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Nov. 12, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:41
"Should We Be Scared?" Stefan Molyneux Interviewed by Piero San Giorgio
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Hello everyone, this is Piero St-George.
Today I have the immense pleasure and the immense honor to receive Stéphane Molineux.
Stéphane, hello! Hello!
How is your French?
Let me switch to English so that I don't end up cursing someone's dog in Arabic.
Yes, very well.
Well, actually, I don't know if this is the first, but certainly my audience being mostly French-speaking, Unfortunately, it doesn't know your immense and valuable and great work.
Could you tell a little bit about yourself and what you have been doing in the last 15 years for mankind and tell them why you're so important, which I believe you are?
Well, I appreciate the kind words.
I would remind people that it's not me who's important.
It's the ideas, the arguments, you know, when I've shuffled off this mortal coil, when I'm dead and in a ditch somewhere, nobody's going to particularly care other than, you know, friends and family.
But I think it's the philosophy which matters.
It's the philosophical ideas and arguments that hopefully will outlast me.
I'm pretty sure that they will.
Certainly, I would say that I'm One of the most influential, doesn't necessarily mean the best, that's a topic for another time, but one of the most influential modern philosophers.
I have been doing my show for 15 years and have had, you know, close to three quarters of a billion Views and downloads.
And that's really the biggest injection of philosophy into the arm, mind, heart, soul of the world that has ever existed in history.
And that's mostly due to the technology and the way in which I wield it.
My education is in the history of philosophy.
That was my master's graduate degree at the University of Toronto, was in the history of philosophy, studying philosophy.
Kant, Hegel, Locke, and Plato.
And the argument that I made was that if you believe in a higher realm, in Platonic realm of forms, or Kant's new or meanal realm, then you are going to end up advocating dictatorship as the ideal political model.
And that seems to hold true for just about every philosopher I've ever studied.
Whereas if you are an empiricist, if you are...
That reality is the greatest thing that we can perceive, sensual sense data, tangible practical reality, that there's no higher realm, there's no other dimension that has a higher value than what we can perceive through our senses.
If you believe that, then you end up with limited government, small government, and you end up with a more civilized and less dictatorial political system.
So that was my basic thesis.
I started podcasting in my car.
Actually, I had a long commute.
I was a software entrepreneur originally.
Then I worked for some other companies in various technical and sales and marketing positions.
I had a pretty long commute, and I'd run out of audiobooks that I really wanted to listen to.
And I had lots of things I'd thought about over many years.
I got into philosophy in my mid-teens as a result of a friend of mine who liked Rush, who liked Diane Grant, who kind of got me into this kind of We're good to go.
Things just kind of grew from there.
And the arc of the show has been steady growth, followed by fairly spectacular growth over the 2015-2016 political season, with me pushing back against the media lies about Donald Trump.
And then, I guess you could say, a fairly spectacular flame-out this year, which was not entirely unanticipated as the...
The powers that be all through their weight in behind Joe Biden.
And I guess there was some concern, given how many millions of views my Donald Trump videos got, that there may be some effect on who gets elected.
And so this summer I was last year, I was kicked off PayPal and then I was kicked off YouTube and Twitter and some other places and so on.
And so right now I've taken a step back from politics.
You know, I think it's one thing to say, you know, let's talk about politics when you can create a show and you can make arguments and you can provide evidence and make presentations and speeches and so on.
And, you know, sway people's minds through an appeal to reason and evidence.
It's quite another thing when there seems to be quite a bit of vote fraud and it looks like the courts are going to have to decide the election.
Courts are wonderful places in many ways, but they're not really where philosophers go.
So, you know, I mean, the trial and death of Socrates was a place, I guess, where the courts and philosophy met.
But I would not say it was a very happy meeting that occurred from there.
So right now, I'm still doing shows like this.
I'm still doing shows where I talk with listeners about how philosophy can help their lives for the better.
And I'm currently reading as an audiobook, I mean, an amazing book that I wrote, if I do say so myself, about almost 20 years ago now about the rise of political violence and And the collapse of democratic institutions that was occurring across Western Europe from the end of the First World War into the middle of the Second World War and It's a novel about a British family and a German family and how their paths intersect in these huge cataclysmic political events.
So I'm just reading that as an audiobook, which is, you know, my voice is a little rough tonight because one of the characters in the novel is Churchill.
Winston Churchill, that is, and doing Winston Churchill's voice is quite tough on the vocal cords.
So I'm a little ragged this evening, but that's sort of been the arc of Of the show as a whole, my basic philosophy, which I don't think is my philosophy any more than a scientist says it's my physics or a biologist says it's my biology.
Philosophy is the study of truth.
And the question, of course, is what is real?
And empirical sense data reality, everything we perceive consistently through the evidence of the senses, that is real.
What is true?
Well, truth is a factual relationship between concepts in the mind and things out there in the world.
If you look at something and you say it's a tree, if it is in fact a tree, well, you've made a true statement.
If it's an elephant, you've made a false statement.
Fairly simple.
When it comes to ethics, so my system of ethics, which I think is a rational system of ethics or the rational system of ethics, is called universally preferable behavior.
And in it, I make the argument that ethics are what we define as universally preferable behavior and something like theft, monogamy.
Well, theft cannot be universally preferable behavior because if we say everyone should want to steal and be stolen from, it's universally preferable.
Everyone should want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
It can't be either practically or logically fulfilled.
It creates insurmountable contradictions.
So if you say, I want you to take my property, well then it's not theft, right?
Because if I want you to take my property, it's not theft.
And so stealing can't be universally preferable behavior.
Rape cannot be universally preferable behavior.
If somebody wants someone else to rape them, in other words, it's some sort of weird twisted Fifty Shades of Grey roleplay or something, then it's not rape in the criminal sense.
It's the same thing with murder and it's the same thing with assault.
If I want you to assault me, Then, I don't know, again, it's some S&M dungeon situation or maybe I'm in a boxing ring or a hockey game or it's Black Friday in Detroit or something.
And so rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behaviors.
And that's the sort of very brief outline of the theory of ethics that I work with.
The non-aggression principle arises out of that because rape, theft, assault, and murder are all violations of the non-aggression principle.
The non-aggression principle, of course, states...
That you cannot initiate force against others.
You can use force in self-defense.
It's not required, but it certainly is optional.
And the non-aggression principle, when universalized, leads to the removal of any and all moral justifications for the existence of a state.
Because a government, by its very nature, is a collection of individuals who claim the moral right to initiate the use of force against others through taxation, through the imposition of particular laws.
And while, of course, I'm very happy that there are bans against rape, theft, assault, and murder, the way in which these bans are enacted and maintained is through the power of the state, which violates the non-aggression principle.
And, you know, for those of your listeners who are dropping their jaws down to the floor, I fully accept that this is a very surprising, if not downright shocking, proposition.
And the only thing that I can say is, well, the end of slavery was also...
A shocking and alarming proposition to many people.
Slavery, as you know, was an institution that had existed from the beginning of time until really the mid-19th century throughout British and British-controlled regions and, of course, a little later in...
In America, never existed in Canada.
And slavery is a system that continues to exist all around the world, with tens of millions of people who are still enslaved, even into the modern world.
And when people, of course, said, you know, maybe we should run a society without slavery, everybody thought, well, we've always had slavery, so how could we not have it?
That's how everything gets made.
That's how the food gets produced.
So how on earth could we not have slavery?
We'll all starve to death, right?
But of course, as it turns out, the modern world only exists because we eliminated slavery.
Because once we started having wage labor, then labor-saving devices became much more valuable, and we ended up with the incredible efficiencies of the modern world.
So, yeah, stateless society, the other place, just to close off a very brief intro, the other place where the non-aggression principle holds sway, is in the family.
Hitting children is a violation of the non-aggression principle because children are small and weak and utterly dependent upon their parents, particularly in their early life.
And to initiate the use of force against children is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
And spanking is by far the most prevalent form of violence The world over.
And so if you want to build a peaceful society, you have to first start with the home, with the family.
And only through that process can we end up, I think, raising children who are peaceful and reasonable enough to begin to actually contemplate and bring into existence a stateless society, which is the moral ideal that we need to start working towards.
So I hope that wasn't too rushed or scattered, but that's the brief intro.
Thank you. I, in fact, encourage our audience to check out the other channels where you are present, like BitChute and others, subscribe, and also check out on your free domain website the books, either the free ones, but also the...
The print ones, I probably have them all.
I've read them all. They are excellent, so I encourage our audience to, if they read English, to check them out.
They're really very thought-provoking and well-written as well.
My next question would be that many philosophers over Over the history, and we share that passion of learning history, have argued that without religion to make good and evil and ethics and morals a commandment by a force, a supernatural force, good and evil and ethics would be very subjective.
And as you mentioned, universally prepped for behavior, while it is common sense to understand what you said, Some people may say, well, if something is profitable to me, brings me pleasure, or enables me to avoid pain, whatever consequences to other people, hey, I will do it.
And so many have seen these notions of good and evil as being subjective.
And I struggle on that.
And I struggle personally to refute that, even if I do have my code of ethics myself, which are close to yours in this case.
And we understand it's not like yours, it's like the idea that you researched and expressed.
What are your thoughts on the objectivity or subjectivity of ethics and good and evil?
Well, that's a big question, and I appreciate it.
It's a very important question.
So I think we have to first understand how we got here.
How on earth did we get to this position in the West where...
The most rational among us tend to be the most tentative, the most unsure, the most insecure, whereas the most irrational, anti-rational tend to be the most passionate, the most certain.
And as we can see with the rising violence on both the extreme left and the extreme right, willing to use outright naked brutality to achieve their goals.
So here's the problem.
Religion. Can provide the semblance of objectivity and universality.
And I do credit Christianity with being one of the few religions in the world, and certainly the one that has spread this idea the most, that morality is objective and universal and not tribal and not genetic, but is universal principles.
But the problem is, there's two major problems.
First, religion was in charge of human ethics, human morality, human society for just about all of recorded history and even pre-recorded history.
We don't find examples of...
I did some speeches a couple of years ago in a rather fractious tour in Australia, where I talked about the Aborigines.
And they'd been in Australia for 40,000 years, and they had infanticide rates of 60 plus They had brutal circumcisions.
They would kill their children by pouring sand into their mouths and were highly superstitious in terms of their view of, you know, they believe that if you imitated the cry of the kookaburra bird, that was a blasphemy and not rational, not objective, not scientific.
So religion was in charge of Of human society for most of human history, and as you know, most of human history was characterized by endless warfare, extreme want, extreme lack of productivity in both the agricultural and the industrial realms, and bare subsistence existence for almost all of humanity.
And those who had more than their fair share just ended up dying of gout and obesity, you know, Henry VIII style.
And so when science It came along when reason and evidence and science came along in the Baconian Revolution, 16th century onwards.
Well, I mean, our very conversation here and all the scientific principles that have to unite and mix together and be productively manipulated in order for us to have this conversation, it's undeniable how incredibly powerful and true and valuable science is.
And so religion...
has somewhat retreated into the realm of ethics because religion as a whole was unable to produce the kind of value and productivity that science and the free market have.
Science plus the free market have produced the modern world.
Now science and the free market have some opposition to religion.
Obviously the tension between science and religion is old and I'm sure everybody understands it to the point where we don't have to go into it much here.
But religion and the free market, despite Christianity's more modern friendliness towards the free market, that they've always had a bit of an uneasy relationship, as you know.
In the past, Christianity was used to justify the divine right of kings, that the king was appointed to rule over man by God, and to disobey the king was to disobey God.
But centralized coercive authority, like a monarchy, is not...
Not free market friendly, right?
Because the king doesn't earn through his productive labor as the capital that he enjoys, but rather gets it by slaughtering everyone else in the vicinity and enslaving the population as either direct slaves or serfs or something like that.
So you can have a sense of the universality of religion on two conditions.
Number one, science and the free market haven't shown how incredibly powerful they are.
And also, you don't have multiculturalism.
Now, one of the problems that has occurred in the modern world, in the West in particular, which is the first multicultural society really since the Roman Empire in many ways, is that it's really hard to believe that your religious worldview is an absolute and universal truth when you get endless waves of other religions, other denominations, and so on pouring into your society.
So the idea that morality is subjective, It comes out of the problem that when you get many religions mixing together in a society, it really looks like morality is subjective because every religion has its moral commandments, which its adherents believe is true, and yet they're incompatible.
You know, as the Muslims believe that if you reject Islam, for some, the punishment is death.
If you stop becoming a Christian or you stop being a Christian, you may experience some disappointment from those around you, but there's no punishment of death for apostasy in Christianity and a wide variety of the relationships between the genders and some religions is more fractious and divided than in others.
And so when you start mixing ideas together and whenever you get an empire, you get like an empire is founded on absolutism.
And then because it becomes multicultural, it ends up with subjectivism, which cracks the certainty of the moral foundations of the empire.
I did a whole presentation on this called The Fall of Rome.
The Truth About the Fall of Rome, Modern Parallels, and you can find that on Library and Bitshoot and so on.
And so, you know, it's really tough.
When you have a bunch of religions in the same society, you end up with this belief that morality is subjective.
The only way morality can be perceived as subjective is if one religious view holds dominance, which is why, if you look at, say, Islamic countries, they tend to be more certain about their ethics in Western countries because Islamic countries are largely...
Monotheocratic in their approach to religion.
And so it's not a lot of competition and all of that.
And the last thing that I would say about all of this is that when you bind your ethics into religion, it's great because you've solved the problem of morality.
What is good?
What God says is good. What is evil?
What God says is evil.
Okay? So you've solved, for most people in their minds, you've solved the problem of ethics.
But, what comes along?
Well, what comes along in the modern world is, you know, some of the guys who've been colloquially referred to as the Four Horsemen.
I always forget one of them, but it's Dennett and Dawkins and Hitchens and, I don't know, some other dude.
I always forget one of them, but...
What happens is you say, aha, we have solved the problem of morality by saying that morality is founded upon religious commandments.
But, but, but, but, but, but, what happens when the atheists come along and undo the foundations of your religion?
What defense do you have against that?
Well, of course, defense throughout most of the history of religion has been kill the atheists.
Kill the atheists.
Or banish them or whatever, right?
And this was one of the crimes of Socrates was not believing in the gods of the city.
Although he denied himself being an outright atheist in ways that were kind of hedgy, but anyway.
So if your moral backbone is founded on religion, okay, got to keep other religions out.
You can't do that if you're expanding.
And when the atheists come along, The whole mountain falls to the ground like it wasn't even there.
It just vanishes almost in a puff of logic.
And so my goal has been well on 12 years, 13 years since I started.
My very second public essay back in 2005 was proving libertarian morality, the morality of the non-aggression principle of private property rights and so on.
Because you can't drag the atheist back to religion, and atheism, because it relies so much on science, hollows out the moral center of your society.
And you know what is true, and the devil's bargain is the devil comes along and says, I will tell you what is true, and I will tell you the secrets of the natures of the atoms of the universe, and I will give you control.
Over the strong and weak atomic forces and magnetism and gravity and electricity and nuclear power, I will give you all the power over the atoms.
But in return, all you have to give up is that tiny little thing you call good and evil.
I will give you power over the whole world and all that it contains.
And you shall live lives, yea, verily you shall live lives of great comfort, And you shall have air conditioning when it is too hot.
And you shall have heating, I tell you, when it is too cold.
And you shall have a roof over your head and you shall be conveyed upon horseless carriages with wheels for hooves.
And you shall be carried between the continents on giant metal-exploding bird wings until the Chinese release a virus.
But to get all of these powers to know what is true, you must give up.
Your knowledge of what is good.
Oh, man.
And it really has been a devil's bargain.
We have lives of unprecedented material comfort.
The biggest problem for the poor in the West is obesity.
We have incredible material comfort.
And our spiritual hunger is eating us alive.
Because we have skyrocketing rates of mental illness, of misery, loneliness, unhappiness, divorce...
Addiction, the opioid crisis, is shredding major portions of the West as a whole.
So we gained all that is true and lost all that is good.
And so my goal and purpose was to say, well, I don't think we're going to be able to drag most of the young fedora wearers back into the embrace of the church.
So we're going to have to plunge on and we're going to have to use philosophy to define not just what is true, which scientists can already do for us, but what is good, because the primary goal and purpose of philosophy is the study of ethics.
It's not the study of the nature of reality, that's the job of physics.
It's not the study of the nature of life, that's the job of biology.
It's not chemistry. It's not geology.
It's not sociology, not psychology.
What is it that only philosophy can do?
Well, the study of virtue.
The study of virtue.
Now that, of course, is elbowing directly into the cassocks of the priests who claim that as their dominion.
But, unfortunately, the religious worldview is dependent upon the metaphysical existence of a god.
And, of course, the atheist can come along And sideswipe that blackboard and erase God in five to ten minutes.
I know, I've done it myself many times.
So what are we going to do?
Science can only tell us what is, not what ought to be.
Biology can tell us what serves our life, but it cannot tell us what is virtuous.
And so we've lost, we've gained all of this material power and we've lost our virtue.
And so now people say, well, the good is good for me.
The good is that which serves my acquisition and expansion of power.
And if anyone thinks that's theoretical, may I just look at the recent U.S. election?
And you can very clearly see that there are two great divides, the Christians and the secularists.
And the Christians are like, well, we've got to do what is right, and we've got to do what is noble, and we've got to do what is proper, and we've got to do what is universal.
We have to maintain the integrity of the system and the Constitution and blah, blah, blah, right?
Whereas the secularists as a whole are saying, well, Mike, are you kidding me?
We just have to check off some boxes, feed them in a machine, and we gain control?
Over trillions of dollars?
And hundreds of millions of lives?
What mammal, what amoral mammal could resist such massive temptation to gain power?
At the expense of what?
They don't fear hell, they don't fear punishment, they don't believe in universal virtue or values.
What's good for them is what's good for the sea otter, for the bonobo.
For the paramecium and the trilobite, what's good for them is power, resources, acquisition, reward without effort, compensation without labor, something for nothing.
That's good.
That's good. I remember many years ago, Being in Florida and going to an alligator zoo.
And my daughter, who loves reptiles, wanted to feed an alligator.
And so they gave her some meat and they let her out into this area and I was with her and there were a whole bunch of alligators lying there in the swamp.
And They said, just throw the meat on their nose, and they'll...
They eat it, right?
And of course, as a father, you sit there, and I said openly, I said, well, aren't they going to eat her?
And they said, no, it never happens.
I said, well, why not? They've been throwing food into their mouths.
Why would they go hunting? Like, why would you go hunting if somebody just gave you a Big Mac?
Ah, right.
So they're getting something for nothing.
Why on earth would they rouse themselves to go and get something they have to work for?
It makes no sense. So to the people who say virtues are subjective, then you have to ask them, okay, well, what is virtue as a definition?
And most times they can't really say, oh, it's something that people like or some vague...
Golden rule, reciprocity, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Maybe a bit of the Kantian categorical imperative thrown in, which is act as if the principle of your action becomes a universal principle for everyone.
Like if you steal and everyone steals, is that okay?
And all that. Maybe a bit of Aristotle's eudomania, which is, you know, the virtue, the highest virtues is excellence in the pursuit of the good.
And, you know, a lot of stuff that just kind of gets mixed in like some big giant intellectual stew.
That never quite satisfies and can, of course, be pushed aside.
Say, ah, well, what is virtue?
It can't be just what people like, because lots of people like lots of different things.
And if you say, well, I've got a new term that just describes personal preference, you say, well, why do you need a new term?
Because, because the word virtue, goodness, ethics, right, have extraordinary power to us.
They have extraordinary power to us.
And so people want to harness that power.
But that word, or those words, virtue, morality, good, they only have power because we yearn for the universal.
Virtue is something that can be justly imposed upon someone else.
If somebody wants to rob me, I can use self-defense up to the point of killing them, if that's the only way I can prevent them from taking what's mine.
If somebody wants to assault me, I can also use violence to defend myself.
I can impose the virtue called the non-aggression principle through violence, if I must.
Now, I like a particular band.
I like a particular musical instrument.
I like a particular color.
There's not many people who would say that I have the right to impose my preference on others through violence.
If you don't come and see Yo-Yo Ma, I'll shoot your leg.
I'll stab you. I will cut you if you don't see Yo-Yo Ma.
That would be kind of crazy.
Or if you don't like the color navy blue, which is objectively, of course, the greatest color.
Nobody can say, well, if you don't like navy blue, I will cut you.
Your ass is mine! Nobody says that, right?
So we all know that virtue is that which you can impose through force if necessary, which is why you have to be very careful in what you define as good and evil, because the moment you define something as good and evil, you are unleashing the dogs of war, because everybody knows that once something is evil, you can use force against it.
And this is, I mean, again, anyone who doubts this, think this is all theoretical.
God, no. Look at America right now.
This is all playing out exactly as philosophy would predict and exactly as I have predicted.
And I predicted it in my book 20 years ago.
Yes. They say that Trump supporters are fascists.
And Nazis. This is not even an extremist position in America.
This was Joe freaking Biden's campaign ad.
Was Trump supporters overlaid with Hitler's speeches?
Now, the hard leftists, the far leftists, are right now, even as we speak, compiling lists of everyone who donated to the Trump campaign, which they get through public records.
And they're going to put them on a map.
This is not me making this up.
This is them directly saying they're going to put them on a map.
And they're saying, you've got to go and confront these people forcibly, not violently, they say.
Of course, it always spills over.
Ah, if you supported Trump, nobody should ever hire you again.
You should be ostracized from society, and of course that's going to make people desperate, and those desperate people are going to become violent, and they say, aha, we told you Trump supporters were violent!
It's like, you know, if you keep cornering a rat, it will become violent.
It doesn't mean that it's a werewolf or a tiger, it just means you've cornered it.
And so, when you say, well, racism is the greatest evil, Trump is clearly a racist, his supporters are racist, well, then you've just legitimized the use of force against Trump supporters, you've legitimized fraud in the process of an election.
Because look, if you or I had a lever in Nazi Germany, or pre-Nazi Germany, and we could pull that lever and prevent Hitler from getting elected, wouldn't we?
Of course we would! So the whole purpose of saying to people, oh, those people, they're Hitler, they're evil, they're Nazis, right?
Ironically it's basically what the Nazis did to the Jews and of course what happens is the moment you label people as evil you've just legitimized the use of violence against them which is exactly what's been happening and will continue to happen until the subriquet is withdrawn and stop calling people evil who aren't evil because when you call them evil you are legitimizing the use of violence against them because that's what evil requires as its quote cure.
If somebody's running at you with a chainsaw you can shoot them Because they're going to do great evil to you, and self-defense is, I mean, morally recommended, though not morally required.
You can't shoot someone for failing to defend themselves, but you can certainly excuse them if they do.
So, even the people who say that there's no such thing as right and wrong and everything subjective, they're still using the power of morality to tar their enemies, to paint their Laser targets so that the general outraged and mindless mob can attack them and feel good and justified and virtuous in doing so.
So for all of those who say, well, morality is subjective and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's like nobody believes that.
It's just something that people say, but nobody believes that deep down.
It's like somebody saying, well, you know, gravity is subjective, man.
You want to walk off this bridge?
No! No, no, no, you said gravity is subjective.
Surely you should be able to walk off this bridge?
No! You can't make me walk off this bridge.
Okay, so then you don't believe that gravity is subjective.
You just say that, maybe in the hopes that other people will walk off a bridge and you can amuse yourself as they plunge to their deaths.
But nobody, nobody believes gravity.
That morality is subjective.
Like you go to the leftists who believe that morality is subjective and you say, okay, if morality is subjective, then clearly there can't be anything objectively wrong with classism or sexism or racism or all of the other isms that you talk about.
But then, of course, if you try and take away their moral outrage because they say, well, morality is subjective, okay, then you can't impose it on anyone else, and therefore the racist, by your philosophy, is as justified as the anti-racist because it's like saying, well, the racist likes the color orange, the anti-racist likes the color blue, and if everything's subjective, you can't prioritize one over the other, and they would recoil from that.
And they would say, no, the racist is wrong, he's bad, he's evil, okay.
Then shut up about morality being subjective.
Shut the hell up about morality being subjective.
If you're going to tar and feather all the Nazis of the greatest evil...
And pretty damn evil, don't get me wrong, but certainly not the greatest evil.
I think that might be communism or statism as a whole, in terms of the death count.
Statism as a whole, 250 million people in the 20th century.
Communism, 100 million plus.
Nazism, maybe 40 million.
Pretty evil. Pretty damn evil, no question.
But not the greatest. Of course, Nazism is a form of socialism as well.
They had to invent the word Nazi, because otherwise you spell out the whole damn thing.
National Socialist German Workers' Party!
And they have to say fascist because they don't want to say, I mean, fascism, Nazism, well, that's just National Socialism.
As you know, Mussolini started as a Marxist, outright Marxist.
And Hitler had – I mean Hitler fought the Marxists for sure because he disliked what he perceived of as their international flavor, right?
He wanted German socialism, not international socialism because that's borderless.
It's globalist and all that, right?
And so, yeah, they had to invent all of these words so that you would think that, you know, mafia groups fight amongst each other, but nobody thinks that it's good versus evil.
And national socialists fight with international socialists, that doesn't mean it's good versus evil.
So, yeah, I mean, nobody believes.
Like, I've never met anyone who just doesn't believe in right or wrong.
I mean, they'll say that, but they'll say that so you'll back away and they'll gain control.
You'll say that so that they can impose their view or version Of right and wrong on you while you've absented yourself from the field of battle.
Of course. I mean, if someone can get you to show up to a duel with no pistol, he's pretty bloody happy, isn't he?
If he's the only one with the weapon and you showed up unarmed, he's going to win.
And so this idea that people say, well, there's no such thing as right and wrong, they never live that way.
They never live that way.
They're just hoping that you'll show up unarmed To a duel for the future.
It's pretty tempting. And of course, when you start tussling with people at the most fundamental levels of morality, things get pretty exciting pretty quickly.
I mean, I've certainly found that out over 15 years, although I knew it beforehand.
So, again, that's the challenge.
I mean, you can sort of say, okay, define ethics, what's right or wrong.
Is it imposable in someone?
Is it universal? The leftists say, racism is a universal evil.
All right? Racism is a universal evil.
Okay, well, universal evil is a morality.
Objective. Universal. So don't tell me that reality is subjective.
Don't tell me that virtue and ethics are subjective.
Because you've just made a universal moral statement.
And you'll find, like, when you start debating at this level, everybody you debate with, everybody you talk about, the Marxists will often say, well, value is...
Virtues are subjective.
It's like, well, isn't your entire moral philosophy founded on the fact that exploitation is evil?
And if exploitation is universally evil, then you just have morality again, don't you?
You can't escape it.
I mean, people will just tell you that it's all nonsense because you just have to find one thing that the person believes is universally good and evil.
And then it's like, well, then shut up.
Shut up about value being subjective, virtue being subjective.
It's never the case in the way it plays out.
I mean, there's other ways you can prove it, but I find the appeal to hypocrisy is just about the most powerful way to get started.
Now, I am currently writing my next book, which is about how you manage fear in uncertain times.
And this question of ethics, of universally preferable behavior, is, I believe, fundamental in providing you the mental, philosophical stability of mind to face events, to face inner fears and Advance your efforts to manage them.
Now, when you have truth, when you have this definition, this universality of definitions of good and evil, how do you think that helps yourself to manage your fears when maybe your enemies could use that against you, could use these Principles against you.
Well, to me, philosophy is where people are willing to either surrender to a better argument or at least refrain from using violence if they lose.
Right? It's the old thing for the untouchables, like don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
So I have been debating with Marxists since I was in my mid-teens.
I debated ferociously with Marxists all the way through my university days and into my business career where I would occasionally run across them and so on.
And I loathe and fear Marxism.
It is a human carnage machine of the first order, kills by the tens of millions, and is extraordinarily dangerous.
Now, and I debated Marxists all the way up until I kicked off social media platforms.
And so to me, yeah, the debate is good, and it's a civilized way to try to resolve differences.
But if somebody says, well, I want to come and debate you, and if I feel that I've lost, I'm going to set fire to your house.
Well, do you show up?
Of course not. Because it's no longer a debate.
Yes. Now, I'm willing to let you disagree with me, but if you disagree with me, I'm going to steal your car.
Right? I mean, that's not a debate anymore.
And you don't civilize that.
You don't put the veneer of civility over that kind of interaction by pretending that it is a debate when it's not.
And so this is the great question of censorship, right?
Because you're talking about fear.
Well, fear is not always something to be overcome.
Sometimes it is, right?
But fear is also something to be damn well listened to because I'm very much into the Aristotelian mean, which is too little of something is pretty bad.
Too much of something is pretty bad.
And finding the mean is kind of tough.
It's just the thing with fear, right?
If you live your life completely dominated by fear, then you're a coward.
But if you live your life without fear, you're kind of a psycho, right?
I mean, it's like you're a foolhardy is the rather archaic phrase that they use for that state of mind.
You know, like if you're in a necessary battle, a war, and you spend your whole time hiding, well, you're kind of a coward, right?
On the other hand, if you just...
Rush over into no man's land, screaming and beating your fists against your chest like you're Wonder Woman, then you're just going to get killed.
So you've got to be smart about the risks that you take.
If you don't want to take no risks, but you also don't want to take crazy risks, which are just going to get you harmed or destroyed or whatever, right?
So with regards to the current situation, it's kind of hanging in the balance.
Is it safe to speak your mind these days?
It's a big question.
It's a big, big question.
And we know for a fact that a significant proportion of people, and I would argue it's probably the majority of people, the majority of people, my friend, don't have any free speech.
I mean, they have free speech on paper.
In the same way, like I'm 54 years old, on paper, I could win a marathon.
There's no law saying I can't, but I don't have any practical ability to win a marathon because I'm 54 years old.
The knees are a little creaky, muscles not quite as springy, and tendons get a little bit more bruised.
So most people in the West, they don't have freedom of speech.
Because if they post something critical of X, Y, or Z organization, or group, or activist, or whatever, or some idea, or whatever, well, people will band together and they will try to get them fired.
They will try to get them kicked off a platform.
They will try and destroy their reputation.
And you can say, well, but you still have the right.
It's like, yeah, yeah, I guess you still have the right.
But... Because they can't get rid of the legal right of free speech in the West, at least not very easily, they have to make it so punishing to speak against the group that nobody bothers to exercise that right.
So as far as fear goes, you know, people are scared.
And I'm not going to tell them there's no reason to be scared.
Of course there's a reason to be scared.
This tends not to go very well, historically.
The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Khmer Rouge, Castro, North Korea.
I mean, it tends not to go very well.
And, of course, people are...
You know, force works.
Intimidation works. Otherwise, people wouldn't even bother with it.
It really, really works.
And people got to feed their families.
People got to pay their bills.
People need their jobs. And people make a rational calculation.
Virtue is a value you can exercise when you are in a state of relative security.
And we recognize this, of course, right?
If somebody goes and robs a bank of their own free will, of his own free will, okay, he's a bank robber.
He'd throw him in jail, right? But if that same person phones someone, this is, I think, out of, oh, that Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, right?
Where the guy's saying, hey, he robbed a bank with a phone because he just phoned some guy and said, hey, we've kidnapped your kids.
Go rob a bank or you'll never see them again.
Okay, so the guy goes and robs the bank.
Well, he's no longer morally responsible for robbing the bank because he did it under duress.
See, morality is when you have a choice.
You don't have morality with a gun to your head.
Now, if someone says, and this is the whole point of this aggression, right?
Somebody says in their mind, okay, I could say this thing.
Voldemort, we'll call it. We can say this thing, Voldemort.
But if I say this thing, which I believe to be true and I have evidence for or whatever, if I say this thing, then I'm going to be targeted.
And, you know, you don't know exactly when or if or how, whatever, right?
I mean, there was this woman many, many years ago, one of the first cancel culture outside of Andrew Anglin, one of the first cancel culture...
Women made some tasteless joke about AIDS when she was flying to Africa, and she didn't really have many followers or anything like that, and she gets off the plane and her life is destroyed.
Yes. Right?
And it took her years and years and years to recover, and of course, you know, it's...
I mean, it's like even if somebody accuses you of a crime, you go through the whole process.
Okay, oh, I'm free, right?
Okay, but you're still never going to be as free as if you'd never been accused, right?
You can never be the person who was never accused.
People see this stuff.
The mob might fixate upon one person, maybe you, maybe someone else, and they might just say, okay, this guy's going down.
And so people make this calculation.
Now, the moment you're making a calculation, you're not free.
You're no longer free. The moment you're saying, oh, I could say this thing, but oh man, if it just happens to be found or it happens to be seen or people happen to fixate on it, right?
Then I could lose my job.
I could, my children could be harassed.
You know, I mean, like, what is it?
They showed up, people, far leftists showed up at Tucker Carlson's house and his wife was dialing 911 hiding in the closet.
You know, I could post this thing, but then I'm going to need an escape room with lava and crocodiles and blow darts.
Well, there's no longer free.
You're no longer free. And some people will choose to post anyway, which I think is a fine decision.
And some people would choose not to post, which I also think is a fine decision because, you know, you've got to feed your kids.
pay your bills so you know functionally the fear is not something that we just have to escape or surmount it's there to help us you know the the human beings who like human beings who don't experience fear are very dangerous very because you know fear is also involved in other nice things we call it empathy or a conscience or whatever right fear of retribution from your own moral sense is kind of important to society
and so i i'm not sure if this was the nature of your question but i've really been thinking a lot as a lot of people have about fear right you You know, this whole, the shy Trump voter, right?
Someone calls up and says, do you support Trump or Biden?
Right? And a lot of people, they may be Trump supporters, and they're like, oh, Biden, man, totally, yeah, Biden.
Why? Because they don't know.
Maybe it's a legitimate polling company.
Maybe it's the local leftist club looking for someone to mess with, right?
Yes. They don't want to answer. Okay, well, it's like what Solzhenitsyn said about Soviet Russia, that the only time a man could be honest was in the middle of the night, under the blankets, with his wife.
And even then, God help, she turns on you or gets turned on you or whatever, right?
Yes. So, yeah, there are enemies lists, there's disavowals, there's re-education camps.
It is a pretty alarming direction to be going in, and I think people have good reason to be scared.
It would be kind of crazy not to be.
Yes. In many of your shows, especially the ones about economic directions in the past...
You end the show by saying, prepare accordingly.
And I'm excluding from that the buying a water buffalo.
But my books start at that point, start from there.
And they're bestsellers in the survivalist field.
You mentioned a few times that you were interested by that way of being or philosophy as well.
Can you tell us what are your thoughts on that movement of prepping, survivalism, and basically preparing accordingly to what is potentially happening?
Well, I think it's wise.
See, that's back to fear, right?
That arises out of a fear of The continuity of currency.
You know, our whole society is a giant house of cards built upon people's shared delusion in the value of paper or bits in a bank account.
And, I mean, on the German side of my family, there are stories that were handed down.
My great grandfather saved his whole life.
He was a good Protestant saver.
And then, after the hyperinflation under Weimar, he took out all the money he had saved his whole life and was just, just able to buy a cup of coffee.
And so, unfortunately, we've lost these histories, right?
We've lost the... People don't understand that all fiat currencies go to zero.
You could say the one that's lasted the longest is the British pound at about 400 years, but it's still lost 98% of its value.
All fiat currencies go to zero.
Just look at those trillion dollars Zimbabwe notes and you'll get it, right?
And so if currency, we wouldn't say it loses value, but when currency achieves the value it has always had, which is functionally zero, Then the whole supply chain, the whole house of cards, the whole field in the country to table in the city, that whole mechanism stops.
It's a machinery kept oiled only by the shared delusion in the value of paper and digits, bits and bytes in a bank.
So it is eminently sensible to recognize that It cannot continue.
Now, when does it not continue?
I don't know. You don't know.
But that's the point, right?
I mean, that's the point. They say, if you're smoking, when are you going to get sick from smoking?
Is it going to be tomorrow, next year, five years, 10 years, 30 years, 50 years?
Or you might be one of these one in a million people or one in 10 people or whatever it is who don't really get sick from smoking.
You've just got some weird gene that fends off the tumors or whatever.
Okay, well, but you don't know.
That's why you quit smoking, right?
Because you don't know. So it is.
It's going to go to zero. It's going to go.
And it's not like coronavirus is exactly slowing that process down or anything, because the amount of debt that's being taken on is absolutely staggering these days.
But, you know, we can't have people getting mad at communist China.
Wallpaper it over with made-up money.
So I think it's eminently sensible.
Yeah. Get some food in the basement.
Get some skills. Get a community.
Get some crypto. Learn how to be a bit more self-sufficient or a hell of a lot more self-sufficient.
Maybe don't live right down in the bowels of a city.
Yes. Right?
I mean, you are much more of an expert on this kind of stuff than I am, but I think that to...
I mean, it's something I learned in the Boy Scouts, right?
Way back in the day.
Failing to prepare is preparing for failure.
And unfortunately, you know, kids go through 12 years of garbage...
Government indoctrination.
And don't come out with any clue about the way the world really works or anything about history.
I mean, if people...
If kids come out of school trusting the government, I mean, their history teacher has damn well not done her job or his job at all.
And if they come out thinking that the current economic system can be sustained at infinitum, well, they failed Math 101, which is...
Mathematically, that which cannot continue will not.
It's just a matter of time. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of that.
I wouldn't consider myself any kind of expert, but I would say that it is important.
I mean, there's lots of books out there to read and lots of websites to go to, and I think it is important.
I mean, let's say you get a whole bunch of food in your basement.
Okay. Let's say you're totally wrong and you never need it.
Okay, we just eat it. I mean, it may not be quite as spanking fresh as your HelloFresh box, but, you know, it will sustain you.
And so if you're wrong, you just eat your mistakes.
But if you're right and you need the food, you know, it's a funny thing, right?
Most people are no more than a week away from no food, right?
Yes. And, I mean, just think about it.
It's an intellectual exercise, right?
People just need to think about it.
Okay, what do you do?
If the grocery store is bare, what do you do?
Well, it gets your attention pretty quickly, right?
Well, of course, you're going to go to your neighbors, or you might go to your parents, or whatever, and maybe they've got a bit of food, and maybe they'll share some with you.
I'm sure they will. Certainly, if you're a family, they'll share some food with you, but...
Okay, so maybe that buys you another week.
And then what happens if you turn on the tap, and there's no water?
Oh... Right?
Three, three, three.
Three minutes without air, you're dead.
Three days without water, you're dead.
Three weeks without food, you're dead.
So we live on this razor's edge that everybody forgets about because there's this conveyor belt of new stuff coming our way, but what if and when that conveyor belt...
Like, at the end of the Roman Empire...
Rome had a population of billions.
And within a couple of months it went down to 18,000.
And then, not much at all.
Okay, where did they all go?
We don't know. It wasn't like there were a bunch of selfies going on back then, right?
They just vanished into the countryside.
They wandered around and they looked for food and they looked for work.
But guess what? The farmers...
We're sick of sending their food into the city to get crap, diluted, copper-filled, tin-filled, trash-filled currency in return.
I send you wheat.
You send me crap.
Coins back. Can't buy anything.
It's a bad deal. So then the farmers say, well, forget it.
I'm not sending stuff into the city anymore.
So they stop growing all of the excess crops that the city dwellers need.
Because that's the whole point.
If the farmers send you food, you send the money, they use that stuff to buy everything else.
They use the money, right? If they don't want the money, they're not sending you the food.
Now, if they're not sending you the food, guess what?
They're not growing the food either.
So then, let's say you make it out from the city into the country...
They don't have anything for you, even if they love you.
Even if they're your family, they just don't have the extra crops.
Why bother? I mean, growing crops is pretty back-breaking labor.
Anybody who's worked on a farm can tell you that.
Anybody who's a survivalist can tell you that.
So why would you grow all this excess stuff?
It just makes you a target for people who want stuff.
So, I mean, I know, and it seems weird, right?
Because it's been forever since we've been hungry in the West, right?
I mean, you'd have to go really back to the Dust Bowl of the 30s.
In America, maybe the John Steinbeck situation or whatever, but, you know, it can easily happen.
And, you know, I've had people on my show, I'm sure you've listened to it as well, people on my show talking about, you know, shipping is dead, man.
Now, there's a bunch of stuff in the pipeline.
And, you know, it's not like if the power goes out, you're out of power, right?
It's not like you've got a whole bunch of power sitting in your...
Pipes, sorry, sitting in your wires that you can use and bleed off over time.
And the power goes out, I mean, you're dead in the water.
But it's not the way with the supply chain because there's always stuff moving through it.
So even if shipping dies, there's still weeks or maybe months of stuff floating around.
It takes a long while for it to become more clear.
But shipping is kind of dead because of COVID, because of quarantines, because of restrictions, because of, you know, the sailors can't land and ships are being abandoned.
It's bad. And we have this whole system.
Because, you know, like in America or other places, what did they do?
Well, they made manufacturing incredibly difficult through bureaucratic red tape, environmental, health and safety, blah, blah, blah.
And it became progressively more and more impossible to make your own stuff.
So then what happens is, hey, we'll just get it shipped over from China, right?
Oh, pandemic? Wait, we can't ship stuff anymore?
Well, it's not like you're going to be able to snap your fingers and get all those factories regrown in America.
It's going to take some time.
Because half the stuff you're going to need to order has got to come from China, which, anyway, you get how this plays, right?
So we've got a whole society that is incredibly configured on the continuity of the supply chain and of the farmer-to-city relationship, which is incredibly reliant upon the continued value of currency.
And if the continued value of currency is threatened, and it always is, at least through inflation, and if you want to know how badly the US dollar is doing, don't look at it relative to the Canadian dollar.
That's like looking at two people falling out of a plane saying, well, relative to each other, they're doing fine.
The question is relative to the ground.
Just look at the value of Bitcoin relative to the US dollar over this year.
Man, people are figuring it out pretty quickly.
You also want to know How the dollar is doing?
Look at gun sales. Gun sales are largely in preparation for shortages.
People say, ah, civil war.
I don't think so.
I think that the gun sales are largely in preparation for shortages.
For rowing gangs of the city dwellers coming out to the country looking for stuff.
And... So, yeah, I think things are not looking good.
I mean, Trump had his positives.
At least he didn't start wars and stuff.
First American in forever.
First American president to not start a war in, like, forever.
But, you know, he was pretty terrible when it came to debt.
I mean, and I don't know what was possible, what is possible in America.
You try and take away the free stuff in America, you get tantrums that blow the mind and burn the cities.
But I mean, the amount of debt that's been taken on under COVID is...
Oh, it's mind-blowing.
I mean, it's like people are getting hand cramps just trying to type all those zeros into these imaginary central banking bank accounts.
And yeah, it's certainly hit the gas towards the closure of this Franken system we've got going on right now.
Yes. So indeed, we need to prepare accordingly.
Can you give me a couple of minutes on, you know, because if we cross-post this, I'm sure my listeners would like to hear.
I mean, I've had a good old jawbone.
I mean, can you give me a couple of minutes on what you would suggest?
It is my style to let my interviewers talk when I have them on my show.
When my first book came out 10 years ago, Survived the Economic Collapse, it was precisely to describe the mechanisms that would Bring any economies, and you exactly mentioned the collapse of the Roman Empire, and there are parallels with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
There are parallels with the collapse of quite a lot of civilizations in the past where, for whatever cultural reason, at some point you refuse to see reality and truth, and you continue to I think?
It enables mechanisms of straining whatever economic base you are building your civilization on into basically a path of collapse which usually you don't come back and it has to go the whole process To a full collapse.
And in my books, of course, I explain historically what do these collapse look like, and it's not pretty.
Like former Yugoslavia, indeed the Soviet Union, which are close to us, which are similar cultures to the Western world.
Of course, Rome was quite a long time ago, but Yugoslavia, it's only 40 years ago, and the Soviet Union the same.
It is very near.
Usually this means a lot of poverty, a lot of crime, a lot of violence, and sometimes it can slip into genocide and other massacres.
Usually it's separation of people.
Usually racial and ethnic lines, which is very brutal and ugly.
It's separation of people on religious lines, and as you mentioned, Christianity, probably the least violent religion in the West today.
It's not the only religion present in the West, and others have been shown to have extreme ease to turn into Christianity.
And we have to be very, very careful to prepare ourselves to, as you mentioned, as I explained in my books, I explained we have seven pillars that are fundamental based on the Maslow needs pyramid.
Of course, you need to be self-sufficient and autonomous as much as possible, even if you live in the city, but it's harder in the city than the countryside, and that autonomy needs to be based on How you get your water, how you get your food, how you get your health, and eventually medicine if you need that, how you get your energy.
Especially in northern countries like mine, Switzerland, like yours in Canada, it can be pretty cold in the winter.
So you want to prepare for that and in some other countries it can be pretty damn hot in the summer.
So you have to think how you can work without air conditioning or without heating or how can you make your own.
It's not simple, not easy.
There's a reason why Not many people were living in the past near Churchill, northern Canada.
And there's a reason why not many people were living in Santa Fe area before air conditioning.
So we may return to some places which are very difficult to be inhabitable.
Unless you prepare for that.
Then there is, of course, after energy is the culture and knowledge, what kind of skills are needed in a world that is more difficult.
Maybe we need less bankers, less insurance salespeople, less...
Social justice warriors, but perhaps more plumbers, more electricians, more people who can repair bicycles, more people who can indeed work on mechanics and electricity production, etc., etc.
These people who have these skills are not in unemployment right now.
In fact, make a good living.
This is why many people, the smart people don't go to university anymore.
They figured out that there is more money and more sustainable jobs into what we used to call manual labor.
And if you have a good skill in the good trades, you can learn on that.
Sixth pillar is defense.
How you can defend yourself, of course, legitimately.
And as you mentioned earlier, legitimate defense is a natural right because you would do it anyways.
At least most people would do it anyways.
So you have to understand how you defend yourself against aggression.
And I share that Non-aggression principle as a philosophy, of course.
I think it's the most natural and wise.
And of course, the last, in no particular importance, but the last in order, is the social network, the social bonds that you create with, first of all, within your families, within your communities, your village, your area where you live, and how you can make sure that this It helps to bring, first of all, mutual help.
When you need something, your friends will help you more than if they are foreigners, or I mean people you don't know, rather.
And of course, all these elements together are the basis upon which you build your self-sustainability, perhaps your resilience, for sure.
And it's a long process.
It's a process of a lifetime.
It's a never-ending process.
It's a lifestyle. It's not just waiting in the bunker with your guns.
This is a completely outdated fiction that the media try to keep alive, but no one is doing that.
People are trying to, I think in America, they call it homesteading.
They try to produce a little bit of their food.
You don't need to produce everything, but a little bit goes a long way.
And having good relationships with your neighbors, and as I said, starting with your family, with your kids, with your in-laws, and having respectful, mutually helping, mutually beneficial relationships.
And this takes years. It's not just something you can buy or you can...
You have to build it slowly and over time.
And I think now is more important than ever because we are reaching the limits of the status-planned economy in a way.
Even if we have a little bit of liberal economy in our world, most of it is planned and regulated and therefore It prevents innovation that could lead us out of this mess, out of overpopulation,
out of resource scarcity, but we are stuck in a way that if it continues and we don't have a lot of time, it will inevitably lead to turmoil, to population drop, and usually this is not super happy and pleasant.
For people involved.
And the West, which was leading the world in innovation, in freedoms, is now unable to do so.
And the rest of the world is not exactly super friendly.
I've worked all over the world, in Africa, in Asia.
It's not exactly with the same philosophies of...
Inclusion and tolerance and non-violence, on the contrary.
Oh, this outgroup preference in the West is very particular to the West.
You go elsewhere in the world, they have no idea what you're talking about.
Exactly. So perhaps, yeah, we need...
And I recently wrote a novel, my first novel, on my grandfather's experience during World War II. In fact, I believe he was in a prison camp very near where...
I think your grandmother in Dresden, just when the Dresden bombing happened.
And I remember the stories he was telling me, which I recounted in that book.
And only 75 or 80 years ago, even in Europe, it was super brutal.
And we have forgotten all of that.
And now it's just some sort of moralizing Indonesian sense of We used that as a tool to make people shy and feel guilty.
But the reality was very brutal and we have forgotten.
And that reality could come back in a second, very fast.
And we have to wake up in the West because otherwise it doesn't mean that we have to be Brutal doesn't mean we have to be As closed or narrow-minded are religiously bigots, we have enough of communist bigots anyway, we don't need that.
We need to actually think of what it means to be self-reliant, what it means to take responsibility of our lives and not depending on the state.
All of this is a long process and this is why philosophy, and this is why I think your show is important, this is why I encourage our viewers to To subscribe, to go into archaeology and listen to your videos from many years ago and come back, and by themes, it's very important.
As you said, you and I are just mere messages and thinkers, but the work that we try to awaken into people, the call to action, rather, That is what I think is important, is getting people to think, getting people to think by themselves, getting them to act and take responsibility.
Our world is dying for people not taking responsibility of themselves, and it's going to cost us very, very dearly, and it's going to cost humanity very dearly, because take away the West, you come back 10,000 years or 3,000 years in terms of philosophy and reason.
We can enter darkness that can last for centuries, if not millennia, if we disappear.
Or so I think, at least.
Right, right. Yeah, and we certainly want the smartest and most able people.
I mean, I want everyone to do well, but if you have to choose, right, you certainly want the smartest and most able people to have the most advantage because for a long time, for a very long time, we've been very much disadvantaged and discriminated against.
You know, the discrimination against the intelligent people is something that's...
A bigotry that's not really talked about a lot, but I think it kind of should be, because it's pretty harsh having your eyes open in the modern world.
There's a dangerous mob out there.
It is. You and I, in different contexts, have been mobbed by that, by the media, by militants, whatever you call them.
And it can be very unpleasant.
It can be dangerous as well, physically dangerous.
I'm lucky to live in Switzerland, where We have laws and a culture that enables pretty peaceful dealings within people, but when you get slandered in the media, while it may be non-violent in a physical way, it is violent in a psychological way on your family, and they know that and they use that on purpose.
So, you know, as Nietzsche said, sometimes you have to take your hand out.
Sometimes you have to be nice and kind and explain things as you do, but sometimes you have to be firm.
My books are usually for people who read them in a lecture shop.
They are facing the kind of violence, or at least this description of violence that I explained when I've been in Rwanda, I've been in South Africa, I've been in those places.
I've seen how it has evolved over time.
I've worked in Zimbabwe, for example.
And yeah, it's not pretty when it happens to you.
It's not pretty when they burn your farm or your house.
And that's a good case scenario when you actually survive your new family.
But I tell you the things that can happen when the world turns against you and when it becomes legitimized to attack you for whatever reason.
Mob mentality can be the most dangerous thing in the world.
Forget atom bombs or virus.
When you have 200 people trying to burn down your house because someone has told them that you're evil, well, you're evil.
That's going to be a difficult moment for you.
So, yeah, we need to awaken people and I think philosophy is fundamental to understand how you live your lives and you do, as I said, an amazing job and I think people should go on free domain and I think support you financially as I did for all these years.
Of course, it's a small support, but It enables you to do your show and people should buy the books of people who are helping to awaken.
So buy my books, please, if you listen to me.
They are available everywhere.
But besides that shameless plugging of our business, we need to continue to do it in the marketplace of ideas if people like it.
They will share it, and I'm sure people who listen to us will share this show and others.
And if you don't like it, well, don't share it and don't buy it.
But this is how ideas grow, and that's why censorship is pure evil.
It's really terrible because it prevents ideas who can help people, including the censors, to actually survive and do well, whereas if you close yourself, well, then You are in Rome discussing the, or actually in Byzantium discussing the sex of angels when actually the enemy is at the gates and it's too late.
So, yeah.
Well, I appreciate that. So for my listeners, where can they get a hold of your work?
Well, for whoever is French, actually I do have videos on my YouTube channel on, actually we are in English, but most are in French.
However, my books are, all of them translated into English and you can find them on Amazon and other, and preferably small libraries if you can.
If they're still alive and open, please make small businesses, keep small businesses alive.
They keep your community alive.
Otherwise, my website is piero.com and it's also in English.
That's P-I-E-R-O dot com.
All right. Well, listen, I really, really appreciate the call today.
I hope we can do it again and thank you so much for your time.
With pleasure. All right.
Take care. Have a great evening.
Have a great evening.
Bye-bye.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
To help out the show, to give me the resources that I need to bring more and better philosophy to an increasingly desperate world.
So thank you so much for your support, my friends.
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