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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:06
The Power of the Parasite Class - Stefan Molyneux Speaks in Toronto
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So, I guess I was last year, in 2007, I talked about free market solutions to environmentalism.
And as you can see from the temperature this morning, I think we solved global warming probably during that talk.
I don't want to take the whole credit for it, but I think it obviously had a factor, a key factor to play.
So, yeah, thanks. I just came back from Libertopia.
I was the speaker in California, and it's great to be here, and I wanted to talk about approaches to communicating about freedom that you may have thought of, may not have thought of, but which I found to be particularly effective.
My show had about 20 million downloads, about a quarter million listeners over the years, and so it's coming along, I guess you could say.
I'm going to propose that we obviously want an evolution in society.
We want society to be more peaceful.
I mean, that is the foundation of the libertarian ethic, which is to examine the way that human beings interact with each other and to say, wherever possible, wherever possible, let's replace coercion with voluntarism.
Laws with negotiation.
I mean, isn't that what we all learned in kindergarten?
Don't hit, don't steal, don't bang other children with your toys, or if we're adults, with your laws.
The idea really is to replace violence with voluntarism.
And this is a... Libertarianism is, you know, the icing on the cake of a long human project.
It's a long human project, all the way from the primitive beginnings of our species to the future, which is...
I'm going to submit it's the extension of personal ethics...
To the public sphere. I mean, libertarians are fundamentally not revolutionaries, I would submit.
I mean, we're evolutionaries, which I think is a good thing to be, but we're not revolutionaries because we're not trying to substitute something completely foreign and unknown into human society.
What we're trying to do, I would submit, is to break down the barriers between public morality and private morality.
Because in our private sphere, in our private way of doing things, we don't use violence to get what we want, other than me running late and hijacking a cab to get here.
Most times... I'm kidding.
Most times we don't use coercion.
If we're out of a job, we don't kidnap somebody's kids so that they'll give us a job.
If we're low on money, we don't go and raid the fruit stand at the grocery store at gunpoint.
We don't use coercion, and that is a generally accepted axiom.
In our private lives, we don't use force to get what we want.
But we have this crazy sphere, this up-is-down, black-is-white sphere of anti-gravity called the public realm.
Now, in the public realm, Not only is it okay to use coercion to get what you want, it's morally necessary, it's morally required, it's morally good, right?
So this is this strange division that we have in society.
Private realm, force, bad.
Public realm, force. Yay!
And it's a very strange thing to have in society.
And what we're working to do is to simply push the private sphere of morality into the public sphere.
To take what we all accept It's morally good in our own lives and extend it to the public sphere.
Why? Because there's no such thing as the public sphere.
There is no such thing as the public sphere.
It's like the slave class in ancient Athens.
There's no slave class.
There's people. There's people doing stuff.
That's my philosophy. People doing stuff.
There is no such thing as the government.
There is no such thing as the public sphere.
It is an artificial division that is created to reverse morality for the sake of the acquisition of power and resources and all of the other things that the ruling classes have done since the dawn of time.
Create a world of opposites that you can step into and you suddenly have your anti-gravity, good is evil, evil is good, suit on.
So, we are seeking to evolve and extend The private virtues which everybody takes for granted to the public sphere by saying that there's no such thing as the public sphere.
There is only people doing things.
Dalton McGinty is somebody doing stuff.
He's no different than you and I, fundamentally.
Okay, he's got an army, so to speak, but he's fundamentally no different.
And it is the extension of humanity, even, no, it's hard to imagine, even to the political class.
It is the extension of humanity to the political class, which I think is our fundamental goal.
Now, the way that we've been approaching that goal, and I use the word we here completely inclusive of myself, because I spent 20 years doing this, and so maybe I've come up with something useful because of that, maybe not.
But the way that we've tried to extend morality to the public sphere and to convince other people of the virtues of freedom and peace and negotiation and voluntarism, It's through what I call the argument from effect.
The argument from effect is to sort of walk up to people and say, you know, your life would be a lot better if you were free.
The society would be richer, right?
So rather than using violence to redistribute the wealth to help the poor, let's free up The free market so that wealth is generated and that in a rising tide lifts all boats within a generation of freedom.
The only poor who would be left would be people who want to become monks or graduate students or people who want to yell about philosophy on the internet and rely on donations like myself.
It would be a voluntary kind of poverty, a vow that you would take.
So that's really, I think, the way that we've tried to argue it.
So we say, look, the welfare state hasn't worked.
It's created a permanent underclass.
From the 1950s to the 1960s, poverty was being statistically reduced by 1% a year.
I mean, that was what the free market was doing, was eliminating poverty.
And then when the welfare state came in, as we sort of know it in the modern world under LBJ's Great Society, and the same thing was happening here in Canada...
The progress towards a poverty-free society stopped.
And now we've created this permanent underclass of people who are dependent upon welfare payments and who are very poorly educated and all the other kinds of things that go on in society.
It's always sort of struck me that in Canada we have a perfect example of government programs.
People say, well, the government should solve this, that, or the other problem.
When I was Younger, I worked as a gold panner and an explorer up north for a mining company, and we spent some time in and around native reservations, where there's the most government that you can imagine.
I mean, there's a Soviet-style government up there.
That's the most government programs that you could conceivably had, combined with...
The worst possible living conditions that you could imagine.
I mean, what's up there is completely apocalyptic.
So our argument is to say, well, look, we've tried these things.
We've tried shoveling money around at the point of a gun to solve various problems.
And we've got huge national debt.
We've got terrible education.
We have a permanent underclass of poverty.
And we've got this financial instability.
And in Canada, the markers...
I was actually on... TV, Max Keiser has a show that runs on Russian television where everybody wants to break into their TV gig.
And you can look for it online under the Max Keiser show.
And I was talking about how the financial indicators in Canada in many ways, particularly in the real estate market, are worse than they were in the US before the crash.
So we have this argument which says it hasn't worked.
And it's a very pragmatic argument.
And I think there's nothing wrong with identifying those facts.
But I think if we want to be pragmatic, I think we have to look at the argument from effect, which is to say freedom will give you a good effect in society.
You'll have more money, you'll have fewer laws, you'll have greater liberty, you'll have all of these good things.
And we have to say to ourselves, has it worked?
Because You could say, and I think you could really make a good case for this, that the goal of extending voluntary interactions from the private to the public sphere, of reducing the amount of coercion within society, has been going on since before Socrates.
I mean, Socrates attempted to substitute reason and debate for politics and coercion.
So, a 2500 year project, and we have The biggest governments that have ever existed in the face of the world.
2,500 years. Libertarians and I, too, get upset with governments because governments just keep doing the same thing that doesn't work, right?
And they don't sort of stop and assess.
Now, you have to do that. As an entrepreneur, you had to do that all the time.
If something didn't work for 12 minutes, you were going to go out of business.
So you really had to monitor what was working.
Constant course correction is the nature of the game in the entrepreneurial world.
So we get mad at government programs and governments for keeping on doing that which doesn't work.
And so when I brought entrepreneurial principles to communication about freedom, I said to myself, well, by any objective standard, I think that what we have been doing, the collective we of being those who want to substitute volunteerism for violence, really hasn't worked too well.
It really hasn't worked very well.
It's worked well in some ways, for sure.
I mean, look, we've extended equality of rights to women.
We're starting to do it in terms of children, viewing them as full citizens with rights.
But as far as reining in the power of the Leviathan, reining in the power of organized and institutionalized coercion, well, we suck.
I mean, we haven't achieved our goals.
And when you haven't achieved your goals, you have to sort of, you know, stop, reassess, and figure it out.
So I did this a couple of years ago when I was just starting out on this path.
And I said to myself, well, what I'd be doing is trying to convince people that the roads would be better in a free society.
You know, we've all had that discussion.
You know, the roads would be better, the poor would be taken care of, the old would have pensions, and the sick would have medical care because it would be so much cheaper, and there'd be charities.
And we're trying to invent this whole new future world.
Like... Tolkien inventing the Middle Earth.
We have to spend this whole time inventing this future world and trying to figure everything out and keeping all this stuff in the air and then somebody comes up with some objection that we have to go off to Google and research and come back.
That, I think, has not worked because it puts the onus upon us to imagine how a future society could work, which can't be done.
Nobody can. Nobody could imagine how a future society could work.
I was just talking at Drexel University in Philadelphia and I sort of made the argument that, you know, the post office, we talk about privatizing the post office.
People would say, well, but how would people...
Say you were doing this in 1960.
And people would say, well, how would poor communities get their mail?
Because it's so far to go, and so this and that.
And you'd say, no, no, no, there'll be electronic devices that will squirt documents back and forth over phone lines.
You'd say, what? No, no, no, even better.
There'll be a series of tubes that will allow people to videoconference for free all over the world, unlimited.
People would just be like, that's insane.
Of course that would never happen.
But it has. Right?
So nobody... And of course, if you go back to 1900, look at the predictions of people, even the smartest people, like H. Jewels and other people like that, look at their predictions of how and where society was going to go, even over 50 years or 100 years.
Nobody even gets it remotely close, which is why I try not to make future predictions about society, because you can't.
I mean, if you could, it would be an argument for dictatorship and statism to say society can be predicted and planned for and understood.
So, when we talk about where we want to go as a society, which is this continual slow chiseling away of coercion and replacing it with voluntarism, I think we need to try letting go of the argument from effect.
And I think we instead need to focus on the argument from morality.
Now, I'm not saying that...
Of course, everybody here understands that the non-initiation of force is a virtue, and I'm not trying to lecture learned libertarians on morality.
They all understand that.
But I think that we gravitate towards the argument from effect because it's less volatile.
Saying that the current system is inefficient is a managerial argument, so to speak.
It is not an argument From fundamental ethics.
The argument from fundamental ethics, as we all know, is that the initiation of force is immoral.
The violence is evil.
That the state's initiation of force against people taking drugs, against people having sex, in particularly acrobatic manners, I don't know the laws in that area, but I think that some Cirque du Soleil shows should be banned.
But the initiation of force in the regulation of trade, the initiation of force to provide education, the initiation of force to control the flow of capital, the initiation of force to have a monopoly of counterfeiting.
I mean, talk about the difference between private and public morality.
I go out and print banknotes.
I mean, it's up against the wall for Steph, right?
But if I have a mint, right?
It's like that old...
I think the story comes from Alexander the Great, captured a pirate.
And he said, you are going to hang for piracy.
And the pirate said, well, sure.
Of course, because I have a smaller pirate fleet than you do.
You just call yours a navy.
But that guy was right, you know, over 2,000 years ago.
Private morality and public morality.
The argument for morality is simply to continue to pound on the reality that the initiation of force is immoral, not to focus on the effects and say, well, we would get better effects if we stopped using violence.
If you look at successful changes in the past, and I'm thinking particularly about feminism and about the abolitionist movement in the 17th and 18th centuries, and to some degree in the 19th in the US, they did not say we should end slavery because it will add to our GDP. They did not say that agriculture will become more productive in the absence of human livestock.
Feminists didn't say, well, you see, if women have the right to have contracts and property rights, then women can go out to work, which will add to our GDP. They just said that we need to extend humanity to these formally controlled and brutalized classes, of which I would put the taxpayer completely in that category.
So, to focus on the ethics, I think, is really important.
Now, let me make... Any questions so far?
I don't want to just completely stun you guys or objections or...
No? Okay, good.
You're either with me or you're completely in your happy places.
Either way, I'll keep going.
I hear seagulls and surf.
Here's the problem with the argument from effect.
Here's why it doesn't work. The argument from effect does not work because in every evolution, there are winners and there are losers.
You know, you can't sell mammals to the dinosaurs because they're going to displace.
Well, I don't know if it was an asteroid or, I don't know, alien dinosaur collectors or something, but they're gone and we're here, right?
So you can't sell that kind of evolution to the dinosaurs because every time the society moves forward, there are winners and there are losers.
Lots of people that heavily invested in the slave trade and become experts at being slave auctioneers and slave catchers and slave branders and slave whippers, they were not happy with the end of slavery.
Lots of people were not happy with the rise of feminism because they liked to control their women.
They just weren't happy with it.
There are people who gain and there are people who lose in every extension of the social ethic.
And we all know that there is a huge class of people who have currently adapted themselves to hanging off the body politic like a bunch of swollen and bloody ticks.
Some through choice, some through circumstance.
But depending on how you measure it, 20, 30, 40% or more of people are partly or totally dependent upon the state for either all or a significant portion of their income.
If we win, if virtue wins, if consistency wins, if integrity wins, these people are going to face a boatload of unwanted changes.
There are mammals and there are dinosaurs.
When the mammals win, the dinosaurs evolve or don't.
So the argument from effect doesn't work because there is no such thing as the collective good.
We always say that, right?
But there is no such thing as society moving forward as a whole or if we get rid of massive areas of the government that the economy will grow.
Well, it certainly will for a lot of people.
But it is going to be a wrenching transition for some and it is going to be a net loss.
For others. So when we say the effects of freedom will be positive, people don't think about it in the global sense of society as a whole, because that's not how human beings work, and that's not the truth.
People look at their individual situation and say, well, am I going to do better under statism, or am I going to do better under freedom?
So who can think of some examples of people who are doing better under statism?
Intellectuals, people who work for universities or bureaucrats.
Particularly free market intellectuals who completely blow my mind.
They completely blow my mind.
Free-market, government-protected professors completely blow my mind.
Because they say everybody should sacrifice, you know, people should give up their government pensions.
Everybody should sacrifice for the sake of the free market.
But not my tenure.
You know, I think it's always better to lead by example, right?
You shouldn't be the 900-pound guy in the cover of the diet book.
Anyway. So yes, intellectuals for sure are going to lose.
Who else? Tax accountants.
Oh man, yeah, they've invested.
And see, at least being a professor is fun.
I mean, tax accountants have gone to conferences like this that go on for nine days where they're just being buried under paperwork like that guy in Brazil, the movie Brazil that Robert De Niro carries.
The tax accountants have had a miserable time accumulating that kind of knowledge.
So they're really going to hate it if that changes.
Who else? Period. Dairy farmers.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Taxi license owners.
Yeah, I just did a show on this.
Do you know, in San Francisco, a taxi license is a quarter of a million dollars?
I mean, you might as well have a house on wheels.
It's astounding. Is it a quarter million in Toronto as well?
Oh, yeah. You know, because you have to have a license, otherwise people are going to get ripped off, because them chipping in to cover a quarter million dollars, that's not ripping them off.
Anyway, who else?
Lobbyists! Oh yes, their tentacles are going to be reaching for nothing to gain, right?
...of many of the rest of us, let alone disagreements between us.
Would you agree? I absolutely agree with you.
I think that money is a very dangerous thing.
I think it's really important to look at the hand of the state on the throat of capital.
And what I mean by that is that the government has a huge incentive to...
I hesitate to use the word encourage because that's not what government does.
But government has a huge incentive to encourage people to use currency because barter can't be taxed.
So I believe that there would be much more bartering in particular sectors of society if we did not have a government currency and if we did not have the form of taxation or taxation at all.
But at the moment, everybody's being herded into using cash because barter and other kinds of things can't be taxed, so that's a big problem for people.
So I think that currency will exist in a free market, but certainly not in the way that it exists now.
And of course I would want competing currencies because without competition you never get quality.
So I agree with you that the way that currency looks right now is completely monstrous and would have nothing to do with how it would look in a free society where there'd be much greater benefits to barter and voluntary exchanges of those kinds.
What part of economics?
Well, let me just...
You know what? Let me just... If you can hold your questions, I'm completely going to lose my train of thought, which is close to being derailed at any particular moment that I'm speaking.
So hold on to your thoughts.
Let me just finish this particular point that I'm making.
But other people who are going to lose.
Yeah, organized labor.
So, for instance, the plumber's union, they're going to go through a transition.
For sure. I mean, the people who make 100 large or more doing overtime at a Ford plant are going to find a change in their conditions, for sure.
Now, you will say, well, yes, but in half a generation, they'll be making 150 in the free market, but not if you're 50 or 60, right?
So, particularly people who are older.
I used to be able to just say old, but now I just have to say older because I'm 44.
I was going to agree with you.
There is all these little groups.
The mass of the population is very concerned about losing their health care that they think is free, losing education that they think is free or subsidized.
They realize that they're paying for it.
So there are all these things that people Even though they may not lose them, they may gain, but there's that perception that they're going to lose all that.
Well, it's more than a perception, I would say.
So anybody who's licensed, I think in the U.S., a third of workers requires some sort of license.
You even need a license in some cities to be an interior decorator.
Astounding. Anyway, so they're going to lose.
Anybody who's licensed has gone through onerous licensing requirements, once those are lifted, there will be a flood of people coming in to the field who will undercut them.
And so they're going to face a negative.
And that's a significant negative, right?
If you've gotten 150 grand in debt to become a doctor, and then the market is opened, then that's going to be a challenge for you.
And again, we've got arguments to say, well, but it'll even out and even improve in the long run.
But that's not how people think.
Any others that people can think of?
Regulators and regulation enforcers.
Regulators and regulators enforcements, or 95% of government employees.
They're going to face this huge challenge, right?
And I think it's safe to say that government workers are not exactly risk-embracing kinds of people, right?
So if you say, don't worry, roll the dice, you'll do much better under freedom, they'll be like, hey, I got my pension.
You know, I got my guaranteed income.
I got my job security.
I'm good. I don't want to roll any dice.
Thank you very much, right? You had something you wanted to?
No? Just you? Just stretching?
Right. So, I mean, we could go on and on, and Lord knows I've been known to, but we understand that there are huge numbers of people and sectors of society who are gaining massive advantages from the existing system.
I mean, and we're just talking about money.
What about power?
I mean, think of the politicians.
Think of the people that are high up in the government.
Think of the mandarins and the head bureaucrats.
The amount of power that they have.
Think of all of the politicians who've got those worn carpets from everybody coming in on bended knee to kiss the ring and demand particular favors from people in power.
I mean... People would say, George Bush, Dalton McGinty, doesn't matter who, he knows what's right for this province.
He knows what's right. Then call him up and say, hey, what should I do with my day today?
How should I spend my money? Maybe he could send out a broadcast phone message to everyone telling them what to do.
That would be a volunteer. If he's so wise that he should run half the province's economy, then he can send out a newsletter saying, here's what you should do with your time and money today.
People go, okay, I'll do that. But don't give him a gun and make him force everyone, metaphorically or not.
So when we use the argument from a fact, we're saying there will be positive material benefits to freedom.
But, that's not true.
Because for a lot of people, there will be negative material benefits.
I mean, sorry for the U.S. examples.
That's what I do most of my research on because that's a big market.
George W. Bush would be a semi-drunk used car salesman.
No question. Because he wasn't even able to run...
You couldn't run an oil rig in Texas.
I mean, if you can't run an oil rig in Texas, you've got some serious non-business skills.
There was a C student, right, propelled only on the surf of his parents' money.
The man would not have been given control of nearly half of the largest economy in the world.
Wouldn't have happened. Wouldn't have been given armies and aircraft carriers.
Wouldn't have happened. So he's not going to benefit from a free society.
The Clintons made $12 million last year or something like that.
Are they going to have made that as lawyers in a free society?
If we even needed lawyers in a free society.
But no, they wouldn't have, right?
And they wouldn't have had all this power.
They wouldn't be on TV all the time.
That narcissistic vanity that these people need to keep themselves vertical.
Vanity is their spine and exploitation is their blood flow.
They will not benefit from a free society.
So as soon as we use the argument from effect, saying people as a whole will benefit, everybody translates that down into their own particular circumstances.
And they say, not will society as a whole benefit, but will I as an individual benefit?
And for a lot of people, that answer is no.
So I think that's why, when we use the argument from effect, we don't seem to gain that traction.
You know, we're trying to climb that glacier without those crampons.
You know, we're just... We can't get purchased because people translate the argument from a fact into their personal circumstances, not into the good of society as a whole.
Any questions about that? Now, you can make the case for the good of society as a whole.
You can. But only using morality, not the argument from a fact.
I mean, it's my considerable opinion.
It's not just my opinion.
It's the opinion of a lot of economists as well.
Human beings are not economic calculators.
I mean, we'll do it at times, you know.
Save some parking. You know, what kind of salary do I want?
Do I invest or save? But fundamentally, human beings...
I mean, we're only here because people make non-economic decisions.
I say this as a relatively new parent.
Having children is ridiculous when it comes to economic calculations, let alone sleep, right?
My daughter's almost two, and it's a time sink, it's a money pit, it's a crazy thing to do.
We're all only here because the parents said, to hell with economics, I'm just going to do what I want, right?
So people don't fundamentally make many of their decisions based upon economic calculations, which is why the argument from benefiting from economic gain doesn't really help, doesn't really grab people.
What grabs people, I think, and allows them to sacrifice Because that's really what we're asking for.
I mean, we know that there's going to be a benefit, but it's a sacrifice.
I mean, telling people to quit politics, telling people to quit statism, I mean, it's the heroine of our culture, right?
I mean, you can say to the guy who's a heroine addict, listen, Sid, you should...
You should put down the smack because you'll be better off later, but let's not gloss over the fact that there's going to be considerable discomfort, let's say, in the transition.
So you can't get people to make sacrifices based on economic calculations and the argument from effect.
You can get people to make sacrifices for virtue.
I mean, you can get people to volunteer for a war in a country they've never heard of if you can convince them that it's for the good of the country and to protect their children.
And we don't want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
Remember that? Vile.
But you can get people to make massive sacrifices if you can convince them that it is for a moral course.
Human beings are so fundamentally driven by morality That if you can hook into that power, there's no stopping the movement, in my opinion.
Just make sure that I'm on track.
I'm sure I had something else to say.
Right. And how am I doing on time?
I'm good. Sorry, that's not quite precise enough for me.
I'm good. Three minutes, half an hour.
Okay. And I do want to make, look, I mean, I don't want to just be talking bobblehead here.
Lord knows I do enough of that in my podcast.
So I'll just make another short point, and then I'd like to get your feedback about what I'm saying, whether you think it has value or utility, and if you've tried this approach, how it's gone.
I think that there are a lot of tools that we have that we don't use because they're volatile.
They're volatile tools, right?
The argument for morality is very volatile.
Because the argument for morality is going up to someone and saying, like, I had a conversation with a listener about the Iraq War.
And she said, I'm for the surge.
I like the surge. I'm good for the surge.
Surge, be A-OK with me.
And I don't want to get into the pluses and minuses of whether the surge...
I mean, how the hell do I know? I don't know whether it's going to work or not.
I don't even know what working means when you've displaced a million and a half people and killed 150,000.
I don't know what working means in that context.
But I did say to her, look, am I allowed to disagree with you?
And she said, of course, yes.
I said, look, if you want to approve the surge, you like the surge, That's fine with me.
I don't agree with you, but you're allowed to disagree with me.
Am I allowed to disagree with you?
Now, she has to say yes, of course, but she's going to say no, right?
And so I said, so what you mean then is that I should be free?
I was playing a U.S. guy at this point.
I said, I should be free then to not pay the taxes to support the surge.
Because it means nothing to say I'm allowed to disagree, but I'm forced to pay.
It's like saying you're allowed to divorce your husband, you just can't move out.
It makes no sense. There's no freedom if you can't act on it.
If it's just theoretical, it means nothing.
So she had to say yes.
Because what you're saying is, look, I have to put you in the role of statist for a sec.
You say that the welfare state helps the poor.
My question to you is not, does it or doesn't it?
Here are the statistics and this and that.
Because you can always find somebody who's poor who has been helped by the welfare state.
You can always find some guy who grew up in poverty and who got this program and that program and joined the military and got his government funding and then got education funding and then became this great guy or whatever, right?
You can always find some... See, it works, right?
Find some other guy who fell off the cliff and never recovered and say, well, it doesn't work.
You can't... I mean, picking these individual examples doesn't work.
What I can do is say, well, look, you believe.
That the welfare state is beneficial to the poor, am I allowed to disagree with you?
Because this is the problem with statism, is that you're not allowed to disagree with people.
You're not allowed to disagree with the culturally enforced solution.
Because if you disagree with it in any fundamental practical way, you get thrown in jail.
So I disagree with government education.
Does that mean I don't have to pay property taxes that go to fund state education?
No. Because if I disagree with state education and act on my principles, I get thrown in jail.
And if I resist, they'll shoot me.
Right? That's a pretty volatile argument to have with someone.
Do you support the use of violence against me?
Am I allowed to disagree with you without you calling out the thugs in blue to hold a gun to my neck?
That is a hard conversation to have with people.
That is a cliff edge confrontation.
And we don't like that. I don't like it.
I do it. Because, you know, morality runs me as much as anybody else.
But I don't like it. I don't like that I have to do that.
But that's the reality of the situation.
Not, well, without the welfare state, some poor would be better off.
And as a whole, we'd have no debt and selling off the future to foreigners, whatever, right?
But am I allowed to disagree with the statists without them wanting me thrown in jail for that disagreement?
Pretty fascistic, as we all know.
That is a very short conversation.
That doesn't require a whole lot of Google time, right?
I mean, that requires girding your loins for combat.
It requires saddling up, you know, putting on your cup and your, you know, Madonna tinfoil bra, whatever, and going into combat.
Sorry, everybody has their own style.
But maybe that's not yours.
But over 40, you've got to prop them up.
Anyway. Man or woman, I think.
But that's a volatile and difficult conversation to have.
And I think that's why we like to go back to this argument from effect.
Because that's safer. That's statistics.
That's instances. That's examples.
That's research. That is not volatile in that...
Do you support the use of violence against me?
When we shift from the argument, from effect to the argument, from morality, we gain a great power.
And I'll tell you what that is very briefly, and then you can tell me if it makes any sense.
The power that we gain is the power of moral condemnation.
Oh, I know. That just sounds so terrible, doesn't it?
You know, it sounds like, you know, instead of the red letter, what was the scarlet letter?
A for adultery, wasn't it?
S for statism! Random...
I love the smell of statist foreheads in the morning.
Smells like...
Smells like roast beef.
But we do gain the power of moral condemnation.
And that's very important. Because we're selling an intangible benefit.
We all know this example.
If the government spends money to create a thousand jobs, everybody who gets those thousand jobs loves it.
Yay! Everybody who sells stuff to those guys who have a thousand jobs loves it.
Their families love it.
Because it's great, tangible benefit.
Of course, everybody knows, in this room, though a few people understand it outside, it's the 5,000 jobs that don't get created because of that money hoovered out of the private sector.
That is missing.
But human beings are fundamentally constituted for a bird in the hand, not two in the bush, right?
So when you see 1,000 jobs getting created, if you just created a constituency of people who worship the state, because they're dependent on it, But the 5,000 people who would have gotten jobs otherwise, they don't know what they're missing because they're just still unemployed.
It wasn't like a job was dangled and, oh, no, no job for you, right?
It just was never created. So we're trying to sell to the 5,000 people who didn't get a job and say, no, no, you would have got a job without this.
And that's a really tough sell because you've got a whole bunch of people dependent on the state who won't want to give it up.
You've got a bunch of people who would have received some intangible benefit that they can't see.
Sorry, that's redundant. Because the state did what it did.
So it's very, very tough to sell that.
But there's a fantastic example of a hugely successful organization that sells completely intangible benefits called religion.
Now, whether you're religious or not, we all understand that heaven is a pretty theoretical benefit.
Right? I mean, nobody's gone through and back and told us the price of real estate over there, right?
It is a very theoretical benefit.
Just like hell is a pretty theoretical punishment, right?
Though it can't be far from Yonge Street at 2 a.m.
on a Saturday morning. Now, how does religion sell an intangible benefit?
Because that's really what we're trying to do, is we're trying to sell an intangible benefit, right?
Submit to reason, evidence, and virtue, and you'll get to a better place, right?
Like, submit to the priest, and you'll get to heaven.
So how does religion do it?
Because if you want to emulate a successful organization, it's not a bad place to start.
5,000 years, 5.5 billion people, it's doing pretty well, right?
I would say morality.
Yeah, that's right.
It's morality. They gain it through morality.
They do have an argument from effect, right?
Heaven and hell is a bit of an argument from effect.
But I would say that most people are not religious because they're afraid of hell.
But obviously there are some, you know, head-hanging Catholics who, you know, that's what they do, but I think the majority of people are religious because they believe that it's good, that it leads them towards virtue and so on, right?
But there is moral condemnation in religion.
You know, whether we like it or not, and no matter how gentle certain religious people are, within religion itself, certainly within the holy texts, you know, God is pretty nuky, trigger, finger happy with the world, right?
I mean, particularly in the Old Testament, it's like, you know, a couple of animals, everyone else, kaboom!
Right? So there is a lot of moral condemnation in religion.
I mean, in the religious texts, I mean, as we all know, right?
You're supposed to kill witches, unbelievers, sorcerers, just about anybody else who's not sitting next to you in the pew.
This is just in the text itself, right?
And in Islam, there's the death penalty for converting to another religion is written into the text.
In Christianity, you're allowed to kill your children if they question you or raise a hand against you.
Anyway, so there's a lot of criticism, moral condemnation and attack in religiosity.
I'm not obviously saying that we should emulate that directly, but I think we should learn from the effect and the power of that.
That religion is fundamentally an argument from morality.
It is not an argument from effect.
Even the argument from effect results from immorality.
You go to hell because you have disobeyed God.
Right? It's not...
They don't say, you know, it's economically efficient to believe in religion.
Now, in some ways it is, right?
Because you get a whole community of people you can do business with and you can sell to, right?
So there is economic efficiency.
It cuts down on your dating time because the women are all around you in religion, right?
So I'm just saying that from that standpoint...
Learning from success is very, very important.
The government does not sell obedience through punishment.
The government sells obedience through patriotism.
The government itself, again, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, you have to learn from the state and you have to learn from religion because they're incredibly successful.
If you're in software, you do what Microsoft does, you're not going to go far wrong.
It doesn't take that much intelligence.
The government doesn't say, pay your taxes or we're going to shoot you.
Never seen that commercial on TV. Never.
But what they do say is, it's your civic duty, you're helping the poor, it's virtuous, it's supporting your country.
You even see this argument that because you consume government services, you're morally obligated to pay for them.
My God. So if I kidnap a guy and feed him, I can bill him.
Because he's consuming money.
Because, you know, there's no alternatives, right?
I mean, it's not like you can choose to use something other than the post office at a reasonable price.
So the government itself functions on the argument from morality.
The argument from effect is always in the back pocket, right?
So jail is always in the back pocket, like hell is always in the back pocket.
But what's front and center is the argument from morality.
Because that's what motivates people.
People will make sacrifices for morality.
They will not make sacrifices for economic efficiency.
Because economic efficiency is kind of the opposite of making sacrifices.
It's maximizing your resource acquisition and consumption.
So, I suggest that you can have a shorter and very exciting conversation with people using fundamental moral principles.
And the beautiful thing is, at least we've advanced enough as a species that when you say to people you shouldn't use violence to solve problems, at least people will agree with you on that.
That's a huge step forward.
I mean, in the past, the Vikings...
They weren't, you know, they weren't hug it out kind of guys, right?
I mean, they were like axe to the forehead kind of guys, right?
So I think we should recognize that, you know, philosophers and libertarians and rationalists have at least made the case in the private sphere that violence is unacceptable.
So when you say to people violence is unacceptable and you're talking about their own personal lives, At least we've won that argument.
You know, unless you're talking to Tony Soprano, even then he's going to cover it up, right?
But they're down with that argument.
Extending it to the public sphere is a huge amount of static in people's heads, right?
Because the public sphere is the matrix, right?
The public sphere is this unreal realm where everything is reversed, as I was saying earlier.
So getting people to extend it, right?
It's like the American Declaration of Independence, right?
All men are created equal.
Okay, not women. We're not slaves.
But all men. So taking that and saying, well, you mean all people, therefore slaves, therefore women, therefore children.
Taking those principles which everybody accepts as valid, extending those into the public sphere, in a sense destroying the public sphere as a concept, which should happen because it is a fantasy realm that does not exist.
It's a real challenge, but I think the only way that we can do it Is to just continually bang this same drum.
You know, non-violence, non-violence.
Am I allowed to disagree? Do you support the use of aggression against me for my opinions?
That repetition is the only way that evolutions or even revolutions have worked in the past, have succeeded.
Abolitionism succeeded by consistently pounding on the drum that slavery was evil.
Slavery was immoral. Slaves have souls.
A lot of them were Christians, Quakers initially.
They made the moral argument.
Slaves have souls.
They are children of God. They cannot be owned because they have self-ownership as sovereign human beings.
Feminists made the same argument.
Women have rights. Women are equal.
Women are human beings. They did not use the argument from effect.
They did not use an argument from economic efficiency.
They didn't say...
Sorry, some people do.
I just read an argument from Gloria Steinem the other day who said that men who do housework more often have more sex.
While they're doing it? Depends what kind of apron you're wearing, I think.
Now, that is an argument from effect, one which is obviously aimed at men, but that wasn't the fundamental argument of feminism.
It wasn't the fundamental argument of the extension of suffrage.
Originally, it was just aristocrats, and then it was rich peasants, and then it was all men, and then it was All women, but that argument was not made from efficiency.
It was made from the rights for everyone and, you know, let's fulfill the mission of the Enlightenment and extend the rights to everyone.
I really, really think that we need to look at that.
Unfortunately, so many people in the movement prior have made the argument from efficiency, and Murray Rothbard was a very big proponent of that.
Ayn Rand, to a large degree, made the argument from efficiency.
It is a very tempting place to stay because it is much less confrontational.
It is much less difficult emotionally.
It doesn't draw that line in the sand in your relationships, which is very challenging to overcome.
If somebody looks at you and says, yeah, you should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me, it's kind of tough to go on with the dinner party, right?
I mean, that's... That's a pretty big gun in the room to have on...
Yeah, it is, right? I mean, it's tough, right?
It's like, oh, okay.
Didn't realize I was in Goodfellas here, but that is the reality.
So, just to sum up, and again, I want to get sort of perspectives from you guys.
I've used this consistently as I can.
I mean, it's... Sometimes it feels like one of those astronauts in the centrifuge.
It's really, really tough to keep going on it because it's really dizzying and it's emotionally difficult, but I think it is where we gain the most traction.
I try to learn as much from history as possible.
Argument for morality is incredibly powerful, but it is difficult.
It is very, very difficult to make that argument.
It's much safer to stay in the realm of statistics and evidence than it is to confront The gun in the room.
The fact that every time anybody passes the law, there's a gun that's being pointed at people and that's in prison and torture and potentially rape in prison that's being inflicted upon people.
Yes, sir? I tried.
I honestly tried. We had a friend who is a very successful tenure professor Who really pictures himself as a libertarian, his pet cause, his agricultural subsidies, and housing hurting the people in Africa.
He obviously considers himself a very, very moral person, and he's a self-declared libertarian.
But when I asked him about government-supplied medicine, the answer was one word.
That's different, right?
It's like that old story from Ayn Rand's days where she explained to somebody exactly why subsidies in the coal industry were harmful to business and to consumers.
And it's like, okay, I completely get that.
But it's completely different for the gas industry.
I mean, yeah, absolutely.
People create these realms of exceptions where they happen to practice.
So, sorry, go ahead. Well, yeah, and basically this is, but the point of this work is that at the same time, they also do consider themselves moral.
For sure. I am starting an argument from the perspective of morality.
I'm running into the realms of conflicting morality.
I can hear the whining sound of my sister who said, only by the social contract.
Right, right, right. That we all agreed on something, and as long as we all agreed, as long as the majority of us agreed on this, that this is the morality, then this is what you damn bastards should accept yourself.
My personal experience is that even though the statistics and talking about the effect is kind of a call out, I can personally go much further I absolutely agree.
So, the issue is that morality is perceived as many different things by many different people, and it tends to wrap around self-interest.
Because this guy is horrified at the effects of agricultural subsidies on the third world, which he's entirely correct about.
I mean, it is completely monstrous what dumping all of these excess crops in the markets of the third world has done to the self-sufficiency of local farmers.
It has destroyed Completely destroyed the agricultural base of the third world and rendered them to be dependent upon the state who then run to first world governments for subsidies and it's taking money from the poor people of rich countries and giving it to the rich people of poor countries.
It's brutal and hideous, absolutely.
But the argument from effect is to say, well, that's really bad, but it's really good for the governments.
Of the third world. I mean, the dictators love it.
The fact that the people are dependent upon every handout that guarantees their political power.
This is why Africa remains such a basket case politically.
I mean, I've got a whole presentation coming up on this for a different thing about subsidies, so I want to get dragged into it, but it's gruesome.
Now, you're absolutely right that the moral argument is the real challenge.
I have a... It's going to sound like a pitch, but it's not, because it's free.
I've written a book on ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior.
It's a rational proof of secular ethics.
How do we derive the non-aggression principle?
Without gods, without governments, without culture, without history, without assuming any prior prejudices, how would we explain it to a space alien or a silicon-based life form living in Manhattan?
How would we explain ethics in a way that made sense?
So I've got a book out there. It's been out for a couple of years.
It still stands. I've had a number of debates about it.
So read that if you don't mind.
Go to freedomainradio.com.
It's completely free. Audiobook, PDF. You can buy the hard copy if you like to mark stuff up.
But it's pretty cheap. So that's one.
Learn ethics from the ground up.
I'm not saying you don't, but take this approach.
But even if you don't want to do any of that, which I can understand.
Ethical theory is...
But if you don't want to do that, that's totally fine.
But this guy will at least accept that violence is bad, right?
Because if you're having disagreements with someone about...
I'm sorry, that was the point when our friendship broke down.
Oh, he said that violence is okay?
I've never understood people who debate that violence is good.
It's like, but you're debating.
I disagree with you, but if I don't say that I don't agree with you, it means that I didn't submit to your argument.
Yeah. Look, I mean, if somebody's going to say to you that violence is an acceptable way to solve social problems, then you need a theory of ethics that's going to demolish that.
And I have one. I think it's a good one.
Maybe there are others. So you can then take on that person and say, okay, well, if violence is good, is it good for everyone at all times?
Is that even feasible? Is it possible?
Can it be logically implemented?
Blah, blah, blah. So this is my approach.
My other approach is just a run.
You know, show them my ass at high velocity.
That's my other approach.
Because I'm not going to pretend to have a civilized debate with somebody who's advocating the use of force.
I'm not going to cloak that gun in velvet and call it a piece of art.
I'm just not going to do it.
I'm not. So if somebody's advocating violence, I'm not going to debate.
Because I'm not going to pretend I'm involved in a civilized discourse.
Sorry, just one sec.
Monsieur Le Handelbar had a question.
I have the same question.
Relating what Sen said about the political party and the political process, what's the role of the political process in achieving the end of your talk?
That's a good question. Next.
One I don't have a prepared answer for.
I'm not a huge fan of the political process in terms of achieving social change within society.
Again, just because I'm an evidence-based empiricist and it hasn't worked.
Even if you just look at 150 years of political activism from the classical liberals of the mid-19th century forward and from the foundation of the Libertarian Party in the 1970s, government has grown and grown and grown.
I have a book called How Not to Achieve Freedom.
Free, free, free, free.
You can go and have a listen to it.
I take on academics and certain kinds of political activism.
My answer is that we need to draw...
We need to plant...
I had a good way of putting it, too.
We need to dance.
We need to draw that line in the sand when it comes to ethics in our lives.
In our personal relationships, we need to plant ourselves so deep in our values that we go to the very corner of the earth, almost like a tree that grows right down to the middle of the earth and can't be moved.
The bulldozer of culture comes up to that tree, bulldozer breaks.
We need to plant our integrity so deep and our commitment to nonviolence so deep that we become immovable.
That to me is how you change the world.
You simply plant yourself so hard that the world has to start orbiting around your values rather than running around trying to chase people and get them to change.
You change yourself.
You change yourself.
You live a life free of coercion, free of people who advocate violence against you.
You become then a gateway, a portal, a window through which people can see a new world.
You have to live by example.
You cannot live by argument.
You cannot live by trying to change people's minds, because that actually turns us into a kind of slave.
We don't show freedom then.
We show that, hey, if you want to get into libertarianism, guess what?
You get ostracism.
You get frustration. You get migraines.
You get alienation. You get endless arguments.
You have to do huge amounts of research.
You end up trying to change people whose whim you're dependent upon, whether they're going to change or not.
So if you actually spend your life trying to change people's minds, You actually look far less free than your average statist who's just swimming with the current, right?
Who's just doing the thing, right?
They look relatively free and relaxed, whereas you look all kind of cling on head and veins and, right, change, everybody change, and frustration and failure and blah, blah, blah, right?
That is not very inspiring.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where appearances matter more than arguments.
That has not changed since the days of Socrates.
Sophists win out over philosophers like us, for sure.
So, you know, the argument I made, I'll make it very quick.
If you live in a world of 500-pound people and everybody thinks that 500 pounds is healthy, anything less than that is sickly, you can't run around...
If you're 500 pounds, you can't run around telling people to lose weight.
You can, but it just looks ridiculous, right?
What you need to do, you just go down to 200 pounds or 150 or whatever...
And you say, hey look, cartwheels.
Hey look, I can go up and down stairs without dying.
I can run.
I can skip. I can hold my child.
I can do all of these wonderful things.
Look at all the positions that have opened up.
I'm Mr. Kamasutra now.
Whatever you come up with, right?
Sorry, that's a separate presentation.
That's many more visual aids involved in that, and batteries.
But you have to show what being free looks like, and I think then people will gravitate and orbit around that.
There's no other shortcut that I know of, but...
Sorry, question in the back?
Oh, yeah, sorry. So, you know, when I... Talk to people about, you know, if I talk about the libertarianism, instead of trying to promote it, that's like, I have a problem with trying to promote something, because that, for me, it makes me feel like, as my own, myself, feel like a politician.
How you doing?
Right, right. Instead of sitting back and living the life that I, or living by example, and doing, you know, doing things moral and everything that, or basically living the way I would like to see everyone live,
how can, what would be some examples that, you know, how to have someone, say, ask, or, you know, come up to me, or what can I say, instead of trying to Right, no.
Sorry, let me just repeat that for the recording.
So the question is, how does that actually work, right?
So rather than going out and trying to change people's minds, just live a free life yourself.
Well, the science is pretty clear that more than 90% of communication is nonverbal.
I mean, you guys are not... I'm aware of this as a speaker.
You're not looking at...
You're not listening to my words as much as you're looking at how I am as a human being, if that makes any sense.
Now, I'm a fairly free human being, I would say.
I'm pretty spontaneous. I make silly jokes and so on, right?
Some may say too free.
Put me back in the box a little bit.
That's okay. So I think that through how I'm communicating, and it's not like a studied ploy or anything.
I mean, this is sort of how I really am.
I'm trying to sort of show...
I'm not trying to show. I'm trying to embody this kind of freedom.
Now, I think it's partly that that has gotten me here, right?
I mean, I could have gone and read the speech, you know, like, argument from effect is not good, morality good, right?
And you would have gotten the words in the same way, like a transcript, but it wouldn't, I think, have had the kind of interest that I hope that it's had.
And so I think that if you just live that kind of freedom, it is just attractive.
We all know that the physically beautiful people in the world don't have to do a whole lot to get drinks and attention.
They just have to kind of show up and not smell too bad.
Fewer flies. And so I think that if you have an attractive soul, you will...
Attract people of like minds because 90% of communication is nonverbal.
If you are free, then people who want to be free will just be interested in that.
I know it sounds like it's witchy voodoo magic and so on.
I'll tell you that it works.
And there's lots of science as to why it works.
But I think you really just have to work on your own personal freedom of expression and freedom from the fears of...
I mean, if you're free of those fears, if you're free of the fears of social disapproval...
Then you are going to be very compelling to people because, I mean, we all are enslaved under that to some degree or another.
The biggest complaint that people have when they get old, when they look back on their lives, according to the research that I've done, is they look back and they say, what's the biggest complaint people say?
I wish I'd been less concerned about what other people thought.
That is the biggest barrier that we all face.
I face it, you face it, we all face that.
If you can overcome that...
Then you're showing a kind of freedom that is going to be very attractive to people because we all struggle with social disapproval.
We're all social tribal animals who are afraid of disapproval and afraid of ridicule and mockery and so on.
But if you can overcome that, which is a personal project, it's not a voting project, then I think you will have that kind of freedom that will be attractive to people.
Then they'll be interested and they'll ask Right?
You don't want to be the kind of guy who's knocking on doors saying, do you want a woman who's going to knock on doors and say, do you want to buy a vacuum cleaner?
Right? I don't know.
To make a stupid metaphor, you want to have really shiny carpets yourself so that when people come over, they say, hey, what's your vacuum cleaner?
That's the worst metaphor I think I've ever come up with.
But, you know, I think that sort of communicates what I'm trying to say in a ridiculously bad way.
Oh, are we done? Is it time?
Oh, you're applauding the metaphor?
Yeah. I wish these carpets worked on that too.
Five more minutes? Okay. Oh, hi.
How's it going? How did things work out?
Did you ever get back to your family member or friend?
No, but I actually want to say I've had some good success with other people.
Oh, good. Good. Okay. Really good success.
The strategies in the argument of morality.
However, I have noticed what you were talking about.
While I will bring forth the argument of morality, I don't care.
I don't care how the poor are going to be helped.
If we come to the conclusion that the initiation, of course, is wrong, then everything else is below that, right?
So, I wanted to ask you your thoughts on self-defense, though, right?
Because... Well, yeah, of course.
Right. Well, then what about, like, do the native Indians have a right to use ports to reclaim their land?
And then it goes back to...
So I've actually have become uncomfortable with actually the idea of self-defense.
Right. Well, what is self-defense?
Well, I just, because it was something that was missing from my book on ethics, so I just wrote an article.
If you give me your email, I'll send it to you.
I just wrote an article on the ethics of self-defense.
Self-defense is completely rational, and it is completely justifiable philosophically in a rational framework of ethics.
And I won't get into the argument, because it will bore half of them and...
Almost everybody else will be bored too, right?
But there is a very, very strong case.
In fact, I would say a conclusive case to be made for the ethics of self-defense.
Self-defense is a voluntary action.
You can't compel someone to act in self-defense because that's just insane, right?
You must defend yourself!
Against who? The guy who's attacking me or the guy who's forcing me to defend myself?
So it works logically.
Now, when people then go to Native American claims and so on, then you're talking about intergenerational morality.
But morality is not intergenerational.
If somebody beat up my great-great-great-grandfather, I can't press charges against their great-great-great-grandson.
Because morality is individual specific actions.
You punish the person who committed the crime.
All the people who committed the crimes are dead.
The crime with the Native American culture at the moment is stealing from the Canadian taxpayers and giving it to these monster chiefs who run the whole system.
That is the crime.
Right? I mean, if there's a crime to be resolved, it is a theft from the taxpayer.
It is not a theft of the land.
There's also the problem of infinite regression, right?
I mean, if you say, well, we took their land...
Well, it wasn't like the native Canadians were all, you know, peaceful, hug-it-out, handshake kind of people.
There was lots of land rolling back and forth and wars and violence and so on, so you just go on forever.
I mean, do I get to go to some guy in Italy saying, well, the Romans stole my ancestors' land, so give me 50 bucks and a pizza?
Right? No, I mean, so morality is individual to the person.
You can't go back in history to right wrongs because those people are all dead, so they've all received the death penalty called nature for their crimes.
So I would say that.
And look, the last thing I would say is if the biggest problem we have as far as ethics goes in society is figuring out land claims from 300 years ago, We're pretty far down the list.
That means we've solved war.
We've solved government education.
We have solved taxation.
We have solved incarceration for nonviolent crimes.
I mean, those are things that are far more pressing to humanity at the moment.
Land claims from 300 years ago, by the time we get to that, we're already living in a utopia.
We're just dotting the last I. So I wouldn't put that at the top of the list and say, well, I can't go any further in property rights and self-defense until we deal with this 200-year-old or 500-year-old land claim.
That's totally putting the cart before the horse, in my opinion.
You have two more? You were kind of dismissive of the political action as a force to change.
But I would kind of argue that several examples you gave, for instance, getting rid of slavery, getting rid of those and all that kind of stuff, nothing happened until there was political action, until the morality was translated into action, which was done through the political process.
So, I totally agree with the principle of going with morality first.
That's also my personal observation.
I do a lot of talking to a lot of people in my position at the party, okay?
The point you bring is very good and very valid, okay?
And a lot of people, nobody, very few people say, you know, I agree with violence and all that kind of stuff.
What is the second stage to take it to the next stage, though, to remove the objection?
What is that second stage?
Tell me what you mean by the second stage.
I just want to be trying.
People agree with it at the high level.
Okay, you know, you shouldn't use violence.
Yeah, I know.
I'm sure you have free speech and say what you want.
But how do you get them to the next stage, which is to start being practical about that?
Yeah, I don't have to play tactics when I don't agree with them.
There's force and violence.
What's a pragmatic way to get to that next stage to get them to think that logical process?
Obviously, you can't force them.
Right, right, right.
What's the moral argument?
How do you develop that moral argument?
Well, look, let me just do a quick show of hands.
How many people have seriously changed people's minds like 100 or more?
50? 25?
10? Now, do we even have one?
So, the people who are here who are still not certain of the position have still got one to go, right?
So, look, look, I mean, this is a very dedicated, very intelligent, and damn handsome crew.
Sorry, I should have started with that, you know, butter up the audience first, very important.
But, look, very, very well read, very good communicative, very dedicated, and the numbers are pretty bad.
And that's not because our case is weak, it's because people can't think.
There are two reasons that they can't think.
The first reason they can't think is that they've not been taught how to think.
Thinking is not an automatic thing.
It's like language. You have to be taught it.
Now, we have an affinity for it, like we have an affinity for language, but people are to reason as kids raised by wolves are to language.
You can kind of get them to learn a few halting phrases later in life, but it's never going to be fluent.
To me, it's all about making the case to parents to teach their children reason when they're younger and to deal with their children in a non-violent way.
It's a multi-generational change.
It's not going to happen in my lifetime.
Doubt it's going to happen in the lifetime of anybody here.
But that's okay. Every single revolution takes at least 150 to 200 years because it's a multi-generational process.
I'll give you one last metaphor, which I actually think is pretty good.
Okay, so National Geographic, anybody old enough to remember getting those when you were kids?
I used to, my dad fixed me up to get them every single, I think they came out monthly, didn't they?
And so after I flipped past the Amazon boobs or whatever, right, I would go to, you'd see these, sorry, somebody paused, I can see there on the Amazon.
Did you get past the Amazon boobs or is that, this is the end, I'm going to just sit here for a while.
Never. AKA the argument for Wonderbra.
Anyway. You would go to these National Geographic and you'd see these pictures of people worshipping this really crazy stuff, right?
So you'd see pygmies in the Amazon.
Some giant stone chicken would be sitting there in the middle of the town, right?
And everybody would go, like magic chicken, right?
And you'd look at that and you'd say, well, that's crazy.
It's a big stone chicken.
It's not a god, right?
Because that's not your culture.
For them, it's a god.
And they would look at us, you know, kneeling in front of, you know, skinny white stretched arms guy saying, that's just a, you know, a hippie looking guy on a cross.
So, because that's not their culture, right?
My goal, what I argue for, is to say to parents and to others around kids, is to say, look, if you raise your children in a non-coercive way without using aggression as a parent, using negotiation from the very beginning, right?
I mean, I have a two-year-old.
I've never raised my voice. Never struck her, of course.
She's never heard any anger.
I negotiate. And it's a very, very gentle process, which he responds to beautifully.
What that means is that children will then grow up Where coercion and aggression from authority will be as familiar to them as that Amazon giant stone chicken is to us.
Like, it would be ridiculous.
So they'll first encounter the state like we encounter that giant stone chicken and say, what the hell?
This makes no sense at all because I'm not familiar with this kind of authority.
I don't speak that language called hierarchical coercion and aggression.
I don't speak that language called control.
Well, that's the conversation we're having.
I'm leaning towards homeschooling, for sure.
For sure. I mean, there's other options which I'm still exploring.
Because I do have a great deal of respect for the profession of teacher.
I don't do my own cavities.
But to me, it's a generational process where we simply convince people to use non-aggression with their children.
Those children would then grow up and they'll look at the state like it's a giant stone chicken and say...
This has no meaning for me.
Whereas if you bring children up in an authoritarian and aggressive fashion, they'll look at the state and say, well, that makes sense.
I speak giant stone chicken.
That has resonance to me. So that's my suggestion.
That's where I'm at.
But education is important.
Policy can help with that. That's it. I'm done.
I'm out. Thank you everybody so much.
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