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Aug. 15, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:24:24

THE END OF JAPAN! Freedomain Call In Aug 14 2020

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	Good evening, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
	It is the 14th of August, 2027.
	Ah, slightly after 7 p.m.
	And welcome to everyone, to the people who are hanging out in the chat.
	I look forward to your questions and comments.
	And for those of you who haven't seen the latest Tadpole update with the radical new creature that has joined our family, it's well worth checking out.
	out you can of course find out how to follow me at freedom main.com forward slash connect that's freedom main.com forward slash connect connect and of course if you value the show and you find value in what it is that i do and we all do together i of course would enormously appreciate your support at freedom main.com forward slash donate well let's get on with the cues from the listeners yes
	hi Okay.
	Hi. Hi.
	So I was just maybe wondering if you would have any wisdom in my predicament at the moment.
	So I moved to England about eight years ago and when I moved here I guess it was already going downhill but things were a lot more different and in a span of eight years changed quite drastically.
	And now I find that I am the only white male in the street that I live in.
	I have four mosques within 10 minutes, within a 10 minute walk all around my house.
	And every day I hear stabbings, grooming gangs going around in the area.
	And yeah, what's the best thing to do when you find yourself living in an area that's dangerous and You don't have a lot of options for moving.
	Well, wait, why don't you have options for moving?
	Well, I've cut relationships with my mother because of issues that happened in the past.
	I can no longer go back to my family.
	I have a It's not great, but it's good and stable.
	I've always had difficulty keeping jobs.
	Now that I've found one and find myself in a stable position, moving would be starting all over again.
	It's hard for me to, you know, it's a fault of mine of finding a stable job.
	It's always been a weak spot of mine.
	Okay, so I'll just sort of tell you straight up my first response to your question or your issue, which is that you have created an impossible situation and you are, I think unconsciously, in my opinion, you are trying to transfer That impossible situation to me, right?
	Which is you live in a dangerous neighborhood, a neighborhood that you feel, you know, I'm sure you have some data to back it up, criminality and these grooming gangs and so on.
	Certainly not a place to raise a family if you're concerned about that stuff, which of course you should be, particularly in England.
	So you're saying, okay, well this is a bad situation, but I can't move.
	Now, you know, philosophy is not magic, right?
	Philosophy can't turn two and two into five.
	It can't make up, down, black, white, gravity, reverse itself, time, go into a Mobius strip, or bring hair back from a bald head, right?
	So I'm not sure.
	I mean, I think that we need to have a conversation.
	I think it'd be helpful to have a conversation.
	But if you said, well, I'm in a dangerous situation, Or I'm in a dangerous neighborhood, but I can't move.
	Well, I mean, frankly, what the hell do you expect me to say?
	You know, like, if you can't move, then you've got to find some way to live with your dangerous situation.
	So you're kind of setting up this impossibility.
	Now, I think that's interesting.
	And I think it's well worth talking about.
	But I think we need to talk about it at a different level than what you're talking about it.
	Right. And it's not a criticism.
	Sorry to interrupt. It's not a criticism at all.
	I'm not upset or anything.
	I just sort of wanted to point out that, you know, if you say to someone, I don't like living where I am, but I can't move.
	It's like, well, I don't know how to tell you to adjust to a high criminal environment.
	I don't want to tell you how to adjust to that.
	And so if moving is not an option, I'm not sure what I could tell you.
	But I think that there's other stuff to talk about related to the form of the question, if that makes sense.
	Sorry. Go ahead. I actually agree with you.
	I was worried that the question maybe wasn't worth analyzing.
	There might have been better topics for a call-in show.
	It's a fantastic question.
	No, listen, I love the question.
	It's a fantastic, fantastic question, and I'm extraordinarily glad that you asked it.
	I really am. But I just want to point out that it is an impossible situation that you put forward, and that is very interesting to me.
	And I say this with great sympathy.
	So, perhaps if you could, tell me a little bit about your childhood and impossible situations that you found yourself in where you can't win either choice you make or any choice you make.
	You're damned if you do or you're damned if you don't.
	Did you have any of those kinds of paralyzing situations when you were a child?
	Well, as I said earlier, I had to cut out my mom's Because, with age, I've recognized some of the abuse that I've suffered as I was growing up.
	The earliest memories that I have of my parents is of them fighting in front of me and my sister.
	They were very angry, very violent all the time.
	They were always arguing and My father was, you know, occasionally he would raise his hands on me.
	My mother also.
	And, you know, that took a while to kind of, you know, recognize that it was harmful for me.
	And if I wanted to plan better for my future, I probably should I should have aligned that with my past.
	And when I tried to confront my mother about it, she kind of never acknowledged any wrongdoings.
	It would always go back to, well, you know, I've always loved your father.
	When we first married, it was different.
	You know, the usual things that abusive parents tend to say.
	So, yeah, I just don't want to go back to my original country, to my family, just because I don't want to go back to that.
	And I have some family here, and this is why I chose to move here.
	But now I'm seeing, you know, frankly, I'm scared here too.
	And I, you know, Economic uncertainty all over the world, so I'm afraid that if I leave somewhere I won't be as lucky to find a job.
	I was very, very lucky to be able to find at the moment.
	It's a job that I enjoy.
	It's nothing fancy.
	I'm a van driver, but I'm good at it.
	I can do it. I like to listen to your podcast or music when I'm driving.
	I can be productive and still be good at what I'm doing.
	Help myself. And so, yeah, it's a good job, and I don't want to leave where I am, but I kind of do.
	Well, you've got a lot in what you've said there, and again, I appreciate the frankness and directness of your communication.
	It's really good to be on the receiving end of.
	So the first sentence you said, you said, I had to leave my mother, or you had to take a break from your family of origin, right?
	Pretty much. Well, that's not true, though.
	And I'm not saying you're lying, but it's not technically true.
	I didn't have to.
	You didn't have to. You chose to, right?
	Yeah. Okay, now that's important because...
	It doesn't sound to me like you have a, I don't know, they call it like a locus of control.
	Like who's in charge of your life?
	Who runs your life, right? Well, if you are, you know, you said your father laid hands on you in anger, your mother was abusive and so on, and they wouldn't take any responsibility, so then you have a choice, right?
	You can, a lot of people, most people in fact.
	All they do is they choose to ignore it, to push it down or to never bring it up in the first place and good for you for being honest with your parents.
	But even after people try and confront parents on historical abuse, a lot of people who have their parents react the way that your parents react, they just go, well, you know, give it a shot and they just...
	Brush it under the rug, as the saying goes, right?
	They just pretend nothing happened.
	And, you know, when people have done you harm, particularly when you're a helpless, dependent, and innocent child, they're more than happy if you just kind of sweep it under the rug and pretend that nothing happened, right?
	And so you made a choice.
	You made a choice to not have abusive people in your life, right?
	Now, here's the challenge, right?
	And I'm sure you're aware of this, but I'll mention it anyway just for others who may be listening who are newer to the conversation.
	So look, the challenge, Is not getting abusive people out of your life.
	That's a challenge, but it's not the challenge.
	The challenge is keeping abusive people out of your life.
	Ah, now that is the big getting...
	You know, it's like for the alcoholic, right?
	And I'm not obviously putting you in the same moral category, but just to understand the nature of this kind of repetition compulsion.
	So the alcoholic, it's not hard for him to not have a drink.
	It's hard for him to keep not having a drink.
	Cigarette smoker. What was it?
	Some old movie with Joe Pesci.
	And I just remember Billy Joel was in the soundtrack on the way out.
	And he's like, yeah, I have no problem quitting smoking.
	I can put the cigarette out.
	I can put the cigarette down.
	No problem. And then he's in the middle of telling a story.
	He immediately starts lighting up another cigarette.
	So for each, for the smoker, putting out a cigarette is easy.
	And not having a cigarette is easy, right?
	Because you can always wait a second or five seconds, but continuing to not have a cigarette, that's the real challenge, right?
	That's the real challenge.
	And so for you, you grew up in a situation of violence, of helplessness, because that's what violence does, is it breeds helplessness.
	It's what it's designed to do, is make you passive and under the control or spell of the violent person or people.
	And so what's happened, I believe, is, since you've listened to this show for a while, so I can go straight to the core of the matter, at least as I see it.
	What's happened is you've said, I don't want violent people in my life.
	I don't want abusive people in my life.
	I don't want dangerous people in my life.
	But here's the thing. You're used to that.
	You're used to that.
	And so now you're in a neighborhood where you have to face what?
	Violent people, criminality, danger.
	And it's not the neighborhood you can't tear yourself away from.
	It's the familiarity with violence and threat and danger.
	And then what happens is you are used to managing your fear.
	You're used to managing your response to violence, right?
	So we can't control violent people in our life when we're children.
	But what we can do is control our own response to it, to learn to manage it, to learn to deal with it.
	This is the analogy that I have in the book, Real-Time Relationships, which people should really pick up.
	It's free at freedomain.com forward slash free.
	In the book Real-Time Relationships, they talk about Simon the Boxer, a man who grew up being hit as a child.
	He couldn't control whether he was hit or not.
	He couldn't control the people who were hitting him, but he could control his own reaction to being hit.
	And that's his only sense of control in life, is how he reacts to being hit.
	And I think, for you, probably, the sense of control that you had as a child was to manage and deal with the violence.
	Now, As your parents are not in your life at the moment, you still have a very strong need to manage and deal with violence because that was your only sense of control growing up to some degree.
	So the question is what's keeping you in this neighborhood?
	Look, van drivers are needed all over the world.
	All over the world.
	So the idea that you couldn't get a job anywhere else, to me, is not very credible.
	So what is keeping you?
	They say, well, I can't go back to where I came from because I'm not in touch with my family.
	Well, there's no reason why you can't go back to where you came from and just not be around your family.
	That's perfectly possible, right?
	So that's not a very credible explanation.
	So, the question is, what is keeping you in the dangerous neighborhood?
	Well, what's keeping you in the dangerous neighborhood is, I believe, your need to manage violence around you.
	It keeps you there.
	The neighborhood is what replaces your parents.
	And allows you to maintain your sense of control, which is to be in an environment of violence and manage your response to that.
	Because if you were hearing this story from someone else, and someone else said, well, I have a job that's in fairly high demand all over the world, but I can't move.
	Well, I can't go back to my country of origin because I don't see my family.
	Well, it's a big country, right?
	There are lots of places you could go.
	So, that would be, you know, if I were in your shoes, that would be the first place that I would look, is how addicted am I, so to speak?
	Or, addiction is the wrong word because adult addictions are generally chosen to a large degree, right?
	You choose to smoke, you choose to drink, and I know it gets addictive after that and all of that, but...
	What if you have an inflicted addiction?
	That's probably a better way of putting it.
	An inflicted addiction of managing a violent environment and as you've gotten rid of your parents for the time being, the violence that is in your environment has become something that in a weird way you kind of need.
	And what would you be like in a situation of significant peace?
	I mean, Let's give you a sort of tiny example, right?
	My mother was raised in a terrible environment, right?
	She was born in Berlin in 1937, went through the Second World War, and was eight years old when war ended and went through unbelievable hell as a child in wartime.
	When we were growing up in London, well, I was growing up in London, and then I was moved to Canada when I was 11, it's hard for people who are born these days, or born more recently, to really get a grasp of just how incredibly peaceful My environment was outside of my home as a whole when I was growing up.
	I went all over London as a little kid, you know, six, seven, eight years old, Either alone or with friends, we would get on a bus, we would go swimming, we would get on a bus, we would go to the War Museum or the Natural History Museum with the giant blue whale, and we just would roam around and never had a stitch of trouble.
	Never had any bullies, never had any aggression, never had any thieving or anything like that.
	As I've said before, very shortly before we left to come to Canada, it was in October of 1977, I went down to the War Museum, and a group of black teenagers just robbed my friends and I. And I remember them being quite merry and happy about it, like it wasn't even a big thing, it was, you know, kind of an enjoyable game, and so on.
	And we did talk to the police, but because we were leaving the country, police said this was a nudge point.
	Starting in on this kind of stuff.
	So yeah, that was sort of my first introduction to criminality was at the age of 11.
	I just turned 11. Immigrants just starting to rub.
	And in Canada, again, I was biking all over and roamed all over from the age of 11 onwards.
	Never had a stitch of trouble.
	Never had any issues.
	Never had any criminality.
	Never had any theft or anything like that.
	Toronto was called Toronto the Good.
	And so my mother, having grown up in a situation of significant danger of violence, the psychotic nature of the Second World War, plus, of course, the evils of the Nazi regime, and she did not adapt well to a situation of peace at all.
	At all. She did not adapt well to a situation of peace at all.
	And I remember her telling me she was held with a friend at gunpoint by a guy.
	This friend, the first boyfriend, was a drunk.
	So she was constantly, had this repetition of compulsion for dangerous situations.
	And was not able to deal with or confront that in herself.
	I'm not putting you in the same category.
	There's a very, very extreme example of somebody who fled a violent environment but was not able to escape the inflicted addiction to violence.
	Sorry for the long response.
	I know you've got stuff to say.
	If you look inward, you say, okay, well, how would I deal with a situation of genuine peace?
	A lot of people who've been raised in stressful environments Face almost no greater stress than a lack of stress.
	It's hard to stay upright when the wind stops blowing, so to speak.
	That's sort of my thoughts.
	I'm just curious what you think. Well, it's a lot, but it sounds pretty accurate.
	And I know it wasn't a comparison.
	These things come in spectrums, so I appreciate the example you made.
	But yeah, I guess...
	The job thing is just an excuse.
	I made the job point just because a fault of mine has always been being able to keep a job.
	I don't work well with...
	Well, I just don't work well.
	I'm Italian so I'm lazy.
	Well, come on. I mean, there was that whole Roman Empire thing.
	I don't know about the whole laziness thing.
	There was the foundation of Christendom through Rome.
	You know, there was quite a lot of great art and literature and plays and wonderful things that have come out of...
	I guess it's whether you're Northern or Southern Italian.
	Southern. I'm from Nazareth, so very, very, yeah.
	But no, look, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter, right?
	It's how I choose to behave in front of these situations.
	It's not who I am.
	Right, right.
	Now, so if you don't like working with people in particular, then I suppose that's one reason why you like the van driving, right?
	Because... Oh yeah, I love it.
	I love it because I can just be in my own world.
	I can... You know, I'm very polite and very kind in smoke bursts.
	But if you're with me for a very long time, I can get very irritable.
	It's definitely something I got from my family because, you know, it's what I grew up around.
	But I can be very polite.
	I have excellent customer service for two or three seconds and I need to deliver the package and just get on with my life and get back into the van and listen to my music or Listen to a podcast or an audiobook or whatever.
	Just be in my own world.
	You know, and this is a similar thing that I thought about when I was a kid.
	My dream job when I was a child, what I would think about as what I would do, my catcher-in-the-ride job, so to speak, was, I'm sure it's similar now in London, but when I was a kid, there were these, of course, double-decker red buses.
	And there were two people on the bus.
	There was the conductor who would go and check that you had your tickets and give you your receipts and all that kind of stuff and get your tickets.
	And the driver.
	Now the driver was in a little cubicle at the front left of the bus facing forward.
	And he had black curtains all the way around him, I guess, so he couldn't be distracted by the passengers or anything like that.
	And he lived in this Little black box.
	I guess, you know, right and rear as him facing forward would be the black curtains and left and forward would be his view.
	And I remember as a kid looking into that black box and not being able to see the driver but knowing he was there and thinking to myself, by God, that would be about the best job in the world because you're alone but you're in charge.
	You don't have to deal with people like the conductor does, but you get to determine where the bus goes.
	And I work to a large degree alone now, and I at least determine where the show goes to a large degree, so I don't know that it's analogized, it extended and expanded,
	but... There are some similarities to my first dream job and kind of what it is that I do now, except the studio is slightly bigger than the bus driver section.
	So listen, I totally understand that.
	Listen, people can be kind of disappointing as a whole.
	Have you found that or is that more my experience than yours?
	Oh yes, very much so.
	I think I've had an introduction to that, so...
	Yeah, I mean, it comes from your parents too, but even as an adult, what have you found it like?
	What have you found it to be like dealing with people as a whole?
	Mostly, I don't like the fact that...
	Well, I don't know.
	To be honest, I don't know.
	I don't like...
	The fact that most of what people's interests are is very superficial, very materialistic.
	When you try and maybe talk to someone in a deeper level, you're looked at as weird or, oh, why would you want to talk about that, you know?
	That's kind of the reactions I get.
	But I also, you know, I'm not naive and I realize that I'm socially awkward in situations.
	And I'm like that kid who, if you go, don't touch the button, there's something in me that has to touch the button.
	So I like talking about the things that you shouldn't talk about and I like saying the things you shouldn't say.
	Not to get, just because I'm curious about these things, you know, and I find that most people aren't.
	Yeah, I think that's a good point.
	I think of it, or I guess I've always thought of it, in terms of the sea.
	So, in the sea...
	There are the fish that do the shallows, right?
	You know, they're right up against the shore.
	If you're in Florida or wherever, you can stand in the water and fish will start floating around you, just these little pale ghost-like small fish.
	And they live up on the surface.
	I don't think they can go very deep and I don't think they even want to go.
	They like staying up there where the sunlight is because I guess there's more plankton or plants or whatever, right?
	And this is kind of true for fish as a whole.
	There are some fish that Stay on the surface.
	There are some fish that, you know, medium depth.
	And then there are those really freaky nightmare bathyscape light angler fish down, way down deep, you know, like Mariana Trench deep where the water pressure would, you know, crush a regular submarine to nothing.
	And I always think that these two kinds of fish, they never meet, right?
	The fish up in the shallows, they never get to the depths.
	And the deep fish, they don't even know that there's light up there.
	They just live in the depth and they live in the dark.
	And I don't think there are any creatures that go all the way from the bottom to all the way to the top.
	I know that. Certain whales, particularly sperm whales, when they're down there fighting the kraken, that they can go pretty deep, maybe 1,000 feet, maybe 1,500 feet, but not in Mariana Trench, seven miles down kind of thing.
	And I always sort of thought that if the fish at the surface...
	If you, you know, dredged up one of these weird, freaky fish at the bottom of the ocean, with no eyes and weird bulging teeth and all that, and there's one fish down there, I think it's pretty far down, where the mate, when the male mates with the female, it hangs onto her and eventually her skin grows over and she absorbs him.
	And if you take...
	Kind of like humans. Yeah, so if you...
	If you take these deep fish up to the surface, the surface fish, they won't even...
	What the hell is that?
	What kind of freaky, weird, epileptic child sketch from hell have you dropped in front of me and probably wouldn't even recognize it as a fish?
	And the deep fish, well, first of all, they couldn't survive at the surface, I imagine, because they're used to handling so much pressure, so much of the depth and the pressure.
	But if they could survive...
	...they'd look at those fish at the surface...
	...and they'd say...
	...what the hell are you?
	And they wouldn't even recognize each other at fish...
	...because they're so used to operating...
	...at such different depths...
	...which is to say......the depth...
	...or lack of depth of the surface fish...
	...and the deep fish...
	...and they can't...
	...they don't live in the same environment...
	...and they can barely communicate...
	...I would assure...
	...if they could...
	...and unfortunately...
	What brings depth, generally, is suffering.
	It's the upside to the downside of suffering.
	And the people who don't suffer or people who avoid suffering are the surface fish.
	And the only predator that exists for them is suffering.
	But it is actually the predator that would feed them rather than eat them.
	And this avoidance of suffering, which characterizes the distracted addiction or rampant addictions of the modern world, everything from TikTok to videos, to video games, to pornography, to drugs, to drinking, to sexuality, to status, to money, like all of the addictions.
	The addictions are there to prevent suffering in the short run.
	I mean, that's really what addiction is, is to act in such a manner that you prevent suffering in the short run while, in a sense, guaranteeing it in the long run.
	And I think it's true that almost all mental dysfunction is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
	Not masochistic suffering, but legitimate suffering.
	And we have this Strange thing in the world where we say we should never suffer.
	We cannot suffer. And that's, I was talking about this with Dr.
	Cottrell the other night, but with coronavirus, we've got something we can't just wish away.
	We can't money print away.
	We can't borrow our way out of it.
	There's suffering. And what we're doing, of course, is we just print money, we'll borrow money, we'll send money to people and so on.
	Well, that's just guaranteeing future suffering that's going to be even worse, right?
	And we have this population in the West that views truth as a poison, views truth as an attack.
	We have been inoculated against the virus of reality through propaganda and through demoralization and guilt and all of that.
	And so, you have suffered in your life, as have I, as a lot of people on this call, a lot of people listening, we've suffered.
	And nobody wants suffering, but it comes.
	And most of human existence, for 150,000 years, and before that for the apes, most of human existence is around suffering.
	And civilization is the attempt to create the opposite of suffering.
	And we thought that the opposite of suffering was happiness, but it turns out that the opposite of suffering is insufferable stupidity.
	That's the opposite of suffering.
	It's shallow, hedonistic, stupid, fat-allergic stupidity.
	Mendacity, as Brick from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof talks about.
	People who haven't suffered are almost inexcusably shallow.
	Now, they sense that suffering will give them some depth, but they don't want to go through it.
	And so when you come along and you start talking about the topics that you're talking about, maybe some of them come from this show or other shows, you know, something that's important or deep or powerful or meaningful, they get a sense of how deep you go.
	They get a sense of how destructive their avoidance of suffering is.
	And they just want to wave you away.
	And because of the smug superiority of the unsuffering, They feel fully justified and we'll get the full social backup of just waving away your thoughts, your concerns, your worries, your fears, your anxieties, your facts, your data, your evidence, your information.
	We just wave it away.
	Oh, the economy shranked by a third in the last quarter in America?
	No problem. We'll just wave it away by printing money and borrowing money.
	We'll just wave it away. There are poor people.
	No problem. We'll just wave it away.
	We'll just give them money. People are sick.
	People are sick and 70% of medical issues are the result of choice.
	People making bad choices. Oh, you're sick?
	No problem. Here's some free health care.
	Oh, you can't afford your medicine?
	That's no problem. We'll just give you free medicine.
	Oh, you don't want to pay for the welfare state and the welfare state?
	No problem. We'll just borrow money, print money.
	You don't have to make any tough choices.
	You don't have to... And a lot of people's hysteria these days...
	I was just reading, my God, the statistics out there for coronavirus, mental illness, is absolutely staggering.
	They did a survey, about 5,000 people in America, I assume fairly randomly sampled.
	And... Of the people they asked the question, have you seriously considered suicide over the past 30 days?
	Not ever in your life, but have you seriously considered suicide?
	Over the past 30 days, 11% of people said yes.
	And that was 14% among blacks and 19% among Hispanics, so I guess the whites are lower, East Asians are lower.
	But on average, more than 1 out of 10 Americans has seriously considered suicide over the past 30 days.
	Because people have not had to make tough decisions, and we've lost the capacity or the willingness or the ability To just say, yeah, there's no easy way out of this.
	We can't money print our way and make this virus go away.
	And people say, ah, well, to get to herd immunity is going to cost X number of deaths.
	That's terrible. But we can't do that.
	Okay, but how is destroying the economy and have people not getting access to healthcare and people killing themselves and people, a lot of people in America, I can't remember the percentage, but significant numbers of people in America as a result of this survey, they said, or in the survey they answered that they have increased substance abuse issues, like they have increased substance abuse, they're taking more of whatever they're addicted to.
	And people are gaining weight and people are not exercising and people are stressed and anxious and vegging out on binging on various stream-on-demand shows and so on.
	And the avoidance of suffering is producing the bill.
	The bill is coming to you.
	So you have suffered.
	Which is sad, of course.
	But I'm not sure, at least until we get a philosophical world, I'm not sure that not suffering is the answer.
	Because it's made people very fragile.
	It's made people very avoidant and when you avoid reality you become very controllable.
	That's why postmodernism is so powerful, right?
	Postmodernism allows you to wish away and avoid reality and that makes you very controllable because you have to sink deep into reality to have the strength to speak truth to power.
	You have to be so certain of your connection in relation to reality.
	You cut people off from reality By saying, well, what matters more is your feelings and your subjective impressions, right?
	Then people become very controllable when the silver cord that connects the human brain to reality through the senses is cut.
	So it's not too shocking or surprising to me that you find people a little tough to relate to.
	I mean, they have suffered, in a sense, in the worst way, which is that legitimate, real suffering has been denied them.
	And they retain this most chilling characteristic of an eternal childhood.
	And the eternal childhood is, I never have to make any tough decisions.
	I mean, that's what childhood is kind of like.
	You just don't have to make tough decisions.
	Adulthood is, okay, I know, there's costs and there's benefits.
	And nobody can have a simple conversation about coronavirus because people say, ah, well, if we go to herd immunity, if we go for herd immunity, a lot of people are going to die.
	It's like, yes, they will.
	And the alternative is what?
	Oh, maybe there'll be a magic vaccine.
	Well, hope is not a strategy, and I know 150-plus vaccines are being worked on.
	I get all of that. But...
	Even if we go through the adverse reactions to vaccines, the fact that vaccines can be manufactured poorly, poorly administered, perhaps people don't come back for their second, maybe you'll get to 50% or 60%.
	The best case scenario, right?
	FDA says 50% or more good, right?
	So best case scenario, well, reasonable case scenario, 50 to 60% of infections are prevented by some vaccine, which itself is going to have side effects and problems.
	Okay, so you can't get rid of this virus, you're just going to have to find some way to live with it.
	I believe that the age of government schools is fundamentally over.
	My prediction is that it's really terrible, because in the fall, people are going to go back to school, and...
	Transmission rates are going to go through the roof, I believe, and the schools will just have to be shut down.
	I don't think that people should go back.
	I don't think kids should go back in the school in the fall because they're going to shut down anyway, in my opinion, and you'll just have created massive outbreaks, and you'll shut the schools down anyway, so you're way worse off than if you'd never opened them to begin with.
	And how long that lasts before people stop...
	People say, well, why the hell am I paying for schools that never open?
	Why the hell am I paying all my property tax, right?
	And then the teachers are going to sit there and say, well, now I'm suffering.
	It's like, well, yeah, but for a generation you told people that communism wasn't very dangerous or that it even was a positive and then the Chinese Communist Party virus...
	Got loose? But people won't want to take it.
	And, you know, you try telling people that level of causality and responsibility, they'll view you as a monster, right?
	Because reality, cause and effect, has become monstrous to people.
	And this is late empire stuff.
	This is all... What is decadence?
	Decadence is the hedonism of being addicted to unreality.
	So... If you have experienced people as tough to talk to, we're sure.
	Because the world has largely become this strange soft asylum where you bring reality to people and they call it hate speech.
	You bring facts and reason and evidence and data to people with a sincere desire to help society.
	And you're viewed as monstrous.
	It's not you they view as monstrous, it's facts.
	Facts are viewed as the enemy.
	Well, that's not good, right?
	So how are you supposed to connect to people who view connection as assault, who view facts as abuse?
	You can't. But that doesn't mean you have to stay in a physically dangerous neighborhood.
	Sorry, that was a long bit of feedback, but that's my thoughts as they stand.
	No, it was very good.
	Didn't Schopenhauer said something similar?
	Life is a pendulum between suffering and boredom.
	Well, I wouldn't go quite as pessimistic as old Artie or, you know, what C.S. Lewis, you know, it's to wake up.
	To suffer is to wake up.
	Yeah. I mean, they're suffering from abusers, which is terrible and should be eliminated, but suffering from reality?
	This is the triggered thing, right?
	You say something that somebody doesn't like and they've been programmed against reality, programmed against facts.
	It's a terrible, terrible thing that the indoctrination institutions of the West has inflicted upon people is to take away their connection with reality.
	It's just appalling.
	So, yeah, I don't think it's wise to stay in a physically dangerous neighborhood myself.
	And you do have choices.
	And you do have options.
	And... It's worth probably thinking how you would fare or how you would do or how you would deal with a situation of genuine peace, of genuine security.
	How would you deal with it?
	Could you? Well, I was...
	Somewhat related, but I was thinking of starting to go back to church, but I don't want...
	I was a young, naive atheist who didn't need God to be moral, and meantime he's having sex with strangers and doing all this stupid stuff that young, naive atheists do, and taking drugs and hanging out with the wrong crowds,
	and then you grow up and You realize that maybe Hitchens wasn't this genius that you thought he was, but at this point you've already taken a bite of the apple and you don't want to go to somewhere that's not heartfelt because then it's just disrespectful.
	Maybe this is a separate question, but how would you go back to approaching a more Maybe going back to church, reopening a kind of page of religion, because I was raised very Catholic until all of a sudden I wasn't, and all of that moral ground that I was given was just gone.
	Yeah, it's tough to find a church that's not too woke these days.
	Especially in England.
	Especially in England, yes indeed.
	I guess it was a question basically, how would you claim, would you call yourself a Christian I don't know if you would. I would not.
	I would not. Sorry?
	Okay, so that's probably the wrong person to ask.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I don't know. I mean, that's something I can't really give much advice on.
	I'm sorry. You know, I love to be able to stretch myself and put myself in different situations mentally, but I think that may be a bit beyond my ken, so to speak.
	And what is it that holds you from, you know, Obviously, you revere Christianity and you speak very highly of it.
	What is it that stops you from allowing yourself to call yourself a Christian?
	Because for me, it's very simple.
	I just don't think Jesus was the literal son of God.
	I don't think he came back from the dead.
	And yeah, there's value in his teachings, but that's why I don't call myself a Christian.
	Is it something similar for you?
	Ugh, you know, I mean, I can give you all of the philosophical reasons.
	I give you all the philosophical reasons, but probably a lot of it has to do with resentment.
	The resentment being...
	Ugh.
	So the Christian answer as to why I suffered so much as a child would be sort of what we were talking about earlier, right?
	Why did I suffer so much as a child?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, the answer would be to make you strong and to make you a fighter and to give you the armor and the willpower and the strength to fight evil in the world, right?
	But that doesn't, you know...
	Why would God create the conditions in the first place where there would be a need for suffering?
	Sorry, you just cut out for a sec there, if you could repeat.
	Oh, sorry, sorry.
	No, no, you don't have to apologize for cutting out.
	It's not your fault, but just, yeah, if you could repeat.
	Yeah, I was just saying, why would God You know, my answer to that point of theological, you know, is why would God need to create the conditions for suffering in the first place?
	You know, isn't he God? Can he be all-powerful and...
	Well, that's... I'm rambling.
	No, no, no, you're not rambling at all.
	These are perfectly sensible and deep questions.
	You and I are floating three inches above the Marianne Trench bottom because this is right down at the root of things, right?
	So the way that I think of it with regards to myself, and this is with all due respect and deference and apologies ahead of time to my Christian friends, but this is, you know, I have sworn...
	Before this show, this is the foundation of the show, that I will not bear false witness.
	So I've got to be honest, and maybe there's good answers.
	I can't think of them. It doesn't mean there aren't any, but...
	If I had a father who called in and said, well, I beat my son to make him strong to fight evil, what would I say?
	Good job. That seems fair.
	That seems just. I wish I could have been there to hit him as well.
	To make him stronger? No.
	No, I don't believe that abusers are serving the will of the divine.
	And if fighting evil was such a virtue, why would God allow a four-year-old child to have his head beaten against a metal door to the point almost of unconsciousness?
	Why would God allow that to happen rather than God Himself fighting evil because, you see, it's such a virtue?
	Why would He allow children to be abused to strengthen them to fight evil when He, being all-powerful and all-knowing, could fight evil and vanquish it in a moment?
	So, I mean, again, theological abstract arguments, they're all important, they're all valid.
	But I simply can't...
	I can make use and value out of my own suffering, but I can't make it a virtue.
	The idea that my mother and her swinging fist was acting as an agent of the divine to strengthen me for the upcoming fight against evil is morally abhorrent beyond words.
	Because then... What could you then say to any abuser?
	Oh, you're beating your child?
	Good, that will make him a glorious golden soldier in the fight against immorality.
	Okay, but then you're saying that the way you fight immorality is to abuse children, which is about the most immoral thing you can do.
	I do not believe that you can fight immorality by enacting the worst moral abuses that there are, which is attacks upon children.
	So my suffering was just my suffering.
	Gertrude Stein, a writer, more of an editor really than a writer, had a couple of great quotes.
	One was with regards to her brother.
	She was a lesbian and she had a very dysfunctional relationship with her brother.
	And she said, little by little we never met again.
	And that always struck me with a bone-chilling, inflamed marrow certainty that if you want to retain your relationships, you don't little by little never meet again.
	People rarely just rupture.
	They rarely have just out of nowhere some big blow-up and just rupture.
	What happens is little by little, they take a little longer to return text messages, they get together slightly less often, and it just kind of trickles off that way.
	Or, you know, people do this other ridiculous fucking thing, which is they just, you don't know what happened, they just vanish.
	I mean, I'm sure everyone's had that experience.
	Hopefully it's not just me. I'm sure everyone's, it's ghosting.
	There's even a word for it, right? Even people you've known for a long time.
	They just, you know, it dawdles off a little, but, you know, you could always resurrect these things.
	You send them a message, they don't return, you don't call, and just boom, right?
	Just ghost.
	Just gone. Little by little, we never met again.
	And if you have a relationship in your life you want to keep, don't let it dawdle out.
	Have a formal end or keep it going, but don't have a trickle off.
	Because it creates a scar tissue of absence that makes it harder to trust new people.
	Little by little, we never met again.
	I remember that. Now, another thing I remember that she said, it's quite powerful, and she had this inscribed on her letterhead.
	A rose is a rose is a rose.
	Which sounds completely stupid, and it took me a little while to get it.
	Maybe you guys are getting it much quicker than I did, but a rose is a rose is a rose, right?
	And she was opposed to the florid, romantic, 19th century writing.
	So I'm reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies to my daughter.
	William Golding, God love him, he is like ridiculously floral in his description.
	I was joking about it last night when I was reading it with my daughter.
	Like if I hear one description, one more description of slanting, shadowed sunlight crawling across a boy's face in leafy extrapolation, like in one page he compares fire to like A squirrel, a panther, you know, a drum roll.
	It's ridiculous.
	It's like, yeah, we get it, man.
	There's fire. It burns shit.
	I get it. And so Gertrude Stein, and this is Hemingway as well, who she discovered, if I remember rightly, it was a response to some of the hyper-ornate language that came out of the Romantic tradition.
	Which is, you know, a rose is like my lover's ruby lips, you know, and it's like, no, a rose is a rose is a rose.
	It's a rose.
	You say the word rose, that's what shows up in people's minds.
	You don't need to give it all of these additional layers of hyperverbose language.
	And that simple direct language, a rose is a rose is a rose.
	You go to most modern philosophers and you say, what is the truth?
	I've been asked this a bunch of times.
	What is the truth?
	What is truth? And you'll get Niagara cascades of policy-labbing bullshit that no human being, no sane human being can pick apart and try and understand.
	For me, truth is that which accords to reason and evidence.
	Boom, done, right? Truth is not a complex social interaction of culture and belief and, you know, truth is not perception solidified.
	Truth is not, well, if you...
	Perception is reality.
	Truth is not subjectivist.
	Truth is not relativistic.
	Truth is that which, of course, is the reason and evidence through the direct medium of the senses.
	Boom, right? But you go to most philosophers who ask, what is truth?
	Truth is that which...
	I mean, Jesus, we were just talking about this the other day with regards to Hegel.
	Truth is the momentum that the world spirit generates in its lavish application of willpower and destiny to a particular nation-state.
	What the fuck does any of that mean?
	Other than yay Nazis or yay communists, what the hell does any of that mean, right?
	A rose is a rose is a rose.
	And with my writing, I've tried to work a lot with that, certainly with my approach to philosophy or philosophy as I see it.
	The truth is the truth is the truth.
	It's not that complicated. You know, if a two-year-old can figure out what the truth is, right?
	If you say, I'm going to give you a candy bar and you give him a piece of broccoli, his tears will show you exactly how he understands A, that you've lied and B, that it's not true that a candy bar is a piece of broccoli.
	And if you say, I will trade you a big candy bar for a small candy bar and you give him a big candy bar, he opens it and there's a piece of wood inside.
	He's going to know that you've cheated, you've lied, and a piece of wood is not the same as a candy bar.
	So if a two-year-old can figure it out, maybe, just maybe, people with 30 years experience in philosophy can also figure it out.
	If a two-year-old can do it, maybe philosophers could figure out some way to do it.
	So a rose is a rose is a rose.
	There's something really foundational and powerful about all of that.
	And so the reason I'm saying all of this is...
	I can look back at my suffering, you can look back at your suffering, and you know what we can say?
	My suffering was the furnace of the forge in which the steely-eyed sword of the fight against injustice was forged, which is creating a steamy mound of bullshit out of a situation of immoral abuse.
	My suffering... Strengthen my soul in the fight against immorality.
	No. A rose is a rose is a rose.
	What was your suffering?
	Your suffering was just your suffering.
	Your suffering was just your suffering.
	In the book that I'm reading, sorry I'm a little bit behind on it, The book that I'm reading deals a lot with this.
	It's a novel that I wrote.
	It's called Almost. This is not any particular spoilers at all, so you can listen to this, and I hope that you will fdrurl.com forward slash almost get the free audiobook.
	It's a really, really good book.
	But in it, there's a character called Ruth, who is the daughter of a military family, and her military family, her father, her uncles, The brothers, they go to the First World War.
	And they just get wiped the fuck out.
	They just wipe the fuck out.
	Like just wet sponge across a blackboard.
	Boom. Just wiped out. And they have all of these romantic views of what war is.
	And there's a line in the book, her brother writes, trying to be positive, but her brother writes to her before he dies, and he says, I always thought that war was like riding up a hill on a white horse with a sword and a pistol and taking out the enemy, or being taken out yourself. But that's not what war is at all.
	War is sitting in a trench trying to beat the rats off your toes while some asshole 20 miles away pushes a button and blows you up.
	The romantic versus the real.
	The allegorical or metaphorical versus the real.
	And her worship, and I think this was true of a lot of women, and obviously some men as well, in the First World War, her worship of the structures that were, of the state, of the church.
	Another character says in a line that I pretty much pillaged from Churchill.
	He says that in the First World War, the only two extremities...
	that the supposedly civilized Christian nations did not avail themselves of were cannibalism and torture, and only because they were of doubtful utility.
	And she goes into a significant depression because not just of the loss of the men in her life, but the loss of the romantic ideal of a benevolent and structured and ordered universe of civilization, which is but the loss of the romantic ideal of a benevolent and structured and ordered universe of civilization, which is
	And in a lot of ways, the hundred years since the end of the First World War, First World War killed the West.
	There's just been a lot of death throes since then, a lot of twitching, a lot of The hair still grows, though the body is gone.
	Your suffering is your suffering.
	What does it mean? What is its purpose?
	It doesn't mean anything.
	There was no purpose to it.
	Trying to extract this glorious purpose out of our personal suffering unfortunately condemns us to repeat it.
	Because you see, if our suffering has value and virtue, Then we should not put ourselves in a situation where we do not suffer because that is to reject value and virtue.
	It's sort of like saying, well, getting off the couch and going for a jog, that's uncomfortable.
	So I should never do that.
	He said, ah, yes, yeah, but getting off the couch and going for a jog is good for you.
	It may not be great for your knees in the long run, just ask Tiger Woods, but it's pretty good for you.
	And so if your suffering has virtue and value, like getting off the couch and going for a jog has virtue and value, then you should not give up jogging or weightlifting or whatever it is, right?
	Stuff that is unpleasant. Cheesecake tastes better than whatever, so just, but you should, you know, the suffering of not eating cheesecake gives you value because of this, that, and the other.
	Okay, great, then don't eat cheesecake all the time and get off the couch and go jogging and go lift some weights.
	So if your suffering has value and virtue, then you can't ever stop suffering.
	But if your suffering was just an acidic shitstorm, you barely made it through alive, then it's like you wake up lost in the desert and you barely crawl out of the desert alive.
	There was some British SAS guy, I don't know, parachuted in the desert, ended up in the desert.
	He spent a week walking his way out, and he lost all his teeth, because he was so dehydrated, he was so hungry, and he had to keep going.
	Now, he's not going to sit there and say, well, boy, did that ever strengthen my character.
	You know what would be great? It'd be great if they dropped me back in the fucking desert again.
	That'd be great! So I could be stronger!
	No! That was stupid point, the suffering.
	Why would you want to do that to yourself again?
	Why did we suffer?
	Because evil people didn't want to suffer.
	That's why we suffered. Because evil people didn't want to suffer.
	It's that simple and that sad.
	Because your father who hit you and my mother who hit me preferred to hit us than not to hit us.
	How do we know that? Because that's what they did.
	Because to not hit us would have caused them suffering.
	And so they would rather you and I suffer than they suffer.
	It's a simple calculation.
	I mean, we all could understand that if someone came to you and said, well, either you can get cancer or some random guy in India can get cancer.
	I mean, most of us would say, yeah, sorry, random guy in India, but better you than me, right?
	You would rather someone else suffer than you suffer.
	That's, you know, and there will be some people, and I don't know whether it's noble or not, but there would be some people who were like, no, no, no, I will take cancer.
	Maybe it's the Indian guy, same age, whatever, right?
	But I will take the cancer.
	Leave the Indian guy alone.
	There's your cancer, right? So we all understand that a lot of times we would rather other people suffer than we suffer.
	I think we have this to some degree with the schadenfreude that comes from Johnny Depp, you know, good-looking, rich.
	We talked about this the other day.
	Talented, famous, successful.
	But a miserable existence, right?
	And to some degree it's like, okay, well, I'm not happy that he's suffering, but I can find some relief in his suffering because he looked like he had a pretty great life, right?
	Pretty great life. And so we all understand what it's like to want other people to suffer rather than ourselves, right?
	This is 1984, the ending, right?
	Do it to Julia, not to me.
	Have her suffer, not me.
	Now, our abusers would rather we suffer than they suffer because to not inflict suffering on us would have caused them great suffering.
	So, you know, shit rolls downhill and they inflicted it on us so that they didn't have to suffer.
	And they inflicted it on us because they were virtually certain that if we tried to end that suffering, in other words, as you did and as I've done, whether it's temporarily or permanent, it's immaterial in the moment.
	But we say, I'm not going to have abusive people in my life.
	But that's incredibly new and incredibly rare.
	And I've been punished, of course, a lot for that in the media and other places.
	People saying it's a cult or whatever it is, right?
	Just saying you don't have to have people who cause you suffering.
	You don't owe them your allegiance for the rest of your life.
	But that's incredibly new and only exists, I think, because of the Internet.
	And so they wouldn't have expected in the moment...
	That their suffering would bounce back on them years later with their children, their adult children, not wanting to see them because they had caused them suffering, the children.
	So why did we suffer?
	Was there a God-glow in it?
	Was there a New Testament shining path to strengthen the battle against evil?
	Were our abusers motivated by the divine fist of sharpening and wetting the swords of our souls to do battle against immorality?
	No! The rose is a rose is a rose.
	A rose is not a poem scribbled by God on the end of a thick.
	A rose is not the flowing, deep, vermilion open heart of a receptive lover.
	A rose is not a deep mystery of beauty and poetic scent.
	A rose is a flower looking to get fucked by a bee.
	that's all it is and our suffering was just our suffering and the only way that I can escape that suffering is to recognize it for what it is It's not a mission.
	It's not a higher calling.
	It's not a purpose. It's not the tempering of a soul to strengthen in the battle against evil.
	It's none of those things. It was petty, bald apes striking out because they preferred me to suffer or you to suffer than for them to suffer.
	We were the strangers in India.
	They would rather get cancer than them.
	If they had accepted their suffering, they would have become better people.
	And I accept my suffering.
	I accept my suffering.
	I don't justify it.
	I accept that I suffered.
	And I've been able to turn it around and become a great husband, a great dad.
	I think a positive force in the world.
	But there was no meaning behind it.
	There's no plan. There's no purpose.
	When you live with people who don't have free will, when you live with people who are bald apes, they don't have UPB, they don't have higher consciousness, they don't have higher purpose, they don't compare their actions against any ideal and attempt to shift themselves towards something better.
	It's just stimulus response.
	You know, you ring the bell and the Pavlov's dog drools and you stand up for yourself and you get hit.
	You talk back, you argue, you get hit.
	You displease, you get hit.
	You interrupt, you get hit.
	You embarrass, you get hit.
	It's just stimulus response.
	Triggered, right? There's no thought, there's no conscious process.
	They're just monkeys with clothes on.
	There's no higher purpose. In fact, suffering entirely arises out of no purpose, no higher goal, no morality.
	It is inhuman.
	Because what makes us human is comparing proposed actions to ideal standards.
	So, when you ask me, well, why am I not taking myself off to church?
	I resent... I resent the very implication that my mother was serving virtue.
	I find that...
	It could be petty.
	I find that incredibly offensive.
	Because then, you understand, if my mother was serving virtue and making me into a stronger person to fight evil...
	Well, then I should be counseling people to go out there and belt the hell out of their kids, right?
	Make them stronger. Make them better.
	Make them fighters of evil.
	And then the non-aggression principle doesn't work, doesn't make any sense.
	And then, you see, suffering becomes a virtue.
	But if suffering becomes a virtue, why on earth would I want to rid myself of suffering?
	And then, you see, I become an abusive parent by not inflicting needless suffering on my child.
	You understand? It's crazy.
	Yeah, it sounds very, very familiar.
	My mom still, to this day, she still proudly calls herself a Catholic.
	And I struggle to call myself a Christian because I don't think sometimes I'm worthy of just being called that.
	And it's It's ironic that the people who question these kind of things the most tend to be the ones that walk away from religion, Whilst, you know, the people that don't give much of a thought to it is kind of like an escapism or an excuse to call themselves moral.
	Right.
	Hello?
	Yep, I'm still listening.
	Yes, I'm listening.
	Yeah, it's just an observation.
	Thank you. I guess I've taken up enough of your time.
	Okay. Was it a helpful chat?
	Yeah, very much.
	Very much so. And on a personal note, I'm a big fan.
	I really admire what you do.
	And you're a very honest and decent guy.
	I don't care what the New York Times says about you.
	I think you're a great guy.
	Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
	Thank you. Thank you very much. And listen, thank you for your call, and I really, really do appreciate the question, as I said at the beginning.
	I had a sense that we were going to hang over a pretty deep trench, and I really, really appreciate that.
	Okay. Thank you very much.
	Thank you very much.
	James?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Shall we go for the next question?
	Oh, sorry, I just wanted to mention something.
	Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, James.
	Here, I'm inviting you. I invite you to speak, and then I interrupt.
	I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
	Not at all. Please go ahead.
	Do you remember Bill Mitchell?
	Yes. Yes, I had to disambiguate for a second, but yeah, it's been a while.
	That is...
	Bill Mitchell has been suspended from Twitter.
	Oh. And yeah, almost 600,000 followers.
	And I saw this from Barnes Law.
	And it just popped up.
	And normally I don't check any...
	Pop-ups during a show in particular, but this just popped up in between.
	And Bill Mitchell looks like he's...
	It says, account suspended.
	Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter rules.
	Now, I don't know if that's a temporary or a perma, something or other, but that is quite something.
	Hmm.
	That is interesting.
	I mean, he was a...
	Gosh, it's been a while.
	I don't really recall.
	All I really remember about him was being very, very...
	Actually, the last conversation I remember having with him was...
	I think it was over Syria, was it?
	Or was it... Oh, yeah, yeah.
	So, I mean, yeah, I did a couple of shows with the guy, and then we had a debate about, you know, can Trump be wrong or something like that, but...
	Yeah, he was certainly no...
	I mean, he didn't go anywhere near some of the topics that I did, and...
	No, no, not at all. Anyway, I'm just...
	But he's a very pro-Trump guy, and I wonder what they got him for.
	That's very interesting.
	A little tragic, of course.
	Again, I think it shows some of the biases and so on, but...
	Wow. Anyway, my sympathies, I suppose, but I just wanted to mention that.
	And maybe it's very breaking-y news, but it does seem to be the case, and I just wanted to mention it.
	All right. Sorry, we got the next.
	All right. So the next question, a bit more of an abstract question.
	Let's see what you think of it.
	What do you think of Star Trek's Prime Directive?
	How does it relate to relations between the Third World and the First World?
	The Directive forbids interference with society is considered not advanced enough by the standards of the United Federation of Planets, also known as who the main character worked for.
	The novel Heart of Darkness comes to mind in showing some such interference.
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	Yes, so Prime Directive, of course, has something to do with you're not allowed to interfere with a civilization that is in the process of developing or a more primitive civilization.
	Is that right?
	Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of fluidity in the Star Trek canon, but usually it's like, you know, I think in the next generation it was like, don't interfere with non-warp civilizations, which they Pretty much always did.
	That was like... Yeah, yeah. They never listened to it, but they said the prime directive is so important.
	And I think it's taken on other meanings as the show's gone on.
	Oh, yeah. No, if it has nine green tits, then Kirk will hump it like a dashund on the leg of a horse, right?
	So, okay. Forbids interference with society is considered not advanced enough.
	Yeah, so it's a huge question.
	Tonight is the night of huge questions, right?
	And this really goes back to the whole question of colonialism, which was...
	Look, colonialism had its predatory aspects, and it had its color of the map and the color of the king issues, but a lot of colonialism was...
	The idea that other cultures, other countries are just like whoever, right?
	Just like England or...
	Holland or Germany or France, but they just don't have our institutions.
	So if you go to India and you try to work to diminish the caste system and you get rid of Suti, the practice of bride burning, like if the husband dies, they burn him and the wife is supposed to jump on the funeral pyre and all of that and burn to death herself, I guess Game of Thrones style.
	But that is the issue, right?
	They're just like us, but they lack particular institutions.
	Get the rule of law, get them some railways, give them some free markets and so on, and they'll be just like us.
	And that is the basic idea that, well, you know, Africa is just like us, but, you know, they just need some food, they need some agricultural, they need some rule of law, they're just like us, right?
	And this arises, of course, to some degree out of Christianity, and Christianity is universalism, but also the metaphysics of Christianity that, you know, God creates souls, and the souls are embedded into human beings.
	And this was, it had a technical name.
	It's called the white man's burden, right, to sort of try and bring technology and the rule of law and Western aspects of civilization to other countries, other cultures, and to be basically the Somewhat brutal, somewhat idealistic busybody of the world and try and reshape the world into the image of Europe-ish, you know, like Europe with curry, you know, that sort of idea.
	And it was a very toxic and dangerous element within Christian theology, of course, and a lot of this stuff occurred prior to the Darwinian Revolution and so on, which says that there are going to be adaptations and various differences around the world between various ethnicities and so on.
	And it's not just a matter of...
	Well, bring European institutions to the rest of the world, and they'll just be just like Europe, but, you know, slightly different.
	That's not how it works.
	And it's not that complicated to figure out how it works.
	I mean, because if, let's say, if India had developed superior weaponry and transportation devices and so on, if India had come and conquered England, how long would it take for the average British person to get used to the caste system and sutti?
	And again, I know it's a lot more complicated than that, but...
	Let's say that India came along and started to get, you know, one of the dozens or hundreds of Indian gods implanted into the British consciousness.
	How long would it take your average Anglican Christian to get used to worshipping Shiva or whatever it is, right?
	Or one of those gods that has an elephant head and nine sword-wielding arms or something like that and is blue.
	How long would it take people to feel comfortable having Indian institutions imposed upon themselves?
	And the arrogance, the hubris and the partly predatory, partly idealistic blindness to say, well...
	We're just going to go and bring Western institutions to India or Africa or China and so on.
	We're just going to bring... And by golly, they'll be just like us.
	They'll be happy. They'll be...
	And that same...
	Delusion of grandeur and brutality occurred back in the day, and it's really tragic how long ago this is now.
	If the Iraq War was a human being, we'd almost be able to vote by now.
	But 2003, right?
	2003, they went into Iraq.
	And, of course, the idea was, well, gosh, you know, we just...
	We just get rid of Saddam Hussein and, don't you know, we'll just get this wonderful Jeffersonian democracy and everybody's going to be just like us.
	And there were all of these pictures.
	I remember seeing a National Geographic cover with the Iraqi people holding up their ink-stained fingers because you voted, right, and you got an ink-stained finger.
	And that way you couldn't double vote and so on, right?
	And has Iraq turned into the West?
	Well, not much.
	Iran used to be more westernized, for sure, before the fundamentalist theologians took over.
	But the idea that the West takes their institutions and they put them into other countries and the other countries become like the West has been one of the most deadly delusions of the world ever, ever throughout human history.
	Now, I think...
	Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, go ahead.
	No, I was right in the middle of taking...
	Sorry, I was right in between thoughts, so now's the good time to jump in.
	Alright, okay. So listen, I have a somewhat cursory understanding of this.
	Well, it's more than one thing, right?
	But it seems to have worked in Japan after World War II. Well, before then to an extent with Westernization and stuff, whereas in most other places it didn't work at all.
	So the non-interference thing That also means no trade, right?
	So it's not necessarily we're not going to try to set up a government or a system.
	system, it's that too, but it's also we will not trade with these people whatsoever.
	I'm sorry, there was comments, observations, but I'm not sure what you want me to respond to because there was quite a lot in what you said, so if you could just guide me a bit, that would be great.
	Oh, right, so...
	I'm not sure I... Okay, so there's the idea.
	I come from a third world country, right?
	I'm Brazilian, I was raised here and all, and it's really bad if I don't like it, right?
	And there are people who really try to improve it, and there are people who really say that there's no improving, and that seems to be a bit more the case.
	How can I put this?
	Should countries like that, or I guess planets in this context, should be kind of isolated?
	Or would trading with them be a good idea?
	How do they improve?
	You know what I mean? Like, over an infinite amount of time, do the third world countries just remain as bad as ever?
	And what's the proper posture towards that if you're coming from a Western perspective or East Asian first world country perspective kind of thing?
	Right, right. Now, I mean, so there's the moral ideal.
	So the moral ideal This is going to sound like an odd transition, so I apologize for that.
	So the moral ideal, if you look at what I'm doing.
	So what I'm doing, again, given the limitations that I only speak English with any fluidity or fluency.
	So what I do is I make the very best, deepest, most powerful arguments that I can muster.
	And I make them available for free to anyone in the world with an internet connection, right?
	Right. Now, I'm not over there with an army saying, do this, do that, here's your new rule of law, and you can't, you know, we're banning this, right?
	I'm simply making the wisdom that I'm able to summon out of myself available for free to the world as a whole.
	And, you know, you said you're from Brazil, and you've been listening, and have I been effecting things in Brazil?
	Yeah, probably to a small degree.
	Okay. Have I been affecting skin?
	Certainly on an individual level, right?
	I mean, to me at least, that's quite nice.
	Yeah, I mean, there's no country in the world where this show doesn't play.
	There's no country in the world where this show...
	Now, you can look at Hong Kong and say, well, you know, Hong Kong was pretty good relative, certainly fantastic relative to China.
	49 onwards, right?
	And you look at Japan, or South Korea versus North Korea, and yeah, yeah, listen, big changes can be made.
	Big changes can be made, no question, no doubt.
	And there's nobody alive who's sane, who'd sit there and say, well, I really would much rather be born in North Korea than South Korea, right?
	Or China versus Hong Kong.
	Now, the question of Japan, to me, is really fascinating.
	Because what causes a society to develop is breaking the superstition of the state.
	Whether that superstition is theologically based, or whether it's based upon the worship of the emperor as a semi-divine character, as in Japan and so on.
	But how do you get a society to break out of its hypnotic addiction To the superstition of the state.
	What Lock and Rose calls the most dangerous superstition, right?
	Well... If you look at Japan...
	Some of the most appalling crimes...
	Literally crimes...
	Against humanity...
	I think the most appalling modern crime against humanity is...
	SARS... COVID-2...
	Coronavirus...
	But... If you look at Japan...
	Okay, if you firebomb Tokyo, causing 100,000 deaths in one night, and setting fire to a complete tinderbox of a city, if you drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing untold suffering for decades, and if you...
	the blockades and starvation, and it's the same thing with Germany, really.
	like if you bomb the whole country from end to end then it's pretty tough for people to maintain the superstition and the value and virtue of their leaders, right?
	But then what happens?
	What happens, and I'm really talking about Germany and Japan here, there's not, this is the whole issue, the whole issue that I've been so wrestling with over the past really half decade or so is that Okay, you destroy the cohesive hierarchy of their worship of the state, their worship of their identity, their worship of their history, their worship of their culture.
	I mean, Japanese arrogance was legendary.
	German arrogance was legendary.
	Throughout the world, Up to the Second World War, and even halfway through, you could even say three-quarters of the way through, and then it went down, right?
	It completely collapsed in and of itself, right?
	And so, if you look at Germany and Japan, they went from fairly psychotic hubris and arrogance to hollowed-out, slow, house-of-cards collapsing cultures.
	Simply, or complexly I suppose, from losing faith in their own identity.
	Japan is dying.
	Germany is dying.
	What was replaced when the leadership was eradicated?
	when the belief in the virtue and value of the German state, of the Japanese state when that was destroyed both physically and psychologically how did they survive?
	Well, the answer seems to be that they don't Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Japan has turned into an incredibly top-heavy society where more adult diapers are sold than children's diapers with a replacement rate of 1.1, which is virtually no replacement at all.
	and the entire massive island that has lasted for tens of thousands of years.
	I mean, who knows how it's going to play out, but statistically they could be gone in a century.
	From, okay.
	Do you mean just the population dying or something?
	No.
	Well, no, I mean, yes, as far as, you know, a replacement of 1.1, I mean, basically halves the population every generation, right?
	Yeah. So, they're virtually going to be gone.
	However long it takes, right?
	Yeah. Because then people scatter, they leave, there's not enough people to sustain the civilization.
	You're just, you know, the country.
	I don't mean every Japanese person is going to be gone.
	I just mean the country as a whole.
	Like, it's glory.
	In any way it might exist, it would be gone.
	Something like that. Yeah, and there doesn't seem to be much of a balance.
	And of course you've had, since the late 80s, it's been an entire zombie economy, right?
	I mean, it's just, I mean, it's got by far the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world, well over 200%.
	And everybody runs to the government.
	The children don't want to have babies.
	They're all, well, a lot of them, you know, they're called the dry fish ladies.
	A lot of the kids, a lot of the young people don't date.
	They don't even leave their home.
	I don't know if they're in there with anime and tentacle porn and Video games, I don't know what the hell they're doing in there, but what they're not doing is making more Japanese people, right?
	Right, that's right.
	Now, I don't know how important this is, but not dating, I'm not sure if it's correct, because most people, they end up getting married.
	It's like 94, 98% of the population, right?
	So, hello?
	Yeah, go ahead. Okay, so I was watching this video, and at least according to it, There's always these statistics, right?
	People from 18 to 25 or 30.
	There's a big percentage that are virgins and stuff that are virgins.
	Now, if you go 30 +, almost everybody gets married, which is kind of interesting, right?
	And if you go and say, again, having kids, which is really relevant, If you go, okay, this 20-year-old person is a virgin and that's abnormal, that's not accurate, I would say. You know what I mean?
	That's not a problem if people, when they're 30 or 28, they get married.
	It's still fairly late to start a family.
	I'm not sure sexlessness is actually a problem in Japan, if that makes sense.
	Okay, so this is from 2015, so I'm sure there's newer data.
	It says here, nearly 40% of young unmarried Japanese people say they don't want a relationship.
	Okay. Let's see.
	Let me just read a little bit here.
	That was an interesting thing, right?
	Now, again, you may end up...
	It says here, the rumors of Japan's shrinking and aging population have not been exaggerated at all, it seems.
	Struggling to develop countermeasures The Japanese Cabinet commissioned a survey of men and women in their 20s and 30s, asking the various questions about marriage.
	7,000 men and women between the ages of 20 and 39 were targeted by the survey, conducted online and by mail, from December 2014 to January 2015.
	Only 38% of the people responded, but of those who did respond, some pretty striking results were found.
	A total of 28.8% of the men and women who responded said were reported to be married, unmarried, or not in a relationship.
	Of those respondents, 37.6% said they weren't interested in a relationship of any kind.
	So it's 37.6% of 28.8%, right?
	So again, it's all of that, right?
	So why did they not want to become engaged in a relationship?
	The number one response at 46.2% from both men and women was that relationships were, quote, too much trouble.
	They wanted to focus on their interests instead of love.
	32.9% said they wanted to spend their time in work or study.
	What anxieties do you have about dating?
	55.5% of the respondents said they had no place to meet other single people.
	34.2% said they had felt no one was interested in them.
	And that is, again, that's not 40% of Japanese people as a whole.
	Mm-hmm. But it is a big number here.
	Here's one more recent, from November 24th, 2018, from the same source.
	It's called soranews24.com.
	Let's see here. Carried out approximately once every six years, the study asks middle school, high school, and university students whether they've ever gone on a date, kissed someone, or had sex.
	13,000 respondents.
	That's pretty high, right?
	30% of college students have never gone on a date, which are 71.8% of college men and 69.3% of college women saying they've been on a romantic outing, right?
	So, yeah, 30% of college students never gone on a date.
	These were the lowest numbers ever recorded, the highest numbers of dateless people ever recorded in the survey, which was first done in 1917.
	The new lows are down more than 10% from the peak for each sex, which were 81.9% for men in 1999 and 82.4% for women in 2005 who have been on dates and all of that.
	So yeah, it's definitely going in the wrong direction as far as all of that goes.
	So college men who've had sex, 2005 it was 63%, 2011 53.7%, 2017 47%.
	College women, 2005 62.2%, 2011 46%, 2017 36.7%.
	And that is truly staggering.
	In 12 years it was cut almost in half.
	But listen, so if most people get married, which was, you know, later on, and they start having sex later on, obviously the problem exists, right?
	But it's, maybe that's not, that kind of specific information, if you've had sex or not, is not something that you should measure a society's health by, you know what I mean?
	Like if you go to most places in, I guess in the third world, and definitely in the West, You ask if they've had sex when they're college age, and most people, they've had a few partners already, right? No, and listen, I agree with you.
	That's not ideal. So let's switch to, I'm not saying, oh, well, you know, if they're going to have sex, that's much better.
	I get all of that. But what about even kissed, right?
	I won't go through each year in detail.
	2005, 73.7% of college men had kissed.
	2017, that was down to 59.1%, right?
	That's 14. 14% drop in 12 years.
	College women have kissed 73.5% in 2005, down to 54.3% in 2017.
	That's almost 20%.
	That's 19%, right?
	19% drop in 12 years.
	I would be worried about that kind of stuff.
	When you start talking about, and maybe it's going down a lot, I don't know, but if you start talking about less and less people getting married, even later, late 20s and stuff like that, then I'm worried.
	And obviously they're not having kids, which is a big, big problem, whereas information on college-age sex or not, it's just...
	You might be worried that people are starting to do it too late to have kids when they're young, but apart from that, it doesn't really worry me.
	Obviously, that has nothing to do with the original question.
	I don't want to take you on a tangent.
	Well, no, no, because, look, the reason we were talking about this, I don't think it's a tangent.
	I could be wrong, right? But I think the reason is that You said that, well, you know, it did seem to work, you know, the sort of switching out of the old government, switching in with the new.
	It did seem to work with regards to Germany and Japan, and I don't think it did.
	Right. Because these countries really aren't going to, they don't have much long-term future.
	Correct. And that's tough, right?
	It's tough. Why have children?
	This is the big question, right?
	Why have children? They're a lot of work, they're expensive, you get tired, you know, and you don't have nearly as much time for hobbies, right?
	I stopped writing books when my daughter was born, and I'm sort of trying to get back into it now.
	I guess, yeah, I mean, when she was born, up until I wrote The Art of the Argument, I wrote Essential Philosophy, but When you started being the main caretaker, I guess, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
	And look, it's 14 hours a day.
	I mean, it's more than a full-time job to be a parent.
	So why? Why do it, right?
	Why do it? Well, of course, the answer before was there's no birth control, right?
	You want to have sex, right?
	That's why you become a parent, right?
	And so when birth control came in, effective and safe birth control and abortions, why become a parent?
	It's a fundamental question.
	And Japan doesn't know how to answer that question.
	And whites as a whole throughout the world, right?
	I think it's about two or three percent of the population of the world is white women of childbearing age, right?
	Why have children?
	Big, big question.
	And a lot of it had to do with pride.
	I mean, the birth rate, you know, and this is the dark side of nationalism, right?
	Which is, you know, this is what used to be said to British women, right?
	Lie back and think of England.
	Right. Right. And it's kind of like a joke, but that sort of nationalism, I don't know what happened to the birthright under Hitler, but I assume it went up.
	And this, you know, produce strong men and women for the motherland, the fatherland, you know, the collective borgness, right?
	That's unfortunately or fortunately, it doesn't really matter, but it's a pretty compelling reason for people to have babies.
	So you think perhaps nationalism was destroyed?
	Oh, without a doubt.
	When you decapitate an entire culture's government and culture, because the government and culture are kind of bound up together in these societies, right?
	Culture serves the government, and the government to a smaller degree serves the culture.
	When you decapitate an entire governmental structure, the question is what do you replace it with?
	Well, the answer always seems to be hedonism, right?
	Hedonism and the avoidance of responsibilities.
	It's what's happening in Japan.
	It's what's happening in Germany.
	Yeah, so Germany, I've lived in Germany for a while, and it's...
	Actually, I've lived around in a few places, and it's one of the places that I... Well, it's only here in Brazil and in Germany that I actually didn't like it.
	And it's clear that...
	That they are weird and that they're taught that being German is not even a thing.
	Once you say that to a foreign person who's living in the country, it's like the most ridiculous thing in the world.
	Because you're in direct contact with the culture, right?
	But anyways, I got the feeling very much so that Sorry, I just want to point this out.
	Sorry, I just want to point this out before I forget.
	Sorry about this. Yeah, go ahead.
	This is from 2015.
	Germany passes Japan to have the world's lowest birthright.
	Germany's birthright has slumped to the lowest in the world, prompting fierce labor market shortages will damage the economy.
	Germany has dropped below Japan to have not just the lowest birthright across Europe, but also globally.
	Right? It's just astounding.
	It has the lowest birth rate in the world.
	Second only to Japan.
	This is what I mean when I say you decapitate an entire culture and way of being.
	See, Germany and Japan both had theology highly bound into their nationalism.
	It was the fatherland.
	And Germany, because of its history with collectivist philosophy, the country was an organic god that you kind of worshipped.
	And of course for Japan, it was directly that the emperor was divinely inspired and so on, right?
	He was a god-emperor, so to speak, right?
	So you take that off.
	You get rid of that. And what happens to the people?
	Well, they don't have a higher purpose because you've taken away the religion of the state, the cult of the state, but you haven't replaced it with anything else.
	What about other countries in East Asia that have the same problem, like Korea?
	Well, there was a war obviously, and Taiwan and stuff.
	Do they have a similar reason for having low birth rates as Japan, or is it a different matter?
	Okay, so if you look at something like Korea, right?
	Yeah. So, South Korea.
	Well, yeah. North Korea, we kind of get it, right?
	So, South Korea. So, here's the thing.
	So, you were from Brazil, right?
	Yes. Okay.
	So, let me ask you this.
	In Brazil, what is the relationship?
	It's a big question, but I think everyone gets it deep down.
	So, in Brazil, what is the relationship?
	With the advances of the West.
	In other words, why did things like the free market, modern science, biology, technology, physics, modern medicine, why did that, philosophy really, why did that come from a relatively small number of countries, mostly out of Western Europe, Northern Europe.
	Why did all of these modern ideas, why did modernity as a whole come out of these tiny number of countries and not Brazil?
	Well, you want to know the standard answer?
	Yeah, please. It's not mine, right?
	But when people talk about, and it's really disappointing because it's not very, Smart at all.
	When people talk about why Brazil is a shithole, if they want to admit it, they just say, well, you know, the Portuguese came down here and they just exploited the country and, you know, we've been free for like 200 years.
	So, well, yeah.
	And... Yeah, but Brazil, hang on, but Brazil was around.
	I mean, listen, I know that that is a standard answer, right?
	That's the Wakanda answer, right?
	Colonialism. Colonialism is why, right?
	But colonialism is only a couple hundred years old.
	Human beings have been around for 150,000 years.
	Like Western colonialism in the modern era is, you know, a couple hundred years old, right?
	Maybe, say, four or five hundred years old, depending on South Africa or other places, right?
	But Brazil had been around as a geographical mass with people in it for, I don't know, 50,000 years maybe?
	So, you know, like, well, the reason is the last 1%.
	It's like, no, no, that's...
	That's not right. Because colonialism in the Western sense was a result of particular advances.
	It was not the cause of those particular advances.
	In other words, they had to have better ships, better cannons, better technology, better gunpowder, better navigation, better financial systems.
	They had to have insurance. A whole bunch of things, right?
	That's what... Like the advances happened and then colonialism happened.
	So that's the big question.
	Why is it That limited government came out of the Western European tradition and not really out of other cultures.
	Now, for other cultures, that's a deep shock.
	And this is back to the Star Trek question.
	What happens to your faith and belief in your culture when your deficiencies are highlighted and your vanity is punctured?
	Am I supposed to answer?
	Thank you, sir.
	Yeah. Okay.
	Let me think. One answer would be to reject it, to adopt the ways that seem superior, or just deny the whole thing, I guess.
	No, okay, so that's interesting, right?
	So, okay, so you say, well, let's adopt the ways that are superior, right?
	Yeah. All right.
	Now, I want you to picture this.
	Now, picture that tomorrow, space aliens come.
	Sorry, who comes? Space aliens.
	Let's get back to our Star Trek thing, right?
	So let's say tomorrow space aliens land and they say, and people say, wow, you've got this incredibly advanced technology.
	You can go faster than light.
	You can do all this funky stuff. And they say, how did you get so far ahead?
	Are you just like an older civilization?
	And they say, oh, hell no.
	We're a younger civilization than you are.
	And we would then say, well, how the hell did you get so advanced so quickly, right?
	And if they said, oh, we don't have governments.
	Yeah, we don't. We don't do the government thing.
	Like, you know, the way you guys don't do the slavery thing anymore for the most part?
	We don't do the government thing.
	And that's how we've advanced so quickly, right?
	Now, if it then seems to be the case, and there's empirical proof that no government is the way to go, What do existing governments do with that information on Earth?
	Do they sit there and say, oh shit!
	Turns out no government's the way to go, man.
	We'll totally disband ourselves.
	So the culture has to survive, essentially.
	No, no, no. Stay with me here.
	What would governments do if space aliens landed and said, we're a younger civilization than you, but we're far more advanced because we don't have governments getting in the way and indebting and controlling and indoctrinating and starting wars and destroying everything.
	We got rid of governments and we have the most incredibly advanced civilization.
	What would existing governments do with that information?
	So, how would they react?
	Or let's say the information...
	Right. They would try to discredit it as much as they could.
	Yeah. Absolutely.
	They'd say it was a lie. They'd say it was a trick.
	They'd probably try and destroy the space aliens.
	they would whatever, right?
	They would want to cripple the advances in order to maintain their own power, right?
	So when...
	Again, I'm... That's right.
	Europeans are space aliens.
	But when better ideas come across, those ideas are better because they threaten entrenched power interests, right?
	Okay. And so what do the entrenched power interests do?
	I mean, one of the worst things about colonialism was it gave an excuse for a lack of advancement to other governments, right?
	Right. So you could say we were colonized and that's why X, Y, and Z. Right.
	Right. No, you spread good ideas, but you don't try and rule other countries.
	You don't invade, you don't take control, you don't anything.
	You give people great ideas.
	It's like being a doctor, right?
	Being a doctor, okay, so maybe you put some ads on the TV. Oh, you take this and you'll feel better or you'll get cured or something.
	But what you don't do is you don't jump people as they get out of their cars and inject stuff directly into their carotid artery, right?
	Right. You offer them something better peacefully, voluntarily.
	I don't think, like in the Star Trek, don't interfere at all.
	It's like, I do think That better ideas are good to share.
	This is why I do what I've done for the last 15 years, right?
	And continue to do. It's why we're having this conversation.
	Better ideas are good to share.
	But you don't go in and invade and decapitate the entire country and culture and all that, right?
	Because that's, I mean, you say, ah, well, you know, but they're violating the non-aggression principle.
	It's like, well, yeah, no, I get all of that.
	But human motivations, human Hopes, dreams, desires, and birth rates are very complicated things.
	If you smash and destroy an entire...
	See, government has become...
	For most of human history, government is synonymous with the culture.
	Because the government approves, and the government indoctrinates, and the government subsidizes, and the government has the king, who for most of human history is considered divine.
	So the culture and the government are the same thing.
	Religion and the government were intertwined in both Germany and in Japan.
	More explicitly in Japan, more implicitly in Germany.
	You get rid of that religion, you get rid of that whole culture, you get rid of that government, and birth rates collapse.
	Because people turn to hedonism rather than sacrifice.
	If you don't have something larger than yourself, why on earth would you sacrifice?
	But why is it that in Japan and Korea and such...
	I'd say that people are a lot more moral than in the West nowadays.
	One very clear thing is that they're less promiscuous, for example.
	You know what I mean? They're not as hedonistic as you see most young people be nowadays.
	There is something left.
	It's not destroyed. With Japan, I would argue that they are very hedonistic.
	It's true that in Japan, the crime rates are low.
	There's some culture, there's some IQ stuff there, but they're very hedonistic because...
	They don't want to have kids. And not having children is the ultimate expression of hedonism, because it's more pleasurable every day in some ways, but it makes the last third of your life pretty miserable.
	Like now, it's gotten to the point where the Japanese government is passing laws to force children to contact their parents.
	To take care of them?
	Just to call them.
	Why? Because the older people now...
	Let's see, so going back, right, so let's say you're 80 now, so you'd be 30 in 1970, right?
	Oh yeah, so this is the age of Karachi and Ova.
	So Japan took its martial ambitions and translated them to economic competition.
	And the Japanese, like the Germans, are not exactly known as moderates.
	You know, they tend to go from one extreme to the other, as Churchill said about the Germans, they're either at your feet or they're at your throat.
	And so what happened with Japan was Japan took all of its competitive energies, which had formerly a lot of times manifested as imperialism, particularly in Indochina and so on, right?
	I mean, you know about the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March, all this kind of stuff, right?
	To an extent, yeah.
	So what happened was Japan then translated those martial ambitions into economic ambitions and they were, you know, the imperial tiger of capitalism, so to speak, kind of went all over the world with exports.
	And I remember, so when I was a little kid, Japanese products were synonymous with like Not good, right?
	And they worked incredibly hard to up their quality, and again, it became like the cult of the company.
	Yeah, it became like the cult of the company, and people just worked insanely hard, and there was this whole phenomenon called karoshi, or death by overwork, that occurred, right?
	And so what happened was the Japanese, who are old now, They worked throughout their kids' childhoods.
	They worked and they worked and they worked.
	You know, these, you know, you hear the sort of tradition.
	Sorry? Not the mums.
	The men did.
	See, I don't know what the Japanese participation of women was in the workforce back in the day.
	As far as I know, in the 90s it started to be a bit stronger and to this day there's a significant amount of stay-at-home loans.
	Abe, who's the prime minister, wants to put more women into the workforce, which I don't like, but it's I don't know, but maybe it's got the best percentage of stay-at-home moms in the world.
	I don't know, but something like that.
	Well, let's see here again.
	I don't know about Islam and stuff like that.
	Yeah, so women now make up the majority of Japan's workforce.
	And I don't know about the history of that.
	Like, I don't know what it was like in the 1980s or whatever it was.
	But I'm pretty sure when you have that kind of economic miracle, there is a lot of...
	There's a lot of women out there.
	So, the passing of the nation's 1986 Equal Employment Opportunity Law created to implement equal employment opportunities between men and women.
	That was revised in 1997.
	Let's just see here. For a long time, there's this thing of...
	Which makes sense, right?
	You wouldn't hire women.
	And I don't remember when that started to change, but it was relatively recent, maybe in the 2000s mostly, I think.
	You'd hire women to be like your secretaries, right?
	Kind of like you do in America a long time ago, right?
	And then they'd get pregnant and have the kids, essentially.
	So you'd have salarymen and the women who would work more of a woman's job, so to speak.
	At least that's very present in their anime and manga and stuff.
	At least, right?
	And from what I've seen about it in YouTube and things like that.
	For example, when I was in Korea, I was there for a while.
	You... So there were women who wanted to have kids and to stay at home.
	But if you ask people, especially guys, it's like, well, if you want that, you better go to Japan.
	It's kind of interesting.
	There's an anime that was released by Netflix, which really showed this, which is kind of nice.
	It's basically, it's called Agretsuko, I think.
	And the plot, like the premise, is there's this girl who's like 25, 24, and she wants to find a husband and stop working.
	Like that's the premise. I don't see that getting produced in the West.
	You know what I mean? I really, really don't.
	You know what? Okay, so I've got a little bit here, right?
	So this is labor force participation of prime-aged women from 1968 to 2016 by country, right?
	Sorry, I can't share this.
	So in 1968, Japan was much higher than the United States or the OECD. Women participation.
	Yeah, female participation in the workforce in 1968.
	So, let's see here.
	United States was 47% or so, and Japanese were 56-57%.
	So, almost 10% higher, of course.
	And that's higher than the OECD average.
	Even in America, the ones who worked maybe were.
	So that's like 64, was it?
	1968. Right.
	Well, in 68 it's getting closer, right?
	You know, because there's being in the workforce and being in the workforce.
	There's 20 all a week, 10 all a week kind of thing, and 15.
	No, no, I get that. I get that.
	No, but hang on. Hang on.
	But be gracious, right?
	I mean, it's higher.
	No, no, no. Sure. It's higher, right?
	I want to get this straight, too, for me.
	No, of course. Right. Now, in 72, so it declined a little bit, and in 72 or 73, the labor force participation in the U.S. began to exceed slightly for women that of Japan, but then Japan's also went up, and then more recently Japan has crossed over and become higher than the United States.
	But yeah, for a while, in the 80s, The U.S. female participation in the workforce was higher than the OECD average, but Japan was nonetheless pretty high.
	It was higher to start with, and then it slightly went down, but of course, America's went way up from this.
	And you know what? I'm going to put...
	Just so I don't forget this.
	It's tough. Just so you know, this kind of stuff is from the perspective of someone who's...
	Not saying that means it's right, but it's just my interest in it.
	Which kind of veered away, maybe, from Star Trek?
	No, no, no, it's not, because we were talking about...
	No, I don't think that we're doing that.
	We are talking about different things, and I guess sometimes I'll go deep into some aspect of it and talk to people, and people are like, what are you talking about?
	But no, this is part of hedonism.
	Hang on. We were talking about hedonism, right?
	So hedonism is important in this context, and I'll tell you why.
	Because hedonism Is getting a job rather than raising your children.
	That's hedonism. Right.
	It's better than killing, maybe, but it's still a problem.
	It's a lack of a big goal, maybe, or something.
	Well, you know what I mean.
	A higher calling, maybe.
	Like, it's a pettier thing to just work on your career, it seems to me.
	Oh yeah, no, I think it's terrible to go to work rather than raise your own kids.
	And that is hedonism because you get more positive feedback, you get more money and all of that.
	And the deferral of gratification is to say, okay, well, I'll be home.
	So, you know, I probably didn't write.
	I was writing a book or two a year before my daughter came along.
	Now, so over the, you know, let's say...
	Nine years that I didn't write any books, I could have written, you know, 10, 15 books, right?
	So you've gone from Stephen King to George Martin, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess so, right?
	But with better reason, I think.
	Now, if I'd written those...
	Well, I don't know the reasons, but still.
	Well, he just likes making the money and, yeah, it's more fun than writing.
	Okay. So...
	No, but so I can sit there and say, okay, well, if I had not given up my book writing in order to be a better parent, then I would have 10 books, maybe 15 books more, right?
	Okay. But when I get old, I would much rather have my daughter's company than see a couple of books on a shelf, right?
	Right. And that's just the referral of gratification.
	I was aware of that, and I thought it was more important to keep doing the shows than to say, okay, well, I can only do shows or write books, so I'm going to spend eight years not doing any shows, no call-in shows, or very few, or no research and all that kind of stuff, and I'm just going to write books.
	I thought it was more important to do the call-in shows and all that, and the research and the historical and political, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But I sit there and say, okay, well, I gave up 10 or 15 books to do that, right?
	Okay, well, that to me, hey, look, there's a lot of times when I was racing around chasing my daughter in a play center that I would rather have been writing a book.
	I mean, come on, right? And I know that because now that she's too old for play centers, I'm not sitting there saying, gee, I really wish you could go back to play centers, especially not now, right?
	What's a play center? Is it like a park?
	No, it's more indoors because it's cold up here in Canada, so a lot of times it's like an indoor park with, you know, you've got climbing things, you've got maybe some trampolines, you've got, you know, just stuff where you play around, just get your energy out, right? Right.
	So, I deferred gratification, because I love writing books, but it was more important for me, both in the moment and in the long run in my life, to spend time with my daughter.
	Now, in the same way, People can say, well, I want a job when my kids are young.
	I'm going to put them in daycare. And, you know, they get a lot of positive feedback, right?
	And they avoid the negative feedback of, oh, you're just a housewife.
	Oh, darn, that's terrible, right?
	All that snarky shit that passes for feedback these days, right?
	And then what happens is they get old and their kids don't have much of a connection with them.
	Well, in fact, it first hits them in the teenage years when they say, well, why are you so influenced by your peers rather than your parents?
	And it's like, because you gave up on parenting and abandoned me to my peers.
	So, of course, my peers mean more to me than my parents do because I was in daycare and I was in school and, you know, I didn't spend much time with you guys.
	And so it hits in the teenage years and then it really hits when the parents get old.
	And so for the kids that I'm talking about here, I guess, yeah, so somebody who was born in...
	I guess 1960 would be 60 years old now.
	And yeah, 1950 they'd be in the workforce.
	68 they'd be 18.
	So yeah, the post-war baby boomers are now pretty old and their kids don't want to have much to do with them.
	And so the government is passing laws to force the kids to spend, to at least call their parents.
	Hopefully spend time with them because the parents are Not happy, and of course they're Japanese, so they're basically undead, right?
	They can't be killed by time or anything.
	You know, it's an all-healthy diet, small bodies, and all that, right?
	And do their tai chi in the park and all that, right?
	So it is, you know, interfering coercively with cultures, if you look at Japan and Germany, I personally, you know, I don't consider them successes.
	And there hasn't been anything that has risen to replace the cult of the state and the vanity.
	You know, like, every man is a hero in his own novel, right?
	Everyone is a hero in his own life.
	But it's tough.
	It's tough when you run up against people who don't agree with your valuation of yourself, which happens to me occasionally, believe it or not.
	But when you say we're the best, which is pretty important for countries with the cult of the state, right?
	That's how you get people to make sacrifices.
	We're the best, right? And then when you're manifestly not the best, what the hell do you do?
	It's really, really tough when you can't gain value or virtue out of collective success.
	And certainly Japan and Germany in the Second World War had the exact opposite of success.
	In fact, they were the most defeated countries in the history of the world.
	Like, bombed end to end with the most advanced weaponry known to man.
	They were the most defeated countries in the world.
	What the hell do you do?
	How do you sit there and say, wow, we're the best, or even we're good?
	I mean, we started these wars, and we were destroyed from end to end.
	The people in charge. Like, how do you get back to a collective concept of yourself as powerful or important or good or whatever it is, right?
	Well, you can't.
	And then hedonism replaces sacrifice.
	Now, don't get me wrong, the sacrifice of Japan and Germany in the Second World War was terrible for the world and terrible for the Japanese and the Germans.
	I mean, it was the worst war in human history.
	So, I'm not a big fan of that big sacrifice.
	That's horrible stuff, right?
	But, when you get destroyed from end to end, and your leaders are humiliated, I mean, Hitler committed suicide, and your judgment that the people that you worshipped Turned out to have led your entire country and significant portions of the world to absolute ruin.
	How do you trust yourself again?
	How do you gain optimism and power in the future?
	When the last time you had optimism and power, your countries were destroyed end to end.
	It's a big question. You can't go back to militaristic nationalism, A, the world won't let you, and B, it didn't work out so well last time.
	So what do you do? You lose your collective identity, you lose your vanity, you lose your pride, you lose your nationalistic narcissism.
	Well, it doesn't work.
	I'm sorry, can you say again?
	So Germany imports people significantly, and they have that distrust in their culture, I guess.
	I'll say in a minute why I think about Japan as much as I do, whereas Japan doesn't seem that way.
	I mean, Japanese is like 98% Japanese, you know what I mean?
	Which is quite wonderful, and they seem quite content to remain that way.
	And they consume massive amounts of their own art and stuff like that.
	It's quite insular, though, culturally.
	Yeah, agreed.
	I agree with all of that.
	There are some indications that that's changing, though.
	There are some indications that that's changing, and a lot of the topics that are taboo in the West are now becoming taboo in Japan, and again, I don't know what the future of the country holds, of course, right?
	But it certainly seems to have escaped some of the excesses of Western liberalism, and whether that is a...
	Of course, you have to remember that the...
	The most important political force of Japan are the elderly, and the elderly go back a long, long way relative to even most countries, right?
	Again, if you're talking about somebody who's in their 80s now, right?
	They were born in 1940s.
	Right? And so those people will be very conservative and they will have retained some of that idealism that they got from their parents regarding Japan's place in the world and the uniqueness and pride of the Japanese people and so on.
	But you'll have to see.
	You'll have to see, of course, how it plays out over the next couple of decades.
	But my guess is that all of that is going to go bye-bye.
	And Japan, of course, because they are so bright, And so industrious, it's much more likely that they will turn to automation rather than immigration to deal with a shortage of labor, which will be to the benefit of their culture.
	But nonetheless, they're still going to run out of people as an effective cultural force in not too long a time.
	Just think about it.
	I mean, let's say it's like 100 million people.
	I don't know how many inhabitants they have.
	And they have a pretty strong, I don't know what you call it, like cultural production, like mass culture kind of a thing, with big budget animation, but it's a big deal.
	Whereas you reduce the population and you reduce your ability to have consumers to do that within your own country.
	That's a real concern.
	I mean, you have animation companies making deals with Netflix and such.
	And there are people, there are people, artists in Japan, and I imagine people in general who are worried about this.
	But they're worried about...
	Oh, did I lose you?
	It dropped for me as well.
	I'm not sure what's going on. Oh, that's all right.
	That's all right. I think we had wound the topic as a whole now.
	Let me just see here.
	I want to get... I do want to get the future demographics of Japan, because I know it's at 100 years.
	It's not like Japan's going to be empty or anything like that, but I just wanted to get that, so I was just looking that up while he was getting it here.
	Let's see here. As far as where it goes in the future.
	I wanted to see if I could get those trends.
	Down, but they're a little, of course, a little challenging to find on the fly.
	Let's see here.
	Hello? Are you back?
	I'm back. All right.
	Did you hear anything you were saying?
	Not really now.
	I'm afraid you dropped off early.
	Okay, so I was saying at least in...
	So let's say you have less population over time, right?
	Which is what's happening. And you have this big animation industry and you have a lot of manga that's read and I don't know about literature, but you reduce it.
	So it's massive.
	Some of the stuff's really big budget.
	Massive cultural, mass market kind of productions, right?
	You reduce the population, you have less consumers.
	And if you want to keep business moving, as I did before, you've got to branch out outside of the country, right?
	Can you hear me? Yeah.
	And that is a worry.
	There are some artists, and I imagine regular people who are worried about this in Japan because animation studios are making deals with Netflix, for example, right?
	They want more Western audience than before.
	And it's pretty clear that, especially for children's animation, but for everything, it's a replacement.
	It's mostly a replacement.
	And they're worried about censorship.
	And I think that's a big deal, actually.
	That's a big problem that they're gonna have to solve, essentially.
	It's like, you have Sony, for example.
	That's a Japanese company, but as far as I know, people who really call the shots are in America, right?
	And it's a big SGW cesspool nowadays.
	You know, probably not in Japan, but But at least what you were saying about cultural force, and that's what I can immediately think of at least.
	You have less consumers, you have less people, less consumers, and it's kind of tough to continue to promulgate your values or do what you're doing.
	You know what I mean? Right, right.
	Let me just correct something I said earlier.
	So, let's see here.
	So, there are 127 million people in Japan at the moment.
	By 2050, it falls to 100 million.
	Right? So, 27 million, obviously lower.
	That's pretty damn significant. It's the fifth more.
	Yeah. So, by 2100, they go to 85 million.
	Which is, again, quite something.
	And so by the year 2300, they would fall to 8.5 million.
	Now, that's interesting because they say here, this is from Quartz, they say the decline isn't inevitable if Japanese women choose to have more children or the country decides to take in more immigrants.
	The government's clear preference is for the former.
	Now, that's interesting because they say the Japanese population, now, of course, Japan, because, as you say, it's 98% ethnically Japanese, Japanese?
	I'm sorry? And the immigrants, that 1.8%, most are Asians, East Asians even.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's kind of funky.
	So the Japanese population, does it mean the ethnicity or people who just live on the island of Japan?
	That's always the big question.
	So I think back to your earlier question, I think colonialism was a massive disaster.
	And I think that you want to put out good ideas.
	This is the approach that I've taken.
	Put out good ideas and see who wants them.
	And rely on personal individual change or whoever wants to...
	I do not believe it's a good idea at all.
	It's immoral and impractical to coercively intervene and interfere with other people's cultures and countries.
	So, I mean, self-defense is fine, but yeah, colonialism was an absolutely terrible, immoral, and destructive idea in so many ways.
	But you do trade with them and interact with them in some way.
	Yeah, I mean, if the trade is voluntary, sure, because otherwise you have to use force to prevent trade, which is also a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	So, yeah, trade is fine, but not when it comes to violence.
	What about trading?
	Again, it seems very basic, but if you're trading with a very dangerous place, right?
	Trading with China, obviously.
	Well, now we're talking about the roots of Hong Kong, which I talked about in my documentary.
	So, well, I mean, that's to each person.
	I do not believe that corporations should use the power of the state to open up trade routes.
	It's a very bad idea, because...
	That is outsourcing the force they need to establish their trade in a way that is socializing the costs, you know, rather than taking whatever costs they need to for enforcement themselves.
	So you don't really know if trade is profitable if you're socializing the costs of enforcement.
	All right, but listen, that's about all I wanted to get to for tonight.
	But I really did appreciate everyone's questions, which is fantastic.
	Thanks again to James for keeping everything running, and thanks again to everyone for dropping by.
	Please don't forget, freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
	It's massively and gratefully appreciated.
	I really can't believe it's been like almost two and a half hours, how much the time flies during these wonderful conversations.
	But lots of love from up here in Canada.
	Take care, everyone. I will talk to you soon.
	Oh, yeah, don't forget, Sunday, the Sunday we're going to do, this is in particular for our European friends, we are going to be doing a call-in show, 11 a.m.
	Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, so join us back here for that.
	Bye! Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
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