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Feb. 3, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

24:18

Stefan Molyneux Grilled on Television!

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	- Happy Year of the Rat everyone, and welcome to Talk the Walk.
	I'm your host, Harminder Singh. The 2019 anti-government protests drew a lot of attention worldwide.
	Many politicians, journalists and filmmakers came to the city to find out what was going on.
	They had their own interpretations of what they saw, including my guest today.
	Stefan Molyneux is the host of Free Domain and creator of the documentary film Hong Kong Fight for Freedom, available now on YouTube.
	He joins me from Canada via Skype.
	Mr. Molyneux, thank you for coming back on Talk the Walk.
	Thank you, Haminda. Great pleasure to be back.
	All right, so I had a chance to look at your documentary.
	It's a two-hour documentary, quite detailed.
	My biggest question about the documentary is the path you took.
	Now, documentaries that you see, short films that you see, they focus strictly on the Protests are happening now.
	Usually they start from the extradition bill that was introduced earlier in 2019 and then they go on from there and then they show the chaos and the police and everything like that.
	You chose a different path.
	You went all the way back into Chinese history.
	You went back colonial era and even before that you were talking about the warring states and things like that.
	Why this path? Why did you have to explain the past to get to the future?
	So everybody wants to try and change the present like it's a blade of grass or it's a little stick that's just stuck into the ground.
	But of course, for those of us who've been wrestling with trying to raise human consciousness and alert people to the dangers of collectivism, When we try to move that stick in the ground, it turns out it's like the top of a church spire that's entirely buried underground.
	Now, my training, of course, is as a historian.
	I have a master's degree in mostly the history of philosophy, but did a lot of European history and other history as well.
	So I don't think there's any point really trying to understand the present without understanding the deep roots of history that produce such warring perspectives as that between mainland China and Hong Kong.
	So to me, starting with the extradition bill is kind of like joining Titanic after the ship has broken in two.
	Like, you kind of need a little bit of backstory to understand why the face-off of these two belief systems is so profound.
	And when you did go back into history, what parallels did you see with the present?
	So the parallels are that there are two cultures that have evolved independently of each other in many ways that are facing each other with a great cloud of suspicion and fear and hostility.
	What happened, of course, in the beginning of what the Chinese call the century of shame, what happened with the First and Second Opium Wars, was a somewhat complacent and bureaucratic China, which had a fair amount of vanity and stagnation, ran into, like full tilt boogie, ran into Expansionistic, energetic, chaotic, confused, and often quite aggressive European colonialism, that caused a lot of friction.
	Now, the development that has occurred in Hong Kong versus the horrors of communism in mainland China have produced cultures that have a great degree of hostility and suspicion when facing each other.
	And without a common language, because the language that China uses to describe itself is not really the same as the language that Hong Kong uses to describe China and vice versa.
	Without trying to find some kind of common language and understanding how the paths split, it's going to be very hard to have any kind of rapprochement that is not just going to be like two carpets folding together, like one dominates the other, the other one goes under.
	So when you fast forward to 1949, when the communists came into power in mainland China, from there, where did history take both Hong Kong and the mainland?
	And eventually, where do you think it converges, the communists?
	Is it 1984 or before that?
	Well, I would say that starting in 1949, I mean, this was, of course, already, as you know, after a year of inflation and endless battles between the nationalists and the communists, an exhausted China settled into the domination of the Communist Party, hoping for some kind of stability.
	And, of course, unfortunately, the major stability that millions of Chinese ended up achieving was six feet under the ground after a hellish series of of sieges and starvations and tortures and gulags and you name it.
	So, the idea or the ideal that the Chinese have, which is that we can erase all class distinctions, we can achieve a stateless society, we are just one more murder away from utopia, well, that was happening on one side of the fence,
	of course. And on the other side of the fence, this amazing city of Hong Kong managed to hold onto The intense economic and to a large degree political liberties that characterize mid to late 19th century England and certainly Western Europe And so you have one side of the equation, which is China, that went about as hard collectivist and communist and totalitarian as can be imagined.
	And on the other side, you have Hong Kong, which retained a lot of the freedoms because it was not sucked into the First and Second World War, at least to the degree, of course, that England was.
	It retained a lot of the liberties that I like to think Europe would have retained if it hadn't been for those two disastrous wars.
	So you have these absolute poles apart, the greatest totalitarian state in many ways, and a state that has held on to liberties that even the West has lost and really are facing each other across a chasm of incomprehensibility almost with each other.
	One thing that struck me while I was watching the documentary is that you say in the voiceover, the communists came into power after the United States helped back them and not the nationalists.
	Can you explain that a bit? Well, this goes back to the oft-maligned, well, actually very unfairly maligned Joseph McCarthy and his attempt in the 1950s and the 1960s to root out communist infiltration in the West, particularly, of course, in America and in the State Department.
	Of course, it was rife with communist subversive, with communist spies.
	And this is not even a theory anymore since the Soviet cables were decrypted.
	In the 1990s under the Venona Project, the number of Soviet spies would have shocked even Joseph McCarthy at his wildest imagination.
	And so the fact was, of course, that you had a lot of communists who were portraying Mao Zedong as the old catchphrase.
	He was an agrarian reformer.
	He wants peace.
	He wants a free market.
	They just portrayed him to the American officials and to FDR and those who came after.
	They portrayed Mao Zedong not as a hardline, hardcore communist who wanted to establish a one-party state, a totalitarian dictatorship, but as somebody who cared for the poor, who wanted stability, who wanted a free market, who wanted some sort of accommodation with the West.
	And they directly starved the opposing armies, the nationalist armies of weaponry.
	They fueled and funneled weaponry to Mao.
	They gave him a huge amount of money as well.
	And it's very easy to make the case that without the communist spies in the State Department in America, that the communist revolution in China would not have succeeded.
	And then, of course, the unbelievable sorrows and brutalities that followed would not have come to pass.
	And when you're talking about Joseph McCarthy, you're talking about the senator from Wisconsin, I believe, that had his whole hearings in the Senate about communist infiltration in the U.S. government.
	Of course, there have been plenty of documentaries, movies, and shows about him.
	And there's a word now called McCarthyism, where you're unfairly accused of something, and then there's a whole drumhead trial that happens and things like that.
	But that tells you who won, right?
	That tells you who won. Joseph McCarthy is still maligned because although he woke up America to the dangers of communist subversion, and he was incredibly popular in America.
	He died, I believe, of sort of stress and overwork and hassle and problems in his 50s.
	And the numbers of people who came out to his funeral, the numbers of people who praised him, it was truly staggering.
	And it just tells you that although he shone the light on the subversion, the communists retained and in many ways in the 1960s expanded their power in the sort of soft march through the institutions.
	And so they won, which is why they've been able to maintain this narrative that, oh, he was crazy.
	He was seeing communists in his jam in the morning.
	He was mad and it was a witch hunt.
	And it's like, well, it wasn't.
	And of course, now that it's been confirmed, no revisionist history, very little at least, has gone forward to reform his name.
	Why didn't the United States want to back the nationalists?
	What was the problem with them for the United States?
	Well, to go back to the Communist and the State Department argument, it wasn't a problem for the United States.
	In fact, I mean, I think that China would have had a much better second half of the 20th century and really into the 21st century if the nationalists had won, who were much more of a traditional party, more in line with the history of China and not this ideologically driven extremist as China.
	As Chairman Mao turned out to be, but it was the communists who didn't want—the communists in the State Department in America who did not want the nationalists to win because they wanted to help expand the glorious march of communism.
	There were accusations that he was extremely corrupt, and they were worried that any arms or money that was funneled to Chiang Kai-shek would have just gone into corruption.
	Well, I mean, if you really want to start talking about corruption, I mean, you want to see what happened, of course, as you know as well as I do, what happened to China and All right,
	we'll take a break right now.
	Stay with us. Welcome back to Talk the Walk with my guest host of Free Domain, Stefan Molyneux. Now Mr.
	Molyneux, let's get more into your documentary.
	So you were here for several days and you had a chance to go around Hong Kong and then you were actually in one of the protests that flared up and of course like most protests it ended in tear gas.
	What surprised you most about the protests?
	Well, I mean, what surprised me the most was the calm and the efficiency and the resolution and the courage of the people who were protesting against the police and against the principles, the withholding of the principles that they wanted applied.
	I mean, they were calm, they were focused, they were deliberate, they were coordinated and I guess I was, you know, I don't want to make it sort of about me.
	I was a little bit surprised that I was like, I felt a certain amount of nervousness going in, but I guess, you know, once you're in, you're in, you know, and you just kind of make do with the best responses that you can.
	People were very kind. They made sure that I got my eyes washed out.
	They made sure that I was okay.
	And of course, far easier for me, you know, as a white guy in Hong Kong, knowing that I'm not really going to get in that much trouble, if at all, And so the people who are staying there, who are getting hit with that blue spray, who are getting filmed, who might get follow-up visits from the police, those people, of course, have the real tough job.
	Me there with a cameraman and a producer and my cell phone and so on, we're kind of bungeeing in and bungeeing out.
	So I was a little bit surprised.
	I'm surprised I've never really been in anything like that before, but I found myself, maybe it's sort of my old military family history background began kicking in, and I think I did sensible things.
	But when I got out, just realizing how dedicated and how courageous the people in Hong Kong who are protesting this are, and also how scared some of the older people was.
	I'm sure you remember the scene where I had a conversation with a man who was 70 and he left or was driven out of China after the communists took over.
	And he left as a very young boy and remembers the horrors.
	And now, of course, everything that he thought he had fled seems to be circling the city.
	And the sort of raw panic and fear and resolution and defiance in his tone was something that I carried with me for quite some time.
	At the end of the documentary, you go through a 20-minute monologue, and it was quite impressive.
	I believe that was in one take.
	I wish I could do that. No script.
	No script. Did you get a sense of hopelessness about this movement, or did you feel hopeful?
	Well, hope is one of these really tricky emotions because hope is one of the—it's good to have a star to guide you by and to say, this is what I want to achieve.
	But hope also is something that can help undermine your sort of resolution.
	So people sort of say to me, well, what is the future going to be, five years, ten years, or whatever— Well, in many ways, it is the most committed and the most resolute who have the most integrity and, I like to believe, the most consistent moral philosophy and system who end up winning the day.
	There's no guarantee of anything like that.
	I was deeply moved and impressed.
	I can't tell you how much I miss Hong Kong coming back to the West here and trying to wake people up to the dangers of totalitarianism, to the dangers of socialism, to the dangers of communism.
	And everyone's like, hey, did you know there's a new iPhone watch or something?
	People are just like distracted by everything.
	I really, really miss that sense of camaraderie with people who see the Leviathan and are willing to sort of take up resolution against it.
	So coming back here, where the danger is A little further away, although not hugely, I would say that if there's hope to be had, to sort of round this off a little chaotic roam around my brain, if there's hope to be had, it lies a lot more in Hong Kong than it does, say, in the West. I mean, with the exclusion of the sort of formerly Eastern Bloc countries who still remember communism very vividly.
	Compared to your other documentaries, and you've done several, especially in the last few years, what was easy about this one and what was difficult about this one?
	And how are they all different?
	Other than the subject matter, of course.
	Of course, yeah. So the first documentary was A Philosopher in Poland, which was when I went out there for the 100-year anniversary of Poland, and there is, of course, a thread between all of these, which is I walked through the graveyards in Poland and told the story of the Second World War and interviewed people about the state of Poland and where it's at and all of that and had a number of questions.
	I've had consultations and conversations with some fairly high-level people and really, really found it powerful and deep.
	My first name is Polish, and there's some background there for me.
	So to me, again, just seeing that solidarity, seeing people march, collective action always seems kind of unstable in the West.
	But certainly in Poland and in Hong Kong, it seemed very stable and solid and committed and knowledgeable.
	And so that was the first one.
	The second one is a series that's still ongoing called Sunset and the Golden State.
	about the transformation of California from a staunch Republican state that gave America Ronald Reagan and other, at least whether you say great or not, certainly prominent Republican politicians to a place now where you have no chance really of You're getting much success in California if you are a Republican.
	And I went and confronted City Hall with their massive deficit spending and spent time with a social worker going through the homeless ghettos in San Francisco to figure out what was the causality and how do people end up there.
	And I interviewed the mayor of Skid Row about the history and current situation that's going on there.
	Because, you know, when I grew up, I'm a little older, probably a lot more older than you, a lot older than you.
	But when I grew up, California was like the Beach Boys and it was a golden, prosperous, amazing state.
	And it really seems to have decayed a lot.
	And they have, you know, the largest per capita poverty.
	They have terrible schools.
	They have unfathomable levels of debt and natural disaster problems because you've got, you know, so many people living in at least large portions of which is essentially a desert area.
	So I really wanted to go and speak to the people, speak to the thinkers, the thought leaders, and the politicians about what on earth was going on there.
	And again, that is liberty versus collectivism.
	That is, you know, there's a lot of tribalism out there in California.
	There's a lot of Hispanics versus whites versus blacks.
	And, you know, there's a big, huge masses of conflict and suspicion.
	And again, that hostility that goes on with these kinds of issues and So for me, there is kind of a common thread in that I want to see the tangible manifestations of age-old political theories.
	And there's an old saying that comes out of objectivism that a lot of what you think is just the echoed thoughts of philosophers long dead.
	And I think in particular, when the evidence began to pile up against communism, they didn't discard the theory.
	They discarded the rules of evidence.
	They discarded the rules of rationality.
	And this is where you got sort of postmodernism and subjectivism and relativism from.
	And the effects of those, you know, when you give up your moral absolutes, you don't end up with this anarchic devil may care, live and let live situation.
	You end up with this highly volatile attack culture, deplatform culture, suppression culture, woke culture.
	And that is very dangerous because people's passions get riled up to an enormously high degree in the absence of reason, and then they lack any capacity to reason their way into compromise.
	And that's a huge problem, I think, the world over at the moment.
	And I was really exploring that in these three more recent documentaries.
	You're a staunch capitalist.
	So why are these documentaries available for free on YouTube?
	Everybody else seems to want to monetize it, especially on Netflix or any other streaming service.
	No, here's the thing. I'm a staunch capitalist.
	That doesn't mean I'm a good capitalist.
	Well... So, I mean, my show is supported through donations, and I don't have sponsors, and I don't run ads.
	So for me, it would be kind of like double-charging because I said, hey, I want to do these documentaries.
	I went out to the community of people who like philosophy and like what it is that I do, and people stepped up, and they helped support what it was.
	And I used some savings, of course, as well to do it, and I don't pay myself while I'm doing it because I just want to get the information out to as wide as A number of people as possible.
	And if you put up a paywall, and there's nothing wrong with that.
	I mean, it's a perfectly valid approach to making money.
	It raises people's suspicions.
	Oh, you know, it's not that good.
	And he's just doing it for the money and so on.
	But you hand it out. And I think a couple of things happen.
	It lowers people's cynicism.
	It also shows that capitalism is not just about charging people for things.
	Capitalism is finding lots of different ways to monetize.
	I mean, the freemium economy, which is stuff is free, but you pay a little bit for premium if you want it.
	It's one of the largest economies in the world if you sort of look at it collectively.
	And the second thing it does, of course, is it gives people who don't have much money and, you know, may not want to spend, you know, 15, 20 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever on a movie or may be suspicious about it.
	It gives them a chance to dip in and try and see it and what's going on in the movie.
	And in a sense, then it spreads it to people who otherwise wouldn't get that information.
	And that to me is really, really important.
	And, I mean, this is why I do what I do without charging anyone because, you know, people who don't have a lot of money should have access to, you know, great philosophy, quality conversations, good interviews, just like everyone else.
	Sure, sure.
	We only have a few minutes here, and I want to get to this point.
	Because of protests that we saw in Hong Kong, It seems to be a theme that's starting to recur around the world.
	There was a survey by Verisk Maplecroft, and they said that 40% of the countries around the world will see civil unrest in 2020.
	In your opinion, what is the cause of that?
	Two, will it happen?
	And three, is it because of income inequality, like a lot of NGOs and other prominent thinkers are saying it is?
	That's a very big question.
	You've got three minutes.
	Go ahead. No problem.
	I can sort it all out right away.
	Okay, so no, it's not income inequality.
	Income inequality in and of itself does not breed class resentment.
	It's necessary but not sufficient for that.
	So when you get a free market, what happens is everybody has an opportunity, and due to various differences in intelligence and ambition and luck and skill sets and family origins and so on, When you get a free market, you do get greater income inequality for a time.
	And then, of course, you bid up the workers' wages.
	As a capitalist, you want to hire more and more people and expand, and it bids up the wages.
	And, you know, the rising tide tends to lift all boats.
	And so it's not income inequality that causes the problem.
	Income inequality, combined with the sophists who come into the society or emerge within the society, who say to all the poor people, The reason that you're poor is that rich guy up on the hill, you know, the guy with the monocle and the fancy car and the pretty wife and all that.
	The reason why you're not making more money is he's stealing from you.
	And we saw this with Ocasio-Cortez was just talking about, you know, we want to take the power of the billionaires because they just sit on a couch and enslave people who are undocumented and they're paying them starvation wages.
	This is the idea. Some people are rich.
	Because other people are poor and that idea that there's only a certain size pie and if I have more, you by definition have less and because I took it from you and so on.
	That's not the reality of how the free market works.
	The free market is a multiplier.
	It grows. You end up with bigger pies and more pies and different pies to sort of extend the metaphor a little.
	So income inequality is fine.
	Listen, there's tons of talent inequality out there.
	I hear there are people in the world, there may be even some people in this room who have more hair than I do.
	There are people who sing better than I do.
	There are people who are taller and more athletic and better looking and have better teeth.
	There are tons of people out there, but they didn't take it from me.
	You know, Jon Bon Jovi did not steal my singing voice or whatever.
	I mean, it's just different. Talents and money is just one reflection of a particular set of talents and risk-taking and ambition and whatever it is, right?
	And, of course, we see the people who make it, and you can get mad at them, but you don't see all the people who tried to make it failed and went into debt.
	I mean, I've known people in my life who ended up with half a million dollars in debt.
	We'll have to end it right there. I do apologize for cutting you off, but we have to close it right here.
	Thank you, Mr. Molyneux, for joining me.

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