Feb. 17, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:24
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Stephen, when it comes to having a coherent political philosophy, a lot of people nowadays, I saw a poll, this was several years ago, and it showed that in the 1960s, people in the United States, at least, and I believe this came from Gallup, really wanted to have a coherent life philosophy. | |
| That was extremely important. I think something like 65% or 70% of Americans said that had to be... | |
| It was just integral to them. | |
| But then, I believe in the early 2000s, Gallup did another... | |
| It asked the same question again. | |
| And the Americans who responded... | |
| Did not believe it was very important to have a life philosophy. | |
| It was way down on their list of priorities. | |
| Now we're here in the 2020s, about 20 years or so after that last Gallup survey. | |
| And it does seem that people nowadays really don't care a terrible deal about being consistent. | |
| And when it comes to politics, that has a host of ramifications, but then again, you know, there's definitely more than one perspective on this, to say the least. | |
| So generally speaking, Stephan, how important do you think it is for Americans as well as Canadians, or how important do they believe it is, to have a coherent philosophy, especially in our contemporary political age? | |
| That's a great question, and thanks, of course, for having me on. | |
| So the problem, of course, is that coherence is greatly desirable. | |
| We all love the idea of coherence and consistency and logical rigor and integrity to first principles. | |
| So that's the carrot, right? | |
| But the stick, of course, is that coherence results in massive amounts of social punishment, ostracism, deplatforming, Hatred, being called all kinds of horrible names. | |
| So, you know, everybody wants to be consistent because it gives you peace of mind. | |
| It gives you serenity and security and a true sense that you're on the righteous and shining path towards philosophical truth. | |
| But boy, society as a whole tends to paint massive clustered Jupiter spots of lasers on your forehead if you're consistent and then seems to work as hard as it possibly can to shred and destroy your life because consistency threatens a lot of existing power structures. | |
| So consistency is like the bringing of science, evidence, and reason to a cult-like mentality. | |
| Everybody likes it in the abstract, but nobody likes it when it's kind of snarling in the face of their fundamental errors. | |
| Paul? Yeah, it looks to me, though, that we are confronting some very dangerous, or in some cases bizarre inconsistencies in our political life. | |
| I mean, for instance, as we both well know on this program, it's perfectly acceptable to be a black racist. | |
| But if one were to extend the same principles to white people, one would immediately be removed from polite society and probably, you know, driven off the internet. | |
| It is perfectly okay to have women's club but not men's clubs. | |
| It is perfectly proper to show all kinds of deference to gay marriage, but to treat heterosexuals in some sort of morally inferior way. | |
| Now, I suppose that one can explain all of this by assuming the victimological framework of our present political culture, but this does seem to be an example of inconsistency that really has hurt what I might describe as normal people. | |
| How would you respond to this problem of inconsistency? | |
| So, there's two ways to look at this. | |
| So, one, of course, is that logical consistency would be an ideal goal, and where you see logical consistency go out the window, you'd say, oh, that's a terrible problem, we need to fix it, and so on. | |
| But, of course, if you're looking at more sort of hidden patterns of what end goals may be that aren't explicitly talked about, then there's actually not inconsistency. | |
| So, for instance... Let's say there was a Super Bowl halftime show, as there was, right? | |
| A Super Bowl halftime show with Shakira and Jennifer Lopez shaking their semi-geriatric butts on stage with children and flash parts and all of that. | |
| And this was considered to be empowered. | |
| This was considered to be woke. | |
| This was considered to be positive. | |
| And, you know, I think Pepsi-Cola just put out something which says, oh, we've got to empower women in the workplace. | |
| We've got to empower women in the boardrooms and so on. | |
| At the same time, it says sponsoring this low-rent butt shake-a-thon that normally would be reserved for somebody getting an internal exam in a doctor's office. | |
| Those kinds of camera angles. | |
| And let's say that people were somewhat shocked and appalled at this, but the hypocrisy would be, well, wait a minute. | |
| How is feminism supposed to be promoting women's empowerment and looking at a woman's intellect and looking at a woman's personality and not judging her as a sexual object? | |
| How is that supposed to coincide with basically a halftime pole dancing show that sears itself into the neocortex of children and probably traumatizes them for quite some time? | |
| You'd say, well, that's wildly inconsistent. | |
| Unless, of course, your goal was to destroy the family. | |
| Now, if your goal is to destroy the family, then teaching women that to be a beloved mother is somehow to be exploited and demeaned But to be a semi-stripper shaking her ass in a pole dancing stage at the Super Bowl is somehow to be empowered. | |
| Well, of course, that provokes the great sin of lust. | |
| It provokes the great sin of envy and it dislocates women from their natural purpose which is true for men as well which is to have and to raise children and to bring values intergenerationally from one generation to the next to nurture the flame of civilization that's been passed down to us in the West for the past few thousand years. | |
| If your goal is to destroy the West Then promoting vapid sexual behavior at the same time as viciously attacking and denigrating actually being a mother and raising your children, you say, oh, well, it's inconsistent regarding the tenets of feminism. | |
| Sure, okay, that's a surface level looking at it. | |
| But the actual goal, of course, is the destruction of the West and the destruction of the family, in which case these two things are perfectly consistent. | |
| And that's where you kind of have to lift that Macbeth three witches cauldron lid and look at the hellscape of dislocation that's occurring in culture at the moment. | |
| By the way, I knew you would give that answer. | |
| I totally agree with you. | |
| It's a subject I've addressed in many of my own writings. | |
| There is a teleological consistency, or the... | |
| In both cases, the object is to destroy the traditional family, approaching it in different ways. | |
| But I think you also get other sorts of inconsistency. | |
| On one hand, you have the toxic masculinity of the black nationalist and the Black Lives Matter movement and the Aslan cause and so forth. | |
| On the other hand, you have the extreme effeminacy of a Pete Buttigieg, And the feminist movement attacking masculinity and so forth. | |
| All of these things seem to coexist within the present left. | |
| I mean, I think there are internal dialectics. | |
| I think there are necessary fissures here. | |
| But at least for the present time, the inconsistencies can operate together for the reason that you've given. | |
| They're all interested in destroying the family in Western civilization. | |
| Well, of course. If you wish to dismantle or destroy a culture, then you would want to promote effeminacy in all those who might have an interest in preserving that culture, while you would want to promote aggression in all of those who have an interest to destroy that culture. | |
| I mean, that to me is almost inevitable. | |
| Right. This funny sort of on the left, these people who are running for presidency and so on, now the Democrats. | |
| What was it? Beto O'Rourke was talking about taking away people's guns. | |
| And there was this picture of him, you know, with his like half little spaghetti noodle muscles in his arms. | |
| And it's like, it looks like he's already given up his guns already. | |
| And it's like, well, you'd want to promote... | |
| Effeminacy and opposition to traditional masculine values. | |
| I'm sure you've seen this meme of a well-dressed Cary Grant from the 1940s and the 1950s, and then it looks like some anemic, junky man in a Donald Duck costume strolling down a fashion runway in Milan. | |
| Of course, Do you suppose... | |
| May I ask a question? Go ahead. | |
| Go ahead. No, I want to ask a question that actually came up in a previous interview that we had about a half hour ago with Paul Ramsey, who is somebody I presumably you're sympathetic to. | |
| And I raise the point about there seems to be two different conservatisms in the United States. | |
| One are the clubbable people who are in Conservatism, Inc., And they are well protected. | |
| If the Southern Poverty Law Center comes after them, there will be a slew of lawyers coming to their defense. | |
| They will be protected on Fox News. | |
| Not a strain of their hair will be ruffled. | |
| As a result of this encounter with the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League or some other left-wing activist group that spreads hate against those who disagree with them. | |
| On the other hand, if you were Stephen Molyneux and represent what is perceived as an unacceptably right-wing position... | |
| You're not at all protected. | |
| You're very much at the mercy of high tech, of the people who control your fortunes as somebody who is doing YouTubes and trying to reach a very, very large public with a relatively modest budget. | |
| But you're not going to be protected If the bad people come after you in the same way that those who are in conservatism incorporated, it doesn't make any difference if David Horowitz, you know, is deplatformed for a week or something like that. | |
| The Fox News will call attention to this and people will write in and the Federalist Society will defend him. | |
| The question is, you know, how does somebody, sort of a Hobbesian man like yourself, who is an anchor With the threats and dangers from the left that I suspect you have to face. | |
| That's a big and complex question, and I'm sorry regarding your comment earlier. | |
| I'm not sure of who it is that you are that we're talking about. | |
| I don't generally have much time to consume other people's content because I'm sort of too busy. | |
| I don't go to concerts because I'm putting out a lot of concerts, so to speak. | |
| I know that some people do perceive me as right-wing and I do oppose, of course, communism is the big danger. | |
| Communism and socialism are the big dangers at the moment. | |
| If Nazism or National Socialism or Fascism or something traditionally characterized as being on the right was the big danger at the moment, I would be opposing that and then everybody would call me an extreme leftist. | |
| So that unfortunately is just the characterization. | |
| I don't consider myself on the right or on the left, but right now, Of course, the big danger is left-wing socialism, communism, and all of the associated tyrannies and censorships that come with that. | |
| Regarding dangers and deep laughing, well, first of all, if you study history, as I know you guys have, and particularly the history of philosophy, which was my graduate topic thesis, you recognize, of course, that To be persecuted is the game. | |
| That's the gig. If you're not being persecuted, you're not doing anything useful. | |
| To take a sort of silly analogy, if you're developing a cure for cancer, well, the cancer cells don't really like you because they want to multiply. | |
| So if the cancer is not bothered by what you're doing, it's because you're not doing much to bother the actual cancer. | |
| So the name of the game from, oh gosh, I mean, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and onwards is that if you tell the truth, then people will be upset. | |
| They will be angry. | |
| The powers that be will lash out at you. | |
| You will be slandered. | |
| You will be mischaracterized. | |
| You will be lied about. | |
| Or as the old Winston Churchill quote goes, when he was talking to a junior MP, he said, oh, you have enemies. | |
| Good. | |
| That means you have stood up for something, sometime, somewhere. | |
| So the name of the game is you speak the truth, though the skies fall. | |
| I was raised as a Christian. | |
| I was raised that thou shalt not bear false witness. | |
| And tell the truth, though the skies fall, that's what I was raised with. | |
| And of course, when I was growing up in the 70s and the 80s, The idea that you would shut up because you'd be upsetting people, well, what did I grow up with? | |
| I grew up with white people are colonialists, Europeans are savage murderers, and they unleash smallpox blankets on the natives and killed everyone they came in touch with, and there's toxic masculinity, and men are pigs, and men are scum, and there's toxic patriarchy, and chauvinism, and so nobody cared that much about my feelings. | |
| My culture, my history, my gender when I was growing up. | |
| They didn't give one good goddamn about my feelings when I was growing up. | |
| And now I find out that most of this is just, in fact, sadistic falsehood. | |
| A whole series of sadistic, manipulative, culture-destroying falsehoods. | |
| And nobody cared about my thoughts and feelings or sense of security or happiness when I was growing up. | |
| So now, of course, when I push back against these falsehoods, people cry victim and they say, oh my gosh, you're upsetting people. | |
| It's like, well, maybe y'all should have thought of that. | |
| When you told me I was a bad guy at the age of eight because of things beyond my control. | |
| You know, maybe, just maybe, you should have been a little bit nicer to me, a little bit more reasonable to me. | |
| Maybe you should have cared about my feelings a little bit more because I have one rule, one rule when it comes to dealing with the world. | |
| Number one, treat people the best you can the very first time you meet them. | |
| And after that, treat them as they treat you. | |
| Not a bad rule at all to live by, by my estimation. | |
| Speaking, I guess, about politics specifically, it seems to me that nowadays a lot of people just go with the flow. | |
| You sort of see this with, we'll just use the modern Democratic Party, but there are several issues with the Republicans I'd like to get into. | |
| I don't know if I have time, but just speaking about the Democrats now, They really hated Russia. | |
| They really hate Russia, excuse me. | |
| But they really were sympathetic toward it as recently as maybe 2015. | |
| And the Republicans were hardcore anti-Russia. | |
| Now the Democrats are pretty much red-baited. | |
| They pulled stuff out of the philosophical playbook of Joe McCarthy, of whom I'm not a fan, by the way. | |
| My own paternal grandfather was victimized during the Red Scare, and it was definitely not a cool thing, to say the least. | |
| I think some on the right romanticize it nowadays, but it was not good. | |
| Anyway, talking about where politics are now, fast forward. | |
| I want to waste too much time with my ancestral grievances. | |
| But it seems that people really don't care about maintaining a solid point of view. | |
| You know, if Russia was bad because of what it stood for yesterday, I believe that today. | |
| The fact that I believe the total opposite a few years ago doesn't really influence me because I'm believing what I believe in order to maintain a narrative. | |
| And if I'm more interested in maintaining the narrative, I'm standing for something serious, for something that has intellectual integrity, then it would seem that philosophy to me is not important. | |
| Everything is just sort of the means to an end, and I don't really focus on the deeper meaning of anything. | |
| It's just really an elaborate form of whim-worshipping, to use two words that Ayn Rand often did. | |
| Stephan, do you have any views on anything I just mentioned? | |
| Well, first of all, I'm a bit more on the M. Staunton Evans and Ann Coulter side of the evaluation of McCarthyism, with all due respect to the fact that your grandfather may have been caught up in an unjust web or have been unjustly accused, but McCarthy had a lot right in what he did. | |
| I've got a whole presentation on the web called McCarthyism. | |
| The truth about McCarthyism, modern parallels for people who are more interested in that. | |
| But the thing that you need to understand about the current power seekers, see power seekers are very different from power limiters. | |
| So people who want to limit the state, who want to have a small or no government, they're seeking to reduce violations of the non-aggression principle, to reduce the evildoing of initiating violence in the world. | |
| And they're seeking to restrain a particular kind of beast that has consumed culture after society, after civilization, all throughout history, in this grim Pac-Man repetition of little yellow dots going down the gullet of totalitarianism. | |
| So there's that one side of things. | |
| On the other side, there are the people who wish to expand Power. | |
| Now the people who wish to expand power can only really be understood as addicts. | |
| Now addicts, what do they do? | |
| They lie. They bully. | |
| They cheat. They play the victim. | |
| They wheedle. They are emotional terrorists. | |
| They will abuse. They will flatter. | |
| They will do whatever it takes to To get what they want, whether they're an addict of cocaine or alcohol or sexuality or power itself, it is an addiction. | |
| And I don't mean that purely allegorically. | |
| as I've said before, there are many studies that have shown, particularly among certain types of monkeys, that as you climb higher in the political power structure of the tribal elites within the monkey tribe, you get dopamine hits, you get massive positive reinforcement. | |
| So people are addicted to power. | |
| So the idea, this is something that constantly comes out of people on the right where they say, ah, but the left said this yesterday and they're saying this today. | |
| And that's terrible as if simply pointing out that addicts lie is somehow going to cure the addiction. | |
| And that's not how it works. | |
| That's not the reality of how you oppose this kind of stuff. | |
| And listen, I fall prey to it myself. | |
| It's very tempting. Because of course, if somebody points out that I've contradicted myself, it troubles me. | |
| Why? Because I'm not an addict. | |
| So it bothers me when I contradict myself. | |
| And I'm like, oh boy, I better really Try and resolve that. | |
| I better sort of sort this one out. | |
| I've got to sit down and stare in the intellectual mirror and attempt to unravel these headphone cords of contradictions that have got somehow wrapped around my neck. | |
| And so it bothers me. | |
| But it doesn't bother addicts. | |
| All they want is to get a hold of the drug that they so desperately need. | |
| And the idea that they're contradicting themselves is irrelevant. | |
| They do whatever it takes to get what they want. | |
| They will take whatever form it takes. | |
| They will say whatever it takes. | |
| They will lie. They will wheedle. | |
| They will cajole. All of that. | |
| And so, yeah, of course, when Russia was communist, the left loved Russia. | |
| Of course they did, right? | |
| And now that Russia has gone nationalistic and, let's say, ethno-positive within Russia and deals very strictly and strenuously with the threat of Islamic radicals within the country, Well, of course they hate it. | |
| Plus, of course, the fact that Russia has some significant interests in Ukraine, which appears to have been a massive pig trough pillage fest for the left for the past half decade, probably also has something to do with it. | |
| So they want to discredit Russia so nobody ever listens to the basic facts that Russia is going to tell them about history and the Democrats in the same way that they will slander people like you and I to try and get people to not hear what it is that we have to say that just happens to be both moral and true. | |
| It is. I'll say before Paul chimes in, it is scary. | |
| You know, I don't mind disagreeing with people. | |
| I actually enjoy it. But what's scary is that somebody could really advocate for something one day, and then when he or she hears that his or her group is doing something different, the next day, they completely repudiate what they said the day before. | |
| They don't give a reason for doing so. | |
| They just say, well, this is what I'm doing today because I'm following, you know, the tribe, the pack, whatever. | |
| But the left is explicitly honest about all of this. | |
| And this is what I give them absolute credit for. | |
| They're absolutely, completely and totally honest about this. | |
| They say, we don't care about truth. | |
| How do you know that? They follow postmodernism. | |
| They follow subjectivism. | |
| They follow relativism. | |
| They follow Michelle... | |
| Foucault's philosophy when Michel Foucault was himself kind of a pedophile and somebody interested in sexual torture and somebody who knowingly passed AIDS along to other people as a social experiment, an absolute, complete and total monster of a human being. | |
| Hillary Clinton dedicates her thesis to Saul Alinsky, who himself dedicated rules for radical, for Satan, to Satan himself. | |
| They're not cloaking themselves up. | |
| It's not like Billie Eilish is singing... | |
| Cutesy Paul McCartney pop songs, I mean, they're straight up telling you. | |
| Straight up telling you, we don't care about truth. | |
| We don't care about consistency. | |
| We don't care about reason. | |
| And of course, what do they care about? | |
| Well, they care about the fact that reason, consistency, reality, objectivity, and philosophy... | |
| Stand between them and their goal of power, subjugation over others and the destruction of everything that good people hold dear. | |
| So this is what's so confusing is that it's like some guy coming up and saying, hey man, I'm running a Ponzi scheme. | |
| Give me your life savings and I'll blow it for you. | |
| And everyone's like... Here are my life savings. | |
| And they're like, oh my god, he stole it! | |
| Oh, he blew it! | |
| You know what's weird? | |
| It turns out it was a Ponzi scheme. | |
| And it's like, that's exactly what they said at the beginning. | |
| Exactly what they're saying to us and have been saying to us, oh well. | |
| I mean, you could really argue that the big push for postmodernism came after Khrushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin, the personality cult of Stalin, and after Solzhenitsyn revealed the gulags and the prison camps and all of that. | |
| So once the truth about communism came out, the evidence went against the theory. | |
| Reason itself has gone against the theory of communism. | |
| So, hey, if you've got a theory you love and reason and evidence go against it, what do you want to do? | |
| Well, you want to roll a grenade under the tent of reason and evidence and wipe them from the landscape so it doesn't interfere with what you want. | |
| Paul? | |
| Yeah, I really hate to disagree with Stephan, because we do agree on so much, including McCarthy, and we both agree with Ann Coulter. | |
| And had I been around, I was a very young man back in the 1950s, I probably would have, given what I know now, I would have been sympathetic to McCarthy. | |
| And yes, I did read M. Stanton Evans' work, and I found his evidence for many of the charges brought by McCarthy to be quite compelling. | |
| But having said that, I'm not sure that addiction to power, communism, and postmodernism provide a sufficient explanation for why the left acts as it does, but... | |
| What I think may be, and I say this, by the way, as an expert, since I write books on this subject and I have a long book on anti-fascism that I was supposed to get into Cornell University Press this evening. | |
| So I'm very much acquainted with the- Wait, you're not missing a book deadline for this interview, are you? | |
| Much though I love myself, that does not seem like the most ideal prioritization. | |
| I feel like you should get that done. | |
| Don't worry, they'll accept it tomorrow morning. | |
| Okay, good. | |
| It wasn't that the dog ate your homework. | |
| It's like, hey man, I had a conversation with Steph Molyneux. | |
| They'd be like, hey man, I get that, man. | |
| Take whatever time you need. | |
| That's beautiful. They won't care. | |
| But I think you were actually closer to the mark when you said that they hate Western civilization and they hate normal people. | |
| I'm not sure all the communists have hated normal people. | |
| And communist regimes have been in some ways very conservative. | |
| In fact, they threw homosexuals into concentration camps. | |
| They clearly were not for the kinky sex which the left is pushing in the United States. | |
| Now, on the other hand, the Frankfurt School was. | |
| The cultural Marxists were. | |
| And I think if we are looking for the pedigree of the left that we're dealing with now, it comes out of an heretical branch of Marxism. | |
| which was able to establish itself very effectively in the United States and in other Western countries, but which continued to be viewed as a dangerous heresy in communist countries. | |
| The other point that I would make is that there does seem to be some kind of Idealism in what the left is doing. | |
| I mean, however inconsistently they behave, and I grant they do. | |
| Ten years ago, they were in favor of building border walls. | |
| Now you're a neo-Nazi if you want to build them. | |
| I understand that there are inconsistencies, but I think there are certain ideals to which they do cling. | |
| One of them is universalism. | |
| Wait, wait, wait, sorry, what do you mean by universalism in this context? | |
| Because it may mean something different for me. | |
| They want to build a global society in which the cultural particularities that define us as Westerners We'll no longer separate us from other people. | |
| They also want to let everybody in into this country so that we can become truly multicultural. | |
| I think there is a commitment to diversity, however debased it is, however mixed it is with other interests and concerns. | |
| The other thing that they do believe in is equality. | |
| Now, pursuing equality will, in the short run, require inequality. | |
| We have to give special preference to gays, to transgender, etc., etc. | |
| But at the end of the day, we will be made more equal as a result of the policies that they pursue. | |
| And these are not just economic policies, because they are good cultural Marxists. | |
| They want to change our attitudes. | |
| They want to change our belief system. | |
| So that we're more open to the rest of humanity. | |
| I think one can discern these ideals at work, however corrupted they may be in leftist practice. | |
| Well, that's a... | |
| A bit of a sideways chewing cut full of information. | |
| So I'll just sort of swing the bat a couple of times and see what I can connect with. | |
| So the first thing that I would say is, with regards to when the communists gain power, they tend to oppose cultural practices that undermine the family. | |
| Well, sure. You know, when you're besieging a city, you want to break down the walls. | |
| When you take the city, what do you want to do? | |
| You want to build the walls back up again. | |
| So when you are attacking the West, then you want to undermine the family. | |
| But then when you gain control over the culture, you then want to reinforce the family so that you get more little communists coming out of the family structure. | |
| So that does not seem to me as much of a paradox. | |
| With regards to equality, well, I mean, this is the fundamental issue, right? | |
| Which is equality of opportunity versus equality of Of outcome, which is kind of an old hoary hat here, but just for those who aren't familiar with it who are listening to this, you think of a running race. | |
| So the running race is, you know, everybody is told about the running race six months in advance. | |
| They can train or not train as they want, and they all get to start at the same spot. | |
| Well, that says that everyone has to cross the finish line At the same time. | |
| Now that, of course, as we know, is a whole different planet because it involves obsessive OCD micromanagement of every single thing, plus everyone's behavior changes with every intervention, right? | |
| So some guy's running fast and you say, oh, by the way, you've got to carry this anvil, right? | |
| So then he's like, he slows down like crazy, right? | |
| And then everyone else is like, oh, the guy at the front has slowed down a lot. | |
| I guess I don't have to run that fast anymore either, right? | |
| And then you give a motor scooter to the people in the back and they say, you know, speed up. | |
| And then other people say, hey, wait a minute, that's not fair. | |
| I didn't get him. So you just, like, you can't ever solve this problem. | |
| And you end up, this is why laws multiply, tyranny multiplies, and the utopia is never, ever achieved. | |
| And so with regards to this equality issue, We know the answer as to why there's economic inequality in the world in a free market. | |
| This is all well understood scientifically. | |
| The answer, generally, is IQ. IQ is the one central factor that has the most significant effect in predicting outcomes. | |
| IQ is significantly genetic. | |
| The estimates are up to about 80% genetic by the time you're in your late teens. | |
| So that is unfair. | |
| I get that. It's kind of unfair. | |
| You know, at least one of you has more hair than I do. | |
| Is that fair? Is it unfair? | |
| I don't know. It's just the way things go, unless you count my ears and my nose because I'm over 50. | |
| That's just the way it goes. So there is this unfairness, and I fully accept and understand that. | |
| You know, I'm a smart guy. | |
| You know, I've done, I think, some good things with my intelligence. | |
| I have a good degree of eloquence. | |
| I didn't earn a lot of that. | |
| It's just kind of the way things shook out genetically. | |
| You know, there are taller people, better-looking people, people who've got better hand-eye coordination, who have perfect pitch. | |
| It's just this scattershot of genetics around the world. | |
| In a free market... A lot of what passes for success is a bit foreordained by some of the genetics. | |
| And that sucks. | |
| Like, it really sucks. | |
| But what's the alternative? What's the alternative? | |
| So look at the music industry, right? | |
| Some people are just amazingly musical. | |
| I mean, all the way from looking back at how... | |
| Elvis used to do this electric boogaloo to his music. | |
| I mean, the guy just embodied music, and you can see that even in ridiculous carpool karaoke things with musical brilliance like Bruno Mars, who just embodies the whole thing and hits every note and has a beautiful voice, and it's just the way things are. | |
| So if you want a music industry... | |
| You have to let the most popular musicians rise to the top. | |
| And that sucks for everyone else. | |
| 95% of the money in music, like in sports, goes to 5% of the people. | |
| But that's the only reason there is that industry. | |
| If you were to say... | |
| Everybody gets a record. | |
| Everybody gets a recording contract. | |
| Everybody can put on a concert. | |
| There's no music industry. | |
| If there's no meritocracy, there's no industry. | |
| And so if you love music and you're not good at music, you have to be happy that they're not letting you make an album or have a concert. | |
| If you love sports, if you love basketball and you're 5'2", You gotta love the fact that they don't let you play basketball in the NBA because if they did, there'd be no NBA and you wouldn't get to enjoy the sport at that incredibly high level. | |
| So we know that a meritocracy is essential for human progress. | |
| It's essential in the intellectual fields. | |
| It's essential, I mean, you know the Pareto principle, right? | |
| The square root of any group of people produces half the value. | |
| You got 10,000 people in a company, 100 of those people are producing half the value In that company, if you take those people out, there's no company. | |
| And so if you don't pay them a lot of money, there's no company and then 10,000 people are out of a job because you didn't want the meritocracy pay the 100 people more. | |
| I mean, it's pretty wild when you think about it too, right? | |
| The Pareto Principle is like one of those little Russian dolls within dolls things, right? | |
| So you've got a 10,000-person company. | |
| 100 of those people are producing half the value and 10 of those are producing half of that value. | |
| So you've got 10 people out of 10,000 producing 25% of the entire value of the company. | |
| That's why Jeff Bezos, I mean, along with his crapitalism and CIA crony crap, is worth $100 billion plus because he saved trillions of dollars to the economy as a whole. | |
| So we know in a meritocracy... | |
| A few people are going to make a huge amount of money and they're going to pull a whole bunch of other people up there. | |
| I mean, if you let really talented people become the musicians at the top of the field, what happens? | |
| They employ thousands and thousands of people over time. | |
| You know, people who shoot their videos, people who drive their trucks, people who set up their lights, people who sell their records, you name it. | |
| And if you take all of that away because you're like, hey, man, it sucks that I don't sing as well as Bruno Mars. | |
| I want to be Bruno Mars. | |
| And it's like you put me in Bruno Mars and, you know, uptown funk ain't going to be quite as much of a hit now. | |
| You know, it's like downtown bowling ball, not so funk over 50, right? | |
| It's not really the way that it shakes out. | |
| So we know why there's a meritocracy. | |
| We know why... People get paid more. | |
| There's particular talents, some of them physical, some of them intellectual, some of them, you name it, right? | |
| There are people who sing better than Taylor Swift but who don't look that... | |
| Right-wing stereotypical pretty or whatever, right? | |
| It's just the way things shake out. | |
| So we know all of that. But the leftists, of course, hate that very reality. | |
| And they say, all differences in outcome are the result of exploitation. | |
| If you're making more, this is what AOC was just talking about the other day. | |
| If you're making more, it's because you've ripped people off, you've stolen from them, and they just drive. | |
| This resentment, all the way back to Nietzschean resentment, like the people who feel they can't compete hate the people who are doing well and want to strip them of all their possessions. | |
| And they run to the government, the government takes away the wealth of the rich, the Pareto principle collapses on itself, and everybody ends up broke. | |
| And those are the only two options we have, unfortunately. | |
| Before I pose the next question, I'll just, I guess, share my views about the origins of the left. | |
| I'm familiar with both the postmodernists and the Frankfurt School arguments. | |
| I think that elements of postmodernism and the Frankfurt School have maybe American left and the Canadian left as well, but they are. | |
| But I think that the actual roots of the left in both countries does go back to Christianity. | |
| If you look at the sort of... What would have been considered the progressive movement in both countries, say, during the 1800s, very much Christian, very much about universal values, very much about some form of otherworldly salvation being humanized, if you will, and therefore people supported what would now be called like a welfare state, or at least they supported the seeds from which the welfare state grew. | |
| So I take everything, really, or at least I try to take everything into account when it comes to thinking about the origins of the modern left. | |
| I would say it's rooted in Christianity, first and foremost. | |
| Then you have the Frankfurt School element, and then finally postmodernism. | |
| You combine all three, and you have the situation with which we are confronted. | |
| Just wanted to throw my two cents out there about that. | |
| Now, looking at The, I guess, values which people have when they go into the polling station. | |
| I don't think there's any real difference here between the US and Canada. | |
| I do believe that a lot of folks today feel that because society is becoming more fractured, more balkanized, if you will, along, you know, Age lines, that's one. | |
| Another is economics. | |
| Another is, I guess, the sort of subculture you like. | |
| Then there's also, with lack of assimilation, there's, I guess, ethnic differences. | |
| And when you look at all this happening, people, I think, become less interested in philosophy and become more interested in being affiliated with a group which they perceive will strengthen their interests in a society that is a salad bowl as opposed to a melting pot. | |
| And I think that this situation that, you know, is present in both the U.S. and Canada really does encourage the baser passions in people. | |
| It often incentivizes them to act on bad instincts, and that makes them more prone to collectivism opposed to individual values. | |
| And then if you ask these same people, well, what about your philosophy? | |
| They probably look at you as if you're asking them, you know, when they're going to vote, what's your favorite flavor of ice cream? | |
| So it's a most unfortunate situation so far, as I can tell, but it seems to be the situation with which we are confronted all the same. | |
| Stefan, any thoughts on any of that? | |
| Well, you're right about this fragmentation aspect of things. | |
| And it's, again, if you were to look at sort of this big potential slow motion tsunami destruction of the West, then what you would do is you would bring in a wide variety of cultures. | |
| And you would shatter their capacity to resolve their differences according to objective reason and evidence. | |
| But that's what, because reason and evidence can bring cultures together and can sand down some of the more extremist elements of cultures. | |
| And you can, I think, genuinely get this diversity is a strength kind of thing. | |
| I mean, if you think of the scientific community, I mean, you have every race, every culture, every gender and a half that's involved in the scientific community and they can all get together and they can have their scientific conferences and they can resolve their differences according to reason and evidence in general. | |
| I mean, sometimes it can take a while. | |
| There's a lot of government funding and garbage that goes on. | |
| But, you know, that's the idea. | |
| That's the theory. That we can have, you know, people from India. | |
| We can have people from Africa and North America and you name it. | |
| And they can all sit down and they can work through the math. | |
| They can look at the empirical evidence. | |
| They can look at the objective results. | |
| And they can figure out whose theory is best. | |
| So that is how different cultures and different races and so on can all work together, I think, very productively because they all... | |
| Submit to an overarching methodology for determining truth from falsehood. | |
| But if you bring a wide variety of different cultures together under the same political system and you destroy Reason and evidence. | |
| That's all they have. | |
| That's all we all have to resolve our disputes is reason and evidence. | |
| It's reason and evidence or it's force. | |
| That's it. So what happens is you bring these groups together who are going to have differences and oppositions and you destroy or have priorly destroyed their capacity to reason and negotiate. | |
| Well, I mean, that is a ticking bomb. | |
| It really is literally a ticking bomb and you end up in this really peculiar situation. | |
| Where you end up not with multiculturalism, but with multilegalism. | |
| In other words, there are either laws that are explicitly designed for different groups in different ways. | |
| This whole ridiculous notion of protected groups in hate speech legislation and so on. | |
| It's like, well, we all know what protected groups means. | |
| It means everybody who votes for the left. | |
| They do take care of their own in a Tony Soprano kind of fashion. | |
| So there is this concept of protective groups or... | |
| There is implicit multilegalism. | |
| In other words, if a white man attacks a black man, well, he's just like a racist, right? | |
| And if a black man, I don't know if you remember Don Lemon on CNN, when those black men and women kidnapped that young white boy, I think he was mentally disabled and tortured him for some time, and he said, well, no, they're not evil. | |
| They're just badly raised. | |
| He's got some home issues and so on, right? | |
| And so you have either this explicit or implicit multilegalism which shatters the universality of the moral law and the criminal law and the civil law, of course, and then you have de facto multiple countries operating ostensibly under the same legal system. | |
| That can't last for long. | |
| That literally cannot last for long because either what happens is you find a way to iron out these differences, which is why I and others, of course, are promoting reason, evidence, and philosophy, or Or you fragment. | |
| You fragment in ways that historically have been absolutely horrendous because people cannot pretend to have different legal systems, different moral standards for long without countries fragmenting. | |
| And while we've seen this in the Balkans, we've seen this, of course, in the breakup of other cultures throughout history that, you know, this is not a pretty... | |
| This is a detonation that occurs. | |
| And that, of course, is what those of us desperately trying to promote philosophy are out there trying to do, is saying, look, we give up reason. | |
| We give up the future. | |
| We give up our capacity to live together, not just within ethnic groups, but even within our own ethnic groups or other people's own ethnic groups. | |
| We can't get along if we can't reason together. | |
| Before Paul chimes in, I will just say that I entirely agree that the rise of irrationality is causing no shortage of problems. | |
| If you look at the most dedicated of activists, which would be younger people, on both the left and right-wing fringe, you find people who are not interested in reason at all. | |
| On the left, it's essentially this utopian, secularized Christian vision of equality in the sense of equality of outcomes, and it's got to be that. | |
| If you don't like that, you're this, that, the other thing, the endless litany of isms and isms. | |
| On the far right, you find a lot of people who use supernaturalism, a rather militant form of it now, which is, I guess, pre-Baggitu or Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity. | |
| And then these same people also want to have a sort of, I guess, ethnic cohesion or outright, you know, I guess, racial supremacy for white people. | |
| And you look at both sides here. | |
| You look at the far right and the far left, and you see people who are acting in a way that has totally – a total lack of concern for the individual. | |
| It's all about – Oh, they hate it. | |
| No, they hate it. The individualism is roundly condemned by both the left and the far left and the far right. | |
| I'm sorry to interrupt, but they're just roundly condemning individualism. | |
| I get targeted like this all the time. | |
| It's like, oh, you bastard objectivists and libertarians with your individualism. | |
| That's fragmented our society and allowed us to be atomized and taken over by the collectivist wave and so on. | |
| It's like... But philosophically, you know, I cannot disappear into the crowd. | |
| I can't turn myself into water vapor and vanish in the general cloud of nothingness. | |
| Like, I'm sorry, I have to have my feet firmly planted in the reality that I am an individual. | |
| And it is the individual who thinks. | |
| It is the tribe that attacks. | |
| Sorry, I just wanted to jump in. | |
| I mean, I completely agree with you. | |
| This individualism is getting a pretty bad rap these days. | |
| It is. That was pretty much the end of my point anyhow. | |
| Paul? Yeah, I was listening to Stephen's discussion of what seemed to be the alternatives once we bring in all of these warring nationalities and We've given up trying to reason with them or teach them Western traditions of rationality or whatever. | |
| One of the solutions, one might say, at least in the short term, possibly in the middle term, is having the government take over. | |
| The government has been empowered or has empowered itself to deal with this problem by establishing a hierarchy of designated victims or protected groups. | |
| One of the things that struck me as a professor was how students understood which group had a higher victim status than others. | |
| Was it gays? | |
| Was it, I don't know, Muslims? | |
| Was it blacks? What combination of victim statuses meant more than other combinations of victim statuses? | |
| But ultimately it is the state that decides this, right? | |
| And we treat protected groups not just as, you know, horizontal victims, but they also have a kind of vertical structure. | |
| They're within a kind of vertical organization. | |
| And depending on government programs and the laws that are set up and so forth, we know exactly who receives the most indulgence as a victim group. | |
| And who receives the least? | |
| And which groups are most responsible for victimizing the others? | |
| So ultimately what we have done is we have created what I describe as a therapeutic managerial state. | |
| Therapeutal in the sense that the state not only is a welfare state, but is committed to shaping us emotionally and behaviorally in terms of this victim hierarchy, which is instilled into us, or at least an awareness of it is instilled in us through the educational system, certainly through the mass media. | |
| to which we're exposed and by the state itself. | |
| So what seems to be an utterly chaotic system is able to operate because of administrative managerial intervention. | |
| Right, and of course the need to resolve all of our problems in the here and now is the inevitable consequence of the fall of Christianity as a central cultural discourse. | |
| Because of course in the past The whole issue was like, okay, man, that guy's doing so much better than me, man. | |
| He's got a big house. | |
| He's got a lot of money. | |
| He's got a beautiful car. | |
| He's got a beautiful wife. He's showing up in a talking head song, you name it. | |
| Like, he's the guy. And you would burn with this resentment. | |
| I mean, I grew up poor. And I saw, you know, I remember in my sort of early to mid-teens, there was some school trip to Russia. | |
| And I was like, oh... | |
| God, I would love to go to Russia. | |
| It was like $1,500. | |
| It might as well have been $15 billion back in the day. | |
| There's no chance for me to go to Russia. | |
| I was having trouble buying food with my paper route, right? | |
| So I had that frustration and that resentment. | |
| Like in my school, there were super rich kids. | |
| I don't know what they were doing in a public school, but like kids who like – you get this like – Clitoris-shaped Lamborghini car in your 16th birthday and you show up and you jump out and everyone's like, ooh, can I touch the car? | |
| No, you can't touch the car. | |
| I'm saving that for the girls. | |
| And you look at this from a guy who's like, I had to buy my clothes by the pound at Goodwill and you look at that and you're like, ooh. | |
| That's not fair! I want to be those guys. | |
| And I remember when I wrote a play in high school and we went to rehearse it at one of these rich kids' houses. | |
| Lord, it went on forever. | |
| It was like an Alice in Wonderland maze of, frankly, quite excessive Italian decorating, but it just kind of went on and on and on. | |
| And you look at that and you resent it. | |
| Because it's not fair. | |
| It's absolute. Like, they had the coolest TVs. | |
| They had the coolest stereo systems. | |
| He had everything. Now, you can look at that when you're older and say, yes, well, but, you know, that's not a great thing to base your ego on. | |
| It's not something that you really earned and it gives you a false sense of superiority. | |
| And it's like, yeah, that's fine when you're 40, but that sucks when you're 14, you know, because you resent it. | |
| You want that. Now, myself... | |
| I had a fairly good idea that I could do fairly well in life. | |
| So I viewed that as like the envy is desire, right? | |
| If you believe you can achieve it, then the envy is transmuted into desire and ambition and hard work and you name it. | |
| So, you know, I went to grad school. | |
| I founded a software company, grew it and sold it. | |
| I've been doing this for 15 years against seemingly near impossible odds at times. | |
| So you look at that, hey, if that guy got to the top of the mountain, if I work out and I get some oxygen, I can get to the top of the mountain too. | |
| Now that is how the difference can give you that desire. | |
| But on the other hand, if you don't believe, or maybe you can't, that you can't get there, you get there's this resentment. | |
| Now, Christianity... | |
| Whether or not we talk about the theological details, the actual effect of it was incredible. | |
| And there's a reason why the free market emerged in Christian countries and has not emerged in non-Christian countries. | |
| Because Christianity says, that guy may have all the cool stuff in the universe, but he's probably going to hell. | |
| No, so, like, you know, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven and so on, and Jesus says, you know, give everything, sell everything you have and give your money to the poor and to be poor. | |
| So you could look at that guy who was doing really, really well, and if you couldn't, like, if you could achieve it, great, you might want to, but if you couldn't achieve it, Then you could say, but he's not following the path of righteousness. | |
| He is too invested in material things. | |
| It's going to cost him his soul, and I'm going to win in the end. | |
| And I know this sounds really, really kind of petty, but given that hell and heaven and God and judgment and St. | |
| Peter and the pearly gates was going to take care of that inequality, you could allow for that inequality to happen. | |
| And as Christianity fell, we said, oh man, so if there's no heaven and there's no hell, I just stay poor my whole life and I get buried in a porpoise grave and nobody cares. | |
| And this guy gets a giant mausoleum, he gets write-ups in the newspaper, and he's remembered forever. | |
| That sucks! So I'm running to the government. | |
| To solve the problem of inequality because God ain't going to be doing it after we die. | |
| And so I think that this is one of the sort of unintended consequences. | |
| And as we've lost religion and the sense that vengeance is the Lord's, then the envy has spilled over into a desire for the state to iron out these inequalities, which means that instead of a few people going to heaven, to hell when they die, we all get to live in hell forever. | |
| No, I absolutely agree with what he has said, but I thought he would also, I thought he would also, Stephen, would also bring up the Max Weber's notion of the relationship between the psychology of capitalism and Protestant moral theology, which I think is a perfectly defensible position, you know, having studied this which I think is a perfectly defensible position, you know, having studied this Lots of exceptions to that, though, as you know, right? | |
| Excuse me? Sorry, I don't want to... | |
| I didn't hear you. We can have this debate perhaps another time. | |
| There are a lot of geographical exceptions to Weber's thesis of the Protestant work ethic. | |
| There certainly are. No, no, I recognize that. | |
| Right, no, I recognize that. | |
| I mean, the Calvinists in Hungary were poorer than the Catholics living in Trans-Denubia and so forth. | |
| And many of the Belgian Catholics were doing better than the Dutch farmers who were Calvinists and so forth. | |
| But I think there is a core truth in what he is saying, that there is an interworldly asceticism that develops, particularly in Protestantism, which is a spur to capitalism. | |
| So it isn't just a matter of accepting my inequality and deferring the ultimate judgment until the afterlife, but I think there is a force within Christianity itself. | |
| And I think Weber's argument is correct. | |
| I think it is more present in Calvinism than it was in Lutheranism or Catholicism, though I am fully aware of the exceptions. | |
| And I think this did contribute in the end to the development of capitalism. | |
| By the way, I agree with you that capitalism is, for cultural reasons, peculiar to the Christian West, even though my friend Joseph Cotill might not want to recognize that fact. | |
| Nor can Christianity be entirely equated with the social gospel form of Christianity that developed in the late 19th and early 20th century. | |
| Well, I mean, I think it's very true. | |
| One thing that is also very powerful with regards to Christianity and appears to be unique among the major religions is the universalism of the moral imperatives, right? | |
| So as you know, Judaism has a strong in-group preference. | |
| Islam has a strong in-group preference. | |
| Christianity doesn't have any asterisks in the Ten Commandments. | |
| It is, you know, thou shalt not murder anyone. | |
| You know, it's not like, yeah, you know, in-group, don't kill, but out-group, who cares, right? | |
| And if you do look at a lot of the crimes, a lot of them seem to come from cultures where there's a strong in-group preference, and those who are not part of the in-group have a lower or no or negative moral standard or standpoint. | |
| And so, If you go to capitalism, the fundamental aspect of capitalism is the universality of property rights and equality of opportunity and so on. | |
| And there's not a strong in-group preference within capitalism. | |
| I mean, there can't be. Otherwise, it becomes mercantilism or it becomes socialism and so on. | |
| And so I think Christianity, with its emphasis on universal values and the fact that if you're not a Christian, you are still deserving of universal moral values, that is something that I think also lays the foundation for the universal moral values of equality of opportunity and property rights and so on, that is the foundation of capitalism as well. | |
| As we begin... | |
| Benjamin Nelson, in a very good study of commercial loans, shows that it is John Calvin, who is the first Christian theologian, and there were not Jewish or Muslim theologians who take this position, who differentiated between loans that are made to a friend in time of need, as explained in Deuteronomy, And a commercial loan. | |
| Calvin understood that you're allowed to make a commercial loan, that it does not go against biblical teachings. | |
| And in fact, he encouraged ministers to invest their money commercially in order to make profit. | |
| So I think there is that connection between capitalism and Calvinism. | |
| I know that our Our shared friend Murray Rothbard probably would have disagreed, and I'm unhappy that he's not around to argue with us. | |
| I don't want to speak for Murray, of course, right? | |
| But the argument that if you confine your commercial lending to your own particular tribe or in-group, it's not going to be as efficient as if you go as wide a talent pool as humanly possible. | |
| I mean, if you say... That the only people who can sing at your wedding are the people you're directly related to. | |
| You're not going to end up with a very good choir. | |
| But if you say, I'm just going to hire the best singer around, regardless of whatever tribal considerations there might be, you're just going to get a better singer. | |
| And the same thing is true. | |
| If you have a universal desire to seek profit, regardless of tribal considerations, that economy is going to grow a lot faster than people who will only lend within their own blood group. | |
| As we begin to wrap up the discussion, this will be the third. | |
| Oh, come on. This is great fun. | |
| I'm just getting going. I didn't know it is. | |
| I'm enjoying it. | |
| This will be the third to last question. | |
| Focusing, I guess, on younger people and their philosophy, I would imagine that probably the youngest electoral demographics are the ones to whom having a coherent philosophy matters least. | |
| But at the same time, I guess we look at the disaffected. | |
| Well, there's a disaffected right and a disaffected left. | |
| I'll focus this question on the disaffected right. | |
| But among disaffected young writers, they really are increasingly interested in, like, these very antiquated forms of Christianity, like I said, Free Vatican II, Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and their form of Orthodox Christianity is not what I see at the Greek Orthodox shrine in St. | |
| Augustine. We're much more hardcore than that. | |
| But they really do seem to at least want the pretense of having a coherent philosophy. | |
| But as Paul and I have discussed, this young dissident right, the hardcore folks there, they have a pastiche of views. | |
| I mean, a total mishmash. I mean, they like both Paul And E. Michael Jones. | |
| And these guys, you know, Paul E. Michael Jones, there's so many differences between them, I can't even begin to get into it. | |
| But yet, a lot of young right-wing activists seem to want this coherent philosophy. | |
| They want some sort of rigid rule set. | |
| But on that note, they have a grab bag sort of informing what they believe in. | |
| And obviously, if you want coherent beliefs, to have the grab bag isn't a great idea because you're then likely just to use whatever makes you emotionally pleased at any given point in time and rationalize yourself that this is a coherent viewpoint, even when it self-evidently is not. | |
| So, Stephen, do you have any views like of these young, disaffected rightists who are turning to these religions, who are turning to these cranks, conspiracy theorists like Jones? | |
| I'll just go out and call them that here. | |
| Or, I guess, if they have anything else to say about this, please do. | |
| Well, so advice to the young at heart to quote an old Tia Sophia song would be something like this, but you have every damn right to be disaffected. | |
| And in fact, you should be a whole lot more disaffected than you actually are because the existing system is so corrupt and is so destructive to the opportunities of the young that... | |
| Words could scarce encompass how decayed the system has become. | |
| And this is before the fundamental impact of unfunded liabilities and national debts accrue on the young and tenderbacks of the young. | |
| They have absolutely every reason. | |
| has been crippled and compromised by decade after decade of unfireable teachers, of massive funding for multiculturalism and multi-language that has little to do with the quality of their education and in fact generally works against it. | |
| Young people, particularly young people of European descent, young whites, have been repeatedly told that their culture is the worst and most brutal and most destructive and that their entire capitalist system and the West is only wealthy because it pillaged all of the wonderful wealth of the third world and They have absolutely every reason to be disaffected. | |
| Their job opportunities are far less than they were in the past. | |
| This is a generation that's going to grow up poorer than their parents' generation. | |
| This is a generation that's going to grow up less healthy with less longevity than their parents' generation. | |
| And so many of these problems were set in place before even I was born and certainly have exacerbated since before they were born. | |
| They have inherited a system Of unbelievable compromise and decay. | |
| And when you are inheriting a decaying system, just as if you have a decaying tooth or you have gangrene in the foot, all solutions. | |
| Look extreme when you are inheriting a decaying system. | |
| Now, this is why Bernie Sanders is such a snake in the grass. | |
| This is why Bernie Sanders is so dangerous, because he's saying this system sucks! | |
| And he's right! | |
| It does! Now, it sucks less than communism, unless, of course, it leads to communism, in which case it sucks like pre-diabetes leads to you going blind. | |
| But he's right. So he's the only one out there saying this system is predatory. | |
| This system is destructive. | |
| This system is lying to children about the quality of their education and burying them in $1.5 trillion, mostly women, of student debt. | |
| This system is importing so many people that wages are being crushed. | |
| This system is propping up the boom of value of real estate in order to maintain high property taxes and keep the boomers happy because they can imagine that economic growth comes from high demand to the magic ATM of their property. | |
| Houses. This system is wretched and terrible and does not care for the young and does not particularly care for the poor. | |
| I mean, I'm old enough to remember when the left used to give a good goddamn about immigration driving down the wages of the poor and the underprivileged within the Western system. | |
| So, they're absolutely right to be disaffected. | |
| For heaven's sakes, by Zeus, be a lot more disaffected than you are because you ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to the problems that this system is heaping upon you. | |
| But when it comes to solutions, it's going to seem extreme and it's going to seem incomprehensible in the same way that the abolition of slavery was incomprehensible to human society at the time and in fact remains largely incomprehensible to significant portions of humanity even in the here and now. | |
| Because every single Human society, for the 150,000 years that human beings have existed, every single human society operated on the greased, ugly, satanic machinery of slavery. | |
| And then people came along and said, hey man, maybe we can have a system without slavery. | |
| And people were like, are you crazy? | |
| We'll have nothing to eat. | |
| We'll have nothing to wear. | |
| If the slaves aren't picking the food, it'll all rot in the fields and we'll die. | |
| And people came along and said, and so it looked like an unbelievably radical break with human history to say, let's get rid of slavery. | |
| Now, the system sucks, and there's two solutions, totalitarianism or freedom. | |
| Both of those look pretty radical from a decaying system. | |
| Now, unfortunately, it seems among the young, capitalism is looking a lot more radical than communism, but that's because, of course, they've been taught what capitalism is by communists. | |
| So, you know, the cancer teaches you to smoke, right? | |
| That's because the cancer wants to grow. | |
| I shouldn't use that analogy, of course, given what we heard about Rush Limbaugh today, but forgive me for that. | |
| It's going to look extreme. | |
| So when people come along and say that the consistent application of the non-aggression principle is a stateless society and people will say, whoa! | |
| You can't be serious. | |
| That's utopian. | |
| That's insane. That's an unprecedented break with human history. | |
| Well, yeah, like free speech, like property rights, like anti-slavery, like equality under the law, like not having an aristocracy of people really good at killing other people ruling over you. | |
| All solutions to a decaying system appear radical. | |
| But the real radical, the really radical solution, the really destructive solution is to allow that decay to continue. | |
| You know, if the tooth is rotten enough, sorry, it has to come out. | |
| People say, well, that's going to leave me with a gap in my smile. | |
| It's like, yes, but you'll still have a smile. | |
| And so we have to look at the system and say, why has it gone so wrong? | |
| It's gone so wrong because it uses coercion at its core. | |
| The law is an opinion with a gun. | |
| Governments are agencies of coercion. | |
| And it should come as no surprise that if you try to bully and incarcerate and chloroform a woman into loving you, she's going to end up hating you. | |
| If you try and beat a pet into bonding with you, that pet is going to end up chewing on your arteries. | |
| If you try and run a society through ever escalations of the initiations of the use of force, yeah, guess what? | |
| Things get worse and worse and worse, and then people say, oh, let's just go the whole hog. | |
| Full totalitarianism. | |
| Okay, that's like beheading someone because he's got a tooth decay. | |
| You've got to take out the bad stuff, and the bad stuff is the initiation of force, and what comes out of that? | |
| Ideally, as a stateless society, what comes out of that in the short run is a much smaller government and much more. | |
| Capacity for human freedom, human trade, human productivity, free speech, you name it. | |
| All rights depend on property rights, and it's property rights that must be expanded in order to save the West. | |
| And people say, well, that's just too radical. | |
| And it's like, but the only reason there is anything to save in the West is because we accepted radical solutions and were willing to break with the past and to break with the trends of society. | |
| Whether that will work, I don't know. | |
| My final thought, of course, is that I've been thinking a lot. | |
| I did a big presentation on the fall of Rome some years ago. | |
| And I don't know. I don't know if we can turn it around. | |
| I think of all the people who put massive amounts of effort into trying to prevent the fall of Rome. | |
| Well, they had to flee with everyone else when Rome got depopulated from 2 million people to 18,000 in a matter of months when they ran out of food. | |
| So whether it works or not, you know, I don't know. | |
| I mean, it sure isn't going to solve itself. | |
| And if we don't do anything, we're going to fail. | |
| So we might as well try something. | |
| Whether that works or not is going to be up to everyone who listens to this much less than us. | |
| Paul, anything before the second final question? | |
| Yeah, I agree with what Stephen is saying, but I think that what we have now is not just Traditional socialism or communism, it's also intersectionality, which is part of the hegemonic ideology. | |
| And, you know, someone like Bernie Sanders was all in favor of controlling immigration because he stood for the working class, however weird and totalitarian his economics were. | |
| But now that he is intersectional as well as a socialist candidate, He's in favor of open borders. | |
| I think he's also in favor of giving reparations to illegals who have been kept out of the country. | |
| When they get here, they'll receive socialized medicine. | |
| If I were looking at him as a candidate, even if I were a young person, I don't know whether one could take him seriously as a traditional socialist. | |
| Because the socialism combined with the intersectionality makes him an extremely weird kind of candidate for leadership. | |
| He's going to do things that are absolutely destructive for those who are already living here in order to enrich us by bringing in other cultures. | |
| He is going to also engage in some kind of Green New Deal, which will beggar the working class even more. | |
| Why, if I were a young person, would I vote for this man, aside from the fact that he promised to give me free college and probably to cancel my academic debts? | |
| But is there any other reason that I could possibly be attracted to a candidate like Bernie Sanders? | |
| Well, that's nihilism, and I just wanted to take an axe to the tree of the civilization you're living in. | |
| I mean, the young are consumed by nihilism, by various addictions to video games and pornography, and there is just this, we're going to use this guy to smash the system that is. | |
| They're like the IRA, who are fundamentally Maoists. | |
| I think that Bernie Sanders was only for less immigration in the past because he couldn't get away with saying what he actually wants. | |
| And so the left has, I mean, you know, if you look at the left from 20 years ago, they'd be considered far right now. | |
| And I don't think that they fundamentally change. | |
| It's just that the Overton window has shifted so far to the left that they can finally be honest about what they want. | |
| And Stephan actually answered the question I was about to pose. | |
| I was about to suspect young lefties, but he sort of merged the two and gave his answer to what I would have asked. | |
| So for my alternative second to last question, looking at, I guess, what people believe in nowadays, I think there's been a huge upsurge of conspiracy theorism. | |
| And scapegoating, which is the result of the conspiracy theorism. | |
| So people believe things that are nonsensical, and then they blame all the problems of society on a specific group, you know, the Jews, the Freemasons, so on, so forth. | |
| And people, you know, believe in this stuff with a tremendous fervor. | |
| And then they use the internet. | |
| They probably learn about it from the internet. | |
| They also use the internet to reinforce their beliefs, and they create these sort of bubbles. | |
| And conspiracy theorism has always been with us. | |
| The internet allows it to proliferate in unforeseen I think one of the reasons why conspiracy theorism is such a big deal now is because people don't have coherent philosophies, especially in the political realm, and that sort of makes them rudderless. | |
| They're like jellyfish in the sea, going in accordance with the current. | |
| So it's very unfortunate. | |
| And I just see this conspiracy theorism as coming out of this lack of a serious life philosophy, a desire for things to be easy, to have, like I said, the scapegoat. | |
| And it tells us about the sort of intellectual banality of 2020s America as well as Canada and some other places too. | |
| But since the chat is just focused on America and Canada, we'll leave it at that. | |
| Any thoughts on this stuff? | |
| Yeah, I mean, with all due respect, I try to stay away from weaponized leftist or totalitarian terms, things like racist, which of course was invented by the left to shut out discourse of people who wanted to protect the West. | |
| Conspiracy theory, as you know, was a term largely popularized by the CIA in order to get people to be discounted for having theories about what the CIA was in fact actually doing. | |
| When it comes to conspiracy theories, I really don't care about private conspiracy theories. | |
| I really don't care about outlandish theories. | |
| I bring them to the light of day. | |
| I had a very civil discussion with a guy on my channel who was fervently believed that the sun was closer to us than Australia was because he believed in a flat earth. | |
| And I'm like, hey, let's talk about this. | |
| I'm happy to discuss this. | |
| It seems a bit outlandish to me, but reason and evidence should not balk at unusual theories and so on. | |
| I think that conspiracy theories is another one of the terms, too, that's invented by the power elites. | |
| To distract people from the real conspiracy theories. | |
| Real conspiracy theories like, I don't know, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, that we don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud. | |
| Now that strikes me as a conspiracy theory somewhat more destructive than the flat earth theory, which as far as I know it has not caused the deaths of half a million Iraqis. | |
| A conspiracy theory like, oh gosh, is it possible that Muammar Gaddafi is starting to have a gold-backed currency? | |
| Well, we better destroy that country and turn it into a Jeffersonian paradise. | |
| Oh, no, it didn't turn into a Jeffersonian paradise. | |
| I'm afraid it actually just now has open-air slave markets and massive warlords. | |
| Oh, let's try all these other conspiracy theories. | |
| Conspiracy theories like, Europeans handed out smallpox-infected blankets to natives to genocide them, which is completely false and was made up by this lunatic Marxist who was later fired for plagiarism. | |
| All just a bunch of absolute nonsense. | |
| And so this conspiracy theory like, oh yes, Africa was enormously wealthy, and that's how Europe got so wealthy, was stealing from Africa. | |
| Those, to me, are the real conspiracy theories. | |
| Conspiracy theories like the rich are rich because... | |
| They have stolen everything from the poor. | |
| There's only a certain amount of money in the world. | |
| And if you have more, I mustn't necessarily have less. | |
| Nothing gets created. It only gets... | |
| Those are conspiracy theories that are incredibly destructive. | |
| And that, to me, is where the real danger is. | |
| People who have outlandish or unusual, you know, Tony the Frog's gay theories in private life is like, yeah, it doesn't do me any particular harm. | |
| And you know what's funny? | |
| You know what's funny, too? It was once a conspiracy theory, you see, that rich people were pedophiles who preyed on children quite a bit. | |
| Huh! Funny story. | |
| Turns out a lot of rich people are pedophiles who prey on children quite a lot. | |
| It was a conspiracy theory that there was a slippery slope between, I don't know, like the legalization of gay marriage and drag queens twerking for money in children's libraries. | |
| You know, that was like, oh my gosh, you've got to be crazy. | |
| That would be such an insane conspiracy theory. | |
| It was a conspiracy theory that hate speech laws would not just be applied against people who were Holocaust deniers or whatever, or didn't accept historical facts about the Holocaust. | |
| It would be used against people who just disagreed with the left. | |
| Well, that was a total conspiracy theory, of course, in the past, right? | |
| This idea that there are these conspiracy theories held by people on the internet in private chat rooms that are so incredibly destructive to society is like, hmm, those guys can jibber-jabber all they want all day long. | |
| It doesn't destroy any countries in the Middle East or North Africa. | |
| It doesn't cripple or destroy the self-confidence of an entire culture and civilization, in my humble opinion, the best one the world has ever seen. | |
| And it does not result in the wholesale subjugation of free speech. | |
| So... I try to avoid the concept of conspiracy theories. | |
| It's sort of like saying, well, some guy four streets over might have parked illegally three years ago as opposed to... | |
| You know, there's some massive amount of violence and corruption going on right in front of us. | |
| I try not to convict on traffic tickets when there's actual war crimes afoot. | |
| So I'm fine with conspiracy theories from a private standpoint because they're kind of waved in front of us as a sleight of hand so that we don't see the actual conspiracies that are going on, you know, Hunter Biden style in the modern world. | |
| Paul? No, I agree with all the examples that Stephen has given of destructive conspiracy theories, which unfortunately were widely accepted by truth and often perpetrated by government, and what he sees as sort of harmless, idiosyncratic theories. | |
| people discuss in chat rooms. | |
| I could probably multiply some of his examples, but I think the ones that he provided are probably sufficient. | |
| Yeah, it is interesting to me, particularly, the way people who say that, for instance, that if we pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we'll have quotas in the next six months and... | |
| And I think it was Hubert Humphrey who famously said that, I will eat my hat if this happened. | |
| Well, it actually took 16 months before you got quotas. | |
| Or the 1965 Immigration Act that won't change American demographics at all, you see. | |
| It's all true. | |
| You're exactly right. | |
| And now for the last question, at long last. | |
| Stephan, I guess this is perhaps a bit off topic, but are there any interesting projects, books, anything like that that will be going on in your orbit during this very obviously important election year in which philosophy is, I think, on short supply among a critical mass of people? | |
| Well, I suppose the big project is staying on social media. | |
| That's my big project for 2020. | |
| That's the big plan. While I did recently release a documentary that I wanted to tell people about, it's frankly pretty hard to find on YouTube. | |
| Even if you type in the actual title of the documentary, you can't find it. | |
| But If people want to check it out, it's at fdrurl.com forward slash Hong Kong. | |
| I did travel to Hong Kong right before the coronavirus outbreak or shortly before, and I interviewed the guy who wrote their constitution, the common law. | |
| I interviewed a number of politicians. | |
| I did a number of street interviews, and I participated in a rather exciting rally or march against the totalitarian tactics of the government and got a nice face full of tear gas and all other kinds of exciting things. | |
| So I hope people will check out that documentary. | |
| I do have an ongoing documentary series called Sunset in the Golden State, which is me out there in California attempting to understand what on earth happened to the formerly Golden State, challenging City Hall directly about their budget practices and interviewing, again, politicians, people on the streets. | |
| I interviewed the mayor of Skid Row about what's going on there. | |
| So I hope people will check out my documentaries. | |
| You can get them at freedomain.com forward slash documentary. | |
| And as far as projects that are upcoming, I do have some documentary ideas that I'm working on. | |
| And if people want to help me out, they can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out with the costs of those. | |
| You know, it's funny because books are fairly lengthy projects and it feels like you've got to be pretty nimble to react to what's going on in the world these days. | |
| And it just seems like I'm 96 years old and planning to go to graduate school to get a PhD that's going to take me 10 years. | |
| It feels like I just don't have the kind of time window for a book at the moment. | |
| But of course, if people are interested, I've got 11 or 12 books out there for free at freedomain.com forward slash books. | |
| And so, yeah, that's sort of where I'm at. | |
| I'm sort of a mammal trying to not get stepped on at the moment these days and trying to get some sounds out there to the universe. | |
| And I think that probably later on in the year after November, I can let the dust settle and look for some longer term plans. | |
| But right now it's a lot of shadowboxing and not a whole lot of yoga. | |
| Paul, anything to add before we go? | |
| Well, before we go, I'm actually going to ask Stephen if you would be interested in looking at an anthology of critical essays on the conservative movement. | |
| And with some of the essays, in fact, cover topics that you've addressed during the course of our interview. | |
| Cornell is also publishing this one. | |
| I organized it, and there is an essay on defense spending And its relationship to the conservative establishment in the United States. | |
| Oh, I'd be thrilled to. Yeah. | |
| I'd love to know. Listen, my daughter is just... | |
| We need a new bedtime book for her. | |
| And it sounds like that would be quite effective at helping her not often, but it would keep me up for sure. | |
| Paul, if memory serves, that's the essay I wrote, right? | |
| Yes, I did refer to your essay on defense spending as the... | |
| As the economic foundation of the conservative establishment, where should I send this? | |
| Oh, I'll give you deets afterwards. | |
| And if you do want a children's edition, something like, I do not like green eggs and ham, and the Fed is evil! | |
| Something like that would be excellent. | |
| A little asterisk there, something at the bottom. | |
| A pop-up book with Ben Bernanke stealing your Halloween candy or something like that would be excellent. |
Export Selection