July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, it's Steph. I'm in Ottawa, Canada. | |
| It's June the 6th, 2007. | |
| Hope you're doing very well. | |
| I'm up here with my wife. | |
| She's attending a conference and I'm Mazing around in a rather nice hotel room doing libertarian-y kind of things. | |
| So this is an article that I've written that I thought I'd share with you. | |
| I'm trying to do a little bit less mad spontaneity and a little bit more planned spontaneity. | |
| So this is called A Personal History of Political Freedom. | |
| Maybe it will be something close to your journey, maybe not. | |
| My journey towards personal political and philosophical freedom has been a complete and total circle. | |
| When I first began to explore philosophy in my mid-teens, I started with the usual suspects, Ayn Rand, Aristotle, Plato, and so on. | |
| I fully accepted all of the theoretical principles inherent in a rational and empirical approach to analyzing truth. | |
| When I first heard the proposition that taxation is theft, I accepted it with the same equanimity I felt when I was first told that the world was round, not immediately evident, but perfectly sensible upon rapid reflection. | |
| And so I began my journey towards the heart of truth and away from the vast majority of the people around me. | |
| The pursuit of philosophical truth, political freedom, and personal authenticity has always been a somewhat lonely task, though spending time with unwise people is always lonelier. | |
| But when starting my journey, I had no idea how far it would take me from my starting point. | |
| It has been very much like the line from the T.S. Eliot poem, At the end of all of our journeying, we shall return to the place of departure and know it for the first time. | |
| Now, I am far from the end of my journey of course, but I really feel that I have gained a new appreciation of the ideas that set me on my path those many years ago. | |
| Because I had no idea of the distance I had to travel when I started, I made far too many compromises along the way. | |
| These compromises have taught me the great value of integrity which was sorely lacking in me. | |
| I wanted friends. I thought I needed my family. | |
| I wanted to date and make love to get a graduate degree and move ahead of my career. | |
| In order to achieve these goals, I created within myself two worlds. | |
| The first was an inner world where philosophy, integrity, honesty, virtue, and truth all ruled supreme. | |
| And I was beholden to the goddess of philosophy in a purely removed and platonic sense. | |
| This, of course, despite being an avowed anti-platonic philosopher. | |
| The second world was the world outside myself, where practical considerations like ambition, companionship, money, and sex all held sway. | |
| There was precious little connection. | |
| Between these two worlds, I dreamt richly in one, a soul without a body. | |
| I lived emptily in the other, a body without a soul. | |
| Throughout my late 20s and early 30s, I pursued the external world of ambition, wealth, status. | |
| I co-founded a software company, worked and traveled endlessly, and grew it to multi-million dollar business. | |
| As the company grew more and more successful, though, it attracted corrupt people who wished to use it to transfer money from gullible investors to their own pockets. | |
| As a technologist, I averted my eyes and clung to my ignorance about the financial aspect of the business. | |
| After selling the company, I stayed on despite increasing evidence of the increasing corruption around me. | |
| I told myself it was for the sake of my employees, but in truth, I was greedy for money, status, and worldly success. | |
| My conscience, however, trained and strengthened by years of philosophical examination, ultimately rebelled and I ceased to be able to sleep. | |
| The contradictions between my values and my actions, my ethics and my companions, My virtue and my family overwhelmed me, though I did not understand what was happening at the time. | |
| Desperate to regain my equilibrium, not to mention my sleep, I plunged into an extraordinary, rigorous self-examination. | |
| I went into therapy, I kept a voluminous journal about my dreams and emotional experiences, engaged in wild dialogues with characters in my unconscious, all of this wild authentication stuff. | |
| Crossing the chasm between these two worlds, the world of inner integrity and outer actions, oh man, proved an enormously difficult task. | |
| Taking the ideas that I had loved so long with all the seriousness that they deserved was an unbelievably hard challenge. | |
| But I learned an important lesson. | |
| Talk is cheap. | |
| Integrity will cost you. | |
| As I began to really live my values, one by one, friends, family, and lovers all began to drop away from me. | |
| Despite my love of rational philosophy, I had accumulated friends who were statists, friends who were mystics of one form or another, friends who were irrational, friends who were amoral, friends who were empty, friends who actively opposed the pursuit of truth and wisdom. | |
| Let's not even bother going over my familial and romantic relationships. | |
| I'm sure you get the picture. I debated with everyone, but it meant nothing. | |
| It was like two television sets, quote, talking to each other. | |
| I strongly disagreed with friends who advocated the use of statist violence, but my moral opposition had no real relation to our friendship. | |
| My ethics had no fundamental impact on my real life. | |
| As a market anarchist, I do face some very challenging moral conversations with people around me. | |
| For instance, if a man tells me he's in favor of taxation, I now have little choice but to remind him that if he's in favor of taxation, he is in favor of the government shooting me. | |
| I'm always willing to discuss alternatives to the violence of taxation, but if this man proves unwilling to alter his opinion, he is a man who wants me to be killed. | |
| When I was younger, I would ignore this. | |
| Now that I'm a little wiser, I don't. | |
| Once my wife's boss came over for dinner, and she brought her husband with her. | |
| He was an outspoken supporter of the invasion of Iraq. | |
| I tried reasoning with him, but his worship of the military, quote, ethic was immovable. | |
| I then said to him, well, if I can't change your mind about the virtue of invading Iraq, will you at least support my right not to fund a war I believe to be morally abhorrent? | |
| I'd never force you to stop funding it. | |
| Will you force me to fund it? | |
| Because if you will, then this debate is sort of pointless, right? | |
| He had a great deal of difficulty understanding what I meant, of course, since taxation is so ingrained into our culture. | |
| But he did eventually understand that I should not be shot for withholding my financial support from a war I believe to be evil. | |
| Fortunately, he at least agreed with this position, helping us avoid a very awkward situation. | |
| I face a similar challenge with Christians. | |
| Both the Old and New Testaments constantly command Christians to murder unbelievers. | |
| I do not pursue these conversations, since they tend to be very explosive, but if a man tells me he's a Christian, I do have to ask him if he supports me being put to death as an atheist. | |
| Now, very few Christians have actually read the Bible all the way through, so they're generally very surprised to hear that God and Jesus can instruct them to kill non-believers. | |
| and of course they also believe that Islam is a violent religion. | |
| They try to find any number of excuses to get their deity off the hook for making such evil commandments. | |
| They point out the virtues of certain Christians or that the Bible is mistranslated, misunderstood, misinterpreted and so on. | |
| However, I do point out that a black man may be forgiven for feeling animosity towards the Ku Klux Klan even if Klan members do put on a good barbecue and sometimes give to charity. | |
| And that's how a rational atheist views Christianity and all other religions that I've ever seen. | |
| Amen. | |
| All these conversations are challenging enough. | |
| However, the most challenging philosophical conversations I have are those involving the family. | |
| My wife practices psychology and has really helped me to understand the role that the family and early childhood experiences play in molding a person's thinking or, in fact, preventing a person's thinking. | |
| If a man rails against the power of the state but submits a cold, offensive, insulting, or aggressive family relations, he understands as little about morality as, well, I did in my twenties. | |
| I now firmly believe that the state gains the vast majority of its power, influence, and credibility from unjust family authority. | |
| In their essence, governments are just parents writ large. | |
| As I began to understand the relationship between familial history and personal liberty, I really began to bring my values to bear on my conversations with my family, family of origin. | |
| I quickly realized that there was no room in my relationships with my family for any of the values I truly treasure. | |
| Curiosity, rationality, ethical examination, the Socratic method. | |
| In fact, it became apparent to me that my family was in fact hostile to everything that I truly held dear. | |
| This was not the main issue, of course. | |
| The main issue was that my family was hostile to my values not because they had opposing values or alternative values or different methodologies, but because they violently opposed values in any form. | |
| In my conversations with my family, I was aggressively instructed in the most errant nonsense. | |
| Subjectivism was an absolute. | |
| Duty to others was a moral commandment, though no other seemed to have such a duty towards me. | |
| I was apparently obligated to spend time with others for the sake of their pleasures, never mine. | |
| I was expected to keep quiet about my values, but also never interrupt others when they talked about their irrational beliefs. | |
| Whenever I brought up that I did not feel I was being listened to, I was told that I was wrong. | |
| Thus, kind of confirming the diagnosis. | |
| I thought that I would have to end up breaking with my family completely since it did not really appeal to me to spend the rest of my days as a vapid ghost conforming to the bigoted expectations of irrational people. | |
| However, this proved to be unnecessary. | |
| As it turned out, since I continued to speak my mind openly and question the moral rules constantly being inflicted on me, my family ended up not wanting to have much to do with me. | |
| I was told that I was becoming unbearable, insufferable, and I must either change my ways or be on my way. | |
| Well, I have to tell you, put that starkly, the choice was actually very, very easy. | |
| I left and have not looked back. | |
| Philosophy is a far better companion than false friends, since it in fact brought true friends into my life. | |
| For me, the basic issue was one of logical consistency, which is the essence of ethics. | |
| I mean, with regards to the government, the ethical theory is that certain people have the right to tax me, but I do not have the right to tax them or anyone else. | |
| That's an example of an illogical ethical theory. | |
| With regards to religion, certain self-contradictory and anti-empirical entities are allowed to exist, a god, because some people believe in them, while other entities which have the exact same characteristics are not allowed to exist, other gods, leprechauns, a tooth fairy, and so on. | |
| In science, this would be the exact equivalent of ascribing opposite properties to identical entities. | |
| In other words, saying, this rock falls down, but this rock falls up. | |
| In math, the equivalent approach would be to say that a triangle has both three sides and four sides simultaneously and is circular to boot. | |
| Since I have such an enormous respect for the scientific method, I could bring no lesser methodology to the question of ethics. | |
| I developed the theory that ethics can be defined as universally preferable behavior, and that all ethical theories must pass the scientific test of universality, reversibility, consistency, and so on. | |
| For an invitation to this theory, you can have a look at the March 2006 section at my blog, freedomain.blogspot.com. | |
| I only really understood all this long after I had broken with my own family, which was quite a shock for me. | |
| I always believed that wisdom came from reason, but sometimes wisdom can be provoked through decisive action. | |
| When I ended all of my unpleasant and negative personal relationships, I thought that I was near the end of the book of truth. | |
| Not so. I turned the page expecting to find an index, but instead found a new table of contents. | |
| Being honest with my family, seeing them for who they really were, and making my decision, taught me more about morality than 20 years of studying ethical theories. | |
| Thoughts and books alone are a sort of prison. | |
| Freedom only really comes alive in action. | |
| We can do precious little to free ourselves from the near omnipotence of state power, but we can take great strides to free ourselves from the far more relevant and invasive tyrannies of corrupt personal relationships. | |
| The motto of my podcast and video show, this video show, Free Domain Radio is the logic of personal and political liberty, and the sequence is not accidental. | |
| Personal liberty must always come first. | |
| It can sometimes be a grim... | |
| Lonely and dispiriting business, talking about moral philosophy from first principles and refusing to associate with people who wish you harm or evil. | |
| However, the rewards are more than worth it. | |
| I have wonderful, though few, remaining friends, a glorious relationship with my lovely wife, and through my work at Freedom Main Radio, I've gathered many new friends and thoroughly enjoy sharing ideas with a truly brilliant crew. | |
| In taking this time to think back More than 20 years over my philosophical journey, I'm really amazed at the impressive circularity of my path. | |
| Except for small aspects of statism, I cannot really think of any moral principles that I accepted in my teens that I do not proactively practice now in some war stuff. | |
| The difference, of course, is that rather than just thinking about philosophy in the abstract, I actually practice it in the here and now, in my own life, every day. | |
| Bringing philosophy to life in this way for me has made all the difference in the world. |
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