it, or we weren't so deluded from it, it's not easy to grasp.
And it's very difficult for someone with a lower IQ or someone who didn't get much education to put it all together in terms of a way they can apply it in their lives or in their beliefs.
Well, yeah, and I think what is so awful is when you begin to truly educate yourself, which is really the only way that you can get educated these days, I think.
When you begin to truly educate yourself, don't you get such a terrible sense of what a great loss you've experienced, of what a great distraction you were subjected to during 10 or 12 years of What a gaping, smoking hole at the center of your brain there is where there should be your reasoning centers, your knowledge centers, your compassion centers, your thirst and drive for facts and evidence centers.
How much gets taken from us?
I mean, I came out of school Like a cripple, like a guy in a wheelchair with wasted legs.
It took me years of mental rehab to even begin to walk mentally again.
And, you know, you say, well, people come out of school and they don't have much knowledge and all.
That's very true. But, damn, that's not accidental.
And it's so tragic and it's so unnecessary.
There's so much that could be done in those 12 years.
It's just not... Yeah, and I agree with you.
I've seen children that are homeschooled.
You know, I know a lot of parents, when I lived in North Carolina and Charlotte, homeschooling was, you know, major.
One parent stayed home, one parent went to work, and I worked with a lot of those parents, and, you know, they were very happy having their children at home.
Something I hear all the time is, kids won't be social if they're, you know, homeschooled.
Yeah, well, I think you saw in Ohio just how great that socializing is, right?
No. You won't be threatened with medication if you don't obey the teacher and behave.
You won't be threatened with beatings.
You won't be threatened with shakedowns for your lunch money.
That's what we need. It's like saying, well, if I send my kid to prison, they're going to get great social skills.
No, they'll get great survival skills, but we don't want that.
Yeah, I have to tell you, I work for a school.
It's an alternative school.
And I was sort of taken aback when I went on a tour of the actual school because I work in the administration building and I noticed that there were padded rooms.
And I was like, I sort of like had to stop a second and say, you know, what are they doing?
You know, why are they here? And the girl replied to me that, you know, there are just some kids that can't be controlled and so a lot of times they have to put them in there.
And we have a cop on duty full time.
At the school, I mean, you know, gone and everything.
Well, did you hear about this?
I'm sorry, go ahead. No, no, I just, it still bothers me.
You know, I went by there the other day, I was taking a new employee on a tour, and I heard a little kid, and he was in one of those padded rooms, and he was yelling, shithead, or something.
But it just, it seems outrageous to me.
You know, like, I don't see this stuff regularly.
I don't know what goes on or why.
I have no idea what the situation was, but it just seems so horrifying to me that our institutions include padded rooms for kids.
Right. It's weird.
When I was a kid, we had kids who would regularly beat their heads against walls, run up and down, threaten.
I was not in a particularly bad section of town.
It was scary.
There were some dangerous kids.
You really, really had to watch out.
Wasn't there some 11-year-old A girl who just beat up a 10-year-old girl.
She got a blood clot in her brain and died.
Now she's being charged with a homicide.
It is terrifying.
And of course, the teachers, a lot of them are pretty bad.
Some commentators have pointed out, you know, we get all fussed as we should be morally horrified at the sexual abuse of kids by priests, but of course sexual abuse of kids by teachers is far more common in the public school system and perhaps even in the private school system, I'm not sure.
But it is absolutely wretched.
And of course, who can deal with root causes in these kinds of issues?
Why are the kids that upset?
Nobody wants to confront the parents because the parents can make your life difficult if you do.
And so we just put a band-aid over the symptoms.
We lock the kids up. We drug them because the kids are the most vulnerable.
They have the least power.
And so they're the ones whose interests must constantly be sacrificed.
As the head of an American teachers' union said, the moment that kids stop paying union dues, I'll stop representing the interests of kids.
And this is the reality, that the kids are basically hostages that are held by people in order to extract more concessions from the involuntary...
I mean, it's a system you could not design it worse.
If you sat down, you know, with Hitler on one shoulder and Stalin on the other whispering in your ear, you simply could not design a system that would be worse for children, you know, outside of feudalism.
And its chance for changing before something radical happens is virtually nil.
So, I just, you know, I think, you know, if anyone can swing it at all, Find a way to get your kids out.
I mean, it's, you know, your kids will thank you later.
And as this knowledge spreads wider and wider, of course, kids are going to look to the parents and say, you put me in there?
You kept me in there?
Are you kidding me? That was the end of my rant, so...
I'm out of rant.
I must refuel. I'm sorry.
Okay, well, you know, I... It's something that I would like to talk to you again sometime, you know, maybe, you know, if you just want to come on or you can always submit pieces too to the show, Stefan, because I think a lot of your message is so important to people and if they just take the time to listen to it and how much sense that it makes and, you know, how a kid feels growing up is their reality.
Regardless of the circumstances, if they feel, you know, they're not being listened to or they don't matter or, you Nobody cares about them.
It has such a huge effect on who they are going forward in life in so many ways.
I can't even put into words.
I've listened to so much of your stuff, but we could just go on and on and on because there's so many important things that you cover in your work.
I hope soon you'll have a national show in America.
Well, I wouldn't hold my breath for an atheist anarchist to get a hold of any particular...
I've been on TV a couple of times, but...
Why not? What are Jersey Shore?
They're anarchist atheists, aren't they?
I mean, what are they representing? Ha!
Yes, but I think that's simply because they can't pronounce the word democracy in theism.
So I don't know if that's necessarily, you know, reasoned out as opposed to just – it may be a little bit over their mental horizon, these concepts.
But no, I wouldn't hold my breath and I don't think I would even want that particularly.
I really do like the freedom that comes with – What I do.
I mean, I am not responsible to advertisers.
I have no bosses. I am responsible to my listeners and to the people I work with like you.
And that's about it.
And that gives me a flexibility and a groundedness in a place where I can broadcast hopefully enough passion and reason to make a slight dent in the idiocy of the world.
And that works really well for me.
So I don't think that there's any particular drive or desire that I would have for any of that kind of exposure.
Well, just your message, you know, is so necessary in everybody's dialogue to just at least consider some of your, you know, some of the things that you bring to the table anyway.
And so we love you and I love you on Free Domain Radio.
And so I hope that your passion never changes.
I wouldn't want anything to derail that.
Well, I don't see that happening.
And just in case this goes out, well, when this goes out, to my listeners as well, do you want to mention your show and how people can tune in?
Oh, yeah. You know, you can call in 760-454-8841.
You can submit comments at Occupy Radio Group at gmail.com.
And you can call in any time.
Stefan's here for another 13 minutes.
So if you have something you'd like to talk to him about, please call.
I did have one listener who wanted to know what you thought of the Austrian economy, I think he said.
Oh, he means Austrian economics?
Yeah. I like it.
I mean, as an outside amateur looking into the field, I think that it's very compelling.
The Austrian economics is basically...
I hesitate to categorize this in any fundamental way because I'm not an economist, of course, but my understanding of it is it's fundamentally anarchist economics.
Here's how the world should interact in a purely voluntary way.
So sort of fundamental principle of certainly Austrian economics is if there's a voluntary exchange between two individuals, Then that is for the perceived benefit of both.
So if you have five bucks and I have a pen and I want your five bucks more than I want my pen and you want my pen more than you want your five bucks, then we exchange and we're happy.
So the free exchange, free trade is to the benefit of both parties.
That's by definition, really.
They also say that inflation is not just Austria, and this comes out of Hayek as well, but inflation is always, always and everywhere and forever a monetary phenomenon.
So a general price increase, what we call inflation, is not an inflation.
Inflation doesn't actually refer to the prices.
That's just an effect.
Inflation refers to the fact that people are printing whack loads of crap money.
They've got the monopoly printing presses going over time 24-7.
And it's the resulting inflation in the money supply that devalues the value of each dollar and thus results in increases in prices at the checkout counter and so on.
Thank you.
I think those things are fantastic.
I mean, I think they really accurately understand things.
The Austrians have an explanation of the business cycle, which is fantastic and seems to me, from what I've read, to be pretty bulletproof.
So they basically say you get an inflation in the money supply that sends signals that people want to buy a bunch of stuff because they've got a bunch of money and they're spending it and they're buying stuff.
And so all the businesses in the world go, ooh, I'd better build another factory.
Ooh, I'd better expand production.
I need more cars.
So they invest in all these capital goods.
The capital goods are like building a factory rather than selling a car.
It's not to the consumer. It's business to business.
And then what happens is there's a crash because it's all illusory.
It's not real money. It's just paper money.
It's just fiat currency.
And so then there's a crash in demand at the consumer level, and everyone's like, oh, crap!
You know, we've got too much capital investment.
And then they claw back and so on, and then there's a crash.
And then the government goes, oh no, there's a crash.
And so they have to start printing more money.
And it's a really great explanation.
It seems to be borne up by the evidence very well.
And so they've got a great explanation of the business cycle.
They really are incredibly critical of fiat currency.
All fiat currencies have a lifetime expectancy in the long run of pretty much zero worth.
There is almost 4,000 of them that have collapsed over the course of history.
So the Austrians, I think, they really are free trade.
They really are private currency or gold.
Governments should not be mucking around with money.
And they are fantastic at explaining why they're the business cycle.
They were the ones who were right about the reasons for the Great Depression.
The reasons for the Great Depression were… The government inflated the money supply by a third throughout the 20s, produced a boom, and then they cut catastrophically the money supply, which caused a crash, and then they passed all these laws, raised taxes, imposed tariffs, which dragged on the Depression, and then they finally got rid of all of this crap at the end of the Second World War, and then everyone said, oh, the government saved us from capitalism, and only war saved us from the Depression.
It's all nonsense. So they were right about all of that.
And people who want to read more about this stuff, you know, Ludwig von Mises, you can get him at mises.org.
It's all free. You can get great books by Marie Rothbard and other of the Austrian school.
So I think the Austrian economics is fantastic.
It's basically how voluntary free market exchanges occur in the absence of the state.
I'm not trying to say that all Austrian economies are anarchists.
I don't believe that's true.
but it's about as close to anarchic economics as I can imagine in any kind of mainstream environment.
So I would highly, highly recommend that people read it.
Not because you can change the Federal Reserve through reading it.
It's just really fascinating to read about how much research has been done into the crap that is killing us as a society and how obvious it has been.
Mises started writing in the 1920s.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Ooh, you got these newsletters 20 years ago.
It's because asking Ron Paul an intelligent question requires that you read more than a fuzzy-headed press bio, but you actually have to do some research.
And the same thing is true of Austrian economics.
Yes. And I will definitely have to look into that because it sounds really intriguing.
I really wasn't aware of it.
So call our listener.
I hope that answers any of your questions you may have had.
You can still call in. I would like to just say, Stefan Molyneux is the host of FreeDomainRadio.com, and he has a host of free books there for people who are interested in the things that he talks about.
If you are looking for more information, he has podcasts, videos, you know, you name it, and Stefan has pretty much done it, blogger, essayist, he does it all.
It's been so exciting having you on the show tonight, and I just wanted to do something with you that I've never done before, and I'm thinking about making it a staple on the show.
There's five things to me that I would like to ask people when they call in, and you can either pass on it or make a quick comment, whatever you want.
So, you probably are familiar with Terrence McKenna.
Ryder? Terence McKenna was a botanist and a philosopher, and he used a lot of psychedelics.
Yes, I'm not an expert, of course.
I've heard of him, yeah. Okay, well, have you heard of his Time Wave Zero theory?
No. Okay, so then I won't ask you what you think of it, then.
What do you think might happen, if anything, on December 21st, 2012?
Well, it'll be a day like every other.
The Mayan thing, you mean? I mean, there seems to be a lot of speculation that some event will take place on that date.
And I was wondering if you had any sense or feeling, or based on the research you've done, if there's any significance to the Mayan calendar ending on that day, or if it's just a coincidence.
No, I think it's just a coincidence.
I'm old enough now to have been through probably a dozen end-of-the-world scares, so I'm not going to...
I'm going to brush my teeth the night before, if that helps.
Excellent. Do you have any thoughts on Agenda 21 and if it's having any effect on our economy and our world?
I'm not familiar enough with Agenda 21.
It's a New World Order thing, if I understand it right.
I'm not familiar enough with it to comment.
Okay. What do you think about David Icke?
And, you know, I love some of the things that David Icke says, but the lizard portion of his theory sort of throws me off.
And I just wonder what people think of that, because he's such an intelligent man.
And a lot of things he says are very wise.
But I really wish I really wish that we were ruled by lizard people.
I think that would be fantastic because getting people to see evil is really hard because evil is very subtle.
Evil is very friendly.
Evil is very charismatic.
Evil is very silver-tongued.
Evil... Evil says that it wants to help you.
Evil says that it wants to make the world a better place.
And evil appeals to your desire for short-term solutions that ensnare you in the long run.
The devil is not brimstone.
The devil is Chanel No.
5 and a low-cut little black dress.
And so if there were lizard people and that's how we could identify evil rulers and masters, That would be great!
Because then we just need to, I don't know, shoot and try and figure out their body heat or something.
This was from Infrared Visor.
We could find out if they're lizards or not, and then we'd know who we had to fight.
Whereas trying to get people to understand the evil that is around them and how to identify it and what to do about it from a philosophical standpoint is really hard.
So if... They had some scaly skin and claws and, you know, you could find their eyes in particular stop-motion photography.
That would be huge.
That would be great and it would make my job so much easier.
It's just not true. Yeah, I agree that it's not true.
They did have a great TV show about that when I was younger called B for Victory and the whole premise was that there were lizards from outer space basically parading around as regular human beings and Underneath there were lizards that ate people.
Right, right. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm more of a Dalek Doctor Who guy because I'm that old.
But yeah, I mean, it's the same kind of thing.
It's the idea. I mean, it's the idea that the rulers are inhuman and cold-blooded.
Well, I agree.
I just don't. I mean, that's a metaphor.
We can say that they're cold-blooded.
That doesn't mean that they give birth through eggs and you can pull their tails off and they'll regrow.
That's just a metaphor. Wow.
Maybe I should have taken it as a metaphor, because when I actually heard that come out of his mouth at one point, the first time I heard it, everything else I heard from him, I had to start questioning it.
But a lot of other things that he said made a whole lot of sense to me about how people have to pull away from the system, that you have to stop contributing to the hierarchy, because we're more of the people, the 99%, and we're holding up the 1%, and all we really need to do is just walk away from this idea that We need institutions and these systems so that we can stay alive and healthy and that they have our best interest at heart, you know, when we have all evidence to the contrary.
Yeah, you know, I've had this happen a number of times.
Hopefully it hasn't happened to you much listening to me.
You know, you find someone and you go, wow, that man, that woman, they can really think.
Wow, that's really intriguing.
That's really great. What a great observation.
That person has really considered things.
Wow, that's good evidence. I never heard that before.
And you're trundling along and you're trundling along.
And part of me now is like, please don't be crazy in the next video.
Please don't be crazy in the next video.
I cross my fingers, which is, of course, a crazy thing to do because it's not rational.
But I'm like... Oh, I like you so much.
Please don't be mad. You know, it's like if you're at a party, you know, you see someone that you find really attractive and you kind of go over, you know, whether it's a man or a woman or whatever, something in between.
You go over and you're like, wow, you know, I really find you physically attractive.
Please don't be insane because that would be a real drag.
And I sort of find the same thing.
So when I start listening to people, you know, I was reading a John Taylor Gatto book and he was like, oh, this is great.
He's really thought about this stuff.
And he's like, we should have national service for young people.
It's like, oh, he just went off the deep bed.
Oh, what a shame!
He was so attractive.
I love the cut of his jib, but then he just turned out to be a bit barking lunatic, and that's a real shame.
It happened a little bit with objectivism behind Rand as well, and I sort of found out some about the sort of personal stuff that went on.
It's like, oh, she's great!
Dang, she was addicted to speed for 30 years.
She had an affair with a guy who she met when he was very young.
Oh, what a shame.
I'm always looking for that wobbly bridge and the next step that forced you into the lava of nuttiness.
I just wanted to mention that.
Excellent. Stefan, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you this evening.
I hope you'll call back whenever you feel like it or we can plan for you to call in.
And again, Stefan Molyneux, host of FreedomainRadio.com.
I will list links on my Facebook page.
We'll make them available with the show in the description notes.
And once again, Stefan, thank you so much.
Well, thank you. And just mention your name again for my listeners.
The name of your show? Oh, it's Occupy Radio.
And we're on every night at 10 p.m.
I'm the host on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
We have We have Sean, who is the host on Sunday and Monday, Brendan on Wednesday, and Ken on Friday and Saturday.
So, Occupy Radio, 10 o'clock every night.
Please call in, share your occupation, whatever's going on, or whatever you want to talk about.
Occupy, your mind.
Yeah, and they can find the show itself.
If they want the web address, it's at blogtalkradio.com slash Occupy Media Group is where they can find that.
Oh, I appreciate that. I'll put that on a link as well.
Well, thanks so much for the invitation.
It was a real pleasure, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.
I did. Thank you very much.
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