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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:39
How to Communicate the Ideas of Liberty (Stefan Molyneux interview)
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Time Text
I'm really passionate about finding better ways to communicate the ideas of liberty to people.
There's this paradigm which is really annoying, which we all face, I think, when we talk about this stuff, which is we say, well, we're against the welfare state.
And people, you know, the machine goes off in their head and they say, well, that means that you don't care about the poor.
You know, or we're against Social Security, so then people think we want all old people to live on cat food because we're just callous Dickensian monsters or something.
I really want to find ways that we can align ourselves with the goals of all just and reasonable people in society.
We want the kids to get a great education.
We want the old to live in dignity.
We want healthcare to be affordable to people.
But recognizing that just because people think that the state is solving the problem at the moment, that's the only way or the best way.
We really want to try and find ways that we can align ourselves with people's just and fair goals and show them that there are far better ways of doing it than the state.
In fact, the state is about the worst way of doing it.
The state is like taking morphine for a toothache.
You'll feel better in the moment, but whatever is happening is going to get worse under the surface.
We're on the same side. We all want a just and fair and rational society.
We want peace. We want good schools.
We want healthcare. We want a general improvement in the human condition.
What I try to do is I try and start with the moral principles that everyone accepts in their personal life.
We all accept that Non-aggression is a good way to get things done.
If I want a job, I don't go kidnap someone's kids and say, give me a job and I'll release them.
I go and I interview or whatever.
If I want to make a sale or if I want someone to have me come and speak at a conference, I don't kidnap their cat and all that kind of stuff.
The way that most people interact in their personal life is through peace and voluntarism and reason and argument and deal with the inevitable disappointments of rejection that voluntarism has.
And what I'm trying to do in general is to get people to understand that ethics doesn't suddenly change when you go to the macro, from the micro.
So if the non-aggression principle is a good way to live in your personal life, it doesn't suddenly turn into the opposite when you go to the social level.
The non-aggression principle is plumb line.
It's valid all the way from the top to the bottom.
It is a universal principle, which means there are no exemptions.
But that's really hard for people, because we've all been trained and conditioned to say, violence is bad for us.
But what the state does is called law and order, and it's different than the initiation of force.
But technically, and factually and empirically, it is the initiation of force.
Anything other than immediate self-defense is the initiation of force.
And unfortunately, we've come to a place in society where we believe, we accept, we value, we treasure, we think is good, initiating force to solve just about every problem.
Every time you see a problem, people say, well, we need to have a law, we need to have a regulation, we need to have another government agency, we need to do X, Y, and Z.
And my argument is to say, look, if it doesn't work at the personal level, it doesn't work at the political level.
Violence is bad for us as individuals, violence is bad for us as a society.
And once we understand that, then we can understand why things keep getting worse, why things keep going wrong.
Why we end up with more debt?
Why we end up with more poor?
Why we end up with more violence in our foreign policy and in our domestic consequences of those foreign policies?
Why are children less interested in school?
Why do we have to drug more and more children just to keep them in school?
Why is the... Dropout rate approaching 50% in American schools.
Well, it's because we're using violence to solve these problems, and that just makes things worse in the long run.
That's a very challenging conversation for people to have, because they think they live in a virtuous society.
When you point out that most of the major decisions are decided through the force of the state, it really turns people's perceptions of their society on their head.
It's very disorienting and upsetting for people, so it's a great challenge.
But we just have to keep reminding people that we want the goals of all just people.
We just have empirically better ways of getting them.
Well, it is a desire to be free.
It is a desire to be free.
With freedom comes responsibility.
It's true.
It's an old caveat. It's the fine print of freedom is responsibility.
And I think everybody in the audience has had an experience with authority that has been negative, that has been destructive, that has been problematic.
And we yearn to make decisions that are peaceful without being aggressed against.
I think that is the dream that human beings have as a whole.
I don't have the right to make the decision to strangle some guy, because that's imposing my will on his in a violent way.
But where I'm making a decision in my life that is not aggressing against anybody else, I yearn to have the freedom to make that decision, and I'm willing to accept the consequences if that decision goes badly.
But I want to finally be an adult.
You know, I feel like in our society, you're never allowed to grow up.
I mean, as a kid, you're told to go to school and you're told what to learn.
You're not given many choices. And then you go to college where you're given curriculum and courses.
And then you go into the workforce where you're told what to do.
And then you've got all these regulations and laws and controls.
You're told what to do and the tax code is like three and a half million words long.
I think last year there were 4,000 new regulations that came down that people have to obey.
And it's like you're never allowed to make a peaceful decision That has no negative impact on somebody else.
You're never allowed to make that decision as a free and sovereign adult.
We're never finally allowed to grow up.
We live in this Peter Pan world of micromanagement by everybody.
And I just want to drive people back and say, I want to be free to make my own decisions.
I'm willing to accept the consequences of those decisions, but I am a 45-year-old adult, well-educated, intelligent, articulate.
I can make my own decisions, and I really insist upon the right to be allowed to make those decisions free of force.
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