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Aug. 9, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:41
Wouldn't You Rather Be Stupid?
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Time Text
Ah, look. People are coming in.
Hello, Jag. Hello, Jacob.
Hello, S. Hello, Dogmites.
Hello, Joshua. How are you guys doing tonight?
How are you guys doing today? In fact, is the audio coming through OKE, all righty?
And I'm trying to recall now.
I'm sorry. I should have checked this ahead of time.
I'm trying to recall how it is that I get you to speak, if you want to speak.
Ah, okay. Yeah, so just give me a, I don't know, do you raise your hand or something?
Let me know if there's something that you want to talk about.
So what I want to talk about is the big lie, my friends.
That's what I want to talk about.
The big ass lie.
The Big Lie. There is something that happens, of course, in the world where there is this sense, and this is straight out of the sort of Nazi handbook and out of the Communist handbook, the Fascist handbook and so on, all the totalitarian handbooks, they deal with this thing called the Big Lie.
Now the Big Lie is gargantuan.
Now let me know if you've ever Been subject to someone who's doing the big lie.
Who's running the big lie on you.
Big lie is crazy. So think of Bernie Madoff, right?
Bernie Madoff was running for like 20-25 years, running this giant Ponzi scheme, I guess the late Bernie Madoff.
And there was some semi-autistic mathematical genius who kept pointing out, it's absolutely impossible!
For Bernie Madoff to get these kinds of returns on a consistent basis, no matter whether the market is doing well, whether the market is doing badly.
It's just not possible.
It can't be done. So you all got to look into it.
And he kept firing off letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And people looked at it and they were close.
But there was this sense of the big lie, which is, come on, come on.
This guy is like head of the industry organization.
He's been in business 20, 25 years.
What is it? Kevin Bacon and John Malkovich and a whole bunch of other people are invested.
He's big. He's famous.
He's everywhere. He talks at conferences.
And the idea that it could all be a Ponzi scheme was just kind of incomprehensible.
The bigger the lie...
I mean, it's audacious in a wild way when you think about it.
But the bigger the lie, the harder it is to discredit.
Now, I have someone in my life Years ago, many years ago now, thankfully, many years ago, I had someone in my life.
They were there by choice. I'm not going to blame them.
I'm going to blame myself and those around me who didn't wise me up to these things.
You know, we can't really be objective when it comes to romance and family, right?
Romance and family, we can't really be objective.
This is why we need our friends to help us out with these kinds of things.
But here's the...
Fact of the matter that occurred back in the day with this person who was in my life.
Oh, by God, she was a bit of a superior nag.
Oh. I mean, all of the worst cliched aspects of negative MGTOW-inducing, monk mode, exacerbating femininity, she had in spades, which was, there's something kind of, you need to fix yourself.
You know, you had a bad childhood, you need to, you do things wrong, you need to approach things differently, you need to be wise like me, you need to be better like me, you need to be smart like me, you need to be just, you need to elevate yourself to my lofty standards, and only then, and only then, will I give you my approval, right? And, you know, this went on for, oh God, an embarrassingly long time.
Oh, man! It was horrendous.
An embarrassingly long time where I really felt like I just had to improve.
I had to improve.
And if only I improved, I would be able to meet her on her lofty Mount Everest summit of perfection.
Oh, and that's really seductive.
Having the... Endless vertical treadmill of continuous improvement is really tempting.
And not feeling good enough, not feeling competent enough, not feeling mature enough.
It's really easy to chase...
What do they call it?
The questing beast, right?
This beast that you follow and you never catch.
This perfection, this self-improvement.
It's really easy to get sucked into following that kind of stuff, man.
Oh... Now, it has a downside, obviously, which is you never really end up feeling secure about anything, but it has an upside in that you genuinely do work to improve yourself, and that can have some real benefits in the world.
So, you know, looking back all these decades later, it was something that helped me improve, but because it was a moving goalpost and because...
I was always chasing an approval that gave someone power over me by withholding that approval, right?
So, if you've got power junkies in your life, and most human beings are just base mammal power junkies, if you've got power junkies in your life, then what'll happen is, by withholding approval, by withholding some positive from you, they get you to chase after whatever they are withholding, and it's really tempting to do that, and you end up...
Because the only power they have over you is the withholding of approval, then they'll never grant that approval, ever.
They'll never grant that approval because that's the power they have over you.
It's really tempting. So in hindsight, it was like, okay, that was a rough passage for quite a while, but it gave me a great incentive to improve.
So, here's the reason I'm talking about this particular passage in my life.
I think most of us have gone through this in one way or another.
The reason I'm talking about this particular passage in my life is because there was a big lie.
Now, when I met this person, I was, you know, a broadcast student living on ramen noodles.
I actually had a tiny apartment, probably no more than 300 square feet, in the basement of...
Oh my God, it was gruesome.
In the basement of...
An apartment building. And I had like one window that faced basically a mine shaft.
And I slept on a futon on the ground and I got my table from the garbage.
My table and chairs.
They're all a bunch of mismatch. You know, the stuff where people are like, well, this is too gross to even be in our garden.
No problem. It can be my formal dining wear.
So I was living.
And that's where we sort of started.
That's where I started. Now, you know, by the end of all of this, by the end of this time I knew this person, I was the chief technical officer of my own software company.
So, you know, let's just say I had traversed a certain amount of time and distance.
And now, to the credit of this person, Part of that improvement was, you know, just me moving along in life and part of my improvement was based upon her dissatisfaction with my life and me and so on.
Anyway, so, after a certain amount of time of knowing this person and chasing her approval and so on...
Oh, man, I don't know how much detail you want.
How much detail? Oh, what the heck, we've got some time, let's do some detail.
So, what happened was...
I've always loved live music.
Live music, oh, it's ambrosia to me.
I'm always fascinated by live music.
I'm interested in live music.
The musician's strength and power, particularly can the singer do what they do in the...
In live what they do in the studio, right?
Can they do live what they do in the studio?
Of course, if you want that from a singer, you've got to catch them early in the tour before they slowly wear out their voice.
I remember... Phil Collins, back in the day, he only ever faxed his children when he was on tour.
He couldn't even talk to them on the phone because he had to rest his voice that much because he really pounded it out when it came to vocals.
And, you know, you see Freddie early on, Freddie Mercury early on in the tour, it's pretty good.
You see him later on in the tour, it's like he's cheating all over the place.
Well, I mean, also, he smoked like a chimney, and that's not...
And a lot of smokers, a lot of singers smoke, which has kind of been comprehensible to me.
So I love him. I remember going to see Colin James many years ago.
He was a great guy to see live, by the way.
Great, great artist. And he's got this song I think he wrote with Elvis Costello called You and Who's Army.
And it's really high and you can hear him straining a little bit for the notes.
And I remember the drummer saying at the end of the song, it's like, oh yeah, everybody forgets the road.
It's like, oh, this is all great fun in the studio and everyone forgets hitting those notes on the road.
I remember that being quite illustrative and quite funny.
Anyway... So, this is back long before the internet and so on, and what happened was I happened to find, in a very remote location, a VHS, oh, ask your parents, I suppose, a VHS copy of Queen Live, I think it was in 1981, in Montreal.
Now, one of my favorite songs in the whole wide world is the Aretha Franklin-inspired Freddie Mercury composition called Somebody to Love.
And I played the tape and I was watching it with this woman and what's amazing is that every different introduction to somebody to love live, Freddie did like a scat thing, he did something different each time and some of it's just absolutely glorious.
So I was watching this and I was just absolutely fascinated by this live performance of a song.
I never really imagined that they did it live because it's a compact, multi-layered choral masterpiece.
Anyway, so I'm watching this and really trying to listen to what Freddie's doing and just amazed that it's all happening.
And it... You know, there's a certain time in life you kind of give up.
I wrote about this in one of my novels.
You kind of give up trying to find new music, and you just find cool live versions of old music.
That's sort of a tipping point.
Now, fortunately, when you become kids, my daughter's got really good taste in music, and she's introduced me to Fauzia, to Sabrina Carpenter, to...
Oh, I don't know, the woman who does Thumbs.
Oh, is that Sabrina Carpenter? Anyway, so she's introduced me to a whole bunch of new music, which I'm really quite enjoying and quite like.
Faouzia sounds like some glorious-voiced Middle Eastern half-goat lamenting session, which is really quite something.
It should be cool to see live.
And whoever sings that When Did You Fall Out of Love With Me, that song.
Anyway, really, really nice stuff.
So, I'm trying to watch this video, and this girl just keeps interrupting me, keeps asking me questions, something kind of irrelevant.
And I don't know... I don't know what happened.
What strange alchemy?
You ever have this where just wires get put together in your mind that you didn't even know existed?
And just illuminate your entire life.
Just out of nowhere. Just boom!
Circuit is complete.
Boom! On go the stadium lights.
And you can hold your hand up and see your veins and your bone and your blood.
Copsicles moving through your arteries and your life.
It's just like... You zoom out.
It's the zoom out. I talked about this when I was ill.
It's the zoom out.
It's the zoom out. And the zoom out for me...
Was this woman I knew was working as a receptionist.
As a receptionist.
And I had this wild zoom out where I just realized instantaneously that she was completely full of crap.
That she didn't know how to live.
That she withheld her approval of me because it gave her power over me.
That she wasn't that interested in my improvement.
That she wasn't some lofty mentor who was going to pull me up to the upper middle class or wherever the heck she thought I should be.
And I was like, and I turned to her and I said, you know, pause the movie.
Pause the movie. Pause the concert.
All right. You know, I don't know what happened.
I think it was to do with seeing excellence in Freddie Mercury, an incredible stage performer, an incredible singer.
Seeing excellence, yearning after excellence, manifesting excellence in my own life, in that I had become the chief technical officer of my own software company that I co-founded, and was doing really well in the business world.
So I had achieved excellence, you know, to a large degree beyond my dreams.
And I said, you know, when we first met, I was broke.
Now, I'm a successful entrepreneur.
Now, when we first met, you weren't broke.
She came from a fairly wealthy family.
But you're now a receptionist, years later.
So if we look at these two trajectories, I guess I just have one basic question.
Who the hell are you, lady, to tell me About improvement.
Who are you to tell me about excellence?
Who are you to hold the highest standard to me?
When I started off lower than you were years ago, but I've ended up far higher in terms of professional success and life success.
I've ended up far higher than you are.
Who the hell are you to judge me as wanting?
To judge me as lacking?
When frankly I'm doing fantastically and you're not doing much of anything at all.
And that was sort of the first wire.
The second wire was I realized that people who withhold their approval from you always end up paralyzed themselves.
So you can break out of somebody withholding their approval from you.
You just have to wait for these wires or pursue these wires or grab these wires and jam them together among a style so that they light up your world.
You can escape other people's disapproval.
But people who use disapproval as a weapon against others Get completely paralyzed in their own lives.
Now, people who are enthusiastic towards the possibilities of others can do amazing things with their own life.
But I realized that the power that she had over me, in terms of disapproving of me, of finding me wanting or lacking, was exactly why she was paralyzed in her own life.
Because she couldn't be enthusiastic for me or even accept my success when she first saw my first office.
The first office I'd ever had.
That was my own. She looked out the window and she said, well, that's a nice view of the parking lot.
Which was, I guess, a bit of a clue.
This was shortly before this sort of wake-up call that I had.
So that was a big lie.
It was a big lie that she knew how to live, I didn't know how to live, she was wise, I was foolish, she was advanced, I was basic, and she just needed for me to, you know, trundle along and become as great as she was, as wise and smart and sensible as she was.
That was a big lie. And it was so big that it took me a long time, rather an embarrassing long, long time to sort that one out.
And I said to myself, I'm never, ever going to be that in my life.
Now, this is long before I became any kind of public figure.
I'm never going to be that in my life.
I'm never going to be somebody who is lofty and superior.
And I will say this in my call-in shows, and I'll say it now again, too.
I'm struggling with the same things that you are.
I am not some floating-ass guru on a high mountain above the cloud, tossing down bags of wisdom from my lofty perch.
Nothing like that.
I'm struggling with the same things that you guys are.
And I'm not speaking from any particular place of wisdom or perfection or God knows anything like that.
so... To remember that we're all down in the trenches trying to figure out how to survive a collapsing world is kind of important.
So that's the big lie.
That's the big lie. So the reason why, you know, the big lie is in the world, you know, oh, we need the state.
It's like, without slavery, it would be the free market.
You know, the people embedded in the conception of slavery were like, well, come on, how is the cotton going to get picked without the slaves?
How are the vegetables and fruits going to get picked?
How's the food going to be planted and harvested without the slaves?
Without the slaves we'll all starve and die!
And it's all nonsense.
Dangerous, pathetic nonsense.
But the big lie, oh, we need the state, that diversity and multiculturalism are always and forever a value, that, you know, growing anti-white rhetoric is not racist, you know, all of these big lies that are going on in the world.
Lockdowns always work and there's no possible better way of handling the pandemic.
All of these big lies.
So I'll tell you why I think people, and then I'll sort of get your questions and comments and criticisms and arguments and Put downs and trawling, whatever you feel like doing, it's an open forum here.
So people... The big lie is absolutely terrifying for people to examine.
The big lie is about the most terrifying in the world for people to examine.
Because the bigger the lie, the more they're enslaved.
The bigger the lie, the more we're enslaved.
We can't really be held down by force, because there's just too many of us.
But we can be held down by lies.
And the bigger the lie, the bigger the subjugation, the more enslaved we are.
And people don't really want to wake up in the morning and feel like livestock to their owners, right?
Livestock to their owners.
And that's pretty wild, right?
To wake up and say, well, I thought I was free, I thought I was patriotic, I thought I lived in the country, and it turns out I'm just a tax livestock to be disposed of as my masters see fit based upon their relatively short-term self-interest.
People really, really, really don't want to learn the truth about human condition in the slave pens of modern countries.
And the big lie reveals to them that They're not subjugated by their rulers.
And I'm sure you're all pretty aware of this, but I sort of want to mention it kind of clearly.
We're not subjugated by our rulers.
Because if you disagree with a general social narrative, for the most part, I mean, it's not like cops are going to kick down your door or whatever, right?
But what happens is, if you disagree with a general social narrative...
Mostly you'll be ostracized by people who claim to love you.
Mostly you'll be ostracized, attacked, undermined, ignored, cut off from the people who say that they love you.
I was talking to a listener recently His sister posted some Black Lives Matter thing on social media, and he posted the quote from Biden that says, well, if you don't vote Democrat, you just ain't black, which is obviously totally racist.
And she just cut him off.
Like, how could you? You've got to apologize.
He wouldn't apologize for accurately quoting Joe Biden.
And they were done.
Just done. Like that.
Like that. Don't agree with the narrative.
I mean, the vax versus the un-vax these days.
Birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, what are people going to do?
What are people going to do?
So, the bigger the lie, the greater the subjugation.
People don't want to know how much they're subjugated because...
I mean, there's a rational aspect to it, of course.
There's a sensible, rational aspect to it, which is, do I really want to know if I'm enslaved if I can't change it?
Isn't ignorance bliss in this kind of way?
Do I really want to know? Do I really want to know?
If I'm enslaved? If I can't change it?
Come on. Let's be honest.
We free souls awake to our chains.
Let's be honest. Come on.
You know and I know.
There are times when if you could take that awake part of your brain Rip it out of your nose with a spork.
Throw it into a blender and scatter it to the stratosphere and go back to the regular normie NPC. Trudge along to the regular drum beat off the cliff of the mainstream media.
Wouldn't you do it? Wouldn't you just be tempted to do it?
Out, out, vile jelly!
That was something, when I played Gloucester in King Lear, in theatre school, that was a line I had when I was gouging out someone's eyes with my cane.
Got to play a really bad guy.
I got to play, actually, most of my Shakespearean roles I played really bad guys.
I played Macbeth, I played Gloucester, a couple other people.
Just the baddies. The baddies.
So... If you could undo all the knowledge that you have gained about the truth and reality of this world, I'm not saying you would at all times and under all circumstances, but there are occasionally times when you're scrolling through the mainstream media and you're like, God, I wish I could believe all this stuff.
Wouldn't it be so much easier? Wouldn't life be so much easier if I could just...
Squeeze out the black pill, the red pill, through my armpit and just go straight back to empty-headed normie land.
Wouldn't that just be the nicest thing in the world?
I mean, so little struggle, so little problems, so, you know, everybody likes you, everyone gets along, you never get deplatformed, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
So I think that what happens, of course, is that people end up really afraid deep down of how much they are enslaved.
And then... They don't want to know the facts.
And therefore they will avoid the big lie.
Because the big lie is the wire that illuminates their life as a cage.
And that's not what people want to do.
Alright, that's my brief intro.
I'm so sorry. Again, it's been some months since I used this app.
Some people have a signal next to them.
Some people have a sign next to them.
I'm going to just invite people to speak who have that next to them.
And if you don't want to speak, you don't have to.
But if you want to, I am all ears.
Let's make this a two-way street and take it from there.
And don't forget, is it tomorrow night?
It's Tuesday today, right? Yeah, tomorrow night, 7 p.m.
Eastern Standard, I will be doing my live stream and we'll do audio this time as well.
So you can ask me in.
We can voice talk.
Voice chat. Voicey voice chat.
Oh, here we go. Here we go.
I think somebody got a hand raised.
Is that a hand raised or are you just giving me the finger?
That is a fine question.
Hello. How you doing?
I'm doing great. How are you?
I'm well, thank you. Wow, you got some background noise.
Are you currently fixing the bowels of the Titanic?
Yeah, a little bit.
I'm just at work right now.
Is it too bad?
No, no, go for it, go for it.
I just wanted to say thank you for everything you do with Peaceful Parenting.
You've been a great inspiration for myself.
I've been parenting my daughter along the lines of Peaceful Parenting for a little while now since I started listening to you and I just wanted to say thanks.
You're very welcome. Did you get into Peaceful Parenting before she was born or when she was little?
I started listening to you right around the time when she was born, which was about three years ago.
She's three now, almost four. So basically, since she's been born, I've been parenting pretty much like you said.
So I'm very much looking forward to your Peaceful Parenting book that you were working on.
I can't wait to read that, actually.
I just wanted to say thanks.
You're very welcome, and I'm very glad that you didn't have to do the brutal 180 that some people have had to do when they've gotten into peaceful parenting after they've had their kids.
Oh, I'm so sorry. Can you just mute yourself?
I feel like I'm at a dentist's office.
Sorry about that. Yeah, sorry.
I'm just at work. But yeah, no, I just want to say thanks, and...
I really like this subject when you talk about the big lie because, you know, I've read the Gulag Archipelago and one of the big things Solzhenitsyn talks about in there is that everyone lies.
The whole thing, the whole system is just based on lies and no one told the truth.
And everyone's conscious of those lies, right?
He says, they're lying.
We know they're lying. They know we know they're lying, and yet still they lie.
It just becomes a completely compulsive addiction to just falsify absolutely everything.
And the fact that you work with your hands, it sounds like, is probably a good thing for philosophy.
No one should claim to be a philosopher who hasn't spent a good deal of time working with their hands, because otherwise it's way too easy to float away like a helium balloon into the Yeah, so you can't manipulate anything.
You can't will anything.
You can't bully. You can't frighten reality.
You have to just manipulate it for real.
And yeah, that's good. That's a very good grounding for the world as it is and a very good grounding for philosophy as a whole.
Are you going to have more kids?
Are you planning on that? I'm going through a pretty nasty divorce.
You and I actually spoke a little bit about this a few months ago on DLive.
Just a brief little chat thing.
She's crazy.
I'm sorry about that.
Like you said, You know, love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
So now I'm looking for virtue in a virtue-less world, so it's kind of tough.
Well, not virtue-less, but virtue-scant.
Yeah, I should say that.
Yeah. Well, listen, best of luck.
If there's anything I can do to help, just let me know.
And, yeah, best of luck.
If the ex is crazy, best of luck keeping the kid close so that it doesn't pass generationally.
I do my best. It sounds silly, but that peaceful parenting helps a lot, actually.
Because I want her to grow up like your daughter.
She sounds lovely.
like the relationship you have with your daughter is honestly what I what I aim for you know because you know there's real love there with you guys and that's that's perfect thank you She actually does talk quite a bit about her...
She's inherited a kind of British reserve.
Which is, and I'm so sorry, Jim, just mind if I have to ask you to mute your, or, yeah, thanks.
Yeah, she's got all this British reserve, so she actually hates to show any kind of affection, but it's all very evident in what she does, and she's got this funny new habit at the moment, it's been going on for a month or two, where she will, she trawls her parents, right?
So, if I say, I don't know, where's my headset?
She will say, oh yeah, mom decided to get back at you by hiding the headset.
I saw her do it and then she told me and left.
I mean, obvious trolling stuff, but it's very funny actually.
It's a really quite enjoyable habit that she's got going on there.
Alright, we've got somebody else.
Heightsy? You wanted to bring yourself into the convo, my friend?
I'm all ears. Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, yeah. How you doing, man? I'm doing just great.
I'm walking the dog. Good, good to know.
What can I do for you?
I wanted to ask you about your most basic rule.
Do not initiate violence.
And I wanted to ask you about how far does defensive violence go?
Like, can you obviously defend your daughter and then your niece?
Maybe a stranger? And how long afterwards does that work?
Like, if somebody did something really bad, then at some point they need to be stopped.
But how far backwards does that go?
Right. Do you need any help with the dog?
Is this an immediate situation for you or are you mostly safe?
I'm mostly safe.
Okay, okay. That's your major question, right?
I can give you an answer, but I'm just not going to hold the phone up at the moment if that's all right.
So I'll give you the thoughts that I have on it.
You know, this is not any kind of conclusive thing.
So the thing for me is that philosophy obviously is not physics, right?
Philosophy is a series of arguments designed to make sure that...
A, your mind is full of ideas that align with reason, evidence, and reality.
And that's A, right?
So consistency in the mind followed by consistency between the mind and your actions in the world, right?
So if you have reason in your thinking, then you can have consistency in your ideas.
I'm sorry, do you mind if I just ask you to mute while you doggy barks?
Not that I dislike the dog, but it's a little distracting.
Just keep going. Just keep going.
Alright. I think I've got to do something here then.
Hold on a sec. How do we do that?
How do we do that? That's interesting.
I don't know if you have to mute or not.
I'll just see if I can.
I've already done some distance.
Yeah, at the bottom right there's a microphone.
I got it. So, you want philosophy to organize the thoughts in your mind so that they're consistent, and then, once your thoughts are consistent, you want to start comparing your actions with your thoughts to make sure that your actions are consistent with your thoughts, to the degree that it's safe to do that.
So, here's the thing.
With regards to self-defense, Then, the non-initiation of the use of force means, take a simple example, if somebody's running at you with an axe, you can use deadly force to protect yourself, because they're showing every indication that they wish to kill you or do you grievous bodily harm, and you have the right to act as aggressively and decisively as possible until the threat is imminent.
Eliminate it. Now, of course, everybody has this fantasy, oh, you just shoot at the legs and disable the person.
It's like, no, that's...
I mean, you can, but that's a pretty risky strategy.
I mean, you've got to aim for the center mass, right, which is where you're most likely to stop the person.
Aiming at the center mass means sort of chest and abdomen, which means that you are not likely to leave them in a very lively state at the end of the interaction.
So... No, no, I'm just giving the background.
Hang on, hang on. Be patient.
I'm just giving the background for everyone who's not familiar with the stuff.
So I'm aware of that, right?
So how do these rules get implemented in a free society, right?
Now, if we say, well, how do they get implemented in a status society?
That's not really... You can't answer that.
Because whatever you and I agree is the right way for self-defense to be handled in the law...
By the time the politicians and the special interest groups and the lawyers and the activists and everyone get through with our great idea, it will be completely unrecognizable from its...
It's like The Hobbit, you know? Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, which is virtually unrecognizable from the book itself.
And he's just one guy, you know, trying to milk a franchise.
So... So, the first thing I want to say is, we can have great ideas about how it should be implemented.
What we don't want to do is then say, therefore we're going to turn these great ideas over to the government.
And when we turn these great ideas over to the government, I'm sure the government will implement our great ideas in a wonderful way.
That will never happen. That will never, ever, ever happen.
So, what we want to do is say, okay, how can we get great ideas implemented in society?
And of course, the only way to do it is not as voters, but as customers.
As customers. So, in a free society, a stateless society, I call them DROs, some people call them DROs, dispute resolution organizations, which is disputes that we can't resolve privately will always occur in society.
I don't think they'll be as common as people think, and they're certainly not as common as they would be in now, like in America, like, what is it, 15 million lawsuits are launched every single year, and...
80% of them against wealthy people.
So it's just kind of like a shakedown and all of that stuff for the most part.
So the great ideas we'll talk about in a sec, but I really just want to mention the implementation.
So if we have great ideas and we have these dispute resolution organizations working to help us deal with disputes in a way that is peaceful and just and fair, Then that's the best chance for our great ideas to actually be implemented in the world as a whole.
And of course, if we have a really fantastic idea and there's these competing agencies that cooperate with each other in the same way that cell phone companies compete with each other, but also cooperate with each other, right?
ISPs compete with each other, but also cooperate with each other to shend information all over the place.
And, you know, you can go to Australia and you can use your cell phone plan for a certain amount of money.
So there's, it's coopetition, it's called, so there's competition but cooperation as well.
So, I mean, think of different companies that build railway lines.
They compete with each other, but they also have to cooperate with each other in that they have to build the railway lines with the same gauge to make sure the trains can go across where they need.
So, just before we get into, like, what's a good idea about these things, recognize that...
If you're in a free society, there will be one of two options.
Either A, a company will provide the good idea to you and then cooperate with other companies to make sure that it happens.
Or, if you have a really great idea about how to deal with self-defense and no company offers it, then you can...
Start your own company and offer this great idea.
And if it is a great idea, people will recognize it.
And then you will be successful in that space.
I just want to sort of mention that. Because this thing that happens, it's really tragic in the political realm.
Because what people do is they say, I've got this great idea.
And then they write about this great idea and they do speeches about this great idea.
They make videos. They might travel around.
They might convince people of this great idea.
And then, let's say, it gains some popular groundswell.
Then what happens is this great idea goes through the political machinery.
And what is that old... Quote from Bismarck in the 1880s in Germany.
He said, there's two things that you never want to see getting made.
Sausages and laws, right?
Because it's just...
And you can see all of this stuff that goes on with these 2,000-page bills with all of the earmarks and pork and crap.
And, you know, you get 13 minutes to read it before you have to vote on that.
And all you do is skim through and make sure that your pork is in there.
And there's even Ron Paul, a very staunch, minarchist guy, made sure that his home district got its pork and all that.
It's just the way that things are.
So if you've got a great idea and you turn it over to the government, you're taking a vegan meal and turning it over to a sausage maker and it's going to be unpalatable and intolerable and unrecognizable when it's all done with it.
So let's talk about a free society.
So what do you want as a customer when it comes to self-defense?
When it comes to self-defense?
Well, you want an objective standard by which you can measure the legitimacy of the self-defense.
So the objective standard tends to be when somebody lays a hand on you in violence, you can then use force to protect yourself until the threat is neutralized, right?
And so the way that it generally works, this is according to a conversation I had with the bouncer years ago, the way it generally works in society is that if you're in a bar, you know, somebody can be yelling at you and calling you names, but you can't use any force against them because...
They're not laying a hand on you, and sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
That has been completely reversed in the modern woke world, where now violence is just protesting, but apparently words are nuclear weapons, so words are weapons, sharpen the knives.
Makes you wonder how the other half dies.
It's a great song. Anyway, so if somebody is simply yelling at you or calling you names, that's not an assault upon you.
Because no physical part of you is being harmed.
And of course, you can back and move away.
Now, if somebody corners you and advances upon you, and you tell them to back off, until they lay a hand on you, You can't use force against them.
Once they lay a hand on you in anger or with obvious intent to do harm, then you are justified in using whatever force is necessary to prevent them from harming you.
Now, the reason why this is valid morally is you're not gaining anything.
You're simply restoring yourself To a whole state, right?
So if somebody steals your bike and then you go and steal it back, all you're doing is you're restoring the bike to its proper owner.
You haven't actually gained anything.
In fact, you've lost the annoyance and time and possible stress of getting your bike back.
So you're not gaining anything.
So it's not like there's going to be this epidemic of stealing your bike back because people don't want to get their bike stolen in the first place.
So you don't have to worry about...
Some sort of escalation of these things.
If you look at California, where they basically made theft under $900 a non-issue, they basically said we're not going to prosecute them.
So, of course, people are just wandering into stores, taking what they want.
The stores are closing down. The next thing they'll do is complain about retail deserts in bad neighborhoods.
And just remember, it is not poverty that drives crime.
This study has been done repeatedly.
It is not poverty that drives crime.
It is crime that makes a neighborhood poor by driving out business and investment and all that.
So it's an important thing to remember. So self-defense is simply restoring yourself back to the state that you were in before the attack or the assault, and that's perfectly fair, perfectly valid.
It's like if you're driving, as I used to drive up north when I worked up north, and there's a tree falling across the road, you get up and you move the tree, right?
You're not doing anything other than restoring your ability to go in the direction that you were going, and that's, you know, perfectly fine.
Now, as far as third-party self-defense, well, sure.
So, self-defense is a universal right.
Which means that you can defend other people on their behalf.
And in fact, you really need that.
It's not just logically justified, but you need that as a whole because there are many people in the world who are either unwilling or frankly unable to defend themselves.
So I remember many years ago when I used to live in downtown Toronto.
I was sitting in a cafe doing some writing and I looked up and there was this big guy who was threatening a woman in a wheelchair.
And he was leaning over her.
You could see him, you know, he was grabbing the handles of her wheelchair and he was shaking them.
So I, of course, got up, jumped over the railing and told him to back off and step back and leave her alone.
Because, you know, I don't care what's going on.
You don't lean over and threaten and grab and shake somebody anywhere, let alone in a wheelchair.
And he did, to his credit, you know, back off.
And then the woman... I took the woman for something to eat and got her story and then she hit me up for money, which was, you know, I guess kind of understandable.
She was in a wheelchair and obviously was on hard times.
So I was performing an act of self-defense on her behalf that she couldn't perform because she was in a wheelchair and obviously unarmed, right?
I mean, and so on, right?
So yeah, it's a universal.
So property rights are universal, which means that if you see someone grab a woman's purse and he runs away, you can trip him, you can take him down to get her purse back.
Because it's a universal principle, it doesn't matter who enacts it, fundamentally.
Like, I mean, if you say the gravity is universal, then it applies to everyone at all times, under all circumstances, right?
So a universal principle is not specific to an individual.
A universal principle is self-defense is valid and therefore defending somebody else's self is perfectly valid.
Property rights are valid and therefore returning somebody else's stolen property or retrieving somebody else's stolen property is perfectly valid.
So the universality means it's not specific to an individual and of course you would need that because In a free society, you would need security guards, you would need police, you would need a military of some kind for foreign threats or other continent threats or something like that.
And so you would have to have the principle of universality when it came to self-defense.
So yes, you can definitely act on behalf of others to enforce their rights.
And as to how long afterwards...
Can you reasonably act in self-defense?
So, to take two extreme examples, let's say someone comes rushing at you with a weapon and you shoot them and they die.
Well, that's self-defense and you would need investigation, but for sure that would be...
Now, let's say, though, that you run away or you escape, which is perfectly fine, right?
And then, three days later, you see the guy...
Asleep on a park bench and you shoot him?
Well, clearly, that's not self-defense anymore because he does not pose an imminent threat to you in the moment.
Now, here's the problem, right?
And I can hear everyone's machinery working, and it's totally fine that you do this, but I can hear everyone's machinery working in my own brain, because my own brain works this way as well, which is...
I never worked as a security guard, but I took the training, and I remember in the training, Trying to find...
It's the devil in the gaps, right?
Can you find a situation where it's ambiguous as to whether self-defense is justified, right?
And that's... You know, like that red dress, blue dress thing that was floating around on the internet a couple of years ago.
Or, you know, everybody knows there's a color black.
Everybody knows there's a color white.
And then at some point there's a gray that's indeterminate between the two.
So the fact that you can find a color that's, you know, some people will say is whitish, some people will say is blackish, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as black and white.
It just means that you found an ambiguous or ambivalent situation.
And, you know, you can see this as well.
Like, I mean, when it comes to somebody steals your bike, and then they've had it, they've sold it to three different people, and it's been 10 years, can you get your bike back?
I mean, you can come up with situations, extremely rare situations, where there's a certain amount of ambivalence, and I don't care.
I don't care. I know that's not an argument, I'm just telling you.
And this would be my answer.
So when I took my training to be a security guard, they said, you know, if you're downstairs in a building, you're the security guard in a building and someone buzzes and you hear it's some ex-boyfriend that the woman says, I don't want him to come up, then you have to stop the guy coming up, right?
And of course, what I did was I said, well, what if she says coming up, but then she changes her mind between...
The guy getting into the building and the guy coming to her door and the guy just looked at me like, yeah, okay, whatever, right, that's never going to happen or whatever, just deal with it intelligently when it comes and I'm not going to give you some kind of rule for something that's wildly improbable that you can just think flexibly about when the situation occurs.
So this god of the gaps, or this devil of the gaps really, shows up all the time when it comes to morals, right?
Which is, you know, what if you think a guy is going to shoot you, but it's a plastic gun, it's Halloween, and he's out there pretending to be a bad guy, and whatever, he was just showing someone his...
You know, you can come up with some situation...
Wherein you could make a decent case that you might be liable for shooting someone even though you may have believed it was in self-defense or whatever it is.
Or let's say that the guy is running towards you but he's actually being chased by someone and it looks like he's running towards you but he's being chased by someone.
He pulls out a weapon because he's afraid and you shoot him because he thinks he's going to...
So you can always come up with some situations, but of course that's why you need general rules and there will be times where stuff falls between the cracks.
Absolutely.
And the only way that you're ever going to have a problem with that, like an emotional problem with that, the only time you're ever going to have a problem with that is if you compare to some platonic ideal of perfect rules that can clearly delineate every possible human interaction and situation.
And it can't.
A woman has sex.
She was a little tipsy in the morning.
She doesn't remember it too well and she regrets it.
Okay, was that rape? According to some people, yes it is.
According to other people, no it's not.
Some people have the standard of rape that there has to be evidence of physical violence or a weapon or something like that.
Other people say, no, no, no, if the woman was not able to consent because she was a little tipsy and if she doesn't, you know, in the morning she realizes she didn't want to have sex, that could be rape.
So these are big and challenging questions.
Now, of course, society has always recognized that these are big and challenging questions, which is why society in a free environment, if you look at something like date rape or rape, society has completely recognized for thousands of years that rape is a heinous crime.
But the problem is, if There's no evidence of physical violence.
There's no evidence of a weapon.
If the woman went to the man's room voluntarily, and again, there's no vaginal tearing, there's no bruises, there's no evidence of weaponry, there's no weapon in the room, the man doesn't own a gun, whatever it is, right?
And then the next day she says, he raped me, then it does become he said, she said, which becomes almost impossible to adjudicate.
Like from a logical who's right, who's wrong.
There of course are instances where it is rape, but it's not the kind that produces this kind of physical damage.
It is also the case, although it may be rare, it is the case where a woman Regrets or is caught out or is pregnant or is cheating on someone and then claims that it was rape when it wasn't.
So these are very messy, difficult, complicated situations and society used to have a very good way of dealing with this.
And the way that society used to deal with this was pretty simple.
Never let these situations arise in the first place.
That's how it used to be.
And so when you were dating in the 1950s, before the welfare state, before the pill became more prevalent, what happened was you'd have a chaperone and you wouldn't be allowed to be in the room alone.
With a boy.
If you were in a dorm room in a university, you had to keep the door open.
You had to keep at least one foot on the floor.
And so in the same way that the professors who are now concerned about accusations of improper conduct with students will leave the door open whenever they're meeting with a student, particularly an opposite sex student.
And so society used to deal with all these things, just prevention, prevention, prevention.
And so if you come up with some very obscure situation, Where, okay, you know, he's just turned around.
It looks like he might be heading out, but then he looks like he's about to turn back.
And, you know, some situation where it's complicated and challenging.
Yeah. Yeah, that's...
That's going to be tough to adjudicate.
But then, see, what happens is people create these complicated...
I'm not accusing the listener or anyone here, just in general people do this.
People create these complicated situations and then they say, well, that's why we need a government.
Like, that solved anything.
The government can't adjudicate these situations any better than anybody else.
In fact, usually worse.
And so what happens is people say, well, there's ambiguity, there's ambivalence, it's complicated, it's messy...
Therefore, government.
Therefore, laws.
And that's not the case at all.
The least possible mess is the best you can possibly do.
It's the best you can possibly do.
And when you have a free society...
You will have situations like this will try to be avoided as much as humanly possible.
So bars may install video cameras.
And people will avoid bad locations or bad bars.
And here's the thing, too.
We only get a free society.
This goes back to the first question about peaceful parenting.
We only get a free society when children are raised peacefully.
Because we can't contradict the statement which runs the government, which is that might makes right.
We can't contradict that statement emotionally if we're raised with violence and our parents get to hit us because they're bigger and stronger, and therefore might makes right in the home, and if might makes right in the home, we just generally believe that might makes right in society, and that's what makes the state hum along in its bloody way.
So, when we have peaceful parenting, and listen, spanking is going down, and lots of good things are happening, and people are now homeschooling more, which is great.
So, peaceful parenting is the best thing you can do to build a free society.
And when we have peaceful parenting, we'll have almost no crime.
Just let me say that again, because it's hard to understand, right?
When we have peaceful parenting, we'll have almost no crime at all.
Almost no crime at all. Because almost all crime arises out of child abuse.
I read a book, I think it's the late Lloyd DeMossis.
I read it as an audiobook.
You can get it at freedomain.com forward slash books.
It's a free audiobook of the origins of war and child abuse.
And it just shows how much violence as an adult is generated by abuse as a child.
There are boys with a particular kind of warrior gene, and if they are physically abused as children, 100% of them will become criminals.
If they're not physically abused, their percentage is much lower.
So when you abuse a child, you are creating a criminal, for the most part, in general.
Again, lots of exceptions, but this is the trend.
It's not that every abused child becomes a criminal, but almost every criminal was abused as a child.
So... As far as self-defense goes, in a peaceful parent society, you'll have almost nothing to defend yourself against.
You know, if you go to some rural church with little old ladies, do you go armed?
No, because the little old ladies aren't going to try and beat you up.
And the little old ladies' church in the middle of nowhere, that's...
The level of violence you'll need to fear in a free society in the future because it's peaceful parenting, right?
Peaceful parenting will raise people who reason, will raise people who aren't hair-trigger.
I've done a whole series called, you can go to bombinthebrain.com, bombinthebrain.com.
I've done a whole series on the effects of child abuse on the developing brain and how much criminality it creates.
So, I think that self-defense is perfectly valid for others.
Self-defense does require physical threat that is manifested.
And self-defense, well, I should say, so if it's just, you know, if somebody's got to lay hands on you, if somebody says, I'm going to kill you and pulls out a gun, well, of course, right?
That's reasonable intent to act in self-defense.
When the threat is eliminated...
Then you are no longer restoring yourself to a place of security, right?
So let's say that some guy runs at you in an alley and then you jump out into the street and you're surrounded by people and there are cops there.
Well, you're no longer in a situation of threat.
Now, of course, you can go to the cop and you can say this guy ran at me and the cop can investigate in a free society, that kind of stuff.
But if you're out in the street, you're now restored to a place where the violence won't occur against you, and therefore you can't just shoot the gun.
So again, there may be other sanctions that you would want to have in that situation, but that's my particular approach to this, if that makes any sense.
And let me see if there's any other comments or issues or questions.
I'm happy to hear if you'd like to raise your hand.
Otherwise, I could do a relatively shorter show.
My gosh, it's time flies from chatting with you guys.
It's just great. All right. I think Charles wants to have a say, which I'm, of course, happy to hear from you, Charles, if you would like to mention something.
You had raised your hand earlier.
Go ahead, my friends. Thank you.
Well, first, I want to thank you for everything that you've done for me for other years.
I've started to listen to you five years ago.
My question was, essentially, For a peaceful society, I mean, there's kind of like the problem of resources, right?
So energy, essentially.
And what I'm trying to say is, isn't there a problem of scarcity?
To have a free society will need abundance.
What are the constraints of it, may I ask?
Okay, so I think I understand where you're coming from.
If you wouldn't mind muting, I'll take a swing at this.
This was a great question. I love this audience.
I just love this audience. So, all human desires are infinite and all resources are finite.
It's the foundation of economics, right?
So, when it comes to resources, scarcity is the human condition and The way that we conserve scarce resources is through a free and private society.
So let's look at the national debt of America.
What is it now? Twenty-three trillion dollars?
So that's twenty-three trillion dollars of consumption that has occurred in the present that can't occur in the future.
Because, you know, if you borrow a thousand dollars and you spend it on TV, you have the TV now on the basis that you will buy a thousand dollars plus interest less of stuff in the future.
So, the US is $23 trillion of excess consumption.
Why? Because of the government.
Because of the government. It's really, really important to understand that.
The government is continually burning the future for the sake of the present.
You think of inflation in this way as well.
Inflation, the money gets printed, it gets handed out to the friends closest to the government, they get to spend it at full value, it trickles down, and the poor and those on fixed income totally get it in the shorts.
So, the best thing to do To reduce energy consumption, to reduce the consumption of our scarce resources, is to not have government.
Certainly fiat currency is absolutely terrible when it comes to this kind of stuff.
A cryptocurrency is much better for this kind of stuff because you can't money print a fiat currency.
Certainly not one like Bitcoin that's limited by mining difficulties or challenges.
You do need to accept scarcity, and once you accept scarcity, you recognize that the government is just about the worst thing in the world for extra consumption of resources.
If you look at something like the welfare state, what you're doing is you are borrowing from the future, or you're taking from the most productive, and in general, you are subsidizing the least productive to have the most children.
And that's a huge problem when it comes to nature's scarce resources.
So that's a big problem.
If you look at mass migration or mass immigration, you're taking people from low-carbon footprint environments and you're moving them to very high-carbon footprint environments.
In other words, they go from India to America or something like that.
Again, absolutely terrible for the environment as a whole.
So the way that society generally works is you get smarter, you get wiser, you get more knowledgeable, you get more moral, you get more rational.
And what happens is you end up having fewer children, right?
As the old saying goes, the best contraception is industrialization.
So you have fewer and fewer children the wealthier you get as a whole.
And there's a variety of reasons for that.
Quality of life, amount of interest that you can have in other things, amount of enjoyment you can have in other things, and the opportunity costs of having children become Much greater when you have more options to travel and get educated and read books and start businesses and so on.
So, a free society will get wealthier, but much more efficient in its use of resources.
If you look at something like war, I mean, war is absolutely catastrophic for the environment, as you know.
Just think of, of course, when Saddam Hussein was pulling back from the oil fields of Kuwait and Iraq, He set fire to them and it darkened skies around the world for quite some time.
And socialism, of course, absolutely terrible for the environment as a whole because there's no way to efficiently allocate resources in the absence of price.
Price is an incredible thing in a free market.
It's one of these absolutely giant crystalline cathedrals of pure dynamic thought and information.
It is the internet of scarcity.
Price is the internet of scarcity because even prior to the internet, price was a signal of supply and demand that was dynamically changing on a continuous basis and provided unbelievable amounts of information for free.
How scarce are oranges?
Well, you go to your greengrocers, you look at the price of oranges, And you get an immediate ratio between supply and demand.
If it's high supply and low demand, then the price is very low.
If it's low supply and high demand, the price is very high.
If it's somewhere in the middle, it's somewhere in the middle.
And it will change. Look at stock tickers and stock prices and so on.
The stock market being the foundational differentiator between a free market and a centralized, controlled, totalitarian system.
So without price, you can't possibly efficiently allocate resources at all in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.
You can't allocate resources without price.
And so you end up, still resources need to be allocated.
So how do you allocate resources?
In a socialist system, well, you what's what Ayn Rand called the aristocracy of pull, that you allocate resources based upon.
Who's bribed you, who's who's who's friend's cousin needs something, you withhold resources from people who you don't like or or, you know, like you'll take resources from Ukraine and produce the famine which kills 10 million Christians through the holodomor for political reasons for like you'll take resources from Ukraine and produce the famine which kills 10 million So it's all about as old politics is rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies and.
And so without price, and you can't have price without a free market, and without price you can't possibly efficiently allocate resources, and in a free market the people who are most efficient at extracting value from resources are those who end up at the most resources.
So a farmer who can get twice the productivity out of the farmland will end up owning that farmland because he can bid more for that farmland than a less competent farmer because he can get more value out of it, right?
So in the same way that Martin Scorsese can get a $100,000 camera and you and I can't or won't, right?
Because he can get much more value out of it by making a movie with blood spatters and classical music all over the place.
So If you are concerned about scarcity of resources, you want to eliminate initiatory wars, you want to eliminate massive birth subsidies for often the least productive in society, you want to eliminate the capacity to borrow on behalf of the next generation, which is a statist phenomenon, you want...
The least possible interference in the free market so that the most price signals can be sent around scarcity of resources.
So, I mean, we saw this when lumber became scarce, the price of lumber went through the roof under COVID, right?
Because I don't even know why it became scarce, but probably due to shipping or maybe increased housing building and all that.
That's what you know. So in a free market society, as you know, if something becomes scarce, the price of it goes up and people automatically reduce consumption of it, which is exactly what you want.
Instead, we've kind of gone to the government to run around slapping tariffs and punishing people and rewarding other people.
And that's all political. There's nothing to do with any kind of efficiency or productivity in the world as a whole.
So yeah, I mean, I like you, share your concern for let's manage and marshal our scarce resources.
So yeah, we need fewer people, and that's a free society.
We need more efficient use of resources, that's a free society.
We need to not have massive hyperinflation and debt, and that's a free society.
And we need to not subsidize People who are going to be unproductive consumers, and that's a free society.
So I hope that helps as a whole.
Listen, I really want to thank you guys for dropping by.
Great questions, great comments, of course.
Love you guys so much. freedomain.com forward slash donate.
If you'd like to help out the show, I'd really appreciate it.
Don't forget to go to freedomain.com I've got an NFT up there that's cooking.
It's really fantastic. Great collector's item.
I think it'll go up in value enormously over the time.
And also, I've got a free novel.
You know, I'm a trained actor, and I wrote this fantastic novel.
It's a big, long-ass, pan-European novel from World War I to World War II. Major historical characters, you name it, are in there.
It's a fantastic book, and it's totally free.
I hope you will check it out and make that a new podcast listen.
Thanks so much, everyone, for dropping by.
Great pleasure to chat.
And... I will, in generally...
How do I leave quietly? Anyway, I'll figure that out.
I'll stop this.
Don't forget, of course, I did put this in the title.
It was the recording show. So this will be going out as well.
Lots of love from up here. Take care, everyone.
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