July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Good morning, everybody. 10 o'clock in the AM on the Pinch Punch, first of the month, September 1st, 2013. | |
| Hope you're doing very well. Don't forget, next week, it's the Bowtie Only Show with the inestimable head of laissez-faire books. | |
| Books that say, leave me alone, don't take me from the shelf, for heaven's sake, don't listen to me. | |
| And we're going to chat about... | |
| I mean, Jeffrey's an expert in a wide variety of topics and a real expert, unlike the faked one, say, speaking now. | |
| But we're going to talk about intellectual property, which I think is a very interesting and hot topic for most of us, and also the road to a free society. | |
| Jeffrey is all kinds of optimistic. | |
| In fact, if you are listening to Jeffrey particularly live, the important thing Is to put a huge amount of SPF 9 million on your face because his enthusiasm may give you a radiation burn. | |
| So that's Jeffrey Tucker. | |
| We'll be co-hosting next week. And if you want to send in your questions for Jeffrey Tucker, then you can email mailbag, M-A-I-L, not the other one, mailbag at freedomainradio.com. | |
| And I don't think we have any other staggering news. | |
| I just did a really good listener mailbag that I hope you'll check out, dealing with the most common objections to a free society. | |
| And I've got some good interviews coming up. | |
| Oh, that's right. | |
| For people who are, you know, gold donators or above, we're going to send out the first section of my book on parenting. | |
| And that comes with a free set of diapers made out of hemp, which I believe is the number one choice of diapers for a significant portion of my listeners, even those who don't have children for some reason. | |
| And so you get the first section of my book. | |
| We're going to be sending it out ongoing. | |
| And as always, I really, really welcome your feedback to that. | |
| Looking forward to getting your feedback. | |
| I mean, if you're a parent, please send me your feedback as well. | |
| I certainly don't claim to have a monopoly on... | |
| The best parenting on the planet. | |
| So feel free to send me back your stories, your anecdotes, and your corrections, and I would love to incorporate them into the book. | |
| Make it a collective project. | |
| Steal your work and make massive amounts of money, which is obviously why I want to have Jeff Tucker on next week to dismiss the idea of intellectual property. | |
| So let's move on with the callers. | |
| FDRURL.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show and keep us free of advertising. | |
| Now, I mean, I'm a free market guy, so I don't mind advertising. | |
| Advertising is a fine way to get people paying for things that other people don't want to pay for, but it's just not for me. | |
| It's just not for me. You know, once you get advertising, then what happens is you just begin to think about your advertisers to some degree and your listeners to some less degree. | |
| Basically, when you're an advertiser, Your fundamental job, if you sort of buy your job, you mean what you get paid for. | |
| Your fundamental job when you have advertising is to deliver audience members to your advertisers. | |
| That is your fundamental job because they're paying the bills. | |
| To deliver audience members to your advertisers is your fundamental job. | |
| And therefore, of course, if anybody wants to do you harm, and you saw this, of course, with Rush Limbaugh and other people, they simply attack the source of your revenue, which is You're advertisers. | |
| I don't want to focus really on the advertisers. | |
| I don't want to say stuff thinking about, ooh, how are the advertisers going to feel? | |
| Or if some really controversial topic comes up, ooh, how do the advertisers feel about this? | |
| But since people respond to incentives, it's sort of inevitable that that would happen. | |
| I really like staying focused on you, the listener. | |
| I stay focused in such a way that it's almost eerie. | |
| I stay focused in a way like I don't blink, like my head slowly rises outside your bathroom window. | |
| My fingers come out of your shower head. | |
| That's how I stay focused on your listeners, in a really pervasive, quasi-legal kind of way. | |
| And I hope that you don't mind that intrusion. | |
| I hope you find it deeply exciting. | |
| Yes, I am, in fact, only wearing a bow tie. | |
| So, Mike, with that shocking visual image deeply embedded, perhaps irrevocably in the listener's psyche, could we bring up the first caller? | |
| Alright, heading into the call. | |
| I'm calling him via phone. His name is Jack. | |
| Jack, I think I had you off quite a bit when I was a teenager. | |
| Hello. Hello, are you Jack? | |
| I'm guessing not. Yes. | |
| You are Jack. No, this is Jack. | |
| Yes, my voice just sounds weird right now because I'm sick. | |
| Oh, okay. Fantastic. | |
| Well, Jack, are you sick with estrogen? | |
| No, I'm just kidding. What's on your mind, my friend? | |
| Thanks. Well, I was just going to tell a bit of background, and I was going to ask a question. | |
| Sure, go ahead. Just try and keep the background brief, if you can. | |
| Yeah, it'll be brief. | |
| So, I'm a recent high school dropout, and I'm 18, and I also moved out of my parents' home early, about 10 months ago. | |
| And so, I have my friends at my high school. | |
| I went to school in an upper-class district, and they're kind of rich. | |
| Book smart, really pro-government, pro-school, very socialist, and then there are my friends at my apartment building who, they work jobs, live in the real world, kind of street smart like myself, and they're really not into the government. | |
| They really don't buy the whole hype, the status hype, and we all kind of know school didn't really do anything for us. | |
| I remember in one of your videos you had said the good news about the financial collapse as it's coming up is that when it happens, we'll kind of be free of the government and volunteerism will rise up naturally, but the government isn't natural. | |
| And I'm just thinking that when I see my friends at my high school who are very, very statist, probably going to go to college, probably never going to get that street smarts, I'm wondering, like, how are we going to recover from this, the propaganda that the schools kind of instilled? | |
| Like, how are we going to recover from our past political mistakes and actually learn from them? | |
| And what can the volunteer community do to ensure that? | |
| That's a great question. | |
| And you know that people generally tend to praise the paycheck, right? | |
| People generally praise... Wherever you get your money from, That is what you praise. | |
| And that's really, really important to understand. | |
| So people who get their money from the government now, or who get their income or status from the government, well, golly gee, don't they tend to praise the government? | |
| Isn't that shocking and remarkable? | |
| Just... How that happens. | |
| I mean, and this is not just the poor. | |
| Obviously, the people who get, you know, disability benefits and welfare and indoctrinating, babysitting, known as public schools and all that kind of stuff, they're going to praise the state, of course. | |
| Academics who get tenure from government contracts, academics who get all of the children of the corn, Camaro eyes like a high beam, staring at them in worshipful submission, those vainglorious rat bastards, they also love The state, because the state gives them the power to grant degrees and the state reinforces this can't-get-fired 10-year contract and so on. | |
| And so they rely on the state. | |
| Economists, the vast majority of economists end up employed by the state or they end up as voodoo economists, not in the Reagan sense, but in the free market sense, in that they're trying to read the tea leaves of what the state is going to do and provide that to the marketplace. | |
| And so the economists generally are Really clustered around the state which is why they tend to be a little bit more on the left and the media of course generally focuses on those with a heck of a lot more free time than people who work for a living and so people with a lot more free time People are those who are embedded in the state in one form or another. | |
| Again, I'm not just talking about the poor, though certainly daytime TV would focus on people who are home during the day, in other words, not working, and they could be single moms, or they could be moms in a marriage, just staying home taking the kids, but then you shouldn't have TV on all day, you certainly shouldn't be focusing on it. | |
| So, media, with advertising, tends to focus on people who have the time to consume it, and those people tend to be Somewhat subsidized, if not completely subsidized by the state and people who are old, social security recipients and so on. | |
| So, to me, when somebody professes an ideology, all I do is I say, well, where's your paycheck? | |
| Who's paying you? | |
| Who's your daddy? Who's your daddy? | |
| And, you know, 19 times out of 20, you'll find that it's the state and one time out of 20, you'll find that people are lying. | |
| So, The one thing is that you really can't trump self-interest with ideology, right? | |
| So immediate self-interest, the government is paying me, the government is giving me food stamps, I'm in the military-industrial complex, I'm a veteran, whatever it is. | |
| Whoever is paying you, I have, you know, I'm 300 pounds, I'm a government worker, and I really, really desperately need my health care benefits because I'm on 19 medications a day. | |
| Ideology follows self-interest, and therefore self-interest trumps ideology, right? | |
| I mean, the wake, right, the churning water follows the boat. | |
| The wake follows the boat. | |
| And moving the wake does not change the direction of the boat because the wake is an effect of the boat, like a shadow is an effect of a statue on a sunny day. | |
| And so ideology doesn't change self-interest. | |
| Ideology is generated to cover up negative or destructive or Particularly parasitical self-interest. | |
| You make up an ideology. You take your money from the state, you make up an ideology like the state is good. | |
| The state is fine. The state is generosity. | |
| The state is charity. The state is good. | |
| And I earned it. I deserve it. | |
| I was watching a back and forth on Facebook the other day. | |
| Someone had posted something about government unions. | |
| I said, and this guy was basically saying, well, look, I paid into this system and I'm owed that money back. | |
| This is a contract. This is blah, blah, blah. | |
| You know, To which I would say, well, who signed the contract? | |
| Did I sign the contract to give you all these benefits? | |
| Well, no. I vociferously would oppose these kinds of things. | |
| I don't sign those contracts at all. | |
| And I paid into it. | |
| Well, so what? That's like saying, well, I put money down on the blackjack table at the casino, so I'm owed a pension for the rest of my life. | |
| The idea that you can escape risk through violence simply postpones and exacerbates the risk. | |
| Saying you can escape risk through violence is like saying you can escape the negative effects of smoking by having another cigarette, which is kind of true in the short run because you don't have to go through the pain of withdrawal. | |
| But when the government can't pay its beneficiaries, when the government runs out or inflation runs up, runs out of money or the inflation runs up, Then people will turn against the government. | |
| I mean, they'll try their very best, right? | |
| They'll storm and they'll protest. | |
| And, you know, one of the reasons why the government is not cutting benefits at the moment is because the ideological structure is not in place to redefine the dependent classes as the parasitical classes. | |
| But I just did an hour and a half long podcast on the coming fall of the Western economies where I go into this in more detail, so I won't do it here. | |
| But when the government can't pay its dependents, then Those dependents will, lo and behold, change their view of the government because they'll obviously try to find someone else or something else to attach to. | |
| You know, like, I mean, if a mora detaches itself from one shark because the shark dies or something or gets fished, have its fins cut off and thrown away, If a remora, this little sucker fish that go under the jaws of a shark and eat scraps, if the shark dies, the remora doesn't just suddenly say, well, that's it, I'm going to be independent. | |
| They'll go and try and find another dependent. | |
| And they'll do that by, you know, holding up their need and making their need radioactively strong. | |
| And it's hard to resist that because, you know, people are kind of charitable in a lot of ways. | |
| But they'll try and desperately find... | |
| Something else to attach to? | |
| And if they can't, then there will be a deep sigh, and they'll say, well, I guess the gig is up, and they'll go and get work. | |
| Now, once they go and get work in an honorable way, then they will then be dependent upon the free market, or at least what's left of it at that point, which will probably be more than what's now. | |
| And once they're dependent on the free market, oh, once you know it, they'll suddenly become quite big fans of the free market. | |
| It's not left versus right. | |
| It's not free market versus socialism and all that. | |
| It's just you follow your master. | |
| You follow whoever pays the piper calls the tune in the people's heads who are dancing as well. | |
| And whoever pays you tells you what to do. | |
| And you won't be surprised if people who work at a Ford plant think Fords, the acronym of which used to be found on Road Dead, but people who work at a Ford plant probably think that Fords are really great cars. | |
| And, you know, people who, obviously people who live in a particular town think that their sports team is A number one, baby. | |
| So once the government can't pay off the conscience, can't pay off the ideologies, can't buy the ideals of the dependent classes, I mean, geez, it's not that surprising. | |
| You say privatize the Fed, so many economists come out and say that's terrible, but that's because they're paid by the Fed or they're paid to read the tea leaves of what the Fed might do. | |
| Sigh. Anyway, so once you change how people are paid, you change what they think and how they think, or rather how they don't think, but just pretend to think, to follow their own self-interest. | |
| And you can see this with you, right? | |
| I mean, you're out there among people working for a living, and they really don't give much of a rat's ass about the state. | |
| I mean, that sticker shock when you have your first job where your taxes get deducted from source, and you feel like... | |
| You know, a bum living under a fountain hoping to catch spirit change falling through the grates when people throw it in to make a wish. | |
| They just happen to experience that sticker shock and they live in a state of dependence upon the school and upon their parents and so they worship the state because they're on the receiving end of benefits. | |
| And then when they go out and get a real job, if they do, hopefully they might, then they will be on the paying end and suddenly their ideology We'll change, not because of any reason to argument, but just to follow their own self-interest. | |
| Does that help at all? Yeah, that actually makes perfect sense. | |
| Really simplified it. Wow, that's shockingly concise. | |
| Well, listen, best of luck. | |
| Are you going to try and get your GED, or what are you going to do about your education? | |
| Well, I'm going to give my GED to get it out of the way, but I'm really looking to become self-employed. | |
| I write and I compose music. | |
| Oh, fantastic. Well, if you ever want to send me anything, I'd be happy to help publish it on Facebook or you can use the message board to try and get your work out there. | |
| And good for you. I mean, if you can work to be self-employed. | |
| I don't believe that Freddie Mercury ever went to composing school. | |
| What he did was, you know, they just practiced for years and he lived in a crappy little room with mold on the walls while they were trying to make their big hit. | |
| So I hope that you'll stick with it. | |
| Music is one of the most beautiful parts and most enjoyable parts of life. | |
| So good for you. | |
| And yeah, if you want to send me anything you've composed, I'd love to help you get the word out. | |
| Yeah, I'll do that. | |
| That's great. All right. | |
| You can send it to operations at freedomainradio.com. | |
| Okay. All right. | |
| Thanks, man. Appreciate it. | |
| And I hope that you feel better soon. | |
| I know you said you were a little under the weather, so I hope you feel better soon. | |
| Yeah. All right, take care. | |
| And who do we have next, Mike? All right, Peter, you're up next. | |
| All right. I kind of wanted to ask you about something that I haven't really seen you talk about very much. | |
| I searched it up on YouTube. | |
| The only thing I could find that really related to it was something, it was like six years ago, that had to do with Prop 8. | |
| Nothing really relevant to the discussion in recent development, but... | |
| It's sort of... What I really want to know is your position sort of on government and marriage. | |
| Because to me, I have gay people close to me in my life, and they're always talking about how it's an equal rights issue. | |
| But to me, marriage has never really been a right by definition. | |
| It's more of a contract. | |
| And a right is something that has to be provided to you, if I'm correct. | |
| So... And the only way to provide a marriage would be to force somebody to marry you, which would be like an arranged marriage. | |
| And I'm sure that's not what they're advocating for. | |
| But to me, it's more about privileges and the government giving people things that come at the expense of others. | |
| And I just kind of want to get a rundown of what you think about that. | |
| Well, I mean, as far as gay marriage goes, I mean, the fact that the state is involved is fundamentally the issue. | |
| And it's not even about whether the state is involved in licensing. | |
| The reason why a lot of gay people, of course, are interested in marriage is because of the laws around it. | |
| So, for instance, in the US, spousal benefits and pension schemes and so on, they only go to the spouse. | |
| So you have to be able to get married to get those things. | |
| So there's lots of laws in the status system that Only apply to marriage. | |
| And of course, gay people are saying, well, why do straight people get these benefits and gays don't? | |
| And that's a perfectly fair and valid question. | |
| There is no moral content to homosexuality, right? | |
| It's neither a positive nor a negative. | |
| There is moral content to homophobia, right? | |
| Which is obviously just another kind of bigotry, a kind of tribalism, and comes directly from It certainly doesn't come from science. | |
| Science would be interested in homosexuality insofar as it provides a challenge to the gene reproduction theory. | |
| My own particular two cents on it is that homosexuality most likely developed for two reasons. | |
| One is war. And the second is long-term hunting parties, right? | |
| So when you are asking people to go to war, the stronger bonds they have with their fellow soldiers, the better warriors they're going to be. | |
| And straight soldiers have a more difficult time leaving wife and children behind, whereas gay soldiers would be more likely to bond with each other and to be happy to go and live with other men, you know, far away from the prying eyes of the elders or whatever. | |
| In the same way that I view monks, you know, basically the monasteries were like the extremely slow-moving gay bars of the Middle Ages. | |
| And also long-term hunting parties, if you say, well, we have to go and follow this herd for two months, straight guys are going to want to stay home and have sex, whereas, you know, gay guys can go off and hunt and have sex with each other if they find each other attractive and all that kind of stuff. | |
| And this would be then beneficial to the genes of the tribe as a whole. | |
| I'd say, wow, what about the genes of the... | |
| The gay people, well, they're shared by a lot of people, right? | |
| And this kind of sacrifice is very common. | |
| I mean, you just have to watch... | |
| Oh, what was that? | |
| That penguin movie that was narrated by Morgan Freeman. | |
| And you can see the amount of sacrifice. | |
| Do you remember what that was called? I can't remember for now. | |
| Something like The Farce of the Penguins, I think. | |
| Wasn't that what it was? Hot Penguins on Ice? | |
| I can't remember. Anyway, so... | |
| Lots of homosexuals taking jobs on cruise lines. | |
| I think when homosexuals say they're going cruising, it's not quite what they mean. | |
| Sorry, that's just a comment from the chat windows. | |
| So, I mean, there's no moral content to homosexuality, and certainly some of the most ferocious warriors in the ancient world were gay. | |
| I mean, just look at some of the Spartan, ancient Greeks and so on, won a whole empire. | |
| And homosexuality was very prevalent in the British Navy. | |
| One of the things that Churchill... | |
| And this later became the title of a Pogues album. | |
| He said, well, we've got to make more out of the Navy than rum, sodomy, and the lash. | |
| Rum, sodomy, and the lash. | |
| Not just a great weekend in Vegas, but also a fairly accurate way of describing the 19th century British Navy. | |
| And that's why in the Navy, you know. | |
| Anyway, so Long Voyage is a lot tougher on heterosexual men than... | |
| Gay men who can easily smuggle aboard convenient rectums simply by walking on them. | |
| So yeah, I mean, there's no moral content to homosexuality. | |
| There certainly is a moral content to homophobia. | |
| But if they want the same rights, you know, the argument from the right, from Ann Coulter and others, is to say, well, gays are not discriminated against because both heterosexuals and homosexuals are barred from Marrying the same gender, the same laws apply to both and so on, right? | |
| But I think that's a pretty specious argument. | |
| I mean, if you had argument against same gender anal sex that would only apply to homosexuals, not to heterosexuals because the heterosexuals would not be in hot pursuit of that. | |
| So I think that again, it's just the usual thing that the more you get, the more you get this kind of stuff, the more that you want to make these equal. | |
| Right. And the thing that I have a huge problem with is the fact that I think sort of the hypocrisy in the gay rights movement is that they sort of say, I'm all for them being left alone. | |
| I want them to be. I don't want the state involved in anyone's lives. | |
| When two people have a voluntary contract, it's their business. | |
| The state has no right to be involved in it whatsoever. | |
| But the thing that they say to me is like... | |
| You can't say what two consenting adults do is nobody else's business and then turn around and say we demand somebody else's seal of approval in the sense that It would demand for these benefits to be provided that I don't think government should be giving any privileges at all. | |
| It would have to come at the expense of everybody else paying for each other. | |
| In that sense, it would be more and more people living at the expense of others. | |
| To me, it reminds me of what Frederick Bastiat once said. | |
| Government is a great fiction of people living at the expense of others. | |
| then I think the millions of single people, myself included, would have to suffer from the lack of benefits that more and more married couples would receive that I myself would not receive. | |
| So I think, to me, it seems like more government intrusion instead of an addition of individual rights, if that makes sense. | |
| Well, sure. | |
| Look, it absolutely is. | |
| But, of course, if you're a gay activist, you're probably a statist. | |
| Obviously, right? | |
| I mean, but more importantly, even if you are a non-statist gay activist, you know that there's absolutely zero chance in the current environment of getting the state out of marriage. | |
| I mean, it's just too profitable. | |
| I mean, the state gets billions of dollars from marriage licenses, and the state loves marriage because the state also loves divorce in many ways, right? | |
| Because divorce creates more dependence. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. I read somewhere in Thomas Sowell's article, I'm not an expert on the legality of marriage and how that works, but I heard that when you're married, your spouse automatically owns like 50% of your property. | |
| And that seems to me like a total immoral intrusion upon somebody's individual rights to have the audacity to say that just because I have a gun to your head, that means I can take everything you own and give it to somebody else. | |
| It's completely morally despicable. | |
| Sure, it is, right? | |
| But I mean, for instance, why are politicians not talking about rising illegitimacy rates? | |
| If they really care about lower crime and all this kind of good stuff, and if they really cared about kids and the negative effects that single motherhood has on children, why aren't they talking about this stuff? | |
| I mean, why is President Obama nattering on about Trayvon Martin? | |
| When he should be saying to blacks, you know, like, fix your family. | |
| Like I did. You know, go fix your families. | |
| I mean, in the 50s, black families were astonishingly intact. | |
| Like, only 10% of black kids were growing up in fatherless homes in the 1950s. | |
| When, of course, racism was much more entrenched and widespread than it is now. | |
| And now, like, 70-75% of black kids are being born outside of wedlock. | |
| And it's just, it's terrible. | |
| Now, why is President Obama not talking about this? | |
| Well, for two reasons, of course, right? | |
| One is that he doesn't want to piss off single moms. | |
| Single moms have become a massive voting bloc, which no politician, if you, Dan Quayle in the 1990s, early 90s, I think it was, talked about a plot line in an old Candace Bergen sitcom called Murphy Brown, where she was in, I think, her early 40s, and she decided to just go and get impregnated and have a kid and raise it on her own. | |
| And he was saying, this isn't really that great. | |
| Statistically, this is really a bad idea. | |
| And it's not a good thing to be modeling. | |
| Not good behavior to be modeling. | |
| And he literally, his political career died. | |
| He became a running joke. | |
| You probably heard about all these Dan Quayle as an idiot memes. | |
| Well, not you, because you sound pretty young. | |
| But Dan Quayle just got lambasted. | |
| For all of this stuff. And it went on and on and on, month after month after month, speeches at the Oscars, all this kind of stuff, right? | |
| And that's because single moms have become so prevalent that they've become a huge voting block. | |
| Now, single moms, again, I'm speaking collectively, this is not a universal statement, but as an aggregate, single moms are pro-state. | |
| Of course they are, because they'd have a very tough time being single moms if they didn't get all these state benefits. | |
| Charles Murray wrote, he said, if you really want to reduce illegitimacy and you really want to reduce children in poverty, all you do is you say starting nine months from today, we will not give welfare benefits to single moms. | |
| And you will find that women will suddenly somehow find some way to have birth control or to keep their legs crossed or to find better men at least. | |
| And I'm not saying that's a good, necessarily a good strategy, but it sort of does reinforce the point. | |
| The vast majority of what we call the welfare state is direct subsidies to single moms. | |
| There's been some studies that have shown that almost all the growth in the welfare state has accrued to single moms, just because of the growth of single motherhood. | |
| So government is not a huge... | |
| I mean, it loves the income generated by marriage, and of course all of the Bullshit economic activity that's generated by everyone spending $20,000 or $10,000 on a wedding. | |
| Because now there's two people still from... | |
| Well, there's that, but there's also... | |
| If you get divorced, then you have to buy another marriage license. | |
| Maybe at some point in the future, you have to have another expensive wedding, and the government then... | |
| Lawyers run the government, and lawyers really love divorce because it's such a cash cow. | |
| They get to... Really prey upon the broken hearts of people like jackals nosing through a shattered corpse. | |
| When marriages break up, the government gets guaranteed dependence on state or statism. | |
| Either the moms end up dependent on the state or they end up dependent upon the state-enforced alimony and child support that they're extracting through force from their ex-husband and still current father. | |
| So, I mean, the government has a highly ambivalent relationship to divorce, but they make money either way, right? | |
| If you get lots of marriage, then they get lots of licenses and all that. | |
| And if you get lots of divorce, then they get lots of dependents. | |
| So, there's no chance that the government's going to get out of the marriage business. | |
| Like, asking the government to get out of the marriage business is like asking the mafia to get out of the gambling or prostitution or drugs business. | |
| That's what they're for! | |
| It's that kind of stuff. | |
| So, for gay activists, I think it makes good sense for them to do what they're doing. | |
| You know, if there are benefits to married couples, you know, why not let them get their jackal seat at the table of the general population? | |
| It is certainly bigoted to deny gay couples the same rights, privileges, and so on of straight couples. | |
| And so, but then there's no way that I mean, we may say you get the government out of marriage, but this is never going to happen. | |
| So do you think there's a better way for us to communicate an idea for gay advocates to advocate? | |
| What do you think the result would be of us successfully getting together and convincing the gay advocates to say, look, we don't want you guys in our marriage. | |
| This is our contract between ourselves. | |
| You absolutely have no part in that. | |
| Or are they too indoctrinated by this whole idea that You know, they need the state to give them money and all these benefits and all that, so they'd be too far down for us to sort of, you know, redeem them from this sort of status indoctrination. | |
| Well, but, I mean, I'm sure there's some principles involved in it, but, you know, I treat gay people just like everyone else, which is, I assume, that they are simply covering financial self-interest with ideology, right? | |
| So, I mean, if you want your spouses, sorry, if you're gay, you live with some guy, or if you're a lesbian, you live with some woman, Then you want their medical benefits, but you can't get that maybe unless you're married, right? | |
| So they just want the medical benefits. | |
| So it's like, well, we got to get married so I can get free healthcare. | |
| We got to get married so I can get the pension after, you know, my partner dies. | |
| I want their pension. I want their money. | |
| I want their stuff. I want, you know, all the goodies that the straight people are getting. | |
| They're just another special interest group that are looking to get the same handouts as everyone else. | |
| I mean, gay people are not... | |
| You know, there's this old thing about the magic negro, you know, like the magic negro shows up and he's so wise and he's so knowing and he's so this and that and the other. | |
| And this is a kind of racism too, right? | |
| And I'm not going to be bigoted towards homosexuals and say that they alone of all the groups in humanity are not motivated by financial interests, but are instead motivated by lofty abstract ideals and so on. | |
| There are people like everyone else, which means that they are motivated primarily by wanting the same handouts and the same You know, they want a seat at the table of, you know, carving up the corpse of a decaying financial empire just like everyone else. | |
| And so I would imagine that that's their primary motive. | |
| And so making an abstract argument to somebody whose abstract arguments are only a cover for the real financial motive or benefit motive is pointless. | |
| I mean, let's say that you were able to convince gay people to sort of get out of trying to get stuff from the state or whatever. | |
| So what? I mean, if you eliminate one special interest group, all the other special interest groups basically say, hey, more for us, right? | |
| Or, hey, there's some new special interest group that's popped up to take their place, right? | |
| At a free-flowing buffet table in Hungrytown, one person leaves, they don't cut it down to 999, right? | |
| Just somebody else comes and, oh, wow, a free seat! | |
| Woohoo! A vacant seat! I've been waiting for this forever. | |
| I'm in, right? So, you know, playing whack-a-mole with special interest groups to me doesn't matter. | |
| It's a strike at the root, right? Yeah, so I think you've kind of opened up, like, this whole realm I wasn't really thinking about in the sense of these financial special interest groups. | |
| Like, even if you did knock them down, even if you did knock the gay marriage part down, there would still be more people coming in being like, oh, great, more for us. | |
| But so do you think, would you say that it's sort of pointless to, like, if you're an advocate for gay rights and... | |
| You hold up a sign at a rally and you say, like, I don't want the government involved. | |
| Is that pointless until the state itself is eliminated altogether? | |
| Or is there some value in advocating right now to get the state out of marriage? | |
| Well, I mean, you just have to ask yourself, right? | |
| I mean, the first lesson of empathy is ask yourself what you would do. | |
| So if you're a A gay guy and you've been living with your partner for 20 years and your partner has retirement benefits that will pay to you if you're married and they'll give you like two grand a month or something like that. | |
| Would you be willing to sacrifice two grand a month for the sake of some abstract idea? | |
| Oh, so yeah, so it's sort of like we're stuck. | |
| No, this is a question for you, right? | |
| Would you be willing to sacrifice $2,000 a month if you didn't have a lot of money for the sake of an abstract idea, which I was never going to change things anyway? | |
| Like, you know, if gay people don't get the spousal benefits, the government has more money to just bribe other people with. | |
| Like the people who say, well, we're going to bring down the system by not paying taxes. | |
| Well, I guess if everyone does that, sure. | |
| But for the most part, if you don't pay your taxes, the government just prints more money or borrows more money, which harms the unborn and harms the poor. | |
| So you can sort of satisfy your, I don't want to pay my taxes because I don't want to participate in blah, blah, blah. | |
| But you're basically just saying, well, I don't want to go to jail, so I'm going to send a kid in my place. | |
| I don't want to pay my fine, so I'm going to offload the fine to some poor person. | |
| I mean, again, the state is primarily morally responsible, but that's the reality of what is happening. | |
| We all mad at the old stuff. You pay your taxes. | |
| Well, and I recognize that if I don't do it, then kids not even born yet are going to have to do it with interest. | |
| How fair is that? Or, you know, they're going to print money and poor people are going to pay for it, those on fixed incomes and so on. | |
| But would you be willing to sacrifice? | |
| Thousands of dollars a month. | |
| Or would you be willing to forego access to healthcare when you're sick for the sake of an abstract ideal, which is not going to change anything? | |
| No, but does it still make sense to still protest for these freedoms from the state? | |
| While still... | |
| I'm sorry to interrupt. | |
| You're asking the wrong question. The question is not, is it good to protest X, right? | |
| I mean, because that's not the real question. | |
| I'm sorry to be annoying and jump in, right? | |
| No, go ahead. You're basically saying, is it good for me to buy this painting? | |
| Well, I don't know, because I don't know. | |
| If your children need to eat and you're taking their food money to buy the painting, then no. | |
| If you live in a gremlin, I don't mean an animal, but a small old car, then no. | |
| There's no place to hang it, right? | |
| I mean, you need to save your money for other things, right? | |
| If you're paying ten times its value, like, so you say, should I buy this painting? | |
| I don't, I mean, I don't know. There's lots of things to consider. | |
| Now when you say, should we protest this or should I protest this, my question would be, given that life is short and all our resources are finite and we all have to work for a living and we all have obligations to family, to children, to friends, to parents, to whoever, right? Given that, given the short amount of time that I have to make a difference in the world, is protesting at a gay marriage rally The best possible use of my time to advance the course of freedom. | |
| Because the opportunity cost is fundamental to every decision that you make. | |
| And we often will make decisions like, should I do this? | |
| When what you really should do is compare what you're thinking of doing to every other possible thing you could be doing. | |
| Does that make sense? So instead of... | |
| I'm not sure if I specified this right. | |
| I didn't mean... In the sense of if I was a gay person and I was in a gay couple protesting myself, I meant sort of we within the liberty movement sort of advocating for that. | |
| No, no, again, sorry, you're not following. | |
| I wasn't making this on the assumption that you're gay. | |
| So what I'm trying to say is, if you say, should I go to a gay rally and hold up, you know, the state should divorce itself for marriage or... | |
| Marriage plus statism equals slavery or whatever. | |
| I don't know. I'm terrible at memes, but something like that. | |
| The question is not, should you do that? | |
| The question is, is that the very best possible use of your limited time on this world to bring about the cause of freedom? | |
| Because if it's not, then you should do something else. | |
| Does that make sense? Is that the best possible way that you can spend your limited time and resources before you're busy, broke, or dead? | |
| Is that the very best possible use of your limited resources to advocate for a free society? | |
| That's the question. It's not, should you do this thing in isolation? | |
| Should you do this thing relative to all other possibilities? | |
| So you're saying instead of focusing on one particular issue such as gay marriage and government, it should be focused on the more broad sense of the liberty movement, like the state in general. | |
| Is that more accurate? | |
| Yeah, so some guy writes to you and says, I'm stuck on a desert island. | |
| Let's say he throws something in a bottle. | |
| He says, I'm stuck on a desert island and there's only one woman here. | |
| Should I marry her? I really want to get married. | |
| I'm desperate to get married. I like her. | |
| Should I marry her? What would you say? | |
| If I'm that person receiving that message? | |
| Oh, no, no. Oh, okay. | |
| If you're getting that message, you've got to send something back to this guy in a bottle. | |
| What are you going to say? And he's asking me if he should marry her. | |
| Yeah. Oh, yeah. | |
| I would say yes. | |
| Of course, because there's only one woman to marry. | |
| So if you want to get married and you like her, clearly you have to marry her because there's no other women, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. Even if she's 300 pounds, even if whatever, right? | |
| If there's something about her she doesn't find. | |
| Now, if Brad Pitt writes to you an email and says, I met this girl. | |
| I'm not particularly attracted to her. | |
| I mean, I like her. And I want to get married. | |
| Should I marry her? What would you say? | |
| He likes her, though, but he's not particularly attracted. | |
| Well, he likes her. He wants to get married. | |
| He's Brad Pitt. Oh, I would say yes anyway. | |
| You'd say what? I would say yes. | |
| You would say yes to him? | |
| Okay, well then this is what you don't, and this is what you're still failing to understand. | |
| How many women could Brad Pitt marry? | |
| Probably anyone he wanted. | |
| Well, hopefully not my wife, but yeah, he would be able to, he would be able to get married to, you know, probably a little, you know, half the world's population minus 12 women or whatever, right? | |
| I guess lesbians wouldn't find him that attractive. | |
| Although his hair is long. Anyway, so Brad Pitt... | |
| He has almost infinitely more choices of who to marry than a guy on a desert island, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. Does that make sense? | |
| Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were saying Brad Pitt was stuck on a desert island. | |
| No, no, no. Sorry. Brad Pitt in the world, right? | |
| He sends you a message and emails you and says, you know, I found this one. | |
| She's nice. I want to get married. | |
| Should I marry her? You'd say, like, no. | |
| You'd say, like, you're Brad Pitt, man. | |
| You can marry almost anyone you want. | |
| Yeah, you can make your own choice. Yeah, you can, right? | |
| So... So what I'm trying to point out is the first guy who's got a woman on a desert island, his opportunity costs are marry her or don't get married at all, right? | |
| It's binary. Yes, no. | |
| Now, almost every choice we make in the world, when we're not in prison or public school, but I repeat myself, almost every choice we make in the world is relative to all other possible choices we could make. | |
| So Brad Pitt says, well, I like this woman. | |
| I want to get married. | |
| And you'd say, well, you're Brad Pitt. | |
| You can wait for a woman you totally love, right? | |
| You can wait, you know, you got the pick of the litter, so to speak, right? | |
| And so what I would remind you is that when you look at, should I go to hold up a sign at a gay rally for equality in marriage? | |
| Well, compared to what? | |
| Compared to every other possible thing you could do in the world. | |
| Compared to standing on your head for an hour. | |
| Compared to learning how to juggle chickens. | |
| Compared to learning how to saw a woman in half in a magic show. | |
| Compared to anything. Compared to advocating for peaceful parenting. | |
| Compared to sitting down and having a conversation with status in your life about the values and virtues of what they believe in. | |
| And so you have to get into the habit of comparing every possible action With every other possible action, including no action at all. | |
| Is it better for the Liberty Movement for you to go to do that, or to read Bastiat, or to read lourockwell.com, or to read mises.org, or to read mises.ca, or to sign up for Doug Casey newsletter, or learn about... | |
| What Jeff Berwick is up to in Chile and so on. | |
| Who knows? I don't know and I don't have the answer. | |
| I certainly have some, I think, statistically relevant or valid arguments to say that we should really focus on peaceful parenting. | |
| That's the best way to bring about a free society. | |
| But you have to be rigorous and responsible with the use of your time. | |
| If you are... An advocate. | |
| If you are a change agent or you want to be a change agent in the world, you owe it to the future to be very rigorous about how it is you're going to spend your time. | |
| Do not say, well, I like this course and I know some gay guys, so I'm going to do X, right? | |
| You need to be responsible. | |
| This comes out of my time as an entrepreneur. | |
| As an entrepreneur, you sweat rivers of blood for every penny that you make, right? | |
| And To spend that is literally like taking out your own kidney with a rusty spoon. | |
| When you spend money as an entrepreneur, you have $10,000 to invest in your company. | |
| You don't just say, well, I like walnuts, so I'm going to buy walnut furniture for my office. | |
| You have to be really rigorous and say, what is the best possible use of my incredibly hard-won dollars to grow this business? | |
| With the full knowledge that your competitors are doing the same thing and whoever guesses best or reasons best is going to win the market, right? | |
| So we had to, when we all sit down, and we would literally discuss for days or weeks how we should spend our money coming up. | |
| When we'd all make cases, when we'd all have to back up our cases, not what I think we should invest more in marketing. | |
| You know, we'd have to really make a case and provide estimates on how much we were going to recoup from our investment as entrepreneurs. | |
| And this is what we need to do even more ferociously as change agents in the world. | |
| You know, we have three hours to advocate for change in the world. | |
| How should we do it? You say, well, maybe I can go out and wave a sign around or maybe I should go and get some people to sign up for this political candidate or whatever. | |
| But we need to be really rigorous and we need to be fact-based in our analysis of how we should spend our time. | |
| Otherwise, it's just self-indulgence. | |
| It's very self-indulgent to just say, well, I'm interested in this, so I'm going to go wave a sign at that. | |
| The whole point is the future desperately needs us to prioritize our resources. | |
| This is why I bag on libertarian political activism so much. | |
| Because the biggest vote count that the libertarians ever got was about 1% about 40 years ago. | |
| Ever since then, it's been muddling around half a percent or even less. | |
| There's no progress whatsoever. | |
| In the libertarian movement to gain political power and at some point we should reassess that if we are to be really responsible to the future and I take my responsibility to the future very seriously but what I mean by that is I am going to really understand if I want to change the way the world thinks I'm going to really try to understand from a scientific standpoint from a researched methodological reproducible standpoint I'm going to try and figure out how people actually think how do they make decisions What influences their decisions and in particular what influences their decisions or decides their decisions, | |
| so to speak, which they are not aware of, what occurs in the unconscious level. | |
| So if we want to change people's minds, the first thing you want to do is study the science of how people make up their minds to begin with. | |
| Like if you want to change how people eat, you've got to be a nutritionist, which means you've got to study how food affects the body and how decisions affect what people eat and why they eat. | |
| And if we want to change the way the world thinks, we damn well need to dig into the science and the methodologies of how people come to decisions. | |
| And when you do that, it's very clear that unconscious childhood trauma is the biggest single unconscious effector of how people make decisions. | |
| And therefore, clearing up childhood is by far the best way to bring people to a state of potential rationality So that our arguments can actually land and take root. | |
| Right now, we're fishing in a bathtub. | |
| There's not even water in it. | |
| We keep pulling it out. | |
| But we're getting paid to fish in a bathtub because everyone thinks there's fish in it, right? | |
| It's a lot easier to fish in a bathtub than it is to fish in a lake or an ocean or a river. | |
| People think there's fish in there. | |
| The fish is called change. The politics is the bathtub. | |
| Education is the bathtub. | |
| There's no fish in there. People don't change their minds based upon Facts or better arguments. | |
| If that were the case, philosophy would not be in this currently degraded state after 2500 years. | |
| Compared to physics and medicine, philosophy is a complete scam. | |
| I mean, it's on the same level as alchemy and voodoo and lizard kings ruling Jim Morrison's headstone. | |
| So we really need to focus on how people make decisions, why they make decisions. | |
| And I'm saying, look, there's no fish in the bathtub. | |
| It's easy. You think you're doing something, but the fish you see there aren't there. | |
| In fact, the state wants you to fish in the bathtub because there's no fish there. | |
| The fish wants you to fish in the bathtub because there's no fish there. | |
| We go to the harder route of actually fishing in the ocean where there are fish. | |
| And that means examining childhood and parenting. | |
| Because we have reason and evidence on our side. | |
| And what has that done for us? | |
| Well, nothing. Hasn't changed very many people's minds at all. | |
| In fact, the proportion of libertarians, at least in terms of people who vote libertarian, is actually declining, not increasing. | |
| And if libertarianism... | |
| Sorry, go ahead. I'm sorry. | |
| So does this sort of go back to your previous caller when you were talking about how, if you want to find out how people think, find out who's paying them? | |
| Well, certainly that's very important. | |
| It's very important to find out who's paying them. | |
| And the reason that you do that is not so you can change it but just so you can understand that trying to bring reason and evidence to people whose economic self-interest runs entirely contrary to your reason and evidence is a complete waste of time. | |
| And the opportunity costs of what else you could be doing with your time and energy is really important to consider and it is thoroughly irresponsible. | |
| and self-indulgent to pursue things without rigorously and objectively and hopefully scientifically examining all possible alternatives people will listen to reason and evidence if they're not traumatized Trauma interferes with our capacity to process reason and evidence. | |
| I mean, the trauma centers of the brain light up. | |
| A few seconds later, people come to a decision, right? | |
| They're not even aware that their trauma centers are lighting up. | |
| They just think that they're making that decision. | |
| These are the facts of how people make their minds. | |
| Everything goes through trauma. | |
| Everything goes through self-interest. | |
| And then, and only then, does the neofrontal cortex kick in with some rationalization. | |
| And so we're trying to push a shadow. | |
| We're trying to steer a boat by splashing water on the wake. | |
| It's ridiculous and it's counterproductive and it's embarrassing people who say reason and evidence should win and they're not even examining the reason and evidence around how people change their minds or decide anything. | |
| You waving a sign around at a gay rally is going to do precisely squat. | |
| I mean, unless you're gay and you want to go cruising, it's going to do precisely nothing to change the future, make you feel better a little bit. | |
| It's not going to do anything. | |
| We need to study how people make... | |
| This is why, fdrurl.com forward slash bib. | |
| I poured God knows how much time into doing the research. | |
| I talked to experts. You know, why do I say therapy? | |
| Because therapy is scientifically shown to provide the greatest benefits to happiness and the most sustainable benefits to happiness. | |
| And so it's really, really important that we as a movement, if we say we want to change people's minds, but we never actually open... | |
| Any books or talk to any experts or review any of the research literature on how people actually currently decide. | |
| We are frauds. | |
| We are scam artists. | |
| We are snake oil salesmen. | |
| We're exactly the same as someone who says, well, I really like, you know, broccoli and chocolate. | |
| So I think everyone should eat broccoli and chocolate. | |
| And they never actually crack a book open to figure out what's good for people. | |
| The fact that people have different dietary requirements is important. | |
| You know, a diabetic versus a pregnant woman versus a weightlifting man versus We just say, well, this is what I like, so this is what everyone should do, and I'm never going to crack open a book on nutrition in any way, shape, or form. | |
| That person would be... | |
| A ridiculous fraud. | |
| And I charge the libertarian movement with not doing the scientific research to figure out how people make decisions and organizing their resources accordingly. | |
| I don't want to waste my life. | |
| I don't want to waste my life in petty self-indulgence and just doing that which makes me money in the short run or doing that which makes me feel like I'm getting something done but is actually just acting out my basic preferences and calling it virtue. | |
| I don't want to do any of that. | |
| I want to spend my precious days as Effectively as possible. | |
| If you want to build a bridge that stands, study engineering. | |
| And if you want to change people's minds, study how people think and what interferes with them thinking. | |
| Otherwise you are wasting your time for fun and profit, which is entirely disrespectful to the ideals that we have around making a better and more peaceful world. | |
| So So your course of action, to sum it all up, would be research and education for everybody in the liberty movement and those outside of it? | |
| Well, if we want to change people's minds, study how people make decisions. | |
| Study what interferes with their capacity to process, reason, and evidence. | |
| Study what causes confirmation bias. | |
| What causes confirmation bias is childhood trauma, fundamentally. | |
| The facts are very clear. I mean, if you show Republicans and Democrats exactly the same information, their brains react to it differently. | |
| And the brain activation occurs deep in the brain first. | |
| It occurs at an unconscious level. | |
| And only afterwards do the higher reasoning and language centers kick in to justify the initial impulse. | |
| That's very clear in science. | |
| The hippocampus lights up, the amygdala lights up, which is all based on the brain unconscious stuff. | |
| And How the amygdala and hippocampus and the base of the brain stuff lights up determines what people do and what they say they do. | |
| And so if we don't understand the deep brain stuff, which is all formed in very early childhood and even in the neonatal, like in the womb environment, it's all formed then. | |
| And it can't be reached through reason and evidence, at least very rarely. | |
| Because reason and evidence is produced, quote reason, quote evidence, is produced in accordance with the unconscious motivations. | |
| These are just facts. This is not my theory. | |
| These are the facts of how people make decisions. | |
| They're traumatized, their reptilian centers light up, and only after that do they come up with justifications. | |
| I quoted another study recently. | |
| I won't get into the methodology, but basically, people agreed with a moral statement and had great reasons for it. | |
| And then literally five minutes later, they agreed with the exact opposite moral statement and came up with great reasons for it too. | |
| And they didn't even know that their moral position were completely opposite, right? | |
| And there's a fact that we have to deal with. | |
| People make up justifications for their moral positions and they don't know why they hold those moral positions. | |
| Those moral positions can be completely reversed In five or ten minutes and they will come up with fantastic new justifications for their new moral positions and won't even know that they've changed. | |
| This is how insane people are at the moment. | |
| You know, I take the philosopher, I think he was an Italian-American philosopher. | |
| B. Joel, who said, you should never argue with a crazy man, man, man, man, man, you ought to know by now, right? | |
| I mean, that's the reality. | |
| We're dealing with crazy people. | |
| And the fact that we're trying to reason with crazy people rather than grow sane people just shows how crazy we are. | |
| No, yeah, I totally agree with that. | |
| So anyway, sorry for the long rants, and I'm sort of getting on to the next caller, but I hope that helps. | |
| Just, you know, you want to change the world? | |
| Learn not about politics. | |
| Learn not about free markets. | |
| Learn about how people think. | |
| Right. Well, thanks a lot, Stefan. | |
| You're very welcome. You're very welcome. | |
| All right. Who's next? | |
| All right, Scott. Sorry, go ahead. | |
| Go ahead, Scott. Hey, Steph. | |
| Thanks for having me on. Great, Scott! | |
| Hi. Oh, and by the way, it was March of the Penguins for the Penguin movie. | |
| I know that's kind of irrelevant, but... | |
| No, no, it's not irrelevant. | |
| You know, it's funny. | |
| The more I get into abstract reasoning, the less I can remember specific shit. | |
| I don't know. My brain is being taken over by abstract reasoning, but it's like, hmm, I wonder why the church is against masturbation. | |
| Where are my keys? Well, obviously, while I'm thinking about that, I can't actually find my keys. | |
| My hands are busy, but... I just can't. | |
| I can't remember specific shit anymore. | |
| I can do abstract arguments from here. | |
| Anyway, go ahead. What's your question? | |
| Well, just a bit of background before I start. | |
| I'll try and keep it brief here. | |
| But I've been listening to your show, really actually just YouTube clips, for about a couple months now. | |
| I've read your book on secular morality, UPB. And because of reading your book, I recently changed my moral framework from judging right and wrong From the biblical Christian perspective to, I guess, UPB or secular morality, which has been a pretty big change. | |
| Wow. That's huge. | |
| That's more than a background. | |
| That's like an encyclopedia in and of itself. | |
| What a massive change. | |
| I mean, how much there is in that to be admired. | |
| Oh, I appreciate it. | |
| Thank you. Yeah, I would say I was a pretty developed Christian. | |
| Yeah. Obviously I'm not anymore, but I just thought your framework for judging right and wrong was more rational. | |
| You didn't need to dig into the past in history. | |
| I was a big fan of Lee Strobel's work. | |
| I don't know. He wrote A Case for Christ and all that. | |
| I found it convincing, but then I thought, why look? | |
| So far back into history for a moral ethic when you don't need to. | |
| You know what I mean? Sorry to interrupt. | |
| Is he the guy who wrote, Christians who were willing to be torn apart by lions in order to be Christians in the Roman amphitheaters must have seen something quite remarkable in the person of Jesus Christ if they were willing to suffer that kind of fate. | |
| You wouldn't do that for some guy who hadn't actually performed miracles or at least convinced people through some... | |
| Form of miraculous behavior or abilities that he was, in fact, the son of God or something. | |
| Therefore, we can assume that at least the people at the time who were willing to suffer those kinds of fates must have seen something extraordinary. | |
| I've heard that, but no, this wasn't a guy, a different guy. | |
| guy. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Anyway, I was just going to say, despite having UPB as my moral framework now, I can't quite say I'm an atheist, more anarchist, libertarian. | |
| I'm more that route for sure. | |
| But yeah, I don't know exactly what I believe. | |
| And I'm not agnostic, so I know you hate agnostics. | |
| Well, no, let's be precise. | |
| I don't hate agnostics. | |
| I just want to be precise. No, I don't hate agnostics because for the most part they've not been exposed to really good arguments for strong atheism. | |
| So I don't hate them. Now, I do have a problem with people who, after being exposed to rational arguments who claim to be rational, who then reject those rational arguments for the sake of emotional convenience. | |
| That I have a problem with. | |
| But I just want to be clear. I don't sort of hate all agnostics or all religious people or all statists. | |
| Prior to knowledge, you're not responsible. | |
| Once you have knowledge, you're responsible. | |
| Sorry, go ahead. Right. | |
| No, I just totally agree. | |
| I just felt like a lot of your book was interesting in that a lot of it seemed to be directed at agnostics, kind of like... | |
| You talk about different beliefs and then you talk about agnosticism and then why, you know, after having all the evidence, why it was, you know, deceiving or unjust to say you were an agnostic. | |
| Okay, so if you, sorry, do you believe that the question of the existence of a deity or deities is unanswerable or unanswered as yet? | |
| It comes from the apparent orderliness of the world. | |
| You know, like a world where not just we exist as As people that live but also have the ability to perceive our own existence. | |
| I'm trying to think how that would work out secularly. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't think I've heard a secular explanation for why that's possible besides just being really mathematically Highly improbable, but like it... | |
| Sorry, let me just make sure I understand you. | |
| So your argument is we have this amazing capacity for self-knowledge, self-reflection, and so on, and there's no secular explanation of that? | |
| Well, I'm just wondering what... | |
| Because I've heard a few, but to me, the ones I've heard, it seems in a way kind of fantastical. | |
| Like... So my question, I guess, is what is the best secular explanation that you know of for having the ability, you know, kind of to perceive what we can? | |
| And yeah, just because the explanations from secular view so far haven't really satisfied me. | |
| Oh, and I want to point out too that this, whatever the answer is, it makes no difference as, you know, UPB doesn't require you, you know, to know exactly. | |
| You know, what kind of the answer is here? | |
| But it's just, you know, from my change in viewpoint, I was just curious here. | |
| Sure, no, that's a great question. | |
| To my knowledge, and I think I would notice if this had been the case, there is no scientific, complete explanation for human consciousness, right? | |
| Right. I mean, there's nobody's... | |
| And that's fine. The science of the brain... | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah. So, brain science is like a decade or two old, fundamentally. | |
| Maybe a little older, depending on how you want to measure it. | |
| Maybe they could measure some sort of electrical activity beforehand, but it's very young, right? | |
| So, if you were to say, well, physics, when it was only a decade or two old, hadn't figured out X, Y, or Z about the universe, we wouldn't say, well, that's a huge problem. | |
| We'd just say, well, it's a very young science. | |
| Brain science is incredibly young. | |
| And So, from that standpoint, I think the progress that it's made is incredible. | |
| But, of course, you could not expect a science that is a decade or two old or three to have explained the most challenging... | |
| And most complicated question in the universe, which is, what is consciousness? | |
| To me, that's the most challenge. | |
| Where the universe came from, or is there dark matter, or string theory? | |
| I mean, that's all, to me, nonsense compared to what is consciousness. | |
| Because then you have consciousness trying to explain itself, which is really, really complicated, right? | |
| And you have all the variability of consciousness, you have culture, you have religiosity affecting consciousness, you have trauma, you have medications, particularly these SSRIs messing up consciousness and all that kind of stuff, right? | |
| So... So it's the most complicated question being confronted by the youngest science, right? | |
| And therefore, the fact that it hasn't explained it all, it would be insane if it did, right? | |
| Yeah. No, absolutely. | |
| I'm just trying to think back to when you're talking about, you know, we're talking about, you know, the foolishness of thinking that God, you know, exists outside of time completely, like not here in. | |
| Well, hang on a sec. | |
| Sorry, let me just finish up. | |
| I hadn't. | |
| I just sort of wanted to just say one other thing. | |
| Okay. | |
| Let me ask you a rhetorical question. | |
| Without using a calculator, what is 7023 times 691? | |
| I couldn't do that in your calculator. | |
| Right, okay, or hopefully a piece of paper, I guess, calculated these days, right? | |
| But you don't know the answer, right? | |
| Now, if I said, I don't know the answer either, but the answer is an opposite of a number, what would you say? | |
| I'd say that it's this kind of square circle thing. | |
| It's impossible. Yeah, I mean, I don't know the answer to that mathematical question. | |
| I can't count toothpicks as they fall, but I'm an excellent driver. | |
| But... I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know it's a number, right? | |
| Right. Now, I don't know where consciousness comes from, but I know that it's not the opposite of science. | |
| I know it's not the opposite of reason and evidence, right? | |
| I don't know where consciousness comes from. | |
| I don't know how it manifests. | |
| I mean, there's some new scientific evidence about free will, which I'm trying to get the expert on the show, but... | |
| Nobody can explain that perfectly either. | |
| But we know the answer is not going to be the opposite of science. | |
| It's not going to be the opposite of reason and evidence. | |
| And God is the opposite of reason and evidence. | |
| It's not neutral. It's the opposite. | |
| And so, if you say, well, I don't know where consciousness comes from, therefore God, what you're saying is, I don't know the answer to, you know, 1223 times 691, therefore God. | |
| And that's not rational. | |
| That's not valid arguing. | |
| We don't know the answer to something. | |
| We are in pursuit of the answer. | |
| The answer we'll only know if we have the answer when it's validated by reason and evidence. | |
| That's how we know we have an answer. | |
| That's true. And God is the opposite of validation by reason and evidence. | |
| God specifically moves the goalpost. | |
| The deity specifically moves the goalpost for evidence and specifically is anti-rational. | |
| Not neutral, not irrational, anti-rational. | |
| Every single time that... | |
| They say, well, we have this proof of God. | |
| Well, God comes down and speaks to people. | |
| Great, let's see that. Well, he doesn't do that anymore. | |
| But God does miracles, even if he's not physically present. | |
| Great, let's see those. Well, he doesn't do that anymore. | |
| The age of miracles is over. | |
| You know, God is X. Well, let's find X. Well, not X anymore, right? | |
| So the moment you go looking for empirical evidence for God, the goalpost moves and I mean, you just keep moving beyond the horizon, beyond the horizon. | |
| God used to be in the thunder. | |
| Now we found out what thunder is. | |
| Oh, he doesn't do thunder anymore. God used to be in the lightning. | |
| Oh, we know what lightning is, so God's not there anymore. | |
| God used to be in the tides. | |
| He used to be in the weather. Now we find out what all those things are. | |
| God is now pushed back to the beginning of the universe, and when we find out what that is, he'll be pushed somewhere else. | |
| It's anti-empirical evidence, because he claims existence, and then every single time you try to validate that claim, the goalpost moves. | |
| That's the opposite. of empirical evidence and the rationality thing omnipotence versus omniscience and all that kind of stuff I've talked about that before and so God is the opposite of reason and evidence and the only way we're going to know if we have an answer to the question of what is consciousness how is consciousness why is consciousness we'll only know that because we have reason and evidence on our side there will be specific scientific measurables predictability reproducibility all the good stuff in the scientific method that's how we'll know we have an answer And saying we don't have an answer yet, | |
| therefore let's have the opposite of an answer, is not rational. | |
| It's like saying I don't know the number, but it's the opposite of a number. | |
| I'm not saying, well, I guess I'll have to read your books again to find out why exactly all the contradictions. | |
| I thought the main one was God couldn't exist in a separate universe. | |
| Or just, it'd be silly to make something like that up. | |
| But I'm not saying that we don't have the answers, therefore God. | |
| So the separate universe thing is, no, no, this is important. | |
| The separate universe thing. This universe is invented where that which does not exist, exists. | |
| That which is irrational suddenly becomes rational. | |
| It's an opposite universe. And it doesn't work anywhere else. | |
| Right? I mean, if I pay you to cure my cancer... | |
| And then you fail to cure my cancer, but you demand payment because in some alternative universe my cancer is cured, I'm not going to pay you. | |
| Right? If you say 3 times 3 make 10 and you get marked an X on that, you don't get to go to the teacher and say, well, you can't mark me with an X on that because in some alternative universe 3 times 3 might make 10. | |
| Yeah. So you can't mark me as false, right? | |
| You can't call up the IRS if you don't pay your taxes and say, no, no, no, you can't. | |
| Pursue any sanctions against me because in some alternative universe I might have paid my taxes. | |
| I mean, this just doesn't work. There's no defense. | |
| There's no rash. Only in the realm of God do we believe this. | |
| So let's say there's this dimension X. Either this dimension X, God is going to poke his ghostly finger and touch something in our universe, in which case we can measure it. | |
| It's either going to do that, in which case he's manifesting himself somehow in our universe in some measurable way, In which case we're not measuring dimension X, we're measuring his impact upon or her impact upon our existing universe. | |
| Or he's going to reside in dimension X and never ever make any effect or have any effect on our existing universe, in which case that is exactly synonymous with non-existence. | |
| Dimension X, where non-existence equals existence and which never affects our universe in any way, shape or form, is exactly the same as non-existence. | |
| It's just non-existence with a bowtie. | |
| I mean, it's just non-existence with intellectual fog. | |
| And so I think that's really important to understand. | |
| Either God's going to do something to our universe we can measure, in which case we can measure that, or God is never going to do anything to our universe which we can measure, in which case... | |
| Well, we're saying, well, he exists, but in some alternate dimension where nothing exists that ever affects our universe. | |
| That's exactly the same as saying God doesn't exist. | |
| You're just creating a little bubble where you get to keep some vestige of faith. | |
| But it's exactly the same as saying he doesn't exist. | |
| Does that make any sense to you? | |
| It does. | |
| But I'm just saying, when you're saying that God is over the horizon, because you're telling me they figured out, okay, he's not on the trees, he's not on the weather, and he gets being pushed back, I'm not saying... | |
| I'm just saying they're... | |
| I'm just trying... | |
| When you say God's kind of like a square circle in a way that it's illogical to even look for something like that just because it can't exist. | |
| I agree with that, but it seems it's getting... | |
| I guess I... Is that the only main argument when you're saying like The only way for him to exist is to make up a separate universe that doesn't really affect ours in any way. | |
| No, just look at this. | |
| All you have to do is look at what is proposed. | |
| What is God? What is God? | |
| Well, God is a couple of things. | |
| God is consciousness without matter, right? | |
| Okay. Well, consciousness is matter. | |
| Consciousness is an effect of the brain. | |
| It's like saying gravity without mass. | |
| Well, gravity is an effect of mass. | |
| Consciousness is matter. | |
| And we know that for sure. | |
| It's matter plus electrical and biochemical energy. | |
| And we know that because when we say someone is brain dead, all electrical and biochemical energy... | |
| Has ceased within the brain. | |
| They don't have any consciousness, right? | |
| I mean, can you imagine a guy walking around and chatting and they put him in a scanner and he's got zero brain activity? | |
| Would that ever happen? | |
| No. No, of course not. | |
| Of course not. It's like expecting a muscle to move with no electrical energy going through it. | |
| Right? So if God is consciousness without matter, you immediately have an insurmountable contradiction. | |
| Because consciousness is an effect of matter. | |
| Right? Right? Light is an effect of a light source, right? | |
| You can't have light without a light source. | |
| You can't have gravity without mass, and you can't have consciousness without a brain. | |
| Because if consciousness is immaterial, but consciousness is an effect of matter, you're saying immateriality is matter. | |
| That which is immaterial is matter. | |
| You understand? That is an insurmountable contradiction. | |
| Yeah. Okay, so the other thing too, right, omniscience and omnipotence, these are two things that are claimed for a deity, right? | |
| Omniscience is knowing everything past, present, and future. | |
| But if you know everything in the future, you can't change it without invalidating that knowledge. | |
| So a deity or an entity cannot be both all-knowing and all-powerful. | |
| If he's all-powerful, he can change anything he wants, and he doesn't know what he's going to do in the future, because if he knows it, he's limited from Jesus. | |
| It's impossible for him to change it, right? | |
| Yeah. And so you can't be both all-knowing And all-powerful at the same time. | |
| Miracles are specific violations of physical laws, right? | |
| And the whole point of physical laws is they can't be violated. | |
| That's the whole point. | |
| I mean, the whole point of gravity is you can't just snap your fingers and have an anvil float in the air, right? | |
| It will never happen. | |
| Right? Go ahead. I'm just saying, like, it's not like anti-science when we There's a theory, and then there are exceptions to that theory because they take place or something's a bit different. | |
| Well, can you give me an example of a universal law which allows for exceptions? | |
| Well, I'm just saying, like, you have gravity on Earth, but it's going to be... | |
| It's going to be different on other planets. | |
| No, no, no. Your weight will be different on other planets, but gravity will not be. | |
| So, for instance, I think the moon is one-sixth the mass of the earth, and so, as a result, you weigh one-sixth less. | |
| So, gravity as a principle remains exactly the same. | |
| Your weight will change, but that's exactly predicted by gravity, right? | |
| So, gravity is constant throughout the universe. | |
| Yeah, but that's what I mean. | |
| If someone's looking and maybe it looks to them like something looks like a miracle, and then you say, oh no, no, and then you can finally explain the scientific principles that are happening. | |
| But lots of people say... | |
| No, but that's the danger of miracles. | |
| That's the danger of miracles, is you stop looking. | |
| Right? So, let's say everything, you're a little kid, right? | |
| Everything falls down. | |
| Then someone gives you a helium balloon, you let go of it, it floats up into the air, right? | |
| And if you say, well, it's been caught by invisible flying unicorns that are carrying it up, then you have an answer, right? | |
| And once you have that answer, you stop looking. | |
| Like, if you're driving home, you get home, you stop driving, right? | |
| Because you want to be home. You're already home. | |
| You stop looking for answers when you invent miracles. | |
| Because your answer is, it's a miracle. | |
| So you stop looking, fundamentally. | |
| And that's what's so dangerous about the idea of miracles, is they provide the illusion of an answer which then creates people with a strong emotional investment in preventing further exploration of that topic, right? | |
| Right. So if the Bible is valid because God placed Earth at the center of the universe... | |
| And in the Bible, it very clearly says the Earth does not move, which is exactly what it would look like to sun-baked Bedouin lunatics, you know, 6,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago. | |
| So they said the Earth does not move. | |
| We have an answer. What is the Earth? | |
| God put it here. The Earth does not move, right? | |
| And then Copernicus and Galileo and Tycho Brahe come along and start talking about the heliocentric model of the solar system where the Earth moves, and they have some significant problems in society with that, right? | |
| Because there's already a huge amount of emotional and psychological and financial investment in the earth not moving, which is not an answer. | |
| I don't know if the earth moves or not. | |
| So miracles are not neutral. | |
| Faith is not neutral. Faith stops exploration, and faith gets offended by exploration. | |
| And so it is the antithesis of curiosity and rationality in science, because it places a big flaming sword like God did on the exit Of the Garden of Eden. | |
| The big flaming sword which says, it is blasphemy! | |
| To ask further questions. | |
| Well, blasphemy is just an ancient and modern word for, I know I'm wrong, but I'm too scared to question. | |
| That's just what you invent. | |
| You invent offense when you have no good argument. | |
| But you don't want to give up your position. | |
| You just become aggressive, right? | |
| So... It's not neutral to say that, well, there's some things that faith alone can answer and some things that we must rely on faith on. | |
| Peter Boghossian, whose, I think, book, How to Make an Atheist, I think it's called, is coming out in November, defines, and I think fairly reasonably, faith is pretending to know things that you don't know. | |
| Not that you can't know, but you don't know. | |
| God is never an answer for anything. | |
| God is never an answer for anything because God is anti-rational, anti-empirical. | |
| And the only way that we know that we have an answer for something is it's rational and empirical. | |
| So God is the opposite of an answer and it ferociously fights the pursuit of rational and empirical answers. | |
| It is not neutral. Alright. | |
| So that makes sense. | |
| I'm just curious though, Stefan, what do you call something where you don't know the answer, you still have some reasons to believe it might be the answer, but just because of logical reasons, you don't have it. | |
| The question's still out there, and you come up with a couple of reasons of what it could be or what it might be. | |
| Like, obviously, with your definition of faith, that wouldn't be... | |
| That's not faith. | |
| So what would you call that? | |
| Well, I mean, the first virtue is always honesty. | |
| Because if that virtue is not pursued, no other virtues are possible. | |
| And if you don't know something, what is the most honest thing you can say about it? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Exactly. I don't know. | |
| Which means that there is no rational, empirically verified answer to the question. | |
| That's what I don't know means. | |
| There is no rational and or empirical solution to the question. | |
| What is consciousness? Well, we have some idea, we have some measurements, we have some hypotheses, but we don't know for sure. | |
| Now, if you say I don't know means I have no rational, empirical solution to the question. | |
| What you cannot do is have anything that is anti-rational and anti-empirical as a, quote, answer. | |
| Because that is the opposite of an answer. | |
| This is why I said, I don't know what the multiplication of two big numbers are, but I know it's a number. | |
| I don't know what that number is, but I know it's a number. | |
| And if somebody tries to tell me it's a unicorn or a rainbow cloud or a disco ball or the opposite of a number, then I know that they're wrong. | |
| Because two numbers multiplied together produce a number, right? | |
| Yeah. And if we say, I don't know the rational and empirical answer to these things, saying that the answer is something that is the opposite of reason and evidence is not valid, never will be valid, and is in fact a barrier to further exploration of the question. | |
| Like, no, I understand what you're saying, but when you say, like, when you were talking before about I'm not claiming anything here. | |
| I'm just saying I don't know because Our experience is that's what we get from being on Earth and from being able to... | |
| Yes, but I don't know is not a blank check. | |
| I don't know what the price of an iPad 1 on eBay is right now. | |
| I don't know. I don't know what the price of it is. | |
| But I know that no one is selling it for leprechauns. | |
| Right? I know it's going to be some form of currency in some way. | |
| Right. So, I don't know is not a blank slate, like it could be the opposite of knowledge. | |
| The answer to this question could be the opposite of an answer. | |
| We know that for sure, right? | |
| Two numbers multiplied together cannot produce the opposite of numbers, whatever that might be, right? | |
| So, I don't know is not, and therefore maybe God, because the only way we'll know something, know something, not believe something, not have a prejudice or a bias or a bigoted attitude towards something, not pretend to know, not imagine we know, right? | |
| The only way we genuinely know things is reason and evidence. | |
| And God is the opposite of reason and evidence. | |
| At every conceivable level, God is infinite complexity with no evolution. | |
| Well, complexity is the result of evolution. | |
| If we say the universe exists, therefore God created it, we're not solving the problem. | |
| Because if everything which exists must have been created, then God who exists must have been created by... | |
| It's turtles all the way down. | |
| From that old story, the world rests on penguins, then the world rests on unicorns, then the world rests on elephants, and at the bottom it's turtles. | |
| And somebody says, what's underneath the turtles? | |
| They say, nothing, it's turtles all the way down. | |
| The world must rest on something, therefore it must rest on something. | |
| And at some point people just say, well it's turtles all the way down. | |
| Right. So the answer to I don't know cannot be the opposite of knowledge. | |
| Do you see what I'm saying? | |
| I don't know how to drive to Vegas right now, but I know that the answer about how to drive to Vegas is not the opposite of roads. | |
| It's not the opposite of travel. | |
| It's not the opposite of a car. | |
| Do you know what I mean? It's some route I don't know yet. | |
| Yeah. And I'll validate it when I get to Vegas. | |
| But if I were to say to you, how do I get to Vegas? | |
| You say, well, you get into the opposite of a car, you drive on the opposite of a road, you empty your car with the opposite of gas, and then at the end of that, you arrive at the opposite of Vegas. | |
| Would you consider those useful GPS directions should we come up with the religious GPS directions? | |
| Which just says whatever the GPS thing is, and the opposite, but not even a reliable opposite, so you can just do the opposite back and get there, right? | |
| The guy's GPS is, I want to go to Vegas. | |
| Well, let me give you the opposite route to the opposite of Vegas. | |
| Thanks, I think I'll just pull out a map, right? | |
| Yeah. No, it just seems... | |
| I'll have to read or look at your arguments more closely, but... | |
| The only thing is, like, when I'm thinking, like, the world is logical and we can reason, therefore there is no God being our deity or something like that. | |
| But if, for instance, I know, I forget the scientist's name, but he was explaining how he believed that the Earth is so old, it, you know, it, um... | |
| Evolution would need more time than what we see here. | |
| So he had some crazy theory about an alien something. | |
| I can't remember it specifically. | |
| Information from somewhere else. | |
| So it could happen. That seems still to me extremely far-fetched. | |
| But I still... | |
| I'm not claiming I know anything, but I guess I don't see the total disconnect between saying, yeah, our world is logical, we think with reason, and therefore God does not exist. | |
| I can't make the argument again, so you'll just need to listen to this again. | |
| Evolution is thoroughly falsifiable. | |
| I mean, it's a falsifiable hypothesis. | |
| All you need to do is find more complex organisms prior to less complex organisms. | |
| I mean, it's very easy. | |
| I mean, if you find a rabbit... | |
| Where you find only trilobites in an age where trilobites were the only... | |
| If you find a rabbit in there, exactly in the same sedimentary layer, evolution takes a significant blow. | |
| Right? If you find mammals before reptiles, if you find reptiles before fishes, if you find fishes before jellyfish, I mean, whatever. | |
| Again, I'm no biological expert, but it's an entirely falsifiable hypothesis. | |
| And that's good, because if it's not falsifiable, it's not science. | |
| And there's no falsifiability to the God hypothesis. | |
| The whole point is it's designed to be non-falsifiable. | |
| Now, if someone comes up with some theory and says, well, the world is too young for evolution to have occurred, well, that's a thesis that's very important. | |
| I don't think it's true. | |
| I think the Earth has been demonstrably proven to be far older than life itself and so on. | |
| But, you know, there's a hypothesis. | |
| Okay, fantastic. Then that's something which I guess some people will explore and But there still can't be the opposite of an answer. | |
| Parading is an answer. You just have to expose it for what is. | |
| So sorry. I mean, I can't do the argument again because I'm ahead we're going to explode. | |
| But if we can move on to the next call. | |
| Thank you so much for your questions. | |
| I really appreciate that. | |
| Thanks, Steph. All right, Aaron, you're up. | |
| Hello. Hello, Steph. | |
| Can you hear me? I can. | |
| Okay. I don't have a microphone right now. | |
| I just have headphones in my internal mic. | |
| No, it sounds good. Go ahead with your question. | |
| And I might also add I'm nervous as hell. | |
| Well, I am terrifying. | |
| So, you know, quake before my web voice. | |
| No, go ahead. What's your question? | |
| No, I think it's the truth, man. | |
| The truth is terrifying. | |
| Yes, it is. The truth is not terrifying except to the part of us which is addicted to or dependent upon lies. | |
| But what's your question? | |
| It was more of a statement, really. | |
| I just wanted to... | |
| I wanted to thank you and philosophy and what you're doing for philosophy. | |
| I feel like I've really turned my life around lately. | |
| Well, that's fantastic. I appreciate that. | |
| Thank you for your kind words. Oh, you're very welcome. | |
| I don't mean that that's nothing. | |
| You said you didn't have a question, just a statement, which is thanks, which I hugely appreciate. | |
| But if you had anything else to say, I'd be happy to hear. | |
| I was wondering if you'd like some details as to what's going so good in my life. | |
| You know, I could tell you that it would be sometimes on these shows, it's a bit of a grim march from chasm to smoking chasm. | |
| So if there's an oasis of happy news, I am overjoyed to hear it. | |
| Let's hear it. Just recently, I found out what I wanted to do with my life, which is, you know, in psychology, but not without the college part. | |
| You know, I just want to be like, put an ad in the paper, make a website and, you know, just offer my services for free. | |
| I want to do the donation model. | |
| Well, I've heard that can be tricky, but I also heard that it can work, so good for you. | |
| You know, just make sure that you don't advertise yourself in any way that's a protected word, right? | |
| Like psychologist or psychiatrist or I don't know what therapist, I don't know. | |
| But just you got to really check and make sure you don't use any word that is protected by some state cartel. | |
| But yeah, best of luck. | |
| Thank you. Well, I understand I've gotten a lot of very helpful information from the board members. | |
| They've really helped me with my advertising skills and, you know, not to use words like you were mentioning, like psychologists, because I could get, you know, in trouble from the state. | |
| Well, that's great. So best of luck to you. | |
| I certainly wish you well with that. | |
| And just as a sort of minor aside, there are a fair number of psychiatrists, sorry, psychologists, I should say, or therapists who will provide services Over the web for people who are looking for some sort of counseling that maybe there's nobody local or nobody you like local or so on. | |
| Just remember that you can look for web counseling with a phone or Skype. | |
| I don't know. But a lack of access immediately should not be that much of a barrier to getting good therapy. | |
| But thank you so much. | |
| It's great to hear and best of luck with your roles. | |
| Somebody asked me the other day, like I said, I want to do life coaching and stuff like that. | |
| Can I put it on the Freedom Aid Radio board? | |
| You know, with all due respect to the listeners and with all due hope for their success in these areas, I'm not a huge fan of advertising that kind of stuff on the board because I don't have a chance to check quality and it does sound like a little bit of an endorsement and all that and I don't really know any way other than spending a huge amount of time how to endorse that kind of stuff. | |
| So I just wanted to mention that. | |
| But yeah, best of luck to you and thank you so much for calling in. | |
| You did. You did great, my friend. | |
| All right. Terrific. | |
| Thank you. Thank you so much. | |
| Have a good day. You too. | |
| Okay, Matthew, go ahead. Okay, can you hear me? | |
| Yes. Okay, wonderful. | |
| Hello, Mr. Stephan. This is my first time calling in. | |
| Wow, I wish we had a cool noise for that. | |
| Let me make one. Okay, go ahead. | |
| My question was in relevance to the bombardment of images in the media, particularly around the gay culture. | |
| You see like 10,000 images and all I'm seeing is people who are dressed crazy, who are consistently complaining, and are just frankly kind of making themselves look bad. | |
| Oh, you mean like sort of the gay pride parade where everyone's dressed up like the village people and they got like anacondas wrapped around their thighs and stuff like that? | |
| Yes, and they're pretty much, I think that... | |
| When someone sees that on television, they're actually telling themselves, oh, that's what someone who's gay should act like. | |
| And people who are also gay associate themselves, well, that must be the only way I can represent myself. | |
| A sort of monkey see, monkey do kind of mindset. | |
| Yeah, I mean, if it's any consolation, there are significant portions of the gay community who are just as embarrassed by that kind of behavior as other people are. | |
| And they do quite resent that this is the way in which gay... | |
| A culture, so to speak, or aspects of the gay culture tend to portray themselves. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Some of it is enormously enjoyable in terms of it's just so uninhibited and out there that I think there's a certain amount of it that's just kind of delightful. | |
| I mean, to me, the big challenge of the gay community is the rampant promiscuity, which I think, and gay people have talked about this quite extensively, I think can be quite destructive self-esteem. | |
| But given the hardships that homosexuals have experienced throughout history, it's kind of hard to be churlish about their first burst of freedom. | |
| I think Oscar Wilde talked about this in his trial. | |
| Of course, he was gay and he was prosecuted for being gay. | |
| And as he pointed out, you know, this is a specifically modern phenomenon, at least it was at the time, this persecution for homosexuality. | |
| Homosexuality was fairly openly accepted and embraced in the ancient world. | |
| But with Christianity and the biblical commandments about the evils of homosexuality, I mean, it just created, you know, 2,000 years of persecution, which is horrendous. | |
| And, you know, one of my favorite 19th century writers, E.M. Forster, wrote an entire book about A gay relationship and was terrified of it. | |
| I mean, just a massive amount of persecution occurred. | |
| Some persecution, of course, still occurs. | |
| And it's tragic. | |
| So I can sort of understand how being out, which is for the first time in thousands of years, has become something that isn't immediately targeting you for social or physical destruction. | |
| That there might be a certain amount of campy exuberance in being able to live My biggest concern with it though is someone who decides they're gay, they're not going to go to the store and buy jeans. | |
| They're more likely to buy a very expensive set of pants because now they're gay and they have to wear that. | |
| It's more or less become if you want to be gay. | |
| Are you saying that gay people will spend more on clothing? | |
| I'm not disagreeing with them. | |
| I'm just trying to understand what you're saying. I'm saying they probably will be, but they're going to dress a certain way and act a certain way because that's what's been betrayed to them. | |
| This is the image they have, and this is what they aspire to be so they know they can be fitting in this mindset. | |
| Well, no. Look, I mean, to be fair, I mean, you see a lot more of that stuff in the media than you do in real life. | |
| Like, in real life, you'll meet gay people. | |
| Some of them you won't even know that you're gay. | |
| Some people you may suspect that they're gay. | |
| Some people you'll know that they're gay, but they're not going to be showing up to a business meeting, you know, in a Flash Gordon costume, right? | |
| Yeah. And so it's like, you know, if all you do is look at rap videos, you're going to get a particular view of African American youth. | |
| But, you know, you go out and talk to black youth and, you know, the majority of them are not... | |
| Dressed like that or talking like that or acting like that. | |
| So be careful with what you see through the media. | |
| That's a sensationalistic view of almost all communities that you can think of. | |
| I mean, think of how the media portrays the anarchist community, right? | |
| You know, a bunch of balaclava wearing, garbage throwing, Starbucks wrecking hooligans, right? | |
| And then people say, well, that's what an anarchist is. | |
| is. | |
| It's like, well, you know, there's a meme on Facebook, you know, anarchy, just a bunch of edgy teenagers, you know, and it's the Santa Spooner and Steph Kinsella, Jeff Tucker, myself and other, you know, prominent anarchists, you know, we're all middle-aged and look like we would cut out of an aging J.Crew catalog and about as whitey-white and conservative we're all middle-aged and look like we would cut out of an aging J.Crew catalog But of course, that doesn't fit the narrative. | |
| Whatever doesn't fit the narrative gets excluded, right? | |
| Well, this sort of imagery doesn't It's not just with the gay community. | |
| It's with absolutely everything. | |
| For example, when you see people talk about religion, they're usually angry and it's usually one side versus the other. | |
| There's no, oh, I'm glad I have a different viewpoint than you. | |
| I have had no intimate relations with your mother. | |
| Have a nice day. No, it's usually the opposite of those polite statements. | |
| Yeah, or whenever you see a soldier interviewed on the media, you will always see the most... | |
| The tallest, best-looking, most, quote, respectful, conservative, even-tempered soldiers that the army can possibly throw at a reporter. | |
| And you usually see, often female reporters, literally fawning over these man-beasts. | |
| And I can't remember the name of the reporter, but there was some reporter I saw consistently, literally salivating over military men. | |
| And then, I mean, it's a true tragedy. | |
| She ended up getting, I think, raped by a crowd in the Middle East and so on. | |
| But there is, of course, this portrayal of the military as well. | |
| And it's as egregious and probably a much more harmful stereotype than almost any of the other ones out there. | |
| Well, yeah, I'd have to agree with you. | |
| I'm just scared of the power that these images have. | |
| You see 10,000 images of the same thing. | |
| You are more likely to be impacted by that than having not seen them. | |
| Oh, yeah, without a doubt. | |
| I mean, with media and all that, propaganda is the new empiricism. | |
| And people don't base their judgments on reality. | |
| I mean, because people consume more media than reality in general. | |
| And we imprint on whatever enters our eyeballs. | |
| I mean, that's just how we are. | |
| I mean, our brain structure and our body and our nervous system and our senses, they don't have any clue that we're staring at a television rather than the real world. | |
| Mm-hmm. And because they consume the media and the media continually feeds them that which stimulates their fight or flight mechanism the most. | |
| That's how you get eyeballs. That's how you deliver advertisers is you scare the shit out of people and you titillate the shit out of people, right? | |
| So, you know, sex and violence, blah, blah, blah. | |
| So it's an old and cliched thing, right? | |
| And people consume, I think the average American watches like four or five hours of television a day. | |
| And so they are consuming more media than they are consuming reality. | |
| Because other time, they're at work and so on. | |
| But in terms of actually being in the world and viewing the world and viewing the people in it, they view it through the lens of the media rather than through reality itself. | |
| And this is something that's really, really important to understand, that when you're dealing with people and talking to people, they have consumed far more media than they have reality. | |
| Because people, what do they do? They come home and they flip on the TV, maybe play a couple of video games, take a break for dinner, sit on the toilet with their cell phones. | |
| They're consuming media, not reality. | |
| And media, of course, is the matrix as far as that goes. | |
| And public school is the first one and media is the second that provokes in you a programmed response that lends you to be more susceptible to the state, more susceptible to being controlled by those in power. | |
| Now, to be controlled, you must be afraid and you must be angry. | |
| That's how you are controlled. | |
| And in order to provoke fear and anger, the government must continually show you things that make you – and the media must show you things that make you fearful and make you angry. | |
| And then the advertisers show you stuff that makes you insecure, you know, in that – You could have this lustrous hair. | |
| You might have a pimple. Maybe your posture isn't great enough. | |
| I remember seeing some Brooke Shields ad where you can get more luscious eyebrows. | |
| I mentioned this before. I just thought, who? | |
| I mean, my God, you really spend a lot of time thinking about it. | |
| Eyelashes, I think it was. Even eyelashes, eyebrows. | |
| Actually, Brooke Shields got these Arkansas ditch caterpillars on her head anyway. | |
| Maybe my eyebrows are too big. | |
| Maybe my eyelashes could be thicker. | |
| Maybe I should try a different coloring around my eyeballs. | |
| I mean, this is the nutty stuff that people consume themselves with. | |
| And of course, all we do is see beautiful people all the time. | |
| Beauty used to be extraordinarily rare. | |
| So rare that Helen of Troy was renowned the world over for her beauty. | |
| Whereas Helen of Troy now would be just one supermodel among thousands of supermodels would not be particularly distinct. | |
| But we're all exposed to such ridiculously impossible standards of beauty that we all feel less attractive thereby, which makes us easier to rule. | |
| And of course, we are – everyone we see who takes off their shirt has abs. | |
| And ever since I was a heavy-duty swimmer and water polo guy and cross-country runner as a teen, I haven't seen abs missing for their 23rd year, right? | |
| They are – my abs are – You just have like one big ab and that's what counts, right? | |
| The keg. And so we have all these ridiculous standards. | |
| We also see ridiculous standards of assertiveness. | |
| I remember when I was younger, I watched some Remington Steele episode where he had a problem with some teacher and he grabbed the teacher, dragged the teacher along a desk and was yelling at him and so on. | |
| You see people slam each other up against the wall and so on. | |
| And I mean, this stuff all lands you in ridiculous standards of assertiveness, ridiculous standards of eloquence. | |
| Everybody always has the great comeback, the great line, the great smart stuff and so on. | |
| And so, yeah, we just use ridiculous standards. | |
| I mean, the people who are beautiful, I mean, just go look at the pictures of them without all the makeup and lighting. | |
| And I mean, they're still attractive people, but I mean, even the people who are beautiful don't see that. | |
| You just don't see them looking like that. | |
| Katy Perry was just on the cover. | |
| Yeah, I mean, Katy Perry was just on the cover, I think, of Vogue magazine, and she prepared for that for three months. | |
| You know, not eating, not drinking any coffee, she didn't want to be puffy. | |
| I talked to a Calvin Klein underwear model once who said he hated underwear shoots because he couldn't drink water for like two days beforehand to make sure he had no excess liquid in his system. | |
| So he's just dying of thirst. | |
| He's freezing cold because he's got zero body fat, which means he's always cold. | |
| Anyway, so we have all these crazy standards, but this is actually what people live in. | |
| Pornography provides entirely unrealistic standards for sexuality, for physical attractiveness, all this kind of stuff. | |
| So yeah, it is crazy stuff and this is where people live and reality just seems like a bland disappointment after that. | |
| Pretty much. I'm pretty scared of what the media can do as far as setting new standards. | |
| For example, I go to someone, I lick their face and tell them, I like pie. | |
| That'd be crazy. But if that was in a movie and that was a comedy and that's supposed to be a funny act, that'd be a lot more acceptable. | |
| They can actually program new actions to be taken and can change how they're to be accepted. | |
| Just through 10,000 images. | |
| Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. | |
| It is very important to understand this. | |
| But of course, people choose this unreality. | |
| And partly we're drawn to it. We're drawn to rich, powerful, successful, beautiful people. | |
| That's just sort of our genetic makeup. | |
| And we have these imaginary relationships and all that. | |
| And it's all nutty. | |
| And it's all crazy. But it's all kind of inevitable. | |
| We just have to try and resist it, I think. | |
| Just try and stay away from media and go out in the real world. | |
| I mean, not 100% or whatever, right? | |
| Yeah. You know, there's lots of before and after pictures. | |
| They've actually, some personal trainers recently have released before and after pictures, which is about 15 minutes difference. | |
| And they do. They look totally different. | |
| They suck in their gut. They put on different clothing. | |
| They get better lighting. They do their hair and so on. | |
| They look totally different. So, anyway. | |
| It's a good thing to be aware of how much the media is programming you. | |
| I think that's really important to understand. | |
| And to be aware of it is important. | |
| So thank you for bringing that up. | |
| It's an important topic. Thank you for taking my call. | |
| That's all I had. You're very welcome. | |
| Can we squeeze in another listener between the buttcheeks of time? | |
| That's it for today's stuff. | |
| Oh my god, are we going to finish early? | |
| How are you doing, Mike? What's new? | |
| We've got ten minutes. Fill it up, baby. | |
| I've got to go to the washroom. I'll be right back. | |
| No, I'm just kidding. Like I don't do the show on a commode already. | |
| That's a big secret. Don't tell anyone. | |
| Oh, wait. Yeah, yeah. Big secret. | |
| Unless you listen for the flushing. All right. | |
| Well, I guess we'll stop early and I won't be leaking urine from my ears for once, which would be nice. | |
| It's a long show after two coffees. | |
| Anyway. Oh, no. | |
| If anybody has a question, type it into the chat window. | |
| I've still got another few minutes. Or I could just do more Billy Joel. | |
| Slow down, you crazy child. | |
| You're so ambitious for a juvenile. | |
| Do we get any questions in the chat window? | |
| We should remind people, the shy people, that they can ask that. | |
| No, I don't see anything. | |
| Anyway, have yourself a wonderful week, everyone. | |
| I hope you have... A great, great week. | |
| I hope you make my week even greater. | |
| fdrurl.com forward slash donate. | |
| Send in your money. | |
| Mailbag at freedomainradio.com to send in your questions for the show. | |
| And what were the Amazon links again? | |
| Oh, oh, oh, lfb.org forward slash forward slash. | |
| I should be able to get that right after 10 million times. | |
| lfb.org forward slash Stefan, S-T-E-F-A-N. If you want to sign up for the Laissez-Faire book club, highly, highly, highly recommended. | |
| And Mike, you want to hurl people. | |
| Don't worry, I'm going to do one more question, which was asked in the chat room right after this. | |
| So don't hang up yet. But what were our Amazon links again? | |
| The base is FDRURL.com. | |
| And for the US, it's Amazon US. For Canada, it's Amazon Canada. | |
| And for the UK, it's Amazon UK. So that's FDRURL.com slash and then the base. | |
| All right. Fantastic. And it costs you nothing and makes us a lot. | |
| And question. | |
| Explain. What was it? | |
| Let me just see here. What was it? Explain the is-ought dichotomy. | |
| Is-ought. Explained. All right. | |
| So this is a human argument that says you cannot get an ought from an is. | |
| A man kills another man. | |
| Well, he ought not to. Well, there's nothing in the action of killing another man that says you shouldn't. | |
| Nothing innate in it. Animals kill each other all the time. | |
| We kill cells all the time. | |
| We scratch our nose. You kill a couple hundred million cells. | |
| You take antibiotics. You kill bacteria and so on. | |
| So there's nothing in the world that says how the world should be, how the world should be. | |
| is a mental imposition. | |
| And so he says you can't get morality from what is. | |
| You can't get an ought. How things ought to be, what we ought to do, what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, what is virtuous, what is non-virtuous. | |
| These are all human constructs that cannot be based on anything in reality, and therefore they are arbitrary, cultural, and subjective. | |
| So that is the human argument in a nutshell, and UPB solves that. | |
| So, for instance, you have to look at the negative. | |
| Anybody who makes a positive universal declarative statement is automatically accepting the value of an ought. | |
| It doesn't mean the ought exists in the world, but they are saying the value of that. | |
| So if I say what you say is wrong, then I've set up standards of right and wrong that are universal, that are not subjective. | |
| If I say I like ice cream and you say I like pecan pie, we don't get to impose that on each other. | |
| It's moral or immoral, right or wrong, virtuous or evil. | |
| But the moment I say, you say the world is banana-shaped, you're wrong. | |
| Well, I'm immediately accepting that there is an ought from an is, which is the world is not. | |
| Banana-shaped and you should not lie about it or you should not be mistaken about it or if you're innocently mistaken, it should be corrected. | |
| All kids basically are born believing the world is flat and then we have to tell them it's a sphere and all that kind of stuff. | |
| That's natural. If you look at the sky, the sun and the moon look the same size. | |
| What's about the size of a dime held at arm's length? | |
| It's not true. Varsely different sizes. | |
| Just one's closer. And so the moment that you say you cannot get an ought from an is... | |
| You're basically saying because there is no ought in what is, there is no should in existence, you can't say that there is. | |
| Well, you just created an ought. You ought not to say there's an ought. | |
| And from there, you can build ethics. | |
| So, thank you very much. | |
| Mike, I'm sure we'll copy these questions and we'll throw them in a listener mailbag, but I'm afraid I'm out of time for the show today. | |
| But just think how much shorter it would be if we had to break every 13 minutes for four minutes of commercials. | |
| Ugh, would drive me crazy. | |
| Where were we again? Anyway. | |
| Thanks to Mike again for setting things up. | |
| And have yourselves a wonderful week. | |
| FDRURL.com forward slash donate. | |
| Don't forget, I like my food. | |
| Have yourself a great week, everyone. Talk to you soon. | |
| Don't forget your Wednesday show, 8 p.m. |
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