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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:54
Philosophy Unleashed - Liberty Fest Questions and Answers!
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. It is Wednesday night, and we are doing a live Q&A, chat, and audio interview set from the kind listeners and supporters and curious innocent bystanders to Freedom Aid Radio.
And you can find out more about this.
It's been organized by Ian from PatriotPulse.com.
This is in anticipation of a grand, grand libertarian festival that he has got going on in New York.
New York, babies!
Which is September the 10th, 2011.
LFNYC.com.
It's Tom Woods.
It's Adam Kokesh. It's Peter Schiff.
I believe I'm a busboy there, so if you have drinks that you want taken away, I will be circulating.
With a big bowl.
So I hope that you will be able to come by and support everyone who's coming out to speak and support libertarianism, support Ian, and support the growth within your own brain about these wonderful ideals.
So thanks so much, Ian, for organizing this.
James is running the board today.
And James, do we have any questions?
Or are we yelling into an echo of Deep Canyon nothingness?
We most certainly have a question.
We actually have a softball for the first question of the night.
What is goodness?
What is goodness?
Softball, you say?
Goodness. I think goodness is...
In philosophy, I think it's very similar to the concept of health in medicine.
So the concept of health in medicine is not...
Perfect health because, of course, there's no such thing as perfect health.
Anybody who's over 40 knows that you pretty much always have some ache or pain at the moment.
I have a tiny little something in my toe that I can't get out of that I got while chasing Izzy around in the playground.
So there's always some damn thing.
You're never quite in perfect health when you get older and even when you're younger.
But still, just because there's no such thing as perfect health doesn't mean that there's no difference between being healthy and being sick.
I think goodness is a state of health, a state of vitality, a state of happiness with regards to virtue.
I don't think that if you're happy because you won the lottery, I don't think that people say that is goodness.
I think if you're happy because you've done the right thing, and you've done the right thing Or have done a series of right things when it's hard to do the right thing.
I mean, the reason we need nutrition is because chocolate cake tastes a lot better than broccoli.
And the reason that we need philosophy is because immorality feels a lot better in the short run and gets you a lot more goodies than morality.
If you're willing to compromise your ideals, and I don't mean like little things here and there, but you know, like major, major things.
Then you will get the accolades and the praise of a corrupt world that hates more than anything to see somebody standing up consistently for ideals.
And, you know, people have often commented to me, oh, Steph, you know, you're a good speaker shot guy.
Boy, you know, if you were in politics, yeah, look, I mean, if I were in politics, I think I'd be doing pretty well.
But unfortunately, that's not really something that goodness can allow you to pursue.
So I think goodness is that state of virtue which is not perfection.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, I think, and the enemy of goodness.
So I think goodness is a reasonable set of consistency in a challenging world with the virtues of nonviolence and respect for the respectful and paying people whatever you owe them in terms of the justice or injustice of their actions.
Philosophy is about fairness.
It's really about paying debts in many ways.
And this is why I think ideal philosophy is closely related to a market economy.
And so if somebody has acted with virtue and with justice, then I think we owe them admiration.
If somebody has acted unjustly or in a destructive way, then we owe them a scorn or ridicule or whatever.
I mean, I think there's a light coin and a dike coin, so to speak.
And this is the same thing that's true in the market world.
If somebody honorably comes and buys a candy bar by exchanging something of real value for it, great.
If they steal from us, then we owe them a slightly different reaction.
So I think goodness is a reasonable state of happiness that comes from a fairly consistent adherence to virtue, if that makes any sense.
Then they ask, what is virtue then?
Well, virtue is consistency.
Virtue is consistency with reason and evidence.
I mean, to me, that's all virtue comes down to.
Now, I have a whole series on virtue that I put out sort of recently.
if anyone can dig up the numbers and let me know I would appreciate that but briefly, very very briefly truth in science or truth in describing the physical world means that you follow the scientific methods So you have a theory that is logically consistent and accords with and hopefully predicts the physical evidence that you're going to get from that.
That is the ideal of science.
And I think that's all good stuff that we want to recognize and enjoy and have.
And so that is integrity or you could say virtue, but it certainly is truth and honesty in the realm of science.
Now, in the realm of virtue, in the realm of integrity, in the realm of philosophy, I mean, all virtue is, is conformity to reason and evidence.
In other words, you have a theory of behavior that is consistent, that is applicable to me and to you and some guy in Poughkeepsie and so on and not just made up – you don't just make up arbitrary distinctions like white guy is good, bad guy – sorry, white guy is good, black guy is bad or something like that or people not in green costume, not black guy is bad or something like that or people not in green costume, not able to murder, people in green costume, able to murder, people in blue costume, able to steal, people not in a blue costume, not able
That's what you need to have to have virtue, to have consistency.
So you have a standard of behavior that is what I call universally preferable behavior that is consistent and that accords with the evidence.
And so that to me is what virtue is.
All right. Somebody asks, what book has been the most influential for you to embrace a libertarian philosophy?
Book or books, I suppose.
It wasn't so much books as it was magazines.
It wasn't so much magazines as it was a particular magazine that had foldouts.
No, actually, let's take that question.
Libertarian. Libertarian philosophy.
Sorry, I thought you said libertine.
Not libertine. Okay, good, good.
So, well, I mean, I come through the traditional route of the great smoky goddess of Russian reason.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead remains one of my favorite books and certainly one of the most influential, if not the most influential book on my thinking.
And I think that Ayn Rand's personal life was sort of a tragedy and I've really, really tried to learn as much as humanly possible from the mistakes of the giants who have come before me, who I hope to put another half inch on their stature.
But yeah, so The Fountainhead for sure.
I would say, I mean, I love Plato's interpretation of Socrates.
I don't love Socrates, but I love the methodology that he worked with.
Nietzsche has been enormously influential on me.
Aristotle to some degree, although I find his ethics kind of annoying because there are just so many assumptions in there.
I think Nathaniel Brandon's The Psychology of Self-Esteem had an enormous impact on me when I read it at about the age of 18 or 19, I was working up north as a gold panner and this is one of the books I'd stuffed in my backpack and I just found it wonderful in terms of self-knowledge.
I think self-knowledge is an underappreciated aspect of the libertarian philosophy.
Libertarian philosophy is all about the market and government and the non-aggression principle and these things are all great and fine and wonderful, but we're not so good at answering why.
People agree with us vaguely in theory and then oppose us viciously in practice, and that requires a knowledge of psychology.
It requires a knowledge of the human soul, so to speak.
It requires self-knowledge, I think, in particular.
So I would say in terms of freedom, the real freedom that we can achieve is the freedom in our own lives.
We cannot achieve freedom in the state.
We cannot achieve freedom from compulsion in the social sense because we simply can't overturn the monstrous Leviathan that squats But we can achieve freedom in our personal lives.
That has to do with self-expression and spontaneity and openness and honesty and integrity in our personal relationships.
That is where the real growth, the real potential, the real gumption is in libertarianism.
And I've gotten a lot more in many ways out of psychology than I have out of economics and philosophy, economics and politics for sure, and to some degree philosophy.
But it has been self-knowledge And a commitment to honesty with myself, honesty with my loved ones, that has given me the most freedom and security in an uncertain world.
So those are very, very brief.
I could sort of go on and on, but those are the major influences.
I've certainly really, really enjoyed the writings of psychologists.
Everything from Love's Executioners to Freud's got a wonderful tripartite analysis of Christianity relative to the superego.
The ego and the id, which I found very compelling on the analysis of dreams.
Jung's analysis of dreams are fantastic.
And so that's where I've gotten a lot of my inspiration from.
All right.
Somebody asked a question.
At what point do you feel philosophy actually starts to make someone dumber?
What really is a shoe?
What really is a shoe? Yeah.
As an example, and my reading of the question as an example, but I think possibly I know what he's getting at.
Oh, so I think I'd be like, so when somebody says, what is a shoe?
I mean, so when you sort of get these really sort of, quote, deep questions, which don't seem to have much to do with life and which everybody kind of gets, but which may be interesting to explore in an abstract sense, but don't really change anything about your life.
Is that sort of what you mean? See if this gentleman responds in the affirmative.
I'm going to start answering it as if I understand it, and then he can tell me if I'm way off base.
Yeah, look, I was reading a book by Paul Bloom.
I can't remember the name of it.
It was to do with babies and philosophy.
It was something I was reading along with Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby.
And he was completely fascinated, I would dare say, neurotically obsessed with this sort of question that when we look at the world and we see a human being, we don't just see a bag of skin and bones and sense data, but we actually see them as a person.
And then we look at a bowl because I had cereal right before this.
We look at a bowl and we don't see it as component atoms or simply light reflecting off a surface, but we see it whole and complete as a bowl.
And how is this possible?
And this is, I think, something that has fascinated highly distractible philosophers throughout history.
I think that kind of philosophy is pretty retarded.
And I'm fully open to the idea that that may be because I don't get it at some level.
But I just think in an age where we have genocides and still even in the civilized, quote, civilized countries, we have wars and incarcerations for innocent drug use.
not paying your bills and people are being kicked out of homes that nobody owns when ownership is claimed.
I think when we have, and this is just a tip of the iceberg, when we have a third of boys and two-thirds of girls reporting unwanted sexual contact before the age of 18, when we live in a molestation-drenched society, when children are still being spanked and hit as if people imagine the non-aggression principle when children are still being spanked and hit as if people imagine the non-aggression principle doesn't apply to children first and foremost, when we have all of these evils in the world worrying about how I look at a bowl and see it as a bowl, to me seems like one of the most massive and brain-frackery schizoid
to me seems like one of the most massive and brain frackery schizoid distractions from the real job of the philosopher.
It's like you run into the emergency.
You run into the emergency and you're holding your one arm in your other arm because it fell off or something and you're gushing blood everywhere and...
You're like, Doc, Doc, help me, help me, stitch me up, cauterize this thing, bind it, do something, I'm bleeding out, baby!
And the doc says, well, you know, it's interesting.
I've often wondered how it is that we know that the arm is attached versus not being attached.
Because you see, there are spaces between the atoms anyway, and so it's an interesting thing.
And it's like, oh my God, will you shut the fuck up and stitch me up?
That's what I think the world is doing with philosophers.
So I think there is a time when philosophy becomes just a A bit of brain-whackery masturbation, which we shouldn't be doing, those of us who are really interested in ethics.
We need to be in there tangling and messing with the powers that be.
So, if that answers to some degree, I hope that helps.
I think I've seen that scene in some science fiction, you know, bad science fiction movie where the doctor's just like, oh, yes, you know.
So... Yeah, look, we may not know.
We may not know all of the mental processes that go into differentiating a human being from a bag of skin.
We may not know all of that.
And frankly, given the evils that surround us in the world that we can actually do something about, who gives a shit right now?
We have way more important stuff to deal with.
rides its rapid way into economic collapse as the civil war called democracy wrenches itself into its component atoms and it soon is going to become a war of interest group against interest group using the mighty bloody cudgel of the state to crush the skulls of their fellow citizens and pick their pockets.
This is not the time that we need to worry about abstract questions.
I would love to live in a society where we could sit around wondering why we don't look like bags of skin to each other but that's not really the society we live in right now.
Things are a little more fucking urgent than that right now.
So that's what I sort of say to other philosophers and unfortunately they tend to almost exclusively be academics which is kind of what you'd expect from academics.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Somebody asks, is the U.S. debt really 15 trillion?
Did they just pick a number out of a hat?
Something tells me the real number is much higher.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course.
I mean, because, look, there's...
I mean, nobody knows.
I mean, obviously, when you start getting into numbers like that, nobody knows.
The rounding error is more than my family.
Your family will make in 10 generations.
So that's all complete nonsense.
So, of course, look, there's a number of components.
There is... The debt that has been accumulated, which I think people have some idea of, there is the debt which is going to be required to be paid back.
I mean, people lend America money, and we say someone lends America a billion dollars to get America through the next 12 goddamn minutes.
So somebody lends America a billion dollars, they say, oh, well, we have a debt of a billion dollars.
Well, no, not really, because...
You have to pay back interest.
Of course, America is able to pay back interest.
It hasn't paid principal back for decades.
It's like if you buy a $30 set of sneakers and you end up paying your minimum on the visa every month, they end up costing you like $550 or something like that.
It's some crazy-ass piece of money that you have to pay if you count into interest.
There's the basic amount that you borrow.
There's all of the obligations that you have to pay down the road in terms of interest.
There's the debt that matures in the future if people have bought certain kinds of treasury instruments and you have to pay them back, principal plus interest.
That's all deferred into the future, so that's all the case.
But the most important thing is all these unfunded liabilities, all of these promises which governments have made to buy votes from people that they simply don't have the money to pay for.
Social Security is just a goddamn Ponzi scheme.
It is completely criminal and, of course, it's completely unsustainable because you're going to have far fewer people working relative to the people who have retired.
So you have all these underfunded liabilities.
The estimate for the unfunded liabilities goes anywhere from $75 trillion and up.
And this, of course, is completely impossible to pay.
The society simply is – there's just no way.
There's absolutely no way.
You don't even need to lose any sleep about it.
It's not going to be paid. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to end up at the short end of the stick.
And because earlier I said that we have justices to pay what people have earned, well, the dumb bastards who put their faith in the state and who relied upon the state for their retirement and for their health care, I'm really sorry.
I mean, I wish there was something I could do about it.
But If you're going to hand your money over to the seediest bunch of thugs in the history of the world, which is anybody who's in the government, then of course they're going to take off with your money and they're going to leave a big fat IOU and they're going to get rich and you're going to get screwed.
The history has shown this over and over again.
So if you swallowed the propaganda and you got greedy and you took a whole bunch of stuff that didn't belong to you and then you expect the young people to come along and pay 70% taxes to keep you In your condos in Florida, well, it's not going to happen and it's going to be very painful and it's going to be very ugly and there's going to be lots of people who are going to get very angry and pretend that they had no idea even though this stuff was a joke when I was 10 years old.
We knew that this was all bullshit.
So yeah, look, it's not going to work and there's going to be a lot of people complaining and there's going to be a lot of emotional pressure put on other people to pay for all these idiots but it's not going to happen and people are just going to Have to find some way to get through.
As I've been taught by the elder generation when I was a kid, actions have consequences.
And if you gamble with the government and you lose, sorry, don't come running to me.
Don't come running to other people.
I mean, you gambled, you lost, you tried to steal, and it didn't work.
Well, you should be lucky you don't end up in jail.
Somebody asks, what's the difference between your perfect scenario of anarchy in a society and survival of the fittest?
Thank you.
What is the difference between my perfect scenario of anarchy and survival of the fittest?
All right. Well, I would say that the one thing about anarchy, which is really just equality or trade, There is no my perfect vision of anarchy versus your perfect vision of anarchy.
If you think about a perfectly free market and somebody says, well, what's your perfectly free market?
Well, there is no such thing because the perfectly free market is an amalgamation or an aggregation of hundreds of choices a day by billions and billions of people.
So it's not my I hate to be nitpicky, but that's my job.
I hate to be nitpicky, but there is no my perfect version of anarchy.
There simply is people who respect the non-aggression principle, who are not clubbing each other or using the threats of state jails to get people to do stuff, and respecting property rights.
Well, I don't know what that's going to look like exactly, and anyone who says they do is lying, and anybody who's, even if they're right about one minute, will not be right about the next minute because things will change and grow so much in a society like that.
So, that having been said, I think you have to be really careful to bring biological metaphors to market scenarios or to political or social scenarios.
So, I mean, there's an old praxeological argument that comes out of the Austrian school, which I think is great, which says if two people voluntarily exchange something that automatically, axiomatically can't get around it means that each one of them believes that he or she will be better off by doing that trade, right? So, if I have a pen and you have $5 and we voluntarily exchange, right?
You give me five bucks and I give you the pen.
Axiomatically, we both believe that we're going to be better off by doing that trade.
How do we know that? Because the trade happened.
The moment you put government in and you start forcing people and you have tariffs and taxes and trade policies and unions that are funded or enforced by the government, you no longer know any of that.
So the difference is that in a free society, everyone who's trading voluntarily is It's doing so with the expectation that they'll be better off.
And they may or may not be better off.
You may have buyer's remorse.
But in the moment of doing the trade, they absolutely, completely and totally believe that they will be better off.
Even if they're doing it grudgingly, even if they'd like it, slightly better terms.
If they do the trade voluntarily, they will be better off.
So trade is fundamentally not like biological competition, right?
It's the old thing. It's a dog-eat-dog world.
Well, dogs don't even eat each other in nature, let alone capitalism.
And so in nature, I mean, there are symbiotic sort of beneficial relationships for like the egrets on the back of the hippo picks off the ticks and also gets some of the food and the remoras that float around the shark's jaws to help clean the gums or whatever.
And they also get some of the food that spills out of the shark's jaws and so on.
So there are mutually beneficial.
I mean, I'm a big bag of flesh that's carrying around Some bacteria that is using me as a big giant mothership to get to the next generation.
Good for them. I'm glad that they do so because I like to fart.
But in nature, survival of the fittest is win-lose.
Generally, it is win-lose.
One set of DNA wins over the other set of DNA. The lion eats the gazelle.
It is win-lose, win-lose, win-lose.
And in a free society, it's win-win.
It's win-win.
And so the only place where biological metaphors are appropriate...
It's in a state of violence, right?
So if a mugger comes up and steals your wallet, steals your wallet, it's win-lose.
And you sure as hell don't want to do that.
You don't want to give him your wallet.
How do we know that? Because you've got a gun in your ribs, right?
It's the difference between charity and theft is the gun in your ribs.
And so the only place where biological metaphors can be usefully deployed is in a situation of coercion, whether it's individual crimes or collective crimes like statism.
So... So I would be very careful about co-joining free interactions, win-win voluntary trades with anything to do with the win-lose that's typical in nature.
So I just wanted to sort of make that point.
I don't think there's any similarity fundamentally between those two situations, the sort of survival of the fittest and a society based on free trade.
And as you alluded to, you know, survival of the fittest is a really reductive and not even a full picture of what actually goes on in nature.
Yeah, there's much more cooperation in nature than there is conflict, but sorry, go on.
And direct competition.
I mean, we have entire ecosystems where there's competition between different species and competition between individuals and species, but there's also massive amounts of cooperation.
And if it was merely competition, I mean, There are some really wonderful books written on this by Dawkins where I learned about this sort of thing.
No money to Dawkins here, but I recommend going to read that sort of stuff to get an idea of just the degree of cooperation that there is in nature.
Codependency, cooperation, Well, that's true, but in the long-term survival of the fittest, it is win-lose in that certain genes tend to die off and other genes tend to sort of win out.
So there is sort of a win-lose in his metaphor.
He wasn't talking about nature as a whole, but rather the survival of the fittest approach.
No, that is true. That is true.
The way, and not to spend too much time on this, but the way in which that maps to us is in terms of ideas.
Like means, that's his contribution, right?
Yeah, in terms of ideas.
There is survival of the fittest when it comes to ideas, and that has a lot to do with how the ideas attach themselves to survival of the fittest.
Yeah, I mean, given how many bad ideas we fight in the world, survival of the fittest may not be the best way to approach ideas because they have propaganda and so on, right?
No, no, no.
But yeah, yeah. In terms of...
In a free society, I would agree with you, but we're back to statism, right?
Because there's indoctrination pounded involuntarily into the minds of children, which is a way of getting really bad memes to replicate.
Or religion, right? These falsehoods that are inflicted upon kids against their will is another way that these things replicate.
It's not quite the same thing that works in genes because they're supposed to be sort of advantageous, whereas these are more parasitical, I would say.
Well, the only thing – and I'll just – this will be my last comment on this – is that a bad gene, so-called bad gene, a gene that has a bad sort of effect, can still attach itself to a really successful survival strategy and propaganda is incredibly successful in the society that we have now.
So that's what I would say about it.
Well, no, but propaganda is cancerous, right?
Because propaganda destroys the society that we have as we just talked about earlier, right?
I mean America is hanging on the edge of a financial precipice.
And you're going to get either debt repudiation, massive inflation or hyperinflation, and a significant reorganization of society.
So the state is successful in its replication, but it destroys the host.
So it's not exactly healthy for human society as a whole.
Or it's like a virus that replicates.
And it's like, well, my tuberculosis virus is doing very well, which means I'm not.
Right? Right, yeah.
It has nothing to do with, like, the validity of the idea, but anyways.
Or the long-term sustainability of it, right?
Yes, that's exactly my point on that, yeah.
I mean, as we know, right?
I mean, again, I love this stuff.
I find it fascinating, and we'll get onto another question in a sec.
But for sure, human beings, you know, there was a gene that we got even bigger damn hits, right?
But unfortunately, we then killed the moms as we were given birth, right?
And so... Things can develop too far, and so this is why we have the sort of fourth trimester or the first six to nine months after birth where we should still be in the womb, but we're not because our heads would get too big to pass through the channel of life, so to speak.
So, yeah, so things can go too far, which then causes the problem, and that's certainly true of statism as well, though I think that's an inevitable growth through that.
I mean, the logic of the system is just that it has to grow to destroy the host, and that's more akin to a disease or a cancer than it is...
I think the sort of interspecies survival of the fittest stuff.
I would definitely like to debate this more with you some other time.
Let's do it. Let's do it. I don't think we're on the same page.
Okay, so someone asked, what are your thoughts and observations on recent increases in the spread of liberty-minded ideas through things like Adam vs.
the Man and School Sucks podcasts and your show, etc.?
And my show!
And my show! My show came first!
No, look, I think it's fantastic.
Huge respect for Brett.
Huge respect for Adam.
I think they're just doing fantastic stuff.
And, I mean, I think it's wonderful.
One of the things that I love, love, love about the internet is the internet lays waste to excuses.
Lays waste to excuses.
I mean, I can understand. Gosh, geez, when I first started out in Liberty, there was like, what was it, Ayn Rand, Hayek...
I guess there was Rothbard, though I didn't read him until much more recently.
Didn't know anything about Mises back in the day.
There were sort of a couple of other...
I didn't know anything about Lissander Spooner at the time.
Never even heard of him. But there were a couple of other liberty writers that you could kind of get your hold on.
And I remember going to a libertarian conference when I was maybe 17.
So, dear God, that's like...
That's a hell of a long time ago.
That is a long time. It was almost 30 years ago.
It was pretty sparse and you really had to dig.
When I was in university to try and find liberty-related material, it was hard.
I mean, there was no...
Whereas now, I mean, look at Mises.org.
You can take an entire online course for free to learn and to study this stuff.
It's literally 10 seconds away from anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
So, Nobody has any excuses anymore.
Oh, we didn't know.
Oh, I've never been exposed to anything else.
Well, then you chose to. I mean, when I grew up in England, there were three television stations, BBC One, which had documentaries, BBC Two, which had bad documentaries, and ITV, which had Bond movies every three months when the entire nation shut down.
And so, yeah, it was kind of hard to get other information, but now it's great.
It just means that if I come across someone now Who's never heard of libertarianism?
It's a lot different than it was when I was 20 and came across somebody who'd never heard of libertarianism.
Back then, completely understandable.
Now, all it means is that you have the intellectual curiosity, not even of a hamster, but of a goddamn hamster's wheel, or the shit that drops out of the hamster while it's running on its wheel.
It means that people have stayed inside a very closeted, very tiny intellectually little world, and it means that they're very Uncurious, intellectually.
And of course, libertarians, they're just sharper than your average mouse, right?
They're just sharper. Because we're constantly facing counter-propaganda.
Well, just propaganda.
Whereas if you're kind of lefty and you read the Washington Post and the New York Times and Noam Chomsky or whatever, then you don't really face ideas that really challenge you.
And so you just don't swim against the current.
You just don't get to be that much stronger a swimmer.
But libertarians, particularly those who are older, we spend so much time swimming against the current.
We're like a cross between Mark Spitz and a dolphin and a propeller and some steroids.
So we've got some good intellectual muscles, which is why we can take apart people so easily when it comes to debating.
I mean, they just haven't met people like us.
So I think it's fantastic and I think it's really separating people who are curious and intelligent and want to think from people who are just running with the herd.
It becomes very obvious very quickly.
which is which when you're dealing with people.
All right, cool.
So we have another question here.
Time to break out some definitions, I think.
How can morality be objective when morality is based on individual choices?
Isn't morality subjective?
Well, morality is not based on individual choices by definition.
Morality has universality.
I mean, otherwise it's not morality.
It's just personal taste, right?
So, I like jazz. You like blues.
Obviously, this is not a moral question.
Unless it's that Kenny G shit, in which case it just becomes question of good versus evil.
But we'll get into that another time.
But personal taste.
I like chocolate ice cream.
You like spumonty ice cream.
But this is not a moral question.
And so, morality has to do with universality.
Morality is not based upon personal choices.
If it is, then it's not morality.
You can't reject universality.
You can try, but you'll fail, and not because of anything I say.
This is just the nature of reality and certainly the nature of debating.
You can't reject universality.
If you try to reject universality, there must be some standard by which you're rejecting it.
And the moment you take some standard to use to reject universality, you're trying to use universality to reject universality, which, no worky!
It does not work. It is a cosmic, truly cosmic fail.
And in the same way, you can't use logic to disprove logic, and you can't use the evidence of the senses to disprove the evidence of the senses.
You just can't do it. And as soon as we accept all of that stuff, we'll be able to move the debate a lot further forward.
But if you want to bore yourself into scintillating kaleidoscopic tears, I have, of course, my free book on ethics, universally preferable behavior, which some people get and some people get annoyed by, which is completely understandable.
It's available at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
I'm sure there will be some follow-up questions to that.
No, no, no. I'm sure we've just solved the entire problem of ethics in about three minutes, so no problem.
Yeah. No, no. Of course.
I'm just, you know, making stuff up.
No, there's another question here. Why can't people accept that some things are unknown, such as the afterlife, beginning of the universe, the question of meaning?
From where does this fear come?
Why can't people accept that things are unknown?
That there are some things that are unknown.
But the afterlife is not unknown.
The afterlife is completely known.
There is no, I mean, just to take one example, there's no question about the afterlife because the only way that the afterlife could be a valid idea, even to explore, would be if we had a soul, if we had an eternal component of our humanity that could not be folded, stapled or mutilated, could not be killed, existed eternally, contained our consciousness and so on.
And we know that this is not true because none of us had an identity or any existence before we were born.
That we know. I mean, if we could live after we died, then we would have been alive before we were born.
That's axiomatic to the equation.
And since I don't remember what 1965 was like, and indeed many parts of 1966, remains somewhat hazy.
I remember... Giant boobs.
I remember a very, very comfortable series of shits and pees, and I remember some falls.
But really, that's about it.
And really, we are just continuing to try and recreate that existence in the old age home.
Sansa giant boobs. I think they're extra.
So there's no question around that.
Now, people say, well, what was before the beginning of the universe?
This makes no sense.
Time began with the beginning of the...
Saying what was before the beginning of the universe is like saying what's north of the North Pole.
Well, that's it.
There is nothing north of the North Pole.
And so I think that people want to...
They just really, really want to, want to, want to create a realm of the unknown.
A realm of the unknowable.
And they make up all of these places and concepts which are unknowable.
Like... People misunderstand quantum physics and think that there's something really crazy and weird about matter deep down, and they were before the beginning of the universe or life after death.
And I hate to be this blunt about it, but I have to tell the truth, at least as I see it.
This is because people have been told a lot of bullshit, and bullshit clogs up your brain.
And rather than confront the bullshit in your brain, what you do is you create a pocket of the universe in time or space where you can put all of that crazy shit that you've been told, whether it was religion or nationalism or racism or patriotism or I don't know what the hell crazy people are told when they're a kid.
But you have to have some place to put that if you're not going to tackle it within yourself.
And so people want to create these pockets that You know, like they want to lift up this carpet, sweep their crazy under it, and then step on it like there's nothing there.
So it's not that people have a problem with the unknown.
People have a desperate desire for the unknown.
And when you debate with religious people, you will always get this, right?
They'll always say, ah, but you can't say for sure.
I have to have a place called the unknown where I can put all the crazy religious propaganda that was jammed down my throat when I was a kid.
And the same thing happens in politics, right?
So... What about the roads?
There's this big unknown. What about national defense?
There's this big unknown. And the moment you can't answer some question, people say, aha, knowledge is limited and therefore I can keep my crazy shit in my head and I don't have to confront it because we've all admitted that there's a limit to knowledge.
So right beyond the limit of knowledge, I'm going to put all the crazy shit I was told as a kid.
And so this is the great thing about anarchism or voluntarism or atheism is that I don't have to answer any of these questions.
How will the roads be built in a free society?
I don't have to answer these questions, because I use the argument for morality, which is, I don't care, I don't know, it doesn't matter, but people still shouldn't be sticking guns in each other's ribs to get something done.
So, I hope that helps.
It's very much like the null zone when it comes to morality, where everything is reversed, right?
Yes, that's an excellent point, James.
So, people will always try and create, whatever moral rule you come up with, people will try and create some exception.
And say, you know, the old one, well, the Nazis come and you've got Jews hiding in the attic and they say, where are the Jews?
And you say, I'm not going to tell you, Nazis come.
Now, here's a face full of phaser or something.
I don't know, maybe mixing my genres a little bit.
They will say that kind of stuff and then people say, aha, you see?
So you can't even say that honesty is always a virtue and therefore I can go out and rape bats in the night or whatever it is that they want to do.
And this, of course, is...
There's lots of great arguments to the Gestapo question.
Sorry, lots of great answers to those kinds of questions.
Primarily that when you're not in a situation, morality is lovemaking.
It is not rape. So we differentiate between rape and lovemaking through the initiation of force, right?
And virtue or honesty is like lovemaking in that if you're being forced, it ain't there.
It ain't there. And so if you have Nazis coming up and shaking guns in your face demanding to know where people are in your house, you can lie.
You can tell the truth. You can lie. There's no virtue.
It doesn't exist any more than lovemaking exists during a horrible rape.
So it just doesn't apply to the scenario.
All right.
Well, we have several more questions to go.
I bet. Well, I can't...
Because I haven't said anything controversial yet, so...
No, no. Keep digging.
Keep digging, please. So, somebody asked, when a person stops dating to do self-knowledge, how long is too long to be out of the dating scene?
Is social interaction needed for self-knowledge?
It's a complicated question, and...
But, you know, and it sounds like, you know, we're talking about a lot of abstracts.
This is a very serious philosophical question because philosophy is really around self-knowledge.
So I really, really applaud the listener for this.
It's a real personal, very relevant, very important question.
So, I mean, there's a number of factors.
It depends on the level of dysfunction that you've experienced.
I mean, if you come from a truly nutty background, longer is better.
If you come from a slightly dysfunctional background, you probably need less time.
So I think social interaction is necessary for To heal traumas that were inflicted in isolation.
And almost all trauma is isolating.
One of the things that abusers, whether it's parents or teachers or priests or whatever, one of the things that abusers, if they're abusive, are going to do is to isolate you, is to fill you full of stuff that is embarrassing or shameful or they're going to put you down or they're going to make you feel isolated.
They're going to put a gap between you and others.
Because if you have a connection with others, you're very, very hard to abuse because...
Abusers have to feel that you're not going to tell.
If someone molests a kid, they have to be pretty sure that that kid isn't going to go and immediately tell a policeman or something.
They have to make sure that they either create or maintain or exacerbate the isolation that people are feeling.
If you come from a dysfunctional background, then isolation is the main problem.
I don't think you can solve the problems That are caused or exacerbated by isolation through being isolated.
So I think community is important.
But of course, when we're brought up that way, we have a difficult time judging community.
We can get involved in communities that are themselves dysfunctional.
So you have to be very careful. Find the right people.
I mean, I think the Freedom in Radio community, there's, I mean, hundreds of people I could name off the top of my head who I would, you know, trust with my life.
And so I think there's lots of great people in this.
There may be great people in other communities.
I don't know. I only have time for this one.
But find the right people.
Get a connection. I mean, I'm a huge fan of talk therapy.
As people know, I won't bore you with that here.
But that's a little different from dating, right?
So get a community. Once you can sustain a good friendship, then I think it's a good time to start thinking about dating.
but I would go for the friendship first myself.
All right.
So we have another question here.
Do you think that trying to get Ron Paul elected is a worthwhile endeavor, or do you see everything going to shit in the next couple of years?
If you do see us spiraling out of control, then what is the scenario you envision?
That's a long question.
Look, I've done the Ron Paul thing quite a bit to death, and it sounds like it's specific to Ron Paul because he just happens to be the foremost libertarian And first of all, Ron Paul is not going to get elected.
You know, let's be blunt about that.
He has no chance of getting elected.
And the reason for that is very simple, is that at some point, and I've read a couple of Ron Paul books, so forgive me if I don't know enough about this.
I've also asked his supporters for more information about this, haven't received any.
I want to know what exactly is going to be cut.
So he says, well, I'll cut this.
I'll cut the military. But I need to know specifically and exactly what's going to be cut.
Now, either he's not going to say that, in which case he's not close to being elected.
But if he gets close to being elected, people are going to start to press him on this and say, look, Dr.
Paul, what exactly are you going to cut?
Give me the list. Now, the moment he publishes that kind of list, then...
Every state-entitled asshole on the planet is going to rise up and rebel against him and dig up dirt against him and make up slanders against him and portray him as crazy.
Remember what they did to...
Oh, Lord, people, help me out.
What was the guy who ran against Clinton and Bush?
Perot. Perot, that's right.
Yeah, I remember Ross Perot, right?
He was the head of a huge software company.
He was very productive and He was a small little Texan, if I remember rightly, and he did have a bit of a fun voice, no question about that.
And I remember one of his quotes, they said, Perot has no experience.
And he's like, that's true. I don't have experience running up a $400 billion debt.
Boy, I remember when that was something you could say with a straight face.
But people made fun of him.
They made fun of him on Saturday Night Live because he had these charts.
And maybe I guess they looked a bit cheesy before computer graphics or whatever.
But this guy was talking some sense.
I mean, this wasn't that long ago.
It was 12, 13, 14 years ago or whatever.
And he was saying, you know, we're heading for a financial meltdown.
We are heading for a huge crash.
And there's too much debt, both personally and institutionally and certainly at the government level.
We've got all of these… Entitlements that can't be cut or at least nobody seriously contemplated cutting.
We have all these unfunded liabilities.
I mean he drew it out like the movie Rollover that I still distinctly remember seeing on a plane flying to Africa when I was 16 which talked a lot about this financial crisis.
This stuff was all known years ago and all the clusterfrecked, squid-headed idiots in the world Just made fun of his voice and his funny little charts and it's like, oh, these idiots.
And these are the same idiots who now are saying, where's my retirement money?
I have got no retirement money.
Well, if you were at all involved with making fun of Ross Perot, I think you should be thrown out of your ass with that one thin dime.
Oh no, I tell you what, we'll print off some charts and you can have those.
Some of Ross Perot's charts, you can have those.
So, I'm sorry?
So use them as blankets. Yeah, you could use those as blankets because, I mean, the man was speaking sense, but nobody wanted to listen.
Everybody made fun of him. So he's not going to get elected because in the moment you start threatening anyone's entitlements, everybody's going to start rising up against you and do whatever it takes.
And so he's not going to get elected.
Is he going to educate people?
Yeah, he's going to educate people.
But my approach is that it's important and useful and helpful to be educated about economics and politics.
It's fundamentally completely irrelevant to saving the world.
The world is going to be saved. Through two things.
It is going to be saved through the peaceful raising of children so that they're no longer frightened of authority and no longer broken by aggression and control and mastery and dominance and power and insults and spankings and hittings and beatings and rapings and all.
You get to raise children peacefully if you want a peaceful world.
It's that simple. And the second thing is that the greatest power in the world is the power of ostracism, is the power of ostracism.
And until liberty activists are willing to at least start considering the process of ostracizing people who support the state, I don't mean right away, but not ten years after you start the debate.
If you believe something is evil, like the state, and you understand and accept that that evil can only continue because of people's support for it, then your relationship to the state is And the people who support the state in your life is like the relationship the bank has with the bank robber and the guy driving away the getaway car for the bank robber.
Well, there's no way the bank robber would have robbed that bank if he didn't have a getaway car.
And there's no way that the government would exercise the kind of power that it does or any damn power at all if people didn't support it and praise it and salute the flag.
And this is true for all aspects of state power.
So until we're willing to think about ostracism, until we're willing to damn well act on our values in a social context, then not really much is going to change.
So talking about the Fed and auditing the Fed and cutting the budget and repealing the welfare state and cutting the military-industrial complex, it's all nonsense because people aren't going to look for what we say.
They're going to look at the values that we can actually act upon in our own lives.
If you define something as evil, If you understand that the state is evil, that has profound, profound implications on your personal relationships.
It is not abstract.
It is not over the hill.
It is not in another pocket of time.
If the state is immoral, and if the state is evil, and if the state is destroying society, civilized society, peaceful, voluntary society, then people who support that state Are bound up in that immorality and I don't believe that you can be in a relationship with anyone whose actions and beliefs you define as evil.
Evil is a very powerful word and I use it as sparingly as humanly possible which is unfortunately not that sparingly in the society that we live in.
So I think that people like Ron Paul because they Feel that someone's going to save them.
They feel that pounding some lawn signs is going to set them free, but it's not.
it's not society is the sum of our personal relationships and it is our personal relationships that we need to bring our values to not to a checkbox in a booth very good we have three more questions time willing um So I don't know. I think your hour might be up for Patriot polls, but I don't see Adam yet.
So keep going until we're done.
All right. Yeah, just...
Ian, just pull the plug when you want to go back.
Just let us know. So go ahead.
Cool.
So somebody asks, how do you see a transfer of resources from today's wealthiest people into the free market in a future theoretical anarchic society?
Do they or should they have more interest in keeping the current system propped up or in creating a free society since they would theoretically be a step ahead in a totally free market given their current accumulation of wealth?
Well, I believe that when you're young, you want stuff and when you're old, you want people.
and And, you know, there's lots of people.
It's, you know, that song, The Cat's in the Cradle...
You know, the guy spends all his time traveling, doesn't have any time for his kids.
Then when he's older, he wants to spend time with his adult kids, but they don't have any time for him because that's all he's taught them and so on.
Well, I think that people who are richer tend to be older and they care a lot about their relationships.
I genuinely believe that there's enough love in the world that if people have to choose between stuff and love, they will generally choose love.
Not always, not consistently, not perfectly, but most people, I think, will choose love.
And what that means is that we have to Give people that stark contrast.
Look, if you want my company, if you want my society, if you want my love, if you want my respect, then you have to give up the support for violence that characterizes statism.
You have to give it up. You have to let go of the gun.
You have to put down the gun if you want to be in my life.
You have to put down your praise of the gun.
You have to put down your support of the gun.
you have to put it on safety, you have to throw it at the ocean, and you have to bury it under concrete.
Because we have to drive this demon of violence out of the human heart and out of human society.
And the only way to do that is through confronting people in their personal lives with the effects of their choices.
We all understand this in the past.
I mean, if you were into equality between the races and a friend of yours was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, then you would face a choice.
If you stay friends with him, clearly you don't give much of a shit about the equality of the races.
And if you really do care about the equality of the races, then you can't hang with racists.
You just can't.
It undermines everything that you claim to believe about.
And so you should give up your beliefs or you have to give up those who act in opposition to your beliefs.
That's a fundamental equation.
So once we do that, people will give up their stuff to stay close to their loved ones, to understand and to accept.
And they will think, you know, society needs an intervention, for Christ's sake.
It needs an intervention. Where people say, look, you need to stop your self-destructive behavior, which is what people say to an addict in an intervention, or I'm done with you.
I'm done with you. I'm out of your life.
Society is addicted to violence.
It is addicted to control.
It is addicted to power and to the unearned, fundamentally.
And we have to say to people, look, I love you enough.
I love you so much.
I love you so much that I cannot...
I cannot stand by while you continue to support this core evil in society because it is destroying your soul.
It is destroying our world.
It is destroying our future.
It will destroy our children.
You have to stop, and this is the commitment that I have, that I'm putting myself in front of you, between you and this grinning, gaping demon called the state.
I'm putting myself between you two.
You can go through me, but then you are past me, and I am done with you if you don't stop with me.
Once we do that, how the stuff that people don't want as much anymore gets distributed is not that important.
Right.
That's it.
And I think – no, I think there's – sorry, there are two more questions.
I think this is related to the previous question, saying, I know that you have dedicated most of your life for the cause of liberty and a free society, but if a free society was achieved, what would you do?
Oh, I would have a great time.
I would have a great time.
Look, I came out of the art world.
I came out of the acting world.
I was a playwright.
I was a director. I've written half a dozen novels.
I would go straight back into art and I would make beautiful art.
I became a philosopher because I understood that the values weren't in place in society to appreciate the art I was creating, which I'm still very proud of.
And so I would go straight back into the art world and not look back.
Fantastic. Fantastic. Alright, so, last question.
I think you're going to like this one.
I've heard Steph say that he tells his daughter the truth about things like Santa Claus instead of going along with the fantasy.
Sorry, can you stop that again?
Sorry, James, you said you missed the start of the truth.
I didn't quite understand that. Can you stop the question again?
Oh. Alright.
I've heard Steph say that he tells his daughter the truth about things like Santa Claus instead of going along with the fantasy.
I've been doing a lot of childcare and reading up on different philosophies regarding childcare.
Rudolf Steiner founded Steiner Schools, also known as Waldorf Schools, and he emphasized the importance of creative play and development of imagination in order for children to be able to develop critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills later in life.
I was wondering if Steph ever engages in fantasy with Izzy and what his thoughts are on this topic.
That's a great question.
I would say that And conservatively, at least half my day with Izzy is fantasy play.
Absolutely and completely.
I mean, I could go through the list of everything.
She's currently into some cartoon characters and she will say, okay, Steph, you're this character and I'm this character and sometimes mommy is that character and we play and we just make up stories and we play.
You know, she's really fascinated by culverts.
I've been explaining to her at the moment.
So, you know, we'll peer in the culvert.
We'll make up what's in there.
Do you see a spider?
You know, which way is he going?
And does he want us to chase him?
We'll play and all. We build forts in the living room and we run away from giants.
And so it is a continual process of fantasy play, which is completely delightful and absolutely charming, wonderful, engaging and challenging.
Part of parenthood, right?
Because, I mean, she loves making up stories.
She loves it when I make up stories.
You know, we'll see something innocuous, you know, like a ball rolling down somebody's lawn and we'll make up a story about it.
You know, the ball is trying to get away from a robot and, you know, we'll play it.
So I think that is completely wonderful.
It's an absolutely delightful and it's a very conversational way of engaging and it erupted a couple of months ago and it's just been continual ever since and I just think it's completely wonderful.
But she knows that it's a story.
I mean, of course, right? Like, so...
So, you know, she's really fascinated by doctors at the moment.
And so, you know, she'll hold up a napkin to her face, and she'll be a doctor.
And, you know, then I'll have gotten some sort of illness.
And she, you know, I need some medicine.
And so she has this gesture, she'll, she'll go and grab something from the air.
And now that is the medicine.
And if I'm in a sugar coma, she needs to Because I've had too much sugar, she needs to break a piece of celery and hold it under my nose, which comes out of some movie.
But she grabs these things from midair.
She knows that it's a fantasy.
She knows that it's not real.
So I don't need to tell her, by the way, there isn't actually any medicine here, right?
She now knows that when she makes a mud pie, she shouldn't actually eat it.
She should only pretend to eat it.
And so when I want some, she now knows that she doesn't actually put the mud in my mouth, that she just pretends and all that.
So She's perfectly aware of the difference between what is real and what is not real.
While we're engaged in the story, it's completely immaterial, but she knows all of that stuff.
If she has a successful time on the toilet, we're toilet training at the moment, then she gets a juice popsicle.
I mean, if I grab one out of thin air and give her an imaginary one, she's like, no, I want a popsicle.
She knows the difference. But if we're playing and giving one of her dolls a popsicle, she'll just grab one out of the air and pretend and all that.
So I think it's completely wonderful.
I assume it's essential.
I assume it's a very important part.
I certainly had a very strong fantasy life when I was a child.
So I think it's just great.
All right. Well, that's all the questions I have in the queue.
Well, I thank everybody.
It's just fantastic questions.
I mean, this is, I guess, a little bit outside the purview of the regular Freedom Aid Radio listeners that's coming over from Patriot Pulse, but I just want to say I'm just continually blown away by the quality and perceptiveness, intelligence, and openness of these questions.
I mean, Every day that I do this, and I've been doing this for a quarter century, every day that I do this, I'm just reminded of how brilliant everybody is, how everybody is a genius, how everybody is a philosopher, and how amazing all of these questions are.
So I just really wanted to reinforce that and to point that out and to just say I truly am honored and humbled and incredibly grateful that people find it worthwhile to toss a few questions my way.
I hope that my answers aren't too alarming or annoying, or if they are, that you'll at least ask yourself why, hopefully rather than lambaste me.
But if you want to lambaste me, that's perfectly fine.
But I just hope that you'll ask if the answers bother you and why.
And of course, I've only given sketches to certain answers here.
So if you want more information, I do a Sunday show every 2 p.m.
I will be in New York September the 10th for a speech and a chat with all interested parties.
I will be at Libertopia.
I think that's October 21st, Libertopia.org and a couple of other places.
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